Question:How EXACTLY do you expect Canonical to pay for the serious R&D required to bring Ubuntu up the the levels of OSX, iOS, and Windows 7 in ease of use? And how EXACTLY are they supposed to pay the developers required to do the above? Shuttleworth may have money but he ain't no Bill Gates in the bank account dept, and like it or not coders have families that need to be fed, roofs on houses that need paying for, car payments, etc.
It is THIS, this right here, that to me points out a serious and critical flaw in the whole FLOSS philosophy. You expect the "community" to magically do everything for free for the good of all while conveniently ignoring that fact that there are fun jobs and shitty jobs in programming and if someone doesn't pay serious $$$ for the shitty jobs then the shitty jobs simply don't get done period. Nobody LIKES doing bug fixes, nobody LIKES doing code cleanup or writing long boring documentation which is why those jobs don't get done under the current model and instead of fixing bugs you get a new version with new features and new bugs instead, and so many docs are "To be done later".
You know for all the bitching about companies trying to make money I don't see any of the coders here "pulling an RMS" and living like a pauper with no real possessions to speak of simply to ensure your principles. The simple fact is if Canonical wants Ubuntu to be a world class OS and be able to stand toe to toe with OSX, iOS and Win 7 then they are gonna have to do a lot of work, and a great deal of that work is gonna suck and be about as fun as a trip to the DMV. The reason companies like RH spend millions investing in Linux for server applications is they can make more millions by doing so and Canonical is the ONLY one that I've seen spending real money to improve the desktop situation. But Shuttleworth can't bankroll it forever, which means it not only has to break even but make enough to keep up with the R&D of much larger companies like Apple. That ain't easy folks and is gonna take some serious moola, like it or not.
Actually yes because they designed a mechanism for just such a case. All you have to do is get 2/3rds of states to agree the fed needs that power and BOOM! the fed has it.
The fact that the fed historically has had trouble getting the states to rubber stamp anything they want not only doesn't prove they need to pull an end run around the constitution it in fact shows the constitution works as designed since the WHOLE POINT was to be "little experiments in democracy" where each state got to decide for itself and any citizen that didn't like the direction he state was going was free to move to one that supports his/her position.
Thanks to crap like stretching the commerce clause to beyond the breaking point all the fed has done is take away the whole point of the constitutional design and give the majority of the power to itself and short circuit the whole process.TL:DR? If The Founding Fathers would have wanted to make it easy to increase the powers of the fed they wouldn't have added the tenth nor the 2/3rds of the states requirements and they did so precisely because they wanted to limit the power of the fed over the states.
I read your blog and have a question and a comment, first the question: Have you tried using an SD card for Readyboost yet? On smaller machines such as that I've found having a dedicated Readyboost (and lets face it, 4Gb SD cards are cheap) will give it a nice pick me up, especially when it comes to game. Think of it as giving yourself some of the advantages of a hybrid drive for ultra cheap, as Readyboost will have small random reads cached to the SD (where the read speed is near instantaneous) while leaving sequential read/write to the HDD. I'd love to see what kind of gaming numbers you get with that unit before/after Readyboost.
Now the comment: Why the Starter hate? For years Linux guys have complained about how "bloated" MSFT OSes had become so you finally get a bloat free MSFT OS with all the bling bling and apps you don't like/use gone bye bye and STILL you bitch? I mean WTF? If you're only real hatred is the wallpaper you DO know that can be changed in seconds with the use of the free third party tool I just linked to, yes?
But considering by your own admission all you want the Windows partition for is gaming you should be damned happy to have Starter By having Starter over HP you probably saved a good chunk of time having to kill the features that would be useless for gaming, like WMP media sharing along with Aero and the other bling bling bells and whistles. Personally I wish MSFT would sell Starter retail for say $35, I'd be buying copies of it like it were going out of style! It would be perfect for older/slower hardware, for SOHOs and other places where you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can run your programs.
Why all the hatred for a bloat free MSFT OS I'll never know, but personally I'd be damned glad to have all the copies of it I could get my hands on.
As for TFA it beats the Atom and that's all that matters to me. Anybody who has had to work on Atom machines knows with normal desktop usage they can quickly and easily get bogged down, especially if they are the non ION variety, so hopefully there will be plenty of models based around these chips so I can steer my customers clear of the suckfest that is Atom. The Radeon GPU should make video and flash nice and unskippy, and paired with Win7 Starter should make for a nice light little netbook with decent battery life and decent performance without breaking the wallet. Sounds good to me and I'll have to look into one of these for my GF's BDay a couple of months from now, sounds perfect for a little purse sized netbook she can take with her on the family camping trips.
Hi MR foaming at the mouth fanboy! you DO know that the part you are naming usually sells for something like 400% MORE than the part being discussed, yes? Your comparison is like saying "Well my Ferrari will beat your Camaro!" which is obviously true but doesn't take into account that one is MUCH more expensive than the other.
And considering the main stated goal for this chip is in ULV netbooks and nettops where Atom is currently being used I don't think it is a fair comparison, do you? I mean last I checked those selling Atom netbooks didn't have a "Drop in a Core i5" option at the checkout.
Now looking at this logically from the chips stated purpose and not from any "AMD yay, Intel boo!" position and its intended opposition (the Intel Atom) it seems to fit well into the category it was designed for. It uses a little more power but at the same time the addition of a Radeon GPU means that for multimedia, a task that pretty much everyone enjoys, the much higher performance should more than offset the slightly higher battery use.
Oh Dear Lord who art is heaven, please say me from the crazy that is Linux fanboy hoop jumping! Seriously WTF has Dell Poweredge servers have to do in ANY way shape or form with netbooks and desktops the correct answer again is not a God damned thing! You want to know WHY Dell Poweredge servers work? Do You? It is because Dell spends assloads of money it shouldn't have to because Linus is constantly breaking shit in the Kernel for the lulz!
I mean sure if every company on the planet hired 100 full time Linux driver developer teams to do NOTHING but constantly fix broken drivers why, it would all be roses and sunshine! But you are kinda missing the point friend, the point is why the fuck should they have to when NOBODY, and I mean nobody, not BSD nor Windows, not OSX nor Solaris, hell not even OS/2, have this problem. Why is that? Oh yeah because the head of kernel development doesn't go around breaking shit that's why!
And if Windows was $1000 then Linux "would be ready"? Again that is one of those "and when monkeys fly out of my butt" kind of "what ifs" since number one it is never gonna happen and it still is classic straw man building and logic hoop jumping!
Look it really is this simple, here is the statement of fact: Your shit don't work in the consumer market by a LONG shot. It doesn't work because your driver model makes Win9x look like FreeBSD in terms of stability, the software that FLOSS trumpets as shining examples is absolute shit (Gimp? F-Spot?) and most importantly for retailers you either disable ALL updates and run the serious risk of turning every customer into a spambot or you spend a damned week every six months doing nothing but free fixes because people naturally tend to get pissy when they run updates and are greeted with a black screen or no sound and a busted wireless.
Frankly it shouldn't have to be Dell's job to spend millions fixing a fundamentally broken design, and it shouldn't be your customer's job to spend more time trawling forums hoping to find "fixes" because your shitty design fell down YET AGAIN when it updated! Look I ain't making this shit up friend, go to ANY forum after the update and see how many THOUSANDS of "update foo broke my driver" posts you find. When Ubuntu went from 9 to 10 just for shits and giggles I decided to count on their forum, know what I found? I quit counting at over 600 posts.
But the part that really pisses me off? YOU have the power to fix it. Yes YOU Mr Linux advocate, you and your precious "community" have the power to fix it, not by spending the rest of your lives in a losing battle to fix all the fuckups but by refusing to take shit sandwiches handed down by the developers. DEMAND that Linus quit fucking up the kernel just to squeeze some 18th of a percent in some benchmark or AT LEAST build a stable ABI so no matter what he shits on at least drivers will still work, DEMAND that minimum standards be written and adhered to when it comes to the UI, DEMAND that NO RELEASE should be allowed unless it can reliably work on the bog standard hardware (Realtek sound and networking, Intel and AMD IGP, and the top three wireless chips) that 90%+ of the PCs come out with.
YOU CAN DO IT Linux advocates, You can change the world and make it a better place for all of us but ONLY by standing up as a group and refusing to take the shit sandwich approach. Just because a pile of shit is free doesn't mean you should accept it when it is given to you between two slices of bread, nor should you have to put up with such substandard workmanship especially when it is wholly preventable It CAN be done Mr Linux user, just look at how Jobs took BSD and made it the centerpiece of a company that now beats MSFT in market cap and who makes devices desired by nearly all.
And here we have the twin psychotic face of Linux thing. On the one hand time and time again (hell sites like/. are practically bursting with articles written by the community) we here you Linux advocates say "Linux is ready for the desktop!" yet when anyone points out the serious problems that give way to that lie you basically say "Oh its not an OS, its a community! Go back to Windows if you won't do things OUR way". So which is it? Can't eat your cake and have it too you know.
As for why I wanted Linux to succeed (but after having read too many logic hoop jumping posts such as yours I honestly believe it is doomed to failure on the desktop) it is because a monopoly is inherently a bad thing and thanks to the failure of the "community" to deliver anything but serious logic hoop jumping that is what we have now, with MSFT owning the sub $1000 market and Apple owning the high end. I remember the days of Amiga and Atari where there were new ideas and innovations happening constantly, and had hopes that Linux would foster such an environment. Sadly what we get is the 300th text editor and arguments over via VS emacs.
