Its sad but then the FOSS community will simply get the support they deserve, which is none. AMD spent quite a lot of money opening their drivers, not only did they have to have legal go over every page with a fine tooth comb (Because Intel owns HDCP and would end up blacklisting AMD cards if they ended up giving away a way to crack HDCP) but they even went so far as to hire several devs to work on the open drivers.
Now when AMD does all that and shows ZERO ROI what kind of message is that gonna send to other companies that are sitting on the fence with regards to open or close their drivers? They are gonna say "Well it didn't help AMD, in fact they lost money, so opening our drivers isn't smart" and will just not bother. The community will stay at the mercy of reverse engineering existing hardware or tossing the hardware when the company no longer supports it and they'll have nobody but themselves to blame.
Because at the end of the day, like it or not, it shows that the FOSS community is nothing but hypocrites. They asked the hardware makers to open their specs and drivers, saying "If you'll only open up we'll support you!", AMD did exactly that, and for all their expense and trouble you get page after page of "LOL buy Nvidia" which is the most locked down and ANTI-FOSS company around, or did everyone forget Torvalds flipping the bird at Nvidia?
Don't know if they still do it as its been awhile since an OEM Nvidia card landed in my shop but I do know back in the day Nvidia did the same shit with the OEM TNT 2 and MX4000, both of which were packaged to look like the "real" TNT 2 and MX400 but of course ran much worse than those cards. I had a LOT of folks back in the day come to me wanting to know why "That new computer i bought from you won't play the latest games even though I have an MX card!" and it would turn out sure enough that they were duped into getting the MX4000 instead of an MX400.
That said I've come across OEM HD4850s in the shop and they are nice cards, well other than the fact they use single slot cooler but that was the reference design for the 48xx cards so I can't really fault them for that. Honestly rebadge or not if the OEM 8xxx cards run as good as the OEM HD48xx cards ran and I can get 'em cheap like I could the 48xx cards? bring 'em on I say, those cards can still play just about every game out there and I was picking them up for nearly 2 years at less than $50 a pop.
Actually I've found that even those with iPads and other high end laptops simply don't use them for basic web surfing, they just don't like the visual keyboards. Instead what the iPad/iPhone/Android units are getting used for is 1.-A portable IMDB lookup on the couch so they can find out "What has that guy been in that I've seen before?" and 2.- A fancy portable video player.
That's it, that is ALL they are being used for. I've had to LMAO walking through a store when i watched some hipster girl in her early 30s struggling with her purse and shopping cart because she was using an iPad as a grocery list and when I said "Trying to justify all that money you spent huh?" she gave me a look, well let's say if looks could kill I wouldn't be typing this right now.
Believe me, this ain't my first dance, I've seen these fads come and go. I was there when the press proclaimed "The PC is dead, thin clients and the web will rule!" and this was when Win9X was the dominant OS and would crash if you looked at it funny, still didn't come to pass though. Then there was "Nobody will read books, it'll all be eReaders!" this was in 99, those fizzled pretty quickly, kinda like how we are seeing dedicated eReaders fizzle again now. There was tablets in 02/03, phones in 05, tablets again thanks to dirt cheap ARM cores making tablets so cheap you practically can find one as the toy surprise in Cracker Jacks, its all the same old dance.
At the end of the day nothing lasts 30+ years unless it has some serious positives, and with the PC you have a full touch type capable keyboard, you can have as small or as big a screen as you want, you get just insane amounts of computing power, they last quite a long time, and they are very cheap. Yeah....I'm not worried just because the MHz bubble burst, people will still kill laptops and PCs, they'll still want them replaced, just as the laptop didn't wipe out the desktop so too will the tablet not wipe out the PC, tablets like netbooks fill a little niche and in that little niche they do well, but as Surface has shown a "jack of all trades" is just not something the people want.
You simply have to look at history between 1867-1920, also known as "the age of the robber barons". You see during that period the government REALLY didn't give a shit, no regulations on food or water quality, no regulations on what you dumped and where, no regulations on anything. Hell you could throw 6 year olds to work in mines while you snorted heroin off the ass of an underage hooker, nobody gave a shit. It was Ayn rand's version of paradise.
So what happened? Simple a handful of the richest men met at places like "hunting clubs" and worked out a nice little plan to split the country among themselves. One owned the railroads, one owned shipping, one owned the cattle industry, one owned the oil industry...get the picture? They gave each other sweetheart deals while using their respective monopolies to insure they stayed the sole games in town. Somebody hit an oil field and not want to sell to Standard oil for a pittance? Well I hope you can move that oil on horseback, as you ain't using the railroads or ships to move it! And so on and so on.
This is why I have to laugh at libertarians, because just like communism and fascism it had a chance and was shown to be wanting. If you don't believe me, please, read up about the trusts and the age of the robber barons, it was the most open market in the entire history of the USA and it showed quite clearly that when you give those at the top an unfettered market to play in they WILL run riot. But in the end that is the problem with most "isms" like libertarianism, fascism, communism, in that for the concept to work those at the top can't be douchebags but if its one thing thousands of years of history has taught us is those at the top will ALWAYS BE douchebags, that's just how that works.
Not to mention DOS makes a kick ass boot environment for many low level diagnostic tools,there is everything from virus scanners to CPU testers that run in DOS so having a free version is quite a nice thing to have.
So between this and DOSBox frankly I don't think we'll have any problems with using legacy or low level apps in the future. Now if only someone will come up with a "Win9XBox" as there is plenty of games that ran great in that OS that are unusable on anything newer and the Win9X hardware is dying out now thanks to the shitty caps.
I've been saying this for quite awhile, if the FOSS community would put their money where their mouth is more companies would be willing to support FOSS. And this isn't just some minor offering, not only has AMD been opening the GPUs as fast as they can but they are moving to Coreboot so for the first time you'll be able to have a fully open system from the BIOS on up.
And when you consider that you can get a 6 core AMD kit for just $260 frankly its not a hard choice. Even though I primarily use Windows I think open hardware is important and competition is vital so I've put my money where my mouth is and have been selling nothing but AMD in my shop for the past 5 years and the customers couldn't be happier. I also put my money where my mouth is with regards to my family, we have 5 desktops and 2 laptops, ALL AMD.
So if you support open hardware then frankly the choice is clear, buy or build AMD for your next system. They have plenty of great desktop chips and if you need a laptop I have gotten several Liano quads for customers and they just love the performance, and if you'd like a really cheap HTPC just pair a Bobcat board with OpenELEC which is a really nice XBMC based Linux with the Fusion drivers baked in. Pair it with one of the Bobcat "VCR style" barebones kits and for less than $200 you can have a damned nice HTPC that sucks less than 18w under load and does full 1080P. Truly a kick ass little system and you can't beat the price.
10 trips to the movies here or 2.4 tanks of gas in my little Ranger, but you are missing the point in that the failure rate on the $100 2TB has been crazy high so you will end up having to pay a LOT more if you don't want to play Russian roulette with your data.
The only 2TB drives I've seen with a very low failure rate has been the Samsung and the Toshiba, the Samsung will cost you $175 when you can find one and the Toshiba is $100 but you have to crack the external to get the drive out.
