Actually it was "Hope & Change" as in "I damned sure Hope nobody notices I didn't Change a damned thing!". I do hope this has been a valuable lesson boys and girls, that trying to change a corrupt system from within the system doesn't work as you are playing in their arena, with their rules, and thanks to Citizens United they can bribe all they want to.
Expecting any slogan by ANY politician in this corrupt system to be worth even as much as the word of your average used car salesman is simply folly. But don't worry the endless money printing will fail, the dollar WILL collapse, and then the smart rich will re-enact the fall of Saigon as they run for the choppers to escape, the stupid ones will be up against the wall. The only question is what will come after, and sadly i'm betting we get our own crazy Austrian or Uncle Joe. It really wouldn't be hard to blame it on foreigners, and if we did like the crazy Austrian only replacing Poland with South America the war will bring plenty of jobs and resources that the worthless dollar won't buy.
Look up on Wikileaks (if it is still legal to even view it) about how we were covering up for a weapons company that was giving 9 year old boys as party favors to seal a deal in Afghanistan and the SAME company had done the SAME thing in Kosovo a decade before with 11 year old girls and we were STILL hiring them!
I'm sorry but if selling little kids as fucktoys just to seal a deal ain't corrupt enough for ya I don't know what is. The money and power have become so concentrated at the top frankly they don't give a shit what they do as long as the final outcome is even a few percentage more profits for them.
Anyone who think voting will actually change a damned thing obviously haven't been paying attention these past few decades or they would notice even with the country about to default on its debts raising the historically low taxes on the top 1% isn't even talked about seriously, as that would be biting the hand bribing them. We may be a little more subtle about our vicious evil, and mainly use brown people to subject this evil upon, but evil is evil and this government is about as evil as one can get without actually rolling the tanks.
Well if they are in Bumfuckistan nobody is gonna care if we just kill the pricks then, are they? These guys are scum, they cause billions in damages and lost hours, as a friend in the state crime lab has told me some are even using their infections to sell CP and not have it on their personal machines. these are true scum of the earth and frankly shouldn't be treated any nicer than we treat the mob or any other criminal org.
So take them out. If the country refuses to do shit, well there are plenty of groups like Blackwater that are happy to do dirty jobs for a fee. follow the money, find these rats in their holes and take them out. I bet a few high profile "actions" on a few of these scum might make them think twice about how much protection they can get by being in bumfuckistan. Let me put it this way: Would we put up with this shit if a country was spreading this much destruction and misery using non cyber means? Hell even the worst terrorist countries don't cause as much monetary damage as a single one of these fast spreading worms!
That is actually quite simple, you can "for non commercial use" clause as well as having a separate license for icons and other graphics like what Mozilla has which gives them some degree of control over FF. Most average folks aren't gonna have the skill to "roll their own" while stripping out all icons and replacing them, and businesses won't want to risk BSAA.
Look nobody is saying suddenly start charging the same crazy prices that MSFT or Apple charges, but even having a pittance in predictable income coming in would frankly transform the FOSS landscape for the better. Imagine how much more polish and bug fixes The Document foundation would be able to do if they had just a $3 fee for every LO install? Or how nice Ubuntu would be if Canonical charged $10 a copy and used that money for developers and QA.
In the end as we have seen time and time again for anything more used that hobbyist code money is required, and for world class software several orders of magnitude more money is needed on top of that. The current beggar model of FOSS simply leaves it permanently underfunded while the competitors roll in the cash. This hurts FOSS not only with software development but in other ways. Imagine how much more protected from software patent trolls the FOSS world would be if Canonical and TDF would have been able to pull finances and buy out the Novell patent portfolio?
In the end lack of money hurts the cause, and as times get tough and more companies like Novell and sun disappear the problem will only get worse. Ideals don't put bread on your table, nor do they pay the bills. If FOSS wants to compete they are gonna need funds and the charity system simply won't give them the needed capital.
But everyone here seems to be missing the forest for the large green things in the way. As a PC repairman that does this 6 days a week when you see an old worm that has been patched still running loose? Piracy, pure and simple.
You'd be amazed at how many machines I've seen with "XP SP2 Corporate Razr1911 Edition" or one of the variants. Hell more than half the machines on Craigslist are probably running pirated Windows, it is everywhere. Now since WGA will bite the person they sell the box to in the ass* the pirates turn off Windows Update. So what happens? The machine runs for years with NO patches and becomes a haven for malware like MyDoom. Hell I've seen XP Sp1 machines cross my desk as late as earlier this year, and most of the Razr1911 boxes are SP2. That leaves....what? Something like 1800+ patches missing the script kiddie can use against them?
Despite many here thinking I'm "pro MSFT" I actually lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of MSFT. Frankly killing the $50 Win 7 HP plan was stupid and caused increased piracy, because that $50 plan had many pirates going legit. I would have taken it one further and released Win 7 Starter as a $25 OEM disc for those whose machines can't handle Aero. This would have wiped out piracy overnight, while giving them a platform for the latest IE and WMP as well as giving them a chance to upsell to HP or Pro. The fact Ballmer killed it is just one more proof in my mind that he is incompetent and needs a good firing. When one has the dominant market switching the pirates over equals a HUGE gain and throwing away that chance was fucking dumb.
So no matter what some here say about "educating users" (never works) or hardening the OS, I'd say the vast majority of myDoom and its friends are running on hot Windows.
*-this includes Windows 7 BTW, the RTM OEM hack has started failing with SP1 and I've had to tell a few folks the reason they are getting that WGA warning is because....surprise! That PC they bought for $100 with a $150 OS doesn't have a legit key.
Uhh they helped them put people into categories for eugenics purposes just like they did here in the USA or did you forget that we were sterilizing undesirables and putting out books on how negroid and mongoloid features were proof they were inferior to white races?
As someone who actually got to hear about liberating one of the polish camps from my grandfather who was there frankly nobody believed the stories until we actually got to the first camps, which is why Patton and Ike made the scenes be recorded and shuffled the townspeople of the nearby villages through the camps to witness the horror. We thought the stories were just so much bullshit just as the stories being spread by Lord Haw Haw and Axis Sally, which had the Nazis slaughtering the Americans in huge numbers while kicking the Russian ass.
So while hindsight is 20/20 most people at the time thought it would be used for sterilization (not nice either, but what we in the USA were doing) not for systemic slaughter. Sadly there are no true good guys with clean hands in that war, you had the Russians and the rape of Berlin as well as mass slaughter of German POWs, the rape of Nanking by the japs as well as experimenting on prisoners (which we let them get away with in return for the data) and you had the USA doing terror bombings as well as two atomics on a country that frankly had had it and was no longer able to put up any real defense.
Despite all the "America Fuck yeah!" attached to that war the simple fact is total war is a brutal thing but we were a little more naive back then and as my grandfather said "If I wouldn't have seen the cattle cars with my own eyes I would have called you a liar." because until they got to the camps they just hadn't seen any indication that the truth wasn't they had sent the Jews east, which is what everyone believed at the time.
Hell look at how many mainstream churches and leaders in the late 40s through early 60s were finding bible passages and any other excuse on why "them niggers need to be kept in their place"? if you dig back far enough in ANY large business you are gonna find something distasteful or even monstrous, because frankly times have changed by leaps and bounds in the last 100 years.
