Dude its not the card, its WinXP which has a frankly terrible memory manager subsystem. Your card is more powerful than my HD4850 by about 20% and on win 7 X64 I play all the latest games at my native 1600x900 with ZERO problems, Deus Ex HR, Borderlands series, Crysis series (except for that last level on the first game but that last level is so badly coded there is actually a fan made patch that drops the graphics on JUST that level because it'll bring even a $500 card to its knees) and I'm not having a bit of trouble, not at all.
So just let go of XP friend, its a boat anchor crippling your performance. I mean for fucks sake when XP came out the average PC was a 600MHz with 256Mb of RAM, the fact that it was able to scale as far as it did was a miracle but its just not built to deal with large amounts of memory, its really not. I can tell you that I still have XP in a dual boot just in case i ever run into anything that won't run in win 7 and the difference in performance is like night and day, while Win 7 flies and never hits the swap with XP even with a hexacore and tons of RAM it'll just grind thanks to the shitty memory manager and CPU scheduler.
Boy you should be modded up to +5 already because that is the understatement of the year! I'm gaming quite happily on an HD4850 I got as a BDay prezzie 2 years back...how old is that card again? 4 years? 5 years? And it plays just about every game out there at medium to high settings. The HD7770 is at $100 right now and is on average 40% faster than my HD4850 while using half the power but I'm waiting as i figure it'll be below $70 this fall.
So frankly PC gaming has NEVER been cheaper, there are a dozen cards under $120 that will play every game out there and you can easily get 3 or more years out of the card and even get a good chunk of what you paid back by selling your old card on CL. I know I got $40 for my old HD4650 when I got the HD4850 and I have no doubt I'll get the same or better when I replace the HD4850 for an HD7770 so the card itself will MAYBE cost me $50 and that is with me replacing the card every 3 years...big fricking whoop. Hell the only reason I'm gonna replace the HD4850 is that they naturally run hot and it would literally be cheaper to buy a new card than to buy a bigger cooler, but the card still plays games like Just Cause II, the Crysis series, Borderland series, and all with zero slowdown and more bling than i can pay attention to while dodging all the explosions and gunfire.
Hell my oldest got a hexacore gaming PC complete with HD4850 AND 8GB of RAM AND 640Gb HDD, the final cost for it including Win 7 HP? $386 shipped. And I really don't see any games needing hexacores for quite awhile so he should be fine with nothing more than a $50 GPU upgrade down the road...you just can't beat that, you really can't. And unlike the consoles he has nearly a dozen places he can buy games from so the prices are REALLY low, not to mention there are thousands of games that are FTP that won't cost him a cent.
Dude the only one you are punishing is yourself, not only does steam give you a hell of a lot of great things in return for that DRM (unlike others like Origin that don't give you a damned thing but more bullshit) but honestly the games are even cheaper than when I used to rent games on the console. Looking at my Steam library I'm up to 105 games, nearly all Triple A killer titles and I MAYBE paid $150 for the whole lot of them and that is WITH the DLC, WITH all the updates taken care of, WITH all the MP matchmaking and chat taken care of, frankly I really need to uninstall the stand alone games I have because I haven't fired one up in over a year, Steam is THAT much better an experience!
Hell it don't even cost a cent to try it dude, Team Fortress 2 is free, DC Universe is free, hell you could game for 16 hours a day just on the free titles and never beat them all. And look at it THIS way....what is the absolute worst that could happen? If Valve was crushed by the ISS falling out of the sky you wouldn't even have to depend on valve keeping their promise of sending out a code that would put Steam into unlock mode because gamecopyworld ALREADY has cracks for every single Steam game out there, so what could you possibly lose?
So if you don't want to use it just on GP that is fine, although you are missing out on some great games and experiences, hell no other service I know of has gaming clubs that have tens of thousands of members that you can jump into games with and have instant teams to back you up, but if you are actually worried about getting bit like Starfuck or SecuROM don't Steam DRM is so trivial to crack its a joke. Its only there to keep the publishers from screaming and to keep Billy Joe Bob from just sticking his game folder on a flash stick and passing it to his buddies, that's all. And with their daily sales frankly there isn't even a point in passing out games when you can just gift them for a couple of bucks. Honestly I have bought more games in the 3 years I have been on Steam than in the 10 years previous just because of how cheap and easy it is, NO waiting on delivery, NO having to wonder whether it will work on your system or not, NO hassles or bullshit, just hit the button and go.
Dude cracks are a hell of a lot better than previous forms of copy protection. You ever try to find a PDF of a game manual for some old as fuck game that made you input answers from the manual? Give it up chuck,, its like playing Where's Waldo across the entire fucking Internet.
And you completely missed the point, the point was the "ZOMFG Valve might go out of business!" which is in and of itself laughable as they are the only gaming company which has DOUBLED their profits for the last 7 years IN A ROW, but even if you could magically blow Valve right off the face of the earth the gamers would STILL have their games.
Would it work on Linux and Mac? Fuck if I know and frankly...why should I care? The last figures from Valve had Linux and Mac users PUT TOGETHER as less than 4% of the ENTIRE userbase...dude if you must game and refuse to do so on anything but an EXTREMELY niche OS that isn't even targeted by the vast majority of game publishers? I'm sorry but you are taking a hell of a risk no matter what you do, I really can't shed a tear if your shit fucks up. That would be like me bitching because games won't run in Win98, get the hell off the niche OS already! But lets say, again for the sake of argument, that Valve was crushed by a Transformer that was trying to save its dignity by escaping Michael Bay...and? If you have to fucking crack it anyway, just download a copy of "Windows 7 Tiny" and set up a fricking dual boot already!
