I did... I bought an Intel X-25G2 160GB drive back when they were $550. Of course, this was in 2010, so I enjoyed it for many years before the price became reasonable. About 6 months ago I replaced it with a Samsung 840 500GB drive that I picked up for just over $300. Boy have they gotten cheaper.:)
But you know what? I don't regret it for a minute, that 160GB drive is still going strong in my wife's computer and based on its remaining life, will last us longer than we'll care to use it.
Enjoying sub 20 second boot times for 3 years? Worth every penny, but I do admit that I'm blessed to be able to spend the money on that, I know that not everyone can.
BTW, many people said the same thing about Blu-Ray when it first came out, I've read many times online where people claim it doesn't "really" make a difference.
One of three things is true for those people:
1. Their eyesight sucks.
2. They were watching on a crappy 720P TV.
3. They were watching some cheap budget Blu-Ray that didn't get a proper transfer.
When we first got our Sony 46" 1080P TV back in 2006 (yea, it was expensive), we loaded up several Blu-Ray discs and everyone who came over was equally impressed with the difference over DVD. On a quality TV, it really shines.
4K will do the same, once good panels and good source material comes out.
Every human is different, all our eyes are different. I most certainly can see the difference, I have lousy hearing but very good eyes and have no problem seeing all the pixels on my 30" 1600P panels, and I'm 2 feet away from them.
When 32" 4K panels become a bit more mainstream and video cards have another generation or two under their belts, I'll replace my trio of Dell 30" monitors with 3 4K monitors on my desk and be very happy.
As for TVs, 4K can't come fast enough, 1080P is great, but I sit about 10 feet from my 60" Sharp TV and I can see the pixels from that distance. 4K will be nice, 8K is probably the end of it, at that point your statement actually will be correct, no further improvement beyond 8K will probably matter.
SWTOR is my current favorite, but I also like games like CoD and Mass Effect. ME3 actually works well with Eyefinity support, as does SWTOR. CoD does not, so I play it on a single monitor.
Then there are other games. Sol Survivor and Defense Grid Awakening are two of my favorites, both work well on Eyefinity.
People who play at a higher resolution than 1080P. I currently game using three Dell 30" monitors, so I have a total of 12 million pixels to push, which is 50% higher than 4K. I could use a pair of 290X cards in crossfire, once they get after market coolers. Yes, I know I'm not a typical user, but you did ask, "who the hell spends $400+ on a video card". The answer would be me and people like me. Considering that I have $3,000 worth of monitors on my desk, $1,000 for a pair of 290X cards in crossfire is not really all that crazy.
You can say that all you want, but the courts disagree, and since they have the guys with the guns behind them, you probably should defer to their opinion. Or don't, but if you were in Terry's shoes and tried to make that argument, they will throw you in jail too.
Now Terry is looking at real prison time and a really big fine that will see him lose all his assets and make it really hard to find work in IT when he gets out. I hope he thinks it was worth it because his life will be very different in the future.
Maybe in Russia, but I doubt we'd capture or kill them so easily. We don't seem to keep much in the way of military force actually ready in the US, heck on our own military bases almost no one is allowed to even carry a gun. They could be in and out before anything got going, and for sure the local police dept (no matter how cool their SWAT team thinks they are) wouldn't be able to do much. The whole idea is timing, they have a very short window before anyone can respond. I'm not endorsing it, just saying that we aren't sitting around ready to "repel invaders" at a moments notice. There are sections of the South West that have border incursions all the time by drug cartels and we don't seem to be able to stop that, what makes you think we could stop a real military?
Do you really believe that the USA would go to war with Russia if they sent in a Spetsnaz team into the USA to take out (or capture) a single target? Do you believe that they would go to war with us if we did the same? Sure, there would be some fall out, lots of words exchanged, but unless it became a common event, neither of us are going to start a war over it.
