Why, because he is black? that gives him some right to kill? Sounds like the only racist here is YOU, that YOU are suffering from classic liberal white guilt and therefor anything a black does to a white is okay, correct?
How do you comment on the 30+ white people attacked after the shooting by blacks saying "Kill YT for Trayvon!" none of which, NOT ONE, even the ones that set a 14 year old kid on fire, were charged with hate crimes? How do you feel about the fact that his OWN MOTHER had gone on record saying she sent him to FLA because he was "out of control"? Or the fact she TRADEMARKED his name and likeness before she even claimed the body? How about the postings of Martin's on FB that went into almost pornographic detail about how much he loved beating a man? How he loved to feel their bones crack, feel their blood pour, and was looking forward to scoring a better gun? Or the fact that he was sporting both Crips tats as well as throwing Crips signs on his FB?
I'm sorry but frankly we are ALL tired of the "white guilt" bullshit as well as the "NAACP racism" like the Martin case. He was already home, if he felt in ANY danger he had a phone in his hand, instead he decided he was gonna "stomp a cracker" only this 6 foot 2 bench pressing 200 pounds thug found out that the cracker could fight back.
Nope! Mama didn't raise no fools so i had in writing from the head IT guy that part of my duty was "Showing new nurses how to bypass any and all filters that might hinder their performance" and that was that. But you have to remember I was only temping there so other than a basic CYA I didn't give a shit as i was headed to the outdoor by summer anyway.
But I can tell ya I'm a HELL of a lot happier now running my own little shop! Sure the pay ain't as good but ya know what? No more being told to fix a problem without even half the budget to get the job done, no more getting treated worse than a Mickey D's worker, no more constant calls on the weekends...I have to say my two boys staging an "intervention" to get me to quit working corporate was a real eye opener. They were sitting there practically in tears, saying "You don't smile anymore, you are always tired, you look like death..we just lost our mom and dad might as well be dead, you and grandma are all that we have left and if it comes down to losing you or doing without the extras? We can do without the tech junk and take out a lot easier than we can do without you".
Now I'm happy, my color is back, I'm in a long term relationship with a sweet gal who thinks the world of the boys, hell she even gets along with mama...life is good man, I must have been insane to work for the corps!
You are correct in all counts, I would only add that there is a major source of infection that most geeks around here probably don't even think of that could seriously tilt those numbers...USB drives and sticks.
Working in a little shop I tend to get exposed to more hardware than most and can see trends emerging and in the past few years the number of cheap flash sticks infected with clickjackers and other bugs have frankly gone right through the roof. Since they can no longer count on autorun they instead disguise themselves as "value added" software on the drive, drive security software, free movie players, stuff like that. Many of these bugs are clickjacker variants which for those that have never encountered one are used to commit ad fraud by driving up hits to websites, many of which are porn sites. With a clickjacker you'll see page hits suddenly explode, I have seen clickjackers that would cause hundreds of new windows to open within seconds, talk about dragging a machine to a screeching halt.
So just going by the data we have here, with the number of hits going from over 10,000 to less than a hundred? Sounds like somebody let a clickjacker loose on their network. Feel sorry for the IT guy if that was the case, the new clickjackers are nasty little buggers and pretty damned hard to kill without just wiping everything and starting over. I hope they had a really solid backup strategy in place if that were the case, otherwise talk about a nightmare.
Boy ain't that the truth! I did a 6 month temp job at a hospital once and one of my jobs was to show nurses how to beat the porn filters! It turned out the PHB who had bought the crap (at an insane markup over a martini lunch from what the rumor mill said) refused to even entertain the thought that his software might be shit but the stupid software would block ANYTHING to do with words like breast or prostrate no matter how many times the IT guys told the stupid software not to, kinda a problem when you have a large part of the hospital dealing with cancer. So I got to go out each morning and show the noobs how to blow past all the filters that the PHB paid insane money to put up, the wonders that is corporate bullshit.
Uhhhh...not only was he in his own back yard when he CHOSE to go back and assault Zimmerman (backed up by the GF on the stand who was egging him on) but he had a CELL PHONE and if he in ANY way, shape, or form felt threatened he could have just as easily dialed 911. The reason why he did not is obvious by reading his FB postings as he LIKED to give people "beat downs" as he called them and in fact posted a long rant on how much he enjoyed beating down a bus driver, with great detail on how good it made him feel BTW.
Okay you are just trolling now, as it was stated multiple times by both the prosecution AND the defense that Martin had Zimmerman down on the pavement, he was NOT in his vehicle at the time of the assault. And frankly NO jury would have convicted Zimmermen thanks to the testimony of the GF who stated 1.- He had made it home and THEN turned around and went back, 2.- She was egging him on, accusing Zimmerman of being gay and inciting homophobia in Martin, 3.- The most damning evidence, his own statements on FB, where he went on and on about how much he liked to beat people!
So I'm sorry if you are misinformed, considering how much absolute lies were pushed by the MSM (Yahoo being the worst, in one week their pic of Martin went from 14, to 11, to the last weeks of the trial using a pic of Martin at SIX YEARS OLD while putting Zimmerman in his police photo, if it were me I'd have sued) but I'd say it has been explained to you pretty clearly by now so any more appeals to emotion by you will obviously be nothing but trolling and should be ignored. If you want to argue whether or not self defense is allowed fine, although I think even the EU says you can defend yourself, but anything more about supposed attacks from the car will just be trollbait.
Sorry but the law says I'm allowed to follow anybody I want down the street, that isn't a crime, you also have somebody in a black hoodie in 84 degree weather at night in a neighborhood that has been robbed repeatedly, that gave Zimmerman every right to wonder if it was another robbery. You have the GF saying on the stand that Martin called Zimmerman a cracker and she encouraged Martin to jump him, you had multiple witnesses that said Martin was pounding Zimmerman's head into the pavement and during the entire fight Zimmerman was totally defensive, never once getting the upper hand, finally you have Martin's own words on FB talking about how he was gonna score a gat, "be gangsta" and laughing about how much fun he had bashing a bus driver's head in for looking at him wrong.
Given THAT much evidence I don't see how anybody can argue anything but the ONLY reason Zimmerman was prosecuted was because of black activists playing the victim card, right down to constantly showing and selling photoshopped t-shirts of Martin at 11 years old in a hoodie when in reality he was 6 foot 2, had multiple tats, and could bench press over 200 pounds. i'm sorry but I don't care if the guy was green I would have likewise followed anybody acting like that and you can be damned sure I'd defend myself if they jumped me.
As for MLK I have NO doubt that if he were to comeback tomorrow he would treat the so called "black leaders" as Jesus did the moneylenders at the temple and would be disgusted with the rise of the welfare state, black fathers not stepping up and raising their kids, the idolizing of thugs and gangbangers and demonizing of education, and the blaming all problems of white people. The goal of MLK was to give everyone a chance to be the best they could be regardless of the color of their skin, not to turn being black into a permanent handicap.
Kinda sad when you can take a black guy straight off the boat from Africa and he has something like 40 TIMES more likelihood of becoming middle class in a single generation than a black man born here. To me that says all that needs to be said, its not the color of their skin, its the demonizing of education and the victim mentality that is holding back black folks in America now.
How EXACTLY is it bullshit friend? Samsung has the bigger profits which they have wisely used in R&D and advertising to pretty much own the market. Does that mean nobody else can make any money with Android? Of course not as HTC and LG show but what that DOES mean is that you are fighting for the scraps, no different than how Nokia had 80% of the dumbphone market yet wasn't making jack shit compared to the high end niche that Apple had carved out.
But if Nokia would have went for Android they would have died that much quicker as they didn't have the experience, nor the advertising, nor the word of mouth. LG has the low end market pretty much locked up with their Optimus line, HTC has the midrange market, and Samsung has the high end market and like Apple has built up serious brand recognition with the consumers....what did Nokia have to bring to the table?
When you are faced with a competitor that is firing on all cylinders and is at the top of their game you just can't go in half ass dude, you better bring your A game and have a product light years ahead of the other guy and what did Nokia have? Old designs, weak chips, if they wouldn't have taken that billion bucks from MSFT and instead released what they had (which nearly all their hardware at the time was based on the ancient TI OMAP, long in the tooth even then and pathetic when compared to the best HTC and Samsung offered) combined with the high cost to manufacture for Nokia would have been suicide, nobody was gonna pay Nokia premium prices for an out of date Android unit.
Again you ignore the more important question which was WHY were they buying dumphones? They were buying dumbphones because the lowest Android smartphone cost a year's wage there so they really didn't have a choice, did they? Well that ended by the middle of 2011, the ultra cheap Cortex SoC made it so that the only really expensive part of the phone was the screen and they solved that by economies of scale, which is why damned near every phone coming out of Asia all have the exact same screen size and design, standardize on one and build a billion and the price quickly drops to very little.
