In reality it shows what many of us have known for awhile now, which is that Google, like every other western corp, can't be counted on for anything whether you pay for it or not. FYI Google WAS getting paid for this, Google Reader, and every other app they shuttered THROUGH ADS, THAT is their business model, THAT is what they based the company on, now they are acting like "if it don't make iMoney it ain't worth having" and THAT is what is wrong with western corps and why they frankly ain't worth shit anymore.
Take IBM's PC division, they were making between 8-12% profit every year, year after year. But you see while most countries have companies that would say "solid profits every quarter, that's good right?" they weren't making the same as the #1 company of the time which was Dell, so out it had to go! I bet my last dollar that if you looked at all the apps Google has killed, Reader, Buzz, this? That they were all making a profit but it wasn't the profit of (insert #1 company) so it doesn't matter, its worthless.
This is why I've been telling people that actually like Google+ "Don't care about it, look at it as a throw away fly by night service as Google WILL shit all over it trying to make it FB and when it don't make FB money? It'll be shitcanned" and I have been saying this for months. Now what do we see? Google shitting on Google+ AND on Gmail by making it so ANYBODY can add you to a circle and then spam you. its opt OUT not opt in, why? because G+ isn't making FB money, that's why! this is why you can consider every bit of Google to be as worthless as any fly by night, because if it isn't #1? It WILL be shit on and shitcanned, because all that exists is #1 as far as western business is concerned. being #2? is being shit, doesn't matter if its profitable, doesn't matter if its growing, its not #1 so its shit, its worthless.
Let me guess...Windows 8? all that tweeting twits for shits cripples the hell out of that OS. I'm on Win 7 and am playing all the big name titles just fine. I'm not playing Battlefield 4 at 4K but then again I have no desire to be surrounded by 20 somethings bragging about their ePeens so if all you care about if BF4? Then yeah you need an ePeen.
But I'm playing Bioshock Infinite, Max Payne 3, Deus Ex HR, the latest COD, they all play on high above 45 FPS which is all I care about. If I wanted an ePeen a second 7750 in CF will give you roughly the same as a 79xx so if you gotta have the ePeen? Just get 2 of 'em, still cheaper than the new chips, what with all the miners sucking them up as fast as they can make 'em.
And YOU sir might not sound so naive and clueless if you knew that this wouldn't be the first time a honeypot was set up to catch P2P users. Personally I'd trust this about as much as I trust the NSA right now, which is zero. Hell the head of Demonoid said last year the odds of coming back were zip, they had cops all over their asses, then suddenly out of the blue they are back, fulled loaded, plenty of bandwidth? Yeah and if you pull the right leg it plays jingle bells.
No its called "impeaching the witness" and honestly? kinda hard to have a problem with it, really.
Imagine I'm brought in because the church down the street burns. they find me with a smell of gas and paint in my truck, people saw a truck matching mine in the area, etc. Now I go on the stand, under oath mind you, and say "Oh I never had a problem with that church, not a bit" are you gonna HONESTLY argue that nobody should be able to bring up the fact i was caught on video not a week before calling the members of that church every filthy name in the book and wishing it would burn down, really?
Because THAT is what these brain trusts are doing folks, they are broadcasting brags about their crimes in public and then are shocked! Shocked I say, that somebody actually notices they are posing with a bag of dope and an AK47? I got a friend in the state crime lab and believe me, not like the cops have to entrap these knuckle draggers, they ALL think they are fricking Tony Montana! I mean do you have ANY idea how many copies of the "scarface coke shot" he has seen? If it was less than 500 I'd be amazed. these bozos have this shit set to public, practically broadcast this shit to everyone that has ever said hi to them even because they WANT this shit to be seen, because they think they are "big pappa bad ass" that an do like some movie and just flip off the world.
So are we REALLY gonna bitch when cops bust somebody waving a pile of money in front of a mound of dope surrounded by guns and stolen shit and then tweeting that shit to the planet? Really? You might as well say the moron that gets busted at 3AM for driving 80 in a 30 with a half a pound and guns in his car should get a do over because "Well he was stoned, duh". I mean give me a break, if anything they should get an extra 5 years for being so fucking stupid, in the hopes of minimizing the risk to the gene pool!
Oh bull, if little old me could build a decent gaming system for less than that then surely these corps with the economies of scale could do better, but I have a feling their heard the word "game console" and just like "gaming PC" is a codeword for "We'll fuck you hard and raw on price" so too are they trying to make mad money on these units which is royally fucking valve's chances of competing. Now watch how easy it is..
We'll do this the fast and easy way, note that I could probably shave a good $60+ by picking parts individually instead of going kit. Start with AMD hexacore kit which gives you 8Gb of RAM, a 500GB HDD, burner, and a nice case, throw in this HD7750 which is what I game on and it plays quite nicely without sounding like an F15 taking off, and finally add Windows 7 HP 64bit which if we were building a Steambox wouldn't even be a cost.
