Posts by kb

Ballmer: Win8 'certainly surpasses' Win95 in importance

Re: Better than 95 because?

But saying your tablet or cell phone is gonna replace X86 is like saying toilet paper is gonna replace napkins because you wipe your behind more than your mouth!

I have yet to meet ANYONE that has gotten rid of their X86 for a tablet, and I've been in the trenches since 386DX...wanna know the truth? here are the facts: 1.- People buy more ARM because its in throwaway devices, how many cell phones you got in a sock drawer? Most people I know have at least 4, they get a new one with their plan and toss the previous in the sock drawer. 2.-People buy tablets to ADD to their X86, because its easier to use on a couch than a laptop. 3.-Since the MHz wars ended PCs became insanely overpowered, we are talking $300 triple and quad PCs and dual core laptops, so nobody replaces until they break, which because they actually pay for it, instead of being handed it "free" as with ARM, they actually take care of it and thus they can last for years.

So there you have it, still hundreds of millions of X86 units sold, 90%+ of them being sold with Windows, while they toss their ARM devices in the dump and get a new one. The future of ARM? $20 tablets being sold in Toys R Us, we are already seeing $45 Android tablets with ICS, in another year they will be as cheap as a pizza and considered no more worthwhile.

Re: Better than 95 because?

Not a chance, too many businesses require Windows software.

No what will ACTUALLY happen is if (I would vote when, but whatever) Win 8 bombs you WILL see the board turn on him. Most likely Ballmer will pull some fake numbers out of his behind, just as he did when XP machines were counted as "Vista sales" because a Vista disc that nobody ever used was left in the bottom of the box, and then he will "retire to pursue other interests" and Sinofsky will get the boot to be replaced by someone from the office team, or possibly luring Ozzie or Allchin back to the fold.

Ballmer may be Bill's little buddy but he has flushed billions and gotten exactly NOWHERE when it comes to mobile and the board knows this. Windows 8 bombs and the stock is gonna start heading south and I don't care if Steve tucks Billy in at night the board is gonna have enough and tell him to walk or be fired, his choice.

I mean look at the man's record, Zune, Kin, Sidekick, the recent 6 billion writeoff on a bad buy, pushing the X360 out with a 2 billion dollar flaw, no wonder the writers wrote of a "lost decade' as the ONLY product they managed to get out without serious problems was 7, and if rumors are true that was because Steve was too busy squirting with his Zune to care!

HTML5 isn't Facebook's 'biggest mistake'

Its not finished!

That is the problem! HTML V5 is frankly alpha quality at best at this stage, it can't even take the place of flash yet (videos yes, barely as its CPU hogging is bad, but the games and apps? Nope) yet everyone is trying to push this out to replace native? Give me a break.

I'm sure that HTML V5 in the future will be very nice, but right now its in the Win95 stage. its buggy, crashy, doesn't run very well on low power devices, and there is a LOT of work to be done!

Western Digital cuts revenue forecast, cites 'muted demand'

Re: Karma is a beach ROTFL

If you want a low power drive? Grab a Samsung ecoGreen if you can find one. I have put those drives in some truly hellish places, we're talking warehouses and construction trailers, really grimy places, and those things purr like kittens. Also their large 32Mb cache had them beating a 400gb 7200 RPM Seagate I used to bench them, really great drives. i was impressed enough I replaced both the OS and data drives with Ecogreens (Got in before the flood Woo Hoo!) and not only did I see a speed boost over the Seagate but the drives rarely get above 89f even when under heavy load, truly great drives.

But if WD wants to know why they aren't selling? Their PRICES STINK! They and Seagate are trying to keep the post flood prices and it just ain't gonna fly, not with SSDs dropping like a stone. Lower the prices already WD!!!

Re: +3

The trick with SSD is have a 1Tb or better USB HDD and use good imaging software like Paragon to make an image of the drive. I have a sweet little E350 EEE netbook I'm gonna drop one in about 6 months from now, waiting on the prices to drop a little farther, but I've already done the same drop for customers and they are quite happy with it.

Would I trust my work machine with my important data to an SSD? Not a chance, but in portables they really do make a lot of sense. in the desktop? meh, sleep wakes in under 6 seconds now, how much faster can it go?

Re: Prices too High

Bimbo Newton Crosby. Pre-Flood I was buying Samsung EcoGreens at $35 for 1Tb, $65 for 2Tb, now they are wanting close to $80 for 1Tb and $120 for 2Tb? No thank you, I'm sitting on 3Tb in my current machine and a 1Tb backup drive, I can wait

AMD CTO spills 'Steamroller' core specs

Re: Refinement

The problem is the consumer lines have been pushing sales as of late since the business market is skittish about the economy, and the simple fact is unless you take Windows 8, already shaping up to be one of the most hated Microsoft OSes since WinME, then you are SOL when it comes to anything based on the Bulldozer module design, and this is coming from someone who has built nothing but AMD for years and is typing this on a Thuban.

The problem is every version of Windows OTHER than Windows 8 has a scheduler that treats the BD module as TWO cores, this is wrong. What it is actually is more like a single core with hardware assisted hyperthreading thanks to only having half the FP, why is this bad? Lets say you have two heavy loads..the SMART way to execute on a BD module would be one load on module1/2 and the other on 3/4, that way each load would have its own FP unit. What you will get in any Windows OTHER than Windows 8 is that Windows will schedule BOTH loads on 1/2, which means they are fighting over a single FP unit and the whole thing just drags. This is why in many tests with Win 7 a Thuban or Deneb will beat a BD with the same amount of cores, sometimes even beating BD chips with MORE cores.

