That is why I never understood AMD having identical cores as it seems to be a waste with the exception of a few apps like video processing. That is why I snatched a Thuban when they were cheap as at least turbocore will ramp up when you are only using one to three cores heavily but a better design would probably be an uber-powerful Core 0, followed by a decently powerful Core 1 & 2, with the Cores after that being slightly more powerful than Bobcats.
Because as you so rightly pointed out frankly it doesn't matter how good the coder is if the program simply won't benefit from multiple threads and many won't.
Haven't run into any Unity3D, have they made anything i might have heard of? And as for why they would complain to me one of the things my customers like is I do followups, usually I will call at the end of the first week, the end of the first month, and a final checkup after the end of 3 months, just to make sure they are happy with their purchase and everything is running smoothly. i will also often see my machines return for upgrades, i make it a point to build desktops and sell netbooks and laptops with some leeway when it comes to upgrades, especially desktops of course.
One of the first things i do after installing the new hardware is to see if any of their software needs updating and frankly i have yet to see one since i quit including.NET by default come back with.NET installed in programs and features, I just haven't. like Java unless its a corporate machine I just don't see either.NET or Java installed, nobody uses it, at least from what I've seen. you DO see a shitload of Visual C++, hell I just looked on my gamer machine and I personally have 2005, 2008, and 2010 when it comes to Visual C++ and I believe my office box at the shop has 05 and 08 and I never install games on it.
So I'm just not seeing it here out in the trenches friend, like Java its just one of those things the majority doesn't even need anymore. again if their goal was to get.NET the level of usage that VB6 had its a pretty miserable failure as I've seen everything from little homebrew style programs to major games and they ALL use Visual C++. In fact the last games i came across that didn't were Chrome I and Chrome II which used a self contained java engine instead.
Actually Office would be simple, because as I said Metro should be treated as a separate entity and on that ground should be treated no different than Office for the Mac. You would have an ARM Metro Uied Office and a Windows desktop Office and with the ribbon frankly there wouldn't have to be a lot of changes to workflow.
Look the problem with their "next 20 years" BS is what works good in ONE form factor may be completely wrong for another form factor, that seems to be something else Apple gets that MSFT doesn't. the worldwide sales of X86 touchscreens last i checked is less than 4%, and when you remove POS and kiosks you are looking at less than 2%. with numbers THAT shitty trying to force a touchscreen paradigm onto a desktop is not only wrong, its foolish. there is a REASON why touchscreens simply don't sell on x86, its because a vertical screen isn't fun to poke all day, its a RSI nightmare. with cells and tablets you are holding it more like a classic pen and paper tablet which is a much more natural motion for the human body than reaching constantly to poke at a vertical screen.
So I'd say its not so much the changes themselves that are the problem, its that they are trying to force these changes onto a form factor where they simply make no sense. There is a reason why desktops have evolved the way they have, with the workspace schema, its because this is one of the most simplistic ways to do complex tasks with a mouse. But MSFT seems to think keyboards and mice are just gonna magically disappear, that people will want to treat a desktop as a "supergigantic smartphone" and the form factor simply makes no damned sense to use that particular UI. a tablet is comfortable being poked with your thumbs while you lounge, a desktop sitting on an office table somewhere? Not so much. i predict Win 8 will be a massive flop on both fronts, because they've simply not given folks any reason to adopt the ARM version and the X86 version makes no sense from a usability standpoint, it just doesn't.
To use a/. car analogy there is a damned good reason why nobody puts steering wheels on motorcycles, its not that people couldn't eventually learn to drive it that way, its just it doesn't add any benefit to what is obviously not the best way to do it for that design.
Which is why I can't stand those that treat FOSS and Linux as a religion, the ones i call FOSSies, because even when you point out what should be as plain as the nose on your face, that there is no damned reason new drivers need to be written for old hardware except that the current driver model simply doesn't work they scream like you must have taken a crap on Baby Jesus.
I mean for the love of Christ they call me an "MS Ninja" for DARING to point out you can't sell Linux to consumers in its current state when what do we see right here on this very forum? That unless the hardware OEMs constantly release new drivers, even for old hardware that isn't even fricking being sold anymore, that the software WILL NOT WORK with current kernels. i'm sorry, that is just royally fucked up. hell on Windows you can use 2K drivers on XP and Vista drivers on 7, and i can take the driver that came with my 2 year old card, slap it in a fully patched Windows with fully updated software and it just works and my customers never have to worry about it.
Believe me friend I WANT Linux to get better, I really do. I want to offer nice looking Linux machines right next to the windows units and even better to get rid of XP on the older units for a nice new shiny Linux OS but I just can't, and that is because if you keep the damned thing updated the drivers fall down and go BOOM!
Please Linux community, please stop taking this half baked horseshit from Torvalds and Co, please stop accepting forum hunts and pages of CLI mess just to get the damned drivers functional after an update as par for the course, you should and do deserve MORE. After all a free shit sandwich is still a shit sandwich and right now the driver situation is a fucking disaster. How can you expect to get support from those thousands of smaller companies making hardware if fricking companies like Nvidia constantly have to release NEW drivers for OLD shit because the old drivers will no longer function thanks to all the BS going on?
so please, demand a stable ABI, with say a 5 year cycle between major changes to said ABI and a way for the previous ABI to be used beside or replace the new ABI if the person has older hardware that requires it. there should be no damned reason why my customer should have to update his GPU driver just to run the latest XBMC or any other software for that matter, and frankly if you fix this glaring problem? then there is a good chance you could grab some real share, as you have nice software, GUIs, pretty much all of the top layer stuff is quite nice but its the low level stuff like drivers that are really putting a couple of slugs into Linux before it can even get out of the gate.
Companies hell, I've had cops come up to me in the shop that wanted obviously illegal stuff done, frankly i think they had seen too many episodes of CSI and actually thought you could hack a network with a VB GUI.
But honestly this kind of shit surprises me not in the least, anyone who has read some of the stuff that has been dumped onto Wikileaks knows that you can buy pretty much anything if the money is good enough. Personally I'm waiting for a cyber version of the Pinkertons, a little private army you can hire to do whatever dirty little thing you need done in cyberspace. After all thanks to many otherwise pretty damned lawless countries having Internet access in a way its like the wild west only the criminals don't have to physically come over the border to do their raiding before heading back to their personal hole in the wall. So to see the corps fighting back when the law itself can't really do shit thanks to countries that don't play by the same rules? Really not surprising.
True he hasn't thought about all that will entail trying to go homebrew for a road capable device. I'd say his best bet is one of the small Atom or my personal preference the E350 based netbooks, you are talking less than 3 pounds, insanely cheap, especially if he can live with a refurb, and small enough he can carry it anywhere. I've tried both the Atom 10in and the E350 12in and I have to say I prefer the extra bit of screen but either choice would be a lot less hassle and a damned sight easier than dragging all the crap around.
As you can see here you can get netbooks starting at $160, again if he doesn't mind returns and refurbs, so frankly it'd be so cheap that even if something were to happen to it it'd be no great loss. If he is worried about data loss they just about all come with an SD card slot, more than enough space to simply pop in and out your work when needed. Personally I've gotten several customers this model Acer and it along with the E350 EEE have been quite well received. Small, light, decent battery life (6-7 hours depending on what you are doing) and there are third party batteries that will stretch that to 12 hours if you don't mind the extra weight but I prefer the 6 cell, 6 hours of 720p video or a little over 7 surfing is just about the right amount of time, at least for most of my customers and me.
Which shows what a piss poor previous CEO they had by selling it. But other than Nvidia PowerVR has pretty much ruled the roost in mobile, but now you have Nvidia, Intel looks to be tailoring the new Atoms for that market, and I wouldn't be surprised if AMD is cooking up a version of Bobcat or quietly marrying a couple of ARM cores to one of their Radeons instead of just tacking on an ARM to their X86 BD designs.
Honestly? I don't care WHO wins because as long as their is growth and competition we the consumer benefit. For ages the GPU in mobile devices were frankly piss poor, just as the IGPs in x86 laptops and desktops were piss poor. Nvidia and AMD made having a decent GPU a selling point and suddenly everyone is talking GPUs which makes me very happy, hell AMD seems to be betting that a "good enough" CPU with an awesome GPU is the way to go and I can see no fault with their logic. There is simply many jobs that consumers want to do today that benefit from having a decent GPU so having the entire market focused on making good GPUs is frankly wonderful news to me, I for one welcome PowerVR into the fray.
