Actually friend in a way you are BOTH right but I'd add that the reason gaming slowed to a crawl was NOT because of the consoles, its because making a triple A game at current standards can easily cost $50 million plus.
I don't remember which gaming house CEO said it (it may have been the head of Epic, maybe Crytek, not sure) but they said to really push the graphics up to the level that even the midrange hardware like an Athlon Quad or HD7750 can do right now? would shoot the cost of developing the games into $120 million plus territory and the devs simply can't afford to spend that kind of money, one flop can kill them as it is, with those kinds of numbers you can sell 5 million copies on launch day and lose money like Ubisoft did on the new Tomb Raider.
So according to him its NOT the consoles that are holding things back, in fact he predicted we aren't gonna see a big leap with the new consoles like we did with the last one, simply because the cost to make a game with THAT high a level of graphics and physics would break the bank of any company that tried.
BTW nice to see a former PC guy, still selling myself, but if anything the dropping prices have made it even easier to sell but these dumbo OEMs are trying to listen to MSFT and Intel and crank out Macbook clones and getting screwed. The sweet spot right now is between $350-$550 and you go past $550 at your own peril, these OEMs will learn that soon enough.
Mind some advice friend? Look at the AMD hexas, especially the Phenom IIs, you can score them crazy cheap if you look around and can get a damned good gaming board from a company like Asrock (Asus and Asrock are one now BTW, with the Asus side mainly laptop and Asrock mainly desktop) for dirt cheap, really great way to get a nice gaming rig for little green. Pair it with an HD7750 or HD7770, hell get a CF enabled board like mine and by this fall you'll be able to score double HD7750s for around $120 and you'll be smoking.
But do NOT toss that Athlon X2 system, still plenty of uses for that baby. You can underclock it and it'll make a great low power HTPC or you can go to starmicro and either squeeze some more performance out by getting a cheap upgrade or if you want to go the HTPC route I'd recommend the 4850E which is just 45w at 2.5Ghz so it makes a great whisper quiet HTPC. Slap the old board into something like one of the cheap VCR style cases on amazon and tada! Slick HTPC that looks great and runs like a champ!
I have to say having the hardware cycle slow down has been fine by me, i can still sell plenty of HTPCs and having the GPU turnover slow down means its cheaper than ever to give my customers a gaming upgrade. Hell me and my boys have been gaming the last 3 years on HD4850s, they cost just $60 a pop at the time (and can be found for as little as $35 online now) and despite our love of shooters they have been kicking the behind. I'll be upgrading us to the HD7750s or HD7770s this fall NOT because our games need it but simply for the power savings, not having to blow $100+ a GPU times three every other year has certainly been fine by me;-)
Exactly and as I pointed out we have just about reached the limits of die shrinks because of electron leakage so barring some amazing new material most of the R&D will end up going to performance per watt and improving what they already have.
I mean put yourself in the shoes of one of my average customers. They walk into the shop,see the triples and quads, see the dual core laptops...do you REALLY think they will give a rat's ass if the chip inside was made at 45nm,32nm,or 22nm? Nope all they care about is "Will it do what I want it to do?" and since the answer is "yes with power to spare" they are just happy little campers. hell I've been sticking with the Athlons and Phenom IIs because of how cheap I've been getting them, think folks care if that new quad is the latest and greatest in chip design? Nope they are happy they have a new kick butt system to plug into their widescreen and do their stuff on, that is all.
So honestly if Intel and AMD both stopped R&D tomorrow it really wouldn't matter to the end user, they both have a chip that fits just about any budget or job the user has, and they can go as high as hexacore on the Intel side or octocore on the AMD side, which is serious overkill for...well pretty much all but a handful of guys. Even me who is a multitasking fool has found my AMD hexacore can do so much work per cycle that it always seems to be dropping into ULV mode waiting for more work from me and when i want to go nuts it can transcode a DVD to AVI and burn a disc AND play my games, no problemo. Why should I care that AMD has an octocore chip out that is 2 gen newer when my hexacore 1035T, which cost a grand total of $105 BTW, has more cycles than I can use?
Finally both Intel and AMD have found that they can use that spare fab capacity (yes i know AMD is now fabless but its common knowledge that the fabs give priority to their best customers) to make the cheap ULV chips like Atom and Bobcat/Jaguar and because those chips are so cheap to make and the OEMs snap them up (especially the AMD APUs, pretty much every sub $350 laptop around here is a Bobcat based) they can keep those fabs humming and with the low cost per chip they can make damned good money off of those. Between Celeron/Pentium and Bobcat/Jaguar/Trinity both companies can still make good money and keep the fabs running, they are a sunk cost after all.
Sigh, let old Hairy enlighten you because you be buying some BULLSHIT friend.
First of all the Jag is NOT an Octocore, not unless you consider a P4 with HT to be a dual core because that is ALL the Jag is, its a quad with hardware HT baked in. Also its NOT a gaming chip, look up "AMD Bobcat" and you'll see its a NETBOOK chip design primarily for streaming media NOT gaming. I have an E350 Bobcat in my netbook and its nice, but even a first gen Athlon64 X2 will curbstomp it. Both MSFT and Sony are looking at all that netflix money and the Jag (Aka Bobcat 3.0) sucks a lot less power than a full chip...but its also a LOT weaker. Look up the Bobcat benches, you'll see that graphics wise its better than Intel but CPU wise a 1.1GHz Celeron dual will beat it.
Second dude? You be talking to somebody who makes his living doing this and its NOT the case that gets Wifey poo on board, its the controller. I have YET to see a woman do anything but smile like you just gave her a box of chocolates when i slap one of these babies in her hand...why? Because most women can text their asses off and that remote fits their smaller hands sooooo good. You slap that bad boy in her hand and pop up her FB and watch how quickly she is ignoring your ass to play her match 3 games. Then when you show her how easy it is to rip all those kid's movies so no more little Billy crying that his Barney got scratched and won't play, and even let her rip her movies and have them all sorted by rating,even password protected if she wants? Cha ching! Dude seriously, easy fucking sale,REAL easy sale.
Third if BPM crashed? 5 will get you 10 it was NOT the fault of BPM but of Win 8, which is why i don't give my customers that POS. do you have ANY idea how many times I've been paid to do the "refresh my PC" bit until folks get fed up and have me install Win 7? Too damned many times. I am thoroughly convinced there is a serious corruption bug in win 8 and that refresh was put in there because they couldn't fix the bullshit before Ballmer shit it out. Now this is just a guess, not gonna fiddle with that hunk of feces long enough to do an in depth troubleshooting on it but if I had to guess its all that mobile and tweeting twits for shits that is causing the problems as I have noticed those that let me toss metro for something like Start 8 seem to have less issues, still not as stable as Win 7 which knock on wood has been the most solid OS I've ever seen. Try start 8 with the Auntie and see if that helps but you may have to get her Win 7 for best results.
Finally what answer should you give? Do you want to be gangfucked without lube? Buy the console. If you want to 1.- Have total control over your hardware, 2.- Have insanely low prices thanks to competition, 3.- have the choice to have as little or as much DRM as you please, 4.- have a system that will outlast ANY console when it comes to useful life, like how my 7 year old former gaming PC is now my GF's surfing and music box?5.- Want to have MP that lasts more than a few months? Then buy the PC, it'll pay for itself in less than a year with all the money you save.
Just look at the humble bundles, steam has constant sales such as L4D 2 right now is a whole $5, and that isn't even counting the literally thousands of FTP games. I have been selling HTPCs left and right and NOT ONE has wanted to go back to console, NOT ONE. The games are cheaper, the systems can do more (no shitty 500GB HDD that you can't change without paying out the ass thanks to DRM, you can pick up a couple of TB for less than $85 if you watch the sales) so you can have it play games AND be a Music Jukebox AND a Video tank AND even an office box if the one in the den is tied up AND an entertainment center...the options are frankly unlimited man, its just a better deal all around. hell want a controller? You can use anything from an Atari 260
Dude I'll say the same thing I've been saying for years, Linux ain't done shit, ain't doing shit, and ain't GONNA do shit until that egomaniac Torvalds is punted like a 30 yard field return because his ass refuses to let go of that tired, worthless, POS, early 90s throwback of a driver model that NOBODY, not even the other FOSS OSes like BSD and OpenSolaris supports.
