Cox cable is field testing 36Gb residential caps and once they roll it out nationwide and see they don't lose their entire market (because most simply have nowhere to go) you WILL see Comcast and others adopt it. See how many games you get at 36Gb with $1.50 per Gb going over why don't you?
You seem to be forgetting this is America, aka "Greed is good" land. While Asia and the EU are rolling out new pipes our ISP are figuring out ways to stick you on the short bus to the Info superhighway so they can maintain their 300% annual CEO and board bonuses. Didn't you get the memo?
Not to mention how much of that bling bling is bullshit? How many here would play a game with Far Cry 1 level graphics if it had a kick ass story and AI that really made you think and work for it, as opposed to dumping in shit AI and expecting everyone to deal with "nigger fag" teens in online bullshit? I know I would.
At the end of the day a good 80%+ of that bling bling ends up box cover bullshit. People walk into my shop and go "ooooh neat!" when I'm sitting there playing "Brothers in Arms:Hells Highway" even though that game is something like 7 years old now because it has cool story and gameplay not because of the bling bling factor.
So I'd say the only ones to blame are the companies themselves who got into a "our ePeen is bigger than yours" race which only looks good on the box and most people ignore anyway. How many sit through those huge cinemas more than once? Hell you could just render them with in game characters and call it a day. Sams as every twig having to be lovingly rendered in explosions. You know what? if shit blows up nice and big I'm a happy camper, I don't give a shit if each blade of grass bends correctly from the blast.
Its a game dammit, make it fun, make it a challenge without dealing with online BS, and I'm on like donkey kong!
First of all, for those that write M$? Well here's your sign. Now as for Linux infringing patents? I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but they probably do. that is what happens when you allow software patents in the first place, as there is only so many efficient ways to figure an equation so whomever files on that equation first gets the patents and the others do it the hard way or cut a check.
This also ignores the fact that MSFT typically offers RAND for any and all of their patents, unlike patent trolls that are looking for the big fat check. How many articles did we see here on the TomTom case that pointed out MSFT offered the same RAND license they offered everyone else and got the bird in return?
So this comes down to NSTAAFL and just because YOU want to offer YOUR product as "free as in beer" does NOT mean those that own patents on things you may need for your free as in beer product HAVE TO give it to you. Frankly I believe if the F/OSS movement continues on the "free as in beer" path they will end up "free as in worthless" as R&D today costs billions and NO Linux foundation currently has the $$$ required to compete with MS Research or Apple ATM.
Be that as it may here are the facts: Is Linux infringing? I have no doubt, it is simply too big a code base with so many patents handed out yearly for it NOT to be. Currently with software patents it is like tap dancing blindfolded in a minefield, sooner or later BOOM! That's your ass Mr Postman. Could they be worked around? Possibly if you don't mind Linux sucking hard, as all the efficient algos have been patented, and you'd certainly have to do without most sound and video as that has patents up the wazoo.
So let us ALL hope MSFT actually wins this one, as ANYTHING that makes it easier to invalidate software patents is a good thing for all. But unless you get SCOTUS to invalidate software patents (unlikely) then sooner or later your product, free as in beer or not, WILL come across a patent in a core module that simply can't be replaced without killing it. What then? Will you give up free as in beer, or will you take some horrible kludge workaround like having to use 30 digit numbers to arrive at 2 while everyone else can use 1+1 thanks to RAND? It will be interesting to see what happens when that day arrives.
Because what you seem to be missing is that sites like GS allow someone who has beaten games to trade them towards the purchase of NEW games they would most likely not make without? Aka lets slit our own throats by making our item less attractive then our competitors?
Plus it is kinda ignoring the elephants in the room which are in no particular order "its a recession dumbass" and "I can get it for $0 dollars!". Hacked X360s? You can get ALL day long on Craigslist for around $100 bucks. Can't play it online? Well who gives a shit? Most folks have a handful they play online as most of us don't care for dealing with foul mouthed teenagers anyway, so no problemo. Wouldn't be surprised if the hacked PS3s will be showing up soon enough.
So at a time when people have LESS money for non essential items (checked the price of gas lately?) Sony as usual is being giant pricks and making their software worth less. Wow, what a surprise, stupid corp pisses on its customers, how could it possibly go wrong?
But of course this makes ME very happy, as one of my better sellers ATM is HTPCs, so thanks Sony. All I have to do is fire up something like Just Cause 2 or HL2:Episode 2 and let them see how purty it looks on an HD48xx (which you can get an HD4830 refurb for $60, if you are lucky an HD4850) and show them how easy it is to surf with it, play games, watch movies, play all their music, all from the comfort of their easy chair with a wireless keyboard and mouse or a wireless X360 controller? Cha Ching baby! Of course the fact that they can get plenty of fresh gaming goodness thanks to Steam and Amazon for less than $10 a pop certainly makes it an easier choice in this climate.
So thanks Sony, thanks for being douchebags and making things worse for your customers. Not only are you a solid last place in the console wars, which means coming up with a PS4 will probably break you, but it makes PC sellers like me have a much easier time, so thanks.
BTW Sony, did you know the X360 is butt simple to wire up with Windows 7? Makes a hell of a media center extender and at $100 a pop or so used is a dirt cheap way for them to have their living room PC play content all over the house. That way they can have lots of the top games for cheaper on PC AND if they want to frag online with their friends they can grab a copy for their X360 and do XBL if they wish. Real easy sale Sony, thanks again!
I'd say this doesn't look good for Apple in the short OR the long, but not for the reasons listed so far. It is because without Jobs they are already losing their way and I have a feeling it will get a LOT worse.
Look at the "look & feel" suit, was it under Jobs? Nope Pepsi guy. Jobs knows that the key is to stay on brand, and keep it elite and THAT is how Apple stays Apple. Is there REALLY enough of a difference to justify the costs between an Apple Mac and any $1000 Intel laptop? not really it is the elitism of the Apple brand same as there are plenty of ricers that can hit Porsche and Ferrari speeds but they will NEVER have the "cool factor" that those brands have.
Now am I saying Apple is all bullshit and hype? Nope, I gave the man credit for putting design first, hell most Apple devices look more like artworks than consumer products. But it was Jobs that built the hype, that built the "cool factor", that turned Apple from just an expensive also ran into THE boutique brand.
For the fans of Apple, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid it will most likely get a LOT worse. Say what you will about Gates but he was ten times the leader the sweaty monkey is, and he wasn't NEARLY an integral part as Jobs. Lets be honest folks, the man's time is almost up. He has lived longer than most with that form of cancer, and all the money in the world can't hold back the reaper forever. Unfortunately unlike Gates Jobs never had a REAL exit strategy set up, and in the end that will hurt the company, probably badly. Maybe he meant it that way, so that when he is gone and the company falls he will be looked upon as this mythic figure that the company could live without.
After all without the Apple mystique and cool factor, what will make their brand any better than say a well built Android or even WebOS device? the megacorps like Google and HP can probably get economies of scale even Apple can't touch, especially HP who has enough contacts with suppliers they can probably get anything they want.
And with so many working on Android even an old Windows guy like me will be the first to admit that short of flooding the channel with CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) which from the looks of it Google is gonna try to kill off with more rules around Android, that the Droid OS is gonna get better and better AND better. No I fear without Steve Apple will go into a slow downward spiral. Will they be able to straight up and pull another rebound afterward? Who knows, but if history is any guide Without Steve it quickly becomes the house that middle management built, with feature creep and PHBs and all the mess. only they won't have Steve to come in and kick some asses anymore, and that doesn't bode well IMHO.
But what you are talking about is a hack that came later. look up the original idea of the cuecat and then try to think how damned retarded you'd have to be to get this to work: Give people device which lets them...dum dum dum...SCAN ADS so that they can what? Why get hit with MORE ads!
Now how many people do YOU know that really truly LIKE staring at ads? Now how many of those do you think are actually gonna go out of their way just so they can see MORE of them? does that make ANY sense?
When I saw Cuecat I thought "Yep, we're in a bubble" because it always seems like the greed goes so crazy that folks just lose their damned minds and will back ANYTHING while dreaming of crazy profit. Hell while I'd say a good 80% of the bubble losers were using a 2.??? 3. Profit! hell with Cuecat even the first one in the 3. profit! schema didn't make any damned sense, as it completely ignored human nature.
It was like those idiots that tried giving away free PCs in order to hit you with ads while not realizing if they are too cheap to buy a PC they won't buy from your ads either so you are simply wasting time or those like pointcast that tried pushing info feeds (along with an assload of ads) while ignoring that in the dialup of the day bandwidth was at a premium so by pushing huge ads with their content they were sure to get kicked off when they slowed connections to a crawl. Cuecat ignored that while some people may be willing to PUT UP with ads, practically nobody was gonna actually put in work just to look at more ads.
And the fact they got so much VC funding for an idea that anyone off the street would have told you was idiotic just goes to show you greed can make anyone retarded.
You know, that is one of the reasons despite all the geek hate I REALLY LIKE Windows. The shortcuts have been the same since the dawn of time, damned near every company uses the same schema, and combined with the new Search and File management system in Win 7 just makes things sooo damned easy.
Hell despite all the complaints about Office my friends that are Office jockeys say damned near all the keyboard shortcuts are still there, and of course the classic file/edit/view that damned near every programs has had since the dawn of time makes third party apps easy as hell.
So while I can understand why you would choose Apple, hell the machines look more like artwork than a PC, the bog standard shortcuts and backwards compatibility making it so I don't have to learn a new app if the old one works fine means I'll be sticking with Windows. It is like I always say, best tool for the job. Want a solid smartphone or a pad? Go apple. Want to work embedded or set up a web server? Go Linux. Want a bog standard desktop that just gets out of the way and lets you work? Go windows.
Well said friend. And let us not forget the tinkerers almost never are able to catch the unforeseen consequences. Here is an example I ran into: I was hired to upgrade a bunch of office machines for this business, since at the same time their main IT guy had a massive new server rollout going on and he simply didn't have enough hours in the day to serve both. No problem, that's what I'm here for.
