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I don't get it. 500GB in an hour would be about 140MB per second (yes, I am rounding up). Most of the enterprise level 15K drives are right in that range without any overclocking, with a couple well above that. Do I win ten grand for buying a Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 for $450 and bringing it in to show that it works?

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/enterprise-hard-drive-charts-2010/Throughput-Read-Average,2156.html

No, I didn't look at the page. It's Slashdotted.

Here you go.

I saw another benchmark compare it the Atom as it is the closest in price range for these. As you can tell it is not the fastest chip by any means nor does it have the best GPU as a dedicated gaming box. However, look at the benchmarks for the price you get? Not so bad for older games. An Intel Atom with Nvidia ION can't even run half of these games.

The bandwidth limitations will be further removed in future versions of Llano later this year as it will have its own memory controller that will not have the latency delay of waiting for the CPU one or somethign weird like that. The fact that the GPU is integrated gets rid of some of the latency and as you can see does quite well for like dirt cheap.

The article does not test using Quick Sync technology for the video rendering portion. When this is turned on, an Intel HD3000 is 6 times faster at video encoding than a top-of-the-line Radeon. (Benchmarks here). And also some of the tests show the Core i7-970 is twice as SLOW than a Core i5?? Gotta call B.S. on that one. And what's the point of testing a dual card (APU + Radeon) against a single Intel integrated graphics? We all know the HD3000 isn't for gaming, that's why you get a $65 Radeon to run your games. Most mid-range laptops come with some sort of discrete graphics card that rivals the GPU performance of the Llano. I waited around for Llano and was severely dissapointed with the CPU results. TomsHardware and Anandtech reviewed it in-depth and found the gaming performance was comparable against a mid-range discrete card, along with similar battery life and similar heat. However cost is the only thing working in AMD's favor. I still don't see why somebody would buy a 4-year old CPU architecture that will be EOL'd by the time Bulldozer comes out in a few months.

2. Build dams, canals and build a few feet into the air. This works for small floods, but if you get something new, it might still wipe you out. This is the Linux aproach: Try to secure things, deal with the few issues as they come up.

Being completely fair here, which security features are you indicating that Linux has that Windows does not-- would that be the non-granular permissions system, their "weak" form of ASLR (researcher Charlie Miller's own words), their lack of digital signature checking on drivers, or their lack of anything comparable to SFC (the system in windows that checksums all the system files and monitors them for changes)?

By the looks of it, #2 is already in place in windows.

Yes
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card-game-performance-radeon-hd-6670,2935-2.html
For $65 you can get a card with great 1680x1050 performance in most games.
In other words good enough for most people.
If they can get APUs up to that level which sounds possible it really will be great.

"Scientific programmers, game and multimedia devs, crypto hackers. Uh oh."

The target market is for developers writting software for Windows 8 tablets and netbooks with AMD fusion Llano (and future cousins).

WIth IE HTML hardware and flash acceleration enalbed by default, a nice GPU will be needed for the gui eye candy and video effects if the cpu is not up to task. GPU speeds with OpenCL are very fast for a dinky integrated low end chip. An integrated ARM processors can use this too if and when they exist as many bash it as not being powerful enough to run Windows 8. AMP is a frameworkf or developers to take advantage of this easier.

AMD Fusion is SWEET! and of course is sponsoring this event. FYI, the bechmarks above are fully integrated lowest end model in the sub $400 notebook market. The fusion one listed in that link is a slow mobile version that is to compete with the intel ATOM. These units have a ATi 6800 style graphics, which can be much much faster with dual channel DDR ram and perhaps a seperate channel for its own ram? These low end bandwidth starved ones can run starcraft at 30 fps for $400 netbook and fully 1080P HD video. Future ones will compete agaisnt fully loaded $1000 systems with dedicated cards and it will have faster CPUs.

Also even if it is slow it has multiple cores (4) on the die so AMP will be quite nice as it can use the low power fusion efficiently too while offloading more tasks to the GPU inside it. Since that is integrated into the chip I can imagine it will be much faster for the CPU/GPU to talk to each other even though memory bandwidth is bad.

I think Intel has some real competition again as I would love to get one of these myself.

The CPU performance is not the best, but that will matter less if it is cheap and graphics are taken care of. How much CPU do you need to run Word?

