I'm sorry but when a BROWSER, you know that thing you surf the web with, that is supposed to render HTML? Yeah that thing, when it sucks up more than 1.5Gb of RAM even AFTER closing the tabs, and with only 6 or 7 hours of usage? I'm sorry but I don't see how you can label that anything but suckage.
And the WHOLE POINT of Firefox was to be a light nimble browser instead of the bloat that was the suite, remember that? So what happened? At the start of the 3.x branch memory usage was going down, the leaks were getting fixed, it was running better than ever, so what happened?
I'll tell you what happened Chrome happened with a capital C. Look up the Mozdev blogs see if you find ANY mention of JavaScript benchmarking or plugin containers pre Chrome, you won't. These ideas weren't even on the radar until Chrome showed up and used them as bullet points and then Mozilla pulled a MSFT and went "Me too!" only they didn't test the underlying arch to see if it could handle it first, which it couldn't.
Look, if you want to go back to the bad old days of 2.x with memory hogging all over the place because you've got more RAM than God, that's cool. Most people however DO NOT. As I said more and more machines are coming into my shop with Chrome installed and NOT Firefox. I didn't switch these people, they actively sought out an alternative because "Firefox is slow" "Firefox is sluggish" "Firefox was dragging the machine down" unquote.
Time will tell which one of us is right, but I'm betting its me. I'd love to know what percentage of Chrome users are former Firefox users because I bet that number would be pretty damned high. Most people will never notice that 2% speed gain in some benchmark, just as they will most likely never notice the plugins are in a container. What they WILL notice is that surfing video sites for any length of time will cause Firefox to suck memory like a drunk sucking booze and it does NOT give it back, even with the trim_on_minimize enabled.
And I still say when all you care about is matching bullet points instead of worrying about the underlying tech and if it is capable of performing the task you have a case of cargo cult usability. Gecko simply wasn't made for warp speed JavaScript and sandboxing and the memory usage and responsiveness bears this out. The sad part is thinking they need these bullet points to keep up with Chrome will simply drive more people away, because Chrome does these things without bloating or UI breakdown.
30% of all webservers? Sheesh, and folks wonder why Linux never gets anywhere. I mean here you have a company that sinks serious money into R&D and improvements to the ENTIRE Linux ecosystem, yet because there are so many Linux users that are "free as in beer!" you'd rather run your network on a hacked copy and risk getting screwed, like when CentOS nearly went tits up, than to actually spend a buck and help pay for your own OSes improvements by supporting the company making those improvements.
I'm sure I'll be modded down for daring to point out this sad little bit of reality, but you want to know why Linux is a blip on the map? Here you go. Companies rightfully see there is no money in Linux because FOSSies will go to great lengths not to pay even when it ultimately hurts themselves. Think RH did this change for fun? Nope, it is because you and so many others are slowly killing the company by refusing to buy the product but you want the fruits of their labor anyway.
Say what you want but THIS, this right here, is why the proprietary model wins out over the FOSS model. It is because companies that make good popular products actually get increased capital they can use to grow and expand, whereas with FOSS three minutes after it comes out someone is copying the code to make a cheap knockoff just to get out of paying. Kinda sad actually.
Actually it wasn't the hardware that was the problem. After dealing with one crashing WinME machine after another when I came across a customer that had a PERFECTLY running WinME machine I decided to investigate, and there I found the answer. The reason why WinME sucked for so many. Ready for the revelation?
His machine had NO VXD drivers, only WDM. Checking the other machines (including my own, which after watching a brand new WinME install crash in less than 20 minutes of just sitting I went Win2K) I found that damned near ALL WinMe machines had a mix of VXD and WDM drivers, and there lay badness.
If you had ALL VXD? Fine and dandy. ALL WDM? Good to go. A mix of the two? Welcome to crashy town. Sadly for WinME owners any hardware that had been manufactured pre release already had Win98 VXD drivers written, and since MSFT in their infinite stupidity said you could use VXD drivers the OEMs simply wrote new WDM drivers for new hardware while keeping the VXD for the old, which was usually sound and modem.
So there you have it, the answer to the mystery of why Win98 was more stable than WinME. if you were one of the few that got WDM drivers congrats, you were few and far between. Most of us got a mix and could set our watches by how fast WinME bit the dust.
Yeah but if they charge you $50 for $10 worth of stuff, is it a good deal? I don't think so.
I don't know how the RS is in your area, but in mine the little parts that cost a buck or two WITH shipping at BGMicro will cost you $12+, and a simple printer cable which I bought for just $3 WITH shipping from Monoprice (which is an EXCELLENT source for cable and adapters BTW. I just picked up a couple of 5 pin DIN to 6 pin PS2 for a couple of classic clicky clacky KBs I got give to me for $3 with shipping!) they wanted $18! For just a bloody printer cable!
So while I don't mind shopping local when the prices are reasonable with RS at least in my area you are looking at 400%-600% markups. I'm sorry but at those prices I can afford to wait a day or two.
Oh I agree completely about the one off software and configuring the domain but as I was trying to point out to the guy that said "always shitcan and get a new one" is that you are gonna have to do that anyway because Dell isn't gonna have the specific apps and the domain setup for company X OOTB.
So as you can see simply tossing working hardware that still does its job well make no sense whatsoever since the things that are gonna suck time will have to be done either way, new or wiped and reinstalled. And as I pointed out with just a few simple free tools all the hassles of a wipe and reinstall just disappear and you are left with what you would have to do with a new box...that is installation and configuration of the company specific software and domain settings.
I just don't think the other guy liked being pointed out as wasteful simply because he didn't want to fix the PC. It is just shameful that so many would toss working hardware simply to keep from having to do the work.
Funny I hear Tommy Shaw and an excellent guitar solo, but maybe that's just me;-)
As for TFA it strikes me funny (again maybe its just me) that he stuck with the consumer OSes until he stuck in Win2K Pro and then suddenly went back to the consumer OSes. Maybe he just blocked out the horror that was WinME? I know there are plenty of us that would like to forget it, although trying to keep Vista running on my machine gave me some serious WinME flashbacks.
What I love is the picture in TFA. I mean could they get ANY more perfect when talking about a system being too slow than to show a couple of old folks outside the airport struggling with their luggage? Hell old folks struggling with baggage should be the picture under "too damned slow" in the dictionary!
As for TFA I'd love for someone to play "follow the money" and see whose palm got greased to pick this system. From the looks of it they picked a system used for BFE middle of nowhere airports and it simply doesn't scale well, which you'd think they would have wanted to see some realtime tests with the amount of data they are cranking before signing the check. My guess is someone there got a really nice "bonus" for picking this system over the others, safety be damned.
Hi flowerpotgirl! If it is that damned security tool variant I feel your pain. I have gotten to the point if they say that have "some sort of security thingie bugging me" I tell them to back up anything they want to keep to flash or DVD (which I'll be happy to sell them or they can use their own) and then I just nuke the bastard. After nuking I scan the flash/DVD with a LiveCD and put their stuff back on. That security tool variant is a royal bitch, and with each new version they add more checks and more places to hide!
