Well, take this as the hint; Linus Torvalds took to using 'Fuck' as a basis of his public dropping a bucket of shit on the vendor. If you want an adult conversation, by all means have the leader who kicks things off lead the way.
Until then, This is slashdot. Not the houses of Parliament.
I've never really understood so much of the background on this. I really don't. Nvidia are probably *the only* fucking company that really went the whole way and really release the right 'kind of ' full drivers for Linux. Yes, they are closed source binary. Yes, they are proprietry. Yes, they don't comply with religious level political idealogy. But they contribute in a less than optimal way to your platform.
And your platform, at least in the short and medium term would be vastly shittier without their efforts.
So, next you publicly go viral dropping a bucket of shit over them. Their response has been moderatly to try to come in and talk, make changes and be more of a interactive unit with you. I bet that the devs inside the company are probably very pro making progress but face real world limits of legal and other things that they themselves are not empowered to fundamentally change.
I'm not surprised at Alan's answer - but here is my raw take on this. What would have been the better way forward was to take their request and frame it globally to that group of people and put Nvidia's request forward. I appreciate that many would likely answer no, and I appreciate this would perhaps not be what Nvidia wanted, but it would have opened a bridge for interaction and perhaps longer term bridge building. Instead, they get a fuck you, fuck your company, and do this our way or the highway.; What were Nvidia trying to do? Provide an answer to the problem they had a bucket of shit thrown over them in public about. ie - trying to solve a problem they were abused about.
The benefit of doing this is fixing something in linux - albeit with a closed driver that people asked for. Linux users asked for this. Linux Kernal people bitched about it. Linux coders refusing to help provide this moves this off being a purely Nvidia are a bunch of fucks to shooting your own platform in both feet.
I don't fucking get it. These bits of code I presume are already fully in Linux. Sat there in daylight.Refusing to let Nvidia use them to help you do something_you_asked for is demented. Or rather - let me reframe that - Its really lame to not engage in a process to find a way forward instead of ramming the ideology down the throat of a vendor who is a closed source bunch - but have come to try and engage with you on a problem.
Let me put it more plainly. Linux needs Nvidia more than Nvidia needs linux - but together you make something that is symbiotic. You think your mythical Ubuintu tablets are going to surface on the very proprietry ARM platform by not getting down and working with people like Nvidia on problems. Linux won't run 'well' on their platform without their help. You want to be there? Take your heads out of your asses.
As much as Linux gets hobbled by closed source folks not playing the game, its just as hobbled by killing off their interactions and opportunities by being too hard headed about the religio-political idealogy.
And a fucking note to the Intel GPU Linux fanboys. The drivers have almost always been shit. And the hardware is low end garbage. I'll take a Linux box with Nvidia GPU *EVERY fucking time over intel gfx. Every time.
I personally disliked a couple of pointed things he said. The first was spindle bashing. Its not that I dislike SSDs per se, but I've run a heap of them over an extended term. My take on them is they have got much faster, but their lifespan has shortened. SSD death is far too common for my liking. And the size and value of HDD over SSD remains what it was. For me, bluntly SSD has not matched what was written on the tin, and I am really really disliking the early death in use. Its almost become perverse to a point where if I have to run IO heavy stuff, and I know its going to have a long life, I am not using SSD unless speed is a paramount primary concern. And in that case I have to spec for short burn lifespan. No, I can't take his view that one tech holds a definitive superiority over the other. Not so far at any rate.
And the thin and light blurb. No Linus, I actually happen to like a big screen. And I like dual drives, a DVD drive/Blue ray, and decent speakers. Add in a real GPU and chunky CPU and RAM mean I have a real actual PC worth a shit. The worst fucking thing ever to happen to PCs - and I really mean this, the worst thing to ever happen has been the netbook and now the garbage ultrabook cretinous stupidity. These are all either horribly hobbled, or massively over priced piles of steaming garbage. Usually vaguely the spec of the previous gen 'business' notebook in the case of ultrabooks, thrown in a thinner chassis, with a mild refresh, and crippled thermals and perfornance.
If I want a fairly crippled system - I can go get one based on an ARM platform that is in actual fact thinner. And its better on battery if thats all you care about. I'm not against thin and light. Those models have always been around, and frankly always had a premium price tag. But if this is to become the platform that is the PC, its deservedly dead man walking, and good riddance.
*Sales of netbooks and Ultrabooks speak in more volume on this matter than my spiel.
Trying to play to a strength you do not possess isn't listed in an book of clever plays. And dropping your areas where you have strength for them is a baffling outcome. I'll add one last thing. For both the PC and for Linux - currently it sits at the end of a cycle in 'gaming; culture where the PC is at a zenith. There is no more powerful gaming platform today than PC. But it has to actually be powerful. The PC could regererate in short order into a full blown game platform, but its not going to do that on ultrabook, netbook or garbage books. And its sat right now at the potential bottom of the curve, because PS3 and XBox are landing at the bottom of their curve, and you can see this clearly in game development circles. If all the vendors simply ship ultrabooks, then they deserve to die. (and they are, PC shipments are falling.)
Make stuff people want, and you need a reason for it to be bought. Simply being shit like your last PC but thinner is as shit a reason as there has ever been.
I'm a Brit. I understand the tradition, and history of US cars, and that this holds a place for many American people. But your business and political angles don't work well for you here. Most of the US car makers already make fuel efficient engines and models for other parts of the world. I don't know if its parts of the US car industry and some political levels that are messing around - but they should stop.
At some stage the US will face a fuel hit. It would be much better to have the things lined up than be caught out. Your citizens should not face that having mistakenly bought high fuel consumption models after being decieved or lied to by car makers or political fools. The car is central to life in the US. The fuel munching car has no real future in this.
Intel repackaged up garbage end user machines that have been doing the rounds as business machines for years, and then raised the prices to 3-4 times the price. The benefit was 'thinness'. Thats it. The problem with this whole ethos is that Intel is busy wrecking its own platform. Intergrated garbage gfx for years - race to the bottom. Wrecks machines in terms of application development and fundamentally ruined it as a gaming platform (Oh its kind of come out the other side now, but not because of anything Intel did.)
The entire PC platform and all the companies within it need to realise that they are on death row. Thin pointless gutless PC's *will* be simply eradicated by thin gutless tablets. And the tablets are better at being thin and gutless, but use less energy. Unless the PC goes back to being a platform that has real value. So make sure its got heavy compute, Cuda - OpenCL, serious GFX punch, decent CPU, and the best application layers. Stop shipping garbage. I really mean it. Stop doing it, or die. Simple horrific choice.
Being thin as your only solid reason for existance was the most fucking stupid thing to eminate from Intel in 30 years. Oh - and thanks for removing half the useful ports, meaning the difference between a laptop and tablet choice gets thinned again. No pun intended.
Modern Islam has become the new Nazi'ism. Its 57 states have unified into a wholly evil conglomerate. Its distorted and twisted human rights law at the UN in diabolically awful ways with a prime directive of distorting the human rights laws to make them compatable with islam (impossible).
Many people in the world keep trying to peddle the idea of islam being peaceful and trying to make an equality between it and everything else. These people, and the 57 states managed to get on the UN books the cretinous 'Islamophobia' stupidity.
Eventually, everyone in the world is going to have to face down this lunacy, or allow it to get out of control and then be forced to face it down. Neither is good.
As for the Pakistani's - an arrest warrant needs issuing for the Railway minister, and it needs to be made clear in our lands - insightment to murder backed by money is a crime. And if he sets foot in the west let him be arrested.
