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Uhh...what great chips? The Thubans were good, but everything based on Bulldozer just blows through power while having terrible IPC, thanks to having shared integer and floating point units. If they were to be honest the "modules" would be treated as single cores with hardware assisted hyperthreading, because the benches show that is a hell of a lot closer to what they are than to true cores. Hell since the release of BD they don't even have a single slot anymore on Tom's Hardware "Best Gaming CPU" list whereas they used to pretty much OWN everything under $200. Hell look at how badly their new chips rate compared to even their old chips, with not only the X6 but no less than TWO of the X4s, the 980 and 955, scoring better than their new FX 8120. So I'm sorry, this is coming from someone who has been building AMD exclusively since i heard about the OEM bribery, but the new chips? Just not good.

And sadly ARM isn't gonna save them either, they are too late to the game and from the looks of it ARM simply isn't gonna scale while keeping its lower power budget. Just look at how companies like Nvidia, that have been sinking a ton into ARM, are having to use ever more cores to get the performance up, it just doesn't scale. And since Intel has the fabs they can get to the lower sizes quicker, and their chips are frankly getting lower powered all the time. A 55w Ivy will frankly curbstomp a 125w Piledriver and with servers while there are some loads you can run without the IPC frankly there are a LOT more loads where you'll need that IPC and AMD just doesn't have it, and with electricity costs and cooling costs? It really don't look good for AMD, damned I wish it weren't true but it is what it is, AMD is in REAL bad shape right now.

The problem is gonna be, as this article notes the chips get a LOT worse with each shrink with more failures and more trouble with throughput. As their tests show single does best, triple cell does worst, but of course we all knew that and what we are seeing on the market is mostly MLC.

I have a feeling SSDs are gonna be a "stop gap" on our way to something like the PRAM that HP is working on, but until it gets here the keyword with SSDs is gonna be backup, backup backup backup. We know that is smart to do anyway, but you'd be surprised how many normal folks will think the SSDs are no different than the HDDs and just trust it and find out the hard way you get NO warning with SSDs. This article may be a little old but its still true, with SSDs its a hot/crazy scale with hot speeds and crazy failure rates.

It is pretty much identical to Windows 7's gaming performance, with some minor exceptions (which will likely be fixed with driver updates or game patches over time). Don't just take my word for it either, check out the conclusion to this article from TomsHardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-8-gaming-performance,3331-13.html

Source?
Cuz I'm looking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs#Microsoft_Windows
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/1249-63-ntfs-win7-windows
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs#Versions

And just not seeing "XP is incompatible with the newest version of NTFS"

I guess you have not been looking at any reviews for the 7000 series then. The 7000 series cards are not winning on performance/watt except on OpenCL now, but are better for the performance/cost in every level. Check out Toms Hardware Best Graphics Card for the Money for this month, and pretty much the past couple of years, and AMD comes out on top in almost every category. Also, there are generally no Radeon specific features such as PhysX, but that is because Nvidia owns PhysX. And, as far as absolute performance in all categories except the very top ($400 plus range), AMD quite often is higher than Nvidia. Compare the Radeon 7850 to the similarly priced and recently release 650 ti. Take off your green colored glasses and take a look at what the current video card situation is.

I think you have it a little backwards. I'd say the manufacturers are the ones who WANT to produce for Apple.. how else do you explain settling for such small margins and demanding timelines.. you don't sign up to be abused unless there's something in it for you. I think Apple is the "feather in the cap" for anyone making components.. looks good on a resume - "look - we met Apple's notoriously demanding timelines, surely we can make widgets for you too"

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Samsung-Display-supply-chain-LCD-Korea-Times-Apple,18625.html

Samsung sounds a bit disappointed.. having to settle for amazon and.. Samsung Electronics.
"Although we are losing Apple business, Samsung looks safe as we found the right alternatives — Amazon and Samsung Electronics’ handset division," the Samsung Display source said.

