Man isn't it sad that the fan mades are getting better quality story wise than the actual bloody films? I just hope Tim Russ is able to do as good with the new Star Trek Renegades as these guys have done with STC. I saw his "Star Trek: Of Gods & Men" and it was damned good, well acted, nice twists and turns in the story, and unlike Generations he used the actors from ST: TOS that appeared in roles that actually mattered to the story.
I don't know about everybody else but I found the JJ movies alternated between "WTF?" and "You have GOT to be kidding, that's retarded!" when it came to plot. Pines' Kirk comes off as a fratboy and the "plot" just seems to be an excuse to go from one action set piece to another. Honestly it felt more like a video game than a movie and NOT in a good way. That is why I'm happy we have these...now if we can only get Joss Whedon to let Greenwalt and Noxon do that Spike and Dru series my happiness will be complete.
Vista was practically a free gift to Linux, MSFT put out OSes that were truly dispised and what did the developers do? A perfect example of why Linux never goes anywhere, they said "Well things are pretty stable and solid, let's rip out the audio subsystem for a broken mess and replace the DEs with alpha quality code that will make Linux as buggy as Windows 98!"...facepalm.
Lets be honest here...the FOSS advocates claimed Elop was a "plant" well what is THEIR excuse? If you managed to get a plant at every major distro there is NOTHING they could have done to sabotage Linux any better than the actual developers did! Every single time MSFT puts out a major bomb like Vista or Windows 8? Some genius decides THAT is the perfect time to make a major dump on some vital system!
You should try the "Hairyfeet Challenge" sometime, as it perfectly illustrates why Linux is BROKEN, because it only asks that the distro perform half, just half, of a Windows lifecycle, can any distro do it? Nope in fact the only time I had a FOSS advocate claim they had "passed" the challenge they 1.- Had to use SciLinux, a distro designed for research labs and thus broke the very. first. condition of the challenge and then if that wasn't sad enough? When asked about the other conditions of the challenge he admitted that 2.- Sound didn't work, another fail, and 3.-His wireless not only took major CLI to get working but couldn't get WPA or even WEP to work!
That is why I'm really not surprised about the mods and insults, because even when faced with something as basic as "Get your OS to update without breaking itself" is shown to not be possible, do they say "Wow, that is just terrible! We should demand better, why Windows has been able to update itself without crapping on its own drivers since Win2K!" they instead call me every filthy name in the book, send me death threats, and having one FOSSie follow me for 6 months just so he could post at every site I use "die you fat fucker die". Seriously look at the challenge yourself, should we consider an OS to be suitable for purpose if it can't even pass such a simple test?
Take ANY mainstream consumer oriented (not LTS, because even Ubuntu advises against mainstream users using LTS) from FIVE years ago, this simulates a 5 year typical lifecycle. This BTW is less than HALF a windows support cycle, so I'm cutting linux a break. Lets say you use Ubuntu, that would be Ubuntu 9.10 and can be downloaded from their archive. Install it on ANY PC, desktop or laptop (NOT VM as that isn't real hardware and comes with special drivers) that has a wireless card. Wireless is required because more and more mainstream users are ditching wires and nobody wants a laptop that doesn't have wireless, do they?
During this phase you are the system builder so CLI (which is usually required because Linux driver support is poor) IS ALLOWED. Once its installed you are no longer the system builder but THE USER, so like a windows user you are ONLY allowed to use the GUI. You then get to "enjoy the freedom" of using nothing but the GUI (because if you can't even update the thing without CLI you're no match for windows are you) of updating to current...with ubuntu that is SEVEN RELEASES, just FYI. You will film this and post it to youtube, you only have to upload the final install process of each release and a pic of the device manager showing working hardware complete with wireless showing WPA V2 connection, but the complete video should be hosted on dropbox to prove you aren't faking it.
I've tried every major Linux distro, PCLOS, Ubuntu, even Fedora because one fanboy swore that Fedora could pass, yet here it is, 8 years since I first issued the challenge and not. a. single. distro. has had a 100% pass. Not one. And that is just sad.
Actually only getting labeled flamebait is an improvement, I turned down a chance recently to write a "devil's advocate" style column for a Linux magazine because I got tired of death threats and cyberstalking, so a little name calling? Not that big a deal.
What pisses me off is they act like I have some sort of axe to grind when the reality is the opposite...I WANT Linux to work on the desktop, I WANT to be able to hand my customers a shiny new desktop with a brand new Linux distro and be confident that it'll run with security updates for the life of the system...but I can't. Do you have ANY idea how many perfectly good systems I dumped because the cost of Windows would be more than the unit was worth? You name the distro I tried it, and it never failed, they ALWAYS shit all over themselves. I even spent a not inconsiderable amount of time coming up with "The Hairyfeet Challenge" so that there would be an easily reproducible way to show even the most zealot FOSS advocate the areas that were horribly broken.
At the end of the day Linux works great on the server and the reason why is simple, you strip out the most broken parts (like sound and wireless) and its administered by someone with a degree and/or years of diagnostic troubleshooting experience. And the reason it works on Android is simple, Google took control away from the "itch scratchers" and put in place actual standards. The sad part is there is no reason why Linux couldn't be a world class desktop PC OS, couldn't be loaded onto HTPCs and laptops in every B&M on the planet but sadly as long as the so called "advocates" take alpha quality code and attack those that point out the issues? Its just never gonna get any better, it'll start to get stable and then get knocked back down.
Meanwhile guys like me will have to junk perfectly working PCs that have years of life left because the cost of Windows is more than the PC is worth and that is just a damned shame.
They work wonderfully in Windows, haven't seen a major issue in their non beta drivers in years. As for the Linux drivers? AMD has been paying for devs to work on the FOSS drivers and they have said repeatedly their goal is to bring the FOSS drivers up to parity with the cards the proprietary release supports and then replace the proprietary with the FOSS so no duh its not as good, its not where their focus has been in at least a couple years.
Also remember Nvidia makes their drivers run "better" by just ripping out part of the graphics stack and replacing it with a binary blob, and its a company whose hostility to FOSS has caused Linus Torvalds to give them the bird. Finally remember their APUs are ahead of the CPU+GPU combo when it comes to the FOSS drivers so if you want to run AMD with Linux the APU is the way to go.
I'm so far left I've been called a "old commie hippie" so you are speaking to someone who farther away from the right than Rachel Maddow and ya know what? Sorry but I wanna know what the catch is.
