Intel is INTC - according to yahoo finance they were down $0.33 (1.35%) today. With a market cap of ~$150B, this puts them down over $2 billion. If you compare Intel's stock price history with the S&P 500, or IBM, or MS, or... you will see that they all (mostly) move in the same direction at the same time. Welcome to the notion of mutual funds. Intel moving 2.5 points (10%!) in one day isn't going to happen any time soon.
It will not use socket 478, but it may use LGA775. Dual-core P4's will let you execute 2 simultaneous threads at about 1.5-1.8X speed they would run on a single core P4 (given the same clockspeed). Single-threaded apps will not see a performance improvement (although you could run 2 single threaded apps and get an aggregate improvement). These will probably also be 64-bit enabled.
If you want dual-core, I would imagine Intel's will be cheaper than AMD's at intro. The Smithfield processor is in their performance mainstream segment (i.e. same as current Pentium 4 - not Xeon). AFAIK, AMD will intro dual-core with their Opteron line. Not sure when it hits the Athlon FX / Athlon 64 line.
You haven't bought Shrek 2 yet. No way to skip about 2-3 minutes of previews. I ended up just ripping it to my home theater PC (main title only, no menu, no previews) and watching it from there.
1. Xscale. You have a really good risc chip in the Xscale. Can you punch up the clock into the Ghz range, add FPU and extend it to 64bits?...
Extending it to 64-bits may be against the licensing agreement that they have with ARM. Or if it wasn't, they may have to turn that IP over to ARM at a later date. I don't think this will ever happen.
2. Alpha reborn. Less likely but it is know to scale well to high speed and smp. Could the Alpha scale down to PDA level?
I love the Alpha architecture. It is a very clean RISC architecture. However, instruction density is a little low.
3. Forget RISC. Maybe RISC is not the way to go after all. The difference between memory speed and cpu speed is increasing. I code density the key to higher speed in this day and age. Should we think about super CISC where each instruction does more?
Ding, ding ding! We have a winner. Both Alpha and ARM (XScale) are RISC architectures. Itanium, Alpha, PPC, and (to a much lesser extent) ARM, have instruction density problems (they require larger instruction caches to get the same effenciency as an x86 chip). This problem only gets worse when CPU core speed keeps increasing at a faster rate than memory speed.
Even x86-64 has its problems. For a long time the x86 arch was seen to be register starved. When AMD release the x86-64 arch, it doubled the number of integer and SSE registers. However, to make use of the extra registers, you needed to add a byte to every instruction. This, combined with doubled pointer sizes, meant that many 64-bit programs run slower than 32-bit versions (especially if the compiler couldn't use the extra registers effectively). This is less of a problem with the Opteron due to it's integrated memory controller.
Anyway, the main reason I replied was because you simultaneously advise going for Alpha and super CISC. These are completely opposite directions. The RISC / CISC wars are funny. CISC was used to keep programs small (no space to store them). RISC pulled ahead when hard drives and memory was cheaper. CISC is taking the lead now because HW is sufficiently fast to decode it, and memory bandwidth into the processor is severely constrained. I don't see the trend reversing again any time soon (especially with multi-core architectures sharing memory bandwidth).
Blu-Ray is a better format than HD-DVD. They will both include security measures to prevent copying, but:
- blu ray has a special coating that is meant to eliminate 90+% of handling scratches to the disk. - blu ray holds more data (changes in materials and tolerances).
They both require the same 3 codec support in the player (MS WM9 (VC-1), MP4 (H.264) and MP2). They both need blue lasers. They both will use next generation Dolby Digital and DTS sound formats for 7.1 (or higher) surround sound. The only reason HD-DVD is even in contention is because the manufacturing methodology is nearly identical to normal DVD. Therefore, the same factories and materials can be used to produce HD-DVD and normal DVD content. With Blu-Ray all new equipment needs to be purchased and the per-disc materials costs is higher. So, the studios are faced with the following choices:
- Use a more consumer-friendly (scratch resistant, more data) format, or - Use a format that gives us more profit.
Zenith DVB318 and Momitsu V880. They both upscale DVD's to HD resolution and output the unencrypted result over analog component cables. The DVD consortium (and the content industry in general), state that everything must be either encrypted with HDCP (when using digital outputs like DVI or HDMI), or messed up with Macrovision. The only exception is for component outputs (where the Macrovision algorithm doesn't work), so they contractually limit the legal output resolution over component to 480p for DVD's.
