Posts by kb
164 posts • joined Tuesday 17th June 2008 03:55 GMT
Re: good riddance
Yeah who wants a platform that doesn't patent troll? Bah, give us an H.265 DRM that will lock out free OSes and make sure that nobody that doesn't buy from a major corp can enjoy any entertainment,!
I had all my main customers switched years ago.
After using Win 7 through the beta i told them that unlike Vista it was worth the switch and within 6 months of RTM I had them all switched. A few hiccups with really old software and one scanner that needed replacing but other than that it really wasn't that hard.
Ironically the only one that hasn't completely switched...is me. I've had an old Sempron that I've used as a netbox in the shop for years but because its so old there is no way I'd be able to find drivers for Win 7, so next week I'll have an ULV Athlon X2 for a spare AMD board I've had sitting in the back slapped into a case and Win 7 installed.
Its understandable why XP lasted so long, its low resource, stable, easy to configure, I'd put it on the short list with XP X64 and Win 7 on any "best of" list but lets face it guys...its 13 years old. When XP came out the average PC was a 400-733MHz single core with MAYBE 256Mb of RAM so the fact that it was able to scale up as far as it did is frankly amazing but now you can buy 6 core CPUs for less than $100 and 16Gb of RAM around the same, its time to say goodbye like we did with Win2K and let her go into that good night.
Re: Failure
And you'll be lucky if the Seagate lasts a month pal, that is what happens when you end up with a duopoly, quality goes down the crapper. this is why I tell anybody getting a hard drive that the first thing they need to do is stress test the hack out of it, because I'd say a good 1 in 4 are coming off the line junk.
Re: @cstumpi
Dude I so hope you are not trolling because that is classic! "Linux is great and wonderful! I can't get any of the important stuff to actually work so its crippled and looks like dirt...but its great man!"...classic, just classic.
What you want..
Is a EEE 1215B or 1225B, B stands for Brazos APU and from what I hear they have been supported for at least a couple of years now in the major distros. The size is 11.6, 1376x768 with HDMI that can do 1080P under Win 7, not sure about Linux, and gets around 5 on the battery new if you are on Win 7, I was able to get about another hour in Expressgate which is the Linux ChromeOS style OS that comes baked into the netbook. I hear there is a way to add your own apps to EG but I never tried it, it had a browser and media player and that was all I needed at the time.
Re: I think we should be talking about the death of Ultrabooks...
And here is a WHOOSH for you. What the guy was saying is that many people that WOULD have bought netbooks are now either buying laptops or something like a tablet NOT because that was their first choice, but that MSFT and Intel priced the systems right out of existence. Just look at the EEE, started out less than $250, the last units were selling a hair under $500! That is DOUBLE okay? That would be like saying "nobody wants econo cars" when you make every econo car more expensive than a Mercedes!
I know that I ended up having to get a refurb Aspire One for my dad's GF because we simply couldn't find any new netbooks, and several friends bought 15 inchers not because they wanted 15 inches, but because the only 12 inchers were over $1000 and the 15 was $375 this isn't about the public not wanting them, its about Intel and MSFT not wanting them, MSFT because they think that they can slap a paintjob on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money and Intel because they have piles of i5s and i7s they want to push for sweeter margins.
Re: I'm Surprised They Lasted This Long
I take it you never tried any of the AMD ones? Because with those having an APU (and not starved for RAM like an Atom) they were and are quite nice. I have an E-Series and my dad's GF has a C-Series and both hers and mine just run like champs, flash, H.264, they are more like a little laptop than those pre-crippled Atoms. Heck go look at the $299-$399 USD laptops at any Best Buy, its the same APUs they were using in the netbooks just put in a bigger case.
And as far as the guy running PS...I ran Audacity and would do basic editing of the multitracks my band made...does that count? I wasn't running a bunch of effects but if something needed a little compression or verb to see how it would sound I could do that no prob.
Gotta agree
While my EEE 1215B doesn't get the battery life yours does (5 hours new, 4 hours after 3 years) it too is 11.6 and has an AMD APU that does 1080P over HDMi and I have NO problem using this as a day to day laptop, I've watched movies, played games, heck edited audio multitracks on the thing and its a great little portable. i tried one of those Atom 10 inchers and even with such a small screen it was just painful to use, everything just chugged.
I think we'll see a comeback of the 12 inchers once the ultrabooks have bombed, i think many of the OEMs are afraid of competing with their ultrabooks but I just don't see many people paying a grand for a mini, I just don't.
Microsoft KILLED it
I'm not the type to blame "The big bad M$" but in this case its true, when they came out the OEMs got XP Home for $15 a pop, then Win 7 Starter cost $35 and was so crippled that many netbook OEMs went and spent $50 on Win 7 HP, then by Win 8 the price had gone up to $60 according to rumor which when combined with the flood raising HDD costs just left no margin for the OEM.
When I bought my EEE E350 at $300 it was one of the pricier models, many B&M had the Atom netbooks in the $225-$255 range, by the time they had quit making them I had to find a refurbed Acer Aspire for my dad's GF because the EEEs were up to nearly $500.
Frankly I think the 12 inchers may make a comeback,possibly even the 10 inchers, by becoming Chromebooks or maybe Ubuntubooks simply because there is still money to be made on cheap and light netbooks but not with Windows as the OS, MSFT has priced themselves out of the market.
I know I'll be hanging onto my EEE 1215B until it dies (which the way I baby it will hopefully be a long time) even though I have a 17 inch C2D I could be using, simply because its so small and light its easier to carry anywhere, its a great little unit.
Easy way to fix that..
I used to get the same from my friends and relatives until I told them flat footed i have ONE, and only one simple rule that shall NEVER be broken under pain of death...MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY.
What does that mean? Simple you want a desktop I BUILD IT so I KNOW that you are not buying some underpowered piece of garbage that is gonna be choking and sputtering in 6 months, you want a portable I PICK IT for the same reason, you need gear like a printer or wireless YOU WILL COME TO ME so that I may choose the model, again you don't know squat and if you pick the wrong thing you are just gonna throw money down the toilet and if you want to do that go to Geek Squad and get ripped off, the choice is yours.
Since I have done this? NO more headaches because the ones dumb enough to think they know better can go get their wallets raped for awhile until they either crawl with their tails between their legs and watch me throw the rubbish out and start over or get used to failure, the smart ones? Are enjoying hassle free computing because i don't mess with trash. Now that isn't to say I'm forcing them to buy high end gear, far from it, if they want a desktop I build them a quite nice and affordable AMD Athlon triple of Phenom II quad, on the laptop front there are several companies that make nice AMD A series laptops that are VERY affordable without being flimsy plastic junk.
They save money and more importantly I KNOW what they have, that it will work with what they've got, and since i did the building and setting up I have made it as close to moron proof as humanly possible and a good 95%+ of problems they can possibly run into I can have fixed in under 30 minutes as I set up sensible backup plans using software simple enough I can walk them through a restore over the phone.
