Yep,same here partner. With older boxes so plentiful and cheap (Go on any Craigslist and keep an eye out and its not hard to find an Athlon X2 or C2D, or go to Starmicro and pick up one of those cheap Phenom I ULV chips) the hassle of trying to run both server AND HTPC is frankly too much hassle and not worth the effort, not when you can remote into the box to set up the jobs and have it setting in a corner somewhere.
And frankly most of the recording software quality wise hasn't changed much since the Win9X days as far as stability, too many times it'll choke if you try to do too much at once so it really is better to just use something like the bobcat for the player and have the recording and storage on a box in a corner somewhere. of course if you are just ripping your DVDs, streaming or downloading from the net this doesn't apply but recording TV is one of those jobs where its better to have a dedicated system for the job.
Give more info and maybe old Hairy can help a feller out. What OS? What amount of RAM and what speed? because I have found RAM speed makes a BIG difference when it comes to APUs, just going from 1066 to 1333 boosted my E350 enough that I'm running 1080P over HDMI. are you using DXVA? Having the GPU take up part of the load is what those APUs are designed for, CCCP or Klite Codec Pack can help a lot in that regard. What browser? that matters too, FF runs like ass on a Bobcat whereas anything based on Chromium runs pretty good. Does yours have the PCI-E slot? as you can get the low midrange cards CHEAP right now and hybrid crossfire works pretty good on the APUs.
Anyway feel free to post here or shoot me an email and when i have a little free time I'll be happy to help, I've found with a lot of the APUs all it takes is the right OS, software, and a little tweaking to get them to run at their best. my personal setup is as follows...E350 APU, 8GB of 1333 RAM, 500GB HDD (does more streaming than media tanking) and a tweaked Windows 7 Home Premium with DXVA via Klite. I also went in and tweaked the buffer times on MP Classic to take advantage of the extra RAM along with a few driver tweaks in CCC.
I think they should get the "facepalm of the year" award myself. i mean you are having serious issues with your gaming company...so you hire a guy that has spawned a million rants and inspires HATRED from gamers everywhere because his answer to any complaints or fears they have is to give 'em the finger?
There is dumb and there is full retard, i think we can safely say Zynga has done the latter.
How could you not remember the robo-daggit? I was a kid of the 70s and anything to do with robots was cool. the only problem was they didn't really explore what would have REALLY happened, I mean you have a race whose home worlds are destroyed and are on the run, and they build a robot dog for a kid who has lost everything...duh! Robo guarddog!
What SHOULD have happened is any time a Cylon got into range that thing should have turned into a fricking killer, it should have been happy to rip out a Cylon's guts and kill every single cylon that came within 100 yards of the kid, no way you'd build a dog under those circumstances and not give it some defense and attack capability! hell that would make a GREAT movie or show even today, imagine a sweet and adorable child's plaything but if you try to hurt the kid? Say hello to Cujo.
Probably because they were too full of cursing, anybody that has ever had to work helpdesk can tell you there is nothing more pissy and foul mouthed than an irate customer.
But this being Zynga, the same bunch of numbnuts that hired the "just deal with it" guy from MSFT to be their new CEO? honestly this doesn't surprise me. what DOES surprise me is how long they have managed to stay in business when their entire "business" is built around ripping off others IP. Go look up the papers EA filed against Zynga and you'll see pretty much every "game" they have is just stolen property, they'd find some indie game that is starting to get buzz and have some Chinese coding house whip up a knock off (some times so exact that even the artwork is damned near pixel perfect copies) which they put up on FB reap the rewards.
Personally as much as I hate the current IP minefield it just goes to show the indie game devs are easily fucked over, after all you couldn't just take the exact same script that they used for the latest Transformers, change the names by one letter (bumblebee becomes rumblebee and so on) and not get sued, or take the latest hit song and record a note for note knockoff and slap it on iTunes without getting busted, but Zynga can take some indie devs life's work, change a couple of sprites and the name and then make a pile of cash without worrying about squat. Hell if it weren't for them getting greedy and going after EA properties most of us would have never known its just a rip off house.
Funny as this old greybeard read that and thought "Wouldn't it have been better to use the robo-daggit instead of the annoying kid?"
And am I the only one that used to watch that show and wanted to see the robo-daggit just come waltzing up with a Cylon arm in its mouth like the way dogs and cats will bring dead animals as 'prezzies' for the owner? Just once i wanted to see the daggit just loping around in the background dragging an arm or a leg and have the rest of the cast go "Ehh its a dog, what can ya do?" and go right back to talking.
Its not wasteful if you use the right tool for the job Drinkypoo and for those that want a ULV HTPC with the ability to do just about anything a standard desktop can do as well i recommend the AMD Bobcat builds which can be as flexible as you want while still pulling only 17w under full load and less than 8w most of the time.
