* Posts by kb

224 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2008

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Torvalds rails at Linux developer: 'I'm f*cking tired of your code'

kb

Re: coding

I don't care if their first language is Klingon Linus Torvalds comes off as a foul mouthed 14 year old Halo player...is THAT the kind of image you want for Linux? An OS run by foul mouthed maladjusts?

There was an article recently talking about how the Linux kernel development has become "an old boy's network" because no new blood has come in in years...here's why, nobody wants to deal with bosses who are foul mouthed ego-maniacs. If you can't act like a professional then you shouldn't be doing the job,PERIOD.

Is this photo PROOF a Windows 7 Start Menu is coming back?

kb
FAIL

Re: LOL

But they STILL don't get one of the most fundamental rules of business which is if you have a flop, or a product with a horrible rep? you sell that sucker CHEAP. Instead Windows 8.1 is priced the exact same as a copy of Windows 7...LOL yeah like anybody is gonna grab Win 8.x with Win 7 at the same price!

They need to drop the price of Win 8.x Home to $50 USD or less, I'd personally say $35-$40 USD. this would get more users to try it, might even get some of those later XP machines to switch, but all they are doing by keeping the price high is getting those people whose XP is about to go EOL a reason to be looking at Chrometops and Android tablets, dumb move MSFT.

Friends don't do tech support for friends running Windows XP

kb
FAIL

Re: This time Microsoft has gone too far

I don't know why because thanks to their boneheaded charging of $100+!!! for Win 7 and 8.x their pulling the plug on XP is gonna be giving a LOT of folks "free upgrades" to Win 7 thanks to piracy.

The stupidest thing they EVER did was kill the $50 Win 7 upgrade as for the first time I had actually seen piracy drop like a stone, after the price went back up? The local papers were filled with PCs running Ultimate. If there was a functioning brain left in Redmond they'd offer Win 7 Starter for $35 and your choice of Win 7 or 8.1 for $50 to get the XP users to switch, instead between those that end up getting tablets and those that get pirate 7 they won't get squat, stupid.

Haswell micro: Intel’s Next Unit of Computing desktop PC

kb

Re: Far too expensive

Look into one of the AMD Bobcat motherboards. Don't know the UK price but the USA price is around $80 USD and will hold from 4Gb-8Gb of RAM depending on the model. As a nice bonus they have AMD GPUs that can do 1080P so they can be used as media tanks as well as servers. Performance wise I'd put them around 30% higher than what you have due to being OoO chips.

To get one in a case similar to the NUC you are looking at $189-$350 USD, just depending on what is included in the kit, SSD, wireless, etc.

Acer C720 Chromebook with Haswell battery boosting goodness

kb
FAIL

Re: AC 09:48

But it points out something that more should be commenting on, which is despite all the claims that "The big bad M$ will lock us out with UEFI, oh noes!" that it was GOOGLE that took what WAS a bog standard laptop and made it so locked down that you can only run Google OS and a handful of hacked bootloader Linux versions. Oh and no dual booting allowed last I checked, you have to wipe Google OS before you can run anything else.

Say what you will but I can take any Windows 8 laptop and be on my way to booting up any flavor of Linux, BSD, or previous version of Windows in mere minutes, while the Chromebook simply can't do nearly as much and restricts your choices.

Nokia's phone division burned us so badly we HAD to flog it, says CEO

kb

Re: android......if only....

Riiight...lets just drive a stake through the magical thinking that Android could save Nokia, shall we? This is about crackberry but the math applies equally to Nokia and shows the odds that Android could have saved Nokia? Virtually zip.

http://www.zdnet.com/should-blackberry-have-gone-android-the-answer-is-no-and-these-numbers-show-why-7000019409/

As to WHY Nokia went the way thy did the answer is simple...bad management. Like Palm before them when they had the lead instead of continuing to build upon what they had and reach for new markets they simply kept pushing the snooze button and making the same device over and over AND OVER until they were as out of date as an 8-track player.

In defence of defenestration: Microsoft MUST hurl Gates from the Windows

kb
Windows

Re: To paraphrase The Matrix

If the rumors are true the best answer is NOT to replace Ballmer at all, its to break up MSFT and put Sinofsky (who the rumor says was fired for telling Ballmer that sticking a cellphone UI on the desktop was just as dumb as sticking a desktop UI on a cellphone) in charge of Windows/Office and put Elop in charge of WinMo and finally a third division for consumer electronics and gaming.

Its pretty obvious that the problem has been trying to force windows to be something it is not, a "one size fits all" solution to all their problems, along with the higher ups trying to force tie ins where they simply made no sense. I'm reminded of the former inventor of WinAmp talking about why he hated and quit AOL "It was ALL about the service (dialup AOL) and they didn't care about anything else or even if bundling would be smart or a disaster, it was about nothing but pushing the service above all and I could see it would end up with WinAmp trashed as WinAmp users didn't want AOL dialup" and the same is happened with MSFT, they keep trying to force things under the WinFlag, even when they make no sense.

Splitting the company would let each group focus on their target, stop the idiot attempts at making one size fit all, and allow each to focus on their core customers and making them happy instead of trying to do everything under a single banner. if they stick to the current course and merely put Elop in to continue forcing windows to be a cellphone? Stick a fork, sell the stock, its toast. Both Google and Apple have shown that mobile and desktop are different beasts, trying to make it all under one banner just makes messes.

ZTE Open: This dirt-cheap smartphone is a swing and a miss

kb

Re: Underpowered hardware doesn't mean the OS is shit....

Really? Somebody needs to tell that to my poor wittle Optimus Q then, it is snappy and responsive when according to you it should be slow as Xmas.

Of course i don't have a bunch of dumb social "app" garbage running in the background 24/7 either..Did you think it might, just maybe, be the lousy apps you install that could possibly be the problem?

kb

Re: RTFA, it's an 80quid phone being compared to an 800quid phone, FFS.

It doesn't change the fact that the phone sounds like a poor choice compared to phones in its price range and even lower!

