But to be fair a lot of the "GTA style" games isn't about actually doing the missions but just seriously fucking off. One of my absolute favorite games is Just Cause II, which if you have never played it brings "just fucking off" to the height of crazy. You have this crazy hookshot grapple hook thing that lets you do crazy shit like tie a bad guy to the bumper of a chopper and use him for a fricking wrecking ball, tie two cars together while going 100 miles an hour on top of a third, totally crazy shit. Frankly I quit giving a shit about the story after like the third mission because I was having too much fun going nuts to really care.
If anyone here watches Zero Punctuation old Yahtzee pointed something out that is really wrong that I hadn't even noticed before. He said basically "we are awash in a sea of brown chest high walls surrounded by thick neck marine types" and frankly he is dead on! Too many of these developers seem to forget that ultimately its a game and games are supposed to be fun not a dragging your ass around while following the numbers snoozefest. I swear if I see one more WWII shooter or one more game featuring thick neck marines with convenient chest high walls I'm gonna scream!
Ultimately it wouldn't be so bad if games ripped off one another if they just did like Just Cause II and remembered that games are supposed to be fun. If they would have made the game in ANY way realistic it would have been the uber suck. After playing Stalker I already know how I would do in a real war, very very badly. So how about make it fun! Give me AI that is a challenge without obvious cheating, like how EA shooters will have grunts that can instantly spot you even when you are behind cover and snipe you from 1000 yards away with a pistol while taking more rounds than the T-800, give me something to shoot other than the same damned weapons everybody else has, like the sneaky crossbow in NOLF II, or even the "angry kitty" bomb! Who cares if that "would never happen in real life" because it ISN'T REAL LIFE it is a fricking game!
You don't have to give us five legged kittens riding purple ponies devs, just quit rehashing the same old shit, okay?
I think you missed the entire point of TFA, which was an entire year before they announced their "feature" this guy had ALREADY submitted an app which they shamelessly ripped off for their OS, right down to the logo.
Now this is one time when I can honestly say I hope some land shark of an attorney really tears into them and costs them shitloads of money. I mean seriously, how much would it have cost just to buy the guy out? Not much I wager, instead they rip off the little guy and give him nothing but the finger. Well i hope that attitude costs them a nice boatload of money and this guy gets to sit back in the sun sipping his beer and lighting cigars with $100 bills by the time this is over. Talk about sorry!
Now you seem to know a hell of a lot more about this than I do, since I mainly deal with SOHOs, SMBs, and home users, so maybe you can fill in the blanks. How exactly would one use this if one were at home?
One of the nice things about dynamic addressing is the "face in the crowd' problem it gives the *.A.As, since with a large regional ISP like mine you are literally talking about half a million people, a good 90% of which are a single power cycle away from a new address and which (at least in my area) gets a new address weekly whether you power cycle or not. That means you are literally talking about mounds of records to go through to figure out who had address X at time Y which is why ISPs refuse to process more than a dozen or two a month which keeps these massive fishing expeditions by the *.A.A and the total scum they hire (if you didn't hear Media Defender or whatever they call themselves now was actually seeding CP on P2P sites to give the NY DA people to bust) from just grabbing huge chunks of people for their little extortion racket.
Now so far all I've seen when it comes to IP V6 is the ISP gives you a set chunk and that's it, you're stuck with those addresses. Now while using some bits from the Mac or whatever might help to obfuscate the IP address a little bit, I just don't see how it won't be trivial for the *.A.A types to get the ISPs just to hand over a list. After all you will be having the same IP address regardless since there really isn't any point to dynamic addressing when you are talking trillions of addresses.
While I'll admit I haven't been able to completely wrap my head around IP V6 yet (sadly there is no "IP V6 for dummies" and my area is still strictly IP V4 so no hands on) I'm gonna assume there is some sort of prefix that gives you the general area/ISP of the address, yes? Wouldn't it then be trivial to use that to find the exact person, since without dynamic addressing they won't have those mounds of data to go through? After all you still have to have an address that can be routed from A to B so wouldn't it be trivial to backtrace? After all it is only the huge amounts of data that make it a PITA for the *.A.As now and that would be gone if everyone had static.
While I like the idea of having my own block to do with as I will frankly after watching some of the horseshit like PROTECT IP (BTW if you haven't signed the petition against it you really should, the petition apparently scares the *.A.A enough they are trying to claim now we must not exist so all of those like me that signed have been sending emails to congress to show we most certainly DO exist) and the crazy laws being supported by our government frankly anything that makes it even a tiny bit easier for those in power to monitor you scares the hell out of me.
Then add in the fact the eggheads behind IP V6 refused to make any kind of backwards compatibility (stupid) and then refused to even entertain the thought that there might actually be decent uses for NAT that some might want, like systems management and having machines only outside accessible under certain conditions (arrogant) really makes me wonder if they have thought this thing through. After all if all governments were fair and just and listened to the people we wouldn't even be having this conversation yet we are. Sadly it is gonna end up with our freedoms not in OUR hands, but in the hands of the techs, for it is ONLY them who can bake in enough countermeasures and obfuscation to keep our last free resource from turning into an Orwellian nightmare. And sorry if that sounds a little melodramatic, but I have a friend that works forensics in the state crime lab and you'd be surprised how quickly one of those guys can ruin someone, and with PROTECT IP giving them even MORE power I really don't like the looks of things ATM.
Don't forget this is also the state where they passed a "don't say gay" bill, like not saying the word will magically make gay teens straight. Pretty sad considering all the press about that 13 year old who committed suicide over being bullied for being gay. I did enjoy Star Trek's George Takei and his take on it, if you haven't seen it his advice is to just say Takei. I think I may buy one of the shirts the rainbow Star trek logo is kinda cute.
As someone who live in AR allow me to say, keep it up TN! You may us look less backward all the time! While you are passing crazy laws like this and the don't say gay bill we've gotten too large and very nice gay communities in our two largest cities, we have a nice symphony and plays in the park, if you haven't come down it is actually quite nice here now. So keep it up TN, you make us look better every day. And Go Hogs!
While I'm an atheist I have an old friend from way back that is a Baptist (NOT Southern Baptists, the nice kind that helps the poor kind) that says if you want a good description of America look up "The Whore of Babylon" who flaunts her wealth and thinks she is above all while everyone hates her. Considering how we have done nothing but stir up shit and kill millions since WWII while bending over backwards for any multinational that waves a little green our way sadly I think the description fits.
Again as much as I miss the man I'm glad my granddad who spent 4 years in the trenches against the Nazis isn't here to see what a blatant whore the country he suffered so much for has become. Truly sad that we defeated the communists only to become just as corrupt and lied to as they ever were.
I can tell you how to make bitrot disappear forever if you'd like. This version of Win 7 I'm typing this on has been running since RTM, that is nearly 3 years, and my XP nettop has been running with the same install since Oct 04 and ZERO bitrot. Now there is a free way and a pay way, I use the pay way but the free way works as well, you just have to keep up with it. what you want is either Tuneup Utilities (the pay way and most excellent) or WinUtilites Free (The free way, you have to run it manually) because what I've found is that "bitrot" is caused by programs shitting on the registry which over time causes it to fill with invalid entries that screw shit up. With Tuneup (You can find a free license for 09 on several sites, they give it hoping you'll try it and buy the new version, worth every penny BTW) it fixes the mess caused by bad programs every 3 days with NO intervention on your part, just leave it alone and watch bitrot disappear.
As for 7 not being good, can I have some of what you're smoking please? Win 7 is fricking awesome compared to XP! Surperfetch, libraries, excellent built in search, breadcrumbs, jumplists, OS level hardware acceleration, it is better and more intuitive in EVERY way. Hell my 68 year old dad got impatient and decided to install it himself rather than waiting on me. With XP it would have equaled a broken infected mess, with 7? I get there and the ONLY thing I had to do was install Firefox for him, that's it. It downloaded and install ALL the drivers, set up everything for him (the hardest question it asked was "are you at home or at work?" for the network settings) and even pointed him at first boot to a page with free and pay AV software so he wouldn't be vulnerable.
It is bloody brilliant and why Win 8 going from the excellent Win 7 UI to Win Phone frankly sucks. I only hope that like their driver rules they force ISVs to have an interface for both the WinPhone UI and the Win 7 UI, otherwise I'll be spending another year tossing Win 8 for 7 like I did tossing Vista for XP. But frankly while I use XP on a couple of machines like my nettop where it really makes no sense spending $100+ on an HP license frankly running XP is just painful after running 7.
