Oh I agree completely. I enjoyed the first Medal of Honor and its expansions, Pacific Assault also was good if buggy, then it took a right turn into shitty town with Airborne which was the same CoD bullshit.
You know what else I'm sick of? Switching to third person after playing french kiss Chesty McWallhigh and doing the cover based shooting tango. That and AI that is so damned thick I can pile their bodies up like the killing fields and they will all go straight to the killzone to line up to die? If WWII would have been this way the Nazis would have been completely wiped out in Poland. And I can't fucking stand difficulty "levels" that are either your guy is a Norse God who can take infinite abuse or the opposite where a green ass private with iron sights can pick you off from 1000 yards while behind cover while taking more damage than the terminator. And Chesty McWallhigh really needs to DIAF already!
And I agree about Bioshock: Infinite. I keep both games permanently installed on my drive and even repeat play on the lousier second one simply because it was different that the same old "Here is a place filled with your friend Chesty McWallhigh. Go from one Chesty to another while enemies pre spawn in the exact same locations at the exact same points. Oh and be ready for a cinema at the end"
Being able to explore the vast world of Rapture? To decide for myself which plasmids and weapons to upgrade, which style I wanted to use? While the much touted "moral choice" was a bunch of bullshit, you were either a saint or Hitler, at least I could carry more than two weapons and could actually decide for myself whether a level would be run and gun or stealth and sneak. I'm sure Bioshock Infinite will have a permanent place on my drive along with 1 and 2. Now if they would only make the prequel, where you get to take part in the Rapture civil war? It would be fricking perfect!
Actually I don't think 3D would help in that situation, and here is why. When you jump IRL, there are several factors automatically processed by your brain, such a your weight and your balance, and then taking this data along with the softness of the ground and how much traction you are getting then and ONLY then do you try to make the jump.
Without virtual reality even with 3D you are only given the visual cues, you can't for instance tell how much force your space marines legs generate or how much distance he needs to be at full speed. Hell there really isn't any difference in most of those games when it comes to jumping between a space marine and a 14 year old girl scout, since they are both simply avatars.
So if anything I'd argue it would probably make jumping worse as they never seem to get the scale right on a 3D plane instead it always devolves into "Dr Tongue's 3D house of shit thrown at you" and the lack of all the non visual context would just make you more inaccurate.
If it is missing why not simply print out a nice form letter asking about it and send it to the retired NASA guys? I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to get a list of their locations since after all you have to send their pension checks somewhere.
While I don't know about the LVDC I know that my retired NASA engineer neighbor has some of the late Apollo stuff like one of the books for programming the capsule computer (Sorry I can't think of the technical term for it ATM, I have a major cold) as well as some of the early to mid shuttle stuff. Actually getting to hold some of the original plans for the shuttle's bay and hatches? Very cool.
According to him most of the guys would take the stuff NASA was throwing in the trash as souvenirs so I honestly wouldn't be surprised if what you seek is in one of their closets somewhere, because according to him NASA threw away a LOT of cool historic stuff and the engineers would take it rather than see it in the dump. Sad to hear NASA was so short sighted, but what do you expect of a government org eh?
While I would agree about future proofing it all comes down to a balancing act: More memory or a faster CPU? More HDD space or a discrete GPU?
Most of my customers are working stiffs so a set price of $450-$550 is usually the order of the day and most would rather have a well balanced machine than to splurge on one section and come up short in another. For the price difference between 2Gb sticks and 4Gb sticks one can replace the IGP with a discrete that IMHO gives more bang for the buck today and is more noticeable than going from 4Gb to 8Gb.
But in the end I try to explain the pros and cons of each and let the customer decide. With a fixed budget that includes paying me to build it there just isn't that "extra $30" lying around so most would rather have me drop in an HD4830 or go from 500Gb to 1Tb in HDD space. But I agree that if money isn't a problem more RAM is always of the good and on my $600+ builds 8Gb is the order of the day.
You see that is the part I don't get, and am starting to wonder if they are using some accounting trick like counting numbers shipped to stores like you would numbers sold.
Because counting customers of my little PC shop I know probably more than 3 dozen folks that bought new TVs, from 32 inchers up to the big monster sets and not a single one bought 3D TV because as I said there is always someone in the family who either gets sick at their stomach or a massive headache from the junk.
So who EXACTLY are supposedly buying up these things? And are they even using it for 3D, or did they just get a deal and are using it as a regular set? But for all their pushing I just haven't seen the buying public, at least in my area, give a crap about 3D TV.
BTW if you want to know what IS selling like mad, which frankly I wouldn't have pictured? Media tanks. Everything from the cheap Nbox for the kiddies to the latest Internet capable ones that will play any format media tanks just seem to be THE thing to have. You'd be surprised how many folks have started learning about DVD ripping because they see a friend with a media tank and want all their DVDs on a tank too. Not that I blame them, if you got kids those things are heaven sent as the kiddies can't scratch the discs. But I didn't see that one becoming popular as I thought they were too geeky but I guess that shows what I know about trends. Folks been buying those things up along with 1Tb USB drives like they were going out of style. Oh and none of the popular ones, or hell anyone that I've seen, actually support 3D either.
I personally think 3D is here today, gone by 4 PM, as the folks just don't seem to care for 3D outside the theater. And I got to agree with you that 60/s rocks and I'd take that over 3D any day of the week. IIRC Ebert also is pushing it, comparing it to the switch from B&W to color.
Well I'd say the bitch is the sports nuts are so hooked on their favorite games that EA pretty much has a free pass to do whatever they want on this and the sports guys will still buy. They are probably hoping this will let them get folks to play some of the less popular sports games in the hope of creating another Madden license to print money.
But I used to live next to one of those sports nuts and while a hell of a nice guy the devotion these guys show to their favorite sports is just a little nuts. He had a standing deal with the local GameStop to where they would automatically charge his CC and make sure he had Madden and any NASCAR game delivered on release day for his PS3 and PSP. He simply couldn't stand the thought of not having them on release and honestly EA could just change the rosters to keep them current every year and he would have shelled out the money without a second thought.
Me personally I don't get how having updated stats was worth so much but I can see why EA was willing to pay whatever it took to get the NFL license because I have no doubt Madden makes so much cash they could dive into pools of the stuff like Scrooge McDuck.
I tried watching Dollhouse but....I honestly didn't care for it at all. I found it too hard to keep up with and the writing just wasn't as good IMHO. I don't know if it was executive meddling, or Whedon had too many irons in the fire (If you watch Buffy and Angel you can tell almost to the episode when Whedon switched his focus to something else as the quality went down like the Hindenburg) but it just never seemed to have that "snap" that the other three did.
If you haven't checked them out though you should really read Buffy Season 8 and Angel: After the fall. They had the classic team of Whedon, Noxon, and Greenwalt along with Espenson and the writing was back to top form. The wit, the smartass remarks and quips, it is all there. It is just a shame they didn't let them do it live action, I mean who wouldn't love to watch Harmony stalking celebrities to bite because "they are just better people" while complaining on MTV that slayers are trying to stop her "God given right as an American to shop"?
Since you are such a true believer answer something for me...what does God need with a starship? Hell our whole damned mideast policy, with propping up scum like Mubarak and kissing Israel's booty no matter how many times they flip us the bird can be sadly explained by a single sentence..."Jesus won't come back!" which of course makes me want to add "Come back Shane! Err Jesus!"
Now you explain to me why we should send millions a day we don't have, prop up scum that makes us truly despised in the region, so that a 2000+ year dead guy can have a place to park his fluffy cloud according to a sheepskin written by an 1800+ year dead goat herder? If your Deity is actually a God, what does God need with our money and weapons? Can't he just magically make the Jews stay in Zion without our assistance?
