The reason I see more 40s is 1.- We have a LOT of apt dwellers and in an apt there just isn't as big a living room so the monsters don't fit. I've seen one TV over 42 and that is a sports nut that wanted the biggest mother he could fit so all his buds could pile in for the game, and 2.- We have a LOT of families so you get 2 sets, one for the parents and a smaller one for the kids, that tends to cut into the finances.
But yeah until the price drops a shitload i just don't see it happening, it'll be like 3D TVs which i have yet to see outside the showroom either, given the choice most opt for the bigger set over 3D. Hell even I am still using a 20 inch monitor, got too many other upgrades I want to do to care about a bigger screen, especially since i sit less than a foot away from the thing. I want a new GPU, add a caching SSD, probably swap out my DDR 2 board for a DDR 3 one so I can max out the mem my OS holds (that is if I can find one with the same chipset, Win 7 really don't like swapping chipsets without a reinstall and I got too much stuff to want to go through THAT mess) so a new screen? pretty far down on that list.
But I see 4K being another 3D, something you see in the showrooms that just doesn't translate to homes. It was the same thing back in the day with laserdisc, every showroom had to have a laserdisc to show off and nobody bought the things,they just never ended up at a price point folks would pay...and God I'm getting old when I can remember long obsolete tech like that.
But how many people can actually see that when all the shit be blowing up all over the screen? I used to always have to go for the biggest GPU I could possibly afford but then one day it was pointed out to me "All you are doing is letting those around you enjoy a little more eye candy, you are too busy trying not to die to notice" and he was right,when I am focusing on actually playing a game as long as it stays above 30FPS and doesn't have obvious graphics pop in I couldn't pay attention to bling, I was too busy playing.
As far as 4K goes for gaming i don't see it becoming mainstream until you can get sub $200 4K screens like you can the 24s and sometimes 32 inch 1080Ps now, because at least with my gamer customers they have waaay too many other parts they want to get so that changing screens? not really high on their list. Can't say as I blame 'em, I want to replace my aging HD4850 with an HD7770,add a caching SSD to speed game load times,heck even getting a nicer headset has a higher priority than replacing my 20 inch 16x9 screen does, I will probably end up keeping it until most games won't play at less than 1080p or the screen dies, one of the two.
So I have a feeling that for the foreseeable future 4k is gonna be strictly a videophile hobby which means the content just won't be there, kinda like how the OEMs pushed like hell for 3D TV and that has bombed pretty massively, nobody cares because the content isn't there and the content isn't there because nobody cares, a classic chicken and the egg kinda deal.
Oh I almost forgot, here is a great place pnutjam if you need cheap units to load Linux onto as cowboom has netbooks starting at $120 and if you keep an eye on the site you can sometimes even get them as low as $80. I have pointed customers there before and they have gotten good deals. In case you wonder where they came from every time somebody tries a laptop at Best Buy or swaps one in for a new model? There ya go. They test 'em before bagging 'em up and my customers are quite happy with theirs, one has been using his Atom dual netbook as his go to for 2 years now and he paid a grand total of $100, can't beat that for an X86 netbook.
Its the same thing I pointed out when someone suggested using an RPi for a carputer to record cams, its just not built for that kind of stuff and doesn't have the horse to force it to do the job with any reliability or consistency. Hell if you want a DIY router you'd be better off getting one of those little Via Pico carputers, those at least are dual cores with built in support for AES encryption and are around $150 with one or two PCIe slots. At least that would have enough throughput to get the job done, hell one of those $70 bobcat boards i use as an upgrade to the shitty old P4s I find in offices would be a better router than an RPi, it was just never made to have a ton of data streaming through its itty bitty brain.
Looks good, I bookmarked it, thanks. I'll still have to kill the wireless,last thing I want is my network slowed to a crawl from script kiddies (or worse, they hauled a guy across the way off in cuffs the other day for downloading CP) but it looks like it'll run the latest and greatest...any idea if it'll support IPV6? As i can't seem to find a thing about IPV6 on it anywhere and I don't see a point in tossing an IPV4 router (Zonenet, nothing fancy but its built like a tank) for another IPV4 only router. if this thing supports IPV6 I'll be snatching it in the fall as i hear that is when they will first start testing having IPV6 alongside IPV4 here.
Yeah wait until gas hits $6 a gallon and get back to me, you'll probably have that muscle car parked in a corner and just dream of being able to afford to feed the beast. I should know as i had an old Pontiac Le Mans Sport back in the day and i had to get rid of it when gas went over a buck fifty as it would take over $100 just to feed that monster for a single night of cruising. Don't get me wrong, like pinball the muscle cars were a blast, its just feeding those monsters got to be too much.