That doesn't change the fact that you are arguing its worth being the "king of 8-tracks" when every month another market was being lost and simply not replaced. By the time Elop was brought in they had lost almost the entire American continent, just about all of Europe, Japan, and a good chunk of China was switching, only the dirt poor rural areas left. And again you are arguing that there is profit to be made by selling to the most dirt poor people on the planet when the simple fact is Nokia had their factories in their home country and their countrymen weren't gonna work for a buck an hour like the Chinese. The release of the Loongson SoC that let you make a complete dumbphone in China for less than $3 USD put the final nail in that coffin, as any of those dirt poor folks buying a dumbphone wouldn't be buying a Nokia, they would be buying a "Mokia" or other Chinese knockoff.
You can point to the past all you want, I will likewise point to sales of 8-tracks in 1978 or betamax in 1981, when you've bet the company on a dead technology there really is no way to go but down. Now you can argue that Elop took a slow death spiral and sped it up, which is arguable, but that doesn't magically change a death spiral into growth. The release of the ultra cheap Cortex SoC was the final nail in the coffin for the dumbphone and there was NOTHING that Elop could do or say to change that, nothing at all. To argue otherwise would be just as insane as saying you think you can get 8-tracks to make a comeback, the tech is dead dude, its not coming back and Elop or frankly anybody that read the trade papers could see that.
Good Lord save us from babies that don't know shit. Who said shit about Win95? Read a book kid the first IE that gained share was IE4 and that was for Win 3.x and you had to download it! Sure they included IE 6 months later in Win95 but like today just because MSFT released a new OS didn't magically make the world adopt it and it was a good 2 and a half years before the majority had moved away from Win 3.x, despite the bullshit MSFT tried to push of the world waiting on baited breath for the Win 95 release.
Yes they abused that power but how did they GET that power? By having competitors that were MORONS. You seem to forget that the first major IE that had real share YOU HAD TO DOWNLOAD as it didn't even come with the OS, and this was in the days of 28k dialup so you had to REALLY want something to go to the trouble, yet people did by a LARGE margin, why? Because NS4 was a heaping pile of fail and shit, that is why!
Believe me grasshopper, I've been in the PC business since the Shat was selling VIC20s with his TJ Hooker hair. I was surfing the boards back when you had to keep a book of IP addresses and frankly I was a BIG fan of NS...until NS4. I can tell you that it was almost comedic to use that browser and if it wouldn't have been "shoot your PC like Elvis" frustrating it would have been funny. Here is what it was like to use NS4..."Hey its installed, great! Okay I'll just go to my favorite hangout and...damn, crashed. Oh well it must have been a glitch I'll just reload and...crashed again. oookay, maybe it just doesn't like that website. I'll pick a different and...(entire PC BSODs)...FUUUUUCCCKKKK!
Time after time I watched in shock as company after company did truly moronic moves that practically gave the market to MSFT, from the NS4 rewrite to IBM trying to buttfuck the OEMs and then with a straight face trying to get them to pay $199 a pop for licenses of an OS that IBM controlled, hell we are seeing it with MSFT itself now, with the entire planet screaming "WE FUCKING HATE METRO!!!" only for Ballmer to go "Oh really? Well here is a "start button" that takes you right back to metro, BWA HA HA...what do you mean sales are down?"
Frankly if I were to cite every moronic move of the 80s and 90s that gave MSFT a free shot here it would be the length of War & Peace but I would argue their abuses were frankly pointless and a way for a paranoid MSFT to try to justify itself when in reality its competitors were either arrogant, stupid, or both. BTW notice that now they are stuck fighting Google and post Jobs Apple, both of which have shown they are anything BUT stupid, that MSFT has gone exactly nowhere in mobile? MSFT can't seem to do well unless the competitor does something dumb first, one can argue all day why that is but its really not hard to come up with citation after citation. hell look at the X360, had a billion dollar flaw and STILL ended up taking the top slot from Sony, why? Sony thought a $599 system would fly, and by setting the PS3 at that insane price point for the pivotal first 2 years gave MSFT a free pass.
Name ONE, just one, place where that doesn't fit. BeOS? Tied first to AT&T Hobbit CPU, then to PPC, by the time they figured out X86 was the way to go it was too late. OS/2? IBM tried to assrape the "gang of nine" with MCA bus so that by the time OS/2 came out it was treated like plague blankets by the OEMs and to top it off they demanded $200! per license from the OEMs when MSFT was selling their for $15, the rest is history. Netscape? NS4. WordPerfect? Refused to move to Windows, instead put out a REALLY shitty DOS port that crashed more than it ran, didn't bother putting out a true Windows port until 99, too late. Apple? Firing Jobs are replacing him with one shit CEO after another left them with an OS that was a decade out of date, overpried underpowered hardware, and to top off the fail they had a pile of products with different names but similar features at wildly different price points so nobody knew what was good and what wasn't.
You can do that with the entire history of MSFT, from Bill Gates lucking into getting the contract for a CP/M clone for IBM on up, they had a competitor royally fuck up and took advantage. the "brilliance" of MSFT was spotting those flubs and capitalizing on them but now MSFT is too big and unweilding to do a quick switch like that which is why they are dying in mobile, even if Google and Apple make a mistake by the time MSFT recognizes it and moves its too late.
But you missed my point which was what choice did they have?
They had ZERO experience in Android and Samsung and HTC would have curbstomped them in that market as they had the experience, the advertising, and they frankly make really solid products that folks like. They didn't have the mountains of money to burn to get WebOS which IMHO would have been the best choice but they couldn't get into a bidding war with HP and ever hope to win, Apple sure as fuck wasn't gonna license their sacred cow iOS to Nokia so they could compete, and their internal divisions were a mess with the ONLY product that had a snowball's chance in hell (both Symbian and the Java OS were designed for dumbphones and would have required a ground up rewrite) was maemo and several of the Maemo devs said it would be at LEAST a year and a half as Maemo had serious memory corruption and CPU usage issues. One dev even reported you had to reboot the phone at least twice a day or the OS would crash....who was willing to put up with that in 2010?
So I don't see how they had any choice in the matter, the board waiting so damned long to try to change course that they were backed into a corner. The only market they had was dying, they didn't have a product to sell in the new market, all they could do was hire Elop and hope a Hail Mary pass would pull their collective asses out of the fire....it failed, but was it a bad call? I would argue that given what they had the answer is a giant NO IT WAS NOT a bad call, they did the best with what they had and it just wasn't good enough. The situation reminds me of what happened with Palm, as they kept milking Garnet until the market had passed them by and by the time they got WebOS out of the door nobody cared anymore as Android and iOS had drank their milkshake. In the 90s Nokia WAS a big name, key word WAS, but by the time that Elop was hired the only ones that gave a fuck about Nokia was some old geeks and FOSSies that remembered the good old days, everybody else had moved onto to Samsung and HTC and LG. They were stuck in the past and just couldn't catch up, that's all. But it wasn't a bad call, they just waited too damned long to make it.
Citation please? Otherwise I gotta call bullshit. Hell I live in one of the poorest rural states in the nation and you almost never see a dumbphone even around here, again because you can get an Android for $20. I can honestly say I have NEVER met anybody who has bought a single program for a dumbphone, not one, and I'm meeting new people constantly at the shop and we often talk about phones (as nearly everybody needs to be shown how to get their pics off the things) and nobody has been buying dumbphones for awhile now. Heck even India now has a dirt cheap Android and so does Africa, the dumbphone market really had nobody to sell to and no place to go but down.
So I'm sorry but Nokia was toast long before Elop ever walked in the door, all they had was 8-track players in the era of the CD,and when you add to that the infighting, trying to support THREE OSes, none of which held a candle to iOS and Android, and the mess that was their smartphone division? Bad management had already blown a hole in that ship big enough to drive a semi through, all the patching by Elop simply couldn't undo the damage.
But if you think dumbphones had any kind of future even then? I got a bridge you might be interested in. the ONLY users of dumbphones I've had walk through my doors for the past 6 years have been folks over 65 and they don't buy apps, hell they don't even browse, and they hang onto a phone until it dies. With the Chinese cranking out a SoC that lets them build dumbphones for less than $3 USD a pop? that market was dead dude, Elop was right on his "burning platform" memo because everybody could see the writing on the wall, no money to make in a phone that costs less to make than a meal at Mickey D's.
Yes they do NOW but that was the point I was trying to make, will Google allow that into the future? After all I'm sure if they had their way all phones and tablets would be ICS, just one version to support means less cost and the new devices have more memory and more powerful CPUs so they can do more with a new 4.x phone than they can a 2.x phone.
Of course whether more equals better is up for interpretation as I have seen one of those 2.x phones easily beat a 4.x Samsung, even though the LG Slider 2.x had half the memory and was a single core to the Samung's dual. The reason why was simple, less bloat and a slimmer OS with Gingerbread than with ICS.
