Sorry friend but given the choice I'd take AM3 over Liano, AMD really screwed the pooch with those chips. Why? One word...sockets. I'm afraid you are screwed when it comes to the socket friend, AM3+ is getting exactly ONE more chip before they pull the plug, and they have already announced Bulldozer will be an FM2 chip NOT and FM1 and the two sockets aren't backwards compatible.
Frankly Intel couldn't ask for a better competitor as AMD has really been shooting themselves right in the face, no need for Intel to do or say shit. First they kill AM3 which not only had the budget and "bang for the buck" demographics tied up but could have been served by a single chip, just take a single 95w Thuban, any that have bad cores you make a Phenom II X4 or X3, any that have bad cache you make an Athlon X4 or X3 and voila! 100% yields and no waste. Instead they toss it for chips that are 40% more expensive while being nearly that big a difference in performance the WRONG way, with the Thuban and Zosma often stomping the crap out of the A series and BD, and their prices are too close to Intel on both the A series and FX to make them worth buying, its a total clusterfuck.
So honestly friend the E-series is the only current chip from AMD I'd touch right now, hell Tiger has been selling Thuban X6 chips for $99 and it stomps a mudhole in the asses of both the A series and FX while having both cheaper boards and more choices on boards. BTW you want cheap chips, be it Intel or AMD, you ought to check out Starmicro whom I've been buying from for a couple of years. Great service and plenty of choices, their $60 Phenom I X4 e chips make great HTPCs, low power and real transcoding monsters.
Exactly, most of my customers simply made do with what they had until the price lowered like the one i just installed where the guy was simply tossing files off his 1Tb until the price hit $100 for a Tb again which is when he had me grab him another Tb to install. I'm just lucky that for once in my life i actually got in when prices were low thanks to Samsung being bought out. I've always preferred the Samsung EcoDrives because of the lower heat and rugged construction so when Newegg dropped the price to $35 for a 1Tb and $59 for a 2Tb i bought them up, ended up making a pretty penny as well as letting some of my preferred customers get drives at a decent price while everyone else was hurting and still managed to keep 6Tb for myself.
What to me is more telling is how quickly Newegg and Tiger dropped SSDs for HDDs in their barebone kits. I wonder if they got bit in the ass by the hot/crazy scale of SSDs and the return rates made it not worth including them because it seemed like it was barely 2 months that both were using SSDs in their kits before switching to Seagate 500gb HDDs instead. You'd think the increased performance and the lower than HDD prices would have made them hang onto the SSDs longer but if its like what I've seen and what many of my fellow system builders have told me the SSDs still have too high a failure rate for the masses. after all with HDDs being high Joe Blow wasn't buying any externals for backups and talking to other builders you pretty much have to constantly back up the SSDs in case you wake up one morning to find its crapped itself and died. I know my gamer customers bought top o' the line SSDs only to have the drives fail in less than a year and a half so they went back to raptors in RAID over dealing with worrying if the machine will fire today or not.
I'd give Pogson a break Barbara if he was just a zealot, but Voldemort syndrome? there is NO excuse for that. Voldemort syndrome actually makes FOSS users look like a bunch of tinfoil hatters and makes it the punchline of jokes. I mean would it REALLY cause the end of civilization if he wrote MSFT or even MS? but not once, not once has he been able to write anything but "M$" or "The OTHER OS" like they are listening to his thoughts through the walls. the LAST thing FOSS needs is another Twitter.
And while I would like to think there would be room for a proprietary Linux frankly the "free as in beer" tards would have such a damned screaming shitfit it would never happen. i mean what was Xandros' crimes? it signed a deal that would give it access to the Exchange and Sharepoint protocols along with access to MSFT tech like AD and GPO backend protocols, that's it. And anyone with a brain would know that for a business OS having the ability to use Exchange and AD is pretty much a must have. Instead the community destroyed what as your friend found out was the only really sanely designed linux I had ever seen, it all "just worked" without "pulling a Gnome" and restricting the user. you had full CLI,could run apt-get and use any app, it just had sane defaults so you didn't need to if you didn't want to. it even had on first startup a "behavior" choice which would make the OS respond to Windows,Mac, or Linux conventions when it came to things like right click so it was simple to convert users. I used to have a Xandros laptop I'd hand to a client to use while i worked on site, just so the person whose machine I was fixing wouldn't be completely down for the day ya know? i had not once needed to spend a single minute teaching them "The Linux way' because it all "just worked". it would detect the AD, ask for a login, plug it into an AD network and it would be up and running faster than XP.
And I agree that Grub and most of the underpinnings have frankly gotten just dumb, what these guys are cooking up is frankly more of a hindrance than a help. And again the fundamental problem is how to pay for the work? How do you pay for the focus groups and QA and regression testing required to bring everything up to a point that while the home user can run it the power user and admins don't feel hamstringed? I truly believe Canonical is gonna be the final straw, after they close their doors any thought of Linux having a prayer on the desktop will be finally dead, well except for pogson whom I'm sure will think "Its a vast conspiracy to keep GNU away from the masses!" while ignoring in the end its the busted shitter problem, in the end the shitty jobs just don't get done. Vista was a pig so the users didn't buy, MSFT got the feedback and built Win 7 which runs great even on netbooks. there just isn't that kind of positive feedback in F/LOSS. I mean how do you tell a dev working for free 'What you are doing isn't helping, it doesn't follow the GUI conventions, its got too many bugs, and it relies too much on CLI and its help files are poorly written"? Answer you don't, they say "take it or leave it" which is why you end up with a shit sandwich, because the devs say 'hey you want a free sandwich?" and when you say yes hand you a turd on bread and say 'No complaining now, because its free". Well a shit sandwich is still shit, like Joe Rogan said "If someone hand you a sandwich that is 95% shit and 5% ham, would you call it a ham sandwich?".
In the end users don't care WHY it don't work, all they care about is their wireless is broke, or their sound is now static, or their GUI doesn't have the options they require. Hell even Nichols admits the new GUIs are shit, and I NEVER thought he'd have a bad word to say about F/LOSS. But you have yourself a great weekend Barbara.
Bass, Got a beautiful swamp ash Squire pro tone, the model that actually made them cancel the entire pro tone series because it was eating into the Fender sales. Man they don't make 'em like that anymore, heavy as hell but the wood is just soooo damned sweet, I hit a low note through that Trace Elliot (One of the last ones while they were still made by Brits) and the tone....man. I cut heads once against a guy with a Fender P-Bass through an actual Ampeg all tube 8x10 stack and the next night his band was due to open for mine and I see him reach into his trunk..and pull out an exact duplicate on MY amp. He even went out and bought the Zoom pedal i was using. I said "Hey WTF happened to the Ampeg?" and he said "Shit, you stomped all over my amp on tone, clarity AND volume so i swapped it out this morning, nice huh?" I just rolled my eyes and said "Just don't try taking my 5 string too" and he laughed and said, "Sorry to say they were sold out, I'll have to live with the 4 string".
And you think a Slav has temper? you never met a Cherokee princess before, fiery temper is an understatement of the century! The day she met my mother some gay guy had seen me play at the club the night before and had slipped a note under my door, here she is, first time she has ever got to meet my mother, and she is ranting on the cell phone "Damned right he's hot and HE IS MINE BITCH BACK THE FUCK OFF OR I WILL STOMP YOUR ASS!!!" and all I could do was say "Mom meet my GF Brenda". Hell some gal hopped on the band FB page and was being flirty and it was like a comedy routine "Oh ur so cute" "Yes he is and he's MINE BITCH" "U can do better than her, u should ban her from your page" "Do you want me to come down there and KICK UR ASS SLUT?" back and forth. needless to say the band and my two teen boys were sitting there laughing their asses off while I just sat there totally facepalmed. Ain't nothin more fiery than a Cherokee dude, when people start talking Spanish at her because she is dark enough to pass for Mexican she says "me no Mexican, me Indian, me kind scalp your kind" and waltzes off while they stand there gaping.
But what can you do right? As I have said many times "The wise man knows when to STFU, the stupid man sleeps on the couch" and i'm happy to report i have NEVER had to sleep on the couch.
