Uhhh...You talking to me? Because I thought giving up the keys was monumentally stupid in the extreme. That would be like a company that sells locks publicly handing out random keys to their locks. Did they hand out yours? I don't know but I'd sure as hell be ditching their product but quick!
But that is not what we are talking about here, we are talking about the professional conduct of the CEO during an interview. To just stomp off while blaring out "national security"? which hell he might as well have said "yeah we did it fuck you!"? It just makes the whole company look like a badly run Mickey Mouse operation, and certainly not a company I would trust with my secure communications.
So if his job was to tank the company? bravo, good work my man. But if his job was to actually sell the Playbook, which just got completely lost in his hissy fit? Well then his ass needs FIRED with a capital F, and somebody better be doing some serious damage control but QUICK. Personally I think it is too late, the shady double dealing and Mickey Mouse bullshit like this has just shot their image straight down the crapper. They have NO compelling argument on why to take them over iOS except security, and they just took a big old steaming dump on that one.
Yeah stick a fork, the fat lady is already down the street having a sandwich. Maybe HP or MSFT will buy what's left when they are flatline. I think HP would be a good fit, replace the OS with WebOS and give them HP support? It couldn't be worse than this clown.
Notice I got modded down for daring to speak the truth? here let me break it down: If I buy a proprietary company I get the software and if I buy a F/OSS company I get....what? The Office furniture? gee, thanks a lot. I could have saved a billion and gone to Office Max.
The simple fact is this: The ONLY ones who will get any real "value" for their money without having to kiss some major community ass when it comes to F/OSS is IP trolls, which is what I'm betting you'll be see a hell of a lot more of, especially when companies like Mandriva go tits up.
All the Sun sale showed the business world is as far as they are concerned F/OSS is "free as in worthless" because if you don't pucker up buttercup they'll just take everything you bought thanks to forking and you can't do shit about it pal. So why in the hell would a corp waste money "buying" that which can't be bought?
Whether the folks here like reality or not, hiding their heads in the sand won't change it. 2/3rds of new servers are now being sold with...dum dum dum...windows. All the new hotness personal devices are made by...dum dum dum...Apple. To compete with two companies that could literally buy most of the third world with the change in their couches you better have some hardcore corporate backing and I'm betting after seeing how Oracle got pretty much the office furniture that backing is gonna dry up and blow away like a fart in the breeze.
In a way that is how RMS has always wanted it, reading his writing he is about as anti-corporate as one can be without coming right out and claiming to be a communist. But while the geeks at/. might like to hang onto old beliefs I hate to break the news but it ain't 1979 anymore and a couple of guys in their basement aren't gonna write the next great OS.
To compete you are gonna need Billions with a B, where is it gonna come from? Not Red hat, because the community is screwing them raw, what with over 34% of the servers out there running NOT RHEL but CentOS. Novell? Practically tits up. Mandriva? Life support. Apple? Moving away from any GPL code as fast as they can. So who is left? Can't just join hands and wish upon a star you know. Devs need to eat, have a roof, etc. Can't all be MIT bums.
You mark my words and mark them well:Without Oracle dough OO.o will fall behind and it WILL fall fast. Because part time coders just can't keep up with full time development teams, sorry.
Actually I'd say you are BOTH wrong. You see the words "liberal" and democrat haven't actually gone together (except in the minds of the right wingers) in quite a long time, probably not since Carter.
You see, here in America we have the right wing party (the democrats) and the ULTRA right wing party (the republicans) and then we have...well that's pretty much it. BOTH are for more power for themselves and the elite, BOTH are for less rights for you and more for the government and BOTH treat the constitution like more of a guideline than any kind of hard or fast rule.
That is why you'll never change things by voting here in America, because it is basically Coke VS Pepsi. Either way you are getting nothing but gas and empty calories for your time.
I don't know about that, as the 70s Ford trucks were pretty decent, and the Maverick was a great car to trick out. You could manage to squeeze some insane motors in that little thing!
As for TFA...if it ain't broke? For files where you don't care about security, like say plopping some Linux ISOs on a server somewhere then FTP is as good as any. It does make me curious though: Is there any tech still in widespread use that is that old or older?
How about audio processing? Are they any good at that? Because anything really customizable seems to cost an arm and a leg when it comes to musical gear. You could write a plugin for Audacity that interacted with it, maybe letting guys like me offload some of the processing on effects?
If there is one place that F/OSS could really take some serious marketshare it would be musical creation. Most of us musicians have no problem with tinkering, and as long as we can do cool things with it we don't mind if we have to get a little fiddly, and finally Audacity is already F/OSS and frankly is pretty kick ass, so there is already great software to plug these things into. If these chips would work good for audio I could see F/OSS DIY home studios becoming hot with musicians, especially seeing as how crazy the prices for some of the proprietary stuff is.
You can get the same thing with Gecko, it is called Kmeleon CCF ME and it uses native APIs and only runs on windows.
That said, is there anybody besides corps using IE anymore? I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a consumer box in my shop running IE. For the past couple of years it has been Firefox everywhere, and now I'm seeing a LOT of Chrome icons on folk's desktops. Personally after having to clean up after IE 6 for a couple of years they could come out with IE "dancing hooker edition" and I wouldn't use it, but before it actually took effort to get folks off IE and now frankly I just don't see anybody not in corporate using it.
One thing I WILL give them credit for though is low rights mode, which is what got me off of FF for Comodo (Chromium based). Running the browser in the lowest rights mode simply is good security policy, especially with so many zero days coming out lately.
That said I think MSFT may have finally fatally shot themselves in the foot by keeping IE9 off of XP and IE10 off of Vista. They could get away with that shit when there weren't any competition, but now there are browsers galore and there are WAY too many users still on XP/Vista to just abandon them when the competitors haven't. It is just a stupid move that will make IE even more fractured, and give that many more people a reason to try the competition.
But frankly bragging about "being native" when Chrome is already as fast as most folks connections will go is just dumb. People aren't gonna give a crap about "native" they care about what they can see! And right now the Chromium based are so fast it is scary, and the amount of plugins are quickly coming close to equaling FF, one thing that IE has never been great at(unless you count an assload of toolbars as great). whats next, "IE has electrolytes"?
Because that is like saying "My horse costs much less to feed now that its dead"? I'm sorry but that Office suite sucked when it was Star Office, it sucked when it was Open Office, and it sucks now that it is Libre office or whatever artsy fartsy name they want to call it. Sure it is fine if you are little Billy and just need to write a word doc, but for businesses? it stinks on ice.
Its not their fault really, trying to reverse engineer a moving target has GOT to suck, but in the end MS Office rules the roost, and anything that tries to replace better be more than just "good enough". Writer is okay, not great, with still too many broken formats if you do anything fancier than basic fonts, Calc is a giant pile of shit compared to Excel, You try handing Calc to an Excel jockey they'll laugh you out of the building, and I hate to say it but I find Access less of a PITA than Base.