I mean you can use fricking math to show how is old fart 90s attitude isn't gonna work, you have MAYBE 400 guys that are qualified to write low level device drivers working on the kernel,right? That number BTW is pulled out of my behind and is probably a LOT smaller but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here. So you have 400 guys, and average TEN THOUSAND or so devices released every.single.quarter. from your cheapo printers to webcams to all the USB crap, and then you look at the back catalog you probably have nearly 100,000 drivers by now...starting to see the problem? if you gave those 400 devs a mountain of coke and made them work 24/7 for the rest of their days they'd MAYBE touch every driver.....oh I'd say about every 4 years. Meanwhile you got Linus fiddling with shit, the guys that run the network stack fiddling with shit, the DE guys, the audio guys...see the problem? What you get is this kind of crap where the drivers you end up with are half assed, don't support most of the features the device has, and are piss poor at best.
There is A REASON why every single other OS on the planet uses ABI and the ONLY one that doesn't is Torvalds, because ABIs are good design, what Torvalds had worked when Linux was a class project but it just don't cut the mustard now. You can look up "The Hairyfeet Challenge" and try it for yourself, it simulates a 5 years install which is HALF the amount of support you get from Windows and also doesn't use a single bit of exotic hardware and even then Torvalds model just doesn't fucking work. The ONLY reason it works in enterprise is companies like HP paying out the ass for dev teams to keep rebuilding their drivers when they get crapped on, that shit ain't happening in the consumer space.
So you see it isn't Windows holding Linux back, its those at the top of Linux that treat it like a FOSSie religion (see the rant from one of the kernel devs when asked about an ABI, and I quote,"And I hope we break non free drivers constantly!" which if that doesn't prove they care more about "racial purity" than having a functional Operating System i don't know what does) that keep holding onto a backwards ass broken system that even 5 minutes of thought and common sense would show its not gonna fucking work, and hasn't worked well since the late 90s. Believe me as a retailer I wished it did work but it don't so its not even worth talking about until it has an ABI, its a waste of time.
Dude that is the second reason (the first being all the damned ads and inserts) that got my goat and why I refused to renew it or Wired, I'd be reading an article that should have been two pages max and not only would they spread it among 4 or 5 pages but those pages would be all over the mag and not a damned page # in fricking sight!
Frankly the whole thing reminds of Windows 8 and the "death of the PC" in that its NOT the medium, be it the mag or the PC, its the assholes at the top that think they can shovel shit to us while jacking the price and "shock!" people get turned off and walk away. Its business 101 man, you give the folks what they want or they go on down the road, PCWorld, Wired, windows 8, its all about giving a big middle finger to the customer and caring only about what corporate wants, so no shit people are walking away.
Preach Mrs AC, boy was that the damned truth! My ex gave me a subscription to the thing a few years back and the first thing I had to do when an issue came in was open it over a trash bin to catch all the damned inserts that would fall out, and it seemed like every article was spread halfway across the mag because what would take 2 paragraphs on a webpage would take 4 pages thanks to all the ads they had jammed into each and every page!
Needless to say when that year was up no matter how many emails they sent begging for me to renew I didn't, at least on the Web I can control the ads and refuse to go to pages where they take 2 paragraphs and spread it out to 4 pages, with PCW they just crammed the living hell out of the thing. I bet if one were to take one of their last issues, cut out all the ads and just print the actual stories? damned thing probably wouldn't be 14 pages long, the rest was just crap.
Well duh! Its a 90s song dude, having a shit video was all the rage, that way you could be "post ironic" about your hipness. Bad pop music, musicians that stared at their feet, oh and while the synths could be new the guitars needed to be from the 60s and 70s, the more shitty and offbeat the brand the better. I was playing with a lot of college bands in those days and while I always had my P-Bass (Can't go wrong with a Fender P-Bass, they never let you down) they were all playing Danelectro and Harmony, Silvertone and Kraftsman, as long as it was quirky looking they'd play those pieces of shit all night long....well for 2-3 song blocks then they'd have to retune those junkers..
As for TFA....am I the only one that reads these things and gets depressed? I see the photo and RTFA and find out its 62 light years away and think "I will NEVER get to see this incredible wonder with my own eyes, never feel its ground under my feet" and just get all bummed out. All one has to do is look up where we are in the Milky Way to see that while being out on the ass end of a spiral may be a safer place to be its sure as hell a looooong way from where all the exciting stuff is and if we can't find a way around that pesky speed of light thing? We will never EVER leave our own back yard.
I don't know about the rest of you but as somebody who grew up watching Star Trek and Battlestar I find that thought thoroughly depressing.
Uhh yeah you can, it just sounds awful funny;-) I know it can be done because i had a friend that raised a runt pig with a litter of puppies, damned thing thought it was a dog i swear. he'd call the dogs and here would come the pig, they would howl and it'd make this really funky sound in its throat trying to sound like them, and when they'd bark it'd make this funny grunt/squeal "bark" right along with them.
But in this case its not about "teaching" squat, its about the feds honestly not giving a fuck about anything but intimidating for their corporate masters anymore. You'd think they would be more concerned about fixing their lax crappy security but nope, its ALL about being as big a douchebag as they can be and making "examples" of as many as they can to try to get a nice chilling effect going. Honestly I'm shocked they are even willing to hold the DEFCON in the USA anymore, i know if I was an overseas presenter I'd avoid the USA like an STD.
I'd say its more like inviting a legbreaker to a peace rally really,especially since they have been shown in the past to be happy to kill the messenger if anybody dares point out their security is shitty.
The weird thing is this seems to have happened all across the country with regard to LEOs, i know little old ladies that used to be as police friendly as can be that wouldn't piss on one if they were on fire now, its really become an "us VS them" mentality all over the place.
Well if the rumors that have been "surfacing" (pun intended) lately are true I owe a big "Sorry about that dude" to Sinofsky as rumor has it he wanted Windows 8 to really be 7.1 and he wanted Metro to be the new mobile and he got cockblocked by Ballmer who probably wears an "I heart Apple" shirt to work.
At the end of the day its business 101, give folks what they want to buy or they'll take their business elsewhere. Instead what we have is TBB (Typical Ballmer behavior) where he goes "Ohh you don't like our walled gardens and cellphone UIs? well fuck you will make it twice as nasty!". See win 8.1 having a "start button" that takes you back to the fucking Metro UI the user wants to get the hell away from in the first place for an example. I just hope when win 8.1 shits itself and bombs that the board will fire his fat ass and the other rumor,that ballmer can NEVER be fired thanks to gates backing his Little buddy" aren't true, or else by 2020 when Win 7 reaches EOL it'll see MSFT reach EOL with it and like 'em or hate 'em they are pretty much the only game in town unless you want a dumb terminal (Google) or an overpriced iToy that you can't upgrade or fix shit on.
I don't know but as somebody who used to run a chatroom dedicated to fricking computer repair i can tell you that if the other chat rooms see/saw what i did what those cops are doing is bullshit and how it can't be entrapment? Fuck if I know. I know I ended up having to threaten harassment charges on a couple of cops to get them to finally STFU with that shit.