So while I hope Google does keep supporting 2.x I would feel a LOT better about TFA if we got some sort of assurance from Google. I have a couple of relatives including my oldest on 2.x phones and it would not be fun to have to file 13 all those phones and tablets which work just fine because Google decides to stop supporting 2.x through Google Play.
Actually the entire speech is about 3 pages long so I wasn't sure where to cut it off at, but you are right that I probably should have included that line.
With or without the line it still illustrates that what we are seeing here today is NOT a new thing, it wasn't caused by a POTUS with a D or an R by his name, its just one sign of a completely corrupted system that frankly has been broken for a good century or more, since the days of cobblestone roads and bolt action rifles. the only difference between then and now is that those in power have gotten so damned arrogant and spoiled thanks to the insane amounts of money they have been able to steal that they just don't give enough of a fuck to even pretend anymore.
Personally I'm shocked it hasn't devolved to the point that the POTUS and congress critters wear badges with the corp logo of those that own them, like a NASCAR driver just covered in patches for this or that product.
Oh bullshit. First of all when it comes to MSFT pretty much ALL of their successes in the past can be preceded by "and then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" thus giving MSFT a free shot, from BE-OS tying itself to one niche CPU after another to netscape putting out the abomination that was NS4 not once did MSFT "come up with some brilliant plan" they just got lucky and were able to capitalize on having a competitor that was a moron.
Second of all Nokia WAS ALREADY TOAST by the time the board called in Elop, they had not one, not two, but THREE OSes, not one of which was up to the task of competing with Android and iOS, the ONLY place they were ahead was in dumbphones which was like being the biggest 8-track manufacturer in 1987, they couldn't go with Android because not only was the Android market then as now the most cutthroat commodity market in mobile (only HTC and Samsung has made any real money and I'd argue they are on borrowed time, Hong Kong was showing off dual core Android phones that retail for $70 not 4 months ago so like PCs its gonna be profits measured in pennies) but Samsung and HTC frankly would have curbstomped them as nobody does high end Android units better, and they just didn't have the money to compete with HP for WebOS which IMHO would have been the best choice. Add in the fact that a couple of Maemo devs were quoted as saying Maemo wouldn't have been ready for another year and a half MINIMUM (it was having serious memory corruption and CPU issues at the time) and the app devs wouldn't have made shit for maemo anyway after Nokia burnt their bridges to the community by changing the framework? yeah there really wasn't any choice, it was take WinPhone or close the doors and give the money back to the shareholders.
All those that hate MSFT frankly ought to be dancing in the street, as this gives ballmer the chance to piss away...what? 9 billion US dollars? And while shitting away a mountain of money Ballmer's retarded attempt to turn Windows into a WinPhone is frankly killing the Windows desktop, talking to other shop owners we have all even stopped carrying Win 8.x anything as its a bigger bomb than WinME, and finally you KNOW that Ballmer is gonna push hard for his little yes man Elop to get the big chair because it will let him still push his "vision" which consists of burning the desktop and server business to the ground so he can push half assed Apple clones that are worse in every way compared to the real thing, worse walled garden, worse performance, worse app selection, everything mobile under Ballmer/Elop has been half assed and piss poor and I don't see that changing if Elop gets the big chair.
But I leave you all here with a warning, be careful what you wish for. So many wanted MSFT dead for being douchebags they aren't even noticing they are replacing one douchebag for an even worse one, Between the big brother levels of data that Google is gathering on every android user and the fact that their new ChromeBooks took what SHOULD have been a completely bog standard X86 laptop and made it so proprietary that the ONLY way to install a different OS is to throw it into "Dev mode" and then and ONLY then can you install not whatever you want, but only one of a handful of Linux distros supported by some guy in his basement? say what you want about MSFT but at least i could grab any Windows desktop or laptop and be booting to install not only any previous MSFT OS but pretty much any other OS, Linux,BSD,Haiku, whatever, in under 20 minutes.
So while we all know where this is gonna end, another shitpile of money pissed away, declining sales on the X86 front and flatline numbers in mobile for MSFT, lets not replace one asshole company for another shall we? as for Nokia...oh well, between Samsung, HTC, LG, and a bazillion Chinese brands there really isn't a place for Nokia anymore now that the dumbphone market is dead. Hell when I was shopping for my Android phone several of the shops had refurb android phones starting at just $20 and new for $50, with prices THAT low for smartphones? Nokia might as well pack it in, no point in even making dumbphones anymore.
Uhhhh...forget about the USA getting the UK to blow millions going after Assange and keeping him locked in that embassy like a caged animal? You seem to be under the mistaken belief the US gov gives a flying fuck WHAT you think, when IRL nothing could be further from the truth. In reality the US gov is trying to rip off the mob with the whole "lets make an example out of him" bit and they don't give a fuck what you think as they have the MSM being their very own Baghdad Bob to hand wave it all away.
For those that believe the US gov is still the "good guys", or ever were for that matter, I present exhibit A and exhibit B. First exhibit A, a speech by Naomi Wolf outlining how many plays from the "dictator's handbook" that goes back to Lenin to El Duce to the Crazy Austrian are being used here and now and this was made in 2007, things are MUCH worse than when this was made. oh as an aside she is now on the watchlist, her crime? talking about what rights you have under the constitution....Hear that sound? That is the sound of the founding fathers spinning like tops in their graves.
Exhibit B was made nearly a century ago, but read this speech and see how much it sounds like exactly what we are seeing now....
"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
Sound familiar? The only thing that has changed is which country is getting fucked and which corp gets rich off the blood of the soldiers. hell you have a government that ADMITS that Gulf Of Tonkin was a "non event" (read total false flag) yet not a single person gets arrested? hell the current AG with Fast & Furious tried to pull a false flag on the American people and got Americans and Mexicans alike killed and has been caught in repeated lies under oath...yet nobody even entertains the thought of hauling his ass to jail?
If it looks like it, acts like it, and smells like it maybe we should call it what it is...fascism. The only difference between the fascism of today and the fascism preached by the crazy Austrian is that the Austrian forced the corps to bend to his will, in this new version the corps and the government are one. Please watch the Wolf video and see how many plays from the dictator playbook is being run here now, a place outside the rule of law where torture takes place, public humiliation of citizens for the purpose of instilling fear and obedience, a government that spies upon its own people as much if not more than it spies on others, I could go on but Ms Wolf says it much better than I do.
Which just for the record probably means he is on the latest Chromium branch or one of those based on Chromium as i have noticed the "weird spacing error" thing since the last update, and instead focus on this great news?
As someone who owns an Android pre-paid (finally got out from under that contract, praise the FSM) this is great news but I have a few reservations...does this mean they'll be forcing updates to ICS on devices that can't run it well? Will they just abandon all but the latest and greatest? or will they do like I hope they would and take all those 2.x and 3.x devices and update to the last release in that branch?
Because looking around when i was shopping for my phone it amazed me how many Gingerbread (most 2.3.X based phones) there are being made and sold and moreover...how fricking well they run! When I was first looking at Android a couple years back it was when the market was crapflooded with 1.x devices and I have to say they ran like absolute dogshit. They were slow, buggy as all get out, the screen response was pathetic, they were just total shit, but these Gingerbread based phones? They are snappy, great battery life, plenty of apps for it,decent touchscreens, etc. While the 1.x devices i'm sure soured some on Android based on how shitty they were the 2.x devices are a nice experience all around.
So while its nice that Google will be able to do an end run around the OEMs, which i have noticed really don't give a rat's ass about support once they have sold you the phone I do hope Google doesn't "pull a MSFT" and drop all support and access to Google Play for those using older devices. I live in a rural state where many are working poor and they just can't afford to go out and spend $300+ on a phone and the contracts are legalized assrape so all those $50-$100 Android 2.x phones give the working poor the chance to enjoy what many of us have enjoyed for ages, the ability to have the Internet in their pocket.
Well he has protools with one of those DSP boards so I kinda doubt he'll be maxing out the cores. i myself like to do some multitrack editing with Audacity and even with running everything in software I don't really slam my CPUs until compiling the finished product.
But its NOT price pressure friend, you'd think it is, its SOUNDS logical, but that ain't it, trust me. I've been working PC shop for over 22 years, see more laptops in a month than most people will ever see in a lifetime and I can tell you what it is, its a combo of the shitty "environmentally friendly" solder (yeah because filling landfills with dead units because of whiskers and solder failure is better than having a little lead) and the drive to pinch every penny to squeeze out more profit. I have seen $1300 and up laptops die just as fast as the cheapos because of the bad solder and corner cutting, you open a new laptop and its as plain as the nose on your face. The boards are too thin, solder too thin, fans too weak, it all comes down into squeezing max profit and making sure the system lasts just long enough to go out of warranty.
