The candle that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast, truth is truth.
Ironically by doing everything in moderation I'd say I'm doing better now creatively than i was 20 years ago, at least as far as my music is concerned. Part of that has to be finding a damned good guitarist/singer/songwriter to work with and a nice tight drummer and sticking with the 3 piece format which makes me have to really bust my ass to make the band sound full with so few instruments, but I'd also say knowing when to step away and clear my head REALLY helps.
I have seen many push themselves like this kid, both in IT and in music and ya know what? It never ends well, they either burn out of fizzle out. I drive my GF nuts with all my sayings but truth is truth and "everything in moderation" is something frankly all should try to live by IMHO. I would love to see a follow up when this kid is 30, I bet he'll have had a burn out or a breakdown.
I take it you didn't see the infamous "Let him die!" cheers during Ron Paul's speech? Even Paul had a look of horror on his face at the blatant fucking GREED that was on front and center display. Whether anybody wants to accept it or not the top 10% of the capital holders are made up in a large part with sociopaths whom if you told "Millions of men,women, and children will die if you do not stop" would say "fuck them peasant scum, charge 'em for the mass graves to dump their sorry corpses in".
This is why I really wouldn't be surprised to see the world go through another dark age, as those at the top frankly would pull an Andrew Ryan and burn the forest to the ground rather than share it with the poor.
The problem is that capitalism, like every other "ism" before it MUST die, and most likely that death will be bloody and vicious as those that have benefited the most from it (such as how 0.01% got 80% of the money made during the recovery) WILL fight until the bitter end to keep their status as elites.
The problem with capitalism is the entire premise is built around trading labor for capital...but what happens when your labor is worthless? That same 0.01% have the ability to buy all the robots and automated factories so they don't have to worry about it, the other 95% that aren't at the top of the caste system will be left to starve. So either the government gives everyone a decent living wage just for drawing breath or eventually those living in grinding poverty will get tired of killing themselves day after day only to find they are truly worthless in a computerized society and rise up violently.
In a way its like how Roddenberry saw Star trek, once you reach a certain point on the technological ladder the old systems just no longer work, with Star Trek it was first contact and warp drive, with us it appears to be the rise of computers, but in either case one only has to have eyes to see that unlike times passed machines are not just making us more productive, they are replacing us in the jobs completely.
Look up "market devaluation" and you will see why Nokia had no choice but to bring in Elop and hope a Hail Mary with WinPhone would save them. The simplified version is that losing half their value in the 6 years before Elop came in made their ability to borrow money VERY difficult and due to the way the tax codes are set up these big corps pretty much live on borrowed money. there are a few exceptions of course (Apple) but most require the ability to get loans easily and at a low enough rate to stay afloat, Nokia could no longer do that and so was bleeding out.
So they really had no choice, its not like Google would cut them a billion dollar check to make Android phones and their market devaluation left them with severe liquidity problems that just rearranging the deck chairs wasn't gonna solve. the huge cash infusion gave Wall Street confidence and helped slow down the stock freefall and also helped reopen their lines of credit. If they would have went with Android we'd be talking about how the evil MSFT is trying to buy Nokia's patents at their bankruptcy, that is all.
Interesting? For a Wiki link? Really mods? if you want a link friend how about one showing what was REALLY going on with MeeGo which had one internal team screwing it (Symbian team) and one of the largest hardware makers ON THE PLANET actively fucking it for fear that the ARM version would outsell the X86 (Intel, which considering the cripple compiler and bribery of OEMs, is anybody surprised?) so MeeGo was DOA before it ever walked out the door.
So before you put your faith in the Wiki how about looking up what was going on behind the scenes? Start with OSNews, many of their posters are from that part of the world and include many software engineers that actually worked there. They paint a picture of an OS with serious flaws, including requiring to be restarted twice a day or MeeGo would crash thanks to a nasty memory corruption bug they were having hell locking down, and if that weren't enough they had Symbian team cockblocking and headhunting, they had Intel demanding and getting changes which sent the OS back practically to square one several times, and you had PHBs changing the entire UI on a whim causing the entire UI to be tossed at 75% complete.
I'm sorry friend but MeeGo, just like Nokia itself, was fucked. It had NO CHANCE of competing with iPhone 2 and Android 2.x (which is still so popular its used by many of the lower tier OEMs like Huawei) and it sure as hell couldn't compete with Android 4 and iPhone 5. All you'd have had is another Touchpad, which with Nokia profits dropping like a stone would have outright slaughtered the company.
Normally we don't agree but you are spot on, its like how all those UNIX stations in the late 80s had everything from the kernel on up written around the particular hardware that was on the system. In a way the current smartphones remind me a LOT of the 80s, back in the days where you could only run the OS that came with a unit because it was written at such a low level around the hardware that anything else would have run like a slug upon it.
Honestly the whole thing is moot anyway, as I said in the earlier post that so few seem to be able to grasp you just can't take a top heavy company like Nokia and throw them into a sharktank that is a race to the bottom and expect them to do anything besides be a snack for the leaner and meaner companies, its just not gonna happen. You look at the costs of the factories, the cost of the employees, the huge amount of management they employed? They were WAY too top heavy to compete with the likes of LG and Huawei, and the only one making bank in the amounts required to keep Nokia in the black was Samsung and that 800 pound gorilla would have treated Nokia like Samsonite luggage.
No I'm saying having Ferrari make Yugo mini-cars would end up with a bankrupt Ferrari?
Why people has so much trouble following a simple concept is beyond me, but for those that seem to have trouble grasping the concept (which from the replies seems to be the majority) I'll spell it out....in a race to the bottom only the tightest ships will survive those that can pinch the most pennies, lower the material costs down to the absolute minimum, shave every penny and pinch it until it screams...remember Dell? Remember why they became the #1 PC maker? Because they were only making $8 a sale that's why!
