I'm throwing the flag, bullshit on the field. Windows 8 works IF and ONLY IF you do everything the "Metro Way" which is so obviously designed for tablets and tweeting twits and social shits it fucking hurts.
With XP didn't want the Fisher price? Took all of 2 seconds to switch to classic and you would NEVER see it again, or you could use one of dozens of themes released the first 6 months that would make it look like anything you wanted. With Metro even if you use third party tools its damned near impossible to 100% kill that fucking Metro and if you are one of the millions that have a laptop that the generic synaptics touchpad drivers won't work on? Either buy a mouse and carry it with your laptop forever or throw the laptop in the trash because you will NEVER EVER get rid of the fucking Charms bar! And once you look down for a second and when you look up find you've been "charmed" and have lost the last 3 - 5 seconds of work thanks to Charms stealing focus and it does that over and over AND OVER throughout the day? You'll find out why so many have a seething hatred for that fucking OS.
What all those Win 8 lovers is simply gonna have to face is THE ENTIRE PREMISE IS STUPID and I can prove this, ready? Where does Windows 8 work best? Tablets and touchscreens, don't take my word for it, just count how many times Sinofsky said touch during the win 8 reveal, it was like 30 times in a 10 minute presentation. Fine but why do people buy Windows? What makes you pick Windows over say Android or iOS? Windows programs which aren't touch enabled and which make no fucking sense and are painful on a fucking tablet!....Argh!
The sad part is that is true even here, just look at how quickly the "truther" slur is trotted out whenever anybody asks why anything better than the frankly piss poor at best investigation wasn't done for the 9/11 attacks, like the government has never lied to us.....except for that "pesky" Gulf Of Tonkin thing that left 50,000 Americans and probably a couple million Asians dead....oops.
If there is one thing Wikileaks and Snowden should have taught us its that the MSM of pretty much every country is nothing but the puppet of the state and is about as truthful as Soviet Pravda.
Thanks. If you want dirt cheap media tanks check out Amazon as you can find ones like this all the time and unlike a used laptop not only does it look nice but you can easily add anything you want, BR drive,SSD, plenty of RAM and HDD, and its easy to add.
I've used the E350 a LOT at the shop and was impressed enough I sold my full size lappy for an E350, its THAT nice. HD videos, office work, hell I've played Torchlight and Portal on 'em and they are great little chips, all while just using 20w full load and 9w for most tasks. A word of advice though and this goes for ANY APU system...ALWAYS get the faster RAM, in fact if it comes down to 4Gb of faster or 8Gb of slower take the 4Gb because that AMD APUs really need decent RAM to shine. Nothing crazy, no need to OC the RAM, 1333 or better will do nicely. One of the barebone systems I picked up came with 4Gb of 1066, I did benches before and after I switched it for 1333 and depending on the tasks I got as much as 35% more performance simply by having the faster RAM, its THAT noticeable.
Sure when you show me a box that is an actual PC and not a thin client for that price, otherwise the comparison is moot as the Chrome isn't a PC, its a thin client. Here is a mini with SATA and wireless for $159, just add a RAM stick and unlike ChromeOS you aren't giving a corporation every single thing you do online...yay!
I'd be more worried about a bio-bomb as that would be the perfect carrier, hell you could infect the passengers and use them as the "payload" and then fly it over a large heavily populated city and blow it up at 10,000 feet, voila! the diseased body parts would be spread over a large area and cause maximum damage. To hamper cleanup you could always mix enough uranium to make the whole thing "dirty" enough to cause a panic and slow the responders to a crawl.
In any case I think there is more than a simple hijack and crash going on, too many conflicting stories to be that simple.
Look for the ones with AMD chips, especially the E350s and E450s, as those come with HDMI out and most will hold 8Gb of RAM and do 1080P. A good place to start would be the Asus EEE "B" series, with B standing for Brazos. I have one and its fricking great, 4 years on and it still types well, gets nearly 4 hours on the battery and with 8Gb of RAM everything plays nice and smooth.
But if you want a really cheap media tank instead of using an old lappy look at th E350 barebone kits as I've seen them on sale at Amazon for around $100 with case, I've built quite a few of those as both media tanks and office boxes and they are really sweet, use less than 20w under load and will play just about any format. A word of advice though, if you get one make sure your player is set to use DXVA and get the codecs from either AMD or the excellent CCCP codec pack as the E series APUs are really designed for hardware video acceleration and not having that turned on ties a boat anchor to them system. Using a player without DXVA a 720p video was hitting 80% CPU while the same video with DXVA was using less than 15% so it makes a HUGE difference when it comes to performance.
As for TFA how anybody would trust some large megacorp after the Snowden revelations is frankly beyond me...I mean do you have ANY idea how easy it is to know pretty much everything about you simply by having your browsing history? Everything from what kind of porn you like to what medical issues you have and what beliefs you hold can be gleamed from that sooo easy its just not funny. This is why I have one company for mail, another for search, and made a throwaway account just for my android phone, giving ANY company THAT much info is just creepy.
Yet again you should just go AMD as you can buy the Jaguar based mini-PCs for cheaper, and since those are based on the same cores as the PS4 and XBone if you care any about gaming the coming games should be optimized for it.
And while we are on the subject of Jaguar and AMD since XP is about to EOL? Please please PLEASE get rid of those damned P4s already, okay? If there was a list of "world's dumbest computing ideas" I'd have to put that one at the top, it was slow, sucked insane amounts of power, and because of the crazy long pipelines one cache miss and it would slam on the brakes. The only thing worse was the Netburst Celeron as the teeny tiny cache made misses all but guaranteed.