So honestly most of the 2TB drives you see out there at a decent price are the Seagates and frankly they are junk, youre more likely to have it die inside of 6 months as not.
Well I won't know if you'll see this or not, its the first of the month so my little FOSSie stalker managed to get a few mod points, personally I think its funny as shit that he sits there foaming at the mouth and just waiting for the day he can get a mod point but whatever.
But its obvious you haven't looked at how these controllers actually work so in the interest of saving you some grief if you ever run into this problem I'll explain how they work. you see not only is there a "data map" that is held ONLY in the controller chip so that when you try to switch chips it doesn't know what is data and what is empty, but these chips also have a form of data encryption on them so some third party can't just snatch the chips out of an SSD and recover the data. Guess where the key for the encryption is at?
so while some have had luck in taking each individual chip out and managing to descramble the data unlike HDDs you can NOT simply swap controllers, all you get when you do that is 2 dead drives instead of 1. Frankly what they need to do is have a read only ARM controller as a backup so that if the main controller fails it'll put the drive in "read only" mode and allow you to recover the data. if any company were to do this frankly they'd make money hand over fist as they'd have the first "fail proof" SSDs but right now if the controller goes? You are SOL.
Bullshit, that is the same bullshit the press has been spewing and its as much bullshit as saying "Well now that the real estate bubble has burst houses are worthless now"
Look its actually REALLY simple, okay? the period between 1993-2005 was a BUBBLE, no different than the housing bubble or financial bubble or any other bubble, it was an UN-NATURAL CONDITION brought about by what we now call the "MHz War". you look at PC sales before the MHz war, how often did people replace PCs? Every 5-7 years. Now that the bubble is over how often will people be replacing PCs? Every 5-7 years. As a guy down here in the trenches I can tell you that not only is the PC NOT "going away" but frankly most folks? Up to their asses in PCs. Before the bubble most had only ONE PC, now most have a PC for every member of their family PLUS one or more laptops.
But the simple fact is once we moved away from simply raising the MHz of a single core into multiple cores PCs went right past "good enough" and straight into "insanely overpowered" for most users. I mean look at what I was selling on my LOW END builds FIVE years ago: A phenom X3 with 3GB-4GB of RAM and a 300GB-500GB HDD. Now how many of your average users are gonna max out that system? Damned few. On the laptop side i was selling Turion X2s with 2GB of RAM and 250Gb HDDs. Now how many people are gonna have needs when they are mobile that that system won't handle? Again damned few.
You want a perfect example of the "typical PC user" just look at my dad, he runs Skype, checks his webmail, does FB, runs his QuickBooks and burns DVDs, about as bog standard as you can get. When the Phenom X6s got cheap i thought "Well it has been a few years since i built that Phenom I X4 for dad, maybe I should see if its time to replace it" so I ran a 3 week monitoring of his system load and then checked the results, what did I find? 43%, that was the MAX he had gotten with the system and that turned out to be a hung browser tab, when I removed that anomaly he averaged less than 35% load. I checked his Core Duo desktop at the shop, similar results.
So the problem with MSFT is NOT Linux, and its NOT mobile anything, although from the way Ballmer is burning the damned company down trying to be Apple you'd think otherwise, but the real problem is they, like many on wall Street during the housing bubble, expected the bubble to last forever. Frankly MSFT could be making money hand over fist if they'd quit trying to ape Apple and ape IBM instead, sell services to that huge install base, but like most short sighted CEOs Ballmer only cares about being "hip and trendy" but no matter how many times he clicks his heels together and says "There's no place like Cupertino,There's no place like Cupertino," you simply can't turn MSFT into Apple and trying to force an iOS style OS onto the desktop is just running off new purchasers.
But at the end of the day the PC is going nowhere, the amount of crap you'd have to plug into a tablet to make it equal the power of even a 4 year old PC would make it a bloated mess so people will continue to buy PCs, they'll continue to buy laptops, they just won't be replacing them every 3 years like they had to do from 93-05 is all. But at the end of the day the amount of power X86 gives you at frankly an absurdly low cost still makes having a PC VERY attractive but that same absurd amount of power means you just don't need to replace as often, that's all. Hell I personally LOVE to play FPS games and used to have to build a new machines every year, now I'm playing on a 3 year old X6 and feel no need to upgrade, the chips are just too damned powerful for even the games to slam anymore. so unless some "killer app" comes along that can blow through anything less than an octo-core i just don't see people needing to replace that often, doesn't mean there isn't still plenty of money to be made in PCs though.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, you nailed the problem right on the head. I only shop at Steam sales as Valve has spoiled me to low price gaming and even just buying the best deals from the Steam sales and the THQ Humble Bundle I ended up with something like 150GB+ worth of games, my game folder is getting awfully close to 500GB and I've only been using Steam a little over 2 years.
So for those of us that like to play games the size of SSDs quickly becomes an issue, you look at the sweet spot on SSD prices and its still at 64GB although 128GB are just now starting to get a decent price. if things continue at this pace it'll be a good 6+ years before we see a 500GB SSD under $150 and of course by then the next gen consoles will be out and the graphics (and file sizes) will have been cranked up another notch.
I'm just glad I managed to score myself 4TB worth of Samsung drives (1TB OS, 2TB data, 1TB external) before the flood, those 3 drives cost me less than $120 all told. If they drop their prices back to pre-flood levels? I'll be happy to add another 2TB internal and 2TB external but right now SSDs are just too small for anything but my netbook. Hell I can't even justify switching my netbook, it has 8GB of RAM and so once the OS is loaded it all runs from RAM and having a 320GB HDD lets me keep plenty of movies and shows on it if I'm stuck somewhere and bored. I'd need at least a 256GB SSD to be a decent replacement and those are still pretty crazy on the prices.
You can get a 100 pack for $22, that is 470GB for $22 or around 22c a disc, where can I get HDDs for that price? And the problem is its damned hard to find decent 2TB drives, the Seagates are just trash and the WDs I've found to be hit or miss. If I could find Samsung or Toshiba drives at a decent price I'd be right there with ya but ATM the only drives they have at affordable prices are the Seagates and the only reason they are so cheap is the word has gotten out about the high failure rates. go to sites system builders use like Newegg and see the reviews of the Seagates, you find rows of 1 star ratings where guys bought 5-10 drives at a pop and the whole bunch didn't even last a year.
at least with the DVD once its been burnt and checks that is it, keep it in a cool dry place and it'll be good 9 years from now. You'll be lucky if your drives even make it past warranty if they are Seagates and you are rolling the dice if they are WD. I hope you have enough space to have backups for your backups friend.
Why would the controllers failing make you want to look at SSDs again? And all I can tell you is what I see here at the shop and we don't get much call for the SSDs that plug in like RAM, that's enterprise stuff and we deal with mostly SMBs and home users. But what I have seen is that it doesn't seem to matter who makes the drive, Kingston, Samsung, Intel, avoid OCZ like the plague because like Seagate over 500GB they are just trash, but no matter who makes the drive with the MLCs you are looking at VERY high drive controller failure rates.
The worst part is the way the drives are designed, if a controller dies on a HDD? you can swap the board with one of the same model and usually get the data off. with the SSDs however not only is the controller soldered to the PCB but they have the data encrypted and guess where it keeps the key to decrypt? You guessed it, in the now dead controller.
