I missed that. Well, your use pattern does seem quite unusual, or say in the upper tail of the distribution of PC users by performance applications. I mean, building software can be very taxing on the system, not just CPU but also I/O. I know some people like to put their home directory on a RAID array to build things faster. Also multimedia editing. Laptops can be used for this, but in the end, this is why we have desktops and even "workstations". Some things will be always slower on laptops. But I do see a certain degree of stagnation in hardware. If you have a nice Sandy Bridge system, there is little reason to move to say Haswell.
This is already too complicated. My parents and their friends would never figure this out on their own. Even with all these settings, Windows 8 (didn't try 8.1) still managers to con them to drop into metro every once in a while, and once my dad somehow ended up switching the login from "local" to "MSN" without wanting it. Of course, I end up being their "sysadmin for life". But why would I want to deal with this all the time? I just tell all friends and relatives to stick with a Windows 7 machine if they have one because Windows 8 does not bring anything good to the table. People who really want to touch their screen, get a tablet, not desktop or notebook PC.
I think it's still the case that it is mostly gamers who obsess with hardware progress. Enthusiast web sites like maximumpc, anadtech, and tomshardware cater 90% of time to gamers. The issue is though that the majority of gamers moved on to play on consoles. Most people just want to play games without thinking of the complexity of building PCs and tuning hardware. Not to mention the price, $300-400 for a typical console, vs at least double for a decent entry level PC rig.
One thing you should keep in mind is that there are two kinds of Intel Core chips. The ones with 15W TDP and others with 35W TDP. The ones with 15W TDP are effectively the same, but are clocked slower to conserve the power. The 15W models are lighter and use less power, but they're portable. So, it's entirely possible that 15 mobile 15W TDP i7 feels slower than a 35W i5, and 15 watt i5 feels slower than 35 watt i3.
Another thing that you should keep in mind is that the name "i7" on mobile space is completely arbitrary (thank you intel so much for consistent chip naming convention). The cheaper i7 CPUs are dual-core with hyper threading, unlike the desktop parts where are quad-core with hyperthreading. Likewise, the mobile i5 is dual-core with hyper-threading even though desktop i5 is quad-core. So effectively all mobile Core processors, except for a few high end quad-core i7 models, are basically the same as the base i3. The only difference is the clock speed. All dual-core i7 models should really have been called i5 since they're all 2C, 4T, with turbo.
So, your experience with the i7 is entirely dependent on the kind of processor you got. There is the 15watt i7, which is slower than 35watt dual-core i7, which is slower than +40watt quad-core mobile i7. Having said that, I am surprised with the observation that an i7, even possibly a low TDP one, is slow. I type this on 3-year old i3-330M portable, and feel quite happy with the speed. I need to start doing something truly nefarious, like 40-tab web browser windows to feel it slow down.
I think the primary reason is not that people don't use desktops, but they don't see a compelling reason to upgrade. Sometime in the previous decade, the progress of hardware outpaced the bloat of software. Moreover, software bloat actually slowed down a bit. Win 7 is just as fast as Vista, and Win 8 is supposedly faster in many ways than Windows 7. I am typing this on a 3.5 year old laptop with Core i3 330M, 4gig ram, and Windows 7 and honestly it's hard to justify upgrading either hardware or software, except perhaps for wanting a lighter, thinner machine.
The next issue is software. Windows 8 is very unwelcome by users. I act as a sort of sysadmin for the extended family and friends, and I see a huge amount of confusion among non-techie people. I am telling them all that if they have a decently fast PC running Windows 7, they should just stick with it. After all, if they run into issues with Win 8, it's not just their headache. It's mine too because I am the "support" person. I setup their system to boot into desktop and use the desktop all the time, and yet Windows still cons them every once in a while into using the Metro versions of Mail, IE, and other things, and then people ask me "how do I get rid of this thing"
Just last week, Windows 8 conned my parents to switch the machine from "local" account to MSN account and that caused quite a bit of headaches among people who can no longer login into a shared account because it requires one specific person's email password to login.
Depends on what governments you have in mind. If I lived in Zimbabwe, I too would have more faith in bitcoin than local currency. However, the advanced western democracies have done a good job managing the money supply. In the USA, the CPI stayed under 4% a year most of the time since the 70s. Even Milton Friedman, the guy who advocated replacing Federal Reserve with a computer, acknowledged that. A little inflation is much better than deflation. As for little people trying to protect their savings, maybe they shouldn't use currency as a store of value. US Treasury paper on average gave a return of 1%, adjusted for inflation, for the last 50-60 years. The stock market gave a return of 9% or so, adjusted for inflation. The real estate, etc, also gave a healthy return, on average. Even Social Security pensions are CPI adjusted. No one should be saving up in plain dollars. If you have more than 10K spare cash, you should invest in a well diversified portfolio.