Believe me do this and you WILL weed the irritants out but quick, once they know that you will NEVER budge from this rule they will either accept that you know more about such things than they do and listen to you or they will go away never to darken your door again and good riddance i say. with a little common sense one can have a truly networked home that is so simple your dad can run the whole thing, but if you let them just go off willy nilly and buy any old junk and expect you to "make it work"? Well I'm sorry but you really should have just listened to me in the first place and you wouldn't be in this mess, would you?
Re: Avoid embarassment? Or avoid wasting money making stuff that never sells?
"Make much more than a year's supply and the surplus never sells AT THE MARGINS INTEL WANTS" FTFY.
After all AMD is having no trouble selling Thubans and Athlons alongside the BD,Liano, and PD chips, but that is because they have such low prices that people don't care if its the latest and greatest or not. I should know as I still am selling quite a few Athlons and Phenom IIs and honestly folks couldn't be happier, I mean X6 for less than $130? Who doesn't like those prices?
But what Intel and AMD are seeing is NOT "the death of the PC", "The rise of mobile computing" or any of the other BS the press keeps coming up with, in fact its beyond simple. You see folks the MHz war? It was a BUBBLE, no different than the housing bubble or dotbomb or any other bubble. For that brief period of 94-06 you had both companies avoid looking at anything BUT Mhz, thus leading to an arms race with PCs that software designers took advantage of. People in that period really had no choice but replace every couple of years as new software simply wouldn't run on a 3 year old P2. My shop PC went from a 400MHz to a 2200MHz in less than 5 years, things were jumping THAT quickly.
What we are all seeing now is simply sanity returning to the landscape, because after both companies hit the thermal wall and switched to lower powered multicores instead of cranking out single core space heaters? Both Intel and AMD found out that software that scales with cores is REALLY hard to write. When the PCs I was selling on the low end 5 years ago was a Phenom triple with 4GB of RAM, how many folks are gonna need the latest core iWhatever when the jobs they have aren't even stressing that Phenom I?
So I don't see the sales coming back to bubble era numbers so shrinking will probably be the smart move in the long run but sales will continue, just in a more steady and less huge leaps in tech.
Posted in Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014
You are correct
Not once but twice, first with WinCE for WinPhone 7 (which while partially based on WinCE many WinCE apps wouldn't run) and now with WinPhone 7 for WinPhone 8.
Frankly they have done so in the desktop as well and while I supported the changes when it came to Vista as lets be honest, both the driver model and the "always run as admin" design of WinXP just wasn't the right path the amount of breakage when it comes to win 8 is just unreal. I have had several customers that (against my advice) bought Win 8 systems only to find so much of their software was broken that it was cheaper to buy copies of Win 7 Pro and have me install them than it was to replace the broken software, just crazy how much Win 8 broke.
Rarely do I agree with Forbes but they are right in naming Steve Ballmer worst CEO, the guy is a trainwreck and is burning their bridges and losing share in what was a practical monopoly on X86 to try to grab share in a space that its obvious they aren't wanted. The SMART move would have been to truly copy Apple (instead of the "cargo cult" way they are doing so now) and kept Metro for tablets/phones like iOS is to OSX and then focused on a "its GOT to work!" mantra when it came to ease of connectivity.
Let Metro sink or swim on its own without the Windows name and legacy, focus on having the ability to connect everything as simple as it can possibly be, and they'd have a shot at mobile. The way they are going now? Its gonna make MS Bob look like a runaway smash hit.
I upvoted you
Because I think that voting with our dollars is the best way to decide what we will and will not take. if being online 24/7 doesn't bother you and this game, despite the issues, makes you happy? Then I'm happy for you, I really and truly am.
That said I will NEVER buy a game that demands i be online merely to "prove" I am not a criminal, I gave you my money and expect to be treated as your customer NOT as a potential shoplifter. If you went to a shop and a security guy followed you down every aisle, even though you had done nothing and shopped with them for years, would you go back? So why put up with the same treatment from a game company?
I buy games from Steam because I can play for a month without Internet and the worse it'll do is tell me that achievements in some game won't count or that it needs to sync my saves next time I hook up, big deal and the services they give me in return for using Steam DRM (great chat and matchmaking, great service even over the holidays, cheaper prices) makes it worth it to me.
I won't buy Origin games as I have already heard from friends how quickly EA will use the banhammer (costing you your games at the same time BTW) if you dare complain, I won't buy always online like the AC series and Splinter Cell series (although I heard Ubisoft has removed all the always online stuff so if true I may pick them up) and when it came out that D3 was online only not only did I buy several copies of Torchlight II to give away to family and friends (if you haven't tried TL2 its a great game, you can do LAN or online MP and SP is offline) but I wrote a nice letter telling Blizzard WHY I wouldn't buy D3 after buying a good dozen copies of D1 and D2 (again so my friends and family could enjoy it too) so they could see how their boneheaded move cost them another loyal customer.
Vote with your wallet folks and stick to your guns, at the worst you'll have a better gaming exp and be rewarding those that treat you well, and at best as we saw with Ubisoft getting rid of always online you CAN make a company change direction.
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Re: welcome to th 1990'2
As opposed to consoles which have embraced every bad trait of the PC, long load times, multiple patches, online registration, but none of the upsides like long lasting MP communities, the ability to host your own game servers, and of course MUCH lower prices? I guess a fool and their money and all that.
Thankfully I switched my two boys off of consoles for Steam and honestly? we have never been happier. We now have more games than we can play thanks to all the sales, by buying Tiger kits I was able to build us 3 nice AMD systems for less than $1200 USD and that was before all the MIR, after i got those it came to less than $1100, and these systems have plenty of cores (2 hexacores and an AMD triple for the youngest but he'll be switching to a hexa soon enough, he decided he'd rather have a bigger screen than a hexa at the time), plenty of RAM, plenty of space, I could easily see us playing games on them 5 years from now with nothing more than a GPU upgrade in another year to year and a half.
Oh and the best part? Not only do we not need to deal with split screen BS but instead each have our own PC with widescreens which makes gaming in something like Borderlands series or Bioshock MUCH more enjoyable but unlike the consoles we not only have the ability to upgrade but when a system finally gets too old for gaming you can use it for other things. My gaming PC from 2006 with a Pentium D? My ex neighbor is gaming on it as we speak, just perfect for his flight sims and surfing. Heck even my very FIRST gaming PC, a 486DX? Its STILL going, I sold it to a local lumber mill who use it as the controller for their custom column lathe. Even after all these years she runs 8 hours a day, six days a week, no problem.
So I would personally argue its no contest, the PC has more uses, better prices, longer life, its just a better way to game.
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Buy AMD, its the better deal
Lets be honest folks, games haven't been CPU in a loooong time and frankly the AMD CPUs are overkill while being dirt cheap. I picked up a 1035T for a lousy $85 USD brand new...that is 6 cores with a turbo of 3.2GHz for $85, how can you top that? My youngest plays all the latest games on a $55 Athlon triple at 3.2GHz and honestly even in the huge MMOs he plays the CPU has cycles to spare.