So final total? Less than $500 building it with Windows, less than $400 building it as a Steambox. Now if little old me can do it there ain't no reason why one of these other companies couldn't make something just as affordable. if Steambox is to have a prayer it needs to have something in the $350-$440 range to make it appealing compared to PS4 and Xbone but at $500? For an i3? Sorry but I fail to see who the thing is gonna sell to. PC gamers are gonna look at the specs and do what I just did and pass, console gamers will compare to PS4 and thanks to Playstation Now their library is gonna curbstomp Steambox, and finally everybody else is gonna look and find out "big name game X" runs on the Windows Steam but does NOT run on the Steambox which will just make Steambox look crippled and sucky. Like it or not the vast majority of PC AAA games? They run on DirectX and very few of them have OpenGL support. Most of the companies simply won't bother with the extra expense of porting it to OpenGL proper over the custom OpenGL ES, especially when the majority of the PC gamers are on Windows, it just won't make good financial sense.
Steambox is stuck with the classic catch 22 in that it needs enough users to get AAA devs porting but they can't get the users until they have the AAA games and unlike Nintendo they just don't make enough first party titles to be compelling on their own enough to sell Steamboxes. So while i was really pumped when i first heard about this now? big meh. the price is too high, not enough big name titles, it looks like a product in search of an audience i just don't see being there.
Exactly! When the whole Aereo thing first hit the news i saw my oldest with a bunch of his college buddies so I asked them "What TV shows do you watch" and what did I get? A bazillion web feeds. When I asked them what shows they watched on the big networks? Blank stares. I asked them what they watched on their TVs and it was "video games, movies" and a good third of them said "I don't have a TV I do everything on the computer".
The modern young adults simply won't put up with that "appointment TV" bullshit, you give them a show when THEY want a show or you can forget it, they ain't watching. I have to say that since moving to this apt 2 years ago? I've become the same way, give it to me on MY schedule or piss off, i got things to do.
If the networks don't embrace the reality of the present, much less the future, they are gonna go the way of AM radio. The smart ones are going with web based content, crowd funding, selling swag, plenty of ways to get a decent show on WITHOUT network meddling and if they don't wake up? I have a feeling the numbers will continue to drop as their audience literally dies out with no new viewers to take their place.
Uhhh...did everybody forget those ubuntu netbooks and laptops already? Wow, short memories here. I can't say as i blame ya though as Dell has hell with Canonical, with them even having to keep their own fork because default ubuntu kept crapping on the drivers.
That said while I was all jazzed up about Steamboxes, now? Its a big meh. i mean the STARTING price is the same as the Xbone, and that is for the LOW END bottom o' the line system? Really? When you can get the octocore PS4 for $100 cheaper? I have a feeling this will go over like a lead balloon, the PC gamers already have Win 7 and DIY, the console gamers aren't gonna pay $100 more than a PS4 for an i3 unit that frankly if it weren't for the stylish case would go for $350 at Worst Buy, and the icing on the fail cake is just how little of the Steam catalog actually runs on the thing. I mean who is gonna want to pay $500 for a machine that gives you a worse catalog than just buying a $299 i3 Worst Buy special and adding an $80 HD7750?
For those looking for a new graphics card? Look at the HD7750 and HD7790. Here at the shop I go through a LOT of different GPUs in builds and I have to say those cards impressed me with just how quiet they are while even playing games. Low heat, the AMD "Zerotech" or whatever its called drops the hell out of the power at idle, just about every video format is accelerated OOTB with AMD's codecs, it is nice enough that when the boys asked what I wanted for Xmas? HD7750. The youngest took one look at how nice it ran games while being uber-quiet and promptly ordered himself an HD7790 (always has to top me in the parts dept LOL) and is likewise just as happy as can be with the performance, just really great cards.
As for TFA? I haven't seen a programmer in years that didn't go multimonitor so maybe this will reverse that trend but I kinda doubt it and more likely we'll just see programmers getting 2 or 3 of those suckers...for "productivity" of course;-)
Hell that is true even for gamers. Take me for an example, old Hairy would build a new PC every other year and have a major upgrade during the halfway point, and now? I have a 4 year old AMD Hexacore with 8Gb of RAM, 3TB of HDD space, and my youngest gave me an HD7750 to replace my aging HD4850 for Xmas...why would i buy a new one again? Windows 7 runs great, all my games and programs run fast, so what would building a new one do except make my wallet several hundred dollars lighter?
