Frankly games even to this day use so little CPU that an i7 for gaming is honestly overkill. You can take any $70 Athlon triple and have a great time gaming on it as long as your GPU has a little muscle. Oh and this was one of the nice things about socket AM3 lasting so long on the AMD side as you could buy a dirt cheap dual in 08 and have upgraded to a quad or hexacore right now for very little without having to toss your board and RAM.
If I were building a gaming PC today on a budget I'd probably go for the Thuban Hexacore, not only can it be had for as little as $100 for a true 6 cores (unlike the FX series which frankly the BD/PD chips are just hyperthreaded half cores instead of real cores) but when you are playing most games turbocore kicks in so its like having a really fast triple core but then when you actually need 6 cores for transcoding or the few games that will scale that high you have 6 actual cores.
But playing games on a 5 year old PC really isn't that big a deal as I was selling Phenom quads at that time and they play games just fine and my GPU is nearly that old (an HD4850) and while I'll be upgrading in a couple of months (the HD6850s seem to be the sweet spot ATM) honestly it plays all the games just fine. Just Cause II, Saints Row 3, The Borderlands series, the Crysis series, all play with plenty of bling so I don't see what the "ZOMFG!" is about a 5 year old PC. After all this isn't the MHz wars anymore, since switching to cores programs just haven't kept up with the speed of the hardware, not even close. Hell I often transcode or build DVDs WHILE gaming and I still don't get all laggy as the games just haven't kept up with the hardware.
And if you look at the specs of the next gen consoles I honestly doubt I'll have to build a new system anytime soon, the PS4 looks to be a COTS middle tier AMD APU and if rumors are true MSFT will be going with an AMD octocore which is just a quad with hyperthreading so it don't look like anybody that built a PC in the past few years will have trouble gaming. A word of advice on GPUs though, Geeks has some truly crazy deals on their refurbs and I must have gone through over a hundred at the shop without a single problem, they really are rock solid.
And its worse than you think. If you don't know the guys that "made" CentOS? USED to BUY RHEL for their HARDWARE, that's right, in any other arena they would be called what they are which is fucking leeches yet you DARE to point that out and listen to the FOSSies scream bloody murder. "Oh Red Hat doesn't say anything bad about Cent"...well what the fuck do you expect them to say, quit being fucking dirtbags?
The simple fact is if you remove the redistribution clause the "printer story" would still be solved. And why is it that doctors and lawyers and plumbers are allowed to charge for THEIR work but software programmers can eat shit and die? Becoming a decent programmer is fucking expensive, years of student loans and bills and yet they are supposed to just work for...what? A pat on the back?
But seriously what do we expect when the license is written by a guy that calls himself "a squatter at MIT" but telling everyone else they don't need money.
It WON'T be financed and thus will never be made under FOSS, that was my point. How many KILLER game engines have been given to the FOSS community? And what do we have to show for them? Q3 Arena MP only DM and CTF crap...yawn.
This is the thing that has always blown my mind about FOSS zealots, or FOSSies as I call them, they seem to have NO problem if CEOs or doctors or even plumbers get paid for their labor but programmers? Fuck you you filthy programmer, you should work for free.
And I have said it before you could COMPLETELY remove the redistribution clause and the "printer story" which RMS claims is the entire reason for the GPL being formed would be completely solved while still allowing something that doesn't fit into "the blessed three" like great games to be made. Would he be able to fix the printer? yep he'd have the code. Could he modify it? Again he has the code so not a problem. Could he post his changes? People do that with mods so no problem there.
But as long as the only way to actually pay your bills with FOSS is the blessed three you'll just not get any software that doesn't fit the blessed three, which is why you'll never see any truly great award winning games more complex than "cut the rope" from FOSS.
Oh please, even Google's own fucking SCC filing lists them as a fucking AD company, alright? Even Google says THEY ARE AN AD COMPANY so don't give us the "true Scotsman" crap when the company contradicts you.
If you look at the businesses that have succeeded using FOSS every. single. one. has used one of the "blessed three" business models, selling support, selling hardware, holding out a tin cup.
This is why for example no matter how many game engines are given to the FOSS community you will NEVER see a great single player masterpiece like Bioshock come from the FOSS community, because games do not fall under the blessed three and therefor they simply can't get enough funding to keep the doors open. This is also why we'll see Canonical close their doors in 3 years or less, they have already moved to the tin cup model after trying both support (Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Server) and selling hardware (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu Tablet) but desktop OSes don't fit under the blessed three so they simply don't have a chance.
This isn't saying that FOSS can't be successful, look at Red Hat, but your business needs to fall under the blessed three to succeed. The reason why is obvious, if anybody can make infinite copies and give them away you simply have to have some other way of making money. Personally I think there needs to be a subset of GPL with no redistribution clause so we can get things like games and software for home users that don't fit under the blessed three as without the redistribution clause the "printer story" that gave birth to the GPL would still be solved, but its so ingrained now I doubt you could ever get it to take off. So in the end stick to the blessed three if you are going FOSS or you'll end up like Xandros, Linspire, Mandriva, Loki, and soon Canonical.
FUD. Win 7 will ALWAYS look as if its installed to the C: drive to applications, even if it is not. I have mine installed to D: because I have XP on C: for a couple of old audio editing programs that don't like 64 bit and when I'm in Win 7 it says its on the C: drive, when I'm in XP it says its on the C: drive, so as far as the applications are concerned I have 2 drives that are each labeled C: instead of 2 partitions. It actually works wonderfully, the only catch is those older programs that would use a hidden partition to back up changes to the file system (Norton GoBack, Comodo Time Machine) naturally don't work since it can't take over the partition.
So if you want to bitch about Win 7 at least bitch about things Joe and Jane Normal would run into, such as how WMC can be slow to load when you have a lot of movies in your library as it insists on loading the metadata from scratch instead of keeping a metadata table and simply comparing the table with the library, or how Explorer sometimes can't make up its mind and will have a single click on a file just load file attributes while other times a single click on a file will load the attributes AND suddenly shoot the file to the far left pane of the explorer window which can be quite jarring when you are in the middle of dealing with a bunch of files.
And that right there shows the weird relationship that FOSS has compared to proprietary software and you can see why some companies wouldn't want to go anywhere near FOSS. I mean show me ANY other tech where you can continue to dictate what happens to something you had sold? To use a/. car analogy this would be like you selling a van and then telling the new owners who they can and can't give rides to.
But like I said give the little twerp credit, when the company that paid him good money for his software wouldn't kiss his behind he took it back WHILE keeping all the money. How many can actually say they have been able to have their cake and eat it too?
Bullshit, Asus/Asrock (they are merging into one company) and Gigabyte make damned good boards but you simply have to choose a board designed for your use case. If you want to be gaming and A/V editing if you choose that $29.99 board designed to give grandma a cheap but stable platform to play her FB games you really only have yourself to blame.
I have been using Asusrock and Gigabyte for years without a bit of hassle, the few times I had to walk a customer through changing any setting on either company's boards the problem ended up being PEBKAC, for example they had me put in a gamer board and they then proceeded to buy a bunch of RAM that was bottom of the barrel off of eBay and then was shocked when the board would hang. But you use a little common sense, don't buy a good board and then fill it with eBay special parts and you'll be fine.
BTW does anybody else find it extra douchey that Intel ran Nvidia out of the motherboard chipset business only for them to bail on the business? Between that and Intel hand in hand with MSFT killing the netbook market (because without ION an Atom was painful to use and Intel and MSFT both dream of being Apple) I just hope AMD doesn't end up going under, their chips are still crazy fast for most use cases and Intel is just the poster boy for sleazy corporate crap.
But simply ripping off Apple just isn't gonna work, Windows 8 is a fundamentally broken UI and is so user UN-friendly that you need a Win 7 PC to Google how to use the Win 8 PC, and folks just aren't gonna put up with it. I support a lot of SMBs and not a single one has expressed any interest in Win 8, not the OS, not WinRT, and not Surface Pro, they are sticking with Win 7 for their X86 needs and using an Android or Apple tablet when they need that level of portability.
Never before in all my years in tech have I seen a company just completely ignore all the indicators and throw money away like that, MSFT does not have a single positive indicator with Win 8, not the desktops and laptops, not the phones and the tablets, seriously how much money does Steve Ballmer have to take a match to before the board wakes up and fires his dumb ass? I think Forbes need to name the MSFT board the worst board to go with Ballmer's worst CEO as they obviously are asleep at the wheel.
I'm sure it will have a little touchscreen where you input exactly what you want and it'll come out exactly as ordered, every single time.
I'd also like to point out I've been calling this one for a couple of years now as there will soon be no point in hiring people to do most of the low end jobs, the machine never gets tired, never calls in sick, doesn't get benefits or days off, in the end we are ALL John Henry working ourselves to death trying to beat the machine but the machine WILL win in the end.
This is why I truly believe capitalism, like every other ism before it, is doomed. you are playing musical chairs with fewer and fewer ending up with a seat. Even in China where workers are cheap as dirt and there isn't any workers protections to speak of a million workers are gonna be replaced by robots and this is just ONE company.
