Maybe you didn't realize its all going through the same gear and when you heat that sucker up pumping data through it like there's no tomorrow the whole system gets glitchy. Frankly these systems weren't designed for the amount of information, neither voice NOR data, going through them and when either side gets crapflooded the whole thing gets buggy. Maybe its different on Verizon, don't know, but I've actually given the guy a hand on the AT&T system in my mom's back yard and when that thing gets overloaded from EITHER side then BOTH sides get glitchy.
The sad part is frankly thanks to the "damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" attitude in the USA its never gonna get any better. My cableco and DSL providers haven't moved a single inch in nearly 2 decades, even though the town is nearly 2/3rds larger since then. Hell when I was staying in Nashville a couple of years back there was places in the dead center of town with NO high speed choices at all! the entire infrastructure, both land and mobile, is frankly behind the curve and in many places held together by chewing gum because the corps won't spend a dime of profits in upgrading their gear. They'd rather buy out other companies instead of improving their own systems and THAT is why the whole thing is falling apart friend. That is why I say please use Wifi or wait until you get home because unless you are in one of the few markets they give enough of a shit about to compete your systems are all on the edge of failure.
Its based on the 707 dude, those are as common as dirt. hell I bet for 50 million you can get fricking Boeing to yank the wing off a retired 707 and perfectly fit it to that one. No friend it sounds to me like they want an excuse to write this off so they can get a "free" new one. After all its YOUR money not theirs they are blowing. My grandfather was USAF and when it came time to "blow the bases budget" as he put it he'd come home with piles of new gear, new tools, new radios, you name it. Where did it all come from? Simple they were throwing it all away so they could blow the budget and anything cool that he liked grandfather got to help himself to. I've still got an excellent all band military radio I need to find some tubes for.
So what is the replacement for this model? i bet its nicer right? They are probably thanking that dumbass for letting them get a new plane. Just more waste from your military, nothing to see, move along.
Geez where are you at that Amazon UK would be considered half price? That's one nice thing about the USA, no VAT and most states don't enforce sales taxes on the net. Personally I don't really see the point in Blu Ray, the PC players are still too high and the burners are nuts as well as the media being too expensive. My netbook is 1366x768 (An Asus EEE 1215B, great unit I highly recommend, gets great battery life while having a pretty nice dual core APU) and my PC which is also my TV is 1600x900 and frankly on both DVDs look "good enough" and more importantly with Tipard DVD ripper its "push button to rip movie" and then I can just slap the.avi on my netbook and watch movies on the go.
Funny I have an XP box with the same specs one of the GF's relatives is using. He was broke and my GF said "I'm sure my BF has something lying around the shop he can give you" and according to her its purring like a kitten. of course now that the great XP dieoff is beginning I'll hand him something nicer, i have a pile of 2.2Ghz-3.2Ghz P4s sitting in the shop now so when she comes down next weekend i'll throw one of those in her trunk and he can keep the 733Mhz as a backup or something.
But you have to admit the specs most Linux distros list is as much bullshit as the MSFT ones. I mean sure you may get it to run on a 400Mhz with 256Mb of RAM, but will it run well? on the web? oh hell no, That's as much bullshit as saying you could run Vista on a 1Ghz Celeron with 512Mb of RAM. if they don't want the OEMs throwing the crap at the bottom of the parts bin together and slapping linux on it they really need to have more realistic specs, don't you think?
I'd agree with two out of three but frankly the world was a better place before the iPhone and everybody trying to use a wireless like a landline. there is only a limited amount of wireless bandwidth you know, and in many places its already saturated to the max just with all the teens blabbing their asses off all day, tethering your laptop and trying to treat it like a landline just makes the whole thing suck worse for everyone else. Wait until you fucking get home or use Wifi dude, don't be a bandwidth piggie.
As for TFA all my customers are switching to media tanks so meh to the MPAA. Once they are all using Nboxes and WDTVs I'm sure they'll find out about the wonders of TPB, just another case where the pirated version is the better version. i mean here it is 2012 and they expect people to feed discs into the thing like its 1997, wake up and smell the technology jerks! Music has already gone to MP3 because with no DRM they'll play anywhere, yet here they are saying only this DRM encrusted crap is the only way you can play a movie. Well i hate to break the news to them but MP3 didn't become the default format because the record companies liked it, it became the default because of piracy, because people wanted easy and simple which the record companies didn't give them. The same thing is happening with movies as even that $40 DVD player from Walmart is now playing DivX.avi and MKV files. Do they think grandma is making MKVs of the kid's baseball game? nope its just folks bypassing the bullshit yet again.
It took years of dragging the record companies before we could bring their stupid asses to the giant money trough that is selling MP3s, it looks like it'll be another decade to do the same to the MPAA. What a bunch of total dipshits, they'd rather spend millions in bribes trying to make the world 1979 again than face the fact that times change, just retarded.
More likely he's Gen Z which OMFG have we come down as a species. All those raised on Medal Of Warfare:Gears of Resistance now with extra expensive DLC frankly are about as subtle as "Ow my balls!" and good irony really needs subtlety.
As for TFA I'll get hate for saying it with all the Star Wars/Trek nerds we have here but we need more/cranks the reverb/ "Meatbags in spaaaace!"/end verb/ like we need more black holes of money sucking military projects. Frankly for the price of sending a single meatbag into LEO for a week we can get a good 5+ YEARS worth of solid scientific data from a probe. NASA has shown us with their "cheap missions" or whatever the hell they call it you can get literally tons of good hard data about the solar system around us for less than the cost of getting some meatbag photographed standing by a flag on the moon. Hell we all know the main reason we were willing to throw insane levels of money at it was to fulfill the late JFK's wish and to be able to wave our wieners at the Ruskies.
But hopefully we've grown up and past the "Suck it Soviets!" one upmanship we were all about back then and can see there really isn't a point with current tech to push for meatbags in space. It simply costs too much to send the amount of air, water, and food required to shoot meatbags into space when for less money we could have probes sending us back data that could prove to be much more interesting, like is there life on Ganymede and Europa. If the Chinese or Indians want to wave their peckers let them, we've been there and done that. Let us worry about developing the tech that will help get us out there like better engines or robotic building platforms, which we can test on the bots so we do't have to blown piles of money on investigations if something goes wrong and the ship blows up.
While there is nothing I'd like more than for us to be able to be Buck Rogers or Capt Picard our tech right now simply isn't up to snuff and we aren't getting the kind of hard data that would make all these meatbag launches worth it IMHO. Finally I would point out with trillion dollar deficits and one party that has signed a "no new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge getting the money is frankly out of the question. Hell we can't even provide low cost medicines and dental to the poor, we sure as fuck don't need to be piling on debt to stick meatbags on the moon.
Then you will enjoy this video because his getting bit in the ass by DRM should be an inspiration to us all. here is a guy that has spent thousands on games yet STILL has to go to crack sites just to make the damned things he PAID FOR work.
Oh please! Do you HONESTLY think they paid MSRP for either the laptop OR the bookbag? The cleaning kit was MAYBE $2, the bookbag MAYBE $8, and they probably made at least $40 on the laptop. So they made out just fine friend, it was the fact they were willing to offer SOMETHING, even if it was cheap, that helped to make the sale.
And as someone who IS an actual retailer frankly its just good business. I often will pick up cheap keyboard mouse combos for less than $10 when newegg or Tiger is having a sale so when someone is looking at a tower I can say "Hey i'll throw in a new keyboard and optic mouse, no charge" and you'd be surprised how often that works. With laptops i use cheap 4-8Gb thumbsticks or if it has a card reader a cheap SDHC card. Does this hurt my bottom line? hell no, all it means is I'm making $50-$60 on the unit instead of $60-$70, big fricking whoop. but it makes the customer feel special to think they got "something extra" and that good feelings equal more business and they are more likely to send others your way.
Its business 101 guy, you want to build a rapport with the customer and make them feel good about buying from you. Throwing in some cheap swag that we frankly didn't pay hardly anything for doesn't hurt our bottom line while making the customer more likely to give us repeat business and IT WORKS. My oldest has gone back to that same BB and bought a whole bunch of extras for that laptop, like USB speakers and a briefcase for when he doesn't need the bookbag, all kinds of little extras, why? Because they made him feel good about buying from them, that's why. Its such a simple thing and it amazes me so many businesses have forgotten that.
