Look for the ones with AMD chips, especially the E350s and E450s, as those come with HDMI out and most will hold 8Gb of RAM and do 1080P. A good place to start would be the Asus EEE "B" series, with B standing for Brazos. I have one and its fricking great, 4 years on and it still types well, gets nearly 4 hours on the battery and with 8Gb of RAM everything plays nice and smooth.

But if you want a really cheap media tank instead of using an old lappy look at th E350 barebone kits as I've seen them on sale at Amazon for around $100 with case, I've built quite a few of those as both media tanks and office boxes and they are really sweet, use less than 20w under load and will play just about any format. A word of advice though, if you get one make sure your player is set to use DXVA and get the codecs from either AMD or the excellent CCCP codec pack as the E series APUs are really designed for hardware video acceleration and not having that turned on ties a boat anchor to them system. Using a player without DXVA a 720p video was hitting 80% CPU while the same video with DXVA was using less than 15% so it makes a HUGE difference when it comes to performance.

As for TFA how anybody would trust some large megacorp after the Snowden revelations is frankly beyond me...I mean do you have ANY idea how easy it is to know pretty much everything about you simply by having your browsing history? Everything from what kind of porn you like to what medical issues you have and what beliefs you hold can be gleamed from that sooo easy its just not funny. This is why I have one company for mail, another for search, and made a throwaway account just for my android phone, giving ANY company THAT much info is just creepy.

Anyone who needed to have that explained to them is demonstrably resistant to facts and so-called "common sense" and is therefore a lost cause. Mass numbers of non-individuals agreeing with you bandwagon-style is the only thing they would find persuasive.

Yet again you should just go AMD as you can buy the Jaguar based mini-PCs for cheaper, and since those are based on the same cores as the PS4 and XBone if you care any about gaming the coming games should be optimized for it.

And while we are on the subject of Jaguar and AMD since XP is about to EOL? Please please PLEASE get rid of those damned P4s already, okay? If there was a list of "world's dumbest computing ideas" I'd have to put that one at the top, it was slow, sucked insane amounts of power, and because of the crazy long pipelines one cache miss and it would slam on the brakes. The only thing worse was the Netburst Celeron as the teeny tiny cache made misses all but guaranteed.

What does that have to do with AMD and Jaguar? Simple the Bobcat, which the jag was based on can be had for just $65 so for less than $100 you can turn any power pig P4 into a MUCH nicer dual core PC capable of 1080P over HDMI. Simply pick up a PCI to IDE adapter so you can keep the original drives and tada! Dirt cheap upgrade.

One final note...why is everybody making such a big whoop over ChromeOS? We had this in the 90s folks, its called a "thin client" only frankly the 90s ones were better as they weren't controlled by a single company with STASI levels of information about their clients and whom may or may not be connected with the NSA. Hell even if they tell the NSA to fuck off they still consider you to be the PRODUCT and the advertisers the customers so its not like they have your best interests at heart. And do they still TiVo the shit out of them with UEFI? Funny how many here say "Oh M$ is teh evil!" yet I can take any Windows 8.1 laptop and be booting the instaler of anything from BSD to ReactOS in a couple minutes but last I looked the ChromeOS devices were so locked down the ONLY things you could run ere CERTAIN Linux distros and ONLY those that had the hacked loaders...shit, how is turning X86 into a game console NOT evil? Because that is what they did,they took the most standards compliant universal hardware on the planet and turned it into the original Xbox, where you gotta hack the thing just to run a limited amount of software.

Nooo..Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter on the school's PDP11 which they sold to Altair, which gave us the famous "computer club piracy" speech. Now one could argue whether or not the computer time was "stealing" but they got their BASIC commands from the same place everybody else did, Knuth and his books of the early 70s.

I don't dispute that. What I contend is that, while doing so, one should recognize that it amounts to viewing the world through the lens of one's own interests. Any decisions made are tempered by that knowledge.

It's a self-awareness beyond standard ego consciousness. It tends to make you truly ashamed of and prepared to abandon any sort of self-centered, exploitative motive.

It's one of those things that anyone is capable of doing, provided they really want to.

I don't know. There is something romantic about choosing to be a geek, against the grain, up the hill, against all odds and disincentives, doing it because you really want to and not because you were bribed into it. It shows great courage and spirit, which I believe is closer to what life is all about. The ones who "go with the flow" and do whatever is the path of least resistance are cowardly and hedonistic by comparison.

