I'm afraid the album probably won't be done until may, we had to fire the previous drummer (glug glug) and are getting the new one up to speed before going into a local studio, but send me an email and i'll shoot you a link to the FB page where I have some (very) rough two tracks we got off the board. Really kinda hard to describe the style, if you can come up with a name for it please let me know, to me its like all these different bands got thrown together in a blender, a little blues, a little rock, a little bit of everything. Folks seem to like it so that's what matters, once we get the album done we are gonna slap a couple of vids on youtube and see if we can find a nice indie label.
As for the rez, my girl's family moved off into the hills a couple of generations ago so she's never been, although she is still dark enough people still mistake her for Mexican. you just gotta love a gal that when someone starts talking Spanish at her says "Me no Mexican, me Indian, me kind SCALP your kind!" and then just waltzes off while they stand there gaping like fish LOL!
And boy I know where you're coming from, man they do change you. I had big wild bushy hair with a good week's worth of stubble and an apt the size of a closet, the first thing she said was 'The hair has go to go dear, and there is NO way we are trying to squeeze into no single, you're gonna have to get a bigger place" LOL! She's had to move back home to help out on the farm since her dad had a heart attack and with my dad having COPD I can't move up there so now she drives down one weekend a month and I drive up, and her boss gives a week paid leave every 3 months to keep her from quitting. running my own little PC shop may be feast or famine but at least when I need to take a week to see my girl i can just take off, sure it was easier when we were living together but hey, ya do what ya gotta do.
How is THAT insightful mods, seriously? MSFT may have other revenue but the majority comes from Windows and Office so it would be logical to call them an OS and Office software company, yes? Apple gets most of its money from consumer devices so they can be called a consumer devices company, following?
Show me where Google makes more than a tiny pittance on ANYTHING bsides ads, lets hear it. Not android because they are product dumping that to the tune of a billion bucks in development a year, not ChromeOS, again they are dumping it gratis, Chrome? nope, hmmm...how are they able to dump billions in software for absolutely no money? Are they making the money from rainbows and puppy farts?
That would be ADS paying those billions PLUS billions in revenues AND profits friend. You can gussy it up all you want, pretend it don't exist all you please, but if you shut down Google's ad business they would be gone in less than a year. Now what would that make Google, could it be, oh I don't know...an AD company perhaps?
Seriously I don't know when all the damned corporate cheerleading started but when someone gets a +4 just for going "Nuh uh, you must be teh shill for not loving teh googles!" this place is getting seriously fucked up. its a fucking company okay, do you wear Google PJs too? Its like the old Mel Brooks bit "All go to hell except cave 76!" because its nothing but pointless flag waving and perception bubbles all around. None of the above companies are your pal, none of them frankly give a flying fuck about you okay? And if any of the big three could see their profits go up by 15% by throwing you in a cage with a horny silverback you'd be getting gorilla loving before you could say "Do no evil!". so just cut the crap okay? We're supposed to be geeks not sheep.
As for TFA I don't if this could be considered a good thing or a bad thing for Google. Google obviously thinks its a good thing but what company is gonna want to use Android on a phone if they have to compete with the OS developer's phone? While this will give Google an Apple style solution, with the ability to integrate hardware and software nicely which looks to be the way the other guys are gonna all do it, MSFT and Nokia, Apple making their own, and now Google with Motorola, what company is gonna want to run android when it will be inferior to the Google Phone? On a positive note maybe this will breathe new life into WebOS as all the OEMs left out in the cold by this deal can simply customize it to their hardware and like Android is gratis.
He's talking about making sure we don't end up with a repeat of the C130 firefighting scandal a few years back. For those that didn't hear of it (My GoogleFU sucketh, maybe someone can find a link?) a few insiders ended up setting up a deal where they got practically new C130s given to them for NO cost in return for their junker 50+ year old cargo planes to be used in "museums" that didn't exist or want the things, they were also supposed to have them ready to use if the forrestry service needed them for firefighting but managed to get the contracts written in such a way it would have cost more to pay them to use them for firefighting than they were worth so these companies essentially could undercut anybody in cargo hauling since their planes were gratis. IIRC several in the forestry dept as well as a couple of them in the USAF got busted in the fallout but that don't change the fact these companies made out like robber barons.
I could see someone with connections getting NASA to launch a bird and then making sure they don't have the funds to actually use it so they "just so happen' to be sitting there willing to take it off their hands for gratis. Wouldn't be the first time this kind of dirty dealing has gone on in the government, and while i'm glad that's not the case with caltech that doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant.
Welll.......yes and no. the problem with the government is it doesn't take long before Congressman Kickbackus and Senator porkman stick their snouts in it and frankly ruin anything in the never ending pursuit of "bringing home the bacon" and causing costs to shoot through the roof. lets take the shuttle, which i'm actually friends with a NASA engineer that worked on the thing and have actually got to hold some of the blueprints in my hot little hands that he rescued from a dumpster. As he pointed out to me the shuttle ended up with parts being scattered all over the country, the final map looking like a shotgun blasted a map of the USA. Also the shuttle frankly failed at every metric it was supposed to fulfill, it was originally seen as a "space truck" that would be large enough to do the military AND civilian payloads while lowering cost per pound and in those metrics failed miserably but you simply couldn't kill it because so many were bringing home the bacon. According to my friend it was the politics that ultimately ruined the replacement programs as every politician wanted it to have at least as many parts spread out as far or farther than the shuttle so they could keep bringing the bacon which is what caused them to push so hard to reuse shuttle parts when they didn't make sense.
So while I agree there are jobs that the business sector simply won't do which need to be done hence the need for NASA but with the politicians not even attempting to hide their greed anymore trying to get anything done on the scale of a NASA rocketry program without causing costs to go through the roof to make sure kickbackus and Porkman get their share is damnd near impossible anymore. say what you will about the private sector that kind of blatant money wasting just doesn't seem to fly as they blow their way right into bankruptcy whereas the government while just keep the presses cranking. better to have the private sector build the rockets than let Porkman and kickbackus skyrocket the costs so they can be sure to get a plant to make some washer in their district.
Congrats on finding a nerd Nethead! My little Cherokee princess goes "hon the PC is acting funny, where's your baby laptop?" and then points me towards the desktop while she kicks back in my recliner with my netbook LOL! But my little princess loves to cook while my idea of cooking is throwing something in the nuker so it all works out. I bet she redecorated your pad, and either changed part of your wardrobe or your hairstyle didn't she? I swear a woman gets her hands on a bachelor she looks at us like an episode of "this old house" and gets to work LOL! Not that I can complain, she is sweet as can be and even gets along with my family which frankly i'd never thought I'd see the day that would happen.
So it just goes to show you can find somebody online you just have to be careful. But if it wasn't for the net we'd have never met as she was the stay at home type while I love playing bass in the honky tonks on the weekend so the odds of our paths crossing were nil. 17 years...wow, hell 4 years is a personal record for me.
While it is true that the Pi could probably make a hell of an HTPC frankly there just isn't that much more you can do with the thing, not unless you are an expert coder with intimate knowledge of assembly so you can squeeze every last drop of performance out of the chips. With that Athlon I can make an HTPC, nettop, file server, jukebox, firewall,workstation, hell depending on the board i can even slap a good cheap PCIe card into it and make it a render box for video transcoding, because of the generic nature of x86 and the abundance of code frankly its trivial to make it into just about anything. Hell if all you are wanting is a media tank I'd just pick up an Nbox HD, those are like $59 and it has all the major formats at 1080p and you can just plug a USB drive into it and call it a day. For the pi personally I think a better use would be a carputer where every single volt matters.
I figured the xbox would be a PITA as i looked at modding mine for a little while and looking at how tightly packed the board was figured it wasn't worth the PITA for an SD video tank. Honestly this is what i hate about the consoles, you have this hardware that COULD do other things but the whole DRM in a box nature of the things make them pretty much worthless for anything but playing approved games in the approved manner. that's why i have a PS1, Genesis, SegaCD, Gamecube, and SNES just sitting in a closet gathering dust. ironically the only console i have that still gets any use is the Dreamcast thanks to the pirates who figured out how to load third party code on the thing without hacking the hardware so the DC makes a great emulator box. I have all my old Genesis and SNES games on a DC disc so I can fire up the DC and enjoy some classic gaming with the boys anytime i want.