Remember that $2000 sale i posted about earlier? Know how I got that account? The guy came in on a sat and was hurting because he needed to get some bookkeeping done by Mon and his PC crapped out on him. I yanked his drive and slapped it into one of my spares so he could get his data and showed him how to access it and told him "You just use this spare while I get the parts ordered for yours, that way you aren't gonna have any downtime" and that simple little act of making sure he wasn't jammed up not only got me his office, but the print shop down the street, a nice upgrade of the dorm at the local college, and three customers that have been steady buyers for nearly 2 years now, all because of treating one guy right and keeping him from hurting. he quickly spread the word about how well i treated him and the business rolled in. Hell i haven't even had business cards in over a year, I've had too much work to even need the things, and just word of mouth keeps me swamped most weeks. treat the customers right and they'll buy, simple as that.
I'm guessing these stores don't really have any kind of standards Mr AC, because if you replace best buy with Staples you'd be describing my local situation. here the Best buy is nice, well all except the geek squad but everyone already knows avoid the GS like the clap, but the local Staples is bait and switch city. the local best buy will usually be within say $50-$60 of the online price but their floor guys are quick to throw in swag like carrying cases or bookbags if they think you're interested so it all evens out in the wash. Compare this to the local Staples where NOTHING you see on the floor will be in stock but they'll be happy to upsell you a higher model they do have...bullshit Staples, nobody is falling for the bait and switch which is why your parking lot is always empty and even though its 35 miles away the BB is always full. if all they have left at BB is the floor model they'll happily take 15%-20% off and sell you the floor unit.
the only store where it seems to be the same everywhere is the Walmart supercenters. You been in one Supercenter you've been in them all, its as identical as Mickey D's and just as bland.
Depends on the product as some stores will really assrape you on price for what should be a common as dirt product. Take 100 packs of blank DVDs, its not like they have an expiration date, DVD burners are as common as dirt and on every new PC and laptop, so WTF? I walk into Wally World and they want $48! I walk into staples and its $46! I can grab the Amazon brand for less than $20 or Verbatim for $25 or so, and frankly i've not had any trouble out of the Amazon store brand.
So at least for certain items I've found the B&M stores aren't even close. thumbsticks, any kind of memory card, blanks, DVD burners, basic bog standard stuff that you wouldn't think they would gouge like a Monster Cable on they very much do. If it was only a couple of bucks more i wouldn't care, taxes or no, but i'm not paying double just to get it now, thanks ever so. Hell the local Walmart wanted $19.99 for a lousy 4Gb thumbstick! Give me a fricking break! That's 4 times the price the same stick is going for on newegg, what are they nuts?
And the "store brands" will be shite on a crusty roll. look at the Best Buy "exclusive" computers, they are the lowest POS garbage that any OEM can scrape together, every part of them is crap from the caps to the plastic. it won't take long for people to realize the ones that can "only be found here" will be the junk piles, like those BB and Staples "exclusive" laptops where they stick some desktop CPU like a bottom of the line Celeron or Pentium in a cheap laptop and pass it off as a good deal.
The best way is to not try to make funky store brands but to simply offer incentives to buy. When my oldest needed a laptop right that minute for class after the old Dell gave up the ghost he went to two local stores, the Staples and Best buy. The Staples were doing nothing but bait and switch, every model he would look at on the floor was magically out of stock but they could get him 'something similar' for a $300 markup, instead we went to the local BB and when they saw he was comparing prices the floor guy said "I'll throw in a bookbag and cleaning kit" and sealed the deal. Later when we checked online they sold it to him within $40 of the average price and the bookbag made up for the difference so we were happy.
So you can still make the sale in retail, simply offer the customer a good deal. I went amazon for my netbook, not because i had something against the local shops, but all they had were Atom crap and i wanted an AMD, now i go into the local shops like Walmart and best buy and i see they have quite a lot of nice AMD Fusion based so if i needed another one I could be tempted if they throw in a little swag or offer a decent price. The local staples still sucks though, last time I went in there with a customer who wanted me there to help decide on some monitors for his business what did i see? same old bait and switch BS. I got so disgusted that even though the BB is 35 miles away i said 'Hop in my truck and we'll get you some monitors". treat the customer right they'll buy, try to screw 'em and watch those sales walk out the door, its really that simple. that customer spent nearly a grand on monitors that day and those sales COULD have been Staples if they wouldn't have tried to screw him. I can't bitch too much about their douchebag tactics though, the customer was so impressed i was trying to keep him from getting ripped off he bought an extra 22 inch and handed it to me for my trouble as well as threw $2000 worth of business my way building the machines for his office. So I guess i should thank Staples for being douches, it certainly made me look better by comparison.
As someone who works 6 days a week fixing the things let me say why this won't work....users are fucking stupid. No seriously, dumb as post,thicker than Mississippi mud, make Forest Gump look like Stephen Hawking, spend a week at any shop and see if your gob isn't permanently smacked by the level of stupid we encounter.
Oh don't get me wrong, we do our best. most of us put on free AVs and try to educate the user but frankly the shit goes in one ear and out another, here let me give an example. One of the local insurance companies has an employee we call "Velma the disaster area' for how quickly she can hose a PC. Now the insurance company won't fire her because she has a mind like a steel trap for insurance, so when Joe the plumber walks in Velma can go "Hey Joe, how's Betty? you're youngest Cindy is about to be driving age and you know i can get you a discount if she gets good grades, does she have time to take a safety course? because i can get you a lower rate if she takes one" and so on. Needless to say the gal brings in business so they STFU and just make us poor fixit guys deal with Velma.
Here is my last exchange with Velma, swear to god its true: Me/Do NOT open that password protected email, its a virus! Velma "Oh you worry too much, its from my BFF Kim, see? that's her name right there, she wouldn't do anything bad she's my BFF!"/Me/ I KNOW Kim and she does NOT have the skills to password protect anything, hell she'd never even find the button! Do NOT open that! Velma "Oh Kim is not that bad on computers and she could have got her husband Bill to do it, and it says its kitten pics see? She know I like kittens!"/Velma promptly opens the zip, clicks on the.exe, and hoses the machine/ Velma "Ooops"/Me...........
So you see friends the malware guys will just do as they are doing now and hit the weakest link which is ALWAYS PEBKAC. I haven't see a Windows driveby since Vista came out, simply because malware writers are lazy and can just get the idiot behind the desktop to do the work for them instead of having to do all that coding work. So it doesn't matter if they make email dummy proof, the malware guys simply will switch to loading a keylogger in a match 3 game or kitty screensaver and that's all she wrote.. the only way to kill malware would also kill FOSS deader than Dixie because you'd have to switch all the users to locked down iShiny or Wintabs where they have ZERO rights to do anything but what the corps tell them to, and to turn the net into an oversized home shopping network. Personally i like having control over my machines too much to let the march of the morons destroy my ability to put what I want on them, so they can try all they want but i can tell them it just won't work. No matter how smart your solution is the monkey with the wrench will fuck that shit up big time.
And the amount of people that are actually actively looking for fucking Linux on an MP3 player? MAYBE 0.004% if you're lucky. It's called voting with your wallet chuck and most people don't give a wet fart about having a FOSS OS on a fricking MP 3 player! You might want to hack your toaster or SSH into your washing machine, but most people, you know the VAST MAJORITY that actually buys these things and thus who they are built for? yeah will most are happy with it OOTB or they wouldn't buy, and if they find it doesn't support some format that's where RB comes in.
So your "solution" is a solution in search of a problem nobody but you and a handful of ubernerds actually have. this is why that open video card is going nowhere, why your open device will likewise do the same, its because nobody gives a good crap as long as the device does what they want it to and with RB you can play any damned thing you want, and THAT is what folks care about, not whether they can read some data sheet or SSH into the stupid thing, okay? Geez and folks wonder why Linux goes nowhere, you ubernerds wouldn't understand the consumer mindset if we did a fucking brain transplant!
Maybe its just me, but WTF do you need 128Gb worth of tunes for on the road? you not going home for a year? I have a little.exe that you can drop in a folder and it'll tell you how many hours/minutes/seconds you have in a music folder (If anybody wants a copy just drop me an email, can't remember where i picked it up ages ago but its freeware) and in my little 4gb MP3 player i have something like 27 hours on the thing. Hell I have every single song I have ever even slightly liked ripped into my music folder at home and that is just 70.6Gb for the whole bang which gives me....hang on I'll check my little.exe.....I have 11,044 songs for a listening total of..953 hours and 53 minutes. geez i didn't know i had that much, been awhile since i ran the thing. And nearly all of those are either 192k or 320k, just depending on when I ripped 'em, and that all fits in at 70.6Gb!
