I'm just going by watching my uncle and cousin having to carry a charger with their iPhones because they can't stop pisslefarting around with the things. I swear with those two it is "app" this and "game' that and I don't think those phones are ever not in their hands for a good chunk of their days.
Now am I saying old Steve makes bad kit? No I'm not, I'm just stating the obvious, that if you slam the crap out of a CPU and GPU pisslefarting with the thing constantly it WILL run the batteries out. Jobs may be smart but even he can't defeat the laws of physics and 3D will ALWAYS suck more than 2D and HD will ALWAYS suck more than SD and large textures will ALWAYS suck more than cheesy games with more primitive textures.
This is just common sense folks and if they expect these things to replace portable gaming consoles then they need to be able to get a good 10-12 hours on a charge while going whole hog like the Nintendo ones can, and I just don't see how that is possible while keeping it thin and sleek.
WTF? Nobody said anything about Ballmer and what was said is common logic. if a machine isn't bricked it can be fixed, end of story. As someone that cleans PCs 6 days a week I can tell you this is a fact and while it is often faster to nuke it isn't the only way to get the job done.
For those that are infected, or are having to clean a friend or relative that is infected MSFT has a nice new free tool to help you out, I tripped over it a couple of weeks back on one of my favorite freeware sites and after giving it a go on a couple of infected boxes I must say they passed multiple subsequent virus scans totally clean. Kinda slow, but for a deep scan that is to be expected. the nice thing is it creates a bootable CD or USB stick so even if the machine is pwned so bad it won't boot you can get in there and clean it up.
It is called Microsoft standalone system sweeper and is a really nice tool to add to your toolbox and is 100% free to those with a legal copy of Windows. it has a 32bit and a 64bit but one can burn both CDs on either OS, the bit refers to the infected system not the clean machine. It updates itself when you make the CD/USB, it cleans rootkits and bootbugs, and it don't cost a cent. MSFT should advertise it better but other than that after several uses I have no complaints.
Plus you have plenty of mobile choices, from DS to PSP to those cheap emulator players (I really need to pick one of those up) and ALL have better controls than a cell phone. Lets face it everything in mobile now is tripping over themselves to rip the Jobsean design school where sleek is sexy and that doesn't leave room for decent buttons or a D-Pad.
So if you really want a way to play games on the road I'd just pick up one of those $50 emulator jobs or a PSP. The emulator one I was looking at was thinner than a PSP, reviews said it got about 20 hours on a charge, had a MicroSD slot, and played everything from 2600 and C64 through SNES and Genesis. And most importantly it had decent controls with shoulder buttons as well as the standard SNES front panel layout and D-Pad. Oh and if you get a little rough gaming or wear out the battery you aren't gonna cry like you would if you toasted your brand new pad or smartphone.
You should probably keep the Tigerdirect one as well, as they have lots of really nice contests (hey somebody has to win right?) and they have some deals that are plumb nuts. I picked up a really nice quad core kit for a customer the other day there, fully loaded for just $350. They also seem to do better prices on graphics cards and flash sticks, such as the 16Gb I have sitting in front of me I got for a whole $9 on a sale they had a few weeks back.
Hell it only takes a couple of seconds the way TD lays out their flyers to scan it and toss if you don't see something sweet, and if you have a browser like Dragon that rocks on the autofill entering their contests are easier than Lazlo filling out those cards for Frito's drawing in Real Genius. So I'd say between that and the NewEgg Daily deal you should be set. Me I'm just waiting for another $35 1Tb HDD deal to come around again. The limit was 4 last time and between customers and family I only got to keep one for myself!
But if you spot it I HIGHLY recommend the Samsung green drive. I tested it against the 400Gb Seagate it was gonna replace and even though the Seagate was 7200RPM to the Samsung 5900RPM the Samsung smoked it, probably due to the much fatter 32Mb of cache. I ended up with one for me, one each for my two boys, and one I sold at cost to a loyal customer (who paid me $50 to install and set it up, so I made money anyway) for just $35 a piece. You can't beat that!
The funny part is since getting mom hooked up I now have her hooked on online shopping as well, in her case Amazon. I keep getting little phone calls like this "Hi hon, I put some more money in your account" uhhhh why? "Oh I found just the perfect house dress, and since the dress didn't reach $25 I got a game for one of the boys and you know I can't buy for one without the other so Dilly got a game too, oh and some ankle weights...and curtains" LOL! I'm addicted to sales flyers, she's hooked on supersaver shipping!
The problem is everyone and their dog and their dog's fleas have bought into the Jobsean school of mobile design which means slim = sexy and iSliver batteries for everyone.
No matter how much you shrink things there are certain fundamental rules one simply can't avoid, and one of those is "you push a bunch of textures and physics and advanced 3D models around in real time you ARE gonna suck power"
Now while I'll give old Steve credit, in that he has trained his users pretty damned well to expect to carry a charger with them I really can't see the iExtension cord becoming the big item on everyone's Xmas list, can you? Sure you might eventually squeeze the vector processing and FP math engines down to that size, hell you can probably stick a chip on my pinkie nail that is faster than my 1998 gamer rig. But in the end it don't change the fact that at the end of the day these are supposed to be MOBILE devices, and not in the Alienware "Where's the outlet again?" definition of the word. I can't see folks putting up with 15 minute battery life just so they can have Halo III on their cell phone.
Al Jazeera? BBC? Oh you mean an American news org? Sorry I've got nothing.
As for TFA? When you are hacking into and deleting a murder victim's voice mails, thus hindering an investigation, and bribing the cops for evidence? Then you've gone way past reporting the news into making it. Personally i hope that just because they close the doors won't stop the investigation and every single one who bribed or hacked gets a nice long jail term.
After all in these days of shell corps if you can kill an investigation simply by closing the doors I think we'll see a lot more of this crap in the future.
That brings up something I've been wondering for awhile...how long should a government allow "designed for the dump" products be brought in before saying no? Because IIRC they had rules with regards to digital tuners in TVs for a decent amount of time before the switch, yet here we are officially out of IPv4 addresses and still the vast majority of routers on NewEgg have NO IPv6 and most likely never will. In fact short of the expensive Apple offerings I don't think there is a single consumer router on NewEgg that supports IPv6.
Now since we know that when the switch does finally happen these routers are landfill fodder, shouldn't the government step in and "just say no" to bring in this crap? Because from the looks of it until the government does step in the sub $60 routers are gonna be strictly IPv4.
