Question: Why does everyone seem so focused on Solar cells, which as everyone points out wear out, will need cooling at these temps, etc, instead of molten salt solar power where the more heat you create the better it runs and the heat stored in the salt itself can be used as a battery? Was there a hidden gotcha I haven't heard about, or is there some sort of kickback or subsidy for cell production?
Because it seems to me that cells are just the wrong direction to go. With Molten Salt it is basically a big tank and focusing mirrors which will make for lower costs, the life of the unit as a whole should beat cells, and the salt as a battery helps deal with the storage problems. So why so much focus on cells?
Don't forget the kickbacks, mustn't forget those. You can tell what drug Big Pharma is pushing this year by going to your average GP and see what he is writing waaaay too many prescriptions for. In the case of my town it is the antibiotic known as "Z-Pac" which if you so much as sneeze is getting handed to you, even when a generic drug like Erythro would probably work just as well and certainly be cheaper on both the insurance companies and/or the government's wallets.
To say there is really much of a difference between Big Pharma and your average pusher is kinda BS. both don't care what they are selling as long as they make the money, both are happy to push anything no matter what the cost or side effects as long as it makes them $$$, and both are happy to give kickbacks to those that bring in the business.
I read TFA and have to agree that it rates pretty dang high on my flamebait o' meter. I mean if forced to choose between one or the other Google is scarier by far because even without having anything to do with them Google can get tons of data on me whereas if I don't like Apple (and for the record the only Apple device I own is a Blue&Silver G3 Tower giveaway I got to play with PPC) I can simply not buy from them, end of story.
This is why I never understood those "ZOMG Apple! ZOMG M$!" types, as the answer is simple if you don't like them don't buy their products its JUST that easy. Hell never before have we had so many choices and if I want a Pad style device (which I don't) then I have tons of choices, same as there are plenty of little shops like System76 that'll be happy to sell me a laptop that has never had a Windows Sticker or WinKey.
So to me this smells like nothing but an article to piss people off and stir up page views, like Nichols on the Linux Troll side or Thurott the WinTroll. in all three cases the point is to stir as much shit per paragraph as possible to crank up the views. The only way to win against this kind of trolling is to quote Wargames: "Not to play".
Kinda missing the point there ain't ya KG? We are talking people that need to communicate with the outside world not download the latest "Hot Arab booty" video. Hell the Egyptians were using Twitter to get word out about what was going down on the ground, dialup can give them text, pics, and PDF back and forth with each other and those on the outside, which sounds like just what they need.
And as for the rest of us, never been in a place without broadband and need to check your email? Plenty of places here in the USA where you get piss poor service or none at all. I bet a $15 a year "whenever you need us we got your back" plan would probably sell quite well. Hell I can think of quite a few times in the past couple of years visiting relatives or out camping with my GF when I could have used that service and my ISP doesn't offer any free number.
But in the end the most logical thing is to look at this from a business sense and when you do you'll see I'm right. What will it cost the dialup ISP? Damned near nothing, as only a small section of Libya has PCs and I'm sure just a small subsection of those have both a modem and will hear about the offer, but if even a few hear and use it to relay info it could help. What does it gain the ISP? Free publicity that ties into one of the day's top news stories and makes them look VERY good and decent to the outside world.
From a purely business standpoint you'll see it is a win/win as it will cost VERY little, most likely generate a LOT of buzz and press, and make them look like a little company standing up for the little guy. It sounds to me like a hell of a lot better plan than hiring Dennis Miller.
The problem with Thorium IIRC was the plans that show Thorium working are to have hundreds of "mini-reactors" like say one in every city 10,000 or better. Now that might work in China where there isn't as many crazies and they (from what I understand) have control of their borders thanks to a "we'll shoot your ass and send you to PMITA prison" policy, but try to remember we have plenty of nutballs here both from the Arab countries we've been fucking with for decades, along with our very own home grown crazies.
Now picture every city 10,000 or better having a nuke plant as a target, how will you protect them? It would take pretty much the entire military, and even then you'd be short handed. We'd have to go total police state or surround the things with automated death cannons you'd have to hope like hell didn't malfunction and pull an ED209 on you.
Let us not forget the OKC bomb was just fertilizer and diesel fuel, now imagine if he could have gotten close enough to a reactor to cause a breach? I don't know how it is in other places but I've been to the reactor in my home state and we are pretty damned good about not letting anybody close to the thing. But a reactor in every little podunk nowhere? Sounds like asking for trouble to me.
While it sounds nice in theory and may actually work for a heavily militaristic state where everyone is raised to respect the state, but I just don't think they'd be too safe around here. Hell if the Chinese keep screwing with Falun Gong they may not be too safe there either, and last I heard the people of Tibet ain't too fond of them as well. Good luck China, you'll need it.
Actually, sad to say, but that Yahoo Portal thingie we geeks can't fricking stand? You know, the big bloated picture and video mess complete with horoscope? That one? Yeah that thing sadly is like the number 1 home page for nearly all that aren't geeks. yeah I know but I swear that damned thing is so popular when I come across a PC that DON'T have their homepage set to that is when I actually notice, the thing is THAT damned popular.
So I can see why MSFT wanted Yahoo and was happy to buy their searches, as the normals use that like the morning paper. Funny as hell part? Watching them actually use it after they get done looking at all the links they care to they then type Google into the Yahoo Search box to actually get to Google to do searches! Now when I asked some of them, thinking maybe they liked the Google UI or whatever over Yahoo? Nope it turned out they didn't know they could actually search with the Yahoo box and thought that was just a way to get to Google, because when you need to find stuff you "Google it" not Yahoo it!
So the point of this story dear AC is that when it comes to the masses you can't plan on shit because their ways are strange and not like us at all. Hell FB could team up with Yahoo and you could have the masses "Facebooking it" in 5 years, you just never know. After all most of us would have looked at Farmville and thought of the little rat pushing the button to get a food pellet and those guys have made money out the wazoo with the lamest ass excuse for a "game" I've ever seen.
Trying to second guess the future when it comes to mass consumers isn't easy and while I hate FB with a passion I wouldn't count them out just yet. After all I think most of us here would agree that Yahoo Portal and Farmville blow chunks yet the normals just loooove that crapola.
To point out no matter where you are a simple USB dialup adapter and you've got net? There are a hell of a lot of business and personal travelers out there and pointing out how "No matter where you go on the planet, if you've got a line we've got your back" sounds like a good way to sell low cost dialup plans as a backup to their net connections while on the go. After all people pay for things like car insurance they hope they'
ll never use but are glad to have it when trouble comes, why not a data line?
With a cheap price and a yearly option it sounds like an easy sell to me, and an event like this would be a good example of how "No matter where you are we've got your back" works in making sure you've got net.
Or maybe, just maybe, those problems with newspapers are because they are dead tree databases and don't have true type? Because not only do I run all of my apps on my 1600x900 monitor maximized (which BTW is the current "sweet spot" and what I find in most households) but so do all my customers. One of the first things I had to show my GF with XP machine at the shop was "where is the bigger button?" since I use a theme on it different than default.
Maybe its just a Linux thing but frankly I can't remember the last time I saw a PC where they DIDN'T maximize everything. In fact I just got back from setting up a college kid's PC at the dorm and I swear that kid used minimize and maximize more than anyone I'd ever seen, and he certainly wasn't hurting for space on the 1080p LCD TV he is using as a monitor.
So maybe what you are saying is true in print but IRL as someone who works with average folks 6 days a week I can tell you maximized apps are the norm, not the exception.
Frankly I don't see why it should cost hardly anything. I mean they have phone lines yes? They didn't take a backhoe to the trunk did they?