So seriously wth do you need 128gb+ on the road for? How damned long as you really gonna be listening on the go?
Don't forget battery life, I don't want my phone going dead just because i want to listen to some tunes while out on a service call or stuck in the doc's waiting room. I have a little Sandisk M260 4Gb, the thing is built like a tank, weighs nearly nothing, at 64k (which is frankly about as good as i'm gonna hear with all the outside noise) i have over 3000 songs on it, and the thing runs on a single AAA battery so if it goes dead while i'm out I can walk into any gas station or grocery store and be back up and running in less than 4 minutes. Oh and it gets nearly 30 hours on that single AAA so I really don't have to change batteries very often and due to the layout I can just button it up in a shirt pocket and tap my finger on it sight unseen if i want to change songs.
So yes Virginia some of us still use MP3 players. I see no point in spending $300 on a PMP when I have a 12 inch netbook with a nice 1366x768 screen for watching movies, I use my phone for...and i know this will come as a shock...making phone calls, and the MP3 player is barely the size of a pill bottle and can easily be popped in my glove box. If anybody wants a nice cheap MP3 player that's built like a tank I can't recommend the Sandisk M series highly enough, I have 3 in my family and the amount of abuse those things have gotten is just nuts, knocked off tables, kicked, dog using it for a chewtoy, they just keep right on working, tough little bastards.
The sad part is valve has already given us a perfect example. Somewhere on their site (can't be arsed to look it it right now, go Google it) they have a nice chart with the profits they made off of L4D along with the price point the game was sold at when it made those profits. Their conclusion? That when they lowered the price to $2 they made more than 1700% PROFIT on L4D simply by the massive economy of scale they were able to achieve. Thanks to digital distribution the costs of scaling sales to that level were trivial, no discs or warehouses so the only real increase in expenditures was bandwidth.
The simple fact is if they would stop trying to make maximum assrape profits on every single copy they could wipe out piracy in the west tomorrow while their sales went through the roof but the greedy fucks are just too damned short sighted for that. For a good example of too stupid look at MSFT. when they had their $50 HP upgrade and $100 family packs I saw first hand piracy disappear, all those machines that had XP Pirate edition or Vista ultimate pirate edition all suddenly had Win Home, why? Because $50 is the price point where even the pirates decide that its less hassle to just buy Windows than pirate it. Ballmer killed the program and suddenly every Craigslist is filled with $100 PCs with $300 copies of Win 7 Ultimate.
You'd think being business 101 they would understand that, you have to make a product at a mass appealing price point if you want those masses to buy, but instead they try to do end runs around first sale and rig the laws so they can charge assrape prices per copy, even though those very same assrape prices are NOT maximizing their profits but as Valve was able to demonstrate severely damaging them.
Are there banks that really allow that? because I've never worried about my debit card because my bank has always covered any BS. They are so good about it I've been using it to buy parts for the shop for years since i don't have to worry about any fees or interest. Once in awhile i'll get some merchant that double dips then i just walk in and tell one of the gals and voila! it takes less than 10 minutes and its all back to normal.
Maybe this should be a lesson not to use shitty megabanks that suck. Use the little Co-Ops and small state banks that still treat you like a customer and not a wallet with feet. When the housing market cratered my bank was bragging on their little opening jingle how they didn't throw money around at crazy housing schemes and therefor had tons of money to loan to local businesses. They made out like bandits as all the local businesses ended up going to them, the last jingle of theirs i heard said they were never doing better and were ready to loan to local folks so come on in. i guess that's what happens when you treat folks decently, your business grows. All I know is they get even the tiniest whiff of fraud they call you and give you a new card as SOP, i'm waiting for a new card right now as a matter of fact, should be here tomorrow. One of the places i shop at had a minor breach and even though I wasn't affected they said "better safe than sorry" and sent me a new card. I like that, nice to see a bank say "better safe than sorry" and be proactive on security.
Sadly that doesn't work thanks to what I call "PPT math" which goes like this: say you boycott the record industry like i have, you just buy from indies and don't pirate. well Mr record company brings a PPT in to congress and says 'Now with this slide you'll see we had X from last year and by our calculations we should have had X+Y in sales yet we didn't. it has to be the ebil pirates!" and they get another nasty law passed. with games they'll simply bring in a PPT and say "With this slide you'll see how many console titles we sold. Now since the game did X and there are Y number of gamers on PC why it goes to follow that a massive hit like this should have had X+Y sales but we didn't, Those ebil pirates robbed us of our precious OMFG!" and get another nasty law passed.
You see its a classic "heads i win tails you lose' situation because no matter what you do unless the answer is "Buy their game" then you're a pirate. Look at the record companies who even though have been posting record profits broke out their PPTs which showed they would have been breaking every record if it wasn't for those filthy pirates. We've seen the billions and billions they keep pulling out of their ass to use in PPT math but no matter how many protest or put on the Amazon reviews 'Don't buy this, its got nasty DRM!" and get others to stay away PPT math says you're a pirate, so that is that.
sadly the guys at XKCD nailed this years ago. Notice how no matter which way you go it ends with you called a pirate? that's the beauty of PPT math, either way the cartels win. so if they are gonna call you a pirate no matter what you do you might as well be one right?
And I paid $28 a piece for most box sets off of amazon, so we are talking double the price and DRM tastic which for me makes the things fucking worthless. there should be no damned reason why i can't just go to Amazon, whip out my CC, and buy the episodes as.avi DivX or H.264 MKVs, but their DRM horseshit means it won't play on WDTV, or nbox, or any other basic set top box except a full blown HTPC. has this in ANY way stopped piracy? Hell most of the P2Ps have entire series all nicely wrapped in a RAR file and when you open it its bog standard MKV files, which are trivial to either play or convert.
so to me this is no different than the stupidity they pulled for years with music, where they would try to sell you some DRMTasitic WMA or ATRAC that wouldn't play anywhere and they wanted ass raping prices for those even though they worth LESS useful than just ripping the CD although at least they didn't try to make ripping CDs illegal like they've done with DVDs. To me its just proof they do NOT get it and it will probably be years before they do. Make it simple, easy and cheap and people WILL buy, make it flaming hoops and DRM nasty and folks will just go around the BS and download it.
Sad an AC had to nail it. I would just add this is also completely against one of the cornerstones of capitalism, and that is first sale. once you sell something that's fucking it, then its mine. I can sell it, wipe my ass with it, turn it into ninja stars if that is what i want to do because ITS NOT FUCKING YOURS ANYMORE you asshole! if you want to play that bullshit why the fuck can't we all do it? from now on PCs aren't sold, we're just giving you a one use non transferable license! Now you have to dispose of all PCs because that license isn't transferable! Hey we'll do it to houses too, clear that whole housing market problem right up because after one use you'll have to burn the fucker!
Just because its on a fucking disc or is IP doesn't suddenly give it magical fucking rights, its STILL a product. this kind of bullshit is what i fucking HATE about these cartels, they are trying to be fucking Schrodinger's fucking cat and be in two states at once. On the one hand they are saying "Oh no, you didn't buy the media, you bought a license" well fine, my disc got scratched so i can just download another one since i have a fucking license right? "Oh no, you don't own a license, you have a disc so if its gone you gotta buy another one!" BULLSHIT fucking bullshit! you can NOT eat your cake and have it too assholes! Its either ONE or the other but NOT both, you can't have all then protections and NONE of the liabilities you greedy little piss ants!
Now i apologize if my language has offended anybody but this REALLY pisses me off. this is just big media trying to do an end run around rules that have been there for ages by trying to claim their IP crap is two things at the same time while being NEITHER ONE when it comes to responsibilities. Well fuck you cartels, i'll pirate also before i buy a single thing from this company!
Before the flood I paid $300 for a 12 inch EEE 1215B, that's an E-350 dual core with an HD6310 GPU built in, 320Gb of RAM and I got an 8Gb upgrade on the RAM since it came with Win 7 HP X64 (the RAM was $32 after MIR) and a nice carrying sleeve for it for a final price of $352 shipped. Even after the flood you can still pick it up for $450 for a dual core that gets 6 hours playing 720p or 8 hours under expressgate. Seriously how fucking cheap do you think they can go? With a little care a unit like that can easily last you 5 plus years and my 17 inch Dell from 2005 last i heard is STILL running just fine with the guy that bought it off me, same as my Athlon dual laptop from 09 I sold to help pay for my EEE.