Well you are probably at a place with a T-1 or better, so some of that may not apply to you. I have customers on AT&T DSL (Eeek!) and for a 200Mb Nvidia driver it was actually quicker for me to 1.-get in my truck, 2.-drive the 15 miles back to my apt, 3.-download on my cable,4.-drive back to the customer's house, than it was to actually use their AT&T DSL to download the thing! When I got back it had more than 45 minutes to go! So for those cases WSUS is a Godsend, as once you have it updated it takes a few minutes each month to keep it current after patch Tuesday and away you go. It also lets you have all the Office and.NET updates as well and deploy them the whole smash with a single click.
And as for TuneUp I'd say you can't be more wrong. I've found the cause of the much vaunted "Winrot" to be garbage piling up in the registry along with fragmentation and temp crap loaded up the wazoo. With TuneUp it is "install,put in key, walk away" and the customer never needs to touch it again if they don't wish to. it also has a couple of nice features like Turbo mode for gamers that turns off all the background BS to give you max FPS at the touch of a button, and for everyone else it has a nice process monitor that will automatically slamming all the cores to the point of unresponsiveness. Quite nice to have that.
And finally ninite is a little slice of heaven, it is like having unattended installers for ALL the software they have listed, always the latest version, and NO TOOLBARS or other crap. If you decide to buy a support license (which IIRC is something like $30 a year) they'll give you an app that lets you set up your own mirror on your server which will seamlessly sync with the Ninite repos along with tools to let you push any updates you want via GPO. Really nice and easy way to keep your Windows machines updated with the latest Flash and Java.
So it really just depends on what you are doing and where. Have a fast connection and rarely if ever install no MSFT software? You can get by with the built in tools easily. Have customers with lousy connections, need to get safe links to third party software to a clueless relative? These tools are a Godsend. Either way all except TuneUp are free and TuneUp has a free trial, so it isn't like it will cost you a cent to give them a spin.
Oh Lord, please tell me you didn't! MSFT saying you could run Win9X on a 286 was as full of shit as their saying you could run Win98SE with just 4Mb of RAM! The lowest I tried to run Win98SE on was a 60Mhz WinChip with 8Mb of RAM, and it hurt. I can't even imagine what it would be like on a 286!
The funny part? The hackers have gotten so damned good at slimming down Windows I have a 700MHz Toshiba laptop with 128Mb of RAM running WinXP and it is actually peppy and smooth! Look up "TinyXP" and "Tiny7" and prepare to be amazed at the numbers. With TinyXP you are talking about a fully functional WinXP WITH themes support running in just 63Mb of RAM with almost ZERO CPU usage. I just stuck on Kmeleon for a lightweight browser and the thing makes a really nice to use little netbook. You can even run it legally, just substitute your WinXP Pro key for the included one and voila!
Ya know MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes the Tiny Windows OSes. I have tried Windows embedded and WinFLP and both are like a bad joke compared to the tiny Windows OSes. Supposedly there is a DVD floating around out there that has all from Tiny2K to Tiny7 fully loaded and ready to go, I'm gonna have to try to hunt me down a copy of that as Tiny2K3 is the only one I haven't gotten to play with yet.
But if you get a chance and have some old hardware (or a VM) lying around give the Tiny Windows a try and prepare to have your mind blown. Hell its too bad the guy never made Tiny98 as then you'd probably have had a snappy Win98 on a 286DX!
They also made great little basic desktop boards, with low power and low noise. I sold one of those a couple of months back, one of the old Trio S3s. It just goes to show that being a pack rat isn't always a bad thing when it comes to tech.
I had a customer whose little Win2K bookkeeping box blew the onboard and he needed it back up like yesterday. The only PCI graphics card I had at the time was an old S3 pull so I told him I'd be happy to let him have that for $15 ($5 for the part, $10 to put it in and give the machine a good fan cleaning) and then I could order him something better the next week. So the next week rolls around and I call him asking when he wants me to order a new card and he says "Why bother? This one is working great, the picture is fine, the machine is quiet. I'm happy."
So I can see why HTC might want to buy the old S3 tech. They do make great basic graphics chips that sip power and are quiet as church mice. As TFA says it probably has a lot to do with the patents but having a nice basic GPU couldn't hurt either.
I just think it is sad the OEM payoff and compiler rigging by Intel has just about destroyed Via. AMD got a nice payout, though I'd argue it was a drop in the bucket compared to how much Intel cost them by paying OEMs to take the sucktastic P4 over the AMD Athlon 64, but Via was pretty much erased from the map by that BS. It is sad because from what I've seen the Via CPUs would not only make killer little netbook chips but would probably rock for low power servers thanks to the built in crypto chips. But as normal money wins over new ideas or innovation.
Well off the top of my head there is SpeedStep which came with the 1GHz PIII, that is 2000, there is PowerNow which is even older, it came on the K6-2 which is 1998, And APM on motherboards had 0x0F which is the code for engage/disengage power management and that's from 92 but I don't know if that would count. And of course this isn't counting embedded CPUs which I'm sure had power saving even earlier.
So yeah, another BS patent. Is anyone surprised? You can see why companies have patent warchests though so they'll have plenty of ammo for dealing with twits such as TFA. But I'm sure if Lenovo was to ask for prior art there are enough guys here with really old gear and docs the stuff would come out of the woodwork.
Maybe this would be a good thing to add to the EFF? They could have a place on their site where everytime a BS patent troll like this popped up guys could submit prior art. Call it something like "Patent my fanny" or something and then the EFF could just hand the gathered examples of prior art and forward them to the companies being trolled.
Even nicer and easier LiveCD IMHO is Peppermint OS which comes with Chromium and has most of the places folks go to on the web set up as web based desktop apps. Pretty neat. I have been testing it out on a 1.4Ghz Athlon with 512Mb of RAM and it seems to run just fine right off the CD.
Re:I don't remember those 90s...
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7 Days In Email Hell
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· Score: 3, Informative
Ya know that is the one kind of "spam" I have to say I really enjoy. Opening my inbox and finding something I wanted ultra cheap, like that 1Tb Samsung I got for $35? that's nice. Or the "77 features of Windows 7" which actually pointed out a few tricks I'd never heard of (type PSR in the start search and you can record what you are doing as a step by step tutorial, real handy when i'm teaching someone how to use a complex program) which showed up last week? That's nice.
But to me the sweetest thing about email today is how damned nice the spam filters have gotten. i remember when false positives were high and you'd still get a bunch of "4er8al v1agra" bullshit, but now? I can't remember the last time I saw spam in my Yahoo or my Gmail.
So while I can understand why some my want to unsubscribe I like getting my parts cheap too much or learning cool tricks to give up my newsletters. As long as the webmail guys (thanks webmail guys) keep the spam filters rocking finding a couple of sales flyers and a newsletter or two is just a nice diversion.
You are most certainly welcome! Having to fix Windows boxes 6 days a week one tries to find ways to make them easy to use, hard to break, and reliable. Not always easy, especially with certain versions (Vista oh how I hated thee) but with a handful of tools one can make Windows a nice reliable OS.
