15 yard penalty, anecdote of a single purchase does not equal evidence, just as your complaints about that ATI laptop from before the sale isn't "proof" that AMD, a separate company, doesn't support their products.
Sapphire offers 2 year warranties on their cards which is pretty standard for the graphics industry and their cards are reviewed highly by their customers with an average of 80% rating 4 stars or better, which again is pretty standard when it comes to GPUs.
And please stop blaming AMD for the fact you got a bad ATI product when AMD didn't even own the company at the time your IGP was sold. AMD drivers are just as solid as Nvidia, they wouldn't sell millions of cards if they weren't, and their support on both the Windows and Linux side I would argue is better because 1.- On Windows its trivial to use the older drivers on the latest version, such as the XP era 2400 Pro cards I have running in many an office building with Windows 7 and 2.- On the Linux side they've opened their specs and are paying the devs to work on the FOSS drivers with the goal of replacing the proprietary driver with a FOSS one. With Nvidia their hostility towards Linux is bad enough Linus flipped them the bird in sheer frustration.
In conclusion...one anecdote does not equal evidence, and one "badly supported" card by the no longer existing ATI (which it was pointed out several times by many people including myself how easy it was to get that card to run on any OS you wanted it to, you blew off any offers of assistance) does not say anything about the current state of AMD drivers in 2015.
But it CAN be done right and be made into a blast, just try the excellent remake of Rise Of The Triad or Shadow Warrior and compare them to the (IMHO frankly boring) Doom 3.
With ROTT and SW they tried to keep what made the classic games "classic" like health packs, power ups, jump pads, but still managed to keep the FUN with a capital F, while Doom 3 felt like "lather rinse repeat" going through the motions. Its like they know what the formula is but just don't have anybody there that knows how to take the formula and make a truly great game from it.
As for TFA? I'm looking forward to Dishonored 2, I just hope they fix the frankly broken sneaking mechanic from the first one. If you are gonna have stealth you really need to have a good sound engine so you can hear the footsteps, otherwise you have like in the first game where the only way to detect who was around was to use your waaay OPed dark powers. In Dishonored 1 the powers once upgraded, even slightly, felt like playing with the cheats on but because of the broken sound engine using the powers was the only way to get from A to B in a lot of spots because you simply had no clues as to what the enemy could and could not detect, how much noise you are making, etc.
Bullshit its the router. I've dealt with so many of those "ZOMFG they keep getting in!" scenarios it ain't even funny and its ALWAYS the router. Five will get you ten they have some ancient router on the backend servicing shit that hasn't been mission critical in ages and its running an OS that has been pwned for years.
I've seen it countless times, bet there is an old Cisco lying on the fringes that has access to the whole network, wouldn't surprise me a bit.
The government didn't do shit when it came out they were bribing OEMs and rigging benchmarks (which they still do to this day) or used their position in one market (X86) to kill a competitor in another market (chipsets) so what makes you think they would give two shits if they became a monopoly?
You seem to forget the USA is an oligarchy and has been so for quite some time. As long as Intel greases the right palms? They can do whatever they want.
Ironically that was when the first "crippled" Intel compiler came out. They didn't target AMD chips until the second release, the first release targeted the Pentium III which I would argue is the smoking gun that proves the "Intel knows how to optimize for their own chips" is total horseshit or else they wouldn't have targeted their own CPU for crippling!
If you look up the very first benches of the P IV at release? It was just getting curbstomped by Tualatin, in some areas the P III was winning by nearly 40%, it wasn't even close, then Intel releases their crippled compiler and throws money at the benchmark companies to use it and wadda ya know....the P IV is suddenly beating the exact same chips by nearly 35%! Isn't that amazing?
Everyone here cheered for the MSFT antitrust trial but if there was any company that deserved to get busted right along with MSFT it was Intel. They rigged the benches, bribed OEMs, even stole a page from MSFT's book by offering OEMs discounts and huge kickbacks as long as they only sold a limited number of low end AMD chips instead of the whole lineup. Anybody remember how hard it was to find good AMD systems on store shelves? That was why. Just imagine how much power was wasted thanks to the OEMs shoveling all those millions of power hog P4s, which is why while I have no problem selling early Athlon X2s or Core based if a Pentium D crosses my desk? Into the trash that garbage goes.
As for TFA congrats Phoronix, your site is one of the few places you can get 100% unbiased benchmarks (thanks to their using GCC instead of ICC) which is why you see results like these AMD vs Intel becnhes and wadda ya know, just by using GCC instead of ICC suddenly you have AMD A10-5800K trading blows with the I5 2400S and the FX-8350 trading blows with i5 3470, chips that cost twice as much.....wow the guys that wrote GCC must be the bestest coders on the entire planet to magically get double the performance that the mainstream benchmarks show...ya think?
You play War Thunder on a PS4? Thx, we love you guys, you make REALLY great target practice LOL! In fact you are your PS4 brethren are usually targeted right along with the AI for the easy kills, thanks again!
And I'm sorry but any Phenom II X4 (or in my case X6) when paired with an R9 280 3GB will absolutely curbstomp your PS4 and the reason why is both simple and obvious....we have a CPU with dedicated RAM and a GPU with dedicated RAM, you only have an APU which means you are stuck with bandwidth contention because your CPU and GPU have to compete for every byte of memory, mine does not. With everything cranked except *AA (which is really pointless at 1080P) the benchmark built into the game has me hitting consistently over 60FPS...how does yours do in the benches? Does your PS4 version even HAVE a benchmark or ability to change quality settings?