While i'm sure there is some price fixing that happens luckily enough there is enough companies still fighting for business that prices are pretty damned low. the PC I'm typing this on I built myself for less than $850 if you count the upgrades, less than $700 if you count the fact i got $50 for the original dual core and the board and quad i had after that is now in my GFs PC so I didn't have to buy those, and we're talking 6 cores, 8Gb of RAM, an HD4850 GPU, 3Tb of HDDs, dual DVD burners and a 1600x900 22 inch screen. Dude that is insanely cheap for that amount of power! hell my customers get new triples and quads to hook up to their HDTVs for around $550 and that is with me making a nice profit putting them together, again that is just crazy cheap.
So I really don't see what anyone is bitching about, my first x86 was a whole 40Mhz (I stayed with the VIC and Trash 80 for years past everyone else) and I got a steal on the thing at $500 simply because the guy wanted to get a state of the art 100Mhz to play Hexen with. By the time i got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc i was out damned near $800 and again i got 'em cheaper than ordinary folks because i knew people. it wasn't a year and a half before the software coming out wouldn't run decently on it because it was too slow and there was ZERO upgrade paths so I was SOL. Now I can build a box and have it run the latest software no problem years later, the nettop i use to surf in the shop is a 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz with 1.5gb of RAM and frankly it'll do anything on the web I wanna do. My boys are gonna finally have to be upgraded this spring because some of the newer games don't play nice on their Pentium Ds which is a circa 2006 chip but I'll get to keep their HD4850s which I paid a whole $60 refurb for a couple of years back.
dude the amount of power we get for dirt cheap is truly mind boggling and the amount of time it lasts is just nuts. you can buy an AMD E-350 board for like $80, slap a 4gb RAM chip in it for $20, and have a system you can surf with 5 years from now, hell you can even plug it in via HDMI to your widescreen and it'll play 1080p no problem. So I don't know what anybody is bitching about, as someone who has been into computing since the days of the VIC and Trash 80 I'd consider this a "golden age" of computing, where even the throw away stuff is so insanely overpowered it'll do the jobs 90% of the public want to do with them with ease. Hell I've already got a buyer for the guts out of one of the boys boxes so that 2006 Pentium D will just be moved along with the board and RAM from his machine to a neighbor who while having no trouble surfing with his late model P4 has a couple of older flight sims he wants to play online and that Pentium D will be more than enough for that. i wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now he's not still running that 2006 chip and quite happy with it, its a golden age friend, enjoy it.
I'll get hate for saying this but I think its a "chickens coming home to roost" scenario with Linux. For years Linux devs about how low powered you could go, like it was some sort of CPU/RAM limbo pole, and we've seen the web positively spammed by "take that dumpster dived machine and make it a new system with Linux!" articles all over the place. So what did anyone expect the OEMs to do when everyone was telling them you could run Linux on a wristwatch?
I've also noticed it gives OEMs an excuse to dump their parts bins instead of having to take a loss on them selling them as OEM parts on the secondary market, look at the Everex desktops they used to sell at Walmart for an example, which they went out of business BTW. While everyone else was at a bare minimum selling much higher clocked Celeron or sempron CPUs they took the cheapest most bottom of the line Via chip they could get, i think it was a lousy 1.2Ghz IIRC, may have been a 1.5Ghz, stuck it with a lousy 512Mb of RAM in 2 256Mb sticks (to get rid of old stock I'm sure) when everyone else had 1 1Gb stick and finished it off with IIRC a lousy CDRW when everyone else had a minimum DVDROM/CDRW combo drive. so what you ended up with was a machine that was worse in every single metric to what the competition had and frankly because they really couldn't get massive economies of scale even the price wasn't that great, they were $199 whereas you could get a MUCH better specc'ed offlease for $175 at the time or spend a little more and Walmart had one with again MUCH better specs WITH the mouse keyboard and a 15 inch screen for like $299.
So maybe the Linux guys need to cut the bullshit and be honest about the REAL system specs? maybe get together and set bare minimums for ARM and X86 that will actually give the users a comfortable experience and tell the OEMs they can't use the distro name or Linux trademarks if they cheap out and go lower? Because you are right these things really don't help Linux adoption because as anyone who has tried one, and i actually played with the Everex unit so i have, can tell you with the specs too low its a sluggish jerky mess. If that would have been my only chance to try Linux i would have thought it was a total POS simply because it was gimped by lame hardware. At least after they got spanked by Vista MSFT grew a brain and realized they couldn't keep upping the system reqs and have seriously scaled back on the power usage and the OEMs always knew their numbers were bullshit anyway, which is why we always had the "Take whatever numbers MSFT gives and double it" rule.
While I don't know enough about the ARM arch to recommend specs, for X86 I'd say a bare minimum 1.2Ghz with 1Gb of RAM would be more fair for minimum, with a 2.2Ghz with 256Mb of RAM on the GPU and 2gb system RAM being more in line for a recommended setting. what do you think? Too low?
Yeah I've noticed talking to customers that jumped on the tablet bandwagon most of them suck on time which to me kinda kills the whole point of having one. What are they doing wrong? Are they making them too thin and thus with no room for a battery? Are they using shitty batteries? Because my EEE 1215B isn't much thicker yet gets nearly 8 hours under Expressgate and 6 hours with Win 7 HP X64, and that's with me watching 720p movies. Now I know the E-350 has hardware decode but surely a generic X86-64 chip, even one designed for low power like Zacate, surely it uses more power than ARM right? so what's the deal?
Because most of the reviews on the new tablets unless you buy one like the Transformer where the keyboard has a second battery the average seems to be around 2 and a half hours which to me is kinds worthless. i mean who cares if they stick Plasma or Ubuntu or whatever on the thing if you've got to have a cord running from it to the wall constantly? Hell if you're gonna get that little time you might as well stick with your smart phone which is what my customers are finding out, most are using their android tablets as expensive digital photo frames.
Frankly I don't know if i trust the Russians figures, at least the figures from before the fall of the USSR. after all they didn't admit the failure of their moon program main launch vehicle until after the fall and if you look up "Lost Cosmonauts" on Google you'll find some pretty interesting recordings done by some Italian teens using WWII surplus on the side of a hill in the Russians flight path. those kids were just caught up in the "Sputnik craze' and didn't have any reason to lie or fake recordings and it looks like the Russians had some "oops we lost Boris" moments in their first launches and quietly swept them under the rug.
Regardless of how safely you pull it off or even if you get the price down that doesn't change the fact its pretty pointless for anything but flag waving. Just to get a man to Mars with enough food and fuel to get back you are looking at a rocket probably the size of the Empire State building and the amount of resources you go through putting a meatsack into space for a week in LEO could have paid for sending a probe to Europa. The simple fact is we meatsacks are just too delicate and require too much stuff, air, water, toilets, food, all these things add pounds and thus costs whereas Mr Robot can go to the farthest reaches of our system and do real science without all that extra baggage. Until we develop new engines (which can be tested on the probes) its just a waste of limited resources when the most we can do affordably is send yet another meatsack to LEO. We probably could have had a half a dozen probes sending back hard data for 5 or more years for the cost of a single Apollo mission, and in the end you really can't argue in favor of that kind of expense logically, the only real reason to do it would be emotional reasons like so an American could get the "first man on the moon" or other nationalistic flag waving, logically the math just doesn't work.
Well the joke in AYBS really they need to be at LEAST 16 to get a lot of it as there is a LOT of wordplay in that show, especially Sloakum and Humphries. Mr. Humphries could tell the filthiest stories while not using a single curseword and making sure there was a completely innocent explanation to get by the censors but if you pay attention to some of his stories you'll think "How did they get THAT past the censors?". But for the younger ones I'd go with Python best of and French and Saunders as they had a lot more visual gags and their stuff wasn't quite as randy as AYBS. Of course once they are older AYBS and AbFab with "poor old, dear old, sad old Patsy" are hilarious but again you have to be able to keep up with the word play. oh and for younger ones Red Dwarf is also very visual while still having jokes for the older ones.
The nice thing about the older British comedies is that you have shows for every age, from the heavy visual and slapstick to the heavy wordplay to the bawdy, it all comes down to picking the right show for the right age. When mine were little they'd fall over laughing at Benny Hill, they thought his chases and the way he was always smacking the bald guy was just too funny, now they watch a lot of Red Dwarf, AbFab, and Vicar of Dibly. So just pick a couple of best ofs for shows you think are about their speed and go for it bro. Frankly any of it is better than the current American TV which is waaay to much into sex jokes and bodily functions. American TV has always been less subtle and now its about as subtle as a punch in the balls.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you didn't realize its all going through the same gear and when you heat that sucker up pumping data through it like there's no tomorrow the whole system gets glitchy. Frankly these systems weren't designed for the amount of information, neither voice NOR data, going through them and when either side gets crapflooded the whole thing gets buggy. Maybe its different on Verizon, don't know, but I've actually given the guy a hand on the AT&T system in my mom's back yard and when that thing gets overloaded from EITHER side then BOTH sides get glitchy.