Which brings us to the second bit of Sybil sized logic hoop jumping, what I call I can't win the game, so I'll just change the rules as provided with your posting about Poweredge servers and the quality of Dell netbooks. What does either of those have to do with the fact the drivers don't work? Why not a God damned thing! Hell we weren't talking servers, nobody had brought up either servers nor cell phones, but since your argument on the desktop would require you to admit the current design royally sucks why we'll just change the subject!
But don't worry, what dealing with the "community" and the Empire State Building sized logic hoops being jumped has taught me and other retailers is your product will NEVER be ready for public consumption and should therefor be avoided. And PLEASE bet the community on cell phones, because we all know you are talking about Android and it is about to get SOOOO funny! Ever see "pirates of silicon valley"? Remember the scene where Jobs is railing about IBM and his engineer is trying to warn him he's about to get fucked by pointing to the IBM logo and then to Gates? Well guess what? Ever notice anything....funny...about Android? Like how Google has gone out of their way to avoid GPL V3 and refuse to have GPL V3 code in the DroidOS? Why do you think that is? I'll tell you, it is because Google and the handset manufacturers are gonna "TiVo trick" your asses and you don't even see it coming and in fact praise Google for using FOSS! It is just TOO FUNNY for words!
So don't fret, the constant logic hoop jumping, the evasion and calls of "shill" for daring to ask things like "WTF is it that you can't even make drivers that survive a single update while everyone else can?" and after setting up a half a dozen testbeds in the shop, running everything from PCLOS to Ubuntu and watching with horror as not a single one survived a single update fully functional has convinced me, oh wise Linux user. it has convinced me that Linux will NEVER "be ready for the desktop" and is in fact only good for embedded and web servers unless you are a nerd with more time on your hands than you know what to do with and see keeping your OS running as a "hobby" of some sort. While I really hoped to sell machines with the much vaunted "Linux security" to the average man the truly fucked up mess that is the Linux update treadmill has convinced me otherwise. I will just block Linux from my/. through preferences and pretend it doesn't exist, which for the common man is 100% true.
Nice try C6gunner, but in reality I tried both mine and my GF's families, which equals 7 cities in two states, going from a size of just 2100 to over a half a million, and it was bullshit, bullshit AAAANNNDD bullshit.
NOT A SINGLE ONE was anything but fairy tales C6Gunner, not a single one. It showed ISPs that don't even operate in the areas listed, it showed non existent services (such as two cable operators and 2 DSL choices in my GFs father's area, where all they have is lousy 768k DSL from a single provider) and the speeds? A complete and total fabrication, where nearly every one is supposedly offered at a minimum 10Mbps and in reality we are talking a MAX of 4, and that is if you pay out the nose for premium business connection.
So if you like paying 200 million dollars of YOUR TAX DOLLARS for a fairy tale C6Gunner that's cool, but pretending this is anything but fantasy is beyond ludicrous.
Because it took control of the money supply away from congress and by extension We, The People, and instead handed it to a nice little cabal of insiders (Mostly Goldman Sachs elite, but a few others as well) and when you compare the USD to what is was Pre Fed you are looking at a dollar that is worth one half of one cent compared to the USD that existed in 1912.
Sorry but when she breaks out the 10 inch "scanner wand" with the straps I'm afraid I'm gonna have to change the channel there bud.
Seriously though how much longer are we gonna keep wasting money on this security theater bullshit? The Israelis aren't doing this crap and they have a hell of a lot more threats to deal with than we do. As Bruce Schneier pointed out with all their "enhanced security" bullshit they still miss 70% of knives,30% of guns, and 60% of fake bombs used to test their system. I think we can all agree for the money being spent that would equal a giant fail in anybody's book.
So maybe we should do as Schneier suggests and better spend that money on intelligence gathering and boots on the ground? Because with stats like that the odds they will actually stop anybody who really wants to do harm is pretty damned slim.
It was a timing issue I believe. Xres uses some seriously funky "tricks" to get around memory limitations of the time and still let you manipulate seriously huge images like temp caches. I tried a VM of both Win9x and Win2K, I tried dual booting on his modern Dual core, no dice. this thing does NOT like a machine faster than 2Ghz and more RAM than around 1.25Gb and it sure as hell don't like SATA.
So no it wasn't good old Win2K (which I still have a couple of customers that have Win2K for older programs that aren't on the net and it works just fine on late model P4s) it was just a seriously picky piece of software that a client has way too much time and money invested in to just shitcan. To be fair though the program was only released for a single year before Adobe swallowed up Macromedia and killed it dead, so it wasn't like they could predict when they released it that people would go from 400Mhz with 32Mb of RAM (its system reqs) to the multiGHz boxes and still actually be using the thing.
That is one of the things about being a repairman, you never know what is gonna show up in your shop, like the 100MHz DOS 3 machine I had to build a few years back to run an ISA board for a $75k lathe a company couldn't afford to replace and whose manufacturer had been out of business since the late 80s. Personally that is why I'm glad XP has lasted this long, as it is easier now more than ever to get some old "must have at all costs" mission critical app to run without digging out old funky hardware.
But in the end all that matters is the customer, and by building him that NOS box and setting up a dual port KVM with dedicated share folders connecting the two he is easily able to just drag and drop files between his new machine and the NOS and get his work done in a third of the time it would take him in Photoshop. I can see why he hangs onto Xres because with his plugins he is able to do his most common tasks (such as cutting ex wives/husbands out of photos LOL) in mere minutes with results that look perfect and watching him do the same job in PS it took three times as long and the results just weren't as good. Sometimes for a specific job the old tools just do it better.
Sadly this thing isn't even worth joking about, it is a 200 million dollar lie that is so full of shit its eyes are brown. Plugged in my mom's address (I've been fighting for a decade to get something better than dialup for her) and it said I had FOUR count them four choices, two of which don't even operate in this area, one which told us point blank if you are even a single block out of the city limits to piss off, and the fourth refuses to run a single inch unless you give them 300% of the costs of the line upfront to ensure their incredible ass raping profits. Oh and they also have a WISP listed that we actually tried and is lucky if it works four hours a night and have worse TOS than Hughesnet.
So yeah, if you are using this thing for anything more than a laugh you are just wasting your time the way the government wasted your money on this fairy tale. So far I've plugged in a dozen addresses and not a single one was close to reality and both the speeds and carriers available were complete bullshit.
Hi OzPeter! I hope you don't mind my asking but I just got to know WTF are you testing that you needed to test for Win98 compatibility. I mean having to service some seriously ancient crap but even I haven't come across a Win9X machine in 4 years.
In fact the last Win9X machine I came across actually being used (it was WinME eeek!) was an old graphics artist that used it for Macromedia Xres. I had to build him an NOS (new, old stock) Win2K PC with a 1.8GHz AMD Athlon along with 1Gb of RAM and a 80Gb HD, all because that old program is finicky as hell and don't like VMs, SATA, or modern DDR RAM. To be fair though the guy has serious time and money invested in Xres with a large selection of custom built plugins that allow him to do common tasks that would take 3 times the time and effort in PhotoShop thanks to knowing Xres like the back of his hand.
So i just got to know WTH else is out there that actually needs Win9x support?
Uhhh...how EXACTLY has "Windows moved towards the Linux way" with regards to drivers? The only major shift has been to go back to having drivers outside the kernel which was how it was originally done in WinNT so if anything they are just going back to Dave Cutler's original design.
And how would having a stable ABI cost Linux billions? If anything it would save billions because companies like Nvidia wouldn't have to pay entire development teams just to deal with whatever fucking off Linus did in the kernel. But that is the real crux of the argument isn't it? With Linux it is less about a functional OS and more about religion thanks to RMS and his militant faction. BTW did you know the man will ONLY use a rare funky MIPS netbook because it is the ONLY machine that will fit his militant agenda? Or that the man doesn't even use the web but instead uses scripts to download web pages to his email? Frankly anybody THAT loonie having the ability to have major affect on your OS really isn't a good thing.
In the end I'd say it isn't the money that is holding Linux back, its the attitude both from the community and from the twin heads of Linus and RMS. Linus is the classic "scratch an itch" kind of developer that doesn't give a shit what he breaks as long as HE gets to do things HIS way. See my earlier post about how the man honestly believes not having any plan with regards to kernel development is a "good" thing.
Then you have the RMS faction that doesn't care if the user has a horrible experience as long as the religious philosophy (and that is what it is, with no compromises and dogma just like any religion) of GPL is strictly upheld. I can take 10 year old Win2K drivers and run them in XP SP3 nearly a decade later, same for Vista drivers in 7. In all my years of working on PCs I can count the number of "update foo broke my driver" since leaving Win9X for WinNT on one hand with fingers left over and it is THAT, that right there, that more than anything makes Linux shit for home users.
I mean Good Lord Man, when you have Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the entire planet having to run their own repos because the QA in Linux is so shitty that you can't use the standard repos without breaking drivers when we are talking about a tiny subset of machines there really is NO excuse for that level of incompetence, there really isn't. How is Linux supposed to gain inroads and get small shops like mine to sell and support your product when even Dell can't get decent QA from the community on such a tiny subset of machines? All the bling bling GUIs (which frankly I don't agree Linux is up to Win2K yet, I'd argue it is more like Win9X where there was GUIs but often it was just DOS with a GUI shell) in the world won't help if the machine can't even be updated without breaking.
Maybe in another decade Linus will quit acting like an ass with regards to stable ABIs and Linux might, just might, get the desktop up to XP standards of stability and ease of use maybe. But by that time everyone will be on Windows 10 and OSX 11 and you'll be so far behind it isn't even funny. Maybe it is time for Linux to "pull an Apple" and just focus on a subset of machines and make them "just work". A good start would be the Dell offerings. Refuse to allow an update to leave the door until those Dell machines "just work" instead of everyone "doing their own thing" and fucking everyone else's shit up, how about that?
