Why is this "bullshit"? Did anyone stick a gun to your head and make you buy it off of Steam? You had the choice of the (IMHO superior) GOG version, with no need for crap running in the background (like Steam), incredibly easy to backup, and all around hassle free version, or you could buy the DRM version from Steam and D2D.
It was completely up to you which version you bought so don't bitch that 'Wahhh I had to make a choice, wahh!" especially when Steam has been allowing third parties like Ubisoft to add more DRM on top of Steam killing the whole damned point for using Steam in the first place.
I just hope you were smart and bought the GOG version, I myself just bought the first one and will be getting the second as soon as I'm done with the first. I believe in putting my money where my mouth is and have been buying from GOG almost from the day it opened. If more would support DRM free then hopefully we will one day see DRM games go the way of DRM music. In both cases it only hurts the buyer while the pirate enjoys their stuff DRM free.
So instead of whining about D2D and Steam having DRM (shock! Surprise!) why not simply always buy from GOG where possible? not to mention as owner GOG gives them 100% of the proceeds from the game VS a percentage with the others, so why the hell shouldn't they support GOG? It would be kinda stupid to give the ones that only give you a cut the same as your own site.
I too have been wondering WTF Nvidia is thinking not buying Via. The new Nano chips are dual core X64 OOO with excellent on chip crypto, which tied in with Nvidia GPU tech would make a kick ass low power server that would be able to do strong encryption as well as a damned good notebook and netbook setup, and of course the Via embedded market would be a given, for things like car PCs and industrial usage.
I just don't see Nvidia staying afloat long term if they completely give up on the X86/64 market which is what it appears they are doing. Discrete GPUs simply don't have that big of a market, especially in mobile where power trumps all, and by buying rights to PowerVR Intel has just killed the ION platform dead. if you look at the numbers while you can't game for shit on it the PowerVR chips accelerate all of the major and minor HD formats (similar to the Broadcom HD chip) while using barely 2w of power. By integrating PowerVR Intel has killed a major source for ION sales, the fact that Atom can't do 1080p video, and as I said the AMD Radeon integrated does all the HD video you could want.
So that just leaves discrete GPUs, which as I said gaming, which I frankly love on my PC, is still a very small niche compared to the overall market, and high end mobile which is frankly dominated by iPhone. The rest usually just get whatever nice handset is offered with the contract and with carriers wanting to maximize profits above all I see the Broadcom and PowerVR chips taking a good chunk of that business. Finally as I pointed out the Nvidia "top first" model is inherently more expensive than the AMD "middle chips only" model, while still giving AMD the ability to scale. I have also found with power usage AMD chips are MUCH better as they can scale the stream processors, whereas Nvidia seems to have an "all or nothing" approach that while good for benchmarks makes for lousy power consumption.
In the end without being bought by Intel or buying Via and getting into APUs I just don't see them surviving long term. The mobile market is a fickle one, where what is "hot" can change in a heartbeat, and with the huge amounts of X86 desktop and mobile devices being more and more closed off from them I just don't see the niches they have left keeping them afloat. The last numbers I saw had them going through quarters of bleeding bad followed by brief respites when the next GPU hit. Again this gives an advantage to AMD who not only uses a cheaper design model but owns the sub $200 CPU market which helps their bottom line. I used to love Nvidia but honestly in 5 years I see them going like Voodoo before them, crushed by the change in tech just as Voodoo was killed when everyone quit using Glide API for DirectX and hardware T&L.
I had the same problem with a customer that turned out had one of those 'wireless security camera' setups set up in his workroom so he could watch his property. I checked for a microwave oven, cell phone interference, finally I walked around the property looking for anything that could cause trouble and spotted the cam. Sure enough I had him turn it off and bingo! WinXP detected and hooked up to his wireless network. Now once it hooks up it works fine, but if the camera is running on first setup you're boned.
Personally I'll be glad when they start selling those whitespace devices. For really short runs like giving a home Internet access there shouldn't be any reason why they can't just use the whitespace, especially if the device is low power. As it is there is simply too much crap running at the 2.4GHz frequency, hell just sitting in my apt I probably have a dozen routers I can hook up to and I am living in a small town. I can't even imagine what a nightmare keeping devices working in say an apt in DC or LA must be like. The interference must be insane!
But I would argue that the reason Windows gained so much traction in the first place is that the programs simply were never written for OS/2. I ran OS/2 for awhile back in the days of Win 3.x and frankly even with only 4Mb of RAM it was more like WinXP than Win3.x, as it had multitasking, the ability to play audio and video without crashing or turning into a sideshow, it was frankly awesome!
So why did I quit and go to win95, even though frankly OS/2 was MUCH nicer than Windows at the time? Simple because there weren't any programs for it while the store shelves were filled with Windows programs! Remember that these were the days before the Internet was fast enough to do much more than checking email and Net Shopping hadn't taken off yet so the vast majority bought their software at B&M stores. While the few of us who knew about the "better Windows than Windows" knew we could run win 3.x software, how many of the general pop knew that? On the boxes it plainly says it needs Windows, so I better get Windows!
Like BeOS which also died hard in that time, or I'd even argue Linux today, an OS is only as good as its programs and IBM simply didn't have the programs to entice buyers, I'd argue in large part because developers simply could resell their windows apps without bothering to port and by the time Windows 95 came out OS/2 was already in decline and so they never bothered.
If they would have written for the OS/2 native APIs their programs would have been head and shoulders more impressive than anything on windows, but because they did not those that saw OS/2 running simply saw it as a very pretty Windows clone that could only run a partial list of the current programs.
Now does that mean IBM marketing didn't suck? nope, they certainly didn't help their cause with one bad move after another. but like BeOS what we had with OS/2 was a case of the MUCH more technically advanced OS losing against a frankly piss poor at the time competitor. And while it is true the more RAM you had the better it ran you could easily run a couple of programs on OS/2 with 4Mb of memory which is 1 more than you could run with Windows during the Win 3.x period. It was simply other than a small handful of programs IBM wrote there simply weren't any progs that took advantage of what OS/2 had to offer.
I'd say the bigger question is: How long will Nvidia be able to stay afloat? First you have the dirty dealing by Intel (why they haven't been busted for antitrust i'll never know, as between AMD and Nvidia they caused billions in damage to the market with their dirty dealing, even worse than MSFT in the 90s IMHO) which slaughtered their Intel chipset division, causing them to go out of business, and now there is Intel licensing PowerVR for Atom which I'm betting will do to ION what cutting off access to the bus did to their Intel desktop sales
And on the other side you have AMD which frankly doesn't need Nvidia as they have excellent Radeon GPUs both discrete and as APUs with the new Bobcat and Bulldozer chips. Nvidia is still trying to make a little money with their desktop chipsets for AMD, but since they aren't making any new ones all they have left is the bottom of the barrel sub $45 market and from what I've seen most AMD guys (myself included) buy the Radeon chips to go with them so not much money on that side of the isle. Finally you have the fact that while Nvidia designs the monster chips first and then figures out ways to cripple them for the smaller markets AMD switched to simply designing for the midrange and using dual GPUs with HT links for the high end which is the obviously cheaper way to go.
So that leaves phones, HPCs, and discrete GPUs, which while decent markets are nothing like the size of the chipset division and as the APUs get better and better OEMs will be less and less likely to use discrete for anything but the gamer laptops, a teeny tiny niche.
Frankly I'll be amazed if Nvidia is around in 5 years, I really will. Personally I think the moves by intel are designed to slowly bleed Nvidia to make a takeover less expensive. Lets face it Intel has always sucked when it comes to GPUs and having Nvidia to integrate the way AMD did with ATI would give them some serious graphical muscle, although again why nobody has screamed antitrust over the way Intel has been behaving I'll never know. but I can't see the markets they are currently in bringing in enough cash to pay for the massive R&D that having to keep up with AMD costs and from the looks of it the new APUs are gonna end up "good enough" for everyone but hardcore gamers further hurting their bottom line.
So frankly I just don't see how discrete chips like TFA are gonna keep them afloat long term. The discrete chips cost money the OEMs don't have to spend with virtually all the chips from Atom on up coming with GPU on chip, those that buy gamer notebooks are a tiny niche of the overall market and with the vast majority of discrete cards going to the sub $150 market, which favors the AMD "build the MOR chips" over the Nvidia "high end first" model I just don't see how they are supposed to survive long term. CUDA is nice but I don't see it being enough to keep them above water, especially if Intel has eyes on buying them out down the road and keeps up their douchebag behavior.
So how many think Nvidia will be here in 5 years, or will they end up a footnote like Voodoo? Which in a twist of irony if it turns out I'm right was bought by Nvidia after being slowly bled to death by changes in the market. While I switched to AMD only for me and my customers after the Bumpgate mess I'd hate to see Nvidia disappear, especially since it would ultimately be over Intel douchebaggery.
Except those "3Ds" are bullshit. The first D means that Israel can build all the concentration camp style containments it wants and you can't say shit because it makes you antisemitic! The second D is the classic fallacy 'you can't judge me because there are other bad people in the world" and I shouldn't have to explain why that one is bullshit, nor is there a "douchebag law' that says you must give equal time to hating every douchebag country on the planet, and finally the whole excuse of why Israel supposed deserves that land is because of a religion most who were kicked out of their homes don't believe in and I doubt VERY seriously you could trace even a single Jew's lineage far back enough to give a legitimate claim to being one of the original tribes. IIRC the vast majority of Jews alive today can be traced back to eastern Europe and Asia NOT the ME. To say they have a legitimate claim to that land would be like me saying I should own Peru because my native American ancestors crossed it getting here 10,000 years ago!
So as you can see, at least if you aren't blinded by politics, that the "3Ds" are just another way of legitimizing Zionism. Now while I say that Britain originally didn't have the right to give other people's land away, anymore than they had the right to all the appeasement giving of others land before WWII, now that they are there I would say they have the right to the pre 67 borders. But since being established they have gone on a systematic land grab that has started multiple conflicts and is costing lives and homes to this day. Allow me to quote: " We would send a tractor to plough someplace where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was" yet to point out this douchebaggery is similar to the false flags and provocation that the crazy Austrian used to build support for the invasion of Poland would labeled antisemitic and that's bullshit!
That sounds like the classic OS/2 problem. For those not old enough to remember back in the days of Windows 2 and 3 IBM marketed OS/2 as "a better Windows than Windows" thanks to its having much of the Windows APIs embedded to use by OS/2.
The problem was the developers that saw this simply didn't bother writing OS/2 apps which could take advantage of the platform, instead simply marketing their Windows programs to OS/2 users. Since they only had rights to Windows through Windows 3 OS/2 quickly lost the "better Windows than Windows" advantage and had no real third party software of its own, and thus dried up and blew away.
So while I don't see this happening because of a game emulator if someone were to say come out with a Wine layer? Then I could see it becoming a problem. If you could simply write Windows apps and pack in Wine, why bother writing for Android?
Well I don't know about him, and call me weird, but I don't think we should be giving a damn dime when it comes to foreign aid when our infrastructure is falling down, we are drowning in debt, we have a huge trade deficit with pretty much everybody, massive unemployment and underemployment, folks losing their homes left and right, borders leaking like sieves, blowing money like shit through a goose on pointless MIC crap like the Osprey, need I go on?
As far as Israel goes i'm proud to say that I believe that AIPAC should be listed as a lobbying firm for a foreign power and STRICTLY controlled, and BTW I'm also damned sick of anybody that is against militaristic Zionism being labeled as antisemitic by AIPAC and Southern Poverty Law Center. As someone whose grandfather helped liberate one of the camps in Poland I find it fucking sick that these douchebags would use the dead to further their own Neocon ambitions, or that they are allowed to so blatantly bribe our elected officials and wield so much power over OUR government!