So if you want to argue that DRM is against your belief system? Fine, just be fucking honest about it, don't try to sell us bullshit doom scenarios which is quite easy to prove are bullshit. In fact that "doom scenario" can apply to every major game service and publishers EVEN GOG, or did you forget they went offline for nearly a week, thus if you didn't have a backup of your installer you were fucked? They have also pulled titles from their service which again, if you didn't have a DVD or USB HDD backup of the installer? You just lost your game NO DIFFERENT than if anybody else went under.
Hell I don't get the whole switch...are they broke? Can they no longer afford to keep Presto, is that it? Because while I don't personally use Opera I have several family and customers that do and they were all quite happy with it, honestly the Opera users were some of the easiest to manage, Opera never broke, it never started acting up, it surfed the web and did that job VERY well.
So the only reason I can see for the switch is they are just too damned poor because it takes a hell of a lot less people to just reskin Chromium than it does to have an actual browser. I wonder how this is gonna affect their userbase as already 2 of my long time Opera users switched to Firefox, they didn't want anything to do with Chrome or Chromium.
Dude if you like space sims and haven't picked it up yet you should really get Freelancer, not only is the default game pretty large with dozens of systems and various factions but the modding community is still pretty active and thanks to the Freelancer Mod Manager you can try out the various mods by simply picking which one you want to run from a drop down list. The amount of systems the community has added is just insane, you can always find plenty online to play with or play one of the huge single player mods and in that game you can do anything you want, from working within the law as a police or bounty hunter to joining one of the pirate factions or just mine and transport your way to one of the big ships.
So try it out dude, its awesome and runs great on even my Win 7 netbook but still looks sharp even today.
Ya know, while I am happy at paying MUCH less when it comes to steam sales i really don't get the whole "ZOMFG Valve might go away!" doom scenarios, I really don't.
I mean lets say for the sake of argument that tomorrow an asteroid blew Valve right off the face of the earth...and? It takes less than 15 minutes on gamecopyworld to get a crack for every single game I have in my Steam folder, no different than with any retail game and in fact I'd argue its even easier than a retail game as you don't have to sit there dealing with SecuROM, Starfuck, or screwing with the registry to crack a Steam game.
So the way that I look at is if they give ME plenty of advantages in return for using the Steam DRM, such as autoupdating for all my games, GPU drivers updates, free MP, chat, and matchmaking services, and oh yeah MUCH cheaper prices? Then I have NO problem with it, I really don't. Hell one year I had to open a support ticket on fricking Xmas eve as a game I had bought was having an issue and I figured with the game not being made by valve and them being ass deep in their biggest sale of the year I'd be lucky if I heard from them in a week...I heard from a support rep not an hour later that not only fixed my problem (by giving me access to an internal Build of Steam that wasn't even available to the beta testers but which had enhancements that fixed the issue) but they even checked back in twice just to make sure i could access everything and it was all running smoothly.
Give me cheaper prices, all the goodies i listed above AND service that quick and customer friendly? Then I honestly don't care about the trivial to crack Steam DRM, I really don't. But does anybody think you'll get even a tenth as good a service from MSFT, or will you just get higher prices to fund some more of Ballmer's follies? I'm betting its the latter, hell I've had GFWL since Bioshock II came out and that shit STILL sucks major ass, making your console experience depend on MSFT having their shit together and not fucking you over is frankly just asking for it.
Sorry but you'll get no sympathy from me, as much of it is their own doing. Just look at how you can take an EA game that is not even 3 years old and when you try to play the MP you get "No servers...buy our new game instead!" yet I got Half Life 1 and Team Fortress Classic, both from the late 90s, as part of a bundle and guess what? The MP works fine and doesn't cost valve squat because the gamer can host!
Nobody is sticking a gun to their head and making them build some generic triple A CoD ripoff, in fact we have ample evidence with games like Dark Souls, Amnesia, XCom, Torchlight series, hell I could go on all day naming games aimed at a niche audience that made 30%,40%, even 50% profit above and beyond what it cost to make but the publishers have become greed on wheels so bad that games like Tomb Raider S (S for Stupid God damned name that makes no sense because there already WAS a Tomb Raider with no number beside it) can sell 4 million copies at $60 a fricking pop and STILL be considered a flop!
So I'm sorry, not a single fuck to give from me, in fact I agree with Jim Sterling at Escapist that has been saying for a couple of years we are heading for a game crash and it will be the best thing to happen for gamers in years as publishers have been treating them like walking ATMs and forcing everything to be generic grey sludge to try to please every possible demographic and the world would frankly be a better place if they died out.
At the end of the day its greed, that is ALL that it is, its this endless greed on wheels that has made it so that when you shell out $60 God damned dollars for a game you often get a gimped all to fuck shitty experience because "herpa de derp, you didn't give us $50 for the levels we ripped out and relabeled as DLC herpa de derpa", it is the endless greed that is made anything less than WoW or CoD money an instant failure, its the endless greed that refuses to look at hard evidence like the numbers Valve published showing that by selling L4D at a $20 or less price point they ended up not only making 1700% profit thanks to digital distribution removing copying costs but also made them insane amounts of money by bringing in new fans that bought everything from T-shirts to action figures, and its endless greed that has removed every single positive the console had over the PC thus making them worthless for the average person.
