Well I think the real point is if you need MS Office? You'll buy it and if you don't then you won't, simple as that.
I can see why MSFT did this, since it seems Word is used by more people than anything else in MS Office, but they really need to be worried about giving up the home users because $99 for Student is just too high. That is why I just give my home users LO because frankly it'll do what the average home user needs even though it won't cut it for the business users but they should be worried about home users using LO instead of MS Office because that is just money left on the table.
If it were me I'd sell Word for $30, or a Word PPT combo for $45, lower student to $60 and pick up that money they are leaving on the table. because as it is they aren't gonna get those that were using an ad supported MS Office to go run out and spend $100+ on MS Office, they'll use LO or the pirated version. But frankly with all the dumbshit moves we've seen from MSFT lately yet another one? Not surprising.
Actually Mr or Mrs AC you have proved that YOU are equally clueless, as there is nothing other than AD support in Win Pro that can't be had cheap or free with third party products that run fine on Win 7 HP. I have several customers using HP at work and frankly not a single one has any trouble running a small business on HP, and if they run into any old software that won't run (rare) they simply use their original XP install that was turned into a VM and just use VMWare Player.
So there really isn't a point of pro or enterprise unless you are working in a place that requires AD, and while ultimate does have bitlocker there are several other free disc encryption tools out there that would just as good like Truecrypt. Frankly the only ones I've ever seen with Ultimate are gamers that treat their PC as an ePeen and have more damned bling on them than an LA ricer.
And finally I'm sorry but if you honestly think a Home user can have their PC replaced by Linux WITHOUT a full time admin to fix the damned thing when the updates crap on drivers? Well then you might be interested in these magic beans I have for sale. Linux is like a 75 Dodge sitting in a field, IF you learn all its quirks AND spend hours on fixing it up AND are willing to jump through hoops to keep it running? It can be good, maybe even a hot rod if you sink enough time in. the rest of the world would rather just get something that runs NOW and will KEEP running. That simply isn't the state of Linux right now friend, as the rants about Nvidia and ATI drivers we saw this week soundly illustrates.
Well here is the family pack for $130 with is $43 a license. It says upgrade but frankly I've used the family pack to clean install with no problems, in fact its what I used to switch my family off of XP. You get one disc for X86, one for X64, and the key is good for three installs.
I still think my pricing is better though, as for that short period where they had HP at $50 and the family packs at $100 frankly I never saw a pirate edition, they were ALL legit Windows. As we have seen with valve the way to beat pirates is not the stick but the carrot, and now would be a perfect time to do so and offer those that buy the $15 Win 8 upgrade they are offering the retailers with new PC sales. This would give people an incentive to go legit and give them an incentive to buy Win 8. Since MSFT seems to think piracy is a problem this is a sure fire way to stop it, as with a price like $50 for HP honestly most would just buy rather than deal with a pirate version.
If it were me you'd see Starter at $35, HP at $50, and Family and pro at $100 and you would be able to upgrade to the Win 8 version of the same level for $20 if you bought the upgrade ticket with your Win 7 purchase. Not only would this virtually wipe out piracy but would get more people interested in Win 8 as well, since they'd already have a key for the RTM download. Seems like a win/win to me.
Because I get 6 hours on my netbook running an E350 playing 720p under Win 7 HP thanks to everything being offloaded? Not a Linux guy but i can understand why they wouldn't be happy, its a hell of a lot less power to use the dedicated GPU to do the rendering than the CPU and when you are building an HTPC you want it quiet. hell if all you are gonna use is the CPU anyway might as well just through in a cheap Phenom I or C2D and call it a day, because it sounds like the GPU ain't do anything anyway.
They can't give away what they don't own, both HDMI and protected path video aren't owned by AMD so they have no choice but remove any traces from the specs.
Sigh...look in the damned mirror people! Its been 20 fricking years already, the damned drivers STILL don't work, they have NEVER worked great, the thing is a mess. Even one of the Red Hat devs says the current system isn't working and isn't sustainable, so its time folks. Time to take a good look in the mirror, cut through the dogma and bullshit, tell Torvalds he's had 20 years and couldn't fix the problems so STFU and give Linux a stable driver ABI already, and start working your way down the list of problems and making Linux a true third way.
Look as a retailer I WANT Linux to succeed, i really do. I do NOT like cutting a check to MSFT with every new build but right now things are a total clusterfuck. Companies having to continue to write drivers for stuff they don't even sell anymore because Linus' kernel fiddling breaks the old drivers, everything from the kernel to the DEs are in a giant state of constant flux and chaos, things that work in foo not working in foo+1, as it is now the driver situation alone would cost me more than a copy of Win HP simply because of all the time I'd have to spend on forum hunts and CLI fiddling and fixes just to get everything back to functional after an update.
Its a mess folks, and the sooner you accept there is a problem the sooner you can start to work to change it. Remember folks CLI fixes and forum hunts should NEVER be par for the course, you should and do deserve better!
The way I got around that was using Task manager to call AtomicTime with the correct on launch checked. the program only takes around 50k memory, works on any machine from Win95- Win 7 X64 (admin required for Vista/7 of course) and takes less than 10 seconds all told to do its job, and its free. if you have some machines that for one reason or another lose time (such as cheap bastards not paying for new batteries) just set up AtomicTime to run on boot and it'll set the time perfectly every time. I had mine set to use the 3 closest servers and since i had it on my thumbstick on my keyring it was as simple as dragging it off and 3 minutes in Task manager, couldn't be easier friend.
The problem with your doom scenario is the law actually already has tons of precedent for not allowing it, its called laches and is designed for EXACTLY the scenario your are proposing and is backed by dozens of cases worth of precedent.
So yet again MSFT would be laughed right out of court, the ONLY thing it would do is risk obliterating their claims to the non OSP pledge patents. But again show me a SINGLE CASE, just one mind you, of MSFT actually doing what you are suggesting and suing over something covered by OSP. Because so far MSFT has been pretty damned clear what is and isn't covered by OSP and has only sued for those things not covered such as FAT32 which is now being replaced by ExFAT. Nowhere is their file systems under OSP, nor do you need their file systems to be covered under OSP to use the code under OSP, therefor it has nothing to do with the OSP covered code.
so if the only thing you can come up with is "doom scenarios" without a shred of proof its FUD, no different than RIAA FUD, Oracle FUD, MSFT FUD, or any other FUD. Its not based on any evidence, its all based on doom scenarios, no different than the RIAA saying artists are gonna starve if you don't give them endless copyrights, its FUD.
It isn't just plausible its pretty damned obvious. Go to TPB and you'll see they have "Windows 7 all versions pre-activated" DVD which will give you ANY version from Basic to Ultimate and they all get full Windows Updates using the bootloader hack. Since the hack involves using legit OEM bootloaders to shut it down they'd have to blacklist so many OEM desktops and laptops it'd be chaos so they might as well consider Win 7 a total wash when it comes to piracy.
As someone who works in a little PC shop if anybody at MSFT with any clout reads this? i have the solution to Windows piracy without any secureboot crap, ready? Win HP at $50, Win HP family packs at $100. I saw guys who had NEVER had a legit version of Windows buy when you had Win 7 HP at $50, in fact while that was going on I don't remember seeing a pirate version around, they were all legit HP. You jacked up the price and now Craigslist is filled with $100 PCs with $300 copies of Win 7 Ultimate on them.
so take a lesson from valve MSFT, the carrot don't work. Are you forgetting what happened with Vista? You made it originally pretty damned pirate proof, even having a kill switch, remember? it BOMBED because its those same guys that actually know how to pirate that support your ass by telling their families what to buy and supporting them. lets face it you've never made your big money at retail anyway, so selling Win HP at $50 isn't gonna kill you but it WILL turn a lot of pirates into actual paying customers because at $50 frankly it isn't worth the hassle to pirate. I'll be the first to admit the reason my family is running Win 7 HP is the family packs and if it wasn't for the 3 for $100 deal they'd be running hacked pro, paying $100+ a machine for HP when the machines themselves cost $250-$350 a kit? Not worth it. there is a sweet spot MSFT, and I'd argue its Starter at $35, HP at $50, Pro and the family packs at $100.
