But you see there is your problem smash, you are thinking like one of us geeks instead of like a normal. hell a normal if you mentioned RAID would go in their kitchen and hand you the bug spray!
You have to remember they have gotten pretty damned good with the failure rates of spinning rust, even in mobile. All the drives now have sensors that park the heads when its moving or jostled, sensors for heat, SMART, they are pretty damned good now. Hell the only way i was able to get folks doing regular backups was with butt simple USB externals and an even simpler software like Paragon drive backup.
That is why I warn folks away from the SSDs now, because they don't know about hot/crazy scales or insane failure rates, they just know "Wow that is a fast laptop!" and then when that SSD takes a dump they are hurting. You don't know how heartbreaking it is to be sitting in the shop with some girl crying her eyes out because there is a good chance the pictures of her late mom she forgot to backup could be gone forever, but at least with HDDs there are usually tricks i can do to get a good chunk of the stuff off, but not with SSDs, its all or nothing.
So I'd say anybody selling SSDs to average folks is frankly doing them a disservice. you and I know "Backup backup and backup some more" and for the important things like pics of my late sis and other important items I have onsite, offsite AND cloud based backups, but most folks frankly don't have the skills nor the dedication, they have stressed out lives and shit happens you know? So I consider it the job of us geeks to try to make their computing experience as safe as we can while still having it useful and I'd say that SSDs just aren't there yet.
Too obvious. Instead you put in your own stereo and if futzing with the wires something was to get accidently unhooked? Well hey you weren't a professional car stereo installer, you were just trying to save a little money. Hell i doubt if there is a black box in my 99 Ranger its hooked to squat as the guy that had it before me couldn't even get the cigarette lighter hooked back up after he put the stereo in it. to be fair though it is a pretty bitchin Sony CD/MP3 with remote, really thumps.
Damn that's just.......damn. The crappy controls, crappy graphics, it was fricking torture man! I was one of the original buyers of the segaCD because i had hopes they'd actually use that space to give us giant Phantasy Stars but other than lunar all we got was sewer chewer and night trap (although that was kinda cheesy stupid fun, at least not painful like the make my videos) style FMV crapfests. To me the only things that were worth playing more than a few minutes for shits and giggles on SegaCD was Lunar, Eternal Champions, and Sonic. In all three of those they actually used the CD the way it should have been used, to load huge games while using traditional sprites.
But dude, nostalgia or not how could you stand all the public domain badly compressed video crap? I always remember playing old sewer chewer (yes i know what the real name was but mine is more accurate IMHO) and thinking "Is that supposed to be a bat? or a snake? Maybe its some kind of manta ray or something". and the textures, man i hadn't seen that much horribly compressed video since those first old WMV porn videos where they would compress a 2 hour movie with like a bitrate of 150 so they could get an entire movie into 100mb file. Maybe you had a little set or something but I had one of those big old projection box types and those FMVs looked like someone smeared crap on the screen.
Exactly and once you have invested in the code and considering the average lifetime of the units would a thousand a pop really have bothered you or any other researcher? i'd say probably not, not when you had a unit that was so efficient at crunching numbers. When you figure in the amount of data those clusters could crunch and the amount of electricity per unit honestly I bet they would have had a hell of a lot of sales even at a thousand a pop from those adding to their existing cluster. then add in the value add by having Sony host a code repo for PS3 code so that there would be tons of FOSS code to run on your cluster and it would seem like a no brainer to me.
Finally don't forget this is a company that hasn't had a profitable quarter in 4 years. With numbers that bad and that much red ink being bled one can just turn away customers, especially ones that could be buying units in bulk that you could be making a pretty penny off of. last numbers I saw had the PS3 costing Sony around $450 a unit so they could have sold them for $800 a pop and still made nearly double per unit. that's not bad profit at all, not for something you'd have almost no support calls from. Just another case of a corp being stupid, that's all.
So you can lose money on each phone and make it up on volume, is that what you are saying? The Applelites can have a fit but I've said it before and i'll say it again, the world was a better place before the iPhone. Before the iPhone the only smart phones were being used by people doing actual work on the things, those that had to check their work email and such things. Now ALL the bandwidth is being sucked down by Applelites who can't quit playing with their damned iShiny for more than 2 minutes, hell I've seen it in my own family with my cousin that stays on FB with his iShiny practically 24/7.
There is no such thing as infinite wireless capacity you know, and frankly the networks in the USA weren't great to start with. Seriously are you gonna fucking die if you can't see the latest bitchfest one of your friends posted on FB? would it REALLY kill you to just use Wifi or wait until you got home? Because as Scotty would say "She can't take much more captain!" and everyplace I've gone to the service has gone down by a hell of a lot since the iShiny, and its all because they just can't get off the damned thing, its like a drug or something. I see them in the malls, in the supermarkets, just staring at the thing and tap tap tapping away. the droid users don't seem to do that, never seen a WinPhone in the wild so i don't know about those, but i know the iShiny users are glued to the damned thing.
So think about other people why don't you? its not like these tight ass corps are gonna spend a damned dime upgrading shit, the damned towers could be on fire and they'd just give the CEO another raise so he can get some more hookers and blow, so just wait until you get home or use the Wifi, kay? Its probably not healthy to be staring and fiddling with the thing all day long anyway, you'll go blind or get hairy palms or something.
Actually one could safely argue it was upgrades that killed Sega and forced them to leave the hardware business. On the Genesis/Megadrive you had the Master adapter, SegaCD, 32x, with the later two practically released on top of each other and of course none of the games were backwards compatible with the original system by itself nor were they compatible with each other. I remember that it seemed like it wasn't 6 months before the SegaCD that originally went for nearly the same price as the Genesis unit itself was being sold for less than $70 and the 32x nosedived even quicker, there was a period where a local store was selling those things with 2 games for $35 just to get rid of them.
So I would argue that Sega would be a perfect example of how NOT to do things because by the time Saturn came out people didn't trust Sega not to abandon it which they did in barely 2 years for Dreamcast that likewise flopped. Considering if you had bought each of these upgrades at time of release you were looking at close to $2000 for a library that all told would have been less than the PS1 library and with a hell of a lot of dreck shoved out the door just so they would have something to sell, Marky Mark make my video anyone?
And I'm smelling an ignorant asshole, but to be fair that and nerd funk are common stenches at slashdot. What you and your "Herp derp we took an economics class once so now we are Milton Friedman herp derp" are missing is that if there is no collusion all it would take is one saying "I'll undercut the others and corner the OEMs!" to make out like a fucking robber baron. do you have ANY idea how many drives someone like HP or Dell goes through? that is a hell of a lot of money and one company could undercut the others and walk away with it all for themselves.