What does that have to do with AMD and Jaguar? Simple the Bobcat, which the jag was based on can be had for just $65 so for less than $100 you can turn any power pig P4 into a MUCH nicer dual core PC capable of 1080P over HDMI. Simply pick up a PCI to IDE adapter so you can keep the original drives and tada! Dirt cheap upgrade.
One final note...why is everybody making such a big whoop over ChromeOS? We had this in the 90s folks, its called a "thin client" only frankly the 90s ones were better as they weren't controlled by a single company with STASI levels of information about their clients and whom may or may not be connected with the NSA. Hell even if they tell the NSA to fuck off they still consider you to be the PRODUCT and the advertisers the customers so its not like they have your best interests at heart. And do they still TiVo the shit out of them with UEFI? Funny how many here say "Oh M$ is teh evil!" yet I can take any Windows 8.1 laptop and be booting the instaler of anything from BSD to ReactOS in a couple minutes but last I looked the ChromeOS devices were so locked down the ONLY things you could run ere CERTAIN Linux distros and ONLY those that had the hacked loaders...shit, how is turning X86 into a game console NOT evil? Because that is what they did,they took the most standards compliant universal hardware on the planet and turned it into the original Xbox, where you gotta hack the thing just to run a limited amount of software.
Nooo..Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter on the school's PDP11 which they sold to Altair, which gave us the famous "computer club piracy" speech. Now one could argue whether or not the computer time was "stealing" but they got their BASIC commands from the same place everybody else did, Knuth and his books of the early 70s.
And on the flip side you can now go to jail for a drawing of Lisa Simpson in an S&M outfit and thanks to their not being any way to make money many who would need a liver and kidney who aren't rich (and can bribe their way to the top like Steve jobs did) will die.
the problem is laws and common sense almost never go together and laws WILL be abused, look at the kids doing time for taking pics of their own bodies and sexting them to their SO. Do I trust BTC? Not really but frankly I trust the governments of the world to make just laws even less.
You DO know its possible, even easy, to pull a "EEE" on a project despite it being open source, yes? That being open source isn't a magical "get out of jail free" card, yes? If you haven't read it you might want to start here and please note that despite the fact there is a FOSS fork (ASOP) its quickly reaching the point where the FOSS part will be about as useful as the FOSS on a TiVo since none of the applications will actually run without major rewrites, which of course nobody is gonna do.
How many times is it gonna be pointed out that Google IS MSFT of the 90s before folks notice its the same dance? EEE? Webkit for Blink, taking more and more of Android behind the proprietary wall (look up Android on Ars for a great set of articles on the behind the scenes of android) its the same fricking dance folks, we've been here and done that and just because a company says "Nooo, we aren't evil, nope, nuh uh" don't make it so. Hell you watch the ads for Halliburton you'd think its a company made of kittens and sunshine, don't make it so.
Maybe I'm wrong but I think its like a law of nature, company starts out cool, gets popular, and then when they reach #1 they get paranoid and start caring more about staying big cheese than on what got them there and turn nasty. After all once upon a time MSFT was just a software house that would happily sell to anybody, even had their own UNIX for a time, but they got to the top and went nasty. Google USED to be this cool mad scientist "throw it at the wall and see what happens" kind of company, now they actively ignore their users (How many have said "do not want" to G+ yet they keep bitchslapping you with it?) and pull douchey moves like this with pretty much zero advantage to anybody but themselves.
History is repeating folks, and i only hope enough notice it and take action before we end up with a half a decade of "This page requires Chrome x.x" because as someone who survived the IE era I can say without hesitation that having one company control the web? REALLY sucks.
I have DVD backups nearly a decade old but I follow two VERY important rules...1.- Take a few discs from each batch at random and test them every 6 months or so, if a disc has any read errors? that batch needs replacing. 2.- the most important of all...AVOID CRAP DVDs!!!! Now just because its cheap does NOT mean they are crap, likewise expensive doesn't always mean good. I've had no problems with the memorex and amazon basics for example. The brands I actively avoid are Ilo,Best Buy/Staples store brands, and while Rosewill are fine for DVDs you hand to people I don't think I'd want to trust them long term.
So follow those simple rules, along with the common sense keeping them in a dark cool place and your DVD backups will easily outlast your desire to keep the old junk backed up. As for TFA? Like for like is really the only way to go with that much data. Buy a pile of HDDs (most will say 4Tb but you can buy 2 2Tb for the price of a single 4Tb so that would be the smart money) and slap 'em in a full size case with a cheap board to be the controller/server and Bob's your uncle. For a board I'd probably go with this. Its cheap, plenty of SATA and more importantly 3 PCIe 1x slots for adding more SATA. For a backup/file server it'd be just perfect.
Sorry, bullshit. If you believe those "tests" I have a bridge you may be interested in, those tests are DESIGNED by the companies! What I trust is my own two eyes and I have gamer customers. Translate that as "must have the giant ePeen rig!" customers so they are NOT buying shit and as little as 6 months ago I was shitcanning brand new drives by Intel and Samsung.
And I noticed you tapdanced around the topic very well, kudos. The topic was the WITHOUT WARNING part which the latest and greatest? STILL NOT FIXED. When it dies, which it WILL die, everything fails sooner or later, whether you like it or not thanks to SMART the customers have on average up to a week before the average HDD shits itself, the SSD? NO WARNING, no data can be saved, its all just fucking gone forever. That is unacceptable.
And again in a perfect world everyone would have backups...but if we lived in a perfect world I would be king and we wouldn't need SMART because everyone would have backups that are current and could just swap drives on fail...not a perfect world Billy, not even close. If simply telling folks to follow best practices actually worked there wouldn't be any viruses, 419 scams, trojans, hell most IT guys wouldn't have a job because nothing would ever break.