And what "actual purpose" would that be, to rip off Apple? Let's be honest folks, Gates was evil, Ballmer is just quasi-evil, he's the light beer of evil, half the calories and a total buzz killer.
Seriously folks look at the man's track record- killing the successful playsforsure for Zune market (iTunes), paying actual money to rebrand the Gigabeat and make it shit brown no less and calling it the Zune (iPod), paying another assload of money to Nokia, whom i believe they'll eventually buy because if its one thing Ballmer knows how to do its piss away money, to crank out WP7 phones nobody wants (iPhone), and for the final uberfail taking their flagship X86 OS, one of the few actual money makers they have, and taking a MASSIVE dump on the UI all so he can treat developers as retards thinking he can "trick them" into developing for ARM Windows (iPad).
Look to do something really evil requires.....of what's the word?....oh yeah, ACTUAL THOUGHT which so far we have yet to see Steve ballmer actually be capable of. Wanna know where he got Secureboot? Apple, hell that is where he has stolen every damned idea he's had, just take something Apple did first and half ass it. In case everyone ain't noticed you can just slap any old OS on an iPod or iPad neither and that is what Ballmer is brewing up like a giant Sunday crap, yet another ripping off of Apple with a half ass incomplete mess with a Win Logo.
So don't worry your little heads about it none FOSS guys, the OEMs won't be putting out in X86 you can flip a switch and kill Secureboot because they know guys like me are gonna spend the next year and a half wiping the shitpile that is Win 8 for the goodness that is Win 7, and the only way you're gonna come across a Win 8 Pad (unless you're thick and buy one at release) is over on Woot! when the OEMs, if there are any which after we saw what they are gonna charge may be few if any, dump the things for firesale prices ala the Touchpad.
To get worried about this turkey is like being worried about WinME taking over the world, it just ain't gonna happen and you might as well not give a crap until you see what happens at release which i predict will be just like this only with cursing which is what I've seen at the shop. The only interesting thing about TFA is Canonical is doing the job for any malware writers that wanna get around secureboot, maybe they'll be nice and send Shuttleworth a thank you note. Not that it matters, until 2014 most of the malware guys seem to be happy going after XP the most since its the lowest hanging fruit. Bet it must be like heaven for 'em, a decade plus old creaky OS with hundreds of millions running as admin? Easy pickings.
Well if you want a cheap one check out the Fusion builds, especially the E350s, as you can often find them in a nice HTPC kit for like $100. And if you want to use XBMC then check out Open ELEC which has builds for the AMD Fusions that covers the E series as well as the newer A series chips. It is only 120Mb and has everything already to go, just install. I've built a couple of HTPCs using the E350s and although my customers went Win 7 HP I can tell you those chips do make for nice media centers, full 1080P and whisper quiet and only draw around 18w under load. again don't know how well it'll work under Linux as i only played with OpenELEC for a little while before installing Windows but it seemed damned nice.
Well I don't kn ow about him but I never cared about canon or not, what pissed me off on both it and VOY was how many times they'd hand a character the idiot ball. With Voyager it wasn't as bad because B&B kept hitting the damned reset button so sadly nearly every episode had them just as clueless as when they first got to the Delta quadrant, but with ENT they had poor Archer hold the idiot ball so many times they might as well had "King Moron" taped to his uniform.
The one that pushed me into the "Oh for fuck's sake! Are you shitting me?" was when they had to negotiate with that race for a part who was VERY picky about protocols...so he brings his fucking dog along who promptly pisses on a sacred tree and fucks the whole thing up. WHAT THE FUCK!!! Are you shitting me? the captain of a fucking starship on a VERY sensitive diplomatic mission, the first contact no less, doesn't have enough motherfucking sense to even leave his damned dog on the fucking ship or at least ASK before he brings it if they would find it in any way offensive?
You have to admit even if you liked the show that they often wrote the crew and especially Archer as dumber than your average frat boys. Hell I liked VOY even though it was a bad show for the most part but I'll be the first to admit that the writers fucked it all up, but by the time they got to ENT you have the feeling they seriously just quit giving a fuck. I've seen interviews with Blalock where she was pissed and just like Beltran on VOY basically said she phoned it in because the writing stunk so bad. In fact sadly after the series ended I found out the reason I liked the Doc on VOY was Picardo threw out the shit they wrote for him and wrote his own dialog, kinda sad when the only actors that have any good dialog write it themselves.
While I'd agree a good sci/fi series would be nice, although i think it could have transporters without them being "too powerful" as logically there would be a hell of a lot that could be dangerous when using tech like that, in the end if you don't have good scripts and good writing you are screwed. I think both ENT and VOY could have been as good as DS9 if only Berman and Braga didn't shit all over the shows, bad writing, idiot balls, reset buttons, and with ENT especially just retarded plot developments, its a damned shame to see good shows ruined by shit writing. But of course we are talking about the same bunch that put out Nemesis which was so fucking terrible the ONLY way the plot makes ANY sense is if the bad guy WANTED TO LOSE and was sabotaging his own plans!
Except the "ZOMFG M$ is gonna poison us with Mono ZOMFG!" argument is a load of deep fried horseshit because they have already covered it in their "We won't sue" pledge which is legally binding and has been published all over the place by MSFT themselves so it isn't like they can claim it was someone without authorization, not that even that would stand up in court.
You can read it on the wiki and see that its similar to IBMs ISP and Sun's ODPS licenses. the only one bitching is old RMS' bunch since it isn't compatible with GPL. Well neither is most licenses including MPL by Mozilla, but that doesn't have people screaming "They gonna poison teh well ZOMFG!"
Show us a SINGLE case, just one, of MSFT actually suing someone over tech covered in the OSP, because otherwise you might as well claim that MSFT secretly has a clone army to take over the world, you have evidence for neither so either could be possible, however unlikely. The simple fact is after making such a clear and plainly written patent pledge no judge in the USA would even let it get to court, they'd be laughed right out of the building. if you don't want to use it because you have an irrational fear then say so, but don't come up with "doom scenarios" without any evidence to back them up, okay?
That is why we need to call them what they are, just as they think they can turn copyright infringement into theft we need to label them with a name that denotes their true purpose....Leeches. that is ALL that they are, they are the middle men, bleeding the consumer AND the artist of every Shekel they can, wanting to destroy one of the most powerful free communication systems in world history for their own gain, leeches.
Jim Sterling at Zero Punctuation has a nice rant and while his is mainly about games the sentiment is the same, its leeches pushing draconian crap like SOPA and PIPA and its all about control, so they can leech.
I usually keep the potatoes plain, too much butter can make it have an oily texture and its all about the texture with this. I usually use a cake frosting spreader to get a nice even layer, but how thick you want it really depends on personal taste and pizza we are talking about. if we are talking about say a single layer beef or pepperoni I would make it thinner as the point is to enhance rather than overpower the pizza flavor, I'd say about a pinky nail thick, while I'd double or maybe even a little more if it were my favorite pizza which is a Larry's double lotsa meat and cheese. With it there is two layers of several meats and cheese so the thicker layer not only enhances all that meat but it also keeps all the bacon from falling off LOL!
Finally as for gravy? It MIGHT work but I'd be worried about it clashing with the pizza sauce. the best thing about this is soak up the flavor of the meat and cheese below it giving a nice counterpoint to the stringy cheese and the bite of the spicy meat, I do mix in the occasional onion or garlic power, especially with a really thick crust pizza to give it more spice and less of a bready taste, but the best thing about this is because you can separate the potatoes into small containers you can experiment and find what works best for the kind of pizza you have. Maybe a half a cup with gravy, a half a cup with spices, butter, etc and simply spread it on a small section of a slice so if it doesn't work you've wasted nothing. Its really trial and error but once you find your fav combos it really kicks ass so give it a spin, that lovely creamy texture mixed with the stringy cheese and the bite of the spices is awesome!.