What everyone seems to have trouble grasping is that Nokia had too many upfront costs, too much overhead to compete in a sharktank like a race to the bottom, they would have died just as many OEMs died in the PC Price Wars, inability to shave costs equals dead company. They have a factory in Europe, one of the most worker friendly places on the planet, no fucking way that factory can compete with a place in China whipping off phones while paying workers less than $5 USD a day, they had a large R&D that frankly wasn't delivering the D part of that, again not gonna be able to compete with the likes of LG and Huawei who have their businesses striped down as a ricer racer, its just not possible.
But of course I'll be marked down for daring to point out the reality of the market, because I refuse to guzzle the koolaid and pretend that RMS farts rainbows and anything that the Linux kernel touches is magically a hit, News Flash...its not. Out of the dozen companies making Android phones? Only ONE is making consistent profits, the rest? They are making money alright, but their profits are less than what Nokia was making on dumbphones in 2011, they just aren't making the kind of bank Nokia would require to survive, the ONLY company making the kind of green a top heavy company like Nokia would require to keep the stock from continuing its free fall? Samsung. Again better companies have tried to beat Samsung, companies that have a hell of a lot more experience, advertising budgets, and brand recognition than Nokia, and they have failed. Nokia would have been curbstomped.
Frankly its amazing how few here can even understand markets, whether its the FOSS blinders or magical thinking? Fuck if I know, you act like that because a company is making profits that means Nokia could make enough to thrive...wrong,for the same reason that Compaq and Maxtor ended up being bought out during the price wars by companies that ran leaner and meaner. if you have an expensive to run company a race to the bottom is corporate suicide. The only way Nokia would have made bank in Android is to close up shop and move to Asia so they could compete with LG and Huawei, but that would have cost billions they just did not have.
Like it or not Nokia was fucked and the Android fairy wouldn't have stopped the freefall, it would have accelerated it. The best thing would have been to buy WebOS back in 08, they didn't do that. By the time the board got its head out of its ass they were too far behind, too bloated, too toxic, they were fucked.
We'll be calling him burnout or a shrink in 5 years sadly. No music, no recreation at all? Yeah I've met a few of those types over the years and...well it never ends well. It is like they bottle everything, using the pressure to gain forward momentum, problem with that? No vessel can contain infinite pressure so sooner or later they blow and when they do its ugly.
I have gamer customers that "Must be teh bestest", one so bad his grandma uses a Skulltrail as that was the weakest hand me down he had, and I can honestly say...I have yet to see SMART work with an SSD, not even once, and we are talking dozens of dead SSDs.
They can call me names like Luddite all they want, I'll tell them the same as I tell win 8 apologists "You can take an innovative shit but its still gonna stink and you shouldn't play with it" because i can say with total honesty, and this is including the refurb drives that I used to get by the load off of Geeks (RIP Geeks.com, you are missed) that the ONLY HDDs I have seen in recent years that didn't give the user warning were the ones where the user killed it, for instance their kid knocking the laptop off the table. The rest? They had enough warnings shown to them to call me and have me replace the disk before data loss ever occurred. The reason why is obvious, the tech is mature, the bugs ironed out long ago.
Most people don't give a rat's ass about the drive, IT'S THE DATA and all it takes is having to tell one person that have their SSD go tits up before the next backup that their stuff was gone forever for you not to recommend SSDs.
Yes and please post a reply to the guy below you saying the same so he knows as well. i have set up both hybrids and the Sandisk caching drive for Win 7 (if you have a desktop they are only $50 and a cheap way to get a boost WITHOUT having to reinstall or move the OS) and with both if the SSD portion fails? The original data is on the HDD and since it uses a technique similar to Windows Readyboost, which just FYI you can use instead of the sandisk caching software if you prefer, the data is never lost, it simply slows back down to HDD speed.
You DO realize that what you are pointing out makes SSDs an even WORSE idea, yes? because it ISN'T the cap that is killing these things like flies, its the controller failures which have ZERO predictability so makes the entire discussion of the cap pointless.
At least with the HDDs you DO get advanced warning nearly every time, Windows delayed write failures, temp spikes, noise, something. With the SSDs the controller can crap any second, doesn't matter if its brand new or a year old and in fact one of my customers had one go tits up after less than a month, because there is serious problems with the controllers that nobody has figured out how to fix.
Oh and one final advantage of HDDs over SSDs, if you have a drive under warranty that starts going wonky? You can in most cases zero out the drive before sending it back, with an SSD failure I've had several customers just eat the cost and toss the warranty because there was no way to remove the data on the drive and they had no idea where or whom would end up with the drive once they sent it back. With an SSD you either use full disc encryption (which frankly slows the hell out of most drives, thus negating the whole point of having SSD over HDD) or you risk your data being recovered by whatever third world company refurbs the things.
Didn't say you couldn't and in fact have had long essays here about how Linux doesn't magically give you security for being FOSS and how the many eyes myth is just that.
But one advantage Linux DOES have over the legal versions of Windows is the fact you can download prebuilt images designed around all kinds of jobs including secure web servers with full disc encryption already set up and configured, you just add your own password. This is one thing that has pissed me off about MSFT for years, you get a "one size fits all" approach whereas if you go to TPB you can find countless versions built for a specific task. One really nice one is the "Tiny" versions which make great VMs, installs for old hardware, and are great to build a secure Windows around as they strip out a LOT of the unneeded cruft.
Sadly you would probably get a call from the BSA if you tried using them in any kind of public manner so until MSFT comes out with a real tiny OS then a strip down Linux server with full disk encryption is probably the best bet.
Well that and property taxes which are just as bad as it takes away your right to own a home (as you will pay for it forever, with an arbitrary price set by the state and if you miss more than a payment or two they sell YOUR property out from under you) and insures a caste system as the poor whites and minorities get shitty schools thanks to shitty property values while the elite get top notch schools thanks to the money extorted from all those that live in nice neighborhoods.