Well the server guy, who had recently started there himself and was a decent and smart guy, said "Could you see WTF is going on in room 106? For some reason THAT office is sucking bandwidth like you wouldn't believe, but scans on the box from the AV says clean. I just don't have time to figure this out, do you?" I said no problem, that's what I'm here for, to make your job easier.
Well sure enough I get there and whip out my laptop to plug in when I notice I'm already connected to their network even though they don't have a WAP. Uh oh. Yep, it turned out some PHB in the past had set up a WAP in the ceiling probably because the previous guy didn't set him up a WAP fast enough in his opinion and since he "knew what he was doing" he decided to go around IT. pretty sneaky little setup, had the line to the desk connected through the router so plugging in would show it straight through, not a bad little hack actually.
Of course where he fucked up is he hadn't bothered to set up ANY security AT ALL on the wireless end and since it was a corner office with easy view of the parking lot and an apt building across the street? No telling how many had been leeching off their bandwidth or what they had been dloading. Could have really caused that company some trouble down the road, and of course whatever PHB had did it wasn't there any more and that particular office was like a revolving door so who knows which one? I had him check to make sure there weren't anymore "vampire boxes" sucking bandwidth and shut it down.
So while you may think its cool that you can set up this stuff, that doesn't mean you can set it up right nor does it mean you can set it up without violating a ton of policies that are there for CYA for the company. If you need this app THAT bad, talk to IT and I'm sure they'll do it ASAP. Just remember in a big place the IT is usually understaffed and constantly fighting fires, so while you think this app is ASAP the IT guy may have workers with NO Internet or their PCs taking a shit or any other of other problems that are more ASAP than yours. Be patient and don't be an ass, they'll get to you.
Oh please! We aren't talking about some badass GUI to physics interface here, we are talking about patents on the GUI equivalent of the Wii Waggle! How would you have liked it if TexStar (or whomever did it first) had patented Ctrl+ for shortcuts? Then you might have Ctrl+C in Office, but Alt+h to do the same in your browser, or Shft+Alt+N to do the same in your camera program. does that SOUND like fun to you friend?
Because frankly we old farts have BEEN down that road, and it fucking sucks! programs in the 80s were a damned mess, with NO hotkeys matching squat, hell I knew folks that had to use several programs that had so damned many cheat sheets taped to their cubicles it looked like walls of code written by the insane!
I don't think anyone besides you would agree that some company should be able to patent whether I point up or down to move a web page, or whether I use one finger or two to open something. Any company that patents stupidity like that and hampers standards will get a "gesture" from me that has prior art going back centuries!
Ya know, I really think we outta give credit where credit is due, and I don't see how these young 'uns will ever be able to top the level of worthless in Cuecat. I mean get VCs to pay for scanners to be passed out so folks can go to the trouble of hooking it up, installing a buggy driver that spied on you AND all for the "privilege" of scanning AN AD so you could be hit with ads on your PC? that is sheer genius levels of worthless right there pal, I don't see FB or any of these kids being able to top THAT nuclear powered failure!
I think the bigger question than "what happens when this bubble bursts" is the much more fundamental question of "What do you do when you don't have a use for people anymore?" Because as it is we are ALL playing IQ musical chairs with less seats for a bigger population every. single. day. and the next to go WILL be the entire service industry. what then?
You think MickeyD's bitches about having to pay minimum wage now, which frankly in America one can't live on and actually keep from going under, what do you think they will do when they can replace the ENTIRE workforce with machines? hell there really isn't anything that can't be done in your average fast food joint that assembly line automation couldn't do better, more accurately, and 24/7 without breaks, the only thing keeping them with humans is cost, but what happens when the robot is cheaper? you can't expect to hire everyone part time at $6 an hour when gas is $6 a gallon and a bag of groceries costs them $60, so what then?
I'd say you have a good 60% of the population that are working C and D level jobs that WILL be either shipped overseas where there is no working regs and you can run sweatshops and pollute the entire area, what are we gonna do with them? Execute them? lock them up? make up bullshit jobs (BTW currently government employs MORE than manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined source here) so now what?
So I'd say that is the bigger question we are facing. If the top 25% have everything while the bottom 75% starve society will collapse, crime will be rampant as they try to survive, yet at the same time we simply don't need the labor of more and more people on this planet. What do we do with these jobless masses? Blowing more bubbles doesn't change it, neither does pushing the "education!" meme that politicians keep harping about while ignoring that more and more that graduate from all these colleges and trade schools have nothing to show but debt they can't pay, because in the end machines will do it better.
And before anyone pops in with the capitalist meme of "wages will go down and they'll balance!" I'd like to point to what the race to the bottom gets us, aka the the Halliburton clause where more and more of our precious water is being contaminated and being rendered unfit for use by those that want to make money NOW and screw later. Meanwhile the super rich just got a giant tax break thanks to outright bribery, so trying to beat the third world at who can be the most polluted and corrupt probably ain't the right way to go, that is unless you like the idea of paying $10 for a bottle of drinkable water and having your kids wear masks just to go outside.
Yeah well the problem with that my Euro friend is that in case you ain't notice we only have TWO parties here, the far right (dems) and extreme far rights (reps) and they want ALL our emails older than 6 months old (because you have nothing to hide, right?) want to force ACTA down the throats of the planet, never met a corporation or private contractor they didn't like cashing checks from, support one failed enterprise after another as long as the kickbacks keep rolling in...
So excuse me if I don't exactly trust these bozos with one of the last truly free forms of expression we have left,okay? Hell I wouldn't trust either party as far as I can throw their overfed corrupt asses as it is, give them even MORE they can abuse?I wonder how much MSFT and Intel can pay to make sure only the "latest and greatest" trusted computing platforms are allowed? Hell it has been the dream of Intel and MSFT since the days of the fritz Chip so excuse me if I don't exactly see this as all hearts and flowers, kay?
Hell when was the last time a politician around here did ANYTHING that he couldn't either grab more power or get his cronies fat checks for doing,hmmm?
Hell Yes! I will never forget what Dru told me when I tried to throw a buck down on the table even though our waitress was shit "Don't you DARE give a damned dime to that nigger! I mean look at her, look! She is 'working" a job with nails like a fucking dragon lady, she is going out of her way to do as little as possible and ignore as many customers as possible, spending ALL her damned time playing with her beeper and phone instead of doing her damned job!" She told me "I worked as a waitress to help pay for my education and I busted my ass, but nigger bitches like her made my life a HELL of a lot harder than it needed to be, because she would scream "Racist!" if you dared to tell her to get off her ass, so that when I went in for a job I had to work TWICE AS HARD to prove myself thanks to niggers like her making us ALL look like lazy and worthless trash!".
She reached over and picked up my money and stuffed it in my pocket while just glaring at that nigger, who just rolled her eyes and gave us attitude. So yeah 110% I think the black community should tell Jackson and Co to go to hell, but more than that WE as a society need to stop the PC bullshit and tell the truth, that there are plenty of good decent black folks and they hate them worthless niggers just as much as anybody else. it isn't right that good decent folks like Dru and Mr Stevens got lumped in with those "thug life" pieces of shit anymore than we would expect to lump all white folks with white trash.
I have known plenty of poor whites that are decent hard working folks just trying to get by, and they look down on the worthless white trash just like Dru and Mr Stevens looked down on niggers. And frankly i'll probably get hate for saying it (notice I got modded down for not being PC?) but that PC bullshit where they claim that Ebonics and thug life is "diversity!" needs to go DIAF yesterday. It is time to stop pretending that a gang banging piece of trash that can't even speak English or write more than a gang symbol is some "poor disadvantaged youth" and call a spade a spade instead of making up endless excuses. We have made excuses since the 60s, that is damned near 40 years. Are they better off? Are ANY of the groups we have made excuses for better off? hell no!
So lets cut the bullshit folks. We need to look at niggers and the wiggers that emulate them as the trash that they are, stop making excuses and blaming their childhood and other bullshit, and tell them if they don't GET OFF THEIR ASS and at LEAST make an attempt at bettering themselves the only future their "thug life" shit has is a nice slot in our prison industry behind a set of iron bars. Because as it is now I know places afraid to hire decent black folks because they never know when they are looking at a nigger just ready to scream 'racist!" and demand special treatment when you tell them to work. the niggers hurt BOTH the blacks and the whites, not just themselves. And it is NO different than the bullshit they have going in the Mexican community with songs written glorifying narco thugs and pushing gang bangers as anything but worthless scum.
But how much of that "comparative advantage" is horseshit? If I bash your skull in I could say I have a comparative advantage to your stuff, but I don't think you nor most other people would go for it. Right now last I checked 6 out of the top 10 cancer causing cities are in China. They dump heavy metals in the water, have land that makes our superfund sites look like a joke, and even now thanks to the "race to the bottom" or as I call it "The race for the 1%ers to fuck the world REAL good" we are already seeing things made in Malaysia as apparently they'd let them pollute even MORE than China!
To say they have a comparative advantage is like saying I can be heavyweight champ of the world if I just shoot my opponent when I get in the ring. How much of a comparative advantage would they have if we made them have working conditions comparable to ours? if we refused to allow companies that throw up so much pollution in China that we can detect it on the west coast in? Whether the 1%ers want to admit it or not we are living in this tiny fish bowl they seem bound and determined to take a big old shit in. Just look at all the pollution and poisoning of our water table thanks to frakking and the "Halliburton clause". Is that REALLY what we want? To not stop until we ALL wear masks just to walk outside, and our kids can't even drink water for fear of heavy metals?
But I think while Jackson as usual is full of shit he does bring up a topic I think is worth discussing...If 60% of your population can only be trained up to a level D job, and those jobs are sent overseas or being done by machines, what do you do with the people? Execute them? Throw them all in prison? Cut them a check for life?
This is a problem we in the tech field need to be seriously thinking about as it affects us more than most. It used to be you needed X number of guys to run the servers and maintain them, now we are at the beginning of self diagnosing servers and things will only get smarter. A factory down the street from me used to employ thousands of machinists making aircraft parts, good folks with families. Now their jobs are done by a handful who basically "watch the machines" to make sure there is someone there to hit the off switch if something goes wrong. Because frankly at the tolerances they are working now (a friend showed me their new laser gauges could even tell the difference in metals that you had held in your hand because of the difference in size caused by your body heat even after holding it in your hand for just a few seconds) there just isn't any way for a human to do the job there anymore.