So you can pick up a VERY nice socket AM3+ board for around $55, that is what I paid for mine which supports 32GB of RAM and Crossfire grab one of the Thuban X6 CPUs (I'd stay away from BD/PD as their "half core" designs just aren't as good as the Thubans, you need a 4.4GHz BD to beat a 3.0GHz Thuban) with a really nice aftermarket cooler (I prefer the Coolermaster N520 myself) and you can build a nice system for less than the cost of the CPU and board if you went Intel. By doing this you can then spend the money you save on upgrades that WILL make for faster games like an SSD or better GPU.
As an added bonus most of the Thuban line has plenty of headroom to OC if you buy a decent board (I prefer Asrock as it has nice automatic as well as manual OC tuning) and with turbocore its like having two CPUs, a fast triple for games that are more single threaded and a hexacore for transcoding or doing work in the background while you game. The prices and bang for the buck is just nuts, the chips and boards have never been cheaper, Intel is good if you are doing work where money doesn't matter and every cycle counts but for gaming? I have yet to see a game that didn't play great on my hexa or even on the youngest boy's Athlon triple. The fact that I could build 3 gaming desktops for less than $1300 with HD4850s and everyone having 8GB of RAM and plenty of HDD space? Just can't beat prices like that folks, you just can't.
Re: Really?
They really tried pushing my doctor to switch his office to win 8, she and her nurses are all older, know what they did after trying Win 8 for a month? They went to iPads with keyboards and new charting software installed. When I asked her about it she said "I don't have to fight this like I did that other mess" and that was that.
I have a feeling Win 8 is gonna come back to haunt them, as XP users are frankly just as well off going Apple or Google since they'll have to learn a whole new UI whichever way they go.
Paris because I doubt even she would be stupid enough to run off her fans like that.
WRONG
There is a point to getting Win 7 over 8, the point being that if you don't have a touchscreen Win 8 is a mess. for example try win 8 on a laptop and see how often the stupid thing will get confused and decide one minute you are moving the cursor, the next swiping...because we all have to run smartphones now and those use swipes don't ya know?
I'm sorry but after fighting that stupid thing for nearly 2 months Win 8 is the first MSFT OS since WinME I will NOT allow in my shop. Not that its gonna matter anyway as from the looks of it "Windows Blue" will be released in 2014 so like Vista Win 8 is gonna be a "here today, gone later today" release, ala the Star Trek rule.
Not to mention
there is plenty of hardware out there that runs XP quite well that won't run Win 7 and 8 at all. I'm not just talking about the really old stuff like the 2004 Sempron nettop I use at the shop (which will be staying on XP as while it has 2GB of RAM and does its job just fine with AV and firewall neither the video nor the sound is supported in any OS other than XP) but I've seen plenty of Pentium Ds and early Athlon X2s that won't run Win 7, sure as hell won't run win 8, because nobody bothered to make compatible drivers. On one Pentium D I tried upgrading to Win 8 I found there was no sound, ethernet, or onboard graphics drivers to be had. You would have to throw out a system that frankly is overkill for the kinds of roles that particular customer has, all so MSFT can push their cellphone UI? No thanks.
XP will be hanging around long past 2014, with so many Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, and Athlons and X2s out there that still run great I have a feeling its gonna have a loooong tail. And I don't see how then will be different than now with regards to hackers, not like MSFT releases out of schedule patches hardly ever and as long as you have moved away from IE (since MSFT doesn't backport their browser) so that the browser gets patches? I don't see what the problem is. Heck there are still browsers out there that support Win98 (Kmeleon) so I doubt XP support will be going away anytime soon.
Posted in Linus Torvalds in NSFW Red Hat rant
Re: Quite frankly.....
Oh please! if he were any more full of crap we could turn the guy into a methane farm! wanna know why drivers suck in Linux? Linus "I'm too good for an ABI, even though BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX and even OS/2 has one" Torvalds.
And if you want to know what this is REALLY about and why MSFT has HAD to go SecureBoot look up "Win 7 SP1 all versions" on TPB. The pirates have a version of Windows that PASSES WGA and most people will never ever know that version of Win 7 they got from Joe's PC hut ain't legit. they tried WGA, that failed, that tried just giving OEMs VLKs, that failed, now they are down to secure boot because every other thing has been hacked by thieves.
But I say if Torvalds doesn't want to support SecureBoot? Good, keep Linux on ARM and the one vendor (AMD) that has chosen CoreBoot over UEFI. If you think Linux is great then vote with your wallets, buy ONLY Linux hardware, and we'll see if Linux has enough of a market to be worth supporting. i have a feeling though outside the server space the numbers will be lower than the margin for error.
No it hasn't! God I HATE how people try to rewrite history to make MSFT this evil genius when at best they were bumbling henchmen. Here is what happened folks from somebody who is gotta more grey than Gandalf and was there since the days of the Altair, ready?
DOS was insider dealing thanks to Billy's mom but more importantly DR dropped the ball and blew off IBM, you'll see "the other guy does something REALLY stupid" quickly becomes a theme with MSFT. Apple was taken over by one bad CEO after another that flooded the channel with confusing products so MSFT was able to capitalize thanks to the "gang of nine" and the MHz wars. WordPerfect ruled the market but then decided "Meh Windows won't be big, no worries" and put out a half baked DOS based WordPerfect that crashed more than it ran, again giving MSFT a free shot.
Somebody at Netscape decided to do a full rewrite on the browser just as things were heating up, the result was a crashing mess called NS 4 that had people going out and downloading IE because while it wasn't as nice at least they could look at 2 websites in a row without crashing. beOS tied their OS first to a failed AT&T CPU, then one failing or dying chip after another and by the time somebody realized "Hey we should be on X86!" it was too late as Windows was everywhere and WinXP was around the corner.
You look at the entire history of MSFT and every win is followed by the sentence "And then the competitor did something REALLY REALLY dumb" which gave them a free shot. X360? PS3's $600 price tag scared off a LOT of folks. DirectX become the gaming platform? Khronos drops the ball with OpenGL and after much infighting decides they care only about CAD and doesn't bother keeping up with the latest GPU tech forcing the GPU makers to use "shims" which gives it worse performance.
Which brings us to today as so far neither Google nor Apple has done anything truly facepalming dumb so MSFT has gone nowhere in mobile. MSFT's only real strength has been to take obvious openings handed them by the competition and run with them, no stupid move by competitor? No chance of MSFT getting ahead because innovation and smart design has never been the strength of the house of Redmond. All the "EEE" and other schemes were frankly MSFT trying to justify their success in a way that didn't sound like "We bumbled into a lucky break" which again and again that is ALL that has happened. Linux gains no share when they put out the Vista bomb because at that very moment the Linux devs decide to shoot the OS in the face by throwing out the DEs and sound subsystem for alpha quality garbage. Again and again its not MSFT being smart, its the other guy being pants wettingly DUMB.