Name someone OTHER than the enterprise that is using.NET? Because i frankly quit supplying.NET on new builds and reinstalls over a year ago and haven't had a single complaint yet, frankly after AMD switched to Visual C++ I haven't run into a single consumer app using.NET. From what I've seen everyone is using Visual C++ and I doubt MSFT is gonna magically get all those devs to suddenly switch because they want Windows to be a supergigantic smartphone OS.
Lets face it friend,.NET was supposed to replace VB6 and in that case its a massive fail. While VB6 was frankly fucking everywhere, with everything from home brew to enterprise using it, like Java.NET seems to have been completely ignored outside the enterprise niche and i can tell you, the average user? NOT using enterprise programs. I honestly haven't seen a single program asking for.NET since the AMD driver switched, nobody is using it, its all Visual C++ now.
Actually got a teen in college (studying pre-med, on the dean's list and head of his frat, naturally I'm VERY proud) and talking to his friends they seem to be starting to cool down with regards to tablets, many are starting to use their cell phones for a similar role that they were using tablets a year ago, especially now that you are getting cells with larger screens. But again they all had a PC, be it desktop or more likely laptop, the tablets simply fill a niche that wasn't a good fit for the laptop, the "kicking back on the (insert couch, train, mall)" niche.
And I agree completely that on the desktop and laptop that no backwards compatibility is suicide, and rightly so, as people have billions invested in Windows software and naturally aren't about to give up all that money because MSFT wants to be hip and sell smartphones. But I would argue the bigger problems is they are doing as they have done a million times in the past, they are creating a half assed copy of a popular thing and thinking their money and name will let them muscle their way in, and its a bad move.
What they SHOULD have done is pulled a Win98SE with Win 7, added a few bells and whistles, a few speed boosts, but otherwise left much unchanged and instead focused metro, which BTW should NOT be called anything Win but simply metro, and instead given people a REASON to buy Metro tablets and phones and they simply haven't done that. this is one area where using their X86 business could have helped them, they could have focused on making everything as seamless as possible, so say I could access content on my Metro tablet from my Win 8 desktop or X360 from anywhere, something similar to easyconnect only for content. as it is now they have given me and my customers NO REASON to use their new product, the ARM version doesn't have as much going for it as the iPad and Android, and the desktop feels like a really big smartphone and you spend more time fighting the damned thing than you do using it.
The whole situation is just a mess, a giant clusterfuck waiting to die right out the gate. but what should we expect from Ballmer, the man has proven no matter how large and successful a company is all it takes is a really shitty CEO to piss those gains right down the toilet.
Have you tried the FOSS drivers? Because you really shouldn't complain when AMD did what the community asked them to do and handed over the specs, or did everyone forget how many times we've heard "Just open up the specs and we'll support the hardware" on this very forum and others? AMD took that one step farther by actually hiring developers to assist the FOSS driver devs in getting up to speed, and from what I've been reading they've been coming along nicely, although focus has naturally been a little heavy on the APUs since so many of them are out there.
This DOES highlight what i consider to be a major failing in Linux for quite some time, the fact that its damned near impossible to JUST get security updates, as package A needs kernel B and depends on packages E-G so to keep the thing updated you end up with an "all or nothing" so you can't just update say the XBMC software without changing graphics drivers and a bunch of other shit. People can scream bloody murder all they want but THIS IS WHY a hardware ABI is a GOOD thing, because if I want to keep my 3 year old graphics drivers while being fully patched and running the latest of everything else on Windows? not a problem, I just don't have to update the graphics driver. this is also why AMD's support phase isn't a problem on Windows, as one can simply stick with the last driver and be fine for the life of the system and after 4 years they've squeezed all the power they are gonna out of a chip. Again like it or not the ONLY REASON that that Nvidia or AMD have to keep releasing new drivers for old hardware in Linux is because you simply can't use the old drivers with new kernels or the whole thing falls down.
So I don't see how the community has any right to complain about AMD, you got exactly what you asked for, all the specs opened and handed to you on a silver platter. AMD simply has a hell of a lot more on its plate than just graphics so continuing to support 4+ year old chips on an OS with maybe 5% market tops is simply a waste of resources. if you want to complain pitch a fit at Torvalds for making driver support such a damned mess, even one of the big Red hat developers says the current way of doing things simply isn't sustainable, that a single group can't control 20,000 packages and drivers and keep it working, and recommends an ABI and a much more stripped down design that allows you to concentrate on the core while letting those that sell the hardware provide drivers. I wonder how much money Nvidia has blown keeping a team of devs around to do nothing but constantly update the Linux drivers when Torvalds constantly breaks the damned drivers with kernel fiddling? bet it isn't cheap, not cheap at all.
If handing you the full specs like you asked for STILL isn't enough? Maybe its time to look in the mirror and consider that maybe, just maybe, you're doing things the wrong way. There should be no damned reason why you can't take the last release that AMD made for that HD3200 and have it run perfectly on the latest distro and the fact that you stand here and admit that it doesn't work just shows what is wrong with linux in a nutshell. After all how do you expect the smaller hardware guys to support you if the big guys have to pay entire teams to constantly fix the damned things just to make the drivers work?
Actually I didn't, this is my first time trying to DIY instead of going to a studio, thanks. The real bitch I'm finding is mixing, trying to get a good clean recording with a 16 track isn't hard but sitting for hours in audacity trying to figure out what works and what doesn't IS. I'm used to the old school stomp box and rack mounts and doing everything in software is a royal bitch, but the local studios have frankly gotten crazy priced and most of the clubs are booked up over a year in advance now so i can't just grab some club gigs to pay for it like I did the last one. That was why i was thinking something like kickstarter, i have the tracks, just maybe a couple of hours in a studio for clean ups and a decent engineer would probably be all I need to get this done.
Anyway thanks for the link, I'll be sure to check it out. I have a few rough two tracks posted on our FB page so just shoot me an email if you want to check them out but I warn you they were straight off the board with a little digital tascam 2 track. by the time the 16 track came in the drummer had fallen off the wagon so we've been doing it just the two of us and like I said still working on the mix, luckily he also plays drums while i play some keyboard. Its been slow going but I think its better to DIY than to try to find new guys and bring them up to speed at this point. hopefully once we get it out there we can maybe get some indie label to give us a club tour like I had with my last group.
Great, not only more billions crapped away but more space junk two,/double facepalm/. what pisses ME off is it isn't like we didn't already have precedent for simply having a reclamation fee, I'm sure most would have agreed like me to happily pay an extra $5-$10 a device to have it last for years instead of tossing all that money not to mention toxic materials into our landfills. I can tell you I've seen a hell of a lot of laptops and netbooks killed waaay too damned early by the whiskers, hell i got a nice mobile Athlon I need to take by my NASA buddy to see if he can salvage that wasn't even old enough to lose the shine to the plastic, about 4 months passed warranty and zzzt. i have NO doubt when he opens it it'll be those damned whiskers.
But frankly I've always know the tree huggers were retarded, I've seen them protest our nuke plant and I've been in the thing and taken a tour, those two plants are as nice as the day they were built and talking to a former HS classmate that works there they constantly run scenarios for every possible emergency on a full size simulator built next door yet the tree huggers will have a fit, while ignoring the ONLY way to replace it in this area would be a coal fired which of course leaves much worse radiation and toxic sludge. I've taken a tour of a coal plant and frankly those things are just nasty, that shit gets everywhere.
But I can tell you that the ROHS solder is just a fricking disaster, my NASA buddy helps the local college with its rocketry and robotics programs and he's is having to pretty much build everything from scratch because those higher stresses just make that shit fail that much quicker. I've got him looking into BeagleBoards and Arduinos but frankly i can't blame him for being gunshy, not with all the damned failures he's had to deal with that comes down to that craptastic solder. he says there is just no way in hell to make that shit safe to use, its just worthless.
I agree with MOST of what you posted except the bit about Joe sixpack. As a guy who actually builds and sells to Joe I can tell that the ones buying tablets? Yeah they usually have a desktop AND a laptop which is where all these "the death of the desktop!" pundits are royally fucking up. they see the X86 numbers but don't understand what they mean, when in reality the tablet has taken a different niche, its used to poke at a screen during the commercial to look something up, or as a portable PMP.
The thing all these pundits and apparently MSFT doesn't seem to understand is thus: For Joe the PC went past "good enough" and into "insanely overpowered" several years ago and with solid caps and a little TLC frankly the things just don't die so they just aren't getting replaced constantly like cell phones are. Hell I have customers i support that are using 5+ year old laptops and first gen dual core desktops, are they poor? Nope they just don't see a point in replacing a machine that frankly they aren't even stressing. I just recently talked my doc into letting me find him a nice netbook because he didn't like the weight of his laptop, it was going on 7 years and had had 2 batteries since he bought it, now the old one is a kitchen nettop for his wife.