In the end that's why I'll always prefer the PC to console, you can always find a new use for the PC. My first gamer box, a 100MHz Pentium is still being used 5 days a week as a C&C controller for an $85,000 lathe that will only run on an ISA card, my frankenputer from 2000 ended up in the hands of Suzy the checkout girl who brought it to me to speed up not realizing I was the original owner, i slapped an old P4 CPU and board I had lying around and now that box is still going, letting her and her kids surf the net, and I'm able to take all these offlease office boxes i get from local businesses and refurb them so folks that wouldn't normally be able to afford a PC can have one. It feels good to help somebody while saving hardware from the dump, too bad it isn't likewise easy to find a new use for all these old consoles but it looks like especially with the first gen X360s these things are designed for the dump, but I wish you luck on your hacking but my old hands simply aren't steady enough to be messing with the solder anymore.
And don't forget the biggest winner of all...We, The People will learn that much more about the universe around us as the knowledge the guys at Caltech gather from this sat will be shared with all of us. Allow me to say that since we've quit wasting huge amounts of the whole "Meatbags in spaaaace!" bit that I'm personally really happy with the direction NASA has taken, they seem to be really focused on probes and sats that can give us maximum knowledge for the dollar and the amount of hard science the guys at NASA have been able to do with limited funds is frankly amazing. if any of the NASA guys read this my hat is off to you fine sirs, good job.
I probably shouldn't respond to an AC, but its so full of fail i just had to chime in. lets see your solution is 1.-design more aerodynamic cars (which the poor can't afford to replace their clunkers now, making a slicker car won't change that) 2.-use trains to transport goods (the lines are in serious disrepair and would be unable to handle the increased load without billions invested) 3.- get high speed rail lines inbetween cities (this will cost a good two hundred billion easily) 4.-make sure our cars get the best gas mileage possible (see 1) 5.- car pool, ride a bike for short trips (or long trips) (the rural states are RURAL and therefor this is wholly impractical, and you certainly aren't gonna live close enough to ride a bike, not unless you enjoy the sounds of gunfire since the inner cities in most of the rural state's capitals are "Welcome to the jungle" time).
So your "solution" requires technology and infrastructure that doesn't exist, would cost conservatively several hundred billion which with 90% of the right having signed a "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge is impossible to raise, and even if you treated it as a matter of most urgent national security would be a good 20+ years before a single benefit would be had. the only things you suggested that wouldn't cost insane money simply is logistically impossible as trying to carpool when you work 40-70 miles away from work is damned near impossible to get everyone on the same page and bicycles work in NYC and LA, not in AR or MS.
So I'm sorry but your solution is about as practical as saying "We'll put big girl panties on all the cows and turn their farts into fuel!".
Riiiight, and hey, while we're at it we can just do a final solution on the poor and most of the city dwellers right? I hate to break the news to ya sparky but we simply haven't developed a technology to replace gas yet and we have too many environmental groups to ever let us develop the oil oil in the gulf, which FYI will probably end up being developed by the Russians who'll then sell that oil to the highest bidder, most likely China.
The electric cars are a joke, you are talking $15,000 average price for the battery pack and it will last MAYBE 7 year under ideal conditions, and freezing cold snaps like we are having now or a normal southern summer will cut that time probably by a good third, most of the southern rural areas, you know, those places where the city folk get the FOOD from? yeah those, well i hate to be the bearer of bad news but a good chunk of it has no rail or public transport of ANY kind so you are looking at several trillion to develop an electric rail and mass transit system. Oh and good luck getting the money for that since more than 90% of the republicans in congress have signed Grover Norquist's "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge and will never renege on that for fear of the "read my lips" effect, and finally you are in the middle of a recession (I'd personally argue its a depression and the government safety nets are simply masking the worst effects) and you have more than 15% of the population at or below the poverty level so good luck getting them the money to sell that used gas hog that's paid for for a brand new green car. of course without a vehicle you can watch unemployment soar, again especially among the rural states since it will be cheaper to sit on welfare than it will be to work and without gas they simply won't have a way to look for a job, or go to a job if they found one.
So we really only have THREE choices friend, choose one. 1.-We drill locally and develop our own resources while working on new tech, perhaps with bounties for fuel efficiency breakthroughs, 2.-We tax the rich and uberrich at 75%+ rates so we will have the funds to develop the massive amount of mass transit we will require and to basically give the poor cheap affordable green electric cars, or 3.- We give these crazy jihadists our money. which shall it be? You can't just raise gas taxes to $6 a gallon and magically get everyone to ride the buses that don't exist in many state ya know. Hell go to a state like AR or MS sometime, in AR there is the CAT bus line which covers less than 1/6th of the capital city and that's it, that's all. hell most towns don't even have taxis so if you don't have a car i hope you can walk that 30 miles to the store!
As for TFA the dumbass deserves to die for being an absolute total idiot. You are in a crazy jihad country so you tweet something nasty about their God, when these people will kill you for drawing a fricking cartoon, and then what do you do? to get away you go to ANOTHER crazy jihad country! Wow, that's really fricking smart, much better to run to an Islamist state than say Canada or the UK or pretty much anyplace that doesn't kill you for saying Muhammad sucks huh?
Are they renting the thing? Because I would think that big iron like that wouldn't be breaking down, hence why they were so popular. If its a support contract then obviously it would be cheaper to hire a couple of admins well versed in the Z-series and let them take care of the thing. But I looked that model up and it was released in 2005, that's barely broke in in mainframe terms. Now if they simply don't need that amount of power now that they've retired the shuttle that's understandable but I just hope it isn't an excuse to buy into some "cloud centric web 3.0 GPGPU blingapaloza" as lets face government agencies and blowing money go together like chocolate and peanut butter. I read TFA (I know I know, but I got bored) and there isn't a single word about what is gonna replace it, is it gonna be more costly? less? Are they simply not replacing it at all? A little more info would be nice.
Well we know now that the caps from the late 90s through mid 00s were crap due to industrial espionage where they stole only part of the formula and boned the recipe, but Atari before the Warner buyout (and for a year afterwards as they cleared out existing stock) frankly wasn't consumer grade quality, they actually put care and love into those. Compare them to someone like Coleco or Mattel who were toy companies that simply jumped on the electronics bandwagon and its night and day. With the Coleco you had both the Atari adapter and Adam PC plugin, both of which concentrated heat, and Mattel made good handheld in the 70s but their handhelds in the 80s like that one that took interchangeable carts (sorry i can't think of the name ATM, they had a Star trek game and breakout for it both of which I had) was really crap.
The ONLY real advantage I'd argue you had in the 80s were the boards were so primitive that replacing caps and other failed parts is easier simply because the boards are so big. Good luck replacing parts on a PS 1 or Xbox 1 or Dreamcast with those tiny boards and double sided chips. That's why i'm glad there seem to be emulators for just about all the machines (although the Xbox one is severally lacking) because most systems from the late 90s on up will frankly be unfixable. Like you said the odds of finding a late model P3 running are pretty slim, but surprisingly i'm find the P4 and early Athlon machines if they didn't get a batch of the bad caps are running like champs. I've got three of them sitting in the shop right now i need to slap on CL cheap, the 2.2GHz and up P4s and Athlons seem really hard to kill short of a lightning strike as long as they didn't get the bad caps. Some of them make great nettops BTW, the 1.8GHz Sempron I'm typing this on now surfs like a champ and is quiet as a churchmouse. Once i get those offlease sold I may just slap an ubercheap Athlon mobile in it just to cut power usage down even further.
