While if you have a larger monitor res (which the article we had recently had the most popular sizes being 1366, 1600, and 1920 ) then you will need a slightly beefier card but again those can be had for less than $100 US and again don't need the huge PSUs and insane power draws of something like the 79xx cards.
So the person i was responding to was simply wrong when he said you'd need 500w just for the graphics cards to play modern games. I've been playing tons of games and they look just fine and so far I've never had them dip below 30fps on my native 1600 res, but even with a larger monitor it just doesn't take 500w cards just to game, as i said the only ones i know buying those $300+ GPUs are those wanting to get high scores on the leaderboards, aka ePeen bragging, same as the only ones you see really OCing anymore are those trying to get the highest benches which IRL don't mean shit. Its a hobby, no different than street racing, where you use crazy shit that IRL most simply would never need.
Well maybe we'll get lucky and they'll be dumping playbooks on Woot! like HP did the Touchpads, gotta look on the bright side you know.
But RIM really deserves what is happening to them, another classic case of a company that tried to rest on their laurels instead of staying ahead of the game and now they are so far behind its practically impossible to get back on top. You might bet by with that in some businesses but tech is NOT one of those. We have seen it over and over again, Palm, MSFT with WinCE, if you don't try to stay ahead of the pack in mobile tech you simply get run over.
Not to mention that is just stupid if you are on Win 7. With hybrid sleep everything is off but a small amount of power to keep the RAM alive and when you hit the button you are back up in less than 10 seconds, at least on desktop. When you figure in the amount of power one uses to go through a full boot you are penny wise and pound foolish to go for a full shutdown anymore.
So even PC gamers would be worse off to follow this "advice" instead of simply putting the unit to sleep when not in use. As an added bonus when a neighbor comes over to have me look something up for them or help them transfer their CD to their PMP (which is often) I can just pop the button and the system is ready to go before I can grab me a soda out of the fridge. Considering most PCs I've ever seen have the CPU running at full clock through the entire boot up sequence I have a feeling you are blowing through more power by going for a full start up unless you simply don't use the PC that often which I'm sure most gamers do. By using hybrid sleep my PC is running at idle in less than 14 seconds from the time I push, compared to 6 cores running at full clock for a little over a minute for a cold start, seems pretty obvious to me having the cores go full clock that long will waste more power than having them idle in one fourth of the time.
Except the only person that "needs" that ultra high end graphics card is someone looking for ePeen bragging rights as most games are console ports and won't even stress 4 year old cards. I should know as me and my boys play on $50 HD4850s and the games look awesome and never skip at the native 1600x900 of our monitors.In fact the newer cards for the most part have been seeing the heat and power go down and not up for everything but the ePeen cards, thanks to die shrinks and better designs.
So I'm sorry friend but there really isn't a point in ePeen cards unless you are just going for bragging rights or are doing serious GPGPU work because the games just ain't stressing the systems that hard. I have plenty of friends playing on $50-$100 graphics cards and even at 1080p the games look great and they sure as hell ain't pulling anywhere near that amount. Hell my system only has a 550w PSU and has two HDDS, a 6 core CPU as well as the HD4850 so there is just no way its sucking THAT much power and the HD48xx series were more power hungry than later models.
Oh please! Do you blame the Cuban people for castro? Because frankly the American people have about as much choice. in my state we voted EVERY DAMNED ELECTION for a lottery, what happened? they found a reason to toss it out every damned time...until the local horsetrack owners got a big payoff and the right to run casinos and THEN suddenly it passed without incident.
In case you ain't figured it out chuck big booze and pharma ain't gonna allow pot because it would cut into their business PERIOD. Its like a dealer not wanting another pusher on the same corner, only instead of a gun they just use a sack of money. It has gotten so damned easy to rig these things it ain't even funny anymore, look up the videos of Ohio in 2004 on Youtube, you know, the state the governor said "he's made sure would go for Bush" and guess what, it did!
All they have to do to make sure pot will never pass is make sure that a few voting booths in key districts don't work and throw a couple of million into a FUD campaign, that's it. Look at Ohio, you'll see the poor neighborhoods had one or two machines, usually with one broken, and they were finding ANY excuse to exclude someone, even going so far as to arrest volunteers that pointed out they had the RIGHT to ask for an absentee ballot.
Sorry friend but if you think you can change a fucking thing by voting against big business you sir are a fool. you are playing three card monty and thinking THIS time, well this time I'm sure to pick the lady!
So what does that have to do with the tea in China? jealous because they have more choices than you? Who gives a fuck! Stay out of everyone's bedroom and quit getting your damned panties in a wad because someone is getting laid. I have been hit on by men before, it takes less than 20 seconds to say "Thanks for the compliment but I don't play for that team" and that is that.
In the end ALL arguments against gays comes down to bible thumping bigots trying to force their ancient crap onto other people. Frankly I don't give a wet fart what some 1800 year dead goat herder wrote on a sheep's ass about some 2000+ year dead guy, okay? I can show you texts just as damned old that says I should slaughter those that don't believe in Ra, now where is MY religious freedom? How come I can't sacrifice unbelievers? Because its ALL bullshit, ancient superstitions that have become a way of easily manipulating the poor. As Marx put it "religion is the opiate of the masses" and doing that much has obviously made them stupid. Leave everyone alone and mind your own damned business, how about that?
Not to mention you have to figure in the long tail of the hardware, well that is as long as you don't buy OEM crap. My gaming PC from 2001? Still running, owned by a little checkout girl who uses it as a nettop. My gaming PC from 06? Still running, in fact the guy that got it still games with it, mainly flight sims. Hell the only reason I upgraded from my 3 year old AMD quad is I found a killer deal on a hexacore and my youngest was bitching about his dual so I figured i'd kill two birds with one stone.
PC Gaming is far different now that when I first started in the mid 90s, back then you were lucky as hell if you managed to get 2 years out of your PC because things were evolving so quickly, now? I doubt seriously I'll need to do more than the occasional $50-$100 GPU upgrade between now and 2020 with the hexa. I'd say we are getting pretty close to the limits of what can be done, simply because amping up the graphics any higher shoots the games into 100 million dollar territory and few companies are gonna want to take that kind of risk. Between that and GPUs stalling out because of the consoles frankly I don't see any reason to upgrade the HD4850s me and the boys are running as it cranks out the purty at native resolution no problem.
So I'd argue PC gaming has never been better or cheaper. The prices on games is just nuts, with the console titles staying higher much longer and with the near constant sales on Steam and GOG you can quickly have more games than you have hours to play, the hardware is cheap, I have built nice gaming PCs for friends for less than $450 fully loaded and with enough HDD space to do double duty as an HTPC, it really is a sweet time to be a PC gamer.
But even in that case the f15 simply makes more sense. Israel has been using the hell out of the F15 and between them and us not a SINGLE F15 has been lost in combat, not one. It frankly can still spank pretty much any non US fighter out there and it isn't like we are gonna go to war with Russia or China because they have nukes.
The countries will WILL be likely to go to war with, like say Iran, are using mostly late 60s tech that they bought from us so we know all the weaknesses. Know what the most popular aircraft is in the Iranian military and which has the largest numbers? Their knockoff of the F5 Tiger which was a tech limited fighter we sold to allies so as not to give them state of the art tech. those planes weren't state of the art when we sold them in 1974 and even with the upgrades they've made to the design they wouldn't even qualify as a fourth generation fighter. their other big aircraft? the F14 Tomcat. again BADLY out of date and would be slaughtered by the F15 or F16 with ease.
In the end the F35 simply makes no sense, we have the F22 if we need stealth and can buy the F15 Stealth Eagle if we need stealth in bulk. The F35 was supposed to fill all roles and instead its a shitty fighter, can't carry enough ordinance to be a bomber, and the stealth design gives it shitty flight time because you can't give it drop tanks, and its stealth design means it also can't dogfight worth a shit. its just a trillion dollar turkey any way you slice it and when we are trillions in debt blowing that kind of money on a plane that only seems good at blowing cash is just a stupid waste.