At the end of the day capitalism can't work if the only ones able to get any capital are those with enough of a fortune to begin that they can buy their own automated factories, what happens to those millions upon millions who weren't lucky enough to be born into wealth? Are you gonna pay them to sit at home and consume? Create megaprisons to house them all? As the record student loan defaults show you simply can't educate your way out of this, so what now?
I'm sorry but I gotta agree with GP, this is a company that sues farmers whose crops are infected by their crappy GMOs and its pretty obvious they have been playing fast and loose with tech that frankly should NEVER be used on food crops.
And before any apologists give us that "Its no different than cross breeding" line BULLSHIT, when you can show me ANY farmer cross breeding corn and starfish or grasshoppers THEN you'll have an argument, until then I'm afraid you are full of shit. I mean we can't even classify these things as plants anymore as they are mixing fish and grasshoppers and who knows what else, and anybody that follows a religious diet such as Kosher shouldn't even eat this crap as its no longer a pure plant but a Frankenstein monster mix of plant and animal!
So I'm sorry but the world would be a better place if Monsanto and their ilk were no longer in it. Thanks to their programming in sterility the farmers in the third world can't even save some seeds for next years crop, they gotta keep shelling out to Monsanto. They are truly a nasty vicious corp and I wouldn't be surprised if they just end up buying some politicians to get a law passed saying this isn't a problem and absolving them of any liability rather than risk there end up being a recall..
And THIS is why I think we are getting close to the big collapse, as the corrupt no longer even pretend to care or to hide their deed from prying eyes, they do it openly and on camera with a big middle finger to the people.
When you look at how big a bubble they've blown in the stock market its pretty plain to see a collapse is inevitable, the bubble of 29 was only 125% GDP and took a world war knocking out the competition and STILL didn't recover until 1953, whereas this bubble is over 430% and rising.
I personally think the PTBs are being this brazen on purpose, they want to get the people used to seeing more and more abuses so when the bubble bursts and they roll the tanks many won't fight back. I don't think it'll work as they have planned though, I think we'll end up like Libya with half the army for the people and half for the PTBs and its gonna end up one big bloody mess. Hell at this point the poor and middle class are hurting so bad that I wouldn't be surprised if they would sign off on some generale taking over, couldn't get any worse for those at the bottom than it already is.
Ya know, you gotta give the little twerp that sold MySQL credit, he not only gets a big fat check but he then forks what he sold and gets all his customers back! Smart as hell, I'll give him that, as nowhere else but FOSS could you sell something and keep it at the exact same time
I already addressed that, what you WILL see in ARM is the exact same thing that is happening to X86 now and WILL happen in 3 years, probably less. Nvidia is already up to 5 cores, Samsung has a 6 core in testing right now, and nobody has been able to figure out how to come up with a language or framework that can scale most jobs over multicores smoothly.
And honestly it does NOT have to mean MSFT's slice of the pie gets smaller, not if they had a CEO that wasn't a fucking moron that can only see Cupertino from his front desk. Put ME in charge of that company and I WILL double profits in 3 years or you won't owe me a dime! How, simple by supplementing the traditional MSFT sells software model with a services model. Companies want to keep XP? Fine pay for a service contract, if enough of you buy contracts we'll extend it for as long as you're willing to pay...BAM! Big chunk of money right there and all MSFT will have to do is security patches. Make an app based on the MSFT cloud that lets a user at work access his home PC or vice versa using 2 part auth based around flash sticks so they can carry a "key to their PCs" in their pocket next to the car keys..BAM! Another pile of cash that comes in monthly or yearly. backport the appstore to Win 7 and bring in some guys that know how to build an appstore, making it as close to "push button to get stuff" as possible while making deals with the biggest freeware companies to have their stuff, Flash, Reader, Java, all the programs people forget to update, included so for one low monthly price you can have ALL the hassle of keeping a PC totally updated in your average SMB gone...BAM! Another pile of cash.
IBM is making more money than ever, even though they sell less big iron than ever, by adding services and support to software and hardware. There is no reason why MSFT couldn't do the same if Steve Ballmer wasn't an MBA idiot that doesn't know shit about his own market and instead think merely aping Cupertino will magically give them Cupertino's customers...not gonna happen, full of fail, they will lose billions and not gain shit. I would have Win 8 for touch devices only, giving users the choice of it or 7, and by constantly adding new services and features for sale I would have Windows become an ala carte OS that YOU could decide what exactly it does or doesn't do. Not only would I be making money hand over fist but people would love MSFT again because they would feel more in control and it would give them constant revenue, even from old installs, without having to force people to take software they don't want.
Thanks and I'll back up my anecdote from the ground with an actual example, what I have found frankly to be the perfect microcosm of the "typical user"...my dad.
My dad could NOT be more of a typical PC user, having started out in the days of the Trash80 he has gone through just about every PC trend there has been and when you take a look at his uses for a PC: Webmail, surfing, burning discs, watching videos and movies, chat, running Quickbooks, he is as close to a typical user of a PC as one could possibly get! So when the Phenom IIs hit the cheap bin I thought "Ya know, its been awhile since I built that $150 Phenom I quad system for him, maybe I better see if its time to move up***" so I monitored his PC performance for 3 weeks and then came by and pulled up the record...what did I find? 45%, that is what I found, the absolute MAX he was able to slam that now nearly 7 year old Phenom I quad was 45% and comparing the performance log to the Windows logs I found that was when he had a tab hang in his browser, removing that anomaly we had an average of less than 35% typical core usage.
So for the "average user", the one which as you point out buys hundreds of millions of PCs a year compared to niches like CAD or even gaming, even though we gamers DO spend crazy money, the PC has been past good enough and into insanely overpowered for almost half a decade now. Hell I DO use video transcoding and editing but I've found this Thuban X6 I picked up for a cheap $100 can do video transcoding AND surfing AND play a lot of the current games without skipping AT THE SAME TIME by just dividing the load between the cores, so why buy a new one? Looking at my own PC usage I found that more than 65% of the time my PC is in "turbo mode" which means that 3 or more cores are IDLE so AMD ramps up the speed on the remaining cores. Now if a guy like me, that is "Mr Multitasker" and often has two or more jobs in the air at once, can't even stress out a $100 chip? What are the odds Joe and Jane Average are gonna be able to stress out a quad?
***oh and for those that say "Fuck you, no way you were building systems THAT cheap" you have forgotten about the TLB bug, when that came out I was getting triples and quads, especially the BEs because of the Core2 bug that kept you from OCing the chips, for DIRT cheap. I can still get Phenom I quads in the $50-$65 range but with the Athlon X3s so cheap they aren't worth getting anymore unless you trip over an AM2 board that will take 'em.
Uhhh...DirectX really isn't much of a moving target since Win 8 has flopped, I'd say a good 80% of the games either are or still have support for DirectX 9C while I can only think of a couple of games that are DirectX 10+ only (Halo 2, Just Cause II being the only ones I can think of) so if you could incorporate a perfect DirectX 9C you would have probably 80%+ game support.
Again though rightly or wrongly our system on reverse engineering is a LOT more strict than the EU or Asia and since a large portion of the game development is done in the USA that is gonna be a serious problem. Frankly MSFT could shut down and block Wine from the USA, might even be able to get it blocked by anybody that signed Berne because of how lax the Wine team has been with regards to reverse engineering. Just look at how ReactOS was brought to a screeching halt when allegations of MSFT code was leveled, with Wine it would be worse because you can go to their dev boards and they come right out and say they don't use clean room.
So until somebody can come up with a product capable of replacing Windows (Linux is too fiddly and is more a loose collection of programs than an OS, OSX too expensive, ChromeOS too locked down and web only) its gonna be really hard to get game devs to give up on DirectX and really who can blame 'em? OpenGL has been a mess for the better part of the decade, with Khronos caring too much about backwards compatibility to make the CAD people happy than actually competing with DX, this is a case where somebody like Valve really needs to fork OpenGL away from Khronos and put it back on a fast track so that once again it can be ahead of DX on features and work closely with GPU makers like they did during the days of HL 1 and Quake.
All they needed to do is change the focus to make it into a decent FA and being a nice guy allow me to do so:
If MLK or any of the other freedom fighters of the 60s were to pull that same shit today they would have all their rights stripped away as EVERYTHING is a felony now.
Now THAT should have been the focus of TFA, Go to some occupy protest? You end up on a list of possible terrorists and if you are arrested they will pile on as many charges as it takes to make it a felony. Go to some rally and hold up a little sign? Same thing, if the PTBs decide to break it up a good portion of your rights will be stripped away. Do you know how many homeless single mothers we have because of the "zero tolerance" crap they passed in the 90s?If you get busted for pretty much anything in many states including protesting you will end up being able to get ZERO help for the rest of your life, in fact a fucking illegal will have more help than you will, you'll have pretty much zero rights and the cops will fuck with you at will for the rest of your life. "do the crime do the time" simply no longer exists as its "Do a crime do a life sentence as a second class citizen"
It was THIS kind of bullshit that killed the kid, not JSTOR or any other corp. Sure corps now have Godlike powers but those Godlike powers are granted them by a broken corrupted system that has turned into a giant revolving door with so much conflict of interest its not even funny.
