Afraid not, a friend of my and myself actually tried contacting some of the old shareware companies to get permission to make the old shareware on a flash stick with a preconfigured DOSBox so kids could see what it was like in the early 90s.
What we found was 1.- A third of them are now owned by vultures that think some DOS card game should command the same prices as Doom 3 did at release, 2.- The rights are in limbo, because the companies have been split up and nobody knows who owned what (but nobody will give permission for fear somebody else might make a penny) and 3.- Companies that say "Oh we are gonna do something with that someday somewhere" and never do.
This is why I think copyrights should be a "use it or lose it" situation, where if a company does not sell their product in retail markets for x number of years they lose the rights which then go into public domain. This would also apply if they refuse to update the software so it can run on a modern system, otherwise they would just open a storefront on Amazon with a handful of discs for Windows 95 and try to argue "its for sale". Because as it is now more and more games are being lost, and with the "forever minus a single day" copyrights we have now programs written for first gen PCs and consoles won't be out of copyright until our fricking grandchildren are ready for retirement!
You missed the bigger issue friend which is that this thing will end up an attack vector because it can't be patched and the apps and OS will be abandoned long before the set dies.
Sure if its one of those that uses Ethernet you could just pull the plug, but what about the new ones that come with WiFi? How many consumers are gonna be able to 1.- Access their router or modem's configuration, 2.- Read the access list AND know which device is what, especially when many just use some string of numbers instead of "phone", TV", etc and 3.- Know how to block just that device without borking anything else?
Adding a Firestick would merely give you back the functionality you had, not remove the threat which is why there needs to be a simple killswitch that will let the user turn their set from a smart to a dumb device. Otherwise its just a matter of time before a CodeRed or Shellshock comes along and turns these TVs into a malware writer's wet dream!
The whole idea of a "smart TV" is retarded because it ignores a fundamental truth, which is 1.- "Smart"devices that are successful are in markets with high turnover so the consumer is able to run the latest apps, for example smart phones and tablets, while 2.- TVs are devices that are typically kept by the consumer for 5-10 years which means the "Smart" part will quickly become as outdated and useless as a Palm Pilot.
Since FirefoxOS hasn't been out long enough lets use Android as an example, lets say you bought your smart TV 6 years ago, right around the time I bought my mother her new set (which is still working great and will probably last at least a couple more years if not more) that would put you on on Android 1.5, AKA Cupcake...now how many apps today can run on Cupcake? Very damned few. What about the hardware, could it have been updated? Since I had one of the early 1.6 (AKA Donut) I can tell you that while you MIGHT have been able to go to 2.0 it would have been painful to use, as the average device then was similar to these specs, a 530Mhz ARM11 with just 192Mb of RAM and 512Mb of flash...now remember that most smart TVs have lower specs than your average phone so how long do you think it would take before it was just painful to use?
At the end of the day I think that other than malware targets these things are gonna quickly become irrelevant, the OS will go out of date looong before the TV dies, making for a security nightmare as vulnerabilities in both the OS and the apps won't be able to be patched as the hardware will just be too weak to run anything newer, and for the consumer the apps will lose support and using the ones that come with it will be about as pleasant as trying to surf modern sites on the phone I listed above. So other than a checkbox on the side of the box? IMHO this is just fucking stupid any way you cut it.
Thanks Billy...and notice how NONE OF THEM have the balls to actually take the challenge, even though I rigged the living hell out of it in Linux' favor? I did NOT require any of the truly modern devices people expect like 1.- Printer support, 2.- Support for phones and other mobile devices, 3.- Hardware video acceleration (which has been in Windows since fricking Vista), 4.- Support for LTE 4G which many new laptops come with. And if that is not enough? They only have to show FIVE years of support instead of Windows TEN years...fucking half, and still they bitch and moan and whine like little bitches?
But the reason the Challenge has lasted so long is because of what you got to see with your own eyes...Torvalds driver model is older than Disco Dan and more brittle than an 86 year old on her third hip! I mean for fucks sake they are admitting that their OS can't even do half of what Windows does and they have the fucking gall to be pissed at me? Why the fuck aren't they bitching at Torvalds for keeping such a shitty poorly designed driver schema that gets fucking curbstomped by Windows 2K?
Ya wanna know the best part Billy? The reason they try to give for keeping the shitfest driver model ends up showing they are full of shit and hypocrites to boot! They say "boo hoo, if we had a functional driver model then devs wouldn't give us their driver code precious, boo hoo"...yet what do we see in every.single.fucking.article. about graphics in Linux? A billion fucking posts squeeing like fangirls for Nvidia, who issues nothing BUT locked down binary blobs and who flips the bird at the very beliefs they say they hold so damned dear!
This is why I have ZERO doubt that in 12 years the Hairyfeet Challenge will celebrate 20 years without a single "consumer friendly" (boy isn't that a joke, about as friendly as handing somebody a hammer, pointing at a forest, and saying "there is your house bitch go build it!") distro coming even close to passing. This is why the OEMs treat Linux like plague blankets, why shops like mine will strip a box for parts before putting Linux on it, its because the last version of Windows Linux could compete with was Windows 98.
I can grab any box out the back, install Win2K RTM and drivers for that hardware and then apply all ten years of SPs and updates and wadda ya know, all the hardware STILL FRICKING WORKS, until they can show that they can pass the challenge, that even one, just one, consumer friendly distro can even go half that time without shitting on its own drivers and dying? Then Linux is nothing but a joke, it is a Mickey Mouse hobbyist desktop that nobody should take seriously.
If you truly believe what you are preaching? Then step right up and take "The Hairyfeet Challenge", now celebrating its eighth year of watching "consumer friendly" Linux distros puke and die!