Sadly a lot of these sites are either filled with scammers or datamine and spam the living hell out of anyone that signs up, i should know as i deal with a lot of folks that have gotten their first computer so I have to warn them and be on the lookout for them as they learn the ropes. Its made all the harder to warn folks because it seems like everybody knows someone who found their current SO through online, hell that's where I got my GF of 4 years, I signed up to get one of my buds to STFU about the stupid site and my little Cherokee princess saw I was a PC guy and asked if I could help her fix the sound on her desktop. I would have never met her IRL since we didn't travel in the same circles but my family just loves her to pieces and we've been happily together ever since.
So if you know anyone that is new to computers or are starting online dating please have them look at a site like Romance Scams so they can see what to watch out for, i know one of the mods and they are good folks just trying to warn the folks about how slick these new scams are. Like the malware I have to deal with daily it seems they get better and smarter at this each year and become harder for those that aren't alert to spot.
ATI graphics maybe? The only time I ever saw it was when someone installed an older ATI driver. As for how to fix your problem, did you try Revo uninstaller on high? frankly I've found that for the rare weird error like yours Revo on high will remove ALL the offending reg entries as well as any caches or leftover and you can then install it clean but frankly unless something asked for it I just wouldn't bother. Feel free to email with the error listed and I can probably walk you through a fix, again nearly all can be done by GUI and the worst I've ever had to do was send a customer a reg file and say "Go clicky clicky on this and reboot" which fixed it right up.
That is the only way to fix a weird error I've encountered called "Windows says no device under sound" which is caused by the Windows sound server subsystem getting corrupted by some shitty drivers the OEMs use, especially the hacked Realtek drivers some OEMs hand out with their boards. That's why I tell folks "Do NOT use that disc that came with the board, I'm just giving it to you as a courtesy and a last resort, call me instead" and I send them links to the correct drivers. The only time I haven't found the ODMs drivers to be better is on mobiles like laptops, their OEM drivers are often customized for the system, for example the EEE ATI drivers will run a little cooler than the default AMD drivers even though the AMD drivers install and run fine, but the Asus customized drivers are designed to be a little more aggressive when it comes to power saving.
But feel free to email me if you are still having the problem or want the sound server reg file, it works on anything from Win2K Pro to Win 7 X64, just clicky clicky and reboot. great little reg file to keep on your keyring thumbdrive just in case.
Actually ground clearance can be a blessing even if you never leave the black stuff. For example my mother is 71 years old and trying to climb down into a vehicle is impossible but my ranger has a high enough clearance she can just slide in and out, I had to take my late grandmom to the doc often because my dad's F350 was simply TOO high and likewise grandmom couldn't climb up into the cab. Also you have to remember that once you load that sucker down with friends or kids along with a ton of stuff from the mall, sports equipment (soccer moms are the biggest buyers of SUVs I've found) and other stuff you're gonna need that ground clearance with the crazy high speed bumps they put around schools nowadays to keep folks from speeding around those areas.
Again this looks to be a toy for rich people who want to say they are green, so some actor or musician can ride around with his posse and say 'I'm helping the environment!" which of course is big around Hollywood. Again nothing wrong with that, there is some crazy money to be made off the demographic, just calling a spade a spade here friend.
I'm sorry you apparently fail at reading comprehension so allow me to break it down. What you have was NOT consumer crap, what you have was designed for business and engineering which had waaaaay better quality parts. the caps and chips used in CONSUMER grade crap was then as now simply not up to the quality of professional instruments which is why we have workstations and desktops with the desktops having significantly lower quality caps, PSUs,fans etc.
We're talking about stuff built for kids in the early 80s and you are talking about HP back when they were THE scientific brand, I'm sorry pal but you couldn't be any more off base if you actually tried and those that marked you interesting obviously don't know how big a quality difference there was between HP and brands like Coleco whose other claim to fame was fricking cabbage patch dolls.
Actually if you read your history, and not just the American propaganda spins on history, then you'd know that for most of his tenure Khrushchev was trying to open things up and be more liberal, with artists and commerce being allowed much more freedom for the majority of his rule, which is why he ended up getting run out on a rail in favor of Brezhnev who was more a classical Soviet style communist which was much more what the old party heads wanted. Of course what followed was a long period of stagnation that was later named the Brezhnev stagnation which lasted for the most part all the way up to the fall of the wall.
As for TFA it just shows that money can't buy common sense or as we say in the south "Give a billion to white trash and all you get is white trash with a lot of money" or if this case give a ton of money to a dufus and you get a dufus with the money to do really dumb ubernerd things.
Hey who doesn't love ole Doc Brown? BTW just FYI but if you watch the first chase scene between Marty and the Libyans? look closely at the "Marty" driving the car. In several scenes you'll see Marty has RED hair because they had originally cast Eric Stoltz as Marty but he read the character way too dark so when Michael J Fox became available they fired Stoltz and reshot the movie but they didn't have it in the budget to reshoot the chase sequence.
As for TFA isn't calling this thing a battery kinda misleading? When I first read the headline I thought "What a breakthrough, this will help the poor get electricity AND drinking water! This person should get the Nobel Prize!" but reading TFA this thing doesn't really act like a battery at all, what a letdown.
Let me see if I have this straight, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. You first having to have a working one of these machines, we are talking consumer level quality of the early 80s, and THEN you are gonna have to take this working 30+ year old machine and take a soldering iron to it? Gee I wonder how this could go wrong......what are they nuts? It would be different if you were talking about a SoC to replace these system, maybe with some kind of universal adapter slot you could buy modules for for the carts and the controllers, THAT would make sense, but you are gonna take a soldering iron to a 30+ year old unit that its frankly a fricking miracle most of these things work at all? Do you know how damned fussy and temperamental some of these machines were to start with? I predict there are gonna be a LOT of "parting out" listings on eBay after this.
I could probably go back and forth all day, point by point, but in the end I think the numbersspeak for themselves. XP and Win 7 trade first place back and forth on test after test and the ones that XP wins is frankly by a VERY small amount, which when you consider that honestly WinXP doesn't really DO much of anything when compared to Win 7, which has performance measuring and superfetch and a new GPU accelerated subsystem all going on at the same time that they were able to make them switch back and forth like that is pretty impressive.
As for Linux honestly i wouldn't even bring it up in discussion because if anything its like WinXP Mini or one of those other hacked all to bits OSes. Sure they have gotten pretty good on initial install but frankly do an in place upgrade or two (which you HAVE to do, because its length of support even on LTS is frankly like a bad joke) and then the thing quickly falls apart. To use a/. car analogy Linux is like that 74 Dart you have setting in the back yard. if you are willing to invest the time in learning ALL its quirks, learning to do everything the way IT wants it done, setting there with a book on 70s Dodges to learn all the things you'll be required to do to keep her going? Well then you can frankly build a nice hot rod out of it. but 99.99% of us simply don't have the time to mess with the fiddly suckers and would just prefer to just go buy something that actually runs without having to spend weeks learning the thing.
BTW just FYI but you want to know what I found the fastest OS on a Netburst Celeron, at least on a 3.06GHz Prescott Celeron that I had in the family and decided to try different things, just for shits and giggles? "Win 7 Tiny edition" which is a stripped down hacked Gamer Edition of Win 7 by the guy that has made tiny versions going back to Tiny 2K. Now TinyXP was faster to boot but once she was up and running the Tiny 7 really ran...well I can't say great as frankly NOTHING not even Linux is gonna make a Netburst Celeron a great chip, but I'd say it handled about as well as one of the newer single core Atom chips which is a hell of a lot better than it handled under default XP OR 7. Frankly I don't know who the "Tiny guy" is but MSFT should bust their asses to find him and HIRE HIM NOW because honestly I've tried every version of Windows, even WinFLP and WinEmbedded and the tiny versions royally stomped the crap out of their supposedly minimal embedded OS while having a lot better support for programs than either embedded or FLP. Whomever the guy is he really knows how to slim down a Windows OS while making it compatible with just about every app out there.
I'd just like to say../wipes away tear/...that I'd like to thank the little HTML nerd that made the ABP code that made Jimbo's ugly ass mug finally disappear from Wikipedia forever! Bless your little nerdy heart!
