Bah you CAN do that with a PC, and at a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than those old consoles! Right now I have a closet FULL of dead consoles...two PS 1, a SNES, a Sega CD, A Genesis, and an original Xbox that works but it is too much of a PITA to mod the thing. Trying to find games and parts? A PITA unless I wwant to deal with the "fun" that is the ripoff land known as eBay.
Compare that to the PC side. I have a pair of 733MHz PCs that dual boot Win98 and WinXP. Cost? Nothing for the machines themselves, as I found a school that was doing an upgrade and talked them out of the machines for giving them a hand on a lazy afternoon. If I were to have bought them? Maybe $20 off of Craigslist. Cost to turn them into gamer PCs for old games? I paid $10 for an MX400 64MB and $15 for an FX5200 128MB, both PCI. If anything short of the motherboard goes? Prices are so cheap for things like HDDs and RAM it is a joke to even mention them. Hell even if I blow a cap I got a neighbor that will happily change caps for me in return for keeping his PCs going. Added a couple of Soundblasters I got for a whole $0.50 at a yard sale, and one $20 4 port KVM I bought for work.
So as you can see for BOTH machines I have a whole $50 invested, and not only do they play every single game I've thrown at them from the DOS era up to around 2001 thanks to being able to boot into DOS from Win98, but they have plenty of other uses as well. For example when the youngest had his PC blow a PSU I was able to hand the MX400 one as a spare until I could get his new PSU in, and the FX5200 one isn't even in my possession ATM as my GF is having to live 2 hours away to help with the family farm after her dad had a heart attack and so she has it as a spare in case anything goes wrong while she is up on the mountain.
But with those machines I am already able to play ANY consoles OR PC game up to the N64 via emulation, and even with the original controllers if my youngest wouldn't have snatched my USB console adapter for his PC. Thanks to the dual core and 4850 he got for Xmas (his brother wanted and got a laser printer) he can play ANY console or PC game up to and including Gamecube via emulation, and it is a hell of a lot easier than dealing with scratched discs or switching consoles around due to limited TV connections and space. In most places one can simply walk down the street if you want an old PC to game on and find one on the curb that just needs a wipe and reinstall, or simply spread the word and you'll end up with more than you can deal with. I have friends keep an eye out for PCs for me at junk and yard sales and the MOST I've ever paid is a whole $10 for a PC. Frankly there are just so many no longer wanted desktops the pickings are good and cheap.
So frankly unless you are living in a closet there really isn't a point in emulation for older games, not when so many good used machines can be had for nothing. There are plenty of places one can get a two port KVM for under $10 (such as this) and I can add a speaker set that plugs into a CD ROM slot for a whole $8. Even if you are short on space something like that 733MHz in a SFF that sits under a monitor is easy to find and again cheap. And as for lasting? Lets see, my first 100MHz PC is STILL running, now as a DOS 3 CNC controller, with my 233MHz running as a backup, my 1GHz Celeron is running an XP Lite install with a cousin as a Nettop, I am typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron I got for $40 off a build from a client, and my last 4 P4s are with my oldest, my youngest, my mom, and my GF. Out of those I had to replace a grand total of one mobo and one PSU, both of which were again cheap.
So again it really isn't hard to put together a PC that WILL run all older software, and console games as well. My advice from experience would be to add a cheap soundblaster (which the site I linked to above has them for a whole $2) along with a cheap AGP or PCI GPU, any older Radeon or GForc
Have you tried unlocking any cores yet? That is the one thing I haven't tried I'm really debating. The trouble is while the 7550 dual I have in the drawer is no doubt a 4 core with two switched off, the only boards I see with selective unlocking at cheap prices is the Nvidia 6050 based boards which is a shitty GPU. On the other hand the AMD based boards have a nice HD4200, which for my GF whose idea of "gaming" is Farmville style flash games along with the occasional CSI game, having flash accelerated would be nice. Of course having a triple or quad to hand her instead of a dual would be nice too...ARGH!
Talk about a PITA, but it is about time I got my GF off the P4 she has been running and a nice custom built box would make a perfect early BDay gift. I guess I'll just end up flipping a quarter and picking whichever wins the toss. As long as it is a dual core with a couple of GB of RAM and XP she'll be a happy camper anyway, and I have that 7550 and an XP Pro license just sitting here unused. But I'd love to hear if you had any luck trying unlock and how much of a PITA it is, because if it is easy sailing I suppose I could always pick up a cheapo Radeon card for her, or maybe even pick up that 4850 I spotted cheap and give her my HD4650.
But I agree that anybody buying duals, especially Intel ones, are just nuts with triple and quads so cheap. If I didn't have the 7550 already sitting there I wouldn't even think of less than a triple, and the only reason I picked up the Pentium Ds is that my kids PCs are old 775 boards that won't take bigger and at $30 each they were a dirt cheap upgrade. Hey if you've got any older boards you'd like to upgrade cheap let me recommend these guys. Fast service, cheap prices, they were even nice enough to call me after the order just to make sure I hadn't pushed a wrong button because I ordered two of the same chip. Really nice folks and the chips were perfect. With prices that low I'll probably max out the CPUs on all my older machines while I can, my family don't slam PCs hard so they'll last them for years anyway.
Too hard to aim on a bouncing boat, you'd need SEAL guys that have had lots of training, and they ain't cheap. A better idea would be to just give each boat a Minigun. We here in the US crank those suckers out because we mount them on damned near anything, they can throw a minimum of 2000 rounds of hot lead and tracer ammo down range in under a minute, hell your grandma could hit the target with THAT much firepower! And they shoot 7.62mm, so it wouldn't even be expensive ammo wise. Not to mention it would make those pirates sure as hell think twice about waving those AK47s and RPGs about.
So I'd say this is one time where technology actually CAN solve the problem, and do so cheaply. A single mini on each side of the boat is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying ransoms to thugs, and would lower the insurance they have to pay for the boats as well. Anybody that doesn't answer repeated hails gets a first burst across the bow, they keep coming you let them have it. Put minis on the boats I bet you wouldn't hear of a single boat snatching after that.
Watching Putin I'd say the man wouldn't mind having the old USSR back, after all Russians have been traditionally unhappy without a "buffer zone" on their western flank, and rightly so. And if Putin shut off the oil and natural gas going to the EU I have a feeling they would STFU. If we sweeten the pot by offering heavy trade with the new USSR and even tell them if they would like part of the Pacific it would be all theirs? Russia is out or on Team USA. Japan has too much on its plate with NK to get involved, which leaves just the EU because as I'll explain China won't say shit.
And the EU has been depending on the USA through NATO for so long if America took its ball and went home frankly their weaponry ain't impressive. Hell England is going to be down to ONE aircraft carrier, the USA? 11 and adding. Mirage and Harrier VS F18 Super Hornet? Not really much of a contest there. Pretty much the only real equalizer the EU would have is nukes, and they wouldn't dare because the USA has enough of those to carpet bomb the entire planet a couple of times over. Say what you want about the USA but we ALWAYS have the nicest war toys, bar none. And how much of the EU arsenal is American tech? Gonna kinda be hard to keep those running for any length of time. That leaves our good friend China.
China WANTS Africa...full stop. The Chinese need living space, the Chinese need resources, both of which Africa has plenty of. Also the entire African military put together wouldn't be shit compared to the Chinese army, it would be a cake walk. Add in the fact that China has a piss poor record on human rights, which means they won't give a shit what the USA does as long as we are willing to trade, and if we offer them some nice weapons tech to sweeten the deal? Yeah they are either on Team USA or sitting on the side, either way no threat there.
So all that leaves in the western EU. Germany? With no NATO to check Russia and after losing two world wars I can't see them being too thrilled at jumping into a third, hell they would probably be too busy trying to get more of the EU under its own banner than dealing with the USA. Italy? Meh, not much to worry about there, they might maybe help the UK/France, but they certainly wouldn't tip any scales. France? Has too many internal troubles, might sanction and rattle a few sabers, but if push came to shove I don't see them doing much.
That leaves the UK, which frankly would be starting off in a seriously bad way. As the wolf packs showed cutting supplies off to an island can seriously bleed it to death and the USA has one of the largest SSBN fleets out there. And usually if the USA is in bad shape the UK isn't doing much better, so if we offered to share the spoils they might not even say boo.