I see the same thing in my own job, if it wasn't for the SMBs and the work I've been doing for those at the college that constantly need more and more powerful machines for their CAD work I'd be hurting, as the push to laptops have turned most computers into "built for the dump" throwaway items as it is nearly impossible to get parts for the proprietary bastards, and it is more profitable for the OEMs to simply force people to shitcan that $400 laptop than it is to build them to be repaired, not with being able to crank the things out like flapjacks thanks to machines.
So we honestly need to sit down and talk about what we as a society are gonna do, as we are ALL playing a game of musical chairs based on IQ, and the number of seats are getting smaller every day while the population is getting larger. There are plenty of good folks in my building that are having trouble even keeping a roof over their head even though they work their asses off simply because work for those that aren't white collar is getting more scarce by the day. These folks aren't Einsteins but they are good people and frankly don't deserve to have to live like animals just to survive.
We really need to sit down and talk about this, because NONE of us has infinite intelligence, yet our "leaders" simply keep spouting the "continued education!" meme while refusing to admit there are plenty that simply can't climb higher and that often piling on the crushing debt of continued education simply doesn't pay back enough to keep their heads above water. We can't ALL be rocket scientists, and we really need to find a way for decent folks who are willing to work hard to survive, because frankly there is a hell of a lot of them and more coming every day. I simply don't see how we can stay on this path without disaster or revolution, I just don't.
I'll never forget the words of one of my favorite black teachers, who had this BEAUTIFUL early 70s Chevy convertible he had lovingly restored with his own two hands. When I saw he had drove up in this POS 80s hunk of garbage all I could think was someone asshole had destroyed that sweet ride so I had to ask him if someone had destroyed his baby. "Nope" he said "I have to go visit some kin that still live in the ghetto and you can't trust a damned nigger not to steal anything that isn't nailed down".
It was one of my first tastes of how much black folks HATE niggers, and the whole 'pity me and give me a check" bullshit that Jackson and his ilk push. I used to love having lunch with Dru, one of the smartest and hardest working women I'd ever met...unless they gave us a nigger as a waitress. The amount of disgust and hatred that would roll off that woman...wow. She would say ten years of hard work by a black woman could be undone by ten minutes of being around some nigger bitch, popping out a half a dozen kids and "damned bitch don't even know who the baby daddy is on half of them" and screaming racism if you dared to tell her to get off her ass and do her job.
So yeah, I'm gonna have to agree with you there. The whole promoting "thug life" which Mr Stevens said of those relatives that refused to leave the ghetto "would act like getting out of jail was graduating with a degree while looking down on me as a Uncle Tom" while bragging about how many illegitimate kids you have (which IIRC was what got Moral Court taken off the air, because the black judge dared to say black men like the one on the show that was bragging he had "ten kids he never done seen" was a disgrace to the black race) and screaming "That's racist!" if you dare to tell them to take care of themselves? yeah this shit needs to end.
What do they think is gonna happen in the future? That when America is broke they can hit the Chinese with "yellow guilt" and get them to cut a check for life? Or that not even bothering to teach your kids to speak English instead of slang will get them anywhere? I have NO PROBLEM with helping someone when they are down. My dad fell off a truck in 75 and we had to spend a year on welfare while the huge split in his skull healed but the second the doc cleared him he was back to work and busting his ass until he could scrape up enough to own his own business.
He taught me that if you wanted something you had better be ready to work for it and thanks to him I own my little shop now. I'll never get rich selling boxes but I'm happy and take care of my own. But sadly I live in a nice little antique apt (building built in 24, with a lot of the original woodwork and decor) that from its spot on the hill one can look down into what is now the black section about a dozen blocks away. what do I see? Sirens constantly, that whole area is nothing but dope slinging and whores and "thug life".
Can't they see they are destroying themselves better than any Klansman ever could? Can't they see as long as you have those like Jackson (how many illegitimate kids did he have with that girl?) keep pushing that whole "victim mentality" that is all they'll ever be? So I'm sorry, they can scream "That's Racist!" all they want, but that "its just a G thang baby" violence and outright refusal to even ATTEMPT to better themselves or get ahead needs to be called by what it is, glorifying being a nigger. And the sooner we look at those "livin the life" as the trash that they are, no different than trailer trash whites or any other low life garbage, the better off we will ALL be.
Personally i think we should do MORE to help those that are truly down through no fault of their own, especially the disabled as one car wreck is all it would take to put ANY of us in their shoes, but the whole glorifying being too lazy to get an education or too sorry to raise your own kids? We need another WPA, then if your ass has a strong back you will WORK YOUR ASS OFF for that check like my grandfather did during the depression, an
Oh it'll probably work, the pirates just got so used to WGA their standard answer is just to get the patches from WSUS Offline or Autopatcher. Hell both of those solutions give you a MUCH better experience than WU any day of the week, so why would anyone even bother to test WU? Hell I only run legit and I haven't touched WU in years.
Autopatcher comes with ALL the extras like Adobe Air and all the reg tweaks, which makes it the bomb if you are only using one version or two of Windows, and for guys like me that have to update multiple versions WSUS offline not only lets you have ALL the updates automated, including service packs, but ALSO gives you the option of having the whole thing run from a thumbdrive or a single DVD for x86 and a single DVD for x64. And that is for ALL Windows from WinXP through Windows 7 X64! All on a disc ready to go! I mean all my machines and my customers are legit, but why waste time and bandwidth with WU? It sucks!
So while I'm sure it would work, frankly from what I read nobody bothered with WU anymore and who could blame them. And like I said they ROYALLY screwed the pooch when they got rid of Win 7 HP for $50. I saw guys that had NEVER paid for Windows suddenly running legit. Hell some were even jumping on the $100 Win 7 pro or the $120 HP family pack and going legit across the board. But the SECOND that price went up to $100 for HP? That's when you suddenly started seeing all these "Win 7 Ultimate" boxes and laptops everywhere.
It is just like how you almost never saw XP Home, because all the pirates said "if I'm gonna snatch anyway, why not pro?". So like I said, snatching defeat from victory. They could have almost completely wiped out piracy in the west AND gotten rid of all those XP users like me that still have boxes not worth spending $100 for an upgrade AND had a captive audience for both the latest IE AND been able to try to upsell them to Pro or Ultimate. But no, that would have been smart, and one thing Ballmer has proven is he is a classic middle management dumbass.
Frankly it ain't the USA that needs to be worried....it is everybody else. remember what happened when Germany went tits up in the 20s? Something about taking Poland? So what do you think will happen when the largest military in the world can't hand out local bread and circuses? Why we'll just take yours!
And the bitch is? With the right leader unlike the crazy Austrian we'll pull it off too and you know how? Deals baby! Watch how easy it would be: Oh Putin want to be president for life? How about having the USSR back? We know you miss the old days, well its yours baby! We won't say a word pal, enjoy...just don't say nothing about what we do in OUR backyard, kay? Russia down
Hey China! Our buddies in the east! Hey you know that whole Taiwan thing? Roll the tanks baby, it is ALL yours. Oh and as long as you keep the trade up Africa? help thyself buddy. China down.
So what do the USA get for our dealing? Why North and South America, of course! The United Continent of America has a REAL nice ring to it, don't ya think? All those nice oil sands up north, all those resources down south, Lebensraum here we come!
And honestly who would stop us if China and Russia agreed to sit this one out? Germany? Will be too busy shitting their pants at the USSR on their doorstep, especially with the USA out of NATO. The UK? They are an island, Wolfpacks showed how to fix THAT problem. They have...what? 1 Aircraft carrier? We got 11, no problem! France? Italy? oh they'll bitch, but who cares.
As for getting the American people behind it? Do the same trick the Austrian used, lots of "bread and jobs" along with a false flag or two. Wouldn't be hard to paint Chavez and a few others to be the new devils.
So for all those "Yay America is gonna fall" types? be careful what you wish for, because Germany got to be the asshole twice last century, and before those in power go silently into that good night I have a feeling it will be the USA's turn. Frankly it wouldn't take long at $10 a gallon gas and 40% unemployment to get Americans to sign off on just about anything. you already have some serious hatred of foreigners building up with the lax border and H1-Bs, really wouldn't be hard to direct that hatred at a chosen target. Scary thought, isn't it?
Who cares! when are these damned scientists gonna give us what they've been promising for years, huh? I want my flying car, I want my huge multiTB holographic disc for my flying car, so I can burn every single tune that has ever been worth a crap for blasting through the sky, and I want my Alyson Hannigan Sexbot to sit beside me and tell how fricking awesome I am dammit!
So quit wasting our time with this mamby pamby nano bullshit and give us stuff worthy of you wearing the white lab coat you damned geeky scientists! Hell you haven't even given us a six million dollar man yet, and that show was in the 70s! You suck!
You know what? I don't think it is so much that "flash sucks" so much as when Adobe bought it they didn't really have a game plan and the code they had only ran on win X86 and frankly that is the same to this day. Flash on win x86? It runs just fine. Runs fine in Win X64 since the browsers are all 32 bit. Everywhere else? Steaming pile of stinky.
So it looks, just from me watching the history of the thing, that they made the classic buyer's mistake. they probably let everyone that was really good at the code behind flash waltz out the door and then milked it for all it was worth. But times change, win x86 isn't the end all be all anymore, and it looks like Adobe simply hasn't been able to keep up.
But then again Adobe never were the brightest bulbs in the sign. Macromedia Xres was a great image manipulation software that they could have sold very nicely in the low to mid market, and used it as an upsell to Photoshop. They have also bloated the living shit out of PDF by jamming everything AND the kitchen sink into what was supposed to be a portable office format, not a fricking office suite or multimedia presentation, with predictable results.
So to me the questions are thus: Will Adobe be able to adapt, or will they go the way of the 8 track? And if flash goes tits up, what will replace it? Because frankly from what I've seen HTML V5 sucks on less than a dual core unless you have some sort of acceleration for it. H.26x is great and does have acceleration, but FOSS won't touch it because of patents, WMV is okay but only on Win, Quicktime sucks, Theora would have been great 10 years ago but sucks now as it eats too many cycles for less quality than H.26x, so what is left?