In either case it simply makes no sense for anyone OTHER than a nation to have something like this built. look at Stux, last estimate i saw said there was MAYBE 25,000 machines on the planet that would fit the target profile, hell there are probably more Win2K machines still on the net than that and any halfway successful Android or Windows malware can easily get 10 times that much.
In the end a cybercriminal is like any other criminal, they want the biggest haul for the shortest amount of work. These things like Stux require one to several zero day attacks, all to get such a teeny tiny target that frankly a script kiddie would score more machines and get more bang for their bux than one of these bugs. It simply makes no sense from a criminal point of view but DOES make sense if you are a nation that wants to shut down a specific target without going to war. in that case then a bug like this would actually be a bargain when you consider how much even a small conflict will cost in money and resources.
Except that you might as well say "if everyone grew wings out their asses, why the airlines would go out of business!" because both are equally likely. One doesn't get to choose what sex one finds sexually attractive, that is just the way we are. Some studies have suggested it all comes down to hormones in the mother during the first few months of pregnancy but no matter what the cause just as there is no damned way in hell i could ever look at a guy as a possible partner and my GF said if she and a lesbian were the last two humans on earth that lesbian would be awful lonely, so too does a gay simply not feel any sexual attraction to the opposite gender. it just doesn't work.
As for TFA, what do these morons want us to do, live in mud huts and eat grass? Renewables at this point simply can NOT take the place of nuclear and fossil fuels and best estimates put it at around 30% if we maxed them out. That of course is just looking at today's energy needs, not the constantly ramping up power requirements. How many want to bet these douchebags go home to their ACed apts and laptops to bitch about science and tech? The simple fact is we need scientists more than ever, including nuclear science because we simply have limited fossil fuels which WILL run out. every tech we can use that will buy us more time to figure out how to truly make renewable energy work is a good thing and frankly we need to be building test reactors using the latest designs to find out which is the safest and can hopefully reprocess the waste we already have piling up. Morons like this can call themselves anything they want but all they are is idiots, plain and simple.
Thank you, as that was EXACTLY what i was going for. I'm all for free trade to other nations but am NOT for simply exporting pollution and misery. As I said we live in a fishbowl so it is just like simply dumping garbage into your basement and then claiming how clean your system is, it just doesn't work. Our air gets fouler, our oceans get sicker, yet these companies can simply import the stuff off some boat belching bunker fuels and still make more profit than doing it cleanly because they can just dump their waste in the river and let the stacks belch out poisons all day long.
In the end one simply has to accept the fact that globalism is death, its exporting death for profit. 9 of the 10 most cancer ridden cities are in China now, 20%+ of their farmland produces food that is toxic yet is fed to the population, what we have done by allowing globalism to flourish is allowed the exportation of misery and death, nothing more or less. i have a feeling in a century people will look back upon this time with shame, it will be looked upon as another "white man's burden" where exploitation of foreign workers and the suffering they endured or their lives being cut short mattered less than the quarterly earnings report and that is both disgusting and a shame upon us as a people.
As a final note many have said "The Chinese will improve their quality of life as they advance, just as we did" but this is false, look upon the shelves and see how many items you find with "made in Malaysia" stamped upon it. As the Chinese demand better pay and better quality of life the corps, who care only about profits and not the suffering their practices bring, are already beginning to leave China for Malaysia because they allow toxic dumping and will work for even less pay. as it is now they are starting with the simple plastic items, garbage cans and toys and the like, but that is also how China started and what I believe you will see happen to China is just what happened in the USA, with tons of superfund sites dotting the landscape while the corps sneak out in the night to the next area they can pollute and exploit.
But in the end there is only one planet and by the time the corps have gone through every dirt poor third world country the amount of destruction they have inflicted will be astronomical. With the planet's population growing by the day we simply can't afford to have so much of the land destroyed and so much of the water made toxic so some corp can pay the CEO a bigger bonus, it has to end.
I think you are wrong and here is why: X86 has gotten so insanely powerful that it simply can't be replaced by ARM for a lot of jobs and with its 10 years of support per version any user that doesn't like a release can just skip it. Hell i didn't even get XP until someone traded in a box that made a good nettop with it in 2008, because I simply went from Win2K pro to XP X64 (which is just Server 2K3 Workstation with an XP skin) and so was able to skip it. same with Vista, while I had a machine test bed Vista i didn't care for it so I likewise skipped it completely and went XP X64 to Win 7 X64.
The other reason I think you're wrong is twofold, one it is frankly easier for businesses to write to Windows because Linux is a fractured mess, even the main version like Ubuntu change enough guts that what worked last year may not work this year, and that MSFT has such economies of scale on Windows they could sell Home for $50 and pro for $100 (which they did for nearly a year for Win 7 to build momentum) and frankly still make assloads of cash.
Finally there is the fact that as long as Linus has a pulse drivers will suck in Linux. look at how FF first had to disable GPU acceleration before finally giving up altogether because the video stack sucks ass, with things such as video buffers which have been around for ages on Windows (1997 I do believe) simply not working correctly in Linux. Linus can poo poo on it all he wants but without a stable ABI to write drivers to you have guaranteed that Linux drivers will always be poor, simply because the math doesn't work. for an excellent take on why the devs simply will never keep up you might enjoy this article written by not some blogger but Ingo Molnar who is one of the big devs at Red hat. he points out there is simply no damned way in hell to QA hundreds of millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of packages which is why so much shit breaks all the time, it is simply impossible to dedicate enough man hours to testing without making development slow to a crawl.
As I see it there is simply no compelling reason for linux on the desktop and that simply isn't gonna change. there is no Linux only killer apps for the masses, but a hell of a lot that doesn't run that the masses want, the OEMs get Windows cheap enough that in the case of home the crapware they install probably pays for Windows and with such a long support cycle anybody who doesn't like version 8 can simply stay on 7 and wait for 9 which is what I believe the majority will do. With the switch to the new driver model and making user software run as user instead of admin MSFT fixed the biggest flaw in windows so frankly other than GUI changes there really isn't much that needs changing, most users are happy with win 7 so no glaring failures there, and with such wide hardware support and drivers that can literally be used for a decade without rewrite there is no reason for most of the OEMs to waste money on Linux drivers. There really is no selling point other than cost for Linux on the desktop and most would rather pay the cost upfront than pay an IT guy to keep Linux running. Its just not a good value on the desktop, no matter how you slice it friend, take it from me as a retailer, I've tried every consumer friendly version and they all don't work worth a crap.
because the average cyber criminal is gonna go after a large target because like all criminals they are lazy and want the most bang for their time, whereas these things are HIGHLY specialized, with Stux it was specialized to the point of absurdity, so while your average or even smart cyber criminal isn't gonna bother attacking a system with such a small target area and which takes more work than say...ohh...fooling someone with an SMS scam nations on the other hand that want to fuck something specific up without going to war will spend the bux to build something like this.
Want proof? How about how the head of the black panthers has called for the execution of Zimmerman and offered a bounty, an obvious hate crime that Holder won't even arrest much less prosecute? Do you think if the head of Aryan nation called for the death and offer a bounty on a black man he wouldn't be in chains before dark? How about how same Black panthers blocked white entrance to voting booth in Philly in 2008, again a hate crime? or how many in the justice dept quit soon after Holder took over because according to them they were told flat footed "minorities can't commit hate crimes because they have been oppressed in the past" thus making any crime against whites okay?
Pick any one of those sentences and look them up yourself, they've had articles written by left AND right leaning sites which is why I didn't pick, because otherwise some would claim liberal/conservative bias. And I agree with you, Obama has been the biggest disappointment since jimmy Carter, in fact i would put Carter as a better president because at least the man believed in what he was doing. you compare what the man said to get in office VS what he has actually done and according to his own rhetoric we are living a third Bush term, since he did every. single. thing. he said mcCain would do, started more wars, delayed getting out of the ones we were in, kept the Bush tax cuts, hell if he is a Dem what the fuck is the difference? Frankly for the first time since Ronald Reagan in 1980 I'm voting Rep this year, because I'd rather have a Rino than another 4 years of being bald faced lied to. The man is a complete and utter disappointment in every metric.