At the end of the day I'm sorry but even AMD lists the Jaguar as a netbook and tablet APU which was designed to compete with the Intel ATOM, and NOT designed for any kind of performance beyond beating the Atom/ION combination. You are welcome to look at your benches yourself and even if you DOUBLE those figures (to compensate for the fact that the PS4/XB1 Jaguar is two Jaguar quads in a MCM housing) you'll see that the scores are pretty bad, and this is coming from somebody who sells AMD exclusively and actually uses the Jaguar arch for his HTPC builds.
I'm not even gonna bring up all the advantages the PC has over the console, because it is already so lopsided it isn't funny. PCs get lower prices, free MP, its just too tilted. But just looking at what you can get for the money today, hell looking at what you can grab on Craigslist for a little of nothing? Its really no contest, the PC will just obliterate the PS4/XB1 both on FPS and on picture quality when paired with pretty much any $110-$180 GPU. Of course this not only affects your picture but also your gameplay which is why guys like me just loooove to hunt guys like you, your shorter draw distance gives us a serious advantage when it comes to targeting. I've had a PS4 tanker dead in my sights from 1km away and you could tell from the horrible blind shots he literally could not see me when I was just standing in the open, this despite the fact it was my first time taking out that tank and thus had ZERO upgrades to tank or crew.
But you just can't change the facts and the fact is the Jaguar arch is a severely cut down APU designed for tablets NOT a gaming chip, even AMD lists it as such.
Sigh...are you really gonna use number sold as a gauge of quality? Because by that metric they should have given a pile of Oscars to the Twilight series and Nicki Minaj should be in the hall of fame.
But if you were to actually look at the white paper on the Jaguar that powers the PS4/XB1 then you would know its a netbook APU which means a 6 year old Phenom X4 or C2Q paired with a sub $180 GPU like the R9 280 3GB should just slaughter the thing both on detail and FPS. Hell last I checked neither console can even do native 1080P above 30 FPS consistently and 1080P has been the standard resolution for how long now?
Lets face it thanks to day 1 patches, beta level bugs, and the "we'll patch it later" attitude this gen they've made the consoles into weak PCs with none of the PC upsides.
Uhhhh...they've been spamming the fuck out of their emails? I often sign petitions on sites like Change.org and I got hit with a shitload from this yahoo, I of course know how to find the unsubscribe button at the bottom but if the rest of the Change.org users got even half the emails that I did? Well its easier to just hit that big spam button at the top of the page than it is to find a teeny tiny unsubscribe at the bottom.
So I'd say this isn't a conspiracy, just a classic example of a noob doing it wrong.
Considering the fact that Tiger was offering 3TB for $89 the other day? I think HDDs will be around for quite awhile yet, especially with both WD and Seagate already reaching 10TB and talking about hitting 20+ soon.
As for "the cloud".....BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA...oh you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA...in case you ain't got the memo, the magic word at ISPs is "caps", can you say assrape the customer for every byte boys and girls? I think you can. You now have smartphones with 13MP+ cameras able to do 720P FMV, DSLRs are getting damned cheap, and camcorders are everywhere. Where do you think all that data is gonna go? If you live in the USA it certainly ain't "the cloud" so that leaves good old spinning rust.
And I'm sorry but 500GB ain't shit anymore, sure its fine for laptops where you keep things "thin" but I've been slapping 500GB drives in the refurbs I sell simply because I've gotten so many from folks upgrading to 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, the second you start taking vids and pics you'll find 500GB goes like shit through a goose!
Nope because I've actually had users ask me to switch them back when they got "Chrome'd". Ironic that you should bring up the Yahoo/Mozilla partnership as one of the biggest complaints I get is people who get "Chrome'd" when some freeware program they download takes control away from their browser and sticks them with Chrome and the Google home page as they do NOT like it in the least, in fact many act like its some sort of PC hijacking.
I have to explain to them that its because some program they downloaded had a little checkbox but I do have to agree that when you go from opt-in to opt-out? You have entered into "scumbag" territory, right along with McCrappee and Horton with their sleazeball security tools.
As opposed to the.INI files Linux shits all over the place? Oh you can give it fancier names like "config files" but at the end of the day just like the shitty driver model the "*NIX" way of doing things is to pretend the last 40 years never existed.
I can take a single.reg file and simply email it to any Windows user from Win2K on up and it will always work the same way every.single. time., allowing me to change, edit, delete, or repair pretty much anything from the log on to the wallpaper, and do so without having to alter it for kernel version, hardware installed, etc and it all just works without a bit of trouble.....can you say the same? Of course not, which is why "The Hairyfeet Challenge" has lasted 8 years without a single "consumer friendly" distro even coming close to passing...because ultimately Linux is built on 40 years old designs that weren't great to begin with!
Actually last statistics I saw had Yahoo neck and neck with Google on the number of email users and as a PC shop guy who deals with home users every day I can tell you the #1 home page I see on folks computers is Yahoo.
So this move is understandable and I doubt signals a "slow death" at Yahoo, they are just getting rid of the stuff with a low amount of users in favor of their most popular stuff, the Yahoo Mail, the Yahoo Homepage (which is where part of the "digital content" comes in) and I wouldn't be surprised to see more featured concerts as they seem to have been doing that a lot lately and it seems to be pretty hot.