Lets be honest friend, Obama has frankly been worse than even Dubya on many issues, from wiretaps to drone strikes, from his flat out ignoring the petition system HE asked for unless it matches his agenda to throwing whistle blowers in jail, the man has been about as far from an actual liberal as one can get. So when I see something like this? I want to know what the angle is, is there a race angle? this administration likes to throw the race card every chance they get, does it give more power to the fed? Something else they seem to love.
So its not just the right friend, those of us on the left have every reason to be looking for the backstab hidden behind the handshake.
He could have created The Washington Monument, that does NOT change the fact that the whacko thought it was perfectly acceptable to sit down ON STAGE no less and ATE TOE CHEESE in front of God and everybody!
Ya know just because somebody was ONCE an insightful person does not mean that they will always be insightful, hell or even sane for that matter. Here we have a person that shows he has no concept of correct public behavior, openly brags about being a homeless squatter, and his views are often frankly self contradictory and don't follow logic (see his "what is a circuit" for some truly amazing logic hoop jumping) and the man doesn't even have the grace or good sense not to piss on his own license by having a childish tantrum and naming a clause after a company he believed didn't uphold "the spirit" of the GPL instead of simply admitting he made errors when coming up with GPL V2. Any way you slice it the man is the best poster child MSFT and Apple ever had, he looks, dresses, and behaves like its 1979 and computers are just toys for homebrew clubs and academia.
As for TFA? Sadly Pottering is another one that MSFT and Apple really should send a fruit basket to, because its him and the devs of his ilk that keep Linux in the backroom instead of the showroom and the reason why is simple...they will NEVER EVER let Linux become fucking stable! I swear these devs and their "itch scratching" are from bizarro world, they are like "Oh noes, things am stable and most stuff am working! This is no good, users am happy and can update without breakage! Quick lets change enough internals that many devices am broken and stability worse than Win2K, that will make users miserable!".
I mean for fucks sake you had MSFT being run by STEVE "Buzzword McBingo" BALMER and you STILL can't gain share, ever wonder why? Well you had the DE devs help out MSFT by taking a steaming dump on the UI with the barely alpha quality KDE 4 release, The Gnome 3 mess, or yeah and Linus made sure to fiddle with the kernel just enough to cause serious driver issues, not to mention the Mickey Mouse Pulse audio which to this very day is usually the most crash prone part of any Linux build. Then you had the whole "What is gonna replace the shitty X Server" mess, Mozilla having to disable hardware acceleration in Linux (which frankly is still piss poor and a decade behind Windows), not to mention here it is 2015 and Linux STILL doesn't have a simple GUI for rolling back drivers or the system if an update takes a steamer on the system (something Windows has had for a decade and a half) and the driver situation is still such a mess hardware OEMs can't just put a penguin on the box and a Linux driver on a CD because hey, what works now may not work 6 months from now!
Sadly at the end of the day Linux is never gonna get any better, its just gonna get different. This is why Linux is getting its ass handed to it by "other" because at the end of the day the devs would rather crank out a new version with new bugs and new problems than fix what they have. Cranking out new software is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than bug fixing, regression testing, writing docs, hell this is the real reason why Linus won't allow Linux to have a stable driver ABI, something every. other. OS. has. because it might mean he couldn't just tweak and twiddle with the kernel like its still 1993 and Linux was only a hobbyist project!
Its a damned shame that FOSS advocates won't hold Linux to the same standards they hold MSFT and Apple, if they flat up refused to take the Mickey Mouse alpha quality shit you could probably whip Linux into an OS that would make Windows 10 look like Windows 3 and OSX look like System 7, all the parts are there, if the devs would actually work to make things better instead of crapping out new versions every other year.
Nooo, folks are getting upset because Google USED to be consumer centric and seemed to really care about its end users, but for the past few years (since around the time they launched G+ and started pushing for real names and tying everything to a single user) they have seemed to toss that out the window in favor of ever higher stock prices.
I have to wonder if this is something that cannot be avoided as it seems every corp that reaches the top of the heap turns into an asshole. Its like they reach a certain point and their drive to innovate and be the best is replaced by a paranoid desire to hang onto what they have and crush competition, from MSFT's OEM contracts to Google's damned near word for word copies of those contracts when it comes to handset makers, its like they reach a point and the engineers are replaced by MBAs and they just turn into giant douchebags.
The reason you don't see something like that on modern PCs is very simple...PCs passed "good enough" several years ago and if it were easy to fix your PC what would drive Joe and Jane Average to buy a new one? My landlord runs his business on a first gen C2D, those were released....what? 8 years ago? But for the tasks he does, bookkeeping, keeping up with his stocks, and web surfing a 2GHz Conroe has cycles to spare. Hell we've had quads for 7 years now and I've found those to be overkill for your non gamers, they just can't come up with enough useful work to keep the cores busy.
That said its really not hard to DIY, there are several tutorials on how to make your own recovery partition but with USB drives being so cheap I usually just install Paragon Baqckup and Recovery Free and have it make a backup capsule (which is a hidden partition that stores encrypted disc images) and then make a weekly differential. this way if anything goes wrong with their PC they can just pop in the USB key and click restore. Paragon by default will look for and load a backup capsule first so all they have to do is choose the previous week's backup and let 'er rip. Combined with a USB HDD backing up their important folders daily the odds of losing anything they care about drops off the map.
The reason you don't see much written about the 8089 is it too ended up absorbed, first into the northbridge/southbridge design and now most of the I/O is handled via the CPU/APU as most of the newest chips are SoC designs.
And I have to call bullshit on your bullshit as the ONLY drives I have seen what you are describing, and frankly I go through more HDDs in a week on average than most folks will see in a couple years, if the frankly notorious "post Maxtor" Seagate 1TB and 1.5TB...let me guess, you got one of those?
Its too bad you don't hang out where the parts hounds do friend, we could have warned ya, just FYI I'd be avoiding any Barracuda 1TB and 1.5TB as the failure rates with those are just nuts. BTW the reason you didn't get a warning? Blame Seagate the skinny is they used a KNOWN BAD controller chip (hence no SMART) on those they got from the Maxtor deal, you see Maxtor got their hands on this dirt cheap ARM controller, we're talking super cheap to manufacture, but the problem is they get flaky as fuck when they get hot and tend to go past the bounds and forget the geometry when their little brains get too warm. Maxtor dealt with this by limiting them to their cheap 5400 RPM drives (you may remember them, DiamondMax? The channel was flooded with them for awhile) but when Seagate bought Maxtor their bean counters looked only at the BOM and how cheap they were to crank out so WHAM! Suddenly they started slapping them in every cheapo drive with predictable results. BTW this is why some were able to be "fixed" with firmware and a few got perfectly working examples, the firmware added checks and some lucky sods got drives with the enterprise ARM chip when they ran low of the cheapos.