I prefer a game that takes full advantage of the PC and mouse+keyboard.

I agree for single player. But for multiplayer, it becomes crowded when four players' mice keyboards are plugged into a PC, and the "Raw Input API" for reading multiple mice and keyboards is a bit more obscure than the traditional DirectInput API for reading four joystick.

I'd rather see a Mac and Linux port than a console port.

I agree here too in principle. But due to the state of graphics on Linux, that might not be easy. Case in point: Fedora recommends Intel, which is definitely not a gaming brand according to the chart at Tom's. And how easily can a single binary package be used across multiple distributions, both RPM-based and Debian-based?

wtf is this, ubuntu?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-11.04-natty-narwhal,2943-13.html
2 hours lost?!!?
how can anyone write code that causes such a huge battery life reduction?

Ask the Linux Kernel developers as it's their fault... Check on Phoronix for details...
Another Major Linux Power Regression Spotted

wtf is this, ubuntu?
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-11.04-natty-narwhal,2943-13.html
2 hours lost?!!?
how can anyone write code that causes such a huge battery life reduction?

Overall the article is objectively balanced

This is how it starts:

Let's start with the meaning of Natty. Here in the States, Natty is short for Anheuser-Busch's bottom-shelf line of “Natural” beers. If you were ever a struggling student, there's a good chance you subsisted at one point on ramen and Natty Ice. Consequently, it has also come to mean cheap, trashy, or sub-par. How's that for a rough start?

And for that matter, what is a narwhal? I mean, look at that thing.

Apparently, Canonical's name for this release gets worse. The word narwhal dates back to Norse seafarers who explored the Arctic waters where this horned beast lives. Narwhal quite literally means “corpse whale” because its skin resembles a water-logged corpse. Oof. Ubuntu 11.04: Cheap, Drunk, Dead, and Bloated.

The technique of associating a product with negative images is an old one - it's called Poisoning the Well.

This review is anything BUT balanced.

Anyone that's been there a few times and read the articles knows to expect this quality of writing from Tomsharware. I'm not sure why other people find it an attractive news source.
I recommend other hardware review sites like anandtech-- very thorough reviews, and they don't split their articles into 30 pages to promote more adviews.
Another good example of ho-hum writing was their benchmark of AMD vs Intel processors with the WoW Cataclysm game release. They reported this for the AMD processors and didn't bother asking why going from 3 cores to 5 doesn't make a difference but 5 to 6 does (makes little sense), just "oh, looks like it needs 6 cores".

What it means is that you can have a gaming machine where the GPU is completely shut off when you're not actually gaming. There are definitely cards out there that will consume nearly as much power as the rest of the system. While they're somewhat unusual for most people, there are definitely cards out there that will use over 100watts themselves, and that's without going the SLI route. And for a machine using that much power, you can still be taking about 50 watts being used on just normal tasks. Granted this is a bit outdated, but it illustrates nicely: Power Consumption--Graphics Cards And Electricity Costs

If you can shut that down or off for the times that you don't need the full performance there's potential for saving some money there, depending upon the cost of the AGU option.

This is really about the small town of Wilson, NC and its community project Greenlight. http://www.greenlightnc.com/ It provides broadband, tv and phone to customers in Wilson for less than Time Warner. Immediately time warner and Embarq began lobbying to shut it down. Time Warner was forced to keep prices lower in nearby areas. It has been an ongoing story for years: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/TWC-Embarq-Wilson-Greenlight,7610.html

You mean no improvement aside from being able to do the same thing?

FTFY

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/riaa-music-download-illegal-mp3,10864.html

The GPU isn't quite as slick as that in, say, an Xbox

Then it's probably an Intel GMA, or "Graphics My Ass" as AMD and NVIDIA fanboys call it. An original Xbox has a GPU nearly identical to GeForce 3, and according to a chart at Tom's Hardware Guide, most GMAs aren't even as powerful as that. The same chart implies that the Radeon 9000, whose fillrate is similar to that of the Wii's Hollywood GPU, is likewise more powerful than most GMAs.