Well, start with some simple things. GFX and Driver API layers need fixing. And by fixing I mean make it easy for Intel, Nvidia and ATI (and others) to make drivers and offer support while cutting ALL the crap that ends up as a firefight because they are blobs or none free. Linux neds these people, and their tech Talk to Steam and others and discuss a Direct X alike layer, perhaps really getting to the core of providing OpenCL, CUDA, OpenGL, Maybe Direct X emulation layers, or perhaps a new layer that does the same. Heavily invite the players, steam, Nvidia, AMD, others to be part of it. Sound API. Fix it. Properly.
Gnome was a shitty limited desktop. The Compiz bunch / crew created a layer on top that allowed *fun* and *customisation* - and resulted in a true surge of YouTube Videos and interest globally in the Linux desktop. It become fun, cool, and interesting. If you could bottle it, wasn't that what you wanted to get hold of? Since then, every window manager, and distro, has seemingly wanted to move away from that, kill that, do touch, or make Gnome 3 or Unity. *Hint to the gnome people, Compiz saved your ass and made your desktop interesting. Maybe you need to understand what it was that was good. It was not your tired, 2d, boring, unconfigurable, tedious, limited desktop, broken desktop.
Having screwed up the desktop via Unity and Gnome 3 - I hear people saying 'Linux on the desktop is dead, its dead man!'. Little wonder why. The desktop stuff I see is tried, limited and in most cases unconfigurable. Only throwiung compiz (for example) adds a layer of personalisation and life. And even that is years old and needs a refresh really.
For anyone saying 'I've used my linux desktop for the past 18 years, man, and I love it' - Yeah. You might, but the part you are missing here is it needs work.
Anyway, the nearest I see is Cinnamon, but while its nice, its pretty lacking in customisation.
Content producers have almost always fought this war, and they have fought it in a way that makes their customer the enemy. They fought tooth and nail against fair use (and still do, the fair usage battles rage on across the globe, and there are no defined standards in the area, with each country going through the legal battles at various miserable stages.)
Apple is not alone. Depending on where you live, You may or may not be allowed to backup the content you 'lease'. I say lease because if you are not allowed to backup content, or rather, if you are not allowed to do what you wish with something you paid for, its not ownership - its more a lease or rental. If you live in the UK, you are not even legally allowed to buy CD's from Hong Kong - because its deemed that although you may have suffered from globalism, you are not allowed to benefit from it. Not so far as the media and content producer mafia is concerned.
Again, depending on where you live, and on how successful these mafia have been in their defense of their ownership - You may not be allowed to copy the CD or DVD or Blue Ray of music or film, or computer game- that you paid for. In such cases, I know of some computer game vendors who do in fact offer to replace the 'defective' disk - and I suppose this is a limited offer. I don't suppose they will still offer that in 20 years time, at least for old games. Music and Film I am less aware of. Do they offer a lifetime replacement offering - or do they sell the goods knowing CD/ DVD will be a fading medium in due course. Buy a new copy might be their way out of the hole. Convenient for them, expensive for you. Compared to this, Apple's digital offering might have legs. Until you die, and then your lease is over.
So, I'll cut to the chase. Bruce (and anyone else in the same boat) should digitise what they have paid for and forceably take their ownership of the item and end the problem. When you die, your digital collection goes to whoever you wish. Yes, this collection won't be cloud based and won't reside in the Apple garden, and you'll have to take responsibility for its maintainance - just as anything in life.
*Please note. I'm not advocating piracy. I'm advocating you bequeth the one paid for copy to one person. Or similar. This may not be in line with Apple terms, or even legal terms in your territory. But if the terms or legalities are so stupid, then they deserve to be broken in any case.
*Legal note* - Most UK MPs MP3 their music. These people are responsible for the law still stating in the UK that this is illegal. *Second legal note* - Nobody I am aware of in the UK has been arrested for converting one or multiple tracks they own into MP3 and illegally loading it onto an MP3 player. *3rd legal note* No record company has ever tried to enforce this in legal case, and they would be epically stupid to ever try.
Valve is sitting in closed rooms patting itself and Intel on the back. Intel GPU performance and drivers have in every encounter I have suffered them - blown. Yes, they will do basic workload gfx wise. They will run office. They run basic apps. The times I take complex apps and have problems are legion. Its great that Intel and Valve are debugging the worst hardware in the PC gaming arena. Great. Even the current HD4000 leaves much to be desired. Might I suggest this is the last place Valve should be knobbing around? If the aim is to make Linux + Intel garbage GPU a gaming platform, I'll even vacate to consoles. Maybe its a case of 'we must make steam and our games work from the bottom up'. If so, then I'll cut some slack.
Valve need to be focusing and getting on board Nvidia and ATI. They are the only really viable PC gaming platform centric hardware to focus on, and IMHO its the only place to focus.
But I said this at the beginning when Valve started down this road. Its a horrible broken lonely road, with vendors not liking Linux enough, and Linux being in a mess at driver and API level.Valve will need to drag the API and driver layers and APIs together (and form up a direct X alike organised, working, stable layer) because no one else is going to do it for them. As they require DRM, they have a perfect vehicle to offer the GFX vendors a driver layer that is open to closed source/binary layers.
All the positive stuff coming out can be ignored. This will be a huge uphill battle, and they are only at the very edge of this task. Even if they get their Source platform working to a vague level, the rest of steam is far far behind, with most Windows Games being Direct X based for a start.
And even if you make Linux + Steam a gaming platform. Its a very long way off Steam + windows. A very very long way off.
With gfx, storage, cpu, mem all piling on the pressure, consoles are drowning. Eventually, devs will move back to the PC because of its more open, less limited setup - even with the headaches that brings with it. Frankly, with steam its a good platform for devs and users. And the hardware is pretty amazing today, even in the medium PC markets, with bang for buck being quite high.
Refurbished Pentium 4's are a terrible pair of rose tinted glasses to view your computing through. Basing that on your computational future isn't in a good boundary layer. While lightweight OSs have a place - its not a be all and end all. New computer equipment is in relative terms cheap.
As for Linux, Miguel is right. A sea of shifting APIs might be accepted at the edge, but anyone making stuff needs stability and this is what you get on a Windows or OSX platform - to some degree. Its never total.
Is linux still arguing over the 20 ways to do sound? Still? In 2012?
Good luck to the steam guys trying to build on this sea of swirling open source maelstrom:)
But I don't anymore. They have morphed into a 'giant' that now has a homepage with a million products. And each one comes with 20 price plans, and innumerable gotcha's in licensing terms and have only one interest - squeezing people for more revenue. When as far as I could see, ESXi got worse from 4.1 to 5, this only underwrote the problem.
When I spent some time trying to talk to VMware people, and this was when I was trying to formulate a Hypervisor move at work, because we were SM/E - I can't tell you how disinterested, and in fact off putting VMware folks were. So the company chose HyperV over their product. I'm not a HyperV fan - and I try out different vendors at different times, but appalling lic terms, screw you attitude from their people, and 5.1 actually looking poor meant I lost interest in being a VMware supporter/invoker.
Since then they did an about turn and decided that in fact, if they lose the tech's and SM/E, they lose the next inbound group of people buying virt - and they started calling and wanting to talk. But damage has been done.
They still have great tech to be honest, but its being utterly ruined by 'marketing/management' for a lack of better wording, and given so much virtualisation is free these days, I can't see anything but death by a thousand nibbles.
It used to be that you could onbly really virt stuff their their products, but its simply becoming an untruth. Wether is server, or workstation, other options exist.