Re: Gates quote
To judge whether he is a success or a giant megafail (hint, its the latter) lets look at his win/loss ratio. Win-Win 7, WinServer 2K3, 2K8, half win, X360 (2 billion RRoD cost it being a full win). Now lets look at his losses, Zune, Kin, WinPhone, killing the profitable playsforsure for the flop Zune market and killing any forward momentum they had in the media biz, Sidekick, Bing (which now pays you to use it in the form of gift cards), the billions they had to write off for the ad company that went nowhere, the billions they spent to buy Yahoo Search, and by Xmas this year you can add Win 8, Surface (both RT and pro) and the new WinPhone.
I'm sorry but the guy is a trainwreck. he has cost the company at LEAST 40 billion in the past half a decade and has ZERO ROI to show for those billions flushed down the loo as you Brits call it. His "leadership" is so bad that one could have had a higher ROI having monkeys fling poo at the stock page and investing there than they got by having Ballmer at the wheel!
There is A REASON why Forbes names him the Worst CEO and that is because that is what he is. as a retailer of PCs I can tell you NOBODY wants Windows 8, I have stopped even having Win 8 systems in my shop because they gather dust. People would buy a system with half the power and memory rather than get stuck with Win 8, yes its hated THAT much by the public. You expect this clown to lead the company when he is losing share in a monopoly situation? I wouldn't trust him to catch a cold with a map and a GPS unit.
The sad part is if they would have stuck to Win 7 on the desktop, pushed Metro on tablets/phones along with a "it MUST just work" mantra? They probably could have made some gains. But with Ballmer in charge the strategy always seems to be "What is the other guy doing? We'll do that but poorly and half baked" and so it ends in disaster. Bottom line if the board doesn't get rid of Gates little buddy MSFT will be RIM in less than 5 years, a company that once ruled their market but now only has legacy customers and even they are looking for the exit. The OEMs are all on the phone to Google, Valve has ported Steam to Linux and will be coming out with their own console, everybody is jumping off before the ship goes down.
Re: Shock asset stripper thinks his shares should be worth more!
Riiight, and I can fly south for the winter by growing wings out my backside. quit believing the stupid press, okay?
Let me make this perfectly clear, this is from somebody who has been in the trenches selling and servicing Pcs since the days of Win 3.x so i know of which I speak, the reason PC sales are down? is because everybody and their dog has multiple PCs and they are ALL overpowered!
Look at what I was selling on the LOW end more than 5 years ago: Phenom I X3 with 4GB of RAM and a 400GB HDD, now how many folks gonna be able to max that out? and on mobile it was Core duos and Turion X2s with 2GB of RAM and 250Gb HDDs. again how many are doing tasks when they are mobile those chips won't handle?
Once the MHz bubble ended and the core wars began PCs quickly went from good enough to top fuel funny cars yet the jobs that people had for them didn't change. Even the gamers don't have to buy as often because at 100 million a pop its doubtful games are gonna get more graphically rich than they are now.
Mark my words ARM will be in the same boat in less than 2 years, already you have Nvidia at 5 cores, Samsung at 6, and I predict by next Xmas season you'll see multicore phones and tablets under $100. Since a good 85% of the population won't feel any difference between an ARM dual and a quad you'll see the sales level out as the stragglers get one and after that it'll start dropping, just as it did on PC.
Until someone invents a new language or framework that will let programmers use as many cores as a system has as trivially as writing a single threaded app is today you are gonna see that the tech levels off because the average user just doesn't need to upgrade when the system they have is overpowered.
But the thing is..
If you look at the figures dell really isn't doing badly, in fact they've already climbed back up to pre-recession levels even though the economy is still down. profits are up, sales are up, why should they sell for $13 a share when it looks like the company is doing better?
It isn't like the Yahoo deal where the moron blocked an offer that was higher than they could possibly get on the market and yahoo had been doing nothing but failing, no in this case dell is doing better which is probably why Michael wants to take it private.
The only reason the netbook is dead
is that MSFT killed it. The whole point of the netbook was a small and CHEAP Internet, media, and basic office device, and when first released the OEMs could get WinPX Home for $15 a pop. Then MSFT went to $35 for 7 Starter, $50 for Win 7 Home, and they just cut all the chances for the OEMs to make a cent right out. When I bought my Win 7 AMD netbook it was $350 with Win 7 HP X64 and 4GB of RAM, by the time the last Win 8 netbooks rolled off the shelves the price had already reached $500 USD.
I think in the coming months you'll see more and more OEMs go to Google's Android and ChromeOS as MSFT has decided they are a "premium" brand and expect the OEMs to only sell premium units. Ask the OEMs with warehouses full of ulrabooks how well that worked in a dead economy MSFT, of course your price for SurfaceRT just shows you still don't get it.
Re: A New Tack
What you are describing is the stock market...pre 1986. If you look at a chart showing GDP and amount of trade in the market between 1935-1985 (29 was of course the bubble pop) you'd see that USA GDP when compared to stocks stayed between 12%-20% for ALL of that time, which includes the biggest boom in American history, the post war manufacturing boom.
But then in 86 you see it shoot up to nearly 30% GDP and every year it has shot ever higher, now its at 430% of GDP and rising...why? Simple before that the only ones in the market were INVESTORS, who did their homework and were in it for the long haul. Reagan when he created the 401K and 403B suddenly flooded the market with money and that money had to go somewhere, where it has gone is to rampant speculation.
This is why America and most of the other stock markets are so focused on trends and gossip, you have too many dollars chasing too little actual value so that true value (such as Dell showed) matters little what matters is the PERCEPTION of value in the form of short term stock bounces.
Actually..
I remember reading such a survey a couple of years back when they found that on average 71% of the games that a gamer owns never get finished because they get bored or go to something else and forget about it.
as for FB what I've found is you really need to spend about a week off and on just killing all the stupid notifications, stuff like "So and so has invited you to play tardedville" and once you do that its just fine. I use it to stay in touch with distant relatives and for that purpose its just fine once you turn all the stupid notifications off.
But I can see why many get burnt if they don't turn those off, the thing will drive you nuts with a constant stream of drivel if you don't.
Re: End of XP support will force decision
May I make a suggestion? Look at the AMD Bobcat boards. these have an APU, so you have the CPU+GPU covered, AMD has opened all their drivers so you can run any OS that you want, and most importantly while they are quite cheap you'll get more performance than those circa 2006 machines while using less power under load than that 2006 machine uses idling.
Because i'm guessing with Intel boards from 2006 we are talking Pentium 4s here and those chips were truly awful, they just gulp power while giving just lousy performance. With the Bobcat you get dual cores plus an HD6310 GPU that does full 1080P over HDMI and at just 18w under load the amount you'll save in power alone makes it well worth the switch.