I mean here I am,running a chat with such "sexy" titles as "Can't install graphics driver" and "Need help bad I keep BSODing" and while me and a couple of the mods would be trying to walk some poor guy that has been bashing his head against the wall trying to get something fixed and suddenly here would come one of those fuckheads, just spewing filthy shit trying to get somebody to talk to them. By the end there i was getting seriously fucking PISSED, cursing the assholes after pointing out for the hundredth time "This isn't that kind of chat asshole, go peddle your "catch a predator" bullshit somewhere else porky".
So if the shit they are doing is the same as what i saw they can fuck right off, they push that shit even in places where it has no damned business and they will harass the hell out of guys to try to get them to talk, really sleazy shit too.
Buy more RAM dude! Seriously you should buy more while the prices are cheap, because there is NEVER such a thing as "too much RAM". I don't how Linux handles large RAM but in Win 7 the 8GB in my desktop is frequently filled with cache so everything loads quicker, and on my netbook that 8GB means that once the desktop is loaded its ALL running in RAM so the drive stays parked giving me better battery life. Sadly I had a sick family member when DDR 2 was cheap so now it'd cost out the Ying Yang to fill my desktop with the 4GB modules its capable of running, it'd be cheaper to replace the board and switch to DDR 3 than to just get more RAM with the price of 4GB DDR-2 modules.
As far as GPUs? Look at the HD7750 and HD7770, they score close to the HD6850 in benches while using less than half the power and heat, the HD7750 will even run without needing external power. But even with new consoles thanks to MSFT and Sony choosing a netbook chip (The Jaguar is based on Bobcat, an ULV netbook APU) I have a feeling anybody with a quad or better,like me with my hexa, is only gonna need a GPU upgrade and NOT toss the whole system like last time. Personally that is fine with me, I figure the HD7770s will hit the $70-$80 price point this fall so I'll just toss the HD4850 in the parts bin and keep on truckin'.
You don't have that for the same reason screens have settled on 720p and 1080p, the masses frankly see no need in going any higher and aren't gonna pay the early adopter penalty to get the economies of scale to get bigger and badder as the new standard. Hell my netbook is 1366x768 and I can see why, when I'm mobile its just fine,I'm not gonna go spend crazy money just to get a higher rez when all i want is to do the service call and go back to the shop.
But one correction, MSFT didn't "turn" the PC into anything, despite MSFT trying to shove their shit in our face like the "Deep Wang" bit in Transformers 3 Windows 8 is doing worse than Vista did and Win 8.1 looks to be the first double flop in history. Oh they WISH they had done that, so they could jack prices to Apple levels, but in reality every retailer and e-Tailer is saying "We have Win 7 here!" so all MSFT has done is killed a LOT of sales and honestly gave the pirates a hell of a boost, pirate win 7 slapped on win 8 systems is starting to become the norm, at least in my area.
And I don't see anybody "running to Android", what I see is people refusing to pay MSFT for an ad-laden cellphone OS so they are just sticking with what they have. Most every person i have met doesn't "like" their Android or iToy, they tolerate it. This is why plenty of laptops still selling, anything more than a quick Google on those phones and it quickly gets irritating for most folks but with even the low end laptops have dual cores there just isn't a reason to upgrade as often.
Exactly, you can slap an ULV Phenom or Athlon X4 together with some ECC RAM and a RAID and tada! Instant SMB server, does all the jobs we used to get the mini boxes for and its a hell of a lot cheaper and less power hungry.
What amazes me is there is soooo much money lying on the table for the PC OEMs to just pick up, but they aren't picking it up. What am I talking about? what's making me damned good money right now,HTPCs and home media applications. Folks are getting sick of the ARM based one trick ponies that they find some of their sites won't play on,the browser becomes out of date or the thing stops getting supported and it quickly becomes a hunk of useless plastic to them. Thanks to the blessing that is HDMI its beyond butt simple to plug a PC into a TV, they can have a full size wireless keyboard mouse or one of those Lenovo excellent one hand PC remotes and tada! A one stop shop that can stream, be a media tank for the whole house, hell slap a $70 card (I recommend the HD7750, nearly the same speed as the HD6850 at less than half the power and heat) and you'll be rocking your games in glorious 1080P in no time, with your choice of controller. Hell with Steam having Big Picture mode and a few tweaks to WMC and its the easiest to use system you've ever seen, I've got customers with little kids that can just grab the remote and be rocking their Plants Vs Zombies or watch their favorite Disney movies at the click of a button.
But most folks don't know how easy it is now,they think its like the bad old days with S-Video and the PITA setups and having to have some insanely huge fan blasting box sitting there just to have an HTPC when nothing can be farther from the truth. If all they want is the casual game and surfing they can get a slick mini that looks great under the set or if they want to game i can take something like this quad core which by itself frankly looks good next to the set (I've had several that looked at the case and decided to just keep it instead of having me go for the HTPC box) and just have me slap it into one of the mini cases or for some reason this one seems to be REAL popular, probably because it looks great on its side and gives them plenty of USB ports.
So if they want to sell more PCs and laptops frankly they need to be putting out some ads showing folks just how easy it is to integrate a PC or laptop into an entertainment center. Once folks see how easy it is to add a living room PC they tell their friends, who tell their friends, next thing you know your moving 10 HTPCs for every office or gamer box. Folks just love having everything at their fingertips and an HTPC with a couple of TB of space lets them have that, VERY cool and an easy sell IMHO.
Sorry dude, here is your sign...I've tried both, plenty of sites that use RMTP just won't get caught by Streamtuner or it'll lose the hookup,never had that problem with Jaksta. so if you are happy with a half ass "solution"? Go ahead, I'd rather have something that works 100% of the time.
Kinda doubt it, with the chips an idle fab is still gonna cost a pretty penny and I think he have reached pretty damned close to the limits on die shrinks, so they'll still crank out enough chips that I doubt prices will climb much beyond what we see now.
But as someone down in the trenches those pundits with their "Death of the PC,grandma is buying tablets" bullshit? hey morons, it was a BUBBLE and like all bubbles it had to burst, what we are seeing now at around 200-400 million units a year is the NORMAL STATE, its only the bubble that is over. this is as stupid as somebody saying "Well you can't flip houses for instant 40% profit anymore,houses must be dying". Its total horseshit.
For those that missed the memo the MHz wars created a bubble, with single core speeds so easy for your even less than average programmer able to take advantage of we went from a pre-bubble lifespan of 5-7 years for a PC to one where a PC would be damned lucky if it lasted even 3 because the chips were advancing so fast a PC that was just 2 years old would struggle to run the latest programs. When we switched to cores because taking advantage of SMP is anything BUT easy, with many programs simply not able to thread, and the number of cores jumping so fast? The programs quickly got blown away by the hardware.
I mean look at what my cheapest build was FIVE years ago...Phenom or Athlon X3 with 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDDs...how many folks will be able to slam that setup enough to need a new one? I have a customer that does extremely intricate Solidworks robot design on a Phenom I X3 and he is happy as a clam with the performance. even myself, who is the major multitasker and rarely have less than 4 things running at once and who built a new PC every year and a half like clockwork, what am I running? A 4 year old Phenom X6 with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space which no matter how much I throw at it has cycles to spare so other than the GPU upgrade I'll be getting in the fall why would I build a new one? On the mobile side I lucked into one of those AMD E350 netbooks, gets nearly 5 hours on its 3 year old battery and does 1080P over HDMI, why would I buy a bulky new full size?
So despite the "sky is falling ZOMFG!" articles that I'm half convinced is being encouraged by Ballmer trying to burn MSFT to the ground by forcing them to become Apple (like folks are gonna pay $1000+ for walled Windows gardens, not likely fat boy) PCs aren't going anywhere, now that the bubble is burst folks will just be going back to the 5-7 year cycle. if anything not only have I not met a single person that is "getting rid of the PC" (and since I'm supplementing my PC work with home theater I'd have plenty of opportunities) but its the opposite, even the kids have their own PCs, they have PCs up the ying yang...which is of course why they aren't buying as many, because that 6 year old Pentium D or first gen Athlon X2 still surfs the web just fine,runs Win 7 just fine,so why fix what I ain't broke?
