Actually if anything I have a feeling HDDs are gonna have a "bounce" in a year or two as all those that got cheap SSDs get burnt when they flip the switch and find all their data gone.
The problem with SSDs is frankly they have never really licked the controller issues and as they add more space the problem just seems to be getting worse. I have honestly never seen an SSD die from the cells being used up but I have seen a LOT of SSDs that had the controller fail and take the drive out. Over at coding horror they labeled this the hot/crazy scale in that to get the hot performance of SSDs you had to put up with the crazy failure rates. While those of us who are religious about backups won't have a problem with this most folks are NOT religious about backups and WILL get bit in the ass when they flip the switch one day and just find their data gone forever.
So I have a feeling when all those cheapo SSDs start going tits up there is gonna be a lot of folks that write off the tech and go back to HDDs, say what you will about HDDs they usually give you plenty of warning before going tits up.
And THIS, this right here, is why their sales are falling. Before the flood I was getting 1TB drives at around $40 and 2TB drives for around $65 but since the flood prices have been close to double that so I simply haven't been buying. If the prices come down? Sure I'd be happy to add another couple of TB of storage, but I'm not gonna pay premium price just to add more space.
Uhhh...what EXACTLY is there to understand? The guy said that movie quality CGI is possible in real time and looking at the football stadium full of computers required to render "The Lord Of The Rings" which is over 16 years old shows that to be total bullshit.
I mean sure if you had infinite money to build a high rise filled with nothing but tesla cards sure it would be POSSIBLE, but it sure as hell ain't gonna be done by this company or any other and actually make a cent in profit as the cost of all those machines (plus power and cooling) will be more than they could ever make selling the service.
So sorry but he is full of shit unless you count "movie CGI" to be on the level of the first Tron from 1982, anything made in the early 90s or later is just gonna take more horse than is possible for this company to muster.
I think the next ET will come from EA, you look at how much money they are shoveling to their triple A titles like Dead Space 3 and they are quickly getting to the point that they will have to sell more games than there are players of a specific genre just to break even. My guess is EA is gonna crank out some $150 million plus triple A title and have it so spread out, trying to cover every possible demographic for "mass appeal" that it'll appeal to nobody and go down in a giant ball of flames, just as Atari bet the farm on ET and had it cripple the company when it went tits up.
Just go DIY, then you can have it YOUR way and run whatever you want. From the specs you listed it sounds like you want this kit which is an i5 with 12GB of RAM, although personally I'd say the best bang for the buck is this AMD kit which gives you 6 cores and 8GB of RAM for less than $250.
I've built a couple of the 1045T based kits and they are pretty nice, I'd change out the stock cooler for a Hyper 212 or N520 though as they drop the temps pretty significantly over the stock coolers.
Not to mention Windows 8 got a lousy 2.25% marketshare and that was with MSFT selling Win 8 Pro at just $40! Now that they have raised the price of Windows 8 to $110 for Home and $200 for Pro? Yeah I don't see those numbers climbing much after this.
I can tell you that as a retailer this is the first MSFT OS since WinME I'm actively not carrying, I've got nothing but bad feedback from those that tried the Win 8 units in the shop. From what I've seen if there is a Win 7 unit and a Win 8 unit side by side the Win 8 unit can have better hardware but nobody will care, they will pass right by it to buy the Win 7 unit.
so while MSFT may be able to sell some tablets and cellphones with win 8 on the desktop and laptop nobody wants metro, they just don't like the UI. Can't say as I blame 'em either, I tried running Metro and was planning on using it 6 months but after the first 3 weeks I was ready to pull my hair out and going back to Win 7 felt like a breath of fresh air, its just not a good UI for a keyboard and mouse.
But does Intel still cripple the power saving features in the mobile Celeron? This is one of the reasons I always stuck with AMD in mobile, Intel was too quick to kill useful power saving features in their mobile chips to try to force an upsell. if you want to kill features like hyperthreading or virtualization fine Intel but killing useful power saving features like advanced Speedstep is just DUMB.
I'd say the answer to whether our teen series planes are more than a match can easily be answered by looking at Israel, they have gone up against the best Russian tech and bitchslapped them right out of the sky. frankly our missiles have such high accuracy and long range that an F15 or F16 fully loaded with missiles can easily dominate the sky, the whole "stealth" bullshit was for fighting the Russians who had invested a ton in radar, now that WWIII in Europe is off the table the potential enemies we have now just doesn't rate needing "techno turkeys" like the F35 that again will end up just like the F22 spending more time on the ground being fixed than they will in the air.
As for the carriers? I would argue any more than 4 is just a waste, 4 of our modern carriers can blacken the sky with craft and again our missiles means that wave of aircraft can just blast anything in their path right out of the sky. Now that both russia and China have sea skimmers (range 900 miles plus, over 90% accuracy) having giant floatillas of boats just makes for a big slow moving target to anybody technically advanced and so worthless, and for those that aren't advanced enough to field sea skimmers frankly a couple of carriers will blow any country like Iran all to hell with little risk.
The only place where I would argue we need to spend money is we need to make more A-10 Warthogs, its becoming pretty damned obvious that on future battlefield the Warthog is gonna be worth its weight in gold for enemy ground suppression yet we have less than 500 of these all told. We should kill the F-35, buy more F-15 and F-16 to replace the aging fleet, let the marines field their own F-15s instead of needing VTOL or at least give 'em a load of Warthogs, and quit acting like its WWII and building these giant carrier fleets that are gonna be nothing but sitting ducks if we actually go against somebody that can put up a fight.
I mean here we are in the middle of the era of IEDs and enemy troops fighting from caves yet we are building like we are facing the USSR in the European theater, its just a stupid pointless waste of money we don't have.
I doubt even that would help here in the states as we have seen the ISPs get nastier every year when it comes to caps and throttling. Hell in my area I usually end up paying more in overage charges during the Steam sales than I do for the games themselves, so who is gonna want to use their game service if they end up paying two to three times more than just buying a retail copy?
