Posts by lightknight

Re: I'm Bill Gates...

I think he is. He does spend a week or so a year, at a lodge on his property, reviewing ideas.

Re: Mature market.

Yes, the PC market matured, in much the same way as the Video Game market matured during the '80s. Everyone can remember that bloodbath that video game manufacturers took then...only to find themselves sitting pretty in the '90s / '00s.

Let's do a little analysis of the PC market before we declare it dead, shall we? The PC, in all of its form factors, is used for Accounting, Engineering, Graphic Art, Word Processing, Databases, Computer Aided Design, Video Game Design, Programming, Math, Entertainment, and so on. No other device on the market is as versatile as the PC...it can do everything, and it can do it well, provided you do not cheap out on the hardware or software. In essence, it's highly adaptable, perhaps a magnitude or so away from human beings themselves in terms of adaptability (for now)...and that tells us one thing -> before the PC is going to 'die,' all of its less capable, stripped down variants will go first. It's not the omnivores that go first, it's the species that have stringent needs / demands that can only be met under certain conditions. As such....I do not see Smart TVs dying out, nor do I see the web-enabled consoles found in cars these days near extinction either, nor do I see smart phones suddenly being replaced with a pair of tin cans and some string. Verdict? The PC is versatile, adaptable, and unlikely to die any time soon.

So what's really driving all these proclamations of death of the PC? An excellent question, and I do not have the answer. Why are PC sales down? Does everyone who needs one have one? Impossible, most of the undeveloped world has yet to be fully tapped. As for the developed world, the upgrade cycles as well as new people being born ensures that new PCs will be continuously acquired, provided we do not suddenly revert to an agrarian society. What are the likely suspects? Well, let's see here...Windows 8, which manufacturers were banking on, has not exactly wow'ed people into buying new hardware; additionally, the global malaise of a malfunctioning economy is making people focus more and more on cutting costs / corners...as such, the upgrade cycle may be lengthening.

Re: No, No,Thrice No

Exactly. The gripes people are having are with IT policy which, with the exception of what kind of encryption to use and the length / complexity of your password, kind of isn't set inside the IT department. You can whine and complain all you like that IT is responsible for Security lockdowns and what devices are and are not supported, but the reality is, that's set by both the budget and higher departments. In other words, go yell at the CEO or the Accounting department if you want some change -> larger budgets so IT departments can afford to have one extra person on staff just to deal with Apple equipment, or what have you; or policy changes so that most of the websites / services aren't blocked, because you're supposed to be working at work, instead of surfing the web.

Your boss doesn't want you to work from home? Guess what, you're not getting the permissions to VPN in to do that. Does IT care, at all, whether you VPN in? Fuck no. The entire company could VPN in, from the beach, somewhere nice, and provided they weren't leaking any sensitive data or introducing any viruses to the network, what does IT care?

Re: @mark 12

Yes, and no. Remember, when it comes to programming, there are always people trying to speed things up with a few architecture dependent tricks. Because that's what people want...and businesses want....right up until they need to port the code to a new architecture....at which point they prize that.

Re: Revolutionise what?

Lol, pity it hasn't thought of the submersible carrier yet. Now there's a project that could keep the military fed for decades, even without fighting. Well, supposing we ever fix the economy (about that...).

Re: This guy has done loads of stuff.

Hmmm. Well, he may not exist...could easily be just an operation / composite individual. But allowing for that, you're right; perhaps he believes that because he's a patriot, the men in black will look the other way?

For that matter, is there any proof he has actually taken down a website, save his own proclamation? Has anyone seen a webpage of one of his mentioned sites replaced with something tasteful of his own design, with a little jester logo to let the world know he did it?

Re: Haswell the ghost

Lol, needs will swell to fit wants. Do I NEED a computer with a SSD for a main drive? Well, having used a computer with one for a while, I'd say yes. And I want one as well.

PC makers got their teeth kicked in because they FAILED to design compelling new products -> they choose to believe marketing, like MS did, and got nailed for it. Look at Windows 8...people don't like it, but that didn't stop MS from declaring it the new messiah of the PC world; same with many of these laptops / desktops -> their configurations are terrible (low amounts of RAM, integrated GPUs, mechanical HDs or tiny SSDs (on some models), etc.