Simple facts. Nasty company. Nasty DRM. I don't tend to pirate games now, because of two core reasons: 1. Steam, and steam value - I feel in most cases I can buy games for a fair price, usually in the sales. The sales are probably at a level that I am willing to pay. Companies are *going to have to accept low price, high volume. Not the reverse. 2. The virus and malware landscape simply means I am generally unwilling to allow unknown/untrusted exe or similar files on my systems. Thats fundamentally a deeper threat to me than evil gamesellers DRM, but both are a threat.
But Ubisoft, frankly, you are a foul, nasty company. Your DRM antics mean you don't deserve to survive. Either learn the lessons or go die. Seriously.
I've tested it, and been testing it for a long time. I've had back and forth with Sinofsky over email on the subject. Here is my take on it.
'Metro' or whatever its name is now, is not really a full screen start menu replacement. Thats too simple a take on this. For a start, it doesn't really work the same way in terms of being a start button and start menu replacement at all. I'd go so far as to say its a pretty poor replacement for what was the start button.
How about this though. It *is* a desktop replacement, and in that, with its interactive applications and notifications means that perhaps the ideal here is to create a modern day real world interactive desktop that is a 2012 variation on previous widgets and gadgets and web based interactive stuff we have seen on the older desktop under Win32. It would seem to me that it works better in a context of embedding the start menu directly into a living desktop. Maybe it might have been better to make the pitch this way and to say that its a more evolved idea. And I think.. vaguely, for me - Metro might well work better if I context it that way. It really doesn't work for me personally in any way at all as a Start button / menu equivelent, replacement, or anything. But if we were going to actually talk about starting on a new footing and have an interactive desktop, where what was a start menu was actually in the desktop - maybe I'd take something of a longer, more sympathetic view. Except.. The Applications are now brain dead fullscreen horrors. You can't easily actually close them. Multitasking now is suddenly much more like some horrid 2012 throwback to OS9, or even Win3.11. Oh the system does multitask, but now the OS just feels like it doesn't. And there are serious and significant problems in Metro and WinRT when you try to apply your ideas of multi-tasking as you did in Win32. Its fortunate that you can still leap to a Win32 desk and environment. If you are used to havig a desktop, and a lot of applications around - which frankly is my home, then perhaps like me you'll find metro is just a horrible place to be stuck, and it gets worse as its used on big res screens. A lot of wasted space, and a serious lack of multiapplication access.
Its also a front end, desktop, UI and framework for new APIs - WinRT. And it has allowed a framework across to the ARM processor family with an entry point into mobility. And this is the part that is generally missed in most overviews about 'Metro'. Its very important to understand that While in 8, The old frameworks and API's remain, I would say that it seems to me that these are really really being left in with a very very firm view of being an end game and a legacy support structure. 'Your old apps will work'. And its Windows. If you break that, a fundamental stop occurs for many buyers. So thats got to stay
WinRT is a deathknell (or its at least supposed to be) for Win32 longterm. Its now going in theory to be at least the ground MS builds its consumer base on. The Start/Desktop will be based around it. The applications and development models will hinge off it. The Microsoft equivelent of the Apple 'App' and 'Media' Stores and Distribution model are going to be based round it, and the application base, and cloud MS brick by brick put together are going to be built on it. At least thats the idea.
Now, as far as I can see, there has been something of a bloodbath inside MS over this. Metro and WinRT has, at least for now, won. Win32 is either dead, or on a very back foot. There are lots of groupings who are still entirely Win32 based in all their stuff and when you run Metro, its pretty painfully obvious how Thin Metro actually is in real terms. 99% of everything I do flips to that Win32 desktop, and by run I mean all my consumer level stuff *and* all the MS stuff I run professionally, Including the bulk of the server side based stuff. If Metro is the victor, that victor has yet to fully own areas like server, exchange and a lot of groups and teams in MS. When I gave 2012 a test run, a heap of stuff i
You just wrote that because you think you're clever and you like an argument. You're not clever, and its no argument.
Gigabit ethernet and a midrange NAS box roughly complment their throughputs, and having a NAS thats setup, possibly offering RAID is a far better solution that your idea of entertaining multiple drives over USB. And theoretical bandwidth is meaningless. USB2 real world tends to be limited to 33MB/s ballpark. Doing something badly multiple times doesn't stop it from being bad.
You are better on your eSATA point, but I regard that as lost given you wrote drivel about thinking USB2 is an ok way to go for this.
Its not.
And who the fuck gave you (3) for your posting. Idiots
I'm not sure if you posed the question out of being nieve, or if its just being daft. You don't want to be moving 24TB over the USB bus. End of discussion really - at least in terms of USB.
Whoever or however you ended up looking at USB for this was wrong/wrong way.
You have lots of choice in terms of boxes, servers, NAS boxes, locally attached storage. 24TB is in the range of midrange NAS boxes.
Once you have this, you can start to make choices on the many backup, replication, and duplication bits of software that already exist, both free and proprietary.
Nope. I live in Britain and was born and bred here.
I can criticise the NBC coverage because being a well infoemed person generally, I have gathered some information and understand it to be so. I have also found some NBC material that I have checked and examined the quality/content myself.
As for the BBC, my viewing can allow me to be critical or in the case of the Olympics, congratulatory about how its coverage has been.
The critique of the BBC outside of the Olympics is because its unbalanced, has severe leftist tendencies, is biased, is politically biased, and gets public money under a premise that it is not allowed to be so. Its reporting and operations do not always slant leftwards, as like any organisations it has a wide ranging employment from many backgrounds. But its politics and news side, and others that are involved in it have leftist views, tendencies, and are biased.
Further, It has an anti British bias, a hatred of British History, a hatred of British institutions and a love of things like the EU - which no real long term understanding of the BBC can really tolerate. Would todays BBC be like World War Two's BBC? Would they refuse the German offer of a Deal even before the government had a chance to? No, Todays BBC spends all of its time being best friends with Terrorism, Immigration, The EU, Leftism, CND, Unions and you can add in plenty of hatred against 'the west' 'the rich west', the 'rich countries'.
If Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland break from the Union, me personally, I expect the BBC scum to be dancing in the streets celebrating. Even though its lost on them that the idea they are dancing about is embedded within their own bloody name.
I find it very very rare that the BBC is representative of me (An English Briton), My Country (England or Great Britain), and its far more likely to be pro immigration, pro foreign institutions, and pro terrorist, with endless critical comments thrown in about Her Majesties Armed Forces.
Some would or might claim that the BBC has to be an impartial entity. Well, its leftism failed today, and in its past it was nominally utterly embedded in being a fundamental pro British institution. So either today or in the past it has not been thus. But I fail to see why an institution that hates Britain so much and operates the way it does should get public support and enforced taxation to support its operations.
There is a vicious, ugly, nasty fifth column that exists in todays UK, and it exists in large parts of the media, the BBC, the Guardian, and other locations. They are not impartial, they are not balanced, and they operate with an agenda that is fifth column, damaging, invasive, and counter to the state and people's well being. And this same bunch going back decades ago would have only been happy if Moscow had waltzed its armoured divisions up downing street. They are all a bit older, they are all a bit wiser, Moscow is gone, but the stupidity leftist garbage embedded into them when younger remains their driven ideal. They can't get Moscow today, so Its moved onto Green power, The EU, Immigration and other 'policies', all destructive to a state, country, people they detest and hate.
And they infest everything, and have reached most levels of things that happen.