Because I REALLY don't want to go back to the 90s, with a dozen competitive formats all with bugs and hassles, and since it looks like Apple and MSFT are sticking with HTML V5 H.26x that will end up fractured. Sigh, I have a feeling it is gonna be a big clusterfuck like the 90s all over again. Say what you want about flash, but at least every machine from a PIII to the latest multicore could run it, and nearly everyone already had it installed.
Oh Good God man! Here, let me help you out. 1.-get rid of the shit drivers which frankly by the third BSOD should have smacked you upside the head with the clue stick, and 2.- put in some real drivers and if none exist you get on the horn and have a royal screaming bitchfit and whatever fly by night bunch sold you that junk and let them know you're gonna take your business somewhere else!
And I honestly hate to do this, as it smacks to much of "ItWorksForMe(TM)" but 10 to 15 a week? Dude ur doin it wrong!
Seriously if it is ONE machine? Shitcan it. you have a bad cap, a bad trace, something nasty be there. if it is more than one machine? Start with power, you'd be surprised how many times I've found bad power to be the culprit. it don't take much of a sag to cause all kinds of hell in a modern machine. If the power checks run Dependency walker and find out what the hell your program is trying to call that isn't there. Also look at the logs and see what program is getting launched immediately before or is finishing immediately before the nasty.
Because I support SOHOs and SMBs and consumers, office workers and parents, gamers and old folks. All are welcome in my shop. And I can tell you windows hasn't done what you describe since the days of Win9X. So if you aren't bullshitting, which I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt by giving you the troubleshooting checklist, then there is something seriously wrong in your setup.
Because I've just finished setting up a little private network for a company that decided to keep their Win2K machines that I built them in like 2003. They have been running solid all this time and they decided for the work they have them doing (basic office work and bookkeeping) it really didn't need net access, so they decided to keep them and just have me build new PCs for the graphics dept. Hell I know a bunch that is still using Win2K Server for file and printing. It too doesn't need net access and it is stable and they're happy.
So my friend if you are having that kind of trouble? you got something bad going down. If you can't figure it out yourself with the tips I gave you might want to call in your local tech shop guy and have him take a look at it, it may be some something you never even thought of. Hell I had one that would throw in the early hours of the morning, it turned out when the cleaning crew would kick in all their gear it would sag the line and throw the machines. But Windows just doesn't do that without something seriously being wrong man, it just don't.
I'd also add there is a "Windows 7 Eng All Edition 32+64 bit pre Activated" out there that...well it works like a charm. Hell it is easier to use than XP, as XP needs a key and this thing pre inserts the key. You can't run Windows Updates but it isn't like there aren't other ways to get those. Just does the batch file trick and that's it, instant 7 in ANY flavor.
So if they are doing this to cut down on piracy they are retarded, hell Win 7 is EASIER than XP. the bitch is they had the solution to piracy and they cocked it up. It was the Win 7 HP $50 upgrade. I saw more pirates go legit on that than I had EVER seen before. It was the "sweet spot" when it came to switching pirates.
But no, instead of doing the smart move and using HP as a foot in the door to switch pirates and then try to upsell them to Pro or Ultimate they canceled it. Just further proof IMHO Ballmer needs a good firing. At $100 Win 7 HP simply isn't worth it to most people, their money would be better spent on hardware. for $50 it is the same price as your average game and both the pirates and many that were sitting on the fence were willing to switch. I know that I only run legit but at $100 my Nettop will keep XP, $100 would be better spent on hardware than 7.
And if they think dangling IE of all things will get people to switch? it isn't 2002 anymore, nobody outside of corporate uses IE. Just more proof in my eyes how MSFT can snatch failure from success, instead of getting the fence sitters off of XP and at the same time turning pirates into customers they just cocked it all up. typical.
IIRC there were plenty of people that paid for a "premium" geocities account, didn't do them much good in the end. It all comes down to how much a corp can 'monetize" the service and whether they are happy with small chunks of change or only huge buckets.
So I'd say the real problem is NO company will admit to how much monetization they require to keep a service. A service can be bringing in a million a month but if some mega corp doesn't think anything less than 4 million a month is worth messing with? Bye bye data.
If they would at least say how much the service makes and how much it is required to make one could make intelligent choices about this, but as it is there is NO WAY of knowing if the service you are using, whether you pay or not, will be here next month.
After all Google could ultimately decide that youtube simply can't be monetized to the amount they consider it worth keeping then poof! Oh Google will most likely be nice enough to give you X number of days, but it doesn't change the fact that without knowing how much they expect per month to keep a service going short of some iron clad contract that gives you compensation if they pull the plug you are at the whim of whomever is deciding what the ultimate monetization goals are.
Oh please! You think they wish to commit suicide? What do you think keeps people locked into Windows? It is all the time and money they have invested in legacy applications that's what! If I can't run my old Windows apps, what is to keep me from buying that new iShiny or even that cheaper Linux box? Why not a thing!
After all they can ALL surf the web, only the Apple has more style and intuitiveness, while the Linux box is cheaper. So the ONLY thing MSFT has going for them is the billions of dollars in programs that run ONLY on Windows.
Now if you were to say "they are gonna figure out a seamless way to VM all those apps" I might agree with you, except so far we haven't seen anything of the sort. But to kill the golden goose that is backwards compatibility? Never!
As for TFA, I think this is a sign MSFT will soon be giving up the "browser wars". After all they aren't making any money on IE, being locked in to IE has been gone since Firefox, and with the exception of corporate IE has become "that thing you use to download Firefox/Chrome". By tying specific versions to specific OSes they have made sure IE will be so fragmented nobody will write for it anyway, so they might as well say "This is what you use to download Chrome/Firefox, we'll plug any glaring obvious holes, but other than that tough luck, its a tech demo for MSR".
Because last I checked while Win 7 has passed XP in the USA, the world map still has XP at nearly 50%, and another 17% for Vista. That is 67% of the world market that can't use your product but can use your competitors and if that isn't giving up I don't know what is. Unless there is someone over at MSFT so stoned they actually think they can get people to spend $100+ on a new OS just by dangling a new IE? If so can I have some, that must be some good shit.
Aww isn't that cute, poor wittle FOSSie AC can't come up with a single intelligent argument and therefor has to insult. Poor wittle FOSSie, didn't the kool aid taste good? here let me use small words so you can understand:
If I am a corporation with a couple of billion to buy a company what do you have to offer me besides a "gee thanks for teh money LOL!" hmmm? The answer NOTHING because with FOSS that is all you CAN offer since nobody OWNS anything. That was the whole point of RMS's little utopia, no ownership.
So with that being that case, what companies would be willing to waste money on buying a FOSS company? Answer: trolls as IP is the ONLY thing that you can "own" in FOSS. This is of course due to RMS fucking up when he wrote GPL V2, and he tried to do away with patents and copyrights in GPL V3, but nobody is touching that thing with a 50 foot pole, not even Linus.
So how about instead of fantasizing about my large penis, why not answer the question? What do you have to offer the corporate world besides your worthless "goodwill" hmm? The Oracle deal proved you get neither the code nor the developers so ALL Oracle got for all that money was IP they can use to sue with and office furniture. Mark my words and mark them well: After the corporate world saw how Oracle didn't get shit for their money the ONLY ones that will be buying FOSS companies will be trolls.
You will also see more and more go tits up as the "community" doesn't even have enough sense not to shit in their own beds, witness Red hat, who gives back more than the top three combined last I checked yet a full 34% of the servers out there are running NOT RHEL but CentOS. Yeah that's smart, lets withhold funds from the ONE company that gives back damned near everything they make. Smart. But go ahead, you keep thinking about my dick instead of asking the hard questions, it is better that way.
You call HIM a troll and then follow it up with a mountain of FUD? I fix Windows 6 days a week and haven't seen a non hardware BSOD in YEARS. Viruses? The users install over 90% of them so how can anyone blame Windows for that. Gonna set them up in a walled garden and take away their choices? Having choice means having the ability to be an idiot too you know.
Meanwhile you say they'll have "a thousand times better than Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows."? Can I have some of what you're smoking? It must be some good shit. I have 7 year old XP installs in the field, never needed squat as far as work. Have you had more than a single upgrade deathmarch (thank Canonical for that) where drivers didn't shit themselves? How much time did you spend in CLI in the past 6 months? Once a day? Weekly? If the answer is I used CLI at all you have failed because consumers ain't touching that 70s era term shit.
So keep spreading the FUD friend. BTW you DO know accounts are free right? I'm sure I'll get the usual Linux TMs from Linux TM repository, such as "WorksForMe(TM)" and "StableABINonsense(TM)" which BTW if you read the argument AGAINST ABIs? It is totally political, with the writer going so far as to call those that refuse to give 100% of the drivers to the devs "leeches".
When your head of kernel development says, "The Linux kernel isn't designed, it grows like a virus" You know you are in serious fucking trouble. yeah Linus it is called an STD and would get your ass FIRED anywhere else. Can you imagine going to YOUR BOSS on a million dollar project and saying "Plan? We don't need no steenkin plan, we gonna grow like a virus LOL!"? Hell even OS fricking 2 has a stable ABI for the love of Pete!
The part that pisses me off as a retailer is the community could change it if they would quit accepting the shit sandwiches and DEMAND better. DEMAND that Linus quit acting like a douche, pick a gameplan and STICK TO IT, DEMAND that the 6 month deathmarch be replaced with a solid plan for fixing bugs, DEMAND that developers quit rushing out one buggy release after another, in short do what others would do by voting with their dollars.
Because frankly if you don't the ONLY places Linux is gonna be successful is those where there simply isn't any real money to be made by the big boys. As it is a full 2/3rds of servers being sold right now are being sold with...dum dum dum...Windows, and no unlike desktop one does NOT buy a Windows server to put Linux on, the new mobile devices like pads are being dominated by...dum dum dum...Apple, which have gotten "it just works" and intuitiveness down to an art, seriously wake up man. it isn't 1997 anymore, 70s era term shit and spend time trawling forums for fixes has got to DIAF if you want to compete. This is said as someone who would love to have your product on my shelves if I could get the damned thing to run for longer than a single update without dropping to CLI and forums just to get the drivers fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Cox cable is field testing 36Gb residential caps and once they roll it out nationwide and see they don't lose their entire market (because most simply have nowhere to go) you WILL see Comcast and others adopt it. See how many games you get at 36Gb with $1.50 per Gb going over why don't you?