Re: Microsoft need to re-learn the basics
The problem isn't the OS, its you. It sounds like you have a corrupted Skype install, I've seen it happen a ton of times, what you need is an unattended Skype install and luckily that is free. Just go to ninite.com and check the box for Skype, while you are there you might as well check the box for any software you have as it'll update it if there is a newer version and skip it if there isn't, and just let its do its thing. That will fix your Skype problems in a snap.
as for search, while it works fine for me if you need deep level searches you are better off with something like Copernicus or Agent ransack, both do deep level searches better than the built in Windows search. Why people can't just organize their folders into logical groups I'll never know, but at least you do have choices.
And I'm gonna assume you meant good and not food, but frankly win 7 does have a LOT of good features, you simply have to use them. For example jumplists and breadcrumbs make getting back to where you were the previous day trivial, Readyboost can give your programs a speedbump by using a flash for random reads,and the split folder feature (simply slam a folder to the left or right of your monitor to have it take exactly half the screen) makes file and folder comparisons fast and easy, and the libraries feature makes combining media spread over multiple drive behave as if its all in one folder. This combined with file2folderGUI and media center master makes WMC into a great HTPC with all the artwork and synopsis loaded and ready to go, really makes movie night a pleasure.
Re: fanboi
Anybody who says "The PC is dead" is a fool, plain and simple. and Linux (notice how he had to get the GNU in there, easiest way to spot a rabid fanboi) isn't ever gonna get anywhere near the desktop.
No the simple fact is the MHz bubble has burst and PCs are going back to the 5-8 year cycle which they had before the MHz war, that is all. Windows 8 is just nasty on anything that isn't a touchscreen (which describes a good 98% of the PCs built and being built) but nobody is giving up their desktop or laptop for an iPhone, they are simply holding off purchasing a new one or coming to somebody like me that will be happy to sell them one with Windows 7.
Finally as to their "internal culture"? You could see which way the wind was blowing when Allchin and Ozzie left, its all marketing drones like the Ballmernator which is why all you see are copies of products Apple put out a couple of years before. Don't worry as sooner or later the board will put down the crack pipe and fire him, when even Forbes lists him as worst CEO its gonna be hard for him to drum up support. I think Sinofsky falling on the sword bought him a little time but when win 8 is as big a flop as WinME it'll be bye bye ballmer. Hopefully they'll bring back one of the engineers like Allchin to right the ship and instead of copying Apple they'll take a page from IBM and supplement their software sales with services and all will straighten out.
Until then simply avoid the mess that is Win 8, stick with Win 7 that has another 7 years minimum support (I say minimum because its obvious that 7 is the new XP so it wouldn't surprise me if it gets an extension like XP did) and unlike Win 8 is actually designed for the user and not Wall Street.
Then put your money where your mouth is..
And buy AMD exclusively. That is all I have been selling in my little shop for the past 5 years and my customers couldn't be happier, they always have killer graphics and the bang for the buck is quite sweet. I also put my money where my mouth is when it comes to my family, we have 5 desktops, 2 laptops, and 3 gaming cards...all AMD.
Honestly unless you are one of the 3% that need every last MHz you can possibly get AMD chips will give you more than you will be able to use. I have been rocking a 1035T 6 core for over a year now and I have to say its the best $100 USD I ever spent on a CPU, it just tears through transcodes while turbocore gives me the extra punch when I'm gaming, just a great chip.
And as somebody who remembers what it was like when Intel was alone, which was nothing but high prices and stagnation, I want to see AMD stay healthy. the fact that 3 out of the 4 consoles are using AMD in either CPU or GPU or both (Xbox Next CPU+GPU, PS4 APU, Wii U GPU) should help but that doesn't mean we can't do our part and buy AMD when we need a new system. Their prices are low, they get plenty of performance, and they have better IGPs and GPUs than Intel, so what's not to like?
Re: Hmm.
I hate to break the news to ya but as someone in the states i can tell ya that corps and gov? Kinda the same thing now. Even if the rumors of NSA funding Google aren't true the fact is the feds can walk themselves into just about any corp office and help themselves and nobody will say or do squat, just look at how quickly the story of AT&T having a secret room for the NSA to help themselves to data fizzled.
So I really hope you guys in the EU do pass something like this, as sadly we here in the states have pretty much ZERO say in our government anymore and if their was any doubt who is running the show the supreme court ruling money is speech cleared it right up.
Re: I thought that flogging had been banned...
It does NOT have a start screen, it may be labeled "start" but in terms of functionality it should be called a "task panel" as that is what it is. Can you launch ANY application from it? No? Then sorry but it ain't a start screen, its a task panel. Same as the "charms bar" is a SIDEBAR, it comes from the side, has gadgets on it, no different than the Vista sidebar except it auto-hides which isn't enough for a full on rename.
This is one of the many problems with "WinME the second coming" in that its obvious a good 90% of the changes are for tablets and cellphones. Not running it on a tablet or cellphone? Then its made of frustration and fail. ironically those that run it on a tablet don't care for it much either as the "desktop app" has to be used (settings are scattered between it and metro task panel for example) and as it has been since XP Tablet Edition the desktop metaphor just doesn't work well on a tablet.
Even though I don't care for or own any Apple products I have to give them credit, they didn't just jam OSX onto a tablet and call it a day, all MSFT did was bolt a half baked tablet UI on top of their desktop UI thus breaking both. great job MSFT, first OS since WinME I'm actively avoiding, even Vista wasn't THIS bad.
Re: Windows 8 FAIL
I was reading a quote from an actual usability expert, one that works for one of the large software houses advising on UI design and I think she nailed it when she was asked about Win 8 and said
"Windows 8 is designed for content consumption rather than content creation and multitasking. Whereas content consumption can easily be done on other media, such as tablets and phones, production and multitasking is still best suited for PCs. Windows 8 appears to ignore that."
Honestly I couldn't have said it better, its "Microsoft WINDOW" design for single tasking mass consumption while ignoring that passive content consumption is a VERY small part of what anybody uses a PC for. Even my little old lady customers make their little calendars with the grandbabies on it or run their little chat programs while they surf so their friends can pop on and talk to them when Win 8 is strictly about trying to sell MSFT customers on an appstore and blindly buying all their content (at a pretty good markup I might add, most are even more expensive than the iOS version) from them. But MSFT can pretend all it wants, slapping a pastel paint job won't make us buy the WinPhone or Surface and all this is doing is killing OEM sales at what frankly couldn't be a worse time.
Re: @Lee Dowling - IT's what happens when you don't listen to your customers
Riiight, a bog standard X86 laptop that is so locked down that only by switching to "dev mode" and jumping through a page and a half worth of CLI BS and possibly voiding your warranty (as you have to completely wipe the drive, no dual booting allowed) is "better" than what we had before?
Love 'em or hate 'em but I can take any Windows laptop and in 10 minutes be booting from one of dozens of distros in live CD or installer form. ChromeBooks are so locked down there is exactly ONE Linux distro that can boot onto a ChromeBook and its a bootloader hacked version of Ubuntu put out by one guy, yeah sure that is gonna get a LOT of support.
