Meh as somebody who is down here in the trenches i think that while the pro MAY find a niche, and I say may because the stench of WinRT has confused folks who now think ALL Surface devices can't run shit, but in the grand scheme of things? I seriously doubt it will get more than 5% of the market tops.
So while I'm sure its nice the simple fact is a good 99% of the Windows software out there just wasn't written with touch in mind, and in a classic chicken or the egg problem they aren't gonna spend the crazy money for a touch focused UI rebuild when less than 2% of PCs on the planet have touch capability.
Anyway as a guy that sells tech you can call me biased but when I'm seeing is tablet equals toy, smartphones are Google in a box and MP3 players that make calls, and when folks want Windows they want a desktop or a laptop. The only reason sales are down is the end of the MHz war has made multicores as common as dirt and most users can't come up with enough work to slam even a Pentium D or Athlon64 X2 but as long as MSFT keeps the insane prices the ONLY ones that will be buying it will be guys that need a tablet that runs Windows programs which frankly is a pretty small niche.
Actually I would say it proves evolution, specifically that because we humans have evolved with a small tribe mentality (protecting our own small sphere instead of looking at humanity as a whole) and an instinct to protect those in our tribe we are creating a "march of the morons" situation by having a civilization that allows truly stupid people like in TFA to have offspring, thus spreading the stupid like a jackass rolling a porta potty downhill spreads shit.
Sadly this IS the future of society, a full on "Big Mother" nanny state that every damned thing you see/read/hear, even eat and drink, because it will assume that you are just as big an idiot as the lowest common denominator who of course will think that lowest common denominator is a bot on Transformers.
But isn't the Surface Pro just a wintel tablet? And while you may like it I wouldn't count on it getting updated for long, just look at how MSFT fucked the WinPhone 7 early adopters by refusing to port WinPhone 8 thus leaving them on a platform with very few apps and already as good as abandoned.
But the main thing we are talking about is WinRT which was doomed before it ever got out the gate, the reason MSFT has a virtual lock on the desktop is the billions of dollars worth of Windows programs. With Surface RT all you have is a system that runs less than iPhone and Android and for a higher price and with less battery life since WinRT doesn't support the tegra 3 fifth core
So while I'm glad you like it I don't know if i would even entertain, much less recommend, the WinRT platform simply because of MSFT track record of abandoning devices that don't meet a metric in x amount of time, again look at what they did to the WinPhone as well as sidekick and Kin. Maybe if they drop below $150 it might be a good deal, above that price point I'd be leery.
Ooookay, maybe I'm just old and haven't kept up on my lingo but I thought "trap" wasn't considered an insult while tranny is? Maybe i heard wrong but the way i was told a "trap' was one that looked so much like a female that you honestly couldn't tell without doing the bit from Crocodile Dundee , which if their goal is to transition logically one would think not being able to tell that they weren't born that sex would be a pretty nice compliment? But since I'm not one and don't know anybody in that community maybe I'm wrong.
As for TFA I thought it was pretty much decided it wasn't ANY one thing but a BUNCH of things over a geologically short period of time that created a "perfect storm" that wiped nearly everything out?
I have a question, not a programmer so I was wondering what advantage do you get by using AVX over SSE? because i took a quick look at AVX and its only supported on Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge, which would be a very VERY small portion of the chips out there. it seems to me if you wanted the widest possible support you'd use the SSE flags since SSE 4 has been around since Phenom I and Core 2.
You final sentence is the case dude, Intel gives big discounts to major software companies, hence why nearly every benchmark uses ICC. And again the smoking gun is the P3, if what you were saying is true then the P3 would NOT be penalized, since they know their own chips, but it is. again take the same program and run it on both the P3 and the P4 of the same speed, with ICC the P4 will get a 30% speed boost while the P3 gets a boat anchor tied to it, the same code with GCC? the P3 will win by 30%.
And as others pointed out so many times with MSFT when you are the market leader? the rules for you are different than for anybody else. the fact that the DoJ let Intel buy their way out by handing AMD 1.2 BILLION dollars frankly was a travesty of justice and just shows how the DoJ is worthless. maybe the EU still has some fangs but the DoJ is nothing but a bad joke.
As a guy that has been doing this since the Shat sold Vics on TV I can tell you where that old wives tale came from and why it no longer applies. the very first drives used either RFM or MFM coding (been awhile) and the drives weren't very precise so it could slip a track and miss data, hence the multiwipe. that hasn't been true in 20 years though, with grooves so tiny and motors so precise no way a drive that isn't already dying is gonna miss a track,no way.
Dude you are buying into old wive's tales, you haven't needed to do more than a single zero pass in like 15 years. Hell there is a guy offering something like 10 grand if you can recover anything from a drive he does a zero pass on and so far not a single taker, not even the recovery companies. You see friend in the bad old days the RFM drives could easily slip the track, that would leave data behind, hence the multipass, but with modern drives that just can't happen anymore, the grooves are too tight and the tracking too precise.
But don't take my word for it, try it yourself, just slap some old 40Gb with a bunch of files on it on a USB adapter, do a full zero pass, and then try to recover the files. you won't get shit, I've tried. and a single zero pass doesn't take long as all, I've found it takes maybe an hour for a 500GB and that is with a wipe and full pass check.
Meh if you were dumb enough to buy one early? Sorry but you kinda deserved the wallet ding for failing to pay attention. Pretty much all of the media had already panned the thing, they were selling it for MORE than an iPad, the Surface had giant FAIL written all over it almost from the start so anybody with any common sense should have figured they'd either have to take a hell of a price drop or end up with a warehouse full of shit they couldn't sell. Folks forget that computer chips have a shelf life, if you don't move the units its soon badly outdated compared to what is on the market and nobody will buy it.
Honestly I wouldn't even buy it at the current price, the tegra 3 was never that great a chip to start with and thanks to bad design on the part of MSFT the Surface can't even take advantage of the fifth core on the tegra 3 so the battery life will be worse than Android on it. Maybe if it hits below $145 it might be worth playing with, but considering we are talking about a company with a history of abandoning products that don't become hits (Zune, Sidekick,Kin,WinPhone 7) do you REALLY want to take the chance?
Mark my words by xmas these things will either be on woot! at $100 or less like the Touchpad or they'll end up in a landfill somewhere, Anything to do with WinRT seems to be destined to fail, hence why nearly all the OEMs canceled their WinRT offerings.
Well as a retailer and system builder believe me there is NO love for MSFT here, they royally screw us system builders, we can't even get them to talk about ANY discount on retail price unless we are buying 10,000+ licenses so we would love nothing more than to flip them the bird and tell Redmond to piss off.
But that is where the Hairyfeet Challenge comes in, as I can't be giving an OS that is gonna crap out on its first update to my customers, it would destroy my rep and put me out of business. So with the Hairyfeet Challenge I'd take a random desktop or laptop down, slap in the version of whatever distro I was testing from 5 years ago, be it Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva (whatever they call it now) and so on and what did I find? NONE of them ended the test with 100% functional drivers, NOT ONE. Wireless, sound, video, drivers were getting crapped on all over the damned place! And was there a find drivers or rolback drivers button, something that has been in windows since Windows 2K a decade and a half ago? Nope the ONLY choice you end up with is CLI messes, forum hunts, and Googling for fixes.