Compare what we just read with the Galaxy precedent and LG Optimus, both of which are sold for $50 new at the prepaid shops here in the USA. While its true both run an older version of Android (2.2 and 2.3 respectively) as someone who has tried both and ended up going with an Optimus as my "day to day beat around" phone I can say its...its a nice phone actually. even though its CPU is just 800MHz its snappy, surfs well, there are even a ton of games and emulators that work quite well with it, and this is a $50 NO CONTRACT phone.

If this would have came out when iPhone 1 came out it might have had a shot as a low cost alternative, but as long as Google keeps supporting Gingerbread its main competition is gonna be the sub $100 Android phones and TFA sounds like it really doesn't measure up when compared to those.

Microsoft mocks Apple and new iPhones in vids it quickly pulls

kb

Re: Apple makes consumer products

That doesn't change the fact that is funny, I personally laughed at both videos. Of course the best humor comes from truth and the fact that Apple is all about image (and are probably running out of gas now that iJobs is no longer there) and that MSFT just loves the bullet points and sys reqs? pretty spot on IMHO.

Chubby-chasing sex trolls ran me offline, says fashion blogger

kb
Unhappy

Re: Welcome to the real world, kid.

They do, you just don't hear about them as often as women tend to be more subtle about such things. Trust me they are out there, I have had to get a restraining order or two in my day, they just don't use the net as much as the guys do. I hate to say it but sometimes stereotypes ARE true and women seem to just be better manipulators and realize that anything they post can be traced back while guys are about as subtle as a bull in a china shop.

Can Microsoft's U-turn stop the Xbox 360 becoming another XP?

kb
Meh

Re: W T F ??

MSFT filed for a patent last year to allow channels to charge by the user based on how many the Kinect can "see" in a room, which is what the other poster is talking about. will they do it? Well considering they have ignored their userbase when it comes to win 8 and probably would have with the XB1 if the PS4 preorders hadn't shot through the roof after their little "reveal" I'd say the odds are probably goo that they will at least try.

kb
Unhappy

Re: Fuck them.

And whose fault is that? Moral of the story, don't work for scumbags. Plenty of room in the indie market, just ask runic who have been enjoying success with the torchlight series. Make a good product, treat the customers right, and you can just sell to use directly.

kb
FAIL

Re: I think you missed the point.

But that is missing a big factor in why that comparison doesn't work. With XP? You honestly don't NEED to get MSFT to "bless" you to make it a usable OS, whereas with consoles MSFT can simply refuse to license new games and that is that.

kb
Windows

Re: No.

You can't compare Sony and MSFT, two totally different corporate cultures. Look at how quickly they pulled the plug on the original Xbox when X360 came out, while promising them backwards compatibility (that never came for the majority of games) while Sony kept putting out games for a couple of years.

With MSFT once the new one comes out that is it, you won't hear a peep about the previous product because as far as they are concerned it doesn't exist. How much do you hear from them about Win 7? Zune? Winphone 7? as far as MSFT is concerned they just don't matter. Japanese corporate culture isn't quite as "quarterly" focused as the US corporate culture so as long as people are willing to buy a product they are willing to sell.

I'm sure the OEMs stuck with all those copies of Win 8 would have liked MSFT to have a similar culture but alas it doesn't.

Microsoft to open Windows Stores inside 600 Best Buy locations

kb
FAIL

Re: Backtrack much?

Look up "Apple store versus Windows Store" if you want a good laugh, somebody filmed in front of both right after the surface launch and what did he see? that the Apple store was packed, the Windows Store? Ghost Town.

At the end of the day he is slapping a paint job on a pinto and sticking a porsche price tag on it and its just not gonna work, it has about as much chance of working as Walmart jacking its prices 5000% and saying they will now compete with macy's, the demographic that buys Apple wouldn't have windows if you paid them and the ones buying windows won't pay Apple prices for it, so who does it leave? Well i think the sales figures shows who is left, nobody.

Former Microsoft Windows chief: I was right to kill the Start button

kb
Windows

Re: Thank god hes out !!

I'm sorry friend but as a small PC shop owner I can tell you that all that? Really wouldn't have saved Win 8.

There is several flaws with Win 8 and metro is but one, the way the design makes assumptions, such as how it thinks the users need ZERO context or explanation, not even mouse overs to let them know what this or that does, its "We are all artsy fartsy!" attitude of making elements that makes it damned hard to tell at a glance what is clickable and what isn't, and the reason I won't carry it in my shop "refresh my PC" which I am convinced was put in there as they had a serious corruption issue they just weren't able to pin down so they stuck that in there as a CYA.

I can tell you that since Win 7 reached RTM I have yet to have to reinstall Win 7 that wasn't either caused by malware infection or hardware failure but I've had waaay too many people paying me to "refresh their PC" thanks to Win 8 shitting itself and them not being comfortable with the procedure. As to the why I can't tell you, I have a theory that its the bolted on nature of TIFKAM and the way its constantly updating all its tweeting twitting crud in the background, probably with a good dose of MSFT's beloved hamfisted DRM, but that is just a theory.

In any case i can tell you that Win 8 is NOT "just Win 7 with TIFKAM" because many of those problems, including the refresh issue, still remain even if you restore the start menu or even replace the shell completely with something like Astonshell. any way you slice it Win 8 is simply a bad design and like Vista I seriously doubt it can be salvaged, and I predict Win 8.1 will be the first double flop in the history of MSFT. No wonder Acer is bragging about 12% of their income coming from Chromebooks, they like most of the OEMs are looking for the exit to get away from TIFKAM.

kb
Unhappy

Re: A pedant writes... <--- perfect!

Well friend if the rumors are true (and please do take into account they ARE rumors, no way to get the full story unless you are one of the participants in these things) then the reason Sinofsky was kicked out the door was NOT because he wanted any of this tripe, quite the opposite in fact as he wanted to make Win 8 the Win98SE to Win 7s Win98, it was BALLMER who rammed all this through and when Sinofsky finally got fed up and said "Fix this or I'm out" Ballmer told him to walk.