It doesn't change the fact I've been proven right a bazillion times, ALWAYS bigger, NEVER smaller. I mean look at the end of the Cold War, why we don't need that massive money sucking military right? we can scale down? Instead we get billion dollars stealth boondoggles, a fleet of ELEVEN fricking carriers when the next largest military? TWO and the ones that would ever be a credible enemy of the USA? ZERO, and of course "war on" everything from dope to terrorists to our own citizens through the NSA. Hey, gotta find a way to blow that cash, gotta bribe and porkbarrel and that ain't cheap, right?
Its ironic that many call me the "/. resident hippie" because i actually support treating the poor as human beings and am against reverse robin hood tactics but in the case of the government for every dollar spent on the poor you have something like 1000 spent on crap, countless wars, overblown military, political favors like roads to nowhere, and how long have the people tried voting for a smaller government only to get bold faced lied to? Remember folks ALWAYS bigger, NEVER smaller.
I am so sick of this "magical thinking" when it comes to Android. There is something like a dozen making Android phones, how many of those have been consistently profitable with Android? ONE, and that is Samsung. HTC and LG have made profits, not consistently mind you, and with LG their profits on a lot of phones can be measured in pennies.
Like it or not folks, and this is coming from somebody that uses an Android phone that I'm quite happy with, with Android you have a race to the bottom where the VAST majority of Android sales in the under $185 price range and this market, the ultra low end? is a market that Nokia could NEVER compete in, okay? They were already WAAAY behind on smartphones thanks to all the infighting and not one, not two, but THREE OS teams backstabbing and playing politics, the ONLY market they had a lead in was dumbphones and that market was dead at the end of 2010 with the mediatek SoC that allowed Chinese shops to make a nice dumbphone for just $3 USD. They also had beancounters insisting on "getting their money's worth" from the TI OMAP chip they had bought the rights for, but that thing was too far behind the curve to make a decent Android phone with and the high cost of the Nokia factories meant they would have to sell them at a price point the market would never go for.
So can we please please PLEASE stop the "Android is magic" bullshit already? When it comes to smartphones honestly the cost or lack thereof of the OS isn't even a real concern and thanks to anybody being able to build Android devices its a race to the bottom and in fact reminds me an awful lot of the "PC Price Wars" that drove many an OEM out of business, and finally Nokia was fucked with a capital F long before then, a toxic corporate culture, too much infighting and too much politics had turned the company into the biggest 8 track player builder in a landscape of CDs. Android isn't some fairy Godmother, it isn't "if you build it they will come" because if that were so there wouldn't be so many struggling Android manufacturers. It wouldn't have mattered by that point if they used windows, Linux, or WebOS, the company was too far behind and too badly fucked by PHBs to ever take on Samsung and the ONLY way for Nokia to survive as an Android maker would have been to curbstomp Samsung as their costs were too high. How many here honestly and truly believe that Nokia could have taken on Samsung at the top and not been bitchslapped?
It is as I have said a billion times, government ALWAYS gets bigger, NEVER smaller. This is why I urged everyone to fight for the smokers as they are the canaries in the coal mine and once the revenue from bleeding them went down (as more and more quit or died out) they would try to screw other groups to make up for the cash they are used to blowing. See talks of fat taxes, sugar taxes, and this dumbass "IT tax".
So next time you hear about a tax against some group, even if it is one you might not personally like, be it smokers, drinkers, fat people, whomever, please use your voice and vote and slap that shit down because remember, ALWAYS bigger NEVER smaller.
The sad part is the way forward for AMD is obvious but nobody there is listening. How did Intel beat AMD after years of having to bribe the OEMs to use the P4? By ditching netburst, going back to the proven P3 technology and focusing on ramping up performance of it instead of the P4.
How can AMD beat Intel again? By dropping the turkey that is the Bulldozer "half core" design and going back to a solid proven performer...the K8, which powered the Athlon64 and 64x2 to such great heights. Use THAT as the basis for a new chip and watch AMD kick serious ass again, hell just taking the stock K8 which was at 90nm and using today's 32nm process you could slap 4 K8s on a die easily and crank their clocks up a good 50% and STILL stay under 95w on the desktop!
Instead it looks like AMD is gonna keep beating the Bulldozer dead horse for awhile while spending the lion's share on Bobcat. This will probably help in mobile, being that Jaguar (which is just an amped up Bobcat) is running the PS4 and Xbox N, who knows maybe their idea of making the CPU and GPU into a single entity (HUPA I think its called) will work and allow them to combine the low power of Jag with the high performance of the Radeons and make a good chip but I just don't see it beating Haswell.
Actually this is as bad for the third world as well, because what do you think is used in all those ruggedized laptops and tablets in the middle of BF Africa? NAND Flash. The OLPC, smartphones (which is allowing many third world countries access for the first time to the WWW) all of these use NAND flash and as long as flash remains high it will hurt the poor more than those in the first world.
Make a clean box (cost around $30, Google for instructions) and place the platters from the drive with the data into an identical drive and it'll last long enough to get the data out. Try that with SSD chips and see how much useful data you get.
Thanks for helping me illustrate my point in that you HAD PLENTY OF TIME to swap out the drive WITHOUT losing any data, with an SSD? It literally works one cycle and is dead the next, no errors, no warning, one of my gamer customer even had a health monitoring gadget in the hopes that it would be able to give him a heads up if the SSD was getting ready to die...nope, just went.
In a way it reminds me of the first years of HDDs, they too were prone to suddenly failing and would do so without warning but while HDDs got better every year thanks to all the shrinks if anything SSDs are getting worse. if you have all your data in the cloud or just don't mind the risk? Go for it, but until I see some better results with my own two peepers i'm gonna advise customers to wait.
Because Cisco wasn't the one being sued? Let me put it this way, if somebody sues me because I sold shitty Chinese cars by a single company that company couldn't cover my behind by taking over the case.
