Sorry but I'm with the AC, after they changed their TOS the first time and bugged the living shit out of me to use my real name everywhere they can take G+ and shove it, I avoid it like an STD.
And this is part of another trend I REALLY don't fucking like, corps avoiding copyrights when its good for THEM but royally screwing you if you dare do the same. Well screw you Google, my pics are copyrighted,wanna use 'em? PAY ME. of course i won't be putting them into either FB or G+ and I'd strongly suggest nobody put jack shit that you care about in either, but maybe you should upload pics to let them know how they feel about these changes....a nice Goatse perhaps?
The reason why is simple...Apple can ONLY keep their high margins when they are the only game in town and when they are not? They end up in a fight with the commodity dealers and a race to the bottom which is where they do NOT want to be.
Love him or hate him, and I personally thought Steve jobs was an asshole, but one thing you gotta give the man credit for is he did understand this and was always looking for new markets. As long as Apple stays in the tablet and phone game they WILL lose, why? Simple because the race to the bottom means that others will put "good enough" hardware better priced in the same arena. Hell you can get dual core Android tablets for $100 now, no way they can keep the $399-$499 price tag with that kind of competition.
Does MSFT have a shot? Personally I'd say no, another things Jobs got right is MSFT has no taste and they think jamming a phone UI onto everything is magic, just like they spent a decade trying to jam desktops onto everything, but what Apple has to worry about isn't Redmond, its China and all those cheap tablets and phones coming out. in either case they can't keep their high margins if they want to keep the numbers, so either they go back to being a tiny niche as they were in the late 90s with desktops or they find new markets they can dominate.
Yeah and how many of those are ACTUAL INSTALLS, versus like what Dell and many others do which is pre-"downgrade" to Win 7 and then give you a Win 8 disc you promptly throw away? And how many of those that are left promptly tossed the shell for Start8 or classic shell?
Remember if you go by MSFT numbers then Vista was a smash hit, in fact with MSFT math they have NEVER had a failure when it comes to OSes, even WinME counts as a hit using their math. As someone on the ground I can tell you that B&M stores are practically giving away Win 8 systems because they are piling up, most of the online vendors have signs that read "Don't want Win 8? We have Win 7 systems here!" and on and on.
Its just like Vista dude, MSFT swore up and down it wasn't a bomb until Win 7 went out the door and then and ONLY then did they go "LOL Vista was a bomb LOL"
And a good 90% of what you just listed support exactly ONE version, put on at the factory, and no other. If you call that "support" then a casio calc watch from the 80s must be a wearable computer to you. BTW why didn't you include TiVo in your list? After all they meet the criteria, just as locked down as TV and appliances yet runs a Linux kernel?
As for TFA...Yo, Shuttleworth? Yeah MSFT was the one that followed your moronic idea, NOT APPLE and look what it got them, flops bigger than winME and Vista put together. If you are so much into "innovation" why don't you rip the steering wheel off your car and replace it with bike handlebars? Well why not, in both cases you are taking a UI designed for one form factor and jamming into a completely different one where it doesn't work well and both are totally moronic, so why not just push the envelope and go full retard?
Look folks its REALLY simple, the PC and laptop are vertical non touch screen high res systems and the phone and tablet are.....wait for it....horizontal touch screen oriented low res systems. Now what do they have in common? NOTHING, that is right NOTHING! They have screens....but the res is several orders of magnitude better on one than the other. They have CPUs....except that one is a SoC made for power consumption above all and therefor is slower than an early Pentium 4 in terms of performance. They have storage....err again several orders of magnitude better and faster on one than the other. Graphics....seeing a pattern here folks?
The reason why Shuttleworth hasn't been able to peddle his shit and Ballmer can't give away Win 8 is because tablets and PCs are NOT the same thing and you can't just rip the UI from one and stuff if it the other and expect it to be anything but suck and fail. Why do the Win 8 apologists never praise the "innovation" of giving phones itty bitty start buttons and menus? Its the same fucking thing, you take a UI designed for one form factor and hamfistedly ram it into the other form factor and expect people are gonna care.
As much as I hate the control freak nature of Apple I have to give them credit, they aren't being bit by a case of the stupids like MSFT and Canonical. Everything they have imported from iOS? Can be easily turned off or just outright ignored and from what I've been told you can have the same UI they have had for the past 6 releases if that is what you want. Who would have thought that Apple of all people would be giving the user what they expect, while MSFT and Canonical would be taken over by art school rejects and go apeshit?
But we already HAD a word for that and it was not "hackers" it was con artists...or bunko men if you prefer a more gender specific term.
If the guys here want to get all pedantic about the difference between virus and malware then why in God's green earth are we calling these guys hackers when they are doing the same shit that has been going on since before the fricking telephone? look up Bunko Bob, or Hod Bacon, guys have been doing cons for hundreds of years using nothing but their ability to manipulate the mark and this is no different and doesn't even require a computer,just the ability to sound professional and manipulate.
This is NOT hacking folks, not even close. You might as well call a washing machine a jet engine for how far off the mark this is from actually hacking a system.
There really isn't a "reference design" when it comes to ARM as its more like the GPUs by AMD and Nvidia where they put out a basic design that a few follow and the rest tweak it in this way or that. Some have better processes and are able to OC easily, some tweak the pipeline, ARM has a bazillion variants out there which is why you can't treat it like X86.
Not to mention that there is a REASON why they have to use a design from the late 90s, anything newer has so many patents and cross licenses attached you'd sooner raise the titanic than get a FOSS card that does full D3D and OpenGL any newer than the late 90s.