Give me a motherfucking break! By THOSE STANDARDS there hasn't been a Windows bug since the fricking Melissa worm...but the sane world doesn't go by "self replicating" as the standard for a bug, now do they?
MacDefender, MacGuardian,hell OSX even has the FBI bug so don't give us this "self replicating" bullshit, nobody cares whether the virus that steals their fucking ID or CC info is self replicating or not!
FUD, not a single source working for MSFT has said a damned thing about a subscription model, THAT bit of FUD was started by a gossip site "El Reg" IIRC that is known for pulling "facts" out of their ass.
The ONLY thing that has been said is they won't have the old service packs anymore, instead you'll have a point release, like 8 to 8.1. This makes it easier for regular folks to know WTF is going on as its easier to know that X.1 is the current version as all the sites treat it as a separate OS, while nobody talks about "Win 7 SP1" they simply call it Win 7.
But just because some dude at MSFT said "Win 10 is the only version we are working on ATM" the sites jumped to this "last version of Windows EVAR" subscription crap when in reality land the prices have already been leaked and its no different than every other release, you'll have retail and OEM, Home and Pro, its business as usual. I'm sure in a year and a half you'll see retail 10.1, maybe even 10.2, and then you'll see the hypetrain for Windows 11, probably hosted by Spinal Tap, coming to a tech site near you.
Sigh...as opposed to the AGW lobby which is run by such selfless companies as Goldman Sachs while pushing cap and trade which has the rules written by the same one who cooked up credit default swaps and is the kind of scam frankly a kid could see through, meanwhile you have Rev Al setting himself up to be a carbon billionaire while driving a fleet of SUVs like a third world El Presidente and living in a McMansion with ACed basketball court while he says that YOU need to pay more, you filthy climate damaging peasant you.
Do we need to pollute less and save more? Of course, this is common sense, but we will get NO common sense approaches offered because companies like Goldman Sachs and scammers like Gore couldn't make out like highway robbery on common sense so we'll get scams like crap and trade pushed where the worst polluters get their carbon "indulgences" so pay nothing, scammers like Gore will pay themselves in carbon credits from their own company so he can have the brass balls to fly a lear jet for one and ride in a fleet of Caddie SUVs while claiming he is "carbon neutral" so who does that leave to pay these shitbags for their magic beans? Why that would be YOU, you filthy peasant who can't afford your own offshore LLC, why you are killing the planet!
Actually it was four, you forgot the wargame Ronnie Reagan had in western EU that had many of the bigshots in Moscow thinking it was a secret build up for a first strike so they pushed for a first launch. IIRC it was the spies the KGB had in the west that stopped it, as they reported the aircraft didn't have weapons loaded which convinced them it was an exercise.
That doesn't change the fact that if it weren't for the bomb Korea would have probably triggered WWIII as you had generals like MacArthur pushing to roll into China and the prevailing domino theory which stated if you let one fall to communism the rest tumble down, it was only the possibility of an exchange with the USSR that kept it and Vietnam limited in scope.
Actually their acceptable ads (which you can turn off with a single checkbox and they even offer the option on first install) is exactly what I've been saying for years should be the only ads allowed due to security concerns,
1.- Static only (no Flash or Java, but they go one further and put no animations like GIFs), 2.- No "pop up/ under" ads blocking content (which is more likely to cause the user to click to try to move it, thus making it a good target for a malware link) but again they go farther with actual size requirements, 3.- Ads have to be clearly labeled as ads (so no fake security dialog boxes or images the user might click on concealing ad links) and yet again they go farther than I came up with by rules for borders and a bunch of rules for hyperlinks.
So as long as advertisers follow these rules? The odds of an ad based malware attack drops right off the chart. All your usual threats, third party flash, fake links, etc are removed from the equation. Most of us have no problem with the sites we use having a few adverts to stay afloat but what we DO very much have a problem with is putting users at risk for the profit of website owners. the ABP acceptable ads rules seems to address this concern and goes above and beyond so ATM I can really find no fault with the system.
Sigh....MSFT didn't have to do a damned thing, neither did Elop as Nokia was already fucked as they pulled the same shit that Palm did, wasting their time at #1 pocketing cash and going in a dozen directions at once instead of actually innovating and staying ahead of the curve!
Break down their sales when they were last #1....what was that? It was nearly 100% Symbian "feature phones" with an OS so damned old it felt like running Windows 2 in 2005? Bingo, we have a winnar! Symbian was waaaaaaay too fucking old to compete, hell I saw that all the way back and Android Donut (1.6 IIRC) which made Symbian look like the fossil that it was. What about Maemo you say? What about it? If you go look at the actual reports coming from the devs working on the thing you'll see that Maemo would take at least another year and a half because they were having serious memory leaking and file corruption issues. Remember this was when Android 1.5/1.6 and iOS 2 was out, no way in hell would the consumer have taken a phone you had to reboot 4 times a day, could crash when you took a call, and turn your files into data salad, not when they had choices that worked!