While people here may be spoiled to having high speed (well if you consider an average 2Mbps high speed) many of us Greybeards spent many a year using dialup to gather and share information.
So all you really need is some western ISPs to offer a few dialup numbers that are free for them to call and have someone spread the word. Considering that last I heard it was something like only 6% of the whole country that even HAD Internet access to start with it isn't like offering them free dialup is gonna suck some major bandwidth here, and would certainly be a lot more doable than climbing a mountain in Crete with a big ass dish with a cantenna in the middle.
Maybe this is the chance for some Netzero style ISP to get a hell of a lot of free publicity and goodwill? Seems to me like it would be a hell of a public relations coup even if only a few there took advantage of it. After all all it takes is a single person spreading information to make this Internet block pointless, and nearly every retail box has for years come with some sort of modem (hell my local Walmart just stopped having modems installed in their retail boxes like two years ago) so it really wouldn't take much.
Hi MR AC! As someone from the other side of the world allow me to elucidate. A "football school" is where a lot of the extra cash and support comes from alumni supporting the team, which means sucky team? Sucky money. Here you will often see schools where the PCs are nearly a decade old but the gym will beat most college athletic depts. While the regular students get a cookie cutter "another brick in the wall" education, the footballers almost from the time they first step on a field are treated as Gods among men.
I can see why so many NFL players end up convicts, they have been giving the footballer treatment almost since grade school. Any crime short of mounting a head on their car is quietly swept under the rug, nobody cares what they do as long as they continue to rack up the yardage. They get money, pussy, better treatment than anyone else, hell to a kid it is like being a rock star!
But sadly the schools have been hit with so many "You're discriminating against my little thug!" lawsuits that they pretty much don't toss anyone for just not giving a shit, so you have overcrowded classes and overworked teachers, which is where "special projects" comes in. Now to be fair frankly I believe I got a better education simply diving into that which interested me than the cookie cutter bullshit they were pushing, and I did try my best with the footballers.
But when you have been coddled since 5th grade and told "don't worry about it, you just concentrate on the game" for years frankly the best tutors in the world ain't gonna help, but at least I did make sure they had practical skills like how to deal with a checkbook or balance their money.
So yeah football schools just aren't gonna give you much anyway. Funny part is when I had to take a remedial algebra class to get a degree the corp wanted (always hated algebra so never bothered) and when the teacher who was from NYC heard my story he too was appalled, but a girl in the class popped up "You too? I did the same job at my school!" and all I had to say was "Go Lions!" and she said "Go Panthers!" and we instantly knew all about each others location and history thanks to our teams playing each other. Pretty much life at a football school is all about the game, everything else? meh.
The problem is that you can listen to tons of indie artists for free without cutting the *.A.As and their ilk a dime. Most indie artists want you to go to their shows where they'll be happy to sell you a CD, a T-Shirt, a mug, hell with my band we even had keyrings because THAT is where performing musicians make their daily bread. We would even have a "pawnshop special" guitar we would play for a song or two and raffle off, each sale got you another shot at the guitar.
These kinds of "deals" only ensure the Titney Spears and other processed Chezz Whizz of music is kept at the top by their corporate masters, by keeping them getting the biggest piece of the pie. remember folks they FEAR you because they fear loss of control. They made fortunes by fucking artists and being gatekeepers to the masses (and as someone who has actually laid hands on a standard new artist contract I can tell you "ass raping" is too kind a description) and the net takes that control away from them by giving YOU power through indie net stations and word of mouth.
So don't give up what little freedom and power you have to the ever greedy megacorps. They have already committed treasonous bribery upon our elected officials to get truly insane copyright terms foisted upon the world, they fuck the artists over with "Hollywood accounting" every chance they get, they are nothing but blood sucking leeches on the ass of society and the world would be a better place without them. The quicker they die the better, don't give them even more revenue with which to screw you and the artists over.
What are YOU talking about? Did you miss the part where both Norton and Ultradefrag have screamed bloody murder over the fact Win 7 doesn't allow kernel hooks when it is those same hooks that allow malware and rootkits to penetrate so deeply?
While I'll be the first to give MSFT credit for the excellence that is Windows 7, the simple fact is a good chunk of those third party tools could be eliminated tomorrow and at the same time give the user a "toaster with a screen" but MSFT can't do that for fear of anti-trust.
Just look up "Windows 7 kernel hooks" along with "anti virus anti trust" and "Microsoft anti trust claims" and see for yourself. Just with disallowing kernel hooks there were nearly a dozen motions filed by various third parties screaming anti trust. Like it or not billions are made by plugging "holes" in MSFT security and every time they plug a hole that was making money for someone here come the lawyers.
All those third party cleaners, AVs, antimalware, etc, could be eliminated tomorrow if MSFT were allowed to ship a default solution but that would cut into both the third party tools business as well as the OEM profit margins. Do you have ANY idea how much the OEMs get for stuff from System Mechanic and Norton for installing trialware? Any time you have vested interests in patching problems actual solutions to those problems are unwelcome as they cut into profits, it is just business 101.
It was stupid because instead of using Java or gasp! even VB to do the job they tied their tech to a specific browser which was a seriously moving target and anybody could see the writing on the wall that the web would develop past IE6?
It is the same reason why I hate Quickbooks, as they will often tie themselves to a specific version of tech (in their case Flash) instead of a general "must need IE" so that when new versions come along you're boned. You'd be surprised at how many VMs and XP Modes I had to set up just because the QB girl (and it is ALWAYS a "QB Girl", I swear they must have a union or something) couldn't run their version of QB thanks to it being tied to some version of flash that won't run on anything past XP.
I mean I have NO problem with ActiveX per se, or even using a current tech, it is when you tie it to a SINGLE version of a tech that I had a problem. If they would have tested for IE5-IE6 they wouldn't be in this mess, same as if QB only demanded flash instead of Flash version x I wouldn't have had to set up so many VMs.
And as for the person who doesn't believe IE6 is a corporate problem? sorry but its true. I have two customers myself I have to deal with IE6 with, one a local insurance company whose ties to the main office are through an IE6 Intranet, and a small TV sales and repair shop whose sat TV sales have the CC checking and credit approval! through an IE6 Intranet portal, ugh.
So believe me as a primarily Windows guy I have NO problem with using whatever tech works best for a job, just don't tie it to a single version of that tech. If you make it work with the last two or three versions of said tech odds are it will work with two or three tech versions in advance. Otherwise you get what we have here with so many having to figure out how to keep a long dead browser running just so they can use the Intranet, same as I had to jump through hoops to get old Flash running on Windows 7 thanks to QB being hard coded.
Well to be fair if the subject the GP was talking about went to what we in the south call a "football school"? Then yeah it is possible to graduate HS with lousy math skills, and if they were on the team probably illiterate to boot. How would I know? Well I managed to graduate with honors and never actually walked into a class.
How did I do that? Well I got to spend my Junior HS years being tutored thanks to eating pavement at 65MPH plus in a bike wreck, but the tutors wanted me to try to do the last two years with a most likely shortened schedule (ended up 3 day on, 2 day off with 1 day of tutoring) just so I "wouldn't feel isolated" and get to know my fellow students. Now I personally didn't care because my mom had and still has one of the best Sci-Fi collections in the area, I was quite happy with Asimov and Heinlein thanks anyway.
So the first day first class is PE and the teacher says "Anyone not ready to run 20 laps can just get out of my class!" so I left, and took about 1/3rd the class with me. Apparently he had been using that line for awhile and nobody had called him on it, but I just looked at it logically and did what I was told and the others said "Hey he's leaving~we'll follow him!" so after the VP gave the moron a "Don't tell them they can leave!" speech he stuck me and the others in study hall, which was run by the head football coach.