The problem is MSFT and the OEMs got spoiled during the MHz wars and thought the 3 year cycle would last forever, but as i see everyday there are a TON of people still using Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s that are fricking 7 years old simply because they can't even stress these old chips out and the machines they are in simply aren't dying. the giant fuckup MSFT is making is by coming in too late into the ARM game and trying to use the Windows UI and name to shove their way in. this is the same dumbshit move they made for damned near a decade with WinCE which was a big fail and it'll be a big fail again.
You are right that businesses (no AD support, WTF?) and legacy apps are seriously gonna hurt them but I'd argue what is gonna hurt them worse is the very market they are badly attempting to target, the consumers, as they simply aren't giving them any reasons to choose WinRT over iPad and Android. What they SHOULD have done is left the desktop alone, maybe added a few bells and whistles but that's it, and instead focused the Metro UI on ONLY tablets and phones and moreover give the consumer a reason to buy them. For example made it incredibly simple for someone like my dad to remote in to his desktop at work on a WinRT pad at home if he needed to check some figures, and tried to make Windows 8 + WinRT + Xbox 360/720 as seamless and "push one button and it works" as much as possible. Instead using Win 8 CP at the shop frankly the ONLY nice thing I can say is "maybe it'll be nice on a cell phone" which is NOT what you want your customers thinking when they use your flagship desktop OS, and now that I know the ARM apps won't work on x86 anymore than the x86 will work on ARM I have even less of a reason to buy a WinRT anything..
Just proving once again old Sinofsky doesn't have a damned clue and Win 8 is gonna suuuuuck, WOA was a good name because WOA is it gonna blow.
In the end there is a damned good reason, a few actually, while Apple could pull this kinda stuff off and MSFT can't. 1.-When Apple switched from PPC to X86 they were switching to an arch that was powerful enough they could have emulation without a severe penalty. this is the opposite of what MSFT is facing, where the best ARM chips simply can't compete with a modern X86 in terms of performance so emulation would probably be roughly the speed of a Pentium II, not good enough to be useful. 2.-Frankly there wasn't nearly as huge a market for third party programs at Apple, many of the most popular programs being built by Apple itself. Again the opposite of MSFT, where other than office frankly all of the software, we are talking millions of programs, are made by third parties that will most likely completely ignore WOA for the much much larger X86 base. 3.-Finally with iOS Apple made it clear it was NOT OSX, and made sure to keep the branding separate between their desktop and mobile OSes. Again the exact opposite of the fucking retarded move by Sinofsky and Ballmer of using the Windows name on WinRT, which will mimic Win 8 X86 right down to the dumbass metro UI. this will of course in all likelihood cause a MASSIVE amount of consumer backlash, as the average consumer don't know ARM from arm&hammer so will simply look and go "hey a tablet with Windows! I can run my stuff!" and when they get it home and find out they can't they WILL return it. I saw this first hand over the holiday with a local retailer selling "Windows tablets" that had WinCE clearly listed on the box but the consumer saw a WinXP desktop and believed it actually run windows.
All in all the more info we receive about Win 8 the bigger the stench of failure that comes wafting up from it. The ARM version won't run X86, the X86 won't run ARM, so right there every damned dev will have to build two of everything, its UI is NOT intuitive or discoverable, as you can see from this video which I can tell you from the Win 8 CP running in the shop is a pretty typical user session with Win 8, and by both reusing the Windows name AND the metro UI they expect consumers to know the difference between arches and to know they can no longer trust their eyes but instead like WinCE look for a label they most likely won't understand if they were staring right at it.
I'm so glad that other than the test bed in the shop me and my family will be sticking to Win 7, because i have the feeling for a year and a half i'm gonna be wiping this damned thing for 7 like I wiped Vista for XP. I have to wonder if the reason Sinofsky, who was never really in the spotlight that much before, is being shoved out there now is to be the fall guy for Ballmer when this thing bombs? Let us just hope that sooner or later the board gets tired of the monkey wiping his ass with billions and they fire his ass, because frankly this is gone past funny and into sad, hell even the pepsi guy at Apple wasn't this pathetic as CEO.
Sadly I doubt they'd even be welcome there, as while they might care if the POTUS gets a blowjob they sure as fuck don't want it coming out some major corps are buying power or influencing the direction of the nation, because they know in x number of years it'll be their turn and they don't want anyone looking into THEIR dirty dealings.
This is why i truly believe the only hope for the Internet is tech like Freenet and Tor that let you build an anonymous network on TOP of what we have, because to both sides the threat of a populace able to organize and rally is a threat. you look at the donors lists of both parties and while one or two faces may change its the same ones in the halls of power year after year. It is the money brokers, the banksters, the power mongers, it is they who wield the REAL power, the rest are nothing but employees of the machine. you look back into history and groups like Goldman Sachs and the Rothschilds have been holding huge sums of power for generations now, they simply pass it on like a legacy.
That is why I think Watergate was an aberrational occurrence, a glitch before they gained enough power to ensure such a thing doesn't happen again. Look at Wikileaks sometime, the amount of dirty deals they found out about will disgust you, such as a PMC selling 10 year old boys for political favors of the tribal leaders and the same group did the same trick in Bosnia with 10 year old girls. Did the MSM have a fit? Nope they just read the "Assange is a dirty rapist traitor" cue cards and went back to business as usual.
Nice to see i'm not the only one who thinks its retarded. I've been recently sorting through the stuff in my late sister's trailer with a neighbor who asked to rent it and it really shows what a difference lead solder makes when we were firing up all this stuff that had been sitting for years and damned near everything fired right up. the late 70s TV, the old microwave, VCR, hell just about every damned thing we plugged in fired right up despite being in an abandoned trailer with no heat for a couple of years.
Compare this to I don't know how many electronics I've tossed a month or two passed warranty, after i got to be buds with an ex NASA engineer i'd swing them by his place and sure enough, tin whisker death. Doesn't matter how well a device is taken care of either, those things are like ticking time bombs and when they go they usually do enough damage to make it not worth fixing.
So I'd personally love to see the figures, i think the only ones that have gained from this "designed for the dump" solder has been the manufacturers. That neighbor that is taking my sis's place is gonna use all that gear because even after all this time it works like brand new, yet thanks to the new solder damned near everything i get now won't last 6 months past warranty. that is one of the reasons I'll never let go of my Trace Elliot bass amp, i got one of the last Brit made ones that used the old solder. My guitarist has had to take his amps into the shop at least 3 times in the past few years, in each case? Tin whiskers. I swear that shit is nothing but useless as far as i'm concerned.
Well the nice thing I've found, which is why I ignore most of the benches, is that X86 has gone so far beyond good enough and into insanely overpowered that even a low end system simply never gets stressed, the users simply can't come up with enough work for the chip to do.
Last year I built my dad a Phenom I quad because i found a kit cheap, now most here would consider that a pretty weak chip, we're talking a 2.1GHz first gen Phenom. Now guess what I found? That after 3 months he had simply never gone above 50% CPU utilization, he simply didn't have enough useful work to stress even a 6 year old chip. FB plus Chat plus Internet TV simply couldn't push the chip hard enough to stress the system. I myself traded in my full size laptop for an E350 EEE netbook, simply because i found the work i had to do when i was mobile simply wasn't putting any stress on my old dual core, and with the new unit I get nearly 6 hours watching 720p video and even longer just surfing.
So while I can see why the editors did it, just like SJVN and Thurott they be trolling for page views, but for the user? Right now unless you are talking a phone or tablet even the lowest X86 will simply give them more cycles than they will really ever use. Hell I still sell plenty of Pentium D and Athlon X2s, simply because I can get them at a good price and the average web surfing simply can't stress even those old chips. Maybe in a few years ARM will be the same but right now I've seen plenty of people frustrated because they've slammed their ARM phone or tablet and its slowed down to a crawl, I can't remember the last time I saw that with even a 5 year old X86 unit.
But I thought the reason they were fast is it works like a giant RAID in a box? I've set up RAID 0s using raptors for gamer customers and while its of course more risky than using RAID 1 its failure rate isn't THAT much higher than a non RAID unit, at least in my experience.
I have to wonder if its not heat cycling myself, all these units are built in 2.5in form factors and are without fans so I have to wonder if packing that many chips generating heat in that small a space may be causing premature death. or it may be that industry has been full of shit and lying their asses off when it comes down to real world writes before failures. After all some of the numbers I've seen put as much as 30% extra space set aside for replacing dead sectors, I can't see them wasting the money to add THAT many extra chips if they lasted on average as long as they have been claiming. Again this is just rumor but what I've been reading on the forums is some users are seeing 10,000 to 40,000 writes before failure which with a modern OS that really isn't a lot.
