Ooookay, then explain EXACTLY how I'm supposed to make money when somebody can give away my work for free and there ain't a damned thing I can do about it?
It is THIS, this right here that has made Liunux on the desktop a non starter, as there is ZERO way for anybody to make dime on the desktop. Just ask Canonical how much money they have lost of Shuttleworth's with pretty much zero chance of ever getting into the black. After all why would anybody give a dime for Ubuntu when they can have every. single. bit. of work canonical does for free with mint or any of the other derivatives? Not to mention the whole "busted shitter" problem where major bugs last for years because nobody is being paid to fix them.
The GPL works in servers because the money isn't in the software, its in hosting and hardware. it works in embedded because Google is able to make money from ads (and they refuse to go near GPL V3 as they lock down more and more of Android) but just as you will NEVER in a million years see a triple A video game that is GPL so too will Linux go nowhere on the desktop thanks to GPL.
Its just too bad that the community continues to hang onto a mistaken belief that because a license works in ONE place it will work in ALL places. At the end of the day the ONLY places where the GPL can work is if your business can fall under the "blessed three" model of 1.-Selling support/services, 2.- Selling hardware, 2.- The tin cup begging model. If your business can't get enough capital to function using one of those three, like videogames or desktops? Well there is a reason why Jobs took BSD and built an empire and Shuttleworth took Linux and just bled his bank account for his trouble.
Well friend that is what isn't making a shitting lick of sense when it comes to this either. After all if all they care about is microcontrollers? the ARM systems are a LOT, we are talking several orders of magnitude better supported here and if its for some legacy crap program? Well DOSBox runs just fine on ARM and would probably run better than on a CPU that was out of date a dozen years ago.
Hell these don't even have ISA board support which is the only place I've ran into a need for ancient computing solutions, everything else? You could run a good 2 or 3 VMs of DOS on that Bobcat board so to me this is a solution in search of a problem that hasn't existed since the mid 00s. Even that mini Atom board Intel put out last year would run rings around a 300MHz 486.
Actually those are REALLY easy to spot and are easy to tell when compared to say somebody like me who is just opinionated. So allow old Hairy to explain in a few easy steps "How you too can spot the Shill"
1.- Look at the account history, do they only post on articles by a single company? this used to be the easiest way to spot the shill but the corps got wise to it and started having their shills do more AC posting. yet another reason to ban AC posts I say.
2.- A shill account will have nearly every post be "on message" and be either pumping up the target of the shilling or nailing that company's rivals. For an example if a poster ONLY writes glowing posts for company X and shits on company Y? Probably a shill.
3.- The easiest "tell" of the shill, the language. Shills get "talking points" from the corps that they need to incorporate to get paid and since those points are written by marketing? Total buzzword bingo. You'll see words like "synergy" and phrases like "user experience" and "positive flow". Basically the kind of shit you'd hear in some mid level PHB board meeting, which is frankly unlike anyone who isn't in marketing would talk.
So there ya go, with these 3 simple tells you too can play "Spot the Shill" and get close to 90% accuracy. Why not 100%? Because its damned hard sometimes to tell the difference between a shill and a rabid fanboy, but usually the fanboy will get their panties twisted enough and put enough passion in the post to spot them over a shill who is merely making a living. For an example look up the/. articles on MacDefender and MacGuardian and ther you will see posters arguing up and down they "don't count" because they don't meet some technical BS criteria for a "virus". Now THOSE are fanboys as a shill would try to change the subject, the fanboy will keep right on digging the hole they are sticking themselves in.
Ya know what? Give ME complete and total control of your PC and I can promise you you will NEVER get malware again? Sound like a good deal? No?
Well that is EXACTLY what you have done when you sold your ass to Apple INC as they and ONLY THEY get to say what YOU can do with THEIR device. And make no mistake it IS their device, you don't have shit to say about it, they can pull any app you paid for, cut off support, oh and make sure that only THEIR programs get top shelf like Safari.
But if you want Big Mommie to wipe your nose while they smack your hand (and take your wallet) you go right ahead sparky, the rest of us like to actually own and control our devices.
Well not to mention that unless ALL you care about is getting the teeniest tiniest device with X86 you can possibly get this isn't really a good value because for a few bucks more you can get an AMD Bobcat board which gives you dual cores, an HD6310 GPU capable of 1080P over HDMI and you can use up to 8GB of RAM.
I'd say if you want a dirt cheap X86 board they can't be beat, you can even use something like OpenELEC which has the drivers and XBMC baked in and have a nice media tank/HTPC for less than $200 complete. I've built several as media tanks and even replacements for aging P4s in offices and I have to say everybody just loves the things, quiet as can be, just sips power, great little systems they are.
Flag on the play, dumbass on the field, 15 yard penalty.
I build PCs for a living and have since the days of The Shat selling VIC 20s with his TJ Hooker hair and if "Windows is almost 100% unreliable" for you then 1.- You haven't touched Windows since Win98SE, or more likely 2.- you sir are a moron who clicks on every "punch the clown and win an iPad" ad on the next and clicky clicky through every EULA you get from any dodgy site. So which is it?
as for TFA? Couldn't happen to a shittier company. I have several gamer customers and the failure rate of the OCZs was just nuts, I don't think a single one managed to make it past the warranty. They were especially bad about controller failures where you would just flip the switch and...nothing, the drive wouldn't even show up in the BIOS. As for Toshiba buying them? The only Toshiba drives I've bought in their portable ones but they were always reliable so let us hope that its a case of the quality going up to the parent, not like Seagate where Maxtor seemed to drag down the quality of Seagate after purchase.
