But how stable will it be when the HD6970 uses both an extra 50w AND a different pin connection than a HD6950. The 6970 uses an 8 pin and a 6, the HD6950 uses a dual 6 connector setup. Can dual PCIe connectors pull the 250w load that the HD6970 requires? This isn't like some Athlon X3 where the only thing you have to do is flip a switch, the other chip pulls more wattage at load and there is no telling if there are other parts besides the connector pin set that they have changed between the cards. Since both cards are over $300 and I'm sure the BIOS flash kills the warranty that is sure a lot of "ifs" there.
Nope. You missed the part where I said "whitebox" which are by definition PCs made in places like "Joe's house of computers" and many other mom&pop shops where they have no money to afford Windows bulk licenses (which last I heard to get the bulk rates you have to buy something like 15,000 at a clip). I used to work as a "hired gun" tech for many of the shops in the state capital and one of the reasons I stopped doing that was being handed some burnt "Razr1911" disc at every shop and being expected to install it.
I even went to a job interview once that went like this: "You know how to setup and run Windows and Linux servers right?" Sure do, not a problem. What do you need? "I want you to set it up so all the machines that we sell will check for updates with us instead of checking with Windows update". Why do you need that? "So we can start selling machines with this" and he hands me a "Razr1911 Vista Ultimate No Activation" burnt DVD. Needless to say I walked out.
So don't count on boxes coming with Windows. Tigerdirect and Newegg aren't selling tens of thousands of those cheap barebones kits to DIYers, I'm willing to bet my last dollar a good 60%-75% of those are going to places like "Bob's PC Hut" and nearly all of them are having something like "Windows 7 all versions No Activation Shareconnector" put on them. Hell in all my years I've heard of exactly ONE mom&pop get busted for hot Windows, and he was also selling hot sat chips and counterfeit DVDs. And when you figure an OEM copy of Windows will add $100 to the price using non legit will immediately let them undercut the competition.
Okay, I'll bite: Why do adverts have artistic and literary value? It is because they let us in on the mindset of the average person of the time, which is of course where most ads are aimed. Look at that old I believe 50s print ad that shows a man taking his wife over his knee for buying the wrong coffee, or the 60s and 70s ads that chastised black women for having "bad hair" if they didn't look like a brown Barbie doll. Hell look at many ads of today which are so rampant with consumerism and greed they make the ads in "They Live" seem tame.
I would say ads had an artistic and literary value because they give us a glimpse into the zeitgeist of the time when they were created. Sure it has been distorted through the lens of Madison Avenue, but because the vast majority of ads are trying not to offend their potential customers it gives a pretty good indication of what was/is acceptable at the time.
So while you hating them is just fine, hell I have adblock installed in Comodo Dragon as we speak, I can also see why some would like them. I myself love to look through classic ads just to see how much things have changed. I mean take the 1940s war bonds and other propaganda ads. There you have some of the most blatant racism you have ever seen, but nobody even batted an eye. Can you imagine if the USA tried to sell bonds to pay for Iraq with "Let's crush the Camel Jockeys!" and get away with it? Not bloody likely.
So while I personally find the new ads irritating there are reasons one could enjoy them without being a glutton for pain. One may simply want to get a feel for what is the "in" thing, or to compare the different techniques that Madison Avenue tries to sway you. Hell they may even just like catchy jingles which is one thing the admen have always excelled at. I would say both the love and hate crowd can have legitimate arguments in this one.
I'm sorry, but there ain't enough sarcasm in the whole damned planet to make that shrew even lukewarm, even if you downed PGA since Xmas eve. I mean...damn. Just seeing that woman naked would probably cause this reaction!
As for TFA, Ethanol has always been nothing but a bad joke, same with HFCS. Corn is one of the, if not the absolute worst uses for land when you figure in the amount of food energy you get out, yet it has been subsidized so damned heavily all you see here in the south is corn as far as the eye can see. If you want to know why the poor are overweight look no further, as anything that isn't filled with HFCS is much more expensive thanks to our tax dollars going to the mega farms. And as a fuel it is a mechanics best friend, as it trashes motors like you wouldn't believe.
If anything this just proves to me how distorted everything has become, and how that are always talking about "the free market" are just talking out their collective asses. There hasn't been a free market in decades, if there ever was one to begin with. And good luck getting congress critters to do anything but pander. Is there anybody here that thinks because the repubs got elected anything will change, other than the donor list? It is gonna take the USA hitting rock bottom before anything gets done, and I give us 10 years, 15 tops before that happens. The whole damned economy is nothing but a shell game, where we are all supposed to sell "services" to each other while the money heads overseas as fast as the feds can print it. Perot talked of the "giant sucking sound" but thanks to the fed printing money we've been able to cover up how little is coming in compared to going out, but the magic money train can't last forever.
My oldest would have to be building an entire PC out of one of my "junkers" to save and restore an entire DOS 3 OS. At the shop I was working at the time this guy comes in in a panic and says 'Please tell me you have a machine that will run this and know how to set it up?" and he pulls out this big ass old ISA card. It turns out his dad owns a big lumber company and they had this big contract that required some custom columns as part of the deal. Wouldn't you know it, the first time junior talks his dad into taking a vacation and letting him be in charge the computer that controls the lathe that makes the columns shits itself and dies. Now this thing was older than dirt and from what I found out later these machines cost anywhere from 75k UP, and naturally the company that made it had been out of business damned near 15 years, so good luck finding a way to upgrade.
So when Doug the boss tells the guy "We don't have anything that old on hand, I can get you one in about a week" the poor kid looked like he was gonna cry. He had been to every shop in town and got told the same thing and the job had to be DONE in 4 days, or goodbye big juicy contract. The kid knew that any chance he had to take over the business was going up in smoke faster than that old 10MHz Intel that had been running that lathe. So needless to say I thought the kid was gonna drop dead from a heart attack right there when I looked over from my spot in the back and said "Hey, I think I got a couple of boxes that'll run that at home." The kid was like "I'll pay, extra, overtime, whatever, but I HAVE TO HAVE it ASAP!" So I swung by my house while the kid waited there ready to crap his pants, because he was sure I'd come back and say I was mistaken, but no. I have always been a pack rat and can't stand throwing out working gear and still had my old first gamer PCs, one a 100MHz that I used for the first DOOM, the other a 233MHz with a Voodoo 1 that was my first Quake box, and both with ISA slots.
So I have the kid fetch the dead box, which was so full of sawdust and gunk it was a miracle it had lasted that long, but lucky for him the 20MB HDD (yeah 20MB, they don't make them like that old heavy dinosaur anymore) would still spin up, so I worked through the evening cloning the DOS 3 install to the 2 drives, getting DOS drivers for the hardware, sealing them so the sawdust wouldn't get sucked in etc. By morning they were done and I was out there setting up the lathe as well as showing him how to spin up the spare once a month so if it happened again he would be able to just pull the first and not suffer any downtime. When that lathe fired up and started cutting those columns that kid jumped a good 3 feet in the air and you would have thought he won the lotto. Good thing I still knew my DOS huh? Anyway he ended up paying me nearly $500 for the nights work, another $300 for the boxes, and at the end of the week when the contract was completed and daddy was back running the company he walked in and handed me $500 and told my boss "Don't you let this one get away, he really knows his stuff!" which made me feel nice.
And the moral of the story is this: If your company depends on something funky and old to function, have an emergency plan, okay? I ran into the kid at the local mall about 6 months ago and asked how it was going. He said that he fires up that 233MHz every month just like clockwork as I taught him, and has the OS image put up in several places on several mediums like I taught him, but that 100MHz is happily working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. It kinda gives me a warm fuzzy to know the first box I hunted CacoDemons on is still working like a champ. Some said I should have reamed the kid on the price, since he needed them so much, but by being square with the kid not only did we end up with the job modernizing their offices, but they probably threw us another $10k-$20k worth of work for businesses and families that were connected to them. So it pays in the long run to treat people with fairness, and not try to gouge them just because they are in a bad way.
And if you are in the south all it will take is ONE preacher in the right place to say "bennomatic is a baby killing bastard!" to not only completely destroy your business, by making sure not a single person in the community will do business with you, but if there are any fundies that are say...a few bubbles off of plumb? Well lets just say I hope you own a gun or are able to throw away everything you have worked for and start anew somewhere else.