But users are run in limited (but not low,which is even more restricted) mode unless they agree to an elevated through a prompt so again I don't see this as a problem, and of the boxes at the shop I tried it on both an old Sempron XP box without DEP or ASLR, a Win 7 32bit Conroe Celeron with both ASLR and DEP on and off, and finally my 64bit home box with ASLR and DEP on...nothing. Their PoC didn't do squat, no crashes, no hangs, nothing.
So unless they can bring something better than a PoC that I can't get to do shit I'm gonna have to side with the VLC guys. I mean on ALL the systems i tried except for my 64bit home system they don't even have AV installed yet so if it was gonna do anything at all? i gave it the perfect platform.
I figured the old XP box would cover that, its a socket 754 Sempron so there isn't any DEP or ALSR and again, nothing. I also tried it on a 32Bit Conroe Celeron and after reading your post switched off DEP and ASLR and again,nothing.
Again maybe it did something on some old version which I would consider valid...if it didn't have an updater, but it does and since it updates itself and is free I don't really consider what it did in some old version a valid test. after all if they have no Internet so it can't update the odds they are gonna run into a SWF malware file is pretty much non existent,it'd be like saying a PC that is airgapped is in danger of viruses. This is why i don't bother with tests for malware that require Windows to never be updated because the only ones I see running around with WU turned off are the pirates and if they are smart enough to pirate Windows they ought to be smart enough to update the damned thing without getting bit by WGA.
As for the AC that wet his panties over how I wrote Secunia? I thought it was Securina, as in Security? Certainly makes more damned sense than what its really called, WTF is a Secunia anyway? If they are just gonna pick a name out of a hat I vote for Petunia, there really ain't enough Petunias in the world.
All I would add to that is "And I shall not get my wallet raped by going over my bandwidth cap just to access data I can access on my system for free"
Hey dropbox guys, in case you missed the memo rather than make their CEOs go without their double triple "how much is left in the coffers?" bonuses all the ISP are going to BANDWIDTH CAPS, you know, the thing that makes your service into dookie? yeah those. Sorry you missed the meeting, say hello to the OnLive guys in the unemployment line.
I use Jaksta Streaming Media Recorder myself. Some may balk at the $50 price tag but you get updates including and I've seen plenty of sites where everything else would balk but Jaksta worked just fine. You can also set it to auto-convert to the format you prefer, set it to ignore files under X size so you don't end up capturing the annoying music or beeps and boops some sites have when you click on things, and I've run it on everything from a Conroe Celeron to an AMD hexacore and it just purrs like a kitten. Oh and as a nice bonus you can use any browser you like, no need for browser integration or toolbars or crap. all in all highly recommend.
As for DRM? all those that bought apple products frankly ought to be ashamed, because its Apple that is gonna end up ramming through HTML DRM and making sure nobody but the big three has access to shit. Its just like how they rammed through H.26x under the "its open!" yeah my aunt Fanny, its run by the biggest trolls since SCO, its all about making sure nothing runs that corporate doesn't get a cut of.
The only positive is that i have switched my family off the consoles and proprietary boxes so if these companies want to be douchebags at least we have choices. Don't like Steam, which i personally love? GOG and many Humble Bundles, don't like all these streaming bullshit sites? Tools like jaksta let you get around a lot of their bullshit. this is why I don't like ARM boxes, too often they are "DRM in a box" one trick ponies and if corp drops support you are royally fucked, whereas that first gen Conroe box I'm using at the shop can still play the latest media under Windows 7 with nothing but an $8 HD2400 card slapped in.
Except that when i just ran the PoC it didn't crash,hang, throw an exception or do anything else, so i think this entire line of conversation is kinda moot. Then you have to add in the fact that to even get this to play you are gonna have to do things that Joe and jane average aren't even gonna think of, such as bypass the default Windows Open and Open With dialog boxes, fire up VLC, switch VLC from media to "any files" and then and ONLY then go to whatever directory its sitting in and run it.
Working for normal folks 6 days a week i can tell you the odds of all that occurring are about the same as me growing wings out my behind and flying north for cooler temps. Most folks will just "clicky clicky" which on the machines at the shop fires up MP Classic which just sits there, no crashes either. for a PoC its pretty damned weak, so far I've tried 3 different players and haven't got it to even crash anything. Hell I even tried opening it in IE, figuring if anything would crap itself it'd be good old Internet Exploiter but nope, didn't do shit...lame.
Well I'm not a security expert so I can't comment on that, but what I DO have is a shitload of PCs at the shop and I can say that the VLC guy is right, I just tested the Securina "Proof Of Concept" SWF and it don't do shit under VLC. If any Securina fans are here it shows an image, the QT logo, and that's it.
I tried it on 32bit and 64bit win 7 and even the old XP box in the corner and he's right, first of all VLC won't even open it by default, won't show up in either open with nor any right click menus for that format, so you have to fire up VLC and THEN switch away from media files to all files to even see the thing in VLC and as I said when run? Nothing, hell it didn't even make VLC hang or crash.
So I'm sorry Securina but if that is your "proof" I gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. I haven't got any real old versions of VLC to check what it does on old versions but since VLC has had an updater in place for a couple of years now I can say that I just don't run into anybody running old versions of VLC in the wild so i don't consider that a test worth running.
Not to mention as a guy that gives VLC out to Joe and Jane average I can tell ya VLC is used for local content on a local computer which as you said is all controlled by the one running the video, despite the LAN part of the title nobody I've seen have ever used it for anything but local content. Also I'm at work so can't check ATM but doesn't VLC run in lower rights than the user? i know I've never seen a UAC prompt to use VLC and it has to pop up a UAC to check for updates so if its running in low or limited permissions the best they can do is crash the player.
In any case i can say i honestly don't care what Securina says, VLC has been one of the most problem free players i have ever encountered in the many many years I've been working in retail, VLC and KLite are my to "go to" when it comes to media on a new install and if the VLC guys say its bullshit I'll give them the benefit of the doubt simply because of how damned solid they have made their player. i have put in content with funky obscure codecs that hasn't been supported by anybody in ages, VLC fired right up and played it without a glitch nor a skip, that means a lot in my position.
So if any of the VLC devs are reading this there is at least one shop owner that will trust you if you say its bogus, your player has been so solid i even keep it on my service call thumbdrive so its always there if I need it. Great job guys, truly excellent work.
The ONLY person moving the goalposts IS YOU. I have been posting here for ages, everyone here knows I run a RETAIL shop, and I sell to Joe and Jane Average, your Brian the backhoe operater, Bill the Bank teller, Mary the checkout girl, the people YOU HAVE TO SUPPORT if you expect Linux to EVER become more than a hobbyist niche OS like Haiku.
And what do Linux advocates call "solutions"? Sci-Linux, RHEL with its minimum $300 a year for updates, the mess and drama that is CENTOS, ironically they have NO choice but to move the goalposts because the ones that are supposedly aimed at consumers is laughably terrible, like Ubuntu whom Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the planet, couldn't keep working on a single netbook without paying a team of devs to run their own fork. Now Dell can call Shuttleworth at home if they wanted, if THEY can't get drivers that will stay working thanks to the fucked up design who in the hell can?
In case you missed the memo its consumer consumer consumer now, with everyone focusing on the consumer, yet all i get told is that your "solutions" are either targeted at niches so small that you could fit every user in your average HS gym and have seats left over, cost waaaaay more than Windows (as I said $300 a years just to get updates with RHEL which again is targeted at workstations NOT consumers) and told this is viable. Bullshit, its not, and its the reason why Walmart, Staples, Best Buy, Asus,MSI, I'll be happy to wallpaper the page with citations if you wish, they ALL tried Linux and ALL found it wanting.