He takes one look at the cover of my "Best Sci-Fi authors of 1976" paperback and thinks I must be hiding girlie mags. He calls me to the front and when he finds it not only doesn't have a hidden girlie mag, but I could sit there and discuss the grandfather paradox and whether time was fixed or changeable he said "How would you like get to straight As and never go to class?" which considering what I had seen so far sounded good to me.
So he takes my class schedule and takes me into each teacher's class on the list and informs them I'll be on "special projects" and they should just give me an A, I of course being a smartass said "Why not an A+?" but got told not to push it. He then sat me up in my very own classroom! where I got to sit and enjoy my books and when any footballer was in "study hall" they were actually in my class being taught how to do basics like spell "flower" and "Stood" and do checkbook math so they could pass eligibility requirements. I swear the first day I was getting "Flower...Floer" and "stood...stuud"
I was quite happy for those last two years, I got my own classroom, I got to sit on the bench during practices and teach the players not in the field, and I'm quite happy to say not a single player I taught was benched for lack of eligibility. Now of course I was lucky, in that I liked to learn new things and that while others got "Horton hears a who" I got stories of worlds with three suns and rivers that looked like liquid mercury which fired up my imagination, but if someone went to a football school and fell through the cracks, or if they had to keep dumbing down so the players could play? Yep I could see you graduating some pretty sad kids.
As for TFA sounds like capitalism 101 to me. Kinda hard to bitch at the kid when you see CEOs cooking the books all over the place. I say you go kid, I'm sure you make a great CxO someday.
Well considering Linux has been sitting at 1% for quite awhile and even Ubuntu is losing share (Gasp! He told the truth again! Smite him!) I kinda doubt Linux is gonna be "sneaking up" on anything which was kinda my point.
And whether you or the "community" want to admit it or not well written code and world class server and desktop OSes don't come from magical RMS pixies they come from top notch developers working their asses off and in this economy I doubt VERY seriously you are gonna be seeing many of the top talent working "for the good of the community".
Why does Apple and MSFT have desktop usability light years ahead of Linux? Because they have the money to pay people to do the shit works, which there is a hell of a lot of. Bug fixing, QA, regression testing, nobody LIKES these jobs but they simply have to be done, except by and large in the FOSS model they don't.
The ONLY reason FOSS has gotten as far as it has on the server is companies paying millions to make it happen, full stop. Look at any LOC count and you'll see RH nearly always number one or two. What happens when fewer and fewer people pay? It is simple math, less money for R&D, less money for QA and regression testing, less money for developers and less code for the community as a whole it is a classic tragedy of the commons case.
Look at how many major FOSS companies have been bought out or are barely alive, if the FOSS model worked, why is this so? It is because the FOSS model was born in a time of abundance and now that we are in another depression the well is running dry. More and more free riders and less and less paying customers and what do you get? Less for all.
Seriously is it any wonder so few companies want to offer a native FOSS version of their programs? The "free as in beer!" brigade grows ever larger while simultaneously the amount of paying customers stagnates or even falls. It is simple math folks, the less RH gets the less it can share, period. In any other model the developers have legal repercussions that can at least keep free riders to a manageable level, not so in FOSS. That is why I believe as the economy grows ever more sour so too will the free riders simply cause too much drain on FOSS and cause it to fall behind while companies like Apple and MSFT are able to make gains and get farther and farther ahead. It is just simple math and all the shouts of "free as in beer!" won't change the figures.
The problem with your proposal is while it might help get the business sector moving in the right direction the Fed isn't dealing with consumer hardware which is where the real waste is piling up. After all if you spend $6k+ on a router most likely you will get an IPV6 update. Under $100? Not so much.
That is why we are gonna have to simply ban its importation, as there really no excuse for cranking out IPV4 routers this late in the game yet short of the $100 Apple there really isn't any consumer support to be had.
Add to this the fact that most ISPs have little to no IPV6 support at this moment and many of their consumer level modems will probably have to be shitcanned as well and one way or the other the third world is gonna get a hell of a lot of waste dumped on its doorstep when the final switch gets pulled.
I predict it is gonna make the CRT to LCD switchover look like planting trees in comparison, since there are so many routers that if it weren't for the fact that IPV6 isn't in any way backwards compatible nor will most of the ones that were capable of getting updated be seeing any will end up being thrown in perfectly (but obsolete) working order? Oh yeah its gonna be a BIG mess. Sad that so much waste is being cranked off the line, but as long as people would prefer to pay $25 for a wireless router instead of $100+ for the Apple logo without regulation I just don't see them disappearing.
I have to agree, especially when he is using an HP bottom o' the line dual box. A MUCH better deal would be start with something like this Asus Quad, which with an OEM Win 7 HP X64 will only set you back $400. Add this Radeon 6850 for eyefinity and then final out with the three monitors of your choice. Personally I'd prefer a single big ass monitor over triple with the lines dividing, but whatever floats your boat.
But all told you could get out at right around $1000 and have a much better machine than that junker HP, and have more upgrade options down the road to boot. I can also vouch that that particular machine plays games nicely as I just built one for a customer to plug into his new 32 inch 1080p TV, and with an HD4830 it plays L4D I&II, Bioshock I&II and Just Cause II quite nicely with lots o' purty. He just had me add a wireless keyboard and mouse and he was good to go. Also kicks ass on Netflix and an AV center. The case isn't exactly subtle, but then again he isn't either so having the light up bling bling made him quite happy, and in the end that's what counts.
Well I'd have to say what the worst was, in no particular order because it was ALL painful, the bad acting, the damned "meesa massa" Jar Jar ebonics, the queen and the kid (although seeing him grown up was worse, way to make a bad ass into a wussy boy!) and the ever obvious "we cooked this up to add a new toy" like that stupid race.
Frankly it is high time for "Spaceballs 33 1/3rd, the search for more money" although Lucas has managed to slaughter so much of the franchise on its own its practically a parody unto itself. To steal a little of Yahtzee's review of Force Unleashed II "proof that no once profitable franchise is so dead that you can't jump on its stomach and sell whatever liquids shoot out of its nose" which at this point is a pretty damned good description for the Star Wars franchise as a whole.
Personally I'm just waiting for the R2D2 vibrators and the Jar Jar "Messa hit that!" panties. After all why pretend to even give a shit about anything but $$$ after Phantom Menace? You might as well embrace your inner Gene Simmons George, you've done shat on the franchise so bad that 100 of the best screenwriters of all time couldn't save it now.
Exactly! It was BS like this along with the compiler and OEM rigging that got me to switch to AMD for me and my customers. At least I know when I buy or recommend an AMD laptop/desktop that it will have all the standard features without having to play "CPU Bingo" just to find out what it has/doesn't have. That way all I have to do is look at the speed/cache/cores and decide what is right for their needs without having to worry about "missing features" like Cool&Quiet or AMD-V. Hell some of the Intel laptop chips I looked at disabled enhanced Speedstep! I mean how fucked up is that?
In the end while there is nothing I'd like more than laptops to become bog standard commodity machines like PCs I just don't see it happening. Keeping PCs longer and longer because they have gotten "good enough" for the tasks the user does is the norm (I even have some customers on 7+ year old machines, they do what they need them to so they're happy) whereas with laptops by locking them down, using substandard parts, making it hell to get replacement parts at a fair price, and generally screwing the customer at every turn makes for increased profits. Too bad it comes at such huge amounts of waste and toxic materials dumped on the third world, but hey, as long as the quarterly earnings report is met, right?