This is the problem I have with the old "Robots take over the world" gag as a "true" AI would be so fucking alien to us that its wants and needs and desires wouldn't be anything at all like or own. I can't remember where I heard this but it always stuck in my head, i think it was an SFDebris review of a "robots take over the world" movie but I can't be sure. What he said was basically thus:
There are variations if sexuality among our own kind that frankly many of us wouldn't be able to understand even in the abstract, take "vore" which is a fetish built around being eaten alive by something. I can understand why someone would like feet instead of breasts or butts because that I can understand even though none of these things by themselves are truly sexual, at best things like breasts can be considered secondary sexual characteristics while feet are normally used to haul your butt to the bed, but vore is something that no matter how many times its explained to me I simply cannot understand, my brain simply can't make the connection between being ripped apart and eaten by a zombie with sex, I just don't "work that way" and that is talking about something that in the grand scheme of things is just a teeny tiny variation between two of the same species.
Now let us take the idea of a true AI, a machine that is completely capable of independent thought. To this creature something like abstract geometry or quantum mechanics or the number Pi could be as stimulating and worth pursuing as food and sex is for us. By that measure it would look at our fetishes and be completely clueless just as I am with Vore, it just wouldn't be able to understand how something as trivial as breasts or feet between creatures that to it would be identical or at best the equivalent of a 1 and a 0 could have so many variations, it just wouldn't "work that way" and while it might be perfectly happy to solve what it would consider a trivial or meaningless problem, like solving aging or world hunger, for what it WOULD consider meaningful, like coming up with the longest calculation of Pi or making a truth table to every action in quantum mechanics we just can't try to stick what would make US tick to such a creature because we would have less in common with it than we do with whales or dolphins, we simply wouldn't think like it and it wouldn't think like us.
For those that like such thought experiments Neil DeGrasse gave his thoughts on what meeting an alien would actually be like and its something similar in nature: that we would be so different from each other that even if we learned each other language the ability to actually understand each other would be VERY difficult because of how differently we would think. To them the kind of quantum mechanics that Hawking spent years figuring out could be as intuitive as 1 plus 1, concepts that only a handful of our smartest minds are able to truly grasp like string theory and multiple dimensions would be as natural as a child learning to walk, so having a conversation between the two would be VERY hard and I bet with a true AI it would be similar, since we are talking about a silicon based life form that we would have little to nothing in common with.
The release date is 2015, which makes it a standard 3 years per release. Since they have already said ALL versions, not just Pro, will get a full 10 years of support this will allow businesses to skip a couple of releases (as they did by skipping Vista for 7, and are now skipping 8) without losing support while basically using the consumers for the beta testers for the features that will end up in the business friendly odd releases.
Frankly I don't know why FOSS users would bitch about this since they are basically copying your "odd/even" or "LTS/regular" release concepts. If the reports are correct, which we've seen no indication that they aren't and a lot of evidence (Surface, MSFT stores, MSFT building their own hardware) that they are what you are gonna see with Windows is the same thing Apple users have had with OSX for ages, a $40 a pop upgrade and faster releases because like OSX instead of trying to come up with a shitload of new features to justify a $100-$200 price point they will just add a couple of things to each release and sell more of them on the fast release schedule.
Personally I don't give a shit as long as the next "LTS Business release" aka Win 9 gives us the choice of getting rid of that damned metro crap in favor of a standard desktop and they make system builders and OEM pricing cheaper and more transparent.
Not to mention until they find a way to fix the BIG PROBLEM which is a good 90%+ of the games are built around DirectX and therefor won't run on Linux? You can give it up. I mean who wants Steam on Linux when it has less selection than the already piss poor Steam for Mac?
Sure they could try to incorporate Wine into Steam but I wouldn't be surprised if Valve ends up with a couple of years worth of lawsuits from MSFT which rightly or wrongly most likely MSFT WILL WIN since most of the Wine development is done in Europe where the laws on reverse engineering are VERY lax compared to ours. In the USA you had better use clean room procedures with strict separation between the one looking at the code to be reverse engineered and the guy writing the replacement.
So I'm sorry but I just don't see how this is gonna get any traction. Not only will you not find Linux being sold on any machines in any B&M stores but when all the hottest games use a framework that you don't have and won't run without serious hoop jumping? Hell the whole point of Steam is its a "push button and get game" service and if the only way you can run the majority of games is to deal with a couple of pages of CLI crap and a LOT of finger crossing because most of the games run DirectX I don't see many people putting up with it.
I still think this is all smoke and mirrors though, the REAL reason for Steam on Linux is Valve's Steambox which will run a GPL V2 only Linux (so they can use the hardware DRM that consoles require) and they are just letting the community beta test the software before it goes into production. Makes sense, if the console is a hit they can talk more devs into porting to OpenGL on Steambox and if they put out a console it needs to be solid on the software front, hence the beta testing. I just don't see how Steam on Linux could be the end goal, not with so many show stopping problems.
But what good is crapping resources when you can get the exact same or better for less? That is like saying "I don't give a fuck if this car gets 2 MPG and doesn't do a damned thing that the car that gets 35 MPG does, because its pretty". While you are entitled to that opinion that doesn't make it insightful or even a good idea because frankly I wouldn't be surprised if you could take the unreal SDK and replicate a scene from Doom 3 with it and run TWO of those in the same CPU and memory space that Doom 3 uses.
And sadly the state of FOSS gaming is like a bad joke, thanks to the ONLY way you can make any money in FOSS is the "blessed three" of support contracts, selling hardware, or holding out a tin cup honestly its just...well kinda sad really. In the "real" gaming world we are seeing great story lines, with great acting and directing, incredible visuals, just a great experience all around in the FOSS world the ONLY thing you EVER see from these engines being released is yet another 50 Q3 Arena ripoffs, just the same tired and lame ass modes all over again, king of the hill, CTF, DM, hell the players that want that kind of gameplay have TF2 for free where at least you have funny little back-stories and characters.
I mean what are you gonna entice people with? Here is another copy of a decade old Q3 Arena? Tux Racer? Wesnoth which looks like if you loaded it onto a cart it would play on the SNES without even stressing the weak ass SNES CPU? This is kind of a microcosm of the weakness of FOSS in general as the ONLY thing you have to offer is "free as in beer and freedom" which players can get the former a HELL of a lot better on Windows with the FTP model and nobody gives two shits about the latter, see the lines around the block to get the latest iToy as an example. What FOSS needs is their own Bioshock or WoW but because throwing some skins on the same tired old game modes is easy while making something worth playing is fucking insanely hard all we get is the former and NEVER the latter. Kinda sad really but I have been saying for ages that thanks to the blessed three FOSS ends up like the old USSR where the only thing it has really in its favor is politics that most just don't care about, not enough to put up with poor substandard games.
I don't know why anybody would hate on the C60, its frankly a kick ass netbook or mini-PC chip and when I couldn't find an E350 for my dad's GF year before last I found him an Acer with a C60 to give her and she just loves the hell out of the thing, like with my E350 EEE she has no intention of getting rid of it and why should she? Unlike the crippled Atom systems the C and E series support a ton of RAM (she has 4GB on hers, I went ahead and slapped 8GB in my E350) and have full VM support as well as does 1080P over HDMI. She loves hers because the C series gets even better battery life than mine, after 2 years she still gets nearly 6 hours whereas after 3 years mine still gets a solid 4. But I'm glad to see you enjoy the Bobcats, I can't count the number of office PCs and HTPCs I've built with Bobcats and they are just great, low power, full 1080P, hell I play L4D and the Portal and Torchlight series on my netbook when stuck at the doctor's office and its a fricking blast.
BTW Crosshair one place to keep an eye out besides Craigslist and eBay is to check out Cowboom which will have some insanely cheap AMD units from time to time. If you have never heard of them its the site Best Buy uses to sell all their returned and refurbed as well as trade in units and as you can see while they have a ton of dirt cheap Atoms they do get some AMD netbooks as well as the occasional full size. I picked up an Atom dual for $85 there that was like new, boy that was an easy unit to turn, as well as a C50 Gateway that was only $129 and also easy to flip. Its one of those sites you really just have to check daily as they constantly get new stuff and you never know what is gonna be there. The only AMDs they have now is a couple of single cores at $165 but last week they had a really nice E450 for just $130, you just gotta keep an eye out.
Oh and also keep an eye out on Amazon because as you can see here you can get some insanely cheap AMD E series boards there, I mean $70 for the Gigabyte with 4 SATA, or $95 for the Asrock with a PCI-E slot? way too cheap. If you are building an office PC I recommend the cheaper Gigabyte but for an HTPC you can't go wrong with the Asrock as hybrid crossfire works pretty damned good on those E series and having dedicated VRAM makes for a sweet HTPC, but as I'm sure you know both do 1080P just fine as long as you don't cheap out and buy 1066 RAM, I found running 1333 does make a difference on those APUs.
