Won't work, because no matter how you slice it the machine is better than you so unless you are gonna "cull" something like 85%+ of the population (which I kinda doubt they'll go along with) or you accept the fact that capitalism dies in the face of technology and find another way.
Look it is VERY simple, yet kinda scary, but follow along. You have HALF the population at IQ x, lets say 105 IQ. Now this group will be qualified for factory, general labor, hell you might get middle manager but nearly all those jobs can be done by the machine so there is simply NO NEED for him or her anymore. And each year that number is gonna inch higher on the "we don't need people below IQ X" because the ONLY jobs left will be research into new machines which frankly VERY few are gonna be qualified for.
You see for the entire 4000+ years of recorded history the whole society has been based on trading labor for pay but what if that labor isn't needed? You used to have entire factories filled with workers, now three guys can run the plant. The ONLY reason the Chinese have a job now is they are cheaper than the machines, but what happens when they are not? same thing that happened here.
The simple fact is unless you want to base a large portion of your society on "make work" or deal with riots because an honest man can't even feed himself simply because the machines do it better, well then something has to change. You can't turn your population into CxOs, or all IP lawyers. You will have masses whose tasks have been replaced by tech and simply aren't qualified and never will be qualified for the ever shrinking musical chairs that is "jobs not done by machines".
Think it would be hard to make an automated McDonald's? Of course not. The service industry will be the next to go, and frankly for many that is all that is left. What's next? THAT is the scary part, nobody knows. We can simply tell by history this way is ending, it is as behind the times as paying someone to deliver letters by horseback. The industrial revolution ended up wiping out our factories, the tech revolution will finish the jobs for most manual labor. What do you do with the millions with no job? That is the question.
I think they are gonna try to pull that "Quickboot Linux" crap like some did with the "instant on" ROM chips in motherboards. My dad has one of those, know how many times he's used it? Never. not a single time. Because while having an instant browser is nice it won't run his messenger or his QB or any of the little Windows apps he likes, so he never bothers.
I think that is kinda the problem most people don't get about the desktop, the simple fact It is NEVER Windows and Office that bites you in the ass and keeps people from trying new stuff, it is those bazillion little apps that they know, that they like, that "just works" for them.
The reason you can get away with this on cell phones is nobody has anything invested in the apps. it is a phone, they have gone through half a dozen, and they have NO expectations so as long as it works and say, there is an app to get to FB or check their mail or whatever, well as long as it has that they frankly don't care.
Now compare that to the desktop where I have had to invest in some CRAZY hoop jumping all because someone has an app that they have spent waaay too much time in, know it by heart, and consider it a "must have". For some it is the funky software that came with some camera, for others it is an app by a certain company like QuickBooks, hell I had one I had to build an NOS (new, old stock) PC and rig him up a KVM switch because much of his work depends on Macromedia Xres, and that thing is picky as hell. No VMs, no dual core CPUs, hell it didn't even like SATA drives. So just for that single program I had to build a 1.8GHz PC with 1.25Gb of RAM and an IDE HDD. But he is happy.
And it is THIS, this right here, that is the double edge sword that gives MSFT the desktop but at the same time makes them work so hard for backwards compatibility . Because they people have invested interest in "their programs" that they need to do stuff "their way" and it damned well better run. WebOS could be the greatest thing since the Amiga but the people won't give up their apps and Windows for it, sorry they just won't.
Greater chance of working out of the box, what kind of shitty Dell you playing on? I can actually remember the last game that didn't work for me, Vampire:Bloodlines, and that was because the company went its up right on release. Thankfully the community were able to patch it a couple of months later and all was good. Would that have happened on a console? Not a chance, because you'd have had to get around the DRM which means only mod chipped consoles could have been patched, so it wouldn't have been worth the effort.
But really if you just stay away from the bleeding edge (beta drivers are NEVER a good idea) you'll find that most games are "insert disc>>clicky clicky next next next>>>play game" and that's it. Hell you can even set the game explorer in Windows 7 to automatically look for patches and give you the heads up, or use Steam and have all that automated. And it isn't like consoles are any better about it since getting a net connection. Just look at how many games need patching right from the start?
Now if you want to argue how some prefer the controls of the console, or their widescreen over the monitor (although to be fair more of the PCs I'm building are already set up to plug into their widescreens, which come with HDMI and VGA) but saying PCs aren't stable game machines is frankly BS. The stability problem died with Win9x and frankly I can't remember the last time I saw a BSOD. How many X360s got RROD, or PS3 the YROD? Quite a few from what I understand.
Re:It's a bit more complex than this article...
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Pocket Wars and Cores
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Riiiiight, you DO realize we've had this "in the cloud" dance once before, yes? It was called "thin client computing" and it didn't go over too well for the same reasons it will fail this time. Line gets cut? Hope you don't have anyone get sick that day. Lines can't handle the extra strain? Hope you like ripping into those multimillion dollar buildings. That doesn't count the fact that every nurse stuck waiting because the network is clogged is money out of your pocket.
No friend the cloud won't work, most of the country just doesn't have the FIOS needed to truly run the apps "in the cloud" and with the economy rotten it won't be coming in the next decade either. No I think the big change will be a switch to Bobcat, with Atom slowly losing ground.
You see Intel has been so scared of cutting into the big chips they have put tons of BS restrictions on their low power Atom that are frankly only there to prop up their business model, whereas AMD has placed no such restrictions on Bobcat. So you have an out of order dual core that uses less than 18w and can have as much memory as you want and be placed into any form factor. And from what I've seen it is equal to about a MOR Athlon dual which is frankly more than "good enough" for the jobs at our hypothetical hospital without needing all the backbone you'd need for "the cloud" not to mention no HIPPA troubles.
The future won't be ARM on the desktop, nor x86 in the cloud, it will be ULV SFF machines that give you all the advantages of the desktop without the heat and electricity bills. Add a 32Gb SSD and you have a machine small enough it can simply be built into the back of a touchscreen monitor, or placed into a tablet for the nurses to carry. All the software still works, no conversion costs other than the price of the hardware, which will be cheap, just a smarter way to go all around.
What is with all this nationalism? I thought we were all supposed to be global now? Welcome to reality, where you can't outsource all your factories and then get enough tax money to blow on things like shuttles, which BTW was supposed to be a "space truck" which never actually fulfilled its mission.
We went from 80% factory jobs at the birth of NASA to now 80% service industry (with a severe cut in pay to boot!) and the simple fact is we're broke. We're the guy writing hot checks at the Walmart to pay for Chinese goods because the national bank account is nothing but red ink. Hell if we spent within our means we probably wouldn't even have a military as big as Brazil, and we sure as hell wouldn't be fighting two endless wars.
I personally wish China and India luck, as they will eventually find what we are gonna have to wake up and accept...capitalism doesn't work with technology. There was a good reason why nobody in Star Trek was waving money around, that is because as you reach a certain technical level you don't really need human labor anymore. You think we are in bad shape now? Wait until automation hits the service industry.
Despite our brilliant leader's idea that piling ever more debt to get ever more degrees (what are we up to now, a Bachelors is the new HS diploma?) to chase ever fewer jobs the simple fact is the way we've done things for the past 4000+ years is coming to an end. The machines are faster, smarter,more accurate, and they never tire or make mistakes.
We can't all be CxOs, doctors, or IP lawyers, so you either make up BS "make work" programs to give you an excuse to cut all these people a check, you have massive unemployment and underemployment like we have now, or you find a new way. The only question is whether that new way will come peacefully or with massive riots and destruction.
So don't look at the shuttle as the end, look at it as a scary and exciting new world beginning. The old ways of doing things have failed, as evidenced by 22%+ unemployment and the fed drowning in red ink while the presses smoke from all the money being cranked out, the odds of giving the huge masses of poor jobs they can actually do is virtually nil since the machines can do them better, and outsourcing has taken most of the rest. Now the question becomes, what to do next? Do we stay on the failing road of capitalism, where the top 1% get fatter until we have another revolution, or do we try something else?