As for TFA I'm frankly shocked that they aren't rotting in prison. try watching The Largest Street Gang in America to see who we are up against. As we have seen time and time again their answer to thuggish and downright criminal behavior is to attack the messenger while shielding the gangbanger with a badge. I live on what is known as the meth highway and frankly I'd rather take my chances with the dealer than to deal with our "boys in blue" because at least the dealer usually isn't out to stir up shit and pick a fight, I can't say the same about the gangbangers with badges.
Sincerely, pretty much all over the age of 14. FTFY. And I agree Ferngully II...errr...I mean Avatar would have been just as nice and MUCH less of a skull thumper without the 3D. I thought Cameron had the better idea years ago, when he was talking about 60FPS film instead of 24.
And am I the only one that just gets massive headaches from the crap? If anything this new stuff gives me worse headaches than the 70s crap did or even the 90s Nvidia crap. And I've noticed that even though the stores are pushing 3D TVs like crazy everyone I know that has bought a new big screen didn't go for the 3D and when I asked them why there was always someone that it didn't work for, be it the husband/wife or BF/GF. I have a feeling a lot of folks are just gonna avoid it like they did in the last three go arounds.
And do we REALLY need crap jumping out at us as we play our games? with a good widescreen there is already so much purty and boom booms on your average AAA FPS that I find it hard not to just gawk and get my ass blown off and they are already so much immersion they can make you jump, so do we REALLY need "Dr Tongue's 3D house of bullets" to enjoy the game?
Actually it was much worse than that Mr AC. you see the original proposal had the Shuttle listed as a "space truck" which would have bay large enough that NASA, the military and civilian corps could all use it, be able to do quick turnarounds, basically making for a cheaper system that would fulfill many roles. It failed horribly at that mission.
It was too small for the military and most corps who stuck with the Delta series, had slow turnaround, it pretty much failed on everything that was in that original proposal. Sadly while it should have been replaced by the early 90s one can't get anything done here anymore without Sen Payola and Congressman Kickbackus getting in on it which is why there was so many places working on shuttle parts and why the Orion was gimped from the start by having the ship reuse many shuttle parts even when they made no sense.
Now that the shuttle is ending maybe we can finally worry about more probes like New Horizons instead of keeping the ancient shuttle going.
They didn't have the WB when Buffy was on and frankly hearing the description (a comedy horror based on a bad movie with a soap star and the Taster's Choice guy?) I would have NEVER bough so much as a single DVD but there was enough good word of mouth I said WTF and downloaded the first two episodes. I ended up hooked and now have the entire Joss Whedon collection, Angel, Buffy and Firefly with a couple of BtVS collectibles my late sister got me for bookends.
I probably spent a good $500 on that and I wouldn't have spent a dime if it weren't for piracy. Also after getting burned by several games where the damned things wouldn't run even when I was waaaay over the specs and finding the demo is usually the ONLY level they do real serious QA on (I'm looking at you Max Payne) I will always download the game first to make sure it will actually play before plunking the cash. If it doesn't? Bye bye. I want all the features like MP so I buy the ones that run that aren't shit (and I don't play shit so they don't even last as long as the demo on my drive).
So these figures really don't surprise me. It really doesn't take getting burned too many times before you want to try before you buy. No way to have a real trial? No sale for me. Sadly though I would argue that no matter what you do they'll claim piracy as their little PPTs say if they made X last year then they should make X*Y simply because they are just wonderful and geniuses.
Mark my words as piracy goes down thanks to plenty of online choices like Netflix when they see their sales don't suddenly spike and give them ever increasing profits? First they'll blame the darknets, it is a scary sounding word and they don't have to prove shit and it will let them ram more draconian BS laws through, then if they keep slipping they'll just have themselves declared "too big to fail" and take the money directly out of your pockets though bribery of congress critters.
Not a problemo. Is it interesting, or yet another visit to Chesty McWallhigh? Do I have weapons that give me a good "thunk" when I fire them, like firing an actual 12 gauge would, or is it another "pew pew' fest? Is my guys 280 pounds of muscle and a bad ass, or can he carry less weapons and ammo that the fat guy at burger world? Am I getting to do new things to keep it fresh, or am I doing the same damned levels only with a little scenery change?
If you answered yes to ANY of the second haves of those questions? Then YOU SUCK!!! Seriously it ain't brain surgery folks! If you are unsure hand a alpha build out on some gamer forums, we'll be happy to test for you and give you all kinds of ideas.
Here is a couple off the top of my head...MORE THAN TWO GUNS!!! Yes I know you can't carry an armory on your back IRL but you know what/ this ISN'T REAL LIFE, its a fricking game? If you are gonna sends waves of baddies at me give me some ammo you stingy bastards, along with some guns so I can decide what I want to use for the situation! One of the reasons I go back to Bioshock and even the shittier Bioshock II is that I can having more than two fricking guns! Hoo fricking ray!
How about NO DAMNED SAVE POINTS ON PC GAMES!! Seriously WTF? I shouldn't have to slog for 20 damned minutes on to have to repeat the whole damned thing over again because console users don't understand what a quicksave is.
How about controls that work? AI that isn't slamming itself into a wall like a tard with assburgers? If you have friendly AI how about getting those fuckers to stop standing in front of me when I'm laying down a hail of bullets. And for the love of God NO MORE ESCORT MISSIONS
And that is just off the top of my head. Make me cool, make my guns feel bad ass, if you need an example Snake Plisskin from Escape from NY. Make me feel like THAT, like I just fought my ass off and walked out bloody but still A number 1 bad ass. Now THAT is fun with a capital F!
Don't forget that if you put 6 of them in a room you wouldn't even be able to get them to agree on what's for lunch!
That is one of the really sad things about the USA, the fact we only have one party now. In Europe they have lots of different parties with different beliefs and have to have a coalition, here we have the "Give teh rich more MONIES! nom nom nom" party and then we have the Ds for dumbasses, that can't agree on shit and spend all their time bickering with each other until people get so fed up with their bullshit they vote for the "more MONIES! nom nom nom" party just to get rid of the dumbasses whining.
Personally I don't think it is really gonna matter in the end what the dumbasses or the nom noms do, we will end up with our own Arab spring. You have lost over 42,000 factories in a single decade and students buried alive in student loans (the next bubble to burst) that go straight from the graduation ceremony to the unemployment line yet we have companies following the how not to hire an American video like its a how to book and bring H1-Bs over as fast as they can shove them on a plane, and the business districts in the south look like Escape from New York thanks to all the abandoned buildings.
People will only put up with shit for so long before the powderkeg blows, and I would argue we are seeing that fuse get smaller every day. it really wouldn't take much to get the people to follow our own crazy Austrian, as frankly anything is better than what we have now. Hell if they keep stretching the military and sending them into one shithole after another I wouldn't even be surprised if some general decided a junta was in order, and most Americans? like I said better than what we've got now.
And the funny part is I have seen cheap ass games get it right and AAA titles get it wrong! I would name as an example one I picked up cheap called Nosferatu. In this the castle levels are randomly generated so you have NO idea what is coming next! Believe me you'll be ready to crap your pants when you walk in a room thinking it is gonna be a cakewalk and walk around the corner and there is 4 master vamps about to rise from their coffins and you only have two stakes!
The downside of this is it will re-randomize even between saves, which means you can save in a nice cleared room and when you restart be stepping into hell. But you know what? I'd rather have that than another linear corridor cinema fest. NO reason to explore, NO secrets, NO differing paths, it feels like you are a cow being drug by the nose to market. Just same shit, same weapons, same bad guys, same levels, hell it feels like putting in time at the job instead of playing!
