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Yes.

Based on testing so far, it looks like one modern Intel CPU core on a Plex Media Server can handle one 3Mbps/720p stream at the default transcode settings. When I tried the same thing using a Core 2 Quad, it couldn't quite handle 3 streams at once at those settings.

We have those concerts every year here, too. The performances are awe-inspiring, held at dusk on the night of a full moon in a forest preserve with an outdoor amphitheater. Not to say I wouldn't still move to California if I had a reason to go, though...

I have come to the conclusion that I seriously, hard-core hate "Material Design", the chunky, information-sparse, candy-color UI theme on updated Android Applications. It's particularly obnoxious in Gmail, but it's also ruined some third party software I use. Material Design applications seem to...

FreeNAS is pretty nifty, but it'll load off a 1GB thumb drive just as well as the 40GB drive you used. Your mom might want the external drive because it's portable. She might also be operating under the not-uncommon impression that external drives are more reliable or somehow indestructible...

X-Com: Enemy Within for Android is probably the best big-studio game I've played on Android, to the point that I'd even like to play it on my PC now that I've played it on my Kindle.

I can't stand facial hair. Not even sideburns. I feel absolutely vile if I can't save at LEAST every other day.

Big Hero 6 is a Marvel movie, so of course I went to the first showing. It's charming and enjoyable and if you have kids they will love it, though it's not as evocative as the canon of Pixar favorites. However, the short that plays before the movie, Feast, is a very special five minutes of film...

The Nexus has a big boy Intel SoC, so there's a lot of potential. It can run apps and games independent of.an attending device and it DOES have some local storage and expansion for downloaded content. The big thing between it and the Kindle devices is which ecosystems it's able to talk to.

Amazon released a Bluetooth digital companion appliance called Echo today. Echo is a speaker and a Microphone that hooks in to components of Amazon's ecosystem so that it can play music, answer questions or interact with things like schedules and E-mail. It's $100 for Prime members or $200 if...

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Buy a faster SSD if you really think you need that. You probably don't need that. 99% of the time it's access latency that you want to improve, not transfer rate. I'm always moving a few terabytes of something around, and if it takes 16 hours to do that, I...

I think that as long as you have a mainstream CPU rather than one of the cut-down budget models, you're probably good for five+ years. A first-generation i3 is still completely viable today, for example.

I used Windows Mobile for years and I was perfectly happy with it. The biggest reason I moved to Android was availability of larger and higher resolution screen options. I generally point people I don't think would do well with an Android device at a Windows phone now. You should be able to...

I've never run a dual GPU setup for longer than it took to troubleshoot something, but double memory bandwidth is a good enough reason to pay the DDR4 premium over a comparable LGA1150 setup. Since I'm not folding and I don't need 4k@60Hz@120fps28xAA (and neither do the shitty console ports...

Yes, though if you're doing an OpenVPN server, you're also going to have to configure the client to talk on the end-point's network, which its own documentation doesn't do a very good job explaining. I made my students set up OpenVPN just working from its documentation and it took them about two...

There are now a small number of AAA gaming titles that want more than 4GB RAM for an optimal experience. Content creation of any sort and particularly heavy web users will also find 8GB+ handy, though personally I don't see a problem sticking 4GB in a typical machine right now, either.

A high end desktop is definitely a huge luxury item. Save your pennies for a decent monitor first and if you want a desktop, maybe look at Sky Lake, the mainstream desktop platform coming next year. You'll probably wind up with 90% of the computer for 50% of the cost. :)

... and rolling back to Server 2008 made the problem go away. Note to self: Never, ever upgrade Windows. Clean installs only.

The computers are for the most part within the realm of reason for a high end workstation, but dd specified $2200 worth of graphics cards and $2200 worth of AutoCAD licenses. If you wanted to move in to a 5820k, 16GB machine, you'd probably be looking at $1200 to get something bare-bones with a...

As a general rule, you'll see a roughly 5% failure rate on drives within their warranty period. When you have dozens of drives, you're more likely to see a drive fail. The 3TB Seagates definitely have more problems than other models, something that I can't really correlate to a particular use...

I did an in-place upgrade from Server 2008r2 to Server 2012r2 for my main workstation a few days ago and I've been fighting with something weird ever since. My file server runs Server 2012 (not r2) and is normally connected 24x7 to an OpenVPN end-point. It's been running that way for a couple...

Congratulations on 4k posts, Howell!

I have a 3TB Seagate drop from a disk array approximately quarterly. Sometimes they're actually bad and sometimes I can't find anything wrong with them, but I haven't lost even one 4TB drive and many of those are coming up on their second birthday. I only lost one 1.5TB Seagate drive, and I have...

C2Ds are basically fine on 4GB RAM as long as they don't have heavyweight security crap (Kaspersky, McAfee) running, but what I'm telling people these days is that anything that didn't ship with a Windows 7 COA on it should probably have antivirus software removed if it's going to continue to be...

