$0. America's Army and Call of Duty are different games.

Maybe, maybe not. I've heard of scripted lessons implemented at the single subject or school level, but because of the price tag they're often rolled out at the district level. A principal could certainly voice his opposition to such a program while it's in the planning stage, but once the decision is made, it would be the district's way or the highway. You're absolutely right that such programs are foisted by administration, but you're absolutely wrong in assuming what level of administration makes the decision to use it.

Once the district decides to use scripted lesson plans, it's up to the OP's father whether he believes it's something worth taking a stand (and potentially losing his job)

What he's talking about are products I've seen referred to as "scripted lesson plans," and he's correct; they're not just textbooks and workbooks, and they're not the "seeds" of lessons.

I have never actually had to use these products in my own teaching experience, but I have seen them and we did work with some of them in my teaching classes in college. Imagine a general math concept such as fractions. There are companies who sell entire packets of lesson plans, designed to be implemented by every teacher in the district and to be used for X weeks for fractions. The packet is three hole punched so that it can be easily distributed in binder form, and really is a collection of "canned" lesson plans. The ones I encountered went so far as to break a day's worth of instruction down into a format like this:

Warm up: 10 Mins [use warmup transparency 11a]
Lesson: 12 Mins [use overhead transparency 11b]
Exercise: 25 Mins [use worksheet 11c]
Suggested homework: [worksheet 11d]
Sample modifications for students with disabilities: X, Y, Z
The real version is much more detailed, of course; the ones I saw for English classes typically consumed three pages for a 45 minute lesson.

Typically, a district would purchase an entire years' worth of lessons and put teachers through extensive in-service training to discuss the proper way to implement such programs.

It's appealing on one hand; as you probably know, planning lessons is difficult, time-consuming, and requires a lot of trial and error. I wasn't truly happy with most of my lessons until after the third or fourth time I'd taught and refined them. These products take out the guesswork. The lessons have been tested (the companies pushing them talk a lot about how much testing goes into their development), and their pacing honestly looked pretty good. On the other hand, of course, it's deeply insulting to the teachers involved; it reduces us to robots, removes the opportunities for creativity, and generally brings everyone down to the same level of mediocrity. I assume this is probably why his father's school had to go all the way to termination - if you let one person off the hook on canned lessons, then everyone will want to.

He's right though. Such products do exist.

Your ECC system is substantially more expensive; it's not just the RAM. $50 more for comparable RAM, $100-$150 more for a board capable of supporting it, and $100-$150 more for slower CPUs. It's the total cost of the platform, not just the RAM, that causes a sticking point. $250 or $300 goes a long way in performance. ECC is all of a sudden the difference between a single $200 card and a pair, and it doesn't provide any tangible benefit to the guy who wanted to game.

5-10% is important once it represents the difference between playable and not. You're absolutely right that the difference between 110 and 120fps on a 60hz LCD is pointless and comical, but mid-range systems don't tend to do that. If you can keep it at 60-70fps on today's games, then next year's start dropping a little below that point. I'll bet the person asking for a gaming computer will want every performance gain he can get to keep him in the playable range for the next few years.

Random crashes? I hate to fight your strawman with anecdotal evidence, but it's not really a problem. The flipped bit has to be one in use at the time it flips, and it has to be one that's actually important (and not just changing color on a texture or something). I haven't used ECC since the EDO RAM era, and I've never had a problem with system instability other than in the dark days of Windows 9x.

My best may be a webpage that's a little vague (who benchmarks products without trying to keep things as similar as possible?), but you haven't even gone that far. Seems as if you're sticking to handwaving for this one. Your argument has boiled down to two points thus far:

A) UPTIME! Besides months of uptime being useless to someone gaming (due to frequent reboots for Windows patches), I hope you understand that there isn't some mass "crash fest" afoot for the majority of the users not running ECC. Seriously, your system's uptime and stability, like any other well-built computer, likely owes far more to a good PSU, reputable brand components, and good cooling than it does ECC.

B) It's good enough; you might pay a bit more and get a little less performance, but that's not such a big deal. Except that it is a big deal, because every dollar you advocate spending on hardware with minimal benefit is a dollar not spent on hardware with an actual tangible benefit.

You and I both know that the best you could honestly tell someone in this position is "It might one day keep your OS or game from crashing, but I can't really tell you the likelihood that it will."