It is NEVER the popular speech that we need freedom of speech for, it is the unpopular. By tying everyone's words that they say online to an individual you have just "Disneyfied" speech on the Internet, because to dare to speak out or advocate anything that is any any way unpopular would simply be too risky.
For a perfect and topical example, look at the "pro pedo" Amazon book. The man who wrote it is currently sitting in prison for writing a book. Sure it is a tasteless book, but it is still just a collection of thoughts on paper and as such no more offensive than Mein Kampf or Mao's little red book, which I would actually classify those two as more offensive seeing is how we can attribute 80 million plus dead to those. What amazed me was the discussions I saw were VERY heavily in favor of free speech, pointing out that it is ALWAYS the speech the public does not agree with that needs to be defended, less ALL speech be degraded into nothing but a chorus of the masses.
But how many of those would have actually came out for free speech if tomorrow there would be a sign at work that says "John is for protecting a kiddy fiddler!". You can be rest assured with the mob mentality going on now anyone who said anything but "string him up!" WILL lose their job, and could even be faced with violence. Or look at how the librarians had to fight to protect the right to check out books with anonymity, because some feds decided "Cather in the rye" equaled "terrorist that needs investigating"? Do you REALLY want a USA where you can not be an advocate for anything without wearing it on a T-shirt?
Oh Lord, not this again. Answer me this: Exactly, give me a number here, exactly how many MPG1 MP4 files have you encountered in the wild? MPG2? Hell even the first link on Wiki when you type in MP4 ends up taking you to an article about MPEG 4 Part 2 so how much more of this completely worthless circle jerk BS do we really need?
It is as completely worthless as those that pop up with "it is GNU-Linux" or "Linux is just a kernel" bullshit. Yeah thanks a lot of that info professor, it just completely changed the entire conversation! What in the world would we do without you?
Just so we have this clear, once more from the top: When someone says "avi" they are NOT talking about a fucking RMV with a Vorbis audio file, kay? They are talking about a DivX or Xvid file. Because there is exactly one asshole in Omaha Nebraska that uses anything else, and that is just so he can enjoy his "it's a container!" BS like you. Likewise if someone says "MP4" they are NOT talking about, in any particular order, MP1, MP2,AAC, or even fricking Indeo video, kay? They are talking about what is defined by MPEG-LA, which I even mentioned in the post, as MPEG-4, Part 2. Why? Because that is ALL you will ever run into in the wild!
So can we PLEASE just stop the pedantic bullshit? If I would have said FLV THEN, and ONLY then, would you have had a point, because in the wild you will find anything and everything, from VP6 to H.26x, all stuffed into an FLV wrapper. But nobody fricking does that with MP4! Click on Nero Recode, pick MP4. What do you get? MP4-PT2. I could name another 100 converters and rippers and ALL will output down to a single app MP4-PT2 when you click on MP4. THEY get it, Wiki gets it, so why in the hell do we have to get at least one smartass "it is a container" worthless post when anyone talks MP4 or avi? Does it bring anything useful to the conversation? NO!
Sadly I live next to a conservative college where a great many of the conservative middle east thinkers come to lecture, and I can sum up the reason the USA protects Israel with a single bad joke: "Because Jesus won't come back! Come back, Jesus, come back!"
You think I'm joking? God I wish I was. Pretty much the entire middle east foreign policy of one of the most powerful nations on the planet is based on the idea written on sheep skins 2000+ years ago that some 2000+ year old dead guy would need Jews in Israel so he can come down on his puffy cloud and create paradise. You don't know how many of these guys I've talked to, guys with frankly scary amounts of money and power, that believe our entire policy MUST revolve around "When the Jews return to Zion" and frankly it wouldn't matter to them if Jews were putting Arab babies on pikes as lawn ornaments, since they consider the Jews nothing but the equivalent of a large "LAND HERE" sign.
Hell I don't know which is worse: The Arabs trying to base entire societies around living like goat herders did 900 years ago, or one of the most powerful countries in the world fucking with an entire region based on the writings of goat herders. if you want to believe fine, no problems with that, I just have a simple question: Why does a God need the US Military to fight his battles for him? I have yet to get a satisfactory answer out of that one, just variations of we'll be punished like little schoolboys if we don't follow the book and make sure the Jews get everything they need to sit there. Considering the Jews don't even believe in Jesus they must LTAO at that.
That still doesn't explain why in the hell ANYBODY is using rockets for non live payloads these days.Lets face it: Rockets are damned dangerous, expensive, depending on which fuel you use can dump a ton of crap into the atmosphere, it just doesn't seem like the most efficient way to go about it.
I still say Gerald Bull had the right idea almost 50 years ago, first with Project HARP and finally with Project Babylon which ultimately got him killed. I think his idea was just so far ahead it wasn't feasible with the technology he had to work with, and now it is.
We all know the US Navy has successfully been firing a Mach 8 railgun and just as it was military rockets that got our first payloads into space, so too do I believe this military technology is the key to lowering the costs of launches and even making manned missions to Mars possible, by combining this technology with HARP.
Imagine a railgun set up on lets say a mountain in the Marshall Islands. The rail gun would allow the craft to build up incredible speeds before launch, and then at the top of the trajectory a much smaller and more economical solid fuel rocket would carry it the last leg. A good 90% of the fuel used is cutting through the lower atmosphere and building up escape velocity which the railgun would take care of. We already know how to generate, store, and release large amounts of electricity, so this wouldn't require any exotic new technology we don't currently possess, and finally this would allow quick turn around and large payloads with more reasonable cost, and we could use the money generated by launching commercial payloads to help offset the costs of our exploration. We could launch unmanned sections which would be put together in space and allow exploration of Mars and other relatively close neighbors.
We have been using rockets since the 50s, and while the costs have gone down some they really haven't gone down enough to really open space up to us. With resources being used up in an ever increasing rate and by an ever growing population, exploration for new resources and places to colonize like Mars will require new ways of doing things if we are ever gonna really get out there. As Stephen Hawking said "The human race must colonise space within the next two centuries or face oblivion". I don't believe we can achieve that goal with rocket tech but we can using Gerald Bull's idea.
More like three little cries as I bitch slapped you around. Linking to your very own posts does NOT equal evidence or proof, otherwise I would simply link to the many instances I posted of me banging your mom and they would thus be "proof" that she owes me $500 for services rendered.
You know what you have to do trollie. Post your IP address as a first post on/. or show us the math proving your HOPES file can scale. Otherwise all you are doing is crying in the dark, hanging onto your your little woobie, hoping someone will listen to your pathetic theories based around tech nobody uses anymore. I find your pathetic little cries...rather amusing actually. Submit your proof trollie, we're waiting.
MP4. I had the "pleasure" of helping several customers on the run up to Xmas learn how to convert videos with this proprietary app or that, because apparently little PMPs were being pushed on sale at several retailers and everyone bought them for stocking stuffers. Nearly all were just using some funky format as a wrapper to help cover the fact they were using MP4. Since IIRC the chip that decodes MP3/MP4 is actually dirt cheap but the licenses to MP4 are not these company use funky formats to try to cover up their lack of a license.
I don't know of any BSD/GPL codec that will decode on those dirt cheap MP3/MP4 chips you get on those little PMPs, and it isn't like they have enough native CPU to decode anything that it doesn't have a chip for. Meh at least they don't make you convert the music into funky formats anymore. Either the license for MP3 must be dirt cheap or nobody gives a fuck about the license anymore, because they all had built in WMV, WAV and MP3 support, followed by whatever funky format they used for MP4.
Of course the big "gotcha" with the BSD/GPL codecs is that MPEG-LA has over 2000 patents that pretty much cover everything one has to do to get video to go from a file on a medium to a picture on a screen, so unless the guys in charge of Vorbis and Theora are willing to sign a contract saying they indemnify users of their codecs (which I doubt they would) then you are no more safe than if you just used MP4 or H.264 without a license. I'd say the only reason the guys making those codecs haven't been sued already is that no major OEMs have been pushing those formats in a popular PMP. If someone like Best Buy or Walmart were to release their own branded PMP that used those formats and took off I have NO doubt the excrement would hit the bladed cooling device. As it is now MPEG-LA simply can't be bothered to raise a stink and stir up bad will over such a tiny niche.
