My current roommate just moved from Fort Wayne and is in fact a stripper. There are 11 clubs there and girls - even the ones who know what they're doing, can't possibly make decent money just because of oversupply. I have no idea how that place supports so damned many. (And for the record: She's cute and can dance but her teeth are awful. She talks about braces the way other dancers talk about boob jobs)
I also had no idea that anything even remotely geeky happened in Indiana, let alone in Fort Wayne. This place is a sucking vortex of sister fucking and bible thumping and if some form of nuclear device were detonated over the state I daresay it would make the world a better place.
In point of fact, the Modern Interface doesn't even have a file manager or cut/copy/paste support. This is entirely irrelevant since I have yet to see any user make even a single effort to use even a single modern-style app other than the PC settings stuff. Ignoring the Modern Interface is definitely part of the standard operating procedure for dealing with Win 8(.1).
I suspect the interface will ultimately get better and more smoothly integrated with time. Right now I don't particularly care. It's just software on the machines that doesn't get used, something that it has in common with every OS released in the last 35 years.
Honestly, it's fine. I rolled out 8 (plus Classic Shell) to about 150 systems and they've been trouble free. My power users like to whine about having to go look for that's now split between Control Panel and the Settings modern app, but power users always whine about things and I don't care. For every person who moans about something that moved, I have at least one compliment about how fast their computer seems now. My less-experienced users actually do pretty well with the start screen that puts the three or four applications they're supposed to be using in a nice, huge tile right in front of their face.
Many Samsung devices have split window support. Samsung devices arguably have a better implementation than Windows RT since each window can be resized by an arbitrary amount, rather than the fixed values available in Modern ("Metro") style Windows apps. I'll be overjoyed when I can use that technology on non-Samsung Android devices, but it's definitely useful on my phone.
Steam has an offline mode, but games can only be accessed if you at least occasionally authenticate with Steam. How often is occasionally? Well, in my mind, any number of times more than "the day that the game was purchased" is too many, but I know that if someone's internet connection is down and they haven't authenticated with the Steam client in the last couple months, games won't start.
As far as I can tell, "Offline Model" just stops all the non-authentication aspects of the Steam client, like the built-in chat service, but games that need to authenticate still need to do so occasionally. The last time I gave Steam a chance, I tried to play Dragon Age: Origins while my internet connection was down and found that despite the fact that I was "offline" and had logged in to the game client sometime before I lost my internet connection, the game wouldn't load.
And that was the point where I said fuck it, I'll just buy everything else from GoG or get it from Pirate Release groups.
You can also run DOSbox for Android and boot Windows 95/98 right now. That might sound perverse, but it does provide decent enough binary compatibility to get Office XP running with support for modern MS Office document formats through the compatibility pack and to run the ever popular VB6 apps that seem to be the standard for discussion in this thread.
I buy several hundred drives a year and I've consistently had more problems with all non-Enterprise Western Digital product lines than with I had with Seagate, Hitachi or Samsung models. By rough order of preference, I found WD "Blue" drives least reliable, followed by WD Green, followed by Seagate Eco models, followed by WD Black. The most trouble free drives over the last five years or so? Samsung's F-series and Hitachi DeskStars. Goddammitsomuch.
The current "Green" drives from WD and Seagate already create nothing but problems for certain workloads, but they're extremely appealing for one-off modest-density needs that are probably appropriate to most consumer applications.
Spinning disks are only dead if you have no bulk storage needs, unless you think prices are going to fall through the floor out of the kindness of NAND Flash manufacturers' hearts.
There's a single chassis in my closet that has 96TB of disks in it. That kind of density is utterly unthinkable on flash memory.
Personally, I run a Plex server that about 40 people can access; I also have a VPN end point set up for family members who live overseas; I have a not-inconsequential number of commercial web sites running and a private "cloud" storage service that I put together for my and my customers' needs. And yes I torrent like a motherfucker. My main server is a 24-thread, 48GB machine with 130TB of local storage that runs 24x7. I pay about $100 a month for electricity and another $130 for internet service, but I actually make enough money from the services that I provide that it's actually profitable for me to do what I do with it.