But whatever the case i have to agree the reliability just isn't there so if a customer asks I'd recommend the hybrid over the SSD. personally I've found simply having plenty of RAM for superfetch and a nice fast SD card for Readyboost gives me plenty of speed without risking my data. At the end of the day i just use my PC too much to deal with it going down and then having to wait on a replacement drive, backups or not having to do a full restore from backup of even just the OS can be a PITA and not worth it to me for the speed boost.
Oh if you get a chance you really must go, and not just for the most delicious pot. you should really bring a camera and be ready to stop almost constantly because the vistas you will see are truly some of the most breathtaking i have ever seen, with huge valley scenes with incredible peaks and cliffs and flowing water everywhere, it is truly a wondrous view of nature that one simply must see with your own eyes. I swear you can simply pull on the side of the road in a large chunk of the Ozarks and the view is like standing on this great peak, with all this beautiful unspoiled wonder spread out before you, quite inspiring.
But I can assure you that its true that in places where there is a lot of fertile land and pot being grown you'll find as many flavors and textures as you do alcohol, everything from lightly mellow to harsh, from sweet to skunky, from tasty to almost medicinal in flavor. If I were to describe the typical pot from the Ozarks it would be peaty with a slight sweet overtone, with a very forest scent, kinda like a mix of pine and juniper, quite lovely. If one were to go to the swampier south AR the pot is more musky, nice tasting but with a definite skunk scent, while the northeast area close to Memphis favors pot that has a much sweeter taste and aroma, almost candy like.
In a way pot is a LOT like wine in that the kind of soil the plant is grown in and the conditions of the area does seem to cause differences in taste and texture not to mention buzz. I have a feeling most of the pot you've had has been either imported or been grown by mega-growers, their weed tends to be extra strong but not very much in the way of variety, kinda like the rotgut of old. And I can't believe that I'm sitting here actually judging flavors of various cultivars, but as a musician I've got to sample quite a few from different areas and there are some overall themes when it comes to pot grown in certain areas. Oh and FYI the worst pot I ever smoked was East Texas, it'll knock you on your ass but tastes like cheap cigarettes smell, a real ditchweed harsh nasty flavoring.
I agree and not only that but I've found honest criticism can help you decide whether or not an opportunity is worth pursuing.
I have gone to auditions where they have said "We love your style but we want you to play like (X)" where X equals some famous player. i know when these words are spoken to simply thank them for their time and pack up because what they want is a mimic, which I find worse than working in a cubicle for sheer clock watching wanting to GTFO out the second the whistle blows drudgery. I have known guys that make a decent living doing nothing but being an ersatz (X) but frankly that is ALL they will ever do or be, simply mimicking everything (X) has ever done. I know I personally would rather be told up front they are looking for an ersatz then waste their time and mine in a role where neither would be happy.
So I personally would rather be told upfront that they didn't like something than play "Guess WTF they are looking for" as that just leads to frustration. I don't know if I want to go the kickstarter way with this new album I'm working on or go fully DIY but I know I'd rather have honest opinions over bullshit any day of the week, one simply doesn't learn from bullshit.
If you REALLY care about bang for the buck in the low power space your best best would probably be an AMD E350 kit which is just $120 USD with a nice little case. I've built a few HTPCs and office boxes out of these and they are not bad little units, if you are really concerned about price you can use Open ELEC which makes a Fusion version of their distro with the XBMC UI for a nice dirt cheap HTPC and for offices there are several distros that support fusion OOTB although my customers prefer Win 7 which runs quite well on these.
So if you are REALLY worried about price and want the best bang for the buck that would be the way to go IMHO, to get the same performance with Atom you'd need an ION setup and those are often a good $60 higher on average from my last price checks.
So if you wanted something similar to TFA you are looking at around $720 to get 6 E350 dual core kits, cheaper of course if you simply buy the boards. Of course you'd have to figure in memory and some sort of storage but since everyone has their own opinions on those I figured it wouldn't be worth attempting to figure.
I can't believe I'm even getting involved on this, but your comparison isn't correct. Just as one can have alcohol at anywhere from light beer to pga so too can pot be had with any strength from light buzz to "OMFG where are the cookies?" so it wouldn't be fair to say one is stronger than the other. i would argue that the very fact that it IS illegal is why you get super strength pot now, same as during prohibition you were more likely to get bathtub rotgut than you were a nice light wine. When things are illegal it simply makes more sense to sell the most concentrated you can because the laws treat mellow and strong pot equally and a customer can get more for less by buying stronger stuff.
I have a feeling once this dark and shameful chapter of our history is over and pot is legal you'll see that just like with alcohol you'll have so many choices in flavor, texture, and intoxication factor that just like with booze there will be something for everyone. Personally i like pot from the Ozarks myself, the rich soil gives it a nice peaty overtone with a lovely aroma, almost like being in a forest, quite lovely.
Not to mention the point is.....what exactly? The whole selling point of ARM is how long it will run on a battery, plugged in the difference between say 7w and 12w really isn't enough to get your panties in a twist over and while ARM may get lower power usage while doing work there is no denying that Intel and AMD have the IPS crown by a pretty wide margin, even more if your code is able to use OpenCL so you can use both halves of a Fusion APU to do useful work.
I just don't get all the "Us VS Them" bullshit lately, except maybe its good for a nice flamewar or fanboi circle jerk. To say ARM is gonna defeat x86 is as insane as saying "This moped is gonna replace the trucking industry!". Does that mean the moped is bad? No, in fact if you simply need to move one individual and maybe a single bag of groceries then the moped will be the more cost effective way of doing so. But with the exception of a few TINY niches X86 and ARM really aren't in competition with each other, they just aren't. A quad Xeon will slaughter in the server space, a Fusion APU desktop or laptop will do more per cycle than a good 80%+ of the population will be able to come up with, and ARM gets insane battery life in mobile phones and tablets. So can't we all just.....get along?
Actually that is one of the bullet points Seagate uses to sell the hybrids friend, every line that is saved on the SSD since the SSD is use for reads but NOT writes is therefor backed up to the HDD and Seagate designed it to run as a plain old HDD in the event the SSD part fails. You can go look it up on their website, they are quite proud of it. For this reason if a customer were to ask I'd recommend the hybrid over the SSD
Its just a shame you can't use say RAID 1 to mirror the SSD to a HDD to do the same with a larger SSD but then of course you'd just slow down the SSD. personally I'd probably just get the hybrid or wait another year or two to see if that IBM memsistor tech licensed by Intel and the other SSD OEMs pans out because the failure rate on the SSDs is just too high.
Now I don't know WHY its so high, it could be the wear leveling isn't as good as they claim, the controller design is bad, there is heat buildup or heat cycling that is causing damage, but there is something not right about the SSD designs because I've seen expensive and cheap, SLC and MLC drives ALL FAIL the exact same way, just flip the switch and they are gone. That tells me there is some fundamental flaw somewhere they haven't gotten a handle on yet, and that isn't something I'd want to trust my data to.
Uhhh...didn't bother reading the second paragraph huh, LOL? I said please DO NOT POST the Google data as its worthless, it would be like comparing engine failures by looking at NASCAR. What google does is take COTS drives that were not built for what they are using them for and then running them flat out balls to the wall in a distributed computing setup, which is about as far from what a normal person will experience IRL as the difference between sitting in a 747 and flying the F22.
And as far as getting a drive DOA? I've found at the shop if you give a drive a good stress test right off the bat frankly its pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. there are plenty of free tester tools like ultimate boot cd that will let you give a new drive a good hard stress testing which i've found if its a dud? it'll fail. if you stress test and get any read/write errors just pack 'er up and ship it back. But since my customers are from all walks of life I get to see plenty of IRL usage and frankly while the spinning rust may not be fast one thing it does do, in as i said a good 85%+ of the cases i've come across, is give enough warning one can get the data off before it dies. Compare this to my gamer customers that went SSD in their desire for "moar biggest fastest gotta be at the top of the leaderboard" whose SSDs all went crapola within 18 months. these guys DO NOT go cheap, we are talking fastest and best rated drives, and when they died it was "flip switch, no data".
So no thanks friend, if I were to recommend anything to my customers it would be the Seagate hybrid and NOT the SSD. At least Seagate has designed the hybrid to continue to function if the SSD shits itself, whereas the failure rate on the SSDs seems to really suck and as they get cheaper and pack more chips I have no doubt those numbers are gonna get worse. read the article i posted by Jeff Atwood, the guys that hang out at coding horror see nothing of plopping down a grand on a drive and even THEY are seeing drives crapping themselves. this is one case where it doesn't seem that paying more money gets you better quality, they ALL seem to be suffering from this problem.