Additional sources have confirmed that both Amazon and Samsung Electronics have increased their orders for displays, making up a portion of the losses caused by Apple's decline. The report suggested that Samsung would cease in providing Apple with displays by next year, but the company will still continue to do business in other areas with Apple including manufacturing the A6 SoC on the 32-nm process."

but then the article goes on to say
"Shortly after the Korea Times article went live, Samsung stated that the report was 100-percent false. "Samsung Display has never tried to cut the supply for LCD panels to Apple," a spokesperson told CNET. The company is asking the Korea Times to revise its story. Still, is there some truth to the story, or was it 100-percent fabrication? We'll find out next year."

so who knows?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Russia-Orthodox-Christians-Apple-Logo-Blasphemous,18567.html

Don't you remember the viruses that affected iOS? http://www.tomshardware.com/news/iphone-virus-botnet-bank-details,9136.html

Intel does make Quad-Core Core i5 processors, check this link http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/277574-28-intel-dual-core-quad-core . And Apple has used them in its computers , my 2010 27 inch iMac has one - http://support.apple.com/kb/SP588 .

90 million?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-windows-7-sales-fastest,9792.html

I'm sure a lot of that is enterprise licensing, but it's still upgrades.

IGPs built on chip kills OCing ability

and yet:it goes to 8.8 GHZ and perhaps 9 GHZ:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-fx-8150-overclock-9ghz-bulldozer,15853.html

So there's more to the story than the simple statements you're making.

I know there are people out there who feel the way you do, but there are people just as knowledgeable who feel the opposite also and who can match you point by point. I freely and cheerfully admit it seems you're more technically savvy than me on CPUs, however, that doesn't make what you're saying correct or definitive.

My point stands: the 8150 is the top of the line AMD chip and it's imminently affordable and performance wise, I have found it to be awesome.

Earlier I linked you to the price/performance valuation which put the 8150 at the top of the heap; your opinion differs and you have your own sites which rate something else as being better, OK, but that evaluation is not some kind of fraud being perpetrated on unwary consumers. I think experts are genuinely disagreeing here, as opposed to people just misrepresenting reality all over the place.

Overclocking is not a problem at all.. my ASUS board makes it a no brainer , basically "how much faster do you want to go? .. push this button".

The Roadmap also seems to include the AM3+ socket. That would give me an upgrade path for which I am thankful.

I'll give you this AMD overpromised on this chip. They did. It is not 50% faster than the 2600k. Obviously they are aware of this and being the great company they are, I am pretty sure they won't misfire like that again any time soon. It's a new design. I am not on Windows 8 and it seems unlikely I will go there even if it does improve my performance because I really hate giving money to Microsoft also. But that's another topic.

Cheers.

For a desktop, I'd say single-threaded speed is more important than total multi-threaded speed The performance of most things you interact with is dependent on single-threaded speed -- browsers, office suites or in general pretty much anything that happens in response to mouse/keyboard input. Things that benefit the most from arbitrary amounts of cores are usually things like compression, video encoding, rendering... things where you start the task and come back later. If you're doing that heavily then it makes sense to buy a many-core CPU, but for regular desktop use you want something that minimizes interaction latency -- fewer cores and higher per-core performance is better.

Of course, as you say, our desktops are often doing more than one thing at once, so >1 core is useful. No use having a fast processor if your interactive task has to wait for something else to finish first. Single core systems are also prone to having a single task eat all your CPU, rendering the entire system unusable until it's finished (although you could argue that's more a problem with the OS scheduler). There comes a point of diminishing returns though, and I think 8 cores is beyond that point. I'd rather have a 4-core processor with faster single-threaded performance than an 8-core one with higher total aggregate performance.

I don't think cost is even in AMD's favor either. It looks like Intel chips are using significantly less power for the same performance, so if you're paying for electricity then Intel will be cheaper in the long run. This review paints a pretty bleak picture for AMD.

About the only thing AMD have going for them right now is that they're not Intel. Intel's trick of not selling any CPU models with all features enabled (there's only a couple of models with unlocked multipliers, and those models have some "business class" features, which I happen to want, disabled) annoys me. But if I built a new desktop now, looking at AMD's current CPU offerings, I'm not sure even being made by Intel would be enough to stop me from buying an Intel chip.

OCZ is the lowest-cost brand in SSDs. Look at any shop listing SSDs, you'll find OCZ at the cheap end of the list.
It is virtually certain that OCZ uses bottom-of-the-barrel Flash chips and controllers to be able to sell SSDs that cheap.
I don't know what the failure/RMA rate is, but probably closer to (if not actually at) a double-digit percentage, than both you and OCZ would like.

OCZ also pulled a fast one not so long ago: The Vertex 2 series was changed to use 25 nm Flash chips without changing the product code .