People forget that Nazi eugenics? Came from right here in the USA. We were sterilizing undesirables long before Hitler had the thought cross his mind, and publishing nice little books on how negroid and mongoloid features were an outward sign of an inferior race. These ideas didn't just magically pop up in Germany, nor did hatred for the Jews.
So maybe instead of rehashing some 70 year old info that frankly isn't gonna change a damned thing, would saying thank you to IBM for giving us a standard that to this day is affecting your life, really be so bad? Everything from the BIOS to the choice of CPU we owe to IBM and if it weren't for them opening up the 5150 all those years ago we might still have a giant proprietary mess on the desktop where you had to buy Compaq RAM to run in Compaq machines, and Dell printers wouldn't work on Acer desktops.
So frankly no matter what IBM did 70+ years ago (Henry Ford hated Jews too, should we put Ford out of business or bring it up whenever a new Mustang comes out?) on their happy 100th maybe we should just let them blow out the candles and sing happy birthday for once.
Well you see there is a "problem" with the theory espoused by TFA. you see those examples they posted? Were only competing with the original whereas Libreoffice (I swear can they pick ANY worse names for FOSS projects? liberoffice, which is what I've heard the majority call it? What's next Goatse email clinet?) has to compete with two well funded office suites, that is of course MS Office and iWork.
The problem as I see it, and I'd argue this is a failure of the "free as in beer" model in general, is that you are dealing with a massively complex monolithic piece of code going on 15 years old, of which there are problem 30 guys at most intimately familiar with the code and they were being paid by Sun or Novell. Well Sun is DOA, Novell go bye bye, so who is gonna pay for these developers? Answer: No one. Oh I'm sure they may have a fund drive or two, which will maybe let them hang onto half of the original teams for 6 months, but after that they are SOL. Meanwhile both MSFT and Apple will be sinking big bux into R&D and spit and polish making Libreoffice look worse and buggier as time goes on.
Sorry to be a downer but maybe its time to finally face the fact that while free as in freedom should be kept free as in beer should be thrown in the dustbin of history? Like it or not to have world class software requires world class developers, it requires QA and bug testers, top notch GUI designers and focus groups and plenty of spit and polish. All of those things cost serious $$$$ that free as in beer simply doesn't bring in. Basically most of FOSS is running on the tin cup begging model and while they may bring in a few dollars (still a pittance) in good times in a dead economy like now they simply won't get enough to do much more than keep the lights on. Hell look at how many bugs on any big project like OO.o have been open for years, and that was with the thing partially bankrolled!
Like it or not if FOSS in general and Linux in particular is to be able to compete on even footing with the big three of Apple, Google, and MSFT then it is gonna take significant capital to do so and free as in beer simply ensures that capital isn't there. It is like putting your HS football team against the Broncos. It doesn't matter how plucky or full of team spirit your HS football team is, the extra advantage brought on by extra resources will simply give too big of an edge to the team with money. Hell look at the company that everyone holds up as a "success" Red Hat: Did you know over a third of the web servers out there are running NOT RHEL but CentOS, an OS cooked up by a company that USED to pay Red hat for use of their OS but decided they'd rather not give RH a dime while still having RH's product?
So in the end it doesn't matter if LO or OO "wins" as in the end they'll both lose for lack of funding. By 2015 you'll have all these killer new features as well as changes to the formatting on the other two office suites, they'll be new OSes to run them on, and the entire time LO will simply fall farther and farther behind until it is looked at like one of those Amiga clones that gets an update committed once a year just to keep from being listed DOA. All the changes they are committing now were cooked up by Novell employees and they'll be getting pink slips if they haven't already. i just don't see how long term FOSS is supposed to compete with a beggar model of funding, I really don't. What are they gonna do, tell the developers they can squat with RMS at MIT? You can't pay the bills or feed the fam on ideals folks.
The BIG difference is that currently browsers ONLY use high level code, and what WebGL will do is give bare metal access to the WWW. You honestly don't see the problem? The entire reason why GPUs are able to crank out the truly insane number of IPS that they are able to now is because they are running at ring 0 right there deep in the kernel.
Your basic graphics calls being done by web browsers today simply aren't getting anywhere close to bare metal, at most they may call on DXVA for flash and even with sandboxing look how often flash has pwned machines. With ANY 3D graphics framework you are talking running at almost a DOS level of bare metal since the OS basically hands everything to the GPU with implicit trust. Without this GPUs would be so slow as to be pointless compared to the CPU, to keep those large pipes fed there is simply NO way to do real sanity checks or sandboxing. Just look at how large the pipes are on the average GPU (hell my $60 HD4850 has a 256bit pipeline and GDDR 3, and that is slow compared to the 256bit GDDR 5 pipelines in the latest Radeons) and you honestly think you can do any real security checks and not have it choke and stall and end up twiddling its thumbs?
The entire point of DX and GL is to make everything fast and smooth. Fast and smooth is not even on the same planet as secure and well programmed. Look at the logs of any machine with decent GPUs you'll find most bugs can be traced back to graphics drivers, and that is with clean legit code running on them. Do you honestly think with malware writers purposely trying to overflow the buffers they won't make the whole thing fall down?
And as a final note I'd like to point out the dead elephant in the room nobody has yet mentioned...the firmware. nearly every chip nowadays comes with the ability to flash firmware, so that bugs can be fixed and features added or subtracted. No imagine what a malware writer could do with that! Hell forget the malware writers, imagine the trolls! you got trolls now that will paste links to foul and sometime illegal shit just to cause someone to have a bad day, imagine what "fun" they'd have with the ability to destroy someone's GPU?
I'm telling you whether you like MSFT or not doesn't matter, having bare metal access to hardware by the WWW is a BAD idea with a capital B!
While this is true to be fair the ones doing business with the Nazis were the German branch and from what I understand in Hitler's Germany you did what you were told or enjoy your nice trip to the concentration camp. His regime weren't real tolerant of being told no, just look at how the German commanders captured (and secretly recorded0 by the Brits were all in agreement that attacking Russia was a majorly BAD idea, but none had the guts to walk up to the Fuhrer and tell him that.
As for TFA, frankly he is full of shit. Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore? Of course not because IBM PC compatible is the standard PERIOD. Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.
As someone who lived through that time allow me to say thank you IBM, thank you for the 5150 and for being stupid enough to publish specs for everything back then which made building add ons easy. today it would be proprietary as hell and innovation would be right out the window, but thanks to IBM we don't have to throw everything out when we want to upgrade for performance. Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, nothing talked to each other, the drives for A wouldn't work on B, hell even computers by the same company often had incompatible peripherals. As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20 frankly it was a royal PITA.
Now thanks to IBM you can buy AMD, Intel or Via, add more RAM or even a new box from a different OEM, it really doesn't matter as it all "just works". Thanks to the hardware being open we were able to route around the douches, like Compaq and their "special RAM", and now it doesn't matter what hardware or even OS you get, your printer still plugs in, you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots, it all is basically compatible. And frankly that is a GOOD thing. Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX, to where we could easily repair or upgrade that would be heaven. Sadly it looks like proprietary in a box will stay in mobile land, which means designed for the dump since third parties can't make cheap parts. Damned shame but thank you IBM for at least giving us one platform that is easy to deal with.
