Uhhh...I live in a SMALL town and there is already 4 different shops that offer upgrading android phones as a service. Remember the creed of the small business "if somebody needs it done somebody is willing to do it for a price" and this is a small town, in any large city you could probably have 2 dozen shops to choose from.
That doesn't change the fact that MSFT gave early adopters the finger so now I wouldn't give them even $20 for a WinPhone. With Android i can go with AreaRomQ, Cyanogen, or at least 2 others that I have found for my Android phone and mine isn't even a very popular model, if I had a big name like a Hero or Galaxy I could have even more choices.
Isn't Metro apps locked into the appstore? That may be what they mean by partial, if they have the metro look without being tied to the appstore.
BTW is anybody else sick of the words apps and appstore yet? Because I'm REALLY fucking tired of hearing apps to app your app, especially when it comes to non mobile devices like Win 8. The second I hear apps now I think "buzzword hipster crap" and start tuning them out.
As for VLC? Congrats guys, your player has been on my "must install" list for quite some time, it opens virtually any format and uses little resources. all in all a great program, keep up the good work!
4. Because of this a massive stock market bubble has been blown which has already cost a trillion dollar bail out and when it pops it will make the great depression look like a flash crash.
I have seen a few places where guys have tried to crunch the numbers and no matter whose figures you go with you are looking at a worldwide depression and the USA economy dead for a good half a century or more. Look at the figures in the video taken from various government sources at the 3.30 mark and note that right before the 29 crash the market was at 125%, we are now over 403% and rising. You also have a huge sector built around the bubble, all those people will end up on the breadline when that bubble bursts as well.
I don't know which is scarier, that we have a bubble that big close to bursting or that the numbers I saw put it between 2020 and 2030 at the latest before no matter how much phony money the fed prints the bubble will no longer be sustainable and HAVE to burst. I have to wonder if that is why we are seeing more and more fascism in this country, the elite know this is gonna happen and are hoping the stormtroops will save their collective asses.
Actually as others have pointed out depending on the area you may end up with a good 35% or better unemployment. I can tell you in my area businesses that were there for over a century are gone, my dad who has been in business since the early 70s is about to let his employees go and sell off the assets, and the business district is now a ghost town full of boarded up buildings.
So yes if you looked at the real numbers and not the bullshit numbers? We are looking at great depression levels of bankruptcy and unemployment. What pisses me off is in a time like this when the government actually should be helping folks a large chunk of the right wing have the "let 'em die!" attitude as seen in the RNC. So yes it really IS that bad, and that is not even counting the underemployed, that is just the jobless. again there are tents being put up in nearly every town in the flyover states and homelessness is exploding as those who can't find a job have their benefits run out and "magically disappear" from the official roles.
I would agree with that...to a point. One thing we have seen over and over in economics is there is a "sweet spot" when it comes to pricing and ease of use and when that sweet spot is ignored then a black market appears to serve those customers you are foolishly ignoring.
Take video games as an example. While of course lower prices equal more sales there is a point where continuing to lower the price doesn't increase sales simply because all of those that want the product have gotten the product by then. Watching game sales that release sales figures here is what I have observed...for indie games the sweet spot seems to be between $2-$5, unless its mobile in which case its a buck. For big name titles it really depends on how niche the game is, for example a Mirror's Edge or a God sim like Populus seem to do best in the $10-$20 price range while something more accessible to a general audience, your Saints Rows and Borderlands seem to do best in the $20-$40 but the SMART publishers go for the lower end of that curve and make up the difference in impulse buy DLC, your costumes in both and expansions in Borderlands.Finally you have those games with a VERY short shelf life, your Call Of Honor: Gears Of Killzone Halo Edition where everybody buys it for the MP which is quickly dead when the next come out and those can sell a huge amount in the $40-$60 range simply because if you don't buy at release when the next title comes out the previous one quickly becomes a ghost town.
But if you ignore those sweet spots then piracy WILL jump off the scale because time and time again we have seen when a large part of the market isn't being served a black market WILL arise to serve those customers. We have seen this in everything from piracy to Chinese knock offs of popular electronics, if the people think the price for a tablet should be between $100-$150 and the big names all push $400 then somebody WILL come along and give all those potential customers what they want.
I think where most industries seriously fuck up is by saying "Oh if you refuse to bend over and give us every cent we think our precious shit is worth (or that we require to pump up our stock price, see the former head of EA saying games should be $100) then you are the evil and should be destroyed" when in reality a black market is simply a signal that you are doing SOMETHING WRONG, your price is too high, your product has ease of use issues, there is something driving your potential customers across the street to the black market, you fix that issue? Watch the money train pull in.
What blows my mind is how little security a city the size of Fairbanks has....WTF people? Did we forget what happened with those planes and the terrorists already? Somebody needs to call the feds and demand some money to improve security because that is just sad.Hell I live in BF AR and if you try to get even up to the fence surrounding the runway you are gonna have a guard there asking you WTF you are doing before you could do shit, no way in hell you could actually DRIVE onto the runway without having a half a dozen cars with flashing lights boxing you in, you'd be staring down a good dozen barrels before you said oopsie.
This is part of a MUCH larger problem I call "the machine never lies" which i have run into MANY times and it goes like this...if common sense tells you one thing and a machine another? The machine never lies so you are incorrect. I have had to call a manager when a cash register said change for a hundred with a 9 dollar purchase was 11 dollars, common sense would tell you that its wrong but the girl simply refused to believe the machine COULD be wrong so hence the manager. I had to go through that again recently when a relative passed on, the moron at the desk refused to believe she didn't owe property taxes for this year...on a piece of property she had sold over a decade ago. Again the machine doesn't lie so no matter what it says they believe it.
As more and more crap like built in mapping end up on every phone I have a feeling we'll see a lot of morons driving off of bridges, driving out in front of trains, as long as the machine tells them to? The little lemmings will march on...God who would have thought that Idiocracy would end up being a documentary?