The easiest way I've found is to use a combination of WSUS Offline so you don't have to wait on Windows Updates (If you have a server with a Fat32 partition you can just keep it there and update it once a month, easy peasy) and Ninite which makes it easy to give users, even if they are in another state, clean and malware free software. I would recommend Avast and Sumatra and Klite, the rest according to your users interests, and finally although it isn't free I can't recommend highly enough TuneUp Utilities as it is even more handy and useful than Norton utilities was in the days of DOS. Nice thing is its automatic, every three days it'll clean the cruft and make sure the drives aren't fragmented.
With these handy dandy tools it is easy peasy to setup a clean machine and keep it that way. For a browser I would suggest Comodo dragon, as it is based on Chromium but has some nice extra security features like better SSL validation. Finally if you DO come across one already pwned MSFT has a nice free system sweeper that will give you a CD to boot from that will wipe out the latest bugs. But if you added TuneUp (truly awesome BTW) and a nice selection of software from Ninite along with Avast Free you're talking maybe an hour and a half from start to finish, and after which they shouldn't need you for anything. I have customers running 8 years now, the only thing I do is hardware upgrades and blow out the fans. The key with Windows is a little time at the start saves a LOT of time down the road.
Actually I KNOW it is much better and I'll explain why...webmail. remember when we all ran our own email programs and had to download all the shit on a sucktastic dialup modem? Sure the spam wasn't as bloaty then but the line was a HELL of a lot slower.
So yes these kids these days don't know how good they got it. They got webmail, they have never been hit by the evil that was Comet Cursors (having your cursor turn into a pocketwatch and slam the CPU so hard your OCed Celeron 300A ran like a 286 trying to load Win98? Fun) or being blinded at 3AM because you tripped over a link and it was a Geocities page in "OMG Ponies!" with bright ass lime green text on a puke pink background with glitter shit falling like rain, or going into work and finding half the boxes have been Bonzi Buddy'ed and your coworkers are screaming at you "OMFG KILL THAT DAMNED MONKEY!"
Yeah kids today they got it so easy, with their multicore this, 3D that. Now get off my lawn!
And that is just perfect proof of how our country has been sold, lock, stock, and barrel, to the MIC. How many carriers are we up to now? 11? And frankly even though she is 51 years old the ship the Ford is supposed to replace, the Enterprise, still does her job and frankly could probably do that job another 20 years.
No the Ford and the F35 are just handouts by another name. look at the F35, how many times has its budget been blown? How far behind is it now? And the sad part is the stupid thing is like building a biplane in the age of jets. We have ALREADY developed planes that can pull more gs than the pilots can survive in the F teen series, yet here we are, when a UCAV could do it safer and cheaper, acting like the cold war is still going on.
We need to cancel the Ford, hell if it was up to me we'd do the reverse of what we did in WWII and use its keel for a battleship since we've found their ship to shore bombardment is still damned useful, cancel the F35 outright, and if they can't get the Webb done in two years with 10% more funds then kill it or offer it to the Europeans to finish.
Sadly we'll blow huge amounts on shit we don't need like the Osprey since it is a handout to the MIC but groups like NOAA where they can give us real data to help shape our world? Nah just cut the budget.
As someone that fixes these things 6 days a week, allow me to elucidate. I've found infections with the security tool and MS20xx AV falls into a few easy to spot patterns, none of which have to do with the OS BTW.
1.- The "you want teh hot lesbos? you need to run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_codec.exe to play teh vidz!" 2.- The "ZOMg you got teh viruz! To fix run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_cleanerz.exe to get rid of it ZOMG!" 3.-The "Use the new Limewire (Iz_not_Viruz_iz_Limewirez) to download teh latest Titney_Spearz.mp3.exe tunez today!" and 4.-"Hey my BFF sent me a funny cat video! It says I should run Iz_not_Viruz_iz_LOLCatz to see teh kittiez!"
Sadly as you can see you can be patched from here to hell and back and it simply won't help as it is all PEBKAC. I even had to get ugly and tell a customer to hit the bricks, something I NEVER do, because he was so determined (after I had told him not to) to get the "New Limewire" he first tried to disable and then when that didn't work uninstalled the AV and then had the gall to complain and want me to fix his PC for free "since it only lasted a week". Finally I had to say the POINT of an AV is to STOP infections, not to let you HAVE infections because you like the name. you ignored the AV, uninstalled the AV, all so you could download some pop song and by doing so ended up infecting your machine with over 80 bugs. Take your business elsewhere.
So you can't really pin this one on MSFT like you could with XP. With XP they had the lamebrain "Hey lets all run as admin!" case of the stupids, but with Vista and 7 that ignorance finally went and DIAF. Now with a decent AV (I recommend either Avast Free or Comodo IS Free, both have JavaScript scan on load and default sandboxing) and even the teeniest tiniest bit of common sense you can easily keep a Windows machine clean for life. Sadly the malware writers have learned the easiest way to infect a machine will ALWAYS be to have the user help you which is why security tool and rogue AV are spreading so easy.
You joke but this is actually a damned smart business move, which is why Apple has been doing it for years with their college program. You get the college kids trained to use your stuff now, and then when they reach the workforce they are already trained in your software and are more likely to buy it.
This is just smart business and why Apple has offered students at the local college gear at or below cost, and why if you have a.edu email address you can get Windows 7 pro for something like $35. I;m sure many here will liken it to the tobacco companies "get 'em while they're young" but since nearly every job I see wants MS Office experience anyway having them learn MS Office in the cloud will probably help them down the road. i'm sure Google probably does something similar we simply don't hear about it.
While all that you said is true, it doesn't change certain facts. fact-We have tons of nuclear waste that if we do NOT reprocess is gonna be seriously dangerous for an incredibly long time. fact- we have tons and tons of plutonium from our days of the Cold War and again if we don't find something constructive to do with it is gonna be hot for a very long time.
Nuclear gives us a chance to "turn our swords into plowshares" and actually find a use for all that material while at the same time actually making less of a mess for those that come after. Now for a goal such as that, for cutting down on the amount of poisons we have piled up? I believe that is worth some subsidy, especially the reprocessing.
Because either way we have tons of waste that needs to be dealt with, and I personally think it would be smarter to try to use the stuff than try to find the perfect hole to drop it in.
Wow, you really want to suck my cock, don't you Alex? Because here we are, talking about fucking high School and the public education system, no one has mentioned Operating Systems in ANY way shape or form, yet still you follow me around like a fangirl with her panties wet. But hey, since you want to get slapped around by my large cock again, here it goes...Watch everyone, as poor Alex has NO comeback for this massive cock slapping!