I'm all for choice and making MSFT actually compete as the next guy, I think competition is great, this is one of the reasons why i still build AMD exclusively but do NOT replace one corporate master with another, okay guys? Honestly Apple, Google, and MSFT seem to be having this contest called "who can be more of an abuser of their customers" so we should be screaming bloody murder about the dirty stuff Google does and just because MSFT is also terrible doesn't give Google a free pass.
Re: Well...
Well its not only that, oh and FYI it was NOT "Vista PREMIUM Capable" as that would have meant it could actually run Vista HP, no what got them was it was Vista CAPABLE which they had set the bar so low so that Intel could unload their God awful 9xx chipsets that frankly you could have sold P3 Celerons and gotten that title as the bar was THAT low. It turned out "Vista capable" was Vista"BASIC" capable which the courts ruled wasn't Vista, it was a crippled netbook OS.
Now as far as the turd goes...sigh, when you need a Win 7 PC to Google how to use the Win 8 PC? Something has gone horribly wrong and before any apologists chime in with "Oh you are just a Luddite you don't want to learn new things" or "All you need to do is (ton of keyboard crud)" I learned enough to do basic tasks in Linux, not do anything fancy, just basics, in about an hour, Android even less than that, about a half hour, whereas 4 days later I still couldn't find basic features in Win 8. I mean the UI doesn't even follow any established guidelines or even common sense. You get to the shutdown from a SETTINGS icon, really? And I'm far from the only one, here is a guy that writes fricking tech articles all day and even HE needed a Win 7 PC to Google how to use the brand new Win 8 PC in front of him. There is NO context clues, no consistency on how things work, its just kinda random..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
Everyone should watch that video because as a tech writer he explains exactly what is wrong (he goes so far as to say there should be a recall) I would only add that in my little shop I had a frankly beautiful Athlon triple core running Win 8 for nearly 7 months for people to try and not only did I not get a SINGLE person saying they actually LIKED Win 8, the closest i could get to a compliment is "Well it may be alright on a cellphone" but not a single person made me an offer on that system, even though it was frankly a beautiful machine. I put Win 7 HP on it? Sold it in less than 3 days. Hmmm...7 months VS 3 days...yeah as a retailer that is all i need to know right there.
The problem at AMD ain't Intel, its AMD
The problem as written up by a former engineer is that the CEO after Ruiz, can't remember his name ATM, basically did a slash and burn on the company so he could get a quick rise out of the stock and cash out. The guys that made Bobcat? FIRED. The guys that made Athlon64? FIRED.
Pretty much all of the really great chip designers they had were given the boot in favor of computer controlled layouts which is why the bulldozer line is such a power piggie, computers simply don't understand anything about optimizing or most used paths so you end up with a chip that's 15% larger, slower, and more power hungry which when you are already behind is NOT the way to go. But of course firing that many people that got decent paychecks did give a short term bounce to the stock. Here is the link although I don't know if links are allowed here or not, this is my first time trying to post a link here so if I mess it up my apologies.
http://www.insideris.com/amd-spreads-propaganda-ex-employee-speaks-out/
Re: Shooting themselves in the foot?
The reason for this is obvious and simple AC, for the past few years, since the release of WinPhone at least, Ballmer has cared about nothing but Wall Street and NOT the customer base.
A sane CEO would look at the negative indicators across the board and not only not give people the choice of Win 7 or 8 to stop the bleeding but to more than double the price on a product they can't sell at $40? Well wall Street likes high priced products herpa de derpa de derp.
The only nice thing I can say about Win 8 is thus: Windows 8 will finally get people to accept that Vista wasn't the mess they thought it was. At least with Vista by SP2 it worked quite well and as long as you turned off its hyper UAC bugging the snot out of you it was quite usable. With Win 8 frankly it needs a product recall as its BROKEN. I mean when most people need a Win 7 PC to Google how to do basic tasks like close metro apps in Win 8 or even shut down the PC? I mean who thought putting shutdown under the universal SETTINGS icon?
Windows 8 will go down as the biggest disaster since WinME, maybe even as bad as Bob.
Re: No doubt to be followed in 2014...
I'm sorry but you are wrong and ARM is frankly a fad. The users will soon grow tired of it when it hits the powerwall (Nvidia is already up to 5 cores, Samsung up to 6) and can't squeeze any more performance out of the chips, it just doesn't scale up very well and the best chips being made can't even beat a Cedar Mill P4 in IPC.
No what has happened to Intel and AMD is something we PC retailers have been predicting for quite awhile now which is thus: PCs passed "good enough" and shot straight into "insanely overpowered" several releases back. Look at what I was selling on the LOW end FIVE years ago, Phenom I X4 with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD with a Radeon 4200 IGP. How many of your average users are gonna be able to max out that system? Not many. Heck I love to game and built myself a new system every year and a half, now I'm using a 3+ year old box, heck I didn't even really need to upgrade the Deneb quad to a Thuban Hexacore but when I found Hexacores for $100 I couldn't pass the deal up.
The simple fact is your average user will be WELL served by a first gen Phenom X2 or better or on the Intel side a Core Duo first gen or better because the software just hasn't been able to keep up with the huge leap in processing power since the MHz war became the core war. Take my dad for example whom I use as my perfect "average user" metric because everything he does with his PCs is mainstream. He watches videos and surfs, he chats and checks his webmail, runs his quickbooks and burns discs, as average a user as you could possibly get. When the Phenom IIs went on sale cheap I thought "Ya know, its been a few years since I built him that Phenom I quad home and office systems, maybe I should see if he needs a new unit" so I set up performance logging and came back in a couple of weeks...know what I found? 45%, that was the MAX he had been able to use after 2 weeks of daily use, 45% CPU. Most of the time 2 or more cores were twiddling their thumbs waiting on useful work to do. I found the same is true when it comes to my netbook, I figured that AMD E350 netbook would last me MAYBE 2 years and then I'd get another, instead what do I find? For the things I do when out on service call the netbook works perfectly, so why buy another?
And THAT is why sales are down. I predict the SAME will happen to ARM in less than 2 years, you already have companies piling on the cores trying to get more IPC and yet you have ARM Holdings talking about "dark silicon" because if you turn everything on with their new ARM64 chips you'll have battery life measured in minutes. Other than Apple who has dedicated fans who look at using last year's iPad as practically a sin most companies will end up in a race to the bottom (just like X86) as fewer and fewer feel a need to buy the latest tablet because that Tegra multicore does everything they want it to do. The simple fact is we haven't had a "killer app" since the end of the MHz wars that can actually slam what we have, a few tiny niches like CAD need every cycle they can get but most users? Wouldn't feel any difference between that first gen Phenom X4 or C2Q and a system with the latest and greatest so why buy a new one?
Re: Well when you've been dumped by everyone else...