Like it or not, and I personally don't believe in allowing software patents, but as long as software patents exist you can give up on getting any kind of FOSS GPU that isn't ancient because its ALL patented by the big three and cross licensed. From S3 to HDCP its all patented, cross licensed, and requires an NDA to even look at so you can give up on having 100% FOSS hardware when it comes to GPUs, there is too much of a legal minefield between FOSS and the hardware. Hell look at AMD, even when they wanted to hand over the specs they had to wait and let the lawyers go through it first and to this day there are parts they can't share thanks to licenses.
Not to mention have you SEEN the winners of the obfuscated C contest? the kind of guys that get jobs with the NSA frankly aren't THAT damned sloppy!
At the end of the day it really doesn't matter though, as we have seen with the Tor nodes being run by the NSA there is more than one way to skin the cat and anybody can write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps by simply targeting the same weak link as on Windows and OSX...the user. BTW anybody that doesn't think it would work should look up the "KDE Look Bug" that worked by using the classic trojan move of bundling malware with something the user wants, in that case a theme and screensaver for KDE.
So the moral of the story is there really is no need for the big bad to manage to hack the Linux kernel, or the Windows or OSX kernels, there are a million other ways to gain control of the system. Quick, show of hands, how many here have done a code audit on Libre Office? Firefox? What about all those little programs that end up in every distro, from the stylish digital clocks to the little googly eyes app? How many have done a serious security minded code audit on those? Just remember because something COULD have been done does NOT mean it HAS been done, after all someone could become a zombie but I really don't think I need to worry about the undead eating my brains, do you?
This is just a wake up call that NO OS is immune, no OS is magically free from zero days or attacks, that is magical thinking and ask all those OSX guys that got MacDefender and macGuardian bugs where magical thinking gets you.
Because you are falling for the same mistake of looking at the MHz and not how they have pipelined it? I have placed a 1.8Ghz C2D and had it smoke a 3.8Ghz Pentium D simply because with the shorter pipe the C2D gets a hell of a lot more work done per cycle while the P4 just blows through power while spinning its wheels. Its the same thing with the first gen Athlon X2 and the later designs like Thuban, a lower clocked Thuban will stomp the X2 even with all but one of its cores turned off because it had a better design and could get more work done per cycle.
Or why not just go to Chinamart and get one of those nice "MP4 Players" that are already put together and have controllers built in and everything?
I'm sure the guys that make them would be happy to hand you the code if you asked, after all all they care about is selling the hardware and they already brag about what systems it emulates so its not like they give a rat's ass about IP laws. Plus since it'll run ROMs straight from the MicroSD no problem baking your own homebrew, just choose what system (NES,SuperNES,Genesis,whatever) you want to homebrew on and go for it.
Although I support kickstarter and think any crazy idea sshould be run up the flagpole to see if enough salute i have to wonder why you'd want to reinvent the wheel like this, not like there aren't a bazillion ARM SoC based gaming handhelds on Chinamart right now. Hell contact one of them and tell him you'll spread the gospel of his handheld if he puts out the code, you'd probably get several to choose from.
Oh Lord save us from the libertarian wonks! if you had bothered scanning the page before blathering on about your free market bullshit, and it IS bullshit BTW as the USA has NEVER had a free market going all the way back to the patronage system and teapot dome the government has been in bed with big business, you would have seen most who live there are saying IT NEVER WORKED, you can be standing alone at 3AM right in the middle of coverage and it DOESN'T WORK, it NEVER WORKED and the few times they were ever able to get on it made dialup look speedy!
Not to mention the post you were replying to had a LOT more than just Wifi, like rampant unemployment, poverty, Google pulling a Walmart and driving smaller businesses out, ghettos growing in the shadow of FB and Google...notice you don't say a word about ANY of that. Doesn't surprise me as the far right tend to have blinders on and just gloss over those kinds of problems or say the "free market will fix it" like its done so well before when it comes to poverty. Well if you consider the top 3% getting 96% of the recovery money helping poverty I suppose it has, most would call bullshit.
Windows 8, the flop that made WinME look popular, was built because Ballmer saw in the financial times that Apple was the richest company and totally flipped his shit, THAT is how it got built. BTW I love how the apologists claim its "innovation" when IRL all they did was take the same strategy they had for a decade and flip it 180, instead of sticking teeny tiny desktops onto smartphones they took a UI designed for a teeny tiny cellphone and stuck it on a 30 inch high def non touch desktop....brilliant. About as "innovative" as sticking bicycle handlebars on a pickup and its gone over about as well.
As for HP? if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing i don't care where they work, the company is still toast. When you look at the amount of money pissed down the drain in the past half dozen years there the fact that their stock isn't penny ante just shows how little connect between wall Street and real life their is, because it seems their "strategy" is "Buy something for WAAAY too much money, not have a clue WTF to do with it, take a bath, write it down, rinse and repeat".
At the end of the day none of these PC companies can change the reality which is thus...once AMD and Intel went from MHz wars to Core wars computers went from "good enough" to insanely powered with so many spare cycles that for the average Joe its like using a top fuel dragster to go to the store so there simply isn't a need to replace them before they break anymore. Even my gaming customers are on 3 and 4 year old chips because the quad and hexacores are just insanely overpowered and on the laptop front those C2Ds and Turion X2s do everything Joe average wants to do on a laptop.