You don't KNOW what I do or don't need, and neither does my ISP. Your monthly cap closely resembles 19 hours of my average use, but I specifically pay for service that is uncapped and at a service tier such that bandwidth is a functionally unlimited commodity. I pay for the service and goddammit I'm going to use all of it.
Plex is a literal Swiss Army knife for this stuff. As long as you have a reasonably powerful back end like a retired Core i or even a Core 2 Quad, you're probably good to go on arbitrary amounts of real time transcoding for a typical home setup. If your Plex Media Server is on some kind of ARM or Atom-powered NAS, you have work to do, but even then there are pretty straightforward tools (e.g. Format Factory on Windows or Handbrake on whatever) that can whip a media collection in to shape if you absolutely need to do it.
Plex is damned near perfect for video but I will say that I have some oddball HD audio formats that it can't handle. Also, not all clients are created equal. It will work as a DLNA server as long as its on the same LAN with client devices, but DLNA-only clients really miss out on the presentation and of course some of the cool online integration stuff.
As long as you have an intermediary to transcode to a supported format, why is that a problem? Plex does a perfectly fine job right now delivering h.264 with AAC audio to less capable mobile devices that I own, as do a number of DLNA servers that are scattered around my apartment. Presumably if you're watching on a device with sub-optimal functionality, you're going to be less concerned about overall source fidelity in the first place; it's not like you care that you aren't getting the full bit rate and eight channel audio from your blu-ray sources when you're watching them on a 4" iThing screen with a $10 pair of headphones.
Specs ARE largely irrelevant, albeit within reason. There's almost no practical difference between an i7 and a Pentium g CPU for most desktop computing purposes and there's little difference between a quad core ARM and a single core version for many mobile applications. Screen resolution, form factor and speed of data access are the biggest differentiating factors most of the time.
That said, Android is nearly-free-except-for-some-licensing-fees and Apple isn't going to open up iOS. Does anyone really think Microsoft is going to start giving away ANYTHING that's branded "Windows?" Because if Microsoft is trying to make money on its mobile OS, it's just going to price itself out of any sort of wide adoption.
I suspect you could probably find a no-name Android tablet and load some flavor of Windows Mobile on it if you really just wanted the big four Office Apps. IIRC the biggest hurdle would be that the screen resolutions supported by Windows Mobile are fixed and relatively stingy.
You could also just use the no-name tablet with Google Docs or the Google Docs web interface. No, it's not Office, but it's perfectly fine for everyday needs. Or use Office 365, which works surprisingly well on Android devices with relatively high resolution screens.
Windows RT is a real OS. The stock software load isn't as feature complete as I'd like, but I've found it to be less maddening to use than any experience I've had with iOS. The Metro interface definitely takes some adjustment and I'm not terribly fond of Microsoft's on-screen keyboard, but I suspect that if Surface tablets had been priced at $250 WITH THE KEYBOARD, they would not be a huge joke in the market that they have been so far. It might've been predatory pricing to gain market share, but the biggest mistake Microsoft made with the basic model Surface was assuming that it was on-par with the lifestyle brand that is Apple and that its offering would be treated as such.
I've got a 24 thread/48GB/108TB system in my back bedroom in spread across a couple 3U Norco chassis (desktop-style PSU and cooling and thankfully almost no noise) that can service a dozen 3Mbit real-time video transcoding requests through Plex and still has the horsepower to run five not-insubstantial Guest VMs at the same time. That machine actually saves me money because it replaced four i7 rigs that I had been using but I can't imagine what possible reason I could have for any more hardware than that.