I personally prefer the ones with a PCI-E slot so they can add a midrange card and get hybrid crossfire if they need more graphical power down the line but the nice thing about these is how flexible they are, its not like these little ARM boxes where it can only do the job the OEM intended. I have used these to replace P4s in office boxes, used them for kid's PCs, used them for HTPCs,media servers, hell i have a friend that uses them as his go to system for carputers, that is what is so great about these Bobcats, they are cheap, flexible, low power, just great little units for all kinds of jobs.
Windows 7 is good until 2020 and by that time we'll have plenty of choices ready to take its place like Open ELEC so its probably not something you should be too awful worried about. Heck most of my boards came with Win2K drivers as late as last year and I have no doubt we'll see Windows 7 drivers for boards probably for at least a couple of years after the plug is pulled which will mean up until 2022 so if you can't find a suitable replacement in 9 years you gotta be doing something wrong friend.
Oh and FYI but for those that use WMC and have large movie collections let me introduce you to your new best friend Media Center Master which i not only hand out with each new HTPC but also use myself and it fricking ROCKS with a capital R. You want all your movies to show up with artwork, synopsis, cast and crew, and all without requiring more work than "clicky clicky" on your part? MCM has you covered. Want it in a format that can be read by WMC,XBMC,or any of a half a dozen devices? Just check the box and MCM will have that covered as well. I have dropped a customer's 400+ title movie collection on a drive and had MCM set up the whole thing, folder structure, artwork, you name it in less than half an hour and the most i had to do with it was answer the occasional question like "there are 4 movies with this title, which one is the one you have?". For anybody that wants to keep a large collection of movies and/or TV shows organized and at their fingertips you just can't go wrong with MCM, highly recommend.
Wow, its nice to know that elitism and being an arrogant asshole is alive and well on the Internet.
The reason Mr Arrogant that users want this is because THEY DON'T KNOW BETTER and are fricking bombarded with all these "the cloud is magical" ads constantly and they have ZERO clue as to how any of this shit works, but for you to expect that Joe and Jane average is gonna understand the nature of the cloud, encryption, and the value of data control is elitism at its most douchebaggy.
So how about instead of saying "Fuck them noobs LULZ" your ass put some of your time where your mouth is and try educating people? I try to spend at least an hour or two of my extremely limited free time online going to sites where there are plenty of noobs so i can point out the risks with this or that technology and showing them how they DO have alternatives. Its nice to get all these emails saying things like "Hey thanks for pointing me to several alternatives, i bought the one you suggested and its been working great, thanks again" and at least I'm doing my little part to share knowledge and experience and to point people away from these DRM "cloud in a box" solutions that just hand control to the corps.
This is why I have been pointing my customers to stand alone boxes like Nbox and WD devices, its too damned easy for these "streaming" boxes to get the plug pulled and then you are left with a brick. Logitech Google TV anyone?
This is also why I prefer low power X86 units like the AMD mini-Bobcat boards, if somebody pulls support? Well screw you too, I can slap something like Open ELEC on there and turn pretty much ANY X86 unit into an XBMC "media in a box" with 10 foot UI, just look at how MSFT fucked their customers with Internet TV, but with X86 you can either use a third party hack or completely toss the OS, you DO always have options. With these little ARM suckers I have found too damned many that end up being "DRM in a box" that when the company abandons them if you are VERY lucky you might find one guy in his basement putting out a build that if you jump through enough hoops MIGHT work for a while, but as soon as Chuck gets another box that support is gone and you are again left with a useless hunk of plastic.
So call me crazy, call me unhip, but i will continue to stick with either a stand alone that will continue working if the company goes tits up or if they have to have streaming support go with an X86 based device so that at least i can put on another OS or update it myself if the company decides to no longer support the users.
And how many moved out of MA? We saw similar moves when Detroit went overboard with the unions, now Detroit is a ghost town and all the factories are in right to work states. You can scream anecdote all you want but I deal with the working poor 6 days a week and the one thing I hear over and over and over, in everything from retail to construction is how NOBODY is getting 40 hours anymore and it all comes down to Obamacare.
When you add this to the fact that most docs and clinics have put strict limits on how many medicaid/care patients that they will treat and the flood of illegals the whole thing is falling apart, in less than 4 years even the little ER in my tiny town went from an average 40 minute wait to having a sign that says "average wait 5 HOURS" and that is if you are bleeding to death, anything less than critical and you'll be there 10-12 hours before being seen.
Like it or not Obamacare was worse than doing nothing and its obvious that the politicians KNOW this, or else why would they keep pushing it back? Its because they know when it goes 100% into effect there is gonna be a LOT of people getting sacked or being turned into temp workers and there is gonna be a hell of a backlash and they wanna grab as much for themselves as they can and get the fuck out of Dodge before that occurs.