Take ANY mainstream consumer oriented (not LTS, because even Ubuntu advises against mainstream users using LTS) from FIVE years ago, this simulates a 5 year typical lifecycle. This BTW is less than HALF a windows support cycle, so I'm cutting linux a break. Lets say you use Ubuntu, that would be Ubuntu 9.10 and can be downloaded from their archive. Install it on ANY PC, desktop or laptop (NOT VM as that isn't real hardware and comes with special drivers) that has a wireless card. Wireless is required because more and more mainstream users are ditching wires and nobody wants a laptop that doesn't have wireless, do they?
During this phase you are the system builder so CLI (which is usually required because Linux driver support is poor) IS ALLOWED. Once its installed you are no longer the system builder but THE USER, so like a windows user you are ONLY allowed to use the GUI. You then get to "enjoy the freedom" of using nothing but the GUI (because if you can't even update the thing without CLI you're no match for windows are you) of updating to current...with ubuntu that is SEVEN RELEASES, just FYI. You will film this and post it to youtube, you only have to upload the final install process of each release and a pic of the device manager showing working hardware complete with wireless showing WPA V2 connection, but the complete video should be hosted on dropbox to prove you aren't faking it.
BTW in case it isn't clear working hardware means WORKING HARDWARE, it does NOT mean wireless that can't use WPA, it does NOT mean a PC with no sound or VESA video, it means FULLY WORKING HARDWARE and again if you are unclear please see the highlighted areas as completing the challenge REQUIRES vids of the final install of each upgrade (last I checked that would be EIGHT for Ubuntu, and around SIX for most others, be sure to have room on your SD Card!) along with a 5 minute video of the end of each install showing that upon completion you could go to hardware manager and had 100% functional hardware with NO FUTZING. After all if you have to futz with the thing just to have functional drivers it isn't on the same level as Windows now is it? BTW the first Windows that passed the challenge was Win2K (RTM to EOL with ZERO failed drivers, 10 years of support) WinXP (14 years, ZERO fails) and both Vista and 7 can go from RTM to current with ZERO failures. So lets see them snappies, otherwise you are just throwing yet more bullshit, which if you want bullshit see "many eyes" which gave us such well vetted code the world lost billions on heartbleed and will probably lose billions more on stopping the current BASHing...what quality!
Just FYI I've already taken the challenge with several distros that guys like you push, Ubuntu (failed in just 2), PCLOS (failed in 1!), Fedora (2) and about a dozen more and I can't wait to see you take the challenge...but you won't, even though 1.- Its free, 2.- Takes less than 3 hours, and 3.- Would show your desktop is ready for the masses....how do I know you won't? Because if you try the challenge you'll see what I've been saying for over a decade is true, that Torvalds 1970s throwback driver model (which just FYI nobody else uses, not even FOSS OSes like BSD) is a pile of shit and his "let the kernel devs handle drivers" worked just fine in 1993 when all the drivers combined could fit on a floppy but just does not scale. That is why you get such "great support" like this for webcams, why even FOSS darling Firefox disables hardware acceleration thus crippling performance, hell I could go on all day!
Agreed and you can bet your behind that many of the small shops like mine will avoid it for the first year because of the major PITA from false positives. Certain OEMs (cough "Lenovo" cough) seem to just be hated by MSFT and are a big enough hassle to get past WGA with their own damned Windows 7 key, to have to jump through the WGA hoops AGAIN just to upgrade the thing? Fuck off MSFT, Win 7 gets patches until 2020 maybe by then you'll get your head out of your ass.
What is fricking sad is for the first year of the Win 7 release they were killing piracy dead, with $50 for Home and $100 for a triple pack the amount of pirate systems in my area was dropping like a stone and as I said then if they would have offered Win 7 Starter for $25 for older systems? They would have wiped it out. Now it looks like they aren't even offering the cheap upgrades for the first year...anybody wanna bet my local Craigslist is gonna be filled with whatever the top Win 10 SKU is because they got a pre hacked off of TPB?
Dear MSFT....the pirates already have Windows 7...you know as well as I do that you CANNOT BLOCK IT because they are using the OEM SKUs which means you'd wipe out tens of thousands of OEM Windows 7 installs and the false positives would be a bad publicity nightmare,mmmkay? Your goal should be to MAKE THE PIRATES RUN LEGIT because your numbers for Windows 8/8.1? Suck monkey nuts, you cannot afford another fail, right? As Gabe Newell said "piracy is a service problem" and with Windows 7 firmly in their hands you have NO stick to swing at them, ALL you have is the carrot...WTF are ya doing man? You should be offering $25 copies of Win 10 Home and $50 triple packs to bring them into the fold! You're shooting yourself in the face all over again, just like when you refused to listen to us beta testers that pointed out Windows 8/8.1 (which is also in the hands of the pirates, they just don't like it as much as Win 7) was like running Windows 2.0 redesigned by hipsters, are ya TRYING to reach a trifecta of fail?
Actually leveling is fine if done correctly so that the user can see and feel they are making progress towards their goal without it being grindtastic. Same goes for real money and paying for time, as long as it doesn't become pay to win and merely gives you relatively minor enhancements.
For me a perfect example of one that "gets it right" not only in the level progression but also in the FTP with real money purchases realm is one I'm currently enjoying, namely War Thunder. In that game leveling your tank/plane and crew is done by playing well, not only getting kills but actually assisting your teammates and completing the objectives. Can you buy a better crew or premium vehicles? Sure but if you don't actually play well you could throw a million bux at it and still suck ass. The same goes with their "premium vehicles" which are all either 1.- Famous vehicles such as Jimmy Thatch's Buffalo from '39 which performs virtually identical to a regular Buffalo and just has a cool paint scheme, or 2.- rare/prototype vehicles that were tested and rejected during the war or were produced in very small quantities. These vehicles have significant downsides but people like them for the "weirdness" factor. Examples include the American Ascender pusher prop or the Soviet "land battleships" like the T-35 and SMK.