But I am here to drive a stake through the heart of "folks are replacing their PCs for cellphones and tablets" bullshit because that is EXACTLY what it is, bullshit. The growth the PC industry had from 1995-2006? That was A BUBBLE, nothing more. The so called "MHz War" made single core chips progress so damned fast that last year's PC would struggle to run the latest and greatest but now? Writing SMP software that can take advantage of these quad, hexa, and octo monsters is damned hard so while the PC has become a monster the software just hasn't kept up. Windows "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone LULZ" 8 certainly didn't help but the simple fact is we small shops guys could have told you this would happen back in 06, when I saw the price dropping on X2s I knew we would quickly end up with PCs too overpowered for most users.
So folks are NOT tossing their PCs for tablets and phones, but they just aren't tossing at all which is why sales are as they are. Why do you think MSFT is having such a hard time getting folks off XP? they didn't have this trouble with Win9X/ME, so why now? Because for Joe and Sally average that 200X PC with a C2D or even Pentium D is frankly fast enough for what they are doing, that is why. The PC has become like the washer and dryer, you just don't need to replace it until it croaks.
Uhh...its the broadcasters themselves that are screwing things up frankly. I mean there is ZERO reason why in 2014 that I shouldn't be able to just go to a webpage and watch my local TV stations, which just FYI I currently can't watch at all because the only way to get a signal here is to get the super to crawl on the roof and set up an antenna and he's backed up a good half a year, but instead they not only don't let the local stations simply stream the same broadcast they are currently showing on the web but thanks to their butt kissing the cablecos you can't even go to the network website and watch same day. meanwhile I can just pirate it and have it commercial free less than 2 hours after broadcast...now which do you think I'm gonna choose?
If they don't get on the damned ball soon there won't be anybody to watch their shit anyway...you talk to the young folks lately? In my shop I talk to young folks every day and I can't remember the last time I talked to a person under 30 that even watched TV, they have all gone to the net and aren't gonna be tethered to some TV at 9,8 central just to watch a damned show. If they don't make things Aereo easy when the current gen dies off its gonna be AM radio, a niche so tiny nobody gives a shit.
Sorry, gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. Last i checked these conflicts come down to RELIGIOUS wars, and since when has a religious war ever stopped because it wasn't profitable?
The problem with the "I ran X back in the day" argument is thus friend...you were running BARE METAL. You really were. Oh you may have THOUGHT you were running an OS but the entire underpinning of Win9X was DOS and so other than some basic I/O when you launched that Quake you may as well have been launching it from CLI for as little as the OS was actually doing.
So sure if that version of Quake was never gonna get on the net, in fact as long as the entire system was firewalled off the net? Then yeah you could play a few old games. But a modern OS has to do a hell of a lot more and comparing the two really isn't fair.
The only problem I have with using HOSTS is that it requires updating to be of use and when it comes to customers? If I did my job right hopefully I won't be seeing them again for years. With ABP and Privdog I don't have to worry about "will they update the thing" as it is done automatically with the latest version every time they launch the browser.
That said I've found a way to go one better than HOSTS, at least for me and my customers, remember how I ran my own DNS? Well I don't have to do that now that Comodo offers their secure DNS for free and with Dragon and IceDragon I can have the browser and ONLY the browser run through their secure DNS. This way anything like games or Steam can hook up directly while the biggest attack vector, the browser, is filtered. Its nice, again auto updating, and best of all for me its a "set and forget" so once set I don't have to ever touch it again and in point of fact since making ads verbotten the only infections I see now are social engineering (Yuo want teh tittiez? Run "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Codex" to see teh hot tittiez!) or when they get "toolbarred" because they refuse to read EULAs. All the actual bugs? Gone, zip zero zilch nada squat.
Do I REALLY need to link to the wikipedia on the Mythical Man-Month? Really? Because that is EXACTLY what "many eyes" is, its Mythical Man-Month applied to code.
In reality "many eyes" is a myth because for "many eyes" to work you'd need 1.- Eyes willing to look at the ENTIRE code, since no code is used in a vacuum, 2.- those eyes have to have the years of experience in low level coding so as to be able to even spot the bug, and 3.- Those eyes have to be willing to do keep checking because new releases keep coming and with them new bugs.
Anyone can do basic math and see how "many eyes" simply cannot work and I'd bet my last buck that if you looked at the logs you'd find the majority of code? Not being looked at by anybody but the guys actually writing the thing. Being FOSS really only gives you ONE major advantage and that is that nobody can just pull the plug, if you need an old version? You can DIY or pay somebody to do it for you. But security wise? Nope, sorry, because OSes are some of the most complex software on the planet and even Torvalds can't tell you with 100% certainty what goes on and what is called when you launch a piece of software, its just too complex with too many interactions.
Well a 486 with a larger cache pretty much WAS the Pentium I dude. Folks don't seem to realize how far we've come, you try doing anything on a PI or PII today and see how fricking painful the kinds of tasks we take for granted are...hell I have a 400MHz PII I got handed to me that is gonna end up in the dumpster just because I can't even find a useful job for the thing.
