Not to mention I'll believe this when AAA games with budgets bigger than some Hollywood blockbusters can actually design AI that doesn't slam into walls like a kid with assburgers, or line up to get slaughtered while not noticing the bodies I've stacked like cordwood all around him, or completely forget about me 30 seconds after I blow his friend's head smooth off and instead of finding cover just wanders around like he is waiting on a bus.
If the top AAA studios can't even build AI worth a fuck who thinks some educational institute will have better luck? I put this right next the the holographic discs, the flying cars, and my preorder of an Alyson Hannigan sexbot in the "fat chance" dept.
And before someone pipes in with "it isn't the same thing" do you have ANY idea how many truckloads of money you would make if you could generate friendly AI that wasn't thick as a stump? Or enemy AI that always gave the player a decent challenge without cheap trick ala EA "rubber band" AI? If you came up with that and put it into a framework you could just plug into the big game engines you'd have so damned much money you could have the sails for your super yacht made out of $1000 bills and even make Ballmer apologize for scratching the paint when you rammed his boat with yours just for shits and giggles!
And how many of those on eBay will you get a box with a brick? I quit messing with eBay after buying some off lease machines that were SUPPOSED to be late model P4s and they shipped me some 386 shitpiles it looked like they had literally picked up off the side of the road and all I got from eBay was basically "tough shit". Now I will ONLY shop Craigslist where I can see the actual merch or someplace where I know its legit like Starmicro (GREAT place for CPUs BTW) and Surpluscomputers.
And while you may not care for the Pentium Ds frankly for MMOs which is all the kids seem to want to play nowadays they work real fine with an HD46xx or better and you can OC them like mad if you want even on air cooling. As I told another poster I offered to build the boys new AMDs and was told "Why bother? We are getting great gaming from what we got. All our games play smooth, everything works great, we're happy". And lets be honest the MMOs just don't slam the crap out of CPUs, lag is the only real limiting factor it seems for games like TFII, LOTRO, and Lunia.
And while I may SOUND like your baby boomer parents I doubt they are getting looks from carrying a device that keeps yelling "Get over here!" while doing standing in line at the DMV. Besides when you have elderly relatives a single missed call can fuck your world up. My grandma recently passed away (made it to 95, tough little woman my grandma) and I was glad to get to see her one last time before she passed. if I had blown the power on my cell playing games and missed that call? Frankly it would have ate at me for ages. Games are for fun, but your phone can be life or death.
Thanks, the first time I heard the phrase I thought "Why not just call it simplistically parallel? Even the lay person would understand what you meant simply by reading it" but I'm just a humble repair guy, nobody listens to us...
And while I'm more than happy to give Intel credit where credit is due in a way it reminds me of MSFT and OS/2. How much farther would OS/2 have come along if MSFT hadn't bribed OEMs? I think we can both agree that in 2004 and right up to the Core series AMD had the clearly better product yet you never saw a single OEM machine except for the lowest end crappy Sempron. Now we know why. If there would have been fair market competition how far would AMD be right now design wise? i think it is pretty obvious that Intel douchebaggery cost AMD their fabs.
But while I will give Intel credit for a performance beast in the i series I would counter with how many people actually need it for the tasks they have? If you are doing major compiles, or heavy CAD work? Yes then I can see why you would need it. But since switching I've been using Windows performance counters in Windows 7 during my follow ups to see how hard my builds are being slammed. Now we aren't even talking the top AMD chips mind you, strictly MOR Athlons and Phenoms, mostly triples and quads. What did I find? That most of the time the chips were idle or running at the lowest C&Q setting simply because the work the average person has really isn't that CPU intensive.
Even games which are traditionally CPU hogs simply don't slam the modern CPUs that hard. Hell I went to see about building new boxes for my nephews and they said "Why bother? These dual core machines you gave us work just fine uncle, no need to put yourself out. Thanks anyway" and with those PCs we are talking the lowest Pentium Ds ( I had a couple of LGA775 boards lying around) with an HD4650 for the casual gamer and an HD4830 for the hardcore FPS player!
So I really think AMD is onto something here. I have been arguing since the first duals came out that for most folks PCs had surpassed "good enough" and were quickly getting into overkill. The one place where I've noticed a big difference in performance is with GPU tech. You run a PC with an Intel IGP for awhile and then run one with an ATI or Nvidia IGP and the difference, especially with Win 7, is like night and day. And more and more people are doing tasks that work well on GPUs like converting videos to play on their portable devices.
So I really think this may be the start of the "next big thing" in personal computing, if only Intel doesn't find a way to derail it like they did with the bribery and like they are STILL doing with the compilers. And sorry about the length but this is something I feel strongly about, I think Intel should have at LEAST gotten nailed as bad as MSFT, who I still think should have been broken up. But at least now when my customers want a netbook to go with their desktop I can sell them a nice AMD machine instead of some bargain basement Sempron junker or even worse an Atom....shudder.
Uh huh...Ever hear of KISS, emphasis on the last S as in stupid? Lets see what can go wrong....
Okay first you are gonna have to have the computer control perfectly align re-entry using those little thrusters all of which have to fire perfectly or it burns up, THEN you have to have a perfect chute deployment AND the heat shield drop, THEN you have to have, again perfectly timed mind you, the chute unit drop and then FOUR thrusters have to be perfectly computer controlled and fire EXACTLY right to give it a picture perfect three point landing and THEN it has to perfectly release all those lines or when the final unit kicks up the thrust to pull away it is liable to flip the thing or damage it.
Oh yeah piece of cake!.....I give 20 to 1 against the thing. Anybody know what the bookies in Vegas are giving on this jobbie?
The problem I have with the phone players is I always seem to end up in an "either or" problem. it is 3AM, I just got the gear packed away after doing a great show at the club, I need to wander around the streets to burn off some of this energy and...crap. My phone has like 12% charge. I can either listen to tunes and not have a phone when it dies, or have a phone and not listen to tunes.
With the Sandisk I just walk into the corner gas station and say "Hey where are the AAA batteries at?" and most of the little gas stations around here have what they call "battery jars" where they have a mix of sizes by the counter and you can just buy a single battery if that is all you need. I hand them 75c or whatever it is and I'm bopping out the doors to my tunes.
Maybe you are just more anal about charging things, who knows. I always seem to have half a dozen things going at the same time and it slips my mind. Hell even as I type this I have two more boxes on the KVM, one is getting patches after a wipe and reinstall and the other is an old socket 478 P4 I put together cheap for this grandma who needs a box for her grandkids so they can chat cause the kids live halfway across the state and its currently having XP Home put on it. My ex said 'I don't know how you can even think with so much going on" but for me anything less than 3 things at once just ain't normal.
So I'll stick with old faithful, at least until I find someplace that builds a 16Gb flash based with user replaceable batteries.
Re:Handicapping, Ridiculous, Anti-Progress
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3D Hurts Your Eyes
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· Score: 1
Well you don't seem to be very sober when you say "what dark hairy orifice " which to most rational intelligent people would sound like someone disagreeing most intently, which is what made it all the more weird when you then went out to agree with me. That would be like me saying "Mcwhatever that last post was completely shite on a crusty roll and you stink on ice for saying it....and I agree with every word of it!" Now if you were talking about another hairy my mistake, but it was rather hard to tell by the post.