Frankly this is a server chip that NEVER should have been released on the desktop, desktop loads are more and more multimedia which is FP city which is exactly what BD is worst at. Instead what they should have done is kept Thuban and Liano for the desktop while working on a new design, pushed out a new Brazos quad for mobile, and kept the BD/PD design for servers where most loads are integer and not FP heavy.

As someone who has been building and selling AMD systems exclusively as well as having my entire family on AMD if they haven't come up with a better design by the time I run out of AM3+ chips I'll have no choice but go Intel, my customers and I are skipping win 8 and there simply is no selling point for BD on Win 7.

UK ice boffin: 'Arctic melt equivalent to 20 years of CO₂'

Not to mention

If we build the new gen fail safe designs, along with thorium reactors beside them for reprocessing the spent fuel we can have clean power for hundreds of years with no mess.

Re: Climate-change sceptics

The problem is NOT the science, its that its been hijacked by scammers like Al Gore who have set themselves up to be carbon billionaires by leeching and scamming the system they intend to set up. Have you EVER, even once, heard Al Gore and CO talk about putting Tariffs on China, who is belching so much pollution we in the USA pick it up on our west coast? Nope because they make mad MONIES off Chinese slave labor, you stupid peasant you!

Many of us are all for pollution being lowered, in fact there are several things we could be doing that don't need carbon credit scams to actually make a difference. putting a layer of light concrete to keep roads from being giant heat sinks, painting roofs white to reflect sunlight, and most importantly in the USA we need a "people's car" that costs less than $15k and gets 45MPG with subsidies to get the poor out of their used cars which get less than 16MPG here in the states.

But you'll NEVER hear or see any of those things come to pass, because the ALgore and friends at Goldman Sachs have already hijacked the platform and made sure the ONLY thing you'll hear about is cap&trade. The results of cap&trade? Since there will be ZERO penalty for sending your company to a country not part of cap&trade (which India and China have already said they won't play the game) the factories in the west that are left will be wiped out overnight, since it'll be cheaper for the companies to build a new factory in China than comply, and the 1% like Al will simply pay THEMSELVES through their Carbon shell corps to drive their SUVs and Lear jets, nope the ONLY ones being hurt will be the poor and middle class who will get more taxes because they can't set up shell corps and move overseas.

So offer REAL solutions? Many of us that fight the AGWers will be on board. Offer us the same old 1% scams designed to enrich the top, like crap&trade? then please go jump off the nearest bridge into the ever rising ocean, because the cap&trade scams will do absolutely ZERO to change anything, unless you consider making Al Gore a billionaire a positive change, I don't.

Why I've got a sync'ing feeling about Amazon's new Kindle Fire

Its not for you..

Yet for people like my mom, that just want to have their cheesy horror paperbacks in an easy to carry form? It'll be perfect. The problem is you are comparing Apples and oranges, the Kindles are simply devices to consume Amazon content...no different than Apple in that respect. If you want a "do anything" pad frankly you shouldn't be looking at a Kindle OR an iPad, but an unlocked Droid you can do whatever with, no different than an X86 laptop.

Not everyone is the same, and for people like my mom a Kindle is perfect for the one task she has for the thing, reading books. If you buy a Kindle Fire and don't care for buying from Amazon then its nobody's fault but your own for buying the wrong device.

Windows Phone 8: Microsoft quite literally can't lose

Re: why would windows phone 8 succeed?

Don't know even a little bit about computer design huh? If your single core phone take say 4 minutes to do task A and the quad takes less than 30 seconds to do the same task...guess which one will have longer battery life? The same thing goes with desktops, if your dual core take 4 hours to convert a video and my 6 core does the same video in 40 minutes guess who is having a lower electric bill next month?

What you don't seem to realize is that those other cores can be turned off in use thus not costing you anything when you have a light load and then it can ramp up when you actually have work to do thus getting the work done much faster which lets you go back to low power state sooner.

Now even China's PC market is shrinking

Re: WTF is an "ultrabook"

A way for Intel to try to push up the price of laptops since the race to the bottom has cut out a large portion of their chips? I hate to break the news to them but the few shops I've seen carrying them say they just aren't moving, the price is simply too high. Whether Intel likes it or not the sweet spot for laptop sales is between $400-$650 which means most of the i5s and i7 are priced right out of the market while on the other hand I'm seeing a lot of those AMD quad lappys as of late.

As for why sales are down worldwide? Duh its a worldwide recession! Thankfully there hasn't been a "killer app" for PCs since they hit the thermal wall and the MHz wars ended so most in the west can stick with their Core Duos and Phenom I X3s and X4s while in China if you can only afford a single device those iPhone knockoffs are cheap and let you carry the net with you.

But you can expect PC sales to remain flatline, but its not tablets and phones that is the problem, its a dead worldwide economy.

Why Java would still stink even if it weren't security swiss cheese

Re: Thank you for this.

Exactly and I'll get hate for saying this but this reminds of all the hate VB 6 got. If you kept VB 6 targeted at its main purpose, writing front ends to local DBs then it was a perfect tool, in fact I've yet to see anything that ran as fast and used as little memory in that role.

The problem with it (and Java) is too many that didn't know what they were doing tried to use it for everything and made these big sprawling messes.

So its not the tool, its the programmer. I mean if you use a hammer wisely you can use it as part of a toolkit that will help you build a lovely home. if on the other hand you hand it to a chimp and let him loose in a bomb factory, should you blame the hammer when the whole place goes up?

Ten netbooks

I'm sure this will sound like a plug..

