Can't say anything bad about Gigabyte, they and Asrock are my two "go to" brands. Biostar is fine for basic office boxes but you learn that they ONLY support the chips that were released before the boards were and their CPU support lists are the biggest lies on the planet, but Asrock and Gigabyte have been damned good about putting out firmware updates for newer chips.
And Drinkypoo? Seriously dude FUCK THE IGPs, I mean who gives a shit about IGPs anymore? Sure if you are buying an FM1 or FM2 where its an APU but honestly those are only good for office boxes and media tanks. If it were ME and I didn't like AMD IGPs? You can grab a basic nvidia card for less than $20, hell they often have cards in the $10 range that will curbstomp the IGPs anyway so sticking with an IGP is really pointless. So if you spot a nice Athlon or Phenom kit you can just slap in a cheap card and there ya go, all set.
Finally for a media tank which lets face it is all the Pi and Wii can do anyway? bobcat. They sell Bobcat boards for $70 shipped on amazon or Tiger sells a kit for $120 that gives you everything but the DVD and HDD, even comes with a slick little VCR style case and those Bobcats are nice and quiet while having about the same power as the first gen Core2Duo. You can then use the OpenELEC Fusion build which already has the drivers and XBMC baked in and voila! Cheap as hell HTPC that is useful for other tasks like a media server or web surfer. I've used quite a few bobcats and they are nice chips, I was impressed enough I sold my full size laptop and just use an Asus EEE with an E350, does anything I need it to do with great battery life. They are cheap, they are low heat, hell you can even get fanless if you want insanely quiet, and they have enough power they can run the latest browsers and Libreoffice no problemo. I'm probably gonna be ripping the board out of the system I use at the shop for one, that is how much I like 'em, I'll be able to turn that P4 era Sempron into a dual core with 4GB of RAM for like $100...what's not to like?
That is easy, on any PC that costs less than $700, especially those with AMD chips, you'll be using that "refresh your PC" option A LOT. Again I have NEVER, not once in the 3 years its been released, had to reinstall a Win 7 PC that wasn't infected or suffered a major hardware failure that caused corruption but I've made a good $800 JUST on refreshing PCs because "Uh oh, I made a stinky" seems to be SOP with Windows 8.
I would like nothing more than to spend a couple of hours with the devs of the internals off the record, because five will get you ten that "refresh your PC" bit was NOT put in there for the users, it was put in because Win 8 was corrupting itself under certain conditions and they couldn't figure out the cause before the deadline so they tacked that on there and kicked its smelly ass out the door.
I was recently called by one of those I wiped and put Win 7 on, his laptop had TWO refreshes before he gave up...now this is a NEW laptop, passes every hardware test i could throw at it, and Win 8 kept shitting itself, what has he found under Win 7, with the SAME hardware and the SAME programs? Nothing, it works great which is why he called me, his niece got a Win 8 laptop and is running into the same shit he ran into so now he wants me to send him a link to an OEM Win 7 disc and he's gonna drop it off with the laptop and have me set it up. the ONLY change was from Win 8 to Win 7 and the system went from an unstable mess to fully functional...what does that tell you? That there is a serious fatal FLAW in Win 8 that the des can't fix. personally I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out its tied to metro and DRM, its common knowledge they were pushing appstores and love DRM so I wouldn't be surprised if their crypto isn't crapping on system files over time, possibly checking files to see you aren't a pirate and not getting them written back correctly, maybe not writing them back during shutdown, who knows, but there is SOMETHING that is wrong with the internals, I have no doubt of this.
Dude if you want to run crypto that the E350 won't run and can't find the card? Fine get an A-Series, you can get one shipped for like $65 for a triple that'll run any damned thing you want. Hell if you don't mind getting an older model you can get E series ULV quad for $68.
As for the drop in card? Its been over a year since I looked at one dude, i don't really run into much use for heavy crypto now that I quit doing corp jobs. IIRC I found 'em by looking up "cell accelerator board" but right now I'm trying to deal with this PLUS 2 chat windows PLUS a nephew bugging my ass to take him to the store so i REALLY don't have time to Google it for you. If you want to know about the card from what I remember it used the same chip as the PS3 along with 512Mb of RAM on a drop in card and was for doing crypto on low power servers, you know, like having a low power webserver that could handle crypto jobs without cranking the TDP. Naturally since that's a teeny tiny niche they didn't do well but the cards are still out there if you want 'em. A MUCH easier card to find that would give you the same benefits would be one of the PhysX cards that was made before that company got bought out by Nvidia, thanks to CUDA you can write programs for it just like for any chip and since its pretty much a math co-processor having it do crypto shouldn't be hard. Math is math after all and those things were math cranking monsters.
But again this whole thread started because somebody said the Pi could do it which surely to God even you will admit that isn't possible, the Pi is good for little jobs, not video processing. With X86 there is so many fucking choices out there that it isn't funny...fuck it just hit me, why not just buy one of the Via based carputers? THAT solves ALL of your problems with the E350 since Via has hardware accelerated crypto baked into the chip and has since the C7. You can pick up one of those for less than $200, use its hardware acceleration to do any crypto you want (IIRC its designed primarily for AES but I'm sure others will run) and there ya go, Bob's your uncle.
Sorry, recently got a case of the hives that is driving me up a damned wall, kinda hard to sleep when it feels like you did a swan dive into a bag full of poison oak, ya know? The doc thinks its some variant of strep I picked up when my mom was in the hospital recently but so far all the antibiotics have done is REALLY piss it off, it went from a few itchy spots to a shitload of itchy spots so it looks like I get the "fun" of sitting for hours in the doctor's office again, oh joy, be still my beating heart.
But when you combine those with the skull splitting migraines that run in my family sleep is a luxury I rarely get to enjoy. As of right now "sleep" is popping enough pills to knock me out of a few hours then its right back up, either from the itching or the headaches, and the fact that both boys expect me to solve all their problems ever since my mother has ended up pretty much bedridden really isn't helping matters much, hell as I write this I'm trying to teach the oldest how to write a resume through chat. I love the boys but I swear the oldest couldn't find his ass without a map and a GPS unit. I personally blame his father, why my late sister chose a pretty boy moron to be the father of her kids is beyond me.
That is why I'm trying to get a new band started, nothing kept me healthier and in better shape than playing on stage and moreover I REALLY need a fucking break, I'm so damned sick of busted boxes and bullshit...what I need is to be back on the stage, letting go of all the fucking stress and bullshit by just letting the music flow through me, one weekend a month of playing would be better for me than a 2 week vacation, I swear to God.
But this is why I've blocked all Linux articles and won't be dealing with their shit anymore, have enough on my plate without wasting my time dealing with crazies.
Let 'em hire the goon squads then and we'll see how long they can hang onto what they got. The vast majority of the history of this planet has been "the strong and smart survive, the rest are cannon fodder" and i have a feeling a lot of those fat Wall Street libertarian wannabes are gonna be the second. This is why myself personally isn't worried about it, I can pick up pretty much anything quickly and they will always need somebody who can make the stuff work. I have a feeling when the collapse hits and all the stores that told people "just throw it away" are gone we fixit guys are gonna be VERY much in demand.
and I wouldn't write off the Russian's suggestion so quickly, he wasn't talking about the country splitting on geographic grounds but on ideology, The map he drew had the east and west coasts separate but working together, the breadbasket as one group trading with Canada, and the red states as one group trading with Mexico. Personally if it all does hit the fan I wonder what will happen to the minorities, lets face it friend America has a looong history of racism that is still here, look at white flight or how segregated the east coast is. If the fed is wiped out? I have a feeling a lot of the old hates is gonna bubble back up.
And I'm sorry but I gotta call bullshit on big pharma, looking up the drugs that some of my relatives are on NOT ONE was being sold at a loss or even profit free to mexico or Canada, on the contrary most were being sold with a healthy 10-15% profit. Nope what is happening is they have figured out they can charge 1000%+ profits here through bribes so that is what they are doing. That $123,000 drug my uncle is trapped on disability because of? Found by NYU with tax dollars and the sold to big pharma. So not only are you getting gouged you are paying for the research. In fact look up the figures friend, the biggest expense big pharma has BY FAR? Advertising. That's right, not R&D, not testing, but ads. I'm sorry but don't shed a tear for big pharma.
They live in the same neighborhoods, play golf at the same clubs, you think if a judge is given a choice of some poor schmuck or that nice guy he's seen at the club he's gonna pick the schmuck? Get real.
Many studies have been done showing how easily juries are swayed by class and color, I'd love to see a similar study done about judges because I have ZERO doubt that if one worked up a spreadsheet those that make the same or above what the judge makes have a much better chance than those who make less. Like sticks with like, that is old as time.
Nooo...because in industry as Mittens said you can FIRE someone who is an asshole. Tell me, how can we fire Linus, who IMHO has set Linux back 10 years with his refusal to support an ABI so drivers won't constantly be shit on? How can we fire RMS who by targeting a single company by name probably put back GPL adoption by a good half a decade because corps will be afraid to be the next TiVo and have their name drug through the mud?
The simple fact is you CAN'T which is the problem. The closest FOSS has to firing is forking which frankly is more like a hostile takeover and is a HELL of a lot more work than just getting rid of the bad elements. Hell thanks to voting with our dollars Sinofsky at MSFT got the axe, although as more of the story comes out its starting to sound like he took a bullet meant for Ballmer, even the head of EA is out the door because we voted with our wallets and they paid the price for their bad attitude with plunging profits.