Because frankly the only thing I could find you not liking is that I said it will bomb based on headaches and you think it will bomb based on price. i would argue that if the 3D groups decided to "pull a Sony" and sell below cost to increase adoption? That it still wouldn't work as if you offer to punch me in the face for half of what you were charging yesterday it is still a punch in the face and having a lower price doesn't make the idea any more appealing.
Since I deal with the SOHO, SMB, and home consumer markets I deal with ALL walks of life on a daily basis, not just the geeks. I have everything from retired NASA guy to a backhoe operator to a grandmother of 6 as customers, my youngest customer 19 and the oldest in their 70s. And talking to these folks I have YET to meet a family where there wasn't at LEAST one person who had a bad reaction from 3D TV. Not one. And I would argue how are you gonna sell a new tech that makes at least one member of your household sick when you use it?
I agree and I think a much better phrase would be something like simplistically parallel or cakewalk parallel even.
And frankly I don't care if Intel calls it Shaka Zulu parallel as the whole point of the new AMD APU arch (which is more than just a CPU+GPU because at the same time they are switching from a VLIW GPU design to a vector based which will allow tighter integration and shared caching) is that there are many jobs the GPU does better than a CPU. It isn't that a CPU can't do those jobs, hell with a fast enough CPU you could probably render Crysis on nothing but a CPU, it is just it would suck down power and crank the heat worse than a Pentium 4.
I'm just glad Intel got caught with their bribing of OEMs (which got so bad an official from Dell said during the price wars there were quarters where the ONLY profit dell saw was Intel kickbacks) and rigging of their compilers so that no WE the customers can actually have choices in the market. walking into the local Walmart the other day i noticed more than half of the laptops and three quarters of the desktops were AMD based now.
Hopefully this will mean AMD will gain some of the share they should have gotten but were denied during the P4, aka "space heater o' suck" era and frankly they deserve as they have really great prices ATM and we are seeing for the first time since AMD64 something completely new in the X86 arena with the AMD APU, which has some really wicked features like letting the integrated do physics while the discrete takes care of textures and by having such tight integration from the looks of it for FP the AMD chips are gonna rock.
Intel seems to be missing the point with TFA, in that we have long since reached "good enough" when it comes to CPUs and more and more of the jobs we have, such as having fast transcoding to our mobile devices like phones and pads, HDMI HD video, gaming, video and picture editing, all these things are done better and with lower heat and power on the GPU.
My only worry is that Intel will yet again be rewarded for their douchebaggery, in this case slowly strangling Nvidia before simply buying them out if the AMD design turns out to be the way to go. Frankly Intel should have been busted for antitrust when the bribery came out, instead of being allowed to kill the Nvidia chipset business. I figure there next move will be when using CPU alone doesn't cut it and facing the fact their GPU division stinks on ice they just buy out Nvidia which we be really sorry as Nvidia would be doing quite well right now if Intel wouldn't have cut them off at the knees.
Maybe you should try Yahoo? While they made the deal with MSFT over search they kept their webmail and it is actually quite nice IMHO. It has built in Yahoo messenger from the browser, you can link multiple accounts to a single inbox even on the free accounts (this way I have my personal, business, and school chums all going to the same inbox) and the spam filtering has gotten to be top notch and I frankly can't remember the last time I saw a spam email. if you want even more features Yahoo plus is like $20 a year IIRC.
So why not give them a shot? I'm a firm believer in supporting competition and frankly Google has been getting more than a little scary on the data control for the past couple of years. Yahoo has easy import and export and as far as I know haven't tried to do any forced bundling of their services, you can if you want to but nobody tries to force you. Their uptime has been better for me than Google as well, as I was one of those that had Gmail go down for nearly a week about a year and a half ago. Now I strictly use Gmail as a spam dump and keep my email in Yahoo and haven't regretted it for a second.
If anyone is deploying XP Embedded at this late stage they need a good smacking. XP has less than 3 years until EOL so now is NOT the time to deploy anything XP based! I haven't had a chance to play with it yet but I hear Windows 7 Embedded is nice and low resource although frankly I think MSFT needs to hire the pirate that makes those custom Tiny versions of Windows like TinyXP and Tiny7 because frankly after trying WinFLP and XP Embedded neither held a candle to the Tiny variants.
Hell for shits and giggles I installed Windows 7 Tiny on an old socket 478 P4 2.4Ghz with the craptastic Intel 845 chipset and 512Mb of RAM and damned if the thing wasn't peppy! Sure it couldn't run Aero without a Dx9 GPU but the thing surfed the web great! It is just a damned shame MSFT doesn't sell Tiny7 for older systems as I'd happily pay $35-$55 a pop for copies of Tiny 7 legally. But as for OS/2 frankly the only places I've seen actually using it anymore is banks who still have some OS/2 software running on the back end.
As for TFA? while I wish WebOS lots of luck I have a feeling it will end up as little used as OS/2. My final prediction? Apple and Google trading the #1 and #2 spots while if MSFT does what I think they'll do and tie the XBL gaming into the Nokia WinPhone they'll take third place simply because of the huge install base of Xbox. RIM will be gone within 2 years, possibly bought by Google, and HP just doesn't really do innovative work anymore IMHO and while they'll try I have a feeling the field is already too crowded and they missed their chance. Final tally...Apple #1, Google a VERY close #2, and MSFT with a solid but pretty far behind #3 and RIM and WebOS DOA.
And I'd say that both of those cases just show how fucked this country can be, as both were pretty obviously seriously mentally ill. Manson thought God told him he would be a future leader after a race war and Turner believed every conspiracy theory ever written and thought China was secretly gonna be given the USA and was being used by the FBI as a mole against the white power movement which just fed into his delusions.
Sadly too often in this country we take those that are seriously mentally ill and put them in prison instead of getting them help.
I saw a show on Rikers Island once and they even had one guy in there that thought he was KGB and the woman he attacked was a CIA agent secretly poisoning his food and planning to execute him! Seriously how completely batshit does one have to be before the court recognizes they are nuts?
I'm just glad the judges in this case came to their senses and saw what some drunk says on some forum at 3AM doesn't equal a stash of weapons or an actual plan.
Well when I'm using it I'm either out walking (can't jog after getting my knee torn up in a bike wreck) or doing a service call and in those situations I have so much background noise and other crap that frankly anything higher is just being wasted.
Now at home? That is a completely different story. I have everything in 320k either running to my cans or to my old 80s stereo through the aux input but sadly since moving into my apt I don't get to blast the big old Pioneer anymore and will probably end up giving it to the oldest boy to hook up to his PC.
But for me the selling point was AAA battery power because when I had one that ran on LiON I always ended up with the damned thing going dead at the absolute WORST possible time. I'd forget to charge it, or I'd be out longer than I planned, it was just a PITA. Sadly I can't find any bigger than 4Gb that run on a AAA, but I may end up just switching to 128k anyway as I've found out of the 1600 tunes I have on the thing I usually only listen to the hard rock stuff which I could easily have in 128k with room left over.
But I really can't complain as I've had nothing but goodness from these Sandisk E series players. I have had 3, I started with 512Mb then went to 1Gb and finally 4Gb and all three are still working beautifully even after nearly 7 years. They've been sat on, left in a hot car, used and abused and the things just keep working year after year. My LiON powered player lasted about a year and a half then it was shot. Maybe I'm weird but I just can't get into the whole disposable gear thing.