The fact is, solar and wind are not going to be enough. Any argument otherwise just delays real solutions. Also true is that conservation won't be enough, our energy use is growing too rapidly for it to do anything other than buy time. Both will help, but we need many more gigawatts of power generation to come online in the next 20 years. That power will have to come from somewhere. Currently, it is coal and natural gas. Would you prefer it remain that way, or would you prefer nuclear?
Just one example... about $7,000 installed for a 120 gallon system, a bit less for an 80 gallon system. About 15 years to pay it back, give or take a bit, not a good use of money.
We have 5 people in the house and use 30,000 gallons a month on average. Granted, a lot of that is for landscaping, but we also use a lot inside the house for dishwashing, clothes, showers, and baths. We do not have a pool, but plan to add one next year, that will of course increase our use of water.
Again, I return to the question at hand... would you like 20 new coal fired power plants, or 20 new nuclear power plants? 20 will be built one way or another, if you want any say in what gets built, pick one.
Will they? Are you expecting an open standard Linux box that you can modify? Are you expecting the likes of Comcast and Time Warner to ever allow that?
What use will the box have? What would you do with it?
In front of my main TV, I have a Ruku 3, a PS3, a DirecTV box, and a Wii U. None of those are open and none of the companies behind them really want them to be. Maybe Ruku might be the closest, but the services on it are as closed as closed gets.
Maybe you should let me know what these Linux appliances will be, because I'm not seeing it.
That all sounds really nice, but out here in the real world it isn't going to help much.
I fully agree with you regarding the whole "computers make heat so run AC" argument, but unless you're willing to put all the servers where it is cold most of the time, you will continue to have that be an issue.
Beyond that, the problem remains bigger than you think. Nothing that you or I do addresses the big picture. Right now, 500 million people in India do not have running water in their house. That will change over the next 50 years. The amount of energy required to pump, clean, and process water for 500 million people should not be underestimated. For whatever low hanging fruit that you might find in the developed world, it will not counter the energy needs of the developing world.
So you need both. Yes, we should find ways to use less energy to do the same work, I'm all for replacing incandescent bulbs with CF or even LED bulbs, I'm all for more efficient AC units and better engines in our cars that get more MPG. But that is only half of the equation.
The other half is to produce more power cleanly, since energy demands are not going to go down any time soon, they will keep rising year after year, even with all those efforts. You simply can't install enough solar panels to keep up, you need large GW scale power plants and you need to build them at faster rate. Coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear, are about the only options for doing so.
Wind is fine, I have nothing against wind farms, but we can't base our power grid on them. Solar is a nice supplement to our power grid, I'm not against it either. But neither is going to do the job.
So, would you prefer we build 20 more coal fired power plants, or 20 more nuclear plants? It will be one or the other, so let me know which you prefer.
I think you overestimate the number of people who care. Apple has one of the most closed ecosystems in the world, but clearly it doesn't matter. Android and Windows provide plenty of competition, but millions still line up to buy completely locked down devices from Apple.
Don't misunderstand, I'd give Snowden the Presidential Medal of Freedom if I could, I was simply saying that if a Bin Laden type was in the US, I'd understand Russian Special Forces going after him. I didn't mean to imply that Snowden deserved the same treatment.
For a "tiny niche", it sure seems like there are a lot of companies selling hardware for it. NewEgg has become quite a large business largely based on selling hardware to such people.
While that is true, I would also like to think there are cases where it would become acceptable. Bin Laden was understandable, Pakistan has made some noise about it, but largely they did understand, even if they had to at least pretend to protest.
If Russia did that in America and the reason they did it was great enough, I would like to think that we'd understand.
Fair enough, but they do have support, someone has to fly the helicopters after all.:) The point remains, an armed uniformed military team is different than a lone person working undercover.