The 5xx series has been moderately well-behaved on the power-usage, but other fairly recent generations have not been so kind. The GTX480 could pull 450W and the GTX295 would happily use 487W (Stats from Tom's Hardware), and from that I'd say that a ballpark of 500W is fair enough, after all the 6xx series could well be very different from the 5xx series and so again have increased power usage.

get serious about developing on low end gfx like Intel GPU - which seriously isn't as bad as people think

Tom's did a comparison, and even the higher-end Intel GMAs are roughly comparable to the GeForce 3 in the original Xbox or the Radeon 9000-class Hollywood GPU in the Wii.

There are tons of more extensive tests than simply leaving the browser running all day, and Firefox uses the least memory in nearly all of them. Perhaps Firefox leaks on your computer, but not on mine and nearly all other users. If its trivial to trigger the memory leak you're seeing, then it should be trivial to make your own test that we can run that demonstrates this memory leak we don't seem to be able to see.

Then it's good that Firefox uses less memory than other browsers.

See for example: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-chrome-opera,2558-4.html, or http://digitizor.com/2010/12/18/opera-11-benchmarked/ Opera places last in the memory usage stakes in all the tests. It is also slower than Chrome in most benchmarks. Firefox is probably the best overall for memory use, but I think for performance/memory tradeoff you cannot beat Chrome.

Every review I've read says otherwise.
Here's one of the better ones:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/internet-explorer-9-chrome-10-opera-11,2897-11.html

If you'd like to disagree, please back it up with evidence.

For some supporting details, see: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/internet-explorer-9-chrome-10-opera-11,2897-11.html

Big Bang II is codename for ForceWare Release 180 or R180. The biggest improvement is the introduction of SLI multi-monitor. Yes, you’ve read it correctly, Nvidia has finally allowed more than one monitor to use multiple video cards at once, something it’s been trying to do since SLI’s introduction back in 2004.

From the nvidia 180 driver release:

*Note: The following SLI features are only supported on Windows Vista: Quad SLI technology using GeForce 9800 GX2, 3-way SLI technology, Hybrid SLI, and SLI multi-monitor support.

Even the SLI Zone (an official nvidia site set up for the 180 release) page for multi monitors states:

System requirements > Microsoft® Windows® Vista 32-bit or 64-bit

Now if you're right and some mythical nvidia driver exists that supports dual monitors on Windows XP, just link to it. Or even a single article or forum post explaining how to make it work. Even if it means rolling back my drivers, I will do it and I will come back here and say "thank you Khyber, thank you for showing me the way, even though you were kind of a dick about it."

That's of course totally disregarding the fact that I shouldn't have to roll back my drivers and lose out on all the driver improvements and bugfixes from the last four years that make half the games I own playable. All of which leads right back to my original point, which is that SLI is more trouble than it's worth. Have a look through the bugfix section of almost any nvidia driver release and there will be an entire section devoted to SLI-only bugfixes.

In hindsight, instead of spending 10-20 hours over the last five years trying to get dual monitors to work, struggling with new games that crash constantly due to SLI bugs, driver updates and rollbacks, reinstalls, whatever, I should have just taken on 10-20 hours of additional paid work, which would have easily paid for a new video card every two years, saving me the massive hassle.

Oh and your "raw photographic evidence" is some random photo with a single display running XP? Are those other displays supposed to be connected to the same box? Is the box even running SLI with all the displays attached to the same card? I don't know because there's no fucking way for me to tell.

attack and undermine the most successful American companies

You paint it as a foreign attack. Umm, let's see what we have here:
- Hewlett-Packard: American, headquartered at Palo Alto, CA
- IBM: American, headquartered at Armonk, New York (Trivia: HAL of 2001: Space Odyssey was named by transposing IBM one letter back through the alphabet)
- Intel: American, headquartered at Santa Clara, CA
- Google: American, headquartered at Mountain View, CA
- NEC: Japanese
- Novell: multinational, headquartered at Waltham, Massachusetts
- Red Hat: American, headquartered at Raleigh, North Carolina

Are we seeing a pattern here? It's not like the US as a whole has anything to lose out of this, given that both the "attackers" and the "defenders" are American...

forming a CARTEL against Microsoft and Apple to try to destroy them using patents rather than competing with products that people, you know, actually want to buy

Again, let's see what we have here.