Re:Handicapping, Ridiculous, Anti-Progress
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3D Hurts Your Eyes
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· Score: 1
Uhhh...didn't actually read my post before replying, huh Mcgrew? I said that nobody was buying the crap because it gave them headaches, how does that sound in any way like support for the format? personally I think it is another Laserdisc big bomb, although frankly I could see quadraphonics more than I can see 3D.
With quad you had more bandwidth which translated into better definition between instruments, at least it did on my old quad setup. If you listen to Queen A Night At The Opera on quad and compared it to stereo the quad really gave Freddy's voice room to breathe. Of course as you said the speakers are what bit you in the ass, but at the time I was good friends with the owner of a local pawnshop so I got the stuff at just 10% over what he paid which made for lots of killer gear dirt cheap.
But you might want to reread my post since it seems you are completely agreeing with me. I said it was a flop in the 70s, it flopped again when Nvidia tried it in the 90s with gaming, and it'll flop this time. Not only are the sets more expensive for less screen real estate but more importantly the thing which I haven't seen any review site mention is that lots of people get massive headaches when watching 3D. Out of the more than 3 dozen households that I know of that recently bought sets not a single one didn't have someone in the household that got sick at their stomach or a headache from the technology. Not a single one.
Out of my own family while my mom and my two boys can watch 3D myself and my dad get MASSIVE skull splitting headaches from watching even 10 minutes of the junk. Now seeing as the ONLY way to solve this is to spend even more money to buy special 2D glasses custom made by a guy who also gets headaches? Then what is the point in blowing the extra cash? The 2D has a better brighter picture, you get a bigger screen and the sets have more features, everyone can watch it without feeling ill, and it is cheaper to boot.
yeah I vote giant bomb and in 4 years or less the B&Ms will be dumping these things below their costs simply because nobody wants them. Then maybe they will switch to something actually worth switching for, like 60 FPS film or ultra HD.
Actually Alex I'm starting to become convinced that IT IS YOU that is working for Microsoft ZOMG! After all you are doing more to make Linux users look like completely batshit basement dwelling loonie toons than anybody since Twitter and his "It is Bill Gates and the Illuminati in a world wide conspiracy to kill FLOSS!". But hey, since you seem to enjoy being cock slapped by the truth and even after 5 WEEKS of following me around have YET to answer a single link posted on the fatal Linux driver issue? Enjoy as I bitch slap you again! No begone or I shall taunt you some more!
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?
Actually that reminds me of a commentary by Joss Whedon when he talked about writing evil characters. he said the trick was that nobody believes they are evil even when they are truly monstrous. He said "I have known people who have done truly vicious things, gone out of their way to cause pain and suffering to a fellow human being and they believed they were moral and just as they did it, for they always had a reason"
And that is the whole problem with that stupid "Do no evil" slogan as you can always find an excuse to justify almost any behavior. They broke the TOS, they threatened our business, they could have cost us contracts that would have cost people their jobs (I'm sure Intel used the last two when bribing OEMs to nearly put AMD out of business). Everyone has an excuse, everyone has a reason.
The fact that people here are actually arguing over what Google had in their hearts when they fucked those people over (how many of us have all our contacts in our email written down?) just shows what a brilliant piece of marketing "Do no evil" is. Makes Apple and MSFT look like little league, but it don't make it any less bullshit.
Heck you can go even cheaper, as a LOT of those late model Pentium 4 LGA775 boards can take a Pentium D and those can be had for a whole $30 and the late model P4s often go for $40, even less sometimes. Drop in a cheap low midrange GPU (Tigerdirect had a Geforce 210 last week for $10) and voila! Gaming goodness. As I said the oldest as well as his little brother are gaming on Pentium Ds, one with a $45 HD4650 1Gb, the other with a $60 HD4850 and both are blasting away on TF2 and their RPGs.
As for playing on a phone? Bah, why waste your juice on something you need for calls, when there are those ultra cheap emulator portables that will let you carry NES, SNES, GBA, GB, Gamegear, and Genesis consoles in your pocket, complete with 10+ hours on a battery and instant save anywhere functionality? It sure is nice when stuck in a line somewhere to whip out some Phantasy Star or Sonic and many also support video and audio so you can carry flicks and tunes on a microSD along with literally thousands of games.
Maybe its just me, but I'd rather save my phone for making calls. Then again when you have elderly parents you don't like to risk being out of touch because your phone is dead from pisslefarting around with the thing.
Re:Handicapping, Ridiculous, Anti-Progress
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3D Hurts Your Eyes
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· Score: 2
But here is what I don't get. Just in the last year I've probably had over 3 dozen folks get new sets, from the 32 inchers all the way to the big monsters and not a single one chose 3D either because in use on half of the couple would get a MASSIVE headache watching 3D like I do, or they would get sick to their stomach or have some other bad reaction.
Now I know this is a small sample of a small area but I bet plenty of guys here at/. can claim similar results, both on the headache/sickness scale and on the no buying scale. So my question is thus: Who EXACTLY is supposedly buying all the 3D sets? Are they fudging the numbers and using accounting tricks, like claiming those delivered to a store the same as a sale, and are the people who DO buy one actually using it for 3D, or did they just get a good deal and are using it as a regular set?
Because I'm old enough to remember the 70s 3D craze, and the late 90s 3D gaming fad, and in all cases I saw the same thing...lots of headaches followed by people actively avoiding. So while I can see the OEM pushing it simply because it lets them try to raise the price floor on TVs I just don't see folks actually lining it to buy the things.
Well one difference between us is I refuse to carry Intel in my shop since it came out they were bribing OEMs and rigging their compiler (which despite the AMD settlement they are STILL rigging their compiler, they just put a little FYI in the readme) and by going all AMD not only are my customers happy about the price but the performance is great, probably overkill for their needs.
I also put my own money where my mouth is and built AMD for myself. I have a Deneb 925 2.8Ghz quad, 8Gb of DDR 2 RAM, an HD480 512Mb, 1.5Tb of HDDs, 2 burners, and Win 7 HP X64. All that cost me less than $700 after MIR and if I want more power later on I can drop in an X6 if I desire. Even when I slam the CPU for hours I never get above 130f, idle at 94f, and frankly the thing is faster than I am, with all my programs preloaded into memory thanks to Superfetch and launching instantly with a single click.
So I wouldn't say that is too small a budget, simply that I'm not paying for bribery and marketing. When you figure in the cost of the boards you are paying a good 200%+ markup for Intel to gain on average 35% speed which frankly most folks will never ever notice. For the jobs Joe and Sally Average have for their PC frankly they won't be slamming the CPU anyway, much less hitting it hard enough to be able to tell in a double blind test which box is the Intel.
Frankly for less than you spent I could have gone X6 and HD5770 GPUs and still probably had money left over. Nothing wrong with the Intel if you don't mind supporting market rigging but I've always tried to support the free market and outright bribery? Just a little too far in my book.
So if they get gang raped and possibly get AIDS then they aren't pussies? because I hate to tell you something friend but the American penal system is a fucking hellhole. I had my best friend go up for a year on a pot charge, he could play guitar like you wouldn't believe. Now he will never play guitar again because he had to shatter his knuckles beating off the bulls.