But as we saw with BOTH LCD AND RAM that price fixing is quite prevalent in this business and I'm sure they've made it clear to each other that if they don't follow the script the third parties that they all buy supplies off of just won't sell to them no more. if you read the transcripts from the previous two cases instead of thinking a single economics class (was it home economics?) makes you an expert you'd know that is how it worked last time and how they were able to set price floors in both RAM and LCDs across the board for years.
So why not look at the actual history of the industry in question instead of giving us all some economics hand wank? Tell me does your supposed economics powers explain not one but two major scandals in the same sector in recent years? But what can we expect from just another perception bubble, thinking that some class he took a decade ago holds all the answers while ignoring evidence sitting right in front of him. Politicians love those like you that walk around with blinders, i believe they are called sheeple.
But that just shows what total idiots Sony was and why they deserve to lose this round. i mean here you have a company literally bleeding red ink, and they have a product they COULD have sold at $1000 a pop and made a pretty decent killing on, as for certain tasks the Cell chip is simply the best for the task, but instead they just flipped everyone the bird, burnt their customers and painted a giant bullseye in themselves with the hackers and for what? So they could turn down incresed profits? that's fucking stupid!
Instead they could have announced a "researcher's initiative" where they would host a code repo and offer $1000 PS3 while ending the sale of PS3s with Linux (while continuing to let the old units update) and kept the goodwill of the users while still making good profits and possibly even opening up new markets as those that have research that would run better on the cell could show that Sony would be supporting the ecosystem long term with access to new boxes. Even at a $1000 a pop the speed difference between cell and x86 for certain jobs would have made it still a viable choice. So frankly their posting a fourth year of solid losing doesn't surprise me, not when they are doing bonehead moves like that!
As for TFA it COULD be done but it would have to be done smart and make the OS control the new parts seamlessly while basically lying to older games to keep from having compatibility errors. For example you could add a memory module that sped things up by caching elements there instead of the HDD. Then the OS would simply redirect to the RAM if it was there, and to the HDD if it was not, thus allowing new and old systems to coexist. On the GPU side you could add support for say something like eyefinity for those that wanted it while not affecting gameplay.
Personally i like how the consoles stretch out now, as it makes for cheap PC gaming for the most part. Even the games that aren't ports typically don't use much better graphics than the consoles so they can later port it to other systems which means I can game on this nearly 3 year old HD4850 i picked up for $60 at my screen's 1600x900 res just fie with lots of purty. And frankly as we've seen giving the game devs more bling to work with can often be a BAD idea, look at how many shooters are now basically a straight line going from "Please be amazed at our scripted sequence, doesn't that building falling fill you with wonder?" setup to the next. you give them more bling and every 5 minutes you'll have to put down the keyboard so some dev can show off his latest particle or water physics. Hell even the greats like Valve aren't immune, see how they always seem to find a way to work in a basic "see saw" physics puzzle into every HL2 game, along with the "too slow elevator" bit.
I'd agree with you on everything but the Intel graphics part. Sure they are okay if you are only doing spreadsheets and the like but it don't take too many flash videos in websites to drag those suckers down, all except the top o' the line chips of course. and I don't know what GPU they are putting in those Atom netbooks but frankly they should be ashamed, even the newest one i recently tried and it royally sucked for anything other than webvideo. Compare this to the C60 I found a customer for $300 over the holiday, that is pretty much the lowest chip AMD makes right now and that still played 720p perfectly and would have probably ran 1080p if her TV would have had an open HDMI port for me to try it out. Frankly I don't know why intel just doesn't try to buy Nvidia already or at least partner up instead of shooting themselves in the face by killing the Nvidia chipset biz, because the only thing that made atom usable was ION and now that's dead.
as for TFA this is why my customers are rediscovering the wonderful world of DVD backups! hell of a lot cheaper to buy 400gb worth of DVDs off of Amazon for $25 than it is to get a new 400gb HDD and if you keep them in a cool dry place frankly they'll last for years and years. In fact i still have some 4x DVDs I burnt with one of the first consumer DVD burners ever released and they read perfectly even after...how long has it been now, something like 9 years? Like I've been telling them discs are cheap enough make two copies and put one offsite for things they care about like pics and then wait for the price to drop. of course those are just the ones that didn't listen to me when i told them to buy 1Tb externals when they were less than $60 most were smart enough to buy when i told them too. I'd tell them to just get some flash sticks for small backups but after having a couple of brand new 16Gb sticks just die without warning i don't think I really trust those things for any files I care about. one thing about the spinning rust is if its gonna fail you usually get some heads up.
Well if they only counted for 1/4th of the production and the price is marked up over 100% I think an investigation is in order because i smell price gouging. while it is to be expected they'd make the consumers pay the cost of fixing the factories 100%-200% over the original price (which they certainly weren't losing money on) makes me smell a little collusion and price fixing. After all if there wasn't any price fixing one company could undercut the others and pretty much own the market, especially with the OEMs. Now that is BIG business and BIG profits so the fact they are ALL setting at almost identical prices? yeah i smell a rat.
But I would like to give a big shout out to Samsung because while i fricking hate the fact they sold their HDD business along with Hitachi because those were my big two go to brands, especially for business and industrial, because they sold out when they did for once in my fricking life i was ahead of the curve and not behind! when i heard they were quitting I bought Samsung ecodrives at $35 for a Tb and $59 for 2Tb and made a nice bit of cash and still had enough drives to make sure i could wait this mess out. I got burnt on DVD, paying $200 for a drive that 6 months later was less than $60, got burnt on my last Intel CPU when i paid too much only to have them abandon the socket and leave me with no upgrade path, but for once i actually came out ahead of the curve, thanks Samsung!
BTW if you need a big drive even at the higher prices i can recommend the Samsung Ecodrive most heartily. I've used them on factory floors and in construction shacks where they get horribly abused and they just come back for more, and any you find on the market in those sizes will be from the last two batches which were particularly good. with that nice fat 32mb of cache I went from a bench of 93 on a Seagate 7200 RPM with 8Mb of cache to nearly 140 on the 1Tb Ecodrive, fast enough i'm using the Eco as a boot drive on all my machines as well as storage and I can tell a difference in the speed thanks to the bigger cache. Oh and the temps made a HUGE drop, from 121-128F under load for the Seagate to a max 98f under load and an idle temp of just 82f compared to nearly 100f for the Seagate. damned shame there won't be any more but sitting on 6Tb I think I can afford to just let this whole mess go on by, thanks again Samsung!
You joke but you have to admit during the MHz wars things were easier to track, faster was better and the PR rating would give you a pretty good idea when it came to AMD VS Intel. Hell look at the old Athlon and Phenom, Athlon was the budget chip, phenom the more high end, the number by the X told you how many cores and faster was better, simple really.