Benchmarks were not quite the same with 25 nm chips (most benchmarks slower, a few slightly faster), and endurance is likely to be a low single-digit number of years, depending on how much data is written to it.
I wouldn't trust a SSD from OCZ with 25 nm chips, to last over a year.
25 nm Flash chips use a larger percentage of spare area to compensate (though I suspect far from entirely) for the reduced endurance from the smaller die-size.
With the new 64 Gbit chips with an even larger spare area, that meant a somewhat smaller Vertex 2 than advertised; not quite the, for example 120 GB ( 120 billion bytes), but only 115 GB (in BIOS).
After the news about it spread, OCZ now offers to swap drives, but still to ones with 25 nm, just not 64 Gbit chips, instead double the 32 Gbit chips so the capacity is actually 120 GB, primarily to help customers with RAID setups, but that's basically too little, too late.

I am NEVER buying a OCZ SSD - that company is only interested in making money and now that they've started to screw over their customers to do so, I'll bet that company goes the way of the Dodo in a few years.

A lot of people are thinking that the Apple Maps errors are just going to be shrugged off – that in a few months or a few years, they'll reach "good enough" status, and everyone will just forget this embarrassing incident. But I think it goes deeper than that. A major part of Apple's appeal, one big reason why they have been able to charge premium prices and get people lining up to buy their stuff, is that their devices "Just Work."

The thing to keep in mind here is that Google is the undisputed champion of mapping, whatever data Apple was going to use it just wasn't going to be as good as Google's. Google has sunk millions of dollars and man hours into their maps in the past few year and redefined people's expectations (a couple years ago who would've thought that having access to a nearly perfect global map at all times would be seen as a necessity ?) Google also knew of this advantage and used it as leverage. Sooner or later something would have to give and it has, unfortunately this means iOS users will have some minor inconvenience in the transition period.

Add that to the fact that the new Lightning connector on the iPhone has an IC designed solely to prevent creation of compatible cables

Actually the best analysis so far is that the chip negotiates the assignment of pins in the reversible connector :

"The controller/driver chip tells the device what type it is, and for cases like the Lightning-to-USB cable whether a charger (that sends power) or a device (that needs power) is on the other end.
The device can then switch the other pins between the SoC’s data lines or the power circuitry, as needed in each case.
[...]
I really see no justification for the “authentication chip” hypothesis"

A lot of people are thinking that the Apple Maps errors are just going to be shrugged off – that in a few months or a few years, they'll reach "good enough" status, and everyone will just forget this embarrassing incident. But I think it goes deeper than that. A major part of Apple's appeal, one big reason why they have been able to charge premium prices and get people lining up to buy their stuff, is that their devices "Just Work." Other companies routinely used their customers as beta testers (this is why it's common knowledge that you never buy a new version of Windows or Office until at least the first Service Pack is out). But Apple avoided that.

No longer. For Apple Maps users *are* beta testers, make no mistake about it. Apple's primary method of map improvement is for users to report problems so they can be fixed. This is unpaid QA work. This is not what Apple's customers thought they were signing up for.

Add that to the fact that the new Lightning connector on the iPhone has an IC designed solely to prevent creation of compatible cables, and of course the numerous lawsuits against Android vendors. It's increasingly starting to look like the post-Jobs Apple is no longer putting the customer experience first. Oh, they always cared about making money, but they understood that their business model was to make money by making the customers happy. Even moves that could be seen as anti-competitive, like the walled garden, could be justified from a user experience perspective (non-technical users probably *shouldn't* be randomly downloading un-vetted executable code, for security reasons). But with Maps, for the first time, they are sacrificing a significant aspect of user experience to internal politics. It is an ill omen for the future. If they continue on this road, what separates them any more from Microsoft, except that MS has a bigger installed base of business users?