So I'm sorry but there is no comparison, the simple fact that someone like Torvalds can act like a prima donna prick (such as that rant he put out against a guy who frankly was only trying to clean up messes made by OTHER people), just shows the problem all too well. Honestly Torvalds can be as big of a prick as he wants and NOTHING will happen to him, in fact look at Drepper who was practically the definition of douchebag and it took nearly a decade before Debian got tired of his shit and forked.
But this is why I'm always quick to point out Android is NOT Linux as it doesn't operate at all like any distro, thanks to the shitpiles of money Google has they could afford to basically fork the entire thing away from the herd of cats and bring a little sanity. Not much, but a little. And of course if Google ignores us we need only not to buy Android devices for the message to get through loud and clear, they will then change or flop. Thanks to MSFT being pants wettingly retarded when it comes to server licenses Linus could change the kernel so that error messages were a pic of him giving the finger and honestly nothing would come of it, no way to fire him or RMS or any of the old guard no matter how much they don't listen. So I stand by my statement that Linux is NOT an OS, an OS has somebody calling the shots whereas in Linux the kernel guys don't talk to the subsystem guys who ignore the DE guys who don't give a shit about the app guys, because they honestly don't have to.
I buy Tiger kits all the time, you should really give them another go. The pretty much shitcanned the entire board there a couple of years back and went to a heavily customer focused mantra and it shows, the few times I've had to send something back because a UPS monkey used it for a tire chuck or somebody fucked up they were just crazy helpful. The system my youngest is gaming on now is actually running a free board from Tiger, somebody fucked up and put a 95w only board with a 125w chip. When i pointed this out and said I really needed to get this done for a customer the service rep just told me to keep the board and he'd express a new board to me and the next day BAM! there it was. It wasn't a bad board they gave me as a replacement either, a nice Biostar office board which was just perfect for what I was building.
Can't blame ya on the 1045T as those ARE pretty sweet chips, I have the 1035T and the oldest the 1045 and they tear through anything we can throw at it. As far as GPUs go I've been AMD since Bumpgate burned me on a couple of cards, the HD4850s are crazy cheap but you are right they ARE heat monsters which is why I'm hanging onto what I got until the HD7770 hits the $65-$75 mark, when you have 2 boys you can't afford to be dropping $120+ a pop on GPUs, especially when all your games run fine. I've found staying one or two revs behind gives the best bang for the buck, I got my HD4850 right before the 6xxx cards hit and its lasted this long so I figure I'll get the same amount of time out of an HD7770. Of course if Geeks has a refurb HD7850 for that price, hell even an HD6850? I'll be snatching.
As an old greybeard shop guy my only advice to you would be...lose the Gateway board dude. Those OEM boards always have worse BIOs, worse support, they always end up more of a PITA than they are worth. I prefer the Asrock and Gigabyte boards, they are cheap, have tons of features, and are well built. But I don't know how many times I've dealt with OEM board only to find they only supported ONE version of Windows and the generic drivers just wouldn't work, I get to play "Hope I can find a driver" for a Toshiba laptop for just that reason, it ONLY supports Windows 8 (On an AMD Bobcat? Really? Talk about trying to pull a boat with a Pinto!) and the nice thing is the new boards support crazy amounts of DDR 3 which is dirt cheap. I'm just glad I slapped 8GB of DDR 2 in mine when it was cheap as I've found Win 7 does NOT like you changing southbridges so its either stick with what I got or the "fun" of re-installing 3+ years of stuff..no thanks.
But don't judge Tiger based on the old days, they really cleaned up their act in the past couple of years and are now top notch. I don't even know how many Tiger kits I've built the past year but Tiger has been nothing but good, good service, good speed on delivery, and damned good prices on kits, especially if you get their little email flyer. Hell you keep an eye on that thing and they have these crazy "subscriber only" deals, the last one got me an Athlon triple and a nice office board for just $70, how can you beat that?
This is why I have been saying America IS heading for a collapse that is now inevitable, the game has been tilted so damned badly to those at the top who as we saw from that article the other day funnel all their money offshore while getting checks from the government that there is NO way to stop the collapse now.
Even though I frankly don't like libertarians and think they all come down to 2 camps, one who wants a government to whip the slaves and the other that would prefer to hire a goon squad to whip the slaves when you look at the actual figures without the bullshit number twisting provided by the libertarian at free domain radio its as plain as the nose on your face...the entire economy is a sham. Its all smoke and mirrors, its the broken window fallacy on a national scale, they are just printing massive amounts of money to "hire" more government workers to pad the numbers but there is NO recovery, in fact we are 13 million jobs behind what we were in 07...its ALL just bullshit.
Of course this won't affect the ones at the top one bit, they'll have enough advance warning they'll just cash out and quietly slink away, they have already moved the jobs to places where they can just dump toxic waste and treat workers like disposable people and thanks to bribes won't even have to pretend to give a fuck, but as for the place once known as the USA? Its toast. My guess is either Naomi Wolf is right and we'll end up another "el presidente" style third world shitholes or the Russian that predicted the breakup of the USSR a decade before it happened will be right and the USA will break up like the USSR did but either way what we call America is just about over. You simply can't tilt things so fucking badly against the majority of the population before they just stop giving a fuck or following your rules, a person with nothing to live for also has nothing to lose, just look at how many long time dictators have fallen in the past few years from the people turning on them.
The ONLY reason why the people aren't already rioting and looting is the government is paying them not to, its the classic "bread and circuses" with more and more getting stuck at the bottom on welfare but as long as they have food, shelter, and cheap entertainment they'll remain placid...that is gonna be ending soon. You can't just keep making magic money without anybody paying in, just ask Zimbabwe how well that works and that is what we have here, we've gone from 85% of healthy working age people having jobs in the 70s to now we are actually below when women started joining the workforce as far as percentages go, and that is with both men and women in the workforce. And don't even get me started on the massive pauouts to big pharma, I know multiple people stuck on disability NOT because they can't or won't work, but because drugs they could easily afford if they went across either border are so insanely priced here that they can't get their meds they have to have to function without being on disability. Hell one of my uncles takes a drug that cost $13k a year in Mexico, know what it costs the state (which means YOU) for the exact same drug? $123,000 a year!
So I say grab everything you can because the free ride is gonna be running out, probably before 2020, and when it happens pretty much all of the west is gonna be so fucked it'll make the depression look like a mild slump. That one took up until 1954 just to claw back to where we were before it happened and that was with all of Europe having their factories turned to rubble. This time? If it took less than 75 years minimum I'd be amazed, shit is THAT fucked up.
He's part of the same division that gave us such "greats" as Games For Windows Live or as i like to call it "attack of the really fucking dumb UI" since you can search in it ON a PC for specifically PC GAMES and it'll give you 4 pages of Xbox games, so do we REALLY care if MSFT is gonna do something fucking retarded? Hell isn't "We're fucking retarded" practically the company logo now?
Lets face it folks, from Zune to Windows 8, from killing PlaysForSure (which was actually GAINING decent share at the time) for the DOA Zune Market, hell I could go on all day just listing fucking DUMB moves by that company in the past few years so would anybody be REALLY surprised if they embraced a bad idea that other companies like Ubisoft already saw kills sales worse than putting a Goatse on the cover, would it REALLY shock you to see MSFT yet again embracing ideas from 2 years ago that were flops?
This is coming from somebody that has sold and serviced MSFT products since the days of Win 3.x but even I can see the company has come off the rails, anybody with eyes can see any guys that had any kind of vision have bailed for Google or Apple and now everything is designed by a committee of PHBs using PPT slides and Excel sheets that focus more on what it'll do to the stock price than whether it'll be a great product. As I have pointed out MANY times before the entire history of MSFT can be summed up as "Then the other guy did something fucking DUMB and MSFT took advantage", from the revolving CEOs and mess of products in the late 80s Apple to Sony adopting a "fuck you peasants" attitude and pricing the PS3 double what the market would bear it all comes down to the other guy doing something really fucking stupid which gives MSFT a free shot.
But now we are seeing what happens when their competition is run by people who are NOT Forest Gump levels of stupid and the answer is simple: a fucking mess. Behind the times, stupid move after stupid move, Ballmer's MSFT snatches defeat from the jaws of victory better than any company out there and from the sound of the 720 or whatever they end up calling it is gonna be another fuckup thanks to bad calls made by the suits.Again is ANYBODY really shocked by this?
Except I can walk over and yank the keyboard out of your Win 7 machine and you won't have ANY problems, without CLI and keyboard commands (which is ironic when all MSFT has been pushing is touchscreen tablets) you'll find Windows 8 will have you bashing your head against the wall just trying to find basic tasks.
Its not about learning new UIs, even guys that have no problem picking up the weirder Linux DEs will have trouble with Win 8 because there is NO context or explanations, it doesn't follow ANY UI conventions AT ALL (shutdown is now hidden under SETTINGS, really? I'm not trying to tweak the thing, just shut down) and finally they are pushing the hell out of their "great new touch support" when 1.-Less than 2% of all the PCs on the planet have touch support 2.- The OEMs have already pointed out nobody is buying touchscreen computers so its not only for PCs that nobody has but doesn't WANT in the first place!