Lets face it as long as the ISPs care more about bumping their stock prices and giving their CEOs mega-bonuses than actually laying lines shit like this just ain't gonna fly. We saw the same thing during the dotbomb where so many pushed the "thin client" model only to find out bandwidth costs ended up eating any savings they had from running fat clients, OnLive will find the same as users buy their service only to cancel the next month when they get a $200 bandwidth bill from little Johnny playing OnLive.
Hell we saw the ISPs trip over themselves to join the 6 strikes bandwagon because it gave them an excuse to toss anybody that uses even half of what they promise, you honestly think they are gonna go for a service like OnLive?
Not to mention with the ChromeBook all you are doing is trading the openness of X86 for a system that is as locked down as a cellphone. With a Windows laptop i can be booting up in under 10 minutes with any flavor of Linux or BSD that I want, I'm not beholden to ANYBODY to continue support of the machine as its mine and i can run what I want. With ChromeOS you have to 1.-Go into "dev mode", 2.-Wipe the OS completely (no dual boot allowed!), 3.-After all that you can run ONE and ONLY ONE OS, and that is a bootloader hacked version of ubuntu run by just one guy. if he quits hacking Ubuntu bootloaders or doesn't support your ChromeBook? Tough shit, regular Linux and BSd WILL NOT RUN on a ChromeBook.
So while i'm all for breaking up the MSFT monopoly on X86 this is NOT the way to go about it, we are trading one corporation for another that is worse in every single way. With Windows laptops if you don't like the latest from MSFT, or they no longer support your hardware who cares? You have dozens of distros to choose from that will have updated software so your device is still usable. With this you're getting the worst of X86 (shorter battery life, more heat) and the worst of ARM (locked down hardware, little support outside the OEM) with the upsides of neither.
What we need is an open laptop running the latest Android NOT a locked down Internet only OS. There are still a lot of places where free WiFi isn't available and if all the ISPs go to 6 strikes you can kiss free WiFi goodbye anyway so unless these have a SIM card slot and you buy a data plan they are gonna be paperweights quickly enough. Maybe its just me but I want a system i can use offline and on, that I can put whatever OS I want onto, and which isn't gonna be locked down like a cellphone and be a PITA for other OSes to support.
I thought MSFT locking systems down with UEFI was wrong, and its still wrong if a company does it while claiming they "do no evil". So I hope these bomb, maybe they'll give us open Android systems instead.
Why is this labeled flamebait and not insightful? The carriers have you by the short hairs and THEY KNOW THIS so they'll get ever shittier with their plans and fees because where are you gonna go? The other guys will simply match the douchebag policies as it makes them more $$$ and since most areas only have good service by one carrier you can take it or do without a cellphone. In my area Verizon service is hit or miss so if you don't like AT&T's policies? Too bad, its take it or leave it.
Like it or not we are at the mercy of the carriers, they can do any damned thing they want and we can't do shit but take it or do without, that's it. We see the same thing with the ISPs with their shitty caps and ever higher prices, because where you gonna go? You gonna give up your job and your home just to move to an area with "better" service that can turn to shit tomorrow without warning? of course not and they know this, so whether you like it or not the future is data plans and extra fees whether you want the service or not.
I can tell you this is NOT just about the iPhone as i went through the same shit with my dad's HTC Android phone, we got him the phone because the big screen made it easier for him to manage his phone book, he NEVER uses data on the thing, yet we have to pay for a data plan because they won't let a smartphone on their network without a data plan PERIOD.
While I can't speak about Lotus (and from what I understand its all but abandoned so its not like you are gonna pick up a new copy anyway) I can speak about WordPerfect and frankly? Its only really useful in the legal profession as its formatting is the default formatting for legal briefs, for everywhere else? its support of Office formatting and files is really poor and if you try to open a complex doc in it you are gonna get word salad.
As far as the ribbon many of my customers just customized the mini-bar and didn't use the ribbon at all, and if you really like the old way there are third party programs that will give you a 2K3 style UI in 2K7 or later. But if you are using spreadsheets and doing anything with any complexity AT ALL then MS Office is pretty much the only game in town, although its easy enough to pick up a copy of 2K3 and do your work in that. Again what MSFT is finding out is their previous versions are "good enough" for most businesses so they see no need to jump on the upgrade bandwagon, hell I personally still use MS Office 2K on my netbook as the compatibility pack lets me open the later formats while having a VERY low footprint, just perfect for a netbook.
But frankly unixsc you're pretty much stuck as MS Office and LO are pretty much the only games in town and Sun's piss poor treatment of Open office has left it pretty damned far behind MS Office, especially Calc and Base which I wouldn't consider an equal to Excel and Access 97, much less 2K3 or 2K7, they just aren't very good. you can of course try them free but in that case you get what you pay for, they just aren't very nice at all. Hell last version of LO I tried making a bog standard DB using Base's own wizard and damned if it didn't crash and corrupt the DB while it was at it. You can really tell that Writer was the only one getting any love from Sun, as while Writer is roughly at Office 97 or even office 2K levels the rest of the suite isn't even up to office 95, they really are piss poor.
You'd honestly be better off with gnumeric if you just had to use a FOSS solution but even then its just nowhere near feature parity.
Because frankly what Valve does or does not do means exactly jack and shit? You can find cracks to EVERY Steam game out there at places like Gamecopyworld in less than 20 minutes flat so who cares? Hell there are plenty of legit publishers that have gone under over the years but as long as I can play the game why should i give a shit?
This is why Steam's DRM doesn't bother me, its beyond trivial to bypass so I'm not depending on any company existing in the future just to play my games. But considering the fact that Valve is the ONLY company that i know of that has doubled profits 7 years in a row I honestly don't think Valve going tits up is something that is a realistic possibility in the foreseeable future. But even if for the sake of argument they DO go tits up 5 minutes in Google and it'll be no different than if you bought the retail, hell many of the cracks on gamecopyworld are based on the Steam version so no big whoop. The only major difference is you paid less than you would have for a boxed copy so who cares? Hell even the boxed copy a lot of times are just the Steam game on a disc so its not like you are gaining any advantage by buying boxes anymore.
Oh I NEVER said it was a fluke, it took Jobs the better part of his lifetime to build that branding up, I'm just pointing out quality is a VERY small part of the equation. As I said i know a lot of folks who bought an iPhone NOT because of the tech or the quality but simply to be seen using an iPhone, it was the elitist nature of the branding that made it appeal to them NOT any kind of measurable quality difference.