I don't doubt that it works. I have a previous version of integrated intel graphics (yes I am aware of the advancements of the HD2000/3000/4000 series in comparison) on this laptop, and -can- game with the settings turned down... way down.

that said, I think my (somewhat cynical) "we are as good as a 6 year old card!" comments are pretty appropriate. Tom's hardware ranks the HD4000 roughly on par with the nvidia 6800 ultra (released in 2004) or the 8600GT (released in 2006).

the 8600gt was a fine midrange card, and can still run today's games, albiet at reduced resolution and details. if all you're looking for is the ability to run a game, period, these chips will work, but I can't really say they'd do much better than a console (the ps3 gpu is essentially an nvidia gtx 7800, and the 360 gpu is similar, only with unified shaders), and again they don't hold a candle to even modest dedicated cards today.

in a laptop, I might be interested. On the desktop, which is what the chips being reviewed are for, I can't see much use for these things when it comes to gaming (which, again, is their big selling point right now). if you're building a desktop machine you expect to do any gaming on, and the extra $100 for, say, a gts 450 or something like that is a budget breaker, maybe you should be saving up an extra month.

Why would you say that ? It can run on an Android Linux kernel or even the less obvious choice of running it on the Raspberry Pi:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gecko/B2G_build_prerequisites

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Firefox-OS-Mozilla-Raspberry-Pi,16883.html

You did not read Slashdot yesterday ?:

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/07/06/1551237/telefonica-shows-prototype-firefox-os-phone

The plan is to release a phone early next year:
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/firefox-os-will-be-on-zte-phones-early-next-year-50009258/

And there was also this, spotted in the London Underground:

http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/A3QARhSCIAA2R9U,0101-353576-0-2-3-1-jpg-.html

Yes. Dear and expensive seem to be synonymous in many language, including (non-American) English

Although the article seems a bit skewed, and makes it (the Windows tablet) out to be worse than it is...

Perhaps, but this is a really skewed article.

50% more than the galaxy 2 10.1"
- Similar resolution screen (1366x768 vs. 1280x800) or iPad2 (1024x768). Still creamed by the iPad 3 (2048x1536)
- Processor that is almost ~45%-80% more powerful than the Galaxy 2
- 3D performance is over 2x the Galaxy 2 with the except one benchmark, which is only 90% better.
- Twice as much memory as any of the other 3 (all 1GB)
- Cant compare storage

most info from ipad/samsuck take from here. I'm assuming the Tegra3 used has a similarly clocked CPU to the Transformer in the review. The Tegra 3 used in the TF300T (in the review) is the slowest Tegra 3 chip of any of this line (1.2Ghz), I think I've seen as slow as 1.0Ghz, but I've definitely seen 1.3Ghz and 1.6Ghz.

Note, again, this assumes the T3 used is similar to that of the Transformer TF300T, which could actually vary, but is still likely to beat the Galaxy 2. The TFS is calling this 'not great', and giving primary comparisons that are not better (except, possibly, the iPad3, I wasn't able to find any good performance metrics on that). The only competitive product mentioned (the Transformer) seemed almost as an afterthought with mention of the dock. These range from $380 to $580 on newegg (new, not refurb or open box).

From a pure hardware perspective, is it worth more than a Galaxy 2? Yes. $200 more? By the benchmarks, a bottom of the line Transformer easily is worth 50% more, so, depending on the Tegra3 setup used, it is possible (and probable). Will it be worth more than the Transformer? Probably not, unless the OS is really well done.

I found some reviews of the iPad3 vs the Transformer (top of the line model, so we'll say "best possible case" for the Windows tablet), they seem to suggest that the two are comparible by performance...

So, roughly speaking:
Screen: Galaxy II ~= MS Tranformer (1080P IIRC) iPad3
Speed: Galaxy II Transformer (low end) = MS = Trasformer (high end) iPad3
Price: Galaxy II (bast in this case) Transformer (low end) iPad3 Transformer (high end) MS (worst in this case)

Overall... I'd take anything on the list over that Galaxy II. In part due to the fact that every Samsung Android device I've had has been a buggy crashzilla (worse than the non-samsung androids, worse than iOS, worse than an HTC WP7), and it just doesn't have the price-performance benefit.

The iPad 3 probably has the best/price performance ratio on the chart, if you can stand iOS.
If like me, you can't, go with the Transformer, with the Windows tab in second place.
If you don't hate iOS, then you probably want the iPad3 more than the Transformer, more than the Windows tab...

It is not too strange that you end up with an end-user price of 600$ - the 85$ should be added to the component cost, which is what, 150$ for a tablet of this class? Basically Microsoft adds at least 50% to the base cost of the device, all other costs comes on top of that.

Google gives away Android for free, so you end up with 49.99$ tablets on Alibaba. (I should get one of those in the mail this week - looking forward to taking it apart). Apple probably does something similar, but then they're not really aiming for the cost-conscious part of the market.

