1. not if you're doing more than one thing at a time with a monitor on a desk. holding your hands up like that is about as unergonomic as it gets. having to switch between that and the keyboard is even worse. 2. not if you're playing an FPS game that requires aim tighter than "somewhere within 90degrees of the target" 3. not if you're actually producing content that involves more than a simple text editor.
i love how fanboys can declare one OS trash because they've become religious about using 1 or 2 platforms.
might as well stop reading after this.. You can't pass off a criticism with the assumption that the person making it is deficient or otherwise unqualified. The statement stands on its own or it doesn't.
1. the 'compatibility crud' is still there. Basically, all that changed was the change from explorer.exe as the shell, and they disabled aero..sorta.
2. There are all kinds of hotkeys for windows. Many of them are useful, but this one thing is not an excuse for other deficiencies.
3. a search box is a crutch for a shitty and/or limited interface. It's ok on a tablet or a phone (even that's a stretch because the difference between picking from lists and typing is even larger), but on a desktop it's definitely faster to use the mouse on a gui. Having to click a menu, then hit 'search' then type 'recovery', then back again to click (as he mentioned in the video) is positively the WORST way to do this. With all the search boxes these days, I'd rather just have a full screen terminal again. It's more powerful and requires less guess work about what you're supposed to type!
4. that's right.. trash is something that doesn't work. Windows 8 doesn't work for all but the simplest of tasks, the kinds of things that could be done with a tablet, media player, or a tracfone. Again, the video is right, the desktop is not about media consumption, it's about content creation. Consumption is a sideline use. Thus windows 8 is trash.
5. the task manager is improved? it's worthless. They've been dumbing it down since windows 2000. Now it's gotten to the point where the default screen shows nothing..literally nothing.. just a blank window. The rest of the tabs are seriously short on information.. The task manager is supposed to give you a top down view of ALL processes running on your computer. Deliberately hiding certain classes and details makes it worse than useless because it's deliberately bad at doing what it's supposed to do. the icing on the cake is that getting at what info is there requires even more clicks than before.
For me, the bigger the screen, the more useless it is because the touchpad interface requires larger and larger gestures to get at what's needed.. Remember the windows 2k/xp start menu with its crazy long cascaded menus? No one wants to sort through those. Metro 'start' is like that, only worse because the tiles are huge.
Most of the complaints in the video link are right on.. It's jarring and mystifying at the same time. Basic functionality should never, ever be hidden. That includes configuration utilities. The whole concept of having two separate interfaces with separate rules is also beyond stupid. The frustration isn't just in figuring it out, it's having to figure out ways to complete the work I need to that actually take longer than it did on previous operating systems.
What's this trend in attacking 'negativity' as though doing so is a legit argument against what was said? Is this some kind of peer pressure to conform to the head-in-ground masses of ostriches who can't handle reality because they're too weak willed to not take everything personally?
A child opening a couple of simple apps != an adult doing complex content creation on a workstation with an os designed for creation instead of consumption.
by 'socialism' in this context, I only meant that those who expect mass sharing of stockpiled resources, especially in the beginning, will probably be shot themselves. I could see remnant governments attempting this as a power grab.
Socialist rubbish. You'll need to learn to get along, sure, but you must MASTER the ability to perceive deception before you get fucked over, because being fucked over, even once, in such a situation, probably means you starve to death or are killed outright and robbed. such a world will be very thin on people willing to share what they have. The sane default is to assume deception at some point along the way in any cooperative endeavor. That doesn't mean you avoid all coops but you should plan contingencies. A lot of them..
The greater one's confidence in one's own individual agency, capability, ability to achieve goals, etc. as opposed to a general lack of confidence or overt recognition of dependence in some areas of life, the more likely somebody might be to treat surviving an apocalypse of some flavor as a plausible goal. However, the same sorts of traits frequently predispose people to adopt vaguely antisocial and tech-heavy solutions for a problem that is (short of magic nanites or something) unlikely to be solvable alone.
The goal of these 'caves' isn't to rebirth the human race. They're there for those who buy in to live out the rest of their lives in comfort. You're right, one can't rebuild humanity alone, but when so few humans give a shit beyond tomorrow's episode of jersey whore, what other choice is there?