And I know, of all the things to be talking about on/. right? But the nice thing about this little trick is it allows for so many variations, my GF prefers to make her potatoes from scratch so she can have nice little potato chunks it it for her, I like mine creamier with a little more pepper and a hint of garlic, it is so easy to add all kinds of variations and it really livens up the average take out pizza and can make a great pizza truly mouth watering.
Paranoid much? I post that link because the guys at coding horror see no problem with plopping down a grand on a drive and like/. is full of geeks that know what they are doing so you can't blame it on noob mistakes. i would also point out that article isn't even a year and a half old so if you can provide your OWN link showing this miracle breakthrough that has eliminated SSD failures I'm sure the guys here would be happy to read it. If you go down to the comments you will see failure after failure, every major brand and model, and these guys again do NOT go cheap so you can use the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) excuse either. We are talking top o' the line drives by reputable companies like Intel crapping all over themselves.
So unless you can provide data of your own I'm gonna call paranoia, since that link is one of the best I've found on the subject and the guys at CH are all pros, frankly I'd be more likely to listen to them than some random "Works4Me" Internet Post.
Ironically while you sit here bitching like its some conspiracy, or I'm being paid by the HDD corps, Atwood says quite clearly that he will continue to use SSDs DESPITE the high fail rates, simply because he believes that as long as you keep up to date back ups that the risk is worth it. of course this is the same guy that spent $400+ on a pair of headphones and can easily afford to have a drawer full of spare SSDs so a failure won't take him 30 minutes to recover from, but my customers are normal folks not the uberrich so different rules apply.
Well I just ran HogXP to see what is taking up what, here is the list:
1.-Windows-23Gb, Program Files(X86) 8.5Gb, Users 8Gb, C: 3Gb, ATI 3Gb (I'm guessing old drivers backup i haven't cleaned out yet), Hiberfil.sys 2Gb, Program Files 1.8Gb, AMD 1.2Gb, Pagefile 1Gb (I keep the majority of my page file on a different drive) Program data 633Mb.
So as you can see while there is a few things like the ATI drivers that can just be chunked there is a LOT that would require either hours of uninstalling or using VLite to hack on windows and this install has purred since RTM and I'm loathe to do any real hacking on it as its stable as a rock.
Sign up for the Tiger emails friend if you are looking for a laptop, they have been having some pretty crazy sales on AMD Fusion powered systems, such as An Aspire Quad for $400 without MIRs which if I wasn't already happy with my E350 EEE netbook I would be sorely tempted, thanks to turbocore those units can ramp up pretty decently when you are using only one or two thread and that unit has dual graphics, with both a discrete and the fusion APU, nice.
And I can tell you that on the Windows front i was right there with you, ATI made great hardware but their software and drivers were just fucking TERRIBLE, they had the damned driver GUI tied to.NET of all things so if there was a problem you had to wonder, was it an ATI problem, was it a.NET problem, just a fucking mess but when AMD bought ATI and Nvidia burned me with bumpgate I can say the drivers became solid as a rock and the bang for the buck is just nuts. So I can't tell you on the Linux side other than when firing up the latest live CDs it all seems to "just work" on both my HD3xxx IGP and my HD4850 discrete, videos play smooth and the picture sharp.
Look if it were me, you got a desktop, right? Go over to Geeks or Tiger and pick up a really cheap AMD graphics card and see how she goes. I've seen low end HD5xxx going for about $20 on Tiger and Geeks has an HD4770 for $43 and an HD3870 X2 for $63. Any of those cards should give you a good taste of what you'd be looking at if you went AMD and if it doesn't work as you'd like you're not really out nothing, just throw it back in the box and send it back or sell it on Craigslist. Here is a 5450 for $22 which at that price its not gonna be any big risk to your wallet. All I can tell you is what Phoronix has been saying which is the FOSS drivers are coming up by leaps and bounds and most of the distros are supporting both the discrete and the Fusions pretty well now.
Not to mention NTP is fricking 27 years old now and is one of the oldest Internet protocols still in use. And it isn't just servers that use it, i can't even count the number of times I've had to make sure Windows boxes were checking into NTP regularly because this software or that software wouldn't play nice, hell even Win2K and WinXP would refuse to use WU if the clocks were off by too much.
So unlike the previous article on Opa, which came up with 5 other terms using that including a Greek song ntp takes all of one second and the first answer is what it is. This is one case where I really don't think the wiki entry was required and if it was please hand in your geek card as well as your minion card and please wear the 'I'm a noob LOL!" button on your shirt for the next 6 months so nobody asks you a damned thing, kthxbye.
Which is exactly what the poster was pointing out, as before the flood I was snatching up Samsung ecodrives at 1Tb for $40 and 2Tb for $65. Man i got lucky on that, first time I ever got in ahead of a curve and made myself a pretty penny and was still able to outfit myself with nearly 6Tb of storage to ride through the high prices.
The problems I see with SSDs are thus: 1.- they have a crazy high failure rate and as the prices bottom and they use cheaper components and stuff more and more data per chip this will probably get worse. 2.-The biggest price drops seem to be in the 40Gb-96Gb, I've seen a few 128Gb but 40-96Gb seems to be the sweet spot now and most folks simply need more space than that, hell I'm using over 100Gb on my OS drive and I keep all my games and movies on a separate drive, and finally 3.-Consumers just aren't as diligent at backups as they should be so when #1 happens its gonna bite a lot of folks in the ass and they probably won't give SSDs a second chance after that.
Personally after seeing some of my gamer customers go through high end SSDs like shit through a goose thanks to high failure rates I'm leery of recommending them or even using one myself. I have found having plenty of RAM for superfetch and an 8Gb flash for Readyboost seems to give me a nice compromise and while I back up my OS regularly I don't want to even know how much bullshit I'd have to go through to get a 3 year old Win 7 install pared down to 64Gb and squeezed onto an SSD. Does anybody have experience with mostly full SSDs? I know they need to use wear leveling and I'm curious how well that would work if the drive is damned near full. Lets say I have 108Gb on my OS drive and I buy a 128Gb SSD, is that gonna kill the performance? Increase the failure rate? Would it be better to simply get a hybrid or wait until the 256Gb drives come down?
I call bullshit, Braga may have caved but Berman was producer and had more clout. Its well known he is the one that made first contact a time travel movie (even wanted Borg in the middle ages, how retarded) and it was Berman that kept insisting on the reset button for Voyager. I wish I could find a link because I saw an interview with Beltran once (Chakotay) and he said that they basically refused to listen to the actors so much that Robert Picardo simply flat refused to say the horrible dialog they kept shoving him and simply wrote his own which is why the Doc usually had decent character development.
If you haven't watched it head over sometime to SFDebris and watch his reviews because he will often point out the behind the scenes stuff to show where and why things went right or wrong. Basically by the third season of Voyager Trek was the Berman and Braga show, with Berman giving all the retarded "More sex" bits (Jeri Ryan saying that Berman was actually upset when he found out after hiring her that her huge tits were the result of having just given birth when they returned to normal size the outfits got tighter to the point she couldn't hardly breathe) and Braga having no damned clue about character development and keeping each character basically the same as they were when they started. No growth, no changes, even when the Doc had a breakdown after having to choose between one crewman or another living it was never added to his character after that, just another reset by Braga.
To me what makes it extra sad is if they had just listened to the fans those two shows could have been fucking great. I remember reading that when Josh Whedon would get stuck on BtVS or Angel he would often head to the forums (under a different name of course) and simply ask THEM what they thought should happen next and he said damned if they didn't come up with excellent ideas and occasionally give him a smacking, such as he wanted to pursue commercialism with the double meat palace bit and they shot it down, saying it was demeaning to the character. If they would have simply asked the fans they would have known that Chakotay and Seven a couple was fucking retarded, everyone thought it would make more sense for the Doc or even Janeway, the fans would have gotten behind year of hell and thought it would have made for great character growth, seeing them make allies, fight and flee, but instead they just kept hitting the reset or in the case of Enterprise handing the idiot ball to Archer.