The prisons aren't like some 50s movie you know, now the guards are more likely than not to take bets and then watch you get your head bashed in. And how much could Mandela have actually accomplished if he hadn't wasted his life in prison? If anything I'd say him losing 27 years was a win for the bad guys.
Sooooo let me get this straight. You take your phone, the thing you kinda really need for people to get a hold of you, for emergencies, etc, and run the battery down by using it as an MP3 player, because while you're not too cheap to buy a several hundred dollar Android smartphone you ARE to cheap to buy a $150 MP3 player?
Maybe I'm just weird, because I don't get it. I have a 4Gb Sandisk, gets 27 hours on a single AAA, and at 64Kb (which frankly with all the outside noise when I'm out and about is the best I'm gonna hear) has about 1600 tunes with space left over. Oh and it cost a grand total of $30. If you keep an eye out you can get one of those 30Gb or 80Gb Zune players for around $120.
So why on earth would you want to run down your phone just to use it as a sub par MP3 player?
You seem to know a little about it, so answer me something if you will...does Lodsys make anything with the patents in question? if the answer is "no" then they are what is wrong with the system and need to fuck right off.
Patents were supposed to protect the little guy from having some corp go "nice idea, we'll just take it LOL!" and helping themselves. it was NOT meant for vultures to come along buying up dead companies so they can become a lawsuit factory.
Now I don't know anything about this Lodsys company so I don't know, maybe there are a little company that got ripped off. If so I'm all for them taking those to court that did the ripping. But if it is just another damned vulture, making toll booths to leech from companies that DO make products while they don't make shit? To quote Mr Garrison "You go to hell! You go to hell and you die!"
You've lost your touch mate. For $550 I can build a nice AMD quad with minimum 4Gb of RAM, TB HDD, DVD burner and Win 7 HP X64. That will easily last most average folks a decade and with a little forethought it will leave plenty of upgrade potential down the road. hell Tigerdirect sells a nice AMD quad kit for $250 after MIR!
I think its just you are thinking folks will be like YOU and they ain't, not by a long shot. They won't be doing major compiles, or tons of video editing, or wanting to crank up the purty on a 50 inch widescreen. Most of the average folks out there want to play a few games, do their Facebook crap like Farmville, listen to music, watch movies, check their email, just basic everyday stuff ya know?
If you DIY and are picky about part and price one can easily get a good box for that price that will last for years. I have computers I built 7+ years ago still in use, they just become "hand me downs" where they go from one relative to another.
Recently the checkout girl at the local grocery store asked if I could look at a PC given to her. She looked hurt when I suddenly started laughing when we went to her car and she showed me it until I told her "Honey I'm just laughing because I built that machine nearly a decade ago out of a tons of parts and nicknamed it "Frankenputer"" which it still had on the back. I found out from her the thing had passed through nearly a dozen relatives before ending up hers. Since she didn't have much of nothing I sold her a late model P4, motherboard and RAM cheap, loaded it into old Frankenputer, and it is surfing Youtube and helping her kids do their homework to this very day.
So I'd say your wrong, you CAN build a decent PC at that price. Sure it ain't gonna set any speed records but for the jobs most folks want a PC for? It'll last them for a minimum of 5-7 years, thanks to my "minimum triple core, 4Gb of RAM" rule on new builds. That kind of power is frankly overkill for someone like Sally Homemaker and Joe Construction worker.
Really? Huh. Personally I couldn't give a crap one way or another about Atlas Shrugged all I cared about was the F.U.N! Maybe you were going for the shitty Plasmids? there are a couple of Plasmids that are waaaaaay overpowered that will pretty much break the game if you aren't careful. electroshock on the earlier levels for example.
So instead of going for the dead simple route here is what I did: A combo of telekinesis along with cyclone and freeze (for the turrets, made it easier to hack) and a little inferno for flavor. I would also set up cyclones near my turrets so any thuggish tried to smash my gun? Bye bye baby! Oh and while old Atlas will occasionally bitch I'd just ignore him and hack and gather my way through the level before bothering to do his quests.
And I'm sure you'd probably have a coronary but Fallout? Didn't care for it. Just never could get the controls down and spent more time dealing with my keyboard than the game. BTW if you want a bug free version GOG has the Fallout series and theirs plays beautifully even on Windows 7 X64. Thief? Good game but a little too much sneak for me. I like to be able to kill as well as sneak and in Thief it always seemed killing ended up screwing you. The original Tenchu or Batman: AA where I could sit on the rooftops and pick off my prey? Now THAT is the kind of sneaky i like. No One Lives Forever though has a level that if you like sneaky will fricking drive you mad. You have to sneak through a full office building in broad daylight with ZERO spotting or you are toast.
I guess it just shows that there are different games for different tastes. But I'm sure you'll agree that even if you don't care for Bioshock overall it is better than another trip to Chesty McWallhigh two gun town. I swear it seems like 9 out of 10 games now are a Cod/GoW/Halo cover based shooter. Yawn.
Well that and the fact that the consoles are having such a long cycle this time means that games haven't been pushing PCs for awhile now. Hell even on the 3D games like shooters you'd be surprised what you could still game on.
My oldest nephew had one of my hand me downs which he was using for gaming for ages, a 3.6Ghz P4 with HT and a 7600GS AGP and while he had to turn down the bling his TF2 and Bioshock II played just fine. I just recently took pity on him by upgrading him to a Pentium D and an HD4650 PCIe and while that isn't anywhere near top o' the line I was frankly surprised at how well it played games.
So honestly it really don't take much to enjoy PC gaming anymore. you could probably pick up a $100 PC off of Craigslist that will play everything short of Crysis with a $40 discrete GPU. That's one of the things me and my customers are quite happy about, makes gaming cheap and easy. I have most of the graphics cranked to 10 on my games and my HD4850 cost a whole $60!
I'm happy that Indie gamers are starting to warm up to Steam, as the more choices we have the better. Bring 'em on!
Oh in that case what you need to do is put out an APB as an "Ask Slashdot" article as I bet there are plenty of geeks here from NASA, as well as geeks like me that know NASA guys.
I'll email my friend and ask if he has anything on the LVDC but I kinda doubt it as that wasn't really his dept. He was one of the guys that built the mock ups used for training. He has an awesome video of him pushing around this 30+ ton shuttle mock up by himself one handed! They had it so perfectly balanced he said a 14 year old girl could move the thing.
So like I said, do an ask/. and I'll tell my bud to look and see what he has. But I bet you money one of the engineers has it in a closet somewhere as I can tell you my NASA buddy has tons of the stuff. Real packrats those guys are.
I'd say Oracle suing is a case of the system working, yes. The very basis of our system is buyer/seller. the buyer sets a price, the seller either negotiates or walks away. What we have here is Google going "Well we won't pay what you want, take this pittance or we'll just take it LOL!" and is NO DIFFERENT than MSFT with MS Java.
Google is using their size to try to take Java, just as MSFT tried to use their size to take Java. Between this and the FTC investigating Google using search results to steer customers away from competitors and towards themselves I think we can put "Do no evil" right next to 'Think Different" and "Get The Facts!" on the shelf of bullshit marketing.