And if you do have an HTPC you ought to email me and I'll send you the links to the free programs I use, i tripped over some killer freeware that loads all the Metadata from IMDB into your media library so when you fire up WMC it has all the box art and synopsis filled in, hell of a lot nicer than trying to just find things alphabetically and since it loads all the metadata you can sort by genre, year, title, its a great way to enjoy your movies and TV shows.
The reason I don't advocate Intel, well besides the douchebag compiler rigging and bribery they should have gotten an anti-trust bust for, is that they cripple their chips and moreover they cripple them WRONG. I mean cutting out POWERSAVING features on the lower end chips? Really? You have cache and HT and VM support you can cut, that isn't enough but you gotta make them laptop chips into pigs when you have so many other ways to upsell?
And I have to completely disagree that Intel chips are cheaper and lower wattage, not only because they tend to cripple powersaving on their lower end chips but also because on the low end you can get insane amounts of power from AMD cheap. I mean I can get an Athlon Triple kit for $195 just add HDD and a fricking Phenom II Hexacore for just $210 just add HDD and burner. When you figure in the cost to finish those kits up I can have a completed product for less than an Intel i3 CPU, board and RAM, which would leave me with half the parts left to buy!
And finally I again have to disagree when it comes to SSDs because until they fix the hot/crazy scale when it comes to SSDs I simply can't recommend them except for certain niches like a mobile device that isn't gonna have mission critical data on it, and that article may be a couple years old but if anything I've found that since going up to triple cells the problem has gotten worse. I have several gamer customers that buy top o' the line and they are up to double digits when it comes to SSDs because of all the failures, and we ain't talking OCZ, we are talking Intel, Kingston, and Samsung. In a way it reminds me of the first days of HDDs and how insanely high those early drive failure rates were and of course once it fails you can't wipe the drive so many of my customers are leery of even claiming on their warranty because they have no idea what kind of third world center those drives will be sent to and if they will be risking ID theft thanks to all the data on the now dead SSD.
The funny part is its NOT the cells that are failing as you'd think, nope its the ARM controllers they have on the drives themselves. When that thing fails, which it ALWAYS does with no warning at all, you can't even get your data off because it won't even show up in BIOS. Now once they get THAT fixed? Behind you 100% although I have to wonder how much gain myself and most of my users will see since most just use sleep mode anyway and with Win 7 intelligent caching most of their programs are already loaded into RAM but in its current state frankly SSDs are even worse than Seagate drives over 600Gb when it comes to the number just shitting themselves.
Oh not only is it THAT retarded but it makes one of the oldest. fucking. mistakes. on Slashdot, the kind of shit we expect from noobs NOT from TFA. Say it with my boys and girls, correlation does NOT equal causation!
And who in the fuck is listening to those fucking retards in the press that think we are going back to one PC? because as a retailer that sells PCs and services I'd like to bitchslap him/her for being so fucking stupid. that is NOT why sales are down, its the exact opposite in that everybody has too many computers with even the poorest people i know having 2 or 3 of the things!
For those that want the actual FACTS from somebody down in the trenches its REALLY fucking simple, the mid 90s through mid 00s? THAT was a bubble, that was NOT the natural state of the market. Look at the sales from before as well as the sales after and you have a perfect bell curve. The reason WHY you saw a bubble blown in PC sales is because you had AMD and Intel dueling in the MHz wars and thanks to how incredibly easy it is to take advantage of a faster single core a PC you bought 2 years previously would struggle to run the latest stuff and by 3 years it couldn't run shit that had been released. I went from a 300MHz to 733MHz, 1100MHz, and finally 2200MHz, all in less than 4 years. That's a more than 7 fold increase in speed folks.
But then a funny thing happened that ironically we are seeing play out all over again in ARM and that is both AMD and Intel ran headfirst into a thermal and power wall, chips were hitting close to 140w TDP and were requiring bigger and bigger coolers, with Intel it was a big enough problem that they had to keep the P3 in mobile because between the power sucking and all the fans it took to keep the damned things from melting you could count the battery life of a P4 laptop in fricking minutes....so what to do? Simple instead of constantly ramping up the MHz ramp up the cores and sell multicores to the masses! Brilliant!
But it turned out for the chip makers and companies like MSFT that had gotten fat and lazy and had convinced themselves and Wall Street that like the real estate bubble the PC sales bubble would continue that it turned out this plan was TOO brilliant because we PC retailers noticed a curious little fact, once you got to dual cores, which gave you one core for foreground and one for background processing? With the vast majority you saw diminishing returns REAL fucking quickly, with the average user not able to tell the difference between a dual, triple, or quad, much less a hexa or octo by the way they acted, why? Because they just couldn't come up with enough useful work to feed the chips. Hell myself and my two boys are fricking PC gamers which traditionally required pretty damned quick PC turnover, during the bubble I was building a new PC every year and a half and building the boys new ones every 2 years, now? Me and the oldest have nearly 3 year old hexacores that have more cores idle than being used a good 90% of the time and the youngest who is the MMO player in the family is so happy with the fast Athlon triple that I loaned him while his quad was waiting for a part he told me just keep the quad, the triple was more than he needed.
So it is NOT that "the PC is dying" or that anybody is trading their fricking laptops or desktops for some dinky ass smartphone, its the simple fact that for nearly 6 years PCs have been insanely overpowered so people see no need to buy a new one when they can't stress the old. Most of my business and home users simply had me install Win 7 when it came out rather than buy a new Win 7 PC, why? Because what I was selling on the LOW end 5 years ago, we are talking the cheapest new builds I had, were fricking Phenom I triples and quads with 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDDs! What normal user is gonna be able to max out a Phenom I triple? Heck I have an engineer customer that runs the latest Solidworks with extremely complex robot models on a Phenom I triple and he's quite happy with the performance.
The FOSSies can waste mod points all the want, doesn't change the fact that its a myth and easily shown to be false. did you forget the bug that was in Debian SIX YEARS before anybody caught it? Or the blatant malware in Q3 Arena that was downloaded countless times and sat in the repos of ALL the major distros for a year and a fricking half before anybody noticed they were all being pwned?
Again you and those that advocate this myth are falling for the assumption because something CAN occur that it HAS occurred. want proof that don't happen? How many fucking Man pages in Linux are placeholders? that is a job that frankly ANYBODY can do, don't need coding experience to write a Man page, yet for most of those that have placeholders it just won't get done.
For the "many eyes" myth to hold true you would have to accept several assumptions that real life simply don't bear out, 1.- That people will download and inspect the code. Again answer my question, have YOU inspected the LO code? Even once? That is one of the most popular programs in FOSS land but I bet out of ALL the geeks on/. the number that have actually downloaded and inspected that code could be counted on one hand. Now if that is the case with one of the most popular apps ON THE PLANET how many do you think have looked at the little pissling ass subsystems and little programs that nobody even think about but which are including in every distro, things like say the clock or the calendar or the theme program? I bet my last dollar if they keep logs you'd find almost NOBODY has downloaded the actual source and there hasn't been jack shit as far as submissions by anybody but the guys that actually maintain the thing.
2.- That people that actually have the skills and experience to do meaningful code reviews are actually gonna spend their free time doing code reviews on this stuff. Do you have ANY idea how many years of coding experience it takes to be able to look at a VERY complex program like LO or Gimp or any of the other dozens of programs included in most distros and to be able to spot errors or problems? Have you ever looked at the winners of the obfuscated C contest? In that contest you KNOW there is malware in the code but frankly unless you have a high enough level of coding skill to instruct classes in C I seriously doubt you would spot it. The guys that actually do have that level of skill are frankly in high demand and free time? Not something they have a lot of so I seriously doubt that they are gonna want to sit around doing code reviews.
3.- That there are enough people out there WITH the skills to spot bugs AND the willingness to do it to keep up with the avalanche of new programs being added to the repos weekly. Hell if we even limit it to JUST the programs that are included in most distros when you figure in all the little sub-programs if it numbers less than 10,000 I'd frankly be amazed. Again go download the code to some of the popular programs like Gimp or LO or even the smaller ones like Abiword or Gnumeric and see just how many fucking pages of code we are talking about here, no way in hell you are gonna get enough highly skilled volunteers to go through that many densely coded programs even once a decade and again I bet for the vital but lesser known programs they probably haven't had a single person not on the dev team that has actually done a meaningful code review of the source code.
So I'm sorry but "many eyes" just doesn't hold up to even the most cursory of logic and you can waste all the modpoints you want but black isn't white, straw isn't gold, and many eyes is bullshit. THAT DOES NOT MEAN that not having the code is somehow "better" or that having the code doesn't give you some pretty powerful advantages, as I said if you want say Abiword to run on MIPS you can port it or pay to have it ported, if you need a program that has been EOLed like gnome 2 you can get like minded people together and keep it going, both of which are pretty powerful advantages. It simply means that "many eyes"
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Frankly games even to this day use so little CPU that an i7 for gaming is honestly overkill. You can take any $70 Athlon triple and have a great time gaming on it as long as your GPU has a little muscle. Oh and this was one of the nice things about socket AM3 lasting so long on the AMD side as you could buy a dirt cheap dual in 08 and have upgraded to a quad or hexacore right now for very little without having to toss your board and RAM.