So you can scream "backup!" forever that isn't gonna change reality which is frankly against you. Reality is you have to make things that work in SPITE of the user, not with the assistance of the user, and SSDs? Not there yet. Will they get there? Maybe, or maybe something new will blow it away, but as long as there is a real chance they can just flip the switch and lose all their work, pics of their dead grandma, everything they actually care about? Then sorry but its gonna be treated as something for gamers, not grandma and Joe and jane and grandma frankly buy more gear than you, which is why damned near every desktop and laptop you see in every B&M on the planet? NOT with SSD.
Throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. You see Billy there is a teeny tiny itty bitty problem with SSD that none of the companies will talk about...they shit themselves WITHOUT WARNING.
Now can a HDD shit itself without warning? Yes but frankly since the coming of SMART its pretty damned rare, instead you get what I had last week, with SMART screaming on boot and a sector scan showing sectors failing. Final result? I was able to get more than 95% of the user's data off the failing drive, with the only thing being lost that which was actually on the failed sectors themselves.
Let us compare that to an SSD failure, shall we? Oh look, all your shit is gone, NO WARNING and no chance in hell of saving anything...wow, sucks to be you huh? I'm sure you'll talk about "cloud backups" or some such bullshit, yeah with the data caps? Hope daddy gave you a trust fund because that shit isn't gonna work on your average residential line in the USA, and in a perfect world people would have backups...and I would have a billion dollars and be woken up every morning by my Alyson Hannigan sexbot who blows me while I eat steak in bed...ain't no perfect world Billy.
So until the SSD OEMs can create an SSD that gives you an "Oh shit I'm gonna die soon" warning all it takes is one person they know getting an SSD shit itself scenario before it turns off everybody they know. BTW if you can show me where I can get a 1Tb SSD for $60 I'd be grateful, as my customers (which are Joe and Jane average BTW) are going through data like crap through a goose, those little 64Gb and 128gb SSDs ain't gonna cut it. Have you SEEN the size of files the average camcorder puts out today? Camera? Hell we now have 41MP fricking smartphones dude, where all that data gonna go? Sure as hell ain't going to the cloud, not with TW/Comcrap merging, by the time the corp buyouts are done you'll be lucky if you get 50Gb a month and then ONLY to the shitty websites, gotta pay those dividends and bonuses ya know.
Seriously guys like you REALLY ought to have to work at a mom&pop shop at least one month every 5 years so that the corporate bullshit don't rot your brain. Sure when you have $100K+ storage budgets throwing several tens of thousands on fatty SSDs with RAID ain't no thing but that is about as fucking far from reality in the consumers space, which just FYI curbstomps corp when it comes to market size just FYI, than it is from here to Mars.
Or maybe, just maybe, nobody there knew WTF they were doing? It was an online exchange for Magic:The Gathering trading ya know, dealing with cryptocurrency? Not exactly in the same ballpark as trading cards, not even the same sport.
The moral of the story? Just because a company gets huge does NOT mean they know WTF they are doing, or are even competent in the field, it just makes 'em big, that's all. I'm sure they were secure as hell when it came to Magic:The Gathering trading, why anybody thought that meant they were able to deal with cryptocurrency? fuck if I know.
To borrow a bit from that old redneck comedian...here's your sign../hands jane an idiot sign/
You DO NOT do dev work on a fricking laptop! Its like pulling a boat with a Pinto, CAN you do it? Sure, is it smart? NO!!! What you do is remote in to a badass desktop that has 6+ cores, a buttload of RAM, and plenty of fast drives including an SSD.
At the end of the day you simply can't beat thermodynamics and you are trying to pack all these uberhot parts into a teeny tiny box of plastic and metal...not smart. Doing real work on a mobile should frankly be a last resort and done as little as possible, mobile workspaces should be doing the light work while the heavy lifting should be done by systems DESIGNED for such jobs. Of course if you want to spend $3000+ for a system weaker than my $700 desktop? Fool and their money and all that.
WRONG, nice try but totally wrong, just try to download any bog standard X86 Linux distro and see how far you get.
In reality what Google has done is turn a laptop into a smartphone because just as the smartphone can ONLY run certain ROMs and certain versions, even if the hardware is the same, so too has Google used UEFI to take bog standard X86 parts and lock the fuck out of them. Can you run BSD? Windows? Haiku? Make a Hackentosh? NOPE, you can on a real laptop but NOT on a Chrome anything.
Sorry but that is total bullshit. BTW we'll see how long those "Linux" distros get supported, considering its being done strictly as a courtesy by a few devs? My bet is you would already be limited if you had a first gen Chromebook and in 2 years? Well it'll be harder than finding somebody that supports android 1.x, Turning X86 into a cellphone? You couldn't be more evil if you put Snidely Whiplash on the logo.
Frankly after the terms that Google put out with Android AND the story on how Google is taking more and more of Android proprietary by taking critical APIs behind the "GoogleWall" I honestly do not see how any sane person can't see that Google IS Microsoft of the 90s.
Seriously folks, how can anyone argue that they aren't the same company? Blocking competition? See TFA and about a dozen other articles on Google pulling products with threats of being kicked out of having access to the OHA and Google Apps. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? Hell Android is practically a textbook case of that, while Android 1 and 2 and ASOP were practically identical now there is a good chunk of the android games and apps that will not run on ASOP without being recompiled and in many cases rewritten. Trying to lock in? For God's sake they take bog standard X86 laptops and when they are done with them they are more fucking locked down than a cellphone! Hell even the latest windows allows you to fricking dual boot but not ChromeOS!
I'm sorry but while Google USED to be this great "throw shit at the wall and see what cool shit we get" kind of company as with sadly too many companies greed and the desire to keep the stock price high has turned them nasty. Maybe its a universal law of business or something, you get to be #1 and you turn nasty and greedy as you fight to stay top dog.