Uhhh...dude? Don't really know squat about chips do you? Its okay bud, let your old pal hairyfeet break it down. you see the E-350 is what is called an "APU" which has BOTH CPU AND GPU built in, so that 18w under load and less than 8w idle is for BOTH CHIPS. You get a Radeon HD6310 AND a Bobcat dual core for that wattage dude. I had a friend that actually ran Kill-A-Watt on his VCR style I made, its 32w under load and right at 12w idle. Hell I had him try the Phenom I based one and it was 94W under load and was idling at around 48w, and that is for a quad core transcoding powerhouse and included an HD5450 GPU discrete.
And the Roku is a moped dude, sure its cheap on gas but what can you actually DO with it? Can you transcode? you can with the E-350. How about use any browser you want? Any chat client? can it download? Stream to other boxes in the home? be a jukebox? Run a choice of OSes? How about support, can you promise it'll will be supported with updates until 2020? Check your email? Play video games other than Angry Birds? Hell I've even used my E-350 as a music production studio with Audacity and hydrogen.
Check out the E-350 man, its got all the features you could want in an HTPC and sips power, quiet as a churchmouse and low enough wattage it can be passively cooled. Then if you want more power the Phenom I E series is $60 for a quad at starmicro and those babies are multitasking monsters, i have a client that often transcodes on his while listening to music and surfing the web, can your Roku do that?
Actually it IS that bad a gamble because they were FINALLY getting businesses to start replacing XP boxes for Win 7, what do you think is gonna happen when they see that failwhale bling bling consumer oriented crap? they are gonna go "How many months does XP have left? Yeah lets wait because that sucks". That is the whole point behind having 10 years of support, they should have stuck with a 5 year release model as that gave businesses time to test and rollout. at 3 years that is simply too soon for some 10,000 seat corp to get all their apps tested and deployed.
As for consumers so far i have showed the dev preview to over 200 average folks, your Suzy the checkout girl and Brian the backhoe operator types and you know what i found? they HATE it, not just dislike but hate it with a passion! The closest i got to an "endorsement" was this exchange..."My, that's a pretty looking cell phone screen, is that Android? I heard that its nice...what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?" and from Ms Pipkin comes wisdom. Everyone can see that's not built for desktops, its a cell phone! It looks like a cell phone, acts like a cell phone, hell even the product shill for yahoo whose answer to everything is "Buy it! Buy it now! you should really buy it!" said this of Windows 8 "Uhhh..you should wait until you get something with a touchscreen before switching" which for that shill might as well be "My eyes! The goggles they do nothing!".
Mark my words, Win 8 is gonna make Vista look like Win95, hell it may even put the WinME and MS Bob jokes to rest. the ONLY way I can see it not bombing is if they sell it to consumers at $50 a copy and OEMs for less than $25, and they give the OEMs and consumers a ballot screen that lets them choose UI on first run so the ones that don't have tablets (99.9998% of those that will be running this turkey) can pick the "Get the fuck out of here metro" button and just have Win 7 with a square start button. never underestimate the comfort zone of the consumer, you change too much too fast and you WILL get a backlash. But again don't take my word for it, you have a dual core or better, right? Consumer preview is free for all on Feb 29th, so fire up a VM and give it a run. I've tried the first one and frankly the level of fail is beyond scary and into 'WTF are they thinking?" territory.
Actually there shouldn't be any, well if EITHER side had a brain which I'm starting to doubt. this is actually fixable, we simply need a better filter on the exhaust. Of course that is gonna take time and money to make but we managed to get lead out the gas i'm sure we can get carbon black out too.
But for those for AGW you are about to get a big dose of "be careful what you wish for" as it looks like before the election President....ya know, I want to say Dumbass but that ain't really fair to Bush, I mean Bush was a frat party boy dumbass but at least you got the feeling he believed what he said, even if it was something incredibly stupid. Obama is just plain evil, the kind of slimy backstabbing "When I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops" politician. Anyway it looks like all the bribes AIPAC has thrown at Dear Leader is gonna pay off before the election by dragging us into a war with Iran, which..what does that make? Is it 4 or 5 wars in as many years? I swear at this rate we are gonna beat Hitler on number of fronts at the same time. And no that's not a Godwin since nobody is being called a Nazi, its simply comparing how many wars you can fight at the same time.
Well when that happens folks you won't have to worry about AGW anymore because when gas hits $8 a gallon you'll be too busy worrying about food riots, as it'll take what was left of the economy and tell it to think about the rabbits as it gets a bullet, right in the back of the head. This kind of shit is why although i thought Palin was a moron "drill baby drill" was a good idea, because as it is a single choke point halfway across the world can throw us into a full blown depression which I think it will. Won't have to worry about carbon black when gas hits $8 a gallon, gotta worry about all the looting and riots when a jug of milk is $10 a gallon and all the poor can't afford to go work their crappy dead end jobs or even feed their kids.
Really hope it don't happen but look at the propaganda folks, its Iraq all over again. Somebody in the halls of power has a serious stiffie for a war with Iran, I'm personally betting its the neocon chickenhawks along with AIPAC, but frankly we have so many war mongers now who the fuck knows. Either way once gas hits $5 a gallon which they are already calling for by summer what's left of the economy is dead, at that price the poor that don't live in the megacities won't be able to afford to go to work, especially in the rural states as it'll cost them more in gas than they get paid. Not like you can take the bus in MS, AR, TN, hell there ain't none, not even taxis in most of those small towns, not that you'll be able to afford taxis when the gas gets that high.
Anybody remember the Evel Knievel pinball table? The first two tables i got to play on was this and the spirit of 76 table which is another great classic, my local hangout burger joint had both tables and i used to hang out there for hours drinking shakes and pounding quarters into the tables. Rest in peace pinball man, you filled many a childhood with great memories and there are very few that can say that.
You really should, as its got practically NO budget at all! Now you'd think that would be a bad thing but its actually a great thing because you don't waste time with bullshit like some Michael Bay flick would, showing him fighting some 300 style battles and crap. Its just a guy getting ready to move and over the course of this thing he talks about what its like to always have to abandon people, how he has literally buried hundreds of wives and kids to the point he leaves rather than face watching what he knows is coming...its just a damned good story.
Actually one of the few smart things they are doing with Win 8 is they are FINALLY gonna have services that start when they are called and stop when they are no longer needed, most likely because the sweaty monkey still thinks he can sell a WinPhone and WinTab so if you don't set any family settings the service won't actually be running so no worries there.
What IS a huge worry is how a company with THAT many engineers can't see the giant screaming FAIL in 50 foot letters! I mean first they tried to jam the Windows desktop metaphor onto phones, complete with teeny tiny start button even though its a completely different form factor and when that fails miserably what do they do? they go "Herp derp i know, we'll stick the Windows tablet UI on the desktop!" which shows that anyone with common sense has done left that company for Google> I mean HOW many desktops and laptops were sold with touch enabled screens this year? MAYBE.03% of the entire market? hell take out Kiosks and POS machines and that number is probably something like 0.001% of the world PC market. So what fucking moron thinks jamming a touch focused UI on something WITHOUT A TOUCHSCREEN is a brilliant idea? Anyone? Beuller?
The ONLY thing I can think of that makes sense is the engineers have frankly gotten sick of Ballmer's Apple fetish and bullshit and are letting him have everything he wants in the hopes he'll flame so badly that even being Bill's little buddy won't save his sweaty ass. I can imagine them going "Sure Mr Ballmer (snicker) having a cell phone UI on the desktop IS a brilliant idea (chokes back a laugh) and yes sir i bet this will finally make us a "cool and hip" company like Apple (rushes to hang up phone before they bust out laughing)". But hey, don't take my word for what a big heaping of fail Win 8 is, try it yourself for free! The Consumer preview is being released to the world at the end of the month, this is the "90% complete" version so what you see is what is gonna be crapped all over desktops and laptops this Oct...well until the OEMs have a screaming shitfit as their sales plummet and they demand downgrade rights to Win 7 like they did with Vista and XP.
