One of the first things to arrive was the Cooler master HAF 932 Advanced Full Tower Case.

w00t! This thing is big!  It comes with three 230mm fans.  One on front, one on the side and the last one on the top.  If that isn’t enough airflow, you can replace the side fan with four 120mm fans, and the top one with three 120mm fans.  I’m going to stick with the default fans for now.

The 800 Watt power supply also arrive, so I installed that. The Sandy Bridge processor and CPU cooler arrived, but not the thermal compound, so those are still in their boxes.

I figured this would have to last me a few years, so I went with the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme Z-LGA 1155 Z68 motherboard. Lots of I/O on this beast, including plenty of USB, 800 Firewire, ESATA and two Gig Ethernet ports.

Once the thermal paste and 8 Gig of RAM arrive, I’ll be able to install the motherboard.

The two other key components I’m waiting for is a  256 Gig SSD and a Samsung Blu-Ray reader/DVD writer optical drive.

Once I have those, I can fire it up and install Window 7 Ultimate, 64 bit.

Ya, I hear you.  No video card.  I’ll be cannibalizing  the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 out of my old system, which will have to get by with the on board graphics again. That and a 2 Gig 7200 RPM hard drive.

That should be enough to get me rolling and installing software.  I’ve also got a multi card reader on order, but I can always add that later on, especially since that seems to be the long pole in the shipping wait.  The old system will eventually end up in the basement, hooked up to the TV for the display and a wireless keyboard/trackball.  It’s got enough horse power to make a good music/movie server, and given the big screen on the TV, hopefully a decent device for stray web surfing.

It does appear that they do appear to have a serious design flaw.

If you let the bloody things sit too long the battery will completely discharge and can’t be recharged!

If it hits that state, it’s a very expensive brick.  Has to be carted back to the factory and have the batteries replaced.

Cost estimates for that procedure range from $30,000 t $40,000.

It is flaws like this that are blocking widespread acceptance.

Oh, and that high end luxury car price tag.  You won’t see a lot of electric vehicles until they are price comparable with a used mini-van.  That is what it’s going to take to have soccer moms drive them.

These SMRs are designed to be pre-assembled in a factory and shipped to location.  They would range in size from 50 MW units to 300 MW units.

These plants could come on line relatively quickly, providing a “carbon free” source of cheap, domestic electrical power that would benefit American homeowners, business owners and provide a competitive edge to US manufacturers.

This requires the use of regedit. Pretty straightforward though.

This spaceport isn’t entirely free-market, it is being build by the state government of New Mexico, but its purpose is to service private contractors like Virgin Galactic.

Metro clearly defined as a touch screen interface and it is just bloody awful to use with a mouse and keyboard.  Really, it’s truly horrible.

To make it worse, you can’t launch your apps from the desktop, unless you pin them to the taskbar or use a third party app launcher.

Yes, that’s right.  You will have to use a third party app launcher because the idiots at Microsoft have been drinking their own marketing Kool-Aid ™ and have removed the start menu from the desktop.

Now if you are one of those people who think Facebook (where you are the product) is the entirety of the Internet, then you will probably be cool with Metro.

Here is a video that makes it pretty clear that Microsoft expects Windows 8 users to buy new hardware.  Expensive hardware with hardware graphics accelerators and touch screen monitors.

Didn’t these clowns learn anything from Vista?

If the new OS requires expensive new hardware, corporate customers are not going to want to adopt.  Why should they? Windows 7 (or XP for those who are still using it) runs their applications, the employees know how to use it, and they don’t have to spend money on new hardware.

In case the Microsoft execs haven’t noticed, the economy is still bad, and companies are looking for ways to cut costs.  IT is not going to sign off on new hardware just so the rank & file employees can directly access Twitter and Angry Birds from the Metro Desktop.

Windows 7 was a nice apology for Vista, but it looks like Windows 8 will be the reincarnation of Vista.

Good luck with that.

The screen is sharp, and the text clear. It’s still not an e-ink display, so if all you want to do is read books, you are better off with one of the other Kindle devices. They are cheaper and easier on the eyes for prolonged reading.

The Fire is also WiFi only. No cell carrier based updates and also, no Bluetooth. So no add on keyboards or wireless headsets.  There is a headset jack, and stereo speakers.   You’ll probably want to use headphones or ear buds, but the audio is good enough through the speakers for casual use.

It has just one button, everything else, including volume/mute requires multiple touches to the screen to adjust. The screen is also a fingerprint magnet. Possibly worse than first gen iPads. Bad enough were I started carrying a stylus I had picked up to draw on the iPad with to use *all the time* on the Fire.  The screen is very crisp and the video quality is quite good, so I don’t want to be staring through fingerprints to see that picture quality.

I’ve heard one review consistently that I have to agree with. For content formatted for the 7″ screen, it looks great! Other content, not so much. Streaming video from Amazon in landscape is large and sharp! I’ve loaded some video content and the gallery player only plays it in portrait mode, so I’ve got landscape formatted video playing in the middle third of the portrait mode screen. Definitely sub-optimal. Browsing the web is not as clean as it is with a larger screen (an iPad for example). I found myself constantly having to drag the screen focus in order to read the end of a line.

The Amazon Android App store is ok, but definitely limited.

Bottom line, if you are already invested in the Amazon eco-system, and just want to read books & magazines, and watch videos from Amazon, then is a very well spent $200.

If you want more flexible device in order to see more of the Internet than what Amazon provides, then you are better off with a tablet with a 10″ screen, with either a more open version of Android or Apple iOS.

Check out the video over at Liveleaks.

This is what you get when you point chatbots at each other.

HT to my friend John for this one.

Well, Byte is back.  Online only, but they do have Dr. Jerry Pournelle writing for them again, which is a good thing.