People who were early adopters of HDTV's (i.e. they ONLY have component inputs for HD, no DVI or HDMI) are pretty pissed about the whole situation.
Think of it less of a win for Itanium and more of a win for SGI Altix (that happens to use Itanium). The SGI Altix machines have a single system image with 512 processors (there are 20 of these clustered together). As far as I know, this is actually the cheapest and highest performing system that can use 512 nodes in a single system image. Other choices (which I'm not even sure scale to 512 processors) include Sun (slow), Power (expensive), and MIPS (SGI predecessor to the Altix - slower). Also, they are working on methods to increase single system image size to 2048 nodes, I believe an industry first. Some workloads just like running in single system images much better than on clusters.
As for Itanium vs. Opteron - the Itanium kicks the Opteron's ass in floating point. Since NASA is presumably going to be doing a lot of engineering simulations, good FP performance is highly desirable. Having 6 MB of cache per node probably helps the Itanium beat out the Opteron for large memory footprint workloads as well.
Basically, until Cray releases Red Storm (not sure if they'll stay in business that long), an Opteron system doesn't exist that can match the performance of the SGI Altix.
Finally, Itaniums are NOT "rediculously more" compared to the 8xx Opteron line (which is the Itanium's real competitor in this area).
For some smaller files (when run compiled with the help of libtool), yes, the terminal takes more cpu. After delving into it a little a few months ago, I found the main culprit to be the vte terminal emulation library. It eschews the stock X11 terminal emulation and is flexible enough to emulate pretty much anything (with text that reads forwards, backwards, updside down, and perhaps inside out). The problem is, it's REALLY slow. And while it does slow down compilation a little, the real problem is doing something like a full screen vi inside gnome-terminal (something I need for analysing simulation runs). The lag is just unbearable.
From a user's perspective, the only thing vte buys me is the ability to click on links and have it launch a web browser (although there might be some real xterms that allow this too?). That's something that konsole can't do.
Also, while pango might be slow, konsole using qt and xft runs just fine with unicode support and anti-aliasing - including the full screen vi test.
Fix gnome-terminal. Any terminal that uses more cpu to display the text from compiling software than is needed for the actual compile is just broken. Miguel complained (and stopped using gnome-terminal) about this more than 2 years ago! This is one of the few reasons that I have stuck with KDE.
(Yes, I know I can run konsole within gnome, but aside from the inconsistent themes, it sucks up a lot of memory to load both the gnome and kde libs at the same time.)
This is done on purpose. Even when XNA is launched, I doubt you'll see many games that support online games working cross-platform. The main reason is the control interface. People on the PC using keyboard + mouse would completely own anyone playing on an Xbox in any type of FPS game (including Pandora Tomorrow). A secondary reason is cheats. Until it can be completely proven that a PC online game can't be hacked, I don't want any PC's connected to Xbox Live.
After MS releases Live for Windows, that's probably what you'll have: Xbox Live and Windows Live. There may be some crossover functionality (sharing friends lists, common accounts, etc.), but having the same game work online for both console and PC users wouldn't work out too well. The one thing that may change this sooner is if MS starts selling Xbox controllers for PC users. Games that work online between Xbox and PC would have to require using the Xbox controller on the PC.
I love Gnome. I think it looks great, I think it works great. I don't mind the lack of options too much. But, I still use KDE for the simple reason that konsole is actually usable and gnome-terminal isn't. It takes more processing power for gnome-terminal to *scroll the text* from a compile than it actually does to compile. As a software developer that has 5-8 tabs open on a couple terimals and is compiling a lot, that just doesn't cut it.
I've read past mailing list logs trying to figure out why gnome-terminal got slower over time and the culprit seems to be the "functionally elegant", emulate anything, terminal emulation library. While I'm sure the code is easy to work with, the actual product isn't. One of the posts mentioned that Miguel doesn't even use the modern gnome-terminal any more.
I guess since the average user isn't a developer this hasn't been an issue. I guess I'll continue working with KDE (which is also a great system, but not perfect).
This is kind of late, so I doubt anyone will read this, but...
What noise is this liquid going to insulate? That was the whole point of my original post. The CPU fan? Not needed in liquid cooling. The PSU fan? Not needed in liquid cooling. The HD and CD/DVD can't be put in liquid, so no insulation there.