Well these kinds of tests are supposed to measure your problem solving ability relative to peers. They try to be comprehensive, but obviously there will always be limitations. The only way it becomes 'how good you are at test taking' is if the answers are already memorized, or if the test design allows one to predict answers without stepping through the problems. Lots of standardized testing in schools are like this and should be fixed, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be some standard for achievement of basic skillsets. There IS a difference between two second graders when one can barely add two two digit numbers together while the other already understands long division.
Standard testing is a tool. It's not a fix-all. Nothing is, but without some objective measurement, what are we supposed to do? Make university seats a lottery for the people who write the most impassioned, insecure pleas for them? (yes, that was a joke, laugh).
Oh I understand that perfectly. I was explaining that there is a link between IQ testing validity discussion and those who dislike any form of objective testing. There are a lot of them out there. It's little different than that article awhile back about the guy who said school doesn't need to teach math (from what I remember he stated he wasn't very good at it. what a shock).
The link with what you said here is that most of the people described above think you're 'better than' too, so they want to overstate the contributions of their 'neuro-typical' abilities in order to compensate ego/command (demand) your respect/feel better about themselves etc. Typically, these people would be corporate officers or supervisors. While having things like empathy and sympathy are valuable in certain situations, they're really only needed when one or more individuals involved are insecure/emotionally needy, etc. None of that helps get the job done, and too much of it (arguably everywhere these days) gets in the way of it. Therefore, in your example, your skills at the tasks needed should be granted elevated respect over 'simply being nice' because they are directly related to the job and they are rare. One of the reasons I prefer technology work is that it is grounded in reality, which helps keep the passive aggressive drama at bay, though not always.
Not at all. I just have limited tolerance for denial of facts/reality and the resulting passive aggressive/manipulative behavior, which runs rampant in groups where so-called 'emotional' and 'social intelligence' dominant types rule the roost. This crap amplifies the difficulty of any task beyond what is healthy. The terms themselves are bogus posturing...even more questionable than the concept of traditional IQ.
'Social intelligence' like 'emotional intelligence' are just examples of political correctness types responding to the possibility that IQ measures something useful. This is why they rail against standardize testing of any kind in schools too. Insecure people don't ever want to be compared by any objective method.
While I think there's a correlation with high IQ and high function, I don't think a single number proves jack shit by itself.
Yeah, then when we're done with them, we can sic the lawyer lynch mob on anyone else who offends The People and their Servants in the People's Paradise..or at least those voters with attributes on their 'social victimhood' lists. Gotta love 'social justice.'
Attack their free speech and you attack your own, along with everyone elses. Once holes are punched the guarantee is meaningless. WBC is a laughable joke. The fact you're offended by them is truly pathetic.
Ah so if someone disagrees with the government position, label him as paranoid or as a 'victim' of 'sensationalist propaganda.' Who does that sound like?
The correct thing to do is verify the facts and the conclusions made. The law under discussion here is the reprehensible issue, not the behavior of the people whacked with it. this larger issue is independent of how register and slashdot editors spun it..
Or maybe we shouldn't make offending these hairtrigger, insecure people a criminal offense in the first place. 'Offending feelings/beliefs' should NEVER be a crime in a free society. Once feelings/consensus matter more than the facts and the truth, the society will fall once it gets too difficult for individuals within it to acknowledge reality when making decisions. The fear and risk of artificially imposed legal reprisals from insecure masses/governments/organizations would be too great.
Western society is suffering from this now, and it shows. Passive aggressive behavior dynamics will be the killer of us all.
I guess my interpretation of jerkycam was always "why the hell is he shaking the camera so much?" Its' annoying and distracting, especially when it's every other scene. If the sharpness of movement isn't sufficient it's because the movements aren't sharp enough. The lower framerate just hid that.
1. argument from antiquity (it's old so it sucks) 2. argument from inverse popularity (no one does it now so it sucks) 3. appeal to realism (when did I say quake was realistic? I said higher steady framerate allows for better perception of action) 4. ad hominem. I'm not butthurt. Perhaps you prefer COD et al because you can't play something requiring more attention and lower reaction time. It's alright, I'm not crazy at quake either.. I was only a bit above average as far as competent players go, but I enjoyed the fluid, fast gameplay much more than the tedious waiting and camping of CS, action quake and its subsequent 'realism' clones. There's no need for insults.