So you'll excuse me if I don't shed a single tear to see these bloated corporate monsters choke to death on their endless desire for every higher profits and need to bump the stock price, the whole lot of them is worthless as far as I'm concerned.
And that is just more "Stupid God damned name that makes no damned sense" so we should just add an S to the end, so now its Tomb Raider S, or DMC S, and then when people ask what the S is for we can tell them its for a Stupid God damned name that makes no damned sense!
Is MSFT gonna buy out all the ISPs? If not then who cares, the combination of shitty service and bandwidth caps will make this a non starter for a good 70%+ of the population if the states I've been to are any indication.
As Jim Sterling points out MSFT is pretty much giving the finger to everybody that doesn't have 1.-A ton of money and 2.- Incredible broadband, but the very same people that are left already have better devices to do the same thing such as gaming PCs, smart TVs, its the same stupid as hell strategy they did when pricing the Surface and that worked out real well didn't it?
Looking at these next gens I can see two positives, 1.- It'll make guys like me that sell and build affordable gaming PCs a LOT of money and 2.- With any luck the crackers will break this thing and then when MSFT can't give the damned things away because nobody wants their DRM-paloza we can pick 'em up and crack them and make halfway decent HTPCs out of the things like we did the original Xbox One.
But as far as an upside for the consumer? Sorry, not seeing one. Hell anybody with a PC less than 5 years old can pick up an HD4850 for like $40 and be able to play pretty much any game out there, most with medium to high settings thanks to how long the consoles have held back the PC and by Xmas I expect to see the HD7750 if not the HD7770 for less than $65 and those on average are 40% faster than the 4850 while using half the power.
Lets face it PC gaming has never been cheaper, heck AMD quads have been going for just $50 online, and thanks to there being competition on both the hardware and the software the price is going down all the time. Now you can buy games from Steam,GOG,D2D,Origin,Desura, box games from Amazon, with so much competition you can have more games than you can ever play for practically nothing AND you get online MP for free AND there are literally thousands of FTP games to choose from...lets face it, all MSFT is doing is making going to the PC a better choice. YOU control the hardware, YOU control the software, YOU choose whom to buy what from, its just a better experience now that MSFT has taken all the positives away from the console.
Then you might as well just start goose stepping in the streets, as fascism is fascism no matter how you dress it up. If they want to go through her panties, maybe give her a physical to check her virginity, you cool with that to?
If you refuse to stand up when wrong things are happening then I'm sorry, you are a coward and deserve what you get. I still have a nice lump where I took 5 stitches standing up to a cop that was slamming around a black man just for being black, you either stand up for what is right or you live in cowardice, your choice.
Dude i'm a fucking smoker and I've had several chain smokers in the family and even THEY couldn't get more than 4 packs a day, and that was when they had a good 14 hour day. And there is no fucking way in hell you could even smoke a short in just 4 minutes, its not possible, hell I've had to try to rush through a cigarette before and even rushing you are looking at 10-12 minutes, no way in hell you are blowing through a whole cigarette in 4.
But even with all that you are missing the point in that in NO WAY is it ANYTHING like reality, hell even Phillip Morris said the average smoker was a pack to a pack and a half a day and they should know as they used to have forms where smokers would fill out their smoking habits and get free samples. I can tell you being around smokers my whole life a pack to a pack and a half is pretty damned average, with some smoking more, some less, but that right there is the middle ground NOT 16 God damned packs a day! hell if the average smoker smoked 16 packs a day the tobacco companies would have made Bill Gates look like a pauper, they could have swam in money like Scrooge mcDuck!
Any way you slice it its still junk science, you replace any chemical they are testing for cancer with water and you'd kill the animal just as dead because NOTHING is healthy in super mega doses, NOT EVEN WATER which everybody requires to live! So I don't see how anybody can argue these tests are anything but crap, if the doses they are using would make even plain water deadly you know its junk science.
Uhhh...duh? For fucks sake there was already a system called the Xbox so guess what folks called the first one when the second one came out?
That is why I'm asking all of the Internet to join me in refusing to call the new Xbox anything other than Xbox S, S for Stupid God damned name that makes no damned sense, Xbox S for short. This bullshit was soooo thought up by the retarded marketing drones at MSFT that have taken over that company, nobody else would be that damned dumb as to name the THIRD system the Xbox...nope, not gonna say it, Xbox S.
THANK YOU, nice to see SOME people in this country still have a God damned brain. You could take those EXACT SAME TESTS and replace the substance with water and what would you get? Dead animal, that's what!
I did the math once when it came to the monkey tests and you would have had to smoke SIXTEEN PACKS A DAY to equal what they were exposing that monkey to...I'm sorry, but bullshit, that's not even physically possible! You would have to chain smoke 3 cigarettes at a fricking time for 18 hours a day to equal what they gave the monkey, now how is that test prove anything other than some scientists like to torture animals?
These others can wave their little flags and scream "science!" all they want, but bullshit bad science is bullshit bad science and I WILL call 'em out when they are doing bad science and that is ALL these tests are! I mean for the love of God they took a sick animal and a healthy animal and stuck them in a pair of hot houses designed so the air from one was pumped into the chamber of the other and its supposed to prove...what? That hothouses are good for germs? Well give them a fucking cookie, who the hell didn't know that?