I would go so far as to say that you never truly reached adulthood until you can clearly and effortlessly distinguish objective, evidence-based reality from your own subjective feelings and opinions and wishes. Objectivity is when your own tastes and preferences do not influence your decision-making about anything important.

Until you can do that, life is a chaotic mess with no solutions except those that create more and more problems.

It's also the problem with alienation and dehumanization, not merely depression. Go out sometime and see for yourself, how rarely people talk to one another like fellow human beings. Usually they would rather talk at someone, listen poorly and keep interrupting (because they have no patience) even when they are listening to an answer to their own question, and generally can't relax and slow down and "take in" much of anything. The irony is, this rushed and hurried approach to life is so error-prone that they accomplish fewer of their goals than they would otherwise.

Compared to that, depression is just a particular special case, an instance of a much more widespread problem with the way we live.

nonsense, as soon as you invoke mass production the fact is extremely cheap real and *properly* shaped convex lenses can be made from glass for a penny a pop, that would exceed by far the abilities of this article's tumbled grit.

the article and its device make no sense, they're nonsense

but over or near land generally planes are in constant communication with ground stations anyway, that's why crash sites are very quickly reached

not even on their website do its developers explain what Replicant is, or what its goals and purpose are

wikipedia does a better job...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

And on the flip side you can now go to jail for a drawing of Lisa Simpson in an S&M outfit and thanks to their not being any way to make money many who would need a liver and kidney who aren't rich (and can bribe their way to the top like Steve jobs did) will die.

the problem is laws and common sense almost never go together and laws WILL be abused, look at the kids doing time for taking pics of their own bodies and sexting them to their SO. Do I trust BTC? Not really but frankly I trust the governments of the world to make just laws even less.

You DO know its possible, even easy, to pull a "EEE" on a project despite it being open source, yes? That being open source isn't a magical "get out of jail free" card, yes? If you haven't read it you might want to start here and please note that despite the fact there is a FOSS fork (ASOP) its quickly reaching the point where the FOSS part will be about as useful as the FOSS on a TiVo since none of the applications will actually run without major rewrites, which of course nobody is gonna do.

How many times is it gonna be pointed out that Google IS MSFT of the 90s before folks notice its the same dance? EEE? Webkit for Blink, taking more and more of Android behind the proprietary wall (look up Android on Ars for a great set of articles on the behind the scenes of android) its the same fricking dance folks, we've been here and done that and just because a company says "Nooo, we aren't evil, nope, nuh uh" don't make it so. Hell you watch the ads for Halliburton you'd think its a company made of kittens and sunshine, don't make it so.

Maybe I'm wrong but I think its like a law of nature, company starts out cool, gets popular, and then when they reach #1 they get paranoid and start caring more about staying big cheese than on what got them there and turn nasty. After all once upon a time MSFT was just a software house that would happily sell to anybody, even had their own UNIX for a time, but they got to the top and went nasty. Google USED to be this cool mad scientist "throw it at the wall and see what happens" kind of company, now they actively ignore their users (How many have said "do not want" to G+ yet they keep bitchslapping you with it?) and pull douchey moves like this with pretty much zero advantage to anybody but themselves.

History is repeating folks, and i only hope enough notice it and take action before we end up with a half a decade of "This page requires Chrome x.x" because as someone who survived the IE era I can say without hesitation that having one company control the web? REALLY sucks.

I have DVD backups nearly a decade old but I follow two VERY important rules...1.- Take a few discs from each batch at random and test them every 6 months or so, if a disc has any read errors? that batch needs replacing. 2.- the most important of all...AVOID CRAP DVDs!!!! Now just because its cheap does NOT mean they are crap, likewise expensive doesn't always mean good. I've had no problems with the memorex and amazon basics for example. The brands I actively avoid are Ilo,Best Buy/Staples store brands, and while Rosewill are fine for DVDs you hand to people I don't think I'd want to trust them long term.

So follow those simple rules, along with the common sense keeping them in a dark cool place and your DVD backups will easily outlast your desire to keep the old junk backed up. As for TFA? Like for like is really the only way to go with that much data. Buy a pile of HDDs (most will say 4Tb but you can buy 2 2Tb for the price of a single 4Tb so that would be the smart money) and slap 'em in a full size case with a cheap board to be the controller/server and Bob's your uncle. For a board I'd probably go with this. Its cheap, plenty of SATA and more importantly 3 PCIe 1x slots for adding more SATA. For a backup/file server it'd be just perfect.