I probably shouldn't chime in, but what the fuck. The problem is perfectly illustrated by the poster above that is getting better battery life on Linux on his 7 year plus old laptop and it is THAT, that right there, that is the problem.
Thanks to Torvalds refusal to allow an ABI, which makes companies either jump through flaming hoops to support Linux or leave their companies rep in the hands of some kernel dev they have no control over, the support for old crap in Linux? Very very good, as it has been out so long it has been reverse engineered. The new stuff? frankly sucks the big wet titty when it comes to support as most companies aren't gonna "pull an Nvidia" and keep a room full of devs just to keep up with Torvalds and his kernel fucking.
The sad part is ultimately it comes down to religion and the belief that the community is too stupid to think for itself. You see all the arguments against having an easy to use stable ABI to write to (like everyone else on the planet has) is "ZOMG teh evil corps might give us binary blobs, ZOMG!" which of course ignores the fact that companies like Nvidia already do and that Linux users by and large do have this thing known as a brain and can decide for themselves if they wish to take the chance on an unsupported device down the road or not.
But the kernel devs and the RMS zealots will NEVER allow you to have a stable ABI, which will just cause Linux to get further and further behind. You see nobody cares about old crap, especially now that the world is switching to laptops. Nobody cares if that 7 year old laptop you picked up at Goodwill works in Linux, because frankly the replacement battery will cost more than the laptop is worth. No what Linux needs is supported for the latest and greatest and with the incredibly fast pace of laptops support will only get worse. It is a shame that you can't have a modern ABI like BSD, Solaris, OSX, and Windows, but as with most things I've found religious zealotry never helps, only hurts.But hey, at least your "purity of essence" remains intact, right?
Not to mention the odds are what? you are more likely to get hit by a bus or win $1000 in Vegas than you are actually getting injured or killed by a terrorist in the USA and that has NOTHING to do with the incredible black hole of money that is the TSA.
Frankly reinforced cockpit doors and one USMC MP with a 9mm loaded with low grain bullets solves the chance of another 9/11 and doesn't strip us of our rights or cost us out the ass. Of course that is if the goal was to actually stop terrorism, when in actuality the goal is pretty obviously another way to skim and pay off the friends of Sen Porker and Con Graftenburger. It is just another $600 hammer deal, only scanners replacing building implements and lets Sen Porker say he is bringing jobs into his area by hiring local yokels to be TSA goons.
Stupid, pointless, liberty infringing, and a total waste of money, but then again do we expect any different when we have a POTUS claiming with a straight face that dropping bombs from drones isn't hostile and have three wars going on, none of which the American people want? Frankly as much as I hate to agree with that guy on anything I have to agree with Glenn Beck, you want to cut down on terrorism? Then it is time for us to Be Switzerland, stop pissing around in third world hellholes and propping up El Presidente types and go the fuck home.
Frankly I'd vote for Bozo the Clown or Caribou Barbie if they were an isolationist. I'm so damned tired of "American interests" as a codeword for some corp that wants to exploit some shithole so we have to go in there and muck about. It is time for us to Be Switzerland and go the hell home. Let the EU waste their money mucking about if they want, it is time to quit being the world's policeman when all it does is make everyone hate us.
Ouch $200 a month? That's gotta hurt. Maybe you should be supporting more nuclear power in your area then. My state has a couple of reactors and the power here is cheap enough most renters (like myself) don't even pay electricity, we get it included in the cost of our rent which is quite affordable. Frankly I don't want to even know what my bill would be like living in a building built in 1925 when I run my AC pretty much 24/7 from late Apr through mid Oct without nuclear power. I know my mom's electric bill tops out at a hair over $100 and she keeps that big old house of hers like a meat locker.
I have to agree on the $10 thing though, who gives a crap about that? my cable box is also bringing my home phone and Internet connection. What am I supposed to do, kill my phone and net to save a couple of bucks? I use my net pretty much 24/7 for one thing or another and I have my favorite shows set to be DVRed by WMC so it isn't like the thing is just sitting there.
If they really wanted to do something about power hogs a much better solution IMHO would be to push for tax breaks for those with old apt buildings like mine so they would modernize. The stove in my apt works great but is from around 1973 (remember 70s green? Its that color) and the fridge and electric radiators are both from the same era. I bet if all of these 90+ apts were to have the old appliances replaced by energy star rated ones the amount of savings in just this one complex would be huge.
So if the PTBs in this country wanted to have us drastically lower power there is a whole lot more low hanging fruit than cable boxes. If all the ancient appliances in this country were replaced by more energy efficient ones I bet we could have pretty large gains and it would be better for the environment as well since the new ones don't use Freon IIRC.
Would you have preferred it if I had wrote "Yo Dawg, I be hooking up video and that shit be fat yo! teh pic be all big and shit, and it be fatter than a ho's ass dawg!" is that more preferable? How else are you gonna write that you get great video performance and the ability to transcode without actually saying that?
So excuse me for actually writing down what I have experienced installing and building AMD systems. Perhaps a video of never gonna give you up or a pic of a distended anus would be more to your liking?
Now back to the topic, I have found since switching that the typical 10% performance gain of Intel usually comes at a 300% markup when you figure in the price of the boards, and most people will never be able to notice the difference. I bet if I built identical quads, one Intel and one AMD, and had you do your average everyday tasks you frankly wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Well not until you got the bill that is.
And frankly anyone that supports the free market would have to be nuts to buy Intel ATM, because their behavior frankly should have had their ass dragged into court for antitrust years ago. Bribery? Rigging software? Oh and BTW Intel still rigs their compiler the ONLY difference since the settlement is they document it in the fine print and give you the "choice" of taking a dump over ALL of the software you compile by forcing it all to run in X87 mode, or only have it take a shit on AMD and Via chips. Wow, what a choice!
When you add to this their current campaign to slowly kill Nvidia, whose chipset division they have already strangled, then how anyone here can say that MSFT deserved to be busted but Intel not I will simply not understand. So if you don't want to reward bribery, unfair market manipulation, and outright douchebaggery, try to buy AMD next time okay? And this is from someone that for nearly 15 years was strictly an Intel man, but I can't reward douchebaggery with a clear conscience.
And as for proof, since teh Google must not work where you are hereyouGo and you should read the first one especially, since it is a post from right here on/. where a programmer documents the behavior and what happened when he ran programs compiled with an Intel compiler on AMD. Now since most programs on Windows (including most benchmarking suites) and compiled for Windows with the Intel compiler than the results of ALL those programs must now be looked upon as suspect. It is no different than the classic "Quack.exe" where if it detects A you get one result and B gets you another, even though the chips in question have identical abilities to run SSE code. And this programmer had noticed the problem back in 2004 so for at LEAST 7 years they have been rigging.
Eh if it is anything like the Tigerdirect and Newegg daily deals I can understand it. I mean you'd have to be nuts NOT to want to pay less than half for stuff you were planning to get anyway. Just the other day I got a Samsung 1Tb Ecodrive for $35 with NO MIR crap. No refurb either. Seriously who can beat that?
So while I don't use the above services if they are anything like the ones I do use I can see why. I've saved myself, my family, and my customers a ton of money by getting these daily emails. it has gotten to the point I have several customers that just leave me cash and say "hey when a deal on that thing I need comes up just snatch it, kay?" which is how 4 of my customers also ended up with those 1Tb drives. Really nice drive BTW, the 32Mb cache makes them pretty damned fast for a 5400RPM drive and the slower speed makes them ultra cool and quiet.
Well I'd say its also news as many of the guys here are in charge of purchases and this shows AMD still has some competitive server offerings, and as someone who remembers what it was like when there was only Intel (crazy ass pricing, lousy chips, insane motherboard costs, etc) having competition is VERY important!
I'd add these gains were done in spite of Intel doing everything but setting the AMD factories on fire trying to kill AMD. They rigged their compiler (and still are BTW) to put out shit code if it runs on an AMD CPU, they bribed the OEMs so much that there were several quarters where the ONLY profits Dell saw were Intel kickbacks, and Toshiba said their kickbacks were so generous they were "like cocaine" to the OEMs.
So I'd say that AMD making gains despite Intel doing everything but breaking their employee's kneecaps just shows they still have some competitive spirit. I personally have switched my shop to AMD only after finding out about the bribery and compiler rigging and my customers couldn't be happier. Their netbooks and laptops all have smooth video and are easy to hook to a TV via HDMI thanks to the Radeon IGPs, their desktops are likewise great with smooth 1080p video and hardware acceleration of all the major formats as well as hardware transcoding, their triples and quads make a great centerpiece for a good cheap media box or HTPC, all in all they make a great consumer box that will do all your average person will ever want to do at a price they can easily afford without breaking the bank.
So I'm personally glad for TFA, as it shows me they have competitive server chips to go with their excellent desktop and notebook lines. And frankly you should be happy too as real free market competition is good for everyone. or do you honestly think Intel would have a chip that costs less than $1000 if it weren't for AMD?
Not really, because in the 70s we could afford our nice big gas hogs thanks to cheap gas. man I miss the car I had then, a 71 Le Mans SS with a 455 that topped out at 155MPH stock. the thing was a primer nightmare that made it so damned easy to take money from snooty college kids in their Vettes. Sadly once gas got over $1 a gallon it was costing me over $100 to make the 105 mile round trip to the capital so I had to give her up. I miss her...sniff!
As for TFA I still don't get why we are still using the monster reactors anymore. Don't get me wrong, as someone who has a couple of them in his state I do enjoy the cheap power and the fact most apts here throw in electric for free,but with transmission losses it would seem the smarter move to switch to those small thorium reactors that can simply be buried in a shipping crate and provide power to a single town.
You make a joke about burning dinosaurs and I'd counter the current reactor tech is 70s era dinosaur crap. We really need to be looking at small cheap and easy to set up reactors over these giant mega monsters. These mega monsters are about as inpracticable today as my 71 Pontiac. Did I mention I miss her? man the gas on those rides sucked but they just don't build them like that anymore, that and my 73 Gold Duster had to be two of the most easy to drive and comfortable rides i ever owned. Back then cars were actually FUN with a capital F, not like these plastic bubble jobs.
See? If you dare to point out a SERIOUS problem all you get is called the Linux equivalent of nigger and faggot, aka troll and shill, and get told "You should tell your customers to learn our way, it is leet!" except its not, its a big giant shit sandwich that nobody has the balls to admit.
And your answer is a perfect example of what I was talking about, because if you had read my first post of this thread you would have seen very plainly I said you can't update Linux because it shits itself and here you are sir admitting you are running a badly out of date distro. Tell me, how much of the software on those machines is out of date? Which kernel do they run? How many of these vulnerabilitiesare your machines susceptible to?
I just want the community to either put up or shut up. You say that Linux is ready for the desktop? That it can replace Windows in peoples homes? Then prove it. Show me a SINGLE distro I can install TODAY that is guaranteed a minimum of 6 years of security updates without the upgrade death march, just one. No CLI horseshit (Proptip: Home users will not touch your precious CLI, they see it for what it is, a throwback to the 70s which is frankly stupid in the modern era. If you want to write a script for speed fine, but one should never HAVE TO use CLI to fix a problem on a modern OS) and no forum hunts, just an OS I can give to customers that won't be out of date and vulnerable by this time next year without jumping on the upgrade treadmill.