Riiiight, he and the board risked millions in fines and prison time all so they could tank the company in the HOPES that MSFT would buy them and not just wait until they collapsed and buy the best pieces...I have a bridge you may be interested in BTW.
Look its REALLY simple, okay? The board fucked up and let there end up not one, not two, but THREE different OSes, none of which could compete with iOS and Android. There best hope MeeGo/MaeMo was being actively sabotaged by both Symbian on the inside and Intel on the outside, and being the #1 dumbphone maker in this day and age of free Android phones from even the prepaid bunches was about as useful as being the biggest 8-track maker in 1987. So Elop was brought in to do the dirty work, kill the no longer update-able Symbian and to throw a Hail Mary pass and hope to gain some ground and...it failed.
so I'm sorry but they really didn't have any other option, they really didn't thanks to the board sitting on ass too long, a repeat of Palm. Ironically the best bet would have been WebOS but HP was willing to pay insane-o money for it so it was off the table, and Android is a shark tank that is in a race to the bottom. While Nokia can make dirt cheap dumbphones they have NOT shown the ability to repeat that in smartphones and there is no way in hell they would have been able to fight Samsung,HTC, and Huawei toe to toe, no way. All that was left was a Hail mary, hence the "burning platform" but there is a REASON why they call it a Hail Mary because it has but a slim prayer of working. If it would have worked I''m sure the Googleites here would be screaming how "It was all Ballmer's plan to take over Nokia!" so damned if you do, damned if you don't. Would you have rather he broke up the company and sold it like a corporate raider, like is what is likely to be the fate of BB?
Well I will take a crack at it....you see the problem is the current system is designed to allow the parasites, those that have made insane amounts of money by rigging and manipulating the government and the system to keep their elite status by being able to pull shit like this which ordinary folks can't do because they don't have the capital required to "buy in" at the correct facilities to beat the wire.
When i see shit like this, along with both parties seeming not to give a shit about being scene outright kicking the poor when they are down i have to wonder....how much time does the USA really have left? After all as has been pointed out several times the unemployment numbers are bullshit and if you figure in all those that they just magically drop from the rolls we are looking at a good 23%+ unemployment, meanwhile you have the right wing being so damned vicious to the poor you might as well replace the elephant with Monty Burns and then to add the shit icing on the asshole cake you have shit like this which allows the really nasty leeches like Goldman Sachs to make mountains of money off of the American people.
So I have to wonder if this isn't the root cause of why all empires fall, those at the top become so fucking greedy that they tilt the system so damned far out of balance the whole thing collapses. It pretty obvious that in the last 4-5 years or so many in power have stopped caring about the kayfabe of giving a fuck about anyone but the elite, the working poor and unemployed, which outnumber the top 1% by a good 10,000 to 1 (because in reality its more like 0.01% that get a good 70% of the wealth consistently) are just being bombarded with story after story like this where the elite scam billions and the only thing the government does is ask if they want a task break, and the war on poverty by attacking food stamps, medicaid/care, disability, welfare, etc makes it real clear to the poor folks that the elite really want them gone...so is this how it ends? With the poor getting everything taken away until their is nothing to lose and we have own own Arab Spring?
I don't know but I can tell you the flyover states are beginning to look like the depression, small businesses that were here for generations closed and the factories gone so that huge chunks of land are nothing but abandoned buildings, and instead of helping the broke and starving poor those in government seem to be doing everything they can to curbstomp poor folks and take away any benefits they may get. Hell I got a disabled relative that if he isn't able to win against them taking his disability he'll be homeless by Xmas, and I hear similar stories from all my customers, women and kids sleeping in cars because they found a way to take away what pitiful benefits they were getting, tents popping up all over the place because folks got nowhere to live, it makes me wonder if the whole French "let 'em eat cake" situation is repeating here and will end with the same result. The teeming poor have nothing to lose and their ranks grow by the day, its seriously bad here folks.
I didn't know that but after working corporate for several years it honestly doesn't surprise me. If the average person only knew how many major corps have just insane amounts of risky data, CC numbers, addresses and SSNs for example, being manipulated on some creaky as hell VB into Access DB cooked up over a couple of days by some guy that hasn't been with the corp in the better part of a decade? Or how many transmit the same risky data over the net to the main branch using some God Awful IE 6 ActiveX mess? Well I bet a LOT of folks wouldn't trust these companies as far as they could throw them.
But your post just supports what I've been saying for years, that JavaScript should have went the way of Gopher and somebody better, something designed from the ground up with security in mind, should have taken its place. I mean its insane the way websites are set up now, I have even seen CHECK OUT PAGES that had calls to third party ad servers! Talk about just asking for CC theft! But I have a feeling as long as the big three look at EVERYTHING as an excuse to try to get some lock in? we'll just keep putting bandaids on bullet wounds.
Try Just Cause II as it has EXACTLY what you are describing. You can start a new game and after the first mission? You can just drive through the countryside if you desire and as long as you don't go running down cops or blasting people nobody will bother you. You can drive to the airport, pick up a plane or chopper and just fly around without being bothered, you can go down to the docs and get anything from a speedboat to a Junk and just go cruising, or if you buy the parachute thrusters DLC (just 99c) you can just jump into the air and fly your parachute all across the place, even use the grappler to grab onto boats and cars and go parasailing.
Anyway as long as you have Vista or better (requires DX10) and even an average gaming card (it plays over 30FPS on my HD4850, a card you can get for less than $40 on Amazon) you can go where you want and do whatever you want, the entire world from the mountain tops to the ocean is 100% open from the get go. Sounds like exactly what you are looking for....but you really should go apeshit in that game at least once, nothing wilder than riding on the hood of a car going 165MPH+ and grappling a pursuing cop car to the ground and making it do the T3 car flip, tying a cop bike to a lamppost like Jedi, or blowing out the tires of a jeep and watching it cartwheel a dozen times before becoming a fireball, VERY cool.
