I've had 4 failures out of approx 20-25 purchased or obtained new drives since 2000.
One 30 GB drive crashed within 10 days of purchase, a 160 GB died 10 months after purchase (possibly because of power loss/surge), a 20GB iPod drive damaged by contact with a large magnet (because iPod integration and subwoofers were being installed at the same time). Someone I know had a 40GB that randomly returned corrupt data without any obvious signs of disk failure -- just Windows bluescreens that would normally indicate corrupt RAM.
Of those drives, the first three were repaired via warranty. The 30GB was replaced with a new drive, and guessing by its capacity, is not still in use. The refurbished 160 GB drive is still working today, about 22 months later. The replaced iPod is also still working today.
The 40 GB drive was out of warranty and was replaced with the same model and is still working one and a half years later. My oldest drives were probably made in 2002 and have been working fine. They've been running constantly for the past few years.
I have had a laptop hard drive fail gradually -- it came from a phyiscally abused laptop. The drive worked (slowly) at first, long enough for me to copy the data off of it. Within a few more hours of use, it died.
Motherboards vary by about $10 for comparable features. Seems like the AMD fanboy is just grasping for straws here...
Core 2 motherboards start at $46 (Newegg; VIA chipset) and Athlon 64 FX AM2 motherboards start at $47 (Newegg; SiS chipset).
A motherboard with an Intel chipset can be found at $66, while a AM2 motherboard with the nForce 410 can be found for $57.
The cheapest SLI board for Intel costs $78 (rebate). The cheapest SLI board for AMD costs $85 (sale). Their original prices were $97 and $95 resepectively.
LGA775-compatible CPUs start at $45 (Celeron D 326). Dual core CPUs start at $90 (Pentium D 805). Core 2 Duo CPUs start at $180 (Core 2 Duo E6300).
AMD AM2 compatible CPUs start at $41 (Semprom 64 2800+). Dual core CPUs start at $153.
Summary -- Intel motherboards are usually within a few dollars of an AMD equivalent. Budget CPUs start within a few dollars of each other. Intel dual core is cheaper. Core 2 Duo is $27 more expensive than the cheapest AM2 Athlon 64 X2, but faster.
Meaning that that Core 2 Duo E6600 still crushes that FX-62.
What part is all fisher-price? The "Aqua" interface with the curved buttons and gradients.
That's the majority of the OS X operating system GUI. The rest (Brushed Metal) isn't any better.
This is one of the *few* valid complaints about OS X out there.
Perhaps I'm old fanshioned, but I prefer solid colors, right angles, reasonably sized icons, and window titlebar buttons that actually indicate what they do. Anything fancier than a titlebar gradien or "3d effect" is a distraction to me.
Most window managers and GUI toolkits for XWindows can offer this to me -- KDE/Qt and Gnome/Gtk+ both when configured properly. Windows can offer this to me as well, via Windows Classic. Sure, I might need to spend a few minutes setting things how I like them, but after that, it's done.
Mac OS X doesn't give me that choice.
Without the GUI, what's the point of using OS X? BSD, Linux, or Solaris all do a much better job of prodiving a unix like environment on its own -- and they cost much less. (Plus, they have much more choice in GUIs than Windows Classic/Luna/Aero on Windows or Aqua in OS X).
My Pioneer DEH-6800MP's iPod integration works very well. The receiver has a wheel that works similar to the iPod's wheel. The reciever's remote would work fine except that it has no repeating or hold-down scroll, so it's useless unless you're near what you're looking for.
The default list gives me Genre, Artist, Song, and Album. Selecting Genre lets me choose the genre and then artists within the genre, so that's my preferred method of finding a given song.
The display shows two lines of song info; I leave it on song title/artist.
Jitter still causes issues, but at my office we've done what's possible to minimize it. T.38 and a real phone line resolve faxing issues... and we've got no need for 56k.
We've got RoadRunner business class cable, which is nice and fast, but at least 40ms to anywhere & with very jittery routes. Receiving faxes worked about half the time and sending was much less.
The solution was to get AT&T DSL and use it primarily for VoIP. Destinations like Google and Akamai mirrors are 17ms away and our key VoIP provders are 33ms away, with minimal latency. It works well enough that we're able to receive faxes the majority of the time (and then we use the required DSL phone line for local faxing and a T.38 provider for long distance).
Plus, for those of us that use the phones at home, we can access the VoIP server through either connection depending on what we've got at home.
VoIP uses lossy compression, introduces much more latency, has dropped packets due to internet congestion, and has rotten timing for the A-D/D-A conversions.
VoIP uses whatever codec it's configured to use, which could be great-sounding G.711 alaw/ulaw (as used on the real phone system) or GSM (not so good).