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Actually friend in a way you are BOTH right but I'd add that the reason gaming slowed to a crawl was NOT because of the consoles, its because making a triple A game at current standards can easily cost $50 million plus.
I don't remember which gaming house CEO said it (it may have been the head of Epic, maybe Crytek, not sure) but they said to really push the graphics up to the level that even the midrange hardware like an Athlon Quad or HD7750 can do right now? would shoot the cost of developing the games into $120 million plus territory and the devs simply can't afford to spend that kind of money, one flop can kill them as it is, with those kinds of numbers you can sell 5 million copies on launch day and lose money like Ubisoft did on the new Tomb Raider.
So according to him its NOT the consoles that are holding things back, in fact he predicted we aren't gonna see a big leap with the new consoles like we did with the last one, simply because the cost to make a game with THAT high a level of graphics and physics would break the bank of any company that tried.
BTW nice to see a former PC guy, still selling myself, but if anything the dropping prices have made it even easier to sell but these dumbo OEMs are trying to listen to MSFT and Intel and crank out Macbook clones and getting screwed. The sweet spot right now is between $350-$550 and you go past $550 at your own peril, these OEMs will learn that soon enough.
Mind some advice friend? Look at the AMD hexas, especially the Phenom IIs, you can score them crazy cheap if you look around and can get a damned good gaming board from a company like Asrock (Asus and Asrock are one now BTW, with the Asus side mainly laptop and Asrock mainly desktop) for dirt cheap, really great way to get a nice gaming rig for little green. Pair it with an HD7750 or HD7770, hell get a CF enabled board like mine and by this fall you'll be able to score double HD7750s for around $120 and you'll be smoking.
But do NOT toss that Athlon X2 system, still plenty of uses for that baby. You can underclock it and it'll make a great low power HTPC or you can go to starmicro and either squeeze some more performance out by getting a cheap upgrade or if you want to go the HTPC route I'd recommend the 4850E which is just 45w at 2.5Ghz so it makes a great whisper quiet HTPC. Slap the old board into something like one of the cheap VCR style cases on amazon and tada! Slick HTPC that looks great and runs like a champ!
I have to say having the hardware cycle slow down has been fine by me, i can still sell plenty of HTPCs and having the GPU turnover slow down means its cheaper than ever to give my customers a gaming upgrade. Hell me and my boys have been gaming the last 3 years on HD4850s, they cost just $60 a pop at the time (and can be found for as little as $35 online now) and despite our love of shooters they have been kicking the behind. I'll be upgrading us to the HD7750s or HD7770s this fall NOT because our games need it but simply for the power savings, not having to blow $100+ a GPU times three every other year has certainly been fine by me ;-)
Exactly and as I pointed out we have just about reached the limits of die shrinks because of electron leakage so barring some amazing new material most of the R&D will end up going to performance per watt and improving what they already have.
I mean put yourself in the shoes of one of my average customers. They walk into the shop,see the triples and quads, see the dual core laptops...do you REALLY think they will give a rat's ass if the chip inside was made at 45nm,32nm,or 22nm? Nope all they care about is "Will it do what I want it to do?" and since the answer is "yes with power to spare" they are just happy little campers. hell I've been sticking with the Athlons and Phenom IIs because of how cheap I've been getting them, think folks care if that new quad is the latest and greatest in chip design? Nope they are happy they have a new kick butt system to plug into their widescreen and do their stuff on, that is all.
So honestly if Intel and AMD both stopped R&D tomorrow it really wouldn't matter to the end user, they both have a chip that fits just about any budget or job the user has, and they can go as high as hexacore on the Intel side or octocore on the AMD side, which is serious overkill for...well pretty much all but a handful of guys. Even me who is a multitasking fool has found my AMD hexacore can do so much work per cycle that it always seems to be dropping into ULV mode waiting for more work from me and when i want to go nuts it can transcode a DVD to AVI and burn a disc AND play my games, no problemo. Why should I care that AMD has an octocore chip out that is 2 gen newer when my hexacore 1035T, which cost a grand total of $105 BTW, has more cycles than I can use?
Finally both Intel and AMD have found that they can use that spare fab capacity (yes i know AMD is now fabless but its common knowledge that the fabs give priority to their best customers) to make the cheap ULV chips like Atom and Bobcat/Jaguar and because those chips are so cheap to make and the OEMs snap them up (especially the AMD APUs, pretty much every sub $350 laptop around here is a Bobcat based) they can keep those fabs humming and with the low cost per chip they can make damned good money off of those. Between Celeron/Pentium and Bobcat/Jaguar/Trinity both companies can still make good money and keep the fabs running, they are a sunk cost after all.
Sigh, let old Hairy enlighten you because you be buying some BULLSHIT friend.
First of all the Jag is NOT an Octocore, not unless you consider a P4 with HT to be a dual core because that is ALL the Jag is, its a quad with hardware HT baked in. Also its NOT a gaming chip, look up "AMD Bobcat" and you'll see its a NETBOOK chip design primarily for streaming media NOT gaming. I have an E350 Bobcat in my netbook and its nice, but even a first gen Athlon64 X2 will curbstomp it. Both MSFT and Sony are looking at all that netflix money and the Jag (Aka Bobcat 3.0) sucks a lot less power than a full chip...but its also a LOT weaker. Look up the Bobcat benches, you'll see that graphics wise its better than Intel but CPU wise a 1.1GHz Celeron dual will beat it.
Second dude? You be talking to somebody who makes his living doing this and its NOT the case that gets Wifey poo on board, its the controller. I have YET to see a woman do anything but smile like you just gave her a box of chocolates when i slap one of these babies in her hand...why? Because most women can text their asses off and that remote fits their smaller hands sooooo good. You slap that bad boy in her hand and pop up her FB and watch how quickly she is ignoring your ass to play her match 3 games. Then when you show her how easy it is to rip all those kid's movies so no more little Billy crying that his Barney got scratched and won't play, and even let her rip her movies and have them all sorted by rating,even password protected if she wants? Cha ching! Dude seriously, easy fucking sale,REAL easy sale.
Third if BPM crashed? 5 will get you 10 it was NOT the fault of BPM but of Win 8, which is why i don't give my customers that POS. do you have ANY idea how many times I've been paid to do the "refresh my PC" bit until folks get fed up and have me install Win 7? Too damned many times. I am thoroughly convinced there is a serious corruption bug in win 8 and that refresh was put in there because they couldn't fix the bullshit before Ballmer shit it out. Now this is just a guess, not gonna fiddle with that hunk of feces long enough to do an in depth troubleshooting on it but if I had to guess its all that mobile and tweeting twits for shits that is causing the problems as I have noticed those that let me toss metro for something like Start 8 seem to have less issues, still not as stable as Win 7 which knock on wood has been the most solid OS I've ever seen. Try start 8 with the Auntie and see if that helps but you may have to get her Win 7 for best results.
Finally what answer should you give? Do you want to be gangfucked without lube? Buy the console. If you want to 1.- Have total control over your hardware, 2.- Have insanely low prices thanks to competition, 3.- have the choice to have as little or as much DRM as you please, 4.- have a system that will outlast ANY console when it comes to useful life, like how my 7 year old former gaming PC is now my GF's surfing and music box?5.- Want to have MP that lasts more than a few months? Then buy the PC, it'll pay for itself in less than a year with all the money you save.
Just look at the humble bundles, steam has constant sales such as L4D 2 right now is a whole $5, and that isn't even counting the literally thousands of FTP games. I have been selling HTPCs left and right and NOT ONE has wanted to go back to console, NOT ONE. The games are cheaper, the systems can do more (no shitty 500GB HDD that you can't change without paying out the ass thanks to DRM, you can pick up a couple of TB for less than $85 if you watch the sales) so you can have it play games AND be a Music Jukebox AND a Video tank AND even an office box if the one in the den is tied up AND an entertainment center...the options are frankly unlimited man, its just a better deal all around. hell want a controller? You can use anything from an Atari 260
Dude I'll say the same thing I've been saying for years, Linux ain't done shit, ain't doing shit, and ain't GONNA do shit until that egomaniac Torvalds is punted like a 30 yard field return because his ass refuses to let go of that tired, worthless, POS, early 90s throwback of a driver model that NOBODY, not even the other FOSS OSes like BSD and OpenSolaris supports.