Considering the evidence such as him being given the boot on a Monday and how while his speeches on the run up to Win 7 were obviously written by him and tech heavy the speeches he gave on the run up to Win 8 were written by marketing and nothing but buzzword bingo (seriously watch one of his Win 8 speeches and take a shot every time he says touchscreen or touch and you'll pass out before the halfway point) I tend to believe this version as it makes the most sense with the known evidence we have. Ballmer has been pushing Apple Clones for more than half a decade like Zune and Kin and Zune Market, ALL failures I might add, while the work done by Sinofsky up to Win 8 didn't show any leaning in that direction, Its really not hard to see whose sweaty fingerprints are all over the design of Win 8.

Another blow for Flash as Unity gaming engine kills support

kb
FAIL

Re: good riddance

Yeah who wants a platform that doesn't patent troll? Bah, give us an H.265 DRM that will lock out free OSes and make sure that nobody that doesn't buy from a major corp can enjoy any entertainment,!

Got a Windows XP end-of-life plan? Neither does anyone else

kb
Windows

I had all my main customers switched years ago.

After using Win 7 through the beta i told them that unlike Vista it was worth the switch and within 6 months of RTM I had them all switched. A few hiccups with really old software and one scanner that needed replacing but other than that it really wasn't that hard.

Ironically the only one that hasn't completely switched...is me. I've had an old Sempron that I've used as a netbox in the shop for years but because its so old there is no way I'd be able to find drivers for Win 7, so next week I'll have an ULV Athlon X2 for a spare AMD board I've had sitting in the back slapped into a case and Win 7 installed.

Its understandable why XP lasted so long, its low resource, stable, easy to configure, I'd put it on the short list with XP X64 and Win 7 on any "best of" list but lets face it guys...its 13 years old. When XP came out the average PC was a 400-733MHz single core with MAYBE 256Mb of RAM so the fact that it was able to scale up as far as it did is frankly amazing but now you can buy 6 core CPUs for less than $100 and 16Gb of RAM around the same, its time to say goodbye like we did with Win2K and let her go into that good night.

Western Digital profits down despite revenue rise

kb
FAIL

Re: Failure

And you'll be lucky if the Seagate lasts a month pal, that is what happens when you end up with a duopoly, quality goes down the crapper. this is why I tell anybody getting a hard drive that the first thing they need to do is stress test the hack out of it, because I'd say a good 1 in 4 are coming off the line junk.

Netbooks projected to become EXTINCT by 2015

kb
Happy

What you want..

Is a EEE 1215B or 1225B, B stands for Brazos APU and from what I hear they have been supported for at least a couple of years now in the major distros. The size is 11.6, 1376x768 with HDMI that can do 1080P under Win 7, not sure about Linux, and gets around 5 on the battery new if you are on Win 7, I was able to get about another hour in Expressgate which is the Linux ChromeOS style OS that comes baked into the netbook. I hear there is a way to add your own apps to EG but I never tried it, it had a browser and media player and that was all I needed at the time.

kb

Re: I think we should be talking about the death of Ultrabooks...

And here is a WHOOSH for you. What the guy was saying is that many people that WOULD have bought netbooks are now either buying laptops or something like a tablet NOT because that was their first choice, but that MSFT and Intel priced the systems right out of existence. Just look at the EEE, started out less than $250, the last units were selling a hair under $500! That is DOUBLE okay? That would be like saying "nobody wants econo cars" when you make every econo car more expensive than a Mercedes!

I know that I ended up having to get a refurb Aspire One for my dad's GF because we simply couldn't find any new netbooks, and several friends bought 15 inchers not because they wanted 15 inches, but because the only 12 inchers were over $1000 and the 15 was $375 this isn't about the public not wanting them, its about Intel and MSFT not wanting them, MSFT because they think that they can slap a paintjob on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money and Intel because they have piles of i5s and i7s they want to push for sweeter margins.

kb
Happy

Re: I'm Surprised They Lasted This Long

I take it you never tried any of the AMD ones? Because with those having an APU (and not starved for RAM like an Atom) they were and are quite nice. I have an E-Series and my dad's GF has a C-Series and both hers and mine just run like champs, flash, H.264, they are more like a little laptop than those pre-crippled Atoms. Heck go look at the $299-$399 USD laptops at any Best Buy, its the same APUs they were using in the netbooks just put in a bigger case.

And as far as the guy running PS...I ran Audacity and would do basic editing of the multitracks my band made...does that count? I wasn't running a bunch of effects but if something needed a little compression or verb to see how it would sound I could do that no prob.

kb
Thumb Up

Gotta agree

While my EEE 1215B doesn't get the battery life yours does (5 hours new, 4 hours after 3 years) it too is 11.6 and has an AMD APU that does 1080P over HDMi and I have NO problem using this as a day to day laptop, I've watched movies, played games, heck edited audio multitracks on the thing and its a great little portable. i tried one of those Atom 10 inchers and even with such a small screen it was just painful to use, everything just chugged.

I think we'll see a comeback of the 12 inchers once the ultrabooks have bombed, i think many of the OEMs are afraid of competing with their ultrabooks but I just don't see many people paying a grand for a mini, I just don't.

kb
Windows

Microsoft KILLED it

I'm not the type to blame "The big bad M$" but in this case its true, when they came out the OEMs got XP Home for $15 a pop, then Win 7 Starter cost $35 and was so crippled that many netbook OEMs went and spent $50 on Win 7 HP, then by Win 8 the price had gone up to $60 according to rumor which when combined with the flood raising HDD costs just left no margin for the OEM.

When I bought my EEE E350 at $300 it was one of the pricier models, many B&M had the Atom netbooks in the $225-$255 range, by the time they had quit making them I had to find a refurbed Acer Aspire for my dad's GF because the EEEs were up to nearly $500.

Frankly I think the 12 inchers may make a comeback,possibly even the 10 inchers, by becoming Chromebooks or maybe Ubuntubooks simply because there is still money to be made on cheap and light netbooks but not with Windows as the OS, MSFT has priced themselves out of the market.

