Yeah but even you have to admit this last round everybody gimped the machines when it came to RAM. I mean 10Mb of EDRAM and 512Mb of RAM for the X360? I'm sorry but they really should have doubled that. GDDR 3 back then really wasn't that high, especially when you are an 800 pound gorilla like MSFT and are gonna be buying a boatload of the stuff.
So even though I'm a PC gamer I really hope MSFT and Sony don't gimp their next systems, as we always end up with the consoles holding back the PCs and the last thing we need is for games to be RAM starved for another decade.
Well if the rumors are true the PS4 is gonna be a midrange AMD APU, which means with a light embedded OS it ought to be pretty kicking for games without breaking the bank, MSFT will probably go with an AMD GPU and POWER CPU, again if rumors are to be believed.
I am shocked that Nintendo went as weak as they did, frankly it looks more like a hopped up wii and the Wii wasn't exactly a powerful system to start with. Now we know that Nintendo has been courting casual gamers of late but personally i think that is a risky move, between the new TVs having casual gaming support baked in and all the phones and tablets you'd think they'd want to at least be able to play current games at 1080p with a reasonable framerate.
I have a feeling if the rumors are true its gonna leave Valve a hell of an opening for their Steambox, because people aren't gonna shell out $300+ for a console without any real "wow!" factor and lets face it, any low end Intel or AMD quad with a modern GPU will give some pretty drool worthy graphics.
But I have to say Nintendo has been a puzzler this time around, not having any of their class A mascots ready to go at launch, again going with a gimmicky controller and an expensive one at that, and having pretty weak hardware I just don't get what they are going for here. Of course i'd say Nintendo would be in trouble right now anyway, because talking to my customers that are into consoles I've found most of the Wii units are in closets gathering dust, just too few AAA titles buried under too much shovelware and too many folks got tired of the whole "stick waggle' gimmicks and just stuffed the thing in a closet.
There are adapters out there that will convert HDMI or DVI to S-Video, which any TV made in the last decade should have, there are also adapters to switch it to RCA. Check out Monoprice, i think they are around $7.
As far as Steam goes you'd probably have to use the website and not the built in interface as it is pretty limited. Look up "passing arguments to Steam" and there are several pages that will show you how to filter. its basically like Google in that you have to put the right filters at the end of the statement.
Finally as far as Win 8? in most places the Metro UI sucks big hairy balls, but for an HTPC it gives you a bright easy to read target to hit so frankly for that particular niche its not bad, I just wouldn't want to use it on a traditional desktop or laptop. But Steam works, all the games on Steam don't seem to be bothered by metro, and we are talking about kids here who will probably like the big colored UI that is Metro. Of course if you want to hack it there is Classic Shell and Start8 that will give you a more traditional UI, and I hear XBMC is coming out with a version for Win 8 so you can always use that instead.
Exactly, just because it was 70+ years ago didn't mean they didn't have strong crypto back then. Just look at VENONA or the Enigma, in both of those cases what allowed them to be broken was that the other side screwed up and either kept using a pad (VENONA) or in the case of Enigma there were flaws in the design (a letter could never be encoded to itself) and several times messages were re-broadcast due to transmission troubles without bothering to change the settings.
Most likely like those handful of late war enigma cyphers (or the 70% of VENONA messages we failed to crack) we'll never decode it, the message is simply lost to history, any copies of that pad were trashed decades ago and without it all you will get is gibberish.
The problem with that idea is the money party is almost over and when this bubble bursts your money is gonna be worth less than a Zimbabwe dollar. this is why gold is over $1700 an ounce and rising, the ones at the top are cashing out and quietly moving overseas before the bubble bursts. look at the charts starting at 3.30, notice how the great depression had 125% of GDP in the market, and that trainwreck ended up leaving us with a busted economy for decades? Well look at the giant hockey stick starting around 1992, we are now at 400% of GDP AND RISING.
All of us who sat back and wondered WTF was gonna happen when the USSR collapsed is gonna get to see it right here on American soil, as you are gonna have millions of poor being handed worthless checks, millions of homeless and exploding crime, the whole thing is gonna fall down and go boom and there is not a damned thing anybody can do now, it is inevitable. So while being part of the underground economy may help a little in the short term the simple fact is with the currency made worthless you are gonna have a hard time even trading,as sooner or later you are gonna need currency to trade for food, shelter, power, and it'll be just like Zimbabwe where you need a wheelbarrow just to go buy some milk.
Oh Lord,you have GOT to be kidding me...you thinking VOTING is gonna do a God damned thing? Well i have a game of three card monty you should play, I'm SURE that you'll find the lady!
Not only do you have an entire class of people that get ZERO say because they got their rights taken away due to a pot bust or other victimless crime, but frankly your "choices" are both bought and paid for before your ass ever gets in the booth! it costs on average 100 million to become a senator, a billion bucks to become president, hell even at the state level you are talking several million a campaign...you think those people that paid those bills and wrote those checks won't be making that money back and then some when the election is over?
Your "choices" are Coke VS Coke in a holiday can, and that is it. Its a bad joke that keeps those silly peasants thinking they have a say when they don't, because the corporations vote in $$$ and $$$ tops votes any day of the week.
I believe it was Richard M. Nixon that said that first, so it would be a 20th century idea that has simply made a comeback. I would argue that simply from the Wikileaks dump at least one, probably two, presidents should have been brought up on War Crimes if there was actual rule of law in this country but the fact that they weren't just shows that Nixon was right, he was just ahead of his time.
Kinda sad to think that if Nixon had pulled Watergate today Woodward and Bernstein would have probably been labeled enemy combatants and both sides of the aisle would be rushing to defend Nixon, but that's what happens when the whole system is corrupt,those at the top cover each other's asses in case they want to pull the same shit when its their turn in the big chair.
That is why we in the south call 'em "public pretenders" because last numbers I saw you literally have better odds defending yourself and getting off (4%) than getting a public pretender and getting off (less than 2% last figures i saw for my state) because they are so overworked and underfunded their answer to ANYTHING is 'plead guilty' no matter how weak a case the state has.
Yeah look close at what goes on in the state and county levels and it makes the feds look like choirboys in comparison. Its ALL about who you know and who gave money to whom, it don't have a damned thing to do with laws or justice. I invite all to sit in any local courtroom for a week and see if you don't pick up the waft of corruption, I have watched guys in Gucci suits have so many charges it ain't funny waved away while some poor kid with a bag of weed gets 3-5, its ALL about the money.
I'd say the only difference between our courts and the third world is at least in the third world ANYBODY can buy their way out, in America you have to be hooked into the right corp or be part of the right group, much more classism here.