Some have suggested I tell my customers to encrypt everything but how much overhead does that add? Kinda pointless to go SSD if you are having to use a chunk of the performance gains just to be prepared for a drive failure. So far I haven't found any benches on using encryption on an SSD and after seeing so many failures I don't currently have any in stock. Like most of the other shops I have been buying up 400GB-500GB drives since these hard drives have the least amount of failures but they are getting harder to find, as is the Samsung, Hitachi, and Toshiba drives, all of which were quite good even up to 2TB.
And as far as RAID? Good luck with that, frankly from what I've seen less than 5 drives you really aren't improving your odds and with RAID 1 it seemed like they were more likely to have both drives go tits up then not. Of course when you look up how much it'll cost to run RAID with 5 SSDs you'll have a heart attack, not exactly the most cost effective way to do things. If you were my customer and wanted to go SSD? Get yourself one or even 2 HDDs in external enclosures, preferably by different manufacturers or at least different batches and then BACK UP RELIGIOUSLY because while that SSD may be greased lightning it WILL fail on you, oh and if you don't want to send a drive full of your data to some third world country you probably should take the hit and encrypt, otherwise kiss the warranty bye bye.
That is why I've been moving into HTPC and security system installs, I already found out dealing with the phone and tablet companies simply aren't worth it. We have one guy in town that works on phones and when I went to ask him how he managed to deal with the asshole companies he simply opened his back door and there he had a giant heated garage, bigger than my shop, full of NOTHING but cell phones. he has to do that just so he can get the parts...fuck that noise.
And I gotta second the Samsung, I have all my systems running on Samsungs because of how low the failure rates were. If you can find any Toshiba or Hitatchi drives those are both damned good too, in fact I'd take a refurb by any of those 3 companies over a brand new 1TB Seagate any day of the week. I've been seeing the same thing when it comes to the 1TB and 2TB drives,, Samsunbg, Toshiba, and Hitachi work well, WD are hit or miss, Seagate is made of fail.
I usually tell my customers to get 2 drives though, one internal and one external so that if one fails they have a backup. Not sure about the BR discs as I haven't seen any long term studies on how good the dye lasts. DVDs work well for small files and I have plenty of those pushing a decade old that still read, but as I learned when DVDs first came out you'll get some really shitty companies cashing in (Staples brand anyone?) so I tend to be more cautious when it comes to backups. The WD green drives make for decent externals and their 1TB failure rate isn't nearly as high so that with a Caviar blue internal is usually enough for my customers.
Oh and my customers did NOT buy OCZ as some have suggested, I'd never recommend that trash, most bought Kingston and Intel, the failures rates were just as high. They just haven't figured out how to deal with the controller issue yet and until they do I just can't recommend an SSD for anything you'd care about if you lost it. But you are right we shops are dying out pretty quickly, we've gone from 6 in my area to just 3 and I bet the old guy in the middle of town will be closed down soon enough. They are just not selling replacement parts and everything is so proprietary that if you don't keep a warehouse full of damaged units for spare parts you can give it up. This is why I stopped fixing laptops and instead simply offer to move their data over, the price of replacement screens has gotten so high that unless its a $1500 laptop its just not worth fixing. Damned shame as the landfills are gonna be filled to the brim with this junk, but what can you do?
But seriously, how hard is it to put together a couple of PCs and have most of the bases covered? This is WinXP we're talking about, a legacy OS whose heyday has a pretty typical build to go with it.
From my years at the shop if someone asked me to hand them a "typical XP box" it would be a 2.2GHz-3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB-1GB of RAM, a 160GB HDD and an Intel 8xx or 9xx IGP. If you wanted to get as perfect to "middle of the road XP" as possible a 2.6GHz with 512Mb of RAM along with a 160GB HDD and an Intel IGP...there, you just have covered a good 80%+ of the XP boxes out there. If you wanted to be thorough add a Pentium D and an Athlon at 2GHz and you'll have covered the vast majority of XP boxes out there.
Personally I think the board will finally put down the crack pipe and punt kick Ballmer like a 30 yard field return. Hopefully they'll lure one of the actual engineers back, maybe Ozzie or Allchin, who know what windows users want and will be happy to give it to them, starting by killing TIFKAM and making Metro strictly a tablet/phone UI where it belongs. But from the reaction of my customers I'm predicting that win 8 will be a megaflop, making Vista look like a hit by comparison.
The sad part is if they would get a CEO with a brain they could be making money hand over fist. You see the company they should be aping is NOT Apple but IBM, selling services on top of Windows so it won't matter if the user buys the latest and greatest or not as they can still make money off the existing userbase. for examples imagine being able to log into your home PC from work or vice versa as simply as plugging in a flash drive (something you have) and inputting a password (something you know) with MSFT servers taking care of authentication and key management. Or making deals with all the major content providers to sell channels in Windows Media Center, similar to what they used to have with Internet TV only with more channels and the content providers actually on board instead of fighting them. Or how about backporting the Windows appstore to Windows 7 and making deals so that all the free software you have on the machine is updated automatically? No more wondering if your software is out of date, simply hop into the appstore and it'll tell you and have download links ready.
There is just so many ways you can make money from existing users that it isn't funny, all they need is a CEO with some common sense and a knowledge of what the Windows user wants. Hell you could even make money off of all those XP installs, a business doesn't want to upgrade? Just buy a yearly OS extension license and as long as enough companies pay they could keep providing security patches. Just give the customers what they want and watch the money roll in, continue trying to be an ersatz Apple and all they will do is fail fail fail. After all if we wanted an Apple we'd bloody well buy an Apple wouldn't we?
Well from the spec sheet you are correct in that they didn't disable speedstep like they did on previous Celerons but 1.1Ghz is awfully slow for a modern CPU and according to the comparison charts (listed below on the same page i linked to) its bested by a Bobcat E series and even by the Atom N450 on a couple of tests.
Personally I think I'll stick with my E-350 netbook, as it lets me run any OS I wish while still getting 5 hours on a battery. Its nice to see plenty of choices in the low end though and I can't wait to see what Intel's answer to the jaguar is gonna be, having 4-8 cores in a netbook or laptop sounds nice and with any luck it'll make Intel drop their prices on their ULV quads. In any case the next year or so ought to be damned nice for tablets and laptops, plenty of choices and at prices that won't make your wallet cry.
Well I think you are wrong on MSFT, not that investor panic might get Ballmer booted from the big chair, that is possible (although I am not sure if its even possible to "boot Ballmer" as I don't know how his and Gates shares are set up, if like Brin and Page they have supervoting shares or just regular shares) but the part I seriously doubt is them getting out of consoles.
The Xbox line has been profitable for a couple of years now, the XBL income is a steady revenue and from all reports the hardware for the Xbox Next is already a done deal which means contracts for the hardware have already been signed, this would make pulling out more costly than its worth. A much more likely scenario is that the guy brought in to right the ship spinning off mobile and Bing to sink or swim on their own while going back to a more traditional model when it comes to the core OS and then selling services on top ala IBM. The Xbox next would play well into that strategy as it allows them to make deals with content providers to sell services to console users as well as giving them a way to further connect the PC and the Xbox, media extenders and the like.
