Won't work sadly, as ALL of the backbone is owned by....dum dum dum...assholes like AT&T! I know because a friend had a business just outside the area where cable and DSL end (and good luck EVER getting them bastards to expand, in my area they haven't moved an inch in 20 years) so he paid a crazy amount of money to have a T-1 run out there and started his own ISP. All well and good, American capitalism right?
Nope, because AT&T got wind and cut off his backbone access, some bullshit excuse about "number of connections" or some shit, made a few phone calls and made sure nobody else would sell to him either. Their answer was a bald faced "try to sue us, we're fucking AT&T!" and his lawyer said "Sure you'll win, but it'll take anywhere from 10 to 15 YEARS and cost...ohhh...about 3 MILLION dollars in lawyers fees". So he closed up his business and moved away, and those people that had a decent Internet were forced back onto AT&Ts $75 a month dialup.
You see the problem isn't fascism, its corporatism. The corps OWN the courts, they OWN the congress, they OWN the lines, they OWN the media. So download all you can while you can friends, because until we have our own Arab Spring this country is gonna have its very own little dark age, with more and more draconian laws designed to royally fuck you in the ass, and there is nothing you can do about it. Vote? you tried that, how's that "Hope & Change" working out? Vote with your dollars? More than 70% last I checked of the population is under monopolies when it comes to the net and ALL are under the same backbone providers, which guess what? Are listed above.
So snatch every damned thing that ain't nailed down, slam the shit out of the ISPs. pretty much all the Internet will be in less than 3 years is the Home Shopping Network and that's the way big business/government wants it because it is easier to control the population if they can't organize, and easier to shut down any "troublemakers" if you make sure they can't be heard. That way they can control the "spin" and make anyone who doesn't go "America Fuck yeah!" into an evil socialist pedo/terrorist. Think I'm crazy? They already got Valenti's dream of "forever minus a single day" copyrights, and with the above they'll kill the net. The party is over folks, the dream is dying. Enjoy as much as you can while you can, because our kids are gonna look back from their dreary media controlled lives and consider this a mythical "golden age" where people could actually converse freely and share ideas. Those days are sadly about to end. Don't forget to hit the lights on your way out.
Actually if you look at the pic I think they have a shot. A small shot mind you, but still a shot, for one little thing in the right hand corner....Xbox Live.
Now if they put out a phone with a decent GPU and something other than an iSliver battery, so you could take some sort of Xbox mini games that will level up your characters or earn achievements? Then I could see it selling. There are a hell of a lot of people that own Xbox, there are a hell of a lot of developers making games for XBL, get those developers on board making games that'll run on WinPhone? Then yes I could see it becoming a hit.
Because lets face it folks, what has MSFT really got going for it right now but gaming and Office? Most of what people do with PCs other than gaming and Office can be done over the web, which can be just as easily done in Linux or Mac. No what keeps people buying MSFT is backwards compatibility and gaming, with the backwards compatibility used for...dum dum dum...their games! From those cheesy things they pick up at the Wally World to the latest Xbox chestie mcWallhigh cover based shooter MSFT is about gaming and if Nokia puts out some decent hardware that lets folks play something other than Angry Birds and ties it all together, Xbox,Windows,Office, and mobile? Then and ONLY then can I see them having a real shot at the title.
Otherwise they are gonna be slaughtered by the 50 bazillion Android phones the carriers are practically giving away and the latest iCool, because one thing MSFT most assuredly does NOT do is cool and slick. But as long as their games work people will ignore the lack of cool and slick. After all look at all the shit folks got with RRoD yet they still buy the hell out of X360s.
Yep it seems like yet again MSFT is ripping off Apple, even the bad parts. I don't know which is worse, MSFT screwing their developers with "me too! Web 3.0 bling bling yee haw" bullshit, or Apple boning the creative industry by putting out an upgraded iMovie and calling it Final Cut Pro while yanking the rug out by refusing to sell new licenses to the previous version.
And just to show some love and keep them from feeling left out this would be a GREAT time for Linux to offer people a "third way" since both Apple and MSFT are burning their hardcore markets to chase the retarded consumer market, but sadly they won't pull their heads out of their collective asses, send Torvalds off on an ice flow or whatever it is you do with a Finn that is past his prime, and finally join the rest of the planet in the 21st century by having a stable ABI like EVERYONE else (Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows, OS/2) has had for fricking ages so that "update foo broke my driver" could finally be laid to rest and updating wouldn't be a "break Linux NOW" button.
Sometimes I swear it is like the whole world just decides to become ca ca flinging monkeys every so often, just for shits and giggles. How two of the biggest companies could be so fricking stupid and burn so many of the ones that make them money is beyond me, nor can I understand why everyone thinks having drivers shit themselves and die when you update the thing is a good idea in Linux.
It is like when Alice says in Wonderland "But I don't want to go around any mad people!" and the cat says "Sorry but we're all mad here dear" as it seems like the whole tech world is off its nut ATM.
The only saving grace for us Windows users is that Windows 7 is supported until 2020, which hopefully by that time Ballmer will be given a mock turtleneck and a pink slip and we can get the office guys to make Windows 9 a decent OS. Of course by then maybe Torvalds will retire and with him his religious hatred of having an ABI, that or Google will just fork the thing away from him and we'll all be using Android/Chrome/whatever they call it this week on everything mobile so it won't matter anyway.
Oh one last thing, don't bother posting that link to the one kernel dev that rails against ABIs as I don't listen to religious nutjobs, and that is EXACTLY what he is. If you bother to read that post he goes so far as to call all like Nvidia who don't hand every scrap of driver code to the devs so that may bless it with their divine hand "leeches" and hopes that Torvalds trashes their driver the next time he goes Goatse on the kernel. Say what you want about MSFT, but my Win2K drivers work in XP SP3, that is 14 YEARS of driver support, and I have no doubt I'll see the same with Vista/7 drivers. In fact I'm using 5 year old Vista cap card drivers in Win 7 SP1, that is 5 years of support. Man if I could get that many years of driver support in Linux my shelves would be full of Linux machines right now.
It isn't about "likable" defendants it is about flagrant slander after ripping someone off! The courts tend to frown on those that brag about their acts when such acts are a violation of literally decades of established law and slandering the person that is taking you to court on a national medium like radio is NOT a smart move. Sorry but these ass clowns deserve to be sued along with the station for a VERY large amount of cash.
To me this is no different than those asses like Ebaum that snatch anything they can find and try to pass it off as their own,or the pricks that steal GPL code and try to lock it behind a paywall. in all of the above you are taking something you have NO rights to and passing it off as your own and this isn't "information wants to be free" this is theft, as you are depriving someone else with your actions which in this case the photographer who is just trying to make a living.
You want one that works, it ain't free but it IS cheap and you get a free 30 day trial to give it a spin. Here you go Comodo Instant SSL. To get the free trial just pick the free SSL button on the upper left. If it works good for you it is $69 a year for the basic package which will do what you want, the cert is recognized by ALL the major browsers, FF, Chromium based, Safari, IE, Opera, you name it.
As much as I hate to admit it, since on just about everything else he is a total nutjob, but I have to agree with Glen beck when it comes to the ME: It is long past time for us to "Be Switzerland". it is time to pack up our shit and go home, to quit having a bazillion bases and spending money we don't have, it is long past time for us to be Switzerland. We have been stirring up shit since the end of WWII, causing nothing but misery and propping up "el presidente" thugs and scum, it is time to call it and just be Switzerland.
Frankly no truer words have been spoken, and actually getting to talk with some of the neocons that actually make policy (I live next to a conservative college that a friend does the rocketry and robotics clubs for so I get to tag along) frankly the reason why we have killed so many people in the ME and wasted so much money and caused so much hatred will make your jaw drop. Ready? Here goes....Jesus won't come back. I swear no matter what logic you throw at them their ONLY real answer is "When the Jews return to Zion".
I mean how fucking sad is it we are bankrolling Israel to the tune of 8 million plus PER DAY 24/7/365, no matter what they do, and are willing to prop up scum like Mubarak, all because of some words some goat herder wrote 1800 years ago about how some 2000 year dead guy had to have a certain race in a certain spot so he'd have a place to park his fluffy cloud. Sadly I felt like the Shat in Undiscovered Country going "What does God need with a starship?" because the only real answer they could come up with that is the Sky bully would give us a spanking if we didn't.
All those lives, all that suffering and misery, because of some words written on a goat skin, hell it wouldn't even surprise me if it turned out to be a mistranslation. Glenn Beck is right, its time to be Switzerland.