But none of that changes the fact that at least with a HDD you can always get your data off (if no other way you can throw together a cheap clean box and swap platters) and as long as you avoid the sucky Seagate models you should always get plenty of heads up. In order of best to worst I would rank 'em Samsung (especially the Ecogreen, in tests I found the 5400 RPM Ecogreen to often match or exceed the Seagate 7200 RPM of same size) followed by Toshiba, Hitachi (despite the buy out they are still making their own drives and they are damned good) WD Green followed by Blue and finally dead last Seagate. If you don't mind a bit of advice? Avoid Seagate above 500Gb and below 2TB, there is a reason why you see all the Tiger kits with either 500Gb Seagates or 1TB WDs and Hitachis,its because they don't want to get their kit builders pissed off by shipping shitty drives. But none of that changes the fact that with HDDs you always have options on getting the data back, if that SSD shits the bed? Its over, its done, you can't even do a controller swap to save the data, its gone forever.
BTW if the drive was clicking? Stick in a ziplock in the freezer for a couple hours, you'd be surprised how much data you can save from even a drive suffering from click death. Just use a sector level copy software that has the ability to ignore errors (I use Paragon but there is plenty of software out there that does the same) and you'd be amazed how much you can get back, I've gotten as much as 85% off drives ticking like a bomb....just FYI but I have yet to recover so much as a single.jpg from a failed SSD, despite their claims that "an SSD will fail into read only mode" in the wild I have yet to see this occur.
I haven't seen any indications of an XP Mode but honestly you really don't need it! Don't ask me how but they have gotten the compatibility mode shims down to a fricking science as I've ran old games that even XP really didn't like (Diablo II LOD, Codename Tenka, No One Lives Forever I) and as long as I stripped out the old 16 bit DRM? Ran like a charm. Hell my 2011 netbook has every.single.driver. on the system, INCLUDING the critical APU drivers, running under compatibility mode and guess what? I even have full codec acceleration! Its fricking AMAZING! That said if you really really REALLY need an old version? Avoid VPC, it sucks. There are several tutorials on how to download the Windows XP Mode VPC container from MSFT and remove it from the VPC container, you can then run it in VMWare which frankly runs rings around VPC.
Look you seem like a decent guy so you didn't get this from me, okay unixisc? If you want to run old versions of Windows going back to Windows 2000? Hit the P2P and look for "eXPerience tiny (insert windows version)", he has 2K, 2K3 (complete with XP skin), Vista, and Windows 7. Each one uses an insanely small amount of memory, 2K uses like 43Mb, XP 65Mb, 2K3 87Mb, Windows 7 like 128Mb, and Vista 384Mb (hey he's a hacker Jim, not a miracle worker LOL) and the things are practically made for VMs, they are just perfect for the task. You probably never heard of them, one of my gamer customers turned me on to them as they were originally cooked up to let gamers run their games with as little overhead as possible. The upside is that same property makes them kick ass for VMs! I have run both a WinXP VM and a Win 7 VM AT THE SAME TIME on a lowly C2D Conroe at 1.8Ghz and it ran smooth as butter! Oh and if the thought of a pirated version of Windows bothers you? You can add your own legal key easy peasy, which will make it just a custom stripped Windows VM.
So there ya have it, an easy to use VM friendly version of Windows that will work just fine on Windows 10, enjoy!
I don't have a single customer running anything else. Lets face it Windows 7 is a great OS! Its rock solid, has excellent device support,unlike XP has sane memory management, also unlike XP was built with 64 bit support as a requirement, its easy to customize should you require it, its just a really good OS. Honestly the only tweaking I do to Windows 7 OOTB is turn off a little of the Aero excess or if its for me personally install the Vista Black theme (what can I say? I like the black taskbar of Vista, only thing I liked about that POS) but other than that there really isn't anything that needs tweaking.
And as far as mainstream? WHO CARES, all mainstream ending means is there will be no more NEW FEATURES....well can anybody here name any "new features" that were released while Win 7 was under mainstream...hmmm? Can you name any "new features" released for Vista under mainstream? Honestly I have sat here thinking and the only new features i can think of released by MSFT under mainstream for their OSes is Dreamscene for Vista (which was only released because Balmer promised "extras" for those that bought Vista Ultimate like it was a fucking video game with DLC and when the lawyers started smelling class action blood in the water they shat out Dreamscene to cover their asses) and setting the firewall to "on" along with a few basic firewall rules in XP SP3....that's it, that's the only "new features" I can think of. Personally I prefer it that way, as having the OS constantly get stuck with a bunch of alpha level code because "hey its new and new is better than old" like a certain OS constantly gets hammered with turns stability into shit and I'll take stable over bleeding edge any day of the week!
I'm running Win 10 Beta on a netbook at the shop and its damned nice, I'm sure if they stay the course it'll be a worthy successor to Win 7. Its faster and uses less memory on the same hardware while retaining the familiar Win 7 desktop, its a nice OS. But until Win 10 is RTM the majority of my systems will be sticking with Win 7 (and even after release I'll probably keep Win 7 on the C2Q in the corner just for Windows DVD Maker) because Windows 7 is just a damned good OS.
Nah what you'll have is what I've started doing with my customers, the SSD for speed and the HDD for storage. You get the best of both worlds and as a nice bonus the HDD can have an image of the SSD so when it shits the bed you can be back up and running in less than 20 minutes.
The problem with SSD is that as the wafers shrink? The errors start shooting WAY up. And so far we haven't seen any sign this is gonna change which makes HDDs frankly the safer choice for storage. I'm sure I'll get some anecdotes from the few guys that had a HDD just shit without warning but at the shop I can tell ya that is REALLY rare, most give you either SMART warning or "delayed write failure" errors long before they die, and while SSDs have been getting better they do so through having a lot of spare cells to cover for the dying ones. As they keep shrinking the process this will get nothing but worse.
BTW just FYI but here is a little tidbit I bet most don't think of, ya know how many SSDs manufacturers will brag about how low their return rate is, like that is an example of how long they last? Yeah...the numbers are total bullshit. You see when they die you get ZERO warning and therefor can't wipe your data and since they demand you send your drive back, which means your pictures, documents, CC info, everything on that PC, will end up in the hands of some Chinese refurb center? Well every shop you talk to will advise you to just shitcan the drive rather than risk ID theft so into the trash they go. So you can't really go by the return numbers when it comes to SSDs as most aren't gonna be foolish enough to send it back and risk ID theft for an RMA.