Yea, that is probably true.:) I consider myself a conservative, but I am not one of those "head in the sand" types who thinks that the free market will fix everything. The problem is the free market takes no responsibility for the future effects of pollution or burning all that carbon. I just know that the idea of NIMBY is now out of date, we humans currently seem to think that if it isn't happening here, it must not be our problem. But we all live on the same planet, so just because our batteries are made in China doesn't mean we can ignore the pollution from their production. Or the pollution from their coal power plants that lack the controls US plants have, since we all breath the same air.
If the op in Chicago was to clean out the criminals in the local government there, I'd give them a ticket tape parade!:)
All joking aside, if someone like Bin Laden who attacked Russia in the same way was hiding in America, I'd understand. I wouldn't be thrilled, but I'd be inclined to give Russia a pass on that one...
There is a world of difference between sending in a lone assassin who works quietly and sending in a 24 man SEAL team with attack helicopters and armed drones for over-watch. I think if we did in Russia what we did in Pakistan to get Bin Laden, Russia might well put up just a tad bit of protest.
It is great that you cover your own needs with solar PV, if it made economic sense, I'd do the same.
But that doesn't matter, the UK, the US, and all of Europe could do it and it wouldn't matter. If India and China continue to burn fossil fuels and burn them all up over 500 years, the same damage is done.
This is a human species problem and a planet Earth problem, we have to stop doing it everywhere, or it isn't going to matter what a few of us do.
Don't misunderstand, I'm no Greenie, I understand that we pollute and that humans are messy creatures. Some amount is acceptable, but the amount we're doing is clearly not. The problem is that you simply can't release 100 million years of stored anything in 500 years and expect there to be no effect. There is no historical precedent because it has never been done before, but once we do it there is no going back. We also have no where else to live, so perhaps we should care a bit more about Earth before we really muck it up.
You are of course correct that desktop sales have slowed, but the question becomes, "how many people are just upgrading their desktops rather than replacing them?"
You can't really upgrade a notebook, however my desktop case is more than 6 years old, it has seen everything replaced in that time frame, including the power supply (needed more power and more PCI-E connectors). That doesn't count as a desktop sale, but I sure spent thousands of dollars in parts.
In any case, for high end graphics, you end up with high powered desktop graphics cards. For GPU processing, you also have high powered desktop cards, because they can compute far faster than anything in a notebook.
Again, comparing what is possible with sub 50W Intel GPU (since some of that 84W goes to the CPU) against 300W that a desktop card can pull, isn't really reasonable. It remains a fair point that if you gave Intel a 300W power budget just for the GPU side, they could probably come up with something very impressive.
My average monthly utility bill is $300. Higher in the summer, lower in the winter. My house has R-44 attic insulation and double-pane windows, it is 12 years old so while it isn't the "latest" energy efficiency, it isn't 30 years old either. We cool to 74 degrees in the summer, and our roof is completely shade free (our trees haven't grown that much yet).
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But you know what? I don't regret it for a minute, that 160GB drive is still going strong in my wife's computer and based on its remaining life, will last us longer than we'll care to use it.
Enjoying sub 20 second boot times for 3 years? Worth every penny, but I do admit that I'm blessed to be able to spend the money on that, I know that not everyone can.
One of three things is true for those people:
1. Their eyesight sucks. 2. They were watching on a crappy 720P TV. 3. They were watching some cheap budget Blu-Ray that didn't get a proper transfer.
When we first got our Sony 46" 1080P TV back in 2006 (yea, it was expensive), we loaded up several Blu-Ray discs and everyone who came over was equally impressed with the difference over DVD. On a quality TV, it really shines.
4K will do the same, once good panels and good source material comes out.
When 32" 4K panels become a bit more mainstream and video cards have another generation or two under their belts, I'll replace my trio of Dell 30" monitors with 3 4K monitors on my desk and be very happy.
As for TVs, 4K can't come fast enough, 1080P is great, but I sit about 10 feet from my 60" Sharp TV and I can see the pixels from that distance. 4K will be nice, 8K is probably the end of it, at that point your statement actually will be correct, no further improvement beyond 8K will probably matter.