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?
Riiiiight. You want to see tribalism? Put two college kids, one who has a MBP and the other an Air, in the same room and ask them which is better. It was hilarious! I thought they were actually gonna come to blows, all over which iShiny was the "better" iShiny! Hell I wasn't even trying to troll them I just didn't know what the specs were and was curious! I guess "there can be only one" when it comes to being the greatest follower of the Lord Steve.
As for TFA, please. Apple doesn't innovate, hell they don't have to and it isn't their biggest selling point. You want to know what Apple sells? Stripping that's what. I read a story by the guy in charge of building iDVD and it went like this "So I come in with all these markups, with all these cool features. Steve doesn't even bother to look at them, he just goes up to the whiteboard and draws a box. He said "This is what I want...a box. You drop video here and a single button that says burn appears. That's it" and then he walked out. I just stood there in shock"
And it is THAT which has made Lord Steve mountains of iCash, stripping everything down to the most bare so that everything can be done with NO manual, NO fiddling, NO previous experience with the product, it all "just works". Frankly Steve has been doing that since the first Mac and it took MSFT from 85 with Windows 1 to 2009 with Windows 7 to FINALLY figure out the answer isn't always 14 submenus. Windows 7 is finally intuitive, my dad can work it out the box and never needs me to explain anything, while I can still get to all the features.
it is THAT combination that has made Steve an assload of money, not being "innovative" or any other marketing buzzword. PCs? Existed before Steve. MP3 Players? Yep, before Steve. Tablets? Again before Steve. But what do all three have in common? Steve stripped out all the bullshit and made them easy to use. Hell maybe in 20 years MSFT will figure out how to build an MP3 Player and Tablet as well, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Uhhh...haven't tried one of the new AMD netbooks have you? 5 hours battery life, will output 1080p over HDMI, has enough power to play WoW or pretty much anything else you'd do with a "normal" PC just in a portable package. they are really nice. Of course they ain't as cheap as an Atom based junker, but an iPad ain't as cheap as a CCC aPad either, still you can get them for $60 less than an iPad and you can do more with it than consume content.
As for TFA? I wish them look but it is probably too little too late. my prediction is thus: Google and Apple trading first and second back and forth and if MSFT gets DirectX and XBL on the Nokia WinPhone they'll get third, a solid third if they can also tie in Skype and AD/GPO support so they can take RIMs former customers.
So while I wish them luck honestly I just don't think there is enough room in the market for four OSes in mobile. Google has a juggernaut that is exploding in popularity and those that follow iSteve will have nothing less than Apple, and MSFT has enough pull in business markets as well as the X360 to pull in consumers to get third place, that is if they don't shoot themselves in the foot like they did with the Kin. If they would have hit the ground running and rushed out a product right after they bought it? maybe they could have built buzz and momentum. I just don't see that happening this late in the game.
But if we reprocessed we could get that waste down to VERY small levels with little radioactivity left in the end, but we have too many "ZOMG! somebody might get stuff to build teh bomb, ZOMG!" which of course ignores the fact that the US military has been pretty damned good about not letting nuclear materials end up in the wild and it would be much cheaper to get the material from some bumfuckistan than to try to get it in the USA.
While I have NO problems with renewables my worry is it is gonna end up like ethanol, one big handout for shit that would never make it on its own. Sadly as we have seen time and time again anytime there is government and big money to be made here comes Mr Corruption and his buddy Mr Graft.
So I think the smarter move would be research into both nuclear like Thorium reactors and renewables with as few subsidies as possible. The more choices we have the better, well except for "clean" coal because coal is about as clean as the tail pipe on a 32 Dodge with a bad gasket.
It is called math, something i thought would be understood on/. but I guess I was wrong. you see MSFT has literally 10s of 1000s of patents, feel free to look them up. They also buy patents by the hundreds EVERY SINGLE YEAR so the number of patents owned or co-owned by MSFT is probably gaining by about a dozen a day. and very very many of those patents are in...surprise!...OS design. Wow, who would have thunk it?
So you have this OS called Linux, an OS made by large groups spread all over the planet, including many that don't have rules about clean room reverse engineering nor do they give a crap about patents (See ReactOS for an example of the trouble this can lead to) but lets say for the sake of argument that not a single person that has EVER worked on Linux has seen a single line of Windows code (which considering even I got to see the WinNT code when the Win2K leak happened is kinda doubtful) and that everything they've ever done was based on a home grown idea.
Again we are talking about TENS of THOUSANDS of patents here that cover everything from system calls to file systems, from memory management to booting. Now are you gonna HONESTLY tell me that there isn't a single line that in any way, shape, or form, infringes on those huge mounds of patents, really? you know there is a reason why Google doesn't indemnify on Android or WebM, yes? it is because MPEG-LA has enough patents that one would be hard pressed to develop anything that did squat with video that didn't infringe, and I would argue that with MSFT R&D cranking out the patents the same WILL be true of Linux and OS design.
Look in a way we are on the same side here, i think patents and copyrights in their current form need to DIAF as they give the big corps too much power and stifle innovation. But until one gets the system itself changed one can't just go "Well I don't like the system so fuck it and fuck you" which is why so many corps like Intel and AMD and Nvidia do cross licensing, because they know that a patent war would equal MAD. But Linux as a whole doesn't have the money or the patents to play that game against an Apple or MSFT. Sure you have Google and IBM coming to your rescue, but for how long? Already both IBM and Google won't allow GPL V3 since they can't TiVo it, so how long before one or both just forks and creates their own proprietary version with eFuses?
The simple fact MSFT isn't the big scary that it was under gates, now they just offer RAND and walk away, easy enough to get rid of them like in TFA. What is gonna slowly bleed Linux to death is the trolls and the death of a thousand cuts. With so many Linux corps going tits up that is a lot of patents ending up on the market and it doesn't take too many lawsuits in East Texas to drain the life out of smaller companies. No until the system is fixed the ONLY protection is big ass patent warchests which sadly Linux is severely lacking in compared to the competition. I foresee a future where you have "Google Linux" and "IBM Linux" and everyone else is shut out by patents.
Do I think that's great, or cheer if it helps MSFT? Hell no, and in fact there is nothing I'd like more for them to get taken down a couple more notches so the sweaty monkey can be shown the door and someone from the Office team can get in there and bring them back to a business OS company that also makes consumer OSes, not the "ZOMG we need to be Apple!" bullshit we have now. But if you want in this business you gotta play the game and right now everyone else is holding bats and you have a Nerf ball. Not really a fair fight friend.
What the hell is wrong with you? Are you a caveman or something? This is America for God's sake....the gun shop is on the corner! Using your fists...why do you hate America?
Support American workers...for all your violence needs American firearms! American firearms...fucking their shit up since 1776!