But the simple fact is you can't do it, because Linux geeks look at the CLI like it gives them mystical gonad powers and they think "its free so you should just upgrade" while ignoring the fact it is ONLY free if your time is worthless. my time on the other hand is a minimum of $35 an hour, so it takes less than 3 hours of forum hunts because Ubuntu Hairy Honky shits its network driver before you have cost me more than a Windows Home license.
And if it were simply one person trolling then please explain that long list of OEMs that have abandoned you? Please explain why NO retailer in the USA will touch your product? Why every. single. one. that has attempted to sell your product, from little shops like mine, to big fortune 500 companies like Walmart, have run away from your product like the clap after attempting to sell it?
I'll tell you why, because if you actually stand beside your product, if you actually offer even the teeny tint bit of support after the sale, you find out quickly the Linux driver model is shit. I can post link after link, showing you 10s of 1000s of posts of "update foo broke my driver!" where the ONLY "help" the user is given is a CLI voodoo dance which often needs to be "tweaked" because it was designed for hardware b rev g and they have hardware d rev k. This sir is simply unacceptable for a retail product.
Fix this and watch the world suddenly bloom with Linux choices. Watch as suddenly all those places that wouldn't give you the time of day suddenly have Linux boxes right beside the Windows ones. Watch as all the B&Ms from little places like mine to the big boys like Walmart carry your product. That is what the community wants right? A year of the Linux desktop. Then make it happen, put up or shut up. Because as it is Linux is a shiny covering over a shit sandwich. Once you get your initial install working it is pretty and all, but quickly the death march and the constant forum hunts will simply make it not worth the effort. And you want what will happen if you tell home users they have to deal with your precious leet CLI? They say "How much for Windows Home again?" and frankly who can blame them. It is 2011, not 1971. Get your shit together and join the rest of us in the 21st century. it is nice here!
Except from what we have seen their "attacks" were basic script kiddie bullshit and as we've seen time and time again script kiddies really aren't that good at covering their tracks.My guess is they realized they are looking at a good 20 years plus and are right now hiding under their beds hoping not to hear a knock on the door but it is probably too late for that now and the feds are just lining up the warrants before their doors come a crashing down.
After 9/11 the feds pretty much look at everyone as a potential terrorist and the fact that they cost corps money means the feds will get really nasty on them. Sorry Lulzsec but your days of freedom are numbered. Might as well go smoke some weed and get some hookers so you'll have some nice memories to look back on in PMITA prison.
Sorry I didn't clarify. what I meant by embedded is that Win 3.11 is still quite popular for use in embedded systems. the driver model is trivial to write for, its very design of one app at a time is perfect for single use systems, it is insanely low resource (last I checked you could run it on a 30MHz with 4Mb of RAM and it will be snappy) and it is beyond trivial to completely strip and rebuild for whatever application you need. you'd be surprised how many kiosks that don't require net access are running Win 3.11 and MSFT has wisely continued to sell it because that is what the customer wants and that is the big difference between MSFT and Apple.
So frankly it doesn't surprise me in the least that you can still get Win 3.11 through MSDN and I bet my last dollar there are still programs being written that use Win 3.11 as a platform. You should check out the embedded Win9x site where if you have a license for Win9x (like say from MSDN) you can buy customized embedded versions of Win9x that run on insanely low memory, like 11Mb for a networked GUI. This makes it trivial for kiosks and devices like dedicated systems since all the RAM and CPU can concentrate on your program and not on OS overhead. I wouldn't want to let it loose on the net, but who cares if your device doesn't need net access?
But your post highlights while any company would frankly have to be insane to use Apple anything for a business critical application since with their notorious tight lipped attitude to roadmaps you have NO clue if the system you just paid a crazy amount of money for (like that huge multimillion dollar video editing studio built around FCP perhaps) will have the legs cut right out from under you like in TFA, whereas MSFT puts everything in B&W years in advance, anyone who wants to know how long they have support for can simply go to the EOL page and look. And lets face it: between mainstream and extended the length of support on MSFT products is frankly insane, your machine will long since be passed down to the secretaries or replaced outright long before it ever reaches EOL.
In case you haven't heard this is NOT just about Apple putting out a beta quality program severely lacking in features. If that were simply the case one could stick with the previous version, like how most businesses skipped Win Vista by going straight from XP to 7 once it was clear Win 7 was a stable and solid platform. No what we have here is Apple yanking copies off the shelves right before launch and refusing to sell licenses to the previous version now. If your production house needs more FCP licenses to grow your business and the new version simply won't cut it? Tough shit, you get to go on eBay and get ass raped as the price is gonna shoot through the roof as production houses that were stupid enough to build around FCP scramble to buy licenses to have the ability to deploy more workstations.
But if you think about it there is ONE reason and one reason only that I can see to purposely burn production houses and run them off like that, and that is if Apple is withdrawing from that market to become a pure consumer device manufacturer. This makes sense because as I said Apple has never been happy with a product that mearly sells well, they want insane sales or nothing. The simple fact is Macs as creative production stations has never been a truly huge market, more of a REALLY expensive niche really, and niches just don't fit into the new Apple way of walking in and owning a market.
so mark my words in 3 years, maybe less, Apple will be completely out of the PC business. All of their offerings will be iOS based devices, designed for Joe and Sally consumer to do simple tasks like edit videos for YouTube and of course to buy crap from the App store. This will make Apple crazy amounts of money and those that formerly counted on OSX will simply have to switch to Windows where there is plenty of pro production software like Premiere and Avid waiting for
And YOU insist on not listening. I'll spell it out in little words, okay? Unless I sit these boxes aside and patiently wait for the next LTS I already have LESS THAN 2 YEARS before these machines shit themselves and die. And this of course doesn't take into account the true insanity of software tying itself to the kernel, so if you have kernel 2.6.x and the software wants 3.x.x you are fucked. What is so damned hard to understand about that?
And yes they DO intentionally break sir! If I design a car, to use the world famous/. car analogy, that can ONLY have its oil changed while going 70MPH+ down the road while you balance on the hood then IT IS MY FAULT if you injure yourself changing the oil because my design is bad and it is THAT, that right there, that is the heart of the matter! You have an entire OS ecosystem held hostage by ONE man, that man is Linus Torvalds. Linus said in 1993 he'd never allow a hardware ABI, here it is 2011 and he STILL refuses to change his mind, thanks to a combination of ego and religious dogma, neither of which should be anyway shape or form the basis of OS design!
Now EVERYONE and I DO mean everyone, OSX, BSD, Solaris, OS/2, Windows, they ALL have an ABI and you know what? Their drivers do NOT break! To take Windows for an example the Win2K/XP driver model lasted for over a decade and will continue to be supported until 2014. That is 14 YEARS of drivers that work! The WinVista/7 driver model will most likely get the same or longer, that is another DECADE PLUS of drivers working!
But as long as Linus insists on treating the kernel as his own personal play toy, as long as I said there is NO decent way to upgrade the thing without Linux shitting itself, I just looked up the numbers and guess what? Ubuntu LTS that is currently out dies hard in just a year and a half so again, your answer is...what? Death March or...death march? Because 10.04 LTS as you can see here has less than a year and a half on the desktop. Do you expect me to put these boxes in a closet for a year?
I'm sorry but your driver model is shit sir, and the sooner the community accepts this and has a royal raging shitfit at Torvalds and demands better the sooner Linux will be able to "just look for the penguin on the box" and can be all over retail shelves like Windows is now.
You show me ONE, just one mind you, one single distro where I can get a GUARANTEED 6 years worth of security updates WITHOUT the upgrade death march and I'll be happy to install it this very moment. But you can't, you know why? Because the entire community is based around the new hotness and since upgrades are "free" (except they are only free if your time is worthless) nobody cares about longer than 3 years worth of support, and most don't even care about that. But I have customers to support, and they ain't gonna take CS classes to learn the fucked up Linux broken driver dance.
Fix this problem, and you'll see Linux machines right next to the Windows ones in every B&M across the country. Isn't that what the community wants? The year of the Linux desktop? Well only you can make it happen, and that is by having a royal shitfit and demanding better than the shit sandwich that is the current driver model.
Because Apple has pulled the software from the shelves
This is one area where the difference between MSFT and Apple is pretty jarring. MSFT will sell you shit for fricking ages as long as folks are buying, hell they quit selling licenses to Win 3.1 embedded in what....2005? Whereas Apple decides "You WILL use the new hotness, you dirty heathen!" and that is that.
Frankly I see this as Apple quietly killing off their pro creative dept, since what they released can in no way be called pro. Looking at the screen caps and what they've omitted the new FCP is more an updated iMovie than a professional video editing suite. Personally I believe the long term roadmap involves Apple pulling out of the creative market and becoming strictly a consumer electronics company.
Apple has never seemed to like products that are only mildly successful, they want huge success or nothing. So I believe in less than 5 years OSX will be out and iOS will be in, most likely on a range of devices where once Mac OSX reined, such as desktops and laptops. This will also fit in with Apple's control issues as I'm sure Steve wasn't happy to have to use older Intel chips because Intel decided to screw over Nvidia, and with ARM Steve controls the whole stack, from the design and features of the chips to the software that runs on them.
So I truly believe this is just the beginning, I believe the long term roadmap (which Apple is notorious for not sharing, another reason for businesses not to use Apple products for mission critical roles) is a complete exit from the professional markets and Apple becoming a pure consumer electronics business. This will kill their problem with bugs since everything will go through the app store, give them complete control of the stack, and as we have seen with the touch and iPad will also make them another mountain or two of money. Software developers will be given software which runs on Windows for doing the actual work, and Apple will sit back and enjoy the huge waves of money headed their way.
As much as I hate to defend Dubya (I personally think he'll rank in the top 5 of shitty presidents) the Libby pardon was all Cheney who basically rode Dubya 24/7 until he got what he wanted. If you look at Bush's history he was always against pardons and did surprisingly few as governor and as president, less than one quarter of Clinton for comparison.
As for TFA the problem is we in the west have left behind actually protecting children a dozen exits ago and now are firmly in the total batshit red scare territory when it comes to these things. We have people doing prison time for looking at a manga, a collection of frankly primitive pen and ink drawings which has about as much to do with an actual abused child as a crude drawing of a missile has to a WMD, and we even have a guy in prison for writing his own fantasies in a journal which if that doesn't count as thoughtcrime I frankly don't know what does. That also doesn't count the removal of free speech such as throwing that guy in jail for the supposedly 'pro pedo' book which was again his thoughts written in book form. Hell according to a friend at the state crime lab the laws are such a convoluted mess you could draw a stick figure and scrawl beside it 'raeped kidz lul!" and could be looking at the same time as an actual raped child. Gentlemen that is SERIOUSLY fucked up. Of course one can't forget that small breasted women apparently aren't allowed to show their boobs in Oz, lest they make someone think they are underage.
So as much as I don't support the general asshattery of the Anon/Lulzsec crowd (personally i thought they should have done their hacking in secret and then released the results anonymously, so as to crank up the paranoia of the criminal elements of our governments and corporations) in this case I say go get 'em guys. This witch hunt has long left behind its original goal of protecting kids from rapists and become just another witch hunt where everyone that isn't for the loss of freedoms are considered a dirty pedo lover.
This is the logical fallacy that seems to bite Linux users in the ass every single time. Windows? minimum 10 YEARS of patches. Windows users don't have to update because they don't get kicked to the curb in 18 months like Linux users do. You don't stay on the update treadmill with Linux you WILL have an unpatched OS, and in this age of zero days isn't just foolish it is dangerous.
