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PS2 to USB can provide legacy support. http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

$55 for 8GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/... Shouldn't add more than $100 to the cost of a DVR and greatly improve performance, especially in the ones that have multi-tuners, and get glitchy when you are recording on both, and manipulating saved files (the reason the 2-tuner PS3 Play TV is called a 1-tuner by Sony, the PS3 can't handle the I/O, so essentially disables one in software. It's a full 2-tuner when you plug it into a PC).

I happen to know a lot more about USB Type-C than the average punter who hasn't authored specs for the USB SIG.

It's good juju. But compare with an Intel NUC, where you can plug in a PCIe SSD.

That would be a good thing to be available on the motherboard.

$500? for 512 GB? Are you KIDDING me?!? If SSDs are going to cost THAT much, platters will spin for quite a while in my computers...

I happen to know a lot more about USB Type-C than the average punter who hasn't authored specs for the USB SIG.

It's good juju. But compare with an Intel NUC, where you can plug in a PCIe SSD.

That would be a good thing to be available on the motherboard.

http://www.newegg.com/Docking-...

Remember displayport? Apple adopted it completely and nobody else wanted quite literally HDMI without audio.

Total fucking bullshit. Newegg sells 312 desktop video cards with DP ports and 297 monitors with Displayport ports. Seems that quite a few people want DP ports otherwise there wouldn't be hundreds of video cards and monitors with the ports.

Remember displayport? Apple adopted it completely and nobody else wanted quite literally HDMI without audio.

Total fucking bullshit. Newegg sells 312 desktop video cards with DP ports and 297 monitors with Displayport ports. Seems that quite a few people want DP ports otherwise there wouldn't be hundreds of video cards and monitors with the ports.

yes, including case:
http://www.newegg.com/HTPC-Med...

FX-8320: $140 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
AM3+ motherboard: $55 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
GTX 750 Ti 2 GB: $146 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
8 GB DDR 3: $60 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Wireless 360 controller: $42 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Complete price: $443.

Assumption people have or can get hold of SOME case with PSU, any HDD, keyboard and mouse somewhere.

It won't play 60 fps 1080p all the time I guess. But it's pretty affordable and likely "surprisingly powerful" relative the current gen consoles too.

FX-8320: $140 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
AM3+ motherboard: $55 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
GTX 750 Ti 2 GB: $146 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
8 GB DDR 3: $60 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Wireless 360 controller: $42 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Complete price: $443.

Assumption people have or can get hold of SOME case with PSU, any HDD, keyboard and mouse somewhere.

It won't play 60 fps 1080p all the time I guess. But it's pretty affordable and likely "surprisingly powerful" relative the current gen consoles too.

FX-8320: $140 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
AM3+ motherboard: $55 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
GTX 750 Ti 2 GB: $146 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
8 GB DDR 3: $60 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Wireless 360 controller: $42 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Complete price: $443.

Assumption people have or can get hold of SOME case with PSU, any HDD, keyboard and mouse somewhere.

It won't play 60 fps 1080p all the time I guess. But it's pretty affordable and likely "surprisingly powerful" relative the current gen consoles too.

FX-8320: $140 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
AM3+ motherboard: $55 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
GTX 750 Ti 2 GB: $146 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
8 GB DDR 3: $60 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Wireless 360 controller: $42 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Complete price: $443.

Assumption people have or can get hold of SOME case with PSU, any HDD, keyboard and mouse somewhere.

It won't play 60 fps 1080p all the time I guess. But it's pretty affordable and likely "surprisingly powerful" relative the current gen consoles too.

FX-8320: $140 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
AM3+ motherboard: $55 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
GTX 750 Ti 2 GB: $146 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
8 GB DDR 3: $60 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Wireless 360 controller: $42 http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Complete price: $443.

Assumption people have or can get hold of SOME case with PSU, any HDD, keyboard and mouse somewhere.

It won't play 60 fps 1080p all the time I guess. But it's pretty affordable and likely "surprisingly powerful" relative the current gen consoles too.

yes, I've got three of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/... and two of these: http://www.addonics.com/produc...

All my SATA gear is either caddied or goes through a Seagate Goflex SATA cradle I got with a 1TB drive in about 2010.

This looks nearly identical to the one I bundled with a HDD for a few bucks back in '09. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812816014 It has worked great for me on many occasions. As stated, it might have problems if the HDD is especially power-hungry (check its label for power stats), but I expect it will most likely solve your problem pretty quickly, easily, and cheaply. On top of that, it's a good tool to have around for a variety of tasks related to working on random hard drives.

Here is a link to a PCMCIA ethernet adapter (out of stock, but the page is informative). Perhaps a used one could be obtained (borrowed?)