I bet a LOT come from the playstore because all it takes is even a couple of hours being in the top 30 of the playstore for an app to easily hit 30k plus. For a malware writer getting 30k+ infections onto a device the average user has ZERO CHANCE of cleaning themselves? That is fucking gold man, believe me as the guy who has to deal with this shit I can tell you that most users are more vulnerable than users of Win98 back in the day. They have NO idea what their phone is doing, have NO idea how to even check, its just a magic screen so all you need is to get on it and its gonna be gravy for a looong time, possibly the life of the device.
Then you add up how many OEMs don't put out updates, how many are still selling android 2.3 devices (go look at Walmart.com if you don't believe me, a good 70%+ of their devices are still 2.x) and how fricking difficult it is to update/upgrade a lot of these devices? Its malware heaven, it makes the flood of noobs during the AOL days look like a LUG meeting, its a nightmare. Honestly the only real advantage we have now is that there are a lot of users that frankly don't know how to use warez sites, just as to this day there are many that can't use a P2P site that isn't "find on Google,click on link" simple so too does most have zero clue how to sideload squat. But all it takes is even a couple of hours of being on the playstore to infect a loooot of devices and with many not knowing how to even see if their device is infected or not? Its a malware writer's wet dream man, its a mess.
I'm sorry friend but you are falling for the "We have to do SOMETHING" fallacy which as we have seen with everything from PATRIOT to "too big to fail" often just creates more messes on top of the old messes. and you can scream excuse all you want, i know plenty of SMB owners and they simply don't have the money to give their employees health care and keep the doors open, they really don't. So all this "something" did was to make damned sure a LOT of employees will now be part time only, thus hurting the hell out of the working poor.
Does he get paid in cash or in Bing points? And do they get paid by the hour, by the post, is there a prime time that they get paid extra for? Meh I use Bing and all I get is Bing points but at least that gives me a small slice of the pie, the way i see it if these search engines are gonna make money datamining my searches the least they can do is give me a slice. Plus i like their animated search page and the image search is quite nice.
As for TFA...sigh, we already knew that android was gonna hit its one millionth infection by this summer so while the fact that somehow (wow does TFA suck when it comes to details) they bypassed the checks as the guy that gets called when the stuff breaks i can tell you...they honestly didn't need to bother, people will happily infect their phones and tablets without a thought in the world. I swear its the damnedest thing, its like the SECOND you put it on another medium? all the old rules no longer apply. I've seen email scams that haven't worked on PCs in years, lame "just download our player" scams which again haven't worked on PCs in years, its like the second the device is in a different form factor it ceases to become a "computer" and instead becomes "a magic screen which i push that does stuff" so for some damned reason all the rules they learned when running PCs just aren't even applied to the new medium.
And I'll get hate for saying it but truth is truth, and hopefully the huge number of Android infections will lay to rest the lie that "Oh this OS is different, it doesn't get bugs" bullshit. ALL OSES, be they Windows, Linux, or OSX are frankly some of the most complex software platforms EVER created by man, and since man is fallible there WILL be bugs and if there are enough users to make it worth the trouble it WILL be exploited.The reason Linux and OSX got away with so few bugs as long as it did was because they just weren't a juicy enough target, and before anybody screams "servers!" don't waste your breath, servers are highly stripped down,locked down, and controlled by VERY smart guys with a shitload of education. Servers are as different from a user oriented OS as a router is,other than the fact they both run on hardware they really don't have much in common.
But give it a few years and the users will begin to learn to show common sense with these mobile devices, the ones writing the OSes for these devices will learn to harden the shit out of them, then we'll see malware infections drop for awhile...until the next new thing comes out which users will treat like a magic box and we'll be back at square one all over again, sigh.
Well I can say its already affecting common folk, I know a LOT of guys whose employers won't give them a 40 week check no matter what just because they don't want or can't afford Obamacare.
No matter which side of this you are on (personally I think a combo of single payer and a revamp of the entire medical and insurance industry is called for, prices have been shooting up too high for most to afford) passing Obamacare without any real controls on prices was just stupid, it left waaaay too many at the bottom with no way to get ahead, too many employers that now will never allow a 40 hour week worker, the whole thing is just a mess.
Because its gonna use more power and generate more heat than the CPU alone would do? Unless you are using something LV like one of the AMD APUs but with those the memory bandwidth is gonna be a bottleneck and with the low end discretes frankly you aren't gonna get enough of a boost to be worth the trouble, probably nothing lower than an HD7750 (around $80) would be useful in this situation.
This is why I've been telling folks "Don't judge LO yet, they got a LOT of legacy cruft they are gonna have to remove so for a project THAT big give them around 2-3 years to get it all cleaned up" and I have to say they are making pretty good progress so far.
But you are right as far as CPUs go, I have an engineer doing huge Solidworks model presentations on a Phenom I triple and use a Bobcat dual core netbook as an HTPC running 1080P so if your spreadsheet manages to drag down even a 5 year old chip? You are doin it wrong.
Dude VB into a DB (or whatever LO does into a DB, what language does BASE have?) is as old as the hills and most that I have seen has been a dozen times better than jamming everything into a spreadsheet.