In the old days it was easy to clean the bugs out but these new security tool and AV20xx variants are just too damned nasty. You can spend all day cleaning one out only to have a timebomb restore the bug! Nuke it from orbit, it is the only way to be sure anymore.
The problem is MSFT can only add so much before screams of "anti trust!" fill the web. Just look at the stink Norton and the rest tried to put up when Windows started coming with Defender and MSFT started offering Security Essentials for free. Now we all now that if Windows came packed with a free fully functional AV like MS Security it would seriously cut down the rates of infections, but that would not only cut into the pay AV business but would hurt the OEMs by not getting paid to bundle crapware time limited AV.
So in a way you can look at this as just another failing of capitalism, as the long term better for everyone solution is rejected in deference to the short term lets make a buck solution. I know that using a few simple third party tools I am able to make Windows "a toaster with a screen" which is one of my most popular optimizations, where it cleans and defrags its file system and registry, fixes broken shortcuts, takes care of its own AV updates and scanning, hell if I could come up with a way to auto-install third party updates it would be damned near perfect, as it is I have to simply have the OS alert the user when the latest flash or other update is ready.
But sadly if MSFT was to do that, even though it would make the net safer and faster and better for everyone, all the vendors of solutions to those problems would scream "Anti Trust!" so fast it would make your head swim. So in the end we get what we have now, where the user has to know more than they should because many want to profit off their misery. Sad but that is the way of things.
Well I can't answer for him, but I can say my personal record at the last shop I worked at was 4673 pieces of malware all running on this top o' the line Toshiba laptop. It actually took one hour and 43 minutes to boot! Normally we'd just do a wipe and reinstall and never mess with it, but the boss had bet me a pizza and a six pack that it wouldn't beat his record of 2879 pieces of malware running. But I had taken one look at the hipster douche that had brought it in and said "I think I'm beating your record today Doug!". Sure enough I was enjoying a meat lovers and a cold one for supper.
So while I find it hard to believe that someone could get 16,000 bugs and still function you'd be surprised how much shit a user can add before Windows will completely die. The hipster douche had every porn bug known to man and had so many running processes that the brand new Toshiba ran like a 486 trying to load Win98. But we didn't count cookies, only malware, so yeah you get some seriously nasty machines walking in sometimes.
Hey now, that ain't fair to Willis. Give the man credit he did tell people not to watch Die Hard 4 because they had cut it all to hell trying to get the Spiderman teen dollar (I mean WTF? Spiderman teens aren't going to see Die Hard). I mean when you can't even say the catch phrase because of the rating? Crapola.
But I have to agree that most of the shit coming out of the Hollywood crap fest is totally shitty rehashes of movies and shows that frankly had ran out of steam ages ago. The last decent action sequel I saw was Iron Man 2, and even then they nuked the fridge in the last 5 minutes (the bots all have timers? The bad guy takes off his battle helmet in the middle of the battle? WTF?).
Sadly as long as people will pay to see or even play crap, crap will get made. I mean how many CoD and MoH are we up to now? Or Bioshock 2, if there was ever a game that made NO sense having a sequel, it was that. No hanging plot points, no cliffhanger ending, Bioshock 1 was the first game made in ages that wasn't written from the beginning with FRANCHISE written in giant letters hanging over the entire story, so what do they do? Make a sequel...yuck.
I only hope the ever cheapening tech will save us. It is getting cheaper by the day to make quality games and movies. Sure they won't be special effect powerhouses, but how many times have you said "Movie looked good, plot sucked" in the past 5 years? I'll happily play a game with NOLF II level graphics or a movie with 70s level effects if it brings something new to the table which sadly we just don't see hardly anymore. It is just one cookie cutter sequel after another. yawn.
Uhhh..WTF? Several games plug OMM directly in the game, such as the monitors in Postal2 or the developers hidden in Serious Sam which follow Sam when freed and call out "Old Man Murry!" Hell it is common knowledge that the reason you see a crate so early both in the original Half Life and Half Life 2 is because the developers tried to beat OMM's "Start To Crate" (which I still do to this day when playing FPS) and finally said "fuck it" and threw in a crate at the front to basically hang a lampshade on it.
OMM seriously affected games of the late 90s/early 00s because OMM was THE review site because if you could get OMM on your side there was serious buzz to be had. I know I bought Serious Sam as soon as I could could and would have never heard of the game otherwise if it weren't for OMM. So yeah, I gotta call it as I see it, another case of delentionism which the Wiki has waaaay too much of as of late.
If you are looking for LEDs and tons of little parts for projects cheap may I suggest BGMicro? I have a customer that helps the local college robotic and rocketry clubs and has been buying from them for ages and swears by them. You can get everything from solar panels to IR illumination and all the LEDs in every color they make, all cheap and delivered to your door. Great for the DIY project hacker type.
But seriously what would be the point NOW? SCO is a corpse and being divided up by the courts to pay creditors, McBride lost his home, I mean WTH is the point in continuing to harp on about a company that you have already destroyed by proving they were bullshit in the courts?
It would be a hell of a lot better if FOSS guys could just let the damned company die already and instead focus on more pressing issues, like how more and more of the Droid devices coming out have been "TiVo Tricked" making the GPL worthless.
So all this crowing about a long dead company is crazy IMHO when there are lots worse problems brewing like a storm on the horizon. While I've always been a "best tool for the job" kinda guy and never hated one company or another (well except Sony, but who doesn't hate them?) I have always believed in respecting the license and TiVo Tricking is making the GPL into a worthless piece of paper. If the community can't get Linus and those developers using GPL V2 on the tools that corps covet to switch to GPL V3 then the four freedoms that RMS has worked so long and hard advocating simply ceases to exist, because all a company has to do is take all the code they want and TiVo Trick your rights away.
So why not just let SCO fade away into the annals of troll companies and focus some serious attention onto the coming trouble? SCO is toast, McBride isn't even there to kick around and got his house foreclosed on. Meanwhile if there isn't serious debate and action with regards to the mobile industry and TiVo Tricking GPL is gonna be in a world of hurt. So let them die already, there are much rougher battles ahead than from a single lame troll like SCO.
What is condescending about showing the answer of "shitcan everything" isn't always the best answer? not only is it EXTREMELY wasteful and bad for the environment but in the end it still takes the same time since it the company specific apps, not the OS, that uses the most time?
And EXACTLY what "driver problem" are you speaking of? The one that can be easily solved by a simple driver pack on a USB drive that costs you maybe $20 (which you can bill the client for) and just like WSUS Offline takes only a few minutes every three months to update? How is that a problem?
Unless you have some seriously funky one off drivers like C&C controllers in which case the machine isn't gonna be just tossed anyway there IS no driver problem. A good 90%+ of the devices in Windows can run just fine with the default drivers included , and if you want the latest and greatest or run into that 10% the driverpack on a USB stick has that covered and is a hell of a lot faster than any CD at being read to boot.