To me though the sad part isn't win 8 being a giant failwhale because Win 7 is supported until 2020 and hopefully Ballmer will be shitcanned by then, no what is sad to me is first with Vista and now 100 times more powerful with the combo of Win 8, the death of XP, and everyone practically living on the net Linux has been given all these great gifts. its like the competition is giving them a 250 meter head start on the 300 meter dash and what does the devs do? Do they announce a distro with ten years of support and a rock solid foundation, built upon a "It works and will consistently continue to work" philosopy? Nope first they gut the entire soundsystem for an unstable mess and then if that didn't set them back far enough they trash the two biggest DEs for a buggy blingfest that set everything back a good 5+ years with regards to stability! Its like someone went back in time with the design of the iPad and tried to hand it to the Linux devs only to have them go " Naaaaah, we're betting it all on the Foleo baby!". So instead of just taking that huge lead and waltzing across the finish line so they can finally give us a true "third way" over apple and MSFT they promptly shoot themselves in the foot and then plop down in the middle of a field to write a script in long PHP codes that makes the CLI answer them with "You are so cool master"...sigh.
As much as I can't believe i'm agreeing with that linTroll Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols all these new UIs just suck, like REALLY hard. Its like all the devs of the world just lost their damned minds when iPhone came out and then lined up to horribly fuck up their offerings in the hopes they could somehow "capture the magic" of the iShiny. It reminds me of the old Python upper class twits bit, these devs probably couldn't even shoot themselves correctly.
Bimbo Newton Crosby this is about control, especially to the RIAA. The future is video channels on the web and tours booked for a percentage instead of the frankly assraping and "Hollywood Accounting" that the record companies have been pulling and this scares the crap out of them. My oldest and his college buddies never listen to the radio, its all tube channels and internet streaming which gives unsigned and unknowns the same chance as everyone else to be heard and this scares the living hell out of them. Ultimately the MAFIAA want to turn the net into the home shopping network so they can go back to being the gatekeepers of exclusive content but frankly even film making with Machinima is getting damned good.
Anybody see "Escape from city 17"? Frankly it was more exciting than the last 3 Hollywood boomfests IMHO and that was made on a shoestring budget. Hell one of the more interesting movies I've seen in awhile practically had a zero budget, wish i knew the name. maybe if I describe it somebody will chime in, it was about a party for a friend that was moving off and as the story progressed you found out the reason the guy was moving was because he was actually over 10,000 years old and had to leave before it got too obvious he didn't age.
this is what scares the MAFIAA, that they won't be able to leech off of artists anymore like how they are screwing many 70s artists like Cheap trick by giving them NOTHING for digital sales, basically saying since it didn't exist when they signed in the 70s tough shit, or how Meatloaf went bankrupt fighting the studios who cliamed Bat out Of Hell I, the album with the record for longest stay in the top 200, actually didn't make a dime. Living close to Memphis I've seen kids sign and hand over an album the studios DIDN'T PAY SHIT FOR only to have the album sell 300,000 copies and get handed a BILL by the studios for "promotion expenses". The sooner that whole cabal DIAF the better.
Personally I'd feel sorry for anybody that lives in a country so damned cold they brag "AC? bah! Just open the door and supercool your data center!....BTW has anybody seen my left nut? It fell off when that last gust from the north hit. Also i can't feel my fingers anymore so if one breaks off just hand it back okay?". Of course what do i know, i live in a state that is like a fricking jungle in the summers and here it is in late Feb and we just had an 80 degree day.
Why would it "ID" them when you can buy a prepaid card at Walmart with nothing but cash? I have a neighbor downstairs that calls himself Inga and puts down German barmaid just for the hell of it since all he uses is those cards, nobody cares dude. I bet with the kind that uses Rapidshare you'll find a lot of Krustys, some Forrest Gumps, and even some gimps.
And whose fault is that? look how many are happily willing to vote for old Mittens who is an admitted tax dodger simply because "We gotta get THAT guy" aka nigger, out the white house? How many vote without a second thought as to what that person stands for simply because of the letter that is besides their name? Sadly you reap what you sow and when more people can tell you who Snooki and the Kardashians are fucking than who their elected reps are what the fuck do you expect?
Oh and just FYI but this government has been pretty much in the bag since the end of WWII when the MIC saw the gravy train about to end. We haven't had 10 years of peace since before WWII and we haven't had 5 years of peace since the 80s. All so the MIC can make insane profits or so some corp can get bananas cheaper by having the USA install some dictator.
So don't think the past was all sunshine and roses, it was just easier to hide the corruption before CNN made everything televised.
The E-350 is 18w under load, hell the Phenom I E is a max 65w under load and idles less than 30w and we are talking about a machine that can transcode from any format to any format! nobody is talking about using some Pentium 4 space heater here dude, low power computing has never been cheaper. Here check this out its less than 30 minutes to put together, just pop a couple of screws and pop in the RAM and HDD and you are good to go, even has built in wireless and is only 18w max while doing 1080p. Hell there are plenty of videos on youTube of guys playing games on them! I know my netbook which is the same chip plays L4D and GTA:VC just fine.
About $199 for the E-350 and about 30 minutes since its already assembled so the only thing you have to do is pop in a RAM stick and attach a drive, two if you want to add a burner. Hell dude these things are so fricking simple just for shits and giggles i handed the youngest who had never built squat the instructions and he had it POSTing in under 30 minutes just by looking at the pictures and following the step by step.
and the big difference is unlike AppleTV where you are at the mercy of Apple who can drop support, suddenly raise prices for their services, or just tell you "Tough shit buy the new one" that $199 system will run year after year and can't have its plug pulled by anybody but you.
You are so close to where the true scariness is about this yet so far. What is truly scary is that with an obstruction charge you have now a situation where you have to prove a negative or get life without a trial! Is there a single file anywhere in your possession you no longer know the password for? All it takes is for some government goon to say "Give us the password" and when you say "I don't remember it" BAM, you get to rot because you have no way of "proving" what you actually do and don't remember.
Got a copy of truecrypt somewhere? Even if you don't have it installed some goon can walk up to a judge and say 'Here is a copy of truecrypt we found on one of his discs. Since this software is used to hide data we believe the suspect has used it to hide illegal activities" and then when you tell the judge 'I don't have a hidden volume" thanks to obstruction you can rot because again how do you "prove" what knowledge is or isn't in your brain? Hell I have NO doubt that I have encrypted files I don't know the passwords to simply because i've played with everything from.RAR's built in encryption to truecrypt to just about every thing ever highlighted on/. and since I was just throwing random crap like text and pictures in them before trying out password crackers so needless to say I didn't give a shit enough to write the codes down and since i have 3Tb worth of space I've not been the greatest at hunting for and deleting old crap.
In the end what makes this so scary is with this they have the perfect catch 22, either you produce some evidence they can stick you with or if you say you can't remember unless you can somehow PROVE that you don't remember, which as pointed out is pretty much impossible, well they can then throw you in a hole and forget where the key is. With crimes IRL they can simply go around you with you cooperating. They can cut open the safe, kick open the door, etc, but with this unless you are using some sort of government approved crypto where the state has a master key you are screwed.
This is why i think we all need to just look around and be amazed every once in awhile (no not at the porn, although I admit the new HD porn is quite impressive visually) at how far we have come. I was late getting into X86, with the VIC and Trash 80 lasting me most of the 80s so when I finally did get an X86 it was a whopping 60MHz Pentium with 8Mb of RAM, and hard drives were...what? 4200RPM? I remember them being slow as Xmas and more than a little prone to head crash and mine was a huge 200Mb. Graphics of course were 2D, I wouldn't be getting my first voodoo for another couple of years, and finally Internet was a 28k modem that frankly on a good night at 3AM you may get a quarter of that speed and had to run a background mouse program to keep the ISPs from kicking you off while you were trying to read.
Now I type this on a computer with 6 cores at 2600MHz, I've gone from 8Mb to 8Gb on the RAM front, hell my $50 GPU has more memory and faster clocks than my first four PCs combined and the thing has 3Tb of capacity and can even run every OS I used from 81 until today at the same time! And of course laptops then were these heavy power sucking "backpack busters" as we called them and frankly if you didn't have some serious money to spend good luck getting one. Now across from me is a dual core netbook that weighs 3 pounds and cost less than my VIC and maxing it out at 8Gb of RAM cost less than i paid for the floppy for my VIC.