The last good version was the one released just after the sale, I can't remember if it was Norton 99 or Norton 2000. The tools were still damned good although it really wasn't made for NTFS so no you really can't use it on anything newer than XP and then it needs to be on a FAT32 volume.
But on Win9X? It was the fricking bomb, it was bundled with what was then Roxio GoBack which gave Win9X a kind of system restore which considering how easily a third party program could just write over critical system files Norton Utilities was a "must have" piece of software. I remember we had a ton of Gateway Astro PCs (Apple iMac ripoff) and we ended up selling a copy with every Astro because it took unstable vanilla Win98 and made it grandma proof, really great software it was.
For those that want something similar there are a few freebies out there but I swear by Tuneup Utilities. Sure you could do a lot of it by hand...but why would you want to? It can also do things that would be a PITA to do manually like enabling and disabling software that demands running services (like say iTunes) so that it only runs when you use it, and a ton of other great tools. Best of all its "one click maintenance" will take care of everything either every 3 days or whenever you want. Its low resource and takes the hassle of maintaining a PC.
Because he sold the company back when Win9X was the main OS? Blaming McAfee for the AV being bad would be like blaming Ford's grandkids because the transmission in your Mustang sucks. Actually he has even less to do with it than they do as while some of the Ford family still has shares McAfee sold all the shares to his company before XP came out.
Its the same with Peter Norton who has jack squat to do with Symantec and I'm sure isn't happy how they have run his name through the mud. Both McAfee and Norton back in the early 90s were damned good, they were on the "must have" lists of every IT guy, but the companies were run right into the ground and now they are just cashing in on the name.
And you don't know how many times I've had to deal with an infected PC that was "protected" by some trialware version of Norton or McCrappie from 7-9 years ago. People got trained by al the trialware to just click "no" or "cancel" that they never bothered to read it and then were shocked, shocked I tell you, when their PC became so infected I had to nuke from orbit. Back then we gave folks AVG and now I give them Avast or Comodo IS depending on their skill level but we always avoided Norton and mcCrappie like the clap, worse on any PC than the bugs we'd always say.
I still don't know why Intel bought that garbage but if it means mcCrappie is gonna be bundled with Intel PCs? One more reason to buy AMD I guess.
Well considering its using the Quark chip which if its the same as on their Galileo board (seriously TFA is so light on details it might as well read "Hey we made a thing") then we are talking about a 400Mhz Pentium I here friend. With a chip THAT weak you simply aren't gonna be doing much with the thing....heck other than small embedded jobs I can't even think right off hand of any good jobs for a chip as weak as a P I. I was gonna say MP3 player but then realized most folks expect to be able to play video on their PMPs so that's out...hell I got nothing. What good is a 400Mhz Pentium I when for the same amount of juice you could have an ARM chip that would be able to do more work per watt?
Informative? Really? Because I have to throw a "Citation needed" here as from what I've seen Silvermont is merely Saltwell with some OoO bolted on to try to fix how long certain macro-ops took to go through the pipeline.
I've checked a dozen articles and NOTHING about the new Atom being based on i7, in fact if true this would reverse almost 30 years of history as Intel has always been VERY protective of its top o' the line chips and sells low end chips highly crippled.
Well if you use something like this AMD Bobcat you are looking at 18w under full load and average 6w-8w day to day. You can buy something low powered and cheap like this or one of the Atom or Celeron boards and build a pretty damned cheap and low power router/server/media tank that will last you for quite awhile, is easy to upgrade, and is whisper quiet.
Except what we've seen lately is companies simply quit making the device when they can no longer command premium prices, thus making sure the only way you can get one is to take your chances on the used market. Just look at how many of the first gen dual core tablets are still being sold, you'll find companies like Asus simply quit selling the unit when it can no longer get $300+ per unit.
Personally I hope I'm wrong but sitting here at the shop it looks like the market is gonna end up split in 2, with one half getting premium gear at premium prices and the other getting Cheapo Chinese Crap at affordable prices but shitty support and high failure rates. For those of us that got to enjoy cheap PCs and routers that you could really tweak? Kinda depressing.
I know that is why I've hung onto my LG slider for so long, once you've used a real keyboard and seen how you can whip off an entire letter in less time than it takes to send an sms there really is no comparison. I've pitted it against those who say "Oh you don't need that with these new touch keyboards" and it never fails that no matter how fast they think they are when you figure in the time it takes them to type a message of the same length (and fix all the typos they end up with) my slider runs rings around them.
As for TFA I'd say they can't own the rights to everything that has round buttons but as fucked up as the USPTO has been with handing out bad paper? It really wouldn't surprise me if they win any court battle.