Apple is suing Samsung for the Galaxy series of Android-powered phones. Reason: they look too much like the iPhone. This didn't come as much of a surprise to me after seeing the Galaxy S, Galaxy S Mk.II and the still Samsung-made Nexus S trounce the iPhone in reviews.
Microsoft was trounced long ago by Apple in the smartphone market, after they failed to make a snappy comeback to the iPhone Mk.I. Windows Phone 7 came too late and just doesn't cut it in the face of Android and iOS together.
And neither one is better than the other, for using patents equally frivolously to make attacks on one another and stifle competition, in your analogy, by being cartels unto themselves by virtue of their sheer size. In this regard, they deserve to have the book thrown at them using one of IBM's patents: they patented patents! It doesn't get any better than this, you gotta admit that...

forming a CARTEL

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

FYI: "A cartel is a formal (explicit) agreement among competing firms. It is a formal organization of producers and manufacturers that agree to fix prices, marketing, and production.", according to Arthur Sullivan and Steven M. Sheffrin. The OIN is an association to pool patents, and protect one another from abuse. I see no evidence of fixing prices, marketing strategy or production strategy here. What I see is that now, instead of the Microsoft/Apple ogres going up against several dwarves, they get to face a single ogre trumping them in size, given that the strength of an IT company these days is measured by the number of patents it owns, no matter how frivolous they are.

When will N-Obama stand up against this kind of market abuse?

He won't. Simply because it's not his job. According to the Constitution of the United States of America (I dare you to find a higher law than that in the States!),
"The Congress shall have Power [...] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;"
I think the IT trade pretty much fits those two criteria, even if it's not actually commerce, nor "market abuse" the way you paint it. Regardless, if it's market, the Congress will regulate, not the President.

Intel Pentium 4 Vs. Atom: A Battle Of The Generations, Conclusion

Eight Years Are Enough!

In the end, there’s a simple conclusion for everyone who wants a low cost system: keep your old Pentium 4 system if you have to, but bear in mind that all relevant metrics (performance, noise, power, and efficiency) are pathetic by modern standards.

If you can afford to spend a few hundred dollars on a nettop, we’d definitely recommend this. We usually rant about Atom due to its shortcomings compared to desktop platforms, but it simply trounces the old P4s. Keeping a PC in service for seven or eight years is more than enough. Just make sure you go for a dual-core Atom when you decide to buy.

This is a complete and utter lie. In 2008 the only system left standing was Ubuntu

The quality of ASLR implementation is not the sole factor that decides who wins the contest, so looking at winners is not giving you any information. But if you read the interviews with participants, they did explain some aspects of making attacks easier, and ASLR was specifically covered. For example, here is one from 2009, and I quote:

"ASLR is also very tough to defeat. This is the way the process randomizes the location of code in a process. Between these two hurdles, no one knows how to execute arbitrary code in Firefox or IE 8 in Vista right now. For the record, Leopard has neither of these features, at least implemented effectively. In the exploit I won Pwn2Own with, I knew right where my shellcode was located and I knew it would execute on the heap for me. ...
And just so that our readers know, ASLR is implemented in Windows Vista (but not XP) and Vista SP1 is required for the full ASLR. Leopard had some binaries placed randomly, but Snow Leopard is rumored to introduce full ASLR. On Linux, kernel 2.6.12 has a weak form of ASLR like Leopard does, but PaX and ExecShield will implement Windows Vista-like ASLR."

and since then no GNU/Linux has been in the contest.

Which basically means that we don't know how it really stacks up against Windows and OS X. By the way, do you know why they don't do Linux? Quote:

"Linux is not an operating system that has widespread use with any one particular distribution, flavor or configuration. In general Linux is still a server-based operating system, people do use it on the desktop, but you can't go to BestBuy and buy Linux with a specific distro on it that everyone uses that has widespread market share. If we were to include Linux, we'd have even more controversy and we just don't want to deal it."

So it's not because it's somehow magically invulnerable.

As for your other points, I wouldn't trust a liar like you about anything.

Fanboi much? You don't need to "trust" me on anything - you've got Google to check facts, and (hopefully) brain to check conclusions. Use them.