The sad part is frankly thanks to the "damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" attitude in the USA its never gonna get any better. My cableco and DSL providers haven't moved a single inch in nearly 2 decades, even though the town is nearly 2/3rds larger since then. Hell when I was staying in Nashville a couple of years back there was places in the dead center of town with NO high speed choices at all! the entire infrastructure, both land and mobile, is frankly behind the curve and in many places held together by chewing gum because the corps won't spend a dime of profits in upgrading their gear. They'd rather buy out other companies instead of improving their own systems and THAT is why the whole thing is falling apart friend. That is why I say please use Wifi or wait until you get home because unless you are in one of the few markets they give enough of a shit about to compete your systems are all on the edge of failure.
Its based on the 707 dude, those are as common as dirt. hell I bet for 50 million you can get fricking Boeing to yank the wing off a retired 707 and perfectly fit it to that one. No friend it sounds to me like they want an excuse to write this off so they can get a "free" new one. After all its YOUR money not theirs they are blowing. My grandfather was USAF and when it came time to "blow the bases budget" as he put it he'd come home with piles of new gear, new tools, new radios, you name it. Where did it all come from? Simple they were throwing it all away so they could blow the budget and anything cool that he liked grandfather got to help himself to. I've still got an excellent all band military radio I need to find some tubes for.
So what is the replacement for this model? i bet its nicer right? They are probably thanking that dumbass for letting them get a new plane. Just more waste from your military, nothing to see, move along.
Geez where are you at that Amazon UK would be considered half price? That's one nice thing about the USA, no VAT and most states don't enforce sales taxes on the net. Personally I don't really see the point in Blu Ray, the PC players are still too high and the burners are nuts as well as the media being too expensive. My netbook is 1366x768 (An Asus EEE 1215B, great unit I highly recommend, gets great battery life while having a pretty nice dual core APU) and my PC which is also my TV is 1600x900 and frankly on both DVDs look "good enough" and more importantly with Tipard DVD ripper its "push button to rip movie" and then I can just slap the .avi on my netbook and watch movies on the go.
Funny I have an XP box with the same specs one of the GF's relatives is using. He was broke and my GF said "I'm sure my BF has something lying around the shop he can give you" and according to her its purring like a kitten. of course now that the great XP dieoff is beginning I'll hand him something nicer, i have a pile of 2.2Ghz-3.2Ghz P4s sitting in the shop now so when she comes down next weekend i'll throw one of those in her trunk and he can keep the 733Mhz as a backup or something.
But you have to admit the specs most Linux distros list is as much bullshit as the MSFT ones. I mean sure you may get it to run on a 400Mhz with 256Mb of RAM, but will it run well? on the web? oh hell no, That's as much bullshit as saying you could run Vista on a 1Ghz Celeron with 512Mb of RAM. if they don't want the OEMs throwing the crap at the bottom of the parts bin together and slapping linux on it they really need to have more realistic specs, don't you think?
I'd agree with two out of three but frankly the world was a better place before the iPhone and everybody trying to use a wireless like a landline. there is only a limited amount of wireless bandwidth you know, and in many places its already saturated to the max just with all the teens blabbing their asses off all day, tethering your laptop and trying to treat it like a landline just makes the whole thing suck worse for everyone else. Wait until you fucking get home or use Wifi dude, don't be a bandwidth piggie.
As for TFA all my customers are switching to media tanks so meh to the MPAA. Once they are all using Nboxes and WDTVs I'm sure they'll find out about the wonders of TPB, just another case where the pirated version is the better version. i mean here it is 2012 and they expect people to feed discs into the thing like its 1997, wake up and smell the technology jerks! Music has already gone to MP3 because with no DRM they'll play anywhere, yet here they are saying only this DRM encrusted crap is the only way you can play a movie. Well i hate to break the news to them but MP3 didn't become the default format because the record companies liked it, it became the default because of piracy, because people wanted easy and simple which the record companies didn't give them. The same thing is happening with movies as even that $40 DVD player from Walmart is now playing DivX .avi and MKV files. Do they think grandma is making MKVs of the kid's baseball game? nope its just folks bypassing the bullshit yet again.
It took years of dragging the record companies before we could bring their stupid asses to the giant money trough that is selling MP3s, it looks like it'll be another decade to do the same to the MPAA. What a bunch of total dipshits, they'd rather spend millions in bribes trying to make the world 1979 again than face the fact that times change, just retarded.
More likely he's Gen Z which OMFG have we come down as a species. All those raised on Medal Of Warfare:Gears of Resistance now with extra expensive DLC frankly are about as subtle as "Ow my balls!" and good irony really needs subtlety.
As for TFA I'll get hate for saying it with all the Star Wars/Trek nerds we have here but we need more /cranks the reverb/ "Meatbags in spaaaace!" /end verb/ like we need more black holes of money sucking military projects. Frankly for the price of sending a single meatbag into LEO for a week we can get a good 5+ YEARS worth of solid scientific data from a probe. NASA has shown us with their "cheap missions" or whatever the hell they call it you can get literally tons of good hard data about the solar system around us for less than the cost of getting some meatbag photographed standing by a flag on the moon. Hell we all know the main reason we were willing to throw insane levels of money at it was to fulfill the late JFK's wish and to be able to wave our wieners at the Ruskies.
But hopefully we've grown up and past the "Suck it Soviets!" one upmanship we were all about back then and can see there really isn't a point with current tech to push for meatbags in space. It simply costs too much to send the amount of air, water, and food required to shoot meatbags into space when for less money we could have probes sending us back data that could prove to be much more interesting, like is there life on Ganymede and Europa. If the Chinese or Indians want to wave their peckers let them, we've been there and done that. Let us worry about developing the tech that will help get us out there like better engines or robotic building platforms, which we can test on the bots so we do't have to blown piles of money on investigations if something goes wrong and the ship blows up.
While there is nothing I'd like more than for us to be able to be Buck Rogers or Capt Picard our tech right now simply isn't up to snuff and we aren't getting the kind of hard data that would make all these meatbag launches worth it IMHO. Finally I would point out with trillion dollar deficits and one party that has signed a "no new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge getting the money is frankly out of the question. Hell we can't even provide low cost medicines and dental to the poor, we sure as fuck don't need to be piling on debt to stick meatbags on the moon.
Then you will enjoy this video because his getting bit in the ass by DRM should be an inspiration to us all. here is a guy that has spent thousands on games yet STILL has to go to crack sites just to make the damned things he PAID FOR work.
Oh please! Do you HONESTLY think they paid MSRP for either the laptop OR the bookbag? The cleaning kit was MAYBE $2, the bookbag MAYBE $8, and they probably made at least $40 on the laptop. So they made out just fine friend, it was the fact they were willing to offer SOMETHING, even if it was cheap, that helped to make the sale.
And as someone who IS an actual retailer frankly its just good business. I often will pick up cheap keyboard mouse combos for less than $10 when newegg or Tiger is having a sale so when someone is looking at a tower I can say "Hey i'll throw in a new keyboard and optic mouse, no charge" and you'd be surprised how often that works. With laptops i use cheap 4-8Gb thumbsticks or if it has a card reader a cheap SDHC card. Does this hurt my bottom line? hell no, all it means is I'm making $50-$60 on the unit instead of $60-$70, big fricking whoop. but it makes the customer feel special to think they got "something extra" and that good feelings equal more business and they are more likely to send others your way.
Its business 101 guy, you want to build a rapport with the customer and make them feel good about buying from you. Throwing in some cheap swag that we frankly didn't pay hardly anything for doesn't hurt our bottom line while making the customer more likely to give us repeat business and IT WORKS. My oldest has gone back to that same BB and bought a whole bunch of extras for that laptop, like USB speakers and a briefcase for when he doesn't need the bookbag, all kinds of little extras, why? Because they made him feel good about buying from them, that's why. Its such a simple thing and it amazes me so many businesses have forgotten that.