And as for the OEMs offering downloads? nobody uses them anymore. Since Vista MSFT maintains most drivers through Windows Update so that the user doesn't do forum hunts all they have to do is let Windows take care of it. Just got my Canon printer updated yesterday by WU. Works beautifully.
With Linux? Often your ONLY indication something is amiss (unless you are a CLI head as I said, by geeks for geeks) is when you try to use hardware, like listen to music or hook to the net, and it simply don't work. Is there a simple "update drivers" button? A simple and easy way that ANYONE, no matter their level of experience, can get the drivers working? Not a snowball's chance in hell friend.
To quote a very old saying "excuses are like assholes, everyone has one and they all stink". The numbers don't lie. read the links I provided. Linux has been free as in beer and freedom for 20 years and STILL the numbers are below the margin for error. Every single B&M that has tried selling your product has ran away. Dell can't even allow repos on their tiny subset of hardware because driver QA is so shitty on Linux that it will cause the Dell machines to shit themselves and die.
Gentlemen this is simply unacceptable. if you want the masses to adopt your product then you have to make a product they can use and NOT expect them to go out and get a CS degree so they can become their own tech guru. There is NO reason why drivers should break, there is NO reason why things should be this big of a mess. If you want to compare yourselves to Windows give us a solid decade of security patches without forcing us to do the upgrade death march, otherwise you should make damned sure that the upgrade death march you force us on won't kill drivers dead.
Look I want Linux to succeed, I really really do. right now I'm looking at 4 boxes that work perfectly fine I'm gonna end up having to send to the dump because the cost of Windows licenses are more than they are worth. I'd love nothing more than to be able to put Linux on these boxes and offer them as low cost machines so those without can have a cheap netbox, but I can't, why? Because in less than a year a new version of whatever distro i put on will come out and they WILL shit themselves and die if they are updated.
Sadly I have found you only get two choices when it comes to Linux at retail, 1.-give away free lifetime support (unacceptable) or 2.-disable ALL updates so the machine don't shit itself and die (unacceptable and foolish) so like the rest of the retailers in the USA I choose the third option 3.-don't carry your product. That means these machines will be going in the garbage, simply because of the POS Linux driver "model". Fix this gentlemen and I'll be happy to have nice new Linux boxes on my shelves, so would a lot of retailers. you think we LIKE paying for Windows licenses? hell no! But until you can guarantee me a MINIMUM of 6 years worth of security patches without causing drivers to shit themselves I simply can't stock your product. As I said I have yet to see a single linux distro even have 18 months worth of updates without a broken driver. this is just insanity and expecting home users to deal with that mess is either arrogance or naivety, I'm not sure which.
The problem I have is NOT flash, which as you said works pretty good, it is that you can't update Linux because the drivers WILL shit themselves and die!
Want proof? proof that nobody here can deny? here you go...why does Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the planet, have to disable the repos on every. single. Ubuntu machine they sell and deal with the hassle and expense of running their own repo, even for a small subset of the hardware they sell? Why because if they don't Linux breaks drivers oh fun oh joy!
It is THIS that I am talking about how mainstream is ignored by the geek brigade. linux is built BY geeks and FOR geeks and as geeks they think because THEY know how to recompile drivers, how to do forum hunts with a list of what make/model/rev of hardware they have, find a fix, and then "tweak" said fix because it was written for hardware B rev f and they have hardware D rev j that anyone can do it, and that is about as far from the truth as from here to Jupiter.
When your product is free, yet all these companies, from little ones like mine to fortune 500 giants, would rather pay money than use your product? That should tell you that you have a problem. Nobody cares if you have the coolest most secure low resource OS on the planet if in 6 months when the updates roll out the box shits itself and dies. The average user isn't gonna jump through flaming hoops just to be "free as in freedom!" and I can't afford to give away lifetime support.
Oh and PLEASE don't say LTS, as long as Linux software is tied to the kernel you might as well call that an out of date unpatched OS, because that is what it is. Oh and please don't say "Use Distro X" where X equals any distro other than the half a dozen I've already tried, since we all know that they are all based on a few "mother sauces" and so far I've tried Ubuntu, mint, PCLinuxOS, and Mepis, oh and Mandriva, and ALL had the same result. Updates roll out/ something breaks. With Windows they get on average a decade of security patches with NO driver issues. I have yet to even update a single machine twice, that equals roughly 18 months of support depending on the distro, without something breaking. Gentlemen that is simply unacceptable.
Now feel free to call me nasty names and mode me down, as I've noticed that anyone that says anything other than "gee isn't Linux perfect? Why it sure is Biff, and RMS's farts smell like roses!" gets modded to hell and called the Linux equivalent of faggot and nigger, that is shill and astroturfer.
The problem is NOT getting it to work initially, that part is fine. Sure I often have to "tweak" or play forum hunts but you know what? I've been building PCs since the early 90s so that isn't a problem FOR ME.
What IS a problem, and which makes me want to fly all the way to Finland to shake that little twerp Linus until he makes sounds like the Swedish chef, is that I can't give Linux to a customer because my choices are 1.-Disable ALL updates and hope they NEVER need any software that I didn't already install (because many apps are tied to which kernel you are using) and worse leave them with outdated flash and hope some zero day doesn't bite them in the ass, or 2.- take a fricking bath on the machine as I will have to provide lifetime support as the first time they allow it to update it WILL shit itself and die with regards to at LEAST one driver if not more.
Now that is just completely unacceptable. I have Windows boxes in the field for over 8 years now, fully patched, with NO problems (because honestly keeping a Windows box clean only takes a teeny amount of common sense which isn't hard for me to teach) and which will continue to run right up to the XP EOL.
Now so far I've tried Ubuntu (both regular AND Mint) PCLinuxOS, and Simply Mepis and ALL OF THEM have yet to survive a single update with 100% working hardware. Not a single one. it is ALWAYS something, sound, graphics, wireless, NIC, it is always something. What am I supposed to tell my customers? Tough shit I hope you don't need sound? You better learn the make/model/rev of EVERY piece of hardware in this box and become a wizard at forum hunts and tweaking bash commands? Tell them to learn to rebuild and recompile drivers? I expect a machine to last at LEAST 7 years, so if OpenSUSE has good support try this: download the version from 7 years ago (or the oldest version there is, whichever is newer) and then try to update it to current. i bet at least one if not several drivers WILL break!
The problem with the community is this: Linux is built BY geeks FOR geeks and geeks think anything that is easy FOR THEM must be easy for everyone else, and honestly nothing could be further from the truth. Hell my clueless dad installed Windows 7 when he got impatient and wouldn't wait for me to come do it. Know how many things were broken? NONE. Zip zero zilch nada squat. hell it downloaded all the drivers, did all the work, even pointed him to a free AV at first boot. The only thing I had to do was show him how to get Firefox and later how to get Comodo Dragon. that's it.
And THAT my friend is what Linux is competing against. Folks aren't gonna go from 'clicky clicky" to learning bash, or memorizing hardware lists, and they sure as hell aren't gonna learn how to rebuild drivers! No my friend the problem isn't the initial install, it is the fact that in a year or less when the latest updates roll around the machine will either be an unpatched zombie waiting to get pwned or it will shit itself and die. And it takes just three hours of my time for the cost of a forum hunt to be greater than the cost of a Windows license, and that is of course if there is even a fix out there! Some things I've seen not get fixed for weeks, weeks I tell you!
So I'm glad it works for you, I'm glad you are able to waste time with forum hunts and fixing broken drivers, or have the brass balls to run all over the net with a badly out of date pile of software. But I deal with normal folks 6 days a week, the average Joe that you see in line at the bank. And he isn't gonna jump through those hoops or take CS courses just to run Linux. When I can take Linux OS 12 and update it to Linux OS 13 and NOT have a single broken driver? Then and ONLY then will it be ready for my customers. But sadly as long as Linus is there to Goatse the kernel I doubt that day will ever come, sorry.
Well I'd say that Yahtzee over at Zero Punctuation nailed it when he described the difference between a GOOD remake and a shit one. He said a good remake or sequel should simply use the source material as a jumping off point while adding new direction or new experiences, while a shit one only wallows in the source material, simply rehashing what has already been done.
Like the new Duke Nukem which my oldest had to pick up simply because he was a fan and REALLY wanted it to be good. I told him he's a college man if he wants to waste his money that was his business and sadly watching him and giving it a spin what a waste it was. It reminded me of those piles of shit "movies" like disaster movie and epic movie where they think simply pointing something out is equal to a joke while completely missing the point of parody. It especially hurt to have Duke make a joke about Halo power armor when he was doing the same shit with only being able to carry two weapons (WTF?) and having regenerating health.
Now compare this to a remake I though was decent, King's Bounty. There they updated the graphics, gave new spells and abilities, gave the character more choices in which way they progress, all while still keeping the core gameplay. While I'm sure turn based strategy is a niche many don't like I thought they pulled that update off quite well.
So I'd say it can be done, you simply have to know the core of the source material you are working with and have good ideas on where to go with it. Which is why I still don't get how they could fuck up DNF so badly, hell you can't get easier to write than a new Duke game!
All they would have had to do is have a decent writer come up with good action hero one liners, allow him to carry more weapons than a tank, preferably with NO reload so you have the action movie cliche of firing 40 rounds from a 6 round gun, an environment with lots of things to blow up and explore, lots of titties and cheap sexist jokes, and at the end of a level an insane boss where Duke blows the living shit out of the place before walking away while lighting his cigar and spouting a smart ass remark, like say impaling a boss on a giant spike and then saying "I guess he got the point!" and just to add the delicious icing an authority figure bitching to Duke about all the shit he blew up followed by someone saying "I'm too old for this shit".
So you can take a classic game and make something wonderful, just look at Half Life II, but you have to know what you are doing and not just phone it in. Sadly most companies get a hold of a classic franchise and look at it as a license to put out shit and get the nostalgia dollar and that just ruins it for everyone. After playing 30 minutes of DNF I had to dig out my old Duke shareware and the high res texture pack just to wash the crappy gameplay from my mind and remember what I loved about the game. that is NOT the reaction one should invoke!
Oh it isn't just that, it is the fact that for YEARS IT guys in enterprise environments have been practically begging Moz for.MSI files and GPO support, and the lack of which on top of this frankly dickish move of just pulling the plug on FF 4 so soon after release of FF 5 means Firefox simply is unsuitable for a corporate environment.
Sadly for Mr IE guy many aren't too happy with them either, with their refusal to backport IE to XP which BTW is STILL under support. Now since I have seen DirectX 10 running on XP I take their "its impossible" with a big fat spoonful of salt and if it is impossible they should have released a stripped down version or compatibility shim for XP.
So I'd say the big winner of all this will be...drum roll...Google! IIRC Google offers.MSIs and allow control of Chrome through GPOs, so that fixes the FF problem, and so far they haven't seemed like they are gonna abandon support for XP anytime soon, so that fixes the IE problem. IMNSHO the IE team has already lost the consumer market as I haven't seen a PC with IE as default in...God, it must have been at least 2 years now? it has literally become that old joke, that IE is "the browser you use to download something better".
