Wow, you are TRULY batshit aren't you? here we are talking about Adobe and Linux, nobody says a damned word about Windows anything, yet it MUST be that I'm a super secret stealth ninja for MSFT just waiting to ambush your 'precious'. But hey this retailer will be more than happy to give your OS a good slapping around if it makes ya happy Alex, lets begin shall we?
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.
So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?
And for the actual Linux USERS out there, not the batshit "It is a plot by gates and the Illuminati to kill FLOSS" nutjobs like Alex? As a retailer let me say this: i like your OS, your GUI is in many ways superior to what is out there, but the driver model is shit. I don't care if you use an ABI or sacrifice Linus to Cthulu fix this one damned problem so my customers can run updates without the OS having a heart attack and hosing the drivers? i'll be happy to put Linux boxes back on the shelve
I just don't get what they are thinking. At $100-$150? yeah I could see people willing to deal with the limitations to have a "browser in a box" but $500? WTF? you can often find Atom netbooks for $250 or less, and I've seen really nice AMD netbooks for around $330. Who in their right mind would pay the price of TWO netbooks for one that is crippled and doesn't do even half of what a full netbook does?
I just don't understand what they think will make it sell at THAT price. i have played with the Athlon Neo netbooks and they do 1080P over HDMi, get good battery life, are real peppy, and can even do some halfway decent gaming with those Radeon chips. Sure it won't play Crysis but I played the original Bioshock on it and the customer that owns it plays WoW on it all the time. What would make this something worth that amount of money?
I bet if they don't seriously come down on the price there is gonna be a warehouse somewhere just filled with these things gathering dust as I can't see people passing up fully featured netbooks to pay more for less.
Oh you want to hear a story that'll piss you off? In early 00 I had a decent amount of money from a settlement (rich asshole playing with his cell instead of watching where he was going, took the entire side out my car and laid me up for a couple of months) so I decided "fuck this I'm gonna help my mom and these folks out". So I went down the road and got EVERY house to sign they would be happy to have service, in fact most wanted the full boat, all the channels and every package they had.
So I march down there to the cableco with this petition and the knowledge of how much it would cost to run the line, as I talked to a linemen that actually went out and measured and the cost was $12,000 to run the entire length at the time. so I tell them "Here is the list of people that want it, i'll pay for the line, just hook it up" and you know what I got? They wanted $30,000 just to consider it and contracts for FIVE YEARS with a 25% markup. They said unless I could "guarantee the profit potential of the area" then they couldn't do it!
So I say it is time We, The People, whose land their wires cross, take back what is ours. it is time to seize the last mile and open it up to REAL competition! sadly if we don't those like you and my mom will NEVER EVER get service, just the finger while they raise rates on those of us that have it and give the CxOs more bonuses for hookers and blow.
The totally fucking sad part is it just doesn't work as the article i linked to shows. hell look up the video of Jamie from Mythbusters, where he walks on stage and tells them he forgot he had some of his mythbuster junk in his pocket before getting on the plane and then pulls out two twelve inch blades out of his pocket which he said was there the ENTIRE time, including when he was scanned!
It doesn't work, it costs crazy money, is increasing our risk of cancer (those of us with thin/light skin are more susceptible to radiation via the skin) and probably killing the TSA guys, and for what? something that is about as useful IRL as those divining rods a "security" company sold the Iraqi police to detect bombs.
It is THIS, this right here, that really pisses me off about this country. Damned near everything now is blatant kickbacks or money flushing. I bet whomever made the screeners kicked back some nice $$$ to those that voted for it while marking the price up 400%, and it isn't like anyone in DC gives a fuck because they'll spend money on war toys and shit like drunken sailors in Vegas, just look at how obscenely over budget the F35 is. But of course they don't care it isn't THEIR money. Oh unless it is aid to the poor, fuck them peasant bastards seem to be the attitude du jour up there.
I'm just glad that my grandfather that fought in WWII for freedom isn't here to see the mockery these assclowns are making of this country. PATRIOT would have made him sick, and seeing bastards groping little kids? they'd be lucky if they could eat solid food in a year. I'm starting to wonder if our only hope is our own Arab spring as it is pretty obvious nobody there gives a fuck what We, The People want.
Or you could, here's just a thought, I'm throwing this out there...be happy that they continue to support your OS when so many don't? After all sales of Linux machines isn't exactly setting the world on fire compared to OSX and Win 7 and there are a hell of a lot of companies out there that simply don't care that you exist. Adobe has been pretty damned good about keeping flash support for Linux, so shouldn't you just be happy? would it really kill the Linux community to say "hey thanks for continuing to support us Adobe, we appreciate it?"
The consistent bad attitude really doesn't help your cause you know. If you want big companies to acknowledge you and support you at least being a little nice to the ones that already do couldn't hurt. i mean you'll take code that is a mangled mess (LibreOffice) or programs that are a decade behind on features (gimp) and act like it is the second coming, but when a company offers you tech that makes the majority of the world's videos play on your machines you act like the CEO took a big dump on your plate. Not smart when you are such a teeny tiny niche
And before someone says "But Adobe isn't FOSS herp derp" you know what? Who gives a shit! would you rather have nothing but Gnash? Last I heard it is FOSS but 4 versions behind and runs like ass. And this is of course not pointing out the decaying elephant in the room which is most companies will NEVER open their software because with so many patent trolls out there it could bury the company in lawsuits for a decade with nothing to show but a "Gee thanks but ur code is shit LOL!" from the community.
so would it REALLY kill ya to be even just a tiny bit grateful for a company spending their resources supporting you? And as for Air...nothing of value was lost. hell I'm primarily a Windows guy and I have found exactly ONE thing that used Air, the GOG Downloader, and not only did you not need Air as you could just use your browser but the GOG team have already said they are writing a new one which doesn't use Air. So what is there to complain about? That someone supports you? Yep that is really worth having a shitfit over, having support might ruin your geek cred!
I shouldn't answer an AC, but what the fuck I'm bored. the core of the matter is this ain't security, its classic security theater. You know this, i know this, hell everyone knows this.
I could write a long detailed explanation but I think it would be better coming from an expert, so I defer the floor to Mr Bruce Schneier who points out on the last test,and I quote "screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. "
So it doesn't work, you are potentially poisoning people with the scanners, and you're groping little kids. Did I miss anything? Oh yeah it lets the companies that makes the scanners and trains the TSA goons to make some nice grift off the USA gov, so it is all right then.
Let us sum up your post, shall we? Insult insult insult aaaand insult. Is there ANY single answer to what I have pointed out? about the link on the president having the right to murder you, about the complete 180 after he got access to the big checks? anything at all?
Nope you hug your blankie and go "that's not true! The TV says its not true! you must be crazy!". Well to borrow from bill again "Go back to sleep, your government is in control. here is reality television. Go back to sleep." Meanwhile I would be happy to post links how much money those at the top made in bailouts under both presidents,dozens of Wikileaks docs showing government coverups, such as the lovely one where a company we KEEP hiring to do security gives out children as fucktoy party favors and our ONLY concern was 'it might make us look bad", but you know what? why bother.
If that were true why was there parts of downtown Nashville with No cable or DSL when I was there a few years back? is the middle of music row in a cornfield?
No friend it is called 'cherry picking" and something the teleco duopoly has done for years. When my mom built her home more than 20 years ago the cable stopped exactly 2 blocks from her house. Now more than 30 households live on this small 2 mile stretch and how far is that cable now? Exactly 2 block from my mother's door, same as it was more than 20 years ago. They haven't moved a single inch in ANY direction in more than a decade here, despite ever more houses being built, because that would mean they would have to invest rather than put the money into their pockets and in the USA it is "damn everything but the quarterly report!" and has been for ages.