So I think we should all stop and look around once in awhile at all we take for granted now because its truly amazing how fast and far we have come. Now even the machines I shitcan because they are simply too old are 10 times faster than my first X86, its truly amazing. Now most of us have crazy pipes that hardwire us instantly to the world, HD screens, surround sound, its just nuts how much we all have now.
That is why I prefer good old fashioned HTPCs and so do my customers. Want to make it a DVR? Add a $30 digital/analog tuner. OS? take your pick, plenty of HTPC software for both Windows and Linux so both work well. Want to make it a media library you can access all over the house? A big fat hard drive and wireless card. No worrying about not liking the surfing or getting locked out like GoogleTV, you can use any browser. Services? netflix, Hulu, hell a dozen channels free in Win 7 WMC as well, tons of choices there. Want to game? Add a cheap powerful graphics card like an HD4850 and you can play pretty much anything you want.
So I don't see why you'd want one of these things when HTPCs have frankly never been cheaper. if you are worried about power (I find if given the choice most will choose features over power though) then simply use an E-350 based board, they have a nice barebones case and all for less than $150 and it'll do 1080p over HDMI and accelerates pretty much any of the major formats. Personally though i like to use the Phenom I of all things, you can get an E series which is the low power chip for $60 for a quad which makes it a great little transcoder, slap it in a nice little VCR style case with a couple of 2Gb sticks and a Tb hard drive and you have a nice media center that'll do a hell of a lot more than any of these boxes. With these all it takes is the box being blacklisted or not being updated and as you said you end up with a useless black box, whereas an HTPC can be used for other things.
See this is what made me so sad about Xandros. if you ever tried it back in the day it was brilliant, in many roles it could out Windows Windows while still giving you Linux security. it played nice with AD and even supported login scripts like Windows, had crossover built in with most of the common apps already having presets that were frankly saner than Windows, it even could do in place upgrades without crapping on a single driver and even supported broadcom wireless!
But instead of seeing Xandros as a really great chance to get people that had "must have" apps or had to easily join domains off of Windows the "community" practically crapped itself and screamed 'ZOMFG they actually signed deals with teh evil M$ KILL IT WITH FIRE!' and pretty effectively boycotted it. Now its dead, its last update in 2009 and Asus doesn't even sell it with a EEE netbook anymore, the community promptly shot themselves in the foot and then sat down in the middle of the race track to write a bash script that put "M$ Suxorz!" all over the screen in long PHP codes.
And it is THIS that will ultimately doom FOSS to a teeny tiny niche, the zealots and the "freetards" that treat it as a religion instead of an OS and programs. Hell you hang out on LinuxInsider, next time you are there look at everything Pogson writes as he is a perfect example. When i pointed out a need for simpler GUIs he asked, I swear, "How will you write "for" loops with a GUI" because I swear the nut actually thought the average person write for loops. Its like the "FOSSies" as I call them, not the rational FOSS users like you, but the crazies like Pogson that have taken over (BTW look and see how he NEVER writes the word Microsoft or even MS, classic Voldemort syndrome) and they refuse to accept that the average consumer is NOT LIKE THEM and has no desire to learn their fiddly ways. they think, again i swear one of them told me this, if "users would just embrace the POWER of CLI" (isn't that cute, they think CLI is the force!) that all would be happiness and puppies. they simply can't see that for Suzy the checkout girl you might as well have tried to hand them DOS. They don't care how poweful it is, because they don't need that damned power, they just need it working and easy.
But thanks for the links, it just proves what I've been saying all along, FOSS simply doesn't work for all use cases and desktops are one of them. MSFT spent something like 300 million on Win 7, Apple regularly spends north of a hundred million on OSX, without at least an equal amount spent Linux will be just as you say, stuck. Oh and you mark my words, Win 8 HP at $50. They tested the waters with this with the presale on Win 7, I paid $50 for the HP I'm typing this on and I was able to switch my entire family to Win 7, all 6 computers, with 2 family packs for $200. Ballmer wants Win 8 to sell bad enough I'm betting you'll see Win 8 HP at $50 and Win 8 family pack at $100 and at that price XP will die quick. Hell I wouldn't even be surprised if they cut the OEMs a break for the first year just so they can lower the prices on laptops and desktops to get as many XP boxes replaced as they can. MSFT knows it make or break on their mobile plans with win 8 and Ballmer is sitting on enough cash he can afford to sell it cheap for at least a year or until it overtakes XP, whichever comes first. Personally while I'll try it I think I'm gonna stick with Win 7, hell if it ain't broke?
And when a couple of the distro heads get thrown in PMITA prison how will you feel about patents then? They WILL add DRM to H.264 because no way in hell they are letting netflix broadcast in the clear and once they do that, no matter how trivial and lame the crypto is, that's DMCA and that's a $300,000 fine or 3 years in jail PER INFRINGEMENT.
What you are gonna end up with is Google TiVoing Android "For security reasons and to protect the app market" and nobody will be able to distribute a version of linux that can play shit in any country that has signed Berne which is pretty much the entire west . Dude why do you think Google has done backflips to keep GPL V3 out of Android? Because they can see the writing on the wall and once they got a look at the code for WebM I'm sure they realized it infringes up the wazoo which is why they won't back anybody that uses it.
Mark my words friend you reap what you sow and the FOSS community is gonna get a big dose of "be careful what you wish for" because you are gonna hand the web to the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT, and all three will lock the living hell out of it. BTW they are already working on H.265 which has even MORE patents than the last one so good luck thinking you can wait until the patents expire because by then the big three will just move to the next one. mark my words when the ONLY things you can enjoy web media on are approved devices and OSes you'll look back on flash with fondness, because at least you could distribute it without risking someone kicking down your door in a raid.
Bah! I'd strap on my 5 string and cut heads with ya! Old Gene may THINK he's the God of Thunder but there is only one lord of the wasteland and that is the guy typing this post baby, yeah! if I haven't lost a couple of pounds of sweat and a half a pint of blood on the strings then its just not a good night, hell i even take a 50 footer and hop down there in the front and dance with the teen babes. of course i'm gonna end up having to get a wireless because my little Cherokee princess is none too happy when she sees me bopping with some 19 year old, but you sometimes just gotta take the pain with the pleasure ya know?
Dude WTF do you think the guys that are NOT sacked are gonna do? I'll tell ya what, they are gonna crank out as many papers as possible, shitty or not. Its not the ones that get sacked that crank out the poo, its those scared for their jobs that just seen old Bill which had been there 20 years get sacked.
Dude are you stoned? And are the mods smoking the good stuff too? Geez these kids today don't remember their history! For those that obviously have forgotten THIS is the kind of crap we USED to have. notice how its got 50 damned keyboard commands? Well guess what? they were ALL different on EVERY program! We used to have fricking cheat sheets taped up all over the damned place just to keep up with the crap!
You may not like MS Office, hell i personally hate that damned ribbon and kill that thing right off the bat, but whether you like them or not they have come a loooong way from the old days dude. Oh and while we old farts hate that damned ribbon my oldest started college and for the first time had to really use office with the school provided 2K10 and frankly he kicks a hell of a lot more ass on that thing than I do with the menus. for someone who has never used Office before that thing is uberfast and intuitive, we old farts just learned the positions. But while my docs are boring Times New Roman blandness he and his friends make docs that look as nice as books in the same time it takes me to remember where the sub menu I want is.
I agree he should have used stalking which is a better analogy. if I followed you all over town, writing down all that you did, and even trying to look at what you are buying in the stores i'd be busted for stalking and rightly so. So what makes it okay because the words "On the Internet" are added? Because its some fortune 50 company? does that make it okay?
In the end the whole thing is bullshit. if Moz or anybody else at first run explained what the choice was and let the user choose? then THAT is the user making a decision about tracking but then folks might actually care about being stalked so instead they hide it under options and lie their asses off. you tell me the choice to import favorites from IE is more important than whether or not every move i make is tracked? Does that make ANY sense people?