And while that something better used to be Firefox for my customers after seeing the memory and CPU hogging getting ever worse I've switched my default builds to Comodo Dragon, but those that are bringing in their PCs for the first time nearly always have Chrome. It used to be Firefox by a large margin but in the last year I've seen FF installs dropping like a stone and Chrome everywhere and that pron bug* was the final straw for a lot of my holdouts.
So while I wish the IE guys luck, anything that makes IE more secure is a good thing in my book, frankly I think they've missed the boat. They let IE rot for too long and by the time they got back on the ball people had moved away and they simply aren't coming back.
*.-For those that haven't run into it yet there is a nasty XSS bug going around that will load Yahoo Mail Beta and spam your address book whether you are currently logged in or not. So far it seems this bug only affects FF, and somehow they manage to get around ABP as well, but it doesn't seem to affect Chrome or the Dragon, nor can it get around NoScript. It took me forever to figure out how a machine without an infection was sending spam but after tracing his steps through the history yep, XSS bug. So if your friends that use FF and also have a Yahoo Mail account start sending you emails that consist of no text but a single link to some random address, now you know why. They were looking at teh titties and got their address book spamed by the XSS bug.
Actually you don't have to even run a wire anymore, just Google "wireless HDMI" and you'll find they have a nice cheap little device that will let you stream wireless from the HDMI out on your PC to the TV. That said PCs are so damned cheap now you can build a nice triple for $200, add in another $100 for a capture card and to kick in with a couple of friends for the Win 7 HP family pack and you have a nice dedicated TV box for dirt cheap.
I've had several customers just have me build them a nice cheap AMD quad with a decent GPU and use that as an all in one hooked to their TV. Lets face it a nice sized set is cheaper than a monitor of the same size, and 1080p is 1080p so it isn't like you are having to deal with a crappy surfing experience like you did in the old days. The last one I built cost a hair over $550 and lets the guy game quite nicely on anything short of crysis, lets him surf the net, lets his wife play her farmville and do her FB, and lets the kids watch their shows. Oh and while they sleep the PC converts the kiddie shows from the DVR of MCE into a DivX.avi so it'll play on the kid's Nbox so they can watch their shows even when their parents are busy on the box.
All in all it is a pretty cheap solution to a one stop shop for all your media so if Hulu goes tits up it isn't like my customers will be left out in the cold. And when you figure in with a little common sense the box will easily last a decade pretty much hassle free you really can't beat the value.
At least in traditional Italian 'fascism' which frankly is the ONLY fascism that has openly tried to work as a governmental philosophy, by and large the corporations do the will of the state. This is important because this brings in nationalism which by and large brings up the lives of many and not just a few at the top. There is a reason why they made jokes about how the trains always ran on time, and how there was little unemployment in those fascist states before they decided to take over the world.
While corporatism on the surface looks similar, it has one underlying difference that is a BIG fucking difference, in that the corporations control the state not the other way around. As a great man that helped found this country said "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." and that distinction makes all the difference in the world.
It is why we actually have the government giving tax breaks to those that offshore all the jobs away, it is why we have companies declared "too big to fail" and why we have the lowest taxes on the top 1% while we are looking at a possible default.
So you see the big difference is a fascist state wants to keep the state strong as they wield the power of the state. That is why fascist states are typically VERY nationalistic to the point of xenophobia, because they don't control what is outside the state so the state is all. In corporatism the corporations ONLY care about making as much money as they possibly can, after which they can simply move on like locusts in search of bigger and better profits. A line from a great movie fits the current corporatist philosophy perfectly "It doesn't matter. It's all profit. And then finally, when there's nothing left, when you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match." and that is what we have been seeing here in the USA. they are stripping out everything of value that ain't nailed down and when they can't wring another drop of profit they'll light a match and walk away. And THAT is the difference between fascism and corporatism my friend.
Question: What software are you using to strip out the commercials, or are you just converting them as clips and then re-integrating them? Because I too after seeing Hulu turn sucktastic just use Win 7 MCE to record off my cable via my capture card but I haven't found any good software for ripping out commercials.
But you think sooner or later the content providers would be hit by the clue stick like the music companies with iTunes, but nope, they just gotta take a big old dump on anything they can't literally bury you in ads with. I hate to break the news to them but with PCs being so cheap now more and more of my customers are asking about hooking PCs to their TVs and just using MCE to DVR their way past the crap. I mean it has gotten to the point cable is unwatchable as they pound you with so many ads it ruins the flow and irritates like hell out of everyone, and for what? With the exception of a handful of shows it is all reality crap all the time now, since they found out a reality show even with shit ratings is crazy profitable since it don't cost them shit to have a bunch of people act like dicks trying to win some prize.
But with the article earlier today about the *.A.As making backroom deals to screw us out of bandwidth I have a feeling sneakernet is gonna be making a comeback. 1Tb drives are beyond cheap, and MCE makes it easy to record entire series. My next guess is they'll cap us so hard Netflix streaming will be DOA, so it'll be everyone and their dog ripping Netflix DVDs and sharing those via sneakernet along with the shows, and all because the content providers never met a customer they couldn't burn and run off.
But it is probably about control more than anything, they want to go back to the days of everyone watching what the content producers say and when they say it, and Nielson ratings letting them see which has captured the most helpless....err I mean consumers. I don't know about everyone else but their erecting of flaming hoops hasn't made me jump to their websites, just the opposite in fact, in that I simply watch a lot less TV. It would be ironic if all their flaming hoops end up getting people to just stop watching rather than deal with their bullshit. I'd LOL if that were to happen and it couldn't happen to a bigger bunch of assholes!
There is a problem with FreeNet, in that their "plausible deniability" has never been tested in court and could cost you 30 plus years of your life.
you see the way I had it explained to me was this: With FreeNet you have that "encrypted store" which you HAVE NO CONTROL ON as far as content goes. Now lets say a cop gets on FreeNet and downloads CP and traces the line and part of the CP came from your IP address. Now there is nothing in the law that states you have to SEE the child porn to be busted for distribution, just that you had to have shared it. So all a cop would have to do is produce the CP he downloaded and a log showing it came from your IP address and that encryption won't mean shit, because you are still guilty of distribution.
So I would be more than a little leery about touting FreeNet as the cure to this, unless you are willing to spend a couple of years in jail before going to trial, and risk a good 30 years plus if you are found guilty.Not to mention that even if you are found innocent after rotting in jail for a couple of years your life will be ruined anyway, as nobody will want to deal with a "suspected child pronographer".
That is a hell of a big risk on something that has zero precedent in court, but maybe you want to be the first to try it out?
Well then are they gonna PAY ME when they fuck up my PC? No? Then bite me. I buy my games yet I play the downloaded version, why? Because I have found their shitastic DRM DOESN'T FUCKING WORK and in fact will fuck your shit up buddy! I've seen PCs that acted like they were infected, with crashes and slowdowns, fucking up all over the place, and it turned out to be just SecuROM and Safe disc having a nice little fight! Maybe you should watch this educational video and learn something.
And what about the shows I never would have bought if it weren't for P2P? I live in a valley so OTA is right out and frankly the cable shows so damned many commercials I can't stand to watch even 20 minutes of a show to find out if I like it because of the constant commercial bullshit. Right behind me as I speak, sitting on a nice shelf with collectors figures my late sis bought me for bookends, is the entire Joss Whedon collection, which set me back about....ohh I'd say a good $500 since I bought them at release. Since my area had NO WB I would have NEVER watched a single episode, nor would I have ever bought or rented it, because really the description sounded lame. I mean the guy from the Taster's choice commercials and a soap opera actress? WTF? But I downloaded a couple of episodes and loved the writing, so I went out and bought the entire series as they were released on DVD.
They THINK this will get people to buy the frankly God awful horseshit they've been shoveling lately, but they're wrong. Guys like me that try before you buy simply won't be buying much at all, and you certainly ain't gonna get those masses living from paycheck to paycheck to pay, they'll just do without. The dumbshits could have been finding ways to monetize these people, like the way games are going free to play with microtransactions, but instead they'll find out the hard way without the word of mouth brought by P2P their sales are gonna suck the big wet titty. I wonder what they'll blame when they can't blame piracy? Sadly they'll probably just have themselves declared "too big to fail" and take the money directly from our collective wallets with taxes, and give us the finger in return.
Meanwhile as the US empire gets the short bus to the information superhighway the rest of the world will simply route around and we can just accept the days of the USA being anything but another third world shithole are behind us. The future is information, and sadly most of America simply won't have access to it. We'll all be fat, lazy, stupid, and broke, with nothing to do but stare blankly at the idiot box. Eh I hope India and China enjoy this gift, and become better superpowers than we were, as with no tech they'll be no future tech jobs and we don't make shit here anymore. maybe they think we can all work in Hollywood?
Does it still get UPDATES, you know, those things Linux users are afraid to implement for fear Linus' latest Goatse on the kernel will cause their installation to fall like a house of cards? if so then it counts but I doubt it.
Meanwhile you get on average a DECADE of updates with Windows, which means the machine will be practically ancient before you go out of support which in a dead economy is a GOOD thing people!
The sad part is I'm looking at 4 1.4GHz PCs that would be just perfect for Linux, yet I'm gonna have to use the XP Home key on the sides and reinstall Windows even though it will be slow as shit with just 1.4GHz of CPU and 512Mb of SDRAM, why?
Because in this age of zero days having an unpatched OS is frankly insane, yet that is EXACTLY what I was told to do, time and time again, even here on/. if I want to run Linux on them, why? Because unless you are a geek and have time to waste on "forum hunts" Linux distros (So far I've tried Ubuntu, PCLOS, and Mepis, the results are the same) will shit themselves when you update them!
There is NO easy way that I've found to apply JUST the security updates, and since third party software is often tied to which kernel you run LTS is a codeword for "really old outdated software" that may/may not have exploits out.
Don't you just find it damned sad, doesn't it bother anyone here, just a little, that there is NO reason why Linux couldn't be on these PCs and on store shelves on nice new boxes, if it weren't for the incredible ego of just one man? In 1993 Torlvalds decided he don't like ABIs, since he couldn't just take a dump on the kernel structure if there was an ABI since he would totally break it. This was in 1993, times were different then, and maybe the memory saved was worth it. BUT IT AIN'T 1993 ANYMORE!
IS there anyone, anyone at all, that truly believes that Torvalds is smarter than the ENTIRE computer industry? Because everyone, and I do mean everyone, has an ABI EXCEPT Linux. OSX, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OS/2, and you know what they have in common? They can apply updates without drivers shitting themselves! Now I have had people here tell me with a straight face I should tell Joe average to learn to do forum hunts, or even learn to recompile fricking drivers, but you know what? he shouldn't have to!
Call me crazy but I still hope that one day I'll be able to walk into Walmart and see Linux laptops right next to Windows, and buying devices will be as simple as "look for the penguin on the box". it COULD be that way you know, if it weren't for a single douchebag, one single asshole holding back the entire ecosystem...Linus Torvalds. So maybe one day we'll get lucky and he'll retire, after which an ABI will quietly be added and people will go "Wow, everything just works!" and shelves will have Linux and all will be good. But as long as pouring a bunch of Bash commands after a multi-hour forum hunt is still considered an acceptable way to deal with drivers? Well that day will never come.
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I probably shouldn't chime in, but what the fuck. The problem is perfectly illustrated by the poster above that is getting better battery life on Linux on his 7 year plus old laptop and it is THAT, that right there, that is the problem.