As for bitcoin possibly becoming a viable store of value, this idea is just laughable. I think all the libertarian backers of bitcoin are about to be schooled in the value of having central banking. The only reason I would hold a bitcoin is so that I could spend it within a few minutes.
Actually, Bitcoin deflation is not a given. If you consider the supply of money overall, which includes dollars, bitcoins, litecoins, and anything else that you can use for transactions, then clearly the supply of money is growing even with the supply of bitcoins being limited. Therefore, if bitcoin and dollars were equally accepted by all vendors, then there should be no reason for bitcoin deflation. However, bitcoin economy is not the same as the dollar economy. That is, the goods and services that are available with bitcoin transactions may not always be available for dollars. Based on this logic, you can assume that the bitcoins will start to appreciate as the bitcoin-only market-place grows. However, there is still a fallacy. The same market place that accepts bitcoins right now, could also accept litecoins, and any other new virtual currency. Therefore, IMHO, there is nothing in bitcoin design that will make it appreciate due to growing marketplace. We have seen wild fluctuations in bitcoin rate recently, but that's more due to speculator activity than fluctuations in the size of the bitcoin marketplace IMHO. Anyone who thinks that a bitcoin will be worth 10,000 dollars on a long run basis is a full. There is nothing in bitcoin design that makes it irreplaceable.
RedHat realized that it can't make money off CentOS users anyways. If you make it really hard to use a free copy of RedHat EL, they will just move onto some other distribution. It's not like there aren't alternatives.
In a perfect world, bitcoin is supposed to be sort of like any other currency, say like Euros and Dollars. So it shouldn't be something you invest in, but something that enables you to sell and buy goods, potentially in a way that's not possible through traditional currency methods.
Mining isn't a waste since it keeps the whole system going. The problem with the extreme volatility of the bitcoin price is that the size of the bitcoin economy is still relatively small, and the number of bit coins that are regularly traded is also small. There is also no central bank. In many economies, at least one of the central bank's functions is to maintain a stable price level and exchange rate. Because of the presence of bunch of speculators can really affect the volatility. The only way to stop this is to grow the size of the bitcoin economy, that is the vendors and buyers that conduct transactions in bitcoin. But there is a chicken and egg problem, because people and businesses don't really like dealing with a volatile currency.
Actually the OP was correct. The OP is taking about people who are making money _now_. Those miners who started mining bitcoins a year ago have already realized their gains. Bitcoin mining today is a different kind of business.
Nothing wrong with paying $1000 per bitcoin if the intention is to spend them. Paying $1000 for a bitcoin as an investment is of course a dangerous idea.
One problem with Octave is that the binaries as distributed for many platforms do not include any serious optimizations. For example, most do not include the ATLAS libraries. Why? I don't know. But it's supposed to run much faster with ATLAS. There are also third party libraries, like qrupdate, that can seriously speed up Octave.
How does Octave or any other open source tool hold up against something with so many resources behind it?
It doesn't. Yes, Octave has a significant community as demonstrated by the activity of the mailing lists, but Maltab's user base is huge. It's like comparing Moon with Sun. Once you look at Matlab's advanced packages (which cost extra), Octave doesn't have much to offer against many of them. Matlab's GUI/IDE system is pretty nice and the help system is great. However, I also know tons of people in the academia who keep on using Matlab, even though they use only the basic language without much of third party packages. For them, switching to R or Octave should have been a no-brainer like a decade ago. In the end, Octave will never overtake Matlab because Octave is the follower. To take on Matlab you need something fundamentally better, and R is a good example. R has been a de-facto standard among academic statisticians for like a decade.
Basically, the academia is filled with lemmings who just barely know elementary Matlab syntax and how to click on the Matlab icon. Being compatible with Matlab is a big advantage. At the same time though, I'd agree that Python or R are better environments for those willing to learn a new language.
The requirement to sign up with a real identity based on say Google+ or Facebook is the reason I stopped commenting on a number of new blogs and web sites (Jalopnik, I am looking at you). My personal concern is the lack of privacy and the possibility of opening up yourself to all sorts of social engineering attacks. I mean, the information we post on the social networks, amazon, etc is already too much. And now, every post you make on the web is publicly identifiable with your persona. This kind of freaks me out.