I personally don't think Blalock was a bad actress, it felt like that she like Beltran simply got pissed and decided to phone it in. The interview with Beltran he basically apologized to the fans but said they simply wouldn't let Chakotay grow or feel, he was just the smiling sidekick and he didn't have the pull that Picardo had so he couldn't just write his own dialog and thus gave up. he wanted to explore how being betrayed twice (Tuvok and Seska) would affect his ability to trust and lead, see how his crew and Janeway's would butt heads and try to become a group, but he said all his ideas were shot down and by the last 2 years it was the Seven Of nine show. Not that he blamed Ryan, he said she was sweet and great to work with, just that the B&B wanted to shove her tits and ass in the screen as much as possible so every other episode became her or the Doc on account of the fans loving Picardo.
Its just a damned shame, if they would have listened to the fans, especially on VOY, they could have had a truly great series that might have even been darker and with more thought provoking episodes than even DS9. Hell the fan fics were better than half the plots B&B came up with for the last years of VOY and ENT, and while I heard ENT got better by the last year frankly after watching the first two seasons and seeing the idiot ball handed to Archer so many times that any hope of that moron commanding a ship being believable was just gone for me by then, I loved trek but I just
They still haven't hit the sweet spot, simply because the ones they are discounting are the smaller drives which most of my customer's OS drives simply wouldn't fit,and neither will mine.
I try to install all my games to a separate drive and my OS drive is at 96Gb used which means a 128Gb would already be nearly full and from the looks of what I've been seeing the drives that are getting dumped on the sales the most are the 40Gb-60Gb. That might be good for a cache drive but you sure as hell aren't fitting Vista or Win 7 on a drive like that without stripping thanks to the retarded "anytime upgrade" crap. The 256Gb ones are still pretty damned high and that would be what is needed to change out most of the OS installs of my customers.
Finally I would note that the spinning rust is ALSO coming back down after its visit to crazy town after the flood, I've been seeing 1Tb drives for $70 and 2Tb for $99. This isn't quite the $40 a Tb I was paying before the flood but the prices do seem to be heading back down so while its not as fast as the SSD they tend to be more reliable and you certainly get a hell of a lot more space.
BTW has anybody used an SSD for a Readyboost drive? I'm AMD exclusive so I can't do the caching trick like with those Z68 boards and I was just wondering if anybody had tried using something like a 40Gb SSD as a Readyboost cache. Is it worth it? I have an 8Gb USB I use now and I can tell a difference, especially in programs like games where after first run Windows loads the levels quicker thanks to using both the HDD and flash, but I just don't know if having THAT big a Readyboost would be worth it and I'm sure as hell not gonna do a clean install and VLite to try to squeeze Win 7 onto some 60Gb. This install has purred like a kitten since RTM and I don't want to deal with that much hassle for a speed boost.
Which is a perfect example of why one shouldn't buy a FOSS company unless one wants to be in the FOSS business, because once the code has been FOSS you can't stuff that cat back in the bag.
Not saying that is a bad thing, after all people like RMS have been preaching for FOSS for just that reason, that you can't put it back behind a paywall once its out there, but if oracle didn't want Sun to be a hardware company (which was what I thought the point was, Oracle OS on Oracle hardware designed for Oracle DBs giving them a full stack approach) then buying it was frankly retarded because Sun had already made any "juicy IP" open source and thus worthless for trolling. agree 100% with the ruling and am frankly shocked oracle would have been that damned dumb.
Actually if they had never seen it "Space Seed" which introduced the character would be a better place to start, to see his fall from power and the lovely wife that Ceti Alpha V would take from Khan would give better context to the movie.
If it were my list I'd probably start with a greatest hits from each series,City on the edge of forever, balance of power, space seed, the conscience of the king, corbomite maneuver,A Taste of Armageddon,Mirror mirror,trouble with tribbles,ultimate computer,day of the dove,Requiem for Methuselah,The Savage Curtain and probably doomsday machine from TOS.
With TNG it gets a little harder as some of these are probably more personal favs than on anybody's top ten but the measure of a man, elementary dear data and ship in a bottle (I always liked Moriarty), best of both worlds I&II, Darmok, Q Who, yesterday's enterprise,inner light,chain of command, all good things.
For DS9, again subjective, Duet,our man bashir, trials and tribbleations,blood oath, Crossover (always liked the mirrorverse),civil defense,through the looking glass (mirrorverse), the adversary,little green men (silly but cute and a good character piece IMHO),return to grace (good Dukat piece), call to arms through sacrifice of angels (6 episode Dominion war arc),Waltz, in the pale moonlight, treachery, faith and the great river (cute and light hearted Ferengi piece),once more into the breach (good Klingon character episode), Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges (good dark episode that shows the federation isn't always the good guys), some like what you leave behind but I thought they should have killed Dukat at Waltz and went too far to keep him as a character so that should be enough there.
Sadly Voyager and Enterprise didn't get as many good episodes, i loved the characters of Voyager but the writers were pussies and kept hitting the reset button and thus killing any character development but there were a few, more than Enterprise which seemed to be an excuse for bad speeches and lesbo yay more than anything. From Voyager..heroes and demons,jetrel,prototype, dreadnought (I liked it), death wish (great Q piece), the thaw (truly good, and a great villain),future's end I&II (again I liked it and had some cute bits),year of hell I&II (damned shame they didn't have the balls to stick with the story instead of the reset button),scorpion I&II (good Borg episodes), message in a bottle, living witness (good doc episode), timeless, nothing human (good character piece),counterpoint,bride of chaotica (just a cute episode) , course oblivion (VERY dark but good) warhead, equinox I&II (another dark but good), tinker tenor doctor spy (silly but cute and a good doc ep), life line (another good doc),author author (another good doc), latent image (noticing a pattern with doc getting the good ones?) dark Frontier I&II (Janeway and the Borg Queen which fits in nicely with the final ep) and Endgame.
As for Enterprise...sigh, only the two Mirrorverse are IMHO worth watching, as in every other episode it feels like the writers are passing the idiot ball and most episodes have the captain especially cringe worthy. The movies? Easy, 2-4 although 3 isn't as good as 2 and 4 they fit nicely together and First Contact is decent.
That should give you more than enough decent episodes that if they like it they can always ask to see others. BTW if you hate them make them set through Okana from TNG and Threshhold from Voyager, both so horribly bad they make for good MST3K style fodder.
That is why I always get a little bummed myself. While I miss someone like Carlin or Pryor, at least they gave us decades of laughs that we can look back on. with Hedberg or Hicks or Kinison...sigh. It seemed like they were just starting to really find their grooves, you just knew they were gonna have so much more to say..then gone. Damned shame, that's what it is, just a damned shame.
As for weird foods that go great together? i'll give ya one i bet most here haven't tried...mashed potatoes on pizza. hear me out though, especially on a great spicy pizza like a nice thick meat lovers some really good creamy mashed potatoes completely absorb the flavor of the pizza underneath while giving you this awesome creamy texture.
I swear just try it, its a totally awesome combo. my GF used to just look at me like a weirdo when i ate it, until i finally got her to try some. Now everytime i go pick up pizza I get home to find a fresh pot of mashed potatoes and her standing there with a cake spreader, too delicious.
Does AMD graphics do what you need them to? Do you wish to show businesses that supporting open specs is good for business? Then buy AMD, simple as that.
In the end for those that wish to see openness supported you have to meet them halfway and give them numbers to show you are worth the money and effort and i think it would be damned hard to argue that AMD isn't doing everything they can to be as open as possible.