But in WT it doesn't matter if you level your vehicle by playing matches or spending golden eagles, doesn't matter if you buy every premium vehicle in the game or just take the vehicles you get from research, at the end of the day you have to play well, keep your head on a swivel, be aware of where friendly and enemy forces are, and know the strengths and weakness of your plane/tank and that of the enemy or you are just gonna get wrecked. I have seen a tier 1 biplane just demolish a tier 3 BF109 who tried to get in a turning fight with it, watched the reserve tanks you get for free at the start just slaughter premium tanks (in fact the Soviet BTs are quite popular even with seasoned pros for how fast they are) whose drivers obviously thought that it was pay to win, because it all comes down to playing well. The same goes for paying for premium time, it lets you earn more XP and add more stickers to your tank but if you suck? You aren't gonna go anywhere fast.
So I think most if not all that you listed is doable, it just has to be done well. Make the content available to everybody, make real money not be a deciding factor in the game, allow the player to see they are progressing towards their goal,reward playing well, and if you are gonna go with a mix of FTP and subscription do it so both sides are on equal footing play wise.
Go back to making horses and buggies, if they can't even spend 30 minutes on the fucking Internet using teh Google? Then they ARE FUCKING LAZY and they don't deserve to make shit, much less sit on their ever widening asses because they wrote a little 3 minute song a decade ago.
NEWS FLASH this ain't the 1970s Disco Dan, those days are over and they ain't never coming back. the Internet is here, its never going away no matter how much you kiss the ass of the corps, which just FYI will charge you 4000 percent interest on your studio time which is why you have bands like System Of A Down having a "steal this record" tour.
Join the 21st century or die like the dinosaur you are, because NOBODY gets paid to sit on their asses anymore unless you are one of the chosen few and the fact you are posting here? Tells me you and your little buddies probably couldn't fill a 150 seat club on open mike night. BTW thanks to sales we would make upwards of a grand even when we played the little 300 seat clubs...how YOU doing? Thought so, probably don't make enough to pay the bar tab.
What you are attempting to do is use the classic Marxist And you are lynching Negroes which is an appeal to hypocrisy logical fallacy designed to derail the topic at hand, while ignoring the fact that Islamist fascists kill more in a single month than the Christian nutbars have in the past 5 years.
Sorry but we were roots pop, ala Old 97s and Wilco, and we had shirts, keyrings, mugs, they are actually quite cheap to get made nowadays and can be a VERY good source of revenue. We were paying on average $3.50 a shirt and selling them for $10, 2.50 a CD sold for $7.50, $0.75 a keyring sold for $2.50, its really easy to have those made you just have to get off your ass and get 'er done.
My last band was making a good living doing it and we were strictly regional. As for non popular music? If you can't find a patron then sorry charlie, nobody is promised a living "just" because they wrote a song decades ago. I mean can you imagine if we carried this kind of "IP" thinking to every field? Just one apt would probably be $10K a month because you'd have to pay everyone from the plumber to the molding finisher for their "art".
But just because you based your life on government created artificial scarcity is not MY problem, remember this was the same arguments that were used to try to ban VCRs and cassettes. Technology and society changes, adapt or perish.
Because the fans that care enough to pirate will often go to shows and buy shirts which actually DOES go to the artist?
If you want to see what REALLY goes on with the artists read up on Hollywood accounting. It was Hollywood accounting that caused Meatloaf to go bankrupt after Bat Out Of Hell I, which just FYI broke several records for length on the top 200 BEFORE there was any piracy, because the record labels said "nah it didn't make nothing". Or ask Cheap Trick who had to spend the better part of a decade suing their label because the label decided "well iTunes didn't exist when you made those albums so all digital sales? Yeah we're keeping 100%".
To paraphrase what the producer Steve Albini said about record labels and contracts, "its like fighting through a river of shit with 500 other people for a "prize" of getting mugged at the end".
And you and Mr "I like to lick butts!" have ZERO fucking understanding of human beings if you think he would EVAR do anything different....why? Because His fans worship him as a fucking God that's why!
They make artwork of him similar to saints, they even "pray to Gaben" when faced with games that have a random number generator element, if the RNG goes your way they say "Praise Gaben!" and you HONESTLY believe he is gonna give up being the fucking POPE of gaming for money? When he ALREADY has so much that with his current lifestyle he'd have to live to be 10,000 years old to just go through what he has this minute? Not a fricking chance, money is nice, but being worshiped and treated like a rockstar when you are this fat nerd? That is priceless.
Gaben has made it clear on several occasions that if valve was to ever go under (and since he's made it clear he'll not go public with the company and they've made double revenue year after year? Not bloody likely) he will issue a patch that will disable calling home on Steam and all Valve games so it really won't matter WTF the other companies think as Steam will just be in offline mode forever.
If you buy a game that uses something other than Steam? That is between you and the third party, I tend to look at those like plague blankets myself, but there won't be a damned thing the third parties will be able to do if he shuts off the DRM to HIS platform, its his, he owns it, he can pull the plug if he so chooses.
Citation please? Because if they have enough knowledge to get in from what I've seen in the field whatever IP schema they use on the internal is pretty much moot.
You have to remember the script kiddies of today? They have a wealth of tools that takes the actual work out of the equation, once they are inside and know the make and model of router its pretty damned trivial to do anything they want. With all these kits and automated tools (easily gotten off of P2P) if they can go "clicky clicky" in a GUI? they are good to go.
Get ready for the SJWs to scream "that's raciss!" but it has NOTHING to do with money and everything to do with culture and peer pressure.
I've lived in both predominately Black and predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, what did I see? Black kids that tried to get an education and do better were "uncle toms" who were "cooning" and "acting white" and treated like shit by those around them, while those that stood on the corner acting gansta were actually chased by the opposite sex as were looked upon as being "down" with their neighborhood. The Hispanics were busting their butts to get ahead, starting their own businesses, etc, while you had "aspiring rappers" in the black neighborhood.