I'm shocked more guys don't come to AR to snatch all the cheap classic cars and make a ton though, here there are classic cars and trucks for sale all over the place for less than $5k and from what i understand those same cars sell on the coast for just crazy money. hell if I was any good with a wrench I'd be doing it myself but I'm no grease monkey and don't have enough hours in the day as it is, but it would be a way to make a damned good living.
Until the monitor manufacturers can crank those puppies out for the same price they can crank 1080p screens out for its largely gonna be moot, it'll be one of those niches like laserdisc back in the day that only a few of the videophiles cared about.
Until then the sweet spot seems to be 32-42 inch 1080p screens, at least that is what I'm seeing in the shop from both the gamers and those setting up home theaters, with the gamers preferring 32s and the home theaters going 40 to 42. Makes me feel like a dinosaur going home to do everything on a 20 inch 16x9 but I'm less than a foot from the screen so I figure right now a 32 inch would be overkill and I'd rather spend that money on a caching SSD and a new GPU.
Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is and pay more for the privilege? I'm betting not.
These units are sold at the prices they are because the OEMs expect to make up some of the money on the appstores, the classic razor and blades model. if you want the hardware completely unlocked you will have to make up the difference, its no different than how Sony offered to sell bundleware free versions of their laptops at $50 more because of the loss of the money they were making on bundleware.
The simple fact is most folks aren't gonna change their OS so having the devices unlocked wouldn't benefit but a teeny tiny niche who then promptly have a shitfit they are paying more than the guy with the locked down hardware, so its no wonder all the devices are locked down now. If enough are willing to pay extra I'm sure there would be plenty of choices but they aren't so there isn't.
That don't change the fact you are trying to pull a boat up a mountain with a pinto hoss, the Atom, heck even the AMD Bobcat which has more horse than an Atom ain't really useful for video encoding as that is heavy lifting.
You'd be better off just throwing together one of those $200 Athlon triple kits (which knock on wood I've been getting around 75% unlock rates with) and just have that do the heavy lifting. There is a reason why nobody really cares about doing any real hacking on these things, Atom is just a netchip, anything else? its gonna be painful.
Oh and lets see some screencaps of that $100 EeePC Linux running video encoding real time, as I call bullshit. The atom is an in order dual core at best, most of them were just single cores with HT if you were lucky, so I am seriously doubting you are gonna get over 30FPS unless the "format" you are encoding to would be useless,like 320x240 low res.
In case you ain't noticed the "gameplan" from Ballmer is basically ape everything Apple does and since Apple locks THEIR hardware down? MSFT must do the same.
Remember its not about selling the OS anymore, MSFT will never be able to please Wall street with the money they get selling OSes thanks to hardware becoming overpowered and lasting longer, nope it all comes down to MSFT skimming 30% off of everything by making it all go through their appstore that is the goal.
Actually the later ones? Ran great with win 7 HP. I still have mine, a EEE 1215B Bobcat dual core that came from the factory with Win 7 HP X64 and I will be babying the shit out of it because you just can't get anything in that size for less than a grand today, just a great little unit. 11.6 inches, 2.4 pounds, has 8GB of RAM and a dual core APU that gets 1080P over HDMI? What's not to like?
Never bothered with Linux on mine, not only does Win 7 HP run great on it but it comes with Expressgate built into ROM so if I wanted I could always hack that and add more programs but for a thin Linux distro its pretty nice, browser, media player and Flash support and takes less than 6 seconds to boot from cold.
The problem is the definition of the word cost. After all their time isn't worthless, you gotta have somebody make the things, take them to the post office and mail 'em off, and then there is shipping cost...so I don't see how one could really say that the $10 I paid for mine is out of line when you are talking about something so niche as fan made Quake levels, especially when IIRC they had built a nice GUI that made installing the levels easy peasy.
And again like Linux ISOs I personally didn't see a problem with that, I was stuck on dialup that on a good day hit a blistering 23k so if it weren't for them i wouldn't have gotten to play the levels at all. Sure you can complain that the guys making the levels and just slapping them on a server somewhere didn't get a cut but if they wanted to all they would have had to do is get together and make their own CDs, but they didn't.
The RT-N66U is $180, The WRT54G is $50...kinda not really comparable, hell an Apple airport is cheaper. How about showing us one under $100 that will run the new/newer stuff?