I mean why do you think getting burned by the Nvidia Bumpgate didn't hurt the Apple brand like it did HP and the others that also got burnt? Because Apple is the brand of the rich, no different than Lexus or BMW and like those its not the quality of the individual product, although if they put out several stinkers in a row I'm sure it would hurt, but the fact that the price gives the illusion of affluence which is what many are buying into. Like $6 cups of coffee and $400 sneakers its not about the quality as much as you can afford to blow the money, if you can just blow cash like that it makes you "better off" than the guy that can't.
Actually you haven't taken a good look at "bath salts" as they make solvents look like beer. My ex goes to visit her ex once every 6 months at the mental institution, he has been there for 3 years now. He did bath salts ONE time and was found digging chunks out of his body with a knife because he thought there were things living under his skin. To this day he is EXTREMELY paranoid and a danger to himself and others, and he did exactly ONE dose of bath salts, that's all it took.
So while I agree that given a choice most will go for the less dangerous drugs i have known "huff heads" as we call them here and while they are seriously burnt I have never seen anything that causes so much long term damage so fast as some of the bath salts being sold out there. I have a customer that is a cop and when they first hit the news i asked him about them, this is a guy that believes most drugs should be legal as long as you aren't driving or doing them while taking care of kids but even he said these things are just too damned dangerous because of how quickly it can make the person into a violent animal. He said he has NEVER in his 12 years on the force seen anything like this, even those that got a hold of some bad angel dust he said would usually be alright once it wore off but not bath salts, a single dose can give them a permanent bad trip that leaves them a paranoid mess.
You can have living wills, you can also refuse treatment, but again this has NOTHING to do with "rising healthcare costs" it has to do with congress being addicted to control and spending YOUR money!
This is why I told folks that they had better fight for the smokers because they would be the canary in the coalmine, if they ever drove down smoking they WOULD simply move to something else to get their money fix, and what are we seeing now? Proposals for soda taxes and red meat taxes and fat taxes because at the end of the day its ALL about taxes, the congress critters couldn't give less of a fuck about the "cost of healthcare". After all if they did they would allow collective bargaining across the board, put limits on the amount of profit per drug instead of letting them gouge as high as 8000% over costs on life saving drugs, and allow a single payer option.
But if they did THAT they wouldn't get all those juicy kickbacks from big pharma and at the end of the day its ALL about money.
I'm afraid you can give up on the xbox 1, you'd think since it was an X86 Celeron that an emulator would be a done deal but for some reason nobody ever really bothered. Luckily you CAN find a couple of really good PS2 emulators on the net and since most games came out for both systems you can just run the PS2 version.
As far as using your own discs frankly I would just go to a site like Emuparadise and download the ISOs and run those instead, you can't read GC games with a normal DVD player and many DVD players won't read the PS2 discs so its just easier in the long run to just download the ISOs. This also gives you the advantage of just having all your games in a folder on your hard drive so no needing to hop up to switch discs, you can just kick back and switch through the emulator.
But I can tell you my youngest nephew was a console maniac until I showed him the wonders of emulators and Steam, now he has all his older consoles right there at his fingertips and of course the frequent Steam sales makes PC gaming a HELL of a lot cheaper than console gaming by a pretty big amount. You can build a really nice AMD unit for less than $450 that will not only play all the latest and greatest but with emulators you can plug in your favorite controller and have everything from the Atari on up right there ready to go.
Its just so much nicer and not only can you have all the games at your fingertips but by using a combo of file2folder GUI and Media Center Master you can rip all your DVDs and have them loaded WITH the box art and synopsis so every movie you've ever liked is right there at your fingertips. I'd say that even more than gaming is what is selling my customers on HTPCs as everybody has large DVD collections nowadays and with this you're not hunting for discs, dealing with scratches or other bullshit, its all instant and on demand.
All I can give you is my own experience at the shop, as I don't think anybody actually tracks the number of PCs in the living room but I can tell you since HDMI became standard on graphics cards I've seen a pretty damned big uptick in sales of PCs for the living room, in fact its my second most popular build after office systems.
But that is why its gonna be hard to come up with concrete figures as frankly ANY PC can be plugged into a TV in seconds now, HDMI is pretty much everywhere. Hell even my netbook does 1080P over HDMI and its honestly been awhile since i found a board that didn't come with HDMI output. As for me since geeks has cards that fit any budget and it doesn't take that much horse to play the games most folks want to play most of my customers are going ahead and adding a discrete to their new build, for the longest time it was the HD4850 as those cards were monsters and dirt cheap but now its starting to lean more the 67xx and 77xx cards.
But I'd say Valve has been pretty good at promoting big picture mode and pointing out how easy it is to just hook the PC to the TV and with the hardware being cheap and plentiful a lot of folks are catching on that it isn't a big deal to just plug straight into the PC. Honestly its an easy sale, all I have to do at the shop is show them how Windows Media Center has all my ripped movies in a nice easy to flip through library with box art and synopsis and follow it up with firing up Just Cause II or Batman AC and letting them see how smooth they look and its "Hey I want MY PC to do that!" Cha ching, easy sale.
This is why I've been saying for years we need to quit wasting money on billion dollar boondoggles like the F-35 and the Ford carrier, I mean who in the hell are we supposed to fight that we won't be super duper insanely overpowered compared to?
How many carriers do we have? 10, how many does anybody that is a viable possible adversary in the future? NONE. The Russians have an old cruiser/carrier that doesn't even have a full crew or plane load on board and is more just to say they have one, the Chinese bought a rusting hulk from the Russians that is roughly the size of one of our jeep carriers, no comparison to our super carriers. For the amount of money we've shit down the drain on the F-22 and F-35 we could have a whole fleet of Stealth Eagles and Fighting Falcons and as the Israelis have shown these designs still kick some serious ass, especially when compared to what the enemy is likely to have.