Uhhh..."redefining"? This is just COINTELPRO updated for the age of social media. The government has been suppressing and in some cases outright murdering activists for decades, this is nothing new. For an example see the middle of the Wiki entry I linked to, outright execution of an activist by members of the US gov, no charges filed of course.
They DON'T HAVE TO, since Dell and HP only care about selling cheap ass lappies guess whre Joe and Jane have to go when they want an HTPC? To...drumroll...guys like me who know about such things because we have been building computers for ages.
That doesn't change the fact that every single problem you have brought up has already been addressed and solved,most ages ago. UI? Solved, in fact one of the few positives of the new metro UI is OOTB it makes a great 10 foot UI. Program support? Solved with XBMC. Controllers, connecting it to a TV, controller friendly games, all of this was solved ages ago.
The only "positive" you get from a console now is helping the bottom line of Sony or MSFT. if that is your thing go for it, most of us here would rather spend our money wisely and get good prices thanks to the increased competition. Try it, I bet you'll like it.
They could sign a document telling Sweden they will NOT under any circumstances try to have him brought to the US, as well as to pressure Sweden to sign the document the Ecuadorians produced saying they agree not to ship him to another country.
But of course Nobama "Yes we can (but I won't)" will NEVER in a million years do that because THIS IS A LIE. Somebody high up has gotten tired of not being able to give Assange a rendition ride and they know that short of hitting the embassy and insuring that no US ambassador will EVER be safe again there is not a damned thing they can do so they made a few calls to get their lapdogs in the media (Just FYI but the post was the one calling for Assange's head the loudest, they are owned by the gov) to try to lure him out.
I would strongly suggest you watch this video and learn what you are REALLY up against. BTW please keep in mind that this video was made in 07 so thanks to "Yes I can (but I won't)" embracing every nasty play by Dubya and cooking up a few of his own things are WORSE NOW. Notice how many things we have in common with countries that suddenly had a complete loss of freedom like Germany and the USSR? Its not a slope, its a plunge.
Uhhh...you DO know that you don't HAVE to stick with the default shell,yes? And that nearly every emulator out there ALREADY has a version built specifically for XBMC which solves pretty much EVERY problem you have brought up, yes? And that its free in both senses of the word?
Seriously give it a try as I have set up several XBMC based HTPCs for customers and they love it. 10 foot UI with multiple choices of UI and layout, emulators already designed to plug into XBMC, it pretty much solves every problem you seem to have with replacing a console with a (frankly superior on performance and media prices) PC short of plugging in the HDMI cable for you.
Uhhh..you might want to look up the history of the FDA friend as its one of the government services that has a DAMN good reason for existing!
You see back in the 1920s, soon after the discovery of Radium and X-Rays...and you just KNOW when a sentence starts like that its gonna end badly..a bunch of companies started selling "Health restoring radium water" which of course not only had zero oversight since there wasn't an FDA but also had zero standards when it came to doses. Needless to say several people died most horribly, including on industrialist whose jaw literally rotted off and who ended up so damned radioactive that they had to bury him in a lead casket to keep him from contaminating the entire area, and THAT is the event that caused the birth of the FDA.
Now if you want to argue that this shouldn't be under their jurisdiction? Fine and dandy although I would argue that a bad test result could cause folks to die as they might ignore symptoms because "The test says I'm not at risk for X", not to mention we have ZERO proof that their labs are even monitored in any way. Don't forget that there was a gal at a state crime lab recently that got busted for just tossing samples and telling cops what they wanted to hear and who knows whether or not they have any bad apples at this place so...yeah I kinda want their to be oversight when it comes to DNA testing, especially since more and more things like insurance and jobs could very well be affected by bad results.
I guess you missed the memo but you see they have these things called emulators and as the homebrew guys get a better handle on a system it doesn't take them long to create a good working emulator.
Oh and unlike your Sony and Nintendo products thanks to emulators you can play every game from the NES-Wii on the Nintendo side and PS1-PS2 on the Sony side (PS3 is still in development which is understandable because of the Cell SPU) so you don't have to worry about losing your old games just because you got a new system. BTW I still have PC games I bought in the late 90s and guess what? They play just fine. In fact its been ages since I actually ran across a game I have trouble playing, no matter how old, and thanks to GOG I didn't even have to mess with DOSBox tweaking to get my Redneck Rampage and Blood fix as they had both preconfigured. Just gotta love that backwards compatibility.
Sorry but"creationism of agriculture" flag on the play, bullshit on the field, 50 yard penalty.
You show ANY place where Farmer Brown has been able to cross breed fricking insects and fish into his crops? I'll buy your bullshit but until then GMOs are just that,bullshit. You have Monsanto (who seems to be in a race with Goldman Sachs on who can be the most like Wolfram & Hart) not only creating plants that frankly shouldn't even be considered plants as they have insect, animal, fish, God knows what else mixed in, but when their frankenstein shit contaminates natural crops they get to sue the shit out of the poor bastard whose crops were contaminated....bullshit.
So please don't try to feed us that "no different than crosbreeding" horseshit because I have yet to see anyplace in the entire history of farming where animal and insect were crossbred with plants by farmer Brown. And that isn't even addressing the elephant rotting in the corner which is how this shit seems to be able to contaminate everything from neighboring crops to weeds. Just wait until Roundup Ready ends up in the Kudzu and we'll see how much you like that crap.