Which means which should say something so allow me to say...thanks Brits! Thanks to you, for no matter how shitty and fascist we become here in the USA, no matter what, you ALWAYS trump us and make us feel better about ourselves! Thanks to you we can go "We at least we Ain't the UK!"
So thanks UK, for sucking even more corporate cock than our politicians here in the USA. Man I bet your MPs jaws are sore!
Well the P4 had that long ass pipeline which for some reason FF 4 seems to love, try it on AMD CPUs and its a different story. Maybe they are using Intel's rigged compiler?
As for Linux and drivers, your post just hit the nail on the head accidentally about what is wrong with the community: They say Linux is a replacement for Windows, when really it is a replacement for Macs. Like a Mac you have to be DAMN picky about hardware, and even then it can be a roll of the dice.
Owning my own little shop I have plenty of boxes of all makes and sizes to try it on and frankly it is more likely to fail at least one driver on update as not. The problem is once you get it running YOU CAN NEVER UPDATE as that will cause the thing to fall down and go BOOM! which in this era of zero days is just too risky for my customers and I can't afford to give away lifetime support, especially when a broken driver may not get a "forum fix" for a week or two which is simply unacceptable when you have a customer wanting their wireless back. Linux makes a great server OS, where companies spend millions to deal with Linus' PITA driver model, but desktops? Most don't care so you literally have a driver written by Bob in his basement, that is hacked together and will crap itself when you update. No thanks.
Anyway next time you are on a Windows box try Comodo Dragon and compare it to FF 4. Even with ABP and ForecastFox installed on both the Dragon frankly stomps the living crap out of FF 4 on memory usage, on CPU spikes and percentage used, frankly there isn't a metric where Dragon don't stomp the fox. Personally i hope they fix it, as I miss my NoScript which there is no replacement for on Chromium based (NotScript is a bad hack and been abandoned) but as long as I have to support a wide variety of hardware I need a browser that works on everything and from 3.6 up FF has just been getting steadily worse.
Then they should just yank the drive of the offending server (while giving the company hosting time to migrate the other VMs while taking the offending one offline) so that the company can restore service to those that are not subject to the warrant and the feds can go on their way.
But even that I believe could raise issues, such as "fruit of the poisoned tree'. like what if they find out while going through a hard drive looking for evidence against company B that company C has been doing something illegal? Legally there should be nothing they can do but we know that isn't the way it works IRL.
In the end what I think is gonna have to happen is to have a clear standard for making a bit for bit copy of VMs and other electronic data, so that it can be verified and work for the chain of evidence without taking down entire colos just to serve a warrant. It would have to be FOSS because even though I see nothing wrong with proprietary per se, when someone's life is on the line we are gonna want to be able to see the source and ensure it is doing what they claim.
Sadly IRL what is gonna happen is more and more are simply gonna avoid hosting in the USA, and that giant sucking sound of jobs leaving to never return is gonna slam dead bang right into the colos, and who can blame them?
So in other words you get the "choice' of cripple ALL CPUs, or just Intel's competitors? Wow their douchebaggery just gets better and better don't it? Especially when it would be trivial to check for the SSE flag (which EVERY CPU that has SSE has implemented for nearly 8 years, which is a lifetime in CPUs) and "If CPU = SSE then run optimized' end of story.
The sad part is AMD does have their own compiler which is completely FOSS and unlike Intel doesn't try to hamstring a CPU because it isn't made by them. Pretty damned sad when a company feels they can't just compete on their merits, nope, they gotta pull dirty backhanded bullshit, just to make sure they can't lose.
This is why I sell nothing but AMD in my shop now and my customers couldn't be happier. They like the low prices on triples and quads, I like supporting a company that isn't a douchebag, its a win/win.
The weird thing is huge numbers of the populace seem to just love that sort of thing. My oldest went out and bought the LOTRO box set and just loves the hell out of it. Me I watched him play for an hour and i'm like "When do you stop grinding?" because frankly I just don't get it. I have yet to see an MMO that wasn't grindtastic to the 12th power, yet people eat that shit up with a spoon, why?
To me the whole thing is a big old "meh" but then again I'm haven't played seriously online since the griefers ruined MechWarrior for me. but at least that game took some thought, it kinda reminded me of the "big blue blanket" WWII Pacific US strategy: You put your big monster heavies in the middle, mediums guarding those in an outer circle, and the smaller ones working as harrassers beyond that. It really took a tight team to keep from getting picked off in the game. These MMOs all seem to be "Bring me the asses of 20 snow goats" which I didn't find fun in games like Sacred or Diablo and I'm sure not gonna pay a monthly fee for the privilege of bringing an NPC the asses of 20 snow goats.
Eh, I guess to rip off every action movie ever made "i'm getting too old for this shit" as I don't get it, nor do I get the whole Farmville thing which my GF thinks is a slice of heaven. I had to set up a spare box on the far side of the apt so I can sleep when she is having her daily click fest. I wish the CoX guys luck, but I just don't see what makes them different from every other MMO out there.
And you MR AC just hit the nail on the head as to what is wrong with the current laws regarding computer seizure. these laws were written when a server was weak enough it held ONE client and one client only, so if you seized the machine you were seizing only what you were supposed to. The problem is now servers are the multicore monsters with more than enough horse to host dozens of virtual servers all of which belong to someone else and the FBI has NO right to mess with AT ALL.
So the feds really do need to get slapped down over this. this is like knowing someone on a city block is dealing dope so you kick down the doors of every house and the tear through their stuff looking for proof. they have the right to seize that ONE server that was named on the warrant and NOT every server in the colo.
I hope all those that have downtime because of this grab a lawyer and hand the feds with a really fat lawsuit, as that is the only way these clowns will learn it isn't 1986 anymore and servers don't work that way.
Well if they used the Intel compiler then it is for all intents and purposes useless as Intel has been rigging their compiler with a "Genuine_Intel" flag and if the flag isn't detected dropping all SSE and above optimizations and instead running in slow ass x87 mode. Last I read despite being ordered to change their behavior Intel is STILL putting out compilers with the evil bit on and haven't done anything to alert previous customers of their douchebaggery.
So I wouldn't be so quick to just dismiss out of hand, after all, who would have thought that Intel would rig their own compiler to cheat? I can't even imagine how many programs out there have been compiled using the Intel compilers which makes every single program written using their tool chain rigged against AMD and Via.
Ya I'd say that is the real news here, that the EFF was accepting BTC which is on legal shaky ground number one, and number two I'd say that by its very design (those that got in first were able to rack up quickly, those that come later find it harder and harder to get anything) that it is a pyramid scam. Then add in the fact that there are already money laundering and dope dealing going on with it and the EFF would be nuts to actually use the things, unless they want to be the defendants for once.
Personally I wouldn't accept anything I can't cash easily or hold in my hand. if you want to start a new currency fine, make it out of something, gold, silver, hell fricking iron bars for all I care, but at least have something you can hold in your hand. I figure BTC has maybe a year at most before implosion, either through huge swings in value, someone figures out how to pull a massive fraud on them, or the governments shut them down for all the criminal activity using them. In any case the EFF was nuts to accept them in the first place IMHO.
Uhhh...where EXACTLY in my post which mentioned Windows several times did you notice me say ANYTHING, anything al all, about Linux? That is like saying "Well my motorboat runs well" in the middle of a conversation about cars.
Frankly it could run like the second coming on Linux for all I care, after watching the drivers fall down and go BOOM! in Linux every. single. time. I tried to update the damned thing I wouldn't touch that POS with a 50 foot barge pole. When Linus gets fired or retires and you FINALLY, after all these damned years, have a stable driver ABI like the rest of the planet? Then I'll take another look. But playing "hunt the forum for fixes" wastes too much of my already limited time. I need an OS to "just work" even after I update it, and Windows does. Sorry.
Now on WINDOWS, WinXP Home SP3 to be exact, I watch FF 4 slam the CPU for every new tab, slam the CPU for several minutes and give me a slideshow when I watch a video, and slowly but surely suck up all the RAM, even if you don't do anything but just let it run. Comodo don't do that, Chrome don't do that, FF 4 does. And I have the same extensions I always have had, just ABP and ForecastFox. That's it. Hell even the FF devs said the memory usage was problematic not a month ago in one of the articles. Maybe you think they are full of shit too?
Oh please! Ya wanna know why Netscape died hard? Because they put out a total POS release that was NS4 and then they broke one of the cardinal rules which basically gave the market to MSFT.