And its not got a damned thing to do with race, its culture. Look up the figures of Blacks straight off the boat from Africa, despite language and culture barriers they are more than 300% more likely to reach middle class in just 1 generation, and something like 1000% more likely to reach it in 2 than American Blacks. As long as American Blacks glorify violence and ignorance and condemn learning and getting ahead? Things will never change.
Look up "RNC rigged Ron Paul" to see why a so called "dark horse" has zero chance under the current system. In that video you'll see election officials come out point blank and say "The votes we counted was NOT what was recorded, the votes for Paul were given to Romney" and even the RNC calling for a floor vote while the teleprompter shows the outcome before the vote was cast and this combined with the MSM not even hiding the fact they were burying any momentum Paul had (one reporter even asks the anchor "Why am I here looking for Palin and Christie, who aren't even running, when polls shows that Paul could win the district?" and is told flat footed "If you get any Christie or Palin footage send it in, you can dump the Paul stuff") shows that you have better odds of winning 3 card monty with a street hustler. Or have you forgotten how the public in the primaries did several rounds of "anybody but Romney" only for the MSM to crucify anybody that wasn't Romney?
The fix is in friend, they'll pick some fool in the Rs and Hillary will get nothing but praise and softballs thrown at her right up until her inauguration.
Give it up, you better get used to saying "President Hillary" as I've talked to dozens of women in the shop and its gonna be the same as blacks in 08 where 97% voted Obama without knowing a damned thing about his policies or positions just because he was black. When I asked these women "Why do you think she would make a good president, what policies does she advocate that you support?"....blank stares and crickets.
Hillary will chat with Oprah and wave a few times and get 95%+ of the female vote because she has a vag, you will see women come out in record numbers which is why even the Vegas bookmakers are giving her "its in the bag" odds, because they have already seen what I've seen,women are gonna shove her into the big chair no matter what she supports, she is a famous woman which is all they care about.
Copy the address for the video you want to download, paste it into Savedeo and choose whether you want the vid in SD, HD, hell you can choose MP3 if its a tune or you want it as a podcast...oh and you're welcome;-)
Sigh....has NOBODY here even tried the Windows 10 Beta? Hell has nobody even tried Windows 8/8.1? The reason they don't really need WMC anymore is that they already HAVE a perfectly good 10 foot UI in the Metro UI, fuck IMHO its really the only thing other than tablets that Metro is good for, and of course if that isn't "media centric" enough there is always MediaPortal which is quite good, along with whatever they renamed XBMC to.
Sorry Barb but its NOT the method of delivery, that change just happened to coincide with the supercharging of the stock market thanks to a massive bubble that has been blown by the government pumping trillions into the market with 401Ks and 403Bs. When you have THAT much money trying to suck out the last dollar in profit? Quality no longer matters, all that matters is perception on the street.
This is why you get CEOs that literally sell the long term future of the company and the stock gets a bounce, why you can have IPOs that are 50 times what the company could ever realistically earn, and why companies can put out shit software that is damned lucky if its even functional, because as long as they can get something out the door there is a good chance the speculators will see this as a "positive indicator" and give the stock a bounce, which allows the CEO to cash out and move on before the excrement hits the bladed cooling device.
Uhhh there is actually a BIG difference between Millennials and previous generations, as they were the first ones raised under the "special snowflake" political correctness doctrine, this is why this is the generation that makes up the overwhelming majority of what is now known as the social justice warrior as being fed a diet of Captain Planet, third wave feminism, and extreme political correctness when combined with 24/7 connectivity to social media has created a group of narcissists that are the absolute worst of BOTH worlds. They are a group that has been coddled so damned much they don't know shit about how things actually work but so fucking arrogant and self righteous that they perceive learning how to actually perform the task as an insult.
Frankly I've never seen any group so fucking clueless yet so full of smugness and a sense of superiority to those around them, the generation before them was just jaded and cynical as hell but were at least willing to LEARN, whereas these Millennials are so damned full of themselves they are downright fricking insulted when the world doesn't conform to THEIR idea how things are supposed to be they practically wear their lack of knowledge as a badge of honor, like its somehow "standing up to conformity" to not learn how to do shit.
You see THAT is why your "vote" is nothing but a sham, its because if you "herp derp, vote the bums out" they just walk across the street and become the lobbyist that buys the guy you just voted in! Saying you can do squat with voting, or blaming the public for how things are is like making you try to "win" your weekly paycheck by being forced to play 3 card monty with a street hustler and then blaming YOU for not getting paid because "if you tried real hard you should find the lady!"...no you won't, the game is rigged, and playing a rigged game and expecting to win? Its a suckers bet.
Sigh....isn't it funny that when Nadella has MSFT do what the Linux guys have been crowing about for fucking EVER that everybody pisses their panties?
For those that haven't bothered to even load Win 10 in a VM you have a "fast" and a "slow", both of which are set by the user under "Windows Updates/ Advanced", this is comparable to your "stable" or "LTS" and your "unstable" on your Linux distros. The stable will ONLY get security patches, the unstable will get new features, most OEM consumer installs will be set to the fast/unstable but again you can change it under WU or if you install yourself you can set it then.
So its gonna be up to you folks, want only security updates for the life of the OS, or to only install every X numbers of years like in the past? Choose slow. If you want to get the latest and greatest? Choose fast.
I take it they never heard of the "Fix MBR" command?
That said any PC shop worth its salt will just pull the drive, try to save any personal data by mounting it as a data drive, then just reinstall the system. Since all this does is wipe MBR its really not a threat, not like TFA makes it sound which is that it bricked PCs.
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Afraid not, a friend of my and myself actually tried contacting some of the old shareware companies to get permission to make the old shareware on a flash stick with a preconfigured DOSBox so kids could see what it was like in the early 90s.