We already TRIED that, it was later called "the age of the robber barons" because i don't give a rat's ass what kind of utopia you dream up without rules it quickly devolves into "he who has the gold makes the rules' just as it has since the days of the cavemen. The problem with libertarianism (or any other ism for that matter) is at their core they all depend on those at the top not being douches when as we have seen a billion times throughout history the ONE thing you can count on is for those at the top to be giant self serving douches.
As for TFA, evil corrupt government VS maladjusted and probably a little batshit hackers...yeah, not really anybody to root for in this fight, they ALL suck.
Hell pick up a guitar or bass and give it a go, I've seen guys that can barely play 3 chords keep an entire crowd just jumping, its like that old saying "3 chords and some heart is all you need" and nearly every town has a club with an open mike night and a house band, get up there are rip through some classic I-IV-V rock and have a fricking ball. Sure you'll never be Steve Vai or Geddy Lee, but there are maybe 0.002% of the planet who can stand in the same room with those guys and not get smoked. I've been on stage with guys that were waaaay above me and I held my own, NOT because I could cut heads with them technically, but because when i got on that stage I was there to have FUN with a capital F and the audience can feel that. As I've often said on stage "tell Gene to get his ass up here because I AM the lord of the wasteland!" and the crowd always cheers and roars because they can tell I'm just eating that shit up and having a fucking ball.
And I bookmarked that link and will check it out if I get a chance, but I gotta knock the rust off if i wanna get back up there after the holidays. Time to break out the AC and Five Finger Death Punch and work my way back up to the Rush, happy holiday!
It depends on the cut, lets say you have tough as leather steaks...what you do is to put a LIGHT layer of table or rock salt (either will do, some prefer one or the other but its more a preference thing) and then lightly massage the meat, kinda like you were tenderizing it but with your hands instead of a mallet.
Now some tell you to wipe it off BEFORE you put it in the marinade, but I don't as it keeps the cells opened up to get more of the marinade in, only time this rule don't hold true is if you marinade is already salty, no need for the excess then. Then you simply put it in a tupperware container (be sure to squeeze the air out, it helps get that marinade deep into the meat) and you let it soak overnight. If I'm gonna be cooking it at say 6PM next day I try to have it in the fridge by 8PM the day before, give it nearly 24 hours of soaking.When you take it out simply pat it dry in a couple of paper towels and you are ready to go!
With this trick you can take game or even beef that is tough as shoe leather and the next day it will be tender and juicy, and if you use an already tender cut of meat it will practically melt in your mouth, and of course the flavor will be so nicely embedded you really won't need condiments, it'll just distract from the flavor.
Don't need monitors, even 5 year old TVs have HDMI, no need for the gaming cards, E350 has the Radeon HD6340 built in (although you can add a card later if you want) and Win 8 is $40, so no biggie on that front.
But even if they didn't build but the one the amount of games they have on steam that support single screen MP is just nuts, a LOT of the indies support SSMP, and there are just tons of them on steam thanks to project greenlight.
But you could buy a fully loaded E350 kit for less than $200 counting RAM, HDD, and Win 8, Steam is free, just slap a couple of X360 controllers and you have a killer HTPC that will also let them surf, chat, let mommy check her FB, its got a hell of a lot more uses than the locked down consoles. I have built several and folks just love 'em, any place you could think of you'd like the net you can just pop one of these babies in there and be good to go, great little units.
Man...remember when ALL the boards were like that? Nice big boards, with big traces, everything was so damned easy to work on, its sooooo nice. Now they overpack the shit out of everything, you get even at ATX board where you think "Sure with THIS much space they won't cram" and NOPE, its cram city! Hell back in the day things started to look even slightly crammed it was daughterboard time, now you have to seriously watch 'em because the cramming makes it hell to insure that all the chips get decent airflow.
As for TFA...meh, the Apple I was okay, but the Apple II was the one that ended up being sold years after everybody else moved on, simply because so damned much software and add-ons were made for it people still wanted the unit, now THAT is impressive, to have your second time at bat, against companies with a HELL of a lot more money and experience under their belts, and to knock it out of the park like that? This is why even though I have never cared for the locked down nature of later Apple I give the two Steves credit, they pulled off some shit back then that would frankly be impossible in this lawsuit heavy megacorp world, they built a fricking empire from a garage...now THAT is impressive.
Dude he is spending $10 a week on LOTTO TICKETS, you think any "investments" this guy would make would actually do better? And what kind of broker is gonna take a client that only has $10 a week to invest?
I hate to say it but your friend has better odds with the lotto tickets than with any penny ante stocks you could get for $10 a week, at least with the lotto he has like a 1 in a bazillion chance of winning, with those low rent penny ante stocks its gotta be pretty damned close to zero as you sure as hell ain't buying no Google or Apple stock for $10, hell you can't even get MSFT for $10.
Shhhhh...the peasants don't know that! You see even though nuclear is a hell of a lot safer (and the reason you see crap like Fukishima is that the NIMBYs make building new plants damned near impossible so you end up with plants running waaaay past their close dates) and you aren't gonna get the foulness and radiation spewing like you do with coal you say nuclear and its "ZOMFG we are all gonna glow in the dark, Waaah!" followed by many morons running like chickens with their heads cut off. On the other hand coal comes from the ground right? You say coal and they think of some old train with a guy shoveling coal, hell if its safe enough for some guy to just scoop it up in a shovel its GOTTA be safe...right?
This is what happens when you let Hollywood educate the masses, coal equals old trains, nuclear equals China Syndrome. And the simple fact is renewables just won't scale and give us the 24/7 power we require and of course the amount of building required to give us renewables at the scale required would bring out the NIMBYs in force, it would be "ZOMFG you are gonna disturb the mating grounds of the eastern hipper hopper snail!" and that would be that.
And I do hope this is a valuable lesson to all on why cap and trade scams won't do a fucking bit of good in a global environment, because as we see here as long as SOMEBODY is willing to buy somebody else will be willing to sell, so all you do is move the factories to the third world who will be happy to deal with that pollution for high employment and you can just keep printing money to pay those millions that now can't get a job because there isn't any to get. For crap and trade scams to work you would have to get ULTRA nationalistic, close down trade completely with ALL that refuse to follow your little cap and trade game, and if you allow even one country to trade that doesn't play along the whole thing collapses. You'll notice Al Gore and friends NEVER say a damned thing about blocking trade with China and India, why heavens no, where would they get their slave labor from?