Look I get why Nokia fanboys wanted to think some "bad guy" just killed poor wittle Nokia, I had a Nokia for ages and AAMOF I just picked up a Lumia for the wife as she didn't care for Android and while I hate Metro with a fiery passion I'll give credit where credit is due for those not "tech heads" its pretty damned intuitive and the hardware as always seems solid but....the one that killed Nokia...was fucking Nokia. It really was Palm all over again, when Elop came on board they had not ONE OS, not TWO OSes, but fucking THREE OPERATING SYSTEMS splitting up the talent and sucking down resources. They had 1.-Symbian, 2.- Maemo, 3.- the dumbphone OS, and wasn't there even a fourth one for awhile? I seem to remember they were also working on a Java based one there for like a year and a half.
When your only selling product, top of the heap at that moment it may be, is the equivalent of VHS when the entire industry and an ever growing segment of the populace was buying DVD? Well that is when your ass better be laser focused on beating the other guy to the punch, instead they split their resources all over the place and by the time Elop showed up? It really was a "burning platform" as Symbian was too fucking old to compete, dumbphones were going the way of the 8-track, and Maemo probably wouldn't have gone gold until after Apple 3 and Android Gingerbread had been out a good 6 months and by then they were royally fucked.
In a perfect world they would have bought WebOS but they couldn't compete with HP throwing stupid money and Android was in a race to the bottom so Elop bought the only other OS available,and it didn't work out, it was a Hail Mary but at that point a Hail Mary was all that was left, the other guys simply were too far ahead in the game.
I mean have you really already forgotten the stink over google trying to ram G+ and real names down on YouTube? From Google Drive to even spying on kids emails the simple fact is Google is all about connecting the dots, its what they do, where their income is coming from, and the more they can gather on you the more money it can make from its REAL customers, the advertisers.
I have to LMAO when you see those "black lives matter" and screams about "racism" when the #1 cause of death of black males is other black males beating the next four causes of death combined. Sure black lives matter....only when they are killed by white people as that supports the permanent victim class political narrative, but when black men like David Carroll and Tommy Sotomayor point out the biggest threat to the lives of black males is other black males? The black community attacks them as "coons" and "Uncle Toms"....I guess supporting an end to thugs preying on their own neighborhoods means they aren't "keepin it real".
Oh and just a little food for thought......if the plight of the American black was racism, why is it a black man from Africa, fresh off the boat, is something like 300% more likely to become middle class in 1 generation, and something like 3000% more likely to become middle class in 2 generations than an American black, despite the language and culture handicaps from not being a native? I'd say the answer is obvious, its nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture and in the USA the black culture has become toxic, glorifying violence, abusing women and not being fathers to their children, while actively condemning education as "acting white".
As for TFA this kind of shit DOES affect Americans heavily even if they do not know it, as it gets them used to living in a police state where laws protecting against the ever watching eye only apply to the wealthy and the rule of law is whatever they say it is this week.
I can't wait to hear even more people bitching about YouTube being "broken" because HTML V5 is still buggy as fuck and on Chrome/Chromium bas when something goes wrong? You get ZERO useful information that you can use to troubleshoot the issue, just a vague "encountered a problem, please try again later" which makes Windows number code errors look like fountains of information by comparison.
Is it REALLY so impossible to give the USER the choice of whether they want HTML V5 or Flash? is it really so damned hard for a company the size of Google to give meaningful error messages? All this rollout, along with the previous playback rollout has done is strengthen my belief that HTML V5 is a classic "we have to do SOMETHING" approach where you take the first alternative without bothering to ask "is this really better than what we had before, or just different?" as HTML V5 still supports less than half the features that Flash supports and what features it DOES have? It uses more memory and CPU and often works worse than what it was supposed to be the cure of!
I take it you've never sat down and actually consulted an attorney about contract law, yes? The language used on your average shareware practically invites lawsuits because of the way they are worded.
For example many say something along the lines of "personal and or non profit redistribution"...would the fact we would have an LLC negate this? What about the fact we were gonna charge the price of the hardware (the actual flash stick) and the shipping to get it to you....would this be considered "profit" even when we simply broke even? Also if you were to actually look at many of the shareware licenses they often had time limits which of course have expired over a decade ago...what would that mean when it comes to redistribution?
Sadly the only way to find this out other than securing the rights would have been to put it out there, get sued, and after spending tens of thousands in court costs see what the district or even supreme court said about this. Otherwise we'd have to set up a second dummy LLC in idontgiveafuckistan and pay pennies to a bunch of Chinese to make the things for us so if anybody tried to sue it would be in a country that doesn't give a fuck about IP, but we just didn't have the kind of funds to jump through that many hoops for a product that by its very nature was gonna be extremely niche in the first place.
But when you are talking about a rock that has been lying around 3,300,000 years how EXACTLY are you gonna tell "these marks are made by a human" versus marks made because at some point in the distant past it say was caught in a rock slide or drug along a creek bed? Or for that matter since its 3,300,000 years old how are you gonna tell if the marks were made that long ago or was made by a primitive 60,000-100,000 years ago?
Nice to know I'm not the only one whose first thought is "Who in the hell is gonna have enough experience with 53 fricking SBCs to actually give a rating on anything other than name recognition?".
OTOH if you wanted to gather a shitload of personal info this would be a cheap as hell way to do it, you wouldn't even have to actually give anything away just say you did and post a couple pics of some random guys holding one of the "winning" SBCs!
Considering how many FB and mobile data mining/ ID theft scams I have to warn folks about monthly? Any time some place I've never heard of has a "contest" like this it gives me serious pause, nice to see I'm not the only one.
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15 yard penalty, anecdote of a single purchase does not equal evidence, just as your complaints about that ATI laptop from before the sale isn't "proof" that AMD, a separate company, doesn't support their products.