I may end up breaking down and buying a 7 license for my nettop so I won't have to touch XP anymore, just go ahead and buy the family pack when I upgrade my nephew's box in a month or two with a new board so it'll support PCIe since I'll be getting his 7600GT AGP card out of the deal. Because after running 7 frankly WinXP looks like some creaky old crap which it really is. 7 is just head and shoulders better in every way, better security (4 per 1000 infections for 7 VS 18 per 1000 on XP IIRC) better UI, better performance with better management tools, just better in every measurable way. If you haven't switched you really should. Just give it a week to learn the new UI like breadcrumbs and jumplists and you'll never want to go back.
Dude Win 7 is fricking awesome and if you haven't gotten it yet you don't know what you are missing! That is why the WinPhone Win 8 hurts so bad, it isn't like they are going from suck Vista to Suck Win 8 here. Breadcrumbs, libraries, excellent file management and search capability, built in performance monitoring and testing, hardware testing, hardware video acceleration, it all "just works" which is what makes their Win 8 "We can be as hip as Apple, yes we can, we really really can! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" Ballmer mess really bites.
So considering Win 7 will bu supported until 2020 (this is supposedly for Pro and up, but since the patches for Pro work on Home just like with XP, and Home is still getting patches I'd say that isn't a problem) your best bet is to get Win 7 and then sit back and watch Win 8 die hard. Then after a good bitch slapping like they got with Vista hopefully Ballmer will get the boot and Win 9 will be done by the office guys (which is who came in and did 7 IIRC) and it will be awesome again.
Nice thing about Windows though is support lasts long enough you can just skip the shitty every other crapfests and just go from good version to good version. wish I would have done that instead of bashing my head on the desk for nearly a year trying to get Vista not to suck.
Uhhh...doesn't Apple still have a webkit browser called Safari that runs on XP just fine? And I could understand it if we are talking about a game, simply because DirectX 10 and 11 don't run officially (I've actually run DX10 on XP with a hack, ran pretty good actually) but this is fricking backup software we are talking about! They could use C,.NET, Java, Silverlight, hell there are plenty of languages that work just fine on anything from Win2K on up.
What bothers me about this kind of crap is we are talking about 400 million machines at last count running XP. When you figure in the cost of the license plus the cost of hardware upgrades that is 400 million perfectly working machines that are gonna end up polluting a landfill because everyone wants to jump on the "latest and greatest" bandwagon and that is just stupid and wasteful.
If MSFT would have pulled their heads out their asses and kept the $50 HP upgrade I would have seen it, as then for less than $100 most of those machines could have ran 7 without Aero. But at $100+ a license it is just too high for the majority of late model AMD Athlons and Intel P4s everywhere, and sadly Torvalds hasn't quit being a douchebag and allowed a hardware ABI so Linux isn't a choice as your ass better be ready for a shitload of forums hunts when his latest kernel fucking breaks drivers, which seems to be every couple of months. Believe me I know, as a retailer I've tried over and over to get the damned thing to update on bog standard hardware only to watch it break over and over AND over.
So I'd say it would be different if we were talking some old P3s with 128Mb of RAM here, but as a retailer I can tell you the average XP machine that crosses my desk is a 2.2GHz-3.2GHz P4 with 1Gb of RAM. for surfing and basic office tasks that is MORE than enough power and frankly there shouldn't be ANY reason why that machine couldn't get another 5-7 years of basic use, especially with a cheap AGP card allowing hardware video acceleration. To me it just seems wasteful to start tying things to 7 before XP is EOL, and what about all those people that bought XP netbooks and PCs because Vista was shit? Should they all throw out their machines too?
Wasteful, just wasteful and if MSFT doesn't bring back the HP upgrade I hope they see piracy go through the roof, demanding $100+ after they have been supporting your products for years is just dickishness on their part.
They know that they have shitloads of money while the traitors in congress are giving tax breaks to their corporate buddies to send our jobs overseas? Look up "GE tax break outsourcing" to really make yourself sick, here is a CEO bragging, and I quote "We're not sending the low skills jobs, we are sending the good jobs because that's where the money is now" while he cashes his big giant tax rebate check. Well no shit that is where the money is, that is because you and your douchebag traitor friends have shipped more than 21,000 FACTORIES overseas since 2001. Considering we are at war I don't know why these douchebags aren't lined up and shot for the traitors that they are.
As for TFA enjoy it while you can China. These same douchebags you're making money on now will be more than happy to fuck you after they are done poisoning your land and exploiting everything they can, then they'll leave you with a shitload of superfund sites to deal with while they quietly cash out and find the next country to exploit.
Isn't that just sad? I'm only glad my grandfather who fought in WWII for our freedom isn't here to see what a blatant sellout our country has become. Hell you can't even watch the news without the obvious spin so thick it makes you think of that Airplane joke about glorious new tractor factories. How sad is it we survived the fall of communism only to become just as corrupt and manipulated as they were.
But when your choices are "Rich corrupt multinational blowing asshole in a dark blue suit" or "Rich corrupt multinational blowing asshole in a slightly darker blue suit" what can we expect? We The People was removed from the equation a LONG time ago. Sadly it is like the late great Carlin foretold "And it is never gonna get any better, things are never gonna change, because that is how the owners of this country want it."
Uh huh. Question: Has ANYONE actually implemented that, or made it a required part of the standard? Because I can't find that anywwhere in your link, nor has any bunch I've seen offering IP V6 offered anything like that. It sounds like a nice idea for sometime in the future but I don't see any routers or other devices I can actually buy or use allowing this, do you? So far everything I've seen they just hand you a block and you are on your own pal.
Now at least currently with the larger regional ISPs you can have a new dynamic address sometimes two or three times a week (In my own case a simple power cycle will get me a new address assigned) and frankly with all the nasty things coming out about governments everywhere I really don't want to change out a harder to trace setup for an easier to trace one, do you?
And folks can waste their mod points all the want but in case they ain't noticed we are getting laws like PROTECT IP rammed down our throat that will get you time in PMITA prison just because some troll company paid by the record companies (and in the case of media defender actually supplying CP on the side to give busts to the NY DA) says it was you. This is NOT a nice time we are living in folks, frankly it is the tech guys VS the jackboots. I just want to make sure the tech side comes out on top, don't you?
Uhhh...dude? Installing SL is "clicky clicky, next next next". hell you don't even need to know how to fricking read as long as you know which button is next, hell my grandma could install SL.
That said if you need further proof that Ballmer needs a good firing just look at the killing of VB and the flailing between.NET/ SL and HTML V5. MSFT went from "developers developers developers" to just blindly flinging poo at the wall and praying something sticks. VB was a Godsend for the SMBs and SOHOs, as it gave them an easy to use tool for VERY simple jobs like making a GUI frontend to a DB, and for that it was bloody brilliant. What would take a single line in VB know takes three in.NET and know it looks like they'll bone.NET and SL in favor of whatever is the flavor of the day.
Add onto this the serious case of the "me too!" that MSFT has had since Ballmer took over (I mean seriously have you SEEN Windows 8? They took the wonderful GUI of Win 7 and replaced it with a fricking WinPhone! WTF? Do they think they are Apple?) and you see a once mighty company that was great for business, developers, and consumers, and have become this big drunken flailing elephant desperately trying to be "hip". Kinda sad really. You can see why Apple and Google are kicking their asses now, as they at least stick to their core strengths and build upon them (consumer goods and the web respectively) whereas MSFT is burning their long term gains for short term attempts at being fresh again. Stupid, lame, pointless, a waste.
I have a feeling just like I did with Vista when Win 8 comes out I'll be booked solid for a good year and a half doing nothing but wiping Win 8 to "upgrade" the machines to Win 7. Sigh. I had hopes that once, JUST once, that MSFT would actually put out two good OSes in a row. I guess that is just a pipe dream as long as Steve "We can be as cool as Apple!" Ballmer is still in the big chair.
For those that haven't gotten to read it here is the article by Taibbi I assume you're talking about, and anyone who reads it will be hard pressed to see Friedman as anything BUT an absolute moron.
As for TFA it isn't that we've reached "peak people" it is that the pigs destroy faster than we can create and by HUGE margins! Look at how many things now are "designed for the dump" so some multinational can force you to buy another rather than affordably fixing the one you have. Look at how much wealth is controlled by the top 3% and how much their hoarding tips the scales. These groups have NO problem with poisoning the water table with frakking, with making huge chunks of land uninhabitable with dumped toxins, whatever it takes to get them another 3% profits they are ALL for.