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That is why I never understood AMD having identical cores as it seems to be a waste with the exception of a few apps like video processing. That is why I snatched a Thuban when they were cheap as at least turbocore will ramp up when you are only using one to three cores heavily but a better design would probably be an uber-powerful Core 0, followed by a decently powerful Core 1 & 2, with the Cores after that being slightly more powerful than Bobcats.
Because as you so rightly pointed out frankly it doesn't matter how good the coder is if the program simply won't benefit from multiple threads and many won't.
Haven't run into any Unity3D, have they made anything i might have heard of? And as for why they would complain to me one of the things my customers like is I do followups, usually I will call at the end of the first week, the end of the first month, and a final checkup after the end of 3 months, just to make sure they are happy with their purchase and everything is running smoothly. i will also often see my machines return for upgrades, i make it a point to build desktops and sell netbooks and laptops with some leeway when it comes to upgrades, especially desktops of course.
One of the first things i do after installing the new hardware is to see if any of their software needs updating and frankly i have yet to see one since i quit including .NET by default come back with .NET installed in programs and features, I just haven't. like Java unless its a corporate machine I just don't see either .NET or Java installed, nobody uses it, at least from what I've seen. you DO see a shitload of Visual C++, hell I just looked on my gamer machine and I personally have 2005, 2008, and 2010 when it comes to Visual C++ and I believe my office box at the shop has 05 and 08 and I never install games on it.
So I'm just not seeing it here out in the trenches friend, like Java its just one of those things the majority doesn't even need anymore. again if their goal was to get .NET the level of usage that VB6 had its a pretty miserable failure as I've seen everything from little homebrew style programs to major games and they ALL use Visual C++. In fact the last games i came across that didn't were Chrome I and Chrome II which used a self contained java engine instead.
Actually Office would be simple, because as I said Metro should be treated as a separate entity and on that ground should be treated no different than Office for the Mac. You would have an ARM Metro Uied Office and a Windows desktop Office and with the ribbon frankly there wouldn't have to be a lot of changes to workflow.
Look the problem with their "next 20 years" BS is what works good in ONE form factor may be completely wrong for another form factor, that seems to be something else Apple gets that MSFT doesn't. the worldwide sales of X86 touchscreens last i checked is less than 4%, and when you remove POS and kiosks you are looking at less than 2%. with numbers THAT shitty trying to force a touchscreen paradigm onto a desktop is not only wrong, its foolish. there is a REASON why touchscreens simply don't sell on x86, its because a vertical screen isn't fun to poke all day, its a RSI nightmare. with cells and tablets you are holding it more like a classic pen and paper tablet which is a much more natural motion for the human body than reaching constantly to poke at a vertical screen.
So I'd say its not so much the changes themselves that are the problem, its that they are trying to force these changes onto a form factor where they simply make no sense. There is a reason why desktops have evolved the way they have, with the workspace schema, its because this is one of the most simplistic ways to do complex tasks with a mouse. But MSFT seems to think keyboards and mice are just gonna magically disappear, that people will want to treat a desktop as a "supergigantic smartphone" and the form factor simply makes no damned sense to use that particular UI. a tablet is comfortable being poked with your thumbs while you lounge, a desktop sitting on an office table somewhere? Not so much. i predict Win 8 will be a massive flop on both fronts, because they've simply not given folks any reason to adopt the ARM version and the X86 version makes no sense from a usability standpoint, it just doesn't.
To use a /. car analogy there is a damned good reason why nobody puts steering wheels on motorcycles, its not that people couldn't eventually learn to drive it that way, its just it doesn't add any benefit to what is obviously not the best way to do it for that design.
Which is why I can't stand those that treat FOSS and Linux as a religion, the ones i call FOSSies, because even when you point out what should be as plain as the nose on your face, that there is no damned reason new drivers need to be written for old hardware except that the current driver model simply doesn't work they scream like you must have taken a crap on Baby Jesus.
I mean for the love of Christ they call me an "MS Ninja" for DARING to point out you can't sell Linux to consumers in its current state when what do we see right here on this very forum? That unless the hardware OEMs constantly release new drivers, even for old hardware that isn't even fricking being sold anymore, that the software WILL NOT WORK with current kernels. i'm sorry, that is just royally fucked up. hell on Windows you can use 2K drivers on XP and Vista drivers on 7, and i can take the driver that came with my 2 year old card, slap it in a fully patched Windows with fully updated software and it just works and my customers never have to worry about it.
Believe me friend I WANT Linux to get better, I really do. I want to offer nice looking Linux machines right next to the windows units and even better to get rid of XP on the older units for a nice new shiny Linux OS but I just can't, and that is because if you keep the damned thing updated the drivers fall down and go BOOM!
Please Linux community, please stop taking this half baked horseshit from Torvalds and Co, please stop accepting forum hunts and pages of CLI mess just to get the damned drivers functional after an update as par for the course, you should and do deserve MORE. After all a free shit sandwich is still a shit sandwich and right now the driver situation is a fucking disaster. How can you expect to get support from those thousands of smaller companies making hardware if fricking companies like Nvidia constantly have to release NEW drivers for OLD shit because the old drivers will no longer function thanks to all the BS going on?
so please, demand a stable ABI, with say a 5 year cycle between major changes to said ABI and a way for the previous ABI to be used beside or replace the new ABI if the person has older hardware that requires it. there should be no damned reason why my customer should have to update his GPU driver just to run the latest XBMC or any other software for that matter, and frankly if you fix this glaring problem? then there is a good chance you could grab some real share, as you have nice software, GUIs, pretty much all of the top layer stuff is quite nice but its the low level stuff like drivers that are really putting a couple of slugs into Linux before it can even get out of the gate.
Companies hell, I've had cops come up to me in the shop that wanted obviously illegal stuff done, frankly i think they had seen too many episodes of CSI and actually thought you could hack a network with a VB GUI.
But honestly this kind of shit surprises me not in the least, anyone who has read some of the stuff that has been dumped onto Wikileaks knows that you can buy pretty much anything if the money is good enough. Personally I'm waiting for a cyber version of the Pinkertons, a little private army you can hire to do whatever dirty little thing you need done in cyberspace. After all thanks to many otherwise pretty damned lawless countries having Internet access in a way its like the wild west only the criminals don't have to physically come over the border to do their raiding before heading back to their personal hole in the wall. So to see the corps fighting back when the law itself can't really do shit thanks to countries that don't play by the same rules? Really not surprising.
True he hasn't thought about all that will entail trying to go homebrew for a road capable device. I'd say his best bet is one of the small Atom or my personal preference the E350 based netbooks, you are talking less than 3 pounds, insanely cheap, especially if he can live with a refurb, and small enough he can carry it anywhere. I've tried both the Atom 10in and the E350 12in and I have to say I prefer the extra bit of screen but either choice would be a lot less hassle and a damned sight easier than dragging all the crap around.
As you can see here you can get netbooks starting at $160, again if he doesn't mind returns and refurbs, so frankly it'd be so cheap that even if something were to happen to it it'd be no great loss. If he is worried about data loss they just about all come with an SD card slot, more than enough space to simply pop in and out your work when needed. Personally I've gotten several customers this model Acer and it along with the E350 EEE have been quite well received. Small, light, decent battery life (6-7 hours depending on what you are doing) and there are third party batteries that will stretch that to 12 hours if you don't mind the extra weight but I prefer the 6 cell, 6 hours of 720p video or a little over 7 surfing is just about the right amount of time, at least for most of my customers and me.
Which shows what a piss poor previous CEO they had by selling it. But other than Nvidia PowerVR has pretty much ruled the roost in mobile, but now you have Nvidia, Intel looks to be tailoring the new Atoms for that market, and I wouldn't be surprised if AMD is cooking up a version of Bobcat or quietly marrying a couple of ARM cores to one of their Radeons instead of just tacking on an ARM to their X86 BD designs.
Honestly? I don't care WHO wins because as long as their is growth and competition we the consumer benefit. For ages the GPU in mobile devices were frankly piss poor, just as the IGPs in x86 laptops and desktops were piss poor. Nvidia and AMD made having a decent GPU a selling point and suddenly everyone is talking GPUs which makes me very happy, hell AMD seems to be betting that a "good enough" CPU with an awesome GPU is the way to go and I can see no fault with their logic. There is simply many jobs that consumers want to do today that benefit from having a decent GPU so having the entire market focused on making good GPUs is frankly wonderful news to me, I for one welcome PowerVR into the fray.