Remember that $2000 sale i posted about earlier? Know how I got that account? The guy came in on a sat and was hurting because he needed to get some bookkeeping done by Mon and his PC crapped out on him. I yanked his drive and slapped it into one of my spares so he could get his data and showed him how to access it and told him "You just use this spare while I get the parts ordered for yours, that way you aren't gonna have any downtime" and that simple little act of making sure he wasn't jammed up not only got me his office, but the print shop down the street, a nice upgrade of the dorm at the local college, and three customers that have been steady buyers for nearly 2 years now, all because of treating one guy right and keeping him from hurting. he quickly spread the word about how well i treated him and the business rolled in. Hell i haven't even had business cards in over a year, I've had too much work to even need the things, and just word of mouth keeps me swamped most weeks. treat the customers right and they'll buy, simple as that.
I'm guessing these stores don't really have any kind of standards Mr AC, because if you replace best buy with Staples you'd be describing my local situation. here the Best buy is nice, well all except the geek squad but everyone already knows avoid the GS like the clap, but the local Staples is bait and switch city. the local best buy will usually be within say $50-$60 of the online price but their floor guys are quick to throw in swag like carrying cases or bookbags if they think you're interested so it all evens out in the wash. Compare this to the local Staples where NOTHING you see on the floor will be in stock but they'll be happy to upsell you a higher model they do have...bullshit Staples, nobody is falling for the bait and switch which is why your parking lot is always empty and even though its 35 miles away the BB is always full. if all they have left at BB is the floor model they'll happily take 15%-20% off and sell you the floor unit.
the only store where it seems to be the same everywhere is the Walmart supercenters. You been in one Supercenter you've been in them all, its as identical as Mickey D's and just as bland.
Depends on the product as some stores will really assrape you on price for what should be a common as dirt product. Take 100 packs of blank DVDs, its not like they have an expiration date, DVD burners are as common as dirt and on every new PC and laptop, so WTF? I walk into Wally World and they want $48! I walk into staples and its $46! I can grab the Amazon brand for less than $20 or Verbatim for $25 or so, and frankly i've not had any trouble out of the Amazon store brand.
So at least for certain items I've found the B&M stores aren't even close. thumbsticks, any kind of memory card, blanks, DVD burners, basic bog standard stuff that you wouldn't think they would gouge like a Monster Cable on they very much do. If it was only a couple of bucks more i wouldn't care, taxes or no, but i'm not paying double just to get it now, thanks ever so. Hell the local Walmart wanted $19.99 for a lousy 4Gb thumbstick! Give me a fricking break! That's 4 times the price the same stick is going for on newegg, what are they nuts?
And the "store brands" will be shite on a crusty roll. look at the Best Buy "exclusive" computers, they are the lowest POS garbage that any OEM can scrape together, every part of them is crap from the caps to the plastic. it won't take long for people to realize the ones that can "only be found here" will be the junk piles, like those BB and Staples "exclusive" laptops where they stick some desktop CPU like a bottom of the line Celeron or Pentium in a cheap laptop and pass it off as a good deal.
The best way is to not try to make funky store brands but to simply offer incentives to buy. When my oldest needed a laptop right that minute for class after the old Dell gave up the ghost he went to two local stores, the Staples and Best buy. The Staples were doing nothing but bait and switch, every model he would look at on the floor was magically out of stock but they could get him 'something similar' for a $300 markup, instead we went to the local BB and when they saw he was comparing prices the floor guy said "I'll throw in a bookbag and cleaning kit" and sealed the deal. Later when we checked online they sold it to him within $40 of the average price and the bookbag made up for the difference so we were happy.
So you can still make the sale in retail, simply offer the customer a good deal. I went amazon for my netbook, not because i had something against the local shops, but all they had were Atom crap and i wanted an AMD, now i go into the local shops like Walmart and best buy and i see they have quite a lot of nice AMD Fusion based so if i needed another one I could be tempted if they throw in a little swag or offer a decent price. The local staples still sucks though, last time I went in there with a customer who wanted me there to help decide on some monitors for his business what did i see? same old bait and switch BS. I got so disgusted that even though the BB is 35 miles away i said 'Hop in my truck and we'll get you some monitors". treat the customer right they'll buy, try to screw 'em and watch those sales walk out the door, its really that simple. that customer spent nearly a grand on monitors that day and those sales COULD have been Staples if they wouldn't have tried to screw him. I can't bitch too much about their douchebag tactics though, the customer was so impressed i was trying to keep him from getting ripped off he bought an extra 22 inch and handed it to me for my trouble as well as threw $2000 worth of business my way building the machines for his office. So I guess i should thank Staples for being douches, it certainly made me look better by comparison.
As someone who works 6 days a week fixing the things let me say why this won't work....users are fucking stupid. No seriously, dumb as post,thicker than Mississippi mud, make Forest Gump look like Stephen Hawking, spend a week at any shop and see if your gob isn't permanently smacked by the level of stupid we encounter.
Oh don't get me wrong, we do our best. most of us put on free AVs and try to educate the user but frankly the shit goes in one ear and out another, here let me give an example. One of the local insurance companies has an employee we call "Velma the disaster area' for how quickly she can hose a PC. Now the insurance company won't fire her because she has a mind like a steel trap for insurance, so when Joe the plumber walks in Velma can go "Hey Joe, how's Betty? you're youngest Cindy is about to be driving age and you know i can get you a discount if she gets good grades, does she have time to take a safety course? because i can get you a lower rate if she takes one" and so on. Needless to say the gal brings in business so they STFU and just make us poor fixit guys deal with Velma.
Here is my last exchange with Velma, swear to god its true: Me/Do NOT open that password protected email, its a virus! Velma "Oh you worry too much, its from my BFF Kim, see? that's her name right there, she wouldn't do anything bad she's my BFF!" /Me/ I KNOW Kim and she does NOT have the skills to password protect anything, hell she'd never even find the button! Do NOT open that! Velma "Oh Kim is not that bad on computers and she could have got her husband Bill to do it, and it says its kitten pics see? She know I like kittens!" /Velma promptly opens the zip, clicks on the .exe, and hoses the machine/ Velma "Ooops" /Me ...........
So you see friends the malware guys will just do as they are doing now and hit the weakest link which is ALWAYS PEBKAC. I haven't see a Windows driveby since Vista came out, simply because malware writers are lazy and can just get the idiot behind the desktop to do the work for them instead of having to do all that coding work. So it doesn't matter if they make email dummy proof, the malware guys simply will switch to loading a keylogger in a match 3 game or kitty screensaver and that's all she wrote.. the only way to kill malware would also kill FOSS deader than Dixie because you'd have to switch all the users to locked down iShiny or Wintabs where they have ZERO rights to do anything but what the corps tell them to, and to turn the net into an oversized home shopping network. Personally i like having control over my machines too much to let the march of the morons destroy my ability to put what I want on them, so they can try all they want but i can tell them it just won't work. No matter how smart your solution is the monkey with the wrench will fuck that shit up big time.
And the amount of people that are actually actively looking for fucking Linux on an MP3 player? MAYBE 0.004% if you're lucky. It's called voting with your wallet chuck and most people don't give a wet fart about having a FOSS OS on a fricking MP 3 player! You might want to hack your toaster or SSH into your washing machine, but most people, you know the VAST MAJORITY that actually buys these things and thus who they are built for? yeah will most are happy with it OOTB or they wouldn't buy, and if they find it doesn't support some format that's where RB comes in.
So your "solution" is a solution in search of a problem nobody but you and a handful of ubernerds actually have. this is why that open video card is going nowhere, why your open device will likewise do the same, its because nobody gives a good crap as long as the device does what they want it to and with RB you can play any damned thing you want, and THAT is what folks care about, not whether they can read some data sheet or SSH into the stupid thing, okay? Geez and folks wonder why Linux goes nowhere, you ubernerds wouldn't understand the consumer mindset if we did a fucking brain transplant!
Maybe its just me, but WTF do you need 128Gb worth of tunes for on the road? you not going home for a year? I have a little .exe that you can drop in a folder and it'll tell you how many hours/minutes/seconds you have in a music folder (If anybody wants a copy just drop me an email, can't remember where i picked it up ages ago but its freeware) and in my little 4gb MP3 player i have something like 27 hours on the thing. Hell I have every single song I have ever even slightly liked ripped into my music folder at home and that is just 70.6Gb for the whole bang which gives me....hang on I'll check my little .exe.....I have 11,044 songs for a listening total of..953 hours and 53 minutes. geez i didn't know i had that much, been awhile since i ran the thing. And nearly all of those are either 192k or 320k, just depending on when I ripped 'em, and that all fits in at 70.6Gb!