If anything, it's the dominant playerbase who reason like your post who are to blame for why so many games today lack actual gameplay learning curves. There's nothing to master and it's all about pressing the right button at the right time a la dragon's lair single player, or having a real time rendered backdrop for VOIP 'multiplayer' conversations...all of this while fumbling around with simplified gameplay mechanics despite the fact they were dumbed down specifically to make the pad workable at all. That's not what I got into gaming for, but to each their own.
Yeah, I read about that.. some games/drivers/engines are absolutely terrible. I think I was spoiled by the earlier quakes.. of course they had bugs too, but todays games are terrible. I suppose not everything is a competitive shooter, but that doesn't mean it should drop or lag input.. It makes the game incredibly frustrating to play.
Well, there's a bandwagon of snobbery out there about this issue. Kinda like people who say vinyl or vhs is superior to digital audio and video, I suspect this whole 'butt is it art' routine is more about social exclusivity and differentiation (and unhealthy doses of insecurity) than it is about their actual experience. I could understand if someone got motion sickness from the higher rate and didn't like that, but otherwise I cannot understand why someone would want animations deliberately choppy.
With today's style all about fast cuts and jerkycam, I think the higher framerate would help the viewer track the action.. It helps in games and I suspect it would help me in such scenes, esp when they pile on the blur and urinal tournamint style colored lighting..
people who complain about higher framerates never seem to have a justification other than 'it's not what I'm used to'. What about the 48fps made it suck? Please avoid using 'audiophile-like' subjective/emotional terms.
Not this again.. This assumption is based on perceived motion from frames containing captured motion blur and even in such (24/30hz) frames, motion is NOT transparent to most people. With games there is no temporal data in frames, so it's VERY obvious. Even 60 is to many gamers, and is why they opt for 120hz (real 120hz, not hdtv '120' interpolated which looks terrible) panels and video cards that can push them.
Then there is input lag. Its perceived turnaround time is very noticeable at 30fps, and if the rendering is not decoupled from the input polling/irq, the latter's latency actually does go up. id had to patch quake 4 to make it acceptable to play because the 60hz was dropping inputs and looked choppy as hell compared to previous releases. Enemy Territory quake wars, which is also idtech4, was locked at 30 and was deemed unplayable by many.. I think it was one of the reasons the game tanked. It was actually painful to look at in motion.
Console devs always push excessive graphics at the expense of gameplay because the publishers want wow factor over playability. This was true in the 8bit and 16bit days too. Some games suffered so badly they were deemed unplayable. This is why pc gamers value useful graphics configuration capability in their games. Often what the publishers/devs thought as 'playable' was not what the community thought was playable, not that this should shock anyone with today's 'quality' releases.
This is why stress testing is so important. The system may seem stable at overclocked speeds but only while it is lightly or even moderately loaded, and not every error will result in a kernel panic. The hardest errors to get stable are often the subtle ones that cause cascades elsewhere, minutes or hours after the load finished.
I start by getting it stable enough to pass memtest86+ tests 5 and 7 at (or as close as possible) my target frequencies/dividers. This is pretty easy to do nowadays, but it's a good sanity check starting point before booting the OS and minimizes gross misconfigurations that cause filesystem corruption. Then I run prime95, then linpack, then y cruncher, then loops of a few 3dmark versions. Sometimes I run the number crunchers simultaneously across all cores, first configured to stress the cpu/cache, then with large sets to stress ram (but not swap! in fact turn swap off for this). The minimum time for all of this really should be 12 hrs.. 24 is best, or more if you're paranoid. A variety of loads over this time is important because the synthetic ones are often highly repetitious, and this can sometimes fail to expose problems despite the load the system's under. The 3dmark (or pick a scriptable util of your choice) stresses bus IO as well as all the really cranky and picky gfx driver code. As a unique stressor, I use a quake 3 map compile that eats most of the ram and pegs the cpu for hours.. q3map2 is a bitch and it usually finds those subtle 'non-fatal' hardware errors if they exist.
If the boot survives without an application or kernel crash (or other wonky behavior), I run a few games in timedemo loops. In the old days this was quake1/2/3, but these days I stick with games like metro 2033 which have their own bench utilities. these tests are still valid even if your intended use is for 'workstation' class work and don't game much, but still want to squeeze as much performance as you can from your hardware. I do both with mine and have had great success with this method.
Slashdot Mirror
1. not if you're doing more than one thing at a time with a monitor on a desk. holding your hands up like that is about as unergonomic as it gets. having to switch between that and the keyboard is even worse.