Now good luck telling shit without a lookup table! Quick tell me what an A4-3300 is? did you say a quad core? WRONG its a dual, WTF? Quick what features separate the i3 2100 from the i5 2500? Does either of those tell you jack shit without a lookup table? NO. Hell the only nice thing i can say is at least AMD isn't playing feature roulette, unlike Intel which you can't tell which ones support which features without a chart, even the bobcat at least does support all the features.
Frankly i think the whole thing is designed to fuck customers, that is the only reason I can think of. it makes it damned near impossible to do a simple side by side comparison of anything, either from different manufacturers or even of the same manufacturers products, so the ONLY thing people can do is "higher priced must be better" which of course don't really tell you shit except it costs more.
Which makes me think of something I've been wondering for awhile, now that Intel has quit making the 386 are we gonna be seeing more failures like this in the future? Because from what i understand Intel kept making the 386 rev for so damned long (last chip rolled out in 09 IIRC) because its large die area and primitive but functional design made it trivial to harden for military and aerospace use. Now again from what I've been told due to the die shrinks that a modern chip, even something as old as the P3 or P4 would be hell to harden simply because its smaller dies and tighter tolerances would make it hell to protect from bit flips caused by cosmic rays, not to mention outright frying the chip from radiation exposure.
so are there any modern chips that would be easy to harden without being insanely expensive? Atom? AMD Geode? I'm sure with its GPU and dual cores Bobcat would be right out, maybe Via C3s? While ARM would be a good guess its die shrinks to fit in mobile phones would probably make it insanely expensive to harden yes? So while i'm sure the military probably bought a warehouse full of 386s before intel shut down what happens when they are gone? do we have a viable modern chip that withstand the rigors of space without costing insane amounts of money?
Try 70s and 80s sci fi, especially TV movies and failed pilots along with short lived series. i personally love these cheese fests like Northstar and Gemini Man because being sci fi they tried to be "cutting edge" which just made them REALLY locked to the time period, kinda like how those 70s and 80s pornos would try to be "hip to the times" so you had guys with bell bottoms and kick ass 70s funk in the 70s or girls with leg warmers and feathered hair and early 80s synth pop in the 80s.
Sadly many of those failed 70s and 80s sci fi were released on VHS but never on DVD and good luck finding them on P2P. here is one that is newer i can't find, see if you can...12:01PM with the guy that played Red on that 70s show. It was a damned good (and more than a little depressing) short story about a man trapped in a single hour that kept looping. Now you can often find the upbeat remake based on the original idea but good luck finding the original.
You see THIS is why we geeks are royally fucked if this is allowed to stand. because i don't know a geek that hasn't played with crypto at one time if for no other reason plain old curiosity and who knows if we tossed every single file we futzed with? the whole point of me buying 3tb worth of HDDs was so that i could futz around all i wanted and not worry about space, who knows what kind of files i have scattered here or there that I haven't messed with in ages. I also have about every crypto tool and security ISO backed up on DVD because it was touted someplace and I wanted to give it a spin and so it ended up in my software folder which gets backed up monthly.
In a way this is like attacking a zebra because it has stripes, after all part of what makes us geeks over jocks or normals is our love of trying new software and playing with the more esoteric stuff like crypto simply so we can learn or just see how something works. I personally had a period where i played with password crackers for awhile and so i have no doubt there are probably a dozen or so encrypted files where i didn't bother even attempting to remember the password because its whole point was just a target for the cracker.
So tell me orgelspieler , how would we ever get free if some three letter kicked down our door and demanded the password? If you can't say I forgot then frankly anybody could be sent to prison forever or trivially railroaded. To me this is a classic case of guilty until proven innocent with the added twist that if you have honestly forgotten you will be getting life in prison. Truly scary orgelspieler , truly scary.
Ya know, I don't know which is worse, a name THAT lame was already called or if they nail Apple we may be looking at iTab or iSlate or iMove or some such shit.
Seriously what is it with corps and fucked up names for products? you have Apple putting i on everything, Intel with core i followed by some number that don't tell me shit without a translation table, AMD tossing Phenom and Athlon and Sempron for a letter followed again by some number that don't tell me shit without a translation table, hell they don't even have the simple "X(number of cores)" anymore, its too damned confusing!
Well as far as RAM goes with it being so cheap frankly maxing out the board is usually the best advice anyway. With my 8Gb of DDR 2 800 (which I bought when DDR 2 was as cheap as DDR 3 is now) in my desktop all but the largest games are prefetched based on my usage, for example Comodo Dragon is pretty much kept in RAM 24/7 while WMP 12 is loaded every evening. With my netbook which I strictly use for media and web that 8Gb of DDR 3 is total overkill and all the apps I use are always prefetched into RAM Most would say 8gb was overboard for an AMD E350 netbook but again by buying when it was dirt cheap the difference between 4gb and 8Gb was a whole $6 so it really wasn't a big deal to max out.
Now with readyboost the trick is while it WILL run on just about any stick frankly its better to buy a 4Gb stick that is crazy fast than a 16gb that is slow. Look for something that gets 5Mbs or even better 10Mbs and since readyboost uses it for the small read/writes it really is superfast, IMHO it gets pretty close to the speed of a hybrid with the only penalty being it adds a few seconds to shutdown. With a netbook/notebook with a card reader its even easier to get crazy speeds because the card reader is usually hooked straight to a PCIe lane so using a 10x or better SDHC makes for a hell of a kick in the pants.
Finally you may want to look into ReFS which is gonna be coming out with winServer 8 as that is the next gen filesystem for Windows and will address many of the things you are asking for. But in many cases RAID simply isn't an option, you can't RAID a laptop for example and in many desktop the spinning rust discs are takin g up too much space to RAID SSDs, not to mention the cost of RAID SSDs. Also I'm not sure that having RAID 1 on SSDs would even be helpful as I have seen a bad batch of discs have multiple failures and from the looks of things SSDs are the same only worse. Ultimately this is why at the current time i simply can't recommend SSDs to my customers as the risk VS the reward is too great. while its all well and good to back up often having the time and keeping everything current can quickly become impossible, especially with mobile devices. Then finally add in the costs of the backup spinning rust at a time the HDD OEMs are gouging because of the flood and you can see why people can easily get a week or two behind. I have my backups scheduled for the day after patch Tuesday and i'm just too busy at the shop to do multiple backups more than once a month and with 3 main machines doing a triple disc image can turn into an all afternoon job VERY quick.
Hell here we are talking about NAND flash failing and just this morning i plugged my barely 6 months old 16gb flash stick in the PC and found its gone, a practically new TDK stick just poof! no files, no nothing. Good thing that didn't have anything on it I cared about but its a good example of how flash can just "go" without the slightest bit of warning.