Kind of. The Roku 3 isn't the best Plex client since it requires a lot of data to be transcoded prior to playback even for local content. That means the Roku is getting stereo-only sound and probably only modest bit rate video for what might be pristine local sources. They do.mkv and h.264 with Dolby Digital and DTS so they're not awful, but if your Plex Server is a Synology NAS or some dusty old single-core PC, good luck getting your.WMVs to play. If you're buying an STB to be a Plex client, there are better options.
Boxee is an odd duck. It speaks SMB and NFS and AFS and it can talk to Youtube and Netflix, but it also wants to continuously re-index network shares. Mine becomes unresponsive with some frequency. They explicitly don't do UPnP/DLNA (they'll try, it just doesn't work) and worst of all, DLink stopped development on them over a year ago. Boxee Box was almost certainly the best device of its generation, but the lack of ongoing support has made it unappealing.
Android Media Players tend to be a little bit sketchy. I have a Pivos Xios and I quite like it, but mine is running Linux. Under Android, there are a few too many drawbacks to make it worthwhile, starting with the limitations of a stock Android interface when using a remote control or some kind of mouse. The general problem that Android players have is that they tend to be under-powered, particularly compared to top-end phones and tablets. Developers are working hard, but for now there are still odd limitations in playback support or worse, an inability to support high quality playback when a proper source IS available. They wind up being acceptable targets for streaming media, but only at modest bit rates and for a limited subset of codecs. We all WANT a low-power, fanless device that can run Plex or XBMC with application support for every streaming service under the sun, but no one is making that box quite yet.
That said, I don't think the world is exactly crying out for another way to get Netflix or Youtube onto a TV in the living room.
Regarding the Share list, I actually use Andmade Share so that I can edit the list that comes up when I do choose to share. Since I don't use Twitter or Facebook and I don't have any need to share to Imgur or Photobucket, I took those options out. However, I'd far rather have a long and consistent list than have a bunch of things that can pretty much only share with Email and Dropbox.
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My current roommate just moved from Fort Wayne and is in fact a stripper. There are 11 clubs there and girls - even the ones who know what they're doing, can't possibly make decent money just because of oversupply. I have no idea how that place supports so damned many.
(And for the record: She's cute and can dance but her teeth are awful. She talks about braces the way other dancers talk about boob jobs)
I also had no idea that anything even remotely geeky happened in Indiana, let alone in Fort Wayne. This place is a sucking vortex of sister fucking and bible thumping and if some form of nuclear device were detonated over the state I daresay it would make the world a better place.
In point of fact, the Modern Interface doesn't even have a file manager or cut/copy/paste support. This is entirely irrelevant since I have yet to see any user make even a single effort to use even a single modern-style app other than the PC settings stuff. Ignoring the Modern Interface is definitely part of the standard operating procedure for dealing with Win 8(.1).
I suspect the interface will ultimately get better and more smoothly integrated with time. Right now I don't particularly care. It's just software on the machines that doesn't get used, something that it has in common with every OS released in the last 35 years.
Honestly, it's fine. I rolled out 8 (plus Classic Shell) to about 150 systems and they've been trouble free. My power users like to whine about having to go look for that's now split between Control Panel and the Settings modern app, but power users always whine about things and I don't care. For every person who moans about something that moved, I have at least one compliment about how fast their computer seems now. My less-experienced users actually do pretty well with the start screen that puts the three or four applications they're supposed to be using in a nice, huge tile right in front of their face.
Many Samsung devices have split window support. Samsung devices arguably have a better implementation than Windows RT since each window can be resized by an arbitrary amount, rather than the fixed values available in Modern ("Metro") style Windows apps. I'll be overjoyed when I can use that technology on non-Samsung Android devices, but it's definitely useful on my phone.
Steam has an offline mode, but games can only be accessed if you at least occasionally authenticate with Steam. How often is occasionally? Well, in my mind, any number of times more than "the day that the game was purchased" is too many, but I know that if someone's internet connection is down and they haven't authenticated with the Steam client in the last couple months, games won't start.