In my opinion, web site operators are simply getting lazy. There is plenty of code available to make self-moderating discussion boards possible (such as this one). They just want to outsource everything. This is a boon for yahoo, google, and facebook since people who otherwise wouldn't sign in are now forced to use their services.
I know I am minority, but it's cool to have a mid-level gaming capability on portables and not having to pay for it arm and leg. On the desktops.. I agree. The market for people who insist on gaming on a budget PC but refuse to put in at least a $100-120 video card is kind of small.
Iris Pro is something I have never seen in any mainstream laptop, and once it comes out in say a Dell or Samsung, that's gonna cost an arm and leg because Intel's high end GPUs come with high-end CPU combos )like the i7). The great thing about AMD's A10+ HD 8650G combo is that you can buy a $600 HP or Lenovo with it today to get about the same level of gaming performance. If Kaveri improves upon the A10 without increasing the price or power consumption, it will be a winner as far as budget gaming on laptop or may be even desktop concerned.
One funny thing is that most of FIA GT classes and also the ACO GT class (Le Mans spec) race cars are based on road cars that are far less extreme than the Carrera GT involved in this crash. That's because ACO got sick of production-based cars winning 24 Hours of Lemans, the overall race, even though they wanted the prototypes to be the fastest class. So they closed the GT loophole and nerfed the GT cars to a predetermined performance level. For example, the Porsche GT race cars are all homologated from the production 911 models, which are a fairly garden variety sports car these days, at least compared to the Enzos, Veyrons, and the McLarens out there. Of course, more extreme cars than 911 are also homologated for GT racing, but in the end their performance is restricted to a certain level. We have a funny situation in GT racing right now, where some race cars have engines that are de-tuned from the street version, such as in Corvette (5.5L engine instead of 7L on the road version) and Ferrari 458 (rev limit is lower than the street version). They still can be faster than street car because of the crazy modifications allowed to the chassis.
I kind of wonder about this too. No matter how low-end your desktop system is, as long as you have a modern CPU, even in say Celeron range, you can always pop into it a 100 dollar ATI video card (check Tom's hardware's latest recommendations) and it should run circles around those AMD APU's with integrated graphics. Now AMD is supposedly shooting at the market for these $100 video cards. That is, they seem to imply that this APU will make cheap video cards unnecessary. It will certainly be interesting to look at Kaveri CPU benchmarks that will come out in coming months.
Now, laptop gamers users are sort of screwed indeed because most decently built laptops with decent graphics will cost you over $1000. What I would love to be able to do is buy a mainstream Dell or Sony laptop for $500-600 with an entry level GPU on it so I could play say five year old 3D games. However, even though the GPU chip costs the OEMs just a couple of dozen bucks, such option pretty much never exists because mobile gamers are a tiny proportion of the buyers, and so we have to buy the "specialist" laptops that cost twice as much.
To be fair, the current AMD A10 chip is already good enough for mobile gaming. It trumps Intels HD4000-5000 graphics by a large margin, like 50-90% FPS. If the next one improves even more upon the current AMD Richland A10, it will be a real deal for some. How about a $500-600 gamer laptop that runs older games in 720 or even 1080P? Sign me up. The only problem, is that as usual, with AMD CPUs being positioned in budget category, only sub-par brands tend to make them available and mostly in low end models with sub-par build and parts (well, for the most part)
Same story with VW Jetta GLI. Before you can even have the navi option, you need to buy the "Autobahn" package with wheels and various whistles and then the tech package is like $2000 on top of that. Before you know, you're in a 4000 dollar hole, just to have a navi system. Don't let them rob you like that. Get a base model, then bring your suction cup and a Garmin.
That's a classic example of widely practiced nickel and dimming in the audio industry. In the 90s, you had to buy into a some kind of $2000 "premium" package to have a $100 CD player deck installed instead of cassette player. Today, you have to buy into a 2000-3000 dollar "premium" or "technology" package (easily a 10 grand package on some luxury cars) to have a damn GPS navigation installed. Moreover, sans nice integration into the center stack, those factory navi systems often work no better than a $150 Garmin unit from Best Buy and you have to pay for map upgrades.