Thanks to Torvalds refusal to allow an ABI, which makes companies either jump through flaming hoops to support Linux or leave their companies rep in the hands of some kernel dev they have no control over, the support for old crap in Linux? Very very good, as it has been out so long it has been reverse engineered. The new stuff? frankly sucks the big wet titty when it comes to support as most companies aren't gonna "pull an Nvidia" and keep a room full of devs just to keep up with Torvalds and his kernel fucking.
The sad part is ultimately it comes down to religion and the belief that the community is too stupid to think for itself. You see all the arguments against having an easy to use stable ABI to write to (like everyone else on the planet has) is "ZOMG teh evil corps might give us binary blobs, ZOMG!" which of course ignores the fact that companies like Nvidia already do and that Linux users by and large do have this thing known as a brain and can decide for themselves if they wish to take the chance on an unsupported device down the road or not.
But the kernel devs and the RMS zealots will NEVER allow you to have a stable ABI, which will just cause Linux to get further and further behind. You see nobody cares about old crap, especially now that the world is switching to laptops. Nobody cares if that 7 year old laptop you picked up at Goodwill works in Linux, because frankly the replacement battery will cost more than the laptop is worth. No what Linux needs is supported for the latest and greatest and with the incredibly fast pace of laptops support will only get worse. It is a shame that you can't have a modern ABI like BSD, Solaris, OSX, and Windows, but as with most things I've found religious zealotry never helps, only hurts.But hey, at least your "purity of essence" remains intact, right?
Not to mention the odds are what? you are more likely to get hit by a bus or win $1000 in Vegas than you are actually getting injured or killed by a terrorist in the USA and that has NOTHING to do with the incredible black hole of money that is the TSA.
Frankly reinforced cockpit doors and one USMC MP with a 9mm loaded with low grain bullets solves the chance of another 9/11 and doesn't strip us of our rights or cost us out the ass. Of course that is if the goal was to actually stop terrorism, when in actuality the goal is pretty obviously another way to skim and pay off the friends of Sen Porker and Con Graftenburger. It is just another $600 hammer deal, only scanners replacing building implements and lets Sen Porker say he is bringing jobs into his area by hiring local yokels to be TSA goons.
Stupid, pointless, liberty infringing, and a total waste of money, but then again do we expect any different when we have a POTUS claiming with a straight face that dropping bombs from drones isn't hostile and have three wars going on, none of which the American people want? Frankly as much as I hate to agree with that guy on anything I have to agree with Glenn Beck, you want to cut down on terrorism? Then it is time for us to Be Switzerland, stop pissing around in third world hellholes and propping up El Presidente types and go the fuck home.
Frankly I'd vote for Bozo the Clown or Caribou Barbie if they were an isolationist. I'm so damned tired of "American interests" as a codeword for some corp that wants to exploit some shithole so we have to go in there and muck about. It is time for us to Be Switzerland and go the hell home. Let the EU waste their money mucking about if they want, it is time to quit being the world's policeman when all it does is make everyone hate us.
Ouch $200 a month? That's gotta hurt. Maybe you should be supporting more nuclear power in your area then. My state has a couple of reactors and the power here is cheap enough most renters (like myself) don't even pay electricity, we get it included in the cost of our rent which is quite affordable. Frankly I don't want to even know what my bill would be like living in a building built in 1925 when I run my AC pretty much 24/7 from late Apr through mid Oct without nuclear power. I know my mom's electric bill tops out at a hair over $100 and she keeps that big old house of hers like a meat locker.
I have to agree on the $10 thing though, who gives a crap about that? my cable box is also bringing my home phone and Internet connection. What am I supposed to do, kill my phone and net to save a couple of bucks? I use my net pretty much 24/7 for one thing or another and I have my favorite shows set to be DVRed by WMC so it isn't like the thing is just sitting there.
If they really wanted to do something about power hogs a much better solution IMHO would be to push for tax breaks for those with old apt buildings like mine so they would modernize. The stove in my apt works great but is from around 1973 (remember 70s green? Its that color) and the fridge and electric radiators are both from the same era. I bet if all of these 90+ apts were to have the old appliances replaced by energy star rated ones the amount of savings in just this one complex would be huge.
So if the PTBs in this country wanted to have us drastically lower power there is a whole lot more low hanging fruit than cable boxes. If all the ancient appliances in this country were replaced by more energy efficient ones I bet we could have pretty large gains and it would be better for the environment as well since the new ones don't use Freon IIRC.
Would you have preferred it if I had wrote "Yo Dawg, I be hooking up video and that shit be fat yo! teh pic be all big and shit, and it be fatter than a ho's ass dawg!" is that more preferable? How else are you gonna write that you get great video performance and the ability to transcode without actually saying that?
So excuse me for actually writing down what I have experienced installing and building AMD systems. Perhaps a video of never gonna give you up or a pic of a distended anus would be more to your liking?
Now back to the topic, I have found since switching that the typical 10% performance gain of Intel usually comes at a 300% markup when you figure in the price of the boards, and most people will never be able to notice the difference. I bet if I built identical quads, one Intel and one AMD, and had you do your average everyday tasks you frankly wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Well not until you got the bill that is.
And frankly anyone that supports the free market would have to be nuts to buy Intel ATM, because their behavior frankly should have had their ass dragged into court for antitrust years ago. Bribery? Rigging software? Oh and BTW Intel still rigs their compiler the ONLY difference since the settlement is they document it in the fine print and give you the "choice" of taking a dump over ALL of the software you compile by forcing it all to run in X87 mode, or only have it take a shit on AMD and Via chips. Wow, what a choice!
When you add to this their current campaign to slowly kill Nvidia, whose chipset division they have already strangled, then how anyone here can say that MSFT deserved to be busted but Intel not I will simply not understand. So if you don't want to reward bribery, unfair market manipulation, and outright douchebaggery, try to buy AMD next time okay? And this is from someone that for nearly 15 years was strictly an Intel man, but I can't reward douchebaggery with a clear conscience.
And as for proof, since teh Google must not work where you are here you Go and you should read the first one especially, since it is a post from right here on /. where a programmer documents the behavior and what happened when he ran programs compiled with an Intel compiler on AMD. Now since most programs on Windows (including most benchmarking suites) and compiled for Windows with the Intel compiler than the results of ALL those programs must now be looked upon as suspect. It is no different than the classic "Quack.exe" where if it detects A you get one result and B gets you another, even though the chips in question have identical abilities to run SSE code. And this programmer had noticed the problem back in 2004 so for at LEAST 7 years they have been rigging.
Eh if it is anything like the Tigerdirect and Newegg daily deals I can understand it. I mean you'd have to be nuts NOT to want to pay less than half for stuff you were planning to get anyway. Just the other day I got a Samsung 1Tb Ecodrive for $35 with NO MIR crap. No refurb either. Seriously who can beat that?
So while I don't use the above services if they are anything like the ones I do use I can see why. I've saved myself, my family, and my customers a ton of money by getting these daily emails. it has gotten to the point I have several customers that just leave me cash and say "hey when a deal on that thing I need comes up just snatch it, kay?" which is how 4 of my customers also ended up with those 1Tb drives. Really nice drive BTW, the 32Mb cache makes them pretty damned fast for a 5400RPM drive and the slower speed makes them ultra cool and quiet.
Well I'd say its also news as many of the guys here are in charge of purchases and this shows AMD still has some competitive server offerings, and as someone who remembers what it was like when there was only Intel (crazy ass pricing, lousy chips, insane motherboard costs, etc) having competition is VERY important!
I'd add these gains were done in spite of Intel doing everything but setting the AMD factories on fire trying to kill AMD. They rigged their compiler (and still are BTW) to put out shit code if it runs on an AMD CPU, they bribed the OEMs so much that there were several quarters where the ONLY profits Dell saw were Intel kickbacks, and Toshiba said their kickbacks were so generous they were "like cocaine" to the OEMs.
So I'd say that AMD making gains despite Intel doing everything but breaking their employee's kneecaps just shows they still have some competitive spirit. I personally have switched my shop to AMD only after finding out about the bribery and compiler rigging and my customers couldn't be happier. Their netbooks and laptops all have smooth video and are easy to hook to a TV via HDMI thanks to the Radeon IGPs, their desktops are likewise great with smooth 1080p video and hardware acceleration of all the major formats as well as hardware transcoding, their triples and quads make a great centerpiece for a good cheap media box or HTPC, all in all they make a great consumer box that will do all your average person will ever want to do at a price they can easily afford without breaking the bank.
So I'm personally glad for TFA, as it shows me they have competitive server chips to go with their excellent desktop and notebook lines. And frankly you should be happy too as real free market competition is good for everyone. or do you honestly think Intel would have a chip that costs less than $1000 if it weren't for AMD?
Not really, because in the 70s we could afford our nice big gas hogs thanks to cheap gas. man I miss the car I had then, a 71 Le Mans SS with a 455 that topped out at 155MPH stock. the thing was a primer nightmare that made it so damned easy to take money from snooty college kids in their Vettes. Sadly once gas got over $1 a gallon it was costing me over $100 to make the 105 mile round trip to the capital so I had to give her up. I miss her...sniff!
As for TFA I still don't get why we are still using the monster reactors anymore. Don't get me wrong, as someone who has a couple of them in his state I do enjoy the cheap power and the fact most apts here throw in electric for free,but with transmission losses it would seem the smarter move to switch to those small thorium reactors that can simply be buried in a shipping crate and provide power to a single town.
You make a joke about burning dinosaurs and I'd counter the current reactor tech is 70s era dinosaur crap. We really need to be looking at small cheap and easy to set up reactors over these giant mega monsters. These mega monsters are about as inpracticable today as my 71 Pontiac. Did I mention I miss her? man the gas on those rides sucked but they just don't build them like that anymore, that and my 73 Gold Duster had to be two of the most easy to drive and comfortable rides i ever owned. Back then cars were actually FUN with a capital F, not like these plastic bubble jobs.
See? If you dare to point out a SERIOUS problem all you get is called the Linux equivalent of nigger and faggot, aka troll and shill, and get told "You should tell your customers to learn our way, it is leet!" except its not, its a big giant shit sandwich that nobody has the balls to admit.
And your answer is a perfect example of what I was talking about, because if you had read my first post of this thread you would have seen very plainly I said you can't update Linux because it shits itself and here you are sir admitting you are running a badly out of date distro. Tell me, how much of the software on those machines is out of date? Which kernel do they run? How many of these vulnerabilitiesare your machines susceptible to?
I just want the community to either put up or shut up. You say that Linux is ready for the desktop? That it can replace Windows in peoples homes? Then prove it. Show me a SINGLE distro I can install TODAY that is guaranteed a minimum of 6 years of security updates without the upgrade death march, just one. No CLI horseshit (Proptip: Home users will not touch your precious CLI, they see it for what it is, a throwback to the 70s which is frankly stupid in the modern era. If you want to write a script for speed fine, but one should never HAVE TO use CLI to fix a problem on a modern OS) and no forum hunts, just an OS I can give to customers that won't be out of date and vulnerable by this time next year without jumping on the upgrade treadmill.
But the simple fact is you can't do it, because Linux geeks look at the CLI like it gives them mystical gonad powers and they think "its free so you should just upgrade" while ignoring the fact it is ONLY free if your time is worthless. my time on the other hand is a minimum of $35 an hour, so it takes less than 3 hours of forum hunts because Ubuntu Hairy Honky shits its network driver before you have cost me more than a Windows Home license.