As far as I can tell, "Offline Model" just stops all the non-authentication aspects of the Steam client, like the built-in chat service, but games that need to authenticate still need to do so occasionally. The last time I gave Steam a chance, I tried to play Dragon Age: Origins while my internet connection was down and found that despite the fact that I was "offline" and had logged in to the game client sometime before I lost my internet connection, the game wouldn't load.
And that was the point where I said fuck it, I'll just buy everything else from GoG or get it from Pirate Release groups.
You can also run DOSbox for Android and boot Windows 95/98 right now. That might sound perverse, but it does provide decent enough binary compatibility to get Office XP running with support for modern MS Office document formats through the compatibility pack and to run the ever popular VB6 apps that seem to be the standard for discussion in this thread.
I buy several hundred drives a year and I've consistently had more problems with all non-Enterprise Western Digital product lines than with I had with Seagate, Hitachi or Samsung models. By rough order of preference, I found WD "Blue" drives least reliable, followed by WD Green, followed by Seagate Eco models, followed by WD Black. The most trouble free drives over the last five years or so? Samsung's F-series and Hitachi DeskStars. Goddammitsomuch.
The current "Green" drives from WD and Seagate already create nothing but problems for certain workloads, but they're extremely appealing for one-off modest-density needs that are probably appropriate to most consumer applications.
Spinning disks are only dead if you have no bulk storage needs, unless you think prices are going to fall through the floor out of the kindness of NAND Flash manufacturers' hearts.
There's a single chassis in my closet that has 96TB of disks in it. That kind of density is utterly unthinkable on flash memory.
Personally, I run a Plex server that about 40 people can access; I also have a VPN end point set up for family members who live overseas; I have a not-inconsequential number of commercial web sites running and a private "cloud" storage service that I put together for my and my customers' needs. And yes I torrent like a motherfucker. My main server is a 24-thread, 48GB machine with 130TB of local storage that runs 24x7. I pay about $100 a month for electricity and another $130 for internet service, but I actually make enough money from the services that I provide that it's actually profitable for me to do what I do with it.
You don't KNOW what I do or don't need, and neither does my ISP. Your monthly cap closely resembles 19 hours of my average use, but I specifically pay for service that is uncapped and at a service tier such that bandwidth is a functionally unlimited commodity. I pay for the service and goddammit I'm going to use all of it.
Plex is a literal Swiss Army knife for this stuff. As long as you have a reasonably powerful back end like a retired Core i or even a Core 2 Quad, you're probably good to go on arbitrary amounts of real time transcoding for a typical home setup. If your Plex Media Server is on some kind of ARM or Atom-powered NAS, you have work to do, but even then there are pretty straightforward tools (e.g. Format Factory on Windows or Handbrake on whatever) that can whip a media collection in to shape if you absolutely need to do it.
Plex is damned near perfect for video but I will say that I have some oddball HD audio formats that it can't handle. Also, not all clients are created equal. It will work as a DLNA server as long as its on the same LAN with client devices, but DLNA-only clients really miss out on the presentation and of course some of the cool online integration stuff.
As long as you have an intermediary to transcode to a supported format, why is that a problem? Plex does a perfectly fine job right now delivering h.264 with AAC audio to less capable mobile devices that I own, as do a number of DLNA servers that are scattered around my apartment. Presumably if you're watching on a device with sub-optimal functionality, you're going to be less concerned about overall source fidelity in the first place; it's not like you care that you aren't getting the full bit rate and eight channel audio from your blu-ray sources when you're watching them on a 4" iThing screen with a $10 pair of headphones.
Presumably somebody out in the world currently has a non-open H.265 encoder. You're being obtuse even by AC standards.
Specs ARE largely irrelevant, albeit within reason. There's almost no practical difference between an i7 and a Pentium g CPU for most desktop computing purposes and there's little difference between a quad core ARM and a single core version for many mobile applications. Screen resolution, form factor and speed of data access are the biggest differentiating factors most of the time.