Riiiight, because.NET is used by anybody, hell I haven't even bothered to install it since ATI replaced.NET with Visual C++ over a year and a half ago, its like Java. Oh and your problem? Took me all of three seconds with Google to find a Microsoft Fix it which involves a...gasp! A Single button you push. No CLI, no tweaking shit, push the button and reboot. Tada! Now find a fix it for Linux if say, your broadcom worked and was crapped on during the GUI upgrade from 10.04 to 11. what you'll get is a pile of CLI which WILL HAVE TO BE TWEAKED because Linux is waaaay too God damned picky and every. single. thing has to be EXACT. So if the Bash CLI crap is for the broadcom 22.14x and you have the 22.16y you damned well better know it and fix it or you are SOL.;
In the end numbers don't lie and even Asus, who started the netbook craze with Linux, well guess what? ASUS has given up most likely because of the amount support costs thanks to crap breaking. I'd bet my last buck that that is the reason that dell won't release their Linux sales figures because they are losing money on every sale since Dell has to Dell has to run their own repos because again you use normal repos? Its craploa on your drivers. That's right, even though they have a teeny tiny subset they can't even use the default repos without the distro crapping out. that's just sad dude.
Your argument might work if the telecos didn't sue the shit out of any city that tries to go DIY which we've seen time and time again. And don't forget that We, the People ALREADY PAID 200 billion for nationwide broadband and all we got in return was a low res Goatse from the telecos while they passed out the money to their CEOs for more hookers and blow.
If THAT is an SUV them my left leg plays jingle bells when you rub it! That thing has crap for ground clearance, i doubt seriously it could haul much more than a soccer mom's fat ass, and good luck parking that thing with gull wings at any mall, well unless you like the idea of standing around for hours waiting for the guy that parked near you car...err.. "SUV" to come back.
Lets be honest and cut the crap folks, okay? Tesla is a car for rich people who want to say they are green...that's it, that's all. Their vehicles are about as practical as a Bugatti and for the most part for the same demographic, rich folks with too much money who want a new toy, its just this toy lets them claim to be green. Of course if you figure in the energy cost to build the thing, all the way from mining the lithium to disposing of failed batteries then its about as green as a hummer I bet, but hey if it makes the rich folks happy go for it. its not like millions haven't been made catering to that demographic.
Sorry, wasn't the driver unless you are saying MSFT can't code a driver to save their lives, that we may agree on. But I used that machine all through the beta all the way through SP1 and I tried both MSFT drivers AND the vendor drivers and frankly neither helped, it was the I/O subsystem of the OS and well documented. me and several testers complained repeatedly that ANY multimedia use would kill the throughput on transfers, we were ignored. i guess they thought people wouldn't watch video while something was going through the network while ignoring STREAMING works exactly this way. oh and the network shares were also documented, Vista would have a senior moment and forget permissions and network setting quit often, requiring a reboot. if you had Intel NIC you were fine, Realtek or Nvidia, you were boned. sad because a good 80% of the desktop out there have Realtek NICs.
Also i have run WinXP and frankly Win 7 is better, sorry. Sure XP is a little faster but you know what? Its not doing anything. Its like saying "Well if you strip a car down to the frame it'll go faster" sure it will but you wouldn't want to ride in it! For example WinXP pounds the swap no matter how much RAM you have. you have 3Gb? don't matter, its swapapaloza, with Win 7 it has intelligent superfetch so if i launch my Dragon browser right now it WILL be faster than XP can ever hope for, because it knows i use this daily and its waiting in RAM.; I click on WMP, on MS Office, on Virtualdub, all are instant because I've used them and Windows knows that during the day I will be firing these up at this time so there they are. XP is faster on boot simply because its not really doing much,its not loading anything into RAM for me, not placing a list of the folders I use most into the jumplist of Explorer, just loading the desktop. And when you have 8Gb of RAM and 6 cores the amount of time it does take to load so little is frankly disappointing.
Finally I would point out i have actually run win 7 on a Celeron, and while NOTHING frankly runs great on a netburst Celeron simply because as you pointed out the cache misses really drag such a long piped CPU down, honestly its more pleasant than XP because Windows 7 reconfigures itself for the machine. if you look around the net there are plenty of places that note that if you put Win 7 on a machine with 512mb its only using 200Mb on startup, yet my PC uses 700Mb, why? Because 7 knows its in a RAM limited environment and will act accordingly. compare the same situation with XP Sp3 and you'll find on first boot its sucking 342Mb of RAM and beating swap like a pimp that ain't got his money. XP simply doesn't care what you have for a CPU or RAM, its using what it wants period. MSFT learned this was a bad idea when netbooks came out so Win 7 actually detects what its running on and cuts down on its superfetching and schedules tasks to run delayed when on a slower CPU or RAM starved.
But the one thing we do agree on is the uberfail that is Win 8, especially on ARM. Why would anyone want this? Android is cheap, OSX is nicer, where is the niche this is supposed to fill? People that like looking at Windows desktops? nope it doesn't even have that, it has a bastard mix of desktop and cell phone. Oh and I'm thinking you're giving MSFT too much credit friend, you see NetBSD actually has support for the server hardware its intended to run on, Win 8 ARM is gonna be a mess with driver support more like the 6 months after the release of Win95 where if you remember what few drivers there were crashed more than they ran. The only nice thing I can say about Win 8 ARM is it may get Ballmer finally fired, which considering i rank him right up there with the apple Pepsi guy on incompetent CEOs might be worth simply avoiding Win 8 for a couple of years. After all Win 7 is supported until 2020, we can all just batten down the hatches and avoid it like the STD that it is.
The difference and IMHO why Windows is worth the money is this...when something goes wrong in Windows you can fix it IN THE GUI and in Linux its bash or you're SOL, period. Driver for sound not working? Open up bash and type, screen resolution won't stick? open up bash and type, latest upgrade crapped all over your wireless card? open up bash and type. oh and you had damned well better be skilled enough to tweak said bash typing because the code you will be given WILL NOT WORK if you don't. that is because it is written for driver B, rev D, firmware H and you have Driver H, rev l, firmware q.
The problem with Linux is that the terminal has become a crutch, nothing more. We don't have an option to change this? meh, let them fire up Bash. what if they have a problem? meh let 'em fire up Bash. Well what if I want to do... i told you they can open bash didn't I? We all know why this is, its because of what I call the "busted toilets" problem. Nobody wants to fixed the busted crapper because there is no pay involved and its all devs scratching their personal itches, so the shitter just don't get fixed. how many have launched a help file in Linux only to find a "to be done" there instead? Empty man pages, lists of arcane commands with ZERO explanation of what they actually do, you can pretend Windows and Linux are equal but they are nowhere close, in fact if I had to compare them I would say Linux is about where Windows was around Win98 because with both it was mostly stable but at the slightest hint of trouble its was back to CLI.
I'm sure i'll get hate for daring to point that out but anyone not suffering from a perception bubble knows this is true. don't get me wrong in some cases it IS getting better, at least on initial install, but nobody seems to do the work to get beyond that point. hell go to any forum and you'll see them advocate having to do a clean install on upgrade which is what the Linux devs USED to make fun of Windows for, now they just accept it, why? Because to fix it would be long boring crappy thankless work that nobody wants to do, hence it don't get done.
But mark my words, what we've seen with canonical cutting Kubuntu loose is just the tip of the iceberg, after they see that selling search and having Amazon MP3 referrals won't pay the bills eventually they'll cut Ubuntu loose too and go strictly servers like Red hat. If you want to make a desktop that can compete with Windows and OSX you need to spend serious money on the nasty jobs and without it they just don't get done. And THAT dear friend is why Linux can't compete with Windows, it isn't a conspiracy, it isn't that there is something wrong with the kernel, its that nobody will put in the millions needed to polish it up to that level and without money getting the developers focused on the bad jobs is like herding cats. they won't do the busted toilet jobs without money so they just won't get done, that's all.