Because as it is now there is simply no way I can offer your product because the apps suck, the OS can't even be updated reliably without the risk of major breakage, there is NO way to simply look at the box and tell whether a device works or not (which with a stable ABI a company could "put a penguin on the box" and know it will still work when Ubuntu 12 comes out) and frankly for the common man Linux in no way, shape, or form "just works" and in fact spends more time broken that it does functional. This isn't 1987 guys, that kind of shit just won't fly anymore.
Have you TRIED it on an x360? That is like pointing out there is a version of Halo for the Atari 2600 (there is BTW) but comparing the two isn't really fair. The PC version supports DX10 and the level of detail and realism is frankly so incredible that the first time I played it I died about a dozen times just because I got mesmerized by the pretty and couldn't focus on the actual game. Some of my customers after watching me play it have begun picking it up themselves just so they can show off their new PCs to their console playing friends because it makes the consoles look like shit in comparison.
And if the problem had been "solved" as you put it when it comes to multicores then frankly nearly all PC software wouldn't be single core only nor would both Intel and AMD be spending incredible amounts on R&D trying to find a way to make easy support for multicores. The simple fact is dealing with timings and race conditions is EXTREMELY difficult and have plagued companies like IBM for decades. You think IBM doesn't have good coders?
The problem is trying to predict with absolute certainty when multiple cores will complete a job and ensuring that they all meet up at the correct point in time so they don't stall. Hell this is one of the things that killed Intel's Netburst, as the huge pipelines made the CPU crazy scalable but a single branch mis-prediction could choke the whole thing.
In the end I'm sure this is a problem that will be solved, but frankly I doubt it will have anything to do with gaming, whether the consoles existed or not. Currently the big leaders in using multicore effectively is video processing and GP-GPU which as more coders become exposed to the intricacies of programming for multiple cores I'm sure someone will trip over the next big "Ah ha!" moment that will really kick up the race with regards to multicores.
But frankly I wouldn't really expect to see new techniques really come to the fore until XP is EOL, because frankly it is still the number 1 OS by a HUGE margin and I just don't see that going away until it is EOL in 2014. For many the PC is just the thing that lets them work and get on the net, and "gaming" is playing Farmville, and as long as XP holds over 70% of the market (something like 300 million plus last I checked) trying to optimize code for multicores simply isn't really cost effective since at its heart XP is a single core OS. Sure it'll run on multicores but it really isn't optimized for it, and anything over a dual is just wasted on it.
So until that changes and multicores are the standard in all or even most homes (I'd say late model P4s outnumber multicores by about 4 to 1 in the number of installed units) I doubt we'll be seeing any new major shifts, and again it isn't the consoles holding everyone back. let the fratboys have their teabagging, the rest of us will be enjoying the new hotness that frankly makes them look like an Atari.
I would say this is one time we should all be damned happy that MSFT didn't stick with its famous backwards compatibility. Why? One word: ActiveX.
At the time ActiveX sounded like a good idea, an easy way to write code for intranets that could be easily deployed and updated from the corporate office but sadly whomever was in charge of security at MSFT was playing hooky that week and it turned out to be a malware writers wet dream. Thanks to how deeply ActiveX was allowed to hook into the underlying OS simply viewing a web page could give a well written piece of ActiveX malware complete control of the system, while even a shitty piece of ActiveX malware could hook into the browser and do all kinds of nasty things.
So we should all be glad that someone at MSFT got the memo and realized that ActiveX was a seriously BAD idea and killed it deader than Dixie. Oh and for all the complaints of web developers about IE 6 and the shitty code you had to write for it? Remember this thing came out nearly a decade ago and those "web standards" you fellas like so much really didn't exist as anything more than proposals at the time, most of which were completely changed after IE 6 had already been released.
Yes MSFT deserves every single bit of hatred for walking away from IE after they won the battle against Netscape, hell they probably should have been hit with a class action for the risk they put every XP user through by not upkeeping their browser while still leaving it installed and default. But let us not forget that "web standards" were more like web suggestions at that time and BOTH sides played seriously fast and loose, remember the "blink" tag in NS?
Frankly both sides sucked the big wet titty and I'm just glad that today we have a wealth (some might even say a glut) of choices, from Firefox/Seamonkey/Kmeleon to Chrome/Chromium/Dragon/Safari to Opera all by its lonesome. Now users have so many well running choices that it is more a personal preference than anything else, and IE is increasingly becoming a footnote of history just like Netscape. Thankfully the bad old days of two shitty browsers is behind us and we can surf the web OUR way, not spend all our time dealing with the "quirks" of one of the big two.
While this is true (although personally with my rock concert abused ears anything over 192k is just a waste on me) I think the bigger question should be where and on what do iTunes users listen to the tunes they purchase?
And having done a whole lot of home PC setups I can honestly say I haven't seen many of the audiophile types using iTunes, but what I HAVE seen is a lot of iTunes users downloading songs into iPods with those shitty little earbuds.
So I really don't know how big a market they'll have for this, but if what I've seen is any indication of a typical iTunes user then they won't be able to tell much if any difference between low and high bitrate 16bit MP3s, much less 24bit. Most folks just want to bee bop around with their iPod and frankly don't really give a shit about MP3 quality when they are jogging or just fucking off.
That is why I still have a 4Gb Sandisk because at 64k it gives me plenty of room and when I'm out and about I couldn't care less about quality sound reproduction, not that I'd hear it on those little earbuds anyway. it is just to give me some background music while I'm working or enjoying a nice late evening stroll, having great sound quality is for at home when I'm wearing the big ass cans on my head, not for portable tuneage. So unless there is a bunch of folks wiring their laptops into really nice stereo systems I just don't think they are gonna tell much of a difference.
Not that that has ever stopped a fool and their money from being parted, see all the Monster Cable jokes for a perfect example of consumer stupidity.
Again that has NOTHING to do with consoles, it has to do with something that has been quite well known for sometime, that parallelization is EXTREMELY hard!.
While it is true we have just begun to scratch multicores (BTW L4D I&II run best on TRIPLE cores FYI, and there are others than run best on duals) the problem with your usages becomes timing and race conditions. A classic example is The Dining philosophers problem which was first wrote about in 1965 long before there ever was an Xbox.
But in a way this just gives us another easy example of why PCs are a superior platform. One of my favorite "Holy Crap!" demos I do for prospective customers is to fire up my browser to a Youtube video WHILE having a tune play in WMP 12 AND have a game of Bioshock fired up in a window. This lets them see the true value of multicore is that I can do several tasks at the same time which is frankly impossible both on single cores and on consoles by design.
The problem is you and others think the PC and its performance should be based around games because that is where the performance boosts came from in the past but I would argue that the "new hotness" isn't JUST games, it is games PLUS the incredible amount of multimedia features that allow one unprecedented control. It is THAT which will drive the new GPUs, excellent features like Eyefinity and the ability to do high def PiP, not simply gaming.
For an example I just got done setting up a new quad core PC in a customers home. For just $550 he got an AMD Phenom Black Edition, 4Gb of DDR2 800Mhz RAM, a 1Tb HDD, 5.1 surround sound setup and an HD4830 to round things out. Now from the comfort of his living room chair he has his 20 years worth of CDs, all nicely ripped and sorted in WMP 12, he is now learning how to rip all his DVDs so they too will be instantly accessible, from this one spot his family can play games, enjoy all their audio/video,watch Netflix and even surf the web, all from the comfort of their living room with their nice 37 inch 1080p TV.
So honestly I'd say the future has never been brighter for PC gaming, all the consoles have done is made PC gaming even more affordable for the masses. We have the choice of literally thousands of games instantly with direct services like Steam and Good Old Games, we can have thousands of top notch titles for a little of nothing especially when compared to console prices (I just picked up the ENTIRE Prince Of Persia Sands of Time series for my oldest for $6 brand new how can you beat that?) and thanks to the rise of multicore CPUs at seriously cheap prices (Thanks AMD you rock!!) and frankly insane amounts of GPU power for under $100 we can have incredible graphics and all at a price even the common man can easily afford.
So I ask you, where is the bad here? The games that focus on how big an ePeen your system is frankly suck (I'm looking at YOU Crysis!) and the graphics got so damned good in 2005 that honestly they have been extreme overkill on pretty ever since. Hell you should try "Just Cause 2" and see the incredible shit you can pull, we are talking flying low in a stolen car while pieces of it are blown off by the military, complete with sparks where the rims hit the pavement, firing a cable into the front of a jeep and then into the ground causing the vehicle to pull a Terminator 3 and go flipping over in a HUGE fireball, and then at the last minute parachuting out of your about to explode car off a bridge into a beautifully rendered jungle before escaping by snatching a boat below.
Frankly as someone who started gaming on an Atari and who would have frankly told you that you were full of shit if you told me even 10 years ago we would have this level of realism and Hollywood style destruction, all in a PC that ANY person can EASILY afford? Frankly we are living in damned good times when it comes to gaming on the PC my friend, I suggest we leave the fratboys to their Halo teabagging sessions and just kick back and enjoy the goodness.
To shamelessly rip off an old joke saying you are "the number 2 Unix variant" like that is a good thing is like saying "Well my horse doesn't eat much at all...now that its dead".
I mean I'm sure the C64 guys can brag they "are the number 1 Commodore computer" but that really ain't saying much anymore, now is it? Not when your competitors (which despite what many FOSSies claim yes, you are in competition) are numbering something like 800 MILLION for Windows and probably close to 100 MILLION for OSX.