Frankly our military has become this giant bloated monster that acts like the cold war is still going on instead of facing reality which is any potential enemy is decades behind us. the new Iranian "super fighter" they just started showing off? According to Jane's its just a knockoff of the old F-5 Freedom Fighter we sold to the Shah back in the early 70s and that thing wasn't state of the art THEN, the whole point of the Freedom Fighter was to sell it to countries where we didn't want our best tech falling into enemy hands. Again according to Jane's their choppers are all knockoffs of the old Huey Cobra, just armed with the Russian knockoff of the Sidewinder. North Korea is flying early 70s MiG 19s and 21s, Pakistan and India have their own planes based on 70s designs but they are more likely to shoot at each other than us, and China has too much invested in their export business to want to turn off the west but if you DO consider them a likely adversary (which most don't as wars between nuclear superpowers is suicidal) that just makes all the money we are wasting on giant carrier groups even more pointless as their sea skimmer missiles could just spam a carrier group from over 900 miles away, well out of range of our stealth turkeys like the F-22.
When you are ass deep in debt the LAST thing you need to be doing is wasting money you don't need to and honestly our teen series fighters are more than a match for anything currently out there thanks to our state of the art missile tech. So all we are doing now is pissing money down a drain, makes the defense contractors fat and lazy but it certainly doesn't make this country any safer. You could probably cut our navy in half and still be able to just spam any enemy right off the battlefield, and our pilots need more teen series fighters, not expensive techno turkeys that spend more time on the ground than they do in the air. The whole thing is just a wasteful bloated mess and is long overdue for a good housecleaning.
I think the bigger deal is they don't ask before they do it and while its been awhile since i ran vanilla FF I seem to remember it asking about such things before flipping any switches.
But you should already know what you are getting into if you buy Apple and their being the largest corp on the planet obviously means more people are happy about their way of doing things than not, so if that level of top down control makes you happy? Good for you, I sincerely mean that. I'm all for voting with your wallet and Apple is obviously doing what their customers want or their sales figures would be dropping, so good for them.
Oh wow...that means anybody with an Athlon triple or better ought to have no problem playing the next gen games since Bobcat was AMD's answer to the Atom and isn't a very powerful chip at all. Hell even the link I found on the PS4 notes that the Jaguar is an "entry level laptop and tablet chip".
Don't get me wrong, I have an E350 based netbook and wouldn't give it up for the world but one does have to accept some limitations when it comes to the bobcat design. Sure it just sips power but on the flipside its meant to have the GPU take a good chunk of the load off, I just don't see how with even 8 of those chips they are gonna be doing the heavy physics that people expect in modern games. Maybe they'll have a dedicated physics chip? In any case i'm glad i built the boys a new quad and hexacore as they should have no problem keeping up with modern games, i'll just have to switch out their HD4850s in a few months for HD7770s and all will be golden.
Yeah and my ass can "basically" fly south for the winter, i just haven't gotten a high enough flap rate on my ass cheeks.
I mean do I REALLY have to post the benches which show you kill half the cores and the benches go UP and not down? And I've been building AMD exclusively for over 5 years now so if anybody wants them to come out with kick ass chips I do but the "half core" design honestly just doesn't work. you look at the arch for Bulldozer followed by Piledriver and then Excavator and you can see they are going AWAY from the half core design because it hobbles performance too much. it gives you frankly lousy single core IPC and in return only VERY modest gains on very heavily threaded loads.
Now will the half core design turn out to be an advantage on consoles? Who knows it certainly didn't on desktops and laptops but since with consoles you are running very specific loads with a highly optimized OS who knows? Personally it makes me happy either way as this will get AMD some much needed predictable revenue and hopefully the ex Apple and Athlon64 chip designer they hired will be able to turn the ship around after the slash and burn the previous CEO did to the company.
But until that day comes as long as I can continue to get socket AM3+ boards and chips cheap I'll stick with AMD and hope they come out with a better design down the line. Lets face it a Stars based Athlon triple makes for a damned good system, even plays games nicely and they just haven't been able to get the bang for the buck crown back with the BD/PD line as they can't get the costs per wafer down. And personally I'll stick with my Thuban X6, 6 true cores and turbocore for just $100 makes for a damned good cheap gaming PC and should have no problem playing games for the next gen consoles with a good GPU like the HD 7770.
I just don't get why this is such a big whoop, 20 minutes on the web will show you how to make a USB bootable Windows and has had the articles for over a decade, its just MSFT didn't support it. Frankly I don't know how much "support" you'll get from MSFT on Windows to go either so I don't see what the big diff is.
Hell maybe I'm missing an angle but to me Windows to go seems more like a solution in search of a problem, we geeks have already known how to make bootable CDs for years and what would Joe Average do with the thing? Most coffee shops aren't gonna let you reboot their PCs and in an office wouldn't roaming profiles make more sense?
And how many Air Jordans are sold each year? it would be hard to argue that Air Jordans are in any way "better" than any other sneaker but its the BRANDING that allows them to sell at a premium. this is pretty much Apple in a nutshell which is why you'll never see Apple try to take the low end markets even though there is good money to be made there, part of their appeal is how expensive they are. Just look at how Porsche tried to put out a low priced model to compete with Camaro and their sales nearly evaporated until they quit selling the low end model, it made the whole brand look cheap.
The little ugly underbelly nobody likes to talk about is a big selling point with the masses is the elitism of Apple and keeping up with the neighbors, i know several who bought iPhones and just use them for dumbphones as it was NOT about the tech, it was about being seen with an iPhone. Let me put it THIS way: You think an app called "I am rich" could have been sold on ANY other platform BUT Apple?
Then the problem isn't with me, the problem is you can't understand basic concepts. If the majority of the population were for murder for hire? Then yes your laws against such would be a waste of time, you are raising your hand and expecting it to stop the tide and its just not gonna work.
But while its pretty obvious by the fact that our streets aren't filled with murderers that murder for hire is NOT condoned by the masses the consuming of various drugs IS, the only question is to what extent. Some are for only legalizing pot, others for legalizing all, still others for something in between. My personal rule of thumb is if its a drug that so powerful it can leave the person with lifelong mental illness and brain damage from a single usage? then its probably just too damned risky to allow, unless the populace is willing to pay for the lifelong mental treatment of those that get burnt.
But you are just building straw men to knock down which is just wasting your time and mine for what? what purpose does your building straw men serve the discourse?