But the the reason why nobody makes those anymore and why very few "Myst style" games came out is really simple and its the same reason why FMV "games" also died, and its the simple fact that graphics caught up.
The reason why Myst was so amazing back in the day was....it was 1993. Remember what PCs were like back in 93? You average game back then was a side scroller, Wolfenstein was less than a year old and you had to have a pretty beefy PC to run it. Now look at Myst...it was simply amazing to look at, much more like a movie than a game as far as graphical quality goes and in an era of levels that looked like paper cut outs? Its really not surprising it blew so many away.
But then something truly amazing happened,..the rise of the graphics card, or as many called it back in the day the "graphical accelerator". Suddenly games went from cut outs to crude 3D shapes to incredible depth...just compare No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 to see how far games came in just a few years, hell I still play a few games from a decade ago online and stuff like Freelancer still can immerse me in this galaxy hopping universe. But Myst just didn't translate well to the fully realized 3D world, like Dragon's Lair and the whole FMV craze what once wowed us just didn't really work in a fully 3D world.
So I would say the legacy of Myst was to give us back in 93 a brief taste of what the future would be like, a world where these fully fleshed out worlds are taken for granted...I mean how many of us here have fired up a recent game and just marveled at how fricking HUGE and fleshed out these worlds really are? I mean when I fire up Just Cause II with islands large enough that it would take the better part of an hour to drive across it, or fire up Borderlands II and look at how many hours I have sunk in and haven't even got to see all the game has to offer? Its pretty fricking amazing, just as Myst made our collective jaws drop back in the day. If you asked me to list the biggest jaw dropper moments of early gaming it would have to be Myst, the first time I played Quake, and that opening with the castle on Unreal.
Most of the high level posts are lifetime posts placed there during Bush Sr and Jr, and that was just MY interpretation, she believes it may be a purposeful leak to create a chilling effect...which if it is one has to give them credit as I know I have spoken to many customers who are now afraid to even say a political leader sucks online for fear of being on a list. Remember the STASI had less than 10% of the population under their watch but had near total obedience thanks to the chilling effect.
I do however find it ironic that I was modded down for merely saying this topic should be discussed, considering how many blatant shills we've had here of late I find it ironic that on the subject of whether we should discuss even the possibility that the government MIGHT be involved somebody is trying to make sure the post isn't seen.
And did you bother to read her reasons? Snowden's "evidence" was VERY targeted at certain political parties and groups (one can't normally grab ONLY a slice that precise) and he was VERY organized and stayed focus on message (compare to Manning and pretty much every other whistleblower, not organized at all because they are in serious danger so not as focused) and his "interview" was not only professionally shot but he comes off NOT like an IT guy who is facing his first time under the spotlight but like an announcer that has done this a million times, no stammers, no stutters, no mistakes or flubbing his lines.
I'm sorry but she is right to call attention to that as it wouldn't be the first time we've had the government use disinformation and you can't have a chilling effect upon a populace if they don't know they are being watched. Is she right? Who knows but considering we have had the government start wars with disinformation and false flags (Vietnam) it is certainly something that at least should be discussed.
Exactly and for an example of what can happen look at the "Yahoo Porn Bug" in my journal, I had customers spamming the living hell out of everyone in their address books and all that took was a little code, a hidden iFrame, and a browser that runs the same permission level as the user, in that case Firefox.
Frankly the whole current system is just fucked up, you can have code from as many as a dozen different servers, splattered all over the planet, all just to load a single page. And as more and more websites go "Web 3.0 apps apps apps...did we mention we have apps?" the ability to block all that crap from God knows where diminishes. I think the problem is that JavaScript was just never built with security in mind, it was back in the day when organized cybercrime and the like was the realm of sci/fi and instead of starting over when the thing started getting unsafe we just put bandaids on the bullet wounds.
And the reason why is obvious, instead of listening the started dictating to customers so that for every one they get they lose a dozen.
Look at me as an example, as somebody who has used and sold Windows systems since the days of 3.x I would be a prime candidate for a WinPhone, what did I get? an Android. Why? Because after the "just deal with it" bad attitude of their games division, the flipping the bird to desktop users AND refusing to port WinPhone 8 to WinPhone 7 buyers, thus leaving them with a worthless device? I'm sorry but I don't trust them not to throw me by the wayside when winPhone 9 comes out. at least with Android i can easily load a ROM myself instead of depending on the carrier or MSFT to support me.
So while they have been going up in certain markets I bet if one did the math they are product dumping to gain share but even MSFT can't afford to dump below cost forever and the bad will they keep generating is turning off more and more folks.
What effects? BB has been dead for awhile, its been a zombie with a billion phones they can't sell and an OS nobody wants. Most likely these vultures will sell off the assets and keep the IP for some major trolling.
The only ones I feel sorry for is the folks on the lines, the smart ones that had skills that would translate have moved on, all that is left is the poor slobs that couldn't find other employment and in this economy? Well let us hope the evil tea party elitists don't kill foodstamps otherwise many of them will end up going hungry.
What I don't get is this...why does anybody think MariaDB is ANY safer? I mean its still run by old Monty, right? The guy that sold MySQL out from under the community to Oracle in the first place? And don't he still require that ALL code contributed have the rights signed over to him?
If he fools you once? Shame on him. If he fools you twice? You are an idiot that deserve what you get.
The user space idiot, a kernel without a userspace is fricking worthless and you and the other flag wavers can mod down ALL you want, but your type were the ones pushing the whole "linux is just a kernel' bullshit...don't like being hoisted on your own petard?
And there are still copies of Win98 out there...you have a point to make? The ENTIRE POINT of the way GPL is set up is sure you can go with an old version and quickly end up with an unsupported mess unless again you are gonna stand here and argue that Valve is gonna hire every. single. team. that has put out a GPL V3 version to support a no longer supported GPL V2 fork?