I know I'll be hanging onto my EEE 1215B until it dies (which the way I baby it will hopefully be a long time) even though I have a 17 inch C2D I could be using, simply because its so small and light its easier to carry anywhere, its a great little unit.

I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working

kb
Megaphone

Easy way to fix that..

I used to get the same from my friends and relatives until I told them flat footed i have ONE, and only one simple rule that shall NEVER be broken under pain of death...MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY.

What does that mean? Simple you want a desktop I BUILD IT so I KNOW that you are not buying some underpowered piece of garbage that is gonna be choking and sputtering in 6 months, you want a portable I PICK IT for the same reason, you need gear like a printer or wireless YOU WILL COME TO ME so that I may choose the model, again you don't know squat and if you pick the wrong thing you are just gonna throw money down the toilet and if you want to do that go to Geek Squad and get ripped off, the choice is yours.

Since I have done this? NO more headaches because the ones dumb enough to think they know better can go get their wallets raped for awhile until they either crawl with their tails between their legs and watch me throw the rubbish out and start over or get used to failure, the smart ones? Are enjoying hassle free computing because i don't mess with trash. Now that isn't to say I'm forcing them to buy high end gear, far from it, if they want a desktop I build them a quite nice and affordable AMD Athlon triple of Phenom II quad, on the laptop front there are several companies that make nice AMD A series laptops that are VERY affordable without being flimsy plastic junk.

They save money and more importantly I KNOW what they have, that it will work with what they've got, and since i did the building and setting up I have made it as close to moron proof as humanly possible and a good 95%+ of problems they can possibly run into I can have fixed in under 30 minutes as I set up sensible backup plans using software simple enough I can walk them through a restore over the phone.

Believe me do this and you WILL weed the irritants out but quick, once they know that you will NEVER budge from this rule they will either accept that you know more about such things than they do and listen to you or they will go away never to darken your door again and good riddance i say. with a little common sense one can have a truly networked home that is so simple your dad can run the whole thing, but if you let them just go off willy nilly and buy any old junk and expect you to "make it work"? Well I'm sorry but you really should have just listened to me in the first place and you wouldn't be in this mess, would you?

Intel and pals shrink their semis by $600m as demand droops

kb
Thumb Up

Re: Avoid embarassment? Or avoid wasting money making stuff that never sells?

"Make much more than a year's supply and the surplus never sells AT THE MARGINS INTEL WANTS" FTFY.

After all AMD is having no trouble selling Thubans and Athlons alongside the BD,Liano, and PD chips, but that is because they have such low prices that people don't care if its the latest and greatest or not. I should know as I still am selling quite a few Athlons and Phenom IIs and honestly folks couldn't be happier, I mean X6 for less than $130? Who doesn't like those prices?

But what Intel and AMD are seeing is NOT "the death of the PC", "The rise of mobile computing" or any of the other BS the press keeps coming up with, in fact its beyond simple. You see folks the MHz war? It was a BUBBLE, no different than the housing bubble or dotbomb or any other bubble. For that brief period of 94-06 you had both companies avoid looking at anything BUT Mhz, thus leading to an arms race with PCs that software designers took advantage of. People in that period really had no choice but replace every couple of years as new software simply wouldn't run on a 3 year old P2. My shop PC went from a 400MHz to a 2200MHz in less than 5 years, things were jumping THAT quickly.

What we are all seeing now is simply sanity returning to the landscape, because after both companies hit the thermal wall and switched to lower powered multicores instead of cranking out single core space heaters? Both Intel and AMD found out that software that scales with cores is REALLY hard to write. When the PCs I was selling on the low end 5 years ago was a Phenom triple with 4GB of RAM, how many folks are gonna need the latest core iWhatever when the jobs they have aren't even stressing that Phenom I?

So I don't see the sales coming back to bubble era numbers so shrinking will probably be the smart move in the long run but sales will continue, just in a more steady and less huge leaps in tech.

Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014

kb
Thumb Up

You are correct

Not once but twice, first with WinCE for WinPhone 7 (which while partially based on WinCE many WinCE apps wouldn't run) and now with WinPhone 7 for WinPhone 8.

Frankly they have done so in the desktop as well and while I supported the changes when it came to Vista as lets be honest, both the driver model and the "always run as admin" design of WinXP just wasn't the right path the amount of breakage when it comes to win 8 is just unreal. I have had several customers that (against my advice) bought Win 8 systems only to find so much of their software was broken that it was cheaper to buy copies of Win 7 Pro and have me install them than it was to replace the broken software, just crazy how much Win 8 broke.

Rarely do I agree with Forbes but they are right in naming Steve Ballmer worst CEO, the guy is a trainwreck and is burning their bridges and losing share in what was a practical monopoly on X86 to try to grab share in a space that its obvious they aren't wanted. The SMART move would have been to truly copy Apple (instead of the "cargo cult" way they are doing so now) and kept Metro for tablets/phones like iOS is to OSX and then focused on a "its GOT to work!" mantra when it came to ease of connectivity.

Let Metro sink or swim on its own without the Windows name and legacy, focus on having the ability to connect everything as simple as it can possibly be, and they'd have a shot at mobile. The way they are going now? Its gonna make MS Bob look like a runaway smash hit.

SimCity owners get free game, EA will get A NEW CEO

kb
Thumb Up

I upvoted you

Because I think that voting with our dollars is the best way to decide what we will and will not take. if being online 24/7 doesn't bother you and this game, despite the issues, makes you happy? Then I'm happy for you, I really and truly am.

That said I will NEVER buy a game that demands i be online merely to "prove" I am not a criminal, I gave you my money and expect to be treated as your customer NOT as a potential shoplifter. If you went to a shop and a security guy followed you down every aisle, even though you had done nothing and shopped with them for years, would you go back? So why put up with the same treatment from a game company?

I buy games from Steam because I can play for a month without Internet and the worse it'll do is tell me that achievements in some game won't count or that it needs to sync my saves next time I hook up, big deal and the services they give me in return for using Steam DRM (great chat and matchmaking, great service even over the holidays, cheaper prices) makes it worth it to me.