Slashdot Mirror
I missed that. Well, your use pattern does seem quite unusual, or say in the upper tail of the distribution of PC users by performance applications. I mean, building software can be very taxing on the system, not just CPU but also I/O. I know some people like to put their home directory on a RAID array to build things faster. Also multimedia editing. Laptops can be used for this, but in the end, this is why we have desktops and even "workstations". Some things will be always slower on laptops. But I do see a certain degree of stagnation in hardware. If you have a nice Sandy Bridge system, there is little reason to move to say Haswell.
This is already too complicated. My parents and their friends would never figure this out on their own. Even with all these settings, Windows 8 (didn't try 8.1) still managers to con them to drop into metro every once in a while, and once my dad somehow ended up switching the login from "local" to "MSN" without wanting it. Of course, I end up being their "sysadmin for life". But why would I want to deal with this all the time? I just tell all friends and relatives to stick with a Windows 7 machine if they have one because Windows 8 does not bring anything good to the table. People who really want to touch their screen, get a tablet, not desktop or notebook PC.
I think it's still the case that it is mostly gamers who obsess with hardware progress. Enthusiast web sites like maximumpc, anadtech, and tomshardware cater 90% of time to gamers. The issue is though that the majority of gamers moved on to play on consoles. Most people just want to play games without thinking of the complexity of building PCs and tuning hardware. Not to mention the price, $300-400 for a typical console, vs at least double for a decent entry level PC rig.
One thing you should keep in mind is that there are two kinds of Intel Core chips. The ones with 15W TDP and others with 35W TDP. The ones with 15W TDP are effectively the same, but are clocked slower to conserve the power. The 15W models are lighter and use less power, but they're portable. So, it's entirely possible that 15 mobile 15W TDP i7 feels slower than a 35W i5, and 15 watt i5 feels slower than 35 watt i3.
Another thing that you should keep in mind is that the name "i7" on mobile space is completely arbitrary (thank you intel so much for consistent chip naming convention). The cheaper i7 CPUs are dual-core with hyper threading, unlike the desktop parts where are quad-core with hyperthreading. Likewise, the mobile i5 is dual-core with hyper-threading even though desktop i5 is quad-core. So effectively all mobile Core processors, except for a few high end quad-core i7 models, are basically the same as the base i3. The only difference is the clock speed. All dual-core i7 models should really have been called i5 since they're all 2C, 4T, with turbo.
So, your experience with the i7 is entirely dependent on the kind of processor you got. There is the 15watt i7, which is slower than 35watt dual-core i7, which is slower than +40watt quad-core mobile i7. Having said that, I am surprised with the observation that an i7, even possibly a low TDP one, is slow. I type this on 3-year old i3-330M portable, and feel quite happy with the speed. I need to start doing something truly nefarious, like 40-tab web browser windows to feel it slow down.
Nothing apple makes is cheap. One way or another, they're gonna make you pay through your nose.
I think the primary reason is not that people don't use desktops, but they don't see a compelling reason to upgrade. Sometime in the previous decade, the progress of hardware outpaced the bloat of software. Moreover, software bloat actually slowed down a bit. Win 7 is just as fast as Vista, and Win 8 is supposedly faster in many ways than Windows 7. I am typing this on a 3.5 year old laptop with Core i3 330M, 4gig ram, and Windows 7 and honestly it's hard to justify upgrading either hardware or software, except perhaps for wanting a lighter, thinner machine.
The next issue is software. Windows 8 is very unwelcome by users. I act as a sort of sysadmin for the extended family and friends, and I see a huge amount of confusion among non-techie people. I am telling them all that if they have a decently fast PC running Windows 7, they should just stick with it. After all, if they run into issues with Win 8, it's not just their headache. It's mine too because I am the "support" person. I setup their system to boot into desktop and use the desktop all the time, and yet Windows still cons them every once in a while into using the Metro versions of Mail, IE, and other things, and then people ask me "how do I get rid of this thing"
Just last week, Windows 8 conned my parents to switch the machine from "local" account to MSN account and that caused quite a bit of headaches among people who can no longer login into a shared account because it requires one specific person's email password to login.
This is just BS.
Nothing shadowy about the CPI. It's used in pretty much every peer reviewed paper published in the top economics journals.
Depends on what governments you have in mind. If I lived in Zimbabwe, I too would have more faith in bitcoin than local currency. However, the advanced western democracies have done a good job managing the money supply. In the USA, the CPI stayed under 4% a year most of the time since the 70s. Even Milton Friedman, the guy who advocated replacing Federal Reserve with a computer, acknowledged that. A little inflation is much better than deflation. As for little people trying to protect their savings, maybe they shouldn't use currency as a store of value. US Treasury paper on average gave a return of 1%, adjusted for inflation, for the last 50-60 years. The stock market gave a return of 9% or so, adjusted for inflation. The real estate, etc, also gave a healthy return, on average. Even Social Security pensions are CPI adjusted. No one should be saving up in plain dollars. If you have more than 10K spare cash, you should invest in a well diversified portfolio.