Okay, I'll play along: Specs - OS Win 7 X64, CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 925 @ 2.8GHz, Memory and HDD - 8GB of DDR2 and dual 500GB HDD. Scores are as follows:
Actually it does help, it helps with the monumental bullshit that has kept us from blowing each other up since WWII, I'm of course talking about Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Now could the Russians guarantee that if we had used a couple of SSBNs off their coast that they could hit us back with any real power? Nope but that didn't matter all that mattered was we thought they could and there wasn't any way to know for sure except take our chances and possibly get blown to bits. Same thing the other way around, no way for Russia to launch without basically sticking their balls on the chopping block and hoping we didn't have a nice axe they didn't know about.
Now that these missiles are getting older than dirt some are doubting they will work, that is where the supercomputer tests come in. Are the tests bullshit? Well of course they are, that's not the point. The point is to be able to stand at a press conference in front of the world and say "Our baddass computer says our missiles will blow your ass into the next life!". Now whether or not that is bullshit doesn't matter, all that matters is the world knows that A.-We have a big bad supercomputer, and that B.-We have run tests of our nukes using it. Because all you need is that big giant question mark that says "If I launch at them even if I hit them hard they may blow my ass up good!" for the weapon to be effective.
So that's all those tests do, they make sure the USA is still a big question mark. And of course we get as a nice bonus nice computers that can be used all over the place for things like climate data and biofuel research. But as long as the world knows there is a risk the entire USA nuke arsenal functions and can be flung at their asses? Well then it is doing its job, and the computers tests give them that worry.
As far as MSFT goes you are forgetting about the bazillion whitebox PCs built every year, which I doubt 20% of them are running legit Windows licenses. I have several neighbors that like to go yard sale hunting, and I have taught them enough that they will pick up boxes for me when they come across one. I must have had over a dozen white boxes brought to me these past few weeks and there was only one that had a legit Windows key. The rest funnily enough all had the exact same key which is the classic "WinXP Pro Corporate Razr1911" key. I'd love to see the WGA logs just to see how many times that see that particular key. But you can bet your last dollar more little shops would be looking at Linux if they didn't "have a disc in the back" that didn't ask for activation.
As for TFA? Pirate all you want people! Who is gonna feel sorry for bloodsucking leeches like this? They pervert our laws with crap like the Mickey Mouse extensions, screw the artists with Hollywood Accounting, screw the customers with higher prices and crap like Rootkit CDs, these piggies is why the common man thinks "scum" when you say corporate. Personally I think the sooner the *.A.As go bankrupt the better. And the sad part is you might as well rip them off, because they will count EVERY lost sale as piracy and demand even more draconian laws that will have to be supported with your tax dollars and used against your fellow citizens, even if you do like me and simply avoid their shit like the plague.
The only music I buy now is local artists and the occasional second hand store, but I'm sure I'm counted on their little PPT as a sale lost to piracy. After all their shit never stinks and the deserve ever climbing profits even in a dead economy, did you not know that? Hell just look at how they scream LOUDER about piracy even when they have record years! It is because there is never enough profits for them, and if they make a billion all they do is think of how they could have made two if they just fucked everyone a little harder. Pigs, that is all they are, greedy insatiable pigs.
Isn't GOG great? You can gift games to your friends, the prices are crazy cheap and even cheaper now that they are having their Xmas sale which IIRC lasts until the 27th, all the games work on BOTH x86 AND x64, and NO DRM AT ALL, no phoning home crap, no stupid ring 0 drivers that can break your OS, oh and for the Linux guys out there they even have a list of games that work on Linux so you can even give games to the FLOSSie in your life. You can redownload ANYTIME you wish, they have tons of extras like wallpapers, avatars, all kinds of cool stuff you get when your purchase, and their forums are top notch, with everything from walkthroughs and mods to tutorials on just about everything in a game.
So please, if you care about PC gaming, spread the word about GOG far and wide. Tell your friends, family, post on places like/., anyplace you can spread the word. Because the ONLY way we are ever gonna do anything about the nasty DRM infections, and yes they ARE an infection, as a repairman I can't even name how many virus like symptoms I've traced back to bad DRM schemes, is to vote with our $$$ and GOG lets us do that. With GOG I keep all my games on a TB USB drive, I can carry them with me when I visit family, and even without a connection it all "just works". I was always a "CD and a box" kind of guy but GOG really changed my tune. I have NEVER had a more easy or satisfying purchasing experience online.
Oh and be sure to sign up for the newsletter. They will not send you anything but notices about sales and new releases, and their sales are killer. I mean where else can you buy everything from Far Cry to Rise of the Triad, and with nearly all the games under $10, and many under $5? With that Xmas sale now is the time to load up on games! Well I wish everyone a Merry Xmas, I'm gonna kick back and enjoy me some fragging courtesy of GOG!
I'm sorry but I think you're wrong, and here is why: We PC gamers enjoy one of the largest catalogs on the planet and thanks to Windows backwards compatibility I can play games from 20 years ago to games released yesterday. There is also a great wealth of places where one can get quality titles, even AAA titles, for quite cheap, such as the Good Old Games Xmas Sale where nearly 300 games are marked down, many half off. This not only makes for a truly staggering amount of choices, but it means that even guys without tons of disposable income such as myself can literally have dozens of games installed we haven't even gotten around to trying yet.
That means the indie developer really needs to find a way to get noticed, the "pay what you will" model does that. Hell I just paid $5 each for Evil Genius (damned fun BTW) and Unreal 2 SE, so some indie guy I never heard of trying to sell me a game for $20 doesn't stand much of a chance. Sell me a fun game for $5? Not only will I remember the guy, I will happily spread the word to friends and on places like/. just like I like to plug GoG simply because they have great prices with NO DRM and great service.
Everything has a price, and the price of the ultra low barrier to entry for PC games means an endless sea of games put out every year. Some good, some bad, but most frankly never even get heard of and die alone, not because of the game itself, but simply because trying to be heard with the endless shouting of a bazillion other developers is damned near impossible. The "pay what you will" model helps a developer starting out or who has a game they think is good but just not getting exposure to get that much needed foot in the door. any marketing type will tell you the hardest thing to do today is build a brand with so much media vying for our attention. This new model gives a chance for the little guy to do EXACTLY that, and without having to accrue a ton of upfront costs like advertising, as the gamers will do that for you. Seems like just good business to me.
And what you'll end up with is cartels lining up to see who can ass rape the consumer the most. See California's energy deregulation for an example. There is NO way to get a truly "free" free market because it is simply too easy and profitable to collude. See DRAM prices, LCD prices, for examples.
Do you REALLY want cheap electricity? You do? Well the answer is simple: Tell the NIMBYs to STFU and approve the building of plenty of new nuclear reactors, as well as breeder reactors to reprocess the waste, which will take care of most of the long term storage problems. Tada! You ALL get cheap electricty, with plenty for electric cars or anything else. I live in north AR and thanks to AR Nuke 1&2 electricity is cheap enough around here many apts throw it in for free. We have plenty of uranium, nuke plants don't belch out carbon or other crap like the coal plants (which should be shut down BTW, clean coal my ass) and can crank out the juice for decades at VERY cheap prices per KWH. We just need to tell the NIMBYs to STFU and get to building, that's all. All deregulation will do is give us rolling blackouts, crazy prices which in a dead economy would be economic suicide, just ask the people of California how deregulation is working out for 'em.
Re:hairyfeet has to eat his own words (twice)
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Still afraid trollie? Can't say as I blame you, as even other websites laugh at you and make fun of your HOPES file. Afraid to put it to the test? Can't hide behind anecdotes with a REAL test, after all I have a great anecdote about your mom and the sound she makes when I give her the beefstick, doesn't make it scientific.
Like I said you now have TWO ways to prove your magical woobie works. 1.-Post your little HOPES file rant on the first post of ANY/. article along with your IP address, if your magical woobie works that shouldn't be any problem. 2.-Post you magical HOPES file rant on any first post along with the mathematical proof that it can scale.
So don't be such a coward trollie, step up! Quit hiding in terror in the back of/. like you mom hiding from an ass pounding, here is your chance! Prove it to the world! Otherwise you are nothing but a pathetic little coward who isn't worthy of licking the sweat from my balls. I've provided the links, I've backed MY position up with more than ranting bullshit. What's a matter trollie? Can't find anything but anecdotes? Afraid to accept a challenge? Poor little chickenshit trollie. Must be sad to be punked so easily.