No we are gonna have to open up the last mile to competition and we are gonna build it ourselves if the companies won't, just as they refused to run electrical lines and water to most of the rural areas. And how much of that "cost" is private contractors and no bid contracts? If one would let the cities and the states build instead of having them buried in teleco lawsuits which is ironic since they are suing for customers they refuse to serve even if they win, well then I bet you'd see that price plummet.
The problem is the current system like the "stimulus" bullshit was done classic government style, which means it doesn't get done if Sen Porkus and Congressman Kickbackus don't get to throw some to their cronies who promptly raise their bids by 600% and act like they won the lotto. We should do it ourselves and demand that the 200 billion we gave the telecos back in 96 for nationwide broadband (who said "Gee thanks! and then gave us the finger, just like GE who took a bailout and used it to send another factory to India) be paid WITH interest in 90 days or we seize the last mile.
The ONLY way we are ever gonna catch up with the rest of the world is to stop tying the hands of the local and state governments and bust up the teleco monopoly on lines. They want a monopoly? Fine we'll give you 20 years for every currently underserved or unserved neighborhood you give FTTH. Make it 15 for every large city you change out, 20-25 for every small town. Otherwise all we are gonna get is ever nastier caps while the CxOs get extra hookers to snort blow off of while we get the short bus to the information superhighway.
You see it is THIS, this right here that pisses me off. first the guy insulted me by calling me a fanboy when I have written quite long lists of what is sucking at MSFT (Ballmer is a shitty CEO with a case of "me too!" Apple envy, mobile strategy being flinging shit at a wall and hoping something sticks, burning playsforsure which was quite popular for subscriptions to push a broken zunepass,killing the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade thus encouraging piracy, etc) and then in the very next sentence as you pointed out used the same bullshit excuses MSFT used on MS Java just putting a different company name in the blank.
This deal with Google is NO DIFFERENT than if MSFT would have called it "MS Coffee" and tried the very same BS. The end results are the same, a fractured Java with more and more writing for the non compatible Google version simply because Google has the power by being as big as they are and able to hand out Android for free. kinda like MSFT leveraging the desktop with IE and MS Java don't ya think?
There is nothing in this world i hate more than fanboy hypocrisy, the incredible logic hoops that are jumped through so they can say their favorite company isn't doing anything bad. it is the same bullshit I saw with Apple fanboys claiming with complete seriousness that "Trojans don't count" because the user has to click on something then in the very same breath making fun of Windows for bugs while ignoring that most Windows bugs are Trojans and so by their very logic "don't count" yet when it comes to Windows it does...because its Windows.
Bullshit is bullshit, and if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck tying a cape on it don't suddenly make it superman. as you rightly pointed out one could take the articles and docs from the MS Java case and simply change the names to Google and Oracle and it would read out just the same as it does now. the fact that Google makes all the fangirls here have a big ole squee doesn't change the facts, nor make black into white.
Well yeah HE says its worth it, you have to remember this is a guy that wears $400 headphones! he really doesn't give a shit if he blows a couple of grand a year on SSDs and says as much in the article I linked to as long as he gets crazy speeds. but you'll notice in the comments while some have had a good experience there are just as many with VERY expensive drives that are now paperweights.
I'm sorry but those kinds of failures not only are unacceptable to the masses, but more importantly the WAY they fail is really unacceptable. In all my years I have yet to have a HDD "just die" without giving SOME kind of warning, be it smart, be it motor whine, be it rising temps...something would clue me in that the customer was in trouble and this gave me time to get the data off. I have had to use Spinrite occasionally when a customer simply didn't heed the warnings and starting throwing errors, but again we are talking about being able to save a good 80%+ of the data.
With the SSDs that my gamer customers picked up it was just...poof. That's it. No warning, no SMART, no errors, they just turned it on one day and found a brick where their SSD used to be. One I managed to get a small amount of data off of, the other? Couldn't even be seen by BIOS.
Frankly I have never seen any PC component just instantly go tits up like that and the fact that data is supposed to be kept on this thing? Uh uh, no way. If you are like Jeff atwood and pay $400 for a pair of headphones and think a couple of grand blown on SSDs is just cool beans as long as you get hot performance? Then play the hot/crazy scale. But for prices of these to truly approach SSD you need the mainstream to accept them and there is no way Joe Average is putting up with having his drive go tits up yearly and take his data with it.
I think my gamer customers had the right idea after getting burned. they just bought a pair of velociraptors and went RAID 0 and then used a big fat 5900RPM drive to do backups. They still get pretty decent performance but don't have to look at pushing the on button as cutting the red wire or seeing their data go float away like a fart on the breeze. If you want to do the same they were selling 74Gb raptors open box for pretty cheap at Newegg. hell of a lot safer than SSDs ATM.
Great another koolaid drinker. Instead of giving citations to back up his beliefs he can ONLY throw insults. You have a president that has broken EVER major campaign pledge since taking office, gitmo, the two wars (added a third, yay for the military industrial complex! They'll be getting extra hookers this Xmas pal!) warrantless wiretapping, do you think this kind of major flip flop was just because he ate some bad cheese? he got a big fat fucking check dude, don't delude yourself. he said "How much money? Really?" and your vote was flushed down the toilet.
So lets see your proof pal, back that mouth up. I can literally wallpaper this place with link after link after link showing major graft and corruption by those at the very top, from a certain SCOTUS wife taking big fat checks to those on the president's job advisory panel getting bailouts to send the jobs overseas. So back that mouth up C6gunner, lets see the links. Because that is what happens when one has truth on their side, they can provide citations all day long.
BTW just FYI the late great Bill Hicks wrote that more than 25 YEARS ago and the man has been dead two decades now. How sad is it that if anything his words are more true today than they ever were? I'd like to end by quoting another late great man, George Carlin: "You know why they call it the American Dream? Because you have to be asleep to believe in it" and no truer words were spoken.
What I don't get with both Google and FaceBook is this: Their ultimate goal is to gather as much data on their users, aka data mining, so that they can make teh big monies off of advertisers, yes? So whether that data is 'public" or private as long as THEY have access to it mission accomplished, yes? So WTF is it with them and the whole "lets shotgun blast this shit over teh webz LOL!" bullshit? Seems counterproductive to do this kind of crap when it will most likely run some off and cause others not to share any useful data.
I just don't get it. It is like these companies are being run by Snidely Whiplash or something.
Ya know, that takes some mega sized brass balls to say that when Obama is the pres. How's that Hope & Change thing working out? Oh yeah he Hopes you don't notice the only Change is from an R to a D on the door. I mean this administration actually has the gall to claim the president has the right to assassinate Americans on American soil with NO oversight or trial, and this is irrevocable under "war powers". Dubya didn't have the balls to do that, even Nixon didn't have balls that large!
Sadly my friend the late great Bill Hicks nailed it more than 20 years ago "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i think the puppet on the right has my interests at heart...hey wait a minute there is one guy controlling both puppets!". Time and time again We, The People have made ourselves heard only to be ignored. We want our borders fixed, we want the wars to end, we want Medicaid/care and aid to the poor left alone, we want taxes to increase on the top 5% and we want companies to stop being rewarded with taxpayer money to close factories and send them overseas like GE did recently. But all you get is two sides to the same coin, and thanks to Citizens United this will only get worse. If you believe either side gives a shit about the American people I have a nice bridge to offer, it goes to nowhere so there is no wear and tear!