But this is just coming from someone that loves this bit of software and seen what it can do. download the trial of "TuneUp Utilities" and run it and see if that don't give it a nice kick in the pants. Well worth the $30 IMHO and I've tried the free stuff and nothing seems to come close.

See it has not only tools that will auto clean the reg of crud (WinRot caused by bad programs leaving garbage reg entries) and other niceties but it has this little app built in called "Turbo Mode" that will monitor and if one app starts just pounding the CPU it'll drop its prioity level and give you back control of the machine.

But I've had customers with similar units to yours, with similar complaints, and they are happy little campers with TuneUp onboard. Even with my E350 which has more kick than an Atom TuneUp helps when you run into a nasty web page or program that tries to slam the CPU.

My other bit of advice would be to switch browsers to something a little more netbook friendly, I use Comodo Dragon with Adblock Plus installed and its positively zippy on a netbook. as a plus it lets you use Comodo Secure DNS just in the browser, which shuts down malware sites and infected ad servers to keep you safe.

TuneUp and Comodo, nice to have on netbooks.

Re: Screen size Fail

The closest thing I've seen to what you are asking is the Asus EEE 12 series, they have 1366x768 screens and hold 8Gb of RAM. Like most notebooks you gotta pop the keyboard off to swap the HDD but there are plenty of tutorial vids so its not hard to do.

As a bonus I know there are those out there selling touch screen replacements so if you don't mind breaking out the screwdriver you can probably find an HD replacement out there as well. But the only ones I've seen with full 1600x900 in that size are ultrabooks which are ultraexpensive.

That said I'm quite happy with 1366x768 on my 1215B, the text is nice and clear, movies all play beautifully, and it doesn't get hot even after hours of usage. As a bonus I even play Portal and L4d and GTA:VC (the others may play, I just don't have 'em) on mine and they play just fine. I have to say these 12 inch EEEs are nice little units, only complaint I have is the glossy screen isn't fun in bright sunlight but other than that I'm happy.

Re: Still using my £120 AAO first series

I don't know if links are allowed here or not but memoryc has what you want, its a little pricey at $80USD but its a 32Gb SSD designed to drop into that unit, HTH.

http://www.memoryc.com/storage/solidstatedisk/32gbsupertalent13idepatassd.html

Re: Shame most of these don't have SSD

Because, and I'm sure I'll get hate for saying this but I can back it up with links, the Linux units didn't sell well and got returned more often (probably by people mad they couldn't run their Windows software) so they all come with Windows now which thanks to "anytime upgrade" takes up some space.

While I may upgrade my 1215B when the 128Gb SSDs drop to around $60 USD (currently around $90 USD here) I have to say with a class 10 SDHC for Readyboost and 8Gb of RAM that 320Gb HDD? Works alright. Sure its not the fastest boot but having my entire music collection with me and being able to pop a half a dozen movies at a time on the netbook makes up for that and with its good GPU I can pop a cable from the HDMI out into dad's TV when I visit and we can kick back and enjoy some movie time, its nice.

SO I'd say the problem is guys like you that wanted cheap above all just didn't buy enough units. What I'm seeing here is less of the 10 inchers and more of the 12s, and more people opting for the ones with bigger, not smaller, HDDs. Like I said maybe when the 128Gb SSDs drop enough in price we'll see it, but with Windows you're just not gonna fit Win 7 Starter, much less HP, on a 16Gb SSD.

Re: D270 Sucks

Well I've had more than my fair share of Acer headaches so you get my sympathy, they used to be great units but lately they've been pretty brain dead when it comes to design.

If you can I'd send it back and look at the Asus EEE 1225B, now that they've quit making the 1215B that is what I've been recommending to all my friends and family and so far the 3 they've bought have all been top notch. Easy to change out the RAM (screw is on bottom, no need to yank keyboard) comes with 4Gb and will go to 8Gb and comes with win 7 HP X64 so it'll give you every bit of that. You can even bump up the amount of RAM supplied for the GPU and paired with an SDHC (slot fits flush so you can just leave it in) for Readyboost those little units fly and unlike my 1215B they have turbocore for the GPU so they can kick it up a notch when you need it.

Its a shame you got burned and I feel for ya, the old AMD Aspire One units were nice and easy but these new units? Not so good. Maybe they are using some kind of Intel reference design?

Ram is because of Intel...

The reason why that is is that Intel purposely gimps their Atoms so they support a MAX of 2Gb of RAM, to try to force you to go for a more expensive chip. That is why I'd suggest just ignoring the Atoms and looking at the AMD units, not only are they not gimped but many units can hold as much RAM as a full size.

I paid a grand total of $350 USD for my EEE 1215B last year and while it only came with 2Gb it also came with Win 7 HP X64 and support for 8Gb! of RAM. Since the difference at the time between buying 1 4Gb stick (thus giving me 6Gb) and 2 was only $14 I went ahead and upgraded mine to the max 8Gb and I have to say the little baby flies, all my programs are cached into memory on start so everything launches instantly, plays videos smooth as butter at 1080P through the HDMI and I get around 5 and a half hours after a year playing movies or around an hour more surfing, nice little unit.Now that SSDs are going down so cheap I'm seriously thinking about upgrading it, those AMD chips paired with an SSD makes for a nice yet cheap ultraportable.

So check 'em out, several of my family ended up going with the AMD units after playing with mine and they are all happy as clams, in fact good luck getting my dad's GF off her little Acer C60 netbook, she has that thing practically glued to her lap!

Publishers pony up $69m in ebook price-fixing settlement

The point isn't the money..