Of course, if you want to stick fingers in your ears and go "Lalala I can't hear you, Linux is the best OS in all respects because how could it possibly be otherwise?", then you're welcome to do so - you can join the company of creationists and other similar religious fundies over there.

Apparently crossfire scales better than sli and you are currently better off buying a couple of HD5970 as the cost is less than one HD5990/GTX590 and you get better performance.

I am on a 'tight' budget and bought one HD5970. I will upgrade next year by buying another should I get some sort of penis envy.

Actually, apple did sue a local grocer in Australia because their logo had an apple in it. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Apple-Woolworths-logo-lawsuit,8784.html

Hitachi must be doing something right, I read in a article that google uses Hitachi by choice in its data-centers, and http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-reliability-storelab,2681-4.html seems to say Hitachi are the most durable and reliable HDs out there.... YMMV

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-990x-extreme-edition-gulftown,2874.html

PC Perspective & Tom's Hardware also have their takes on this now. There's also an ongoing DiskCompare.com review roundup

They stopped doing this awhile back because from the very beginning, it was clear that comparing the two are like comparing ride-on lawnmowers with Ferrari's. Check out tom's hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-drives,3.html You can't put SSD's along side regular HD's, but casual glances at the charts show that SSD's beat platter's by a large margin in every category, with the notable exception being some of the first generation SSD's that suffered from major slowdowns once they filled up- this has been resolved in every new SSD that I am aware of, and if you are an informed buyer it should not be a problem at all.

I don't know if you have been out of the loop, but the latest generation of drives is almost double the performance of the previous generation's drives. Ironically, this has made me hesitant to buy an SSD even though the small capacity drives are now under $300, and within my "splurge" budget. They still talk about cost per GB because the chasm is still very wide, ridiculously so, and you can't buy SSDs with the same capacity as platter drives.

It's nice to get excited about hardware again though, that hasn't happened since around 2002!

Have any quotes or links to back that up, Mr. Submitter?

Is it just me, or do a lot of the Mac fan-boys not know how to use Google before they open their moth and insert their foot?
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pc-windows-apple-mac-osx,9557.html (second google hit, btw)

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/security-snow-leopard/

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hack-windows-security-snow-leopard,8704.html

Feh - I hit submit instead of continue editing. My apologies. I didnt address your comment "in whos universe". In the vast majority of these cases, nobody could quit their job and pursue their moonlighting work. This is especially true of for ad-hoc mobile app development. They only reason most people can do this kind of thing is because they have a day job.

In most moonlighting situations (not just at Microsoft), the moonlighter cannot just quit their day job and pursue their dream.

I think the moonlighting policy at Microsoft is more than fair - its excellent. As I said, it is very likely the most liberal of any high tech company. I know it is much more liberal than Google and Apples polices.

Remember, the 20% time thing at Google has nothing to do with moonlighting - its time spent on projects for Google. Its also worth noting that while Microsoft doesnt have an official delineated 20% time policy, that kind of time is common for many people. But, its different than Google. For example, when my team is in the middle of a Windows development cycle - we focus on that 100%. But, when we are not focused on finishing a coding, integration or stabilization milestone, we very often have time to work on 20% kind of things - often way more than 20%. We call this prototyping. It is quite common for prototype code to productized and used in products. Ive done this several times. So have many others I know. This is true for minor things and some big things. For example Superfetch was heavily prototyped. So where some key cold boot optimizations. We could not have included these things (and many others) in Windows without considerable prototyping time. Note that prototypes are very often the idea of a single person, or a small group of people. Program mangers often come up with great prototyping ideas. Prototyping ideas almost never come from management saying "Hey guys, go prototype this thing" (but that does happen sometimes).

As further illustration, many of the projects on Codeplex.com are from Microsoft people and are great examples of moonlighting and 20% time kinds of things. Heck, Cineplex itself started out (long ago) as an internal side project.

-Foredecker

Even more worthless than that That means it would be trivial to make a transceiver that takes in HDMI (complete with HDCP support) and outputs component video.

An atom CPU is a bit more than just those 330 whatevers you can still find. There are literally dozens of variants of the "Atom" chips now.

The Atom I am familiar with is in a netbook, and it blows lots of hot air out the side vent. Way too much power dissipation.