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I'm afraid the album probably won't be done until may, we had to fire the previous drummer (glug glug) and are getting the new one up to speed before going into a local studio, but send me an email and i'll shoot you a link to the FB page where I have some (very) rough two tracks we got off the board. Really kinda hard to describe the style, if you can come up with a name for it please let me know, to me its like all these different bands got thrown together in a blender, a little blues, a little rock, a little bit of everything. Folks seem to like it so that's what matters, once we get the album done we are gonna slap a couple of vids on youtube and see if we can find a nice indie label.
As for the rez, my girl's family moved off into the hills a couple of generations ago so she's never been, although she is still dark enough people still mistake her for Mexican. you just gotta love a gal that when someone starts talking Spanish at her says "Me no Mexican, me Indian, me kind SCALP your kind!" and then just waltzes off while they stand there gaping like fish LOL!
And boy I know where you're coming from, man they do change you. I had big wild bushy hair with a good week's worth of stubble and an apt the size of a closet, the first thing she said was 'The hair has go to go dear, and there is NO way we are trying to squeeze into no single, you're gonna have to get a bigger place" LOL! She's had to move back home to help out on the farm since her dad had a heart attack and with my dad having COPD I can't move up there so now she drives down one weekend a month and I drive up, and her boss gives a week paid leave every 3 months to keep her from quitting. running my own little PC shop may be feast or famine but at least when I need to take a week to see my girl i can just take off, sure it was easier when we were living together but hey, ya do what ya gotta do.
How is THAT insightful mods, seriously? MSFT may have other revenue but the majority comes from Windows and Office so it would be logical to call them an OS and Office software company, yes? Apple gets most of its money from consumer devices so they can be called a consumer devices company, following?
Show me where Google makes more than a tiny pittance on ANYTHING bsides ads, lets hear it. Not android because they are product dumping that to the tune of a billion bucks in development a year, not ChromeOS, again they are dumping it gratis, Chrome? nope, hmmm...how are they able to dump billions in software for absolutely no money? Are they making the money from rainbows and puppy farts?
That would be ADS paying those billions PLUS billions in revenues AND profits friend. You can gussy it up all you want, pretend it don't exist all you please, but if you shut down Google's ad business they would be gone in less than a year. Now what would that make Google, could it be, oh I don't know...an AD company perhaps?
Seriously I don't know when all the damned corporate cheerleading started but when someone gets a +4 just for going "Nuh uh, you must be teh shill for not loving teh googles!" this place is getting seriously fucked up. its a fucking company okay, do you wear Google PJs too? Its like the old Mel Brooks bit "All go to hell except cave 76!" because its nothing but pointless flag waving and perception bubbles all around. None of the above companies are your pal, none of them frankly give a flying fuck about you okay? And if any of the big three could see their profits go up by 15% by throwing you in a cage with a horny silverback you'd be getting gorilla loving before you could say "Do no evil!". so just cut the crap okay? We're supposed to be geeks not sheep.
As for TFA I don't if this could be considered a good thing or a bad thing for Google. Google obviously thinks its a good thing but what company is gonna want to use Android on a phone if they have to compete with the OS developer's phone? While this will give Google an Apple style solution, with the ability to integrate hardware and software nicely which looks to be the way the other guys are gonna all do it, MSFT and Nokia, Apple making their own, and now Google with Motorola, what company is gonna want to run android when it will be inferior to the Google Phone? On a positive note maybe this will breathe new life into WebOS as all the OEMs left out in the cold by this deal can simply customize it to their hardware and like Android is gratis.
He's talking about making sure we don't end up with a repeat of the C130 firefighting scandal a few years back. For those that didn't hear of it (My GoogleFU sucketh, maybe someone can find a link?) a few insiders ended up setting up a deal where they got practically new C130s given to them for NO cost in return for their junker 50+ year old cargo planes to be used in "museums" that didn't exist or want the things, they were also supposed to have them ready to use if the forrestry service needed them for firefighting but managed to get the contracts written in such a way it would have cost more to pay them to use them for firefighting than they were worth so these companies essentially could undercut anybody in cargo hauling since their planes were gratis. IIRC several in the forestry dept as well as a couple of them in the USAF got busted in the fallout but that don't change the fact these companies made out like robber barons.
I could see someone with connections getting NASA to launch a bird and then making sure they don't have the funds to actually use it so they "just so happen' to be sitting there willing to take it off their hands for gratis. Wouldn't be the first time this kind of dirty dealing has gone on in the government, and while i'm glad that's not the case with caltech that doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant.
Welll.......yes and no. the problem with the government is it doesn't take long before Congressman Kickbackus and Senator porkman stick their snouts in it and frankly ruin anything in the never ending pursuit of "bringing home the bacon" and causing costs to shoot through the roof. lets take the shuttle, which i'm actually friends with a NASA engineer that worked on the thing and have actually got to hold some of the blueprints in my hot little hands that he rescued from a dumpster. As he pointed out to me the shuttle ended up with parts being scattered all over the country, the final map looking like a shotgun blasted a map of the USA. Also the shuttle frankly failed at every metric it was supposed to fulfill, it was originally seen as a "space truck" that would be large enough to do the military AND civilian payloads while lowering cost per pound and in those metrics failed miserably but you simply couldn't kill it because so many were bringing home the bacon. According to my friend it was the politics that ultimately ruined the replacement programs as every politician wanted it to have at least as many parts spread out as far or farther than the shuttle so they could keep bringing the bacon which is what caused them to push so hard to reuse shuttle parts when they didn't make sense.
So while I agree there are jobs that the business sector simply won't do which need to be done hence the need for NASA but with the politicians not even attempting to hide their greed anymore trying to get anything done on the scale of a NASA rocketry program without causing costs to go through the roof to make sure kickbackus and Porkman get their share is damnd near impossible anymore. say what you will about the private sector that kind of blatant money wasting just doesn't seem to fly as they blow their way right into bankruptcy whereas the government while just keep the presses cranking. better to have the private sector build the rockets than let Porkman and kickbackus skyrocket the costs so they can be sure to get a plant to make some washer in their district.
Congrats on finding a nerd Nethead! My little Cherokee princess goes "hon the PC is acting funny, where's your baby laptop?" and then points me towards the desktop while she kicks back in my recliner with my netbook LOL! But my little princess loves to cook while my idea of cooking is throwing something in the nuker so it all works out. I bet she redecorated your pad, and either changed part of your wardrobe or your hairstyle didn't she? I swear a woman gets her hands on a bachelor she looks at us like an episode of "this old house" and gets to work LOL! Not that I can complain, she is sweet as can be and even gets along with my family which frankly i'd never thought I'd see the day that would happen.
So it just goes to show you can find somebody online you just have to be careful. But if it wasn't for the net we'd have never met as she was the stay at home type while I love playing bass in the honky tonks on the weekend so the odds of our paths crossing were nil. 17 years...wow, hell 4 years is a personal record for me.
While it is true that the Pi could probably make a hell of an HTPC frankly there just isn't that much more you can do with the thing, not unless you are an expert coder with intimate knowledge of assembly so you can squeeze every last drop of performance out of the chips. With that Athlon I can make an HTPC, nettop, file server, jukebox, firewall,workstation, hell depending on the board i can even slap a good cheap PCIe card into it and make it a render box for video transcoding, because of the generic nature of x86 and the abundance of code frankly its trivial to make it into just about anything. Hell if all you are wanting is a media tank I'd just pick up an Nbox HD, those are like $59 and it has all the major formats at 1080p and you can just plug a USB drive into it and call it a day. For the pi personally I think a better use would be a carputer where every single volt matters.
I figured the xbox would be a PITA as i looked at modding mine for a little while and looking at how tightly packed the board was figured it wasn't worth the PITA for an SD video tank. Honestly this is what i hate about the consoles, you have this hardware that COULD do other things but the whole DRM in a box nature of the things make them pretty much worthless for anything but playing approved games in the approved manner. that's why i have a PS1, Genesis, SegaCD, Gamecube, and SNES just sitting in a closet gathering dust. ironically the only console i have that still gets any use is the Dreamcast thanks to the pirates who figured out how to load third party code on the thing without hacking the hardware so the DC makes a great emulator box. I have all my old Genesis and SNES games on a DC disc so I can fire up the DC and enjoy some classic gaming with the boys anytime i want.