Its keeping them from pulling these collusion deals in the future. So even if we won't be getting hardly any money back this is still good, because now they will have to compete again instead of just signing backroom deals.

Windows 8: Download it, then speak YOUR brains

Re: Windows 8 isn't aimed as an upgrade

You nailed it friend, I've tried DP and CP (haven't had a chance to slap RTM on my test bed yet) and frankly the ONLY nice thing I could say about it was "it might be nice on a tablet" but on a desktop? Yucky, just awful. Maybe if they'd give us a way to kill Tile_UI maybe, but with the horrible Tile_UI (try installing more than a few programs and it becomes a fricking mess, worse than any start menu they've ever had) its a no sale for me. I'll probably pick up a copy of Win 8 pro since its only $40, just in case i run into a program that actually requires Win 8, but otherwise i'll be skipping it.

'$199' Surface tablets: So crazy it might work, or just crazy?

Re: "internal event"

Actually it has a good chance of being released at that price, as that is how MSFT was able to get into the console market and take a good chunk of the business. Its a classic "razor and blades" play where you sell the units at a loss and hope to make a profit on the 30% per app or content they intend to charge anyone using the Windows appstore.

Personally I still think its gonna bomb, because people are gonna see the name "Windows" and automatically assume it'll run their Windows programs and when it don't? Right back it'll go. On the plus side all those returns should end up on Woot! for like $50 so if you want a cheap tablet to play with it might be worth checking out 6 months after release. But between the new iPad and the Fire i just don't see people lining up for the fugly Metro-UI, or whatever they are calling it this week.

The big question though is whether the EU will try to get them for product dumping or antitrust since the whole way the R&B model works is by selling below cost and we all know the EU don't like MSFT none.

Microsoft: It's not Metro, it's Windows 8

Re: It doesn't matter

I have started to wonder if this isn't a "New Coke" kinda deal. After all my customers that got stuck on vista sure was happy to pay for Win 7. I mean if you think about it, if Metrosexual takes off then they win, if it bombs people rush to buy Win 7 and/or Win 8 which means...they win.

Certainly seems like a nice way to make money, seeing as there isn't a downside. Lets face it people have too much Windows software to switch to OSX which is also too crazy priced on their desktops, Linux isn't gonna cut the mustard as its still too fiddly and bleeding edge, so you end up buying Windows one way or another. This way MSFT gets two sales for each unit, Metrosuckatitude and either Win 7 or Win 9....more money is more money folks.

Microsoft dumps Metro from Windows 8

Re: In response to...

How about "Oh Hai" as in "Oh Hai! I iz a cellphone now LOL!" which is pretty much win 8 in a nutshell. I swear if i didn't know better i'd think the whole thing was an Onion style parody, but sadly others like Canonical have adopted the "Oh Hai" interface as well. It seems like Jobs last laugh is gonna be making every UI designer lose their minds and try to make everything into a damned cell phone like some cargo cult praying for the ghost of Jobs to bring them some iMoney.

Of course they could always go with metrosexual, its about as tasteless as metrosexual fashion and the guys up in Redmond wouldn't know what it meant anyway, they'd just be happy they could keep the original work by tacking sexual onto the end. Besides who don't like sex?

Microsoft tightens grip on OEM Windows 8 licensing

But will they want to?

WinVista frankly wasn't pirated much either...because nobody wanted it. Whether MS likes it or not its the pirate versions that teach all the fixit guys who then turn around and support their software. Talking to most of the little shop guys in my area they are figuring the same thing I'm figuring, that the only "support" they'll be giving win 8 is to wipe it off for Win 7, just as they did Vista for XP.

Remember that Win 7 is supported until 2020, has been hacked for years and passes WGA, and doesn't have that "LOL I iz a cell phone LOL!" Metrosexual UI so why would the pirates bother? Hell why would the public bother if they aren't buying a tablet or smartphone? MSFT can make as many flaming hoops as they want, remember Vista had a "black screen of death" antipiracy crap built in for a long while, didn't make either the pirates nor the public want the thing.

Intel, AMD financials: Bad news for Obama campaign

Re: The Coming Tempest and Inevitable Storm ......... will not be a Squirmish for the Squeamish

If you want to know why the whole thing is rotten and will collapse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF87sMjYlws and look closely at the charts...notice how the stock market went from something one actually invested in into this beast with over 400% of GDP floating in it?

As much as I hate the "its the gubbmint's fault" posts in this one case...it is. They are the ones that tilted the tax structure with the 401k and 403b and turned the thing into a giant bubble that WILL blow.

Re: @kb- Best current summary of economy and politics in America

Sorry friend, just a humble computer builder and repairman with two elderly parents I can't abandon or I'd have already left the area as most of my friends have. And I am not nearly as worried about offshoring as by having my throat slit by one of the MS13 style hoods from the barrios we have popping up all over the place.

Tell me friend, can you play the "Immigra!" game there? here you can, walk by any construction site and yell "Immigra" and watch it become a ghost town in less than 30 seconds, they scatter like deer. I've heard the local cops have even gone to the HS to tell them stop playing the Immigra game as they run into traffic and they worry someone is gonna get killed.

But personally i think BOTH parties suck and would be happy to sell you out if it helped their friends on wall street (or in Hollywood if its the dems, although Obama certainly didn't say boo to the banksters) and I figure sooner or later, most likely sooner, we're gonna have ourselves another depression if we aren't in the start of one now. I know that more than half our business district has been bulldozed and if it weren't for the college and all that government money flowing into it frankly this would already be an abandoned town.

Re: Best current summary of economy and politics in America

"Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there's one guy controlling both puppets!"...The Late Great Bill Hicks, and man we could use him now.