Nice strawman, be a shame if this match were to get too close...WHOOSH!
The SMART gaming houses have ALREADY FIGURED OUT how to make mad money even WITH the Steam sales..ready to have your mind blown? here it comes....its called DLC!
I bought 3 copies of Borderlands II on a Steam sale for $30, know how much I ACTUALLY ended up spending on the game? Over $100. I bought all the expansions, bought the loot packs and the level upgrades, and am now buying the "headhunter packs" which will add another $20 or so to the final total. This has been the case with multiple games and talking to customers that game they too have been buying up the DLC and since digital distribution is free for the game publishers once they have paid their employees that is all free money.
But hey you wanna get assraped by consoles that treat you as a combination walking wallet and shoplifter? bend over and spread those cheeks pal. But if the devs weren't making money on Steam sales guess what? They wouldn't HAVE THEM. Its called supply and demand, I know its an alien concept to the corp behind kissers as the corps in the west are as anti-capitalism as can be and see the free market as a hindrance to monopolies but PC gaming is a perfect example of a free market in action and IT WORKS. You have multiple competing sources so the price will naturally seek equilibrium which appears to be $40-$50 for new releases then quickly dropping to the $20 sweet spot.
If a game publisher can't make money without assraping their customers maybe they should be in another line of work. Look at Payday:The Heist as a perfect example of how game publishing SHOULD be, they listened to their customers, gave them what they asked for WITHOUT going insane on the budget and guess what? Preorders alone had the game profitable and every sale after release day is just gravy. Now THAT is how it should be done, but you won't see me crying because some corp makes yet another "Call of Honor:Gears of Killzone" knock off and can't make back their budget, boo fricking hoo.
And piracy has gone down 5 years in a row but God fucking forbid if the corps don't have somebody to blame for their failures. Wonder what excuses the publishers are gonna use on the "DRM in a box phone home daily to check if you are a filthy shoplifter" new consoles? Wanna bet they blame darknets or some other bullshit buzzword bingo? There has been piracy since the days of the floppy, yet billions have been made every year for ages. Good games make money, shitty games don't, welcome to reality, quit using piracy as an excuse to cover up for your badly overblown budgets on shitty games that care more about HDR and lens flare than they do on a decent gaming experience, how about that?
What trouble would that be? Plugging a single HDMI cable in? Having MUCH more choice when it comes to controllers and having much better prices? "Oh woe is me, I have too many games for sale at very cheap prices, if only some corp would take away all the competition and assrape my wallet!"
Mark my words, Steambox is gonna slaughter. You'll be able to run games from pretty much anywhere (its a fully GPLed OS after all) and with the lower PC prices and wider selection it seems like it will be pretty much the only consumer friendly console this gen.
Tigerdirect has several quad laptops under $400 and several hexacore desktops for under $500 and high DPI means exactly jack and squat on a little screen. I also note that you avoided the simple truth that the ONLY difference between what Foxconn makes for Apple and the low end Dell crap is the screen. Again you can make a million DPI screen 1 inch wide...who cares, the world has settled on 1080p and the amount of content that is coming out native to Retina is so tiny as not to exist.
Actually that rumor was proved to be false and they only recovered IIRC 9 episodes which leaves around 100 still lost.
While it would have been nice if the rumor had been true it looks like a good chunk of the episodes missing were never sold overseas (for example the creator of the Daleks was trying to get a Dalek show made in the USA so they never sold any of the Dalek episodes) which makes their recovery very VERY unlikely as its overseas where all missing episodes so far have been found.
As for fav Doctor? Frankly all of them but Colin Baker had their moments (his hammy acting style combined with that outfit just made him a turn off for me) but for me it would be a toss up between Troughton's chessmaster and Tom Baker's eccentric for the classic series and while I would have liked to have seen Eccleston stay on a little longer Tennant was damned good in the role, even episodes like "blink" where he is barely in it his performance sticks with you.
Well what did Sony expect? Their online store stinks, prices suck, its got great hardware...but what good is that? Not like you can access the hardware to do anything with the thing that isn't corp approved so it could be more powerful than a hundred PS4s but without a killer line up the specs are just pointless.
I have a feeling when the Steambox comes out all the other consoles are gonna be royally screwed. it seems like the corps went out of their way to be as consumer UNFRIENDLY as possible this round, like they all got together and said "if we were gonna get together and screw the buyers like a Bangkok whore on coupon day what would we do?" and they went down the list and just went nuts. As I was pointing out to some folks thinking of buying a console there really is NO upsides to the consoles over the PC this gen, and when it comes to handhelds? Well the mobile devices like tablets and phones are getting crazy powerful and they seem to get the lion's share of devs anymore.
What we need is for somebody to come along and do like Valve is doing with the Steambox on the mobile front, come out with a minimum set of specs and control layout and then let all the companies compete. But I think the days of separate game handhelds will soon be over, folks don't like carrying extra devices around and if your phone or tablet is already crazy powerful why not just use it to game?
But at what cost? The power of the high end GPUs like the top Tesla units are frankly insane while the power of both AMD and Intel CPUs has been going down. Last I checked those top o the line GPUs sucked so much juice you could probably run a 32 core Intel and still use less juice and require less cooling.