Look, as a retailer I want Linux to succeed, I really do. I remember the good old days of Atari and Commodore and how new ideas were popping up all over the place, and that doesn't even bring in the fact I believe in free market competition being good for everyone and having a lower cost "third way" would help me reduce my costs while still remaining legal (sadly many shops just use pirated Windows, which makes it hard in a recession for legit shops like mine to compete with their unfair advantage).
But the difference between me and a FOSSie is that even though I'm a computer nerd I spend my days with the common man and therefor have unique insight which the average CS nerd FOSSie simply doesn't have.
And I can tell you this with 100% honesty, without trying to be mean or piss you or anyone off (notice how I got modded down without a SINGLE response? Could it be they had NO rebuttal and could only get mad at being told the truth?) that in its current incarnation while Linux is just hunky dory for webservers and embedded devices, both of which have highly trained CS grads to write programs and admin them, as a desktop for the common man LINUX SUCKS with a capital S!
Now why does it suck? Lets start with the guy at the top, old Linus himself. While myself and other have been begging for a proper driver ABI (which FYI ALL the major OSes, BSD, Solaris, OSX,, hell even OS/2 have had since the dawn of time) if you read Linus's arguments it basically comes down to "I don't like them because it limits me fucking with the kernel later on". Which coming from a man who actually admits that the way he does things is that Linux isn't designed, it grows like a virus which of course is a REALLY shitty way to develop an OS since without a plan shit breaking is naturally the order of the day.
And it is THIS, the shit constantly breaking, drivers that work in foo not working in foo+1 without jumping through major hoops, 6 month releases that break more than they fix, no QA at all to where even Dell has to run their own repos just to keep from having their Ubuntu install from being bricked the first time the user updates, hell I could go on all day.
If you actually want to compete, if you actually want Linux to be something more than an OS for webservers and basement nerds, then the community needs to ask itself "what are we doing wrong, and what is the other guy doing right?" which guys like me in the trenches will be happy to tell you. With Windows you are looking at nearly a decade (since they tie both the home and pro versions together so patches for one work on the other) where a machine will be updated without it breaking. Apps work for years and years (thus no need to retrain) and CLI on both Windows and OSX is nonexistent Now is the time a FOSSie will point to Powershell, while they conveniently ignore that Powershell is a server technology and that a home user will NEVER see a CLI, not even once.
All I want is a little honesty Mr FOSSie, is that too much to ask? If you like things the way they are, if you don't want to change to gain users, fine, I'm really happy for you and wish you nothing but the best. But please, don't delude yourself into thinking that Linux in its common form is in any way usable by your non CS grad common man. He has NO desire to learn your ways, he has NO desire to learn arcane Bash commands, he has NO desire to trawl forums because
Oh I agree that old Yahtzee is a major pessimist (which if YOU had to review Kane & Lynch 2 you'd probably be kinda a bummer yourself) but I have to agree with him that while the Dead Space series is damned good it just wasn't that scary at least for me. it didn't have the "creep factor" for me that say the original Bioshock had where I would be crouched high on a ledge watching as some splicer descended into madness spouting bible passages while dragging a fricking pickaxe along the ground with that lovely scraping noise.
Or if you want "Holy Shit!" make you jump a foot and piss your pants kind of horror you really should try Nosferatu. The game was a sleeper but entire game has a creep factor and some of the best sudden spooks I've ever played. The whole place feels like a creepy 1930s Universal horror movie, and not in a camp way, you walk up to the castle and the family priest takes a high dive to escape and dies at your feet, and you NEVER know what you will find when you walk into a room (because they are randomly populated and generated) and the sound...wow. When you walk into a room and this pentagram starts glowing and suddenly these multiple demon vamps just come flying out to tear you a new ass? Or you walk into a room and find out you've stepped right into a nest of vamps getting ready to rise from their coffins? Truly scare the shit out of you time.
I think the problems with many of the new "horror" games are twofold: one you have an overabundance of weapons, which it just isn't scary if you can "just go Rambo" like the later levels of FEAR, and two they think that splattering the walls with gore and having shit just jump every two minutes equal scary. There really isn't any building of tension or atmosphere if I know shit is gonna pop out in the next room ala DOOM 3. So while I agree that the Dead Space series are good games, I just don't know if they should be called good horror games. Horror to me is about more than just gore and spooky settings, it is the total environment that makes my hair stand on end.
Not to mention how badly we humans like to latch onto what I call "magical thinking" which is "If we have (insert product or technology) then we'll be safe!". You'd be surprised how many times I've walked into some SMB or large office and found a totally pwned network where they were just shocked! shocked I tell you! that the magical McGuffin they had based their entire security on had failed them. Hell there is a troll on this very website that subscribes to magical thinking with regards to HOSTS files and thinks they will magically protect him from all malware.
The simple fact is that NO OS, security technology or other magical McGuffin can take the place of good old fashioned best practices, with a top to bottom least privilege layout and sensible security policies. But all of that is hard, takes constant work, costs money, and is hard to explain to a PHB so in walks these companies offering magical thinking which sells like hotcakes right up until a company gets pwned.
But why not let them have both and thus give them more value for their $$$$? Both AMD and Intel now have the ability to shut down cores when not in use, hell the new AMD Bulldozers can even shut down portions of the GPU when not needed to drop power usage even lower. This lets you have the power when you need it (they could even set it up so it only ran on outlet if they really wanted to be anal about it) and the battery life when you don't.
So I have to agree with the other poster that using dual cores now just seems stupid. You are cutting down on the amount of jobs the PC can do and when you figure in the Apple premium paying more for a dual just doesn't make sense, not when you can buy nice quad laptops starting at around $700.
I'm probably dating the hell out of myself here, but anybody else remember the football game with the big ass metal trackballs you had to use to get the guys to run? Man that game would wear you out! To me the arcade died when it quit being about cool interfaces like giant metal trackballs and guns and started just being a glorified console in a box. By the time the last arcade closed in my area all they had were lame fighting games where it was all about memorizing funky move lists and the same boring left to right beat them ups you could get at home.
Arcades for me were always about the cool factor, which like you said was all the cool interfaces like bikes that you could ride and other experiences I couldn't get at home. Once they all started saving money by just recycling the same cabinet with new plug ins they just lost all of the appeal, at least for me. And IMHO they also got greedy in the way they designed the games, like before one could actually get good at a game and play for an afternoon if your skill was high enough, but the later games seemed designed to ensure you just couldn't play for any length of time without shelling out more cash no matter how good you were. That was when for me it became nothing more than slot machines that didn't pay out, and that also helped kill the fun and made the arcade just another waste of money IMHO.
Man I miss the tic tac toe chickens. in the 80s I lived down the road from the little amusement place where they trained the chickens call the IQ Zoo. They had chickens that rode trikes and all kinds of cool shows but the signs you would keep seeing would just fuck with you..."Beware of the mugger ducks"
You'd play against the chicken (who always won) or go see the spider monkey that rode a pony but then you'd see that sign again and it would just be fucking with your head..."Beware of the mugger ducks"..and you'd be just waltzing along thinking "WTF is a mugger duck anyway?"
So you'd be walking along and decide to get a popcorn and then you'd find out what the signs were about. You see they had a ninja strike team of super stealth ducks that just waited on you to get a popcorn. They'd wait until you were down the path a bit and then BAM! Two ducks would shoot out to make you stumble while another two would jump up and grab the popcorn bag and VOOM they were just...gone. Like they had never been there. Of course when you'd go back to get another popcorn they'd just say "Didn't pay attention to the signs did you?"
Sadly they and Hailey's zoo closed down when the owners passed on, but to this day I remember that sign when I get a popcorn outdoors and look around for any mugger ducks.
I didn't miss the point, what you are talking about has NOTHING to do with consoles and everything to do with standardization of LCD manufacture. If a new consoles came out that did native 2650x1950 resolution do you think LCD manufacturers are all gonna jump to crank out screens with those dimensions? Nope because they have found the sweet spots as far as yield and customer satisfaction and they ain't going nowhere.
I've found you can divide the LCD manufacturers into three resolutions and pretty much cover the market, there is 720p, there is 1600x900 (which is the #1 size for monitors by a long shot ATM) and there is 1080p. Not a single one of those has anything to do with the limitations of consoles and everything to do with yields and standardization around video resolution.
So while the modern GPU can handle these resolutions well it has nothing to do with the consoles and everything to do with the combination of "buzzword bingo" and the ability to crank out certain sizes quite cheaply with high yields. same as I figure 720p is gonna be gone next, as people are coming to me asking for 1080p monitors and TVs. They don't actually know what that means but they have heard it enough times to know "it is good" so that is what they want.
When it comes to monitors 1600x900 at 19-22 inch seems to be the sweet spot when it comes to price so that is what is selling around 4 to 1 last I checked. Again nothing to do with consoles and everything to do with yields and pricing.
But you won't be seeing those crazy high resolutions any time soon simply because the tolerances are too tight and you end up with low yields and high prices. Sadly most people can't really tell once you get past around 1280x720 so for the mass consumer the above resolutions are "good enough" and then it becomes about price. I'd say the next big shift will be 120hz for 3D, which IIRC most consoles can't even run, just because folks have seen Avatar and want that at home. this of course gives another advantage to PCs in the living room as they can do 120hz no problem, but trying to blame consoles and PCs for LCD yields is a little far fetched IMHO.