When you have the candidates for both parties going to kiss the booty of AIPAC before running you can see where the paranoid get their ZOG ideas from because AIPAC and SPLC have too God damned much power over OUR government. If American Jews want to send their money to Israel? Fine, go right ahead. But you should be able to take money out of my pocket to support a regime I don't believe in, nor allow their lobbyists to have more control and access than We, the People do!
Finally, just to piss off the Neocons and Xtians allow me to say this: Basing our Mid East policies on "Jesus won't come back!" is dumb as fuck! You have people dying, billions being blown, and enemies being made all over the region, because our entire ME policy is tied into whether or not a 2000+ year old dead guy, written about on sheep skins by goat herders, has a place to park his fluffy cloud on some mythical day where his dead ass comes floating on down from heaven. Protip" If your "God" is so fucking weak he can't even get a parking spot without the US MIC backing his ass up then your "God" is pretty damned pathetic. And the fact that both sides kiss the AIPAC booty and cause so much suffering because of scribblings written by primitives is fucking idiotic!
Fuck Israel and every other country with their hand out. We should cut our military by half, quit blowing our money on bling bling MIC tech like its still the cold war, and spend OUR money on OUR people, period. As much as I don't agree with Glenn Beck on...well pretty much anything, the man did say one thing insightful. He said it is high time we in the USA decided to "Be Switzerland" and stay the hell out of everyone's business. As he said we have been sticking our noses in other people's business for a century and caused NOTHING but misery, dictators like Mubarak, and suffering wherever we went. it is high time to "Be Switzerland". Oh and before any Xtians believe that "When the Jews return to Zion" line they might just want to look up what it says about 'The Whore of Babylon" which with our sellout congress critters and stirring up shit everywhere is what we are acting like.
Do you even hear yourself? The amount of logical hop jumping and plain denial is just astounding! I guess denial isn't just a river in Egypt huh? Because the simple fact that you honestly believe that I should tell customers to learn to recompile their own drivers which BTW won't do SHIT when it comes to some of Linus's serious kernel fucking, is simply beyond ridiculous. How can you stand here with a straight face and claim your OS is ready for the masses,em>if they need to compile their own drivers
And WTF do Windows forums have to do with shit/ Or Lowes? you NEVER need Windows forums after simply updating the OS whereas you BETTER be ready to spend an assload of time at your distros forums with make/model/rev thanks to updates breaking shit left and right, which again I linked to. This is a classic case of "moving the goalposts" as you refuse to acknowledge, even though I provided links rubbing your nose in it, that even Dell can't keep the drivers working which is beyond insanity! And who gives a shit what some enterprise, which BTW has these things called "admins" that get paid big bucks to deal with broken shit like drivers and has about as much to do with retail PC sales as a car does with an F-16, have to do with this discussion? Did I MENTION anywhere enterprise? Or say in any place that we were talking about, in no particular order, enterprise deployments, servers, routers, cell phones, or any other damned thing that isn't a retail Linux sale? Nope don't think so.
In the end the numbers don't lie. no retail B&M store will touch your OS, and after 20 years Linux is so far behind/. has an article congratulating Linux on reaching a whole 1%! Woo Hoo, and it only took 20 damned years! If the "community" continues like you with elitism, refusing to see problems and correct them, refusing to make things easy for the user, and most importantly refusing to keep Linus from constantly breaking shit, then don't be surprised that it takes Linux another 20 damned years to reach that magical 2%. The simple fact is it isn't 1993, and users aren't gonna jump through flaming hoops simply for "free as in freedom, fight teh power!" bullshit. you gotta be better or at the very least as good, and frankly with the kernel futzing Linux doesn't even rank as high as Windows 98 in my book, MAYBE Win 3.1. Because with Windows 98 I could actually take a RTM and update it to the last patch and the drivers still worked whereas the Linux update notifier may as well be a "Break Linux NOW!" button, for all the broken drivers. It is pretty God damned sad when you can't even run updates without your OS shitting itself, and if the choices are 1.-Give them a broken OS and telling them "RTFM Noob LOL!" 2.-Turning off ALL updates and leaving them as vulnerable as any other unpatched OS, or 3.-Installing Windows and at least having it run until EOL without having broken drivers? Well at $35 an hour it really only takes a single forum hunt to make your OS more expensive than Windows. But you pretend it is all a conspiracy, that we 'just don't understand" your OS. it reminds me of that old joke "I have no friends, Linux has no friends, maybe I can be Linux's friend!" because the public sure as hell ain't touching it!
McGrew there is actually a REASON for patch Tuesday and that is because everyone was having a shitfit that the patches would come willy nilly! With Patch Tuesday it makes it MUCH easier to plan for updates in a corporate environment, and since Windows rules the business world by a HUGE margin you can't expect them to fuck over such a large client base just because Mcgrew wants updates quicker.
That said if you show even tiniest bit of common sense.then your risk of infection is practically zip which my customers that have been running 8 years on the same XP install and simply having me come over to do an occasional memory upgrade can attest, so whether patches come out on Tuesday or the week after tomorrow really shouldn't matter! Watch how easy it is to have a nice clean running Windows from first install..
1.-Install Wndows. 2.- Run WSUS Offline from a flash, which if you've checked the little checkbox will have all the SPs,.NET, and all the patches in one nice easy to run place. 3.- Install Comodo Dragon from the same flash, so they'll have a nice browser that uses low rights mode and sandboxing and so you won't have to worry about IE, after installing go ahead and add ABP for Chrome which kills ad based malware dead. While you are at it you can install any third party software that doesn't need constant updating, I install LibreOffice, Win 7 Codec pack (which is great as it lets you burn just about any format in WinDVD maker, which folks just love) and Media Player Classic Home Cinema 4.- Go to Ninite to install the third party software that needs to be fresh, depending on the user. I usually install Flash, Foxit PDF Reader, any messenger program they use, along with Irfanview, Picasa, Avast Free, Malwarebytes, along with CCleaner and Defraggler. For burning I carry Ashampoo on the flash as folks like its layout better than CDBurnerXP. As this finishes up I usually add WinUtilities, which automates registry cleaning and the dumping of temp files along with tossing broken shortcuts. For the finale add Filehippo Update checker which only takes up 300Kb and will let them know when there are third party updates like flash, so they aren't using an old vulnerable solution.
And that's it! Notice how nothing there is more complex than going "clicky clicky" and doesn't cost you a dime? And a machine you've followed these simple steps with will be fine for anything short of user stupidity, which NO OS can keep the stupid from doing dumb shit, like running "Iz_Not_Viruz_Porn_Codecs!" trying to see teh tittiez. But a machine done this way, while sensibly having Automatic Updates set to Automatic (duh!) will give you years of trouble free service, while having all the third party software updated without the user having to constantly check for patches and with both Comodo dragon AND Avast doing sandboxing, as well as dragon running low rights mode, means web bugs really aren't going anywhere. With just a tiny bit of preparation and common sense (don't run email attachments, if they want free porn tell them to go to myfreepaysite.com which has like 5000 DVDs of porn for free, if they insist on having P2P Gnucleus or Emule with P2P shield running in Avast, no making kids accounts admin) your Windows machine will run trouble free for years, just as my customers after I'm through only need to come to me for hardware upgrades.
Bingo! As someone who fixes these things every week while there are still plenty of Adobe exploits I've noticed since Win 7 came out they simply haven't been using OS exploits like they used to, now they run social engineering because it is always easier to take control if the user helps you and by appealing to their greed, desire, or fear it really ain't hard to get them to go along.
The big attack vectors i'm seeing day after day, in no particular order, is: 1.- The "you want teh hot lesbos? you need to run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_codec.exe to play teh vidz!" 2.- The "ZOMg you got teh viruz! To fix run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_cleanerz.exe to get rid of it ZOMG!" 3.-The "Use the new Limewire (Iz_not_Viruz_iz_Limewirez) to download teh latest Titney_Spearz.mp3.exe tunez today!" and 4.-"Hey my BFF sent me a funny cat video! It says I should run Iz_not_Viruz_iz_LOLCatz to see teh kittiez!"
As you will notice with ALL of the above you simply don't have to bother with an exploit for ANY of those, as the user IS the exploit and is the weakest link. The last major "WTF?" that MSFT had, the "Hey lets run everybody as admin!" officially died with Vista and since 7 doesn't bug the crap out of folks with "Cancel/allow?" boxes every three seconds UAC has been left on and along with low rights mode in IE and Chromium based is doing a good job, as we saw by the numbers released the other week where there are only 4 per 1000 7 machines infected VS 14 for XP.
But as long as you have people willing to ignore or even turn off their AV (as I had the other week with a customer and the "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz_Limewire") because a malware writer waved a cookie in front of them then frankly I don't see what else can be done besides what MSFT is already doing with the free MSRT and MSE. And as we have seen with first MacDefender and now MacGuard (which doesn't even need the password anymore) on OSX and the nasty Android trojan apps it doesn't matter whether you are on an alternative OS or not, all that matters is whether or not the bad guys want in bad enough to do the work and whether you have any users who'll run "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz" style apps. sadly I've found that WAAAY too many are more than happy to do just that.
Because, and I'm sure to get hatred for pointing this out, a lot of the developers out there seem to suffer from Cargo Cult Usability where they implement basic ideas without understanding the underlying structure which is why you saw a previous poster talking about "dept store knockoffs" because when you implement some of the front end without the underlying structure it feels like a badly done copy.
Take Gnome for example. they have ripped off (homage, whatever) a lot of the Mac GUI without understanding how the structure ties in which makes it 'off". For example they have the traditional Mac menu in the correct placement but their DE is windows based and Macs are application based which causes it to make no sense. Since Macs are app based all apps use the same menu at the top whereas with gnome each app typically has their own menu layout or at least did last time I tried it with Ubuntu 10.04, which makes having the top menu kinda pointless.
With KDE they seem to follow the Windows model but yet again they don't implement the features, just the look or at least that was the case last time I tried it (again with Ubuntu 10.04) because while they had a lot of the familiar layout they didn't have breadcrumbs or Readyboost or superfetch or many of the other features that makes Windows more usable.
So I think Canonical is in the right here, even if it falls flat or takes a while to get solid, in that the way to go is to forge a "Linux centric" model where you have a completely different GUI that won't make people feel "cheap knockoff" when features they are used to in Macs or windows aren't found or are different. By switching to Unity+Wayland they will have a different "look and feel" to other OSes, thus removing some of the preconceived notions people have when you use a Windows or Mac centric layout.
Uhhhh who gives a fuck when the important thing is the CP witchhunt has gotten so bad a shot of a cartoon panty is considered CP which is beyond fucking ridiculous!
Ya know when the bullshit first started I actually supported SOME of it. Oh I didn't and still don't support the truly insane amounts of time they give someone who looks at a picture without actually touching a kid themselves (because I have a friend in the state crime lab who says more than 90% of those they bust are social retards who are about as much of a threat to kids as a bowl of marshmallows, most are afraid of or avoid interactions with ANYBODY and they are looking at the same old shit that has been floating around since USENET) but the idea of cops working together internationally to find the child rapists and hunt their sorry asses down? I was ALL for that!
But now we have literally reached the point of thoughtcrime, where it doesn't matter if any child was involved at all it is still treated as child rape! Just in the past few years we have seen a man given several years for writing his own thoughts onto paper which IIRC he was told to do by his shrink to help him work through it (thoughtcrime), a guy given several years for looking at Japanese hentai (thoughtcrime) and even one thrown in jail for looking at one of those crudely drawn Simpsons cartoons, even though legally the Simpson "kids" if they actually existed would be in their 30s!