I'm seriously starting to wonder if the death of capitalism for something like a resource based economy might be a good thing for everyone. The amount of waste we generate focusing everything only on the short term profits is poisoning the world and wasting precious resources we'll be hard pressed to replace. Maybe if the "race to the bottom" ever increasing profit motive were removed we could go back to building items that lasted again. It is pretty sad that my nearly 30 year old stereo still works great while I've tossed dozens of DVD players and other e-waste in that same time. Just no quality to be had anymore.
Funny that is why I carry a couple of TrendNet routers myself. Folks may make cracks because TrendNet routers are cheap and aren't fancy, but I have set up TrendNet routers on construction sites where the amount of grit, funk, and temp differences would choke just about any router (and killed brand new Linksys junk dead) and they just keep on humping along, solid as ever.
Like you I have thrown away more brand new Linksys routers than any other brand by a looong shot. There is cheap and there is garbage and Linksys has been garbage for as long as I've dealt with them. I walk into an SMB or SOHO with network troubles more than half the time a Linksys is involved. Just absolute trash.
To me what the real tragedy of IPV6 is (and why they didn't figure out a way to be backwards compatible I'll never know) is how many brand new routers are being sold at this very minute with NO IPV6 support. I'm normally not big on government regulation but this is just ridiculous. You just know the vast majority of these new routers will get NO IPV6 update and are just doomed for the garbage heap straight from the assembly line. The amount of waste this will create is just staggering and if the OEMs can't get onboard then the government simply needs to ban all non IPV6 capable routers from being imported, along with coming up with a standards test so that IPV6 capable doesn't end up another Vista capable.
. If they get a couple of shipments left to rot on the docks maybe they'll rethink selling IPV4 only routers this late in the game.
And you notice how I went from Insightful to Flamebait the second the FOSSies found out someone was pointing out one of their sacred cows was bullshit? Surprise surprise FOSSies can't face reality. That is why I point out the difference between a FOSS advocate and a FOSSie, who like a Moonie is all about dogma and bullshit instead of doing what is best for the community.
And the fact that CentOS was cooked up by those too damned cheap to simply pay a license (even though I'm sure RH is happy to work with a vendor and provide bulk rates) while at the same time wanting the fruits of their labors surprises me not one bit. Why is it so hard for FOSSies to understand that everything has a cost and the tragedy of the commons is all too real?
For all the FOSSies out there, it is just simple math. Red Hat uses the money they get from RHEL to make Linux a better OS by providing developers to the community, fixing bugs, and providing much needed R&D. Do you think the shit jobs will get done if nobody pays for them? The more leeches like CentOS you have that take what others create while giving nothing in return the less the ENTIRE community has because RH loses money they would have otherwise gotten, which leads to less employees, which leads to less code for you to enjoy. See how it works?
If CentOS were to blow away tomorrow while I'm sure there are some that would rather go through an entire server OS migration rather than spend a dollar I bet many would go with RH thanks to their excellent management tools. That money in turn would flow back into the community thanks to the increased output by RH which has been beyond generous when it comes to sharing.
Is that really so hard to understand? Or are so many just so damned greedy that the thought of giving back to the company that makes so much happen really so disgusting to you you'd rather run more than 30% of the world's webservers on a cheap knockoff rather than give back? Is this REALLY the sharing spirit that we hear so much of with FOSS? Just a variation of "I got mine so fuck you"? How sad is that,, or the fact that nobody can even point out how in the long run you are slitting your own throats by hurting the very company who does so much to advance Linux without getting attacked. How sad indeed.
This is why I'm just gonna block Linux articles from my/. as the hypocrisy and bullshit is getting a little too thick for my tastes. At least Apple and MSFT never pretend to be anything other than what they are, but while FOSSies love to talk about share and share alike they certainly don't want to share a dime with the company working their ass off to make Linux better. How sad.
Nice straw man you built there, don't mind the match...WHOOSH! The reason your straw man just went up (although he did make such a lovely flame) is that A.-The RIAA are the leeches in the middle kinda like CentOS, and B.-Unlike the RIAA RH actually gives back to the community and with HUGE amounts of code at that.
So is your argument that there is no such thing as the "tragedy of the commons" or is it that "RH can afford free riders"? Look it is simple, okay? RH sells product and gives back to the community, the more product it sells the more it is able to give back to the community in the form of developers, bug fixing, and R&D.
And if your argument worked, why is RH doing this, hmmm? Shouldn't your argument apply equally to Oracle? A free rider is a free rider, right? After all BOTH cost RH money in lost sales and ability to compete thanks to less dollars for R&D.
While you may like to pretend that FOSS is nothing but guys in their basements coding for fun nothing could be further from the truth. FOSS is supported by large corporations like RH that frankly are making maybe 1/10th what a proprietary company would make thanks to so many in FOSS caring about nothing but "free as in beer!"
But don't take my word for it, watch Canonical. After bleeding millions without ever seeing a dime trying to make Linux more user friendly I bet as a last resort they will start charging for Ubuntu. It'll be cheap, but that won't matter because the "free as in beer!" brigade will HOWL with rage and get everyone to switch to anything other than Ubuntu and Canonical WILL die. Then you can go back to having the same upstream caca repackaged 80 ways to Sunday with ZERO R&D going to UI.
But hey, getting stuff for free never hurts anyone, right? I wonder how many out of work developers would be on the RH payroll if just 10% of those servers paid.
The problem is you seem to think the users are going "yay lets use crappy IE6!" when of course that isn't the case, it is the fact that all their Intranet will break since it was coded in crappy IE6 ActiveX and good luck getting the suits to pay to upgrade THAT mess!
But there is a good reason why IE6 usage jumps from 9AM to 5PM Mon through Fri, and that is because millions of dollars worth of corporate Intranet apps are written around IE6. Was it stupid? Of course. Do most places have the budget to replace it? Not in this economy they don't.
But if you want o run off the business users that's cool with me, free market and all that. But don't pretend there are millions of consumers running crappy old IE6 just for the fun of it.
And you just hit the nail on the head of why this will NEVER take off...planned obsolescence. The OEMs want you to have to blow cash for a new laptop every couple of years, and having a tweak-able BIOS doesn't help in that regard. The same goes for the ass raping most of these companies charge for replacement parts for laptops. Often it is cheaper to shitcan the laptop and get another one and that is precisely the point in a nutshell.
Sadly I doubt we'll ever see a truly open laptop BIOS because it is in the short term interest of the companies to make laptops into disposable devices, damn the waste and effect on the environment. This is just another example of why "damn everything but the quarterly earnings report!" hurts us all in the long run. It is a waste of material, a waste of resources, a poisoning of the environment, all to make a product that could easily last 10 years with a little thought into a 2 year or less disposable item. Just sad.
Hi MR AC! How EXACTLY is he trolling? Whether you like it or not R&D costs money and whether you like it or not developers need to get paid and without that R&D and those developers the entire community is in worse shape get the picture?
What nobody here in the FOSS community is willing to accept is the tragedy of the commons works JUST AS WELL in software as it does anywhere else. It is the classic "free rider" problem where too many free riders and the bus line shuts down. According to an earlier poster 30% of webservers are running CentOS. Now just imagine how much farther along RHEL would be if those 30% paid which would give them 30% more for R&D and hiring developers. NOW do you get it?
You want to know why you haven't made serious inroads against Apple and MSFT here you go, it is because by having most of the customers pay they are able to leverage several times more developers and R&D than you can muster. Or are you gonna sit here and argue some guy coding in his basement is equal to several $100k+ developers with years of experience?
If you just want to take without giving that is your business but don't act like RH will magically just make up the money, they won't. Less money means less developers and less R&D and that means less improvements for Linux as a whole. it really isn't rocket science folks.