Wanna know what pisses ME off? These apologists and keyboard commanders keep making excuses yet when i pointed out how stupid the design is, like putting shutdown on the settings screen on a VERY heavily geek site what did I get? "Oh is THAT how you get to shut down?" because frankly most of them were just doing random shit, one would log off to get the shutdown built into the log in, another was just holding the power button because if he didn't his laptop went into sleep mode...this is a site filled with fucking geeks and if THEY can't figure out the most basic shit like shutdown without just throwing crap and hoping something sticks? Then WTF chance you think Bob the builder or Sally secretary are gonna have figuring this shit out?
Just watch Win 8 the animated evaluation to see what I mean, if you have to have a Win 7 PC to Google how to shut down the apps in win 8? Something has gone horribly WRONG. made all the worse by the keyboard commanders trying to cover for an OS made for TABLETS by giving lists of commands..I mean can't anybody smell the irony? Windows 8 is handlebars on a pickup truck, its taking something that made sense in a different form factor being jammed into something it doesn't belong in the cynical belief that they can force people to "get used to it" and buy their overpriced iPad ripoff. Instead what you get is lost users, confusing and context free UI design...its a clusterfuck, no way around it.
You'd be surprised, which is why I really miss Spinrite. I don't know how many times I was able to save data off a seriously failing drive using that tool but he hasn't updated it in years and it won't support drives over 500GB which makes it useless today, but with a few hours and Spinrite I was often able to get a drive to go just long enough to save the important stuff from somebody's dying drive.
Why is he labeled troll? I mean seriously who doesn't know that Windows 8 sucks? Its the first MSFT OS since WinME I won't allow in my shop and I'm making as much wiping it for Win 7 as I did wiping Vista for XP which was quite a lot.
And please do NOT give us that "Oh its just 7 with a start screen" bullshit because that is what it is, bullshit. I'd love nothing more than to talk to some of the internal devs of Win 8 because i truly believe that "refresh your PC" was NOT put in there to help users but because they knew there was serious flaws they couldn't fix before RTM. I haven't had to reinstall a single Windows 7 system that the user hadn't gotten infected, with Win 8 I've probably made a good $800 in the past couple of months from folks bringing their laptops in for me to do just that with Win 8 as it shits itself a LOT.
Frankly the confusion over Win 8 VS Win RT is just the stinky tip of a shit iceberg, the whole damned thing is just a mess. Oh and "keyboard commanders" don't bother replying, you are full of crap and here is a study proving it. The simple fact is when you HAVE to be a keyboard commander and memorize a shitload of keyboard commands on an OS that MSFT designed for keyboard-less touch tablets? Something has gone horribly horribly WRONG.
Lets cut through the bull, Win 8 and WinRT is gonna be on every "worst of" list come Dec and the fact that even the fricking retailers don't know the difference should just show how badly thought out the whole thing was. I only hope that after ballmer shits out "Windows Blue" and the board sees its just as fucking stupid and pointless as Win 8 (you are focusing on touch, when more than 98% of the PCs DO NOT HAVE TOUCH and the OEMs are saying "We can't sell the touchscreens as nobody wants 'em" and you don't see that as a problem? Really?) they will punt kick his fat sweaty ass like a 40 yard field return and bring somebody in there with a functioning brain...fuck put ME in charge and I'll double the numbers in 2 years or you won't owe me a dime!
Spin off mobile, make Metro OPTIONAL on systems that aren't ARM and focus on a "it must be simple and work no matter what" mantra, oh and toss the mess that is Win 8, build the optional metro on the much more solid Win 7, and add services that will allow you to monetize those that stick with previous builds. hell I can think of two just off the top of my head, make deals with the media companies to make any laptop with an HDMI out and Windows Media Center into a media powerhouse and use the MSFT servers to allow home users and SMBs with a thumbstick remotely access their PCs from anywhere.
But any other corp would look at the facts, Win 8 bombed, WinRT bombed, numbers falling, users not even able to shut the damned thing down without knowing shit they have no reason to know, and see the whole direction is a failure. Instead we get what we see in TFA, where even the retailers don't know WTF you are selling or the differences between the models. What a fucking mess.
Mind some advice Drinkypoo? If you really want to stretch the life of a machine go to Geeks. i have been using their refurb parts for years with no hassles, their refurbs frankly come better packed than a lot of sites and they just last and last, the PC I'm typing this on has been running one of their HD4850s which I got for just $50 a couple of years back and she runs like a champ.
You haven't said what kind of system you have but if you buy a piece at a time and shop smart frankly you can build a nice system for dirt cheap. The one I'm typing on started like as an Athlon dual with 2GB and a single 300GB HDD, by shopping smart I was able over the course of 2 years build it up to a hexacore with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space. Believe me with 2 boys and an elderly mom I KNOW how tight money can get!
But if you ever decide you want better than what you have (for all I know you had a fully loaded quad, if that is the case just ignore) feel free to shoot me an email and I'll point you to the places where I get my parts, with a little smart shopping and buying a part here, a part there honestly anybody can have a nice PC.
Yep and sadly they used the power VR stuff on a lot of the Atom units, which with its low power and low price would have been a great makers platform. But luckily we DO have AMD and Bobcat, you can buy a Bobcat board with 1.6GHz dual core and a GPU that will do 1080P over HDMI for just $70 and there are several custom builds for that chip that lets you make cool things like HTPCs out of it, I personally like OpenELEC which uses the XBMC frontend and has pretty decent support for remotes.
That is why I don't understand how any FOSS advocate can say intel is more FOSS friendly than AMD, they didn't even bother making sure they could get the code for PowervVR opened before buying, whereas once AMD bought ATI they were looking at opening the code almost out of the gate and have been spending their money opening the drivers, getting the specs into the hands of FOSS devs, even paying to help support not only the guys making Radeon drivers but Coreboot as well.
I have been selling and using AMD exclusively for the past 5 years at the shop and the bang for the buck is just nuts, for the same price that I would have paid for a Pentium dual I got an AMD hexacore that just blows through everything I throw at it with cycles left over. Seriously what's not to like?
Oh I "get" open source just fine, its great for small projects but for anything of any size where cooperation is required it shows its true colors, you get a bunch of little fiefdoms with BIG egos run by guys like Ulrich Drepper, so I "get" it just fine.
As for DRM? As long as its only to stop Bob from throwing a disc in nero and hit copy? I have NO problem with that, its when it starts breaking software or hardware like starfuck that I have a problem with it. Take Steam DRM which IMHO is model these companies SHOULD be copying as an example. Can I break any of my Steam games in 20 minutes or less? Sure I can but why would I want to? It does its job, keeping Billy from just dragging the game folder onto a flash and handing it out to all his friends while at the same time not getting in my way and moreover they give ME something in return, a lot of something AAMOF, they give me chat, matchmaking that is as simple as "hey want to play?", patches to my games and the latest drivers for my GPUs, not to mention the crazy huge sales that has left me with so many games I still haven't gotten to all of the games from the fall sale I picked up, not to mention Xmas or the THQ Humble Bundle, in return for all of that? I don't mind them keeping Billy from copying it to a flash. hell they even have one touch backup so if I need to reinstall my OS for any reason i can have my games back up faster than any other software...nice.
And...your point? You think the BSD is evil or something? How is it being BSD change a single word i said? Is BSD FOSS? Yep. Can I take the source and make my own version? Well looking at how many Webkit variants are out there, not to mention the fact I'm typing this on one of them I think the answer to that is obvious.
People who forget their history are doomed to repeat it and while Apple and Google may pay varying degrees of lip service to "being open" never forget there are BILLIONS OF DOLLARS at stake here. Does anybody think if MSFT could royally fuck you and lock you into a platform that would keep the money rolling their way they wouldn't do that? so what makes you think Apple and Google is run by Tofu eating hippies? They'll fuck you JUST AS HARD if it means their stock jumps 30%, you can COUNT ON IT.
Mark my words and mark them well, by 2015 HTML will have DRM baked in and Android will be locked down just like the TiVo was so that Android can play that DRMed content. Remember you can get the source for TiVo right now, its just not worth anything as you can't access the hardware. In less than a year after release you'll be seeing "This site requires Blink! V x" just like we saw with IE then and now with webkit extensions to pages, and I have yet to see Google talk about what license they are using for this "great new thing" have you? Mark my words while I'm sure the final product will benefit GOOGLE a lot how much it will benefit Joe Average will be dubious at best.
And an SSD running on SATA 6 (or RAID 0 a pair if that melts your butter) would do it just fine. And again you DO NOT NEED to have the crypto running on the E350 itself, okay? As I said you have options, there are several E350 boards that give you a full X16 PCI-E that is more than enough to support a drop in cell card or FPGA and while I haven't looked at FPGA crypto in ages IIRC the cell card (which FYI can be had for around $100-$150 last i looked but its been awhile, you might have to ebay it) supported up to 1024bit in just about every format you can name OOTB so then you are only using the E350 for basic tasks like memory management and letting the cell do the heavy lifting.
But again the whole damned thing is moot because the guy has moved on and will probably never build the fucking thing anyway so who gives a shit? I have already named off half a dozen ways you can do the same damned thing using X86, you can use the E350 with an add-on card, you can use an ULV Intel or AMD, hell if you went to the Open-CL forums and told them what you needed it to do you could probably code it yourself to run on a $65 AMD A4-3400...the guy is only wanting to keep a cop's nose out of the thing, just fucking pick one. Hell this whole thread was started by some guy saying a fucking raspberry pi could do the job, why aren't you bitching at him?