Because like it or not folks we're broke, and whether the talking heads want to admit it or not for huge masses of your fellow Americans this IS another depression. Only as we have seen we can't use war production to get us out of this one, since nothing is built here anymore.
Re:It's a bit more complex than this article...
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Pocket Wars and Cores
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Your hypothetical director would say "oh great lets switch".....only to find out that NONE of tens of millions of dollars worth of custom software designed to speed productivity will run and it will cost a billion dollars or so to have it all written in house, that is of course if you don't get sued because half of it is patented up the wazoo, and then say "Fuck the electricity".
The reason nobody runs ARM on the desktop is the same reason why you don't see masses of Linux machines at your local Walmart...its the apps, not the OS and MSFT cooking up some half baked.NET based about as useful as WinCE OS and calling it "Windows for ARM devices" won't change a bit of that.
The simple facts are these: Those running x86/x64 Windows don't have the code for their programs, it would cost orders of magnitude to write code to replace those programs, and that is of course after the vendors spend the next 10 years dragging you through the courts for trying to rip off their IP.
To try to make the Linux ARM world fit the Windows x86 world simply doesn't work, they are two COMPLETELY different ecosystems that are as different as the top of a mountain and the bottom of the Marianas trench. People will happily take Linux ARM because they have ZERO or near ZERO invested in code for the platform. They literally have billions of dollars in mission critical programs tied to x86, most of which would simply never be ported to ARM and would cost incredible amount of money to be written from scratch in house.
So while it might make cool back of the envelope math to compare the two IRL it simply wouldn't work.
If only 3% of the 32 million did he'll make enough to live decently while working on the program.
BTW we have a somewhat modern version of the old shareware model in Giveaway Of The Day. The way it works for those that haven't tried it is each day a single different program is offered free and they give you this app for free, you can load it as many times on as many PCs as you own that day, and they usually offer along with it a chance to get a more powerful program or other offerings at a greatly reduced price.
Now I can say from experience this model works, as I have bought quite a few programs that I originally tried on Giveaway Of The Day like Astonshell which is great for older XP machines like my nettop and gives me useful gadgets like a CPU/RAM/Net throughput meter while using less resources than the default Winshell, or Paragon Drive Backup which is an awesome desktop and server imaging and backup program which I doubt I ever would have found without it being on GAOTD.
So you can still make good money with the shareware model today, you simply have to make a good and affordable product while more importantly getting it noticed. With GAOTD I can try apps easily without worrying about bugs and backdoors, and if I like it or need to add it to another machine later I can just buy a copy like I did with the above.
And Indie game designers? Giveaway Of The Day has a sister Game Giveaway on weekends and would be happy to offer it more often if they had more indie games, so you might want to contact them about getting your game featured. It is good exposure and if you offer at a fair price many of us WILL buy from you, just make it easy, make it affordable, and make it fast. Oh and NO PAYPAL as many of us will take one look at "Paypal only" and just walk away. There have been several programs I tried on GAOTD I wanted to buy and had my CC out but when I saw Paypal only I just closed the browser. No way I'm trusting my card to those crooks.
Sorry about that, didn't make myself clear. I wasn't talking about multichips but multicores. The new 12 core Bulldozer sounds like a perfect console chip, dynamic power reduction and the ability to turn CPU/GPUs off when not needed to lower the power/heat, and hybrid crossfire with the discrete GPU to give the designers plenty of room to work. You could just use BD onboard for the Console and multimedia and kick on the discrete for gaming.
All they would have to do then is learn from the Sony stupidity and have the CPU/GPU combo and discrete GPU open for OtherOS if you desire and just have a separate DRM chip that locks down GameOS (which would be trivial since Win 7 Embedded supports TPM) so you don't have to worry about piracy and the open arch would keep the Linux hackers happy, yeah it would be an easy sell that would seriously lower the R&D and time to market and catch Sony and Nintendo asleep at the wheel. Hell if they went COTS like that they could have it out by summer next year easy!
Exactly! It is called "taking care of your own" and something we in the south take very seriously (well unless you're trash, and we don't hang around them kind) and as you said it all comes back around or as we say "it all evens out in the wash".
Like a couple of weeks ago I had to go out and deal with a hum dinger of a PITA when my dad had accidentally updated his MSN messenger and the one he had before had a feature the new one doesn't that he needed (something about the way the camera accesses allows him to activate the camera for his old HS sweetheart who is even worse with tech than he is and can't work the stupid thing) so I spent ages getting that stupid thing cleaned up and set back EXACTLY the way he had it before.
Well wouldn't you know it I come out the other morning and have a flat, so I call dad who has an account with the tire shop down the street to see if he can have them come patch the thing. He says "no problem just leave the keys under the mat so they can pick it up" and when I got back that afternoon not only didn't I have a flat but I had 4 new tires since he "had them check it and the rubber was getting a little thin".
So you do what you can and you take care of your own. Now I can understand threatening to charge if they refuse to listen and just keep doing dumb shit, but if your family has any sense (and mine does) they look to you for advice and will do what you tell them so a little prevention takes care of a lot of it.
Now I just deal with the occasional busted program or fried part, like the old dinosaur 733MHz I'm taking to MY GF's boy this weekend so he can check his email until he can afford something better. The kid just had to shell out nearly a grand in car repair and his old rig bought the farm, so this is one less thing he has to deal with while he gets his money back on track. Of course once I drop it off I'll be going down the street to spend the weekend with my GF, where I'll have a big home cooked dinner all waiting there for for me just pretty as you please. It all evens out in the wash you see, it all evens out in the wash.
You charged you own mama? Boy that's just...that's just so wrong it ain't even funny! Now telling her it'll be a while so she'll make you supper that's one thing but taking cash from close family just to fix a basic fuckup? That's low man.
The only ones I do "freebies" for are my parents, my kids, and my GF and her immediate fam (parents and kids) but I get compensated in different ways which is called being family like my GF's mom insisting on whipping up a big deer steak dinner (man that was good eats!) or her daughter whipping up some nice chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven (mmmm good!).
They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and I'd say that goes just as well for his tech skills. But charging money to your family? that's just sorry. Hell I've frankensteined whole PCs out of the junk pile in the back of the shop just because a family member had their PC blow and was having a rough time, it's called "family takes care of their own". Maybe its just a southern thing if there are folks really charging their own mamas.
So in other words I got labeled a troll and had a pile of stupid posts that never answered the technical question of what is good/bad about Silverlight because yet again/. has been taken over by the "ZOMG M$ ZOMG!" weeinie wankers, no different than the "Lunix Lusers" or the "MacFag".
Sadly I remember when Slashdot was a TECH site where one could actually discuss the TECHNICAL advantages/disadvantages of a language without having the conversation taken over by weenie wankers whose ONLY objection is their religious sheeple zealot hatred to anything that doesn't run on their "chosen" OS.
So waste your mod points, oh teat sucking sheeple. Just remember it is YOU that are lowering the quality of discussions here and making tech looking like squee loving 14 year old girls because one can't simply discuss the merits/weakness of a TECH anymore without having wastes of space like you coming out. You are an example of what is wrong with this country as every discussion now falls for the pro rassling "dems VS repubs!" bullshit instead of meaningful debates.
To give NO reason to hate Silverlight or any other language other than "ZOMG! It isn't on my worship OS! ZOMG!" just shows what a blatant sheeple fanboy you are. If you have actual technical reasons, preferably with advantages/disadvantages weighed like a normal thinking adult lets hear them, but the "ZOMG!" bullshit really needs to DIAF.
Why would you say that? I just finished one up for a customer at right around $500, it has a Phenom II Quad, 4Gb of RAM, 1Tb HDD and an HD4830 GPU. This plays just about any game you can throw at it and the most I figure he'll have to replace within 2 years is upgrade the GPU to a nice 6xxx series when the price comes down.
Ever since the consoles started stagnating the games industry you simply don't need the giant ePeen machine to game anymore. Most games are barely hitting dual core ATM, and with the X360/PS3 GPUs so long in the tooth you just don't need to blow huge piles o' cash to get purty games. Where something like TFA will shine is Eyefinity and GP-GPU work like video transcoding and render acceleration thanks to OpenCL and AMD Streams SDK.