Name someone OTHER than the enterprise that is using .NET? Because i frankly quit supplying .NET on new builds and reinstalls over a year ago and haven't had a single complaint yet, frankly after AMD switched to Visual C++ I haven't run into a single consumer app using .NET. From what I've seen everyone is using Visual C++ and I doubt MSFT is gonna magically get all those devs to suddenly switch because they want Windows to be a supergigantic smartphone OS.
Lets face it friend, .NET was supposed to replace VB6 and in that case its a massive fail. While VB6 was frankly fucking everywhere, with everything from home brew to enterprise using it, like Java .NET seems to have been completely ignored outside the enterprise niche and i can tell you, the average user? NOT using enterprise programs. I honestly haven't seen a single program asking for .NET since the AMD driver switched, nobody is using it, its all Visual C++ now.
Actually got a teen in college (studying pre-med, on the dean's list and head of his frat, naturally I'm VERY proud) and talking to his friends they seem to be starting to cool down with regards to tablets, many are starting to use their cell phones for a similar role that they were using tablets a year ago, especially now that you are getting cells with larger screens. But again they all had a PC, be it desktop or more likely laptop, the tablets simply fill a niche that wasn't a good fit for the laptop, the "kicking back on the (insert couch, train, mall)" niche.
And I agree completely that on the desktop and laptop that no backwards compatibility is suicide, and rightly so, as people have billions invested in Windows software and naturally aren't about to give up all that money because MSFT wants to be hip and sell smartphones. But I would argue the bigger problems is they are doing as they have done a million times in the past, they are creating a half assed copy of a popular thing and thinking their money and name will let them muscle their way in, and its a bad move.
What they SHOULD have done is pulled a Win98SE with Win 7, added a few bells and whistles, a few speed boosts, but otherwise left much unchanged and instead focused metro, which BTW should NOT be called anything Win but simply metro, and instead given people a REASON to buy Metro tablets and phones and they simply haven't done that. this is one area where using their X86 business could have helped them, they could have focused on making everything as seamless as possible, so say I could access content on my Metro tablet from my Win 8 desktop or X360 from anywhere, something similar to easyconnect only for content. as it is now they have given me and my customers NO REASON to use their new product, the ARM version doesn't have as much going for it as the iPad and Android, and the desktop feels like a really big smartphone and you spend more time fighting the damned thing than you do using it.
The whole situation is just a mess, a giant clusterfuck waiting to die right out the gate. but what should we expect from Ballmer, the man has proven no matter how large and successful a company is all it takes is a really shitty CEO to piss those gains right down the toilet.
Have you tried the FOSS drivers? Because you really shouldn't complain when AMD did what the community asked them to do and handed over the specs, or did everyone forget how many times we've heard "Just open up the specs and we'll support the hardware" on this very forum and others? AMD took that one step farther by actually hiring developers to assist the FOSS driver devs in getting up to speed, and from what I've been reading they've been coming along nicely, although focus has naturally been a little heavy on the APUs since so many of them are out there.
This DOES highlight what i consider to be a major failing in Linux for quite some time, the fact that its damned near impossible to JUST get security updates, as package A needs kernel B and depends on packages E-G so to keep the thing updated you end up with an "all or nothing" so you can't just update say the XBMC software without changing graphics drivers and a bunch of other shit. People can scream bloody murder all they want but THIS IS WHY a hardware ABI is a GOOD thing, because if I want to keep my 3 year old graphics drivers while being fully patched and running the latest of everything else on Windows? not a problem, I just don't have to update the graphics driver. this is also why AMD's support phase isn't a problem on Windows, as one can simply stick with the last driver and be fine for the life of the system and after 4 years they've squeezed all the power they are gonna out of a chip. Again like it or not the ONLY REASON that that Nvidia or AMD have to keep releasing new drivers for old hardware in Linux is because you simply can't use the old drivers with new kernels or the whole thing falls down.
So I don't see how the community has any right to complain about AMD, you got exactly what you asked for, all the specs opened and handed to you on a silver platter. AMD simply has a hell of a lot more on its plate than just graphics so continuing to support 4+ year old chips on an OS with maybe 5% market tops is simply a waste of resources. if you want to complain pitch a fit at Torvalds for making driver support such a damned mess, even one of the big Red hat developers says the current way of doing things simply isn't sustainable, that a single group can't control 20,000 packages and drivers and keep it working, and recommends an ABI and a much more stripped down design that allows you to concentrate on the core while letting those that sell the hardware provide drivers. I wonder how much money Nvidia has blown keeping a team of devs around to do nothing but constantly update the Linux drivers when Torvalds constantly breaks the damned drivers with kernel fiddling? bet it isn't cheap, not cheap at all.
If handing you the full specs like you asked for STILL isn't enough? Maybe its time to look in the mirror and consider that maybe, just maybe, you're doing things the wrong way. There should be no damned reason why you can't take the last release that AMD made for that HD3200 and have it run perfectly on the latest distro and the fact that you stand here and admit that it doesn't work just shows what is wrong with linux in a nutshell. After all how do you expect the smaller hardware guys to support you if the big guys have to pay entire teams to constantly fix the damned things just to make the drivers work?
Actually I didn't, this is my first time trying to DIY instead of going to a studio, thanks. The real bitch I'm finding is mixing, trying to get a good clean recording with a 16 track isn't hard but sitting for hours in audacity trying to figure out what works and what doesn't IS. I'm used to the old school stomp box and rack mounts and doing everything in software is a royal bitch, but the local studios have frankly gotten crazy priced and most of the clubs are booked up over a year in advance now so i can't just grab some club gigs to pay for it like I did the last one. That was why i was thinking something like kickstarter, i have the tracks, just maybe a couple of hours in a studio for clean ups and a decent engineer would probably be all I need to get this done.
Anyway thanks for the link, I'll be sure to check it out. I have a few rough two tracks posted on our FB page so just shoot me an email if you want to check them out but I warn you they were straight off the board with a little digital tascam 2 track. by the time the 16 track came in the drummer had fallen off the wagon so we've been doing it just the two of us and like I said still working on the mix, luckily he also plays drums while i play some keyboard. Its been slow going but I think its better to DIY than to try to find new guys and bring them up to speed at this point. hopefully once we get it out there we can maybe get some indie label to give us a club tour like I had with my last group.
Great, not only more billions crapped away but more space junk two, /double facepalm/. what pisses ME off is it isn't like we didn't already have precedent for simply having a reclamation fee, I'm sure most would have agreed like me to happily pay an extra $5-$10 a device to have it last for years instead of tossing all that money not to mention toxic materials into our landfills. I can tell you I've seen a hell of a lot of laptops and netbooks killed waaay too damned early by the whiskers, hell i got a nice mobile Athlon I need to take by my NASA buddy to see if he can salvage that wasn't even old enough to lose the shine to the plastic, about 4 months passed warranty and zzzt. i have NO doubt when he opens it it'll be those damned whiskers.
But frankly I've always know the tree huggers were retarded, I've seen them protest our nuke plant and I've been in the thing and taken a tour, those two plants are as nice as the day they were built and talking to a former HS classmate that works there they constantly run scenarios for every possible emergency on a full size simulator built next door yet the tree huggers will have a fit, while ignoring the ONLY way to replace it in this area would be a coal fired which of course leaves much worse radiation and toxic sludge. I've taken a tour of a coal plant and frankly those things are just nasty, that shit gets everywhere.
But I can tell you that the ROHS solder is just a fricking disaster, my NASA buddy helps the local college with its rocketry and robotics programs and he's is having to pretty much build everything from scratch because those higher stresses just make that shit fail that much quicker. I've got him looking into BeagleBoards and Arduinos but frankly i can't blame him for being gunshy, not with all the damned failures he's had to deal with that comes down to that craptastic solder. he says there is just no way in hell to make that shit safe to use, its just worthless.
I agree with MOST of what you posted except the bit about Joe sixpack. As a guy who actually builds and sells to Joe I can tell that the ones buying tablets? Yeah they usually have a desktop AND a laptop which is where all these "the death of the desktop!" pundits are royally fucking up. they see the X86 numbers but don't understand what they mean, when in reality the tablet has taken a different niche, its used to poke at a screen during the commercial to look something up, or as a portable PMP.
The thing all these pundits and apparently MSFT doesn't seem to understand is thus: For Joe the PC went past "good enough" and into "insanely overpowered" several years ago and with solid caps and a little TLC frankly the things just don't die so they just aren't getting replaced constantly like cell phones are. Hell I have customers i support that are using 5+ year old laptops and first gen dual core desktops, are they poor? Nope they just don't see a point in replacing a machine that frankly they aren't even stressing. I just recently talked my doc into letting me find him a nice netbook because he didn't like the weight of his laptop, it was going on 7 years and had had 2 batteries since he bought it, now the old one is a kitchen nettop for his wife.