So as you can see whether you believe in AGW or not the whole cap and trade scam simply doesn't work as long as there are players that refuse to play the game, and since any country that refuses to play will get increased employment and lower energy costs there is a pretty damned good incentive not to play the game. of course those at the top of the scam KNOW this, this is why they hired the one who wrote the credit default swap scam to write the rules on cap and trade, after all they made out like Gods and even got the American taxpayer to pick up a 700 billion dollar tab for every bet they made that went bust, so why not do it again with cap and trade? Free profits for everyone at the top, courtesy of the American people, what could be sweeter?
Its not the lack of 64bit that is gonna kills it, its the performance. take something like Process Explorer and have it set to show you via the system tray what is going on as far as CPU/RAM/HDD (its in options>tray IIRC) and then run ANY webkit and FF side by side and see for yourself. Hell I can take a low power machine from 8 years ago and still run multiple tabs and even SD video and its just fine in Webkit, the video is smooth and the UI responsive, the exact same pages and video in Firefox? It'll spike the CPU so badly the entire UI becomes unresponsive (which is why you need the tray app because when FF does this you aren't gonna be switching) and if you are on a laptop or netbook all those spikes equal worse battery life.
Like I said I REALLY wish this weren't so, I used FF before it was even called FF and I used the Moz Suite before that, but its obvious to anybody with eyes the future is more and more laptops and low power devices and in that crucial arena FF just blows chunks and again i think it comes down to gecko. gecko ran fine when they were doing their own thing, but ever since they've been trying to match Chrome feature for feature by just bolting shit onto Gecko performance has gone WAAAAY down. I would say gecko needs a major rewrite, build a new gecko with sandboxing and isolation with a focus on low resource use OOTB, because as it is now anything webkit based just blows it out of the water.
I can tell ya what the problem is friend...its gecko. you look at the history of Firefox and up to about FF 4 every version got better, memory got better (although they royally pissed me off by going "La la la we don't leak memory" only to turn around and say "We fixed the memory leaks!") CPU usage got better, extensions got better...so what happened? Simple they started to try to match Webkit features by just bolting them onto gecko and the simple fact is gecko just wasn't made with those features in mind so naturally bolting on advanced features sucks. If you try ANY of the webkit based browsers it is just not funny how much better they run, i personally give Comodo Dragon to my users but frankly ANY of the webkits, Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Dragon, they all just run rings around FF now.
And as someone who has to support low power devices like netbooks/nettops as well as older office systems i can tell you that since FF V5 the performance on low power devices blows chunks. For testing I use a circa 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz I use as a nettop at the shop (37w under load, idles around 20w) and my own Asus EEE with an E350 dual core and here is what I found: While I got with multiple tabs and even SD video on ANY webkit based on either of those machines since FF V5 Firefox is completely unsuitable for purpose on the Sempron, SD video is a slideshow and nearly every action you do in FF will cause the CPU to spike to 100% and cause the UI to become unresponsive, and on the netbook I get nearly an hour longer on the battery simply by not using Firefox.
So I really hope they fix it, as there is a couple of the Firefox extensions like NoScript that I miss, but between the missing security features (Low Rights Mode has been out since 07, chromium based have supported it almost from the start while FF still doesn't) and the frankly just awful performance right now I have NO choice but to steer my customers away from FF.
BTW anybody know of a Chrome extension that will make downloading YouTube videos as simple as "Download as MP4 and FLV" for Firefox? The few hold outs I have just love that extension but so far i can find nothing that works as well, so I have to give them IceDragon with that extension installed and then let them use Dragon proper for their day to day surfing.
Oh please! If you had bothered to read TFA you'd know the reason they are using Bing is Google keeps breaking the API so companies like DDG can NOT use their engine. The reason is simple...Google wants to know what you had for breakfast because the more data they have on you the more they can sell to advertisers, simple as that. Remember when it comes to search YOU ARE THE PRODUCT and the advertisers are the customers.
So its not a "conspiracy' its the simple fact that as the underdog MSFT is so happy to have people using their search so they don't go breaking the API every other week like Google does. don't like it? Complain to Google but after their privacy policy changes you can expect it to fall on deaf ears.
Here is a bunch I bet you never heard of, but you can actually get some pretty nice playing instruments for cheap. They're Korean but who gives a crap if they play good, right? As you can see most of their basses are the P or J bass style, but since those are the easiest to customize with pickguards and pickups that is just a point in their favor. I've had a couple of these and have played with guitarists that used their strats and teles and frankly? they play pretty damned good. So if you want a nice cheap one that you can go all crazy custom like i have my Washburn they are the ones to go to.
And I've been building that gear up since 1986 so its taken quite awhile to get that together, I just never sell anything good so over the years its built up nicely. As far as guitar goes you really ought to give the guitar version of my Zoom pedal a try, built in headphone amp and drum machine for when you are alone, and when you get a chance to play out it has some kick ass guitar/amp combos built in and some tasty effects without going apeshit like a lot of those pedals do and the built in expression lets you do things most just can't do, like work the sweep on a phase or the amount of repeats in a delay like it was a wah wah, plus at $60 its cheap enough that it won't break the bank and even has a built in tuner, I just love the hell out of mine.
And the trick with the newer Squires is the wood just isn't as good, that is why I have hung onto that swamp ash pro tone, you just don't get that quality of wood in a squire anymore. GK amps are nice but to me nothing beats the tone of a pre buyout Trace Elliot, they have the sweetest tone and are really built solid, just truly great amps. Sadly they got bought by Peavey and now are just overpriced peaveys, too muddy and dark for anything but country IMHO. But if you need a good cheap bass amp Behringer makes some decent ones in the $100-$300 range, not gonna compete with a Marshall or a Trace but they won't break your wallet like one either, and they have the nice touches like a DI out and channel switching by footswitch, nice to have. Their guitar amps are pretty nice too, although naturally you'll need your own distortion as nobody makes a decent distortion in the cheaper amps.
And turkey day was great here, shame I have to go deal with the crazy traffic to do a backup drive install or my butt would be kicking back with some leftovers. have a great holiday weekend!
Riiight, because this hurts Windows.....how exactly? this just makes Mozilla look Mickey mouse, because IE comes in 64 bit and has for something like 7 years now poor lame Mozilla can't even write well enough to tell the difference between 32bit and 64bit bugs.
And I hate to break the news to ya, but most Windows users have no clue if what they are using is 32 bit or 64 bit nor do they care, it "just works" either way and that is all they give a shit about. Besides most won't notice this as they've switched to Chrome as the falling numbers clearly indicate.