So THIS, this right here, is why Linux ain't doing shit even with MSFT putting out the most hated OS since WinME, its because every B&M and retailer that has tried Linux has found out the same thing I have, Torvalds piss poor driver model just doesn't fucking work. And what really pisses me off is its not because of some deep and dark flaw with the underlying OS, in fact it could have an ABI added probably pretty easily, no it comes down to RELIGION and when you start having religious debates in the middle of a talk on OS design? you are royally FUCKED with a capital F.
But that is what it comes down to, religion. Like the more extreme religions they don't trust you to choose "their way" of living so like a cult you HAVE to follow their beliefs, no choice is allowed in the so called "free as in freedom" OS. I found this out the hard way by going to their forums, sending the higher ups emails, it never failed that what would always START as a talk on OS design would quickly be switched by them to a talk about "GPL Purity" and "Spirit of the GPL"...spirits belong in seances NOT in talks of OS design! You saw the quote from one of the kernel devs, that is what I got when I pointed out how I can take a decade old driver and still have it work in Windows while a three year old driver won't work in Linux, they WANT the drivers to break so they can try to force their "GPL purity" bullshit upon you instead of letting you choose what works for you! And the ultimate irony, their forums are filled with posts advising people to use the NON FREE Nvidia drivers because...drumroll...they fucking work!
This is why I have all Linux articles blocked, there is no point in talking OS design with religious loonies which is why I call 'em FOSSies, like Moonies its ALL about the dogma, reality has no place there, and until that changes Linux will stay right where it is, with numbers so low it is below the margin for error. When you have people risking fines and even jail time to steal the other guy's product when you stand there trying to hand them yours for free? If that isn't a cluebat to the head that something is seriously wrong with your product i don't know what is! BTW you know what I got when I pointed that out? "I don't care if only one person uses it as long as it upholds the GPL"...fucking religious bullshit!
Thanks but as a grunt in the trenches this REALLY pisses me off, they have this beta program, we all happily do their damned job for them and tell them what's wrong and what do they do? throw ALL THE INFO they gained in the fucking trash because ballmer has a stiffie for the iPhone yet doesn't have a damned clue about what makes an iPhone an iPhone! News Flash, Jobs spent more than 3 decades slowly but surely building up Apple to be a high end boutique brand, refused to cut prices even in the 90s when they were on the ropes, because for his entire strategy to work it NEEDED to be expensive!
A perfect analogy would be slapping a new coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting to get Porsche money for it, because MSFT slaughtered the competition precisely because they were NOT expensive, they were the Walmart to Apple's Macy's and there is NO WAY IN HELL they are gonna suddenly flip that and get people to pay more than for an Apple to buy WinPhones and Wintabs, its NEVER gonna happen, it will NEVER work, the MSFT stores are ghost towns, all the little shops like mine have "Yes we have Win 7!" signs in the window, he is burning the damned company to the ground trying to force a strategy that has less of a chance of succeeding than Heaven's Gate II has a chance of being made!
Those of us on the ground could have told them that and saved the company billions, but as long as Steve "I'm duh big cheese, herpa de derp!" Ballmer is in the seat the company is gonna keep tanking. Its business 101, give the people products they want to buy or they'll go somewhere else. sinofsky knew that, he wanted Win 8 to be Win 7.1 and got fired for it, now there is nobody to rein in the sweaty one and he is gonna trash their remaining businesses by ignoring the numbers and shoving a "We're a more expensive Apple clone!" strategy on the company. If the people want an apple they'll BUY an Apple, they sure as hell ain't gonna pay Apple money for a Windows device, its doomed to fail.
Have you tried the AMD compiler yet? Its free and according to the one that originally found the "Intel cripple code" it does NOT favor any one chip over another but actually checks the use flags like a compiler SHOULD, not this CPUID market rigging bullshit. while it was originally based on GCC they have added a bunch of optimizations and updates to GCC to make it faster and support the latest and greatest.
Here is the link at least I think, its been awhile since I went looking for dev tools, but as you can see its supports C,C++,and Fortran, and unlike Intel doesn't use CPUID or favor one chip over another. Maybe you running a couple of tests and posting results would make a good/. follow up article?
I'm sorry dude but while you started out well, you quickly ran into bullshit. Look up what I said to look up, "Intel cripples compiler" and there you WILL see the smoking gun....The Pentium 3. If your arguments were valid, that its JUST Intel knows their own chips well? Then the P3 wouldn't get penalized by ICC...but it does. and again if you ONLY change the CPUID, which frankly ANY compiler that uses CPUID to judge what a chip can do instead of the flags? Bullshit. But you switch from Centaur hauls to genuine Intel and tada! Your chip will "magically" score 30% HIGHER than it did before the switch,the ONLY thing being changed is the CPUID.
The guy wrote did the tests tore down his code to see what it was doing and what intel has done with their cripple compiler is that on ANY chip that they don't want pushed, including their own P3, that doesn't give it a P4 or better CPUID gets thrown into X87 mode. That's right NO SSE, even though BOTH Intel and AMD has had SSE for over a decade now and that ANY code could just check the CPU Flags and know this, but this isn't about using what the chip has, its about making sure Intel chips score higher no matter what.
So I'm sorry dude but if that isn't grounds for antitrust then nothing is. Intel ignores CPU flags on ALL chips but their own and instead uses CPUID to make sure that any non Intel chip gets thrown into slow mode so they can win, again its quack.exe all over again only worse because plenty of companies compile with ICC and they are helping Intel rig the market against competition.
Actually as a PC repair guy who often does this very thing I say they should throw the contractor in jail, he is making us all look bad.
I've done plenty of work for the city in the past and they know any donations they give to me will be wiped clean so they have no problem handing me desktops and laptops that are being replaced. Is there any records on them? probably but I wouldn't know as the first thing they get is a boot 'n nuke from me, the ONLY thing I don't wipe is the factory restore partition if it has one, everything else? Wiped before I ever mess with the system.
So I'm all for throwing this asshole in jail because its jerks like this that end up causing systems to be disposed of via shotgun. In a dead economy there is plenty of folks hurting out there and these off-lease systems can be used to make sure anybody can have a PC, hell thanks to donations from the city I have a complete desktop system for $50 at the shop. Sure its not the fastest thing in the world but it surfs, burns DVDs, and when somebody needs a PC so their kid can look up info for school reports and they can look for a second job? A system like that can really make a difference. This is why I fricking HATE when assholes like this do dumb shit like just throwing it on eBay, he could have boot n' nuked and been done in no time, throw the lazy ass in jail.
And if you work in a position that has getting rid of older systems as part of your duties? Don't dispose of via shotgun, talk to the local shop guys, talk to the local churches, there is usually a guy like me that is happy to refurb 'em for the poor folks and unlike this douchebag we're happy to do secure wiping on anything you hand us. There is nothing like the feeling of making a difference, just last week I donated a couple of systems to one of the local churches so they could expand their computer classes, they do a lot of work with abused women and teaching them basic computer and office skills helps them get a job and not be dependent on some wife beating scumbag. I wouldn't have been able to hand those systems over if they hadn't been donated to me, so ask around, those old P4s and Athlons may be junkers to you but it could make a difference to somebody else.