Besides lets cut the bullshit and speak some truth, the whole reason spreadsheets got so abused and bloated was the bastard admins from hell wouldn't let anybody have an IDE or any tools EXCEPT for that copy of MS Office (or LO in this case) and as usual when you have a job to do and the admin is cockblocking you find a way around him and that was abusing the hell out of Excel and Access, or in this case Calc and BASE.
But I have found if the admin is reasonable and not an asshole and lets them have decent tools if they need them the spreadsheets from hell just doesn't happen, I would just ask guys what they were doing and if they had a legitimate plan to create something they required i was fine with letting them have an IDE like Netbeans or whatever they needed. I was always "the right tool for the job" kinda guy and I found if you just listened to the grunts and gave them the right tools when they needed them all those half assed spreadsheets and DB frontends just didn't happen, at least on my watch.
Oh Lord, preach brother preach! Do you know how many damned "Excel sheets from hell" I ran into when I was working corporate? That and "Access DB from the deep" were usually the 2 most abused tools I have EVER seen in all my days!
Now don't get me wrong, both spreadsheets and small DBs like Access can be great...if you know their limitations, hell I use an old VB into Access DB setup to catalog my DVDs, but what some of those guys were doing should have been a criminal offense. You'd have so much programming jammed into a spreadsheet it was unreal, or an entire office all depending on a single Access DB that had grown into this bloated monster.
So I have to agree, if your spreadsheet has become such a bloated mess that you actually need to offload to the GPU just to speed up all the data crunching that thing is doing? You might want to look into using something else instead of trying to get a spreadsheet to do it all.
I do have to say though that since taking over the guys at ODF seem to be doing a pretty damned good job modernizing LO, they keep this up and in another year and a half it'll probably be a drop in replacement for MS Office so great job guys.
Alright you got the cash, old hairy has got the advice...get a RAMDrive. I got a dev customer running SSDs with a 32Gb RAMDrive and I swear the fricking times are just AMAZING, with those bad boys feeding into a fire breathing Core i7 its just a screamin' demon when it comes to...well pretty much any damned thing he wants to run. SSDs are fast but nothing will touch a 32GB or 64GB DDR 3 RAMDrive when it comes to squeezing every drop of performance that the chips will do.
Cubase, Quicken, Quickbooks, those are just three off the top of my head, run great in 7, gotta buy the latest version (at several hundred dollars for some of them) to get them to work on 8.
Oh bullshit, but what should I expect from an anon coward, I swear there needs to be a way to just wipe all ac posts from your sight forever without affecting downmodded LEGIT posts.
But just FYI you can easily buy a pound of dope straight from the border, you got the cash you could probably buy your own sex slave while you were at it, do you REALLY think your gun laws would affect any criminal in the slightest?
If you have a border with ZERO security your stupid laws mean exactly dick, hell the whole reason we had the treasonous false flag known as fast and Furious is they found out the cartels weren't buying american guns, they were buying ex-Soviet stuff because they could get full auto and RPGs and grenades and shit. So do you HONESTLY believe that a stupid ass law would keep ANY criminal from just going up to the dealer and getting a gun to go with his 8-ball?
Well consider that Ballmer has been like a stuck record, all "appstores appstores appstores, social social social" I have no doubt that the Xbone will be all about pushing the appstore and social crap so most likely it'll suck like everything Ballmer has "personally" gotten involved in.Zune,Sidekick, Zune Market, WinPhone, his "leadership" seems to be "make it suck so I can pretend I can become the new Apple".
So it honestly doesn't surprise me that Ballmer let him go and took over, it is pretty obvious that his ego overrides any common sense. I have been trying to think of another company to compare it to but I really can't, the closest i can come up with is how badly the Pepsi guy ran Apple, but even he saw there was problems and tried to correct them, Ballmer seems to be just going full retard ahead. I mean can anybody else think of a tech company where every single metric was shit and instead of trying to change course just gave the finger to their customers repeatedly? I sure as hell can't.
Uhhh..wasn't he the douchebag that told their prospective CUSTOMERS to "deal with it" when the complaints about always online DRM surfaced and told them if they didn't like it to buy a 360, a fricking ancient piece of tech that if it follows typical MSFT strategy will be completely abandoned not 6 months after the Xbone comes out?
Hell if that doesn't earn your ass a pink slip at MSFT WTF would? of course MSFT seems to be bound and determined to completely destroy their business so who am I to complain, i only hope somebody forces Ballmer out before he completely fucking slaughters the company. I wonder if in 5 years we'll be talking about "The Ballmer effect" to describe companies that refuse to listen to their customers and commit suicide?
Not gonna happen, too many major corps making mad money on the net to allow it to get turned off. Sadly we have a country run by whores and corps like Google can just whip out their checkbook and having them dropping to their knees faster than you can say campaign contributions.