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Actually if anything I have a feeling HDDs are gonna have a "bounce" in a year or two as all those that got cheap SSDs get burnt when they flip the switch and find all their data gone.
The problem with SSDs is frankly they have never really licked the controller issues and as they add more space the problem just seems to be getting worse. I have honestly never seen an SSD die from the cells being used up but I have seen a LOT of SSDs that had the controller fail and take the drive out. Over at coding horror they labeled this the hot/crazy scale in that to get the hot performance of SSDs you had to put up with the crazy failure rates. While those of us who are religious about backups won't have a problem with this most folks are NOT religious about backups and WILL get bit in the ass when they flip the switch one day and just find their data gone forever.
So I have a feeling when all those cheapo SSDs start going tits up there is gonna be a lot of folks that write off the tech and go back to HDDs, say what you will about HDDs they usually give you plenty of warning before going tits up.
And THIS, this right here, is why their sales are falling. Before the flood I was getting 1TB drives at around $40 and 2TB drives for around $65 but since the flood prices have been close to double that so I simply haven't been buying. If the prices come down? Sure I'd be happy to add another couple of TB of storage, but I'm not gonna pay premium price just to add more space.
Uhhh...what EXACTLY is there to understand? The guy said that movie quality CGI is possible in real time and looking at the football stadium full of computers required to render "The Lord Of The Rings" which is over 16 years old shows that to be total bullshit.
I mean sure if you had infinite money to build a high rise filled with nothing but tesla cards sure it would be POSSIBLE, but it sure as hell ain't gonna be done by this company or any other and actually make a cent in profit as the cost of all those machines (plus power and cooling) will be more than they could ever make selling the service.
So sorry but he is full of shit unless you count "movie CGI" to be on the level of the first Tron from 1982, anything made in the early 90s or later is just gonna take more horse than is possible for this company to muster.
I think the next ET will come from EA, you look at how much money they are shoveling to their triple A titles like Dead Space 3 and they are quickly getting to the point that they will have to sell more games than there are players of a specific genre just to break even. My guess is EA is gonna crank out some $150 million plus triple A title and have it so spread out, trying to cover every possible demographic for "mass appeal" that it'll appeal to nobody and go down in a giant ball of flames, just as Atari bet the farm on ET and had it cripple the company when it went tits up.
Just go DIY, then you can have it YOUR way and run whatever you want. From the specs you listed it sounds like you want this kit which is an i5 with 12GB of RAM, although personally I'd say the best bang for the buck is this AMD kit which gives you 6 cores and 8GB of RAM for less than $250.
I've built a couple of the 1045T based kits and they are pretty nice, I'd change out the stock cooler for a Hyper 212 or N520 though as they drop the temps pretty significantly over the stock coolers.
Not to mention Windows 8 got a lousy 2.25% marketshare and that was with MSFT selling Win 8 Pro at just $40! Now that they have raised the price of Windows 8 to $110 for Home and $200 for Pro? Yeah I don't see those numbers climbing much after this.
I can tell you that as a retailer this is the first MSFT OS since WinME I'm actively not carrying, I've got nothing but bad feedback from those that tried the Win 8 units in the shop. From what I've seen if there is a Win 7 unit and a Win 8 unit side by side the Win 8 unit can have better hardware but nobody will care, they will pass right by it to buy the Win 7 unit.
so while MSFT may be able to sell some tablets and cellphones with win 8 on the desktop and laptop nobody wants metro, they just don't like the UI. Can't say as I blame 'em either, I tried running Metro and was planning on using it 6 months but after the first 3 weeks I was ready to pull my hair out and going back to Win 7 felt like a breath of fresh air, its just not a good UI for a keyboard and mouse.
But does Intel still cripple the power saving features in the mobile Celeron? This is one of the reasons I always stuck with AMD in mobile, Intel was too quick to kill useful power saving features in their mobile chips to try to force an upsell. if you want to kill features like hyperthreading or virtualization fine Intel but killing useful power saving features like advanced Speedstep is just DUMB.
I'd say the answer to whether our teen series planes are more than a match can easily be answered by looking at Israel, they have gone up against the best Russian tech and bitchslapped them right out of the sky. frankly our missiles have such high accuracy and long range that an F15 or F16 fully loaded with missiles can easily dominate the sky, the whole "stealth" bullshit was for fighting the Russians who had invested a ton in radar, now that WWIII in Europe is off the table the potential enemies we have now just doesn't rate needing "techno turkeys" like the F35 that again will end up just like the F22 spending more time on the ground being fixed than they will in the air.
As for the carriers? I would argue any more than 4 is just a waste, 4 of our modern carriers can blacken the sky with craft and again our missiles means that wave of aircraft can just blast anything in their path right out of the sky. Now that both russia and China have sea skimmers (range 900 miles plus, over 90% accuracy) having giant floatillas of boats just makes for a big slow moving target to anybody technically advanced and so worthless, and for those that aren't advanced enough to field sea skimmers frankly a couple of carriers will blow any country like Iran all to hell with little risk.
The only place where I would argue we need to spend money is we need to make more A-10 Warthogs, its becoming pretty damned obvious that on future battlefield the Warthog is gonna be worth its weight in gold for enemy ground suppression yet we have less than 500 of these all told. We should kill the F-35, buy more F-15 and F-16 to replace the aging fleet, let the marines field their own F-15s instead of needing VTOL or at least give 'em a load of Warthogs, and quit acting like its WWII and building these giant carrier fleets that are gonna be nothing but sitting ducks if we actually go against somebody that can put up a fight.
I mean here we are in the middle of the era of IEDs and enemy troops fighting from caves yet we are building like we are facing the USSR in the European theater, its just a stupid pointless waste of money we don't have.
I doubt even that would help here in the states as we have seen the ISPs get nastier every year when it comes to caps and throttling. Hell in my area I usually end up paying more in overage charges during the Steam sales than I do for the games themselves, so who is gonna want to use their game service if they end up paying two to three times more than just buying a retail copy?