But for how long? In netbooks we have never really seen an ARM push, and for good reason. The public looks at those as "baby laptops" and expects them to run the same software as a full size only slower. My local Craigslist is full of ARM netbooks for $50, some even less, and when I inquired why they were selling I was told by several "It doesn't run Windows" which of course means X86 Windows apps which Windows ARM won't fix.
And as for tablets, while it is currently being dominated by ARM I wouldn't count x86 out yet, because AMD will have Bobcat in full production in early 2011. From what I have seen of early tests you are looking at a dual core with a 5xxx Radeon GPU so you have full hardware accelerated everything and even the ability to play games like WoW with some of the settings turned down, all in a chip that uses a MAX 9w with idle power draw of just 0.5w. Now pair this with an embedded Windows variant, something stripped of the cruft like a legal version of Tiny7?
People seem to forget there is a reason why x86 has lasted this long, even after its inventor has tried to kill itrepeatedly, including with their own ARM variant. It is the same reason why Linux can't seem to gain any traction on the desktop, it is the huge amount of apps for x86 and the huge amount of time and familiarity that the public has with them. People will put up with the lack of familiar apps on cell phones, because it is a phone. Most see it as a throwaway device and are used to not being able to reuse squat thanks to their proprietary nature. With tablets so far from what I've seen folks treat them like an oversized phone so yet again no complaints about their apps not working because it is "something new" and doesn't have the expectation of running what they are used to. That does NOT apply to netbooks which the public look upon as "mini laptops" and if they start offering Bobcat based tablets it could quickly be the case for tablets as well.
So I wouldn't be fitting x86 for a toe tag in those markets just yet. After all, who wouldn't like to have all their apps and games run on such a convenient form factor?
As for the ads, I don't see why it wouldn't work. You are going to a site dedicated to HTPCs, and that IS your target audience. I'm into CPUs and frankensteining boxes, and I have bought from ads I ran across on sites dedicated to my hobby. Why wouldn't you arget your audience? It just makes good business sense.
As for the E rated games? That is simple....grandma. You don't want grandma hearing cuss words every three minutes, or playing slap the ho. And there are plenty out there that simply don't like violence and would rather just play a game than deal with it. My youngest is 16 and is allowed to play any game he wants, yet both he and his 18 year old brother never cared for violence, they say there is enough violence in the world and seeing a character bleed just takes the fun out of it for them.
But I STILL say the reason your genre isn't popular anymore is simply a time factor. Our lives are simply much faster and we don't get the time to sit around with controllers in our hands. The Wii party games are popular precisely for that reason, as the controls are inaccurate enough and the movements so silly it is the modern equivalent of Srabble, something everyone can just "pick up and play" without really need to practice like in say a FPS. Make your game, advertise on the sites dedicated to the device you want it played on (in this case HTPC) and most importantly make it EASY to pick up, either by design or by changeable skill levels. Then I don't see why you can't make a living doing what you love. Sometimes it really IS just that simple.
Re:Terrible, terrible and juvenile summary.
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Actually I still think it is a bot someone is using/. to test. look at the evidence: The bot starts "trolling" by throwing one of 3 to 5 catch lines, if anyone responds the bot then takes a piece of text and throws it back with something about as witty and original as "your mama does...insert text..." and then ends with the "you're pathetic" catch all. There is NEVER any deviation from the pattern, and we all know if you get a troll pissed it will spout all different kinds of crap trying not to look like an idiot...this one don't. Never any changes to the spelling, never any changes to the patterns....it reminds me too damned much of ELIZA to be human. Ergo, its a bot. Hell it doesn't even use the classic Twitter "lets make a dozen sock puppets that are different enough I might fool somebody" bit, just keeps using the same name with an incremental number after the name with again NO deviation in the pattern. Its a bot.
That is because you are talking a niche that if you are really really lucky is 1% of the total market. That is like saying "they really don't make games for those of us that like laserdisc games anymore". Because just like laserdisc games you are talking about a very tiny niche market, that in the case of split screen gaming was biggest during the days of SNES and Genesis and simply died off. But even then there is NO reason whatsoever a developer has to do as you say, when they could just make the game directly and sell it to their target audience. You can advertise on the sites dedicated to HTPCs (of which there are plenty) and unlike consoles simply make your case straight to the people.
But I think the REAL reason that genre died off is that simply isn't the way most people game anymore. When I was a teen to early 20s sure, me and my buds would get together for some split screen gaming goodness. Now none of us have the time for that anymore, hell we are lucky if we can schedule a time we can meet online for a little fragfest. That that DO occasionally get the time have to deal with the fact that they don't have time to practice, which is why you have the rise of simplistic 'party games" like the Wii party games as well as stuff like Rock Band, where on lower difficulties my grandma could do it.
So I'm really sorry if that is your niche, but like I said for the public at large that niche is about as dead as laserdisc. But even though it is dead a developer could still make and sell games for the HTPC crowd, they would just have to accept that unless they made a game as addictive as world of goo they would be lucky to make more than beer money. Sorry.
You want to know why you're a troll? because you are falling for one of the biggest mistakes in IT Security: Magical thinking. It is "I have (insert magic product) and therefor I'm safe!" Truth: Bullshit, you're not. Remember the SIX YEAR OLD X Server bug that everyone just happened to miss? News Flash....ALL Operating Systems have flaws full stop. Running OSX or Linux or BSD or Haiku doesn't give you a magical woobie that protects you from harm, you are simply banking on magical think and security by obscurity. And before you trot out that old chestnut "But But But...Linux runs on some of the biggest servers in the world! It IS NOT Obscure!" Bullshit, it is.
You see, servers are managed by these things called server admins which actually read sites like Securina and go to security conventions and hell, some of them even write security papers on the side. They do this because they are paid well to do it and are thus about 1000% more knowledgeable than your average PEBKAC. Now if it is one thing we all should know by now, it is criminals are lazy bastards. Just like any other predator they are NOT gonna waste needless energy hunting when they don't have to. Now considering every pre 2007 OEM box I've ever come across came from the factory with AUTOUPDATES TURNED OFF just that group equals millions of boxes, then you have the Adobe crap that is almost never up to date, Metasploit making it so your average 14 year old could put together a nasty...get the picture?
The only reason why Linux isn't getting a beat down right at this very minute is simply there is plenty of lower hanging fruit. If Walmart starts selling Ubuntu boxes to the PEBKAC crowd? Watch the exploits climb. Because, and this is VERY important... Magical thinking NEVER works IRL. Only a top to bottom, ever vigilant, absolute least permissions allowed to get a particular job done approach works. Anything else and you are just pinning everything on magical thinking, and THAT is why they labeled you a troll.
Exactly. One of the nice things about PC gaming is there is NO shortage of good cheap games, which means you can't royally screw PC gamers on price unless you are talking a just released AAA game, and even then it better be good or word of mouth will kill sales quick.
For an example of cheap games for the PC look no further than the Good Old Games Xmas sale where there is 290 GAMES ON SALE with most of them half off! I just picked up Unreal 2 SE, Spellforce Platinum Edition, and Evil Genius, all for just $16 and change. This let me snatch up some games I missed the first time around and at dirt cheap. Oh and ALL work on X64 as well as x86 and NO DRM!!!
So I have to agree that it isn't so much about the "perception" that the low price brings as much as it is we PC gamers have an abundance of choices, which means you have to offer better prices if you are an indie. Of course the flip side of that is the low barrier to entry, as the consoles can be quite high when it comes to SDKs, and then there is securing a deal, which Nintendo doesn't even allow garage outfits, do they? With PC gamers we frankly don't care where a game company resides, hell make it in your basement. Make it good, give us a good (preferably cheap) price, and as in TFA you CAN make good money. Sure you probably won't become the next EA, but you don't have to act like asses like EA either.
Well if we are all gonna play anecdote roulette, here are my "choices" for broadband: Cableco at $106 with a 36GB cap, DSL at a max speed of 300Kb when the stars align (actual speed? 80Kb to 160Kb depending on the time, and slow enough it is often faster to drive the 20 miles round trip to my place and download drivers than to wait for them at a customer's house) at $98, or a WISP at 200Kb with a cap of 25Gb,and if you try to use more than say a half a GB in a day they will automatically say "you must have a virus because normal people don't use that much" and cut you off. Whee! What wonderful choices we have!