You can't have your cake and eat it too sparky, either valve spends countless millions supporting an entire GPL V2 userspace that has been abandoned for years, including a good chunk of the UI, network stack, audio subsystems, etc or they have NO CHOICE but to go DRM free which is the kiss of death for a console. Most likely they will do the latter and end up with another Touchpad as no way in hell is Ubisoft, activision, and EA gonna support a fully unlocked hacker friendly console, no way in hell. the piracy rates on the current consoles is high enough but can you imagine with the FOSSie hate for DRM how quickly steambox will have cracks? Even the PC versions won't be cracked as fast.
But mark my words and mark them well, either they spend a boatload of cash running an unsupported abandoned mess or they get fucked on the DRM. Like it or not GPL V3 closed the "TiVo Hole" so no way in hell they can have DRM in Linux, that is by design. Don't blame the messenger, blame business unfriendly RMS.
What I like is FUN with a capital F, if I wanted dark and gritty I'd be playing Medal of Duty: Gears of Killzone Extreme Edition, what I want out of a sandbox is to be able to do all the shit one could never do IRL. If you haven't played it you really should try Just Cause II as I have yet to see a sandbox that cranks the badass to 11 like it does but a close second would be the Saints Series including 3. Haven't gotten 4 yet as I still haven't beaten all the DLC in Borderlands II and I tend to stick with one game for awhile before moving on.
To me the GTA series just ends up feeling very grindtastic after about the halfway point, it always felt like the devs just run out of gas and pad out the second half of the game.
Hey dumbass...Linux is just a kernel, remember? or are you REALLY gonna claim that Valve is gonna spend over a billion bucks to make their own GPL V2 fork as Google did with Android? because we have seen ZERO indications of that. And Linus has said in interviews repeatedly he CAN'T go GPL V3 as he didn't add "or better" in the original license which mans he'd have to contact every single person who has EVER contributed code and get their permission, which would probably take the better part of a decade and the guy has shit to do.
Sadly it just shows that FOSSie flag wavers don't know WTF they are talking about and wildly wave the flag but if you had bothered to even do the tiniest bit of research before talking out your ass you'd see the majority of Linux besides the kernel has ALREADY gone GPL V3, hence why there isn't a single distro in the over 500 on distrowatch, not a single one, that is GPL V2 only. Or do you think they can magically build an entire gaming OS with nothing but a kernel?
Bullshit as I have several customers with iPhones and the so called "Apple Quality" has gone right down the shitter, their cables and chargers are just as much junk as any Cheapo Chinese Crap, it just costs more. I hate to make it sound like "Saint steve" because i really thought Jobs was an asshole in several areas but one thing I'll give him credit for is that on his watch their gear DID seem to be better quality than most, but like Sony they now seem to be selling substandard crap while keeping the high quality prices.
Ironically this is why when I went shopping for the most "Windows like" experience on a phone I ended up going Android as MSFT and Apple seem to be in a race to see who can be the most customer unfriendly while the experience with Android is "Meh, just do what you want". I can use any charger or adapter, can rip out the OS and install something else, and can tweak it any way I want as well as trivially download and run programs from anywhere.
But sadly you watch, this thread will be filled to the brim with apologists. Even after death the RDF is incredibly strong and from what I've seen Apple could replace the home screen with a Goatse while doubling the price and you'd get a hundred posters saying "You just don't get it, this is Apple's brilliant take on modern society". Call me weird but I can't see waving the flag and apologizing for a company that is obviously giving their customers the finger. But to me the ultimate "WTF?" moment is the knowledge that if MSFT did the exact same thing? We hear the screams but if Apple or Google does it its automatically a good thing and worthy of applause. that just baffles the shit out of me, how being a douchebag is completely fine if you are company X but assrape if you are company Y. Douchebag behavior is douchebag behavior in my book and I'd say this? pretty douchey.
I'd say the bigger question is why we need to continue to scale in any place but the HPC and server spaces? Lets face it folks the reason PC sales are down is because when AMD and Intel switched from MHz wars to core wars PCs went from "good enough" to "insane top fuel dragster" and the software just hasn't kept up, not even close. My main system is nearly 5 years old yet has more cycles than i know what to do with and even my customers on the first gen C2Ds and Athlon X2s frankly spend more time with their PC idling than it does under load.
So what we need now is not a breakthrough in hardware, its in software. What we need is a new framework or language that makes developing programs that will scale with cores as easy to do as taking advantage of single thread performance and we need to intelligently manage all these cores so as to get the best combination of power management and performance. Otherwise they are gonna keep building these "super chips for a smaller and smaller audience as more and more folks realize what I did several years back which is they have more hardware now than they can use. Seriously how many folks are gonna max out even a C2Q or AMD Phenom I X4, much less the latest hexa and octocores? I know even with me multitasking like mad I just can't come up with enough useful work to feed my hexa, even 3D shooters tend to slam only one core hard and then lightly use a couple more for pathfinding and the like, software is way behind what we have now, much less what we'd get from 3D chips and specialized DSP and the like.
Actually Dave they don't even have the physical keyboard market cornered anymore, as LG has been shipping slider phones with android for quite some time. Its very popular, at least around here and I ended up getting one as I hate texting using an on screen UI and I have to say they...are quite nice, my thumbs fit perfectly and the Android OS runs well.
Lets face it BB is dead. Its over, stick a fork, the fat lady has not only sung she is down the street having a sammich. it will end up getting bought by a troll for the patents. Much like Nokia and Palm they simply sat on ass for too long and the market passed them by, they simply won't be able to catch up.
Bullshit, the reason why BB is on the ropes is they no longer HAVE the enterprise customers, BYOD killed BB dead and all those PHBs that had to have a crackberry now have an iPhone or Android.
