See my little rant here for my take and some examples i ran into of THAT problem.
I would say a BIG, as in Hiroshima nuke style big problem we have in this country is "upward failure" where time and time again stupidity is rewarded by those dipshits that did said stupidity either moving up and out of a dept so they don't get the blame, or using their 'success story" to move to another company like a wafting fart. I've seen morons get a promotion for 'saving significant resources on the IT budget" when all he did was fire everyone who knew WTF they were doing and hire green ass kids that didn't know shit. Needless to say by the time the excrement hits the bladed cooling device they have moved on or are no longer connected to IT therefor don't get the blame.
This is a serious problem in this country and one that if we don't fix frankly will leave the USA in even worse shape than it is now, which I would argue is in due to no small part the above herp derp. Nobody thinks beyond the quarter, nobody looks at the long term costs or even if what they are doing is just turning a small problem into a big clusterfuck, all they notice is the immediate "gains" which as you pointed out can often be so much smoke in the rectum. Just look at how Circuit City when faced with Best Buy fired all the experienced sales people because they "cost too much". Result? Dead company. But I bet the herp derp that fired them got a nice bonus and was long gone by the time the crapola hit the wind generator.
Strange, most place I dealt with the server was gone when the support ran out, which was typically 3 to 5 years depending on the contract. Sure you could run them longer, it isn't like milk where it is just gonna "go bad" but frankly computers are machines just like any other and servers do get more use than your average desktop so I can see businesses not wanting to trust unsupported hardware.
Now since i'm sure Oracle doesn't sell support for this hardware anymore I bet most companies have already shitcanned them or sold them off, so I bet this will only affect a minority at best. For those that are still running what is frankly in computing terms ancient hardware it isn't like there aren't free Linux distros that will run on these machines, and if you are so concerned about money you are running actual business on a server that old frankly I doubt you're gonna pay for an upgrade to the latest and greatest Solaris anyway.
So I don't see this as any different than say MSFT saying they wouldn't support running Winserver 2K10 on a P4, since that is the age we are talking about here. I just don't see old servers getting expensive new OSes, that just wouldn't make any sense. Maybe someone can chime in here and say why they'd buy new server licenses to run on 6 year old tech?
This reminds me of an old story i was told by a teacher: A friend of his goes in to do some hired gun work for this company and gets told by the PHB he is NOT allowed under ANY circumstances to touch the NT 3.whatever server box. It has run great for years and he don't care if it is out of date, it works so just clean the fans and go on. Now since he had worked with NT 3.whatever before he didn't see how this machine had been doing its job all these years without a single fail. So he logs into it and what does he find? It is actually some version of Fedora. apparently the guy before him got tired of the BS and just changed it out without telling the PHB.
And it is THIS, this right here, that is often the problem. It isn't that the IT guys don't want to do a good job, it is that some PHB is cockblocking them at every turn. I myself ran into this doing some hired gun for a law firm. I told them I didn't have time to support the place but I recommended a couple of different guys who could do the job well. they had experience, their prices were reasonable, so what happened?
Somebody decided they cost to much and "he knew a guy" that was "a whiz at computers" and could do it for half the price. I get called back a year later when they catch this clown running a gaming server and downloading porn on company time and...wow. he had first of all took ALL the nice neat Dell office boxes, which were standard MOR office machines, and chunked them because they were "too slow" and instead custom built a bunch of gamer rigs from kits so of course nothing matched, then since he didn't know shit about corporate networking he bought a bunch of Dlink home routers you know, the shitty blue ones? Oh and that is not all he had more than half a dozen ISPs as his idea of "adding capacity" was just to add another ISP.
So needless to say fixing that clusterfuck wasn't cheap, neither for me nor all the hardware I had to buy to replace his gamer shit, so did the guy that caused this mess get punished? Nope he had already got promoted a couple of times for all the money he saved them on "IT costs" and was no longer in charge of anything IT and therefor didn't get the blame...ARGH!
So if you want to know why networks are a mess, it often ain't the IT guy (except for gamer retard) it is the stupid ass, dumb shit, WTF are they thinking, Dilbert bullshit that goes on every single damned day in this country. The PHBs get rewarded for saving money even if that money was saved by sacking anyone who knew what the fuck was going on, they cause one clusterfuck after another, but ultimately they don't care because they either fail up or use their "success story" to move to another comapny.
This is why i had to get out of corporate and open my little shop, as the stress of absolute insane stupidity was giving me chest pains. It was like a friend who ended up being threatened with losing his job and got drug before the regional head. The PHB above him wanted him fired because, and I quote "You have NO RIGHT to tell me who i can and can't talk to! I demand you give me my emails from Melissa right now!". He got lucky that the regional head actually watched the news so he went "He isn't talking about the virus, is he?" and when he found out that yes, senior bigfool wanted Glenn to let Melissa loose on the network the PHB got a dressing down and Glenn got an apology and a free steak dinner.
But it is that kinda of rampant herp derp that is the cause of this bullshit and frankly I don't see how some script kiddies are gonna undo decades of upward failure and PHBs. Oh and what you are talking about is what me and my friends called "black box thinking" which sadly I saw every time the salesmen came around. You wine and dine the PHB and give the "This (insert device) will make you (insert hacker, virus,fool) proof!" and sadly they'd bite 9 times out of 10. Needless to say the shit never worked like it was sold, but since the PHB never got dinged for it who cares, right?
I frankly don't give a shit about initial config, as I've been building boxes since the 80s, and that is the problem. For you see in retail these boxes won't be mine they'll belong to somebody who HASN'T been building machines since the 80s and therein lies the problem.
I have yet to see ONE, just one mind you, distro that managed to get through an upgrade with 100% of the drivers working. Frankly I am starting to believe it is like Bigfoot, it just doesn't exist except on some shaky cam filmed by a hick in Alabama. Let me name just a few I've personally seen off the top of my head: Sigmatel audio dead after update, Realtek audio giving nothing but a lovely crackle, Ali network dead, Realtek network dead, Via network...well dead, Ati coming up to nothing but a black screen (tried both company and FOSS drivers BTW, no difference in odds of getting boned), Nvidia having picture come and go, wireless more problems than I can name, sleep and hibernate? Fugedaboutit, need I go on?
Frankly I don't give a shit if I have to jump through hoops the customer must NEVER have to do so, period. I have XP boxes in the field that are 9 years old without fail and the ONLY thing they've needed from me is the occasional hardware upgrade. I have Win2K boxes even older that are now being used in a kid's room or in a basement after being rotated out of the office. Again they work just fine, completely updated from RTM to final update rollout, no driver issues.
It is THIS, this right here that for some reason when talking to Linux users I feel like I'm talking to Martians. Frankly it doesn't matter if YOU are comfortable with forum hunts and tweaking Bash commands, what matters is the customer and for the customer it had damned well better "just work" without shitting itself. You see the difference between Linux and XP is support. With XP there is 14 YEARS of support, Win 7 a DECADE. That is ten years I don't have to worry about broken drivers just because they applied an update. Even the current Ubuntu LTS has less than a year and a half on support and then its boned.
You show me just one Linux distro where I can get 6 years, that is less than half of XP and barely half of win 7, just 6 years of support without having to upgrade. People always compare this to upgrading WinXP to 7, but this is like comparing Apples to toilet plungers. WinXP gets over a decade of support so there is no need to upgrade yet if you don't want a badly out of date system in Linux there is NO choice but to jump on the upgrade bandwagon, which as I said equals "update foo broke my" and I have to protect my reputation so that is simply unacceptable.
Believe me I wish it weren't so. I have no love of throwing away working hardware, no do I love buying Windows licenses. if I could find but ONE distro that could give me 6 years without doing the upgrade death march these boxes could be saved. But I have looked at it and they simply don't exist. they don't exist because geeks think because THEY have no trouble with forum hunts and tweaking Bash commands to get a driver to work then EVERYONE can do this, but reality is about as far from that as it is from here to Jupiter. My users simply want to come home, turn on the machine, and then go to FaceBook or YouTube and have it "just work". if an update is required for security they want to click the button, let it do its thing, then reboot. That's it! No broken driver messes, no forum hunts, hell there ain't even a way to roll back to a previous version if an upgrade takes a shit all over your machine!
I want nothing more than Linux to succeed, I really do. Most of my customers now spend all their time on the web and from what I've seen Linux does do that well. But I can't in good conscience disable all updates because as we have all seen unpatched software can be pwned, no matter the OS. But the community is gonna have to accept the world simply isn't like them, the world doesn't want to set around learning Bash or keeping lists of al
Well would you think it was "normal" if a company regularly took one of its best and most productive teams and just shot a few of them, you know, just for shits and giggles? Time and time again, study after study, it has been shown that ridiculous hours destroy creativity and slow production because you simply can't be at your best when you are worn out. Then you have to figure in the loss of morale, the loss of experienced employees to burn out, etc.