PC makers want to know what people want? http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey. There you go. That's from Steam, popular gaming service, which tells you what people are running (software / hardware wise), as well as trends in the industry. Take a look at System RAM, for instance: 8 GB = 24.49%, 12 GB or higher = 10.08%. What does that tell you? Over a third of the PCs out there, who run Steam, are using 8GB or more of RAM. Does your starting lineup on your frontpage spec in a minimum of 8 GB of RAM? No? Well, obviously you aren't targeting these folks. Primary screen resolution? 1080P appears to be the popular choice. Most popular hard drive space? 250 GB to 499 GB = 33.60%, which, if you are tech savy, tells you something: they aren't using 500 GB HDs (in all probability), but possibly 256GB SSDs. Video cards? Nvidia is leading the pack, followed by AMD, with Intel in a distant third. Most popular OS? Windows 7, 64-bit edition. Interpret the rest yourselves.

So yes, PC / OEM manufacturers are getting nailed for hideous price costs for machines like the above (probably closer to $4K for a machine configured with top of the line kit), when their size should give them leverage to work the prices down so the bulk costs work out for both them and the consumer.

Re: The Great Unified System - not

- They realized that simple, cheap devices will outnumber general purpose computers in the future, and they designed a simple device that is twice as expensive as compared to cheap computers / notebooks.

Indeed, but the fun part is: those cheap devices augment people's computer inventory, they don't replace it! Marketing, as usual, got it wrong. They thought, for obvious reasons, that everyone would throw away desktops / laptops, and embrace tablets; I say obviously, because Marketing must never have done any actual content creation (I mean serious content creation) on a tablet, or they'd know that it simply wasn't going to fly.

Yes, people like tablets...for games, browsing, and reading books. Trying to use Visual Studio or Adobe PhotoShop or a CAD program on it would be death; trying to write a term paper on it would probably make your finger tips hurt.

As for Windows 8...well, the Surface probably saved 8 from being a complete train wreck, but 8.1 still has some work to do.

Re: Windows 8.1

Lol...I thought it was just me. Yes, it's sitting in a VirtualBox, waiting for the day MS fixes that Start Menu permanently, or I break down and decide that StarDock will remain a a must-have feature of Windows 8. I get my Start Menu (and Program Groups, etc.)...Windows 8 gets a chance at running on bare metal, provided there are no other nasty surprises waiting for me.

Re: I feel sorry for Snowdon

Well, duh, obviously, that's how things roll. You go public, you make your case, the opposition examines your entire life from the moment you were conceived, finds something that will be blasted into a larger story than the original (pick anything out of the ordinary, it can be phrased to sound wrong..."He ate a hamburger...a piece of cow's flesh, on a bun made from wheat that was once harvested by slaves in a third world country...he ate a hamburger, and enjoyed it!"), people become fixated on the bun ("Did he know that slaves were responsible for his white privileged food? How could he not?"), every time someone brings up the first piece ("Controversial NSA program"), they will, of course, feel the urge to discuss the second piece ("Isn't it dumb how they tried to link him to bun-gate?"), which will eventually sidetrack or arrest the whole conversation, ensuring that nothing is resolved. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Lol

I seem to remember that it used to be someone's job to ensure MS products were recommended (when they fit) and properly overseen so that the 'experience' was a good one...could it have been IT during the late '90s/ early '00s? Oh, but IT took a bath with repeated outsourcings and so on...and despite all this, still had enough strength left to tell MS that Windows 8 was not going to fly.

See, it doesn't matter how awesome your sales guy is -> Sharepoint won't administrate itself. Which means you're either going to have one (or several guys) who know nothing, giving the company a bad image, or they do know something....at which point, "free tech support."

Still, putting people inside Best Buy....wow. Or rather, ouch.

Re: malware

So...no actual evidence of any malware...not that anyone in IT would need it since IT usually has remote access to everything. It's like breaking into your own house...you don't need to, you already have access. Just chaff thrown in the air, to draw attention away from whatever the real problem probably is.