You'll probably laugh but ya know what works for me? WMP 12 on Win 7. I can stream my tunes from any system on my network, there is some great third party DSPs that can really let you tweak the hell out of the sound (great for those older tracks that was made with less than optimal MP3 rippers) and honestly I haven't had a bit of a problem with bloat but then again I tend to strip out anything I know I'll never use. But I have my streaming box which is a 1.8GHz C2D with 2GB of RAM so if a system THAT old makes for a good streaming server then most anything will.
Mind a bit of advice? If you want a media tank that will be cheap on your wallet AND your electric bill look up the AMD Bobcat boards on Amazon. Its a 1.6GHz dual core with Radeon 63XX baked in, only uses 18w under heavy load yet is still powerful enough to do 1080P over HDMI and they make great media tanks. Just slap 4GB of RAM in it and place it in any standard mATX case which you can then fill with drives. As a bonus the Bobcat runs VERY quiet, you can even get it passively cooled if you wish, so its easy to just stuff in a closet or corner and forget about. Also makes a great file and backup server BTW.
Folks can make fun of it but you know what I've found works fricking great on my over 80GB MP3 collection? WMP, specifically the WMP 12 that comes with Win 7. Its easy to fix missing tag info with it, has a smart sort so I can cook up playlists like "Things I listened to a lot in the past 6 months but not lately" and all in all its been really solid.
As for TFA the original designer of Winamp said it would die when he left and he said the reason was "the service" AKA AOHell dialup. He said "they just kept jamming more and more crap pushing the service into WA, it didn't matter if our data showed WA users DID NOT WANT the service, that it was costing us users, all they cared about was the service".
Maybe we should get together a petition to have WA made FOSS? After all it wouldn't be the first time a former commercial product rose from the ashes as FOSS, Netscape anyone?
I can buy a damned nice hexacore system for $500, and a quad core laptop for $399. Apple uses the same Foxconn shit as Dell yet charges premium prices and I'm sorry but its a scam, they are making crazy high margins because they are selling snake oil as the ONLY thing they have that is better than your average shitty Dell is the screen, that's it.
Look up "The Hairyfeet Challenge" to see why *nix don't cut it my friend. You are obviously a system admin and thus its trivial for you to admin your own systems, I on the other hand work primarily with home users, SOHOs, and SMBs and with them it better "just work" and any fuck up, like say Ubuntu shitting on the wireless or Mint doing a dump on the video? Then its ME that is gonna get a hit to my rep.
What the FOSS zealots here refuse to accept that you have seen with your own eyes is that from Vista on up? Once you set Windows up right, with the default user not running as admin, a low rights browser like Dragon or Chrome, and a decent AV like Comodo IS or Avast then that's it. That system can easily run for the life of the system with ZERO maintenance and with ALL the patches installed automatically. as long as Torvalds is in the big chair Linux will have "update foo broke my drivers" because he cares about "GPL purity" than he does a functioning system, sorry but he cares more about the politics than the OS.
So while I'm glad you have found something that works for you, in the markets I make my bread and butter in? Linux isn't even up to XP yet it terms of stability and functionality, MAYBE Win2K RTM levels but folks want a heck of a lot more now like functioning wireless and updates that don't crap on the system and in that regard Linux has a ways to go.
Oh lord let us hope so! My dad needed a new laptop when he had to go into rehab after knee surgery and all they had was Win 8 and I thought "My dad is the kind of folks Win 8 is supposed to be targeted at, those that know very little about computing and maybe the big icons will help him see a little better". I figured this would be the perfect user test and dropped it off at lunch and told him I'd be back at supper....know what I got told when I got there? "Take this son of a bitch and run over it with your truck!". BTW he was NOT joking, he was THAT pissed off at Windows 8!
Personally I have never seen a product so broken an I have used every version of Windows, home and business, since Windows 3.1/WinNT 3.5, and have NEVER seen such a fucking trainwreck,even WinME wasn't THIS bad. How anybody can defend that POS I'll never know because after spending the night hacking the reg and putting a shell replacement in I got it to "kinda sorta" behave like Win 7 but it was still annoying enough that my dad went and bought a tablet and put the new laptop in the closet. Everybody says "oh just use Start8/ClassicShell whatever and its just like Win 7"...bullshit, fucking BULLSHIT, as you can NEVER fully kill that charms and swipe horseshit!
So like you I'm hanging onto my Win 7 discs for dear life but I don't know what the fuck we are gonna do if MSFT puts "Burning Moron" Elop in charge as the man sounds like he thinks EVERYTHING should be a fucking sailphone, Linux isn't ever gonna be stable on drivers as long as Torvalds has a pulse, Android is like Linux frankly buggy as fuck (and this is coming from somebody who loves his Android phone but I have to deal with more hangs and CPU spikes and bullshit from Android than I have EVER had to deal with from Windows) and Apple is locked down and overpriced, so WTF? If the software houses start requiring Win 8/9 we be fucked and unless they get somebody with some fucking sense in the big chair it looks like MSFT is gonna become a shitty Apple clone.
Preach brother! I have tried just about every browser out there and frankly they ALL suck when it comes to writes, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have either it'll just keep pounding the drive. I mean when I have 8GB of RAM on my netbook there really isn't any excuse for touching the drive until browser close yet the one program that will keep my drive pounded is the browser. Even my audio editing in audacity doesn't seem to hit the drive as much as looking at simple web pages, and that is with ABP and flashblock!