So as I said, it really isn't the USA that needs to be worried, it is everyone else. All it would take is a Xenophobic leader pushing a "USA First!" agenda to get the populace to jump on the bandwagon, and the American populace has traditionally been kinda xenophobic to start with, just see the distrust and hatred for anybody crossing the border illegally for a small taste. Just because the USA has played nice in the past does NOT mean we'll play nice in the future, especially when the leaders are looking at a large population barely above starving and wanting somebodies head on a platter. Easier to point your finger at someone and say "It is THAT GUY that caused the problems!" than to fix your own troubles, as the short German found out in the 30s.
The ONLY reason you have the populace placated ATM is because mommy government is paying them via a dozen different programs, but the Fed can't keep cranking the presses forever. Sooner or later (I vote within the decade) the excrement IS gonna hit the bladed cooling device, and then we shall see. My guess is first will come isolationism, followed by "USA First!" jingoism, followed by possible expansion. I'd vote Mexico falling first, as frankly it wouldn't take much to convince the people that they are too lawless and the b
I'm not the one you are replying to, but I just had to answer your "what would happen to you if America never recovers" bit. Honestly? I don't think it is us in the USA that would need to worry, it would be the other poor bastards that should worry. I mean look at the facts: You've got a country with a whole shitload of weaponry, a serious "Yay war!" mentality, and plenty of raw materials. Frankly it wouldn't take much of an "El Presidente" if the USA stays in the shitter to talk us into...ohhh...saying taking the entirety of South America? Especially if you have a ten year depression (which I believe is VERY possible) so you have a populace happy for "bread and jobs" and a seriously bad attitude from feeling like losers. Hmmm...seems like I've heard this one before? Something about a short guy and Poland?
Seriously who would stand up to the USA? Especially if they told Russia whatever they wanted to do in Europe was cool by us and told China "hey, have fun in Africa!"? who, Brazil? Argentina? A couple of well placed surgical strikes and that problem go bye bye. So I'd say that it isn't the USA that should be worried about the US staying in the shitter, it should be the rest of the planet. Because as the world should have learned the last time we had a major long term economic meltdown having a country with a shitload of industrial capacity and raw materials (which despite so much outsourcing weapon capacity is one thing the USA has a LOT of) stay on the skids for a long period of time NEVER ends well. Don't say it couldn't happen either, because we may end up with Caribou Barbie as president in 2012 so ANYTHING is possible. And frankly it wouldn't take much to get the USA in a nice war happy mood, especially if it starts with factories opening up. Hell with so many of the population worried about even having a job tomorrow frankly it wouldn't take much to get them to sign off on ANYTHING that promises plenty of bread and jobs. Scary as hell, but then again I doubt anybody in 1932 thought things would end up as fucked as they did.
And yours are frankly bullshit. I watched a big bust in Mexico not a week ago on CNN. You know what kind of guns were lying on the ground? Fully auto AK47s, enough grenades to blow up a couple of city blocks, several RPGs, hell the closest thing they had to "handguns" were some custom fully auto 9mm. So tell me, oh wise one, where do you buy fully auto machine guns in the USA hmmm? Answer: You don't, it is red herring bullshit by those that wish to ban guns.
It is very simple: with the drugs come the money, with the money comes the power, with the power comes any damned thing you want including all the quality Russian military weapons you can carry. There is a damned good reason why every battle against the cartels you see bad guys with AK47s and it is precisely because the USA DON'T SELL AUTOS to civilians and the Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, etc don't care if you got $$$.
So please, tell us another one. If you'd like I'll be happy to post about a dozen links to Mexican drug busts and you can count the AKs and grenades for yourself. And unless you are gonna turn the USA into a police state with towers frankly anybody can make a single shot zip gun or shotgun. The reason you don't see those? Because criminals have NO problem getting real guns and believe me your average felon isn't going through a background check, he is getting them from Mr Dealer, who can have a load of cheap Russian guns just as easily as he has that load of smack dropped off. Or do you think they are growing Opium in the ghettos? ALL banning does is take guns away from the citizens while doing jack and squat about criminals. Like I said if they're going to rob or kill someone feel free to tack on a weapons charge, see how much they care.
Give me $1000 and ONE hour, I'll come back with ANYTHING you want INCLUDING one of several choices of guns. Do you think that will change one damned bit if you pass some sort of law? Please! I repeat you've been trying that with dope for nearly a century and it is a hell of a lot farther from the golden triangle than to South America. It is ONLY the law abiding citizens that jump through your flaming hoop gun laws NOW, you think further hoops will do jack shit?
I agree. And for the "ban guns" advocates out there? I hate to break the news to ya but criminals don't follow laws which is why they are called criminals and not boy scouts. I can buy the finest crank, coke, smack, hell 16 year old girls, thanks to the giant leaking border that is less than a day from where I live. You think it would be ANY TROUBLE to add guns to that list?
ALL YOU DO with your stupid "lets ban guns!" crap is take them away from the people and give them to the criminals because if I'm looking to rape, rob, and kill I don't really think I'm gonna give a shit if you tack on a weapons possession charge. Where I live you see thieves break into businesses but not many home invasions. In fact it is almost unheard of, why? Because you might get your balls blown off by the owner of the home, that's why. Take away guns and the dealers will just have a nice selection to go along with the smack and coke, and it will be open season on anybody else. You've tried the "lets ban!" bullshit for about a century with dope, hows that working out?
Besides most guys have the ultimate "cleaners" and they are called nephews. When my uncle passed he had left instructions for me and a couple of my cousins to go and "pack his things away" so his wife wouldn't have to deal. When we got to his porn stash I simply handed it to one of the cousins who wanted it, he packed it in a box and carried it away. His wife was never the wiser and didn't have to deal with putting his things away which was easier on her.
If you really don't have a single relative in your family you can't trust to "put things away" when you are gone I'd say you have bigger problems than them finding your porn stash. And as for TFA it just makes me happy I'm the only nerd in my family, which means I won't have to have that ignorant bullshit as a "legacy" of my death. You'd have to be some kind of self involved narcissist asshole to want to leave some giant "Look at me!" bling bling web bullshit after you have gone.
Oh no my friend, you are thinking MUCH too small! Imagine the ULTIMATE troll hack, one that would go down in history for all time! I am of course talking about replacing one of Disney's primetime product sales dressed as a show with....dum dum dum....a 3D Goatse!
All across the land one would hear all the little childrens in a unified voice say "Mooooom, there's a GIANT BUTTHOLE on the TV!" followed by all the dads saying "What, did the president interrupt programming again?". Oh it would be a classic and go down in history! For bonus points one could have the 3D Goatse bounce to the beat of "Never gonna give you up"!
As for TFA, who didn't see this coming? This is one of the reasons I say we need NAT on IPV6. Because otherwise we are gonna have tons of CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) consumer junk, all of which will be plugged into the Internet and most of which will have squat in the ability to update or patch, all just sitting there ripe for the picking. It'll make those XP SP2 machines still running on the net look like hardened BSD installs.
So I ask you, what better way to dramatically prove to the masses the current "plug it all into the net!" idea is flawed than by giving them a giant Goatse?
Uhhh...didn't read past the first sentence, did ya friend? Otherwise you might have noticed this part: I was a lifelong Intel man but after all the payola came out I switched to only AMD for myself and my customers . So it is kinda hard to tell me to "switch to AMD" when BOTH the boxes I use AND the boxes I sell are ALL AMD. Hell my oldest even got a nice Turion X2 netbook for college. It does all his schoolwork and games nicely when he doesn't have homework, and at $599 the only competition was from "Intel IGP" machines locally. Yuck!.
That still don't change the fact that unless you are just sticking it in a board that can't support anything else (like those 775 Pentium Ds I picked up cheap) then buying dual cores is dumb when you can get triples and quads for so cheap. Even if you don't need the power now you may need it down the road and then not be able to get the chip (as I found with a board that I had in 99 that would take the high end P3 that I waited too long on) and end up boned. With C&Q even the quads sip power when not having work to do but when you do have a job for them such as converting a video you'll be damned glad you got the extra cores.
But buying dual cores nowadays unless you are trying for insane OC speeds thanks to having the larger die for cooling, or going for a cheap shot that may/may not unlock, it just seems silly to be building duallies anymore, especially on the AMD side. Just look again at this chart and notice how few dual cores are on it. The better value nowadays is triple and quad, and by a pretty good margin.