One of the big money makers has been the consoles and except for the Steambox which we haven't heard the specs of yet the big three, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are ALL using AMD for their next gen consoles. The PS4 will have an AMD APU covering CPU and GPU, the Xbox Next will have a PPC with an AMD GPU, and the Wii-U has the equivalent of an HD4670 last I heard, so Nvidia is pretty much trapped in PC gamer land for the most part.
Sure there are some takers for Tegra but since you can get a broadcom HD chip for dirt cheap and more people play videos than games on their tablets its gonna be a pretty small niche. as a PC gamer I can tell you that most of us are buying less cards simply because the consoles hamstring the graphics, heck I'm still running an HD4850 which still plays all the games at native res and with plenty of bling. I'm gonna get an HD6850 not because I need it but because its my BDay in a couple of months and the HD68xx use less power, but frankly I don't NEED the card to play all the latest games like Borderlands 2 with full bling and talking to customers that game they are telling me the same thing, they are using 2+ year old GPUs because they see no point in upgrading.
So yeah Nvidia is in a bad way right now. and its obvious that AMD buying ATI was a smart move as when the previous CEO fired all the engineers and bet the farm on netburst...err I mean Bulldozer its the ATI division that is gonna keep the cash rolling for the next couple of years and having 3 major consoles is gonna be a heck of a nice earner, and with both the X360 and Wii having ATI as well as long as those units are still sold that's more money for AMD, less for Nvidia. So while I don't really have a horse in the console race I have to say I probably wouldn't buy Nvidia stock right now, looks like they are gonna be in for a lean patch.
Re: "Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment".
Oh lord can we end that lie already? Nokia was big in DUMBPHONES which anybody could see was like being the number 1 maker of 8-tracks in 1983, really not a good place to be. they had not one, not two, but THREE internal OSes, all were in various stages of broken and were in no shape to compete with iPhone (and don't even say MeeGo, their dev team admitted it would be a year and a half minimum before it was up to snuff and there are several guys that worked on it that said it had fatal memory and networking issues) so what EXACTLY did people expect him to do? Close the doors and give the money back to the shareholders?
Nobody has made money on Android but Google and Samsung, even HTC is no seriously hurting because Android is in a free fall race to the bottom. heck you can go in any Walmart here in the states and get an Android smartphone with no contract for $70 USD. There is just no money left in Android for any company that doesn't outsource all their hardware to China, Nokia didn't have the money to get into a bidding war with HP over WebOS (which IMHO would have been the best bet) and Apple certainly isn't gonna license iOS, so that left them only THREE, count 'em three choices...either give up on the smartphone market for at least a year and a half (probably more like 2 and a half if the insiders are correct) with NOTHING to sell but bottom of the line dumbphones running Symbian until then, get completely slaughtered jumping into the sharktank that is Android, or go with WinPhone where MSFT would pay for all the adverts and engineering so all they had to do was make hardware, heck they even got the cost of every license back in advertising dollars.
In hindsight was it a bad call? yes but I would argue there wasn't any other call Elop could make, short of selling off the company piecemeal like a corporate raider. The dumbphone is dead, it made them good money in the past but even the third world is getting cheap droid phones now so its just a dead end street Symbian was a dumbphone OS that looked like Win 3.x and simply couldn't run a new UI and new apps without a total rewrite, the Java based one they had in house had fatal memory leaks, and MeeGoo had both memory and networking issues that would have required you having to reboot the phone when you wanted to surf...nobody is gonna put up with that today. So it really came down to MSFT or close the doors and I doubt the folks at Nokia would have been happy had he started closing the place down.
Re: typo
To me the bigger problem is the name...Seagate. i don't know if you guys have been seeing the same thing on that side of the pond but here in the states Seagate is quickly getting the rep of "the company whose stuff you don't count on" because of all the failures, just look at the BF and Xmas ads, the WDs were selling for as much as 40% more than the Seagates and they would sell out whereas the Seagates have been on sale for weeks and they still can't move 'em.
Now I don't know if this is true or not, just what I heard, but the scuttlebutt going around is this can all be traced back to the Maxtor deal, instead of bringing Maxtor up to Seagate quality they cranked out the cheap garbage Maxtor ARM controller chips and those when combined with frankly lousy firmware code is making these things die left and right. the way I had it explained to me is the firmware screws up and can "lose" where the sectors end at when those cheap ARM chips get too hot and it tries to slam past the physical boundary and bye bye Seagate.
So if it were me I'd just put up with a little more noise and wait 6-8 months before touching anything with the name Seagate on it. In my exp the best is Samsung (if you can find any) followed by Hitachi (both Samsung and Hitachi pre-buyout of course) followed by WD and then at the bottom of the barrel Seagates. I know I've dealt with enough dead Seagates in the past 3 years at the shop I avoid them like the plague and even had to walk a guy through building a clean box so he could try to save his family photos that were on a less than 2 month old Seagate that croaked. The quality just isn't there anymore and when it comes to your data is it REALLY worth such a risk to savea few DBs worth of sound?
I have been saying its a CYA
For awhile now, they are trying to use him as a scapegoat when the simple fact is you look and the SAME BOARD has been there for all of the major foul ups of the last 5+ years! I mean you look at their track record of purchases and you quickly spot an obvious pattern...they always massively overpay for a company then end up having to take a big write down!
Seriously folks this board makes the one at AMD look like Mensa, they have made one horribly bad call after another and blown through cash like Charlie Sheen at a porn convention and now that the stock is nosediving and it looks like the poo might hit the blades the board, which included Whitman BTW, are trying to do a CYA and blame it on the last deal. Well I'm sorry but if you want me to swallow this company was so brilliant they could cook the books to the tune of 5+ billion and not get caught? That is laughable.
Re: When smoke gets in your eyes
I don't know why anybody would mark you down when one only has to look at the history of HP to know their claims are rubbish. I mean they expect us to swallow a 5.5 BILLION dollar book cooking that just so happened to get by not one but two separate accounting firms? Give me a break!
But you look at the past 6 years or so of HP and you quickly see a pattern emerge which is pretty much spot on what you listed with one change to #1 which is "CEO buys company FOR SEVERAL TIMES ITS VALUE then gets bullet along with others". Hp has bought companies multiple times now for several times what the most optimistic outlook would warrant, just look at what they paid for WebOS.
But the part I'm hoping this stink will change is Whitman and the board, because while the CEOs have been through the place like a revolving door the board that rubber stamped these insane moves including Whitman are still there and still filling the air with the stench of failure. This is why going through multiple CEOs hasn't helped AMD either, because its the pathetic board that has stayed and stunk up the place.
So I hope it all ends up getting aired in public and the board get their golden parachutes and just get out before they have completely destroyed the company, because its painful to see what once was a great company just get run into the ground like that.