Get a better laptop. With the additional 12-cell battery plus the internal 6-cell, my laptop has an estimated battery life of 16 hours (6 on the internal, 10 on the additional). That'd probably work out to 10 hours or so while playing a movie.
looking at price and product quality, the premium of the Sony brand is usually not worth it.
My 32" LCD TV was $900 ($1300 MSRP) and has recently sold as low as $800. It includes an ATSC/QAM HD tuner.
A lower end 32" Sony LCD TV without HD tuner would cost $1330 ($1600 MSRP); then, they have at least two additional 32" models available that cost even more.
Not if you appreciate the higher resolution video. (Some people do.)
2) Can't afford. Bring prices down for HD TVs, HD cable boxes, HD cable, HD players, etc.
You can get HDTVs for $800 (32" LCD) or less. I think you can get 30" CRT HDTVs for $500 or less. Considering they're all widescreen, they're pretty nice even if you only want to watch DVDs.
Digital Cable here with one HD receiver (plus analog for evey other tv) cost less than the analog package we were previously on for the past six years. A DVR brought up the price by $2.
I don't pay extra HD content -- just the basic digital cable, which costs less than analog did -- and I get the locals, TNT HD, and Discovery HD Theater.
Without the cable box, I was able to get the local channels in HD on my TV.
While high definition video players are expensive, I can get 5 channels of HD content (HDNet, HDNet Movies, InHD, InHD2, and ESPN) for $7/mo extra -- and get lots of HD content. Or, by subscribing to HBO and/or Showtime, you also get the HD versions of either.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray are expensive but getting an HDTV doesn't mean you can't still watch DVDs. With the right software or player, they look better than they would on an SDTV -- Cyberlink PowerDVD is able to make DVDs look pretty good at 1366x768.
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Or you can simply put in the recovery code at boot, assuming you save it, and it'll boot up.
How many Chinese will search for a term in English? It's likely that more effort has been put into blocking things in Chinese.
Wow, when you think of it that way, cable or satellite TV is a hell of a deal.
$55/mo for a cable DVR that will record all of those shows...
Neither would I.
Played San Andreas? On the PS2, aiming was a simple click of R1 and then fire. Nice and easy.
I've seen the cards for as low as $15. Not very much at all, if you ask me.
No, you havent.
Vista works fine with low-end 3D acceleration such as the Intel GMA 950 that's on the majority of all Core/Core 2 business laptops.
I have to agree; I also liked the ACT better. (score: 33)
Also, the ACT does not deduct points for guessing.
No, they actually use a separate channel from the internet channels.
I've had 4 failures out of approx 20-25 purchased or obtained new drives since 2000.
One 30 GB drive crashed within 10 days of purchase, a 160 GB died 10 months after purchase (possibly because of power loss/surge), a 20GB iPod drive damaged by contact with a large magnet (because iPod integration and subwoofers were being installed at the same time). Someone I know had a 40GB that randomly returned corrupt data without any obvious signs of disk failure -- just Windows bluescreens that would normally indicate corrupt RAM.
Of those drives, the first three were repaired via warranty. The 30GB was replaced with a new drive, and guessing by its capacity, is not still in use. The refurbished 160 GB drive is still working today, about 22 months later. The replaced iPod is also still working today.
The 40 GB drive was out of warranty and was replaced with the same model and is still working one and a half years later. My oldest drives were probably made in 2002 and have been working fine. They've been running constantly for the past few years.
I have had a laptop hard drive fail gradually -- it came from a phyiscally abused laptop. The drive worked (slowly) at first, long enough for me to copy the data off of it. Within a few more hours of use, it died.
Motherboards vary by about $10 for comparable features. Seems like the AMD fanboy is just grasping for straws here...
Core 2 motherboards start at $46 (Newegg; VIA chipset) and Athlon 64 FX AM2 motherboards start at $47 (Newegg; SiS chipset).
A motherboard with an Intel chipset can be found at $66, while a AM2 motherboard with the nForce 410 can be found for $57.
The cheapest SLI board for Intel costs $78 (rebate). The cheapest SLI board for AMD costs $85 (sale). Their original prices were $97 and $95 resepectively.
LGA775-compatible CPUs start at $45 (Celeron D 326). Dual core CPUs start at $90 (Pentium D 805). Core 2 Duo CPUs start at $180 (Core 2 Duo E6300).
AMD AM2 compatible CPUs start at $41 (Semprom 64 2800+). Dual core CPUs start at $153.
Summary -- Intel motherboards are usually within a few dollars of an AMD equivalent. Budget CPUs start within a few dollars of each other. Intel dual core is cheaper. Core 2 Duo is $27 more expensive than the cheapest AM2 Athlon 64 X2, but faster.
Meaning that that Core 2 Duo E6600 still crushes that FX-62.