So seriously wth do you need 128gb+ on the road for? How damned long as you really gonna be listening on the go?
Don't forget battery life, I don't want my phone going dead just because i want to listen to some tunes while out on a service call or stuck in the doc's waiting room. I have a little Sandisk M260 4Gb, the thing is built like a tank, weighs nearly nothing, at 64k (which is frankly about as good as i'm gonna hear with all the outside noise) i have over 3000 songs on it, and the thing runs on a single AAA battery so if it goes dead while i'm out I can walk into any gas station or grocery store and be back up and running in less than 4 minutes. Oh and it gets nearly 30 hours on that single AAA so I really don't have to change batteries very often and due to the layout I can just button it up in a shirt pocket and tap my finger on it sight unseen if i want to change songs.
So yes Virginia some of us still use MP3 players. I see no point in spending $300 on a PMP when I have a 12 inch netbook with a nice 1366x768 screen for watching movies, I use my phone for...and i know this will come as a shock...making phone calls, and the MP3 player is barely the size of a pill bottle and can easily be popped in my glove box. If anybody wants a nice cheap MP3 player that's built like a tank I can't recommend the Sandisk M series highly enough, I have 3 in my family and the amount of abuse those things have gotten is just nuts, knocked off tables, kicked, dog using it for a chewtoy, they just keep right on working, tough little bastards.
The sad part is valve has already given us a perfect example. Somewhere on their site (can't be arsed to look it it right now, go Google it) they have a nice chart with the profits they made off of L4D along with the price point the game was sold at when it made those profits. Their conclusion? That when they lowered the price to $2 they made more than 1700% PROFIT on L4D simply by the massive economy of scale they were able to achieve. Thanks to digital distribution the costs of scaling sales to that level were trivial, no discs or warehouses so the only real increase in expenditures was bandwidth.
The simple fact is if they would stop trying to make maximum assrape profits on every single copy they could wipe out piracy in the west tomorrow while their sales went through the roof but the greedy fucks are just too damned short sighted for that. For a good example of too stupid look at MSFT. when they had their $50 HP upgrade and $100 family packs I saw first hand piracy disappear, all those machines that had XP Pirate edition or Vista ultimate pirate edition all suddenly had Win Home, why? Because $50 is the price point where even the pirates decide that its less hassle to just buy Windows than pirate it. Ballmer killed the program and suddenly every Craigslist is filled with $100 PCs with $300 copies of Win 7 Ultimate.
You'd think being business 101 they would understand that, you have to make a product at a mass appealing price point if you want those masses to buy, but instead they try to do end runs around first sale and rig the laws so they can charge assrape prices per copy, even though those very same assrape prices are NOT maximizing their profits but as Valve was able to demonstrate severely damaging them.
Are there banks that really allow that? because I've never worried about my debit card because my bank has always covered any BS. They are so good about it I've been using it to buy parts for the shop for years since i don't have to worry about any fees or interest. Once in awhile i'll get some merchant that double dips then i just walk in and tell one of the gals and voila! it takes less than 10 minutes and its all back to normal.
Maybe this should be a lesson not to use shitty megabanks that suck. Use the little Co-Ops and small state banks that still treat you like a customer and not a wallet with feet. When the housing market cratered my bank was bragging on their little opening jingle how they didn't throw money around at crazy housing schemes and therefor had tons of money to loan to local businesses. They made out like bandits as all the local businesses ended up going to them, the last jingle of theirs i heard said they were never doing better and were ready to loan to local folks so come on in. i guess that's what happens when you treat folks decently, your business grows. All I know is they get even the tiniest whiff of fraud they call you and give you a new card as SOP, i'm waiting for a new card right now as a matter of fact, should be here tomorrow. One of the places i shop at had a minor breach and even though I wasn't affected they said "better safe than sorry" and sent me a new card. I like that, nice to see a bank say "better safe than sorry" and be proactive on security.
Sadly that doesn't work thanks to what I call "PPT math" which goes like this: say you boycott the record industry like i have, you just buy from indies and don't pirate. well Mr record company brings a PPT in to congress and says 'Now with this slide you'll see we had X from last year and by our calculations we should have had X+Y in sales yet we didn't. it has to be the ebil pirates!" and they get another nasty law passed. with games they'll simply bring in a PPT and say "With this slide you'll see how many console titles we sold. Now since the game did X and there are Y number of gamers on PC why it goes to follow that a massive hit like this should have had X+Y sales but we didn't, Those ebil pirates robbed us of our precious OMFG!" and get another nasty law passed.
You see its a classic "heads i win tails you lose' situation because no matter what you do unless the answer is "Buy their game" then you're a pirate. Look at the record companies who even though have been posting record profits broke out their PPTs which showed they would have been breaking every record if it wasn't for those filthy pirates. We've seen the billions and billions they keep pulling out of their ass to use in PPT math but no matter how many protest or put on the Amazon reviews 'Don't buy this, its got nasty DRM!" and get others to stay away PPT math says you're a pirate, so that is that.
sadly the guys at XKCD nailed this years ago. Notice how no matter which way you go it ends with you called a pirate? that's the beauty of PPT math, either way the cartels win. so if they are gonna call you a pirate no matter what you do you might as well be one right?
And I paid $28 a piece for most box sets off of amazon, so we are talking double the price and DRM tastic which for me makes the things fucking worthless. there should be no damned reason why i can't just go to Amazon, whip out my CC, and buy the episodes as .avi DivX or H.264 MKVs, but their DRM horseshit means it won't play on WDTV, or nbox, or any other basic set top box except a full blown HTPC. has this in ANY way stopped piracy? Hell most of the P2Ps have entire series all nicely wrapped in a RAR file and when you open it its bog standard MKV files, which are trivial to either play or convert.
so to me this is no different than the stupidity they pulled for years with music, where they would try to sell you some DRMTasitic WMA or ATRAC that wouldn't play anywhere and they wanted ass raping prices for those even though they worth LESS useful than just ripping the CD although at least they didn't try to make ripping CDs illegal like they've done with DVDs. To me its just proof they do NOT get it and it will probably be years before they do. Make it simple, easy and cheap and people WILL buy, make it flaming hoops and DRM nasty and folks will just go around the BS and download it.
Sad an AC had to nail it. I would just add this is also completely against one of the cornerstones of capitalism, and that is first sale. once you sell something that's fucking it, then its mine. I can sell it, wipe my ass with it, turn it into ninja stars if that is what i want to do because ITS NOT FUCKING YOURS ANYMORE you asshole! if you want to play that bullshit why the fuck can't we all do it? from now on PCs aren't sold, we're just giving you a one use non transferable license! Now you have to dispose of all PCs because that license isn't transferable! Hey we'll do it to houses too, clear that whole housing market problem right up because after one use you'll have to burn the fucker!
Just because its on a fucking disc or is IP doesn't suddenly give it magical fucking rights, its STILL a product. this kind of bullshit is what i fucking HATE about these cartels, they are trying to be fucking Schrodinger's fucking cat and be in two states at once. On the one hand they are saying "Oh no, you didn't buy the media, you bought a license" well fine, my disc got scratched so i can just download another one since i have a fucking license right? "Oh no, you don't own a license, you have a disc so if its gone you gotta buy another one!" BULLSHIT fucking bullshit! you can NOT eat your cake and have it too assholes! Its either ONE or the other but NOT both, you can't have all then protections and NONE of the liabilities you greedy little piss ants!
Now i apologize if my language has offended anybody but this REALLY pisses me off. this is just big media trying to do an end run around rules that have been there for ages by trying to claim their IP crap is two things at the same time while being NEITHER ONE when it comes to responsibilities. Well fuck you cartels, i'll pirate also before i buy a single thing from this company!
Before the flood I paid $300 for a 12 inch EEE 1215B, that's an E-350 dual core with an HD6310 GPU built in, 320Gb of RAM and I got an 8Gb upgrade on the RAM since it came with Win 7 HP X64 (the RAM was $32 after MIR) and a nice carrying sleeve for it for a final price of $352 shipped. Even after the flood you can still pick it up for $450 for a dual core that gets 6 hours playing 720p or 8 hours under expressgate. Seriously how fucking cheap do you think they can go? With a little care a unit like that can easily last you 5 plus years and my 17 inch Dell from 2005 last i heard is STILL running just fine with the guy that bought it off me, same as my Athlon dual laptop from 09 I sold to help pay for my EEE.
