And as somebody who builds and uses AMD exclusively while I'd like to see some new chips come out I have to say....it makes perfect sense. Their production is being taken up by the console Jaguar chips (based on Bobcat, i don't know WTF the console manufacturers were thinking but its good for AMD regardless) and coming out with a new chip would take resources away from that. Also there will of course be mainstream boards based on jaguar once the orders for the console chips are filled and I'm sure they are hoard a big pile of X6 and X4 jags that had one or two modules not pass muster so there is designing chipsets for those and of course their GPU line so their plate is rather full ATM.
I also really can't blame them in this matter as I have been saying for years and time and time again I've seen with my own two eyes that CPUs passed "good enough" several releases ago and even the Phenom II based chips and first gen Bulldozers really are overkill for all but a handful of users. Take myself as an example since I do a LOT of multitasking and therefor use more CPU than most. I transcode videos, edit multitrack audio recordings and I just loooove my shooters. Now throughout the 90s and a good chunk of the 00s I HAD to replace my PC every 2 years with major upgrades such as CPU and RAM added on the "off" years because I really had no choice, the software coming out at the time would just overwhelm a 2 year old PC, and now? I'm typing this on a 2009 Phenom II X6 with 8GB of RAM, 3TB of HDD space, why would I buy a new PC? Frankly the only upgrade I need is to swap out the aging HD4850 for an HD7770 and that will be less than $100 come the holidays so even with me multitasking like mad even this 4 year old chip runs everything I want to run and runs it well.
So there really isn't a point in them coming out with new CPUs or APUs at the moment as the ones that they are selling now are extreme overkill. I'm sure a few will chime in with "But but but...i7!" but ya know what? Know how many people actually give a rat's ass about which corp has the biggest e-Peen? From what I've seen selling to folks from all walks of life, from the gamers to the grandmas i'd say that number is less than 5%, maybe even as low as 3%. Everybody else just wants a snappy powerful system at a good price that won't sit there bogged down and the current AMD chips deliver that in spades. I've had not a bit of trouble moving desktops based on Phenom II X3 and X4, even the Athlon X3 and X4 moves pretty briskly and of course those 6 and 8 cores are easy sells to the heavy multitaskers and everybody likes those new $400 quad APU laptops as those babies have plenty of cycles to spare. Showing off how you can just plug them into any TV and get a full 1080P media center when you are done roaming for the day just seals the deal, no problem.
Personally if I were in the big chair I'd probably be doing the same thing, wait until the next gen consoles are out, get the Jaguar ULV APU boards and laptops out (probably along with a "the same tech that powers the PS4 and Xbox N!" advertising campaign) and then and ONLY then would I start really concentrating on getting those next chips out. Also remember that they hired back the chip designer that made the original Athlon64 along with the A6 for Apple so I'm sure he is cooking up something as well so it might be smart to wait and see if his new chip will be worth dropping the BD arch for. All in all I'd say AMD is in a good position right now, all three major consoles are using chips made by them (one GPU and two APUs) and while their current chips might not win a dick measuring contest with Intel frankly they are extreme overkill for the majority of mainstream customers whom I can tell you are quite happy to have that bang for the buck. It also helps that Intel has been stupidly greedy as of late, with the bottom of the barrel Pentium Dual Core being the chip they have matched price wise with the new X6s and frankly they don't have anything priced in the realm of the X3s and X4s, makes it that much easier for guys like me to make a sale, go AMD!
No they just face reality which is for the past 40 years we've been faced with a concerted effort to turn America into a third world country that speaks English.
Look at the student loan bubble which will soon burst, kids having to enslave themselves for life with debt they can't even discharge through bankruptcy (but the corps sure don't have any trouble discharging THEIR debts) just in the (in most cases) vain hope to rise above grinding poverty only to find that instead of that degree giving them a ticket out of poverty it instead ties a millstone around their neck because they can get an Indian or Chinese for less than the interest he is paying on his loans. Think if you tried the reverse and organized a mass immigration to India or China they would accept you taking THEIR jobs? Not a chance in hell because both countries are "nationalist" which is a code word for "Not fucking retarded and whored out to the megacorps".
For the past several decades you have seen the top 5% go from controlling 45% of this country's wealth to over 82% (and its been a couple years since i checked, probably higher than that now) and the reason for that is shit like this and "How NOT to hire an American" which for those who haven't seen it you should really look up the video, its a confidential law firm lecture on how easy it is for them to help these corps make sure they ONLY hire foreign workers. Time and time again you see the revolving door between DC and the corps and you see the future of America being sold to the new robber barons, refusing to accept that while the far east will have an abundance of skilled workers coming up with the next revolutions in tech we are increasingly becoming like the third world, huge ghettos of grinding poverty with the elite in their gated communities down the street living as Gods.
But massive change is coming folks, if you want to see the future look to the east, look at what has happened all over the middle east with the so called "Arab Springs" which should rightly be called class warfare as the poor refuse to be stomped on and rise up against the elite that have ruled them for so long. The reason you will see a similar event here, and why there hasn't been one so far here is because there is a MASSIVE stock market bubble and part of that bubble has been used by the government to provide "bread and circuses" to the poor so they do not revolt. Oh and before the right wing chime in on how its all the fault of the current figurehead? Might want to look at the graph at around the 3.30 mark and see when the bubble started really blowing up, the date is in the mid 80s, specifically when Ronnie Raygun signed the 401K and 403B programs into law. What that did was pour billions upon billions into the stock market, inflating the "value" of stocks to true insanity levels and causing an entire industry to be born just around leeching some of that "wealth" and manipulating it.
So why is it doomed, and guaranteed to make the 29 crash look like a flash crash? Simple in their infinite greed and lust for ever higher profits the corps didn't bother to think what would happen when they fired all the American workers and replaced them with cheap labor, what happened was the birth of the "temp nation" and money from 401Ks and 403Bs dropped like a stone. After all that temp worker barely keeping a roof over his/her head certainly isn't sticking money in a 401K. Because "privatize profits, socialize costs" is practically the mantra of Wall Street they ran to mommy government who likewise wasn't bringing in the dough, again because the middle class was gutted and because those at the top pushed the "job creators" myth and lowered taxes while increasing spending, but have no fear, The Federal Reserve is here!
But you can't print your way out of a dead end, and you can't expect Americans paying over $100K for their education to be able to compete with somebody who paid less for a master's than we do for a new Mustang so the money? Not
THAT IS A LIE, you are being had. What Win 8.1 has is NOT a Start button, it has a "Goatse Button" that upon clicking just dumps you BACK INTO METRO. That's right, thought you could escape, but if you use the start button all it will do is dump users into the one place they were trying to get away from!
The problem is that LEOs are always looking for "magic bullets" that will make it as easy as "its that guy" but the simple fact is none exist or are likely to ever be found. Look at how many did serious time over "bullet matching" when it turned out that...and the obviousness of this is just insane...that because large scale manufacturing is so standardized that thousands of bullets could have the exact same proportions of ingredients thus making the whole thing a bad joke.
Sadly even once everybody sees its total bullshit it'll probably take years, maybe decades to get rid of it because its gotten entrenched, just as we are seeing that tasers are anything BUT non lethal but since an entire industry has been built around the taser it'll be hell to get rid of, same here.