I don't think the problem will be the code so much as the wildly varying hardware which it will run on. Nvidia is currently selling from the 6200 to Fermi, AMD has from the 2900-the latest 6xxx in the channel, and I haven't kept up with Intel but i'm sure they got plenty of chips as well, and that don't include all the chips not currently sold which may or may not have the power to run WebGL.
So how in the hell would you lock it down, when you are dealing with tons of drivers (most folks don't update GPU drivers) and tons of chips, with huge variance in implementation? Unless you lock it down to where it only runs on a tiny subset (and even then malware writers would write code that bypasses this check) which would kinda kill the whole point of this I honestly just don't see anyway to have any real security with this. Hell Nvidia and AMD has released...what...50 drivers between them just in the past couple of years? And there is some pretty huge differences in how a 6200 handles things VS say an HD4650 or the latest Fermi chip.
So I just don't see how it is possible, not without slowing it down so much with browser checks that you would be better off just using the CPU. it isn't like x86 where pretty much everything runs identical, we are talking a ton of chips with a ton of differences with drivers all over the place. GPUs work well now because the user is only running games which he/she bought from legit sources, and like the Carmack quote above GFX isn't exactly a hotbed of security focus in the first place.
Whether you want to say MSFT has an agenda or not I think the results would be the same, WebGL equals major pwnage.
Oh please! Can you and the other fanbois be any more full of shit? Lets look at the facts, shall we? What is currently the most buggy driver on ANY system by a LARGE margin...hmmm? Why that would be the graphics drivers by a mile. So what does OpenGL do? Why it allows untrusted third party code to run on the buggiest drivers and NOBODY here sees that as a problem?
The ONLY reason machines aren't getting pwned by the graphics cards is because currently the ONLY things running on them are legitimate code written by game designers and adding sanity checks or any kind of security to graphics drivers would slow the living shit out of them so that's right out. Do you REALLY want the entire web to be able to run any code they want on that nice fast processor with plenty of RAM for loading exploits and with no real security protecting it? Because if you honestly believe that OpenGL wouldn't be a malware writers paradise I have a bridge you might be interested in.
MSFT has already made developers shit bricks by going HTML V5, which will probably cause the slow death of SL and.Net, at least on the client side, so your theory doesn't hold weight. But after finally getting security right with Windows 7 (only 4 per 1000 infected vs 14 per 1000 infected with XP IIRC) they sure as hell don't want to hand the keys to the kingdom over to the WWW. Hell considering how much JavaScript malware is out there you don't think giving malware writers their own processor and RAM wouldn't be exploited out the ass? Please!
Personally i'm hoping Nvidia buys out Via and then we could easily see two with this design (AMD and Nvidia) VS Intel going traditional CPU. According to TFA AMD plans to keep this design open and is happy to cross license, and I'm sure AMD and Nvidia have plenty of cross licensing deals already. Intel is doing its damnedest to cut off Nvidia from access to their arch and AMD really doesn't need Nvidia with the Radeon chips, so that leaves Nvidia the odd man out.
So personally I'm hoping Nvidia just jumps in and buys out Via. The new Nano chips look pretty nice, especially with the built in crypto which would be great for servers when combined with Fermi, and Intel wouldn't say shit without risking antitust smacking them down like it did MSFT. They have been hit with one fine too many by the EU so I have a feeling if they said shit they could get some seriously nasty antitrust dropped upon them.
So to me the question is what is Nvidia gonna do. AMD and Intel adding APUs means the low end is gone to them, thanks to Intel their chipset business is DOA, and discrete GPUs will only get them so far. So in my mind there is really only two outcomes for them, either buy Via and give us a three way race, or slowly bleed until they end up bought by Intel. Let us just hope its the former rather than the later, as i'd hate to see Intel rewarded for their douchebaggery against Nvidia.
Uhhh...didn't read TFA, did you MR AC? It says plainly that in cases where there is a dedicated GPU the integrated will take over the physics and leave the dGPU to push the graphics. Think of it as the biggest baddest FPU ever created, sure it'll do graphics, and if all your friends wans to do is play WoW it'll work fine for that, but it isn't gonna stomp some GDDR 5 800 stream processor beast.
But the nice thing about this design is unlike today all those IGPs won't just be turned off if you have a real card, it'll be doing physics and other number crunching thus making your monster GPU even more insanely powerful because it isn't having to do both graphics and physics anymore. Frankly from the sounds of it it will be pretty sweet, just give it about 2 years for everything to get integrated which will be right about the time I'll be ready to move this AMD quad into the background and build me a new box. Go AMD!
Frankly I really don't see how much better GPUs can get picture wise myself. Hell my HD4850 which my GF got me for my BDay cranks the living hell out of the purty, so much I have to be careful not to be distracted by the purty and get my ass blown off! And maybe it is different with CUDA but the only thing I've seen come out for Streams is a video transcoder that frankly doesn't give you as good a result as a plain Jane CPU only transcode, and the time savings isn't worth the picture hit.
So while I'm sure this will make programmers happy I really don't see how it will make much of a difference to Joe user. Hell even the sub $150 GPUs that are the biggest market have so much purty being thrown on the screen it is truly insane, I never thought I'd see the day that human faces and movements would get THAT realistic!
And finally there is that bloated stinking dead elephant in the room no one mentions, I'm of course talking about the craptastic consoles that everyone is writing the games for. While i like the fact that the vast majority of games will run native resolution with lots of bling even on my 3 generations old HD4850, I'll be the first to admit PCs aren't the main target market anymore. Hell the new Nintendo is gonna have the HD4xxx series, which like mine is already three generations behind and it ain't come out yet!
So I honestly don't see how all this extra goodness is gonna make much of a diff. The developers write to the consoles first, the consoles don't have these features, therefor nobody writes to them. Hell look at how few DX10 and DX11 games are out, simply because the consoles are DX9. If the other consoles follow Nintendo then we'll be seeing DX10 in late 2012, so maybe this cutting edge stuff will get used by the majority of games around 2022, when you can pick up these chips at a yard sale for $5. Depressing, but that is life.
You'll probably laugh at what i tell my customers when they need a really tough password for important sites: flip over your keyboard or look behind your monitor. The serial numbers on plenty of everyday devices around your house make for some pretty tough passwords that aren't tied to anything personally about you like in TFA, and these devices will be with them for years if not forever.
I personally like the serial numbers on my musical equipment since I never get rid of my basses and if I ever forget its as easy as popping open the case. Makes for an easy source for large password with letters/numbers/upper/lower without being something obvious. I'd personally rather them do that than what sadly I've found way too many people use, which is their SS number.
That is why I tell my customers to have a "bullshit" email address and password for sites they really don't give a crap about. Every damned site nowadays wants details to let you do anything, so I tell them to have a spam dump email (I personally use my Gmail as their excellent spam filters mean if someone actually sends me something worth reading to my spam dump I still see it) and a BS password they only use for crap sites.
Seriously who cares if they get the bullshit info, or spams some spam dump email address? Join the crowd, have fun. If someone manages to "hack" some forum I occasionally BS on when I'm bored? nothing of value was lost. Cooking up complex passwords to guard worthless crap is like putting laser tripwire alarm systems to guard my garbage can. You want my old packing material and empty milk jugs? Help thyself, try not to make a mess.