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But how stable will it be when the HD6970 uses both an extra 50w AND a different pin connection than a HD6950. The 6970 uses an 8 pin and a 6, the HD6950 uses a dual 6 connector setup. Can dual PCIe connectors pull the 250w load that the HD6970 requires? This isn't like some Athlon X3 where the only thing you have to do is flip a switch, the other chip pulls more wattage at load and there is no telling if there are other parts besides the connector pin set that they have changed between the cards. Since both cards are over $300 and I'm sure the BIOS flash kills the warranty that is sure a lot of "ifs" there.
Nope. You missed the part where I said "whitebox" which are by definition PCs made in places like "Joe's house of computers" and many other mom&pop shops where they have no money to afford Windows bulk licenses (which last I heard to get the bulk rates you have to buy something like 15,000 at a clip). I used to work as a "hired gun" tech for many of the shops in the state capital and one of the reasons I stopped doing that was being handed some burnt "Razr1911" disc at every shop and being expected to install it.
I even went to a job interview once that went like this: "You know how to setup and run Windows and Linux servers right?" Sure do, not a problem. What do you need? "I want you to set it up so all the machines that we sell will check for updates with us instead of checking with Windows update". Why do you need that? "So we can start selling machines with this" and he hands me a "Razr1911 Vista Ultimate No Activation" burnt DVD. Needless to say I walked out.
So don't count on boxes coming with Windows. Tigerdirect and Newegg aren't selling tens of thousands of those cheap barebones kits to DIYers, I'm willing to bet my last dollar a good 60%-75% of those are going to places like "Bob's PC Hut" and nearly all of them are having something like "Windows 7 all versions No Activation Shareconnector" put on them. Hell in all my years I've heard of exactly ONE mom&pop get busted for hot Windows, and he was also selling hot sat chips and counterfeit DVDs. And when you figure an OEM copy of Windows will add $100 to the price using non legit will immediately let them undercut the competition.
Okay, I'll bite: Why do adverts have artistic and literary value? It is because they let us in on the mindset of the average person of the time, which is of course where most ads are aimed. Look at that old I believe 50s print ad that shows a man taking his wife over his knee for buying the wrong coffee, or the 60s and 70s ads that chastised black women for having "bad hair" if they didn't look like a brown Barbie doll. Hell look at many ads of today which are so rampant with consumerism and greed they make the ads in "They Live" seem tame.
I would say ads had an artistic and literary value because they give us a glimpse into the zeitgeist of the time when they were created. Sure it has been distorted through the lens of Madison Avenue, but because the vast majority of ads are trying not to offend their potential customers it gives a pretty good indication of what was/is acceptable at the time.
So while you hating them is just fine, hell I have adblock installed in Comodo Dragon as we speak, I can also see why some would like them. I myself love to look through classic ads just to see how much things have changed. I mean take the 1940s war bonds and other propaganda ads. There you have some of the most blatant racism you have ever seen, but nobody even batted an eye. Can you imagine if the USA tried to sell bonds to pay for Iraq with "Let's crush the Camel Jockeys!" and get away with it? Not bloody likely.
So while I personally find the new ads irritating there are reasons one could enjoy them without being a glutton for pain. One may simply want to get a feel for what is the "in" thing, or to compare the different techniques that Madison Avenue tries to sway you. Hell they may even just like catchy jingles which is one thing the admen have always excelled at. I would say both the love and hate crowd can have legitimate arguments in this one.
I'm sorry, but there ain't enough sarcasm in the whole damned planet to make that shrew even lukewarm, even if you downed PGA since Xmas eve. I mean...damn. Just seeing that woman naked would probably cause this reaction!
As for TFA, Ethanol has always been nothing but a bad joke, same with HFCS. Corn is one of the, if not the absolute worst uses for land when you figure in the amount of food energy you get out, yet it has been subsidized so damned heavily all you see here in the south is corn as far as the eye can see. If you want to know why the poor are overweight look no further, as anything that isn't filled with HFCS is much more expensive thanks to our tax dollars going to the mega farms. And as a fuel it is a mechanics best friend, as it trashes motors like you wouldn't believe.
If anything this just proves to me how distorted everything has become, and how that are always talking about "the free market" are just talking out their collective asses. There hasn't been a free market in decades, if there ever was one to begin with. And good luck getting congress critters to do anything but pander. Is there anybody here that thinks because the repubs got elected anything will change, other than the donor list? It is gonna take the USA hitting rock bottom before anything gets done, and I give us 10 years, 15 tops before that happens. The whole damned economy is nothing but a shell game, where we are all supposed to sell "services" to each other while the money heads overseas as fast as the feds can print it. Perot talked of the "giant sucking sound" but thanks to the fed printing money we've been able to cover up how little is coming in compared to going out, but the magic money train can't last forever.
My oldest would have to be building an entire PC out of one of my "junkers" to save and restore an entire DOS 3 OS. At the shop I was working at the time this guy comes in in a panic and says 'Please tell me you have a machine that will run this and know how to set it up?" and he pulls out this big ass old ISA card. It turns out his dad owns a big lumber company and they had this big contract that required some custom columns as part of the deal. Wouldn't you know it, the first time junior talks his dad into taking a vacation and letting him be in charge the computer that controls the lathe that makes the columns shits itself and dies. Now this thing was older than dirt and from what I found out later these machines cost anywhere from 75k UP, and naturally the company that made it had been out of business damned near 15 years, so good luck finding a way to upgrade.
So when Doug the boss tells the guy "We don't have anything that old on hand, I can get you one in about a week" the poor kid looked like he was gonna cry. He had been to every shop in town and got told the same thing and the job had to be DONE in 4 days, or goodbye big juicy contract. The kid knew that any chance he had to take over the business was going up in smoke faster than that old 10MHz Intel that had been running that lathe. So needless to say I thought the kid was gonna drop dead from a heart attack right there when I looked over from my spot in the back and said "Hey, I think I got a couple of boxes that'll run that at home." The kid was like "I'll pay, extra, overtime, whatever, but I HAVE TO HAVE it ASAP!" So I swung by my house while the kid waited there ready to crap his pants, because he was sure I'd come back and say I was mistaken, but no. I have always been a pack rat and can't stand throwing out working gear and still had my old first gamer PCs, one a 100MHz that I used for the first DOOM, the other a 233MHz with a Voodoo 1 that was my first Quake box, and both with ISA slots.
So I have the kid fetch the dead box, which was so full of sawdust and gunk it was a miracle it had lasted that long, but lucky for him the 20MB HDD (yeah 20MB, they don't make them like that old heavy dinosaur anymore) would still spin up, so I worked through the evening cloning the DOS 3 install to the 2 drives, getting DOS drivers for the hardware, sealing them so the sawdust wouldn't get sucked in etc. By morning they were done and I was out there setting up the lathe as well as showing him how to spin up the spare once a month so if it happened again he would be able to just pull the first and not suffer any downtime. When that lathe fired up and started cutting those columns that kid jumped a good 3 feet in the air and you would have thought he won the lotto. Good thing I still knew my DOS huh? Anyway he ended up paying me nearly $500 for the nights work, another $300 for the boxes, and at the end of the week when the contract was completed and daddy was back running the company he walked in and handed me $500 and told my boss "Don't you let this one get away, he really knows his stuff!" which made me feel nice.
And the moral of the story is this: If your company depends on something funky and old to function, have an emergency plan, okay? I ran into the kid at the local mall about 6 months ago and asked how it was going. He said that he fires up that 233MHz every month just like clockwork as I taught him, and has the OS image put up in several places on several mediums like I taught him, but that 100MHz is happily working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. It kinda gives me a warm fuzzy to know the first box I hunted CacoDemons on is still working like a champ. Some said I should have reamed the kid on the price, since he needed them so much, but by being square with the kid not only did we end up with the job modernizing their offices, but they probably threw us another $10k-$20k worth of work for businesses and families that were connected to them. So it pays in the long run to treat people with fairness, and not try to gouge them just because they are in a bad way.
And if you are in the south all it will take is ONE preacher in the right place to say "bennomatic is a baby killing bastard!" to not only completely destroy your business, by making sure not a single person in the community will do business with you, but if there are any fundies that are say...a few bubbles off of plumb? Well lets just say I hope you own a gun or are able to throw away everything you have worked for and start anew somewhere else.