As much as I dislike the CEO of Oracle they have the right to set a price for their product, and unlike some here I am not blinded by fanboyism to think the exact same douchebag shit MSFT tried to pull in the 90s is hunky dory now because it is Google being the douche.
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Not to mention I'll believe this when AAA games with budgets bigger than some Hollywood blockbusters can actually design AI that doesn't slam into walls like a kid with assburgers, or line up to get slaughtered while not noticing the bodies I've stacked like cordwood all around him, or completely forget about me 30 seconds after I blow his friend's head smooth off and instead of finding cover just wanders around like he is waiting on a bus.
If the top AAA studios can't even build AI worth a fuck who thinks some educational institute will have better luck? I put this right next the the holographic discs, the flying cars, and my preorder of an Alyson Hannigan sexbot in the "fat chance" dept.
And before someone pipes in with "it isn't the same thing" do you have ANY idea how many truckloads of money you would make if you could generate friendly AI that wasn't thick as a stump? Or enemy AI that always gave the player a decent challenge without cheap trick ala EA "rubber band" AI? If you came up with that and put it into a framework you could just plug into the big game engines you'd have so damned much money you could have the sails for your super yacht made out of $1000 bills and even make Ballmer apologize for scratching the paint when you rammed his boat with yours just for shits and giggles!
And how many of those on eBay will you get a box with a brick? I quit messing with eBay after buying some off lease machines that were SUPPOSED to be late model P4s and they shipped me some 386 shitpiles it looked like they had literally picked up off the side of the road and all I got from eBay was basically "tough shit". Now I will ONLY shop Craigslist where I can see the actual merch or someplace where I know its legit like Starmicro (GREAT place for CPUs BTW) and Surpluscomputers.
And while you may not care for the Pentium Ds frankly for MMOs which is all the kids seem to want to play nowadays they work real fine with an HD46xx or better and you can OC them like mad if you want even on air cooling. As I told another poster I offered to build the boys new AMDs and was told "Why bother? We are getting great gaming from what we got. All our games play smooth, everything works great, we're happy". And lets be honest the MMOs just don't slam the crap out of CPUs, lag is the only real limiting factor it seems for games like TFII, LOTRO, and Lunia.
And while I may SOUND like your baby boomer parents I doubt they are getting looks from carrying a device that keeps yelling "Get over here!" while doing standing in line at the DMV. Besides when you have elderly relatives a single missed call can fuck your world up. My grandma recently passed away (made it to 95, tough little woman my grandma) and I was glad to get to see her one last time before she passed. if I had blown the power on my cell playing games and missed that call? Frankly it would have ate at me for ages. Games are for fun, but your phone can be life or death.
Thanks, the first time I heard the phrase I thought "Why not just call it simplistically parallel? Even the lay person would understand what you meant simply by reading it" but I'm just a humble repair guy, nobody listens to us...
And while I'm more than happy to give Intel credit where credit is due in a way it reminds me of MSFT and OS/2. How much farther would OS/2 have come along if MSFT hadn't bribed OEMs? I think we can both agree that in 2004 and right up to the Core series AMD had the clearly better product yet you never saw a single OEM machine except for the lowest end crappy Sempron. Now we know why. If there would have been fair market competition how far would AMD be right now design wise? i think it is pretty obvious that Intel douchebaggery cost AMD their fabs.
But while I will give Intel credit for a performance beast in the i series I would counter with how many people actually need it for the tasks they have? If you are doing major compiles, or heavy CAD work? Yes then I can see why you would need it. But since switching I've been using Windows performance counters in Windows 7 during my follow ups to see how hard my builds are being slammed. Now we aren't even talking the top AMD chips mind you, strictly MOR Athlons and Phenoms, mostly triples and quads. What did I find? That most of the time the chips were idle or running at the lowest C&Q setting simply because the work the average person has really isn't that CPU intensive.
Even games which are traditionally CPU hogs simply don't slam the modern CPUs that hard. Hell I went to see about building new boxes for my nephews and they said "Why bother? These dual core machines you gave us work just fine uncle, no need to put yourself out. Thanks anyway" and with those PCs we are talking the lowest Pentium Ds ( I had a couple of LGA775 boards lying around) with an HD4650 for the casual gamer and an HD4830 for the hardcore FPS player!
So I really think AMD is onto something here. I have been arguing since the first duals came out that for most folks PCs had surpassed "good enough" and were quickly getting into overkill. The one place where I've noticed a big difference in performance is with GPU tech. You run a PC with an Intel IGP for awhile and then run one with an ATI or Nvidia IGP and the difference, especially with Win 7, is like night and day. And more and more people are doing tasks that work well on GPUs like converting videos to play on their portable devices.
So I really think this may be the start of the "next big thing" in personal computing, if only Intel doesn't find a way to derail it like they did with the bribery and like they are STILL doing with the compilers. And sorry about the length but this is something I feel strongly about, I think Intel should have at LEAST gotten nailed as bad as MSFT, who I still think should have been broken up. But at least now when my customers want a netbook to go with their desktop I can sell them a nice AMD machine instead of some bargain basement Sempron junker or even worse an Atom....shudder.
Uh huh...Ever hear of KISS, emphasis on the last S as in stupid? Lets see what can go wrong....
Okay first you are gonna have to have the computer control perfectly align re-entry using those little thrusters all of which have to fire perfectly or it burns up, THEN you have to have a perfect chute deployment AND the heat shield drop, THEN you have to have, again perfectly timed mind you, the chute unit drop and then FOUR thrusters have to be perfectly computer controlled and fire EXACTLY right to give it a picture perfect three point landing and THEN it has to perfectly release all those lines or when the final unit kicks up the thrust to pull away it is liable to flip the thing or damage it.
Oh yeah piece of cake!.....I give 20 to 1 against the thing. Anybody know what the bookies in Vegas are giving on this jobbie?
The problem I have with the phone players is I always seem to end up in an "either or" problem. it is 3AM, I just got the gear packed away after doing a great show at the club, I need to wander around the streets to burn off some of this energy and ...crap. My phone has like 12% charge. I can either listen to tunes and not have a phone when it dies, or have a phone and not listen to tunes.
With the Sandisk I just walk into the corner gas station and say "Hey where are the AAA batteries at?" and most of the little gas stations around here have what they call "battery jars" where they have a mix of sizes by the counter and you can just buy a single battery if that is all you need. I hand them 75c or whatever it is and I'm bopping out the doors to my tunes.
Maybe you are just more anal about charging things, who knows. I always seem to have half a dozen things going at the same time and it slips my mind. Hell even as I type this I have two more boxes on the KVM, one is getting patches after a wipe and reinstall and the other is an old socket 478 P4 I put together cheap for this grandma who needs a box for her grandkids so they can chat cause the kids live halfway across the state and its currently having XP Home put on it. My ex said 'I don't know how you can even think with so much going on" but for me anything less than 3 things at once just ain't normal.
So I'll stick with old faithful, at least until I find someplace that builds a 16Gb flash based with user replaceable batteries.
Well you don't seem to be very sober when you say "what dark hairy orifice " which to most rational intelligent people would sound like someone disagreeing most intently, which is what made it all the more weird when you then went out to agree with me. That would be like me saying "Mcwhatever that last post was completely shite on a crusty roll and you stink on ice for saying it....and I agree with every word of it!" Now if you were talking about another hairy my mistake, but it was rather hard to tell by the post.