No what is sad is that to be labeled evil now you simply don't support the status quo which is what our current corporatist state loves with all its little black heart. I mean if they hadn't fallen even though their regimes were truly evil I'm sure the US Gov would be happily sending billions of our dollars to monsters like the Shah and Mubarak just to "ensure stability" no matter how much blood and suffering that stability caused.
So it is actually really simple: anyone who doesn't support the status quo and the top 1% no matter what is an evil socialist pinko terrorist scum. And as long as things tomorrow stay the same as today, so the top 1%ers can leach more money from the system and pad their already 60%+ take of the economy, no matter how much misery they bring? Well then it is all good because it brings "stability" to the system don't ya know?
That is why as much as I hate to say this I agree with Glen Beck 110%. For the good of the US and the world it is time for the US to "Be Switzerland" and stay the hell out of everyone's business and tend to our own. Bring home the troops, shut down the piles of overseas bases, stop trying to be the world's policeman and let them take care of themselves. The past 80 years have seen the USA prop up one truly mad dog scumbag after another with the taxes of the American people all so some company can get bananas 10c cheaper and it is time to end. Take the billions we are blowing on the military and invest it in our own people and renewable energy and let the mid east sort itself out.
Like the misery that has been the drug war the current path has been shown to be nothing but bloodshed and suffering for the masses for the enrichment of the few, and it is time for it to end. Any Tea partier or other third candidate that wants to be pres? Run on the "Be Switzerland" platform, as the American people are tired of being taxed to pay for monsters. It is time to stay home, it is time to "Be Switzerland".
Problem with your post is this: The entire point of the Xbox was NOT to make money which if you'll watch the early talks about the system they made quite clear what the main focus was: To get MSFT out of the Office Den and into the living room. And I'd argue on that front they succeeded beautifully.
Now with the X360 not only do they have a front row seat in millions of living rooms, they also get money from every game sold thanks to licensing and have a way to sell entertainment and other devices, such as how Windows 7 which is bog simple to hook to an X360 or WinPhone 7 which if rumors turn out to be true will come out with a way to have your games tie into your phone, so that for instance you play a minigame building armor that armor would be available on the console.
So if you look at the console based on its stated purpose, to get MSFT into the living room just like iPod got Apple into millions of pockets then it is a smashing success. One thing MSFT has shown is they don't mind spending money if it gets them into a long term steady growth market and the sheer simplicity of consoles means that for the foreseeable future they aren't going anywhere.
As I said in a previous post the smart thing to do now that PCs are so far ahead tech wise is to do another COTS like the original Xbox, Like say the 12 core Bulldozer CPU/GPU combo into an AMD 6xxx GPU. This would allow developers to get better physics and AI thanks to being able to use the power of the Radeon 4xxx built into BD, while leaving the 6xxx free for graphics. As the console matured the developers could use the BD GPU in connection with the 6xxx in hybrid crossfire for certain games or even when they just need to crank the purty, and the low R&D and quick time to market would have the console making money almost from day 1 while catching the competitors blindsided. This would also make games going from PC to console and vice versa trivial, and if they wise up and kill GFWL and partner with Steam could make matchmaking between the two systems easy.
Actually from the data I've seen the new Bulldozer saves serious wafer space which turns into real savings for AMD which I'm sure they'd be happy to share the love with a nice console contract. IIRC they were looking at a retail price of the 12 core at about midrange Thuban territory, which is around $220-$270 retail price so it is definitely doable.
Add in economies of scale at that size and the fact that by going COTS they are gonna seriously cut down the R&D and time to market? I could easily see them putting this out as a $500 unit to start with the 1Tb drive and having it be a break even unit. Give it 6 months worth of product and/or a die shrink and they'll be making money on the units or can start lowering the price. While I doubt they'd be able to get it down to the sub $200 X360 price I could see it easily end up being a $300 unit that with that kind of power would be easy to keep selling for quite a long time.
If they learn from Sony's mistake and embrace the hacker community by letting them have access to the CPU and GPU and simply have the DRM on a separate chip tied to the game OS (which would be easily doable since like their previous consoles it would probably be based on Windows embedded, which supports TPM) so that geeks have no reason to tear into it? I could see this thing selling like hotcakes.
Question: What EXACTLY is wrong with Silverlight, other than you don't like the parent company? Because while I'm not a coder I'd have to say the SilveOS full OS in a browser is a pretty damned impressive demo. I'd say if you can cook up something THAT cool in Silverlight and actually have it run smooth in bog standard Firefox with no funkiness needed you ought to be able to cook up anything in it.
Me personally I never understood this whole "hate a language" thing (except maybe Brainfuck, but that was evil from birth) since all languages are tools and it is up to the coder to use it correctly instead of acting like a monkey with a wrench beating on a bomb. I've seen damned nice apps written in everything from C to VB and the coders I've known usually didn't have any trouble picking up a language.
So what exactly is wrong with the language known as Silverlight? I haven't seen it used a lot, but that doesn't mean it isn't a perfectly usable tool, just unpopular.
Oh please oh please, can we have decent AI if we ask really nicely? All the kick ass graphics in the world doesn't help if the bad guys are as thick as a box full of hammers.
All we seem to get now is variations on the EA "rubber band" AI where the enemy will literally line up to stand in the SAME place where piles of their buddies lay dead or if you crank the difficulty you get PFCs that can snipe you from half a mile away while you are behind cover while being able to take more rounds than the Terminator. Kinda ruins the suspension of disbelief when all the enemies are Gomer Pyle or T-800s. Kinda sad really as for a short time there with games like Far Cry 1 you started to see bad guys that actually fought halfway decent, but then it is like the designers said "nahh...just pile on the bling bling!:.
Personally I'd be happy if the graphics stayed the way they are now on current PCs if they just had decent AI and good physics. Maybe an ATI 59xx for the GPU, with a multicore CPU? Hell maybe they should team with AMD and use COTS like they did with the original Xbox. A dozen Bulldozer CPU/GPU combos feeding into a 58xx or 59xx or even a 6 series GPU would be a pretty badass console and make conversion between console and PC trivial.
Add in a 1Tb or 2Tb HDD (depending on model) and you'd have a kick ass console/media center that you could tie into Win 7/8 for a total multimedia powerhouse. I haven't bought a console since the PS2/Xbox 1 but for something like that I'd buy it for my family in a heartbeat. All the ease of a console with the power of a good HTPC. Give it the Windows Media Center 10 foot UI and it would be a slam dunk.
Why thank you Petey for illustrating my point SO well. While Twitter was a master of insanity you are just another poor lame assburgers holding onto your magical woobie and having trouble typing a sentence. You really should go find Twitter and study at the feet of the master, because frankly ATM you aren't even qualified to wash his jockstrap.
Kinda sad really, but you are the PERFECT example of how the crazies and trolls don't measure up to the greats. So how does it feel to know that even in crazy you are third rate? Hell you can't even cook up a decent sockpuppet, just going back to your tired old lame ass king'sjester or joker or whatever. you are the equivalent of the mid season reality show replacement nobody can even muster up enough caring about to remember the name, what a sad little fate for a sad little man.
I think the bigger question MR AC (nice UID BTW) is why would you want a non nuke carrier in this day and age? When you are moving something THAT damned heavy I don't care how well you design your ICE it is still gonna suck fuel like a drunk sucking MD20/20. So why in the world would you want a non nuke carrier in this day and age?
The only reason I can think is getting an old carrier off someone like the UK or USA for cheap (I think the one we sold Brazil cost them something like 20 mil for a WWII sized carrier, another 20 mil for the A4s that could use the smaller runway, still pretty cheap), but I bet figuring the fuel you'd come out in the hole in the long run anyway.
As for TFA that's nice and all, but what EXACTLY is the point other than "we got the cash to blow so lets go for it!"? These things that just do it for the hell of it remind me of the "I Got Money" iPhone app, where people paid $1000! just to have a jewel on the screen. In the big scheme of things it is completely pointless, a waste of resources, and for what? It isn't like you are gonna get any useful data off this thing, or start using rocket cars to go buy groceries at Walmart.