Re: AMD's plan to beat Intel.

Hmm. Browsing NewEgg, I can roll with AMD's top of the line FX-8350 with 8-cores for $200...or Intel's "Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E 3.3GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor" for only $1096, which has 6-cores. The AMD is clocked a little higher, but its thermal envelope is also slightly smaller. I wonder which I would choose....the one with slightly worse single-threaded performance, which, in a world that is pretty far into the multi-threaded stuff is almost a non-sequitur unless running an extremely poorly written application...pay out the ass for slightly better performance under certain circumstances where not having an extra two cores would be useful, or not pay out the pass, and never win the 3DMark benchmark for single-threaded performance...what to do...$896 dollars...that would be 572.89 pounds at the moment...hmm.

Is it true that putting the little blue sticker on your PC case makes it a whole 100Mhz faster? ;-)

Re: I Am Sad

Fair enough. Now, what are we going to do about it? There's inertia behind it, and many of the elected ones have come out condoning the operation. Almost leads me to think that the NSA has some high-quality blackmail on all of the politicians, and told them, "Defend our little program, or the skeletons in your closet see daylight." This is obviously a problem, and a sacrifice may need to be made to take a stand against this evil (one of the politicians will have to take a stand, despite whatever disgrace it will result in, if only to put up the seed of some resistance against this monstrosity). An annoyance, since even I despise the concept of sacrifices...mainly because they have yet to show that they were worth it.

The Intelligence industry is meant to be the eyes and ears of a country. When it turns inwards, and begins acting like the enemy, then it must be treated like the enemy. Cut it off, burnt it down, and build something clean when we can; some would argue that this will leave us vulnerable, for a time; well, we're already vulnerable, and the people attacking us are not so kind as to be speaking with a foreign accent. A gentle reminder will not work here -> they've already gone over the deep-end, and will not stop until some horrific travesty claims them (and too many innocents in the process).

Most importantly, the cost, both economically and civilly, of these operations is outstanding. We are a nation filled with people who, let's be honest, wish to be wealthier, in all aspects (fiscally, technologically, culturally, spiritually) than they already are; having the spooks running vague intercepts across the entire country, carte blanche, is not the way to promote that end.

We have all of these data centers, "clouds," being the operative term, that companies and government (I imagine) have spent a bundle on to build, with the goal of getting a decent return on their investment; we can't realize that return because foreign governments / companies do not trust that we won't go rifling their stuff for shits and giggles, ergo, they do not use these services. The US used to bank on the idea that it was the one country that really cared about those silly freedoms like free speech, and in return, even though its track record was not perfect, it received a lot of business. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way, and business is failing en mass.

The US can have Soviet-style control of the interior...or it can be wealthy. Not both.

Re: Just goes to show

Nonsense. The best crackers are not necessarily the ones with the best coding skills, but the ones who understand how to use every resource available to them, even to the point of getting those resources to act in concert.

How many times has a cracker with excellent coding skills been defeated by something as simple as a hardware keylogger? How many times has a half-baked, couldn't write C-code if it would stay an execution cracker managed to finangle his or her way into some high-level systems simply by offering to play tech support to a company for a day, walking around installing trojans using admin rights on company machines?

And the best crackers, of course, are the ones who've managed to convince the state / security forces that they are working for them, all for the low salary of a few tens of thousands a year, or maybe to get some time off a prison sentence.

I've openly wondered where all the great crackers of yesteryear went...those who were masters of their art in the '90s, and by now, would possibly be gods among men. They all just....disappeared. Now I wonder if, with the sudden rise of these cyberarmies and the firms which offer said services, if they didn't simply change their colors. Still, I am not sure...the problem I have is that if these firms hosted these people, I'd imagine they'd be a lot more effective than they have been. It's odd.

Re: How to generate revenue from social media?

Indeed. That's one of the things that seems so hard for companies to grasp these days: how to 'make money' without destroying their 'eyeball' base. And part of the reason I refuse to take part in (i.e. program, build websites) along the Web 2.0 social paradigm: I think it's just a scam, I think they have no idea how to really make any revenue without destroying themselves, and it just feels unclean.