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Question: Why does everyone seem so focused on Solar cells, which as everyone points out wear out, will need cooling at these temps, etc, instead of molten salt solar power where the more heat you create the better it runs and the heat stored in the salt itself can be used as a battery? Was there a hidden gotcha I haven't heard about, or is there some sort of kickback or subsidy for cell production?
Because it seems to me that cells are just the wrong direction to go. With Molten Salt it is basically a big tank and focusing mirrors which will make for lower costs, the life of the unit as a whole should beat cells, and the salt as a battery helps deal with the storage problems. So why so much focus on cells?
Don't forget the kickbacks, mustn't forget those. You can tell what drug Big Pharma is pushing this year by going to your average GP and see what he is writing waaaay too many prescriptions for. In the case of my town it is the antibiotic known as "Z-Pac" which if you so much as sneeze is getting handed to you, even when a generic drug like Erythro would probably work just as well and certainly be cheaper on both the insurance companies and/or the government's wallets.
To say there is really much of a difference between Big Pharma and your average pusher is kinda BS. both don't care what they are selling as long as they make the money, both are happy to push anything no matter what the cost or side effects as long as it makes them $$$, and both are happy to give kickbacks to those that bring in the business.
I read TFA and have to agree that it rates pretty dang high on my flamebait o' meter. I mean if forced to choose between one or the other Google is scarier by far because even without having anything to do with them Google can get tons of data on me whereas if I don't like Apple (and for the record the only Apple device I own is a Blue&Silver G3 Tower giveaway I got to play with PPC) I can simply not buy from them, end of story.
This is why I never understood those "ZOMG Apple! ZOMG M$!" types, as the answer is simple if you don't like them don't buy their products its JUST that easy. Hell never before have we had so many choices and if I want a Pad style device (which I don't) then I have tons of choices, same as there are plenty of little shops like System76 that'll be happy to sell me a laptop that has never had a Windows Sticker or WinKey.
So to me this smells like nothing but an article to piss people off and stir up page views, like Nichols on the Linux Troll side or Thurott the WinTroll. in all three cases the point is to stir as much shit per paragraph as possible to crank up the views. The only way to win against this kind of trolling is to quote Wargames: "Not to play".
Kinda missing the point there ain't ya KG? We are talking people that need to communicate with the outside world not download the latest "Hot Arab booty" video. Hell the Egyptians were using Twitter to get word out about what was going down on the ground, dialup can give them text, pics, and PDF back and forth with each other and those on the outside, which sounds like just what they need.
And as for the rest of us, never been in a place without broadband and need to check your email? Plenty of places here in the USA where you get piss poor service or none at all. I bet a $15 a year "whenever you need us we got your back" plan would probably sell quite well. Hell I can think of quite a few times in the past couple of years visiting relatives or out camping with my GF when I could have used that service and my ISP doesn't offer any free number.
But in the end the most logical thing is to look at this from a business sense and when you do you'll see I'm right. What will it cost the dialup ISP? Damned near nothing, as only a small section of Libya has PCs and I'm sure just a small subsection of those have both a modem and will hear about the offer, but if even a few hear and use it to relay info it could help. What does it gain the ISP? Free publicity that ties into one of the day's top news stories and makes them look VERY good and decent to the outside world.
From a purely business standpoint you'll see it is a win/win as it will cost VERY little, most likely generate a LOT of buzz and press, and make them look like a little company standing up for the little guy. It sounds to me like a hell of a lot better plan than hiring Dennis Miller.
The problem with Thorium IIRC was the plans that show Thorium working are to have hundreds of "mini-reactors" like say one in every city 10,000 or better. Now that might work in China where there isn't as many crazies and they (from what I understand) have control of their borders thanks to a "we'll shoot your ass and send you to PMITA prison" policy, but try to remember we have plenty of nutballs here both from the Arab countries we've been fucking with for decades, along with our very own home grown crazies.
Now picture every city 10,000 or better having a nuke plant as a target, how will you protect them? It would take pretty much the entire military, and even then you'd be short handed. We'd have to go total police state or surround the things with automated death cannons you'd have to hope like hell didn't malfunction and pull an ED209 on you.
Let us not forget the OKC bomb was just fertilizer and diesel fuel, now imagine if he could have gotten close enough to a reactor to cause a breach? I don't know how it is in other places but I've been to the reactor in my home state and we are pretty damned good about not letting anybody close to the thing. But a reactor in every little podunk nowhere? Sounds like asking for trouble to me.
While it sounds nice in theory and may actually work for a heavily militaristic state where everyone is raised to respect the state, but I just don't think they'd be too safe around here. Hell if the Chinese keep screwing with Falun Gong they may not be too safe there either, and last I heard the people of Tibet ain't too fond of them as well. Good luck China, you'll need it.
Actually, sad to say, but that Yahoo Portal thingie we geeks can't fricking stand? You know, the big bloated picture and video mess complete with horoscope? That one? Yeah that thing sadly is like the number 1 home page for nearly all that aren't geeks. yeah I know but I swear that damned thing is so popular when I come across a PC that DON'T have their homepage set to that is when I actually notice, the thing is THAT damned popular.
So I can see why MSFT wanted Yahoo and was happy to buy their searches, as the normals use that like the morning paper. Funny as hell part? Watching them actually use it after they get done looking at all the links they care to they then type Google into the Yahoo Search box to actually get to Google to do searches! Now when I asked some of them, thinking maybe they liked the Google UI or whatever over Yahoo? Nope it turned out they didn't know they could actually search with the Yahoo box and thought that was just a way to get to Google, because when you need to find stuff you "Google it" not Yahoo it!
So the point of this story dear AC is that when it comes to the masses you can't plan on shit because their ways are strange and not like us at all. Hell FB could team up with Yahoo and you could have the masses "Facebooking it" in 5 years, you just never know. After all most of us would have looked at Farmville and thought of the little rat pushing the button to get a food pellet and those guys have made money out the wazoo with the lamest ass excuse for a "game" I've ever seen.
Trying to second guess the future when it comes to mass consumers isn't easy and while I hate FB with a passion I wouldn't count them out just yet. After all I think most of us here would agree that Yahoo Portal and Farmville blow chunks yet the normals just loooove that crapola.
To point out no matter where you are a simple USB dialup adapter and you've got net? There are a hell of a lot of business and personal travelers out there and pointing out how "No matter where you go on the planet, if you've got a line we've got your back" sounds like a good way to sell low cost dialup plans as a backup to their net connections while on the go. After all people pay for things like car insurance they hope they' ll never use but are glad to have it when trouble comes, why not a data line?
With a cheap price and a yearly option it sounds like an easy sell to me, and an event like this would be a good example of how "No matter where you are we've got your back" works in making sure you've got net.
Or maybe, just maybe, those problems with newspapers are because they are dead tree databases and don't have true type? Because not only do I run all of my apps on my 1600x900 monitor maximized (which BTW is the current "sweet spot" and what I find in most households) but so do all my customers. One of the first things I had to show my GF with XP machine at the shop was "where is the bigger button?" since I use a theme on it different than default.
Maybe its just a Linux thing but frankly I can't remember the last time I saw a PC where they DIDN'T maximize everything. In fact I just got back from setting up a college kid's PC at the dorm and I swear that kid used minimize and maximize more than anyone I'd ever seen, and he certainly wasn't hurting for space on the 1080p LCD TV he is using as a monitor.
So maybe what you are saying is true in print but IRL as someone who works with average folks 6 days a week I can tell you maximized apps are the norm, not the exception.
Frankly I don't see why it should cost hardly anything. I mean they have phone lines yes? They didn't take a backhoe to the trunk did they?
