Gee, a $1000 GPU that runs 7x as fast a 1/8th of an $1500 CPU. It woud be good idea if you didn't need that CPU to run it, but just barely so. If you cheap out on the CPU and only spend ~$750 on it, assuminng there is no slowdown on the GPU because of it, then the economics break. And people wonder why GPU compute on databases isn't catching on.

Then there is the power use aka TCO/running costs to think about. And everything mentioned above. And.... This study has all he hallmarks of an Nvidia research project who's targets are financial analysts rather than potential customers. The science is fine but that is not the intent.

            -Charlie

Does an employment contract come with the perk of war crimes indemnification in writing? Just curious.

You missed the point, it is not a case of "My platform isn't quite as shitty as yours." this time around.

That said we have reached a state of meta-fanboi-ism, the new argument is, "The platform I don't have and have no real clue about isn't quite as shitty as the platform you don't have and have no real clue about." And for the record, yes this is yet another internet derived regresion of the human species.

I work with a charity that has access to the MS discounts and there is one authorized outlet for it, Tech Soup. MS has ALWAYS made the latest version available so this is nothing new. It is just an astroturfing post to try and drum up some good PR for the embattled and truly miserable OS.

That said why is MS so cruel to those in need?

It forces me to do thing in a way that bugs me. I don't like having to search for things I want, I like ot put them where I feel they should be. Hiding things from the user ala the menu system in Offices past is a good example of this. I don't work the way it wants me to work so I end up spending more time fighting the OS than I do things I want to do.

In short, this pisses me off. Last time I played with it there weren't enough customization options to make it not annoying enough to use so I went to Mint. For the moment, Cinnamon is more than good enough for me so I haven't tried 13.04 enough to say that it has gotten better. That said there is no reason for me to go back.

This tech is old, they are called "ringtones" by others. They transfer information quite reliably telling others, "The phone is owned by a total *sshole" when certain things play with near 100% accuracy. MS is probably going to use this to patent ringtones, and start suing android vendors.....

            -Charlie

"I have never understood why listening to morons on CNBC, Fox Business, or anywhere else was any different from listening to some guy screaming on a street corner."

Two differences. For the guy on the street corner, you have to go outside. Secondly, said guy screeming about the impending space eel apolcalypse because people have lapsed from believing in the book of Jed The Holy Phebotomist could possibly be right. That is about the sum of the difference if you don't count such tangential things as looks, shoes, and holes in clothes.

                  -Charlie

I don't hate it but the UI annoys me to the point that I can't use it.

While I haven't used the Google service yet, I see similar problems in a lot of public areas like airports where I happen to find myself a lot. It seems to be more of an issue with the non-direct data traffic like the auth services, ads/gateway tasks, and DNS. More often than not it is one of these 'services' that are unrelated to the traffic that are acting up.

One example is the wi-fi networks in the Minneapolis or San Fran airports. You can log on, and then getting an IP, getting on the "I agree" screens, the videos you have to watch etc etc are all dog slow to one degree or other. The Delta lounge in the Minneapolis and San Fran airports are very extreme examples of this problem especially when they were T-Mobile (damn their black souls). You would 'get on' and then nothing or something trivial really slow.

Once on you would have decent ping times and some speed tests would be OK but anything that needed 'extra services' was pain. Changing your DNS to something you have or a know fast provider helped a lot which tells me the NAS/Radius/whatever server they use was overwhelmed. Now that I am thinking about it I should do a traceroute next time I am on to see what is happening in more detail, I am curious.

My first bet is that the majority of these services go through a single auth/security box that is under-CPUd and forces everything out a single overloaded link. If anyone has the time. I also wouldn't be surprised if DPI had a hand in it too, especially from Google.

"Why cant i record on my Xbox offline and transfer the resultant file to a PC that can upload for FREE?"

Because Bing wouldn't know how to find it, duh. :)