That is why I urge everyone to stand up, not just here but IRL as well, when these laws are abused to create thoughtcrimes. Remember folks it is NEVER the "good guy" they use to take away our rights it is ALWAYS done by using scapegoats like "terrorists" and "perverts" and "racists" because those in power know too many fear standing up for those types, for fear of being labeled as supporting their views.
But just as my grandfather took a wall dropped on him by a Werewulf squad in WWII yet STILL stood up and said that the Illinois Nazis should have the right to march, because as he said "That is what makes us better than the system they are supporting as here ALL ideas have the right to be spoken of and discussed" so too must we stand up for those used to take away our liberties one thoughtcrime at a time. Remember the words of that wise pastor years ago: "First they came for" because those same laws stretched to cover pictures or words on a page can and WILL be abused to go after sites like wikileaks or maybe even yourself if you protest something the powerful want! Hell according to my friend at the crime lab the way the law is worded now someone could draw a stick figure and someone else write on top "nekked kid" and that would technically get you the same time as a real pic of a raped child! Does that make ANY sense to anyone here? How fucking scary can you get!
And here comes the religious dogma I was talking about! Isn't it funny that the argument against having stable functioning drivers always comes down to IDEOLOGY, with the rant most people link to going so far as to call those that refuse to hand over source "leeches" and hope the kernel futzing breaks their drivers?
I mean WTF is it to you if some do and some don't? Is that ANY different than right now? Nope, as you still have companies like Nvidia that makes binary blobs, only now you get to watch them break every six months. Does having open drivers keep Linux from breaking? Nope again as the open drivers break just as often thanks to Linus and his kernel fucking, because if you could look at it logically instead of a faith based perspective you'd see that there are only so many devs, and there are fewer of them than drivers to fix so drivers will ALWAYS be broken when Linus gets a wild hair up his ass, every. single. time!
And allow me to say that if your way "worked" in any kind of reasonable fashion retailers wouldn't avoid your OS like the clap which I can assure you we most certainly do. Not just all the thousands of mom&pop shops, dotting the entire country, but big names like Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, do you think they avoid your OS because of its "quality construction" or a secret conspiracy? NO! It is because they take the box home, run updates when the little icon tells them to and get a broken machine like it is 1993 all over again, and promptly take that broke ass shit back! And since we retailers can't sell used as new that means we take a hit on every return making Linux even MORE expensive!
As a final word allow me to give you proof, undeniable proof like a slap to the face your current way is broke ass shit. Now I'm sure you'll find some excuse, like "Use Distro X" or "You should buy hardware Y" but in the end all you will have is excuses because this proof should make even YOU take note! Now you and your fellow converts think we retailers are just full of it, that it should "just work" right? well when one of the biggest OEMs on the planet has to DISABLE the repos and spend considerable money and man hours keeping a badly out of date "corporate repo" just for their customers because if they don't the drivers WILL break then i'm sure you can see why both little guys like me and big guys like Walmart and OEMs like ASUS have washed their hands of your OS. I mean when fricking netbooks, a class of machine built around Linux strengths and which started out more than 30% Linux ends up completely obliterated by a decade old Windows OS it is high time to ask yourself "What are we doing wrong?" and I'd say basing your OS on religion instead of sound design practices and trusting your customers to make purchases that will benefit them (such as choosing FOSS drivers where possible so they have LTS) is a good example of why Linux is so far behind everyone else, and why even free you are getting hammered by an OS with a $100 barrier to entry.
Well that is why I put the "MP" part on there you seem to have missed. One of my grandpas was an MP and getting to hang around him and his fellow MPs one thing I learned is there is NOBODY that takes the law more seriously than a USMC MP. To him and his friends to break the law in performance of his duty would have been like pissing on the USMC flag, he would have rather died first. They take their oaths VERY seriously and I honestly can't see a USMC MP bringing dishonor to the corp and his fellow MPs by going rampage or using extreme force if it wasn't warranted.
Now as far as stuff like Iraq? frankly I'd say you can't really judge them like you could an MP on an airplane, simply because of the incredible horrors they have to deal with day after day after day. my second grandfather was USAAF Sgt in charge of ensuring the communication lines between the front and HQ work and I was fortunate enough to have him tell me what it was like from his landing on day 3 to the end of the war when he got a wall dropped on him by a Werewulf squad and spent two years in a body cast.
He told me of how in France they would be walking along checking the line when suddenly a German artillery manning a hidden Flak88 would use one of the men as a target trying to kill them with shrapnel and when it would hit your friend would be nothing but a fine red mist that coated everything, or how he ran into my great uncle Mike on the road to the Rhine and while they were laughing and joking with their CO the entire side of the CO's face exploded from a German sniper shot, covering them in his brains and skull fragments. Mike was a trained sharpshooter and saw where the smoke came from and bore down. When he got there he found a woman 6 months pregnant trying to reach for her sidearm to blow him away, so he killed her with a head shot.
I give my grandfather credit, because he was always brutally honest yet said after all that horror and burying so many of his friends there was only ONE time he came close to "saying damn the rules lets get some payback" as he put it, was when he was there when they liberated one of the Polish camps and saw little kids starved to death and piled like cordwood. He said the ONLY thing that kept he and his buddies from just lining the Nazis against the wall and shooting them in cold blood was one of the prisoners spoke English and told them that the guards were just flunkies called up at the last minute to guard the camp while the real bastards snuck off in the night, and the flunkies had been horrified and was treating them well and sharing what they had.
So I find it hard to judge guys in that situation, as frankly you don't know how much horror they had been exposed to before the atrocities occurred. You can only take so much truly vicious acts happening to people you know before you see everybody as one of "them". That said I don't see how you would have that same problem with MPs as long as you didn't take them straight from the front to airplane duty. There are plenty here in the states they could use for the job, and with their dedication to upholding the law I personally would feel safer with one of them than a civilian in that role.
Excuse me, not that I really give much of a shit about consoles (Been a PC gamer since i got burnt with three dead PS1s, still have an Xbox 1 and GC left over from the kids I'm trying to figure out what to do with) but I don't understand how you can say the PS2s specs were shit when it had a 64bit 300Mhz CPU and a GPU capable of 1280x1024 when it was released in 2000.
Maybe you have forgotten what we had at the turn of the century but I haven't as back then I shelled out nearly $300 for a refurb 1.2GHz Celeron box at that time and it was a good deal and used to run my Geforce 256 SDR, with its whole 32Mb of SDRAM and 120MHz clock. IMHO things only started getting ape shit with regards to processing power with the whole P4 VS Athlon on the CPU side (still keep a couple of those around for loaners, still surf the web quite nicely even after 7 years) and the Radeon VS Geforce on the GPU end. Both of those only really started cranking and leapfrogging around 2004-2005 IIRC, which would have made the PS2 4 years old already.
So if you look at the specs from the context of the time they really weren't bad. One thing that always struck me as weird is why the original Xbox didn't just slaughter everybody. I mean you had COTS X86 parts, so porting should have been laughably easy, with none of the long "learning curve" you see on most consoles, it had good specs and a low resource OS and used DirectX, which most game houses had plenty of experience in. The only thing I thought they'd done wrong was not include some "OtherOS" style functionality, to where those that had an Xbox could use it like a Netbox for basics like checking email or posting on forums.
Ya know, just as we saw Google just show up and blow the doors off with Android I'm really shocked somebody hasn't done the same with game consoles. Just imagine how nice of a console you could have with one of those really affordable Bulldozer APU, maybe put in the 4 core/8 thread model with the 65xx GPU built in? It would be ultra low power, have 2Gb of DDR3 RAM, a 500Gb or 1Tb HDD, use Streams for full HD acceleration of just about any format, and use a low resource OS like an embedded Linux with a lightweight GUI like LXDE. Seems like it would be a no brainer, and could be an all in one media center/game console that would be easy to port just about anything to. Hell buying in bulk you could probably sell them for under $300 to start and still make a healthy profit and just have an encryption chip to keep the hackers from modding the games while giving them access to the rest.
But just the fact that they are still making and selling PS2s and folks are buying them after the other two of that generation are long gone shows that folks thought the graphics are decent enough to still play after all this time, and giving the developers credit they did manage to squeeze some pretty sweet gaming goodness out of the PS2. But when it was released I'd say it wasn't no wimp, just MOR compared to the competitors that came later.
I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out but its true: Linux is free if your time is worthless. I've have looked into offering Linux as an alternative OS in my little retail shop for years, and every year i find nothing has changed. Until Torvalds either retires or someone fires his irritating ass so that Linux can FINALLY, after everyone else (Solaris, BSD, OSX and Windows, hell even OS/2) has had them for over a decade, get a stable kernel level hardware ABI so drivers don't shit themselves and die every time Linus gets an itch to fuck shit up in the kernel, then Linux will remain a black hole of time wasting where you have to spend days or even a week or more every six months doing the "forum hunts" trying to find "fixes' for the multitude of drivers Torvalds breaks constantly.
Which makes sense if anyone would look at it from an engineering instead of religious dogma perspective, as you are talking about literally tens of thousands of drivers nearly all of which have to interact with a kernel that Torvalds treats as his personal plaything and with little regard to the thousands of man hours he is pissing away, not only by all the developers that have to go in and ifx what he has broken but in all the hours users waste with forum hunts.
Not to mention how many Linux users it ultimately ends up costing because mom&pop retailers like me, the kind of guys YOU NEED to get on board Linux, as we have NO real ties or support from MSFT and in our position could really help Linux with sales and after sale support who stay away from your OS because with all the man hours forum hunts suck up it makes Linux literally MORE expensive than Windows. My time is a minimum $35 an hour, at the rate it only takes 2.5 hours to make Linux more expensive than Windows 7 HP and I can easily waste half a day on a forum hunt, what with searching for, tweaking, and multiple attempts to get said fix working.
So until the day comes I can sell a box with Linux on it and be confident that the drivers will continue working for at LEAST three years minimum, preferably five, then "Linux is free if your time is worthless" is simply the truth for all those that do this as something other than a hobby. Home users aren't gonna learn CLI to apply fixes, neither are SMBs and SOHO, and they sure as hell aren't gonna sit around with a list of make/model/rev of every piece of hardware they have in order to do forum hunts.
I want Linux to succeed in the desktop and retail markets, I really really do. I grew up in the days of GEM and Commodore and having lots of choices, and I believe lots of choice makes for a healthy and vibrant ecosystem. but someone is gonna have to face the fact that Torvalds is a douchebag. It is all well and good he invented the kernel, but it ain't 1991 anymore and Linux isn't just some plaything for Torvalds to futz with and share his changes over IRQ. The kernel is the heart of a multi-billion dollar OS, being counted on by millions, yet Torvalds treats it NO differently than he did at the beginning.
And before anyone says "LTS" let me say LTS is a bad joke. As long as much software is tied to which kernel you are using LTS is a codeword for "run out of date and possibly insecure software" and it is just ridiculous. It ain't 1991 folks, having drivers shit themselves and die is simply unacceptable in this day and age, especially when your competition gives on average a decade of support for their OS. Frankly this problem would be trivial to fix with a stable ABI for drivers, but Torvalds and his ego won't admit he made a mistake. The current way was fine when it was a hobbyist OS, it simply isn't anymore. Now you either shell out for expensive enterprise gear (which negates any savings by going Linux) where a team of developers have to constantly fix drivers for the life of the contract, or you are SOL, because you'll be wasting time on forum hunts. Sorry but that is just unacceptable.
Develop a decentralized P2P app for BT links? The way this is supposed to "work" is by blocking websites with P2P links (but of course as any government power I'm sure they'll abuse the shit out of it to say try to kill wikileaks and other whistleblowers) by the thought that if you can't get the link you can't get the torrent.