So they can stick all their employees in an underground lair for all the good it will do, PCs have become appliances and like the washer and dryer just aren't getting replaced until they die. There really isn't anything any of them can do and until some new way of programming comes out that can make writing programs for multicores that will scale with cores as easy as writing for a single core? Then the OEMs are just gonna keep having shitty quarters. I predict the same will be happening to phones and pads within the next 2 years as you already have Nvidia up to pentacores and Samsung up to hexacores so just like PCs it'll be a race to the bottom and once everybody who wants one has a multicore it'll be stagnant for them as well.
I'm sorry but gold has had multiple uses throughout history, from sutures (first used by the Romans IIRC) to computer chips. Gold and silver isn't just given value because "hurr..looks purty" because if that were the case there are plenty of metals that look purity but they aren't valued like gold and silver, the reason why is obvious and that is because both gold and silver are easy to work and have multiple applications.
Insightful, really? Since they signed an NDA with Intel to be able to support HDCP on their chips for all we know its just another hoop Intel forced on a competitor to make their lives a little harder. After all it wouldn't be the first time Intel fucked AMD, remember the 1.2 billion dollar payout to AMD to sweep their market rigging back into the closet? It also wouldn't be the first time Intel fucked a competitor when it came to graphics, remember Nvidia having to use a slower PCIe 4x line to get Optimus to work with Atom chips because Intel wouldn't allow any hooking into the faster QPI?
Considering how much AMD has opened their hardware the past couple of years they at least deserve the benefit of the doubt long enough to tell us their side of the story THEN we can decide whether its a crock or not.
I can say I've noticed the past couple of years that becoming the norm, like the pocketwatch my great grandfather carried folks just reach in their pocket and check their smartphones. Can't say as i blame 'em, I too got rid of my watch ages ago, the smartphone gives me not only the time, but the weather and notifications so I really see no need in carrying a watch anymore.
Of course we can speak the truth here and we ALL know what this is about, when Jobs ran Apple he kept the premium price up by finding new markets for Apple to flock to and since taking the big chair all Cook has done is put new paint on the same old ideas and while the faithful will buy an iAnything if he doesn't want to end up stuck in commodity land he has NO choice but to find new markets. I honestly don't think this will work, the iPad replaced pen and paper, plenty of jobs that used to make you carry around pen and paper like medical office, warehousing, inventory, etc so plenty of uses for that and before the iPhone we were stuck with MSFT putting itty bitty start buttons on the phone so there was plenty of room for improvement but...a watch? You are talking about a form factor that is already dying and which thanks to a VERY limited amount of space will have shitty battery life and/or lousy performance.
yeah....I just don't think this one is gonna be another iPod, sorry Apple.
Which is why all I can figure is Obama and pals must have gotten some really big checks from the MIC as it makes ZERO sense for the USA to get involved here, just as it made zero sense to do anything in Libya. There really ain't ANY "good guys" here, on the one hand you have a bloody dictator, on the other militant jihadists that will turn the country into another terrorist haven, so we really need to stay the hell out of the whole thing.
The only other way i could see it making any sense is if the crazy birther bunch was right and Obama really was a Muslim, since the Hadiths make it clear the goal of every Muslim is to make Sharia the law of the entire planet. I find it more likely that he just cashed the checks like every other politician that has stirred up shit in the third world.
Well since you want one maybe you can answer a few questions for me....why? Why would you want to pay hundreds of dollars for an itty bitty teeny tiny screen, just so you can have less features, worse battery life, and just an all around worse experience than the phone you already have in your pocket?
It is THIS that has been bugging me ever since the whole smartwatch thing first surfaced...why? Why would you want this? if anything more and more folks aren't even wearing watches at all and are doing what i call "future meets the past" and using their phones like my great grandfather used his pocketwatch. I know that when i first pointed this out I thought about it and....I don't have a watch anymore! I don't know WHEN it happened, WHERE it happened, just somewhere along the way the battery went dead in my watch and i never replaced it. When this hit me I started paying close attention to those around me and more and more folks have done the same thing, just lost the watch along the way in favor of their smartphone.
So I don't get why so many tech sites seem to think this will be the next big thing when we already have the smartphone, its in our pocket ready to go, and so far every smartphone, even the most basic model, does a hell of a lot more than these things do....so why? Especially why if the stupid things are gonna need to be tethered to a phone anyway why bother?
Yes and we call those crazy people. Lets see, a country with a LOT of nukes, a LOT of guns, a nationalistic streak a mile wide and a distrust of pretty much everybody else.
Take out the nuke part and you 'd have a situation a lot like what brought the crazy Austrian to power all them years ago, you even have someone to take the place of the Jews, those bad nasty illegals and to take the place of Poland you have South America. So I'd say be VERY careful what you wish for, as you just might get it.
"The Celestial Toymaker" you can watch the review here which includes the nigger line. You have to remember it was 1964 and the actor was in his 40s so its not like its shocking,just compared to our time.
But to play Devil's Advocate here...how many of you have actually WATCHED any of the first two Doctor's shows? I have watched a few and....its pretty sad actually, they treated it like a show for children and looks like they had a budget of something like 2 pounds, its pretty rough to watch some of them. Oh and lets not forget the first Doc had quite a few that were VERY un-PC, even saying nigger a few times on the show.
