It’s me, live with it

Well, I’ve been using intel for quite a while now, starting with a 2,66GHz prescott, to a Pentium D 925, and now an e2180. I used to use a celeron 400 and a Pentium III, too, so the name ‘pentium’ is carved strongly inside my head.

Nowadays, intel’s “pentium” lineup is filled with cut down core 2 processors, which is not a bad thing, but might be confusing. I’ll take a pentium e6300 for example. Not only it shares a name with a core 2 processor, named appropriately core 2 duo e6300. I’m willing to bet that it perform much better than its core 2 brother. Heck, I’d bet it trade blows evenly with a core 2 duo e7300 in raw power. The pentium e6300 even has Intel Virtualization Technology listed as a feature, which should make it perform better than the e7300 in virtualization tasks.

Anyway, now that intel have pretty much released a very awesome dual core processor for its price (About US$82 in US, maybe IDR 1 million here), I wonder whether they will release a pentium Quad core.

Intel’s Quad core lineup starts with q6600 and q8200 up to the Holy-crap-look-at-the-price core i7 975.

The cheapest Intel Quad core processor you can find now is the q8200, which can be had for around IDR 1,7 million. Not exactly expensive, but not really affordable either. Which got me thinking, why don’t they release a cheap, cut down quad core processor and name them ‘Pentium Quad Core’?

I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Intel’s pentium dual core processors are very competitive, even the slowest pentium dual core you can find now, the e2160, should give you enough performance to do most tasks with reasonable speed, even including gaming.

Which is why I think that a 2 GHz pentium quad core might not be a bad idea, they can cut the cache to around 4 megabyte and lower the price to a more affordable level of, say, IDR 1 million, at which we can find AMD’s triple-core phenom. The pentium should have lower power consumption than the phenom, and, in quad-core optimized applications, faster. A 2 GHz core microarchitecture processor shouldn’t be a slouch in single-core-only applications either.

If at future time intel release something like a ‘Pentium quad core q7200′, I will want my part.

Everyone that make software agree that publishing their software in a P2P site is a bad thing. It’s practically stealing their hours of building it. And I’m not just talking about the legit software company. Heck, look at this screenshot:

Yeah, that is RELOADED, complaining about P2P users publishing their crack.

Granted, they seems like the lone, hated group from the scene, but still, They worked for their release, and pissed of when someone put them on P2P.

I’m kinda shocked about this. For all these years of seeing (and using) cracks and fixes made by them, I thought they are the one who put it on P2P. I guess I was wrong, then.

Which brings us to today’s topic: What can you do if you can’t pay for your softwares?

Well, you can always use free software (both as in beer and as in speech). There should be almost anything you need in the free world. Need a good OS? Linux, or BSD should do fine. Word Processors? Openoffice, KOffice, Gnome Office, LaTeX will do all of them. Multimedia? A lot of choice you can choose from.

Most of the software I mentioned above can be had for nothing. You can use it as you like, get a free community support, free updates, and you can freely redistribute it, Like selling your own PC brand with free software loaded into them.

But is that it? You use the software, made money with it, and walk away?

Let’s not do that, shall we?

There are a LOT of ways for you to return what free software gave you. For example, you can hang out at the community forum, providing support for others, you can help translate the software, you can help track their bugs, and, of course, you can help them build it.

To give and to receive is a beautiful thing.

I had a disagreement with a friend of mine. He said that a graphics card’s brand will determine its performance. I think the opposite. I’m following dan’s must-be-cheap doctrine.

I think so because there are only a few board manufacturer, versus a helluva number of brands. This means that quite a few brands will share the same board, Maybe they put a custom heatpipe cooler, but that’s about it.

And as far as I can see, they perform pretty much the same, too. An example here at firingsquad. If you look at the boards which shares the same clockspeed, you can see that there’s no performance difference. Even when you’re comparing it with the highest factory-overclocked type, you can only see 13% difference. It is big enough to be noticeable, but not big enough for me to care. Besides, I like overclocking the card myself, so if I can save 40 bucks by buying a cheap brand, I will without hesitation.

Shamus made a somewhat dark post here. He’s pretty much talking about how future PCs will be equipped with user-hating DRM chips, and how our future computing will be badly ruined by them. Now that I know this, I try to stay calm. And I advise that you do, too.

The reason from my calmness come from, as Shamus pictured, the end of the spectrum. The open source activist, software freedom fighter, Linuxers, and pretty much all open source programmer.

By the time the actual scheme unveiled, I’ll be ready with my OpenSuse/Fedora Install DVD and haul away with Linux to sunset. I might even actually grow a beard.

This, of course, is not a solution to everyone. I still see around 1:20 ratio between Linux and Windows user, counting pirated Windows. And I’m talking about the Information and technology community (my campus). I’m pretty sure the ratio in general public is pretty much the same to worse.

But to people who use computer just for basic task, like browsing, or office work, or even image and music processing, Linux is pretty much ready to accommodate them. It means that most home users can migrate to Linux easily, they just need a little time learning.

Gamers, though, are not that lucky. Most All of the big games are released on Windows platform, maybe Apple sometimes, but Windows nonetheless is still the choice for gamers. Linux games are growing nicely, but it is still far away from actually competing in the same playground with Windows.

Sure, there are Cedega and Crossover in Linux, maybe Wine for those hardcore Linux user, but they are still too buggy to use on regular basis. They are truly nice development steps, though, those who are desperate to play games on Sabayon or something should try them.

All in all, I’m basically ready to avoid the worst when it comes, I’ll just barricade the kitchen, and hide under the table with a loaded shotgun….

Wait, that’s not right.

I mean I’ll just jump into Linux. I’m pretty sure when there are enough gamers making the jump, the gaming part will sort itself.

I only remembered that today, The Escapist released a new Zero Punctuation video.

The problem is, I can’t watch it here in my campus, well, not because of moral or professional reasons. I tried almost every way a normal person would think of, you see, but I still can’t watch it.

Which leads me to a confusion. I can watch youtube, metacafe, even quicktime videos here, but no Zero Punctuation?

I gave up trying. I guess I’ll just wait till I got back home.

And now I have to actually work… [sigh]

…or write a new post, of course.