Lets face it the only ones that would be interested in buying BB is patent trolls and the big three who could use those patents against the competition. Since MSFT gets paid for every android sold thanks to patents my money would be on them buying it but it sure won't be for the customers, it'll be for the patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh...I live in a SMALL town and there is already 4 different shops that offer upgrading android phones as a service. Remember the creed of the small business "if somebody needs it done somebody is willing to do it for a price" and this is a small town, in any large city you could probably have 2 dozen shops to choose from.
That doesn't change the fact that MSFT gave early adopters the finger so now I wouldn't give them even $20 for a WinPhone. With Android i can go with AreaRomQ, Cyanogen, or at least 2 others that I have found for my Android phone and mine isn't even a very popular model, if I had a big name like a Hero or Galaxy I could have even more choices.
Isn't Metro apps locked into the appstore? That may be what they mean by partial, if they have the metro look without being tied to the appstore.
BTW is anybody else sick of the words apps and appstore yet? Because I'm REALLY fucking tired of hearing apps to app your app, especially when it comes to non mobile devices like Win 8. The second I hear apps now I think "buzzword hipster crap" and start tuning them out.
As for VLC? Congrats guys, your player has been on my "must install" list for quite some time, it opens virtually any format and uses little resources. all in all a great program, keep up the good work!
4. Because of this a massive stock market bubble has been blown which has already cost a trillion dollar bail out and when it pops it will make the great depression look like a flash crash.
I have seen a few places where guys have tried to crunch the numbers and no matter whose figures you go with you are looking at a worldwide depression and the USA economy dead for a good half a century or more. Look at the figures in the video taken from various government sources at the 3.30 mark and note that right before the 29 crash the market was at 125%, we are now over 403% and rising. You also have a huge sector built around the bubble, all those people will end up on the breadline when that bubble bursts as well.
I don't know which is scarier, that we have a bubble that big close to bursting or that the numbers I saw put it between 2020 and 2030 at the latest before no matter how much phony money the fed prints the bubble will no longer be sustainable and HAVE to burst. I have to wonder if that is why we are seeing more and more fascism in this country, the elite know this is gonna happen and are hoping the stormtroops will save their collective asses.
Actually as others have pointed out depending on the area you may end up with a good 35% or better unemployment. I can tell you in my area businesses that were there for over a century are gone, my dad who has been in business since the early 70s is about to let his employees go and sell off the assets, and the business district is now a ghost town full of boarded up buildings.
So yes if you looked at the real numbers and not the bullshit numbers? We are looking at great depression levels of bankruptcy and unemployment. What pisses me off is in a time like this when the government actually should be helping folks a large chunk of the right wing have the "let 'em die!" attitude as seen in the RNC. So yes it really IS that bad, and that is not even counting the underemployed, that is just the jobless. again there are tents being put up in nearly every town in the flyover states and homelessness is exploding as those who can't find a job have their benefits run out and "magically disappear" from the official roles.
I would agree with that...to a point. One thing we have seen over and over in economics is there is a "sweet spot" when it comes to pricing and ease of use and when that sweet spot is ignored then a black market appears to serve those customers you are foolishly ignoring.
Take video games as an example. While of course lower prices equal more sales there is a point where continuing to lower the price doesn't increase sales simply because all of those that want the product have gotten the product by then. Watching game sales that release sales figures here is what I have observed...for indie games the sweet spot seems to be between $2-$5, unless its mobile in which case its a buck. For big name titles it really depends on how niche the game is, for example a Mirror's Edge or a God sim like Populus seem to do best in the $10-$20 price range while something more accessible to a general audience, your Saints Rows and Borderlands seem to do best in the $20-$40 but the SMART publishers go for the lower end of that curve and make up the difference in impulse buy DLC, your costumes in both and expansions in Borderlands.Finally you have those games with a VERY short shelf life, your Call Of Honor: Gears Of Killzone Halo Edition where everybody buys it for the MP which is quickly dead when the next come out and those can sell a huge amount in the $40-$60 range simply because if you don't buy at release when the next title comes out the previous one quickly becomes a ghost town.
But if you ignore those sweet spots then piracy WILL jump off the scale because time and time again we have seen when a large part of the market isn't being served a black market WILL arise to serve those customers. We have seen this in everything from piracy to Chinese knock offs of popular electronics, if the people think the price for a tablet should be between $100-$150 and the big names all push $400 then somebody WILL come along and give all those potential customers what they want.
I think where most industries seriously fuck up is by saying "Oh if you refuse to bend over and give us every cent we think our precious shit is worth (or that we require to pump up our stock price, see the former head of EA saying games should be $100) then you are the evil and should be destroyed" when in reality a black market is simply a signal that you are doing SOMETHING WRONG, your price is too high, your product has ease of use issues, there is something driving your potential customers across the street to the black market, you fix that issue? Watch the money train pull in.
What blows my mind is how little security a city the size of Fairbanks has....WTF people? Did we forget what happened with those planes and the terrorists already? Somebody needs to call the feds and demand some money to improve security because that is just sad.Hell I live in BF AR and if you try to get even up to the fence surrounding the runway you are gonna have a guard there asking you WTF you are doing before you could do shit, no way in hell you could actually DRIVE onto the runway without having a half a dozen cars with flashing lights boxing you in, you'd be staring down a good dozen barrels before you said oopsie.
This is part of a MUCH larger problem I call "the machine never lies" which i have run into MANY times and it goes like this...if common sense tells you one thing and a machine another? The machine never lies so you are incorrect. I have had to call a manager when a cash register said change for a hundred with a 9 dollar purchase was 11 dollars, common sense would tell you that its wrong but the girl simply refused to believe the machine COULD be wrong so hence the manager. I had to go through that again recently when a relative passed on, the moron at the desk refused to believe she didn't owe property taxes for this year...on a piece of property she had sold over a decade ago. Again the machine doesn't lie so no matter what it says they believe it.
As more and more crap like built in mapping end up on every phone I have a feeling we'll see a lot of morons driving off of bridges, driving out in front of trains, as long as the machine tells them to? The little lemmings will march on...God who would have thought that Idiocracy would end up being a documentary?