What's the best I've got? For starters, not dismissing non-substantial differences as meaningless? The end result of our entire discussion is the same as it was at the beginning: The original poster wants a gaming machine, and you would have him select something that is either slower at the same price or more expensive. Assuming whatever budget you're working with, burning money on pricier mainboards and RAM (even if you don't care about the CPUs) still takes money away from the portion of the budget that you can devote to GPUs. I'll completely agree that GPUs make up the majority of the performance in the computer, so I'm very confused about why you seem focused on getting the poster to drop cash in areas other than his GPU.

If you want to casually dismiss any performance difference as meaningless, go right ahead; don't be surprised when someone calls you on it. 1-2% is pointless and should be ignored, but 5-10% is not. The guy plays games, and wants to know why he would want ECC RAM in his gaming computer. Frames per second is a pretty damned important feature in a gaming computer, and is certainly a hell of a lot more compelling to someone who says they play games than months of uptime. ECC has its place, and clearly you value it, but its place is not in a gaming computer unless your goal is simply to throw money about.

So, what's the best you've got? The poster wants to play games, and presumably he's interested in the best product for doing so. Please, tell me how dropping loads more money on a mainboard that supports ECC RAM, the ECC RAM itself, and the slower processors to run the whole system will benefit him rather than focusing that budget on videocards. Alternately, feel free to resort to condescension and insults, as it's about all you appear capable of mustering to bolster your argument.

Easily done on a home PC, and with no gain or benefit for that user. OP wants a gaming machine, and you want to spout off on things that won't benefit him.

"CPU can have an impact" is a bit of an understatement. According to Tom's Hardware's Far Cry 2 benchmark a $280 core i7 920 will spank a pair of comparably priced 2.5Ghz Opterons ($360 for the pair) to the tune of almost 30 additional frames per second. The opteron isn't on that chart, mind you, but you can ballpark it pretty reasonably among the comparably clocked Phenom chips.

I'm glad that you've realized the folly of claiming that a slow CPU isn't going to make a difference, but I'd encourage you to go check benchmarks on RAM speed and x8 vs x16 GPUs on games (the latter might be harder to find as it's been a while since mid-range boards likely to be used for gaming have dropped speed on second/both PCI-E slots). It's not but a few frames per second - maybe 10 or 12 in aggregate between the RAM and GPU bandwidth- but that's quite a bit when it costs nothing more and the original poster wants a gaming machine.

FYI: calling people "kid" on the internet doesn't bolster your argument one bit. It just makes you look rude.

Hell, let's grant your claim that GPU speed is all that matters. It's not, but we'll roll with it. You're going to end up with a lousier GPU when you blow all of your budget on more expensive mainboards, RAM, and CPUs. Enjoy your sub-par (but not really any more stable) gaming experience!

The OP is building a gaming computer. He specifically asked about it. Not a "dev box," not a DB server, not a home theater PC, but something for gaming. Before you go spouting off like a jack-ass about not building gaming computers, understand that I'm talking about them because the original poster asked why he wouldn't put ECC in a gaming machine. For someone who doesn't build gaming computers and never claimed to, though, you sure can spout bullshit about games not benefiting from CPU speed, RAM speed, or GPU bandwidth.

Different needs for different apps; you can continue to pretend that RAM and GPU bandwidth and CPU speed have no effect on gaming. The rest of us will stay in reality, thanks.

You can get a dual CPU board for about $300 (Why dual CPU for gaming, again, when a multi-core chip will do fine for the few games that truly benefit from multiple CPUs?) You can spend more money on equal speed parts or kid yourself that your CPU speed won't have any effect - I'll give you that it affects some types of games less than others, but it always has some relevance to the argument.

You can pay more money for slower RAM that will be guaranteed against a flipped bit, even if that bit doesn't effect what you're playing at the moment anyway.

You can get 2 x16 slots that cut down to x8 speed when used in paired mode and further cripple your performance as compared to a regular ol' $150 semi-premium mainboard. Either computer may last for many years, but the presence of ECC RAM has no bearing on that case.

Staying up for months? I had a craptastic K6-2 on ALi chipset computer that had no problem doing that. If someone's building a gaming computer, they're probably using/dual-booting into windows, and the updates or dual-booting is going to negate their "amazing" uptime anyway.

In other words, you advocate spending a good deal more money for less performance than a non-server product would deliver on gaming, with "reliability" features that may never be relevant given the stated use. OP wants to know why he wouldn't want ECC RAM for gaming, and I explained it.

ECC is a server-targeted feature. Newegg has 18 mainboards that support ECC listed in the Dual LGA 1366 category alone, and I'd imagine plenty more scattered throughout their server board categories.