My last dual core build will be this AMD X2 7550 I have sitting in a drawer from my upgrade to a quad that I will end up building into a cheap netbox for my GF. Considering the hardest thing she does on a machine is plays Farmville? I think it is safe to say it will be overkill. But even then I'm gonna get a cheapo core unlocking board just to see if I can get a stable X3 or X4 out of it. If I can get her a free upgrade, why the hell not?
Or people like me that have to clean up the mess when their buggy as fuck DRM shits itself and dies, breaking shit all the way? Why don't YOU try cleaning up the mess that you get with Starforce+Safedisc+SecuROM, sometimes ending up with multiple versions of each because the older version refuses to hand off to the newer? Do you have ANY idea how many DVD and CD burners of customers I've had to shitcan because those stupid DRM schemas would throw a drive into PIO and the people wouldn't realize and bring it into to me until the motor had burnt? Oh and don't forget those lovely Sony rootkits that I STILL run into occasionally thanks to those "CDs" still floating around like the clap.
Sorry MR AC Troll, but there are plenty of us that buy our media that hate DRM with a passion. It is buggy, badly written, ALWAYS sucks up resources, will default on the side of SCREW YOU, but here is a guy (warning, language NSFW) who sums up better than I ever could why DRM is ultimately completely useless bullshit. And please not the HUGE PILES of legitimate media all around him, meaning that is THEIR CUSTOMER they are pissing on. Enjoy MR AC!
But isn't the i3 a duallie? Why would you want a duallie when AMD quads are so cheap? Unless of course you are a rabid OCer as I heard the i3 can crank, but then again the AMD duallies can usually unlock, so I'd call it a wash.
I'd say the big problems with Intel is they are too damned high and they have too many sockets ATM. If you look at this chart of top 50 price/performance the only i series comes in all the way down at #27. I was a lifelong Intel man but after all the payola came out I switched to only AMD for myself and my customers and you know what? I can't really tell the difference. Lets be honest, most of us aren't gonna be slamming the living shit out of our CPUs to be able to tell that 15% difference in performance and the price of the CPU plus motherboard is great enough on most of Intel's good chips one can really outfit a nice box for a hell of a lot less. And my customers are sure happy with $450 triples and $500 quad core machines delivered to their door.
So while I've got nothing against Intel users, hell I've got a couple of 775 boxes I just upgraded to Pentium D chips I picked up dirt cheap, after the payola, rigging their compiler, the just announced DRM, even using dirty tricks against the OLPC, Intel just doesn't seem like a company I would feel right about supporting ATM. I'm a firm believer in putting your money where your mouth is and where your beliefs lie and just like I won't buy Sony after the rootkit and the screwing of PS3 owners I just couldn't in good conscience support a company that has played so dirty lately, even for a 15% performance gain.
Now be perfectly honest: Did you not buy from them because of philosophy, or because it cost money? Because despite what Linux users say about wanting things like gaming every time I see someone actually try to support Linux by catering to them, like Cedega or Loki, they end up going tits up. From where I have been sitting as an interested but on the sidelines observer, the only way to actually make money with Linux is to 1.-Sell support contracts to corps, ala Red Hat or 2.-Embed it into a device and sell that, ala every Router out there.
So why should all these companies that currently make Windows only consumer programs, like games and Photoshop and the nice picture app that came with the camera you gave grandma for Xmas, actually spend all that money to give Linux users product if they just don't buy squat? Because from where I'm sitting despite RMS saying it is about "free as in freedom" the only stuff I see popular on Linux is "free as in beer".
So answer honestly Linux guys, how much money have you spent on the software that is currently installed on your PC? Because hiring coders, constantly having to deal with the changes in the kernel, this I'm sure costs serious money. I've probably got at least a grand sunk into the software I use not counting the money I paid for Windows, and having that money sunk gives me motivation to learn to get the most out of it as well as that money motivating the developers to support me by writing more apps. Where is the motivation in Linux? Because you can't feed your family or pay your mortgage with pats on the back, and unless you are selling to corps that seems to me all you get from writing for Linux.
And while Wine is nice lets be honest: The average Joe isn't gonna jump through all those hoops trying to get the Windows software they need, which as I just pointed out has very little reason to come out natively on Linux, to run correctly. So like it or not you kinda need companies like Cedega that make it simple for the masses. So how is Linux ever gonna get the apps and the OOTB ease of use that the masses require, if one can't make a living supporting consumers on which is easily arguably the more difficult platform to write for?
I think the bigger danger is giving a country who ran the most notorious bio weapons labs in history, also known as the Biopreparat access to God knows what that haven't been seen in the environment in 4 million plus years. Hell I wouldn't trust the USA with 4 million years old possible biological weapons, and Putin is even less cuddly than the USA.
Oh Dear Lord, would that not be just wonderful? I always believed in the old "fighting fire with marshmallows" and to show the stupidity of DRM in that fashion would just be oh so delicious!
I mean can you imagine someone hacking the DRM and instead of the latest Disney excuse to sell toys all of them got a nice 3d Goatse? Can't you hear all those little children now: "Mom there is a GIANT BUTTHOLE on the screen!"
Bingo! We have a winner! For those that say "its too hard!" then how do you explain the absolutely obvious warez on Rapidshare? Pick ANY rapidshare search, your choice, and type in the name of current movies, what do you see? Name of movie, name of date, name of resolution, etc. At least a dozen for Inception when I just checked.
Now are you gonna seriously say finding THAT is too hard? Really? Because if so here is a nice bridge you might be interested in. It isn't that "rapidshare is trying and failing" it is "rapidshare obviously doesn't give a shit" or there would at least be a token effort into hiding the files. Hell my grandma could snatch the latest movies with rapidshare!
But Rapidshare doesn't pass what I call the "Napster Test". That is, if ALL illegal content were to disappear tomorrow, would they still be profitable? I think we ALL know the answer to that, and it is a big NO. They do absolutely nothing to even give the barest token attempt at blocking anything infringing, because it would hurt their business model. You can share "L4D V1 Cracked" and if they get a DMCA you can put up "L4D V1.1 Cracked" and they simply don't care. And your SAME argument could have been used by Audiogalaxy and Napster, but it didn't fly did it? And there is a BIG difference between having a decentralized service like BT and hosting the files like Rapidshare.
Now personally I think that the media companies should just set up game and video channels, where for X pe month you can have all you want DRM free. I also think trying to stop file sharing is like playing whack a mole and is a waste of time. But c'mon guys, Rapidshare? Who in the hell EVER uses Rapidshare for legit anything? Their whole business model is based on snatching content!
Hi MR AC! Word of advice? Buy a shitload of old boxes and have them ready, because machines THAT old WILL DIE HARD. That customer I had with the $75,000 CNC controller that requires DOS 3! (Yeah no shit, fricking DOS 3. Not 4, not 5, won't run on anything but DOS 3 and bare metal) I sold two boxes upfront and got another half a dozen, all with images of the "OS" and software loaded up which he picked up the tab for.
That way when the box this "mission critical" app is running on bites the farm you can just fire up one of the boxes in storage and switch it out. Boxes that old can be had for cheap but are getting harder to find, so do so now. Use the local paper or Craigslist if you have trouble finding any. I would also see if I could find any more of those ISA cards and buy them up. Sadly I looked for nearly a year and couldn't find any, so if that card goes tits up they will be SOL if my engineer buddy can't make them some sort of new interface. But like your sitch this little company could never afford to replace the machine, which is a computer controlled lathe that makes custom columns. Not exactly the kind of thing one finds on eBay cheap.
There is a couple of SERIOUS PROBLEMS with your comparison. One, you are talking about CPUs that were custom designed for gaming compared to an off the shelf in order Atom, and Two, You are talking about devices that had custom ultra low resource gaming OSes VS running Windows 7 plain Jane.
I'm sorry, but that is some pretty big fucking differences there tepples. That is like saying "A Cesna and an F16 are just alike, since their both planes" but if you put one against the other I don't think anybody here would want to be in the La Bamba plane, do you? And the reason those here say "Atom plays streaming video great!" is because it is often paired with something like this and allow me to QFT a piece from that article "Otherwise, Atom is a useless chip in HTPCs"
So I stand by my statement. Every single benchmark we have seen of Atom CPUs have shown us two things, One it was made to be REALLY cheap, and Two it was made to be REALLY low power. Now does anyone here actually associate really cheap and really low power with WINDOWS GAMING? Anyone? Beuller? Windows gaming never has been and never will be really cheap and really low power, not unless you consider Windows gaming to be Farmville.