Because they may have like in my case good data along with the worthless or be like spotting a needle in a needle stack? When WinRAR first started touting their ability to encrypt RAR files I futzed with it, throwing a picture here or doc there and then trying to see if I could break into it with a password cracker. Did i erase every. single. instance? Fuck if I know but since it was something involving software I would have played with it in my software folder which i back up monthly because you never know when some driver or software you downloaded 3 years ago for a client could come in handy and I have a little DB app that lets me find which stack its on quickly since they are all sorted by day/month/year. I have also played around with just about every encryption software that has ever been featured on slashdot or Freeware Arena. Again can i be 100% sure i tossed every single file I futzed with? The answer would be no simply because this kind of crazy bullshit isn't a scenario that a reasonable man could have foretold.
But I think you missed the point friend, even if lets say i did manage to toss every encrypted file since truecrypt makes hidden volumes and there are a couple of copies of truecrypt scattered among the backups that gives them a perfect excuse to simply drop you in a hole and forget about you. "Your honor as you can see he has a copy of truecrypt and this software is known to create hidden volumes therefor we ask you to compel him to provide the password" and since i can't provide the password to a hidden volume i don't have and of course can't prove a hidden volume that is made to be undetectable isn't there tada! Instant disappearing geek.
Now any way you slice it friend that is some truly scary shit, a legal way to throw you in a hole without trial for the rest of your days if the judge feels like it.
If this stands it means that anyone can be detained indefinitely without trial. All they have to say is "We believe this file is encrypted using stenography, give us the password" and since saying you don't know equals contempt of court tada! Instant disappearing person. Hell with most geeks they wouldn't even have to go that far, how many of you have truecrypt on some disc somewhere? all they'd have to say is "The defendant has truecrypt in his possession and we believe he has a hidden volume, give us the password' and tada! Bye bye geek. don't say it couldn't happen because it wasn't too long ago most of us would have never believed the USA would have free speech zones and rendition taxis either.
Kinda sad that after we spent all those years supposedly fighting the USSR because of freedom the wall falls only for us to slowly but surely become like the USSR.
Exactly, thanks smash. I mean who gives a flying fuck about the drive? but if you are working on some important term paper or business proposal and the SSD decides NOW is the time its gonna crap itself? That's when you realize that hot speed isn't worth the crazy failure rates. I mean either you have every. single. change of any note backed up or you are literally rolling the dice. try contacting them and asking about your data, they'll tell you tough luck, it isn't covered.
One of my gamers learned the hard way on the first failure as it was on his gaming laptop and he had uploaded his recent vacation pics to it and hadn't had a chance to backup before it crapped out. With HDDs I can usually get something back, even with one with a dying controller i can usually put it in the freezer and then use spinrite and get it to function long enough to get at least some of the data back, but when that SSD went there was nothing, the BIOS couldn't even detect a drive, it was just gone. You can't even do the old controller board swap trick, when they go.....its toast.
So who cares about the drive? Drives are a dime a dozen, its only the data that anyone cares about. Honestly after seeing the failure rates I decided instead to max my machines out on RAM and use Readyboost and with 8Gb each in my desktop and netbook I'd say the only place an SSD is gonna beat me is boot which I almost never do. With everything else superfetch has it already loaded into RAM based on what times I use it and even the best SSD still can't compete with RAM for speed. So I think I'll pass, and wait until i can actually get at least 5 years out of a drive, not just have it replaced for free if it goes tits up. Hell I just used up the last of my 40gb and 80Gb IDEs on some old offlease boxes to dump on CL, every single one of them worked just fine even after sitting in a drawer for years.
What the fuck are you babbling about? Are you high? Making an NES sound chip go "bloop" isn't "sticking it to teh man" you know, nintendo frankly doesn't give a flying fuck what you do with a 25+ year old NES dumbass.
And that doesn't change the fact these machines are so pitifully underpowered that frankly for anything OTHER than making it go "bloop" its completely pointless. hell i throw in the trash machines 200 times more powerful than that every. single. day. simply because there really isn't a point in some old 1Ghz anything anymore.
but if you think spending a couple of weeks writing an assembler just so you can go "bloop" is such an accomplishment here is your special olympics badge, it says "Ur Special!", oh and have a cookie. you keep sticking it to teh man sparknut, i'm sure he really is fucking crying now. my fucking god, he can make our old abandoned shit go "bloop!" whatever shall we do?
That is actually why I still sell analog capture cards because while folks can just get the new shows off of the net you'd be surprised how many folks have older shows they'd like to convert that simply weren't ever released, or more importantly videos of their families. I myself am gonna have to drop a couple of VHS tapes over to a friend's house or borrow his player for a day or two because i recently found a couple of old VHS tapes of me from the 90s playing with my old band and i'd like a copy but don't have a VCR anymore.
Oh look, its the FOSSie, how ya doing ya old Linux loonie? Guess you can't even support your own by supporting buying linux, nope that wouldn't let you foam at the mouth now would it? But don't worry i have some links you might find interesting, its linux pwning day! Enjoy!
Get ready, heretheycome! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? takea lookand see. Maybe they just had configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a flukeby any means.
Why would you say that? i haven't gotten to try the new ones but the ones that came with my nephew's Wii were frankly kinda lame. Sure you could do big movements like bowling or tennis, but trying to get precise movements on the RE game he had was more frustration than anything. while I haven't tried the kinect so i have no idea how it does on precise movements I don't see how it could suck worse than them first gen wiimotes. And as to whether they bought it or built it, who cares? Apple bought siri and it seems to be working out for them and its a hell of a lot smarter buy than Balmer trying to buy yahoo.
But is there a point? Well I'm sure the guy got a few weekends of goofing off to show for it is there any point of this being on slashdot? i mean i can see if it were an article on hacking the PS3 or X360, as those units have enough horsepower that if you could get around the DRM they would probably make really nice HTPCs and of course you can cluster the PS3. But we are talking the NES which while it was fun back in the day most folks that DO have one have it stuffed in a closet somewhere where it will most likely never see the light of day, like the closet I have out at my mom's that has a Genesis, SegaCD, N64, GameCube, and an Xbox in it. Not really a point in breaking out any of those systems anymore. I mean sure you can turn the Xbox into an SD player if you want to take the time but why bother when you can get an Nbox HD for like $60?
This is why I've always preferred computers to consoles because the DRMtastic nature of the consoles quickly make them worthless. once they are no longer sold games disappear quickly, cords get lost, other than a trip down memory lane they can't really do much. Meanwhile the PC I built in 1995 is still running 5 days a week as a C&C lathe controller, the gamer rig I had in 2000 has had a late model P4 slapped in it and is being used by suzy the checkout girl to surf the web, my Celeron from 05 is being used by mom for AoE and her match 3 games...you get the idea. There is just not much you can actually DO with these things except play approved games in the approved method.
While i'm glad this guy had fun i just don't see a point of putting an article about somebody who made a 25 year old console go "bloop" when frankly there are other topics that could have used the space.