Now don't take this wrong, I LIKE Dr Who, I used to watch the Fourth Doctor on PBS every weekend, it was a blast, but if you look STRICTLY based on quality, quality of sets, writing, costumes, etc, there are really only a handful of the first two Dr Who Doctors that are really worth watching for anybody but the most hardcore of completionist. If you were to magically have them show on my monitor right now? I'd watch the Daleks, the Cybermen, especially Tenth Planet, but the rest? The rest were sadly hampered by the way the show was treated by the BBC...Remember folks it was originally supposed to be an EDUCATIONAL show, think "Magic School Bus" for the 60s, with the dr going back to historical points for educating the childrens.
You are forgetting that the governments and corps are becoming one and the corps don't want you watching or listening to anything that they don't get a cut of and certainly not in a DRM free format. All it would take is the countries tightening that noose a little bit tighter (six strikes anyone?) for your amaing Internet to become nothing but a home shopping channel and propaganda outlet for the government. Now break out your CC and watch the latest approved DRMed video from Michael Bay, that is a good citizen.
Actually according to Chuck at SFDebris it WAS true at one time,late 80s/early 90s, but they were destroyed along with the TV station and half the countryside during the civil war.
And this country would be....where exactly? The USA has a pretty damned long reach, ask Kim Dotcom about that. Also that person/persons would have to be prepared to NEVER set foot into any country which has ties and extradition to the USA which again is a pretty damned long list.
So I'm sorry but as long as USA "justice" is by the corp, of the corp, and for the corp you can give it up, all it takes is a big enough player to crush you like a bug.
Uhhh...insightful? Really mods? never tried Powershell I take it? And as for outlook and the registry stop thinking that every OS has to be like Linux. When it comes to windows like Apple the best tools are third party so we actually have CHOICE. There is free, there is various for pay, and YOU get to choose what you want, not what you can get some devs to donate their time for.
As far as work after the fact? when it comes to the GPUs you can lay the blame FIRMLY on Linus Torvalds shoulders. Quick what do BSD,OSX,Solarius, Windows, and OS/2 have in common that Linux does NOT have? Why a stable ABI so that GPU makers don't HAVE to constantly crap out drivers to fix what Linus Torvalds breaks this week! I can take the disc that came with my 2008 AMD 4850, pop it in and guess what? the drivers WORK. in a pinch I can use XP drivers if I like, that equals THIRTEEN YEARS of drivers I can choose from...tell me can YOU take the driver that AMD or Nvidia released in 2008 and install it on the latest Linux with ZERO fuss or muss? Hell can you do so for even 2 year old drivers?
The reason you can't is simple...Linus Torvalds. If Windows would have kept the old crappy VXD driver model for aaaaaall these years, you'd laugh right? it would be a joke to use a driver model from the early 90s on 2013 hardware right? Well guess what, Torvalds has kept his driver model virtually unchanged since 1994! His model was written at a time where ALL Linux drivers could fit on a single floppy and now? Now its a bad joke. the ONLY reason you have any working drivers AT ALL is that companies like Nvidia shell out the ass for a dev team to do nothing but fix Torvalds messes!
And the sad part? the part that just sticks it in and breaks it off? it was NOT done for design reasons, NOT done because he thinks its better on memory, or CPU or anything else, nope it was done for POLITICAL reasons! If you want proof just bring up a stable ABI to a Linux dev and see how quickly the subject becomes NOT what the merits of this or that model is, NOT the advantages or disadvantages would be, nope you'll suddenly start hearing code words like "GPL purity" and "Spirit of FOSS" which translates to "We don't care if it stays a broken mess as long as it fits our political agenda!
And it is THIS, this right here, that have kept Linux below the margin of error for 20 years and which keeps Linux so far behind that win 8, the most hated MSFT OS since MS Bob, beat the entire Linux desktop install numbers the first fricking week! I'm sure valve will learn the hard way, as did MSI,ASUS,Walmart, Best Buy, all these companies learned that Linux LOOKS nice but keeping it running? Not so nice. Its a fucking shame too as so much work has been put in it and KDE 4 is frankly a better Windows than Windows 8, there is tons of software that likewise looks and runs great, but the first time Joe and Bob go to update their new steambox and get the "fun" of having sound crapped on, or video trashed, or wireless gone? They'll go right back to Windows. Its a fucking shame and maybe when Torvalds finally retires we can get somebody that will put the OS above politics, until then its just not going anywhere long term. As a system builder I personally hate it,MSFT treats us like shit,but Linux is a money loser, keeping it running is just too much bullshit.
Not only is it a myth you can show with basic common sense WHY its a myth.
You have something like 40 MILLION lines of code making up even the thinnest Linux distro, right? Now programs on average with FOSS have two to four releases a year, some like FF even higher.
Now for "many eyes" to be true ALL of what I'm about to post HAS to be true or many eyes is false...1.- you have to have people with the education and experience in both code AND stenography AND obfuscation, for why you have to have that look at the obfuscated C contest to see how even when you know there is malware how well it can be hidden, 2.- those people HAVE to look at not ONLY the code but ALSO all that it interacts with, for why you have to have that look at payload malware where by itself it is harmless but when mixed with a second program turns nasty, and finally 3.- They have to be willing to check not ONLY this one version but EVERY release for both the program AND the subsystems!
The "many eyes" myth works on the fallacy that states because something COULD be done it HAS been done. Well there COULD be vampires in the world but I don't think I need to carry a stake, do you? if I wanted I could wallpaper this page with Linux malware links but I think an even better answer is to show how you can write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps which will work on pretty much ANY distro, how? By exploiting the weakest link, like any virus...the user. And for those that Linux users wouldn't fall for those? look up the "KDE Look Bug" to see thousands of Linux users that got pwned by a screensaver and theme.