Slashdot Mirror
In reality it shows what many of us have known for awhile now, which is that Google, like every other western corp, can't be counted on for anything whether you pay for it or not. FYI Google WAS getting paid for this, Google Reader, and every other app they shuttered THROUGH ADS, THAT is their business model, THAT is what they based the company on, now they are acting like "if it don't make iMoney it ain't worth having" and THAT is what is wrong with western corps and why they frankly ain't worth shit anymore.
Take IBM's PC division, they were making between 8-12% profit every year, year after year. But you see while most countries have companies that would say "solid profits every quarter, that's good right?" they weren't making the same as the #1 company of the time which was Dell, so out it had to go! I bet my last dollar that if you looked at all the apps Google has killed, Reader, Buzz, this? That they were all making a profit but it wasn't the profit of (insert #1 company) so it doesn't matter, its worthless.
This is why I've been telling people that actually like Google+ "Don't care about it, look at it as a throw away fly by night service as Google WILL shit all over it trying to make it FB and when it don't make FB money? It'll be shitcanned" and I have been saying this for months. Now what do we see? Google shitting on Google+ AND on Gmail by making it so ANYBODY can add you to a circle and then spam you. its opt OUT not opt in, why? because G+ isn't making FB money, that's why! this is why you can consider every bit of Google to be as worthless as any fly by night, because if it isn't #1? It WILL be shit on and shitcanned, because all that exists is #1 as far as western business is concerned. being #2? is being shit, doesn't matter if its profitable, doesn't matter if its growing, its not #1 so its shit, its worthless.
Let me guess...Windows 8? all that tweeting twits for shits cripples the hell out of that OS. I'm on Win 7 and am playing all the big name titles just fine. I'm not playing Battlefield 4 at 4K but then again I have no desire to be surrounded by 20 somethings bragging about their ePeens so if all you care about if BF4? Then yeah you need an ePeen.
But I'm playing Bioshock Infinite, Max Payne 3, Deus Ex HR, the latest COD, they all play on high above 45 FPS which is all I care about. If I wanted an ePeen a second 7750 in CF will give you roughly the same as a 79xx so if you gotta have the ePeen? Just get 2 of 'em, still cheaper than the new chips, what with all the miners sucking them up as fast as they can make 'em.
And YOU sir might not sound so naive and clueless if you knew that this wouldn't be the first time a honeypot was set up to catch P2P users. Personally I'd trust this about as much as I trust the NSA right now, which is zero. Hell the head of Demonoid said last year the odds of coming back were zip, they had cops all over their asses, then suddenly out of the blue they are back, fulled loaded, plenty of bandwidth? Yeah and if you pull the right leg it plays jingle bells.
No its called "impeaching the witness" and honestly? kinda hard to have a problem with it, really.
Imagine I'm brought in because the church down the street burns. they find me with a smell of gas and paint in my truck, people saw a truck matching mine in the area, etc. Now I go on the stand, under oath mind you, and say "Oh I never had a problem with that church, not a bit" are you gonna HONESTLY argue that nobody should be able to bring up the fact i was caught on video not a week before calling the members of that church every filthy name in the book and wishing it would burn down, really?
Because THAT is what these brain trusts are doing folks, they are broadcasting brags about their crimes in public and then are shocked! Shocked I say, that somebody actually notices they are posing with a bag of dope and an AK47? I got a friend in the state crime lab and believe me, not like the cops have to entrap these knuckle draggers, they ALL think they are fricking Tony Montana! I mean do you have ANY idea how many copies of the "scarface coke shot" he has seen? If it was less than 500 I'd be amazed. these bozos have this shit set to public, practically broadcast this shit to everyone that has ever said hi to them even because they WANT this shit to be seen, because they think they are "big pappa bad ass" that an do like some movie and just flip off the world.
So are we REALLY gonna bitch when cops bust somebody waving a pile of money in front of a mound of dope surrounded by guns and stolen shit and then tweeting that shit to the planet? Really? You might as well say the moron that gets busted at 3AM for driving 80 in a 30 with a half a pound and guns in his car should get a do over because "Well he was stoned, duh". I mean give me a break, if anything they should get an extra 5 years for being so fucking stupid, in the hopes of minimizing the risk to the gene pool!
Oh bull, if little old me could build a decent gaming system for less than that then surely these corps with the economies of scale could do better, but I have a feling their heard the word "game console" and just like "gaming PC" is a codeword for "We'll fuck you hard and raw on price" so too are they trying to make mad money on these units which is royally fucking valve's chances of competing. Now watch how easy it is..
We'll do this the fast and easy way, note that I could probably shave a good $60+ by picking parts individually instead of going kit. Start with AMD hexacore kit which gives you 8Gb of RAM, a 500GB HDD, burner, and a nice case, throw in this HD7750 which is what I game on and it plays quite nicely without sounding like an F15 taking off, and finally add Windows 7 HP 64bit which if we were building a Steambox wouldn't even be a cost.