They can waste mod points all the want but to me it only shows that we hand out grants to damned near anybody these days, no matter how junk the science is.
What is hyperbole? The fact that you could replace their tests with any substance and get the same results because main lining massive doses of ANYTHING IS BAD even water, or the fact that overdosing an animal or cooking up a test that would never happen IRL is supposed to "prove" anything, other than you know how to rig a test that is?
This is what i can't fucking stand about the USA and the whole "left versus right" horseshit because you HAVE to turn off your damned brain and wave your little flag, no such thing as hypocrisy or bullshit as long as the one shoveling the shit is on the "right" side. I mean did ANY OF YOU even read TFA? The ONLY way you can call that in ANY way valid is if and ONLY if you were testing the risk of working in a hot house, that's it, that's all, no fucking way in a million damned years would you have conditions even SLIGHTLY like this in real life but "Its science herpa de derp".
Well fuck that, bullshit is bullshit and whether its slung by someone in a white coat or not its STILL BULLSHIT. Again use the EXACT SAME CONDITIONS they use to test any substance and replace that substance with water, what will happen? Dead animal because NOTHING IS GOOD IN MEGA-DOSES,okay? Nothing, even the things our bodies require to live can kill you dead if you do nothing but mainline that shit, yet we are supposed to accept results from a test where they practically tied the sick animal and the healthy one together in an environment designed to make germs flourish?
Bad science is bad science and the fact so many of you run to blindly defend it without even reading TFA just shows how God damned knee jerk flag waving bullshit has embedded itself like cancer in this society, its sad and pathetic, that is what it is, someone in a whit coat could tell you the moon is made of green cheese and you'd probably buy it, fucking pathetic.
If you want a non nuke you'd be a fool to buy from anybody but Russia, they are so far ahead of everyone else when it comes to diesel boats its not even funny.
But since we are talking Canada I'm sure the USA would have no qualms leasing them a boat, we still have the shipyards making LA class last I checked along with the new cheaper design (can't remember if its the Virginia class or if that was the expensive one and the other is the cheaper) so all they would have to do is pick up the phone and I'm sure we'd lease them a couple.
I do think its funny how just about every war since the end of WWII has been either USA or Russian tech, sometimes even USA VS USA or Russian VS Russian because a good 90% of the world's arms are built by those two countries. Hell in Vietnam it was the Sidewinder VS the Sidewinder as the Chinese managed to get their hands on a dud Sidewinder in the early 60s when it got stuck in a MiG and didn't go off and the Russians just bought it off the Chinese and copied it. They say you can take an Atoll and a Sidewinder and mix and match parts, their copy is so good that it'll fly straight with any combo of USA and Russian parts.
I saw an interview with a PR rep for MSFT and even he admitted the days of console exclusives are just about gone, the high cost of a triple A title makes console exclusivity almost a guaranteed money loser so that all they are really gonna get is a little exclusive DLC and a handful of in house franchises like Gear Of War and Halo...who gives a crap?
I'm sorry but a dozen exclusives over the life of the console doesn't make up for the higher price of games, the cost of the console, the always online bullshit, it just don't. They have taken every positive the console had over the PC and crapped all over it in their desperate desire to get Apple style "lock in" and in doing so they have taken away every. single. positive. that the console had. Can you just grab your disc and go play at a friend's house? Nope. Sell, trade, borrow? Nope nope and nope. Can you just plug it and go? Nope because now its always online, no net and no console...fucking retarded, that's what it is. There is not a single positive for having a console with this next gen and a shitload of negatives because unlike the PC where I can buy from multiple vendors and use competing services to get me the best prices it all goes through MSFT which has shown with their SurfaceRT they have no qualms about charging even more than Apple, even when the system is failing.
The only nice thing I can say about the new console is since it runs on X86 maybe when it bombs the crackers will figure out how to jailbreak it and we can get some cheap PCs out of the deal, otherwise its a failwhale.
No it don't, its already been reported with the Steambox you'll be able to go from your PC to the console and back at ANY time hassle free, you buy something through GFWL and even if its also on XBL they make you buy a second copy, that is bullshit.
And we haven't seen how the Xbox S (not calling that damned thing the One, that is just retarded) is gonna handle accounts yet, with Steam if my nephew comes over he can just log into his account on my PC and it'll carry over all his achievements, saves, etc, and with this thing having a piddly 500GB HDD I don't see that working out very well without a LOT of de-authorizing and re-authorizing which is gonna be a PITA. With Steam I went from a 250GB to 500GB to 1TB to 2TB, know what I had to do? Drag the folder over and let Steam hook up, that's it, no registry bullshit, no keys, just drag and drop simple.
I think Angry Joe is right in that they have lost their way, they are so hard thinking about having "An Apple Ecosystem" where they can have little walled gardens where they get a cut of every show, song, game, everything else that they are making devices that are jacks of all trades and masters of nothing.
And dude its NOT about price, unless you are talking about how much a bigger profit margin would give Wall Street a stiffie, because both consoles are expected to retail at $450-$550 which anybody that knows anything about retail will tell you that is too damned high for a game console. Frankly you can get a hell of a lot nicer system from Tiger for cheaper and with Phenom II quads going for $50 a pop the only real reason to go with netbook chips is so they can have the thing constantly shitting out app updates...and ads to sell you more shit.