It is NEVER the popular speech that we need freedom of speech for, it is the unpopular. By tying everyone's words that they say online to an individual you have just "Disneyfied" speech on the Internet, because to dare to speak out or advocate anything that is any any way unpopular would simply be too risky.
For a perfect and topical example, look at the "pro pedo" Amazon book. The man who wrote it is currently sitting in prison for writing a book. Sure it is a tasteless book, but it is still just a collection of thoughts on paper and as such no more offensive than Mein Kampf or Mao's little red book, which I would actually classify those two as more offensive seeing is how we can attribute 80 million plus dead to those. What amazed me was the discussions I saw were VERY heavily in favor of free speech, pointing out that it is ALWAYS the speech the public does not agree with that needs to be defended, less ALL speech be degraded into nothing but a chorus of the masses.
But how many of those would have actually came out for free speech if tomorrow there would be a sign at work that says "John is for protecting a kiddy fiddler!". You can be rest assured with the mob mentality going on now anyone who said anything but "string him up!" WILL lose their job, and could even be faced with violence. Or look at how the librarians had to fight to protect the right to check out books with anonymity, because some feds decided "Cather in the rye" equaled "terrorist that needs investigating"? Do you REALLY want a USA where you can not be an advocate for anything without wearing it on a T-shirt?
Oh Lord, not this again. Answer me this: Exactly, give me a number here, exactly how many MPG1 MP4 files have you encountered in the wild? MPG2? Hell even the first link on Wiki when you type in MP4 ends up taking you to an article about MPEG 4 Part 2 so how much more of this completely worthless circle jerk BS do we really need?
It is as completely worthless as those that pop up with "it is GNU-Linux" or "Linux is just a kernel" bullshit. Yeah thanks a lot of that info professor, it just completely changed the entire conversation! What in the world would we do without you?
Just so we have this clear, once more from the top: When someone says "avi" they are NOT talking about a fucking RMV with a Vorbis audio file, kay? They are talking about a DivX or Xvid file. Because there is exactly one asshole in Omaha Nebraska that uses anything else, and that is just so he can enjoy his "it's a container!" BS like you. Likewise if someone says "MP4" they are NOT talking about, in any particular order, MP1, MP2,AAC, or even fricking Indeo video, kay? They are talking about what is defined by MPEG-LA, which I even mentioned in the post, as MPEG-4, Part 2. Why? Because that is ALL you will ever run into in the wild!
So can we PLEASE just stop the pedantic bullshit? If I would have said FLV THEN, and ONLY then, would you have had a point, because in the wild you will find anything and everything, from VP6 to H.26x, all stuffed into an FLV wrapper. But nobody fricking does that with MP4! Click on Nero Recode, pick MP4. What do you get? MP4-PT2. I could name another 100 converters and rippers and ALL will output down to a single app MP4-PT2 when you click on MP4. THEY get it, Wiki gets it, so why in the hell do we have to get at least one smartass "it is a container" worthless post when anyone talks MP4 or avi? Does it bring anything useful to the conversation? NO!
Sadly I live next to a conservative college where a great many of the conservative middle east thinkers come to lecture, and I can sum up the reason the USA protects Israel with a single bad joke: "Because Jesus won't come back! Come back, Jesus, come back!"
You think I'm joking? God I wish I was. Pretty much the entire middle east foreign policy of one of the most powerful nations on the planet is based on the idea written on sheep skins 2000+ years ago that some 2000+ year old dead guy would need Jews in Israel so he can come down on his puffy cloud and create paradise. You don't know how many of these guys I've talked to, guys with frankly scary amounts of money and power, that believe our entire policy MUST revolve around "When the Jews return to Zion" and frankly it wouldn't matter to them if Jews were putting Arab babies on pikes as lawn ornaments, since they consider the Jews nothing but the equivalent of a large "LAND HERE" sign.
Hell I don't know which is worse: The Arabs trying to base entire societies around living like goat herders did 900 years ago, or one of the most powerful countries in the world fucking with an entire region based on the writings of goat herders. if you want to believe fine, no problems with that, I just have a simple question: Why does a God need the US Military to fight his battles for him? I have yet to get a satisfactory answer out of that one, just variations of we'll be punished like little schoolboys if we don't follow the book and make sure the Jews get everything they need to sit there. Considering the Jews don't even believe in Jesus they must LTAO at that.
That still doesn't explain why in the hell ANYBODY is using rockets for non live payloads these days.Lets face it: Rockets are damned dangerous, expensive, depending on which fuel you use can dump a ton of crap into the atmosphere, it just doesn't seem like the most efficient way to go about it.
I still say Gerald Bull had the right idea almost 50 years ago, first with Project HARP and finally with Project Babylon which ultimately got him killed. I think his idea was just so far ahead it wasn't feasible with the technology he had to work with, and now it is.
We all know the US Navy has successfully been firing a Mach 8 railgun and just as it was military rockets that got our first payloads into space, so too do I believe this military technology is the key to lowering the costs of launches and even making manned missions to Mars possible, by combining this technology with HARP.
Imagine a railgun set up on lets say a mountain in the Marshall Islands. The rail gun would allow the craft to build up incredible speeds before launch, and then at the top of the trajectory a much smaller and more economical solid fuel rocket would carry it the last leg. A good 90% of the fuel used is cutting through the lower atmosphere and building up escape velocity which the railgun would take care of. We already know how to generate, store, and release large amounts of electricity, so this wouldn't require any exotic new technology we don't currently possess, and finally this would allow quick turn around and large payloads with more reasonable cost, and we could use the money generated by launching commercial payloads to help offset the costs of our exploration. We could launch unmanned sections which would be put together in space and allow exploration of Mars and other relatively close neighbors.
We have been using rockets since the 50s, and while the costs have gone down some they really haven't gone down enough to really open space up to us. With resources being used up in an ever increasing rate and by an ever growing population, exploration for new resources and places to colonize like Mars will require new ways of doing things if we are ever gonna really get out there. As Stephen Hawking said "The human race must colonise space within the next two centuries or face oblivion". I don't believe we can achieve that goal with rocket tech but we can using Gerald Bull's idea.
More like three little cries as I bitch slapped you around. Linking to your very own posts does NOT equal evidence or proof, otherwise I would simply link to the many instances I posted of me banging your mom and they would thus be "proof" that she owes me $500 for services rendered.
You know what you have to do trollie. Post your IP address as a first post on /. or show us the math proving your HOPES file can scale. Otherwise all you are doing is crying in the dark, hanging onto your your little woobie, hoping someone will listen to your pathetic theories based around tech nobody uses anymore. I find your pathetic little cries...rather amusing actually. Submit your proof trollie, we're waiting.
MP4. I had the "pleasure" of helping several customers on the run up to Xmas learn how to convert videos with this proprietary app or that, because apparently little PMPs were being pushed on sale at several retailers and everyone bought them for stocking stuffers. Nearly all were just using some funky format as a wrapper to help cover the fact they were using MP4. Since IIRC the chip that decodes MP3/MP4 is actually dirt cheap but the licenses to MP4 are not these company use funky formats to try to cover up their lack of a license.
I don't know of any BSD/GPL codec that will decode on those dirt cheap MP3/MP4 chips you get on those little PMPs, and it isn't like they have enough native CPU to decode anything that it doesn't have a chip for. Meh at least they don't make you convert the music into funky formats anymore. Either the license for MP3 must be dirt cheap or nobody gives a fuck about the license anymore, because they all had built in WMV, WAV and MP3 support, followed by whatever funky format they used for MP4.
Of course the big "gotcha" with the BSD/GPL codecs is that MPEG-LA has over 2000 patents that pretty much cover everything one has to do to get video to go from a file on a medium to a picture on a screen, so unless the guys in charge of Vorbis and Theora are willing to sign a contract saying they indemnify users of their codecs (which I doubt they would) then you are no more safe than if you just used MP4 or H.264 without a license. I'd say the only reason the guys making those codecs haven't been sued already is that no major OEMs have been pushing those formats in a popular PMP. If someone like Best Buy or Walmart were to release their own branded PMP that used those formats and took off I have NO doubt the excrement would hit the bladed cooling device. As it is now MPEG-LA simply can't be bothered to raise a stink and stir up bad will over such a tiny niche.