So final total? Less than $500 building it with Windows, less than $400 building it as a Steambox. Now if little old me can do it there ain't no reason why one of these other companies couldn't make something just as affordable. if Steambox is to have a prayer it needs to have something in the $350-$440 range to make it appealing compared to PS4 and Xbone but at $500? For an i3? Sorry but I fail to see who the thing is gonna sell to. PC gamers are gonna look at the specs and do what I just did and pass, console gamers will compare to PS4 and thanks to Playstation Now their library is gonna curbstomp Steambox, and finally everybody else is gonna look and find out "big name game X" runs on the Windows Steam but does NOT run on the Steambox which will just make Steambox look crippled and sucky. Like it or not the vast majority of PC AAA games? They run on DirectX and very few of them have OpenGL support. Most of the companies simply won't bother with the extra expense of porting it to OpenGL proper over the custom OpenGL ES, especially when the majority of the PC gamers are on Windows, it just won't make good financial sense.
Steambox is stuck with the classic catch 22 in that it needs enough users to get AAA devs porting but they can't get the users until they have the AAA games and unlike Nintendo they just don't make enough first party titles to be compelling on their own enough to sell Steamboxes. So while i was really pumped when i first heard about this now? big meh. the price is too high, not enough big name titles, it looks like a product in search of an audience i just don't see being there.
Exactly! When the whole Aereo thing first hit the news i saw my oldest with a bunch of his college buddies so I asked them "What TV shows do you watch" and what did I get? A bazillion web feeds. When I asked them what shows they watched on the big networks? Blank stares. I asked them what they watched on their TVs and it was "video games, movies" and a good third of them said "I don't have a TV I do everything on the computer".
The modern young adults simply won't put up with that "appointment TV" bullshit, you give them a show when THEY want a show or you can forget it, they ain't watching. I have to say that since moving to this apt 2 years ago? I've become the same way, give it to me on MY schedule or piss off, i got things to do.
If the networks don't embrace the reality of the present, much less the future, they are gonna go the way of AM radio. The smart ones are going with web based content, crowd funding, selling swag, plenty of ways to get a decent show on WITHOUT network meddling and if they don't wake up? I have a feeling the numbers will continue to drop as their audience literally dies out with no new viewers to take their place.
Uhhh...did everybody forget those ubuntu netbooks and laptops already? Wow, short memories here. I can't say as i blame ya though as Dell has hell with Canonical, with them even having to keep their own fork because default ubuntu kept crapping on the drivers.
That said while I was all jazzed up about Steamboxes, now? Its a big meh. i mean the STARTING price is the same as the Xbone, and that is for the LOW END bottom o' the line system? Really? When you can get the octocore PS4 for $100 cheaper? I have a feeling this will go over like a lead balloon, the PC gamers already have Win 7 and DIY, the console gamers aren't gonna pay $100 more than a PS4 for an i3 unit that frankly if it weren't for the stylish case would go for $350 at Worst Buy, and the icing on the fail cake is just how little of the Steam catalog actually runs on the thing. I mean who is gonna want to pay $500 for a machine that gives you a worse catalog than just buying a $299 i3 Worst Buy special and adding an $80 HD7750?
For those looking for a new graphics card? Look at the HD7750 and HD7790. Here at the shop I go through a LOT of different GPUs in builds and I have to say those cards impressed me with just how quiet they are while even playing games. Low heat, the AMD "Zerotech" or whatever its called drops the hell out of the power at idle, just about every video format is accelerated OOTB with AMD's codecs, it is nice enough that when the boys asked what I wanted for Xmas? HD7750. The youngest took one look at how nice it ran games while being uber-quiet and promptly ordered himself an HD7790 (always has to top me in the parts dept LOL) and is likewise just as happy as can be with the performance, just really great cards.
As for TFA? I haven't seen a programmer in years that didn't go multimonitor so maybe this will reverse that trend but I kinda doubt it and more likely we'll just see programmers getting 2 or 3 of those suckers...for "productivity" of course ;-)
Hell that is true even for gamers. Take me for an example, old Hairy would build a new PC every other year and have a major upgrade during the halfway point, and now? I have a 4 year old AMD Hexacore with 8Gb of RAM, 3TB of HDD space, and my youngest gave me an HD7750 to replace my aging HD4850 for Xmas...why would i buy a new one again? Windows 7 runs great, all my games and programs run fast, so what would building a new one do except make my wallet several hundred dollars lighter?