I don't know why the word GAME doesn't seem to ring any bells with these bozos but it is really irritating. They will take a single idea and beat the living shit out of it. How many games have a stupid two gun limit now? How many shooters do the crouch behind Chesty McWallhigh bullshit? How many are filled with achievements for every damned little thing you do? Or give you lousy guns or too little ammo thinking it will "create tension" when all it does is piss you off that a 15 year old girl could carry more than the big bad ass marine?
it is stupid, pointless, derivative, dumb, treats us like idiots, boring, and most importantly NOT FUN AT ALL! If you want to make a damned movie, get in the movie business! If you want to make GAMES then make them FUN!
Because I have found 8Gb for grandma is more than a little overkill? I have plenty of PCs being used for HTPCs right now with 4Gb of RAM and AMD quad cores and they are quite happy with them, they load fast, execute fast, and a pair of 2Gb DDR3 sticks are dirt cheap which means they can use the money saved for another Tb HDD which once they learn how to rip DVD to avi is quickly appreciated.
So while I am using 64bit Win 7 on all new builds there just isn't a point ATM for over 4Gb on consumer gear. Windows 7 aggressive caching doesn't really help if they only run a handful of programs. Most are running FF or chrome, WMC with Netflix, WMP for media, and that's about it. Oh and whatever ripping program they like. That's it, that's all. And with a cheap but decent GPU (I've been using a lot of HD4830s lately, only $60 and the fat 256bit pipe makes for great media transcoding and actually plays games pretty well too if they get the itch) taking the load off there really isn't much point for more ATM.
But when the average person is spending all their time watching movies or playing Farmville? 8Gb of RAM just isn't really needed. I'l agree for guys like me that do a lot of gaming and AV editing having an assload of RAM is a must, but for grandma and Joe construction worker? Not so much.
I would have to agree and would also add that the reason people aren't finishing is because you games suck and quickly become boring as hell.
A good example of one sitting on my drive gathering dust is RF Guerrilla. The weapons suck so bad with you only able to carry a tiny amount of ammo and the game spans assloads of bad guys if you so much as hit a lamppost on bad guy turf, even if there isn't anyone around for miles, so the whole game ends up "Run your ass off from one vehicle to the next" and then just run over everything in the vehicle. BORING. I ended up having to put a mod that made the pistol rounds into explosives just to have some fun, but it gives ALL the characters that have pistols explosive bullets so if any AI allies (which are all dumb as rocks and will happily shoot you or run in front of you while you are shooting, dropping your morale score) have pistols you and everyone else is ragdoll city.
Compare this to something like Bioshock where there was always something new to see and do, or No One Lives Forever 1&2 where they actually spoofed the genre, or Just Cause 2 which was a crazy blast fest of insanity and mayhem. Those were FUN and I was happy to play all the way through and sad when I reached the end.
The problem is these bozos think a "cinematic experience" should be walk in a straight line, scripted battle, walk in a straight line, cinema scene, lather rinse repeat. After you have seen the second level and seen it is more of the same why bother finishing it when it will just feel like work.
If any of the devs are reading this? It is a GAME and FUN should be first and foremost, not your frustrated desire to be a director! Quit rehashing the same linear corridor crap and make your game FUN with a capital F. If people aren't finishing your game the goal shouldn't be to just give us less for our money, it should be to not make your game so damned BORING that nobody wants to finish the fucking thing!
You think we are gonna pay $50+ for less game in smaller boring bites? Screw you, quit making suckfests and give us something worth playing through! This would be like saying "Oh our crappy music isn't selling anymore, so our answer should be just make Titney Spears and all the other crap CDs only 12 minutes long for the same price! that's the ticket!". All this harebrained "idea" will do is give us more titles in the bargain bin, because most of us are felling ripped by the crapfests they are pushing out now, making it a little shit instead of a big dump isn't improving things.
The problem is like Chewbacca it makes no sense and I sure as hell ain't paying to read their report! Here is what we DO know: 1.-RAM is several orders of magnitude FASTER than NAND, 2.- most intelligent modern OSes do serious caching of the most used programs into RAM to seriously speed performance, 3.- 4-8Gb of RAM will allow the OS to prefetch pretty much everything you use on a daily basis and then some, while 4-8Gb of NAND? Kinda useless.
In certain use cases and in certain use cases ONLY does having a MIXTURE of RAM and NAND make sense. In a mobile user's laptop, one that is constantly on the move? Makes sense. On a server where IOPS are the most important metric? makes sense. On a PC where there is only 2Gb of RAM? Does NOT make sense and would be better served by 4-8Gb of RAM which would be a hell of a lot cheaper than a SSD of any real size.
Hell with all the crap they install on them and the size of cameras nowadays i find plenty of 200-300Gb HDD PCs being brought in to add bigger drives simply because they are overloaded, yet we are talking a cool $500+ to add a SSD of that size or larger easily. ATM unless you are a geek that know about installing to separate partitions so you can use a mixed drive setup, or as I said one of the above use cases SSD just doesn't make sense for the vast majority and trying to claim just because the price of RAM went up a bit suddenly SSDs, which are still frankly insanely priced and are still not really stable is suddenly the better deal? I gotta call bullshit.
A much wiser man than me once wrote "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
You believe that you can "count on your fellow Americans to do the right thing" and I would point out that many of the megacorps that control so much are NOT Americans, they hold nothing dear to their hearts but wealth, and rotting in the fields? If you haven't noticed this will NOT be a global meltdown, the BRIC are doing quite well in this and will be happy to buy that food for THEIR people while YOURS starve.
Between the corps at the top and waves of illegals at the bottom which in case you've not been informed of current events might want to look at "Aztland video" to see illegals in as far north as Utah using this crisis as an excuse to burn the flag and push their agenda of "Yankee go home the west coast is ours now!" who have NO reason to be civil and EVERY reason to cause as much destruction as they can so they can run the people off their lands and claim it for themselves?
Well I wished I held your belief in your fellow man but frankly I do not sir. Here all the cops are on the take and snitches get fed alive to the chipper, you can yell "immigra!" at any construction site and watch them scatter like deer, and I see endless waves of houses empty because the banks would rather let them rot and take a tax break or a bailout on the property than let the former owner have a roof over their head. And in case you haven't noticed the majority live in cities now, have since the late 60s. you know, those big piles of concrete and asphalt where nothing grows? What do you suggest they do, eat tires?
No sir things are gonna get seriously nasty. The militias and supremacist groups are having their ranks swell like never before, you have the illegals on the west coast wanting nothing more than to take control away from the US, and the south has people with their number painted on the back of their cars because they can't find any work. The turnover in my own building has been more than half these past 6 months not because they found a better place, but because they lost everything including the roof over their head. the lucky ones are sleeping on someone's couch, the unlucky? in their cars in 105 degree heat.
I'm sorry sir but I haven't see any "Americans pulling together" what I have seen is either "fuck you pay me!" or "fuck the poor!" or "We must give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom". No coming together, no helping each other out. The ideals you speak of? Long since dead I'm afraid. Hell look at congress right this very minute where the teabaggers won't be happy unless they can slash the hell out of aid to the poor at the very worst possible time. Where is their "caring for their fellow Americans"?
Not to mention what TFA neglects is the simple fact that one doesn't need as much memory as they do storage space so comparing the two? More than a little pointless.
When DDR 2 was so cheap I bought 8Gb for my PC, which thanks to Superfetch means ALL of the programs that I use frequently? Instant load, poof, faster than even an SSD could possibly load them because they are already in RAM waiting for me and as we know RAM is several orders of magnitude faster than the fastest SSD. I won't build a PC anymore with less than 3Gb and I usually try to talk the customer into 4Gb, why? Again thanks to intelligent prefetching by the OS the programs they use most often will be preloaded into RAM waiting on them, thus not only making the PC crazy fast but also cutting down on drive spinning which lets the drive park the heads and thus lowers heat and power usage.