Let's take a look at Facebook, one of the more successful Web 2.0 companies. How are they acquiring revenue? Advertisements? Freemium Games? Selling profile data crunched from the accounts of millions?

And how have their eyeballs reacted? People are sick of it. They hate being flooded with erroneous advertisements, pay to play games, and having their private details sold on the open market. It's the snake eating its own tail here...the more Facebook attempts to extract revenue with these methods, the more its destroys its base, the sooner Facebook passes into obsolescence.

Let's face it. These people really don't have a sustainable design for providing a service that people see in a positive light that can also produce a positive revenue source. The fallback for every website seems to be advertising which usually, over time, grows to the point where useful content is displaced with banner and flashing items. They need to innovate / invent a new design if they wish to collect revenue, but have yet to come up with one.

Re: I agree...

I think they were rolling with the 'fake it until you make it' style of thinking. If they just put out enough good chatter about Windows 8, and maintained it long enough, it would, in time, demolish the 'hump' of old biases, and everyone would embrace the new interface, praising it as the new way of doing things. Very marketing, very psychological, very wrong. They made the same mistake that venture capitalists complain about when interviewing potential candidates -> you need to be profitable from day one, or, in this case, the interface needs to sell itself from the get go. Techs need to pickup a copy of the new Windows 8 interface, and find that it scratches an itch they didn't even knew they had....something like buying a new car, pressing a button, and finding a drinks dispenser / ice chest.

And the techs have been telling MS, since day one, that Windows 8 not only did not do that for them, but that it went in the other direction. The computer industry would have been happy with Windows 8 being Windows 7 SP3, and paid for the privilege of running it. See, this is how bad MS messed this up...they took something that worked, made it worse, then publicly denounced everyone that said so, right up until the larger players started weighing in, then MS started backing off....long after antagonizing everyone in the industry.

Re: How about you listen to feedback _before_ you RTM next time?

Indeed. When IT was telling MS that Windows 8 was going to sink, MS Marketing came out and gave IT the third degree. I would speak to people about Windows 8, and ask their opinions of it, and they would say that they loved it or hated it, but in either case, 'there is a minority of old techs who refuse to get with the times and get on board.' MS launched a scorched earth attack on its own people for giving it honest feedback, for the simple reason that they would not tout the corporate line, but told them to fix Windows 8.

Now MS Marketing is experiencing the shoe on the other foot, and suddenly they don't want any of it. Too bad. You guys banjaxxed the OS, you falsified the product feedback, you fought IT tooth and nail when they told you it was a kludge and would cost MS billions, time to take some of your own bitter medicine. The point behind a blood interface is to make things more efficient, faster, better, etc. than a previous one; Windows 8, excluding the StarDock add-ons (which I fancy), appears to fail in this realm. What more, your attempts to unify the desktop / tablet space would be, I don't know, better, if the tablet interface for Windows 8 did not seem to have so many problems (this is hearsay, I grant you, but I have heard that people are complaining that the typing interface / on-screen keyboard needs some polish).

At the end of the day, people run Windows, in businesses, because it allows them to generate more revenue / profits / be more efficient / whatever than simply using a pen and a piece of paper. As such, the interface should be quick and easy to use...require a minimum of retraining between versions, and run on older hardware. Windows 8 does one of those...and it is built around the idea that everyone would run out and splurge on new touchscreen interfaces, as opposed to the reality that everyone would upgrade hardware over a 3-year cycle. A killer app might have launched earlier upgrades, but there isn't one, that I am aware of, for Windows 8. Office 2013 uses the Cloud...not sure of any features which make use of touch there or a stylus which are a 'must have.' Visual Studio....again, not sure of any touch features there. So...no killer app? Just a new interface built around hardware that only 10% of the customers have, and is useless for giant monitors / projectors / etc. without some special hardware?

Re: How is this possible?