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Sorry friend but given the choice I'd take AM3 over Liano, AMD really screwed the pooch with those chips. Why? One word...sockets. I'm afraid you are screwed when it comes to the socket friend, AM3+ is getting exactly ONE more chip before they pull the plug, and they have already announced Bulldozer will be an FM2 chip NOT and FM1 and the two sockets aren't backwards compatible.
Frankly Intel couldn't ask for a better competitor as AMD has really been shooting themselves right in the face, no need for Intel to do or say shit. First they kill AM3 which not only had the budget and "bang for the buck" demographics tied up but could have been served by a single chip, just take a single 95w Thuban, any that have bad cores you make a Phenom II X4 or X3, any that have bad cache you make an Athlon X4 or X3 and voila! 100% yields and no waste. Instead they toss it for chips that are 40% more expensive while being nearly that big a difference in performance the WRONG way, with the Thuban and Zosma often stomping the crap out of the A series and BD, and their prices are too close to Intel on both the A series and FX to make them worth buying, its a total clusterfuck.
So honestly friend the E-series is the only current chip from AMD I'd touch right now, hell Tiger has been selling Thuban X6 chips for $99 and it stomps a mudhole in the asses of both the A series and FX while having both cheaper boards and more choices on boards. BTW you want cheap chips, be it Intel or AMD, you ought to check out Starmicro whom I've been buying from for a couple of years. Great service and plenty of choices, their $60 Phenom I X4 e chips make great HTPCs, low power and real transcoding monsters.
Exactly, most of my customers simply made do with what they had until the price lowered like the one i just installed where the guy was simply tossing files off his 1Tb until the price hit $100 for a Tb again which is when he had me grab him another Tb to install. I'm just lucky that for once in my life i actually got in when prices were low thanks to Samsung being bought out. I've always preferred the Samsung EcoDrives because of the lower heat and rugged construction so when Newegg dropped the price to $35 for a 1Tb and $59 for a 2Tb i bought them up, ended up making a pretty penny as well as letting some of my preferred customers get drives at a decent price while everyone else was hurting and still managed to keep 6Tb for myself.
What to me is more telling is how quickly Newegg and Tiger dropped SSDs for HDDs in their barebone kits. I wonder if they got bit in the ass by the hot/crazy scale of SSDs and the return rates made it not worth including them because it seemed like it was barely 2 months that both were using SSDs in their kits before switching to Seagate 500gb HDDs instead. You'd think the increased performance and the lower than HDD prices would have made them hang onto the SSDs longer but if its like what I've seen and what many of my fellow system builders have told me the SSDs still have too high a failure rate for the masses. after all with HDDs being high Joe Blow wasn't buying any externals for backups and talking to other builders you pretty much have to constantly back up the SSDs in case you wake up one morning to find its crapped itself and died. I know my gamer customers bought top o' the line SSDs only to have the drives fail in less than a year and a half so they went back to raptors in RAID over dealing with worrying if the machine will fire today or not.
I'd give Pogson a break Barbara if he was just a zealot, but Voldemort syndrome? there is NO excuse for that. Voldemort syndrome actually makes FOSS users look like a bunch of tinfoil hatters and makes it the punchline of jokes. I mean would it REALLY cause the end of civilization if he wrote MSFT or even MS? but not once, not once has he been able to write anything but "M$" or "The OTHER OS" like they are listening to his thoughts through the walls. the LAST thing FOSS needs is another Twitter.
And while I would like to think there would be room for a proprietary Linux frankly the "free as in beer" tards would have such a damned screaming shitfit it would never happen. i mean what was Xandros' crimes? it signed a deal that would give it access to the Exchange and Sharepoint protocols along with access to MSFT tech like AD and GPO backend protocols, that's it. And anyone with a brain would know that for a business OS having the ability to use Exchange and AD is pretty much a must have. Instead the community destroyed what as your friend found out was the only really sanely designed linux I had ever seen, it all "just worked" without "pulling a Gnome" and restricting the user. you had full CLI,could run apt-get and use any app, it just had sane defaults so you didn't need to if you didn't want to. it even had on first startup a "behavior" choice which would make the OS respond to Windows,Mac, or Linux conventions when it came to things like right click so it was simple to convert users. I used to have a Xandros laptop I'd hand to a client to use while i worked on site, just so the person whose machine I was fixing wouldn't be completely down for the day ya know? i had not once needed to spend a single minute teaching them "The Linux way' because it all "just worked". it would detect the AD, ask for a login, plug it into an AD network and it would be up and running faster than XP.
And I agree that Grub and most of the underpinnings have frankly gotten just dumb, what these guys are cooking up is frankly more of a hindrance than a help. And again the fundamental problem is how to pay for the work? How do you pay for the focus groups and QA and regression testing required to bring everything up to a point that while the home user can run it the power user and admins don't feel hamstringed? I truly believe Canonical is gonna be the final straw, after they close their doors any thought of Linux having a prayer on the desktop will be finally dead, well except for pogson whom I'm sure will think "Its a vast conspiracy to keep GNU away from the masses!" while ignoring in the end its the busted shitter problem, in the end the shitty jobs just don't get done. Vista was a pig so the users didn't buy, MSFT got the feedback and built Win 7 which runs great even on netbooks. there just isn't that kind of positive feedback in F/LOSS. I mean how do you tell a dev working for free 'What you are doing isn't helping, it doesn't follow the GUI conventions, its got too many bugs, and it relies too much on CLI and its help files are poorly written"? Answer you don't, they say "take it or leave it" which is why you end up with a shit sandwich, because the devs say 'hey you want a free sandwich?" and when you say yes hand you a turd on bread and say 'No complaining now, because its free". Well a shit sandwich is still shit, like Joe Rogan said "If someone hand you a sandwich that is 95% shit and 5% ham, would you call it a ham sandwich?".
In the end users don't care WHY it don't work, all they care about is their wireless is broke, or their sound is now static, or their GUI doesn't have the options they require. Hell even Nichols admits the new GUIs are shit, and I NEVER thought he'd have a bad word to say about F/LOSS. But you have yourself a great weekend Barbara.
Bass, Got a beautiful swamp ash Squire pro tone, the model that actually made them cancel the entire pro tone series because it was eating into the Fender sales. Man they don't make 'em like that anymore, heavy as hell but the wood is just soooo damned sweet, I hit a low note through that Trace Elliot (One of the last ones while they were still made by Brits) and the tone....man. I cut heads once against a guy with a Fender P-Bass through an actual Ampeg all tube 8x10 stack and the next night his band was due to open for mine and I see him reach into his trunk..and pull out an exact duplicate on MY amp. He even went out and bought the Zoom pedal i was using. I said "Hey WTF happened to the Ampeg?" and he said "Shit, you stomped all over my amp on tone, clarity AND volume so i swapped it out this morning, nice huh?" I just rolled my eyes and said "Just don't try taking my 5 string too" and he laughed and said, "Sorry to say they were sold out, I'll have to live with the 4 string".
And you think a Slav has temper? you never met a Cherokee princess before, fiery temper is an understatement of the century! The day she met my mother some gay guy had seen me play at the club the night before and had slipped a note under my door, here she is, first time she has ever got to meet my mother, and she is ranting on the cell phone "Damned right he's hot and HE IS MINE BITCH BACK THE FUCK OFF OR I WILL STOMP YOUR ASS!!!" and all I could do was say "Mom meet my GF Brenda". Hell some gal hopped on the band FB page and was being flirty and it was like a comedy routine "Oh ur so cute" "Yes he is and he's MINE BITCH" "U can do better than her, u should ban her from your page" "Do you want me to come down there and KICK UR ASS SLUT?" back and forth. needless to say the band and my two teen boys were sitting there laughing their asses off while I just sat there totally facepalmed. Ain't nothin more fiery than a Cherokee dude, when people start talking Spanish at her because she is dark enough to pass for Mexican she says "me no Mexican, me Indian, me kind scalp your kind" and waltzes off while they stand there gaping.
But what can you do right? As I have said many times "The wise man knows when to STFU, the stupid man sleeps on the couch" and i'm happy to report i have NEVER had to sleep on the couch.