Uhhh AMD64 was released in late 2003 and XP x64 (aka Server 2K3 X64) was released in Apr 2005 so I'd say a year and a half to jump from 32 to 64 bits really isn't a "long time".
As for TFA Oracle can plainly see that This chip is no more! It has ceased to be! 'Its expired and gone to meet Its maker! Its a stiff! Bereft of life, It
rests in peace! If Intel hadn't nailed It to the motherboard 'It'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Its VLIW processes are now 'istory! 'Its off the twig! Its kicked the bucket, Its shuffled off Its central processing coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PROCESSOR!
Even if that is the case why go with a shitastic 8Gb of flash instead of a HDD? Aren't HDDs cheap as dirt and just as plentiful? Considering how many complaints they got from people having to delete and redownload games they bought for lack of storage on the Wii this seems like a serious 'WTF?" moment in console design. WTF are they thinking?
They could have put in an 160Gb 2.5 inch and given the customer plenty of room and thus plenty of reasons to buy games from their online market. This is a seriously bonehead move IMHO. The price of HDDs especially at Nintendo economies of scale just make sticking with a lousy 8Gb of flash a real head scratcher.
Actually if you read up on what actually happened at Kent you'll find interviews with a guy that was working for Hoover's COINTEPRO that fired his gun at the guard and while he didn't hit them, either by being a shit shot or on purpose, this had the desired effect.
You really should read up on COINTELPRO it is some truly scary "Alice through the looking glass" shadow government shit. Basically anybody that didn't toe the party line, went "yay war!" and down with commies, oh and black had better stay in their place, was labeled as "subversive" and could have all kinds of nasty things happen to them, including the execution of a Black Panther, an American citizen on American soil protested being treated badly. truly scary shit. And just because they were college kids didn't protect them in the eyes of Hoover, if anything he saw colleges as "left wing pinkos" and had them stirring up even more shit trying to find an excuse for letting loose the nasty.
And the most scary part is it is still going on today right here in America, with cops planted in protests for G-8 with orders to start trouble (so as to give the cops a visible excuse) and cops having the brass balls after political conventions to have shirts printed up with them as Duke Nukem style pigcops cracking skulls (that was Denver i believe) right out in the open. Kent wasn't an accident, a tragic disaster, it was designed to quell dissent and it backfired when people felt not for the forces of order but that iconic image of the girl screaming over a body. Today that camera would be smashed and the one taking the picture arrested, and all protests would be kept far away from prying eyes in "official protest zones" where their planted rabble rouser could get things going nicely with nobody saying a word. Scary shit huh? Welcome to Amerika my friend, where the dollar is sacred and power is God.
Must be nice to have choices where you are Mr Perens, where i'm at the choices are "rich corporate suckup in a blue suit" or "rich corporate suckup in a slightly darker blue suit". Every D we have elected turned out to be a DINO, every R turned out to be the same as the D. Where is the choice there? Even on the local level being on the meth highway your choices are "Guy already bought by the narcos" or "guy that will be bought by the narcos 3 minutes after election" again where is the choice?
The simple fact is that Citizens United put the final nail in the coffin that was elections Mr Perens, not that they had really been functional for several decades. With a two party system the answer is to simply buy off both sides, it ensures whomever wins follows the corporate line. We have reps leaving their post to take cushy jobs from the companies whom they gave big favorable deals, you have Obama sticking RIAA lawyers into jobs where they'll be deciding what happens to file share defendants. How's that hope and change working out for ya?
Thinking you can solve anything from within the system, unless your name is Gates or Dell or you have your own lobbyists, is like your HS football team thinking they can win against the Broncos, with the refs paid to ignore any Denver penalties just to make sure. To quote the late Bill Hicks" I believe the puppet on the left share my beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has my interests at heat hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!" Sadly the man has been gone 20 years and his words are even more true today.
Uhhh...did you miss the buy it on CL for $100 option? I see all day early dual cores with 2Gb of RAM and a 15-19 inch fp going for right at $100. Watch the sales and refurbs you can get a PCIe GPU for dirt cheap (newegg has an Nvidia 8400 for $3 after $15 MIR) or if you want your buds to have more power I have seen plenty of refurb HD4830s for less than $40 with no MIR.
So you are talking about $120 or so and the gas to go pick it up. that gives you an Internet and basic gaming machine, the screen to play it on, and a GPU upgrade. If you consider anyone gaming will most likely already have a PC you could have a 4 player LAN of your own for less than the cost of a PS3 and controllers, and these will play every game from the mid 80s on up to most games short of Crysis. Seriously if they can't afford $120 then gaming is too expensive a hobby for them anyway. How much cheaper can you get?
But in those cases you are dealing with serious capital expenses where what i'm talking about at most would add a dime to the BOM. The Hollywood presses already know how to do BD, they'll still be selling the discs as primarily BD but this would give them a new market simply by re-encoding the movie once to WebM or Theora and having that on the flip side.
Again it seems like a trivial thing to add that would give value to Nintendo customers (like how you could include the Dark Knight or a Batman documentary on the flipside of Batmann:AA) give retailers a reason to reserve extra shelf space for the Wii U (since it could sell movies and games) and give Hollywood a second console with which to further sales of BD by using a "back door" and having WiiMovie on the flipside of BD discs.
So I don't see a downside here. it would cost Nintendo practically nothing,hell I bet it wouldn't be hard to write a WebM accelerator for the HD4xxx series, give people one more feature to sell your machines, its a win/win. And as I said Google would probably be more than happy to hand them a free license to WebM, would probably be more than willing to write the accelerator and player as well for free to boost the codec, so in terms of BOM you are talking about pennies at most and in all likelihood Nintendo could get this feature for $0.
So even if your argument was correct and eventually it fails as a movie format, if it costs Nintendo zipola so what? It is still one more bullet point to help sell your console to retailers and customers and in a three way race all the extra bullet points you can get is of a good.
But then why not just license someone else's codec for dirt cheap or free, like WebM or Theora? Hell if the thing sells Wii numbers Hollywood WILL put out movie discs for it, maybe a double sided with BD on one and "WiiMovie" on the other. Hell I'm sure Google would give them WebM for free to get the boost and it just seems like a waste to have all that space and no way to play video.
I do like how their chip will be two generations behind, as the HD4850s go for like $60 so that means we PC gamers will still be able to game on the cheap. That is the nice thing IMHO about the consoles now, they last so long and it takes so long for the R&D that we PC gamers will be enjoying dirt cheap gaming for a long time to come. I know my customers like I can build them sub $450 HTPCs that play nice on their 1080p sets with lots of purty, so keep it up Nintendo, Sony, and MSFT!
But compared to the current gen and especially the Wii this thing ought to be a monster but then of course the question becomes "Will anybody make serious games for the Wii?" since Nintendo has been courting the casual gamer crowd for so long. I just don't picture the loyal Nintendo fans really caring that much about Crysis, it just isn't a Nintendo style game experience.
Ya know, you really should give the guy credit. I mean i never thought anyone would actually invent a food product where cooking one's neighbors would actually seem more appealing, but he did it! If given the choice rather than eat shitburgers i think I'd be cooking my neighbor up with some fava beans and a nice chianti.I don't think even old Hannibal would find a shitburger something he could stomach.