I won't buy Origin games as I have already heard from friends how quickly EA will use the banhammer (costing you your games at the same time BTW) if you dare complain, I won't buy always online like the AC series and Splinter Cell series (although I heard Ubisoft has removed all the always online stuff so if true I may pick them up) and when it came out that D3 was online only not only did I buy several copies of Torchlight II to give away to family and friends (if you haven't tried TL2 its a great game, you can do LAN or online MP and SP is offline) but I wrote a nice letter telling Blizzard WHY I wouldn't buy D3 after buying a good dozen copies of D1 and D2 (again so my friends and family could enjoy it too) so they could see how their boneheaded move cost them another loyal customer.

Vote with your wallet folks and stick to your guns, at the worst you'll have a better gaming exp and be rewarding those that treat you well, and at best as we saw with Ubisoft getting rid of always online you CAN make a company change direction.

Build a BONKERS gaming PC

kb
WTF?

Re: welcome to th 1990'2

As opposed to consoles which have embraced every bad trait of the PC, long load times, multiple patches, online registration, but none of the upsides like long lasting MP communities, the ability to host your own game servers, and of course MUCH lower prices? I guess a fool and their money and all that.

Thankfully I switched my two boys off of consoles for Steam and honestly? we have never been happier. We now have more games than we can play thanks to all the sales, by buying Tiger kits I was able to build us 3 nice AMD systems for less than $1200 USD and that was before all the MIR, after i got those it came to less than $1100, and these systems have plenty of cores (2 hexacores and an AMD triple for the youngest but he'll be switching to a hexa soon enough, he decided he'd rather have a bigger screen than a hexa at the time), plenty of RAM, plenty of space, I could easily see us playing games on them 5 years from now with nothing more than a GPU upgrade in another year to year and a half.

Oh and the best part? Not only do we not need to deal with split screen BS but instead each have our own PC with widescreens which makes gaming in something like Borderlands series or Bioshock MUCH more enjoyable but unlike the consoles we not only have the ability to upgrade but when a system finally gets too old for gaming you can use it for other things. My gaming PC from 2006 with a Pentium D? My ex neighbor is gaming on it as we speak, just perfect for his flight sims and surfing. Heck even my very FIRST gaming PC, a 486DX? Its STILL going, I sold it to a local lumber mill who use it as the controller for their custom column lathe. Even after all these years she runs 8 hours a day, six days a week, no problem.

So I would personally argue its no contest, the PC has more uses, better prices, longer life, its just a better way to game.

kb
Happy

Buy AMD, its the better deal

Lets be honest folks, games haven't been CPU in a loooong time and frankly the AMD CPUs are overkill while being dirt cheap. I picked up a 1035T for a lousy $85 USD brand new...that is 6 cores with a turbo of 3.2GHz for $85, how can you top that? My youngest plays all the latest games on a $55 Athlon triple at 3.2GHz and honestly even in the huge MMOs he plays the CPU has cycles to spare.

So you can pick up a VERY nice socket AM3+ board for around $55, that is what I paid for mine which supports 32GB of RAM and Crossfire grab one of the Thuban X6 CPUs (I'd stay away from BD/PD as their "half core" designs just aren't as good as the Thubans, you need a 4.4GHz BD to beat a 3.0GHz Thuban) with a really nice aftermarket cooler (I prefer the Coolermaster N520 myself) and you can build a nice system for less than the cost of the CPU and board if you went Intel. By doing this you can then spend the money you save on upgrades that WILL make for faster games like an SSD or better GPU.

As an added bonus most of the Thuban line has plenty of headroom to OC if you buy a decent board (I prefer Asrock as it has nice automatic as well as manual OC tuning) and with turbocore its like having two CPUs, a fast triple for games that are more single threaded and a hexacore for transcoding or doing work in the background while you game. The prices and bang for the buck is just nuts, the chips and boards have never been cheaper, Intel is good if you are doing work where money doesn't matter and every cycle counts but for gaming? I have yet to see a game that didn't play great on my hexa or even on the youngest boy's Athlon triple. The fact that I could build 3 gaming desktops for less than $1300 with HD4850s and everyone having 8GB of RAM and plenty of HDD space? Just can't beat prices like that folks, you just can't.

1 in 7 WinXP-using biz bods DON'T KNOW Microsoft is pulling the plug

kb
Paris Hilton

Re: Really?

They really tried pushing my doctor to switch his office to win 8, she and her nurses are all older, know what they did after trying Win 8 for a month? They went to iPads with keyboards and new charting software installed. When I asked her about it she said "I don't have to fight this like I did that other mess" and that was that.

I have a feeling Win 8 is gonna come back to haunt them, as XP users are frankly just as well off going Apple or Google since they'll have to learn a whole new UI whichever way they go.

Paris because I doubt even she would be stupid enough to run off her fans like that.

kb
Facepalm

WRONG

There is a point to getting Win 7 over 8, the point being that if you don't have a touchscreen Win 8 is a mess. for example try win 8 on a laptop and see how often the stupid thing will get confused and decide one minute you are moving the cursor, the next swiping...because we all have to run smartphones now and those use swipes don't ya know?

I'm sorry but after fighting that stupid thing for nearly 2 months Win 8 is the first MSFT OS since WinME I will NOT allow in my shop. Not that its gonna matter anyway as from the looks of it "Windows Blue" will be released in 2014 so like Vista Win 8 is gonna be a "here today, gone later today" release, ala the Star Trek rule.

kb
Thumb Up

Not to mention

there is plenty of hardware out there that runs XP quite well that won't run Win 7 and 8 at all. I'm not just talking about the really old stuff like the 2004 Sempron nettop I use at the shop (which will be staying on XP as while it has 2GB of RAM and does its job just fine with AV and firewall neither the video nor the sound is supported in any OS other than XP) but I've seen plenty of Pentium Ds and early Athlon X2s that won't run Win 7, sure as hell won't run win 8, because nobody bothered to make compatible drivers. On one Pentium D I tried upgrading to Win 8 I found there was no sound, ethernet, or onboard graphics drivers to be had. You would have to throw out a system that frankly is overkill for the kinds of roles that particular customer has, all so MSFT can push their cellphone UI? No thanks.