I'm looking at a 5820k, an Asus (sigh) X99-A, 16GB of DDR4 and probably a Crucial 500GB SSD, if I want to go the enthusiast route. I could also get an E5-2620v3 and a SuperMicro board for probably $150 more. There aren't a lot of good X99 options generally, but I probably won't use any of the...

Udemy.com has a complete CCNA web-based training course on sale right now for $10 with coupon code MILE10. The course is usually $400.

Actually, just looking at what's on chocolatey.org, I was able to paste together a script that installs CCleaner, AdwCleaner, Spybot, Malwarebytes, Avast and Hijack This. That's more or less my Anti-malware toolkit, and it includes some things that aren't available packaging services. I don't...

That's true - you can find anything you want, and the file sizes are so trivial, right? The problem is that you're explicitly working outside the chain of trust. You have no earthly idea what's being installed along with those .APK files, whether they come from something that purports to be an...

Hint: You can get different RDP apps if you don't like the one you're using.

Well this is certainly a game changer for Desktop admins.

The Moto G is an excellent device, and I've used devices with screens smaller than 4" to RDP. If you're desperate enough, it's surprising how usable it'll seem. ;)

In context of "chromecast" and "Roku stick", it should be clear that I'm referring to the FireTV Stick.

They seem to have become increasingly uncommon, actually. In the last couple years, I noticed that the 36"/37" size has largely vanished and almost all the sub-40" screens seem to have settled at 720p. I'm not saying they're impossible to find, but I think there were more options a few years ago.

Marvel announced Black Panther, Inhumans and Captain (Ms.) Marvel movies today.

Down side to pretty much any TV less than 40" is that it will almost certainly be 720p. 24" or 32" 1080p TVs are hard to come by. Maybe you can beg and plead for something like this instead.

From what I've read, it's the same BS of being mandatory online rights management, just like Steam: "Origin-enabled games are those games which have Origin as a mandatory requirement regardless of where the game is purchased from. These games are listed as follows:..." And of course Dragon Age...

The Kindle device is again faster and has more RAM than the Chromecast and Roku stick. Assuming that it's the same release of FireOS, it'll also be dead simple to load Kodi/XBMC and Firefox on one. I ordered got a Matchstick a couple weeks ago. I don't really need one of these, but the price is...

I think I'd be arguing to make the more modest DDR3/Slightly fewer cores Dev machine the eventual standby server so that some future machine could be the expandable production box. It's OK to have one big server if that's all the resources you have, as long as contingencies have been made and...

I'd switch the Samsung 830 for something else. Maybe a Kingston or Crucial drive. It'll save $25 and you won't have to deal with the possibility that Samsung will lose your drive if you ever have to ship it back to them. Jerks.

Is Origin indivisible from games like Steam or is it just some kind of download service?

Greg, you do realize that most of the CPUs at the top of that list are at least six years old, right?

It's ancient history now but It was an Proliant DL350, only about 10 months old at the time. HP kept sending me FlexATX power supplies instead of a rackmount redundant one. I chalked it up to HP's normal level of competence and resolved to just stick with Intel.

The thing I heard about Beyond Earth is that it's relatively lacking in the distinct voices among the faction leaders and the atmospheric touches that were present in Alpha Centauri. I had been hoping to see SMAC2 and it sounds like we got yet another Civilization game with some upgraded art...

My eyes are bad enough that the surgery wouldn't be sufficiently helpful. I would still have to wear glasses. If I did anything, I'd probably have a bunch of extra skin cut off my midsection.

There was/is an Amazon App Store app for Android. Updates to the regular Amazon App for Android have added the functionality of its App Store to the app that's most often used for Shopping; the App Store for Android is functionally obsolete now.

That the standard Amazon (store) app for Android can now download and install apps on its own. We don't need the App Store app now.

My new classroom machines are i3-4130s on Gigabyte GA-H81N motherboards, 4GB RAM, with 240GB Crucial M500 mSATA drives, sitting in Antec ISK300-150 enclosures. The only down side is that the motherboard I chose doesn't have a USB3 header, so I have to buy a $6 adapter for the front USB port...

For as little work as is involved in swapping a standard PSU, especially in an environment like a server room where clean power and a good UPS will be available, it's a risk I'd be willing to tolerate. Last time I had half a redundant PSU blow, it took three weeks to get a warranty replacement...

In that scenario, I'd be tempted to look at some kind of workstation board and use off the shelf parts rather than rolling with the SuperMicro. If you set your sights on an older chipset with DDR3, you could effectively buy twice as much RAM or make some needed changes to the storage configuration.

With no compelling reason to consider the GPU, I'd suggest a modern i3. I'll admit that I have a prejudice against AMD these days that stems from the frequency with which I wind up replacing motherboards for one platform versus the other. For a home system where modest gaming might be on the...