So the way to go around it, at least with regards to torrents, is to simply use a decentralized P2P app to distribute torrent links. A specialized P2P app designed to give you JUST torrent files, complete with user ratings, would kill this from blocking torrents dead, since you wouldn't need TPB or any other torrent site to find torrents. As for getting rid of whistleblower sites the only answer I have to that would be something like Freenet, but the catch with that is so far nobody has tried their "plausible deniability" theory in court and considering a CP charge can net you 60 year that is a hell of a risk to take on an untested legal theory.
Now please ignore if the situation has changed since I last looked at it, but last I checked you still needed websites for torrent links. By going decentralized P2P tp spread said links that would make blocking sites such as TPB useless, since you wouldn't need them to get the links. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if their next move would be to force search engines like Google to remove ALL torrent links that haven't been given to some committee for approval first.
Of course in the end I have a feeling we'll just have a "great firewall of corporatist Amerika" and we'll have to take lessons from our Chinese friends on how to run a VPN and risk being labeled a "terrorist/pedo" or whatever bogeyman word they use for it this week. Because heaven forbid we don't help entrenched multinationals by using tax dollars to prop up their failing business models and help them keep complete control on what the population hears and sees. God forbid they should have to come up with new business models for a new era, heavens no! If these corrupt bastards would have been in office at the turn of the 20th century we'd all be paying a "buggy tax" on our cars and labeling buggy whip manufacturers as "too big to fail".
As for protecting our rights, what rights would those be? We don't even have the right to a fair trial anymore as Obama declared, in a case of having even bigger brass balls than Bush, that he has the right to perform assassinations on Americans, even on American soil and if you don't even have the right to life under the "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" clause of the constitution, how can you possibly have ANY rights at all? After all, how can giving the corps the right to have you thrown in prison for sharing some shitty Hollywood movie even compare to just having you shot? Welcome to Amerika, where the only freedoms are reserved for the top 1%ers.
Ya know, if it was 5 years ago I'd probably be right with them, but now? Ballmer has actually been making some smart moves in the past couple of years. Windows 7 is an awesome OS, the Nokia deal will allow them to have vertical integration with WinPhone like Apple enjoys with iPod, and the Skype deal will not only give them a huge consumer base but again will give them vertical integration in both the business and consumer sectors.
Imagine a Nokia WinPhone with a DirectX subset and.NET for gaming so you can use XNA to share between it and the X360, integrated Skype support in the phone, Windows 7, and the X360, and having Skype integrated with WinServer so any corp can hand out a WinPhone and have complete control of it via GPOs and AD as well as a fixed low price for calls no matter where you send the employee. And that employee will be able to take it home and have it all "just work" nice and simple. And this doesn't count the fact that the new Office 07 and up has made things more intuitive with the ribbon and sold quite well.
So frankly I don't see Ballmer going anywhere ATM. sales are doing great, he is making smart moves in the mobile space which I'm guessing will pay off in the next year to year and a half, they have a new tablet based version of Windows 8 coming out, and it looks like the days of a decade between OSes has been stopped for a more sensible 3 years between OSes with a decade of support per OS. So I'd say after the disasters that were Vista and allowing the OEMs to sell weak hardware as "Vista Capable" it looks like Ballmer may have finally pointed the ship in the right direction. And with Gates still being chairman of the board I don't see him firing his old friend, not when sales are doing great.
I just hope that now they can break with the tradition of never putting out two good OSes in a row and not cock up Windows 8. Windows 7 is intuitive enough those like my dad can install it himself, run it with ease and actually find more functionality he never even knew was there thanks to the smart search, while at the same time making it easier for old hands like me to easily manage things with features like breadcrumbs and libraries. So please MSFT don't cock up the UI for Windows 8, okay?
How is that? Saying "Go back to your homes, everything is fine" is a whole hell of a lot different than saying 'At this point in time we simply don't know" and these folks were depending on these guys to give them SOME sort of heads up!
That would be like me saying "Yeah that PC is supposed to release little balls of white smoke like that, its an effect!" and then being surprised when the person who is listening to me because of my knowledge and experience takes the PC home and it burns the house to the ground and kills their family. I doubt very seriously any court would allow me to say:"Oops, my bad" and walk away. At the very least one should err on the side of caution and from looking at TFA it seems they didn't do that.
So while I don't know if they should be looking at manslaughter, criminal negligence? That I could easily believe.
No shit. my oldest got an inkjet thrown in with his new laptop he got for college, and being the "hates to waste things" type tried to actually use it. Blew through a good $70 in a month. I calmly went out and found him a nice B&W laser on the net WITH a 5000 sheet toner PLUS a 15,000 and a 13,000 toner carts thrown in. Final cost? a hair over $100. The laser cost slightly more than he blew through in a month trying to feed the inkjet and after 6 months of printing constantly for class he has yet to go through the 5K, much less even open the 13k and 15k carts.
When you look at even the color laser printers the prices are low enough the insane inkjet cart prices just don't make sense. I have a brand new inkjet given to me by a customer who didn't know better and got a laser after I pointed out the price difference, and as soon as the black ink cart runs out it'll be headed to the dump or to my engineering buddy who likes to strip stuff for parts like gears. If you are printing so little you think an inkjet would work I can promise you you'd get better results simply having your printing done at Walgreen's or Wally World, for everyone else B&Ws start at like $40 refurb and you can often find color lasers like this wireless model for $150. Inkjets are like floppies, once upon a time they made sense and now they are just pointless designed for the dump ripoffs. The only time I recommend an inkjet anymore is when someone needs a cheap scanner/fax I tell them to get an all in one and simply use the ink up and then keep the scanner/fax. IMHO that is pretty much the only time having an inkjet makes any sense anymore, as the all in ones are cheaper than buying two devices.
Meh, I still think my idea for an icon is better. picture the iconic Ballmer with his tongue stuck out, wearing an "I heart Apple!" beanie. Considering his "me too!" aping of Apple since he took the helm it would be a perfect fit. I can just imagine him rallying the troops: "And with this new version we'll take the market by storm and be as hip and cool as Apple! yes we will! We really really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!!!"
As for TFA...emmm...okay? As someone who started with windows 3 frankly I'm glad those days are gone. TSAs, memory corruption, constant reboots, frankly all the OSes of that period were shit. The fact that with those early machines they were able to squeeze so much into an OS that was that primitive, no memory protection and everything having bare metal access, was a miracle. i think I'll just stay with my nice quad with 8Gb of RAM and Windows 7, where the only time I have to deal with a reboot is when I want to run my really old copy of Cubase in XP. Frankly those days? nothing really "good" about them computing wise IMHO. Might as well be trying to build a punch card reader and hook up some core memory to your Arduino, more interesting that running really old crap OSes.
It would be interesting though to see Linux 1.0, Windows 1.0, and the first MacOS side by side running in VMs, just to see which shits itself and dies first. Most would probably say win 1.0 but I bet it would be the Linux, as the driver support really wasn't there that early in the game.
I have seen guys playing Nintendos in avant garde Lo fi, so frankly I don't see why any music can't be played live. hell in case you ain't heard Elvis is on tour (digital Elvis with live band) and in Japan they have a hologram throwing live concerts and packing the place!
As for the sweepstakes rules? Dude cops don't care about that as long as the drawings are fair which was why they had the "no purchase necessary" placed in there in the first place! Hell we even had a uniformed state trooper do the drawing at one of our shows, he got a thrill out of being the one to choose the winners and hand out the prizes, nobody cares as long as you're honest, and since we in the band NEVER did the drawings ourselves, but would pick some random person from the front row to reach in and draw the tickets it was all good.
As for kids most of us are QUITE happy to play outdoor festivals and all age shows, our main concern is you get to enjoy the music, not how much booze you get to drink. Most bands love playing the summer shed shows, it lets us get closer to the audience (we would always set up a booth in the back where folks could get merch and talk to us about anything, it was nice to get folks asking questions like "Why do you play that pretty red & white bass on some songs and not on others?" Answer-Because it is nearly 40 pounds of South American Swamp ash and sling that sucker for the whole show slows me down, whereas my black JP90 is less than 10 pounds and lets me run across the stage like a madman?) and we were all kids too once you know. We remember how nice it was to go out and catch a live band and have a good time.
As for "how do I get on the list" are you SERIOUSLY that naive dude? Because the same companies that own the radio own the TV thanks to the congress critters removing that pesky "only allowed so many stations per area" rule. Go look up the rules on Clear channel play, I'm sure you'll find them posted, no big secret. you have to be signed with an affiliated label to get on the lists. No label deal? no play for you! It isn't exactly a secret dude, its been that way for years. Good luck BTW since no lawyer is gonna want to tangle with those sharks for less than a couple of hundred grand up front, as they know the appeals will take the better part of a decade.
Do the same thing the Israelis do, and have not only a solid door to the flight deck that won't be opened during a flight but have an armed military escort by the door with full license to kill if needed? I have plenty of family that have been in the military and have NO doubt what so ever that a USMC MP with low grained hollow points (so he will penetrate the bad guy not the cabin) would have no problem ensuring the safety of any flight, and without the need to feel up little kids.
The problem with this "security theater" crap is just like the MIC once you get the ball rolling it is damned hard to bring it back from insanity because so much money ends up funneled through it. Just like we keep cash sucking money pits like the Osprey and F-35, even though a combination of new F-18s and Blackhawks along with newer advanced UCAVs would be able to do the job for MUCH cheaper, but it would cause Senator Hogsnout to lose some pork so good luck killing it, so too does the ever widening TSA cause more and more money to be blown that Congressman Pigsknuckle won't want to see leave his district, not with the plant closings and all.
In the end all the high tech bullshit can't do the job as well as a USMC with a solid door, but it is harder to bleed money out of a program simply paying Marines and buying doors. These high tech bling blings and ever more TSA agents needed to feel up little kids means more money for the districts of Hogsnout and Pigsknuckle, and if we don't shut this crap down soon I have a feeling like the truckloads of money we blow yearly to the MIC contractors we will never see the end of the ever widening mess, simply because too many congress critters will use the programs "to bring jobs and money to the area!" aka pork barrel politics.
Uhhh...just in case you ain't noticed, been hid under a rock or something, the current choices (hell for the last 30 years at least) have been, now choose wisely! A.-Corporate cock sucking rich douchebag in a blue suit, OR B.Corporate cock sucking rich douchebag in a slightly darker blue suit. Man, decisions decisions!
News Flash: when it costs on average something in the neighborhood of 100 MILLION dollars just to be a senator or congressman, and that is from one of the shitty flyover states? Well the odds you are gonna get a choice that isn't Corporate cock sucking rich douchebag in a blue suit is pretty much 0%. That is why no matter how bad things get they ALWAYS vote for the corporate interests, every time.
As for TFA anybody who think the corps won't get everything their hard stolen bribes can buy can think again. the lust for power and control has gotten to the point that they don't even pretend to give a fuck about We The People or the constitution or rule of law anymore. i mean can you imagine Nixon or LBJ having the brass balls to say they have the right to assassinate Americans anywhere, even on American soil without so much as a hearing and get away with it? But that's where getting your corporate pals in control of the media pays off. it lets you label whistleblowers as 'terrorists" and have a dozen talking heads talking about what an evil bastard they are before the end of the day.
I mean for fuck's sake they ruled that a single Goatse style troll can land you in prison since the feds are running their own "kiddie porn" honeypots that don't log referrers and don't actually offer any CP! When you've got a system so corrupted where the rule of law is completely ignored time and time again any corp with a big bank acount can ram shit like this home. Just don't be surprised if you see Nancy Grace talking up how TPB and other P2P sites are nothing but a "home for pedos and pervs!" as they have just about beat the terrorist buzzword to death so they'll need a new bogeyman to sell this to the general pop.