What if you have a so called "x-ray" camera? Its been shown that certain wavelengths really don't care about clothing and that cameras can pick up these wavelengths so would the person that owns the camera be looking at jail time if he takes a picture of a busy street with it? Because I could see the artistic merit of such a photo, showing how many shapes and sizes and colors we humans come in on just one little bit of street for example, how we are all very different but also the same.
But at the end of the day these kinds of laws always make me nervous as they WILL be abused, they WILL be stretched beyond all reason, its simply a matter of how long it takes. For an example look at the CP laws which were originally to protect kids from predators but thanks to being stretched beyond all recognition you can drag a stick figure and write "nekkid kid getting screwed' and depending on the state you could be looking at just as much jailtime as an actual photo. That is fucked up and I can see these "upskirt" or revenge porn laws also being twisted.
What is wrong with AMD? The dirty little secret of the CPU industry is that chips went from "good enough" to insanely overpowered several years so unless you are doing a job that needs every last drop of power you can squeeze (wave simulation, heavy number crunching) you'd be hard pressed in a blind trial to tell an AMD from an Intel....except when you got the bill and saw how much money you can save.
Check out the AMD Jaguar quads for example (if you can find one, they are selling like hotcakes) for what you can get for cheap nowadays. We are talking 4 Jaguar cores (the same cores powering the XBone and PS4) with Radeon HD8400 GPU capable of running 1080P video with a board that will hold 32Gb of RAM, all for $150. If you want insanely cheap you can grab an AMD E350 which I've used a LOT of in the shop and which makes a cheap and easy upgrade path for all those aging power piggie P4s, simply slap in a PCI to IDE adapter and they can keep their old drives while getting an upgrade to dual cores that again will do 1080P while using less power under load than a P4 does idling. So I'd say we HAVE a good competitor, frankly the only slot where AMD doesn't have a competing product is in the ultra hardcore market and that is a teeny tiny niche compared to mainstream.
As for TFA? I'd say its gonna all come down to support. If Mozilla can take control of the update process away from the carriers, who have a vested interest in trying to get you to buy a new phone, so that all MozPhones get say 3 years of updates? Then I think they really have a shot here in the states too as I don't know how many folks I've talked to that are seriously pissed at their Android phones because the carriers are so piss poor when it comes to pushing updates. Hell even the $300+ phones are lucky if they even get a year of support from the carriers and it makes folks feel ripped off, If Moz can get out a decent dual core phone at a sweet price ($150 or less should be doable with a dual core and a Gb of RAM) they could really grab some share away from Android, and this is from someone with an Android that I love but I had to ROM it to get a later version. Offer me a dual core for $150 or less that gets 3 years of support? I'm there.
Not to mention its not like you HAVE to take stock android anymore, pretty much any shop now offers changing ROMs which honestly really gives the low end phones a real kick in the ass. hell after ROMing mine I decided to stay with it instead of getting a new phone as the ROM included tethering which the new ones didn't have at the time.
But as somebody who gets to mess with folks phones as well as PCs (you'd be surprised how many "can you look at this too?" I get in a day when it comes to phones) I have to say...yeah...Android DOES suck OOTB and you can lay the blame at Google themselves. Sure the carrier apps suck but Google has so much shit running in the background that just sucks cycles its not even funny. I got to looking at the third party ROMs and I'd say a good 80% of their speed boosts are merely turning off all the Google shit.
If Moz actually supports the units and makes say 2 years worth of updates mandatory across the line? hell I'll buy 'em, sell them here. I am so sick of having to find third party ROMs for recent phones because the carriers never bother, bring MozPhone on I say.
Citation please? Because his negatives FAR outweigh his positives IMHO. Zune,Kin,Sidekick,killing the growing playsforsure for a doa iStore ripoff, the money lost on all his purchases that didn't pan out (HOW many writedowns did he have to do again?) if you strictly look at the bottom line, how much money came in versus what went out under his watch? Honestly you could have just had monkeys throw poo at a copy of the stock page and had a better ROI.
To me it showed just how fucking BROKEN the current review system is, as reviewers rushed to trip over themselves giving perfect 10 scores when if you were to truly look at it as a GAME, and not just the story? it was honestly maybe a 5, I personally would have given it a 4. It just wasn't fun, it was all scripted, all linear, and it was painfully obvious the entire game was designed for you to use the hook and the hook alone, as they made sure damned near every guy rushed you...yawn.
Bioshock I,II, and Minerva had good stories but they were presented in what felt like a living breathing WORLD, whereas Infinite felt like set pieces. And I agree with others once you start throwing in time travel you can give it up as you can hand wave any plot holes away with paradoxes...so even the story frankly wasn't that good. I would even argue to jam in their "twist" they had to throw out the entire arc and make more than half of what you learned (such as the fact Booker wasn't racist and felt guilty over Wounded Knee) to make their lame M. Night twist fit!
So I still say it was average at best, again not completely broken like F3AR but strictly a 1 and done.
Citation please? because I thought we were all given the reason for MSFT pushing the POS Kinect when the patent came out showing they had filed a patent on charging by the head for PPV movies. Of course we have all seen how well it works with gameplay and its pretty much universally hated for anything other than dancing games.
To me the Kinect is the perfect example of why Ballmer should have been axed half a decade ago, come up with a DUMB idea to make money, refuse to accept its a dumb idea, and spend a shitload of money trying to push said dumb idea even when everyone has told you how fucking dumb it is.
Ever hear of the boy who cried wolf? Might want to look up "map of US CIA involvement 1952-present" to see why nobody trusts the USA anymore. Remember those are JUST the ones we know about, where high muckety mucks decided to spill the beans for a book deal or the like while in reality the numbers are undoubtedly MUCH higher.
So don't bitch about people wondering if its a USA led fake coup when that is pretty much all the CIA has been doing for over half a century.