Meanwhile the tech they are pushing is so damned unreliable Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror says they should be judged on a hot/crazy scale as they go tits up quite often in return for the crazy speed. Atwood still loves them but I would point out he is the same guy that recommends spending over $400 on a pair of headphones like he does.
If you have the money to blow a couple of grand a year on big fast SSDs? I'm happy for you, you are doing better in a dead economy than most. But RAM almost never wears out and can easily last a decade, is still relatively cheap for maxing out a PC, and the performance one gets nowadays for giving the OS plenty of RAM for fetching is really quite stunning. By having plenty of RAM and hybrid sleep my customers have an instant on PC that loads every program they use as fast as they can click the button. What more can you ask for?
The problem with comparing it to the 30s is three things: 1.-rampant inflation will make being frugal an exercise in futility as your money will keep dropping in value every second you hang onto it. Just look at how a bag of groceries that would have cost you $20 ten years ago is more like $50 now. 2.-insane healthcare prices. In the 30s if you were sick you could go to the country doc, hell my grandma traded chickens for healthcare. Today you fall and break a leg depending on where you are it could cost thousands. 3.-lack of agriculture. in the 30s many farms were owned by families so one could trade goods and services for food. Now the vast majority are owned by the megacorps who will simply ship the food overseas and let the poor starve.
So as you see we are talking a VASTLY different situation and like the man a couple of weeks ago in NC who held up a bank for $1 just so he could get medical care in prison things are gonna get REALLY ugly. In the 30s my grandma had a 2 acre farm which she could trade labor for some of her food, raised chickens and hogs which she could get slaughtered for free in return for some of the meat, things just aren't like that anymore. If you don't have money you better have a gun because that is what it looks like it is gonna come down to as we simply don't have the family farms anymore, the banks took those decades ago and sold them to ConAgra.
Hell you'd be surprised how many to this very day do this with P2P programs. Just fire up any P2P like Emule or Bearshare or any of the other classic P2P and look for * plus the file extension for various programs like Quicken and Quickbooks and be prepared to be amazed at how many are sharing their data with the world!
As for TFA this idea is so patently dumb the only thing I can do is wear this expression when thinking about it. Granted fixing PCs all day I wear that expression a lot, but this level of dumbshit boosted the depth of that expression a good 4 fold.
Ugh I forgot about that. The really REALLY scary part? Is the world thinks the USA will just silently go into that good night and slink into a corner to die when those bubbles burst.
Afraid not as pre WWII Europe showed us what happens to a militaristic society when the shit hits the fan, they start looking for "living space" and I'd argue with all the crap south of the border and the resentment of illegals it really wouldn't be hard to get the American people behind "pulling a Poland" on South America, especially if they promise "bread and jobs" and I would argue that if the president made a deal with Russia, China and India they could probably do so without opposition from anyone outside South America. How? Tell Russia anything they do in Eastern Europe is cool, same for China and Africa, same for India and Afghanistan.
Mark my words we are in for another depression and it is gonna be fugly with a capital FU. The peasants won't just go quietly starve like in the 30s, there are too many guns for that. it is gonna be seriously nasty folks, seriously nasty.
Friend if that laptop is more than 2 years old I would look at Tiny7. It is virus free and for shits and giggles I tested it on some 1.6Ghz Athlon boxes I had given to me and we are talking barely 128Mb on the desktop and that is with everything except AeroGlass and WinFlip. It has the full search, UAC, breadcrumbs, you name it, and the thing actually ran faster than original XP did on these old boxes.
Oh and I would note some of what gets listed as "malware" on scans of those hacked discs is actually false positives. You see to rip crap out of a Windows install they will often use CMD based scripting tools and both MSE and Avira list scripting tools as "hacker tools" and thus they have a shitfit. But it wouldn't surprise me if shops there are putting pre-rooted Windows on boxes, hell I once knew a perv repair guy that worked one of the big chain stores that if a pretty girl brought her box in he would put a backdoor so the perv could look for pics later.
But look at Tin7 dude. Just use your key instead of theirs (which actually passes WGA, I don't know how they did that but it was a neat trick) and you have just about the perfect modern laptop OS. MSFT really ought to hire the Tiny guy, as his builds make both WinFLP and Embedded look like bloated hogs.
Funny you should mention that, as for shits and giggles I decided to run my own little test, since I was bored and a gamer customer handed me a pair of discs, one is called "Windows Ultra DVD eXperience" which has the in order of memory requirements micro/tiny/full/loaded versions of Win2K/XP/2K3 and along with that the Tiny Vista disc and the Tiny7 disc which I already had. Now since Micro is IMHO TOO stripped, as in many programs won't run as well as many drivers, I stuck with Tiny for my tests...here are my findings and the tests were all done on Athlon 1.6Ghz machines with 512Mb of RAM and 40Gb HDDs.
First up Tiny2K which after 3 minutes after the desktop loaded was using 48Mb of RAM, 0% CPU. TinyXP...65Mb of RAM, 0-1% CPU. Tiny2K3 68Mb of RAM, 1-2% CPU, Tiny Vista 268Mb of RAM, 3-4% CPU and finally Tiny7 126Mb of RAM, 1-2% CPU.
But I would point out that out of all the tests Win 7 was the ONLY one that still had fast search, as well as having the latest features like libraries and breadcrumbs. As I said the ONLY new feature I could find disabled was AeroGlass. UAC, Low Rights Mode, all was there. And of course Vista even stripped was a bloated pig, surprise surprise.
Now while I wouldn't condone piracy since Windows can have the key changed I would say the Tiny versions are a great way to use your existing key to get a premade ultra light environment for gaming or older machines without all the hassle of DIY.
Oh and as for the other poster and the worry of WGA? I have actually run across boxes coming into my shop that had WSUS Offline on a hidden partition with an update script, not a bad trick that pirate had come up with, and of course there is also Autopatcher. Personally even though my boxes are all legal I uses WSUS Offline as it keeps me from dealing with WGA crap running in the background and it is easy peasy for me to show customers how to use WSUS offline to update all the machines in their house by simply keeping it on a $10 thumbstick.
With an 8Gb thumbstick one could keep an entire household full of Windows 7 boxes up to date for the life of Win 7 by simply running WSUS Offline once a month and then passing the stick to the machines. When much of my area has either slow ass DSL or caps on the cable being able to update multiple machines with only a single download is a good thing to have!
Actually I believe it was a member of the current administration that said along the lines of "never let a tragedy go to waste" which is why I believe the Anons will be used to ram through more draconian spying bullshit. Between the various gaming companies you are talking millions of voters that got emails that basically said "The Anons has your data, sorry" and many of those people and their families will be happy to support anything if they think it will keep those "cyber terrorists" (more like script kiddies) from getting their CC number.
As for TFA it just goes to prove script kiddies are never as hot shit as they think they are. They never should have went around bragging about their deeds, instead they should have just quietly dropped any dirt they found onto Wikileaks. If they would have done that after originally announcing their intent they could have sown the seeds of paranoia, made those in power wonder if they had been infiltrated by the Anons. Instead they went "I be teh haxxorz! LULZ!" while I'm sure they were leaving a trail a mile wide, script kiddie types rarely are as smart as they think they are.
So allow me to say so long Anonymous, you could have been a great source of knowledge like Wikileaks but your insatiable desire "for the lulz" ultimately doomed you to failure and PMITA prison.