Posted in The best e-readers for Christmas
Frankly they can sing and dance
As its not gonna matter, the tablets are gonna make all the eReaders other than the Kindle look as dated and worthless as 8-tracks. I mean put yourselves in the shoes of one of my customers, I tell them that for $130 I can get them a nice eReader, or for the SAME PRICE I can get them a 7 inch tablet that not only read eBooks but can ALSO play music and watch movies and plays games and even comes with Angry Birds and Cut The Rope? Its really not a hard choice for them, I have yet to have one say "I'd rather just have an eReader, thanks".
The ONLY reason the Kindle will survive and thrive is because Amazon has spent crazy money to make it so, both with the deals with the carriers they made for the "free 3G" and by willing to take a lesser cut from authors so they have an incredible selection at cheap prices. All of the book lovers I know have switched simply because of the combination of it being cheap ( and it having such a huge selection at great prices.
So I have a feeling this time next year the other eReaders will be toast or nothing but a standard Android color tablet with an eReader app, they simply can't compete with the Android tablets that grow ever more powerful while becoming ever cheaper. Heck I pointed a customer to one of those $70 tablets on the week of Black Friday for her grand niece, she loves it so much after seeing how nicely it ran she ended up going back and buying tablets for all her friends. Can't say as I blame her, 1.2Ghz, 512Mb of RAM, 4Gb of space, and with all the apps like FB that people want as well as a bunch of games like Angry Birds? At prices that low most of the eReaders don't stand a chance.
Re: Said it before and I'll say it again
Actually as a retailer I haven't seen the tablets take much away from the netbooks either, in fact its the OEMs taking AMD's netbook chips and slapping them in 15 inch laptops that is hurting the netbook sales because they are becoming harder to find, at least here in the states.
No what I'm seeing with the tablets is TWO uses, and two uses alone. 1.- Giving them to the kids as a low cost net consumption device that keep the kiddies off mommy or daddy's PCs, and 2.- A "look stuff up from the couch" device so mommy or daddy can find out who that actor is while the commercial is on or do a quick check of their email.
But I haven't met a single customer that is giving up their desktop or laptop for a tablet, keyboard attachment or no. Any retailer will tell you the reason X86 sales are down is because the core wars has caused machines for the past several years to be MASSIVELY overpowered compared to the work the people have for them, hell the netbooks I'm selling are all dual cores with plenty of RAM and HDD space, and the low end desktops I've been selling for nearly 5 years are all triple cores with tons of space and the ability to do 1080p...so what do they need a new one for, when they have the equivalent of a jet fuel burning funny car just to go to the store?
So I predict tablets will continue to race to the bottom so that by this time next year we'll have dual core 7 inchers for $50 USD and then a year after that sales will drop just as they have for X86 because everybody that wants one will have one. And I predict win 8 in ALL flavors will flop, I'm not even gonna carry it because of all the hate and backlash I've seen from customers, they just don't like metro and that is that.
They could cut it in half and it wouldn't help
Because MSFT refuses to accept reality which is thus: NOBODY buys Windows because they LIKE the brand, they buy it because they have a ton of Windows X86 software to run! What you have is a "WINO" Windows In Name Only, and nobody wants a Windows that don't run Windows programs. I mean why would they? Android units are MUCH cheaper, Apple has the better branding, and both have MUCH more apps.
As a retailer who is telling his customers to avoid Win 8 like an STD I'm just gonna kick back and enjoy the fail, because rather than listening to their customers and giving them what they want Ballmer would rather try to make MSFT into an ersatz Apple and nobody wants an ersatz. So I say kick back and enjoy , I'd say you can get them on Woot! in 6 months for $99 but knowing Ballmer's ego he'll probably have them buried in NM next to the ET carts rather than admit he failed.
Posted in Windows 8 fails to revive world CPU biz
Re: Could it just be......
Bingo, we have a winner! The simple fact is one we retailers could have told you a couple years back, and that is when they switched from the MHz wars to the core wars the PC quickly outpaced both the users and the software.
I mean look at what I was selling on my low end FIVE years ago, a Phenom I X3 or X4 with 4Gb of RAM and a 500Gb HDD...now what is Joe and Jane Average gonna do that is gonna stress this CPU? Nothing, they just can't come up with enough work to stress the chip so why buy a new one? Heck I've been picking up Athlon X3s for $60 USD and X4s for $80 USD, so I've been able to build dirt cheap units that are frankly insanely overpowered, what is little Timmy gonna do to stress that chip? slap a $100 GPU and you can even game with it, no problem.
So its not "the death of the PC" or "the rise of smartphones" or any of that rubbish, its just users have desktops and laptops that are so much more powerful than what they need that they see no reason to replace them. heck my netbook is going on 3 years old yet it has a dual core with 8Gb of RAM and a 320Gb HDD, what good would a new one bring me? would it make my surfing any faster, my movies somehow better? Nope, so I just won't buy a new one until the old one dies, there just isn't any point.
We have a winner!
As Jobs said all those years ago "Microsoft doesn't have to lose for Apple to win" and the same applies here, if AMD keeps the "bang for the buck" while still making decent profits? Well its a lot easier to sell a low priced machine with more cores than a higher priced one with less, i don't care what market you are talking about.
I do have a question though, will those AM3+ Opterons work in a standard board, or are they server only? Because that 8 core one might be a nice upgrade to my Thuban, when you are doing video editing and transcoding no such thing as too many cores ya know.
But as far as ARM? I really wouldn't bet the farm on ARM, I think its time is just about over. they simply haven't been able to bump up the IPC high enough to keep up with the ever higher multimedia and gaming demands and that when combined with the fact you can only bolt so many cores onto ARM before blowing the power savings has them pretty much in a pickle. mark my words you'll see dual core ARM tablets for $50, because without speed or cores they will have a race to the bottom just like x86, you'll have a few companies like Apple make money in the ARM field but most will lose their shirts. if AMD bets the farm on ARM they may as well close their doors now, they have nothing to offer over Apple and Nvidia in that space. The fact that they are the only other source for X86 chips gives them an advantage, and if they can continue dropping the heat while bumping the IPC without pricing the chips out of their low to midrange market? Then they can carve out a nice niche without having to worry about Intel one way or another.
Never hear of the Osborne Effect?
If they confirm it'll get picked up by the big sites and not just the geeky places and with Xmas coming up they don't want everybody going "Well I was gonna buy a 2Tb, but hey, they are coming out with a 5Tb next year! I think I'll wait on that!" and watching their sales dry up.
I just hope that with the release of 4Tb and 5Tb we'll see the return of pre-flood prices on the 1Tb and 2Tb models, because I was paying $35 USD a Tb which was a LOT more affordable, thank you very much. I'm sitting on 3Tb right now and I'd love to double that but not at these prices, i'll wait until they come down.
Re: Oracle? That crowd spreading malware?
Who installs stuff like Java manually anymore, when even the little guy can have it automated and toolbar free? just go to Ninite, check the boxes for what you want, that's it. Totally free for personal use and if you're running a business they have really cheap support licenses and will even help you set up a copy of their server so updates to any software you have can be downloaded once and spread to all the PCs, really nice that.