I would just add the whole thing ignores that big old rotting elephant in the room which is HDDs? I have found that in damned near every case, not all but most, will give you PLENTY of warning before it goes completely tits up whereas the SSD? One day its working and the next....nothing. No warning, no noise, no indication at all that there was a problem just...poof, buh bye data. This is also ignoring the fact that if the circuit board fails in a HDD you can swap one out for the same model and get it back in most cases, at least long enough to get the data, the SSD? Hope you are good with a soldering iron and a chip reader and I have heard even then its unlikely.
I may be just a little country shop guy but when my gamer customers have all experienced multiple failures when it comes to SSDs, and these guys don't go cheap, sorry but ATM I still don't trust it. I tell folks if they want an SSD don't have anything on it they would feel bad if they lost, now does that mean there aren't still uses for SSDs? Of course not, for one thing if you have a laptop where most if not all of your data is in the cloud? Knock yourself out, just make a weekly disk image so you can re-image when it goes tits up and you are golden. I also have several customers that have bought either hybrid drives or that Sandisk caching drive for Win 7 and in both of those cases they have seen pretty big speed boosts while not having to worry because if it dies all you do is go back to HDD speeds as it is just a cache.
Oh and one final thing....its gonna get worse. its common knowledge that with each shrink the number of writes goes down and the number of failures go up and with all of the major chip companies seeming to only care about how many bits they can stuff per nano-meter? The failure rate WILL get worse, you can count on it. Its too bad that SLC is so insanely high as those seem to have lower failure rates than MLC but as long as all the companies care about is getting that GB number up at all costs its really not gonna be getting better, its gonna be getting worse.
Ironic that they talk about how supposedly high HDD failure rates are when I cleaned out a how drawer of them before moving into the new place, we are talking drives going back to Quantum Fireballs in the 200Mb size, yes Mb not Gb, and they all fired up. granted some of them were noisy as hell but I could still get files off of them while not a single one of my gamer customers have their first SSD, they are all dead. yes i know its an anecdote but I'm not the only one that has seen this, coding horror calls SSDs the hot crazy scale as you trade red hot performance for crazy failure rates. Call me old fashioned but I think I'll just pick upa caching SSD and keep the 5Tb in spinning rust, thanks ever so Intel.
Who said anything about demo charges? If you know a nutter is gonna crash a plane into X and you just...ohh...say weaken the supports some? You still get the results you want and you even get some nice nutters to blame it on. I think where they fucked up is the third tower, i have NO doubt, none whatsoever, that the plane the passengers crashed in PN was fated to hit that tower and somebody said "Oh shit, now what? Well the supports already weakened, plenty of flammable material put in the janitors closets to help spread the flames, set a fire and we'll say the second plane took it out"
But lets hear your brilliant explanation of how you take out THREE unconnected buildings with TWO planes, because this should be good. remember the Empire State building got hit by a fully loaded BOMBER and that sucker didn't drop, you telling me some flaming debris from a thin as tissue paper passenger jet managed to take out a tower more than a fricking block away? And what about the fighters? what about the air defense? you telling me that the POTUS has ZERO protection from attack? Does this not strike you as unbelievable, even in the slightest? That plane came within blocks of the fricking white house for God's sake!
I'm sorry but ONE irregularity? yeah that could happen, two? Possible, but you have event after event that frankly would either mean the POTUS has NO security AT ALL, even less than some banana republic, our buildings are made of cheap rebar and crap, or something was fishy...your choice but considering this is the same government that only recently admitted that the Gulf Of Tonkin incident was a "non event", AKA a false flag that got over 58,000 Americans sent home in body bags? Well WTF makes you think the same kinds of guys that would rack up that big a body count would have any problem with three thousand nobodies?
Uhhh...I think you missed where the conversation was going friend as we were talking about wealth and NOT about population. Here let me illustrate...if we have 100 people in the room (100% of the population) and $100 that is to be divided up among those hundred people and I get $99 dollars of it right off the bat that does NOT make me 99 people, that just gives me control, complete control, of our wealth while YOU and the other 98 guys get to kill yourself fighting over a couple of cents of that last dollar...understand it now?
I'm sure you were confused about the usage of the "1%" moniker which is really just shorthand for the elite, the ones that control more than 80% of the wealth? Actually more like 0.01% if you wanted to view it as relative to the population. Since 0.01% just doesn't roll off the tongue the phrase "1%er" was used instead but reality its more like 0.01%er. Sorry if I caused confusion.
Have you seen how few actually qualify for top 1%? You could fit all of them in your average big city gym. Oh I see the problem now, hit the 5 instead of a 1, my bad, sorry. That is what I get for typing on a 1989 clicky clack with the key lettering worn off while my GF is asleep, no light means I'm going by memory and occasionally I goof, oops.
That to me is the "smoking gun" that the whole tower thing is bullshit. I mean how in the hell you gonna knock down THREE buildings, straight down no less which any demolition guy will tell you is DAMN hard to do with a modern building as the steel cores makes them want to topple sideways, with only TWO planes. And nobody thinks that is funny? We are supposed to believe some burning pieces of a jet is gonna fall on a roof and make a whole damned building fall straight down instead of merely catching it on fire? Then add in that somebody in the pentagon was dumping American Airlines stock by the ton a full 45 minutes before the hijackings were known, you have a plane, a full 90 fricking minutes after the first tower was hit manage to get through the most heavily guarded airspace in the country, no missiles, no fighters, nothing even attempts to stop it...yeah I smelled bullshit then and I smell bullshit now.
The way I see it there are really only two explanations, 1.- The buildings were so substandard that it just fell apart and at the same time the entire US military and civil defense is completely incompetent and incapable of even basic logical thought, or 2.- Somebody on the inside was blocking the response that would have normally happened. I'd say the odds for 1 are pretty damned slim.