Uhhh...dude? Don't really know squat about chips do you? Its okay bud, let your old pal hairyfeet break it down. you see the E-350 is what is called an "APU" which has BOTH CPU AND GPU built in, so that 18w under load and less than 8w idle is for BOTH CHIPS. You get a Radeon HD6310 AND a Bobcat dual core for that wattage dude. I had a friend that actually ran Kill-A-Watt on his VCR style I made, its 32w under load and right at 12w idle. Hell I had him try the Phenom I based one and it was 94W under load and was idling at around 48w, and that is for a quad core transcoding powerhouse and included an HD5450 GPU discrete.
And the Roku is a moped dude, sure its cheap on gas but what can you actually DO with it? Can you transcode? you can with the E-350. How about use any browser you want? Any chat client? can it download? Stream to other boxes in the home? be a jukebox? Run a choice of OSes? How about support, can you promise it'll will be supported with updates until 2020? Check your email? Play video games other than Angry Birds? Hell I've even used my E-350 as a music production studio with Audacity and hydrogen.
Check out the E-350 man, its got all the features you could want in an HTPC and sips power, quiet as a churchmouse and low enough wattage it can be passively cooled. Then if you want more power the Phenom I E series is $60 for a quad at starmicro and those babies are multitasking monsters, i have a client that often transcodes on his while listening to music and surfing the web, can your Roku do that?
Actually it IS that bad a gamble because they were FINALLY getting businesses to start replacing XP boxes for Win 7, what do you think is gonna happen when they see that failwhale bling bling consumer oriented crap? they are gonna go "How many months does XP have left? Yeah lets wait because that sucks". That is the whole point behind having 10 years of support, they should have stuck with a 5 year release model as that gave businesses time to test and rollout. at 3 years that is simply too soon for some 10,000 seat corp to get all their apps tested and deployed.
As for consumers so far i have showed the dev preview to over 200 average folks, your Suzy the checkout girl and Brian the backhoe operator types and you know what i found? they HATE it, not just dislike but hate it with a passion! The closest i got to an "endorsement" was this exchange..."My, that's a pretty looking cell phone screen, is that Android? I heard that its nice...what do you mean Windows? Windows what? Well that's just stupid! Why would I want a cell phone on my computer?" and from Ms Pipkin comes wisdom. Everyone can see that's not built for desktops, its a cell phone! It looks like a cell phone, acts like a cell phone, hell even the product shill for yahoo whose answer to everything is "Buy it! Buy it now! you should really buy it!" said this of Windows 8 "Uhhh..you should wait until you get something with a touchscreen before switching" which for that shill might as well be "My eyes! The goggles they do nothing!".
Mark my words, Win 8 is gonna make Vista look like Win95, hell it may even put the WinME and MS Bob jokes to rest. the ONLY way I can see it not bombing is if they sell it to consumers at $50 a copy and OEMs for less than $25, and they give the OEMs and consumers a ballot screen that lets them choose UI on first run so the ones that don't have tablets (99.9998% of those that will be running this turkey) can pick the "Get the fuck out of here metro" button and just have Win 7 with a square start button. never underestimate the comfort zone of the consumer, you change too much too fast and you WILL get a backlash. But again don't take my word for it, you have a dual core or better, right? Consumer preview is free for all on Feb 29th, so fire up a VM and give it a run. I've tried the first one and frankly the level of fail is beyond scary and into 'WTF are they thinking?" territory.
Actually there shouldn't be any, well if EITHER side had a brain which I'm starting to doubt. this is actually fixable, we simply need a better filter on the exhaust. Of course that is gonna take time and money to make but we managed to get lead out the gas i'm sure we can get carbon black out too.
But for those for AGW you are about to get a big dose of "be careful what you wish for" as it looks like before the election President....ya know, I want to say Dumbass but that ain't really fair to Bush, I mean Bush was a frat party boy dumbass but at least you got the feeling he believed what he said, even if it was something incredibly stupid. Obama is just plain evil, the kind of slimy backstabbing "When I'm not kissing babies I'm stealing their lollipops" politician. Anyway it looks like all the bribes AIPAC has thrown at Dear Leader is gonna pay off before the election by dragging us into a war with Iran, which..what does that make? Is it 4 or 5 wars in as many years? I swear at this rate we are gonna beat Hitler on number of fronts at the same time. And no that's not a Godwin since nobody is being called a Nazi, its simply comparing how many wars you can fight at the same time.
Well when that happens folks you won't have to worry about AGW anymore because when gas hits $8 a gallon you'll be too busy worrying about food riots, as it'll take what was left of the economy and tell it to think about the rabbits as it gets a bullet, right in the back of the head. This kind of shit is why although i thought Palin was a moron "drill baby drill" was a good idea, because as it is a single choke point halfway across the world can throw us into a full blown depression which I think it will. Won't have to worry about carbon black when gas hits $8 a gallon, gotta worry about all the looting and riots when a jug of milk is $10 a gallon and all the poor can't afford to go work their crappy dead end jobs or even feed their kids.
Really hope it don't happen but look at the propaganda folks, its Iraq all over again. Somebody in the halls of power has a serious stiffie for a war with Iran, I'm personally betting its the neocon chickenhawks along with AIPAC, but frankly we have so many war mongers now who the fuck knows. Either way once gas hits $5 a gallon which they are already calling for by summer what's left of the economy is dead, at that price the poor that don't live in the megacities won't be able to afford to go to work, especially in the rural states as it'll cost them more in gas than they get paid. Not like you can take the bus in MS, AR, TN, hell there ain't none, not even taxis in most of those small towns, not that you'll be able to afford taxis when the gas gets that high.
Anybody remember the Evel Knievel pinball table? The first two tables i got to play on was this and the spirit of 76 table which is another great classic, my local hangout burger joint had both tables and i used to hang out there for hours drinking shakes and pounding quarters into the tables. Rest in peace pinball man, you filled many a childhood with great memories and there are very few that can say that.
You really should, as its got practically NO budget at all! Now you'd think that would be a bad thing but its actually a great thing because you don't waste time with bullshit like some Michael Bay flick would, showing him fighting some 300 style battles and crap. Its just a guy getting ready to move and over the course of this thing he talks about what its like to always have to abandon people, how he has literally buried hundreds of wives and kids to the point he leaves rather than face watching what he knows is coming...its just a damned good story.
Actually one of the few smart things they are doing with Win 8 is they are FINALLY gonna have services that start when they are called and stop when they are no longer needed, most likely because the sweaty monkey still thinks he can sell a WinPhone and WinTab so if you don't set any family settings the service won't actually be running so no worries there.
What IS a huge worry is how a company with THAT many engineers can't see the giant screaming FAIL in 50 foot letters! I mean first they tried to jam the Windows desktop metaphor onto phones, complete with teeny tiny start button even though its a completely different form factor and when that fails miserably what do they do? they go "Herp derp i know, we'll stick the Windows tablet UI on the desktop!" which shows that anyone with common sense has done left that company for Google> I mean HOW many desktops and laptops were sold with touch enabled screens this year? MAYBE .03% of the entire market? hell take out Kiosks and POS machines and that number is probably something like 0.001% of the world PC market. So what fucking moron thinks jamming a touch focused UI on something WITHOUT A TOUCHSCREEN is a brilliant idea? Anyone? Beuller?
The ONLY thing I can think of that makes sense is the engineers have frankly gotten sick of Ballmer's Apple fetish and bullshit and are letting him have everything he wants in the hopes he'll flame so badly that even being Bill's little buddy won't save his sweaty ass. I can imagine them going "Sure Mr Ballmer (snicker) having a cell phone UI on the desktop IS a brilliant idea (chokes back a laugh) and yes sir i bet this will finally make us a "cool and hip" company like Apple (rushes to hang up phone before they bust out laughing)". But hey, don't take my word for what a big heaping of fail Win 8 is, try it yourself for free! The Consumer preview is being released to the world at the end of the month, this is the "90% complete" version so what you see is what is gonna be crapped all over desktops and laptops this Oct...well until the OEMs have a screaming shitfit as their sales plummet and they demand downgrade rights to Win 7 like they did with Vista and XP.