As for TFA I hate to be the one to say it, but good riddance to the shuttle, it is only sad we don't have a replacement that should have been built in 1995. The shuttle was a failure from the start, its original mission statement was for a "space truck" that would allow both the military and NASA to share expenses, to allow cheaper and larger loads into space, and to allow fast turnaround. It failed to live up to that statement which is why the military has been using the Delta V.
I would argue the only reason it has hung on this long is Sen Porkus and Congressman Kickbackus were using it to "bring jobs to the area!" which is why there was nearly 20 states working on shuttle parts and why congress pushed for reusing shuttle parts when it made no sense on Orion. Both sides of the aisle have long since quit giving a shit if they hurt this nation as long as it suits their personal goals and spreading the shuttle parts like a shotgun blast across the country helped them show they were bringing home that bacon.
So goodbye shuttle, you did much good work despite failing your original goals and I'm only sorry you weren't put out to pasture years ago and something more practical brought up in your place. maybe we'll have the Delta Vs man rated, hell maybe we should just buy some Soyuz off of Russia. Either way the shuttle should have been in a museum years ago and I hope the astronauts get down safely for this their final ride.
And when farmer John cuts the trunk? In my area we were down for nearly a week, we are talking nearly 60,000 people affected, thanks to some farmer digging with his backhoe and tearing up the fiber. Can you afford your business to be down that long?
The only way I would recommend that a company go to the cloud is if they have redundant systems on site, at least enough that the world wouldn't end if someone took out the fiber. Shit happens folks and you'd hate to have your business be screwed simply because you weren't ready for the occasional SNAFU.
The problem with SSDs is that the tech isn't really ready for primetime IMHO, unless you just have some money burning a hole and don't care about the data they'll have on them. Atwood at Coding Horror even says SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale since you are dealing with a device that gives serious performance at an INSANE failure rate. From the looks of things they may be full of shit on those MTBF numbers.
All I know is I have a couple of gamer customers for whom the benchmark is God and both went SSD, not cheap shit either, the biggest most expensive they could find. With BOTH drives what happened is one day they flipped the switch and....nothing. That's it, just dead. No warning, no SMART, just tits up DOA bye bye data. Needless to say they weren't happy.
So i think I'll let others blow the crazy money on a drive that may only last a year, since with the big fat caches on the new HDDs combined with plenty of RAM for Windows 7 to superfetch everything seems to me more than fast enough for my customers. I just can't see myself spending that kind of money then having to be drawn up in a knot or do backup after backup just to keep from having to worry about flipping the switch and watching my data go poof. Faster is nice, but not when it is going really fast right off a cliff.
But your honor, he's hooking our stuff to our stuff but not the right stuff mind you, but the wrong stuff. if you read the EULA it clearly says it is our stuff, not his stuff, and there is a list of stuff that can be hooked to other stuff. Since this stuff isn't on the approved stuff list his is clearly puffinstuff if he thinks he can get away with this!
Something like that maybe? As for TFA man that guy can twist things around and how he gets some of that...well stuff to fit together in such small spaces is frankly amazing. It really is a shame that all the trademark copyright bullshit keeps him from hiring some Chinese company to cook up some of his designs on a larger scale, because some of the console laptops he has cooked up would be seriously awesome to have.
Who cares? How does Microsoft's leveraging off Java deprive Sun revenue from its R&D? FTFY.
Lets call a spade a spade folks, you can't say it is bad for one company because you don't like them but wonderful for a different company to pull the same shit because they make you squee like a fangirl.
Do you call Apple system 13 and a quarter? if you want to insult MSFT there are plenty of targets, the big dumb sweaty monkey, the completely clueless mobile "strategy" if there even is one, the giant attack of the "Me toos!" under Ballmer like Zune and Kin and the Win 8 aka WinPad UI, killing PlaysForSure that was quite popular for monthly subscriptions for the crapola ZunePass which was incompatible.
But MSDOS has officially been dead since 1995 dude, unofficially 2000 if you count the DOS bootstrapping that was in Win9x. To keep bringing up DOS like it is still relevant not only isn't funny it is kinda pointless when there are plenty of more topical potshots you could enjoy.
Maybe the next Linux article that comes around you can write about how Linux is stuck on the 0.x kernel and it doesn't even support your daisy wheel printer or have a GUI, since that is how far behind the times the DOS jokes are. But I will give you credit for one thing, at least you didn't trot out the "M$" lameness like some here are known to do and which the majority I doubt even remembers far enough back to know where that came from.
Uhhhh...who EXACTLY forced you? Did a MSFT rep come and put a 38 to your head? You DO realize WinXP is STILL supported yes? hell Win2k only went out of support last year!
You can find a lot of things to bitch at MSFT about, such as a bad case of the "me too!"s, a mobile strategy that consists of flinging poo at a wall, etc but one thing you can NO bitch about is length of support. Your office, friends, family could be on WinXP right now if Vista or 7 didn't work for you. If you bought pro (a whole $30 difference) then you had downgrade rights you could have used at ANY time, no hassle. I actually invoked those downgrade rights a couple of time for customers on Vista, it took a single phone call and reading off the code, no big whoop.
So if there is anyone to blame here if printers don't work that would be YOU sir. Both Vista and 7 had compatibility lists, the websites of the manufacturers often listed whether or not they supported Vista or 7, and of course there was the Winflag on the box telling you in black and white. Frankly with decade plus support cycles and so many resources to check compatibility I don't see how anyone could find a fault with MSFT over that.
Out of ALL the hardware (and I do have a lot) that I had to deal with when I switched my family from XP to 7 I found ONE, just one mind you, thing that didn't work. my no name CCC PCI capture card. That cost me a whole $30 to replace. With my customers I told them to let me install the trial version and dual boot and within the month I was getting all clears to install Windows 7.
So if you like XP so much why aren't you still using it? You have another THREE YEARS you know. By then most of the software will most likely be Vista/7 or better and you'd be a fool to run unpatched software on the net. Now MSFT has given you 14 years, the guys that wrote WinXP have long since moved on. The guys here at/. know that you just can't support an old version forever, especially when they have three newer versions they will be supporting by then. Stick with XP until 2014, by then your printer will be dead or you can pick up a cheapo network laser. This gives you plenty of time to plan a migration and if you don't? That would be YOUR fault.
I just don't get what the rush is for. Windows 7 just came out in Oct 09, that isn't even 2 years ago! WinXP will be supported until 2014, they are contractually obligated to stick to that date and IIRC they will pull the plug on WinME II (aka Vista) on the same date which is 7 years for a loser OS, so why not release it then? It isn't like Windows 7 isn't selling quite well, the reviews have been great, everyone is happy, and certainly those that have recently bought a Win 7 PC aren't gonna just toss it because win 8 came out. So what's the rush?
This does however point out one thing which IMHO makes MSFT OSes better than others for the common man ATM and that is support. WinXP will be supported until 2014 which is nearly 14 years of support. Win2K? Got a decade of support. Windows 7 will be supported until 2020 according to their EOL roadmap which means another 11 years of support. This means if you don't want to upgrade? Then don't. It isn't like you won't still be getting security fixes for a very loooong time.