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Actually it was "Hope & Change" as in "I damned sure Hope nobody notices I didn't Change a damned thing!". I do hope this has been a valuable lesson boys and girls, that trying to change a corrupt system from within the system doesn't work as you are playing in their arena, with their rules, and thanks to Citizens United they can bribe all they want to.
Expecting any slogan by ANY politician in this corrupt system to be worth even as much as the word of your average used car salesman is simply folly. But don't worry the endless money printing will fail, the dollar WILL collapse, and then the smart rich will re-enact the fall of Saigon as they run for the choppers to escape, the stupid ones will be up against the wall. The only question is what will come after, and sadly i'm betting we get our own crazy Austrian or Uncle Joe. It really wouldn't be hard to blame it on foreigners, and if we did like the crazy Austrian only replacing Poland with South America the war will bring plenty of jobs and resources that the worthless dollar won't buy.
Look up on Wikileaks (if it is still legal to even view it) about how we were covering up for a weapons company that was giving 9 year old boys as party favors to seal a deal in Afghanistan and the SAME company had done the SAME thing in Kosovo a decade before with 11 year old girls and we were STILL hiring them!
I'm sorry but if selling little kids as fucktoys just to seal a deal ain't corrupt enough for ya I don't know what is. The money and power have become so concentrated at the top frankly they don't give a shit what they do as long as the final outcome is even a few percentage more profits for them.
Anyone who think voting will actually change a damned thing obviously haven't been paying attention these past few decades or they would notice even with the country about to default on its debts raising the historically low taxes on the top 1% isn't even talked about seriously, as that would be biting the hand bribing them. We may be a little more subtle about our vicious evil, and mainly use brown people to subject this evil upon, but evil is evil and this government is about as evil as one can get without actually rolling the tanks.
Well if they are in Bumfuckistan nobody is gonna care if we just kill the pricks then, are they? These guys are scum, they cause billions in damages and lost hours, as a friend in the state crime lab has told me some are even using their infections to sell CP and not have it on their personal machines. these are true scum of the earth and frankly shouldn't be treated any nicer than we treat the mob or any other criminal org.
So take them out. If the country refuses to do shit, well there are plenty of groups like Blackwater that are happy to do dirty jobs for a fee. follow the money, find these rats in their holes and take them out. I bet a few high profile "actions" on a few of these scum might make them think twice about how much protection they can get by being in bumfuckistan. Let me put it this way: Would we put up with this shit if a country was spreading this much destruction and misery using non cyber means? Hell even the worst terrorist countries don't cause as much monetary damage as a single one of these fast spreading worms!
That is actually quite simple, you can "for non commercial use" clause as well as having a separate license for icons and other graphics like what Mozilla has which gives them some degree of control over FF. Most average folks aren't gonna have the skill to "roll their own" while stripping out all icons and replacing them, and businesses won't want to risk BSAA.
Look nobody is saying suddenly start charging the same crazy prices that MSFT or Apple charges, but even having a pittance in predictable income coming in would frankly transform the FOSS landscape for the better. Imagine how much more polish and bug fixes The Document foundation would be able to do if they had just a $3 fee for every LO install? Or how nice Ubuntu would be if Canonical charged $10 a copy and used that money for developers and QA.
In the end as we have seen time and time again for anything more used that hobbyist code money is required, and for world class software several orders of magnitude more money is needed on top of that. The current beggar model of FOSS simply leaves it permanently underfunded while the competitors roll in the cash. This hurts FOSS not only with software development but in other ways. Imagine how much more protected from software patent trolls the FOSS world would be if Canonical and TDF would have been able to pull finances and buy out the Novell patent portfolio?
In the end lack of money hurts the cause, and as times get tough and more companies like Novell and sun disappear the problem will only get worse. Ideals don't put bread on your table, nor do they pay the bills. If FOSS wants to compete they are gonna need funds and the charity system simply won't give them the needed capital.
But everyone here seems to be missing the forest for the large green things in the way. As a PC repairman that does this 6 days a week when you see an old worm that has been patched still running loose? Piracy, pure and simple.
You'd be amazed at how many machines I've seen with "XP SP2 Corporate Razr1911 Edition" or one of the variants. Hell more than half the machines on Craigslist are probably running pirated Windows, it is everywhere. Now since WGA will bite the person they sell the box to in the ass* the pirates turn off Windows Update. So what happens? The machine runs for years with NO patches and becomes a haven for malware like MyDoom. Hell I've seen XP Sp1 machines cross my desk as late as earlier this year, and most of the Razr1911 boxes are SP2. That leaves....what? Something like 1800+ patches missing the script kiddie can use against them?
Despite many here thinking I'm "pro MSFT" I actually lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of MSFT. Frankly killing the $50 Win 7 HP plan was stupid and caused increased piracy, because that $50 plan had many pirates going legit. I would have taken it one further and released Win 7 Starter as a $25 OEM disc for those whose machines can't handle Aero. This would have wiped out piracy overnight, while giving them a platform for the latest IE and WMP as well as giving them a chance to upsell to HP or Pro. The fact Ballmer killed it is just one more proof in my mind that he is incompetent and needs a good firing. When one has the dominant market switching the pirates over equals a HUGE gain and throwing away that chance was fucking dumb.
So no matter what some here say about "educating users" (never works) or hardening the OS, I'd say the vast majority of myDoom and its friends are running on hot Windows.
*-this includes Windows 7 BTW, the RTM OEM hack has started failing with SP1 and I've had to tell a few folks the reason they are getting that WGA warning is because....surprise! That PC they bought for $100 with a $150 OS doesn't have a legit key.
Uhh they helped them put people into categories for eugenics purposes just like they did here in the USA or did you forget that we were sterilizing undesirables and putting out books on how negroid and mongoloid features were proof they were inferior to white races?
As someone who actually got to hear about liberating one of the polish camps from my grandfather who was there frankly nobody believed the stories until we actually got to the first camps, which is why Patton and Ike made the scenes be recorded and shuffled the townspeople of the nearby villages through the camps to witness the horror. We thought the stories were just so much bullshit just as the stories being spread by Lord Haw Haw and Axis Sally, which had the Nazis slaughtering the Americans in huge numbers while kicking the Russian ass.
So while hindsight is 20/20 most people at the time thought it would be used for sterilization (not nice either, but what we in the USA were doing) not for systemic slaughter. Sadly there are no true good guys with clean hands in that war, you had the Russians and the rape of Berlin as well as mass slaughter of German POWs, the rape of Nanking by the japs as well as experimenting on prisoners (which we let them get away with in return for the data) and you had the USA doing terror bombings as well as two atomics on a country that frankly had had it and was no longer able to put up any real defense.
Despite all the "America Fuck yeah!" attached to that war the simple fact is total war is a brutal thing but we were a little more naive back then and as my grandfather said "If I wouldn't have seen the cattle cars with my own eyes I would have called you a liar." because until they got to the camps they just hadn't seen any indication that the truth wasn't they had sent the Jews east, which is what everyone believed at the time.
Hell look at how many mainstream churches and leaders in the late 40s through early 60s were finding bible passages and any other excuse on why "them niggers need to be kept in their place"? if you dig back far enough in ANY large business you are gonna find something distasteful or even monstrous, because frankly times have changed by leaps and bounds in the last 100 years.