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But you see there is your problem smash, you are thinking like one of us geeks instead of like a normal. hell a normal if you mentioned RAID would go in their kitchen and hand you the bug spray!
You have to remember they have gotten pretty damned good with the failure rates of spinning rust, even in mobile. All the drives now have sensors that park the heads when its moving or jostled, sensors for heat, SMART, they are pretty damned good now. Hell the only way i was able to get folks doing regular backups was with butt simple USB externals and an even simpler software like Paragon drive backup.
That is why I warn folks away from the SSDs now, because they don't know about hot/crazy scales or insane failure rates, they just know "Wow that is a fast laptop!" and then when that SSD takes a dump they are hurting. You don't know how heartbreaking it is to be sitting in the shop with some girl crying her eyes out because there is a good chance the pictures of her late mom she forgot to backup could be gone forever, but at least with HDDs there are usually tricks i can do to get a good chunk of the stuff off, but not with SSDs, its all or nothing.
So I'd say anybody selling SSDs to average folks is frankly doing them a disservice. you and I know "Backup backup and backup some more" and for the important things like pics of my late sis and other important items I have onsite, offsite AND cloud based backups, but most folks frankly don't have the skills nor the dedication, they have stressed out lives and shit happens you know? So I consider it the job of us geeks to try to make their computing experience as safe as we can while still having it useful and I'd say that SSDs just aren't there yet.
Too obvious. Instead you put in your own stereo and if futzing with the wires something was to get accidently unhooked? Well hey you weren't a professional car stereo installer, you were just trying to save a little money. Hell i doubt if there is a black box in my 99 Ranger its hooked to squat as the guy that had it before me couldn't even get the cigarette lighter hooked back up after he put the stereo in it. to be fair though it is a pretty bitchin Sony CD/MP3 with remote, really thumps.
Damn that's just.......damn. The crappy controls, crappy graphics, it was fricking torture man! I was one of the original buyers of the segaCD because i had hopes they'd actually use that space to give us giant Phantasy Stars but other than lunar all we got was sewer chewer and night trap (although that was kinda cheesy stupid fun, at least not painful like the make my videos) style FMV crapfests. To me the only things that were worth playing more than a few minutes for shits and giggles on SegaCD was Lunar, Eternal Champions, and Sonic. In all three of those they actually used the CD the way it should have been used, to load huge games while using traditional sprites.
But dude, nostalgia or not how could you stand all the public domain badly compressed video crap? I always remember playing old sewer chewer (yes i know what the real name was but mine is more accurate IMHO) and thinking "Is that supposed to be a bat? or a snake? Maybe its some kind of manta ray or something". and the textures, man i hadn't seen that much horribly compressed video since those first old WMV porn videos where they would compress a 2 hour movie with like a bitrate of 150 so they could get an entire movie into 100mb file. Maybe you had a little set or something but I had one of those big old projection box types and those FMVs looked like someone smeared crap on the screen.
Exactly and once you have invested in the code and considering the average lifetime of the units would a thousand a pop really have bothered you or any other researcher? i'd say probably not, not when you had a unit that was so efficient at crunching numbers. When you figure in the amount of data those clusters could crunch and the amount of electricity per unit honestly I bet they would have had a hell of a lot of sales even at a thousand a pop from those adding to their existing cluster. then add in the value add by having Sony host a code repo for PS3 code so that there would be tons of FOSS code to run on your cluster and it would seem like a no brainer to me.
Finally don't forget this is a company that hasn't had a profitable quarter in 4 years. With numbers that bad and that much red ink being bled one can just turn away customers, especially ones that could be buying units in bulk that you could be making a pretty penny off of. last numbers I saw had the PS3 costing Sony around $450 a unit so they could have sold them for $800 a pop and still made nearly double per unit. that's not bad profit at all, not for something you'd have almost no support calls from. Just another case of a corp being stupid, that's all.
So you can lose money on each phone and make it up on volume, is that what you are saying? The Applelites can have a fit but I've said it before and i'll say it again, the world was a better place before the iPhone. Before the iPhone the only smart phones were being used by people doing actual work on the things, those that had to check their work email and such things. Now ALL the bandwidth is being sucked down by Applelites who can't quit playing with their damned iShiny for more than 2 minutes, hell I've seen it in my own family with my cousin that stays on FB with his iShiny practically 24/7.
There is no such thing as infinite wireless capacity you know, and frankly the networks in the USA weren't great to start with. Seriously are you gonna fucking die if you can't see the latest bitchfest one of your friends posted on FB? would it REALLY kill you to just use Wifi or wait until you got home? Because as Scotty would say "She can't take much more captain!" and everyplace I've gone to the service has gone down by a hell of a lot since the iShiny, and its all because they just can't get off the damned thing, its like a drug or something. I see them in the malls, in the supermarkets, just staring at the thing and tap tap tapping away. the droid users don't seem to do that, never seen a WinPhone in the wild so i don't know about those, but i know the iShiny users are glued to the damned thing.
So think about other people why don't you? its not like these tight ass corps are gonna spend a damned dime upgrading shit, the damned towers could be on fire and they'd just give the CEO another raise so he can get some more hookers and blow, so just wait until you get home or use the Wifi, kay? Its probably not healthy to be staring and fiddling with the thing all day long anyway, you'll go blind or get hairy palms or something.
Actually one could safely argue it was upgrades that killed Sega and forced them to leave the hardware business. On the Genesis/Megadrive you had the Master adapter, SegaCD, 32x, with the later two practically released on top of each other and of course none of the games were backwards compatible with the original system by itself nor were they compatible with each other. I remember that it seemed like it wasn't 6 months before the SegaCD that originally went for nearly the same price as the Genesis unit itself was being sold for less than $70 and the 32x nosedived even quicker, there was a period where a local store was selling those things with 2 games for $35 just to get rid of them.
So I would argue that Sega would be a perfect example of how NOT to do things because by the time Saturn came out people didn't trust Sega not to abandon it which they did in barely 2 years for Dreamcast that likewise flopped. Considering if you had bought each of these upgrades at time of release you were looking at close to $2000 for a library that all told would have been less than the PS1 library and with a hell of a lot of dreck shoved out the door just so they would have something to sell, Marky Mark make my video anyone?
And I'm smelling an ignorant asshole, but to be fair that and nerd funk are common stenches at slashdot. What you and your "Herp derp we took an economics class once so now we are Milton Friedman herp derp" are missing is that if there is no collusion all it would take is one saying "I'll undercut the others and corner the OEMs!" to make out like a fucking robber baron. do you have ANY idea how many drives someone like HP or Dell goes through? that is a hell of a lot of money and one company could undercut the others and walk away with it all for themselves.