You may be too young but I was one of the poor bastards that had always used NS and had TRIED to use NS4. Let me give you my impression of me using NS4: "Alright! Its installed! So lets fire it up and go.../NS4 crashes/....Okay, must have been a glitch! So I'll just go to a different site this time and../.NS4 hangs and THEN crashes/...huh, maybe that site is buggy. This time I'll just go check my.../NS4 crashes and BSODs the OS/...*&^*^%*&^%*&%!
NS4 was complete and total garbage, NS6 was released THREE YEARS later (there was no NS5) and by that time nobody gave a shit because IE was "good enough". If you look at the download numbers (NS4 was in the days before IE was bundled) I'm sure you'll see a BIG spike soon after NS4 was released. Compared to NS4 IE4 was a big bundle of candy flavored goodness. No frankly it wasn't great, but at least it ran most of the time and didn't BSOD the OS like NS4 which in the days of dialup meant a long bunch of BS as you had to reboot and redial.
As for TFA, because FF isn't the "lean mean" browser it was originally supposed to be, but a big bloated monster? mobile is all about thin and light, because with the exception of the top o' the line mobiles most have less CPU and RAM than we used on desktops a decade ago. FF 4 is frankly a huge bloated mess, especially compared to Chromium based so I can understand why nobody at Moz is talking about a FF OS.
I hate to say it, but maybe it is time for a rewrite of the Gecko engine? Because ever since the 3.6 branch I've found it to be quite painful on anything less than a 3GHz+ with 2Gb of RAM, which is a hell of a lot more than your average mobile device. It is pretty obvious at least for now that mobile and green computing are gonna be popular for awhile, and FF bloat just don't fit in with that. When FF 4 can give a really nice experience on a single core Atom with 1Gb of RAM and work well all day then maybe a FF OS will be in order, but that day sure ain't today.
Don't worry Windows 7 will be supported until 2020 and by then Ballmer will hopefully be fired and the office guys will put out another decent OS. That is one of the nice things about Windows, its support cycles are long enough if you time it right you can just skip completely the shit releases which traditionally have been every other one.
So I figure Windows 9 will be just Windows 7 with some updates and a little extra bling and all will be good again, and on a positive note i'll probably make a nice pile o' cash stripping out Win 8 for 7 the way I did Vista for XP, I'd say thanks MSFT but it seems such a waste that Win 7 rocks and instead of doing the smart thing and just adding some nice features to make it worth upgrading (I'd suggest something as easy as homegroup for computers in different locations, so someone like my dad could just use a USB stick to copy some token at work and be able to stick the stick in and have it hook up to his work PC from home) it'll be some "me too!" Apple ripoff that is gonna royally suck ass just so they can try to hop on the ARM bandwagon, even though backwards compatibility is what sells Windows and without it there is no point in buying MSFT anything.
As for TFA, because currently FF 4 sucks the big wet titty when it comes to memory and CPU, two places that are seriously constrained on mobile devices? i have to support everything from decade old office boxes to the latest quads and I've been having to switch everyone over to Comodo Dragon as FF 4 is simply unusable on anything slower or smaller than a 3.2GHz P4 with 2Gb of RAM.
I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM, which is 512Mb more than you get on the average netbook and faster than a single core Atom, yet FF 4 is completely unusable, even with ABP. Launching a tab can slam the CPU for up to two minute where the machine is unresponsive, and may the FSM help you if you dare to click on a video link as FF 4 will slam the CPU into the redline while giving you a slideshow. Compare that to Dragon and other Chromium browsers where I can have several tabs open without ANY CPU slamming, just a VERY quick spike and then it drops, and when I click on a video link the video plays nicely on anything short of HD, and even the HD ones play alright as long as I let it buffer a little first. Not to mention for some reason FF will slowly but surely continue to suck RAM until it slams the swap, whereas Chromium actually gives back RAM when you close a tab.
So I'd have to say a "FF OS" based on the current FF would be a majorly BAD idea, because they have some serious problems in that code. Even the devs admitted here in an article a few months back that they needed to work on memory usage, boy is THAT an understatement! I don't know what they did, as pre 3.6.x it was actually quite nice but after 3.6 it has been going downhill fast. Maybe Gecko simply can't take all the additions like a separate flash container being bolted onto it, I don't know, but currently I wouldn't use it on less than a 3.2GHz with preferably HT and 2Gb+ of RAM and those specs are more than a little too high for a mobile OS, unless mobile means like Alienware laptops in that you need a really long extension cord?
Meh, I've found half my posts labeled insightful and the other half troll or flamebait when the funny part is I'm always just doing what I always do, which is call it how I see it.
The part that pisses me off is that Anon COULD have been a great force for change. A good example was their image of an empty suit. Imagine if instead of trying to claim credit for everything they would have just quietly been leaking dirty deals and evil misdeed to Wikileaks and the web at large. Every criminal cabal in government, every dirty bureaucratic goon would have to think "Is that guy next to me one of them? Is he gonna rat this deal out and make my life hell?" and that paranoia COULD have been crippling and helped to make these kinds of evil bullshit harder to pull off.
But instead we have them blasting all over the web "Look at me LOL look!!" and by showing that all of their "attacks" are classic script kiddie bullshit not only tosses that chance to cause paranoia away, it gives the governments a perfect bogeyman for getting every authoritarian nasty thing they've ever want passed, by keeping in the news stories of normal folks losing their CC numbers to a bunch of clowns wearing trollface.
Like I said its a damned shame that one of the last great freedoms we have will in all likelihood be trashed thanks to these clowns, but as we have seen trolls come along and take a big shit all over the place and ruin it for everyone, all in the name of LULZ.
I'd say the bigger problem is what to do about the ever shortening time some of these games are up as you end up with dead games on shelves being sold to unsuspecting players. If you want to know how to stop this retail would be a good place to start, as letting customers know these games are worthless as the MP has been pulled would leave retailers with plenty of merchandise they can't give away, who in turn will pitch royal bloody shitfits at the publishers.
Because with some of these games (EA) barely getting 2 years if even that you'd be surprised at how many times worthless games are sitting there on the shelves of big retail giants like BB and Walmart. These games should be treated no different than ruined milk or moldy bread, it is a product unsuitable for purpose since it was being sold for use with features X-Z and now Y and Z are DOA and with more and more games requiring online activation as well you might not even get X.
So if these retailers were forced to take a bath on unsold product because the company has tossed it then I bet they will bring appropriate pressure to bear on the rest of the industry. I'm sure EA and Codemasters wouldn't like it if a few of the retail giants refused to stock their product just like many of them refused to carry Dreamcast after getting burnt by Sega. If you want to get these guys to listen hit them where it hurts, right in the wallet.
Your post brings up something I've been wondering for awhile: What EXACTLY is wrong with BSD? Is its code shit? Is the tools to use it shit? Does its network stacks suck ass? What?
Because you would think that companies that don't want to give back would just use BSD and be done with it, but instead they risk long drawn out and expensive lawsuits trying to snatch GPL code. So what is wrong with BSD that makes it better to risk a lawsuit than use it?
Dear AC, this WOULD be one of the "most important events in recent technological history" if it wasn't being conducted by asshats that want credit for their actions.
If instead of waving their dicks around while wearing images of Trollface they would just quietly drop the info they gather into Wikileaks and a dozen other sources? Then the government wouldn't know if the leaks were internal or external, wouldn't know whether they have been infiltrated or not, and paranoia helps to undermine power by making it harder for their little cabals to communicate.
Instead what these guy Fawkes wearing dipshits will end up with is a nice new law where unless you are a developer (and if you say you are your line will be tapped) you will have to run an "approved OS to protect you from ID theft" which after all this high publicity will be quite easy to get the general populace to sign on to. This approved OS will be given software to "protect you" that will have a digital sig so that everywhere you go, anything you do, will be marked so as to be trivial to trace. Anyone who tries hooking up a machine without the sig will get a visit from guys in dark suits and their connection will be pulled seconds after the lack of the sig is detected.
If anyone thinks that having that old scrap of paper known as the constitution will keep those in power from crushing your rights like a bug haven't been paying attention to current events lately, and those in power were already looking for excuses to clamp down after seeing the Arab Spring events and how their old cronies who held power for decades are ending up run out on a rail. The fact that the current administration claims dropping bombs isn't hostile and that they have the right to Assassinate Americans on American soil should be pretty clear indicators that the constitution is being ignored.