I know I've personally RMAed several HDDs which I managed to keep working long enough to boot&nuke, have yet to send a single SSD back as when they die? "Its dead Jim"
Every time we get an article like this I always remember holodiscs...remember those? A TB or more of storage on a disc the size of a DVD and a buck or less a pop. It was supposed to "revolutionize storage" and was always "right around the corner".....don't hear anything about it anymore, do ya?
Holodiscs, PRAM, phase change memory...all are "in 10 years" or "right around the corner" but until I see an actual affordable unit in my hot little hands I'll consider this like every other pie in the sky storage solution, just a bunch of hot air and empty promises.
Uhhhhh they still give security updates to WinPhone 7, just FYI. They have also said anybody on Windows 8 WILL be able to upgrade to Windows 10, the reason WinPhone 7 couldn't upgrade was they did a complete change of arch, as significant as Apple going from System to OSX. WinPhone 7 was Windows CE, Windows 8 in both phone and desktop is WinNT.
So if you compare like to like Google STILL loses as the very first WinPhone 7 units still get security updates whereas anything running 4.3 or earlier, which makes the vast majority of Android phones both in retail AND in use, is left with a giant exploitable hole just waiting to be pwned.
However you slice it MSFT is doing the right thing and protecting their customers, Google just gave theirs the finger.
MSFT gave XP users 7 years to migrate to the next version, 5 years past the last sold copies. Meanwhile Google pulls support while the majority is still on the unsupported version and in fact the majority of units being sold in retail are still using the vulnerable build!
C'mon fanboys, have some fucking balls will ya? Quit being hypocrites, if this were ANYBODY else, would you put up with this shit? If Apple found an exploit in iPhone 5 and told the users "fuck you, buy iPhone 6" would you say that is fair? We are talking about devices that can cost half a fricking grand and which are barely two years old people!
If you want to claim that mobile beats the desktop? Then putting up with this Mickey Mouse horseshit has GOT to stop, this is the kind of shit the desktop saw in the 1980s, with everything proprietary, nothing supported, and the answer always being "buy a new one"!
So stop being fucking fanboys and DEMAND BETTER!! If Google puts out a patch and the carriers don't push it? Fine we can jump the carrier's asses but as of right now the FAULT IS WITH GOOGLE, it is THEY who are fucking the users, NOT the carriers! So no excuses, no fanboy bullshit, hold Google to the same standards and nail their asses to the damned wall!
So facts don't matter if they don't match your flag waving? FACT Windows gets 10 years of support, FACT Google abandons their devices less than 2 years after release. Like it or lump it THOSE ARE THE FACTS.
But since your only criteria seems to be which website the info comes from? Here is the same report on ZDNet, you're welcome.
They have billions and law firms on retainer, you most likely do not. Remember there are laws for the peasants and laws for the elite and just as a poor man can steal $500 and go to prison while a corp can steal 500 million and get to dine with the POTUS so too can they do things you as a peasant cannot.
Uhhh because courts HAVE and DO jump to the worst possible conclusion and fuck guy's lives up for nothing? For exhibit A how about men accused of CP thanks to virus which a whole 5 minutes with malwarebytes would have shown the PC was infected, but did the courts even bother to check? Nope in fact on a similar case the prosecutor said he believed it was a "trick" and that "the suspect infected himself" so he would have a fucking excuse! The reason? He had enough technical knowledge to build his own tower....yep, if you can read instructions in the USSA "you be a criminal mastermind yo"!
The problem you and many geeks have with the CP laws is you try to treat the courts as rational actors....they aren't. You try to treat the laws as logical and consistently applied...they aren't. You try to treat the judges and prosecutors as individuals that seek justice and apply the law as fairly as possible....do I really need to point out how wrong you are? THIS IS A WITCH HUNT, and by their very definition Witch. Hunts. Aren't. Rational. and trying to apply rational thought to a witch hunt is just a waste of time!
We have seen time and time again, going all the way back to McMartin Preschool, that sanity and CP are two concepts that just don't go together. Doesn't matter how obvious it is that it isn't your CP, doesn't matter if you don't have the key to the crypto, in fact the laws of many states don't have anything about you personally having access to it, merely that you possess it, so your rational statements? Really do not belong in this discussion.
He's talking about warez, the excuse every warez site and protocol uses has been "we also share Linux ISOs" trying to use the old VHS "some non infringing uses" standard as an excuse.
Sigh, could most (hell any) of the Android 1.x phones run 2.x? Nope, because it was the first release and Google had to learn what NOT to do, so why does everyone think MSFT magically doesn't have the same learning curve everyone else does? Do you think having money means MSFT has precognition?
Lets face it folks out of the big three which one has the most consistent record of long term support? MSFT. Nobody gets it right on the first release, not Google with Android 1.x, not Apple with the Rokr, and not MSFT with WinPhone 7. And let us not forget that they have a new CEO that is a 180 departure from the sweaty one, Nadella seems to be focusing on the customer instead of playing "follow the buzz" like Balmer, so what would be the point of abandoning WinPhone 8 customers?
But TFA is ignoring the reports from all the early adopters that say Lolipop is Google's Vista, its bloated, buggy, doesn't work as well as the previous release....sound familiar? MSFT knows they can't afford to abandon any current WinPhone customers, they simply cannot afford the bad press and backlash, so I'd say WinPhone 8 running WinPhone 10 is something you can take to the bank.
Might want to look at early "rogue like" games as if there is any copy of it around it'll probably be there. BTW have you tried looking on eBay for shareware titles? I bought a pile of like 60 discs a few years back for like $20,probably be your best bet for finding it.
How are you "preserving" games which are currently for sale by offering them for free? I don't see how you can argue that is anything but straight up piracy. hell we aren't even talking about some one off site that the masses have never heard of selling old copies, we are talking the latest fully patched versions being sold worldwide on GOG!
Well look at it THIS way....if you were gonna spend say $40K on a sound system wouldn't YOU want it to look nice and professional? THAT is what you get when you build around a brand, the pieces all have the same color schema, they have been designed to work together and compliment each other, its just a nicer experience.
And as you found out when it comes to Sony? The quality just isn't there, they traded their rock solid rep for short term gains and now the chickens have come home to roost.