Oh and just FYI there won't be any consumer Jaguar chips, at least not for another 3-4 years, its been widely reported that AMD is having keeping its supply chain running smooth with the chips they have already sold and with both Sony AND MSFT buying Jaguar chips as fast as they can crank them suckers out I seriously doubt you'll be seeing one mounted on a board a day earlier than 2 years from now, just look at how long it took them to get the A series out the door and those didn't have two major gaming companies buying every last chip before it comes off the line.
So you are sitting here looooonnnggg after everyone else has moved on arguing about a job that doesn't even exist...if that is what makes you happy? Knock yourself out,me i got a nephew across the hall wanting me to make him a pizza at 5AM. Man I thought I was a night owl. Oh and I'll never have to worry about this kind of job, my friend that does carputers for a living is planning to move into a place my mom is renting in a month so I'd just send the work his way.
See? This is the same kind of just total asspull horseshit we get from those I call "FOSSies" that like to put out such "truthful" gems as "Windows gets BSODs every day!"...sorry but if you are getting BSODs then YOU fucked something up or have a hardware failure, hell even Vista was EXTREMELY hard to BSOD, oh it still sucked but it wasn't because of BSODs.
While I haven't used Linux day to day in a year and a half (I got tired of the bullshit like distros replacing things that worked with alpha quality crap like Pulse) I not only sell plenty of the HD4xxx cards to this very day but as i said both myself and both my two boys game on the HD48xx cards every day and they are solid as rocks. even when I have been gaming for hours and get my HD4850 up to just crazy heat temps (seriously whomever decided that should be a single slot card should have been fired) its NEVER crashed or locked up, and I have run every driver that has came out for it at release without skipping a one.
So if this guy is really having all these problems with the mobile HD4850? Well if he were my customer I'd be putting a temp monitor on the thing and running some tests on both the CPU and GPU as I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he pushed the shit out of it without enough cooling and cooked something. You'd be surprised how many go "Oh well its a laptop so i can just set it on this thick bedding or pillow because its a laptop, how much heat can it put out?" and screw the thing up. with a quad core AND an HD4850 in one of those thin plastic laptop chassis? you don't have a serious laptop cooler under that sucker forcing cool air up you could fry it VERY easily.
Oh bullshit, make me the head of MSFT tomorrow and I could have Torvalds flipping burgers in less than 2 years...how? "Winserver now comes in 4 versions from $100 for home to $750 for datacenter and NO USER CALS" and in less than a year the Linux server numbers would be in freefall.
Linus gets away with his STUPID SHIT, and that is EXACTLY what it is because you have to be one arrogant son of a bitch to think you are smarter than every other fucking OS team ON THE PLANET, simply because MSFT has been thumb up their ass retarded when it comes to licenses. Hell I build fucking Windows boxes for a living and if you asked me about setting up a server unless it was a domain controller even I would be using Linux, not because I think its great, but because MSFT licensing is so damned retarded you practically have to hire a lawyer just to go through the 20 pages of legalese bullshit to see whether you have to worry about getting reamed by a BSAA audit or not.
Again name ONE major OS besides linux that does shit Torvalds way, JUST ONE. You can't because everybody can plainly see what that gets you, my drivers WORK and his DO NOT, because in Linux drivers have about as long a shelf life as Lindsey Lohan's sobriety. Just the fact that you will sit here with a straight fucking face and try to defend the fact that drivers "go bad" on Linux like bread thanks to tovralds bullshit just shows how conditioned the Linux community has gotten to taking shit from prima donnas but if Windows or OSX or any other OS broke fucking drivers at even HALF the rate Torvalds does everyone would be having a shitfit. Hell I've run fricking XP drivers on Windows 7, an OS that came out NINE YEARS after XP and as long as I matched the bit, like 32bit for 32bit? Its worked fine. Good luck on your running even the drivers that came with that 3 year old graphics card in Linux because thanks to Torvalds bullshit they just won't work. I'm sorry but that is BULLSHIT and no matter how you spin it or polish it the fact that I can have a driver that works today get shit all over by simply updating the OS is a bad fucking joke.
The only reason that corps pay Linux admins to put up with Torvalds driver breaking bullshit is the competition is stupidly priced and has the most fucked up legalese licenses bar none.
Yeah because we've never seen that go wrong in the past...quirks mode anyone?
Ya know the more crap like this they pull the more I distrust Google. Call me weird but even though I don't agree with the FOSS guys on a LOT of issues frankly I trust them more to put the user #1 over what is best for supermegacorp Google Maybe I'm wrong, and I honestly hope that I am but frankly I wouldn't be surprised if this "great new engine" just so happens, purely by accident of course, make it a royal pain in the ass to use something like ABP with it.
I know a lot of the more hardcore here think of me as "Mr Proprietary Guy" but I really really REALLY don't like this feeling I've been getting of these supermegacorps trying to go back to the "good old days" of every damned thing on the web ending up needing or having to depend on some corp for the web. i thought it sucked when it was "Works best in IE" and I think "Works best in webkit" sucks just as hard but at least with fucking Webkit I don't HAVE to take Google's version, or Apple's version, hell I could make my OWN version from the source if I wanted to go through the trouble (I use the Comodo variant instead, after flirting briefly with SWIron and Chromium) but whenever I hear of a big corp like that suddenly switching gears like that all I can think is...what is the catch? I mean if they just want to remove some features for their mobile Chome they can do that NOW and if they changes work I honestly wouldn't be surprised if upstream would go along, so what is the angle?
I have a feeling I KNOW what the catch is, its the same damned thing I have been saying for a few years when it first seemed like every company was trying to rip off not only Apple's thunder but their control freak nature, its that good old fashioned pain in our collective asses known as lock in. Google has the same kind of power MSFT had in the 90s so I have a feeling I'm gonna end up seeing "This site requires Blink x.x" in the not to distant future...man am I the ONLY one that has this sinking feeling in the middle of my guts that for the first time since i got into computers in the early 80s that computing is gonna get WORSE not better in the future?
Because I don't know about the rest of you but I so do NOT want to end up locked into some corporate wet dream of "locked down, black box, kiss our appstore" cellphones and tablets that I have to toss every time the stock dips because "hey the web requires Blink! Version 4 and your device will only support Version 3, now get out there and consume you lazy peasant" kind of bullshit, but sadly that is what we're gonna be heading towards, hell you won't even be able to unlock the damned thing without running afoul of DMCA.
Ya know, I have heard these recovery company bullshit about recovering a shot drive but until i see it with my own two peepers i seriously doubt a hard drive that has had 3 or 4.357 rounds put through it so the insides sound like a macaroni shaker is gonna get any real data taken out of it.
Its a shame you don't have Win 7 as the HD4xxx cards are nothing but killer in Win 7, I have an HD4850 and I play pretty much any game I want. As for not releasing Catalyst drivers? Uhhh...you DO know they are supporting the FOSS drivers by helping their devs for precisely that reason, right? so that all the legacy cards will be supported by the FOSS driver so they only have to worry about the latest and greatest?
And I get hate for pointing this out but fuck it truth is truth if you want to direct some hate at someone direct it at Linus "I'm too fucking good for an ABI" Torvalds. After all I can dig out the CD that came with MY HD4xxx card 3 years ago and it'll install and run fine, its Torvalds constant fiddling that makes you get stuck on old versions NOT AMD or anybody else. Hell name another OS that does NOT have an ABI, OSX, Windows, BSD, Solaris, hell even OS fricking 2 has an ABI, so either every OS designer on the planet is an idiot or Torvalds is, i think its the latter.
Oh and the ACs can save their breath, i don't give a rat's ass to hear Torvalds pathetic excuses, as excuses are like assholes and they ALL stink. At the end of the day you can't change the fact that MY drivers work and this guy's drivers DO NOT WORK and THAT is why having an ABI is important. Otherwise companies have to pay dev teams to support shit they haven't sold in years, all because Torvalds is a jerk. The HD4xxx is a 5 year old card that doesn't even share anything in common with the new gen cards, it was VLIW 4 and the new cards are vector based GP-GPUs so nothing AMD is doing now can be used on those old cards which is why they no longer support them.
Sorry, I call bullshit because I HAVE the HD4850, as a matter of fact I have TWO HD4850s and one HD4830 in my family as those are what me and the boys game on and the drivers have been nothing but solid. I can't even remember the last time I saw them put out a shitty driver, in fact come to think of it it was when AMD bought them out and shitcanned the damned.NET tie ins that the graphics drivers suddenly went from bad to good so sorry.NET fans but for driver front ends.NET does sucketh.
But we all are using the latest driver for the card, 13.1 legacy and its fine, it was fine all through the 9s and 10s and 11s and 12s and its fine now. I have also sold a ton of those cards as if someone wants to game on the cheap you can get the HD4850s for around $40 and they'll still play just about all the games out there on med if not high and the ONLY bit of trouble I ever had with the HD4850 was an HTPC where the guy had an older LCD TV without HDMI on it and the card wasn't detecting the correct resolution through DVI. It took maybe 10 minutes to go in and tweak the settings to get it set right and its been humming along happily for the past 2 years, hassle free.