But as we saw with BOTH LCD AND RAM that price fixing is quite prevalent in this business and I'm sure they've made it clear to each other that if they don't follow the script the third parties that they all buy supplies off of just won't sell to them no more. if you read the transcripts from the previous two cases instead of thinking a single economics class (was it home economics?) makes you an expert you'd know that is how it worked last time and how they were able to set price floors in both RAM and LCDs across the board for years.
So why not look at the actual history of the industry in question instead of giving us all some economics hand wank? Tell me does your supposed economics powers explain not one but two major scandals in the same sector in recent years? But what can we expect from just another perception bubble, thinking that some class he took a decade ago holds all the answers while ignoring evidence sitting right in front of him. Politicians love those like you that walk around with blinders, i believe they are called sheeple.
But that just shows what total idiots Sony was and why they deserve to lose this round. i mean here you have a company literally bleeding red ink, and they have a product they COULD have sold at $1000 a pop and made a pretty decent killing on, as for certain tasks the Cell chip is simply the best for the task, but instead they just flipped everyone the bird, burnt their customers and painted a giant bullseye in themselves with the hackers and for what? So they could turn down incresed profits? that's fucking stupid!
Instead they could have announced a "researcher's initiative" where they would host a code repo and offer $1000 PS3 while ending the sale of PS3s with Linux (while continuing to let the old units update) and kept the goodwill of the users while still making good profits and possibly even opening up new markets as those that have research that would run better on the cell could show that Sony would be supporting the ecosystem long term with access to new boxes. Even at a $1000 a pop the speed difference between cell and x86 for certain jobs would have made it still a viable choice. So frankly their posting a fourth year of solid losing doesn't surprise me, not when they are doing bonehead moves like that!
As for TFA it COULD be done but it would have to be done smart and make the OS control the new parts seamlessly while basically lying to older games to keep from having compatibility errors. For example you could add a memory module that sped things up by caching elements there instead of the HDD. Then the OS would simply redirect to the RAM if it was there, and to the HDD if it was not, thus allowing new and old systems to coexist. On the GPU side you could add support for say something like eyefinity for those that wanted it while not affecting gameplay.
Personally i like how the consoles stretch out now, as it makes for cheap PC gaming for the most part. Even the games that aren't ports typically don't use much better graphics than the consoles so they can later port it to other systems which means I can game on this nearly 3 year old HD4850 i picked up for $60 at my screen's 1600x900 res just fie with lots of purty. And frankly as we've seen giving the game devs more bling to work with can often be a BAD idea, look at how many shooters are now basically a straight line going from "Please be amazed at our scripted sequence, doesn't that building falling fill you with wonder?" setup to the next. you give them more bling and every 5 minutes you'll have to put down the keyboard so some dev can show off his latest particle or water physics. Hell even the greats like Valve aren't immune, see how they always seem to find a way to work in a basic "see saw" physics puzzle into every HL2 game, along with the "too slow elevator" bit.
I'd agree with you on everything but the Intel graphics part. Sure they are okay if you are only doing spreadsheets and the like but it don't take too many flash videos in websites to drag those suckers down, all except the top o' the line chips of course. and I don't know what GPU they are putting in those Atom netbooks but frankly they should be ashamed, even the newest one i recently tried and it royally sucked for anything other than webvideo. Compare this to the C60 I found a customer for $300 over the holiday, that is pretty much the lowest chip AMD makes right now and that still played 720p perfectly and would have probably ran 1080p if her TV would have had an open HDMI port for me to try it out. Frankly I don't know why intel just doesn't try to buy Nvidia already or at least partner up instead of shooting themselves in the face by killing the Nvidia chipset biz, because the only thing that made atom usable was ION and now that's dead.
as for TFA this is why my customers are rediscovering the wonderful world of DVD backups! hell of a lot cheaper to buy 400gb worth of DVDs off of Amazon for $25 than it is to get a new 400gb HDD and if you keep them in a cool dry place frankly they'll last for years and years. In fact i still have some 4x DVDs I burnt with one of the first consumer DVD burners ever released and they read perfectly even after...how long has it been now, something like 9 years? Like I've been telling them discs are cheap enough make two copies and put one offsite for things they care about like pics and then wait for the price to drop. of course those are just the ones that didn't listen to me when i told them to buy 1Tb externals when they were less than $60 most were smart enough to buy when i told them too. I'd tell them to just get some flash sticks for small backups but after having a couple of brand new 16Gb sticks just die without warning i don't think I really trust those things for any files I care about. one thing about the spinning rust is if its gonna fail you usually get some heads up.
Well if they only counted for 1/4th of the production and the price is marked up over 100% I think an investigation is in order because i smell price gouging. while it is to be expected they'd make the consumers pay the cost of fixing the factories 100%-200% over the original price (which they certainly weren't losing money on) makes me smell a little collusion and price fixing. After all if there wasn't any price fixing one company could undercut the others and pretty much own the market, especially with the OEMs. Now that is BIG business and BIG profits so the fact they are ALL setting at almost identical prices? yeah i smell a rat.
But I would like to give a big shout out to Samsung because while i fricking hate the fact they sold their HDD business along with Hitachi because those were my big two go to brands, especially for business and industrial, because they sold out when they did for once in my fricking life i was ahead of the curve and not behind! when i heard they were quitting I bought Samsung ecodrives at $35 for a Tb and $59 for 2Tb and made a nice bit of cash and still had enough drives to make sure i could wait this mess out. I got burnt on DVD, paying $200 for a drive that 6 months later was less than $60, got burnt on my last Intel CPU when i paid too much only to have them abandon the socket and leave me with no upgrade path, but for once i actually came out ahead of the curve, thanks Samsung!
BTW if you need a big drive even at the higher prices i can recommend the Samsung Ecodrive most heartily. I've used them on factory floors and in construction shacks where they get horribly abused and they just come back for more, and any you find on the market in those sizes will be from the last two batches which were particularly good. with that nice fat 32mb of cache I went from a bench of 93 on a Seagate 7200 RPM with 8Mb of cache to nearly 140 on the 1Tb Ecodrive, fast enough i'm using the Eco as a boot drive on all my machines as well as storage and I can tell a difference in the speed thanks to the bigger cache. Oh and the temps made a HUGE drop, from 121-128F under load for the Seagate to a max 98f under load and an idle temp of just 82f compared to nearly 100f for the Seagate. damned shame there won't be any more but sitting on 6Tb I think I can afford to just let this whole mess go on by, thanks again Samsung!
You joke but you have to admit during the MHz wars things were easier to track, faster was better and the PR rating would give you a pretty good idea when it came to AMD VS Intel. Hell look at the old Athlon and Phenom, Athlon was the budget chip, phenom the more high end, the number by the X told you how many cores and faster was better, simple really.