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Sorry but I'm with the AC, after they changed their TOS the first time and bugged the living shit out of me to use my real name everywhere they can take G+ and shove it, I avoid it like an STD.
And this is part of another trend I REALLY don't fucking like, corps avoiding copyrights when its good for THEM but royally screwing you if you dare do the same. Well screw you Google, my pics are copyrighted,wanna use 'em? PAY ME. of course i won't be putting them into either FB or G+ and I'd strongly suggest nobody put jack shit that you care about in either, but maybe you should upload pics to let them know how they feel about these changes....a nice Goatse perhaps?
The reason why is simple...Apple can ONLY keep their high margins when they are the only game in town and when they are not? They end up in a fight with the commodity dealers and a race to the bottom which is where they do NOT want to be.
Love him or hate him, and I personally thought Steve jobs was an asshole, but one thing you gotta give the man credit for is he did understand this and was always looking for new markets. As long as Apple stays in the tablet and phone game they WILL lose, why? Simple because the race to the bottom means that others will put "good enough" hardware better priced in the same arena. Hell you can get dual core Android tablets for $100 now, no way they can keep the $399-$499 price tag with that kind of competition.
Does MSFT have a shot? Personally I'd say no, another things Jobs got right is MSFT has no taste and they think jamming a phone UI onto everything is magic, just like they spent a decade trying to jam desktops onto everything, but what Apple has to worry about isn't Redmond, its China and all those cheap tablets and phones coming out. in either case they can't keep their high margins if they want to keep the numbers, so either they go back to being a tiny niche as they were in the late 90s with desktops or they find new markets they can dominate.
Yeah and how many of those are ACTUAL INSTALLS, versus like what Dell and many others do which is pre-"downgrade" to Win 7 and then give you a Win 8 disc you promptly throw away? And how many of those that are left promptly tossed the shell for Start8 or classic shell?
Remember if you go by MSFT numbers then Vista was a smash hit, in fact with MSFT math they have NEVER had a failure when it comes to OSes, even WinME counts as a hit using their math. As someone on the ground I can tell you that B&M stores are practically giving away Win 8 systems because they are piling up, most of the online vendors have signs that read "Don't want Win 8? We have Win 7 systems here!" and on and on.
Its just like Vista dude, MSFT swore up and down it wasn't a bomb until Win 7 went out the door and then and ONLY then did they go "LOL Vista was a bomb LOL"
And a good 90% of what you just listed support exactly ONE version, put on at the factory, and no other. If you call that "support" then a casio calc watch from the 80s must be a wearable computer to you. BTW why didn't you include TiVo in your list? After all they meet the criteria, just as locked down as TV and appliances yet runs a Linux kernel?
As for TFA...Yo, Shuttleworth? Yeah MSFT was the one that followed your moronic idea, NOT APPLE and look what it got them, flops bigger than winME and Vista put together. If you are so much into "innovation" why don't you rip the steering wheel off your car and replace it with bike handlebars? Well why not, in both cases you are taking a UI designed for one form factor and jamming into a completely different one where it doesn't work well and both are totally moronic, so why not just push the envelope and go full retard?
Look folks its REALLY simple, the PC and laptop are vertical non touch screen high res systems and the phone and tablet are.....wait for it....horizontal touch screen oriented low res systems. Now what do they have in common? NOTHING, that is right NOTHING! They have screens....but the res is several orders of magnitude better on one than the other. They have CPUs....except that one is a SoC made for power consumption above all and therefor is slower than an early Pentium 4 in terms of performance. They have storage....err again several orders of magnitude better and faster on one than the other. Graphics....seeing a pattern here folks?
The reason why Shuttleworth hasn't been able to peddle his shit and Ballmer can't give away Win 8 is because tablets and PCs are NOT the same thing and you can't just rip the UI from one and stuff if it the other and expect it to be anything but suck and fail. Why do the Win 8 apologists never praise the "innovation" of giving phones itty bitty start buttons and menus? Its the same fucking thing, you take a UI designed for one form factor and hamfistedly ram it into the other form factor and expect people are gonna care.
As much as I hate the control freak nature of Apple I have to give them credit, they aren't being bit by a case of the stupids like MSFT and Canonical. Everything they have imported from iOS? Can be easily turned off or just outright ignored and from what I've been told you can have the same UI they have had for the past 6 releases if that is what you want. Who would have thought that Apple of all people would be giving the user what they expect, while MSFT and Canonical would be taken over by art school rejects and go apeshit?
But we already HAD a word for that and it was not "hackers" it was con artists...or bunko men if you prefer a more gender specific term.
If the guys here want to get all pedantic about the difference between virus and malware then why in God's green earth are we calling these guys hackers when they are doing the same shit that has been going on since before the fricking telephone? look up Bunko Bob, or Hod Bacon, guys have been doing cons for hundreds of years using nothing but their ability to manipulate the mark and this is no different and doesn't even require a computer,just the ability to sound professional and manipulate.
This is NOT hacking folks, not even close. You might as well call a washing machine a jet engine for how far off the mark this is from actually hacking a system.
There really isn't a "reference design" when it comes to ARM as its more like the GPUs by AMD and Nvidia where they put out a basic design that a few follow and the rest tweak it in this way or that. Some have better processes and are able to OC easily, some tweak the pipeline, ARM has a bazillion variants out there which is why you can't treat it like X86.
Not to mention that there is a REASON why they have to use a design from the late 90s, anything newer has so many patents and cross licenses attached you'd sooner raise the titanic than get a FOSS card that does full D3D and OpenGL any newer than the late 90s.