While i'm sure there is some price fixing that happens luckily enough there is enough companies still fighting for business that prices are pretty damned low. the PC I'm typing this on I built myself for less than $850 if you count the upgrades, less than $700 if you count the fact i got $50 for the original dual core and the board and quad i had after that is now in my GFs PC so I didn't have to buy those, and we're talking 6 cores, 8Gb of RAM, an HD4850 GPU, 3Tb of HDDs, dual DVD burners and a 1600x900 22 inch screen. Dude that is insanely cheap for that amount of power! hell my customers get new triples and quads to hook up to their HDTVs for around $550 and that is with me making a nice profit putting them together, again that is just crazy cheap.
So I really don't see what anyone is bitching about, my first x86 was a whole 40Mhz (I stayed with the VIC and Trash 80 for years past everyone else) and I got a steal on the thing at $500 simply because the guy wanted to get a state of the art 100Mhz to play Hexen with. By the time i got a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc i was out damned near $800 and again i got 'em cheaper than ordinary folks because i knew people. it wasn't a year and a half before the software coming out wouldn't run decently on it because it was too slow and there was ZERO upgrade paths so I was SOL. Now I can build a box and have it run the latest software no problem years later, the nettop i use to surf in the shop is a 2004 Sempron 1.8Ghz with 1.5gb of RAM and frankly it'll do anything on the web I wanna do. My boys are gonna finally have to be upgraded this spring because some of the newer games don't play nice on their Pentium Ds which is a circa 2006 chip but I'll get to keep their HD4850s which I paid a whole $60 refurb for a couple of years back.
dude the amount of power we get for dirt cheap is truly mind boggling and the amount of time it lasts is just nuts. you can buy an AMD E-350 board for like $80, slap a 4gb RAM chip in it for $20, and have a system you can surf with 5 years from now, hell you can even plug it in via HDMI to your widescreen and it'll play 1080p no problem. So I don't know what anybody is bitching about, as someone who has been into computing since the days of the VIC and Trash 80 I'd consider this a "golden age" of computing, where even the throw away stuff is so insanely overpowered it'll do the jobs 90% of the public want to do with them with ease. Hell I've already got a buyer for the guts out of one of the boys boxes so that 2006 Pentium D will just be moved along with the board and RAM from his machine to a neighbor who while having no trouble surfing with his late model P4 has a couple of older flight sims he wants to play online and that Pentium D will be more than enough for that. i wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now he's not still running that 2006 chip and quite happy with it, its a golden age friend, enjoy it.
I'll get hate for saying this but I think its a "chickens coming home to roost" scenario with Linux. For years Linux devs about how low powered you could go, like it was some sort of CPU/RAM limbo pole, and we've seen the web positively spammed by "take that dumpster dived machine and make it a new system with Linux!" articles all over the place. So what did anyone expect the OEMs to do when everyone was telling them you could run Linux on a wristwatch?
I've also noticed it gives OEMs an excuse to dump their parts bins instead of having to take a loss on them selling them as OEM parts on the secondary market, look at the Everex desktops they used to sell at Walmart for an example, which they went out of business BTW. While everyone else was at a bare minimum selling much higher clocked Celeron or sempron CPUs they took the cheapest most bottom of the line Via chip they could get, i think it was a lousy 1.2Ghz IIRC, may have been a 1.5Ghz, stuck it with a lousy 512Mb of RAM in 2 256Mb sticks (to get rid of old stock I'm sure) when everyone else had 1 1Gb stick and finished it off with IIRC a lousy CDRW when everyone else had a minimum DVDROM/CDRW combo drive. so what you ended up with was a machine that was worse in every single metric to what the competition had and frankly because they really couldn't get massive economies of scale even the price wasn't that great, they were $199 whereas you could get a MUCH better specc'ed offlease for $175 at the time or spend a little more and Walmart had one with again MUCH better specs WITH the mouse keyboard and a 15 inch screen for like $299.
So maybe the Linux guys need to cut the bullshit and be honest about the REAL system specs? maybe get together and set bare minimums for ARM and X86 that will actually give the users a comfortable experience and tell the OEMs they can't use the distro name or Linux trademarks if they cheap out and go lower? Because you are right these things really don't help Linux adoption because as anyone who has tried one, and i actually played with the Everex unit so i have, can tell you with the specs too low its a sluggish jerky mess. If that would have been my only chance to try Linux i would have thought it was a total POS simply because it was gimped by lame hardware. At least after they got spanked by Vista MSFT grew a brain and realized they couldn't keep upping the system reqs and have seriously scaled back on the power usage and the OEMs always knew their numbers were bullshit anyway, which is why we always had the "Take whatever numbers MSFT gives and double it" rule.
While I don't know enough about the ARM arch to recommend specs, for X86 I'd say a bare minimum 1.2Ghz with 1Gb of RAM would be more fair for minimum, with a 2.2Ghz with 256Mb of RAM on the GPU and 2gb system RAM being more in line for a recommended setting. what do you think? Too low?
Yeah I've noticed talking to customers that jumped on the tablet bandwagon most of them suck on time which to me kinda kills the whole point of having one. What are they doing wrong? Are they making them too thin and thus with no room for a battery? Are they using shitty batteries? Because my EEE 1215B isn't much thicker yet gets nearly 8 hours under Expressgate and 6 hours with Win 7 HP X64, and that's with me watching 720p movies. Now I know the E-350 has hardware decode but surely a generic X86-64 chip, even one designed for low power like Zacate, surely it uses more power than ARM right? so what's the deal?
Because most of the reviews on the new tablets unless you buy one like the Transformer where the keyboard has a second battery the average seems to be around 2 and a half hours which to me is kinds worthless. i mean who cares if they stick Plasma or Ubuntu or whatever on the thing if you've got to have a cord running from it to the wall constantly? Hell if you're gonna get that little time you might as well stick with your smart phone which is what my customers are finding out, most are using their android tablets as expensive digital photo frames.
Frankly I don't know if i trust the Russians figures, at least the figures from before the fall of the USSR. after all they didn't admit the failure of their moon program main launch vehicle until after the fall and if you look up "Lost Cosmonauts" on Google you'll find some pretty interesting recordings done by some Italian teens using WWII surplus on the side of a hill in the Russians flight path. those kids were just caught up in the "Sputnik craze' and didn't have any reason to lie or fake recordings and it looks like the Russians had some "oops we lost Boris" moments in their first launches and quietly swept them under the rug.
Regardless of how safely you pull it off or even if you get the price down that doesn't change the fact its pretty pointless for anything but flag waving. Just to get a man to Mars with enough food and fuel to get back you are looking at a rocket probably the size of the Empire State building and the amount of resources you go through putting a meatsack into space for a week in LEO could have paid for sending a probe to Europa. The simple fact is we meatsacks are just too delicate and require too much stuff, air, water, toilets, food, all these things add pounds and thus costs whereas Mr Robot can go to the farthest reaches of our system and do real science without all that extra baggage. Until we develop new engines (which can be tested on the probes) its just a waste of limited resources when the most we can do affordably is send yet another meatsack to LEO. We probably could have had a half a dozen probes sending back hard data for 5 or more years for the cost of a single Apollo mission, and in the end you really can't argue in favor of that kind of expense logically, the only real reason to do it would be emotional reasons like so an American could get the "first man on the moon" or other nationalistic flag waving, logically the math just doesn't work.
Well the joke in AYBS really they need to be at LEAST 16 to get a lot of it as there is a LOT of wordplay in that show, especially Sloakum and Humphries. Mr. Humphries could tell the filthiest stories while not using a single curseword and making sure there was a completely innocent explanation to get by the censors but if you pay attention to some of his stories you'll think "How did they get THAT past the censors?". But for the younger ones I'd go with Python best of and French and Saunders as they had a lot more visual gags and their stuff wasn't quite as randy as AYBS. Of course once they are older AYBS and AbFab with "poor old, dear old, sad old Patsy" are hilarious but again you have to be able to keep up with the word play. oh and for younger ones Red Dwarf is also very visual while still having jokes for the older ones.
The nice thing about the older British comedies is that you have shows for every age, from the heavy visual and slapstick to the heavy wordplay to the bawdy, it all comes down to picking the right show for the right age. When mine were little they'd fall over laughing at Benny Hill, they thought his chases and the way he was always smacking the bald guy was just too funny, now they watch a lot of Red Dwarf, AbFab, and Vicar of Dibly. So just pick a couple of best ofs for shows you think are about their speed and go for it bro. Frankly any of it is better than the current American TV which is waaay to much into sex jokes and bodily functions. American TV has always been less subtle and now its about as subtle as a punch in the balls.