Okay, I'll play along: Specs - OS Win 7 X64, CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 925 @ 2.8GHz, Memory and HDD - 8GB of DDR2 and dual 500GB HDD. Scores are as follows:
Browser 1-Firefox 3.6.13 - 5587/50000 rwb points
Browser 2-Comodo Dragon 60.10 (based on Chromium) - 9448/50000 rwb points
Actually it does help, it helps with the monumental bullshit that has kept us from blowing each other up since WWII, I'm of course talking about Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. Now could the Russians guarantee that if we had used a couple of SSBNs off their coast that they could hit us back with any real power? Nope but that didn't matter all that mattered was we thought they could and there wasn't any way to know for sure except take our chances and possibly get blown to bits. Same thing the other way around, no way for Russia to launch without basically sticking their balls on the chopping block and hoping we didn't have a nice axe they didn't know about.
Now that these missiles are getting older than dirt some are doubting they will work, that is where the supercomputer tests come in. Are the tests bullshit? Well of course they are, that's not the point. The point is to be able to stand at a press conference in front of the world and say "Our baddass computer says our missiles will blow your ass into the next life!". Now whether or not that is bullshit doesn't matter, all that matters is the world knows that A.-We have a big bad supercomputer, and that B.-We have run tests of our nukes using it. Because all you need is that big giant question mark that says "If I launch at them even if I hit them hard they may blow my ass up good!" for the weapon to be effective.
So that's all those tests do, they make sure the USA is still a big question mark. And of course we get as a nice bonus nice computers that can be used all over the place for things like climate data and biofuel research. But as long as the world knows there is a risk the entire USA nuke arsenal functions and can be flung at their asses? Well then it is doing its job, and the computers tests give them that worry.
As far as MSFT goes you are forgetting about the bazillion whitebox PCs built every year, which I doubt 20% of them are running legit Windows licenses. I have several neighbors that like to go yard sale hunting, and I have taught them enough that they will pick up boxes for me when they come across one. I must have had over a dozen white boxes brought to me these past few weeks and there was only one that had a legit Windows key. The rest funnily enough all had the exact same key which is the classic "WinXP Pro Corporate Razr1911" key. I'd love to see the WGA logs just to see how many times that see that particular key. But you can bet your last dollar more little shops would be looking at Linux if they didn't "have a disc in the back" that didn't ask for activation.
As for TFA? Pirate all you want people! Who is gonna feel sorry for bloodsucking leeches like this? They pervert our laws with crap like the Mickey Mouse extensions, screw the artists with Hollywood Accounting, screw the customers with higher prices and crap like Rootkit CDs, these piggies is why the common man thinks "scum" when you say corporate. Personally I think the sooner the *.A.As go bankrupt the better. And the sad part is you might as well rip them off, because they will count EVERY lost sale as piracy and demand even more draconian laws that will have to be supported with your tax dollars and used against your fellow citizens, even if you do like me and simply avoid their shit like the plague.
The only music I buy now is local artists and the occasional second hand store, but I'm sure I'm counted on their little PPT as a sale lost to piracy. After all their shit never stinks and the deserve ever climbing profits even in a dead economy, did you not know that? Hell just look at how they scream LOUDER about piracy even when they have record years! It is because there is never enough profits for them, and if they make a billion all they do is think of how they could have made two if they just fucked everyone a little harder. Pigs, that is all they are, greedy insatiable pigs.
Isn't GOG great? You can gift games to your friends, the prices are crazy cheap and even cheaper now that they are having their Xmas sale which IIRC lasts until the 27th, all the games work on BOTH x86 AND x64, and NO DRM AT ALL, no phoning home crap, no stupid ring 0 drivers that can break your OS, oh and for the Linux guys out there they even have a list of games that work on Linux so you can even give games to the FLOSSie in your life. You can redownload ANYTIME you wish, they have tons of extras like wallpapers, avatars, all kinds of cool stuff you get when your purchase, and their forums are top notch, with everything from walkthroughs and mods to tutorials on just about everything in a game.
So please, if you care about PC gaming, spread the word about GOG far and wide. Tell your friends, family, post on places like /., anyplace you can spread the word. Because the ONLY way we are ever gonna do anything about the nasty DRM infections, and yes they ARE an infection, as a repairman I can't even name how many virus like symptoms I've traced back to bad DRM schemes, is to vote with our $$$ and GOG lets us do that. With GOG I keep all my games on a TB USB drive, I can carry them with me when I visit family, and even without a connection it all "just works". I was always a "CD and a box" kind of guy but GOG really changed my tune. I have NEVER had a more easy or satisfying purchasing experience online.
Oh and be sure to sign up for the newsletter. They will not send you anything but notices about sales and new releases, and their sales are killer. I mean where else can you buy everything from Far Cry to Rise of the Triad, and with nearly all the games under $10, and many under $5? With that Xmas sale now is the time to load up on games! Well I wish everyone a Merry Xmas, I'm gonna kick back and enjoy me some fragging courtesy of GOG!
I'm sorry but I think you're wrong, and here is why: We PC gamers enjoy one of the largest catalogs on the planet and thanks to Windows backwards compatibility I can play games from 20 years ago to games released yesterday. There is also a great wealth of places where one can get quality titles, even AAA titles, for quite cheap, such as the Good Old Games Xmas Sale where nearly 300 games are marked down, many half off. This not only makes for a truly staggering amount of choices, but it means that even guys without tons of disposable income such as myself can literally have dozens of games installed we haven't even gotten around to trying yet.
That means the indie developer really needs to find a way to get noticed, the "pay what you will" model does that. Hell I just paid $5 each for Evil Genius (damned fun BTW) and Unreal 2 SE, so some indie guy I never heard of trying to sell me a game for $20 doesn't stand much of a chance. Sell me a fun game for $5? Not only will I remember the guy, I will happily spread the word to friends and on places like /. just like I like to plug GoG simply because they have great prices with NO DRM and great service.
Everything has a price, and the price of the ultra low barrier to entry for PC games means an endless sea of games put out every year. Some good, some bad, but most frankly never even get heard of and die alone, not because of the game itself, but simply because trying to be heard with the endless shouting of a bazillion other developers is damned near impossible. The "pay what you will" model helps a developer starting out or who has a game they think is good but just not getting exposure to get that much needed foot in the door. any marketing type will tell you the hardest thing to do today is build a brand with so much media vying for our attention. This new model gives a chance for the little guy to do EXACTLY that, and without having to accrue a ton of upfront costs like advertising, as the gamers will do that for you. Seems like just good business to me.
And what you'll end up with is cartels lining up to see who can ass rape the consumer the most. See California's energy deregulation for an example. There is NO way to get a truly "free" free market because it is simply too easy and profitable to collude. See DRAM prices, LCD prices, for examples.
Do you REALLY want cheap electricity? You do? Well the answer is simple: Tell the NIMBYs to STFU and approve the building of plenty of new nuclear reactors, as well as breeder reactors to reprocess the waste, which will take care of most of the long term storage problems. Tada! You ALL get cheap electricty, with plenty for electric cars or anything else. I live in north AR and thanks to AR Nuke 1&2 electricity is cheap enough around here many apts throw it in for free. We have plenty of uranium, nuke plants don't belch out carbon or other crap like the coal plants (which should be shut down BTW, clean coal my ass) and can crank out the juice for decades at VERY cheap prices per KWH. We just need to tell the NIMBYs to STFU and get to building, that's all. All deregulation will do is give us rolling blackouts, crazy prices which in a dead economy would be economic suicide, just ask the people of California how deregulation is working out for 'em.
Still afraid trollie? Can't say as I blame you, as even other websites laugh at you and make fun of your HOPES file. Afraid to put it to the test? Can't hide behind anecdotes with a REAL test, after all I have a great anecdote about your mom and the sound she makes when I give her the beefstick, doesn't make it scientific.
Like I said you now have TWO ways to prove your magical woobie works. 1.-Post your little HOPES file rant on the first post of ANY /. article along with your IP address, if your magical woobie works that shouldn't be any problem. 2.-Post you magical HOPES file rant on any first post along with the mathematical proof that it can scale.
So don't be such a coward trollie, step up! Quit hiding in terror in the back of /. like you mom hiding from an ass pounding, here is your chance! Prove it to the world! Otherwise you are nothing but a pathetic little coward who isn't worthy of licking the sweat from my balls. I've provided the links, I've backed MY position up with more than ranting bullshit. What's a matter trollie? Can't find anything but anecdotes? Afraid to accept a challenge? Poor little chickenshit trollie. Must be sad to be punked so easily.