If I were building a gaming PC today on a budget I'd probably go for the Thuban Hexacore, not only can it be had for as little as $100 for a true 6 cores (unlike the FX series which frankly the BD/PD chips are just hyperthreaded half cores instead of real cores) but when you are playing most games turbocore kicks in so its like having a really fast triple core but then when you actually need 6 cores for transcoding or the few games that will scale that high you have 6 actual cores.
But playing games on a 5 year old PC really isn't that big a deal as I was selling Phenom quads at that time and they play games just fine and my GPU is nearly that old (an HD4850) and while I'll be upgrading in a couple of months (the HD6850s seem to be the sweet spot ATM) honestly it plays all the games just fine. Just Cause II, Saints Row 3, The Borderlands series, the Crysis series, all play with plenty of bling so I don't see what the "ZOMFG!" is about a 5 year old PC. After all this isn't the MHz wars anymore, since switching to cores programs just haven't kept up with the speed of the hardware, not even close. Hell I often transcode or build DVDs WHILE gaming and I still don't get all laggy as the games just haven't kept up with the hardware.
And if you look at the specs of the next gen consoles I honestly doubt I'll have to build a new system anytime soon, the PS4 looks to be a COTS middle tier AMD APU and if rumors are true MSFT will be going with an AMD octocore which is just a quad with hyperthreading so it don't look like anybody that built a PC in the past few years will have trouble gaming. A word of advice on GPUs though, Geeks has some truly crazy deals on their refurbs and I must have gone through over a hundred at the shop without a single problem, they really are rock solid.
And its worse than you think. If you don't know the guys that "made" CentOS? USED to BUY RHEL for their HARDWARE, that's right, in any other arena they would be called what they are which is fucking leeches yet you DARE to point that out and listen to the FOSSies scream bloody murder. "Oh Red Hat doesn't say anything bad about Cent"...well what the fuck do you expect them to say, quit being fucking dirtbags?
The simple fact is if you remove the redistribution clause the "printer story" would still be solved. And why is it that doctors and lawyers and plumbers are allowed to charge for THEIR work but software programmers can eat shit and die? Becoming a decent programmer is fucking expensive, years of student loans and bills and yet they are supposed to just work for...what? A pat on the back?
But seriously what do we expect when the license is written by a guy that calls himself "a squatter at MIT" but telling everyone else they don't need money.
It WON'T be financed and thus will never be made under FOSS, that was my point. How many KILLER game engines have been given to the FOSS community? And what do we have to show for them? Q3 Arena MP only DM and CTF crap...yawn.
This is the thing that has always blown my mind about FOSS zealots, or FOSSies as I call them, they seem to have NO problem if CEOs or doctors or even plumbers get paid for their labor but programmers? Fuck you you filthy programmer, you should work for free.
And I have said it before you could COMPLETELY remove the redistribution clause and the "printer story" which RMS claims is the entire reason for the GPL being formed would be completely solved while still allowing something that doesn't fit into "the blessed three" like great games to be made. Would he be able to fix the printer? yep he'd have the code. Could he modify it? Again he has the code so not a problem. Could he post his changes? People do that with mods so no problem there.
But as long as the only way to actually pay your bills with FOSS is the blessed three you'll just not get any software that doesn't fit the blessed three, which is why you'll never see any truly great award winning games more complex than "cut the rope" from FOSS.
Oh please, even Google's own fucking SCC filing lists them as a fucking AD company, alright? Even Google says THEY ARE AN AD COMPANY so don't give us the "true Scotsman" crap when the company contradicts you.
If you look at the businesses that have succeeded using FOSS every. single. one. has used one of the "blessed three" business models, selling support, selling hardware, holding out a tin cup.
This is why for example no matter how many game engines are given to the FOSS community you will NEVER see a great single player masterpiece like Bioshock come from the FOSS community, because games do not fall under the blessed three and therefor they simply can't get enough funding to keep the doors open. This is also why we'll see Canonical close their doors in 3 years or less, they have already moved to the tin cup model after trying both support (Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Server) and selling hardware (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu Tablet) but desktop OSes don't fit under the blessed three so they simply don't have a chance.
This isn't saying that FOSS can't be successful, look at Red Hat, but your business needs to fall under the blessed three to succeed. The reason why is obvious, if anybody can make infinite copies and give them away you simply have to have some other way of making money. Personally I think there needs to be a subset of GPL with no redistribution clause so we can get things like games and software for home users that don't fit under the blessed three as without the redistribution clause the "printer story" that gave birth to the GPL would still be solved, but its so ingrained now I doubt you could ever get it to take off. So in the end stick to the blessed three if you are going FOSS or you'll end up like Xandros, Linspire, Mandriva, Loki, and soon Canonical.
FUD. Win 7 will ALWAYS look as if its installed to the C: drive to applications, even if it is not. I have mine installed to D: because I have XP on C: for a couple of old audio editing programs that don't like 64 bit and when I'm in Win 7 it says its on the C: drive, when I'm in XP it says its on the C: drive, so as far as the applications are concerned I have 2 drives that are each labeled C: instead of 2 partitions. It actually works wonderfully, the only catch is those older programs that would use a hidden partition to back up changes to the file system (Norton GoBack, Comodo Time Machine) naturally don't work since it can't take over the partition.
So if you want to bitch about Win 7 at least bitch about things Joe and Jane Normal would run into, such as how WMC can be slow to load when you have a lot of movies in your library as it insists on loading the metadata from scratch instead of keeping a metadata table and simply comparing the table with the library, or how Explorer sometimes can't make up its mind and will have a single click on a file just load file attributes while other times a single click on a file will load the attributes AND suddenly shoot the file to the far left pane of the explorer window which can be quite jarring when you are in the middle of dealing with a bunch of files.
And that right there shows the weird relationship that FOSS has compared to proprietary software and you can see why some companies wouldn't want to go anywhere near FOSS. I mean show me ANY other tech where you can continue to dictate what happens to something you had sold? To use a /. car analogy this would be like you selling a van and then telling the new owners who they can and can't give rides to.
But like I said give the little twerp credit, when the company that paid him good money for his software wouldn't kiss his behind he took it back WHILE keeping all the money. How many can actually say they have been able to have their cake and eat it too?
Bullshit, Asus/Asrock (they are merging into one company) and Gigabyte make damned good boards but you simply have to choose a board designed for your use case. If you want to be gaming and A/V editing if you choose that $29.99 board designed to give grandma a cheap but stable platform to play her FB games you really only have yourself to blame.
I have been using Asusrock and Gigabyte for years without a bit of hassle, the few times I had to walk a customer through changing any setting on either company's boards the problem ended up being PEBKAC, for example they had me put in a gamer board and they then proceeded to buy a bunch of RAM that was bottom of the barrel off of eBay and then was shocked when the board would hang. But you use a little common sense, don't buy a good board and then fill it with eBay special parts and you'll be fine.
BTW does anybody else find it extra douchey that Intel ran Nvidia out of the motherboard chipset business only for them to bail on the business? Between that and Intel hand in hand with MSFT killing the netbook market (because without ION an Atom was painful to use and Intel and MSFT both dream of being Apple) I just hope AMD doesn't end up going under, their chips are still crazy fast for most use cases and Intel is just the poster boy for sleazy corporate crap.
And now we know the date we can all pop some popcorn and watch MSFT score a hat trick of fail, Win 8, Surface, and now Surface Pro.
They have already had to cut the order for Surface RT in half because the things are piling up, Win 8 is a failure yet do they listen to the public? Nope Ballmer is going full retard by building their own phones and PCs just so there can be NO doubt that Ballmer only knows how to copy Apple.
But simply ripping off Apple just isn't gonna work, Windows 8 is a fundamentally broken UI and is so user UN-friendly that you need a Win 7 PC to Google how to use the Win 8 PC, and folks just aren't gonna put up with it. I support a lot of SMBs and not a single one has expressed any interest in Win 8, not the OS, not WinRT, and not Surface Pro, they are sticking with Win 7 for their X86 needs and using an Android or Apple tablet when they need that level of portability.
Never before in all my years in tech have I seen a company just completely ignore all the indicators and throw money away like that, MSFT does not have a single positive indicator with Win 8, not the desktops and laptops, not the phones and the tablets, seriously how much money does Steve Ballmer have to take a match to before the board wakes up and fires his dumb ass? I think Forbes need to name the MSFT board the worst board to go with Ballmer's worst CEO as they obviously are asleep at the wheel.
I'm sure it will have a little touchscreen where you input exactly what you want and it'll come out exactly as ordered, every single time.
I'd also like to point out I've been calling this one for a couple of years now as there will soon be no point in hiring people to do most of the low end jobs, the machine never gets tired, never calls in sick, doesn't get benefits or days off, in the end we are ALL John Henry working ourselves to death trying to beat the machine but the machine WILL win in the end.