Like it or not, and I personally don't believe in allowing software patents, but as long as software patents exist you can give up on getting any kind of FOSS GPU that isn't ancient because its ALL patented by the big three and cross licensed. From S3 to HDCP its all patented, cross licensed, and requires an NDA to even look at so you can give up on having 100% FOSS hardware when it comes to GPUs, there is too much of a legal minefield between FOSS and the hardware. Hell look at AMD, even when they wanted to hand over the specs they had to wait and let the lawyers go through it first and to this day there are parts they can't share thanks to licenses.
Not to mention have you SEEN the winners of the obfuscated C contest? the kind of guys that get jobs with the NSA frankly aren't THAT damned sloppy!
At the end of the day it really doesn't matter though, as we have seen with the Tor nodes being run by the NSA there is more than one way to skin the cat and anybody can write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps by simply targeting the same weak link as on Windows and OSX...the user. BTW anybody that doesn't think it would work should look up the "KDE Look Bug" that worked by using the classic trojan move of bundling malware with something the user wants, in that case a theme and screensaver for KDE.
So the moral of the story is there really is no need for the big bad to manage to hack the Linux kernel, or the Windows or OSX kernels, there are a million other ways to gain control of the system. Quick, show of hands, how many here have done a code audit on Libre Office? Firefox? What about all those little programs that end up in every distro, from the stylish digital clocks to the little googly eyes app? How many have done a serious security minded code audit on those? Just remember because something COULD have been done does NOT mean it HAS been done, after all someone could become a zombie but I really don't think I need to worry about the undead eating my brains, do you?
This is just a wake up call that NO OS is immune, no OS is magically free from zero days or attacks, that is magical thinking and ask all those OSX guys that got MacDefender and macGuardian bugs where magical thinking gets you.
Because you are falling for the same mistake of looking at the MHz and not how they have pipelined it? I have placed a 1.8Ghz C2D and had it smoke a 3.8Ghz Pentium D simply because with the shorter pipe the C2D gets a hell of a lot more work done per cycle while the P4 just blows through power while spinning its wheels. Its the same thing with the first gen Athlon X2 and the later designs like Thuban, a lower clocked Thuban will stomp the X2 even with all but one of its cores turned off because it had a better design and could get more work done per cycle.
Or why not just go to Chinamart and get one of those nice "MP4 Players" that are already put together and have controllers built in and everything?
I'm sure the guys that make them would be happy to hand you the code if you asked, after all all they care about is selling the hardware and they already brag about what systems it emulates so its not like they give a rat's ass about IP laws. Plus since it'll run ROMs straight from the MicroSD no problem baking your own homebrew, just choose what system (NES,SuperNES,Genesis,whatever) you want to homebrew on and go for it.
Although I support kickstarter and think any crazy idea sshould be run up the flagpole to see if enough salute i have to wonder why you'd want to reinvent the wheel like this, not like there aren't a bazillion ARM SoC based gaming handhelds on Chinamart right now. Hell contact one of them and tell him you'll spread the gospel of his handheld if he puts out the code, you'd probably get several to choose from.
Oh Lord save us from the libertarian wonks! if you had bothered scanning the page before blathering on about your free market bullshit, and it IS bullshit BTW as the USA has NEVER had a free market going all the way back to the patronage system and teapot dome the government has been in bed with big business, you would have seen most who live there are saying IT NEVER WORKED, you can be standing alone at 3AM right in the middle of coverage and it DOESN'T WORK, it NEVER WORKED and the few times they were ever able to get on it made dialup look speedy!
Not to mention the post you were replying to had a LOT more than just Wifi, like rampant unemployment, poverty, Google pulling a Walmart and driving smaller businesses out, ghettos growing in the shadow of FB and Google...notice you don't say a word about ANY of that. Doesn't surprise me as the far right tend to have blinders on and just gloss over those kinds of problems or say the "free market will fix it" like its done so well before when it comes to poverty. Well if you consider the top 3% getting 96% of the recovery money helping poverty I suppose it has, most would call bullshit.
Windows 8, the flop that made WinME look popular, was built because Ballmer saw in the financial times that Apple was the richest company and totally flipped his shit, THAT is how it got built. BTW I love how the apologists claim its "innovation" when IRL all they did was take the same strategy they had for a decade and flip it 180, instead of sticking teeny tiny desktops onto smartphones they took a UI designed for a teeny tiny cellphone and stuck it on a 30 inch high def non touch desktop....brilliant. About as "innovative" as sticking bicycle handlebars on a pickup and its gone over about as well.
As for HP? if they don't get a CEO that has a plan and knows WTF they are doing i don't care where they work, the company is still toast. When you look at the amount of money pissed down the drain in the past half dozen years there the fact that their stock isn't penny ante just shows how little connect between wall Street and real life their is, because it seems their "strategy" is "Buy something for WAAAY too much money, not have a clue WTF to do with it, take a bath, write it down, rinse and repeat".
At the end of the day none of these PC companies can change the reality which is thus...once AMD and Intel went from MHz wars to Core wars computers went from "good enough" to insanely powered with so many spare cycles that for the average Joe its like using a top fuel dragster to go to the store so there simply isn't a need to replace them before they break anymore. Even my gaming customers are on 3 and 4 year old chips because the quad and hexacores are just insanely overpowered and on the laptop front those C2Ds and Turion X2s do everything Joe average wants to do on a laptop.