But I am here to drive a stake through the heart of "folks are replacing their PCs for cellphones and tablets" bullshit because that is EXACTLY what it is, bullshit. The growth the PC industry had from 1995-2006? That was A BUBBLE, nothing more. The so called "MHz War" made single core chips progress so damned fast that last year's PC would struggle to run the latest and greatest but now? Writing SMP software that can take advantage of these quad, hexa, and octo monsters is damned hard so while the PC has become a monster the software just hasn't kept up. Windows "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone LULZ" 8 certainly didn't help but the simple fact is we small shops guys could have told you this would happen back in 06, when I saw the price dropping on X2s I knew we would quickly end up with PCs too overpowered for most users.
So folks are NOT tossing their PCs for tablets and phones, but they just aren't tossing at all which is why sales are as they are. Why do you think MSFT is having such a hard time getting folks off XP? they didn't have this trouble with Win9X/ME, so why now? Because for Joe and Sally average that 200X PC with a C2D or even Pentium D is frankly fast enough for what they are doing, that is why. The PC has become like the washer and dryer, you just don't need to replace it until it croaks.
Uhh...its the broadcasters themselves that are screwing things up frankly. I mean there is ZERO reason why in 2014 that I shouldn't be able to just go to a webpage and watch my local TV stations, which just FYI I currently can't watch at all because the only way to get a signal here is to get the super to crawl on the roof and set up an antenna and he's backed up a good half a year, but instead they not only don't let the local stations simply stream the same broadcast they are currently showing on the web but thanks to their butt kissing the cablecos you can't even go to the network website and watch same day. meanwhile I can just pirate it and have it commercial free less than 2 hours after broadcast...now which do you think I'm gonna choose?
If they don't get on the damned ball soon there won't be anybody to watch their shit anyway...you talk to the young folks lately? In my shop I talk to young folks every day and I can't remember the last time I talked to a person under 30 that even watched TV, they have all gone to the net and aren't gonna be tethered to some TV at 9,8 central just to watch a damned show. If they don't make things Aereo easy when the current gen dies off its gonna be AM radio, a niche so tiny nobody gives a shit.
Sorry, gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. Last i checked these conflicts come down to RELIGIOUS wars, and since when has a religious war ever stopped because it wasn't profitable?
The problem with the "I ran X back in the day" argument is thus friend...you were running BARE METAL. You really were. Oh you may have THOUGHT you were running an OS but the entire underpinning of Win9X was DOS and so other than some basic I/O when you launched that Quake you may as well have been launching it from CLI for as little as the OS was actually doing.
So sure if that version of Quake was never gonna get on the net, in fact as long as the entire system was firewalled off the net? Then yeah you could play a few old games. But a modern OS has to do a hell of a lot more and comparing the two really isn't fair.
The only problem I have with using HOSTS is that it requires updating to be of use and when it comes to customers? If I did my job right hopefully I won't be seeing them again for years. With ABP and Privdog I don't have to worry about "will they update the thing" as it is done automatically with the latest version every time they launch the browser.
That said I've found a way to go one better than HOSTS, at least for me and my customers, remember how I ran my own DNS? Well I don't have to do that now that Comodo offers their secure DNS for free and with Dragon and IceDragon I can have the browser and ONLY the browser run through their secure DNS. This way anything like games or Steam can hook up directly while the biggest attack vector, the browser, is filtered. Its nice, again auto updating, and best of all for me its a "set and forget" so once set I don't have to ever touch it again and in point of fact since making ads verbotten the only infections I see now are social engineering (Yuo want teh tittiez? Run "Iz_Not_Viruz_Iz_Codex" to see teh hot tittiez!) or when they get "toolbarred" because they refuse to read EULAs. All the actual bugs? Gone, zip zero zilch nada squat.
Do I REALLY need to link to the wikipedia on the Mythical Man-Month? Really? Because that is EXACTLY what "many eyes" is, its Mythical Man-Month applied to code.
And comparing the three it appears I'm right, its more like the 486 or first gen Pentium than the later Pentium Pro/Pentium II design.
In reality "many eyes" is a myth because for "many eyes" to work you'd need 1.- Eyes willing to look at the ENTIRE code, since no code is used in a vacuum, 2.- those eyes have to have the years of experience in low level coding so as to be able to even spot the bug, and 3.- Those eyes have to be willing to do keep checking because new releases keep coming and with them new bugs.
Anyone can do basic math and see how "many eyes" simply cannot work and I'd bet my last buck that if you looked at the logs you'd find the majority of code? Not being looked at by anybody but the guys actually writing the thing. Being FOSS really only gives you ONE major advantage and that is that nobody can just pull the plug, if you need an old version? You can DIY or pay somebody to do it for you. But security wise? Nope, sorry, because OSes are some of the most complex software on the planet and even Torvalds can't tell you with 100% certainty what goes on and what is called when you launch a piece of software, its just too complex with too many interactions.
Well a 486 with a larger cache pretty much WAS the Pentium I dude. Folks don't seem to realize how far we've come, you try doing anything on a PI or PII today and see how fricking painful the kinds of tasks we take for granted are...hell I have a 400MHz PII I got handed to me that is gonna end up in the dumpster just because I can't even find a useful job for the thing.