Frankly most of these problems could be solved if we had real laws with real consequences for causing disasters and massive environmental destruction, but instead these scum will just quietly cash out and leave the superfund sites to the rest of humanity to clean up. if we took a dozen of the top polluters and had their CxOs executed on national TV I bet they wouldn't be so quick to fuck everyone else for another percentage of profit, what do you think?
Question: Has anybody figured out how to keep the fact that IPV6 will give everyone a unique and easy to trace address from making the switch into a *.A.A and big brother government wet dream? Because frankly I kinda like how dynamic addressing makes for a PITA to *.A.As and big brothers everywhere. Even though I'm not doing anything I sure as hell don't want some daily report handed to some pencil pusher, nor do I want to explain that the BT I was downloading was the latest ultimate driver DVD to some *.A.A monkey who thinks I have nothing better to do than download his latest Titney Spears 'epic".
So frankly if the eggheads haven't figured out this basic problem (which considering their answer to NAT was "you don't need it" frankly I don't trust them to wipe their noses) then personally i hope it takes a hell of a long time to switch. Let the third world countries that were late to the party have IPV6 while we that already have addresses use something like 6to4 to talk to them. Because honestly I really really REALLY don't trust my government not to sell us out right now, nor do i trust them not to label someone a terrorist for say putting up a mirror of Wikileaks. I know that with determination you can still be hunted down, but lets not make it any easier for them, shall we?
Legal Shmegal, the bigger question is...does anybody care? The Indian working the phone for MSFT does he care? he don't care he just wants to get you off the phone ASAP to keep his metrics high, which is why I have NEVER had a problem activating Windows. Does MSFT care? not according to Ballmer, which I'm sorry I can't find a transcript but I saw an interview shortly after he became CEO where he said "I don't care about the kid that puts a pirated copy of XP on his PC. What I DO care about is that boatload of fake XP boxes from Malaysia that I myself can't tell from the real thing."
Now since he was saying he don't care about hot copies for personal use I seriously doubt he is gonna give a shit about a license he has already been paid for when you are not using that license on two machines, which is what happens when you upgrade an XP box to 7 and use the XP as a VM. If you haven't tried it frankly it is pretty slick, as VMWare and several other VMs lets you take the XP with ALL the apps that you already have set the way you like and with your settings and turn THAT into a VM. So much nicer than XP mode IMHO.
But I stick to what I said on firmware. I LIKE that I was able to get a nice HD4850 for my BDay from my GF because it was much more affordable at the time than the HD4870, my customers LIKE that they can have me get and install an HD4830 for a third off the HD4850 I've got and less than half of what an HD4870 costs and they LIKE the idea that when that card gets long in the tooth and they are ready for a new one they can have me flash it for the hell of it and maybe get another 6 months or give it to a family member.
To me it is no different than the awesome AMD cores trick. Thanks to them not blowing traces next time I have a few extra bucks I can pop this AMD 7550 dual into an unlocker board and maybe have a triple or a quad for free. You'd be surprised how many customers I've got that are quite happy about that, as I was able to build them an affordable dual or triple that was within their budget and then just flip a switch and suddenly they have gone from a dual to a triple or a quad. By using firmware to differentiate between cards it lets us have many price points so that anyone can get away from IGPs to a discrete that will give them a better experience, and it gives those of us that are brave or are willing to take a gamble a chance to get a free 30-45% speed boost just by flashing. That sounds like a win/win to me, no matter what the guys here say.
Uhhh...why EXACTLY would you throw their stuff on TPB when it is dirt cheap and they are nice to you if they did indeed follow the GOG model?
I have bought probably close to 50 games from GOG since I first heard about them. Could I have pirated those games? Of course. So why did I buy them from GOG? Because not only is GOG cheap but they give you extras such as having all their games tested to work on x64 (you'd be surprised how many games even a couple of years old don't run well on x64) and along with that which is VERY important to me since I've been on x64 since late 05 they give me, in no particular order: soundtracks, avatars, guidebooks, keyboard layouts, calendars, behind the scenes, expansion packs pre integrated, and a VERY nice forum full of helpful folks that have everything from mods to walkthroughs to howtos, all in an easy to use format.
This of course doesn't even bring up the fact that nearly all their games are less than $10, most under $7, I can download them as many times as I want (not that I would ever need to thanks to the next part), are trivial to backup onto a USB HDD (just a single.exe or on large games an.exe and several.part files, simple) and of course have NO DRM, don't phone home, don't bitch if I want to have them installed on more than one of my machines, has a nice Adobe Air based download manager, in short everything "just works" and at a killer low price point.
I think you'll find pirates can usually be broken down into two camps: 1.- those that can't afford the crazy prices they are asking for the product, which is a classical reason why a black market springs up like piracy, and 2.-those that are tired of being fucked by DRM. I have often bought games off of Amazon only to leave the pretty box unopened and use the pirate version. Why? Because the shitty fucking DRM don't work, and in fact can seriously fuck to the point of reinstall x64 OSes. While I don't I can see plenty getting fed up and just not bothering with the buying part when the pirate version is the better product by a HUGE margin and for an example of how buyers get fucked by DRM watch this video (warning language NSFW, but if you watch it you'll know why he is POed).
But I think you'd find if eBooks followed the GOG model piracy would be almost non existent. I mean why bother? If it is cheaper, faster, and you get all kinds of incentives to buy, why bother pirating? In fact I'd say my PC game purchases have easily tripled since finding out about them, ironically while going on forums trying to get my PITA legal copy of Redneck Rampage to run on XP X64. I was so frustrated trying to get DOSBox and all the other hoops I had to jump through to work I gladly rebought only to find it all"just worked" while giving me all kinds of extras like the expansions and the cuss packs. After that I was hooked and I'm sure if we saw the same on ebooks there would be tons of folks like me lined up with their CC out.
But instead they'll try to assrape you on the price to prop up the dead tree version and most folks will do something MUCH worse than piracy....they simply won't bother at all. And sorry about the length but as someone who has had to deal with the messes DRM can cause, such as drives thrown in PIO mode or computers stuttering and glitching because the DRM crap code was throwing conflicts, I personally wish the garbage would DIAF.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you have your ass kissing all mixed up! you see it is the democrats that blow the big media cock while it is the republicans that blow the defense contractors and multinationals! See how that works, and notice how neither side works for you anymore? That is what happens when even a congressional seat in a flyover state can easily cost 40 million plus. But if you'll look at your history your big media "forever minus a single day" copyright fuckfest are nearly always hosted by the Ds, it is just the Rs don't really give a shit either way, unless you could convince them a copyright could be used for abortions or something.
As for TFA? Good luck pal! The SCOTUS has been bought and paid for for several years now, and I doubt they are gonna throw away all that delicious bribe money now. Hell did anybody even do a damned thing about Thomas cashing all those checks through his wife? Nope, so while i wish him all the luck in the world I personally think he has about as much of a chance as getting lemonade with extra ice in hell.
I'd say OSNews is pretty nice, but since it has a small community you won't get 300 comment threads there (but no shit eater and nigger trolls for the most part, gotta look on the bright side) and if you only want to browse the headlines so as to avoid troll articles in the future then Daily Rotation lets you customize the headlines towards your interests. I have mine set for science, new tech gear, Windows gadgets and freeware, and the basic headlines.
Well if we are adding to the list of trolls we shouldn't have linked to/. for ANY reason, can I add a couple? If I never see another "article" by Steven J Nichols and Paul Thurott I would be quite happy, thanks ever so. Nichols and Thurott are two sides of the same coin, Nichols the "Will (insert topic of the day) (kill/crush/destroy) (Linux/FOSS/The GPL)?" and Thurott is such a shill he actually had the brass troll balls to say Vista was great, stable AND low resource. Right Paul, because i forgot what fun it was to have to reboot a dozen times a day because the &*&^$^$ OS keeps forgetting how to access shared folders. I also loved the "feature" where I couldn't download while listening to music without everything slowing to a crawl. that was nice.
So while Florian is a pretty irritating little shit (and no I won't RTFA since his name is on it, I'm sure its his usual troll bait trying to get page views) frankly he is little league compared to pro trolls like Thurott and Nichols. Hell I would rather sit down to one of Twitter's rants on how it is all a MSFT conspiracy, at least THOSE were entertaining and unpredictable, he had a knack for going six degrees and being able to blame ANYTHING on MSFT. Thurott, Nichols, and Florian are just the same tired old shilling and baiting for page views, same shit different day. Yawn.