In the end that's why I'll always prefer the PC to console, you can always find a new use for the PC. My first gamer box, a 100MHz Pentium is still being used 5 days a week as a C&C controller for an $85,000 lathe that will only run on an ISA card, my frankenputer from 2000 ended up in the hands of Suzy the checkout girl who brought it to me to speed up not realizing I was the original owner, i slapped an old P4 CPU and board I had lying around and now that box is still going, letting her and her kids surf the net, and I'm able to take all these offlease office boxes i get from local businesses and refurb them so folks that wouldn't normally be able to afford a PC can have one. It feels good to help somebody while saving hardware from the dump, too bad it isn't likewise easy to find a new use for all these old consoles but it looks like especially with the first gen X360s these things are designed for the dump, but I wish you luck on your hacking but my old hands simply aren't steady enough to be messing with the solder anymore.
And don't forget the biggest winner of all...We, The People will learn that much more about the universe around us as the knowledge the guys at Caltech gather from this sat will be shared with all of us. Allow me to say that since we've quit wasting huge amounts of the whole "Meatbags in spaaaace!" bit that I'm personally really happy with the direction NASA has taken, they seem to be really focused on probes and sats that can give us maximum knowledge for the dollar and the amount of hard science the guys at NASA have been able to do with limited funds is frankly amazing. if any of the NASA guys read this my hat is off to you fine sirs, good job.
I probably shouldn't respond to an AC, but its so full of fail i just had to chime in. lets see your solution is 1.-design more aerodynamic cars (which the poor can't afford to replace their clunkers now, making a slicker car won't change that) 2.-use trains to transport goods (the lines are in serious disrepair and would be unable to handle the increased load without billions invested) 3.- get high speed rail lines inbetween cities (this will cost a good two hundred billion easily) 4.-make sure our cars get the best gas mileage possible (see 1) 5.- car pool, ride a bike for short trips (or long trips) (the rural states are RURAL and therefor this is wholly impractical, and you certainly aren't gonna live close enough to ride a bike, not unless you enjoy the sounds of gunfire since the inner cities in most of the rural state's capitals are "Welcome to the jungle" time).
So your "solution" requires technology and infrastructure that doesn't exist, would cost conservatively several hundred billion which with 90% of the right having signed a "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge is impossible to raise, and even if you treated it as a matter of most urgent national security would be a good 20+ years before a single benefit would be had. the only things you suggested that wouldn't cost insane money simply is logistically impossible as trying to carpool when you work 40-70 miles away from work is damned near impossible to get everyone on the same page and bicycles work in NYC and LA, not in AR or MS.
So I'm sorry but your solution is about as practical as saying "We'll put big girl panties on all the cows and turn their farts into fuel!".
Riiiight, and hey, while we're at it we can just do a final solution on the poor and most of the city dwellers right? I hate to break the news to ya sparky but we simply haven't developed a technology to replace gas yet and we have too many environmental groups to ever let us develop the oil oil in the gulf, which FYI will probably end up being developed by the Russians who'll then sell that oil to the highest bidder, most likely China.
The electric cars are a joke, you are talking $15,000 average price for the battery pack and it will last MAYBE 7 year under ideal conditions, and freezing cold snaps like we are having now or a normal southern summer will cut that time probably by a good third, most of the southern rural areas, you know, those places where the city folk get the FOOD from? yeah those, well i hate to be the bearer of bad news but a good chunk of it has no rail or public transport of ANY kind so you are looking at several trillion to develop an electric rail and mass transit system. Oh and good luck getting the money for that since more than 90% of the republicans in congress have signed Grover Norquist's "No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge and will never renege on that for fear of the "read my lips" effect, and finally you are in the middle of a recession (I'd personally argue its a depression and the government safety nets are simply masking the worst effects) and you have more than 15% of the population at or below the poverty level so good luck getting them the money to sell that used gas hog that's paid for for a brand new green car. of course without a vehicle you can watch unemployment soar, again especially among the rural states since it will be cheaper to sit on welfare than it will be to work and without gas they simply won't have a way to look for a job, or go to a job if they found one.
So we really only have THREE choices friend, choose one. 1.-We drill locally and develop our own resources while working on new tech, perhaps with bounties for fuel efficiency breakthroughs, 2.-We tax the rich and uberrich at 75%+ rates so we will have the funds to develop the massive amount of mass transit we will require and to basically give the poor cheap affordable green electric cars, or 3.- We give these crazy jihadists our money. which shall it be? You can't just raise gas taxes to $6 a gallon and magically get everyone to ride the buses that don't exist in many state ya know. Hell go to a state like AR or MS sometime, in AR there is the CAT bus line which covers less than 1/6th of the capital city and that's it, that's all. hell most towns don't even have taxis so if you don't have a car i hope you can walk that 30 miles to the store!
As for TFA the dumbass deserves to die for being an absolute total idiot. You are in a crazy jihad country so you tweet something nasty about their God, when these people will kill you for drawing a fricking cartoon, and then what do you do? to get away you go to ANOTHER crazy jihad country! Wow, that's really fricking smart, much better to run to an Islamist state than say Canada or the UK or pretty much anyplace that doesn't kill you for saying Muhammad sucks huh?
Are they renting the thing? Because I would think that big iron like that wouldn't be breaking down, hence why they were so popular. If its a support contract then obviously it would be cheaper to hire a couple of admins well versed in the Z-series and let them take care of the thing. But I looked that model up and it was released in 2005, that's barely broke in in mainframe terms. Now if they simply don't need that amount of power now that they've retired the shuttle that's understandable but I just hope it isn't an excuse to buy into some "cloud centric web 3.0 GPGPU blingapaloza" as lets face government agencies and blowing money go together like chocolate and peanut butter. I read TFA (I know I know, but I got bored) and there isn't a single word about what is gonna replace it, is it gonna be more costly? less? Are they simply not replacing it at all? A little more info would be nice.
Well we know now that the caps from the late 90s through mid 00s were crap due to industrial espionage where they stole only part of the formula and boned the recipe, but Atari before the Warner buyout (and for a year afterwards as they cleared out existing stock) frankly wasn't consumer grade quality, they actually put care and love into those. Compare them to someone like Coleco or Mattel who were toy companies that simply jumped on the electronics bandwagon and its night and day. With the Coleco you had both the Atari adapter and Adam PC plugin, both of which concentrated heat, and Mattel made good handheld in the 70s but their handhelds in the 80s like that one that took interchangeable carts (sorry i can't think of the name ATM, they had a Star trek game and breakout for it both of which I had) was really crap.
The ONLY real advantage I'd argue you had in the 80s were the boards were so primitive that replacing caps and other failed parts is easier simply because the boards are so big. Good luck replacing parts on a PS 1 or Xbox 1 or Dreamcast with those tiny boards and double sided chips. That's why i'm glad there seem to be emulators for just about all the machines (although the Xbox one is severally lacking) because most systems from the late 90s on up will frankly be unfixable. Like you said the odds of finding a late model P3 running are pretty slim, but surprisingly i'm find the P4 and early Athlon machines if they didn't get a batch of the bad caps are running like champs. I've got three of them sitting in the shop right now i need to slap on CL cheap, the 2.2GHz and up P4s and Athlons seem really hard to kill short of a lightning strike as long as they didn't get the bad caps. Some of them make great nettops BTW, the 1.8GHz Sempron I'm typing this on now surfs like a champ and is quiet as a churchmouse. Once i get those offlease sold I may just slap an ubercheap Athlon mobile in it just to cut power usage down even further.