That said, Android is nearly-free-except-for-some-licensing-fees and Apple isn't going to open up iOS. Does anyone really think Microsoft is going to start giving away ANYTHING that's branded "Windows?" Because if Microsoft is trying to make money on its mobile OS, it's just going to price itself out of any sort of wide adoption.
I suspect you could probably find a no-name Android tablet and load some flavor of Windows Mobile on it if you really just wanted the big four Office Apps. IIRC the biggest hurdle would be that the screen resolutions supported by Windows Mobile are fixed and relatively stingy.
You could also just use the no-name tablet with Google Docs or the Google Docs web interface. No, it's not Office, but it's perfectly fine for everyday needs. Or use Office 365, which works surprisingly well on Android devices with relatively high resolution screens.
Windows RT is a real OS. The stock software load isn't as feature complete as I'd like, but I've found it to be less maddening to use than any experience I've had with iOS. The Metro interface definitely takes some adjustment and I'm not terribly fond of Microsoft's on-screen keyboard, but I suspect that if Surface tablets had been priced at $250 WITH THE KEYBOARD, they would not be a huge joke in the market that they have been so far. It might've been predatory pricing to gain market share, but the biggest mistake Microsoft made with the basic model Surface was assuming that it was on-par with the lifestyle brand that is Apple and that its offering would be treated as such.
I've got a 24 thread/48GB/108TB system in my back bedroom in spread across a couple 3U Norco chassis (desktop-style PSU and cooling and thankfully almost no noise) that can service a dozen 3Mbit real-time video transcoding requests through Plex and still has the horsepower to run five not-insubstantial Guest VMs at the same time. That machine actually saves me money because it replaced four i7 rigs that I had been using but I can't imagine what possible reason I could have for any more hardware than that.
Kind of. The Roku 3 isn't the best Plex client since it requires a lot of data to be transcoded prior to playback even for local content. That means the Roku is getting stereo-only sound and probably only modest bit rate video for what might be pristine local sources. They do .mkv and h.264 with Dolby Digital and DTS so they're not awful, but if your Plex Server is a Synology NAS or some dusty old single-core PC, good luck getting your .WMVs to play.
If you're buying an STB to be a Plex client, there are better options.
Boxee is an odd duck. It speaks SMB and NFS and AFS and it can talk to Youtube and Netflix, but it also wants to continuously re-index network shares. Mine becomes unresponsive with some frequency. They explicitly don't do UPnP/DLNA (they'll try, it just doesn't work) and worst of all, DLink stopped development on them over a year ago. Boxee Box was almost certainly the best device of its generation, but the lack of ongoing support has made it unappealing.
Plex is pretty sweet but how many Roku user have the technical sophistication to set it or some DLNA A/V provider up?
Roku units are god-awful for playback of local content. They're only half a solution to the Smart TV problem.
Android Media Players tend to be a little bit sketchy. I have a Pivos Xios and I quite like it, but mine is running Linux. Under Android, there are a few too many drawbacks to make it worthwhile, starting with the limitations of a stock Android interface when using a remote control or some kind of mouse.
The general problem that Android players have is that they tend to be under-powered, particularly compared to top-end phones and tablets. Developers are working hard, but for now there are still odd limitations in playback support or worse, an inability to support high quality playback when a proper source IS available. They wind up being acceptable targets for streaming media, but only at modest bit rates and for a limited subset of codecs. We all WANT a low-power, fanless device that can run Plex or XBMC with application support for every streaming service under the sun, but no one is making that box quite yet.
That said, I don't think the world is exactly crying out for another way to get Netflix or Youtube onto a TV in the living room.
If your Android device has a Google Apps account on it, the Apps administrator doesn't even need that long.
Regarding the Share list, I actually use Andmade Share so that I can edit the list that comes up when I do choose to share. Since I don't use Twitter or Facebook and I don't have any need to share to Imgur or Photobucket, I took those options out. However, I'd far rather have a long and consistent list than have a bunch of things that can pretty much only share with Email and Dropbox.