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Well I think the real point is if you need MS Office? You'll buy it and if you don't then you won't, simple as that.
I can see why MSFT did this, since it seems Word is used by more people than anything else in MS Office, but they really need to be worried about giving up the home users because $99 for Student is just too high. That is why I just give my home users LO because frankly it'll do what the average home user needs even though it won't cut it for the business users but they should be worried about home users using LO instead of MS Office because that is just money left on the table.
If it were me I'd sell Word for $30, or a Word PPT combo for $45, lower student to $60 and pick up that money they are leaving on the table. because as it is they aren't gonna get those that were using an ad supported MS Office to go run out and spend $100+ on MS Office, they'll use LO or the pirated version. But frankly with all the dumbshit moves we've seen from MSFT lately yet another one? Not surprising.
Actually Mr or Mrs AC you have proved that YOU are equally clueless, as there is nothing other than AD support in Win Pro that can't be had cheap or free with third party products that run fine on Win 7 HP. I have several customers using HP at work and frankly not a single one has any trouble running a small business on HP, and if they run into any old software that won't run (rare) they simply use their original XP install that was turned into a VM and just use VMWare Player.
So there really isn't a point of pro or enterprise unless you are working in a place that requires AD, and while ultimate does have bitlocker there are several other free disc encryption tools out there that would just as good like Truecrypt. Frankly the only ones I've ever seen with Ultimate are gamers that treat their PC as an ePeen and have more damned bling on them than an LA ricer.
And finally I'm sorry but if you honestly think a Home user can have their PC replaced by Linux WITHOUT a full time admin to fix the damned thing when the updates crap on drivers? Well then you might be interested in these magic beans I have for sale. Linux is like a 75 Dodge sitting in a field, IF you learn all its quirks AND spend hours on fixing it up AND are willing to jump through hoops to keep it running? It can be good, maybe even a hot rod if you sink enough time in. the rest of the world would rather just get something that runs NOW and will KEEP running. That simply isn't the state of Linux right now friend, as the rants about Nvidia and ATI drivers we saw this week soundly illustrates.
Well here is the family pack for $130 with is $43 a license. It says upgrade but frankly I've used the family pack to clean install with no problems, in fact its what I used to switch my family off of XP. You get one disc for X86, one for X64, and the key is good for three installs.
I still think my pricing is better though, as for that short period where they had HP at $50 and the family packs at $100 frankly I never saw a pirate edition, they were ALL legit Windows. As we have seen with valve the way to beat pirates is not the stick but the carrot, and now would be a perfect time to do so and offer those that buy the $15 Win 8 upgrade they are offering the retailers with new PC sales. This would give people an incentive to go legit and give them an incentive to buy Win 8. Since MSFT seems to think piracy is a problem this is a sure fire way to stop it, as with a price like $50 for HP honestly most would just buy rather than deal with a pirate version.
If it were me you'd see Starter at $35, HP at $50, and Family and pro at $100 and you would be able to upgrade to the Win 8 version of the same level for $20 if you bought the upgrade ticket with your Win 7 purchase. Not only would this virtually wipe out piracy but would get more people interested in Win 8 as well, since they'd already have a key for the RTM download. Seems like a win/win to me.
Because I get 6 hours on my netbook running an E350 playing 720p under Win 7 HP thanks to everything being offloaded? Not a Linux guy but i can understand why they wouldn't be happy, its a hell of a lot less power to use the dedicated GPU to do the rendering than the CPU and when you are building an HTPC you want it quiet. hell if all you are gonna use is the CPU anyway might as well just through in a cheap Phenom I or C2D and call it a day, because it sounds like the GPU ain't do anything anyway.
They can't give away what they don't own, both HDMI and protected path video aren't owned by AMD so they have no choice but remove any traces from the specs.
Sigh...look in the damned mirror people! Its been 20 fricking years already, the damned drivers STILL don't work, they have NEVER worked great, the thing is a mess. Even one of the Red Hat devs says the current system isn't working and isn't sustainable, so its time folks. Time to take a good look in the mirror, cut through the dogma and bullshit, tell Torvalds he's had 20 years and couldn't fix the problems so STFU and give Linux a stable driver ABI already, and start working your way down the list of problems and making Linux a true third way.
Look as a retailer I WANT Linux to succeed, i really do. I do NOT like cutting a check to MSFT with every new build but right now things are a total clusterfuck. Companies having to continue to write drivers for stuff they don't even sell anymore because Linus' kernel fiddling breaks the old drivers, everything from the kernel to the DEs are in a giant state of constant flux and chaos, things that work in foo not working in foo+1, as it is now the driver situation alone would cost me more than a copy of Win HP simply because of all the time I'd have to spend on forum hunts and CLI fiddling and fixes just to get everything back to functional after an update.
Its a mess folks, and the sooner you accept there is a problem the sooner you can start to work to change it. Remember folks CLI fixes and forum hunts should NEVER be par for the course, you should and do deserve better!
The way I got around that was using Task manager to call AtomicTime with the correct on launch checked. the program only takes around 50k memory, works on any machine from Win95- Win 7 X64 (admin required for Vista/7 of course) and takes less than 10 seconds all told to do its job, and its free. if you have some machines that for one reason or another lose time (such as cheap bastards not paying for new batteries) just set up AtomicTime to run on boot and it'll set the time perfectly every time. I had mine set to use the 3 closest servers and since i had it on my thumbstick on my keyring it was as simple as dragging it off and 3 minutes in Task manager, couldn't be easier friend.
The problem with your doom scenario is the law actually already has tons of precedent for not allowing it, its called laches and is designed for EXACTLY the scenario your are proposing and is backed by dozens of cases worth of precedent.
So yet again MSFT would be laughed right out of court, the ONLY thing it would do is risk obliterating their claims to the non OSP pledge patents. But again show me a SINGLE CASE, just one mind you, of MSFT actually doing what you are suggesting and suing over something covered by OSP. Because so far MSFT has been pretty damned clear what is and isn't covered by OSP and has only sued for those things not covered such as FAT32 which is now being replaced by ExFAT. Nowhere is their file systems under OSP, nor do you need their file systems to be covered under OSP to use the code under OSP, therefor it has nothing to do with the OSP covered code.
so if the only thing you can come up with is "doom scenarios" without a shred of proof its FUD, no different than RIAA FUD, Oracle FUD, MSFT FUD, or any other FUD. Its not based on any evidence, its all based on doom scenarios, no different than the RIAA saying artists are gonna starve if you don't give them endless copyrights, its FUD.
It isn't just plausible its pretty damned obvious. Go to TPB and you'll see they have "Windows 7 all versions pre-activated" DVD which will give you ANY version from Basic to Ultimate and they all get full Windows Updates using the bootloader hack. Since the hack involves using legit OEM bootloaders to shut it down they'd have to blacklist so many OEM desktops and laptops it'd be chaos so they might as well consider Win 7 a total wash when it comes to piracy.
As someone who works in a little PC shop if anybody at MSFT with any clout reads this? i have the solution to Windows piracy without any secureboot crap, ready? Win HP at $50, Win HP family packs at $100. I saw guys who had NEVER had a legit version of Windows buy when you had Win 7 HP at $50, in fact while that was going on I don't remember seeing a pirate version around, they were all legit HP. You jacked up the price and now Craigslist is filled with $100 PCs with $300 copies of Win 7 Ultimate on them.
so take a lesson from valve MSFT, the carrot don't work. Are you forgetting what happened with Vista? You made it originally pretty damned pirate proof, even having a kill switch, remember? it BOMBED because its those same guys that actually know how to pirate that support your ass by telling their families what to buy and supporting them. lets face it you've never made your big money at retail anyway, so selling Win HP at $50 isn't gonna kill you but it WILL turn a lot of pirates into actual paying customers because at $50 frankly it isn't worth the hassle to pirate. I'll be the first to admit the reason my family is running Win 7 HP is the family packs and if it wasn't for the 3 for $100 deal they'd be running hacked pro, paying $100+ a machine for HP when the machines themselves cost $250-$350 a kit? Not worth it. there is a sweet spot MSFT, and I'd argue its Starter at $35, HP at $50, Pro and the family packs at $100.