Sapphire offers 2 year warranties on their cards which is pretty standard for the graphics industry and their cards are reviewed highly by their customers with an average of 80% rating 4 stars or better, which again is pretty standard when it comes to GPUs.
And please stop blaming AMD for the fact you got a bad ATI product when AMD didn't even own the company at the time your IGP was sold. AMD drivers are just as solid as Nvidia, they wouldn't sell millions of cards if they weren't, and their support on both the Windows and Linux side I would argue is better because 1.- On Windows its trivial to use the older drivers on the latest version, such as the XP era 2400 Pro cards I have running in many an office building with Windows 7 and 2.- On the Linux side they've opened their specs and are paying the devs to work on the FOSS drivers with the goal of replacing the proprietary driver with a FOSS one. With Nvidia their hostility towards Linux is bad enough Linus flipped them the bird in sheer frustration.
In conclusion...one anecdote does not equal evidence, and one "badly supported" card by the no longer existing ATI (which it was pointed out several times by many people including myself how easy it was to get that card to run on any OS you wanted it to, you blew off any offers of assistance) does not say anything about the current state of AMD drivers in 2015.
But it CAN be done right and be made into a blast, just try the excellent remake of Rise Of The Triad or Shadow Warrior and compare them to the (IMHO frankly boring) Doom 3.
With ROTT and SW they tried to keep what made the classic games "classic" like health packs, power ups, jump pads, but still managed to keep the FUN with a capital F, while Doom 3 felt like "lather rinse repeat" going through the motions. Its like they know what the formula is but just don't have anybody there that knows how to take the formula and make a truly great game from it.
As for TFA? I'm looking forward to Dishonored 2, I just hope they fix the frankly broken sneaking mechanic from the first one. If you are gonna have stealth you really need to have a good sound engine so you can hear the footsteps, otherwise you have like in the first game where the only way to detect who was around was to use your waaay OPed dark powers. In Dishonored 1 the powers once upgraded, even slightly, felt like playing with the cheats on but because of the broken sound engine using the powers was the only way to get from A to B in a lot of spots because you simply had no clues as to what the enemy could and could not detect, how much noise you are making, etc.
Bullshit its the router. I've dealt with so many of those "ZOMFG they keep getting in!" scenarios it ain't even funny and its ALWAYS the router. Five will get you ten they have some ancient router on the backend servicing shit that hasn't been mission critical in ages and its running an OS that has been pwned for years.
I've seen it countless times, bet there is an old Cisco lying on the fringes that has access to the whole network, wouldn't surprise me a bit.
The government didn't do shit when it came out they were bribing OEMs and rigging benchmarks (which they still do to this day) or used their position in one market (X86) to kill a competitor in another market (chipsets) so what makes you think they would give two shits if they became a monopoly?
You seem to forget the USA is an oligarchy and has been so for quite some time. As long as Intel greases the right palms? They can do whatever they want.
Ironically that was when the first "crippled" Intel compiler came out. They didn't target AMD chips until the second release, the first release targeted the Pentium III which I would argue is the smoking gun that proves the "Intel knows how to optimize for their own chips" is total horseshit or else they wouldn't have targeted their own CPU for crippling!
If you look up the very first benches of the P IV at release? It was just getting curbstomped by Tualatin, in some areas the P III was winning by nearly 40%, it wasn't even close, then Intel releases their crippled compiler and throws money at the benchmark companies to use it and wadda ya know....the P IV is suddenly beating the exact same chips by nearly 35%! Isn't that amazing?
Everyone here cheered for the MSFT antitrust trial but if there was any company that deserved to get busted right along with MSFT it was Intel. They rigged the benches, bribed OEMs, even stole a page from MSFT's book by offering OEMs discounts and huge kickbacks as long as they only sold a limited number of low end AMD chips instead of the whole lineup. Anybody remember how hard it was to find good AMD systems on store shelves? That was why. Just imagine how much power was wasted thanks to the OEMs shoveling all those millions of power hog P4s, which is why while I have no problem selling early Athlon X2s or Core based if a Pentium D crosses my desk? Into the trash that garbage goes.
As for TFA congrats Phoronix, your site is one of the few places you can get 100% unbiased benchmarks (thanks to their using GCC instead of ICC) which is why you see results like these AMD vs Intel becnhes and wadda ya know, just by using GCC instead of ICC suddenly you have AMD A10-5800K trading blows with the I5 2400S and the FX-8350 trading blows with i5 3470, chips that cost twice as much.....wow the guys that wrote GCC must be the bestest coders on the entire planet to magically get double the performance that the mainstream benchmarks show...ya think?
You play War Thunder on a PS4? Thx, we love you guys, you make REALLY great target practice LOL! In fact you are your PS4 brethren are usually targeted right along with the AI for the easy kills, thanks again!
And I'm sorry but any Phenom II X4 (or in my case X6) when paired with an R9 280 3GB will absolutely curbstomp your PS4 and the reason why is both simple and obvious....we have a CPU with dedicated RAM and a GPU with dedicated RAM, you only have an APU which means you are stuck with bandwidth contention because your CPU and GPU have to compete for every byte of memory, mine does not. With everything cranked except *AA (which is really pointless at 1080P) the benchmark built into the game has me hitting consistently over 60FPS...how does yours do in the benches? Does your PS4 version even HAVE a benchmark or ability to change quality settings?