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I'm just going by watching my uncle and cousin having to carry a charger with their iPhones because they can't stop pisslefarting around with the things. I swear with those two it is "app" this and "game' that and I don't think those phones are ever not in their hands for a good chunk of their days.
Now am I saying old Steve makes bad kit? No I'm not, I'm just stating the obvious, that if you slam the crap out of a CPU and GPU pisslefarting with the thing constantly it WILL run the batteries out. Jobs may be smart but even he can't defeat the laws of physics and 3D will ALWAYS suck more than 2D and HD will ALWAYS suck more than SD and large textures will ALWAYS suck more than cheesy games with more primitive textures.
This is just common sense folks and if they expect these things to replace portable gaming consoles then they need to be able to get a good 10-12 hours on a charge while going whole hog like the Nintendo ones can, and I just don't see how that is possible while keeping it thin and sleek.
WTF? Nobody said anything about Ballmer and what was said is common logic. if a machine isn't bricked it can be fixed, end of story. As someone that cleans PCs 6 days a week I can tell you this is a fact and while it is often faster to nuke it isn't the only way to get the job done.
For those that are infected, or are having to clean a friend or relative that is infected MSFT has a nice new free tool to help you out, I tripped over it a couple of weeks back on one of my favorite freeware sites and after giving it a go on a couple of infected boxes I must say they passed multiple subsequent virus scans totally clean. Kinda slow, but for a deep scan that is to be expected. the nice thing is it creates a bootable CD or USB stick so even if the machine is pwned so bad it won't boot you can get in there and clean it up.
It is called Microsoft standalone system sweeper and is a really nice tool to add to your toolbox and is 100% free to those with a legal copy of Windows. it has a 32bit and a 64bit but one can burn both CDs on either OS, the bit refers to the infected system not the clean machine. It updates itself when you make the CD/USB, it cleans rootkits and bootbugs, and it don't cost a cent. MSFT should advertise it better but other than that after several uses I have no complaints.
Plus you have plenty of mobile choices, from DS to PSP to those cheap emulator players (I really need to pick one of those up) and ALL have better controls than a cell phone. Lets face it everything in mobile now is tripping over themselves to rip the Jobsean design school where sleek is sexy and that doesn't leave room for decent buttons or a D-Pad.
So if you really want a way to play games on the road I'd just pick up one of those $50 emulator jobs or a PSP. The emulator one I was looking at was thinner than a PSP, reviews said it got about 20 hours on a charge, had a MicroSD slot, and played everything from 2600 and C64 through SNES and Genesis. And most importantly it had decent controls with shoulder buttons as well as the standard SNES front panel layout and D-Pad. Oh and if you get a little rough gaming or wear out the battery you aren't gonna cry like you would if you toasted your brand new pad or smartphone.
You should probably keep the Tigerdirect one as well, as they have lots of really nice contests (hey somebody has to win right?) and they have some deals that are plumb nuts. I picked up a really nice quad core kit for a customer the other day there, fully loaded for just $350. They also seem to do better prices on graphics cards and flash sticks, such as the 16Gb I have sitting in front of me I got for a whole $9 on a sale they had a few weeks back.
Hell it only takes a couple of seconds the way TD lays out their flyers to scan it and toss if you don't see something sweet, and if you have a browser like Dragon that rocks on the autofill entering their contests are easier than Lazlo filling out those cards for Frito's drawing in Real Genius. So I'd say between that and the NewEgg Daily deal you should be set. Me I'm just waiting for another $35 1Tb HDD deal to come around again. The limit was 4 last time and between customers and family I only got to keep one for myself!
But if you spot it I HIGHLY recommend the Samsung green drive. I tested it against the 400Gb Seagate it was gonna replace and even though the Seagate was 7200RPM to the Samsung 5900RPM the Samsung smoked it, probably due to the much fatter 32Mb of cache. I ended up with one for me, one each for my two boys, and one I sold at cost to a loyal customer (who paid me $50 to install and set it up, so I made money anyway) for just $35 a piece. You can't beat that!
The funny part is since getting mom hooked up I now have her hooked on online shopping as well, in her case Amazon. I keep getting little phone calls like this "Hi hon, I put some more money in your account" uhhhh why? "Oh I found just the perfect house dress, and since the dress didn't reach $25 I got a game for one of the boys and you know I can't buy for one without the other so Dilly got a game too, oh and some ankle weights...and curtains" LOL! I'm addicted to sales flyers, she's hooked on supersaver shipping!
The problem is everyone and their dog and their dog's fleas have bought into the Jobsean school of mobile design which means slim = sexy and iSliver batteries for everyone.
No matter how much you shrink things there are certain fundamental rules one simply can't avoid, and one of those is "you push a bunch of textures and physics and advanced 3D models around in real time you ARE gonna suck power"
Now while I'll give old Steve credit, in that he has trained his users pretty damned well to expect to carry a charger with them I really can't see the iExtension cord becoming the big item on everyone's Xmas list, can you? Sure you might eventually squeeze the vector processing and FP math engines down to that size, hell you can probably stick a chip on my pinkie nail that is faster than my 1998 gamer rig. But in the end it don't change the fact that at the end of the day these are supposed to be MOBILE devices, and not in the Alienware "Where's the outlet again?" definition of the word. I can't see folks putting up with 15 minute battery life just so they can have Halo III on their cell phone.
Al Jazeera? BBC? Oh you mean an American news org? Sorry I've got nothing.
As for TFA? When you are hacking into and deleting a murder victim's voice mails, thus hindering an investigation, and bribing the cops for evidence? Then you've gone way past reporting the news into making it. Personally i hope that just because they close the doors won't stop the investigation and every single one who bribed or hacked gets a nice long jail term.
After all in these days of shell corps if you can kill an investigation simply by closing the doors I think we'll see a lot more of this crap in the future.
That brings up something I've been wondering for awhile...how long should a government allow "designed for the dump" products be brought in before saying no? Because IIRC they had rules with regards to digital tuners in TVs for a decent amount of time before the switch, yet here we are officially out of IPv4 addresses and still the vast majority of routers on NewEgg have NO IPv6 and most likely never will. In fact short of the expensive Apple offerings I don't think there is a single consumer router on NewEgg that supports IPv6.
Now since we know that when the switch does finally happen these routers are landfill fodder, shouldn't the government step in and "just say no" to bring in this crap? Because from the looks of it until the government does step in the sub $60 routers are gonna be strictly IPv4.