Riiiight, because if the guy went out and just named the chip the military would say 'oh that's okay, no harm no foul". Shit his ass would be in custody so fast it would make his head swim!
Besides, lets be honest folks....who didn't know this kinda shit has been going on damned nearly constantly? To steal a line from an old movie "The Chinese fucking steal, they steal every idea that ain't nailed down!" and who can blame them? they've saved billions in R&D that way. hell look at their stealth fighter, the rumor is they paid dirt farmers to dig up the F117 that crashed in Kosovo and between that and the stealth drone that landed in Iran they saved years worth of work. Its just how the game is played.
So the moral of the story here folks is simple, if you want it done right you do it yourself and you sure as hell don't trust a country known for snatching every idea that ain't nailed down and who is famous for copying other's stuff to do it for you! When you think about how many billions it costs to build a weapon nowadays frankly any country would be retarded not to just steal the tech if it were possible so this only shows the Chinese? NOT stupid. Again this isn't the first time, the Russians were shooting sidewinders at us all through the 60s because a dud one got lodged in a Chinese MiG over Taiwan and they managed to land the bird with it intact. the Russians saved themselves years of work on short range missiles by simply copying sidewinder. Supposedly you could mix and match parts between the Atoll 1 and the mid 60s sidewinder and no matter which combo you made it shot perfectly, they ripped off the design THAT well.
If you don't like it you really only have two choices, either sell the tech the Chinese want, or DIY, that's really it. Because if you won't sell it to them then they WILL get it some other way and who can blame them? If it turns out the Chinese stealth stomps the F35 and can be made for less than $80 mil flyaway you don't think we'll steal from them? Please.
Why did this person get labeled troll? I'm personally for nuclear power (although i think we should at the very least be reprocessing and looking at Thorium reactors) and i found the article he linked to quite interesting. One could argue if those figures are correct that Japan doesn't have time to waste when it comes to cleaning up the mess and I would argue with Japan sitting next to the ring of fire if they build any new reactors they should be smaller and easier to shut down and get out of there in case of catastrophic earthquakes, maybe something along the lines of the small pebble reactor designs.
But no matter which side you are on in the nuclear debate, and I'm of the mind there is simply no truly viable alternative with our ever growing power needs, the article he linked to is an interesting take on the probability of another major earthquake and what the damage will be if it happens. Its a good read and certainly not worthy of a troll label IMHO.
While Vietnam was a puppet regime pretty much controlled by the spooks in the case of Korea it was actually a UN intervention and while the USA pretty much took over (our allies were still hurting from WWII and the last of the rationing had only ended in the UK a few years before) I'm sure the people of South Korea would tell you they are quite grateful that the UN stepped in and helped them. when you look at what a horrible place NK is compared to SK I find it awfully hard to say the Korean war was unjustified.
Oh and FYI but the lifestyle we live today is thanks to cheap credit and China's desire to become the manufacturing capital of the world, sorry to burst your bubble. One could argue the ME was over oil but even if there was no oil I believe there would still be conflict as the USA is allied with Israel and the majority of Muslim countries in the area have made it clear they will settle for nothing less than driving the Jews into the sea. Since most of America believes Israel has a right to exist regardless of whether there is oil there or not there would be battles over this issue and again FYI but most of America's oil comes from South America not the ME so if the ME dried up tomorrow there would still be conflict over Israel.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY are you gonna get a dozen pilots into an F22? I suppose you could use it as a relay but its an awful damned expensive relay with lousy loitering time.
Look the F22 is a turkey friend, its a way too damned expensive techno turkey that was built to fight adversaries that have nukes so would be suicidal to fight. We would be better off with the F15 Stealth as we can actually afford to buy those in number whereas the F22 will never get any cheaper, in fact will get more expensive as we go down the line because so few were made, its just not a great program. put one of our pilots in the F15 VS the F22 and long after the F22 has shot its wad and has hit bingo fuel the F15 will still be out there with plenty of shots left and enough fuel to prosecute.
I'm sorry friend but any way you slice it the F22 is a turkey, unless you are planning on starting WWIII, which even then I doubt its electronics would survive very long in that kind of conflict. Lets face it friend, there are really only two kinds of conflicts anymore, those with nukes and those without. The countries where this tech could be useful? Have nukes so it would be suicidal to attack them. the countries without nukes? Frankly their tech is 70s era at best and our modern jammers make those old SA/2 Guidelines pretty much just telephone pole obstacle courses. The kinds of countries were are liable to come into military conflict that don't have nukes frankly wouldn't stand up to the F16 any better than they would stand up to the F22, look at Iraq, every air to air battle was a turkey shoot and the closest our pilots got to getting blasting by enemy aircraft was when we sent those old Ravens in with no weapons to defend themselves which frankly was dumb as shit, we could have at least given them a gun and maybe a pair of sidewinders.
There just isn't any real way to sell the F22 as anything but a dick waving exercise. if the numbers are correct the Russians will have their own version for less than 100 mil flyaway and the Chinese will have their own stealth aircraft (built in no small part from our own stealth like the drone captured in Iran and the F117 they dug up in Kosovo) and it'll cost less than 60 mil flyaway. the only thing our MIC seems to be good at anymore is padding expense accounts, they sure as hell can't build a modern aircraft for a flyaway cost that simply makes them affordable to buy. Hell you could have gave every person in America whose homes were ready to be foreclosed on the deed to their home for less than we've sunk in the f35 and the damned thing still isn't off the ground and at last report has over 17 show stopping bugs, that's nothing to brag about friend, and the F22 has pilots refusing to fly it because its more likely to kill the pilot than the enemy. some awesome aircraft that is.
Uhhh..as an American Dubya got that nick because that is how the man said "W" when he pronounced his name. it was like Ford and falling on his butt, Bush had a VERY thick accent when it came to certain words or phrases and the comedians ran with it and Dubya stuck in the minds of many of us.
Sadly there are NO cute nicknames for Obama because he has turned out to be nothing but a giant lying sellout, and this is from someone who has voted D since Bush senior. As much as i didn't like Bush's policies at least the man was consistent in his beliefs and stood by them, Obama told one story on the campaign trail and then did a full 180 when he made it to the big chair. He has been nothing but divisive, tried to run a false flag op to get guns banned with fast & furious , and the only consistency in his administration has been to lie and divide the country, look at how he jumped into the Martin case without even bothering to find out any facts. he should be blamed for every race riot and attack on whites caused by that dumb ass political move.
But don't take my word for it friend, I'm sure you folks overseas don't have a great opinion of our president and if you look up what he said VS what he did you'll see the man lied his ass off. Most of us are pretty much expecting massive waves of violence and race riots when he loses in November because he has done nothing but stir up hate between the races and figure it'll be Watts riots all over again. that is the state of American politics friend, scary ain't it?
Because for normal folks (the non geeks out there) the Yahoo Portal has replaced the morning paper and the last figures i saw had yahoo mail as #1 in number of active users?
Frankly Yahoo has a BUNCH of original content....that nobody knows about. Did you know that have over 70 categories on their portal, from comedy and horoscopes to fantasy football? I didn't, not until I hooked up with my current GF who uses the Yahoo portal as her home page and decided to check it out. Hell I've been using Yahoo mail as a primary email for years, I like to explore, how did I not notice this? Its because they don't advertise these services, even on their own portal, instead they are on this little strip on the far left side of the page that doesn't draw the eye at all.
So lets see if this CEO knows what to do with all this content. if it were me I'd be featuring a couple of different categories each week front and center on the portal, change the placement and size of the category pane to make it more eye catching and maybe have a couple of little humorous "tutorial" videos pointing out all this free stuff. Because frankly they have plenty of content they just need to let folks know it exists.