The quicker these ass clown PHBs in the games industry get it through their thick head that 40 hour workweeks weren't just pulled out of a hat but instead help to keep your teams productive the better. if it takes some massive lawsuits to get that message through? Oh well sometime you gotta crack the mule upside the head to make the stubborn ass listen.
The problem with that is this: Sadly since there is no loner a Ruskie threat to give a weapon to NASA against them in its current form NASA has become a black hole for Sen Porker and Congressman kickbackus to "bring home the bacon" no matter how much money it blows or how badly it screws things up.
See how the shuttle building and support was shotgunned all over the damned country or how Orion would have had to reuse a bunch of crap shuttle parts that frankly made no sense and probably would have been dangerous, just so Porker and Kickbackus could say they are "keeping those lines open for the people!" and ensure they stay in office until they take that cushy contractor job or get caught with a rent boy.
Sadly like everything else in government, no matter how noble or pure the original intentions were, Kickbackus and Porker will find a way to subvert and pervert the funds into their own pockets and the pockets of their friends. This is why we are still building aircraft carriers like we have WWIII planned for next Tuesday even though we have something like 1000% more of the things than the next possible threat, why we blew boatloads of cash on the F-22 and are blowing even more truckloads of cash on the F-35 when frankly we've already reached the point that with current designs they can pull more Gs than a human body can stand and UCAVs can do the job faster, cheaper, and safer.
So I'm sorry but like everything else once good in this country NASA has been turned to shit by Porker and Kickbackus. Most likely the next golden age of space will come from China, where they still have the ability to execute treasonous bastards instead of letting them reward their treason with cushy contractor jobs for their families and big fat checks for themselves.
Soooo...you're saying you are FOR letting a kid run around with $60+ and not having a fucking clue what he/she spent the money on without the government to tell you so? Maybe that whole "need a license to have a kid' idea isn't such a bad thing.
I personally as a parent thought the law was bullshit because I don't need to have the government tell me what my kid can/can't play and actually had NO problem with my boys playing a violent game if they so desired. Of course unlike those that sit their kids in front of a box and walk away I actually interacted with my boys, I know, its a concept, and I sat them down and actually showed them how what they saw on the screen was created. I had no worry that mistake game stupidity for reality because they knew how levels were made, how to edit textures, how scripts create the illusion of AI, etc and you know what? By and large they didn't care about the really violent games because those games had nothing to sell themselves with BUT violence and my boys preferred games with decent level design and good combat to just another blood fest.
Now my oldest is in his second year of pre-med and on the Dean's list, and the youngest is trying to decide whether he wants to go into computer generated art or follow his love of cooking and be a chef. So I think I did just fine without nanny government watching my kids for me, which BTW the movie theaters have NO law that forbids them from letting your kid see an R or NC17 movie, just like the ESRB it is voluntary as it should be.
Know where your kids are, know what they are doing, and spend some time with them. if that is too much to ask then frankly you shouldn't be having kids in the first place. You can't babyproof the world, nor can you have the state raise your kids for you. When my sister ended up trapped in a bed with terminal cancer and I got two babies dropped in my lap I stepped up to the plate and did my damned job. It was hard as hell, I must have spent three years sleeping in a rocking chair so that the youngest could sleep and frankly i'm probably 3 years behind on decent nights rest now. But that is what it takes to be a parent, it takes long hours and hard work. And frankly if you aren't ready for that or can't even honestly say you know what your kid is buying or playing? Maybe it isn't for you.
What exactly is "humiliating" about having your patent warchest make you money? Like it or not thanks to the fucked up system we have in the west pretty much all major corps HAVE to have a patent warchest and need to buy up as much patents as possible to protect them from trolls and other corps. Now filing all those patents and buying up patents from DOA companies like Novell sure as hell ain't cheap, so why not make some of that money back?
Frankly putting those patents to work is a smart move and unlike some corps MSFT has always been good about RAND licensing. People forget with that TomTom bullshit MSFT offered TomTom the SAME price they offered to every flash and camera maker for FAT32 and basically got the finger. All those patents certainly weren't free to file or buy, so why not make money off them? maybe Linux would be doing better if those with lots of patents like Red Hat would do the same thing and license those patents under RAND to other companies.
Like it or not patent portfolios ain't cheap and are pretty much required property if you want to operate in the mobile space. I have NO doubt Android is infringing on some of MSFT's patents, it is simple math. With the amount of patents that MSFT has I'm sure pretty much any mobile company would be infringing on at least a dozen, so the smart ones just do cross licensing and call it a day. No different that I doubt ANY codec, free or not, can actually operate and not run afoul of the MPEG-LA patent pool It isn't the fault of MSFT or any other corp if you wish to pursue a "free as in beer" business plan that leaves you broke, nobody forced you to follow that path.
If companies want to not worry about the huge patent warchests of other companies buying access to them is simply good business sense. Maybe you would prefer it if MSFT took the "sue your ass off" route that Apple currently uses?
Actually it was worse than that! I had a 20 gallon tank and I had to stop halfway back and REFILL or I wouldn't make it home. But that is what you get when you have 3000 pounds plus pumped by a 455 with a big ass 4 barrel carb. Of course I couldn't stand to drive that baby less than 90MPH, it really started to purr right at 95MPH. I had her rigged up with a switch that would let me lock the front brake so i could heat up the tires and once those flat street slicks had heated up? Oh mama that positrac rear end would make that old baby get up and go!
But you have to remember gas in 71 was something like 50c a gallon max, this was before the first oil crisis so nobody gave a shit if it was a pig or not. Man if I was to ever win the lotto (yeah I know its stupid to play, but its a whole buck a week) I'd get me another Gold Duster with a 318 and a Le Mans SS with the 455. The Duster actually wasn't too bad on gas, about like my Ranger now at 14MPG. But they just don't make them like that anymore, with big comfy seats that were great for sex, room for big honking speakers to blast your tunes down the road, and most of all it was FUN with a capital F.
Sadly I traded her in on a 76 Camaro with a 350 (which three days after I had it restored to mint state an off duty cop slammed into it and trashed it and his buddies wrote the scene up as a no fault even though I was in the ditch trying to avoid the asshole who was playing with his radio) and I heard that my beautiful primer baby was totaled by the guy who bought it after me, the moron tried to take a curve with her at 100MPH and slammed straight into a tree. Straight aways she was great, but taking curves? too much weight to sling that ass end, as he found out.
So your answer is to buy nothing? Kinda funny how the web is covered with "replace Windows with Linux" and "save that old machine by putting Linux on it" articles but whe you point out that doesn't actually work you get told to buy some mythical "open source hardware" that frankly the ONLY hardware I've seen with decent reliable open source drivers is top of the line workstation gear that frankly it would be cheaper to just buy Apple.
After all if you look up what RMS uses, which he claims is the ONLY truly "pure" FOSS device he has found so far, it is a Loongson netbook with an ARM CPU which you can't even pick up unless you are heading to the Chinese coast anytime soon.
So if the only answer to the upgrade death march is to buy and use ONLY open source driver supplied hardware? Please do the right thing and say that when you see those "replace Windows with Linux" articles and tell them they are full of shit. Because so far using the same bog standard hardware that is on a good 85%+ of the machines out there...AMD and Intel CPUs, Nvidia and ATI GPUs, Realtek, Via and Sigma sound, Realtek and Via NICs, and Broadcom and no name wireless, I have yet to find a box of consumer level hardware that doesn't shit itself and die if you let it update.
Like I said that answer really doesn't help keep these 4 1.4Ghz with 512Mb of RAM PCs I'm looking at from going to the dumpster and kinda kills the "save a PC with Linux!" meme quite dead. because if I were to listen to you the amount of parts I would have to rip out and replace would cost more than these machines would be worth. So again for the lack of a decent driver model in Linux into the trash they shall go. Shame really but Torvalds hasn't changed his position since 1993 and I doubt anyone will get anything past him until he retires or someone gets tired of the bullshit and forks the kernel..
Exactly! After being exposed to the rotting stench that is Duke Nukem Forever I just had to pull out the original Duke Nukem Atomic and load up the high res pack just to have me some real Duke Nukem goodness. That game is from what? 1997? Still plays great on win 7 HP X64 BTW.
If you make a good product, especially a good product at an affordable price? Folks by and large WILL keep your product. As others have pointed out theoretically you could use the same argument for things like power tools that IRL most folks will have limited use for. But we aren't talking power saws here, we are talking about little time wasters to give you something to do while you are in the doctor's office or waiting in line someplace.