PC's submerged in liquid will be quiter than air-cooled PC's, but not because the liquid is insulating the sound. It's because the liquid is replacing the parts that cause the sound in the first place!
That's kind of funny. The only things that make noise in a computer are the mechanically moving parts: hard drives, CD/DVD drives, and fans (along with the air being moved). Presumably, using a liquid cooling system would remove the fans and moving air, which are by far the loudest parts of a typical PC.
The company I work for uses a similar rating system, but requires peer reviews to be supplied to your manager to be rolled into your official review. Normally, each person writes 2-3 reviews for his peers / managers, and they have 2-3 peers write reviews for them. This means that a large part of your official review is how much you helped other team members. It's kind of a pain in the ass during review period, but it tends to almost completely eliminate the backstabbing described in the original post.
Where in the grandparent's post did he say TrollTech was a fiend? I personally think it would be fun to develop some shareware apps that were cross platform. Devel tools on Linux is free. Devel tools on Windows can either be free (cygwin), or relatively low cost ($100 for VC++ standard). Shareware is not usually meant to provide primary income. It's kind of like doing open-source work (because it's fun) and yet you get some play money if you provide something useful. Spending $1000 to develop some software that probably won't generate $1000 in income doesn't seem like a good investment. A small business license would make sense here (maybe no direct support, just a license to sell proprietary code). I don't think anyone thinks Trolltech is evil, we just like free stuff just like everyone else.;) Personally, I think Trolltech is slightly hippocritical for not providing the Windows libraries under the GPL. The only way to get a free (but more restrictive than GPL) version for Windows is to buy the programming QT3 book.
What I'd like them to do with it is make it available without standard cable. Here in Portland Ore, comcast charges $12 / month for limited basic (local, discovery, crap) and $44 for standard basic (the cheapest package that includes espn). All I really want is local, discovery, and espn/espn2. However, I'm not paying an extra $32 just for espn (I don't care about the rest of the channels that come with standard cable). It would be nice if they offered just espn (or perhaps the whole disney package) for $10-$15 more per month. I'll probably end up getting the cheapest dish network subscription ($25) instead. I'll keep comcast for local because I use them for broadband, and the incremental cost for local channels is only $2 (which is less than the $5 to get local from dish).
Hmm, I haven't tried this and may be talking out of my ass, but couldn't you use use something like dd to copy the raw bits of the drive to a large file and mount it using loopback as a virtual drive? You may need some twiddling in mplayer / xine / whatever to recognize the file as a dvd device. You may also need to use something other than dd to decrypt the vob files during the rip process (not sure if you need some uncopyable bits from the actual disc for DeCSS to work). Just a guess...
It was my understanding (from articles about last year's IDF where this was intro'd) that the BTX design basically mandates a wind tunnel from the front of the case, over the CPU / chipset, out the back - with one "wall" of the tunnel typically being implemented by a video card. There was talk that both the CPU *and* the video card could revert to passive heatsinks, with large (slow rpm) fans driving the air through the tunnel. Regardless of the specifics, I'm positive that the BTX form factor will help video card cooling.
There are some games for the Xbox that do 720p, but there's not enough memory bandwidth / pixel shader horsepower on the xbox to do complicated shaders at that resolution. I would imagine that MS would require that whatever graphics solution they support for the next system will be capable of doing much more complicated rendering than the current console at 720p / 1080i. They may also require that all games support those resolutions. If they don't require support in HD, then developers will optimize for 480p, usually using too many effects to run at higher resolutions at a consistant framerate.
Personally, I think it's a great idea - as long as it is optional. There should be nothing wrong with allowing people to have something like 16-32 MB of storage space per Live account for storing data. Gamers can already choose (on most games) to save to HD or memory card, just make Live another option. As someone who had an Xbox HD die recently and lost a few hundred gold medals / cars on Project Gotham Racing, this would have been a godsend. I guess I should buy memory cards to back up important saves in the future...
Not sure where Taco is, but I grew up about 30 miles NW of Ann Arbor in the middle of nowhere. My family is still there. Last time I talked with my brother he had cable modem access (about 2Mb down / 256 Kb up) for $35 a month (Charter communications). I don't know of anywhere near Ann Arbor that doesn't have something.
Slashdot Mirror
Original 8-bit glory, not the 16-bit sweetness...