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The candle that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast, truth is truth.
Ironically by doing everything in moderation I'd say I'm doing better now creatively than i was 20 years ago, at least as far as my music is concerned. Part of that has to be finding a damned good guitarist/singer/songwriter to work with and a nice tight drummer and sticking with the 3 piece format which makes me have to really bust my ass to make the band sound full with so few instruments, but I'd also say knowing when to step away and clear my head REALLY helps.
I have seen many push themselves like this kid, both in IT and in music and ya know what? It never ends well, they either burn out of fizzle out. I drive my GF nuts with all my sayings but truth is truth and "everything in moderation" is something frankly all should try to live by IMHO. I would love to see a follow up when this kid is 30, I bet he'll have had a burn out or a breakdown.
I take it you didn't see the infamous "Let him die!" cheers during Ron Paul's speech? Even Paul had a look of horror on his face at the blatant fucking GREED that was on front and center display. Whether anybody wants to accept it or not the top 10% of the capital holders are made up in a large part with sociopaths whom if you told "Millions of men,women, and children will die if you do not stop" would say "fuck them peasant scum, charge 'em for the mass graves to dump their sorry corpses in".
This is why I really wouldn't be surprised to see the world go through another dark age, as those at the top frankly would pull an Andrew Ryan and burn the forest to the ground rather than share it with the poor.
The problem is that capitalism, like every other "ism" before it MUST die, and most likely that death will be bloody and vicious as those that have benefited the most from it (such as how 0.01% got 80% of the money made during the recovery) WILL fight until the bitter end to keep their status as elites.
The problem with capitalism is the entire premise is built around trading labor for capital...but what happens when your labor is worthless? That same 0.01% have the ability to buy all the robots and automated factories so they don't have to worry about it, the other 95% that aren't at the top of the caste system will be left to starve. So either the government gives everyone a decent living wage just for drawing breath or eventually those living in grinding poverty will get tired of killing themselves day after day only to find they are truly worthless in a computerized society and rise up violently.
In a way its like how Roddenberry saw Star trek, once you reach a certain point on the technological ladder the old systems just no longer work, with Star Trek it was first contact and warp drive, with us it appears to be the rise of computers, but in either case one only has to have eyes to see that unlike times passed machines are not just making us more productive, they are replacing us in the jobs completely.
Look up "market devaluation" and you will see why Nokia had no choice but to bring in Elop and hope a Hail Mary with WinPhone would save them. The simplified version is that losing half their value in the 6 years before Elop came in made their ability to borrow money VERY difficult and due to the way the tax codes are set up these big corps pretty much live on borrowed money. there are a few exceptions of course (Apple) but most require the ability to get loans easily and at a low enough rate to stay afloat, Nokia could no longer do that and so was bleeding out.
So they really had no choice, its not like Google would cut them a billion dollar check to make Android phones and their market devaluation left them with severe liquidity problems that just rearranging the deck chairs wasn't gonna solve. the huge cash infusion gave Wall Street confidence and helped slow down the stock freefall and also helped reopen their lines of credit. If they would have went with Android we'd be talking about how the evil MSFT is trying to buy Nokia's patents at their bankruptcy, that is all.
Interesting? For a Wiki link? Really mods? if you want a link friend how about one showing what was REALLY going on with MeeGo which had one internal team screwing it (Symbian team) and one of the largest hardware makers ON THE PLANET actively fucking it for fear that the ARM version would outsell the X86 (Intel, which considering the cripple compiler and bribery of OEMs, is anybody surprised?) so MeeGo was DOA before it ever walked out the door.
So before you put your faith in the Wiki how about looking up what was going on behind the scenes? Start with OSNews, many of their posters are from that part of the world and include many software engineers that actually worked there. They paint a picture of an OS with serious flaws, including requiring to be restarted twice a day or MeeGo would crash thanks to a nasty memory corruption bug they were having hell locking down, and if that weren't enough they had Symbian team cockblocking and headhunting, they had Intel demanding and getting changes which sent the OS back practically to square one several times, and you had PHBs changing the entire UI on a whim causing the entire UI to be tossed at 75% complete.
I'm sorry friend but MeeGo, just like Nokia itself, was fucked. It had NO CHANCE of competing with iPhone 2 and Android 2.x (which is still so popular its used by many of the lower tier OEMs like Huawei) and it sure as hell couldn't compete with Android 4 and iPhone 5. All you'd have had is another Touchpad, which with Nokia profits dropping like a stone would have outright slaughtered the company.
Normally we don't agree but you are spot on, its like how all those UNIX stations in the late 80s had everything from the kernel on up written around the particular hardware that was on the system. In a way the current smartphones remind me a LOT of the 80s, back in the days where you could only run the OS that came with a unit because it was written at such a low level around the hardware that anything else would have run like a slug upon it.
Honestly the whole thing is moot anyway, as I said in the earlier post that so few seem to be able to grasp you just can't take a top heavy company like Nokia and throw them into a sharktank that is a race to the bottom and expect them to do anything besides be a snack for the leaner and meaner companies, its just not gonna happen. You look at the costs of the factories, the cost of the employees, the huge amount of management they employed? They were WAY too top heavy to compete with the likes of LG and Huawei, and the only one making bank in the amounts required to keep Nokia in the black was Samsung and that 800 pound gorilla would have treated Nokia like Samsonite luggage.
No I'm saying having Ferrari make Yugo mini-cars would end up with a bankrupt Ferrari?
Why people has so much trouble following a simple concept is beyond me, but for those that seem to have trouble grasping the concept (which from the replies seems to be the majority) I'll spell it out....in a race to the bottom only the tightest ships will survive those that can pinch the most pennies, lower the material costs down to the absolute minimum, shave every penny and pinch it until it screams...remember Dell? Remember why they became the #1 PC maker? Because they were only making $8 a sale that's why!