So IMHO Google is the douche in this and I wish we would have a similar law passed here in the states for ALL software. I can't count the number of times I've been all jazzed up because I got me a killer new game to play, i'm waaay above the minimum specs, but then I get home and load it up only to have the game run like shit if it runs at all so the ONLY thing I get for my money is a lighter wallet.
If your game or app is so shitty that you honestly think people can't even get the low selling price worth of entertainment or use out of it after a measly 7 days? Well maybe you might want to think about not making programs that are so shitty. I've bought plenty of bargain basement programs that weren't anywhere near AAA quality but you know what? I got my $3-$7 bucks worth of use out of them so I was happy. We aren't talking about some $1000 a seat enterprise software here, we are talking about giving the customer a few bucks worth of use/entertainment. If you can't even manage that? Well maybe you ought to think about designing something other than another iFart.
So how's that 6 month upgrade death march working out for ya? How many forum hunts have you had to do to find driver fixes in the last couple of years? anybody who says with a straight face that 6 months is long enough for even basic QA on an OS is just frankly insane. So far I have tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS and on every. single. one. when the upgrades rolled around at least one if not many drivers would shit themselves and die. This is why I won't carry Linux in my shop nor allow it in my home.
The sad part is other than Linus Torvalds being an absolute douche and treating the kernel as his personal playtoy and not allowing Linux to have what everyone else has had for a decade or more, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, OS/2, a stable hardware ABI so updates don't hose drivers? Well other than that I found Linux was nice, low resource, and had plenty of apps. Of course that is like saying other than the assassination thing Mr and Mrs Kennedy had a nice trip to Dallas.
That is why when I go pick up my new playtoy tomorrow ( found a sweet little 750Mhz Toshiba laptop in mint state with case and DVD external for $40, just couldn't turn that down for a new hack toy) I'll be putting on TinyXP. Funny that users talk about low resource use for Linux when I have yet to see anybody beat TinyXP, the whole thing uses less than 64Mb for a fully loaded desktop. Since I have plenty of XP licenses laying around it ought to be perfect for that little WinME lappy.
So while I'm glad that Ubuntu works for you frankly I found Linux to be too big a PITA, with too much time spent on forum hunts and driver fixes than the thing was worth. It is a shame too, as I have 4 1.4Ghz machines sitting right in front of me that will probably end up in the dump as the XP licenses to reload them are worth more than the boxes, but with Linux I'd either have to do a Dell and disable updates and leave them vulnerable to the next flash zero day that comes along, or provide free lifetime support for all the drivers that get hosed on the upgrade death march. Frankly it just ain't worth the effort for boxes that are worth maybe $30 a piece, so in the garbage they'll go. I hate throwing working gear away but what choice do I have?
It just goes to show you how completely fucked up and out of touch the land of fruits and nuts is. First the sanctuary bullshit, which for ANY city that declares that bullshit I would open them to lawsuits by the victims of illegals no different than what we did with Libya and supporting terrorism, and why not fish? Because asshole it isn't your job to control everyone's lives and just because you have a little power doesn't mean you get to act like a little brown shirted goon and control everyone else! What's next, going along with PETA and having fish declared "sea kittens" and forcing everyone in SF to eat nothing but grass?
So allow me to say I now 100% support the red states bleeding you dry. After all you seem to like government intervention and frankly if this is what you think of to do with government maybe a little more wealth redistribution would be just the thing to pull your collective heads out your asses! Your economy is in the crapper, you have border jumpers cranking up the crime rate, your state is in the red and THIS, this is all you can think of? Lord help California if the rest of the state is like this and I can see why some in the north of that state really wouldn't mind having the state split in half like Carolina.
Actually that isn't entirely accurate, it depends on the AV. Both Avast free and Comodo IS free have by default heuristics and sandboxing of ALL apps, so you'd be surprised how much herp derp that can protect against.
I have some customers that can get more viruses than a Bangkok whore on a Saturday night and switching to Avast Free (used to use Comodo but it is more fiddly than Avast) I have watched infections plummet. By putting everything in a sandbox away from the actual registry and Program Files it really does help keep the nasties away, and Avast Web Shield really does help against the zero days and nasty JavaScripts.
I hate to sound like an ad but if you don't want to deal with nearly as much herp derp PEBKAC PITA crap try Avast Free. I've found by pairing that with Comodo Dragon (which has excellent anti phisishing and sandboxing of its own) it really does help cut down on the nasties caused by a rampant case of the stupids. Of course that doesn't mean one should forgo backups, far from it, but when dealing with dumbasses all the extra protection you can get helps.
Ya know, I really wish I could find the link because it really explained why ultimately it will be either the west or Islam in a battle to the death. It explained how in all Sharia societies you have on average 10% that are stone cold killers, and another 15% that are collaborators. What this does is pretty much kill ANY and all dissent, because you know that 1 in 4 is either a killer or a collaborator. And since there you don't get punished if you "Kill for Allah" it just makes the killer and collaborators emboldened. They also had a nice quote from one of the hardcore Mullahs that said "We need to not attack Europe, since with our birthrate we'll own it in three generations and one shouldn't destroy one's own property".
Sadly I think ultimately we will HAVE to become isolationist, we will simply have no other choice. It is gonna end up "fortress America" with the Americas against the former free Europe and Asia ruled by Sharia fanatics. At the current birthrate Germany will be Sharia in less than 30 years, the UK in as little as 25. The Muslims make it a point to NOT in any way assimilate, instead living in "Sharia Ghettos" so they can keep their birthrate high and their fanaticism intact. This is why you have women that refuse to wear the veil attacked in England as we speak.
And while I believe ALL organized religions are ultimately about control and are full of shit (what you believe should end where it infringes upon me) in the end as you say Islam is a cult filled with fanatics. There is NO "religion of peace" when it comes to Islam, there are mearly killers, collaborators, and those afraid to speak against the two above for fear of being murdered for being an apostate. In the end we will have no choice, we will have to lock down the borders and keep them over there, or risk losing our freedoms to Sharia and the cult that is Islam. Their own book says there will be NO PEACE until the world bows to Islam and Sharia, so frankly we should take them at their word and leave their asses in the desert to rot.
We should treat switching off oil as a national defense priority no less than our development of the bomb, and let them swim in their no longer all powerful oil and slaughter each other.
Riiiight. Hows that FLOSS koolaid Drinkypoo? Is it cherry flavored? WTF does MSFT have to do with the fact that Linux has and always will have shitty driver support thanks to being 15 years behind everyone else on OS design? Are you REALLY so arrogant to think that Linus fricking Torvalds is smarter than the entire OS industry because if so you might want to cut down on that koolaid. BSD? Hardware ABI. Solaris? Hardware ABI. OSX? Hardware ABI. Windows? Hardware ABI. OS/2? Hardware ABI. Notice a pattern here buddy?
The sad part is it all comes down to RELIGION, no different than flat earthers or young creationists. look up the rant against ABIs and you will see it is a religious rant, with the author going so far as to call those who don't hand EVERY scrap of code to the blessed hand of ye kernel devs "leeches" and then hopes that the blessed Torvalds does smiteth their drivers even though that is fucking Linux users.
You see like all religion it comes down to your leaders deciding you aren't smart enough to think for yourself. The argument is that "Gasp!" if there is a device with FOSS drivers and one with a binary blob you will be too dumb to pick by yourself, therefor they need to discourage binary blobs to protect your "purity of essence". this of course ignores the facts. Like Nvidia, or the fact that most companies ATM won't jump through your flaming hoops that is the current model, or that the current model causes driver breakage pretty much constantly, or that all it would take is a manufacturer burning Linux users by dropping support for them to do this thing we call "vote with your dollars" and finally it ignores the fact that Linux users that care about graphics buy Nvidia and use binary blobs because the much vaunted FOSS graphics code is...well it is kinda shit.
But hey, feel free to ignore me. Feel free to ignore that after 20 years Linux is STILL lower than the margin for error, feel free to ignore that you can't simply walk into a store and buy a device by looking for "a penguin on the box" but instead have to hunt through outdated hardware lists and ultimately play hardware roulette, and finally ignore the fact that every B&M in the USA won't touch your OS because we have all been burnt trying to support an OS with a broken driver model. Or do you expect us to tell our customers "RTFM noob or go back to Windblowz LOL!".
Frankly between Torvalds kernel fucking, RMS's "purity of essence" and the general "go back to Windblowz" bad attitude of the frankly teeny tiny niche that is the Linux community? Honestly you really need to change the mascot from Tux to Trollface. It would fit the current clusterfuck better.
Or you can just be smart (or have hired a smart guy like yours truly) and have previously downloaded and run Paragon Backup & Recovery 2011 Free and then you'd have a nice disc image preferably backed up to a USB drive that with the included recovery CD.ISO burnt takes about 20 minutes to have the machine up and running.