2. not if you're playing an FPS game that requires aim tighter than "somewhere within 90degrees of the target"
3. not if you're actually producing content that involves more than a simple text editor.
reminds me of the early kde4 builds.. that charm thing was retarded.
i love how fanboys can declare one OS trash because they've become religious about using 1 or 2 platforms.
might as well stop reading after this.. You can't pass off a criticism with the assumption that the person making it is deficient or otherwise unqualified. The statement stands on its own or it doesn't.
1. the 'compatibility crud' is still there. Basically, all that changed was the change from explorer.exe as the shell, and they disabled aero..sorta.
2. There are all kinds of hotkeys for windows. Many of them are useful, but this one thing is not an excuse for other deficiencies.
3. a search box is a crutch for a shitty and/or limited interface. It's ok on a tablet or a phone (even that's a stretch because the difference between picking from lists and typing is even larger), but on a desktop it's definitely faster to use the mouse on a gui. Having to click a menu, then hit 'search' then type 'recovery', then back again to click (as he mentioned in the video) is positively the WORST way to do this. With all the search boxes these days, I'd rather just have a full screen terminal again. It's more powerful and requires less guess work about what you're supposed to type!
4. that's right.. trash is something that doesn't work. Windows 8 doesn't work for all but the simplest of tasks, the kinds of things that could be done with a tablet, media player, or a tracfone. Again, the video is right, the desktop is not about media consumption, it's about content creation. Consumption is a sideline use. Thus windows 8 is trash.
5. the task manager is improved? it's worthless. They've been dumbing it down since windows 2000. Now it's gotten to the point where the default screen shows nothing..literally nothing.. just a blank window. The rest of the tabs are seriously short on information.. The task manager is supposed to give you a top down view of ALL processes running on your computer. Deliberately hiding certain classes and details makes it worse than useless because it's deliberately bad at doing what it's supposed to do. the icing on the cake is that getting at what info is there requires even more clicks than before.
For me, the bigger the screen, the more useless it is because the touchpad interface requires larger and larger gestures to get at what's needed.. Remember the windows 2k/xp start menu with its crazy long cascaded menus? No one wants to sort through those. Metro 'start' is like that, only worse because the tiles are huge.
Most of the complaints in the video link are right on.. It's jarring and mystifying at the same time. Basic functionality should never, ever be hidden. That includes configuration utilities. The whole concept of having two separate interfaces with separate rules is also beyond stupid. The frustration isn't just in figuring it out, it's having to figure out ways to complete the work I need to that actually take longer than it did on previous operating systems.
What's this trend in attacking 'negativity' as though doing so is a legit argument against what was said? Is this some kind of peer pressure to conform to the head-in-ground masses of ostriches who can't handle reality because they're too weak willed to not take everything personally?
A child opening a couple of simple apps != an adult doing complex content creation on a workstation with an os designed for creation instead of consumption.
by 'socialism' in this context, I only meant that those who expect mass sharing of stockpiled resources, especially in the beginning, will probably be shot themselves. I could see remnant governments attempting this as a power grab.
Yeah this guy blew it.. He should've kept it as secret as possible..and in as remote an area as possible.
Socialist rubbish. You'll need to learn to get along, sure, but you must MASTER the ability to perceive deception before you get fucked over, because being fucked over, even once, in such a situation, probably means you starve to death or are killed outright and robbed. such a world will be very thin on people willing to share what they have. The sane default is to assume deception at some point along the way in any cooperative endeavor. That doesn't mean you avoid all coops but you should plan contingencies. A lot of them..
The greater one's confidence in one's own individual agency, capability, ability to achieve goals, etc. as opposed to a general lack of confidence or overt recognition of dependence in some areas of life, the more likely somebody might be to treat surviving an apocalypse of some flavor as a plausible goal. However, the same sorts of traits frequently predispose people to adopt vaguely antisocial and tech-heavy solutions for a problem that is (short of magic nanites or something) unlikely to be solvable alone.
The goal of these 'caves' isn't to rebirth the human race. They're there for those who buy in to live out the rest of their lives in comfort. You're right, one can't rebuild humanity alone, but when so few humans give a shit beyond tomorrow's episode of jersey whore, what other choice is there?