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Oh I agree completely. I enjoyed the first Medal of Honor and its expansions, Pacific Assault also was good if buggy, then it took a right turn into shitty town with Airborne which was the same CoD bullshit.
You know what else I'm sick of? Switching to third person after playing french kiss Chesty McWallhigh and doing the cover based shooting tango. That and AI that is so damned thick I can pile their bodies up like the killing fields and they will all go straight to the killzone to line up to die? If WWII would have been this way the Nazis would have been completely wiped out in Poland. And I can't fucking stand difficulty "levels" that are either your guy is a Norse God who can take infinite abuse or the opposite where a green ass private with iron sights can pick you off from 1000 yards while behind cover while taking more damage than the terminator. And Chesty McWallhigh really needs to DIAF already!
And I agree about Bioshock: Infinite. I keep both games permanently installed on my drive and even repeat play on the lousier second one simply because it was different that the same old "Here is a place filled with your friend Chesty McWallhigh. Go from one Chesty to another while enemies pre spawn in the exact same locations at the exact same points. Oh and be ready for a cinema at the end"
Being able to explore the vast world of Rapture? To decide for myself which plasmids and weapons to upgrade, which style I wanted to use? While the much touted "moral choice" was a bunch of bullshit, you were either a saint or Hitler, at least I could carry more than two weapons and could actually decide for myself whether a level would be run and gun or stealth and sneak. I'm sure Bioshock Infinite will have a permanent place on my drive along with 1 and 2. Now if they would only make the prequel, where you get to take part in the Rapture civil war? It would be fricking perfect!
Actually I don't think 3D would help in that situation, and here is why. When you jump IRL, there are several factors automatically processed by your brain, such a your weight and your balance, and then taking this data along with the softness of the ground and how much traction you are getting then and ONLY then do you try to make the jump.
Without virtual reality even with 3D you are only given the visual cues, you can't for instance tell how much force your space marines legs generate or how much distance he needs to be at full speed. Hell there really isn't any difference in most of those games when it comes to jumping between a space marine and a 14 year old girl scout, since they are both simply avatars.
So if anything I'd argue it would probably make jumping worse as they never seem to get the scale right on a 3D plane instead it always devolves into "Dr Tongue's 3D house of shit thrown at you" and the lack of all the non visual context would just make you more inaccurate.
If it is missing why not simply print out a nice form letter asking about it and send it to the retired NASA guys? I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to get a list of their locations since after all you have to send their pension checks somewhere.
While I don't know about the LVDC I know that my retired NASA engineer neighbor has some of the late Apollo stuff like one of the books for programming the capsule computer (Sorry I can't think of the technical term for it ATM, I have a major cold) as well as some of the early to mid shuttle stuff. Actually getting to hold some of the original plans for the shuttle's bay and hatches? Very cool.
According to him most of the guys would take the stuff NASA was throwing in the trash as souvenirs so I honestly wouldn't be surprised if what you seek is in one of their closets somewhere, because according to him NASA threw away a LOT of cool historic stuff and the engineers would take it rather than see it in the dump. Sad to hear NASA was so short sighted, but what do you expect of a government org eh?
While I would agree about future proofing it all comes down to a balancing act: More memory or a faster CPU? More HDD space or a discrete GPU?
Most of my customers are working stiffs so a set price of $450-$550 is usually the order of the day and most would rather have a well balanced machine than to splurge on one section and come up short in another. For the price difference between 2Gb sticks and 4Gb sticks one can replace the IGP with a discrete that IMHO gives more bang for the buck today and is more noticeable than going from 4Gb to 8Gb.
But in the end I try to explain the pros and cons of each and let the customer decide. With a fixed budget that includes paying me to build it there just isn't that "extra $30" lying around so most would rather have me drop in an HD4830 or go from 500Gb to 1Tb in HDD space. But I agree that if money isn't a problem more RAM is always of the good and on my $600+ builds 8Gb is the order of the day.
You see that is the part I don't get, and am starting to wonder if they are using some accounting trick like counting numbers shipped to stores like you would numbers sold.
Because counting customers of my little PC shop I know probably more than 3 dozen folks that bought new TVs, from 32 inchers up to the big monster sets and not a single one bought 3D TV because as I said there is always someone in the family who either gets sick at their stomach or a massive headache from the junk.
So who EXACTLY are supposedly buying up these things? And are they even using it for 3D, or did they just get a deal and are using it as a regular set? But for all their pushing I just haven't seen the buying public, at least in my area, give a crap about 3D TV.
BTW if you want to know what IS selling like mad, which frankly I wouldn't have pictured? Media tanks. Everything from the cheap Nbox for the kiddies to the latest Internet capable ones that will play any format media tanks just seem to be THE thing to have. You'd be surprised how many folks have started learning about DVD ripping because they see a friend with a media tank and want all their DVDs on a tank too. Not that I blame them, if you got kids those things are heaven sent as the kiddies can't scratch the discs. But I didn't see that one becoming popular as I thought they were too geeky but I guess that shows what I know about trends. Folks been buying those things up along with 1Tb USB drives like they were going out of style. Oh and none of the popular ones, or hell anyone that I've seen, actually support 3D either.
I personally think 3D is here today, gone by 4 PM, as the folks just don't seem to care for 3D outside the theater. And I got to agree with you that 60/s rocks and I'd take that over 3D any day of the week. IIRC Ebert also is pushing it, comparing it to the switch from B&W to color.
Well I'd say the bitch is the sports nuts are so hooked on their favorite games that EA pretty much has a free pass to do whatever they want on this and the sports guys will still buy. They are probably hoping this will let them get folks to play some of the less popular sports games in the hope of creating another Madden license to print money.
But I used to live next to one of those sports nuts and while a hell of a nice guy the devotion these guys show to their favorite sports is just a little nuts. He had a standing deal with the local GameStop to where they would automatically charge his CC and make sure he had Madden and any NASCAR game delivered on release day for his PS3 and PSP. He simply couldn't stand the thought of not having them on release and honestly EA could just change the rosters to keep them current every year and he would have shelled out the money without a second thought.
Me personally I don't get how having updated stats was worth so much but I can see why EA was willing to pay whatever it took to get the NFL license because I have no doubt Madden makes so much cash they could dive into pools of the stuff like Scrooge McDuck.
I tried watching Dollhouse but....I honestly didn't care for it at all. I found it too hard to keep up with and the writing just wasn't as good IMHO. I don't know if it was executive meddling, or Whedon had too many irons in the fire (If you watch Buffy and Angel you can tell almost to the episode when Whedon switched his focus to something else as the quality went down like the Hindenburg) but it just never seemed to have that "snap" that the other three did.
If you haven't checked them out though you should really read Buffy Season 8 and Angel: After the fall. They had the classic team of Whedon, Noxon, and Greenwalt along with Espenson and the writing was back to top form. The wit, the smartass remarks and quips, it is all there. It is just a shame they didn't let them do it live action, I mean who wouldn't love to watch Harmony stalking celebrities to bite because "they are just better people" while complaining on MTV that slayers are trying to stop her "God given right as an American to shop"?
Since you are such a true believer answer something for me...what does God need with a starship? Hell our whole damned mideast policy, with propping up scum like Mubarak and kissing Israel's booty no matter how many times they flip us the bird can be sadly explained by a single sentence..."Jesus won't come back!" which of course makes me want to add "Come back Shane! Err Jesus!"
Now you explain to me why we should send millions a day we don't have, prop up scum that makes us truly despised in the region, so that a 2000+ year dead guy can have a place to park his fluffy cloud according to a sheepskin written by an 1800+ year dead goat herder? If your Deity is actually a God, what does God need with our money and weapons? Can't he just magically make the Jews stay in Zion without our assistance?