To me it just seems like a total waste of resources at a time when our resources are dwindling, just another case of folks with more money than sense.
But IS it a lie? We have hard data for HDDs because we've all used them in every single role from light usage to pound the shit out of the bastard, so most of us know what they can take and what they can't.
Now I know anecdotes aren't data, but that is all I have to go by besides the data given by the manufacturer which as we have seen in the past this bunch don't mind the bullshit (remember when they switched from base 2 to base 10, just to make drives sound bigger?) so that is all I have to go by. I have a couple of customers that are the "ePeen" gamer types buy insane parts to have me build (one even bought a skulltrail with me telling him it was pointless!) and blowing through them every two years, etc.
The last one I built for an ePeen had an SSD (whichever one had the highest benches ATT, he ALWAYS has a list of benches) along with a pair of Raptors in RAID 0 for storage and while the Raptors are humming good he tells me the SSD has already lost about 25% of its size to bad cells. Now a report like that frankly gives me pause, because he ain't running no cheap shit, he always buys top o' the line. This thing is only like 18 months old!
So personally I'd feel more comfortable with something like our very own "Slashdot Report: Cutting through the bullshit with news from the trenches" before I judge the things one way or another. Now I still have plenty of 40-120Gb HDDs just humming along, in fact I can count the number of drives I've managed to kill on one hand with fingers left over (the correct answer is three, and I blame one on Vista) and ALL OF THEM gave me plenty of warnings before they kicked the bucket. Now from what I've been told you can have an SSD just shit itself and die, with NO warning at all!
So c'mon fellow trench workers, spill your guts. I know there has to be plenty of guys out here in geekland pounding the shit out of SSDs trying to squeeze that last drop of I/O throughput, How they holding up? How bad is the cell loss? Had any shit themselves? Did you get a heads up before they croaked? These are the questions I want to know.
Uhhhh...You DO know the fed stopped him from buying Nokia and selling off his shares of MSFT under insider trading rules, yes? And that anyone who takes one of the high level positions in a company like CxO has to follow insider trading rules that only allow them to sell X number of stock per six months and IIRC not to buy ANY of the stock of the company they have joined for 6 months, too keep from having their knowledge affect pricing?
If you want to blame someone for his stock situation blame the fed, as he already announced when he took the job we would be selling off his MSFT stock as fast as allowed and replacing it with Nokia since he believes in the company.
And why is it everyone here would rather have Nokia dead than sell a WinPhone? They didn't hire a new CEO because it was Tuesday you know, they did it because they were bleeding to death and needed to do something NOW. Some will say they could have made MaeMo/MeeGo work, and this much is true if they would have picked one and trashed the others two years ago but they didn't and the infighting between the Symbian and MaeMo/MeeGo camps pretty much shit all over each other and the company.
And as for Android? BWA HA HA HA HA...oh wait, you're serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA! That market is BEYOND saturated! In a race to the bottom which is what Android is right now nobody and I mean NOBODY will pay the higher prices for Nokia handsets, not when most of the carriers are offering CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) running Droid for free for signing up (Hell a buddy got two for signing up. They aren't great but they work good enough) so Nokia would be left fighting for scraps with expensive hardware running a low end OS.
Not saying anything is bad about Android, it is actually quite nice, but like PCs it IS in a race to the bottom ATM, with every retail store selling CCC phones and pads running the OS. And lets be honest folks, if you think the consumer don't know shit about X86 and have no clue when buying they know even less about ARM, and you'll find many are just looking at the pictures, which all look the same even on the boxes of CCC.
So I think in the end this CEO will be given credit for doing the best he had with a shitty situation. The best bet Nokia could have done was snatch up Palm when it was on the market and fire the whole OS division and replace their OS with WebOS, but that ship has sailed. That left them with MeeGo (which go look up the hands on reviews and see how many times you read "unfinished" or "not where the others were a year ago" in the reviews) Symbian (which has more that hate it than love it) Android (over-saturated and in a race for the bottom) and WinPhone. Of these choices the ONLY one that would net them billions in advertising and engineering help was MSFT.
Would you have rather they jumped head first into Droid and gotten nothing but a cutthroat market and a thank you note from Brin and Page?
Ahhh...It is nice to see someone that still remembers and respects the old ways. Remember when the trolls and crazies were epic? When a good flamewar started by a smart troll could easily hit over 400 comments in a thread? How the troll would slowly build to a crescendo, slowly making tempers boil and blood simmer until the noobs blew up in a frenzy of "FUCK YOU!" screaming?
And what about the crazies? everyone pays attention to the trolls but like a great straight man a good crazy could make ALL the difference! We don't even get great OS crazies anymore, just the same soundbite variations on "MS Suxorz!" "Lunix is for Luzerz!" and "MacFags suck Steve Jobs wrinkled wick!"
There just isn't any subtlety to the trolling or crazy anymore, remember Twitter? Aie, now there was a fine crazy if ever there was one, all the Lithium in the world couldn't quench his fire! He was a master of the buildup, always starting with a subtle plug for FLOSS with just enough M$ and wrong information to lure in the prey.
But did he go straight for the sockpuppet? No, he was too skilled for that, he would slowly build their anger with ever more lies and half truths, building in intensity until he had more than a dozen on his line then BAM! He would unleash his sockpuppets like the dogs of war and spin the whole thread into a tale involving him as a Harrison Ford everyman railing against a global conspiracy involving Bill Gates as the ultimate puppet master in a global star chamber! Now THAT was a true master of insanity!!
Sadly just as our children and their children when never know the delightful screams of pain when a user accidentally hit a page with Comet Cursor and watched as his PC slowly melted from trying to swing a clock like a ball of snot from the end of his pointer, or will ever hear the painful yelps as someone's retina was damaged from hitting an "OMG Ponies!" neon pink with flashing green puke text on a Geocities page at 3AM with the lights off, so too will they never know the truly epic levels of trolling and craziness that once roamed this formerly wild prairie.
They will forever think an "epic troll" is some Halo fratboy pasting crude nigger jokes, or some squeaky voiced 14 year old yelling "faggot!" while blasting gangster rap and pretending to be black. And just like the free roaming herd of buffalo that once ran free across this great nation I believe too few will remember and appreciate what has been lost. Truly a sad day on the net my friend, a truly sad day indeed.
Bah! Only when they make a copy of the most perfect being Alyson Hannigan will their skills be proven!
BTW Japanese and Danish researchers, when you have proven your skills to replicate perfection.....I'd like a Season Two Willow with the "Vamp Willow" outfit? And I'll pay extra if you can program it to wake me with the "What's my name bitch?" routine, just the way to get a body going, along with having it have steaks ready when I get home. Thanks and let me know what you need for a deposit.
You want to know what I miss? (shut up, of course you do!) I miss when/. had really good trolls. Remember them? The ones that took pride in their trolling? The ones that would spend all day cooking up offensive ASCII art or writing a shit eater or ass rape troll that like a fine novel didn't give away its true intention until nearly the end?
Man we used to have some damned fine trolling here, not the lame "Nigger nigger faggot faggot" crap spewed from Halo fratboys on 4chan and Digg, no trolls that were PROUD to be trolls and took pride in their work. Even our crazies were a cut above the rest, folks like Twitter that could spin a dozen sockpuppets into one giant conspiracy fueled fantasy around MSFT and the Illuminati. Now THAT was some damned fine trolling!
Sadly now our trolls are as cheap and badly made as a Chinese knockoff iPod, just no pride in the work anymore. Even our crazies have lost their flair,like MichaelK with his endless copies of his name with a number after it just so he can type "pathetic" and have it not at -1, or the HOSTS guy that capitalizes every other word like that makes his crazy more powerful or something, just no subtlety or finesse at all.
I'm sure the great trolls of the past are looking down from under their bridge in the sky and hanging their heads in shame. Oh and of course trying to shake their dicks at us, but unlike the lousy trolls of today they have a chorus line going with all the wieners having tassels and spinning in time like the pasties on a Vegas showgirl. Its all in the presentation you see, something the trolls of today just don't get. Personally I blame reality programming and MTV.