I mean you can use fricking math to show how is old fart 90s attitude isn't gonna work, you have MAYBE 400 guys that are qualified to write low level device drivers working on the kernel,right? That number BTW is pulled out of my behind and is probably a LOT smaller but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt here. So you have 400 guys, and average TEN THOUSAND or so devices released every.single.quarter. from your cheapo printers to webcams to all the USB crap, and then you look at the back catalog you probably have nearly 100,000 drivers by now...starting to see the problem? if you gave those 400 devs a mountain of coke and made them work 24/7 for the rest of their days they'd MAYBE touch every driver.....oh I'd say about every 4 years. Meanwhile you got Linus fiddling with shit, the guys that run the network stack fiddling with shit, the DE guys, the audio guys...see the problem? What you get is this kind of crap where the drivers you end up with are half assed, don't support most of the features the device has, and are piss poor at best.
There is A REASON why every single other OS on the planet uses ABI and the ONLY one that doesn't is Torvalds, because ABIs are good design, what Torvalds had worked when Linux was a class project but it just don't cut the mustard now. You can look up "The Hairyfeet Challenge" and try it for yourself, it simulates a 5 years install which is HALF the amount of support you get from Windows and also doesn't use a single bit of exotic hardware and even then Torvalds model just doesn't fucking work. The ONLY reason it works in enterprise is companies like HP paying out the ass for dev teams to keep rebuilding their drivers when they get crapped on, that shit ain't happening in the consumer space.
So you see it isn't Windows holding Linux back, its those at the top of Linux that treat it like a FOSSie religion (see the rant from one of the kernel devs when asked about an ABI, and I quote,"And I hope we break non free drivers constantly!" which if that doesn't prove they care more about "racial purity" than having a functional Operating System i don't know what does) that keep holding onto a backwards ass broken system that even 5 minutes of thought and common sense would show its not gonna fucking work, and hasn't worked well since the late 90s. Believe me as a retailer I wished it did work but it don't so its not even worth talking about until it has an ABI, its a waste of time.
Dude that is the second reason (the first being all the damned ads and inserts) that got my goat and why I refused to renew it or Wired, I'd be reading an article that should have been two pages max and not only would they spread it among 4 or 5 pages but those pages would be all over the mag and not a damned page # in fricking sight!
Frankly the whole thing reminds of Windows 8 and the "death of the PC" in that its NOT the medium, be it the mag or the PC, its the assholes at the top that think they can shovel shit to us while jacking the price and "shock!" people get turned off and walk away. Its business 101 man, you give the folks what they want or they go on down the road, PCWorld, Wired, windows 8, its all about giving a big middle finger to the customer and caring only about what corporate wants, so no shit people are walking away.
Preach Mrs AC, boy was that the damned truth! My ex gave me a subscription to the thing a few years back and the first thing I had to do when an issue came in was open it over a trash bin to catch all the damned inserts that would fall out, and it seemed like every article was spread halfway across the mag because what would take 2 paragraphs on a webpage would take 4 pages thanks to all the ads they had jammed into each and every page!
Needless to say when that year was up no matter how many emails they sent begging for me to renew I didn't, at least on the Web I can control the ads and refuse to go to pages where they take 2 paragraphs and spread it out to 4 pages, with PCW they just crammed the living hell out of the thing. I bet if one were to take one of their last issues, cut out all the ads and just print the actual stories? damned thing probably wouldn't be 14 pages long, the rest was just crap.
Well duh! Its a 90s song dude, having a shit video was all the rage, that way you could be "post ironic" about your hipness. Bad pop music, musicians that stared at their feet, oh and while the synths could be new the guitars needed to be from the 60s and 70s, the more shitty and offbeat the brand the better. I was playing with a lot of college bands in those days and while I always had my P-Bass (Can't go wrong with a Fender P-Bass, they never let you down) they were all playing Danelectro and Harmony, Silvertone and Kraftsman, as long as it was quirky looking they'd play those pieces of shit all night long....well for 2-3 song blocks then they'd have to retune those junkers..
As for TFA....am I the only one that reads these things and gets depressed? I see the photo and RTFA and find out its 62 light years away and think "I will NEVER get to see this incredible wonder with my own eyes, never feel its ground under my feet" and just get all bummed out. All one has to do is look up where we are in the Milky Way to see that while being out on the ass end of a spiral may be a safer place to be its sure as hell a looooong way from where all the exciting stuff is and if we can't find a way around that pesky speed of light thing? We will never EVER leave our own back yard.
I don't know about the rest of you but as somebody who grew up watching Star Trek and Battlestar I find that thought thoroughly depressing.
Uhh yeah you can, it just sounds awful funny ;-) I know it can be done because i had a friend that raised a runt pig with a litter of puppies, damned thing thought it was a dog i swear. he'd call the dogs and here would come the pig, they would howl and it'd make this really funky sound in its throat trying to sound like them, and when they'd bark it'd make this funny grunt/squeal "bark" right along with them.
But in this case its not about "teaching" squat, its about the feds honestly not giving a fuck about anything but intimidating for their corporate masters anymore. You'd think they would be more concerned about fixing their lax crappy security but nope, its ALL about being as big a douchebag as they can be and making "examples" of as many as they can to try to get a nice chilling effect going. Honestly I'm shocked they are even willing to hold the DEFCON in the USA anymore, i know if I was an overseas presenter I'd avoid the USA like an STD.
I'd say its more like inviting a legbreaker to a peace rally really,especially since they have been shown in the past to be happy to kill the messenger if anybody dares point out their security is shitty.
The weird thing is this seems to have happened all across the country with regard to LEOs, i know little old ladies that used to be as police friendly as can be that wouldn't piss on one if they were on fire now, its really become an "us VS them" mentality all over the place.
Well if the rumors that have been "surfacing" (pun intended) lately are true I owe a big "Sorry about that dude" to Sinofsky as rumor has it he wanted Windows 8 to really be 7.1 and he wanted Metro to be the new mobile and he got cockblocked by Ballmer who probably wears an "I heart Apple" shirt to work.
At the end of the day its business 101, give folks what they want to buy or they'll take their business elsewhere. Instead what we have is TBB (Typical Ballmer behavior) where he goes "Ohh you don't like our walled gardens and cellphone UIs? well fuck you will make it twice as nasty!". See win 8.1 having a "start button" that takes you back to the fucking Metro UI the user wants to get the hell away from in the first place for an example. I just hope when win 8.1 shits itself and bombs that the board will fire his fat ass and the other rumor,that ballmer can NEVER be fired thanks to gates backing his Little buddy" aren't true, or else by 2020 when Win 7 reaches EOL it'll see MSFT reach EOL with it and like 'em or hate 'em they are pretty much the only game in town unless you want a dumb terminal (Google) or an overpriced iToy that you can't upgrade or fix shit on.
I don't know but as somebody who used to run a chatroom dedicated to fricking computer repair i can tell you that if the other chat rooms see/saw what i did what those cops are doing is bullshit and how it can't be entrapment? Fuck if I know. I know I ended up having to threaten harassment charges on a couple of cops to get them to finally STFU with that shit.
I mean here I am,running a chat with such "sexy" titles as "Can't install graphics driver" and "Need help bad I keep BSODing" and while me and a couple of the mods would be trying to walk some poor guy that has been bashing his head against the wall trying to get something fixed and suddenly here would come one of those fuckheads, just spewing filthy shit trying to get somebody to talk to them. By the end there i was getting seriously fucking PISSED, cursing the assholes after pointing out for the hundredth time "This isn't that kind of chat asshole, go peddle your "catch a predator" bullshit somewhere else porky".