What we found was 1.- A third of them are now owned by vultures that think some DOS card game should command the same prices as Doom 3 did at release, 2.- The rights are in limbo, because the companies have been split up and nobody knows who owned what (but nobody will give permission for fear somebody else might make a penny) and 3.- Companies that say "Oh we are gonna do something with that someday somewhere" and never do.
This is why I think copyrights should be a "use it or lose it" situation, where if a company does not sell their product in retail markets for x number of years they lose the rights which then go into public domain. This would also apply if they refuse to update the software so it can run on a modern system, otherwise they would just open a storefront on Amazon with a handful of discs for Windows 95 and try to argue "its for sale". Because as it is now more and more games are being lost, and with the "forever minus a single day" copyrights we have now programs written for first gen PCs and consoles won't be out of copyright until our fricking grandchildren are ready for retirement!
You missed the bigger issue friend which is that this thing will end up an attack vector because it can't be patched and the apps and OS will be abandoned long before the set dies.
Sure if its one of those that uses Ethernet you could just pull the plug, but what about the new ones that come with WiFi? How many consumers are gonna be able to 1.- Access their router or modem's configuration, 2.- Read the access list AND know which device is what, especially when many just use some string of numbers instead of "phone", TV", etc and 3.- Know how to block just that device without borking anything else?
Adding a Firestick would merely give you back the functionality you had, not remove the threat which is why there needs to be a simple killswitch that will let the user turn their set from a smart to a dumb device. Otherwise its just a matter of time before a CodeRed or Shellshock comes along and turns these TVs into a malware writer's wet dream!
The whole idea of a "smart TV" is retarded because it ignores a fundamental truth, which is 1.- "Smart"devices that are successful are in markets with high turnover so the consumer is able to run the latest apps, for example smart phones and tablets, while 2.- TVs are devices that are typically kept by the consumer for 5-10 years which means the "Smart" part will quickly become as outdated and useless as a Palm Pilot.
Since FirefoxOS hasn't been out long enough lets use Android as an example, lets say you bought your smart TV 6 years ago, right around the time I bought my mother her new set (which is still working great and will probably last at least a couple more years if not more) that would put you on on Android 1.5, AKA Cupcake...now how many apps today can run on Cupcake? Very damned few. What about the hardware, could it have been updated? Since I had one of the early 1.6 (AKA Donut) I can tell you that while you MIGHT have been able to go to 2.0 it would have been painful to use, as the average device then was similar to these specs, a 530Mhz ARM11 with just 192Mb of RAM and 512Mb of flash...now remember that most smart TVs have lower specs than your average phone so how long do you think it would take before it was just painful to use?
At the end of the day I think that other than malware targets these things are gonna quickly become irrelevant, the OS will go out of date looong before the TV dies, making for a security nightmare as vulnerabilities in both the OS and the apps won't be able to be patched as the hardware will just be too weak to run anything newer, and for the consumer the apps will lose support and using the ones that come with it will be about as pleasant as trying to surf modern sites on the phone I listed above. So other than a checkbox on the side of the box? IMHO this is just fucking stupid any way you cut it.
Thanks Billy...and notice how NONE OF THEM have the balls to actually take the challenge, even though I rigged the living hell out of it in Linux' favor? I did NOT require any of the truly modern devices people expect like 1.- Printer support, 2.- Support for phones and other mobile devices, 3.- Hardware video acceleration (which has been in Windows since fricking Vista), 4.- Support for LTE 4G which many new laptops come with. And if that is not enough? They only have to show FIVE years of support instead of Windows TEN years...fucking half, and still they bitch and moan and whine like little bitches?
But the reason the Challenge has lasted so long is because of what you got to see with your own eyes...Torvalds driver model is older than Disco Dan and more brittle than an 86 year old on her third hip! I mean for fucks sake they are admitting that their OS can't even do half of what Windows does and they have the fucking gall to be pissed at me? Why the fuck aren't they bitching at Torvalds for keeping such a shitty poorly designed driver schema that gets fucking curbstomped by Windows 2K?
Ya wanna know the best part Billy? The reason they try to give for keeping the shitfest driver model ends up showing they are full of shit and hypocrites to boot! They say "boo hoo, if we had a functional driver model then devs wouldn't give us their driver code precious, boo hoo"...yet what do we see in every.single.fucking.article. about graphics in Linux? A billion fucking posts squeeing like fangirls for Nvidia, who issues nothing BUT locked down binary blobs and who flips the bird at the very beliefs they say they hold so damned dear!
This is why I have ZERO doubt that in 12 years the Hairyfeet Challenge will celebrate 20 years without a single "consumer friendly" (boy isn't that a joke, about as friendly as handing somebody a hammer, pointing at a forest, and saying "there is your house bitch go build it!") distro coming even close to passing. This is why the OEMs treat Linux like plague blankets, why shops like mine will strip a box for parts before putting Linux on it, its because the last version of Windows Linux could compete with was Windows 98.
I can grab any box out the back, install Win2K RTM and drivers for that hardware and then apply all ten years of SPs and updates and wadda ya know, all the hardware STILL FRICKING WORKS, until they can show that they can pass the challenge, that even one, just one, consumer friendly distro can even go half that time without shitting on its own drivers and dying? Then Linux is nothing but a joke, it is a Mickey Mouse hobbyist desktop that nobody should take seriously.
If you truly believe what you are preaching? Then step right up and take "The Hairyfeet Challenge", now celebrating its eighth year of watching "consumer friendly" Linux distros puke and die!