Re: Read x86 financials

Actually AMD had a winning hand but then shot themselves right in the face. Anyone who has looked at the numbers can tell you that the Bobcat cores were selling like mad, AMD twice had to slow desktop production just to give it to the Bobcats, so what did AMD do? Did they sink plenty of R&D into the Bobcats to keep them exciting? Maybe come up with a sub 20w Bobcat quad with excellent GPU?

Nope they killed the successor to Bobcat in favor of....drumroll.....faildozer. Oh and just to compound the fail AMD never bothered to contact MSFT and tell them what they were doing so that every. single. OS. by MSFT OTHER than Win 8, which looks to be the next MS Bob, will cripple performance on anything based on faildozer thanks to the Windows scheduler not having a clue how to deal with a "half core" design like what AMD pulled.

So while I agree about Intel with AMD they had a shot at taking a huge chunk and just threw it away. Even to this day you see a lot of companies putting out E series Bobcat units even though they haven't been updated for 2 years, simply because they are such a good value for the consumers. People want low prices, good battery life, and good multimedia capability and the Bobcats fit the bill perfectly, instead they locked themselves into a chip that if Win 8 bombs won't even have a MSFT OS that will run on it without tying a boat anchor to the system. I'm just glad I built some Thubans for me and my boys when I saw the fail coming down the line because I wouldn't take a faildozer on a bet.

Re: Best current summary of economy and politics in America

Wow, the pro Obama crowd is slamming everyone who dares point out that Dear leader makes Jimmy Carter look like a great president!

Well just to add my own modding down as a badge of honor everyone should come to the southern USA to see what an absolute failure Obama has been. He has just recently given another 800,000 illegals a free pass, on top of blocking any and all attempts by the states to stop the absolute joke that is our southern border so our crime rates are shooting through the roof, we have huge crime ridden barrios all over the place, and our jails are filling up with "No habla law" types.

Everyone needs to remember for every one that comes over looking for a job (which frankly should be sent back, because i can tell you we have Americans so desperate for work here they are picking coke cans out of the trash for recycling just to earn enough to eat) you have 50 dope dealers, human traffickers, and gangbangers. Gee, thanks a lot Obama! For the first time in my 30 years of voting I will vote straight R in the hopes that like Carter you are a one term failure.

As promised, AMD posts disappointing financial results

Wrong

I'm sorry but you are wrong, and here is why: Piledriver is based on the same faildozer design and thus will NOT work right on anything but Windows 8, and as we have seen the backlash on win 8 is gonna be insane. its like designing a chip that works best with WinME, its practically suicide.

The problem is Faildozer was originally envisioned as "The GPU does the FP with a weaker FP shared between cores for when gaming" now we can already see the problem, yes? windows cheduler, thanks to AMD not keeping them in the loop, doesn't have a clue how to treat the "one FP for two cores" design so what you get is a bad hardware assisted HyperThreading. this is why a Thuban, which has a FP per core, stomps the new design in most benches.

While the "GPU does the FP" is an interesting idea in theory, as we all know theory and practice are two different things. For that to work either AMD is gonna have to get everyone to code for it (not likely) or AMD is gonna have to seamlessly offload the FP code to the GPU with enough cache and speed that it doesn't take a penalty. Now as much as i support AMD, in fact every machine I've built for the past 5 years and my own family's machines are ALL AMD, I'm sorry but we haven't seen AMD pull anything that was THAT big a game changer since Athlon64 and since they fired all those guys for computer automated chip layouts I seriously doubt they can pull it off. finally since they kept MSFT out of the loop for so long good luck getting all those businesses who will be staying with win 7 to buy AMD when its crippled by the Win 7 scheduler.

Final verdict? Faildozer is AMD's netburst and without anything in the pipe besides it (they killed Thuban production, killed the next rev of Bobcat, all they have left is Liano and Faildozer) means for the next couple of years AMD is gonna be hurting BAD. Hell Thuban wins in most benches and was 40% cheaper to make than faildozer quad which Windows treats as a dual core with HT! As much as I love AMD when I can't get anymore Thubans and Athlons and Phenom IIs I'll have no choice but go Intel, faildozer is too hot, sucks too much power, and gives too little in return, just like netburst.

Re: No surprise or issues here that I see

Actually AC in the case of AMD they shot themselves in the face. The OEMs were gobbling up the Bobcat chips as fast as they could crank them out, so did they actually LISTEN to the market and boost R&D on the Bobcats? Nope they canceled the successor to Bobcat in favor of faildozer, a chip they knew for over a year before release was too hot, sucked too much power, and because they didn't bother to keep MSFT in the loop won't even have an OS that supports it until Windows 8, because every Windows before that has a scheduler that doesn't know how to allocate for a "half core" design like AMD went for.

So sadly AMD did this to themselves. they could have invested in Bobcat, kept dropping the power with die shrinks and working on even better designs, like better GPUs and more cores, instead they bet the farm on a chip that nobody wanted and they knew was too hot and too underpowered and was expensive to manufacture to boot. At current prices a faildozer quad (which is actually a dual core with hardware HT if you are wanting to use anything but Win 8, because that is how the MSFT Win 7 patch treats a faildozer, as HyperThreaded) costs more than 40% HIGHER than a Thuban which has six actual cores and get on average 50% higher on the benches.

Faildozer is the AMD Netburst, they knew it, but instead of doing the smart thing and investing in Bobcat while working on the next design and using Liano to cover the gap they bet it all on a turkey, now they will pay for that mistake. The only thing AMD had going for it was "bang for the buck" and faildozer crushed that with its high cost to manufacture. Sorry AMD, you brought this on yourselves.