And installing the business apps? I got news for you you are gonna have to do that anyway since Dell isn't gonna magically have all the software they use ANYWAY. So you are saving ZERO time by bringing in the new box.
Look don't get mad at me because I show filling the landfills with working hardware isn't a good solution either from the environment or from a cost perspective. All it takes is a tiny bit of thinking ahead just a little bit, that can be ran in the background while you're being paid to do something else, that makes ALL the difference and makes Windows installs incredibly simple.
But as I said if you fail to plan then you plan to fail, and I'd argue if installing a brand new box, possibly having to clean the bloatware, and installing all of their apps, takes you less time than a simple format and reinstall then something is wrong with your automation and you really should be looking into it. But hey, if it makes you happy to cost your customers more money on unneeded hardware while tossing working machines in the dump? Hey that is your business. I'm just pointing out from both a time and business standpoint it isn't needed 95% of the time.
Yeah because they treat packages so gently if you don't say anything. Ever see that scene in Ace Ventura? it is funny because it is true! I actually got all the local UPS guys fired because they were sitting around smoking pot (I don't care what you do on your own time but when the office smells like a bong you know you're in trouble) and treating packages liik footballs. The final straw was when I had to send some PCs back not once but twice because they were using them as step ladders and not only were the PCs smashed but there were boot prints on the side where they had stood on them!
Unfortunately for them at the time I was doing some work for the manager for the entire area and when I told her I'd never use her service and why she calmly thanked me for the information, got in her car and drove straight there. The next day when I talked to her she said she walked in and the stench of pot smoke nearly knocked her down and they were all glassy eyed and the place was a mess so she fired them on the spot! Now nobody expects them to treat everything like it is made of glass, but c'mon! Using packages as step ladders? Being fried on the job and screwing up deliveries? The reason so many makes jokes about these places is because so many have had shoddy service so everyone can relate. Now I give Dru credit, once she cleaned house the place has run like clockwork and the packages are always in good shape.
As for TFA it sounds like a good idea to me. I doubt I'd ever use it since I usually buy motherboards as a kit with the box included, but if they are gonna have to use the packing anyway why not give it an extra function? For those that want to take their time and be ultra picky about a case it seems like a no brainer to use Asus now.
What are you talking about? I'm not talking about making a PC specific image (which works fine in corporate, but as you pointed out fails in a mixed environment) I'm talking about using a bog standard Windows CD/DVD and simply having all the patches already integrated since updating is what sucks down the time.
Just use something like Ryan VM to make you a new disc image every three months or so, and update your WSUS Offline monthly. Tada! I have a completely PC agnostic solution that seriously cuts down the time and makes it easy peasy.
So as someone who actually works in SMB/SOHO/Home users I again say "ur doin it wrong" if it is taking anywhere like three hours. Hell the longest part will be installing any custom software they have which you would have to do anyway if they replaced the box so you are saving them $0 by having them toss. All it takes is a little thought my friend. I have my WSUS Offline update monthly, I integrate patches every three in my disc images. Takes maybe an hour of it running in the background while I'm doing other things so it isn't a hardship.
If you fail to plan you plan to fail my friend, and with a little planning ahead of time it doesn't matter what kind of machine they have it is as simple as stick in CD>>>tell it to install>>go work on something else for 25-35 minutes>>insert key and activate on first boot while sticking in WSUS Offline DVD>>go back to working on something else while Windows updates (usually around 20 minutes if your images are close to current)>>go to Ninite to install common apps and then install specific company apps. Tada! About an hour and a half tops.
Yeah but you are kinda missing the point, which is let them fricking DIE already! Sheesh, the company is a corpse, McBride lost his home, this is like going to kick your asshole former neighbor that is now living in a van down by the river "for old times sake".
FOSS guys just don't know when to give it a fricking rest! It is like that old saying "don't go around fighting yesterday's battles" I mean look at how much time and energy FOSS guys waste on hating MSFT, when Bill ain't even there anymore and they are getting their ass royally kicked in mobile which is the new hot growth sector, when what they need to be watching out for is Apple and Google (just look at how many Android phones out there can't be updated thanks to the "TiVo trick" which lets the OEMs take away your four freedoms while taking your code at the same time)
So just let SCO die already. The game is over, the crowds are gone, the fat lady is down the street having a sandwich. The ONLY reason they ever even get any press anymore is FOSS guys keep kicking the corpse!
Question: Why is it taking 3+ hours to do a simple wipe and reinstall? You just wipe the machine, put in a pre built OS install CD/DVD with all the patches already done, put in the key on first boot, install the apps from the local server or via flash drive, done. Maybe an hour and a half tops.
Using a combination of WSUS Offline (which you can tell to include MS Office updates along with MS Essentials AV) and Ninite I can whip off a dozen boxes or more a day easy and spend less time per box than I do trying to figure where I sat my Coke down. Just a little preparation goes a long way friend.
As for TFA, welcome to the game Android users! Anything that becomes popular WILL become a target for malware as long as they can use social engineering, because it is just so damned easy to do as in TFA. I mean 50k infections and they didn't even have to write the app, just attach their malware to an existing app and upload? How easy can you get!
So welcome to the game Android users, where you have to watch out and worry about malware just like us Windows users. The donuts are over in the back, right next to the Apple users who are currently sulking after finding out shiny plastic and aluminum doesn't stop bugs. Look on the bright side, it just means you're popular now! Hell the Linux guys would kill to be that popular on the desktop! So enjoy the coffee it's fresh, meetings are on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Oh I agree completely with regards to the patent minefield and that is why I don't support software patents, as it is all just math at its heart anyway. But the sad fact is as long as we have software patents that gives a serious advantage to the incumbent (what in America doesn't, right?) which means unless you get ahead of the curve you will just end up with a worse solution than what is already out there.
So if I were FOSS developers I wouldn't be looking at the current landscape at all, I'd be trying to work on the next "new thing" so that by the time people caught up we'd already have a FOSS implementation and there wouldn't be a risk of a patent minefield since FOSS held the patents. I'd be looking at 3D codecs and over 4K ultra HD because there WILL be a breakthrough in size limitations, same as in the 90s anything over 640x480 would break you then suddenly we have screens that are full HD for cheap.
But your post just shows why to go toe to toe against H.264 is a sucker's game. MPEG-LA have over 2000 patents in their warchest that covers pretty much the gambit of compression/decompression which means anything the guys at Google cook up that avoid the minefield will be necessity be not as efficient as H.264. And in these days of ISP wanting caps and mobile devices having serious bandwidth costs an inefficient codec simply won't fly.
That is why I say my idea for a MSFT icon would be much more appropriate: Picture Ballmer sticking his tongue out with an "I Heart Apple!" beanie on. In one stroke you've captured Ballmer's undignified CEO style and MSFT's "Me too!" attitude that seems to be the SOP since Ballmer took the reins, see Zune and Kin for examples.