Lets face it as long as the ISPs care more about bumping their stock prices and giving their CEOs mega-bonuses than actually laying lines shit like this just ain't gonna fly. We saw the same thing during the dotbomb where so many pushed the "thin client" model only to find out bandwidth costs ended up eating any savings they had from running fat clients, OnLive will find the same as users buy their service only to cancel the next month when they get a $200 bandwidth bill from little Johnny playing OnLive.
Hell we saw the ISPs trip over themselves to join the 6 strikes bandwagon because it gave them an excuse to toss anybody that uses even half of what they promise, you honestly think they are gonna go for a service like OnLive?
Not to mention with the ChromeBook all you are doing is trading the openness of X86 for a system that is as locked down as a cellphone. With a Windows laptop i can be booting up in under 10 minutes with any flavor of Linux or BSD that I want, I'm not beholden to ANYBODY to continue support of the machine as its mine and i can run what I want. With ChromeOS you have to 1.-Go into "dev mode", 2.-Wipe the OS completely (no dual boot allowed!), 3.-After all that you can run ONE and ONLY ONE OS, and that is a bootloader hacked version of ubuntu run by just one guy. if he quits hacking Ubuntu bootloaders or doesn't support your ChromeBook? Tough shit, regular Linux and BSd WILL NOT RUN on a ChromeBook.
So while i'm all for breaking up the MSFT monopoly on X86 this is NOT the way to go about it, we are trading one corporation for another that is worse in every single way. With Windows laptops if you don't like the latest from MSFT, or they no longer support your hardware who cares? You have dozens of distros to choose from that will have updated software so your device is still usable. With this you're getting the worst of X86 (shorter battery life, more heat) and the worst of ARM (locked down hardware, little support outside the OEM) with the upsides of neither.
What we need is an open laptop running the latest Android NOT a locked down Internet only OS. There are still a lot of places where free WiFi isn't available and if all the ISPs go to 6 strikes you can kiss free WiFi goodbye anyway so unless these have a SIM card slot and you buy a data plan they are gonna be paperweights quickly enough. Maybe its just me but I want a system i can use offline and on, that I can put whatever OS I want onto, and which isn't gonna be locked down like a cellphone and be a PITA for other OSes to support.
I thought MSFT locking systems down with UEFI was wrong, and its still wrong if a company does it while claiming they "do no evil". So I hope these bomb, maybe they'll give us open Android systems instead.
Why is this labeled flamebait and not insightful? The carriers have you by the short hairs and THEY KNOW THIS so they'll get ever shittier with their plans and fees because where are you gonna go? The other guys will simply match the douchebag policies as it makes them more $$$ and since most areas only have good service by one carrier you can take it or do without a cellphone. In my area Verizon service is hit or miss so if you don't like AT&T's policies? Too bad, its take it or leave it.
Like it or not we are at the mercy of the carriers, they can do any damned thing they want and we can't do shit but take it or do without, that's it. We see the same thing with the ISPs with their shitty caps and ever higher prices, because where you gonna go? You gonna give up your job and your home just to move to an area with "better" service that can turn to shit tomorrow without warning? of course not and they know this, so whether you like it or not the future is data plans and extra fees whether you want the service or not.
I can tell you this is NOT just about the iPhone as i went through the same shit with my dad's HTC Android phone, we got him the phone because the big screen made it easier for him to manage his phone book, he NEVER uses data on the thing, yet we have to pay for a data plan because they won't let a smartphone on their network without a data plan PERIOD.
While I can't speak about Lotus (and from what I understand its all but abandoned so its not like you are gonna pick up a new copy anyway) I can speak about WordPerfect and frankly? Its only really useful in the legal profession as its formatting is the default formatting for legal briefs, for everywhere else? its support of Office formatting and files is really poor and if you try to open a complex doc in it you are gonna get word salad.
As far as the ribbon many of my customers just customized the mini-bar and didn't use the ribbon at all, and if you really like the old way there are third party programs that will give you a 2K3 style UI in 2K7 or later. But if you are using spreadsheets and doing anything with any complexity AT ALL then MS Office is pretty much the only game in town, although its easy enough to pick up a copy of 2K3 and do your work in that. Again what MSFT is finding out is their previous versions are "good enough" for most businesses so they see no need to jump on the upgrade bandwagon, hell I personally still use MS Office 2K on my netbook as the compatibility pack lets me open the later formats while having a VERY low footprint, just perfect for a netbook.
But frankly unixsc you're pretty much stuck as MS Office and LO are pretty much the only games in town and Sun's piss poor treatment of Open office has left it pretty damned far behind MS Office, especially Calc and Base which I wouldn't consider an equal to Excel and Access 97, much less 2K3 or 2K7, they just aren't very good. you can of course try them free but in that case you get what you pay for, they just aren't very nice at all. Hell last version of LO I tried making a bog standard DB using Base's own wizard and damned if it didn't crash and corrupt the DB while it was at it. You can really tell that Writer was the only one getting any love from Sun, as while Writer is roughly at Office 97 or even office 2K levels the rest of the suite isn't even up to office 95, they really are piss poor.
You'd honestly be better off with gnumeric if you just had to use a FOSS solution but even then its just nowhere near feature parity.
Because frankly what Valve does or does not do means exactly jack and shit? You can find cracks to EVERY Steam game out there at places like Gamecopyworld in less than 20 minutes flat so who cares? Hell there are plenty of legit publishers that have gone under over the years but as long as I can play the game why should i give a shit?
This is why Steam's DRM doesn't bother me, its beyond trivial to bypass so I'm not depending on any company existing in the future just to play my games. But considering the fact that Valve is the ONLY company that i know of that has doubled profits 7 years in a row I honestly don't think Valve going tits up is something that is a realistic possibility in the foreseeable future. But even if for the sake of argument they DO go tits up 5 minutes in Google and it'll be no different than if you bought the retail, hell many of the cracks on gamecopyworld are based on the Steam version so no big whoop. The only major difference is you paid less than you would have for a boxed copy so who cares? Hell even the boxed copy a lot of times are just the Steam game on a disc so its not like you are gaining any advantage by buying boxes anymore.
Oh I NEVER said it was a fluke, it took Jobs the better part of his lifetime to build that branding up, I'm just pointing out quality is a VERY small part of the equation. As I said i know a lot of folks who bought an iPhone NOT because of the tech or the quality but simply to be seen using an iPhone, it was the elitist nature of the branding that made it appeal to them NOT any kind of measurable quality difference.