And if it were simply one person trolling then please explain that long list of OEMs that have abandoned you? Please explain why NO retailer in the USA will touch your product? Why every. single. one. that has attempted to sell your product, from little shops like mine, to big fortune 500 companies like Walmart, have run away from your product like the clap after attempting to sell it?
I'll tell you why, because if you actually stand beside your product, if you actually offer even the teeny tint bit of support after the sale, you find out quickly the Linux driver model is shit. I can post link after link, showing you 10s of 1000s of posts of "update foo broke my driver!" where the ONLY "help" the user is given is a CLI voodoo dance which often needs to be "tweaked" because it was designed for hardware b rev g and they have hardware d rev k. This sir is simply unacceptable for a retail product.
Fix this and watch the world suddenly bloom with Linux choices. Watch as suddenly all those places that wouldn't give you the time of day suddenly have Linux boxes right beside the Windows ones. Watch as all the B&Ms from little places like mine to the big boys like Walmart carry your product. That is what the community wants right? A year of the Linux desktop. Then make it happen, put up or shut up. Because as it is Linux is a shiny covering over a shit sandwich. Once you get your initial install working it is pretty and all, but quickly the death march and the constant forum hunts will simply make it not worth the effort. And you want what will happen if you tell home users they have to deal with your precious leet CLI? They say "How much for Windows Home again?" and frankly who can blame them. It is 2011, not 1971. Get your shit together and join the rest of us in the 21st century. it is nice here!
Except from what we have seen their "attacks" were basic script kiddie bullshit and as we've seen time and time again script kiddies really aren't that good at covering their tracks.My guess is they realized they are looking at a good 20 years plus and are right now hiding under their beds hoping not to hear a knock on the door but it is probably too late for that now and the feds are just lining up the warrants before their doors come a crashing down.
After 9/11 the feds pretty much look at everyone as a potential terrorist and the fact that they cost corps money means the feds will get really nasty on them. Sorry Lulzsec but your days of freedom are numbered. Might as well go smoke some weed and get some hookers so you'll have some nice memories to look back on in PMITA prison.
Sorry I didn't clarify. what I meant by embedded is that Win 3.11 is still quite popular for use in embedded systems. the driver model is trivial to write for, its very design of one app at a time is perfect for single use systems, it is insanely low resource (last I checked you could run it on a 30MHz with 4Mb of RAM and it will be snappy) and it is beyond trivial to completely strip and rebuild for whatever application you need. you'd be surprised how many kiosks that don't require net access are running Win 3.11 and MSFT has wisely continued to sell it because that is what the customer wants and that is the big difference between MSFT and Apple.
So frankly it doesn't surprise me in the least that you can still get Win 3.11 through MSDN and I bet my last dollar there are still programs being written that use Win 3.11 as a platform. You should check out the embedded Win9x site where if you have a license for Win9x (like say from MSDN) you can buy customized embedded versions of Win9x that run on insanely low memory, like 11Mb for a networked GUI. This makes it trivial for kiosks and devices like dedicated systems since all the RAM and CPU can concentrate on your program and not on OS overhead. I wouldn't want to let it loose on the net, but who cares if your device doesn't need net access?
But your post highlights while any company would frankly have to be insane to use Apple anything for a business critical application since with their notorious tight lipped attitude to roadmaps you have NO clue if the system you just paid a crazy amount of money for (like that huge multimillion dollar video editing studio built around FCP perhaps) will have the legs cut right out from under you like in TFA, whereas MSFT puts everything in B&W years in advance, anyone who wants to know how long they have support for can simply go to the EOL page and look. And lets face it: between mainstream and extended the length of support on MSFT products is frankly insane, your machine will long since be passed down to the secretaries or replaced outright long before it ever reaches EOL.
In case you haven't heard this is NOT just about Apple putting out a beta quality program severely lacking in features. If that were simply the case one could stick with the previous version, like how most businesses skipped Win Vista by going straight from XP to 7 once it was clear Win 7 was a stable and solid platform. No what we have here is Apple yanking copies off the shelves right before launch and refusing to sell licenses to the previous version now. If your production house needs more FCP licenses to grow your business and the new version simply won't cut it? Tough shit, you get to go on eBay and get ass raped as the price is gonna shoot through the roof as production houses that were stupid enough to build around FCP scramble to buy licenses to have the ability to deploy more workstations.
But if you think about it there is ONE reason and one reason only that I can see to purposely burn production houses and run them off like that, and that is if Apple is withdrawing from that market to become a pure consumer device manufacturer. This makes sense because as I said Apple has never been happy with a product that mearly sells well, they want insane sales or nothing. The simple fact is Macs as creative production stations has never been a truly huge market, more of a REALLY expensive niche really, and niches just don't fit into the new Apple way of walking in and owning a market.
so mark my words in 3 years, maybe less, Apple will be completely out of the PC business. All of their offerings will be iOS based devices, designed for Joe and Sally consumer to do simple tasks like edit videos for YouTube and of course to buy crap from the App store. This will make Apple crazy amounts of money and those that formerly counted on OSX will simply have to switch to Windows where there is plenty of pro production software like Premiere and Avid waiting for
And YOU insist on not listening. I'll spell it out in little words, okay? Unless I sit these boxes aside and patiently wait for the next LTS I already have LESS THAN 2 YEARS before these machines shit themselves and die. And this of course doesn't take into account the true insanity of software tying itself to the kernel, so if you have kernel 2.6.x and the software wants 3.x.x you are fucked. What is so damned hard to understand about that?
And yes they DO intentionally break sir! If I design a car, to use the world famous /. car analogy, that can ONLY have its oil changed while going 70MPH+ down the road while you balance on the hood then IT IS MY FAULT if you injure yourself changing the oil because my design is bad and it is THAT, that right there, that is the heart of the matter! You have an entire OS ecosystem held hostage by ONE man, that man is Linus Torvalds. Linus said in 1993 he'd never allow a hardware ABI, here it is 2011 and he STILL refuses to change his mind, thanks to a combination of ego and religious dogma, neither of which should be anyway shape or form the basis of OS design!
Now EVERYONE and I DO mean everyone, OSX, BSD, Solaris, OS/2, Windows, they ALL have an ABI and you know what? Their drivers do NOT break! To take Windows for an example the Win2K/XP driver model lasted for over a decade and will continue to be supported until 2014. That is 14 YEARS of drivers that work! The WinVista/7 driver model will most likely get the same or longer, that is another DECADE PLUS of drivers working!
But as long as Linus insists on treating the kernel as his own personal play toy, as long as I said there is NO decent way to upgrade the thing without Linux shitting itself, I just looked up the numbers and guess what? Ubuntu LTS that is currently out dies hard in just a year and a half so again, your answer is...what? Death March or...death march? Because 10.04 LTS as you can see here has less than a year and a half on the desktop. Do you expect me to put these boxes in a closet for a year?
I'm sorry but your driver model is shit sir, and the sooner the community accepts this and has a royal raging shitfit at Torvalds and demands better the sooner Linux will be able to "just look for the penguin on the box" and can be all over retail shelves like Windows is now.
You show me ONE, just one mind you, one single distro where I can get a GUARANTEED 6 years worth of security updates WITHOUT the upgrade death march and I'll be happy to install it this very moment. But you can't, you know why? Because the entire community is based around the new hotness and since upgrades are "free" (except they are only free if your time is worthless) nobody cares about longer than 3 years worth of support, and most don't even care about that. But I have customers to support, and they ain't gonna take CS classes to learn the fucked up Linux broken driver dance.
Fix this problem, and you'll see Linux machines right next to the Windows ones in every B&M across the country. Isn't that what the community wants? The year of the Linux desktop? Well only you can make it happen, and that is by having a royal shitfit and demanding better than the shit sandwich that is the current driver model.
Because Apple has pulled the software from the shelves
This is one area where the difference between MSFT and Apple is pretty jarring. MSFT will sell you shit for fricking ages as long as folks are buying, hell they quit selling licenses to Win 3.1 embedded in what....2005? Whereas Apple decides "You WILL use the new hotness, you dirty heathen!" and that is that.
Frankly I see this as Apple quietly killing off their pro creative dept, since what they released can in no way be called pro. Looking at the screen caps and what they've omitted the new FCP is more an updated iMovie than a professional video editing suite. Personally I believe the long term roadmap involves Apple pulling out of the creative market and becoming strictly a consumer electronics company.
Apple has never seemed to like products that are only mildly successful, they want huge success or nothing. So I believe in less than 5 years OSX will be out and iOS will be in, most likely on a range of devices where once Mac OSX reined, such as desktops and laptops. This will also fit in with Apple's control issues as I'm sure Steve wasn't happy to have to use older Intel chips because Intel decided to screw over Nvidia, and with ARM Steve controls the whole stack, from the design and features of the chips to the software that runs on them.
So I truly believe this is just the beginning, I believe the long term roadmap (which Apple is notorious for not sharing, another reason for businesses not to use Apple products for mission critical roles) is a complete exit from the professional markets and Apple becoming a pure consumer electronics business. This will kill their problem with bugs since everything will go through the app store, give them complete control of the stack, and as we have seen with the touch and iPad will also make them another mountain or two of money. Software developers will be given software which runs on Windows for doing the actual work, and Apple will sit back and enjoy the huge waves of money headed their way.
As much as I hate to defend Dubya (I personally think he'll rank in the top 5 of shitty presidents) the Libby pardon was all Cheney who basically rode Dubya 24/7 until he got what he wanted. If you look at Bush's history he was always against pardons and did surprisingly few as governor and as president, less than one quarter of Clinton for comparison.
As for TFA the problem is we in the west have left behind actually protecting children a dozen exits ago and now are firmly in the total batshit red scare territory when it comes to these things. We have people doing prison time for looking at a manga, a collection of frankly primitive pen and ink drawings which has about as much to do with an actual abused child as a crude drawing of a missile has to a WMD, and we even have a guy in prison for writing his own fantasies in a journal which if that doesn't count as thoughtcrime I frankly don't know what does. That also doesn't count the removal of free speech such as throwing that guy in jail for the supposedly 'pro pedo' book which was again his thoughts written in book form. Hell according to a friend at the state crime lab the laws are such a convoluted mess you could draw a stick figure and scrawl beside it 'raeped kidz lul!" and could be looking at the same time as an actual raped child. Gentlemen that is SERIOUSLY fucked up. Of course one can't forget that small breasted women apparently aren't allowed to show their boobs in Oz, lest they make someone think they are underage.
So as much as I don't support the general asshattery of the Anon/Lulzsec crowd (personally i thought they should have done their hacking in secret and then released the results anonymously, so as to crank up the paranoia of the criminal elements of our governments and corporations) in this case I say go get 'em guys. This witch hunt has long left behind its original goal of protecting kids from rapists and become just another witch hunt where everyone that isn't for the loss of freedoms are considered a dirty pedo lover.
This is the logical fallacy that seems to bite Linux users in the ass every single time. Windows? minimum 10 YEARS of patches. Windows users don't have to update because they don't get kicked to the curb in 18 months like Linux users do. You don't stay on the update treadmill with Linux you WILL have an unpatched OS, and in this age of zero days isn't just foolish it is dangerous.