Now with Blizzard I agree but I don't know if it will take WoW or CoD going tits up to deal a serious blow, after all they have put a LOT of money into the D3 real money market and as we saw with PSN the hackers can cause some serious damage to your brand if they get into the right spots. Imagine some hacker group like Anon getting the CC numbers from the D3 RMM or finding a way to dupe a bunch of high level items and flooding the market? Frankly it wouldn't take much to spook off gamers and the clean up costs can be enormous for something like that.
But my money is still on EA, if its one thing Riccitiello has shown us is that EA has a knack for pissing people off and they seem to be one of the worst for taking an IP and running it into the ground. so honestly I really wouldn't be surprised if EA sinks $150 million plus into some "WoW killer" or "CoD Killer" and then trying to pull a Resident Evil 6 and make it cover every damned demographic that your average PHB can fit into a PPT slide they just cock the whole thing up.
But when a company the size of THQ can end up broken to pieces on the auction block I'd say anything can happen so the next few years ought to be interesting if nothing else.
The only person that need an education is YOU friend, why do you think that one guy puts out "ChrUbuntu" anyway? For his health? No its because the ONLY way to run another OS is with a bootloader hack because "dev mode" does NOT give you an open BIOS, its still as locked down as ever. in fact "dev mode" is just that, a way for developers to test their applications on ChromeOS, its NOT made to allow you to install any alternate OSes.
Again I don't give a flying shit WHO locks down the hardware, locked down hardware is wrong PERIOD. Its wrong when Apple does it, its wrong when MSFT does it, its wrong when Google does it. Just because they say "do no evil" doesn't absolve them of dickish behavior and turning bog standard X86 units into a locked down platform is wrong and very much evil in my book.
I'm sorry LordLimecat but when you are talking about home users bandwidth very much IS an issue, thanks to the shitty caps that residential customers get compared to business class users.
When you look at how much bandwidth something like OnLive would take for your average gamer who plays a couple of hours a night they would only use OnLive for a month because once they got the bill for overage fees (most ISPs have crazy overage charges, some as high as $1.50 a GB if you go over and don't move up to the next tier) that would be the end of that. So honestly even if they managed to magically remove latency the fact that our ISPs oversell like crazy and then just cap everybody means that bandwidth heavy services like OnLive would quickly end up costing more than they are worth.
Believe me I know, as I typically spend anywhere from $40-$70 dollars on the big Steam sales but I'll end up paying more than that in overage fees when the bill comes, but since the next higher tier in my area is more than double what I'm paying now its cheaper to just take the hit 3 or 4 times a year. If someone in my area were to use OnLive they could look forward to a bill with overage fees every single month, it really wouldn't take long for it to be cheaper just to buy a system capable of gaming and then buy the games outright.
All I can tell you is what I've seen at the shop and my gamer customers are up to double digits on their SSDs because of all the controller failures.
And you can take that "warranty" with a BIG ASS pinch of salt, as I have found that damned near NOBODY will claim any of those warranties, why? Because they would have to send the drive back and they have no idea what third world country that busted drive is gonna be sent to or if their data will end up recovered by somebody so they don't risk using the warranty. Hell if my gamer customers would use their warranties they wouldn't have had to buy a drive for the past 3 years but they are afraid their CC numbers will end up in the hands of some hacker in China so they just shitcan 'em.
Finally as for Seagate? Ask any retailer and we'll be happy to tell you that Seagate drives over 500GB are deep fried fail right now. Go to any place system builders get their parts like Newegg and look up the Seagate 1TB and 2TB drives and you'll see post after post saying things like "Bought 10 drives, 4 DOA, 3 dead in a month, the other three are already iffy less than 3 months". If the rumors are true its the fact Seagate took the shitty ARM controllers from Maxtor and this combined with shitty firmware that gets corrupted when it gets hot leads to a condition where the drive will try to write past the end of the platter and ends up crapping all over itself.
But I'm sitting here at the shop working on systems 6 days a week and I can tell you that I can't even remember the last time I had a HDD fail on me that I didn't get SOME warning, either Windows "delayed write failure" errors or Windows corruption or rarely SMART errors. Sadly in the last few years (Since Seagate started putting out junk drives) more and more I've seen SMART used NOT to tell when a drive is failing but instead used as a way to cover up bad drives so the OEMs don't have to honor warranties. In fact I was told a couple of months ago right here by a fellow system builder that if you call Seagate trying to get them to honor their warranty they make you run the latest Seatools which just resets the SMART so it'll claim its no longer seeing errors when it is. Honestly it really wouldn't surprise me as I learned quickly enough to avoid anything over 500GB by Seagate, they really are garbage.
Exactly,I have a lot of customers that would be happy to add another couple of TB for storage and backup purposes....but not at the prices they currently want. I currently have 3TB in my system (1TB OS drive, 2TB data) and wouldn't mind adding another 2TB so I can rip my entire DVD collection and just drop them in a folder but there is no way I'm paying $100+ for a single 2TB drive, not when I paid less than that pre-flood for both the 1TB and 2TB drives put together.
So if the prices go back down to pre flood levels, where i'm paying around $35-40 a TB? I'll be happy to pick up several TB worth of storage but right now its just not worth the higher costs and talking to customers many feel the same, they are sitting on their 650GB-1TB worth of storage and waiting for the costs come down before adding that second drive.
Hell I still find good old DVDs to be quite useful for backup purposes, you can hold a lot of docs and pics on a 4.7GB disc and I have some nearly a decade old and they still read just fine.
And I agree that the Internet just isn't very good at moving large files and if anything its gonna get worse not better as the ISPs continue to oversell capacity without laying new lines. This is why I wasn't surprised at the ISPs all jumping on board the "6 strikes" bullshit as it gives them an easy to use excuse to get rid of anybody that uses even half the bandwidth they paid for.
So I'd be quite surprised if the Xbox next and PS4 don't both come with BR drives, until we can get nationwide fiber discs are still gonna be the easiest way to get a large game to the masses.
And that is the classic "broken window fallacy" as a LOT of those "financial sector" jobs frankly wouldn't be needed if mommy government wasn't pumping piles of money into the stock market in the first place. look at the graphs starting a 3.20 or thereabout, look at how much of the GDP was in the market right before the 29 crash and how much is in there now.
What we have is the government blowing bubbles for their friends on Wall Street and then handing them even MORE money when they pop, any way you slice it this is a bad way to go and when the next bubble bursts I doubt the fed will be able to print their way out of it again.
And I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out but its easy to see why and its NOT because of law enforcement. When you look at the single parent homes by race frankly blacks are pretty far ahead when it comes to that metric and its pretty well known and documented by now that single parent homes produce more kids that end up incarcerated than two parent homes.
Now we can sit here and argue all day as to the "why" that is, whether its culture or a side effect of poverty or what but in any case you can't bitch about the numbers just because you don't like what they say. If someone with "X" for a name is more likely to be arrested then that is what the search engine is gonna return, can't blame the engine for crunching numbers as that is what they do. Whether we like it or not more blacks are born to single parent homes and those that are raised in single parent homes are more likely to be criminals than those that have 2 parents, that's just the way it is folks.