As for bitcoin possibly becoming a viable store of value, this idea is just laughable. I think all the libertarian backers of bitcoin are about to be schooled in the value of having central banking. The only reason I would hold a bitcoin is so that I could spend it within a few minutes.
Actually, Bitcoin deflation is not a given. If you consider the supply of money overall, which includes dollars, bitcoins, litecoins, and anything else that you can use for transactions, then clearly the supply of money is growing even with the supply of bitcoins being limited. Therefore, if bitcoin and dollars were equally accepted by all vendors, then there should be no reason for bitcoin deflation. However, bitcoin economy is not the same as the dollar economy. That is, the goods and services that are available with bitcoin transactions may not always be available for dollars. Based on this logic, you can assume that the bitcoins will start to appreciate as the bitcoin-only market-place grows. However, there is still a fallacy. The same market place that accepts bitcoins right now, could also accept litecoins, and any other new virtual currency. Therefore, IMHO, there is nothing in bitcoin design that will make it appreciate due to growing marketplace. We have seen wild fluctuations in bitcoin rate recently, but that's more due to speculator activity than fluctuations in the size of the bitcoin marketplace IMHO. Anyone who thinks that a bitcoin will be worth 10,000 dollars on a long run basis is a full. There is nothing in bitcoin design that makes it irreplaceable.
RedHat realized that it can't make money off CentOS users anyways. If you make it really hard to use a free copy of RedHat EL, they will just move onto some other distribution. It's not like there aren't alternatives.
In a perfect world, bitcoin is supposed to be sort of like any other currency, say like Euros and Dollars. So it shouldn't be something you invest in, but something that enables you to sell and buy goods, potentially in a way that's not possible through traditional currency methods.
Mining isn't a waste since it keeps the whole system going. The problem with the extreme volatility of the bitcoin price is that the size of the bitcoin economy is still relatively small, and the number of bit coins that are regularly traded is also small. There is also no central bank. In many economies, at least one of the central bank's functions is to maintain a stable price level and exchange rate. Because of the presence of bunch of speculators can really affect the volatility. The only way to stop this is to grow the size of the bitcoin economy, that is the vendors and buyers that conduct transactions in bitcoin. But there is a chicken and egg problem, because people and businesses don't really like dealing with a volatile currency.
Actually the OP was correct. The OP is taking about people who are making money _now_. Those miners who started mining bitcoins a year ago have already realized their gains. Bitcoin mining today is a different kind of business.
Nothing wrong with paying $1000 per bitcoin if the intention is to spend them. Paying $1000 for a bitcoin as an investment is of course a dangerous idea.
One problem with Octave is that the binaries as distributed for many platforms do not include any serious optimizations. For example, most do not include the ATLAS libraries. Why? I don't know. But it's supposed to run much faster with ATLAS. There are also third party libraries, like qrupdate, that can seriously speed up Octave.
How does Octave or any other open source tool hold up against something with so many resources behind it?
It doesn't. Yes, Octave has a significant community as demonstrated by the activity of the mailing lists, but Maltab's user base is huge. It's like comparing Moon with Sun. Once you look at Matlab's advanced packages (which cost extra), Octave doesn't have much to offer against many of them. Matlab's GUI/IDE system is pretty nice and the help system is great. However, I also know tons of people in the academia who keep on using Matlab, even though they use only the basic language without much of third party packages. For them, switching to R or Octave should have been a no-brainer like a decade ago. In the end, Octave will never overtake Matlab because Octave is the follower. To take on Matlab you need something fundamentally better, and R is a good example. R has been a de-facto standard among academic statisticians for like a decade.
Basically, the academia is filled with lemmings who just barely know elementary Matlab syntax and how to click on the Matlab icon. Being compatible with Matlab is a big advantage. At the same time though, I'd agree that Python or R are better environments for those willing to learn a new language.
The requirement to sign up with a real identity based on say Google+ or Facebook is the reason I stopped commenting on a number of new blogs and web sites (Jalopnik, I am looking at you). My personal concern is the lack of privacy and the possibility of opening up yourself to all sorts of social engineering attacks. I mean, the information we post on the social networks, amazon, etc is already too much. And now, every post you make on the web is publicly identifiable with your persona. This kind of freaks me out.