And what "actual purpose" would that be, to rip off Apple? Let's be honest folks, Gates was evil, Ballmer is just quasi-evil, he's the light beer of evil, half the calories and a total buzz killer.
Seriously folks look at the man's track record- killing the successful playsforsure for Zune market (iTunes), paying actual money to rebrand the Gigabeat and make it shit brown no less and calling it the Zune (iPod), paying another assload of money to Nokia, whom i believe they'll eventually buy because if its one thing Ballmer knows how to do its piss away money, to crank out WP7 phones nobody wants (iPhone), and for the final uberfail taking their flagship X86 OS, one of the few actual money makers they have, and taking a MASSIVE dump on the UI all so he can treat developers as retards thinking he can "trick them" into developing for ARM Windows (iPad).
Look to do something really evil requires.....of what's the word?....oh yeah, ACTUAL THOUGHT which so far we have yet to see Steve ballmer actually be capable of. Wanna know where he got Secureboot? Apple, hell that is where he has stolen every damned idea he's had, just take something Apple did first and half ass it. In case everyone ain't noticed you can just slap any old OS on an iPod or iPad neither and that is what Ballmer is brewing up like a giant Sunday crap, yet another ripping off of Apple with a half ass incomplete mess with a Win Logo.
So don't worry your little heads about it none FOSS guys, the OEMs won't be putting out in X86 you can flip a switch and kill Secureboot because they know guys like me are gonna spend the next year and a half wiping the shitpile that is Win 8 for the goodness that is Win 7, and the only way you're gonna come across a Win 8 Pad (unless you're thick and buy one at release) is over on Woot! when the OEMs, if there are any which after we saw what they are gonna charge may be few if any, dump the things for firesale prices ala the Touchpad.
To get worried about this turkey is like being worried about WinME taking over the world, it just ain't gonna happen and you might as well not give a crap until you see what happens at release which i predict will be just like this only with cursing which is what I've seen at the shop. The only interesting thing about TFA is Canonical is doing the job for any malware writers that wanna get around secureboot, maybe they'll be nice and send Shuttleworth a thank you note. Not that it matters, until 2014 most of the malware guys seem to be happy going after XP the most since its the lowest hanging fruit. Bet it must be like heaven for 'em, a decade plus old creaky OS with hundreds of millions running as admin? Easy pickings.
Well if you want a cheap one check out the Fusion builds, especially the E350s, as you can often find them in a nice HTPC kit for like $100. And if you want to use XBMC then check out Open ELEC which has builds for the AMD Fusions that covers the E series as well as the newer A series chips. It is only 120Mb and has everything already to go, just install. I've built a couple of HTPCs using the E350s and although my customers went Win 7 HP I can tell you those chips do make for nice media centers, full 1080P and whisper quiet and only draw around 18w under load. again don't know how well it'll work under Linux as i only played with OpenELEC for a little while before installing Windows but it seemed damned nice.
Well I don't kn ow about him but I never cared about canon or not, what pissed me off on both it and VOY was how many times they'd hand a character the idiot ball. With Voyager it wasn't as bad because B&B kept hitting the damned reset button so sadly nearly every episode had them just as clueless as when they first got to the Delta quadrant, but with ENT they had poor Archer hold the idiot ball so many times they might as well had "King Moron" taped to his uniform.
The one that pushed me into the "Oh for fuck's sake! Are you shitting me?" was when they had to negotiate with that race for a part who was VERY picky about protocols...so he brings his fucking dog along who promptly pisses on a sacred tree and fucks the whole thing up. WHAT THE FUCK!!! Are you shitting me? the captain of a fucking starship on a VERY sensitive diplomatic mission, the first contact no less, doesn't have enough motherfucking sense to even leave his damned dog on the fucking ship or at least ASK before he brings it if they would find it in any way offensive?
You have to admit even if you liked the show that they often wrote the crew and especially Archer as dumber than your average frat boys. Hell I liked VOY even though it was a bad show for the most part but I'll be the first to admit that the writers fucked it all up, but by the time they got to ENT you have the feeling they seriously just quit giving a fuck. I've seen interviews with Blalock where she was pissed and just like Beltran on VOY basically said she phoned it in because the writing stunk so bad. In fact sadly after the series ended I found out the reason I liked the Doc on VOY was Picardo threw out the shit they wrote for him and wrote his own dialog, kinda sad when the only actors that have any good dialog write it themselves.
While I'd agree a good sci/fi series would be nice, although i think it could have transporters without them being "too powerful" as logically there would be a hell of a lot that could be dangerous when using tech like that, in the end if you don't have good scripts and good writing you are screwed. I think both ENT and VOY could have been as good as DS9 if only Berman and Braga didn't shit all over the shows, bad writing, idiot balls, reset buttons, and with ENT especially just retarded plot developments, its a damned shame to see good shows ruined by shit writing. But of course we are talking about the same bunch that put out Nemesis which was so fucking terrible the ONLY way the plot makes ANY sense is if the bad guy WANTED TO LOSE and was sabotaging his own plans!
Except the "ZOMFG M$ is gonna poison us with Mono ZOMFG!" argument is a load of deep fried horseshit because they have already covered it in their "We won't sue" pledge which is legally binding and has been published all over the place by MSFT themselves so it isn't like they can claim it was someone without authorization, not that even that would stand up in court.
You can read it on the wiki and see that its similar to IBMs ISP and Sun's ODPS licenses. the only one bitching is old RMS' bunch since it isn't compatible with GPL. Well neither is most licenses including MPL by Mozilla, but that doesn't have people screaming "They gonna poison teh well ZOMFG!"
Show us a SINGLE case, just one, of MSFT actually suing someone over tech covered in the OSP, because otherwise you might as well claim that MSFT secretly has a clone army to take over the world, you have evidence for neither so either could be possible, however unlikely. The simple fact is after making such a clear and plainly written patent pledge no judge in the USA would even let it get to court, they'd be laughed right out of the building. if you don't want to use it because you have an irrational fear then say so, but don't come up with "doom scenarios" without any evidence to back them up, okay?
That is why we need to call them what they are, just as they think they can turn copyright infringement into theft we need to label them with a name that denotes their true purpose....Leeches. that is ALL that they are, they are the middle men, bleeding the consumer AND the artist of every Shekel they can, wanting to destroy one of the most powerful free communication systems in world history for their own gain, leeches.
Jim Sterling at Zero Punctuation has a nice rant and while his is mainly about games the sentiment is the same, its leeches pushing draconian crap like SOPA and PIPA and its all about control, so they can leech.
I usually keep the potatoes plain, too much butter can make it have an oily texture and its all about the texture with this. I usually use a cake frosting spreader to get a nice even layer, but how thick you want it really depends on personal taste and pizza we are talking about. if we are talking about say a single layer beef or pepperoni I would make it thinner as the point is to enhance rather than overpower the pizza flavor, I'd say about a pinky nail thick, while I'd double or maybe even a little more if it were my favorite pizza which is a Larry's double lotsa meat and cheese. With it there is two layers of several meats and cheese so the thicker layer not only enhances all that meat but it also keeps all the bacon from falling off LOL!
Finally as for gravy? It MIGHT work but I'd be worried about it clashing with the pizza sauce. the best thing about this is soak up the flavor of the meat and cheese below it giving a nice counterpoint to the stringy cheese and the bite of the spicy meat, I do mix in the occasional onion or garlic power, especially with a really thick crust pizza to give it more spice and less of a bready taste, but the best thing about this is because you can separate the potatoes into small containers you can experiment and find what works best for the kind of pizza you have. Maybe a half a cup with gravy, a half a cup with spices, butter, etc and simply spread it on a small section of a slice so if it doesn't work you've wasted nothing. Its really trial and error but once you find your fav combos it really kicks ass so give it a spin, that lovely creamy texture mixed with the stringy cheese and the bite of the spices is awesome!.