Take ANY mainstream consumer oriented (not LTS, because even Ubuntu advises against mainstream users using LTS) from FIVE years ago, this simulates a 5 year typical lifecycle. This BTW is less than HALF a windows support cycle, so I'm cutting linux a break. Lets say you use Ubuntu, that would be Ubuntu 9.10 and can be downloaded from their archive. Install it on ANY PC, desktop or laptop (NOT VM as that isn't real hardware and comes with special drivers) that has a wireless card. Wireless is required because more and more mainstream users are ditching wires and nobody wants a laptop that doesn't have wireless, do they?
During this phase you are the system builder so CLI (which is usually required because Linux driver support is poor) IS ALLOWED. Once its installed you are no longer the system builder but THE USER, so like a windows user you are ONLY allowed to use the GUI. You then get to "enjoy the freedom" of using nothing but the GUI (because if you can't even update the thing without CLI you're no match for windows are you) of updating to current...with ubuntu that is SEVEN RELEASES, just FYI. You will film this and post it to youtube, you only have to upload the final install process of each release and a pic of the device manager showing working hardware complete with wireless showing WPA V2 connection, but the complete video should be hosted on dropbox to prove you aren't faking it.
BTW in case it isn't clear working hardware means WORKING HARDWARE, it does NOT mean wireless that can't use WPA, it does NOT mean a PC with no sound or VESA video, it means FULLY WORKING HARDWARE and again if you are unclear please see the highlighted areas as completing the challenge REQUIRES vids of the final install of each upgrade (last I checked that would be EIGHT for Ubuntu, and around SIX for most others, be sure to have room on your SD Card!) along with a 5 minute video of the end of each install showing that upon completion you could go to hardware manager and had 100% functional hardware with NO FUTZING. After all if you have to futz with the thing just to have functional drivers it isn't on the same level as Windows now is it? BTW the first Windows that passed the challenge was Win2K (RTM to EOL with ZERO failed drivers, 10 years of support) WinXP (14 years, ZERO fails) and both Vista and 7 can go from RTM to current with ZERO failures. So lets see them snappies, otherwise you are just throwing yet more bullshit, which if you want bullshit see "many eyes" which gave us such well vetted code the world lost billions on heartbleed and will probably lose billions more on stopping the current BASHing...what quality!
Just FYI I've already taken the challenge with several distros that guys like you push, Ubuntu (failed in just 2), PCLOS (failed in 1!), Fedora (2) and about a dozen more and I can't wait to see you take the challenge...but you won't, even though 1.- Its free, 2.- Takes less than 3 hours, and 3.- Would show your desktop is ready for the masses....how do I know you won't? Because if you try the challenge you'll see what I've been saying for over a decade is true, that Torvalds 1970s throwback driver model (which just FYI nobody else uses, not even FOSS OSes like BSD) is a pile of shit and his "let the kernel devs handle drivers" worked just fine in 1993 when all the drivers combined could fit on a floppy but just does not scale. That is why you get such "great support" like this for webcams, why even FOSS darling Firefox disables hardware acceleration thus crippling performance, hell I could go on all day!
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Agreed and you can bet your behind that many of the small shops like mine will avoid it for the first year because of the major PITA from false positives. Certain OEMs (cough "Lenovo" cough) seem to just be hated by MSFT and are a big enough hassle to get past WGA with their own damned Windows 7 key, to have to jump through the WGA hoops AGAIN just to upgrade the thing? Fuck off MSFT, Win 7 gets patches until 2020 maybe by then you'll get your head out of your ass.
What is fricking sad is for the first year of the Win 7 release they were killing piracy dead, with $50 for Home and $100 for a triple pack the amount of pirate systems in my area was dropping like a stone and as I said then if they would have offered Win 7 Starter for $25 for older systems? They would have wiped it out. Now it looks like they aren't even offering the cheap upgrades for the first year...anybody wanna bet my local Craigslist is gonna be filled with whatever the top Win 10 SKU is because they got a pre hacked off of TPB?
Dear MSFT....the pirates already have Windows 7...you know as well as I do that you CANNOT BLOCK IT because they are using the OEM SKUs which means you'd wipe out tens of thousands of OEM Windows 7 installs and the false positives would be a bad publicity nightmare,mmmkay? Your goal should be to MAKE THE PIRATES RUN LEGIT because your numbers for Windows 8/8.1? Suck monkey nuts, you cannot afford another fail, right? As Gabe Newell said "piracy is a service problem" and with Windows 7 firmly in their hands you have NO stick to swing at them, ALL you have is the carrot...WTF are ya doing man? You should be offering $25 copies of Win 10 Home and $50 triple packs to bring them into the fold! You're shooting yourself in the face all over again, just like when you refused to listen to us beta testers that pointed out Windows 8/8.1 (which is also in the hands of the pirates, they just don't like it as much as Win 7) was like running Windows 2.0 redesigned by hipsters, are ya TRYING to reach a trifecta of fail?
Actually leveling is fine if done correctly so that the user can see and feel they are making progress towards their goal without it being grindtastic. Same goes for real money and paying for time, as long as it doesn't become pay to win and merely gives you relatively minor enhancements.
For me a perfect example of one that "gets it right" not only in the level progression but also in the FTP with real money purchases realm is one I'm currently enjoying, namely War Thunder. In that game leveling your tank/plane and crew is done by playing well, not only getting kills but actually assisting your teammates and completing the objectives. Can you buy a better crew or premium vehicles? Sure but if you don't actually play well you could throw a million bux at it and still suck ass. The same goes with their "premium vehicles" which are all either 1.- Famous vehicles such as Jimmy Thatch's Buffalo from '39 which performs virtually identical to a regular Buffalo and just has a cool paint scheme, or 2.- rare/prototype vehicles that were tested and rejected during the war or were produced in very small quantities. These vehicles have significant downsides but people like them for the "weirdness" factor. Examples include the American Ascender pusher prop or the Soviet "land battleships" like the T-35 and SMK.