Intel is INTC - according to yahoo finance they were down $0.33 (1.35%) today. With a market cap of ~$150B, this puts them down over $2 billion. If you compare Intel's stock price history with the S&P 500, or IBM, or MS, or ... you will see that they all (mostly) move in the same direction at the same time. Welcome to the notion of mutual funds. Intel moving 2.5 points (10%!) in one day isn't going to happen any time soon.
It will not use socket 478, but it may use LGA775. Dual-core P4's will let you execute 2 simultaneous threads at about 1.5-1.8X speed they would run on a single core P4 (given the same clockspeed). Single-threaded apps will not see a performance improvement (although you could run 2 single threaded apps and get an aggregate improvement). These will probably also be 64-bit enabled.
If you want dual-core, I would imagine Intel's will be cheaper than AMD's at intro. The Smithfield processor is in their performance mainstream segment (i.e. same as current Pentium 4 - not Xeon). AFAIK, AMD will intro dual-core with their Opteron line. Not sure when it hits the Athlon FX / Athlon 64 line.
You haven't bought Shrek 2 yet. No way to skip about 2-3 minutes of previews. I ended up just ripping it to my home theater PC (main title only, no menu, no previews) and watching it from there.
Extending it to 64-bits may be against the licensing agreement that they have with ARM. Or if it wasn't, they may have to turn that IP over to ARM at a later date. I don't think this will ever happen.
2. Alpha reborn. Less likely but it is know to scale well to high speed and smp. Could the Alpha scale down to PDA level?
I love the Alpha architecture. It is a very clean RISC architecture. However, instruction density is a little low.
3. Forget RISC. Maybe RISC is not the way to go after all. The difference between memory speed and cpu speed is increasing. I code density the key to higher speed in this day and age. Should we think about super CISC where each instruction does more?
Ding, ding ding! We have a winner. Both Alpha and ARM (XScale) are RISC architectures. Itanium, Alpha, PPC, and (to a much lesser extent) ARM, have instruction density problems (they require larger instruction caches to get the same effenciency as an x86 chip). This problem only gets worse when CPU core speed keeps increasing at a faster rate than memory speed.
Even x86-64 has its problems. For a long time the x86 arch was seen to be register starved. When AMD release the x86-64 arch, it doubled the number of integer and SSE registers. However, to make use of the extra registers, you needed to add a byte to every instruction. This, combined with doubled pointer sizes, meant that many 64-bit programs run slower than 32-bit versions (especially if the compiler couldn't use the extra registers effectively). This is less of a problem with the Opteron due to it's integrated memory controller.
Anyway, the main reason I replied was because you simultaneously advise going for Alpha and super CISC. These are completely opposite directions. The RISC / CISC wars are funny. CISC was used to keep programs small (no space to store them). RISC pulled ahead when hard drives and memory was cheaper. CISC is taking the lead now because HW is sufficiently fast to decode it, and memory bandwidth into the processor is severely constrained. I don't see the trend reversing again any time soon (especially with multi-core architectures sharing memory bandwidth).
Blu-Ray is a better format than HD-DVD. They will both include security measures to prevent copying, but:
:(
- blu ray has a special coating that is meant to eliminate 90+% of handling scratches to the disk.
- blu ray holds more data (changes in materials and tolerances).
They both require the same 3 codec support in the player (MS WM9 (VC-1), MP4 (H.264) and MP2). They both need blue lasers. They both will use next generation Dolby Digital and DTS sound formats for 7.1 (or higher) surround sound. The only reason HD-DVD is even in contention is because the manufacturing methodology is nearly identical to normal DVD. Therefore, the same factories and materials can be used to produce HD-DVD and normal DVD content. With Blu-Ray all new equipment needs to be purchased and the per-disc materials costs is higher. So, the studios are faced with the following choices:
- Use a more consumer-friendly (scratch resistant, more data) format, or
- Use a format that gives us more profit.
Wonder which one will win?
PCI-X is not the same as PCI-Express (PCIe). I'm pretty sure you mean PCIe.
Zenith DVB318 and Momitsu V880. They both upscale DVD's to HD resolution and output the unencrypted result over analog component cables. The DVD consortium (and the content industry in general), state that everything must be either encrypted with HDCP (when using digital outputs like DVI or HDMI), or messed up with Macrovision. The only exception is for component outputs (where the Macrovision algorithm doesn't work), so they contractually limit the legal output resolution over component to 480p for DVD's.