Thanks, you really ought to try their pedals if you get a chance, they are cheap and have some really great tone. This is the one I have and I just love the thing to death. It has a copy of all the original presets in ROM so I can tweak all I want and never lose a sound, sounds great on a 5 string, the expression pedal lets me do some frankly awesome things because i can control ANY setting of ANY effect with the pedal, from the speed of the chorus to the level of distortion to pitch of the harmonizer, its just a great little pedal.
And wow..an 18? the low end rumble you must have had had to be insane! My Trace is only a 2-10 unit but its one of the last of the Brit Trace Elliots and the tone and power is just incredible. Once my band was opening for a group whose bass player was running an Ampeg SVT Tube with the full 8-10 cab and when he saw mine he said "You sure you don't want to use mine?" and I just laughed and said "Nah, when I fire this baby up you'll see, i'm good". of course he started to drool a little when i popped the case and whipped out My Squire Pro Tone 5, its all see through red swamp ash and lovely. Sure enough the next night we are opening up for them again at another club and he waves me over to their van, pops the door...and there is the twinkie to my Trace. I laughed and said "Where's the Ampeg? And i'm shocked you didn't just go for the whole package and get the Squire as well!" and he said "Screw that back breaker, your rig was clean and powerful and didn't take a dolly to move! And as for the Squire they were all out of the pro tones but.." and he popped out a Squire Jazz 5 LOL!
In the end i don't care if its big name or no name, as long as it has the TONE, for as you know with bass tone is all. Hell I need to take a pic of my most popular bass next to the pro Tone and upload it as you'd probably die laughing, but i get more complements on that old thing than any other bass. its a 1984 Washburn Force series (it was so old I actually had to write the company to find out what it was, it kinda looks like a P bass with the horns stretched) that is white with a black pickguard which I painted the pickguard with glitter fingernail polish, replaced the cracked knobs with a couple of B&W dice, the white face has aged to a lovely yellow and I have 3 1940s pinup girls sticker placed around the face that i picked up on beale street in the late 90s. It has this wonderful road warrior look and a dark thick tone with lots of lows and I don't know how many times I've had bassists come up and say "Sell it to me" LOL! Everyone talks about how cool that bass is when it is nothing but a pawn shop special that got customized when I was bored on the road.
so screw the audiophiles, if it works good for you? Its cool. I'm sure they'd gag if they saw that Washburn or me running a $70 pedal into a Brit amp but the audience and my own enjoyment is what matters and people remember the different and the weird.
The reason MS Home Server no longer exists is frankly nobody bought it and it didn't do Citrix style remote desktops anyway. Also you seem to think that the network can replace the PC when in most places, hell even a lot of colleges, the amount of bandwidth that would require would cost more than the machines to roll out.
But if you don't need the cycles the nice thing about X86 is that you can save money while still having a full desktop. I paid about $350 for my EEE PC AMD with 8Gb of RAM, it only uses 18w under load and gets 6+ hours on a charge. if you want similar on the desktop it is even easier as several make both kit and fully built E350 that are cheap and again low powered. I have actually done what you are suggesting, in that I replaced the majority of full size P4 hogging power towers at the local print shop with E350s that are about the size of a VCR and just pop under the monitor. For the workers there editing HD graphics naturally they required bigger units but there is no reason for the basic office workers or a school for that matter to need all that power.
So there really isn't a need to switch to a client server model when you can buy a unit that'll run a full blown OS and applications with low power and heat. sun tried what you are suggesting with the Sun Ray and last i looked those can be bought for $10 a pop simply because so few used them. By going with client server you'd need a pretty damned big server that would be blowing through power 24/7/365 whereas when not in use the desktops can go to sleep and only draw a couple of watts.
Finally you are forgetting a big chunk of the cost in client server which is licenses. Like it or not most places simply can't use linux as they have too much Windows software that is required to run and MSFT really sticks it to you if you are using terminal services. I have looked into your idea with some SMBs and frankly for less than several hundred seats it ends up costing more for the licenses than it does just to give everyone a bog standard desktop. Again there is always ways to save power and electricity on a desktop but any savings you'd have by going client server would be quickly eaten by the licenses so you'd end up losing money on the deal. Better to just stick with the way we do things now and simply use less powerful machines friend.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, for most the iDevices are just glorified PMPs whereas with X86 not only can you consume but you can produce as well. Hell with my little E350 i will edit multitracks straight off the recorder in Audacity just to see if we got a good take, on my desktops i do a lot of transcoding because some of my family is on widescreen, some 4x3 and ALL bitch if they have to watch the wrong one on their sets. I have customers that are artists, engineers, contractors, hell even the little happy home maker types are editing the photos from their cameras or making DVDs of their kid's soccer game in Windows DVD maker so there is a LOT of uses for even ordinary folks to actually create instead of just consume.
But then again every person i know that bought an iPad has a desktop AND a laptop AND the Ipad, so it isn't like they are actually doing without. All these fanbois that think the iPad is gonna magically replace X86 I have NO doubt they themselves have X86 at home and its probably used several times a week, because there are plenty of jobs where a PMP like the iPad just don't cut it. I know trying to type anything more than a simple tweet on one of those visual keyboards drives me up a damned wall, give me my little E350 netbook any day of the week as i've have a full paragraph written on it before i get to the second sentence on an iPad.
Oh and on the long life of X86? I'm typing this on the 1.8GHz Sempron at the shop while i wait on some board tests to check out. this PC is nearly 9 years old now but for the tasks that it has, being a driver and patch server and nettop? it is whisper quiet, it never hangs, it never sucks power, it "just works" and works so well i gave the customer $75 in trade in just to get it, with its built in card reader and super quiet operation its really a great unit. I can pick up a mobile Athlon for it dirt cheap but....why bother? Even with this 8+ year old box I have cycles to spare.
Uhhh...I didn't think I needed to actually spell it out as i assumed that most here would know who the president was, my bad if that is not the case. Doesn't change the fact that he lied his ass off "I'll leave medical pot alone!" and six months later he's busting more of them than Dubya, not to mention EVERY SINGLE PETITION that has gotten the requisite that isn't following the corporate agenda just got a flowery "LOL fuck off peasant" speech and ultimately was an absolute waste of time, see how it got so bad there was actually a "please stop ignoring us" petition. BTW did he tell everyone to fuck off with that one as well? I'm sure he put it in more flowery terms but that would have been the gist.
Given the choice between the idiot and the sell out I think I'd prefer the idiot as at least an idiot has principles, even if they are wrong, whereas the sell out will flip flop daily and lie his ass off while cashing the check and knowing damned well every word he says is absolute bullshit. Dubya may have been dumb as a bag of hammers but at least he believed what he said, even if he couldn't speak it intelligently, whereas Obama has done damned near a 180 on every damned thing he said on the campaign trail, hell you could run 2008 Obama against 2012 Obama and neither would have a thing in common other than bullshit ability.
Why would it have to be by sat? Why not an AWAC in the back with the pilots controlling from there? While i agree with you the tech simply isn't there yet I'd argue that frankly we have gone as far as we can with manned planes and there is really no point in the F35. We could do just as well with the F15 Stealth, the F16 and the F18 because in all three of those designs we already have to put limiters on the planes because they will take more gs than the human behind the controls can.
In the end the F35 is simply a giant waste of money, its a plane designed to fight a cold war opponent while ignoring the fact that every. single. country. with tech advanced enough to really need stealth already has nukes so to attack them would be frankly insane. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, you MIGHT be able to argue that you could sneak in on NK but if you were to try that you'd need enough bombs to take out their silos in one shot so you'd be better off with the B-2.
The F35 has already failed in its goal, which was to be "one plane to replace them all" because the foreign buyers have already for the most part backed out or have limited their orders to such a low amount you'll never get the prices down enough to make them a truly replacement fighter. The best we can hope for now is for it to be another F22, a very limited system that will most likely simply not be used hardly any for fear of pissing away a quarter billion if it crashes. We should instead cut our losses and buy more teen series fighters which can be bought in much higher numbers and whose production lines are still up and running. The F35 is just a giant money pit, that's all.