This is why I tell all my customers to just buy the cheapest laptop that will do what they want it to and use the savings on the desktops as even I, while babying the living hell out of my systems, have managed to go through 4 laptops in the past 8 years whereas even my desktop from 2000 is still going, last I heard a local checkout girl had gotten it after it passed through a dozen or more hands before she brought it to me. I replaced the still running P3 board with a late model P4 board for cheap and last I heard she is still running it 7 days a week. I have yet to see a laptop last even half that time, they really are junk for the most part.
Dude you ought to think about snatching one of the X6s while they are dirt cheap as it sounds you could use a better board anyway. I would suggest the Asrock boards, come with some killer tools like XFast USB (boosts the hell out of USB 2 transfer speeds) XFast LAN (lets you set up priorities for applications so lets say you are playing an online game then XFast LAN would give it priority over say your browser checking for updates) and XFast RAM (easily set up RAMDrives of any size, great if you are running resource intensive programs) along with some kick ass OCing features and nice extras like BIOS backup.
That said unless you are a heavy multitasker like me that quad of yours will be more than enough, I only went X6 so I could give myself a treat while handing my X4 925 to my youngest boy who is now gonna hand me the X4 BACK as HE is gonna go with a faster X6 just so he can be king of the hill (both me and his older bro have X6s). But I can totally understand staying X4, just as I can understand AMD not being in a hurry to release new chips as what we have now? Really is overkill. I have the lowest speed of the Phenom II X6 (1035T, scored it for just $105 shipped) and frankly it blows through anything I throw at it so why go buy a new one? My board has 8GB of DDR2 RAM which even with me playing new shooters never runs out, got 3TB of HDD space so more than enough to work on video and audio, the only upgrades i'm planning on is replacing my HD4850 with an HD7770 in 6 months and probably adding one of those caching SSDs so I can get a nice speedboost without having to reinstall my nearly 4 year old Windows install.
I used to be the guy that HAD to build a new machine every other year and gut it for upgrades in the off year so if I'm staying on a 4 year old system? Then there really isn't any reason for the average Joe to upgrade. My dad I use as the perfect "Joe Normal" test case as everything he does is common, does his work (quickbooks) on the PC, chats, watches videos, uses email, everything is as bog standard as you can get right? So when the price dropped on the Phenom IIs I thought "Well it has been a few years since I built dad that Phenom I quad, maybe its time to upgrade" and ran a log on the system for a couple weeks to see how heavy the cores were being slammed, the result? 35%, that's it, he never got above 35% except for a single time where it spiked to 50% and looking at event viewer i found that was due to a hung browser tab, his everyday usage frankly left his quad twiddling its thumbs most of the time.
Honestly when AMD and Intel went from the MHz wars to the core wars they passed good enough and into ludicrous power VERY quickly, so much so that even 5 and 6 year old machines really aren't being taxed. So I'd say having AMD not come out with a new chip this year will be no great loss as long as they keep cranking out current gen chips, as $60 triples, $80 quads and $110 hexacores? Really not hard for a guy like me to move, really not at all.
Actually I tell my customers the opposite, buy really cheap laptops and spend the savings on the desktop because while the desktop will last and is easily repaired the laptops are frankly all throwaway junk. The reason why is obvious, you are squeezing these hot chips into a little teeny tiny thin case which NEVER has enough cooling BTW, and i've found most laptops will be falling apart by year 3 whereas even a 5 or 6 year old desktop will be going strong and will be easily upgradeable and have a multitude of uses.
Hell take the system I'm writing this on as an example, it started out as an Athlon X2 with 2GB of RAM, 400GB HDD and went from that to a Phenom II X4 (which is my youngest boy's chip now but he is getting a new board so he can go with an X6 so it looks like I'll have a spare quad soon) to what it has now which is a Phenom II X6 with 8GB of RAM and a 3TB HDD. Thanks to the easy upgradeability of desktops doing this was trivial and due to how you can have better cooling the desktop lasts MUCH longer than the average laptop. My dad has personally gone through 3 laptops in the past 5 years but his home desktop? Still the same Phenom I X4 that I scored cheap when the TLB bug came out and it frankly still runs rings around your average laptop and does everything he wants it to do, from chat and video messaging to letting him remote into his office PC from home, day after day, year after year it "just works" and works well.
But I agree that many don't "need" a new CPU, although I do advise my customers (who since finding out about the Intel compiler and market rigging got AMD units from me since that is all I sell now) to get the best CPU that their board can hold simply because the prices are so cheap right now, I mean 6 cores for less than $120? Triples and quads from $60? With those prices it'd be nuts not to score the best your board will hold. That said I have stopped at the X6 now instead of going with an X8 simply because i find the X6 has cycles to spare, I am typing this WHILE transcoding a movie to DVD WHILE also burning some backup discs and even with that PLUS a dozen windows open in dragon i still haven't managed to max out the cores.
That is really the little secret that AMD and Intel don't ant to talk about and why not releasing another chip until next year really won't hurt AMD, or my sales for that matter, and that is PCs passed good enough several revs back and are now into crazy overpowered. Hell I'm about to build an X6 for a local music studio and I bet even with all those tracks and effects he won't be maxing out his X6 as the software really hasn't kept up with the hardware.
But that said unless you are one of the "road warrior" types that live out of a suitcase and goes for VERY long stretches between outlets frankly there really isn't any point into upgrading to Haswell, especially if your laptop is already a multicore. The software just hasn't kept up with the hardware and those AMD and Intel dual core laptops frankly do everything that most folks want them to do, if you really want insane battery life you are better off just buying a second battery anyway, no new chip design will ever top just having a second battery fully charged and ready to go.
That is the libertarian argument and frankly its bullshit, you might as well say that "pure" communism or fascism works, the reason the USSR and Nazi Germany failed was they didn't "stay the course".
The reality is that capitalism, like every other ism before it, is doomed. it WILL die, this is INEVITABLE and cannot be stopped, the only question is what will come next? You see for the first time in recorded history human labor is no longer of any real value, its worthless. the entire concept of capitalism is trading what you have (labor) for what you don't have (capital) but what if what you have is completely worthless? This is why the student loan bubble WILL burst, you have all these people that,education or no, simply are no longer required. With just the tech we have right now there is ZERO reason to have anybody employed in fast food and most service industries (the machines can do it perfectly and without mistake) and the only reason that any humans work there at all is the government paying for the workers in the form of food stamps and subsidies that tilt the math and make the human cheaper than they really are. In position after position we are seeing this, to the point that you now have almost half of the United States citizens getting some form of government aid...who is gonna pay for this aid? At the moment the answer is nobody, its "magic money" that is created from nothing, what happens when the world will no longer take the magic money?
Like it or not there is really only three choices, 1.- Plague/war/disease dropping the population low enough for labor to be worth something, 2.- the government gives everyone a living wage for simply existing, wiping out the elite in the process, or 3.- Destroying the machines and going backwards. Personally I think #2 will be the most likely but it will only happen after a VERY bloody and messy war as those multigeneration money are gonna fight to the last breath to hang onto the status quo, no matter how much suffering it causes.
But I'm sorry to inform you of this but capitalism is doomed as most of those born today? Simply won't be of any use, not when you will have robots capable of doing pretty much any job, they just won't be required. Why do you think the so called "47%" exist? Think folks LIKE having to live hand to mouth like animals? No its just that those millions of people really are no longer required and when you can no longer trade your labor for capital the entire premise of capitalism breaks down. What we have today is really more like the royalty caste system of old, with a handful at the top having enough wealth to afford to buy the factories and robots and thus live like Gods while the peons live like animals but when that financial bubble bursts and the government can no longer just buy off the peasants with bread anc circuses THEN you will see change, the only question is whether the change will be bloodless or a slaughter. Sadly i'm predicting the latter.
OMFG, did you just DEFEND the age of the robber barons as a GOOD thing? To use a line the libertarians are fond of i bet you thought slavery was great, what with zero unemployment and all.
The ONLY ones who gained from the age of the robber barons WAS the robber barons, the rest got to drink polluted water, have everything in their lives controlled by a handful of uber-rich (who owned the railroads, oil,cattle, and pretty much anything else of value) and got to enjoy being enslaved. "I owe my soul to the company store" ring any bells?
But like most of the libertarian extreme right the ONLY thing you can do is insult, because the facts? really not on your side. ironically the libertarians rail against the "ebil gubmint" when in reality those regulations you hate? guess who bought them? The ROBBER BARONS! Look up "regulatory capture" and try actually reading up on the Rockefellers and Morgans and I think you'll find they were NOT nice people. Ironic that you would defend them when if you don't have at least a mil five in the bank they wouldn't have pissed on you if you were on fire, but living in the south and seeing Romney signs outside tarpaper shacks I'm used to dealing with the batshit crazy.
Never had to deal with someone with autism i take it? This sounds like it would be perfect for those with milder forms of autism to work on their ability to interact with strangers.