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Its sad but then the FOSS community will simply get the support they deserve, which is none. AMD spent quite a lot of money opening their drivers, not only did they have to have legal go over every page with a fine tooth comb (Because Intel owns HDCP and would end up blacklisting AMD cards if they ended up giving away a way to crack HDCP) but they even went so far as to hire several devs to work on the open drivers.
Now when AMD does all that and shows ZERO ROI what kind of message is that gonna send to other companies that are sitting on the fence with regards to open or close their drivers? They are gonna say "Well it didn't help AMD, in fact they lost money, so opening our drivers isn't smart" and will just not bother. The community will stay at the mercy of reverse engineering existing hardware or tossing the hardware when the company no longer supports it and they'll have nobody but themselves to blame.
Because at the end of the day, like it or not, it shows that the FOSS community is nothing but hypocrites. They asked the hardware makers to open their specs and drivers, saying "If you'll only open up we'll support you!", AMD did exactly that, and for all their expense and trouble you get page after page of "LOL buy Nvidia" which is the most locked down and ANTI-FOSS company around, or did everyone forget Torvalds flipping the bird at Nvidia?
Don't know if they still do it as its been awhile since an OEM Nvidia card landed in my shop but I do know back in the day Nvidia did the same shit with the OEM TNT 2 and MX4000, both of which were packaged to look like the "real" TNT 2 and MX400 but of course ran much worse than those cards. I had a LOT of folks back in the day come to me wanting to know why "That new computer i bought from you won't play the latest games even though I have an MX card!" and it would turn out sure enough that they were duped into getting the MX4000 instead of an MX400.
That said I've come across OEM HD4850s in the shop and they are nice cards, well other than the fact they use single slot cooler but that was the reference design for the 48xx cards so I can't really fault them for that. Honestly rebadge or not if the OEM 8xxx cards run as good as the OEM HD48xx cards ran and I can get 'em cheap like I could the 48xx cards? bring 'em on I say, those cards can still play just about every game out there and I was picking them up for nearly 2 years at less than $50 a pop.
Actually I've found that even those with iPads and other high end laptops simply don't use them for basic web surfing, they just don't like the visual keyboards. Instead what the iPad/iPhone/Android units are getting used for is 1.-A portable IMDB lookup on the couch so they can find out "What has that guy been in that I've seen before?" and 2.- A fancy portable video player.
That's it, that is ALL they are being used for. I've had to LMAO walking through a store when i watched some hipster girl in her early 30s struggling with her purse and shopping cart because she was using an iPad as a grocery list and when I said "Trying to justify all that money you spent huh?" she gave me a look, well let's say if looks could kill I wouldn't be typing this right now.
Believe me, this ain't my first dance, I've seen these fads come and go. I was there when the press proclaimed "The PC is dead, thin clients and the web will rule!" and this was when Win9X was the dominant OS and would crash if you looked at it funny, still didn't come to pass though. Then there was "Nobody will read books, it'll all be eReaders!" this was in 99, those fizzled pretty quickly, kinda like how we are seeing dedicated eReaders fizzle again now. There was tablets in 02/03, phones in 05, tablets again thanks to dirt cheap ARM cores making tablets so cheap you practically can find one as the toy surprise in Cracker Jacks, its all the same old dance.
At the end of the day nothing lasts 30+ years unless it has some serious positives, and with the PC you have a full touch type capable keyboard, you can have as small or as big a screen as you want, you get just insane amounts of computing power, they last quite a long time, and they are very cheap. Yeah....I'm not worried just because the MHz bubble burst, people will still kill laptops and PCs, they'll still want them replaced, just as the laptop didn't wipe out the desktop so too will the tablet not wipe out the PC, tablets like netbooks fill a little niche and in that little niche they do well, but as Surface has shown a "jack of all trades" is just not something the people want.
You simply have to look at history between 1867-1920, also known as "the age of the robber barons". You see during that period the government REALLY didn't give a shit, no regulations on food or water quality, no regulations on what you dumped and where, no regulations on anything. Hell you could throw 6 year olds to work in mines while you snorted heroin off the ass of an underage hooker, nobody gave a shit. It was Ayn rand's version of paradise.
So what happened? Simple a handful of the richest men met at places like "hunting clubs" and worked out a nice little plan to split the country among themselves. One owned the railroads, one owned shipping, one owned the cattle industry, one owned the oil industry...get the picture? They gave each other sweetheart deals while using their respective monopolies to insure they stayed the sole games in town. Somebody hit an oil field and not want to sell to Standard oil for a pittance? Well I hope you can move that oil on horseback, as you ain't using the railroads or ships to move it! And so on and so on.
This is why I have to laugh at libertarians, because just like communism and fascism it had a chance and was shown to be wanting. If you don't believe me, please, read up about the trusts and the age of the robber barons, it was the most open market in the entire history of the USA and it showed quite clearly that when you give those at the top an unfettered market to play in they WILL run riot. But in the end that is the problem with most "isms" like libertarianism, fascism, communism, in that for the concept to work those at the top can't be douchebags but if its one thing thousands of years of history has taught us is those at the top will ALWAYS BE douchebags, that's just how that works.
Not to mention DOS makes a kick ass boot environment for many low level diagnostic tools,there is everything from virus scanners to CPU testers that run in DOS so having a free version is quite a nice thing to have.
So between this and DOSBox frankly I don't think we'll have any problems with using legacy or low level apps in the future. Now if only someone will come up with a "Win9XBox" as there is plenty of games that ran great in that OS that are unusable on anything newer and the Win9X hardware is dying out now thanks to the shitty caps.
I've been saying this for quite awhile, if the FOSS community would put their money where their mouth is more companies would be willing to support FOSS. And this isn't just some minor offering, not only has AMD been opening the GPUs as fast as they can but they are moving to Coreboot so for the first time you'll be able to have a fully open system from the BIOS on up.
And when you consider that you can get a 6 core AMD kit for just $260 frankly its not a hard choice. Even though I primarily use Windows I think open hardware is important and competition is vital so I've put my money where my mouth is and have been selling nothing but AMD in my shop for the past 5 years and the customers couldn't be happier. I also put my money where my mouth is with regards to my family, we have 5 desktops and 2 laptops, ALL AMD.
So if you support open hardware then frankly the choice is clear, buy or build AMD for your next system. They have plenty of great desktop chips and if you need a laptop I have gotten several Liano quads for customers and they just love the performance, and if you'd like a really cheap HTPC just pair a Bobcat board with OpenELEC which is a really nice XBMC based Linux with the Fusion drivers baked in. Pair it with one of the Bobcat "VCR style" barebones kits and for less than $200 you can have a damned nice HTPC that sucks less than 18w under load and does full 1080P. Truly a kick ass little system and you can't beat the price.
10 trips to the movies here or 2.4 tanks of gas in my little Ranger, but you are missing the point in that the failure rate on the $100 2TB has been crazy high so you will end up having to pay a LOT more if you don't want to play Russian roulette with your data.
The only 2TB drives I've seen with a very low failure rate has been the Samsung and the Toshiba, the Samsung will cost you $175 when you can find one and the Toshiba is $100 but you have to crack the external to get the drive out.
So honestly most of the 2TB drives you see out there at a decent price are the Seagates and frankly they are junk, youre more likely to have it die inside of 6 months as not.