Oh and if it isn't wireless so much the better as the first thing I have to do with a wireless router is disable the wireless part, between all the interference from having so many in a large apt complex on the same frequency and the script kiddies constantly pounding on the firewalls looking for somebody to leech off of? Not really worth messing with.
I don't think that's the problem hoss, its the fact that they are suggesting using the RPi, which has 1 lousy Ethernet plug and USB 2.0 as a suitable replacement for a fricking router that has most people going WTF.
To use a slashdot car analogy that would be like Ford saying your truck is obsolete so here is a motor, build yourself a replacement. The "solution" isn't one, its a piss poor substitute for an actual router and this is coming from somebody that actually likes the RPI, its great for things like rocketry or remote planes or all kinds of cool stuff but a router? I'd say that is trying to jam a square peg in a round hole, not everything can be done easily with a RPi nor should it.
Hell go look on newegg and you'll see the majority of routers being sold today aren't any faster than the WRT54G, heck most of them still don't have IPV6 support.
Its a router folks, router companies aren't exactly known for rushing to embrace new tech. Honestly I'd be amazed if even 15% of the new routers coming out would support this change.
And that second part is why its doomed...the cost. Anybody who has looked into pinball cabinets will tell you how crazy expensive they are to build and maintain,not to mention how it'll wear out sooner thanks to the punishment the ball slamming into all those switches and bumpers causes.
Now compare your average pinball cabinet, with several feet of wiring, pounds of glass plating,lots of rubber bumpers and mechanical switches to a video arcade cabinet...its pretty much a screen, a board, and a controller (or 2 if you want two player co-op or vs) and that is pretty much it. What's more you can just swap out the board and have a new game and moreover pretty much anybody can have one built in their garage over a weekend,hell a Raspberry Pi,a flatscreen monitor and maybe $100 worth of parts from some place like Happs and you can take any dead cabinet off of eBay and have pretty much every arcade game of the 80s and 90s for you to play, with pinball you only only get the one game.
There is a reason why pinball died out folks and that is because they were just too expensive to keep and maintain compared to the alternative so while I'm sure it may become a regional fad for a year or two it'll ultimately fade away again because like the muscle cars of the era they were cool but just cost too much to keep.
Sorry but while you can bitch about the copyright issues those shareware discs helped a LOT of people back in the day. I know I wouldn't have gotten to play any of those levels at all if it weren't for Head Games putting them on CD, in a way I look at them no differently than those sites that sold Linux ISOs in the mail for those who were like me stuck on dialup at the time.
How is this in any way, shape, or form insightful? They are doing tests on ONE sample from ONE particular dinosaur...this is supposed to tell us anything? For all we know that dino had a skin infection or was an oddball, a single sample isn't gonna tell us jack squat except about that single individual dinosaur.
Personally I say let kids draw the things with tiger stripes for all it matters, something that has been gone that long simply isn't gonna leave enough evidence behind for us to talk about anything more than conjecture anyway.
It shouldn't, the corp got their money, wasn't fined or prosecuted, the corps are just better people than you peasants and thus don't face the same laws you do. Anyone doubt that if the defendant had altered the files he would have gotten an obstruction charge?
Its time we call the courts what they really are, "peasants courts" because that is their function, it is a place for the state and the rich to punish peasants while the wealthy walk away.
Well this probably shouldn't be taxed until its turned into something tangible or should be treated like capital gains in that you don't pay until you cash out. I mean we don't tax the virtual armor in MMOs, even though people actually pay real money for that shit, so I don't see why bitcoins should be treated any differently. At the end of the day its really just this virtual thing that really only has value because some people believe in it,, again we have seen people pay crazy prices for virtual crap because they believe in that but we don't tax it.
Of course sadly what is gonna end up happening is virtual crap will end up getting taxed too because god fucking forbid there be a single thing in the universe the government doesn't get a cut of, no matter how real or unreal the thing is. I just don't see how bitcoin should be considered any better or more special than WoW gold or any other unreal thing people are willing to buy, if they trade the unreal thing for real money? I suppose you could tax it then but I'd argue you are already taxing them when they spend the real money but at least that would make sense, treating BC any differently than WoW gold or horse armor just doesn't make any sense to me...hell we've seen idiots pay money for low UID account on Slashdot on eBay, does that mean the government should have a "low UID tax" since you could theoretically get some money for it?