New version of Chrome can WATCH and LISTEN

Suggestion?

If you like Chrome try Comodo Dragon, it uses the Chromium base but doesn't have the chrome "phone home" crud and has some nice security features that you can choose to use or not with a simple checkbox, either at install or in the options.

I've been using it for a couple of years now and its great, its fast, works with any chrome extensions, and their secure DNS is nice and will catch a lot of malware infected sites. Its pretty sweet and unlike chrome every single feature is completely up to YOU not Comodo.

Big biz 'struggling' to dump Windows XP

Re: Delaying the Inevitable

Win 7 is supported until 2020 minimum, and everyone knows "never touch Windows before at least the first SP". So anybody that tried to go straight from XP to Win 8 RTM would frankly have to be off their nut.

I personally got lucky and all my small business owners didn't use IE so I was able to get the switched over to win 7 (skipped Vista) and will set on behind while Ballmer and Sinofsky flail around with their "Oh Hai! I'm a cell phone LOL!" Win 8.

Smart business that have to have Windows programs would be wise to switch to Win 7 and then stay there until Ballmer gets his act together and puts out another business desktop or the board revolts and fires him, whichever comes first. heck by the time Win 7 goes EOL we may have all moved into the cloud or onto Android or something else, no point being a beta tester for Redmond when win 7 is stable and if they are on software assurance its not like they can't just run a WinXP VM for those few apps that need it, win 7 pro does come with "XP Mode" ya know..

Bradley Manning's lawyers seek to show 'cruel treatment'

Re: Poor Guy

But should a government be supported when it is doing what anyone would see is pure evil? look up on Wikileaks "children sold Afghanistan" and there you will see the US government was covering up for a PMC that was SELLING BOYS AS SEX TOYS as young as 9 to get better arms deals and that they had done the same thing in Kosovo with 11 year old girls and the US government covered THAT up as well.

I'm sorry but after reading some of the truly foul, disgusting, and depraved things the US government has done in the name of keeping its war profiteering friends happy? I don't blame him one bit, how anyone could live with themselves while knowing such evil sick sh*t was being done and supported by their own government is beyond me.

Gabe Newell: Windows 8 is a 'catastrophe' for PC biz

Re: Windows App Store

Uhhh...you've never actually TRIED Games For Windows live, have you? To call it half baked and painful is the understatement of the century! If they can't get that right, where they are trying to sell AAA games at $40+ a pop, what makes you think they'll make their appstore run ANY better?

Lets face it boys and girls...MSFT has become the PHB from Dilbert. they hear a buzzword, get all excited, come out with a half baked ripoff, and then are shocked! Shocked I tell you! when everyone doesn't trip all over themselves to buy their half baked mess. they've failed with Zune, Kin, Zune Market, GFWL, its debatable whether they have ever broke even with Xbox (since we don't know if they include the 2 billion RRoD writeoff or the R&D costs for Xbox 1&2) lost money hand over fist with bing, frankly worrying about MSFT actually getting something right at this point is more than a little premature.

Most likely everyone will try the appstore, find it a corporate committee designed piece of trash and go right back to Steam. I bet a year from now Gabe will be backing up the money truck and laughing about how all the reports have Windows appstore right there with WinPhone on the fail scale.

Windows 8 'bad' for desktop users - Gartner's one-word review

Re: Please don't let them revert to Classical Windows 7

Funny but the black theme was the ONLY thing I liked about Vista. I have all the Aero junk turned off and a nice flat black theme on Win 7 and its quite nice.

I agree that going back to XP? Painful on the eyes. What moron though electric blue was a good color choice for the desktop?

Re: Another Vista?

Actually it WAS MS's fault, as they changed a good chunk of the driver model is Beta 2 which threw out all the work that the hardware companies had done so naturally they backlashed. Many of the Intel drivers that worked on alpha and beta 1 were completely trashed and no longer worked by beta 2 for example so you can just imagine how ticked the companies were when MS changed the driver underpinning with less than 6 months before launch.

Re: Shock Horror

Its not just that friend, its the fact that MSFT wants to send us back to 1993. When MSFT was putting out an OS every couple of years frankly we were at the beginning of the MHz wars so by the time that new Windows came out? You were ready to chunk anyway as your machine would struggle with the latest software.

That just isn't the case anymore people, PCs haven't HAD to be upgraded since they went multicore. I have customers on first gen Core Duos and Phenom I X3 and you know what? they are happy. the machines are fast, run their software well, and since the boxes are paid for its a sunk cost.

It is THIS, this right here, that MSFT refuses to accept. I have just recently gotten the last of my customers switched to Win 7, do you think they are gonna want to switch NOW? When they finally have everything working perfectly? Even my home customers don't switch every 3 years anymore, I have plenty of them on Pentium Ds and Athlon X2s and they are again happy with what they have. Laptops and desktops last longer than ever before and there hasn't been a "killer app" that would require upgrading systems in years.

Mark my words Win 8 will be the new MS Bob because its simply not what the market wants or needs. if they would have kept Metro on mobile, and made Win 8 desktop just a souped up Win 7? It probably would have sold well. but nobody wants to treat their widescreen desktop as an oversized cell phone.

US Justice Dept rejects criticisms of ebook settlements

Most Favored Nation

What the MFN clause did was make it so NOBODY could sell an ebook cheaper than Apple, nobody. That and the fact that Apple sat down with these companies and set the prices, which is classic cartel action BTW, is why they got busted.