At the end of the day I'm sorry but even AMD lists the Jaguar as a netbook and tablet APU which was designed to compete with the Intel ATOM, and NOT designed for any kind of performance beyond beating the Atom/ION combination. You are welcome to look at your benches yourself and even if you DOUBLE those figures (to compensate for the fact that the PS4/XB1 Jaguar is two Jaguar quads in a MCM housing) you'll see that the scores are pretty bad, and this is coming from somebody who sells AMD exclusively and actually uses the Jaguar arch for his HTPC builds.
I'm not even gonna bring up all the advantages the PC has over the console, because it is already so lopsided it isn't funny. PCs get lower prices, free MP, its just too tilted. But just looking at what you can get for the money today, hell looking at what you can grab on Craigslist for a little of nothing? Its really no contest, the PC will just obliterate the PS4/XB1 both on FPS and on picture quality when paired with pretty much any $110-$180 GPU. Of course this not only affects your picture but also your gameplay which is why guys like me just loooove to hunt guys like you, your shorter draw distance gives us a serious advantage when it comes to targeting. I've had a PS4 tanker dead in my sights from 1km away and you could tell from the horrible blind shots he literally could not see me when I was just standing in the open, this despite the fact it was my first time taking out that tank and thus had ZERO upgrades to tank or crew.
But you just can't change the facts and the fact is the Jaguar arch is a severely cut down APU designed for tablets NOT a gaming chip, even AMD lists it as such.
Sigh...are you really gonna use number sold as a gauge of quality? Because by that metric they should have given a pile of Oscars to the Twilight series and Nicki Minaj should be in the hall of fame.
But if you were to actually look at the white paper on the Jaguar that powers the PS4/XB1 then you would know its a netbook APU which means a 6 year old Phenom X4 or C2Q paired with a sub $180 GPU like the R9 280 3GB should just slaughter the thing both on detail and FPS. Hell last I checked neither console can even do native 1080P above 30 FPS consistently and 1080P has been the standard resolution for how long now?
Lets face it thanks to day 1 patches, beta level bugs, and the "we'll patch it later" attitude this gen they've made the consoles into weak PCs with none of the PC upsides.
Uhhhh...they've been spamming the fuck out of their emails? I often sign petitions on sites like Change.org and I got hit with a shitload from this yahoo, I of course know how to find the unsubscribe button at the bottom but if the rest of the Change.org users got even half the emails that I did? Well its easier to just hit that big spam button at the top of the page than it is to find a teeny tiny unsubscribe at the bottom.
So I'd say this isn't a conspiracy, just a classic example of a noob doing it wrong.
Considering the fact that Tiger was offering 3TB for $89 the other day? I think HDDs will be around for quite awhile yet, especially with both WD and Seagate already reaching 10TB and talking about hitting 20+ soon.
As for "the cloud".....BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA...oh you were serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA...in case you ain't got the memo, the magic word at ISPs is "caps", can you say assrape the customer for every byte boys and girls? I think you can. You now have smartphones with 13MP+ cameras able to do 720P FMV, DSLRs are getting damned cheap, and camcorders are everywhere. Where do you think all that data is gonna go? If you live in the USA it certainly ain't "the cloud" so that leaves good old spinning rust.
And I'm sorry but 500GB ain't shit anymore, sure its fine for laptops where you keep things "thin" but I've been slapping 500GB drives in the refurbs I sell simply because I've gotten so many from folks upgrading to 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, the second you start taking vids and pics you'll find 500GB goes like shit through a goose!
Nope because I've actually had users ask me to switch them back when they got "Chrome'd". Ironic that you should bring up the Yahoo/Mozilla partnership as one of the biggest complaints I get is people who get "Chrome'd" when some freeware program they download takes control away from their browser and sticks them with Chrome and the Google home page as they do NOT like it in the least, in fact many act like its some sort of PC hijacking.
I have to explain to them that its because some program they downloaded had a little checkbox but I do have to agree that when you go from opt-in to opt-out? You have entered into "scumbag" territory, right along with McCrappee and Horton with their sleazeball security tools.
As opposed to the .INI files Linux shits all over the place? Oh you can give it fancier names like "config files" but at the end of the day just like the shitty driver model the "*NIX" way of doing things is to pretend the last 40 years never existed.
I can take a single .reg file and simply email it to any Windows user from Win2K on up and it will always work the same way every.single. time., allowing me to change, edit, delete, or repair pretty much anything from the log on to the wallpaper, and do so without having to alter it for kernel version, hardware installed, etc and it all just works without a bit of trouble.....can you say the same? Of course not, which is why "The Hairyfeet Challenge" has lasted 8 years without a single "consumer friendly" distro even coming close to passing...because ultimately Linux is built on 40 years old designs that weren't great to begin with!
Actually last statistics I saw had Yahoo neck and neck with Google on the number of email users and as a PC shop guy who deals with home users every day I can tell you the #1 home page I see on folks computers is Yahoo.
So this move is understandable and I doubt signals a "slow death" at Yahoo, they are just getting rid of the stuff with a low amount of users in favor of their most popular stuff, the Yahoo Mail, the Yahoo Homepage (which is where part of the "digital content" comes in) and I wouldn't be surprised to see more featured concerts as they seem to have been doing that a lot lately and it seems to be pretty hot.