Slashdot Mirror
Ooookay, then explain EXACTLY how I'm supposed to make money when somebody can give away my work for free and there ain't a damned thing I can do about it?
It is THIS, this right here that has made Liunux on the desktop a non starter, as there is ZERO way for anybody to make dime on the desktop. Just ask Canonical how much money they have lost of Shuttleworth's with pretty much zero chance of ever getting into the black. After all why would anybody give a dime for Ubuntu when they can have every. single. bit. of work canonical does for free with mint or any of the other derivatives? Not to mention the whole "busted shitter" problem where major bugs last for years because nobody is being paid to fix them.
The GPL works in servers because the money isn't in the software, its in hosting and hardware. it works in embedded because Google is able to make money from ads (and they refuse to go near GPL V3 as they lock down more and more of Android) but just as you will NEVER in a million years see a triple A video game that is GPL so too will Linux go nowhere on the desktop thanks to GPL.
Its just too bad that the community continues to hang onto a mistaken belief that because a license works in ONE place it will work in ALL places. At the end of the day the ONLY places where the GPL can work is if your business can fall under the "blessed three" model of 1.-Selling support/services, 2.- Selling hardware, 2.- The tin cup begging model. If your business can't get enough capital to function using one of those three, like videogames or desktops? Well there is a reason why Jobs took BSD and built an empire and Shuttleworth took Linux and just bled his bank account for his trouble.
Well friend that is what isn't making a shitting lick of sense when it comes to this either. After all if all they care about is microcontrollers? the ARM systems are a LOT, we are talking several orders of magnitude better supported here and if its for some legacy crap program? Well DOSBox runs just fine on ARM and would probably run better than on a CPU that was out of date a dozen years ago.
Hell these don't even have ISA board support which is the only place I've ran into a need for ancient computing solutions, everything else? You could run a good 2 or 3 VMs of DOS on that Bobcat board so to me this is a solution in search of a problem that hasn't existed since the mid 00s. Even that mini Atom board Intel put out last year would run rings around a 300MHz 486.
Actually those are REALLY easy to spot and are easy to tell when compared to say somebody like me who is just opinionated. So allow old Hairy to explain in a few easy steps "How you too can spot the Shill"
1.- Look at the account history, do they only post on articles by a single company? this used to be the easiest way to spot the shill but the corps got wise to it and started having their shills do more AC posting. yet another reason to ban AC posts I say.
2.- A shill account will have nearly every post be "on message" and be either pumping up the target of the shilling or nailing that company's rivals. For an example if a poster ONLY writes glowing posts for company X and shits on company Y? Probably a shill.
3.- The easiest "tell" of the shill, the language. Shills get "talking points" from the corps that they need to incorporate to get paid and since those points are written by marketing? Total buzzword bingo. You'll see words like "synergy" and phrases like "user experience" and "positive flow". Basically the kind of shit you'd hear in some mid level PHB board meeting, which is frankly unlike anyone who isn't in marketing would talk.
So there ya go, with these 3 simple tells you too can play "Spot the Shill" and get close to 90% accuracy. Why not 100%? Because its damned hard sometimes to tell the difference between a shill and a rabid fanboy, but usually the fanboy will get their panties twisted enough and put enough passion in the post to spot them over a shill who is merely making a living. For an example look up the /. articles on MacDefender and MacGuardian and ther you will see posters arguing up and down they "don't count" because they don't meet some technical BS criteria for a "virus". Now THOSE are fanboys as a shill would try to change the subject, the fanboy will keep right on digging the hole they are sticking themselves in.
Ya know what? Give ME complete and total control of your PC and I can promise you you will NEVER get malware again? Sound like a good deal? No?
Well that is EXACTLY what you have done when you sold your ass to Apple INC as they and ONLY THEY get to say what YOU can do with THEIR device. And make no mistake it IS their device, you don't have shit to say about it, they can pull any app you paid for, cut off support, oh and make sure that only THEIR programs get top shelf like Safari.
But if you want Big Mommie to wipe your nose while they smack your hand (and take your wallet) you go right ahead sparky, the rest of us like to actually own and control our devices.
Well not to mention that unless ALL you care about is getting the teeniest tiniest device with X86 you can possibly get this isn't really a good value because for a few bucks more you can get an AMD Bobcat board which gives you dual cores, an HD6310 GPU capable of 1080P over HDMI and you can use up to 8GB of RAM.
I'd say if you want a dirt cheap X86 board they can't be beat, you can even use something like OpenELEC which has the drivers and XBMC baked in and have a nice media tank/HTPC for less than $200 complete. I've built several as media tanks and even replacements for aging P4s in offices and I have to say everybody just loves the things, quiet as can be, just sips power, great little systems they are.
Flag on the play, dumbass on the field, 15 yard penalty.
I build PCs for a living and have since the days of The Shat selling VIC 20s with his TJ Hooker hair and if "Windows is almost 100% unreliable" for you then 1.- You haven't touched Windows since Win98SE, or more likely 2.- you sir are a moron who clicks on every "punch the clown and win an iPad" ad on the next and clicky clicky through every EULA you get from any dodgy site. So which is it?
as for TFA? Couldn't happen to a shittier company. I have several gamer customers and the failure rate of the OCZs was just nuts, I don't think a single one managed to make it past the warranty. They were especially bad about controller failures where you would just flip the switch and...nothing, the drive wouldn't even show up in the BIOS. As for Toshiba buying them? The only Toshiba drives I've bought in their portable ones but they were always reliable so let us hope that its a case of the quality going up to the parent, not like Seagate where Maxtor seemed to drag down the quality of Seagate after purchase.