I swear in this age of 1.5Tb USB external drives costing less than $70 you'd think that having a disc image would be a no brainer. The software above is free, it is simple, does differential if you like, and I have yet to see any malware that would infect a third party disc image
So seriously folks, if you have friends or family that don't have a backup plan show them TFA and point them to some nice disc imaging software and a cheap external drive. Sellout.Woot has a 1.5Tb for $70 last I checked, which is more than enough space for your average folks to easily keep over a years worth of backups if they so choose. Mine has not only disc images of all my OSes, but a synced backup of all my tunes, all my GOG installers, backups of my pics, they really are handy things to have and take the work and worry out of nasties like TFA.
Uhhh...this is the "Bob's Game" guy, the one whose vaporware game he has been spamming "viral marketing, whatever" for years with no actual game to speak of?
So considering the fact you can't even buy a screen from Digikey, a place that has those made in bulk, for $10 I kinda doubt this guy is gonna get a complete system for that price. Go look at Chinamart and you'll see the bunches cranking out low end emulator systems by the boatload only have the price down to around $45 for machines MUCH worse specs than this.
So yeah, until I see actual systems in actual hands I'm gonna have to call bullshit.
Was I the only one rooting for the polluters on that show? I think it was the whiny little "heart" punk that did it for me, every week I just hoped one of the bad guys would bury that little twerp in toxic waste or plutonium or something.
as for TFA, what's the odds this waste can blow up? I'm not talking nuclear China syndrome kinda blow up, but I'm betting plenty of those chemicals are also flammable. Radioactive smoke and chemical fires don't sound too good. So anybody know if what they stored there is at risk of going boom?
Yes to the 1000th power about cutting off the 8 million plus a DAY we are sending to Israel. If the Jews of this country want to send THEIR money to Israel? Fine and dandy. But the fact that our current ME policy is based on a single sentence...Jesus won't come back...frankly sickens me. So many dead, so much wasted lives and property and for what? So a prophecy written by an 1800 year dead goat herder on sheep skin about a 2000 year old dead mystic that has to have a certain race in a certain place so he has a place to park his fluffy cloud, WTF?
If their God wants Jews in Zion, well I'm sure A GOD can make sure Jews stay in Zion, don't you think? Living next to a Christian conservative college where many of the right wingers that roam the halls of power come to lecture I've actually gotten to talk to some of these people of power, and I swear that line above has caused more suffering since 1947 than you would believe.
How bad is it when I have to do a Shat and point out "What does God need with missiles and piles of money, just to make sure some race is in the right place? Isn't he a God?" and basically get told we'll get spanked like some bad child by the sky bully if we don't bend over backwards for Israel. these guys wouldn't care if Jews decorated their cars with Arab baby heads as long as there is a Jew in Zion to fulfill that stupid line. I swear the Commies had the right idea, we should just load up all the books of all the religions and burn the damned things. The world would be a better place after a couple of generations.
I don't know about that, as here where I am (North central AR) the tornadoes follow the freeway except when there is a trailer park nearby and then it WILL veer and head straight for the trailer park. It is so predictable that when we listen to severe weather and the weatherman says a tornado has shifted someone will say "Is there a trailer park there?".
Maybe its a heat thing, I know they follow the freeways because all that asphalt holds in heat, maybe all that metal holds enough heat to "pull" the tornado in that direction? Because knock on wood every tornado that has rolled through this area in the past three years has stayed on the freeway...except when it takes out the trailer park on the south side, which has to be a good mile off of the road. After it trashes it, back to the freeway. Like I said if I didn't know better I'd think tornadoes are snobs.
As you point out it isn't the "DOODZ, WHERE DA APPS AT??" that will kill RIM, sadly it is RIM itself. If you look at their competitors all treat their phones as a platform. You get X amount of support, you can update from OS # to OS #1 or whatever, the whole thing is treated as a platform.
RIM on the other hand goes "Oh look, here is our new phone! It isn't compatible with our old phone OS, and BTW we won't be updating squat on the last model (even if it came out yesterday) because we have a new model! Buy it now!" and frankly folks just ain't gonna go for that anymore. People want their phones to at least be treated as current for the life of their contracts, they don't want to feel abandoned three months after getting the thing yet that is EXACTLY what RIM has been doing.
So if you want to know who killed RIM, that would be RIM. My prediction? When their share price gets low enough they will be bought by MSFT and be replaced by a WinPhone Corporate Edition. MSFT has experience with businesses, it'll integrate with AD, and RIM still has plenty of patents that would look good in the MSFT war chest. So final total...Google and Apple trading one and two, MSFT/Nokia in third, everyone else toast.
Ya know, I've always wondered about this...what is it that draws tornadoes to trailer parks? If there is a trailer park anywhere near the path you just know they are fucked, as it seems a tornado will go out of its way to take that fucker out. Since I doubt tornadoes are just snobs I have to wonder, what is it? Magnetism?
As for TFA frankly I'm shocked, but then again I'm really not. Any law that will affect a corporation in the pocketbook will get shut down, see Citizens United for example. The fact that this is ultimately good for the people should probably be seen as a side effect with the main goal making sure corps can sell GTA 47 to anybody with a buck. Not that I think that is a bad thing, as I let my kids play violent games but of course instead of just sitting them in front of the machine I actually showed them how it works and how files like DOOM Wads (boy I'm dating myself!) were translated into what they see on the screen, how scripts gave the illusion of AI, how textures could be edited to make the game "world" whatever they wanted it to be.
Of course while this did have the intended effect of showing the kids the difference between reality and gaming it did have one very strange unforeseen "side effect" and that was the way my oldest "cursed" when he played a game. I would hear "What is this? Tearing? Do they think this is DOOM? And who designed these levels? I've seen mods with better levels than this. And this AI is just pathetic! DUCK YOU STUPID BAD GUY!". Needless to say I had to chuckle at his little tirades against bad game design.
Citation please? because from what I understand as long as you are recording yourself and aren't trying to hide that fact you are legally in the clear, otherwise all those "This call may be recorded for quality assurance" messages would be announcing they are breaking the law.
As for TFA looking at TFA (I know, but I got bored) it seems to be more along the lines of letting grandma record her video calls of her kids and vice versa than some new wiretap schema, which BTW CALEA means that ALL have to allow the police to access it with a warrant.
As someone who has buried his sister and grandma in the past 5 years I see the ability to record conversations as a GOOD thing. With so many of us spread out having recordings of them, even talking about trivial things, would be nice when they shuffle off this mortal coil. Nobody lives forever and you'd be surprised what a comfort having recordings of a loved one that has passed can be.
Except that ISN'T what they are doing. If you bothered to read the post this all started back when the first P4s came out, aka little space heaters big pile o' suck. if you'll notice it also crippled performance on the P3 which was currently kicking the dog snot out of Netburst (and eventually came back under the Core moniker) so what we have is a simple "If chip equals what we want to promote then code=fast" and "If ship equals one we want to bomb then code' shit".
If they simply wanted to be safe then the safest thing to do would be to do nothing at all. After all if someone complains that just helps them sell chips, right? They could say "Sorry, please use genuine Intel next time" and that would be that. But no, that would let people know they are being fucked. Otherwise how do you explain disabling SSE support on the P3, which had an Intel designed SSE path? Can't be worries about compatibility, after all Intel designed the thing!
No if you read the results in the first link sadly there is only ONE conclusion, and that was Intel is using their position as leader in the market to hamstring any chips they did not want to promote. The P3 really is the smoking gun here, as at the time the benchmarks were showing the P3 on average 20% faster than the Netburst while using 40%+ less power. But guess what happened after the Intel compiler rigging? Why Netburst was suddenly 22% faster than the P3! Isn't that amazing? Oh and while there may be other compilers on Linux, on Windows it is Intel or MSFT. Kinda sad when MSFT is the fairer choice huh?
The simple fact is we aren't talking about some esoteric feature that may or may not be supported, we are talking about basic SSE which is a published standard and has been supported by ALL chip manufacturers since before the Intel compilers were rigged. No this is no different than if MSFT had OEMs rig the BIOS of laptops to do a check for "Genuine Windows" and have it run like shit if the flag wasn't tested. This check does NOTHING but look at CPUID, that's it. No checking of MXX, or SSE, or any other flag. It just looks for a P4 or above flag and if it isn't found drops the entire stack into slow ass x87 mode, which frankly has been depreciated since the Pentium 1 and is used by NOBODY else. If you read the first link the programmer points out they even used a poorly documented crap memory move just to ensure that it would REALLY slow it down.
This isn't "playing it safe" this is classic Sherman Antitrust behavior that sadly Intel WILL get away with, because our government was sold to the corps years ago. Hell if the MSFT case happened today they wouldn't even have had a trial, hell they would have probably gotten a tax break for doing it!
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See my little rant here for my take and some examples i ran into of THAT problem.