What everyone seems to have trouble grasping is that Nokia had too many upfront costs, too much overhead to compete in a sharktank like a race to the bottom, they would have died just as many OEMs died in the PC Price Wars, inability to shave costs equals dead company. They have a factory in Europe, one of the most worker friendly places on the planet, no fucking way that factory can compete with a place in China whipping off phones while paying workers less than $5 USD a day, they had a large R&D that frankly wasn't delivering the D part of that, again not gonna be able to compete with the likes of LG and Huawei who have their businesses striped down as a ricer racer, its just not possible.
But of course I'll be marked down for daring to point out the reality of the market, because I refuse to guzzle the koolaid and pretend that RMS farts rainbows and anything that the Linux kernel touches is magically a hit, News Flash...its not. Out of the dozen companies making Android phones? Only ONE is making consistent profits, the rest? They are making money alright, but their profits are less than what Nokia was making on dumbphones in 2011, they just aren't making the kind of bank Nokia would require to survive, the ONLY company making the kind of green a top heavy company like Nokia would require to keep the stock from continuing its free fall? Samsung. Again better companies have tried to beat Samsung, companies that have a hell of a lot more experience, advertising budgets, and brand recognition than Nokia, and they have failed. Nokia would have been curbstomped.
Frankly its amazing how few here can even understand markets, whether its the FOSS blinders or magical thinking? Fuck if I know, you act like that because a company is making profits that means Nokia could make enough to thrive...wrong,for the same reason that Compaq and Maxtor ended up being bought out during the price wars by companies that ran leaner and meaner. if you have an expensive to run company a race to the bottom is corporate suicide. The only way Nokia would have made bank in Android is to close up shop and move to Asia so they could compete with LG and Huawei, but that would have cost billions they just did not have.
Like it or not Nokia was fucked and the Android fairy wouldn't have stopped the freefall, it would have accelerated it. The best thing would have been to buy WebOS back in 08, they didn't do that. By the time the board got its head out of its ass they were too far behind, too bloated, too toxic, they were fucked.
We'll be calling him burnout or a shrink in 5 years sadly. No music, no recreation at all? Yeah I've met a few of those types over the years and...well it never ends well. It is like they bottle everything, using the pressure to gain forward momentum, problem with that? No vessel can contain infinite pressure so sooner or later they blow and when they do its ugly.
I have gamer customers that "Must be teh bestest", one so bad his grandma uses a Skulltrail as that was the weakest hand me down he had, and I can honestly say...I have yet to see SMART work with an SSD, not even once, and we are talking dozens of dead SSDs.
They can call me names like Luddite all they want, I'll tell them the same as I tell win 8 apologists "You can take an innovative shit but its still gonna stink and you shouldn't play with it" because i can say with total honesty, and this is including the refurb drives that I used to get by the load off of Geeks (RIP Geeks.com, you are missed) that the ONLY HDDs I have seen in recent years that didn't give the user warning were the ones where the user killed it, for instance their kid knocking the laptop off the table. The rest? They had enough warnings shown to them to call me and have me replace the disk before data loss ever occurred. The reason why is obvious, the tech is mature, the bugs ironed out long ago.
Most people don't give a rat's ass about the drive, IT'S THE DATA and all it takes is having to tell one person that have their SSD go tits up before the next backup that their stuff was gone forever for you not to recommend SSDs.
Yes and please post a reply to the guy below you saying the same so he knows as well. i have set up both hybrids and the Sandisk caching drive for Win 7 (if you have a desktop they are only $50 and a cheap way to get a boost WITHOUT having to reinstall or move the OS) and with both if the SSD portion fails? The original data is on the HDD and since it uses a technique similar to Windows Readyboost, which just FYI you can use instead of the sandisk caching software if you prefer, the data is never lost, it simply slows back down to HDD speed.
You DO realize that what you are pointing out makes SSDs an even WORSE idea, yes? because it ISN'T the cap that is killing these things like flies, its the controller failures which have ZERO predictability so makes the entire discussion of the cap pointless.
At least with the HDDs you DO get advanced warning nearly every time, Windows delayed write failures, temp spikes, noise, something. With the SSDs the controller can crap any second, doesn't matter if its brand new or a year old and in fact one of my customers had one go tits up after less than a month, because there is serious problems with the controllers that nobody has figured out how to fix.
Oh and one final advantage of HDDs over SSDs, if you have a drive under warranty that starts going wonky? You can in most cases zero out the drive before sending it back, with an SSD failure I've had several customers just eat the cost and toss the warranty because there was no way to remove the data on the drive and they had no idea where or whom would end up with the drive once they sent it back. With an SSD you either use full disc encryption (which frankly slows the hell out of most drives, thus negating the whole point of having SSD over HDD) or you risk your data being recovered by whatever third world company refurbs the things.
Didn't say you couldn't and in fact have had long essays here about how Linux doesn't magically give you security for being FOSS and how the many eyes myth is just that.
But one advantage Linux DOES have over the legal versions of Windows is the fact you can download prebuilt images designed around all kinds of jobs including secure web servers with full disc encryption already set up and configured, you just add your own password. This is one thing that has pissed me off about MSFT for years, you get a "one size fits all" approach whereas if you go to TPB you can find countless versions built for a specific task. One really nice one is the "Tiny" versions which make great VMs, installs for old hardware, and are great to build a secure Windows around as they strip out a LOT of the unneeded cruft.
Sadly you would probably get a call from the BSA if you tried using them in any kind of public manner so until MSFT comes out with a real tiny OS then a strip down Linux server with full disk encryption is probably the best bet.
Well that and property taxes which are just as bad as it takes away your right to own a home (as you will pay for it forever, with an arbitrary price set by the state and if you miss more than a payment or two they sell YOUR property out from under you) and insures a caste system as the poor whites and minorities get shitty schools thanks to shitty property values while the elite get top notch schools thanks to the money extorted from all those that live in nice neighborhoods.