Wow, you really WANT a fresh bitchslapping, don't you? Challenge accepted!

Lets see...you have Electronic Arts using DRM, we have Ubisoft still requiring online activation if not always on, and of course the current Linux darling Valve which is you'll stop slurping the GNUoolaid from RMS then you'd know that Steam is THE BIGGEST DRM SYSTEM ON THE PLANET DUMBASS that makes its own secure executable which is LOCKED TO A PLAYER...hmm...locked to a player so nobody can share that, what is it? Sounds familiar, could it be...DRM? Dum dum DUMBASS.

But of course all YOU can do is scream NIGGER which in FOSSie language is called PaidMicrosoftShill, but hey, if your kind didn't act like religious zealots then we couldn't enjoy laughing at you, which we do Alex, we ALL laugh at you, at how you can't even see reality when it is cockslapping you in the face, how no matter how broken a mess the devs hand you you say "Oh please good sir, may I have another?" that's what makes it so damned funny!

The lack of a tactile keyboard is definitely one drawback to smartphones. I think the Tactus touchscreen stuff is going to solve that problem. Hopefully apple won't buy them out and refuse to license it to other companies. Link: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Touchscreen-Tactile-Feedback-Smartphones-buttons,16492.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-tegra-4-wayne-arm-a15,15261.html

By 2013, NVidia's Tegra 4 gonna be out.

It's rumored to have a Kepler GPU and run 10 times the performance of Tegra2, more or less the equivalent to the TI-chip the Blackberry is based on.

What's the power consumption on that going to be like?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-tegra-4-wayne-arm-a15,15261.html

By 2013, NVidia's Tegra 4 gonna be out.

It's rumored to have a Kepler GPU and run 10 times the performance of Tegra2, more or less the equivalent to the TI-chip the Blackberry is based on.

The first place I ran across the concept was Tom's Hardware, and you can still see the original article. "High Performance Computing" says Intel? Pish Tosh. Kids, you really can try this at home... but get a grown-up to assist you!

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/strip-fans,1203.html

Yes, and he asserted it with zero evidence.

I assumed we all remembered the quarterly stories reminding us. I'm at work now so it's hard to the most relevant sites, but here are two links:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/pc-gaming-fastest-growing-platform/16749.html to support the "fastest growing" claim and http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-pc-console-sales-battlefield-3-bf3-pc-gaming,13499.html to compare PC game software sales to the sum of all console sales. It doesn't show PC game sales vs. each individual console, which is related to my claim, but notice that in 2008 PC game software sales were over 50% of the total sales of all consoles combined and since then that fraction has been growing every year.

So to reiterate my initial claim, now with annoyingly indirect but still strong evidence, the PC platform is both (1) the largest and (2) fastest growing and it has been for many years. And to those linking to today's very nice XKCD, claim (1) means that the comic isn't relevant to claim (2). Anyway, pwned.

2) For other programs, I just hit Super and type the first letters of the program name

My keyboard doesn't have a "Super" key. And if it did, if I'm running an application I don't commonly use, I often don't know the name of it, so I would like a categorized menu of software to choose from.

You could run Gnome 3 and press alt+f1 instead of the Super key and if you install the frippery menu extension from extensions.gnome.org, you will have a traditional applications menu (you can also add a places menu with an additional extension).

Here are other keystroke/shortcuts besides the alt+f1: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fedora-16-gnome-3-review,3155-10.html

This hasn't been true for about 4 years. Intel is now so crushingly ahead of AMD in the server space performance-wise and energy-efficiency-wise that they hold 94.5% of the server/workstation market. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-processor,15041.html

And since server/workstation hardware costs are dwarfed by server/workstation software license costs, which tend to be per core, that means that the total cost of ownership of fewer Intel cores is actually less than the TCO of more, slower AMD cores that deliver the same performance. It turns out that due to Amdahl's Law, single-threaded performance matters even more in the many-core space.

Why? Because 99.9% of the time six cores at 2.8ghz is more than enough. Even games run perfectly

There are virtually no games that actually use 6 cores though, so 2 of those cores just sit idle doing nothing. There are a lot of games that still only use 2 cores too, for example Skyrim (one of the most popular games in recent years):

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

That's one of the big problems with Bulldozer. In programs than can use all 8 cores it is somewhat competitive with 4 Intel cores, but in the programs that can't use 8 cores (quite a few) they get absolutely crushed by Intel.