Give me a motherfucking break! By THOSE STANDARDS there hasn't been a Windows bug since the fricking Melissa worm...but the sane world doesn't go by "self replicating" as the standard for a bug, now do they?
MacDefender, MacGuardian,hell OSX even has the FBI bug so don't give us this "self replicating" bullshit, nobody cares whether the virus that steals their fucking ID or CC info is self replicating or not!
FUD, not a single source working for MSFT has said a damned thing about a subscription model, THAT bit of FUD was started by a gossip site "El Reg" IIRC that is known for pulling "facts" out of their ass.
The ONLY thing that has been said is they won't have the old service packs anymore, instead you'll have a point release, like 8 to 8.1. This makes it easier for regular folks to know WTF is going on as its easier to know that X.1 is the current version as all the sites treat it as a separate OS, while nobody talks about "Win 7 SP1" they simply call it Win 7.
But just because some dude at MSFT said "Win 10 is the only version we are working on ATM" the sites jumped to this "last version of Windows EVAR" subscription crap when in reality land the prices have already been leaked and its no different than every other release, you'll have retail and OEM, Home and Pro, its business as usual. I'm sure in a year and a half you'll see retail 10.1, maybe even 10.2, and then you'll see the hypetrain for Windows 11, probably hosted by Spinal Tap, coming to a tech site near you.
Sigh...as opposed to the AGW lobby which is run by such selfless companies as Goldman Sachs while pushing cap and trade which has the rules written by the same one who cooked up credit default swaps and is the kind of scam frankly a kid could see through, meanwhile you have Rev Al setting himself up to be a carbon billionaire while driving a fleet of SUVs like a third world El Presidente and living in a McMansion with ACed basketball court while he says that YOU need to pay more, you filthy climate damaging peasant you.
Do we need to pollute less and save more? Of course, this is common sense, but we will get NO common sense approaches offered because companies like Goldman Sachs and scammers like Gore couldn't make out like highway robbery on common sense so we'll get scams like crap and trade pushed where the worst polluters get their carbon "indulgences" so pay nothing, scammers like Gore will pay themselves in carbon credits from their own company so he can have the brass balls to fly a lear jet for one and ride in a fleet of Caddie SUVs while claiming he is "carbon neutral" so who does that leave to pay these shitbags for their magic beans? Why that would be YOU, you filthy peasant who can't afford your own offshore LLC, why you are killing the planet!
Actually it was four, you forgot the wargame Ronnie Reagan had in western EU that had many of the bigshots in Moscow thinking it was a secret build up for a first strike so they pushed for a first launch. IIRC it was the spies the KGB had in the west that stopped it, as they reported the aircraft didn't have weapons loaded which convinced them it was an exercise.
That doesn't change the fact that if it weren't for the bomb Korea would have probably triggered WWIII as you had generals like MacArthur pushing to roll into China and the prevailing domino theory which stated if you let one fall to communism the rest tumble down, it was only the possibility of an exchange with the USSR that kept it and Vietnam limited in scope.
Actually their acceptable ads (which you can turn off with a single checkbox and they even offer the option on first install) is exactly what I've been saying for years should be the only ads allowed due to security concerns,
1.- Static only (no Flash or Java, but they go one further and put no animations like GIFs), 2.- No "pop up/ under" ads blocking content (which is more likely to cause the user to click to try to move it, thus making it a good target for a malware link) but again they go farther with actual size requirements, 3.- Ads have to be clearly labeled as ads (so no fake security dialog boxes or images the user might click on concealing ad links) and yet again they go farther than I came up with by rules for borders and a bunch of rules for hyperlinks.
So as long as advertisers follow these rules? The odds of an ad based malware attack drops right off the chart. All your usual threats, third party flash, fake links, etc are removed from the equation. Most of us have no problem with the sites we use having a few adverts to stay afloat but what we DO very much have a problem with is putting users at risk for the profit of website owners. the ABP acceptable ads rules seems to address this concern and goes above and beyond so ATM I can really find no fault with the system.
Sigh....MSFT didn't have to do a damned thing, neither did Elop as Nokia was already fucked as they pulled the same shit that Palm did, wasting their time at #1 pocketing cash and going in a dozen directions at once instead of actually innovating and staying ahead of the curve!
Break down their sales when they were last #1....what was that? It was nearly 100% Symbian "feature phones" with an OS so damned old it felt like running Windows 2 in 2005? Bingo, we have a winnar! Symbian was waaaaaaay too fucking old to compete, hell I saw that all the way back and Android Donut (1.6 IIRC) which made Symbian look like the fossil that it was. What about Maemo you say? What about it? If you go look at the actual reports coming from the devs working on the thing you'll see that Maemo would take at least another year and a half because they were having serious memory leaking and file corruption issues. Remember this was when Android 1.5/1.6 and iOS 2 was out, no way in hell would the consumer have taken a phone you had to reboot 4 times a day, could crash when you took a call, and turn your files into data salad, not when they had choices that worked!
Look I get why Nokia fanboys wanted to think some "bad guy" just killed poor wittle Nokia, I had a Nokia for ages and AAMOF I just picked up a Lumia for the wife as she didn't care for Android and while I hate Metro with a fiery passion I'll give credit where credit is due for those not "tech heads" its pretty damned intuitive and the hardware as always seems solid but....the one that killed Nokia...was fucking Nokia. It really was Palm all over again, when Elop came on board they had not ONE OS, not TWO OSes, but fucking THREE OPERATING SYSTEMS splitting up the talent and sucking down resources. They had 1.-Symbian, 2.- Maemo, 3.- the dumbphone OS, and wasn't there even a fourth one for awhile? I seem to remember they were also working on a Java based one there for like a year and a half.