You seem to be forgetting this is America, aka "Greed is good" land. While Asia and the EU are rolling out new pipes our ISP are figuring out ways to stick you on the short bus to the Info superhighway so they can maintain their 300% annual CEO and board bonuses. Didn't you get the memo?
Not to mention how much of that bling bling is bullshit? How many here would play a game with Far Cry 1 level graphics if it had a kick ass story and AI that really made you think and work for it, as opposed to dumping in shit AI and expecting everyone to deal with "nigger fag" teens in online bullshit? I know I would.
At the end of the day a good 80%+ of that bling bling ends up box cover bullshit. People walk into my shop and go "ooooh neat!" when I'm sitting there playing "Brothers in Arms:Hells Highway" even though that game is something like 7 years old now because it has cool story and gameplay not because of the bling bling factor.
So I'd say the only ones to blame are the companies themselves who got into a "our ePeen is bigger than yours" race which only looks good on the box and most people ignore anyway. How many sit through those huge cinemas more than once? Hell you could just render them with in game characters and call it a day. Sams as every twig having to be lovingly rendered in explosions. You know what? if shit blows up nice and big I'm a happy camper, I don't give a shit if each blade of grass bends correctly from the blast.
Its a game dammit, make it fun, make it a challenge without dealing with online BS, and I'm on like donkey kong!
First of all, for those that write M$? Well here's your sign. Now as for Linux infringing patents? I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out, but they probably do. that is what happens when you allow software patents in the first place, as there is only so many efficient ways to figure an equation so whomever files on that equation first gets the patents and the others do it the hard way or cut a check.
This also ignores the fact that MSFT typically offers RAND for any and all of their patents, unlike patent trolls that are looking for the big fat check. How many articles did we see here on the TomTom case that pointed out MSFT offered the same RAND license they offered everyone else and got the bird in return?
So this comes down to NSTAAFL and just because YOU want to offer YOUR product as "free as in beer" does NOT mean those that own patents on things you may need for your free as in beer product HAVE TO give it to you. Frankly I believe if the F/OSS movement continues on the "free as in beer" path they will end up "free as in worthless" as R&D today costs billions and NO Linux foundation currently has the $$$ required to compete with MS Research or Apple ATM.
Be that as it may here are the facts: Is Linux infringing? I have no doubt, it is simply too big a code base with so many patents handed out yearly for it NOT to be. Currently with software patents it is like tap dancing blindfolded in a minefield, sooner or later BOOM! That's your ass Mr Postman. Could they be worked around? Possibly if you don't mind Linux sucking hard, as all the efficient algos have been patented, and you'd certainly have to do without most sound and video as that has patents up the wazoo.
So let us ALL hope MSFT actually wins this one, as ANYTHING that makes it easier to invalidate software patents is a good thing for all. But unless you get SCOTUS to invalidate software patents (unlikely) then sooner or later your product, free as in beer or not, WILL come across a patent in a core module that simply can't be replaced without killing it. What then? Will you give up free as in beer, or will you take some horrible kludge workaround like having to use 30 digit numbers to arrive at 2 while everyone else can use 1+1 thanks to RAND? It will be interesting to see what happens when that day arrives.
Because what you seem to be missing is that sites like GS allow someone who has beaten games to trade them towards the purchase of NEW games they would most likely not make without? Aka lets slit our own throats by making our item less attractive then our competitors?
Plus it is kinda ignoring the elephants in the room which are in no particular order "its a recession dumbass" and "I can get it for $0 dollars!". Hacked X360s? You can get ALL day long on Craigslist for around $100 bucks. Can't play it online? Well who gives a shit? Most folks have a handful they play online as most of us don't care for dealing with foul mouthed teenagers anyway, so no problemo. Wouldn't be surprised if the hacked PS3s will be showing up soon enough.
So at a time when people have LESS money for non essential items (checked the price of gas lately?) Sony as usual is being giant pricks and making their software worth less. Wow, what a surprise, stupid corp pisses on its customers, how could it possibly go wrong?
But of course this makes ME very happy, as one of my better sellers ATM is HTPCs, so thanks Sony. All I have to do is fire up something like Just Cause 2 or HL2:Episode 2 and let them see how purty it looks on an HD48xx (which you can get an HD4830 refurb for $60, if you are lucky an HD4850) and show them how easy it is to surf with it, play games, watch movies, play all their music, all from the comfort of their easy chair with a wireless keyboard and mouse or a wireless X360 controller? Cha Ching baby! Of course the fact that they can get plenty of fresh gaming goodness thanks to Steam and Amazon for less than $10 a pop certainly makes it an easier choice in this climate.
So thanks Sony, thanks for being douchebags and making things worse for your customers. Not only are you a solid last place in the console wars, which means coming up with a PS4 will probably break you, but it makes PC sellers like me have a much easier time, so thanks.
BTW Sony, did you know the X360 is butt simple to wire up with Windows 7? Makes a hell of a media center extender and at $100 a pop or so used is a dirt cheap way for them to have their living room PC play content all over the house. That way they can have lots of the top games for cheaper on PC AND if they want to frag online with their friends they can grab a copy for their X360 and do XBL if they wish. Real easy sale Sony, thanks again!
I'd say this doesn't look good for Apple in the short OR the long, but not for the reasons listed so far. It is because without Jobs they are already losing their way and I have a feeling it will get a LOT worse.
Look at the "look & feel" suit, was it under Jobs? Nope Pepsi guy. Jobs knows that the key is to stay on brand, and keep it elite and THAT is how Apple stays Apple. Is there REALLY enough of a difference to justify the costs between an Apple Mac and any $1000 Intel laptop? not really it is the elitism of the Apple brand same as there are plenty of ricers that can hit Porsche and Ferrari speeds but they will NEVER have the "cool factor" that those brands have.
Now am I saying Apple is all bullshit and hype? Nope, I gave the man credit for putting design first, hell most Apple devices look more like artworks than consumer products. But it was Jobs that built the hype, that built the "cool factor", that turned Apple from just an expensive also ran into THE boutique brand.
For the fans of Apple, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid it will most likely get a LOT worse. Say what you will about Gates but he was ten times the leader the sweaty monkey is, and he wasn't NEARLY an integral part as Jobs. Lets be honest folks, the man's time is almost up. He has lived longer than most with that form of cancer, and all the money in the world can't hold back the reaper forever. Unfortunately unlike Gates Jobs never had a REAL exit strategy set up, and in the end that will hurt the company, probably badly. Maybe he meant it that way, so that when he is gone and the company falls he will be looked upon as this mythic figure that the company could live without.
After all without the Apple mystique and cool factor, what will make their brand any better than say a well built Android or even WebOS device? the megacorps like Google and HP can probably get economies of scale even Apple can't touch, especially HP who has enough contacts with suppliers they can probably get anything they want.
And with so many working on Android even an old Windows guy like me will be the first to admit that short of flooding the channel with CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) which from the looks of it Google is gonna try to kill off with more rules around Android, that the Droid OS is gonna get better and better AND better. No I fear without Steve Apple will go into a slow downward spiral. Will they be able to straight up and pull another rebound afterward? Who knows, but if history is any guide Without Steve it quickly becomes the house that middle management built, with feature creep and PHBs and all the mess. only they won't have Steve to come in and kick some asses anymore, and that doesn't bode well IMHO.
But what you are talking about is a hack that came later. look up the original idea of the cuecat and then try to think how damned retarded you'd have to be to get this to work: Give people device which lets them...dum dum dum...SCAN ADS so that they can what? Why get hit with MORE ads!
Now how many people do YOU know that really truly LIKE staring at ads? Now how many of those do you think are actually gonna go out of their way just so they can see MORE of them? does that make ANY sense?
When I saw Cuecat I thought "Yep, we're in a bubble" because it always seems like the greed goes so crazy that folks just lose their damned minds and will back ANYTHING while dreaming of crazy profit. Hell while I'd say a good 80% of the bubble losers were using a 2.??? 3. Profit! hell with Cuecat even the first one in the 3. profit! schema didn't make any damned sense, as it completely ignored human nature.
It was like those idiots that tried giving away free PCs in order to hit you with ads while not realizing if they are too cheap to buy a PC they won't buy from your ads either so you are simply wasting time or those like pointcast that tried pushing info feeds (along with an assload of ads) while ignoring that in the dialup of the day bandwidth was at a premium so by pushing huge ads with their content they were sure to get kicked off when they slowed connections to a crawl. Cuecat ignored that while some people may be willing to PUT UP with ads, practically nobody was gonna actually put in work just to look at more ads.
And the fact they got so much VC funding for an idea that anyone off the street would have told you was idiotic just goes to show you greed can make anyone retarded.
You know, that is one of the reasons despite all the geek hate I REALLY LIKE Windows. The shortcuts have been the same since the dawn of time, damned near every company uses the same schema, and combined with the new Search and File management system in Win 7 just makes things sooo damned easy.
Hell despite all the complaints about Office my friends that are Office jockeys say damned near all the keyboard shortcuts are still there, and of course the classic file/edit/view that damned near every programs has had since the dawn of time makes third party apps easy as hell.
So while I can understand why you would choose Apple, hell the machines look more like artwork than a PC, the bog standard shortcuts and backwards compatibility making it so I don't have to learn a new app if the old one works fine means I'll be sticking with Windows. It is like I always say, best tool for the job. Want a solid smartphone or a pad? Go apple. Want to work embedded or set up a web server? Go Linux. Want a bog standard desktop that just gets out of the way and lets you work? Go windows.
Well said friend. And let us not forget the tinkerers almost never are able to catch the unforeseen consequences. Here is an example I ran into: I was hired to upgrade a bunch of office machines for this business, since at the same time their main IT guy had a massive new server rollout going on and he simply didn't have enough hours in the day to serve both. No problem, that's what I'm here for.