Amd surprised me with some of their more power efficient offerings. I was able to get an e-350 based motherboard for under $100 for an always on little home server. The thing draws less than 40 watts with a bunch of spinning hard drives. When doing research, it very solidly competed with Atom (Tom's hardware) in terms of price/ performance. I'd be interested to see what this refresh does for this line of chips.

Yes, exactly! The high memory usage comes from firebug. If you really have so little memory, then you'll be much better off running 2 separate instances of Firefox. In both my own testing and Tom's latest browser Firefox turn out on top with the lowest memory footprint.
http://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/memoryusage3wbgp11,0101-343668-0-2-3-1-png-.html

Best 40 tab - Firefox 794 MB
Worst 40 tab - Chrome 1449 MB

Chrome used almost twice the memory as Firefox.

Firefox is a memory pig - I am typically running 15 - 20, even 30 tabs at a time, and it's typically grabbing 3+Gig of memory (flash is a massive hog, too).

From every test on the net http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228-12.html memory is comparable to the other major browsers.

Sorry, forgot a link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-13.html

i7-2600K
4 cores: 80.57 fps
3 cores: 81.07 fps
2 cores: 80.76 fps
1 core: doesn't start

> The research into frame-rate latencies is really interesting,
Indeed. There was a VERY interesting article last year on Micro-Stuttering And GPU Scaling In CrossFire And SLI
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stutter-crossfire,2995.html

> but the whole idea that *anyone* knowledgeable about PC gaming would have *ever* denied that the CPU was an important factor in performance is ridiculous.
Not exactly. Battlefield 3 doesn't use more then 2 cores.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2011/11/10/battlefield-3-technical-analysis/7
http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html

If you have a high profile AAA title with that level of quality of graphics it kind of makes you wonder why other games "need" 4-cores?

... and if the app isn't free, then Android users will make it free. You know what I'm talking about. Also, Android users vote for Romney.

PIPA, SOPA, ACTA, DMCA, PROTECT-IP all bankrolled and lobbied for by Sony and friends.

I'd say "and friends" is a key here. Somehow you want to make one company responsible for it.
Sony PS3 allows you to rip your CD and put it on MP3 drive, mind you.

Not to mention their relentless attempts to proprietize media formats.

Why not mention it? Last time I've checked people had to pay royalties for:

• Every CD, DVD, Blue Ray disk
• Every player of the mentioned devices
• HDMI port

It is a profitable business that's why nearly ALL companies try to do have their share. What makes Sony outstanding in this regard?

I own a Sony Walkmen MP3 player. It doesn't force me to install anything. It doesn't try to do any DRM crap. It can be used as USB drive. Oh, it even can play all files in a folder. That's quite contrary to what some popular music player from another company does.
I own Sony Reader (actually a bunch of them). It supports EPUBs, an open standard. None of them locks me in into particular store. I can get e-books from public libraries with it. Unlike with very popular product by some other company. All of them are easily modded with custom firmware to add more features. It was easy for Sony stop CFW from running on it (as Amazon did with Kindle), but they aren't doing it.

PS
Oh, and while we're at it, this seems to be bogus news.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Anon-Hack-PSN-Sony-Deny,16916.html

Actually, the opposite is true. This was possible before RTM, but Microsoft has removed this ability in the final code.

CNET reports that users of the recently-leaked RTM builds of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 have discovered that one of the tweaks Microsoft has made since the launch of the last public test build, Windows 8 Release Preview, centers on the boot process. Microsoft is reportedly now blocking users from bypassing the boxy Start screen, preventing them from booting straight into Desktop mode.

Previous test builds allowed Windows 8 users to create a shortcut that switches to the Windows 8 desktop. If the user didn't want to boot their machine into the tiled desktop UI (formerly known as Metro), they could simply schedule this shortcut to be activated immediately after logging into the user's account.

Rafael Rivera, coauthor of the forthcoming Windows 8 Secrets, has reportedly verified with RTM downloaders that Microsoft's block of the boot bypass is indeed in place. He also believes that Microsoft has blocked the ability for administrators to use Group Policy to allow users to bypass the tiled startup screen. That said, it seems that Microsoft is trying to keep the desktop of old out of sight, hoping users will simply grow accustomed to the new blocky era of Windows.