As for TFA I'm frankly shocked that they aren't rotting in prison. try watching The Largest Street Gang in America to see who we are up against. As we have seen time and time again their answer to thuggish and downright criminal behavior is to attack the messenger while shielding the gangbanger with a badge. I live on what is known as the meth highway and frankly I'd rather take my chances with the dealer than to deal with our "boys in blue" because at least the dealer usually isn't out to stir up shit and pick a fight, I can't say the same about the gangbangers with badges.
Sincerely, pretty much all over the age of 14. FTFY. And I agree Ferngully II...errr...I mean Avatar would have been just as nice and MUCH less of a skull thumper without the 3D. I thought Cameron had the better idea years ago, when he was talking about 60FPS film instead of 24.
And am I the only one that just gets massive headaches from the crap? If anything this new stuff gives me worse headaches than the 70s crap did or even the 90s Nvidia crap. And I've noticed that even though the stores are pushing 3D TVs like crazy everyone I know that has bought a new big screen didn't go for the 3D and when I asked them why there was always someone that it didn't work for, be it the husband/wife or BF/GF. I have a feeling a lot of folks are just gonna avoid it like they did in the last three go arounds.
And do we REALLY need crap jumping out at us as we play our games? with a good widescreen there is already so much purty and boom booms on your average AAA FPS that I find it hard not to just gawk and get my ass blown off and they are already so much immersion they can make you jump, so do we REALLY need "Dr Tongue's 3D house of bullets" to enjoy the game?
Actually it was much worse than that Mr AC. you see the original proposal had the Shuttle listed as a "space truck" which would have bay large enough that NASA, the military and civilian corps could all use it, be able to do quick turnarounds, basically making for a cheaper system that would fulfill many roles. It failed horribly at that mission.
It was too small for the military and most corps who stuck with the Delta series, had slow turnaround, it pretty much failed on everything that was in that original proposal. Sadly while it should have been replaced by the early 90s one can't get anything done here anymore without Sen Payola and Congressman Kickbackus getting in on it which is why there was so many places working on shuttle parts and why the Orion was gimped from the start by having the ship reuse many shuttle parts even when they made no sense.
Now that the shuttle is ending maybe we can finally worry about more probes like New Horizons instead of keeping the ancient shuttle going.
They didn't have the WB when Buffy was on and frankly hearing the description (a comedy horror based on a bad movie with a soap star and the Taster's Choice guy?) I would have NEVER bough so much as a single DVD but there was enough good word of mouth I said WTF and downloaded the first two episodes. I ended up hooked and now have the entire Joss Whedon collection, Angel, Buffy and Firefly with a couple of BtVS collectibles my late sister got me for bookends.
I probably spent a good $500 on that and I wouldn't have spent a dime if it weren't for piracy. Also after getting burned by several games where the damned things wouldn't run even when I was waaaay over the specs and finding the demo is usually the ONLY level they do real serious QA on (I'm looking at you Max Payne) I will always download the game first to make sure it will actually play before plunking the cash. If it doesn't? Bye bye. I want all the features like MP so I buy the ones that run that aren't shit (and I don't play shit so they don't even last as long as the demo on my drive).
So these figures really don't surprise me. It really doesn't take getting burned too many times before you want to try before you buy. No way to have a real trial? No sale for me. Sadly though I would argue that no matter what you do they'll claim piracy as their little PPTs say if they made X last year then they should make X*Y simply because they are just wonderful and geniuses.
Mark my words as piracy goes down thanks to plenty of online choices like Netflix when they see their sales don't suddenly spike and give them ever increasing profits? First they'll blame the darknets, it is a scary sounding word and they don't have to prove shit and it will let them ram more draconian BS laws through, then if they keep slipping they'll just have themselves declared "too big to fail" and take the money directly out of your pockets though bribery of congress critters.
Not a problemo. Is it interesting, or yet another visit to Chesty McWallhigh? Do I have weapons that give me a good "thunk" when I fire them, like firing an actual 12 gauge would, or is it another "pew pew' fest? Is my guys 280 pounds of muscle and a bad ass, or can he carry less weapons and ammo that the fat guy at burger world? Am I getting to do new things to keep it fresh, or am I doing the same damned levels only with a little scenery change?
If you answered yes to ANY of the second haves of those questions? Then YOU SUCK!!! Seriously it ain't brain surgery folks! If you are unsure hand a alpha build out on some gamer forums, we'll be happy to test for you and give you all kinds of ideas.
Here is a couple off the top of my head...MORE THAN TWO GUNS!!! Yes I know you can't carry an armory on your back IRL but you know what/ this ISN'T REAL LIFE, its a fricking game? If you are gonna sends waves of baddies at me give me some ammo you stingy bastards, along with some guns so I can decide what I want to use for the situation! One of the reasons I go back to Bioshock and even the shittier Bioshock II is that I can having more than two fricking guns! Hoo fricking ray!
How about NO DAMNED SAVE POINTS ON PC GAMES!! Seriously WTF? I shouldn't have to slog for 20 damned minutes on to have to repeat the whole damned thing over again because console users don't understand what a quicksave is.
How about controls that work? AI that isn't slamming itself into a wall like a tard with assburgers? If you have friendly AI how about getting those fuckers to stop standing in front of me when I'm laying down a hail of bullets. And for the love of God NO MORE ESCORT MISSIONS And that is just off the top of my head. Make me cool, make my guns feel bad ass, if you need an example Snake Plisskin from Escape from NY. Make me feel like THAT, like I just fought my ass off and walked out bloody but still A number 1 bad ass. Now THAT is fun with a capital F!
Don't forget that if you put 6 of them in a room you wouldn't even be able to get them to agree on what's for lunch!
That is one of the really sad things about the USA, the fact we only have one party now. In Europe they have lots of different parties with different beliefs and have to have a coalition, here we have the "Give teh rich more MONIES! nom nom nom" party and then we have the Ds for dumbasses, that can't agree on shit and spend all their time bickering with each other until people get so fed up with their bullshit they vote for the "more MONIES! nom nom nom" party just to get rid of the dumbasses whining.
Personally I don't think it is really gonna matter in the end what the dumbasses or the nom noms do, we will end up with our own Arab spring. You have lost over 42,000 factories in a single decade and students buried alive in student loans (the next bubble to burst) that go straight from the graduation ceremony to the unemployment line yet we have companies following the how not to hire an American video like its a how to book and bring H1-Bs over as fast as they can shove them on a plane, and the business districts in the south look like Escape from New York thanks to all the abandoned buildings.
People will only put up with shit for so long before the powderkeg blows, and I would argue we are seeing that fuse get smaller every day. it really wouldn't take much to get the people to follow our own crazy Austrian, as frankly anything is better than what we have now. Hell if they keep stretching the military and sending them into one shithole after another I wouldn't even be surprised if some general decided a junta was in order, and most Americans? like I said better than what we've got now.
And the funny part is I have seen cheap ass games get it right and AAA titles get it wrong! I would name as an example one I picked up cheap called Nosferatu. In this the castle levels are randomly generated so you have NO idea what is coming next! Believe me you'll be ready to crap your pants when you walk in a room thinking it is gonna be a cakewalk and walk around the corner and there is 4 master vamps about to rise from their coffins and you only have two stakes!
The downside of this is it will re-randomize even between saves, which means you can save in a nice cleared room and when you restart be stepping into hell. But you know what? I'd rather have that than another linear corridor cinema fest. NO reason to explore, NO secrets, NO differing paths, it feels like you are a cow being drug by the nose to market. Just same shit, same weapons, same bad guys, same levels, hell it feels like putting in time at the job instead of playing!