Yes, I concur. I am a fan of the Rosewill USB 2.0 Adapter - RCW-608 - for IDE / SATA Device. Cheap, versatile, effective. Connect one of these to your average Linux box and doing data rescue operations from ancient hardware becomes as simple as pulling the drive out of the original machine.

OK, I take that back, I just looked at newegg. Prices are about 50% of what I expected.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

You can purchase two 1TB SSDs and mount them in this http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

LG 65LB5200 $850
LG 65LB5200 $999

How is it that you can't access floppy disks and IDE drives now?

Here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

And here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Those are from a simple google search, and among the first links returned; you could probably find cheaper deals than those.

How is it that you can't access floppy disks and IDE drives now?

Here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

And here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Those are from a simple google search, and among the first links returned; you could probably find cheaper deals than those.

We have 120 Hz .. 144 Hz monitors now, with 1 ms response times...

While the PQ (picture quality) of CRTs are great, they don't match the True Power On Black == Power off Black of OLED.

Newegg has 120 DirectX video cards available. So what's the hold up on drivers?

I can't speak much for NVidia products, but Sapphire makes a short AMD-based card that would fit in an Elite 110 I'm sure there are others (might have to put the power connector into the cutout for the front panel if it's a card-rear power connector model),

parallel still available, http://www.newegg.com/Product/... or try ebay.

It doesn't match the spec, it has less processing power and an older video adapter, and the screen resolution is lower and the hard drive is smaller. But the size is the same, the RAM capacity is the same, the wifi adapter is the same, the optical drive is the same, and for everyday computing the greater processing power, better video card, larger storage and higher screen resolution wouldn't help much - that's why I don't value these advantages too much in a laptop. A computer from 2009 will still perform most non-gaming duties very nearly as well as one from 2015.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

If it was a gaming PC these things would help, but the Librem would have many drawbacks as a gaming PC (not even counting the fact that it's a laptop).

MSFT Surface tablets can be had for $200 to $400 which are better specs than most $200 Android tablets.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

At $800 you were looking at the high end full on laptop Surface Pro...which really should be compared to ultra-books or Macbook Airs. In that comparo they are really pretty solid value for people who want a full PC in a tablet like profile.

Have you thought of popping the case open and fitting a ramsink to it? It has an internal aluminium heatsink, but it's just a piece of aluminium inside the case. You could do a lot better with a small copper block with fins. Take a dremel to the case over where the RAM and SoC sit (opposite sides of the board, sadly) and you should be able to get much better airflow.
 
Teardown here and ramsinks here as a suggestion.

No but you can install such kind of SSD in there (a picture is worth a few dozen words)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/... or http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

After which there's wired ethernet, or attaching a 2.5" hard drive to USB 3 (which can power the drive with a single cable) ought to give some nice quite fast storage.

No but you can install such kind of SSD in there (a picture is worth a few dozen words)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/... or http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

After which there's wired ethernet, or attaching a 2.5" hard drive to USB 3 (which can power the drive with a single cable) ought to give some nice quite fast storage.

I don't know what's on offer from OEMs but a custom LAN party box might be a good choice--micro ATX, carry handle, desktop hardware.

Where else?

another example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

and that one is 10.1 inches. It is also a 2 in 1... which I guess is the new name for laptops that can become tablets. I think that was the whole point of windows 8. Boy did they cock that up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

Not 10 inches but basically the same thing. You can go sub ten inches with a chromebook if you want to be a stickler for the 10 inch thing.

What was really relevant about the netbooks was that they were cheap. 200 to 300 dollars was all you'd spend for one. And there are lots of 200 to 300 dollar laptops these days. Most of them are small like the netbooks and they tend to have similar specs. No cd drive. Itsybitsy keyboard. Atom processors are pretty common. Etc.

They didn't go anywhere. Nothing has gone.

The desktop is still here.
The laptop is still here.
The dumb clam shell phone is still here.
The smart phone is still here.
The tablet is still here.
The netbook is still here.

They're all still here. They arrive on the scene, enjoy high sales, and then drop down to an equilibrium rate. It is like saying the new iphone or ipad are going away because their sales figures aren't what they were in the first week of release.

You have your time and then you become just another product.

Ok, so I was completely accurate in my depiction of what you are proposing:

It should be possible to do something similar using the voice layer, but then the #1 is worse, and the call route can easily be move around anywhere, and it'd be packetized voice, encrypted, then turned analog, then going over voice, which goes over a digital network for parts of the transit, and unwraps again on the other side, with nearly all the same drawbacks to the existing system.