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Man isn't it sad that the fan mades are getting better quality story wise than the actual bloody films? I just hope Tim Russ is able to do as good with the new Star Trek Renegades as these guys have done with STC. I saw his "Star Trek: Of Gods & Men" and it was damned good, well acted, nice twists and turns in the story, and unlike Generations he used the actors from ST: TOS that appeared in roles that actually mattered to the story.
I don't know about everybody else but I found the JJ movies alternated between "WTF?" and "You have GOT to be kidding, that's retarded!" when it came to plot. Pines' Kirk comes off as a fratboy and the "plot" just seems to be an excuse to go from one action set piece to another. Honestly it felt more like a video game than a movie and NOT in a good way. That is why I'm happy we have these...now if we can only get Joss Whedon to let Greenwalt and Noxon do that Spike and Dru series my happiness will be complete.
Vista was practically a free gift to Linux, MSFT put out OSes that were truly dispised and what did the developers do? A perfect example of why Linux never goes anywhere, they said "Well things are pretty stable and solid, let's rip out the audio subsystem for a broken mess and replace the DEs with alpha quality code that will make Linux as buggy as Windows 98!"...facepalm.
Lets be honest here...the FOSS advocates claimed Elop was a "plant" well what is THEIR excuse? If you managed to get a plant at every major distro there is NOTHING they could have done to sabotage Linux any better than the actual developers did! Every single time MSFT puts out a major bomb like Vista or Windows 8? Some genius decides THAT is the perfect time to make a major dump on some vital system!
You should try the "Hairyfeet Challenge" sometime, as it perfectly illustrates why Linux is BROKEN, because it only asks that the distro perform half, just half, of a Windows lifecycle, can any distro do it? Nope in fact the only time I had a FOSS advocate claim they had "passed" the challenge they 1.- Had to use SciLinux, a distro designed for research labs and thus broke the very. first. condition of the challenge and then if that wasn't sad enough? When asked about the other conditions of the challenge he admitted that 2.- Sound didn't work, another fail, and 3.-His wireless not only took major CLI to get working but couldn't get WPA or even WEP to work!
That is why I'm really not surprised about the mods and insults, because even when faced with something as basic as "Get your OS to update without breaking itself" is shown to not be possible, do they say "Wow, that is just terrible! We should demand better, why Windows has been able to update itself without crapping on its own drivers since Win2K!" they instead call me every filthy name in the book, send me death threats, and having one FOSSie follow me for 6 months just so he could post at every site I use "die you fat fucker die". Seriously look at the challenge yourself, should we consider an OS to be suitable for purpose if it can't even pass such a simple test?
Take ANY mainstream consumer oriented (not LTS, because even Ubuntu advises against mainstream users using LTS) from FIVE years ago, this simulates a 5 year typical lifecycle. This BTW is less than HALF a windows support cycle, so I'm cutting linux a break. Lets say you use Ubuntu, that would be Ubuntu 9.10 and can be downloaded from their archive. Install it on ANY PC, desktop or laptop (NOT VM as that isn't real hardware and comes with special drivers) that has a wireless card. Wireless is required because more and more mainstream users are ditching wires and nobody wants a laptop that doesn't have wireless, do they?
During this phase you are the system builder so CLI (which is usually required because Linux driver support is poor) IS ALLOWED. Once its installed you are no longer the system builder but THE USER, so like a windows user you are ONLY allowed to use the GUI. You then get to "enjoy the freedom" of using nothing but the GUI (because if you can't even update the thing without CLI you're no match for windows are you) of updating to current...with ubuntu that is SEVEN RELEASES, just FYI. You will film this and post it to youtube, you only have to upload the final install process of each release and a pic of the device manager showing working hardware complete with wireless showing WPA V2 connection, but the complete video should be hosted on dropbox to prove you aren't faking it.
I've tried every major Linux distro, PCLOS, Ubuntu, even Fedora because one fanboy swore that Fedora could pass, yet here it is, 8 years since I first issued the challenge and not. a. single. distro. has had a 100% pass. Not one. And that is just sad.
Actually only getting labeled flamebait is an improvement, I turned down a chance recently to write a "devil's advocate" style column for a Linux magazine because I got tired of death threats and cyberstalking, so a little name calling? Not that big a deal.
What pisses me off is they act like I have some sort of axe to grind when the reality is the opposite...I WANT Linux to work on the desktop, I WANT to be able to hand my customers a shiny new desktop with a brand new Linux distro and be confident that it'll run with security updates for the life of the system...but I can't. Do you have ANY idea how many perfectly good systems I dumped because the cost of Windows would be more than the unit was worth? You name the distro I tried it, and it never failed, they ALWAYS shit all over themselves. I even spent a not inconsiderable amount of time coming up with "The Hairyfeet Challenge" so that there would be an easily reproducible way to show even the most zealot FOSS advocate the areas that were horribly broken.
At the end of the day Linux works great on the server and the reason why is simple, you strip out the most broken parts (like sound and wireless) and its administered by someone with a degree and/or years of diagnostic troubleshooting experience. And the reason it works on Android is simple, Google took control away from the "itch scratchers" and put in place actual standards. The sad part is there is no reason why Linux couldn't be a world class desktop PC OS, couldn't be loaded onto HTPCs and laptops in every B&M on the planet but sadly as long as the so called "advocates" take alpha quality code and attack those that point out the issues? Its just never gonna get any better, it'll start to get stable and then get knocked back down.
Meanwhile guys like me will have to junk perfectly working PCs that have years of life left because the cost of Windows is more than the PC is worth and that is just a damned shame.
They work wonderfully in Windows, haven't seen a major issue in their non beta drivers in years. As for the Linux drivers? AMD has been paying for devs to work on the FOSS drivers and they have said repeatedly their goal is to bring the FOSS drivers up to parity with the cards the proprietary release supports and then replace the proprietary with the FOSS so no duh its not as good, its not where their focus has been in at least a couple years.
Also remember Nvidia makes their drivers run "better" by just ripping out part of the graphics stack and replacing it with a binary blob, and its a company whose hostility to FOSS has caused Linus Torvalds to give them the bird. Finally remember their APUs are ahead of the CPU+GPU combo when it comes to the FOSS drivers so if you want to run AMD with Linux the APU is the way to go.
I'm so far left I've been called a "old commie hippie" so you are speaking to someone who farther away from the right than Rachel Maddow and ya know what? Sorry but I wanna know what the catch is.