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While if you have a larger monitor res (which the article we had recently had the most popular sizes being 1366, 1600, and 1920 ) then you will need a slightly beefier card but again those can be had for less than $100 US and again don't need the huge PSUs and insane power draws of something like the 79xx cards.
So the person i was responding to was simply wrong when he said you'd need 500w just for the graphics cards to play modern games. I've been playing tons of games and they look just fine and so far I've never had them dip below 30fps on my native 1600 res, but even with a larger monitor it just doesn't take 500w cards just to game, as i said the only ones i know buying those $300+ GPUs are those wanting to get high scores on the leaderboards, aka ePeen bragging, same as the only ones you see really OCing anymore are those trying to get the highest benches which IRL don't mean shit. Its a hobby, no different than street racing, where you use crazy shit that IRL most simply would never need.
Well maybe we'll get lucky and they'll be dumping playbooks on Woot! like HP did the Touchpads, gotta look on the bright side you know.
But RIM really deserves what is happening to them, another classic case of a company that tried to rest on their laurels instead of staying ahead of the game and now they are so far behind its practically impossible to get back on top. You might bet by with that in some businesses but tech is NOT one of those. We have seen it over and over again, Palm, MSFT with WinCE, if you don't try to stay ahead of the pack in mobile tech you simply get run over.
Not to mention that is just stupid if you are on Win 7. With hybrid sleep everything is off but a small amount of power to keep the RAM alive and when you hit the button you are back up in less than 10 seconds, at least on desktop. When you figure in the amount of power one uses to go through a full boot you are penny wise and pound foolish to go for a full shutdown anymore.
So even PC gamers would be worse off to follow this "advice" instead of simply putting the unit to sleep when not in use. As an added bonus when a neighbor comes over to have me look something up for them or help them transfer their CD to their PMP (which is often) I can just pop the button and the system is ready to go before I can grab me a soda out of the fridge. Considering most PCs I've ever seen have the CPU running at full clock through the entire boot up sequence I have a feeling you are blowing through more power by going for a full start up unless you simply don't use the PC that often which I'm sure most gamers do. By using hybrid sleep my PC is running at idle in less than 14 seconds from the time I push, compared to 6 cores running at full clock for a little over a minute for a cold start, seems pretty obvious to me having the cores go full clock that long will waste more power than having them idle in one fourth of the time.
Except the only person that "needs" that ultra high end graphics card is someone looking for ePeen bragging rights as most games are console ports and won't even stress 4 year old cards. I should know as me and my boys play on $50 HD4850s and the games look awesome and never skip at the native 1600x900 of our monitors.In fact the newer cards for the most part have been seeing the heat and power go down and not up for everything but the ePeen cards, thanks to die shrinks and better designs.
So I'm sorry friend but there really isn't a point in ePeen cards unless you are just going for bragging rights or are doing serious GPGPU work because the games just ain't stressing the systems that hard. I have plenty of friends playing on $50-$100 graphics cards and even at 1080p the games look great and they sure as hell ain't pulling anywhere near that amount. Hell my system only has a 550w PSU and has two HDDS, a 6 core CPU as well as the HD4850 so there is just no way its sucking THAT much power and the HD48xx series were more power hungry than later models.
Oh please! Do you blame the Cuban people for castro? Because frankly the American people have about as much choice. in my state we voted EVERY DAMNED ELECTION for a lottery, what happened? they found a reason to toss it out every damned time...until the local horsetrack owners got a big payoff and the right to run casinos and THEN suddenly it passed without incident.
In case you ain't figured it out chuck big booze and pharma ain't gonna allow pot because it would cut into their business PERIOD. Its like a dealer not wanting another pusher on the same corner, only instead of a gun they just use a sack of money. It has gotten so damned easy to rig these things it ain't even funny anymore, look up the videos of Ohio in 2004 on Youtube, you know, the state the governor said "he's made sure would go for Bush" and guess what, it did!
All they have to do to make sure pot will never pass is make sure that a few voting booths in key districts don't work and throw a couple of million into a FUD campaign, that's it. Look at Ohio, you'll see the poor neighborhoods had one or two machines, usually with one broken, and they were finding ANY excuse to exclude someone, even going so far as to arrest volunteers that pointed out they had the RIGHT to ask for an absentee ballot.
Sorry friend but if you think you can change a fucking thing by voting against big business you sir are a fool. you are playing three card monty and thinking THIS time, well this time I'm sure to pick the lady!
So what does that have to do with the tea in China? jealous because they have more choices than you? Who gives a fuck! Stay out of everyone's bedroom and quit getting your damned panties in a wad because someone is getting laid. I have been hit on by men before, it takes less than 20 seconds to say "Thanks for the compliment but I don't play for that team" and that is that.
In the end ALL arguments against gays comes down to bible thumping bigots trying to force their ancient crap onto other people. Frankly I don't give a wet fart what some 1800 year dead goat herder wrote on a sheep's ass about some 2000+ year dead guy, okay? I can show you texts just as damned old that says I should slaughter those that don't believe in Ra, now where is MY religious freedom? How come I can't sacrifice unbelievers? Because its ALL bullshit, ancient superstitions that have become a way of easily manipulating the poor. As Marx put it "religion is the opiate of the masses" and doing that much has obviously made them stupid. Leave everyone alone and mind your own damned business, how about that?
Not to mention you have to figure in the long tail of the hardware, well that is as long as you don't buy OEM crap. My gaming PC from 2001? Still running, owned by a little checkout girl who uses it as a nettop. My gaming PC from 06? Still running, in fact the guy that got it still games with it, mainly flight sims. Hell the only reason I upgraded from my 3 year old AMD quad is I found a killer deal on a hexacore and my youngest was bitching about his dual so I figured i'd kill two birds with one stone.
PC Gaming is far different now that when I first started in the mid 90s, back then you were lucky as hell if you managed to get 2 years out of your PC because things were evolving so quickly, now? I doubt seriously I'll need to do more than the occasional $50-$100 GPU upgrade between now and 2020 with the hexa. I'd say we are getting pretty close to the limits of what can be done, simply because amping up the graphics any higher shoots the games into 100 million dollar territory and few companies are gonna want to take that kind of risk. Between that and GPUs stalling out because of the consoles frankly I don't see any reason to upgrade the HD4850s me and the boys are running as it cranks out the purty at native resolution no problem.
So I'd argue PC gaming has never been better or cheaper. The prices on games is just nuts, with the console titles staying higher much longer and with the near constant sales on Steam and GOG you can quickly have more games than you have hours to play, the hardware is cheap, I have built nice gaming PCs for friends for less than $450 fully loaded and with enough HDD space to do double duty as an HTPC, it really is a sweet time to be a PC gamer.
But even in that case the f15 simply makes more sense. Israel has been using the hell out of the F15 and between them and us not a SINGLE F15 has been lost in combat, not one. It frankly can still spank pretty much any non US fighter out there and it isn't like we are gonna go to war with Russia or China because they have nukes.
The countries will WILL be likely to go to war with, like say Iran, are using mostly late 60s tech that they bought from us so we know all the weaknesses. Know what the most popular aircraft is in the Iranian military and which has the largest numbers? Their knockoff of the F5 Tiger which was a tech limited fighter we sold to allies so as not to give them state of the art tech. those planes weren't state of the art when we sold them in 1974 and even with the upgrades they've made to the design they wouldn't even qualify as a fourth generation fighter. their other big aircraft? the F14 Tomcat. again BADLY out of date and would be slaughtered by the F15 or F16 with ease.
In the end the F35 simply makes no sense, we have the F22 if we need stealth and can buy the F15 Stealth Eagle if we need stealth in bulk. The F35 was supposed to fill all roles and instead its a shitty fighter, can't carry enough ordinance to be a bomber, and the stealth design gives it shitty flight time because you can't give it drop tanks, and its stealth design means it also can't dogfight worth a shit. its just a trillion dollar turkey any way you slice it and when we are trillions in debt blowing that kind of money on a plane that only seems good at blowing cash is just a stupid waste.