Dude if you really want to give people a convincing argument? Just send 'em a link to the humble bundles and the Steam sales page, problem solved. Hell they got Borderlands II with ALL the DLC for a grand total of...drumroll...$20. I don't think I've had to spend more than $20 since switching and nearly all my games are triple A titles, I have so many games now that I still have a dozen i haven't even got to fire up yet, with all the free mods i still haven't got to enjoy all the free content for the ones I'm already playing and there is only so many hours in the day.
As far as ripping goes? Nobody cares dude, they really don't. Heck I had a state trooper bring in his wife last year so i could give her a couple of lessons on ripping because their daughters love Dora and the littlest one keeps managing to get the discs scratched, so now they have a nice ULV Athlon quad in the living room with 4TB worth of drives and the wifey poo takes all their new kid's movies and after ripping slaps 'em in the closet where the kids can't get at it. as long as all they are doing is format shifting their own stuff and not running P2P nobody cares, in fact i don't think I've heard of a single case of somebody getting busted for format shifting or backing up their own stuff. And with todays rippers its "stick in disc, push button" simple so converting your content to digital has never been easier. Hell you see that video on Bill Gates house? he has all his movies loaded on a server in his basement and just streams then around the house and that thing was broadcast around the world, nobody said shit.
as far as BC goes i have found MAYBE 4 games out of my collection that don't work, and they were just VERY badly coded, as an example i76 was coded to use the PC clockspeed as a timer for in game events so that even with MoSlo it simply doesn't play those events because it can't understand a modern clock but other than a couple like that? Plays great. Blood, redneck Rampage, No One Lives Forever, they all run great. and of course thanks to emulation i can also run PS1,PS2, SNES,Genesis, NES, Atari jaguar, pretty much all of the great classic consoles work and more and more of the classic console games are being brought to the PC, you can buy pretty much the entire Sega back catalog on steam now.
Uhhh..I AM the builder friend, so i can install it no problem. while some may argue its a grey area I've talked to MSFT tech support and if they don't have a problem with it, WGA don't have a problem with it, and MSFT took the money? I don't see a problem here. all the systems have the holo-stickers on the sides, the only ones that don't are the units I built for the family which duh! Used the family pack back when i could pick it up for $100. why they only include one sticker but 3 installs is beyond me but whatever, I've had to re-auth when i changed the board and it passes WGA so who cares? all the systems in the shop are built for sale so no worries there, and if you wanted to be a stickler for the license have somebody else push the button and you give them a dollar, tada! They are a system installer now.
And you must have missed the memo put out by Sony before E3, sorry I can't Google it right now but I'm making supper but the way they worded it was "WE at Sony will never use this feature, the use of this feature is purely up to the publishers and we at Sony support the new features that will come from..."blah blah blah, you get the idea. You already know EA is gonna jump on this shit, why do you think they just up and dropped ALL of the online pass bullshit they were making people do? because they know they can tell Sony they want the switch flipped and the hardware will do that FOR them, no need for those assholes to even run an auth server, let the hardware do it. Mark my words within 6 months of release you'll see activision,EA, and ubisoft ALL using this bullshitl, the former CEO of EA even said games should be $80-$100, no way they are gonna let the ability to kill used games and borrowing slip away like
You call saying windows 8 is the worst things since Windows ME a POSITIVE review? My God you FOSSies are batshit. I tore Vista a new asshole, pointing out it was a bloated buggy mess, said it was fucking stupid not to have a simple switch that would let the user choose between new Office layout and old, and I've already been calling win 8.1 the first OS that will give MSFT a double flop.
So if you call giving an honest opinion, which doesn't automatically knee jerk because some company does not give you "the precious code" that you frankly wouldn't know WTF to do with if you had it being positive? Fine, be as delusional as you want, we should probably be glad you aren't in a voting booth or behind the wheel.
Well what is he gonna say? "Hi, I want Wall street to kiss my behind and love me like they do Apple so I'm gonna burn the company to the ground by being MORE expensive, MORE cellphone like (since iPhone is kicking our behinds) and with more walled gardens and even higher apps! What could possibly go wrong, it works for Apple right?"
I wonder if in 5 years we'll take of "The Ballmer Effect" where a CEO has such a disconnect from reality that he'll torch the company trying to make it something it isn't. if Ballmer reads this let me make this perfectly clear, okay? Hey Steve...if I wanted a tablet I'D BUY A FRICKING TABLET so stop trying to jam a tablet UI onto my PC, okay buddy? And we sure as hell ain't paying apple money for Windows Steve, that plan is as retarded as Walmart raising prices 5000% and thinking that means they can compete with Macy's, its a different demographic dude and you can't slap a coat of paint on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money, its just not gonna work, its a giant bloated failwhale on the beach of life.
Look up "Intel cripples compiler" and you'll see its MUCH worse than merely tilting the benchmarks in favor of ARM, this bullshit means that ANY chip that doesn't have a CPUID of "Genuine intel" gets royally fucked by ALL SOFTWARE that is compiled with the Intel compiler.
If you look up the above in google you'll find a researcher that has done studies and if that doesn't deserve antitrust i don't know what does, he started looking into it when he found that his code would run faster on an old P4 than on a new AMD and it is soooo nasty that if you take a Via chip, the only chip that lets you change the CPUID, and change it from "Centaur hauls" to genuine Intel it jumps nearly 30% in the benches!
So do NOT buy chips based on the benches, they are as rigged as the old "quack.exe" but this is a thousand times worse because ANY program that is compiled with this is crippled and WILL run slower on ANY non Intel chip. So please programmers, use GCC, use AMD's compiler (which is based on GCC and doesn't favor one chip over another) and for those looking for a system DO NOT buy Intel if you can help it, since you are supporting this kind of market rigging bullshit. after seeing the results and seeing just how badly Intel is rigging I went exclusively AMD in my shop and even in my family with NO regrets, at least this way i'm supporting a company that isn't bribing OEMs and rigging markets.
seriously guys don't take MY word for it, look it up. They have even rigged it in the past to push shittier chips over better ones, the guy doing the tests found that even though the early P4 was a slow as hell chip when you ran a program compiled with ICC on both the P3 and P4 surprise! P4 would win. same program compiled with GCC? P3 won by over 30%.
The SCOTUS has ruled that format shifting falls under fair use, i simply can't do the ripping FOR you but you are free to do it yourself and there are plenty of free and low cost rippers to choose from.