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Why is this "bullshit"? Did anyone stick a gun to your head and make you buy it off of Steam? You had the choice of the (IMHO superior) GOG version, with no need for crap running in the background (like Steam), incredibly easy to backup, and all around hassle free version, or you could buy the DRM version from Steam and D2D.
It was completely up to you which version you bought so don't bitch that 'Wahhh I had to make a choice, wahh!" especially when Steam has been allowing third parties like Ubisoft to add more DRM on top of Steam killing the whole damned point for using Steam in the first place.
I just hope you were smart and bought the GOG version, I myself just bought the first one and will be getting the second as soon as I'm done with the first. I believe in putting my money where my mouth is and have been buying from GOG almost from the day it opened. If more would support DRM free then hopefully we will one day see DRM games go the way of DRM music. In both cases it only hurts the buyer while the pirate enjoys their stuff DRM free.
So instead of whining about D2D and Steam having DRM (shock! Surprise!) why not simply always buy from GOG where possible? not to mention as owner GOG gives them 100% of the proceeds from the game VS a percentage with the others, so why the hell shouldn't they support GOG? It would be kinda stupid to give the ones that only give you a cut the same as your own site.
I too have been wondering WTF Nvidia is thinking not buying Via. The new Nano chips are dual core X64 OOO with excellent on chip crypto, which tied in with Nvidia GPU tech would make a kick ass low power server that would be able to do strong encryption as well as a damned good notebook and netbook setup, and of course the Via embedded market would be a given, for things like car PCs and industrial usage.
I just don't see Nvidia staying afloat long term if they completely give up on the X86/64 market which is what it appears they are doing. Discrete GPUs simply don't have that big of a market, especially in mobile where power trumps all, and by buying rights to PowerVR Intel has just killed the ION platform dead. if you look at the numbers while you can't game for shit on it the PowerVR chips accelerate all of the major and minor HD formats (similar to the Broadcom HD chip) while using barely 2w of power. By integrating PowerVR Intel has killed a major source for ION sales, the fact that Atom can't do 1080p video, and as I said the AMD Radeon integrated does all the HD video you could want.
So that just leaves discrete GPUs, which as I said gaming, which I frankly love on my PC, is still a very small niche compared to the overall market, and high end mobile which is frankly dominated by iPhone. The rest usually just get whatever nice handset is offered with the contract and with carriers wanting to maximize profits above all I see the Broadcom and PowerVR chips taking a good chunk of that business. Finally as I pointed out the Nvidia "top first" model is inherently more expensive than the AMD "middle chips only" model, while still giving AMD the ability to scale. I have also found with power usage AMD chips are MUCH better as they can scale the stream processors, whereas Nvidia seems to have an "all or nothing" approach that while good for benchmarks makes for lousy power consumption.
In the end without being bought by Intel or buying Via and getting into APUs I just don't see them surviving long term. The mobile market is a fickle one, where what is "hot" can change in a heartbeat, and with the huge amounts of X86 desktop and mobile devices being more and more closed off from them I just don't see the niches they have left keeping them afloat. The last numbers I saw had them going through quarters of bleeding bad followed by brief respites when the next GPU hit. Again this gives an advantage to AMD who not only uses a cheaper design model but owns the sub $200 CPU market which helps their bottom line. I used to love Nvidia but honestly in 5 years I see them going like Voodoo before them, crushed by the change in tech just as Voodoo was killed when everyone quit using Glide API for DirectX and hardware T&L.
I had the same problem with a customer that turned out had one of those 'wireless security camera' setups set up in his workroom so he could watch his property. I checked for a microwave oven, cell phone interference, finally I walked around the property looking for anything that could cause trouble and spotted the cam. Sure enough I had him turn it off and bingo! WinXP detected and hooked up to his wireless network. Now once it hooks up it works fine, but if the camera is running on first setup you're boned.
Personally I'll be glad when they start selling those whitespace devices. For really short runs like giving a home Internet access there shouldn't be any reason why they can't just use the whitespace, especially if the device is low power. As it is there is simply too much crap running at the 2.4GHz frequency, hell just sitting in my apt I probably have a dozen routers I can hook up to and I am living in a small town. I can't even imagine what a nightmare keeping devices working in say an apt in DC or LA must be like. The interference must be insane!
But I would argue that the reason Windows gained so much traction in the first place is that the programs simply were never written for OS/2. I ran OS/2 for awhile back in the days of Win 3.x and frankly even with only 4Mb of RAM it was more like WinXP than Win3.x, as it had multitasking, the ability to play audio and video without crashing or turning into a sideshow, it was frankly awesome!
So why did I quit and go to win95, even though frankly OS/2 was MUCH nicer than Windows at the time? Simple because there weren't any programs for it while the store shelves were filled with Windows programs! Remember that these were the days before the Internet was fast enough to do much more than checking email and Net Shopping hadn't taken off yet so the vast majority bought their software at B&M stores. While the few of us who knew about the "better Windows than Windows" knew we could run win 3.x software, how many of the general pop knew that? On the boxes it plainly says it needs Windows, so I better get Windows!
Like BeOS which also died hard in that time, or I'd even argue Linux today, an OS is only as good as its programs and IBM simply didn't have the programs to entice buyers, I'd argue in large part because developers simply could resell their windows apps without bothering to port and by the time Windows 95 came out OS/2 was already in decline and so they never bothered.
If they would have written for the OS/2 native APIs their programs would have been head and shoulders more impressive than anything on windows, but because they did not those that saw OS/2 running simply saw it as a very pretty Windows clone that could only run a partial list of the current programs.
Now does that mean IBM marketing didn't suck? nope, they certainly didn't help their cause with one bad move after another. but like BeOS what we had with OS/2 was a case of the MUCH more technically advanced OS losing against a frankly piss poor at the time competitor. And while it is true the more RAM you had the better it ran you could easily run a couple of programs on OS/2 with 4Mb of memory which is 1 more than you could run with Windows during the Win 3.x period. It was simply other than a small handful of programs IBM wrote there simply weren't any progs that took advantage of what OS/2 had to offer.
I'd say the bigger question is: How long will Nvidia be able to stay afloat? First you have the dirty dealing by Intel (why they haven't been busted for antitrust i'll never know, as between AMD and Nvidia they caused billions in damage to the market with their dirty dealing, even worse than MSFT in the 90s IMHO) which slaughtered their Intel chipset division, causing them to go out of business, and now there is Intel licensing PowerVR for Atom which I'm betting will do to ION what cutting off access to the bus did to their Intel desktop sales
And on the other side you have AMD which frankly doesn't need Nvidia as they have excellent Radeon GPUs both discrete and as APUs with the new Bobcat and Bulldozer chips. Nvidia is still trying to make a little money with their desktop chipsets for AMD, but since they aren't making any new ones all they have left is the bottom of the barrel sub $45 market and from what I've seen most AMD guys (myself included) buy the Radeon chips to go with them so not much money on that side of the isle. Finally you have the fact that while Nvidia designs the monster chips first and then figures out ways to cripple them for the smaller markets AMD switched to simply designing for the midrange and using dual GPUs with HT links for the high end which is the obviously cheaper way to go.
So that leaves phones, HPCs, and discrete GPUs, which while decent markets are nothing like the size of the chipset division and as the APUs get better and better OEMs will be less and less likely to use discrete for anything but the gamer laptops, a teeny tiny niche.
Frankly I'll be amazed if Nvidia is around in 5 years, I really will. Personally I think the moves by intel are designed to slowly bleed Nvidia to make a takeover less expensive. Lets face it Intel has always sucked when it comes to GPUs and having Nvidia to integrate the way AMD did with ATI would give them some serious graphical muscle, although again why nobody has screamed antitrust over the way Intel has been behaving I'll never know. but I can't see the markets they are currently in bringing in enough cash to pay for the massive R&D that having to keep up with AMD costs and from the looks of it the new APUs are gonna end up "good enough" for everyone but hardcore gamers further hurting their bottom line.
So frankly I just don't see how discrete chips like TFA are gonna keep them afloat long term. The discrete chips cost money the OEMs don't have to spend with virtually all the chips from Atom on up coming with GPU on chip, those that buy gamer notebooks are a tiny niche of the overall market and with the vast majority of discrete cards going to the sub $150 market, which favors the AMD "build the MOR chips" over the Nvidia "high end first" model I just don't see how they are supposed to survive long term. CUDA is nice but I don't see it being enough to keep them above water, especially if Intel has eyes on buying them out down the road and keeps up their douchebag behavior.
So how many think Nvidia will be here in 5 years, or will they end up a footnote like Voodoo? Which in a twist of irony if it turns out I'm right was bought by Nvidia after being slowly bled to death by changes in the market. While I switched to AMD only for me and my customers after the Bumpgate mess I'd hate to see Nvidia disappear, especially since it would ultimately be over Intel douchebaggery.
Except those "3Ds" are bullshit. The first D means that Israel can build all the concentration camp style containments it wants and you can't say shit because it makes you antisemitic! The second D is the classic fallacy 'you can't judge me because there are other bad people in the world" and I shouldn't have to explain why that one is bullshit, nor is there a "douchebag law' that says you must give equal time to hating every douchebag country on the planet, and finally the whole excuse of why Israel supposed deserves that land is because of a religion most who were kicked out of their homes don't believe in and I doubt VERY seriously you could trace even a single Jew's lineage far back enough to give a legitimate claim to being one of the original tribes. IIRC the vast majority of Jews alive today can be traced back to eastern Europe and Asia NOT the ME. To say they have a legitimate claim to that land would be like me saying I should own Peru because my native American ancestors crossed it getting here 10,000 years ago!
So as you can see, at least if you aren't blinded by politics, that the "3Ds" are just another way of legitimizing Zionism. Now while I say that Britain originally didn't have the right to give other people's land away, anymore than they had the right to all the appeasement giving of others land before WWII, now that they are there I would say they have the right to the pre 67 borders. But since being established they have gone on a systematic land grab that has started multiple conflicts and is costing lives and homes to this day. Allow me to quote: " We would send a tractor to plough someplace where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was" yet to point out this douchebaggery is similar to the false flags and provocation that the crazy Austrian used to build support for the invasion of Poland would labeled antisemitic and that's bullshit!
That sounds like the classic OS/2 problem. For those not old enough to remember back in the days of Windows 2 and 3 IBM marketed OS/2 as "a better Windows than Windows" thanks to its having much of the Windows APIs embedded to use by OS/2.
The problem was the developers that saw this simply didn't bother writing OS/2 apps which could take advantage of the platform, instead simply marketing their Windows programs to OS/2 users. Since they only had rights to Windows through Windows 3 OS/2 quickly lost the "better Windows than Windows" advantage and had no real third party software of its own, and thus dried up and blew away.
So while I don't see this happening because of a game emulator if someone were to say come out with a Wine layer? Then I could see it becoming a problem. If you could simply write Windows apps and pack in Wine, why bother writing for Android?
Well I don't know about him, and call me weird, but I don't think we should be giving a damn dime when it comes to foreign aid when our infrastructure is falling down, we are drowning in debt, we have a huge trade deficit with pretty much everybody, massive unemployment and underemployment, folks losing their homes left and right, borders leaking like sieves, blowing money like shit through a goose on pointless MIC crap like the Osprey, need I go on?
As far as Israel goes i'm proud to say that I believe that AIPAC should be listed as a lobbying firm for a foreign power and STRICTLY controlled, and BTW I'm also damned sick of anybody that is against militaristic Zionism being labeled as antisemitic by AIPAC and Southern Poverty Law Center. As someone whose grandfather helped liberate one of the camps in Poland I find it fucking sick that these douchebags would use the dead to further their own Neocon ambitions, or that they are allowed to so blatantly bribe our elected officials and wield so much power over OUR government!