Wow....you haven't been keeping up on current events huh? Why do you think MSFT is pushing the living shit out of Windows 8? Look up "Win 7 all versions pre-activated" and slap it in a VM and try it for yourself, not only does it appear NO DIFFERENT than a stock Win 7, even has the OEM wallpapers and the "Genuine Windows" look when you click properties but on top of that it gets updates just fine and even greys out any updates to WGA!
That is of course just pointing out the easiest route, the one used by the guy selling PCs at yard sales and off the back of a truck, I have also seen them set up to use WSUS Offline with a little script that was set to run once a month, seen one that was set to update off some server in BFE, and that is also ignoring the elephant in the room which is if you don't update Windows you can still run the latest software which is completely IMPOSSIBLE in Linux unless your ass has some backporting skills and a LOT of time!
I'm sorry but THERE IS A REASON why Linux has been free for 22 damned years and ain't done jack shit on the desktop, and that is because it sucks ass as a desktop OS. Frankly it wasn't made to be a desktop OS, corps sink millions to use it in the server role and nobody sinks shit into the desktop side, and millions are also poured into the embedded side and that works good too, but on the desktop? I'm sorry but its crap. To use a/. car analogy its like that old 83 Dodge you see rusting in a field IF you spend your weekends futzing with it and IF you learn its quirks and IF you are willing to work around the problems? Sure you can get it to take you down the road....but most folks aren't driving down backroads looking for their next car in a field somewhere and that is because they have better things to do than spend all their time tinkering. That is Linux on the desktop/laptop in a nutshell, a hobby OS for tinkering.
Now lets be fair, as much as I think EA is ass cancer when it comes to publishers let us give credit where credit is due and on the Genesis EA games were consistently one of the best, its only on the PC where they are a total crapshoot and you never know if the game you buy is actually playable or not.
This is why I have said for years that we in the states need the right to return a PC game when it doesn't work, I can't think of any other product where they can sell you something that turns out to be completely BROKEN and you can't even get a refund. This is why I won't buy games at launch anymore, after getting burned on Vampire Bloodlines and Max Payne and having 2 coasters i could not play until a patch came out, in the case of Bloodlines two years fricking later, so now I wait at least 3 months for the poor suckers to beta test and get bit by all the show stoppers before I'll even pick it up. EA burnt me with Pacific Assault, I don't think they ever fixed that mission bug where the Jap planes would just dive UNDERWATER and crash into you, thus making sure you could never get past the halfway point of the game. I even bought the tenth anniversary pack hoping they had fixed it by then but nope, still broken. Never did get to finish that game.
But I don't know how they are on modern consoles as I gave up the console after the original Xbox and PS1 but back in the day EA console games were always top notch, with graphics that really pushed the systems and fun gameplay. They at least deserve credit for that even if their PC games are total poo poo.
Hell I don't know which is worse, EA games or Origin for being buggy crap. Personally I'd love to see how many that bought the recent EA Humble Bundle even bothered with the Origin games, I know I just installed the Steam games and ignored the Origin crap because while I was curious if Dead Space 3 was as bad as I heard or if battlefield 3 was actually worth playing or another "run like a chicken with its head cut off" online game they sure as hell weren't worth dealing with Origin to find out.
And to the Apple guys that bought it and are now bashing their heads against their keyboards....Hi Apple guys, welcome to the "fun" that is EA gaming! Please don't use this is an excuse to start the whole "Windows gaming sucks" crap because honestly?Its not PC gaming ITS EA because there are plenty of companies out there that make pretty solid and well supported games, Valve for example, and there are others that will put out the occasional clunker but be otherwise good, compare Borderlands II to Aliens Colonial Marines, but EA is one of those "Meh just ship that shit" kinda companies so when you buy from them its really more or less a crapshoot. Sorry for your misfortune, hope it doesn't sour you on the PC as a gaming device, might I suggest Steam instead?
I"d like to hear you explain how come every boom America has had has come under high taxes for the top 5% and every time the economy is in the shitter the taxes on that same top 5% has been low.
Voodoo Economics don't work, the "job creators" myth is just that, and giving ever more wealth to the top 5% just destroys the economy as that money never circulates, its hoarded. Libertarians can believe in their "invisible hand" which frankly should go right beside sky bullies on the "divorced from reality" scale because we already tried libertarian-ism and it was later known as "the age of the robber barons" for all the collusion, market rigging and violence against the workers.
Libertarianism like every other ism sounds doable on paper, IRL the douchebags at the top will ALWAYS ruin it for everybody else.
The same can be said of Windows except you'd be opening it up to malware and guess what? The same applies to Linux. How fricking sad is it that you will sit here with a straight face and tell me i should leave my users vulnerable with a badly out of date OS? And you HAVE to do the forced upgrade deathmarch because Linux don't support previous versions for shit because "Hey its free!" well so is that dogshit in the park but I don't want to be handling it either.
At the end of the day there is a reason why more people risk hefty fines and in some regions even jail time to steal the competitor's product than take yours for free by several orders of magnitude and that is because Torvalds is a shitty developer who refuses to let go of a broken driver model he ripped off of UNIX in 1993. I mean can you imagine how much you'd be laughing if Windows kept the creaking and buggy as fuck.VXD driver model in 2013? that shit would be hilarious, right? Well that is EXACTLY WHAT TORVALDS HAS DONE by keeping the ancient fucked up POS dependency hell breaks constantly "let the devs do it" driver model which in the end leaves you with shit like this, with drivers that are half assed, piss poor, and break often.
Again feel free to take the Hairyfeet Challenge and try for yourself and see if 1 or more drivers aren't completely trashed by the end. For extra points try it on a laptop and see how quickly Linux shits all over the wireless. the Hairyfeet Challenge actually rigs things in Linux' favor by asking for only HALF the support Windows gets and on top of that I didn't even use anything exotic, we are talking boring bog standard hardware that is in a good 90% of the desktops and laptops and it STILL shit all over itself. If the Linux community wanted to pay me for the bandwidth and time I'd be happy to film it live but frankly the challenge is so easy to replicate at home that anybody can do it, all you need is a bog standard desktop or laptop and a copy of whatever distro you want to test from 5 years ago which you will then upgrade/date to current through the GUI as Joe and Jane Normal would be expected to do.
At the end of the day the Linux driver model is deep fried tampons and as long as Torvalds is in the big chair it will stay that way because he is old and cares more about "purity of essence" than having a functional OS. Hell even basic common sense will illustrate that the math don't work when it comes to drivers, when Torvalds adopted that driver model you could fit every Linux driver on a single floppy, now you have over 100,000 drivers, hundreds of new drivers released each month and MAYBE 300 devs (I'm pretty sure it isn't even half that, just giving Torvalds the benefit of the doubt) that are qualified to do low level driver debug and testing. If you mainlined pure coke into their veins and kept them working 24/7 then you would MAYBE have each driver looked at once every 6 years MAYBE.