Uh AC dude? This is a country that has used panty vending machines and urinals that look like anime characters. How could they NOT have whack job politicians?
As for TFA...well...what did anyone expect? Wasn't that like the WORST tsunami and earthquake recorded there in like 100 years? You can only design structures that will last to a reasonable degree. I mean does anyone think if we had a quake the size of the great San Francisco quake close to one of our reactors shit wouldn't get broke? Hell what do you think the damage would be if a tsunami that size hit chemical row in the gulf?
The simple fact is Japan built reactors in the first place because they don't have the resources like piles of coal and natural gas to work with. While solar and wind are nice ideas with the current tech they simply can't take the ever increasing demands for power. Where Japan fucked up was not admitting right off the bat how bad things were and calling on the international community for help. But sometimes you just have to deal with the unpredictable and without nuclear I don't see how they are gonna keep the lights on in Tokyo, there just aren't enough reliable high output alternatives to take the place of nuclear ATM.
And this boys and girls is a PERFECT example of Greater Internet Theory and why one shouldn't allow ACs. At the very least make them spend the whole 2 minutes to make an account like everyone else as you'd be surprised how short of an attention span and how great the need for instant gratification is in the average troll.
Now as for Win 8 from what I've read the "WinPhone" style interface will NOT be the default UNLESS the device is touch enabled, such as tablets and convertibles. Is your PC touch enabled? No? Then who bloody cares about the touch screen. Hell even if you DO have a touch enabled devices it is a single checkbox away from having the standard Win 7 interface, just as you can go back to a classic style that looks as fugly and gray as Win98.
Now as for Macs? They're toast, sorry fanboys. Steve is notorious for liking small lines with VERY few devices, and it wouldn't be the first time he has killed a line while it was still profitable. After all IIRC the Newton was actually selling decently if not spectacularly when old Steve pulled the plug. The simple fact is the margins on iOS are huge, the margins on Mac? Not so much.
If you look back at the history of Apple and Jobs (history repeats you know) you'll see that Jobs never really was "general purpose" guy, that was Woz. Jobs like to carve out niches and OWN them, even when he was doing computers at NeXT he was aiming for specific niches such as college R&D. With Mac he doesn't really control the platform, after all anybody can just install software without needing the app store, he has limited control over the direction of the hardware since Intel isn't gonna bend over backwards to design chips for Jobs when the PC market is so much larger, for a good example look at how the BS with Nvidia getting fucked caused Steve to have to stick with older chips for WAAAY longer than he would have liked because the Intel IGP is shit, and with the iOS platform he controls it all, from the chip design to what software goes on it.
Whether you like it or not (I personally like having more control and ability to fiddle, but I can see how many would like the whole "it just works never fiddle with anything" route) Steve has always been about control, going all the way to that Apple that you had to drop to reseat the chips because Steve didn't like the sound of fans (Apple III?) and thanks to ARM Steve has complete control of the whole smash, top to bottom and everything in between. So my guess is you'll see a slow phase out of the Mac line, starting with the low end consumer models and working their way up. Their ass raping prices on the Mac Pro lines means I doubt they are moving many on that front anyway, so that line will probably just be quietly killed.
Like it or not Apple isn't really a computer company anymore, they are a consumer device manufacturer. They make several orders of magnitude more on the iPod and iPad lines than they EVER did on Mac and while the iOS devices have been selling like mad and has all the buzz last numbers I saw had OSX devices growing at a much smaller rate. Steve has never been about small, when it comes to desire for control and dominance of a market he could teach old Billy a thing or two, and with his "less is more" policy I just don't see OSX fitting into his long term "ruling the consumer market the way Windows rules the desktop" plans.
Don't play the others so I can't comment, other than Doom 3 lasted about 45 minutes on my PC as I got tired of "walk into a room, take three steps, turn to shoot booger in the closet, lather rinse repeat" but if the total gaming goodness that is HL is "milking" a franchise? Then PLEASE milk that shit, milk it more! Between the excellent mechanics, story, and mods, I'd say that is a perfect example of how to do gaming RIGHT.
That would be like saying they shouldn't have made The Dark Knight because someone had previously made Grease II. Just because some companies can't do anything but hit the repeat texture button doesn't mean there aren't plenty of killers out there.
But if you'll read my post the "milking" I was talking about was the HARDWARE, which lets be honest friend, on the consoles it is some seriously old and stinky shite. The X360 is what? An X1900 GPU? Hell the hand me down card in my mama's PC is better than that! All these add ons like Kinect is nothing but milking that crappy old hardware for all it is worth and frankly with the economy in the shitter I don't blame them. the upside for us PC gamers is it lets us have kick ass framerates with $60 GPUs, and spend our money on other upgrades like the Samsung multi-Tb drives I'm snatching up while they are cheap! So I still say milk that shit MSFT and Sony, I like having killer framerates for cheap!
I'm sure I'll probably get hate for pointing this out, but it is also why you can get card X for cheaper than card Y, just as with Win 7 Starter (which is actually a damned nice low resource OS and I wish they'd sell it as an OEM) through Ultimate having the same code just with different parts turned off. This lets the manufacturers sell the same device with different feature sets thus making it so those of us who don't need Y-Z can only pay for X.
For an example on the hardware side the AMD HD4830 and HD4850. The HD4850 was originally a $200 part (now $80-100) and the HD4830 a $150 (now $60) and the ONLY difference between the two was the firmware, which switched off some of the stream processors in the HD4830. This is good for the consumer as they have different price points while not losing the core features such as hardware transcoding and DirectX 10.1, and it is good for the manufacturer as they don't have to spend money (and thus raise prices) by blowing circuits in hardware but instead simply switching them off with a bit of firmware code.
So I can see why manufacturers wouldn't want to hand out firmware and it is for the same reason why there is more than one version of Windows. Frankly I've sold many an HD4830 to people that didn't need the extra stream processors, just as myself and most of my customers use Win 7 HP because we don't need the features (the only one I cared about was XP Mode, and that was easily enough replaced with VMWare Player for free) that come with the higher price points of Windows.
Frankly it would suck if manufacturers had to raise prices across the board to pay for eFuses or burning traces just as it would suck if everyone had to shell out for Ultimate. so I'd say that not handing out the firmware is a GOOD thing, that is unless you think there should only be a "one size fits all" hardware model that is. If so you might want to check out the fruit company as I hear they are quite good at that.
Hey now we should give MSFT credit! After all Halo singlehandedly helps keep drunken fratboys safely contained on the X360. I know that when I play online games after a Halo release the amount of "nigger fag" teabagger bullshit drops WAY down, thus showing Halo is doing its job and keeping the fratboys away from the rest of us, yay!
And personally i hope MSFT and Sony milk the living shit out of the X360 and PS3 respectively, thank you VERY much! I LIKE being able to play all the newest games on a $60 HD4850 thank you! I LIKE that I get a great framerate with my 2 year old AMD quad, I LIKE that it allows me to spend my money on new multi-TB drives instead of buying a new CPU and GPU yearly like I did in the late 90s/ early 00s, I LIKE that I can sell my customers $500 PCs that let them game and enjoy HD 1080p on their new widescreen TVs!
So while I know that after the PS4 and X720 come out it won't be 6 months before PCs stomp them again, if it even takes that long, with all the games being optimized for the consoles it seems to take about a year to a year and a half before their shitty unoptimized code runs well on PCs, simply because their code is usually buggy shite. So the longer MSFT and Sony milk the current gen the longer guys like me can enjoy nice HD gaming on the cheap while having oodles of games to choose from that all run great from GOG, Steam, and Amazon. So go MSFT, and take Sony with you! Milk that shit!
Re:Kevin Bacon has played many roles in his career
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Dude did you even SEE any of the other X-Men movies? Halle SUCKED! Not just a regular 'phone it in" kind of lame suck either, we are talking "aww crap here I was starting to enjoy it and then here comes Halle sucking the enjoyment out the screen" kinda suckage. And WTF has she done worth a shit besides Monster's Ball? I think we can safely say unless her next film turns out to be the best fucking thing since the Godfather that MB was more of a one off than anything.
So frankly I don't give a shit how pretty an actress is (although frankly I think there are a hell of a lot finer females in Hollywood than Berry, Theron or Hannigan for example) but when she walks onto the screen and the scene just kinda starts stinking like a silent but deadly released upon the audience I say pretty or not her ass needs to go stat!