As for TFA, give me a break. MSFT doesn't own Windows they own "Microsoft Windows" same as Apple should be allowed to own the "Apple App Store" but not the word app which is simply application shortened. Hell it isn't even like an app store is a new idea, as Linux had Click N' Run for ages. If Apple wants to claim Apple App Store fine and dandy, but app? Give me a break!
And before someone brings up the Lindows case let me point out that Lindows was putting out a Linux distro that was aping the Windows UI while calling itself a name close enough your average Joe could have been confused if he saw it at the Best Buy. In that one you had a company that was basing their business on confusion with another product, on this you have a concept that has been around forever. Just because you call an application an "app" doesn't magically change it into anything but just another application, sorry Apple.
While you are correct I think a more important point to be made about those is eventually the public believes anything is better than what they've got which is the tipping point that causes the revolution in the first place.
I doubt the average person on the street wanted to round up Jews or go invade Russia like the crazy Austrian (Yes Germans, after being corrected about a dozen times I won't call him a crazy German even though you voted him in okay?) but the people looked around and said "anything has to be better than this" which allowed the crazy Austrian to build momentum.
Looking out my window at the boarded up shops and houses everywhere with for sale signs on them I think we are headed for the crucial "anything has to be better than this" moment with a hell of a lot of people here in the USA. They don't believe in a representative system anymore because they have seen if you "vote the bums out" you just get more bums with a different letter after their name, and sadly there are ever increasing numbers of the poor (which outnumber everyone else by probably 4 to 1 and rising fast) that would be happy to take a communist or even totalitarian regime if it meant a guaranteed job, roof over their heads and food in their bellies.
Never forget the crazy Austrian started out by pushing a "bread and jobs" platform which when you've been out of work for a year and are living hand to mouth sounds pretty good. So don't think it can't happen here, because with the middle class being wiped out, all the factory jobs and now even white collar work being sent overseas, frankly what reason do the poor have to believe in your system? what worse can the other forms of government be when compared to the robber baron "he who has the gold makes the rules" system we have now?
Hi MR AC! I didn't mention cost because I didn't want to set off a flamewar, but here goes: I would argue that WebM would cost more than H.264 to everyone but the "free as in freedom!" crowd who don't use H.264 on principle anyway.
Why would it cost more? simple H.264 acceleration is already a sunk cost so for OEMs we are in the pure profit part of the equation because adding the H.264 support is for all intents and purposes nothing as the chips are already designed and thanks to economies of scale beyond cheap.
Then add to that equation pretty much everything that isn't an x86/64 device will have to be shitcanned, since they can't run WebM without killing the battery and don't have the room for added firmware? Yeah WebM might come out ahead 4 years from now, maybe. But in the meantime it would be a serious cost when compared to simply tossing MPEG-LA their few pennies and calling it a day.,/p>
So I'm sorry but it is one of those arguments like "Linux is free!" that sounds good on the surface but ends up costing you more than staying with the status quo, just as the OS may be free, but the cost of the admins, paying developers to rewrite all that already written code or to develop replacement apps from scratch to replace the software that works on Windows and is mission critical but don't have an equivalent in Linux? It quickly turns into a money sink.
The only reason Linux is a hit on servers is because MSFT is insane with their CALs, both in licensing and in hoop jumping to remain complaint, whereas Linux has none of those restrictions. The same as WebM adoption would help FOSS developers and for profit websites, but since the majority of us aren't FOSS developers or run for pay websites it don't really help us any, and in fact costs us when we have to replace our devices or hit our bandwidth caps because WebM don't play as nice as H.264.
While what you say is true on the surface, what you have to remember is this: Number 1 the guys doing this ain't poor, and I doubt they'll be selling their trophy which is what the pwn to own prize is.. Number 2 you have the prisoner's dilemma where if everyone else is going after A then the logical course would be to go after B, and Number 3 you have to remember that with all the new security features in Windows (DEP, ASLR, file and registry virtualization) being able to punch through all that will score some serious bragging rights. And finally don't forget the first to pwn gets $10k, which means the easiest target would be hit first since most would rather have 10 grand than a laptop anyway.
So in the end I'd say pwn to own is a pretty fair test, as it is using the bog standard OS with patches and typical software. There are too many ways to rig a test any other way, such as not allowing flash and other typical third party software, and pwn to own has been pretty good about setting up a machine you would see in the typical user's hands.
Now it is a shame that they don't have Linux in the running anymore, but from what I understand there was serious arguments over whether you should use the latest beta, the latest release, or the LTS version and nobody could decide. Considering how fractured the Linux landscape is right now you'd just get "Of course it fell, you used Distro X! You should have used Distro Y instead" anyway I can see why they just quit messing with the Linux portion.
If again you read TFL it gives some excellent examples of why cargo cult usability is a bad idea using Gnome. In OSX the entire design of the OS is applications based, so having a single menu works since everything is treated as an application and thus under the control of the top menu bar. In Linux applications are window based and that means you will often have TWO menu bars instead of one, the Gnome bar PLUS the bar for the application itself.
Now if one were to simply look at the Gnome desktop it looks correct, yet all it takes is using it for any length of time to see they've aped the look, NOT the behavior of the OS they are trying to copy and it all fails.
Now to bring it back to FF look at their recent focus on benchmarks. Lately they seem obsessed with "beating" Chrome in the benchmarks, which frankly I don't doubt they will since so much effort is being focused on it but the browser is suffering as a result. Their "me too!" of putting plugins in a separate container has seriously cranked the bloat and made the browser sluggish (Chrome was built with this in mind and doesn't have this problem) and as I said with the last two builds more than a half a day's usage with multiple tabs can see FF RAM usage jump like mad, consuming nearly all of a nettop's 1.5Gb of RAM, while Chrome simply doesn't have this problem. They've focused on specific tasks in order to match the bullet points of Chrome without making sure they integrate well or cause problems with the underlying design.
So I'd say they are becoming a classic example of cargo cult usability by focusing on the bullet points and benchmarks instead of making sure the tech behind those bullet points will work well with the Gecko engine without a major rewrite. And if it works differently in Linux I'm happy for you, but since Window owns more than 90% of the desktops having something work well in Linux but fall apart in Windows sounds like corporate suicide to me. unless you are gonna argue there is enough money from Linux searches to justify Google paying Mozilla all those millions?
I kinda doubt that Mozilla will be able to stay afloat if they run off all their Windows users, and if they don't do something about the bloat and sluggishness they surely will, as more and more I'm seeing Chrome showing up on the desktops and laptops being brought into the shop. Most of these people were either put on FF by me or a relative and then heard about Chrome through word of mouth. Talking to them about why they switched I hear the same things over and over 'FF is sluggish" "FF is slow" "FF drug the system down". And I would argue if the current path of aping Chrome and trying to match their bullet points were working I wouldn't be hearing that now. The fact that I am just reinforces my contention that FF is headed down the wrong path.