Now someone can point out if this humble repair guy is wrong, but from what I read of TFA it sounds to me like TCP is the problem and not the buffers. What TCP is doing is slamming the network until it drops packets, and then using that to determine speed, correct? Doesn't sound like an efficient way to allocate resources when even grandma has a fat cable or DSL pipe. It would be like everyone trying to shove their way to the front of a line and only backing off when getting punched in the face.
So again feel free to correct if I'm missing something, but wouldn't the better solution be to come up with a new way to allocate space? Perhaps a packet every so often that says "Hi, how much bandwidth may I have please?" which the server or node would reply "You can have X" and then everyone wouldn't be trying to slam and your route would be based on which gives you the largest X.
So maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to be a choice of that or rip every buffer out of everything from the home modem on up. Considering even the el crappo motherboards are gigabit now, and even the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) home routers have decent sized buffers on them this would seem like a more doable solution. Because while the "slam and back off" method probably worked really well in the past I just don't see having millions of people trying to slam their way to the head of the line as the most efficient way to utilize a limited resource, and no matter how big a pipe you have it is still just that, limited.
I'd say it is more of a meh. I mean c'mon it has a fricking Atom CPU! even if they went dual core Atom that is just double shitty. Seriously look at how many games like L4D already will pound the hell out of an older Pentium Dual or even a Core2Duo, and you're gonna build a gaming laptop on the Atom? Maybe it is because the screens are gonna suck serious money as well as power, but why cripple your device with such a shitty CPU?
I could see it if they went with Bulldozer or a ULV I series with an NV GPU, but you know that anything more heavy than WoW is gonna make that thing into a slideshow. An in order CPU like Atom was made for web browser and even that it does slow, it sure as hell ain't no gamer chip. Hell I've seen a 6 year old Pentium just spank an Atom, so you know any really modern games would just choke, much less the games coming down the line. The only numbers I could fine for the Atom dual is here and it is a bad joke. Hell the AMD Fusion at 500MHz slower just stomps it, and nobody would think of calling the 1GHz Fusion a gamer's chip, so what were they thinking?
As your link shows this is why I think using the silos is so bloody brilliant. Thanks to the SALT treaties we have literally thousands of these old missile silos lying abandoned across the country, most will be sold for dirt cheap (I actually helped my dad wire one for a guy that turned one into a house, only cost him 30k for the fully outfitted silo) or even wasted by being filled in if nobody buys them. The biggest expense for an underground facility is ALWAYS the massive digging effort, and this is already done for you so all you really have to do is bring in the gear.
So it really does seem like a no brainer to me. Like in your link one simply puts metal grates across the silo at the different levels, there is already a pretty big and elaborate infrastructure built in for the workers (kitchen, sleeping quarters, etc) and the lower levels on those silos stay pretty damned cool, I can tell you that from experience. Then you add in the fact the insurance would be INCREDIBLY cheap (after all, who is gonna be able to blast into one of those mothers?) and with the economy being down the amount of breaks the local government hands out would be sweet, it just seems like an easy deal. Hell you could probably even get decent tax breaks for being green by using natural cooling methods. Seems like a win/win to me and if I could get a hold of the startup capital I'd jump on it in a heartbeat. Seems like a license to print money where I'm sitting, because with the lower operational costs one could undercut the competition and STILL make a healthy profit!
While I agree with part of what you are saying, on the other hand we should be careful not to reward shitty design by making it criminal to exploit it. I mean look at DMCA where ANY encryption, even something as lame and completely bogus as ROT13 could possibly get you busted for "circumventing" it. Or that guy being sued for accessing the hockey game even though they put it on a server with NO authentication methods that would let anyone that knew or found the IP address to help themselves.
And finally let us not forget this is casinos we are talking about, places where the odds are so badly stacked against the player that if anyone that didn't have the blessing of the state tried to set up a similar gaming operation they would be busted for fraud, and rightly so. The last thing we need is to give them an excuse to not to have to pay out what little they do pay without having to go through a bunch of legal hoops. After all as another poster pointed out that actually worked on slot machine code all the code is shitty so one could argue that ANY significant payout could be attributed to "software glitch" and with piss poor badly managed code that would be a legitimate argument.
The odds are already so badly stacked on most of them games you'd have better odds at 3 Card Monty, so I'm just worried about setting a precedent that gives them even BETTER than the already overwhelming advantage they already have. Hell I'd already argue most of those games are legalized robbery, do we really need to let them slide for not bothering to have decent code written as well?
Oh Please, the only troll or shill here is YOU! You say they need "email and collaboration"? Okay sparky show me a single solution that does EVERYTHING that Exchange+Sharepoint does. Not some half baked bullshit from a dozen companies but ONE solution from ONE vendor that DOES IT ALL.
But you can't do that, and you know why? Because despite what FOSSies think Linux IS, WAS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a server OS no matter how much crap you try to duct tape on top. why do you think the big boys like Red Hat and IBM don't screw around with desktop in any meaningful way? Because it isn't worth the effort to try to shoehorn Linux in a job it wasn't built for.
Web servers, DB servers? Linux is top notch. I would have NO PROBLEM recommending Linux in those roles. Trying to control email, collaboration, group policy, and make it all play nice with Windows? Bullshit, it ain't gonna happen. Oh sure you can pile a bunch of half assed solutions all duct taped together, but it will NEVER equal the ease of use and fine grained control you have with Windows desktop + Exchange + AD. Hell I can teach my 15 year old everything he needs to control a Windows AD setup in less than a month.
And as for your "Google does 90%"? Bullshit. Have you ever used Google Docs? It is crap. It is fine for making simple docs online, that's it. Hell I'd take AbiWord over Google Docs,and I sure as hell wouldn't want to try to run an enterprise on AbiWord. And just like the way FOSSies never accept it is never Windows that locks in the user it is the bazillion custom apps that have ZERO equivalent on Linux, it is NEVER the "mythical 90%" that everyone supposedly has that is the problem, it is the last 10% that often ties into something critical like those dozen VBA apps that are required for day to day operations.
So before you start sling words like troll and shill, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and try doing a massive conversion from one OS to another completely different OS and get back to me. Because I have, and believe me the bullshit and pain and costs and training and the million other issues that come and take a bite out of you ass often make it about 1000% MORE expensive than just going with what works with what they have. You want to call it lock in, or inertia, fine and dandy. Why don't YOU call them up and explain how blowing those extra millions of $$$ is "worth it" to be "free as in freedom!".
I think you are missing the point, and why this could really be a threat: Think "persistent user experience". imagine your average guy, we'll call him Bob. Bob gets up, gets ready for work, and before he walks out the door he pops his Win 8 tablet out of the cradle where it has not only charged but loaded the data he was working on and maybe even the morning paper as well if they don't have wifi on the train.
Bob gets to work and he either sets the tablet in a cradle or uses Bluetooth and the data he was working on is beamed into the apps he is used to like Word, Excel, Access, etc. If he works on the floor he simply inputs his data into the familiar Windows apps and when he walks by the bosses desk on the way out it is all shot into the bosses PC all nice and neat. Bob will also be able to stream movies and shows to/from his desktop at home thanks to the deals MSFT is making with content providers. Bob goes home and it all syncs up with no tweaking from Bob, and he plops on the couch and can surf and control everything from his Wintab.
If this was 5 years ago I'd be right there laughing with you, but with Windows 7 and how nicely it networks and plays with other devices like the x360 it seems MSFT is finally starting to get persistent user experience. The user must NEVER have to fiddle with layers of submenus or pages of checkboxes, which has always been MSFT's big weakness in the past. They seem to finally get KISS and do the setup work FOR the user, which means if they have everything just plug into each other, such as MSFT cloud into WinPhone into WinTablet into WinDesktop? They already have the desktop and a good chunk of the living room with the X360. They manage to tie the rest into that then yeah, this thing could sell.
If it is one thing we should have learned over the years is that MSFT always starts lame, but then they learn and get better if they choose to stay in the market. Just look at the Xbox. Who would have thought they would ever beat Sony in the console wars? I sure as hell didn't. I would say this is the one advantage they have over Apple and Google in this arena, because MSFT can tie it all together nicely with the OS everybody already uses and the X360 which is in millions of homes. Of course never underestimate the ability of MSFT to do something stupid ala the Kin, but to count them out without even seeing the product is more than a little premature.