And not having to pay a dealer for downgrades? what would you call yellow and red rings o' death then? Or how many had to hunt for the older PS3s if they wanted backwards compatibility which isn't a problem on the PC? I can fire up an emulator and in seconds be playing the very first game I EVER owned, Pong, or play the latest and greatest and everything in between. hell if you don't want to mess with DOSBox for the really old stuff GOG has them prebuilt with DOSBox for a little of nothing, nothing like firing up Blood, the first FPS I ever got, and being able to play it on my hexacore along with Redneck rampage and the rest of my early shooter years. with the consoles you are SOL, you either keep a shitload of old hardware or you don't play.
as far as Classic Shell its fine, my customers seem to like the look and feel of Start8 a little better but its a preference really. But the Metro crap doesn't seem to be very stable and I'm convinced its all that cellphone "tweeting twits for shits" craps constantly updating that is a BIG cause of the problems with win 8 as i have a couple of customers that stripped all that shit out so metro is just an oversized cpl and it seems to run stable without all the updating background trash. But with win 7 and Win 8 being the same price its really a moot point, why buy something shitty when you can have something good? If they sell win 8.1 for a dirt cheap price for 6 months like they did Win 8 I'll probably pick up a handful of licenses and use Start8 to make into an ersatz Win 8 but if its the same price as 7 no contest. And no i don't think its because of what they are "used' to, i have run alternate shells for years yet even i found myself bashing my head on the desk because of metro, its a real step backwards when it comes to UIs...except for HTPCs, then its a perfect 10 foot UI, again just kill the tweeting twits crap.
and dude quit waving your ePeen in my face, nobody gives a rat's ass about GDDR 5, okay? NOBODY. and the head of one of the major gaming houses (sorry have a migraine and my Google goes shitty when my head hurts) says it isn't gonna make a damned bit of difference, a triple A game costs a min of 40 mil right now so they will ALL be cross platform except for a small handful made by the console owners. since its all cross platform guess what? that GDDR 5 means exact jack and shit because its gonna have to run equally well on all systems, lowest common denominator. BTW I can easily slap another 8GB of RAM into my system AND as much as 6GB of GDDR 5 if I want to go crossfire, can you? I can also quadruple my HDD space, add SSDs if I want, even RAM based cache to make my games truly fly, what do you have besides GDDR 5? Squat, that's what, its even got a subpar 500Gb HDD instead of a 1TB which frankly ought to be standard.
As for how DRM gets in the way, did you not pay attention to the xbone? Or that Sony has a similar mechanism that devs can opt in for? How about what happens to those PSHome games when the arch switches? I really don't see Sony giving out coupons to get those games for free with the PS4 since the PS3 version won't run. with X86 I can fire up a game from 1984 and play just fine, hell some of them even have fan made patches (verbotten on consoles) that not only allow the MP to still work but extend the game to insane levels! Check out freelancer sometime, still has new systems being added a decade after its release and still has a large MP community to play with/against if you so choose.
and throwing another flag, bullshit on the field. I play a fricking TON of MP games, and I can honestly say i have NEVER run into a cheater. Ran into some sore losers, and you see those on ANY game, but those hosting games are quick to ban the shit out of anybody cheating but quick and if you prefer there is always punkbuster. In fact if
Not like what he is talking about friend. if your local library has back issues look at something like Wired from the early 90s and then look at it now. Back in the day they would have small page numbers or move them from the bottom to a corner or some such, but with mags today i can pick up a mag and go a good 30+ pages before I EVER see a single page number and when you have articles that start on 20, have another page on 84, to finally end up with the conclusion around 137? Not having page numbers gets old REAL fast.
This kind of crap is why I don't trust Vine reviews. Instead I try to find an ordinary Joe, they are usually easy enough to spot, not the fanciest writers, not all flowery in their prose, but you get an honest review from somebody that bought the thing because they wanted/needed it and are just giving their opinion.
Likewise when i buy stuff there I try to give as straight forward a review as possible and point out any limitations because i have often found that a thing might work really fantastic in one particular role but be just terrible in another. For an example of what I mean one Amazon seller had a load of OEM PCIe graphics cards for dirt cheap. After picking up a couple and slapping them in some boxes in the shop i wrote a nice glowing review that pointed out these cards were GREAT if you had an older system you want to upgrade from XP to Win 7 and needed a graphics card, or if you were building an HTPC that was strictly gonna be a media box? Wonderful for that role, but anybody that thought these cards would be good for gaming anything newer than Portal 1 was gonna be disappointed because these cards just weren't made for that.
So are Amazon Vines reviews bullshit? I personally think so, for me they are useless because too often they come off like a paid ad or as in TFA written by somebody that doesn't truly understand the product, give me just a normal guy that bought the thing to do a job and is just giving his thoughts on it any day of the week. may not be the most flowery of prose but it gives me a much better idea of the pros and cons than the Vines reviews.
You ever work with law enforcement? Dude its fucking SCARY how little many of them know how this shit works, just because they have a badge doesn't make 'em immune to what i call the "NCIS delusion" where they think you can magically do that CSI shit without risking anything. Hell I once had a state crime lab guy ask me for a program to find and sift files from a Win95 box as all they had were automated tools designed for NTFS and without the tools? Lost.
I have had them tell me they would "cover for me" if I would hack into a state owned PC, had them expect me to be able to push a button and instantly give them a street address, there is a REASON why they automatically go overboard when you talk PC, its because most of them frankly don't know any more than the civvies and fear you can do the shit like on that dumbass movie and "hack the Gibson" and shut off the world, considering how the alien dialup guy was getting into the DoD? i don't think you'd have to hack the Gibson, more like hack the Atari..LOL.
If ALL you are doing is passively consuming? Sure that will work fine...most folks aren't just passive consumers though friend.
Take my GF's roommate for an example, I call her "That girl" (short for "that loudmouthed nosy girl") so we'll call her that. That girl bought a tablet...never uses it,why? She found that while it would let her passively surf or look at her email, when it came to replying or playing her FB games or chatting with her friends? It really REALLY sucked ass for that. and it isn't like she is what anybody would call a "hardcore" user by any stretch, her idea of "gaming" is that little flower growing game (or as i call it "Hamster push the button and gets a pellet") but she found that thanks to her roomie having a BF that knows PCs it cost her next to nothing to get an HDMI cable and wireless keyboard/mouse setup and now she can kick back all comfy and do everything she wants so the tablet sits in the box.
so from what I'm seeing not very many folks fit your anecdote, too many want to tweet, chat on FB, play their little games, write emails AND do the passive stuff and honestly? even with the BT keyboard frankly those little ARM jobbies I've found to be just too underpowered to be anything but irritating, like trying to watch a movie on a cellphone while you CAN do it most would find it seriously wanting.
Not him but I gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. The game you cite is frankly notorious for being a giant pig, no different than the Crytek games when it comes to wasting cycles, and most folks aren't gonna base their entire gaming exp around BF 3.
I can tell you my youngest loves games like the Borderlands series, along with huge MMORPGs and his 3.3Ghz Athlon X3 with an HD4850 cranks the purty just fine, and I'm playing the Bioshock series, the Saints Row games, the Crytek games, Deus Ex HR, Serious Sam 3 BFE (Had to grab the Humble Bundle, gotta love me some Sam I Am) and most of the time my AMD hexacore is running in triple core mode with again an HD4850 and on my single monitor? Looks fricking great. I even have an Athlon X3 and HD4850 set up in the shop to show people what kind of games they can play on their TV with a PC, I have Just Cause II loaded on it and all it takes is me planting a half a dozen C4s and doing the "cool guys don't look at explosions" bit while these huge gasoline fires blow and smokestacks fall for it to be an easy sale.
So if you are gonna be judging systems you really need to use something besides Battle Fatass 3, that would be like judging a system based on how it run the carrier bit in Crysis that is so badly coded there is a fan made patch just to turn down that single spot because even the ultra high end cards would have graphical glitches on that shit. But hey, if having a big ePeen makes you happy? Who am I to judge;-)
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Meh as somebody who is down here in the trenches i think that while the pro MAY find a niche, and I say may because the stench of WinRT has confused folks who now think ALL Surface devices can't run shit, but in the grand scheme of things? I seriously doubt it will get more than 5% of the market tops.