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But to be fair a lot of the "GTA style" games isn't about actually doing the missions but just seriously fucking off. One of my absolute favorite games is Just Cause II, which if you have never played it brings "just fucking off" to the height of crazy. You have this crazy hookshot grapple hook thing that lets you do crazy shit like tie a bad guy to the bumper of a chopper and use him for a fricking wrecking ball, tie two cars together while going 100 miles an hour on top of a third, totally crazy shit. Frankly I quit giving a shit about the story after like the third mission because I was having too much fun going nuts to really care.
If anyone here watches Zero Punctuation old Yahtzee pointed something out that is really wrong that I hadn't even noticed before. He said basically "we are awash in a sea of brown chest high walls surrounded by thick neck marine types" and frankly he is dead on! Too many of these developers seem to forget that ultimately its a game and games are supposed to be fun not a dragging your ass around while following the numbers snoozefest. I swear if I see one more WWII shooter or one more game featuring thick neck marines with convenient chest high walls I'm gonna scream!
Ultimately it wouldn't be so bad if games ripped off one another if they just did like Just Cause II and remembered that games are supposed to be fun. If they would have made the game in ANY way realistic it would have been the uber suck. After playing Stalker I already know how I would do in a real war, very very badly. So how about make it fun! Give me AI that is a challenge without obvious cheating, like how EA shooters will have grunts that can instantly spot you even when you are behind cover and snipe you from 1000 yards away with a pistol while taking more rounds than the T-800, give me something to shoot other than the same damned weapons everybody else has, like the sneaky crossbow in NOLF II, or even the "angry kitty" bomb! Who cares if that "would never happen in real life" because it ISN'T REAL LIFE it is a fricking game!
You don't have to give us five legged kittens riding purple ponies devs, just quit rehashing the same old shit, okay?
I think you missed the entire point of TFA, which was an entire year before they announced their "feature" this guy had ALREADY submitted an app which they shamelessly ripped off for their OS, right down to the logo.
Now this is one time when I can honestly say I hope some land shark of an attorney really tears into them and costs them shitloads of money. I mean seriously, how much would it have cost just to buy the guy out? Not much I wager, instead they rip off the little guy and give him nothing but the finger. Well i hope that attitude costs them a nice boatload of money and this guy gets to sit back in the sun sipping his beer and lighting cigars with $100 bills by the time this is over. Talk about sorry!
Now you seem to know a hell of a lot more about this than I do, since I mainly deal with SOHOs, SMBs, and home users, so maybe you can fill in the blanks. How exactly would one use this if one were at home?
One of the nice things about dynamic addressing is the "face in the crowd' problem it gives the *.A.As, since with a large regional ISP like mine you are literally talking about half a million people, a good 90% of which are a single power cycle away from a new address and which (at least in my area) gets a new address weekly whether you power cycle or not. That means you are literally talking about mounds of records to go through to figure out who had address X at time Y which is why ISPs refuse to process more than a dozen or two a month which keeps these massive fishing expeditions by the *.A.A and the total scum they hire (if you didn't hear Media Defender or whatever they call themselves now was actually seeding CP on P2P sites to give the NY DA people to bust) from just grabbing huge chunks of people for their little extortion racket.
Now so far all I've seen when it comes to IP V6 is the ISP gives you a set chunk and that's it, you're stuck with those addresses. Now while using some bits from the Mac or whatever might help to obfuscate the IP address a little bit, I just don't see how it won't be trivial for the *.A.A types to get the ISPs just to hand over a list. After all you will be having the same IP address regardless since there really isn't any point to dynamic addressing when you are talking trillions of addresses.
While I'll admit I haven't been able to completely wrap my head around IP V6 yet (sadly there is no "IP V6 for dummies" and my area is still strictly IP V4 so no hands on) I'm gonna assume there is some sort of prefix that gives you the general area/ISP of the address, yes? Wouldn't it then be trivial to use that to find the exact person, since without dynamic addressing they won't have those mounds of data to go through? After all you still have to have an address that can be routed from A to B so wouldn't it be trivial to backtrace? After all it is only the huge amounts of data that make it a PITA for the *.A.As now and that would be gone if everyone had static.
While I like the idea of having my own block to do with as I will frankly after watching some of the horseshit like PROTECT IP (BTW if you haven't signed the petition against it you really should, the petition apparently scares the *.A.A enough they are trying to claim now we must not exist so all of those like me that signed have been sending emails to congress to show we most certainly DO exist) and the crazy laws being supported by our government frankly anything that makes it even a tiny bit easier for those in power to monitor you scares the hell out of me.
Then add in the fact the eggheads behind IP V6 refused to make any kind of backwards compatibility (stupid) and then refused to even entertain the thought that there might actually be decent uses for NAT that some might want, like systems management and having machines only outside accessible under certain conditions (arrogant) really makes me wonder if they have thought this thing through. After all if all governments were fair and just and listened to the people we wouldn't even be having this conversation yet we are. Sadly it is gonna end up with our freedoms not in OUR hands, but in the hands of the techs, for it is ONLY them who can bake in enough countermeasures and obfuscation to keep our last free resource from turning into an Orwellian nightmare. And sorry if that sounds a little melodramatic, but I have a friend that works forensics in the state crime lab and you'd be surprised how quickly one of those guys can ruin someone, and with PROTECT IP giving them even MORE power I really don't like the looks of things ATM.
Don't forget this is also the state where they passed a "don't say gay" bill, like not saying the word will magically make gay teens straight. Pretty sad considering all the press about that 13 year old who committed suicide over being bullied for being gay. I did enjoy Star Trek's George Takei and his take on it, if you haven't seen it his advice is to just say Takei. I think I may buy one of the shirts the rainbow Star trek logo is kinda cute.
As someone who live in AR allow me to say, keep it up TN! You may us look less backward all the time! While you are passing crazy laws like this and the don't say gay bill we've gotten too large and very nice gay communities in our two largest cities, we have a nice symphony and plays in the park, if you haven't come down it is actually quite nice here now. So keep it up TN, you make us look better every day. And Go Hogs!
While I'm an atheist I have an old friend from way back that is a Baptist (NOT Southern Baptists, the nice kind that helps the poor kind) that says if you want a good description of America look up "The Whore of Babylon" who flaunts her wealth and thinks she is above all while everyone hates her. Considering how we have done nothing but stir up shit and kill millions since WWII while bending over backwards for any multinational that waves a little green our way sadly I think the description fits.
Again as much as I miss the man I'm glad my granddad who spent 4 years in the trenches against the Nazis isn't here to see what a blatant whore the country he suffered so much for has become. Truly sad that we defeated the communists only to become just as corrupt and lied to as they ever were.
I can tell you how to make bitrot disappear forever if you'd like. This version of Win 7 I'm typing this on has been running since RTM, that is nearly 3 years, and my XP nettop has been running with the same install since Oct 04 and ZERO bitrot. Now there is a free way and a pay way, I use the pay way but the free way works as well, you just have to keep up with it. what you want is either Tuneup Utilities (the pay way and most excellent) or WinUtilites Free (The free way, you have to run it manually) because what I've found is that "bitrot" is caused by programs shitting on the registry which over time causes it to fill with invalid entries that screw shit up. With Tuneup (You can find a free license for 09 on several sites, they give it hoping you'll try it and buy the new version, worth every penny BTW) it fixes the mess caused by bad programs every 3 days with NO intervention on your part, just leave it alone and watch bitrot disappear.
As for 7 not being good, can I have some of what you're smoking please? Win 7 is fricking awesome compared to XP! Surperfetch, libraries, excellent built in search, breadcrumbs, jumplists, OS level hardware acceleration, it is better and more intuitive in EVERY way. Hell my 68 year old dad got impatient and decided to install it himself rather than waiting on me. With XP it would have equaled a broken infected mess, with 7? I get there and the ONLY thing I had to do was install Firefox for him, that's it. It downloaded and install ALL the drivers, set up everything for him (the hardest question it asked was "are you at home or at work?" for the network settings) and even pointed him at first boot to a page with free and pay AV software so he wouldn't be vulnerable.
It is bloody brilliant and why Win 8 going from the excellent Win 7 UI to Win Phone frankly sucks. I only hope that like their driver rules they force ISVs to have an interface for both the WinPhone UI and the Win 7 UI, otherwise I'll be spending another year tossing Win 8 for 7 like I did tossing Vista for XP. But frankly while I use XP on a couple of machines like my nettop where it really makes no sense spending $100+ on an HP license frankly running XP is just painful after running 7.