And as for the OEMs offering downloads? nobody uses them anymore. Since Vista MSFT maintains most drivers through Windows Update so that the user doesn't do forum hunts all they have to do is let Windows take care of it. Just got my Canon printer updated yesterday by WU. Works beautifully.
With Linux? Often your ONLY indication something is amiss (unless you are a CLI head as I said, by geeks for geeks) is when you try to use hardware, like listen to music or hook to the net, and it simply don't work. Is there a simple "update drivers" button? A simple and easy way that ANYONE, no matter their level of experience, can get the drivers working? Not a snowball's chance in hell friend.
To quote a very old saying "excuses are like assholes, everyone has one and they all stink". The numbers don't lie. read the links I provided. Linux has been free as in beer and freedom for 20 years and STILL the numbers are below the margin for error. Every single B&M that has tried selling your product has ran away. Dell can't even allow repos on their tiny subset of hardware because driver QA is so shitty on Linux that it will cause the Dell machines to shit themselves and die.
Gentlemen this is simply unacceptable. if you want the masses to adopt your product then you have to make a product they can use and NOT expect them to go out and get a CS degree so they can become their own tech guru. There is NO reason why drivers should break, there is NO reason why things should be this big of a mess. If you want to compare yourselves to Windows give us a solid decade of security patches without forcing us to do the upgrade death march, otherwise you should make damned sure that the upgrade death march you force us on won't kill drivers dead.
Look I want Linux to succeed, I really really do. right now I'm looking at 4 boxes that work perfectly fine I'm gonna end up having to send to the dump because the cost of Windows licenses are more than they are worth. I'd love nothing more than to be able to put Linux on these boxes and offer them as low cost machines so those without can have a cheap netbox, but I can't, why? Because in less than a year a new version of whatever distro i put on will come out and they WILL shit themselves and die if they are updated.
Sadly I have found you only get two choices when it comes to Linux at retail, 1.-give away free lifetime support (unacceptable) or 2.-disable ALL updates so the machine don't shit itself and die (unacceptable and foolish) so like the rest of the retailers in the USA I choose the third option 3.-don't carry your product. That means these machines will be going in the garbage, simply because of the POS Linux driver "model". Fix this gentlemen and I'll be happy to have nice new Linux boxes on my shelves, so would a lot of retailers. you think we LIKE paying for Windows licenses? hell no! But until you can guarantee me a MINIMUM of 6 years worth of security patches without causing drivers to shit themselves I simply can't stock your product. As I said I have yet to see a single linux distro even have 18 months worth of updates without a broken driver. this is just insanity and expecting home users to deal with that mess is either arrogance or naivety, I'm not sure which.
The problem I have is NOT flash, which as you said works pretty good, it is that you can't update Linux because the drivers WILL shit themselves and die!
Want proof? proof that nobody here can deny? here you go...why does Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the planet, have to disable the repos on every. single. Ubuntu machine they sell and deal with the hassle and expense of running their own repo, even for a small subset of the hardware they sell? Why because if they don't Linux breaks drivers oh fun oh joy!
It is THIS that I am talking about how mainstream is ignored by the geek brigade. linux is built BY geeks and FOR geeks and as geeks they think because THEY know how to recompile drivers, how to do forum hunts with a list of what make/model/rev of hardware they have, find a fix, and then "tweak" said fix because it was written for hardware B rev f and they have hardware D rev j that anyone can do it, and that is about as far from the truth as from here to Jupiter.
This is why small retailers like me won't carry your product even though it would save us a fortune it license fees, it is why Walmart and every other B&M that has tried offering your product has dropped it, why a 10 year old Windows beat the latest Linux on netbooks and why early adopters like ASUS has all but abandoned your product.
When your product is free, yet all these companies, from little ones like mine to fortune 500 giants, would rather pay money than use your product? That should tell you that you have a problem. Nobody cares if you have the coolest most secure low resource OS on the planet if in 6 months when the updates roll out the box shits itself and dies. The average user isn't gonna jump through flaming hoops just to be "free as in freedom!" and I can't afford to give away lifetime support.
Oh and PLEASE don't say LTS, as long as Linux software is tied to the kernel you might as well call that an out of date unpatched OS, because that is what it is. Oh and please don't say "Use Distro X" where X equals any distro other than the half a dozen I've already tried, since we all know that they are all based on a few "mother sauces" and so far I've tried Ubuntu, mint, PCLinuxOS, and Mepis, oh and Mandriva, and ALL had the same result. Updates roll out/ something breaks. With Windows they get on average a decade of security patches with NO driver issues. I have yet to even update a single machine twice, that equals roughly 18 months of support depending on the distro, without something breaking. Gentlemen that is simply unacceptable.
Now feel free to call me nasty names and mode me down, as I've noticed that anyone that says anything other than "gee isn't Linux perfect? Why it sure is Biff, and RMS's farts smell like roses!" gets modded to hell and called the Linux equivalent of faggot and nigger, that is shill and astroturfer.
The problem is NOT getting it to work initially, that part is fine. Sure I often have to "tweak" or play forum hunts but you know what? I've been building PCs since the early 90s so that isn't a problem FOR ME.
What IS a problem, and which makes me want to fly all the way to Finland to shake that little twerp Linus until he makes sounds like the Swedish chef, is that I can't give Linux to a customer because my choices are 1.-Disable ALL updates and hope they NEVER need any software that I didn't already install (because many apps are tied to which kernel you are using) and worse leave them with outdated flash and hope some zero day doesn't bite them in the ass, or 2.- take a fricking bath on the machine as I will have to provide lifetime support as the first time they allow it to update it WILL shit itself and die with regards to at LEAST one driver if not more.
Now that is just completely unacceptable. I have Windows boxes in the field for over 8 years now, fully patched, with NO problems (because honestly keeping a Windows box clean only takes a teeny amount of common sense which isn't hard for me to teach) and which will continue to run right up to the XP EOL.
Now so far I've tried Ubuntu (both regular AND Mint) PCLinuxOS, and Simply Mepis and ALL OF THEM have yet to survive a single update with 100% working hardware. Not a single one. it is ALWAYS something, sound, graphics, wireless, NIC, it is always something. What am I supposed to tell my customers? Tough shit I hope you don't need sound? You better learn the make/model/rev of EVERY piece of hardware in this box and become a wizard at forum hunts and tweaking bash commands? Tell them to learn to rebuild and recompile drivers? I expect a machine to last at LEAST 7 years, so if OpenSUSE has good support try this: download the version from 7 years ago (or the oldest version there is, whichever is newer) and then try to update it to current. i bet at least one if not several drivers WILL break!
The problem with the community is this: Linux is built BY geeks FOR geeks and geeks think anything that is easy FOR THEM must be easy for everyone else, and honestly nothing could be further from the truth. Hell my clueless dad installed Windows 7 when he got impatient and wouldn't wait for me to come do it. Know how many things were broken? NONE. Zip zero zilch nada squat. hell it downloaded all the drivers, did all the work, even pointed him to a free AV at first boot. The only thing I had to do was show him how to get Firefox and later how to get Comodo Dragon. that's it.
And THAT my friend is what Linux is competing against. Folks aren't gonna go from 'clicky clicky" to learning bash, or memorizing hardware lists, and they sure as hell aren't gonna learn how to rebuild drivers! No my friend the problem isn't the initial install, it is the fact that in a year or less when the latest updates roll around the machine will either be an unpatched zombie waiting to get pwned or it will shit itself and die. And it takes just three hours of my time for the cost of a forum hunt to be greater than the cost of a Windows license, and that is of course if there is even a fix out there! Some things I've seen not get fixed for weeks, weeks I tell you!
So I'm glad it works for you, I'm glad you are able to waste time with forum hunts and fixing broken drivers, or have the brass balls to run all over the net with a badly out of date pile of software. But I deal with normal folks 6 days a week, the average Joe that you see in line at the bank. And he isn't gonna jump through those hoops or take CS courses just to run Linux. When I can take Linux OS 12 and update it to Linux OS 13 and NOT have a single broken driver? Then and ONLY then will it be ready for my customers. But sadly as long as Linus is there to Goatse the kernel I doubt that day will ever come, sorry.
Well I'd say that Yahtzee over at Zero Punctuation nailed it when he described the difference between a GOOD remake and a shit one. He said a good remake or sequel should simply use the source material as a jumping off point while adding new direction or new experiences, while a shit one only wallows in the source material, simply rehashing what has already been done.
Like the new Duke Nukem which my oldest had to pick up simply because he was a fan and REALLY wanted it to be good. I told him he's a college man if he wants to waste his money that was his business and sadly watching him and giving it a spin what a waste it was. It reminded me of those piles of shit "movies" like disaster movie and epic movie where they think simply pointing something out is equal to a joke while completely missing the point of parody. It especially hurt to have Duke make a joke about Halo power armor when he was doing the same shit with only being able to carry two weapons (WTF?) and having regenerating health.
Now compare this to a remake I though was decent, King's Bounty. There they updated the graphics, gave new spells and abilities, gave the character more choices in which way they progress, all while still keeping the core gameplay. While I'm sure turn based strategy is a niche many don't like I thought they pulled that update off quite well.
So I'd say it can be done, you simply have to know the core of the source material you are working with and have good ideas on where to go with it. Which is why I still don't get how they could fuck up DNF so badly, hell you can't get easier to write than a new Duke game!
All they would have had to do is have a decent writer come up with good action hero one liners, allow him to carry more weapons than a tank, preferably with NO reload so you have the action movie cliche of firing 40 rounds from a 6 round gun, an environment with lots of things to blow up and explore, lots of titties and cheap sexist jokes, and at the end of a level an insane boss where Duke blows the living shit out of the place before walking away while lighting his cigar and spouting a smart ass remark, like say impaling a boss on a giant spike and then saying "I guess he got the point!" and just to add the delicious icing an authority figure bitching to Duke about all the shit he blew up followed by someone saying "I'm too old for this shit".
So you can take a classic game and make something wonderful, just look at Half Life II, but you have to know what you are doing and not just phone it in. Sadly most companies get a hold of a classic franchise and look at it as a license to put out shit and get the nostalgia dollar and that just ruins it for everyone. After playing 30 minutes of DNF I had to dig out my old Duke shareware and the high res texture pack just to wash the crappy gameplay from my mind and remember what I loved about the game. that is NOT the reaction one should invoke!
Oh it isn't just that, it is the fact that for YEARS IT guys in enterprise environments have been practically begging Moz for .MSI files and GPO support, and the lack of which on top of this frankly dickish move of just pulling the plug on FF 4 so soon after release of FF 5 means Firefox simply is unsuitable for a corporate environment.
Sadly for Mr IE guy many aren't too happy with them either, with their refusal to backport IE to XP which BTW is STILL under support. Now since I have seen DirectX 10 running on XP I take their "its impossible" with a big fat spoonful of salt and if it is impossible they should have released a stripped down version or compatibility shim for XP.
So I'd say the big winner of all this will be...drum roll...Google! IIRC Google offers .MSIs and allow control of Chrome through GPOs, so that fixes the FF problem, and so far they haven't seemed like they are gonna abandon support for XP anytime soon, so that fixes the IE problem. IMNSHO the IE team has already lost the consumer market as I haven't seen a PC with IE as default in...God, it must have been at least 2 years now? it has literally become that old joke, that IE is "the browser you use to download something better".