So while I'm sure its nice the simple fact is a good 99% of the Windows software out there just wasn't written with touch in mind, and in a classic chicken or the egg problem they aren't gonna spend the crazy money for a touch focused UI rebuild when less than 2% of PCs on the planet have touch capability.
Anyway as a guy that sells tech you can call me biased but when I'm seeing is tablet equals toy, smartphones are Google in a box and MP3 players that make calls, and when folks want Windows they want a desktop or a laptop. The only reason sales are down is the end of the MHz war has made multicores as common as dirt and most users can't come up with enough work to slam even a Pentium D or Athlon64 X2 but as long as MSFT keeps the insane prices the ONLY ones that will be buying it will be guys that need a tablet that runs Windows programs which frankly is a pretty small niche.
Actually I would say it proves evolution, specifically that because we humans have evolved with a small tribe mentality (protecting our own small sphere instead of looking at humanity as a whole) and an instinct to protect those in our tribe we are creating a "march of the morons" situation by having a civilization that allows truly stupid people like in TFA to have offspring, thus spreading the stupid like a jackass rolling a porta potty downhill spreads shit.
Sadly this IS the future of society, a full on "Big Mother" nanny state that every damned thing you see/read/hear, even eat and drink, because it will assume that you are just as big an idiot as the lowest common denominator who of course will think that lowest common denominator is a bot on Transformers.
But isn't the Surface Pro just a wintel tablet? And while you may like it I wouldn't count on it getting updated for long, just look at how MSFT fucked the WinPhone 7 early adopters by refusing to port WinPhone 8 thus leaving them on a platform with very few apps and already as good as abandoned.
But the main thing we are talking about is WinRT which was doomed before it ever got out the gate, the reason MSFT has a virtual lock on the desktop is the billions of dollars worth of Windows programs. With Surface RT all you have is a system that runs less than iPhone and Android and for a higher price and with less battery life since WinRT doesn't support the tegra 3 fifth core
So while I'm glad you like it I don't know if i would even entertain, much less recommend, the WinRT platform simply because of MSFT track record of abandoning devices that don't meet a metric in x amount of time, again look at what they did to the WinPhone as well as sidekick and Kin. Maybe if they drop below $150 it might be a good deal, above that price point I'd be leery.
Ooookay, maybe I'm just old and haven't kept up on my lingo but I thought "trap" wasn't considered an insult while tranny is? Maybe i heard wrong but the way i was told a "trap' was one that looked so much like a female that you honestly couldn't tell without doing the bit from Crocodile Dundee , which if their goal is to transition logically one would think not being able to tell that they weren't born that sex would be a pretty nice compliment? But since I'm not one and don't know anybody in that community maybe I'm wrong.
As for TFA I thought it was pretty much decided it wasn't ANY one thing but a BUNCH of things over a geologically short period of time that created a "perfect storm" that wiped nearly everything out?
I have a question, not a programmer so I was wondering what advantage do you get by using AVX over SSE? because i took a quick look at AVX and its only supported on Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge, which would be a very VERY small portion of the chips out there. it seems to me if you wanted the widest possible support you'd use the SSE flags since SSE 4 has been around since Phenom I and Core 2.
You final sentence is the case dude, Intel gives big discounts to major software companies, hence why nearly every benchmark uses ICC. And again the smoking gun is the P3, if what you were saying is true then the P3 would NOT be penalized, since they know their own chips, but it is. again take the same program and run it on both the P3 and the P4 of the same speed, with ICC the P4 will get a 30% speed boost while the P3 gets a boat anchor tied to it, the same code with GCC? the P3 will win by 30%.
And as others pointed out so many times with MSFT when you are the market leader? the rules for you are different than for anybody else. the fact that the DoJ let Intel buy their way out by handing AMD 1.2 BILLION dollars frankly was a travesty of justice and just shows how the DoJ is worthless. maybe the EU still has some fangs but the DoJ is nothing but a bad joke.
As a guy that has been doing this since the Shat sold Vics on TV I can tell you where that old wives tale came from and why it no longer applies. the very first drives used either RFM or MFM coding (been awhile) and the drives weren't very precise so it could slip a track and miss data, hence the multiwipe. that hasn't been true in 20 years though, with grooves so tiny and motors so precise no way a drive that isn't already dying is gonna miss a track,no way.
Dude you are buying into old wive's tales, you haven't needed to do more than a single zero pass in like 15 years. Hell there is a guy offering something like 10 grand if you can recover anything from a drive he does a zero pass on and so far not a single taker, not even the recovery companies. You see friend in the bad old days the RFM drives could easily slip the track, that would leave data behind, hence the multipass, but with modern drives that just can't happen anymore, the grooves are too tight and the tracking too precise.
But don't take my word for it, try it yourself, just slap some old 40Gb with a bunch of files on it on a USB adapter, do a full zero pass, and then try to recover the files. you won't get shit, I've tried. and a single zero pass doesn't take long as all, I've found it takes maybe an hour for a 500GB and that is with a wipe and full pass check.
Meh if you were dumb enough to buy one early? Sorry but you kinda deserved the wallet ding for failing to pay attention. Pretty much all of the media had already panned the thing, they were selling it for MORE than an iPad, the Surface had giant FAIL written all over it almost from the start so anybody with any common sense should have figured they'd either have to take a hell of a price drop or end up with a warehouse full of shit they couldn't sell. Folks forget that computer chips have a shelf life, if you don't move the units its soon badly outdated compared to what is on the market and nobody will buy it.
Honestly I wouldn't even buy it at the current price, the tegra 3 was never that great a chip to start with and thanks to bad design on the part of MSFT the Surface can't even take advantage of the fifth core on the tegra 3 so the battery life will be worse than Android on it. Maybe if it hits below $145 it might be worth playing with, but considering we are talking about a company with a history of abandoning products that don't become hits (Zune, Sidekick,Kin,WinPhone 7) do you REALLY want to take the chance?
Mark my words by xmas these things will either be on woot! at $100 or less like the Touchpad or they'll end up in a landfill somewhere, Anything to do with WinRT seems to be destined to fail, hence why nearly all the OEMs canceled their WinRT offerings.
Well as a retailer and system builder believe me there is NO love for MSFT here, they royally screw us system builders, we can't even get them to talk about ANY discount on retail price unless we are buying 10,000+ licenses so we would love nothing more than to flip them the bird and tell Redmond to piss off.
But that is where the Hairyfeet Challenge comes in, as I can't be giving an OS that is gonna crap out on its first update to my customers, it would destroy my rep and put me out of business. So with the Hairyfeet Challenge I'd take a random desktop or laptop down, slap in the version of whatever distro I was testing from 5 years ago, be it Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva (whatever they call it now) and so on and what did I find? NONE of them ended the test with 100% functional drivers, NOT ONE. Wireless, sound, video, drivers were getting crapped on all over the damned place! And was there a find drivers or rolback drivers button, something that has been in windows since Windows 2K a decade and a half ago? Nope the ONLY choice you end up with is CLI messes, forum hunts, and Googling for fixes.