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Yep,same here partner. With older boxes so plentiful and cheap (Go on any Craigslist and keep an eye out and its not hard to find an Athlon X2 or C2D, or go to Starmicro and pick up one of those cheap Phenom I ULV chips) the hassle of trying to run both server AND HTPC is frankly too much hassle and not worth the effort, not when you can remote into the box to set up the jobs and have it setting in a corner somewhere.
And frankly most of the recording software quality wise hasn't changed much since the Win9X days as far as stability, too many times it'll choke if you try to do too much at once so it really is better to just use something like the bobcat for the player and have the recording and storage on a box in a corner somewhere. of course if you are just ripping your DVDs, streaming or downloading from the net this doesn't apply but recording TV is one of those jobs where its better to have a dedicated system for the job.
Give more info and maybe old Hairy can help a feller out. What OS? What amount of RAM and what speed? because I have found RAM speed makes a BIG difference when it comes to APUs, just going from 1066 to 1333 boosted my E350 enough that I'm running 1080P over HDMI. are you using DXVA? Having the GPU take up part of the load is what those APUs are designed for, CCCP or Klite Codec Pack can help a lot in that regard. What browser? that matters too, FF runs like ass on a Bobcat whereas anything based on Chromium runs pretty good. Does yours have the PCI-E slot? as you can get the low midrange cards CHEAP right now and hybrid crossfire works pretty good on the APUs.
Anyway feel free to post here or shoot me an email and when i have a little free time I'll be happy to help, I've found with a lot of the APUs all it takes is the right OS, software, and a little tweaking to get them to run at their best. my personal setup is as follows...E350 APU, 8GB of 1333 RAM, 500GB HDD (does more streaming than media tanking) and a tweaked Windows 7 Home Premium with DXVA via Klite. I also went in and tweaked the buffer times on MP Classic to take advantage of the extra RAM along with a few driver tweaks in CCC.
I think they should get the "facepalm of the year" award myself. i mean you are having serious issues with your gaming company...so you hire a guy that has spawned a million rants and inspires HATRED from gamers everywhere because his answer to any complaints or fears they have is to give 'em the finger?
There is dumb and there is full retard, i think we can safely say Zynga has done the latter.
How could you not remember the robo-daggit? I was a kid of the 70s and anything to do with robots was cool. the only problem was they didn't really explore what would have REALLY happened, I mean you have a race whose home worlds are destroyed and are on the run, and they build a robot dog for a kid who has lost everything...duh! Robo guarddog!
What SHOULD have happened is any time a Cylon got into range that thing should have turned into a fricking killer, it should have been happy to rip out a Cylon's guts and kill every single cylon that came within 100 yards of the kid, no way you'd build a dog under those circumstances and not give it some defense and attack capability! hell that would make a GREAT movie or show even today, imagine a sweet and adorable child's plaything but if you try to hurt the kid? Say hello to Cujo.
Probably because they were too full of cursing, anybody that has ever had to work helpdesk can tell you there is nothing more pissy and foul mouthed than an irate customer.
But this being Zynga, the same bunch of numbnuts that hired the "just deal with it" guy from MSFT to be their new CEO? honestly this doesn't surprise me. what DOES surprise me is how long they have managed to stay in business when their entire "business" is built around ripping off others IP. Go look up the papers EA filed against Zynga and you'll see pretty much every "game" they have is just stolen property, they'd find some indie game that is starting to get buzz and have some Chinese coding house whip up a knock off (some times so exact that even the artwork is damned near pixel perfect copies) which they put up on FB reap the rewards.
Personally as much as I hate the current IP minefield it just goes to show the indie game devs are easily fucked over, after all you couldn't just take the exact same script that they used for the latest Transformers, change the names by one letter (bumblebee becomes rumblebee and so on) and not get sued, or take the latest hit song and record a note for note knockoff and slap it on iTunes without getting busted, but Zynga can take some indie devs life's work, change a couple of sprites and the name and then make a pile of cash without worrying about squat. Hell if it weren't for them getting greedy and going after EA properties most of us would have never known its just a rip off house.
Funny as this old greybeard read that and thought "Wouldn't it have been better to use the robo-daggit instead of the annoying kid?"
And am I the only one that used to watch that show and wanted to see the robo-daggit just come waltzing up with a Cylon arm in its mouth like the way dogs and cats will bring dead animals as 'prezzies' for the owner? Just once i wanted to see the daggit just loping around in the background dragging an arm or a leg and have the rest of the cast go "Ehh its a dog, what can ya do?" and go right back to talking.
Its not wasteful if you use the right tool for the job Drinkypoo and for those that want a ULV HTPC with the ability to do just about anything a standard desktop can do as well i recommend the AMD Bobcat builds which can be as flexible as you want while still pulling only 17w under full load and less than 8w most of the time.