So i am having to go with Angry Joe, i think the thing is gonna bomb. Not only is it gonna cost more than a PC does today but with such weak chips the devs will max the thing out in under 2 years, hell maybe even under a year since we are talking about a netbook chip, and its gonna quickly get slammed when we are talking about how physics heavy both the third and first person games are getting...its just not a smart move. Hell I'd take an Athlon quad over this thing, I bet you'll get a hell of a lot more IPC compared to a netbook chip with HT.
And this isn't slamming AMD nor Bobcat, hell i have a netbook with a Bobcat dual and i love the hell out of it but its big selling points are battery life and multimedia, NOT hardcore gaming.
Hell I work in computer retail and have encountered it exactly ONCE, and it was a gaming mouse that charged off the pad. This to me sounds like how they argued over DVD-A and SACD and in the end nobody gave a rat's ass about either tech so they both went exactly nowhere.
If anything from what I'm seeing everything powered by USB is the wave of the future, damned near every laptop brags about how you can charge phones off their USB, you see USB disposable "quick charge" power packs at every checkout here, it looks like my dad is right in that everything is gonna end up USB.
Frankly most of their "tests" I have to call bullshit, its like scientists aren't happy unless they rig the living fuck out of tests.
I mean look at their tests that say "This or that causes cancer!" you go "Ohh, that is interesting, I think I'll look at the tests" and what did they do? pumped them so full of the shit it would be no different than if a human mainlined that and ONLY that 24 hours a day for several years....yeah, not really seeing that as a valid "test" for anything.
I don't know how many years they have been pulling this bullshit but I first started looking into it when i saw one of their "tests" which "showed" cigarettes cause cancer by putting a poor monkey in a box with a dozen cigarettes at a time blasting in it so you literally couldn't see the fucking monkey...now who in the fuck would EVER be in a similar situation? Hell I've played in redneck bars and the smoke was never even a tenth as bad as what they were subjecting that poor monkey to, no fucking way in hell anybody in real life would be exposed to anything like that.
So now unless they show that the test was done in realistic conditions I automatically call bullshit because real life just doesn't work like that. hell if you used the same methodology with fricking water you'd have it banned as you can't mainline water 24/7 for 6 months without it killing you either. As the poster above pointed out they cooked up conditions that you would NEVER have IRL with the poor animals practically in a hothouse to keep it as germ positive as possible, and this is supposed to "prove" anything?
The only thing it proves to me is we give too many grants for shitty science.
Exactly, I really don't get this trying to shoehorn ARM into places where it just don't make any damned sense, its just as stupid as how they tried pushing ActiveX "cloud apps" a few years back for every damned thing and it was retarded then and retarded now.
Does that mean ARM doesn't have a place? of course not, I could easily see new hybrid servers that have an ARM chip for when its not doing much and then hand it off to the X86 when it needs the power but lets face it, the IPC of ARM is just piss poor, it really is. To get ARM up to the level of an 8 year old Core based Xeon or AMD Opteron causes it to blow its power budget all to shit, to use a/. car analogy it would be like buying a Kia for the gas mileage and then rebuilding the thing to haul boats, you've just destroyed the reason for buying the Kia in the first place by forcing it to do a job it just isn't good at.
Lets face it folks, that 6 year old C2Q or Phenom X4 just curbstomps the latest and great ARM chips when it comes to IPC and I don't see that changing in the future, you can have low power or high performance, NOT both.
Anybody that would want to go to a place where they demand their fricking passwords is batshit and deserve what they get, what's next, asking to go through her underwear drawer to make sure her panties meet their approval?
But I too am a big believer in using nicknames, I don't think there are 3 pics of me on the whole net that aren't using my nick and I taught both boys to only use their nicks, its just too easy to find out all kinds of stuff on a person otherwise. And its not just employers you gotta worry about friend as there are all kinds of folks out there with a few screws loose and if you leave too big a trail online you'd be surprised how much stuff a stalker can pick up.
You never went to a keg party? Because we have seen people not get a job, one teacher even got fired for a pic of her at a keg party in college.
The problem is many an HR dept is run by prissypants that couldn't get laid in a women's prison with a fistful of pardons and take out the fact that they had a miserable life on everybody else.
As another pointed out what these people are calling mistakes and judging people over and things that the last couple of presidents did, so its being a hypocrite to the billionth power to say someone can be POTUS but isn't "pure" enough to work as a corporate drone.
While I can understand a personal preference for text when it comes to some of these concepts I seriously doubt that anything less than video would work, I mean imagine trying to lay out a 27 dimension universe in flat pics, I really don't think it would be possible to do it justice.
And if you like a good, well written horror flick where you aren't sitting there going "Oh you SO deserve to die for being an idiot" then you'll like Event Horizon, I thought it was really well written with people acting more like people would act in such a situation.
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Dude its not the card, its WinXP which has a frankly terrible memory manager subsystem. Your card is more powerful than my HD4850 by about 20% and on win 7 X64 I play all the latest games at my native 1600x900 with ZERO problems, Deus Ex HR, Borderlands series, Crysis series (except for that last level on the first game but that last level is so badly coded there is actually a fan made patch that drops the graphics on JUST that level because it'll bring even a $500 card to its knees) and I'm not having a bit of trouble, not at all.