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I'm throwing the flag, bullshit on the field. Windows 8 works IF and ONLY IF you do everything the "Metro Way" which is so obviously designed for tablets and tweeting twits and social shits it fucking hurts.
With XP didn't want the Fisher price? Took all of 2 seconds to switch to classic and you would NEVER see it again, or you could use one of dozens of themes released the first 6 months that would make it look like anything you wanted. With Metro even if you use third party tools its damned near impossible to 100% kill that fucking Metro and if you are one of the millions that have a laptop that the generic synaptics touchpad drivers won't work on? Either buy a mouse and carry it with your laptop forever or throw the laptop in the trash because you will NEVER EVER get rid of the fucking Charms bar! And once you look down for a second and when you look up find you've been "charmed" and have lost the last 3 - 5 seconds of work thanks to Charms stealing focus and it does that over and over AND OVER throughout the day? You'll find out why so many have a seething hatred for that fucking OS.
What all those Win 8 lovers is simply gonna have to face is THE ENTIRE PREMISE IS STUPID and I can prove this, ready? Where does Windows 8 work best? Tablets and touchscreens, don't take my word for it, just count how many times Sinofsky said touch during the win 8 reveal, it was like 30 times in a 10 minute presentation. Fine but why do people buy Windows? What makes you pick Windows over say Android or iOS? Windows programs which aren't touch enabled and which make no fucking sense and are painful on a fucking tablet!....Argh!
The sad part is that is true even here, just look at how quickly the "truther" slur is trotted out whenever anybody asks why anything better than the frankly piss poor at best investigation wasn't done for the 9/11 attacks, like the government has never lied to us.....except for that "pesky" Gulf Of Tonkin thing that left 50,000 Americans and probably a couple million Asians dead....oops.
If there is one thing Wikileaks and Snowden should have taught us its that the MSM of pretty much every country is nothing but the puppet of the state and is about as truthful as Soviet Pravda.
Thanks. If you want dirt cheap media tanks check out Amazon as you can find ones like this all the time and unlike a used laptop not only does it look nice but you can easily add anything you want, BR drive,SSD, plenty of RAM and HDD, and its easy to add.
I've used the E350 a LOT at the shop and was impressed enough I sold my full size lappy for an E350, its THAT nice. HD videos, office work, hell I've played Torchlight and Portal on 'em and they are great little chips, all while just using 20w full load and 9w for most tasks. A word of advice though and this goes for ANY APU system...ALWAYS get the faster RAM, in fact if it comes down to 4Gb of faster or 8Gb of slower take the 4Gb because that AMD APUs really need decent RAM to shine. Nothing crazy, no need to OC the RAM, 1333 or better will do nicely. One of the barebone systems I picked up came with 4Gb of 1066, I did benches before and after I switched it for 1333 and depending on the tasks I got as much as 35% more performance simply by having the faster RAM, its THAT noticeable.
Sure when you show me a box that is an actual PC and not a thin client for that price, otherwise the comparison is moot as the Chrome isn't a PC, its a thin client. Here is a mini with SATA and wireless for $159, just add a RAM stick and unlike ChromeOS you aren't giving a corporation every single thing you do online...yay!
I'd be more worried about a bio-bomb as that would be the perfect carrier, hell you could infect the passengers and use them as the "payload" and then fly it over a large heavily populated city and blow it up at 10,000 feet, voila! the diseased body parts would be spread over a large area and cause maximum damage. To hamper cleanup you could always mix enough uranium to make the whole thing "dirty" enough to cause a panic and slow the responders to a crawl.
In any case I think there is more than a simple hijack and crash going on, too many conflicting stories to be that simple.
Look for the ones with AMD chips, especially the E350s and E450s, as those come with HDMI out and most will hold 8Gb of RAM and do 1080P. A good place to start would be the Asus EEE "B" series, with B standing for Brazos. I have one and its fricking great, 4 years on and it still types well, gets nearly 4 hours on the battery and with 8Gb of RAM everything plays nice and smooth.
But if you want a really cheap media tank instead of using an old lappy look at th E350 barebone kits as I've seen them on sale at Amazon for around $100 with case, I've built quite a few of those as both media tanks and office boxes and they are really sweet, use less than 20w under load and will play just about any format. A word of advice though, if you get one make sure your player is set to use DXVA and get the codecs from either AMD or the excellent CCCP codec pack as the E series APUs are really designed for hardware video acceleration and not having that turned on ties a boat anchor to them system. Using a player without DXVA a 720p video was hitting 80% CPU while the same video with DXVA was using less than 15% so it makes a HUGE difference when it comes to performance.
As for TFA how anybody would trust some large megacorp after the Snowden revelations is frankly beyond me...I mean do you have ANY idea how easy it is to know pretty much everything about you simply by having your browsing history? Everything from what kind of porn you like to what medical issues you have and what beliefs you hold can be gleamed from that sooo easy its just not funny. This is why I have one company for mail, another for search, and made a throwaway account just for my android phone, giving ANY company THAT much info is just creepy.
Yet again you should just go AMD as you can buy the Jaguar based mini-PCs for cheaper, and since those are based on the same cores as the PS4 and XBone if you care any about gaming the coming games should be optimized for it.
And while we are on the subject of Jaguar and AMD since XP is about to EOL? Please please PLEASE get rid of those damned P4s already, okay? If there was a list of "world's dumbest computing ideas" I'd have to put that one at the top, it was slow, sucked insane amounts of power, and because of the crazy long pipelines one cache miss and it would slam on the brakes. The only thing worse was the Netburst Celeron as the teeny tiny cache made misses all but guaranteed.
What does that have to do with AMD and Jaguar? Simple the Bobcat, which the jag was based on can be had for just $65 so for less than $100 you can turn any power pig P4 into a MUCH nicer dual core PC capable of 1080P over HDMI. Simply pick up a PCI to IDE adapter so you can keep the original drives and tada! Dirt cheap upgrade.