And thanks for showing you live in Washington where a billion here and a billion there? really not worth worrying about. while i'm sure they wouldn't like being associated with terrorists guess what? THEY AREN'T, oh maybe in some circles in the belt but NOBODY in the free world automatically thinks IEDs when they think fertilizer, they think...well they think "crap" but that's another story.
Again when you are talking about selling boatloads? A 10c per pound raise can mean the difference to whether you get that billion dollar contract or you don't so again unless you stick a gun to their head or bribe them so its cheaper NOT to make the kind that can be used for IEDs the other guy WILL be happy to take that billion dollar contract and the ones stupid enough to go along will be out of business in three years or less..again for a country that they honestly don't give a rat fuck about either way.
Might want to look up global trade and fertilizer sales sometime because that ain't a case of through the looking glass like in the belt, where you can piss money away and not care, a single cent increase in price can mean the difference between a company having a great quarter and a company going out of business. Most of the third world? They are worried about having food on the table, jobs for their people, and not having the whole thing get blown away by a disaster, IEDs? really not even in the top ten. Sorry to be so blunt but that is white people's problems and not really on the radar, especially if it'll cost them hundreds of millions which when you are talking about completely retooling a factory to make something different? it MOST CERTAINLY WILL, so please quit pretending this is some magic switch, its billions of dollars that SOMEBODY has to pay...sadly it will probably yet again be the American taxpayer.
I'll take that bet because its the same thing that the FOSS guys said about netbooks...remember how that worked out? With MSFT wiping out the Linux netbooks within 2 years by first using XP then Win 7 Starter?
Lets face facts folks...Ballmer needs Win 8 to be a hit, and if he has to sell it for $5 a copy to make it so? Well Win 8 is a sunk cost so it doesn't matter what they sell licenses for does it? if the rumor is true that they are coming out with a sub $250 tablet running Atom my guess is Ballmer will practically give Win 8 away to insure its on every one that rolls out the line, it would finally give them a toehold into the tablet market and he would be able to say "See? Modern UI isn't a flop!".
Unless you are gonna stick a gun to their head and force them to switch why should they? Knowing this stuff will end up being more expensive so you expect them to waste millions, possibly billions, because some of their product is used to blow up soldiers of a country the majority there isn't fond of anyway? Not bloody likely.
So the only way you'll get them to switch is bribe them or bomb them, otherwise they have absolutely zero reason to care. Fertilizer is a billion dollar business and even raising the cost a dime could shift who gets these huge contracts so unless you believe the American taxpayer should yet again foot the bill so that it costs them nothing or is more profitable to use the new stuff i just don't see most of the third world switching. After all all it will do for them is raise costs, IEDs aren't really that high on the radar from their point of view.
They are trying to sell it because it is a Vista sized bomb, its underpowered, undergunned, its a billion dollar piece of shit. Which shouldn't be surprising as the only thing our military industrial complex has been able to do since the 90s is pad the expense account but there ya go, yet another billion dollar boondoggle that won't do what we need and is good for nothing more than target practice.
I'm sorry but capitalism, like every other ism before it, is simply doomed, why? Simple because greed always wins against a belief in the capitalist system so they corrupt the system until it no longer functions and falls apart. The right wingers like to trot out that bit about the people voting themselves more favors but that isn't what breaks the system, what breaks the system is those at the top that become too powerful to lose, like how Goldman Sachs got 125% on the dollar when the housing bubble hit courtesy of the American taxpayer.
What happens is you end up with a handful at the top that are greed on wheels and rig more and more of the system to give themselves more and more of the pie until the people will happily choose any other system because "it can't be as bad as what we got". For a capitalist system to function capital actually has to flow through the system and when it becomes too tilted towards those handful at the top that no longer happens. The "dirty little secret" when it comes to the gold standard is that if the USA were to go back to it there wouldn't be a cent flowing through the economy as its all being hoarded by a handful at the very top.
As for TFA? Two words...tar baby. Anyone that has read anything about this knows that the danger ain't from the objects big enough for you to change course to dodge it, its the fact that a single screw traveling at those speeds can tear into a spacecraft like a bullet so what you need is something capable of getting all the little bits and bringing them down, hence the tar baby. It wouldn't even have to be sticky, just thick enough that it could absorb all those little bits without letting them go through,I'm sure with a little experimenting we can find the right mix then you simply let it go with maybe one or two little thrusters to use to bring it down once it gets enough bits stuck in it that its no longer useful.
So while something like a laser might work on the bigger stuff i don't see it working on all the paint chips and screws and little bits that turn a sat into Swiss cheese over time, for that we need to think outside the box...tar baby.