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Can't say anything bad about Gigabyte, they and Asrock are my two "go to" brands. Biostar is fine for basic office boxes but you learn that they ONLY support the chips that were released before the boards were and their CPU support lists are the biggest lies on the planet, but Asrock and Gigabyte have been damned good about putting out firmware updates for newer chips.
And Drinkypoo? Seriously dude FUCK THE IGPs, I mean who gives a shit about IGPs anymore? Sure if you are buying an FM1 or FM2 where its an APU but honestly those are only good for office boxes and media tanks. If it were ME and I didn't like AMD IGPs? You can grab a basic nvidia card for less than $20, hell they often have cards in the $10 range that will curbstomp the IGPs anyway so sticking with an IGP is really pointless. So if you spot a nice Athlon or Phenom kit you can just slap in a cheap card and there ya go, all set.
Finally for a media tank which lets face it is all the Pi and Wii can do anyway? bobcat. They sell Bobcat boards for $70 shipped on amazon or Tiger sells a kit for $120 that gives you everything but the DVD and HDD, even comes with a slick little VCR style case and those Bobcats are nice and quiet while having about the same power as the first gen Core2Duo. You can then use the OpenELEC Fusion build which already has the drivers and XBMC baked in and voila! Cheap as hell HTPC that is useful for other tasks like a media server or web surfer. I've used quite a few bobcats and they are nice chips, I was impressed enough I sold my full size laptop and just use an Asus EEE with an E350, does anything I need it to do with great battery life. They are cheap, they are low heat, hell you can even get fanless if you want insanely quiet, and they have enough power they can run the latest browsers and Libreoffice no problemo. I'm probably gonna be ripping the board out of the system I use at the shop for one, that is how much I like 'em, I'll be able to turn that P4 era Sempron into a dual core with 4GB of RAM for like $100...what's not to like?
That is easy, on any PC that costs less than $700, especially those with AMD chips, you'll be using that "refresh your PC" option A LOT. Again I have NEVER, not once in the 3 years its been released, had to reinstall a Win 7 PC that wasn't infected or suffered a major hardware failure that caused corruption but I've made a good $800 JUST on refreshing PCs because "Uh oh, I made a stinky" seems to be SOP with Windows 8.
I would like nothing more than to spend a couple of hours with the devs of the internals off the record, because five will get you ten that "refresh your PC" bit was NOT put in there for the users, it was put in because Win 8 was corrupting itself under certain conditions and they couldn't figure out the cause before the deadline so they tacked that on there and kicked its smelly ass out the door.
I was recently called by one of those I wiped and put Win 7 on, his laptop had TWO refreshes before he gave up...now this is a NEW laptop, passes every hardware test i could throw at it, and Win 8 kept shitting itself, what has he found under Win 7, with the SAME hardware and the SAME programs? Nothing, it works great which is why he called me, his niece got a Win 8 laptop and is running into the same shit he ran into so now he wants me to send him a link to an OEM Win 7 disc and he's gonna drop it off with the laptop and have me set it up. the ONLY change was from Win 8 to Win 7 and the system went from an unstable mess to fully functional...what does that tell you? That there is a serious fatal FLAW in Win 8 that the des can't fix. personally I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out its tied to metro and DRM, its common knowledge they were pushing appstores and love DRM so I wouldn't be surprised if their crypto isn't crapping on system files over time, possibly checking files to see you aren't a pirate and not getting them written back correctly, maybe not writing them back during shutdown, who knows, but there is SOMETHING that is wrong with the internals, I have no doubt of this.
Dude if you want to run crypto that the E350 won't run and can't find the card? Fine get an A-Series, you can get one shipped for like $65 for a triple that'll run any damned thing you want. Hell if you don't mind getting an older model you can get E series ULV quad for $68.
As for the drop in card? Its been over a year since I looked at one dude, i don't really run into much use for heavy crypto now that I quit doing corp jobs. IIRC I found 'em by looking up "cell accelerator board" but right now I'm trying to deal with this PLUS 2 chat windows PLUS a nephew bugging my ass to take him to the store so i REALLY don't have time to Google it for you. If you want to know about the card from what I remember it used the same chip as the PS3 along with 512Mb of RAM on a drop in card and was for doing crypto on low power servers, you know, like having a low power webserver that could handle crypto jobs without cranking the TDP. Naturally since that's a teeny tiny niche they didn't do well but the cards are still out there if you want 'em. A MUCH easier card to find that would give you the same benefits would be one of the PhysX cards that was made before that company got bought out by Nvidia, thanks to CUDA you can write programs for it just like for any chip and since its pretty much a math co-processor having it do crypto shouldn't be hard. Math is math after all and those things were math cranking monsters.
But again this whole thread started because somebody said the Pi could do it which surely to God even you will admit that isn't possible, the Pi is good for little jobs, not video processing. With X86 there is so many fucking choices out there that it isn't funny...fuck it just hit me, why not just buy one of the Via based carputers? THAT solves ALL of your problems with the E350 since Via has hardware accelerated crypto baked into the chip and has since the C7. You can pick up one of those for less than $200, use its hardware acceleration to do any crypto you want (IIRC its designed primarily for AES but I'm sure others will run) and there ya go, Bob's your uncle.
Sorry, recently got a case of the hives that is driving me up a damned wall, kinda hard to sleep when it feels like you did a swan dive into a bag full of poison oak, ya know? The doc thinks its some variant of strep I picked up when my mom was in the hospital recently but so far all the antibiotics have done is REALLY piss it off, it went from a few itchy spots to a shitload of itchy spots so it looks like I get the "fun" of sitting for hours in the doctor's office again, oh joy, be still my beating heart.
But when you combine those with the skull splitting migraines that run in my family sleep is a luxury I rarely get to enjoy. As of right now "sleep" is popping enough pills to knock me out of a few hours then its right back up, either from the itching or the headaches, and the fact that both boys expect me to solve all their problems ever since my mother has ended up pretty much bedridden really isn't helping matters much, hell as I write this I'm trying to teach the oldest how to write a resume through chat. I love the boys but I swear the oldest couldn't find his ass without a map and a GPS unit. I personally blame his father, why my late sister chose a pretty boy moron to be the father of her kids is beyond me.
That is why I'm trying to get a new band started, nothing kept me healthier and in better shape than playing on stage and moreover I REALLY need a fucking break, I'm so damned sick of busted boxes and bullshit...what I need is to be back on the stage, letting go of all the fucking stress and bullshit by just letting the music flow through me, one weekend a month of playing would be better for me than a 2 week vacation, I swear to God.
But this is why I've blocked all Linux articles and won't be dealing with their shit anymore, have enough on my plate without wasting my time dealing with crazies.
Let 'em hire the goon squads then and we'll see how long they can hang onto what they got. The vast majority of the history of this planet has been "the strong and smart survive, the rest are cannon fodder" and i have a feeling a lot of those fat Wall Street libertarian wannabes are gonna be the second. This is why myself personally isn't worried about it, I can pick up pretty much anything quickly and they will always need somebody who can make the stuff work. I have a feeling when the collapse hits and all the stores that told people "just throw it away" are gone we fixit guys are gonna be VERY much in demand.
and I wouldn't write off the Russian's suggestion so quickly, he wasn't talking about the country splitting on geographic grounds but on ideology, The map he drew had the east and west coasts separate but working together, the breadbasket as one group trading with Canada, and the red states as one group trading with Mexico. Personally if it all does hit the fan I wonder what will happen to the minorities, lets face it friend America has a looong history of racism that is still here, look at white flight or how segregated the east coast is. If the fed is wiped out? I have a feeling a lot of the old hates is gonna bubble back up.
And I'm sorry but I gotta call bullshit on big pharma, looking up the drugs that some of my relatives are on NOT ONE was being sold at a loss or even profit free to mexico or Canada, on the contrary most were being sold with a healthy 10-15% profit. Nope what is happening is they have figured out they can charge 1000%+ profits here through bribes so that is what they are doing. That $123,000 drug my uncle is trapped on disability because of? Found by NYU with tax dollars and the sold to big pharma. So not only are you getting gouged you are paying for the research. In fact look up the figures friend, the biggest expense big pharma has BY FAR? Advertising. That's right, not R&D, not testing, but ads. I'm sorry but don't shed a tear for big pharma.
They live in the same neighborhoods, play golf at the same clubs, you think if a judge is given a choice of some poor schmuck or that nice guy he's seen at the club he's gonna pick the schmuck? Get real.
Many studies have been done showing how easily juries are swayed by class and color, I'd love to see a similar study done about judges because I have ZERO doubt that if one worked up a spreadsheet those that make the same or above what the judge makes have a much better chance than those who make less. Like sticks with like, that is old as time.
Nooo...because in industry as Mittens said you can FIRE someone who is an asshole. Tell me, how can we fire Linus, who IMHO has set Linux back 10 years with his refusal to support an ABI so drivers won't constantly be shit on? How can we fire RMS who by targeting a single company by name probably put back GPL adoption by a good half a decade because corps will be afraid to be the next TiVo and have their name drug through the mud?
The simple fact is you CAN'T which is the problem. The closest FOSS has to firing is forking which frankly is more like a hostile takeover and is a HELL of a lot more work than just getting rid of the bad elements. Hell thanks to voting with our dollars Sinofsky at MSFT got the axe, although as more of the story comes out its starting to sound like he took a bullet meant for Ballmer, even the head of EA is out the door because we voted with our wallets and they paid the price for their bad attitude with plunging profits.