Now good luck telling shit without a lookup table! Quick tell me what an A4-3300 is? did you say a quad core? WRONG its a dual, WTF? Quick what features separate the i3 2100 from the i5 2500? Does either of those tell you jack shit without a lookup table? NO. Hell the only nice thing i can say is at least AMD isn't playing feature roulette, unlike Intel which you can't tell which ones support which features without a chart, even the bobcat at least does support all the features.
Frankly i think the whole thing is designed to fuck customers, that is the only reason I can think of. it makes it damned near impossible to do a simple side by side comparison of anything, either from different manufacturers or even of the same manufacturers products, so the ONLY thing people can do is "higher priced must be better" which of course don't really tell you shit except it costs more.
Which makes me think of something I've been wondering for awhile, now that Intel has quit making the 386 are we gonna be seeing more failures like this in the future? Because from what i understand Intel kept making the 386 rev for so damned long (last chip rolled out in 09 IIRC) because its large die area and primitive but functional design made it trivial to harden for military and aerospace use. Now again from what I've been told due to the die shrinks that a modern chip, even something as old as the P3 or P4 would be hell to harden simply because its smaller dies and tighter tolerances would make it hell to protect from bit flips caused by cosmic rays, not to mention outright frying the chip from radiation exposure.
so are there any modern chips that would be easy to harden without being insanely expensive? Atom? AMD Geode? I'm sure with its GPU and dual cores Bobcat would be right out, maybe Via C3s? While ARM would be a good guess its die shrinks to fit in mobile phones would probably make it insanely expensive to harden yes? So while i'm sure the military probably bought a warehouse full of 386s before intel shut down what happens when they are gone? do we have a viable modern chip that withstand the rigors of space without costing insane amounts of money?
Try 70s and 80s sci fi, especially TV movies and failed pilots along with short lived series. i personally love these cheese fests like Northstar and Gemini Man because being sci fi they tried to be "cutting edge" which just made them REALLY locked to the time period, kinda like how those 70s and 80s pornos would try to be "hip to the times" so you had guys with bell bottoms and kick ass 70s funk in the 70s or girls with leg warmers and feathered hair and early 80s synth pop in the 80s.
Sadly many of those failed 70s and 80s sci fi were released on VHS but never on DVD and good luck finding them on P2P. here is one that is newer i can't find, see if you can...12:01PM with the guy that played Red on that 70s show. It was a damned good (and more than a little depressing) short story about a man trapped in a single hour that kept looping. Now you can often find the upbeat remake based on the original idea but good luck finding the original.
You see THIS is why we geeks are royally fucked if this is allowed to stand. because i don't know a geek that hasn't played with crypto at one time if for no other reason plain old curiosity and who knows if we tossed every single file we futzed with? the whole point of me buying 3tb worth of HDDs was so that i could futz around all i wanted and not worry about space, who knows what kind of files i have scattered here or there that I haven't messed with in ages. I also have about every crypto tool and security ISO backed up on DVD because it was touted someplace and I wanted to give it a spin and so it ended up in my software folder which gets backed up monthly.
In a way this is like attacking a zebra because it has stripes, after all part of what makes us geeks over jocks or normals is our love of trying new software and playing with the more esoteric stuff like crypto simply so we can learn or just see how something works. I personally had a period where i played with password crackers for awhile and so i have no doubt there are probably a dozen or so encrypted files where i didn't bother even attempting to remember the password because its whole point was just a target for the cracker.
So tell me orgelspieler , how would we ever get free if some three letter kicked down our door and demanded the password? If you can't say I forgot then frankly anybody could be sent to prison forever or trivially railroaded. To me this is a classic case of guilty until proven innocent with the added twist that if you have honestly forgotten you will be getting life in prison. Truly scary orgelspieler , truly scary.
Ya know, I don't know which is worse, a name THAT lame was already called or if they nail Apple we may be looking at iTab or iSlate or iMove or some such shit.
Seriously what is it with corps and fucked up names for products? you have Apple putting i on everything, Intel with core i followed by some number that don't tell me shit without a translation table, AMD tossing Phenom and Athlon and Sempron for a letter followed again by some number that don't tell me shit without a translation table, hell they don't even have the simple "X(number of cores)" anymore, its too damned confusing!
Well as far as RAM goes with it being so cheap frankly maxing out the board is usually the best advice anyway. With my 8Gb of DDR 2 800 (which I bought when DDR 2 was as cheap as DDR 3 is now) in my desktop all but the largest games are prefetched based on my usage, for example Comodo Dragon is pretty much kept in RAM 24/7 while WMP 12 is loaded every evening. With my netbook which I strictly use for media and web that 8Gb of DDR 3 is total overkill and all the apps I use are always prefetched into RAM Most would say 8gb was overboard for an AMD E350 netbook but again by buying when it was dirt cheap the difference between 4gb and 8Gb was a whole $6 so it really wasn't a big deal to max out.
Now with readyboost the trick is while it WILL run on just about any stick frankly its better to buy a 4Gb stick that is crazy fast than a 16gb that is slow. Look for something that gets 5Mbs or even better 10Mbs and since readyboost uses it for the small read/writes it really is superfast, IMHO it gets pretty close to the speed of a hybrid with the only penalty being it adds a few seconds to shutdown. With a netbook/notebook with a card reader its even easier to get crazy speeds because the card reader is usually hooked straight to a PCIe lane so using a 10x or better SDHC makes for a hell of a kick in the pants.
Finally you may want to look into ReFS which is gonna be coming out with winServer 8 as that is the next gen filesystem for Windows and will address many of the things you are asking for. But in many cases RAID simply isn't an option, you can't RAID a laptop for example and in many desktop the spinning rust discs are takin g up too much space to RAID SSDs, not to mention the cost of RAID SSDs. Also I'm not sure that having RAID 1 on SSDs would even be helpful as I have seen a bad batch of discs have multiple failures and from the looks of things SSDs are the same only worse. Ultimately this is why at the current time i simply can't recommend SSDs to my customers as the risk VS the reward is too great. while its all well and good to back up often having the time and keeping everything current can quickly become impossible, especially with mobile devices. Then finally add in the costs of the backup spinning rust at a time the HDD OEMs are gouging because of the flood and you can see why people can easily get a week or two behind. I have my backups scheduled for the day after patch Tuesday and i'm just too busy at the shop to do multiple backups more than once a month and with 3 main machines doing a triple disc image can turn into an all afternoon job VERY quick.
Hell here we are talking about NAND flash failing and just this morning i plugged my barely 6 months old 16gb flash stick in the PC and found its gone, a practically new TDK stick just poof! no files, no nothing. Good thing that didn't have anything on it I cared about but its a good example of how flash can just "go" without the slightest bit of warning.