And I'll add a little note on the Olympics ceremony. And I say this not because I have an axe to grind, but if you tell a story, tell the story, don't warp it for political purpose. Black people were portrayed in the Industrial revolution, as the Business leaders who led the revolution. They were included in suits, and the pretence is that this is done for equality. And the CND badge was on display because of course - CND persuaded the UK to disarm and have no Nuclear power//sarcasm off// . They would have been happy too if Moscow had tanks in Downing street because they happen to be a bunch of unions, lefties, and people who detest the UK as well. CND should never have appeared in the British Olympics Ceremony. They are a bl
To be blunt, the Olympic organisation needs to step up in its bid process to make sure that not only is it about getting money in to work within the machinery of an Olympics, but that any partner, and in particular its broadcast partners behave with minimum standards. These would be max advert time per hour, and min coverage required.
Any broadcasters who paster the coverage with advert time and clearly ruin the spectable could be eliminated. Any that don't plan to cover enough get the chop and so on. It should not merely be about the money.
I'm not a fan of the BBC. But its coverage of this Olympics has been stellar, and I can watch any - and all events. No coverage has ever been this vast or all encompassing.
The problems with this idea seem to outmatch the idea. (Not that I'm against it.)
1. API's. Linux is a sea of APIs and they shift like the wind. In the area of drivers, kernel, gfx api's, - its frankly not something I expect Steam to navigate easily. In windows a lot of development was based on OpenGL, DirectX. OpenGL is certainly doable in Linux, but good luck in having it work in an expectable way - I say that given Intel, ATI, Nvidia drivers..
2. I think it can only happen if someone like steam and perhaps its partners build and define and work with OpenGL, and a directX alike environment. And early on I think to even think about making this work, it would probably need to be a platform idea where steam get hardware makers to make a box that has some fundamental hardware they and their user base would not have to fight. A steambox? Sure. And others could make their hardware 'steambox' ready by supplying hardware that fitted this working model. An early stab would seem to me to require Nvidia - as I think their closed source drivers are the only drivers *today* that would be viable.
3. Other areas like sound and multimedia are just as messy in Linux. Don't see any other way than Steam and partners getting involved in some way to keep some stuff defined.
4. Seems like a good basis to campaign for an open game/source standard.
Yes, all very laudable when you cite a law case that people agree with.
So where is the line drawn? And what laws are good bad? Facebook will answer this in corporate speak. 'We just comply with local laws'.
And in Germany in 35-39, having a conversation lead to people being killed. In Islamic states, it could lead to people being killed. In the chinese state, it can lead to people being killed.
And since when did people accept statsi-alike government or private wiretapping on comms anyway. This is not East Germany, and its not 1960.
Seriously has Sinofsky's mits written all over this. They killed this in 8, and it just means they have bullshit justification by saying 'it was insecure'.
Yes, run as admin and download/run executable can own your machine. (For the past 30 years. Its not new. ) Nobody should be running as Admin. And partially even when you do the OS impedes this to some degree.
I suspect what is likely is that Gadgets may be flawed to a level where UAC and OS protection can't cover off enough, and its unhinged. But they should be promoting not running as Admin and not promoting running like XP and throwing sticky plasters at bad practice.
I don't really use gadgets often, and its always seemed fairly limited to the odd decent one. But I have to say its a very bullshit and garbage reason to kill a feature/API.
But then thats MS in 2012. Remove and restrict features, charge you for what was free before, and generally be a fucking bunch of dicks.
And Sinofsky, give me back my start button and menu, you c***.
"but at least every end user can go trough the sourcecode to discover faults"
Yes, sure they can. And every user has such ability, and kernel level hacking skills. And each and every individual and company should employ people to do this.
Yessss, right. While this is philosophically a nice point, I have to say that the real world aspect is delusional. And I'll add another point. Its open source. If Governments can insert code into MS codebases, they can do so with any open source. The fact is they might only be caught out by exceptional code audits looking for it.
Let me get this right. A BB platform devices now needs a 'Mobile Fusion Server' to manage it? Here is a hint. And I don't mean to be nasty - but what part are you not understanding about Playbook not fitting a Blackberry 'fitment'?
Maybe you share the current BB problematic management view.
The Playbook should be nominally have been a Blackberry. The fact it was not was its absolute failure. It should be managed by BES. No, I don't want 15 different devices, Servers, and management tools.
Seriously. If someone can't build and provide a platform, and a working one at that, then don't expect me to buy, support, build and maintain it.
There are simplistic core problems with Blackberry. These are not hard to comprehend. Fix the devices. Fix the server (and I mean that, FIX IT.) And turn round the network. Make it the product its vision once enlightened. Right now, the biggest problem is Blackberry is not very good at being Blackberry. The server sucks. The handsets break if you look at them. The playbook wasn't even a blackberry. And network has clear issues that need proper attention. If you fundamentally fix these, and show all the large mobile networks you are on the warpath, and build on top of that, you have a world class company again.
Blackberry remains to my knowledge the only platform for certain things. Some of these include secure handset ops, world wide data transit, and client/server ops. These are basically world beating advantanges being overwhelmed by the scale of problems platform wide. And they might crow all day and night about BB 10, but if BES remains the steaming pile of crap it is, and the network isn't given due attention, it won't matter.
I have to run Blackberry Enterprise Server. Its a complete pain in the ass in terms of support and main. Its years behind, and its clunky, chunky, and we end up going through endless workload and silly upgrade games. The handsets break if users look at them. I have to do warranty on them daily, and BB now quibble over each return, making the whole thing fail.
The handsets themselves - good email platform, crap at everything else. And the world _is_moving off being email platform centric. Blackberry messenger is a bright point, but that should be broken out and made an application layer across all mobile devices. The same could well be said for the application layer and so on.
Their network is creaking, but is the one serious advantage that they have, but leverage poorly.
The playbook should have been a blackberry in a tablet form. Instead you needed a BB and as PB to get function. = Fail. Do not now how that ever, ever, ever passed QA and system testing.
If I were BB, I would go software only, and build my whole thing as a software/API/Network package, and build on that. Make the software a package available on all main platforms (Android, IOS, Others) and sell on data packages, and data transit using BB networks. And I'd radically overhaul BB enterprise server into something cleaner, better supported and easier to install, manage, run.
If they stay in the handset market, they need a killer phone/tablet BB 10 release, and they need to cut down handsets to one cheap cheerful, and one kickass model (curve/bold) and stop shipping masses of differening handsets, and make the things robust (the current models are not robust, and are inexusably so) And whatever tablet they ship needs to be a full BB. (For the record, the playbook was so close to being very very good, and was wrecked by a simplistically small, but incredibly important part, that the whol board and playbook team need to have their heads banged together until they realise how stupid that fail was)
Microsoft seem almost becalmed and bereft. Windows 8, apart from some good baseline (read unexciting, but sound steps) engineering has a crippled, useless, featureless, desert of a UI. Its also seemingly an assault on Win32 and much of Windows infrastructure, in exchnage for untested WinRT/WinRT, and at least on the surface, a limited, confined, controlled new API and an Empty house as far as software goes.
And I'll be blunt. In desktop terms, Apple was wrong when it went full screen nuts, and so are these idiots. The desktop is a rich, diverse, interesting environment. Its not a phone and its not a tablet.
Windows 8 deserves to actually die and have its journey terminated, at least in this incarnation. And no, taking a failed zune base and trying to make it your computational universe was very stupid.
And its been matched by the stupidity on display in countless windows 8 blog posts where they show their unhinged ideas are based on the feedback from the wrong people (hint, savvy windows users shut off the feedback, they tend not to want or accept MS poking around). The endless idiotic postings about not enough people used the start button, so we deleted it are legion. Die Die Die.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, take this as the hint; Linus Torvalds took to using 'Fuck' as a basis of his public dropping a bucket of shit on the vendor. If you want an adult conversation, by all means have the leader who kicks things off lead the way.