Well these kinds of tests are supposed to measure your problem solving ability relative to peers. They try to be comprehensive, but obviously there will always be limitations. The only way it becomes 'how good you are at test taking' is if the answers are already memorized, or if the test design allows one to predict answers without stepping through the problems. Lots of standardized testing in schools are like this and should be fixed, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be some standard for achievement of basic skillsets. There IS a difference between two second graders when one can barely add two two digit numbers together while the other already understands long division.
Standard testing is a tool. It's not a fix-all. Nothing is, but without some objective measurement, what are we supposed to do? Make university seats a lottery for the people who write the most impassioned, insecure pleas for them? (yes, that was a joke, laugh).
Oh I understand that perfectly. I was explaining that there is a link between IQ testing validity discussion and those who dislike any form of objective testing. There are a lot of them out there. It's little different than that article awhile back about the guy who said school doesn't need to teach math (from what I remember he stated he wasn't very good at it. what a shock).
The link with what you said here is that most of the people described above think you're 'better than' too, so they want to overstate the contributions of their 'neuro-typical' abilities in order to compensate ego/command (demand) your respect/feel better about themselves etc. Typically, these people would be corporate officers or supervisors. While having things like empathy and sympathy are valuable in certain situations, they're really only needed when one or more individuals involved are insecure/emotionally needy, etc. None of that helps get the job done, and too much of it (arguably everywhere these days) gets in the way of it. Therefore, in your example, your skills at the tasks needed should be granted elevated respect over 'simply being nice' because they are directly related to the job and they are rare. One of the reasons I prefer technology work is that it is grounded in reality, which helps keep the passive aggressive drama at bay, though not always.
Not at all. I just have limited tolerance for denial of facts/reality and the resulting passive aggressive/manipulative behavior, which runs rampant in groups where so-called 'emotional' and 'social intelligence' dominant types rule the roost. This crap amplifies the difficulty of any task beyond what is healthy. The terms themselves are bogus posturing...even more questionable than the concept of traditional IQ.
'Social intelligence' like 'emotional intelligence' are just examples of political correctness types responding to the possibility that IQ measures something useful. This is why they rail against standardize testing of any kind in schools too. Insecure people don't ever want to be compared by any objective method.
While I think there's a correlation with high IQ and high function, I don't think a single number proves jack shit by itself.
Yeah, then when we're done with them, we can sic the lawyer lynch mob on anyone else who offends The People and their Servants in the People's Paradise..or at least those voters with attributes on their 'social victimhood' lists. Gotta love 'social justice.'
Attack their free speech and you attack your own, along with everyone elses. Once holes are punched the guarantee is meaningless. WBC is a laughable joke. The fact you're offended by them is truly pathetic.
Ah so if someone disagrees with the government position, label him as paranoid or as a 'victim' of 'sensationalist propaganda.' Who does that sound like?
The correct thing to do is verify the facts and the conclusions made. The law under discussion here is the reprehensible issue, not the behavior of the people whacked with it. this larger issue is independent of how register and slashdot editors spun it..
Or maybe we shouldn't make offending these hairtrigger, insecure people a criminal offense in the first place. 'Offending feelings/beliefs' should NEVER be a crime in a free society. Once feelings/consensus matter more than the facts and the truth, the society will fall once it gets too difficult for individuals within it to acknowledge reality when making decisions. The fear and risk of artificially imposed legal reprisals from insecure masses/governments/organizations would be too great.
Western society is suffering from this now, and it shows. Passive aggressive behavior dynamics will be the killer of us all.
I guess my interpretation of jerkycam was always "why the hell is he shaking the camera so much?" Its' annoying and distracting, especially when it's every other scene. If the sharpness of movement isn't sufficient it's because the movements aren't sharp enough. The lower framerate just hid that.
lets count the fallacies shall we?
1. argument from antiquity (it's old so it sucks)
2. argument from inverse popularity (no one does it now so it sucks)
3. appeal to realism (when did I say quake was realistic? I said higher steady framerate allows for better perception of action)
4. ad hominem. I'm not butthurt. Perhaps you prefer COD et al because you can't play something requiring more attention and lower reaction time. It's alright, I'm not crazy at quake either.. I was only a bit above average as far as competent players go, but I enjoyed the fluid, fast gameplay much more than the tedious waiting and camping of CS, action quake and its subsequent 'realism' clones. There's no need for insults.