What's the point? I'm stretching here, but I can only think of two benefits to sending the packetized and encrypted voice data over the existing voice network:
1. You could still use a POTs line if you plugged in a handset that had the ability to speak that language (ie. you have a buy new handsets or a house-wide filter)
2. On the cell network, it could still work when you lose data (3g/4g/roaming/etc) but happen to still have enough signal for voice.

#1 is, IMO, a silly edge case with very very very few potential users (assuming the competing protocol goes over IP).
#2 carries all the same issues previously stated, as well as bandwidth issues (there's going to be overhead to packetizing, encrypting, then encoding into something akin to v.90, and there will be loss and retransmission issues to deal with, so you'd better compress the audio a TON).

The same sort of thing can be done using the IP network and an app, and it'd automatically get a bunch of benefits that are non-existent if you're shoving it down the voice network. Using the IP network with end-to-end encryption with perfect forward secrecy would also solve your other issue of LEO's snagging call records carte-blanche.

If you still wanted to solve #1 and #2 mentioned above, you could use a gateway device.
For the home phones, something like this at the premise: http://www.newegg.com/Product/... ... or they could dial into a gateway (just like old dial-up modems, which is all it is you are suggesting, just with an encryption layer on top).

The only all-in-one motherboard I'm willing to consider is the ASRock C2550D4I Mini ITX Server Motherboard with a quad-core Intel Avoton processor and 12 SATA connectors. This is a favorite motherboard for FreeNAS file server builders. I just got a new case for my file server that can hold eight 3.5" drives and three 5.25" drives. At $269, it's bit out of my price range and doesn't include ECC memory.

You can buy hardware with lower-power Intel chips from NewEgg, you just can't buy the CPU by itself. It's not in your price range, but here's a Zotac mini computer for $380 (which includes the RAM and SSD): http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

They also sell numerous tablets/laptops/etc with that processor.

For an Intel motherbaord/CPU/RAM combo, you're looking at around $40 for the motherboard (all these prices from NewEgg US), $30 for 4GB of RAM, leaving you up to $130 for the processor. That puts it at an Intel i3-4360, a high-clocked dual-core Haswell part.

For AMD's part, assuming the same CPU budget, you're looking at an A10-6800K.

Right off the bat we can notice a disparity in TDP, being 54W on the Intel chip and 100W on the AMD chip.

In terms of performance, AnandTech Bench conveniently has both of those chips in their system. The benchmarks show that the Intel chip is faster (sometimes substantially) in almost every benchmark, be it single or multithreaded... And all that while using much less power.

After looking up those results, though, I realized that that AMD chip was a Richland, while there is the newer Kaveri cores available. There is also a Kaveri CPU at the same $130 pricepoint (but with a lower clockspeed/model number), the A10-7700K, with a TDP of 95W. That one is unfortunately not in Bench, but looking at other sides indicates that it manages to narrow the gap substantially, while still generally being slower than the i3 chip. But in order to do this, it uses 10W more power at idle and 26W more power at load.

Intel's got Haswell chips at decent clockspeeds down to roughly the $40 pricepoint, where I expect they'd still compete favourably with AMD. Below that is nothing, and I suspect there might be a point somewhere between $40 and $130 where AMD makes more sense.

All this said, I'm disappointed in AMD. I don't want Intel to beat them, I want AMD to put out parts that are competitive in price, performance, AND power consumption. Most of my early CPUs were AMD chips. I've owned a K6-2, a Duron, and an Athlon XP, and all were fantastic. The Athlon 64 was also great. But ever since then, AMD has been behind, and the lack of competition has certainly not helped the market. I keep hoping that AMD will put out something new that wows me, a completely new architecture that shakes things up like Conroe did for Intel or ClawHammer did for AMD. But thus far they seem to keep iterating on the same non-competitive designs.

Unfortunately, it seems like ARM is more likely than AMD to bring competition to the market as they keep slowly creeping up the TDP ladder, and we're just now starting to see them going head-to-head with Intel in the PC space with lower-end Chromebooks. nVidia's Denver core is supposed to be competitive with Haswell in terms of performance/power, but I can't find any benchmarks that directly compare them.

The lowest i3 TDP available at Newegg is 35W. Yes, we all know that Intel beats AMD in performance. Just not on price.

You can still have 5 year spin disk warranty.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

I've had no problems with it. I suspect most of the performance issues people experience have nothing to do with disk drives, but lack of RAM. Every time someone complains to me about "computer is slow", all you need to do is look at their HDD activity to notice that it's swapping madly.

If you want fast computer, get at least 16GB RAM. Turn OFF swap. Enjoy.