People forget that Nazi eugenics? Came from right here in the USA. We were sterilizing undesirables long before Hitler had the thought cross his mind, and publishing nice little books on how negroid and mongoloid features were an outward sign of an inferior race. These ideas didn't just magically pop up in Germany, nor did hatred for the Jews.
So maybe instead of rehashing some 70 year old info that frankly isn't gonna change a damned thing, would saying thank you to IBM for giving us a standard that to this day is affecting your life, really be so bad? Everything from the BIOS to the choice of CPU we owe to IBM and if it weren't for them opening up the 5150 all those years ago we might still have a giant proprietary mess on the desktop where you had to buy Compaq RAM to run in Compaq machines, and Dell printers wouldn't work on Acer desktops.
So frankly no matter what IBM did 70+ years ago (Henry Ford hated Jews too, should we put Ford out of business or bring it up whenever a new Mustang comes out?) on their happy 100th maybe we should just let them blow out the candles and sing happy birthday for once.
Well you see there is a "problem" with the theory espoused by TFA. you see those examples they posted? Were only competing with the original whereas Libreoffice (I swear can they pick ANY worse names for FOSS projects? liberoffice, which is what I've heard the majority call it? What's next Goatse email clinet?) has to compete with two well funded office suites, that is of course MS Office and iWork.
The problem as I see it, and I'd argue this is a failure of the "free as in beer" model in general, is that you are dealing with a massively complex monolithic piece of code going on 15 years old, of which there are problem 30 guys at most intimately familiar with the code and they were being paid by Sun or Novell. Well Sun is DOA, Novell go bye bye, so who is gonna pay for these developers? Answer: No one. Oh I'm sure they may have a fund drive or two, which will maybe let them hang onto half of the original teams for 6 months, but after that they are SOL. Meanwhile both MSFT and Apple will be sinking big bux into R&D and spit and polish making Libreoffice look worse and buggier as time goes on.
Sorry to be a downer but maybe its time to finally face the fact that while free as in freedom should be kept free as in beer should be thrown in the dustbin of history? Like it or not to have world class software requires world class developers, it requires QA and bug testers, top notch GUI designers and focus groups and plenty of spit and polish. All of those things cost serious $$$$ that free as in beer simply doesn't bring in. Basically most of FOSS is running on the tin cup begging model and while they may bring in a few dollars (still a pittance) in good times in a dead economy like now they simply won't get enough to do much more than keep the lights on. Hell look at how many bugs on any big project like OO.o have been open for years, and that was with the thing partially bankrolled!
Like it or not if FOSS in general and Linux in particular is to be able to compete on even footing with the big three of Apple, Google, and MSFT then it is gonna take significant capital to do so and free as in beer simply ensures that capital isn't there. It is like putting your HS football team against the Broncos. It doesn't matter how plucky or full of team spirit your HS football team is, the extra advantage brought on by extra resources will simply give too big of an edge to the team with money. Hell look at the company that everyone holds up as a "success" Red Hat: Did you know over a third of the web servers out there are running NOT RHEL but CentOS, an OS cooked up by a company that USED to pay Red hat for use of their OS but decided they'd rather not give RH a dime while still having RH's product?
So in the end it doesn't matter if LO or OO "wins" as in the end they'll both lose for lack of funding. By 2015 you'll have all these killer new features as well as changes to the formatting on the other two office suites, they'll be new OSes to run them on, and the entire time LO will simply fall farther and farther behind until it is looked at like one of those Amiga clones that gets an update committed once a year just to keep from being listed DOA. All the changes they are committing now were cooked up by Novell employees and they'll be getting pink slips if they haven't already. i just don't see how long term FOSS is supposed to compete with a beggar model of funding, I really don't. What are they gonna do, tell the developers they can squat with RMS at MIT? You can't pay the bills or feed the fam on ideals folks.
The BIG difference is that currently browsers ONLY use high level code, and what WebGL will do is give bare metal access to the WWW. You honestly don't see the problem? The entire reason why GPUs are able to crank out the truly insane number of IPS that they are able to now is because they are running at ring 0 right there deep in the kernel.
Your basic graphics calls being done by web browsers today simply aren't getting anywhere close to bare metal, at most they may call on DXVA for flash and even with sandboxing look how often flash has pwned machines. With ANY 3D graphics framework you are talking running at almost a DOS level of bare metal since the OS basically hands everything to the GPU with implicit trust. Without this GPUs would be so slow as to be pointless compared to the CPU, to keep those large pipes fed there is simply NO way to do real sanity checks or sandboxing. Just look at how large the pipes are on the average GPU (hell my $60 HD4850 has a 256bit pipeline and GDDR 3, and that is slow compared to the 256bit GDDR 5 pipelines in the latest Radeons) and you honestly think you can do any real security checks and not have it choke and stall and end up twiddling its thumbs?
The entire point of DX and GL is to make everything fast and smooth. Fast and smooth is not even on the same planet as secure and well programmed. Look at the logs of any machine with decent GPUs you'll find most bugs can be traced back to graphics drivers, and that is with clean legit code running on them. Do you honestly think with malware writers purposely trying to overflow the buffers they won't make the whole thing fall down?
And as a final note I'd like to point out the dead elephant in the room nobody has yet mentioned...the firmware. nearly every chip nowadays comes with the ability to flash firmware, so that bugs can be fixed and features added or subtracted. No imagine what a malware writer could do with that! Hell forget the malware writers, imagine the trolls! you got trolls now that will paste links to foul and sometime illegal shit just to cause someone to have a bad day, imagine what "fun" they'd have with the ability to destroy someone's GPU?
I'm telling you whether you like MSFT or not doesn't matter, having bare metal access to hardware by the WWW is a BAD idea with a capital B!
While this is true to be fair the ones doing business with the Nazis were the German branch and from what I understand in Hitler's Germany you did what you were told or enjoy your nice trip to the concentration camp. His regime weren't real tolerant of being told no, just look at how the German commanders captured (and secretly recorded0 by the Brits were all in agreement that attacking Russia was a majorly BAD idea, but none had the guts to walk up to the Fuhrer and tell him that.
As for TFA, frankly he is full of shit. Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore? Of course not because IBM PC compatible is the standard PERIOD. Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.
As someone who lived through that time allow me to say thank you IBM, thank you for the 5150 and for being stupid enough to publish specs for everything back then which made building add ons easy. today it would be proprietary as hell and innovation would be right out the window, but thanks to IBM we don't have to throw everything out when we want to upgrade for performance. Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, nothing talked to each other, the drives for A wouldn't work on B, hell even computers by the same company often had incompatible peripherals. As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20 frankly it was a royal PITA.
Now thanks to IBM you can buy AMD, Intel or Via, add more RAM or even a new box from a different OEM, it really doesn't matter as it all "just works". Thanks to the hardware being open we were able to route around the douches, like Compaq and their "special RAM", and now it doesn't matter what hardware or even OS you get, your printer still plugs in, you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots, it all is basically compatible. And frankly that is a GOOD thing. Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX, to where we could easily repair or upgrade that would be heaven. Sadly it looks like proprietary in a box will stay in mobile land, which means designed for the dump since third parties can't make cheap parts. Damned shame but thank you IBM for at least giving us one platform that is easy to deal with.