But for how long? In netbooks we have never really seen an ARM push, and for good reason. The public looks at those as "baby laptops" and expects them to run the same software as a full size only slower. My local Craigslist is full of ARM netbooks for $50, some even less, and when I inquired why they were selling I was told by several "It doesn't run Windows" which of course means X86 Windows apps which Windows ARM won't fix.
And as for tablets, while it is currently being dominated by ARM I wouldn't count x86 out yet, because AMD will have Bobcat in full production in early 2011. From what I have seen of early tests you are looking at a dual core with a 5xxx Radeon GPU so you have full hardware accelerated everything and even the ability to play games like WoW with some of the settings turned down, all in a chip that uses a MAX 9w with idle power draw of just 0.5w. Now pair this with an embedded Windows variant, something stripped of the cruft like a legal version of Tiny7?
People seem to forget there is a reason why x86 has lasted this long, even after its inventor has tried to kill it repeatedly, including with their own ARM variant. It is the same reason why Linux can't seem to gain any traction on the desktop, it is the huge amount of apps for x86 and the huge amount of time and familiarity that the public has with them. People will put up with the lack of familiar apps on cell phones, because it is a phone. Most see it as a throwaway device and are used to not being able to reuse squat thanks to their proprietary nature. With tablets so far from what I've seen folks treat them like an oversized phone so yet again no complaints about their apps not working because it is "something new" and doesn't have the expectation of running what they are used to. That does NOT apply to netbooks which the public look upon as "mini laptops" and if they start offering Bobcat based tablets it could quickly be the case for tablets as well.
So I wouldn't be fitting x86 for a toe tag in those markets just yet. After all, who wouldn't like to have all their apps and games run on such a convenient form factor?
As for the ads, I don't see why it wouldn't work. You are going to a site dedicated to HTPCs, and that IS your target audience. I'm into CPUs and frankensteining boxes, and I have bought from ads I ran across on sites dedicated to my hobby. Why wouldn't you arget your audience? It just makes good business sense.
As for the E rated games? That is simple....grandma. You don't want grandma hearing cuss words every three minutes, or playing slap the ho. And there are plenty out there that simply don't like violence and would rather just play a game than deal with it. My youngest is 16 and is allowed to play any game he wants, yet both he and his 18 year old brother never cared for violence, they say there is enough violence in the world and seeing a character bleed just takes the fun out of it for them.
But I STILL say the reason your genre isn't popular anymore is simply a time factor. Our lives are simply much faster and we don't get the time to sit around with controllers in our hands. The Wii party games are popular precisely for that reason, as the controls are inaccurate enough and the movements so silly it is the modern equivalent of Srabble, something everyone can just "pick up and play" without really need to practice like in say a FPS. Make your game, advertise on the sites dedicated to the device you want it played on (in this case HTPC) and most importantly make it EASY to pick up, either by design or by changeable skill levels. Then I don't see why you can't make a living doing what you love. Sometimes it really IS just that simple.
Actually I still think it is a bot someone is using /. to test. look at the evidence: The bot starts "trolling" by throwing one of 3 to 5 catch lines, if anyone responds the bot then takes a piece of text and throws it back with something about as witty and original as "your mama does...insert text..." and then ends with the "you're pathetic" catch all. There is NEVER any deviation from the pattern, and we all know if you get a troll pissed it will spout all different kinds of crap trying not to look like an idiot...this one don't. Never any changes to the spelling, never any changes to the patterns....it reminds me too damned much of ELIZA to be human. Ergo, its a bot. Hell it doesn't even use the classic Twitter "lets make a dozen sock puppets that are different enough I might fool somebody" bit, just keeps using the same name with an incremental number after the name with again NO deviation in the pattern. Its a bot.
That is because you are talking a niche that if you are really really lucky is 1% of the total market. That is like saying "they really don't make games for those of us that like laserdisc games anymore". Because just like laserdisc games you are talking about a very tiny niche market, that in the case of split screen gaming was biggest during the days of SNES and Genesis and simply died off. But even then there is NO reason whatsoever a developer has to do as you say, when they could just make the game directly and sell it to their target audience. You can advertise on the sites dedicated to HTPCs (of which there are plenty) and unlike consoles simply make your case straight to the people.
But I think the REAL reason that genre died off is that simply isn't the way most people game anymore. When I was a teen to early 20s sure, me and my buds would get together for some split screen gaming goodness. Now none of us have the time for that anymore, hell we are lucky if we can schedule a time we can meet online for a little fragfest. That that DO occasionally get the time have to deal with the fact that they don't have time to practice, which is why you have the rise of simplistic 'party games" like the Wii party games as well as stuff like Rock Band, where on lower difficulties my grandma could do it.
So I'm really sorry if that is your niche, but like I said for the public at large that niche is about as dead as laserdisc. But even though it is dead a developer could still make and sell games for the HTPC crowd, they would just have to accept that unless they made a game as addictive as world of goo they would be lucky to make more than beer money. Sorry.
You want to know why you're a troll? because you are falling for one of the biggest mistakes in IT Security: Magical thinking. It is "I have (insert magic product) and therefor I'm safe!" Truth: Bullshit, you're not. Remember the SIX YEAR OLD X Server bug that everyone just happened to miss? News Flash....ALL Operating Systems have flaws full stop. Running OSX or Linux or BSD or Haiku doesn't give you a magical woobie that protects you from harm, you are simply banking on magical think and security by obscurity. And before you trot out that old chestnut "But But But...Linux runs on some of the biggest servers in the world! It IS NOT Obscure!" Bullshit, it is.
You see, servers are managed by these things called server admins which actually read sites like Securina and go to security conventions and hell, some of them even write security papers on the side. They do this because they are paid well to do it and are thus about 1000% more knowledgeable than your average PEBKAC. Now if it is one thing we all should know by now, it is criminals are lazy bastards. Just like any other predator they are NOT gonna waste needless energy hunting when they don't have to. Now considering every pre 2007 OEM box I've ever come across came from the factory with AUTOUPDATES TURNED OFF just that group equals millions of boxes, then you have the Adobe crap that is almost never up to date, Metasploit making it so your average 14 year old could put together a nasty...get the picture?
The only reason why Linux isn't getting a beat down right at this very minute is simply there is plenty of lower hanging fruit. If Walmart starts selling Ubuntu boxes to the PEBKAC crowd? Watch the exploits climb. Because, and this is VERY important... Magical thinking NEVER works IRL. Only a top to bottom, ever vigilant, absolute least permissions allowed to get a particular job done approach works. Anything else and you are just pinning everything on magical thinking, and THAT is why they labeled you a troll.
Exactly. One of the nice things about PC gaming is there is NO shortage of good cheap games, which means you can't royally screw PC gamers on price unless you are talking a just released AAA game, and even then it better be good or word of mouth will kill sales quick.
For an example of cheap games for the PC look no further than the Good Old Games Xmas sale where there is 290 GAMES ON SALE with most of them half off! I just picked up Unreal 2 SE, Spellforce Platinum Edition, and Evil Genius, all for just $16 and change. This let me snatch up some games I missed the first time around and at dirt cheap. Oh and ALL work on X64 as well as x86 and NO DRM!!!
So I have to agree that it isn't so much about the "perception" that the low price brings as much as it is we PC gamers have an abundance of choices, which means you have to offer better prices if you are an indie. Of course the flip side of that is the low barrier to entry, as the consoles can be quite high when it comes to SDKs, and then there is securing a deal, which Nintendo doesn't even allow garage outfits, do they? With PC gamers we frankly don't care where a game company resides, hell make it in your basement. Make it good, give us a good (preferably cheap) price, and as in TFA you CAN make good money. Sure you probably won't become the next EA, but you don't have to act like asses like EA either.
Well if we are all gonna play anecdote roulette, here are my "choices" for broadband: Cableco at $106 with a 36GB cap, DSL at a max speed of 300Kb when the stars align (actual speed? 80Kb to 160Kb depending on the time, and slow enough it is often faster to drive the 20 miles round trip to my place and download drivers than to wait for them at a customer's house) at $98, or a WISP at 200Kb with a cap of 25Gb,and if you try to use more than say a half a GB in a day they will automatically say "you must have a virus because normal people don't use that much" and cut you off. Whee! What wonderful choices we have!