Until then, This is slashdot. Not the houses of Parliament.
I've never really understood so much of the background on this. I really don't. Nvidia are probably *the only* fucking company that really went the whole way and really release the right 'kind of ' full drivers for Linux. Yes, they are closed source binary. Yes, they are proprietry. Yes, they don't comply with religious level political idealogy. But they contribute in a less than optimal way to your platform.
And your platform, at least in the short and medium term would be vastly shittier without their efforts.
So, next you publicly go viral dropping a bucket of shit over them. Their response has been moderatly to try to come in and talk, make changes and be more of a interactive unit with you. I bet that the devs inside the company are probably very pro making progress but face real world limits of legal and other things that they themselves are not empowered to fundamentally change.
I'm not surprised at Alan's answer - but here is my raw take on this. What would have been the better way forward was to take their request and frame it globally to that group of people and put Nvidia's request forward. I appreciate that many would likely answer no, and I appreciate this would perhaps not be what Nvidia wanted, but it would have opened a bridge for interaction and perhaps longer term bridge building. Instead, they get a fuck you, fuck your company, and do this our way or the highway.; What were Nvidia trying to do? Provide an answer to the problem they had a bucket of shit thrown over them in public about. ie - trying to solve a problem they were abused about.
The benefit of doing this is fixing something in linux - albeit with a closed driver that people asked for. Linux users asked for this. Linux Kernal people bitched about it. Linux coders refusing to help provide this moves this off being a purely Nvidia are a bunch of fucks to shooting your own platform in both feet.
I don't fucking get it. These bits of code I presume are already fully in Linux. Sat there in daylight .Refusing to let Nvidia use them to help you do something_you_asked for is demented. Or rather - let me reframe that - Its really lame to not engage in a process to find a way forward instead of ramming the ideology down the throat of a vendor who is a closed source bunch - but have come to try and engage with you on a problem.
Let me put it more plainly. Linux needs Nvidia more than Nvidia needs linux - but together you make something that is symbiotic. You think your mythical Ubuintu tablets are going to surface on the very proprietry ARM platform by not getting down and working with people like Nvidia on problems. Linux won't run 'well' on their platform without their help. You want to be there? Take your heads out of your asses.
As much as Linux gets hobbled by closed source folks not playing the game, its just as hobbled by killing off their interactions and opportunities by being too hard headed about the religio-political idealogy.
And a fucking note to the Intel GPU Linux fanboys. The drivers have almost always been shit. And the hardware is low end garbage. I'll take a Linux box with Nvidia GPU *EVERY fucking time over intel gfx. Every time.
I personally disliked a couple of pointed things he said. The first was spindle bashing. Its not that I dislike SSDs per se, but I've run a heap of them over an extended term. My take on them is they have got much faster, but their lifespan has shortened. SSD death is far too common for my liking. And the size and value of HDD over SSD remains what it was. For me, bluntly SSD has not matched what was written on the tin, and I am really really disliking the early death in use. Its almost become perverse to a point where if I have to run IO heavy stuff, and I know its going to have a long life, I am not using SSD unless speed is a paramount primary concern. And in that case I have to spec for short burn lifespan. No, I can't take his view that one tech holds a definitive superiority over the other. Not so far at any rate.
And the thin and light blurb. No Linus, I actually happen to like a big screen. And I like dual drives, a DVD drive/Blue ray, and decent speakers. Add in a real GPU and chunky CPU and RAM mean I have a real actual PC worth a shit. The worst fucking thing ever to happen to PCs - and I really mean this, the worst thing to ever happen has been the netbook and now the garbage ultrabook cretinous stupidity. These are all either horribly hobbled, or massively over priced piles of steaming garbage. Usually vaguely the spec of the previous gen 'business' notebook in the case of ultrabooks, thrown in a thinner chassis, with a mild refresh, and crippled thermals and perfornance.
If I want a fairly crippled system - I can go get one based on an ARM platform that is in actual fact thinner. And its better on battery if thats all you care about. I'm not against thin and light. Those models have always been around, and frankly always had a premium price tag. But if this is to become the platform that is the PC, its deservedly dead man walking, and good riddance.
*Sales of netbooks and Ultrabooks speak in more volume on this matter than my spiel.
Trying to play to a strength you do not possess isn't listed in an book of clever plays. And dropping your areas where you have strength for them is a baffling outcome.
I'll add one last thing. For both the PC and for Linux - currently it sits at the end of a cycle in 'gaming; culture where the PC is at a zenith. There is no more powerful gaming platform today than PC. But it has to actually be powerful. The PC could regererate in short order into a full blown game platform, but its not going to do that on ultrabook, netbook or garbage books. And its sat right now at the potential bottom of the curve, because PS3 and XBox are landing at the bottom of their curve, and you can see this clearly in game development circles. If all the vendors simply ship ultrabooks, then they deserve to die. (and they are, PC shipments are falling.)
Make stuff people want, and you need a reason for it to be bought. Simply being shit like your last PC but thinner is as shit a reason as there has ever been.
I'm a Brit. I understand the tradition, and history of US cars, and that this holds a place for many American people. But your business and political angles don't work well for you here. Most of the US car makers already make fuel efficient engines and models for other parts of the world. I don't know if its parts of the US car industry and some political levels that are messing around - but they should stop.
At some stage the US will face a fuel hit. It would be much better to have the things lined up than be caught out. Your citizens should not face that having mistakenly bought high fuel consumption models after being decieved or lied to by car makers or political fools. The car is central to life in the US. The fuel munching car has no real future in this.
Intel repackaged up garbage end user machines that have been doing the rounds as business machines for years, and then raised the prices to 3-4 times the price. The benefit was 'thinness'. Thats it.
The problem with this whole ethos is that Intel is busy wrecking its own platform. Intergrated garbage gfx for years - race to the bottom. Wrecks machines in terms of application development and fundamentally ruined it as a gaming platform (Oh its kind of come out the other side now, but not because of anything Intel did.)
The entire PC platform and all the companies within it need to realise that they are on death row. Thin pointless gutless PC's *will* be simply eradicated by thin gutless tablets. And the tablets are better at being thin and gutless, but use less energy. Unless the PC goes back to being a platform that has real value. So make sure its got heavy compute, Cuda - OpenCL, serious GFX punch, decent CPU, and the best application layers. Stop shipping garbage. I really mean it. Stop doing it, or die. Simple horrific choice.
Being thin as your only solid reason for existance was the most fucking stupid thing to eminate from Intel in 30 years. Oh - and thanks for removing half the useful ports, meaning the difference between a laptop and tablet choice gets thinned again. No pun intended.
Modern Islam has become the new Nazi'ism. Its 57 states have unified into a wholly evil conglomerate. Its distorted and twisted human rights law at the UN in diabolically awful ways with a prime directive of distorting the human rights laws to make them compatable with islam (impossible).
Many people in the world keep trying to peddle the idea of islam being peaceful and trying to make an equality between it and everything else. These people, and the 57 states managed to get on the UN books the cretinous 'Islamophobia' stupidity.
Eventually, everyone in the world is going to have to face down this lunacy, or allow it to get out of control and then be forced to face it down. Neither is good.
As for the Pakistani's - an arrest warrant needs issuing for the Railway minister, and it needs to be made clear in our lands - insightment to murder backed by money is a crime. And if he sets foot in the west let him be arrested.
How would you 'fix' it?