When you have the candidates for both parties going to kiss the booty of AIPAC before running you can see where the paranoid get their ZOG ideas from because AIPAC and SPLC have too God damned much power over OUR government. If American Jews want to send their money to Israel? Fine, go right ahead. But you should be able to take money out of my pocket to support a regime I don't believe in, nor allow their lobbyists to have more control and access than We, the People do!
Finally, just to piss off the Neocons and Xtians allow me to say this: Basing our Mid East policies on "Jesus won't come back!" is dumb as fuck! You have people dying, billions being blown, and enemies being made all over the region, because our entire ME policy is tied into whether or not a 2000+ year old dead guy, written about on sheep skins by goat herders, has a place to park his fluffy cloud on some mythical day where his dead ass comes floating on down from heaven. Protip" If your "God" is so fucking weak he can't even get a parking spot without the US MIC backing his ass up then your "God" is pretty damned pathetic. And the fact that both sides kiss the AIPAC booty and cause so much suffering because of scribblings written by primitives is fucking idiotic!
Fuck Israel and every other country with their hand out. We should cut our military by half, quit blowing our money on bling bling MIC tech like its still the cold war, and spend OUR money on OUR people, period. As much as I don't agree with Glenn Beck on...well pretty much anything, the man did say one thing insightful. He said it is high time we in the USA decided to "Be Switzerland" and stay the hell out of everyone's business. As he said we have been sticking our noses in other people's business for a century and caused NOTHING but misery, dictators like Mubarak, and suffering wherever we went. it is high time to "Be Switzerland". Oh and before any Xtians believe that "When the Jews return to Zion" line they might just want to look up what it says about 'The Whore of Babylon" which with our sellout congress critters and stirring up shit everywhere is what we are acting like.
Do you even hear yourself? The amount of logical hop jumping and plain denial is just astounding! I guess denial isn't just a river in Egypt huh? Because the simple fact that you honestly believe that I should tell customers to learn to recompile their own drivers which BTW won't do SHIT when it comes to some of Linus's serious kernel fucking, is simply beyond ridiculous. How can you stand here with a straight face and claim your OS is ready for the masses ,em>if they need to compile their own drivers
And WTF do Windows forums have to do with shit/ Or Lowes? you NEVER need Windows forums after simply updating the OS whereas you BETTER be ready to spend an assload of time at your distros forums with make/model/rev thanks to updates breaking shit left and right, which again I linked to. This is a classic case of "moving the goalposts" as you refuse to acknowledge, even though I provided links rubbing your nose in it, that even Dell can't keep the drivers working which is beyond insanity! And who gives a shit what some enterprise, which BTW has these things called "admins" that get paid big bucks to deal with broken shit like drivers and has about as much to do with retail PC sales as a car does with an F-16, have to do with this discussion? Did I MENTION anywhere enterprise? Or say in any place that we were talking about, in no particular order, enterprise deployments, servers, routers, cell phones, or any other damned thing that isn't a retail Linux sale? Nope don't think so.
In the end the numbers don't lie. no retail B&M store will touch your OS, and after 20 years Linux is so far behind /. has an article congratulating Linux on reaching a whole 1%! Woo Hoo, and it only took 20 damned years! If the "community" continues like you with elitism, refusing to see problems and correct them, refusing to make things easy for the user, and most importantly refusing to keep Linus from constantly breaking shit, then don't be surprised that it takes Linux another 20 damned years to reach that magical 2%. The simple fact is it isn't 1993, and users aren't gonna jump through flaming hoops simply for "free as in freedom, fight teh power!" bullshit. you gotta be better or at the very least as good, and frankly with the kernel futzing Linux doesn't even rank as high as Windows 98 in my book, MAYBE Win 3.1. Because with Windows 98 I could actually take a RTM and update it to the last patch and the drivers still worked whereas the Linux update notifier may as well be a "Break Linux NOW!" button, for all the broken drivers. It is pretty God damned sad when you can't even run updates without your OS shitting itself, and if the choices are 1.-Give them a broken OS and telling them "RTFM Noob LOL!" 2.-Turning off ALL updates and leaving them as vulnerable as any other unpatched OS, or 3.-Installing Windows and at least having it run until EOL without having broken drivers? Well at $35 an hour it really only takes a single forum hunt to make your OS more expensive than Windows. But you pretend it is all a conspiracy, that we 'just don't understand" your OS. it reminds me of that old joke "I have no friends, Linux has no friends, maybe I can be Linux's friend!" because the public sure as hell ain't touching it!
McGrew there is actually a REASON for patch Tuesday and that is because everyone was having a shitfit that the patches would come willy nilly! With Patch Tuesday it makes it MUCH easier to plan for updates in a corporate environment, and since Windows rules the business world by a HUGE margin you can't expect them to fuck over such a large client base just because Mcgrew wants updates quicker.
That said if you show even tiniest bit of common sense .then your risk of infection is practically zip which my customers that have been running 8 years on the same XP install and simply having me come over to do an occasional memory upgrade can attest, so whether patches come out on Tuesday or the week after tomorrow really shouldn't matter! Watch how easy it is to have a nice clean running Windows from first install..
1.-Install Wndows. 2.- Run WSUS Offline from a flash, which if you've checked the little checkbox will have all the SPs, .NET, and all the patches in one nice easy to run place. 3.- Install Comodo Dragon from the same flash, so they'll have a nice browser that uses low rights mode and sandboxing and so you won't have to worry about IE, after installing go ahead and add ABP for Chrome which kills ad based malware dead. While you are at it you can install any third party software that doesn't need constant updating, I install LibreOffice, Win 7 Codec pack (which is great as it lets you burn just about any format in WinDVD maker, which folks just love) and Media Player Classic Home Cinema 4.- Go to Ninite to install the third party software that needs to be fresh, depending on the user. I usually install Flash, Foxit PDF Reader, any messenger program they use, along with Irfanview, Picasa, Avast Free, Malwarebytes, along with CCleaner and Defraggler. For burning I carry Ashampoo on the flash as folks like its layout better than CDBurnerXP. As this finishes up I usually add WinUtilities, which automates registry cleaning and the dumping of temp files along with tossing broken shortcuts. For the finale add Filehippo Update checker which only takes up 300Kb and will let them know when there are third party updates like flash, so they aren't using an old vulnerable solution.
And that's it! Notice how nothing there is more complex than going "clicky clicky" and doesn't cost you a dime? And a machine you've followed these simple steps with will be fine for anything short of user stupidity, which NO OS can keep the stupid from doing dumb shit, like running "Iz_Not_Viruz_Porn_Codecs!" trying to see teh tittiez. But a machine done this way, while sensibly having Automatic Updates set to Automatic (duh!) will give you years of trouble free service, while having all the third party software updated without the user having to constantly check for patches and with both Comodo dragon AND Avast doing sandboxing, as well as dragon running low rights mode, means web bugs really aren't going anywhere. With just a tiny bit of preparation and common sense (don't run email attachments, if they want free porn tell them to go to myfreepaysite.com which has like 5000 DVDs of porn for free, if they insist on having P2P Gnucleus or Emule with P2P shield running in Avast, no making kids accounts admin) your Windows machine will run trouble free for years, just as my customers after I'm through only need to come to me for hardware upgrades.
Bingo! As someone who fixes these things every week while there are still plenty of Adobe exploits I've noticed since Win 7 came out they simply haven't been using OS exploits like they used to, now they run social engineering because it is always easier to take control if the user helps you and by appealing to their greed, desire, or fear it really ain't hard to get them to go along.
The big attack vectors i'm seeing day after day, in no particular order, is: 1.- The "you want teh hot lesbos? you need to run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_codec.exe to play teh vidz!" 2.- The "ZOMg you got teh viruz! To fix run our Iz_not_Viruz_iz_cleanerz.exe to get rid of it ZOMG!" 3.-The "Use the new Limewire (Iz_not_Viruz_iz_Limewirez) to download teh latest Titney_Spearz.mp3.exe tunez today!" and 4.-"Hey my BFF sent me a funny cat video! It says I should run Iz_not_Viruz_iz_LOLCatz to see teh kittiez!"
As you will notice with ALL of the above you simply don't have to bother with an exploit for ANY of those, as the user IS the exploit and is the weakest link. The last major "WTF?" that MSFT had, the "Hey lets run everybody as admin!" officially died with Vista and since 7 doesn't bug the crap out of folks with "Cancel/allow?" boxes every three seconds UAC has been left on and along with low rights mode in IE and Chromium based is doing a good job, as we saw by the numbers released the other week where there are only 4 per 1000 7 machines infected VS 14 for XP.
But as long as you have people willing to ignore or even turn off their AV (as I had the other week with a customer and the "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz_Limewire") because a malware writer waved a cookie in front of them then frankly I don't see what else can be done besides what MSFT is already doing with the free MSRT and MSE. And as we have seen with first MacDefender and now MacGuard (which doesn't even need the password anymore) on OSX and the nasty Android trojan apps it doesn't matter whether you are on an alternative OS or not, all that matters is whether or not the bad guys want in bad enough to do the work and whether you have any users who'll run "Iz_Not_Bug_Iz" style apps. sadly I've found that WAAAY too many are more than happy to do just that.
Because, and I'm sure to get hatred for pointing this out, a lot of the developers out there seem to suffer from Cargo Cult Usability where they implement basic ideas without understanding the underlying structure which is why you saw a previous poster talking about "dept store knockoffs" because when you implement some of the front end without the underlying structure it feels like a badly done copy.
Take Gnome for example. they have ripped off (homage, whatever) a lot of the Mac GUI without understanding how the structure ties in which makes it 'off". For example they have the traditional Mac menu in the correct placement but their DE is windows based and Macs are application based which causes it to make no sense. Since Macs are app based all apps use the same menu at the top whereas with gnome each app typically has their own menu layout or at least did last time I tried it with Ubuntu 10.04, which makes having the top menu kinda pointless.
With KDE they seem to follow the Windows model but yet again they don't implement the features, just the look or at least that was the case last time I tried it (again with Ubuntu 10.04) because while they had a lot of the familiar layout they didn't have breadcrumbs or Readyboost or superfetch or many of the other features that makes Windows more usable.
So I think Canonical is in the right here, even if it falls flat or takes a while to get solid, in that the way to go is to forge a "Linux centric" model where you have a completely different GUI that won't make people feel "cheap knockoff" when features they are used to in Macs or windows aren't found or are different. By switching to Unity+Wayland they will have a different "look and feel" to other OSes, thus removing some of the preconceived notions people have when you use a Windows or Mac centric layout.
Uhhhh who gives a fuck when the important thing is the CP witchhunt has gotten so bad a shot of a cartoon panty is considered CP which is beyond fucking ridiculous!
Ya know when the bullshit first started I actually supported SOME of it. Oh I didn't and still don't support the truly insane amounts of time they give someone who looks at a picture without actually touching a kid themselves (because I have a friend in the state crime lab who says more than 90% of those they bust are social retards who are about as much of a threat to kids as a bowl of marshmallows, most are afraid of or avoid interactions with ANYBODY and they are looking at the same old shit that has been floating around since USENET) but the idea of cops working together internationally to find the child rapists and hunt their sorry asses down? I was ALL for that!
But now we have literally reached the point of thoughtcrime, where it doesn't matter if any child was involved at all it is still treated as child rape! Just in the past few years we have seen a man given several years for writing his own thoughts onto paper which IIRC he was told to do by his shrink to help him work through it (thoughtcrime), a guy given several years for looking at Japanese hentai (thoughtcrime) and even one thrown in jail for looking at one of those crudely drawn Simpsons cartoons, even though legally the Simpson "kids" if they actually existed would be in their 30s!