While people here may be spoiled to having high speed (well if you consider an average 2Mbps high speed) many of us Greybeards spent many a year using dialup to gather and share information.
So all you really need is some western ISPs to offer a few dialup numbers that are free for them to call and have someone spread the word. Considering that last I heard it was something like only 6% of the whole country that even HAD Internet access to start with it isn't like offering them free dialup is gonna suck some major bandwidth here, and would certainly be a lot more doable than climbing a mountain in Crete with a big ass dish with a cantenna in the middle.
Maybe this is the chance for some Netzero style ISP to get a hell of a lot of free publicity and goodwill? Seems to me like it would be a hell of a public relations coup even if only a few there took advantage of it. After all all it takes is a single person spreading information to make this Internet block pointless, and nearly every retail box has for years come with some sort of modem (hell my local Walmart just stopped having modems installed in their retail boxes like two years ago) so it really wouldn't take much.
Hi MR AC! As someone from the other side of the world allow me to elucidate. A "football school" is where a lot of the extra cash and support comes from alumni supporting the team, which means sucky team? Sucky money. Here you will often see schools where the PCs are nearly a decade old but the gym will beat most college athletic depts. While the regular students get a cookie cutter "another brick in the wall" education, the footballers almost from the time they first step on a field are treated as Gods among men.
I can see why so many NFL players end up convicts, they have been giving the footballer treatment almost since grade school. Any crime short of mounting a head on their car is quietly swept under the rug, nobody cares what they do as long as they continue to rack up the yardage. They get money, pussy, better treatment than anyone else, hell to a kid it is like being a rock star!
But sadly the schools have been hit with so many "You're discriminating against my little thug!" lawsuits that they pretty much don't toss anyone for just not giving a shit, so you have overcrowded classes and overworked teachers, which is where "special projects" comes in. Now to be fair frankly I believe I got a better education simply diving into that which interested me than the cookie cutter bullshit they were pushing, and I did try my best with the footballers.
But when you have been coddled since 5th grade and told "don't worry about it, you just concentrate on the game" for years frankly the best tutors in the world ain't gonna help, but at least I did make sure they had practical skills like how to deal with a checkbook or balance their money.
So yeah football schools just aren't gonna give you much anyway. Funny part is when I had to take a remedial algebra class to get a degree the corp wanted (always hated algebra so never bothered) and when the teacher who was from NYC heard my story he too was appalled, but a girl in the class popped up "You too? I did the same job at my school!" and all I had to say was "Go Lions!" and she said "Go Panthers!" and we instantly knew all about each others location and history thanks to our teams playing each other. Pretty much life at a football school is all about the game, everything else? meh.
The problem is that you can listen to tons of indie artists for free without cutting the *.A.As and their ilk a dime. Most indie artists want you to go to their shows where they'll be happy to sell you a CD, a T-Shirt, a mug, hell with my band we even had keyrings because THAT is where performing musicians make their daily bread. We would even have a "pawnshop special" guitar we would play for a song or two and raffle off, each sale got you another shot at the guitar.
These kinds of "deals" only ensure the Titney Spears and other processed Chezz Whizz of music is kept at the top by their corporate masters, by keeping them getting the biggest piece of the pie. remember folks they FEAR you because they fear loss of control. They made fortunes by fucking artists and being gatekeepers to the masses (and as someone who has actually laid hands on a standard new artist contract I can tell you "ass raping" is too kind a description) and the net takes that control away from them by giving YOU power through indie net stations and word of mouth.
So don't give up what little freedom and power you have to the ever greedy megacorps. They have already committed treasonous bribery upon our elected officials to get truly insane copyright terms foisted upon the world, they fuck the artists over with "Hollywood accounting" every chance they get, they are nothing but blood sucking leeches on the ass of society and the world would be a better place without them. The quicker they die the better, don't give them even more revenue with which to screw you and the artists over.
What are YOU talking about? Did you miss the part where both Norton and Ultradefrag have screamed bloody murder over the fact Win 7 doesn't allow kernel hooks when it is those same hooks that allow malware and rootkits to penetrate so deeply?
While I'll be the first to give MSFT credit for the excellence that is Windows 7, the simple fact is a good chunk of those third party tools could be eliminated tomorrow and at the same time give the user a "toaster with a screen" but MSFT can't do that for fear of anti-trust.
Just look up "Windows 7 kernel hooks" along with "anti virus anti trust" and "Microsoft anti trust claims" and see for yourself. Just with disallowing kernel hooks there were nearly a dozen motions filed by various third parties screaming anti trust. Like it or not billions are made by plugging "holes" in MSFT security and every time they plug a hole that was making money for someone here come the lawyers.
All those third party cleaners, AVs, antimalware, etc, could be eliminated tomorrow if MSFT were allowed to ship a default solution but that would cut into both the third party tools business as well as the OEM profit margins. Do you have ANY idea how much the OEMs get for stuff from System Mechanic and Norton for installing trialware? Any time you have vested interests in patching problems actual solutions to those problems are unwelcome as they cut into profits, it is just business 101.
It was stupid because instead of using Java or gasp! even VB to do the job they tied their tech to a specific browser which was a seriously moving target and anybody could see the writing on the wall that the web would develop past IE6?
It is the same reason why I hate Quickbooks, as they will often tie themselves to a specific version of tech (in their case Flash) instead of a general "must need IE" so that when new versions come along you're boned. You'd be surprised at how many VMs and XP Modes I had to set up just because the QB girl (and it is ALWAYS a "QB Girl", I swear they must have a union or something) couldn't run their version of QB thanks to it being tied to some version of flash that won't run on anything past XP.
I mean I have NO problem with ActiveX per se, or even using a current tech, it is when you tie it to a SINGLE version of a tech that I had a problem. If they would have tested for IE5-IE6 they wouldn't be in this mess, same as if QB only demanded flash instead of Flash version x I wouldn't have had to set up so many VMs.
And as for the person who doesn't believe IE6 is a corporate problem? sorry but its true. I have two customers myself I have to deal with IE6 with, one a local insurance company whose ties to the main office are through an IE6 Intranet, and a small TV sales and repair shop whose sat TV sales have the CC checking and credit approval! through an IE6 Intranet portal, ugh.
So believe me as a primarily Windows guy I have NO problem with using whatever tech works best for a job, just don't tie it to a single version of that tech. If you make it work with the last two or three versions of said tech odds are it will work with two or three tech versions in advance. Otherwise you get what we have here with so many having to figure out how to keep a long dead browser running just so they can use the Intranet, same as I had to jump through hoops to get old Flash running on Windows 7 thanks to QB being hard coded.
Well to be fair if the subject the GP was talking about went to what we in the south call a "football school"? Then yeah it is possible to graduate HS with lousy math skills, and if they were on the team probably illiterate to boot. How would I know? Well I managed to graduate with honors and never actually walked into a class.
How did I do that? Well I got to spend my Junior HS years being tutored thanks to eating pavement at 65MPH plus in a bike wreck, but the tutors wanted me to try to do the last two years with a most likely shortened schedule (ended up 3 day on, 2 day off with 1 day of tutoring) just so I "wouldn't feel isolated" and get to know my fellow students. Now I personally didn't care because my mom had and still has one of the best Sci-Fi collections in the area, I was quite happy with Asimov and Heinlein thanks anyway.
So the first day first class is PE and the teacher says "Anyone not ready to run 20 laps can just get out of my class!" so I left, and took about 1/3rd the class with me. Apparently he had been using that line for awhile and nobody had called him on it, but I just looked at it logically and did what I was told and the others said "Hey he's leaving~we'll follow him!" so after the VP gave the moron a "Don't tell them they can leave!" speech he stuck me and the others in study hall, which was run by the head football coach.