So they can stick all their employees in an underground lair for all the good it will do, PCs have become appliances and like the washer and dryer just aren't getting replaced until they die. There really isn't anything any of them can do and until some new way of programming comes out that can make writing programs for multicores that will scale with cores as easy as writing for a single core? Then the OEMs are just gonna keep having shitty quarters. I predict the same will be happening to phones and pads within the next 2 years as you already have Nvidia up to pentacores and Samsung up to hexacores so just like PCs it'll be a race to the bottom and once everybody who wants one has a multicore it'll be stagnant for them as well.
I'm sorry but gold has had multiple uses throughout history, from sutures (first used by the Romans IIRC) to computer chips. Gold and silver isn't just given value because "hurr..looks purty" because if that were the case there are plenty of metals that look purity but they aren't valued like gold and silver, the reason why is obvious and that is because both gold and silver are easy to work and have multiple applications.
Insightful, really? Since they signed an NDA with Intel to be able to support HDCP on their chips for all we know its just another hoop Intel forced on a competitor to make their lives a little harder. After all it wouldn't be the first time Intel fucked AMD, remember the 1.2 billion dollar payout to AMD to sweep their market rigging back into the closet? It also wouldn't be the first time Intel fucked a competitor when it came to graphics, remember Nvidia having to use a slower PCIe 4x line to get Optimus to work with Atom chips because Intel wouldn't allow any hooking into the faster QPI?
Considering how much AMD has opened their hardware the past couple of years they at least deserve the benefit of the doubt long enough to tell us their side of the story THEN we can decide whether its a crock or not.
I can say I've noticed the past couple of years that becoming the norm, like the pocketwatch my great grandfather carried folks just reach in their pocket and check their smartphones. Can't say as i blame 'em, I too got rid of my watch ages ago, the smartphone gives me not only the time, but the weather and notifications so I really see no need in carrying a watch anymore.
Of course we can speak the truth here and we ALL know what this is about, when Jobs ran Apple he kept the premium price up by finding new markets for Apple to flock to and since taking the big chair all Cook has done is put new paint on the same old ideas and while the faithful will buy an iAnything if he doesn't want to end up stuck in commodity land he has NO choice but to find new markets. I honestly don't think this will work, the iPad replaced pen and paper, plenty of jobs that used to make you carry around pen and paper like medical office, warehousing, inventory, etc so plenty of uses for that and before the iPhone we were stuck with MSFT putting itty bitty start buttons on the phone so there was plenty of room for improvement but...a watch? You are talking about a form factor that is already dying and which thanks to a VERY limited amount of space will have shitty battery life and/or lousy performance.
yeah....I just don't think this one is gonna be another iPod, sorry Apple.
Which is why all I can figure is Obama and pals must have gotten some really big checks from the MIC as it makes ZERO sense for the USA to get involved here, just as it made zero sense to do anything in Libya. There really ain't ANY "good guys" here, on the one hand you have a bloody dictator, on the other militant jihadists that will turn the country into another terrorist haven, so we really need to stay the hell out of the whole thing.
The only other way i could see it making any sense is if the crazy birther bunch was right and Obama really was a Muslim, since the Hadiths make it clear the goal of every Muslim is to make Sharia the law of the entire planet. I find it more likely that he just cashed the checks like every other politician that has stirred up shit in the third world.
Well since you want one maybe you can answer a few questions for me....why? Why would you want to pay hundreds of dollars for an itty bitty teeny tiny screen, just so you can have less features, worse battery life, and just an all around worse experience than the phone you already have in your pocket?
It is THIS that has been bugging me ever since the whole smartwatch thing first surfaced...why? Why would you want this? if anything more and more folks aren't even wearing watches at all and are doing what i call "future meets the past" and using their phones like my great grandfather used his pocketwatch. I know that when i first pointed this out I thought about it and....I don't have a watch anymore! I don't know WHEN it happened, WHERE it happened, just somewhere along the way the battery went dead in my watch and i never replaced it. When this hit me I started paying close attention to those around me and more and more folks have done the same thing, just lost the watch along the way in favor of their smartphone.
So I don't get why so many tech sites seem to think this will be the next big thing when we already have the smartphone, its in our pocket ready to go, and so far every smartphone, even the most basic model, does a hell of a lot more than these things do....so why? Especially why if the stupid things are gonna need to be tethered to a phone anyway why bother?
Yes and we call those crazy people. Lets see, a country with a LOT of nukes, a LOT of guns, a nationalistic streak a mile wide and a distrust of pretty much everybody else.
Take out the nuke part and you 'd have a situation a lot like what brought the crazy Austrian to power all them years ago, you even have someone to take the place of the Jews, those bad nasty illegals and to take the place of Poland you have South America. So I'd say be VERY careful what you wish for, as you just might get it.
"The Celestial Toymaker" you can watch the review here which includes the nigger line. You have to remember it was 1964 and the actor was in his 40s so its not like its shocking,just compared to our time.
But to play Devil's Advocate here...how many of you have actually WATCHED any of the first two Doctor's shows? I have watched a few and....its pretty sad actually, they treated it like a show for children and looks like they had a budget of something like 2 pounds, its pretty rough to watch some of them. Oh and lets not forget the first Doc had quite a few that were VERY un-PC, even saying nigger a few times on the show.