I may end up breaking down and buying a 7 license for my nettop so I won't have to touch XP anymore, just go ahead and buy the family pack when I upgrade my nephew's box in a month or two with a new board so it'll support PCIe since I'll be getting his 7600GT AGP card out of the deal. Because after running 7 frankly WinXP looks like some creaky old crap which it really is. 7 is just head and shoulders better in every way, better security (4 per 1000 infections for 7 VS 18 per 1000 on XP IIRC) better UI, better performance with better management tools, just better in every measurable way. If you haven't switched you really should. Just give it a week to learn the new UI like breadcrumbs and jumplists and you'll never want to go back.
Dude Win 7 is fricking awesome and if you haven't gotten it yet you don't know what you are missing! That is why the WinPhone Win 8 hurts so bad, it isn't like they are going from suck Vista to Suck Win 8 here. Breadcrumbs, libraries, excellent file management and search capability, built in performance monitoring and testing, hardware testing, hardware video acceleration, it all "just works" which is what makes their Win 8 "We can be as hip as Apple, yes we can, we really really can! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" Ballmer mess really bites.
So considering Win 7 will bu supported until 2020 (this is supposedly for Pro and up, but since the patches for Pro work on Home just like with XP, and Home is still getting patches I'd say that isn't a problem) your best bet is to get Win 7 and then sit back and watch Win 8 die hard. Then after a good bitch slapping like they got with Vista hopefully Ballmer will get the boot and Win 9 will be done by the office guys (which is who came in and did 7 IIRC) and it will be awesome again.
Nice thing about Windows though is support lasts long enough you can just skip the shitty every other crapfests and just go from good version to good version. wish I would have done that instead of bashing my head on the desk for nearly a year trying to get Vista not to suck.
Uhhh...doesn't Apple still have a webkit browser called Safari that runs on XP just fine? And I could understand it if we are talking about a game, simply because DirectX 10 and 11 don't run officially (I've actually run DX10 on XP with a hack, ran pretty good actually) but this is fricking backup software we are talking about! They could use C, .NET, Java, Silverlight, hell there are plenty of languages that work just fine on anything from Win2K on up.
What bothers me about this kind of crap is we are talking about 400 million machines at last count running XP. When you figure in the cost of the license plus the cost of hardware upgrades that is 400 million perfectly working machines that are gonna end up polluting a landfill because everyone wants to jump on the "latest and greatest" bandwagon and that is just stupid and wasteful.
If MSFT would have pulled their heads out their asses and kept the $50 HP upgrade I would have seen it, as then for less than $100 most of those machines could have ran 7 without Aero. But at $100+ a license it is just too high for the majority of late model AMD Athlons and Intel P4s everywhere, and sadly Torvalds hasn't quit being a douchebag and allowed a hardware ABI so Linux isn't a choice as your ass better be ready for a shitload of forums hunts when his latest kernel fucking breaks drivers, which seems to be every couple of months. Believe me I know, as a retailer I've tried over and over to get the damned thing to update on bog standard hardware only to watch it break over and over AND over.
So I'd say it would be different if we were talking some old P3s with 128Mb of RAM here, but as a retailer I can tell you the average XP machine that crosses my desk is a 2.2GHz-3.2GHz P4 with 1Gb of RAM. for surfing and basic office tasks that is MORE than enough power and frankly there shouldn't be ANY reason why that machine couldn't get another 5-7 years of basic use, especially with a cheap AGP card allowing hardware video acceleration. To me it just seems wasteful to start tying things to 7 before XP is EOL, and what about all those people that bought XP netbooks and PCs because Vista was shit? Should they all throw out their machines too?
Wasteful, just wasteful and if MSFT doesn't bring back the HP upgrade I hope they see piracy go through the roof, demanding $100+ after they have been supporting your products for years is just dickishness on their part.
They know that they have shitloads of money while the traitors in congress are giving tax breaks to their corporate buddies to send our jobs overseas? Look up "GE tax break outsourcing" to really make yourself sick, here is a CEO bragging, and I quote "We're not sending the low skills jobs, we are sending the good jobs because that's where the money is now" while he cashes his big giant tax rebate check. Well no shit that is where the money is, that is because you and your douchebag traitor friends have shipped more than 21,000 FACTORIES overseas since 2001. Considering we are at war I don't know why these douchebags aren't lined up and shot for the traitors that they are.
As for TFA enjoy it while you can China. These same douchebags you're making money on now will be more than happy to fuck you after they are done poisoning your land and exploiting everything they can, then they'll leave you with a shitload of superfund sites to deal with while they quietly cash out and find the next country to exploit.
Isn't that just sad? I'm only glad my grandfather who fought in WWII for our freedom isn't here to see what a blatant sellout our country has become. Hell you can't even watch the news without the obvious spin so thick it makes you think of that Airplane joke about glorious new tractor factories. How sad is it we survived the fall of communism only to become just as corrupt and manipulated as they were.
But when your choices are "Rich corrupt multinational blowing asshole in a dark blue suit" or "Rich corrupt multinational blowing asshole in a slightly darker blue suit" what can we expect? We The People was removed from the equation a LONG time ago. Sadly it is like the late great Carlin foretold "And it is never gonna get any better, things are never gonna change, because that is how the owners of this country want it."
Uh huh. Question: Has ANYONE actually implemented that, or made it a required part of the standard? Because I can't find that anywwhere in your link, nor has any bunch I've seen offering IP V6 offered anything like that. It sounds like a nice idea for sometime in the future but I don't see any routers or other devices I can actually buy or use allowing this, do you? So far everything I've seen they just hand you a block and you are on your own pal.
Now at least currently with the larger regional ISPs you can have a new dynamic address sometimes two or three times a week (In my own case a simple power cycle will get me a new address assigned) and frankly with all the nasty things coming out about governments everywhere I really don't want to change out a harder to trace setup for an easier to trace one, do you?
And folks can waste their mod points all the want but in case they ain't noticed we are getting laws like PROTECT IP rammed down our throat that will get you time in PMITA prison just because some troll company paid by the record companies (and in the case of media defender actually supplying CP on the side to give busts to the NY DA) says it was you. This is NOT a nice time we are living in folks, frankly it is the tech guys VS the jackboots. I just want to make sure the tech side comes out on top, don't you?
Uhhh...dude? Installing SL is "clicky clicky, next next next". hell you don't even need to know how to fricking read as long as you know which button is next, hell my grandma could install SL.
That said if you need further proof that Ballmer needs a good firing just look at the killing of VB and the flailing between .NET/ SL and HTML V5. MSFT went from "developers developers developers" to just blindly flinging poo at the wall and praying something sticks. VB was a Godsend for the SMBs and SOHOs, as it gave them an easy to use tool for VERY simple jobs like making a GUI frontend to a DB, and for that it was bloody brilliant. What would take a single line in VB know takes three in .NET and know it looks like they'll bone .NET and SL in favor of whatever is the flavor of the day.
Add onto this the serious case of the "me too!" that MSFT has had since Ballmer took over (I mean seriously have you SEEN Windows 8? They took the wonderful GUI of Win 7 and replaced it with a fricking WinPhone! WTF? Do they think they are Apple?) and you see a once mighty company that was great for business, developers, and consumers, and have become this big drunken flailing elephant desperately trying to be "hip". Kinda sad really. You can see why Apple and Google are kicking their asses now, as they at least stick to their core strengths and build upon them (consumer goods and the web respectively) whereas MSFT is burning their long term gains for short term attempts at being fresh again. Stupid, lame, pointless, a waste.
I have a feeling just like I did with Vista when Win 8 comes out I'll be booked solid for a good year and a half doing nothing but wiping Win 8 to "upgrade" the machines to Win 7. Sigh. I had hopes that once, JUST once, that MSFT would actually put out two good OSes in a row. I guess that is just a pipe dream as long as Steve "We can be as cool as Apple!" Ballmer is still in the big chair.
For those that haven't gotten to read it here is the article by Taibbi I assume you're talking about, and anyone who reads it will be hard pressed to see Friedman as anything BUT an absolute moron.
As for TFA it isn't that we've reached "peak people" it is that the pigs destroy faster than we can create and by HUGE margins! Look at how many things now are "designed for the dump" so some multinational can force you to buy another rather than affordably fixing the one you have. Look at how much wealth is controlled by the top 3% and how much their hoarding tips the scales. These groups have NO problem with poisoning the water table with frakking, with making huge chunks of land uninhabitable with dumped toxins, whatever it takes to get them another 3% profits they are ALL for.