This is why I truly believe capitalism, like every other ism before it, is doomed. you are playing musical chairs with fewer and fewer ending up with a seat. Even in China where workers are cheap as dirt and there isn't any workers protections to speak of a million workers are gonna be replaced by robots and this is just ONE company.
At the end of the day capitalism can't work if the only ones able to get any capital are those with enough of a fortune to begin that they can buy their own automated factories, what happens to those millions upon millions who weren't lucky enough to be born into wealth? Are you gonna pay them to sit at home and consume? Create megaprisons to house them all? As the record student loan defaults show you simply can't educate your way out of this, so what now?
I'm sorry but I gotta agree with GP, this is a company that sues farmers whose crops are infected by their crappy GMOs and its pretty obvious they have been playing fast and loose with tech that frankly should NEVER be used on food crops.
And before any apologists give us that "Its no different than cross breeding" line BULLSHIT, when you can show me ANY farmer cross breeding corn and starfish or grasshoppers THEN you'll have an argument, until then I'm afraid you are full of shit. I mean we can't even classify these things as plants anymore as they are mixing fish and grasshoppers and who knows what else, and anybody that follows a religious diet such as Kosher shouldn't even eat this crap as its no longer a pure plant but a Frankenstein monster mix of plant and animal!
So I'm sorry but the world would be a better place if Monsanto and their ilk were no longer in it. Thanks to their programming in sterility the farmers in the third world can't even save some seeds for next years crop, they gotta keep shelling out to Monsanto. They are truly a nasty vicious corp and I wouldn't be surprised if they just end up buying some politicians to get a law passed saying this isn't a problem and absolving them of any liability rather than risk there end up being a recall..
And THIS is why I think we are getting close to the big collapse, as the corrupt no longer even pretend to care or to hide their deed from prying eyes, they do it openly and on camera with a big middle finger to the people.
When you look at how big a bubble they've blown in the stock market its pretty plain to see a collapse is inevitable, the bubble of 29 was only 125% GDP and took a world war knocking out the competition and STILL didn't recover until 1953, whereas this bubble is over 430% and rising.
I personally think the PTBs are being this brazen on purpose, they want to get the people used to seeing more and more abuses so when the bubble bursts and they roll the tanks many won't fight back. I don't think it'll work as they have planned though, I think we'll end up like Libya with half the army for the people and half for the PTBs and its gonna end up one big bloody mess. Hell at this point the poor and middle class are hurting so bad that I wouldn't be surprised if they would sign off on some generale taking over, couldn't get any worse for those at the bottom than it already is.
Ya know, you gotta give the little twerp that sold MySQL credit, he not only gets a big fat check but he then forks what he sold and gets all his customers back! Smart as hell, I'll give him that, as nowhere else but FOSS could you sell something and keep it at the exact same time
I already addressed that, what you WILL see in ARM is the exact same thing that is happening to X86 now and WILL happen in 3 years, probably less. Nvidia is already up to 5 cores, Samsung has a 6 core in testing right now, and nobody has been able to figure out how to come up with a language or framework that can scale most jobs over multicores smoothly.
And honestly it does NOT have to mean MSFT's slice of the pie gets smaller, not if they had a CEO that wasn't a fucking moron that can only see Cupertino from his front desk. Put ME in charge of that company and I WILL double profits in 3 years or you won't owe me a dime! How, simple by supplementing the traditional MSFT sells software model with a services model. Companies want to keep XP? Fine pay for a service contract, if enough of you buy contracts we'll extend it for as long as you're willing to pay...BAM! Big chunk of money right there and all MSFT will have to do is security patches. Make an app based on the MSFT cloud that lets a user at work access his home PC or vice versa using 2 part auth based around flash sticks so they can carry a "key to their PCs" in their pocket next to the car keys..BAM! Another pile of cash that comes in monthly or yearly. backport the appstore to Win 7 and bring in some guys that know how to build an appstore, making it as close to "push button to get stuff" as possible while making deals with the biggest freeware companies to have their stuff, Flash, Reader, Java, all the programs people forget to update, included so for one low monthly price you can have ALL the hassle of keeping a PC totally updated in your average SMB gone...BAM! Another pile of cash.
IBM is making more money than ever, even though they sell less big iron than ever, by adding services and support to software and hardware. There is no reason why MSFT couldn't do the same if Steve Ballmer wasn't an MBA idiot that doesn't know shit about his own market and instead think merely aping Cupertino will magically give them Cupertino's customers...not gonna happen, full of fail, they will lose billions and not gain shit. I would have Win 8 for touch devices only, giving users the choice of it or 7, and by constantly adding new services and features for sale I would have Windows become an ala carte OS that YOU could decide what exactly it does or doesn't do. Not only would I be making money hand over fist but people would love MSFT again because they would feel more in control and it would give them constant revenue, even from old installs, without having to force people to take software they don't want.
Thanks and I'll back up my anecdote from the ground with an actual example, what I have found frankly to be the perfect microcosm of the "typical user"...my dad.
My dad could NOT be more of a typical PC user, having started out in the days of the Trash80 he has gone through just about every PC trend there has been and when you take a look at his uses for a PC: Webmail, surfing, burning discs, watching videos and movies, chat, running Quickbooks, he is as close to a typical user of a PC as one could possibly get! So when the Phenom IIs hit the cheap bin I thought "Ya know, its been awhile since I built that $150 Phenom I quad system for him, maybe I better see if its time to move up***" so I monitored his PC performance for 3 weeks and then came by and pulled up the record...what did I find? 45%, that is what I found, the absolute MAX he was able to slam that now nearly 7 year old Phenom I quad was 45% and comparing the performance log to the Windows logs I found that was when he had a tab hang in his browser, removing that anomaly we had an average of less than 35% typical core usage.
So for the "average user", the one which as you point out buys hundreds of millions of PCs a year compared to niches like CAD or even gaming, even though we gamers DO spend crazy money, the PC has been past good enough and into insanely overpowered for almost half a decade now. Hell I DO use video transcoding and editing but I've found this Thuban X6 I picked up for a cheap $100 can do video transcoding AND surfing AND play a lot of the current games without skipping AT THE SAME TIME by just dividing the load between the cores, so why buy a new one? Looking at my own PC usage I found that more than 65% of the time my PC is in "turbo mode" which means that 3 or more cores are IDLE so AMD ramps up the speed on the remaining cores. Now if a guy like me, that is "Mr Multitasker" and often has two or more jobs in the air at once, can't even stress out a $100 chip? What are the odds Joe and Jane Average are gonna be able to stress out a quad?
***oh and for those that say "Fuck you, no way you were building systems THAT cheap" you have forgotten about the TLB bug, when that came out I was getting triples and quads, especially the BEs because of the Core2 bug that kept you from OCing the chips, for DIRT cheap. I can still get Phenom I quads in the $50-$65 range but with the Athlon X3s so cheap they aren't worth getting anymore unless you trip over an AM2 board that will take 'em.
Uhhh...DirectX really isn't much of a moving target since Win 8 has flopped, I'd say a good 80% of the games either are or still have support for DirectX 9C while I can only think of a couple of games that are DirectX 10+ only (Halo 2, Just Cause II being the only ones I can think of) so if you could incorporate a perfect DirectX 9C you would have probably 80%+ game support.
Again though rightly or wrongly our system on reverse engineering is a LOT more strict than the EU or Asia and since a large portion of the game development is done in the USA that is gonna be a serious problem. Frankly MSFT could shut down and block Wine from the USA, might even be able to get it blocked by anybody that signed Berne because of how lax the Wine team has been with regards to reverse engineering. Just look at how ReactOS was brought to a screeching halt when allegations of MSFT code was leveled, with Wine it would be worse because you can go to their dev boards and they come right out and say they don't use clean room.
So until somebody can come up with a product capable of replacing Windows (Linux is too fiddly and is more a loose collection of programs than an OS, OSX too expensive, ChromeOS too locked down and web only) its gonna be really hard to get game devs to give up on DirectX and really who can blame 'em? OpenGL has been a mess for the better part of the decade, with Khronos caring too much about backwards compatibility to make the CAD people happy than actually competing with DX, this is a case where somebody like Valve really needs to fork OpenGL away from Khronos and put it back on a fast track so that once again it can be ahead of DX on features and work closely with GPU makers like they did during the days of HL 1 and Quake.
All they needed to do is change the focus to make it into a decent FA and being a nice guy allow me to do so:
If MLK or any of the other freedom fighters of the 60s were to pull that same shit today they would have all their rights stripped away as EVERYTHING is a felony now.
Now THAT should have been the focus of TFA, Go to some occupy protest? You end up on a list of possible terrorists and if you are arrested they will pile on as many charges as it takes to make it a felony. Go to some rally and hold up a little sign? Same thing, if the PTBs decide to break it up a good portion of your rights will be stripped away. Do you know how many homeless single mothers we have because of the "zero tolerance" crap they passed in the 90s?If you get busted for pretty much anything in many states including protesting you will end up being able to get ZERO help for the rest of your life, in fact a fucking illegal will have more help than you will, you'll have pretty much zero rights and the cops will fuck with you at will for the rest of your life. "do the crime do the time" simply no longer exists as its "Do a crime do a life sentence as a second class citizen"
It was THIS kind of bullshit that killed the kid, not JSTOR or any other corp. Sure corps now have Godlike powers but those Godlike powers are granted them by a broken corrupted system that has turned into a giant revolving door with so much conflict of interest its not even funny.