I don't think the problem will be the code so much as the wildly varying hardware which it will run on. Nvidia is currently selling from the 6200 to Fermi, AMD has from the 2900-the latest 6xxx in the channel, and I haven't kept up with Intel but i'm sure they got plenty of chips as well, and that don't include all the chips not currently sold which may or may not have the power to run WebGL.
So how in the hell would you lock it down, when you are dealing with tons of drivers (most folks don't update GPU drivers) and tons of chips, with huge variance in implementation? Unless you lock it down to where it only runs on a tiny subset (and even then malware writers would write code that bypasses this check) which would kinda kill the whole point of this I honestly just don't see anyway to have any real security with this. Hell Nvidia and AMD has released...what...50 drivers between them just in the past couple of years? And there is some pretty huge differences in how a 6200 handles things VS say an HD4650 or the latest Fermi chip.
So I just don't see how it is possible, not without slowing it down so much with browser checks that you would be better off just using the CPU. it isn't like x86 where pretty much everything runs identical, we are talking a ton of chips with a ton of differences with drivers all over the place. GPUs work well now because the user is only running games which he/she bought from legit sources, and like the Carmack quote above GFX isn't exactly a hotbed of security focus in the first place.
Whether you want to say MSFT has an agenda or not I think the results would be the same, WebGL equals major pwnage.
Oh please! Can you and the other fanbois be any more full of shit? Lets look at the facts, shall we? What is currently the most buggy driver on ANY system by a LARGE margin...hmmm? Why that would be the graphics drivers by a mile. So what does OpenGL do? Why it allows untrusted third party code to run on the buggiest drivers and NOBODY here sees that as a problem?
The ONLY reason machines aren't getting pwned by the graphics cards is because currently the ONLY things running on them are legitimate code written by game designers and adding sanity checks or any kind of security to graphics drivers would slow the living shit out of them so that's right out. Do you REALLY want the entire web to be able to run any code they want on that nice fast processor with plenty of RAM for loading exploits and with no real security protecting it? Because if you honestly believe that OpenGL wouldn't be a malware writers paradise I have a bridge you might be interested in.
MSFT has already made developers shit bricks by going HTML V5, which will probably cause the slow death of SL and .Net, at least on the client side, so your theory doesn't hold weight. But after finally getting security right with Windows 7 (only 4 per 1000 infected vs 14 per 1000 infected with XP IIRC) they sure as hell don't want to hand the keys to the kingdom over to the WWW. Hell considering how much JavaScript malware is out there you don't think giving malware writers their own processor and RAM wouldn't be exploited out the ass? Please!
Personally i'm hoping Nvidia buys out Via and then we could easily see two with this design (AMD and Nvidia) VS Intel going traditional CPU. According to TFA AMD plans to keep this design open and is happy to cross license, and I'm sure AMD and Nvidia have plenty of cross licensing deals already. Intel is doing its damnedest to cut off Nvidia from access to their arch and AMD really doesn't need Nvidia with the Radeon chips, so that leaves Nvidia the odd man out.
So personally I'm hoping Nvidia just jumps in and buys out Via. The new Nano chips look pretty nice, especially with the built in crypto which would be great for servers when combined with Fermi, and Intel wouldn't say shit without risking antitust smacking them down like it did MSFT. They have been hit with one fine too many by the EU so I have a feeling if they said shit they could get some seriously nasty antitrust dropped upon them.
So to me the question is what is Nvidia gonna do. AMD and Intel adding APUs means the low end is gone to them, thanks to Intel their chipset business is DOA, and discrete GPUs will only get them so far. So in my mind there is really only two outcomes for them, either buy Via and give us a three way race, or slowly bleed until they end up bought by Intel. Let us just hope its the former rather than the later, as i'd hate to see Intel rewarded for their douchebaggery against Nvidia.
Uhhh...didn't read TFA, did you MR AC? It says plainly that in cases where there is a dedicated GPU the integrated will take over the physics and leave the dGPU to push the graphics. Think of it as the biggest baddest FPU ever created, sure it'll do graphics, and if all your friends wans to do is play WoW it'll work fine for that, but it isn't gonna stomp some GDDR 5 800 stream processor beast.
But the nice thing about this design is unlike today all those IGPs won't just be turned off if you have a real card, it'll be doing physics and other number crunching thus making your monster GPU even more insanely powerful because it isn't having to do both graphics and physics anymore. Frankly from the sounds of it it will be pretty sweet, just give it about 2 years for everything to get integrated which will be right about the time I'll be ready to move this AMD quad into the background and build me a new box. Go AMD!
Frankly I really don't see how much better GPUs can get picture wise myself. Hell my HD4850 which my GF got me for my BDay cranks the living hell out of the purty, so much I have to be careful not to be distracted by the purty and get my ass blown off! And maybe it is different with CUDA but the only thing I've seen come out for Streams is a video transcoder that frankly doesn't give you as good a result as a plain Jane CPU only transcode, and the time savings isn't worth the picture hit.
So while I'm sure this will make programmers happy I really don't see how it will make much of a difference to Joe user. Hell even the sub $150 GPUs that are the biggest market have so much purty being thrown on the screen it is truly insane, I never thought I'd see the day that human faces and movements would get THAT realistic!
And finally there is that bloated stinking dead elephant in the room no one mentions, I'm of course talking about the craptastic consoles that everyone is writing the games for. While i like the fact that the vast majority of games will run native resolution with lots of bling even on my 3 generations old HD4850, I'll be the first to admit PCs aren't the main target market anymore. Hell the new Nintendo is gonna have the HD4xxx series, which like mine is already three generations behind and it ain't come out yet!
So I honestly don't see how all this extra goodness is gonna make much of a diff. The developers write to the consoles first, the consoles don't have these features, therefor nobody writes to them. Hell look at how few DX10 and DX11 games are out, simply because the consoles are DX9. If the other consoles follow Nintendo then we'll be seeing DX10 in late 2012, so maybe this cutting edge stuff will get used by the majority of games around 2022, when you can pick up these chips at a yard sale for $5. Depressing, but that is life.
You'll probably laugh at what i tell my customers when they need a really tough password for important sites: flip over your keyboard or look behind your monitor. The serial numbers on plenty of everyday devices around your house make for some pretty tough passwords that aren't tied to anything personally about you like in TFA, and these devices will be with them for years if not forever.
I personally like the serial numbers on my musical equipment since I never get rid of my basses and if I ever forget its as easy as popping open the case. Makes for an easy source for large password with letters/numbers/upper/lower without being something obvious. I'd personally rather them do that than what sadly I've found way too many people use, which is their SS number.
That is why I tell my customers to have a "bullshit" email address and password for sites they really don't give a crap about. Every damned site nowadays wants details to let you do anything, so I tell them to have a spam dump email (I personally use my Gmail as their excellent spam filters mean if someone actually sends me something worth reading to my spam dump I still see it) and a BS password they only use for crap sites.
Seriously who cares if they get the bullshit info, or spams some spam dump email address? Join the crowd, have fun. If someone manages to "hack" some forum I occasionally BS on when I'm bored? nothing of value was lost. Cooking up complex passwords to guard worthless crap is like putting laser tripwire alarm systems to guard my garbage can. You want my old packing material and empty milk jugs? Help thyself, try not to make a mess.