Uhhh..."redefining"? This is just COINTELPRO updated for the age of social media. The government has been suppressing and in some cases outright murdering activists for decades, this is nothing new. For an example see the middle of the Wiki entry I linked to, outright execution of an activist by members of the US gov, no charges filed of course.
They DON'T HAVE TO, since Dell and HP only care about selling cheap ass lappies guess whre Joe and Jane have to go when they want an HTPC? To...drumroll...guys like me who know about such things because we have been building computers for ages.
That doesn't change the fact that every single problem you have brought up has already been addressed and solved,most ages ago. UI? Solved, in fact one of the few positives of the new metro UI is OOTB it makes a great 10 foot UI. Program support? Solved with XBMC. Controllers, connecting it to a TV, controller friendly games, all of this was solved ages ago.
The only "positive" you get from a console now is helping the bottom line of Sony or MSFT. if that is your thing go for it, most of us here would rather spend our money wisely and get good prices thanks to the increased competition. Try it, I bet you'll like it.
They could sign a document telling Sweden they will NOT under any circumstances try to have him brought to the US, as well as to pressure Sweden to sign the document the Ecuadorians produced saying they agree not to ship him to another country.
But of course Nobama "Yes we can (but I won't)" will NEVER in a million years do that because THIS IS A LIE. Somebody high up has gotten tired of not being able to give Assange a rendition ride and they know that short of hitting the embassy and insuring that no US ambassador will EVER be safe again there is not a damned thing they can do so they made a few calls to get their lapdogs in the media (Just FYI but the post was the one calling for Assange's head the loudest, they are owned by the gov) to try to lure him out.
I would strongly suggest you watch this video and learn what you are REALLY up against. BTW please keep in mind that this video was made in 07 so thanks to "Yes I can (but I won't)" embracing every nasty play by Dubya and cooking up a few of his own things are WORSE NOW. Notice how many things we have in common with countries that suddenly had a complete loss of freedom like Germany and the USSR? Its not a slope, its a plunge.
Uhhh...you DO know that you don't HAVE to stick with the default shell,yes? And that nearly every emulator out there ALREADY has a version built specifically for XBMC which solves pretty much EVERY problem you have brought up, yes? And that its free in both senses of the word?
Seriously give it a try as I have set up several XBMC based HTPCs for customers and they love it. 10 foot UI with multiple choices of UI and layout, emulators already designed to plug into XBMC, it pretty much solves every problem you seem to have with replacing a console with a (frankly superior on performance and media prices) PC short of plugging in the HDMI cable for you.
Uhhh..you might want to look up the history of the FDA friend as its one of the government services that has a DAMN good reason for existing!
You see back in the 1920s, soon after the discovery of Radium and X-Rays...and you just KNOW when a sentence starts like that its gonna end badly..a bunch of companies started selling "Health restoring radium water" which of course not only had zero oversight since there wasn't an FDA but also had zero standards when it came to doses. Needless to say several people died most horribly, including on industrialist whose jaw literally rotted off and who ended up so damned radioactive that they had to bury him in a lead casket to keep him from contaminating the entire area, and THAT is the event that caused the birth of the FDA.
Now if you want to argue that this shouldn't be under their jurisdiction? Fine and dandy although I would argue that a bad test result could cause folks to die as they might ignore symptoms because "The test says I'm not at risk for X", not to mention we have ZERO proof that their labs are even monitored in any way. Don't forget that there was a gal at a state crime lab recently that got busted for just tossing samples and telling cops what they wanted to hear and who knows whether or not they have any bad apples at this place so...yeah I kinda want their to be oversight when it comes to DNA testing, especially since more and more things like insurance and jobs could very well be affected by bad results.
I guess you missed the memo but you see they have these things called emulators and as the homebrew guys get a better handle on a system it doesn't take them long to create a good working emulator.
Oh and unlike your Sony and Nintendo products thanks to emulators you can play every game from the NES-Wii on the Nintendo side and PS1-PS2 on the Sony side (PS3 is still in development which is understandable because of the Cell SPU) so you don't have to worry about losing your old games just because you got a new system. BTW I still have PC games I bought in the late 90s and guess what? They play just fine. In fact its been ages since I actually ran across a game I have trouble playing, no matter how old, and thanks to GOG I didn't even have to mess with DOSBox tweaking to get my Redneck Rampage and Blood fix as they had both preconfigured. Just gotta love that backwards compatibility.
Sorry but"creationism of agriculture" flag on the play, bullshit on the field, 50 yard penalty.
You show ANY place where Farmer Brown has been able to cross breed fricking insects and fish into his crops? I'll buy your bullshit but until then GMOs are just that,bullshit. You have Monsanto (who seems to be in a race with Goldman Sachs on who can be the most like Wolfram & Hart) not only creating plants that frankly shouldn't even be considered plants as they have insect, animal, fish, God knows what else mixed in, but when their frankenstein shit contaminates natural crops they get to sue the shit out of the poor bastard whose crops were contaminated....bullshit.
So please don't try to feed us that "no different than crosbreeding" horseshit because I have yet to see anyplace in the entire history of farming where animal and insect were crossbred with plants by farmer Brown. And that isn't even addressing the elephant rotting in the corner which is how this shit seems to be able to contaminate everything from neighboring crops to weeds. Just wait until Roundup Ready ends up in the Kudzu and we'll see how much you like that crap.
