I was excited for Obamacare, until I experienced Nevada's botched implementation, and found out it's not nearly as affordable as it's made out to be. On March 28th, I received a mass email from whitehouse.gov, purporting to be from a Mark D. Bearden, Ph.D., and how he's a "staunch Republican and self-proclaimed Fox News addict". The bulk of the email was how he was a chemotherapy patient, who was paying $428/mo for health coverage and it was cancelled, so he signed up for Obamacare and found a plan for $62 a month and it's the best healthcare he ever had.
I was excited, but when I tried to find a comparable plan, there wasn't anything even close. How can a Ph.D. in North Carolina find a good plan for $62 a month, but the cheapest plan I could find was $160 with a $2000 deductable? If I wanted a "manageable" deductable, closer to $500, my monthly payments went up to $300.
I even tried searching in North Carolina, where he is from, and couldn't even get close to $62, even if I set my income below minimum wage, there were 0 plans for $62 month, so where did this guy get his insurance? Does he *really* exist? Why can't I find a plan like this? I emailed whitehouse.gov to get answers to this, but all I got was an autoresponder.
My problem with the whole implementation of Obamacare is that it is supposed to be affordable, however, the only way to get the payments truly affordable is to have high deductables, which means if you go to the doctor a lot for small things (most of which won't exceed the deductable), then you are paying out of pocket for most of those. On top of already having to pay out of pocket for most of your care (which you would have to do if you didn't have insurance), you are also forced to pay for the insurance, so instead of costing people less, it's actually costing people more.
If you opt for reasonable deductables, then the plans are MUCH less affordable. Basically, it seems the insurance companies have managed to massage this whole thing into just a government mandated requirement for you to get and keep insurance.
Yeah, Desert Combat was cool as hell, but I thought the inherent small size limits of the maps made modern jets quite a bit over powered in terms of their ability to move across the map quickly. Most DC maps I played were quickly dominated by the jets.
Hell, there are still BF1942 servers up, I may have to dig out my disks this weekend:)
The only GOOD Battlefield was BF 1942 and its expansions. When BF:Vietnam came out and allowed picking any primary class with any secondary class, it just ruined the game, killed cooperation and turned it into a free-for-all.
Wrote a php script using vim on my web server. I was at a bar at the time, logged in using an SSH client on my nokia nGage. Took about an hour to write like 10 lines of code. Most of that time was spent trying to find special characters, like parentheses and square brackets. It would have been much quicker to drive to the office and do it there, but logging into our server from a phone was new and cool.
The Nexus 7, like the Nook, has a 'special' charging USB cable that can carry more current. The plug-in part is slightly longer. When i use normal phone chargers on my Nexus 7 it takes a lot longer to charge.
The tip of the cable being slightly longer is to accommodate the curve on the edge of the N7. A cable being able to carry more current makes no difference if the power source is the same (ie. a USB port on your PC).
Everyone else seems to always forget that cable used to advertise itself as one of the advantages is that there were no commericials.
Now the cable companies rape you for more money than ever and all the channels have tons of commercials...
When I was growing up in Texas, when cable was first taking off, I remember commercials for Rogers Cable where they would pose the question "Why would anyone PAY for TV?!?" and the big answer to that question was "No commercials".
I pay quite enough for Cable TV that I consider it my prerogative to switch channels during commercials, or skip them on the DVR. I'm sorry that the OTA channels are feeling like they're being ripped off, but most of them are owned in whole or part by large media groups, who make quite enough money from the premium channel packages I pay for.
Yeah, my Nexus 7 will use any micro USB cable I happen to have lying around. I think GP may have just had a bad cable and made an assumption that it was proprietary instead of just a bad cable.
I suspect they have a great deal of the digital market. I made a realization the other day that the vast majority of games I purchase are from 2 sources: Steam or Amazon. I haven't made a conscious effort to use those 2 exclusively, they just happen to be the most convenient and have very frequent sales.
I think the most startling thing for me is that 2 years ago, I didn't buy games from Amazon at all, but since then, they have managed to become my #2 go-to game shop, and I didn't even realize it.
It's also apparently not working. Over on the Answers HQ forum, there are more than a few people complaining about corrupt cities that can either be abandoned or rolled back, usually resulting in huge population and money loss. I can only imagine what kind of chaos this causes with the influence that cities are supposed to have over each other.
I wasn't able to even get into the game in the 2 days since it launched so I requested, and received, a refund from Amazon. Last EA game I ever buy.
In the case of Skyrim, the game didn't work AT ALL with Crossfire on my system when it was first released. Had to disable Crossfire at first, then ATI released a profile that finally got it working, but it wasn't a performance boost, it was a bug fix.