Well I won't know if you'll see this or not, its the first of the month so my little FOSSie stalker managed to get a few mod points, personally I think its funny as shit that he sits there foaming at the mouth and just waiting for the day he can get a mod point but whatever.
But its obvious you haven't looked at how these controllers actually work so in the interest of saving you some grief if you ever run into this problem I'll explain how they work. you see not only is there a "data map" that is held ONLY in the controller chip so that when you try to switch chips it doesn't know what is data and what is empty, but these chips also have a form of data encryption on them so some third party can't just snatch the chips out of an SSD and recover the data. Guess where the key for the encryption is at?
so while some have had luck in taking each individual chip out and managing to descramble the data unlike HDDs you can NOT simply swap controllers, all you get when you do that is 2 dead drives instead of 1. Frankly what they need to do is have a read only ARM controller as a backup so that if the main controller fails it'll put the drive in "read only" mode and allow you to recover the data. if any company were to do this frankly they'd make money hand over fist as they'd have the first "fail proof" SSDs but right now if the controller goes? You are SOL.
Bullshit, that is the same bullshit the press has been spewing and its as much bullshit as saying "Well now that the real estate bubble has burst houses are worthless now"
Look its actually REALLY simple, okay? the period between 1993-2005 was a BUBBLE, no different than the housing bubble or financial bubble or any other bubble, it was an UN-NATURAL CONDITION brought about by what we now call the "MHz War". you look at PC sales before the MHz war, how often did people replace PCs? Every 5-7 years. Now that the bubble is over how often will people be replacing PCs? Every 5-7 years. As a guy down here in the trenches I can tell you that not only is the PC NOT "going away" but frankly most folks? Up to their asses in PCs. Before the bubble most had only ONE PC, now most have a PC for every member of their family PLUS one or more laptops.
But the simple fact is once we moved away from simply raising the MHz of a single core into multiple cores PCs went right past "good enough" and straight into "insanely overpowered" for most users. I mean look at what I was selling on my LOW END builds FIVE years ago: A phenom X3 with 3GB-4GB of RAM and a 300GB-500GB HDD. Now how many of your average users are gonna max out that system? Damned few. On the laptop side i was selling Turion X2s with 2GB of RAM and 250Gb HDDs. Now how many people are gonna have needs when they are mobile that that system won't handle? Again damned few.
You want a perfect example of the "typical PC user" just look at my dad, he runs Skype, checks his webmail, does FB, runs his QuickBooks and burns DVDs, about as bog standard as you can get. When the Phenom X6s got cheap i thought "Well it has been a few years since i built that Phenom I X4 for dad, maybe I should see if its time to replace it" so I ran a 3 week monitoring of his system load and then checked the results, what did I find? 43%, that was the MAX he had gotten with the system and that turned out to be a hung browser tab, when I removed that anomaly he averaged less than 35% load. I checked his Core Duo desktop at the shop, similar results.
So the problem with MSFT is NOT Linux, and its NOT mobile anything, although from the way Ballmer is burning the damned company down trying to be Apple you'd think otherwise, but the real problem is they, like many on wall Street during the housing bubble, expected the bubble to last forever. Frankly MSFT could be making money hand over fist if they'd quit trying to ape Apple and ape IBM instead, sell services to that huge install base, but like most short sighted CEOs Ballmer only cares about being "hip and trendy" but no matter how many times he clicks his heels together and says "There's no place like Cupertino,There's no place like Cupertino," you simply can't turn MSFT into Apple and trying to force an iOS style OS onto the desktop is just running off new purchasers.
But at the end of the day the PC is going nowhere, the amount of crap you'd have to plug into a tablet to make it equal the power of even a 4 year old PC would make it a bloated mess so people will continue to buy PCs, they'll continue to buy laptops, they just won't be replacing them every 3 years like they had to do from 93-05 is all. But at the end of the day the amount of power X86 gives you at frankly an absurdly low cost still makes having a PC VERY attractive but that same absurd amount of power means you just don't need to replace as often, that's all. Hell I personally LOVE to play FPS games and used to have to build a new machines every year, now I'm playing on a 3 year old X6 and feel no need to upgrade, the chips are just too damned powerful for even the games to slam anymore. so unless some "killer app" comes along that can blow through anything less than an octo-core i just don't see people needing to replace that often, doesn't mean there isn't still plenty of money to be made in PCs though.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, you nailed the problem right on the head. I only shop at Steam sales as Valve has spoiled me to low price gaming and even just buying the best deals from the Steam sales and the THQ Humble Bundle I ended up with something like 150GB+ worth of games, my game folder is getting awfully close to 500GB and I've only been using Steam a little over 2 years.
So for those of us that like to play games the size of SSDs quickly becomes an issue, you look at the sweet spot on SSD prices and its still at 64GB although 128GB are just now starting to get a decent price. if things continue at this pace it'll be a good 6+ years before we see a 500GB SSD under $150 and of course by then the next gen consoles will be out and the graphics (and file sizes) will have been cranked up another notch.
I'm just glad I managed to score myself 4TB worth of Samsung drives (1TB OS, 2TB data, 1TB external) before the flood, those 3 drives cost me less than $120 all told. If they drop their prices back to pre-flood levels? I'll be happy to add another 2TB internal and 2TB external but right now SSDs are just too small for anything but my netbook. Hell I can't even justify switching my netbook, it has 8GB of RAM and so once the OS is loaded it all runs from RAM and having a 320GB HDD lets me keep plenty of movies and shows on it if I'm stuck somewhere and bored. I'd need at least a 256GB SSD to be a decent replacement and those are still pretty crazy on the prices.
You can get a 100 pack for $22, that is 470GB for $22 or around 22c a disc, where can I get HDDs for that price? And the problem is its damned hard to find decent 2TB drives, the Seagates are just trash and the WDs I've found to be hit or miss. If I could find Samsung or Toshiba drives at a decent price I'd be right there with ya but ATM the only drives they have at affordable prices are the Seagates and the only reason they are so cheap is the word has gotten out about the high failure rates. go to sites system builders use like Newegg and see the reviews of the Seagates, you find rows of 1 star ratings where guys bought 5-10 drives at a pop and the whole bunch didn't even last a year.
at least with the DVD once its been burnt and checks that is it, keep it in a cool dry place and it'll be good 9 years from now. You'll be lucky if your drives even make it past warranty if they are Seagates and you are rolling the dice if they are WD. I hope you have enough space to have backups for your backups friend.
Why would the controllers failing make you want to look at SSDs again? And all I can tell you is what I see here at the shop and we don't get much call for the SSDs that plug in like RAM, that's enterprise stuff and we deal with mostly SMBs and home users. But what I have seen is that it doesn't seem to matter who makes the drive, Kingston, Samsung, Intel, avoid OCZ like the plague because like Seagate over 500GB they are just trash, but no matter who makes the drive with the MLCs you are looking at VERY high drive controller failure rates.
The worst part is the way the drives are designed, if a controller dies on a HDD? you can swap the board with one of the same model and usually get the data off. with the SSDs however not only is the controller soldered to the PCB but they have the data encrypted and guess where it keeps the key to decrypt? You guessed it, in the now dead controller.