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Why, because he is black? that gives him some right to kill? Sounds like the only racist here is YOU, that YOU are suffering from classic liberal white guilt and therefor anything a black does to a white is okay, correct?
How do you comment on the 30+ white people attacked after the shooting by blacks saying "Kill YT for Trayvon!" none of which, NOT ONE, even the ones that set a 14 year old kid on fire, were charged with hate crimes? How do you feel about the fact that his OWN MOTHER had gone on record saying she sent him to FLA because he was "out of control"? Or the fact she TRADEMARKED his name and likeness before she even claimed the body? How about the postings of Martin's on FB that went into almost pornographic detail about how much he loved beating a man? How he loved to feel their bones crack, feel their blood pour, and was looking forward to scoring a better gun? Or the fact that he was sporting both Crips tats as well as throwing Crips signs on his FB?
I'm sorry but frankly we are ALL tired of the "white guilt" bullshit as well as the "NAACP racism" like the Martin case. He was already home, if he felt in ANY danger he had a phone in his hand, instead he decided he was gonna "stomp a cracker" only this 6 foot 2 bench pressing 200 pounds thug found out that the cracker could fight back.
Nope! Mama didn't raise no fools so i had in writing from the head IT guy that part of my duty was "Showing new nurses how to bypass any and all filters that might hinder their performance" and that was that. But you have to remember I was only temping there so other than a basic CYA I didn't give a shit as i was headed to the outdoor by summer anyway.
But I can tell ya I'm a HELL of a lot happier now running my own little shop! Sure the pay ain't as good but ya know what? No more being told to fix a problem without even half the budget to get the job done, no more getting treated worse than a Mickey D's worker, no more constant calls on the weekends...I have to say my two boys staging an "intervention" to get me to quit working corporate was a real eye opener. They were sitting there practically in tears, saying "You don't smile anymore, you are always tired, you look like death..we just lost our mom and dad might as well be dead, you and grandma are all that we have left and if it comes down to losing you or doing without the extras? We can do without the tech junk and take out a lot easier than we can do without you".
Now I'm happy, my color is back, I'm in a long term relationship with a sweet gal who thinks the world of the boys, hell she even gets along with mama...life is good man, I must have been insane to work for the corps!
You are correct in all counts, I would only add that there is a major source of infection that most geeks around here probably don't even think of that could seriously tilt those numbers...USB drives and sticks.
Working in a little shop I tend to get exposed to more hardware than most and can see trends emerging and in the past few years the number of cheap flash sticks infected with clickjackers and other bugs have frankly gone right through the roof. Since they can no longer count on autorun they instead disguise themselves as "value added" software on the drive, drive security software, free movie players, stuff like that. Many of these bugs are clickjacker variants which for those that have never encountered one are used to commit ad fraud by driving up hits to websites, many of which are porn sites. With a clickjacker you'll see page hits suddenly explode, I have seen clickjackers that would cause hundreds of new windows to open within seconds, talk about dragging a machine to a screeching halt.
So just going by the data we have here, with the number of hits going from over 10,000 to less than a hundred? Sounds like somebody let a clickjacker loose on their network. Feel sorry for the IT guy if that was the case, the new clickjackers are nasty little buggers and pretty damned hard to kill without just wiping everything and starting over. I hope they had a really solid backup strategy in place if that were the case, otherwise talk about a nightmare.
Boy ain't that the truth! I did a 6 month temp job at a hospital once and one of my jobs was to show nurses how to beat the porn filters! It turned out the PHB who had bought the crap (at an insane markup over a martini lunch from what the rumor mill said) refused to even entertain the thought that his software might be shit but the stupid software would block ANYTHING to do with words like breast or prostrate no matter how many times the IT guys told the stupid software not to, kinda a problem when you have a large part of the hospital dealing with cancer. So I got to go out each morning and show the noobs how to blow past all the filters that the PHB paid insane money to put up, the wonders that is corporate bullshit.
Uhhhh...not only was he in his own back yard when he CHOSE to go back and assault Zimmerman (backed up by the GF on the stand who was egging him on) but he had a CELL PHONE and if he in ANY way, shape, or form felt threatened he could have just as easily dialed 911. The reason why he did not is obvious by reading his FB postings as he LIKED to give people "beat downs" as he called them and in fact posted a long rant on how much he enjoyed beating down a bus driver, with great detail on how good it made him feel BTW.
Okay you are just trolling now, as it was stated multiple times by both the prosecution AND the defense that Martin had Zimmerman down on the pavement, he was NOT in his vehicle at the time of the assault. And frankly NO jury would have convicted Zimmermen thanks to the testimony of the GF who stated 1.- He had made it home and THEN turned around and went back, 2.- She was egging him on, accusing Zimmerman of being gay and inciting homophobia in Martin, 3.- The most damning evidence, his own statements on FB, where he went on and on about how much he liked to beat people!
So I'm sorry if you are misinformed, considering how much absolute lies were pushed by the MSM (Yahoo being the worst, in one week their pic of Martin went from 14, to 11, to the last weeks of the trial using a pic of Martin at SIX YEARS OLD while putting Zimmerman in his police photo, if it were me I'd have sued) but I'd say it has been explained to you pretty clearly by now so any more appeals to emotion by you will obviously be nothing but trolling and should be ignored. If you want to argue whether or not self defense is allowed fine, although I think even the EU says you can defend yourself, but anything more about supposed attacks from the car will just be trollbait.
Sorry but the law says I'm allowed to follow anybody I want down the street, that isn't a crime, you also have somebody in a black hoodie in 84 degree weather at night in a neighborhood that has been robbed repeatedly, that gave Zimmerman every right to wonder if it was another robbery. You have the GF saying on the stand that Martin called Zimmerman a cracker and she encouraged Martin to jump him, you had multiple witnesses that said Martin was pounding Zimmerman's head into the pavement and during the entire fight Zimmerman was totally defensive, never once getting the upper hand, finally you have Martin's own words on FB talking about how he was gonna score a gat, "be gangsta" and laughing about how much fun he had bashing a bus driver's head in for looking at him wrong.
Given THAT much evidence I don't see how anybody can argue anything but the ONLY reason Zimmerman was prosecuted was because of black activists playing the victim card, right down to constantly showing and selling photoshopped t-shirts of Martin at 11 years old in a hoodie when in reality he was 6 foot 2, had multiple tats, and could bench press over 200 pounds. i'm sorry but I don't care if the guy was green I would have likewise followed anybody acting like that and you can be damned sure I'd defend myself if they jumped me.
As for MLK I have NO doubt that if he were to comeback tomorrow he would treat the so called "black leaders" as Jesus did the moneylenders at the temple and would be disgusted with the rise of the welfare state, black fathers not stepping up and raising their kids, the idolizing of thugs and gangbangers and demonizing of education, and the blaming all problems of white people. The goal of MLK was to give everyone a chance to be the best they could be regardless of the color of their skin, not to turn being black into a permanent handicap.
Kinda sad when you can take a black guy straight off the boat from Africa and he has something like 40 TIMES more likelihood of becoming middle class in a single generation than a black man born here. To me that says all that needs to be said, its not the color of their skin, its the demonizing of education and the victim mentality that is holding back black folks in America now.
How EXACTLY is it bullshit friend? Samsung has the bigger profits which they have wisely used in R&D and advertising to pretty much own the market. Does that mean nobody else can make any money with Android? Of course not as HTC and LG show but what that DOES mean is that you are fighting for the scraps, no different than how Nokia had 80% of the dumbphone market yet wasn't making jack shit compared to the high end niche that Apple had carved out.
But if Nokia would have went for Android they would have died that much quicker as they didn't have the experience, nor the advertising, nor the word of mouth. LG has the low end market pretty much locked up with their Optimus line, HTC has the midrange market, and Samsung has the high end market and like Apple has built up serious brand recognition with the consumers....what did Nokia have to bring to the table?
When you are faced with a competitor that is firing on all cylinders and is at the top of their game you just can't go in half ass dude, you better bring your A game and have a product light years ahead of the other guy and what did Nokia have? Old designs, weak chips, if they wouldn't have taken that billion bucks from MSFT and instead released what they had (which nearly all their hardware at the time was based on the ancient TI OMAP, long in the tooth even then and pathetic when compared to the best HTC and Samsung offered) combined with the high cost to manufacture for Nokia would have been suicide, nobody was gonna pay Nokia premium prices for an out of date Android unit.
Again you ignore the more important question which was WHY were they buying dumphones? They were buying dumbphones because the lowest Android smartphone cost a year's wage there so they really didn't have a choice, did they? Well that ended by the middle of 2011, the ultra cheap Cortex SoC made it so that the only really expensive part of the phone was the screen and they solved that by economies of scale, which is why damned near every phone coming out of Asia all have the exact same screen size and design, standardize on one and build a billion and the price quickly drops to very little.