By splattering their "Lulz" all over the Internet these dumbasses are playing right into the hands of those that want the Internet turned into cableTV. They COULD have been a major force of change, they COULD have brought to light many of the hidden evils these corrupt administrations all over the world are perpetrating on the peoples of the world. But by jumping up and down going "look at me, look!" all they will end up doing is having the ban hammer dropped on one of the last places of free expression left on the planet. So goodbye Internet, it was fun while it lasted but like most things online the trolls took a big shit all over you and ruined it for everyone.
Actually if you use Linux and Apple you WILL pay for patches, MSFT? Nope. At least that is what a friend at my local cableco has told me and I wouldn't be surprised if that is the same at other ISPs. Oh and you can't blame it on MSFT this time either, unless you want to blame them for the ease of use that is WSUS Server.
Because according to my friend that is what they are rolling out, your Windows Updates will be local thanks to WSUS and since Linux doesn't have a "one size fits all" repo and with Apple there are more iPads and iPhones than Macs so the cableco doesn't even think about them. According to my friend they'll be doing the same with Netflix, all the popular movies will be on a local CDN.
As for TFA? Yes the cloud is toast unless we take the last mile away from them. We have already paid them 200 billion yes with a B, for nationwide broadband and all we got in return was a nice view of the CEOs enjoying their new benefits and pay packages.
If you look up most ISP what you'll see is "cherry picking" where they pick out the best neighborhoods and then give the bird to the rest. When I was staying in Nashville just a couple of years back there were places in a city that size with NO broadband, as the ISPs had the places they wanted and fuck the rest. I know in my area the cableco hasn't moved a single inch in more than 20 years, not one inch. Still plenty of people in town that don't have squat, nobody cares as they have the most profitable neighborhoods.
So frankly if we don't take the last mile and open it up to real free market competition we're screwed. Already there are places like Romania kicking our asses, and things will only get worse. We are gonna end up on the short bus to the information superhighway while everyone else has Ferrari. This is a perfect time to put all those unemployed to work, start another WPA only for fiber to the home. They want a monopoly? every place they beat us with FTTH they'll get a 20 year monopoly. If it is a place that has NO coverage now? They'll get 30. Otherwise we should do them like they did us when we gave them that 200 billion, and just give them the finger.
But wouldn't mini strokes show up in a CT or MRI? Because she has had those, blood work, you name it they have poked and prodded and basically are to the point of throwing darts at a dartboard. hell I don't blame the docs, they have run just about every damned thing they know to run, they just ain't finding squat.
The doc says "just to be safe" he is gonna treat her like she has a clot just in case there is one that has gotten by, but as I said her symptoms are just weird. like don't mini strokes cause them to shut down? When she is having one her her spells often she is just talking a mile a minute, it just don't make no damned sense. Then there is the bouts of just throwing up without warning, she says she doesn't even feel sick she just feels "off" and then it is just coming up like the exorcist, and then like I said there is the ragdoll falls.
Hell I don't know, the docs don't know, nobody knows. One minute she is my mom and the next minute she isn't and it isn't like one of those slow onset kinda things this was just WHAM!
All I know is I'm dancing as fast as I can and the world keeps speeding up the music. Now I have got to figure out a way to keep her house without anyone working or bringing anything but me AND still feed myself and two boys AND figure out a way to take care of her and see my GF 185 miles away more than once every 3 months AND be able to do ALL that without fail, because my oldest nephew loves that damned house so much I'm willing to bet he'll give up med school to work some shitty job just to keep the thing since it has been in the family for so long and it is the place his late mother lived her whole life right up to the end.
I just don't see how in the hell to pull it all off and I sure as hell don't see how to pull it all off AND take care of her. Frankly the stress of the whole mess, coming so soon after they lost their mother, is damned near got us to the breaking point. It was like we just got the grieving done for their mother and everyone had finally started to move on, and then this shit hits. A man can only take so damned much ya know?
Yeah you know some times I really wish I was stupid, ya know? That I could just buy all the bullshit and jingoism and believe the Pravda level of garbage poured out every night that the majority believe, I really do. Sadly that is the curse of having a 156 IQ, you ask things like "aren't we supposed to be the good guys?" and "Why is America attacking some third world shithole that couldn't hit us with a map and a GPS unit?" or "Why are we being told how wonderful everything is when all around me people are losing their homes (and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if I end up losing my mom's house when I put her in the home, but I just can't make ends meet as it is, much less with her house payments on top) and all the factories and jobs are being sent overseas as fast as the corps can move them?"
Well maybe when I've lost it all I'll drive over to my GF's house and she can say fuck this and come with me or I can go alone. I have this dream of just getting rid of everything and pointing my Ranger south and driving until I run out of money and wherever I am in South America is where I'll lay my head. Just take my acoustic bass and sing "illegal alien" by Genesis with a tin cup for tourists and enjoy the heat. I'm sure they'd enjoy the irony of an American being the illegal alien for once. Frankly it couldn't be worse than the misery and slow death I see around me, where everyone is working themselves into their graves and never getting an inch ahead.
How fucking sad that this is what became of the country my grandpa fought the Nazis for, man he must be spinning like a top right about now. There is no way in hell orders or not he would put up with scum selling little kids like that, they'd meet an untimely war event if you know what I mean. The fact that we would deal with such vile pieces of absolute dogshit and then have is our only concern how to cover their crimes up? Makes me fucking sick. I see all these pricks like Haliburton and Goldman Sachs causing misery and destruction while reaping ever larger checks and I have to wonder if Whedon wasn't a little close to the bone with that "Wolfram and Hart" bit, because frankly if these vile animals aren't concentrated evil I don't know what is. What was it they said about the Nazis? The "banality of evil" I believe? Because now I understand what they meant. Evil these days doesn't carry a gun, it carries a fountain pen and roams the halls of power having martini lunches while deciding which group they can make suffer for another couple of percentage points.
And yes it makes me just as fucking sick and disgusted, but sadly I am smart enough to see that no matter what you do or how involved you are justice only is for the wealthy, and the only change they'll allow is the change from your pockets into their bank accounts. We are the whore of Babylon, flaunting our wealth and power while everyone hates us.
And also it isn't like the families don't try to do what they can, it simply gets overwhelming and you end up with no choice. I'm probably gonna have to send my mom to a home next week. I hate to do it, I really do, but she has fallen six times in 4 weeks, the last one cracked her head and the first one broke 6 ribs. You simply can't stay up 24/7 to watch them like a hawk and when it is just me and the two boys and the oldest is in college? As I said nobody can stay awake forever.
The biggest bitch is all the docs can tell me is what it isn't. It isn't her heart, her liver is working, etc. gee thanks, that really helps. It still doesn't explain why a 68 year old woman was perfectly fine, doing her own shopping, cooking her own meals, etc and then within 24 hours is having "spells" where she just rambles like a mad woman and when she walks sometimes it is like cutting the strings on a puppet. I mean no warning, no her legs are getting weak and giving out, I mean it literally looks like a ragdoll puppet that the strings were cut, she doesn't even make a sound or try to catch herself, she just takes a header.
Of course when she is having a spell you can't tell her she shouldn't try walking alone, that just makes her angry and along with the sudden personality switches and mood swings freaks the hell out of the boys especially after losing their mom to cancer in 07. Finally trying to deal with her affairs and keep the family home, that my oldest will end up dropping out of med school to try to keep because he'll be damned if he loses the home his grandpa built and the place where his mom grew up, while my GF is having to live 250 miles away because of HER elderly relative (her dad) having a heart attack so he can't be left alone, the stress is frankly driving me into an early grave. The lack of sleep and constantly trying to make ever more money while spending as much time with her as possible (because shit for the elderly sure as fuck ain't cheap) has got me eating aspirin by the handful to deal with the chest pains which is nothing but stress I'm sure. hell I cracked a tooth a few weeks back dragging a case down from a shelf and I can't even get the damned painful bitch fixed as I'm spending money like shit through a goose trying to keep her place and mine too.
So it isn't like most of us just want to dump our family on the state, we just end up without any choice in the matter. As I said docs don't have a fricking clue, we can't afford live in help so that we can actually sleep, and even as we speak she is in the hospital from her last fall so we can't just leave her be for a few hours because she will end up trying to go to the bathroom by herself and splitting her head open. So all I can do is hope the local nursing home doesn't suck, because with more than 25k owed on her house and trying to deal with everything else I just can't do anymore. A man can only stay awake for so long, ya know?