Slashdot Mirror
Won't work, because no matter how you slice it the machine is better than you so unless you are gonna "cull" something like 85%+ of the population (which I kinda doubt they'll go along with) or you accept the fact that capitalism dies in the face of technology and find another way.
Look it is VERY simple, yet kinda scary, but follow along. You have HALF the population at IQ x, lets say 105 IQ. Now this group will be qualified for factory, general labor, hell you might get middle manager but nearly all those jobs can be done by the machine so there is simply NO NEED for him or her anymore. And each year that number is gonna inch higher on the "we don't need people below IQ X" because the ONLY jobs left will be research into new machines which frankly VERY few are gonna be qualified for.
You see for the entire 4000+ years of recorded history the whole society has been based on trading labor for pay but what if that labor isn't needed? You used to have entire factories filled with workers, now three guys can run the plant. The ONLY reason the Chinese have a job now is they are cheaper than the machines, but what happens when they are not? same thing that happened here.
The simple fact is unless you want to base a large portion of your society on "make work" or deal with riots because an honest man can't even feed himself simply because the machines do it better, well then something has to change. You can't turn your population into CxOs, or all IP lawyers. You will have masses whose tasks have been replaced by tech and simply aren't qualified and never will be qualified for the ever shrinking musical chairs that is "jobs not done by machines".
Think it would be hard to make an automated McDonald's? Of course not. The service industry will be the next to go, and frankly for many that is all that is left. What's next? THAT is the scary part, nobody knows. We can simply tell by history this way is ending, it is as behind the times as paying someone to deliver letters by horseback. The industrial revolution ended up wiping out our factories, the tech revolution will finish the jobs for most manual labor. What do you do with the millions with no job? That is the question.
I think they are gonna try to pull that "Quickboot Linux" crap like some did with the "instant on" ROM chips in motherboards. My dad has one of those, know how many times he's used it? Never. not a single time. Because while having an instant browser is nice it won't run his messenger or his QB or any of the little Windows apps he likes, so he never bothers.
I think that is kinda the problem most people don't get about the desktop, the simple fact It is NEVER Windows and Office that bites you in the ass and keeps people from trying new stuff, it is those bazillion little apps that they know, that they like, that "just works" for them.
The reason you can get away with this on cell phones is nobody has anything invested in the apps. it is a phone, they have gone through half a dozen, and they have NO expectations so as long as it works and say, there is an app to get to FB or check their mail or whatever, well as long as it has that they frankly don't care.
Now compare that to the desktop where I have had to invest in some CRAZY hoop jumping all because someone has an app that they have spent waaay too much time in, know it by heart, and consider it a "must have". For some it is the funky software that came with some camera, for others it is an app by a certain company like QuickBooks, hell I had one I had to build an NOS (new, old stock) PC and rig him up a KVM switch because much of his work depends on Macromedia Xres, and that thing is picky as hell. No VMs, no dual core CPUs, hell it didn't even like SATA drives. So just for that single program I had to build a 1.8GHz PC with 1.25Gb of RAM and an IDE HDD. But he is happy.
And it is THIS, this right here, that is the double edge sword that gives MSFT the desktop but at the same time makes them work so hard for backwards compatibility . Because they people have invested interest in "their programs" that they need to do stuff "their way" and it damned well better run. WebOS could be the greatest thing since the Amiga but the people won't give up their apps and Windows for it, sorry they just won't.
While I like George I think Bill Hicks nailed it perfectly.
Greater chance of working out of the box, what kind of shitty Dell you playing on? I can actually remember the last game that didn't work for me, Vampire:Bloodlines, and that was because the company went its up right on release. Thankfully the community were able to patch it a couple of months later and all was good. Would that have happened on a console? Not a chance, because you'd have had to get around the DRM which means only mod chipped consoles could have been patched, so it wouldn't have been worth the effort.
But really if you just stay away from the bleeding edge (beta drivers are NEVER a good idea) you'll find that most games are "insert disc>>clicky clicky next next next>>>play game" and that's it. Hell you can even set the game explorer in Windows 7 to automatically look for patches and give you the heads up, or use Steam and have all that automated. And it isn't like consoles are any better about it since getting a net connection. Just look at how many games need patching right from the start?
Now if you want to argue how some prefer the controls of the console, or their widescreen over the monitor (although to be fair more of the PCs I'm building are already set up to plug into their widescreens, which come with HDMI and VGA) but saying PCs aren't stable game machines is frankly BS. The stability problem died with Win9x and frankly I can't remember the last time I saw a BSOD. How many X360s got RROD, or PS3 the YROD? Quite a few from what I understand.
Riiiiight, you DO realize we've had this "in the cloud" dance once before, yes? It was called "thin client computing" and it didn't go over too well for the same reasons it will fail this time. Line gets cut? Hope you don't have anyone get sick that day. Lines can't handle the extra strain? Hope you like ripping into those multimillion dollar buildings. That doesn't count the fact that every nurse stuck waiting because the network is clogged is money out of your pocket.
No friend the cloud won't work, most of the country just doesn't have the FIOS needed to truly run the apps "in the cloud" and with the economy rotten it won't be coming in the next decade either. No I think the big change will be a switch to Bobcat, with Atom slowly losing ground.
You see Intel has been so scared of cutting into the big chips they have put tons of BS restrictions on their low power Atom that are frankly only there to prop up their business model, whereas AMD has placed no such restrictions on Bobcat. So you have an out of order dual core that uses less than 18w and can have as much memory as you want and be placed into any form factor. And from what I've seen it is equal to about a MOR Athlon dual which is frankly more than "good enough" for the jobs at our hypothetical hospital without needing all the backbone you'd need for "the cloud" not to mention no HIPPA troubles.
The future won't be ARM on the desktop, nor x86 in the cloud, it will be ULV SFF machines that give you all the advantages of the desktop without the heat and electricity bills. Add a 32Gb SSD and you have a machine small enough it can simply be built into the back of a touchscreen monitor, or placed into a tablet for the nurses to carry. All the software still works, no conversion costs other than the price of the hardware, which will be cheap, just a smarter way to go all around.
What is with all this nationalism? I thought we were all supposed to be global now? Welcome to reality, where you can't outsource all your factories and then get enough tax money to blow on things like shuttles, which BTW was supposed to be a "space truck" which never actually fulfilled its mission.
We went from 80% factory jobs at the birth of NASA to now 80% service industry (with a severe cut in pay to boot!) and the simple fact is we're broke. We're the guy writing hot checks at the Walmart to pay for Chinese goods because the national bank account is nothing but red ink. Hell if we spent within our means we probably wouldn't even have a military as big as Brazil, and we sure as hell wouldn't be fighting two endless wars.
I personally wish China and India luck, as they will eventually find what we are gonna have to wake up and accept...capitalism doesn't work with technology. There was a good reason why nobody in Star Trek was waving money around, that is because as you reach a certain technical level you don't really need human labor anymore. You think we are in bad shape now? Wait until automation hits the service industry.
Despite our brilliant leader's idea that piling ever more debt to get ever more degrees (what are we up to now, a Bachelors is the new HS diploma?) to chase ever fewer jobs the simple fact is the way we've done things for the past 4000+ years is coming to an end. The machines are faster, smarter,more accurate, and they never tire or make mistakes.
We can't all be CxOs, doctors, or IP lawyers, so you either make up BS "make work" programs to give you an excuse to cut all these people a check, you have massive unemployment and underemployment like we have now, or you find a new way. The only question is whether that new way will come peacefully or with massive riots and destruction.
So don't look at the shuttle as the end, look at it as a scary and exciting new world beginning. The old ways of doing things have failed, as evidenced by 22%+ unemployment and the fed drowning in red ink while the presses smoke from all the money being cranked out, the odds of giving the huge masses of poor jobs they can actually do is virtually nil since the machines can do them better, and outsourcing has taken most of the rest. Now the question becomes, what to do next? Do we stay on the failing road of capitalism, where the top 1% get fatter until we have another revolution, or do we try something else?