So THIS, this right here, is why Linux ain't doing shit even with MSFT putting out the most hated OS since WinME, its because every B&M and retailer that has tried Linux has found out the same thing I have, Torvalds piss poor driver model just doesn't fucking work. And what really pisses me off is its not because of some deep and dark flaw with the underlying OS, in fact it could have an ABI added probably pretty easily, no it comes down to RELIGION and when you start having religious debates in the middle of a talk on OS design? you are royally FUCKED with a capital F.
But that is what it comes down to, religion. Like the more extreme religions they don't trust you to choose "their way" of living so like a cult you HAVE to follow their beliefs, no choice is allowed in the so called "free as in freedom" OS. I found this out the hard way by going to their forums, sending the higher ups emails, it never failed that what would always START as a talk on OS design would quickly be switched by them to a talk about "GPL Purity" and "Spirit of the GPL"...spirits belong in seances NOT in talks of OS design! You saw the quote from one of the kernel devs, that is what I got when I pointed out how I can take a decade old driver and still have it work in Windows while a three year old driver won't work in Linux, they WANT the drivers to break so they can try to force their "GPL purity" bullshit upon you instead of letting you choose what works for you! And the ultimate irony, their forums are filled with posts advising people to use the NON FREE Nvidia drivers because...drumroll...they fucking work!
This is why I have all Linux articles blocked, there is no point in talking OS design with religious loonies which is why I call 'em FOSSies, like Moonies its ALL about the dogma, reality has no place there, and until that changes Linux will stay right where it is, with numbers so low it is below the margin for error. When you have people risking fines and even jail time to steal the other guy's product when you stand there trying to hand them yours for free? If that isn't a cluebat to the head that something is seriously wrong with your product i don't know what is! BTW you know what I got when I pointed that out? "I don't care if only one person uses it as long as it upholds the GPL"...fucking religious bullshit!
Thanks but as a grunt in the trenches this REALLY pisses me off, they have this beta program, we all happily do their damned job for them and tell them what's wrong and what do they do? throw ALL THE INFO they gained in the fucking trash because ballmer has a stiffie for the iPhone yet doesn't have a damned clue about what makes an iPhone an iPhone! News Flash, Jobs spent more than 3 decades slowly but surely building up Apple to be a high end boutique brand, refused to cut prices even in the 90s when they were on the ropes, because for his entire strategy to work it NEEDED to be expensive!
A perfect analogy would be slapping a new coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting to get Porsche money for it, because MSFT slaughtered the competition precisely because they were NOT expensive, they were the Walmart to Apple's Macy's and there is NO WAY IN HELL they are gonna suddenly flip that and get people to pay more than for an Apple to buy WinPhones and Wintabs, its NEVER gonna happen, it will NEVER work, the MSFT stores are ghost towns, all the little shops like mine have "Yes we have Win 7!" signs in the window, he is burning the damned company to the ground trying to force a strategy that has less of a chance of succeeding than Heaven's Gate II has a chance of being made!
Those of us on the ground could have told them that and saved the company billions, but as long as Steve "I'm duh big cheese, herpa de derp!" Ballmer is in the seat the company is gonna keep tanking. Its business 101, give the people products they want to buy or they'll go somewhere else. sinofsky knew that, he wanted Win 8 to be Win 7.1 and got fired for it, now there is nobody to rein in the sweaty one and he is gonna trash their remaining businesses by ignoring the numbers and shoving a "We're a more expensive Apple clone!" strategy on the company. If the people want an apple they'll BUY an Apple, they sure as hell ain't gonna pay Apple money for a Windows device, its doomed to fail.
Have you tried the AMD compiler yet? Its free and according to the one that originally found the "Intel cripple code" it does NOT favor any one chip over another but actually checks the use flags like a compiler SHOULD, not this CPUID market rigging bullshit. while it was originally based on GCC they have added a bunch of optimizations and updates to GCC to make it faster and support the latest and greatest.
Here is the link at least I think, its been awhile since I went looking for dev tools, but as you can see its supports C,C++,and Fortran, and unlike Intel doesn't use CPUID or favor one chip over another. Maybe you running a couple of tests and posting results would make a good /. follow up article?
I'm sorry dude but while you started out well, you quickly ran into bullshit. Look up what I said to look up, "Intel cripples compiler" and there you WILL see the smoking gun....The Pentium 3. If your arguments were valid, that its JUST Intel knows their own chips well? Then the P3 wouldn't get penalized by ICC...but it does. and again if you ONLY change the CPUID, which frankly ANY compiler that uses CPUID to judge what a chip can do instead of the flags? Bullshit. But you switch from Centaur hauls to genuine Intel and tada! Your chip will "magically" score 30% HIGHER than it did before the switch,the ONLY thing being changed is the CPUID.
The guy wrote did the tests tore down his code to see what it was doing and what intel has done with their cripple compiler is that on ANY chip that they don't want pushed, including their own P3, that doesn't give it a P4 or better CPUID gets thrown into X87 mode. That's right NO SSE, even though BOTH Intel and AMD has had SSE for over a decade now and that ANY code could just check the CPU Flags and know this, but this isn't about using what the chip has, its about making sure Intel chips score higher no matter what.
So I'm sorry dude but if that isn't grounds for antitrust then nothing is. Intel ignores CPU flags on ALL chips but their own and instead uses CPUID to make sure that any non Intel chip gets thrown into slow mode so they can win, again its quack.exe all over again only worse because plenty of companies compile with ICC and they are helping Intel rig the market against competition.
Actually as a PC repair guy who often does this very thing I say they should throw the contractor in jail, he is making us all look bad.
I've done plenty of work for the city in the past and they know any donations they give to me will be wiped clean so they have no problem handing me desktops and laptops that are being replaced. Is there any records on them? probably but I wouldn't know as the first thing they get is a boot 'n nuke from me, the ONLY thing I don't wipe is the factory restore partition if it has one, everything else? Wiped before I ever mess with the system.
So I'm all for throwing this asshole in jail because its jerks like this that end up causing systems to be disposed of via shotgun. In a dead economy there is plenty of folks hurting out there and these off-lease systems can be used to make sure anybody can have a PC, hell thanks to donations from the city I have a complete desktop system for $50 at the shop. Sure its not the fastest thing in the world but it surfs, burns DVDs, and when somebody needs a PC so their kid can look up info for school reports and they can look for a second job? A system like that can really make a difference. This is why I fricking HATE when assholes like this do dumb shit like just throwing it on eBay, he could have boot n' nuked and been done in no time, throw the lazy ass in jail.
And if you work in a position that has getting rid of older systems as part of your duties? Don't dispose of via shotgun, talk to the local shop guys, talk to the local churches, there is usually a guy like me that is happy to refurb 'em for the poor folks and unlike this douchebag we're happy to do secure wiping on anything you hand us. There is nothing like the feeling of making a difference, just last week I donated a couple of systems to one of the local churches so they could expand their computer classes, they do a lot of work with abused women and teaching them basic computer and office skills helps them get a job and not be dependent on some wife beating scumbag. I wouldn't have been able to hand those systems over if they hadn't been donated to me, so ask around, those old P4s and Athlons may be junkers to you but it could make a difference to somebody else.