Some have suggested I tell my customers to encrypt everything but how much overhead does that add? Kinda pointless to go SSD if you are having to use a chunk of the performance gains just to be prepared for a drive failure. So far I haven't found any benches on using encryption on an SSD and after seeing so many failures I don't currently have any in stock. Like most of the other shops I have been buying up 400GB-500GB drives since these hard drives have the least amount of failures but they are getting harder to find, as is the Samsung, Hitachi, and Toshiba drives, all of which were quite good even up to 2TB.
And as far as RAID? Good luck with that, frankly from what I've seen less than 5 drives you really aren't improving your odds and with RAID 1 it seemed like they were more likely to have both drives go tits up then not. Of course when you look up how much it'll cost to run RAID with 5 SSDs you'll have a heart attack, not exactly the most cost effective way to do things. If you were my customer and wanted to go SSD? Get yourself one or even 2 HDDs in external enclosures, preferably by different manufacturers or at least different batches and then BACK UP RELIGIOUSLY because while that SSD may be greased lightning it WILL fail on you, oh and if you don't want to send a drive full of your data to some third world country you probably should take the hit and encrypt, otherwise kiss the warranty bye bye.
And? I have a triple boot and don't want to mess with multiple partitions for software installs on those 3 OSes.
That is why I've been moving into HTPC and security system installs, I already found out dealing with the phone and tablet companies simply aren't worth it. We have one guy in town that works on phones and when I went to ask him how he managed to deal with the asshole companies he simply opened his back door and there he had a giant heated garage, bigger than my shop, full of NOTHING but cell phones. he has to do that just so he can get the parts...fuck that noise.
And I gotta second the Samsung, I have all my systems running on Samsungs because of how low the failure rates were. If you can find any Toshiba or Hitatchi drives those are both damned good too, in fact I'd take a refurb by any of those 3 companies over a brand new 1TB Seagate any day of the week. I've been seeing the same thing when it comes to the 1TB and 2TB drives,, Samsunbg, Toshiba, and Hitachi work well, WD are hit or miss, Seagate is made of fail.
I usually tell my customers to get 2 drives though, one internal and one external so that if one fails they have a backup. Not sure about the BR discs as I haven't seen any long term studies on how good the dye lasts. DVDs work well for small files and I have plenty of those pushing a decade old that still read, but as I learned when DVDs first came out you'll get some really shitty companies cashing in (Staples brand anyone?) so I tend to be more cautious when it comes to backups. The WD green drives make for decent externals and their 1TB failure rate isn't nearly as high so that with a Caviar blue internal is usually enough for my customers.
Oh and my customers did NOT buy OCZ as some have suggested, I'd never recommend that trash, most bought Kingston and Intel, the failures rates were just as high. They just haven't figured out how to deal with the controller issue yet and until they do I just can't recommend an SSD for anything you'd care about if you lost it. But you are right we shops are dying out pretty quickly, we've gone from 6 in my area to just 3 and I bet the old guy in the middle of town will be closed down soon enough. They are just not selling replacement parts and everything is so proprietary that if you don't keep a warehouse full of damaged units for spare parts you can give it up. This is why I stopped fixing laptops and instead simply offer to move their data over, the price of replacement screens has gotten so high that unless its a $1500 laptop its just not worth fixing. Damned shame as the landfills are gonna be filled to the brim with this junk, but what can you do?
But seriously, how hard is it to put together a couple of PCs and have most of the bases covered? This is WinXP we're talking about, a legacy OS whose heyday has a pretty typical build to go with it.
From my years at the shop if someone asked me to hand them a "typical XP box" it would be a 2.2GHz-3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB-1GB of RAM, a 160GB HDD and an Intel 8xx or 9xx IGP. If you wanted to get as perfect to "middle of the road XP" as possible a 2.6GHz with 512Mb of RAM along with a 160GB HDD and an Intel IGP...there, you just have covered a good 80%+ of the XP boxes out there. If you wanted to be thorough add a Pentium D and an Athlon at 2GHz and you'll have covered the vast majority of XP boxes out there.
Personally I think the board will finally put down the crack pipe and punt kick Ballmer like a 30 yard field return. Hopefully they'll lure one of the actual engineers back, maybe Ozzie or Allchin, who know what windows users want and will be happy to give it to them, starting by killing TIFKAM and making Metro strictly a tablet/phone UI where it belongs. But from the reaction of my customers I'm predicting that win 8 will be a megaflop, making Vista look like a hit by comparison.
The sad part is if they would get a CEO with a brain they could be making money hand over fist. You see the company they should be aping is NOT Apple but IBM, selling services on top of Windows so it won't matter if the user buys the latest and greatest or not as they can still make money off the existing userbase. for examples imagine being able to log into your home PC from work or vice versa as simply as plugging in a flash drive (something you have) and inputting a password (something you know) with MSFT servers taking care of authentication and key management. Or making deals with all the major content providers to sell channels in Windows Media Center, similar to what they used to have with Internet TV only with more channels and the content providers actually on board instead of fighting them. Or how about backporting the Windows appstore to Windows 7 and making deals so that all the free software you have on the machine is updated automatically? No more wondering if your software is out of date, simply hop into the appstore and it'll tell you and have download links ready.
There is just so many ways you can make money from existing users that it isn't funny, all they need is a CEO with some common sense and a knowledge of what the Windows user wants. Hell you could even make money off of all those XP installs, a business doesn't want to upgrade? Just buy a yearly OS extension license and as long as enough companies pay they could keep providing security patches. Just give the customers what they want and watch the money roll in, continue trying to be an ersatz Apple and all they will do is fail fail fail. After all if we wanted an Apple we'd bloody well buy an Apple wouldn't we?
Well from the spec sheet you are correct in that they didn't disable speedstep like they did on previous Celerons but 1.1Ghz is awfully slow for a modern CPU and according to the comparison charts (listed below on the same page i linked to) its bested by a Bobcat E series and even by the Atom N450 on a couple of tests.
Personally I think I'll stick with my E-350 netbook, as it lets me run any OS I wish while still getting 5 hours on a battery. Its nice to see plenty of choices in the low end though and I can't wait to see what Intel's answer to the jaguar is gonna be, having 4-8 cores in a netbook or laptop sounds nice and with any luck it'll make Intel drop their prices on their ULV quads. In any case the next year or so ought to be damned nice for tablets and laptops, plenty of choices and at prices that won't make your wallet cry.
Well I think you are wrong on MSFT, not that investor panic might get Ballmer booted from the big chair, that is possible (although I am not sure if its even possible to "boot Ballmer" as I don't know how his and Gates shares are set up, if like Brin and Page they have supervoting shares or just regular shares) but the part I seriously doubt is them getting out of consoles.
The Xbox line has been profitable for a couple of years now, the XBL income is a steady revenue and from all reports the hardware for the Xbox Next is already a done deal which means contracts for the hardware have already been signed, this would make pulling out more costly than its worth. A much more likely scenario is that the guy brought in to right the ship spinning off mobile and Bing to sink or swim on their own while going back to a more traditional model when it comes to the core OS and then selling services on top ala IBM. The Xbox next would play well into that strategy as it allows them to make deals with content providers to sell services to console users as well as giving them a way to further connect the PC and the Xbox, media extenders and the like.