That doesn't change the fact that you are arguing its worth being the "king of 8-tracks" when every month another market was being lost and simply not replaced. By the time Elop was brought in they had lost almost the entire American continent, just about all of Europe, Japan, and a good chunk of China was switching, only the dirt poor rural areas left. And again you are arguing that there is profit to be made by selling to the most dirt poor people on the planet when the simple fact is Nokia had their factories in their home country and their countrymen weren't gonna work for a buck an hour like the Chinese. The release of the Loongson SoC that let you make a complete dumbphone in China for less than $3 USD put the final nail in that coffin, as any of those dirt poor folks buying a dumbphone wouldn't be buying a Nokia, they would be buying a "Mokia" or other Chinese knockoff.
You can point to the past all you want, I will likewise point to sales of 8-tracks in 1978 or betamax in 1981, when you've bet the company on a dead technology there really is no way to go but down. Now you can argue that Elop took a slow death spiral and sped it up, which is arguable, but that doesn't magically change a death spiral into growth. The release of the ultra cheap Cortex SoC was the final nail in the coffin for the dumbphone and there was NOTHING that Elop could do or say to change that, nothing at all. To argue otherwise would be just as insane as saying you think you can get 8-tracks to make a comeback, the tech is dead dude, its not coming back and Elop or frankly anybody that read the trade papers could see that.
Good Lord save us from babies that don't know shit. Who said shit about Win95? Read a book kid the first IE that gained share was IE4 and that was for Win 3.x and you had to download it! Sure they included IE 6 months later in Win95 but like today just because MSFT released a new OS didn't magically make the world adopt it and it was a good 2 and a half years before the majority had moved away from Win 3.x, despite the bullshit MSFT tried to push of the world waiting on baited breath for the Win 95 release.
Yes they abused that power but how did they GET that power? By having competitors that were MORONS. You seem to forget that the first major IE that had real share YOU HAD TO DOWNLOAD as it didn't even come with the OS, and this was in the days of 28k dialup so you had to REALLY want something to go to the trouble, yet people did by a LARGE margin, why? Because NS4 was a heaping pile of fail and shit, that is why!
Believe me grasshopper, I've been in the PC business since the Shat was selling VIC20s with his TJ Hooker hair. I was surfing the boards back when you had to keep a book of IP addresses and frankly I was a BIG fan of NS...until NS4. I can tell you that it was almost comedic to use that browser and if it wouldn't have been "shoot your PC like Elvis" frustrating it would have been funny. Here is what it was like to use NS4..."Hey its installed, great! Okay I'll just go to my favorite hangout and...damn, crashed. Oh well it must have been a glitch I'll just reload and...crashed again. oookay, maybe it just doesn't like that website. I'll pick a different and...(entire PC BSODs)...FUUUUUCCCKKKK!
Time after time I watched in shock as company after company did truly moronic moves that practically gave the market to MSFT, from the NS4 rewrite to IBM trying to buttfuck the OEMs and then with a straight face trying to get them to pay $199 a pop for licenses of an OS that IBM controlled, hell we are seeing it with MSFT itself now, with the entire planet screaming "WE FUCKING HATE METRO!!!" only for Ballmer to go "Oh really? Well here is a "start button" that takes you right back to metro, BWA HA HA...what do you mean sales are down?"
Frankly if I were to cite every moronic move of the 80s and 90s that gave MSFT a free shot here it would be the length of War & Peace but I would argue their abuses were frankly pointless and a way for a paranoid MSFT to try to justify itself when in reality its competitors were either arrogant, stupid, or both. BTW notice that now they are stuck fighting Google and post Jobs Apple, both of which have shown they are anything BUT stupid, that MSFT has gone exactly nowhere in mobile? MSFT can't seem to do well unless the competitor does something dumb first, one can argue all day why that is but its really not hard to come up with citation after citation. hell look at the X360, had a billion dollar flaw and STILL ended up taking the top slot from Sony, why? Sony thought a $599 system would fly, and by setting the PS3 at that insane price point for the pivotal first 2 years gave MSFT a free pass.
Name ONE, just one, place where that doesn't fit. BeOS? Tied first to AT&T Hobbit CPU, then to PPC, by the time they figured out X86 was the way to go it was too late. OS/2? IBM tried to assrape the "gang of nine" with MCA bus so that by the time OS/2 came out it was treated like plague blankets by the OEMs and to top it off they demanded $200! per license from the OEMs when MSFT was selling their for $15, the rest is history. Netscape? NS4. WordPerfect? Refused to move to Windows, instead put out a REALLY shitty DOS port that crashed more than it ran, didn't bother putting out a true Windows port until 99, too late. Apple? Firing Jobs are replacing him with one shit CEO after another left them with an OS that was a decade out of date, overpried underpowered hardware, and to top off the fail they had a pile of products with different names but similar features at wildly different price points so nobody knew what was good and what wasn't.
You can do that with the entire history of MSFT, from Bill Gates lucking into getting the contract for a CP/M clone for IBM on up, they had a competitor royally fuck up and took advantage. the "brilliance" of MSFT was spotting those flubs and capitalizing on them but now MSFT is too big and unweilding to do a quick switch like that which is why they are dying in mobile, even if Google and Apple make a mistake by the time MSFT recognizes it and moves its too late.
But you missed my point which was what choice did they have?
They had ZERO experience in Android and Samsung and HTC would have curbstomped them in that market as they had the experience, the advertising, and they frankly make really solid products that folks like. They didn't have the mountains of money to burn to get WebOS which IMHO would have been the best choice but they couldn't get into a bidding war with HP and ever hope to win, Apple sure as fuck wasn't gonna license their sacred cow iOS to Nokia so they could compete, and their internal divisions were a mess with the ONLY product that had a snowball's chance in hell (both Symbian and the Java OS were designed for dumbphones and would have required a ground up rewrite) was maemo and several of the Maemo devs said it would be at LEAST a year and a half as Maemo had serious memory corruption and CPU usage issues. One dev even reported you had to reboot the phone at least twice a day or the OS would crash....who was willing to put up with that in 2010?
So I don't see how they had any choice in the matter, the board waiting so damned long to try to change course that they were backed into a corner. The only market they had was dying, they didn't have a product to sell in the new market, all they could do was hire Elop and hope a Hail Mary pass would pull their collective asses out of the fire....it failed, but was it a bad call? I would argue that given what they had the answer is a giant NO IT WAS NOT a bad call, they did the best with what they had and it just wasn't good enough. The situation reminds me of what happened with Palm, as they kept milking Garnet until the market had passed them by and by the time they got WebOS out of the door nobody cared anymore as Android and iOS had drank their milkshake. In the 90s Nokia WAS a big name, key word WAS, but by the time that Elop was hired the only ones that gave a fuck about Nokia was some old geeks and FOSSies that remembered the good old days, everybody else had moved onto to Samsung and HTC and LG. They were stuck in the past and just couldn't catch up, that's all. But it wasn't a bad call, they just waited too damned long to make it.
Citation please? Otherwise I gotta call bullshit. Hell I live in one of the poorest rural states in the nation and you almost never see a dumbphone even around here, again because you can get an Android for $20. I can honestly say I have NEVER met anybody who has bought a single program for a dumbphone, not one, and I'm meeting new people constantly at the shop and we often talk about phones (as nearly everybody needs to be shown how to get their pics off the things) and nobody has been buying dumbphones for awhile now. Heck even India now has a dirt cheap Android and so does Africa, the dumbphone market really had nobody to sell to and no place to go but down.
So I'm sorry but Nokia was toast long before Elop ever walked in the door, all they had was 8-track players in the era of the CD,and when you add to that the infighting, trying to support THREE OSes, none of which held a candle to iOS and Android, and the mess that was their smartphone division? Bad management had already blown a hole in that ship big enough to drive a semi through, all the patching by Elop simply couldn't undo the damage.
But if you think dumbphones had any kind of future even then? I got a bridge you might be interested in. the ONLY users of dumbphones I've had walk through my doors for the past 6 years have been folks over 65 and they don't buy apps, hell they don't even browse, and they hang onto a phone until it dies. With the Chinese cranking out a SoC that lets them build dumbphones for less than $3 USD a pop? that market was dead dude, Elop was right on his "burning platform" memo because everybody could see the writing on the wall, no money to make in a phone that costs less to make than a meal at Mickey D's.
Yes they do NOW but that was the point I was trying to make, will Google allow that into the future? After all I'm sure if they had their way all phones and tablets would be ICS, just one version to support means less cost and the new devices have more memory and more powerful CPUs so they can do more with a new 4.x phone than they can a 2.x phone.
Of course whether more equals better is up for interpretation as I have seen one of those 2.x phones easily beat a 4.x Samsung, even though the LG Slider 2.x had half the memory and was a single core to the Samung's dual. The reason why was simple, less bloat and a slimmer OS with Gingerbread than with ICS.