Sadly a lot of these sites are either filled with scammers or datamine and spam the living hell out of anyone that signs up, i should know as i deal with a lot of folks that have gotten their first computer so I have to warn them and be on the lookout for them as they learn the ropes. Its made all the harder to warn folks because it seems like everybody knows someone who found their current SO through online, hell that's where I got my GF of 4 years, I signed up to get one of my buds to STFU about the stupid site and my little Cherokee princess saw I was a PC guy and asked if I could help her fix the sound on her desktop. I would have never met her IRL since we didn't travel in the same circles but my family just loves her to pieces and we've been happily together ever since.
So if you know anyone that is new to computers or are starting online dating please have them look at a site like Romance Scams so they can see what to watch out for, i know one of the mods and they are good folks just trying to warn the folks about how slick these new scams are. Like the malware I have to deal with daily it seems they get better and smarter at this each year and become harder for those that aren't alert to spot.
ATI graphics maybe? The only time I ever saw it was when someone installed an older ATI driver. As for how to fix your problem, did you try Revo uninstaller on high? frankly I've found that for the rare weird error like yours Revo on high will remove ALL the offending reg entries as well as any caches or leftover and you can then install it clean but frankly unless something asked for it I just wouldn't bother. Feel free to email with the error listed and I can probably walk you through a fix, again nearly all can be done by GUI and the worst I've ever had to do was send a customer a reg file and say "Go clicky clicky on this and reboot" which fixed it right up.
That is the only way to fix a weird error I've encountered called "Windows says no device under sound" which is caused by the Windows sound server subsystem getting corrupted by some shitty drivers the OEMs use, especially the hacked Realtek drivers some OEMs hand out with their boards. That's why I tell folks "Do NOT use that disc that came with the board, I'm just giving it to you as a courtesy and a last resort, call me instead" and I send them links to the correct drivers. The only time I haven't found the ODMs drivers to be better is on mobiles like laptops, their OEM drivers are often customized for the system, for example the EEE ATI drivers will run a little cooler than the default AMD drivers even though the AMD drivers install and run fine, but the Asus customized drivers are designed to be a little more aggressive when it comes to power saving.
But feel free to email me if you are still having the problem or want the sound server reg file, it works on anything from Win2K Pro to Win 7 X64, just clicky clicky and reboot. great little reg file to keep on your keyring thumbdrive just in case.
Actually ground clearance can be a blessing even if you never leave the black stuff. For example my mother is 71 years old and trying to climb down into a vehicle is impossible but my ranger has a high enough clearance she can just slide in and out, I had to take my late grandmom to the doc often because my dad's F350 was simply TOO high and likewise grandmom couldn't climb up into the cab. Also you have to remember that once you load that sucker down with friends or kids along with a ton of stuff from the mall, sports equipment (soccer moms are the biggest buyers of SUVs I've found) and other stuff you're gonna need that ground clearance with the crazy high speed bumps they put around schools nowadays to keep folks from speeding around those areas.
Again this looks to be a toy for rich people who want to say they are green, so some actor or musician can ride around with his posse and say 'I'm helping the environment!" which of course is big around Hollywood. Again nothing wrong with that, there is some crazy money to be made off the demographic, just calling a spade a spade here friend.
I'm sorry you apparently fail at reading comprehension so allow me to break it down. What you have was NOT consumer crap, what you have was designed for business and engineering which had waaaaay better quality parts. the caps and chips used in CONSUMER grade crap was then as now simply not up to the quality of professional instruments which is why we have workstations and desktops with the desktops having significantly lower quality caps, PSUs,fans etc.
We're talking about stuff built for kids in the early 80s and you are talking about HP back when they were THE scientific brand, I'm sorry pal but you couldn't be any more off base if you actually tried and those that marked you interesting obviously don't know how big a quality difference there was between HP and brands like Coleco whose other claim to fame was fricking cabbage patch dolls.
Actually if you read your history, and not just the American propaganda spins on history, then you'd know that for most of his tenure Khrushchev was trying to open things up and be more liberal, with artists and commerce being allowed much more freedom for the majority of his rule, which is why he ended up getting run out on a rail in favor of Brezhnev who was more a classical Soviet style communist which was much more what the old party heads wanted. Of course what followed was a long period of stagnation that was later named the Brezhnev stagnation which lasted for the most part all the way up to the fall of the wall.
As for TFA it just shows that money can't buy common sense or as we say in the south "Give a billion to white trash and all you get is white trash with a lot of money" or if this case give a ton of money to a dufus and you get a dufus with the money to do really dumb ubernerd things.
Hey who doesn't love ole Doc Brown? BTW just FYI but if you watch the first chase scene between Marty and the Libyans? look closely at the "Marty" driving the car. In several scenes you'll see Marty has RED hair because they had originally cast Eric Stoltz as Marty but he read the character way too dark so when Michael J Fox became available they fired Stoltz and reshot the movie but they didn't have it in the budget to reshoot the chase sequence.
As for TFA isn't calling this thing a battery kinda misleading? When I first read the headline I thought "What a breakthrough, this will help the poor get electricity AND drinking water! This person should get the Nobel Prize!" but reading TFA this thing doesn't really act like a battery at all, what a letdown.
Let me see if I have this straight, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. You first having to have a working one of these machines, we are talking consumer level quality of the early 80s, and THEN you are gonna have to take this working 30+ year old machine and take a soldering iron to it? Gee I wonder how this could go wrong......what are they nuts? It would be different if you were talking about a SoC to replace these system, maybe with some kind of universal adapter slot you could buy modules for for the carts and the controllers, THAT would make sense, but you are gonna take a soldering iron to a 30+ year old unit that its frankly a fricking miracle most of these things work at all? Do you know how damned fussy and temperamental some of these machines were to start with? I predict there are gonna be a LOT of "parting out" listings on eBay after this.
I could probably go back and forth all day, point by point, but in the end I think the numbers speak for themselves. XP and Win 7 trade first place back and forth on test after test and the ones that XP wins is frankly by a VERY small amount, which when you consider that honestly WinXP doesn't really DO much of anything when compared to Win 7, which has performance measuring and superfetch and a new GPU accelerated subsystem all going on at the same time that they were able to make them switch back and forth like that is pretty impressive.
As for Linux honestly i wouldn't even bring it up in discussion because if anything its like WinXP Mini or one of those other hacked all to bits OSes. Sure they have gotten pretty good on initial install but frankly do an in place upgrade or two (which you HAVE to do, because its length of support even on LTS is frankly like a bad joke) and then the thing quickly falls apart. To use a /. car analogy Linux is like that 74 Dart you have setting in the back yard. if you are willing to invest the time in learning ALL its quirks, learning to do everything the way IT wants it done, setting there with a book on 70s Dodges to learn all the things you'll be required to do to keep her going? Well then you can frankly build a nice hot rod out of it. but 99.99% of us simply don't have the time to mess with the fiddly suckers and would just prefer to just go buy something that actually runs without having to spend weeks learning the thing.
BTW just FYI but you want to know what I found the fastest OS on a Netburst Celeron, at least on a 3.06GHz Prescott Celeron that I had in the family and decided to try different things, just for shits and giggles? "Win 7 Tiny edition" which is a stripped down hacked Gamer Edition of Win 7 by the guy that has made tiny versions going back to Tiny 2K. Now TinyXP was faster to boot but once she was up and running the Tiny 7 really ran...well I can't say great as frankly NOTHING not even Linux is gonna make a Netburst Celeron a great chip, but I'd say it handled about as well as one of the newer single core Atom chips which is a hell of a lot better than it handled under default XP OR 7. Frankly I don't know who the "Tiny guy" is but MSFT should bust their asses to find him and HIRE HIM NOW because honestly I've tried every version of Windows, even WinFLP and WinEmbedded and the tiny versions royally stomped the crap out of their supposedly minimal embedded OS while having a lot better support for programs than either embedded or FLP. Whomever the guy is he really knows how to slim down a Windows OS while making it compatible with just about every app out there.
I'd just like to say../wipes away tear/...that I'd like to thank the little HTML nerd that made the ABP code that made Jimbo's ugly ass mug finally disappear from Wikipedia forever! Bless your little nerdy heart!