*shrugs* They are probably considering their audience's technical capability, wallet capacity, and attention span, then recommending accordingly. Typically if someone is coming to ask you which video card to put in their machine, it means they 1.) have a budget in mind, and 2.) probably already have a card picked out, and just want you to tell them it is a good buy. Since no amount of persuasion will sway them into buying a better card (they really are only going to spend $70 on it), and your time is your time, well, telling them that a Intel or AMD integrated video chipset is all they need saves you a lot of hassle; and if they care, they'll research it on their own. Gone are the days when people would show up with large budgets and say "I want the best machine you can build me for $4K."

I mean, even talking to fellow techs these days is painful. "Dude, all you need is a dual core machine, with a 128MB video card, and a 80 GB HD." -> there are people out there like this, and they are multiplying. There are even people who do not understand why 64-bit x86 is more awesome than 32-bit x86...and would prefer than all apps continue to build 32-bit versions well into the future. I feel like I've lost a loved one when I have to explain something so basic to these types.

Re: An external provider's job is to milk you, IT's job is to make things work

*shrugs* IT is playing the scapegoat, apparently, for a number of popular sins at companies these days. I believe it may be due, in part, to the paranoia brought on by the fear that computers / technology represent to the masses (IT might be spying on you!), as well as the massive inferiority complexes exposed by interacting with the machines on a daily basis (30+ years on, machines are still magic to some people; and they are hell bent against taking a course to reveal the wonders behind them / get comfortable with them).

But the fact is, IT really is such an easy victim. There isn't enough data, yet, being pounded into business school graduates about the effects of a long-term slash and burn on a company's IT department. Hell, what they're doing now is part of the learning process, albeit on a global scale -> many businesses out there are stuck between various versions of Windows, let alone Linux, Unix, or Mac OS X, with varying degrees of IT support (or no support), with some businesses paying to be on the bleeding edge of technology, while others are trying to 'suck it and see it approach'; the latter continue to use Windows XP machines, for example, until they are run into the ground. This strategy, of not paying for upgrades / keeping up with capital investments, appears to pay off handsomely at first; the skills for operating the machinery are well-known, support is common, replacement parts are rapidly depreciating in cost. This works for 5-10 years. However, at some point, a critical part breaks, or a pressing need to upgrade becomes apparent. The critical part probably costs a little too much, or can't easily be replaced...or so on. An upgrade is needed. However, since the machine is so dated, it can't be upgraded. It has to be replaced. And not just a little bit. The entire thing, as well as all of its attachments. Nothing can be salvaged. The business owner will probably try to find a way to keep it going a little longer, but it quickly becomes apparent that this golden goose is dying, if not dead. And now, shock of shocks, he has to pay a whopper of a price for a new machine, with totally new software (possibly from a new developer), wait for someone to learn how to use this software (several months of training), and that's assuming that it fits all the business's needs...ouch. And that's assuming a single machine...if it's multiple machines, with some proprietary manufacturing interfaces hooked up to them....could be rough. You're looking at serious down time.

Re: The Tree is Dead

Yes, but that's the true idiocy of this design. RAM is so inexpensive at the moment, that only the most naive of your first-time customers, who incidentally has spent the last two decades under a rock, would go for these 'upgrades.' I mean, if you're a large OEM, you're supposed to negotiate a lower price (at a higher volume) for things like memory, then pass some of those savings along to your customer, while keeping some of the savings for yourself; your customer gets a better machine than they can by buying the memory retail, and you and the memory guys make more money at the end of the day.

And do not get me started on the $1K 512GB SSDs that a lot of these places want to sell you. Since the cost of the SSD is usually less than $500, that's easily a 200+% markup. Wait, I take that back. If you go with OCZ, and / or get the PCIe variant of these SSDs, then that could easily be over $500. Point being, people are getting robbed.

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

But that's exactly the point! Developers are finally getting around to polishing concurrency / parallelism on non-supercomputers, and it's taking a few years to hit the important qualifications, which are: 1.) Is the hardware there? (Who wants to put major effort into these designs if only 1% of your customers have multiple cores?), 2.) Is the software there? (Hyperthreading, whatever the hell is AMD's variant, etc. all profile slightly differently...when you throw in multiple real cores with half-cores, you really need a mature set of development tools).