People who were early adopters of HDTV's (i.e. they ONLY have component inputs for HD, no DVI or HDMI) are pretty pissed about the whole situation.
Think of it less of a win for Itanium and more of a win for SGI Altix (that happens to use Itanium). The SGI Altix machines have a single system image with 512 processors (there are 20 of these clustered together). As far as I know, this is actually the cheapest and highest performing system that can use 512 nodes in a single system image. Other choices (which I'm not even sure scale to 512 processors) include Sun (slow), Power (expensive), and MIPS (SGI predecessor to the Altix - slower). Also, they are working on methods to increase single system image size to 2048 nodes, I believe an industry first. Some workloads just like running in single system images much better than on clusters.
As for Itanium vs. Opteron - the Itanium kicks the Opteron's ass in floating point. Since NASA is presumably going to be doing a lot of engineering simulations, good FP performance is highly desirable. Having 6 MB of cache per node probably helps the Itanium beat out the Opteron for large memory footprint workloads as well.
Basically, until Cray releases Red Storm (not sure if they'll stay in business that long), an Opteron system doesn't exist that can match the performance of the SGI Altix.
Finally, Itaniums are NOT "rediculously more" compared to the 8xx Opteron line (which is the Itanium's real competitor in this area).
For some smaller files (when run compiled with the help of libtool), yes, the terminal takes more cpu. After delving into it a little a few months ago, I found the main culprit to be the vte terminal emulation library. It eschews the stock X11 terminal emulation and is flexible enough to emulate pretty much anything (with text that reads forwards, backwards, updside down, and perhaps inside out). The problem is, it's REALLY slow. And while it does slow down compilation a little, the real problem is doing something like a full screen vi inside gnome-terminal (something I need for analysing simulation runs). The lag is just unbearable.
From a user's perspective, the only thing vte buys me is the ability to click on links and have it launch a web browser (although there might be some real xterms that allow this too?). That's something that konsole can't do.
Also, while pango might be slow, konsole using qt and xft runs just fine with unicode support and anti-aliasing - including the full screen vi test.
Fix gnome-terminal. Any terminal that uses more cpu to display the text from compiling software than is needed for the actual compile is just broken. Miguel complained (and stopped using gnome-terminal) about this more than 2 years ago! This is one of the few reasons that I have stuck with KDE.
(Yes, I know I can run konsole within gnome, but aside from the inconsistent themes, it sucks up a lot of memory to load both the gnome and kde libs at the same time.)
This is done on purpose. Even when XNA is launched, I doubt you'll see many games that support online games working cross-platform. The main reason is the control interface. People on the PC using keyboard + mouse would completely own anyone playing on an Xbox in any type of FPS game (including Pandora Tomorrow). A secondary reason is cheats. Until it can be completely proven that a PC online game can't be hacked, I don't want any PC's connected to Xbox Live.
After MS releases Live for Windows, that's probably what you'll have: Xbox Live and Windows Live. There may be some crossover functionality (sharing friends lists, common accounts, etc.), but having the same game work online for both console and PC users wouldn't work out too well. The one thing that may change this sooner is if MS starts selling Xbox controllers for PC users. Games that work online between Xbox and PC would have to require using the Xbox controller on the PC.
I love Gnome. I think it looks great, I think it works great. I don't mind the lack of options too much. But, I still use KDE for the simple reason that konsole is actually usable and gnome-terminal isn't. It takes more processing power for gnome-terminal to *scroll the text* from a compile than it actually does to compile. As a software developer that has 5-8 tabs open on a couple terimals and is compiling a lot, that just doesn't cut it.
I've read past mailing list logs trying to figure out why gnome-terminal got slower over time and the culprit seems to be the "functionally elegant", emulate anything, terminal emulation library. While I'm sure the code is easy to work with, the actual product isn't. One of the posts mentioned that Miguel doesn't even use the modern gnome-terminal any more.
I guess since the average user isn't a developer this hasn't been an issue. I guess I'll continue working with KDE (which is also a great system, but not perfect).
Would be nice if they listed that in, say, the official GNUStep Application Database, under, hmm, development tools...
So I looked on that site and found Gorm (Interface Builder), but where exactly is the project builder clone?
This is kind of late, so I doubt anyone will read this, but...