I personally prefer the ones with a PCI-E slot so they can add a midrange card and get hybrid crossfire if they need more graphical power down the line but the nice thing about these is how flexible they are, its not like these little ARM boxes where it can only do the job the OEM intended. I have used these to replace P4s in office boxes, used them for kid's PCs, used them for HTPCs,media servers, hell i have a friend that uses them as his go to system for carputers, that is what is so great about these Bobcats, they are cheap, flexible, low power, just great little units for all kinds of jobs.
Windows 7 is good until 2020 and by that time we'll have plenty of choices ready to take its place like Open ELEC so its probably not something you should be too awful worried about. Heck most of my boards came with Win2K drivers as late as last year and I have no doubt we'll see Windows 7 drivers for boards probably for at least a couple of years after the plug is pulled which will mean up until 2022 so if you can't find a suitable replacement in 9 years you gotta be doing something wrong friend.
Oh and FYI but for those that use WMC and have large movie collections let me introduce you to your new best friend Media Center Master which i not only hand out with each new HTPC but also use myself and it fricking ROCKS with a capital R. You want all your movies to show up with artwork, synopsis, cast and crew, and all without requiring more work than "clicky clicky" on your part? MCM has you covered. Want it in a format that can be read by WMC,XBMC,or any of a half a dozen devices? Just check the box and MCM will have that covered as well. I have dropped a customer's 400+ title movie collection on a drive and had MCM set up the whole thing, folder structure, artwork, you name it in less than half an hour and the most i had to do with it was answer the occasional question like "there are 4 movies with this title, which one is the one you have?". For anybody that wants to keep a large collection of movies and/or TV shows organized and at their fingertips you just can't go wrong with MCM, highly recommend.
Wow, its nice to know that elitism and being an arrogant asshole is alive and well on the Internet.
The reason Mr Arrogant that users want this is because THEY DON'T KNOW BETTER and are fricking bombarded with all these "the cloud is magical" ads constantly and they have ZERO clue as to how any of this shit works, but for you to expect that Joe and Jane average is gonna understand the nature of the cloud, encryption, and the value of data control is elitism at its most douchebaggy.
So how about instead of saying "Fuck them noobs LULZ" your ass put some of your time where your mouth is and try educating people? I try to spend at least an hour or two of my extremely limited free time online going to sites where there are plenty of noobs so i can point out the risks with this or that technology and showing them how they DO have alternatives. Its nice to get all these emails saying things like "Hey thanks for pointing me to several alternatives, i bought the one you suggested and its been working great, thanks again" and at least I'm doing my little part to share knowledge and experience and to point people away from these DRM "cloud in a box" solutions that just hand control to the corps.
This is why I have been pointing my customers to stand alone boxes like Nbox and WD devices, its too damned easy for these "streaming" boxes to get the plug pulled and then you are left with a brick. Logitech Google TV anyone?
This is also why I prefer low power X86 units like the AMD mini-Bobcat boards, if somebody pulls support? Well screw you too, I can slap something like Open ELEC on there and turn pretty much ANY X86 unit into an XBMC "media in a box" with 10 foot UI, just look at how MSFT fucked their customers with Internet TV, but with X86 you can either use a third party hack or completely toss the OS, you DO always have options. With these little ARM suckers I have found too damned many that end up being "DRM in a box" that when the company abandons them if you are VERY lucky you might find one guy in his basement putting out a build that if you jump through enough hoops MIGHT work for a while, but as soon as Chuck gets another box that support is gone and you are again left with a useless hunk of plastic.
So call me crazy, call me unhip, but i will continue to stick with either a stand alone that will continue working if the company goes tits up or if they have to have streaming support go with an X86 based device so that at least i can put on another OS or update it myself if the company decides to no longer support the users.
And how many moved out of MA? We saw similar moves when Detroit went overboard with the unions, now Detroit is a ghost town and all the factories are in right to work states. You can scream anecdote all you want but I deal with the working poor 6 days a week and the one thing I hear over and over and over, in everything from retail to construction is how NOBODY is getting 40 hours anymore and it all comes down to Obamacare.
When you add this to the fact that most docs and clinics have put strict limits on how many medicaid/care patients that they will treat and the flood of illegals the whole thing is falling apart, in less than 4 years even the little ER in my tiny town went from an average 40 minute wait to having a sign that says "average wait 5 HOURS" and that is if you are bleeding to death, anything less than critical and you'll be there 10-12 hours before being seen.
Like it or not Obamacare was worse than doing nothing and its obvious that the politicians KNOW this, or else why would they keep pushing it back? Its because they know when it goes 100% into effect there is gonna be a LOT of people getting sacked or being turned into temp workers and there is gonna be a hell of a backlash and they wanna grab as much for themselves as they can and get the fuck out of Dodge before that occurs.