I would say a BIG, as in Hiroshima nuke style big problem we have in this country is "upward failure" where time and time again stupidity is rewarded by those dipshits that did said stupidity either moving up and out of a dept so they don't get the blame, or using their 'success story" to move to another company like a wafting fart. I've seen morons get a promotion for 'saving significant resources on the IT budget" when all he did was fire everyone who knew WTF they were doing and hire green ass kids that didn't know shit. Needless to say by the time the excrement hits the bladed cooling device they have moved on or are no longer connected to IT therefor don't get the blame.
This is a serious problem in this country and one that if we don't fix frankly will leave the USA in even worse shape than it is now, which I would argue is in due to no small part the above herp derp. Nobody thinks beyond the quarter, nobody looks at the long term costs or even if what they are doing is just turning a small problem into a big clusterfuck, all they notice is the immediate "gains" which as you pointed out can often be so much smoke in the rectum. Just look at how Circuit City when faced with Best Buy fired all the experienced sales people because they "cost too much". Result? Dead company. But I bet the herp derp that fired them got a nice bonus and was long gone by the time the crapola hit the wind generator.
Strange, most place I dealt with the server was gone when the support ran out, which was typically 3 to 5 years depending on the contract. Sure you could run them longer, it isn't like milk where it is just gonna "go bad" but frankly computers are machines just like any other and servers do get more use than your average desktop so I can see businesses not wanting to trust unsupported hardware.
Now since i'm sure Oracle doesn't sell support for this hardware anymore I bet most companies have already shitcanned them or sold them off, so I bet this will only affect a minority at best. For those that are still running what is frankly in computing terms ancient hardware it isn't like there aren't free Linux distros that will run on these machines, and if you are so concerned about money you are running actual business on a server that old frankly I doubt you're gonna pay for an upgrade to the latest and greatest Solaris anyway.
So I don't see this as any different than say MSFT saying they wouldn't support running Winserver 2K10 on a P4, since that is the age we are talking about here. I just don't see old servers getting expensive new OSes, that just wouldn't make any sense. Maybe someone can chime in here and say why they'd buy new server licenses to run on 6 year old tech?
This reminds me of an old story i was told by a teacher: A friend of his goes in to do some hired gun work for this company and gets told by the PHB he is NOT allowed under ANY circumstances to touch the NT 3.whatever server box. It has run great for years and he don't care if it is out of date, it works so just clean the fans and go on. Now since he had worked with NT 3.whatever before he didn't see how this machine had been doing its job all these years without a single fail. So he logs into it and what does he find? It is actually some version of Fedora. apparently the guy before him got tired of the BS and just changed it out without telling the PHB.
And it is THIS, this right here, that is often the problem. It isn't that the IT guys don't want to do a good job, it is that some PHB is cockblocking them at every turn. I myself ran into this doing some hired gun for a law firm. I told them I didn't have time to support the place but I recommended a couple of different guys who could do the job well. they had experience, their prices were reasonable, so what happened?
Somebody decided they cost to much and "he knew a guy" that was "a whiz at computers" and could do it for half the price. I get called back a year later when they catch this clown running a gaming server and downloading porn on company time and...wow. he had first of all took ALL the nice neat Dell office boxes, which were standard MOR office machines, and chunked them because they were "too slow" and instead custom built a bunch of gamer rigs from kits so of course nothing matched, then since he didn't know shit about corporate networking he bought a bunch of Dlink home routers you know, the shitty blue ones? Oh and that is not all he had more than half a dozen ISPs as his idea of "adding capacity" was just to add another ISP.
So needless to say fixing that clusterfuck wasn't cheap, neither for me nor all the hardware I had to buy to replace his gamer shit, so did the guy that caused this mess get punished? Nope he had already got promoted a couple of times for all the money he saved them on "IT costs" and was no longer in charge of anything IT and therefor didn't get the blame...ARGH!
So if you want to know why networks are a mess, it often ain't the IT guy (except for gamer retard) it is the stupid ass, dumb shit, WTF are they thinking, Dilbert bullshit that goes on every single damned day in this country. The PHBs get rewarded for saving money even if that money was saved by sacking anyone who knew what the fuck was going on, they cause one clusterfuck after another, but ultimately they don't care because they either fail up or use their "success story" to move to another comapny.
This is why i had to get out of corporate and open my little shop, as the stress of absolute insane stupidity was giving me chest pains. It was like a friend who ended up being threatened with losing his job and got drug before the regional head. The PHB above him wanted him fired because, and I quote "You have NO RIGHT to tell me who i can and can't talk to! I demand you give me my emails from Melissa right now!". He got lucky that the regional head actually watched the news so he went "He isn't talking about the virus, is he?" and when he found out that yes, senior bigfool wanted Glenn to let Melissa loose on the network the PHB got a dressing down and Glenn got an apology and a free steak dinner.
But it is that kinda of rampant herp derp that is the cause of this bullshit and frankly I don't see how some script kiddies are gonna undo decades of upward failure and PHBs. Oh and what you are talking about is what me and my friends called "black box thinking" which sadly I saw every time the salesmen came around. You wine and dine the PHB and give the "This (insert device) will make you (insert hacker, virus,fool) proof!" and sadly they'd bite 9 times out of 10. Needless to say the shit never worked like it was sold, but since the PHB never got dinged for it who cares, right?
I frankly don't give a shit about initial config, as I've been building boxes since the 80s, and that is the problem. For you see in retail these boxes won't be mine they'll belong to somebody who HASN'T been building machines since the 80s and therein lies the problem.
I have yet to see ONE, just one mind you, distro that managed to get through an upgrade with 100% of the drivers working. Frankly I am starting to believe it is like Bigfoot, it just doesn't exist except on some shaky cam filmed by a hick in Alabama. Let me name just a few I've personally seen off the top of my head: Sigmatel audio dead after update, Realtek audio giving nothing but a lovely crackle, Ali network dead, Realtek network dead, Via network...well dead, Ati coming up to nothing but a black screen (tried both company and FOSS drivers BTW, no difference in odds of getting boned), Nvidia having picture come and go, wireless more problems than I can name, sleep and hibernate? Fugedaboutit, need I go on?
Frankly I don't give a shit if I have to jump through hoops the customer must NEVER have to do so, period. I have XP boxes in the field that are 9 years old without fail and the ONLY thing they've needed from me is the occasional hardware upgrade. I have Win2K boxes even older that are now being used in a kid's room or in a basement after being rotated out of the office. Again they work just fine, completely updated from RTM to final update rollout, no driver issues.
It is THIS, this right here that for some reason when talking to Linux users I feel like I'm talking to Martians. Frankly it doesn't matter if YOU are comfortable with forum hunts and tweaking Bash commands, what matters is the customer and for the customer it had damned well better "just work" without shitting itself. You see the difference between Linux and XP is support. With XP there is 14 YEARS of support, Win 7 a DECADE. That is ten years I don't have to worry about broken drivers just because they applied an update. Even the current Ubuntu LTS has less than a year and a half on support and then its boned.
You show me just one Linux distro where I can get 6 years, that is less than half of XP and barely half of win 7, just 6 years of support without having to upgrade. People always compare this to upgrading WinXP to 7, but this is like comparing Apples to toilet plungers. WinXP gets over a decade of support so there is no need to upgrade yet if you don't want a badly out of date system in Linux there is NO choice but to jump on the upgrade bandwagon, which as I said equals "update foo broke my" and I have to protect my reputation so that is simply unacceptable.
Believe me I wish it weren't so. I have no love of throwing away working hardware, no do I love buying Windows licenses. if I could find but ONE distro that could give me 6 years without doing the upgrade death march these boxes could be saved. But I have looked at it and they simply don't exist. they don't exist because geeks think because THEY have no trouble with forum hunts and tweaking Bash commands to get a driver to work then EVERYONE can do this, but reality is about as far from that as it is from here to Jupiter. My users simply want to come home, turn on the machine, and then go to FaceBook or YouTube and have it "just work". if an update is required for security they want to click the button, let it do its thing, then reboot. That's it! No broken driver messes, no forum hunts, hell there ain't even a way to roll back to a previous version if an upgrade takes a shit all over your machine!
I want nothing more than Linux to succeed, I really do. Most of my customers now spend all their time on the web and from what I've seen Linux does do that well. But I can't in good conscience disable all updates because as we have all seen unpatched software can be pwned, no matter the OS. But the community is gonna have to accept the world simply isn't like them, the world doesn't want to set around learning Bash or keeping lists of al
Well would you think it was "normal" if a company regularly took one of its best and most productive teams and just shot a few of them, you know, just for shits and giggles? Time and time again, study after study, it has been shown that ridiculous hours destroy creativity and slow production because you simply can't be at your best when you are worn out. Then you have to figure in the loss of morale, the loss of experienced employees to burn out, etc.