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Bah you CAN do that with a PC, and at a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than those old consoles! Right now I have a closet FULL of dead consoles...two PS 1, a SNES, a Sega CD, A Genesis, and an original Xbox that works but it is too much of a PITA to mod the thing. Trying to find games and parts? A PITA unless I wwant to deal with the "fun" that is the ripoff land known as eBay.
Compare that to the PC side. I have a pair of 733MHz PCs that dual boot Win98 and WinXP. Cost? Nothing for the machines themselves, as I found a school that was doing an upgrade and talked them out of the machines for giving them a hand on a lazy afternoon. If I were to have bought them? Maybe $20 off of Craigslist. Cost to turn them into gamer PCs for old games? I paid $10 for an MX400 64MB and $15 for an FX5200 128MB, both PCI. If anything short of the motherboard goes? Prices are so cheap for things like HDDs and RAM it is a joke to even mention them. Hell even if I blow a cap I got a neighbor that will happily change caps for me in return for keeping his PCs going. Added a couple of Soundblasters I got for a whole $0.50 at a yard sale, and one $20 4 port KVM I bought for work.
So as you can see for BOTH machines I have a whole $50 invested, and not only do they play every single game I've thrown at them from the DOS era up to around 2001 thanks to being able to boot into DOS from Win98, but they have plenty of other uses as well. For example when the youngest had his PC blow a PSU I was able to hand the MX400 one as a spare until I could get his new PSU in, and the FX5200 one isn't even in my possession ATM as my GF is having to live 2 hours away to help with the family farm after her dad had a heart attack and so she has it as a spare in case anything goes wrong while she is up on the mountain.
But with those machines I am already able to play ANY consoles OR PC game up to the N64 via emulation, and even with the original controllers if my youngest wouldn't have snatched my USB console adapter for his PC. Thanks to the dual core and 4850 he got for Xmas (his brother wanted and got a laser printer) he can play ANY console or PC game up to and including Gamecube via emulation, and it is a hell of a lot easier than dealing with scratched discs or switching consoles around due to limited TV connections and space. In most places one can simply walk down the street if you want an old PC to game on and find one on the curb that just needs a wipe and reinstall, or simply spread the word and you'll end up with more than you can deal with. I have friends keep an eye out for PCs for me at junk and yard sales and the MOST I've ever paid is a whole $10 for a PC. Frankly there are just so many no longer wanted desktops the pickings are good and cheap.
So frankly unless you are living in a closet there really isn't a point in emulation for older games, not when so many good used machines can be had for nothing. There are plenty of places one can get a two port KVM for under $10 (such as this) and I can add a speaker set that plugs into a CD ROM slot for a whole $8. Even if you are short on space something like that 733MHz in a SFF that sits under a monitor is easy to find and again cheap. And as for lasting? Lets see, my first 100MHz PC is STILL running, now as a DOS 3 CNC controller, with my 233MHz running as a backup, my 1GHz Celeron is running an XP Lite install with a cousin as a Nettop, I am typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron I got for $40 off a build from a client, and my last 4 P4s are with my oldest, my youngest, my mom, and my GF. Out of those I had to replace a grand total of one mobo and one PSU, both of which were again cheap.
So again it really isn't hard to put together a PC that WILL run all older software, and console games as well. My advice from experience would be to add a cheap soundblaster (which the site I linked to above has them for a whole $2) along with a cheap AGP or PCI GPU, any older Radeon or GForc
Have you tried unlocking any cores yet? That is the one thing I haven't tried I'm really debating. The trouble is while the 7550 dual I have in the drawer is no doubt a 4 core with two switched off, the only boards I see with selective unlocking at cheap prices is the Nvidia 6050 based boards which is a shitty GPU. On the other hand the AMD based boards have a nice HD4200, which for my GF whose idea of "gaming" is Farmville style flash games along with the occasional CSI game, having flash accelerated would be nice. Of course having a triple or quad to hand her instead of a dual would be nice too...ARGH!
Talk about a PITA, but it is about time I got my GF off the P4 she has been running and a nice custom built box would make a perfect early BDay gift. I guess I'll just end up flipping a quarter and picking whichever wins the toss. As long as it is a dual core with a couple of GB of RAM and XP she'll be a happy camper anyway, and I have that 7550 and an XP Pro license just sitting here unused. But I'd love to hear if you had any luck trying unlock and how much of a PITA it is, because if it is easy sailing I suppose I could always pick up a cheapo Radeon card for her, or maybe even pick up that 4850 I spotted cheap and give her my HD4650.
But I agree that anybody buying duals, especially Intel ones, are just nuts with triple and quads so cheap. If I didn't have the 7550 already sitting there I wouldn't even think of less than a triple, and the only reason I picked up the Pentium Ds is that my kids PCs are old 775 boards that won't take bigger and at $30 each they were a dirt cheap upgrade. Hey if you've got any older boards you'd like to upgrade cheap let me recommend these guys. Fast service, cheap prices, they were even nice enough to call me after the order just to make sure I hadn't pushed a wrong button because I ordered two of the same chip. Really nice folks and the chips were perfect. With prices that low I'll probably max out the CPUs on all my older machines while I can, my family don't slam PCs hard so they'll last them for years anyway.
Too hard to aim on a bouncing boat, you'd need SEAL guys that have had lots of training, and they ain't cheap. A better idea would be to just give each boat a Minigun. We here in the US crank those suckers out because we mount them on damned near anything, they can throw a minimum of 2000 rounds of hot lead and tracer ammo down range in under a minute, hell your grandma could hit the target with THAT much firepower! And they shoot 7.62mm, so it wouldn't even be expensive ammo wise. Not to mention it would make those pirates sure as hell think twice about waving those AK47s and RPGs about.
So I'd say this is one time where technology actually CAN solve the problem, and do so cheaply. A single mini on each side of the boat is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying ransoms to thugs, and would lower the insurance they have to pay for the boats as well. Anybody that doesn't answer repeated hails gets a first burst across the bow, they keep coming you let them have it. Put minis on the boats I bet you wouldn't hear of a single boat snatching after that.
Watching Putin I'd say the man wouldn't mind having the old USSR back, after all Russians have been traditionally unhappy without a "buffer zone" on their western flank, and rightly so. And if Putin shut off the oil and natural gas going to the EU I have a feeling they would STFU. If we sweeten the pot by offering heavy trade with the new USSR and even tell them if they would like part of the Pacific it would be all theirs? Russia is out or on Team USA. Japan has too much on its plate with NK to get involved, which leaves just the EU because as I'll explain China won't say shit.
And the EU has been depending on the USA through NATO for so long if America took its ball and went home frankly their weaponry ain't impressive. Hell England is going to be down to ONE aircraft carrier, the USA? 11 and adding. Mirage and Harrier VS F18 Super Hornet? Not really much of a contest there. Pretty much the only real equalizer the EU would have is nukes, and they wouldn't dare because the USA has enough of those to carpet bomb the entire planet a couple of times over. Say what you want about the USA but we ALWAYS have the nicest war toys, bar none. And how much of the EU arsenal is American tech? Gonna kinda be hard to keep those running for any length of time. That leaves our good friend China.
China WANTS Africa...full stop. The Chinese need living space, the Chinese need resources, both of which Africa has plenty of. Also the entire African military put together wouldn't be shit compared to the Chinese army, it would be a cake walk. Add in the fact that China has a piss poor record on human rights, which means they won't give a shit what the USA does as long as we are willing to trade, and if we offer them some nice weapons tech to sweeten the deal? Yeah they are either on Team USA or sitting on the side, either way no threat there.
So all that leaves in the western EU. Germany? With no NATO to check Russia and after losing two world wars I can't see them being too thrilled at jumping into a third, hell they would probably be too busy trying to get more of the EU under its own banner than dealing with the USA. Italy? Meh, not much to worry about there, they might maybe help the UK/France, but they certainly wouldn't tip any scales. France? Has too many internal troubles, might sanction and rattle a few sabers, but if push came to shove I don't see them doing much.
That leaves the UK, which frankly would be starting off in a seriously bad way. As the wolf packs showed cutting supplies off to an island can seriously bleed it to death and the USA has one of the largest SSBN fleets out there. And usually if the USA is in bad shape the UK isn't doing much better, so if we offered to share the spoils they might not even say boo.