So I don't understand the mad rush when Win 7 is still selling well thanks to the long support times I say fuck it MSFT, if you want to jump the gun you go right ahead. After the Vista debacle me and my customers won't be touching Windows 8 for 2 years after release, just to see if it is another Windows 7 plate of goodness or a Vista pile of shite on a crusty roll. I bought the Win 7 family pack last year when it was on sale and it runs great on even my boys hand me downs, which are two Pentium Ds, one with 1Gb the other 2Gb,
So thanks MSFT for putting out Windows 7 but unless you can offer me and my customers something more than a cheap cell phone touch UI ripoff (who needs touch on a desktop? Nobody that's who, as outside of kiosks hardly anyone wants to put their cheeto stained fingers on their screen!) I'm afraid me and my customers will have to pass. I just hope you don't cock up Win 8 so bad I have to spend a year and a half ripping it out for Win 7 like I did giving people upgrades from Vista to XP. That was a looooong year and a half MSFT, and even though it was profitable I don't fancy repeating it, kay?
Thank you. I read a story from the head of the team that worked on iDVD that to me shown a light on the difference between Jobs and these MBAs running tech companies.
The guy said "So we cooked up mockups with all these tabs and buttons and every feature we could think of. Steve walks in, completely ignores us, and walks to the whiteboard and draws a box. He said "This is what I want, a box. When you drop a movie into the box a button that says burn comes up. That's it" and walks out. we just stood there in shock"
And THAT is the difference between a Jobs or Gates and some salesguy or MBA like Ballmer. Marketing thinks in bullet points, Jobs cuts through the bullshit and gets to the heart of the function. Even though I've never cared for Apple's walled garden attitude I have always been the first to give the man props, he has always had a clear vision of where he wanted to go and how to get there. sadly if he doesn't return I have a feeling we'll see a return of the bullet point bullshit and lawsuit happy days of the Pepsi guy, just as without Gates ruling from on high Ballmer seems to be flailing around with a serious case of the "Ohhh me too me too!" like Zune and Kin and the flip flopping mobile strategy.
We had that article here the other day saying tech companies need to be run by engineers, but I don't think that is the problem. after all Jobs isn't an engineer and most would be hard pressed to say he hasn't seriously changed tech this past decade. No what i believe a tech company needs is a person with serious vision, one that knows what they want instead of polls and bullet points. I just hope like I said old Steve pulls through, as even though I'm not a customer I do respect the man and would hate to see all his hard work destroyed again by another Pepsi guy, without him to come and rescue the "house that Steve built" one last time.
Actually I believe this is why the current trading labor for money system will simply have to end if we are to go forward as a race. Look up "MIT wants to eliminate cooks" to see some of the tech on the drawing board, for they have a "food machine" that "prints" the food like a 3D printer, cooks it, slices it, and spits it out the end, kinda like a slower version of a replicator.
It seems pretty obvious to most of us that we are currently playing musical chairs based on IQ and each year there are simply less chairs. Is there any job at your average fast food joint that couldn't easily be replaced by an automated assembly line? not really but the government lets them pay shit wages and makes it up with benefits to the poor, a classic "make work" scenario and things will only get worse. if they had to pay a living wage I'm sure every fast food joint would be automated within 3 years.
So we really do need to change the system, unless we are gonna smash the machines or pay people to put card A in slot B or some other pointless make work.
As for TFA this is part of a discussion we've been having at Linux Insider (Just FYI I'm quoted in part of the article) on FOSS and the freeloader problem. I personally believe the GPL and other FOSS licenses need a "free for non commercial use ONLY" clause to allow FOSS developers the funds required to maintain and grow the code. In great economic times one can get by with the "tin cup donation or support" model but as the economy sinks you will see more and more that used to pay simply becoming freeloaders. If a corp is making money off FOSS then they should have to kick back a few bucks, it is only fair. After all if it wasn't for FOSS they wouldn't be making the massive profits like they do, so kicking a small amount of the profits to those that did the work is only fair and just IMHO. This would make it better for everyone, including the corps whom I'm sure would find a way to take it off their taxes and would benefit from more bug fixing and more developers writing FOSS code, which in turn benefits us all.
Apparently you've never had to work on the box of someone who has cats. Trust me, the power of cat fur completely overwhelms your pitiful fan, no matter how many filters you put in the damned thing. I swear it is like cat fur is sentient and has the same 'fuck you" attitude of its former owner and seeks out things that will piss you off, the way a cat scratches on the curtains.
As for TFA I've gotten a chance to skim the PDF ( a little too math heavy for an overview frankly) and i don't get what is gonna keep the CPU equivalent of a headcrash from occuring. After all we had HDD tech for a hell of a lot longer and we still suffer from headcrashes, not as often mind you but they do still happen. Now considering if you have a headcrash with this airgap it is bye bye CPU (or AC, or fridge) and so far I haven't found anything addressing this I am curious to see how he managed to eliminate this problem.
And wouldn't the friction of the thing spinning generate heat as well? I'll admit i just looked at the pics but heatsink compound is made for heat transfer NOT lubrication so I don't see how this would be such a great improvement, not to mention having it spin right on top of the CPU would have me worried about it putting sideways pull on the pins, as anyone who has built boxes knows those pins are teeny tiny and don't take much to bend so if the lubricant you used started to get sticky I could see this thing slowly but surely causing problems with the pins.
So unless someone can explain how they've done away with friction and the risk of stress on the pins I have to vote meh. And while this might have been helpful in the days of the P4, aka space heater in a box, at least with modern CPUs if anything power has been going pretty steadily downward. I know I have to slam the new AMD quads pretty damned hard to get the fan to crank up and even then they rarely reach above 130f, and that is with all four cores pegged. For day to day usage they tend to stay like mine is now at 94f with the case fan being the only real fan noise.
It used to be a codeword for "built US Army jacket tough" but nowadays usually means "So overpriced you'll wet yourself when you see the bill". for examples see the F22, F35, the latest aircraft carriers, etc.
I think the bigger question is "Can Nvidia survive on this alone with Intel trying to murder them?". Just as AMD lost billions thanks to Intel's OEM bribery and compiler rigging (which the rigging part is still going on BTW, they consider sticking a little FYI in the docs to be a "fix") and caused Via so many losses they recently sold S3 just to get operating capital Nvidia has already had their chipset division taken out back by Intel and shot thanks to Intel's predatory practices.
Now without access to Intel's QPI they are pretty much down to this and discrete chips which I'm betting are pretty small niches. After all AMD doesn't need them since they bought ATI, Intel wants them gone so they can get paid for their shitastic GPUs, so where can Nvidia go?
I personally believe there will end up only two paths before Nvidia, to either buy up Via and release their own X86 APU, or to end up slowly bleeding out before being swallowed up by Intel which I believe is why Intel is behaving the way they are. while mobile is a good market and they have Tegra as long as Apple doesn't use Tegra I don't see them gaining much in that arena and for everyone else it is cheaper to just add a Broadcom mobile chip for video. with Via not only would they have a decent low power chip in the Nano but I would argue that for things like TFA and servers it would kick ass. Especially servers where they would have the power of the Nvidia GPUs with the Via built in hardware crypto.
So only time will tell but I'm betting things won't be rosy for Nvidia without an APU. It is pretty obvious the US justice dept is bought and paid for so Intel won't have to worry about antitrust (if they weren't they wouldn't have gotten away with outright bribery of the OEMs, which the Toshiba exec called "like cocaine" and which for several quarters were what kept dell from showing losses during the price wars) so nobody is gonna stop Intel from putting the squeeze on Nvidia as much as they can. AMD doesn't need them and furthermore their new GPU design philosophy of "build the MOR and add a second for the high end) is cheaper in the long run than the Nvidia top down approach. That just leaves Via which if Nvidia bought now could be had for a song. Frankly I don't know what they are waiting for, time isn't on their side.