Uhhh AMD64 was released in late 2003 and XP x64 (aka Server 2K3 X64) was released in Apr 2005 so I'd say a year and a half to jump from 32 to 64 bits really isn't a "long time".
As for TFA Oracle can plainly see that This chip is no more! It has ceased to be! 'Its expired and gone to meet Its maker! Its a stiff! Bereft of life, It rests in peace! If Intel hadn't nailed It to the motherboard 'It'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Its VLIW processes are now 'istory! 'Its off the twig! Its kicked the bucket, Its shuffled off Its central processing coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-PROCESSOR!
Even if that is the case why go with a shitastic 8Gb of flash instead of a HDD? Aren't HDDs cheap as dirt and just as plentiful? Considering how many complaints they got from people having to delete and redownload games they bought for lack of storage on the Wii this seems like a serious 'WTF?" moment in console design. WTF are they thinking?
They could have put in an 160Gb 2.5 inch and given the customer plenty of room and thus plenty of reasons to buy games from their online market. This is a seriously bonehead move IMHO. The price of HDDs especially at Nintendo economies of scale just make sticking with a lousy 8Gb of flash a real head scratcher.
Actually if you read up on what actually happened at Kent you'll find interviews with a guy that was working for Hoover's COINTEPRO that fired his gun at the guard and while he didn't hit them, either by being a shit shot or on purpose, this had the desired effect.
You really should read up on COINTELPRO it is some truly scary "Alice through the looking glass" shadow government shit. Basically anybody that didn't toe the party line, went "yay war!" and down with commies, oh and black had better stay in their place, was labeled as "subversive" and could have all kinds of nasty things happen to them, including the execution of a Black Panther, an American citizen on American soil protested being treated badly. truly scary shit. And just because they were college kids didn't protect them in the eyes of Hoover, if anything he saw colleges as "left wing pinkos" and had them stirring up even more shit trying to find an excuse for letting loose the nasty.
And the most scary part is it is still going on today right here in America, with cops planted in protests for G-8 with orders to start trouble (so as to give the cops a visible excuse) and cops having the brass balls after political conventions to have shirts printed up with them as Duke Nukem style pigcops cracking skulls (that was Denver i believe) right out in the open. Kent wasn't an accident, a tragic disaster, it was designed to quell dissent and it backfired when people felt not for the forces of order but that iconic image of the girl screaming over a body. Today that camera would be smashed and the one taking the picture arrested, and all protests would be kept far away from prying eyes in "official protest zones" where their planted rabble rouser could get things going nicely with nobody saying a word. Scary shit huh? Welcome to Amerika my friend, where the dollar is sacred and power is God.
Must be nice to have choices where you are Mr Perens, where i'm at the choices are "rich corporate suckup in a blue suit" or "rich corporate suckup in a slightly darker blue suit". Every D we have elected turned out to be a DINO, every R turned out to be the same as the D. Where is the choice there? Even on the local level being on the meth highway your choices are "Guy already bought by the narcos" or "guy that will be bought by the narcos 3 minutes after election" again where is the choice?
The simple fact is that Citizens United put the final nail in the coffin that was elections Mr Perens, not that they had really been functional for several decades. With a two party system the answer is to simply buy off both sides, it ensures whomever wins follows the corporate line. We have reps leaving their post to take cushy jobs from the companies whom they gave big favorable deals, you have Obama sticking RIAA lawyers into jobs where they'll be deciding what happens to file share defendants. How's that hope and change working out for ya?
Thinking you can solve anything from within the system, unless your name is Gates or Dell or you have your own lobbyists, is like your HS football team thinking they can win against the Broncos, with the refs paid to ignore any Denver penalties just to make sure. To quote the late Bill Hicks" I believe the puppet on the left share my beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has my interests at heat hey wait a minute, there is one guy working both puppets!" Sadly the man has been gone 20 years and his words are even more true today.
Uhhh...did you miss the buy it on CL for $100 option? I see all day early dual cores with 2Gb of RAM and a 15-19 inch fp going for right at $100. Watch the sales and refurbs you can get a PCIe GPU for dirt cheap (newegg has an Nvidia 8400 for $3 after $15 MIR) or if you want your buds to have more power I have seen plenty of refurb HD4830s for less than $40 with no MIR.
So you are talking about $120 or so and the gas to go pick it up. that gives you an Internet and basic gaming machine, the screen to play it on, and a GPU upgrade. If you consider anyone gaming will most likely already have a PC you could have a 4 player LAN of your own for less than the cost of a PS3 and controllers, and these will play every game from the mid 80s on up to most games short of Crysis. Seriously if they can't afford $120 then gaming is too expensive a hobby for them anyway. How much cheaper can you get?
But in those cases you are dealing with serious capital expenses where what i'm talking about at most would add a dime to the BOM. The Hollywood presses already know how to do BD, they'll still be selling the discs as primarily BD but this would give them a new market simply by re-encoding the movie once to WebM or Theora and having that on the flip side.
Again it seems like a trivial thing to add that would give value to Nintendo customers (like how you could include the Dark Knight or a Batman documentary on the flipside of Batmann:AA) give retailers a reason to reserve extra shelf space for the Wii U (since it could sell movies and games) and give Hollywood a second console with which to further sales of BD by using a "back door" and having WiiMovie on the flipside of BD discs.
So I don't see a downside here. it would cost Nintendo practically nothing,hell I bet it wouldn't be hard to write a WebM accelerator for the HD4xxx series, give people one more feature to sell your machines, its a win/win. And as I said Google would probably be more than happy to hand them a free license to WebM, would probably be more than willing to write the accelerator and player as well for free to boost the codec, so in terms of BOM you are talking about pennies at most and in all likelihood Nintendo could get this feature for $0.
So even if your argument was correct and eventually it fails as a movie format, if it costs Nintendo zipola so what? It is still one more bullet point to help sell your console to retailers and customers and in a three way race all the extra bullet points you can get is of a good.
But then why not just license someone else's codec for dirt cheap or free, like WebM or Theora? Hell if the thing sells Wii numbers Hollywood WILL put out movie discs for it, maybe a double sided with BD on one and "WiiMovie" on the other. Hell I'm sure Google would give them WebM for free to get the boost and it just seems like a waste to have all that space and no way to play video.
I do like how their chip will be two generations behind, as the HD4850s go for like $60 so that means we PC gamers will still be able to game on the cheap. That is the nice thing IMHO about the consoles now, they last so long and it takes so long for the R&D that we PC gamers will be enjoying dirt cheap gaming for a long time to come. I know my customers like I can build them sub $450 HTPCs that play nice on their 1080p sets with lots of purty, so keep it up Nintendo, Sony, and MSFT!
But compared to the current gen and especially the Wii this thing ought to be a monster but then of course the question becomes "Will anybody make serious games for the Wii?" since Nintendo has been courting the casual gamer crowd for so long. I just don't picture the loyal Nintendo fans really caring that much about Crysis, it just isn't a Nintendo style game experience.
Ya know, you really should give the guy credit. I mean i never thought anyone would actually invent a food product where cooking one's neighbors would actually seem more appealing, but he did it! If given the choice rather than eat shitburgers i think I'd be cooking my neighbor up with some fava beans and a nice chianti.I don't think even old Hannibal would find a shitburger something he could stomach.