As someone who used and advocated Firefox before it was even called firefox frankly.....sigh, the company just seems to be a trainwreck ATM. They've been all over the place instead of focusing on their browser which IMHO has gone to shit since around V6. I have to support plenty of low power devices and older office boxes and frankly Mozilla Firefox is just god awful on anything less than a dual core,especially if you have a decent amount of bookmarks, as it'll slam the hell out of the CPU when you do...well pretty much anything. This is why I moved my customers over to Comodo dragon (Chromium variant) several versions back, because between the UI changes, the bugs, and the CPU and memory usage frankly Firefox can't hold a candle to anything Webkit based, it just can't.
So frankly this doesn't hurt Windows in the slightest, it just makes Mozilla look lame but since more and more are jumping on Chrome I just don't see this affecting too many people.
Ewww...sugar in the jerky? that is just nasty! No we don't do that, we do have a little sugar (usually molasses) in the BBQ sauce but with us southerners its all about the smoking when making jerky or even having a great cookout. Man you should smell my apt right now, you would be drooling as the big thanksgiving cookout was done in the little fenced in landing below my window so my AC unit has been filling the room with the smell of smoked turkey, country ham, and deer roast...mmm, even though I did dinner with the fam as always I ended up stopping in on the way back and getting a plate of that smoked deer and turkey, and i took my dad out a couple of thick slices of smoked ham, he is enjoying a holiday meal of slow smoked ham sammichs (I tried to fix him a traditional plate, but i also brought him Expendables II and he has been jazzed to see it) with a big glass of cold milk and lots of explosions on the TV, just the way he likes it.
But you should really try marinading friend, not only can you make dozens of different marinades for any mood, sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, but you can frankly take the toughest cuts of meat and have people lined up at the grill to get some, because it'll be sooooo tender and juicy. Just give the meat a good salt rub, don't worry about it getting too salty as you'll pat it dry after the marinade and that will get any excess salt of, then just put it in a tupperware container overnight in the fridge. Be SURE to squeeze the air out of the tupperware, because between that and the salt rub opening the cells that marinade will get into the deepest parts of the meat, just filling it with flavor.
Now me personally I like to marinade with my own little concoction, which is Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice or lemon slices (just depends on how the lemons look that day) or you can go lime juice and/or lime slices and then the two things that just finish it so nicely is a little bit, not too much, just a little, of fresh ground onion or garlic depending on your mood and then top it off with just a little dash of cooking sherry or a little wine. You cook that meat the next day and it'll have such a nice medley of flavors that people will be dumbfounded to tell you WHY its soo good, they'll just enjoy the hell out of it.
But yeah we southerners are big into our marinades, along with the salt rubs and smoking, like i said we just hate to waste meat and with these tricks you can take a tough game animal or even a bad cut of beef from the store and make yourself some truly tasty meat. works great on hamburger you are intending to cook in say a stew or chili as well, hell even burgers it'll give this nice burst of flavor. Just remember to use use a lot less salt since the meat is already well ground and you don't want the meat to end up salty, just a pinch or two per pound with a slow marinade makes for some juicy beef.
Thanks godel, I forgot to mention that and it is VERY true. i have the EEE E350 netbook and changing out the 2gb of 1066 for 8gb of 1333 (hey it was only $8 difference between 4Gb and 8gb so I went for it) I can not only play videos smooth as butter in 1080P over HDMI but I can even play HL 2, L4D, even played far Cry 1 on lowest settings just fine, but personally if I'm on the netbook I like the RPGs like Torchlight I and II, those work great on the Bobcat.
And of course that is on a netbook where you have to deal with heat, I've built the E350 barebones for offices and cheap HTPCs and without being squeezed into a netbook those chips are just great, idles less than 6w, 18w under load, no noise, and you can just do so damned much with them!
You must not have looked in the indie section lately, lots of games like 2D side scrollers and puzzlers that allow controllers and MP on one screen, just go to steam and check out the indie section. As a bonus there are many VERY cheap or even free games now in the indie section, so unlike a console where you get old games or shovelware when you go cheap you have tons of great games to choose from.
And believe me, as a parent? Steam is like manna from heaven. A year and a half ago i built myself and the boys new gaming PCs over a 6 month period (hexacore for me and the oldest, Phenom II quad for the youngest) and with Steam not only is it the easiest thing in the world for one of my boys to just say "hey, wanna play a game with me?" but the built in chat makes it easy for us to just have a nice chat anytime, we can pop links to each other to check out new games or even funny videos, all the games stay updated and hassle free, frankly its just too damned easy.
Once i showed the boys how easy Steam was they ended up getting ALL their friends on it which means even on a holiday like this they can just pop on and chat with their friends and even play a little game even with their friends stuck at some relative's a couple of states away. And believe me friend there is a TON of games that work GREAT with a wireless X360 controller, in fact one of my popular builds ATM is the low end Athlon triple or quad with an HD4850 or other cheap gaming card for an HTPC, this way daddy and the kids can play games and when they are not on it mom can plop down in the big chair and grab that Lenovo remote (which if they are good at texting really rocks as an HTPC remote) and can tweet and check her FB and even play her farmville, all on that nice big screen TV.
Exactly. I mean think about it, you ever PRICE a 1024 node rack? Even going AMD that is a hell of a chunk of change, and having to start a calculation aaaaalllll the way back at the beginning if a node fails as the AC was talking about is simply unacceptable. when you look at the power bill alone for a 12 hour calc on a 1024 node going full bore frankly the cost of throwing an 8-16 core per rack just to store current state is frankly cheap compared to the alternative.
And again when you look at the cost I'd say this is definitely doable, put a RAID 5 of enterprise class HDDs with a couple of 256Gb SSDs for a fast store, and make sure that node has plenty of RAM so you would have a nice fast cache with plenty of buffering...yeah I'd say its doable. you could probably cook up some specialized ARM chips right into the interconnect for future designs but even what we have now with fibre channel i would say it could be done, and again look at how much money you lose by having a 1024 node go full bore for 10 hours like AC said only to have to start over at hour 11 because a node failed.
Remember when you are talking cost on this scale you have to figure in cost of operation and having to double that cost because a node fails is simply unacceptable, not when you could slap a 16 core with 64Gb of RAM and some SSDs feeding into HDDs to have current state backed up. that way if a node fails just like RAID that data could be rebuilt on a fresh node and the calc could continue instead of starting over so...yeah I still say with some planning it should be doable.
Oh and Happy Turkey day to you and yours, I'm getting ready to go do the whole roast beast with the fam and in the spirit of the holiday my oldest is bringing a local gal who doesn't have any family, and I hope you and yours look around and make sure there isn't anybody sitting alone with nobody on the holiday. I brought the guest last year but this year the new owner of the apt building is having a HUGE blow out in the back of the building, with a bunch of smokers cooking turkey and ham, so nobody in this building is gonna be alone this Thanksgiving which i thought was DAMN nice and told him so. Happy Holidays!