He takes one look at the cover of my "Best Sci-Fi authors of 1976" paperback and thinks I must be hiding girlie mags. He calls me to the front and when he finds it not only doesn't have a hidden girlie mag, but I could sit there and discuss the grandfather paradox and whether time was fixed or changeable he said "How would you like get to straight As and never go to class?" which considering what I had seen so far sounded good to me.
So he takes my class schedule and takes me into each teacher's class on the list and informs them I'll be on "special projects" and they should just give me an A, I of course being a smartass said "Why not an A+?" but got told not to push it. He then sat me up in my very own classroom! where I got to sit and enjoy my books and when any footballer was in "study hall" they were actually in my class being taught how to do basics like spell "flower" and "Stood" and do checkbook math so they could pass eligibility requirements. I swear the first day I was getting "Flower...Floer" and "stood...stuud"
I was quite happy for those last two years, I got my own classroom, I got to sit on the bench during practices and teach the players not in the field, and I'm quite happy to say not a single player I taught was benched for lack of eligibility. Now of course I was lucky, in that I liked to learn new things and that while others got "Horton hears a who" I got stories of worlds with three suns and rivers that looked like liquid mercury which fired up my imagination, but if someone went to a football school and fell through the cracks, or if they had to keep dumbing down so the players could play? Yep I could see you graduating some pretty sad kids.
As for TFA sounds like capitalism 101 to me. Kinda hard to bitch at the kid when you see CEOs cooking the books all over the place. I say you go kid, I'm sure you make a great CxO someday.
Well considering Linux has been sitting at 1% for quite awhile and even Ubuntu is losing share (Gasp! He told the truth again! Smite him!) I kinda doubt Linux is gonna be "sneaking up" on anything which was kinda my point.
And whether you or the "community" want to admit it or not well written code and world class server and desktop OSes don't come from magical RMS pixies they come from top notch developers working their asses off and in this economy I doubt VERY seriously you are gonna be seeing many of the top talent working "for the good of the community".
Why does Apple and MSFT have desktop usability light years ahead of Linux? Because they have the money to pay people to do the shit works, which there is a hell of a lot of. Bug fixing, QA, regression testing, nobody LIKES these jobs but they simply have to be done, except by and large in the FOSS model they don't.
The ONLY reason FOSS has gotten as far as it has on the server is companies paying millions to make it happen, full stop. Look at any LOC count and you'll see RH nearly always number one or two. What happens when fewer and fewer people pay? It is simple math, less money for R&D, less money for QA and regression testing, less money for developers and less code for the community as a whole it is a classic tragedy of the commons case.
Look at how many major FOSS companies have been bought out or are barely alive, if the FOSS model worked, why is this so? It is because the FOSS model was born in a time of abundance and now that we are in another depression the well is running dry. More and more free riders and less and less paying customers and what do you get? Less for all.
Seriously is it any wonder so few companies want to offer a native FOSS version of their programs? The "free as in beer!" brigade grows ever larger while simultaneously the amount of paying customers stagnates or even falls. It is simple math folks, the less RH gets the less it can share, period. In any other model the developers have legal repercussions that can at least keep free riders to a manageable level, not so in FOSS. That is why I believe as the economy grows ever more sour so too will the free riders simply cause too much drain on FOSS and cause it to fall behind while companies like Apple and MSFT are able to make gains and get farther and farther ahead. It is just simple math and all the shouts of "free as in beer!" won't change the figures.
The problem with your proposal is while it might help get the business sector moving in the right direction the Fed isn't dealing with consumer hardware which is where the real waste is piling up. After all if you spend $6k+ on a router most likely you will get an IPV6 update. Under $100? Not so much.
That is why we are gonna have to simply ban its importation, as there really no excuse for cranking out IPV4 routers this late in the game yet short of the $100 Apple there really isn't any consumer support to be had.
Add to this the fact that most ISPs have little to no IPV6 support at this moment and many of their consumer level modems will probably have to be shitcanned as well and one way or the other the third world is gonna get a hell of a lot of waste dumped on its doorstep when the final switch gets pulled.
I predict it is gonna make the CRT to LCD switchover look like planting trees in comparison, since there are so many routers that if it weren't for the fact that IPV6 isn't in any way backwards compatible nor will most of the ones that were capable of getting updated be seeing any will end up being thrown in perfectly (but obsolete) working order? Oh yeah its gonna be a BIG mess. Sad that so much waste is being cranked off the line, but as long as people would prefer to pay $25 for a wireless router instead of $100+ for the Apple logo without regulation I just don't see them disappearing.
I have to agree, especially when he is using an HP bottom o' the line dual box. A MUCH better deal would be start with something like this Asus Quad, which with an OEM Win 7 HP X64 will only set you back $400. Add this Radeon 6850 for eyefinity and then final out with the three monitors of your choice. Personally I'd prefer a single big ass monitor over triple with the lines dividing, but whatever floats your boat.
But all told you could get out at right around $1000 and have a much better machine than that junker HP, and have more upgrade options down the road to boot. I can also vouch that that particular machine plays games nicely as I just built one for a customer to plug into his new 32 inch 1080p TV, and with an HD4830 it plays L4D I&II, Bioshock I&II and Just Cause II quite nicely with lots o' purty. He just had me add a wireless keyboard and mouse and he was good to go. Also kicks ass on Netflix and an AV center. The case isn't exactly subtle, but then again he isn't either so having the light up bling bling made him quite happy, and in the end that's what counts.
Well I'd have to say what the worst was, in no particular order because it was ALL painful, the bad acting, the damned "meesa massa" Jar Jar ebonics, the queen and the kid (although seeing him grown up was worse, way to make a bad ass into a wussy boy!) and the ever obvious "we cooked this up to add a new toy" like that stupid race.
Frankly it is high time for "Spaceballs 33 1/3rd, the search for more money" although Lucas has managed to slaughter so much of the franchise on its own its practically a parody unto itself. To steal a little of Yahtzee's review of Force Unleashed II "proof that no once profitable franchise is so dead that you can't jump on its stomach and sell whatever liquids shoot out of its nose" which at this point is a pretty damned good description for the Star Wars franchise as a whole.
Personally I'm just waiting for the R2D2 vibrators and the Jar Jar "Messa hit that!" panties. After all why pretend to even give a shit about anything but $$$ after Phantom Menace? You might as well embrace your inner Gene Simmons George, you've done shat on the franchise so bad that 100 of the best screenwriters of all time couldn't save it now.
Exactly! It was BS like this along with the compiler and OEM rigging that got me to switch to AMD for me and my customers. At least I know when I buy or recommend an AMD laptop/desktop that it will have all the standard features without having to play "CPU Bingo" just to find out what it has/doesn't have. That way all I have to do is look at the speed/cache/cores and decide what is right for their needs without having to worry about "missing features" like Cool&Quiet or AMD-V. Hell some of the Intel laptop chips I looked at disabled enhanced Speedstep! I mean how fucked up is that?
In the end while there is nothing I'd like more than laptops to become bog standard commodity machines like PCs I just don't see it happening. Keeping PCs longer and longer because they have gotten "good enough" for the tasks the user does is the norm (I even have some customers on 7+ year old machines, they do what they need them to so they're happy) whereas with laptops by locking them down, using substandard parts, making it hell to get replacement parts at a fair price, and generally screwing the customer at every turn makes for increased profits. Too bad it comes at such huge amounts of waste and toxic materials dumped on the third world, but hey, as long as the quarterly earnings report is met, right?