Riiiight, because .NET is used by anybody, hell I haven't even bothered to install it since ATI replaced .NET with Visual C++ over a year and a half ago, its like Java. Oh and your problem? Took me all of three seconds with Google to find a Microsoft Fix it which involves a ...gasp! A Single button you push. No CLI, no tweaking shit, push the button and reboot. Tada! Now find a fix it for Linux if say, your broadcom worked and was crapped on during the GUI upgrade from 10.04 to 11. what you'll get is a pile of CLI which WILL HAVE TO BE TWEAKED because Linux is waaaay too God damned picky and every. single. thing has to be EXACT. So if the Bash CLI crap is for the broadcom 22.14x and you have the 22.16y you damned well better know it and fix it or you are SOL.;
In the end numbers don't lie and even Asus, who started the netbook craze with Linux, well guess what? ASUS has given up most likely because of the amount support costs thanks to crap breaking. I'd bet my last buck that that is the reason that dell won't release their Linux sales figures because they are losing money on every sale since Dell has to Dell has to run their own repos because again you use normal repos? Its craploa on your drivers. That's right, even though they have a teeny tiny subset they can't even use the default repos without the distro crapping out. that's just sad dude.
Your argument might work if the telecos didn't sue the shit out of any city that tries to go DIY which we've seen time and time again. And don't forget that We, the People ALREADY PAID 200 billion for nationwide broadband and all we got in return was a low res Goatse from the telecos while they passed out the money to their CEOs for more hookers and blow.
If THAT is an SUV them my left leg plays jingle bells when you rub it! That thing has crap for ground clearance, i doubt seriously it could haul much more than a soccer mom's fat ass, and good luck parking that thing with gull wings at any mall, well unless you like the idea of standing around for hours waiting for the guy that parked near you car...err.. "SUV" to come back.
Lets be honest and cut the crap folks, okay? Tesla is a car for rich people who want to say they are green...that's it, that's all. Their vehicles are about as practical as a Bugatti and for the most part for the same demographic, rich folks with too much money who want a new toy, its just this toy lets them claim to be green. Of course if you figure in the energy cost to build the thing, all the way from mining the lithium to disposing of failed batteries then its about as green as a hummer I bet, but hey if it makes the rich folks happy go for it. its not like millions haven't been made catering to that demographic.
Sorry, wasn't the driver unless you are saying MSFT can't code a driver to save their lives, that we may agree on. But I used that machine all through the beta all the way through SP1 and I tried both MSFT drivers AND the vendor drivers and frankly neither helped, it was the I/O subsystem of the OS and well documented. me and several testers complained repeatedly that ANY multimedia use would kill the throughput on transfers, we were ignored. i guess they thought people wouldn't watch video while something was going through the network while ignoring STREAMING works exactly this way. oh and the network shares were also documented, Vista would have a senior moment and forget permissions and network setting quit often, requiring a reboot. if you had Intel NIC you were fine, Realtek or Nvidia, you were boned. sad because a good 80% of the desktop out there have Realtek NICs.
Also i have run WinXP and frankly Win 7 is better, sorry. Sure XP is a little faster but you know what? Its not doing anything. Its like saying "Well if you strip a car down to the frame it'll go faster" sure it will but you wouldn't want to ride in it! For example WinXP pounds the swap no matter how much RAM you have. you have 3Gb? don't matter, its swapapaloza, with Win 7 it has intelligent superfetch so if i launch my Dragon browser right now it WILL be faster than XP can ever hope for, because it knows i use this daily and its waiting in RAM.; I click on WMP, on MS Office, on Virtualdub, all are instant because I've used them and Windows knows that during the day I will be firing these up at this time so there they are. XP is faster on boot simply because its not really doing much,its not loading anything into RAM for me, not placing a list of the folders I use most into the jumplist of Explorer, just loading the desktop. And when you have 8Gb of RAM and 6 cores the amount of time it does take to load so little is frankly disappointing.
Finally I would point out i have actually run win 7 on a Celeron, and while NOTHING frankly runs great on a netburst Celeron simply because as you pointed out the cache misses really drag such a long piped CPU down, honestly its more pleasant than XP because Windows 7 reconfigures itself for the machine. if you look around the net there are plenty of places that note that if you put Win 7 on a machine with 512mb its only using 200Mb on startup, yet my PC uses 700Mb, why? Because 7 knows its in a RAM limited environment and will act accordingly. compare the same situation with XP Sp3 and you'll find on first boot its sucking 342Mb of RAM and beating swap like a pimp that ain't got his money. XP simply doesn't care what you have for a CPU or RAM, its using what it wants period. MSFT learned this was a bad idea when netbooks came out so Win 7 actually detects what its running on and cuts down on its superfetching and schedules tasks to run delayed when on a slower CPU or RAM starved.
But the one thing we do agree on is the uberfail that is Win 8, especially on ARM. Why would anyone want this? Android is cheap, OSX is nicer, where is the niche this is supposed to fill? People that like looking at Windows desktops? nope it doesn't even have that, it has a bastard mix of desktop and cell phone. Oh and I'm thinking you're giving MSFT too much credit friend, you see NetBSD actually has support for the server hardware its intended to run on, Win 8 ARM is gonna be a mess with driver support more like the 6 months after the release of Win95 where if you remember what few drivers there were crashed more than they ran. The only nice thing I can say about Win 8 ARM is it may get Ballmer finally fired, which considering i rank him right up there with the apple Pepsi guy on incompetent CEOs might be worth simply avoiding Win 8 for a couple of years. After all Win 7 is supported until 2020, we can all just batten down the hatches and avoid it like the STD that it is.
The difference and IMHO why Windows is worth the money is this...when something goes wrong in Windows you can fix it IN THE GUI and in Linux its bash or you're SOL, period. Driver for sound not working? Open up bash and type, screen resolution won't stick? open up bash and type, latest upgrade crapped all over your wireless card? open up bash and type. oh and you had damned well better be skilled enough to tweak said bash typing because the code you will be given WILL NOT WORK if you don't. that is because it is written for driver B, rev D, firmware H and you have Driver H, rev l, firmware q.
The problem with Linux is that the terminal has become a crutch, nothing more. We don't have an option to change this? meh, let them fire up Bash. what if they have a problem? meh let 'em fire up Bash. Well what if I want to do... i told you they can open bash didn't I? We all know why this is, its because of what I call the "busted toilets" problem. Nobody wants to fixed the busted crapper because there is no pay involved and its all devs scratching their personal itches, so the shitter just don't get fixed. how many have launched a help file in Linux only to find a "to be done" there instead? Empty man pages, lists of arcane commands with ZERO explanation of what they actually do, you can pretend Windows and Linux are equal but they are nowhere close, in fact if I had to compare them I would say Linux is about where Windows was around Win98 because with both it was mostly stable but at the slightest hint of trouble its was back to CLI.
I'm sure i'll get hate for daring to point that out but anyone not suffering from a perception bubble knows this is true. don't get me wrong in some cases it IS getting better, at least on initial install, but nobody seems to do the work to get beyond that point. hell go to any forum and you'll see them advocate having to do a clean install on upgrade which is what the Linux devs USED to make fun of Windows for, now they just accept it, why? Because to fix it would be long boring crappy thankless work that nobody wants to do, hence it don't get done.
But mark my words, what we've seen with canonical cutting Kubuntu loose is just the tip of the iceberg, after they see that selling search and having Amazon MP3 referrals won't pay the bills eventually they'll cut Ubuntu loose too and go strictly servers like Red hat. If you want to make a desktop that can compete with Windows and OSX you need to spend serious money on the nasty jobs and without it they just don't get done. And THAT dear friend is why Linux can't compete with Windows, it isn't a conspiracy, it isn't that there is something wrong with the kernel, its that nobody will put in the millions needed to polish it up to that level and without money getting the developers focused on the bad jobs is like herding cats. they won't do the busted toilet jobs without money so they just won't get done, that's all.