The last good version was the one released just after the sale, I can't remember if it was Norton 99 or Norton 2000. The tools were still damned good although it really wasn't made for NTFS so no you really can't use it on anything newer than XP and then it needs to be on a FAT32 volume.
But on Win9X? It was the fricking bomb, it was bundled with what was then Roxio GoBack which gave Win9X a kind of system restore which considering how easily a third party program could just write over critical system files Norton Utilities was a "must have" piece of software. I remember we had a ton of Gateway Astro PCs (Apple iMac ripoff) and we ended up selling a copy with every Astro because it took unstable vanilla Win98 and made it grandma proof, really great software it was.
For those that want something similar there are a few freebies out there but I swear by Tuneup Utilities. Sure you could do a lot of it by hand...but why would you want to? It can also do things that would be a PITA to do manually like enabling and disabling software that demands running services (like say iTunes) so that it only runs when you use it, and a ton of other great tools. Best of all its "one click maintenance" will take care of everything either every 3 days or whenever you want. Its low resource and takes the hassle of maintaining a PC.
Because he sold the company back when Win9X was the main OS? Blaming McAfee for the AV being bad would be like blaming Ford's grandkids because the transmission in your Mustang sucks. Actually he has even less to do with it than they do as while some of the Ford family still has shares McAfee sold all the shares to his company before XP came out.
Its the same with Peter Norton who has jack squat to do with Symantec and I'm sure isn't happy how they have run his name through the mud. Both McAfee and Norton back in the early 90s were damned good, they were on the "must have" lists of every IT guy, but the companies were run right into the ground and now they are just cashing in on the name.
And you don't know how many times I've had to deal with an infected PC that was "protected" by some trialware version of Norton or McCrappie from 7-9 years ago. People got trained by al the trialware to just click "no" or "cancel" that they never bothered to read it and then were shocked, shocked I tell you, when their PC became so infected I had to nuke from orbit. Back then we gave folks AVG and now I give them Avast or Comodo IS depending on their skill level but we always avoided Norton and mcCrappie like the clap, worse on any PC than the bugs we'd always say.
I still don't know why Intel bought that garbage but if it means mcCrappie is gonna be bundled with Intel PCs? One more reason to buy AMD I guess.
Well considering its using the Quark chip which if its the same as on their Galileo board (seriously TFA is so light on details it might as well read "Hey we made a thing") then we are talking about a 400Mhz Pentium I here friend. With a chip THAT weak you simply aren't gonna be doing much with the thing....heck other than small embedded jobs I can't even think right off hand of any good jobs for a chip as weak as a P I. I was gonna say MP3 player but then realized most folks expect to be able to play video on their PMPs so that's out...hell I got nothing. What good is a 400Mhz Pentium I when for the same amount of juice you could have an ARM chip that would be able to do more work per watt?
Informative? Really? Because I have to throw a "Citation needed" here as from what I've seen Silvermont is merely Saltwell with some OoO bolted on to try to fix how long certain macro-ops took to go through the pipeline.
I've checked a dozen articles and NOTHING about the new Atom being based on i7, in fact if true this would reverse almost 30 years of history as Intel has always been VERY protective of its top o' the line chips and sells low end chips highly crippled.
Well if you use something like this AMD Bobcat you are looking at 18w under full load and average 6w-8w day to day. You can buy something low powered and cheap like this or one of the Atom or Celeron boards and build a pretty damned cheap and low power router/server/media tank that will last you for quite awhile, is easy to upgrade, and is whisper quiet.
Except what we've seen lately is companies simply quit making the device when they can no longer command premium prices, thus making sure the only way you can get one is to take your chances on the used market. Just look at how many of the first gen dual core tablets are still being sold, you'll find companies like Asus simply quit selling the unit when it can no longer get $300+ per unit.
Personally I hope I'm wrong but sitting here at the shop it looks like the market is gonna end up split in 2, with one half getting premium gear at premium prices and the other getting Cheapo Chinese Crap at affordable prices but shitty support and high failure rates. For those of us that got to enjoy cheap PCs and routers that you could really tweak? Kinda depressing.
I know that is why I've hung onto my LG slider for so long, once you've used a real keyboard and seen how you can whip off an entire letter in less time than it takes to send an sms there really is no comparison. I've pitted it against those who say "Oh you don't need that with these new touch keyboards" and it never fails that no matter how fast they think they are when you figure in the time it takes them to type a message of the same length (and fix all the typos they end up with) my slider runs rings around them.
As for TFA I'd say they can't own the rights to everything that has round buttons but as fucked up as the USPTO has been with handing out bad paper? It really wouldn't surprise me if they win any court battle.