So as I said, it really isn't the USA that needs to be worried, it is everyone else. All it would take is a Xenophobic leader pushing a "USA First!" agenda to get the populace to jump on the bandwagon, and the American populace has traditionally been kinda xenophobic to start with, just see the distrust and hatred for anybody crossing the border illegally for a small taste. Just because the USA has played nice in the past does NOT mean we'll play nice in the future, especially when the leaders are looking at a large population barely above starving and wanting somebodies head on a platter. Easier to point your finger at someone and say "It is THAT GUY that caused the problems!" than to fix your own troubles, as the short German found out in the 30s.
The ONLY reason you have the populace placated ATM is because mommy government is paying them via a dozen different programs, but the Fed can't keep cranking the presses forever. Sooner or later (I vote within the decade) the excrement IS gonna hit the bladed cooling device, and then we shall see. My guess is first will come isolationism, followed by "USA First!" jingoism, followed by possible expansion. I'd vote Mexico falling first, as frankly it wouldn't take much to convince the people that they are too lawless and the b
I'm not the one you are replying to, but I just had to answer your "what would happen to you if America never recovers" bit. Honestly? I don't think it is us in the USA that would need to worry, it would be the other poor bastards that should worry. I mean look at the facts: You've got a country with a whole shitload of weaponry, a serious "Yay war!" mentality, and plenty of raw materials. Frankly it wouldn't take much of an "El Presidente" if the USA stays in the shitter to talk us into...ohhh...saying taking the entirety of South America? Especially if you have a ten year depression (which I believe is VERY possible) so you have a populace happy for "bread and jobs" and a seriously bad attitude from feeling like losers. Hmmm...seems like I've heard this one before? Something about a short guy and Poland?
Seriously who would stand up to the USA? Especially if they told Russia whatever they wanted to do in Europe was cool by us and told China "hey, have fun in Africa!"? who, Brazil? Argentina? A couple of well placed surgical strikes and that problem go bye bye. So I'd say that it isn't the USA that should be worried about the US staying in the shitter, it should be the rest of the planet. Because as the world should have learned the last time we had a major long term economic meltdown having a country with a shitload of industrial capacity and raw materials (which despite so much outsourcing weapon capacity is one thing the USA has a LOT of) stay on the skids for a long period of time NEVER ends well. Don't say it couldn't happen either, because we may end up with Caribou Barbie as president in 2012 so ANYTHING is possible. And frankly it wouldn't take much to get the USA in a nice war happy mood, especially if it starts with factories opening up. Hell with so many of the population worried about even having a job tomorrow frankly it wouldn't take much to get them to sign off on ANYTHING that promises plenty of bread and jobs. Scary as hell, but then again I doubt anybody in 1932 thought things would end up as fucked as they did.
And yours are frankly bullshit. I watched a big bust in Mexico not a week ago on CNN. You know what kind of guns were lying on the ground? Fully auto AK47s, enough grenades to blow up a couple of city blocks, several RPGs, hell the closest thing they had to "handguns" were some custom fully auto 9mm. So tell me, oh wise one, where do you buy fully auto machine guns in the USA hmmm? Answer: You don't, it is red herring bullshit by those that wish to ban guns.
It is very simple: with the drugs come the money, with the money comes the power, with the power comes any damned thing you want including all the quality Russian military weapons you can carry. There is a damned good reason why every battle against the cartels you see bad guys with AK47s and it is precisely because the USA DON'T SELL AUTOS to civilians and the Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, etc don't care if you got $$$.
So please, tell us another one. If you'd like I'll be happy to post about a dozen links to Mexican drug busts and you can count the AKs and grenades for yourself. And unless you are gonna turn the USA into a police state with towers frankly anybody can make a single shot zip gun or shotgun. The reason you don't see those? Because criminals have NO problem getting real guns and believe me your average felon isn't going through a background check, he is getting them from Mr Dealer, who can have a load of cheap Russian guns just as easily as he has that load of smack dropped off. Or do you think they are growing Opium in the ghettos? ALL banning does is take guns away from the citizens while doing jack and squat about criminals. Like I said if they're going to rob or kill someone feel free to tack on a weapons charge, see how much they care.
Give me $1000 and ONE hour, I'll come back with ANYTHING you want INCLUDING one of several choices of guns. Do you think that will change one damned bit if you pass some sort of law? Please! I repeat you've been trying that with dope for nearly a century and it is a hell of a lot farther from the golden triangle than to South America. It is ONLY the law abiding citizens that jump through your flaming hoop gun laws NOW, you think further hoops will do jack shit?
I agree. And for the "ban guns" advocates out there? I hate to break the news to ya but criminals don't follow laws which is why they are called criminals and not boy scouts. I can buy the finest crank, coke, smack, hell 16 year old girls, thanks to the giant leaking border that is less than a day from where I live. You think it would be ANY TROUBLE to add guns to that list?
ALL YOU DO with your stupid "lets ban guns!" crap is take them away from the people and give them to the criminals because if I'm looking to rape, rob, and kill I don't really think I'm gonna give a shit if you tack on a weapons possession charge. Where I live you see thieves break into businesses but not many home invasions. In fact it is almost unheard of, why? Because you might get your balls blown off by the owner of the home, that's why. Take away guns and the dealers will just have a nice selection to go along with the smack and coke, and it will be open season on anybody else. You've tried the "lets ban!" bullshit for about a century with dope, hows that working out?
Besides most guys have the ultimate "cleaners" and they are called nephews. When my uncle passed he had left instructions for me and a couple of my cousins to go and "pack his things away" so his wife wouldn't have to deal. When we got to his porn stash I simply handed it to one of the cousins who wanted it, he packed it in a box and carried it away. His wife was never the wiser and didn't have to deal with putting his things away which was easier on her.
If you really don't have a single relative in your family you can't trust to "put things away" when you are gone I'd say you have bigger problems than them finding your porn stash. And as for TFA it just makes me happy I'm the only nerd in my family, which means I won't have to have that ignorant bullshit as a "legacy" of my death. You'd have to be some kind of self involved narcissist asshole to want to leave some giant "Look at me!" bling bling web bullshit after you have gone.
Oh no my friend, you are thinking MUCH too small! Imagine the ULTIMATE troll hack, one that would go down in history for all time! I am of course talking about replacing one of Disney's primetime product sales dressed as a show with....dum dum dum....a 3D Goatse!
All across the land one would hear all the little childrens in a unified voice say "Mooooom, there's a GIANT BUTTHOLE on the TV!" followed by all the dads saying "What, did the president interrupt programming again?". Oh it would be a classic and go down in history! For bonus points one could have the 3D Goatse bounce to the beat of "Never gonna give you up"!
As for TFA, who didn't see this coming? This is one of the reasons I say we need NAT on IPV6. Because otherwise we are gonna have tons of CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) consumer junk, all of which will be plugged into the Internet and most of which will have squat in the ability to update or patch, all just sitting there ripe for the picking. It'll make those XP SP2 machines still running on the net look like hardened BSD installs.
So I ask you, what better way to dramatically prove to the masses the current "plug it all into the net!" idea is flawed than by giving them a giant Goatse?
Uhhh...didn't read past the first sentence, did ya friend? Otherwise you might have noticed this part: I was a lifelong Intel man but after all the payola came out I switched to only AMD for myself and my customers . So it is kinda hard to tell me to "switch to AMD" when BOTH the boxes I use AND the boxes I sell are ALL AMD. Hell my oldest even got a nice Turion X2 netbook for college. It does all his schoolwork and games nicely when he doesn't have homework, and at $599 the only competition was from "Intel IGP" machines locally. Yuck!.
That still don't change the fact that unless you are just sticking it in a board that can't support anything else (like those 775 Pentium Ds I picked up cheap) then buying dual cores is dumb when you can get triples and quads for so cheap. Even if you don't need the power now you may need it down the road and then not be able to get the chip (as I found with a board that I had in 99 that would take the high end P3 that I waited too long on) and end up boned. With C&Q even the quads sip power when not having work to do but when you do have a job for them such as converting a video you'll be damned glad you got the extra cores.
But buying dual cores nowadays unless you are trying for insane OC speeds thanks to having the larger die for cooling, or going for a cheap shot that may/may not unlock, it just seems silly to be building duallies anymore, especially on the AMD side. Just look again at this chart and notice how few dual cores are on it. The better value nowadays is triple and quad, and by a pretty good margin.