XP will be hanging around long past 2014, with so many Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, and Athlons and X2s out there that still run great I have a feeling its gonna have a loooong tail. And I don't see how then will be different than now with regards to hackers, not like MSFT releases out of schedule patches hardly ever and as long as you have moved away from IE (since MSFT doesn't backport their browser) so that the browser gets patches? I don't see what the problem is. Heck there are still browsers out there that support Win98 (Kmeleon) so I doubt XP support will be going away anytime soon.

Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant

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Thumb Down

Re: Quite frankly.....

Oh please! if he were any more full of crap we could turn the guy into a methane farm! wanna know why drivers suck in Linux? Linus "I'm too good for an ABI, even though BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX and even OS/2 has one" Torvalds.

And if you want to know what this is REALLY about and why MSFT has HAD to go SecureBoot look up "Win 7 SP1 all versions" on TPB. The pirates have a version of Windows that PASSES WGA and most people will never ever know that version of Win 7 they got from Joe's PC hut ain't legit. they tried WGA, that failed, that tried just giving OEMs VLKs, that failed, now they are down to secure boot because every other thing has been hacked by thieves.

But I say if Torvalds doesn't want to support SecureBoot? Good, keep Linux on ARM and the one vendor (AMD) that has chosen CoreBoot over UEFI. If you think Linux is great then vote with your wallets, buy ONLY Linux hardware, and we'll see if Linux has enough of a market to be worth supporting. i have a feeling though outside the server space the numbers will be lower than the margin for error.

Bill Gates: Windows Phone strategy was 'a mistake'

kb
WTF?

No it hasn't! God I HATE how people try to rewrite history to make MSFT this evil genius when at best they were bumbling henchmen. Here is what happened folks from somebody who is gotta more grey than Gandalf and was there since the days of the Altair, ready?

DOS was insider dealing thanks to Billy's mom but more importantly DR dropped the ball and blew off IBM, you'll see "the other guy does something REALLY stupid" quickly becomes a theme with MSFT. Apple was taken over by one bad CEO after another that flooded the channel with confusing products so MSFT was able to capitalize thanks to the "gang of nine" and the MHz wars. WordPerfect ruled the market but then decided "Meh Windows won't be big, no worries" and put out a half baked DOS based WordPerfect that crashed more than it ran, again giving MSFT a free shot.

Somebody at Netscape decided to do a full rewrite on the browser just as things were heating up, the result was a crashing mess called NS 4 that had people going out and downloading IE because while it wasn't as nice at least they could look at 2 websites in a row without crashing. beOS tied their OS first to a failed AT&T CPU, then one failing or dying chip after another and by the time somebody realized "Hey we should be on X86!" it was too late as Windows was everywhere and WinXP was around the corner.

You look at the entire history of MSFT and every win is followed by the sentence "And then the competitor did something REALLY REALLY dumb" which gave them a free shot. X360? PS3's $600 price tag scared off a LOT of folks. DirectX become the gaming platform? Khronos drops the ball with OpenGL and after much infighting decides they care only about CAD and doesn't bother keeping up with the latest GPU tech forcing the GPU makers to use "shims" which gives it worse performance.

Which brings us to today as so far neither Google nor Apple has done anything truly facepalming dumb so MSFT has gone nowhere in mobile. MSFT's only real strength has been to take obvious openings handed them by the competition and run with them, no stupid move by competitor? No chance of MSFT getting ahead because innovation and smart design has never been the strength of the house of Redmond. All the "EEE" and other schemes were frankly MSFT trying to justify their success in a way that didn't sound like "We bumbled into a lucky break" which again and again that is ALL that has happened. Linux gains no share when they put out the Vista bomb because at that very moment the Linux devs decide to shoot the OS in the face by throwing out the DEs and sound subsystem for alpha quality garbage. Again and again its not MSFT being smart, its the other guy being pants wettingly DUMB.

kb
Thumb Down

Re: Gates quote

To judge whether he is a success or a giant megafail (hint, its the latter) lets look at his win/loss ratio. Win-Win 7, WinServer 2K3, 2K8, half win, X360 (2 billion RRoD cost it being a full win). Now lets look at his losses, Zune, Kin, WinPhone, killing the profitable playsforsure for the flop Zune market and killing any forward momentum they had in the media biz, Sidekick, Bing (which now pays you to use it in the form of gift cards), the billions they had to write off for the ad company that went nowhere, the billions they spent to buy Yahoo Search, and by Xmas this year you can add Win 8, Surface (both RT and pro) and the new WinPhone.

I'm sorry but the guy is a trainwreck. he has cost the company at LEAST 40 billion in the past half a decade and has ZERO ROI to show for those billions flushed down the loo as you Brits call it. His "leadership" is so bad that one could have had a higher ROI having monkeys fling poo at the stock page and investing there than they got by having Ballmer at the wheel!

There is A REASON why Forbes names him the Worst CEO and that is because that is what he is. as a retailer of PCs I can tell you NOBODY wants Windows 8, I have stopped even having Win 8 systems in my shop because they gather dust. People would buy a system with half the power and memory rather than get stuck with Win 8, yes its hated THAT much by the public. You expect this clown to lead the company when he is losing share in a monopoly situation? I wouldn't trust him to catch a cold with a map and a GPS unit.

The sad part is if they would have stuck to Win 7 on the desktop, pushed Metro on tablets/phones along with a "it MUST just work" mantra? They probably could have made some gains. But with Ballmer in charge the strategy always seems to be "What is the other guy doing? We'll do that but poorly and half baked" and so it ends in disaster. Bottom line if the board doesn't get rid of Gates little buddy MSFT will be RIM in less than 5 years, a company that once ruled their market but now only has legacy customers and even they are looking for the exit. The OEMs are all on the phone to Google, Valve has ported Steam to Linux and will be coming out with their own console, everybody is jumping off before the ship goes down.