In either case it simply makes no sense for anyone OTHER than a nation to have something like this built. look at Stux, last estimate i saw said there was MAYBE 25,000 machines on the planet that would fit the target profile, hell there are probably more Win2K machines still on the net than that and any halfway successful Android or Windows malware can easily get 10 times that much.
In the end a cybercriminal is like any other criminal, they want the biggest haul for the shortest amount of work. These things like Stux require one to several zero day attacks, all to get such a teeny tiny target that frankly a script kiddie would score more machines and get more bang for their bux than one of these bugs. It simply makes no sense from a criminal point of view but DOES make sense if you are a nation that wants to shut down a specific target without going to war. in that case then a bug like this would actually be a bargain when you consider how much even a small conflict will cost in money and resources.
Except that you might as well say "if everyone grew wings out their asses, why the airlines would go out of business!" because both are equally likely. One doesn't get to choose what sex one finds sexually attractive, that is just the way we are. Some studies have suggested it all comes down to hormones in the mother during the first few months of pregnancy but no matter what the cause just as there is no damned way in hell i could ever look at a guy as a possible partner and my GF said if she and a lesbian were the last two humans on earth that lesbian would be awful lonely, so too does a gay simply not feel any sexual attraction to the opposite gender. it just doesn't work.
As for TFA, what do these morons want us to do, live in mud huts and eat grass? Renewables at this point simply can NOT take the place of nuclear and fossil fuels and best estimates put it at around 30% if we maxed them out. That of course is just looking at today's energy needs, not the constantly ramping up power requirements. How many want to bet these douchebags go home to their ACed apts and laptops to bitch about science and tech? The simple fact is we need scientists more than ever, including nuclear science because we simply have limited fossil fuels which WILL run out. every tech we can use that will buy us more time to figure out how to truly make renewable energy work is a good thing and frankly we need to be building test reactors using the latest designs to find out which is the safest and can hopefully reprocess the waste we already have piling up. Morons like this can call themselves anything they want but all they are is idiots, plain and simple.
Thank you, as that was EXACTLY what i was going for. I'm all for free trade to other nations but am NOT for simply exporting pollution and misery. As I said we live in a fishbowl so it is just like simply dumping garbage into your basement and then claiming how clean your system is, it just doesn't work. Our air gets fouler, our oceans get sicker, yet these companies can simply import the stuff off some boat belching bunker fuels and still make more profit than doing it cleanly because they can just dump their waste in the river and let the stacks belch out poisons all day long.
In the end one simply has to accept the fact that globalism is death, its exporting death for profit. 9 of the 10 most cancer ridden cities are in China now, 20%+ of their farmland produces food that is toxic yet is fed to the population, what we have done by allowing globalism to flourish is allowed the exportation of misery and death, nothing more or less. i have a feeling in a century people will look back upon this time with shame, it will be looked upon as another "white man's burden" where exploitation of foreign workers and the suffering they endured or their lives being cut short mattered less than the quarterly earnings report and that is both disgusting and a shame upon us as a people.
As a final note many have said "The Chinese will improve their quality of life as they advance, just as we did" but this is false, look upon the shelves and see how many items you find with "made in Malaysia" stamped upon it. As the Chinese demand better pay and better quality of life the corps, who care only about profits and not the suffering their practices bring, are already beginning to leave China for Malaysia because they allow toxic dumping and will work for even less pay. as it is now they are starting with the simple plastic items, garbage cans and toys and the like, but that is also how China started and what I believe you will see happen to China is just what happened in the USA, with tons of superfund sites dotting the landscape while the corps sneak out in the night to the next area they can pollute and exploit.
But in the end there is only one planet and by the time the corps have gone through every dirt poor third world country the amount of destruction they have inflicted will be astronomical. With the planet's population growing by the day we simply can't afford to have so much of the land destroyed and so much of the water made toxic so some corp can pay the CEO a bigger bonus, it has to end.
I think you are wrong and here is why: X86 has gotten so insanely powerful that it simply can't be replaced by ARM for a lot of jobs and with its 10 years of support per version any user that doesn't like a release can just skip it. Hell i didn't even get XP until someone traded in a box that made a good nettop with it in 2008, because I simply went from Win2K pro to XP X64 (which is just Server 2K3 Workstation with an XP skin) and so was able to skip it. same with Vista, while I had a machine test bed Vista i didn't care for it so I likewise skipped it completely and went XP X64 to Win 7 X64.
The other reason I think you're wrong is twofold, one it is frankly easier for businesses to write to Windows because Linux is a fractured mess, even the main version like Ubuntu change enough guts that what worked last year may not work this year, and that MSFT has such economies of scale on Windows they could sell Home for $50 and pro for $100 (which they did for nearly a year for Win 7 to build momentum) and frankly still make assloads of cash.
Finally there is the fact that as long as Linus has a pulse drivers will suck in Linux. look at how FF first had to disable GPU acceleration before finally giving up altogether because the video stack sucks ass, with things such as video buffers which have been around for ages on Windows (1997 I do believe) simply not working correctly in Linux. Linus can poo poo on it all he wants but without a stable ABI to write drivers to you have guaranteed that Linux drivers will always be poor, simply because the math doesn't work. for an excellent take on why the devs simply will never keep up you might enjoy this article written by not some blogger but Ingo Molnar who is one of the big devs at Red hat. he points out there is simply no damned way in hell to QA hundreds of millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of packages which is why so much shit breaks all the time, it is simply impossible to dedicate enough man hours to testing without making development slow to a crawl.
As I see it there is simply no compelling reason for linux on the desktop and that simply isn't gonna change. there is no Linux only killer apps for the masses, but a hell of a lot that doesn't run that the masses want, the OEMs get Windows cheap enough that in the case of home the crapware they install probably pays for Windows and with such a long support cycle anybody who doesn't like version 8 can simply stay on 7 and wait for 9 which is what I believe the majority will do. With the switch to the new driver model and making user software run as user instead of admin MSFT fixed the biggest flaw in windows so frankly other than GUI changes there really isn't much that needs changing, most users are happy with win 7 so no glaring failures there, and with such wide hardware support and drivers that can literally be used for a decade without rewrite there is no reason for most of the OEMs to waste money on Linux drivers. There really is no selling point other than cost for Linux on the desktop and most would rather pay the cost upfront than pay an IT guy to keep Linux running. Its just not a good value on the desktop, no matter how you slice it friend, take it from me as a retailer, I've tried every consumer friendly version and they all don't work worth a crap.
because the average cyber criminal is gonna go after a large target because like all criminals they are lazy and want the most bang for their time, whereas these things are HIGHLY specialized, with Stux it was specialized to the point of absurdity, so while your average or even smart cyber criminal isn't gonna bother attacking a system with such a small target area and which takes more work than say...ohh...fooling someone with an SMS scam nations on the other hand that want to fuck something specific up without going to war will spend the bux to build something like this.
Want proof? How about how the head of the black panthers has called for the execution of Zimmerman and offered a bounty, an obvious hate crime that Holder won't even arrest much less prosecute? Do you think if the head of Aryan nation called for the death and offer a bounty on a black man he wouldn't be in chains before dark? How about how same Black panthers blocked white entrance to voting booth in Philly in 2008, again a hate crime? or how many in the justice dept quit soon after Holder took over because according to them they were told flat footed "minorities can't commit hate crimes because they have been oppressed in the past" thus making any crime against whites okay?
Pick any one of those sentences and look them up yourself, they've had articles written by left AND right leaning sites which is why I didn't pick, because otherwise some would claim liberal/conservative bias. And I agree with you, Obama has been the biggest disappointment since jimmy Carter, in fact i would put Carter as a better president because at least the man believed in what he was doing. you compare what the man said to get in office VS what he has actually done and according to his own rhetoric we are living a third Bush term, since he did every. single. thing. he said mcCain would do, started more wars, delayed getting out of the ones we were in, kept the Bush tax cuts, hell if he is a Dem what the fuck is the difference? Frankly for the first time since Ronald Reagan in 1980 I'm voting Rep this year, because I'd rather have a Rino than another 4 years of being bald faced lied to. The man is a complete and utter disappointment in every metric.