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I'm sorry but when a BROWSER, you know that thing you surf the web with, that is supposed to render HTML? Yeah that thing, when it sucks up more than 1.5Gb of RAM even AFTER closing the tabs, and with only 6 or 7 hours of usage? I'm sorry but I don't see how you can label that anything but suckage.
And the WHOLE POINT of Firefox was to be a light nimble browser instead of the bloat that was the suite, remember that? So what happened? At the start of the 3.x branch memory usage was going down, the leaks were getting fixed, it was running better than ever, so what happened?
I'll tell you what happened Chrome happened with a capital C. Look up the Mozdev blogs see if you find ANY mention of JavaScript benchmarking or plugin containers pre Chrome, you won't. These ideas weren't even on the radar until Chrome showed up and used them as bullet points and then Mozilla pulled a MSFT and went "Me too!" only they didn't test the underlying arch to see if it could handle it first, which it couldn't.
Look, if you want to go back to the bad old days of 2.x with memory hogging all over the place because you've got more RAM than God, that's cool. Most people however DO NOT. As I said more and more machines are coming into my shop with Chrome installed and NOT Firefox. I didn't switch these people, they actively sought out an alternative because "Firefox is slow" "Firefox is sluggish" "Firefox was dragging the machine down" unquote.
Time will tell which one of us is right, but I'm betting its me. I'd love to know what percentage of Chrome users are former Firefox users because I bet that number would be pretty damned high. Most people will never notice that 2% speed gain in some benchmark, just as they will most likely never notice the plugins are in a container. What they WILL notice is that surfing video sites for any length of time will cause Firefox to suck memory like a drunk sucking booze and it does NOT give it back, even with the trim_on_minimize enabled.
And I still say when all you care about is matching bullet points instead of worrying about the underlying tech and if it is capable of performing the task you have a case of cargo cult usability. Gecko simply wasn't made for warp speed JavaScript and sandboxing and the memory usage and responsiveness bears this out. The sad part is thinking they need these bullet points to keep up with Chrome will simply drive more people away, because Chrome does these things without bloating or UI breakdown.
30% of all webservers? Sheesh, and folks wonder why Linux never gets anywhere. I mean here you have a company that sinks serious money into R&D and improvements to the ENTIRE Linux ecosystem, yet because there are so many Linux users that are "free as in beer!" you'd rather run your network on a hacked copy and risk getting screwed, like when CentOS nearly went tits up, than to actually spend a buck and help pay for your own OSes improvements by supporting the company making those improvements.
I'm sure I'll be modded down for daring to point out this sad little bit of reality, but you want to know why Linux is a blip on the map? Here you go. Companies rightfully see there is no money in Linux because FOSSies will go to great lengths not to pay even when it ultimately hurts themselves. Think RH did this change for fun? Nope, it is because you and so many others are slowly killing the company by refusing to buy the product but you want the fruits of their labor anyway.
Say what you want but THIS, this right here, is why the proprietary model wins out over the FOSS model. It is because companies that make good popular products actually get increased capital they can use to grow and expand, whereas with FOSS three minutes after it comes out someone is copying the code to make a cheap knockoff just to get out of paying. Kinda sad actually.
Actually it wasn't the hardware that was the problem. After dealing with one crashing WinME machine after another when I came across a customer that had a PERFECTLY running WinME machine I decided to investigate, and there I found the answer. The reason why WinME sucked for so many. Ready for the revelation?
His machine had NO VXD drivers, only WDM. Checking the other machines (including my own, which after watching a brand new WinME install crash in less than 20 minutes of just sitting I went Win2K) I found that damned near ALL WinMe machines had a mix of VXD and WDM drivers, and there lay badness.
If you had ALL VXD? Fine and dandy. ALL WDM? Good to go. A mix of the two? Welcome to crashy town. Sadly for WinME owners any hardware that had been manufactured pre release already had Win98 VXD drivers written, and since MSFT in their infinite stupidity said you could use VXD drivers the OEMs simply wrote new WDM drivers for new hardware while keeping the VXD for the old, which was usually sound and modem.
So there you have it, the answer to the mystery of why Win98 was more stable than WinME. if you were one of the few that got WDM drivers congrats, you were few and far between. Most of us got a mix and could set our watches by how fast WinME bit the dust.
Yeah but if they charge you $50 for $10 worth of stuff, is it a good deal? I don't think so.
I don't know how the RS is in your area, but in mine the little parts that cost a buck or two WITH shipping at BGMicro will cost you $12+, and a simple printer cable which I bought for just $3 WITH shipping from Monoprice (which is an EXCELLENT source for cable and adapters BTW. I just picked up a couple of 5 pin DIN to 6 pin PS2 for a couple of classic clicky clacky KBs I got give to me for $3 with shipping!) they wanted $18! For just a bloody printer cable!
So while I don't mind shopping local when the prices are reasonable with RS at least in my area you are looking at 400%-600% markups. I'm sorry but at those prices I can afford to wait a day or two.
Oh I agree completely about the one off software and configuring the domain but as I was trying to point out to the guy that said "always shitcan and get a new one" is that you are gonna have to do that anyway because Dell isn't gonna have the specific apps and the domain setup for company X OOTB.
So as you can see simply tossing working hardware that still does its job well make no sense whatsoever since the things that are gonna suck time will have to be done either way, new or wiped and reinstalled. And as I pointed out with just a few simple free tools all the hassles of a wipe and reinstall just disappear and you are left with what you would have to do with a new box...that is installation and configuration of the company specific software and domain settings.
I just don't think the other guy liked being pointed out as wasteful simply because he didn't want to fix the PC. It is just shameful that so many would toss working hardware simply to keep from having to do the work.
Funny I hear Tommy Shaw and an excellent guitar solo, but maybe that's just me ;-)
As for TFA it strikes me funny (again maybe its just me) that he stuck with the consumer OSes until he stuck in Win2K Pro and then suddenly went back to the consumer OSes. Maybe he just blocked out the horror that was WinME? I know there are plenty of us that would like to forget it, although trying to keep Vista running on my machine gave me some serious WinME flashbacks.
What I love is the picture in TFA. I mean could they get ANY more perfect when talking about a system being too slow than to show a couple of old folks outside the airport struggling with their luggage? Hell old folks struggling with baggage should be the picture under "too damned slow" in the dictionary!
As for TFA I'd love for someone to play "follow the money" and see whose palm got greased to pick this system. From the looks of it they picked a system used for BFE middle of nowhere airports and it simply doesn't scale well, which you'd think they would have wanted to see some realtime tests with the amount of data they are cranking before signing the check. My guess is someone there got a really nice "bonus" for picking this system over the others, safety be damned.
Hi flowerpotgirl! If it is that damned security tool variant I feel your pain. I have gotten to the point if they say that have "some sort of security thingie bugging me" I tell them to back up anything they want to keep to flash or DVD (which I'll be happy to sell them or they can use their own) and then I just nuke the bastard. After nuking I scan the flash/DVD with a LiveCD and put their stuff back on. That security tool variant is a royal bitch, and with each new version they add more checks and more places to hide!