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Won't work sadly, as ALL of the backbone is owned by....dum dum dum...assholes like AT&T! I know because a friend had a business just outside the area where cable and DSL end (and good luck EVER getting them bastards to expand, in my area they haven't moved an inch in 20 years) so he paid a crazy amount of money to have a T-1 run out there and started his own ISP. All well and good, American capitalism right?
Nope, because AT&T got wind and cut off his backbone access, some bullshit excuse about "number of connections" or some shit, made a few phone calls and made sure nobody else would sell to him either. Their answer was a bald faced "try to sue us, we're fucking AT&T!" and his lawyer said "Sure you'll win, but it'll take anywhere from 10 to 15 YEARS and cost...ohhh...about 3 MILLION dollars in lawyers fees". So he closed up his business and moved away, and those people that had a decent Internet were forced back onto AT&Ts $75 a month dialup.
You see the problem isn't fascism, its corporatism. The corps OWN the courts, they OWN the congress, they OWN the lines, they OWN the media. So download all you can while you can friends, because until we have our own Arab Spring this country is gonna have its very own little dark age, with more and more draconian laws designed to royally fuck you in the ass, and there is nothing you can do about it. Vote? you tried that, how's that "Hope & Change" working out? Vote with your dollars? More than 70% last I checked of the population is under monopolies when it comes to the net and ALL are under the same backbone providers, which guess what? Are listed above.
So snatch every damned thing that ain't nailed down, slam the shit out of the ISPs. pretty much all the Internet will be in less than 3 years is the Home Shopping Network and that's the way big business/government wants it because it is easier to control the population if they can't organize, and easier to shut down any "troublemakers" if you make sure they can't be heard. That way they can control the "spin" and make anyone who doesn't go "America Fuck yeah!" into an evil socialist pedo/terrorist. Think I'm crazy? They already got Valenti's dream of "forever minus a single day" copyrights, and with the above they'll kill the net. The party is over folks, the dream is dying. Enjoy as much as you can while you can, because our kids are gonna look back from their dreary media controlled lives and consider this a mythical "golden age" where people could actually converse freely and share ideas. Those days are sadly about to end. Don't forget to hit the lights on your way out.
Actually if you look at the pic I think they have a shot. A small shot mind you, but still a shot, for one little thing in the right hand corner....Xbox Live.
Now if they put out a phone with a decent GPU and something other than an iSliver battery, so you could take some sort of Xbox mini games that will level up your characters or earn achievements? Then I could see it selling. There are a hell of a lot of people that own Xbox, there are a hell of a lot of developers making games for XBL, get those developers on board making games that'll run on WinPhone? Then yes I could see it becoming a hit.
Because lets face it folks, what has MSFT really got going for it right now but gaming and Office? Most of what people do with PCs other than gaming and Office can be done over the web, which can be just as easily done in Linux or Mac. No what keeps people buying MSFT is backwards compatibility and gaming, with the backwards compatibility used for...dum dum dum...their games! From those cheesy things they pick up at the Wally World to the latest Xbox chestie mcWallhigh cover based shooter MSFT is about gaming and if Nokia puts out some decent hardware that lets folks play something other than Angry Birds and ties it all together, Xbox,Windows,Office, and mobile? Then and ONLY then can I see them having a real shot at the title.
Otherwise they are gonna be slaughtered by the 50 bazillion Android phones the carriers are practically giving away and the latest iCool, because one thing MSFT most assuredly does NOT do is cool and slick. But as long as their games work people will ignore the lack of cool and slick. After all look at all the shit folks got with RRoD yet they still buy the hell out of X360s.
Yep it seems like yet again MSFT is ripping off Apple, even the bad parts. I don't know which is worse, MSFT screwing their developers with "me too! Web 3.0 bling bling yee haw" bullshit, or Apple boning the creative industry by putting out an upgraded iMovie and calling it Final Cut Pro while yanking the rug out by refusing to sell new licenses to the previous version.
And just to show some love and keep them from feeling left out this would be a GREAT time for Linux to offer people a "third way" since both Apple and MSFT are burning their hardcore markets to chase the retarded consumer market, but sadly they won't pull their heads out of their collective asses, send Torvalds off on an ice flow or whatever it is you do with a Finn that is past his prime, and finally join the rest of the planet in the 21st century by having a stable ABI like EVERYONE else (Solaris, BSD, OSX, Windows, OS/2) has had for fricking ages so that "update foo broke my driver" could finally be laid to rest and updating wouldn't be a "break Linux NOW" button.
Sometimes I swear it is like the whole world just decides to become ca ca flinging monkeys every so often, just for shits and giggles. How two of the biggest companies could be so fricking stupid and burn so many of the ones that make them money is beyond me, nor can I understand why everyone thinks having drivers shit themselves and die when you update the thing is a good idea in Linux. It is like when Alice says in Wonderland "But I don't want to go around any mad people!" and the cat says "Sorry but we're all mad here dear" as it seems like the whole tech world is off its nut ATM.
The only saving grace for us Windows users is that Windows 7 is supported until 2020, which hopefully by that time Ballmer will be given a mock turtleneck and a pink slip and we can get the office guys to make Windows 9 a decent OS. Of course by then maybe Torvalds will retire and with him his religious hatred of having an ABI, that or Google will just fork the thing away from him and we'll all be using Android/Chrome/whatever they call it this week on everything mobile so it won't matter anyway.
Oh one last thing, don't bother posting that link to the one kernel dev that rails against ABIs as I don't listen to religious nutjobs, and that is EXACTLY what he is. If you bother to read that post he goes so far as to call all like Nvidia who don't hand every scrap of driver code to the devs so that may bless it with their divine hand "leeches" and hopes that Torvalds trashes their driver the next time he goes Goatse on the kernel. Say what you want about MSFT, but my Win2K drivers work in XP SP3, that is 14 YEARS of driver support, and I have no doubt I'll see the same with Vista/7 drivers. In fact I'm using 5 year old Vista cap card drivers in Win 7 SP1, that is 5 years of support. Man if I could get that many years of driver support in Linux my shelves would be full of Linux machines right now.
It isn't about "likable" defendants it is about flagrant slander after ripping someone off! The courts tend to frown on those that brag about their acts when such acts are a violation of literally decades of established law and slandering the person that is taking you to court on a national medium like radio is NOT a smart move. Sorry but these ass clowns deserve to be sued along with the station for a VERY large amount of cash.
To me this is no different than those asses like Ebaum that snatch anything they can find and try to pass it off as their own,or the pricks that steal GPL code and try to lock it behind a paywall. in all of the above you are taking something you have NO rights to and passing it off as your own and this isn't "information wants to be free" this is theft, as you are depriving someone else with your actions which in this case the photographer who is just trying to make a living.
You want one that works, it ain't free but it IS cheap and you get a free 30 day trial to give it a spin. Here you go Comodo Instant SSL. To get the free trial just pick the free SSL button on the upper left. If it works good for you it is $69 a year for the basic package which will do what you want, the cert is recognized by ALL the major browsers, FF, Chromium based, Safari, IE, Opera, you name it.
As much as I hate to admit it, since on just about everything else he is a total nutjob, but I have to agree with Glen beck when it comes to the ME: It is long past time for us to "Be Switzerland". it is time to pack up our shit and go home, to quit having a bazillion bases and spending money we don't have, it is long past time for us to be Switzerland. We have been stirring up shit since the end of WWII, causing nothing but misery and propping up "el presidente" thugs and scum, it is time to call it and just be Switzerland.
Frankly no truer words have been spoken, and actually getting to talk with some of the neocons that actually make policy (I live next to a conservative college that a friend does the rocketry and robotics clubs for so I get to tag along) frankly the reason why we have killed so many people in the ME and wasted so much money and caused so much hatred will make your jaw drop. Ready? Here goes....Jesus won't come back. I swear no matter what logic you throw at them their ONLY real answer is "When the Jews return to Zion".
I mean how fucking sad is it we are bankrolling Israel to the tune of 8 million plus PER DAY 24/7/365, no matter what they do, and are willing to prop up scum like Mubarak, all because of some words some goat herder wrote 1800 years ago about how some 2000 year dead guy had to have a certain race in a certain spot so he'd have a place to park his fluffy cloud. Sadly I felt like the Shat in Undiscovered Country going "What does God need with a starship?" because the only real answer they could come up with that is the Sky bully would give us a spanking if we didn't.