My last dual core build will be this AMD X2 7550 I have sitting in a drawer from my upgrade to a quad that I will end up building into a cheap netbox for my GF. Considering the hardest thing she does on a machine is plays Farmville? I think it is safe to say it will be overkill. But even then I'm gonna get a cheapo core unlocking board just to see if I can get a stable X3 or X4 out of it. If I can get her a free upgrade, why the hell not?
Or people like me that have to clean up the mess when their buggy as fuck DRM shits itself and dies, breaking shit all the way? Why don't YOU try cleaning up the mess that you get with Starforce+Safedisc+SecuROM, sometimes ending up with multiple versions of each because the older version refuses to hand off to the newer? Do you have ANY idea how many DVD and CD burners of customers I've had to shitcan because those stupid DRM schemas would throw a drive into PIO and the people wouldn't realize and bring it into to me until the motor had burnt? Oh and don't forget those lovely Sony rootkits that I STILL run into occasionally thanks to those "CDs" still floating around like the clap.
Sorry MR AC Troll, but there are plenty of us that buy our media that hate DRM with a passion. It is buggy, badly written, ALWAYS sucks up resources, will default on the side of SCREW YOU, but here is a guy (warning, language NSFW) who sums up better than I ever could why DRM is ultimately completely useless bullshit. And please not the HUGE PILES of legitimate media all around him, meaning that is THEIR CUSTOMER they are pissing on. Enjoy MR AC!
But isn't the i3 a duallie? Why would you want a duallie when AMD quads are so cheap? Unless of course you are a rabid OCer as I heard the i3 can crank, but then again the AMD duallies can usually unlock, so I'd call it a wash.
I'd say the big problems with Intel is they are too damned high and they have too many sockets ATM. If you look at this chart of top 50 price/performance the only i series comes in all the way down at #27. I was a lifelong Intel man but after all the payola came out I switched to only AMD for myself and my customers and you know what? I can't really tell the difference. Lets be honest, most of us aren't gonna be slamming the living shit out of our CPUs to be able to tell that 15% difference in performance and the price of the CPU plus motherboard is great enough on most of Intel's good chips one can really outfit a nice box for a hell of a lot less. And my customers are sure happy with $450 triples and $500 quad core machines delivered to their door.
So while I've got nothing against Intel users, hell I've got a couple of 775 boxes I just upgraded to Pentium D chips I picked up dirt cheap, after the payola, rigging their compiler, the just announced DRM, even using dirty tricks against the OLPC, Intel just doesn't seem like a company I would feel right about supporting ATM. I'm a firm believer in putting your money where your mouth is and where your beliefs lie and just like I won't buy Sony after the rootkit and the screwing of PS3 owners I just couldn't in good conscience support a company that has played so dirty lately, even for a 15% performance gain.
Now be perfectly honest: Did you not buy from them because of philosophy, or because it cost money? Because despite what Linux users say about wanting things like gaming every time I see someone actually try to support Linux by catering to them, like Cedega or Loki, they end up going tits up. From where I have been sitting as an interested but on the sidelines observer, the only way to actually make money with Linux is to 1.-Sell support contracts to corps, ala Red Hat or 2.-Embed it into a device and sell that, ala every Router out there.
So why should all these companies that currently make Windows only consumer programs, like games and Photoshop and the nice picture app that came with the camera you gave grandma for Xmas, actually spend all that money to give Linux users product if they just don't buy squat? Because from where I'm sitting despite RMS saying it is about "free as in freedom" the only stuff I see popular on Linux is "free as in beer".
So answer honestly Linux guys, how much money have you spent on the software that is currently installed on your PC? Because hiring coders, constantly having to deal with the changes in the kernel, this I'm sure costs serious money. I've probably got at least a grand sunk into the software I use not counting the money I paid for Windows, and having that money sunk gives me motivation to learn to get the most out of it as well as that money motivating the developers to support me by writing more apps. Where is the motivation in Linux? Because you can't feed your family or pay your mortgage with pats on the back, and unless you are selling to corps that seems to me all you get from writing for Linux.
And while Wine is nice lets be honest: The average Joe isn't gonna jump through all those hoops trying to get the Windows software they need, which as I just pointed out has very little reason to come out natively on Linux, to run correctly. So like it or not you kinda need companies like Cedega that make it simple for the masses. So how is Linux ever gonna get the apps and the OOTB ease of use that the masses require, if one can't make a living supporting consumers on which is easily arguably the more difficult platform to write for?
I think the bigger danger is giving a country who ran the most notorious bio weapons labs in history, also known as the Biopreparat access to God knows what that haven't been seen in the environment in 4 million plus years. Hell I wouldn't trust the USA with 4 million years old possible biological weapons, and Putin is even less cuddly than the USA.
Oh Dear Lord, would that not be just wonderful? I always believed in the old "fighting fire with marshmallows" and to show the stupidity of DRM in that fashion would just be oh so delicious!
I mean can you imagine someone hacking the DRM and instead of the latest Disney excuse to sell toys all of them got a nice 3d Goatse? Can't you hear all those little children now: "Mom there is a GIANT BUTTHOLE on the screen!"
Bingo! We have a winner! For those that say "its too hard!" then how do you explain the absolutely obvious warez on Rapidshare? Pick ANY rapidshare search, your choice, and type in the name of current movies, what do you see? Name of movie, name of date, name of resolution, etc. At least a dozen for Inception when I just checked.
Now are you gonna seriously say finding THAT is too hard? Really? Because if so here is a nice bridge you might be interested in. It isn't that "rapidshare is trying and failing" it is "rapidshare obviously doesn't give a shit" or there would at least be a token effort into hiding the files. Hell my grandma could snatch the latest movies with rapidshare!
But Rapidshare doesn't pass what I call the "Napster Test". That is, if ALL illegal content were to disappear tomorrow, would they still be profitable? I think we ALL know the answer to that, and it is a big NO. They do absolutely nothing to even give the barest token attempt at blocking anything infringing, because it would hurt their business model. You can share "L4D V1 Cracked" and if they get a DMCA you can put up "L4D V1.1 Cracked" and they simply don't care. And your SAME argument could have been used by Audiogalaxy and Napster, but it didn't fly did it? And there is a BIG difference between having a decentralized service like BT and hosting the files like Rapidshare.
Now personally I think that the media companies should just set up game and video channels, where for X pe month you can have all you want DRM free. I also think trying to stop file sharing is like playing whack a mole and is a waste of time. But c'mon guys, Rapidshare? Who in the hell EVER uses Rapidshare for legit anything? Their whole business model is based on snatching content!
Hi MR AC! Word of advice? Buy a shitload of old boxes and have them ready, because machines THAT old WILL DIE HARD. That customer I had with the $75,000 CNC controller that requires DOS 3! (Yeah no shit, fricking DOS 3. Not 4, not 5, won't run on anything but DOS 3 and bare metal) I sold two boxes upfront and got another half a dozen, all with images of the "OS" and software loaded up which he picked up the tab for.
That way when the box this "mission critical" app is running on bites the farm you can just fire up one of the boxes in storage and switch it out. Boxes that old can be had for cheap but are getting harder to find, so do so now. Use the local paper or Craigslist if you have trouble finding any. I would also see if I could find any more of those ISA cards and buy them up. Sadly I looked for nearly a year and couldn't find any, so if that card goes tits up they will be SOL if my engineer buddy can't make them some sort of new interface. But like your sitch this little company could never afford to replace the machine, which is a computer controlled lathe that makes custom columns. Not exactly the kind of thing one finds on eBay cheap.
There is a couple of SERIOUS PROBLEMS with your comparison. One, you are talking about CPUs that were custom designed for gaming compared to an off the shelf in order Atom, and Two, You are talking about devices that had custom ultra low resource gaming OSes VS running Windows 7 plain Jane.
I'm sorry, but that is some pretty big fucking differences there tepples. That is like saying "A Cesna and an F16 are just alike, since their both planes" but if you put one against the other I don't think anybody here would want to be in the La Bamba plane, do you? And the reason those here say "Atom plays streaming video great!" is because it is often paired with something like this and allow me to QFT a piece from that article "Otherwise, Atom is a useless chip in HTPCs"
So I stand by my statement. Every single benchmark we have seen of Atom CPUs have shown us two things, One it was made to be REALLY cheap, and Two it was made to be REALLY low power. Now does anyone here actually associate really cheap and really low power with WINDOWS GAMING? Anyone? Beuller? Windows gaming never has been and never will be really cheap and really low power, not unless you consider Windows gaming to be Farmville.