In the old days it was easy to clean the bugs out but these new security tool and AV20xx variants are just too damned nasty. You can spend all day cleaning one out only to have a timebomb restore the bug! Nuke it from orbit, it is the only way to be sure anymore.
The problem is MSFT can only add so much before screams of "anti trust!" fill the web. Just look at the stink Norton and the rest tried to put up when Windows started coming with Defender and MSFT started offering Security Essentials for free. Now we all now that if Windows came packed with a free fully functional AV like MS Security it would seriously cut down the rates of infections, but that would not only cut into the pay AV business but would hurt the OEMs by not getting paid to bundle crapware time limited AV.
So in a way you can look at this as just another failing of capitalism, as the long term better for everyone solution is rejected in deference to the short term lets make a buck solution. I know that using a few simple third party tools I am able to make Windows "a toaster with a screen" which is one of my most popular optimizations, where it cleans and defrags its file system and registry, fixes broken shortcuts, takes care of its own AV updates and scanning, hell if I could come up with a way to auto-install third party updates it would be damned near perfect, as it is I have to simply have the OS alert the user when the latest flash or other update is ready.
But sadly if MSFT was to do that, even though it would make the net safer and faster and better for everyone, all the vendors of solutions to those problems would scream "Anti Trust!" so fast it would make your head swim. So in the end we get what we have now, where the user has to know more than they should because many want to profit off their misery. Sad but that is the way of things.
Well I can't answer for him, but I can say my personal record at the last shop I worked at was 4673 pieces of malware all running on this top o' the line Toshiba laptop. It actually took one hour and 43 minutes to boot! Normally we'd just do a wipe and reinstall and never mess with it, but the boss had bet me a pizza and a six pack that it wouldn't beat his record of 2879 pieces of malware running. But I had taken one look at the hipster douche that had brought it in and said "I think I'm beating your record today Doug!". Sure enough I was enjoying a meat lovers and a cold one for supper.
So while I find it hard to believe that someone could get 16,000 bugs and still function you'd be surprised how much shit a user can add before Windows will completely die. The hipster douche had every porn bug known to man and had so many running processes that the brand new Toshiba ran like a 486 trying to load Win98. But we didn't count cookies, only malware, so yeah you get some seriously nasty machines walking in sometimes.
Hey now, that ain't fair to Willis. Give the man credit he did tell people not to watch Die Hard 4 because they had cut it all to hell trying to get the Spiderman teen dollar (I mean WTF? Spiderman teens aren't going to see Die Hard). I mean when you can't even say the catch phrase because of the rating? Crapola.
But I have to agree that most of the shit coming out of the Hollywood crap fest is totally shitty rehashes of movies and shows that frankly had ran out of steam ages ago. The last decent action sequel I saw was Iron Man 2, and even then they nuked the fridge in the last 5 minutes (the bots all have timers? The bad guy takes off his battle helmet in the middle of the battle? WTF?).
Sadly as long as people will pay to see or even play crap, crap will get made. I mean how many CoD and MoH are we up to now? Or Bioshock 2, if there was ever a game that made NO sense having a sequel, it was that. No hanging plot points, no cliffhanger ending, Bioshock 1 was the first game made in ages that wasn't written from the beginning with FRANCHISE written in giant letters hanging over the entire story, so what do they do? Make a sequel...yuck.
I only hope the ever cheapening tech will save us. It is getting cheaper by the day to make quality games and movies. Sure they won't be special effect powerhouses, but how many times have you said "Movie looked good, plot sucked" in the past 5 years? I'll happily play a game with NOLF II level graphics or a movie with 70s level effects if it brings something new to the table which sadly we just don't see hardly anymore. It is just one cookie cutter sequel after another. yawn.
Uhhh..WTF? Several games plug OMM directly in the game, such as the monitors in Postal2 or the developers hidden in Serious Sam which follow Sam when freed and call out "Old Man Murry!" Hell it is common knowledge that the reason you see a crate so early both in the original Half Life and Half Life 2 is because the developers tried to beat OMM's "Start To Crate" (which I still do to this day when playing FPS) and finally said "fuck it" and threw in a crate at the front to basically hang a lampshade on it.
OMM seriously affected games of the late 90s/early 00s because OMM was THE review site because if you could get OMM on your side there was serious buzz to be had. I know I bought Serious Sam as soon as I could could and would have never heard of the game otherwise if it weren't for OMM. So yeah, I gotta call it as I see it, another case of delentionism which the Wiki has waaaay too much of as of late.
If you are looking for LEDs and tons of little parts for projects cheap may I suggest BGMicro? I have a customer that helps the local college robotic and rocketry clubs and has been buying from them for ages and swears by them. You can get everything from solar panels to IR illumination and all the LEDs in every color they make, all cheap and delivered to your door. Great for the DIY project hacker type.
But seriously what would be the point NOW? SCO is a corpse and being divided up by the courts to pay creditors, McBride lost his home, I mean WTH is the point in continuing to harp on about a company that you have already destroyed by proving they were bullshit in the courts?
It would be a hell of a lot better if FOSS guys could just let the damned company die already and instead focus on more pressing issues, like how more and more of the Droid devices coming out have been "TiVo Tricked" making the GPL worthless.
So all this crowing about a long dead company is crazy IMHO when there are lots worse problems brewing like a storm on the horizon. While I've always been a "best tool for the job" kinda guy and never hated one company or another (well except Sony, but who doesn't hate them?) I have always believed in respecting the license and TiVo Tricking is making the GPL into a worthless piece of paper. If the community can't get Linus and those developers using GPL V2 on the tools that corps covet to switch to GPL V3 then the four freedoms that RMS has worked so long and hard advocating simply ceases to exist, because all a company has to do is take all the code they want and TiVo Trick your rights away.
So why not just let SCO fade away into the annals of troll companies and focus some serious attention onto the coming trouble? SCO is toast, McBride isn't even there to kick around and got his house foreclosed on. Meanwhile if there isn't serious debate and action with regards to the mobile industry and TiVo Tricking GPL is gonna be in a world of hurt. So let them die already, there are much rougher battles ahead than from a single lame troll like SCO.
What is condescending about showing the answer of "shitcan everything" isn't always the best answer? not only is it EXTREMELY wasteful and bad for the environment but in the end it still takes the same time since it the company specific apps, not the OS, that uses the most time?
And EXACTLY what "driver problem" are you speaking of? The one that can be easily solved by a simple driver pack on a USB drive that costs you maybe $20 (which you can bill the client for) and just like WSUS Offline takes only a few minutes every three months to update? How is that a problem?
Unless you have some seriously funky one off drivers like C&C controllers in which case the machine isn't gonna be just tossed anyway there IS no driver problem. A good 90%+ of the devices in Windows can run just fine with the default drivers included , and if you want the latest and greatest or run into that 10% the driverpack on a USB stick has that covered and is a hell of a lot faster than any CD at being read to boot.