There is a reason why every B&M shop that has tried Linux has dropped it, from little shops like mine to giants like Walmart, why simply shopping for devices to use with Linux quickly becomes a game of hardware roulette and why drivers get shit on constantly when you update/grade and that is because the driver model just doesn't work. But when you get any of the devs on here the only explanation you get is either Torvalds "It wouldn't let me just tweak whatever I want at any time" (yeah jackass, that is kinda the damned point, to keep you from breaking shit) or worse that kernel dev who said, I swear to God, that "I hope every non free driver breaks often!". Yeah because users don't want functional hardware, all they care about is the racial purity of the GPL. BTW in a case of irony moist and delicious what does every forum tell you to buy for video? Nvidia because their proprietary drivers actually fucking work!
Sure they got choice, they can go to Mr Pirate down the street who is much loved ATM thanks to the fact that Win 8 is ass cancer. Piracy from the little shops is fricking insane and even from some of the medium sized places and frankly most people couldn't give a rat's ass, they are already pissed at MSFT for trying to ram that "LULZ I'm a cellphone LULZ" Win 8 garbage down their throat so they are more than happy to pay Mr Pirate to make that nasty thing just go away. BTW I have to say you gotta give the pirates credit, i was shown a Win 7 DVD that not only updates, it automatically greys out any updates to WGA and even sets up the system with an OEM wallpaper based on what OEM is listed in the BIOS.
But by your logic Vista should have sold like gangbusters, it didn't, and in the end the OEMs ended up having to offer XP (just as Lenovo and others are offering win 7 pre-installed) because at the end of the day you can't force somebody to use something they fricking loathe and folks loathe Win 8 and its "LOL hai, have you seen our apps?" cellphone bullshit with a passion. I have watched people pay more for a refurb than a new system sitting right beside it because the refurb had 7, THAT is how much of a backlash we guys in the trenches are seeing, they don't just dislike it, they act like you took a steaming dump in front of them when looking at Win 8.
No fricking shit, too much CLEAN power is bad? What a waste of space, and I bet that while he talks about how that clean power would be bad his fat ass is sitting in a room with the AC blasting sipping a cold drink and eating his takeout, I've found that a lot of those academic types are nothing but big fat hypocrites.
Meh I use Bing, I figure if somebody is gonna make money off my searches the least they can do is give me a slice and all those $5 Amazon gift cards are great for picking up the little adapters and odds and ends i'm always needing round the shop. Plus I like their image search better than Google.
As for TFA this just shows that the USPTO has basically become a rubber stamp for the corps, frankly the whole copyrights and patents system need to be tossed out and overhauled, all it does now is make rich old white guys ever richer while making minefields for everybody else.
Yeah it was in the DP build IIRC, I know I was going straight to desktop after 5 minutes of dealing with "Oh hai, I'm a cellphone giggle" Metro but when that no longer worked in CP I tossed the thing and never looked back. It might work good on a tablet but since i have ZERO desire for a MSFT tablet (happy with my android smartphone, thanks anyway) Win 8 is just a giant PITA.
Really? My Android smartphone plays games, surfs the web, plays music, chats, what else does a unit have to do to be considered a personal computer by you?
Nope they were all returned because Linux shits all over its own drivers every time you update the damned thing. You take the "Hairyfeet challenge" which i'm sure you can find with a little Googling and you'll see that QA and testing is non existent in Linux, its just a fucking mess of an OS. As much as I hate Vista and 8 I'd take either one over Linux, yes its THAT bad.
And please don't waste my time talking about your router (never gets updated so no shit it don't break) your cellphone (controlled by google with a billion a year spent on upkeep, also doesn't use vanilla linux for shit) or servers (all the major server companies pay entire dev teams to do nothing but fix their drivers when Torvalds and company take a steaming dump on them) because we are talking about laptops and desktops and in that arena Linux is deep fried shit.
And if the phone isn't set to vibrate the noise could cause him to have a wreck, I know I've nearly jumped a foot when I was in the middle of some complex lane changing furball traffic and had my phone just suddenly go off.
Because if MSFT stays on the same path Win 7 will be a red headed stepchild that gets updates late if at all by next year?
Unless the new CEO changes the course ballmer put them on its "tablets ahoy!" while Win 7 gets left out in the cold. hell they have already said there will be NO service pack 2, which considering its something like 200 patches to take an SP1 Win 7 system to current should show how MSFT feels about those still on Win 7, and 8.1 is "apps apps apps, have we told you we have an appstore?" bullshit so its pretty obvious that Win 7 is gonna be treated like Vista, an OS that TECHNICALLY is still supported but which gets almost zero attention from the company.
Besides like it or not its getting harder and harder to get new laptops with Windows 7 so I might as well learn now how to fix the bastard.
To be fair there is gonna be plenty of times when you are gonna "have a special reason to know" the person you are texting is driving. For example the drummer for my band has a day job which involves driving a long distance to work so i know not to call him for at least 2 hours after his shift ends otherwise he is likely to get my call during his commute so by this ruling if I ignored the fact that I know what hours he works I would be at least partially responsible.
So while the courts have had a LOT of bad rulings lately this one it seems is just applying common sense, if you know the person is on the road between the hours of X and Y and you text them anyway? You are helping to contribute to unsafe conditions, no different than if you were the passenger and kept distracting the driver to show them some LOLCats on your phone.
Exactly, look at the dual screen tablet they had, courier I think? You can have the greatest idea on the planet and if you do fuck all with it....what good was it?
As far as MSFT not innovating, oh they do, its just ruined, half assed, and piss poor thanks to the legions of PHBs that have to get their 2c in. I mean who can look at the piss awful art school drop out mess that is Windows 8x and not realize it was designed by committee? Even the most basic rules of UI convention like control (user should feel they are in control of the OS, not feel helpless), conveyance (user should have enough visual clues and information they can figure out how to do basic tasks), continuity (user should consistently get the same result from the same action) simply do not exist in Win 8, the user feels lost and helpless as there is ZERO information given. How does a user find out there is a "charms bar", or as I call it the "Random in your face" bar? Is there a balloon? Pop up? Something? Nope they have to trip over it by accident. Not that they will be happy when they DO trip over it because they soon find because a touchpad just gives indications of movement and NOT position like a tablet the stupid OS treats ANY fast movement as a swipe gesture and cockblocks you with that damned charms bar.
Hell I could go on all damned day listing the problems with Win 8 but I'll end with a little anecdote, my dad. My dad is about the most bog standard Windows user that has ever drawn breath, he chats, uses FB, does his Quickbooks, watches movies, completely bog standard stuff here. he needed a new laptop so after doing a little research I found one that was really nice, light, core i3, plenty of HDD space and memory, and most importantly had drivers for Win 7 so if dad didn't like Win 8 I could put on Win 7 easily. I decided to use this as a test of Win 8 and simply handed it to my dad, just as if he bought it himself and it showed up at his house. Now i didn't do ANYTHING to sour him on Win 8 or Metro, in fact i had actually wanted Win 8 to succeed as my dad has poor eyesight and I thought the large tiles might be easier to use.
So how did it go? Less than an hour into the experiment dad wanted me to, and I quote "Take this piece of garbage and run over it with my truck". BTW he was DEADLY serious, Windows 8 pissed him off so much he was willing to gladly write off his new $500 laptop to see Windows 8 destroyed. So I took it home and after a night of hacking the registry and adding third party shells and generic touchpad drivers so i could kill that uncharming charms bar he is happy...with an OS that looks and acts 100% like Windows 7.