I'm not saying Crossfire/SLI didn't give any performance boosts, what I'm saying is that for most models of graphics cards, it is a marketing gimmick to get you to pay twice for something that might average out to a 10% performance boost across all your games. In some cases, it was buggy and causes games to crash, in some other cases, the games didn't even support it.
Yes, at the bleeding edge, with super high resolution, you probably require SLI or Crossfire, but for those of us not in that 1%, who build our PC's within a budget, SLI and Crossfire are a waste of that budget
Bear in mind, this is just my experience. It's purely anecdotal, take it with a grain of salt.
It's possible that newer cards may have gotten a lot more efficient at SLI/Crossfire, but given my experience last time with video cards, I can't justify paying for something twice when I can't see any real noticeable improvement.
I discovered this about a year ago, when i wanted to add a 3rd monitor to my system, and discovered I couldn't do it in Crossfire mode with my dual 4850s, but COULD do it if i turned it off. Productivity being slightly more important to me than game performance, I turned it off and hooked up my 3rd monitor.
A few days later I decided to fire up Skyrim, and didn't notice any discernible drop in performance at all. My settings were all on medium, just because the cards were a few years old, but still, I expected to see *some* performance hit going from 2 GPUs to 1.
I have since upgraded to a 7950 that supports 3 monitors, but I'm never doing that SLI/Crossfire shit again.
If this was the most recent beta over the weekend, it wasn't a *real* beta, it was a preview weekend to bump up pre-orders that just happened to be called a beta test. You could only play for an hour at a time, probably half the content wasn't there, and every time the game ended, Origin would open the SimCity pre-order page in the store and it would open the pre-order page in your browser as well. There was no *required* post-game reporting, feedback or bug reports.
This is how I do my upgrades as well. My current machine started out with a Q6600, DDR3 ram and Crossfired Radeon HD 4850s. First upgrade I did was to swap the processor for a Q9650, and that gave me a mild performance gain, but tended to smooth things out quote a bit. My most recent upgrade was replacing the Radeon HD 4850s with a Radeon HD 7950. That got me HUGE performance gains and enabled a lot of video options that just weren't available on the 4850s. Next upgrade will be a new Mobo and i7 processor, probably around June or so.
That was the only reason I liked WinAmp. WinAmp kicked the llama's ass. When it stopped kicking the llama's ass, I stopped using it. Get in line for your asskicking, little llama!
Hey waitaminute! When did it STOP whipping/kicking the llama's ass? I still use winamp, quite simply, because I haven't found anything that works better
I find a couple of flaws in this whole thing:
Apparently, the cloud storage is so a user can take their mouse with them and use their profile from anywhere. The problem I have is that this particular scenario seems extremely rare, and I'll explain:
1. The general consensus seems to be the LAN party scenario, but every LAN party I have ever attended, I had to bring my own equipment, including my computer, which already has my mouse profiles on it, so no need for cloud storage, and in fact, local storage would be preferable in case the LAN party doesn't allow outside connections. Hell, the last LAN party I was at was probably 7 or 8 years ago. With high speed internet connections, are LAN parties even a thing anymore?
2. using the mouse in multiple locations (ie. work and home). In this situation I would just bring my profiles with me on a USB stick, or email them to myself. It's something I would only need to do once, and maybe once or twice later for adjustments or setting up profiles for different apps/games.
The only situation I can see where cloud storage would be really useful is a situation where you are using your mouse on a different computer every day.
Even in that scenario, cloud storage would only be a useful secondary feature, if the mouse can't find profiles locally. Certainly not the primary storage medium.
This whole situation seems to be either that Razer wants the data for nefarious purposes (They pretty much claim the right to use anything their software can grab), or the marketing team was adamant about needing to add "new technology" and "cloud storage" was the buzzword around the office that day.
Their older devices actually had onboard storage. Not sure why they are moving away from that.
That's funny, I plugged mine in and the standard USB HID mouse "driver" kicked right in.
That's great, if you're ok with standard mouse features and an $80 pricetag, but presumably, you bought a Naga to actually USE the 12 buttons on the side of it, which you can't do without the synapse software.