And installing the business apps? I got news for you you are gonna have to do that anyway since Dell isn't gonna magically have all the software they use ANYWAY. So you are saving ZERO time by bringing in the new box.
Look don't get mad at me because I show filling the landfills with working hardware isn't a good solution either from the environment or from a cost perspective. All it takes is a tiny bit of thinking ahead just a little bit, that can be ran in the background while you're being paid to do something else, that makes ALL the difference and makes Windows installs incredibly simple.
But as I said if you fail to plan then you plan to fail, and I'd argue if installing a brand new box, possibly having to clean the bloatware, and installing all of their apps, takes you less time than a simple format and reinstall then something is wrong with your automation and you really should be looking into it. But hey, if it makes you happy to cost your customers more money on unneeded hardware while tossing working machines in the dump? Hey that is your business. I'm just pointing out from both a time and business standpoint it isn't needed 95% of the time.
Yeah because they treat packages so gently if you don't say anything. Ever see that scene in Ace Ventura? it is funny because it is true! I actually got all the local UPS guys fired because they were sitting around smoking pot (I don't care what you do on your own time but when the office smells like a bong you know you're in trouble) and treating packages liik footballs. The final straw was when I had to send some PCs back not once but twice because they were using them as step ladders and not only were the PCs smashed but there were boot prints on the side where they had stood on them!
Unfortunately for them at the time I was doing some work for the manager for the entire area and when I told her I'd never use her service and why she calmly thanked me for the information, got in her car and drove straight there. The next day when I talked to her she said she walked in and the stench of pot smoke nearly knocked her down and they were all glassy eyed and the place was a mess so she fired them on the spot! Now nobody expects them to treat everything like it is made of glass, but c'mon! Using packages as step ladders? Being fried on the job and screwing up deliveries? The reason so many makes jokes about these places is because so many have had shoddy service so everyone can relate. Now I give Dru credit, once she cleaned house the place has run like clockwork and the packages are always in good shape.
As for TFA it sounds like a good idea to me. I doubt I'd ever use it since I usually buy motherboards as a kit with the box included, but if they are gonna have to use the packing anyway why not give it an extra function? For those that want to take their time and be ultra picky about a case it seems like a no brainer to use Asus now.
What are you talking about? I'm not talking about making a PC specific image (which works fine in corporate, but as you pointed out fails in a mixed environment) I'm talking about using a bog standard Windows CD/DVD and simply having all the patches already integrated since updating is what sucks down the time.
Just use something like Ryan VM to make you a new disc image every three months or so, and update your WSUS Offline monthly. Tada! I have a completely PC agnostic solution that seriously cuts down the time and makes it easy peasy.
So as someone who actually works in SMB/SOHO/Home users I again say "ur doin it wrong" if it is taking anywhere like three hours. Hell the longest part will be installing any custom software they have which you would have to do anyway if they replaced the box so you are saving them $0 by having them toss. All it takes is a little thought my friend. I have my WSUS Offline update monthly, I integrate patches every three in my disc images. Takes maybe an hour of it running in the background while I'm doing other things so it isn't a hardship.
If you fail to plan you plan to fail my friend, and with a little planning ahead of time it doesn't matter what kind of machine they have it is as simple as stick in CD>>>tell it to install>>go work on something else for 25-35 minutes>>insert key and activate on first boot while sticking in WSUS Offline DVD>>go back to working on something else while Windows updates (usually around 20 minutes if your images are close to current)>>go to Ninite to install common apps and then install specific company apps. Tada! About an hour and a half tops.
Yeah but you are kinda missing the point, which is let them fricking DIE already! Sheesh, the company is a corpse, McBride lost his home, this is like going to kick your asshole former neighbor that is now living in a van down by the river "for old times sake".
FOSS guys just don't know when to give it a fricking rest! It is like that old saying "don't go around fighting yesterday's battles" I mean look at how much time and energy FOSS guys waste on hating MSFT, when Bill ain't even there anymore and they are getting their ass royally kicked in mobile which is the new hot growth sector, when what they need to be watching out for is Apple and Google (just look at how many Android phones out there can't be updated thanks to the "TiVo trick" which lets the OEMs take away your four freedoms while taking your code at the same time)
So just let SCO die already. The game is over, the crowds are gone, the fat lady is down the street having a sandwich. The ONLY reason they ever even get any press anymore is FOSS guys keep kicking the corpse!
Question: Why is it taking 3+ hours to do a simple wipe and reinstall? You just wipe the machine, put in a pre built OS install CD/DVD with all the patches already done, put in the key on first boot, install the apps from the local server or via flash drive, done. Maybe an hour and a half tops.
Using a combination of WSUS Offline (which you can tell to include MS Office updates along with MS Essentials AV) and Ninite I can whip off a dozen boxes or more a day easy and spend less time per box than I do trying to figure where I sat my Coke down. Just a little preparation goes a long way friend.
As for TFA, welcome to the game Android users! Anything that becomes popular WILL become a target for malware as long as they can use social engineering, because it is just so damned easy to do as in TFA. I mean 50k infections and they didn't even have to write the app, just attach their malware to an existing app and upload? How easy can you get!
So welcome to the game Android users, where you have to watch out and worry about malware just like us Windows users. The donuts are over in the back, right next to the Apple users who are currently sulking after finding out shiny plastic and aluminum doesn't stop bugs. Look on the bright side, it just means you're popular now! Hell the Linux guys would kill to be that popular on the desktop! So enjoy the coffee it's fresh, meetings are on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Oh I agree completely with regards to the patent minefield and that is why I don't support software patents, as it is all just math at its heart anyway. But the sad fact is as long as we have software patents that gives a serious advantage to the incumbent (what in America doesn't, right?) which means unless you get ahead of the curve you will just end up with a worse solution than what is already out there.
So if I were FOSS developers I wouldn't be looking at the current landscape at all, I'd be trying to work on the next "new thing" so that by the time people caught up we'd already have a FOSS implementation and there wouldn't be a risk of a patent minefield since FOSS held the patents. I'd be looking at 3D codecs and over 4K ultra HD because there WILL be a breakthrough in size limitations, same as in the 90s anything over 640x480 would break you then suddenly we have screens that are full HD for cheap.
But your post just shows why to go toe to toe against H.264 is a sucker's game. MPEG-LA have over 2000 patents in their warchest that covers pretty much the gambit of compression/decompression which means anything the guys at Google cook up that avoid the minefield will be necessity be not as efficient as H.264. And in these days of ISP wanting caps and mobile devices having serious bandwidth costs an inefficient codec simply won't fly.
That is why I say my idea for a MSFT icon would be much more appropriate: Picture Ballmer sticking his tongue out with an "I Heart Apple!" beanie on. In one stroke you've captured Ballmer's undignified CEO style and MSFT's "Me too!" attitude that seems to be the SOP since Ballmer took the reins, see Zune and Kin for examples.