Because they may have like in my case good data along with the worthless or be like spotting a needle in a needle stack? When WinRAR first started touting their ability to encrypt RAR files I futzed with it, throwing a picture here or doc there and then trying to see if I could break into it with a password cracker. Did i erase every. single. instance? Fuck if I know but since it was something involving software I would have played with it in my software folder which i back up monthly because you never know when some driver or software you downloaded 3 years ago for a client could come in handy and I have a little DB app that lets me find which stack its on quickly since they are all sorted by day/month/year. I have also played around with just about every encryption software that has ever been featured on slashdot or Freeware Arena. Again can i be 100% sure i tossed every single file I futzed with? The answer would be no simply because this kind of crazy bullshit isn't a scenario that a reasonable man could have foretold.
But I think you missed the point friend, even if lets say i did manage to toss every encrypted file since truecrypt makes hidden volumes and there are a couple of copies of truecrypt scattered among the backups that gives them a perfect excuse to simply drop you in a hole and forget about you. "Your honor as you can see he has a copy of truecrypt and this software is known to create hidden volumes therefor we ask you to compel him to provide the password" and since i can't provide the password to a hidden volume i don't have and of course can't prove a hidden volume that is made to be undetectable isn't there tada! Instant disappearing geek.
Now any way you slice it friend that is some truly scary shit, a legal way to throw you in a hole without trial for the rest of your days if the judge feels like it.
If this stands it means that anyone can be detained indefinitely without trial. All they have to say is "We believe this file is encrypted using stenography, give us the password" and since saying you don't know equals contempt of court tada! Instant disappearing person. Hell with most geeks they wouldn't even have to go that far, how many of you have truecrypt on some disc somewhere? all they'd have to say is "The defendant has truecrypt in his possession and we believe he has a hidden volume, give us the password' and tada! Bye bye geek. don't say it couldn't happen because it wasn't too long ago most of us would have never believed the USA would have free speech zones and rendition taxis either.
Kinda sad that after we spent all those years supposedly fighting the USSR because of freedom the wall falls only for us to slowly but surely become like the USSR.
Exactly, thanks smash. I mean who gives a flying fuck about the drive? but if you are working on some important term paper or business proposal and the SSD decides NOW is the time its gonna crap itself? That's when you realize that hot speed isn't worth the crazy failure rates. I mean either you have every. single. change of any note backed up or you are literally rolling the dice. try contacting them and asking about your data, they'll tell you tough luck, it isn't covered.
One of my gamers learned the hard way on the first failure as it was on his gaming laptop and he had uploaded his recent vacation pics to it and hadn't had a chance to backup before it crapped out. With HDDs I can usually get something back, even with one with a dying controller i can usually put it in the freezer and then use spinrite and get it to function long enough to get at least some of the data back, but when that SSD went there was nothing, the BIOS couldn't even detect a drive, it was just gone. You can't even do the old controller board swap trick, when they go.....its toast.
So who cares about the drive? Drives are a dime a dozen, its only the data that anyone cares about. Honestly after seeing the failure rates I decided instead to max my machines out on RAM and use Readyboost and with 8Gb each in my desktop and netbook I'd say the only place an SSD is gonna beat me is boot which I almost never do. With everything else superfetch has it already loaded into RAM based on what times I use it and even the best SSD still can't compete with RAM for speed. So I think I'll pass, and wait until i can actually get at least 5 years out of a drive, not just have it replaced for free if it goes tits up. Hell I just used up the last of my 40gb and 80Gb IDEs on some old offlease boxes to dump on CL, every single one of them worked just fine even after sitting in a drawer for years.
What the fuck are you babbling about? Are you high? Making an NES sound chip go "bloop" isn't "sticking it to teh man" you know, nintendo frankly doesn't give a flying fuck what you do with a 25+ year old NES dumbass.
And that doesn't change the fact these machines are so pitifully underpowered that frankly for anything OTHER than making it go "bloop" its completely pointless. hell i throw in the trash machines 200 times more powerful than that every. single. day. simply because there really isn't a point in some old 1Ghz anything anymore.
but if you think spending a couple of weeks writing an assembler just so you can go "bloop" is such an accomplishment here is your special olympics badge, it says "Ur Special!", oh and have a cookie. you keep sticking it to teh man sparknut, i'm sure he really is fucking crying now. my fucking god, he can make our old abandoned shit go "bloop!" whatever shall we do?
That is actually why I still sell analog capture cards because while folks can just get the new shows off of the net you'd be surprised how many folks have older shows they'd like to convert that simply weren't ever released, or more importantly videos of their families. I myself am gonna have to drop a couple of VHS tapes over to a friend's house or borrow his player for a day or two because i recently found a couple of old VHS tapes of me from the 90s playing with my old band and i'd like a copy but don't have a VCR anymore.
Oh look, its the FOSSie, how ya doing ya old Linux loonie? Guess you can't even support your own by supporting buying linux, nope that wouldn't let you foam at the mouth now would it? But don't worry i have some links you might find interesting, its linux pwning day! Enjoy!
Get ready, here they come! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.
BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.
Why would you say that? i haven't gotten to try the new ones but the ones that came with my nephew's Wii were frankly kinda lame. Sure you could do big movements like bowling or tennis, but trying to get precise movements on the RE game he had was more frustration than anything. while I haven't tried the kinect so i have no idea how it does on precise movements I don't see how it could suck worse than them first gen wiimotes. And as to whether they bought it or built it, who cares? Apple bought siri and it seems to be working out for them and its a hell of a lot smarter buy than Balmer trying to buy yahoo.
But is there a point? Well I'm sure the guy got a few weekends of goofing off to show for it is there any point of this being on slashdot? i mean i can see if it were an article on hacking the PS3 or X360, as those units have enough horsepower that if you could get around the DRM they would probably make really nice HTPCs and of course you can cluster the PS3. But we are talking the NES which while it was fun back in the day most folks that DO have one have it stuffed in a closet somewhere where it will most likely never see the light of day, like the closet I have out at my mom's that has a Genesis, SegaCD, N64, GameCube, and an Xbox in it. Not really a point in breaking out any of those systems anymore. I mean sure you can turn the Xbox into an SD player if you want to take the time but why bother when you can get an Nbox HD for like $60?
This is why I've always preferred computers to consoles because the DRMtastic nature of the consoles quickly make them worthless. once they are no longer sold games disappear quickly, cords get lost, other than a trip down memory lane they can't really do much. Meanwhile the PC I built in 1995 is still running 5 days a week as a C&C lathe controller, the gamer rig I had in 2000 has had a late model P4 slapped in it and is being used by suzy the checkout girl to surf the web, my Celeron from 05 is being used by mom for AoE and her match 3 games...you get the idea. There is just not much you can actually DO with these things except play approved games in the approved method.
While i'm glad this guy had fun i just don't see a point of putting an article about somebody who made a 25 year old console go "bloop" when frankly there are other topics that could have used the space.
Be careful friend, if its anything like the Shat's it may come gunning for you!