Nope, not seeing ANY XP users, I haven't seen one in about 6 months, no what everyone wants is Windows 7 because Windows 8 is a broken mess that is simply unusable. Watch this video to see how a fricking tech writer fares with Win 8, now imagine that for Joe Average its much MUCH worse. in fact when people talk about Win 8 I usually say "Oh you mean "Hey stop doing that!"" and they all agree because Win 8 seems to be completely random and arbitrary, it just does shit whenever and whatever it feels with zero prompts or explanation given.
And if by other OSes you mean Android and iOS? I'll agree with ya there, if the next CEO don't toss the trainwreck that is metro the end of Win 7 will be the end of MSFT. Hell Acer is already up to double digit sales of ChromeOS, an alternative to Windows on X86 getting double digit sales is unheard of since the days of the 386! The simple fact is that Metro is designed for an interface that just doesn't exist, the touchscreen PC. Sure there is a handful in the wild but when you look at the numbers they are MAYBE 3% of the entire PC landscape, that means 97% of the users get a broken interface because ballmer had a raging hard on for tablets, just fucking retarded.
Insightful, really mods? Got news for ya pal and its that NOBODY IS BUYING WIN 8! In fact I can get a refurb Win 7 machine sold in a few hours, i had a Win 8 machine sit SEVEN MONTHS before it sold, how did I sell it? Put Win 7 on it!
MSFT is screwed on two fronts, 1.- After the MHz Wars switched to the Core War PCs quickly became waaaaaay overpowered compared to the jobs that folks had to do, so that 5 year old C2D laptop, or Phenom I X3 desktop? it has more cycles to spare than Joe Average knows what to do with. 2.- When it does come time to get something new a lot of people are either having the machine they have fixed or are buying a Win 7 system because Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT, its Vista all over again with people using downgrade rights (I've had to deal with downgrades so often that I now charge extra if I have to call for a key) or buying OEM or getting a refurb unit, whatever it takes the vast majority will do because they hate Windows 8!
Dude its not even just the little guys like me, its gotten so bad for the OEMs that Lenovo and Acer are selling their PCs "pre hacked" with a third party shell already bolted on so the machine looks and acts like....Windows 7! That is fricking bad when the #1 OEM on the planet has to hack the shell just to get anybody to buy a PC with Windows 8 on it, I mean how piss poor do you have to be for sales to have the OEMs go out and buy a third party shell and bolt that shit on there just to move some units?
So try looking at those figures again before you say MSFT has the customers locked in, because between Android, ChromeOS, OSX, iOS, and Win 7 frankly there is a lot of choices for those that think Win 8 is a turd and judging by the adoption rates a hell of a lot more are ignoring or actively avoiding Win 8 than are buying.
The problem AIN'T the 40% Billy, its the other 60% that are either Jihadists or collaborators, THAT is the problem.
You want to compare it to the west fine, be careful what you wish for. In the west the militants like WBC and Aryan Brotherhood are treated like...drumroll...EXTREMISTS! They are marginalized, looked down upon, and are monitored by the authorities and get busted when they step a hair out of line. Compare that to the ME where the ones screaming for heads are not only NOT marginalized but they are often REWARDED for their behavior, have the MSM blowing propaganda out for them, and are protected by many including a large number of your so called 40%.
And just because you know some Arab guy who was nice to you in public means just about as much as me saying "I know a nice old black guy down the hall, he would never do a flash mob so its not a problem" but it IS a problem Billy, it IS a problem. I'm sorry I can no longer find the link but there was a nice little table that showed how many terrorists attacks a country had and compared it to how many Muslims they had, know what it showed? A perfect hockeystick going up, with 12% seeming to be the tipping point before the violence shot off like a rocket. It may not be politically correct to say it but fuck it, truth is truth, and in countries that are 100% Muslim or as close as you can get what do you see? Barbarity, the chopping off of limbs for crimes, killing rape victims as well as gays and women and children treated like property.
I'm sorry but there is NO way you can spin that into something nice, just as there is NO way you can argue that going into a Muslim country will be anything but constant war. You are talking about a people that venerate a mother whose child straps a bomb to themselves and kills innocent people, You are talking about a people that had a show for 5 year olds that starred a Mickey Mouse ripoff who carried an AK47 and cheered kids that said "I'm gonna kill Christians and Jews for Allah!" and who was written out of the show by having Jewish soldiers stomp him to death, I'm sorry Billy but there is no way in hell you are gonna sell that backward ass barbaric culture as anything but what it is, vicious and extreme.
Or maybe, just maybe, the dirty little secret MSFT doesn't want you to know is really the fact that Windows 8.1 is just Windows 8 with a switch flipped that will let you go to the desktop and some more "apps apps apps, have we mentioned we have an appstore with apps?" in your face metro bullshit. Like making a "Start Goatse" as I call it where you click the start button trying to escape and it hauls your ass right back to metro...have they mentioned they have touch and apps?
Or maybe the engineers at MSFT are doing this on purpose, its been widely known that ballmer is fricking HATED by many at the company and doing what they can to make sure "Ballmer's Folly" flops as bad as Win 8? Really wouldn't be out of the question. At the end it won't matter though as i can tell you little shops like mine have stopped carrying Win 8x anything as I have watched people gladly pay for a more expensive refurb with Win 7 than be forced to take Windows 8, its a giant DO NOT WANT as far as consumers are concerned and after I was stuck fixing that mess a few times i can say honestly? Don't blame 'em.
It takes a HELL of a lot more than simply slapping Start8 to kill the abomination that is "Oh hai I'm a cellphone LULZ" Metro, specifically it took a half a dozen deep level registry hacks AND hunting down a generic synaptics touchpad driver to kill those $%#^%# swipe gestures bullshit, and even then it looks like a poor man's Win 7 copy. I'm predicting it'll bomb and suck and be the punchline of jokes, just like Win 8. They can polish their asses off but all they are gonna have is a shiny turd NOT a diamond!
Can't happen because as long as we support Israel and refuse to live under Sharia we'll be "The Great Satan" and your "help" will be rewarded with jihad. Like it or not the countries of the ME have been stuck in a time warp since their "great prophet" showed up and while the other religions of the world have, for the most part at least, grown the fuck up and become more civilized with Islam they still party like its 1499 and refuse to change.
When you couple that to the almost constant propaganda against Jews that frankly would make Hitler go "Dude that is a little extreme" you can give the fuck up on the idea that ANY intervention won't result in more jihad against us. Look at Iraq, we are still digging up killing fields from Saddam, the guy was a real monster that even slaughtered family members when they didn't do to suit him, yet what do we see? the ONE time that Shia and Sunni are in agreement is when it comes to killing American soldiers.
The war between Sunni and Shia has been going on for over 400 years now, its the height of arrogance to think we can walk into the middle of a holy war, kill a bad guy like Assad and then say "love me!" and have them do anything but call a truce long enough to attack you.