I'm seriously starting to wonder if the death of capitalism for something like a resource based economy might be a good thing for everyone. The amount of waste we generate focusing everything only on the short term profits is poisoning the world and wasting precious resources we'll be hard pressed to replace. Maybe if the "race to the bottom" ever increasing profit motive were removed we could go back to building items that lasted again. It is pretty sad that my nearly 30 year old stereo still works great while I've tossed dozens of DVD players and other e-waste in that same time. Just no quality to be had anymore.
Funny that is why I carry a couple of TrendNet routers myself. Folks may make cracks because TrendNet routers are cheap and aren't fancy, but I have set up TrendNet routers on construction sites where the amount of grit, funk, and temp differences would choke just about any router (and killed brand new Linksys junk dead) and they just keep on humping along, solid as ever.
Like you I have thrown away more brand new Linksys routers than any other brand by a looong shot. There is cheap and there is garbage and Linksys has been garbage for as long as I've dealt with them. I walk into an SMB or SOHO with network troubles more than half the time a Linksys is involved. Just absolute trash.
To me what the real tragedy of IPV6 is (and why they didn't figure out a way to be backwards compatible I'll never know) is how many brand new routers are being sold at this very minute with NO IPV6 support. I'm normally not big on government regulation but this is just ridiculous. You just know the vast majority of these new routers will get NO IPV6 update and are just doomed for the garbage heap straight from the assembly line. The amount of waste this will create is just staggering and if the OEMs can't get onboard then the government simply needs to ban all non IPV6 capable routers from being imported, along with coming up with a standards test so that IPV6 capable doesn't end up another Vista capable.
. If they get a couple of shipments left to rot on the docks maybe they'll rethink selling IPV4 only routers this late in the game.
And you notice how I went from Insightful to Flamebait the second the FOSSies found out someone was pointing out one of their sacred cows was bullshit? Surprise surprise FOSSies can't face reality. That is why I point out the difference between a FOSS advocate and a FOSSie, who like a Moonie is all about dogma and bullshit instead of doing what is best for the community.
And the fact that CentOS was cooked up by those too damned cheap to simply pay a license (even though I'm sure RH is happy to work with a vendor and provide bulk rates) while at the same time wanting the fruits of their labors surprises me not one bit. Why is it so hard for FOSSies to understand that everything has a cost and the tragedy of the commons is all too real?
For all the FOSSies out there, it is just simple math. Red Hat uses the money they get from RHEL to make Linux a better OS by providing developers to the community, fixing bugs, and providing much needed R&D. Do you think the shit jobs will get done if nobody pays for them? The more leeches like CentOS you have that take what others create while giving nothing in return the less the ENTIRE community has because RH loses money they would have otherwise gotten, which leads to less employees, which leads to less code for you to enjoy. See how it works?
If CentOS were to blow away tomorrow while I'm sure there are some that would rather go through an entire server OS migration rather than spend a dollar I bet many would go with RH thanks to their excellent management tools. That money in turn would flow back into the community thanks to the increased output by RH which has been beyond generous when it comes to sharing.
Is that really so hard to understand? Or are so many just so damned greedy that the thought of giving back to the company that makes so much happen really so disgusting to you you'd rather run more than 30% of the world's webservers on a cheap knockoff rather than give back? Is this REALLY the sharing spirit that we hear so much of with FOSS? Just a variation of "I got mine so fuck you"? How sad is that,, or the fact that nobody can even point out how in the long run you are slitting your own throats by hurting the very company who does so much to advance Linux without getting attacked. How sad indeed.
This is why I'm just gonna block Linux articles from my /. as the hypocrisy and bullshit is getting a little too thick for my tastes. At least Apple and MSFT never pretend to be anything other than what they are, but while FOSSies love to talk about share and share alike they certainly don't want to share a dime with the company working their ass off to make Linux better. How sad.
Nice straw man you built there, don't mind the match...WHOOSH! The reason your straw man just went up (although he did make such a lovely flame) is that A.-The RIAA are the leeches in the middle kinda like CentOS, and B.-Unlike the RIAA RH actually gives back to the community and with HUGE amounts of code at that.
So is your argument that there is no such thing as the "tragedy of the commons" or is it that "RH can afford free riders"? Look it is simple, okay? RH sells product and gives back to the community, the more product it sells the more it is able to give back to the community in the form of developers, bug fixing, and R&D.
And if your argument worked, why is RH doing this, hmmm? Shouldn't your argument apply equally to Oracle? A free rider is a free rider, right? After all BOTH cost RH money in lost sales and ability to compete thanks to less dollars for R&D.
While you may like to pretend that FOSS is nothing but guys in their basements coding for fun nothing could be further from the truth. FOSS is supported by large corporations like RH that frankly are making maybe 1/10th what a proprietary company would make thanks to so many in FOSS caring about nothing but "free as in beer!"
But don't take my word for it, watch Canonical. After bleeding millions without ever seeing a dime trying to make Linux more user friendly I bet as a last resort they will start charging for Ubuntu. It'll be cheap, but that won't matter because the "free as in beer!" brigade will HOWL with rage and get everyone to switch to anything other than Ubuntu and Canonical WILL die. Then you can go back to having the same upstream caca repackaged 80 ways to Sunday with ZERO R&D going to UI.
But hey, getting stuff for free never hurts anyone, right? I wonder how many out of work developers would be on the RH payroll if just 10% of those servers paid.
The problem is you seem to think the users are going "yay lets use crappy IE6!" when of course that isn't the case, it is the fact that all their Intranet will break since it was coded in crappy IE6 ActiveX and good luck getting the suits to pay to upgrade THAT mess!
But there is a good reason why IE6 usage jumps from 9AM to 5PM Mon through Fri, and that is because millions of dollars worth of corporate Intranet apps are written around IE6. Was it stupid? Of course. Do most places have the budget to replace it? Not in this economy they don't.
But if you want o run off the business users that's cool with me, free market and all that. But don't pretend there are millions of consumers running crappy old IE6 just for the fun of it.
And you just hit the nail on the head of why this will NEVER take off...planned obsolescence. The OEMs want you to have to blow cash for a new laptop every couple of years, and having a tweak-able BIOS doesn't help in that regard. The same goes for the ass raping most of these companies charge for replacement parts for laptops. Often it is cheaper to shitcan the laptop and get another one and that is precisely the point in a nutshell.
Sadly I doubt we'll ever see a truly open laptop BIOS because it is in the short term interest of the companies to make laptops into disposable devices, damn the waste and effect on the environment. This is just another example of why "damn everything but the quarterly earnings report!" hurts us all in the long run. It is a waste of material, a waste of resources, a poisoning of the environment, all to make a product that could easily last 10 years with a little thought into a 2 year or less disposable item. Just sad.
Hi MR AC! How EXACTLY is he trolling? Whether you like it or not R&D costs money and whether you like it or not developers need to get paid and without that R&D and those developers the entire community is in worse shape get the picture?
What nobody here in the FOSS community is willing to accept is the tragedy of the commons works JUST AS WELL in software as it does anywhere else. It is the classic "free rider" problem where too many free riders and the bus line shuts down. According to an earlier poster 30% of webservers are running CentOS. Now just imagine how much farther along RHEL would be if those 30% paid which would give them 30% more for R&D and hiring developers. NOW do you get it?
You want to know why you haven't made serious inroads against Apple and MSFT here you go, it is because by having most of the customers pay they are able to leverage several times more developers and R&D than you can muster. Or are you gonna sit here and argue some guy coding in his basement is equal to several $100k+ developers with years of experience?
If you just want to take without giving that is your business but don't act like RH will magically just make up the money, they won't. Less money means less developers and less R&D and that means less improvements for Linux as a whole. it really isn't rocket science folks.