All those lives, all that suffering and misery, because of some words written on a goat skin, hell it wouldn't even surprise me if it turned out to be a mistranslation. Glenn Beck is right, its time to be Switzerland.
Which means which should say something so allow me to say...thanks Brits! Thanks to you, for no matter how shitty and fascist we become here in the USA, no matter what, you ALWAYS trump us and make us feel better about ourselves! Thanks to you we can go "We at least we Ain't the UK!"
So thanks UK, for sucking even more corporate cock than our politicians here in the USA. Man I bet your MPs jaws are sore!
Well the P4 had that long ass pipeline which for some reason FF 4 seems to love, try it on AMD CPUs and its a different story. Maybe they are using Intel's rigged compiler?
As for Linux and drivers, your post just hit the nail on the head accidentally about what is wrong with the community: They say Linux is a replacement for Windows, when really it is a replacement for Macs. Like a Mac you have to be DAMN picky about hardware, and even then it can be a roll of the dice.
Owning my own little shop I have plenty of boxes of all makes and sizes to try it on and frankly it is more likely to fail at least one driver on update as not. The problem is once you get it running YOU CAN NEVER UPDATE as that will cause the thing to fall down and go BOOM! which in this era of zero days is just too risky for my customers and I can't afford to give away lifetime support, especially when a broken driver may not get a "forum fix" for a week or two which is simply unacceptable when you have a customer wanting their wireless back. Linux makes a great server OS, where companies spend millions to deal with Linus' PITA driver model, but desktops? Most don't care so you literally have a driver written by Bob in his basement, that is hacked together and will crap itself when you update. No thanks.
Anyway next time you are on a Windows box try Comodo Dragon and compare it to FF 4. Even with ABP and ForecastFox installed on both the Dragon frankly stomps the living crap out of FF 4 on memory usage, on CPU spikes and percentage used, frankly there isn't a metric where Dragon don't stomp the fox. Personally i hope they fix it, as I miss my NoScript which there is no replacement for on Chromium based (NotScript is a bad hack and been abandoned) but as long as I have to support a wide variety of hardware I need a browser that works on everything and from 3.6 up FF has just been getting steadily worse.
Then they should just yank the drive of the offending server (while giving the company hosting time to migrate the other VMs while taking the offending one offline) so that the company can restore service to those that are not subject to the warrant and the feds can go on their way.
But even that I believe could raise issues, such as "fruit of the poisoned tree'. like what if they find out while going through a hard drive looking for evidence against company B that company C has been doing something illegal? Legally there should be nothing they can do but we know that isn't the way it works IRL.
In the end what I think is gonna have to happen is to have a clear standard for making a bit for bit copy of VMs and other electronic data, so that it can be verified and work for the chain of evidence without taking down entire colos just to serve a warrant. It would have to be FOSS because even though I see nothing wrong with proprietary per se, when someone's life is on the line we are gonna want to be able to see the source and ensure it is doing what they claim.
Sadly IRL what is gonna happen is more and more are simply gonna avoid hosting in the USA, and that giant sucking sound of jobs leaving to never return is gonna slam dead bang right into the colos, and who can blame them?
So in other words you get the "choice' of cripple ALL CPUs, or just Intel's competitors? Wow their douchebaggery just gets better and better don't it? Especially when it would be trivial to check for the SSE flag (which EVERY CPU that has SSE has implemented for nearly 8 years, which is a lifetime in CPUs) and "If CPU = SSE then run optimized' end of story.
The sad part is AMD does have their own compiler which is completely FOSS and unlike Intel doesn't try to hamstring a CPU because it isn't made by them. Pretty damned sad when a company feels they can't just compete on their merits, nope, they gotta pull dirty backhanded bullshit, just to make sure they can't lose.
This is why I sell nothing but AMD in my shop now and my customers couldn't be happier. They like the low prices on triples and quads, I like supporting a company that isn't a douchebag, its a win/win.
The weird thing is huge numbers of the populace seem to just love that sort of thing. My oldest went out and bought the LOTRO box set and just loves the hell out of it. Me I watched him play for an hour and i'm like "When do you stop grinding?" because frankly I just don't get it. I have yet to see an MMO that wasn't grindtastic to the 12th power, yet people eat that shit up with a spoon, why?
To me the whole thing is a big old "meh" but then again I'm haven't played seriously online since the griefers ruined MechWarrior for me. but at least that game took some thought, it kinda reminded me of the "big blue blanket" WWII Pacific US strategy: You put your big monster heavies in the middle, mediums guarding those in an outer circle, and the smaller ones working as harrassers beyond that. It really took a tight team to keep from getting picked off in the game. These MMOs all seem to be "Bring me the asses of 20 snow goats" which I didn't find fun in games like Sacred or Diablo and I'm sure not gonna pay a monthly fee for the privilege of bringing an NPC the asses of 20 snow goats.
Eh, I guess to rip off every action movie ever made "i'm getting too old for this shit" as I don't get it, nor do I get the whole Farmville thing which my GF thinks is a slice of heaven. I had to set up a spare box on the far side of the apt so I can sleep when she is having her daily click fest. I wish the CoX guys luck, but I just don't see what makes them different from every other MMO out there.
And you MR AC just hit the nail on the head as to what is wrong with the current laws regarding computer seizure. these laws were written when a server was weak enough it held ONE client and one client only, so if you seized the machine you were seizing only what you were supposed to. The problem is now servers are the multicore monsters with more than enough horse to host dozens of virtual servers all of which belong to someone else and the FBI has NO right to mess with AT ALL.
So the feds really do need to get slapped down over this. this is like knowing someone on a city block is dealing dope so you kick down the doors of every house and the tear through their stuff looking for proof. they have the right to seize that ONE server that was named on the warrant and NOT every server in the colo.
I hope all those that have downtime because of this grab a lawyer and hand the feds with a really fat lawsuit, as that is the only way these clowns will learn it isn't 1986 anymore and servers don't work that way.
Well if they used the Intel compiler then it is for all intents and purposes useless as Intel has been rigging their compiler with a "Genuine_Intel" flag and if the flag isn't detected dropping all SSE and above optimizations and instead running in slow ass x87 mode. Last I read despite being ordered to change their behavior Intel is STILL putting out compilers with the evil bit on and haven't done anything to alert previous customers of their douchebaggery.
So I wouldn't be so quick to just dismiss out of hand, after all, who would have thought that Intel would rig their own compiler to cheat? I can't even imagine how many programs out there have been compiled using the Intel compilers which makes every single program written using their tool chain rigged against AMD and Via.
Ya I'd say that is the real news here, that the EFF was accepting BTC which is on legal shaky ground number one, and number two I'd say that by its very design (those that got in first were able to rack up quickly, those that come later find it harder and harder to get anything) that it is a pyramid scam. Then add in the fact that there are already money laundering and dope dealing going on with it and the EFF would be nuts to actually use the things, unless they want to be the defendants for once.
Personally I wouldn't accept anything I can't cash easily or hold in my hand. if you want to start a new currency fine, make it out of something, gold, silver, hell fricking iron bars for all I care, but at least have something you can hold in your hand. I figure BTC has maybe a year at most before implosion, either through huge swings in value, someone figures out how to pull a massive fraud on them, or the governments shut them down for all the criminal activity using them. In any case the EFF was nuts to accept them in the first place IMHO.
Uhhh...where EXACTLY in my post which mentioned Windows several times did you notice me say ANYTHING, anything al all, about Linux? That is like saying "Well my motorboat runs well" in the middle of a conversation about cars.
Frankly it could run like the second coming on Linux for all I care, after watching the drivers fall down and go BOOM! in Linux every. single. time. I tried to update the damned thing I wouldn't touch that POS with a 50 foot barge pole. When Linus gets fired or retires and you FINALLY, after all these damned years, have a stable driver ABI like the rest of the planet? Then I'll take another look. But playing "hunt the forum for fixes" wastes too much of my already limited time. I need an OS to "just work" even after I update it, and Windows does. Sorry.
Now on WINDOWS, WinXP Home SP3 to be exact, I watch FF 4 slam the CPU for every new tab, slam the CPU for several minutes and give me a slideshow when I watch a video, and slowly but surely suck up all the RAM, even if you don't do anything but just let it run. Comodo don't do that, Chrome don't do that, FF 4 does. And I have the same extensions I always have had, just ABP and ForecastFox. That's it. Hell even the FF devs said the memory usage was problematic not a month ago in one of the articles. Maybe you think they are full of shit too?