Because like it or not folks we're broke, and whether the talking heads want to admit it or not for huge masses of your fellow Americans this IS another depression. Only as we have seen we can't use war production to get us out of this one, since nothing is built here anymore.
Your hypothetical director would say "oh great lets switch".....only to find out that NONE of tens of millions of dollars worth of custom software designed to speed productivity will run and it will cost a billion dollars or so to have it all written in house, that is of course if you don't get sued because half of it is patented up the wazoo, and then say "Fuck the electricity".
The reason nobody runs ARM on the desktop is the same reason why you don't see masses of Linux machines at your local Walmart...its the apps, not the OS and MSFT cooking up some half baked .NET based about as useful as WinCE OS and calling it "Windows for ARM devices" won't change a bit of that.
The simple facts are these: Those running x86/x64 Windows don't have the code for their programs, it would cost orders of magnitude to write code to replace those programs, and that is of course after the vendors spend the next 10 years dragging you through the courts for trying to rip off their IP.
To try to make the Linux ARM world fit the Windows x86 world simply doesn't work, they are two COMPLETELY different ecosystems that are as different as the top of a mountain and the bottom of the Marianas trench. People will happily take Linux ARM because they have ZERO or near ZERO invested in code for the platform. They literally have billions of dollars in mission critical programs tied to x86, most of which would simply never be ported to ARM and would cost incredible amount of money to be written from scratch in house.
So while it might make cool back of the envelope math to compare the two IRL it simply wouldn't work.
If only 3% of the 32 million did he'll make enough to live decently while working on the program.
BTW we have a somewhat modern version of the old shareware model in Giveaway Of The Day. The way it works for those that haven't tried it is each day a single different program is offered free and they give you this app for free, you can load it as many times on as many PCs as you own that day, and they usually offer along with it a chance to get a more powerful program or other offerings at a greatly reduced price.
Now I can say from experience this model works, as I have bought quite a few programs that I originally tried on Giveaway Of The Day like Astonshell which is great for older XP machines like my nettop and gives me useful gadgets like a CPU/RAM/Net throughput meter while using less resources than the default Winshell, or Paragon Drive Backup which is an awesome desktop and server imaging and backup program which I doubt I ever would have found without it being on GAOTD.
So you can still make good money with the shareware model today, you simply have to make a good and affordable product while more importantly getting it noticed. With GAOTD I can try apps easily without worrying about bugs and backdoors, and if I like it or need to add it to another machine later I can just buy a copy like I did with the above.
And Indie game designers? Giveaway Of The Day has a sister Game Giveaway on weekends and would be happy to offer it more often if they had more indie games, so you might want to contact them about getting your game featured. It is good exposure and if you offer at a fair price many of us WILL buy from you, just make it easy, make it affordable, and make it fast. Oh and NO PAYPAL as many of us will take one look at "Paypal only" and just walk away. There have been several programs I tried on GAOTD I wanted to buy and had my CC out but when I saw Paypal only I just closed the browser. No way I'm trusting my card to those crooks.
Sorry about that, didn't make myself clear. I wasn't talking about multichips but multicores. The new 12 core Bulldozer sounds like a perfect console chip, dynamic power reduction and the ability to turn CPU/GPUs off when not needed to lower the power/heat, and hybrid crossfire with the discrete GPU to give the designers plenty of room to work. You could just use BD onboard for the Console and multimedia and kick on the discrete for gaming.
All they would have to do then is learn from the Sony stupidity and have the CPU/GPU combo and discrete GPU open for OtherOS if you desire and just have a separate DRM chip that locks down GameOS (which would be trivial since Win 7 Embedded supports TPM) so you don't have to worry about piracy and the open arch would keep the Linux hackers happy, yeah it would be an easy sell that would seriously lower the R&D and time to market and catch Sony and Nintendo asleep at the wheel. Hell if they went COTS like that they could have it out by summer next year easy!
Exactly! It is called "taking care of your own" and something we in the south take very seriously (well unless you're trash, and we don't hang around them kind) and as you said it all comes back around or as we say "it all evens out in the wash".
Like a couple of weeks ago I had to go out and deal with a hum dinger of a PITA when my dad had accidentally updated his MSN messenger and the one he had before had a feature the new one doesn't that he needed (something about the way the camera accesses allows him to activate the camera for his old HS sweetheart who is even worse with tech than he is and can't work the stupid thing) so I spent ages getting that stupid thing cleaned up and set back EXACTLY the way he had it before.
Well wouldn't you know it I come out the other morning and have a flat, so I call dad who has an account with the tire shop down the street to see if he can have them come patch the thing. He says "no problem just leave the keys under the mat so they can pick it up" and when I got back that afternoon not only didn't I have a flat but I had 4 new tires since he "had them check it and the rubber was getting a little thin".
So you do what you can and you take care of your own. Now I can understand threatening to charge if they refuse to listen and just keep doing dumb shit, but if your family has any sense (and mine does) they look to you for advice and will do what you tell them so a little prevention takes care of a lot of it.
Now I just deal with the occasional busted program or fried part, like the old dinosaur 733MHz I'm taking to MY GF's boy this weekend so he can check his email until he can afford something better. The kid just had to shell out nearly a grand in car repair and his old rig bought the farm, so this is one less thing he has to deal with while he gets his money back on track. Of course once I drop it off I'll be going down the street to spend the weekend with my GF, where I'll have a big home cooked dinner all waiting there for for me just pretty as you please. It all evens out in the wash you see, it all evens out in the wash.
You charged you own mama? Boy that's just...that's just so wrong it ain't even funny! Now telling her it'll be a while so she'll make you supper that's one thing but taking cash from close family just to fix a basic fuckup? That's low man.
The only ones I do "freebies" for are my parents, my kids, and my GF and her immediate fam (parents and kids) but I get compensated in different ways which is called being family like my GF's mom insisting on whipping up a big deer steak dinner (man that was good eats!) or her daughter whipping up some nice chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven (mmmm good!).
They say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and I'd say that goes just as well for his tech skills. But charging money to your family? that's just sorry. Hell I've frankensteined whole PCs out of the junk pile in the back of the shop just because a family member had their PC blow and was having a rough time, it's called "family takes care of their own". Maybe its just a southern thing if there are folks really charging their own mamas.
So in other words I got labeled a troll and had a pile of stupid posts that never answered the technical question of what is good/bad about Silverlight because yet again /. has been taken over by the "ZOMG M$ ZOMG!" weeinie wankers, no different than the "Lunix Lusers" or the "MacFag".
Sadly I remember when Slashdot was a TECH site where one could actually discuss the TECHNICAL advantages/disadvantages of a language without having the conversation taken over by weenie wankers whose ONLY objection is their religious sheeple zealot hatred to anything that doesn't run on their "chosen" OS.
So waste your mod points, oh teat sucking sheeple. Just remember it is YOU that are lowering the quality of discussions here and making tech looking like squee loving 14 year old girls because one can't simply discuss the merits/weakness of a TECH anymore without having wastes of space like you coming out. You are an example of what is wrong with this country as every discussion now falls for the pro rassling "dems VS repubs!" bullshit instead of meaningful debates.
To give NO reason to hate Silverlight or any other language other than "ZOMG! It isn't on my worship OS! ZOMG!" just shows what a blatant sheeple fanboy you are. If you have actual technical reasons, preferably with advantages/disadvantages weighed like a normal thinking adult lets hear them, but the "ZOMG!" bullshit really needs to DIAF.
Why would you say that? I just finished one up for a customer at right around $500, it has a Phenom II Quad, 4Gb of RAM, 1Tb HDD and an HD4830 GPU. This plays just about any game you can throw at it and the most I figure he'll have to replace within 2 years is upgrade the GPU to a nice 6xxx series when the price comes down.
Ever since the consoles started stagnating the games industry you simply don't need the giant ePeen machine to game anymore. Most games are barely hitting dual core ATM, and with the X360/PS3 GPUs so long in the tooth you just don't need to blow huge piles o' cash to get purty games. Where something like TFA will shine is Eyefinity and GP-GPU work like video transcoding and render acceleration thanks to OpenCL and AMD Streams SDK.