Because frankly the only thing I could find you not liking is that I said it will bomb based on headaches and you think it will bomb based on price. i would argue that if the 3D groups decided to "pull a Sony" and sell below cost to increase adoption? That it still wouldn't work as if you offer to punch me in the face for half of what you were charging yesterday it is still a punch in the face and having a lower price doesn't make the idea any more appealing.
Since I deal with the SOHO, SMB, and home consumer markets I deal with ALL walks of life on a daily basis, not just the geeks. I have everything from retired NASA guy to a backhoe operator to a grandmother of 6 as customers, my youngest customer 19 and the oldest in their 70s. And talking to these folks I have YET to meet a family where there wasn't at LEAST one person who had a bad reaction from 3D TV. Not one. And I would argue how are you gonna sell a new tech that makes at least one member of your household sick when you use it?
I agree and I think a much better phrase would be something like simplistically parallel or cakewalk parallel even.
And frankly I don't care if Intel calls it Shaka Zulu parallel as the whole point of the new AMD APU arch (which is more than just a CPU+GPU because at the same time they are switching from a VLIW GPU design to a vector based which will allow tighter integration and shared caching) is that there are many jobs the GPU does better than a CPU. It isn't that a CPU can't do those jobs, hell with a fast enough CPU you could probably render Crysis on nothing but a CPU, it is just it would suck down power and crank the heat worse than a Pentium 4.
I'm just glad Intel got caught with their bribing of OEMs (which got so bad an official from Dell said during the price wars there were quarters where the ONLY profit dell saw was Intel kickbacks) and rigging of their compilers so that no WE the customers can actually have choices in the market. walking into the local Walmart the other day i noticed more than half of the laptops and three quarters of the desktops were AMD based now.
Hopefully this will mean AMD will gain some of the share they should have gotten but were denied during the P4, aka "space heater o' suck" era and frankly they deserve as they have really great prices ATM and we are seeing for the first time since AMD64 something completely new in the X86 arena with the AMD APU, which has some really wicked features like letting the integrated do physics while the discrete takes care of textures and by having such tight integration from the looks of it for FP the AMD chips are gonna rock.
Intel seems to be missing the point with TFA, in that we have long since reached "good enough" when it comes to CPUs and more and more of the jobs we have, such as having fast transcoding to our mobile devices like phones and pads, HDMI HD video, gaming, video and picture editing, all these things are done better and with lower heat and power on the GPU.
My only worry is that Intel will yet again be rewarded for their douchebaggery, in this case slowly strangling Nvidia before simply buying them out if the AMD design turns out to be the way to go. Frankly Intel should have been busted for antitrust when the bribery came out, instead of being allowed to kill the Nvidia chipset business. I figure there next move will be when using CPU alone doesn't cut it and facing the fact their GPU division stinks on ice they just buy out Nvidia which we be really sorry as Nvidia would be doing quite well right now if Intel wouldn't have cut them off at the knees.
Maybe you should try Yahoo? While they made the deal with MSFT over search they kept their webmail and it is actually quite nice IMHO. It has built in Yahoo messenger from the browser, you can link multiple accounts to a single inbox even on the free accounts (this way I have my personal, business, and school chums all going to the same inbox) and the spam filtering has gotten to be top notch and I frankly can't remember the last time I saw a spam email. if you want even more features Yahoo plus is like $20 a year IIRC.
So why not give them a shot? I'm a firm believer in supporting competition and frankly Google has been getting more than a little scary on the data control for the past couple of years. Yahoo has easy import and export and as far as I know haven't tried to do any forced bundling of their services, you can if you want to but nobody tries to force you. Their uptime has been better for me than Google as well, as I was one of those that had Gmail go down for nearly a week about a year and a half ago. Now I strictly use Gmail as a spam dump and keep my email in Yahoo and haven't regretted it for a second.
If anyone is deploying XP Embedded at this late stage they need a good smacking. XP has less than 3 years until EOL so now is NOT the time to deploy anything XP based! I haven't had a chance to play with it yet but I hear Windows 7 Embedded is nice and low resource although frankly I think MSFT needs to hire the pirate that makes those custom Tiny versions of Windows like TinyXP and Tiny7 because frankly after trying WinFLP and XP Embedded neither held a candle to the Tiny variants.
Hell for shits and giggles I installed Windows 7 Tiny on an old socket 478 P4 2.4Ghz with the craptastic Intel 845 chipset and 512Mb of RAM and damned if the thing wasn't peppy! Sure it couldn't run Aero without a Dx9 GPU but the thing surfed the web great! It is just a damned shame MSFT doesn't sell Tiny7 for older systems as I'd happily pay $35-$55 a pop for copies of Tiny 7 legally. But as for OS/2 frankly the only places I've seen actually using it anymore is banks who still have some OS/2 software running on the back end.
As for TFA? while I wish WebOS lots of luck I have a feeling it will end up as little used as OS/2. My final prediction? Apple and Google trading the #1 and #2 spots while if MSFT does what I think they'll do and tie the XBL gaming into the Nokia WinPhone they'll take third place simply because of the huge install base of Xbox. RIM will be gone within 2 years, possibly bought by Google, and HP just doesn't really do innovative work anymore IMHO and while they'll try I have a feeling the field is already too crowded and they missed their chance. Final tally...Apple #1, Google a VERY close #2, and MSFT with a solid but pretty far behind #3 and RIM and WebOS DOA.
And I'd say that both of those cases just show how fucked this country can be, as both were pretty obviously seriously mentally ill. Manson thought God told him he would be a future leader after a race war and Turner believed every conspiracy theory ever written and thought China was secretly gonna be given the USA and was being used by the FBI as a mole against the white power movement which just fed into his delusions.
Sadly too often in this country we take those that are seriously mentally ill and put them in prison instead of getting them help. I saw a show on Rikers Island once and they even had one guy in there that thought he was KGB and the woman he attacked was a CIA agent secretly poisoning his food and planning to execute him! Seriously how completely batshit does one have to be before the court recognizes they are nuts?
I'm just glad the judges in this case came to their senses and saw what some drunk says on some forum at 3AM doesn't equal a stash of weapons or an actual plan.
Well when I'm using it I'm either out walking (can't jog after getting my knee torn up in a bike wreck) or doing a service call and in those situations I have so much background noise and other crap that frankly anything higher is just being wasted.
Now at home? That is a completely different story. I have everything in 320k either running to my cans or to my old 80s stereo through the aux input but sadly since moving into my apt I don't get to blast the big old Pioneer anymore and will probably end up giving it to the oldest boy to hook up to his PC.
But for me the selling point was AAA battery power because when I had one that ran on LiON I always ended up with the damned thing going dead at the absolute WORST possible time. I'd forget to charge it, or I'd be out longer than I planned, it was just a PITA. Sadly I can't find any bigger than 4Gb that run on a AAA, but I may end up just switching to 128k anyway as I've found out of the 1600 tunes I have on the thing I usually only listen to the hard rock stuff which I could easily have in 128k with room left over.
But I really can't complain as I've had nothing but goodness from these Sandisk E series players. I have had 3, I started with 512Mb then went to 1Gb and finally 4Gb and all three are still working beautifully even after nearly 7 years. They've been sat on, left in a hot car, used and abused and the things just keep working year after year. My LiON powered player lasted about a year and a half then it was shot. Maybe I'm weird but I just can't get into the whole disposable gear thing.