It doesn't change the fact I've been proven right a bazillion times, ALWAYS bigger, NEVER smaller. I mean look at the end of the Cold War, why we don't need that massive money sucking military right? we can scale down? Instead we get billion dollars stealth boondoggles, a fleet of ELEVEN fricking carriers when the next largest military? TWO and the ones that would ever be a credible enemy of the USA? ZERO, and of course "war on" everything from dope to terrorists to our own citizens through the NSA. Hey, gotta find a way to blow that cash, gotta bribe and porkbarrel and that ain't cheap, right?
Its ironic that many call me the "/. resident hippie" because i actually support treating the poor as human beings and am against reverse robin hood tactics but in the case of the government for every dollar spent on the poor you have something like 1000 spent on crap, countless wars, overblown military, political favors like roads to nowhere, and how long have the people tried voting for a smaller government only to get bold faced lied to? Remember folks ALWAYS bigger, NEVER smaller.
I am so sick of this "magical thinking" when it comes to Android. There is something like a dozen making Android phones, how many of those have been consistently profitable with Android? ONE, and that is Samsung. HTC and LG have made profits, not consistently mind you, and with LG their profits on a lot of phones can be measured in pennies.
Like it or not folks, and this is coming from somebody that uses an Android phone that I'm quite happy with, with Android you have a race to the bottom where the VAST majority of Android sales in the under $185 price range and this market, the ultra low end? is a market that Nokia could NEVER compete in, okay? They were already WAAAY behind on smartphones thanks to all the infighting and not one, not two, but THREE OS teams backstabbing and playing politics, the ONLY market they had a lead in was dumbphones and that market was dead at the end of 2010 with the mediatek SoC that allowed Chinese shops to make a nice dumbphone for just $3 USD. They also had beancounters insisting on "getting their money's worth" from the TI OMAP chip they had bought the rights for, but that thing was too far behind the curve to make a decent Android phone with and the high cost of the Nokia factories meant they would have to sell them at a price point the market would never go for.
So can we please please PLEASE stop the "Android is magic" bullshit already? When it comes to smartphones honestly the cost or lack thereof of the OS isn't even a real concern and thanks to anybody being able to build Android devices its a race to the bottom and in fact reminds me an awful lot of the "PC Price Wars" that drove many an OEM out of business, and finally Nokia was fucked with a capital F long before then, a toxic corporate culture, too much infighting and too much politics had turned the company into the biggest 8 track player builder in a landscape of CDs. Android isn't some fairy Godmother, it isn't "if you build it they will come" because if that were so there wouldn't be so many struggling Android manufacturers. It wouldn't have mattered by that point if they used windows, Linux, or WebOS, the company was too far behind and too badly fucked by PHBs to ever take on Samsung and the ONLY way for Nokia to survive as an Android maker would have been to curbstomp Samsung as their costs were too high. How many here honestly and truly believe that Nokia could have taken on Samsung at the top and not been bitchslapped?
It is as I have said a billion times, government ALWAYS gets bigger, NEVER smaller. This is why I urged everyone to fight for the smokers as they are the canaries in the coal mine and once the revenue from bleeding them went down (as more and more quit or died out) they would try to screw other groups to make up for the cash they are used to blowing. See talks of fat taxes, sugar taxes, and this dumbass "IT tax".
So next time you hear about a tax against some group, even if it is one you might not personally like, be it smokers, drinkers, fat people, whomever, please use your voice and vote and slap that shit down because remember, ALWAYS bigger NEVER smaller.
The sad part is the way forward for AMD is obvious but nobody there is listening. How did Intel beat AMD after years of having to bribe the OEMs to use the P4? By ditching netburst, going back to the proven P3 technology and focusing on ramping up performance of it instead of the P4.
How can AMD beat Intel again? By dropping the turkey that is the Bulldozer "half core" design and going back to a solid proven performer...the K8, which powered the Athlon64 and 64x2 to such great heights. Use THAT as the basis for a new chip and watch AMD kick serious ass again, hell just taking the stock K8 which was at 90nm and using today's 32nm process you could slap 4 K8s on a die easily and crank their clocks up a good 50% and STILL stay under 95w on the desktop!
Instead it looks like AMD is gonna keep beating the Bulldozer dead horse for awhile while spending the lion's share on Bobcat. This will probably help in mobile, being that Jaguar (which is just an amped up Bobcat) is running the PS4 and Xbox N, who knows maybe their idea of making the CPU and GPU into a single entity (HUPA I think its called) will work and allow them to combine the low power of Jag with the high performance of the Radeons and make a good chip but I just don't see it beating Haswell.
Actually this is as bad for the third world as well, because what do you think is used in all those ruggedized laptops and tablets in the middle of BF Africa? NAND Flash. The OLPC, smartphones (which is allowing many third world countries access for the first time to the WWW) all of these use NAND flash and as long as flash remains high it will hurt the poor more than those in the first world.
Make a clean box (cost around $30, Google for instructions) and place the platters from the drive with the data into an identical drive and it'll last long enough to get the data out. Try that with SSD chips and see how much useful data you get.
Thanks for helping me illustrate my point in that you HAD PLENTY OF TIME to swap out the drive WITHOUT losing any data, with an SSD? It literally works one cycle and is dead the next, no errors, no warning, one of my gamer customer even had a health monitoring gadget in the hopes that it would be able to give him a heads up if the SSD was getting ready to die...nope, just went.
In a way it reminds me of the first years of HDDs, they too were prone to suddenly failing and would do so without warning but while HDDs got better every year thanks to all the shrinks if anything SSDs are getting worse. if you have all your data in the cloud or just don't mind the risk? Go for it, but until I see some better results with my own two peepers i'm gonna advise customers to wait.
Because Cisco wasn't the one being sued? Let me put it this way, if somebody sues me because I sold shitty Chinese cars by a single company that company couldn't cover my behind by taking over the case.