I don't know why the word GAME doesn't seem to ring any bells with these bozos but it is really irritating. They will take a single idea and beat the living shit out of it. How many games have a stupid two gun limit now? How many shooters do the crouch behind Chesty McWallhigh bullshit? How many are filled with achievements for every damned little thing you do? Or give you lousy guns or too little ammo thinking it will "create tension" when all it does is piss you off that a 15 year old girl could carry more than the big bad ass marine?
it is stupid, pointless, derivative, dumb, treats us like idiots, boring, and most importantly NOT FUN AT ALL! If you want to make a damned movie, get in the movie business! If you want to make GAMES then make them FUN!
Because I have found 8Gb for grandma is more than a little overkill? I have plenty of PCs being used for HTPCs right now with 4Gb of RAM and AMD quad cores and they are quite happy with them, they load fast, execute fast, and a pair of 2Gb DDR3 sticks are dirt cheap which means they can use the money saved for another Tb HDD which once they learn how to rip DVD to avi is quickly appreciated.
So while I am using 64bit Win 7 on all new builds there just isn't a point ATM for over 4Gb on consumer gear. Windows 7 aggressive caching doesn't really help if they only run a handful of programs. Most are running FF or chrome, WMC with Netflix, WMP for media, and that's about it. Oh and whatever ripping program they like. That's it, that's all. And with a cheap but decent GPU (I've been using a lot of HD4830s lately, only $60 and the fat 256bit pipe makes for great media transcoding and actually plays games pretty well too if they get the itch) taking the load off there really isn't much point for more ATM.
But when the average person is spending all their time watching movies or playing Farmville? 8Gb of RAM just isn't really needed. I'l agree for guys like me that do a lot of gaming and AV editing having an assload of RAM is a must, but for grandma and Joe construction worker? Not so much.
I would have to agree and would also add that the reason people aren't finishing is because you games suck and quickly become boring as hell.
A good example of one sitting on my drive gathering dust is RF Guerrilla. The weapons suck so bad with you only able to carry a tiny amount of ammo and the game spans assloads of bad guys if you so much as hit a lamppost on bad guy turf, even if there isn't anyone around for miles, so the whole game ends up "Run your ass off from one vehicle to the next" and then just run over everything in the vehicle. BORING. I ended up having to put a mod that made the pistol rounds into explosives just to have some fun, but it gives ALL the characters that have pistols explosive bullets so if any AI allies (which are all dumb as rocks and will happily shoot you or run in front of you while you are shooting, dropping your morale score) have pistols you and everyone else is ragdoll city.
Compare this to something like Bioshock where there was always something new to see and do, or No One Lives Forever 1&2 where they actually spoofed the genre, or Just Cause 2 which was a crazy blast fest of insanity and mayhem. Those were FUN and I was happy to play all the way through and sad when I reached the end.
The problem is these bozos think a "cinematic experience" should be walk in a straight line, scripted battle, walk in a straight line, cinema scene, lather rinse repeat. After you have seen the second level and seen it is more of the same why bother finishing it when it will just feel like work.
If any of the devs are reading this? It is a GAME and FUN should be first and foremost, not your frustrated desire to be a director! Quit rehashing the same linear corridor crap and make your game FUN with a capital F. If people aren't finishing your game the goal shouldn't be to just give us less for our money, it should be to not make your game so damned BORING that nobody wants to finish the fucking thing!
You think we are gonna pay $50+ for less game in smaller boring bites? Screw you, quit making suckfests and give us something worth playing through! This would be like saying "Oh our crappy music isn't selling anymore, so our answer should be just make Titney Spears and all the other crap CDs only 12 minutes long for the same price! that's the ticket!". All this harebrained "idea" will do is give us more titles in the bargain bin, because most of us are felling ripped by the crapfests they are pushing out now, making it a little shit instead of a big dump isn't improving things.
The problem is like Chewbacca it makes no sense and I sure as hell ain't paying to read their report! Here is what we DO know: 1.-RAM is several orders of magnitude FASTER than NAND, 2.- most intelligent modern OSes do serious caching of the most used programs into RAM to seriously speed performance, 3.- 4-8Gb of RAM will allow the OS to prefetch pretty much everything you use on a daily basis and then some, while 4-8Gb of NAND? Kinda useless.
In certain use cases and in certain use cases ONLY does having a MIXTURE of RAM and NAND make sense. In a mobile user's laptop, one that is constantly on the move? Makes sense. On a server where IOPS are the most important metric? makes sense. On a PC where there is only 2Gb of RAM? Does NOT make sense and would be better served by 4-8Gb of RAM which would be a hell of a lot cheaper than a SSD of any real size.
Hell with all the crap they install on them and the size of cameras nowadays i find plenty of 200-300Gb HDD PCs being brought in to add bigger drives simply because they are overloaded, yet we are talking a cool $500+ to add a SSD of that size or larger easily. ATM unless you are a geek that know about installing to separate partitions so you can use a mixed drive setup, or as I said one of the above use cases SSD just doesn't make sense for the vast majority and trying to claim just because the price of RAM went up a bit suddenly SSDs, which are still frankly insanely priced and are still not really stable is suddenly the better deal? I gotta call bullshit.
A much wiser man than me once wrote "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
You believe that you can "count on your fellow Americans to do the right thing" and I would point out that many of the megacorps that control so much are NOT Americans, they hold nothing dear to their hearts but wealth, and rotting in the fields? If you haven't noticed this will NOT be a global meltdown, the BRIC are doing quite well in this and will be happy to buy that food for THEIR people while YOURS starve.
Between the corps at the top and waves of illegals at the bottom which in case you've not been informed of current events might want to look at "Aztland video" to see illegals in as far north as Utah using this crisis as an excuse to burn the flag and push their agenda of "Yankee go home the west coast is ours now!" who have NO reason to be civil and EVERY reason to cause as much destruction as they can so they can run the people off their lands and claim it for themselves?
Well I wished I held your belief in your fellow man but frankly I do not sir. Here all the cops are on the take and snitches get fed alive to the chipper, you can yell "immigra!" at any construction site and watch them scatter like deer, and I see endless waves of houses empty because the banks would rather let them rot and take a tax break or a bailout on the property than let the former owner have a roof over their head. And in case you haven't noticed the majority live in cities now, have since the late 60s. you know, those big piles of concrete and asphalt where nothing grows? What do you suggest they do, eat tires?
No sir things are gonna get seriously nasty. The militias and supremacist groups are having their ranks swell like never before, you have the illegals on the west coast wanting nothing more than to take control away from the US, and the south has people with their number painted on the back of their cars because they can't find any work. The turnover in my own building has been more than half these past 6 months not because they found a better place, but because they lost everything including the roof over their head. the lucky ones are sleeping on someone's couch, the unlucky? in their cars in 105 degree heat.
I'm sorry sir but I haven't see any "Americans pulling together" what I have seen is either "fuck you pay me!" or "fuck the poor!" or "We must give teh rich more MONIES nom nom nom". No coming together, no helping each other out. The ideals you speak of? Long since dead I'm afraid. Hell look at congress right this very minute where the teabaggers won't be happy unless they can slash the hell out of aid to the poor at the very worst possible time. Where is their "caring for their fellow Americans"?
Not to mention what TFA neglects is the simple fact that one doesn't need as much memory as they do storage space so comparing the two? More than a little pointless.