And while that something better used to be Firefox for my customers after seeing the memory and CPU hogging getting ever worse I've switched my default builds to Comodo Dragon, but those that are bringing in their PCs for the first time nearly always have Chrome. It used to be Firefox by a large margin but in the last year I've seen FF installs dropping like a stone and Chrome everywhere and that pron bug* was the final straw for a lot of my holdouts.
So while I wish the IE guys luck, anything that makes IE more secure is a good thing in my book, frankly I think they've missed the boat. They let IE rot for too long and by the time they got back on the ball people had moved away and they simply aren't coming back.
*.-For those that haven't run into it yet there is a nasty XSS bug going around that will load Yahoo Mail Beta and spam your address book whether you are currently logged in or not. So far it seems this bug only affects FF, and somehow they manage to get around ABP as well, but it doesn't seem to affect Chrome or the Dragon, nor can it get around NoScript. It took me forever to figure out how a machine without an infection was sending spam but after tracing his steps through the history yep, XSS bug. So if your friends that use FF and also have a Yahoo Mail account start sending you emails that consist of no text but a single link to some random address, now you know why. They were looking at teh titties and got their address book spamed by the XSS bug.
Obligatory XKCD which I've found in my own exp with Linux to be sadly all too true.
Actually you don't have to even run a wire anymore, just Google "wireless HDMI" and you'll find they have a nice cheap little device that will let you stream wireless from the HDMI out on your PC to the TV. That said PCs are so damned cheap now you can build a nice triple for $200, add in another $100 for a capture card and to kick in with a couple of friends for the Win 7 HP family pack and you have a nice dedicated TV box for dirt cheap.
I've had several customers just have me build them a nice cheap AMD quad with a decent GPU and use that as an all in one hooked to their TV. Lets face it a nice sized set is cheaper than a monitor of the same size, and 1080p is 1080p so it isn't like you are having to deal with a crappy surfing experience like you did in the old days. The last one I built cost a hair over $550 and lets the guy game quite nicely on anything short of crysis, lets him surf the net, lets his wife play her farmville and do her FB, and lets the kids watch their shows. Oh and while they sleep the PC converts the kiddie shows from the DVR of MCE into a DivX .avi so it'll play on the kid's Nbox so they can watch their shows even when their parents are busy on the box.
All in all it is a pretty cheap solution to a one stop shop for all your media so if Hulu goes tits up it isn't like my customers will be left out in the cold. And when you figure in with a little common sense the box will easily last a decade pretty much hassle free you really can't beat the value.
At least in traditional Italian 'fascism' which frankly is the ONLY fascism that has openly tried to work as a governmental philosophy, by and large the corporations do the will of the state. This is important because this brings in nationalism which by and large brings up the lives of many and not just a few at the top. There is a reason why they made jokes about how the trains always ran on time, and how there was little unemployment in those fascist states before they decided to take over the world.
While corporatism on the surface looks similar, it has one underlying difference that is a BIG fucking difference, in that the corporations control the state not the other way around. As a great man that helped found this country said "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." and that distinction makes all the difference in the world. It is why we actually have the government giving tax breaks to those that offshore all the jobs away, it is why we have companies declared "too big to fail" and why we have the lowest taxes on the top 1% while we are looking at a possible default.
So you see the big difference is a fascist state wants to keep the state strong as they wield the power of the state. That is why fascist states are typically VERY nationalistic to the point of xenophobia, because they don't control what is outside the state so the state is all. In corporatism the corporations ONLY care about making as much money as they possibly can, after which they can simply move on like locusts in search of bigger and better profits. A line from a great movie fits the current corporatist philosophy perfectly "It doesn't matter. It's all profit. And then finally, when there's nothing left, when you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match." and that is what we have been seeing here in the USA. they are stripping out everything of value that ain't nailed down and when they can't wring another drop of profit they'll light a match and walk away. And THAT is the difference between fascism and corporatism my friend.
Question: What software are you using to strip out the commercials, or are you just converting them as clips and then re-integrating them? Because I too after seeing Hulu turn sucktastic just use Win 7 MCE to record off my cable via my capture card but I haven't found any good software for ripping out commercials.
But you think sooner or later the content providers would be hit by the clue stick like the music companies with iTunes, but nope, they just gotta take a big old dump on anything they can't literally bury you in ads with. I hate to break the news to them but with PCs being so cheap now more and more of my customers are asking about hooking PCs to their TVs and just using MCE to DVR their way past the crap. I mean it has gotten to the point cable is unwatchable as they pound you with so many ads it ruins the flow and irritates like hell out of everyone, and for what? With the exception of a handful of shows it is all reality crap all the time now, since they found out a reality show even with shit ratings is crazy profitable since it don't cost them shit to have a bunch of people act like dicks trying to win some prize.
But with the article earlier today about the *.A.As making backroom deals to screw us out of bandwidth I have a feeling sneakernet is gonna be making a comeback. 1Tb drives are beyond cheap, and MCE makes it easy to record entire series. My next guess is they'll cap us so hard Netflix streaming will be DOA, so it'll be everyone and their dog ripping Netflix DVDs and sharing those via sneakernet along with the shows, and all because the content providers never met a customer they couldn't burn and run off.
But it is probably about control more than anything, they want to go back to the days of everyone watching what the content producers say and when they say it, and Nielson ratings letting them see which has captured the most helpless....err I mean consumers. I don't know about everyone else but their erecting of flaming hoops hasn't made me jump to their websites, just the opposite in fact, in that I simply watch a lot less TV. It would be ironic if all their flaming hoops end up getting people to just stop watching rather than deal with their bullshit. I'd LOL if that were to happen and it couldn't happen to a bigger bunch of assholes!
There is a problem with FreeNet, in that their "plausible deniability" has never been tested in court and could cost you 30 plus years of your life.
you see the way I had it explained to me was this: With FreeNet you have that "encrypted store" which you HAVE NO CONTROL ON as far as content goes. Now lets say a cop gets on FreeNet and downloads CP and traces the line and part of the CP came from your IP address. Now there is nothing in the law that states you have to SEE the child porn to be busted for distribution, just that you had to have shared it. So all a cop would have to do is produce the CP he downloaded and a log showing it came from your IP address and that encryption won't mean shit, because you are still guilty of distribution.
So I would be more than a little leery about touting FreeNet as the cure to this, unless you are willing to spend a couple of years in jail before going to trial, and risk a good 30 years plus if you are found guilty.Not to mention that even if you are found innocent after rotting in jail for a couple of years your life will be ruined anyway, as nobody will want to deal with a "suspected child pronographer".
That is a hell of a big risk on something that has zero precedent in court, but maybe you want to be the first to try it out?
Well then are they gonna PAY ME when they fuck up my PC? No? Then bite me. I buy my games yet I play the downloaded version, why? Because I have found their shitastic DRM DOESN'T FUCKING WORK and in fact will fuck your shit up buddy! I've seen PCs that acted like they were infected, with crashes and slowdowns, fucking up all over the place, and it turned out to be just SecuROM and Safe disc having a nice little fight! Maybe you should watch this educational video and learn something.
And what about the shows I never would have bought if it weren't for P2P? I live in a valley so OTA is right out and frankly the cable shows so damned many commercials I can't stand to watch even 20 minutes of a show to find out if I like it because of the constant commercial bullshit. Right behind me as I speak, sitting on a nice shelf with collectors figures my late sis bought me for bookends, is the entire Joss Whedon collection, which set me back about....ohh I'd say a good $500 since I bought them at release. Since my area had NO WB I would have NEVER watched a single episode, nor would I have ever bought or rented it, because really the description sounded lame. I mean the guy from the Taster's choice commercials and a soap opera actress? WTF? But I downloaded a couple of episodes and loved the writing, so I went out and bought the entire series as they were released on DVD.
They THINK this will get people to buy the frankly God awful horseshit they've been shoveling lately, but they're wrong. Guys like me that try before you buy simply won't be buying much at all, and you certainly ain't gonna get those masses living from paycheck to paycheck to pay, they'll just do without. The dumbshits could have been finding ways to monetize these people, like the way games are going free to play with microtransactions, but instead they'll find out the hard way without the word of mouth brought by P2P their sales are gonna suck the big wet titty. I wonder what they'll blame when they can't blame piracy? Sadly they'll probably just have themselves declared "too big to fail" and take the money directly from our collective wallets with taxes, and give us the finger in return.
Meanwhile as the US empire gets the short bus to the information superhighway the rest of the world will simply route around and we can just accept the days of the USA being anything but another third world shithole are behind us. The future is information, and sadly most of America simply won't have access to it. We'll all be fat, lazy, stupid, and broke, with nothing to do but stare blankly at the idiot box. Eh I hope India and China enjoy this gift, and become better superpowers than we were, as with no tech they'll be no future tech jobs and we don't make shit here anymore. maybe they think we can all work in Hollywood?
Does it still get UPDATES, you know, those things Linux users are afraid to implement for fear Linus' latest Goatse on the kernel will cause their installation to fall like a house of cards? if so then it counts but I doubt it.
Meanwhile you get on average a DECADE of updates with Windows, which means the machine will be practically ancient before you go out of support which in a dead economy is a GOOD thing people!
The sad part is I'm looking at 4 1.4GHz PCs that would be just perfect for Linux, yet I'm gonna have to use the XP Home key on the sides and reinstall Windows even though it will be slow as shit with just 1.4GHz of CPU and 512Mb of SDRAM, why?
Because in this age of zero days having an unpatched OS is frankly insane, yet that is EXACTLY what I was told to do, time and time again, even here on /. if I want to run Linux on them, why? Because unless you are a geek and have time to waste on "forum hunts" Linux distros (So far I've tried Ubuntu, PCLOS, and Mepis, the results are the same) will shit themselves when you update them!
There is NO easy way that I've found to apply JUST the security updates, and since third party software is often tied to which kernel you run LTS is a codeword for "really old outdated software" that may/may not have exploits out.
Don't you just find it damned sad, doesn't it bother anyone here, just a little, that there is NO reason why Linux couldn't be on these PCs and on store shelves on nice new boxes, if it weren't for the incredible ego of just one man? In 1993 Torlvalds decided he don't like ABIs, since he couldn't just take a dump on the kernel structure if there was an ABI since he would totally break it. This was in 1993, times were different then, and maybe the memory saved was worth it. BUT IT AIN'T 1993 ANYMORE!
IS there anyone, anyone at all, that truly believes that Torvalds is smarter than the ENTIRE computer industry? Because everyone, and I do mean everyone, has an ABI EXCEPT Linux. OSX, BSD, Solaris, Windows, OS/2, and you know what they have in common? They can apply updates without drivers shitting themselves! Now I have had people here tell me with a straight face I should tell Joe average to learn to do forum hunts, or even learn to recompile fricking drivers, but you know what? he shouldn't have to!
Call me crazy but I still hope that one day I'll be able to walk into Walmart and see Linux laptops right next to Windows, and buying devices will be as simple as "look for the penguin on the box". it COULD be that way you know, if it weren't for a single douchebag, one single asshole holding back the entire ecosystem...Linus Torvalds. So maybe one day we'll get lucky and he'll retire, after which an ABI will quietly be added and people will go "Wow, everything just works!" and shelves will have Linux and all will be good. But as long as pouring a bunch of Bash commands after a multi-hour forum hunt is still considered an acceptable way to deal with drivers? Well that day will never come.