Riiiight, because if the guy went out and just named the chip the military would say 'oh that's okay, no harm no foul". Shit his ass would be in custody so fast it would make his head swim!
Besides, lets be honest folks....who didn't know this kinda shit has been going on damned nearly constantly? To steal a line from an old movie "The Chinese fucking steal, they steal every idea that ain't nailed down!" and who can blame them? they've saved billions in R&D that way. hell look at their stealth fighter, the rumor is they paid dirt farmers to dig up the F117 that crashed in Kosovo and between that and the stealth drone that landed in Iran they saved years worth of work. Its just how the game is played.
So the moral of the story here folks is simple, if you want it done right you do it yourself and you sure as hell don't trust a country known for snatching every idea that ain't nailed down and who is famous for copying other's stuff to do it for you! When you think about how many billions it costs to build a weapon nowadays frankly any country would be retarded not to just steal the tech if it were possible so this only shows the Chinese? NOT stupid. Again this isn't the first time, the Russians were shooting sidewinders at us all through the 60s because a dud one got lodged in a Chinese MiG over Taiwan and they managed to land the bird with it intact. the Russians saved themselves years of work on short range missiles by simply copying sidewinder. Supposedly you could mix and match parts between the Atoll 1 and the mid 60s sidewinder and no matter which combo you made it shot perfectly, they ripped off the design THAT well.
If you don't like it you really only have two choices, either sell the tech the Chinese want, or DIY, that's really it. Because if you won't sell it to them then they WILL get it some other way and who can blame them? If it turns out the Chinese stealth stomps the F35 and can be made for less than $80 mil flyaway you don't think we'll steal from them? Please.
Why did this person get labeled troll? I'm personally for nuclear power (although i think we should at the very least be reprocessing and looking at Thorium reactors) and i found the article he linked to quite interesting. One could argue if those figures are correct that Japan doesn't have time to waste when it comes to cleaning up the mess and I would argue with Japan sitting next to the ring of fire if they build any new reactors they should be smaller and easier to shut down and get out of there in case of catastrophic earthquakes, maybe something along the lines of the small pebble reactor designs.
But no matter which side you are on in the nuclear debate, and I'm of the mind there is simply no truly viable alternative with our ever growing power needs, the article he linked to is an interesting take on the probability of another major earthquake and what the damage will be if it happens. Its a good read and certainly not worthy of a troll label IMHO.
While Vietnam was a puppet regime pretty much controlled by the spooks in the case of Korea it was actually a UN intervention and while the USA pretty much took over (our allies were still hurting from WWII and the last of the rationing had only ended in the UK a few years before) I'm sure the people of South Korea would tell you they are quite grateful that the UN stepped in and helped them. when you look at what a horrible place NK is compared to SK I find it awfully hard to say the Korean war was unjustified.
Oh and FYI but the lifestyle we live today is thanks to cheap credit and China's desire to become the manufacturing capital of the world, sorry to burst your bubble. One could argue the ME was over oil but even if there was no oil I believe there would still be conflict as the USA is allied with Israel and the majority of Muslim countries in the area have made it clear they will settle for nothing less than driving the Jews into the sea. Since most of America believes Israel has a right to exist regardless of whether there is oil there or not there would be battles over this issue and again FYI but most of America's oil comes from South America not the ME so if the ME dried up tomorrow there would still be conflict over Israel.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY are you gonna get a dozen pilots into an F22? I suppose you could use it as a relay but its an awful damned expensive relay with lousy loitering time.
Look the F22 is a turkey friend, its a way too damned expensive techno turkey that was built to fight adversaries that have nukes so would be suicidal to fight. We would be better off with the F15 Stealth as we can actually afford to buy those in number whereas the F22 will never get any cheaper, in fact will get more expensive as we go down the line because so few were made, its just not a great program. put one of our pilots in the F15 VS the F22 and long after the F22 has shot its wad and has hit bingo fuel the F15 will still be out there with plenty of shots left and enough fuel to prosecute.
I'm sorry friend but any way you slice it the F22 is a turkey, unless you are planning on starting WWIII, which even then I doubt its electronics would survive very long in that kind of conflict. Lets face it friend, there are really only two kinds of conflicts anymore, those with nukes and those without. The countries where this tech could be useful? Have nukes so it would be suicidal to attack them. the countries without nukes? Frankly their tech is 70s era at best and our modern jammers make those old SA/2 Guidelines pretty much just telephone pole obstacle courses. The kinds of countries were are liable to come into military conflict that don't have nukes frankly wouldn't stand up to the F16 any better than they would stand up to the F22, look at Iraq, every air to air battle was a turkey shoot and the closest our pilots got to getting blasting by enemy aircraft was when we sent those old Ravens in with no weapons to defend themselves which frankly was dumb as shit, we could have at least given them a gun and maybe a pair of sidewinders.
There just isn't any real way to sell the F22 as anything but a dick waving exercise. if the numbers are correct the Russians will have their own version for less than 100 mil flyaway and the Chinese will have their own stealth aircraft (built in no small part from our own stealth like the drone captured in Iran and the F117 they dug up in Kosovo) and it'll cost less than 60 mil flyaway. the only thing our MIC seems to be good at anymore is padding expense accounts, they sure as hell can't build a modern aircraft for a flyaway cost that simply makes them affordable to buy. Hell you could have gave every person in America whose homes were ready to be foreclosed on the deed to their home for less than we've sunk in the f35 and the damned thing still isn't off the ground and at last report has over 17 show stopping bugs, that's nothing to brag about friend, and the F22 has pilots refusing to fly it because its more likely to kill the pilot than the enemy. some awesome aircraft that is.
Uhhh..as an American Dubya got that nick because that is how the man said "W" when he pronounced his name. it was like Ford and falling on his butt, Bush had a VERY thick accent when it came to certain words or phrases and the comedians ran with it and Dubya stuck in the minds of many of us.
Sadly there are NO cute nicknames for Obama because he has turned out to be nothing but a giant lying sellout, and this is from someone who has voted D since Bush senior. As much as i didn't like Bush's policies at least the man was consistent in his beliefs and stood by them, Obama told one story on the campaign trail and then did a full 180 when he made it to the big chair. He has been nothing but divisive, tried to run a false flag op to get guns banned with fast & furious , and the only consistency in his administration has been to lie and divide the country, look at how he jumped into the Martin case without even bothering to find out any facts. he should be blamed for every race riot and attack on whites caused by that dumb ass political move.
But don't take my word for it friend, I'm sure you folks overseas don't have a great opinion of our president and if you look up what he said VS what he did you'll see the man lied his ass off. Most of us are pretty much expecting massive waves of violence and race riots when he loses in November because he has done nothing but stir up hate between the races and figure it'll be Watts riots all over again. that is the state of American politics friend, scary ain't it?
Because for normal folks (the non geeks out there) the Yahoo Portal has replaced the morning paper and the last figures i saw had yahoo mail as #1 in number of active users?
Frankly Yahoo has a BUNCH of original content....that nobody knows about. Did you know that have over 70 categories on their portal, from comedy and horoscopes to fantasy football? I didn't, not until I hooked up with my current GF who uses the Yahoo portal as her home page and decided to check it out. Hell I've been using Yahoo mail as a primary email for years, I like to explore, how did I not notice this? Its because they don't advertise these services, even on their own portal, instead they are on this little strip on the far left side of the page that doesn't draw the eye at all.
So lets see if this CEO knows what to do with all this content. if it were me I'd be featuring a couple of different categories each week front and center on the portal, change the placement and size of the category pane to make it more eye catching and maybe have a couple of little humorous "tutorial" videos pointing out all this free stuff. Because frankly they have plenty of content they just need to let folks know it exists.