As for Oracle? The lesson here is, and I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing it out, but the lesson is FOSS is "free as in worthless" if you are a corp because you actually buy nothing for your money. they should have waited until Sun flatlined and picked it up for a song and ditched the FOSS and kept the IP copyrights and patents. Because as Libre Office proved it doesn't matter how much you pay for something if the FOSSies get their panties in a wad it quickly becomes not worth the effort. From what I saw oracle didn't do a damned thing different than sun before them, but because Sun was the "good guys" and Oracle was "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison" it didn't really matter.
So if I was Oracle I'd cut it loose, not allow another cent spent on development, and see how long it lasts. My guess is it'll flounder around without corporate support for a year or two until it goes tits up. Because whether anyone cares to admit it or not its the corps paying the devs not a bunch of RMS wannabes sitting in their basements writing all this stuff. And whether you care to admit it or not MS Office is the defacto standard and having to keep up with that size of a development team will take some serious money. Just passing a tip jar or a few devs "scratching an itch" (have you seen the OO.o code? Man that is some big thick mess to wade through) will cut it. If Oracle cuts funding I'm betting it'll die hard.
Oh Please! hell even I could have handled that question, watch: "We are here to talk about the playbook, if you want to schedule an interview about other topics talk to my secretary. Next". See how easy that was? If you are a CEO it is your damned job to be ready for anything.
His having a little hissy fit, screaming "national security" at the end (making it look like they are REALLY shady) and storming out like a kid who didn't get his way should have this bozo FIRED with a capital F. He has hurt the image of the company, will probably hurt the stock price, and made them look like a shady Mickey Mouse operation all at the same time which is simply inexcusable.
There is a reason why Ballmer and Jobs don't seem to flinch whatever you throw at them in an interview (and I've seen some doozies thrown at Ballmer) and that is because they are pros and have a straight quick cutoff answer ready for anything they don't want to talk about. This was just third rate all around, and to me just shows why RIM is getting their asses handed to them in the mobile space. Anybody who had stock in a company with THAT lousy of a CEO needs to be dumping that stock NOW.
That is what they used in my last election (AR) sorry I didn't think to see who made the system. I thought it was quite nice actually, as it gave you a big easy to read touch screen and after saying "yes I'm sure" to each choice (which I thought was a nice touch, for those that may have trembling hands or other disabilities) it would print you selection on a scrolling ballot which you would place in the box. I asked what the electronic results were for and the local official said "it gives the news the early results" so it seemed to cover both the speed that news wants and the paper trail WE want.
What I thought was most excellent in their new system was there was NO disenfranchisement of voters. None at all. If someone didn't have their name on the roll (just moved, didn't know where to go, etc) they would simply pull them aside, ask a few questions, and get on their cells and have it all straightened out so they could vote where they were and not have to try to find the correct place. I watched it happen twice while I was in line and it took less than 5 minutes both times. Quite nice. Hell they even provided coffee and donuts since there was a heavy turnout.
So I say it CAN be done right with just a little thought. Whereas before I looked forward to voting day about as much as I look forward to a trip to the DMV before, now it is a nice pleasant easy experience.
It doesn't matter whether they had "a deal" or not (even though we've seen no evidence of a deal) because once that camera rolls that's your ass Mr CEO so you had damned well be ready for ANYTHING.
All he has done is make RIM look like a Mickey Mouse operation with seriously shady dealings going on. Anyone want to bet this will do some damage to the stock price? Walking out of an interview might be fine for Crazy Charlie, but a CEO is supposed to not act like he is four years old. No fair? welcome to life Mr CEO, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
You want to know why MS Office gets bit (and also why OO.o isn't gaining any traction)? simple: Business are hooked on Macros like crack, that's why. You'd be amazed at how many "mission critical apps" I've seen that were some horrible kludge of VB and Office Macros.
Hell why do you think VB6 was so damned hard for MSFT to kill? Because businesses had WAY too much shit running on it. Same thing with MS Office, as VBA is all over the damned place and anything they patch has to make sure it don't shit all over all those macros.
So I'd say the whole thing is a "be careful what you wish for" as businesses wanted something that even non coders could whip up basic office programs with and MSFT gave it to them. Well letting anybody and his dog run any code embedded in something else is a BAD IDEA, and then add to the fact that Adobe has added the kitchen sink into what was supposed to be a "Portable Document Format" and we have a serious SNAFU.
As much as I thiunk sandboxes are band aids on bullet wounds maybe that's what we are gonna end up needing here: an automatic "drop your broke ass code here" sandbox that lets businesses keep their big kludge VBA nightmares and horribly written PDF bloatware while letting the rest of us just look at a PDF or open a word doc without the BS.
Yes in a way we CAN blame it on the government, because it ultimately comes down to "can you baby proof the world?". Because as someone who cleans these things for a living I can tell you a good 90% of infections are from users being dumbasses and NOTHING else. Example follows:
Last week a customer needed to pay me for a cleaning on a machine I built him nearly a month ago. Did I leave him unprotected? did I not harden the machine? NOPE, total PEBKAC. When the AV practically threw itself in front of him trying to install the "new Limewire" a hacked Limewire ripoff he uninstalled it so it would "shut up" and let him have his bugs. Well he got it alright, more than 60 bugs running.
Now the ONLY way the government can have ANY effect on that level of stupid is to take away all our rights to run what we want and give us basically "approved disc images" or locked down OSes with app store style "choice" as to what you run.
Because lets be honest folks: the government can shut down botnets until the cows come home, but from THAT level of stupid, as shown above? Hell they might as well be pissin in the wind for all the good it will do. I mean how can you even attempt to stop something that all they have to do is print the equivalent of "free candy" on the side to get morons to ignore their AV and everything else just so they can install malware onto their own machines? Short of baby proofing the world how can you stop super stupidity without taking choice?
If you aren't being sarcastic (so hard to tell these days, we really need a sarcasm tag) the ways these guys have it set up makes carny workers look like paragons of virtue. If you want to play the game its easy:
You have all valuable assets set up that while they show up on your books they can be dumped into a shell corp at a moment's notice, you have several charters and LLCs ready to go, already registered with different owners (use cousins, in laws, etc) and then you simply dump all liabilities onto the "bad" corp and burn it. All the debts and lawsuits are with a bankrupt name with ZERO assets and anything worth having is with your new "good" corp in another city and away you go!
I would give them credit on getting scamming down to an artform, except we are talking real serious environmental damage NOW (frakking chemicals in the water table, quakes, drilling pits, roads trashed, etc) and the significant risk of real loss of life in the future. When the big ones hit and it is traced back to frakking those who lose everything will come looking for redress will find only ghosts while the CEOs sneak away with the profits. Welcome to corporate Amerika, enjoy your stay citizen!
What amazes me is how many of the young 'uns here are surprised, whereas we old guys remember when MSFT brought over Dave Cutler his big thing was portability and he had WinNT running on just about every chip out there.