Frankly nobody should be able to set the price but the retailer PERIOD and giving control to the publishers just breaks the entire free market when it comes to eBooks. If I want to buy your regular book for $5 a piece and sell it for $3 to get people into my shop its simply a "loss leader" and been done for ages but what Apple did was make it so that if anybody sold it for lower than Apple then you HAD to give it to Apple at a price lower than that, so it basically tied the hands of the retailers since you couldn't sell for any price other than what the publisher told you or they wouldn't sell you anymore product.

So I'm all for this and hope it means the DoJ is starting to grow some teeth again. Once I buy a product it should be mine to do with as I please, to sell it for more, less, or even give it away if i want to and these kinds of deals cripple the retailers who couldn't sell loss leaders anymore if this would have been upheld.

China reveals new strategy of stockpiling rare earths

Re: Watch and learn

The problem is the strategy is gonna bite them in the behind, because unlike oil (which the USA had all but pumped dry by the time OPEC became big) there are plenty of rare earth supplies in the USA and other countries, it just hasn't been economically feasible to dig them up...until now.

There is a mine in Utah already being slated to reopen, the Japanese found a large cache on the ocean floor that if the price rises will be economically viable, and I believe Russia as well has rare earth mines as well as Africa.

So if China wants to play hardball i have a feeling they are gonna find out the hard way that unlike oil there are a LOT more choices out there.

Forget Ultrabooks and Win 8 - only fondleslabs can save us now

Actually as someone who runs a little PC shop I can tell you what is REALLY going on, and it isn't a "Post PC world' or any of that rubbish, and it isn't the downturn although i'm sure that is stopping some of the "ooh shiny!" PC buyers ATM.

Its actually quite simple, the MHz wars are over and PCs went right past "good enough" and into "insanely overpowered' for the vast majority. i know several customers whose businesses are filled with Phenom Is and original Core Duos, with some of the secretaries running Pentium Ds and early Athlon X2s, why? are they poor? Nope its simply the fact that even chips THAT old have more cycles than they can come up with work to fill, that's all.

So the simple reason why the OEMs and MSFT are having kittens is they just didn't realize that the huge numbers they were putting up were the result of an anomaly (the MHz War) and NOT the normal state. What we are seeing now IS the normal state thanks to the fact machines have been simply overpowered for the users for several years now. There hasn't been a "killer app" that will stress these monsters, heck most of the popular apps won't even stress those old chips I listed above, so why waste money on a new PC when the one you have is twiddling its thumbs most of the day?

Seagate fscks up: Disk drive sales fall short by $500m

Re: Seagate Schmeegate

If you can find some grab some Samsung or Hitachi drives before they are all gone, especially the Samsung Ecodrives. I was lucky enough to score plenty of them before the flood and I can tell you I've put those in places i would NEVER put a Seagate, such as construction trailers and warehouses and the things are tough as nails. I liked 'em so much even my boot drive is an Ecodrive even though they are only 5400RPM but thanks to the 32Mb cache the 1Tb ecodrives were scoring a good 30% higher than the Seagate 400Gb 7200RPM that it replaced.

As for this? Maybe their quality will go back up but lately I've just not had much luck with Seagates, especially any of their consumer lines over 500Gb. I don't know what they are doing wrong, rumor floating around is they are using junk ARM controllers, but their drives over 500Gb just don't seem to last very long, they start throwing bad sectors or developing click death even on machines where they aren't being stressed.

Sigh, I guess I'll have to go WD now, at least i haven't been seeing any major failures with their externals, but I'm really gonna miss Samsung and Hitachi, they both made really solid drives. I guess if their prices drop low enough you can always RAID 1 the Seagates and hope you don't get two drives that fail at the same time, but until I see feedback from places like Newegg that isn't got 20 low ratings for every decent I think I'll pass and their numbers tell me lots of other folks feel the same way. I'm just glad that even after making a healthy profit i still have 6Tb of samsung Ecogoodness to keep me happy for awhile.

Shuttleworth: Why Windows 8 made us ditch GPL Linux loader

Re: But

It doesn't have a single thing to do with malware folks....its piracy. go to any torrent site and you'll find "Win 7 all versions preactivated" that uses a bootloader hack that makes Win 7 even easier to pirate than XP, it even greys out and unchecks the one Windows update that could disable it so it even gets full Windows Updates.

While i would have preferred to see MSFT lower prices to fight piracy, as they did with the $100 family pack before the release of Win 7, in the end its their OS and if they want to get the OEMs to put out secureboot so those home basic machines won't be running ultimate without being obviously pirate that is their business. I'm sure of course in the end the pirates will figure a way around this, they always do but if anyone thinks MSFT is going to all this trouble for the extremely low number of boot bugs I have some magic beans you might be interested in, its all about making piracy of Windows harder.

Mozilla shoots down Thunderbird, hatches new release model

Re: Mail without a mail client

Yep, afraid so. I run a little PC shop and i can tell you that home users NEVER have any kind of desktop mail app and business users treat outlook more as a PIM and meeting scheduler than they do a mail client anymore. heck I'm probably the geekiest one in my area and i simply use one webmail service to backup the other, most of us just don't have anything in our emails we care about keeping for any length of time.

I'm afraid for the vast majority it looks like desktop mail has gone the way of the floppy drive, where once it was everywhere now most simply don't have a use for it. With webmail I get get my email anywhere from multiple devices, its just nicer all around that dealing with downloading all the mail, a good 90% I probably don't want or will toss after reading once anyway.

I need to multitask, but Windows 8's Metro won't let me

Re: @Obviously!