Well the server guy, who had recently started there himself and was a decent and smart guy, said "Could you see WTF is going on in room 106? For some reason THAT office is sucking bandwidth like you wouldn't believe, but scans on the box from the AV says clean. I just don't have time to figure this out, do you?" I said no problem, that's what I'm here for, to make your job easier.
Well sure enough I get there and whip out my laptop to plug in when I notice I'm already connected to their network even though they don't have a WAP. Uh oh. Yep, it turned out some PHB in the past had set up a WAP in the ceiling probably because the previous guy didn't set him up a WAP fast enough in his opinion and since he "knew what he was doing" he decided to go around IT. pretty sneaky little setup, had the line to the desk connected through the router so plugging in would show it straight through, not a bad little hack actually.
Of course where he fucked up is he hadn't bothered to set up ANY security AT ALL on the wireless end and since it was a corner office with easy view of the parking lot and an apt building across the street? No telling how many had been leeching off their bandwidth or what they had been dloading. Could have really caused that company some trouble down the road, and of course whatever PHB had did it wasn't there any more and that particular office was like a revolving door so who knows which one? I had him check to make sure there weren't anymore "vampire boxes" sucking bandwidth and shut it down.
So while you may think its cool that you can set up this stuff, that doesn't mean you can set it up right nor does it mean you can set it up without violating a ton of policies that are there for CYA for the company. If you need this app THAT bad, talk to IT and I'm sure they'll do it ASAP. Just remember in a big place the IT is usually understaffed and constantly fighting fires, so while you think this app is ASAP the IT guy may have workers with NO Internet or their PCs taking a shit or any other of other problems that are more ASAP than yours. Be patient and don't be an ass, they'll get to you.
Oh please! We aren't talking about some badass GUI to physics interface here, we are talking about patents on the GUI equivalent of the Wii Waggle! How would you have liked it if TexStar (or whomever did it first) had patented Ctrl+ for shortcuts? Then you might have Ctrl+C in Office, but Alt+h to do the same in your browser, or Shft+Alt+N to do the same in your camera program. does that SOUND like fun to you friend?
Because frankly we old farts have BEEN down that road, and it fucking sucks! programs in the 80s were a damned mess, with NO hotkeys matching squat, hell I knew folks that had to use several programs that had so damned many cheat sheets taped to their cubicles it looked like walls of code written by the insane!
I don't think anyone besides you would agree that some company should be able to patent whether I point up or down to move a web page, or whether I use one finger or two to open something. Any company that patents stupidity like that and hampers standards will get a "gesture" from me that has prior art going back centuries!
Ya know, I really think we outta give credit where credit is due, and I don't see how these young 'uns will ever be able to top the level of worthless in Cuecat. I mean get VCs to pay for scanners to be passed out so folks can go to the trouble of hooking it up, installing a buggy driver that spied on you AND all for the "privilege" of scanning AN AD so you could be hit with ads on your PC? that is sheer genius levels of worthless right there pal, I don't see FB or any of these kids being able to top THAT nuclear powered failure!
I think the bigger question than "what happens when this bubble bursts" is the much more fundamental question of "What do you do when you don't have a use for people anymore?" Because as it is we are ALL playing IQ musical chairs with less seats for a bigger population every. single. day. and the next to go WILL be the entire service industry. what then?
You think MickeyD's bitches about having to pay minimum wage now, which frankly in America one can't live on and actually keep from going under, what do you think they will do when they can replace the ENTIRE workforce with machines? hell there really isn't anything that can't be done in your average fast food joint that assembly line automation couldn't do better, more accurately, and 24/7 without breaks, the only thing keeping them with humans is cost, but what happens when the robot is cheaper? you can't expect to hire everyone part time at $6 an hour when gas is $6 a gallon and a bag of groceries costs them $60, so what then?
I'd say you have a good 60% of the population that are working C and D level jobs that WILL be either shipped overseas where there is no working regs and you can run sweatshops and pollute the entire area, what are we gonna do with them? Execute them? lock them up? make up bullshit jobs (BTW currently government employs MORE than manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined source here) so now what?
So I'd say that is the bigger question we are facing. If the top 25% have everything while the bottom 75% starve society will collapse, crime will be rampant as they try to survive, yet at the same time we simply don't need the labor of more and more people on this planet. What do we do with these jobless masses? Blowing more bubbles doesn't change it, neither does pushing the "education!" meme that politicians keep harping about while ignoring that more and more that graduate from all these colleges and trade schools have nothing to show but debt they can't pay, because in the end machines will do it better.
And before anyone pops in with the capitalist meme of "wages will go down and they'll balance!" I'd like to point to what the race to the bottom gets us, aka the the Halliburton clause where more and more of our precious water is being contaminated and being rendered unfit for use by those that want to make money NOW and screw later. Meanwhile the super rich just got a giant tax break thanks to outright bribery, so trying to beat the third world at who can be the most polluted and corrupt probably ain't the right way to go, that is unless you like the idea of paying $10 for a bottle of drinkable water and having your kids wear masks just to go outside.
Yeah well the problem with that my Euro friend is that in case you ain't notice we only have TWO parties here, the far right (dems) and extreme far rights (reps) and they want ALL our emails older than 6 months old (because you have nothing to hide, right?) want to force ACTA down the throats of the planet, never met a corporation or private contractor they didn't like cashing checks from, support one failed enterprise after another as long as the kickbacks keep rolling in...
So excuse me if I don't exactly trust these bozos with one of the last truly free forms of expression we have left,okay? Hell I wouldn't trust either party as far as I can throw their overfed corrupt asses as it is, give them even MORE they can abuse?I wonder how much MSFT and Intel can pay to make sure only the "latest and greatest" trusted computing platforms are allowed? Hell it has been the dream of Intel and MSFT since the days of the fritz Chip so excuse me if I don't exactly see this as all hearts and flowers, kay?
Hell when was the last time a politician around here did ANYTHING that he couldn't either grab more power or get his cronies fat checks for doing,hmmm?
Hell Yes! I will never forget what Dru told me when I tried to throw a buck down on the table even though our waitress was shit "Don't you DARE give a damned dime to that nigger! I mean look at her, look! She is 'working" a job with nails like a fucking dragon lady, she is going out of her way to do as little as possible and ignore as many customers as possible, spending ALL her damned time playing with her beeper and phone instead of doing her damned job!" She told me "I worked as a waitress to help pay for my education and I busted my ass, but nigger bitches like her made my life a HELL of a lot harder than it needed to be, because she would scream "Racist!" if you dared to tell her to get off her ass, so that when I went in for a job I had to work TWICE AS HARD to prove myself thanks to niggers like her making us ALL look like lazy and worthless trash!".
She reached over and picked up my money and stuffed it in my pocket while just glaring at that nigger, who just rolled her eyes and gave us attitude. So yeah 110% I think the black community should tell Jackson and Co to go to hell, but more than that WE as a society need to stop the PC bullshit and tell the truth, that there are plenty of good decent black folks and they hate them worthless niggers just as much as anybody else. it isn't right that good decent folks like Dru and Mr Stevens got lumped in with those "thug life" pieces of shit anymore than we would expect to lump all white folks with white trash.
I have known plenty of poor whites that are decent hard working folks just trying to get by, and they look down on the worthless white trash just like Dru and Mr Stevens looked down on niggers. And frankly i'll probably get hate for saying it (notice I got modded down for not being PC?) but that PC bullshit where they claim that Ebonics and thug life is "diversity!" needs to go DIAF yesterday. It is time to stop pretending that a gang banging piece of trash that can't even speak English or write more than a gang symbol is some "poor disadvantaged youth" and call a spade a spade instead of making up endless excuses. We have made excuses since the 60s, that is damned near 40 years. Are they better off? Are ANY of the groups we have made excuses for better off? hell no!
So lets cut the bullshit folks. We need to look at niggers and the wiggers that emulate them as the trash that they are, stop making excuses and blaming their childhood and other bullshit, and tell them if they don't GET OFF THEIR ASS and at LEAST make an attempt at bettering themselves the only future their "thug life" shit has is a nice slot in our prison industry behind a set of iron bars. Because as it is now I know places afraid to hire decent black folks because they never know when they are looking at a nigger just ready to scream 'racist!" and demand special treatment when you tell them to work. the niggers hurt BOTH the blacks and the whites, not just themselves. And it is NO different than the bullshit they have going in the Mexican community with songs written glorifying narco thugs and pushing gang bangers as anything but worthless scum.
But how much of that "comparative advantage" is horseshit? If I bash your skull in I could say I have a comparative advantage to your stuff, but I don't think you nor most other people would go for it. Right now last I checked 6 out of the top 10 cancer causing cities are in China. They dump heavy metals in the water, have land that makes our superfund sites look like a joke, and even now thanks to the "race to the bottom" or as I call it "The race for the 1%ers to fuck the world REAL good" we are already seeing things made in Malaysia as apparently they'd let them pollute even MORE than China!
To say they have a comparative advantage is like saying I can be heavyweight champ of the world if I just shoot my opponent when I get in the ring. How much of a comparative advantage would they have if we made them have working conditions comparable to ours? if we refused to allow companies that throw up so much pollution in China that we can detect it on the west coast in? Whether the 1%ers want to admit it or not we are living in this tiny fish bowl they seem bound and determined to take a big old shit in. Just look at all the pollution and poisoning of our water table thanks to frakking and the "Halliburton clause". Is that REALLY what we want? To not stop until we ALL wear masks just to walk outside, and our kids can't even drink water for fear of heavy metals?
But I think while Jackson as usual is full of shit he does bring up a topic I think is worth discussing...If 60% of your population can only be trained up to a level D job, and those jobs are sent overseas or being done by machines, what do you do with the people? Execute them? Throw them all in prison? Cut them a check for life?
This is a problem we in the tech field need to be seriously thinking about as it affects us more than most. It used to be you needed X number of guys to run the servers and maintain them, now we are at the beginning of self diagnosing servers and things will only get smarter. A factory down the street from me used to employ thousands of machinists making aircraft parts, good folks with families. Now their jobs are done by a handful who basically "watch the machines" to make sure there is someone there to hit the off switch if something goes wrong. Because frankly at the tolerances they are working now (a friend showed me their new laser gauges could even tell the difference in metals that you had held in your hand because of the difference in size caused by your body heat even after holding it in your hand for just a few seconds) there just isn't any way for a human to do the job there anymore.