That is why I urge everyone to stand up, not just here but IRL as well, when these laws are abused to create thoughtcrimes. Remember folks it is NEVER the "good guy" they use to take away our rights it is ALWAYS done by using scapegoats like "terrorists" and "perverts" and "racists" because those in power know too many fear standing up for those types, for fear of being labeled as supporting their views.
But just as my grandfather took a wall dropped on him by a Werewulf squad in WWII yet STILL stood up and said that the Illinois Nazis should have the right to march, because as he said "That is what makes us better than the system they are supporting as here ALL ideas have the right to be spoken of and discussed" so too must we stand up for those used to take away our liberties one thoughtcrime at a time. Remember the words of that wise pastor years ago: "First they came for" because those same laws stretched to cover pictures or words on a page can and WILL be abused to go after sites like wikileaks or maybe even yourself if you protest something the powerful want! Hell according to my friend at the crime lab the way the law is worded now someone could draw a stick figure and someone else write on top "nekked kid" and that would technically get you the same time as a real pic of a raped child! Does that make ANY sense to anyone here? How fucking scary can you get!
And here comes the religious dogma I was talking about! Isn't it funny that the argument against having stable functioning drivers always comes down to IDEOLOGY, with the rant most people link to going so far as to call those that refuse to hand over source "leeches" and hope the kernel futzing breaks their drivers?
I mean WTF is it to you if some do and some don't? Is that ANY different than right now? Nope, as you still have companies like Nvidia that makes binary blobs, only now you get to watch them break every six months. Does having open drivers keep Linux from breaking? Nope again as the open drivers break just as often thanks to Linus and his kernel fucking, because if you could look at it logically instead of a faith based perspective you'd see that there are only so many devs, and there are fewer of them than drivers to fix so drivers will ALWAYS be broken when Linus gets a wild hair up his ass, every. single. time!
And allow me to say that if your way "worked" in any kind of reasonable fashion retailers wouldn't avoid your OS like the clap which I can assure you we most certainly do. Not just all the thousands of mom&pop shops, dotting the entire country, but big names like Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, do you think they avoid your OS because of its "quality construction" or a secret conspiracy? NO! It is because they take the box home, run updates when the little icon tells them to and get a broken machine like it is 1993 all over again, and promptly take that broke ass shit back! And since we retailers can't sell used as new that means we take a hit on every return making Linux even MORE expensive!
As a final word allow me to give you proof, undeniable proof like a slap to the face your current way is broke ass shit. Now I'm sure you'll find some excuse, like "Use Distro X" or "You should buy hardware Y" but in the end all you will have is excuses because this proof should make even YOU take note! Now you and your fellow converts think we retailers are just full of it, that it should "just work" right? well when one of the biggest OEMs on the planet has to DISABLE the repos and spend considerable money and man hours keeping a badly out of date "corporate repo" just for their customers because if they don't the drivers WILL break then i'm sure you can see why both little guys like me and big guys like Walmart and OEMs like ASUS have washed their hands of your OS. I mean when fricking netbooks, a class of machine built around Linux strengths and which started out more than 30% Linux ends up completely obliterated by a decade old Windows OS it is high time to ask yourself "What are we doing wrong?" and I'd say basing your OS on religion instead of sound design practices and trusting your customers to make purchases that will benefit them (such as choosing FOSS drivers where possible so they have LTS) is a good example of why Linux is so far behind everyone else, and why even free you are getting hammered by an OS with a $100 barrier to entry.
Well that is why I put the "MP" part on there you seem to have missed. One of my grandpas was an MP and getting to hang around him and his fellow MPs one thing I learned is there is NOBODY that takes the law more seriously than a USMC MP. To him and his friends to break the law in performance of his duty would have been like pissing on the USMC flag, he would have rather died first. They take their oaths VERY seriously and I honestly can't see a USMC MP bringing dishonor to the corp and his fellow MPs by going rampage or using extreme force if it wasn't warranted.
Now as far as stuff like Iraq? frankly I'd say you can't really judge them like you could an MP on an airplane, simply because of the incredible horrors they have to deal with day after day after day. my second grandfather was USAAF Sgt in charge of ensuring the communication lines between the front and HQ work and I was fortunate enough to have him tell me what it was like from his landing on day 3 to the end of the war when he got a wall dropped on him by a Werewulf squad and spent two years in a body cast.
He told me of how in France they would be walking along checking the line when suddenly a German artillery manning a hidden Flak88 would use one of the men as a target trying to kill them with shrapnel and when it would hit your friend would be nothing but a fine red mist that coated everything, or how he ran into my great uncle Mike on the road to the Rhine and while they were laughing and joking with their CO the entire side of the CO's face exploded from a German sniper shot, covering them in his brains and skull fragments. Mike was a trained sharpshooter and saw where the smoke came from and bore down. When he got there he found a woman 6 months pregnant trying to reach for her sidearm to blow him away, so he killed her with a head shot.
I give my grandfather credit, because he was always brutally honest yet said after all that horror and burying so many of his friends there was only ONE time he came close to "saying damn the rules lets get some payback" as he put it, was when he was there when they liberated one of the Polish camps and saw little kids starved to death and piled like cordwood. He said the ONLY thing that kept he and his buddies from just lining the Nazis against the wall and shooting them in cold blood was one of the prisoners spoke English and told them that the guards were just flunkies called up at the last minute to guard the camp while the real bastards snuck off in the night, and the flunkies had been horrified and was treating them well and sharing what they had.
So I find it hard to judge guys in that situation, as frankly you don't know how much horror they had been exposed to before the atrocities occurred. You can only take so much truly vicious acts happening to people you know before you see everybody as one of "them". That said I don't see how you would have that same problem with MPs as long as you didn't take them straight from the front to airplane duty. There are plenty here in the states they could use for the job, and with their dedication to upholding the law I personally would feel safer with one of them than a civilian in that role.
Excuse me, not that I really give much of a shit about consoles (Been a PC gamer since i got burnt with three dead PS1s, still have an Xbox 1 and GC left over from the kids I'm trying to figure out what to do with) but I don't understand how you can say the PS2s specs were shit when it had a 64bit 300Mhz CPU and a GPU capable of 1280x1024 when it was released in 2000.
Maybe you have forgotten what we had at the turn of the century but I haven't as back then I shelled out nearly $300 for a refurb 1.2GHz Celeron box at that time and it was a good deal and used to run my Geforce 256 SDR, with its whole 32Mb of SDRAM and 120MHz clock. IMHO things only started getting ape shit with regards to processing power with the whole P4 VS Athlon on the CPU side (still keep a couple of those around for loaners, still surf the web quite nicely even after 7 years) and the Radeon VS Geforce on the GPU end. Both of those only really started cranking and leapfrogging around 2004-2005 IIRC, which would have made the PS2 4 years old already.
So if you look at the specs from the context of the time they really weren't bad. One thing that always struck me as weird is why the original Xbox didn't just slaughter everybody. I mean you had COTS X86 parts, so porting should have been laughably easy, with none of the long "learning curve" you see on most consoles, it had good specs and a low resource OS and used DirectX, which most game houses had plenty of experience in. The only thing I thought they'd done wrong was not include some "OtherOS" style functionality, to where those that had an Xbox could use it like a Netbox for basics like checking email or posting on forums.
Ya know, just as we saw Google just show up and blow the doors off with Android I'm really shocked somebody hasn't done the same with game consoles. Just imagine how nice of a console you could have with one of those really affordable Bulldozer APU, maybe put in the 4 core/8 thread model with the 65xx GPU built in? It would be ultra low power, have 2Gb of DDR3 RAM, a 500Gb or 1Tb HDD, use Streams for full HD acceleration of just about any format, and use a low resource OS like an embedded Linux with a lightweight GUI like LXDE. Seems like it would be a no brainer, and could be an all in one media center/game console that would be easy to port just about anything to. Hell buying in bulk you could probably sell them for under $300 to start and still make a healthy profit and just have an encryption chip to keep the hackers from modding the games while giving them access to the rest.
But just the fact that they are still making and selling PS2s and folks are buying them after the other two of that generation are long gone shows that folks thought the graphics are decent enough to still play after all this time, and giving the developers credit they did manage to squeeze some pretty sweet gaming goodness out of the PS2. But when it was released I'd say it wasn't no wimp, just MOR compared to the competitors that came later.
I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out but its true: Linux is free if your time is worthless. I've have looked into offering Linux as an alternative OS in my little retail shop for years, and every year i find nothing has changed. Until Torvalds either retires or someone fires his irritating ass so that Linux can FINALLY, after everyone else (Solaris, BSD, OSX and Windows, hell even OS/2) has had them for over a decade, get a stable kernel level hardware ABI so drivers don't shit themselves and die every time Linus gets an itch to fuck shit up in the kernel, then Linux will remain a black hole of time wasting where you have to spend days or even a week or more every six months doing the "forum hunts" trying to find "fixes' for the multitude of drivers Torvalds breaks constantly.
Which makes sense if anyone would look at it from an engineering instead of religious dogma perspective, as you are talking about literally tens of thousands of drivers nearly all of which have to interact with a kernel that Torvalds treats as his personal plaything and with little regard to the thousands of man hours he is pissing away, not only by all the developers that have to go in and ifx what he has broken but in all the hours users waste with forum hunts.
Not to mention how many Linux users it ultimately ends up costing because mom&pop retailers like me, the kind of guys YOU NEED to get on board Linux, as we have NO real ties or support from MSFT and in our position could really help Linux with sales and after sale support who stay away from your OS because with all the man hours forum hunts suck up it makes Linux literally MORE expensive than Windows. My time is a minimum $35 an hour, at the rate it only takes 2.5 hours to make Linux more expensive than Windows 7 HP and I can easily waste half a day on a forum hunt, what with searching for, tweaking, and multiple attempts to get said fix working.
So until the day comes I can sell a box with Linux on it and be confident that the drivers will continue working for at LEAST three years minimum, preferably five, then "Linux is free if your time is worthless" is simply the truth for all those that do this as something other than a hobby. Home users aren't gonna learn CLI to apply fixes, neither are SMBs and SOHO, and they sure as hell aren't gonna sit around with a list of make/model/rev of every piece of hardware they have in order to do forum hunts.
I want Linux to succeed in the desktop and retail markets, I really really do. I grew up in the days of GEM and Commodore and having lots of choices, and I believe lots of choice makes for a healthy and vibrant ecosystem. but someone is gonna have to face the fact that Torvalds is a douchebag. It is all well and good he invented the kernel, but it ain't 1991 anymore and Linux isn't just some plaything for Torvalds to futz with and share his changes over IRQ. The kernel is the heart of a multi-billion dollar OS, being counted on by millions, yet Torvalds treats it NO differently than he did at the beginning.
And before anyone says "LTS" let me say LTS is a bad joke. As long as much software is tied to which kernel you are using LTS is a codeword for "run out of date and possibly insecure software" and it is just ridiculous. It ain't 1991 folks, having drivers shit themselves and die is simply unacceptable in this day and age, especially when your competition gives on average a decade of support for their OS. Frankly this problem would be trivial to fix with a stable ABI for drivers, but Torvalds and his ego won't admit he made a mistake. The current way was fine when it was a hobbyist OS, it simply isn't anymore. Now you either shell out for expensive enterprise gear (which negates any savings by going Linux) where a team of developers have to constantly fix drivers for the life of the contract, or you are SOL, because you'll be wasting time on forum hunts. Sorry but that is just unacceptable.
Develop a decentralized P2P app for BT links? The way this is supposed to "work" is by blocking websites with P2P links (but of course as any government power I'm sure they'll abuse the shit out of it to say try to kill wikileaks and other whistleblowers) by the thought that if you can't get the link you can't get the torrent.