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Yeah but even you have to admit this last round everybody gimped the machines when it came to RAM. I mean 10Mb of EDRAM and 512Mb of RAM for the X360? I'm sorry but they really should have doubled that. GDDR 3 back then really wasn't that high, especially when you are an 800 pound gorilla like MSFT and are gonna be buying a boatload of the stuff.
So even though I'm a PC gamer I really hope MSFT and Sony don't gimp their next systems, as we always end up with the consoles holding back the PCs and the last thing we need is for games to be RAM starved for another decade.
Well if the rumors are true the PS4 is gonna be a midrange AMD APU, which means with a light embedded OS it ought to be pretty kicking for games without breaking the bank, MSFT will probably go with an AMD GPU and POWER CPU, again if rumors are to be believed.
I am shocked that Nintendo went as weak as they did, frankly it looks more like a hopped up wii and the Wii wasn't exactly a powerful system to start with. Now we know that Nintendo has been courting casual gamers of late but personally i think that is a risky move, between the new TVs having casual gaming support baked in and all the phones and tablets you'd think they'd want to at least be able to play current games at 1080p with a reasonable framerate.
I have a feeling if the rumors are true its gonna leave Valve a hell of an opening for their Steambox, because people aren't gonna shell out $300+ for a console without any real "wow!" factor and lets face it, any low end Intel or AMD quad with a modern GPU will give some pretty drool worthy graphics.
But I have to say Nintendo has been a puzzler this time around, not having any of their class A mascots ready to go at launch, again going with a gimmicky controller and an expensive one at that, and having pretty weak hardware I just don't get what they are going for here. Of course i'd say Nintendo would be in trouble right now anyway, because talking to my customers that are into consoles I've found most of the Wii units are in closets gathering dust, just too few AAA titles buried under too much shovelware and too many folks got tired of the whole "stick waggle' gimmicks and just stuffed the thing in a closet.
There are adapters out there that will convert HDMI or DVI to S-Video, which any TV made in the last decade should have, there are also adapters to switch it to RCA. Check out Monoprice, i think they are around $7.
As far as Steam goes you'd probably have to use the website and not the built in interface as it is pretty limited. Look up "passing arguments to Steam" and there are several pages that will show you how to filter. its basically like Google in that you have to put the right filters at the end of the statement.
Finally as far as Win 8? in most places the Metro UI sucks big hairy balls, but for an HTPC it gives you a bright easy to read target to hit so frankly for that particular niche its not bad, I just wouldn't want to use it on a traditional desktop or laptop. But Steam works, all the games on Steam don't seem to be bothered by metro, and we are talking about kids here who will probably like the big colored UI that is Metro. Of course if you want to hack it there is Classic Shell and Start8 that will give you a more traditional UI, and I hear XBMC is coming out with a version for Win 8 so you can always use that instead.
Exactly, just because it was 70+ years ago didn't mean they didn't have strong crypto back then. Just look at VENONA or the Enigma, in both of those cases what allowed them to be broken was that the other side screwed up and either kept using a pad (VENONA) or in the case of Enigma there were flaws in the design (a letter could never be encoded to itself) and several times messages were re-broadcast due to transmission troubles without bothering to change the settings.
Most likely like those handful of late war enigma cyphers (or the 70% of VENONA messages we failed to crack) we'll never decode it, the message is simply lost to history, any copies of that pad were trashed decades ago and without it all you will get is gibberish.
The problem with that idea is the money party is almost over and when this bubble bursts your money is gonna be worth less than a Zimbabwe dollar. this is why gold is over $1700 an ounce and rising, the ones at the top are cashing out and quietly moving overseas before the bubble bursts. look at the charts starting at 3.30, notice how the great depression had 125% of GDP in the market, and that trainwreck ended up leaving us with a busted economy for decades? Well look at the giant hockey stick starting around 1992, we are now at 400% of GDP AND RISING.
All of us who sat back and wondered WTF was gonna happen when the USSR collapsed is gonna get to see it right here on American soil, as you are gonna have millions of poor being handed worthless checks, millions of homeless and exploding crime, the whole thing is gonna fall down and go boom and there is not a damned thing anybody can do now, it is inevitable. So while being part of the underground economy may help a little in the short term the simple fact is with the currency made worthless you are gonna have a hard time even trading,as sooner or later you are gonna need currency to trade for food, shelter, power, and it'll be just like Zimbabwe where you need a wheelbarrow just to go buy some milk.
Oh Lord,you have GOT to be kidding me...you thinking VOTING is gonna do a God damned thing? Well i have a game of three card monty you should play, I'm SURE that you'll find the lady!
Not only do you have an entire class of people that get ZERO say because they got their rights taken away due to a pot bust or other victimless crime, but frankly your "choices" are both bought and paid for before your ass ever gets in the booth! it costs on average 100 million to become a senator, a billion bucks to become president, hell even at the state level you are talking several million a campaign...you think those people that paid those bills and wrote those checks won't be making that money back and then some when the election is over?
Your "choices" are Coke VS Coke in a holiday can, and that is it. Its a bad joke that keeps those silly peasants thinking they have a say when they don't, because the corporations vote in $$$ and $$$ tops votes any day of the week.
I believe it was Richard M. Nixon that said that first, so it would be a 20th century idea that has simply made a comeback. I would argue that simply from the Wikileaks dump at least one, probably two, presidents should have been brought up on War Crimes if there was actual rule of law in this country but the fact that they weren't just shows that Nixon was right, he was just ahead of his time.
Kinda sad to think that if Nixon had pulled Watergate today Woodward and Bernstein would have probably been labeled enemy combatants and both sides of the aisle would be rushing to defend Nixon, but that's what happens when the whole system is corrupt,those at the top cover each other's asses in case they want to pull the same shit when its their turn in the big chair.
That is why we in the south call 'em "public pretenders" because last numbers I saw you literally have better odds defending yourself and getting off (4%) than getting a public pretender and getting off (less than 2% last figures i saw for my state) because they are so overworked and underfunded their answer to ANYTHING is 'plead guilty' no matter how weak a case the state has.
Yeah look close at what goes on in the state and county levels and it makes the feds look like choirboys in comparison. Its ALL about who you know and who gave money to whom, it don't have a damned thing to do with laws or justice. I invite all to sit in any local courtroom for a week and see if you don't pick up the waft of corruption, I have watched guys in Gucci suits have so many charges it ain't funny waved away while some poor kid with a bag of weed gets 3-5, its ALL about the money.
I'd say the only difference between our courts and the third world is at least in the third world ANYBODY can buy their way out, in America you have to be hooked into the right corp or be part of the right group, much more classism here.