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Question:How EXACTLY do you expect Canonical to pay for the serious R&D required to bring Ubuntu up the the levels of OSX, iOS, and Windows 7 in ease of use? And how EXACTLY are they supposed to pay the developers required to do the above? Shuttleworth may have money but he ain't no Bill Gates in the bank account dept, and like it or not coders have families that need to be fed, roofs on houses that need paying for, car payments, etc.
It is THIS, this right here, that to me points out a serious and critical flaw in the whole FLOSS philosophy. You expect the "community" to magically do everything for free for the good of all while conveniently ignoring that fact that there are fun jobs and shitty jobs in programming and if someone doesn't pay serious $$$ for the shitty jobs then the shitty jobs simply don't get done period. Nobody LIKES doing bug fixes, nobody LIKES doing code cleanup or writing long boring documentation which is why those jobs don't get done under the current model and instead of fixing bugs you get a new version with new features and new bugs instead, and so many docs are "To be done later".
You know for all the bitching about companies trying to make money I don't see any of the coders here "pulling an RMS" and living like a pauper with no real possessions to speak of simply to ensure your principles. The simple fact is if Canonical wants Ubuntu to be a world class OS and be able to stand toe to toe with OSX, iOS and Win 7 then they are gonna have to do a lot of work, and a great deal of that work is gonna suck and be about as fun as a trip to the DMV. The reason companies like RH spend millions investing in Linux for server applications is they can make more millions by doing so and Canonical is the ONLY one that I've seen spending real money to improve the desktop situation. But Shuttleworth can't bankroll it forever, which means it not only has to break even but make enough to keep up with the R&D of much larger companies like Apple. That ain't easy folks and is gonna take some serious moola, like it or not.
Actually yes because they designed a mechanism for just such a case. All you have to do is get 2/3rds of states to agree the fed needs that power and BOOM! the fed has it.
The fact that the fed historically has had trouble getting the states to rubber stamp anything they want not only doesn't prove they need to pull an end run around the constitution it in fact shows the constitution works as designed since the WHOLE POINT was to be "little experiments in democracy" where each state got to decide for itself and any citizen that didn't like the direction he state was going was free to move to one that supports his/her position.
Thanks to crap like stretching the commerce clause to beyond the breaking point all the fed has done is take away the whole point of the constitutional design and give the majority of the power to itself and short circuit the whole process.TL:DR? If The Founding Fathers would have wanted to make it easy to increase the powers of the fed they wouldn't have added the tenth nor the 2/3rds of the states requirements and they did so precisely because they wanted to limit the power of the fed over the states.
I read your blog and have a question and a comment, first the question: Have you tried using an SD card for Readyboost yet? On smaller machines such as that I've found having a dedicated Readyboost (and lets face it, 4Gb SD cards are cheap) will give it a nice pick me up, especially when it comes to game. Think of it as giving yourself some of the advantages of a hybrid drive for ultra cheap, as Readyboost will have small random reads cached to the SD (where the read speed is near instantaneous) while leaving sequential read/write to the HDD. I'd love to see what kind of gaming numbers you get with that unit before/after Readyboost.
Now the comment: Why the Starter hate? For years Linux guys have complained about how "bloated" MSFT OSes had become so you finally get a bloat free MSFT OS with all the bling bling and apps you don't like/use gone bye bye and STILL you bitch? I mean WTF? If you're only real hatred is the wallpaper you DO know that can be changed in seconds with the use of the free third party tool I just linked to, yes?
But considering by your own admission all you want the Windows partition for is gaming you should be damned happy to have Starter By having Starter over HP you probably saved a good chunk of time having to kill the features that would be useless for gaming, like WMP media sharing along with Aero and the other bling bling bells and whistles. Personally I wish MSFT would sell Starter retail for say $35, I'd be buying copies of it like it were going out of style! It would be perfect for older/slower hardware, for SOHOs and other places where you just want the OS to get out of the way so you can run your programs. Why all the hatred for a bloat free MSFT OS I'll never know, but personally I'd be damned glad to have all the copies of it I could get my hands on.
As for TFA it beats the Atom and that's all that matters to me. Anybody who has had to work on Atom machines knows with normal desktop usage they can quickly and easily get bogged down, especially if they are the non ION variety, so hopefully there will be plenty of models based around these chips so I can steer my customers clear of the suckfest that is Atom. The Radeon GPU should make video and flash nice and unskippy, and paired with Win7 Starter should make for a nice light little netbook with decent battery life and decent performance without breaking the wallet. Sounds good to me and I'll have to look into one of these for my GF's BDay a couple of months from now, sounds perfect for a little purse sized netbook she can take with her on the family camping trips.
Hi MR foaming at the mouth fanboy! you DO know that the part you are naming usually sells for something like 400% MORE than the part being discussed, yes? Your comparison is like saying "Well my Ferrari will beat your Camaro!" which is obviously true but doesn't take into account that one is MUCH more expensive than the other.
And considering the main stated goal for this chip is in ULV netbooks and nettops where Atom is currently being used I don't think it is a fair comparison, do you? I mean last I checked those selling Atom netbooks didn't have a "Drop in a Core i5" option at the checkout.
Now looking at this logically from the chips stated purpose and not from any "AMD yay, Intel boo!" position and its intended opposition (the Intel Atom) it seems to fit well into the category it was designed for. It uses a little more power but at the same time the addition of a Radeon GPU means that for multimedia, a task that pretty much everyone enjoys, the much higher performance should more than offset the slightly higher battery use.
That depends.....are they gonna make us sammiches?
Oh Dear Lord who art is heaven, please say me from the crazy that is Linux fanboy hoop jumping! Seriously WTF has Dell Poweredge servers have to do in ANY way shape or form with netbooks and desktops the correct answer again is not a God damned thing! You want to know WHY Dell Poweredge servers work? Do You? It is because Dell spends assloads of money it shouldn't have to because Linus is constantly breaking shit in the Kernel for the lulz!
I mean sure if every company on the planet hired 100 full time Linux driver developer teams to do NOTHING but constantly fix broken drivers why, it would all be roses and sunshine! But you are kinda missing the point friend, the point is why the fuck should they have to when NOBODY, and I mean nobody, not BSD nor Windows, not OSX nor Solaris, hell not even OS/2, have this problem. Why is that? Oh yeah because the head of kernel development doesn't go around breaking shit that's why!
And if Windows was $1000 then Linux "would be ready"? Again that is one of those "and when monkeys fly out of my butt" kind of "what ifs" since number one it is never gonna happen and it still is classic straw man building and logic hoop jumping!
Look it really is this simple, here is the statement of fact: Your shit don't work in the consumer market by a LONG shot. It doesn't work because your driver model makes Win9x look like FreeBSD in terms of stability, the software that FLOSS trumpets as shining examples is absolute shit (Gimp? F-Spot?) and most importantly for retailers you either disable ALL updates and run the serious risk of turning every customer into a spambot or you spend a damned week every six months doing nothing but free fixes because people naturally tend to get pissy when they run updates and are greeted with a black screen or no sound and a busted wireless.
Frankly it shouldn't have to be Dell's job to spend millions fixing a fundamentally broken design, and it shouldn't be your customer's job to spend more time trawling forums hoping to find "fixes" because your shitty design fell down YET AGAIN when it updated! Look I ain't making this shit up friend, go to ANY forum after the update and see how many THOUSANDS of "update foo broke my driver" posts you find. When Ubuntu went from 9 to 10 just for shits and giggles I decided to count on their forum, know what I found? I quit counting at over 600 posts.
But the part that really pisses me off? YOU have the power to fix it. Yes YOU Mr Linux advocate, you and your precious "community" have the power to fix it, not by spending the rest of your lives in a losing battle to fix all the fuckups but by refusing to take shit sandwiches handed down by the developers. DEMAND that Linus quit fucking up the kernel just to squeeze some 18th of a percent in some benchmark or AT LEAST build a stable ABI so no matter what he shits on at least drivers will still work, DEMAND that minimum standards be written and adhered to when it comes to the UI, DEMAND that NO RELEASE should be allowed unless it can reliably work on the bog standard hardware (Realtek sound and networking, Intel and AMD IGP, and the top three wireless chips) that 90%+ of the PCs come out with.
YOU CAN DO IT Linux advocates, You can change the world and make it a better place for all of us but ONLY by standing up as a group and refusing to take the shit sandwich approach. Just because a pile of shit is free doesn't mean you should accept it when it is given to you between two slices of bread, nor should you have to put up with such substandard workmanship especially when it is wholly preventable It CAN be done Mr Linux user, just look at how Jobs took BSD and made it the centerpiece of a company that now beats MSFT in market cap and who makes devices desired by nearly all.
Maybe I'm just
And here we have the twin psychotic face of Linux thing. On the one hand time and time again (hell sites like /. are practically bursting with articles written by the community) we here you Linux advocates say "Linux is ready for the desktop!" yet when anyone points out the serious problems that give way to that lie you basically say "Oh its not an OS, its a community! Go back to Windows if you won't do things OUR way". So which is it? Can't eat your cake and have it too you know.
As for why I wanted Linux to succeed (but after having read too many logic hoop jumping posts such as yours I honestly believe it is doomed to failure on the desktop) it is because a monopoly is inherently a bad thing and thanks to the failure of the "community" to deliver anything but serious logic hoop jumping that is what we have now, with MSFT owning the sub $1000 market and Apple owning the high end. I remember the days of Amiga and Atari where there were new ideas and innovations happening constantly, and had hopes that Linux would foster such an environment. Sadly what we get is the 300th text editor and arguments over via VS emacs.