80ms? That seems rather high. If I set my mouse button to 3ms response[1], I get a min of 141 ( typical 156ms) from visual for: http://cognitivefun.net/test/1
(try looking at stimuli from side of eye)

I doubt my audio reaction time would be 70ms. I get about the same (153ms, typical min 156-169) for the audio test: http://cognitivefun.net/test/16

That said the audio tests might be flawed on windows because of the high latency way sound is done. So maybe the audio test adds 80ms to the score.

[1] For some reason the default is 16ms, which is significant for some games. The rest of the system is important too - screen latency. So a lot of the higher scores might be due to people having crappy LCD screens and mice/keyboards.

Interesting note: using the spacebar on my keyboard brings my min score up to about 200ms! Even if I use the same hand and finger as with the mouse. So I guess my PS/2 keyboard sucks and adds about 40-50ms[2], my mouse is a cheap gaming (1000Hz) a4tech usb mouse, so nothing that fancy.

[2] Could be because of bounce delay:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mechanical-switch-keyboard,2955-5.html

Here it is for the link. There are plenty of other reports if you want.

Here is another link to another response that illustrate that what Apple is doing it not necessarily what Apple would like to be doing.

Yes, it is worth it to me. I only run my PC when I am home for the day, so having the OS boot in a quarter of the time is awesome (ESPECIALLY on the laptop, where I am often trying to pull up something quickly for class), but everything ELSE I do with it runs faster, too, like opening up Office as you said, Paint, Winamp, FRAPS, the control panel, or Firefox. I've never seen Superfetch use more than 2 GB or so of RAM, even on my desktop that has 16 GB and close to a year of data to predict, and Readyboost is only useful if you are running very limited amounts of RAM, i.e. 2 GB or less, and even then, USB and SD cards are a bottleneck to flash performance - putting an SSD into my old netbook (1201N with 4 GB of RAM) made a huge difference, even with a Class 10/8 GB SD card dedicated to Readyboost.

I have 120 GB drives in both my laptop and my desktop, so with a bit of pruning, all of the games I have a reasonable expectation of playing in the near future (Borderlands, Torchlight, L4D, TF2, Path of Exile, Alien Swarm, whatever games I've recently bought) fit on the drives with plenty of space. A few multiplayer games that I don't play often, but do play on occasion on a Friday night when my friends are baby-free, like Counter-Strike, Civ IV, DoD, AvP, I keep installed on my media drive with Steam Mover, so when it does come up every couple of months, I don't have to wait to download it. Most single-player games, like Fallout 3, or Arkham Asylum, I don't bother to keep installed, because they're play-once-and-done kind of games, at least until I decide to revisit them two years down the line, when I just reinstall them (since I've undoubtedly reformatted once or twice since then anyway).

Plus, on my laptop, using Readyboost is a pain, because I have to plug/unplug the SD card every time (full recess SD slots have pretty much gone the way of the dodo).

As to failure rates, I have four SSDs (my first two, 60 GB drives that are now in my HTPC and my stepson's 1201N), and I have not had a problem with any of them, though I have had two of the eight or so HDDs I have purchased since I built my first PC about ten years ago fail. Not comparable sample groups, of course, but in my experience, SSDs are more reliable.

Now, without Steam Mover, I might very well still share your opinion - having Steam tied to a single, small drive was a pain in the ass, and there were several instances in the first few months of my SSD ownership where I missed an hour of gaming with my friends on Friday nights because they were playing something I had deleted to make room for War for Cybertron, or the Ghostbusters game, or whatever I was currently playing. But being able to keep the old favorites on a slow drive for the rare instances when I do need them immediately makes it a superior system.

I assume that was intended as an analogy but I can't come up with any link between that and what we are talking about...

There was plenty of other stuff in my post for you to dwell on. The point was, it isn't your crap, it is owned by someone else, You do not get to decide when or how what is done unless the employer/owner gives you permission first.

That sounds like a very poorly structured work place data infrastructure. There shouldn't be any important data on desktops and workstations in the first place.

Or a very poor employee and perhaps a dishonest employee who is making deals to take with him or even taking the client lists or trade secrets. No one has cleared this employee and designated them uber honorable or anything. Wanting to destroy any traces of his computer usage definitely has a different sound to it then "I don't want them knowing my log on to to site X that they could have found out at any time if they wanted over the last 10 years".