I mean why do you think getting burned by the Nvidia Bumpgate didn't hurt the Apple brand like it did HP and the others that also got burnt? Because Apple is the brand of the rich, no different than Lexus or BMW and like those its not the quality of the individual product, although if they put out several stinkers in a row I'm sure it would hurt, but the fact that the price gives the illusion of affluence which is what many are buying into. Like $6 cups of coffee and $400 sneakers its not about the quality as much as you can afford to blow the money, if you can just blow cash like that it makes you "better off" than the guy that can't.
Actually you haven't taken a good look at "bath salts" as they make solvents look like beer. My ex goes to visit her ex once every 6 months at the mental institution, he has been there for 3 years now. He did bath salts ONE time and was found digging chunks out of his body with a knife because he thought there were things living under his skin. To this day he is EXTREMELY paranoid and a danger to himself and others, and he did exactly ONE dose of bath salts, that's all it took.
So while I agree that given a choice most will go for the less dangerous drugs i have known "huff heads" as we call them here and while they are seriously burnt I have never seen anything that causes so much long term damage so fast as some of the bath salts being sold out there. I have a customer that is a cop and when they first hit the news i asked him about them, this is a guy that believes most drugs should be legal as long as you aren't driving or doing them while taking care of kids but even he said these things are just too damned dangerous because of how quickly it can make the person into a violent animal. He said he has NEVER in his 12 years on the force seen anything like this, even those that got a hold of some bad angel dust he said would usually be alright once it wore off but not bath salts, a single dose can give them a permanent bad trip that leaves them a paranoid mess.
You can have living wills, you can also refuse treatment, but again this has NOTHING to do with "rising healthcare costs" it has to do with congress being addicted to control and spending YOUR money!
This is why I told folks that they had better fight for the smokers because they would be the canary in the coalmine, if they ever drove down smoking they WOULD simply move to something else to get their money fix, and what are we seeing now? Proposals for soda taxes and red meat taxes and fat taxes because at the end of the day its ALL about taxes, the congress critters couldn't give less of a fuck about the "cost of healthcare". After all if they did they would allow collective bargaining across the board, put limits on the amount of profit per drug instead of letting them gouge as high as 8000% over costs on life saving drugs, and allow a single payer option.
But if they did THAT they wouldn't get all those juicy kickbacks from big pharma and at the end of the day its ALL about money.
I'm afraid you can give up on the xbox 1, you'd think since it was an X86 Celeron that an emulator would be a done deal but for some reason nobody ever really bothered. Luckily you CAN find a couple of really good PS2 emulators on the net and since most games came out for both systems you can just run the PS2 version.
As far as using your own discs frankly I would just go to a site like Emuparadise and download the ISOs and run those instead, you can't read GC games with a normal DVD player and many DVD players won't read the PS2 discs so its just easier in the long run to just download the ISOs. This also gives you the advantage of just having all your games in a folder on your hard drive so no needing to hop up to switch discs, you can just kick back and switch through the emulator.
But I can tell you my youngest nephew was a console maniac until I showed him the wonders of emulators and Steam, now he has all his older consoles right there at his fingertips and of course the frequent Steam sales makes PC gaming a HELL of a lot cheaper than console gaming by a pretty big amount. You can build a really nice AMD unit for less than $450 that will not only play all the latest and greatest but with emulators you can plug in your favorite controller and have everything from the Atari on up right there ready to go.
Its just so much nicer and not only can you have all the games at your fingertips but by using a combo of file2folder GUI and Media Center Master you can rip all your DVDs and have them loaded WITH the box art and synopsis so every movie you've ever liked is right there at your fingertips. I'd say that even more than gaming is what is selling my customers on HTPCs as everybody has large DVD collections nowadays and with this you're not hunting for discs, dealing with scratches or other bullshit, its all instant and on demand.
All I can give you is my own experience at the shop, as I don't think anybody actually tracks the number of PCs in the living room but I can tell you since HDMI became standard on graphics cards I've seen a pretty damned big uptick in sales of PCs for the living room, in fact its my second most popular build after office systems.
But that is why its gonna be hard to come up with concrete figures as frankly ANY PC can be plugged into a TV in seconds now, HDMI is pretty much everywhere. Hell even my netbook does 1080P over HDMI and its honestly been awhile since i found a board that didn't come with HDMI output. As for me since geeks has cards that fit any budget and it doesn't take that much horse to play the games most folks want to play most of my customers are going ahead and adding a discrete to their new build, for the longest time it was the HD4850 as those cards were monsters and dirt cheap but now its starting to lean more the 67xx and 77xx cards.
But I'd say Valve has been pretty good at promoting big picture mode and pointing out how easy it is to just hook the PC to the TV and with the hardware being cheap and plentiful a lot of folks are catching on that it isn't a big deal to just plug straight into the PC. Honestly its an easy sale, all I have to do at the shop is show them how Windows Media Center has all my ripped movies in a nice easy to flip through library with box art and synopsis and follow it up with firing up Just Cause II or Batman AC and letting them see how smooth they look and its "Hey I want MY PC to do that!" Cha ching, easy sale.
This is why I've been saying for years we need to quit wasting money on billion dollar boondoggles like the F-35 and the Ford carrier, I mean who in the hell are we supposed to fight that we won't be super duper insanely overpowered compared to?
How many carriers do we have? 10, how many does anybody that is a viable possible adversary in the future? NONE. The Russians have an old cruiser/carrier that doesn't even have a full crew or plane load on board and is more just to say they have one, the Chinese bought a rusting hulk from the Russians that is roughly the size of one of our jeep carriers, no comparison to our super carriers. For the amount of money we've shit down the drain on the F-22 and F-35 we could have a whole fleet of Stealth Eagles and Fighting Falcons and as the Israelis have shown these designs still kick some serious ass, especially when compared to what the enemy is likely to have.