Which brings us to the second bit of Sybil sized logic hoop jumping, what I call I can't win the game, so I'll just change the rules as provided with your posting about Poweredge servers and the quality of Dell netbooks. What does either of those have to do with the fact the drivers don't work? Why not a God damned thing! Hell we weren't talking servers, nobody had brought up either servers nor cell phones, but since your argument on the desktop would require you to admit the current design royally sucks why we'll just change the subject!
But don't worry, what dealing with the "community" and the Empire State Building sized logic hoops being jumped has taught me and other retailers is your product will NEVER be ready for public consumption and should therefor be avoided. And PLEASE bet the community on cell phones, because we all know you are talking about Android and it is about to get SOOOO funny! Ever see "pirates of silicon valley"? Remember the scene where Jobs is railing about IBM and his engineer is trying to warn him he's about to get fucked by pointing to the IBM logo and then to Gates? Well guess what? Ever notice anything....funny...about Android? Like how Google has gone out of their way to avoid GPL V3 and refuse to have GPL V3 code in the DroidOS? Why do you think that is? I'll tell you, it is because Google and the handset manufacturers are gonna "TiVo trick" your asses and you don't even see it coming and in fact praise Google for using FOSS! It is just TOO FUNNY for words!
So don't fret, the constant logic hoop jumping, the evasion and calls of "shill" for daring to ask things like "WTF is it that you can't even make drivers that survive a single update while everyone else can?" and after setting up a half a dozen testbeds in the shop, running everything from PCLOS to Ubuntu and watching with horror as not a single one survived a single update fully functional has convinced me, oh wise Linux user. it has convinced me that Linux will NEVER "be ready for the desktop" and is in fact only good for embedded and web servers unless you are a nerd with more time on your hands than you know what to do with and see keeping your OS running as a "hobby" of some sort. While I really hoped to sell machines with the much vaunted "Linux security" to the average man the truly fucked up mess that is the Linux update treadmill has convinced me otherwise. I will just block Linux from my /. through preferences and pretend it doesn't exist, which for the common man is 100% true.
Nice try C6gunner, but in reality I tried both mine and my GF's families, which equals 7 cities in two states, going from a size of just 2100 to over a half a million, and it was bullshit, bullshit AAAANNNDD bullshit.
NOT A SINGLE ONE was anything but fairy tales C6Gunner, not a single one. It showed ISPs that don't even operate in the areas listed, it showed non existent services (such as two cable operators and 2 DSL choices in my GFs father's area, where all they have is lousy 768k DSL from a single provider) and the speeds? A complete and total fabrication, where nearly every one is supposedly offered at a minimum 10Mbps and in reality we are talking a MAX of 4, and that is if you pay out the nose for premium business connection.
So if you like paying 200 million dollars of YOUR TAX DOLLARS for a fairy tale C6Gunner that's cool, but pretending this is anything but fantasy is beyond ludicrous.
Because it took control of the money supply away from congress and by extension We, The People, and instead handed it to a nice little cabal of insiders (Mostly Goldman Sachs elite, but a few others as well) and when you compare the USD to what is was Pre Fed you are looking at a dollar that is worth one half of one cent compared to the USD that existed in 1912.
To quote one of the Rothschilds ""Give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws" and no truer words have been spoken, because while leaders come and go the power elite still have their hands on the throat of the country thanks to control of the currency.
Sorry but when she breaks out the 10 inch "scanner wand" with the straps I'm afraid I'm gonna have to change the channel there bud.
Seriously though how much longer are we gonna keep wasting money on this security theater bullshit? The Israelis aren't doing this crap and they have a hell of a lot more threats to deal with than we do. As Bruce Schneier pointed out with all their "enhanced security" bullshit they still miss 70% of knives,30% of guns, and 60% of fake bombs used to test their system. I think we can all agree for the money being spent that would equal a giant fail in anybody's book.
So maybe we should do as Schneier suggests and better spend that money on intelligence gathering and boots on the ground? Because with stats like that the odds they will actually stop anybody who really wants to do harm is pretty damned slim.
It was a timing issue I believe. Xres uses some seriously funky "tricks" to get around memory limitations of the time and still let you manipulate seriously huge images like temp caches. I tried a VM of both Win9x and Win2K, I tried dual booting on his modern Dual core, no dice. this thing does NOT like a machine faster than 2Ghz and more RAM than around 1.25Gb and it sure as hell don't like SATA.
So no it wasn't good old Win2K (which I still have a couple of customers that have Win2K for older programs that aren't on the net and it works just fine on late model P4s) it was just a seriously picky piece of software that a client has way too much time and money invested in to just shitcan. To be fair though the program was only released for a single year before Adobe swallowed up Macromedia and killed it dead, so it wasn't like they could predict when they released it that people would go from 400Mhz with 32Mb of RAM (its system reqs) to the multiGHz boxes and still actually be using the thing.
That is one of the things about being a repairman, you never know what is gonna show up in your shop, like the 100MHz DOS 3 machine I had to build a few years back to run an ISA board for a $75k lathe a company couldn't afford to replace and whose manufacturer had been out of business since the late 80s. Personally that is why I'm glad XP has lasted this long, as it is easier now more than ever to get some old "must have at all costs" mission critical app to run without digging out old funky hardware.
But in the end all that matters is the customer, and by building him that NOS box and setting up a dual port KVM with dedicated share folders connecting the two he is easily able to just drag and drop files between his new machine and the NOS and get his work done in a third of the time it would take him in Photoshop. I can see why he hangs onto Xres because with his plugins he is able to do his most common tasks (such as cutting ex wives/husbands out of photos LOL) in mere minutes with results that look perfect and watching him do the same job in PS it took three times as long and the results just weren't as good. Sometimes for a specific job the old tools just do it better.
Sadly this thing isn't even worth joking about, it is a 200 million dollar lie that is so full of shit its eyes are brown. Plugged in my mom's address (I've been fighting for a decade to get something better than dialup for her) and it said I had FOUR count them four choices, two of which don't even operate in this area, one which told us point blank if you are even a single block out of the city limits to piss off, and the fourth refuses to run a single inch unless you give them 300% of the costs of the line upfront to ensure their incredible ass raping profits. Oh and they also have a WISP listed that we actually tried and is lucky if it works four hours a night and have worse TOS than Hughesnet.
So yeah, if you are using this thing for anything more than a laugh you are just wasting your time the way the government wasted your money on this fairy tale. So far I've plugged in a dozen addresses and not a single one was close to reality and both the speeds and carriers available were complete bullshit.
Hi OzPeter! I hope you don't mind my asking but I just got to know WTF are you testing that you needed to test for Win98 compatibility. I mean having to service some seriously ancient crap but even I haven't come across a Win9X machine in 4 years.
In fact the last Win9X machine I came across actually being used (it was WinME eeek!) was an old graphics artist that used it for Macromedia Xres. I had to build him an NOS (new, old stock) Win2K PC with a 1.8GHz AMD Athlon along with 1Gb of RAM and a 80Gb HD, all because that old program is finicky as hell and don't like VMs, SATA, or modern DDR RAM. To be fair though the guy has serious time and money invested in Xres with a large selection of custom built plugins that allow him to do common tasks that would take 3 times the time and effort in PhotoShop thanks to knowing Xres like the back of his hand.
So i just got to know WTH else is out there that actually needs Win9x support?
Uhhh...how EXACTLY has "Windows moved towards the Linux way" with regards to drivers? The only major shift has been to go back to having drivers outside the kernel which was how it was originally done in WinNT so if anything they are just going back to Dave Cutler's original design.
And how would having a stable ABI cost Linux billions? If anything it would save billions because companies like Nvidia wouldn't have to pay entire development teams just to deal with whatever fucking off Linus did in the kernel. But that is the real crux of the argument isn't it? With Linux it is less about a functional OS and more about religion thanks to RMS and his militant faction. BTW did you know the man will ONLY use a rare funky MIPS netbook because it is the ONLY machine that will fit his militant agenda? Or that the man doesn't even use the web but instead uses scripts to download web pages to his email? Frankly anybody THAT loonie having the ability to have major affect on your OS really isn't a good thing.
In the end I'd say it isn't the money that is holding Linux back, its the attitude both from the community and from the twin heads of Linus and RMS. Linus is the classic "scratch an itch" kind of developer that doesn't give a shit what he breaks as long as HE gets to do things HIS way. See my earlier post about how the man honestly believes not having any plan with regards to kernel development is a "good" thing.
Then you have the RMS faction that doesn't care if the user has a horrible experience as long as the religious philosophy (and that is what it is, with no compromises and dogma just like any religion) of GPL is strictly upheld. I can take 10 year old Win2K drivers and run them in XP SP3 nearly a decade later, same for Vista drivers in 7. In all my years of working on PCs I can count the number of "update foo broke my driver" since leaving Win9X for WinNT on one hand with fingers left over and it is THAT, that right there, that more than anything makes Linux shit for home users.
I mean Good Lord Man, when you have Dell, one of the largest OEMs on the entire planet having to run their own repos because the QA in Linux is so shitty that you can't use the standard repos without breaking drivers when we are talking about a tiny subset of machines there really is NO excuse for that level of incompetence, there really isn't. How is Linux supposed to gain inroads and get small shops like mine to sell and support your product when even Dell can't get decent QA from the community on such a tiny subset of machines? All the bling bling GUIs (which frankly I don't agree Linux is up to Win2K yet, I'd argue it is more like Win9X where there was GUIs but often it was just DOS with a GUI shell) in the world won't help if the machine can't even be updated without breaking.