If anything, it's the dominant playerbase who reason like your post who are to blame for why so many games today lack actual gameplay learning curves. There's nothing to master and it's all about pressing the right button at the right time a la dragon's lair single player, or having a real time rendered backdrop for VOIP 'multiplayer' conversations...all of this while fumbling around with simplified gameplay mechanics despite the fact they were dumbed down specifically to make the pad workable at all. That's not what I got into gaming for, but to each their own.
Yeah, I read about that.. some games/drivers/engines are absolutely terrible. I think I was spoiled by the earlier quakes.. of course they had bugs too, but todays games are terrible. I suppose not everything is a competitive shooter, but that doesn't mean it should drop or lag input.. It makes the game incredibly frustrating to play.
Well, there's a bandwagon of snobbery out there about this issue. Kinda like people who say vinyl or vhs is superior to digital audio and video, I suspect this whole 'butt is it art' routine is more about social exclusivity and differentiation (and unhealthy doses of insecurity) than it is about their actual experience. I could understand if someone got motion sickness from the higher rate and didn't like that, but otherwise I cannot understand why someone would want animations deliberately choppy.
With today's style all about fast cuts and jerkycam, I think the higher framerate would help the viewer track the action.. It helps in games and I suspect it would help me in such scenes, esp when they pile on the blur and urinal tournamint style colored lighting..
For me the higher framerate helps suspend disbelief because everything moves more fluidly. 24fps always gave me a headache too.
because 35 or 40 isn't an even multiple of 60, so you get tearing and juddering.
people who complain about higher framerates never seem to have a justification other than 'it's not what I'm used to'. What about the 48fps made it suck? Please avoid using 'audiophile-like' subjective/emotional terms.
Not this again.. This assumption is based on perceived motion from frames containing captured motion blur and even in such (24/30hz) frames, motion is NOT transparent to most people. With games there is no temporal data in frames, so it's VERY obvious. Even 60 is to many gamers, and is why they opt for 120hz (real 120hz, not hdtv '120' interpolated which looks terrible) panels and video cards that can push them.
Then there is input lag. Its perceived turnaround time is very noticeable at 30fps, and if the rendering is not decoupled from the input polling/irq, the latter's latency actually does go up. id had to patch quake 4 to make it acceptable to play because the 60hz was dropping inputs and looked choppy as hell compared to previous releases. Enemy Territory quake wars, which is also idtech4, was locked at 30 and was deemed unplayable by many.. I think it was one of the reasons the game tanked. It was actually painful to look at in motion.
Console devs always push excessive graphics at the expense of gameplay because the publishers want wow factor over playability. This was true in the 8bit and 16bit days too. Some games suffered so badly they were deemed unplayable. This is why pc gamers value useful graphics configuration capability in their games. Often what the publishers/devs thought as 'playable' was not what the community thought was playable, not that this should shock anyone with today's 'quality' releases.
This is why stress testing is so important. The system may seem stable at overclocked speeds but only while it is lightly or even moderately loaded, and not every error will result in a kernel panic. The hardest errors to get stable are often the subtle ones that cause cascades elsewhere, minutes or hours after the load finished.
I start by getting it stable enough to pass memtest86+ tests 5 and 7 at (or as close as possible) my target frequencies/dividers. This is pretty easy to do nowadays, but it's a good sanity check starting point before booting the OS and minimizes gross misconfigurations that cause filesystem corruption. Then I run prime95, then linpack, then y cruncher, then loops of a few 3dmark versions. Sometimes I run the number crunchers simultaneously across all cores, first configured to stress the cpu/cache, then with large sets to stress ram (but not swap! in fact turn swap off for this). The minimum time for all of this really should be 12 hrs.. 24 is best, or more if you're paranoid. A variety of loads over this time is important because the synthetic ones are often highly repetitious, and this can sometimes fail to expose problems despite the load the system's under. The 3dmark (or pick a scriptable util of your choice) stresses bus IO as well as all the really cranky and picky gfx driver code. As a unique stressor, I use a quake 3 map compile that eats most of the ram and pegs the cpu for hours.. q3map2 is a bitch and it usually finds those subtle 'non-fatal' hardware errors if they exist.
If the boot survives without an application or kernel crash (or other wonky behavior), I run a few games in timedemo loops. In the old days this was quake1/2/3, but these days I stick with games like metro 2033 which have their own bench utilities. these tests are still valid even if your intended use is for 'workstation' class work and don't game much, but still want to squeeze as much performance as you can from your hardware. I do both with mine and have had great success with this method.