The quicker these ass clown PHBs in the games industry get it through their thick head that 40 hour workweeks weren't just pulled out of a hat but instead help to keep your teams productive the better. if it takes some massive lawsuits to get that message through? Oh well sometime you gotta crack the mule upside the head to make the stubborn ass listen.
The problem with that is this: Sadly since there is no loner a Ruskie threat to give a weapon to NASA against them in its current form NASA has become a black hole for Sen Porker and Congressman kickbackus to "bring home the bacon" no matter how much money it blows or how badly it screws things up.
See how the shuttle building and support was shotgunned all over the damned country or how Orion would have had to reuse a bunch of crap shuttle parts that frankly made no sense and probably would have been dangerous, just so Porker and Kickbackus could say they are "keeping those lines open for the people!" and ensure they stay in office until they take that cushy contractor job or get caught with a rent boy.
Sadly like everything else in government, no matter how noble or pure the original intentions were, Kickbackus and Porker will find a way to subvert and pervert the funds into their own pockets and the pockets of their friends. This is why we are still building aircraft carriers like we have WWIII planned for next Tuesday even though we have something like 1000% more of the things than the next possible threat, why we blew boatloads of cash on the F-22 and are blowing even more truckloads of cash on the F-35 when frankly we've already reached the point that with current designs they can pull more Gs than a human body can stand and UCAVs can do the job faster, cheaper, and safer.
So I'm sorry but like everything else once good in this country NASA has been turned to shit by Porker and Kickbackus. Most likely the next golden age of space will come from China, where they still have the ability to execute treasonous bastards instead of letting them reward their treason with cushy contractor jobs for their families and big fat checks for themselves.
Soooo...you're saying you are FOR letting a kid run around with $60+ and not having a fucking clue what he/she spent the money on without the government to tell you so? Maybe that whole "need a license to have a kid' idea isn't such a bad thing.
I personally as a parent thought the law was bullshit because I don't need to have the government tell me what my kid can/can't play and actually had NO problem with my boys playing a violent game if they so desired. Of course unlike those that sit their kids in front of a box and walk away I actually interacted with my boys, I know, its a concept, and I sat them down and actually showed them how what they saw on the screen was created. I had no worry that mistake game stupidity for reality because they knew how levels were made, how to edit textures, how scripts create the illusion of AI, etc and you know what? By and large they didn't care about the really violent games because those games had nothing to sell themselves with BUT violence and my boys preferred games with decent level design and good combat to just another blood fest.
Now my oldest is in his second year of pre-med and on the Dean's list, and the youngest is trying to decide whether he wants to go into computer generated art or follow his love of cooking and be a chef. So I think I did just fine without nanny government watching my kids for me, which BTW the movie theaters have NO law that forbids them from letting your kid see an R or NC17 movie, just like the ESRB it is voluntary as it should be.
Know where your kids are, know what they are doing, and spend some time with them. if that is too much to ask then frankly you shouldn't be having kids in the first place. You can't babyproof the world, nor can you have the state raise your kids for you. When my sister ended up trapped in a bed with terminal cancer and I got two babies dropped in my lap I stepped up to the plate and did my damned job. It was hard as hell, I must have spent three years sleeping in a rocking chair so that the youngest could sleep and frankly i'm probably 3 years behind on decent nights rest now. But that is what it takes to be a parent, it takes long hours and hard work. And frankly if you aren't ready for that or can't even honestly say you know what your kid is buying or playing? Maybe it isn't for you.
What exactly is "humiliating" about having your patent warchest make you money? Like it or not thanks to the fucked up system we have in the west pretty much all major corps HAVE to have a patent warchest and need to buy up as much patents as possible to protect them from trolls and other corps. Now filing all those patents and buying up patents from DOA companies like Novell sure as hell ain't cheap, so why not make some of that money back?
Frankly putting those patents to work is a smart move and unlike some corps MSFT has always been good about RAND licensing. People forget with that TomTom bullshit MSFT offered TomTom the SAME price they offered to every flash and camera maker for FAT32 and basically got the finger. All those patents certainly weren't free to file or buy, so why not make money off them? maybe Linux would be doing better if those with lots of patents like Red Hat would do the same thing and license those patents under RAND to other companies.
Like it or not patent portfolios ain't cheap and are pretty much required property if you want to operate in the mobile space. I have NO doubt Android is infringing on some of MSFT's patents, it is simple math. With the amount of patents that MSFT has I'm sure pretty much any mobile company would be infringing on at least a dozen, so the smart ones just do cross licensing and call it a day. No different that I doubt ANY codec, free or not, can actually operate and not run afoul of the MPEG-LA patent pool It isn't the fault of MSFT or any other corp if you wish to pursue a "free as in beer" business plan that leaves you broke, nobody forced you to follow that path.
If companies want to not worry about the huge patent warchests of other companies buying access to them is simply good business sense. Maybe you would prefer it if MSFT took the "sue your ass off" route that Apple currently uses?
Actually it was worse than that! I had a 20 gallon tank and I had to stop halfway back and REFILL or I wouldn't make it home. But that is what you get when you have 3000 pounds plus pumped by a 455 with a big ass 4 barrel carb. Of course I couldn't stand to drive that baby less than 90MPH, it really started to purr right at 95MPH. I had her rigged up with a switch that would let me lock the front brake so i could heat up the tires and once those flat street slicks had heated up? Oh mama that positrac rear end would make that old baby get up and go!
But you have to remember gas in 71 was something like 50c a gallon max, this was before the first oil crisis so nobody gave a shit if it was a pig or not. Man if I was to ever win the lotto (yeah I know its stupid to play, but its a whole buck a week) I'd get me another Gold Duster with a 318 and a Le Mans SS with the 455. The Duster actually wasn't too bad on gas, about like my Ranger now at 14MPG. But they just don't make them like that anymore, with big comfy seats that were great for sex, room for big honking speakers to blast your tunes down the road, and most of all it was FUN with a capital F.
Sadly I traded her in on a 76 Camaro with a 350 (which three days after I had it restored to mint state an off duty cop slammed into it and trashed it and his buddies wrote the scene up as a no fault even though I was in the ditch trying to avoid the asshole who was playing with his radio) and I heard that my beautiful primer baby was totaled by the guy who bought it after me, the moron tried to take a curve with her at 100MPH and slammed straight into a tree. Straight aways she was great, but taking curves? too much weight to sling that ass end, as he found out.
So your answer is to buy nothing? Kinda funny how the web is covered with "replace Windows with Linux" and "save that old machine by putting Linux on it" articles but whe you point out that doesn't actually work you get told to buy some mythical "open source hardware" that frankly the ONLY hardware I've seen with decent reliable open source drivers is top of the line workstation gear that frankly it would be cheaper to just buy Apple.
After all if you look up what RMS uses, which he claims is the ONLY truly "pure" FOSS device he has found so far, it is a Loongson netbook with an ARM CPU which you can't even pick up unless you are heading to the Chinese coast anytime soon.
So if the only answer to the upgrade death march is to buy and use ONLY open source driver supplied hardware? Please do the right thing and say that when you see those "replace Windows with Linux" articles and tell them they are full of shit. Because so far using the same bog standard hardware that is on a good 85%+ of the machines out there...AMD and Intel CPUs, Nvidia and ATI GPUs, Realtek, Via and Sigma sound, Realtek and Via NICs, and Broadcom and no name wireless, I have yet to find a box of consumer level hardware that doesn't shit itself and die if you let it update.
Like I said that answer really doesn't help keep these 4 1.4Ghz with 512Mb of RAM PCs I'm looking at from going to the dumpster and kinda kills the "save a PC with Linux!" meme quite dead. because if I were to listen to you the amount of parts I would have to rip out and replace would cost more than these machines would be worth. So again for the lack of a decent driver model in Linux into the trash they shall go. Shame really but Torvalds hasn't changed his position since 1993 and I doubt anyone will get anything past him until he retires or someone gets tired of the bullshit and forks the kernel..
Exactly! After being exposed to the rotting stench that is Duke Nukem Forever I just had to pull out the original Duke Nukem Atomic and load up the high res pack just to have me some real Duke Nukem goodness. That game is from what? 1997? Still plays great on win 7 HP X64 BTW.
If you make a good product, especially a good product at an affordable price? Folks by and large WILL keep your product. As others have pointed out theoretically you could use the same argument for things like power tools that IRL most folks will have limited use for. But we aren't talking power saws here, we are talking about little time wasters to give you something to do while you are in the doctor's office or waiting in line someplace.
So IMHO Google is the douche in this and I wish we would have a similar law passed here in the states for ALL software. I can't count the number of times I've been all jazzed up because I got me a killer new game to play, i'm waaay above the minimum specs, but then I get home and load it up only to have the game run like shit if it runs at all so the ONLY thing I get for my money is a lighter wallet.