We already TRIED that, it was later called "the age of the robber barons" because i don't give a rat's ass what kind of utopia you dream up without rules it quickly devolves into "he who has the gold makes the rules' just as it has since the days of the cavemen. The problem with libertarianism (or any other ism for that matter) is at their core they all depend on those at the top not being douches when as we have seen a billion times throughout history the ONE thing you can count on is for those at the top to be giant self serving douches.
As for TFA, evil corrupt government VS maladjusted and probably a little batshit hackers...yeah, not really anybody to root for in this fight, they ALL suck.
Hell pick up a guitar or bass and give it a go, I've seen guys that can barely play 3 chords keep an entire crowd just jumping, its like that old saying "3 chords and some heart is all you need" and nearly every town has a club with an open mike night and a house band, get up there are rip through some classic I-IV-V rock and have a fricking ball. Sure you'll never be Steve Vai or Geddy Lee, but there are maybe 0.002% of the planet who can stand in the same room with those guys and not get smoked. I've been on stage with guys that were waaaay above me and I held my own, NOT because I could cut heads with them technically, but because when i got on that stage I was there to have FUN with a capital F and the audience can feel that. As I've often said on stage "tell Gene to get his ass up here because I AM the lord of the wasteland!" and the crowd always cheers and roars because they can tell I'm just eating that shit up and having a fucking ball.
And I bookmarked that link and will check it out if I get a chance, but I gotta knock the rust off if i wanna get back up there after the holidays. Time to break out the AC and Five Finger Death Punch and work my way back up to the Rush, happy holiday!
It depends on the cut, lets say you have tough as leather steaks...what you do is to put a LIGHT layer of table or rock salt (either will do, some prefer one or the other but its more a preference thing) and then lightly massage the meat, kinda like you were tenderizing it but with your hands instead of a mallet.
Now some tell you to wipe it off BEFORE you put it in the marinade, but I don't as it keeps the cells opened up to get more of the marinade in, only time this rule don't hold true is if you marinade is already salty, no need for the excess then. Then you simply put it in a tupperware container (be sure to squeeze the air out, it helps get that marinade deep into the meat) and you let it soak overnight. If I'm gonna be cooking it at say 6PM next day I try to have it in the fridge by 8PM the day before, give it nearly 24 hours of soaking.When you take it out simply pat it dry in a couple of paper towels and you are ready to go!
With this trick you can take game or even beef that is tough as shoe leather and the next day it will be tender and juicy, and if you use an already tender cut of meat it will practically melt in your mouth, and of course the flavor will be so nicely embedded you really won't need condiments, it'll just distract from the flavor.
Don't need monitors, even 5 year old TVs have HDMI, no need for the gaming cards, E350 has the Radeon HD6340 built in (although you can add a card later if you want) and Win 8 is $40, so no biggie on that front.
But even if they didn't build but the one the amount of games they have on steam that support single screen MP is just nuts, a LOT of the indies support SSMP, and there are just tons of them on steam thanks to project greenlight.
But you could buy a fully loaded E350 kit for less than $200 counting RAM, HDD, and Win 8, Steam is free, just slap a couple of X360 controllers and you have a killer HTPC that will also let them surf, chat, let mommy check her FB, its got a hell of a lot more uses than the locked down consoles. I have built several and folks just love 'em, any place you could think of you'd like the net you can just pop one of these babies in there and be good to go, great little units.
Man...remember when ALL the boards were like that? Nice big boards, with big traces, everything was so damned easy to work on, its sooooo nice. Now they overpack the shit out of everything, you get even at ATX board where you think "Sure with THIS much space they won't cram" and NOPE, its cram city! Hell back in the day things started to look even slightly crammed it was daughterboard time, now you have to seriously watch 'em because the cramming makes it hell to insure that all the chips get decent airflow.
As for TFA...meh, the Apple I was okay, but the Apple II was the one that ended up being sold years after everybody else moved on, simply because so damned much software and add-ons were made for it people still wanted the unit, now THAT is impressive, to have your second time at bat, against companies with a HELL of a lot more money and experience under their belts, and to knock it out of the park like that? This is why even though I have never cared for the locked down nature of later Apple I give the two Steves credit, they pulled off some shit back then that would frankly be impossible in this lawsuit heavy megacorp world, they built a fricking empire from a garage...now THAT is impressive.
Dude he is spending $10 a week on LOTTO TICKETS, you think any "investments" this guy would make would actually do better? And what kind of broker is gonna take a client that only has $10 a week to invest?
I hate to say it but your friend has better odds with the lotto tickets than with any penny ante stocks you could get for $10 a week, at least with the lotto he has like a 1 in a bazillion chance of winning, with those low rent penny ante stocks its gotta be pretty damned close to zero as you sure as hell ain't buying no Google or Apple stock for $10, hell you can't even get MSFT for $10.
Shhhhh...the peasants don't know that! You see even though nuclear is a hell of a lot safer (and the reason you see crap like Fukishima is that the NIMBYs make building new plants damned near impossible so you end up with plants running waaaay past their close dates) and you aren't gonna get the foulness and radiation spewing like you do with coal you say nuclear and its "ZOMFG we are all gonna glow in the dark, Waaah!" followed by many morons running like chickens with their heads cut off. On the other hand coal comes from the ground right? You say coal and they think of some old train with a guy shoveling coal, hell if its safe enough for some guy to just scoop it up in a shovel its GOTTA be safe...right?
This is what happens when you let Hollywood educate the masses, coal equals old trains, nuclear equals China Syndrome. And the simple fact is renewables just won't scale and give us the 24/7 power we require and of course the amount of building required to give us renewables at the scale required would bring out the NIMBYs in force, it would be "ZOMFG you are gonna disturb the mating grounds of the eastern hipper hopper snail!" and that would be that.
And I do hope this is a valuable lesson to all on why cap and trade scams won't do a fucking bit of good in a global environment, because as we see here as long as SOMEBODY is willing to buy somebody else will be willing to sell, so all you do is move the factories to the third world who will be happy to deal with that pollution for high employment and you can just keep printing money to pay those millions that now can't get a job because there isn't any to get. For crap and trade scams to work you would have to get ULTRA nationalistic, close down trade completely with ALL that refuse to follow your little cap and trade game, and if you allow even one country to trade that doesn't play along the whole thing collapses. You'll notice Al Gore and friends NEVER say a damned thing about blocking trade with China and India, why heavens no, where would they get their slave labor from?