So just let go of XP friend, its a boat anchor crippling your performance. I mean for fucks sake when XP came out the average PC was a 600MHz with 256Mb of RAM, the fact that it was able to scale as far as it did was a miracle but its just not built to deal with large amounts of memory, its really not. I can tell you that I still have XP in a dual boot just in case i ever run into anything that won't run in win 7 and the difference in performance is like night and day, while Win 7 flies and never hits the swap with XP even with a hexacore and tons of RAM it'll just grind thanks to the shitty memory manager and CPU scheduler.
Boy you should be modded up to +5 already because that is the understatement of the year! I'm gaming quite happily on an HD4850 I got as a BDay prezzie 2 years back...how old is that card again? 4 years? 5 years? And it plays just about every game out there at medium to high settings. The HD7770 is at $100 right now and is on average 40% faster than my HD4850 while using half the power but I'm waiting as i figure it'll be below $70 this fall.
So frankly PC gaming has NEVER been cheaper, there are a dozen cards under $120 that will play every game out there and you can easily get 3 or more years out of the card and even get a good chunk of what you paid back by selling your old card on CL. I know I got $40 for my old HD4650 when I got the HD4850 and I have no doubt I'll get the same or better when I replace the HD4850 for an HD7770 so the card itself will MAYBE cost me $50 and that is with me replacing the card every 3 years...big fricking whoop. Hell the only reason I'm gonna replace the HD4850 is that they naturally run hot and it would literally be cheaper to buy a new card than to buy a bigger cooler, but the card still plays games like Just Cause II, the Crysis series, Borderland series, and all with zero slowdown and more bling than i can pay attention to while dodging all the explosions and gunfire.
Hell my oldest got a hexacore gaming PC complete with HD4850 AND 8GB of RAM AND 640Gb HDD, the final cost for it including Win 7 HP? $386 shipped. And I really don't see any games needing hexacores for quite awhile so he should be fine with nothing more than a $50 GPU upgrade down the road...you just can't beat that, you really can't. And unlike the consoles he has nearly a dozen places he can buy games from so the prices are REALLY low, not to mention there are thousands of games that are FTP that won't cost him a cent.
Dude the only one you are punishing is yourself, not only does steam give you a hell of a lot of great things in return for that DRM (unlike others like Origin that don't give you a damned thing but more bullshit) but honestly the games are even cheaper than when I used to rent games on the console. Looking at my Steam library I'm up to 105 games, nearly all Triple A killer titles and I MAYBE paid $150 for the whole lot of them and that is WITH the DLC, WITH all the updates taken care of, WITH all the MP matchmaking and chat taken care of, frankly I really need to uninstall the stand alone games I have because I haven't fired one up in over a year, Steam is THAT much better an experience!
Hell it don't even cost a cent to try it dude, Team Fortress 2 is free, DC Universe is free, hell you could game for 16 hours a day just on the free titles and never beat them all. And look at it THIS way....what is the absolute worst that could happen? If Valve was crushed by the ISS falling out of the sky you wouldn't even have to depend on valve keeping their promise of sending out a code that would put Steam into unlock mode because gamecopyworld ALREADY has cracks for every single Steam game out there, so what could you possibly lose?
So if you don't want to use it just on GP that is fine, although you are missing out on some great games and experiences, hell no other service I know of has gaming clubs that have tens of thousands of members that you can jump into games with and have instant teams to back you up, but if you are actually worried about getting bit like Starfuck or SecuROM don't Steam DRM is so trivial to crack its a joke. Its only there to keep the publishers from screaming and to keep Billy Joe Bob from just sticking his game folder on a flash stick and passing it to his buddies, that's all. And with their daily sales frankly there isn't even a point in passing out games when you can just gift them for a couple of bucks. Honestly I have bought more games in the 3 years I have been on Steam than in the 10 years previous just because of how cheap and easy it is, NO waiting on delivery, NO having to wonder whether it will work on your system or not, NO hassles or bullshit, just hit the button and go.
Dude cracks are a hell of a lot better than previous forms of copy protection. You ever try to find a PDF of a game manual for some old as fuck game that made you input answers from the manual? Give it up chuck,, its like playing Where's Waldo across the entire fucking Internet.
And you completely missed the point, the point was the "ZOMFG Valve might go out of business!" which is in and of itself laughable as they are the only gaming company which has DOUBLED their profits for the last 7 years IN A ROW, but even if you could magically blow Valve right off the face of the earth the gamers would STILL have their games.
Would it work on Linux and Mac? Fuck if I know and frankly...why should I care? The last figures from Valve had Linux and Mac users PUT TOGETHER as less than 4% of the ENTIRE userbase...dude if you must game and refuse to do so on anything but an EXTREMELY niche OS that isn't even targeted by the vast majority of game publishers? I'm sorry but you are taking a hell of a risk no matter what you do, I really can't shed a tear if your shit fucks up. That would be like me bitching because games won't run in Win98, get the hell off the niche OS already! But lets say, again for the sake of argument, that Valve was crushed by a Transformer that was trying to save its dignity by escaping Michael Bay...and? If you have to fucking crack it anyway, just download a copy of "Windows 7 Tiny" and set up a fricking dual boot already!
So if you want to argue that DRM is against your belief system? Fine, just be fucking honest about it, don't try to sell us bullshit doom scenarios which is quite easy to prove are bullshit. In fact that "doom scenario" can apply to every major game service and publishers EVEN GOG, or did you forget they went offline for nearly a week, thus if you didn't have a backup of your installer you were fucked? They have also pulled titles from their service which again, if you didn't have a DVD or USB HDD backup of the installer? You just lost your game NO DIFFERENT than if anybody else went under.