If your game or app is so shitty that you honestly think people can't even get the low selling price worth of entertainment or use out of it after a measly 7 days? Well maybe you might want to think about not making programs that are so shitty. I've bought plenty of bargain basement programs that weren't anywhere near AAA quality but you know what? I got my $3-$7 bucks worth of use out of them so I was happy. We aren't talking about some $1000 a seat enterprise software here, we are talking about giving the customer a few bucks worth of use/entertainment. If you can't even manage that? Well maybe you ought to think about designing something other than another iFart.
So how's that 6 month upgrade death march working out for ya? How many forum hunts have you had to do to find driver fixes in the last couple of years? anybody who says with a straight face that 6 months is long enough for even basic QA on an OS is just frankly insane. So far I have tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, Mandriva, and PCLinuxOS and on every. single. one. when the upgrades rolled around at least one if not many drivers would shit themselves and die. This is why I won't carry Linux in my shop nor allow it in my home.
The sad part is other than Linus Torvalds being an absolute douche and treating the kernel as his personal playtoy and not allowing Linux to have what everyone else has had for a decade or more, BSD, Solaris, OSX, Windows, OS/2, a stable hardware ABI so updates don't hose drivers? Well other than that I found Linux was nice, low resource, and had plenty of apps. Of course that is like saying other than the assassination thing Mr and Mrs Kennedy had a nice trip to Dallas.
That is why when I go pick up my new playtoy tomorrow ( found a sweet little 750Mhz Toshiba laptop in mint state with case and DVD external for $40, just couldn't turn that down for a new hack toy) I'll be putting on TinyXP. Funny that users talk about low resource use for Linux when I have yet to see anybody beat TinyXP, the whole thing uses less than 64Mb for a fully loaded desktop. Since I have plenty of XP licenses laying around it ought to be perfect for that little WinME lappy.
So while I'm glad that Ubuntu works for you frankly I found Linux to be too big a PITA, with too much time spent on forum hunts and driver fixes than the thing was worth. It is a shame too, as I have 4 1.4Ghz machines sitting right in front of me that will probably end up in the dump as the XP licenses to reload them are worth more than the boxes, but with Linux I'd either have to do a Dell and disable updates and leave them vulnerable to the next flash zero day that comes along, or provide free lifetime support for all the drivers that get hosed on the upgrade death march. Frankly it just ain't worth the effort for boxes that are worth maybe $30 a piece, so in the garbage they'll go. I hate throwing working gear away but what choice do I have?
It just goes to show you how completely fucked up and out of touch the land of fruits and nuts is. First the sanctuary bullshit, which for ANY city that declares that bullshit I would open them to lawsuits by the victims of illegals no different than what we did with Libya and supporting terrorism, and why not fish? Because asshole it isn't your job to control everyone's lives and just because you have a little power doesn't mean you get to act like a little brown shirted goon and control everyone else! What's next, going along with PETA and having fish declared "sea kittens" and forcing everyone in SF to eat nothing but grass?
So allow me to say I now 100% support the red states bleeding you dry. After all you seem to like government intervention and frankly if this is what you think of to do with government maybe a little more wealth redistribution would be just the thing to pull your collective heads out your asses! Your economy is in the crapper, you have border jumpers cranking up the crime rate, your state is in the red and THIS, this is all you can think of? Lord help California if the rest of the state is like this and I can see why some in the north of that state really wouldn't mind having the state split in half like Carolina.
Actually that isn't entirely accurate, it depends on the AV. Both Avast free and Comodo IS free have by default heuristics and sandboxing of ALL apps, so you'd be surprised how much herp derp that can protect against.
I have some customers that can get more viruses than a Bangkok whore on a Saturday night and switching to Avast Free (used to use Comodo but it is more fiddly than Avast) I have watched infections plummet. By putting everything in a sandbox away from the actual registry and Program Files it really does help keep the nasties away, and Avast Web Shield really does help against the zero days and nasty JavaScripts.
I hate to sound like an ad but if you don't want to deal with nearly as much herp derp PEBKAC PITA crap try Avast Free. I've found by pairing that with Comodo Dragon (which has excellent anti phisishing and sandboxing of its own) it really does help cut down on the nasties caused by a rampant case of the stupids. Of course that doesn't mean one should forgo backups, far from it, but when dealing with dumbasses all the extra protection you can get helps.
Ya know, I really wish I could find the link because it really explained why ultimately it will be either the west or Islam in a battle to the death. It explained how in all Sharia societies you have on average 10% that are stone cold killers, and another 15% that are collaborators. What this does is pretty much kill ANY and all dissent, because you know that 1 in 4 is either a killer or a collaborator. And since there you don't get punished if you "Kill for Allah" it just makes the killer and collaborators emboldened. They also had a nice quote from one of the hardcore Mullahs that said "We need to not attack Europe, since with our birthrate we'll own it in three generations and one shouldn't destroy one's own property".
Sadly I think ultimately we will HAVE to become isolationist, we will simply have no other choice. It is gonna end up "fortress America" with the Americas against the former free Europe and Asia ruled by Sharia fanatics. At the current birthrate Germany will be Sharia in less than 30 years, the UK in as little as 25. The Muslims make it a point to NOT in any way assimilate, instead living in "Sharia Ghettos" so they can keep their birthrate high and their fanaticism intact. This is why you have women that refuse to wear the veil attacked in England as we speak.
And while I believe ALL organized religions are ultimately about control and are full of shit (what you believe should end where it infringes upon me) in the end as you say Islam is a cult filled with fanatics. There is NO "religion of peace" when it comes to Islam, there are mearly killers, collaborators, and those afraid to speak against the two above for fear of being murdered for being an apostate. In the end we will have no choice, we will have to lock down the borders and keep them over there, or risk losing our freedoms to Sharia and the cult that is Islam. Their own book says there will be NO PEACE until the world bows to Islam and Sharia, so frankly we should take them at their word and leave their asses in the desert to rot.
We should treat switching off oil as a national defense priority no less than our development of the bomb, and let them swim in their no longer all powerful oil and slaughter each other.
Riiiight. Hows that FLOSS koolaid Drinkypoo? Is it cherry flavored? WTF does MSFT have to do with the fact that Linux has and always will have shitty driver support thanks to being 15 years behind everyone else on OS design? Are you REALLY so arrogant to think that Linus fricking Torvalds is smarter than the entire OS industry because if so you might want to cut down on that koolaid. BSD? Hardware ABI. Solaris? Hardware ABI. OSX? Hardware ABI. Windows? Hardware ABI. OS/2? Hardware ABI. Notice a pattern here buddy?
The sad part is it all comes down to RELIGION, no different than flat earthers or young creationists. look up the rant against ABIs and you will see it is a religious rant, with the author going so far as to call those who don't hand EVERY scrap of code to the blessed hand of ye kernel devs "leeches" and then hopes that the blessed Torvalds does smiteth their drivers even though that is fucking Linux users.
You see like all religion it comes down to your leaders deciding you aren't smart enough to think for yourself. The argument is that "Gasp!" if there is a device with FOSS drivers and one with a binary blob you will be too dumb to pick by yourself, therefor they need to discourage binary blobs to protect your "purity of essence". this of course ignores the facts. Like Nvidia, or the fact that most companies ATM won't jump through your flaming hoops that is the current model, or that the current model causes driver breakage pretty much constantly, or that all it would take is a manufacturer burning Linux users by dropping support for them to do this thing we call "vote with your dollars" and finally it ignores the fact that Linux users that care about graphics buy Nvidia and use binary blobs because the much vaunted FOSS graphics code is...well it is kinda shit.
But hey, feel free to ignore me. Feel free to ignore that after 20 years Linux is STILL lower than the margin for error, feel free to ignore that you can't simply walk into a store and buy a device by looking for "a penguin on the box" but instead have to hunt through outdated hardware lists and ultimately play hardware roulette, and finally ignore the fact that every B&M in the USA won't touch your OS because we have all been burnt trying to support an OS with a broken driver model. Or do you expect us to tell our customers "RTFM noob or go back to Windblowz LOL!".
Frankly between Torvalds kernel fucking, RMS's "purity of essence" and the general "go back to Windblowz" bad attitude of the frankly teeny tiny niche that is the Linux community? Honestly you really need to change the mascot from Tux to Trollface. It would fit the current clusterfuck better.
Or you can just be smart (or have hired a smart guy like yours truly) and have previously downloaded and run Paragon Backup & Recovery 2011 Free and then you'd have a nice disc image preferably backed up to a USB drive that with the included recovery CD .ISO burnt takes about 20 minutes to have the machine up and running.