So if the shit they are doing is the same as what i saw they can fuck right off, they push that shit even in places where it has no damned business and they will harass the hell out of guys to try to get them to talk, really sleazy shit too.
Buy more RAM dude! Seriously you should buy more while the prices are cheap, because there is NEVER such a thing as "too much RAM". I don't how Linux handles large RAM but in Win 7 the 8GB in my desktop is frequently filled with cache so everything loads quicker, and on my netbook that 8GB means that once the desktop is loaded its ALL running in RAM so the drive stays parked giving me better battery life. Sadly I had a sick family member when DDR 2 was cheap so now it'd cost out the Ying Yang to fill my desktop with the 4GB modules its capable of running, it'd be cheaper to replace the board and switch to DDR 3 than to just get more RAM with the price of 4GB DDR-2 modules.
As far as GPUs? Look at the HD7750 and HD7770, they score close to the HD6850 in benches while using less than half the power and heat, the HD7750 will even run without needing external power. But even with new consoles thanks to MSFT and Sony choosing a netbook chip (The Jaguar is based on Bobcat, an ULV netbook APU) I have a feeling anybody with a quad or better,like me with my hexa, is only gonna need a GPU upgrade and NOT toss the whole system like last time. Personally that is fine with me, I figure the HD7770s will hit the $70-$80 price point this fall so I'll just toss the HD4850 in the parts bin and keep on truckin'.
You don't have that for the same reason screens have settled on 720p and 1080p, the masses frankly see no need in going any higher and aren't gonna pay the early adopter penalty to get the economies of scale to get bigger and badder as the new standard. Hell my netbook is 1366x768 and I can see why, when I'm mobile its just fine,I'm not gonna go spend crazy money just to get a higher rez when all i want is to do the service call and go back to the shop.
But one correction, MSFT didn't "turn" the PC into anything, despite MSFT trying to shove their shit in our face like the "Deep Wang" bit in Transformers 3 Windows 8 is doing worse than Vista did and Win 8.1 looks to be the first double flop in history. Oh they WISH they had done that, so they could jack prices to Apple levels, but in reality every retailer and e-Tailer is saying "We have Win 7 here!" so all MSFT has done is killed a LOT of sales and honestly gave the pirates a hell of a boost, pirate win 7 slapped on win 8 systems is starting to become the norm, at least in my area.
And I don't see anybody "running to Android", what I see is people refusing to pay MSFT for an ad-laden cellphone OS so they are just sticking with what they have. Most every person i have met doesn't "like" their Android or iToy, they tolerate it. This is why plenty of laptops still selling, anything more than a quick Google on those phones and it quickly gets irritating for most folks but with even the low end laptops have dual cores there just isn't a reason to upgrade as often.
Exactly, you can slap an ULV Phenom or Athlon X4 together with some ECC RAM and a RAID and tada! Instant SMB server, does all the jobs we used to get the mini boxes for and its a hell of a lot cheaper and less power hungry.
What amazes me is there is soooo much money lying on the table for the PC OEMs to just pick up, but they aren't picking it up. What am I talking about? what's making me damned good money right now,HTPCs and home media applications. Folks are getting sick of the ARM based one trick ponies that they find some of their sites won't play on,the browser becomes out of date or the thing stops getting supported and it quickly becomes a hunk of useless plastic to them. Thanks to the blessing that is HDMI its beyond butt simple to plug a PC into a TV, they can have a full size wireless keyboard mouse or one of those Lenovo excellent one hand PC remotes and tada! A one stop shop that can stream, be a media tank for the whole house, hell slap a $70 card (I recommend the HD7750, nearly the same speed as the HD6850 at less than half the power and heat) and you'll be rocking your games in glorious 1080P in no time, with your choice of controller. Hell with Steam having Big Picture mode and a few tweaks to WMC and its the easiest to use system you've ever seen, I've got customers with little kids that can just grab the remote and be rocking their Plants Vs Zombies or watch their favorite Disney movies at the click of a button.
But most folks don't know how easy it is now,they think its like the bad old days with S-Video and the PITA setups and having to have some insanely huge fan blasting box sitting there just to have an HTPC when nothing can be farther from the truth. If all they want is the casual game and surfing they can get a slick mini that looks great under the set or if they want to game i can take something like this quad core which by itself frankly looks good next to the set (I've had several that looked at the case and decided to just keep it instead of having me go for the HTPC box) and just have me slap it into one of the mini cases or for some reason this one seems to be REAL popular, probably because it looks great on its side and gives them plenty of USB ports.
So if they want to sell more PCs and laptops frankly they need to be putting out some ads showing folks just how easy it is to integrate a PC or laptop into an entertainment center. Once folks see how easy it is to add a living room PC they tell their friends, who tell their friends, next thing you know your moving 10 HTPCs for every office or gamer box. Folks just love having everything at their fingertips and an HTPC with a couple of TB of space lets them have that, VERY cool and an easy sell IMHO.
Sorry dude, here is your sign...I've tried both, plenty of sites that use RMTP just won't get caught by Streamtuner or it'll lose the hookup,never had that problem with Jaksta. so if you are happy with a half ass "solution"? Go ahead, I'd rather have something that works 100% of the time.
Kinda doubt it, with the chips an idle fab is still gonna cost a pretty penny and I think he have reached pretty damned close to the limits on die shrinks, so they'll still crank out enough chips that I doubt prices will climb much beyond what we see now.
But as someone down in the trenches those pundits with their "Death of the PC,grandma is buying tablets" bullshit? hey morons, it was a BUBBLE and like all bubbles it had to burst, what we are seeing now at around 200-400 million units a year is the NORMAL STATE, its only the bubble that is over. this is as stupid as somebody saying "Well you can't flip houses for instant 40% profit anymore,houses must be dying". Its total horseshit.
For those that missed the memo the MHz wars created a bubble, with single core speeds so easy for your even less than average programmer able to take advantage of we went from a pre-bubble lifespan of 5-7 years for a PC to one where a PC would be damned lucky if it lasted even 3 because the chips were advancing so fast a PC that was just 2 years old would struggle to run the latest programs. When we switched to cores because taking advantage of SMP is anything BUT easy, with many programs simply not able to thread, and the number of cores jumping so fast? The programs quickly got blown away by the hardware.
I mean look at what my cheapest build was FIVE years ago...Phenom or Athlon X3 with 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDDs...how many folks will be able to slam that setup enough to need a new one? I have a customer that does extremely intricate Solidworks robot design on a Phenom I X3 and he is happy as a clam with the performance. even myself, who is the major multitasker and rarely have less than 4 things running at once and who built a new PC every year and a half like clockwork, what am I running? A 4 year old Phenom X6 with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space which no matter how much I throw at it has cycles to spare so other than the GPU upgrade I'll be getting in the fall why would I build a new one? On the mobile side I lucked into one of those AMD E350 netbooks, gets nearly 5 hours on its 3 year old battery and does 1080P over HDMI, why would I buy a bulky new full size?
So despite the "sky is falling ZOMFG!" articles that I'm half convinced is being encouraged by Ballmer trying to burn MSFT to the ground by forcing them to become Apple (like folks are gonna pay $1000+ for walled Windows gardens, not likely fat boy) PCs aren't going anywhere, now that the bubble is burst folks will just be going back to the 5-7 year cycle. if anything not only have I not met a single person that is "getting rid of the PC" (and since I'm supplementing my PC work with home theater I'd have plenty of opportunities) but its the opposite, even the kids have their own PCs, they have PCs up the ying yang...which is of course why they aren't buying as many, because that 6 year old Pentium D or first gen Athlon X2 still surfs the web just fine,runs Win 7 just fine,so why fix what I ain't broke?