So I wouldn't doubt they've kept a division of MSR going with an up to date portable version of the NT code base. what I don't see how they can keep from getting bit in the ass on is if they name it Windows people are gonna expect Windows apps to work which of course they most assuredly WON'T, not without a recompile that most companies simply won't do.
that is one I will hand to the F/OSS guys, if they want to run F/OSS OSes on the old Motorola 68k or any other chip they can do so if they spend the time recompiling it for the arch. Too much of Windows value is tied up in third party code that will simply not get off x86 anytime soon, and without it windows is pretty much worthless. After all people aren't gonna buy Windows licenses just to play Solitaire.
Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart...bite me you corporate ass kisser. If you knew anything you'd know you ALREADY PAID to the tune of 200 billion and all you got for your money was a "LOL Goatse LOL!" pic from the ISPs who used the money to give themselves bonuses and trips to Vegas.
So instead of sucking down the corporate bullshit maybe you better ask yourself why even shitty countries like Romania are currently royally kicking our ass on speed, service AND pricing, while our ISPs can't think of anything better to do with the massive profits they are generating than to institute caps and find ways to get BOTH the websites AND you to pay while they give themselves another bonus, hmmm? Like everything else in our corporatist society the shit is falling down around our ears while the CEOs take their mistresses to the Bahamas and the poor can't even have email. WAKE UP!
Riiiight, and it'll run QuickBooks/Quicken? Aunt Tillie's camera software, all those games junior bought at Walmart? No? Then it isn't really useful on a desktop now is it?
For those that talk about MSFT "not getting it" F/OSS users seem to also have some serious blinders going on. Just to make it clear it is NEVER Windows and Office that keeps them on Windows, kay? It is the billions of dollars in programs that neither Linux nor Android will run, THAT is what keeps them on Windows. Why do you think MSFT spends so much on backwards compatibility? Because without the programs they're boned, that's why!
So frankly it wouldn't matter if Android came with dancing hookers and blow if it won't run the programs people need its worthless and NOTHING will change that! You can get by with it in mobile because mobile phones are throw away items and thus nobody has anything really invested in them. Everyone I know has a drawer full of the things, the contract is up they get another addition to the drawer when the new hotness is laid in their hands.
Do they CARE that it don't run the apps the one in the drawer ran? NOPE, it is a phone and people just don't see them as computers, they are "phones with screens" same as people consider ATMs as "screens where you stick in your card and get money out" not a computer. geeks should really be forced to spend a day with Joe Normals once a year, then they'd find out the geek way of thinking is as alien as a Martian to the people actually buying and having the market based on them.
Android on the desktop will go the same place Linux on the desktop has NOWHERE, because people don't run a desktop to look at icons or to only surf FB they use them to run programs which simply don't run on your OS. saying Android will conquer the desktop is as ridiculous as saying replace everyone's PC with an Amiga and it will result in NO loss of productivity!
Well if they'd quit bloating the government out of control they wouldn't be having any money worries, now would they? For those that don't know there are officially MORE working in government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities COMBINED. Source here.
Their whole "IP economy" "Outsource everything" Ponzi scheme is falling down, and if it wasn't for government "make work" we wouldn't have much of an economy at all. It is time to go hardline isolationist (what the 1% call "nationalist and look the other way when other countries do it, such as China and the Yuan and India building a new Aerospace industry rather than buy from us) and take care of our own. bring back a 70% tax rate on the top 1% so they will be forced to invest rather than hoard, kill the H1-B and allowing companies to get breaks for outsourcing, it is time to put America FIRST.
They can keep adding taxes all they want but when the majority of Americans are in the "service industry" aka McJobs there simply isn't any money to pay that daddy fed doesn't hand them from the smoking hot printing presses first. This BS needs to end NOW or we can see what happens when a first world power comes completely unglued like Egypt. You simply can't employ the entire country in the government, and that is what we are heading towards.
Hey what do you know, not only a fellow Arkie but in the same town my GF lives in!
And if you want easy proof to show your friends look up the geological survey for AR with a list of quakes. I wish I could give you the address but a friend that was working with one of the fly by night wilcat crews turned me on to it and I didn't think to save. He showed me if you overlaid the map he had of where the different groups were frakking with the detected earthquakes guess what? A PERFECT 1:1 MATCH.
And you guys better get ready for worse, now that they've hit it big here in White and according to my friend may have hit oil in Stone county they are moving northwest towards your area. The bitch is these wildcatters have lawsuit avoidance built in. When my city started to complain about the quakes and all the mess a local "energy group" was causing? They said "we'll work on it" and disappeared the next day.
Legally it is like they never existed, they dissolved the company, sold the mineral rights to a shell corp, and were back up and running in another county the very next day under a new name and charter. These guys make carny workers look honest and I have a feeling AR is gonna look like VI with all the polluted mining left over by the time they are through.
personally I'd MUCH rather have the new safe and clean Nuke reactor than these frakking crews ANY day of the week! Most of the buildings here are from the 1920s and earlier (some are pre civil war) and simply weren't built for quakes as we simply never got any here. If these guys set off a big one the loss of life and devastation is gonna be massive, and as we saw with the one I named earlier these guys have game plans to where they can disappear if anything goes wrong. it is a recipe for disaster, but what do you expect in a country where the corps own everything including the laws.
Nope, as MW3 and I'm pretty sure i76 are both Dx games. can't use Glide on non Voodoo games.
The real bitch is because win9x was so "thin" as an OS when you launched a game it pretty much had complete and total control of the hardware. this meant it could write to memory in pretty much any way it felt like, they could use "hacks" like i76 did where the CPU clock was used as timing in game (which is why i76 is damned near impossible to play now) to cut down on overhead, the arch of the early Dx cards was simple enough there were plenty of ways to "hack" around those and beat your competitors in the framerate battle, or you could cook up funky OpenGL extensions that gave your game a bit of a boost.
The simple fact is nobody thought about the future, and with the games long abandoned and the code locked up on some disk drive somewhere trying to save these games and make them playable again is gonna be some serious work. I give GOG credit for going as far as they have, but they really need to test it on some modern hardware before they mark off a game as playable.
I would recommend a bog standard AMD quad with a MOR GPU, something in the $60 range. If it can play on THAT, which is a sub $600 machine, it'll play on most anything. as it is i76 simply isn't playable unless you have an old single core PC lying around, which is becoming rare since duals dropped to almost nothing.
Because even the shitty Tracphones are starting to have "smart" features now? Or that by the time you figure in all the fees the cell is usually the cheapest way to go to get a phone? Or that the cable and teleco without competition have taken assraping to new heights so that is often the ONLY way short of getting in line at a library that a poor person can have email?
Take your pick, I know in my area the price for VoIP with Internet with the cable company is $103 with a 2 year contract with a shittastic 36Gb cap, the DSL option is $108 with a top speed of 756k and a 26Gb cap (not that you'd ever hit it on their shitpile o garbage) again with a 2 year contract, or they can get a smartphone from Fred's for $50 and buy minutes in $20 increments when they have it.
Now which do YOU think the average poor person is more likely to have? $100+ or $50 or less (as they often have sales, I have seen the semi smartphones going for as low as $20 on sale) with no monthly fees or penalties if they have a bad month and can't afford to pay? I have to agree with another poster we need regs NOW for both the teleco and cableco industry, as the reason they can get away with this leeching is the simple fact they know they have a monopoly. WTF? Where is the Anti trust?