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The reason I see more 40s is 1.- We have a LOT of apt dwellers and in an apt there just isn't as big a living room so the monsters don't fit. I've seen one TV over 42 and that is a sports nut that wanted the biggest mother he could fit so all his buds could pile in for the game, and 2.- We have a LOT of families so you get 2 sets, one for the parents and a smaller one for the kids, that tends to cut into the finances.
But yeah until the price drops a shitload i just don't see it happening, it'll be like 3D TVs which i have yet to see outside the showroom either, given the choice most opt for the bigger set over 3D. Hell even I am still using a 20 inch monitor, got too many other upgrades I want to do to care about a bigger screen, especially since i sit less than a foot away from the thing. I want a new GPU, add a caching SSD, probably swap out my DDR 2 board for a DDR 3 one so I can max out the mem my OS holds (that is if I can find one with the same chipset, Win 7 really don't like swapping chipsets without a reinstall and I got too much stuff to want to go through THAT mess) so a new screen? pretty far down on that list.
But I see 4K being another 3D, something you see in the showrooms that just doesn't translate to homes. It was the same thing back in the day with laserdisc, every showroom had to have a laserdisc to show off and nobody bought the things,they just never ended up at a price point folks would pay...and God I'm getting old when I can remember long obsolete tech like that.
But how many people can actually see that when all the shit be blowing up all over the screen? I used to always have to go for the biggest GPU I could possibly afford but then one day it was pointed out to me "All you are doing is letting those around you enjoy a little more eye candy, you are too busy trying not to die to notice" and he was right,when I am focusing on actually playing a game as long as it stays above 30FPS and doesn't have obvious graphics pop in I couldn't pay attention to bling, I was too busy playing.
As far as 4K goes for gaming i don't see it becoming mainstream until you can get sub $200 4K screens like you can the 24s and sometimes 32 inch 1080Ps now, because at least with my gamer customers they have waaay too many other parts they want to get so that changing screens? not really high on their list. Can't say as I blame 'em, I want to replace my aging HD4850 with an HD7770,add a caching SSD to speed game load times,heck even getting a nicer headset has a higher priority than replacing my 20 inch 16x9 screen does, I will probably end up keeping it until most games won't play at less than 1080p or the screen dies, one of the two.
So I have a feeling that for the foreseeable future 4k is gonna be strictly a videophile hobby which means the content just won't be there, kinda like how the OEMs pushed like hell for 3D TV and that has bombed pretty massively, nobody cares because the content isn't there and the content isn't there because nobody cares, a classic chicken and the egg kinda deal.
Oh I almost forgot, here is a great place pnutjam if you need cheap units to load Linux onto as cowboom has netbooks starting at $120 and if you keep an eye on the site you can sometimes even get them as low as $80. I have pointed customers there before and they have gotten good deals. In case you wonder where they came from every time somebody tries a laptop at Best Buy or swaps one in for a new model? There ya go. They test 'em before bagging 'em up and my customers are quite happy with theirs, one has been using his Atom dual netbook as his go to for 2 years now and he paid a grand total of $100, can't beat that for an X86 netbook.
Its the same thing I pointed out when someone suggested using an RPi for a carputer to record cams, its just not built for that kind of stuff and doesn't have the horse to force it to do the job with any reliability or consistency. Hell if you want a DIY router you'd be better off getting one of those little Via Pico carputers, those at least are dual cores with built in support for AES encryption and are around $150 with one or two PCIe slots. At least that would have enough throughput to get the job done, hell one of those $70 bobcat boards i use as an upgrade to the shitty old P4s I find in offices would be a better router than an RPi, it was just never made to have a ton of data streaming through its itty bitty brain.
Looks good, I bookmarked it, thanks. I'll still have to kill the wireless,last thing I want is my network slowed to a crawl from script kiddies (or worse, they hauled a guy across the way off in cuffs the other day for downloading CP) but it looks like it'll run the latest and greatest...any idea if it'll support IPV6? As i can't seem to find a thing about IPV6 on it anywhere and I don't see a point in tossing an IPV4 router (Zonenet, nothing fancy but its built like a tank) for another IPV4 only router. if this thing supports IPV6 I'll be snatching it in the fall as i hear that is when they will first start testing having IPV6 alongside IPV4 here.
Yeah wait until gas hits $6 a gallon and get back to me, you'll probably have that muscle car parked in a corner and just dream of being able to afford to feed the beast. I should know as i had an old Pontiac Le Mans Sport back in the day and i had to get rid of it when gas went over a buck fifty as it would take over $100 just to feed that monster for a single night of cruising. Don't get me wrong, like pinball the muscle cars were a blast, its just feeding those monsters got to be too much.