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I was excited for Obamacare, until I experienced Nevada's botched implementation, and found out it's not nearly as affordable as it's made out to be. On March 28th, I received a mass email from whitehouse.gov, purporting to be from a Mark D. Bearden, Ph.D., and how he's a "staunch Republican and self-proclaimed Fox News addict". The bulk of the email was how he was a chemotherapy patient, who was paying $428/mo for health coverage and it was cancelled, so he signed up for Obamacare and found a plan for $62 a month and it's the best healthcare he ever had. I was excited, but when I tried to find a comparable plan, there wasn't anything even close. How can a Ph.D. in North Carolina find a good plan for $62 a month, but the cheapest plan I could find was $160 with a $2000 deductable? If I wanted a "manageable" deductable, closer to $500, my monthly payments went up to $300. I even tried searching in North Carolina, where he is from, and couldn't even get close to $62, even if I set my income below minimum wage, there were 0 plans for $62 month, so where did this guy get his insurance? Does he *really* exist? Why can't I find a plan like this? I emailed whitehouse.gov to get answers to this, but all I got was an autoresponder.
My problem with the whole implementation of Obamacare is that it is supposed to be affordable, however, the only way to get the payments truly affordable is to have high deductables, which means if you go to the doctor a lot for small things (most of which won't exceed the deductable), then you are paying out of pocket for most of those. On top of already having to pay out of pocket for most of your care (which you would have to do if you didn't have insurance), you are also forced to pay for the insurance, so instead of costing people less, it's actually costing people more.
If you opt for reasonable deductables, then the plans are MUCH less affordable. Basically, it seems the insurance companies have managed to massage this whole thing into just a government mandated requirement for you to get and keep insurance.
Try Rhino. I absolutely LOVE their mouse controls. Incredibly intuitive.
Yeah, Desert Combat was cool as hell, but I thought the inherent small size limits of the maps made modern jets quite a bit over powered in terms of their ability to move across the map quickly. Most DC maps I played were quickly dominated by the jets. Hell, there are still BF1942 servers up, I may have to dig out my disks this weekend :)
The only GOOD Battlefield was BF 1942 and its expansions. When BF:Vietnam came out and allowed picking any primary class with any secondary class, it just ruined the game, killed cooperation and turned it into a free-for-all.
I don't even like Apple and I wouldn't trade a macbook for a surface pro. Hell, I'd be hard pressed to trade my first gen Nexus 7 for a surface pro.
Wrote a php script using vim on my web server. I was at a bar at the time, logged in using an SSH client on my nokia nGage. Took about an hour to write like 10 lines of code. Most of that time was spent trying to find special characters, like parentheses and square brackets. It would have been much quicker to drive to the office and do it there, but logging into our server from a phone was new and cool.
The Nexus 7, like the Nook, has a 'special' charging USB cable that can carry more current. The plug-in part is slightly longer. When i use normal phone chargers on my Nexus 7 it takes a lot longer to charge.
The tip of the cable being slightly longer is to accommodate the curve on the edge of the N7. A cable being able to carry more current makes no difference if the power source is the same (ie. a USB port on your PC).
Everyone else seems to always forget that cable used to advertise itself as one of the advantages is that there were no commericials. Now the cable companies rape you for more money than ever and all the channels have tons of commercials...
When I was growing up in Texas, when cable was first taking off, I remember commercials for Rogers Cable where they would pose the question "Why would anyone PAY for TV?!?" and the big answer to that question was "No commercials".
I pay quite enough for Cable TV that I consider it my prerogative to switch channels during commercials, or skip them on the DVR. I'm sorry that the OTA channels are feeling like they're being ripped off, but most of them are owned in whole or part by large media groups, who make quite enough money from the premium channel packages I pay for.
Yeah, my Nexus 7 will use any micro USB cable I happen to have lying around. I think GP may have just had a bad cable and made an assumption that it was proprietary instead of just a bad cable.
HA! I totally called this back in August!
I suspect they have a great deal of the digital market. I made a realization the other day that the vast majority of games I purchase are from 2 sources: Steam or Amazon. I haven't made a conscious effort to use those 2 exclusively, they just happen to be the most convenient and have very frequent sales.
I think the most startling thing for me is that 2 years ago, I didn't buy games from Amazon at all, but since then, they have managed to become my #2 go-to game shop, and I didn't even realize it.
It's also apparently not working. Over on the Answers HQ forum, there are more than a few people complaining about corrupt cities that can either be abandoned or rolled back, usually resulting in huge population and money loss. I can only imagine what kind of chaos this causes with the influence that cities are supposed to have over each other. I wasn't able to even get into the game in the 2 days since it launched so I requested, and received, a refund from Amazon. Last EA game I ever buy.
In the case of Skyrim, the game didn't work AT ALL with Crossfire on my system when it was first released. Had to disable Crossfire at first, then ATI released a profile that finally got it working, but it wasn't a performance boost, it was a bug fix.