What noise is this liquid going to insulate? That was the whole point of my original post. The CPU fan? Not needed in liquid cooling. The PSU fan? Not needed in liquid cooling. The HD and CD/DVD can't be put in liquid, so no insulation there.
PC's submerged in liquid will be quiter than air-cooled PC's, but not because the liquid is insulating the sound. It's because the liquid is replacing the parts that cause the sound in the first place!
That's kind of funny. The only things that make noise in a computer are the mechanically moving parts: hard drives, CD/DVD drives, and fans (along with the air being moved). Presumably, using a liquid cooling system would remove the fans and moving air, which are by far the loudest parts of a typical PC.
The company I work for uses a similar rating system, but requires peer reviews to be supplied to your manager to be rolled into your official review. Normally, each person writes 2-3 reviews for his peers / managers, and they have 2-3 peers write reviews for them. This means that a large part of your official review is how much you helped other team members. It's kind of a pain in the ass during review period, but it tends to almost completely eliminate the backstabbing described in the original post.
Where in the grandparent's post did he say TrollTech was a fiend? I personally think it would be fun to develop some shareware apps that were cross platform. Devel tools on Linux is free. Devel tools on Windows can either be free (cygwin), or relatively low cost ($100 for VC++ standard). Shareware is not usually meant to provide primary income. It's kind of like doing open-source work (because it's fun) and yet you get some play money if you provide something useful. Spending $1000 to develop some software that probably won't generate $1000 in income doesn't seem like a good investment. A small business license would make sense here (maybe no direct support, just a license to sell proprietary code). I don't think anyone thinks Trolltech is evil, we just like free stuff just like everyone else. ;) Personally, I think Trolltech is slightly hippocritical for not providing the Windows libraries under the GPL. The only way to get a free (but more restrictive than GPL) version for Windows is to buy the programming QT3 book.
What I'd like them to do with it is make it available without standard cable. Here in Portland Ore, comcast charges $12 / month for limited basic (local, discovery, crap) and $44 for standard basic (the cheapest package that includes espn). All I really want is local, discovery, and espn/espn2. However, I'm not paying an extra $32 just for espn (I don't care about the rest of the channels that come with standard cable). It would be nice if they offered just espn (or perhaps the whole disney package) for $10-$15 more per month. I'll probably end up getting the cheapest dish network subscription ($25) instead. I'll keep comcast for local because I use them for broadband, and the incremental cost for local channels is only $2 (which is less than the $5 to get local from dish).
Hmm, I haven't tried this and may be talking out of my ass, but couldn't you use use something like dd to copy the raw bits of the drive to a large file and mount it using loopback as a virtual drive? You may need some twiddling in mplayer / xine / whatever to recognize the file as a dvd device. You may also need to use something other than dd to decrypt the vob files during the rip process (not sure if you need some uncopyable bits from the actual disc for DeCSS to work). Just a guess...
It was my understanding (from articles about last year's IDF where this was intro'd) that the BTX design basically mandates a wind tunnel from the front of the case, over the CPU / chipset, out the back - with one "wall" of the tunnel typically being implemented by a video card. There was talk that both the CPU *and* the video card could revert to passive heatsinks, with large (slow rpm) fans driving the air through the tunnel. Regardless of the specifics, I'm positive that the BTX form factor will help video card cooling.
There are some games for the Xbox that do 720p, but there's not enough memory bandwidth / pixel shader horsepower on the xbox to do complicated shaders at that resolution. I would imagine that MS would require that whatever graphics solution they support for the next system will be capable of doing much more complicated rendering than the current console at 720p / 1080i. They may also require that all games support those resolutions. If they don't require support in HD, then developers will optimize for 480p, usually using too many effects to run at higher resolutions at a consistant framerate.
Personally, I think it's a great idea - as long as it is optional. There should be nothing wrong with allowing people to have something like 16-32 MB of storage space per Live account for storing data. Gamers can already choose (on most games) to save to HD or memory card, just make Live another option. As someone who had an Xbox HD die recently and lost a few hundred gold medals / cars on Project Gotham Racing, this would have been a godsend. I guess I should buy memory cards to back up important saves in the future...
Not sure where Taco is, but I grew up about 30 miles NW of Ann Arbor in the middle of nowhere. My family is still there. Last time I talked with my brother he had cable modem access (about 2Mb down / 256 Kb up) for $35 a month (Charter communications). I don't know of anywhere near Ann Arbor that doesn't have something.