I bet a LOT come from the playstore because all it takes is even a couple of hours being in the top 30 of the playstore for an app to easily hit 30k plus. For a malware writer getting 30k+ infections onto a device the average user has ZERO CHANCE of cleaning themselves? That is fucking gold man, believe me as the guy who has to deal with this shit I can tell you that most users are more vulnerable than users of Win98 back in the day. They have NO idea what their phone is doing, have NO idea how to even check, its just a magic screen so all you need is to get on it and its gonna be gravy for a looong time, possibly the life of the device.
Then you add up how many OEMs don't put out updates, how many are still selling android 2.3 devices (go look at Walmart.com if you don't believe me, a good 70%+ of their devices are still 2.x) and how fricking difficult it is to update/upgrade a lot of these devices? Its malware heaven, it makes the flood of noobs during the AOL days look like a LUG meeting, its a nightmare. Honestly the only real advantage we have now is that there are a lot of users that frankly don't know how to use warez sites, just as to this day there are many that can't use a P2P site that isn't "find on Google,click on link" simple so too does most have zero clue how to sideload squat. But all it takes is even a couple of hours of being on the playstore to infect a loooot of devices and with many not knowing how to even see if their device is infected or not? Its a malware writer's wet dream man, its a mess.
I'm sorry friend but you are falling for the "We have to do SOMETHING" fallacy which as we have seen with everything from PATRIOT to "too big to fail" often just creates more messes on top of the old messes. and you can scream excuse all you want, i know plenty of SMB owners and they simply don't have the money to give their employees health care and keep the doors open, they really don't. So all this "something" did was to make damned sure a LOT of employees will now be part time only, thus hurting the hell out of the working poor.
Does he get paid in cash or in Bing points? And do they get paid by the hour, by the post, is there a prime time that they get paid extra for? Meh I use Bing and all I get is Bing points but at least that gives me a small slice of the pie, the way i see it if these search engines are gonna make money datamining my searches the least they can do is give me a slice. Plus i like their animated search page and the image search is quite nice.
As for TFA...sigh, we already knew that android was gonna hit its one millionth infection by this summer so while the fact that somehow (wow does TFA suck when it comes to details) they bypassed the checks as the guy that gets called when the stuff breaks i can tell you...they honestly didn't need to bother, people will happily infect their phones and tablets without a thought in the world. I swear its the damnedest thing, its like the SECOND you put it on another medium? all the old rules no longer apply. I've seen email scams that haven't worked on PCs in years, lame "just download our player" scams which again haven't worked on PCs in years, its like the second the device is in a different form factor it ceases to become a "computer" and instead becomes "a magic screen which i push that does stuff" so for some damned reason all the rules they learned when running PCs just aren't even applied to the new medium.
And I'll get hate for saying it but truth is truth, and hopefully the huge number of Android infections will lay to rest the lie that "Oh this OS is different, it doesn't get bugs" bullshit. ALL OSES, be they Windows, Linux, or OSX are frankly some of the most complex software platforms EVER created by man, and since man is fallible there WILL be bugs and if there are enough users to make it worth the trouble it WILL be exploited.The reason Linux and OSX got away with so few bugs as long as it did was because they just weren't a juicy enough target, and before anybody screams "servers!" don't waste your breath, servers are highly stripped down,locked down, and controlled by VERY smart guys with a shitload of education. Servers are as different from a user oriented OS as a router is,other than the fact they both run on hardware they really don't have much in common.
But give it a few years and the users will begin to learn to show common sense with these mobile devices, the ones writing the OSes for these devices will learn to harden the shit out of them, then we'll see malware infections drop for awhile...until the next new thing comes out which users will treat like a magic box and we'll be back at square one all over again, sigh.
Well I can say its already affecting common folk, I know a LOT of guys whose employers won't give them a 40 week check no matter what just because they don't want or can't afford Obamacare.
No matter which side of this you are on (personally I think a combo of single payer and a revamp of the entire medical and insurance industry is called for, prices have been shooting up too high for most to afford) passing Obamacare without any real controls on prices was just stupid, it left waaaay too many at the bottom with no way to get ahead, too many employers that now will never allow a 40 hour week worker, the whole thing is just a mess.
Because its gonna use more power and generate more heat than the CPU alone would do? Unless you are using something LV like one of the AMD APUs but with those the memory bandwidth is gonna be a bottleneck and with the low end discretes frankly you aren't gonna get enough of a boost to be worth the trouble, probably nothing lower than an HD7750 (around $80) would be useful in this situation.
This is why I've been telling folks "Don't judge LO yet, they got a LOT of legacy cruft they are gonna have to remove so for a project THAT big give them around 2-3 years to get it all cleaned up" and I have to say they are making pretty good progress so far.
But you are right as far as CPUs go, I have an engineer doing huge Solidworks model presentations on a Phenom I triple and use a Bobcat dual core netbook as an HTPC running 1080P so if your spreadsheet manages to drag down even a 5 year old chip? You are doin it wrong.
Dude VB into a DB (or whatever LO does into a DB, what language does BASE have?) is as old as the hills and most that I have seen has been a dozen times better than jamming everything into a spreadsheet.