Now with Blizzard I agree but I don't know if it will take WoW or CoD going tits up to deal a serious blow, after all they have put a LOT of money into the D3 real money market and as we saw with PSN the hackers can cause some serious damage to your brand if they get into the right spots. Imagine some hacker group like Anon getting the CC numbers from the D3 RMM or finding a way to dupe a bunch of high level items and flooding the market? Frankly it wouldn't take much to spook off gamers and the clean up costs can be enormous for something like that.
But my money is still on EA, if its one thing Riccitiello has shown us is that EA has a knack for pissing people off and they seem to be one of the worst for taking an IP and running it into the ground. so honestly I really wouldn't be surprised if EA sinks $150 million plus into some "WoW killer" or "CoD Killer" and then trying to pull a Resident Evil 6 and make it cover every damned demographic that your average PHB can fit into a PPT slide they just cock the whole thing up.
But when a company the size of THQ can end up broken to pieces on the auction block I'd say anything can happen so the next few years ought to be interesting if nothing else.
The only person that need an education is YOU friend, why do you think that one guy puts out "ChrUbuntu" anyway? For his health? No its because the ONLY way to run another OS is with a bootloader hack because "dev mode" does NOT give you an open BIOS, its still as locked down as ever. in fact "dev mode" is just that, a way for developers to test their applications on ChromeOS, its NOT made to allow you to install any alternate OSes.
Again I don't give a flying shit WHO locks down the hardware, locked down hardware is wrong PERIOD. Its wrong when Apple does it, its wrong when MSFT does it, its wrong when Google does it. Just because they say "do no evil" doesn't absolve them of dickish behavior and turning bog standard X86 units into a locked down platform is wrong and very much evil in my book.
I'm sorry LordLimecat but when you are talking about home users bandwidth very much IS an issue, thanks to the shitty caps that residential customers get compared to business class users.
When you look at how much bandwidth something like OnLive would take for your average gamer who plays a couple of hours a night they would only use OnLive for a month because once they got the bill for overage fees (most ISPs have crazy overage charges, some as high as $1.50 a GB if you go over and don't move up to the next tier) that would be the end of that. So honestly even if they managed to magically remove latency the fact that our ISPs oversell like crazy and then just cap everybody means that bandwidth heavy services like OnLive would quickly end up costing more than they are worth.
Believe me I know, as I typically spend anywhere from $40-$70 dollars on the big Steam sales but I'll end up paying more than that in overage fees when the bill comes, but since the next higher tier in my area is more than double what I'm paying now its cheaper to just take the hit 3 or 4 times a year. If someone in my area were to use OnLive they could look forward to a bill with overage fees every single month, it really wouldn't take long for it to be cheaper just to buy a system capable of gaming and then buy the games outright.
All I can tell you is what I've seen at the shop and my gamer customers are up to double digits on their SSDs because of all the controller failures.
And you can take that "warranty" with a BIG ASS pinch of salt, as I have found that damned near NOBODY will claim any of those warranties, why? Because they would have to send the drive back and they have no idea what third world country that busted drive is gonna be sent to or if their data will end up recovered by somebody so they don't risk using the warranty. Hell if my gamer customers would use their warranties they wouldn't have had to buy a drive for the past 3 years but they are afraid their CC numbers will end up in the hands of some hacker in China so they just shitcan 'em.
Finally as for Seagate? Ask any retailer and we'll be happy to tell you that Seagate drives over 500GB are deep fried fail right now. Go to any place system builders get their parts like Newegg and look up the Seagate 1TB and 2TB drives and you'll see post after post saying things like "Bought 10 drives, 4 DOA, 3 dead in a month, the other three are already iffy less than 3 months". If the rumors are true its the fact Seagate took the shitty ARM controllers from Maxtor and this combined with shitty firmware that gets corrupted when it gets hot leads to a condition where the drive will try to write past the end of the platter and ends up crapping all over itself.
But I'm sitting here at the shop working on systems 6 days a week and I can tell you that I can't even remember the last time I had a HDD fail on me that I didn't get SOME warning, either Windows "delayed write failure" errors or Windows corruption or rarely SMART errors. Sadly in the last few years (Since Seagate started putting out junk drives) more and more I've seen SMART used NOT to tell when a drive is failing but instead used as a way to cover up bad drives so the OEMs don't have to honor warranties. In fact I was told a couple of months ago right here by a fellow system builder that if you call Seagate trying to get them to honor their warranty they make you run the latest Seatools which just resets the SMART so it'll claim its no longer seeing errors when it is. Honestly it really wouldn't surprise me as I learned quickly enough to avoid anything over 500GB by Seagate, they really are garbage.
Exactly,I have a lot of customers that would be happy to add another couple of TB for storage and backup purposes....but not at the prices they currently want. I currently have 3TB in my system (1TB OS drive, 2TB data) and wouldn't mind adding another 2TB so I can rip my entire DVD collection and just drop them in a folder but there is no way I'm paying $100+ for a single 2TB drive, not when I paid less than that pre-flood for both the 1TB and 2TB drives put together.
So if the prices go back down to pre flood levels, where i'm paying around $35-40 a TB? I'll be happy to pick up several TB worth of storage but right now its just not worth the higher costs and talking to customers many feel the same, they are sitting on their 650GB-1TB worth of storage and waiting for the costs come down before adding that second drive.
Hell I still find good old DVDs to be quite useful for backup purposes, you can hold a lot of docs and pics on a 4.7GB disc and I have some nearly a decade old and they still read just fine.
And I agree that the Internet just isn't very good at moving large files and if anything its gonna get worse not better as the ISPs continue to oversell capacity without laying new lines. This is why I wasn't surprised at the ISPs all jumping on board the "6 strikes" bullshit as it gives them an easy to use excuse to get rid of anybody that uses even half the bandwidth they paid for.
So I'd be quite surprised if the Xbox next and PS4 don't both come with BR drives, until we can get nationwide fiber discs are still gonna be the easiest way to get a large game to the masses.
And that is the classic "broken window fallacy" as a LOT of those "financial sector" jobs frankly wouldn't be needed if mommy government wasn't pumping piles of money into the stock market in the first place. look at the graphs starting a 3.20 or thereabout, look at how much of the GDP was in the market right before the 29 crash and how much is in there now.
What we have is the government blowing bubbles for their friends on Wall Street and then handing them even MORE money when they pop, any way you slice it this is a bad way to go and when the next bubble bursts I doubt the fed will be able to print their way out of it again.
And I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing this out but its easy to see why and its NOT because of law enforcement. When you look at the single parent homes by race frankly blacks are pretty far ahead when it comes to that metric and its pretty well known and documented by now that single parent homes produce more kids that end up incarcerated than two parent homes.
Now we can sit here and argue all day as to the "why" that is, whether its culture or a side effect of poverty or what but in any case you can't bitch about the numbers just because you don't like what they say. If someone with "X" for a name is more likely to be arrested then that is what the search engine is gonna return, can't blame the engine for crunching numbers as that is what they do. Whether we like it or not more blacks are born to single parent homes and those that are raised in single parent homes are more likely to be criminals than those that have 2 parents, that's just the way it is folks.