I'm shocked more guys don't come to AR to snatch all the cheap classic cars and make a ton though, here there are classic cars and trucks for sale all over the place for less than $5k and from what i understand those same cars sell on the coast for just crazy money. hell if I was any good with a wrench I'd be doing it myself but I'm no grease monkey and don't have enough hours in the day as it is, but it would be a way to make a damned good living.
Until the monitor manufacturers can crank those puppies out for the same price they can crank 1080p screens out for its largely gonna be moot, it'll be one of those niches like laserdisc back in the day that only a few of the videophiles cared about.
Until then the sweet spot seems to be 32-42 inch 1080p screens, at least that is what I'm seeing in the shop from both the gamers and those setting up home theaters, with the gamers preferring 32s and the home theaters going 40 to 42. Makes me feel like a dinosaur going home to do everything on a 20 inch 16x9 but I'm less than a foot from the screen so I figure right now a 32 inch would be overkill and I'd rather spend that money on a caching SSD and a new GPU.
Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is and pay more for the privilege? I'm betting not.
These units are sold at the prices they are because the OEMs expect to make up some of the money on the appstores, the classic razor and blades model. if you want the hardware completely unlocked you will have to make up the difference, its no different than how Sony offered to sell bundleware free versions of their laptops at $50 more because of the loss of the money they were making on bundleware.
The simple fact is most folks aren't gonna change their OS so having the devices unlocked wouldn't benefit but a teeny tiny niche who then promptly have a shitfit they are paying more than the guy with the locked down hardware, so its no wonder all the devices are locked down now. If enough are willing to pay extra I'm sure there would be plenty of choices but they aren't so there isn't.
That don't change the fact you are trying to pull a boat up a mountain with a pinto hoss, the Atom, heck even the AMD Bobcat which has more horse than an Atom ain't really useful for video encoding as that is heavy lifting.
You'd be better off just throwing together one of those $200 Athlon triple kits (which knock on wood I've been getting around 75% unlock rates with) and just have that do the heavy lifting. There is a reason why nobody really cares about doing any real hacking on these things, Atom is just a netchip, anything else? its gonna be painful.
Oh and lets see some screencaps of that $100 EeePC Linux running video encoding real time, as I call bullshit. The atom is an in order dual core at best, most of them were just single cores with HT if you were lucky, so I am seriously doubting you are gonna get over 30FPS unless the "format" you are encoding to would be useless,like 320x240 low res.
In case you ain't noticed the "gameplan" from Ballmer is basically ape everything Apple does and since Apple locks THEIR hardware down? MSFT must do the same.
Remember its not about selling the OS anymore, MSFT will never be able to please Wall street with the money they get selling OSes thanks to hardware becoming overpowered and lasting longer, nope it all comes down to MSFT skimming 30% off of everything by making it all go through their appstore that is the goal.
Actually the later ones? Ran great with win 7 HP. I still have mine, a EEE 1215B Bobcat dual core that came from the factory with Win 7 HP X64 and I will be babying the shit out of it because you just can't get anything in that size for less than a grand today, just a great little unit. 11.6 inches, 2.4 pounds, has 8GB of RAM and a dual core APU that gets 1080P over HDMI? What's not to like?
Never bothered with Linux on mine, not only does Win 7 HP run great on it but it comes with Expressgate built into ROM so if I wanted I could always hack that and add more programs but for a thin Linux distro its pretty nice, browser, media player and Flash support and takes less than 6 seconds to boot from cold.
The problem is the definition of the word cost. After all their time isn't worthless, you gotta have somebody make the things, take them to the post office and mail 'em off, and then there is shipping cost...so I don't see how one could really say that the $10 I paid for mine is out of line when you are talking about something so niche as fan made Quake levels, especially when IIRC they had built a nice GUI that made installing the levels easy peasy.
And again like Linux ISOs I personally didn't see a problem with that, I was stuck on dialup that on a good day hit a blistering 23k so if it weren't for them i wouldn't have gotten to play the levels at all. Sure you can complain that the guys making the levels and just slapping them on a server somewhere didn't get a cut but if they wanted to all they would have had to do is get together and make their own CDs, but they didn't.
The RT-N66U is $180, The WRT54G is $50...kinda not really comparable, hell an Apple airport is cheaper. How about showing us one under $100 that will run the new/newer stuff?