Riiiight, he and the board risked millions in fines and prison time all so they could tank the company in the HOPES that MSFT would buy them and not just wait until they collapsed and buy the best pieces...I have a bridge you may be interested in BTW.
Look its REALLY simple, okay? The board fucked up and let there end up not one, not two, but THREE different OSes, none of which could compete with iOS and Android. There best hope MeeGo/MaeMo was being actively sabotaged by both Symbian on the inside and Intel on the outside, and being the #1 dumbphone maker in this day and age of free Android phones from even the prepaid bunches was about as useful as being the biggest 8-track maker in 1987. So Elop was brought in to do the dirty work, kill the no longer update-able Symbian and to throw a Hail Mary pass and hope to gain some ground and...it failed.
so I'm sorry but they really didn't have any other option, they really didn't thanks to the board sitting on ass too long, a repeat of Palm. Ironically the best bet would have been WebOS but HP was willing to pay insane-o money for it so it was off the table, and Android is a shark tank that is in a race to the bottom. While Nokia can make dirt cheap dumbphones they have NOT shown the ability to repeat that in smartphones and there is no way in hell they would have been able to fight Samsung,HTC, and Huawei toe to toe, no way. All that was left was a Hail mary, hence the "burning platform" but there is a REASON why they call it a Hail Mary because it has but a slim prayer of working. If it would have worked I''m sure the Googleites here would be screaming how "It was all Ballmer's plan to take over Nokia!" so damned if you do, damned if you don't. Would you have rather he broke up the company and sold it like a corporate raider, like is what is likely to be the fate of BB?
Well I will take a crack at it....you see the problem is the current system is designed to allow the parasites, those that have made insane amounts of money by rigging and manipulating the government and the system to keep their elite status by being able to pull shit like this which ordinary folks can't do because they don't have the capital required to "buy in" at the correct facilities to beat the wire.
When i see shit like this, along with both parties seeming not to give a shit about being scene outright kicking the poor when they are down i have to wonder....how much time does the USA really have left? After all as has been pointed out several times the unemployment numbers are bullshit and if you figure in all those that they just magically drop from the rolls we are looking at a good 23%+ unemployment, meanwhile you have the right wing being so damned vicious to the poor you might as well replace the elephant with Monty Burns and then to add the shit icing on the asshole cake you have shit like this which allows the really nasty leeches like Goldman Sachs to make mountains of money off of the American people.
So I have to wonder if this isn't the root cause of why all empires fall, those at the top become so fucking greedy that they tilt the system so damned far out of balance the whole thing collapses. It pretty obvious that in the last 4-5 years or so many in power have stopped caring about the kayfabe of giving a fuck about anyone but the elite, the working poor and unemployed, which outnumber the top 1% by a good 10,000 to 1 (because in reality its more like 0.01% that get a good 70% of the wealth consistently) are just being bombarded with story after story like this where the elite scam billions and the only thing the government does is ask if they want a task break, and the war on poverty by attacking food stamps, medicaid/care, disability, welfare, etc makes it real clear to the poor folks that the elite really want them gone...so is this how it ends? With the poor getting everything taken away until their is nothing to lose and we have own own Arab Spring?
I don't know but I can tell you the flyover states are beginning to look like the depression, small businesses that were here for generations closed and the factories gone so that huge chunks of land are nothing but abandoned buildings, and instead of helping the broke and starving poor those in government seem to be doing everything they can to curbstomp poor folks and take away any benefits they may get. Hell I got a disabled relative that if he isn't able to win against them taking his disability he'll be homeless by Xmas, and I hear similar stories from all my customers, women and kids sleeping in cars because they found a way to take away what pitiful benefits they were getting, tents popping up all over the place because folks got nowhere to live, it makes me wonder if the whole French "let 'em eat cake" situation is repeating here and will end with the same result. The teeming poor have nothing to lose and their ranks grow by the day, its seriously bad here folks.
I didn't know that but after working corporate for several years it honestly doesn't surprise me. If the average person only knew how many major corps have just insane amounts of risky data, CC numbers, addresses and SSNs for example, being manipulated on some creaky as hell VB into Access DB cooked up over a couple of days by some guy that hasn't been with the corp in the better part of a decade? Or how many transmit the same risky data over the net to the main branch using some God Awful IE 6 ActiveX mess? Well I bet a LOT of folks wouldn't trust these companies as far as they could throw them.
But your post just supports what I've been saying for years, that JavaScript should have went the way of Gopher and somebody better, something designed from the ground up with security in mind, should have taken its place. I mean its insane the way websites are set up now, I have even seen CHECK OUT PAGES that had calls to third party ad servers! Talk about just asking for CC theft! But I have a feeling as long as the big three look at EVERYTHING as an excuse to try to get some lock in? we'll just keep putting bandaids on bullet wounds.
Try Just Cause II as it has EXACTLY what you are describing. You can start a new game and after the first mission? You can just drive through the countryside if you desire and as long as you don't go running down cops or blasting people nobody will bother you. You can drive to the airport, pick up a plane or chopper and just fly around without being bothered, you can go down to the docs and get anything from a speedboat to a Junk and just go cruising, or if you buy the parachute thrusters DLC (just 99c) you can just jump into the air and fly your parachute all across the place, even use the grappler to grab onto boats and cars and go parasailing.
Anyway as long as you have Vista or better (requires DX10) and even an average gaming card (it plays over 30FPS on my HD4850, a card you can get for less than $40 on Amazon) you can go where you want and do whatever you want, the entire world from the mountain tops to the ocean is 100% open from the get go. Sounds like exactly what you are looking for....but you really should go apeshit in that game at least once, nothing wilder than riding on the hood of a car going 165MPH+ and grappling a pursuing cop car to the ground and making it do the T3 car flip, tying a cop bike to a lamppost like Jedi, or blowing out the tires of a jeep and watching it cartwheel a dozen times before becoming a fireball, VERY cool.