Dude if you really want to give people a convincing argument? Just send 'em a link to the humble bundles and the Steam sales page, problem solved. Hell they got Borderlands II with ALL the DLC for a grand total of...drumroll...$20. I don't think I've had to spend more than $20 since switching and nearly all my games are triple A titles, I have so many games now that I still have a dozen i haven't even got to fire up yet, with all the free mods i still haven't got to enjoy all the free content for the ones I'm already playing and there is only so many hours in the day.
As far as ripping goes? Nobody cares dude, they really don't. Heck I had a state trooper bring in his wife last year so i could give her a couple of lessons on ripping because their daughters love Dora and the littlest one keeps managing to get the discs scratched, so now they have a nice ULV Athlon quad in the living room with 4TB worth of drives and the wifey poo takes all their new kid's movies and after ripping slaps 'em in the closet where the kids can't get at it. as long as all they are doing is format shifting their own stuff and not running P2P nobody cares, in fact i don't think I've heard of a single case of somebody getting busted for format shifting or backing up their own stuff. And with todays rippers its "stick in disc, push button" simple so converting your content to digital has never been easier. Hell you see that video on Bill Gates house? he has all his movies loaded on a server in his basement and just streams then around the house and that thing was broadcast around the world, nobody said shit.
as far as BC goes i have found MAYBE 4 games out of my collection that don't work, and they were just VERY badly coded, as an example i76 was coded to use the PC clockspeed as a timer for in game events so that even with MoSlo it simply doesn't play those events because it can't understand a modern clock but other than a couple like that? Plays great. Blood, redneck Rampage, No One Lives Forever, they all run great. and of course thanks to emulation i can also run PS1,PS2, SNES,Genesis, NES, Atari jaguar, pretty much all of the great classic consoles work and more and more of the classic console games are being brought to the PC, you can buy pretty much the entire Sega back catalog on steam now.
Uhhh..I AM the builder friend, so i can install it no problem. while some may argue its a grey area I've talked to MSFT tech support and if they don't have a problem with it, WGA don't have a problem with it, and MSFT took the money? I don't see a problem here. all the systems have the holo-stickers on the sides, the only ones that don't are the units I built for the family which duh! Used the family pack back when i could pick it up for $100. why they only include one sticker but 3 installs is beyond me but whatever, I've had to re-auth when i changed the board and it passes WGA so who cares? all the systems in the shop are built for sale so no worries there, and if you wanted to be a stickler for the license have somebody else push the button and you give them a dollar, tada! They are a system installer now.
And you must have missed the memo put out by Sony before E3, sorry I can't Google it right now but I'm making supper but the way they worded it was "WE at Sony will never use this feature, the use of this feature is purely up to the publishers and we at Sony support the new features that will come from..."blah blah blah, you get the idea. You already know EA is gonna jump on this shit, why do you think they just up and dropped ALL of the online pass bullshit they were making people do? because they know they can tell Sony they want the switch flipped and the hardware will do that FOR them, no need for those assholes to even run an auth server, let the hardware do it. Mark my words within 6 months of release you'll see activision,EA, and ubisoft ALL using this bullshitl, the former CEO of EA even said games should be $80-$100, no way they are gonna let the ability to kill used games and borrowing slip away like
You call saying windows 8 is the worst things since Windows ME a POSITIVE review? My God you FOSSies are batshit. I tore Vista a new asshole, pointing out it was a bloated buggy mess, said it was fucking stupid not to have a simple switch that would let the user choose between new Office layout and old, and I've already been calling win 8.1 the first OS that will give MSFT a double flop.
So if you call giving an honest opinion, which doesn't automatically knee jerk because some company does not give you "the precious code" that you frankly wouldn't know WTF to do with if you had it being positive? Fine, be as delusional as you want, we should probably be glad you aren't in a voting booth or behind the wheel.
Well what is he gonna say? "Hi, I want Wall street to kiss my behind and love me like they do Apple so I'm gonna burn the company to the ground by being MORE expensive, MORE cellphone like (since iPhone is kicking our behinds) and with more walled gardens and even higher apps! What could possibly go wrong, it works for Apple right?"
I wonder if in 5 years we'll take of "The Ballmer Effect" where a CEO has such a disconnect from reality that he'll torch the company trying to make it something it isn't. if Ballmer reads this let me make this perfectly clear, okay? Hey Steve...if I wanted a tablet I'D BUY A FRICKING TABLET so stop trying to jam a tablet UI onto my PC, okay buddy? And we sure as hell ain't paying apple money for Windows Steve, that plan is as retarded as Walmart raising prices 5000% and thinking that means they can compete with Macy's, its a different demographic dude and you can't slap a coat of paint on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money, its just not gonna work, its a giant bloated failwhale on the beach of life.
Look up "Intel cripples compiler" and you'll see its MUCH worse than merely tilting the benchmarks in favor of ARM, this bullshit means that ANY chip that doesn't have a CPUID of "Genuine intel" gets royally fucked by ALL SOFTWARE that is compiled with the Intel compiler.
If you look up the above in google you'll find a researcher that has done studies and if that doesn't deserve antitrust i don't know what does, he started looking into it when he found that his code would run faster on an old P4 than on a new AMD and it is soooo nasty that if you take a Via chip, the only chip that lets you change the CPUID, and change it from "Centaur hauls" to genuine Intel it jumps nearly 30% in the benches!
So do NOT buy chips based on the benches, they are as rigged as the old "quack.exe" but this is a thousand times worse because ANY program that is compiled with this is crippled and WILL run slower on ANY non Intel chip. So please programmers, use GCC, use AMD's compiler (which is based on GCC and doesn't favor one chip over another) and for those looking for a system DO NOT buy Intel if you can help it, since you are supporting this kind of market rigging bullshit. after seeing the results and seeing just how badly Intel is rigging I went exclusively AMD in my shop and even in my family with NO regrets, at least this way i'm supporting a company that isn't bribing OEMs and rigging markets.
seriously guys don't take MY word for it, look it up. They have even rigged it in the past to push shittier chips over better ones, the guy doing the tests found that even though the early P4 was a slow as hell chip when you ran a program compiled with ICC on both the P3 and P4 surprise! P4 would win. same program compiled with GCC? P3 won by over 30%.
The SCOTUS has ruled that format shifting falls under fair use, i simply can't do the ripping FOR you but you are free to do it yourself and there are plenty of free and low cost rippers to choose from.