And I know, of all the things to be talking about on /. right? But the nice thing about this little trick is it allows for so many variations, my GF prefers to make her potatoes from scratch so she can have nice little potato chunks it it for her, I like mine creamier with a little more pepper and a hint of garlic, it is so easy to add all kinds of variations and it really livens up the average take out pizza and can make a great pizza truly mouth watering.
Paranoid much? I post that link because the guys at coding horror see no problem with plopping down a grand on a drive and like /. is full of geeks that know what they are doing so you can't blame it on noob mistakes. i would also point out that article isn't even a year and a half old so if you can provide your OWN link showing this miracle breakthrough that has eliminated SSD failures I'm sure the guys here would be happy to read it. If you go down to the comments you will see failure after failure, every major brand and model, and these guys again do NOT go cheap so you can use the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) excuse either. We are talking top o' the line drives by reputable companies like Intel crapping all over themselves.
So unless you can provide data of your own I'm gonna call paranoia, since that link is one of the best I've found on the subject and the guys at CH are all pros, frankly I'd be more likely to listen to them than some random "Works4Me" Internet Post.
Ironically while you sit here bitching like its some conspiracy, or I'm being paid by the HDD corps, Atwood says quite clearly that he will continue to use SSDs DESPITE the high fail rates, simply because he believes that as long as you keep up to date back ups that the risk is worth it. of course this is the same guy that spent $400+ on a pair of headphones and can easily afford to have a drawer full of spare SSDs so a failure won't take him 30 minutes to recover from, but my customers are normal folks not the uberrich so different rules apply.
Well I just ran HogXP to see what is taking up what, here is the list:
1.-Windows-23Gb, Program Files(X86) 8.5Gb, Users 8Gb, C: 3Gb, ATI 3Gb (I'm guessing old drivers backup i haven't cleaned out yet), Hiberfil.sys 2Gb, Program Files 1.8Gb, AMD 1.2Gb, Pagefile 1Gb (I keep the majority of my page file on a different drive) Program data 633Mb.
So as you can see while there is a few things like the ATI drivers that can just be chunked there is a LOT that would require either hours of uninstalling or using VLite to hack on windows and this install has purred since RTM and I'm loathe to do any real hacking on it as its stable as a rock.
Sign up for the Tiger emails friend if you are looking for a laptop, they have been having some pretty crazy sales on AMD Fusion powered systems, such as An Aspire Quad for $400 without MIRs which if I wasn't already happy with my E350 EEE netbook I would be sorely tempted, thanks to turbocore those units can ramp up pretty decently when you are using only one or two thread and that unit has dual graphics, with both a discrete and the fusion APU, nice.
And I can tell you that on the Windows front i was right there with you, ATI made great hardware but their software and drivers were just fucking TERRIBLE, they had the damned driver GUI tied to .NET of all things so if there was a problem you had to wonder, was it an ATI problem, was it a .NET problem, just a fucking mess but when AMD bought ATI and Nvidia burned me with bumpgate I can say the drivers became solid as a rock and the bang for the buck is just nuts. So I can't tell you on the Linux side other than when firing up the latest live CDs it all seems to "just work" on both my HD3xxx IGP and my HD4850 discrete, videos play smooth and the picture sharp.
Look if it were me, you got a desktop, right? Go over to Geeks or Tiger and pick up a really cheap AMD graphics card and see how she goes. I've seen low end HD5xxx going for about $20 on Tiger and Geeks has an HD4770 for $43 and an HD3870 X2 for $63. Any of those cards should give you a good taste of what you'd be looking at if you went AMD and if it doesn't work as you'd like you're not really out nothing, just throw it back in the box and send it back or sell it on Craigslist. Here is a 5450 for $22 which at that price its not gonna be any big risk to your wallet. All I can tell you is what Phoronix has been saying which is the FOSS drivers are coming up by leaps and bounds and most of the distros are supporting both the discrete and the Fusions pretty well now.
Not to mention NTP is fricking 27 years old now and is one of the oldest Internet protocols still in use. And it isn't just servers that use it, i can't even count the number of times I've had to make sure Windows boxes were checking into NTP regularly because this software or that software wouldn't play nice, hell even Win2K and WinXP would refuse to use WU if the clocks were off by too much.
So unlike the previous article on Opa, which came up with 5 other terms using that including a Greek song ntp takes all of one second and the first answer is what it is. This is one case where I really don't think the wiki entry was required and if it was please hand in your geek card as well as your minion card and please wear the 'I'm a noob LOL!" button on your shirt for the next 6 months so nobody asks you a damned thing, kthxbye.
Which is exactly what the poster was pointing out, as before the flood I was snatching up Samsung ecodrives at 1Tb for $40 and 2Tb for $65. Man i got lucky on that, first time I ever got in ahead of a curve and made myself a pretty penny and was still able to outfit myself with nearly 6Tb of storage to ride through the high prices.
The problems I see with SSDs are thus: 1.- they have a crazy high failure rate and as the prices bottom and they use cheaper components and stuff more and more data per chip this will probably get worse. 2.-The biggest price drops seem to be in the 40Gb-96Gb, I've seen a few 128Gb but 40-96Gb seems to be the sweet spot now and most folks simply need more space than that, hell I'm using over 100Gb on my OS drive and I keep all my games and movies on a separate drive, and finally 3.-Consumers just aren't as diligent at backups as they should be so when #1 happens its gonna bite a lot of folks in the ass and they probably won't give SSDs a second chance after that.
Personally after seeing some of my gamer customers go through high end SSDs like shit through a goose thanks to high failure rates I'm leery of recommending them or even using one myself. I have found having plenty of RAM for superfetch and an 8Gb flash for Readyboost seems to give me a nice compromise and while I back up my OS regularly I don't want to even know how much bullshit I'd have to go through to get a 3 year old Win 7 install pared down to 64Gb and squeezed onto an SSD. Does anybody have experience with mostly full SSDs? I know they need to use wear leveling and I'm curious how well that would work if the drive is damned near full. Lets say I have 108Gb on my OS drive and I buy a 128Gb SSD, is that gonna kill the performance? Increase the failure rate? Would it be better to simply get a hybrid or wait until the 256Gb drives come down?
I call bullshit, Braga may have caved but Berman was producer and had more clout. Its well known he is the one that made first contact a time travel movie (even wanted Borg in the middle ages, how retarded) and it was Berman that kept insisting on the reset button for Voyager. I wish I could find a link because I saw an interview with Beltran once (Chakotay) and he said that they basically refused to listen to the actors so much that Robert Picardo simply flat refused to say the horrible dialog they kept shoving him and simply wrote his own which is why the Doc usually had decent character development.
If you haven't watched it head over sometime to SFDebris and watch his reviews because he will often point out the behind the scenes stuff to show where and why things went right or wrong. Basically by the third season of Voyager Trek was the Berman and Braga show, with Berman giving all the retarded "More sex" bits (Jeri Ryan saying that Berman was actually upset when he found out after hiring her that her huge tits were the result of having just given birth when they returned to normal size the outfits got tighter to the point she couldn't hardly breathe) and Braga having no damned clue about character development and keeping each character basically the same as they were when they started. No growth, no changes, even when the Doc had a breakdown after having to choose between one crewman or another living it was never added to his character after that, just another reset by Braga.
To me what makes it extra sad is if they had just listened to the fans those two shows could have been fucking great. I remember reading that when Josh Whedon would get stuck on BtVS or Angel he would often head to the forums (under a different name of course) and simply ask THEM what they thought should happen next and he said damned if they didn't come up with excellent ideas and occasionally give him a smacking, such as he wanted to pursue commercialism with the double meat palace bit and they shot it down, saying it was demeaning to the character. If they would have simply asked the fans they would have known that Chakotay and Seven a couple was fucking retarded, everyone thought it would make more sense for the Doc or even Janeway, the fans would have gotten behind year of hell and thought it would have made for great character growth, seeing them make allies, fight and flee, but instead they just kept hitting the reset or in the case of Enterprise handing the idiot ball to Archer.