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And as somebody who builds and uses AMD exclusively while I'd like to see some new chips come out I have to say....it makes perfect sense. Their production is being taken up by the console Jaguar chips (based on Bobcat, i don't know WTF the console manufacturers were thinking but its good for AMD regardless) and coming out with a new chip would take resources away from that. Also there will of course be mainstream boards based on jaguar once the orders for the console chips are filled and I'm sure they are hoard a big pile of X6 and X4 jags that had one or two modules not pass muster so there is designing chipsets for those and of course their GPU line so their plate is rather full ATM.
I also really can't blame them in this matter as I have been saying for years and time and time again I've seen with my own two eyes that CPUs passed "good enough" several releases ago and even the Phenom II based chips and first gen Bulldozers really are overkill for all but a handful of users. Take myself as an example since I do a LOT of multitasking and therefor use more CPU than most. I transcode videos, edit multitrack audio recordings and I just loooove my shooters. Now throughout the 90s and a good chunk of the 00s I HAD to replace my PC every 2 years with major upgrades such as CPU and RAM added on the "off" years because I really had no choice, the software coming out at the time would just overwhelm a 2 year old PC, and now? I'm typing this on a 2009 Phenom II X6 with 8GB of RAM, 3TB of HDD space, why would I buy a new PC? Frankly the only upgrade I need is to swap out the aging HD4850 for an HD7770 and that will be less than $100 come the holidays so even with me multitasking like mad even this 4 year old chip runs everything I want to run and runs it well.
So there really isn't a point in them coming out with new CPUs or APUs at the moment as the ones that they are selling now are extreme overkill. I'm sure a few will chime in with "But but but...i7!" but ya know what? Know how many people actually give a rat's ass about which corp has the biggest e-Peen? From what I've seen selling to folks from all walks of life, from the gamers to the grandmas i'd say that number is less than 5%, maybe even as low as 3%. Everybody else just wants a snappy powerful system at a good price that won't sit there bogged down and the current AMD chips deliver that in spades. I've had not a bit of trouble moving desktops based on Phenom II X3 and X4, even the Athlon X3 and X4 moves pretty briskly and of course those 6 and 8 cores are easy sells to the heavy multitaskers and everybody likes those new $400 quad APU laptops as those babies have plenty of cycles to spare. Showing off how you can just plug them into any TV and get a full 1080P media center when you are done roaming for the day just seals the deal, no problem.
Personally if I were in the big chair I'd probably be doing the same thing, wait until the next gen consoles are out, get the Jaguar ULV APU boards and laptops out (probably along with a "the same tech that powers the PS4 and Xbox N!" advertising campaign) and then and ONLY then would I start really concentrating on getting those next chips out. Also remember that they hired back the chip designer that made the original Athlon64 along with the A6 for Apple so I'm sure he is cooking up something as well so it might be smart to wait and see if his new chip will be worth dropping the BD arch for. All in all I'd say AMD is in a good position right now, all three major consoles are using chips made by them (one GPU and two APUs) and while their current chips might not win a dick measuring contest with Intel frankly they are extreme overkill for the majority of mainstream customers whom I can tell you are quite happy to have that bang for the buck. It also helps that Intel has been stupidly greedy as of late, with the bottom of the barrel Pentium Dual Core being the chip they have matched price wise with the new X6s and frankly they don't have anything priced in the realm of the X3s and X4s, makes it that much easier for guys like me to make a sale, go AMD!
No they just face reality which is for the past 40 years we've been faced with a concerted effort to turn America into a third world country that speaks English.
Look at the student loan bubble which will soon burst, kids having to enslave themselves for life with debt they can't even discharge through bankruptcy (but the corps sure don't have any trouble discharging THEIR debts) just in the (in most cases) vain hope to rise above grinding poverty only to find that instead of that degree giving them a ticket out of poverty it instead ties a millstone around their neck because they can get an Indian or Chinese for less than the interest he is paying on his loans. Think if you tried the reverse and organized a mass immigration to India or China they would accept you taking THEIR jobs? Not a chance in hell because both countries are "nationalist" which is a code word for "Not fucking retarded and whored out to the megacorps".
For the past several decades you have seen the top 5% go from controlling 45% of this country's wealth to over 82% (and its been a couple years since i checked, probably higher than that now) and the reason for that is shit like this and "How NOT to hire an American" which for those who haven't seen it you should really look up the video, its a confidential law firm lecture on how easy it is for them to help these corps make sure they ONLY hire foreign workers. Time and time again you see the revolving door between DC and the corps and you see the future of America being sold to the new robber barons, refusing to accept that while the far east will have an abundance of skilled workers coming up with the next revolutions in tech we are increasingly becoming like the third world, huge ghettos of grinding poverty with the elite in their gated communities down the street living as Gods.
But massive change is coming folks, if you want to see the future look to the east, look at what has happened all over the middle east with the so called "Arab Springs" which should rightly be called class warfare as the poor refuse to be stomped on and rise up against the elite that have ruled them for so long. The reason you will see a similar event here, and why there hasn't been one so far here is because there is a MASSIVE stock market bubble and part of that bubble has been used by the government to provide "bread and circuses" to the poor so they do not revolt. Oh and before the right wing chime in on how its all the fault of the current figurehead? Might want to look at the graph at around the 3.30 mark and see when the bubble started really blowing up, the date is in the mid 80s, specifically when Ronnie Raygun signed the 401K and 403B programs into law. What that did was pour billions upon billions into the stock market, inflating the "value" of stocks to true insanity levels and causing an entire industry to be born just around leeching some of that "wealth" and manipulating it.
So why is it doomed, and guaranteed to make the 29 crash look like a flash crash? Simple in their infinite greed and lust for ever higher profits the corps didn't bother to think what would happen when they fired all the American workers and replaced them with cheap labor, what happened was the birth of the "temp nation" and money from 401Ks and 403Bs dropped like a stone. After all that temp worker barely keeping a roof over his/her head certainly isn't sticking money in a 401K. Because "privatize profits, socialize costs" is practically the mantra of Wall Street they ran to mommy government who likewise wasn't bringing in the dough, again because the middle class was gutted and because those at the top pushed the "job creators" myth and lowered taxes while increasing spending, but have no fear, The Federal Reserve is here!
But you can't print your way out of a dead end, and you can't expect Americans paying over $100K for their education to be able to compete with somebody who paid less for a master's than we do for a new Mustang so the money? Not
THAT IS A LIE, you are being had. What Win 8.1 has is NOT a Start button, it has a "Goatse Button" that upon clicking just dumps you BACK INTO METRO. That's right, thought you could escape, but if you use the start button all it will do is dump users into the one place they were trying to get away from!
The problem is that LEOs are always looking for "magic bullets" that will make it as easy as "its that guy" but the simple fact is none exist or are likely to ever be found. Look at how many did serious time over "bullet matching" when it turned out that...and the obviousness of this is just insane...that because large scale manufacturing is so standardized that thousands of bullets could have the exact same proportions of ingredients thus making the whole thing a bad joke.
Sadly even once everybody sees its total bullshit it'll probably take years, maybe decades to get rid of it because its gotten entrenched, just as we are seeing that tasers are anything BUT non lethal but since an entire industry has been built around the taser it'll be hell to get rid of, same here.