Besides lets cut the bullshit and speak some truth, the whole reason spreadsheets got so abused and bloated was the bastard admins from hell wouldn't let anybody have an IDE or any tools EXCEPT for that copy of MS Office (or LO in this case) and as usual when you have a job to do and the admin is cockblocking you find a way around him and that was abusing the hell out of Excel and Access, or in this case Calc and BASE.
But I have found if the admin is reasonable and not an asshole and lets them have decent tools if they need them the spreadsheets from hell just doesn't happen, I would just ask guys what they were doing and if they had a legitimate plan to create something they required i was fine with letting them have an IDE like Netbeans or whatever they needed. I was always "the right tool for the job" kinda guy and I found if you just listened to the grunts and gave them the right tools when they needed them all those half assed spreadsheets and DB frontends just didn't happen, at least on my watch.
Oh Lord, preach brother preach! Do you know how many damned "Excel sheets from hell" I ran into when I was working corporate? That and "Access DB from the deep" were usually the 2 most abused tools I have EVER seen in all my days!
Now don't get me wrong, both spreadsheets and small DBs like Access can be great...if you know their limitations, hell I use an old VB into Access DB setup to catalog my DVDs, but what some of those guys were doing should have been a criminal offense. You'd have so much programming jammed into a spreadsheet it was unreal, or an entire office all depending on a single Access DB that had grown into this bloated monster.
So I have to agree, if your spreadsheet has become such a bloated mess that you actually need to offload to the GPU just to speed up all the data crunching that thing is doing? You might want to look into using something else instead of trying to get a spreadsheet to do it all.
I do have to say though that since taking over the guys at ODF seem to be doing a pretty damned good job modernizing LO, they keep this up and in another year and a half it'll probably be a drop in replacement for MS Office so great job guys.
Alright you got the cash, old hairy has got the advice...get a RAMDrive. I got a dev customer running SSDs with a 32Gb RAMDrive and I swear the fricking times are just AMAZING, with those bad boys feeding into a fire breathing Core i7 its just a screamin' demon when it comes to...well pretty much any damned thing he wants to run. SSDs are fast but nothing will touch a 32GB or 64GB DDR 3 RAMDrive when it comes to squeezing every drop of performance that the chips will do.
Cubase, Quicken, Quickbooks, those are just three off the top of my head, run great in 7, gotta buy the latest version (at several hundred dollars for some of them) to get them to work on 8.
Oh bullshit, but what should I expect from an anon coward, I swear there needs to be a way to just wipe all ac posts from your sight forever without affecting downmodded LEGIT posts.
But just FYI you can easily buy a pound of dope straight from the border, you got the cash you could probably buy your own sex slave while you were at it, do you REALLY think your gun laws would affect any criminal in the slightest?
If you have a border with ZERO security your stupid laws mean exactly dick, hell the whole reason we had the treasonous false flag known as fast and Furious is they found out the cartels weren't buying american guns, they were buying ex-Soviet stuff because they could get full auto and RPGs and grenades and shit. So do you HONESTLY believe that a stupid ass law would keep ANY criminal from just going up to the dealer and getting a gun to go with his 8-ball?
Well consider that Ballmer has been like a stuck record, all "appstores appstores appstores, social social social" I have no doubt that the Xbone will be all about pushing the appstore and social crap so most likely it'll suck like everything Ballmer has "personally" gotten involved in.Zune,Sidekick, Zune Market, WinPhone, his "leadership" seems to be "make it suck so I can pretend I can become the new Apple".
So it honestly doesn't surprise me that Ballmer let him go and took over, it is pretty obvious that his ego overrides any common sense. I have been trying to think of another company to compare it to but I really can't, the closest i can come up with is how badly the Pepsi guy ran Apple, but even he saw there was problems and tried to correct them, Ballmer seems to be just going full retard ahead. I mean can anybody else think of a tech company where every single metric was shit and instead of trying to change course just gave the finger to their customers repeatedly? I sure as hell can't.
Uhhh..wasn't he the douchebag that told their prospective CUSTOMERS to "deal with it" when the complaints about always online DRM surfaced and told them if they didn't like it to buy a 360, a fricking ancient piece of tech that if it follows typical MSFT strategy will be completely abandoned not 6 months after the Xbone comes out?
Hell if that doesn't earn your ass a pink slip at MSFT WTF would? of course MSFT seems to be bound and determined to completely destroy their business so who am I to complain, i only hope somebody forces Ballmer out before he completely fucking slaughters the company. I wonder if in 5 years we'll be talking about "The Ballmer effect" to describe companies that refuse to listen to their customers and commit suicide?
Not gonna happen, too many major corps making mad money on the net to allow it to get turned off. Sadly we have a country run by whores and corps like Google can just whip out their checkbook and having them dropping to their knees faster than you can say campaign contributions.