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Wow, you are TRULY batshit aren't you? here we are talking about Adobe and Linux, nobody says a damned word about Windows anything, yet it MUST be that I'm a super secret stealth ninja for MSFT just waiting to ambush your 'precious'. But hey this retailer will be more than happy to give your OS a good slapping around if it makes ya happy Alex, lets begin shall we?
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .
You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.
So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?
And for the actual Linux USERS out there, not the batshit "It is a plot by gates and the Illuminati to kill FLOSS" nutjobs like Alex? As a retailer let me say this: i like your OS, your GUI is in many ways superior to what is out there, but the driver model is shit. I don't care if you use an ABI or sacrifice Linus to Cthulu fix this one damned problem so my customers can run updates without the OS having a heart attack and hosing the drivers? i'll be happy to put Linux boxes back on the shelve
I just don't get what they are thinking. At $100-$150? yeah I could see people willing to deal with the limitations to have a "browser in a box" but $500? WTF? you can often find Atom netbooks for $250 or less, and I've seen really nice AMD netbooks for around $330. Who in their right mind would pay the price of TWO netbooks for one that is crippled and doesn't do even half of what a full netbook does?
I just don't understand what they think will make it sell at THAT price. i have played with the Athlon Neo netbooks and they do 1080P over HDMi, get good battery life, are real peppy, and can even do some halfway decent gaming with those Radeon chips. Sure it won't play Crysis but I played the original Bioshock on it and the customer that owns it plays WoW on it all the time. What would make this something worth that amount of money?
I bet if they don't seriously come down on the price there is gonna be a warehouse somewhere just filled with these things gathering dust as I can't see people passing up fully featured netbooks to pay more for less.
Oh you want to hear a story that'll piss you off? In early 00 I had a decent amount of money from a settlement (rich asshole playing with his cell instead of watching where he was going, took the entire side out my car and laid me up for a couple of months) so I decided "fuck this I'm gonna help my mom and these folks out". So I went down the road and got EVERY house to sign they would be happy to have service, in fact most wanted the full boat, all the channels and every package they had.
So I march down there to the cableco with this petition and the knowledge of how much it would cost to run the line, as I talked to a linemen that actually went out and measured and the cost was $12,000 to run the entire length at the time. so I tell them "Here is the list of people that want it, i'll pay for the line, just hook it up" and you know what I got? They wanted $30,000 just to consider it and contracts for FIVE YEARS with a 25% markup. They said unless I could "guarantee the profit potential of the area" then they couldn't do it!
So I say it is time We, The People, whose land their wires cross, take back what is ours. it is time to seize the last mile and open it up to REAL competition! sadly if we don't those like you and my mom will NEVER EVER get service, just the finger while they raise rates on those of us that have it and give the CxOs more bonuses for hookers and blow.
The totally fucking sad part is it just doesn't work as the article i linked to shows. hell look up the video of Jamie from Mythbusters, where he walks on stage and tells them he forgot he had some of his mythbuster junk in his pocket before getting on the plane and then pulls out two twelve inch blades out of his pocket which he said was there the ENTIRE time, including when he was scanned!
It doesn't work, it costs crazy money, is increasing our risk of cancer (those of us with thin/light skin are more susceptible to radiation via the skin) and probably killing the TSA guys, and for what? something that is about as useful IRL as those divining rods a "security" company sold the Iraqi police to detect bombs.
It is THIS, this right here, that really pisses me off about this country. Damned near everything now is blatant kickbacks or money flushing. I bet whomever made the screeners kicked back some nice $$$ to those that voted for it while marking the price up 400%, and it isn't like anyone in DC gives a fuck because they'll spend money on war toys and shit like drunken sailors in Vegas, just look at how obscenely over budget the F35 is. But of course they don't care it isn't THEIR money. Oh unless it is aid to the poor, fuck them peasant bastards seem to be the attitude du jour up there.
I'm just glad that my grandfather that fought in WWII for freedom isn't here to see the mockery these assclowns are making of this country. PATRIOT would have made him sick, and seeing bastards groping little kids? they'd be lucky if they could eat solid food in a year. I'm starting to wonder if our only hope is our own Arab spring as it is pretty obvious nobody there gives a fuck what We, The People want.
Or you could, here's just a thought, I'm throwing this out there...be happy that they continue to support your OS when so many don't? After all sales of Linux machines isn't exactly setting the world on fire compared to OSX and Win 7 and there are a hell of a lot of companies out there that simply don't care that you exist. Adobe has been pretty damned good about keeping flash support for Linux, so shouldn't you just be happy? would it really kill the Linux community to say "hey thanks for continuing to support us Adobe, we appreciate it?"
The consistent bad attitude really doesn't help your cause you know. If you want big companies to acknowledge you and support you at least being a little nice to the ones that already do couldn't hurt. i mean you'll take code that is a mangled mess (LibreOffice) or programs that are a decade behind on features (gimp) and act like it is the second coming, but when a company offers you tech that makes the majority of the world's videos play on your machines you act like the CEO took a big dump on your plate. Not smart when you are such a teeny tiny niche
And before someone says "But Adobe isn't FOSS herp derp" you know what? Who gives a shit! would you rather have nothing but Gnash? Last I heard it is FOSS but 4 versions behind and runs like ass. And this is of course not pointing out the decaying elephant in the room which is most companies will NEVER open their software because with so many patent trolls out there it could bury the company in lawsuits for a decade with nothing to show but a "Gee thanks but ur code is shit LOL!" from the community.
so would it REALLY kill ya to be even just a tiny bit grateful for a company spending their resources supporting you? And as for Air...nothing of value was lost. hell I'm primarily a Windows guy and I have found exactly ONE thing that used Air, the GOG Downloader, and not only did you not need Air as you could just use your browser but the GOG team have already said they are writing a new one which doesn't use Air. So what is there to complain about? That someone supports you? Yep that is really worth having a shitfit over, having support might ruin your geek cred!
I shouldn't answer an AC, but what the fuck I'm bored. the core of the matter is this ain't security, its classic security theater. You know this, i know this, hell everyone knows this.
I could write a long detailed explanation but I think it would be better coming from an expert, so I defer the floor to Mr Bruce Schneier who points out on the last test,and I quote "screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. "
So it doesn't work, you are potentially poisoning people with the scanners, and you're groping little kids. Did I miss anything? Oh yeah it lets the companies that makes the scanners and trains the TSA goons to make some nice grift off the USA gov, so it is all right then.
Let us sum up your post, shall we? Insult insult insult aaaand insult. Is there ANY single answer to what I have pointed out? about the link on the president having the right to murder you, about the complete 180 after he got access to the big checks? anything at all?
Nope you hug your blankie and go "that's not true! The TV says its not true! you must be crazy!". Well to borrow from bill again "Go back to sleep, your government is in control. here is reality television. Go back to sleep." Meanwhile I would be happy to post links how much money those at the top made in bailouts under both presidents,dozens of Wikileaks docs showing government coverups, such as the lovely one where a company we KEEP hiring to do security gives out children as fucktoy party favors and our ONLY concern was 'it might make us look bad", but you know what? why bother.
Go back to sleep C6Gunner, go back to sleep.
If that were true why was there parts of downtown Nashville with No cable or DSL when I was there a few years back? is the middle of music row in a cornfield?
No friend it is called 'cherry picking" and something the teleco duopoly has done for years. When my mom built her home more than 20 years ago the cable stopped exactly 2 blocks from her house. Now more than 30 households live on this small 2 mile stretch and how far is that cable now? Exactly 2 block from my mother's door, same as it was more than 20 years ago. They haven't moved a single inch in ANY direction in more than a decade here, despite ever more houses being built, because that would mean they would have to invest rather than put the money into their pockets and in the USA it is "damn everything but the quarterly report!" and has been for ages.