So while I hope Google does keep supporting 2.x I would feel a LOT better about TFA if we got some sort of assurance from Google. I have a couple of relatives including my oldest on 2.x phones and it would not be fun to have to file 13 all those phones and tablets which work just fine because Google decides to stop supporting 2.x through Google Play.
Actually the entire speech is about 3 pages long so I wasn't sure where to cut it off at, but you are right that I probably should have included that line.
With or without the line it still illustrates that what we are seeing here today is NOT a new thing, it wasn't caused by a POTUS with a D or an R by his name, its just one sign of a completely corrupted system that frankly has been broken for a good century or more, since the days of cobblestone roads and bolt action rifles. the only difference between then and now is that those in power have gotten so damned arrogant and spoiled thanks to the insane amounts of money they have been able to steal that they just don't give enough of a fuck to even pretend anymore.
Personally I'm shocked it hasn't devolved to the point that the POTUS and congress critters wear badges with the corp logo of those that own them, like a NASCAR driver just covered in patches for this or that product.
Oh bullshit. First of all when it comes to MSFT pretty much ALL of their successes in the past can be preceded by "and then the other guy did something REALLY dumb" thus giving MSFT a free shot, from BE-OS tying itself to one niche CPU after another to netscape putting out the abomination that was NS4 not once did MSFT "come up with some brilliant plan" they just got lucky and were able to capitalize on having a competitor that was a moron.
Second of all Nokia WAS ALREADY TOAST by the time the board called in Elop, they had not one, not two, but THREE OSes, not one of which was up to the task of competing with Android and iOS, the ONLY place they were ahead was in dumbphones which was like being the biggest 8-track manufacturer in 1987, they couldn't go with Android because not only was the Android market then as now the most cutthroat commodity market in mobile (only HTC and Samsung has made any real money and I'd argue they are on borrowed time, Hong Kong was showing off dual core Android phones that retail for $70 not 4 months ago so like PCs its gonna be profits measured in pennies) but Samsung and HTC frankly would have curbstomped them as nobody does high end Android units better, and they just didn't have the money to compete with HP for WebOS which IMHO would have been the best choice. Add in the fact that a couple of Maemo devs were quoted as saying Maemo wouldn't have been ready for another year and a half MINIMUM (it was having serious memory corruption and CPU issues at the time) and the app devs wouldn't have made shit for maemo anyway after Nokia burnt their bridges to the community by changing the framework? yeah there really wasn't any choice, it was take WinPhone or close the doors and give the money back to the shareholders.
All those that hate MSFT frankly ought to be dancing in the street, as this gives ballmer the chance to piss away...what? 9 billion US dollars? And while shitting away a mountain of money Ballmer's retarded attempt to turn Windows into a WinPhone is frankly killing the Windows desktop, talking to other shop owners we have all even stopped carrying Win 8.x anything as its a bigger bomb than WinME, and finally you KNOW that Ballmer is gonna push hard for his little yes man Elop to get the big chair because it will let him still push his "vision" which consists of burning the desktop and server business to the ground so he can push half assed Apple clones that are worse in every way compared to the real thing, worse walled garden, worse performance, worse app selection, everything mobile under Ballmer/Elop has been half assed and piss poor and I don't see that changing if Elop gets the big chair.
But I leave you all here with a warning, be careful what you wish for. So many wanted MSFT dead for being douchebags they aren't even noticing they are replacing one douchebag for an even worse one, Between the big brother levels of data that Google is gathering on every android user and the fact that their new ChromeBooks took what SHOULD have been a completely bog standard X86 laptop and made it so proprietary that the ONLY way to install a different OS is to throw it into "Dev mode" and then and ONLY then can you install not whatever you want, but only one of a handful of Linux distros supported by some guy in his basement? say what you want about MSFT but at least i could grab any Windows desktop or laptop and be booting to install not only any previous MSFT OS but pretty much any other OS, Linux,BSD,Haiku, whatever, in under 20 minutes.
So while we all know where this is gonna end, another shitpile of money pissed away, declining sales on the X86 front and flatline numbers in mobile for MSFT, lets not replace one asshole company for another shall we? as for Nokia...oh well, between Samsung, HTC, LG, and a bazillion Chinese brands there really isn't a place for Nokia anymore now that the dumbphone market is dead. Hell when I was shopping for my Android phone several of the shops had refurb android phones starting at just $20 and new for $50, with prices THAT low for smartphones? Nokia might as well pack it in, no point in even making dumbphones anymore.
Uhhhh...forget about the USA getting the UK to blow millions going after Assange and keeping him locked in that embassy like a caged animal? You seem to be under the mistaken belief the US gov gives a flying fuck WHAT you think, when IRL nothing could be further from the truth. In reality the US gov is trying to rip off the mob with the whole "lets make an example out of him" bit and they don't give a fuck what you think as they have the MSM being their very own Baghdad Bob to hand wave it all away.
For those that believe the US gov is still the "good guys", or ever were for that matter, I present exhibit A and exhibit B. First exhibit A, a speech by Naomi Wolf outlining how many plays from the "dictator's handbook" that goes back to Lenin to El Duce to the Crazy Austrian are being used here and now and this was made in 2007, things are MUCH worse than when this was made. oh as an aside she is now on the watchlist, her crime? talking about what rights you have under the constitution....Hear that sound? That is the sound of the founding fathers spinning like tops in their graves.
Exhibit B was made nearly a century ago, but read this speech and see how much it sounds like exactly what we are seeing now....
"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
Sound familiar? The only thing that has changed is which country is getting fucked and which corp gets rich off the blood of the soldiers. hell you have a government that ADMITS that Gulf Of Tonkin was a "non event" (read total false flag) yet not a single person gets arrested? hell the current AG with Fast & Furious tried to pull a false flag on the American people and got Americans and Mexicans alike killed and has been caught in repeated lies under oath...yet nobody even entertains the thought of hauling his ass to jail?
If it looks like it, acts like it, and smells like it maybe we should call it what it is...fascism. The only difference between the fascism of today and the fascism preached by the crazy Austrian is that the Austrian forced the corps to bend to his will, in this new version the corps and the government are one. Please watch the Wolf video and see how many plays from the dictator playbook is being run here now, a place outside the rule of law where torture takes place, public humiliation of citizens for the purpose of instilling fear and obedience, a government that spies upon its own people as much if not more than it spies on others, I could go on but Ms Wolf says it much better than I do.
Which just for the record probably means he is on the latest Chromium branch or one of those based on Chromium as i have noticed the "weird spacing error" thing since the last update, and instead focus on this great news?
As someone who owns an Android pre-paid (finally got out from under that contract, praise the FSM) this is great news but I have a few reservations...does this mean they'll be forcing updates to ICS on devices that can't run it well? Will they just abandon all but the latest and greatest? or will they do like I hope they would and take all those 2.x and 3.x devices and update to the last release in that branch?
Because looking around when i was shopping for my phone it amazed me how many Gingerbread (most 2.3.X based phones) there are being made and sold and moreover...how fricking well they run! When I was first looking at Android a couple years back it was when the market was crapflooded with 1.x devices and I have to say they ran like absolute dogshit. They were slow, buggy as all get out, the screen response was pathetic, they were just total shit, but these Gingerbread based phones? They are snappy, great battery life, plenty of apps for it,decent touchscreens, etc. While the 1.x devices i'm sure soured some on Android based on how shitty they were the 2.x devices are a nice experience all around.
So while its nice that Google will be able to do an end run around the OEMs, which i have noticed really don't give a rat's ass about support once they have sold you the phone I do hope Google doesn't "pull a MSFT" and drop all support and access to Google Play for those using older devices. I live in a rural state where many are working poor and they just can't afford to go out and spend $300+ on a phone and the contracts are legalized assrape so all those $50-$100 Android 2.x phones give the working poor the chance to enjoy what many of us have enjoyed for ages, the ability to have the Internet in their pocket.
Well he has protools with one of those DSP boards so I kinda doubt he'll be maxing out the cores. i myself like to do some multitrack editing with Audacity and even with running everything in software I don't really slam my CPUs until compiling the finished product.
But its NOT price pressure friend, you'd think it is, its SOUNDS logical, but that ain't it, trust me. I've been working PC shop for over 22 years, see more laptops in a month than most people will ever see in a lifetime and I can tell you what it is, its a combo of the shitty "environmentally friendly" solder (yeah because filling landfills with dead units because of whiskers and solder failure is better than having a little lead) and the drive to pinch every penny to squeeze out more profit. I have seen $1300 and up laptops die just as fast as the cheapos because of the bad solder and corner cutting, you open a new laptop and its as plain as the nose on your face. The boards are too thin, solder too thin, fans too weak, it all comes down into squeezing max profit and making sure the system lasts just long enough to go out of warranty.