Lets be honest friend, Obama has frankly been worse than even Dubya on many issues, from wiretaps to drone strikes, from his flat out ignoring the petition system HE asked for unless it matches his agenda to throwing whistle blowers in jail, the man has been about as far from an actual liberal as one can get. So when I see something like this? I want to know what the angle is, is there a race angle? this administration likes to throw the race card every chance they get, does it give more power to the fed? Something else they seem to love.
So its not just the right friend, those of us on the left have every reason to be looking for the backstab hidden behind the handshake.
He could have created The Washington Monument, that does NOT change the fact that the whacko thought it was perfectly acceptable to sit down ON STAGE no less and ATE TOE CHEESE in front of God and everybody!
Ya know just because somebody was ONCE an insightful person does not mean that they will always be insightful, hell or even sane for that matter. Here we have a person that shows he has no concept of correct public behavior, openly brags about being a homeless squatter, and his views are often frankly self contradictory and don't follow logic (see his "what is a circuit" for some truly amazing logic hoop jumping) and the man doesn't even have the grace or good sense not to piss on his own license by having a childish tantrum and naming a clause after a company he believed didn't uphold "the spirit" of the GPL instead of simply admitting he made errors when coming up with GPL V2. Any way you slice it the man is the best poster child MSFT and Apple ever had, he looks, dresses, and behaves like its 1979 and computers are just toys for homebrew clubs and academia.
As for TFA? Sadly Pottering is another one that MSFT and Apple really should send a fruit basket to, because its him and the devs of his ilk that keep Linux in the backroom instead of the showroom and the reason why is simple...they will NEVER EVER let Linux become fucking stable! I swear these devs and their "itch scratching" are from bizarro world, they are like "Oh noes, things am stable and most stuff am working! This is no good, users am happy and can update without breakage! Quick lets change enough internals that many devices am broken and stability worse than Win2K, that will make users miserable!".
I mean for fucks sake you had MSFT being run by STEVE "Buzzword McBingo" BALMER and you STILL can't gain share, ever wonder why? Well you had the DE devs help out MSFT by taking a steaming dump on the UI with the barely alpha quality KDE 4 release, The Gnome 3 mess, or yeah and Linus made sure to fiddle with the kernel just enough to cause serious driver issues, not to mention the Mickey Mouse Pulse audio which to this very day is usually the most crash prone part of any Linux build. Then you had the whole "What is gonna replace the shitty X Server" mess, Mozilla having to disable hardware acceleration in Linux (which frankly is still piss poor and a decade behind Windows), not to mention here it is 2015 and Linux STILL doesn't have a simple GUI for rolling back drivers or the system if an update takes a steamer on the system (something Windows has had for a decade and a half) and the driver situation is still such a mess hardware OEMs can't just put a penguin on the box and a Linux driver on a CD because hey, what works now may not work 6 months from now!
Sadly at the end of the day Linux is never gonna get any better, its just gonna get different. This is why Linux is getting its ass handed to it by "other" because at the end of the day the devs would rather crank out a new version with new bugs and new problems than fix what they have. Cranking out new software is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than bug fixing, regression testing, writing docs, hell this is the real reason why Linus won't allow Linux to have a stable driver ABI, something every. other. OS. has. because it might mean he couldn't just tweak and twiddle with the kernel like its still 1993 and Linux was only a hobbyist project!
Its a damned shame that FOSS advocates won't hold Linux to the same standards they hold MSFT and Apple, if they flat up refused to take the Mickey Mouse alpha quality shit you could probably whip Linux into an OS that would make Windows 10 look like Windows 3 and OSX look like System 7, all the parts are there, if the devs would actually work to make things better instead of crapping out new versions every other year.
Nooo, folks are getting upset because Google USED to be consumer centric and seemed to really care about its end users, but for the past few years (since around the time they launched G+ and started pushing for real names and tying everything to a single user) they have seemed to toss that out the window in favor of ever higher stock prices.
I have to wonder if this is something that cannot be avoided as it seems every corp that reaches the top of the heap turns into an asshole. Its like they reach a certain point and their drive to innovate and be the best is replaced by a paranoid desire to hang onto what they have and crush competition, from MSFT's OEM contracts to Google's damned near word for word copies of those contracts when it comes to handset makers, its like they reach a point and the engineers are replaced by MBAs and they just turn into giant douchebags.
The reason you don't see something like that on modern PCs is very simple...PCs passed "good enough" several years ago and if it were easy to fix your PC what would drive Joe and Jane Average to buy a new one? My landlord runs his business on a first gen C2D, those were released....what? 8 years ago? But for the tasks he does, bookkeeping, keeping up with his stocks, and web surfing a 2GHz Conroe has cycles to spare. Hell we've had quads for 7 years now and I've found those to be overkill for your non gamers, they just can't come up with enough useful work to keep the cores busy.
That said its really not hard to DIY, there are several tutorials on how to make your own recovery partition but with USB drives being so cheap I usually just install Paragon Baqckup and Recovery Free and have it make a backup capsule (which is a hidden partition that stores encrypted disc images) and then make a weekly differential. this way if anything goes wrong with their PC they can just pop in the USB key and click restore. Paragon by default will look for and load a backup capsule first so all they have to do is choose the previous week's backup and let 'er rip. Combined with a USB HDD backing up their important folders daily the odds of losing anything they care about drops off the map.
The reason you don't see much written about the 8089 is it too ended up absorbed, first into the northbridge/southbridge design and now most of the I/O is handled via the CPU/APU as most of the newest chips are SoC designs.
And I have to call bullshit on your bullshit as the ONLY drives I have seen what you are describing, and frankly I go through more HDDs in a week on average than most folks will see in a couple years, if the frankly notorious "post Maxtor" Seagate 1TB and 1.5TB...let me guess, you got one of those?
Its too bad you don't hang out where the parts hounds do friend, we could have warned ya, just FYI I'd be avoiding any Barracuda 1TB and 1.5TB as the failure rates with those are just nuts. BTW the reason you didn't get a warning? Blame Seagate the skinny is they used a KNOWN BAD controller chip (hence no SMART) on those they got from the Maxtor deal, you see Maxtor got their hands on this dirt cheap ARM controller, we're talking super cheap to manufacture, but the problem is they get flaky as fuck when they get hot and tend to go past the bounds and forget the geometry when their little brains get too warm. Maxtor dealt with this by limiting them to their cheap 5400 RPM drives (you may remember them, DiamondMax? The channel was flooded with them for awhile) but when Seagate bought Maxtor their bean counters looked only at the BOM and how cheap they were to crank out so WHAM! Suddenly they started slapping them in every cheapo drive with predictable results. BTW this is why some were able to be "fixed" with firmware and a few got perfectly working examples, the firmware added checks and some lucky sods got drives with the enterprise ARM chip when they ran low of the cheapos.