What part is all fisher-price? The "Aqua" interface with the curved buttons and gradients.
That's the majority of the OS X operating system GUI. The rest (Brushed Metal) isn't any better.
This is one of the *few* valid complaints about OS X out there.
Perhaps I'm old fanshioned, but I prefer solid colors, right angles, reasonably sized icons, and window titlebar buttons that actually indicate what they do. Anything fancier than a titlebar gradien or "3d effect" is a distraction to me.
Most window managers and GUI toolkits for XWindows can offer this to me -- KDE/Qt and Gnome/Gtk+ both when configured properly. Windows can offer this to me as well, via Windows Classic. Sure, I might need to spend a few minutes setting things how I like them, but after that, it's done.
Mac OS X doesn't give me that choice.
Without the GUI, what's the point of using OS X? BSD, Linux, or Solaris all do a much better job of prodiving a unix like environment on its own -- and they cost much less. (Plus, they have much more choice in GUIs than Windows Classic/Luna/Aero on Windows or Aqua in OS X).
There's one glaringly huge difference you neglected to mention.
Mac OS X is all Fisher Price, all the time. Windows gives you the choice to disable Aero/Luna.
Incorrect; VMware ESX uses a custom-made kernel. Linux is used for the console and runs in a VM.
Tried Opera? It worked a lot better than Firefox did, back when I tried to use a laptop without a touchpad or pointing stick.
My Pioneer DEH-6800MP's iPod integration works very well. The receiver has a wheel that works similar to the iPod's wheel. The reciever's remote would work fine except that it has no repeating or hold-down scroll, so it's useless unless you're near what you're looking for.
The default list gives me Genre, Artist, Song, and Album. Selecting Genre lets me choose the genre and then artists within the genre, so that's my preferred method of finding a given song.
The display shows two lines of song info; I leave it on song title/artist.
Jitter still causes issues, but at my office we've done what's possible to minimize it. T.38 and a real phone line resolve faxing issues... and we've got no need for 56k.
We've got RoadRunner business class cable, which is nice and fast, but at least 40ms to anywhere & with very jittery routes. Receiving faxes worked about half the time and sending was much less.
The solution was to get AT&T DSL and use it primarily for VoIP. Destinations like Google and Akamai mirrors are 17ms away and our key VoIP provders are 33ms away, with minimal latency. It works well enough that we're able to receive faxes the majority of the time (and then we use the required DSL phone line for local faxing and a T.38 provider for long distance).
Plus, for those of us that use the phones at home, we can access the VoIP server through either connection depending on what we've got at home.
All of our calls use (and always have used) ulaw.
FWIW, running Opera in Windows with 50+ open subwindows works just fine....
VoIP uses whatever codec it's configured to use, which could be great-sounding G.711 alaw/ulaw (as used on the real phone system) or GSM (not so good).
Get a better laptop. With the additional 12-cell battery plus the internal 6-cell, my laptop has an estimated battery life of 16 hours (6 on the internal, 10 on the additional). That'd probably work out to 10 hours or so while playing a movie.
looking at price and product quality, the premium of the Sony brand is usually not worth it.
My 32" LCD TV was $900 ($1300 MSRP) and has recently sold as low as $800. It includes an ATSC/QAM HD tuner.
A lower end 32" Sony LCD TV without HD tuner would cost $1330 ($1600 MSRP); then, they have at least two additional 32" models available that cost even more.
That sounds great, except HDTVs start at less than $600 (Example) and LCD HDTVs (27" and 32") can be had for under $1000.
Not if you appreciate the higher resolution video. (Some people do.)
You can get HDTVs for $800 (32" LCD) or less. I think you can get 30" CRT HDTVs for $500 or less. Considering they're all widescreen, they're pretty nice even if you only want to watch DVDs.
Digital Cable here with one HD receiver (plus analog for evey other tv) cost less than the analog package we were previously on for the past six years. A DVR brought up the price by $2.
I don't pay extra HD content -- just the basic digital cable, which costs less than analog did -- and I get the locals, TNT HD, and Discovery HD Theater.
Without the cable box, I was able to get the local channels in HD on my TV.
While high definition video players are expensive, I can get 5 channels of HD content (HDNet, HDNet Movies, InHD, InHD2, and ESPN) for $7/mo extra -- and get lots of HD content. Or, by subscribing to HBO and/or Showtime, you also get the HD versions of either.
HD-DVD and Blu-ray are expensive but getting an HDTV doesn't mean you can't still watch DVDs. With the right software or player, they look better than they would on an SDTV -- Cyberlink PowerDVD is able to make DVDs look pretty good at 1366x768.
Not to mention OS X's inferior perfomance compared to other server-capable operating systems due to its threading performance.
There's more to infrastructure than mobile phone networks.