This is why I tell all my customers to just buy the cheapest laptop that will do what they want it to and use the savings on the desktops as even I, while babying the living hell out of my systems, have managed to go through 4 laptops in the past 8 years whereas even my desktop from 2000 is still going, last I heard a local checkout girl had gotten it after it passed through a dozen or more hands before she brought it to me. I replaced the still running P3 board with a late model P4 board for cheap and last I heard she is still running it 7 days a week. I have yet to see a laptop last even half that time, they really are junk for the most part.
Dude you ought to think about snatching one of the X6s while they are dirt cheap as it sounds you could use a better board anyway. I would suggest the Asrock boards, come with some killer tools like XFast USB (boosts the hell out of USB 2 transfer speeds) XFast LAN (lets you set up priorities for applications so lets say you are playing an online game then XFast LAN would give it priority over say your browser checking for updates) and XFast RAM (easily set up RAMDrives of any size, great if you are running resource intensive programs) along with some kick ass OCing features and nice extras like BIOS backup.
That said unless you are a heavy multitasker like me that quad of yours will be more than enough, I only went X6 so I could give myself a treat while handing my X4 925 to my youngest boy who is now gonna hand me the X4 BACK as HE is gonna go with a faster X6 just so he can be king of the hill (both me and his older bro have X6s). But I can totally understand staying X4, just as I can understand AMD not being in a hurry to release new chips as what we have now? Really is overkill. I have the lowest speed of the Phenom II X6 (1035T, scored it for just $105 shipped) and frankly it blows through anything I throw at it so why go buy a new one? My board has 8GB of DDR2 RAM which even with me playing new shooters never runs out, got 3TB of HDD space so more than enough to work on video and audio, the only upgrades i'm planning on is replacing my HD4850 with an HD7770 in 6 months and probably adding one of those caching SSDs so I can get a nice speedboost without having to reinstall my nearly 4 year old Windows install.
I used to be the guy that HAD to build a new machine every other year and gut it for upgrades in the off year so if I'm staying on a 4 year old system? Then there really isn't any reason for the average Joe to upgrade. My dad I use as the perfect "Joe Normal" test case as everything he does is common, does his work (quickbooks) on the PC, chats, watches videos, uses email, everything is as bog standard as you can get right? So when the price dropped on the Phenom IIs I thought "Well it has been a few years since I built dad that Phenom I quad, maybe its time to upgrade" and ran a log on the system for a couple weeks to see how heavy the cores were being slammed, the result? 35%, that's it, he never got above 35% except for a single time where it spiked to 50% and looking at event viewer i found that was due to a hung browser tab, his everyday usage frankly left his quad twiddling its thumbs most of the time.
Honestly when AMD and Intel went from the MHz wars to the core wars they passed good enough and into ludicrous power VERY quickly, so much so that even 5 and 6 year old machines really aren't being taxed. So I'd say having AMD not come out with a new chip this year will be no great loss as long as they keep cranking out current gen chips, as $60 triples, $80 quads and $110 hexacores? Really not hard for a guy like me to move, really not at all.
Actually I tell my customers the opposite, buy really cheap laptops and spend the savings on the desktop because while the desktop will last and is easily repaired the laptops are frankly all throwaway junk. The reason why is obvious, you are squeezing these hot chips into a little teeny tiny thin case which NEVER has enough cooling BTW, and i've found most laptops will be falling apart by year 3 whereas even a 5 or 6 year old desktop will be going strong and will be easily upgradeable and have a multitude of uses.
Hell take the system I'm writing this on as an example, it started out as an Athlon X2 with 2GB of RAM, 400GB HDD and went from that to a Phenom II X4 (which is my youngest boy's chip now but he is getting a new board so he can go with an X6 so it looks like I'll have a spare quad soon) to what it has now which is a Phenom II X6 with 8GB of RAM and a 3TB HDD. Thanks to the easy upgradeability of desktops doing this was trivial and due to how you can have better cooling the desktop lasts MUCH longer than the average laptop. My dad has personally gone through 3 laptops in the past 5 years but his home desktop? Still the same Phenom I X4 that I scored cheap when the TLB bug came out and it frankly still runs rings around your average laptop and does everything he wants it to do, from chat and video messaging to letting him remote into his office PC from home, day after day, year after year it "just works" and works well.
But I agree that many don't "need" a new CPU, although I do advise my customers (who since finding out about the Intel compiler and market rigging got AMD units from me since that is all I sell now) to get the best CPU that their board can hold simply because the prices are so cheap right now, I mean 6 cores for less than $120? Triples and quads from $60? With those prices it'd be nuts not to score the best your board will hold. That said I have stopped at the X6 now instead of going with an X8 simply because i find the X6 has cycles to spare, I am typing this WHILE transcoding a movie to DVD WHILE also burning some backup discs and even with that PLUS a dozen windows open in dragon i still haven't managed to max out the cores.
That is really the little secret that AMD and Intel don't ant to talk about and why not releasing another chip until next year really won't hurt AMD, or my sales for that matter, and that is PCs passed good enough several revs back and are now into crazy overpowered. Hell I'm about to build an X6 for a local music studio and I bet even with all those tracks and effects he won't be maxing out his X6 as the software really hasn't kept up with the hardware.
But that said unless you are one of the "road warrior" types that live out of a suitcase and goes for VERY long stretches between outlets frankly there really isn't any point into upgrading to Haswell, especially if your laptop is already a multicore. The software just hasn't kept up with the hardware and those AMD and Intel dual core laptops frankly do everything that most folks want them to do, if you really want insane battery life you are better off just buying a second battery anyway, no new chip design will ever top just having a second battery fully charged and ready to go.
That is the libertarian argument and frankly its bullshit, you might as well say that "pure" communism or fascism works, the reason the USSR and Nazi Germany failed was they didn't "stay the course".
The reality is that capitalism, like every other ism before it, is doomed. it WILL die, this is INEVITABLE and cannot be stopped, the only question is what will come next? You see for the first time in recorded history human labor is no longer of any real value, its worthless. the entire concept of capitalism is trading what you have (labor) for what you don't have (capital) but what if what you have is completely worthless? This is why the student loan bubble WILL burst, you have all these people that,education or no, simply are no longer required. With just the tech we have right now there is ZERO reason to have anybody employed in fast food and most service industries (the machines can do it perfectly and without mistake) and the only reason that any humans work there at all is the government paying for the workers in the form of food stamps and subsidies that tilt the math and make the human cheaper than they really are. In position after position we are seeing this, to the point that you now have almost half of the United States citizens getting some form of government aid...who is gonna pay for this aid? At the moment the answer is nobody, its "magic money" that is created from nothing, what happens when the world will no longer take the magic money?
Like it or not there is really only three choices, 1.- Plague/war/disease dropping the population low enough for labor to be worth something, 2.- the government gives everyone a living wage for simply existing, wiping out the elite in the process, or 3.- Destroying the machines and going backwards. Personally I think #2 will be the most likely but it will only happen after a VERY bloody and messy war as those multigeneration money are gonna fight to the last breath to hang onto the status quo, no matter how much suffering it causes.
But I'm sorry to inform you of this but capitalism is doomed as most of those born today? Simply won't be of any use, not when you will have robots capable of doing pretty much any job, they just won't be required. Why do you think the so called "47%" exist? Think folks LIKE having to live hand to mouth like animals? No its just that those millions of people really are no longer required and when you can no longer trade your labor for capital the entire premise of capitalism breaks down. What we have today is really more like the royalty caste system of old, with a handful at the top having enough wealth to afford to buy the factories and robots and thus live like Gods while the peons live like animals but when that financial bubble bursts and the government can no longer just buy off the peasants with bread anc circuses THEN you will see change, the only question is whether the change will be bloodless or a slaughter. Sadly i'm predicting the latter.
OMFG, did you just DEFEND the age of the robber barons as a GOOD thing? To use a line the libertarians are fond of i bet you thought slavery was great, what with zero unemployment and all.
The ONLY ones who gained from the age of the robber barons WAS the robber barons, the rest got to drink polluted water, have everything in their lives controlled by a handful of uber-rich (who owned the railroads, oil,cattle, and pretty much anything else of value) and got to enjoy being enslaved. "I owe my soul to the company store" ring any bells?
But like most of the libertarian extreme right the ONLY thing you can do is insult, because the facts? really not on your side. ironically the libertarians rail against the "ebil gubmint" when in reality those regulations you hate? guess who bought them? The ROBBER BARONS! Look up "regulatory capture" and try actually reading up on the Rockefellers and Morgans and I think you'll find they were NOT nice people. Ironic that you would defend them when if you don't have at least a mil five in the bank they wouldn't have pissed on you if you were on fire, but living in the south and seeing Romney signs outside tarpaper shacks I'm used to dealing with the batshit crazy.
Never had to deal with someone with autism i take it? This sounds like it would be perfect for those with milder forms of autism to work on their ability to interact with strangers.