One final note...why is everybody making such a big whoop over ChromeOS? We had this in the 90s folks, its called a "thin client" only frankly the 90s ones were better as they weren't controlled by a single company with STASI levels of information about their clients and whom may or may not be connected with the NSA. Hell even if they tell the NSA to fuck off they still consider you to be the PRODUCT and the advertisers the customers so its not like they have your best interests at heart. And do they still TiVo the shit out of them with UEFI? Funny how many here say "Oh M$ is teh evil!" yet I can take any Windows 8.1 laptop and be booting the instaler of anything from BSD to ReactOS in a couple minutes but last I looked the ChromeOS devices were so locked down the ONLY things you could run ere CERTAIN Linux distros and ONLY those that had the hacked loaders...shit, how is turning X86 into a game console NOT evil? Because that is what they did,they took the most standards compliant universal hardware on the planet and turned it into the original Xbox, where you gotta hack the thing just to run a limited amount of software.
Nooo..Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter on the school's PDP11 which they sold to Altair, which gave us the famous "computer club piracy" speech. Now one could argue whether or not the computer time was "stealing" but they got their BASIC commands from the same place everybody else did, Knuth and his books of the early 70s.
And on the flip side you can now go to jail for a drawing of Lisa Simpson in an S&M outfit and thanks to their not being any way to make money many who would need a liver and kidney who aren't rich (and can bribe their way to the top like Steve jobs did) will die.
the problem is laws and common sense almost never go together and laws WILL be abused, look at the kids doing time for taking pics of their own bodies and sexting them to their SO. Do I trust BTC? Not really but frankly I trust the governments of the world to make just laws even less.
You DO know its possible, even easy, to pull a "EEE" on a project despite it being open source, yes? That being open source isn't a magical "get out of jail free" card, yes? If you haven't read it you might want to start here and please note that despite the fact there is a FOSS fork (ASOP) its quickly reaching the point where the FOSS part will be about as useful as the FOSS on a TiVo since none of the applications will actually run without major rewrites, which of course nobody is gonna do.
How many times is it gonna be pointed out that Google IS MSFT of the 90s before folks notice its the same dance? EEE? Webkit for Blink, taking more and more of Android behind the proprietary wall (look up Android on Ars for a great set of articles on the behind the scenes of android) its the same fricking dance folks, we've been here and done that and just because a company says "Nooo, we aren't evil, nope, nuh uh" don't make it so. Hell you watch the ads for Halliburton you'd think its a company made of kittens and sunshine, don't make it so.
Maybe I'm wrong but I think its like a law of nature, company starts out cool, gets popular, and then when they reach #1 they get paranoid and start caring more about staying big cheese than on what got them there and turn nasty. After all once upon a time MSFT was just a software house that would happily sell to anybody, even had their own UNIX for a time, but they got to the top and went nasty. Google USED to be this cool mad scientist "throw it at the wall and see what happens" kind of company, now they actively ignore their users (How many have said "do not want" to G+ yet they keep bitchslapping you with it?) and pull douchey moves like this with pretty much zero advantage to anybody but themselves.
History is repeating folks, and i only hope enough notice it and take action before we end up with a half a decade of "This page requires Chrome x.x" because as someone who survived the IE era I can say without hesitation that having one company control the web? REALLY sucks.
I have DVD backups nearly a decade old but I follow two VERY important rules...1.- Take a few discs from each batch at random and test them every 6 months or so, if a disc has any read errors? that batch needs replacing. 2.- the most important of all...AVOID CRAP DVDs!!!! Now just because its cheap does NOT mean they are crap, likewise expensive doesn't always mean good. I've had no problems with the memorex and amazon basics for example. The brands I actively avoid are Ilo,Best Buy/Staples store brands, and while Rosewill are fine for DVDs you hand to people I don't think I'd want to trust them long term.
So follow those simple rules, along with the common sense keeping them in a dark cool place and your DVD backups will easily outlast your desire to keep the old junk backed up. As for TFA? Like for like is really the only way to go with that much data. Buy a pile of HDDs (most will say 4Tb but you can buy 2 2Tb for the price of a single 4Tb so that would be the smart money) and slap 'em in a full size case with a cheap board to be the controller/server and Bob's your uncle. For a board I'd probably go with this. Its cheap, plenty of SATA and more importantly 3 PCIe 1x slots for adding more SATA. For a backup/file server it'd be just perfect.
Sorry, bullshit. If you believe those "tests" I have a bridge you may be interested in, those tests are DESIGNED by the companies! What I trust is my own two eyes and I have gamer customers. Translate that as "must have the giant ePeen rig!" customers so they are NOT buying shit and as little as 6 months ago I was shitcanning brand new drives by Intel and Samsung.
And I noticed you tapdanced around the topic very well, kudos. The topic was the WITHOUT WARNING part which the latest and greatest? STILL NOT FIXED. When it dies, which it WILL die, everything fails sooner or later, whether you like it or not thanks to SMART the customers have on average up to a week before the average HDD shits itself, the SSD? NO WARNING, no data can be saved, its all just fucking gone forever. That is unacceptable.
And again in a perfect world everyone would have backups...but if we lived in a perfect world I would be king and we wouldn't need SMART because everyone would have backups that are current and could just swap drives on fail...not a perfect world Billy, not even close. If simply telling folks to follow best practices actually worked there wouldn't be any viruses, 419 scams, trojans, hell most IT guys wouldn't have a job because nothing would ever break.