No we are gonna have to open up the last mile to competition and we are gonna build it ourselves if the companies won't, just as they refused to run electrical lines and water to most of the rural areas. And how much of that "cost" is private contractors and no bid contracts? If one would let the cities and the states build instead of having them buried in teleco lawsuits which is ironic since they are suing for customers they refuse to serve even if they win, well then I bet you'd see that price plummet.
The problem is the current system like the "stimulus" bullshit was done classic government style, which means it doesn't get done if Sen Porkus and Congressman Kickbackus don't get to throw some to their cronies who promptly raise their bids by 600% and act like they won the lotto. We should do it ourselves and demand that the 200 billion we gave the telecos back in 96 for nationwide broadband (who said "Gee thanks! and then gave us the finger, just like GE who took a bailout and used it to send another factory to India) be paid WITH interest in 90 days or we seize the last mile.
The ONLY way we are ever gonna catch up with the rest of the world is to stop tying the hands of the local and state governments and bust up the teleco monopoly on lines. They want a monopoly? Fine we'll give you 20 years for every currently underserved or unserved neighborhood you give FTTH. Make it 15 for every large city you change out, 20-25 for every small town. Otherwise all we are gonna get is ever nastier caps while the CxOs get extra hookers to snort blow off of while we get the short bus to the information superhighway.
You see it is THIS, this right here that pisses me off. first the guy insulted me by calling me a fanboy when I have written quite long lists of what is sucking at MSFT (Ballmer is a shitty CEO with a case of "me too!" Apple envy, mobile strategy being flinging shit at a wall and hoping something sticks, burning playsforsure which was quite popular for subscriptions to push a broken zunepass,killing the $50 Win 7 HP upgrade thus encouraging piracy, etc) and then in the very next sentence as you pointed out used the same bullshit excuses MSFT used on MS Java just putting a different company name in the blank.
This deal with Google is NO DIFFERENT than if MSFT would have called it "MS Coffee" and tried the very same BS. The end results are the same, a fractured Java with more and more writing for the non compatible Google version simply because Google has the power by being as big as they are and able to hand out Android for free. kinda like MSFT leveraging the desktop with IE and MS Java don't ya think?
There is nothing in this world i hate more than fanboy hypocrisy, the incredible logic hoops that are jumped through so they can say their favorite company isn't doing anything bad. it is the same bullshit I saw with Apple fanboys claiming with complete seriousness that "Trojans don't count" because the user has to click on something then in the very same breath making fun of Windows for bugs while ignoring that most Windows bugs are Trojans and so by their very logic "don't count" yet when it comes to Windows it does...because its Windows.
Bullshit is bullshit, and if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck tying a cape on it don't suddenly make it superman. as you rightly pointed out one could take the articles and docs from the MS Java case and simply change the names to Google and Oracle and it would read out just the same as it does now. the fact that Google makes all the fangirls here have a big ole squee doesn't change the facts, nor make black into white.
Well yeah HE says its worth it, you have to remember this is a guy that wears $400 headphones! he really doesn't give a shit if he blows a couple of grand a year on SSDs and says as much in the article I linked to as long as he gets crazy speeds. but you'll notice in the comments while some have had a good experience there are just as many with VERY expensive drives that are now paperweights.
I'm sorry but those kinds of failures not only are unacceptable to the masses, but more importantly the WAY they fail is really unacceptable. In all my years I have yet to have a HDD "just die" without giving SOME kind of warning, be it smart, be it motor whine, be it rising temps...something would clue me in that the customer was in trouble and this gave me time to get the data off. I have had to use Spinrite occasionally when a customer simply didn't heed the warnings and starting throwing errors, but again we are talking about being able to save a good 80%+ of the data.
With the SSDs that my gamer customers picked up it was just...poof. That's it. No warning, no SMART, no errors, they just turned it on one day and found a brick where their SSD used to be. One I managed to get a small amount of data off of, the other? Couldn't even be seen by BIOS.
Frankly I have never seen any PC component just instantly go tits up like that and the fact that data is supposed to be kept on this thing? Uh uh, no way. If you are like Jeff atwood and pay $400 for a pair of headphones and think a couple of grand blown on SSDs is just cool beans as long as you get hot performance? Then play the hot/crazy scale. But for prices of these to truly approach SSD you need the mainstream to accept them and there is no way Joe Average is putting up with having his drive go tits up yearly and take his data with it.
I think my gamer customers had the right idea after getting burned. they just bought a pair of velociraptors and went RAID 0 and then used a big fat 5900RPM drive to do backups. They still get pretty decent performance but don't have to look at pushing the on button as cutting the red wire or seeing their data go float away like a fart on the breeze. If you want to do the same they were selling 74Gb raptors open box for pretty cheap at Newegg. hell of a lot safer than SSDs ATM.
Great another koolaid drinker. Instead of giving citations to back up his beliefs he can ONLY throw insults. You have a president that has broken EVER major campaign pledge since taking office, gitmo, the two wars (added a third, yay for the military industrial complex! They'll be getting extra hookers this Xmas pal!) warrantless wiretapping, do you think this kind of major flip flop was just because he ate some bad cheese? he got a big fat fucking check dude, don't delude yourself. he said "How much money? Really?" and your vote was flushed down the toilet.
So lets see your proof pal, back that mouth up. I can literally wallpaper this place with link after link after link showing major graft and corruption by those at the very top, from a certain SCOTUS wife taking big fat checks to those on the president's job advisory panel getting bailouts to send the jobs overseas. So back that mouth up C6gunner, lets see the links. Because that is what happens when one has truth on their side, they can provide citations all day long.
BTW just FYI the late great Bill Hicks wrote that more than 25 YEARS ago and the man has been dead two decades now. How sad is it that if anything his words are more true today than they ever were? I'd like to end by quoting another late great man, George Carlin: "You know why they call it the American Dream? Because you have to be asleep to believe in it" and no truer words were spoken.
What I don't get with both Google and FaceBook is this: Their ultimate goal is to gather as much data on their users, aka data mining, so that they can make teh big monies off of advertisers, yes? So whether that data is 'public" or private as long as THEY have access to it mission accomplished, yes? So WTF is it with them and the whole "lets shotgun blast this shit over teh webz LOL!" bullshit? Seems counterproductive to do this kind of crap when it will most likely run some off and cause others not to share any useful data.
I just don't get it. It is like these companies are being run by Snidely Whiplash or something.
Ya know, that takes some mega sized brass balls to say that when Obama is the pres. How's that Hope & Change thing working out? Oh yeah he Hopes you don't notice the only Change is from an R to a D on the door. I mean this administration actually has the gall to claim the president has the right to assassinate Americans on American soil with NO oversight or trial, and this is irrevocable under "war powers". Dubya didn't have the balls to do that, even Nixon didn't have balls that large!
Sadly my friend the late great Bill Hicks nailed it more than 20 years ago "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i think the puppet on the right has my interests at heart...hey wait a minute there is one guy controlling both puppets!". Time and time again We, The People have made ourselves heard only to be ignored. We want our borders fixed, we want the wars to end, we want Medicaid/care and aid to the poor left alone, we want taxes to increase on the top 5% and we want companies to stop being rewarded with taxpayer money to close factories and send them overseas like GE did recently. But all you get is two sides to the same coin, and thanks to Citizens United this will only get worse. If you believe either side gives a shit about the American people I have a nice bridge to offer, it goes to nowhere so there is no wear and tear!