Oh and if it isn't wireless so much the better as the first thing I have to do with a wireless router is disable the wireless part, between all the interference from having so many in a large apt complex on the same frequency and the script kiddies constantly pounding on the firewalls looking for somebody to leech off of? Not really worth messing with.
I don't think that's the problem hoss, its the fact that they are suggesting using the RPi, which has 1 lousy Ethernet plug and USB 2.0 as a suitable replacement for a fricking router that has most people going WTF.
To use a slashdot car analogy that would be like Ford saying your truck is obsolete so here is a motor, build yourself a replacement. The "solution" isn't one, its a piss poor substitute for an actual router and this is coming from somebody that actually likes the RPI, its great for things like rocketry or remote planes or all kinds of cool stuff but a router? I'd say that is trying to jam a square peg in a round hole, not everything can be done easily with a RPi nor should it.
Hell go look on newegg and you'll see the majority of routers being sold today aren't any faster than the WRT54G, heck most of them still don't have IPV6 support.
Its a router folks, router companies aren't exactly known for rushing to embrace new tech. Honestly I'd be amazed if even 15% of the new routers coming out would support this change.
And that second part is why its doomed...the cost. Anybody who has looked into pinball cabinets will tell you how crazy expensive they are to build and maintain,not to mention how it'll wear out sooner thanks to the punishment the ball slamming into all those switches and bumpers causes.
Now compare your average pinball cabinet, with several feet of wiring, pounds of glass plating,lots of rubber bumpers and mechanical switches to a video arcade cabinet...its pretty much a screen, a board, and a controller (or 2 if you want two player co-op or vs) and that is pretty much it. What's more you can just swap out the board and have a new game and moreover pretty much anybody can have one built in their garage over a weekend,hell a Raspberry Pi,a flatscreen monitor and maybe $100 worth of parts from some place like Happs and you can take any dead cabinet off of eBay and have pretty much every arcade game of the 80s and 90s for you to play, with pinball you only only get the one game.
There is a reason why pinball died out folks and that is because they were just too expensive to keep and maintain compared to the alternative so while I'm sure it may become a regional fad for a year or two it'll ultimately fade away again because like the muscle cars of the era they were cool but just cost too much to keep.
Sorry but while you can bitch about the copyright issues those shareware discs helped a LOT of people back in the day. I know I wouldn't have gotten to play any of those levels at all if it weren't for Head Games putting them on CD, in a way I look at them no differently than those sites that sold Linux ISOs in the mail for those who were like me stuck on dialup at the time.
How is this in any way, shape, or form insightful? They are doing tests on ONE sample from ONE particular dinosaur...this is supposed to tell us anything? For all we know that dino had a skin infection or was an oddball, a single sample isn't gonna tell us jack squat except about that single individual dinosaur.
Personally I say let kids draw the things with tiger stripes for all it matters, something that has been gone that long simply isn't gonna leave enough evidence behind for us to talk about anything more than conjecture anyway.
It shouldn't, the corp got their money, wasn't fined or prosecuted, the corps are just better people than you peasants and thus don't face the same laws you do. Anyone doubt that if the defendant had altered the files he would have gotten an obstruction charge?
Its time we call the courts what they really are, "peasants courts" because that is their function, it is a place for the state and the rich to punish peasants while the wealthy walk away.
Well this probably shouldn't be taxed until its turned into something tangible or should be treated like capital gains in that you don't pay until you cash out. I mean we don't tax the virtual armor in MMOs, even though people actually pay real money for that shit, so I don't see why bitcoins should be treated any differently. At the end of the day its really just this virtual thing that really only has value because some people believe in it,, again we have seen people pay crazy prices for virtual crap because they believe in that but we don't tax it.
Of course sadly what is gonna end up happening is virtual crap will end up getting taxed too because god fucking forbid there be a single thing in the universe the government doesn't get a cut of, no matter how real or unreal the thing is. I just don't see how bitcoin should be considered any better or more special than WoW gold or any other unreal thing people are willing to buy, if they trade the unreal thing for real money? I suppose you could tax it then but I'd argue you are already taxing them when they spend the real money but at least that would make sense, treating BC any differently than WoW gold or horse armor just doesn't make any sense to me...hell we've seen idiots pay money for low UID account on Slashdot on eBay, does that mean the government should have a "low UID tax" since you could theoretically get some money for it?