As for TFA, give me a break. MSFT doesn't own Windows they own "Microsoft Windows" same as Apple should be allowed to own the "Apple App Store" but not the word app which is simply application shortened. Hell it isn't even like an app store is a new idea, as Linux had Click N' Run for ages. If Apple wants to claim Apple App Store fine and dandy, but app? Give me a break!
And before someone brings up the Lindows case let me point out that Lindows was putting out a Linux distro that was aping the Windows UI while calling itself a name close enough your average Joe could have been confused if he saw it at the Best Buy. In that one you had a company that was basing their business on confusion with another product, on this you have a concept that has been around forever. Just because you call an application an "app" doesn't magically change it into anything but just another application, sorry Apple.
While you are correct I think a more important point to be made about those is eventually the public believes anything is better than what they've got which is the tipping point that causes the revolution in the first place.
I doubt the average person on the street wanted to round up Jews or go invade Russia like the crazy Austrian (Yes Germans, after being corrected about a dozen times I won't call him a crazy German even though you voted him in okay?) but the people looked around and said "anything has to be better than this" which allowed the crazy Austrian to build momentum.
Looking out my window at the boarded up shops and houses everywhere with for sale signs on them I think we are headed for the crucial "anything has to be better than this" moment with a hell of a lot of people here in the USA. They don't believe in a representative system anymore because they have seen if you "vote the bums out" you just get more bums with a different letter after their name, and sadly there are ever increasing numbers of the poor (which outnumber everyone else by probably 4 to 1 and rising fast) that would be happy to take a communist or even totalitarian regime if it meant a guaranteed job, roof over their heads and food in their bellies.
Never forget the crazy Austrian started out by pushing a "bread and jobs" platform which when you've been out of work for a year and are living hand to mouth sounds pretty good. So don't think it can't happen here, because with the middle class being wiped out, all the factory jobs and now even white collar work being sent overseas, frankly what reason do the poor have to believe in your system? what worse can the other forms of government be when compared to the robber baron "he who has the gold makes the rules" system we have now?
Hi MR AC! I didn't mention cost because I didn't want to set off a flamewar, but here goes: I would argue that WebM would cost more than H.264 to everyone but the "free as in freedom!" crowd who don't use H.264 on principle anyway.
Why would it cost more? simple H.264 acceleration is already a sunk cost so for OEMs we are in the pure profit part of the equation because adding the H.264 support is for all intents and purposes nothing as the chips are already designed and thanks to economies of scale beyond cheap.
Then add to that equation pretty much everything that isn't an x86/64 device will have to be shitcanned, since they can't run WebM without killing the battery and don't have the room for added firmware? Yeah WebM might come out ahead 4 years from now, maybe. But in the meantime it would be a serious cost when compared to simply tossing MPEG-LA their few pennies and calling it a day.,/p>
So I'm sorry but it is one of those arguments like "Linux is free!" that sounds good on the surface but ends up costing you more than staying with the status quo, just as the OS may be free, but the cost of the admins, paying developers to rewrite all that already written code or to develop replacement apps from scratch to replace the software that works on Windows and is mission critical but don't have an equivalent in Linux? It quickly turns into a money sink.
The only reason Linux is a hit on servers is because MSFT is insane with their CALs, both in licensing and in hoop jumping to remain complaint, whereas Linux has none of those restrictions. The same as WebM adoption would help FOSS developers and for profit websites, but since the majority of us aren't FOSS developers or run for pay websites it don't really help us any, and in fact costs us when we have to replace our devices or hit our bandwidth caps because WebM don't play as nice as H.264.
While what you say is true on the surface, what you have to remember is this: Number 1 the guys doing this ain't poor, and I doubt they'll be selling their trophy which is what the pwn to own prize is.. Number 2 you have the prisoner's dilemma where if everyone else is going after A then the logical course would be to go after B, and Number 3 you have to remember that with all the new security features in Windows (DEP, ASLR, file and registry virtualization) being able to punch through all that will score some serious bragging rights. And finally don't forget the first to pwn gets $10k, which means the easiest target would be hit first since most would rather have 10 grand than a laptop anyway.
So in the end I'd say pwn to own is a pretty fair test, as it is using the bog standard OS with patches and typical software. There are too many ways to rig a test any other way, such as not allowing flash and other typical third party software, and pwn to own has been pretty good about setting up a machine you would see in the typical user's hands.
Now it is a shame that they don't have Linux in the running anymore, but from what I understand there was serious arguments over whether you should use the latest beta, the latest release, or the LTS version and nobody could decide. Considering how fractured the Linux landscape is right now you'd just get "Of course it fell, you used Distro X! You should have used Distro Y instead" anyway I can see why they just quit messing with the Linux portion.
If again you read TFL it gives some excellent examples of why cargo cult usability is a bad idea using Gnome. In OSX the entire design of the OS is applications based, so having a single menu works since everything is treated as an application and thus under the control of the top menu bar. In Linux applications are window based and that means you will often have TWO menu bars instead of one, the Gnome bar PLUS the bar for the application itself.
Now if one were to simply look at the Gnome desktop it looks correct, yet all it takes is using it for any length of time to see they've aped the look, NOT the behavior of the OS they are trying to copy and it all fails.
Now to bring it back to FF look at their recent focus on benchmarks. Lately they seem obsessed with "beating" Chrome in the benchmarks, which frankly I don't doubt they will since so much effort is being focused on it but the browser is suffering as a result. Their "me too!" of putting plugins in a separate container has seriously cranked the bloat and made the browser sluggish (Chrome was built with this in mind and doesn't have this problem) and as I said with the last two builds more than a half a day's usage with multiple tabs can see FF RAM usage jump like mad, consuming nearly all of a nettop's 1.5Gb of RAM, while Chrome simply doesn't have this problem. They've focused on specific tasks in order to match the bullet points of Chrome without making sure they integrate well or cause problems with the underlying design.
So I'd say they are becoming a classic example of cargo cult usability by focusing on the bullet points and benchmarks instead of making sure the tech behind those bullet points will work well with the Gecko engine without a major rewrite. And if it works differently in Linux I'm happy for you, but since Window owns more than 90% of the desktops having something work well in Linux but fall apart in Windows sounds like corporate suicide to me. unless you are gonna argue there is enough money from Linux searches to justify Google paying Mozilla all those millions?
I kinda doubt that Mozilla will be able to stay afloat if they run off all their Windows users, and if they don't do something about the bloat and sluggishness they surely will, as more and more I'm seeing Chrome showing up on the desktops and laptops being brought into the shop. Most of these people were either put on FF by me or a relative and then heard about Chrome through word of mouth. Talking to them about why they switched I hear the same things over and over 'FF is sluggish" "FF is slow" "FF drug the system down". And I would argue if the current path of aping Chrome and trying to match their bullet points were working I wouldn't be hearing that now. The fact that I am just reinforces my contention that FF is headed down the wrong path.