Well you are probably at a place with a T-1 or better, so some of that may not apply to you. I have customers on AT&T DSL (Eeek!) and for a 200Mb Nvidia driver it was actually quicker for me to 1.-get in my truck, 2.-drive the 15 miles back to my apt, 3.-download on my cable,4.-drive back to the customer's house, than it was to actually use their AT&T DSL to download the thing! When I got back it had more than 45 minutes to go! So for those cases WSUS is a Godsend, as once you have it updated it takes a few minutes each month to keep it current after patch Tuesday and away you go. It also lets you have all the Office and .NET updates as well and deploy them the whole smash with a single click.
And as for TuneUp I'd say you can't be more wrong. I've found the cause of the much vaunted "Winrot" to be garbage piling up in the registry along with fragmentation and temp crap loaded up the wazoo. With TuneUp it is "install,put in key, walk away" and the customer never needs to touch it again if they don't wish to. it also has a couple of nice features like Turbo mode for gamers that turns off all the background BS to give you max FPS at the touch of a button, and for everyone else it has a nice process monitor that will automatically slamming all the cores to the point of unresponsiveness. Quite nice to have that.
And finally ninite is a little slice of heaven, it is like having unattended installers for ALL the software they have listed, always the latest version, and NO TOOLBARS or other crap. If you decide to buy a support license (which IIRC is something like $30 a year) they'll give you an app that lets you set up your own mirror on your server which will seamlessly sync with the Ninite repos along with tools to let you push any updates you want via GPO. Really nice and easy way to keep your Windows machines updated with the latest Flash and Java.
So it really just depends on what you are doing and where. Have a fast connection and rarely if ever install no MSFT software? You can get by with the built in tools easily. Have customers with lousy connections, need to get safe links to third party software to a clueless relative? These tools are a Godsend. Either way all except TuneUp are free and TuneUp has a free trial, so it isn't like it will cost you a cent to give them a spin.
Oh Lord, please tell me you didn't! MSFT saying you could run Win9X on a 286 was as full of shit as their saying you could run Win98SE with just 4Mb of RAM! The lowest I tried to run Win98SE on was a 60Mhz WinChip with 8Mb of RAM, and it hurt. I can't even imagine what it would be like on a 286!
The funny part? The hackers have gotten so damned good at slimming down Windows I have a 700MHz Toshiba laptop with 128Mb of RAM running WinXP and it is actually peppy and smooth! Look up "TinyXP" and "Tiny7" and prepare to be amazed at the numbers. With TinyXP you are talking about a fully functional WinXP WITH themes support running in just 63Mb of RAM with almost ZERO CPU usage. I just stuck on Kmeleon for a lightweight browser and the thing makes a really nice to use little netbook. You can even run it legally, just substitute your WinXP Pro key for the included one and voila!
Ya know MSFT really ought to hire the guy that makes the Tiny Windows OSes. I have tried Windows embedded and WinFLP and both are like a bad joke compared to the tiny Windows OSes. Supposedly there is a DVD floating around out there that has all from Tiny2K to Tiny7 fully loaded and ready to go, I'm gonna have to try to hunt me down a copy of that as Tiny2K3 is the only one I haven't gotten to play with yet.
But if you get a chance and have some old hardware (or a VM) lying around give the Tiny Windows a try and prepare to have your mind blown. Hell its too bad the guy never made Tiny98 as then you'd probably have had a snappy Win98 on a 286DX!
They also made great little basic desktop boards, with low power and low noise. I sold one of those a couple of months back, one of the old Trio S3s. It just goes to show that being a pack rat isn't always a bad thing when it comes to tech.
I had a customer whose little Win2K bookkeeping box blew the onboard and he needed it back up like yesterday. The only PCI graphics card I had at the time was an old S3 pull so I told him I'd be happy to let him have that for $15 ($5 for the part, $10 to put it in and give the machine a good fan cleaning) and then I could order him something better the next week. So the next week rolls around and I call him asking when he wants me to order a new card and he says "Why bother? This one is working great, the picture is fine, the machine is quiet. I'm happy."
So I can see why HTC might want to buy the old S3 tech. They do make great basic graphics chips that sip power and are quiet as church mice. As TFA says it probably has a lot to do with the patents but having a nice basic GPU couldn't hurt either.
I just think it is sad the OEM payoff and compiler rigging by Intel has just about destroyed Via. AMD got a nice payout, though I'd argue it was a drop in the bucket compared to how much Intel cost them by paying OEMs to take the sucktastic P4 over the AMD Athlon 64, but Via was pretty much erased from the map by that BS. It is sad because from what I've seen the Via CPUs would not only make killer little netbook chips but would probably rock for low power servers thanks to the built in crypto chips. But as normal money wins over new ideas or innovation.
Well off the top of my head there is SpeedStep which came with the 1GHz PIII, that is 2000, there is PowerNow which is even older, it came on the K6-2 which is 1998, And APM on motherboards had 0x0F which is the code for engage/disengage power management and that's from 92 but I don't know if that would count. And of course this isn't counting embedded CPUs which I'm sure had power saving even earlier.
So yeah, another BS patent. Is anyone surprised? You can see why companies have patent warchests though so they'll have plenty of ammo for dealing with twits such as TFA. But I'm sure if Lenovo was to ask for prior art there are enough guys here with really old gear and docs the stuff would come out of the woodwork.
Maybe this would be a good thing to add to the EFF? They could have a place on their site where everytime a BS patent troll like this popped up guys could submit prior art. Call it something like "Patent my fanny" or something and then the EFF could just hand the gathered examples of prior art and forward them to the companies being trolled.
Even nicer and easier LiveCD IMHO is Peppermint OS which comes with Chromium and has most of the places folks go to on the web set up as web based desktop apps. Pretty neat. I have been testing it out on a 1.4Ghz Athlon with 512Mb of RAM and it seems to run just fine right off the CD.
Ya know that is the one kind of "spam" I have to say I really enjoy. Opening my inbox and finding something I wanted ultra cheap, like that 1Tb Samsung I got for $35? that's nice. Or the "77 features of Windows 7" which actually pointed out a few tricks I'd never heard of (type PSR in the start search and you can record what you are doing as a step by step tutorial, real handy when i'm teaching someone how to use a complex program) which showed up last week? That's nice.
But to me the sweetest thing about email today is how damned nice the spam filters have gotten. i remember when false positives were high and you'd still get a bunch of "4er8al v1agra" bullshit, but now? I can't remember the last time I saw spam in my Yahoo or my Gmail.
So while I can understand why some my want to unsubscribe I like getting my parts cheap too much or learning cool tricks to give up my newsletters. As long as the webmail guys (thanks webmail guys) keep the spam filters rocking finding a couple of sales flyers and a newsletter or two is just a nice diversion.
You are most certainly welcome! Having to fix Windows boxes 6 days a week one tries to find ways to make them easy to use, hard to break, and reliable. Not always easy, especially with certain versions (Vista oh how I hated thee) but with a handful of tools one can make Windows a nice reliable OS.