No what is sad is that to be labeled evil now you simply don't support the status quo which is what our current corporatist state loves with all its little black heart. I mean if they hadn't fallen even though their regimes were truly evil I'm sure the US Gov would be happily sending billions of our dollars to monsters like the Shah and Mubarak just to "ensure stability" no matter how much blood and suffering that stability caused.
So it is actually really simple: anyone who doesn't support the status quo and the top 1% no matter what is an evil socialist pinko terrorist scum. And as long as things tomorrow stay the same as today, so the top 1%ers can leach more money from the system and pad their already 60%+ take of the economy, no matter how much misery they bring? Well then it is all good because it brings "stability" to the system don't ya know?
That is why as much as I hate to say this I agree with Glen Beck 110%. For the good of the US and the world it is time for the US to "Be Switzerland" and stay the hell out of everyone's business and tend to our own. Bring home the troops, shut down the piles of overseas bases, stop trying to be the world's policeman and let them take care of themselves. The past 80 years have seen the USA prop up one truly mad dog scumbag after another with the taxes of the American people all so some company can get bananas 10c cheaper and it is time to end. Take the billions we are blowing on the military and invest it in our own people and renewable energy and let the mid east sort itself out.
Like the misery that has been the drug war the current path has been shown to be nothing but bloodshed and suffering for the masses for the enrichment of the few, and it is time for it to end. Any Tea partier or other third candidate that wants to be pres? Run on the "Be Switzerland" platform, as the American people are tired of being taxed to pay for monsters. It is time to stay home, it is time to "Be Switzerland".
Problem with your post is this: The entire point of the Xbox was NOT to make money which if you'll watch the early talks about the system they made quite clear what the main focus was: To get MSFT out of the Office Den and into the living room. And I'd argue on that front they succeeded beautifully.
Now with the X360 not only do they have a front row seat in millions of living rooms, they also get money from every game sold thanks to licensing and have a way to sell entertainment and other devices, such as how Windows 7 which is bog simple to hook to an X360 or WinPhone 7 which if rumors turn out to be true will come out with a way to have your games tie into your phone, so that for instance you play a minigame building armor that armor would be available on the console.
So if you look at the console based on its stated purpose, to get MSFT into the living room just like iPod got Apple into millions of pockets then it is a smashing success. One thing MSFT has shown is they don't mind spending money if it gets them into a long term steady growth market and the sheer simplicity of consoles means that for the foreseeable future they aren't going anywhere.
As I said in a previous post the smart thing to do now that PCs are so far ahead tech wise is to do another COTS like the original Xbox, Like say the 12 core Bulldozer CPU/GPU combo into an AMD 6xxx GPU. This would allow developers to get better physics and AI thanks to being able to use the power of the Radeon 4xxx built into BD, while leaving the 6xxx free for graphics. As the console matured the developers could use the BD GPU in connection with the 6xxx in hybrid crossfire for certain games or even when they just need to crank the purty, and the low R&D and quick time to market would have the console making money almost from day 1 while catching the competitors blindsided. This would also make games going from PC to console and vice versa trivial, and if they wise up and kill GFWL and partner with Steam could make matchmaking between the two systems easy.
Actually from the data I've seen the new Bulldozer saves serious wafer space which turns into real savings for AMD which I'm sure they'd be happy to share the love with a nice console contract. IIRC they were looking at a retail price of the 12 core at about midrange Thuban territory, which is around $220-$270 retail price so it is definitely doable.
Add in economies of scale at that size and the fact that by going COTS they are gonna seriously cut down the R&D and time to market? I could easily see them putting this out as a $500 unit to start with the 1Tb drive and having it be a break even unit. Give it 6 months worth of product and/or a die shrink and they'll be making money on the units or can start lowering the price. While I doubt they'd be able to get it down to the sub $200 X360 price I could see it easily end up being a $300 unit that with that kind of power would be easy to keep selling for quite a long time.
If they learn from Sony's mistake and embrace the hacker community by letting them have access to the CPU and GPU and simply have the DRM on a separate chip tied to the game OS (which would be easily doable since like their previous consoles it would probably be based on Windows embedded, which supports TPM) so that geeks have no reason to tear into it? I could see this thing selling like hotcakes.
Question: What EXACTLY is wrong with Silverlight, other than you don't like the parent company? Because while I'm not a coder I'd have to say the SilveOS full OS in a browser is a pretty damned impressive demo. I'd say if you can cook up something THAT cool in Silverlight and actually have it run smooth in bog standard Firefox with no funkiness needed you ought to be able to cook up anything in it.
Me personally I never understood this whole "hate a language" thing (except maybe Brainfuck, but that was evil from birth) since all languages are tools and it is up to the coder to use it correctly instead of acting like a monkey with a wrench beating on a bomb. I've seen damned nice apps written in everything from C to VB and the coders I've known usually didn't have any trouble picking up a language.
So what exactly is wrong with the language known as Silverlight? I haven't seen it used a lot, but that doesn't mean it isn't a perfectly usable tool, just unpopular.
Oh please oh please, can we have decent AI if we ask really nicely? All the kick ass graphics in the world doesn't help if the bad guys are as thick as a box full of hammers.
All we seem to get now is variations on the EA "rubber band" AI where the enemy will literally line up to stand in the SAME place where piles of their buddies lay dead or if you crank the difficulty you get PFCs that can snipe you from half a mile away while you are behind cover while being able to take more rounds than the Terminator. Kinda ruins the suspension of disbelief when all the enemies are Gomer Pyle or T-800s. Kinda sad really as for a short time there with games like Far Cry 1 you started to see bad guys that actually fought halfway decent, but then it is like the designers said "nahh...just pile on the bling bling!:.
Personally I'd be happy if the graphics stayed the way they are now on current PCs if they just had decent AI and good physics. Maybe an ATI 59xx for the GPU, with a multicore CPU? Hell maybe they should team with AMD and use COTS like they did with the original Xbox. A dozen Bulldozer CPU/GPU combos feeding into a 58xx or 59xx or even a 6 series GPU would be a pretty badass console and make conversion between console and PC trivial.
Add in a 1Tb or 2Tb HDD (depending on model) and you'd have a kick ass console/media center that you could tie into Win 7/8 for a total multimedia powerhouse. I haven't bought a console since the PS2/Xbox 1 but for something like that I'd buy it for my family in a heartbeat. All the ease of a console with the power of a good HTPC. Give it the Windows Media Center 10 foot UI and it would be a slam dunk.
Why thank you Petey for illustrating my point SO well. While Twitter was a master of insanity you are just another poor lame assburgers holding onto your magical woobie and having trouble typing a sentence. You really should go find Twitter and study at the feet of the master, because frankly ATM you aren't even qualified to wash his jockstrap.
Kinda sad really, but you are the PERFECT example of how the crazies and trolls don't measure up to the greats. So how does it feel to know that even in crazy you are third rate? Hell you can't even cook up a decent sockpuppet, just going back to your tired old lame ass king'sjester or joker or whatever. you are the equivalent of the mid season reality show replacement nobody can even muster up enough caring about to remember the name, what a sad little fate for a sad little man.
I think the bigger question MR AC (nice UID BTW) is why would you want a non nuke carrier in this day and age? When you are moving something THAT damned heavy I don't care how well you design your ICE it is still gonna suck fuel like a drunk sucking MD20/20. So why in the world would you want a non nuke carrier in this day and age?
The only reason I can think is getting an old carrier off someone like the UK or USA for cheap (I think the one we sold Brazil cost them something like 20 mil for a WWII sized carrier, another 20 mil for the A4s that could use the smaller runway, still pretty cheap), but I bet figuring the fuel you'd come out in the hole in the long run anyway.
As for TFA that's nice and all, but what EXACTLY is the point other than "we got the cash to blow so lets go for it!"? These things that just do it for the hell of it remind me of the "I Got Money" iPhone app, where people paid $1000! just to have a jewel on the screen. In the big scheme of things it is completely pointless, a waste of resources, and for what? It isn't like you are gonna get any useful data off this thing, or start using rocket cars to go buy groceries at Walmart.