'Disturbed' Dell investors could tank private buyout

kb
Facepalm

Re: Shock asset stripper thinks his shares should be worth more!

Riiight, and I can fly south for the winter by growing wings out my backside. quit believing the stupid press, okay?

Let me make this perfectly clear, this is from somebody who has been in the trenches selling and servicing Pcs since the days of Win 3.x so i know of which I speak, the reason PC sales are down? is because everybody and their dog has multiple PCs and they are ALL overpowered!

Look at what I was selling on the LOW end more than 5 years ago: Phenom I X3 with 4GB of RAM and a 400GB HDD, now how many folks gonna be able to max that out? and on mobile it was Core duos and Turion X2s with 2GB of RAM and 250Gb HDDs. again how many are doing tasks when they are mobile those chips won't handle?

Once the MHz bubble ended and the core wars began PCs quickly went from good enough to top fuel funny cars yet the jobs that people had for them didn't change. Even the gamers don't have to buy as often because at 100 million a pop its doubtful games are gonna get more graphically rich than they are now.

Mark my words ARM will be in the same boat in less than 2 years, already you have Nvidia at 5 cores, Samsung at 6, and I predict by next Xmas season you'll see multicore phones and tablets under $100. Since a good 85% of the population won't feel any difference between an ARM dual and a quad you'll see the sales level out as the stragglers get one and after that it'll start dropping, just as it did on PC.

Until someone invents a new language or framework that will let programmers use as many cores as a system has as trivially as writing a single threaded app is today you are gonna see that the tech levels off because the average user just doesn't need to upgrade when the system they have is overpowered.

kb
WTF?

But the thing is..

If you look at the figures dell really isn't doing badly, in fact they've already climbed back up to pre-recession levels even though the economy is still down. profits are up, sales are up, why should they sell for $13 a share when it looks like the company is doing better?

It isn't like the Yahoo deal where the moron blocked an offer that was higher than they could possibly get on the market and yahoo had been doing nothing but failing, no in this case dell is doing better which is probably why Michael wants to take it private.

Microsoft can't even shift Windows 8 slabs in the middle of a tablet frenzy

kb
FAIL

The only reason the netbook is dead

is that MSFT killed it. The whole point of the netbook was a small and CHEAP Internet, media, and basic office device, and when first released the OEMs could get WinPX Home for $15 a pop. Then MSFT went to $35 for 7 Starter, $50 for Win 7 Home, and they just cut all the chances for the OEMs to make a cent right out. When I bought my Win 7 AMD netbook it was $350 with Win 7 HP X64 and 4GB of RAM, by the time the last Win 8 netbooks rolled off the shelves the price had already reached $500 USD.

I think in the coming months you'll see more and more OEMs go to Google's Android and ChromeOS as MSFT has decided they are a "premium" brand and expect the OEMs to only sell premium units. Ask the OEMs with warehouses full of ulrabooks how well that worked in a dead economy MSFT, of course your price for SurfaceRT just shows you still don't get it.

Dell: Shhh, don't tell a soul, but the PC sector ISN'T doomed...

kb
Thumb Up

Re: A New Tack

What you are describing is the stock market...pre 1986. If you look at a chart showing GDP and amount of trade in the market between 1935-1985 (29 was of course the bubble pop) you'd see that USA GDP when compared to stocks stayed between 12%-20% for ALL of that time, which includes the biggest boom in American history, the post war manufacturing boom.

But then in 86 you see it shoot up to nearly 30% GDP and every year it has shot ever higher, now its at 430% of GDP and rising...why? Simple before that the only ones in the market were INVESTORS, who did their homework and were in it for the long haul. Reagan when he created the 401K and 403B suddenly flooded the market with money and that money had to go somewhere, where it has gone is to rampant speculation.

This is why America and most of the other stock markets are so focused on trends and gossip, you have too many dollars chasing too little actual value so that true value (such as Dell showed) matters little what matters is the PERCEPTION of value in the form of short term stock bounces.

Facebook burnout: 61% of users have needed a break

kb
Happy

Actually..

I remember reading such a survey a couple of years back when they found that on average 71% of the games that a gamer owns never get finished because they get bored or go to something else and forget about it.

as for FB what I've found is you really need to spend about a week off and on just killing all the stupid notifications, stuff like "So and so has invited you to play tardedville" and once you do that its just fine. I use it to stay in touch with distant relatives and for that purpose its just fine once you turn all the stupid notifications off.

But I can see why many get burnt if they don't turn those off, the thing will drive you nuts with a constant stream of drivel if you don't.

Microsoft blasts PC makers: It's YOUR fault Windows 8 crash landed

kb
Happy

Re: End of XP support will force decision

May I make a suggestion? Look at the AMD Bobcat boards. these have an APU, so you have the CPU+GPU covered, AMD has opened all their drivers so you can run any OS that you want, and most importantly while they are quite cheap you'll get more performance than those circa 2006 machines while using less power under load than that 2006 machine uses idling.

Because i'm guessing with Intel boards from 2006 we are talking Pentium 4s here and those chips were truly awful, they just gulp power while giving just lousy performance. With the Bobcat you get dual cores plus an HD6310 GPU that does full 1080P over HDMI and at just 18w under load the amount you'll save in power alone makes it well worth the switch.

kb
WTF?

Re: Microsoft need to re-learn the basics

The problem isn't the OS, its you. It sounds like you have a corrupted Skype install, I've seen it happen a ton of times, what you need is an unattended Skype install and luckily that is free. Just go to ninite.com and check the box for Skype, while you are there you might as well check the box for any software you have as it'll update it if there is a newer version and skip it if there isn't, and just let its do its thing. That will fix your Skype problems in a snap.

as for search, while it works fine for me if you need deep level searches you are better off with something like Copernicus or Agent ransack, both do deep level searches better than the built in Windows search. Why people can't just organize their folders into logical groups I'll never know, but at least you do have choices.