But in WT it doesn't matter if you level your vehicle by playing matches or spending golden eagles, doesn't matter if you buy every premium vehicle in the game or just take the vehicles you get from research, at the end of the day you have to play well, keep your head on a swivel, be aware of where friendly and enemy forces are, and know the strengths and weakness of your plane/tank and that of the enemy or you are just gonna get wrecked. I have seen a tier 1 biplane just demolish a tier 3 BF109 who tried to get in a turning fight with it, watched the reserve tanks you get for free at the start just slaughter premium tanks (in fact the Soviet BTs are quite popular even with seasoned pros for how fast they are) whose drivers obviously thought that it was pay to win, because it all comes down to playing well. The same goes for paying for premium time, it lets you earn more XP and add more stickers to your tank but if you suck? You aren't gonna go anywhere fast.
So I think most if not all that you listed is doable, it just has to be done well. Make the content available to everybody, make real money not be a deciding factor in the game, allow the player to see they are progressing towards their goal,reward playing well, and if you are gonna go with a mix of FTP and subscription do it so both sides are on equal footing play wise.
Go back to making horses and buggies, if they can't even spend 30 minutes on the fucking Internet using teh Google? Then they ARE FUCKING LAZY and they don't deserve to make shit, much less sit on their ever widening asses because they wrote a little 3 minute song a decade ago.
NEWS FLASH this ain't the 1970s Disco Dan, those days are over and they ain't never coming back. the Internet is here, its never going away no matter how much you kiss the ass of the corps, which just FYI will charge you 4000 percent interest on your studio time which is why you have bands like System Of A Down having a "steal this record" tour.
Join the 21st century or die like the dinosaur you are, because NOBODY gets paid to sit on their asses anymore unless you are one of the chosen few and the fact you are posting here? Tells me you and your little buddies probably couldn't fill a 150 seat club on open mike night. BTW thanks to sales we would make upwards of a grand even when we played the little 300 seat clubs...how YOU doing? Thought so, probably don't make enough to pay the bar tab.
What you are attempting to do is use the classic Marxist And you are lynching Negroes which is an appeal to hypocrisy logical fallacy designed to derail the topic at hand, while ignoring the fact that Islamist fascists kill more in a single month than the Christian nutbars have in the past 5 years.
Sorry but we were roots pop, ala Old 97s and Wilco, and we had shirts, keyrings, mugs, they are actually quite cheap to get made nowadays and can be a VERY good source of revenue. We were paying on average $3.50 a shirt and selling them for $10, 2.50 a CD sold for $7.50, $0.75 a keyring sold for $2.50, its really easy to have those made you just have to get off your ass and get 'er done.
My last band was making a good living doing it and we were strictly regional. As for non popular music? If you can't find a patron then sorry charlie, nobody is promised a living "just" because they wrote a song decades ago. I mean can you imagine if we carried this kind of "IP" thinking to every field? Just one apt would probably be $10K a month because you'd have to pay everyone from the plumber to the molding finisher for their "art".
But just because you based your life on government created artificial scarcity is not MY problem, remember this was the same arguments that were used to try to ban VCRs and cassettes. Technology and society changes, adapt or perish.
Because the fans that care enough to pirate will often go to shows and buy shirts which actually DOES go to the artist?
If you want to see what REALLY goes on with the artists read up on Hollywood accounting. It was Hollywood accounting that caused Meatloaf to go bankrupt after Bat Out Of Hell I, which just FYI broke several records for length on the top 200 BEFORE there was any piracy, because the record labels said "nah it didn't make nothing". Or ask Cheap Trick who had to spend the better part of a decade suing their label because the label decided "well iTunes didn't exist when you made those albums so all digital sales? Yeah we're keeping 100%".
To paraphrase what the producer Steve Albini said about record labels and contracts, "its like fighting through a river of shit with 500 other people for a "prize" of getting mugged at the end".
And you and Mr "I like to lick butts!" have ZERO fucking understanding of human beings if you think he would EVAR do anything different....why? Because His fans worship him as a fucking God that's why!
They make artwork of him similar to saints, they even "pray to Gaben" when faced with games that have a random number generator element, if the RNG goes your way they say "Praise Gaben!" and you HONESTLY believe he is gonna give up being the fucking POPE of gaming for money? When he ALREADY has so much that with his current lifestyle he'd have to live to be 10,000 years old to just go through what he has this minute? Not a fricking chance, money is nice, but being worshiped and treated like a rockstar when you are this fat nerd? That is priceless.
Gaben has made it clear on several occasions that if valve was to ever go under (and since he's made it clear he'll not go public with the company and they've made double revenue year after year? Not bloody likely) he will issue a patch that will disable calling home on Steam and all Valve games so it really won't matter WTF the other companies think as Steam will just be in offline mode forever.
If you buy a game that uses something other than Steam? That is between you and the third party, I tend to look at those like plague blankets myself, but there won't be a damned thing the third parties will be able to do if he shuts off the DRM to HIS platform, its his, he owns it, he can pull the plug if he so chooses.
Citation please? Because if they have enough knowledge to get in from what I've seen in the field whatever IP schema they use on the internal is pretty much moot.
You have to remember the script kiddies of today? They have a wealth of tools that takes the actual work out of the equation, once they are inside and know the make and model of router its pretty damned trivial to do anything they want. With all these kits and automated tools (easily gotten off of P2P) if they can go "clicky clicky" in a GUI? they are good to go.
Get ready for the SJWs to scream "that's raciss!" but it has NOTHING to do with money and everything to do with culture and peer pressure.
I've lived in both predominately Black and predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, what did I see? Black kids that tried to get an education and do better were "uncle toms" who were "cooning" and "acting white" and treated like shit by those around them, while those that stood on the corner acting gansta were actually chased by the opposite sex as were looked upon as being "down" with their neighborhood. The Hispanics were busting their butts to get ahead, starting their own businesses, etc, while you had "aspiring rappers" in the black neighborhood.