I swear in this age of 1.5Tb USB external drives costing less than $70 you'd think that having a disc image would be a no brainer. The software above is free, it is simple, does differential if you like, and I have yet to see any malware that would infect a third party disc image
So seriously folks, if you have friends or family that don't have a backup plan show them TFA and point them to some nice disc imaging software and a cheap external drive. Sellout.Woot has a 1.5Tb for $70 last I checked, which is more than enough space for your average folks to easily keep over a years worth of backups if they so choose. Mine has not only disc images of all my OSes, but a synced backup of all my tunes, all my GOG installers, backups of my pics, they really are handy things to have and take the work and worry out of nasties like TFA.
Uhhh...this is the "Bob's Game" guy, the one whose vaporware game he has been spamming "viral marketing, whatever" for years with no actual game to speak of?
So considering the fact you can't even buy a screen from Digikey, a place that has those made in bulk, for $10 I kinda doubt this guy is gonna get a complete system for that price. Go look at Chinamart and you'll see the bunches cranking out low end emulator systems by the boatload only have the price down to around $45 for machines MUCH worse specs than this.
So yeah, until I see actual systems in actual hands I'm gonna have to call bullshit.
Was I the only one rooting for the polluters on that show? I think it was the whiny little "heart" punk that did it for me, every week I just hoped one of the bad guys would bury that little twerp in toxic waste or plutonium or something.
as for TFA, what's the odds this waste can blow up? I'm not talking nuclear China syndrome kinda blow up, but I'm betting plenty of those chemicals are also flammable. Radioactive smoke and chemical fires don't sound too good. So anybody know if what they stored there is at risk of going boom?
Yes to the 1000th power about cutting off the 8 million plus a DAY we are sending to Israel. If the Jews of this country want to send THEIR money to Israel? Fine and dandy. But the fact that our current ME policy is based on a single sentence...Jesus won't come back...frankly sickens me. So many dead, so much wasted lives and property and for what? So a prophecy written by an 1800 year dead goat herder on sheep skin about a 2000 year old dead mystic that has to have a certain race in a certain place so he has a place to park his fluffy cloud, WTF?
If their God wants Jews in Zion, well I'm sure A GOD can make sure Jews stay in Zion, don't you think? Living next to a Christian conservative college where many of the right wingers that roam the halls of power come to lecture I've actually gotten to talk to some of these people of power, and I swear that line above has caused more suffering since 1947 than you would believe.
How bad is it when I have to do a Shat and point out "What does God need with missiles and piles of money, just to make sure some race is in the right place? Isn't he a God?" and basically get told we'll get spanked like some bad child by the sky bully if we don't bend over backwards for Israel. these guys wouldn't care if Jews decorated their cars with Arab baby heads as long as there is a Jew in Zion to fulfill that stupid line. I swear the Commies had the right idea, we should just load up all the books of all the religions and burn the damned things. The world would be a better place after a couple of generations.
I don't know about that, as here where I am (North central AR) the tornadoes follow the freeway except when there is a trailer park nearby and then it WILL veer and head straight for the trailer park. It is so predictable that when we listen to severe weather and the weatherman says a tornado has shifted someone will say "Is there a trailer park there?".
Maybe its a heat thing, I know they follow the freeways because all that asphalt holds in heat, maybe all that metal holds enough heat to "pull" the tornado in that direction? Because knock on wood every tornado that has rolled through this area in the past three years has stayed on the freeway...except when it takes out the trailer park on the south side, which has to be a good mile off of the road. After it trashes it, back to the freeway. Like I said if I didn't know better I'd think tornadoes are snobs.
As you point out it isn't the "DOODZ, WHERE DA APPS AT??" that will kill RIM, sadly it is RIM itself. If you look at their competitors all treat their phones as a platform. You get X amount of support, you can update from OS # to OS #1 or whatever, the whole thing is treated as a platform.
RIM on the other hand goes "Oh look, here is our new phone! It isn't compatible with our old phone OS, and BTW we won't be updating squat on the last model (even if it came out yesterday) because we have a new model! Buy it now!" and frankly folks just ain't gonna go for that anymore. People want their phones to at least be treated as current for the life of their contracts, they don't want to feel abandoned three months after getting the thing yet that is EXACTLY what RIM has been doing.
So if you want to know who killed RIM, that would be RIM. My prediction? When their share price gets low enough they will be bought by MSFT and be replaced by a WinPhone Corporate Edition. MSFT has experience with businesses, it'll integrate with AD, and RIM still has plenty of patents that would look good in the MSFT war chest. So final total...Google and Apple trading one and two, MSFT/Nokia in third, everyone else toast.
Ya know, I've always wondered about this...what is it that draws tornadoes to trailer parks? If there is a trailer park anywhere near the path you just know they are fucked, as it seems a tornado will go out of its way to take that fucker out. Since I doubt tornadoes are just snobs I have to wonder, what is it? Magnetism?
As for TFA frankly I'm shocked, but then again I'm really not. Any law that will affect a corporation in the pocketbook will get shut down, see Citizens United for example. The fact that this is ultimately good for the people should probably be seen as a side effect with the main goal making sure corps can sell GTA 47 to anybody with a buck. Not that I think that is a bad thing, as I let my kids play violent games but of course instead of just sitting them in front of the machine I actually showed them how it works and how files like DOOM Wads (boy I'm dating myself!) were translated into what they see on the screen, how scripts gave the illusion of AI, how textures could be edited to make the game "world" whatever they wanted it to be.
Of course while this did have the intended effect of showing the kids the difference between reality and gaming it did have one very strange unforeseen "side effect" and that was the way my oldest "cursed" when he played a game. I would hear "What is this? Tearing? Do they think this is DOOM? And who designed these levels? I've seen mods with better levels than this. And this AI is just pathetic! DUCK YOU STUPID BAD GUY!". Needless to say I had to chuckle at his little tirades against bad game design.
Citation please? because from what I understand as long as you are recording yourself and aren't trying to hide that fact you are legally in the clear, otherwise all those "This call may be recorded for quality assurance" messages would be announcing they are breaking the law.
As for TFA looking at TFA (I know, but I got bored) it seems to be more along the lines of letting grandma record her video calls of her kids and vice versa than some new wiretap schema, which BTW CALEA means that ALL have to allow the police to access it with a warrant.
As someone who has buried his sister and grandma in the past 5 years I see the ability to record conversations as a GOOD thing. With so many of us spread out having recordings of them, even talking about trivial things, would be nice when they shuffle off this mortal coil. Nobody lives forever and you'd be surprised what a comfort having recordings of a loved one that has passed can be.
Except that ISN'T what they are doing. If you bothered to read the post this all started back when the first P4s came out, aka little space heaters big pile o' suck. if you'll notice it also crippled performance on the P3 which was currently kicking the dog snot out of Netburst (and eventually came back under the Core moniker) so what we have is a simple "If chip equals what we want to promote then code=fast" and "If ship equals one we want to bomb then code' shit".
If they simply wanted to be safe then the safest thing to do would be to do nothing at all. After all if someone complains that just helps them sell chips, right? They could say "Sorry, please use genuine Intel next time" and that would be that. But no, that would let people know they are being fucked. Otherwise how do you explain disabling SSE support on the P3, which had an Intel designed SSE path? Can't be worries about compatibility, after all Intel designed the thing!
No if you read the results in the first link sadly there is only ONE conclusion, and that was Intel is using their position as leader in the market to hamstring any chips they did not want to promote. The P3 really is the smoking gun here, as at the time the benchmarks were showing the P3 on average 20% faster than the Netburst while using 40%+ less power. But guess what happened after the Intel compiler rigging? Why Netburst was suddenly 22% faster than the P3! Isn't that amazing? Oh and while there may be other compilers on Linux, on Windows it is Intel or MSFT. Kinda sad when MSFT is the fairer choice huh?
The simple fact is we aren't talking about some esoteric feature that may or may not be supported, we are talking about basic SSE which is a published standard and has been supported by ALL chip manufacturers since before the Intel compilers were rigged. No this is no different than if MSFT had OEMs rig the BIOS of laptops to do a check for "Genuine Windows" and have it run like shit if the flag wasn't tested. This check does NOTHING but look at CPUID, that's it. No checking of MXX, or SSE, or any other flag. It just looks for a P4 or above flag and if it isn't found drops the entire stack into slow ass x87 mode, which frankly has been depreciated since the Pentium 1 and is used by NOBODY else. If you read the first link the programmer points out they even used a poorly documented crap memory move just to ensure that it would REALLY slow it down.
This isn't "playing it safe" this is classic Sherman Antitrust behavior that sadly Intel WILL get away with, because our government was sold to the corps years ago. Hell if the MSFT case happened today they wouldn't even have had a trial, hell they would have probably gotten a tax break for doing it!