The problem is MSFT and the OEMs got spoiled during the MHz wars and thought the 3 year cycle would last forever, but as i see everyday there are a TON of people still using Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s that are fricking 7 years old simply because they can't even stress these old chips out and the machines they are in simply aren't dying. the giant fuckup MSFT is making is by coming in too late into the ARM game and trying to use the Windows UI and name to shove their way in. this is the same dumbshit move they made for damned near a decade with WinCE which was a big fail and it'll be a big fail again.
You are right that businesses (no AD support, WTF?) and legacy apps are seriously gonna hurt them but I'd argue what is gonna hurt them worse is the very market they are badly attempting to target, the consumers, as they simply aren't giving them any reasons to choose WinRT over iPad and Android. What they SHOULD have done is left the desktop alone, maybe added a few bells and whistles but that's it, and instead focused the Metro UI on ONLY tablets and phones and moreover give the consumer a reason to buy them. For example made it incredibly simple for someone like my dad to remote in to his desktop at work on a WinRT pad at home if he needed to check some figures, and tried to make Windows 8 + WinRT + Xbox 360/720 as seamless and "push one button and it works" as much as possible. Instead using Win 8 CP at the shop frankly the ONLY nice thing I can say is "maybe it'll be nice on a cell phone" which is NOT what you want your customers thinking when they use your flagship desktop OS, and now that I know the ARM apps won't work on x86 anymore than the x86 will work on ARM I have even less of a reason to buy a WinRT anything..
Just proving once again old Sinofsky doesn't have a damned clue and Win 8 is gonna suuuuuck, WOA was a good name because WOA is it gonna blow.
In the end there is a damned good reason, a few actually, while Apple could pull this kinda stuff off and MSFT can't. 1.-When Apple switched from PPC to X86 they were switching to an arch that was powerful enough they could have emulation without a severe penalty. this is the opposite of what MSFT is facing, where the best ARM chips simply can't compete with a modern X86 in terms of performance so emulation would probably be roughly the speed of a Pentium II, not good enough to be useful. 2.-Frankly there wasn't nearly as huge a market for third party programs at Apple, many of the most popular programs being built by Apple itself. Again the opposite of MSFT, where other than office frankly all of the software, we are talking millions of programs, are made by third parties that will most likely completely ignore WOA for the much much larger X86 base. 3.-Finally with iOS Apple made it clear it was NOT OSX, and made sure to keep the branding separate between their desktop and mobile OSes. Again the exact opposite of the fucking retarded move by Sinofsky and Ballmer of using the Windows name on WinRT, which will mimic Win 8 X86 right down to the dumbass metro UI. this will of course in all likelihood cause a MASSIVE amount of consumer backlash, as the average consumer don't know ARM from arm&hammer so will simply look and go "hey a tablet with Windows! I can run my stuff!" and when they get it home and find out they can't they WILL return it. I saw this first hand over the holiday with a local retailer selling "Windows tablets" that had WinCE clearly listed on the box but the consumer saw a WinXP desktop and believed it actually run windows.
All in all the more info we receive about Win 8 the bigger the stench of failure that comes wafting up from it. The ARM version won't run X86, the X86 won't run ARM, so right there every damned dev will have to build two of everything, its UI is NOT intuitive or discoverable, as you can see from this video which I can tell you from the Win 8 CP running in the shop is a pretty typical user session with Win 8, and by both reusing the Windows name AND the metro UI they expect consumers to know the difference between arches and to know they can no longer trust their eyes but instead like WinCE look for a label they most likely won't understand if they were staring right at it.
I'm so glad that other than the test bed in the shop me and my family will be sticking to Win 7, because i have the feeling for a year and a half i'm gonna be wiping this damned thing for 7 like I wiped Vista for XP. I have to wonder if the reason Sinofsky, who was never really in the spotlight that much before, is being shoved out there now is to be the fall guy for Ballmer when this thing bombs? Let us just hope that sooner or later the board gets tired of the monkey wiping his ass with billions and they fire his ass, because frankly this is gone past funny and into sad, hell even the pepsi guy at Apple wasn't this pathetic as CEO.
Sadly I doubt they'd even be welcome there, as while they might care if the POTUS gets a blowjob they sure as fuck don't want it coming out some major corps are buying power or influencing the direction of the nation, because they know in x number of years it'll be their turn and they don't want anyone looking into THEIR dirty dealings.
This is why i truly believe the only hope for the Internet is tech like Freenet and Tor that let you build an anonymous network on TOP of what we have, because to both sides the threat of a populace able to organize and rally is a threat. you look at the donors lists of both parties and while one or two faces may change its the same ones in the halls of power year after year. It is the money brokers, the banksters, the power mongers, it is they who wield the REAL power, the rest are nothing but employees of the machine. you look back into history and groups like Goldman Sachs and the Rothschilds have been holding huge sums of power for generations now, they simply pass it on like a legacy.
That is why I think Watergate was an aberrational occurrence, a glitch before they gained enough power to ensure such a thing doesn't happen again. Look at Wikileaks sometime, the amount of dirty deals they found out about will disgust you, such as a PMC selling 10 year old boys for political favors of the tribal leaders and the same group did the same trick in Bosnia with 10 year old girls. Did the MSM have a fit? Nope they just read the "Assange is a dirty rapist traitor" cue cards and went back to business as usual.
Nice to see i'm not the only one who thinks its retarded. I've been recently sorting through the stuff in my late sister's trailer with a neighbor who asked to rent it and it really shows what a difference lead solder makes when we were firing up all this stuff that had been sitting for years and damned near everything fired right up. the late 70s TV, the old microwave, VCR, hell just about every damned thing we plugged in fired right up despite being in an abandoned trailer with no heat for a couple of years.
Compare this to I don't know how many electronics I've tossed a month or two passed warranty, after i got to be buds with an ex NASA engineer i'd swing them by his place and sure enough, tin whisker death. Doesn't matter how well a device is taken care of either, those things are like ticking time bombs and when they go they usually do enough damage to make it not worth fixing.
So I'd personally love to see the figures, i think the only ones that have gained from this "designed for the dump" solder has been the manufacturers. That neighbor that is taking my sis's place is gonna use all that gear because even after all this time it works like brand new, yet thanks to the new solder damned near everything i get now won't last 6 months past warranty. that is one of the reasons I'll never let go of my Trace Elliot bass amp, i got one of the last Brit made ones that used the old solder. My guitarist has had to take his amps into the shop at least 3 times in the past few years, in each case? Tin whiskers. I swear that shit is nothing but useless as far as i'm concerned.
Well the nice thing I've found, which is why I ignore most of the benches, is that X86 has gone so far beyond good enough and into insanely overpowered that even a low end system simply never gets stressed, the users simply can't come up with enough work for the chip to do.
Last year I built my dad a Phenom I quad because i found a kit cheap, now most here would consider that a pretty weak chip, we're talking a 2.1GHz first gen Phenom. Now guess what I found? That after 3 months he had simply never gone above 50% CPU utilization, he simply didn't have enough useful work to stress even a 6 year old chip. FB plus Chat plus Internet TV simply couldn't push the chip hard enough to stress the system. I myself traded in my full size laptop for an E350 EEE netbook, simply because i found the work i had to do when i was mobile simply wasn't putting any stress on my old dual core, and with the new unit I get nearly 6 hours watching 720p video and even longer just surfing.
So while I can see why the editors did it, just like SJVN and Thurott they be trolling for page views, but for the user? Right now unless you are talking a phone or tablet even the lowest X86 will simply give them more cycles than they will really ever use. Hell I still sell plenty of Pentium D and Athlon X2s, simply because I can get them at a good price and the average web surfing simply can't stress even those old chips. Maybe in a few years ARM will be the same but right now I've seen plenty of people frustrated because they've slammed their ARM phone or tablet and its slowed down to a crawl, I can't remember the last time I saw that with even a 5 year old X86 unit.
But I thought the reason they were fast is it works like a giant RAID in a box? I've set up RAID 0s using raptors for gamer customers and while its of course more risky than using RAID 1 its failure rate isn't THAT much higher than a non RAID unit, at least in my experience.
I have to wonder if its not heat cycling myself, all these units are built in 2.5in form factors and are without fans so I have to wonder if packing that many chips generating heat in that small a space may be causing premature death. or it may be that industry has been full of shit and lying their asses off when it comes down to real world writes before failures. After all some of the numbers I've seen put as much as 30% extra space set aside for replacing dead sectors, I can't see them wasting the money to add THAT many extra chips if they lasted on average as long as they have been claiming. Again this is just rumor but what I've been reading on the forums is some users are seeing 10,000 to 40,000 writes before failure which with a modern OS that really isn't a lot.