In my opinion, web site operators are simply getting lazy. There is plenty of code available to make self-moderating discussion boards possible (such as this one). They just want to outsource everything. This is a boon for yahoo, google, and facebook since people who otherwise wouldn't sign in are now forced to use their services.
I know I am minority, but it's cool to have a mid-level gaming capability on portables and not having to pay for it arm and leg. On the desktops.. I agree. The market for people who insist on gaming on a budget PC but refuse to put in at least a $100-120 video card is kind of small.
Iris Pro is something I have never seen in any mainstream laptop, and once it comes out in say a Dell or Samsung, that's gonna cost an arm and leg because Intel's high end GPUs come with high-end CPU combos )like the i7). The great thing about AMD's A10+ HD 8650G combo is that you can buy a $600 HP or Lenovo with it today to get about the same level of gaming performance. If Kaveri improves upon the A10 without increasing the price or power consumption, it will be a winner as far as budget gaming on laptop or may be even desktop concerned.
Speaking of which. People have died in this car on a race track too.
http://www.autoblog.com/2007/10/24/4-5-million-awarded-in-porsche-carrera-gt-case/
One funny thing is that most of FIA GT classes and also the ACO GT class (Le Mans spec) race cars are based on road cars that are far less extreme than the Carrera GT involved in this crash. That's because ACO got sick of production-based cars winning 24 Hours of Lemans, the overall race, even though they wanted the prototypes to be the fastest class. So they closed the GT loophole and nerfed the GT cars to a predetermined performance level. For example, the Porsche GT race cars are all homologated from the production 911 models, which are a fairly garden variety sports car these days, at least compared to the Enzos, Veyrons, and the McLarens out there. Of course, more extreme cars than 911 are also homologated for GT racing, but in the end their performance is restricted to a certain level. We have a funny situation in GT racing right now, where some race cars have engines that are de-tuned from the street version, such as in Corvette (5.5L engine instead of 7L on the road version) and Ferrari 458 (rev limit is lower than the street version). They still can be faster than street car because of the crazy modifications allowed to the chassis.
The car is road legal, so it passed the crash tests and what not.
I kind of wonder about this too. No matter how low-end your desktop system is, as long as you have a modern CPU, even in say Celeron range, you can always pop into it a 100 dollar ATI video card (check Tom's hardware's latest recommendations) and it should run circles around those AMD APU's with integrated graphics. Now AMD is supposedly shooting at the market for these $100 video cards. That is, they seem to imply that this APU will make cheap video cards unnecessary. It will certainly be interesting to look at Kaveri CPU benchmarks that will come out in coming months.
Now, laptop gamers users are sort of screwed indeed because most decently built laptops with decent graphics will cost you over $1000. What I would love to be able to do is buy a mainstream Dell or Sony laptop for $500-600 with an entry level GPU on it so I could play say five year old 3D games. However, even though the GPU chip costs the OEMs just a couple of dozen bucks, such option pretty much never exists because mobile gamers are a tiny proportion of the buyers, and so we have to buy the "specialist" laptops that cost twice as much.
To be fair, the current AMD A10 chip is already good enough for mobile gaming. It trumps Intels HD4000-5000 graphics by a large margin, like 50-90% FPS. If the next one improves even more upon the current AMD Richland A10, it will be a real deal for some. How about a $500-600 gamer laptop that runs older games in 720 or even 1080P? Sign me up. The only problem, is that as usual, with AMD CPUs being positioned in budget category, only sub-par brands tend to make them available and mostly in low end models with sub-par build and parts (well, for the most part)
Great post. Welcome back.
Same story with VW Jetta GLI. Before you can even have the navi option, you need to buy the "Autobahn" package with wheels and various whistles and then the tech package is like $2000 on top of that. Before you know, you're in a 4000 dollar hole, just to have a navi system. Don't let them rob you like that. Get a base model, then bring your suction cup and a Garmin.
That's a classic example of widely practiced nickel and dimming in the audio industry. In the 90s, you had to buy into a some kind of $2000 "premium" package to have a $100 CD player deck installed instead of cassette player. Today, you have to buy into a 2000-3000 dollar "premium" or "technology" package (easily a 10 grand package on some luxury cars) to have a damn GPS navigation installed. Moreover, sans nice integration into the center stack, those factory navi systems often work no better than a $150 Garmin unit from Best Buy and you have to pay for map upgrades.