So you can scream "backup!" forever that isn't gonna change reality which is frankly against you. Reality is you have to make things that work in SPITE of the user, not with the assistance of the user, and SSDs? Not there yet. Will they get there? Maybe, or maybe something new will blow it away, but as long as there is a real chance they can just flip the switch and lose all their work, pics of their dead grandma, everything they actually care about? Then sorry but its gonna be treated as something for gamers, not grandma and Joe and jane and grandma frankly buy more gear than you, which is why damned near every desktop and laptop you see in every B&M on the planet? NOT with SSD.
Throwing a flag, bullshit on the field. You see Billy there is a teeny tiny itty bitty problem with SSD that none of the companies will talk about...they shit themselves WITHOUT WARNING.
Now can a HDD shit itself without warning? Yes but frankly since the coming of SMART its pretty damned rare, instead you get what I had last week, with SMART screaming on boot and a sector scan showing sectors failing. Final result? I was able to get more than 95% of the user's data off the failing drive, with the only thing being lost that which was actually on the failed sectors themselves.
Let us compare that to an SSD failure, shall we? Oh look, all your shit is gone, NO WARNING and no chance in hell of saving anything...wow, sucks to be you huh? I'm sure you'll talk about "cloud backups" or some such bullshit, yeah with the data caps? Hope daddy gave you a trust fund because that shit isn't gonna work on your average residential line in the USA, and in a perfect world people would have backups...and I would have a billion dollars and be woken up every morning by my Alyson Hannigan sexbot who blows me while I eat steak in bed...ain't no perfect world Billy.
So until the SSD OEMs can create an SSD that gives you an "Oh shit I'm gonna die soon" warning all it takes is one person they know getting an SSD shit itself scenario before it turns off everybody they know. BTW if you can show me where I can get a 1Tb SSD for $60 I'd be grateful, as my customers (which are Joe and Jane average BTW) are going through data like crap through a goose, those little 64Gb and 128gb SSDs ain't gonna cut it. Have you SEEN the size of files the average camcorder puts out today? Camera? Hell we now have 41MP fricking smartphones dude, where all that data gonna go? Sure as hell ain't going to the cloud, not with TW/Comcrap merging, by the time the corp buyouts are done you'll be lucky if you get 50Gb a month and then ONLY to the shitty websites, gotta pay those dividends and bonuses ya know.
Seriously guys like you REALLY ought to have to work at a mom&pop shop at least one month every 5 years so that the corporate bullshit don't rot your brain. Sure when you have $100K+ storage budgets throwing several tens of thousands on fatty SSDs with RAID ain't no thing but that is about as fucking far from reality in the consumers space, which just FYI curbstomps corp when it comes to market size just FYI, than it is from here to Mars.
Or maybe, just maybe, nobody there knew WTF they were doing? It was an online exchange for Magic:The Gathering trading ya know, dealing with cryptocurrency? Not exactly in the same ballpark as trading cards, not even the same sport.
The moral of the story? Just because a company gets huge does NOT mean they know WTF they are doing, or are even competent in the field, it just makes 'em big, that's all. I'm sure they were secure as hell when it came to Magic:The Gathering trading, why anybody thought that meant they were able to deal with cryptocurrency? fuck if I know.
To borrow a bit from that old redneck comedian...here's your sign../hands jane an idiot sign/
You DO NOT do dev work on a fricking laptop! Its like pulling a boat with a Pinto, CAN you do it? Sure, is it smart? NO!!! What you do is remote in to a badass desktop that has 6+ cores, a buttload of RAM, and plenty of fast drives including an SSD.
At the end of the day you simply can't beat thermodynamics and you are trying to pack all these uberhot parts into a teeny tiny box of plastic and metal...not smart. Doing real work on a mobile should frankly be a last resort and done as little as possible, mobile workspaces should be doing the light work while the heavy lifting should be done by systems DESIGNED for such jobs. Of course if you want to spend $3000+ for a system weaker than my $700 desktop? Fool and their money and all that.
WRONG, nice try but totally wrong, just try to download any bog standard X86 Linux distro and see how far you get.
In reality what Google has done is turn a laptop into a smartphone because just as the smartphone can ONLY run certain ROMs and certain versions, even if the hardware is the same, so too has Google used UEFI to take bog standard X86 parts and lock the fuck out of them. Can you run BSD? Windows? Haiku? Make a Hackentosh? NOPE, you can on a real laptop but NOT on a Chrome anything.
Sorry but that is total bullshit. BTW we'll see how long those "Linux" distros get supported, considering its being done strictly as a courtesy by a few devs? My bet is you would already be limited if you had a first gen Chromebook and in 2 years? Well it'll be harder than finding somebody that supports android 1.x, Turning X86 into a cellphone? You couldn't be more evil if you put Snidely Whiplash on the logo.
Frankly after the terms that Google put out with Android AND the story on how Google is taking more and more of Android proprietary by taking critical APIs behind the "GoogleWall" I honestly do not see how any sane person can't see that Google IS Microsoft of the 90s.
Seriously folks, how can anyone argue that they aren't the same company? Blocking competition? See TFA and about a dozen other articles on Google pulling products with threats of being kicked out of having access to the OHA and Google Apps. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? Hell Android is practically a textbook case of that, while Android 1 and 2 and ASOP were practically identical now there is a good chunk of the android games and apps that will not run on ASOP without being recompiled and in many cases rewritten. Trying to lock in? For God's sake they take bog standard X86 laptops and when they are done with them they are more fucking locked down than a cellphone! Hell even the latest windows allows you to fricking dual boot but not ChromeOS!
I'm sorry but while Google USED to be this great "throw shit at the wall and see what cool shit we get" kind of company as with sadly too many companies greed and the desire to keep the stock price high has turned them nasty. Maybe its a universal law of business or something, you get to be #1 and you turn nasty and greedy as you fight to stay top dog.