To me though the sad part isn't win 8 being a giant failwhale because Win 7 is supported until 2020 and hopefully Ballmer will be shitcanned by then, no what is sad to me is first with Vista and now 100 times more powerful with the combo of Win 8, the death of XP, and everyone practically living on the net Linux has been given all these great gifts. its like the competition is giving them a 250 meter head start on the 300 meter dash and what does the devs do? Do they announce a distro with ten years of support and a rock solid foundation, built upon a "It works and will consistently continue to work" philosopy? Nope first they gut the entire soundsystem for an unstable mess and then if that didn't set them back far enough they trash the two biggest DEs for a buggy blingfest that set everything back a good 5+ years with regards to stability! Its like someone went back in time with the design of the iPad and tried to hand it to the Linux devs only to have them go " Naaaaah, we're betting it all on the Foleo baby!". So instead of just taking that huge lead and waltzing across the finish line so they can finally give us a true "third way" over apple and MSFT they promptly shoot themselves in the foot and then plop down in the middle of a field to write a script in long PHP codes that makes the CLI answer them with "You are so cool master"...sigh.
As much as I can't believe i'm agreeing with that linTroll Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols all these new UIs just suck, like REALLY hard. Its like all the devs of the world just lost their damned minds when iPhone came out and then lined up to horribly fuck up their offerings in the hopes they could somehow "capture the magic" of the iShiny. It reminds me of the old Python upper class twits bit, these devs probably couldn't even shoot themselves correctly.
Bimbo Newton Crosby this is about control, especially to the RIAA. The future is video channels on the web and tours booked for a percentage instead of the frankly assraping and "Hollywood Accounting" that the record companies have been pulling and this scares the crap out of them. My oldest and his college buddies never listen to the radio, its all tube channels and internet streaming which gives unsigned and unknowns the same chance as everyone else to be heard and this scares the living hell out of them. Ultimately the MAFIAA want to turn the net into the home shopping network so they can go back to being the gatekeepers of exclusive content but frankly even film making with Machinima is getting damned good.
Anybody see "Escape from city 17"? Frankly it was more exciting than the last 3 Hollywood boomfests IMHO and that was made on a shoestring budget. Hell one of the more interesting movies I've seen in awhile practically had a zero budget, wish i knew the name. maybe if I describe it somebody will chime in, it was about a party for a friend that was moving off and as the story progressed you found out the reason the guy was moving was because he was actually over 10,000 years old and had to leave before it got too obvious he didn't age.
this is what scares the MAFIAA, that they won't be able to leech off of artists anymore like how they are screwing many 70s artists like Cheap trick by giving them NOTHING for digital sales, basically saying since it didn't exist when they signed in the 70s tough shit, or how Meatloaf went bankrupt fighting the studios who cliamed Bat out Of Hell I, the album with the record for longest stay in the top 200, actually didn't make a dime. Living close to Memphis I've seen kids sign and hand over an album the studios DIDN'T PAY SHIT FOR only to have the album sell 300,000 copies and get handed a BILL by the studios for "promotion expenses". The sooner that whole cabal DIAF the better.
Personally I'd feel sorry for anybody that lives in a country so damned cold they brag "AC? bah! Just open the door and supercool your data center!....BTW has anybody seen my left nut? It fell off when that last gust from the north hit. Also i can't feel my fingers anymore so if one breaks off just hand it back okay?". Of course what do i know, i live in a state that is like a fricking jungle in the summers and here it is in late Feb and we just had an 80 degree day.
Why would it "ID" them when you can buy a prepaid card at Walmart with nothing but cash? I have a neighbor downstairs that calls himself Inga and puts down German barmaid just for the hell of it since all he uses is those cards, nobody cares dude. I bet with the kind that uses Rapidshare you'll find a lot of Krustys, some Forrest Gumps, and even some gimps.
And whose fault is that? look how many are happily willing to vote for old Mittens who is an admitted tax dodger simply because "We gotta get THAT guy" aka nigger, out the white house? How many vote without a second thought as to what that person stands for simply because of the letter that is besides their name? Sadly you reap what you sow and when more people can tell you who Snooki and the Kardashians are fucking than who their elected reps are what the fuck do you expect?
Oh and just FYI but this government has been pretty much in the bag since the end of WWII when the MIC saw the gravy train about to end. We haven't had 10 years of peace since before WWII and we haven't had 5 years of peace since the 80s. All so the MIC can make insane profits or so some corp can get bananas cheaper by having the USA install some dictator.
So don't think the past was all sunshine and roses, it was just easier to hide the corruption before CNN made everything televised.
The E-350 is 18w under load, hell the Phenom I E is a max 65w under load and idles less than 30w and we are talking about a machine that can transcode from any format to any format! nobody is talking about using some Pentium 4 space heater here dude, low power computing has never been cheaper. Here check this out its less than 30 minutes to put together, just pop a couple of screws and pop in the RAM and HDD and you are good to go, even has built in wireless and is only 18w max while doing 1080p. Hell there are plenty of videos on youTube of guys playing games on them! I know my netbook which is the same chip plays L4D and GTA:VC just fine.
About $199 for the E-350 and about 30 minutes since its already assembled so the only thing you have to do is pop in a RAM stick and attach a drive, two if you want to add a burner. Hell dude these things are so fricking simple just for shits and giggles i handed the youngest who had never built squat the instructions and he had it POSTing in under 30 minutes just by looking at the pictures and following the step by step.
and the big difference is unlike AppleTV where you are at the mercy of Apple who can drop support, suddenly raise prices for their services, or just tell you "Tough shit buy the new one" that $199 system will run year after year and can't have its plug pulled by anybody but you.
You are so close to where the true scariness is about this yet so far. What is truly scary is that with an obstruction charge you have now a situation where you have to prove a negative or get life without a trial! Is there a single file anywhere in your possession you no longer know the password for? All it takes is for some government goon to say "Give us the password" and when you say "I don't remember it" BAM, you get to rot because you have no way of "proving" what you actually do and don't remember.
Got a copy of truecrypt somewhere? Even if you don't have it installed some goon can walk up to a judge and say 'Here is a copy of truecrypt we found on one of his discs. Since this software is used to hide data we believe the suspect has used it to hide illegal activities" and then when you tell the judge 'I don't have a hidden volume" thanks to obstruction you can rot because again how do you "prove" what knowledge is or isn't in your brain? Hell I have NO doubt that I have encrypted files I don't know the passwords to simply because i've played with everything from .RAR's built in encryption to truecrypt to just about every thing ever highlighted on /. and since I was just throwing random crap like text and pictures in them before trying out password crackers so needless to say I didn't give a shit enough to write the codes down and since i have 3Tb worth of space I've not been the greatest at hunting for and deleting old crap.
In the end what makes this so scary is with this they have the perfect catch 22, either you produce some evidence they can stick you with or if you say you can't remember unless you can somehow PROVE that you don't remember, which as pointed out is pretty much impossible, well they can then throw you in a hole and forget where the key is. With crimes IRL they can simply go around you with you cooperating. They can cut open the safe, kick open the door, etc, but with this unless you are using some sort of government approved crypto where the state has a master key you are screwed.
This is why i think we all need to just look around and be amazed every once in awhile (no not at the porn, although I admit the new HD porn is quite impressive visually) at how far we have come. I was late getting into X86, with the VIC and Trash 80 lasting me most of the 80s so when I finally did get an X86 it was a whopping 60MHz Pentium with 8Mb of RAM, and hard drives were...what? 4200RPM? I remember them being slow as Xmas and more than a little prone to head crash and mine was a huge 200Mb. Graphics of course were 2D, I wouldn't be getting my first voodoo for another couple of years, and finally Internet was a 28k modem that frankly on a good night at 3AM you may get a quarter of that speed and had to run a background mouse program to keep the ISPs from kicking you off while you were trying to read.
Now I type this on a computer with 6 cores at 2600MHz, I've gone from 8Mb to 8Gb on the RAM front, hell my $50 GPU has more memory and faster clocks than my first four PCs combined and the thing has 3Tb of capacity and can even run every OS I used from 81 until today at the same time! And of course laptops then were these heavy power sucking "backpack busters" as we called them and frankly if you didn't have some serious money to spend good luck getting one. Now across from me is a dual core netbook that weighs 3 pounds and cost less than my VIC and maxing it out at 8Gb of RAM cost less than i paid for the floppy for my VIC.