Hell I don't get the whole switch...are they broke? Can they no longer afford to keep Presto, is that it? Because while I don't personally use Opera I have several family and customers that do and they were all quite happy with it, honestly the Opera users were some of the easiest to manage, Opera never broke, it never started acting up, it surfed the web and did that job VERY well.
So the only reason I can see for the switch is they are just too damned poor because it takes a hell of a lot less people to just reskin Chromium than it does to have an actual browser. I wonder how this is gonna affect their userbase as already 2 of my long time Opera users switched to Firefox, they didn't want anything to do with Chrome or Chromium.
Dude if you like space sims and haven't picked it up yet you should really get Freelancer, not only is the default game pretty large with dozens of systems and various factions but the modding community is still pretty active and thanks to the Freelancer Mod Manager you can try out the various mods by simply picking which one you want to run from a drop down list. The amount of systems the community has added is just insane, you can always find plenty online to play with or play one of the huge single player mods and in that game you can do anything you want, from working within the law as a police or bounty hunter to joining one of the pirate factions or just mine and transport your way to one of the big ships.
So try it out dude, its awesome and runs great on even my Win 7 netbook but still looks sharp even today.
Ya know, while I am happy at paying MUCH less when it comes to steam sales i really don't get the whole "ZOMFG Valve might go away!" doom scenarios, I really don't.
I mean lets say for the sake of argument that tomorrow an asteroid blew Valve right off the face of the earth...and? It takes less than 15 minutes on gamecopyworld to get a crack for every single game I have in my Steam folder, no different than with any retail game and in fact I'd argue its even easier than a retail game as you don't have to sit there dealing with SecuROM, Starfuck, or screwing with the registry to crack a Steam game.
So the way that I look at is if they give ME plenty of advantages in return for using the Steam DRM, such as autoupdating for all my games, GPU drivers updates, free MP, chat, and matchmaking services, and oh yeah MUCH cheaper prices? Then I have NO problem with it, I really don't. Hell one year I had to open a support ticket on fricking Xmas eve as a game I had bought was having an issue and I figured with the game not being made by valve and them being ass deep in their biggest sale of the year I'd be lucky if I heard from them in a week...I heard from a support rep not an hour later that not only fixed my problem (by giving me access to an internal Build of Steam that wasn't even available to the beta testers but which had enhancements that fixed the issue) but they even checked back in twice just to make sure i could access everything and it was all running smoothly.
Give me cheaper prices, all the goodies i listed above AND service that quick and customer friendly? Then I honestly don't care about the trivial to crack Steam DRM, I really don't. But does anybody think you'll get even a tenth as good a service from MSFT, or will you just get higher prices to fund some more of Ballmer's follies? I'm betting its the latter, hell I've had GFWL since Bioshock II came out and that shit STILL sucks major ass, making your console experience depend on MSFT having their shit together and not fucking you over is frankly just asking for it.
Sorry but you'll get no sympathy from me, as much of it is their own doing. Just look at how you can take an EA game that is not even 3 years old and when you try to play the MP you get "No servers...buy our new game instead!" yet I got Half Life 1 and Team Fortress Classic, both from the late 90s, as part of a bundle and guess what? The MP works fine and doesn't cost valve squat because the gamer can host!
Nobody is sticking a gun to their head and making them build some generic triple A CoD ripoff, in fact we have ample evidence with games like Dark Souls, Amnesia, XCom, Torchlight series, hell I could go on all day naming games aimed at a niche audience that made 30%,40%, even 50% profit above and beyond what it cost to make but the publishers have become greed on wheels so bad that games like Tomb Raider S (S for Stupid God damned name that makes no sense because there already WAS a Tomb Raider with no number beside it) can sell 4 million copies at $60 a fricking pop and STILL be considered a flop!
So I'm sorry, not a single fuck to give from me, in fact I agree with Jim Sterling at Escapist that has been saying for a couple of years we are heading for a game crash and it will be the best thing to happen for gamers in years as publishers have been treating them like walking ATMs and forcing everything to be generic grey sludge to try to please every possible demographic and the world would frankly be a better place if they died out.
At the end of the day its greed, that is ALL that it is, its this endless greed on wheels that has made it so that when you shell out $60 God damned dollars for a game you often get a gimped all to fuck shitty experience because "herpa de derp, you didn't give us $50 for the levels we ripped out and relabeled as DLC herpa de derpa", it is the endless greed that is made anything less than WoW or CoD money an instant failure, its the endless greed that refuses to look at hard evidence like the numbers Valve published showing that by selling L4D at a $20 or less price point they ended up not only making 1700% profit thanks to digital distribution removing copying costs but also made them insane amounts of money by bringing in new fans that bought everything from T-shirts to action figures, and its endless greed that has removed every single positive the console had over the PC thus making them worthless for the average person.
So you'll excuse me if I don't shed a single tear to see these bloated corporate monsters choke to death on their endless desire for every higher profits and need to bump the stock price, the whole lot of them is worthless as far as I'm concerned.
And that is just more "Stupid God damned name that makes no damned sense" so we should just add an S to the end, so now its Tomb Raider S, or DMC S, and then when people ask what the S is for we can tell them its for a Stupid God damned name that makes no damned sense!