Wow....you haven't been keeping up on current events huh? Why do you think MSFT is pushing the living shit out of Windows 8? Look up "Win 7 all versions pre-activated" and slap it in a VM and try it for yourself, not only does it appear NO DIFFERENT than a stock Win 7, even has the OEM wallpapers and the "Genuine Windows" look when you click properties but on top of that it gets updates just fine and even greys out any updates to WGA!
That is of course just pointing out the easiest route, the one used by the guy selling PCs at yard sales and off the back of a truck, I have also seen them set up to use WSUS Offline with a little script that was set to run once a month, seen one that was set to update off some server in BFE, and that is also ignoring the elephant in the room which is if you don't update Windows you can still run the latest software which is completely IMPOSSIBLE in Linux unless your ass has some backporting skills and a LOT of time!
I'm sorry but THERE IS A REASON why Linux has been free for 22 damned years and ain't done jack shit on the desktop, and that is because it sucks ass as a desktop OS. Frankly it wasn't made to be a desktop OS, corps sink millions to use it in the server role and nobody sinks shit into the desktop side, and millions are also poured into the embedded side and that works good too, but on the desktop? I'm sorry but its crap. To use a /. car analogy its like that old 83 Dodge you see rusting in a field IF you spend your weekends futzing with it and IF you learn its quirks and IF you are willing to work around the problems? Sure you can get it to take you down the road....but most folks aren't driving down backroads looking for their next car in a field somewhere and that is because they have better things to do than spend all their time tinkering. That is Linux on the desktop/laptop in a nutshell, a hobby OS for tinkering.
Well if the game doesn't run you certainly aren't gonna wanna copy it so....mission accomplished!
Now lets be fair, as much as I think EA is ass cancer when it comes to publishers let us give credit where credit is due and on the Genesis EA games were consistently one of the best, its only on the PC where they are a total crapshoot and you never know if the game you buy is actually playable or not.
This is why I have said for years that we in the states need the right to return a PC game when it doesn't work, I can't think of any other product where they can sell you something that turns out to be completely BROKEN and you can't even get a refund. This is why I won't buy games at launch anymore, after getting burned on Vampire Bloodlines and Max Payne and having 2 coasters i could not play until a patch came out, in the case of Bloodlines two years fricking later, so now I wait at least 3 months for the poor suckers to beta test and get bit by all the show stoppers before I'll even pick it up. EA burnt me with Pacific Assault, I don't think they ever fixed that mission bug where the Jap planes would just dive UNDERWATER and crash into you, thus making sure you could never get past the halfway point of the game. I even bought the tenth anniversary pack hoping they had fixed it by then but nope, still broken. Never did get to finish that game.
But I don't know how they are on modern consoles as I gave up the console after the original Xbox and PS1 but back in the day EA console games were always top notch, with graphics that really pushed the systems and fun gameplay. They at least deserve credit for that even if their PC games are total poo poo.
Hell I don't know which is worse, EA games or Origin for being buggy crap. Personally I'd love to see how many that bought the recent EA Humble Bundle even bothered with the Origin games, I know I just installed the Steam games and ignored the Origin crap because while I was curious if Dead Space 3 was as bad as I heard or if battlefield 3 was actually worth playing or another "run like a chicken with its head cut off" online game they sure as hell weren't worth dealing with Origin to find out.
And to the Apple guys that bought it and are now bashing their heads against their keyboards....Hi Apple guys, welcome to the "fun" that is EA gaming! Please don't use this is an excuse to start the whole "Windows gaming sucks" crap because honestly?Its not PC gaming ITS EA because there are plenty of companies out there that make pretty solid and well supported games, Valve for example, and there are others that will put out the occasional clunker but be otherwise good, compare Borderlands II to Aliens Colonial Marines, but EA is one of those "Meh just ship that shit" kinda companies so when you buy from them its really more or less a crapshoot. Sorry for your misfortune, hope it doesn't sour you on the PC as a gaming device, might I suggest Steam instead?
I"d like to hear you explain how come every boom America has had has come under high taxes for the top 5% and every time the economy is in the shitter the taxes on that same top 5% has been low.
Voodoo Economics don't work, the "job creators" myth is just that, and giving ever more wealth to the top 5% just destroys the economy as that money never circulates, its hoarded. Libertarians can believe in their "invisible hand" which frankly should go right beside sky bullies on the "divorced from reality" scale because we already tried libertarian-ism and it was later known as "the age of the robber barons" for all the collusion, market rigging and violence against the workers.
Libertarianism like every other ism sounds doable on paper, IRL the douchebags at the top will ALWAYS ruin it for everybody else.
The same can be said of Windows except you'd be opening it up to malware and guess what? The same applies to Linux. How fricking sad is it that you will sit here with a straight face and tell me i should leave my users vulnerable with a badly out of date OS? And you HAVE to do the forced upgrade deathmarch because Linux don't support previous versions for shit because "Hey its free!" well so is that dogshit in the park but I don't want to be handling it either.
At the end of the day there is a reason why more people risk hefty fines and in some regions even jail time to steal the competitor's product than take yours for free by several orders of magnitude and that is because Torvalds is a shitty developer who refuses to let go of a broken driver model he ripped off of UNIX in 1993. I mean can you imagine how much you'd be laughing if Windows kept the creaking and buggy as fuck .VXD driver model in 2013? that shit would be hilarious, right? Well that is EXACTLY WHAT TORVALDS HAS DONE by keeping the ancient fucked up POS dependency hell breaks constantly "let the devs do it" driver model which in the end leaves you with shit like this, with drivers that are half assed, piss poor, and break often.
Again feel free to take the Hairyfeet Challenge and try for yourself and see if 1 or more drivers aren't completely trashed by the end. For extra points try it on a laptop and see how quickly Linux shits all over the wireless. the Hairyfeet Challenge actually rigs things in Linux' favor by asking for only HALF the support Windows gets and on top of that I didn't even use anything exotic, we are talking boring bog standard hardware that is in a good 90% of the desktops and laptops and it STILL shit all over itself. If the Linux community wanted to pay me for the bandwidth and time I'd be happy to film it live but frankly the challenge is so easy to replicate at home that anybody can do it, all you need is a bog standard desktop or laptop and a copy of whatever distro you want to test from 5 years ago which you will then upgrade/date to current through the GUI as Joe and Jane Normal would be expected to do.
At the end of the day the Linux driver model is deep fried tampons and as long as Torvalds is in the big chair it will stay that way because he is old and cares more about "purity of essence" than having a functional OS. Hell even basic common sense will illustrate that the math don't work when it comes to drivers, when Torvalds adopted that driver model you could fit every Linux driver on a single floppy, now you have over 100,000 drivers, hundreds of new drivers released each month and MAYBE 300 devs (I'm pretty sure it isn't even half that, just giving Torvalds the benefit of the doubt) that are qualified to do low level driver debug and testing. If you mainlined pure coke into their veins and kept them working 24/7 then you would MAYBE have each driver looked at once every 6 years MAYBE.