I'm a gamer with a wife and two kids. My wife doesn't game at all. I didn't need to be asked to put the PC elsewhere because I also don't want a loud ass, ugly machine ruining the living room either. So I put together a machine that looked like a piece of A/V equipment, there are lots of great cases now that are unobtrusive, and I purchased components that made low noise the priority. It pulls double duty as a media center and I made sure the cabling ran all within the walls, with as few wires as possible and bound them nicely so as not to attract dust bunnies.

For example this.
And wiring like this.

I'm not sure what there is about being a man that means I have to be gross and loud. It's not like I don't appreciate a clean, aesthetically pleasing place to live as well. Ultimately I ended up moving the machine to another room running the cables through the floor to the basement because I didn't want to see anything at all. That was my choice.

Why not spend $100 and buy a new case? One which has larger fans which don't make noise? Suggestion would be a Cooler Master HAF 932, or for a smaller, mid-size one, Cooler Master HAF 912

Why not spend $100 and buy a new case? One which has larger fans which don't make noise? Suggestion would be a Cooler Master HAF 932, or for a smaller, mid-size one, Cooler Master HAF 912

Or get it for $253.

Some more URLs I have in my collection (haven't checked some of these in awhile, though):

UPS tracking (after trigger enter your tracking number)
US Postal Service Tracking (after trigger enter your tracking number)
YouTube Video Search
E.gg Timer (type the length of the countdown in plain text after your trigger -- eg: "5 minutes" to make the timer run for five minutes, "2 hours 3 minutes" for two hours and three minutes, ect. You can even go do other browsing and background the tab, it will jump to the front when it goes off.
IMDB Search
Rotten Tomatoes
Google Translate (to English) -- just paste the URL of the foreign site after your trigger.
ZXing QR Code decoder -- paste a image URL after the trigger.
DownForEveryoneOrJustMe website check
NewEgg Product Search
FreshPorts Search

For sites without their own searches, you can always set up a Google search restricted to the site with "site%3Adomainofsite.tld+%s" as the string.

Once you have all the major search engines set up there's really no reason to waste toolbar space on Firefox with the actual Search Bar anymore.

Having said that, my ideal laptop would have oodles of storage but the drive would hardly ever need to "spin up" because almost everything I need would fit in the SSD. In "real terms" this would be at least a 128GB SSD plus at least 2TB of less expensive storage.

Try this on for size then. My current laptop has 3 x 1tb drives internal, but they only spin up when I need them to. My many OSs (several flavors of linux, 2 versions of windows, plus BSD) all run off of a single 480gb mSATA Crucial M500 SSD, attached to a cheap M-SATA-to-USB-3 adapter.

All the features you're looking for, plus the portability of being able to use your personal setup on any other computer just by plugging in to a USB port.

Even a thick terminal supporting remote GUIs like X require less than 10 gb of space, even if you are supporting something like X.

A $170 gets you a 480 GB SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...

If you setting up terminals that take up 480 GB, then you are doing it wrong.

I have 240 GB SSD and I have Windows along with several varations of Linux VMs and a Windows VM for isolated testing. Numerous repositories. SQL Server, Postgre Server, all the client tooling that goes with them. Numerous multi GB games.

Even 480 GB is plenty for most amateur audio/video production if you are moving finished projects off to a NAS.

And as for the phone comment, show me a single microSD that costs $170 and offers 480 GB of space.

Every aspect of your response is littered with stupidity.

...as long as high capacity SSDs keep costing as much as an entire computer.

Hard Drive: $429

Whole Computer: $400 or less.

...as long as high capacity SSDs keep costing as much as an entire computer.

Hard Drive: $429

Whole Computer: $400 or less.

You made a funny but for an HTPC? Its just too damned small, it limits the system too much.

IMNSHO as a system builder and VAR a much better choice would be something like the Sempron 3850 if you want a media tank and streaming box or the Athlon 5350 if you want something with a little more kick for tasks like transcoding your vids to your mobile devices. Pair it with this Asrock board and an Apex VCR style case and voila! A VERY capable HTPC based on the same APU used in the XB-One and PS4 that just sips power while being able to do pretty much any HTPC related task, even game as long as you stick to older games or lowered settings. this is one of my most popular builds,just slap a BD player into it and you have a box that looks nice in any media cabinet, can play any popular format with full hardware acceleration, and is quiet as a churchmouse.

those sticks are just too limited, most won't play local content, very few video/audio formats supported, its just too limited in function. Hell the above is flexible enough that when one of my customers had his sister's laptop die he lent her his office PC and while he waited for me to get the parts in to build her what she wanted he used his Athlon quad HTPC as his office computer and was quite happy with the performance. Oh and if you slap a couple of wireless controllers they make damned good emulator boxes, you can play everything from Atari 2600- PS1 on one of those, great for when you have friends or kids/grandkids over.