I swear we need another Teddy "Trust Buster" Roosevelt right now, and it is one of the issues that could finally get us a third party pres (along with "Be Switzerland" as we are tired of spending billions propping up the third world) because this monopoly bullshit needs to DIAF.
Speeds in my area haven't changed in ages, even though I'm practically across the street from one of the largest private colleges in the state, my mom has been waiting 32 YEARS now for the cable company to run the whole BLOCK AND A HALF yet neither the teleco nor the cableco will service her, hell is it any wonder the poor are switching to smartphones? In the rural areas or even two blocks out of town its the only damned non dialup Internet you can get!!!
Thanks for the attempt to help, but it doesn't work on X64, nor does it really work on anything faster than a low end dual or a P4. it is starting to look like i76 is just one of those games that simply can't be played on a modern system which is a damned shame as from what I remember it was a fun as hell game and started the whole "cars with weapons" phase, ala V8 and Twisted Metal on the PS.
Sadly I believe that unless someone can come up with a DOSBox style emulation that can give us a Win98Se with a MOR late 90s GPU included that many win9x games are gonna simply be lost forever. I know that one of the games that I practically lived on during that period, the excellent MechWarrior 3, is no longer playable as on anything but win9x you have a "bouncing bug" where vehicles will bounce 1000s of feet in the air before the game CTD, and I've run into serious show stoppers in plenty of other games of that era, such as memory access crashes because Win9x didn't protect the memory like a modern OS and therefor it was easy for games to write out of bounds.
Hopefully someone will come up with an emulator strictly for the Win9x era, as the win2K era games can be played with WOW and DOSBox takes care of the DOS era so that is the one era we have left with no real workaround. Considering this was to many the "golden age of PC gaming" with so many excellent games being released it would be a damned shame if they went the way of the 8 track simply for lack of decent emulation.
Sorry, won't work. The game is so tied to BOTH the CPU speed AND the GPU "hacks" of the day that you would need something like Mo-Slo for the GPU as well as the CPU and then you'd STILL probably have serious issues. I can tell you that even tied to a single CPU with an HD4850 GPU the graphics corruption and in game show stoppers (such as a required to complete the mission car jump where you CAN NOT GET ANY SPEED no matter what you do, and thus fall to your death over, and over, and over) makes the game pretty much unplayable.
This is the one thing that is seriously gonna bite classic gaming in the ass. While emulating DOS is frankly butt simple thanks to DOSBox what is gonna kill classic games when it comes to emulation is Win9X. Somebody really needs to come up with a lightweight Win9X environment that basically gives you a Win98Se with GF4000 emulated as so many games from that era are simply unplayable now. I still have my MachWarrior 3 disc for all the good that it will do me, as on anything but Win9X with an old GPU the vehicles will bounce 1000s of feet in the air making them unshootable, before finally CTD.
As more and more of the old hardware is shitcanned this is gonna be a real problem as these games won't run on DOS nor will they run on modern machines either. Neither WOW nor Wine seems to be able to accurately simulate a late 90s Win9x with MOR graphics card, and the beasts of today are simply so overpowered as to make those games unplayable.
But this is one area I fault GOG for, they should really warn people if a game is gonna require specific hardware or serious hacking just to run. with their old DOS games a few hacks and you are good to go, and the community is pretty good about providing resources (such as the excellent BLOOD launcher and patches) to make it butt simple to run them on modern hardware, but the Win9X games can be a real PITA, especially if they used hardware hacks like tying in game actions to CPU speed or GPU features such as they did in i76.
Sadly you usually can't because the ones that think they can get away with this are usually someone's buddy/GF/wife/cousin/etc.
True story, I get called into this little 10 man SMB because the secretary had seen one of those newscasts where someone recommends "strong passwords to protect you from hackers" along with giving them the usual capitals/numbers/symbols bit, so she marched right into work and set some crazy password...which she promptly forgot and couldn't get back in when she returned from lunch. Since all the payroll and invoicing (since she was also the "QB girl" which for some reason is ALWAYS a girl, you'd think they have a union or something) ran through this machine they were shut down. Since this was like the fourth time in as many weeks I had to come fix one of her doozies, out of earshot of her I asked the boss "Since she breaks so much stuff, why don't you fire her?" and he got this wistful look on his face and said "Lord I'd love to but my son would never speak to me again if I fired his wife"
So working SMBs for damned near 20 years now I'd say it is a classic case of SNAFU, where the one that always causes the most hell is usually somebody's kinfolk or SO and that puts a screeching halt to firing them no matter what they break. I talked the owner into making her the full time "accounts admin" and set her up in a corner with a secondary machine that backed up daily with a KVM so that when she broke something she could just "clicky clicky" and keep working until they could bring the machine around the shop. Now that she is limited in the damage she can do they only have to drop a box off every three months or so, better for them and less hassle for me.
geothermal? yep because forcing things into the ground where we have these little things called FAULTS is a lovely idea. Ask those of us in AR with the constant earthquakes from all the NG frakking how smart THAT move is.
You and most of the other "Nukes ZOMG!" crowd seem to be missing how much like Chernobyl this thing REALLY is. In both cases you have a severely old reactor, that frankly should have been shut down years ago, kept going thanks to bribes, NIMBYs, and no real plans by the government on how to replace it, lax inspections along with bribes to make any problems inspectors find just "go away" and then everyone is surprised when it gets hit by the largest Tsunami the place is ever seen shit breaks. Well duh.
The simple facts are these: a combination of small thorium reactors and reuse of waste COULD make nuclear one of the safest things we have, but like everything else we've let rich scum who only care about how much profits can be made cock it all up. It NEEDS to be treated as a public works project, like building a dam NOT as some private SuperMegaCorp endeavor which will inevitably end up with cost cutting shims everywhere, bribes, and all the usual nasty.
Don't blame the tech because the leeches fuck it up. After all we could make ICE vehicles that easily get 60MPH plus, but too many are making money on shit being...well shit. Misery is easy to profit off of, as is half assed and SNAFU. If we take the profit motive out of their construction and operation I bet you'd have the safest tech on the planet bar none!
A bigger question: Will it still be hackable? I could see some that planned on hacking the thing anyway saving $25, the same as I've known Linux guys that would take the cheapest trialware ridden laptop because they knew they'd never even boot into the mess anyway, so it saved them money.
So the bigger question is what is stopping the hackers from doing this now? Anything? And how long before this is mandatory? I bet Amazon isn't making huge profits on the thing to start with (and all corps seem to believe they are entitled to huge profits nowadays) and force feeding ads would probably make them a mint. So how long with you be able to buy the "Non TiVo'd" Kindle, vs one that protects their ad revenue with eFuses or code signing?
I'm all for choice, and if they offered this thing for $40 or less with ads I'd probably get one just to play with, but I worry about the future of ads on mobile devices. We can hardly escape ads now as it is, with even schools renting out spaces on lockers and tables to ad companies, so how long until you can't escape the crap?