Thanks, you really ought to try their pedals if you get a chance, they are cheap and have some really great tone. This is the one I have and I just love the thing to death. It has a copy of all the original presets in ROM so I can tweak all I want and never lose a sound, sounds great on a 5 string, the expression pedal lets me do some frankly awesome things because i can control ANY setting of ANY effect with the pedal, from the speed of the chorus to the level of distortion to pitch of the harmonizer, its just a great little pedal.
And wow..an 18? the low end rumble you must have had had to be insane! My Trace is only a 2-10 unit but its one of the last of the Brit Trace Elliots and the tone and power is just incredible. Once my band was opening for a group whose bass player was running an Ampeg SVT Tube with the full 8-10 cab and when he saw mine he said "You sure you don't want to use mine?" and I just laughed and said "Nah, when I fire this baby up you'll see, i'm good". of course he started to drool a little when i popped the case and whipped out My Squire Pro Tone 5, its all see through red swamp ash and lovely. Sure enough the next night we are opening up for them again at another club and he waves me over to their van, pops the door...and there is the twinkie to my Trace. I laughed and said "Where's the Ampeg? And i'm shocked you didn't just go for the whole package and get the Squire as well!" and he said "Screw that back breaker, your rig was clean and powerful and didn't take a dolly to move! And as for the Squire they were all out of the pro tones but.." and he popped out a Squire Jazz 5 LOL!
In the end i don't care if its big name or no name, as long as it has the TONE, for as you know with bass tone is all. Hell I need to take a pic of my most popular bass next to the pro Tone and upload it as you'd probably die laughing, but i get more complements on that old thing than any other bass. its a 1984 Washburn Force series (it was so old I actually had to write the company to find out what it was, it kinda looks like a P bass with the horns stretched) that is white with a black pickguard which I painted the pickguard with glitter fingernail polish, replaced the cracked knobs with a couple of B&W dice, the white face has aged to a lovely yellow and I have 3 1940s pinup girls sticker placed around the face that i picked up on beale street in the late 90s. It has this wonderful road warrior look and a dark thick tone with lots of lows and I don't know how many times I've had bassists come up and say "Sell it to me" LOL! Everyone talks about how cool that bass is when it is nothing but a pawn shop special that got customized when I was bored on the road.
so screw the audiophiles, if it works good for you? Its cool. I'm sure they'd gag if they saw that Washburn or me running a $70 pedal into a Brit amp but the audience and my own enjoyment is what matters and people remember the different and the weird.
The reason MS Home Server no longer exists is frankly nobody bought it and it didn't do Citrix style remote desktops anyway. Also you seem to think that the network can replace the PC when in most places, hell even a lot of colleges, the amount of bandwidth that would require would cost more than the machines to roll out.
But if you don't need the cycles the nice thing about X86 is that you can save money while still having a full desktop. I paid about $350 for my EEE PC AMD with 8Gb of RAM, it only uses 18w under load and gets 6+ hours on a charge. if you want similar on the desktop it is even easier as several make both kit and fully built E350 that are cheap and again low powered. I have actually done what you are suggesting, in that I replaced the majority of full size P4 hogging power towers at the local print shop with E350s that are about the size of a VCR and just pop under the monitor. For the workers there editing HD graphics naturally they required bigger units but there is no reason for the basic office workers or a school for that matter to need all that power.
So there really isn't a need to switch to a client server model when you can buy a unit that'll run a full blown OS and applications with low power and heat. sun tried what you are suggesting with the Sun Ray and last i looked those can be bought for $10 a pop simply because so few used them. By going with client server you'd need a pretty damned big server that would be blowing through power 24/7/365 whereas when not in use the desktops can go to sleep and only draw a couple of watts.
Finally you are forgetting a big chunk of the cost in client server which is licenses. Like it or not most places simply can't use linux as they have too much Windows software that is required to run and MSFT really sticks it to you if you are using terminal services. I have looked into your idea with some SMBs and frankly for less than several hundred seats it ends up costing more for the licenses than it does just to give everyone a bog standard desktop. Again there is always ways to save power and electricity on a desktop but any savings you'd have by going client server would be quickly eaten by the licenses so you'd end up losing money on the deal. Better to just stick with the way we do things now and simply use less powerful machines friend.
Bimbo Newton Crosby, for most the iDevices are just glorified PMPs whereas with X86 not only can you consume but you can produce as well. Hell with my little E350 i will edit multitracks straight off the recorder in Audacity just to see if we got a good take, on my desktops i do a lot of transcoding because some of my family is on widescreen, some 4x3 and ALL bitch if they have to watch the wrong one on their sets. I have customers that are artists, engineers, contractors, hell even the little happy home maker types are editing the photos from their cameras or making DVDs of their kid's soccer game in Windows DVD maker so there is a LOT of uses for even ordinary folks to actually create instead of just consume.
But then again every person i know that bought an iPad has a desktop AND a laptop AND the Ipad, so it isn't like they are actually doing without. All these fanbois that think the iPad is gonna magically replace X86 I have NO doubt they themselves have X86 at home and its probably used several times a week, because there are plenty of jobs where a PMP like the iPad just don't cut it. I know trying to type anything more than a simple tweet on one of those visual keyboards drives me up a damned wall, give me my little E350 netbook any day of the week as i've have a full paragraph written on it before i get to the second sentence on an iPad.
Oh and on the long life of X86? I'm typing this on the 1.8GHz Sempron at the shop while i wait on some board tests to check out. this PC is nearly 9 years old now but for the tasks that it has, being a driver and patch server and nettop? it is whisper quiet, it never hangs, it never sucks power, it "just works" and works so well i gave the customer $75 in trade in just to get it, with its built in card reader and super quiet operation its really a great unit. I can pick up a mobile Athlon for it dirt cheap but....why bother? Even with this 8+ year old box I have cycles to spare.
Uhhh...I didn't think I needed to actually spell it out as i assumed that most here would know who the president was, my bad if that is not the case. Doesn't change the fact that he lied his ass off "I'll leave medical pot alone!" and six months later he's busting more of them than Dubya, not to mention EVERY SINGLE PETITION that has gotten the requisite that isn't following the corporate agenda just got a flowery "LOL fuck off peasant" speech and ultimately was an absolute waste of time, see how it got so bad there was actually a "please stop ignoring us" petition. BTW did he tell everyone to fuck off with that one as well? I'm sure he put it in more flowery terms but that would have been the gist.
Given the choice between the idiot and the sell out I think I'd prefer the idiot as at least an idiot has principles, even if they are wrong, whereas the sell out will flip flop daily and lie his ass off while cashing the check and knowing damned well every word he says is absolute bullshit. Dubya may have been dumb as a bag of hammers but at least he believed what he said, even if he couldn't speak it intelligently, whereas Obama has done damned near a 180 on every damned thing he said on the campaign trail, hell you could run 2008 Obama against 2012 Obama and neither would have a thing in common other than bullshit ability.
Why would it have to be by sat? Why not an AWAC in the back with the pilots controlling from there? While i agree with you the tech simply isn't there yet I'd argue that frankly we have gone as far as we can with manned planes and there is really no point in the F35. We could do just as well with the F15 Stealth, the F16 and the F18 because in all three of those designs we already have to put limiters on the planes because they will take more gs than the human behind the controls can.
In the end the F35 is simply a giant waste of money, its a plane designed to fight a cold war opponent while ignoring the fact that every. single. country. with tech advanced enough to really need stealth already has nukes so to attack them would be frankly insane. Russia, China, India, Pakistan, you MIGHT be able to argue that you could sneak in on NK but if you were to try that you'd need enough bombs to take out their silos in one shot so you'd be better off with the B-2.
The F35 has already failed in its goal, which was to be "one plane to replace them all" because the foreign buyers have already for the most part backed out or have limited their orders to such a low amount you'll never get the prices down enough to make them a truly replacement fighter. The best we can hope for now is for it to be another F22, a very limited system that will most likely simply not be used hardly any for fear of pissing away a quarter billion if it crashes. We should instead cut our losses and buy more teen series fighters which can be bought in much higher numbers and whose production lines are still up and running. The F35 is just a giant money pit, that's all.