There is a reason why every B&M shop that has tried Linux has dropped it, from little shops like mine to giants like Walmart, why simply shopping for devices to use with Linux quickly becomes a game of hardware roulette and why drivers get shit on constantly when you update/grade and that is because the driver model just doesn't work. But when you get any of the devs on here the only explanation you get is either Torvalds "It wouldn't let me just tweak whatever I want at any time" (yeah jackass, that is kinda the damned point, to keep you from breaking shit) or worse that kernel dev who said, I swear to God, that "I hope every non free driver breaks often!". Yeah because users don't want functional hardware, all they care about is the racial purity of the GPL. BTW in a case of irony moist and delicious what does every forum tell you to buy for video? Nvidia because their proprietary drivers actually fucking work!
After nearly 5 ye
Sure they got choice, they can go to Mr Pirate down the street who is much loved ATM thanks to the fact that Win 8 is ass cancer. Piracy from the little shops is fricking insane and even from some of the medium sized places and frankly most people couldn't give a rat's ass, they are already pissed at MSFT for trying to ram that "LULZ I'm a cellphone LULZ" Win 8 garbage down their throat so they are more than happy to pay Mr Pirate to make that nasty thing just go away. BTW I have to say you gotta give the pirates credit, i was shown a Win 7 DVD that not only updates, it automatically greys out any updates to WGA and even sets up the system with an OEM wallpaper based on what OEM is listed in the BIOS.
But by your logic Vista should have sold like gangbusters, it didn't, and in the end the OEMs ended up having to offer XP (just as Lenovo and others are offering win 7 pre-installed) because at the end of the day you can't force somebody to use something they fricking loathe and folks loathe Win 8 and its "LOL hai, have you seen our apps?" cellphone bullshit with a passion. I have watched people pay more for a refurb than a new system sitting right beside it because the refurb had 7, THAT is how much of a backlash we guys in the trenches are seeing, they don't just dislike it, they act like you took a steaming dump in front of them when looking at Win 8.
No fricking shit, too much CLEAN power is bad? What a waste of space, and I bet that while he talks about how that clean power would be bad his fat ass is sitting in a room with the AC blasting sipping a cold drink and eating his takeout, I've found that a lot of those academic types are nothing but big fat hypocrites.
Meh I use Bing, I figure if somebody is gonna make money off my searches the least they can do is give me a slice and all those $5 Amazon gift cards are great for picking up the little adapters and odds and ends i'm always needing round the shop. Plus I like their image search better than Google.
As for TFA this just shows that the USPTO has basically become a rubber stamp for the corps, frankly the whole copyrights and patents system need to be tossed out and overhauled, all it does now is make rich old white guys ever richer while making minefields for everybody else.
Yeah it was in the DP build IIRC, I know I was going straight to desktop after 5 minutes of dealing with "Oh hai, I'm a cellphone giggle" Metro but when that no longer worked in CP I tossed the thing and never looked back. It might work good on a tablet but since i have ZERO desire for a MSFT tablet (happy with my android smartphone, thanks anyway) Win 8 is just a giant PITA.
Really? My Android smartphone plays games, surfs the web, plays music, chats, what else does a unit have to do to be considered a personal computer by you?
Nope they were all returned because Linux shits all over its own drivers every time you update the damned thing. You take the "Hairyfeet challenge" which i'm sure you can find with a little Googling and you'll see that QA and testing is non existent in Linux, its just a fucking mess of an OS. As much as I hate Vista and 8 I'd take either one over Linux, yes its THAT bad.
And please don't waste my time talking about your router (never gets updated so no shit it don't break) your cellphone (controlled by google with a billion a year spent on upkeep, also doesn't use vanilla linux for shit) or servers (all the major server companies pay entire dev teams to do nothing but fix their drivers when Torvalds and company take a steaming dump on them) because we are talking about laptops and desktops and in that arena Linux is deep fried shit.
And if the phone isn't set to vibrate the noise could cause him to have a wreck, I know I've nearly jumped a foot when I was in the middle of some complex lane changing furball traffic and had my phone just suddenly go off.
Because if MSFT stays on the same path Win 7 will be a red headed stepchild that gets updates late if at all by next year?
Unless the new CEO changes the course ballmer put them on its "tablets ahoy!" while Win 7 gets left out in the cold. hell they have already said there will be NO service pack 2, which considering its something like 200 patches to take an SP1 Win 7 system to current should show how MSFT feels about those still on Win 7, and 8.1 is "apps apps apps, have we told you we have an appstore?" bullshit so its pretty obvious that Win 7 is gonna be treated like Vista, an OS that TECHNICALLY is still supported but which gets almost zero attention from the company.
Besides like it or not its getting harder and harder to get new laptops with Windows 7 so I might as well learn now how to fix the bastard.
To be fair there is gonna be plenty of times when you are gonna "have a special reason to know" the person you are texting is driving. For example the drummer for my band has a day job which involves driving a long distance to work so i know not to call him for at least 2 hours after his shift ends otherwise he is likely to get my call during his commute so by this ruling if I ignored the fact that I know what hours he works I would be at least partially responsible.
So while the courts have had a LOT of bad rulings lately this one it seems is just applying common sense, if you know the person is on the road between the hours of X and Y and you text them anyway? You are helping to contribute to unsafe conditions, no different than if you were the passenger and kept distracting the driver to show them some LOLCats on your phone.
Exactly, look at the dual screen tablet they had, courier I think? You can have the greatest idea on the planet and if you do fuck all with it....what good was it?
As far as MSFT not innovating, oh they do, its just ruined, half assed, and piss poor thanks to the legions of PHBs that have to get their 2c in. I mean who can look at the piss awful art school drop out mess that is Windows 8x and not realize it was designed by committee? Even the most basic rules of UI convention like control (user should feel they are in control of the OS, not feel helpless), conveyance (user should have enough visual clues and information they can figure out how to do basic tasks), continuity (user should consistently get the same result from the same action) simply do not exist in Win 8, the user feels lost and helpless as there is ZERO information given. How does a user find out there is a "charms bar", or as I call it the "Random in your face" bar? Is there a balloon? Pop up? Something? Nope they have to trip over it by accident. Not that they will be happy when they DO trip over it because they soon find because a touchpad just gives indications of movement and NOT position like a tablet the stupid OS treats ANY fast movement as a swipe gesture and cockblocks you with that damned charms bar.
Hell I could go on all damned day listing the problems with Win 8 but I'll end with a little anecdote, my dad. My dad is about the most bog standard Windows user that has ever drawn breath, he chats, uses FB, does his Quickbooks, watches movies, completely bog standard stuff here. he needed a new laptop so after doing a little research I found one that was really nice, light, core i3, plenty of HDD space and memory, and most importantly had drivers for Win 7 so if dad didn't like Win 8 I could put on Win 7 easily. I decided to use this as a test of Win 8 and simply handed it to my dad, just as if he bought it himself and it showed up at his house. Now i didn't do ANYTHING to sour him on Win 8 or Metro, in fact i had actually wanted Win 8 to succeed as my dad has poor eyesight and I thought the large tiles might be easier to use.