Oh please! Ya wanna know why Netscape died hard? Because they put out a total POS release that was NS4 and then they broke one of the cardinal rules which basically gave the market to MSFT.
You may be too young but I was one of the poor bastards that had always used NS and had TRIED to use NS4. Let me give you my impression of me using NS4: "Alright! Its installed! So lets fire it up and go.../NS4 crashes/....Okay, must have been a glitch! So I'll just go to a different site this time and../.NS4 hangs and THEN crashes/...huh, maybe that site is buggy. This time I'll just go check my.../NS4 crashes and BSODs the OS/...*&^*^%*&^%*&%!
NS4 was complete and total garbage, NS6 was released THREE YEARS later (there was no NS5) and by that time nobody gave a shit because IE was "good enough". If you look at the download numbers (NS4 was in the days before IE was bundled) I'm sure you'll see a BIG spike soon after NS4 was released. Compared to NS4 IE4 was a big bundle of candy flavored goodness. No frankly it wasn't great, but at least it ran most of the time and didn't BSOD the OS like NS4 which in the days of dialup meant a long bunch of BS as you had to reboot and redial.
As for TFA, because FF isn't the "lean mean" browser it was originally supposed to be, but a big bloated monster? mobile is all about thin and light, because with the exception of the top o' the line mobiles most have less CPU and RAM than we used on desktops a decade ago. FF 4 is frankly a huge bloated mess, especially compared to Chromium based so I can understand why nobody at Moz is talking about a FF OS.
I hate to say it, but maybe it is time for a rewrite of the Gecko engine? Because ever since the 3.6 branch I've found it to be quite painful on anything less than a 3GHz+ with 2Gb of RAM, which is a hell of a lot more than your average mobile device. It is pretty obvious at least for now that mobile and green computing are gonna be popular for awhile, and FF bloat just don't fit in with that. When FF 4 can give a really nice experience on a single core Atom with 1Gb of RAM and work well all day then maybe a FF OS will be in order, but that day sure ain't today.
Don't worry Windows 7 will be supported until 2020 and by then Ballmer will hopefully be fired and the office guys will put out another decent OS. That is one of the nice things about Windows, its support cycles are long enough if you time it right you can just skip completely the shit releases which traditionally have been every other one.
So I figure Windows 9 will be just Windows 7 with some updates and a little extra bling and all will be good again, and on a positive note i'll probably make a nice pile o' cash stripping out Win 8 for 7 the way I did Vista for XP, I'd say thanks MSFT but it seems such a waste that Win 7 rocks and instead of doing the smart thing and just adding some nice features to make it worth upgrading (I'd suggest something as easy as homegroup for computers in different locations, so someone like my dad could just use a USB stick to copy some token at work and be able to stick the stick in and have it hook up to his work PC from home) it'll be some "me too!" Apple ripoff that is gonna royally suck ass just so they can try to hop on the ARM bandwagon, even though backwards compatibility is what sells Windows and without it there is no point in buying MSFT anything.
As for TFA, because currently FF 4 sucks the big wet titty when it comes to memory and CPU, two places that are seriously constrained on mobile devices? i have to support everything from decade old office boxes to the latest quads and I've been having to switch everyone over to Comodo Dragon as FF 4 is simply unusable on anything slower or smaller than a 3.2GHz P4 with 2Gb of RAM.
I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM, which is 512Mb more than you get on the average netbook and faster than a single core Atom, yet FF 4 is completely unusable, even with ABP. Launching a tab can slam the CPU for up to two minute where the machine is unresponsive, and may the FSM help you if you dare to click on a video link as FF 4 will slam the CPU into the redline while giving you a slideshow. Compare that to Dragon and other Chromium browsers where I can have several tabs open without ANY CPU slamming, just a VERY quick spike and then it drops, and when I click on a video link the video plays nicely on anything short of HD, and even the HD ones play alright as long as I let it buffer a little first. Not to mention for some reason FF will slowly but surely continue to suck RAM until it slams the swap, whereas Chromium actually gives back RAM when you close a tab.
So I'd have to say a "FF OS" based on the current FF would be a majorly BAD idea, because they have some serious problems in that code. Even the devs admitted here in an article a few months back that they needed to work on memory usage, boy is THAT an understatement! I don't know what they did, as pre 3.6.x it was actually quite nice but after 3.6 it has been going downhill fast. Maybe Gecko simply can't take all the additions like a separate flash container being bolted onto it, I don't know, but currently I wouldn't use it on less than a 3.2GHz with preferably HT and 2Gb+ of RAM and those specs are more than a little too high for a mobile OS, unless mobile means like Alienware laptops in that you need a really long extension cord?
Meh, I've found half my posts labeled insightful and the other half troll or flamebait when the funny part is I'm always just doing what I always do, which is call it how I see it.
The part that pisses me off is that Anon COULD have been a great force for change. A good example was their image of an empty suit. Imagine if instead of trying to claim credit for everything they would have just quietly been leaking dirty deals and evil misdeed to Wikileaks and the web at large. Every criminal cabal in government, every dirty bureaucratic goon would have to think "Is that guy next to me one of them? Is he gonna rat this deal out and make my life hell?" and that paranoia COULD have been crippling and helped to make these kinds of evil bullshit harder to pull off.
But instead we have them blasting all over the web "Look at me LOL look!!" and by showing that all of their "attacks" are classic script kiddie bullshit not only tosses that chance to cause paranoia away, it gives the governments a perfect bogeyman for getting every authoritarian nasty thing they've ever want passed, by keeping in the news stories of normal folks losing their CC numbers to a bunch of clowns wearing trollface.
Like I said its a damned shame that one of the last great freedoms we have will in all likelihood be trashed thanks to these clowns, but as we have seen trolls come along and take a big shit all over the place and ruin it for everyone, all in the name of LULZ.
I'd say the bigger problem is what to do about the ever shortening time some of these games are up as you end up with dead games on shelves being sold to unsuspecting players. If you want to know how to stop this retail would be a good place to start, as letting customers know these games are worthless as the MP has been pulled would leave retailers with plenty of merchandise they can't give away, who in turn will pitch royal bloody shitfits at the publishers.
Because with some of these games (EA) barely getting 2 years if even that you'd be surprised at how many times worthless games are sitting there on the shelves of big retail giants like BB and Walmart. These games should be treated no different than ruined milk or moldy bread, it is a product unsuitable for purpose since it was being sold for use with features X-Z and now Y and Z are DOA and with more and more games requiring online activation as well you might not even get X.
So if these retailers were forced to take a bath on unsold product because the company has tossed it then I bet they will bring appropriate pressure to bear on the rest of the industry. I'm sure EA and Codemasters wouldn't like it if a few of the retail giants refused to stock their product just like many of them refused to carry Dreamcast after getting burnt by Sega. If you want to get these guys to listen hit them where it hurts, right in the wallet.
Your post brings up something I've been wondering for awhile: What EXACTLY is wrong with BSD? Is its code shit? Is the tools to use it shit? Does its network stacks suck ass? What?
Because you would think that companies that don't want to give back would just use BSD and be done with it, but instead they risk long drawn out and expensive lawsuits trying to snatch GPL code. So what is wrong with BSD that makes it better to risk a lawsuit than use it?
Dear AC, this WOULD be one of the "most important events in recent technological history" if it wasn't being conducted by asshats that want credit for their actions.
If instead of waving their dicks around while wearing images of Trollface they would just quietly drop the info they gather into Wikileaks and a dozen other sources? Then the government wouldn't know if the leaks were internal or external, wouldn't know whether they have been infiltrated or not, and paranoia helps to undermine power by making it harder for their little cabals to communicate.
Instead what these guy Fawkes wearing dipshits will end up with is a nice new law where unless you are a developer (and if you say you are your line will be tapped) you will have to run an "approved OS to protect you from ID theft" which after all this high publicity will be quite easy to get the general populace to sign on to. This approved OS will be given software to "protect you" that will have a digital sig so that everywhere you go, anything you do, will be marked so as to be trivial to trace. Anyone who tries hooking up a machine without the sig will get a visit from guys in dark suits and their connection will be pulled seconds after the lack of the sig is detected.
If anyone thinks that having that old scrap of paper known as the constitution will keep those in power from crushing your rights like a bug haven't been paying attention to current events lately, and those in power were already looking for excuses to clamp down after seeing the Arab Spring events and how their old cronies who held power for decades are ending up run out on a rail. The fact that the current administration claims dropping bombs isn't hostile and that they have the right to Assassinate Americans on American soil should be pretty clear indicators that the constitution is being ignored.