Maybe in another decade Linus will quit acting like an ass with regards to stable ABIs and Linux might, just might, get the desktop up to XP standards of stability and ease of use maybe. But by that time everyone will be on Windows 10 and OSX 11 and you'll be so far behind it isn't even funny. Maybe it is time for Linux to "pull an Apple" and just focus on a subset of machines and make them "just work". A good start would be the Dell offerings. Refuse to allow an update to leave the door until those Dell machines "just work" instead of everyone "doing their own thing" and fucking everyone else's shit up, how about that?
Because as it is now there is simply no way I can offer your product because the apps suck, the OS can't even be updated reliably without the risk of major breakage, there is NO way to simply look at the box and tell whether a device works or not (which with a stable ABI a company could "put a penguin on the box" and know it will still work when Ubuntu 12 comes out) and frankly for the common man Linux in no way, shape, or form "just works" and in fact spends more time broken that it does functional. This isn't 1987 guys, that kind of shit just won't fly anymore.
Have you TRIED it on an x360? That is like pointing out there is a version of Halo for the Atari 2600 (there is BTW) but comparing the two isn't really fair. The PC version supports DX10 and the level of detail and realism is frankly so incredible that the first time I played it I died about a dozen times just because I got mesmerized by the pretty and couldn't focus on the actual game. Some of my customers after watching me play it have begun picking it up themselves just so they can show off their new PCs to their console playing friends because it makes the consoles look like shit in comparison.
And if the problem had been "solved" as you put it when it comes to multicores then frankly nearly all PC software wouldn't be single core only nor would both Intel and AMD be spending incredible amounts on R&D trying to find a way to make easy support for multicores. The simple fact is dealing with timings and race conditions is EXTREMELY difficult and have plagued companies like IBM for decades. You think IBM doesn't have good coders?
The problem is trying to predict with absolute certainty when multiple cores will complete a job and ensuring that they all meet up at the correct point in time so they don't stall. Hell this is one of the things that killed Intel's Netburst, as the huge pipelines made the CPU crazy scalable but a single branch mis-prediction could choke the whole thing.
In the end I'm sure this is a problem that will be solved, but frankly I doubt it will have anything to do with gaming, whether the consoles existed or not. Currently the big leaders in using multicore effectively is video processing and GP-GPU which as more coders become exposed to the intricacies of programming for multiple cores I'm sure someone will trip over the next big "Ah ha!" moment that will really kick up the race with regards to multicores.
But frankly I wouldn't really expect to see new techniques really come to the fore until XP is EOL, because frankly it is still the number 1 OS by a HUGE margin and I just don't see that going away until it is EOL in 2014. For many the PC is just the thing that lets them work and get on the net, and "gaming" is playing Farmville, and as long as XP holds over 70% of the market (something like 300 million plus last I checked) trying to optimize code for multicores simply isn't really cost effective since at its heart XP is a single core OS. Sure it'll run on multicores but it really isn't optimized for it, and anything over a dual is just wasted on it.
So until that changes and multicores are the standard in all or even most homes (I'd say late model P4s outnumber multicores by about 4 to 1 in the number of installed units) I doubt we'll be seeing any new major shifts, and again it isn't the consoles holding everyone back. let the fratboys have their teabagging, the rest of us will be enjoying the new hotness that frankly makes them look like an Atari.
I would say this is one time we should all be damned happy that MSFT didn't stick with its famous backwards compatibility. Why? One word: ActiveX.
At the time ActiveX sounded like a good idea, an easy way to write code for intranets that could be easily deployed and updated from the corporate office but sadly whomever was in charge of security at MSFT was playing hooky that week and it turned out to be a malware writers wet dream. Thanks to how deeply ActiveX was allowed to hook into the underlying OS simply viewing a web page could give a well written piece of ActiveX malware complete control of the system, while even a shitty piece of ActiveX malware could hook into the browser and do all kinds of nasty things.
So we should all be glad that someone at MSFT got the memo and realized that ActiveX was a seriously BAD idea and killed it deader than Dixie. Oh and for all the complaints of web developers about IE 6 and the shitty code you had to write for it? Remember this thing came out nearly a decade ago and those "web standards" you fellas like so much really didn't exist as anything more than proposals at the time, most of which were completely changed after IE 6 had already been released.
Yes MSFT deserves every single bit of hatred for walking away from IE after they won the battle against Netscape, hell they probably should have been hit with a class action for the risk they put every XP user through by not upkeeping their browser while still leaving it installed and default. But let us not forget that "web standards" were more like web suggestions at that time and BOTH sides played seriously fast and loose, remember the "blink" tag in NS?
Frankly both sides sucked the big wet titty and I'm just glad that today we have a wealth (some might even say a glut) of choices, from Firefox/Seamonkey/Kmeleon to Chrome/Chromium/Dragon/Safari to Opera all by its lonesome. Now users have so many well running choices that it is more a personal preference than anything else, and IE is increasingly becoming a footnote of history just like Netscape. Thankfully the bad old days of two shitty browsers is behind us and we can surf the web OUR way, not spend all our time dealing with the "quirks" of one of the big two.
While this is true (although personally with my rock concert abused ears anything over 192k is just a waste on me) I think the bigger question should be where and on what do iTunes users listen to the tunes they purchase?
And having done a whole lot of home PC setups I can honestly say I haven't seen many of the audiophile types using iTunes, but what I HAVE seen is a lot of iTunes users downloading songs into iPods with those shitty little earbuds.
So I really don't know how big a market they'll have for this, but if what I've seen is any indication of a typical iTunes user then they won't be able to tell much if any difference between low and high bitrate 16bit MP3s, much less 24bit. Most folks just want to bee bop around with their iPod and frankly don't really give a shit about MP3 quality when they are jogging or just fucking off.
That is why I still have a 4Gb Sandisk because at 64k it gives me plenty of room and when I'm out and about I couldn't care less about quality sound reproduction, not that I'd hear it on those little earbuds anyway. it is just to give me some background music while I'm working or enjoying a nice late evening stroll, having great sound quality is for at home when I'm wearing the big ass cans on my head, not for portable tuneage. So unless there is a bunch of folks wiring their laptops into really nice stereo systems I just don't think they are gonna tell much of a difference.
Not that that has ever stopped a fool and their money from being parted, see all the Monster Cable jokes for a perfect example of consumer stupidity.
Again that has NOTHING to do with consoles, it has to do with something that has been quite well known for sometime, that parallelization is EXTREMELY hard!.
While it is true we have just begun to scratch multicores (BTW L4D I&II run best on TRIPLE cores FYI, and there are others than run best on duals) the problem with your usages becomes timing and race conditions. A classic example is The Dining philosophers problem which was first wrote about in 1965 long before there ever was an Xbox.
But in a way this just gives us another easy example of why PCs are a superior platform. One of my favorite "Holy Crap!" demos I do for prospective customers is to fire up my browser to a Youtube video WHILE having a tune play in WMP 12 AND have a game of Bioshock fired up in a window. This lets them see the true value of multicore is that I can do several tasks at the same time which is frankly impossible both on single cores and on consoles by design.
The problem is you and others think the PC and its performance should be based around games because that is where the performance boosts came from in the past but I would argue that the "new hotness" isn't JUST games, it is games PLUS the incredible amount of multimedia features that allow one unprecedented control. It is THAT which will drive the new GPUs, excellent features like Eyefinity and the ability to do high def PiP, not simply gaming.
For an example I just got done setting up a new quad core PC in a customers home. For just $550 he got an AMD Phenom Black Edition, 4Gb of DDR2 800Mhz RAM, a 1Tb HDD, 5.1 surround sound setup and an HD4830 to round things out. Now from the comfort of his living room chair he has his 20 years worth of CDs, all nicely ripped and sorted in WMP 12, he is now learning how to rip all his DVDs so they too will be instantly accessible, from this one spot his family can play games, enjoy all their audio/video,watch Netflix and even surf the web, all from the comfort of their living room with their nice 37 inch 1080p TV.
So honestly I'd say the future has never been brighter for PC gaming, all the consoles have done is made PC gaming even more affordable for the masses. We have the choice of literally thousands of games instantly with direct services like Steam and Good Old Games, we can have thousands of top notch titles for a little of nothing especially when compared to console prices (I just picked up the ENTIRE Prince Of Persia Sands of Time series for my oldest for $6 brand new how can you beat that?) and thanks to the rise of multicore CPUs at seriously cheap prices (Thanks AMD you rock!!) and frankly insane amounts of GPU power for under $100 we can have incredible graphics and all at a price even the common man can easily afford.
So I ask you, where is the bad here? The games that focus on how big an ePeen your system is frankly suck (I'm looking at YOU Crysis!) and the graphics got so damned good in 2005 that honestly they have been extreme overkill on pretty ever since. Hell you should try "Just Cause 2" and see the incredible shit you can pull, we are talking flying low in a stolen car while pieces of it are blown off by the military, complete with sparks where the rims hit the pavement, firing a cable into the front of a jeep and then into the ground causing the vehicle to pull a Terminator 3 and go flipping over in a HUGE fireball, and then at the last minute parachuting out of your about to explode car off a bridge into a beautifully rendered jungle before escaping by snatching a boat below.
Frankly as someone who started gaming on an Atari and who would have frankly told you that you were full of shit if you told me even 10 years ago we would have this level of realism and Hollywood style destruction, all in a PC that ANY person can EASILY afford? Frankly we are living in damned good times when it comes to gaming on the PC my friend, I suggest we leave the fratboys to their Halo teabagging sessions and just kick back and enjoy the goodness.
To shamelessly rip off an old joke saying you are "the number 2 Unix variant" like that is a good thing is like saying "Well my horse doesn't eat much at all...now that its dead".