So how did it go? Less than an hour into the experiment dad wanted me to, and I quote "Take this piece of garbage and run over it with my truck". BTW he was DEADLY serious, Windows 8 pissed him off so much he was willing to gladly write off his new $500 laptop to see Windows 8 destroyed. So I took it home and after a night of hacking the registry and adding third party shells and generic touchpad drivers so i could kill that uncharming charms bar he is happy...with an OS that looks and acts 100% like Windows 7.
Nope, not seeing ANY XP users, I haven't seen one in about 6 months, no what everyone wants is Windows 7 because Windows 8 is a broken mess that is simply unusable. Watch this video to see how a fricking tech writer fares with Win 8, now imagine that for Joe Average its much MUCH worse. in fact when people talk about Win 8 I usually say "Oh you mean "Hey stop doing that!"" and they all agree because Win 8 seems to be completely random and arbitrary, it just does shit whenever and whatever it feels with zero prompts or explanation given.
And if by other OSes you mean Android and iOS? I'll agree with ya there, if the next CEO don't toss the trainwreck that is metro the end of Win 7 will be the end of MSFT. Hell Acer is already up to double digit sales of ChromeOS, an alternative to Windows on X86 getting double digit sales is unheard of since the days of the 386! The simple fact is that Metro is designed for an interface that just doesn't exist, the touchscreen PC. Sure there is a handful in the wild but when you look at the numbers they are MAYBE 3% of the entire PC landscape, that means 97% of the users get a broken interface because ballmer had a raging hard on for tablets, just fucking retarded.
Insightful, really mods? Got news for ya pal and its that NOBODY IS BUYING WIN 8! In fact I can get a refurb Win 7 machine sold in a few hours, i had a Win 8 machine sit SEVEN MONTHS before it sold, how did I sell it? Put Win 7 on it!
MSFT is screwed on two fronts, 1.- After the MHz Wars switched to the Core War PCs quickly became waaaaaay overpowered compared to the jobs that folks had to do, so that 5 year old C2D laptop, or Phenom I X3 desktop? it has more cycles to spare than Joe Average knows what to do with. 2.- When it does come time to get something new a lot of people are either having the machine they have fixed or are buying a Win 7 system because Win 8 is a DO NOT WANT, its Vista all over again with people using downgrade rights (I've had to deal with downgrades so often that I now charge extra if I have to call for a key) or buying OEM or getting a refurb unit, whatever it takes the vast majority will do because they hate Windows 8!
Dude its not even just the little guys like me, its gotten so bad for the OEMs that Lenovo and Acer are selling their PCs "pre hacked" with a third party shell already bolted on so the machine looks and acts like....Windows 7! That is fricking bad when the #1 OEM on the planet has to hack the shell just to get anybody to buy a PC with Windows 8 on it, I mean how piss poor do you have to be for sales to have the OEMs go out and buy a third party shell and bolt that shit on there just to move some units?
So try looking at those figures again before you say MSFT has the customers locked in, because between Android, ChromeOS, OSX, iOS, and Win 7 frankly there is a lot of choices for those that think Win 8 is a turd and judging by the adoption rates a hell of a lot more are ignoring or actively avoiding Win 8 than are buying.
The problem AIN'T the 40% Billy, its the other 60% that are either Jihadists or collaborators, THAT is the problem.
You want to compare it to the west fine, be careful what you wish for. In the west the militants like WBC and Aryan Brotherhood are treated like...drumroll...EXTREMISTS! They are marginalized, looked down upon, and are monitored by the authorities and get busted when they step a hair out of line. Compare that to the ME where the ones screaming for heads are not only NOT marginalized but they are often REWARDED for their behavior, have the MSM blowing propaganda out for them, and are protected by many including a large number of your so called 40%.
And just because you know some Arab guy who was nice to you in public means just about as much as me saying "I know a nice old black guy down the hall, he would never do a flash mob so its not a problem" but it IS a problem Billy, it IS a problem. I'm sorry I can no longer find the link but there was a nice little table that showed how many terrorists attacks a country had and compared it to how many Muslims they had, know what it showed? A perfect hockeystick going up, with 12% seeming to be the tipping point before the violence shot off like a rocket. It may not be politically correct to say it but fuck it, truth is truth, and in countries that are 100% Muslim or as close as you can get what do you see? Barbarity, the chopping off of limbs for crimes, killing rape victims as well as gays and women and children treated like property.
I'm sorry but there is NO way you can spin that into something nice, just as there is NO way you can argue that going into a Muslim country will be anything but constant war. You are talking about a people that venerate a mother whose child straps a bomb to themselves and kills innocent people, You are talking about a people that had a show for 5 year olds that starred a Mickey Mouse ripoff who carried an AK47 and cheered kids that said "I'm gonna kill Christians and Jews for Allah!" and who was written out of the show by having Jewish soldiers stomp him to death, I'm sorry Billy but there is no way in hell you are gonna sell that backward ass barbaric culture as anything but what it is, vicious and extreme.
Or maybe, just maybe, the dirty little secret MSFT doesn't want you to know is really the fact that Windows 8.1 is just Windows 8 with a switch flipped that will let you go to the desktop and some more "apps apps apps, have we mentioned we have an appstore with apps?" in your face metro bullshit. Like making a "Start Goatse" as I call it where you click the start button trying to escape and it hauls your ass right back to metro...have they mentioned they have touch and apps?
Or maybe the engineers at MSFT are doing this on purpose, its been widely known that ballmer is fricking HATED by many at the company and doing what they can to make sure "Ballmer's Folly" flops as bad as Win 8? Really wouldn't be out of the question. At the end it won't matter though as i can tell you little shops like mine have stopped carrying Win 8x anything as I have watched people gladly pay for a more expensive refurb with Win 7 than be forced to take Windows 8, its a giant DO NOT WANT as far as consumers are concerned and after I was stuck fixing that mess a few times i can say honestly? Don't blame 'em.
It takes a HELL of a lot more than simply slapping Start8 to kill the abomination that is "Oh hai I'm a cellphone LULZ" Metro, specifically it took a half a dozen deep level registry hacks AND hunting down a generic synaptics touchpad driver to kill those $%#^%# swipe gestures bullshit, and even then it looks like a poor man's Win 7 copy. I'm predicting it'll bomb and suck and be the punchline of jokes, just like Win 8. They can polish their asses off but all they are gonna have is a shiny turd NOT a diamond!
Can't happen because as long as we support Israel and refuse to live under Sharia we'll be "The Great Satan" and your "help" will be rewarded with jihad. Like it or not the countries of the ME have been stuck in a time warp since their "great prophet" showed up and while the other religions of the world have, for the most part at least, grown the fuck up and become more civilized with Islam they still party like its 1499 and refuse to change.
When you couple that to the almost constant propaganda against Jews that frankly would make Hitler go "Dude that is a little extreme" you can give the fuck up on the idea that ANY intervention won't result in more jihad against us. Look at Iraq, we are still digging up killing fields from Saddam, the guy was a real monster that even slaughtered family members when they didn't do to suit him, yet what do we see? the ONE time that Shia and Sunni are in agreement is when it comes to killing American soldiers.
The war between Sunni and Shia has been going on for over 400 years now, its the height of arrogance to think we can walk into the middle of a holy war, kill a bad guy like Assad and then say "love me!" and have them do anything but call a truce long enough to attack you.