So as you can see whether you believe in AGW or not the whole cap and trade scam simply doesn't work as long as there are players that refuse to play the game, and since any country that refuses to play will get increased employment and lower energy costs there is a pretty damned good incentive not to play the game. of course those at the top of the scam KNOW this, this is why they hired the one who wrote the credit default swap scam to write the rules on cap and trade, after all they made out like Gods and even got the American taxpayer to pick up a 700 billion dollar tab for every bet they made that went bust, so why not do it again with cap and trade? Free profits for everyone at the top, courtesy of the American people, what could be sweeter?
Its not the lack of 64bit that is gonna kills it, its the performance. take something like Process Explorer and have it set to show you via the system tray what is going on as far as CPU/RAM/HDD (its in options>tray IIRC) and then run ANY webkit and FF side by side and see for yourself. Hell I can take a low power machine from 8 years ago and still run multiple tabs and even SD video and its just fine in Webkit, the video is smooth and the UI responsive, the exact same pages and video in Firefox? It'll spike the CPU so badly the entire UI becomes unresponsive (which is why you need the tray app because when FF does this you aren't gonna be switching) and if you are on a laptop or netbook all those spikes equal worse battery life.
Like I said I REALLY wish this weren't so, I used FF before it was even called FF and I used the Moz Suite before that, but its obvious to anybody with eyes the future is more and more laptops and low power devices and in that crucial arena FF just blows chunks and again i think it comes down to gecko. gecko ran fine when they were doing their own thing, but ever since they've been trying to match Chrome feature for feature by just bolting shit onto Gecko performance has gone WAAAAY down. I would say gecko needs a major rewrite, build a new gecko with sandboxing and isolation with a focus on low resource use OOTB, because as it is now anything webkit based just blows it out of the water.
I can tell ya what the problem is friend...its gecko. you look at the history of Firefox and up to about FF 4 every version got better, memory got better (although they royally pissed me off by going "La la la we don't leak memory" only to turn around and say "We fixed the memory leaks!") CPU usage got better, extensions got better...so what happened? Simple they started to try to match Webkit features by just bolting them onto gecko and the simple fact is gecko just wasn't made with those features in mind so naturally bolting on advanced features sucks. If you try ANY of the webkit based browsers it is just not funny how much better they run, i personally give Comodo Dragon to my users but frankly ANY of the webkits, Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Dragon, they all just run rings around FF now.
And as someone who has to support low power devices like netbooks/nettops as well as older office systems i can tell you that since FF V5 the performance on low power devices blows chunks. For testing I use a circa 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz I use as a nettop at the shop (37w under load, idles around 20w) and my own Asus EEE with an E350 dual core and here is what I found: While I got with multiple tabs and even SD video on ANY webkit based on either of those machines since FF V5 Firefox is completely unsuitable for purpose on the Sempron, SD video is a slideshow and nearly every action you do in FF will cause the CPU to spike to 100% and cause the UI to become unresponsive, and on the netbook I get nearly an hour longer on the battery simply by not using Firefox.
So I really hope they fix it, as there is a couple of the Firefox extensions like NoScript that I miss, but between the missing security features (Low Rights Mode has been out since 07, chromium based have supported it almost from the start while FF still doesn't) and the frankly just awful performance right now I have NO choice but to steer my customers away from FF.
BTW anybody know of a Chrome extension that will make downloading YouTube videos as simple as "Download as MP4 and FLV" for Firefox? The few hold outs I have just love that extension but so far i can find nothing that works as well, so I have to give them IceDragon with that extension installed and then let them use Dragon proper for their day to day surfing.
Oh please! If you had bothered to read TFA you'd know the reason they are using Bing is Google keeps breaking the API so companies like DDG can NOT use their engine. The reason is simple...Google wants to know what you had for breakfast because the more data they have on you the more they can sell to advertisers, simple as that. Remember when it comes to search YOU ARE THE PRODUCT and the advertisers are the customers.
So its not a "conspiracy' its the simple fact that as the underdog MSFT is so happy to have people using their search so they don't go breaking the API every other week like Google does. don't like it? Complain to Google but after their privacy policy changes you can expect it to fall on deaf ears.
Here is a bunch I bet you never heard of, but you can actually get some pretty nice playing instruments for cheap. They're Korean but who gives a crap if they play good, right? As you can see most of their basses are the P or J bass style, but since those are the easiest to customize with pickguards and pickups that is just a point in their favor. I've had a couple of these and have played with guitarists that used their strats and teles and frankly? they play pretty damned good. So if you want a nice cheap one that you can go all crazy custom like i have my Washburn they are the ones to go to.
And I've been building that gear up since 1986 so its taken quite awhile to get that together, I just never sell anything good so over the years its built up nicely. As far as guitar goes you really ought to give the guitar version of my Zoom pedal a try, built in headphone amp and drum machine for when you are alone, and when you get a chance to play out it has some kick ass guitar/amp combos built in and some tasty effects without going apeshit like a lot of those pedals do and the built in expression lets you do things most just can't do, like work the sweep on a phase or the amount of repeats in a delay like it was a wah wah, plus at $60 its cheap enough that it won't break the bank and even has a built in tuner, I just love the hell out of mine.
And the trick with the newer Squires is the wood just isn't as good, that is why I have hung onto that swamp ash pro tone, you just don't get that quality of wood in a squire anymore. GK amps are nice but to me nothing beats the tone of a pre buyout Trace Elliot, they have the sweetest tone and are really built solid, just truly great amps. Sadly they got bought by Peavey and now are just overpriced peaveys, too muddy and dark for anything but country IMHO. But if you need a good cheap bass amp Behringer makes some decent ones in the $100-$300 range, not gonna compete with a Marshall or a Trace but they won't break your wallet like one either, and they have the nice touches like a DI out and channel switching by footswitch, nice to have. Their guitar amps are pretty nice too, although naturally you'll need your own distortion as nobody makes a decent distortion in the cheaper amps.
And turkey day was great here, shame I have to go deal with the crazy traffic to do a backup drive install or my butt would be kicking back with some leftovers. have a great holiday weekend!
Riiight, because this hurts Windows.....how exactly? this just makes Mozilla look Mickey mouse, because IE comes in 64 bit and has for something like 7 years now poor lame Mozilla can't even write well enough to tell the difference between 32bit and 64bit bugs.
And I hate to break the news to ya, but most Windows users have no clue if what they are using is 32 bit or 64 bit nor do they care, it "just works" either way and that is all they give a shit about. Besides most won't notice this as they've switched to Chrome as the falling numbers clearly indicate.