Frankly most of these problems could be solved if we had real laws with real consequences for causing disasters and massive environmental destruction, but instead these scum will just quietly cash out and leave the superfund sites to the rest of humanity to clean up. if we took a dozen of the top polluters and had their CxOs executed on national TV I bet they wouldn't be so quick to fuck everyone else for another percentage of profit, what do you think?
Question: Has anybody figured out how to keep the fact that IPV6 will give everyone a unique and easy to trace address from making the switch into a *.A.A and big brother government wet dream? Because frankly I kinda like how dynamic addressing makes for a PITA to *.A.As and big brothers everywhere. Even though I'm not doing anything I sure as hell don't want some daily report handed to some pencil pusher, nor do I want to explain that the BT I was downloading was the latest ultimate driver DVD to some *.A.A monkey who thinks I have nothing better to do than download his latest Titney Spears 'epic".
So frankly if the eggheads haven't figured out this basic problem (which considering their answer to NAT was "you don't need it" frankly I don't trust them to wipe their noses) then personally i hope it takes a hell of a long time to switch. Let the third world countries that were late to the party have IPV6 while we that already have addresses use something like 6to4 to talk to them. Because honestly I really really REALLY don't trust my government not to sell us out right now, nor do i trust them not to label someone a terrorist for say putting up a mirror of Wikileaks. I know that with determination you can still be hunted down, but lets not make it any easier for them, shall we?
Legal Shmegal, the bigger question is...does anybody care? The Indian working the phone for MSFT does he care? he don't care he just wants to get you off the phone ASAP to keep his metrics high, which is why I have NEVER had a problem activating Windows. Does MSFT care? not according to Ballmer, which I'm sorry I can't find a transcript but I saw an interview shortly after he became CEO where he said "I don't care about the kid that puts a pirated copy of XP on his PC. What I DO care about is that boatload of fake XP boxes from Malaysia that I myself can't tell from the real thing."
Now since he was saying he don't care about hot copies for personal use I seriously doubt he is gonna give a shit about a license he has already been paid for when you are not using that license on two machines, which is what happens when you upgrade an XP box to 7 and use the XP as a VM. If you haven't tried it frankly it is pretty slick, as VMWare and several other VMs lets you take the XP with ALL the apps that you already have set the way you like and with your settings and turn THAT into a VM. So much nicer than XP mode IMHO.
But I stick to what I said on firmware. I LIKE that I was able to get a nice HD4850 for my BDay from my GF because it was much more affordable at the time than the HD4870, my customers LIKE that they can have me get and install an HD4830 for a third off the HD4850 I've got and less than half of what an HD4870 costs and they LIKE the idea that when that card gets long in the tooth and they are ready for a new one they can have me flash it for the hell of it and maybe get another 6 months or give it to a family member.
To me it is no different than the awesome AMD cores trick. Thanks to them not blowing traces next time I have a few extra bucks I can pop this AMD 7550 dual into an unlocker board and maybe have a triple or a quad for free. You'd be surprised how many customers I've got that are quite happy about that, as I was able to build them an affordable dual or triple that was within their budget and then just flip a switch and suddenly they have gone from a dual to a triple or a quad. By using firmware to differentiate between cards it lets us have many price points so that anyone can get away from IGPs to a discrete that will give them a better experience, and it gives those of us that are brave or are willing to take a gamble a chance to get a free 30-45% speed boost just by flashing. That sounds like a win/win to me, no matter what the guys here say.
Uhhh...why EXACTLY would you throw their stuff on TPB when it is dirt cheap and they are nice to you if they did indeed follow the GOG model?
I have bought probably close to 50 games from GOG since I first heard about them. Could I have pirated those games? Of course. So why did I buy them from GOG? Because not only is GOG cheap but they give you extras such as having all their games tested to work on x64 (you'd be surprised how many games even a couple of years old don't run well on x64) and along with that which is VERY important to me since I've been on x64 since late 05 they give me, in no particular order: soundtracks, avatars, guidebooks, keyboard layouts, calendars, behind the scenes, expansion packs pre integrated, and a VERY nice forum full of helpful folks that have everything from mods to walkthroughs to howtos, all in an easy to use format.
This of course doesn't even bring up the fact that nearly all their games are less than $10, most under $7, I can download them as many times as I want (not that I would ever need to thanks to the next part), are trivial to backup onto a USB HDD (just a single .exe or on large games an .exe and several .part files, simple) and of course have NO DRM, don't phone home, don't bitch if I want to have them installed on more than one of my machines, has a nice Adobe Air based download manager, in short everything "just works" and at a killer low price point.
I think you'll find pirates can usually be broken down into two camps: 1.- those that can't afford the crazy prices they are asking for the product, which is a classical reason why a black market springs up like piracy, and 2.-those that are tired of being fucked by DRM. I have often bought games off of Amazon only to leave the pretty box unopened and use the pirate version. Why? Because the shitty fucking DRM don't work, and in fact can seriously fuck to the point of reinstall x64 OSes. While I don't I can see plenty getting fed up and just not bothering with the buying part when the pirate version is the better product by a HUGE margin and for an example of how buyers get fucked by DRM watch this video (warning language NSFW, but if you watch it you'll know why he is POed) .
But I think you'd find if eBooks followed the GOG model piracy would be almost non existent. I mean why bother? If it is cheaper, faster, and you get all kinds of incentives to buy, why bother pirating? In fact I'd say my PC game purchases have easily tripled since finding out about them, ironically while going on forums trying to get my PITA legal copy of Redneck Rampage to run on XP X64. I was so frustrated trying to get DOSBox and all the other hoops I had to jump through to work I gladly rebought only to find it all"just worked" while giving me all kinds of extras like the expansions and the cuss packs. After that I was hooked and I'm sure if we saw the same on ebooks there would be tons of folks like me lined up with their CC out.
But instead they'll try to assrape you on the price to prop up the dead tree version and most folks will do something MUCH worse than piracy....they simply won't bother at all. And sorry about the length but as someone who has had to deal with the messes DRM can cause, such as drives thrown in PIO mode or computers stuttering and glitching because the DRM crap code was throwing conflicts, I personally wish the garbage would DIAF.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you have your ass kissing all mixed up! you see it is the democrats that blow the big media cock while it is the republicans that blow the defense contractors and multinationals! See how that works, and notice how neither side works for you anymore? That is what happens when even a congressional seat in a flyover state can easily cost 40 million plus. But if you'll look at your history your big media "forever minus a single day" copyright fuckfest are nearly always hosted by the Ds, it is just the Rs don't really give a shit either way, unless you could convince them a copyright could be used for abortions or something.
As for TFA? Good luck pal! The SCOTUS has been bought and paid for for several years now, and I doubt they are gonna throw away all that delicious bribe money now. Hell did anybody even do a damned thing about Thomas cashing all those checks through his wife? Nope, so while i wish him all the luck in the world I personally think he has about as much of a chance as getting lemonade with extra ice in hell.
I'd say OSNews is pretty nice, but since it has a small community you won't get 300 comment threads there (but no shit eater and nigger trolls for the most part, gotta look on the bright side) and if you only want to browse the headlines so as to avoid troll articles in the future then Daily Rotation lets you customize the headlines towards your interests. I have mine set for science, new tech gear, Windows gadgets and freeware, and the basic headlines.
Well if we are adding to the list of trolls we shouldn't have linked to /. for ANY reason, can I add a couple? If I never see another "article" by Steven J Nichols and Paul Thurott I would be quite happy, thanks ever so. Nichols and Thurott are two sides of the same coin, Nichols the "Will (insert topic of the day) (kill/crush/destroy) (Linux/FOSS/The GPL)?" and Thurott is such a shill he actually had the brass troll balls to say Vista was great, stable AND low resource. Right Paul, because i forgot what fun it was to have to reboot a dozen times a day because the &*&^$^$ OS keeps forgetting how to access shared folders. I also loved the "feature" where I couldn't download while listening to music without everything slowing to a crawl. that was nice.
So while Florian is a pretty irritating little shit (and no I won't RTFA since his name is on it, I'm sure its his usual troll bait trying to get page views) frankly he is little league compared to pro trolls like Thurott and Nichols. Hell I would rather sit down to one of Twitter's rants on how it is all a MSFT conspiracy, at least THOSE were entertaining and unpredictable, he had a knack for going six degrees and being able to blame ANYTHING on MSFT. Thurott, Nichols, and Florian are just the same tired old shilling and baiting for page views, same shit different day. Yawn.