The easiest way I've found is to use a combination of WSUS Offline so you don't have to wait on Windows Updates (If you have a server with a Fat32 partition you can just keep it there and update it once a month, easy peasy) and Ninite which makes it easy to give users, even if they are in another state, clean and malware free software. I would recommend Avast and Sumatra and Klite, the rest according to your users interests, and finally although it isn't free I can't recommend highly enough TuneUp Utilities as it is even more handy and useful than Norton utilities was in the days of DOS. Nice thing is its automatic, every three days it'll clean the cruft and make sure the drives aren't fragmented.
With these handy dandy tools it is easy peasy to setup a clean machine and keep it that way. For a browser I would suggest Comodo dragon, as it is based on Chromium but has some nice extra security features like better SSL validation. Finally if you DO come across one already pwned MSFT has a nice free system sweeper that will give you a CD to boot from that will wipe out the latest bugs. But if you added TuneUp (truly awesome BTW) and a nice selection of software from Ninite along with Avast Free you're talking maybe an hour and a half from start to finish, and after which they shouldn't need you for anything. I have customers running 8 years now, the only thing I do is hardware upgrades and blow out the fans. The key with Windows is a little time at the start saves a LOT of time down the road.
Actually I KNOW it is much better and I'll explain why...webmail. remember when we all ran our own email programs and had to download all the shit on a sucktastic dialup modem? Sure the spam wasn't as bloaty then but the line was a HELL of a lot slower.
So yes these kids these days don't know how good they got it. They got webmail, they have never been hit by the evil that was Comet Cursors (having your cursor turn into a pocketwatch and slam the CPU so hard your OCed Celeron 300A ran like a 286 trying to load Win98? Fun) or being blinded at 3AM because you tripped over a link and it was a Geocities page in "OMG Ponies!" with bright ass lime green text on a puke pink background with glitter shit falling like rain, or going into work and finding half the boxes have been Bonzi Buddy'ed and your coworkers are screaming at you "OMFG KILL THAT DAMNED MONKEY!"
Yeah kids today they got it so easy, with their multicore this, 3D that. Now get off my lawn!
And that is just perfect proof of how our country has been sold, lock, stock, and barrel, to the MIC. How many carriers are we up to now? 11? And frankly even though she is 51 years old the ship the Ford is supposed to replace, the Enterprise, still does her job and frankly could probably do that job another 20 years.
No the Ford and the F35 are just handouts by another name. look at the F35, how many times has its budget been blown? How far behind is it now? And the sad part is the stupid thing is like building a biplane in the age of jets. We have ALREADY developed planes that can pull more gs than the pilots can survive in the F teen series, yet here we are, when a UCAV could do it safer and cheaper, acting like the cold war is still going on.
We need to cancel the Ford, hell if it was up to me we'd do the reverse of what we did in WWII and use its keel for a battleship since we've found their ship to shore bombardment is still damned useful, cancel the F35 outright, and if they can't get the Webb done in two years with 10% more funds then kill it or offer it to the Europeans to finish.
Sadly we'll blow huge amounts on shit we don't need like the Osprey since it is a handout to the MIC but groups like NOAA where they can give us real data to help shape our world? Nah just cut the budget.
As someone that fixes these things 6 days a week, allow me to elucidate. I've found infections with the security tool and MS20xx AV falls into a few easy to spot patterns, none of which have to do with the OS BTW.
1.- The "you want teh hot lesbos? you need to run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_codec.exe to play teh vidz!" 2.- The "ZOMg you got teh viruz! To fix run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_cleanerz.exe to get rid of it ZOMG!" 3.-The "Use the new Limewire (Iz_not_Viruz_iz_Limewirez) to download teh latest Titney_Spearz.mp3.exe tunez today!" and 4.-"Hey my BFF sent me a funny cat video! It says I should run Iz_not_Viruz_iz_LOLCatz to see teh kittiez!"
Sadly as you can see you can be patched from here to hell and back and it simply won't help as it is all PEBKAC. I even had to get ugly and tell a customer to hit the bricks, something I NEVER do, because he was so determined (after I had told him not to) to get the "New Limewire" he first tried to disable and then when that didn't work uninstalled the AV and then had the gall to complain and want me to fix his PC for free "since it only lasted a week". Finally I had to say the POINT of an AV is to STOP infections, not to let you HAVE infections because you like the name. you ignored the AV, uninstalled the AV, all so you could download some pop song and by doing so ended up infecting your machine with over 80 bugs. Take your business elsewhere.
So you can't really pin this one on MSFT like you could with XP. With XP they had the lamebrain "Hey lets all run as admin!" case of the stupids, but with Vista and 7 that ignorance finally went and DIAF. Now with a decent AV (I recommend either Avast Free or Comodo IS Free, both have JavaScript scan on load and default sandboxing) and even the teeniest tiniest bit of common sense you can easily keep a Windows machine clean for life. Sadly the malware writers have learned the easiest way to infect a machine will ALWAYS be to have the user help you which is why security tool and rogue AV are spreading so easy.
You joke but this is actually a damned smart business move, which is why Apple has been doing it for years with their college program. You get the college kids trained to use your stuff now, and then when they reach the workforce they are already trained in your software and are more likely to buy it.
This is just smart business and why Apple has offered students at the local college gear at or below cost, and why if you have a .edu email address you can get Windows 7 pro for something like $35. I;m sure many here will liken it to the tobacco companies "get 'em while they're young" but since nearly every job I see wants MS Office experience anyway having them learn MS Office in the cloud will probably help them down the road. i'm sure Google probably does something similar we simply don't hear about it.
While all that you said is true, it doesn't change certain facts. fact-We have tons of nuclear waste that if we do NOT reprocess is gonna be seriously dangerous for an incredibly long time. fact- we have tons and tons of plutonium from our days of the Cold War and again if we don't find something constructive to do with it is gonna be hot for a very long time.
Nuclear gives us a chance to "turn our swords into plowshares" and actually find a use for all that material while at the same time actually making less of a mess for those that come after. Now for a goal such as that, for cutting down on the amount of poisons we have piled up? I believe that is worth some subsidy, especially the reprocessing.
Because either way we have tons of waste that needs to be dealt with, and I personally think it would be smarter to try to use the stuff than try to find the perfect hole to drop it in.
Wow, you really want to suck my cock, don't you Alex? Because here we are, talking about fucking high School and the public education system, no one has mentioned Operating Systems in ANY way shape or form, yet still you follow me around like a fangirl with her panties wet. But hey, since you want to get slapped around by my large cock again, here it goes...Watch everyone, as poor Alex has NO comeback for this massive cock slapping!
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?