After reading your comment, I Googled for "Atom system on a chip" and found:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/atom-soc-system-on-chip-e600-processor,11304.html

Looks like it is actually shipping, too, not just vapor. I haven't heard of any phones shipping with it. I wonder if it will show up first in tablets.

steveha

Lies. Cheapest core i3 2100 is ~$140, and you'd have to be buying from some potentially unreliable outlet at that, and in no way is its performance equivalent to a Phenom 2 X6 1100T. Look at some real bench aggregates, fanboi. You'll see it can outperform an i7-920 in many applications for fully half the cost. Even though it's a bit slower in games, is 5-10% more speed worth 200% the price? Not to most people.

First PC games don't have to specifically support a TV in order to be played on a TV.

This is correct for single-player, but multiplayer games need to be specifically programmed to use gamepads instead of separate computers. Most major PC game developers don't bother.

You can buy any of the cable configurations 6' long for $5 and a 30' is between $10 and $20 depending on which type of cable your needing.

If your PC has only VGA and HDMI out, and your TV has only composite and S-Video in, then you need a $30 adapter from sewelldirect.com, and they don't appear to advertise much.

they will still look better than console games due to the fact that PCs have better processing power even if your using an on-board video card.

AMD onboard graphics doesn't suck. But I saw a chart at Tom's implying that Intel onboard graphics is still comparable to GeForce 3, the GPU in the original Xbox.

Start it to DLing in the morning and when you get home hit the "Play" button...really not a problem.

True, you can download while at work or in bed, but watch the download have slowed to dial-up speeds once you get back because you've gone over your daily cap. Not everywhere has DSL or cable, and satellite providers are notorious for their "Fair Access Policy".

I had more than one Nvidia video card failing on me after less than 2 years. In the past Nvidia were OK.

This might be because of a manufacturing problem:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1004378/why-nvidia-chips-defective
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Nvidia-GPU-failure,6248.html

The latter link emphasizes notebooks, but there's no reason why desktop chips wouldn't be affected.

FWIW, I was already aware of this, that's why I picked a Gigabyte 9800GT with a 3 year warranty.

They should have fixed the problem by now... But who knows ;).
 

I have a desktop (Core i5/8GB)
I have a laptop (Core i5/6GB)
I have a netbook (Atom dual core)
I have a cell phone ($20)
I have a portable internet tablet/audio device (Nokia N800)

These have 24", 15", 10", 1.5", and 4.5" viewing screens.

So, I'd like a device that is about 7" for reading and surfing, but has a real keyboard and 15+ hours of battery. Honestly, I'd love the N800 Maemo interface on a 7" device. Screw MeeGo, give me Maemo/Linux.

I'm all tapped out on gadgets for money. I might spend $120 on a 7" screen, provided I can hack it for use as a remote access device and run 90% of my Maemo apps including the GPS, SIP and Skype apps. WiFi only networking is fine. No cell data plan wanted.

Oh, the netbook was free and I barely use it at all. While the Nokia N800 gets used a few hours every day and it is 3 yrs old. Some days it is used 8+ hrs, so I understand why folks like their smart-phones, but I don't understand why they'd pay $50/month for a data plan.

I'd buy a mini-netbook today for $99 http://www.tomshardware.com/news/CherryPal-Africa-99-OLPC-Netbook,9275.html if it ran Linux and had a little more memory than the Nokia.

Just to add in a little anecdote of mine. I recently upgraded my brothers PC, in the sense that we replaced motherboard/CPU and RAM. The rest stayed the same. As he now has 16GB RAM, we decided to shell out for Win7 Pro 64-bit instead of reusing the OEM XP license (which would be borderline in legality).

Anyway, that machine has a Linksys WMP54G (version 1.0) wireless PCI card. Silly me, expected it to work by default in Windows as the card was a bit older and my experience from XP was that "if it existed prior to release, there is a driver". Well, no.... *sigh*

Linksys website, no avail. Tried their customer support which said "Not Supported". Call me old-fashioned, but a NIC should be one of the things that is least-"obsoleteable". Luckily, I found a forum post (look for the post by "skinnypirate") that this particular card uses a RALink Chip and you can use their drivers.

Now, I freely admit I didn't try Linux on this machine... (Gaming machine) Perhaps it wouldn't work either... Who knows...