And thanks for showing you live in Washington where a billion here and a billion there? really not worth worrying about. while i'm sure they wouldn't like being associated with terrorists guess what? THEY AREN'T, oh maybe in some circles in the belt but NOBODY in the free world automatically thinks IEDs when they think fertilizer, they think...well they think "crap" but that's another story.
Again when you are talking about selling boatloads? A 10c per pound raise can mean the difference to whether you get that billion dollar contract or you don't so again unless you stick a gun to their head or bribe them so its cheaper NOT to make the kind that can be used for IEDs the other guy WILL be happy to take that billion dollar contract and the ones stupid enough to go along will be out of business in three years or less..again for a country that they honestly don't give a rat fuck about either way.
Might want to look up global trade and fertilizer sales sometime because that ain't a case of through the looking glass like in the belt, where you can piss money away and not care, a single cent increase in price can mean the difference between a company having a great quarter and a company going out of business. Most of the third world? They are worried about having food on the table, jobs for their people, and not having the whole thing get blown away by a disaster, IEDs? really not even in the top ten. Sorry to be so blunt but that is white people's problems and not really on the radar, especially if it'll cost them hundreds of millions which when you are talking about completely retooling a factory to make something different? it MOST CERTAINLY WILL, so please quit pretending this is some magic switch, its billions of dollars that SOMEBODY has to pay...sadly it will probably yet again be the American taxpayer.
I'll take that bet because its the same thing that the FOSS guys said about netbooks...remember how that worked out? With MSFT wiping out the Linux netbooks within 2 years by first using XP then Win 7 Starter?
Lets face facts folks...Ballmer needs Win 8 to be a hit, and if he has to sell it for $5 a copy to make it so? Well Win 8 is a sunk cost so it doesn't matter what they sell licenses for does it? if the rumor is true that they are coming out with a sub $250 tablet running Atom my guess is Ballmer will practically give Win 8 away to insure its on every one that rolls out the line, it would finally give them a toehold into the tablet market and he would be able to say "See? Modern UI isn't a flop!".
Unless you are gonna stick a gun to their head and force them to switch why should they? Knowing this stuff will end up being more expensive so you expect them to waste millions, possibly billions, because some of their product is used to blow up soldiers of a country the majority there isn't fond of anyway? Not bloody likely.
So the only way you'll get them to switch is bribe them or bomb them, otherwise they have absolutely zero reason to care. Fertilizer is a billion dollar business and even raising the cost a dime could shift who gets these huge contracts so unless you believe the American taxpayer should yet again foot the bill so that it costs them nothing or is more profitable to use the new stuff i just don't see most of the third world switching. After all all it will do for them is raise costs, IEDs aren't really that high on the radar from their point of view.
They are trying to sell it because it is a Vista sized bomb, its underpowered, undergunned, its a billion dollar piece of shit. Which shouldn't be surprising as the only thing our military industrial complex has been able to do since the 90s is pad the expense account but there ya go, yet another billion dollar boondoggle that won't do what we need and is good for nothing more than target practice.
I'm sorry but capitalism, like every other ism before it, is simply doomed, why? Simple because greed always wins against a belief in the capitalist system so they corrupt the system until it no longer functions and falls apart. The right wingers like to trot out that bit about the people voting themselves more favors but that isn't what breaks the system, what breaks the system is those at the top that become too powerful to lose, like how Goldman Sachs got 125% on the dollar when the housing bubble hit courtesy of the American taxpayer.
What happens is you end up with a handful at the top that are greed on wheels and rig more and more of the system to give themselves more and more of the pie until the people will happily choose any other system because "it can't be as bad as what we got". For a capitalist system to function capital actually has to flow through the system and when it becomes too tilted towards those handful at the top that no longer happens. The "dirty little secret" when it comes to the gold standard is that if the USA were to go back to it there wouldn't be a cent flowing through the economy as its all being hoarded by a handful at the very top.
As for TFA? Two words...tar baby. Anyone that has read anything about this knows that the danger ain't from the objects big enough for you to change course to dodge it, its the fact that a single screw traveling at those speeds can tear into a spacecraft like a bullet so what you need is something capable of getting all the little bits and bringing them down, hence the tar baby. It wouldn't even have to be sticky, just thick enough that it could absorb all those little bits without letting them go through,I'm sure with a little experimenting we can find the right mix then you simply let it go with maybe one or two little thrusters to use to bring it down once it gets enough bits stuck in it that its no longer useful.
So while something like a laser might work on the bigger stuff i don't see it working on all the paint chips and screws and little bits that turn a sat into Swiss cheese over time, for that we need to think outside the box...tar baby.