So I'm sorry but there is no comparison, the simple fact that someone like Torvalds can act like a prima donna prick (such as that rant he put out against a guy who frankly was only trying to clean up messes made by OTHER people), just shows the problem all too well. Honestly Torvalds can be as big of a prick as he wants and NOTHING will happen to him, in fact look at Drepper who was practically the definition of douchebag and it took nearly a decade before Debian got tired of his shit and forked.
But this is why I'm always quick to point out Android is NOT Linux as it doesn't operate at all like any distro, thanks to the shitpiles of money Google has they could afford to basically fork the entire thing away from the herd of cats and bring a little sanity. Not much, but a little. And of course if Google ignores us we need only not to buy Android devices for the message to get through loud and clear, they will then change or flop. Thanks to MSFT being pants wettingly retarded when it comes to server licenses Linus could change the kernel so that error messages were a pic of him giving the finger and honestly nothing would come of it, no way to fire him or RMS or any of the old guard no matter how much they don't listen. So I stand by my statement that Linux is NOT an OS, an OS has somebody calling the shots whereas in Linux the kernel guys don't talk to the subsystem guys who ignore the DE guys who don't give a shit about the app guys, because they honestly don't have to.
I buy Tiger kits all the time, you should really give them another go. The pretty much shitcanned the entire board there a couple of years back and went to a heavily customer focused mantra and it shows, the few times I've had to send something back because a UPS monkey used it for a tire chuck or somebody fucked up they were just crazy helpful. The system my youngest is gaming on now is actually running a free board from Tiger, somebody fucked up and put a 95w only board with a 125w chip. When i pointed this out and said I really needed to get this done for a customer the service rep just told me to keep the board and he'd express a new board to me and the next day BAM! there it was. It wasn't a bad board they gave me as a replacement either, a nice Biostar office board which was just perfect for what I was building.
Can't blame ya on the 1045T as those ARE pretty sweet chips, I have the 1035T and the oldest the 1045 and they tear through anything we can throw at it. As far as GPUs go I've been AMD since Bumpgate burned me on a couple of cards, the HD4850s are crazy cheap but you are right they ARE heat monsters which is why I'm hanging onto what I got until the HD7770 hits the $65-$75 mark, when you have 2 boys you can't afford to be dropping $120+ a pop on GPUs, especially when all your games run fine. I've found staying one or two revs behind gives the best bang for the buck, I got my HD4850 right before the 6xxx cards hit and its lasted this long so I figure I'll get the same amount of time out of an HD7770. Of course if Geeks has a refurb HD7850 for that price, hell even an HD6850? I'll be snatching.
As an old greybeard shop guy my only advice to you would be...lose the Gateway board dude. Those OEM boards always have worse BIOs, worse support, they always end up more of a PITA than they are worth. I prefer the Asrock and Gigabyte boards, they are cheap, have tons of features, and are well built. But I don't know how many times I've dealt with OEM board only to find they only supported ONE version of Windows and the generic drivers just wouldn't work, I get to play "Hope I can find a driver" for a Toshiba laptop for just that reason, it ONLY supports Windows 8 (On an AMD Bobcat? Really? Talk about trying to pull a boat with a Pinto!) and the nice thing is the new boards support crazy amounts of DDR 3 which is dirt cheap. I'm just glad I slapped 8GB of DDR 2 in mine when it was cheap as I've found Win 7 does NOT like you changing southbridges so its either stick with what I got or the "fun" of re-installing 3+ years of stuff..no thanks.
But don't judge Tiger based on the old days, they really cleaned up their act in the past couple of years and are now top notch. I don't even know how many Tiger kits I've built the past year but Tiger has been nothing but good, good service, good speed on delivery, and damned good prices on kits, especially if you get their little email flyer. Hell you keep an eye on that thing and they have these crazy "subscriber only" deals, the last one got me an Athlon triple and a nice office board for just $70, how can you beat that?
This is why I have been saying America IS heading for a collapse that is now inevitable, the game has been tilted so damned badly to those at the top who as we saw from that article the other day funnel all their money offshore while getting checks from the government that there is NO way to stop the collapse now.
Even though I frankly don't like libertarians and think they all come down to 2 camps, one who wants a government to whip the slaves and the other that would prefer to hire a goon squad to whip the slaves when you look at the actual figures without the bullshit number twisting provided by the libertarian at free domain radio its as plain as the nose on your face...the entire economy is a sham. Its all smoke and mirrors, its the broken window fallacy on a national scale, they are just printing massive amounts of money to "hire" more government workers to pad the numbers but there is NO recovery, in fact we are 13 million jobs behind what we were in 07...its ALL just bullshit.
Of course this won't affect the ones at the top one bit, they'll have enough advance warning they'll just cash out and quietly slink away, they have already moved the jobs to places where they can just dump toxic waste and treat workers like disposable people and thanks to bribes won't even have to pretend to give a fuck, but as for the place once known as the USA? Its toast. My guess is either Naomi Wolf is right and we'll end up another "el presidente" style third world shitholes or the Russian that predicted the breakup of the USSR a decade before it happened will be right and the USA will break up like the USSR did but either way what we call America is just about over. You simply can't tilt things so fucking badly against the majority of the population before they just stop giving a fuck or following your rules, a person with nothing to live for also has nothing to lose, just look at how many long time dictators have fallen in the past few years from the people turning on them.
The ONLY reason why the people aren't already rioting and looting is the government is paying them not to, its the classic "bread and circuses" with more and more getting stuck at the bottom on welfare but as long as they have food, shelter, and cheap entertainment they'll remain placid...that is gonna be ending soon. You can't just keep making magic money without anybody paying in, just ask Zimbabwe how well that works and that is what we have here, we've gone from 85% of healthy working age people having jobs in the 70s to now we are actually below when women started joining the workforce as far as percentages go, and that is with both men and women in the workforce. And don't even get me started on the massive pauouts to big pharma, I know multiple people stuck on disability NOT because they can't or won't work, but because drugs they could easily afford if they went across either border are so insanely priced here that they can't get their meds they have to have to function without being on disability. Hell one of my uncles takes a drug that cost $13k a year in Mexico, know what it costs the state (which means YOU) for the exact same drug? $123,000 a year!
So I say grab everything you can because the free ride is gonna be running out, probably before 2020, and when it happens pretty much all of the west is gonna be so fucked it'll make the depression look like a mild slump. That one took up until 1954 just to claw back to where we were before it happened and that was with all of Europe having their factories turned to rubble. This time? If it took less than 75 years minimum I'd be amazed, shit is THAT fucked up.
He's part of the same division that gave us such "greats" as Games For Windows Live or as i like to call it "attack of the really fucking dumb UI" since you can search in it ON a PC for specifically PC GAMES and it'll give you 4 pages of Xbox games, so do we REALLY care if MSFT is gonna do something fucking retarded? Hell isn't "We're fucking retarded" practically the company logo now?
Lets face it folks, from Zune to Windows 8, from killing PlaysForSure (which was actually GAINING decent share at the time) for the DOA Zune Market, hell I could go on all day just listing fucking DUMB moves by that company in the past few years so would anybody be REALLY surprised if they embraced a bad idea that other companies like Ubisoft already saw kills sales worse than putting a Goatse on the cover, would it REALLY shock you to see MSFT yet again embracing ideas from 2 years ago that were flops?
This is coming from somebody that has sold and serviced MSFT products since the days of Win 3.x but even I can see the company has come off the rails, anybody with eyes can see any guys that had any kind of vision have bailed for Google or Apple and now everything is designed by a committee of PHBs using PPT slides and Excel sheets that focus more on what it'll do to the stock price than whether it'll be a great product. As I have pointed out MANY times before the entire history of MSFT can be summed up as "Then the other guy did something fucking DUMB and MSFT took advantage", from the revolving CEOs and mess of products in the late 80s Apple to Sony adopting a "fuck you peasants" attitude and pricing the PS3 double what the market would bear it all comes down to the other guy doing something really fucking stupid which gives MSFT a free shot.
But now we are seeing what happens when their competition is run by people who are NOT Forest Gump levels of stupid and the answer is simple: a fucking mess. Behind the times, stupid move after stupid move, Ballmer's MSFT snatches defeat from the jaws of victory better than any company out there and from the sound of the 720 or whatever they end up calling it is gonna be another fuckup thanks to bad calls made by the suits.Again is ANYBODY really shocked by this?
Except I can walk over and yank the keyboard out of your Win 7 machine and you won't have ANY problems, without CLI and keyboard commands (which is ironic when all MSFT has been pushing is touchscreen tablets) you'll find Windows 8 will have you bashing your head against the wall just trying to find basic tasks.
Its not about learning new UIs, even guys that have no problem picking up the weirder Linux DEs will have trouble with Win 8 because there is NO context or explanations, it doesn't follow ANY UI conventions AT ALL (shutdown is now hidden under SETTINGS, really? I'm not trying to tweak the thing, just shut down) and finally they are pushing the hell out of their "great new touch support" when 1.-Less than 2% of all the PCs on the planet have touch support 2.- The OEMs have already pointed out nobody is buying touchscreen computers so its not only for PCs that nobody has but doesn't WANT in the first place!