But users are run in limited (but not low,which is even more restricted) mode unless they agree to an elevated through a prompt so again I don't see this as a problem, and of the boxes at the shop I tried it on both an old Sempron XP box without DEP or ASLR, a Win 7 32bit Conroe Celeron with both ASLR and DEP on and off, and finally my 64bit home box with ASLR and DEP on...nothing. Their PoC didn't do squat, no crashes, no hangs, nothing.
So unless they can bring something better than a PoC that I can't get to do shit I'm gonna have to side with the VLC guys. I mean on ALL the systems i tried except for my 64bit home system they don't even have AV installed yet so if it was gonna do anything at all? i gave it the perfect platform.
I figured the old XP box would cover that, its a socket 754 Sempron so there isn't any DEP or ALSR and again, nothing. I also tried it on a 32Bit Conroe Celeron and after reading your post switched off DEP and ASLR and again,nothing.
Again maybe it did something on some old version which I would consider valid...if it didn't have an updater, but it does and since it updates itself and is free I don't really consider what it did in some old version a valid test. after all if they have no Internet so it can't update the odds they are gonna run into a SWF malware file is pretty much non existent,it'd be like saying a PC that is airgapped is in danger of viruses. This is why i don't bother with tests for malware that require Windows to never be updated because the only ones I see running around with WU turned off are the pirates and if they are smart enough to pirate Windows they ought to be smart enough to update the damned thing without getting bit by WGA.
As for the AC that wet his panties over how I wrote Secunia? I thought it was Securina, as in Security? Certainly makes more damned sense than what its really called, WTF is a Secunia anyway? If they are just gonna pick a name out of a hat I vote for Petunia, there really ain't enough Petunias in the world.
All I would add to that is "And I shall not get my wallet raped by going over my bandwidth cap just to access data I can access on my system for free"
Hey dropbox guys, in case you missed the memo rather than make their CEOs go without their double triple "how much is left in the coffers?" bonuses all the ISP are going to BANDWIDTH CAPS, you know, the thing that makes your service into dookie? yeah those. Sorry you missed the meeting, say hello to the OnLive guys in the unemployment line.
I use Jaksta Streaming Media Recorder myself. Some may balk at the $50 price tag but you get updates including and I've seen plenty of sites where everything else would balk but Jaksta worked just fine. You can also set it to auto-convert to the format you prefer, set it to ignore files under X size so you don't end up capturing the annoying music or beeps and boops some sites have when you click on things, and I've run it on everything from a Conroe Celeron to an AMD hexacore and it just purrs like a kitten. Oh and as a nice bonus you can use any browser you like, no need for browser integration or toolbars or crap. all in all highly recommend.
As for DRM? all those that bought apple products frankly ought to be ashamed, because its Apple that is gonna end up ramming through HTML DRM and making sure nobody but the big three has access to shit. Its just like how they rammed through H.26x under the "its open!" yeah my aunt Fanny, its run by the biggest trolls since SCO, its all about making sure nothing runs that corporate doesn't get a cut of.
The only positive is that i have switched my family off the consoles and proprietary boxes so if these companies want to be douchebags at least we have choices. Don't like Steam, which i personally love? GOG and many Humble Bundles, don't like all these streaming bullshit sites? Tools like jaksta let you get around a lot of their bullshit. this is why I don't like ARM boxes, too often they are "DRM in a box" one trick ponies and if corp drops support you are royally fucked, whereas that first gen Conroe box I'm using at the shop can still play the latest media under Windows 7 with nothing but an $8 HD2400 card slapped in.
Except that when i just ran the PoC it didn't crash,hang, throw an exception or do anything else, so i think this entire line of conversation is kinda moot. Then you have to add in the fact that to even get this to play you are gonna have to do things that Joe and jane average aren't even gonna think of, such as bypass the default Windows Open and Open With dialog boxes, fire up VLC, switch VLC from media to "any files" and then and ONLY then go to whatever directory its sitting in and run it.
Working for normal folks 6 days a week i can tell you the odds of all that occurring are about the same as me growing wings out my behind and flying north for cooler temps. Most folks will just "clicky clicky" which on the machines at the shop fires up MP Classic which just sits there, no crashes either. for a PoC its pretty damned weak, so far I've tried 3 different players and haven't got it to even crash anything. Hell I even tried opening it in IE, figuring if anything would crap itself it'd be good old Internet Exploiter but nope, didn't do shit...lame.
Well I'm not a security expert so I can't comment on that, but what I DO have is a shitload of PCs at the shop and I can say that the VLC guy is right, I just tested the Securina "Proof Of Concept" SWF and it don't do shit under VLC. If any Securina fans are here it shows an image, the QT logo, and that's it.
I tried it on 32bit and 64bit win 7 and even the old XP box in the corner and he's right, first of all VLC won't even open it by default, won't show up in either open with nor any right click menus for that format, so you have to fire up VLC and THEN switch away from media files to all files to even see the thing in VLC and as I said when run? Nothing, hell it didn't even make VLC hang or crash.
So I'm sorry Securina but if that is your "proof" I gotta throw a flag, bullshit on the field. I haven't got any real old versions of VLC to check what it does on old versions but since VLC has had an updater in place for a couple of years now I can say that I just don't run into anybody running old versions of VLC in the wild so i don't consider that a test worth running.
Not to mention as a guy that gives VLC out to Joe and Jane average I can tell ya VLC is used for local content on a local computer which as you said is all controlled by the one running the video, despite the LAN part of the title nobody I've seen have ever used it for anything but local content. Also I'm at work so can't check ATM but doesn't VLC run in lower rights than the user? i know I've never seen a UAC prompt to use VLC and it has to pop up a UAC to check for updates so if its running in low or limited permissions the best they can do is crash the player.
In any case i can say i honestly don't care what Securina says, VLC has been one of the most problem free players i have ever encountered in the many many years I've been working in retail, VLC and KLite are my to "go to" when it comes to media on a new install and if the VLC guys say its bullshit I'll give them the benefit of the doubt simply because of how damned solid they have made their player. i have put in content with funky obscure codecs that hasn't been supported by anybody in ages, VLC fired right up and played it without a glitch nor a skip, that means a lot in my position.
So if any of the VLC devs are reading this there is at least one shop owner that will trust you if you say its bogus, your player has been so solid i even keep it on my service call thumbdrive so its always there if I need it. Great job guys, truly excellent work.
The ONLY person moving the goalposts IS YOU. I have been posting here for ages, everyone here knows I run a RETAIL shop, and I sell to Joe and Jane Average, your Brian the backhoe operater, Bill the Bank teller, Mary the checkout girl, the people YOU HAVE TO SUPPORT if you expect Linux to EVER become more than a hobbyist niche OS like Haiku.
And what do Linux advocates call "solutions"? Sci-Linux, RHEL with its minimum $300 a year for updates, the mess and drama that is CENTOS, ironically they have NO choice but to move the goalposts because the ones that are supposedly aimed at consumers is laughably terrible, like Ubuntu whom Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the planet, couldn't keep working on a single netbook without paying a team of devs to run their own fork. Now Dell can call Shuttleworth at home if they wanted, if THEY can't get drivers that will stay working thanks to the fucked up design who in the hell can?
In case you missed the memo its consumer consumer consumer now, with everyone focusing on the consumer, yet all i get told is that your "solutions" are either targeted at niches so small that you could fit every user in your average HS gym and have seats left over, cost waaaaay more than Windows (as I said $300 a years just to get updates with RHEL which again is targeted at workstations NOT consumers) and told this is viable. Bullshit, its not, and its the reason why Walmart, Staples, Best Buy, Asus,MSI, I'll be happy to wallpaper the page with citations if you wish, they ALL tried Linux and ALL found it wanting.