As for TFA I hate to be the one to say it, but good riddance to the shuttle, it is only sad we don't have a replacement that should have been built in 1995. The shuttle was a failure from the start, its original mission statement was for a "space truck" that would allow both the military and NASA to share expenses, to allow cheaper and larger loads into space, and to allow fast turnaround. It failed to live up to that statement which is why the military has been using the Delta V.
I would argue the only reason it has hung on this long is Sen Porkus and Congressman Kickbackus were using it to "bring jobs to the area!" which is why there was nearly 20 states working on shuttle parts and why congress pushed for reusing shuttle parts when it made no sense on Orion. Both sides of the aisle have long since quit giving a shit if they hurt this nation as long as it suits their personal goals and spreading the shuttle parts like a shotgun blast across the country helped them show they were bringing home that bacon.
So goodbye shuttle, you did much good work despite failing your original goals and I'm only sorry you weren't put out to pasture years ago and something more practical brought up in your place. maybe we'll have the Delta Vs man rated, hell maybe we should just buy some Soyuz off of Russia. Either way the shuttle should have been in a museum years ago and I hope the astronauts get down safely for this their final ride.
And when farmer John cuts the trunk? In my area we were down for nearly a week, we are talking nearly 60,000 people affected, thanks to some farmer digging with his backhoe and tearing up the fiber. Can you afford your business to be down that long?
The only way I would recommend that a company go to the cloud is if they have redundant systems on site, at least enough that the world wouldn't end if someone took out the fiber. Shit happens folks and you'd hate to have your business be screwed simply because you weren't ready for the occasional SNAFU.
The problem with SSDs is that the tech isn't really ready for primetime IMHO, unless you just have some money burning a hole and don't care about the data they'll have on them. Atwood at Coding Horror even says SSDs should be judged on a hot/crazy scale since you are dealing with a device that gives serious performance at an INSANE failure rate. From the looks of things they may be full of shit on those MTBF numbers.
All I know is I have a couple of gamer customers for whom the benchmark is God and both went SSD, not cheap shit either, the biggest most expensive they could find. With BOTH drives what happened is one day they flipped the switch and....nothing. That's it, just dead. No warning, no SMART, just tits up DOA bye bye data. Needless to say they weren't happy.
So i think I'll let others blow the crazy money on a drive that may only last a year, since with the big fat caches on the new HDDs combined with plenty of RAM for Windows 7 to superfetch everything seems to me more than fast enough for my customers. I just can't see myself spending that kind of money then having to be drawn up in a knot or do backup after backup just to keep from having to worry about flipping the switch and watching my data go poof. Faster is nice, but not when it is going really fast right off a cliff.
But your honor, he's hooking our stuff to our stuff but not the right stuff mind you, but the wrong stuff. if you read the EULA it clearly says it is our stuff, not his stuff, and there is a list of stuff that can be hooked to other stuff. Since this stuff isn't on the approved stuff list his is clearly puffinstuff if he thinks he can get away with this!
Something like that maybe? As for TFA man that guy can twist things around and how he gets some of that...well stuff to fit together in such small spaces is frankly amazing. It really is a shame that all the trademark copyright bullshit keeps him from hiring some Chinese company to cook up some of his designs on a larger scale, because some of the console laptops he has cooked up would be seriously awesome to have.
Who cares? How does Microsoft's leveraging off Java deprive Sun revenue from its R&D? FTFY.
Lets call a spade a spade folks, you can't say it is bad for one company because you don't like them but wonderful for a different company to pull the same shit because they make you squee like a fangirl.
Do you call Apple system 13 and a quarter? if you want to insult MSFT there are plenty of targets, the big dumb sweaty monkey, the completely clueless mobile "strategy" if there even is one, the giant attack of the "Me toos!" under Ballmer like Zune and Kin and the Win 8 aka WinPad UI, killing PlaysForSure that was quite popular for monthly subscriptions for the crapola ZunePass which was incompatible.
But MSDOS has officially been dead since 1995 dude, unofficially 2000 if you count the DOS bootstrapping that was in Win9x. To keep bringing up DOS like it is still relevant not only isn't funny it is kinda pointless when there are plenty of more topical potshots you could enjoy.
Maybe the next Linux article that comes around you can write about how Linux is stuck on the 0.x kernel and it doesn't even support your daisy wheel printer or have a GUI, since that is how far behind the times the DOS jokes are. But I will give you credit for one thing, at least you didn't trot out the "M$" lameness like some here are known to do and which the majority I doubt even remembers far enough back to know where that came from.
Uhhhh...who EXACTLY forced you? Did a MSFT rep come and put a 38 to your head? You DO realize WinXP is STILL supported yes? hell Win2k only went out of support last year!
You can find a lot of things to bitch at MSFT about, such as a bad case of the "me too!"s, a mobile strategy that consists of flinging poo at a wall, etc but one thing you can NO bitch about is length of support. Your office, friends, family could be on WinXP right now if Vista or 7 didn't work for you. If you bought pro (a whole $30 difference) then you had downgrade rights you could have used at ANY time, no hassle. I actually invoked those downgrade rights a couple of time for customers on Vista, it took a single phone call and reading off the code, no big whoop.
So if there is anyone to blame here if printers don't work that would be YOU sir. Both Vista and 7 had compatibility lists, the websites of the manufacturers often listed whether or not they supported Vista or 7, and of course there was the Winflag on the box telling you in black and white. Frankly with decade plus support cycles and so many resources to check compatibility I don't see how anyone could find a fault with MSFT over that.
Out of ALL the hardware (and I do have a lot) that I had to deal with when I switched my family from XP to 7 I found ONE, just one mind you, thing that didn't work. my no name CCC PCI capture card. That cost me a whole $30 to replace. With my customers I told them to let me install the trial version and dual boot and within the month I was getting all clears to install Windows 7.
So if you like XP so much why aren't you still using it? You have another THREE YEARS you know. By then most of the software will most likely be Vista/7 or better and you'd be a fool to run unpatched software on the net. Now MSFT has given you 14 years, the guys that wrote WinXP have long since moved on. The guys here at /. know that you just can't support an old version forever, especially when they have three newer versions they will be supporting by then. Stick with XP until 2014, by then your printer will be dead or you can pick up a cheapo network laser. This gives you plenty of time to plan a migration and if you don't? That would be YOUR fault.
I just don't get what the rush is for. Windows 7 just came out in Oct 09, that isn't even 2 years ago! WinXP will be supported until 2014, they are contractually obligated to stick to that date and IIRC they will pull the plug on WinME II (aka Vista) on the same date which is 7 years for a loser OS, so why not release it then? It isn't like Windows 7 isn't selling quite well, the reviews have been great, everyone is happy, and certainly those that have recently bought a Win 7 PC aren't gonna just toss it because win 8 came out. So what's the rush?
This does however point out one thing which IMHO makes MSFT OSes better than others for the common man ATM and that is support. WinXP will be supported until 2014 which is nearly 14 years of support. Win2K? Got a decade of support. Windows 7 will be supported until 2020 according to their EOL roadmap which means another 11 years of support. This means if you don't want to upgrade? Then don't. It isn't like you won't still be getting security fixes for a very loooong time.