Wanna know what pisses ME off? These apologists and keyboard commanders keep making excuses yet when i pointed out how stupid the design is, like putting shutdown on the settings screen on a VERY heavily geek site what did I get? "Oh is THAT how you get to shut down?" because frankly most of them were just doing random shit, one would log off to get the shutdown built into the log in, another was just holding the power button because if he didn't his laptop went into sleep mode...this is a site filled with fucking geeks and if THEY can't figure out the most basic shit like shutdown without just throwing crap and hoping something sticks? Then WTF chance you think Bob the builder or Sally secretary are gonna have figuring this shit out?
Just watch Win 8 the animated evaluation to see what I mean, if you have to have a Win 7 PC to Google how to shut down the apps in win 8? Something has gone horribly WRONG. made all the worse by the keyboard commanders trying to cover for an OS made for TABLETS by giving lists of commands..I mean can't anybody smell the irony? Windows 8 is handlebars on a pickup truck, its taking something that made sense in a different form factor being jammed into something it doesn't belong in the cynical belief that they can force people to "get used to it" and buy their overpriced iPad ripoff. Instead what you get is lost users, confusing and context free UI design...its a clusterfuck, no way around it.
You'd be surprised, which is why I really miss Spinrite. I don't know how many times I was able to save data off a seriously failing drive using that tool but he hasn't updated it in years and it won't support drives over 500GB which makes it useless today, but with a few hours and Spinrite I was often able to get a drive to go just long enough to save the important stuff from somebody's dying drive.
Why is he labeled troll? I mean seriously who doesn't know that Windows 8 sucks? Its the first MSFT OS since WinME I won't allow in my shop and I'm making as much wiping it for Win 7 as I did wiping Vista for XP which was quite a lot.
And please do NOT give us that "Oh its just 7 with a start screen" bullshit because that is what it is, bullshit. I'd love nothing more than to talk to some of the internal devs of Win 8 because i truly believe that "refresh your PC" was NOT put in there to help users but because they knew there was serious flaws they couldn't fix before RTM. I haven't had to reinstall a single Windows 7 system that the user hadn't gotten infected, with Win 8 I've probably made a good $800 in the past couple of months from folks bringing their laptops in for me to do just that with Win 8 as it shits itself a LOT.
Frankly the confusion over Win 8 VS Win RT is just the stinky tip of a shit iceberg, the whole damned thing is just a mess. Oh and "keyboard commanders" don't bother replying, you are full of crap and here is a study proving it. The simple fact is when you HAVE to be a keyboard commander and memorize a shitload of keyboard commands on an OS that MSFT designed for keyboard-less touch tablets? Something has gone horribly horribly WRONG.
Lets cut through the bull, Win 8 and WinRT is gonna be on every "worst of" list come Dec and the fact that even the fricking retailers don't know the difference should just show how badly thought out the whole thing was. I only hope that after ballmer shits out "Windows Blue" and the board sees its just as fucking stupid and pointless as Win 8 (you are focusing on touch, when more than 98% of the PCs DO NOT HAVE TOUCH and the OEMs are saying "We can't sell the touchscreens as nobody wants 'em" and you don't see that as a problem? Really?) they will punt kick his fat sweaty ass like a 40 yard field return and bring somebody in there with a functioning brain...fuck put ME in charge and I'll double the numbers in 2 years or you won't owe me a dime!
Spin off mobile, make Metro OPTIONAL on systems that aren't ARM and focus on a "it must be simple and work no matter what" mantra, oh and toss the mess that is Win 8, build the optional metro on the much more solid Win 7, and add services that will allow you to monetize those that stick with previous builds. hell I can think of two just off the top of my head, make deals with the media companies to make any laptop with an HDMI out and Windows Media Center into a media powerhouse and use the MSFT servers to allow home users and SMBs with a thumbstick remotely access their PCs from anywhere.
But any other corp would look at the facts, Win 8 bombed, WinRT bombed, numbers falling, users not even able to shut the damned thing down without knowing shit they have no reason to know, and see the whole direction is a failure. Instead we get what we see in TFA, where even the retailers don't know WTF you are selling or the differences between the models. What a fucking mess.
Mind some advice Drinkypoo? If you really want to stretch the life of a machine go to Geeks. i have been using their refurb parts for years with no hassles, their refurbs frankly come better packed than a lot of sites and they just last and last, the PC I'm typing this on has been running one of their HD4850s which I got for just $50 a couple of years back and she runs like a champ.
You haven't said what kind of system you have but if you buy a piece at a time and shop smart frankly you can build a nice system for dirt cheap. The one I'm typing on started like as an Athlon dual with 2GB and a single 300GB HDD, by shopping smart I was able over the course of 2 years build it up to a hexacore with 8GB of RAM and 3TB of HDD space. Believe me with 2 boys and an elderly mom I KNOW how tight money can get!
But if you ever decide you want better than what you have (for all I know you had a fully loaded quad, if that is the case just ignore) feel free to shoot me an email and I'll point you to the places where I get my parts, with a little smart shopping and buying a part here, a part there honestly anybody can have a nice PC.
Yep and sadly they used the power VR stuff on a lot of the Atom units, which with its low power and low price would have been a great makers platform. But luckily we DO have AMD and Bobcat, you can buy a Bobcat board with 1.6GHz dual core and a GPU that will do 1080P over HDMI for just $70 and there are several custom builds for that chip that lets you make cool things like HTPCs out of it, I personally like OpenELEC which uses the XBMC frontend and has pretty decent support for remotes.
That is why I don't understand how any FOSS advocate can say intel is more FOSS friendly than AMD, they didn't even bother making sure they could get the code for PowervVR opened before buying, whereas once AMD bought ATI they were looking at opening the code almost out of the gate and have been spending their money opening the drivers, getting the specs into the hands of FOSS devs, even paying to help support not only the guys making Radeon drivers but Coreboot as well.
I have been selling and using AMD exclusively for the past 5 years at the shop and the bang for the buck is just nuts, for the same price that I would have paid for a Pentium dual I got an AMD hexacore that just blows through everything I throw at it with cycles left over. Seriously what's not to like?
Oh I "get" open source just fine, its great for small projects but for anything of any size where cooperation is required it shows its true colors, you get a bunch of little fiefdoms with BIG egos run by guys like Ulrich Drepper, so I "get" it just fine.
As for DRM? As long as its only to stop Bob from throwing a disc in nero and hit copy? I have NO problem with that, its when it starts breaking software or hardware like starfuck that I have a problem with it. Take Steam DRM which IMHO is model these companies SHOULD be copying as an example. Can I break any of my Steam games in 20 minutes or less? Sure I can but why would I want to? It does its job, keeping Billy from just dragging the game folder onto a flash and handing it out to all his friends while at the same time not getting in my way and moreover they give ME something in return, a lot of something AAMOF, they give me chat, matchmaking that is as simple as "hey want to play?", patches to my games and the latest drivers for my GPUs, not to mention the crazy huge sales that has left me with so many games I still haven't gotten to all of the games from the fall sale I picked up, not to mention Xmas or the THQ Humble Bundle, in return for all of that? I don't mind them keeping Billy from copying it to a flash. hell they even have one touch backup so if I need to reinstall my OS for any reason i can have my games back up faster than any other software...nice.
And...your point? You think the BSD is evil or something? How is it being BSD change a single word i said? Is BSD FOSS? Yep. Can I take the source and make my own version? Well looking at how many Webkit variants are out there, not to mention the fact I'm typing this on one of them I think the answer to that is obvious.
People who forget their history are doomed to repeat it and while Apple and Google may pay varying degrees of lip service to "being open" never forget there are BILLIONS OF DOLLARS at stake here. Does anybody think if MSFT could royally fuck you and lock you into a platform that would keep the money rolling their way they wouldn't do that? so what makes you think Apple and Google is run by Tofu eating hippies? They'll fuck you JUST AS HARD if it means their stock jumps 30%, you can COUNT ON IT.
Mark my words and mark them well, by 2015 HTML will have DRM baked in and Android will be locked down just like the TiVo was so that Android can play that DRMed content. Remember you can get the source for TiVo right now, its just not worth anything as you can't access the hardware. In less than a year after release you'll be seeing "This site requires Blink! V x" just like we saw with IE then and now with webkit extensions to pages, and I have yet to see Google talk about what license they are using for this "great new thing" have you? Mark my words while I'm sure the final product will benefit GOOGLE a lot how much it will benefit Joe Average will be dubious at best.
And an SSD running on SATA 6 (or RAID 0 a pair if that melts your butter) would do it just fine. And again you DO NOT NEED to have the crypto running on the E350 itself, okay? As I said you have options, there are several E350 boards that give you a full X16 PCI-E that is more than enough to support a drop in cell card or FPGA and while I haven't looked at FPGA crypto in ages IIRC the cell card (which FYI can be had for around $100-$150 last i looked but its been awhile, you might have to ebay it) supported up to 1024bit in just about every format you can name OOTB so then you are only using the E350 for basic tasks like memory management and letting the cell do the heavy lifting.
But again the whole damned thing is moot because the guy has moved on and will probably never build the fucking thing anyway so who gives a shit? I have already named off half a dozen ways you can do the same damned thing using X86, you can use the E350 with an add-on card, you can use an ULV Intel or AMD, hell if you went to the Open-CL forums and told them what you needed it to do you could probably code it yourself to run on a $65 AMD A4-3400...the guy is only wanting to keep a cop's nose out of the thing, just fucking pick one. Hell this whole thread was started by some guy saying a fucking raspberry pi could do the job, why aren't you bitching at him?