As you've already discovered, though, it's not terribly common on home-targeted boards. You're welcome to use one of those boards for gaming, but you'll probably have to use a pricier Xeon or Opteron processor, more expensive ECC RAM, and suffer with slower PCI-E links for your videocards. Higher prices and similar or slower gaming performance is probably not what you're interested in.

You'll also have to assume that a bit will flip in an area of RAM that's actually holding information that's important at the moment that bit flips; it's a useless feature if nothing's in the bit of RAM that accidentally flips. It's extremely useful on servers that are on 24/7, always stressed, and likely to have the RAM completely filled with important information. For home users, it falls on the wrong side of the cost/benefit test.

The Z3 hasn't been made in almost 7 years, and the first models rolled off the line in 1996. You can certainly debate the safety of giving the car to a new driver, but the odds are that the cost wasn't prohibitively more than many 6 or 7 year old cars. An extremely cursory internet search shows several 70K mile examples in my area for $10,000 to $11,000, and those were all 2000 or later models. Older stuff is likely closer to the $7,000 mark.

If you had enough cash to buy your 16 year-old a Z3, you also have enough cash to buy them a 6 or 7 year-old Toyota Camry. Getting a good condition used Camry as your first car is a pretty sweet deal, mind you, but it's also not the sort of carg you'd bat an eye at if you saw a young driver in one.

2) HDMI inputs. Again, my TV has 4 inputs - 3 more than I need. The TV will NOT take the digital audio from an HDMI source - for example, Blu-Ray audio from my PS3 - and pass that audio unmolested through to the optical output connecting the TV to the amplifier. As a result, all I would get from any game or from most Blu-Ray disks was the left and right channels passed on to the stereo - no sub, no surround, no center channel. And the TV does NOT have a six channel audio output - only 2. So I end up having to do all the switching at the stereo, and then pass everything on to the TV - so I really only need one HDMI input.

Just as a heads-up: The reason your TV won't do this is because it couldn't pass all of the audio streams through an optical or coaxial digital connection. The S/PDIF system standard used over those connections tops out at a bitrate that's too low for the newer Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS HD audio formats used on Blu-Ray discs. Hence, you could get regular 5.1 Dolby Digital or DTS, but not the lossless compressed audio formats. I can imagine that it would be a support nightmare for any TV manufacturer to have a TV that could output audio from some discs with some audio selections turned on, but not from others.

Yeah, I guess I was a little unclear when I dashed off the response earlier. The only requirement is that the salvage yard sell the parts within 6 months; it doesn't have to sell the parts directly to someone who is going to install it that day. There's nothing in the program that I'm aware of that would prevent the salvage yard from stripping the car of useful parts and selling them to a wholesaler or even to a sister company run on the same lot. The only thing that should be getting crushed is the chassis and some body panels from an old shitbox.

In reality, of course, salvage yards are used to outsourcing their "stripping" to customers via the pick-a-part business model. The six month time limit might cause the salvage yard to do the stripping themselves. High-demand, relatively easily removed items such as alternators, starters, ECUs, doors/trunk, etc. will probably be stripped but I doubt they're going to go to the trouble of pulling harder to get to parts. The rest of the drive train besides the engine can actually be sold, but it has to be in its component parts, and it's a little hard to understand if they'll let you sell a whole transmission or if it has to be dismantled down; either way, I doubt it's financially worthwhile to expend huge amounts of time ripping an aging transmission out of a sub-$4,000 car. The drive train is as good as dead, absent maybe an axle or driveshaft.

I'm no expert, obviously, but it looks like the only thing that necessarily must be destroyed within 6 months is a hunk of scrap iron in the vague shape of a car. The only thing a non-shredded car would be good for is the parts, and you can get those before you shred it. As far as I'm concerned, the car still exists in a useful manner if you can use the parts after the fact.

From the law (599.400-.403): "the disposal facility may sell any part of the vehicle other than the engine block or the drive train." Their words, not mine. To be fair, they're not killing the rest of the drive train, but it does have to be dismantled down into parts before it can be sold. A differential and drive shaft might get picked off, but I doubt anyone is going to the trouble to tear down the transmission and sell off random gears in their six month period.

Then what I don't understand is that all of the car that are traded in, go straight to the car crusher.

The entire car isn't crushed; the only requirement is that the drive train be destroyed. The recommended method from the feds is to drain the engine of oil, fill it with some sand, and turn it on. The rest of the car is sent off to the parts yard.

My comment was a response to someone who wanted to buy an HD disc player but wanted to wait for the Blu Ray/HD-DVD battle to settle down. I was not commenting on the original article, but rather on another poster's desire not to be stuck with the "wrong" HD disc format. Hence the "Re:" in my post title.