But we have a long way to go before we get there.
Then there are other games. Sol Survivor and Defense Grid Awakening are two of my favorites, both work well on Eyefinity.
People who play at a higher resolution than 1080P. I currently game using three Dell 30" monitors, so I have a total of 12 million pixels to push, which is 50% higher than 4K. I could use a pair of 290X cards in crossfire, once they get after market coolers. Yes, I know I'm not a typical user, but you did ask, "who the hell spends $400+ on a video card". The answer would be me and people like me. Considering that I have $3,000 worth of monitors on my desk, $1,000 for a pair of 290X cards in crossfire is not really all that crazy.
Now Terry is looking at real prison time and a really big fine that will see him lose all his assets and make it really hard to find work in IT when he gets out. I hope he thinks it was worth it because his life will be very different in the future.
Maybe in Russia, but I doubt we'd capture or kill them so easily. We don't seem to keep much in the way of military force actually ready in the US, heck on our own military bases almost no one is allowed to even carry a gun. They could be in and out before anything got going, and for sure the local police dept (no matter how cool their SWAT team thinks they are) wouldn't be able to do much. The whole idea is timing, they have a very short window before anyone can respond. I'm not endorsing it, just saying that we aren't sitting around ready to "repel invaders" at a moments notice. There are sections of the South West that have border incursions all the time by drug cartels and we don't seem to be able to stop that, what makes you think we could stop a real military?
Do you really believe that the USA would go to war with Russia if they sent in a Spetsnaz team into the USA to take out (or capture) a single target? Do you believe that they would go to war with us if we did the same? Sure, there would be some fall out, lots of words exchanged, but unless it became a common event, neither of us are going to start a war over it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
The fact is, solar and wind are not going to be enough. Any argument otherwise just delays real solutions. Also true is that conservation won't be enough, our energy use is growing too rapidly for it to do anything other than buy time. Both will help, but we need many more gigawatts of power generation to come online in the next 20 years. That power will have to come from somewhere. Currently, it is coal and natural gas. Would you prefer it remain that way, or would you prefer nuclear?
http://www.rheem.com/products/solar_water_heating/
Just one example... about $7,000 installed for a 120 gallon system, a bit less for an 80 gallon system. About 15 years to pay it back, give or take a bit, not a good use of money.
We have 5 people in the house and use 30,000 gallons a month on average. Granted, a lot of that is for landscaping, but we also use a lot inside the house for dishwashing, clothes, showers, and baths. We do not have a pool, but plan to add one next year, that will of course increase our use of water.
Again, I return to the question at hand... would you like 20 new coal fired power plants, or 20 new nuclear power plants? 20 will be built one way or another, if you want any say in what gets built, pick one.
What use will the box have? What would you do with it?
In front of my main TV, I have a Ruku 3, a PS3, a DirecTV box, and a Wii U. None of those are open and none of the companies behind them really want them to be. Maybe Ruku might be the closest, but the services on it are as closed as closed gets.
Maybe you should let me know what these Linux appliances will be, because I'm not seeing it.
I fully agree with you regarding the whole "computers make heat so run AC" argument, but unless you're willing to put all the servers where it is cold most of the time, you will continue to have that be an issue.
Beyond that, the problem remains bigger than you think. Nothing that you or I do addresses the big picture. Right now, 500 million people in India do not have running water in their house. That will change over the next 50 years. The amount of energy required to pump, clean, and process water for 500 million people should not be underestimated. For whatever low hanging fruit that you might find in the developed world, it will not counter the energy needs of the developing world.
So you need both. Yes, we should find ways to use less energy to do the same work, I'm all for replacing incandescent bulbs with CF or even LED bulbs, I'm all for more efficient AC units and better engines in our cars that get more MPG. But that is only half of the equation.