I don't know about him but I can tell you why I am sticking with Win 7, because it IS a major upgrade over XP thanks to breadcrumbs, jumplists, MUCH better memory management, Readyboost (great for netbooks like mine) and all in all just a better built solid OS, oh and not having to run as admin because XP couldn't handle non admin worth spit.

As for why I will NOT be going to Win 8, Metro UI is awful and feels like I'm fighting the OS instead of it getting out of my way, its "always on" social crud slams the network,I often have multiple tasks going (because what's the point of having a hexacore if you don't use but a single task at a time?), without a touch screen it is a step backwards, I have NO desire to poke at my screen all day, the cost of replacing my screens with touch screen of similar caliber would be prohibitively expensive, its lack of customization irks me, and frankly it just doesn't "feel' good when i'm using it, and finally the obvious contempt MSFT is showing by ignoring their customers by not giving you an option to simply use the Win 7 UI.

Look we're all geeks here, right? We ALL know what this is, its a "Hail Mary" by Ballmer who has seen that while X86 is a mature market where folks won't replace the last one before it dies ARM is undergoing a MHz war like what made MSFT rich in the 90s. what Ballmer seems to forget is nobody runs Windows for MSFT software, they run it for the wealth of X86 third party stuff that simply won't be there on ARM. If I were to buy an ARM mobile device tomorrow it'd be Android as that is where the apps are NOT Win 8. Since Win 7 is good until 2020 I'm advising my customers to just skip it, although I'm sure i'll make out like a bandit for a good year while people who bought a Win 8 device have me wipe it for Win 7, just as I wiped Vista machines for XP.

Crazy Geckos: Nitot on Mozilla's post-Firefox mobile crusade

Re: "Lost its memory hog"??

Mind some advice? Try QTWeb, works on Linux and Windows, light on resources, you can even put it on a flash and run it from there.

And what Moz seems to be ignoring is the USERS which is why their numbers are tanking. Its obvious that nobody likes the current UI and as you saw they still have memory issues so what is their answer? Why to go metro UI and make an appstore!...facepalm.

If you don't listen to your customers they go somewhere else, simple as that.

'Perfect storm' drives electronics stores to EXTINCTION

Re: Greed

Actually Best Buy here in the states is bleeding to death by doing the same moves that killed Circuit City, by firing all the decent salespeople, gouging the customers on even the most ordinary items (Last time I went in they wanted more than $20 USB for a 4Gb flash stick when they go online for $5) and sticking the customers with bad choices and worse service.

I went to Best Buy in Aug of last year to get a netbook. the BB had sold my nephew a nice laptop at a decent price that while higher than online they threw in a few small things like a cleaning kit and carrying case so that along with the knowledgeable staff made it worth it. But what did i find when i got there? they had fired ALL the sales staff that knew what they were doing and replaced them with workers so clueless their answer to every question was "uhhh" and it was obvious that they were told to "push what they have" even if it wasn't anything like what I needed, like saying a 17 inch Celeron laptop could be just as portable as a netbook! So I went to Tigerdirect, found a nice AMD dual core netbook for $350 USD and had it delivered in 3 days. and that price includes an upgrade to 8Gb of RAM and a carrying case!

So goodbye Worst Buy, can't say as I'll miss you. Your return policies are horrid, the Geek Squad is a bad joke, your sales staff is pathetic and your choices badly limited and prices insane. I may not be able to try before i buy at someplace like tiger or Amazon but the reviews tell me enough to know what's what as I found out with my new Asus EEE netbook, just love how powerful and portable that little baby is.

Adam Sandler's cross-dresser shocker is Razzies stonker

Re: excellent choice

Well I think Sandler is like his fellow SNL alum Will Farrell in that regard, if they have REALLY good costars then THEY will be good, but if their costars don't bring their A games its gonna be fricking torture (Land Of The Lost anyone?) so I don't know if its their own talents or the fact that they can get into a groove with good actors to work off of.

Windows XP support ends two years from now

Re: P4 and XP

Because unless you get your power for free you're not really doing yourself any favors? both of my boys had Pentium Ds which BTW are beyond dirt cheap so if you have a socket 775 and can't afford new kit that is a possibility, but by replacing them with an AMD quad and AMD hexacore their power usage went DOWN by a pretty significant amount and that of course isn't counting the fact they'll need less AC in the summer.

As i tell my customers the Pentium netburst arch was 'power piggie oink oink suck" that just got worse as they came out with new models, hence why they gave up on the P4 and went back to the P3 design that was used in mobile. of course the cheapest for power sipping is the CULV intel chips but Jebus those things are crazy priced .

So i tell my customers that if all they want is surfing and light gaming? then look at the Brazos E350 boards. those have an AMD 1.6GHz bobcat dual with an HD6320 GPU. great for videos and i play L4D and GTA:VC on mine in the netbook. after this the newer AMD APUs based on liano, costs more but you get more GPU and better performance, next up in speed from that would be the Zosma and Thubans, I'm having a lot of folks jump on these as they are cheap chips in the states, we're talking about 6 cores for $139 and of course then you can pair it with any GPU you want. I could have saved power there but the kids like heavy MMOs so i went with a couple of HD4850s i scored for $50 each.

But trust me friend you look up how much power those P4s sucked and they simply weren't a good chip to hang onto. the newer AMD boards like the Asrock can even turn off phases when idle to REALLY drop the heck out of the power. looking at mine I've saved 25 Kj just by having the phases drop when i'm just surfing instead of gaming. Look into the power difference friend, those P4s really aren't something you want to hang onto. but if all they are playing is TF2 you could probably get by with an E350, they are dirt cheap and only use 35w max.