So I think we should all stop and look around once in awhile at all we take for granted now because its truly amazing how fast and far we have come. Now even the machines I shitcan because they are simply too old are 10 times faster than my first X86, its truly amazing. Now most of us have crazy pipes that hardwire us instantly to the world, HD screens, surround sound, its just nuts how much we all have now.
That is why I prefer good old fashioned HTPCs and so do my customers. Want to make it a DVR? Add a $30 digital/analog tuner. OS? take your pick, plenty of HTPC software for both Windows and Linux so both work well. Want to make it a media library you can access all over the house? A big fat hard drive and wireless card. No worrying about not liking the surfing or getting locked out like GoogleTV, you can use any browser. Services? netflix, Hulu, hell a dozen channels free in Win 7 WMC as well, tons of choices there. Want to game? Add a cheap powerful graphics card like an HD4850 and you can play pretty much anything you want.
So I don't see why you'd want one of these things when HTPCs have frankly never been cheaper. if you are worried about power (I find if given the choice most will choose features over power though) then simply use an E-350 based board, they have a nice barebones case and all for less than $150 and it'll do 1080p over HDMI and accelerates pretty much any of the major formats. Personally though i like to use the Phenom I of all things, you can get an E series which is the low power chip for $60 for a quad which makes it a great little transcoder, slap it in a nice little VCR style case with a couple of 2Gb sticks and a Tb hard drive and you have a nice media center that'll do a hell of a lot more than any of these boxes. With these all it takes is the box being blacklisted or not being updated and as you said you end up with a useless black box, whereas an HTPC can be used for other things.
See this is what made me so sad about Xandros. if you ever tried it back in the day it was brilliant, in many roles it could out Windows Windows while still giving you Linux security. it played nice with AD and even supported login scripts like Windows, had crossover built in with most of the common apps already having presets that were frankly saner than Windows, it even could do in place upgrades without crapping on a single driver and even supported broadcom wireless!
But instead of seeing Xandros as a really great chance to get people that had "must have" apps or had to easily join domains off of Windows the "community" practically crapped itself and screamed 'ZOMFG they actually signed deals with teh evil M$ KILL IT WITH FIRE!' and pretty effectively boycotted it. Now its dead, its last update in 2009 and Asus doesn't even sell it with a EEE netbook anymore, the community promptly shot themselves in the foot and then sat down in the middle of the race track to write a bash script that put "M$ Suxorz!" all over the screen in long PHP codes.
And it is THIS that will ultimately doom FOSS to a teeny tiny niche, the zealots and the "freetards" that treat it as a religion instead of an OS and programs. Hell you hang out on LinuxInsider, next time you are there look at everything Pogson writes as he is a perfect example. When i pointed out a need for simpler GUIs he asked, I swear, "How will you write "for" loops with a GUI" because I swear the nut actually thought the average person write for loops. Its like the "FOSSies" as I call them, not the rational FOSS users like you, but the crazies like Pogson that have taken over (BTW look and see how he NEVER writes the word Microsoft or even MS, classic Voldemort syndrome) and they refuse to accept that the average consumer is NOT LIKE THEM and has no desire to learn their fiddly ways. they think, again i swear one of them told me this, if "users would just embrace the POWER of CLI" (isn't that cute, they think CLI is the force!) that all would be happiness and puppies. they simply can't see that for Suzy the checkout girl you might as well have tried to hand them DOS. They don't care how poweful it is, because they don't need that damned power, they just need it working and easy.
But thanks for the links, it just proves what I've been saying all along, FOSS simply doesn't work for all use cases and desktops are one of them. MSFT spent something like 300 million on Win 7, Apple regularly spends north of a hundred million on OSX, without at least an equal amount spent Linux will be just as you say, stuck. Oh and you mark my words, Win 8 HP at $50. They tested the waters with this with the presale on Win 7, I paid $50 for the HP I'm typing this on and I was able to switch my entire family to Win 7, all 6 computers, with 2 family packs for $200. Ballmer wants Win 8 to sell bad enough I'm betting you'll see Win 8 HP at $50 and Win 8 family pack at $100 and at that price XP will die quick. Hell I wouldn't even be surprised if they cut the OEMs a break for the first year just so they can lower the prices on laptops and desktops to get as many XP boxes replaced as they can. MSFT knows it make or break on their mobile plans with win 8 and Ballmer is sitting on enough cash he can afford to sell it cheap for at least a year or until it overtakes XP, whichever comes first. Personally while I'll try it I think I'm gonna stick with Win 7, hell if it ain't broke?
And when a couple of the distro heads get thrown in PMITA prison how will you feel about patents then? They WILL add DRM to H.264 because no way in hell they are letting netflix broadcast in the clear and once they do that, no matter how trivial and lame the crypto is, that's DMCA and that's a $300,000 fine or 3 years in jail PER INFRINGEMENT.
What you are gonna end up with is Google TiVoing Android "For security reasons and to protect the app market" and nobody will be able to distribute a version of linux that can play shit in any country that has signed Berne which is pretty much the entire west . Dude why do you think Google has done backflips to keep GPL V3 out of Android? Because they can see the writing on the wall and once they got a look at the code for WebM I'm sure they realized it infringes up the wazoo which is why they won't back anybody that uses it.
Mark my words friend you reap what you sow and the FOSS community is gonna get a big dose of "be careful what you wish for" because you are gonna hand the web to the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT, and all three will lock the living hell out of it. BTW they are already working on H.265 which has even MORE patents than the last one so good luck thinking you can wait until the patents expire because by then the big three will just move to the next one. mark my words when the ONLY things you can enjoy web media on are approved devices and OSes you'll look back on flash with fondness, because at least you could distribute it without risking someone kicking down your door in a raid.
Bah! I'd strap on my 5 string and cut heads with ya! Old Gene may THINK he's the God of Thunder but there is only one lord of the wasteland and that is the guy typing this post baby, yeah! if I haven't lost a couple of pounds of sweat and a half a pint of blood on the strings then its just not a good night, hell i even take a 50 footer and hop down there in the front and dance with the teen babes. of course i'm gonna end up having to get a wireless because my little Cherokee princess is none too happy when she sees me bopping with some 19 year old, but you sometimes just gotta take the pain with the pleasure ya know?
Dude WTF do you think the guys that are NOT sacked are gonna do? I'll tell ya what, they are gonna crank out as many papers as possible, shitty or not. Its not the ones that get sacked that crank out the poo, its those scared for their jobs that just seen old Bill which had been there 20 years get sacked.
Dude are you stoned? And are the mods smoking the good stuff too? Geez these kids today don't remember their history! For those that obviously have forgotten THIS is the kind of crap we USED to have. notice how its got 50 damned keyboard commands? Well guess what? they were ALL different on EVERY program! We used to have fricking cheat sheets taped up all over the damned place just to keep up with the crap!
You may not like MS Office, hell i personally hate that damned ribbon and kill that thing right off the bat, but whether you like them or not they have come a loooong way from the old days dude. Oh and while we old farts hate that damned ribbon my oldest started college and for the first time had to really use office with the school provided 2K10 and frankly he kicks a hell of a lot more ass on that thing than I do with the menus. for someone who has never used Office before that thing is uberfast and intuitive, we old farts just learned the positions. But while my docs are boring Times New Roman blandness he and his friends make docs that look as nice as books in the same time it takes me to remember where the sub menu I want is.
I agree he should have used stalking which is a better analogy. if I followed you all over town, writing down all that you did, and even trying to look at what you are buying in the stores i'd be busted for stalking and rightly so. So what makes it okay because the words "On the Internet" are added? Because its some fortune 50 company? does that make it okay?
In the end the whole thing is bullshit. if Moz or anybody else at first run explained what the choice was and let the user choose? then THAT is the user making a decision about tracking but then folks might actually care about being stalked so instead they hide it under options and lie their asses off. you tell me the choice to import favorites from IE is more important than whether or not every move i make is tracked? Does that make ANY sense people?