By splattering their "Lulz" all over the Internet these dumbasses are playing right into the hands of those that want the Internet turned into cableTV. They COULD have been a major force of change, they COULD have brought to light many of the hidden evils these corrupt administrations all over the world are perpetrating on the peoples of the world. But by jumping up and down going "look at me, look!" all they will end up doing is having the ban hammer dropped on one of the last places of free expression left on the planet. So goodbye Internet, it was fun while it lasted but like most things online the trolls took a big shit all over you and ruined it for everyone.
Actually if you use Linux and Apple you WILL pay for patches, MSFT? Nope. At least that is what a friend at my local cableco has told me and I wouldn't be surprised if that is the same at other ISPs. Oh and you can't blame it on MSFT this time either, unless you want to blame them for the ease of use that is WSUS Server.
Because according to my friend that is what they are rolling out, your Windows Updates will be local thanks to WSUS and since Linux doesn't have a "one size fits all" repo and with Apple there are more iPads and iPhones than Macs so the cableco doesn't even think about them. According to my friend they'll be doing the same with Netflix, all the popular movies will be on a local CDN.
As for TFA? Yes the cloud is toast unless we take the last mile away from them. We have already paid them 200 billion yes with a B, for nationwide broadband and all we got in return was a nice view of the CEOs enjoying their new benefits and pay packages.
If you look up most ISP what you'll see is "cherry picking" where they pick out the best neighborhoods and then give the bird to the rest. When I was staying in Nashville just a couple of years back there were places in a city that size with NO broadband, as the ISPs had the places they wanted and fuck the rest. I know in my area the cableco hasn't moved a single inch in more than 20 years, not one inch. Still plenty of people in town that don't have squat, nobody cares as they have the most profitable neighborhoods.
So frankly if we don't take the last mile and open it up to real free market competition we're screwed. Already there are places like Romania kicking our asses, and things will only get worse. We are gonna end up on the short bus to the information superhighway while everyone else has Ferrari. This is a perfect time to put all those unemployed to work, start another WPA only for fiber to the home. They want a monopoly? every place they beat us with FTTH they'll get a 20 year monopoly. If it is a place that has NO coverage now? They'll get 30. Otherwise we should do them like they did us when we gave them that 200 billion, and just give them the finger.
But wouldn't mini strokes show up in a CT or MRI? Because she has had those, blood work, you name it they have poked and prodded and basically are to the point of throwing darts at a dartboard. hell I don't blame the docs, they have run just about every damned thing they know to run, they just ain't finding squat.
The doc says "just to be safe" he is gonna treat her like she has a clot just in case there is one that has gotten by, but as I said her symptoms are just weird. like don't mini strokes cause them to shut down? When she is having one her her spells often she is just talking a mile a minute, it just don't make no damned sense. Then there is the bouts of just throwing up without warning, she says she doesn't even feel sick she just feels "off" and then it is just coming up like the exorcist, and then like I said there is the ragdoll falls. Hell I don't know, the docs don't know, nobody knows. One minute she is my mom and the next minute she isn't and it isn't like one of those slow onset kinda things this was just WHAM!
All I know is I'm dancing as fast as I can and the world keeps speeding up the music. Now I have got to figure out a way to keep her house without anyone working or bringing anything but me AND still feed myself and two boys AND figure out a way to take care of her and see my GF 185 miles away more than once every 3 months AND be able to do ALL that without fail, because my oldest nephew loves that damned house so much I'm willing to bet he'll give up med school to work some shitty job just to keep the thing since it has been in the family for so long and it is the place his late mother lived her whole life right up to the end.
I just don't see how in the hell to pull it all off and I sure as hell don't see how to pull it all off AND take care of her. Frankly the stress of the whole mess, coming so soon after they lost their mother, is damned near got us to the breaking point. It was like we just got the grieving done for their mother and everyone had finally started to move on, and then this shit hits. A man can only take so damned much ya know?
Yeah you know some times I really wish I was stupid, ya know? That I could just buy all the bullshit and jingoism and believe the Pravda level of garbage poured out every night that the majority believe, I really do. Sadly that is the curse of having a 156 IQ, you ask things like "aren't we supposed to be the good guys?" and "Why is America attacking some third world shithole that couldn't hit us with a map and a GPS unit?" or "Why are we being told how wonderful everything is when all around me people are losing their homes (and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if I end up losing my mom's house when I put her in the home, but I just can't make ends meet as it is, much less with her house payments on top) and all the factories and jobs are being sent overseas as fast as the corps can move them?"
Well maybe when I've lost it all I'll drive over to my GF's house and she can say fuck this and come with me or I can go alone. I have this dream of just getting rid of everything and pointing my Ranger south and driving until I run out of money and wherever I am in South America is where I'll lay my head. Just take my acoustic bass and sing "illegal alien" by Genesis with a tin cup for tourists and enjoy the heat. I'm sure they'd enjoy the irony of an American being the illegal alien for once. Frankly it couldn't be worse than the misery and slow death I see around me, where everyone is working themselves into their graves and never getting an inch ahead.
How fucking sad that this is what became of the country my grandpa fought the Nazis for, man he must be spinning like a top right about now. There is no way in hell orders or not he would put up with scum selling little kids like that, they'd meet an untimely war event if you know what I mean. The fact that we would deal with such vile pieces of absolute dogshit and then have is our only concern how to cover their crimes up? Makes me fucking sick. I see all these pricks like Haliburton and Goldman Sachs causing misery and destruction while reaping ever larger checks and I have to wonder if Whedon wasn't a little close to the bone with that "Wolfram and Hart" bit, because frankly if these vile animals aren't concentrated evil I don't know what is. What was it they said about the Nazis? The "banality of evil" I believe? Because now I understand what they meant. Evil these days doesn't carry a gun, it carries a fountain pen and roams the halls of power having martini lunches while deciding which group they can make suffer for another couple of percentage points.
And yes it makes me just as fucking sick and disgusted, but sadly I am smart enough to see that no matter what you do or how involved you are justice only is for the wealthy, and the only change they'll allow is the change from your pockets into their bank accounts. We are the whore of Babylon, flaunting our wealth and power while everyone hates us.
And also it isn't like the families don't try to do what they can, it simply gets overwhelming and you end up with no choice. I'm probably gonna have to send my mom to a home next week. I hate to do it, I really do, but she has fallen six times in 4 weeks, the last one cracked her head and the first one broke 6 ribs. You simply can't stay up 24/7 to watch them like a hawk and when it is just me and the two boys and the oldest is in college? As I said nobody can stay awake forever.
The biggest bitch is all the docs can tell me is what it isn't. It isn't her heart, her liver is working, etc. gee thanks, that really helps. It still doesn't explain why a 68 year old woman was perfectly fine, doing her own shopping, cooking her own meals, etc and then within 24 hours is having "spells" where she just rambles like a mad woman and when she walks sometimes it is like cutting the strings on a puppet. I mean no warning, no her legs are getting weak and giving out, I mean it literally looks like a ragdoll puppet that the strings were cut, she doesn't even make a sound or try to catch herself, she just takes a header.
Of course when she is having a spell you can't tell her she shouldn't try walking alone, that just makes her angry and along with the sudden personality switches and mood swings freaks the hell out of the boys especially after losing their mom to cancer in 07. Finally trying to deal with her affairs and keep the family home, that my oldest will end up dropping out of med school to try to keep because he'll be damned if he loses the home his grandpa built and the place where his mom grew up, while my GF is having to live 250 miles away because of HER elderly relative (her dad) having a heart attack so he can't be left alone, the stress is frankly driving me into an early grave. The lack of sleep and constantly trying to make ever more money while spending as much time with her as possible (because shit for the elderly sure as fuck ain't cheap) has got me eating aspirin by the handful to deal with the chest pains which is nothing but stress I'm sure. hell I cracked a tooth a few weeks back dragging a case down from a shelf and I can't even get the damned painful bitch fixed as I'm spending money like shit through a goose trying to keep her place and mine too.
So it isn't like most of us just want to dump our family on the state, we just end up without any choice in the matter. As I said docs don't have a fricking clue, we can't afford live in help so that we can actually sleep, and even as we speak she is in the hospital from her last fall so we can't just leave her be for a few hours because she will end up trying to go to the bathroom by herself and splitting her head open. So all I can do is hope the local nursing home doesn't suck, because with more than 25k owed on her house and trying to deal with everything else I just can't do anymore. A man can only stay awake for so long, ya know?