Well, start with some simple things. GFX and Driver API layers need fixing. And by fixing I mean make it easy for Intel, Nvidia and ATI (and others) to make drivers and offer support while cutting ALL the crap that ends up as a firefight because they are blobs or none free. Linux neds these people, and their tech
Talk to Steam and others and discuss a Direct X alike layer, perhaps really getting to the core of providing OpenCL, CUDA, OpenGL, Maybe Direct X emulation layers, or perhaps a new layer that does the same. Heavily invite the players, steam, Nvidia, AMD, others to be part of it.
Sound API. Fix it. Properly.
Gnome was a shitty limited desktop. The Compiz bunch / crew created a layer on top that allowed *fun* and *customisation* - and resulted in a true surge of YouTube Videos and interest globally in the Linux desktop. It become fun, cool, and interesting. If you could bottle it, wasn't that what you wanted to get hold of?
Since then, every window manager, and distro, has seemingly wanted to move away from that, kill that, do touch, or make Gnome 3 or Unity.
*Hint to the gnome people, Compiz saved your ass and made your desktop interesting. Maybe you need to understand what it was that was good. It was not your tired, 2d, boring, unconfigurable, tedious, limited desktop, broken desktop.
Having screwed up the desktop via Unity and Gnome 3 - I hear people saying 'Linux on the desktop is dead, its dead man!'. Little wonder why. The desktop stuff I see is tried, limited and in most cases unconfigurable. Only throwiung compiz (for example) adds a layer of personalisation and life. And even that is years old and needs a refresh really.
For anyone saying 'I've used my linux desktop for the past 18 years, man, and I love it' - Yeah. You might, but the part you are missing here is it needs work.
Anyway, the nearest I see is Cinnamon, but while its nice, its pretty lacking in customisation.
Content producers have almost always fought this war, and they have fought it in a way that makes their customer the enemy. They fought tooth and nail against fair use (and still do, the fair usage battles rage on across the globe, and there are no defined standards in the area, with each country going through the legal battles at various miserable stages.)
Apple is not alone. Depending on where you live, You may or may not be allowed to backup the content you 'lease'. I say lease because if you are not allowed to backup content, or rather, if you are not allowed to do what you wish with something you paid for, its not ownership - its more a lease or rental. If you live in the UK, you are not even legally allowed to buy CD's from Hong Kong - because its deemed that although you may have suffered from globalism, you are not allowed to benefit from it. Not so far as the media and content producer mafia is concerned.
Again, depending on where you live, and on how successful these mafia have been in their defense of their ownership - You may not be allowed to copy the CD or DVD or Blue Ray of music or film, or computer game- that you paid for. In such cases, I know of some computer game vendors who do in fact offer to replace the 'defective' disk - and I suppose this is a limited offer. I don't suppose they will still offer that in 20 years time, at least for old games. Music and Film I am less aware of. Do they offer a lifetime replacement offering - or do they sell the goods knowing CD/ DVD will be a fading medium in due course. Buy a new copy might be their way out of the hole. Convenient for them, expensive for you. Compared to this, Apple's digital offering might have legs. Until you die, and then your lease is over.
So, I'll cut to the chase. Bruce (and anyone else in the same boat) should digitise what they have paid for and forceably take their ownership of the item and end the problem. When you die, your digital collection goes to whoever you wish. Yes, this collection won't be cloud based and won't reside in the Apple garden, and you'll have to take responsibility for its maintainance - just as anything in life.
*Please note. I'm not advocating piracy. I'm advocating you bequeth the one paid for copy to one person. Or similar. This may not be in line with Apple terms, or even legal terms in your territory. But if the terms or legalities are so stupid, then they deserve to be broken in any case.
*Legal note* - Most UK MPs MP3 their music. These people are responsible for the law still stating in the UK that this is illegal.
*Second legal note* - Nobody I am aware of in the UK has been arrested for converting one or multiple tracks they own into MP3 and illegally loading it onto an MP3 player.
*3rd legal note* No record company has ever tried to enforce this in legal case, and they would be epically stupid to ever try.
Valve is sitting in closed rooms patting itself and Intel on the back.
Intel GPU performance and drivers have in every encounter I have suffered them - blown. Yes, they will do basic workload gfx wise. They will run office. They run basic apps. The times I take complex apps and have problems are legion. Its great that Intel and Valve are debugging the worst hardware in the PC gaming arena. Great. Even the current HD4000 leaves much to be desired.
Might I suggest this is the last place Valve should be knobbing around? If the aim is to make Linux + Intel garbage GPU a gaming platform, I'll even vacate to consoles.
Maybe its a case of 'we must make steam and our games work from the bottom up'. If so, then I'll cut some slack.
Valve need to be focusing and getting on board Nvidia and ATI. They are the only really viable PC gaming platform centric hardware to focus on, and IMHO its the only place to focus.
But I said this at the beginning when Valve started down this road. Its a horrible broken lonely road, with vendors not liking Linux enough, and Linux being in a mess at driver and API level.Valve will need to drag the API and driver layers and APIs together (and form up a direct X alike organised, working, stable layer) because no one else is going to do it for them. As they require DRM, they have a perfect vehicle to offer the GFX vendors a driver layer that is open to closed source/binary layers.
All the positive stuff coming out can be ignored. This will be a huge uphill battle, and they are only at the very edge of this task. Even if they get their Source platform working to a vague level, the rest of steam is far far behind, with most Windows Games being Direct X based for a start.
And even if you make Linux + Steam a gaming platform. Its a very long way off Steam + windows. A very very long way off.
With gfx, storage, cpu, mem all piling on the pressure, consoles are drowning. Eventually, devs will move back to the PC because of its more open, less limited setup - even with the headaches that brings with it.
Frankly, with steam its a good platform for devs and users. And the hardware is pretty amazing today, even in the medium PC markets, with bang for buck being quite high.
Refurbished Pentium 4's are a terrible pair of rose tinted glasses to view your computing through. Basing that on your computational future isn't in a good boundary layer.
While lightweight OSs have a place - its not a be all and end all. New computer equipment is in relative terms cheap.
As for Linux, Miguel is right. A sea of shifting APIs might be accepted at the edge, but anyone making stuff needs stability and this is what you get on a Windows or OSX platform - to some degree. Its never total.
Is linux still arguing over the 20 ways to do sound? Still? In 2012?
Good luck to the steam guys trying to build on this sea of swirling open source maelstrom :)
But I don't anymore. They have morphed into a 'giant' that now has a homepage with a million products. And each one comes with 20 price plans, and innumerable gotcha's in licensing terms and have only one interest - squeezing people for more revenue.
When as far as I could see, ESXi got worse from 4.1 to 5, this only underwrote the problem.
When I spent some time trying to talk to VMware people, and this was when I was trying to formulate a Hypervisor move at work, because we were SM/E - I can't tell you how disinterested, and in fact off putting VMware folks were. So the company chose HyperV over their product. I'm not a HyperV fan - and I try out different vendors at different times, but appalling lic terms, screw you attitude from their people, and 5.1 actually looking poor meant I lost interest in being a VMware supporter/invoker.
Since then they did an about turn and decided that in fact, if they lose the tech's and SM/E, they lose the next inbound group of people buying virt - and they started calling and wanting to talk. But damage has been done.
They still have great tech to be honest, but its being utterly ruined by 'marketing/management' for a lack of better wording, and given so much virtualisation is free these days, I can't see anything but death by a thousand nibbles.
It used to be that you could onbly really virt stuff their their products, but its simply becoming an untruth. Wether is server, or workstation, other options exist.
Simple facts. Nasty company. Nasty DRM.