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Uhhh...You talking to me? Because I thought giving up the keys was monumentally stupid in the extreme. That would be like a company that sells locks publicly handing out random keys to their locks. Did they hand out yours? I don't know but I'd sure as hell be ditching their product but quick!
But that is not what we are talking about here, we are talking about the professional conduct of the CEO during an interview. To just stomp off while blaring out "national security"? which hell he might as well have said "yeah we did it fuck you!"? It just makes the whole company look like a badly run Mickey Mouse operation, and certainly not a company I would trust with my secure communications.
So if his job was to tank the company? bravo, good work my man. But if his job was to actually sell the Playbook, which just got completely lost in his hissy fit? Well then his ass needs FIRED with a capital F, and somebody better be doing some serious damage control but QUICK. Personally I think it is too late, the shady double dealing and Mickey Mouse bullshit like this has just shot their image straight down the crapper. They have NO compelling argument on why to take them over iOS except security, and they just took a big old steaming dump on that one.
Yeah stick a fork, the fat lady is already down the street having a sandwich. Maybe HP or MSFT will buy what's left when they are flatline. I think HP would be a good fit, replace the OS with WebOS and give them HP support? It couldn't be worse than this clown.
Notice I got modded down for daring to speak the truth? here let me break it down: If I buy a proprietary company I get the software and if I buy a F/OSS company I get....what? The Office furniture? gee, thanks a lot. I could have saved a billion and gone to Office Max.
The simple fact is this: The ONLY ones who will get any real "value" for their money without having to kiss some major community ass when it comes to F/OSS is IP trolls, which is what I'm betting you'll be see a hell of a lot more of, especially when companies like Mandriva go tits up.
All the Sun sale showed the business world is as far as they are concerned F/OSS is "free as in worthless" because if you don't pucker up buttercup they'll just take everything you bought thanks to forking and you can't do shit about it pal. So why in the hell would a corp waste money "buying" that which can't be bought?
Whether the folks here like reality or not, hiding their heads in the sand won't change it. 2/3rds of new servers are now being sold with...dum dum dum...windows. All the new hotness personal devices are made by...dum dum dum...Apple. To compete with two companies that could literally buy most of the third world with the change in their couches you better have some hardcore corporate backing and I'm betting after seeing how Oracle got pretty much the office furniture that backing is gonna dry up and blow away like a fart in the breeze.
In a way that is how RMS has always wanted it, reading his writing he is about as anti-corporate as one can be without coming right out and claiming to be a communist. But while the geeks at /. might like to hang onto old beliefs I hate to break the news but it ain't 1979 anymore and a couple of guys in their basement aren't gonna write the next great OS.
To compete you are gonna need Billions with a B, where is it gonna come from? Not Red hat, because the community is screwing them raw, what with over 34% of the servers out there running NOT RHEL but CentOS. Novell? Practically tits up. Mandriva? Life support. Apple? Moving away from any GPL code as fast as they can. So who is left? Can't just join hands and wish upon a star you know. Devs need to eat, have a roof, etc. Can't all be MIT bums.
You mark my words and mark them well:Without Oracle dough OO.o will fall behind and it WILL fall fast. Because part time coders just can't keep up with full time development teams, sorry.
Actually I'd say you are BOTH wrong. You see the words "liberal" and democrat haven't actually gone together (except in the minds of the right wingers) in quite a long time, probably not since Carter.
You see, here in America we have the right wing party (the democrats) and the ULTRA right wing party (the republicans) and then we have...well that's pretty much it. BOTH are for more power for themselves and the elite, BOTH are for less rights for you and more for the government and BOTH treat the constitution like more of a guideline than any kind of hard or fast rule.
That is why you'll never change things by voting here in America, because it is basically Coke VS Pepsi. Either way you are getting nothing but gas and empty calories for your time.
I don't know about that, as the 70s Ford trucks were pretty decent, and the Maverick was a great car to trick out. You could manage to squeeze some insane motors in that little thing!
As for TFA...if it ain't broke? For files where you don't care about security, like say plopping some Linux ISOs on a server somewhere then FTP is as good as any. It does make me curious though: Is there any tech still in widespread use that is that old or older?
How about audio processing? Are they any good at that? Because anything really customizable seems to cost an arm and a leg when it comes to musical gear. You could write a plugin for Audacity that interacted with it, maybe letting guys like me offload some of the processing on effects?
If there is one place that F/OSS could really take some serious marketshare it would be musical creation. Most of us musicians have no problem with tinkering, and as long as we can do cool things with it we don't mind if we have to get a little fiddly, and finally Audacity is already F/OSS and frankly is pretty kick ass, so there is already great software to plug these things into. If these chips would work good for audio I could see F/OSS DIY home studios becoming hot with musicians, especially seeing as how crazy the prices for some of the proprietary stuff is.
You can get the same thing with Gecko, it is called Kmeleon CCF ME and it uses native APIs and only runs on windows.
That said, is there anybody besides corps using IE anymore? I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a consumer box in my shop running IE. For the past couple of years it has been Firefox everywhere, and now I'm seeing a LOT of Chrome icons on folk's desktops. Personally after having to clean up after IE 6 for a couple of years they could come out with IE "dancing hooker edition" and I wouldn't use it, but before it actually took effort to get folks off IE and now frankly I just don't see anybody not in corporate using it.
One thing I WILL give them credit for though is low rights mode, which is what got me off of FF for Comodo (Chromium based). Running the browser in the lowest rights mode simply is good security policy, especially with so many zero days coming out lately.
That said I think MSFT may have finally fatally shot themselves in the foot by keeping IE9 off of XP and IE10 off of Vista. They could get away with that shit when there weren't any competition, but now there are browsers galore and there are WAY too many users still on XP/Vista to just abandon them when the competitors haven't. It is just a stupid move that will make IE even more fractured, and give that many more people a reason to try the competition.
But frankly bragging about "being native" when Chrome is already as fast as most folks connections will go is just dumb. People aren't gonna give a crap about "native" they care about what they can see! And right now the Chromium based are so fast it is scary, and the amount of plugins are quickly coming close to equaling FF, one thing that IE has never been great at(unless you count an assload of toolbars as great). whats next, "IE has electrolytes"?
Because that is like saying "My horse costs much less to feed now that its dead"? I'm sorry but that Office suite sucked when it was Star Office, it sucked when it was Open Office, and it sucks now that it is Libre office or whatever artsy fartsy name they want to call it. Sure it is fine if you are little Billy and just need to write a word doc, but for businesses? it stinks on ice.
Its not their fault really, trying to reverse engineer a moving target has GOT to suck, but in the end MS Office rules the roost, and anything that tries to replace better be more than just "good enough". Writer is okay, not great, with still too many broken formats if you do anything fancier than basic fonts, Calc is a giant pile of shit compared to Excel, You try handing Calc to an Excel jockey they'll laugh you out of the building, and I hate to say it but I find Access less of a PITA than Base.