To me it just seems like a total waste of resources at a time when our resources are dwindling, just another case of folks with more money than sense.
But IS it a lie? We have hard data for HDDs because we've all used them in every single role from light usage to pound the shit out of the bastard, so most of us know what they can take and what they can't.
Now I know anecdotes aren't data, but that is all I have to go by besides the data given by the manufacturer which as we have seen in the past this bunch don't mind the bullshit (remember when they switched from base 2 to base 10, just to make drives sound bigger?) so that is all I have to go by. I have a couple of customers that are the "ePeen" gamer types buy insane parts to have me build (one even bought a skulltrail with me telling him it was pointless!) and blowing through them every two years, etc.
The last one I built for an ePeen had an SSD (whichever one had the highest benches ATT, he ALWAYS has a list of benches) along with a pair of Raptors in RAID 0 for storage and while the Raptors are humming good he tells me the SSD has already lost about 25% of its size to bad cells. Now a report like that frankly gives me pause, because he ain't running no cheap shit, he always buys top o' the line. This thing is only like 18 months old!
So personally I'd feel more comfortable with something like our very own "Slashdot Report: Cutting through the bullshit with news from the trenches" before I judge the things one way or another. Now I still have plenty of 40-120Gb HDDs just humming along, in fact I can count the number of drives I've managed to kill on one hand with fingers left over (the correct answer is three, and I blame one on Vista) and ALL OF THEM gave me plenty of warnings before they kicked the bucket. Now from what I've been told you can have an SSD just shit itself and die, with NO warning at all!
So c'mon fellow trench workers, spill your guts. I know there has to be plenty of guys out here in geekland pounding the shit out of SSDs trying to squeeze that last drop of I/O throughput, How they holding up? How bad is the cell loss? Had any shit themselves? Did you get a heads up before they croaked? These are the questions I want to know.
Uhhhh...You DO know the fed stopped him from buying Nokia and selling off his shares of MSFT under insider trading rules, yes? And that anyone who takes one of the high level positions in a company like CxO has to follow insider trading rules that only allow them to sell X number of stock per six months and IIRC not to buy ANY of the stock of the company they have joined for 6 months, too keep from having their knowledge affect pricing?
If you want to blame someone for his stock situation blame the fed, as he already announced when he took the job we would be selling off his MSFT stock as fast as allowed and replacing it with Nokia since he believes in the company.
And why is it everyone here would rather have Nokia dead than sell a WinPhone? They didn't hire a new CEO because it was Tuesday you know, they did it because they were bleeding to death and needed to do something NOW. Some will say they could have made MaeMo/MeeGo work, and this much is true if they would have picked one and trashed the others two years ago but they didn't and the infighting between the Symbian and MaeMo/MeeGo camps pretty much shit all over each other and the company.
And as for Android? BWA HA HA HA HA...oh wait, you're serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA! That market is BEYOND saturated! In a race to the bottom which is what Android is right now nobody and I mean NOBODY will pay the higher prices for Nokia handsets, not when most of the carriers are offering CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) running Droid for free for signing up (Hell a buddy got two for signing up. They aren't great but they work good enough) so Nokia would be left fighting for scraps with expensive hardware running a low end OS.
Not saying anything is bad about Android, it is actually quite nice, but like PCs it IS in a race to the bottom ATM, with every retail store selling CCC phones and pads running the OS. And lets be honest folks, if you think the consumer don't know shit about X86 and have no clue when buying they know even less about ARM, and you'll find many are just looking at the pictures, which all look the same even on the boxes of CCC.
So I think in the end this CEO will be given credit for doing the best he had with a shitty situation. The best bet Nokia could have done was snatch up Palm when it was on the market and fire the whole OS division and replace their OS with WebOS, but that ship has sailed. That left them with MeeGo (which go look up the hands on reviews and see how many times you read "unfinished" or "not where the others were a year ago" in the reviews) Symbian (which has more that hate it than love it) Android (over-saturated and in a race for the bottom) and WinPhone. Of these choices the ONLY one that would net them billions in advertising and engineering help was MSFT.
Would you have rather they jumped head first into Droid and gotten nothing but a cutthroat market and a thank you note from Brin and Page?
Ahhh...It is nice to see someone that still remembers and respects the old ways. Remember when the trolls and crazies were epic? When a good flamewar started by a smart troll could easily hit over 400 comments in a thread? How the troll would slowly build to a crescendo, slowly making tempers boil and blood simmer until the noobs blew up in a frenzy of "FUCK YOU!" screaming?
And what about the crazies? everyone pays attention to the trolls but like a great straight man a good crazy could make ALL the difference! We don't even get great OS crazies anymore, just the same soundbite variations on "MS Suxorz!" "Lunix is for Luzerz!" and "MacFags suck Steve Jobs wrinkled wick!"
There just isn't any subtlety to the trolling or crazy anymore, remember Twitter? Aie, now there was a fine crazy if ever there was one, all the Lithium in the world couldn't quench his fire! He was a master of the buildup, always starting with a subtle plug for FLOSS with just enough M$ and wrong information to lure in the prey. But did he go straight for the sockpuppet? No, he was too skilled for that, he would slowly build their anger with ever more lies and half truths, building in intensity until he had more than a dozen on his line then BAM! He would unleash his sockpuppets like the dogs of war and spin the whole thread into a tale involving him as a Harrison Ford everyman railing against a global conspiracy involving Bill Gates as the ultimate puppet master in a global star chamber! Now THAT was a true master of insanity!!
Sadly just as our children and their children when never know the delightful screams of pain when a user accidentally hit a page with Comet Cursor and watched as his PC slowly melted from trying to swing a clock like a ball of snot from the end of his pointer, or will ever hear the painful yelps as someone's retina was damaged from hitting an "OMG Ponies!" neon pink with flashing green puke text on a Geocities page at 3AM with the lights off, so too will they never know the truly epic levels of trolling and craziness that once roamed this formerly wild prairie.
They will forever think an "epic troll" is some Halo fratboy pasting crude nigger jokes, or some squeaky voiced 14 year old yelling "faggot!" while blasting gangster rap and pretending to be black. And just like the free roaming herd of buffalo that once ran free across this great nation I believe too few will remember and appreciate what has been lost. Truly a sad day on the net my friend, a truly sad day indeed.
Bah! Only when they make a copy of the most perfect being Alyson Hannigan will their skills be proven!
BTW Japanese and Danish researchers, when you have proven your skills to replicate perfection.....I'd like a Season Two Willow with the "Vamp Willow" outfit? And I'll pay extra if you can program it to wake me with the "What's my name bitch?" routine, just the way to get a body going, along with having it have steaks ready when I get home. Thanks and let me know what you need for a deposit.
You want to know what I miss? (shut up, of course you do!) I miss when /. had really good trolls. Remember them? The ones that took pride in their trolling? The ones that would spend all day cooking up offensive ASCII art or writing a shit eater or ass rape troll that like a fine novel didn't give away its true intention until nearly the end?
Man we used to have some damned fine trolling here, not the lame "Nigger nigger faggot faggot" crap spewed from Halo fratboys on 4chan and Digg, no trolls that were PROUD to be trolls and took pride in their work. Even our crazies were a cut above the rest, folks like Twitter that could spin a dozen sockpuppets into one giant conspiracy fueled fantasy around MSFT and the Illuminati. Now THAT was some damned fine trolling!
Sadly now our trolls are as cheap and badly made as a Chinese knockoff iPod, just no pride in the work anymore. Even our crazies have lost their flair,like MichaelK with his endless copies of his name with a number after it just so he can type "pathetic" and have it not at -1, or the HOSTS guy that capitalizes every other word like that makes his crazy more powerful or something, just no subtlety or finesse at all.
I'm sure the great trolls of the past are looking down from under their bridge in the sky and hanging their heads in shame. Oh and of course trying to shake their dicks at us, but unlike the lousy trolls of today they have a chorus line going with all the wieners having tassels and spinning in time like the pasties on a Vegas showgirl. Its all in the presentation you see, something the trolls of today just don't get. Personally I blame reality programming and MTV.