I don't tend to pirate games now, because of two core reasons:
1. Steam, and steam value - I feel in most cases I can buy games for a fair price, usually in the sales. The sales are probably at a level that I am willing to pay. Companies are *going to have to accept low price, high volume. Not the reverse.
2. The virus and malware landscape simply means I am generally unwilling to allow unknown/untrusted exe or similar files on my systems. Thats fundamentally a deeper threat to me than evil gamesellers DRM, but both are a threat.
But Ubisoft, frankly, you are a foul, nasty company. Your DRM antics mean you don't deserve to survive. Either learn the lessons or go die. Seriously.
I've tested it, and been testing it for a long time. I've had back and forth with Sinofsky over email on the subject. Here is my take on it.
'Metro' or whatever its name is now, is not really a full screen start menu replacement. Thats too simple a take on this. For a start, it doesn't really work the same way in terms of being a start button and start menu replacement at all. I'd go so far as to say its a pretty poor replacement for what was the start button.
How about this though. It *is* a desktop replacement, and in that, with its interactive applications and notifications means that perhaps the ideal here is to create a modern day real world interactive desktop that is a 2012 variation on previous widgets and gadgets and web based interactive stuff we have seen on the older desktop under Win32. It would seem to me that it works better in a context of embedding the start menu directly into a living desktop. Maybe it might have been better to make the pitch this way and to say that its a more evolved idea. And I think.. vaguely, for me - Metro might well work better if I context it that way. It really doesn't work for me personally in any way at all as a Start button / menu equivelent, replacement, or anything. But if we were going to actually talk about starting on a new footing and have an interactive desktop, where what was a start menu was actually in the desktop - maybe I'd take something of a longer, more sympathetic view. Except.. The Applications are now brain dead fullscreen horrors. You can't easily actually close them. Multitasking now is suddenly much more like some horrid 2012 throwback to OS9, or even Win3.11. Oh the system does multitask, but now the OS just feels like it doesn't. And there are serious and significant problems in Metro and WinRT when you try to apply your ideas of multi-tasking as you did in Win32. Its fortunate that you can still leap to a Win32 desk and environment. If you are used to havig a desktop, and a lot of applications around - which frankly is my home, then perhaps like me you'll find metro is just a horrible place to be stuck, and it gets worse as its used on big res screens. A lot of wasted space, and a serious lack of multiapplication access.
Its also a front end, desktop, UI and framework for new APIs - WinRT. And it has allowed a framework across to the ARM processor family with an entry point into mobility. And this is the part that is generally missed in most overviews about 'Metro'. Its very important to understand that While in 8, The old frameworks and API's remain, I would say that it seems to me that these are really really being left in with a very very firm view of being an end game and a legacy support structure. 'Your old apps will work'. And its Windows. If you break that, a fundamental stop occurs for many buyers. So thats got to stay
WinRT is a deathknell (or its at least supposed to be) for Win32 longterm. Its now going in theory to be at least the ground MS builds its consumer base on. The Start/Desktop will be based around it. The applications and development models will hinge off it. The Microsoft equivelent of the Apple 'App' and 'Media' Stores and Distribution model are going to be based round it, and the application base, and cloud MS brick by brick put together are going to be built on it. At least thats the idea.
Now, as far as I can see, there has been something of a bloodbath inside MS over this. Metro and WinRT has, at least for now, won. Win32 is either dead, or on a very back foot. There are lots of groupings who are still entirely Win32 based in all their stuff and when you run Metro, its pretty painfully obvious how Thin Metro actually is in real terms. 99% of everything I do flips to that Win32 desktop, and by run I mean all my consumer level stuff *and* all the MS stuff I run professionally, Including the bulk of the server side based stuff. If Metro is the victor, that victor has yet to fully own areas like server, exchange and a lot of groups and teams in MS. When I gave 2012 a test run, a heap of stuff i
You just wrote that because you think you're clever and you like an argument. You're not clever, and its no argument.
Gigabit ethernet and a midrange NAS box roughly complment their throughputs, and having a NAS thats setup, possibly offering RAID is a far better solution that your idea of entertaining multiple drives over USB. And theoretical bandwidth is meaningless. USB2 real world tends to be limited to 33MB/s ballpark. Doing something badly multiple times doesn't stop it from being bad.
You are better on your eSATA point, but I regard that as lost given you wrote drivel about thinking USB2 is an ok way to go for this.
Its not.
And who the fuck gave you (3) for your posting. Idiots
I'm not sure if you posed the question out of being nieve, or if its just being daft. You don't want to be moving 24TB over the USB bus. End of discussion really - at least in terms of USB.
Whoever or however you ended up looking at USB for this was wrong/wrong way.
You have lots of choice in terms of boxes, servers, NAS boxes, locally attached storage. 24TB is in the range of midrange NAS boxes.
Once you have this, you can start to make choices on the many backup, replication, and duplication bits of software that already exist, both free and proprietary.
Nope. I live in Britain and was born and bred here.
I can criticise the NBC coverage because being a well infoemed person generally, I have gathered some information and understand it to be so.
I have also found some NBC material that I have checked and examined the quality/content myself.
As for the BBC, my viewing can allow me to be critical or in the case of the Olympics, congratulatory about how its coverage has been.
The critique of the BBC outside of the Olympics is because its unbalanced, has severe leftist tendencies, is biased, is politically biased, and gets public money under a premise that it is not allowed to be so. Its reporting and operations do not always slant leftwards, as like any organisations it has a wide ranging employment from many backgrounds. But its politics and news side, and others that are involved in it have leftist views, tendencies, and are biased.
Further, It has an anti British bias, a hatred of British History, a hatred of British institutions and a love of things like the EU - which no real long term understanding of the BBC can really tolerate. Would todays BBC be like World War Two's BBC? Would they refuse the German offer of a Deal even before the government had a chance to? No, Todays BBC spends all of its time being best friends with Terrorism, Immigration, The EU, Leftism, CND, Unions and you can add in plenty of hatred against 'the west' 'the rich west', the 'rich countries'.
If Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland break from the Union, me personally, I expect the BBC scum to be dancing in the streets celebrating. Even though its lost on them that the idea they are dancing about is embedded within their own bloody name.
I find it very very rare that the BBC is representative of me (An English Briton), My Country (England or Great Britain), and its far more likely to be pro immigration, pro foreign institutions, and pro terrorist, with endless critical comments thrown in about Her Majesties Armed Forces.
Some would or might claim that the BBC has to be an impartial entity. Well, its leftism failed today, and in its past it was nominally utterly embedded in being a fundamental pro British institution. So either today or in the past it has not been thus. But I fail to see why an institution that hates Britain so much and operates the way it does should get public support and enforced taxation to support its operations.
There is a vicious, ugly, nasty fifth column that exists in todays UK, and it exists in large parts of the media, the BBC, the Guardian, and other locations. They are not impartial, they are not balanced, and they operate with an agenda that is fifth column, damaging, invasive, and counter to the state and people's well being. And this same bunch going back decades ago would have only been happy if Moscow had waltzed its armoured divisions up downing street. They are all a bit older, they are all a bit wiser, Moscow is gone, but the stupidity leftist garbage embedded into them when younger remains their driven ideal. They can't get Moscow today, so Its moved onto Green power, The EU, Immigration and other 'policies', all destructive to a state, country, people they detest and hate.
And they infest everything, and have reached most levels of things that happen.