But whatever the case i have to agree the reliability just isn't there so if a customer asks I'd recommend the hybrid over the SSD. personally I've found simply having plenty of RAM for superfetch and a nice fast SD card for Readyboost gives me plenty of speed without risking my data. At the end of the day i just use my PC too much to deal with it going down and then having to wait on a replacement drive, backups or not having to do a full restore from backup of even just the OS can be a PITA and not worth it to me for the speed boost.
Oh if you get a chance you really must go, and not just for the most delicious pot. you should really bring a camera and be ready to stop almost constantly because the vistas you will see are truly some of the most breathtaking i have ever seen, with huge valley scenes with incredible peaks and cliffs and flowing water everywhere, it is truly a wondrous view of nature that one simply must see with your own eyes. I swear you can simply pull on the side of the road in a large chunk of the Ozarks and the view is like standing on this great peak, with all this beautiful unspoiled wonder spread out before you, quite inspiring.
But I can assure you that its true that in places where there is a lot of fertile land and pot being grown you'll find as many flavors and textures as you do alcohol, everything from lightly mellow to harsh, from sweet to skunky, from tasty to almost medicinal in flavor. If I were to describe the typical pot from the Ozarks it would be peaty with a slight sweet overtone, with a very forest scent, kinda like a mix of pine and juniper, quite lovely. If one were to go to the swampier south AR the pot is more musky, nice tasting but with a definite skunk scent, while the northeast area close to Memphis favors pot that has a much sweeter taste and aroma, almost candy like.
In a way pot is a LOT like wine in that the kind of soil the plant is grown in and the conditions of the area does seem to cause differences in taste and texture not to mention buzz. I have a feeling most of the pot you've had has been either imported or been grown by mega-growers, their weed tends to be extra strong but not very much in the way of variety, kinda like the rotgut of old. And I can't believe that I'm sitting here actually judging flavors of various cultivars, but as a musician I've got to sample quite a few from different areas and there are some overall themes when it comes to pot grown in certain areas. Oh and FYI the worst pot I ever smoked was East Texas, it'll knock you on your ass but tastes like cheap cigarettes smell, a real ditchweed harsh nasty flavoring.
I agree and not only that but I've found honest criticism can help you decide whether or not an opportunity is worth pursuing.
I have gone to auditions where they have said "We love your style but we want you to play like (X)" where X equals some famous player. i know when these words are spoken to simply thank them for their time and pack up because what they want is a mimic, which I find worse than working in a cubicle for sheer clock watching wanting to GTFO out the second the whistle blows drudgery. I have known guys that make a decent living doing nothing but being an ersatz (X) but frankly that is ALL they will ever do or be, simply mimicking everything (X) has ever done. I know I personally would rather be told up front they are looking for an ersatz then waste their time and mine in a role where neither would be happy.
So I personally would rather be told upfront that they didn't like something than play "Guess WTF they are looking for" as that just leads to frustration. I don't know if I want to go the kickstarter way with this new album I'm working on or go fully DIY but I know I'd rather have honest opinions over bullshit any day of the week, one simply doesn't learn from bullshit.
If you REALLY care about bang for the buck in the low power space your best best would probably be an AMD E350 kit which is just $120 USD with a nice little case. I've built a few HTPCs and office boxes out of these and they are not bad little units, if you are really concerned about price you can use Open ELEC which makes a Fusion version of their distro with the XBMC UI for a nice dirt cheap HTPC and for offices there are several distros that support fusion OOTB although my customers prefer Win 7 which runs quite well on these.
So if you are REALLY worried about price and want the best bang for the buck that would be the way to go IMHO, to get the same performance with Atom you'd need an ION setup and those are often a good $60 higher on average from my last price checks.
So if you wanted something similar to TFA you are looking at around $720 to get 6 E350 dual core kits, cheaper of course if you simply buy the boards. Of course you'd have to figure in memory and some sort of storage but since everyone has their own opinions on those I figured it wouldn't be worth attempting to figure.
I can't believe I'm even getting involved on this, but your comparison isn't correct. Just as one can have alcohol at anywhere from light beer to pga so too can pot be had with any strength from light buzz to "OMFG where are the cookies?" so it wouldn't be fair to say one is stronger than the other. i would argue that the very fact that it IS illegal is why you get super strength pot now, same as during prohibition you were more likely to get bathtub rotgut than you were a nice light wine. When things are illegal it simply makes more sense to sell the most concentrated you can because the laws treat mellow and strong pot equally and a customer can get more for less by buying stronger stuff.
I have a feeling once this dark and shameful chapter of our history is over and pot is legal you'll see that just like with alcohol you'll have so many choices in flavor, texture, and intoxication factor that just like with booze there will be something for everyone. Personally i like pot from the Ozarks myself, the rich soil gives it a nice peaty overtone with a lovely aroma, almost like being in a forest, quite lovely.
Not to mention the point is.....what exactly? The whole selling point of ARM is how long it will run on a battery, plugged in the difference between say 7w and 12w really isn't enough to get your panties in a twist over and while ARM may get lower power usage while doing work there is no denying that Intel and AMD have the IPS crown by a pretty wide margin, even more if your code is able to use OpenCL so you can use both halves of a Fusion APU to do useful work.
I just don't get all the "Us VS Them" bullshit lately, except maybe its good for a nice flamewar or fanboi circle jerk. To say ARM is gonna defeat x86 is as insane as saying "This moped is gonna replace the trucking industry!". Does that mean the moped is bad? No, in fact if you simply need to move one individual and maybe a single bag of groceries then the moped will be the more cost effective way of doing so. But with the exception of a few TINY niches X86 and ARM really aren't in competition with each other, they just aren't. A quad Xeon will slaughter in the server space, a Fusion APU desktop or laptop will do more per cycle than a good 80%+ of the population will be able to come up with, and ARM gets insane battery life in mobile phones and tablets. So can't we all just.....get along?
Actually that is one of the bullet points Seagate uses to sell the hybrids friend, every line that is saved on the SSD since the SSD is use for reads but NOT writes is therefor backed up to the HDD and Seagate designed it to run as a plain old HDD in the event the SSD part fails. You can go look it up on their website, they are quite proud of it. For this reason if a customer were to ask I'd recommend the hybrid over the SSD
Its just a shame you can't use say RAID 1 to mirror the SSD to a HDD to do the same with a larger SSD but then of course you'd just slow down the SSD. personally I'd probably just get the hybrid or wait another year or two to see if that IBM memsistor tech licensed by Intel and the other SSD OEMs pans out because the failure rate on the SSDs is just too high.
Now I don't know WHY its so high, it could be the wear leveling isn't as good as they claim, the controller design is bad, there is heat buildup or heat cycling that is causing damage, but there is something not right about the SSD designs because I've seen expensive and cheap, SLC and MLC drives ALL FAIL the exact same way, just flip the switch and they are gone. That tells me there is some fundamental flaw somewhere they haven't gotten a handle on yet, and that isn't something I'd want to trust my data to.
Uhhh...didn't bother reading the second paragraph huh, LOL? I said please DO NOT POST the Google data as its worthless, it would be like comparing engine failures by looking at NASCAR. What google does is take COTS drives that were not built for what they are using them for and then running them flat out balls to the wall in a distributed computing setup, which is about as far from what a normal person will experience IRL as the difference between sitting in a 747 and flying the F22.
And as far as getting a drive DOA? I've found at the shop if you give a drive a good stress test right off the bat frankly its pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. there are plenty of free tester tools like ultimate boot cd that will let you give a new drive a good hard stress testing which i've found if its a dud? it'll fail. if you stress test and get any read/write errors just pack 'er up and ship it back. But since my customers are from all walks of life I get to see plenty of IRL usage and frankly while the spinning rust may not be fast one thing it does do, in as i said a good 85%+ of the cases i've come across, is give enough warning one can get the data off before it dies. Compare this to my gamer customers that went SSD in their desire for "moar biggest fastest gotta be at the top of the leaderboard" whose SSDs all went crapola within 18 months. these guys DO NOT go cheap, we are talking fastest and best rated drives, and when they died it was "flip switch, no data".
So no thanks friend, if I were to recommend anything to my customers it would be the Seagate hybrid and NOT the SSD. At least Seagate has designed the hybrid to continue to function if the SSD shits itself, whereas the failure rate on the SSDs seems to really suck and as they get cheaper and pack more chips I have no doubt those numbers are gonna get worse. read the article i posted by Jeff Atwood, the guys that hang out at coding horror see nothing of plopping down a grand on a drive and even THEY are seeing drives crapping themselves. this is one case where it doesn't seem that paying more money gets you better quality, they ALL seem to be suffering from this problem.