Oh and just FYI there won't be any consumer Jaguar chips, at least not for another 3-4 years, its been widely reported that AMD is having keeping its supply chain running smooth with the chips they have already sold and with both Sony AND MSFT buying Jaguar chips as fast as they can crank them suckers out I seriously doubt you'll be seeing one mounted on a board a day earlier than 2 years from now, just look at how long it took them to get the A series out the door and those didn't have two major gaming companies buying every last chip before it comes off the line.
So you are sitting here looooonnnggg after everyone else has moved on arguing about a job that doesn't even exist...if that is what makes you happy? Knock yourself out,me i got a nephew across the hall wanting me to make him a pizza at 5AM. Man I thought I was a night owl. Oh and I'll never have to worry about this kind of job, my friend that does carputers for a living is planning to move into a place my mom is renting in a month so I'd just send the work his way.
See? This is the same kind of just total asspull horseshit we get from those I call "FOSSies" that like to put out such "truthful" gems as "Windows gets BSODs every day!"...sorry but if you are getting BSODs then YOU fucked something up or have a hardware failure, hell even Vista was EXTREMELY hard to BSOD, oh it still sucked but it wasn't because of BSODs.
While I haven't used Linux day to day in a year and a half (I got tired of the bullshit like distros replacing things that worked with alpha quality crap like Pulse) I not only sell plenty of the HD4xxx cards to this very day but as i said both myself and both my two boys game on the HD48xx cards every day and they are solid as rocks. even when I have been gaming for hours and get my HD4850 up to just crazy heat temps (seriously whomever decided that should be a single slot card should have been fired) its NEVER crashed or locked up, and I have run every driver that has came out for it at release without skipping a one.
So if this guy is really having all these problems with the mobile HD4850? Well if he were my customer I'd be putting a temp monitor on the thing and running some tests on both the CPU and GPU as I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he pushed the shit out of it without enough cooling and cooked something. You'd be surprised how many go "Oh well its a laptop so i can just set it on this thick bedding or pillow because its a laptop, how much heat can it put out?" and screw the thing up. with a quad core AND an HD4850 in one of those thin plastic laptop chassis? you don't have a serious laptop cooler under that sucker forcing cool air up you could fry it VERY easily.
Oh bullshit, make me the head of MSFT tomorrow and I could have Torvalds flipping burgers in less than 2 years...how? "Winserver now comes in 4 versions from $100 for home to $750 for datacenter and NO USER CALS" and in less than a year the Linux server numbers would be in freefall.
Linus gets away with his STUPID SHIT, and that is EXACTLY what it is because you have to be one arrogant son of a bitch to think you are smarter than every other fucking OS team ON THE PLANET, simply because MSFT has been thumb up their ass retarded when it comes to licenses. Hell I build fucking Windows boxes for a living and if you asked me about setting up a server unless it was a domain controller even I would be using Linux, not because I think its great, but because MSFT licensing is so damned retarded you practically have to hire a lawyer just to go through the 20 pages of legalese bullshit to see whether you have to worry about getting reamed by a BSAA audit or not.
Again name ONE major OS besides linux that does shit Torvalds way, JUST ONE. You can't because everybody can plainly see what that gets you, my drivers WORK and his DO NOT, because in Linux drivers have about as long a shelf life as Lindsey Lohan's sobriety. Just the fact that you will sit here with a straight fucking face and try to defend the fact that drivers "go bad" on Linux like bread thanks to tovralds bullshit just shows how conditioned the Linux community has gotten to taking shit from prima donnas but if Windows or OSX or any other OS broke fucking drivers at even HALF the rate Torvalds does everyone would be having a shitfit. Hell I've run fricking XP drivers on Windows 7, an OS that came out NINE YEARS after XP and as long as I matched the bit, like 32bit for 32bit? Its worked fine. Good luck on your running even the drivers that came with that 3 year old graphics card in Linux because thanks to Torvalds bullshit they just won't work. I'm sorry but that is BULLSHIT and no matter how you spin it or polish it the fact that I can have a driver that works today get shit all over by simply updating the OS is a bad fucking joke.
The only reason that corps pay Linux admins to put up with Torvalds driver breaking bullshit is the competition is stupidly priced and has the most fucked up legalese licenses bar none.
Yeah because we've never seen that go wrong in the past...quirks mode anyone?
Ya know the more crap like this they pull the more I distrust Google. Call me weird but even though I don't agree with the FOSS guys on a LOT of issues frankly I trust them more to put the user #1 over what is best for supermegacorp Google Maybe I'm wrong, and I honestly hope that I am but frankly I wouldn't be surprised if this "great new engine" just so happens, purely by accident of course, make it a royal pain in the ass to use something like ABP with it.
I know a lot of the more hardcore here think of me as "Mr Proprietary Guy" but I really really REALLY don't like this feeling I've been getting of these supermegacorps trying to go back to the "good old days" of every damned thing on the web ending up needing or having to depend on some corp for the web. i thought it sucked when it was "Works best in IE" and I think "Works best in webkit" sucks just as hard but at least with fucking Webkit I don't HAVE to take Google's version, or Apple's version, hell I could make my OWN version from the source if I wanted to go through the trouble (I use the Comodo variant instead, after flirting briefly with SWIron and Chromium) but whenever I hear of a big corp like that suddenly switching gears like that all I can think is...what is the catch? I mean if they just want to remove some features for their mobile Chome they can do that NOW and if they changes work I honestly wouldn't be surprised if upstream would go along, so what is the angle?
I have a feeling I KNOW what the catch is, its the same damned thing I have been saying for a few years when it first seemed like every company was trying to rip off not only Apple's thunder but their control freak nature, its that good old fashioned pain in our collective asses known as lock in. Google has the same kind of power MSFT had in the 90s so I have a feeling I'm gonna end up seeing "This site requires Blink x.x" in the not to distant future...man am I the ONLY one that has this sinking feeling in the middle of my guts that for the first time since i got into computers in the early 80s that computing is gonna get WORSE not better in the future?
Because I don't know about the rest of you but I so do NOT want to end up locked into some corporate wet dream of "locked down, black box, kiss our appstore" cellphones and tablets that I have to toss every time the stock dips because "hey the web requires Blink! Version 4 and your device will only support Version 3, now get out there and consume you lazy peasant" kind of bullshit, but sadly that is what we're gonna be heading towards, hell you won't even be able to unlock the damned thing without running afoul of DMCA.
Ya know, I have heard these recovery company bullshit about recovering a shot drive but until i see it with my own two peepers i seriously doubt a hard drive that has had 3 or 4 .357 rounds put through it so the insides sound like a macaroni shaker is gonna get any real data taken out of it.
Its a shame you don't have Win 7 as the HD4xxx cards are nothing but killer in Win 7, I have an HD4850 and I play pretty much any game I want. As for not releasing Catalyst drivers? Uhhh...you DO know they are supporting the FOSS drivers by helping their devs for precisely that reason, right? so that all the legacy cards will be supported by the FOSS driver so they only have to worry about the latest and greatest?
And I get hate for pointing this out but fuck it truth is truth if you want to direct some hate at someone direct it at Linus "I'm too fucking good for an ABI" Torvalds. After all I can dig out the CD that came with MY HD4xxx card 3 years ago and it'll install and run fine, its Torvalds constant fiddling that makes you get stuck on old versions NOT AMD or anybody else. Hell name another OS that does NOT have an ABI, OSX, Windows, BSD, Solaris, hell even OS fricking 2 has an ABI, so either every OS designer on the planet is an idiot or Torvalds is, i think its the latter.
Oh and the ACs can save their breath, i don't give a rat's ass to hear Torvalds pathetic excuses, as excuses are like assholes and they ALL stink. At the end of the day you can't change the fact that MY drivers work and this guy's drivers DO NOT WORK and THAT is why having an ABI is important. Otherwise companies have to pay dev teams to support shit they haven't sold in years, all because Torvalds is a jerk. The HD4xxx is a 5 year old card that doesn't even share anything in common with the new gen cards, it was VLIW 4 and the new cards are vector based GP-GPUs so nothing AMD is doing now can be used on those old cards which is why they no longer support them.
Sorry, I call bullshit because I HAVE the HD4850, as a matter of fact I have TWO HD4850s and one HD4830 in my family as those are what me and the boys game on and the drivers have been nothing but solid. I can't even remember the last time I saw them put out a shitty driver, in fact come to think of it it was when AMD bought them out and shitcanned the damned .NET tie ins that the graphics drivers suddenly went from bad to good so sorry .NET fans but for driver front ends .NET does sucketh.
But we all are using the latest driver for the card, 13.1 legacy and its fine, it was fine all through the 9s and 10s and 11s and 12s and its fine now. I have also sold a ton of those cards as if someone wants to game on the cheap you can get the HD4850s for around $40 and they'll still play just about all the games out there on med if not high and the ONLY bit of trouble I ever had with the HD4850 was an HTPC where the guy had an older LCD TV without HDMI on it and the card wasn't detecting the correct resolution through DVI. It took maybe 10 minutes to go in and tweak the settings to get it set right and its been humming along happily for the past 2 years, hassle free.