And I'll add a little note on the Olympics ceremony. And I say this not because I have an axe to grind, but if you tell a story, tell the story, don't warp it for political purpose. Black people were portrayed in the Industrial revolution, as the Business leaders who led the revolution. They were included in suits, and the pretence is that this is done for equality. And the CND badge was on display because of course - CND persuaded the UK to disarm and have no Nuclear power //sarcasm off// . They would have been happy too if Moscow had tanks in Downing street because they happen to be a bunch of unions, lefties, and people who detest the UK as well. CND should never have appeared in the British Olympics Ceremony. They are a bl
To be blunt, the Olympic organisation needs to step up in its bid process to make sure that not only is it about getting money in to work within the machinery of an Olympics, but that any partner, and in particular its broadcast partners behave with minimum standards. These would be max advert time per hour, and min coverage required.
Any broadcasters who paster the coverage with advert time and clearly ruin the spectable could be eliminated. Any that don't plan to cover enough get the chop and so on. It should not merely be about the money.
I'm not a fan of the BBC. But its coverage of this Olympics has been stellar, and I can watch any - and all events. No coverage has ever been this vast or all encompassing.
The problems with this idea seem to outmatch the idea. (Not that I'm against it.)
1. API's. Linux is a sea of APIs and they shift like the wind. In the area of drivers, kernel, gfx api's, - its frankly not something I expect Steam to navigate easily.
In windows a lot of development was based on OpenGL, DirectX. OpenGL is certainly doable in Linux, but good luck in having it work in an expectable way - I say that given Intel, ATI, Nvidia drivers..
2. I think it can only happen if someone like steam and perhaps its partners build and define and work with OpenGL, and a directX alike environment. And early on I think to even think about making this work, it would probably need to be a platform idea where steam get hardware makers to make a box that has some fundamental hardware they and their user base would not have to fight. A steambox? Sure. And others could make their hardware 'steambox' ready by supplying hardware that fitted this working model. An early stab would seem to me to require Nvidia - as I think their closed source drivers are the only drivers *today* that would be viable.
3. Other areas like sound and multimedia are just as messy in Linux. Don't see any other way than Steam and partners getting involved in some way to keep some stuff defined.
4. Seems like a good basis to campaign for an open game/source standard.
Yes, all very laudable when you cite a law case that people agree with.
So where is the line drawn? And what laws are good bad?
Facebook will answer this in corporate speak. 'We just comply with local laws'.
And in Germany in 35-39, having a conversation lead to people being killed.
In Islamic states, it could lead to people being killed.
In the chinese state, it can lead to people being killed.
And since when did people accept statsi-alike government or private wiretapping on comms anyway. This is not East Germany, and its not 1960.
Seriously has Sinofsky's mits written all over this.
They killed this in 8, and it just means they have bullshit justification by saying 'it was insecure'.
Yes, run as admin and download/run executable can own your machine. (For the past 30 years. Its not new. )
Nobody should be running as Admin. And partially even when you do the OS impedes this to some degree.
I suspect what is likely is that Gadgets may be flawed to a level where UAC and OS protection can't cover off enough, and its unhinged. But they should be promoting not running as Admin and not promoting running like XP and throwing sticky plasters at bad practice.
I don't really use gadgets often, and its always seemed fairly limited to the odd decent one. But I have to say its a very bullshit and garbage reason to kill a feature/API.
But then thats MS in 2012. Remove and restrict features, charge you for what was free before, and generally be a fucking bunch of dicks.
And Sinofsky, give me back my start button and menu, you c***.
"but at least every end user can go trough the sourcecode to discover faults"
Yes, sure they can. And every user has such ability, and kernel level hacking skills. And each and every individual and company should employ people to do this.
Yessss, right. While this is philosophically a nice point, I have to say that the real world aspect is delusional. And I'll add another point. Its open source. If Governments can insert code into MS codebases, they can do so with any open source. The fact is they might only be caught out by exceptional code audits looking for it.
Let me get this right. A BB platform devices now needs a 'Mobile Fusion Server' to manage it?
Here is a hint. And I don't mean to be nasty - but what part are you not understanding about Playbook not fitting a Blackberry 'fitment'?
Maybe you share the current BB problematic management view.
The Playbook should be nominally have been a Blackberry. The fact it was not was its absolute failure.
It should be managed by BES.
No, I don't want 15 different devices, Servers, and management tools.
Seriously. If someone can't build and provide a platform, and a working one at that, then don't expect me to buy, support, build and maintain it.
There are simplistic core problems with Blackberry. These are not hard to comprehend. Fix the devices. Fix the server (and I mean that, FIX IT.) And turn round the network. Make it the product its vision once enlightened. Right now, the biggest problem is Blackberry is not very good at being Blackberry. The server sucks. The handsets break if you look at them. The playbook wasn't even a blackberry. And network has clear issues that need proper attention. If you fundamentally fix these, and show all the large mobile networks you are on the warpath, and build on top of that, you have a world class company again.
Blackberry remains to my knowledge the only platform for certain things. Some of these include secure handset ops, world wide data transit, and client/server ops. These are basically world beating advantanges being overwhelmed by the scale of problems platform wide. And they might crow all day and night about BB 10, but if BES remains the steaming pile of crap it is, and the network isn't given due attention, it won't matter.
I have to run Blackberry Enterprise Server. Its a complete pain in the ass in terms of support and main. Its years behind, and its clunky, chunky, and we end up going through endless workload and silly upgrade games. The handsets break if users look at them. I have to do warranty on them daily, and BB now quibble over each return, making the whole thing fail.
The handsets themselves - good email platform, crap at everything else. And the world _is_moving off being email platform centric.
Blackberry messenger is a bright point, but that should be broken out and made an application layer across all mobile devices. The same could well be said for the application layer and so on.
Their network is creaking, but is the one serious advantage that they have, but leverage poorly.
The playbook should have been a blackberry in a tablet form. Instead you needed a BB and as PB to get function. = Fail. Do not now how that ever, ever, ever passed QA and system testing.
If I were BB, I would go software only, and build my whole thing as a software/API/Network package, and build on that. Make the software a package available on all main platforms (Android, IOS, Others) and sell on data packages, and data transit using BB networks. And I'd radically overhaul BB enterprise server into something cleaner, better supported and easier to install, manage, run.
If they stay in the handset market, they need a killer phone/tablet BB 10 release, and they need to cut down handsets to one cheap cheerful, and one kickass model (curve/bold) and stop shipping masses of differening handsets, and make the things robust (the current models are not robust, and are inexusably so) And whatever tablet they ship needs to be a full BB.
(For the record, the playbook was so close to being very very good, and was wrecked by a simplistically small, but incredibly important part, that the whol board and playbook team need to have their heads banged together until they realise how stupid that fail was)
Not that anyone at BB listens anymore.
Nuff said.
Microsoft seem almost becalmed and bereft. Windows 8, apart from some good baseline (read unexciting, but sound steps) engineering has a crippled, useless, featureless, desert of a UI. Its also seemingly an assault on Win32 and much of Windows infrastructure, in exchnage for untested WinRT/WinRT, and at least on the surface, a limited, confined, controlled new API and an Empty house as far as software goes.
And I'll be blunt. In desktop terms, Apple was wrong when it went full screen nuts, and so are these idiots. The desktop is a rich, diverse, interesting environment. Its not a phone and its not a tablet.
Windows 8 deserves to actually die and have its journey terminated, at least in this incarnation. And no, taking a failed zune base and trying to make it your computational universe was very stupid.
And its been matched by the stupidity on display in countless windows 8 blog posts where they show their unhinged ideas are based on the feedback from the wrong people (hint, savvy windows users shut off the feedback, they tend not to want or accept MS poking around). The endless idiotic postings about not enough people used the start button, so we deleted it are legion. Die Die Die.