What if you have a so called "x-ray" camera? Its been shown that certain wavelengths really don't care about clothing and that cameras can pick up these wavelengths so would the person that owns the camera be looking at jail time if he takes a picture of a busy street with it? Because I could see the artistic merit of such a photo, showing how many shapes and sizes and colors we humans come in on just one little bit of street for example, how we are all very different but also the same.
But at the end of the day these kinds of laws always make me nervous as they WILL be abused, they WILL be stretched beyond all reason, its simply a matter of how long it takes. For an example look at the CP laws which were originally to protect kids from predators but thanks to being stretched beyond all recognition you can drag a stick figure and write "nekkid kid getting screwed' and depending on the state you could be looking at just as much jailtime as an actual photo. That is fucked up and I can see these "upskirt" or revenge porn laws also being twisted.
What is wrong with AMD? The dirty little secret of the CPU industry is that chips went from "good enough" to insanely overpowered several years so unless you are doing a job that needs every last drop of power you can squeeze (wave simulation, heavy number crunching) you'd be hard pressed in a blind trial to tell an AMD from an Intel....except when you got the bill and saw how much money you can save.
Check out the AMD Jaguar quads for example (if you can find one, they are selling like hotcakes) for what you can get for cheap nowadays. We are talking 4 Jaguar cores (the same cores powering the XBone and PS4) with Radeon HD8400 GPU capable of running 1080P video with a board that will hold 32Gb of RAM, all for $150. If you want insanely cheap you can grab an AMD E350 which I've used a LOT of in the shop and which makes a cheap and easy upgrade path for all those aging power piggie P4s, simply slap in a PCI to IDE adapter and they can keep their old drives while getting an upgrade to dual cores that again will do 1080P while using less power under load than a P4 does idling. So I'd say we HAVE a good competitor, frankly the only slot where AMD doesn't have a competing product is in the ultra hardcore market and that is a teeny tiny niche compared to mainstream.
As for TFA? I'd say its gonna all come down to support. If Mozilla can take control of the update process away from the carriers, who have a vested interest in trying to get you to buy a new phone, so that all MozPhones get say 3 years of updates? Then I think they really have a shot here in the states too as I don't know how many folks I've talked to that are seriously pissed at their Android phones because the carriers are so piss poor when it comes to pushing updates. Hell even the $300+ phones are lucky if they even get a year of support from the carriers and it makes folks feel ripped off, If Moz can get out a decent dual core phone at a sweet price ($150 or less should be doable with a dual core and a Gb of RAM) they could really grab some share away from Android, and this is from someone with an Android that I love but I had to ROM it to get a later version. Offer me a dual core for $150 or less that gets 3 years of support? I'm there.
Not to mention its not like you HAVE to take stock android anymore, pretty much any shop now offers changing ROMs which honestly really gives the low end phones a real kick in the ass. hell after ROMing mine I decided to stay with it instead of getting a new phone as the ROM included tethering which the new ones didn't have at the time.
But as somebody who gets to mess with folks phones as well as PCs (you'd be surprised how many "can you look at this too?" I get in a day when it comes to phones) I have to say...yeah...Android DOES suck OOTB and you can lay the blame at Google themselves. Sure the carrier apps suck but Google has so much shit running in the background that just sucks cycles its not even funny. I got to looking at the third party ROMs and I'd say a good 80% of their speed boosts are merely turning off all the Google shit.
If Moz actually supports the units and makes say 2 years worth of updates mandatory across the line? hell I'll buy 'em, sell them here. I am so sick of having to find third party ROMs for recent phones because the carriers never bother, bring MozPhone on I say.
Citation please? Because his negatives FAR outweigh his positives IMHO. Zune,Kin,Sidekick,killing the growing playsforsure for a doa iStore ripoff, the money lost on all his purchases that didn't pan out (HOW many writedowns did he have to do again?) if you strictly look at the bottom line, how much money came in versus what went out under his watch? Honestly you could have just had monkeys throw poo at a copy of the stock page and had a better ROI.
To me it showed just how fucking BROKEN the current review system is, as reviewers rushed to trip over themselves giving perfect 10 scores when if you were to truly look at it as a GAME, and not just the story? it was honestly maybe a 5, I personally would have given it a 4. It just wasn't fun, it was all scripted, all linear, and it was painfully obvious the entire game was designed for you to use the hook and the hook alone, as they made sure damned near every guy rushed you...yawn.
Bioshock I,II, and Minerva had good stories but they were presented in what felt like a living breathing WORLD, whereas Infinite felt like set pieces. And I agree with others once you start throwing in time travel you can give it up as you can hand wave any plot holes away with paradoxes...so even the story frankly wasn't that good. I would even argue to jam in their "twist" they had to throw out the entire arc and make more than half of what you learned (such as the fact Booker wasn't racist and felt guilty over Wounded Knee) to make their lame M. Night twist fit!
So I still say it was average at best, again not completely broken like F3AR but strictly a 1 and done.
Citation please? because I thought we were all given the reason for MSFT pushing the POS Kinect when the patent came out showing they had filed a patent on charging by the head for PPV movies. Of course we have all seen how well it works with gameplay and its pretty much universally hated for anything other than dancing games.
To me the Kinect is the perfect example of why Ballmer should have been axed half a decade ago, come up with a DUMB idea to make money, refuse to accept its a dumb idea, and spend a shitload of money trying to push said dumb idea even when everyone has told you how fucking dumb it is.
Ever hear of the boy who cried wolf? Might want to look up "map of US CIA involvement 1952-present" to see why nobody trusts the USA anymore. Remember those are JUST the ones we know about, where high muckety mucks decided to spill the beans for a book deal or the like while in reality the numbers are undoubtedly MUCH higher.
So don't bitch about people wondering if its a USA led fake coup when that is pretty much all the CIA has been doing for over half a century.