This is the problem I have with the old "Robots take over the world" gag as a "true" AI would be so fucking alien to us that its wants and needs and desires wouldn't be anything at all like or own. I can't remember where I heard this but it always stuck in my head, i think it was an SFDebris review of a "robots take over the world" movie but I can't be sure. What he said was basically thus:
There are variations if sexuality among our own kind that frankly many of us wouldn't be able to understand even in the abstract, take "vore" which is a fetish built around being eaten alive by something. I can understand why someone would like feet instead of breasts or butts because that I can understand even though none of these things by themselves are truly sexual, at best things like breasts can be considered secondary sexual characteristics while feet are normally used to haul your butt to the bed, but vore is something that no matter how many times its explained to me I simply cannot understand, my brain simply can't make the connection between being ripped apart and eaten by a zombie with sex, I just don't "work that way" and that is talking about something that in the grand scheme of things is just a teeny tiny variation between two of the same species.
Now let us take the idea of a true AI, a machine that is completely capable of independent thought. To this creature something like abstract geometry or quantum mechanics or the number Pi could be as stimulating and worth pursuing as food and sex is for us. By that measure it would look at our fetishes and be completely clueless just as I am with Vore, it just wouldn't be able to understand how something as trivial as breasts or feet between creatures that to it would be identical or at best the equivalent of a 1 and a 0 could have so many variations, it just wouldn't "work that way" and while it might be perfectly happy to solve what it would consider a trivial or meaningless problem, like solving aging or world hunger, for what it WOULD consider meaningful, like coming up with the longest calculation of Pi or making a truth table to every action in quantum mechanics we just can't try to stick what would make US tick to such a creature because we would have less in common with it than we do with whales or dolphins, we simply wouldn't think like it and it wouldn't think like us.
For those that like such thought experiments Neil DeGrasse gave his thoughts on what meeting an alien would actually be like and its something similar in nature: that we would be so different from each other that even if we learned each other language the ability to actually understand each other would be VERY difficult because of how differently we would think. To them the kind of quantum mechanics that Hawking spent years figuring out could be as intuitive as 1 plus 1, concepts that only a handful of our smartest minds are able to truly grasp like string theory and multiple dimensions would be as natural as a child learning to walk, so having a conversation between the two would be VERY hard and I bet with a true AI it would be similar, since we are talking about a silicon based life form that we would have little to nothing in common with.
The release date is 2015, which makes it a standard 3 years per release. Since they have already said ALL versions, not just Pro, will get a full 10 years of support this will allow businesses to skip a couple of releases (as they did by skipping Vista for 7, and are now skipping 8) without losing support while basically using the consumers for the beta testers for the features that will end up in the business friendly odd releases.
Frankly I don't know why FOSS users would bitch about this since they are basically copying your "odd/even" or "LTS/regular" release concepts. If the reports are correct, which we've seen no indication that they aren't and a lot of evidence (Surface, MSFT stores, MSFT building their own hardware) that they are what you are gonna see with Windows is the same thing Apple users have had with OSX for ages, a $40 a pop upgrade and faster releases because like OSX instead of trying to come up with a shitload of new features to justify a $100-$200 price point they will just add a couple of things to each release and sell more of them on the fast release schedule.
Personally I don't give a shit as long as the next "LTS Business release" aka Win 9 gives us the choice of getting rid of that damned metro crap in favor of a standard desktop and they make system builders and OEM pricing cheaper and more transparent.
Not to mention until they find a way to fix the BIG PROBLEM which is a good 90%+ of the games are built around DirectX and therefor won't run on Linux? You can give it up. I mean who wants Steam on Linux when it has less selection than the already piss poor Steam for Mac?
Sure they could try to incorporate Wine into Steam but I wouldn't be surprised if Valve ends up with a couple of years worth of lawsuits from MSFT which rightly or wrongly most likely MSFT WILL WIN since most of the Wine development is done in Europe where the laws on reverse engineering are VERY lax compared to ours. In the USA you had better use clean room procedures with strict separation between the one looking at the code to be reverse engineered and the guy writing the replacement.
So I'm sorry but I just don't see how this is gonna get any traction. Not only will you not find Linux being sold on any machines in any B&M stores but when all the hottest games use a framework that you don't have and won't run without serious hoop jumping? Hell the whole point of Steam is its a "push button and get game" service and if the only way you can run the majority of games is to deal with a couple of pages of CLI crap and a LOT of finger crossing because most of the games run DirectX I don't see many people putting up with it.
I still think this is all smoke and mirrors though, the REAL reason for Steam on Linux is Valve's Steambox which will run a GPL V2 only Linux (so they can use the hardware DRM that consoles require) and they are just letting the community beta test the software before it goes into production. Makes sense, if the console is a hit they can talk more devs into porting to OpenGL on Steambox and if they put out a console it needs to be solid on the software front, hence the beta testing. I just don't see how Steam on Linux could be the end goal, not with so many show stopping problems.
But what good is crapping resources when you can get the exact same or better for less? That is like saying "I don't give a fuck if this car gets 2 MPG and doesn't do a damned thing that the car that gets 35 MPG does, because its pretty". While you are entitled to that opinion that doesn't make it insightful or even a good idea because frankly I wouldn't be surprised if you could take the unreal SDK and replicate a scene from Doom 3 with it and run TWO of those in the same CPU and memory space that Doom 3 uses.
And sadly the state of FOSS gaming is like a bad joke, thanks to the ONLY way you can make any money in FOSS is the "blessed three" of support contracts, selling hardware, or holding out a tin cup honestly its just...well kinda sad really. In the "real" gaming world we are seeing great story lines, with great acting and directing, incredible visuals, just a great experience all around in the FOSS world the ONLY thing you EVER see from these engines being released is yet another 50 Q3 Arena ripoffs, just the same tired and lame ass modes all over again, king of the hill, CTF, DM, hell the players that want that kind of gameplay have TF2 for free where at least you have funny little back-stories and characters.
I mean what are you gonna entice people with? Here is another copy of a decade old Q3 Arena? Tux Racer? Wesnoth which looks like if you loaded it onto a cart it would play on the SNES without even stressing the weak ass SNES CPU? This is kind of a microcosm of the weakness of FOSS in general as the ONLY thing you have to offer is "free as in beer and freedom" which players can get the former a HELL of a lot better on Windows with the FTP model and nobody gives two shits about the latter, see the lines around the block to get the latest iToy as an example. What FOSS needs is their own Bioshock or WoW but because throwing some skins on the same tired old game modes is easy while making something worth playing is fucking insanely hard all we get is the former and NEVER the latter. Kinda sad really but I have been saying for ages that thanks to the blessed three FOSS ends up like the old USSR where the only thing it has really in its favor is politics that most just don't care about, not enough to put up with poor substandard games.
I don't know why anybody would hate on the C60, its frankly a kick ass netbook or mini-PC chip and when I couldn't find an E350 for my dad's GF year before last I found him an Acer with a C60 to give her and she just loves the hell out of the thing, like with my E350 EEE she has no intention of getting rid of it and why should she? Unlike the crippled Atom systems the C and E series support a ton of RAM (she has 4GB on hers, I went ahead and slapped 8GB in my E350) and have full VM support as well as does 1080P over HDMI. She loves hers because the C series gets even better battery life than mine, after 2 years she still gets nearly 6 hours whereas after 3 years mine still gets a solid 4. But I'm glad to see you enjoy the Bobcats, I can't count the number of office PCs and HTPCs I've built with Bobcats and they are just great, low power, full 1080P, hell I play L4D and the Portal and Torchlight series on my netbook when stuck at the doctor's office and its a fricking blast.
BTW Crosshair one place to keep an eye out besides Craigslist and eBay is to check out Cowboom which will have some insanely cheap AMD units from time to time. If you have never heard of them its the site Best Buy uses to sell all their returned and refurbed as well as trade in units and as you can see while they have a ton of dirt cheap Atoms they do get some AMD netbooks as well as the occasional full size. I picked up an Atom dual for $85 there that was like new, boy that was an easy unit to turn, as well as a C50 Gateway that was only $129 and also easy to flip. Its one of those sites you really just have to check daily as they constantly get new stuff and you never know what is gonna be there. The only AMDs they have now is a couple of single cores at $165 but last week they had a really nice E450 for just $130, you just gotta keep an eye out.
Oh and also keep an eye out on Amazon because as you can see here you can get some insanely cheap AMD E series boards there, I mean $70 for the Gigabyte with 4 SATA, or $95 for the Asrock with a PCI-E slot? way too cheap. If you are building an office PC I recommend the cheaper Gigabyte but for an HTPC you can't go wrong with the Asrock as hybrid crossfire works pretty damned good on those E series and having dedicated VRAM makes for a sweet HTPC, but as I'm sure you know both do 1080P just fine as long as you don't cheap out and buy 1066 RAM, I found running 1333 does make a difference on those APUs.