But none of that changes the fact that at least with a HDD you can always get your data off (if no other way you can throw together a cheap clean box and swap platters) and as long as you avoid the sucky Seagate models you should always get plenty of heads up. In order of best to worst I would rank 'em Samsung (especially the Ecogreen, in tests I found the 5400 RPM Ecogreen to often match or exceed the Seagate 7200 RPM of same size) followed by Toshiba, Hitachi (despite the buy out they are still making their own drives and they are damned good) WD Green followed by Blue and finally dead last Seagate. If you don't mind a bit of advice? Avoid Seagate above 500Gb and below 2TB, there is a reason why you see all the Tiger kits with either 500Gb Seagates or 1TB WDs and Hitachis,its because they don't want to get their kit builders pissed off by shipping shitty drives. But none of that changes the fact that with HDDs you always have options on getting the data back, if that SSD shits the bed? Its over, its done, you can't even do a controller swap to save the data, its gone forever.
BTW if the drive was clicking? Stick in a ziplock in the freezer for a couple hours, you'd be surprised how much data you can save from even a drive suffering from click death. Just use a sector level copy software that has the ability to ignore errors (I use Paragon but there is plenty of software out there that does the same) and you'd be amazed how much you can get back, I've gotten as much as 85% off drives ticking like a bomb....just FYI but I have yet to recover so much as a single .jpg from a failed SSD, despite their claims that "an SSD will fail into read only mode" in the wild I have yet to see this occur.
I haven't seen any indications of an XP Mode but honestly you really don't need it! Don't ask me how but they have gotten the compatibility mode shims down to a fricking science as I've ran old games that even XP really didn't like (Diablo II LOD, Codename Tenka, No One Lives Forever I) and as long as I stripped out the old 16 bit DRM? Ran like a charm. Hell my 2011 netbook has every.single.driver. on the system, INCLUDING the critical APU drivers, running under compatibility mode and guess what? I even have full codec acceleration! Its fricking AMAZING! That said if you really really REALLY need an old version? Avoid VPC, it sucks. There are several tutorials on how to download the Windows XP Mode VPC container from MSFT and remove it from the VPC container, you can then run it in VMWare which frankly runs rings around VPC.
Look you seem like a decent guy so you didn't get this from me, okay unixisc? If you want to run old versions of Windows going back to Windows 2000? Hit the P2P and look for "eXPerience tiny (insert windows version)", he has 2K, 2K3 (complete with XP skin), Vista, and Windows 7. Each one uses an insanely small amount of memory, 2K uses like 43Mb, XP 65Mb, 2K3 87Mb, Windows 7 like 128Mb, and Vista 384Mb (hey he's a hacker Jim, not a miracle worker LOL) and the things are practically made for VMs, they are just perfect for the task. You probably never heard of them, one of my gamer customers turned me on to them as they were originally cooked up to let gamers run their games with as little overhead as possible. The upside is that same property makes them kick ass for VMs! I have run both a WinXP VM and a Win 7 VM AT THE SAME TIME on a lowly C2D Conroe at 1.8Ghz and it ran smooth as butter! Oh and if the thought of a pirated version of Windows bothers you? You can add your own legal key easy peasy, which will make it just a custom stripped Windows VM.
So there ya have it, an easy to use VM friendly version of Windows that will work just fine on Windows 10, enjoy!
I don't have a single customer running anything else. Lets face it Windows 7 is a great OS! Its rock solid, has excellent device support,unlike XP has sane memory management, also unlike XP was built with 64 bit support as a requirement, its easy to customize should you require it, its just a really good OS. Honestly the only tweaking I do to Windows 7 OOTB is turn off a little of the Aero excess or if its for me personally install the Vista Black theme (what can I say? I like the black taskbar of Vista, only thing I liked about that POS) but other than that there really isn't anything that needs tweaking.
And as far as mainstream? WHO CARES, all mainstream ending means is there will be no more NEW FEATURES....well can anybody here name any "new features" that were released while Win 7 was under mainstream...hmmm? Can you name any "new features" released for Vista under mainstream? Honestly I have sat here thinking and the only new features i can think of released by MSFT under mainstream for their OSes is Dreamscene for Vista (which was only released because Balmer promised "extras" for those that bought Vista Ultimate like it was a fucking video game with DLC and when the lawyers started smelling class action blood in the water they shat out Dreamscene to cover their asses) and setting the firewall to "on" along with a few basic firewall rules in XP SP3....that's it, that's the only "new features" I can think of. Personally I prefer it that way, as having the OS constantly get stuck with a bunch of alpha level code because "hey its new and new is better than old" like a certain OS constantly gets hammered with turns stability into shit and I'll take stable over bleeding edge any day of the week!
I'm running Win 10 Beta on a netbook at the shop and its damned nice, I'm sure if they stay the course it'll be a worthy successor to Win 7. Its faster and uses less memory on the same hardware while retaining the familiar Win 7 desktop, its a nice OS. But until Win 10 is RTM the majority of my systems will be sticking with Win 7 (and even after release I'll probably keep Win 7 on the C2Q in the corner just for Windows DVD Maker) because Windows 7 is just a damned good OS.
Nah what you'll have is what I've started doing with my customers, the SSD for speed and the HDD for storage. You get the best of both worlds and as a nice bonus the HDD can have an image of the SSD so when it shits the bed you can be back up and running in less than 20 minutes.
The problem with SSD is that as the wafers shrink? The errors start shooting WAY up. And so far we haven't seen any sign this is gonna change which makes HDDs frankly the safer choice for storage. I'm sure I'll get some anecdotes from the few guys that had a HDD just shit without warning but at the shop I can tell ya that is REALLY rare, most give you either SMART warning or "delayed write failure" errors long before they die, and while SSDs have been getting better they do so through having a lot of spare cells to cover for the dying ones. As they keep shrinking the process this will get nothing but worse.
BTW just FYI but here is a little tidbit I bet most don't think of, ya know how many SSDs manufacturers will brag about how low their return rate is, like that is an example of how long they last? Yeah...the numbers are total bullshit. You see when they die you get ZERO warning and therefor can't wipe your data and since they demand you send your drive back, which means your pictures, documents, CC info, everything on that PC, will end up in the hands of some Chinese refurb center? Well every shop you talk to will advise you to just shitcan the drive rather than risk ID theft so into the trash they go. So you can't really go by the return numbers when it comes to SSDs as most aren't gonna be foolish enough to send it back and risk ID theft for an RMA.