As someone who used and advocated Firefox before it was even called firefox frankly.....sigh, the company just seems to be a trainwreck ATM. They've been all over the place instead of focusing on their browser which IMHO has gone to shit since around V6. I have to support plenty of low power devices and older office boxes and frankly Mozilla Firefox is just god awful on anything less than a dual core,especially if you have a decent amount of bookmarks, as it'll slam the hell out of the CPU when you do...well pretty much anything. This is why I moved my customers over to Comodo dragon (Chromium variant) several versions back, because between the UI changes, the bugs, and the CPU and memory usage frankly Firefox can't hold a candle to anything Webkit based, it just can't.
So frankly this doesn't hurt Windows in the slightest, it just makes Mozilla look lame but since more and more are jumping on Chrome I just don't see this affecting too many people.
Ewww...sugar in the jerky? that is just nasty! No we don't do that, we do have a little sugar (usually molasses) in the BBQ sauce but with us southerners its all about the smoking when making jerky or even having a great cookout. Man you should smell my apt right now, you would be drooling as the big thanksgiving cookout was done in the little fenced in landing below my window so my AC unit has been filling the room with the smell of smoked turkey, country ham, and deer roast...mmm, even though I did dinner with the fam as always I ended up stopping in on the way back and getting a plate of that smoked deer and turkey, and i took my dad out a couple of thick slices of smoked ham, he is enjoying a holiday meal of slow smoked ham sammichs (I tried to fix him a traditional plate, but i also brought him Expendables II and he has been jazzed to see it) with a big glass of cold milk and lots of explosions on the TV, just the way he likes it.
But you should really try marinading friend, not only can you make dozens of different marinades for any mood, sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, but you can frankly take the toughest cuts of meat and have people lined up at the grill to get some, because it'll be sooooo tender and juicy. Just give the meat a good salt rub, don't worry about it getting too salty as you'll pat it dry after the marinade and that will get any excess salt of, then just put it in a tupperware container overnight in the fridge. Be SURE to squeeze the air out of the tupperware, because between that and the salt rub opening the cells that marinade will get into the deepest parts of the meat, just filling it with flavor.
Now me personally I like to marinade with my own little concoction, which is Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice or lemon slices (just depends on how the lemons look that day) or you can go lime juice and/or lime slices and then the two things that just finish it so nicely is a little bit, not too much, just a little, of fresh ground onion or garlic depending on your mood and then top it off with just a little dash of cooking sherry or a little wine. You cook that meat the next day and it'll have such a nice medley of flavors that people will be dumbfounded to tell you WHY its soo good, they'll just enjoy the hell out of it.
But yeah we southerners are big into our marinades, along with the salt rubs and smoking, like i said we just hate to waste meat and with these tricks you can take a tough game animal or even a bad cut of beef from the store and make yourself some truly tasty meat. works great on hamburger you are intending to cook in say a stew or chili as well, hell even burgers it'll give this nice burst of flavor. Just remember to use use a lot less salt since the meat is already well ground and you don't want the meat to end up salty, just a pinch or two per pound with a slow marinade makes for some juicy beef.
Thanks godel, I forgot to mention that and it is VERY true. i have the EEE E350 netbook and changing out the 2gb of 1066 for 8gb of 1333 (hey it was only $8 difference between 4Gb and 8gb so I went for it) I can not only play videos smooth as butter in 1080P over HDMI but I can even play HL 2, L4D, even played far Cry 1 on lowest settings just fine, but personally if I'm on the netbook I like the RPGs like Torchlight I and II, those work great on the Bobcat.
And of course that is on a netbook where you have to deal with heat, I've built the E350 barebones for offices and cheap HTPCs and without being squeezed into a netbook those chips are just great, idles less than 6w, 18w under load, no noise, and you can just do so damned much with them!
You must not have looked in the indie section lately, lots of games like 2D side scrollers and puzzlers that allow controllers and MP on one screen, just go to steam and check out the indie section. As a bonus there are many VERY cheap or even free games now in the indie section, so unlike a console where you get old games or shovelware when you go cheap you have tons of great games to choose from.
And believe me, as a parent? Steam is like manna from heaven. A year and a half ago i built myself and the boys new gaming PCs over a 6 month period (hexacore for me and the oldest, Phenom II quad for the youngest) and with Steam not only is it the easiest thing in the world for one of my boys to just say "hey, wanna play a game with me?" but the built in chat makes it easy for us to just have a nice chat anytime, we can pop links to each other to check out new games or even funny videos, all the games stay updated and hassle free, frankly its just too damned easy.
Once i showed the boys how easy Steam was they ended up getting ALL their friends on it which means even on a holiday like this they can just pop on and chat with their friends and even play a little game even with their friends stuck at some relative's a couple of states away. And believe me friend there is a TON of games that work GREAT with a wireless X360 controller, in fact one of my popular builds ATM is the low end Athlon triple or quad with an HD4850 or other cheap gaming card for an HTPC, this way daddy and the kids can play games and when they are not on it mom can plop down in the big chair and grab that Lenovo remote (which if they are good at texting really rocks as an HTPC remote) and can tweet and check her FB and even play her farmville, all on that nice big screen TV.
Exactly. I mean think about it, you ever PRICE a 1024 node rack? Even going AMD that is a hell of a chunk of change, and having to start a calculation aaaaalllll the way back at the beginning if a node fails as the AC was talking about is simply unacceptable. when you look at the power bill alone for a 12 hour calc on a 1024 node going full bore frankly the cost of throwing an 8-16 core per rack just to store current state is frankly cheap compared to the alternative.
And again when you look at the cost I'd say this is definitely doable, put a RAID 5 of enterprise class HDDs with a couple of 256Gb SSDs for a fast store, and make sure that node has plenty of RAM so you would have a nice fast cache with plenty of buffering...yeah I'd say its doable. you could probably cook up some specialized ARM chips right into the interconnect for future designs but even what we have now with fibre channel i would say it could be done, and again look at how much money you lose by having a 1024 node go full bore for 10 hours like AC said only to have to start over at hour 11 because a node failed.
Remember when you are talking cost on this scale you have to figure in cost of operation and having to double that cost because a node fails is simply unacceptable, not when you could slap a 16 core with 64Gb of RAM and some SSDs feeding into HDDs to have current state backed up. that way if a node fails just like RAID that data could be rebuilt on a fresh node and the calc could continue instead of starting over so...yeah I still say with some planning it should be doable.
Oh and Happy Turkey day to you and yours, I'm getting ready to go do the whole roast beast with the fam and in the spirit of the holiday my oldest is bringing a local gal who doesn't have any family, and I hope you and yours look around and make sure there isn't anybody sitting alone with nobody on the holiday. I brought the guest last year but this year the new owner of the apt building is having a HUGE blow out in the back of the building, with a bunch of smokers cooking turkey and ham, so nobody in this building is gonna be alone this Thanksgiving which i thought was DAMN nice and told him so. Happy Holidays!