I see the same thing in my own job, if it wasn't for the SMBs and the work I've been doing for those at the college that constantly need more and more powerful machines for their CAD work I'd be hurting, as the push to laptops have turned most computers into "built for the dump" throwaway items as it is nearly impossible to get parts for the proprietary bastards, and it is more profitable for the OEMs to simply force people to shitcan that $400 laptop than it is to build them to be repaired, not with being able to crank the things out like flapjacks thanks to machines.
So we honestly need to sit down and talk about what we as a society are gonna do, as we are ALL playing a game of musical chairs based on IQ, and the number of seats are getting smaller every day while the population is getting larger. There are plenty of good folks in my building that are having trouble even keeping a roof over their head even though they work their asses off simply because work for those that aren't white collar is getting more scarce by the day. These folks aren't Einsteins but they are good people and frankly don't deserve to have to live like animals just to survive.
We really need to sit down and talk about this, because NONE of us has infinite intelligence, yet our "leaders" simply keep spouting the "continued education!" meme while refusing to admit there are plenty that simply can't climb higher and that often piling on the crushing debt of continued education simply doesn't pay back enough to keep their heads above water. We can't ALL be rocket scientists, and we really need to find a way for decent folks who are willing to work hard to survive, because frankly there is a hell of a lot of them and more coming every day. I simply don't see how we can stay on this path without disaster or revolution, I just don't.
I'll never forget the words of one of my favorite black teachers, who had this BEAUTIFUL early 70s Chevy convertible he had lovingly restored with his own two hands. When I saw he had drove up in this POS 80s hunk of garbage all I could think was someone asshole had destroyed that sweet ride so I had to ask him if someone had destroyed his baby. "Nope" he said "I have to go visit some kin that still live in the ghetto and you can't trust a damned nigger not to steal anything that isn't nailed down".
It was one of my first tastes of how much black folks HATE niggers, and the whole 'pity me and give me a check" bullshit that Jackson and his ilk push. I used to love having lunch with Dru, one of the smartest and hardest working women I'd ever met...unless they gave us a nigger as a waitress. The amount of disgust and hatred that would roll off that woman...wow. She would say ten years of hard work by a black woman could be undone by ten minutes of being around some nigger bitch, popping out a half a dozen kids and "damned bitch don't even know who the baby daddy is on half of them" and screaming racism if you dared to tell her to get off her ass and do her job.
So yeah, I'm gonna have to agree with you there. The whole promoting "thug life" which Mr Stevens said of those relatives that refused to leave the ghetto "would act like getting out of jail was graduating with a degree while looking down on me as a Uncle Tom" while bragging about how many illegitimate kids you have (which IIRC was what got Moral Court taken off the air, because the black judge dared to say black men like the one on the show that was bragging he had "ten kids he never done seen" was a disgrace to the black race) and screaming "That's racist!" if you dare to tell them to take care of themselves? yeah this shit needs to end.
What do they think is gonna happen in the future? That when America is broke they can hit the Chinese with "yellow guilt" and get them to cut a check for life? Or that not even bothering to teach your kids to speak English instead of slang will get them anywhere? I have NO PROBLEM with helping someone when they are down. My dad fell off a truck in 75 and we had to spend a year on welfare while the huge split in his skull healed but the second the doc cleared him he was back to work and busting his ass until he could scrape up enough to own his own business.
He taught me that if you wanted something you had better be ready to work for it and thanks to him I own my little shop now. I'll never get rich selling boxes but I'm happy and take care of my own. But sadly I live in a nice little antique apt (building built in 24, with a lot of the original woodwork and decor) that from its spot on the hill one can look down into what is now the black section about a dozen blocks away. what do I see? Sirens constantly, that whole area is nothing but dope slinging and whores and "thug life".
Can't they see they are destroying themselves better than any Klansman ever could? Can't they see as long as you have those like Jackson (how many illegitimate kids did he have with that girl?) keep pushing that whole "victim mentality" that is all they'll ever be? So I'm sorry, they can scream "That's Racist!" all they want, but that "its just a G thang baby" violence and outright refusal to even ATTEMPT to better themselves or get ahead needs to be called by what it is, glorifying being a nigger. And the sooner we look at those "livin the life" as the trash that they are, no different than trailer trash whites or any other low life garbage, the better off we will ALL be.
Personally i think we should do MORE to help those that are truly down through no fault of their own, especially the disabled as one car wreck is all it would take to put ANY of us in their shoes, but the whole glorifying being too lazy to get an education or too sorry to raise your own kids? We need another WPA, then if your ass has a strong back you will WORK YOUR ASS OFF for that check like my grandfather did during the depression, an
Oh it'll probably work, the pirates just got so used to WGA their standard answer is just to get the patches from WSUS Offline or Autopatcher. Hell both of those solutions give you a MUCH better experience than WU any day of the week, so why would anyone even bother to test WU? Hell I only run legit and I haven't touched WU in years.
Autopatcher comes with ALL the extras like Adobe Air and all the reg tweaks, which makes it the bomb if you are only using one version or two of Windows, and for guys like me that have to update multiple versions WSUS offline not only lets you have ALL the updates automated, including service packs, but ALSO gives you the option of having the whole thing run from a thumbdrive or a single DVD for x86 and a single DVD for x64. And that is for ALL Windows from WinXP through Windows 7 X64! All on a disc ready to go! I mean all my machines and my customers are legit, but why waste time and bandwidth with WU? It sucks!
So while I'm sure it would work, frankly from what I read nobody bothered with WU anymore and who could blame them. And like I said they ROYALLY screwed the pooch when they got rid of Win 7 HP for $50. I saw guys that had NEVER paid for Windows suddenly running legit. Hell some were even jumping on the $100 Win 7 pro or the $120 HP family pack and going legit across the board. But the SECOND that price went up to $100 for HP? That's when you suddenly started seeing all these "Win 7 Ultimate" boxes and laptops everywhere.
It is just like how you almost never saw XP Home, because all the pirates said "if I'm gonna snatch anyway, why not pro?". So like I said, snatching defeat from victory. They could have almost completely wiped out piracy in the west AND gotten rid of all those XP users like me that still have boxes not worth spending $100 for an upgrade AND had a captive audience for both the latest IE AND been able to try to upsell them to Pro or Ultimate. But no, that would have been smart, and one thing Ballmer has proven is he is a classic middle management dumbass.
Frankly it ain't the USA that needs to be worried....it is everybody else. remember what happened when Germany went tits up in the 20s? Something about taking Poland? So what do you think will happen when the largest military in the world can't hand out local bread and circuses? Why we'll just take yours!
And the bitch is? With the right leader unlike the crazy Austrian we'll pull it off too and you know how? Deals baby! Watch how easy it would be: Oh Putin want to be president for life? How about having the USSR back? We know you miss the old days, well its yours baby! We won't say a word pal, enjoy...just don't say nothing about what we do in OUR backyard, kay? Russia down
Hey China! Our buddies in the east! Hey you know that whole Taiwan thing? Roll the tanks baby, it is ALL yours. Oh and as long as you keep the trade up Africa? help thyself buddy. China down.
So what do the USA get for our dealing? Why North and South America, of course! The United Continent of America has a REAL nice ring to it, don't ya think? All those nice oil sands up north, all those resources down south, Lebensraum here we come!
And honestly who would stop us if China and Russia agreed to sit this one out? Germany? Will be too busy shitting their pants at the USSR on their doorstep, especially with the USA out of NATO. The UK? They are an island, Wolfpacks showed how to fix THAT problem. They have...what? 1 Aircraft carrier? We got 11, no problem! France? Italy? oh they'll bitch, but who cares.
As for getting the American people behind it? Do the same trick the Austrian used, lots of "bread and jobs" along with a false flag or two. Wouldn't be hard to paint Chavez and a few others to be the new devils.
So for all those "Yay America is gonna fall" types? be careful what you wish for, because Germany got to be the asshole twice last century, and before those in power go silently into that good night I have a feeling it will be the USA's turn. Frankly it wouldn't take long at $10 a gallon gas and 40% unemployment to get Americans to sign off on just about anything. you already have some serious hatred of foreigners building up with the lax border and H1-Bs, really wouldn't be hard to direct that hatred at a chosen target. Scary thought, isn't it?
Who cares! when are these damned scientists gonna give us what they've been promising for years, huh? I want my flying car, I want my huge multiTB holographic disc for my flying car, so I can burn every single tune that has ever been worth a crap for blasting through the sky, and I want my Alyson Hannigan Sexbot to sit beside me and tell how fricking awesome I am dammit!
So quit wasting our time with this mamby pamby nano bullshit and give us stuff worthy of you wearing the white lab coat you damned geeky scientists! Hell you haven't even given us a six million dollar man yet, and that show was in the 70s! You suck!
You know what? I don't think it is so much that "flash sucks" so much as when Adobe bought it they didn't really have a game plan and the code they had only ran on win X86 and frankly that is the same to this day. Flash on win x86? It runs just fine. Runs fine in Win X64 since the browsers are all 32 bit. Everywhere else? Steaming pile of stinky.
So it looks, just from me watching the history of the thing, that they made the classic buyer's mistake. they probably let everyone that was really good at the code behind flash waltz out the door and then milked it for all it was worth. But times change, win x86 isn't the end all be all anymore, and it looks like Adobe simply hasn't been able to keep up.
But then again Adobe never were the brightest bulbs in the sign. Macromedia Xres was a great image manipulation software that they could have sold very nicely in the low to mid market, and used it as an upsell to Photoshop. They have also bloated the living shit out of PDF by jamming everything AND the kitchen sink into what was supposed to be a portable office format, not a fricking office suite or multimedia presentation, with predictable results.
So to me the questions are thus: Will Adobe be able to adapt, or will they go the way of the 8 track? And if flash goes tits up, what will replace it? Because frankly from what I've seen HTML V5 sucks on less than a dual core unless you have some sort of acceleration for it. H.26x is great and does have acceleration, but FOSS won't touch it because of patents, WMV is okay but only on Win, Quicktime sucks, Theora would have been great 10 years ago but sucks now as it eats too many cycles for less quality than H.26x, so what is left?