But the the reason why nobody makes those anymore and why very few "Myst style" games came out is really simple and its the same reason why FMV "games" also died, and its the simple fact that graphics caught up.
The reason why Myst was so amazing back in the day was....it was 1993. Remember what PCs were like back in 93? You average game back then was a side scroller, Wolfenstein was less than a year old and you had to have a pretty beefy PC to run it. Now look at Myst...it was simply amazing to look at, much more like a movie than a game as far as graphical quality goes and in an era of levels that looked like paper cut outs? Its really not surprising it blew so many away.
But then something truly amazing happened,..the rise of the graphics card, or as many called it back in the day the "graphical accelerator". Suddenly games went from cut outs to crude 3D shapes to incredible depth...just compare No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 to see how far games came in just a few years, hell I still play a few games from a decade ago online and stuff like Freelancer still can immerse me in this galaxy hopping universe. But Myst just didn't translate well to the fully realized 3D world, like Dragon's Lair and the whole FMV craze what once wowed us just didn't really work in a fully 3D world.
So I would say the legacy of Myst was to give us back in 93 a brief taste of what the future would be like, a world where these fully fleshed out worlds are taken for granted...I mean how many of us here have fired up a recent game and just marveled at how fricking HUGE and fleshed out these worlds really are? I mean when I fire up Just Cause II with islands large enough that it would take the better part of an hour to drive across it, or fire up Borderlands II and look at how many hours I have sunk in and haven't even got to see all the game has to offer? Its pretty fricking amazing, just as Myst made our collective jaws drop back in the day. If you asked me to list the biggest jaw dropper moments of early gaming it would have to be Myst, the first time I played Quake, and that opening with the castle on Unreal.
Most of the high level posts are lifetime posts placed there during Bush Sr and Jr, and that was just MY interpretation, she believes it may be a purposeful leak to create a chilling effect...which if it is one has to give them credit as I know I have spoken to many customers who are now afraid to even say a political leader sucks online for fear of being on a list. Remember the STASI had less than 10% of the population under their watch but had near total obedience thanks to the chilling effect.
I do however find it ironic that I was modded down for merely saying this topic should be discussed, considering how many blatant shills we've had here of late I find it ironic that on the subject of whether we should discuss even the possibility that the government MIGHT be involved somebody is trying to make sure the post isn't seen.
And did you bother to read her reasons? Snowden's "evidence" was VERY targeted at certain political parties and groups (one can't normally grab ONLY a slice that precise) and he was VERY organized and stayed focus on message (compare to Manning and pretty much every other whistleblower, not organized at all because they are in serious danger so not as focused) and his "interview" was not only professionally shot but he comes off NOT like an IT guy who is facing his first time under the spotlight but like an announcer that has done this a million times, no stammers, no stutters, no mistakes or flubbing his lines.
I'm sorry but she is right to call attention to that as it wouldn't be the first time we've had the government use disinformation and you can't have a chilling effect upon a populace if they don't know they are being watched. Is she right? Who knows but considering we have had the government start wars with disinformation and false flags (Vietnam) it is certainly something that at least should be discussed.
Exactly and for an example of what can happen look at the "Yahoo Porn Bug" in my journal, I had customers spamming the living hell out of everyone in their address books and all that took was a little code, a hidden iFrame, and a browser that runs the same permission level as the user, in that case Firefox.
Frankly the whole current system is just fucked up, you can have code from as many as a dozen different servers, splattered all over the planet, all just to load a single page. And as more and more websites go "Web 3.0 apps apps apps...did we mention we have apps?" the ability to block all that crap from God knows where diminishes. I think the problem is that JavaScript was just never built with security in mind, it was back in the day when organized cybercrime and the like was the realm of sci/fi and instead of starting over when the thing started getting unsafe we just put bandaids on the bullet wounds.
And the reason why is obvious, instead of listening the started dictating to customers so that for every one they get they lose a dozen.
Look at me as an example, as somebody who has used and sold Windows systems since the days of 3.x I would be a prime candidate for a WinPhone, what did I get? an Android. Why? Because after the "just deal with it" bad attitude of their games division, the flipping the bird to desktop users AND refusing to port WinPhone 8 to WinPhone 7 buyers, thus leaving them with a worthless device? I'm sorry but I don't trust them not to throw me by the wayside when winPhone 9 comes out. at least with Android i can easily load a ROM myself instead of depending on the carrier or MSFT to support me.
So while they have been going up in certain markets I bet if one did the math they are product dumping to gain share but even MSFT can't afford to dump below cost forever and the bad will they keep generating is turning off more and more folks.
What effects? BB has been dead for awhile, its been a zombie with a billion phones they can't sell and an OS nobody wants. Most likely these vultures will sell off the assets and keep the IP for some major trolling.
The only ones I feel sorry for is the folks on the lines, the smart ones that had skills that would translate have moved on, all that is left is the poor slobs that couldn't find other employment and in this economy? Well let us hope the evil tea party elitists don't kill foodstamps otherwise many of them will end up going hungry.
What I don't get is this...why does anybody think MariaDB is ANY safer? I mean its still run by old Monty, right? The guy that sold MySQL out from under the community to Oracle in the first place? And don't he still require that ALL code contributed have the rights signed over to him?
If he fools you once? Shame on him. If he fools you twice? You are an idiot that deserve what you get.
The user space idiot, a kernel without a userspace is fricking worthless and you and the other flag wavers can mod down ALL you want, but your type were the ones pushing the whole "linux is just a kernel' bullshit...don't like being hoisted on your own petard?
And there are still copies of Win98 out there...you have a point to make? The ENTIRE POINT of the way GPL is set up is sure you can go with an old version and quickly end up with an unsupported mess unless again you are gonna stand here and argue that Valve is gonna hire every. single. team. that has put out a GPL V3 version to support a no longer supported GPL V2 fork?