As for Win7 obsoleted scanners... Before throwing them out, consider the following first: VueScan (Not affiliated, just a very happy customer). It's an amazing little piece of software that seems to operate pretty much any scanner you throw at it. My dad has a SCSI Dia/Negative-Scanner with advanced functions for rewinding film and stuff like that. On Linux, XSane doesn't even detect it... VueScan sees it and all functions can be used. Same for my wifes cheap Canon LiDE20. Not supported on Mac OS X 10.6.x at all... VueScan sees it and it works perfectly. Old SCSI AGFA SnapScan 310? No problem... (XSane does this one too though.)

I've never used in on Windows though... Only on Linux and Mac OS X. I have no reason to believe that the quality of the software is less on Windows. You may argue that the software is more expensive than a new cheap scanner. True, but once you have the software, you'll never use another one ever again.

Some data on what other components consume. Not very rigorously determined, but good to make an idea.

Some other data on how much switching from 1.5V to 1.35V to 1.25V DDR3 type of RAM impacts the power consumption at idle time (scroll to the bottom of the page: 1W).

The RAM power consumption will have, though, an impact on how long you can keep a laptop/notebook on idle (so, little CPU, no HDD and LCD, no graphics) before it shuts down and you loose everything you had in RAM (if this matters to someone).

32 GB? What laptop takes anywhere near that?

Who said they were talking about putting 32GB into a laptop? But if you really most know check out this.

Tom's Hardware Guide: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-core-i7-2600k-core-i5-2500k,2833.html

"I was excited as these appear to be Mini PCIe cards" - by DurendalMac (736637) on Wednesday December 29, @10:25PM (#34706832)

I hear you: The last time I was "excited" about a SSD product though, was THIS one (never came to market):

DDRdrive uses PCIe to increase speed of mainstream solid state disks

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ddrdrive-ssd-announced-q1,2195.html

This was "in the makings", back in 2006, but it never came to market... I was BADLY disappointed! I already have & use:

---

1.) A CENATEK RocketDrive 2gb PCI-133 SDRAM based "true SSD" PCI bus based (133mb/sec)

2.) GIGABYTE IRAM 4gb DDR2 RAM based "true SSD" SATA 1 bus based (150mb/sec)

Both drives are used for:

  A. pagefile.sys placement
  B. %temp/tmp% ops via environment variable set
  C. %comspec% location
  D. system logs (like eventlogs, which ARE moveable)
  E. application logs (app logging)
  F. all webbrowser caches
  G. print spooler location

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(I say 'true SSD', because none of these units use FLASH memory on them, which has slower write cycles typically)

The PCI-e based DDRDrive X1 however?

It was going to use the immensely FASTER PCI-e bus... & faster RAM than my CENATEK RocketDrive, in DDR memory: I was "saving my pennies" for it in fact, but again, it NEVER came out to market!

What a shame!

APK

P.S.=> One of these days though, you KNOW someone's going to make a SSD that doesn't use FLASH RAM, & thus has instantly FAST writes too (faster than FLASH RAM does @ least), as well as screaming fast reads + access times, & one that uses the PCI-e bus too, only a matter of time... apk

Have a look at this. Just imagine if a linux system could get an infection just by doing ls on a USB drive!

So windows no longer jams the pencil up it's nose deliberately, but it does run up and down the stairs while holding it point up in front of it's face.

283 watts for HD 4870 with two six pin connectors.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-4870,1964-15.html

Oh I can think of a couple

Albeit, Jailbroken iPhones are less Secure than... umm... whats the term for that? Non-jailbroken? Jailfixed? StillJailed? Anyways.

Point is that some people have started writing malicious software for phones, its becoming glaringly obvious.

What we don't have is people focused on finding, removing, and spouting a product yet like Norton/McAffee/AVG/whatever.

Who is to say a lot of phones are infected but no one yet knows. I bet most users, if their email was compromised, would assume they were hacked via a computer, not tracked via their phone, which could easily be the case.

Almost all my friends carry around laptops anyway.

Are they gaming laptops, or are they homework-and-Facebook laptops with an Intel GMA whose performance is comparable to the GeForce 3 in the original Xbox according to a chart at Tom's Hardware Guide? And do they carry the laptops everywhere they go?