Frankly our military has become this giant bloated monster that acts like the cold war is still going on instead of facing reality which is any potential enemy is decades behind us. the new Iranian "super fighter" they just started showing off? According to Jane's its just a knockoff of the old F-5 Freedom Fighter we sold to the Shah back in the early 70s and that thing wasn't state of the art THEN, the whole point of the Freedom Fighter was to sell it to countries where we didn't want our best tech falling into enemy hands. Again according to Jane's their choppers are all knockoffs of the old Huey Cobra, just armed with the Russian knockoff of the Sidewinder. North Korea is flying early 70s MiG 19s and 21s, Pakistan and India have their own planes based on 70s designs but they are more likely to shoot at each other than us, and China has too much invested in their export business to want to turn off the west but if you DO consider them a likely adversary (which most don't as wars between nuclear superpowers is suicidal) that just makes all the money we are wasting on giant carrier groups even more pointless as their sea skimmer missiles could just spam a carrier group from over 900 miles away, well out of range of our stealth turkeys like the F-22.
When you are ass deep in debt the LAST thing you need to be doing is wasting money you don't need to and honestly our teen series fighters are more than a match for anything currently out there thanks to our state of the art missile tech. So all we are doing now is pissing money down a drain, makes the defense contractors fat and lazy but it certainly doesn't make this country any safer. You could probably cut our navy in half and still be able to just spam any enemy right off the battlefield, and our pilots need more teen series fighters, not expensive techno turkeys that spend more time on the ground than they do in the air. The whole thing is just a wasteful bloated mess and is long overdue for a good housecleaning.
I think the bigger deal is they don't ask before they do it and while its been awhile since i ran vanilla FF I seem to remember it asking about such things before flipping any switches.
But you should already know what you are getting into if you buy Apple and their being the largest corp on the planet obviously means more people are happy about their way of doing things than not, so if that level of top down control makes you happy? Good for you, I sincerely mean that. I'm all for voting with your wallet and Apple is obviously doing what their customers want or their sales figures would be dropping, so good for them.
Oh wow...that means anybody with an Athlon triple or better ought to have no problem playing the next gen games since Bobcat was AMD's answer to the Atom and isn't a very powerful chip at all. Hell even the link I found on the PS4 notes that the Jaguar is an "entry level laptop and tablet chip".
Don't get me wrong, I have an E350 based netbook and wouldn't give it up for the world but one does have to accept some limitations when it comes to the bobcat design. Sure it just sips power but on the flipside its meant to have the GPU take a good chunk of the load off, I just don't see how with even 8 of those chips they are gonna be doing the heavy physics that people expect in modern games. Maybe they'll have a dedicated physics chip? In any case i'm glad i built the boys a new quad and hexacore as they should have no problem keeping up with modern games, i'll just have to switch out their HD4850s in a few months for HD7770s and all will be golden.
Yeah and my ass can "basically" fly south for the winter, i just haven't gotten a high enough flap rate on my ass cheeks.
I mean do I REALLY have to post the benches which show you kill half the cores and the benches go UP and not down? And I've been building AMD exclusively for over 5 years now so if anybody wants them to come out with kick ass chips I do but the "half core" design honestly just doesn't work. you look at the arch for Bulldozer followed by Piledriver and then Excavator and you can see they are going AWAY from the half core design because it hobbles performance too much. it gives you frankly lousy single core IPC and in return only VERY modest gains on very heavily threaded loads.
Now will the half core design turn out to be an advantage on consoles? Who knows it certainly didn't on desktops and laptops but since with consoles you are running very specific loads with a highly optimized OS who knows? Personally it makes me happy either way as this will get AMD some much needed predictable revenue and hopefully the ex Apple and Athlon64 chip designer they hired will be able to turn the ship around after the slash and burn the previous CEO did to the company.
But until that day comes as long as I can continue to get socket AM3+ boards and chips cheap I'll stick with AMD and hope they come out with a better design down the line. Lets face it a Stars based Athlon triple makes for a damned good system, even plays games nicely and they just haven't been able to get the bang for the buck crown back with the BD/PD line as they can't get the costs per wafer down. And personally I'll stick with my Thuban X6, 6 true cores and turbocore for just $100 makes for a damned good cheap gaming PC and should have no problem playing games for the next gen consoles with a good GPU like the HD 7770.
I just don't get why this is such a big whoop, 20 minutes on the web will show you how to make a USB bootable Windows and has had the articles for over a decade, its just MSFT didn't support it. Frankly I don't know how much "support" you'll get from MSFT on Windows to go either so I don't see what the big diff is.
Hell maybe I'm missing an angle but to me Windows to go seems more like a solution in search of a problem, we geeks have already known how to make bootable CDs for years and what would Joe Average do with the thing? Most coffee shops aren't gonna let you reboot their PCs and in an office wouldn't roaming profiles make more sense?
And how many Air Jordans are sold each year? it would be hard to argue that Air Jordans are in any way "better" than any other sneaker but its the BRANDING that allows them to sell at a premium. this is pretty much Apple in a nutshell which is why you'll never see Apple try to take the low end markets even though there is good money to be made there, part of their appeal is how expensive they are. Just look at how Porsche tried to put out a low priced model to compete with Camaro and their sales nearly evaporated until they quit selling the low end model, it made the whole brand look cheap.
The little ugly underbelly nobody likes to talk about is a big selling point with the masses is the elitism of Apple and keeping up with the neighbors, i know several who bought iPhones and just use them for dumbphones as it was NOT about the tech, it was about being seen with an iPhone. Let me put it THIS way: You think an app called "I am rich" could have been sold on ANY other platform BUT Apple?
Then the problem isn't with me, the problem is you can't understand basic concepts. If the majority of the population were for murder for hire? Then yes your laws against such would be a waste of time, you are raising your hand and expecting it to stop the tide and its just not gonna work.
But while its pretty obvious by the fact that our streets aren't filled with murderers that murder for hire is NOT condoned by the masses the consuming of various drugs IS, the only question is to what extent. Some are for only legalizing pot, others for legalizing all, still others for something in between. My personal rule of thumb is if its a drug that so powerful it can leave the person with lifelong mental illness and brain damage from a single usage? then its probably just too damned risky to allow, unless the populace is willing to pay for the lifelong mental treatment of those that get burnt.
But you are just building straw men to knock down which is just wasting your time and mine for what? what purpose does your building straw men serve the discourse?