I'm not saying Crossfire/SLI didn't give any performance boosts, what I'm saying is that for most models of graphics cards, it is a marketing gimmick to get you to pay twice for something that might average out to a 10% performance boost across all your games. In some cases, it was buggy and causes games to crash, in some other cases, the games didn't even support it.
Yes, at the bleeding edge, with super high resolution, you probably require SLI or Crossfire, but for those of us not in that 1%, who build our PC's within a budget, SLI and Crossfire are a waste of that budget
Bear in mind, this is just my experience. It's purely anecdotal, take it with a grain of salt. It's possible that newer cards may have gotten a lot more efficient at SLI/Crossfire, but given my experience last time with video cards, I can't justify paying for something twice when I can't see any real noticeable improvement.
Yeah, I don't get this either. How did they open source it, then sell it to LG who is now claiming complete ownership?
I discovered this about a year ago, when i wanted to add a 3rd monitor to my system, and discovered I couldn't do it in Crossfire mode with my dual 4850s, but COULD do it if i turned it off. Productivity being slightly more important to me than game performance, I turned it off and hooked up my 3rd monitor.
A few days later I decided to fire up Skyrim, and didn't notice any discernible drop in performance at all. My settings were all on medium, just because the cards were a few years old, but still, I expected to see *some* performance hit going from 2 GPUs to 1.
I have since upgraded to a 7950 that supports 3 monitors, but I'm never doing that SLI/Crossfire shit again.
Depending on the cost, this might make a nifty power supply for Raspberry Pi or Arduino based robots.
If this was the most recent beta over the weekend, it wasn't a *real* beta, it was a preview weekend to bump up pre-orders that just happened to be called a beta test. You could only play for an hour at a time, probably half the content wasn't there, and every time the game ended, Origin would open the SimCity pre-order page in the store and it would open the pre-order page in your browser as well. There was no *required* post-game reporting, feedback or bug reports.
Ah gotcha, thanks for the clarification.
Am I missing something? I don't see VM mentioned in the article at all, just cloud, which to me just means storage.
This is how I do my upgrades as well. My current machine started out with a Q6600, DDR3 ram and Crossfired Radeon HD 4850s. First upgrade I did was to swap the processor for a Q9650, and that gave me a mild performance gain, but tended to smooth things out quote a bit. My most recent upgrade was replacing the Radeon HD 4850s with a Radeon HD 7950. That got me HUGE performance gains and enabled a lot of video options that just weren't available on the 4850s. Next upgrade will be a new Mobo and i7 processor, probably around June or so.
I'll have to check when I get home, but I believe they removed the "no whipping" restrictions :)
That was the only reason I liked WinAmp. WinAmp kicked the llama's ass. When it stopped kicking the llama's ass, I stopped using it. Get in line for your asskicking, little llama!
Hey waitaminute! When did it STOP whipping/kicking the llama's ass? I still use winamp, quite simply, because I haven't found anything that works better
I'm too busy flushing the toilet to hear the commercials.
You have a toilet in the kitchen?
I find a couple of flaws in this whole thing:
Apparently, the cloud storage is so a user can take their mouse with them and use their profile from anywhere. The problem I have is that this particular scenario seems extremely rare, and I'll explain:
1. The general consensus seems to be the LAN party scenario, but every LAN party I have ever attended, I had to bring my own equipment, including my computer, which already has my mouse profiles on it, so no need for cloud storage, and in fact, local storage would be preferable in case the LAN party doesn't allow outside connections. Hell, the last LAN party I was at was probably 7 or 8 years ago. With high speed internet connections, are LAN parties even a thing anymore?
2. using the mouse in multiple locations (ie. work and home). In this situation I would just bring my profiles with me on a USB stick, or email them to myself. It's something I would only need to do once, and maybe once or twice later for adjustments or setting up profiles for different apps/games.
The only situation I can see where cloud storage would be really useful is a situation where you are using your mouse on a different computer every day. Even in that scenario, cloud storage would only be a useful secondary feature, if the mouse can't find profiles locally. Certainly not the primary storage medium.
This whole situation seems to be either that Razer wants the data for nefarious purposes (They pretty much claim the right to use anything their software can grab), or the marketing team was adamant about needing to add "new technology" and "cloud storage" was the buzzword around the office that day.
Their older devices actually had onboard storage. Not sure why they are moving away from that.
That's funny, I plugged mine in and the standard USB HID mouse "driver" kicked right in.
That's great, if you're ok with standard mouse features and an $80 pricetag, but presumably, you bought a Naga to actually USE the 12 buttons on the side of it, which you can't do without the synapse software.