So I don't understand the mad rush when Win 7 is still selling well thanks to the long support times I say fuck it MSFT, if you want to jump the gun you go right ahead. After the Vista debacle me and my customers won't be touching Windows 8 for 2 years after release, just to see if it is another Windows 7 plate of goodness or a Vista pile of shite on a crusty roll. I bought the Win 7 family pack last year when it was on sale and it runs great on even my boys hand me downs, which are two Pentium Ds, one with 1Gb the other 2Gb,
So thanks MSFT for putting out Windows 7 but unless you can offer me and my customers something more than a cheap cell phone touch UI ripoff (who needs touch on a desktop? Nobody that's who, as outside of kiosks hardly anyone wants to put their cheeto stained fingers on their screen!) I'm afraid me and my customers will have to pass. I just hope you don't cock up Win 8 so bad I have to spend a year and a half ripping it out for Win 7 like I did giving people upgrades from Vista to XP. That was a looooong year and a half MSFT, and even though it was profitable I don't fancy repeating it, kay?
Thank you. I read a story from the head of the team that worked on iDVD that to me shown a light on the difference between Jobs and these MBAs running tech companies.
The guy said "So we cooked up mockups with all these tabs and buttons and every feature we could think of. Steve walks in, completely ignores us, and walks to the whiteboard and draws a box. He said "This is what I want, a box. When you drop a movie into the box a button that says burn comes up. That's it" and walks out. we just stood there in shock"
And THAT is the difference between a Jobs or Gates and some salesguy or MBA like Ballmer. Marketing thinks in bullet points, Jobs cuts through the bullshit and gets to the heart of the function. Even though I've never cared for Apple's walled garden attitude I have always been the first to give the man props, he has always had a clear vision of where he wanted to go and how to get there. sadly if he doesn't return I have a feeling we'll see a return of the bullet point bullshit and lawsuit happy days of the Pepsi guy, just as without Gates ruling from on high Ballmer seems to be flailing around with a serious case of the "Ohhh me too me too!" like Zune and Kin and the flip flopping mobile strategy.
We had that article here the other day saying tech companies need to be run by engineers, but I don't think that is the problem. after all Jobs isn't an engineer and most would be hard pressed to say he hasn't seriously changed tech this past decade. No what i believe a tech company needs is a person with serious vision, one that knows what they want instead of polls and bullet points. I just hope like I said old Steve pulls through, as even though I'm not a customer I do respect the man and would hate to see all his hard work destroyed again by another Pepsi guy, without him to come and rescue the "house that Steve built" one last time.
Actually I believe this is why the current trading labor for money system will simply have to end if we are to go forward as a race. Look up "MIT wants to eliminate cooks" to see some of the tech on the drawing board, for they have a "food machine" that "prints" the food like a 3D printer, cooks it, slices it, and spits it out the end, kinda like a slower version of a replicator.
It seems pretty obvious to most of us that we are currently playing musical chairs based on IQ and each year there are simply less chairs. Is there any job at your average fast food joint that couldn't easily be replaced by an automated assembly line? not really but the government lets them pay shit wages and makes it up with benefits to the poor, a classic "make work" scenario and things will only get worse. if they had to pay a living wage I'm sure every fast food joint would be automated within 3 years.
So we really do need to change the system, unless we are gonna smash the machines or pay people to put card A in slot B or some other pointless make work.
As for TFA this is part of a discussion we've been having at Linux Insider (Just FYI I'm quoted in part of the article) on FOSS and the freeloader problem. I personally believe the GPL and other FOSS licenses need a "free for non commercial use ONLY" clause to allow FOSS developers the funds required to maintain and grow the code. In great economic times one can get by with the "tin cup donation or support" model but as the economy sinks you will see more and more that used to pay simply becoming freeloaders. If a corp is making money off FOSS then they should have to kick back a few bucks, it is only fair. After all if it wasn't for FOSS they wouldn't be making the massive profits like they do, so kicking a small amount of the profits to those that did the work is only fair and just IMHO. This would make it better for everyone, including the corps whom I'm sure would find a way to take it off their taxes and would benefit from more bug fixing and more developers writing FOSS code, which in turn benefits us all.
Apparently you've never had to work on the box of someone who has cats. Trust me, the power of cat fur completely overwhelms your pitiful fan, no matter how many filters you put in the damned thing. I swear it is like cat fur is sentient and has the same 'fuck you" attitude of its former owner and seeks out things that will piss you off, the way a cat scratches on the curtains.
As for TFA I've gotten a chance to skim the PDF ( a little too math heavy for an overview frankly) and i don't get what is gonna keep the CPU equivalent of a headcrash from occuring. After all we had HDD tech for a hell of a lot longer and we still suffer from headcrashes, not as often mind you but they do still happen. Now considering if you have a headcrash with this airgap it is bye bye CPU (or AC, or fridge) and so far I haven't found anything addressing this I am curious to see how he managed to eliminate this problem.
And wouldn't the friction of the thing spinning generate heat as well? I'll admit i just looked at the pics but heatsink compound is made for heat transfer NOT lubrication so I don't see how this would be such a great improvement, not to mention having it spin right on top of the CPU would have me worried about it putting sideways pull on the pins, as anyone who has built boxes knows those pins are teeny tiny and don't take much to bend so if the lubricant you used started to get sticky I could see this thing slowly but surely causing problems with the pins.
So unless someone can explain how they've done away with friction and the risk of stress on the pins I have to vote meh. And while this might have been helpful in the days of the P4, aka space heater in a box, at least with modern CPUs if anything power has been going pretty steadily downward. I know I have to slam the new AMD quads pretty damned hard to get the fan to crank up and even then they rarely reach above 130f, and that is with all four cores pegged. For day to day usage they tend to stay like mine is now at 94f with the case fan being the only real fan noise.
It used to be a codeword for "built US Army jacket tough" but nowadays usually means "So overpriced you'll wet yourself when you see the bill". for examples see the F22, F35, the latest aircraft carriers, etc.
I think the bigger question is "Can Nvidia survive on this alone with Intel trying to murder them?". Just as AMD lost billions thanks to Intel's OEM bribery and compiler rigging (which the rigging part is still going on BTW, they consider sticking a little FYI in the docs to be a "fix") and caused Via so many losses they recently sold S3 just to get operating capital Nvidia has already had their chipset division taken out back by Intel and shot thanks to Intel's predatory practices.
Now without access to Intel's QPI they are pretty much down to this and discrete chips which I'm betting are pretty small niches. After all AMD doesn't need them since they bought ATI, Intel wants them gone so they can get paid for their shitastic GPUs, so where can Nvidia go?
I personally believe there will end up only two paths before Nvidia, to either buy up Via and release their own X86 APU, or to end up slowly bleeding out before being swallowed up by Intel which I believe is why Intel is behaving the way they are. while mobile is a good market and they have Tegra as long as Apple doesn't use Tegra I don't see them gaining much in that arena and for everyone else it is cheaper to just add a Broadcom mobile chip for video. with Via not only would they have a decent low power chip in the Nano but I would argue that for things like TFA and servers it would kick ass. Especially servers where they would have the power of the Nvidia GPUs with the Via built in hardware crypto.
So only time will tell but I'm betting things won't be rosy for Nvidia without an APU. It is pretty obvious the US justice dept is bought and paid for so Intel won't have to worry about antitrust (if they weren't they wouldn't have gotten away with outright bribery of the OEMs, which the Toshiba exec called "like cocaine" and which for several quarters were what kept dell from showing losses during the price wars) so nobody is gonna stop Intel from putting the squeeze on Nvidia as much as they can. AMD doesn't need them and furthermore their new GPU design philosophy of "build the MOR and add a second for the high end) is cheaper in the long run than the Nvidia top down approach. That just leaves Via which if Nvidia bought now could be had for a song. Frankly I don't know what they are waiting for, time isn't on their side.