Uhhh...didn't actually read my post before replying, huh Mcgrew? I said that nobody was buying the crap because it gave them headaches, how does that sound in any way like support for the format? personally I think it is another Laserdisc big bomb, although frankly I could see quadraphonics more than I can see 3D.
With quad you had more bandwidth which translated into better definition between instruments, at least it did on my old quad setup. If you listen to Queen A Night At The Opera on quad and compared it to stereo the quad really gave Freddy's voice room to breathe. Of course as you said the speakers are what bit you in the ass, but at the time I was good friends with the owner of a local pawnshop so I got the stuff at just 10% over what he paid which made for lots of killer gear dirt cheap.
But you might want to reread my post since it seems you are completely agreeing with me. I said it was a flop in the 70s, it flopped again when Nvidia tried it in the 90s with gaming, and it'll flop this time. Not only are the sets more expensive for less screen real estate but more importantly the thing which I haven't seen any review site mention is that lots of people get massive headaches when watching 3D. Out of the more than 3 dozen households that I know of that recently bought sets not a single one didn't have someone in the household that got sick at their stomach or a headache from the technology. Not a single one.
Out of my own family while my mom and my two boys can watch 3D myself and my dad get MASSIVE skull splitting headaches from watching even 10 minutes of the junk. Now seeing as the ONLY way to solve this is to spend even more money to buy special 2D glasses custom made by a guy who also gets headaches? Then what is the point in blowing the extra cash? The 2D has a better brighter picture, you get a bigger screen and the sets have more features, everyone can watch it without feeling ill, and it is cheaper to boot.
yeah I vote giant bomb and in 4 years or less the B&Ms will be dumping these things below their costs simply because nobody wants them. Then maybe they will switch to something actually worth switching for, like 60 FPS film or ultra HD.
Actually Alex I'm starting to become convinced that IT IS YOU that is working for Microsoft ZOMG! After all you are doing more to make Linux users look like completely batshit basement dwelling loonie toons than anybody since Twitter and his "It is Bill Gates and the Illuminati in a world wide conspiracy to kill FLOSS!". But hey, since you seem to enjoy being cock slapped by the truth and even after 5 WEEKS of following me around have YET to answer a single link posted on the fatal Linux driver issue? Enjoy as I bitch slap you again! No begone or I shall taunt you some more!
Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?
Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .
So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?
Actually that reminds me of a commentary by Joss Whedon when he talked about writing evil characters. he said the trick was that nobody believes they are evil even when they are truly monstrous. He said "I have known people who have done truly vicious things, gone out of their way to cause pain and suffering to a fellow human being and they believed they were moral and just as they did it, for they always had a reason"
And that is the whole problem with that stupid "Do no evil" slogan as you can always find an excuse to justify almost any behavior. They broke the TOS, they threatened our business, they could have cost us contracts that would have cost people their jobs (I'm sure Intel used the last two when bribing OEMs to nearly put AMD out of business). Everyone has an excuse, everyone has a reason.
The fact that people here are actually arguing over what Google had in their hearts when they fucked those people over (how many of us have all our contacts in our email written down?) just shows what a brilliant piece of marketing "Do no evil" is. Makes Apple and MSFT look like little league, but it don't make it any less bullshit.
Heck you can go even cheaper, as a LOT of those late model Pentium 4 LGA775 boards can take a Pentium D and those can be had for a whole $30 and the late model P4s often go for $40, even less sometimes. Drop in a cheap low midrange GPU (Tigerdirect had a Geforce 210 last week for $10) and voila! Gaming goodness. As I said the oldest as well as his little brother are gaming on Pentium Ds, one with a $45 HD4650 1Gb, the other with a $60 HD4850 and both are blasting away on TF2 and their RPGs.
As for playing on a phone? Bah, why waste your juice on something you need for calls, when there are those ultra cheap emulator portables that will let you carry NES, SNES, GBA, GB, Gamegear, and Genesis consoles in your pocket, complete with 10+ hours on a battery and instant save anywhere functionality? It sure is nice when stuck in a line somewhere to whip out some Phantasy Star or Sonic and many also support video and audio so you can carry flicks and tunes on a microSD along with literally thousands of games.
Maybe its just me, but I'd rather save my phone for making calls. Then again when you have elderly parents you don't like to risk being out of touch because your phone is dead from pisslefarting around with the thing.
But here is what I don't get. Just in the last year I've probably had over 3 dozen folks get new sets, from the 32 inchers all the way to the big monsters and not a single one chose 3D either because in use on half of the couple would get a MASSIVE headache watching 3D like I do, or they would get sick to their stomach or have some other bad reaction.
Now I know this is a small sample of a small area but I bet plenty of guys here at /. can claim similar results, both on the headache/sickness scale and on the no buying scale. So my question is thus: Who EXACTLY is supposedly buying all the 3D sets? Are they fudging the numbers and using accounting tricks, like claiming those delivered to a store the same as a sale, and are the people who DO buy one actually using it for 3D, or did they just get a good deal and are using it as a regular set?
Because I'm old enough to remember the 70s 3D craze, and the late 90s 3D gaming fad, and in all cases I saw the same thing...lots of headaches followed by people actively avoiding. So while I can see the OEM pushing it simply because it lets them try to raise the price floor on TVs I just don't see folks actually lining it to buy the things.
Well one difference between us is I refuse to carry Intel in my shop since it came out they were bribing OEMs and rigging their compiler (which despite the AMD settlement they are STILL rigging their compiler, they just put a little FYI in the readme) and by going all AMD not only are my customers happy about the price but the performance is great, probably overkill for their needs.
I also put my own money where my mouth is and built AMD for myself. I have a Deneb 925 2.8Ghz quad, 8Gb of DDR 2 RAM, an HD480 512Mb, 1.5Tb of HDDs, 2 burners, and Win 7 HP X64. All that cost me less than $700 after MIR and if I want more power later on I can drop in an X6 if I desire. Even when I slam the CPU for hours I never get above 130f, idle at 94f, and frankly the thing is faster than I am, with all my programs preloaded into memory thanks to Superfetch and launching instantly with a single click.
So I wouldn't say that is too small a budget, simply that I'm not paying for bribery and marketing. When you figure in the cost of the boards you are paying a good 200%+ markup for Intel to gain on average 35% speed which frankly most folks will never ever notice. For the jobs Joe and Sally Average have for their PC frankly they won't be slamming the CPU anyway, much less hitting it hard enough to be able to tell in a double blind test which box is the Intel.
Frankly for less than you spent I could have gone X6 and HD5770 GPUs and still probably had money left over. Nothing wrong with the Intel if you don't mind supporting market rigging but I've always tried to support the free market and outright bribery? Just a little too far in my book.
So if they get gang raped and possibly get AIDS then they aren't pussies? because I hate to tell you something friend but the American penal system is a fucking hellhole. I had my best friend go up for a year on a pot charge, he could play guitar like you wouldn't believe. Now he will never play guitar again because he had to shatter his knuckles beating off the bulls.