As for Oracle? The lesson here is, and I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing it out, but the lesson is FOSS is "free as in worthless" if you are a corp because you actually buy nothing for your money. they should have waited until Sun flatlined and picked it up for a song and ditched the FOSS and kept the IP copyrights and patents. Because as Libre Office proved it doesn't matter how much you pay for something if the FOSSies get their panties in a wad it quickly becomes not worth the effort. From what I saw oracle didn't do a damned thing different than sun before them, but because Sun was the "good guys" and Oracle was "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison" it didn't really matter.
So if I was Oracle I'd cut it loose, not allow another cent spent on development, and see how long it lasts. My guess is it'll flounder around without corporate support for a year or two until it goes tits up. Because whether anyone cares to admit it or not its the corps paying the devs not a bunch of RMS wannabes sitting in their basements writing all this stuff. And whether you care to admit it or not MS Office is the defacto standard and having to keep up with that size of a development team will take some serious money. Just passing a tip jar or a few devs "scratching an itch" (have you seen the OO.o code? Man that is some big thick mess to wade through) will cut it. If Oracle cuts funding I'm betting it'll die hard.
Oh Please! hell even I could have handled that question, watch: "We are here to talk about the playbook, if you want to schedule an interview about other topics talk to my secretary. Next". See how easy that was? If you are a CEO it is your damned job to be ready for anything.
His having a little hissy fit, screaming "national security" at the end (making it look like they are REALLY shady) and storming out like a kid who didn't get his way should have this bozo FIRED with a capital F. He has hurt the image of the company, will probably hurt the stock price, and made them look like a shady Mickey Mouse operation all at the same time which is simply inexcusable.
There is a reason why Ballmer and Jobs don't seem to flinch whatever you throw at them in an interview (and I've seen some doozies thrown at Ballmer) and that is because they are pros and have a straight quick cutoff answer ready for anything they don't want to talk about. This was just third rate all around, and to me just shows why RIM is getting their asses handed to them in the mobile space. Anybody who had stock in a company with THAT lousy of a CEO needs to be dumping that stock NOW.
That is what they used in my last election (AR) sorry I didn't think to see who made the system. I thought it was quite nice actually, as it gave you a big easy to read touch screen and after saying "yes I'm sure" to each choice (which I thought was a nice touch, for those that may have trembling hands or other disabilities) it would print you selection on a scrolling ballot which you would place in the box. I asked what the electronic results were for and the local official said "it gives the news the early results" so it seemed to cover both the speed that news wants and the paper trail WE want.
What I thought was most excellent in their new system was there was NO disenfranchisement of voters. None at all. If someone didn't have their name on the roll (just moved, didn't know where to go, etc) they would simply pull them aside, ask a few questions, and get on their cells and have it all straightened out so they could vote where they were and not have to try to find the correct place. I watched it happen twice while I was in line and it took less than 5 minutes both times. Quite nice. Hell they even provided coffee and donuts since there was a heavy turnout.
So I say it CAN be done right with just a little thought. Whereas before I looked forward to voting day about as much as I look forward to a trip to the DMV before, now it is a nice pleasant easy experience.
It doesn't matter whether they had "a deal" or not (even though we've seen no evidence of a deal) because once that camera rolls that's your ass Mr CEO so you had damned well be ready for ANYTHING.
All he has done is make RIM look like a Mickey Mouse operation with seriously shady dealings going on. Anyone want to bet this will do some damage to the stock price? Walking out of an interview might be fine for Crazy Charlie, but a CEO is supposed to not act like he is four years old. No fair? welcome to life Mr CEO, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
You want to know why MS Office gets bit (and also why OO.o isn't gaining any traction)? simple: Business are hooked on Macros like crack, that's why. You'd be amazed at how many "mission critical apps" I've seen that were some horrible kludge of VB and Office Macros.
Hell why do you think VB6 was so damned hard for MSFT to kill? Because businesses had WAY too much shit running on it. Same thing with MS Office, as VBA is all over the damned place and anything they patch has to make sure it don't shit all over all those macros.
So I'd say the whole thing is a "be careful what you wish for" as businesses wanted something that even non coders could whip up basic office programs with and MSFT gave it to them. Well letting anybody and his dog run any code embedded in something else is a BAD IDEA, and then add to the fact that Adobe has added the kitchen sink into what was supposed to be a "Portable Document Format" and we have a serious SNAFU.
As much as I thiunk sandboxes are band aids on bullet wounds maybe that's what we are gonna end up needing here: an automatic "drop your broke ass code here" sandbox that lets businesses keep their big kludge VBA nightmares and horribly written PDF bloatware while letting the rest of us just look at a PDF or open a word doc without the BS.
Yes in a way we CAN blame it on the government, because it ultimately comes down to "can you baby proof the world?". Because as someone who cleans these things for a living I can tell you a good 90% of infections are from users being dumbasses and NOTHING else. Example follows:
Last week a customer needed to pay me for a cleaning on a machine I built him nearly a month ago. Did I leave him unprotected? did I not harden the machine? NOPE, total PEBKAC. When the AV practically threw itself in front of him trying to install the "new Limewire" a hacked Limewire ripoff he uninstalled it so it would "shut up" and let him have his bugs. Well he got it alright, more than 60 bugs running.
Now the ONLY way the government can have ANY effect on that level of stupid is to take away all our rights to run what we want and give us basically "approved disc images" or locked down OSes with app store style "choice" as to what you run.
Because lets be honest folks: the government can shut down botnets until the cows come home, but from THAT level of stupid, as shown above? Hell they might as well be pissin in the wind for all the good it will do. I mean how can you even attempt to stop something that all they have to do is print the equivalent of "free candy" on the side to get morons to ignore their AV and everything else just so they can install malware onto their own machines? Short of baby proofing the world how can you stop super stupidity without taking choice?
If you aren't being sarcastic (so hard to tell these days, we really need a sarcasm tag) the ways these guys have it set up makes carny workers look like paragons of virtue. If you want to play the game its easy:
You have all valuable assets set up that while they show up on your books they can be dumped into a shell corp at a moment's notice, you have several charters and LLCs ready to go, already registered with different owners (use cousins, in laws, etc) and then you simply dump all liabilities onto the "bad" corp and burn it. All the debts and lawsuits are with a bankrupt name with ZERO assets and anything worth having is with your new "good" corp in another city and away you go!
I would give them credit on getting scamming down to an artform, except we are talking real serious environmental damage NOW (frakking chemicals in the water table, quakes, drilling pits, roads trashed, etc) and the significant risk of real loss of life in the future. When the big ones hit and it is traced back to frakking those who lose everything will come looking for redress will find only ghosts while the CEOs sneak away with the profits. Welcome to corporate Amerika, enjoy your stay citizen!
What amazes me is how many of the young 'uns here are surprised, whereas we old guys remember when MSFT brought over Dave Cutler his big thing was portability and he had WinNT running on just about every chip out there.