Nice strawman, be a shame if this match were to get too close...WHOOSH!
The SMART gaming houses have ALREADY FIGURED OUT how to make mad money even WITH the Steam sales..ready to have your mind blown? here it comes....its called DLC!
I bought 3 copies of Borderlands II on a Steam sale for $30, know how much I ACTUALLY ended up spending on the game? Over $100. I bought all the expansions, bought the loot packs and the level upgrades, and am now buying the "headhunter packs" which will add another $20 or so to the final total. This has been the case with multiple games and talking to customers that game they too have been buying up the DLC and since digital distribution is free for the game publishers once they have paid their employees that is all free money.
But hey you wanna get assraped by consoles that treat you as a combination walking wallet and shoplifter? bend over and spread those cheeks pal. But if the devs weren't making money on Steam sales guess what? They wouldn't HAVE THEM. Its called supply and demand, I know its an alien concept to the corp behind kissers as the corps in the west are as anti-capitalism as can be and see the free market as a hindrance to monopolies but PC gaming is a perfect example of a free market in action and IT WORKS. You have multiple competing sources so the price will naturally seek equilibrium which appears to be $40-$50 for new releases then quickly dropping to the $20 sweet spot.
If a game publisher can't make money without assraping their customers maybe they should be in another line of work. Look at Payday:The Heist as a perfect example of how game publishing SHOULD be, they listened to their customers, gave them what they asked for WITHOUT going insane on the budget and guess what? Preorders alone had the game profitable and every sale after release day is just gravy. Now THAT is how it should be done, but you won't see me crying because some corp makes yet another "Call of Honor:Gears of Killzone" knock off and can't make back their budget, boo fricking hoo.
And piracy has gone down 5 years in a row but God fucking forbid if the corps don't have somebody to blame for their failures. Wonder what excuses the publishers are gonna use on the "DRM in a box phone home daily to check if you are a filthy shoplifter" new consoles? Wanna bet they blame darknets or some other bullshit buzzword bingo? There has been piracy since the days of the floppy, yet billions have been made every year for ages. Good games make money, shitty games don't, welcome to reality, quit using piracy as an excuse to cover up for your badly overblown budgets on shitty games that care more about HDR and lens flare than they do on a decent gaming experience, how about that?
What trouble would that be? Plugging a single HDMI cable in? Having MUCH more choice when it comes to controllers and having much better prices? "Oh woe is me, I have too many games for sale at very cheap prices, if only some corp would take away all the competition and assrape my wallet!"
Mark my words, Steambox is gonna slaughter. You'll be able to run games from pretty much anywhere (its a fully GPLed OS after all) and with the lower PC prices and wider selection it seems like it will be pretty much the only consumer friendly console this gen.
Tigerdirect has several quad laptops under $400 and several hexacore desktops for under $500 and high DPI means exactly jack and squat on a little screen. I also note that you avoided the simple truth that the ONLY difference between what Foxconn makes for Apple and the low end Dell crap is the screen. Again you can make a million DPI screen 1 inch wide...who cares, the world has settled on 1080p and the amount of content that is coming out native to Retina is so tiny as not to exist.
Actually that rumor was proved to be false and they only recovered IIRC 9 episodes which leaves around 100 still lost.
While it would have been nice if the rumor had been true it looks like a good chunk of the episodes missing were never sold overseas (for example the creator of the Daleks was trying to get a Dalek show made in the USA so they never sold any of the Dalek episodes) which makes their recovery very VERY unlikely as its overseas where all missing episodes so far have been found.
As for fav Doctor? Frankly all of them but Colin Baker had their moments (his hammy acting style combined with that outfit just made him a turn off for me) but for me it would be a toss up between Troughton's chessmaster and Tom Baker's eccentric for the classic series and while I would have liked to have seen Eccleston stay on a little longer Tennant was damned good in the role, even episodes like "blink" where he is barely in it his performance sticks with you.
Well what did Sony expect? Their online store stinks, prices suck, its got great hardware...but what good is that? Not like you can access the hardware to do anything with the thing that isn't corp approved so it could be more powerful than a hundred PS4s but without a killer line up the specs are just pointless.
I have a feeling when the Steambox comes out all the other consoles are gonna be royally screwed. it seems like the corps went out of their way to be as consumer UNFRIENDLY as possible this round, like they all got together and said "if we were gonna get together and screw the buyers like a Bangkok whore on coupon day what would we do?" and they went down the list and just went nuts. As I was pointing out to some folks thinking of buying a console there really is NO upsides to the consoles over the PC this gen, and when it comes to handhelds? Well the mobile devices like tablets and phones are getting crazy powerful and they seem to get the lion's share of devs anymore.
What we need is for somebody to come along and do like Valve is doing with the Steambox on the mobile front, come out with a minimum set of specs and control layout and then let all the companies compete. But I think the days of separate game handhelds will soon be over, folks don't like carrying extra devices around and if your phone or tablet is already crazy powerful why not just use it to game?
But at what cost? The power of the high end GPUs like the top Tesla units are frankly insane while the power of both AMD and Intel CPUs has been going down. Last I checked those top o the line GPUs sucked so much juice you could probably run a 32 core Intel and still use less juice and require less cooling.