Employee issued systems can't be trusted with any data of significance and as such it shouldn't be significant if one is lost.

If the employee is competent and trust worthy.

Systems get corrupted and wiped routinely in normal operations so it shouldn't matter if an employee wipes a system.

Your right, it shouldn't if it is done at the direction of the owner of the computer. However, an ex employee is not the owner of the computer or the data on it.

Your security policy should work from the assumption that employee systems are untrusted and implement infrastructure level controls that don't depend on software on that system or preventing local administrative access to the employee.

In an ideal world, but the world is far from ideal. What should be done is often replaced with how much is it going to cost and you simply cannot get around that in a lot of situations. It doesn't matter because in the real world, data does sit in a lot of places and it as well as the computer belongs to the employer not the employee.

But hey, don't just take my word for it, here are some links where people who believe like you ended up believing like me after a costly and painful experience.

http://news.cnet.com/Police-blotter-Ex-employee-sued-for-deleting-files/2100-7348_3-6171274.html

http://computerfraud.us/recent-updates/california-court-holds-that-an-employee-can-be-sued-under-the-cfaa-for-deleting-company-files

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/top-10-lawsuits-2006,1884-3.html

http://www.sgrlaw.com/resources/trust_the_leaders/leaders_issues/ttl17/827/

You are behind the times, and should really be firing your complaints at Nvidia.

Discussions on graphics card performance show both suck in different areas.

They never fail! This is a problem because you never find out errors in your GL code until after you've shipped the product.

Or new drivers are released which break things like in Rage.

The upshot is that people incorrectly assume that ATI drivers suck. They don't. Nvidia drivers are the ones that suck!

Perhaps you missed the recent article stating AMD/ATI video drivers are incompatible with system-wide ASLR. 'Always On' DEP combined with 'Always On' ASLR are effective exploit mitigations. However, most people don't know about 'Always On' ASLR since Microsoft had to hide it from EMET with an 'EnableUnsafeSettings' registry key — because AMD/ATI video drivers will cause a BSOD on boot if 'Always On' ASLR is enabled.

Windows has been using GPU acceleration since 3.0. They were just called video cards then, and it was GDI and not directx.

Here's a benchmark where a Voodoo 4 on Win98 out-BitBlts an Intel G45 on Aero.

Try
Experiment: Can You Mine Gold From Old Motherboards?
Tom's Hardware Recovers Gold And Silver From CPUs

Try
Experiment: Can You Mine Gold From Old Motherboards?
Tom's Hardware Recovers Gold And Silver From CPUs

For the slashdotter with more experience: Can 3d Stereo be achieved with regular commodity LCD monitors?

Given their current prices, you should go for 3D-enabled LCD monitors, e.g. the HP 2311 gt. Look for reviews like this one. I personally strongly recommend passive displays (less expensive, and way more comfortable e.g. under fluorescent light).

And if you want to show stuff in 3D easily, why don't you give Tao Presentations a spin?

A quality game requires a higher pricing point.

I agree, and one possible compromise between 99 cent games and $60 games is to split a game into 45-minute episodes (like a TV series) and sell each for a buck or two (also like a TV series).

The console will be more anemic than even the wii is.

Wii's AMD Hollywood GPU is roughly comparable in fillrate to a Radeon 9000, and the Xenos in the Xbox 360 is like a Radeon X1900. Which GPU on Tom's chart comes closest to the specs of a Tegra 3?

A simple software tweak, and those nextgen consoles would be able to more than emulate the proper environment for the android console's titles

But the console makers probably won't choose to emulate Android because if they did, Android titles would compete with native disc and download titles.

Sorry for the typo; here is Grand Prix 8:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/macbook-air-chrome-16-firefox-9-benchmark,3108-18.html

Not that the comparisons count for much, but it's disappointing that Slashdot's headline says "Notably Improved" when Firefox won the three previous comparisons and finished second this time:

  * Grand Prix 7
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.html

  * Grand Prix 8
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-18.html

  * Grand Prix 9
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-18.html

Not that the comparisons count for much, but it's disappointing that Slashdot's headline says "Notably Improved" when Firefox won the three previous comparisons and finished second this time:

  * Grand Prix 7
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.html

  * Grand Prix 8
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-18.html

  * Grand Prix 9
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,3129-18.html