I mean I'm sure the C64 guys can brag they "are the number 1 Commodore computer" but that really ain't saying much anymore, now is it? Not when your competitors (which despite what many FOSSies claim yes, you are in competition) are numbering something like 800 MILLION for Windows and probably close to 100 MILLION for OSX.
Look, as a retailer I want Linux to succeed, I really do. I remember the good old days of Atari and Commodore and how new ideas were popping up all over the place, and that doesn't even bring in the fact I believe in free market competition being good for everyone and having a lower cost "third way" would help me reduce my costs while still remaining legal (sadly many shops just use pirated Windows, which makes it hard in a recession for legit shops like mine to compete with their unfair advantage).
But the difference between me and a FOSSie is that even though I'm a computer nerd I spend my days with the common man and therefor have unique insight which the average CS nerd FOSSie simply doesn't have.
And I can tell you this with 100% honesty, without trying to be mean or piss you or anyone off (notice how I got modded down without a SINGLE response? Could it be they had NO rebuttal and could only get mad at being told the truth?) that in its current incarnation while Linux is just hunky dory for webservers and embedded devices, both of which have highly trained CS grads to write programs and admin them, as a desktop for the common man LINUX SUCKS with a capital S!
Now why does it suck? Lets start with the guy at the top, old Linus himself. While myself and other have been begging for a proper driver ABI (which FYI ALL the major OSes, BSD, Solaris, OSX,, hell even OS/2 have had since the dawn of time) if you read Linus's arguments it basically comes down to "I don't like them because it limits me fucking with the kernel later on". Which coming from a man who actually admits that the way he does things is that Linux isn't designed, it grows like a virus which of course is a REALLY shitty way to develop an OS since without a plan shit breaking is naturally the order of the day.
And it is THIS, the shit constantly breaking, drivers that work in foo not working in foo+1 without jumping through major hoops, 6 month releases that break more than they fix, no QA at all to where even Dell has to run their own repos just to keep from having their Ubuntu install from being bricked the first time the user updates, hell I could go on all day.
If you actually want to compete, if you actually want Linux to be something more than an OS for webservers and basement nerds, then the community needs to ask itself "what are we doing wrong, and what is the other guy doing right?" which guys like me in the trenches will be happy to tell you. With Windows you are looking at nearly a decade (since they tie both the home and pro versions together so patches for one work on the other) where a machine will be updated without it breaking. Apps work for years and years (thus no need to retrain) and CLI on both Windows and OSX is nonexistent Now is the time a FOSSie will point to Powershell, while they conveniently ignore that Powershell is a server technology and that a home user will NEVER see a CLI, not even once.
All I want is a little honesty Mr FOSSie, is that too much to ask? If you like things the way they are, if you don't want to change to gain users, fine, I'm really happy for you and wish you nothing but the best. But please, don't delude yourself into thinking that Linux in its common form is in any way usable by your non CS grad common man. He has NO desire to learn your ways, he has NO desire to learn arcane Bash commands, he has NO desire to trawl forums because
Oh I agree that old Yahtzee is a major pessimist (which if YOU had to review Kane & Lynch 2 you'd probably be kinda a bummer yourself) but I have to agree with him that while the Dead Space series is damned good it just wasn't that scary at least for me. it didn't have the "creep factor" for me that say the original Bioshock had where I would be crouched high on a ledge watching as some splicer descended into madness spouting bible passages while dragging a fricking pickaxe along the ground with that lovely scraping noise.
Or if you want "Holy Shit!" make you jump a foot and piss your pants kind of horror you really should try Nosferatu. The game was a sleeper but entire game has a creep factor and some of the best sudden spooks I've ever played. The whole place feels like a creepy 1930s Universal horror movie, and not in a camp way, you walk up to the castle and the family priest takes a high dive to escape and dies at your feet, and you NEVER know what you will find when you walk into a room (because they are randomly populated and generated) and the sound...wow. When you walk into a room and this pentagram starts glowing and suddenly these multiple demon vamps just come flying out to tear you a new ass? Or you walk into a room and find out you've stepped right into a nest of vamps getting ready to rise from their coffins? Truly scare the shit out of you time.
I think the problems with many of the new "horror" games are twofold: one you have an overabundance of weapons, which it just isn't scary if you can "just go Rambo" like the later levels of FEAR, and two they think that splattering the walls with gore and having shit just jump every two minutes equal scary. There really isn't any building of tension or atmosphere if I know shit is gonna pop out in the next room ala DOOM 3. So while I agree that the Dead Space series are good games, I just don't know if they should be called good horror games. Horror to me is about more than just gore and spooky settings, it is the total environment that makes my hair stand on end.
Not to mention how badly we humans like to latch onto what I call "magical thinking" which is "If we have (insert product or technology) then we'll be safe!". You'd be surprised how many times I've walked into some SMB or large office and found a totally pwned network where they were just shocked! shocked I tell you! that the magical McGuffin they had based their entire security on had failed them. Hell there is a troll on this very website that subscribes to magical thinking with regards to HOSTS files and thinks they will magically protect him from all malware.
The simple fact is that NO OS, security technology or other magical McGuffin can take the place of good old fashioned best practices, with a top to bottom least privilege layout and sensible security policies. But all of that is hard, takes constant work, costs money, and is hard to explain to a PHB so in walks these companies offering magical thinking which sells like hotcakes right up until a company gets pwned.
But why not let them have both and thus give them more value for their $$$$? Both AMD and Intel now have the ability to shut down cores when not in use, hell the new AMD Bulldozers can even shut down portions of the GPU when not needed to drop power usage even lower. This lets you have the power when you need it (they could even set it up so it only ran on outlet if they really wanted to be anal about it) and the battery life when you don't.
So I have to agree with the other poster that using dual cores now just seems stupid. You are cutting down on the amount of jobs the PC can do and when you figure in the Apple premium paying more for a dual just doesn't make sense, not when you can buy nice quad laptops starting at around $700.
I'm probably dating the hell out of myself here, but anybody else remember the football game with the big ass metal trackballs you had to use to get the guys to run? Man that game would wear you out! To me the arcade died when it quit being about cool interfaces like giant metal trackballs and guns and started just being a glorified console in a box. By the time the last arcade closed in my area all they had were lame fighting games where it was all about memorizing funky move lists and the same boring left to right beat them ups you could get at home.
Arcades for me were always about the cool factor, which like you said was all the cool interfaces like bikes that you could ride and other experiences I couldn't get at home. Once they all started saving money by just recycling the same cabinet with new plug ins they just lost all of the appeal, at least for me. And IMHO they also got greedy in the way they designed the games, like before one could actually get good at a game and play for an afternoon if your skill was high enough, but the later games seemed designed to ensure you just couldn't play for any length of time without shelling out more cash no matter how good you were. That was when for me it became nothing more than slot machines that didn't pay out, and that also helped kill the fun and made the arcade just another waste of money IMHO.
Man I miss the tic tac toe chickens. in the 80s I lived down the road from the little amusement place where they trained the chickens call the IQ Zoo. They had chickens that rode trikes and all kinds of cool shows but the signs you would keep seeing would just fuck with you..."Beware of the mugger ducks"
You'd play against the chicken (who always won) or go see the spider monkey that rode a pony but then you'd see that sign again and it would just be fucking with your head..."Beware of the mugger ducks"..and you'd be just waltzing along thinking "WTF is a mugger duck anyway?"
So you'd be walking along and decide to get a popcorn and then you'd find out what the signs were about. You see they had a ninja strike team of super stealth ducks that just waited on you to get a popcorn. They'd wait until you were down the path a bit and then BAM! Two ducks would shoot out to make you stumble while another two would jump up and grab the popcorn bag and VOOM they were just...gone. Like they had never been there. Of course when you'd go back to get another popcorn they'd just say "Didn't pay attention to the signs did you?"
Sadly they and Hailey's zoo closed down when the owners passed on, but to this day I remember that sign when I get a popcorn outdoors and look around for any mugger ducks.
I didn't miss the point, what you are talking about has NOTHING to do with consoles and everything to do with standardization of LCD manufacture. If a new consoles came out that did native 2650x1950 resolution do you think LCD manufacturers are all gonna jump to crank out screens with those dimensions? Nope because they have found the sweet spots as far as yield and customer satisfaction and they ain't going nowhere.
I've found you can divide the LCD manufacturers into three resolutions and pretty much cover the market, there is 720p, there is 1600x900 (which is the #1 size for monitors by a long shot ATM) and there is 1080p. Not a single one of those has anything to do with the limitations of consoles and everything to do with yields and standardization around video resolution.
So while the modern GPU can handle these resolutions well it has nothing to do with the consoles and everything to do with the combination of "buzzword bingo" and the ability to crank out certain sizes quite cheaply with high yields. same as I figure 720p is gonna be gone next, as people are coming to me asking for 1080p monitors and TVs. They don't actually know what that means but they have heard it enough times to know "it is good" so that is what they want.
When it comes to monitors 1600x900 at 19-22 inch seems to be the sweet spot when it comes to price so that is what is selling around 4 to 1 last I checked. Again nothing to do with consoles and everything to do with yields and pricing.
But you won't be seeing those crazy high resolutions any time soon simply because the tolerances are too tight and you end up with low yields and high prices. Sadly most people can't really tell once you get past around 1280x720 so for the mass consumer the above resolutions are "good enough" and then it becomes about price. I'd say the next big shift will be 120hz for 3D, which IIRC most consoles can't even run, just because folks have seen Avatar and want that at home. this of course gives another advantage to PCs in the living room as they can do 120hz no problem, but trying to blame consoles and PCs for LCD yields is a little far fetched IMHO.