And I'm gonna assume you meant good and not food, but frankly win 7 does have a LOT of good features, you simply have to use them. For example jumplists and breadcrumbs make getting back to where you were the previous day trivial, Readyboost can give your programs a speedbump by using a flash for random reads,and the split folder feature (simply slam a folder to the left or right of your monitor to have it take exactly half the screen) makes file and folder comparisons fast and easy, and the libraries feature makes combining media spread over multiple drive behave as if its all in one folder. This combined with file2folderGUI and media center master makes WMC into a great HTPC with all the artwork and synopsis loaded and ready to go, really makes movie night a pleasure.

kb
Thumb Up

Re: fanboi

Anybody who says "The PC is dead" is a fool, plain and simple. and Linux (notice how he had to get the GNU in there, easiest way to spot a rabid fanboi) isn't ever gonna get anywhere near the desktop.

No the simple fact is the MHz bubble has burst and PCs are going back to the 5-8 year cycle which they had before the MHz war, that is all. Windows 8 is just nasty on anything that isn't a touchscreen (which describes a good 98% of the PCs built and being built) but nobody is giving up their desktop or laptop for an iPhone, they are simply holding off purchasing a new one or coming to somebody like me that will be happy to sell them one with Windows 7.

Finally as to their "internal culture"? You could see which way the wind was blowing when Allchin and Ozzie left, its all marketing drones like the Ballmernator which is why all you see are copies of products Apple put out a couple of years before. Don't worry as sooner or later the board will put down the crack pipe and fire him, when even Forbes lists him as worst CEO its gonna be hard for him to drum up support. I think Sinofsky falling on the sword bought him a little time but when win 8 is as big a flop as WinME it'll be bye bye ballmer. Hopefully they'll bring back one of the engineers like Allchin to right the ship and instead of copying Apple they'll take a page from IBM and supplement their software sales with services and all will straighten out.

Until then simply avoid the mess that is Win 8, stick with Win 7 that has another 7 years minimum support (I say minimum because its obvious that 7 is the new XP so it wouldn't surprise me if it gets an extension like XP did) and unlike Win 8 is actually designed for the user and not Wall Street.

kb
Stop

Re: I thought that flogging had been banned...

It does NOT have a start screen, it may be labeled "start" but in terms of functionality it should be called a "task panel" as that is what it is. Can you launch ANY application from it? No? Then sorry but it ain't a start screen, its a task panel. Same as the "charms bar" is a SIDEBAR, it comes from the side, has gadgets on it, no different than the Vista sidebar except it auto-hides which isn't enough for a full on rename.

This is one of the many problems with "WinME the second coming" in that its obvious a good 90% of the changes are for tablets and cellphones. Not running it on a tablet or cellphone? Then its made of frustration and fail. ironically those that run it on a tablet don't care for it much either as the "desktop app" has to be used (settings are scattered between it and metro task panel for example) and as it has been since XP Tablet Edition the desktop metaphor just doesn't work well on a tablet.

Even though I don't care for or own any Apple products I have to give them credit, they didn't just jam OSX onto a tablet and call it a day, all MSFT did was bolt a half baked tablet UI on top of their desktop UI thus breaking both. great job MSFT, first OS since WinME I'm actively avoiding, even Vista wasn't THIS bad.

kb
Megaphone

Re: @Lee Dowling - IT's what happens when you don't listen to your customers

Riiight, a bog standard X86 laptop that is so locked down that only by switching to "dev mode" and jumping through a page and a half worth of CLI BS and possibly voiding your warranty (as you have to completely wipe the drive, no dual booting allowed) is "better" than what we had before?

Love 'em or hate 'em but I can take any Windows laptop and in 10 minutes be booting from one of dozens of distros in live CD or installer form. ChromeBooks are so locked down there is exactly ONE Linux distro that can boot onto a ChromeBook and its a bootloader hacked version of Ubuntu put out by one guy, yeah sure that is gonna get a LOT of support.

I'm all for choice and making MSFT actually compete as the next guy, I think competition is great, this is one of the reasons why i still build AMD exclusively but do NOT replace one corporate master with another, okay guys? Honestly Apple, Google, and MSFT seem to be having this contest called "who can be more of an abuser of their customers" so we should be screaming bloody murder about the dirty stuff Google does and just because MSFT is also terrible doesn't give Google a free pass.

AMD alllllmost promises profitability by year end

kb
Thumb Up

Then put your money where your mouth is..

And buy AMD exclusively. That is all I have been selling in my little shop for the past 5 years and my customers couldn't be happier, they always have killer graphics and the bang for the buck is quite sweet. I also put my money where my mouth is when it comes to my family, we have 5 desktops, 2 laptops, and 3 gaming cards...all AMD.

Honestly unless you are one of the 3% that need every last MHz you can possibly get AMD chips will give you more than you will be able to use. I have been rocking a 1035T 6 core for over a year now and I have to say its the best $100 USD I ever spent on a CPU, it just tears through transcodes while turbocore gives me the extra punch when I'm gaming, just a great chip.

And as somebody who remembers what it was like when Intel was alone, which was nothing but high prices and stagnation, I want to see AMD stay healthy. the fact that 3 out of the 4 consoles are using AMD in either CPU or GPU or both (Xbox Next CPU+GPU, PS4 APU, Wii U GPU) should help but that doesn't mean we can't do our part and buy AMD when we need a new system. Their prices are low, they get plenty of performance, and they have better IGPs and GPUs than Intel, so what's not to like?

US diplomat: If EU allows 'right to be forgotten' ... it might spark TRADE WAR

kb
Unhappy

Re: Hmm.

I hate to break the news to ya but as someone in the states i can tell ya that corps and gov? Kinda the same thing now. Even if the rumors of NSA funding Google aren't true the fact is the feds can walk themselves into just about any corp office and help themselves and nobody will say or do squat, just look at how quickly the story of AT&T having a secret room for the NSA to help themselves to data fizzled.

So I really hope you guys in the EU do pass something like this, as sadly we here in the states have pretty much ZERO say in our government anymore and if their was any doubt who is running the show the supreme court ruling money is speech cleared it right up.

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