So the way to go around it, at least with regards to torrents, is to simply use a decentralized P2P app to distribute torrent links. A specialized P2P app designed to give you JUST torrent files, complete with user ratings, would kill this from blocking torrents dead, since you wouldn't need TPB or any other torrent site to find torrents. As for getting rid of whistleblower sites the only answer I have to that would be something like Freenet, but the catch with that is so far nobody has tried their "plausible deniability" theory in court and considering a CP charge can net you 60 year that is a hell of a risk to take on an untested legal theory.
Now please ignore if the situation has changed since I last looked at it, but last I checked you still needed websites for torrent links. By going decentralized P2P tp spread said links that would make blocking sites such as TPB useless, since you wouldn't need them to get the links. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if their next move would be to force search engines like Google to remove ALL torrent links that haven't been given to some committee for approval first.
Of course in the end I have a feeling we'll just have a "great firewall of corporatist Amerika" and we'll have to take lessons from our Chinese friends on how to run a VPN and risk being labeled a "terrorist/pedo" or whatever bogeyman word they use for it this week. Because heaven forbid we don't help entrenched multinationals by using tax dollars to prop up their failing business models and help them keep complete control on what the population hears and sees. God forbid they should have to come up with new business models for a new era, heavens no! If these corrupt bastards would have been in office at the turn of the 20th century we'd all be paying a "buggy tax" on our cars and labeling buggy whip manufacturers as "too big to fail".
As for protecting our rights, what rights would those be? We don't even have the right to a fair trial anymore as Obama declared, in a case of having even bigger brass balls than Bush, that he has the right to perform assassinations on Americans, even on American soil and if you don't even have the right to life under the "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" clause of the constitution, how can you possibly have ANY rights at all? After all, how can giving the corps the right to have you thrown in prison for sharing some shitty Hollywood movie even compare to just having you shot? Welcome to Amerika, where the only freedoms are reserved for the top 1%ers.
Ya know, if it was 5 years ago I'd probably be right with them, but now? Ballmer has actually been making some smart moves in the past couple of years. Windows 7 is an awesome OS, the Nokia deal will allow them to have vertical integration with WinPhone like Apple enjoys with iPod, and the Skype deal will not only give them a huge consumer base but again will give them vertical integration in both the business and consumer sectors.
Imagine a Nokia WinPhone with a DirectX subset and .NET for gaming so you can use XNA to share between it and the X360, integrated Skype support in the phone, Windows 7, and the X360, and having Skype integrated with WinServer so any corp can hand out a WinPhone and have complete control of it via GPOs and AD as well as a fixed low price for calls no matter where you send the employee. And that employee will be able to take it home and have it all "just work" nice and simple. And this doesn't count the fact that the new Office 07 and up has made things more intuitive with the ribbon and sold quite well.
So frankly I don't see Ballmer going anywhere ATM. sales are doing great, he is making smart moves in the mobile space which I'm guessing will pay off in the next year to year and a half, they have a new tablet based version of Windows 8 coming out, and it looks like the days of a decade between OSes has been stopped for a more sensible 3 years between OSes with a decade of support per OS. So I'd say after the disasters that were Vista and allowing the OEMs to sell weak hardware as "Vista Capable" it looks like Ballmer may have finally pointed the ship in the right direction. And with Gates still being chairman of the board I don't see him firing his old friend, not when sales are doing great.
I just hope that now they can break with the tradition of never putting out two good OSes in a row and not cock up Windows 8. Windows 7 is intuitive enough those like my dad can install it himself, run it with ease and actually find more functionality he never even knew was there thanks to the smart search, while at the same time making it easier for old hands like me to easily manage things with features like breadcrumbs and libraries. So please MSFT don't cock up the UI for Windows 8, okay?
How is that? Saying "Go back to your homes, everything is fine" is a whole hell of a lot different than saying 'At this point in time we simply don't know" and these folks were depending on these guys to give them SOME sort of heads up!
That would be like me saying "Yeah that PC is supposed to release little balls of white smoke like that, its an effect!" and then being surprised when the person who is listening to me because of my knowledge and experience takes the PC home and it burns the house to the ground and kills their family. I doubt very seriously any court would allow me to say :"Oops, my bad" and walk away. At the very least one should err on the side of caution and from looking at TFA it seems they didn't do that.
So while I don't know if they should be looking at manslaughter, criminal negligence? That I could easily believe.
No shit. my oldest got an inkjet thrown in with his new laptop he got for college, and being the "hates to waste things" type tried to actually use it. Blew through a good $70 in a month. I calmly went out and found him a nice B&W laser on the net WITH a 5000 sheet toner PLUS a 15,000 and a 13,000 toner carts thrown in. Final cost? a hair over $100. The laser cost slightly more than he blew through in a month trying to feed the inkjet and after 6 months of printing constantly for class he has yet to go through the 5K, much less even open the 13k and 15k carts.
When you look at even the color laser printers the prices are low enough the insane inkjet cart prices just don't make sense. I have a brand new inkjet given to me by a customer who didn't know better and got a laser after I pointed out the price difference, and as soon as the black ink cart runs out it'll be headed to the dump or to my engineering buddy who likes to strip stuff for parts like gears. If you are printing so little you think an inkjet would work I can promise you you'd get better results simply having your printing done at Walgreen's or Wally World, for everyone else B&Ws start at like $40 refurb and you can often find color lasers like this wireless model for $150. Inkjets are like floppies, once upon a time they made sense and now they are just pointless designed for the dump ripoffs. The only time I recommend an inkjet anymore is when someone needs a cheap scanner/fax I tell them to get an all in one and simply use the ink up and then keep the scanner/fax. IMHO that is pretty much the only time having an inkjet makes any sense anymore, as the all in ones are cheaper than buying two devices.
Meh, I still think my idea for an icon is better. picture the iconic Ballmer with his tongue stuck out, wearing an "I heart Apple!" beanie. Considering his "me too!" aping of Apple since he took the helm it would be a perfect fit. I can just imagine him rallying the troops: "And with this new version we'll take the market by storm and be as hip and cool as Apple! yes we will! We really really will! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!!!"
As for TFA...emmm...okay? As someone who started with windows 3 frankly I'm glad those days are gone. TSAs, memory corruption, constant reboots, frankly all the OSes of that period were shit. The fact that with those early machines they were able to squeeze so much into an OS that was that primitive, no memory protection and everything having bare metal access, was a miracle. i think I'll just stay with my nice quad with 8Gb of RAM and Windows 7, where the only time I have to deal with a reboot is when I want to run my really old copy of Cubase in XP. Frankly those days? nothing really "good" about them computing wise IMHO. Might as well be trying to build a punch card reader and hook up some core memory to your Arduino, more interesting that running really old crap OSes.
It would be interesting though to see Linux 1.0, Windows 1.0, and the first MacOS side by side running in VMs, just to see which shits itself and dies first. Most would probably say win 1.0 but I bet it would be the Linux, as the driver support really wasn't there that early in the game.
I have seen guys playing Nintendos in avant garde Lo fi, so frankly I don't see why any music can't be played live. hell in case you ain't heard Elvis is on tour (digital Elvis with live band) and in Japan they have a hologram throwing live concerts and packing the place!
As for the sweepstakes rules? Dude cops don't care about that as long as the drawings are fair which was why they had the "no purchase necessary" placed in there in the first place! Hell we even had a uniformed state trooper do the drawing at one of our shows, he got a thrill out of being the one to choose the winners and hand out the prizes, nobody cares as long as you're honest, and since we in the band NEVER did the drawings ourselves, but would pick some random person from the front row to reach in and draw the tickets it was all good.
As for kids most of us are QUITE happy to play outdoor festivals and all age shows, our main concern is you get to enjoy the music, not how much booze you get to drink. Most bands love playing the summer shed shows, it lets us get closer to the audience (we would always set up a booth in the back where folks could get merch and talk to us about anything, it was nice to get folks asking questions like "Why do you play that pretty red & white bass on some songs and not on others?" Answer-Because it is nearly 40 pounds of South American Swamp ash and sling that sucker for the whole show slows me down, whereas my black JP90 is less than 10 pounds and lets me run across the stage like a madman?) and we were all kids too once you know. We remember how nice it was to go out and catch a live band and have a good time.
As for "how do I get on the list" are you SERIOUSLY that naive dude? Because the same companies that own the radio own the TV thanks to the congress critters removing that pesky "only allowed so many stations per area" rule. Go look up the rules on Clear channel play, I'm sure you'll find them posted, no big secret. you have to be signed with an affiliated label to get on the lists. No label deal? no play for you! It isn't exactly a secret dude, its been that way for years. Good luck BTW since no lawyer is gonna want to tangle with those sharks for less than a couple of hundred grand up front, as they know the appeals will take the better part of a decade.
Do the same thing the Israelis do, and have not only a solid door to the flight deck that won't be opened during a flight but have an armed military escort by the door with full license to kill if needed? I have plenty of family that have been in the military and have NO doubt what so ever that a USMC MP with low grained hollow points (so he will penetrate the bad guy not the cabin) would have no problem ensuring the safety of any flight, and without the need to feel up little kids.
The problem with this "security theater" crap is just like the MIC once you get the ball rolling it is damned hard to bring it back from insanity because so much money ends up funneled through it. Just like we keep cash sucking money pits like the Osprey and F-35, even though a combination of new F-18s and Blackhawks along with newer advanced UCAVs would be able to do the job for MUCH cheaper, but it would cause Senator Hogsnout to lose some pork so good luck killing it, so too does the ever widening TSA cause more and more money to be blown that Congressman Pigsknuckle won't want to see leave his district, not with the plant closings and all.
In the end all the high tech bullshit can't do the job as well as a USMC with a solid door, but it is harder to bleed money out of a program simply paying Marines and buying doors. These high tech bling blings and ever more TSA agents needed to feel up little kids means more money for the districts of Hogsnout and Pigsknuckle, and if we don't shut this crap down soon I have a feeling like the truckloads of money we blow yearly to the MIC contractors we will never see the end of the ever widening mess, simply because too many congress critters will use the programs "to bring jobs and money to the area!" aka pork barrel politics.
Uhhh...just in case you ain't noticed, been hid under a rock or something, the current choices (hell for the last 30 years at least) have been, now choose wisely! A.-Corporate cock sucking rich douchebag in a blue suit, OR B.Corporate cock sucking rich douchebag in a slightly darker blue suit. Man, decisions decisions!
News Flash: when it costs on average something in the neighborhood of 100 MILLION dollars just to be a senator or congressman, and that is from one of the shitty flyover states? Well the odds you are gonna get a choice that isn't Corporate cock sucking rich douchebag in a blue suit is pretty much 0%. That is why no matter how bad things get they ALWAYS vote for the corporate interests, every time.
As for TFA anybody who think the corps won't get everything their hard stolen bribes can buy can think again. the lust for power and control has gotten to the point that they don't even pretend to give a fuck about We The People or the constitution or rule of law anymore. i mean can you imagine Nixon or LBJ having the brass balls to say they have the right to assassinate Americans anywhere, even on American soil without so much as a hearing and get away with it? But that's where getting your corporate pals in control of the media pays off. it lets you label whistleblowers as 'terrorists" and have a dozen talking heads talking about what an evil bastard they are before the end of the day.
I mean for fuck's sake they ruled that a single Goatse style troll can land you in prison since the feds are running their own "kiddie porn" honeypots that don't log referrers and don't actually offer any CP! When you've got a system so corrupted where the rule of law is completely ignored time and time again any corp with a big bank acount can ram shit like this home. Just don't be surprised if you see Nancy Grace talking up how TPB and other P2P sites are nothing but a "home for pedos and pervs!" as they have just about beat the terrorist buzzword to death so they'll need a new bogeyman to sell this to the general pop.