I would just add the whole thing ignores that big old rotting elephant in the room which is HDDs? I have found that in damned near every case, not all but most, will give you PLENTY of warning before it goes completely tits up whereas the SSD? One day its working and the next....nothing. No warning, no noise, no indication at all that there was a problem just...poof, buh bye data. This is also ignoring the fact that if the circuit board fails in a HDD you can swap one out for the same model and get it back in most cases, at least long enough to get the data, the SSD? Hope you are good with a soldering iron and a chip reader and I have heard even then its unlikely.
I may be just a little country shop guy but when my gamer customers have all experienced multiple failures when it comes to SSDs, and these guys don't go cheap, sorry but ATM I still don't trust it. I tell folks if they want an SSD don't have anything on it they would feel bad if they lost, now does that mean there aren't still uses for SSDs? Of course not, for one thing if you have a laptop where most if not all of your data is in the cloud? Knock yourself out, just make a weekly disk image so you can re-image when it goes tits up and you are golden. I also have several customers that have bought either hybrid drives or that Sandisk caching drive for Win 7 and in both of those cases they have seen pretty big speed boosts while not having to worry because if it dies all you do is go back to HDD speeds as it is just a cache.
Oh and one final thing....its gonna get worse. its common knowledge that with each shrink the number of writes goes down and the number of failures go up and with all of the major chip companies seeming to only care about how many bits they can stuff per nano-meter? The failure rate WILL get worse, you can count on it. Its too bad that SLC is so insanely high as those seem to have lower failure rates than MLC but as long as all the companies care about is getting that GB number up at all costs its really not gonna be getting better, its gonna be getting worse.
Ironic that they talk about how supposedly high HDD failure rates are when I cleaned out a how drawer of them before moving into the new place, we are talking drives going back to Quantum Fireballs in the 200Mb size, yes Mb not Gb, and they all fired up. granted some of them were noisy as hell but I could still get files off of them while not a single one of my gamer customers have their first SSD, they are all dead. yes i know its an anecdote but I'm not the only one that has seen this, coding horror calls SSDs the hot crazy scale as you trade red hot performance for crazy failure rates. Call me old fashioned but I think I'll just pick upa caching SSD and keep the 5Tb in spinning rust, thanks ever so Intel.
Who said anything about demo charges? If you know a nutter is gonna crash a plane into X and you just...ohh...say weaken the supports some? You still get the results you want and you even get some nice nutters to blame it on. I think where they fucked up is the third tower, i have NO doubt, none whatsoever, that the plane the passengers crashed in PN was fated to hit that tower and somebody said "Oh shit, now what? Well the supports already weakened, plenty of flammable material put in the janitors closets to help spread the flames, set a fire and we'll say the second plane took it out"
But lets hear your brilliant explanation of how you take out THREE unconnected buildings with TWO planes, because this should be good. remember the Empire State building got hit by a fully loaded BOMBER and that sucker didn't drop, you telling me some flaming debris from a thin as tissue paper passenger jet managed to take out a tower more than a fricking block away? And what about the fighters? what about the air defense? you telling me that the POTUS has ZERO protection from attack? Does this not strike you as unbelievable, even in the slightest? That plane came within blocks of the fricking white house for God's sake!
I'm sorry but ONE irregularity? yeah that could happen, two? Possible, but you have event after event that frankly would either mean the POTUS has NO security AT ALL, even less than some banana republic, our buildings are made of cheap rebar and crap, or something was fishy...your choice but considering this is the same government that only recently admitted that the Gulf Of Tonkin incident was a "non event", AKA a false flag that got over 58,000 Americans sent home in body bags? Well WTF makes you think the same kinds of guys that would rack up that big a body count would have any problem with three thousand nobodies?
Uhhh...I think you missed where the conversation was going friend as we were talking about wealth and NOT about population. Here let me illustrate...if we have 100 people in the room (100% of the population) and $100 that is to be divided up among those hundred people and I get $99 dollars of it right off the bat that does NOT make me 99 people, that just gives me control, complete control, of our wealth while YOU and the other 98 guys get to kill yourself fighting over a couple of cents of that last dollar...understand it now?
I'm sure you were confused about the usage of the "1%" moniker which is really just shorthand for the elite, the ones that control more than 80% of the wealth? Actually more like 0.01% if you wanted to view it as relative to the population. Since 0.01% just doesn't roll off the tongue the phrase "1%er" was used instead but reality its more like 0.01%er. Sorry if I caused confusion.
Have you seen how few actually qualify for top 1%? You could fit all of them in your average big city gym. Oh I see the problem now, hit the 5 instead of a 1, my bad, sorry. That is what I get for typing on a 1989 clicky clack with the key lettering worn off while my GF is asleep, no light means I'm going by memory and occasionally I goof, oops.
That to me is the "smoking gun" that the whole tower thing is bullshit. I mean how in the hell you gonna knock down THREE buildings, straight down no less which any demolition guy will tell you is DAMN hard to do with a modern building as the steel cores makes them want to topple sideways, with only TWO planes. And nobody thinks that is funny? We are supposed to believe some burning pieces of a jet is gonna fall on a roof and make a whole damned building fall straight down instead of merely catching it on fire? Then add in that somebody in the pentagon was dumping American Airlines stock by the ton a full 45 minutes before the hijackings were known, you have a plane, a full 90 fricking minutes after the first tower was hit manage to get through the most heavily guarded airspace in the country, no missiles, no fighters, nothing even attempts to stop it...yeah I smelled bullshit then and I smell bullshit now.
The way I see it there are really only two explanations, 1.- The buildings were so substandard that it just fell apart and at the same time the entire US military and civil defense is completely incompetent and incapable of even basic logical thought, or 2.- Somebody on the inside was blocking the response that would have normally happened. I'd say the odds for 1 are pretty damned slim.