Now don't take this wrong, I LIKE Dr Who, I used to watch the Fourth Doctor on PBS every weekend, it was a blast, but if you look STRICTLY based on quality, quality of sets, writing, costumes, etc, there are really only a handful of the first two Dr Who Doctors that are really worth watching for anybody but the most hardcore of completionist. If you were to magically have them show on my monitor right now? I'd watch the Daleks, the Cybermen, especially Tenth Planet, but the rest? The rest were sadly hampered by the way the show was treated by the BBC...Remember folks it was originally supposed to be an EDUCATIONAL show, think "Magic School Bus" for the 60s, with the dr going back to historical points for educating the childrens.
You are forgetting that the governments and corps are becoming one and the corps don't want you watching or listening to anything that they don't get a cut of and certainly not in a DRM free format. All it would take is the countries tightening that noose a little bit tighter (six strikes anyone?) for your amaing Internet to become nothing but a home shopping channel and propaganda outlet for the government. Now break out your CC and watch the latest approved DRMed video from Michael Bay, that is a good citizen.
Actually according to Chuck at SFDebris it WAS true at one time,late 80s/early 90s, but they were destroyed along with the TV station and half the countryside during the civil war.
And this country would be....where exactly? The USA has a pretty damned long reach, ask Kim Dotcom about that. Also that person/persons would have to be prepared to NEVER set foot into any country which has ties and extradition to the USA which again is a pretty damned long list.
So I'm sorry but as long as USA "justice" is by the corp, of the corp, and for the corp you can give it up, all it takes is a big enough player to crush you like a bug.
Uhhh...insightful? Really mods? never tried Powershell I take it? And as for outlook and the registry stop thinking that every OS has to be like Linux. When it comes to windows like Apple the best tools are third party so we actually have CHOICE. There is free, there is various for pay, and YOU get to choose what you want, not what you can get some devs to donate their time for.
As far as work after the fact? when it comes to the GPUs you can lay the blame FIRMLY on Linus Torvalds shoulders. Quick what do BSD,OSX,Solarius, Windows, and OS/2 have in common that Linux does NOT have? Why a stable ABI so that GPU makers don't HAVE to constantly crap out drivers to fix what Linus Torvalds breaks this week! I can take the disc that came with my 2008 AMD 4850, pop it in and guess what? the drivers WORK. in a pinch I can use XP drivers if I like, that equals THIRTEEN YEARS of drivers I can choose from...tell me can YOU take the driver that AMD or Nvidia released in 2008 and install it on the latest Linux with ZERO fuss or muss? Hell can you do so for even 2 year old drivers?
The reason you can't is simple...Linus Torvalds. If Windows would have kept the old crappy VXD driver model for aaaaaall these years, you'd laugh right? it would be a joke to use a driver model from the early 90s on 2013 hardware right? Well guess what, Torvalds has kept his driver model virtually unchanged since 1994! His model was written at a time where ALL Linux drivers could fit on a single floppy and now? Now its a bad joke. the ONLY reason you have any working drivers AT ALL is that companies like Nvidia shell out the ass for a dev team to do nothing but fix Torvalds messes!
And the sad part? the part that just sticks it in and breaks it off? it was NOT done for design reasons, NOT done because he thinks its better on memory, or CPU or anything else, nope it was done for POLITICAL reasons! If you want proof just bring up a stable ABI to a Linux dev and see how quickly the subject becomes NOT what the merits of this or that model is, NOT the advantages or disadvantages would be, nope you'll suddenly start hearing code words like "GPL purity" and "Spirit of FOSS" which translates to "We don't care if it stays a broken mess as long as it fits our political agenda!
And it is THIS, this right here, that have kept Linux below the margin of error for 20 years and which keeps Linux so far behind that win 8, the most hated MSFT OS since MS Bob, beat the entire Linux desktop install numbers the first fricking week! I'm sure valve will learn the hard way, as did MSI,ASUS,Walmart, Best Buy, all these companies learned that Linux LOOKS nice but keeping it running? Not so nice. Its a fucking shame too as so much work has been put in it and KDE 4 is frankly a better Windows than Windows 8, there is tons of software that likewise looks and runs great, but the first time Joe and Bob go to update their new steambox and get the "fun" of having sound crapped on, or video trashed, or wireless gone? They'll go right back to Windows. Its a fucking shame and maybe when Torvalds finally retires we can get somebody that will put the OS above politics, until then its just not going anywhere long term. As a system builder I personally hate it,MSFT treats us like shit,but Linux is a money loser, keeping it running is just too much bullshit.
Not only is it a myth you can show with basic common sense WHY its a myth.
You have something like 40 MILLION lines of code making up even the thinnest Linux distro, right? Now programs on average with FOSS have two to four releases a year, some like FF even higher.
Now for "many eyes" to be true ALL of what I'm about to post HAS to be true or many eyes is false...1.- you have to have people with the education and experience in both code AND stenography AND obfuscation, for why you have to have that look at the obfuscated C contest to see how even when you know there is malware how well it can be hidden, 2.- those people HAVE to look at not ONLY the code but ALSO all that it interacts with, for why you have to have that look at payload malware where by itself it is harmless but when mixed with a second program turns nasty, and finally 3.- They have to be willing to check not ONLY this one version but EVERY release for both the program AND the subsystems!
The "many eyes" myth works on the fallacy that states because something COULD be done it HAS been done. Well there COULD be vampires in the world but I don't think I need to carry a stake, do you? if I wanted I could wallpaper this page with Linux malware links but I think an even better answer is to show how you can write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps which will work on pretty much ANY distro, how? By exploiting the weakest link, like any virus...the user. And for those that Linux users wouldn't fall for those? look up the "KDE Look Bug" to see thousands of Linux users that got pwned by a screensaver and theme.