The prisons aren't like some 50s movie you know, now the guards are more likely than not to take bets and then watch you get your head bashed in. And how much could Mandela have actually accomplished if he hadn't wasted his life in prison? If anything I'd say him losing 27 years was a win for the bad guys.
Sooooo let me get this straight. You take your phone, the thing you kinda really need for people to get a hold of you, for emergencies, etc, and run the battery down by using it as an MP3 player, because while you're not too cheap to buy a several hundred dollar Android smartphone you ARE to cheap to buy a $150 MP3 player?
Maybe I'm just weird, because I don't get it. I have a 4Gb Sandisk, gets 27 hours on a single AAA, and at 64Kb (which frankly with all the outside noise when I'm out and about is the best I'm gonna hear) has about 1600 tunes with space left over. Oh and it cost a grand total of $30. If you keep an eye out you can get one of those 30Gb or 80Gb Zune players for around $120.
So why on earth would you want to run down your phone just to use it as a sub par MP3 player?
You seem to know a little about it, so answer me something if you will...does Lodsys make anything with the patents in question? if the answer is "no" then they are what is wrong with the system and need to fuck right off.
Patents were supposed to protect the little guy from having some corp go "nice idea, we'll just take it LOL!" and helping themselves. it was NOT meant for vultures to come along buying up dead companies so they can become a lawsuit factory.
Now I don't know anything about this Lodsys company so I don't know, maybe there are a little company that got ripped off. If so I'm all for them taking those to court that did the ripping. But if it is just another damned vulture, making toll booths to leech from companies that DO make products while they don't make shit? To quote Mr Garrison "You go to hell! You go to hell and you die!"
You've lost your touch mate. For $550 I can build a nice AMD quad with minimum 4Gb of RAM, TB HDD, DVD burner and Win 7 HP X64. That will easily last most average folks a decade and with a little forethought it will leave plenty of upgrade potential down the road. hell Tigerdirect sells a nice AMD quad kit for $250 after MIR!
I think its just you are thinking folks will be like YOU and they ain't, not by a long shot. They won't be doing major compiles, or tons of video editing, or wanting to crank up the purty on a 50 inch widescreen. Most of the average folks out there want to play a few games, do their Facebook crap like Farmville, listen to music, watch movies, check their email, just basic everyday stuff ya know?
If you DIY and are picky about part and price one can easily get a good box for that price that will last for years. I have computers I built 7+ years ago still in use, they just become "hand me downs" where they go from one relative to another.
Recently the checkout girl at the local grocery store asked if I could look at a PC given to her. She looked hurt when I suddenly started laughing when we went to her car and she showed me it until I told her "Honey I'm just laughing because I built that machine nearly a decade ago out of a tons of parts and nicknamed it "Frankenputer"" which it still had on the back. I found out from her the thing had passed through nearly a dozen relatives before ending up hers. Since she didn't have much of nothing I sold her a late model P4, motherboard and RAM cheap, loaded it into old Frankenputer, and it is surfing Youtube and helping her kids do their homework to this very day.
So I'd say your wrong, you CAN build a decent PC at that price. Sure it ain't gonna set any speed records but for the jobs most folks want a PC for? It'll last them for a minimum of 5-7 years, thanks to my "minimum triple core, 4Gb of RAM" rule on new builds. That kind of power is frankly overkill for someone like Sally Homemaker and Joe Construction worker.
Really? Huh. Personally I couldn't give a crap one way or another about Atlas Shrugged all I cared about was the F.U.N! Maybe you were going for the shitty Plasmids? there are a couple of Plasmids that are waaaaaay overpowered that will pretty much break the game if you aren't careful. electroshock on the earlier levels for example.
So instead of going for the dead simple route here is what I did: A combo of telekinesis along with cyclone and freeze (for the turrets, made it easier to hack) and a little inferno for flavor. I would also set up cyclones near my turrets so any thuggish tried to smash my gun? Bye bye baby! Oh and while old Atlas will occasionally bitch I'd just ignore him and hack and gather my way through the level before bothering to do his quests.
And I'm sure you'd probably have a coronary but Fallout? Didn't care for it. Just never could get the controls down and spent more time dealing with my keyboard than the game. BTW if you want a bug free version GOG has the Fallout series and theirs plays beautifully even on Windows 7 X64. Thief? Good game but a little too much sneak for me. I like to be able to kill as well as sneak and in Thief it always seemed killing ended up screwing you. The original Tenchu or Batman: AA where I could sit on the rooftops and pick off my prey? Now THAT is the kind of sneaky i like. No One Lives Forever though has a level that if you like sneaky will fricking drive you mad. You have to sneak through a full office building in broad daylight with ZERO spotting or you are toast.
I guess it just shows that there are different games for different tastes. But I'm sure you'll agree that even if you don't care for Bioshock overall it is better than another trip to Chesty McWallhigh two gun town. I swear it seems like 9 out of 10 games now are a Cod/GoW/Halo cover based shooter. Yawn.
Well that and the fact that the consoles are having such a long cycle this time means that games haven't been pushing PCs for awhile now. Hell even on the 3D games like shooters you'd be surprised what you could still game on.
My oldest nephew had one of my hand me downs which he was using for gaming for ages, a 3.6Ghz P4 with HT and a 7600GS AGP and while he had to turn down the bling his TF2 and Bioshock II played just fine. I just recently took pity on him by upgrading him to a Pentium D and an HD4650 PCIe and while that isn't anywhere near top o' the line I was frankly surprised at how well it played games.
So honestly it really don't take much to enjoy PC gaming anymore. you could probably pick up a $100 PC off of Craigslist that will play everything short of Crysis with a $40 discrete GPU. That's one of the things me and my customers are quite happy about, makes gaming cheap and easy. I have most of the graphics cranked to 10 on my games and my HD4850 cost a whole $60!
I'm happy that Indie gamers are starting to warm up to Steam, as the more choices we have the better. Bring 'em on!
Oh in that case what you need to do is put out an APB as an "Ask Slashdot" article as I bet there are plenty of geeks here from NASA, as well as geeks like me that know NASA guys.
I'll email my friend and ask if he has anything on the LVDC but I kinda doubt it as that wasn't really his dept. He was one of the guys that built the mock ups used for training. He has an awesome video of him pushing around this 30+ ton shuttle mock up by himself one handed! They had it so perfectly balanced he said a 14 year old girl could move the thing.
So like I said, do an ask /. and I'll tell my bud to look and see what he has. But I bet you money one of the engineers has it in a closet somewhere as I can tell you my NASA buddy has tons of the stuff. Real packrats those guys are.
I'd say Oracle suing is a case of the system working, yes. The very basis of our system is buyer/seller. the buyer sets a price, the seller either negotiates or walks away. What we have here is Google going "Well we won't pay what you want, take this pittance or we'll just take it LOL!" and is NO DIFFERENT than MSFT with MS Java.
Google is using their size to try to take Java, just as MSFT tried to use their size to take Java. Between this and the FTC investigating Google using search results to steer customers away from competitors and towards themselves I think we can put "Do no evil" right next to 'Think Different" and "Get The Facts!" on the shelf of bullshit marketing.
As much as I dislike the CEO of Oracle they have the right to set a price for their product, and unlike some here I am not blinded by fanboyism to think the exact same douchebag shit MSFT tried to pull in the 90s is hunky dory now because it is Google being the douche.