Because I REALLY don't want to go back to the 90s, with a dozen competitive formats all with bugs and hassles, and since it looks like Apple and MSFT are sticking with HTML V5 H.26x that will end up fractured. Sigh, I have a feeling it is gonna be a big clusterfuck like the 90s all over again. Say what you want about flash, but at least every machine from a PIII to the latest multicore could run it, and nearly everyone already had it installed.
Oh Good God man! Here, let me help you out. 1.-get rid of the shit drivers which frankly by the third BSOD should have smacked you upside the head with the clue stick, and 2.- put in some real drivers and if none exist you get on the horn and have a royal screaming bitchfit and whatever fly by night bunch sold you that junk and let them know you're gonna take your business somewhere else!
And I honestly hate to do this, as it smacks to much of "ItWorksForMe(TM)" but 10 to 15 a week? Dude ur doin it wrong!
Seriously if it is ONE machine? Shitcan it. you have a bad cap, a bad trace, something nasty be there. if it is more than one machine? Start with power, you'd be surprised how many times I've found bad power to be the culprit. it don't take much of a sag to cause all kinds of hell in a modern machine. If the power checks run Dependency walker and find out what the hell your program is trying to call that isn't there. Also look at the logs and see what program is getting launched immediately before or is finishing immediately before the nasty.
Because I support SOHOs and SMBs and consumers, office workers and parents, gamers and old folks. All are welcome in my shop. And I can tell you windows hasn't done what you describe since the days of Win9X. So if you aren't bullshitting, which I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt by giving you the troubleshooting checklist, then there is something seriously wrong in your setup.
Because I've just finished setting up a little private network for a company that decided to keep their Win2K machines that I built them in like 2003. They have been running solid all this time and they decided for the work they have them doing (basic office work and bookkeeping) it really didn't need net access, so they decided to keep them and just have me build new PCs for the graphics dept. Hell I know a bunch that is still using Win2K Server for file and printing. It too doesn't need net access and it is stable and they're happy.
So my friend if you are having that kind of trouble? you got something bad going down. If you can't figure it out yourself with the tips I gave you might want to call in your local tech shop guy and have him take a look at it, it may be some something you never even thought of. Hell I had one that would throw in the early hours of the morning, it turned out when the cleaning crew would kick in all their gear it would sag the line and throw the machines. But Windows just doesn't do that without something seriously being wrong man, it just don't.
I'd also add there is a "Windows 7 Eng All Edition 32+64 bit pre Activated" out there that...well it works like a charm. Hell it is easier to use than XP, as XP needs a key and this thing pre inserts the key. You can't run Windows Updates but it isn't like there aren't other ways to get those. Just does the batch file trick and that's it, instant 7 in ANY flavor.
So if they are doing this to cut down on piracy they are retarded, hell Win 7 is EASIER than XP. the bitch is they had the solution to piracy and they cocked it up. It was the Win 7 HP $50 upgrade. I saw more pirates go legit on that than I had EVER seen before. It was the "sweet spot" when it came to switching pirates.
But no, instead of doing the smart move and using HP as a foot in the door to switch pirates and then try to upsell them to Pro or Ultimate they canceled it. Just further proof IMHO Ballmer needs a good firing. At $100 Win 7 HP simply isn't worth it to most people, their money would be better spent on hardware. for $50 it is the same price as your average game and both the pirates and many that were sitting on the fence were willing to switch. I know that I only run legit but at $100 my Nettop will keep XP, $100 would be better spent on hardware than 7.
And if they think dangling IE of all things will get people to switch? it isn't 2002 anymore, nobody outside of corporate uses IE. Just more proof in my eyes how MSFT can snatch failure from success, instead of getting the fence sitters off of XP and at the same time turning pirates into customers they just cocked it all up. typical.
IIRC there were plenty of people that paid for a "premium" geocities account, didn't do them much good in the end. It all comes down to how much a corp can 'monetize" the service and whether they are happy with small chunks of change or only huge buckets.
So I'd say the real problem is NO company will admit to how much monetization they require to keep a service. A service can be bringing in a million a month but if some mega corp doesn't think anything less than 4 million a month is worth messing with? Bye bye data.
If they would at least say how much the service makes and how much it is required to make one could make intelligent choices about this, but as it is there is NO WAY of knowing if the service you are using, whether you pay or not, will be here next month.
After all Google could ultimately decide that youtube simply can't be monetized to the amount they consider it worth keeping then poof! Oh Google will most likely be nice enough to give you X number of days, but it doesn't change the fact that without knowing how much they expect per month to keep a service going short of some iron clad contract that gives you compensation if they pull the plug you are at the whim of whomever is deciding what the ultimate monetization goals are.
Oh please! You think they wish to commit suicide? What do you think keeps people locked into Windows? It is all the time and money they have invested in legacy applications that's what! If I can't run my old Windows apps, what is to keep me from buying that new iShiny or even that cheaper Linux box? Why not a thing!
After all they can ALL surf the web, only the Apple has more style and intuitiveness, while the Linux box is cheaper. So the ONLY thing MSFT has going for them is the billions of dollars in programs that run ONLY on Windows.
Now if you were to say "they are gonna figure out a seamless way to VM all those apps" I might agree with you, except so far we haven't seen anything of the sort. But to kill the golden goose that is backwards compatibility? Never!
As for TFA, I think this is a sign MSFT will soon be giving up the "browser wars". After all they aren't making any money on IE, being locked in to IE has been gone since Firefox, and with the exception of corporate IE has become "that thing you use to download Firefox/Chrome". By tying specific versions to specific OSes they have made sure IE will be so fragmented nobody will write for it anyway, so they might as well say "This is what you use to download Chrome/Firefox, we'll plug any glaring obvious holes, but other than that tough luck, its a tech demo for MSR".
Because last I checked while Win 7 has passed XP in the USA, the world map still has XP at nearly 50%, and another 17% for Vista. That is 67% of the world market that can't use your product but can use your competitors and if that isn't giving up I don't know what is. Unless there is someone over at MSFT so stoned they actually think they can get people to spend $100+ on a new OS just by dangling a new IE? If so can I have some, that must be some good shit.
Aww isn't that cute, poor wittle FOSSie AC can't come up with a single intelligent argument and therefor has to insult. Poor wittle FOSSie, didn't the kool aid taste good? here let me use small words so you can understand:
If I am a corporation with a couple of billion to buy a company what do you have to offer me besides a "gee thanks for teh money LOL!" hmmm? The answer NOTHING because with FOSS that is all you CAN offer since nobody OWNS anything. That was the whole point of RMS's little utopia, no ownership.
So with that being that case, what companies would be willing to waste money on buying a FOSS company? Answer: trolls as IP is the ONLY thing that you can "own" in FOSS. This is of course due to RMS fucking up when he wrote GPL V2, and he tried to do away with patents and copyrights in GPL V3, but nobody is touching that thing with a 50 foot pole, not even Linus.
So how about instead of fantasizing about my large penis, why not answer the question? What do you have to offer the corporate world besides your worthless "goodwill" hmm? The Oracle deal proved you get neither the code nor the developers so ALL Oracle got for all that money was IP they can use to sue with and office furniture. Mark my words and mark them well: After the corporate world saw how Oracle didn't get shit for their money the ONLY ones that will be buying FOSS companies will be trolls.
You will also see more and more go tits up as the "community" doesn't even have enough sense not to shit in their own beds, witness Red hat, who gives back more than the top three combined last I checked yet a full 34% of the servers out there are running NOT RHEL but CentOS. Yeah that's smart, lets withhold funds from the ONE company that gives back damned near everything they make. Smart. But go ahead, you keep thinking about my dick instead of asking the hard questions, it is better that way.
You call HIM a troll and then follow it up with a mountain of FUD? I fix Windows 6 days a week and haven't seen a non hardware BSOD in YEARS. Viruses? The users install over 90% of them so how can anyone blame Windows for that. Gonna set them up in a walled garden and take away their choices? Having choice means having the ability to be an idiot too you know.
Meanwhile you say they'll have "a thousand times better than Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows."? Can I have some of what you're smoking? It must be some good shit. I have 7 year old XP installs in the field, never needed squat as far as work. Have you had more than a single upgrade deathmarch (thank Canonical for that) where drivers didn't shit themselves? How much time did you spend in CLI in the past 6 months? Once a day? Weekly? If the answer is I used CLI at all you have failed because consumers ain't touching that 70s era term shit.
So keep spreading the FUD friend. BTW you DO know accounts are free right? I'm sure I'll get the usual Linux TMs from Linux TM repository, such as "WorksForMe(TM)" and "StableABINonsense(TM)" which BTW if you read the argument AGAINST ABIs? It is totally political, with the writer going so far as to call those that refuse to give 100% of the drivers to the devs "leeches".
When your head of kernel development says, "The Linux kernel isn't designed, it grows like a virus" You know you are in serious fucking trouble. yeah Linus it is called an STD and would get your ass FIRED anywhere else. Can you imagine going to YOUR BOSS on a million dollar project and saying "Plan? We don't need no steenkin plan, we gonna grow like a virus LOL!"? Hell even OS fricking 2 has a stable ABI for the love of Pete!
The part that pisses me off as a retailer is the community could change it if they would quit accepting the shit sandwiches and DEMAND better. DEMAND that Linus quit acting like a douche, pick a gameplan and STICK TO IT, DEMAND that the 6 month deathmarch be replaced with a solid plan for fixing bugs, DEMAND that developers quit rushing out one buggy release after another, in short do what others would do by voting with their dollars.
Because frankly if you don't the ONLY places Linux is gonna be successful is those where there simply isn't any real money to be made by the big boys. As it is a full 2/3rds of servers being sold right now are being sold with...dum dum dum...Windows, and no unlike desktop one does NOT buy a Windows server to put Linux on, the new mobile devices like pads are being dominated by...dum dum dum...Apple, which have gotten "it just works" and intuitiveness down to an art, seriously wake up man. it isn't 1997 anymore, 70s era term shit and spend time trawling forums for fixes has got to DIAF if you want to compete. This is said as someone who would love to have your product on my shelves if I could get the damned thing to run for longer than a single update without dropping to CLI and forums just to get the drivers fixed.