And not having to pay a dealer for downgrades? what would you call yellow and red rings o' death then? Or how many had to hunt for the older PS3s if they wanted backwards compatibility which isn't a problem on the PC? I can fire up an emulator and in seconds be playing the very first game I EVER owned, Pong, or play the latest and greatest and everything in between. hell if you don't want to mess with DOSBox for the really old stuff GOG has them prebuilt with DOSBox for a little of nothing, nothing like firing up Blood, the first FPS I ever got, and being able to play it on my hexacore along with Redneck rampage and the rest of my early shooter years. with the consoles you are SOL, you either keep a shitload of old hardware or you don't play.
as far as Classic Shell its fine, my customers seem to like the look and feel of Start8 a little better but its a preference really. But the Metro crap doesn't seem to be very stable and I'm convinced its all that cellphone "tweeting twits for shits" craps constantly updating that is a BIG cause of the problems with win 8 as i have a couple of customers that stripped all that shit out so metro is just an oversized cpl and it seems to run stable without all the updating background trash. But with win 7 and Win 8 being the same price its really a moot point, why buy something shitty when you can have something good? If they sell win 8.1 for a dirt cheap price for 6 months like they did Win 8 I'll probably pick up a handful of licenses and use Start8 to make into an ersatz Win 8 but if its the same price as 7 no contest. And no i don't think its because of what they are "used' to, i have run alternate shells for years yet even i found myself bashing my head on the desk because of metro, its a real step backwards when it comes to UIs...except for HTPCs, then its a perfect 10 foot UI, again just kill the tweeting twits crap.
and dude quit waving your ePeen in my face, nobody gives a rat's ass about GDDR 5, okay? NOBODY. and the head of one of the major gaming houses (sorry have a migraine and my Google goes shitty when my head hurts) says it isn't gonna make a damned bit of difference, a triple A game costs a min of 40 mil right now so they will ALL be cross platform except for a small handful made by the console owners. since its all cross platform guess what? that GDDR 5 means exact jack and shit because its gonna have to run equally well on all systems, lowest common denominator. BTW I can easily slap another 8GB of RAM into my system AND as much as 6GB of GDDR 5 if I want to go crossfire, can you? I can also quadruple my HDD space, add SSDs if I want, even RAM based cache to make my games truly fly, what do you have besides GDDR 5? Squat, that's what, its even got a subpar 500Gb HDD instead of a 1TB which frankly ought to be standard.
As for how DRM gets in the way, did you not pay attention to the xbone? Or that Sony has a similar mechanism that devs can opt in for? How about what happens to those PSHome games when the arch switches? I really don't see Sony giving out coupons to get those games for free with the PS4 since the PS3 version won't run. with X86 I can fire up a game from 1984 and play just fine, hell some of them even have fan made patches (verbotten on consoles) that not only allow the MP to still work but extend the game to insane levels! Check out freelancer sometime, still has new systems being added a decade after its release and still has a large MP community to play with/against if you so choose.
and throwing another flag, bullshit on the field. I play a fricking TON of MP games, and I can honestly say i have NEVER run into a cheater. Ran into some sore losers, and you see those on ANY game, but those hosting games are quick to ban the shit out of anybody cheating but quick and if you prefer there is always punkbuster. In fact if
Not like what he is talking about friend. if your local library has back issues look at something like Wired from the early 90s and then look at it now. Back in the day they would have small page numbers or move them from the bottom to a corner or some such, but with mags today i can pick up a mag and go a good 30+ pages before I EVER see a single page number and when you have articles that start on 20, have another page on 84, to finally end up with the conclusion around 137? Not having page numbers gets old REAL fast.
This kind of crap is why I don't trust Vine reviews. Instead I try to find an ordinary Joe, they are usually easy enough to spot, not the fanciest writers, not all flowery in their prose, but you get an honest review from somebody that bought the thing because they wanted/needed it and are just giving their opinion.
Likewise when i buy stuff there I try to give as straight forward a review as possible and point out any limitations because i have often found that a thing might work really fantastic in one particular role but be just terrible in another. For an example of what I mean one Amazon seller had a load of OEM PCIe graphics cards for dirt cheap. After picking up a couple and slapping them in some boxes in the shop i wrote a nice glowing review that pointed out these cards were GREAT if you had an older system you want to upgrade from XP to Win 7 and needed a graphics card, or if you were building an HTPC that was strictly gonna be a media box? Wonderful for that role, but anybody that thought these cards would be good for gaming anything newer than Portal 1 was gonna be disappointed because these cards just weren't made for that.
So are Amazon Vines reviews bullshit? I personally think so, for me they are useless because too often they come off like a paid ad or as in TFA written by somebody that doesn't truly understand the product, give me just a normal guy that bought the thing to do a job and is just giving his thoughts on it any day of the week. may not be the most flowery of prose but it gives me a much better idea of the pros and cons than the Vines reviews.
You ever work with law enforcement? Dude its fucking SCARY how little many of them know how this shit works, just because they have a badge doesn't make 'em immune to what i call the "NCIS delusion" where they think you can magically do that CSI shit without risking anything. Hell I once had a state crime lab guy ask me for a program to find and sift files from a Win95 box as all they had were automated tools designed for NTFS and without the tools? Lost.
I have had them tell me they would "cover for me" if I would hack into a state owned PC, had them expect me to be able to push a button and instantly give them a street address, there is a REASON why they automatically go overboard when you talk PC, its because most of them frankly don't know any more than the civvies and fear you can do the shit like on that dumbass movie and "hack the Gibson" and shut off the world, considering how the alien dialup guy was getting into the DoD? i don't think you'd have to hack the Gibson, more like hack the Atari..LOL.
Hell have you ever had to call HP support? if it was more complex than "HP001" I'd be surprised,maybe "HP#1" if they wanted to get fancy ;-)
If ALL you are doing is passively consuming? Sure that will work fine...most folks aren't just passive consumers though friend.
Take my GF's roommate for an example, I call her "That girl" (short for "that loudmouthed nosy girl") so we'll call her that. That girl bought a tablet...never uses it,why? She found that while it would let her passively surf or look at her email, when it came to replying or playing her FB games or chatting with her friends? It really REALLY sucked ass for that. and it isn't like she is what anybody would call a "hardcore" user by any stretch, her idea of "gaming" is that little flower growing game (or as i call it "Hamster push the button and gets a pellet") but she found that thanks to her roomie having a BF that knows PCs it cost her next to nothing to get an HDMI cable and wireless keyboard/mouse setup and now she can kick back all comfy and do everything she wants so the tablet sits in the box.
so from what I'm seeing not very many folks fit your anecdote, too many want to tweet, chat on FB, play their little games, write emails AND do the passive stuff and honestly? even with the BT keyboard frankly those little ARM jobbies I've found to be just too underpowered to be anything but irritating, like trying to watch a movie on a cellphone while you CAN do it most would find it seriously wanting.
Not him but I gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. The game you cite is frankly notorious for being a giant pig, no different than the Crytek games when it comes to wasting cycles, and most folks aren't gonna base their entire gaming exp around BF 3.
I can tell you my youngest loves games like the Borderlands series, along with huge MMORPGs and his 3.3Ghz Athlon X3 with an HD4850 cranks the purty just fine, and I'm playing the Bioshock series, the Saints Row games, the Crytek games, Deus Ex HR, Serious Sam 3 BFE (Had to grab the Humble Bundle, gotta love me some Sam I Am) and most of the time my AMD hexacore is running in triple core mode with again an HD4850 and on my single monitor? Looks fricking great. I even have an Athlon X3 and HD4850 set up in the shop to show people what kind of games they can play on their TV with a PC, I have Just Cause II loaded on it and all it takes is me planting a half a dozen C4s and doing the "cool guys don't look at explosions" bit while these huge gasoline fires blow and smokestacks fall for it to be an easy sale.
So if you are gonna be judging systems you really need to use something besides Battle Fatass 3, that would be like judging a system based on how it run the carrier bit in Crysis that is so badly coded there is a fan made patch just to turn down that single spot because even the ultra high end cards would have graphical glitches on that shit. But hey, if having a big ePeen makes you happy? Who am I to judge ;-)