So I wouldn't doubt they've kept a division of MSR going with an up to date portable version of the NT code base. what I don't see how they can keep from getting bit in the ass on is if they name it Windows people are gonna expect Windows apps to work which of course they most assuredly WON'T, not without a recompile that most companies simply won't do.
that is one I will hand to the F/OSS guys, if they want to run F/OSS OSes on the old Motorola 68k or any other chip they can do so if they spend the time recompiling it for the arch. Too much of Windows value is tied up in third party code that will simply not get off x86 anytime soon, and without it windows is pretty much worthless. After all people aren't gonna buy Windows licenses just to play Solitaire.
Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart...bite me you corporate ass kisser. If you knew anything you'd know you ALREADY PAID to the tune of 200 billion and all you got for your money was a "LOL Goatse LOL!" pic from the ISPs who used the money to give themselves bonuses and trips to Vegas.
So instead of sucking down the corporate bullshit maybe you better ask yourself why even shitty countries like Romania are currently royally kicking our ass on speed, service AND pricing, while our ISPs can't think of anything better to do with the massive profits they are generating than to institute caps and find ways to get BOTH the websites AND you to pay while they give themselves another bonus, hmmm? Like everything else in our corporatist society the shit is falling down around our ears while the CEOs take their mistresses to the Bahamas and the poor can't even have email. WAKE UP!
Riiiight, and it'll run QuickBooks/Quicken? Aunt Tillie's camera software, all those games junior bought at Walmart? No? Then it isn't really useful on a desktop now is it?
For those that talk about MSFT "not getting it" F/OSS users seem to also have some serious blinders going on. Just to make it clear it is NEVER Windows and Office that keeps them on Windows, kay? It is the billions of dollars in programs that neither Linux nor Android will run, THAT is what keeps them on Windows. Why do you think MSFT spends so much on backwards compatibility? Because without the programs they're boned, that's why!
So frankly it wouldn't matter if Android came with dancing hookers and blow if it won't run the programs people need its worthless and NOTHING will change that! You can get by with it in mobile because mobile phones are throw away items and thus nobody has anything really invested in them. Everyone I know has a drawer full of the things, the contract is up they get another addition to the drawer when the new hotness is laid in their hands.
Do they CARE that it don't run the apps the one in the drawer ran? NOPE, it is a phone and people just don't see them as computers, they are "phones with screens" same as people consider ATMs as "screens where you stick in your card and get money out" not a computer. geeks should really be forced to spend a day with Joe Normals once a year, then they'd find out the geek way of thinking is as alien as a Martian to the people actually buying and having the market based on them.
Android on the desktop will go the same place Linux on the desktop has NOWHERE, because people don't run a desktop to look at icons or to only surf FB they use them to run programs which simply don't run on your OS. saying Android will conquer the desktop is as ridiculous as saying replace everyone's PC with an Amiga and it will result in NO loss of productivity!
Well if they'd quit bloating the government out of control they wouldn't be having any money worries, now would they? For those that don't know there are officially MORE working in government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities COMBINED. Source here.
Their whole "IP economy" "Outsource everything" Ponzi scheme is falling down, and if it wasn't for government "make work" we wouldn't have much of an economy at all. It is time to go hardline isolationist (what the 1% call "nationalist and look the other way when other countries do it, such as China and the Yuan and India building a new Aerospace industry rather than buy from us) and take care of our own. bring back a 70% tax rate on the top 1% so they will be forced to invest rather than hoard, kill the H1-B and allowing companies to get breaks for outsourcing, it is time to put America FIRST.
They can keep adding taxes all they want but when the majority of Americans are in the "service industry" aka McJobs there simply isn't any money to pay that daddy fed doesn't hand them from the smoking hot printing presses first. This BS needs to end NOW or we can see what happens when a first world power comes completely unglued like Egypt. You simply can't employ the entire country in the government, and that is what we are heading towards.
Hey what do you know, not only a fellow Arkie but in the same town my GF lives in!
And if you want easy proof to show your friends look up the geological survey for AR with a list of quakes. I wish I could give you the address but a friend that was working with one of the fly by night wilcat crews turned me on to it and I didn't think to save. He showed me if you overlaid the map he had of where the different groups were frakking with the detected earthquakes guess what? A PERFECT 1:1 MATCH.
And you guys better get ready for worse, now that they've hit it big here in White and according to my friend may have hit oil in Stone county they are moving northwest towards your area. The bitch is these wildcatters have lawsuit avoidance built in. When my city started to complain about the quakes and all the mess a local "energy group" was causing? They said "we'll work on it" and disappeared the next day.
Legally it is like they never existed, they dissolved the company, sold the mineral rights to a shell corp, and were back up and running in another county the very next day under a new name and charter. These guys make carny workers look honest and I have a feeling AR is gonna look like VI with all the polluted mining left over by the time they are through.
personally I'd MUCH rather have the new safe and clean Nuke reactor than these frakking crews ANY day of the week! Most of the buildings here are from the 1920s and earlier (some are pre civil war) and simply weren't built for quakes as we simply never got any here. If these guys set off a big one the loss of life and devastation is gonna be massive, and as we saw with the one I named earlier these guys have game plans to where they can disappear if anything goes wrong. it is a recipe for disaster, but what do you expect in a country where the corps own everything including the laws.
Nope, as MW3 and I'm pretty sure i76 are both Dx games. can't use Glide on non Voodoo games.
The real bitch is because win9x was so "thin" as an OS when you launched a game it pretty much had complete and total control of the hardware. this meant it could write to memory in pretty much any way it felt like, they could use "hacks" like i76 did where the CPU clock was used as timing in game (which is why i76 is damned near impossible to play now) to cut down on overhead, the arch of the early Dx cards was simple enough there were plenty of ways to "hack" around those and beat your competitors in the framerate battle, or you could cook up funky OpenGL extensions that gave your game a bit of a boost.
The simple fact is nobody thought about the future, and with the games long abandoned and the code locked up on some disk drive somewhere trying to save these games and make them playable again is gonna be some serious work. I give GOG credit for going as far as they have, but they really need to test it on some modern hardware before they mark off a game as playable.
I would recommend a bog standard AMD quad with a MOR GPU, something in the $60 range. If it can play on THAT, which is a sub $600 machine, it'll play on most anything. as it is i76 simply isn't playable unless you have an old single core PC lying around, which is becoming rare since duals dropped to almost nothing.
Because even the shitty Tracphones are starting to have "smart" features now? Or that by the time you figure in all the fees the cell is usually the cheapest way to go to get a phone? Or that the cable and teleco without competition have taken assraping to new heights so that is often the ONLY way short of getting in line at a library that a poor person can have email?
Take your pick, I know in my area the price for VoIP with Internet with the cable company is $103 with a 2 year contract with a shittastic 36Gb cap, the DSL option is $108 with a top speed of 756k and a 26Gb cap (not that you'd ever hit it on their shitpile o garbage) again with a 2 year contract, or they can get a smartphone from Fred's for $50 and buy minutes in $20 increments when they have it.
Now which do YOU think the average poor person is more likely to have? $100+ or $50 or less (as they often have sales, I have seen the semi smartphones going for as low as $20 on sale) with no monthly fees or penalties if they have a bad month and can't afford to pay? I have to agree with another poster we need regs NOW for both the teleco and cableco industry, as the reason they can get away with this leeching is the simple fact they know they have a monopoly. WTF? Where is the Anti trust?