Now someone can point out if this humble repair guy is wrong, but from what I read of TFA it sounds to me like TCP is the problem and not the buffers. What TCP is doing is slamming the network until it drops packets, and then using that to determine speed, correct? Doesn't sound like an efficient way to allocate resources when even grandma has a fat cable or DSL pipe. It would be like everyone trying to shove their way to the front of a line and only backing off when getting punched in the face.
So again feel free to correct if I'm missing something, but wouldn't the better solution be to come up with a new way to allocate space? Perhaps a packet every so often that says "Hi, how much bandwidth may I have please?" which the server or node would reply "You can have X" and then everyone wouldn't be trying to slam and your route would be based on which gives you the largest X.
So maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to be a choice of that or rip every buffer out of everything from the home modem on up. Considering even the el crappo motherboards are gigabit now, and even the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) home routers have decent sized buffers on them this would seem like a more doable solution. Because while the "slam and back off" method probably worked really well in the past I just don't see having millions of people trying to slam their way to the head of the line as the most efficient way to utilize a limited resource, and no matter how big a pipe you have it is still just that, limited.
I'd say it is more of a meh. I mean c'mon it has a fricking Atom CPU! even if they went dual core Atom that is just double shitty. Seriously look at how many games like L4D already will pound the hell out of an older Pentium Dual or even a Core2Duo, and you're gonna build a gaming laptop on the Atom? Maybe it is because the screens are gonna suck serious money as well as power, but why cripple your device with such a shitty CPU?
I could see it if they went with Bulldozer or a ULV I series with an NV GPU, but you know that anything more heavy than WoW is gonna make that thing into a slideshow. An in order CPU like Atom was made for web browser and even that it does slow, it sure as hell ain't no gamer chip. Hell I've seen a 6 year old Pentium just spank an Atom, so you know any really modern games would just choke, much less the games coming down the line. The only numbers I could fine for the Atom dual is here and it is a bad joke. Hell the AMD Fusion at 500MHz slower just stomps it, and nobody would think of calling the 1GHz Fusion a gamer's chip, so what were they thinking?
As your link shows this is why I think using the silos is so bloody brilliant. Thanks to the SALT treaties we have literally thousands of these old missile silos lying abandoned across the country, most will be sold for dirt cheap (I actually helped my dad wire one for a guy that turned one into a house, only cost him 30k for the fully outfitted silo) or even wasted by being filled in if nobody buys them. The biggest expense for an underground facility is ALWAYS the massive digging effort, and this is already done for you so all you really have to do is bring in the gear.
So it really does seem like a no brainer to me. Like in your link one simply puts metal grates across the silo at the different levels, there is already a pretty big and elaborate infrastructure built in for the workers (kitchen, sleeping quarters, etc) and the lower levels on those silos stay pretty damned cool, I can tell you that from experience. Then you add in the fact the insurance would be INCREDIBLY cheap (after all, who is gonna be able to blast into one of those mothers?) and with the economy being down the amount of breaks the local government hands out would be sweet, it just seems like an easy deal. Hell you could probably even get decent tax breaks for being green by using natural cooling methods. Seems like a win/win to me and if I could get a hold of the startup capital I'd jump on it in a heartbeat. Seems like a license to print money where I'm sitting, because with the lower operational costs one could undercut the competition and STILL make a healthy profit!
While I agree with part of what you are saying, on the other hand we should be careful not to reward shitty design by making it criminal to exploit it. I mean look at DMCA where ANY encryption, even something as lame and completely bogus as ROT13 could possibly get you busted for "circumventing" it. Or that guy being sued for accessing the hockey game even though they put it on a server with NO authentication methods that would let anyone that knew or found the IP address to help themselves.
And finally let us not forget this is casinos we are talking about, places where the odds are so badly stacked against the player that if anyone that didn't have the blessing of the state tried to set up a similar gaming operation they would be busted for fraud, and rightly so. The last thing we need is to give them an excuse to not to have to pay out what little they do pay without having to go through a bunch of legal hoops. After all as another poster pointed out that actually worked on slot machine code all the code is shitty so one could argue that ANY significant payout could be attributed to "software glitch" and with piss poor badly managed code that would be a legitimate argument.
The odds are already so badly stacked on most of them games you'd have better odds at 3 Card Monty, so I'm just worried about setting a precedent that gives them even BETTER than the already overwhelming advantage they already have. Hell I'd already argue most of those games are legalized robbery, do we really need to let them slide for not bothering to have decent code written as well?
Oh Please, the only troll or shill here is YOU! You say they need "email and collaboration"? Okay sparky show me a single solution that does EVERYTHING that Exchange+Sharepoint does. Not some half baked bullshit from a dozen companies but ONE solution from ONE vendor that DOES IT ALL.
But you can't do that, and you know why? Because despite what FOSSies think Linux IS, WAS, and ALWAYS WILL BE a server OS no matter how much crap you try to duct tape on top. why do you think the big boys like Red Hat and IBM don't screw around with desktop in any meaningful way? Because it isn't worth the effort to try to shoehorn Linux in a job it wasn't built for.
Web servers, DB servers? Linux is top notch. I would have NO PROBLEM recommending Linux in those roles. Trying to control email, collaboration, group policy, and make it all play nice with Windows? Bullshit, it ain't gonna happen. Oh sure you can pile a bunch of half assed solutions all duct taped together, but it will NEVER equal the ease of use and fine grained control you have with Windows desktop + Exchange + AD. Hell I can teach my 15 year old everything he needs to control a Windows AD setup in less than a month.
And as for your "Google does 90%"? Bullshit. Have you ever used Google Docs? It is crap. It is fine for making simple docs online, that's it. Hell I'd take AbiWord over Google Docs,and I sure as hell wouldn't want to try to run an enterprise on AbiWord. And just like the way FOSSies never accept it is never Windows that locks in the user it is the bazillion custom apps that have ZERO equivalent on Linux, it is NEVER the "mythical 90%" that everyone supposedly has that is the problem, it is the last 10% that often ties into something critical like those dozen VBA apps that are required for day to day operations.
So before you start sling words like troll and shill, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and try doing a massive conversion from one OS to another completely different OS and get back to me. Because I have, and believe me the bullshit and pain and costs and training and the million other issues that come and take a bite out of you ass often make it about 1000% MORE expensive than just going with what works with what they have. You want to call it lock in, or inertia, fine and dandy. Why don't YOU call them up and explain how blowing those extra millions of $$$ is "worth it" to be "free as in freedom!".
I think you are missing the point, and why this could really be a threat: Think "persistent user experience". imagine your average guy, we'll call him Bob. Bob gets up, gets ready for work, and before he walks out the door he pops his Win 8 tablet out of the cradle where it has not only charged but loaded the data he was working on and maybe even the morning paper as well if they don't have wifi on the train.
Bob gets to work and he either sets the tablet in a cradle or uses Bluetooth and the data he was working on is beamed into the apps he is used to like Word, Excel, Access, etc. If he works on the floor he simply inputs his data into the familiar Windows apps and when he walks by the bosses desk on the way out it is all shot into the bosses PC all nice and neat. Bob will also be able to stream movies and shows to/from his desktop at home thanks to the deals MSFT is making with content providers. Bob goes home and it all syncs up with no tweaking from Bob, and he plops on the couch and can surf and control everything from his Wintab.
If this was 5 years ago I'd be right there laughing with you, but with Windows 7 and how nicely it networks and plays with other devices like the x360 it seems MSFT is finally starting to get persistent user experience. The user must NEVER have to fiddle with layers of submenus or pages of checkboxes, which has always been MSFT's big weakness in the past. They seem to finally get KISS and do the setup work FOR the user, which means if they have everything just plug into each other, such as MSFT cloud into WinPhone into WinTablet into WinDesktop? They already have the desktop and a good chunk of the living room with the X360. They manage to tie the rest into that then yeah, this thing could sell.
If it is one thing we should have learned over the years is that MSFT always starts lame, but then they learn and get better if they choose to stay in the market. Just look at the Xbox. Who would have thought they would ever beat Sony in the console wars? I sure as hell didn't. I would say this is the one advantage they have over Apple and Google in this arena, because MSFT can tie it all together nicely with the OS everybody already uses and the X360 which is in millions of homes. Of course never underestimate the ability of MSFT to do something stupid ala the Kin, but to count them out without even seeing the product is more than a little premature.