You'll probably laugh but ya know what works for me? WMP 12 on Win 7. I can stream my tunes from any system on my network, there is some great third party DSPs that can really let you tweak the hell out of the sound (great for those older tracks that was made with less than optimal MP3 rippers) and honestly I haven't had a bit of a problem with bloat but then again I tend to strip out anything I know I'll never use. But I have my streaming box which is a 1.8GHz C2D with 2GB of RAM so if a system THAT old makes for a good streaming server then most anything will.
Mind a bit of advice? If you want a media tank that will be cheap on your wallet AND your electric bill look up the AMD Bobcat boards on Amazon. Its a 1.6GHz dual core with Radeon 63XX baked in, only uses 18w under heavy load yet is still powerful enough to do 1080P over HDMI and they make great media tanks. Just slap 4GB of RAM in it and place it in any standard mATX case which you can then fill with drives. As a bonus the Bobcat runs VERY quiet, you can even get it passively cooled if you wish, so its easy to just stuff in a closet or corner and forget about. Also makes a great file and backup server BTW.
Folks can make fun of it but you know what I've found works fricking great on my over 80GB MP3 collection? WMP, specifically the WMP 12 that comes with Win 7. Its easy to fix missing tag info with it, has a smart sort so I can cook up playlists like "Things I listened to a lot in the past 6 months but not lately" and all in all its been really solid.
As for TFA the original designer of Winamp said it would die when he left and he said the reason was "the service" AKA AOHell dialup. He said "they just kept jamming more and more crap pushing the service into WA, it didn't matter if our data showed WA users DID NOT WANT the service, that it was costing us users, all they cared about was the service".
Maybe we should get together a petition to have WA made FOSS? After all it wouldn't be the first time a former commercial product rose from the ashes as FOSS, Netscape anyone?
I can buy a damned nice hexacore system for $500, and a quad core laptop for $399. Apple uses the same Foxconn shit as Dell yet charges premium prices and I'm sorry but its a scam, they are making crazy high margins because they are selling snake oil as the ONLY thing they have that is better than your average shitty Dell is the screen, that's it.
Look up "The Hairyfeet Challenge" to see why *nix don't cut it my friend. You are obviously a system admin and thus its trivial for you to admin your own systems, I on the other hand work primarily with home users, SOHOs, and SMBs and with them it better "just work" and any fuck up, like say Ubuntu shitting on the wireless or Mint doing a dump on the video? Then its ME that is gonna get a hit to my rep.
What the FOSS zealots here refuse to accept that you have seen with your own eyes is that from Vista on up? Once you set Windows up right, with the default user not running as admin, a low rights browser like Dragon or Chrome, and a decent AV like Comodo IS or Avast then that's it. That system can easily run for the life of the system with ZERO maintenance and with ALL the patches installed automatically. as long as Torvalds is in the big chair Linux will have "update foo broke my drivers" because he cares about "GPL purity" than he does a functioning system, sorry but he cares more about the politics than the OS.
So while I'm glad you have found something that works for you, in the markets I make my bread and butter in? Linux isn't even up to XP yet it terms of stability and functionality, MAYBE Win2K RTM levels but folks want a heck of a lot more now like functioning wireless and updates that don't crap on the system and in that regard Linux has a ways to go.
Oh lord let us hope so! My dad needed a new laptop when he had to go into rehab after knee surgery and all they had was Win 8 and I thought "My dad is the kind of folks Win 8 is supposed to be targeted at, those that know very little about computing and maybe the big icons will help him see a little better". I figured this would be the perfect user test and dropped it off at lunch and told him I'd be back at supper....know what I got told when I got there? "Take this son of a bitch and run over it with your truck!". BTW he was NOT joking, he was THAT pissed off at Windows 8!
Personally I have never seen a product so broken an I have used every version of Windows, home and business, since Windows 3.1 /WinNT 3.5, and have NEVER seen such a fucking trainwreck,even WinME wasn't THIS bad. How anybody can defend that POS I'll never know because after spending the night hacking the reg and putting a shell replacement in I got it to "kinda sorta" behave like Win 7 but it was still annoying enough that my dad went and bought a tablet and put the new laptop in the closet. Everybody says "oh just use Start8/ClassicShell whatever and its just like Win 7"...bullshit, fucking BULLSHIT, as you can NEVER fully kill that charms and swipe horseshit!
So like you I'm hanging onto my Win 7 discs for dear life but I don't know what the fuck we are gonna do if MSFT puts "Burning Moron" Elop in charge as the man sounds like he thinks EVERYTHING should be a fucking sailphone, Linux isn't ever gonna be stable on drivers as long as Torvalds has a pulse, Android is like Linux frankly buggy as fuck (and this is coming from somebody who loves his Android phone but I have to deal with more hangs and CPU spikes and bullshit from Android than I have EVER had to deal with from Windows) and Apple is locked down and overpriced, so WTF? If the software houses start requiring Win 8/9 we be fucked and unless they get somebody with some fucking sense in the big chair it looks like MSFT is gonna become a shitty Apple clone.
Preach brother! I have tried just about every browser out there and frankly they ALL suck when it comes to writes, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have either it'll just keep pounding the drive. I mean when I have 8GB of RAM on my netbook there really isn't any excuse for touching the drive until browser close yet the one program that will keep my drive pounded is the browser. Even my audio editing in audacity doesn't seem to hit the drive as much as looking at simple web pages, and that is with ABP and flashblock!