And if you do have an HTPC you ought to email me and I'll send you the links to the free programs I use, i tripped over some killer freeware that loads all the Metadata from IMDB into your media library so when you fire up WMC it has all the box art and synopsis filled in, hell of a lot nicer than trying to just find things alphabetically and since it loads all the metadata you can sort by genre, year, title, its a great way to enjoy your movies and TV shows.
The reason I don't advocate Intel, well besides the douchebag compiler rigging and bribery they should have gotten an anti-trust bust for, is that they cripple their chips and moreover they cripple them WRONG. I mean cutting out POWERSAVING features on the lower end chips? Really? You have cache and HT and VM support you can cut, that isn't enough but you gotta make them laptop chips into pigs when you have so many other ways to upsell?
And I have to completely disagree that Intel chips are cheaper and lower wattage, not only because they tend to cripple powersaving on their lower end chips but also because on the low end you can get insane amounts of power from AMD cheap. I mean I can get an Athlon Triple kit for $195 just add HDD and a fricking Phenom II Hexacore for just $210 just add HDD and burner. When you figure in the cost to finish those kits up I can have a completed product for less than an Intel i3 CPU, board and RAM, which would leave me with half the parts left to buy!
And finally I again have to disagree when it comes to SSDs because until they fix the hot/crazy scale when it comes to SSDs I simply can't recommend them except for certain niches like a mobile device that isn't gonna have mission critical data on it, and that article may be a couple years old but if anything I've found that since going up to triple cells the problem has gotten worse. I have several gamer customers that buy top o' the line and they are up to double digits when it comes to SSDs because of all the failures, and we ain't talking OCZ, we are talking Intel, Kingston, and Samsung. In a way it reminds me of the first days of HDDs and how insanely high those early drive failure rates were and of course once it fails you can't wipe the drive so many of my customers are leery of even claiming on their warranty because they have no idea what kind of third world center those drives will be sent to and if they will be risking ID theft thanks to all the data on the now dead SSD.
The funny part is its NOT the cells that are failing as you'd think, nope its the ARM controllers they have on the drives themselves. When that thing fails, which it ALWAYS does with no warning at all, you can't even get your data off because it won't even show up in BIOS. Now once they get THAT fixed? Behind you 100% although I have to wonder how much gain myself and most of my users will see since most just use sleep mode anyway and with Win 7 intelligent caching most of their programs are already loaded into RAM but in its current state frankly SSDs are even worse than Seagate drives over 600Gb when it comes to the number just shitting themselves.
Oh not only is it THAT retarded but it makes one of the oldest. fucking. mistakes. on Slashdot, the kind of shit we expect from noobs NOT from TFA. Say it with my boys and girls, correlation does NOT equal causation!
And who in the fuck is listening to those fucking retards in the press that think we are going back to one PC? because as a retailer that sells PCs and services I'd like to bitchslap him/her for being so fucking stupid. that is NOT why sales are down, its the exact opposite in that everybody has too many computers with even the poorest people i know having 2 or 3 of the things!
For those that want the actual FACTS from somebody down in the trenches its REALLY fucking simple, the mid 90s through mid 00s? THAT was a bubble, that was NOT the natural state of the market. Look at the sales from before as well as the sales after and you have a perfect bell curve. The reason WHY you saw a bubble blown in PC sales is because you had AMD and Intel dueling in the MHz wars and thanks to how incredibly easy it is to take advantage of a faster single core a PC you bought 2 years previously would struggle to run the latest stuff and by 3 years it couldn't run shit that had been released. I went from a 300MHz to 733MHz, 1100MHz, and finally 2200MHz, all in less than 4 years. That's a more than 7 fold increase in speed folks.
But then a funny thing happened that ironically we are seeing play out all over again in ARM and that is both AMD and Intel ran headfirst into a thermal and power wall, chips were hitting close to 140w TDP and were requiring bigger and bigger coolers, with Intel it was a big enough problem that they had to keep the P3 in mobile because between the power sucking and all the fans it took to keep the damned things from melting you could count the battery life of a P4 laptop in fricking minutes....so what to do? Simple instead of constantly ramping up the MHz ramp up the cores and sell multicores to the masses! Brilliant!
But it turned out for the chip makers and companies like MSFT that had gotten fat and lazy and had convinced themselves and Wall Street that like the real estate bubble the PC sales bubble would continue that it turned out this plan was TOO brilliant because we PC retailers noticed a curious little fact, once you got to dual cores, which gave you one core for foreground and one for background processing? With the vast majority you saw diminishing returns REAL fucking quickly, with the average user not able to tell the difference between a dual, triple, or quad, much less a hexa or octo by the way they acted, why? Because they just couldn't come up with enough useful work to feed the chips. Hell myself and my two boys are fricking PC gamers which traditionally required pretty damned quick PC turnover, during the bubble I was building a new PC every year and a half and building the boys new ones every 2 years, now? Me and the oldest have nearly 3 year old hexacores that have more cores idle than being used a good 90% of the time and the youngest who is the MMO player in the family is so happy with the fast Athlon triple that I loaned him while his quad was waiting for a part he told me just keep the quad, the triple was more than he needed.
So it is NOT that "the PC is dying" or that anybody is trading their fricking laptops or desktops for some dinky ass smartphone, its the simple fact that for nearly 6 years PCs have been insanely overpowered so people see no need to buy a new one when they can't stress the old. Most of my business and home users simply had me install Win 7 when it came out rather than buy a new Win 7 PC, why? Because what I was selling on the LOW end 5 years ago, we are talking the cheapest new builds I had, were fricking Phenom I triples and quads with 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDDs! What normal user is gonna be able to max out a Phenom I triple? Heck I have an engineer customer that runs the latest Solidworks with extremely complex robot models on a Phenom I triple and he's quite happy with the performance.
The FOSSies can waste mod points all the want, doesn't change the fact that its a myth and easily shown to be false. did you forget the bug that was in Debian SIX YEARS before anybody caught it? Or the blatant malware in Q3 Arena that was downloaded countless times and sat in the repos of ALL the major distros for a year and a fricking half before anybody noticed they were all being pwned?
Again you and those that advocate this myth are falling for the assumption because something CAN occur that it HAS occurred. want proof that don't happen? How many fucking Man pages in Linux are placeholders? that is a job that frankly ANYBODY can do, don't need coding experience to write a Man page, yet for most of those that have placeholders it just won't get done.
For the "many eyes" myth to hold true you would have to accept several assumptions that real life simply don't bear out, 1.- That people will download and inspect the code. Again answer my question, have YOU inspected the LO code? Even once? That is one of the most popular programs in FOSS land but I bet out of ALL the geeks on /. the number that have actually downloaded and inspected that code could be counted on one hand. Now if that is the case with one of the most popular apps ON THE PLANET how many do you think have looked at the little pissling ass subsystems and little programs that nobody even think about but which are including in every distro, things like say the clock or the calendar or the theme program? I bet my last dollar if they keep logs you'd find almost NOBODY has downloaded the actual source and there hasn't been jack shit as far as submissions by anybody but the guys that actually maintain the thing.
2.- That people that actually have the skills and experience to do meaningful code reviews are actually gonna spend their free time doing code reviews on this stuff. Do you have ANY idea how many years of coding experience it takes to be able to look at a VERY complex program like LO or Gimp or any of the other dozens of programs included in most distros and to be able to spot errors or problems? Have you ever looked at the winners of the obfuscated C contest? In that contest you KNOW there is malware in the code but frankly unless you have a high enough level of coding skill to instruct classes in C I seriously doubt you would spot it. The guys that actually do have that level of skill are frankly in high demand and free time? Not something they have a lot of so I seriously doubt that they are gonna want to sit around doing code reviews.
3.- That there are enough people out there WITH the skills to spot bugs AND the willingness to do it to keep up with the avalanche of new programs being added to the repos weekly. Hell if we even limit it to JUST the programs that are included in most distros when you figure in all the little sub-programs if it numbers less than 10,000 I'd frankly be amazed. Again go download the code to some of the popular programs like Gimp or LO or even the smaller ones like Abiword or Gnumeric and see just how many fucking pages of code we are talking about here, no way in hell you are gonna get enough highly skilled volunteers to go through that many densely coded programs even once a decade and again I bet for the vital but lesser known programs they probably haven't had a single person not on the dev team that has actually done a meaningful code review of the source code.
So I'm sorry but "many eyes" just doesn't hold up to even the most cursory of logic and you can waste all the modpoints you want but black isn't white, straw isn't gold, and many eyes is bullshit. THAT DOES NOT MEAN that not having the code is somehow "better" or that having the code doesn't give you some pretty powerful advantages, as I said if you want say Abiword to run on MIPS you can port it or pay to have it ported, if you need a program that has been EOLed like gnome 2 you can get like minded people together and keep it going, both of which are pretty powerful advantages. It simply means that "many eyes"