You can't have your cake and eat it too sparky, either valve spends countless millions supporting an entire GPL V2 userspace that has been abandoned for years, including a good chunk of the UI, network stack, audio subsystems, etc or they have NO CHOICE but to go DRM free which is the kiss of death for a console. Most likely they will do the latter and end up with another Touchpad as no way in hell is Ubisoft, activision, and EA gonna support a fully unlocked hacker friendly console, no way in hell. the piracy rates on the current consoles is high enough but can you imagine with the FOSSie hate for DRM how quickly steambox will have cracks? Even the PC versions won't be cracked as fast.
But mark my words and mark them well, either they spend a boatload of cash running an unsupported abandoned mess or they get fucked on the DRM. Like it or not GPL V3 closed the "TiVo Hole" so no way in hell they can have DRM in Linux, that is by design. Don't blame the messenger, blame business unfriendly RMS.
What I like is FUN with a capital F, if I wanted dark and gritty I'd be playing Medal of Duty: Gears of Killzone Extreme Edition, what I want out of a sandbox is to be able to do all the shit one could never do IRL. If you haven't played it you really should try Just Cause II as I have yet to see a sandbox that cranks the badass to 11 like it does but a close second would be the Saints Series including 3. Haven't gotten 4 yet as I still haven't beaten all the DLC in Borderlands II and I tend to stick with one game for awhile before moving on.
To me the GTA series just ends up feeling very grindtastic after about the halfway point, it always felt like the devs just run out of gas and pad out the second half of the game.
Hey dumbass...Linux is just a kernel, remember? or are you REALLY gonna claim that Valve is gonna spend over a billion bucks to make their own GPL V2 fork as Google did with Android? because we have seen ZERO indications of that. And Linus has said in interviews repeatedly he CAN'T go GPL V3 as he didn't add "or better" in the original license which mans he'd have to contact every single person who has EVER contributed code and get their permission, which would probably take the better part of a decade and the guy has shit to do.
Sadly it just shows that FOSSie flag wavers don't know WTF they are talking about and wildly wave the flag but if you had bothered to even do the tiniest bit of research before talking out your ass you'd see the majority of Linux besides the kernel has ALREADY gone GPL V3, hence why there isn't a single distro in the over 500 on distrowatch, not a single one, that is GPL V2 only. Or do you think they can magically build an entire gaming OS with nothing but a kernel?
Bullshit as I have several customers with iPhones and the so called "Apple Quality" has gone right down the shitter, their cables and chargers are just as much junk as any Cheapo Chinese Crap, it just costs more. I hate to make it sound like "Saint steve" because i really thought Jobs was an asshole in several areas but one thing I'll give him credit for is that on his watch their gear DID seem to be better quality than most, but like Sony they now seem to be selling substandard crap while keeping the high quality prices.
Ironically this is why when I went shopping for the most "Windows like" experience on a phone I ended up going Android as MSFT and Apple seem to be in a race to see who can be the most customer unfriendly while the experience with Android is "Meh, just do what you want". I can use any charger or adapter, can rip out the OS and install something else, and can tweak it any way I want as well as trivially download and run programs from anywhere.
But sadly you watch, this thread will be filled to the brim with apologists. Even after death the RDF is incredibly strong and from what I've seen Apple could replace the home screen with a Goatse while doubling the price and you'd get a hundred posters saying "You just don't get it, this is Apple's brilliant take on modern society". Call me weird but I can't see waving the flag and apologizing for a company that is obviously giving their customers the finger. But to me the ultimate "WTF?" moment is the knowledge that if MSFT did the exact same thing? We hear the screams but if Apple or Google does it its automatically a good thing and worthy of applause. that just baffles the shit out of me, how being a douchebag is completely fine if you are company X but assrape if you are company Y. Douchebag behavior is douchebag behavior in my book and I'd say this? pretty douchey.
I'd say the bigger question is why we need to continue to scale in any place but the HPC and server spaces? Lets face it folks the reason PC sales are down is because when AMD and Intel switched from MHz wars to core wars PCs went from "good enough" to "insane top fuel dragster" and the software just hasn't kept up, not even close. My main system is nearly 5 years old yet has more cycles than i know what to do with and even my customers on the first gen C2Ds and Athlon X2s frankly spend more time with their PC idling than it does under load.
So what we need now is not a breakthrough in hardware, its in software. What we need is a new framework or language that makes developing programs that will scale with cores as easy to do as taking advantage of single thread performance and we need to intelligently manage all these cores so as to get the best combination of power management and performance. Otherwise they are gonna keep building these "super chips for a smaller and smaller audience as more and more folks realize what I did several years back which is they have more hardware now than they can use. Seriously how many folks are gonna max out even a C2Q or AMD Phenom I X4, much less the latest hexa and octocores? I know even with me multitasking like mad I just can't come up with enough useful work to feed my hexa, even 3D shooters tend to slam only one core hard and then lightly use a couple more for pathfinding and the like, software is way behind what we have now, much less what we'd get from 3D chips and specialized DSP and the like.
Actually Dave they don't even have the physical keyboard market cornered anymore, as LG has been shipping slider phones with android for quite some time. Its very popular, at least around here and I ended up getting one as I hate texting using an on screen UI and I have to say they...are quite nice, my thumbs fit perfectly and the Android OS runs well.
Lets face it BB is dead. Its over, stick a fork, the fat lady has not only sung she is down the street having a sammich. it will end up getting bought by a troll for the patents. Much like Nokia and Palm they simply sat on ass for too long and the market passed them by, they simply won't be able to catch up.
Bullshit, the reason why BB is on the ropes is they no longer HAVE the enterprise customers, BYOD killed BB dead and all those PHBs that had to have a crackberry now have an iPhone or Android.
Lets face it the only ones that would be interested in buying BB is patent trolls and the big three who could use those patents against the competition. Since MSFT gets paid for every android sold thanks to patents my money would be on them buying it but it sure won't be for the customers, it'll be for the patents.