I personally don't think Blalock was a bad actress, it felt like that she like Beltran simply got pissed and decided to phone it in. The interview with Beltran he basically apologized to the fans but said they simply wouldn't let Chakotay grow or feel, he was just the smiling sidekick and he didn't have the pull that Picardo had so he couldn't just write his own dialog and thus gave up. he wanted to explore how being betrayed twice (Tuvok and Seska) would affect his ability to trust and lead, see how his crew and Janeway's would butt heads and try to become a group, but he said all his ideas were shot down and by the last 2 years it was the Seven Of nine show. Not that he blamed Ryan, he said she was sweet and great to work with, just that the B&B wanted to shove her tits and ass in the screen as much as possible so every other episode became her or the Doc on account of the fans loving Picardo.
Its just a damned shame, if they would have listened to the fans, especially on VOY, they could have had a truly great series that might have even been darker and with more thought provoking episodes than even DS9. Hell the fan fics were better than half the plots B&B came up with for the last years of VOY and ENT, and while I heard ENT got better by the last year frankly after watching the first two seasons and seeing the idiot ball handed to Archer so many times that any hope of that moron commanding a ship being believable was just gone for me by then, I loved trek but I just
They still haven't hit the sweet spot, simply because the ones they are discounting are the smaller drives which most of my customer's OS drives simply wouldn't fit,and neither will mine.
I try to install all my games to a separate drive and my OS drive is at 96Gb used which means a 128Gb would already be nearly full and from the looks of what I've been seeing the drives that are getting dumped on the sales the most are the 40Gb-60Gb. That might be good for a cache drive but you sure as hell aren't fitting Vista or Win 7 on a drive like that without stripping thanks to the retarded "anytime upgrade" crap. The 256Gb ones are still pretty damned high and that would be what is needed to change out most of the OS installs of my customers.
Finally I would note that the spinning rust is ALSO coming back down after its visit to crazy town after the flood, I've been seeing 1Tb drives for $70 and 2Tb for $99. This isn't quite the $40 a Tb I was paying before the flood but the prices do seem to be heading back down so while its not as fast as the SSD they tend to be more reliable and you certainly get a hell of a lot more space.
BTW has anybody used an SSD for a Readyboost drive? I'm AMD exclusive so I can't do the caching trick like with those Z68 boards and I was just wondering if anybody had tried using something like a 40Gb SSD as a Readyboost cache. Is it worth it? I have an 8Gb USB I use now and I can tell a difference, especially in programs like games where after first run Windows loads the levels quicker thanks to using both the HDD and flash, but I just don't know if having THAT big a Readyboost would be worth it and I'm sure as hell not gonna do a clean install and VLite to try to squeeze Win 7 onto some 60Gb. This install has purred like a kitten since RTM and I don't want to deal with that much hassle for a speed boost.
Which is a perfect example of why one shouldn't buy a FOSS company unless one wants to be in the FOSS business, because once the code has been FOSS you can't stuff that cat back in the bag.
Not saying that is a bad thing, after all people like RMS have been preaching for FOSS for just that reason, that you can't put it back behind a paywall once its out there, but if oracle didn't want Sun to be a hardware company (which was what I thought the point was, Oracle OS on Oracle hardware designed for Oracle DBs giving them a full stack approach) then buying it was frankly retarded because Sun had already made any "juicy IP" open source and thus worthless for trolling. agree 100% with the ruling and am frankly shocked oracle would have been that damned dumb.
Actually if they had never seen it "Space Seed" which introduced the character would be a better place to start, to see his fall from power and the lovely wife that Ceti Alpha V would take from Khan would give better context to the movie.
If it were my list I'd probably start with a greatest hits from each series,City on the edge of forever, balance of power, space seed, the conscience of the king, corbomite maneuver,A Taste of Armageddon,Mirror mirror,trouble with tribbles,ultimate computer,day of the dove,Requiem for Methuselah,The Savage Curtain and probably doomsday machine from TOS.
With TNG it gets a little harder as some of these are probably more personal favs than on anybody's top ten but the measure of a man, elementary dear data and ship in a bottle (I always liked Moriarty), best of both worlds I&II, Darmok, Q Who, yesterday's enterprise,inner light,chain of command, all good things.
For DS9, again subjective, Duet,our man bashir, trials and tribbleations,blood oath, Crossover (always liked the mirrorverse),civil defense,through the looking glass (mirrorverse), the adversary,little green men (silly but cute and a good character piece IMHO),return to grace (good Dukat piece), call to arms through sacrifice of angels (6 episode Dominion war arc),Waltz, in the pale moonlight, treachery, faith and the great river (cute and light hearted Ferengi piece),once more into the breach (good Klingon character episode), Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges (good dark episode that shows the federation isn't always the good guys), some like what you leave behind but I thought they should have killed Dukat at Waltz and went too far to keep him as a character so that should be enough there.
Sadly Voyager and Enterprise didn't get as many good episodes, i loved the characters of Voyager but the writers were pussies and kept hitting the reset button and thus killing any character development but there were a few, more than Enterprise which seemed to be an excuse for bad speeches and lesbo yay more than anything. From Voyager..heroes and demons,jetrel,prototype, dreadnought (I liked it), death wish (great Q piece), the thaw (truly good, and a great villain),future's end I&II (again I liked it and had some cute bits),year of hell I&II (damned shame they didn't have the balls to stick with the story instead of the reset button),scorpion I&II (good Borg episodes), message in a bottle, living witness (good doc episode), timeless, nothing human (good character piece),counterpoint,bride of chaotica (just a cute episode) , course oblivion (VERY dark but good) warhead, equinox I&II (another dark but good), tinker tenor doctor spy (silly but cute and a good doc ep), life line (another good doc),author author (another good doc), latent image (noticing a pattern with doc getting the good ones?) dark Frontier I&II (Janeway and the Borg Queen which fits in nicely with the final ep) and Endgame.
As for Enterprise...sigh, only the two Mirrorverse are IMHO worth watching, as in every other episode it feels like the writers are passing the idiot ball and most episodes have the captain especially cringe worthy. The movies? Easy, 2-4 although 3 isn't as good as 2 and 4 they fit nicely together and First Contact is decent.
That should give you more than enough decent episodes that if they like it they can always ask to see others. BTW if you hate them make them set through Okana from TNG and Threshhold from Voyager, both so horribly bad they make for good MST3K style fodder.
That is why I always get a little bummed myself. While I miss someone like Carlin or Pryor, at least they gave us decades of laughs that we can look back on. with Hedberg or Hicks or Kinison...sigh. It seemed like they were just starting to really find their grooves, you just knew they were gonna have so much more to say..then gone. Damned shame, that's what it is, just a damned shame.
As for weird foods that go great together? i'll give ya one i bet most here haven't tried...mashed potatoes on pizza. hear me out though, especially on a great spicy pizza like a nice thick meat lovers some really good creamy mashed potatoes completely absorb the flavor of the pizza underneath while giving you this awesome creamy texture.
I swear just try it, its a totally awesome combo. my GF used to just look at me like a weirdo when i ate it, until i finally got her to try some. Now everytime i go pick up pizza I get home to find a fresh pot of mashed potatoes and her standing there with a cake spreader, too delicious.
Does AMD graphics do what you need them to? Do you wish to show businesses that supporting open specs is good for business? Then buy AMD, simple as that.
In the end for those that wish to see openness supported you have to meet them halfway and give them numbers to show you are worth the money and effort and i think it would be damned hard to argue that AMD isn't doing everything they can to be as open as possible.