The other half is to produce more power cleanly, since energy demands are not going to go down any time soon, they will keep rising year after year, even with all those efforts. You simply can't install enough solar panels to keep up, you need large GW scale power plants and you need to build them at faster rate. Coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear, are about the only options for doing so.
Wind is fine, I have nothing against wind farms, but we can't base our power grid on them. Solar is a nice supplement to our power grid, I'm not against it either. But neither is going to do the job.
So, would you prefer we build 20 more coal fired power plants, or 20 more nuclear plants? It will be one or the other, so let me know which you prefer.
I think you overestimate the number of people who care. Apple has one of the most closed ecosystems in the world, but clearly it doesn't matter. Android and Windows provide plenty of competition, but millions still line up to buy completely locked down devices from Apple.
Don't misunderstand, I'd give Snowden the Presidential Medal of Freedom if I could, I was simply saying that if a Bin Laden type was in the US, I'd understand Russian Special Forces going after him. I didn't mean to imply that Snowden deserved the same treatment.
For a "tiny niche", it sure seems like there are a lot of companies selling hardware for it. NewEgg has become quite a large business largely based on selling hardware to such people.
If Russia did that in America and the reason they did it was great enough, I would like to think that we'd understand.
Fair enough, but they do have support, someone has to fly the helicopters after all. :) The point remains, an armed uniformed military team is different than a lone person working undercover.
Yea, that is probably true. :) I consider myself a conservative, but I am not one of those "head in the sand" types who thinks that the free market will fix everything. The problem is the free market takes no responsibility for the future effects of pollution or burning all that carbon. I just know that the idea of NIMBY is now out of date, we humans currently seem to think that if it isn't happening here, it must not be our problem. But we all live on the same planet, so just because our batteries are made in China doesn't mean we can ignore the pollution from their production. Or the pollution from their coal power plants that lack the controls US plants have, since we all breath the same air.
All joking aside, if someone like Bin Laden who attacked Russia in the same way was hiding in America, I'd understand. I wouldn't be thrilled, but I'd be inclined to give Russia a pass on that one...
There is a world of difference between sending in a lone assassin who works quietly and sending in a 24 man SEAL team with attack helicopters and armed drones for over-watch. I think if we did in Russia what we did in Pakistan to get Bin Laden, Russia might well put up just a tad bit of protest.
But that doesn't matter, the UK, the US, and all of Europe could do it and it wouldn't matter. If India and China continue to burn fossil fuels and burn them all up over 500 years, the same damage is done.
This is a human species problem and a planet Earth problem, we have to stop doing it everywhere, or it isn't going to matter what a few of us do.
Don't misunderstand, I'm no Greenie, I understand that we pollute and that humans are messy creatures. Some amount is acceptable, but the amount we're doing is clearly not. The problem is that you simply can't release 100 million years of stored anything in 500 years and expect there to be no effect. There is no historical precedent because it has never been done before, but once we do it there is no going back. We also have no where else to live, so perhaps we should care a bit more about Earth before we really muck it up.
You can't really upgrade a notebook, however my desktop case is more than 6 years old, it has seen everything replaced in that time frame, including the power supply (needed more power and more PCI-E connectors). That doesn't count as a desktop sale, but I sure spent thousands of dollars in parts.
In any case, for high end graphics, you end up with high powered desktop graphics cards. For GPU processing, you also have high powered desktop cards, because they can compute far faster than anything in a notebook.
Again, comparing what is possible with sub 50W Intel GPU (since some of that 84W goes to the CPU) against 300W that a desktop card can pull, isn't really reasonable. It remains a fair point that if you gave Intel a 300W power budget just for the GPU side, they could probably come up with something very impressive.
My average monthly utility bill is $300. Higher in the summer, lower in the winter. My house has R-44 attic insulation and double-pane windows, it is 12 years old so while it isn't the "latest" energy efficiency, it isn't 30 years old either. We cool to 74 degrees in the summer, and our roof is completely shade free (our trees haven't grown that much yet).