When your only selling product, top of the heap at that moment it may be, is the equivalent of VHS when the entire industry and an ever growing segment of the populace was buying DVD? Well that is when your ass better be laser focused on beating the other guy to the punch, instead they split their resources all over the place and by the time Elop showed up? It really was a "burning platform" as Symbian was too fucking old to compete, dumbphones were going the way of the 8-track, and Maemo probably wouldn't have gone gold until after Apple 3 and Android Gingerbread had been out a good 6 months and by then they were royally fucked.
In a perfect world they would have bought WebOS but they couldn't compete with HP throwing stupid money and Android was in a race to the bottom so Elop bought the only other OS available,and it didn't work out, it was a Hail Mary but at that point a Hail Mary was all that was left, the other guys simply were too far ahead in the game.
If you don't learn from your history? Then you sir are a dumbass, because datamining is what Google does and if its one thing they love its gathering more and more intel on you.
I mean have you really already forgotten the stink over google trying to ram G+ and real names down on YouTube? From Google Drive to even spying on kids emails the simple fact is Google is all about connecting the dots, its what they do, where their income is coming from, and the more they can gather on you the more money it can make from its REAL customers, the advertisers.
I have to LMAO when you see those "black lives matter" and screams about "racism" when the #1 cause of death of black males is other black males beating the next four causes of death combined. Sure black lives matter....only when they are killed by white people as that supports the permanent victim class political narrative, but when black men like David Carroll and Tommy Sotomayor point out the biggest threat to the lives of black males is other black males? The black community attacks them as "coons" and "Uncle Toms"....I guess supporting an end to thugs preying on their own neighborhoods means they aren't "keepin it real".
Oh and just a little food for thought......if the plight of the American black was racism, why is it a black man from Africa, fresh off the boat, is something like 300% more likely to become middle class in 1 generation, and something like 3000% more likely to become middle class in 2 generations than an American black, despite the language and culture handicaps from not being a native? I'd say the answer is obvious, its nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture and in the USA the black culture has become toxic, glorifying violence, abusing women and not being fathers to their children, while actively condemning education as "acting white".
As for TFA this kind of shit DOES affect Americans heavily even if they do not know it, as it gets them used to living in a police state where laws protecting against the ever watching eye only apply to the wealthy and the rule of law is whatever they say it is this week.
I can't wait to hear even more people bitching about YouTube being "broken" because HTML V5 is still buggy as fuck and on Chrome/Chromium bas when something goes wrong? You get ZERO useful information that you can use to troubleshoot the issue, just a vague "encountered a problem, please try again later" which makes Windows number code errors look like fountains of information by comparison.
Is it REALLY so impossible to give the USER the choice of whether they want HTML V5 or Flash? is it really so damned hard for a company the size of Google to give meaningful error messages? All this rollout, along with the previous playback rollout has done is strengthen my belief that HTML V5 is a classic "we have to do SOMETHING" approach where you take the first alternative without bothering to ask "is this really better than what we had before, or just different?" as HTML V5 still supports less than half the features that Flash supports and what features it DOES have? It uses more memory and CPU and often works worse than what it was supposed to be the cure of!
I take it you've never sat down and actually consulted an attorney about contract law, yes? The language used on your average shareware practically invites lawsuits because of the way they are worded.
For example many say something along the lines of "personal and or non profit redistribution" ...would the fact we would have an LLC negate this? What about the fact we were gonna charge the price of the hardware (the actual flash stick) and the shipping to get it to you....would this be considered "profit" even when we simply broke even? Also if you were to actually look at many of the shareware licenses they often had time limits which of course have expired over a decade ago...what would that mean when it comes to redistribution?
Sadly the only way to find this out other than securing the rights would have been to put it out there, get sued, and after spending tens of thousands in court costs see what the district or even supreme court said about this. Otherwise we'd have to set up a second dummy LLC in idontgiveafuckistan and pay pennies to a bunch of Chinese to make the things for us so if anybody tried to sue it would be in a country that doesn't give a fuck about IP, but we just didn't have the kind of funds to jump through that many hoops for a product that by its very nature was gonna be extremely niche in the first place.
But when you are talking about a rock that has been lying around 3,300,000 years how EXACTLY are you gonna tell "these marks are made by a human" versus marks made because at some point in the distant past it say was caught in a rock slide or drug along a creek bed? Or for that matter since its 3,300,000 years old how are you gonna tell if the marks were made that long ago or was made by a primitive 60,000-100,000 years ago?
Nice to know I'm not the only one whose first thought is "Who in the hell is gonna have enough experience with 53 fricking SBCs to actually give a rating on anything other than name recognition?".
OTOH if you wanted to gather a shitload of personal info this would be a cheap as hell way to do it, you wouldn't even have to actually give anything away just say you did and post a couple pics of some random guys holding one of the "winning" SBCs!
Considering how many FB and mobile data mining/ ID theft scams I have to warn folks about monthly? Any time some place I've never heard of has a "contest" like this it gives me serious pause, nice to see I'm not the only one.
He asked for help choosing an IDE, not an OS. As for the right IDE? The answer is simple....80 pin.