When DDR 2 was so cheap I bought 8Gb for my PC, which thanks to Superfetch means ALL of the programs that I use frequently? Instant load, poof, faster than even an SSD could possibly load them because they are already in RAM waiting for me and as we know RAM is several orders of magnitude faster than the fastest SSD. I won't build a PC anymore with less than 3Gb and I usually try to talk the customer into 4Gb, why? Again thanks to intelligent prefetching by the OS the programs they use most often will be preloaded into RAM waiting on them, thus not only making the PC crazy fast but also cutting down on drive spinning which lets the drive park the heads and thus lowers heat and power usage.
Meanwhile the tech they are pushing is so damned unreliable Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror says they should be judged on a hot/crazy scale as they go tits up quite often in return for the crazy speed. Atwood still loves them but I would point out he is the same guy that recommends spending over $400 on a pair of headphones like he does. If you have the money to blow a couple of grand a year on big fast SSDs? I'm happy for you, you are doing better in a dead economy than most. But RAM almost never wears out and can easily last a decade, is still relatively cheap for maxing out a PC, and the performance one gets nowadays for giving the OS plenty of RAM for fetching is really quite stunning. By having plenty of RAM and hybrid sleep my customers have an instant on PC that loads every program they use as fast as they can click the button. What more can you ask for?
The problem with comparing it to the 30s is three things: 1.-rampant inflation will make being frugal an exercise in futility as your money will keep dropping in value every second you hang onto it. Just look at how a bag of groceries that would have cost you $20 ten years ago is more like $50 now. 2.-insane healthcare prices. In the 30s if you were sick you could go to the country doc, hell my grandma traded chickens for healthcare. Today you fall and break a leg depending on where you are it could cost thousands. 3.-lack of agriculture. in the 30s many farms were owned by families so one could trade goods and services for food. Now the vast majority are owned by the megacorps who will simply ship the food overseas and let the poor starve.
So as you see we are talking a VASTLY different situation and like the man a couple of weeks ago in NC who held up a bank for $1 just so he could get medical care in prison things are gonna get REALLY ugly. In the 30s my grandma had a 2 acre farm which she could trade labor for some of her food, raised chickens and hogs which she could get slaughtered for free in return for some of the meat, things just aren't like that anymore. If you don't have money you better have a gun because that is what it looks like it is gonna come down to as we simply don't have the family farms anymore, the banks took those decades ago and sold them to ConAgra.
Hell you'd be surprised how many to this very day do this with P2P programs. Just fire up any P2P like Emule or Bearshare or any of the other classic P2P and look for * plus the file extension for various programs like Quicken and Quickbooks and be prepared to be amazed at how many are sharing their data with the world!
As for TFA this idea is so patently dumb the only thing I can do is wear this expression when thinking about it. Granted fixing PCs all day I wear that expression a lot, but this level of dumbshit boosted the depth of that expression a good 4 fold.
Ugh I forgot about that. The really REALLY scary part? Is the world thinks the USA will just silently go into that good night and slink into a corner to die when those bubbles burst.
Afraid not as pre WWII Europe showed us what happens to a militaristic society when the shit hits the fan, they start looking for "living space" and I'd argue with all the crap south of the border and the resentment of illegals it really wouldn't be hard to get the American people behind "pulling a Poland" on South America, especially if they promise "bread and jobs" and I would argue that if the president made a deal with Russia, China and India they could probably do so without opposition from anyone outside South America. How? Tell Russia anything they do in Eastern Europe is cool, same for China and Africa, same for India and Afghanistan.
Mark my words we are in for another depression and it is gonna be fugly with a capital FU. The peasants won't just go quietly starve like in the 30s, there are too many guns for that. it is gonna be seriously nasty folks, seriously nasty.
Friend if that laptop is more than 2 years old I would look at Tiny7. It is virus free and for shits and giggles I tested it on some 1.6Ghz Athlon boxes I had given to me and we are talking barely 128Mb on the desktop and that is with everything except AeroGlass and WinFlip. It has the full search, UAC, breadcrumbs, you name it, and the thing actually ran faster than original XP did on these old boxes.
Oh and I would note some of what gets listed as "malware" on scans of those hacked discs is actually false positives. You see to rip crap out of a Windows install they will often use CMD based scripting tools and both MSE and Avira list scripting tools as "hacker tools" and thus they have a shitfit. But it wouldn't surprise me if shops there are putting pre-rooted Windows on boxes, hell I once knew a perv repair guy that worked one of the big chain stores that if a pretty girl brought her box in he would put a backdoor so the perv could look for pics later.
But look at Tin7 dude. Just use your key instead of theirs (which actually passes WGA, I don't know how they did that but it was a neat trick) and you have just about the perfect modern laptop OS. MSFT really ought to hire the Tiny guy, as his builds make both WinFLP and Embedded look like bloated hogs.
Funny you should mention that, as for shits and giggles I decided to run my own little test, since I was bored and a gamer customer handed me a pair of discs, one is called "Windows Ultra DVD eXperience" which has the in order of memory requirements micro/tiny/full/loaded versions of Win2K/XP/2K3 and along with that the Tiny Vista disc and the Tiny7 disc which I already had. Now since Micro is IMHO TOO stripped, as in many programs won't run as well as many drivers, I stuck with Tiny for my tests...here are my findings and the tests were all done on Athlon 1.6Ghz machines with 512Mb of RAM and 40Gb HDDs.
First up Tiny2K which after 3 minutes after the desktop loaded was using 48Mb of RAM, 0% CPU. TinyXP...65Mb of RAM, 0-1% CPU. Tiny2K3 68Mb of RAM, 1-2% CPU, Tiny Vista 268Mb of RAM, 3-4% CPU and finally Tiny7 126Mb of RAM, 1-2% CPU.
But I would point out that out of all the tests Win 7 was the ONLY one that still had fast search, as well as having the latest features like libraries and breadcrumbs. As I said the ONLY new feature I could find disabled was AeroGlass. UAC, Low Rights Mode, all was there. And of course Vista even stripped was a bloated pig, surprise surprise.
Now while I wouldn't condone piracy since Windows can have the key changed I would say the Tiny versions are a great way to use your existing key to get a premade ultra light environment for gaming or older machines without all the hassle of DIY.
Oh and as for the other poster and the worry of WGA? I have actually run across boxes coming into my shop that had WSUS Offline on a hidden partition with an update script, not a bad trick that pirate had come up with, and of course there is also Autopatcher. Personally even though my boxes are all legal I uses WSUS Offline as it keeps me from dealing with WGA crap running in the background and it is easy peasy for me to show customers how to use WSUS offline to update all the machines in their house by simply keeping it on a $10 thumbstick.
With an 8Gb thumbstick one could keep an entire household full of Windows 7 boxes up to date for the life of Win 7 by simply running WSUS Offline once a month and then passing the stick to the machines. When much of my area has either slow ass DSL or caps on the cable being able to update multiple machines with only a single download is a good thing to have!
Actually I believe it was a member of the current administration that said along the lines of "never let a tragedy go to waste" which is why I believe the Anons will be used to ram through more draconian spying bullshit. Between the various gaming companies you are talking millions of voters that got emails that basically said "The Anons has your data, sorry" and many of those people and their families will be happy to support anything if they think it will keep those "cyber terrorists" (more like script kiddies) from getting their CC number.
As for TFA it just goes to prove script kiddies are never as hot shit as they think they are. They never should have went around bragging about their deeds, instead they should have just quietly dropped any dirt they found onto Wikileaks. If they would have done that after originally announcing their intent they could have sown the seeds of paranoia, made those in power wonder if they had been infiltrated by the Anons. Instead they went "I be teh haxxorz! LULZ!" while I'm sure they were leaving a trail a mile wide, script kiddie types rarely are as smart as they think they are.
So allow me to say so long Anonymous, you could have been a great source of knowledge like Wikileaks but your insatiable desire "for the lulz" ultimately doomed you to failure and PMITA prison.