I swear we need another Teddy "Trust Buster" Roosevelt right now, and it is one of the issues that could finally get us a third party pres (along with "Be Switzerland" as we are tired of spending billions propping up the third world) because this monopoly bullshit needs to DIAF.
Speeds in my area haven't changed in ages, even though I'm practically across the street from one of the largest private colleges in the state, my mom has been waiting 32 YEARS now for the cable company to run the whole BLOCK AND A HALF yet neither the teleco nor the cableco will service her, hell is it any wonder the poor are switching to smartphones? In the rural areas or even two blocks out of town its the only damned non dialup Internet you can get!!!
Thanks for the attempt to help, but it doesn't work on X64, nor does it really work on anything faster than a low end dual or a P4. it is starting to look like i76 is just one of those games that simply can't be played on a modern system which is a damned shame as from what I remember it was a fun as hell game and started the whole "cars with weapons" phase, ala V8 and Twisted Metal on the PS.
Sadly I believe that unless someone can come up with a DOSBox style emulation that can give us a Win98Se with a MOR late 90s GPU included that many win9x games are gonna simply be lost forever. I know that one of the games that I practically lived on during that period, the excellent MechWarrior 3, is no longer playable as on anything but win9x you have a "bouncing bug" where vehicles will bounce 1000s of feet in the air before the game CTD, and I've run into serious show stoppers in plenty of other games of that era, such as memory access crashes because Win9x didn't protect the memory like a modern OS and therefor it was easy for games to write out of bounds.
Hopefully someone will come up with an emulator strictly for the Win9x era, as the win2K era games can be played with WOW and DOSBox takes care of the DOS era so that is the one era we have left with no real workaround. Considering this was to many the "golden age of PC gaming" with so many excellent games being released it would be a damned shame if they went the way of the 8 track simply for lack of decent emulation.
Sorry, won't work. The game is so tied to BOTH the CPU speed AND the GPU "hacks" of the day that you would need something like Mo-Slo for the GPU as well as the CPU and then you'd STILL probably have serious issues. I can tell you that even tied to a single CPU with an HD4850 GPU the graphics corruption and in game show stoppers (such as a required to complete the mission car jump where you CAN NOT GET ANY SPEED no matter what you do, and thus fall to your death over, and over, and over) makes the game pretty much unplayable.
This is the one thing that is seriously gonna bite classic gaming in the ass. While emulating DOS is frankly butt simple thanks to DOSBox what is gonna kill classic games when it comes to emulation is Win9X. Somebody really needs to come up with a lightweight Win9X environment that basically gives you a Win98Se with GF4000 emulated as so many games from that era are simply unplayable now. I still have my MachWarrior 3 disc for all the good that it will do me, as on anything but Win9X with an old GPU the vehicles will bounce 1000s of feet in the air making them unshootable, before finally CTD.
As more and more of the old hardware is shitcanned this is gonna be a real problem as these games won't run on DOS nor will they run on modern machines either. Neither WOW nor Wine seems to be able to accurately simulate a late 90s Win9x with MOR graphics card, and the beasts of today are simply so overpowered as to make those games unplayable.
But this is one area I fault GOG for, they should really warn people if a game is gonna require specific hardware or serious hacking just to run. with their old DOS games a few hacks and you are good to go, and the community is pretty good about providing resources (such as the excellent BLOOD launcher and patches) to make it butt simple to run them on modern hardware, but the Win9X games can be a real PITA, especially if they used hardware hacks like tying in game actions to CPU speed or GPU features such as they did in i76.
Sadly you usually can't because the ones that think they can get away with this are usually someone's buddy/GF/wife/cousin/etc.
True story, I get called into this little 10 man SMB because the secretary had seen one of those newscasts where someone recommends "strong passwords to protect you from hackers" along with giving them the usual capitals/numbers/symbols bit, so she marched right into work and set some crazy password...which she promptly forgot and couldn't get back in when she returned from lunch. Since all the payroll and invoicing (since she was also the "QB girl" which for some reason is ALWAYS a girl, you'd think they have a union or something) ran through this machine they were shut down. Since this was like the fourth time in as many weeks I had to come fix one of her doozies, out of earshot of her I asked the boss "Since she breaks so much stuff, why don't you fire her?" and he got this wistful look on his face and said "Lord I'd love to but my son would never speak to me again if I fired his wife"
So working SMBs for damned near 20 years now I'd say it is a classic case of SNAFU, where the one that always causes the most hell is usually somebody's kinfolk or SO and that puts a screeching halt to firing them no matter what they break. I talked the owner into making her the full time "accounts admin" and set her up in a corner with a secondary machine that backed up daily with a KVM so that when she broke something she could just "clicky clicky" and keep working until they could bring the machine around the shop. Now that she is limited in the damage she can do they only have to drop a box off every three months or so, better for them and less hassle for me.
geothermal? yep because forcing things into the ground where we have these little things called FAULTS is a lovely idea. Ask those of us in AR with the constant earthquakes from all the NG frakking how smart THAT move is.
You and most of the other "Nukes ZOMG!" crowd seem to be missing how much like Chernobyl this thing REALLY is. In both cases you have a severely old reactor, that frankly should have been shut down years ago, kept going thanks to bribes, NIMBYs, and no real plans by the government on how to replace it, lax inspections along with bribes to make any problems inspectors find just "go away" and then everyone is surprised when it gets hit by the largest Tsunami the place is ever seen shit breaks. Well duh.
The simple facts are these: a combination of small thorium reactors and reuse of waste COULD make nuclear one of the safest things we have, but like everything else we've let rich scum who only care about how much profits can be made cock it all up. It NEEDS to be treated as a public works project, like building a dam NOT as some private SuperMegaCorp endeavor which will inevitably end up with cost cutting shims everywhere, bribes, and all the usual nasty.
Don't blame the tech because the leeches fuck it up. After all we could make ICE vehicles that easily get 60MPH plus, but too many are making money on shit being...well shit. Misery is easy to profit off of, as is half assed and SNAFU. If we take the profit motive out of their construction and operation I bet you'd have the safest tech on the planet bar none!
A bigger question: Will it still be hackable? I could see some that planned on hacking the thing anyway saving $25, the same as I've known Linux guys that would take the cheapest trialware ridden laptop because they knew they'd never even boot into the mess anyway, so it saved them money.
So the bigger question is what is stopping the hackers from doing this now? Anything? And how long before this is mandatory? I bet Amazon isn't making huge profits on the thing to start with (and all corps seem to believe they are entitled to huge profits nowadays) and force feeding ads would probably make them a mint. So how long with you be able to buy the "Non TiVo'd" Kindle, vs one that protects their ad revenue with eFuses or code signing?
I'm all for choice, and if they offered this thing for $40 or less with ads I'd probably get one just to play with, but I worry about the future of ads on mobile devices. We can hardly escape ads now as it is, with even schools renting out spaces on lockers and tables to ad companies, so how long until you can't escape the crap?