And its not got a damned thing to do with race, its culture. Look up the figures of Blacks straight off the boat from Africa, despite language and culture barriers they are more than 300% more likely to reach middle class in just 1 generation, and something like 1000% more likely to reach it in 2 than American Blacks. As long as American Blacks glorify violence and ignorance and condemn learning and getting ahead? Things will never change.
Look up "RNC rigged Ron Paul" to see why a so called "dark horse" has zero chance under the current system. In that video you'll see election officials come out point blank and say "The votes we counted was NOT what was recorded, the votes for Paul were given to Romney" and even the RNC calling for a floor vote while the teleprompter shows the outcome before the vote was cast and this combined with the MSM not even hiding the fact they were burying any momentum Paul had (one reporter even asks the anchor "Why am I here looking for Palin and Christie, who aren't even running, when polls shows that Paul could win the district?" and is told flat footed "If you get any Christie or Palin footage send it in, you can dump the Paul stuff") shows that you have better odds of winning 3 card monty with a street hustler. Or have you forgotten how the public in the primaries did several rounds of "anybody but Romney" only for the MSM to crucify anybody that wasn't Romney?
The fix is in friend, they'll pick some fool in the Rs and Hillary will get nothing but praise and softballs thrown at her right up until her inauguration.
Give it up, you better get used to saying "President Hillary" as I've talked to dozens of women in the shop and its gonna be the same as blacks in 08 where 97% voted Obama without knowing a damned thing about his policies or positions just because he was black. When I asked these women "Why do you think she would make a good president, what policies does she advocate that you support?"....blank stares and crickets.
Hillary will chat with Oprah and wave a few times and get 95%+ of the female vote because she has a vag, you will see women come out in record numbers which is why even the Vegas bookmakers are giving her "its in the bag" odds, because they have already seen what I've seen,women are gonna shove her into the big chair no matter what she supports, she is a famous woman which is all they care about.
Copy the address for the video you want to download, paste it into Savedeo and choose whether you want the vid in SD, HD, hell you can choose MP3 if its a tune or you want it as a podcast...oh and you're welcome ;-)
Sigh....has NOBODY here even tried the Windows 10 Beta? Hell has nobody even tried Windows 8/8.1? The reason they don't really need WMC anymore is that they already HAVE a perfectly good 10 foot UI in the Metro UI, fuck IMHO its really the only thing other than tablets that Metro is good for, and of course if that isn't "media centric" enough there is always MediaPortal which is quite good, along with whatever they renamed XBMC to.
Sorry Barb but its NOT the method of delivery, that change just happened to coincide with the supercharging of the stock market thanks to a massive bubble that has been blown by the government pumping trillions into the market with 401Ks and 403Bs. When you have THAT much money trying to suck out the last dollar in profit? Quality no longer matters, all that matters is perception on the street.
This is why you get CEOs that literally sell the long term future of the company and the stock gets a bounce, why you can have IPOs that are 50 times what the company could ever realistically earn, and why companies can put out shit software that is damned lucky if its even functional, because as long as they can get something out the door there is a good chance the speculators will see this as a "positive indicator" and give the stock a bounce, which allows the CEO to cash out and move on before the excrement hits the bladed cooling device.
Uhhh there is actually a BIG difference between Millennials and previous generations, as they were the first ones raised under the "special snowflake" political correctness doctrine, this is why this is the generation that makes up the overwhelming majority of what is now known as the social justice warrior as being fed a diet of Captain Planet, third wave feminism, and extreme political correctness when combined with 24/7 connectivity to social media has created a group of narcissists that are the absolute worst of BOTH worlds. They are a group that has been coddled so damned much they don't know shit about how things actually work but so fucking arrogant and self righteous that they perceive learning how to actually perform the task as an insult.
Frankly I've never seen any group so fucking clueless yet so full of smugness and a sense of superiority to those around them, the generation before them was just jaded and cynical as hell but were at least willing to LEARN, whereas these Millennials are so damned full of themselves they are downright fricking insulted when the world doesn't conform to THEIR idea how things are supposed to be they practically wear their lack of knowledge as a badge of honor, like its somehow "standing up to conformity" to not learn how to do shit.
You want facts? Challenge accepted!
How about Lobbyists Now Spend More on Congress Than the Government Does, think that is for shits and giggles? Or Study shows revolving door of employment between Congress, lobbying firms, or even better you can go and see the sellout of the week right here!
You see THAT is why your "vote" is nothing but a sham, its because if you "herp derp, vote the bums out" they just walk across the street and become the lobbyist that buys the guy you just voted in! Saying you can do squat with voting, or blaming the public for how things are is like making you try to "win" your weekly paycheck by being forced to play 3 card monty with a street hustler and then blaming YOU for not getting paid because "if you tried real hard you should find the lady!"...no you won't, the game is rigged, and playing a rigged game and expecting to win? Its a suckers bet.
Sigh....isn't it funny that when Nadella has MSFT do what the Linux guys have been crowing about for fucking EVER that everybody pisses their panties?
For those that haven't bothered to even load Win 10 in a VM you have a "fast" and a "slow", both of which are set by the user under "Windows Updates/ Advanced", this is comparable to your "stable" or "LTS" and your "unstable" on your Linux distros. The stable will ONLY get security patches, the unstable will get new features, most OEM consumer installs will be set to the fast/unstable but again you can change it under WU or if you install yourself you can set it then.
So its gonna be up to you folks, want only security updates for the life of the OS, or to only install every X numbers of years like in the past? Choose slow. If you want to get the latest and greatest? Choose fast.
I take it they never heard of the "Fix MBR" command?
That said any PC shop worth its salt will just pull the drive, try to save any personal data by mounting it as a data drive, then just reinstall the system. Since all this does is wipe MBR its really not a threat, not like TFA makes it sound which is that it bricked PCs.