Let me know when we have "quantum" processors that actually out-perform "traditional" CPUs on the tasks that quantum processing is supposed to be good at (e.g. graph optimization.) Until then, it's all marketting smoke and mirrors and not worth shit.

I have no idea how many weekends we got together for a night at the office for a TFC fest. We used to have about a dozen regular players, so it was enough to keep things fun without overloading the server at the office. Our bosses were big into gaming, so all the machines were equipped with 3D cards for those weekend gatherings.

Good times, man, good times.

For me, that was the heyday of gaming. But to be honest, it was the people that made it so much fun; the games were actually relatively primitive when compared to modern eye-candy.

TFC was the game. :)

Rather than building one from scratch, you could buy a box that's certified to run Linux. Unlike the old days, I find that nowadays you really can't build a box any cheaper than you can buy one from companies like Lenovo or HP, and Lenovo has several boxen that are "Linux ready."

Personally I think my box-building days are over. I no longer play video games, so all I'm really interested in is a fast CPU and a PCI16 slot for my "silent" (no fans) video card, and audio and networking that are supported by Linux (which is pretty much everything Lenovo sells; I haven't looked into HP -- I don't like their reliability ratings.)

Regardless, I couldn't come up with pricing any better than about $800 + tax + shipping no matter how I scrounged, and that was only for a Core i5, not a Core i7. It's about another $150 to bump up to an i7, but I don't *need* a quad i7 for what I do. I'd *like* one, but I don't *need* it.

I think I'd get more of a performance boost out of using my PCI video card to offload the memory access from the CPU channels than I would out of bumping from an i5 to an i7.

Ay ah tol' ya and ay ah tol' ya....

It's funny how many of the responses try to justify the US jack-booting all over the laws of foreign nations.

Zeig Heil, Mein Fuhrer!

Oh yes, being in pain, throwing up, and not being able to see due to auras is just a "little headache."

So you can kiss my haemorrhoidic ass.

Precisely the point. Unless they are an officer of the foreign corporation, they are not in a position of authority to produce the data. They have to go through channels.

I hate being proven wrong.

The correct phrasing would have been "I literally know dozens", because "know" is the modified verb and "dozens" is not a verb.

Curse you both for being right! :D

But I'm not surprised that people from the land of Ebonics would take issue with the correct use of the English language. :P

You're correct. It's not a typo. (I thought maybe it was supposed to be spelled with one "l".)

It is the correct use of the term to emphasize the "dozens" in my statement:

Merriam-Webster definition

Unless the officer in question is also an officer of the foreign division/corporation, I disagree completely.

Oh my fucking God! Shoot him! He made a fucking TYPO!

Asshat.

Nonsense. Microsoft is a multi-national conglomerate with seperate corporations/business entities scattered around the world. Those seperate entites are not US businesses, though they are owned by a US business, they are subject to the laws of the jurisdictions they operate in, not US law.

The US could take a page from the Russians on the whole issue of legal jurisdiction. The Russians have mandated that all corporate and personal data hosted by "the cloud" must be on servers on Russian soil so there is no question of legal jurisdiction when they're trying to investigate and prosecute a case involving a Russian entity.

The US and every other nation should be doing the same thing: mandating that the data owned by their citizens and corporations be hosted in country so that it can't be "hidden" by legal loopholes of the jurisdiction where the data resides.

But, hey, the US cloud operators don't want to invest in that many offshore nodes/clusters, and they're the ones paying off Congress and the Senate, so I doubt we'll see such sane legislation passed in my lifetime. Far easier to try to shove your legal system down international throats, eh?

Pffft. I fart towards the south...