I know I've personally RMAed several HDDs which I managed to keep working long enough to boot&nuke, have yet to send a single SSD back as when they die? "Its dead Jim"
Every time we get an article like this I always remember holodiscs...remember those? A TB or more of storage on a disc the size of a DVD and a buck or less a pop. It was supposed to "revolutionize storage" and was always "right around the corner".....don't hear anything about it anymore, do ya?
Holodiscs, PRAM, phase change memory...all are "in 10 years" or "right around the corner" but until I see an actual affordable unit in my hot little hands I'll consider this like every other pie in the sky storage solution, just a bunch of hot air and empty promises.
Uhhhhh they still give security updates to WinPhone 7, just FYI. They have also said anybody on Windows 8 WILL be able to upgrade to Windows 10, the reason WinPhone 7 couldn't upgrade was they did a complete change of arch, as significant as Apple going from System to OSX. WinPhone 7 was Windows CE, Windows 8 in both phone and desktop is WinNT.
So if you compare like to like Google STILL loses as the very first WinPhone 7 units still get security updates whereas anything running 4.3 or earlier, which makes the vast majority of Android phones both in retail AND in use, is left with a giant exploitable hole just waiting to be pwned.
However you slice it MSFT is doing the right thing and protecting their customers, Google just gave theirs the finger.
Cordelia Chase? As in Charisma Carpenter? What about her? I haven't seen or heard anything by her since her Playboy pics.
MSFT gave XP users 7 years to migrate to the next version, 5 years past the last sold copies. Meanwhile Google pulls support while the majority is still on the unsupported version and in fact the majority of units being sold in retail are still using the vulnerable build!
C'mon fanboys, have some fucking balls will ya? Quit being hypocrites, if this were ANYBODY else, would you put up with this shit? If Apple found an exploit in iPhone 5 and told the users "fuck you, buy iPhone 6" would you say that is fair? We are talking about devices that can cost half a fricking grand and which are barely two years old people!
If you want to claim that mobile beats the desktop? Then putting up with this Mickey Mouse horseshit has GOT to stop, this is the kind of shit the desktop saw in the 1980s, with everything proprietary, nothing supported, and the answer always being "buy a new one"!
So stop being fucking fanboys and DEMAND BETTER!! If Google puts out a patch and the carriers don't push it? Fine we can jump the carrier's asses but as of right now the FAULT IS WITH GOOGLE, it is THEY who are fucking the users, NOT the carriers! So no excuses, no fanboy bullshit, hold Google to the same standards and nail their asses to the damned wall!
So facts don't matter if they don't match your flag waving? FACT Windows gets 10 years of support, FACT Google abandons their devices less than 2 years after release. Like it or lump it THOSE ARE THE FACTS.
But since your only criteria seems to be which website the info comes from? Here is the same report on ZDNet, you're welcome.
They have billions and law firms on retainer, you most likely do not. Remember there are laws for the peasants and laws for the elite and just as a poor man can steal $500 and go to prison while a corp can steal 500 million and get to dine with the POTUS so too can they do things you as a peasant cannot.
Uhhh because courts HAVE and DO jump to the worst possible conclusion and fuck guy's lives up for nothing? For exhibit A how about men accused of CP thanks to virus which a whole 5 minutes with malwarebytes would have shown the PC was infected, but did the courts even bother to check? Nope in fact on a similar case the prosecutor said he believed it was a "trick" and that "the suspect infected himself" so he would have a fucking excuse! The reason? He had enough technical knowledge to build his own tower....yep, if you can read instructions in the USSA "you be a criminal mastermind yo"!
The problem you and many geeks have with the CP laws is you try to treat the courts as rational actors....they aren't. You try to treat the laws as logical and consistently applied...they aren't. You try to treat the judges and prosecutors as individuals that seek justice and apply the law as fairly as possible....do I really need to point out how wrong you are? THIS IS A WITCH HUNT, and by their very definition Witch. Hunts. Aren't. Rational. and trying to apply rational thought to a witch hunt is just a waste of time!
We have seen time and time again, going all the way back to McMartin Preschool, that sanity and CP are two concepts that just don't go together. Doesn't matter how obvious it is that it isn't your CP, doesn't matter if you don't have the key to the crypto, in fact the laws of many states don't have anything about you personally having access to it, merely that you possess it, so your rational statements? Really do not belong in this discussion.
He's talking about warez, the excuse every warez site and protocol uses has been "we also share Linux ISOs" trying to use the old VHS "some non infringing uses" standard as an excuse.
Sigh, could most (hell any) of the Android 1.x phones run 2.x? Nope, because it was the first release and Google had to learn what NOT to do, so why does everyone think MSFT magically doesn't have the same learning curve everyone else does? Do you think having money means MSFT has precognition?
Lets face it folks out of the big three which one has the most consistent record of long term support? MSFT. Nobody gets it right on the first release, not Google with Android 1.x, not Apple with the Rokr, and not MSFT with WinPhone 7. And let us not forget that they have a new CEO that is a 180 departure from the sweaty one, Nadella seems to be focusing on the customer instead of playing "follow the buzz" like Balmer, so what would be the point of abandoning WinPhone 8 customers?
But TFA is ignoring the reports from all the early adopters that say Lolipop is Google's Vista, its bloated, buggy, doesn't work as well as the previous release....sound familiar? MSFT knows they can't afford to abandon any current WinPhone customers, they simply cannot afford the bad press and backlash, so I'd say WinPhone 8 running WinPhone 10 is something you can take to the bank.
Might want to look at early "rogue like" games as if there is any copy of it around it'll probably be there. BTW have you tried looking on eBay for shareware titles? I bought a pile of like 60 discs a few years back for like $20,probably be your best bet for finding it.
How are you "preserving" games which are currently for sale by offering them for free? I don't see how you can argue that is anything but straight up piracy. hell we aren't even talking about some one off site that the masses have never heard of selling old copies, we are talking the latest fully patched versions being sold worldwide on GOG!
Well look at it THIS way....if you were gonna spend say $40K on a sound system wouldn't YOU want it to look nice and professional? THAT is what you get when you build around a brand, the pieces all have the same color schema, they have been designed to work together and compliment each other, its just a nicer experience.
And as you found out when it comes to Sony? The quality just isn't there, they traded their rock solid rep for short term gains and now the chickens have come home to roost.