Riiiiight. You want to see tribalism? Put two college kids, one who has a MBP and the other an Air, in the same room and ask them which is better. It was hilarious! I thought they were actually gonna come to blows, all over which iShiny was the "better" iShiny! Hell I wasn't even trying to troll them I just didn't know what the specs were and was curious! I guess "there can be only one" when it comes to being the greatest follower of the Lord Steve.
As for TFA, please. Apple doesn't innovate, hell they don't have to and it isn't their biggest selling point. You want to know what Apple sells? Stripping that's what. I read a story by the guy in charge of building iDVD and it went like this "So I come in with all these markups, with all these cool features. Steve doesn't even bother to look at them, he just goes up to the whiteboard and draws a box. He said "This is what I want...a box. You drop video here and a single button that says burn appears. That's it" and then he walked out. I just stood there in shock"
And it is THAT which has made Lord Steve mountains of iCash, stripping everything down to the most bare so that everything can be done with NO manual, NO fiddling, NO previous experience with the product, it all "just works". Frankly Steve has been doing that since the first Mac and it took MSFT from 85 with Windows 1 to 2009 with Windows 7 to FINALLY figure out the answer isn't always 14 submenus. Windows 7 is finally intuitive, my dad can work it out the box and never needs me to explain anything, while I can still get to all the features.
it is THAT combination that has made Steve an assload of money, not being "innovative" or any other marketing buzzword. PCs? Existed before Steve. MP3 Players? Yep, before Steve. Tablets? Again before Steve. But what do all three have in common? Steve stripped out all the bullshit and made them easy to use. Hell maybe in 20 years MSFT will figure out how to build an MP3 Player and Tablet as well, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Uhhh...haven't tried one of the new AMD netbooks have you? 5 hours battery life, will output 1080p over HDMI, has enough power to play WoW or pretty much anything else you'd do with a "normal" PC just in a portable package. they are really nice. Of course they ain't as cheap as an Atom based junker, but an iPad ain't as cheap as a CCC aPad either, still you can get them for $60 less than an iPad and you can do more with it than consume content.
As for TFA? I wish them look but it is probably too little too late. my prediction is thus: Google and Apple trading first and second back and forth and if MSFT gets DirectX and XBL on the Nokia WinPhone they'll get third, a solid third if they can also tie in Skype and AD/GPO support so they can take RIMs former customers.
So while I wish them luck honestly I just don't think there is enough room in the market for four OSes in mobile. Google has a juggernaut that is exploding in popularity and those that follow iSteve will have nothing less than Apple, and MSFT has enough pull in business markets as well as the X360 to pull in consumers to get third place, that is if they don't shoot themselves in the foot like they did with the Kin. If they would have hit the ground running and rushed out a product right after they bought it? maybe they could have built buzz and momentum. I just don't see that happening this late in the game.
But if we reprocessed we could get that waste down to VERY small levels with little radioactivity left in the end, but we have too many "ZOMG! somebody might get stuff to build teh bomb, ZOMG!" which of course ignores the fact that the US military has been pretty damned good about not letting nuclear materials end up in the wild and it would be much cheaper to get the material from some bumfuckistan than to try to get it in the USA.
While I have NO problems with renewables my worry is it is gonna end up like ethanol, one big handout for shit that would never make it on its own. Sadly as we have seen time and time again anytime there is government and big money to be made here comes Mr Corruption and his buddy Mr Graft.
So I think the smarter move would be research into both nuclear like Thorium reactors and renewables with as few subsidies as possible. The more choices we have the better, well except for "clean" coal because coal is about as clean as the tail pipe on a 32 Dodge with a bad gasket.
It is called math, something i thought would be understood on /. but I guess I was wrong. you see MSFT has literally 10s of 1000s of patents, feel free to look them up. They also buy patents by the hundreds EVERY SINGLE YEAR so the number of patents owned or co-owned by MSFT is probably gaining by about a dozen a day. and very very many of those patents are in...surprise!...OS design. Wow, who would have thunk it?
So you have this OS called Linux, an OS made by large groups spread all over the planet, including many that don't have rules about clean room reverse engineering nor do they give a crap about patents (See ReactOS for an example of the trouble this can lead to) but lets say for the sake of argument that not a single person that has EVER worked on Linux has seen a single line of Windows code (which considering even I got to see the WinNT code when the Win2K leak happened is kinda doubtful) and that everything they've ever done was based on a home grown idea.
Again we are talking about TENS of THOUSANDS of patents here that cover everything from system calls to file systems, from memory management to booting. Now are you gonna HONESTLY tell me that there isn't a single line that in any way, shape, or form, infringes on those huge mounds of patents, really? you know there is a reason why Google doesn't indemnify on Android or WebM, yes? it is because MPEG-LA has enough patents that one would be hard pressed to develop anything that did squat with video that didn't infringe, and I would argue that with MSFT R&D cranking out the patents the same WILL be true of Linux and OS design.
Look in a way we are on the same side here, i think patents and copyrights in their current form need to DIAF as they give the big corps too much power and stifle innovation. But until one gets the system itself changed one can't just go "Well I don't like the system so fuck it and fuck you" which is why so many corps like Intel and AMD and Nvidia do cross licensing, because they know that a patent war would equal MAD. But Linux as a whole doesn't have the money or the patents to play that game against an Apple or MSFT. Sure you have Google and IBM coming to your rescue, but for how long? Already both IBM and Google won't allow GPL V3 since they can't TiVo it, so how long before one or both just forks and creates their own proprietary version with eFuses?
The simple fact MSFT isn't the big scary that it was under gates, now they just offer RAND and walk away, easy enough to get rid of them like in TFA. What is gonna slowly bleed Linux to death is the trolls and the death of a thousand cuts. With so many Linux corps going tits up that is a lot of patents ending up on the market and it doesn't take too many lawsuits in East Texas to drain the life out of smaller companies. No until the system is fixed the ONLY protection is big ass patent warchests which sadly Linux is severely lacking in compared to the competition. I foresee a future where you have "Google Linux" and "IBM Linux" and everyone else is shut out by patents.
Do I think that's great, or cheer if it helps MSFT? Hell no, and in fact there is nothing I'd like more for them to get taken down a couple more notches so the sweaty monkey can be shown the door and someone from the Office team can get in there and bring them back to a business OS company that also makes consumer OSes, not the "ZOMG we need to be Apple!" bullshit we have now. But if you want in this business you gotta play the game and right now everyone else is holding bats and you have a Nerf ball. Not really a fair fight friend.
What the hell is wrong with you? Are you a caveman or something? This is America for God's sake....the gun shop is on the corner! Using your fists...why do you hate America?
Support American workers...for all your violence needs American firearms! American firearms...fucking their shit up since 1776!