Uh AC dude? This is a country that has used panty vending machines and urinals that look like anime characters. How could they NOT have whack job politicians?
As for TFA...well...what did anyone expect? Wasn't that like the WORST tsunami and earthquake recorded there in like 100 years? You can only design structures that will last to a reasonable degree. I mean does anyone think if we had a quake the size of the great San Francisco quake close to one of our reactors shit wouldn't get broke? Hell what do you think the damage would be if a tsunami that size hit chemical row in the gulf?
The simple fact is Japan built reactors in the first place because they don't have the resources like piles of coal and natural gas to work with. While solar and wind are nice ideas with the current tech they simply can't take the ever increasing demands for power. Where Japan fucked up was not admitting right off the bat how bad things were and calling on the international community for help. But sometimes you just have to deal with the unpredictable and without nuclear I don't see how they are gonna keep the lights on in Tokyo, there just aren't enough reliable high output alternatives to take the place of nuclear ATM.
And this boys and girls is a PERFECT example of Greater Internet Theory and why one shouldn't allow ACs. At the very least make them spend the whole 2 minutes to make an account like everyone else as you'd be surprised how short of an attention span and how great the need for instant gratification is in the average troll.
Now as for Win 8 from what I've read the "WinPhone" style interface will NOT be the default UNLESS the device is touch enabled, such as tablets and convertibles. Is your PC touch enabled? No? Then who bloody cares about the touch screen. Hell even if you DO have a touch enabled devices it is a single checkbox away from having the standard Win 7 interface, just as you can go back to a classic style that looks as fugly and gray as Win98.
Now as for Macs? They're toast, sorry fanboys. Steve is notorious for liking small lines with VERY few devices, and it wouldn't be the first time he has killed a line while it was still profitable. After all IIRC the Newton was actually selling decently if not spectacularly when old Steve pulled the plug. The simple fact is the margins on iOS are huge, the margins on Mac? Not so much.
If you look back at the history of Apple and Jobs (history repeats you know) you'll see that Jobs never really was "general purpose" guy, that was Woz. Jobs like to carve out niches and OWN them, even when he was doing computers at NeXT he was aiming for specific niches such as college R&D. With Mac he doesn't really control the platform, after all anybody can just install software without needing the app store, he has limited control over the direction of the hardware since Intel isn't gonna bend over backwards to design chips for Jobs when the PC market is so much larger, for a good example look at how the BS with Nvidia getting fucked caused Steve to have to stick with older chips for WAAAY longer than he would have liked because the Intel IGP is shit, and with the iOS platform he controls it all, from the chip design to what software goes on it.
Whether you like it or not (I personally like having more control and ability to fiddle, but I can see how many would like the whole "it just works never fiddle with anything" route) Steve has always been about control, going all the way to that Apple that you had to drop to reseat the chips because Steve didn't like the sound of fans (Apple III?) and thanks to ARM Steve has complete control of the whole smash, top to bottom and everything in between. So my guess is you'll see a slow phase out of the Mac line, starting with the low end consumer models and working their way up. Their ass raping prices on the Mac Pro lines means I doubt they are moving many on that front anyway, so that line will probably just be quietly killed.
Like it or not Apple isn't really a computer company anymore, they are a consumer device manufacturer. They make several orders of magnitude more on the iPod and iPad lines than they EVER did on Mac and while the iOS devices have been selling like mad and has all the buzz last numbers I saw had OSX devices growing at a much smaller rate. Steve has never been about small, when it comes to desire for control and dominance of a market he could teach old Billy a thing or two, and with his "less is more" policy I just don't see OSX fitting into his long term "ruling the consumer market the way Windows rules the desktop" plans.
Don't play the others so I can't comment, other than Doom 3 lasted about 45 minutes on my PC as I got tired of "walk into a room, take three steps, turn to shoot booger in the closet, lather rinse repeat" but if the total gaming goodness that is HL is "milking" a franchise? Then PLEASE milk that shit, milk it more! Between the excellent mechanics, story, and mods, I'd say that is a perfect example of how to do gaming RIGHT.
That would be like saying they shouldn't have made The Dark Knight because someone had previously made Grease II. Just because some companies can't do anything but hit the repeat texture button doesn't mean there aren't plenty of killers out there.
But if you'll read my post the "milking" I was talking about was the HARDWARE, which lets be honest friend, on the consoles it is some seriously old and stinky shite. The X360 is what? An X1900 GPU? Hell the hand me down card in my mama's PC is better than that! All these add ons like Kinect is nothing but milking that crappy old hardware for all it is worth and frankly with the economy in the shitter I don't blame them. the upside for us PC gamers is it lets us have kick ass framerates with $60 GPUs, and spend our money on other upgrades like the Samsung multi-Tb drives I'm snatching up while they are cheap! So I still say milk that shit MSFT and Sony, I like having killer framerates for cheap!
I'm sure I'll probably get hate for pointing this out, but it is also why you can get card X for cheaper than card Y, just as with Win 7 Starter (which is actually a damned nice low resource OS and I wish they'd sell it as an OEM) through Ultimate having the same code just with different parts turned off. This lets the manufacturers sell the same device with different feature sets thus making it so those of us who don't need Y-Z can only pay for X.
For an example on the hardware side the AMD HD4830 and HD4850. The HD4850 was originally a $200 part (now $80-100) and the HD4830 a $150 (now $60) and the ONLY difference between the two was the firmware, which switched off some of the stream processors in the HD4830. This is good for the consumer as they have different price points while not losing the core features such as hardware transcoding and DirectX 10.1, and it is good for the manufacturer as they don't have to spend money (and thus raise prices) by blowing circuits in hardware but instead simply switching them off with a bit of firmware code.
So I can see why manufacturers wouldn't want to hand out firmware and it is for the same reason why there is more than one version of Windows. Frankly I've sold many an HD4830 to people that didn't need the extra stream processors, just as myself and most of my customers use Win 7 HP because we don't need the features (the only one I cared about was XP Mode, and that was easily enough replaced with VMWare Player for free) that come with the higher price points of Windows.
Frankly it would suck if manufacturers had to raise prices across the board to pay for eFuses or burning traces just as it would suck if everyone had to shell out for Ultimate. so I'd say that not handing out the firmware is a GOOD thing, that is unless you think there should only be a "one size fits all" hardware model that is. If so you might want to check out the fruit company as I hear they are quite good at that.
Hey now we should give MSFT credit! After all Halo singlehandedly helps keep drunken fratboys safely contained on the X360. I know that when I play online games after a Halo release the amount of "nigger fag" teabagger bullshit drops WAY down, thus showing Halo is doing its job and keeping the fratboys away from the rest of us, yay!
And personally i hope MSFT and Sony milk the living shit out of the X360 and PS3 respectively, thank you VERY much! I LIKE being able to play all the newest games on a $60 HD4850 thank you! I LIKE that I get a great framerate with my 2 year old AMD quad, I LIKE that it allows me to spend my money on new multi-TB drives instead of buying a new CPU and GPU yearly like I did in the late 90s/ early 00s, I LIKE that I can sell my customers $500 PCs that let them game and enjoy HD 1080p on their new widescreen TVs!
So while I know that after the PS4 and X720 come out it won't be 6 months before PCs stomp them again, if it even takes that long, with all the games being optimized for the consoles it seems to take about a year to a year and a half before their shitty unoptimized code runs well on PCs, simply because their code is usually buggy shite. So the longer MSFT and Sony milk the current gen the longer guys like me can enjoy nice HD gaming on the cheap while having oodles of games to choose from that all run great from GOG, Steam, and Amazon. So go MSFT, and take Sony with you! Milk that shit!
Dude did you even SEE any of the other X-Men movies? Halle SUCKED! Not just a regular 'phone it in" kind of lame suck either, we are talking "aww crap here I was starting to enjoy it and then here comes Halle sucking the enjoyment out the screen" kinda suckage. And WTF has she done worth a shit besides Monster's Ball? I think we can safely say unless her next film turns out to be the best fucking thing since the Godfather that MB was more of a one off than anything.
So frankly I don't give a shit how pretty an actress is (although frankly I think there are a hell of a lot finer females in Hollywood than Berry, Theron or Hannigan for example) but when she walks onto the screen and the scene just kinda starts stinking like a silent but deadly released upon the audience I say pretty or not her ass needs to go stat!