Is MSFT gonna buy out all the ISPs? If not then who cares, the combination of shitty service and bandwidth caps will make this a non starter for a good 70%+ of the population if the states I've been to are any indication.
As Jim Sterling points out MSFT is pretty much giving the finger to everybody that doesn't have 1.-A ton of money and 2.- Incredible broadband, but the very same people that are left already have better devices to do the same thing such as gaming PCs, smart TVs, its the same stupid as hell strategy they did when pricing the Surface and that worked out real well didn't it?
Looking at these next gens I can see two positives, 1.- It'll make guys like me that sell and build affordable gaming PCs a LOT of money and 2.- With any luck the crackers will break this thing and then when MSFT can't give the damned things away because nobody wants their DRM-paloza we can pick 'em up and crack them and make halfway decent HTPCs out of the things like we did the original Xbox One.
But as far as an upside for the consumer? Sorry, not seeing one. Hell anybody with a PC less than 5 years old can pick up an HD4850 for like $40 and be able to play pretty much any game out there, most with medium to high settings thanks to how long the consoles have held back the PC and by Xmas I expect to see the HD7750 if not the HD7770 for less than $65 and those on average are 40% faster than the 4850 while using half the power.
Lets face it PC gaming has never been cheaper, heck AMD quads have been going for just $50 online, and thanks to there being competition on both the hardware and the software the price is going down all the time. Now you can buy games from Steam,GOG,D2D,Origin,Desura, box games from Amazon, with so much competition you can have more games than you can ever play for practically nothing AND you get online MP for free AND there are literally thousands of FTP games to choose from...lets face it, all MSFT is doing is making going to the PC a better choice. YOU control the hardware, YOU control the software, YOU choose whom to buy what from, its just a better experience now that MSFT has taken all the positives away from the console.
Then you might as well just start goose stepping in the streets, as fascism is fascism no matter how you dress it up. If they want to go through her panties, maybe give her a physical to check her virginity, you cool with that to?
If you refuse to stand up when wrong things are happening then I'm sorry, you are a coward and deserve what you get. I still have a nice lump where I took 5 stitches standing up to a cop that was slamming around a black man just for being black, you either stand up for what is right or you live in cowardice, your choice.
Dude i'm a fucking smoker and I've had several chain smokers in the family and even THEY couldn't get more than 4 packs a day, and that was when they had a good 14 hour day. And there is no fucking way in hell you could even smoke a short in just 4 minutes, its not possible, hell I've had to try to rush through a cigarette before and even rushing you are looking at 10-12 minutes, no way in hell you are blowing through a whole cigarette in 4.
But even with all that you are missing the point in that in NO WAY is it ANYTHING like reality, hell even Phillip Morris said the average smoker was a pack to a pack and a half a day and they should know as they used to have forms where smokers would fill out their smoking habits and get free samples. I can tell you being around smokers my whole life a pack to a pack and a half is pretty damned average, with some smoking more, some less, but that right there is the middle ground NOT 16 God damned packs a day! hell if the average smoker smoked 16 packs a day the tobacco companies would have made Bill Gates look like a pauper, they could have swam in money like Scrooge mcDuck!
Any way you slice it its still junk science, you replace any chemical they are testing for cancer with water and you'd kill the animal just as dead because NOTHING is healthy in super mega doses, NOT EVEN WATER which everybody requires to live! So I don't see how anybody can argue these tests are anything but crap, if the doses they are using would make even plain water deadly you know its junk science.
Uhhh...duh? For fucks sake there was already a system called the Xbox so guess what folks called the first one when the second one came out?
That is why I'm asking all of the Internet to join me in refusing to call the new Xbox anything other than Xbox S, S for Stupid God damned name that makes no damned sense, Xbox S for short. This bullshit was soooo thought up by the retarded marketing drones at MSFT that have taken over that company, nobody else would be that damned dumb as to name the THIRD system the Xbox...nope, not gonna say it, Xbox S.
THANK YOU, nice to see SOME people in this country still have a God damned brain. You could take those EXACT SAME TESTS and replace the substance with water and what would you get? Dead animal, that's what!
I did the math once when it came to the monkey tests and you would have had to smoke SIXTEEN PACKS A DAY to equal what they were exposing that monkey to...I'm sorry, but bullshit, that's not even physically possible! You would have to chain smoke 3 cigarettes at a fricking time for 18 hours a day to equal what they gave the monkey, now how is that test prove anything other than some scientists like to torture animals?
These others can wave their little flags and scream "science!" all they want, but bullshit bad science is bullshit bad science and I WILL call 'em out when they are doing bad science and that is ALL these tests are! I mean for the love of God they took a sick animal and a healthy animal and stuck them in a pair of hot houses designed so the air from one was pumped into the chamber of the other and its supposed to prove...what? That hothouses are good for germs? Well give them a fucking cookie, who the hell didn't know that?
They can waste mod points all the want but to me it only shows that we hand out grants to damned near anybody these days, no matter how junk the science is.
What is hyperbole? The fact that you could replace their tests with any substance and get the same results because main lining massive doses of ANYTHING IS BAD even water, or the fact that overdosing an animal or cooking up a test that would never happen IRL is supposed to "prove" anything, other than you know how to rig a test that is?
This is what i can't fucking stand about the USA and the whole "left versus right" horseshit because you HAVE to turn off your damned brain and wave your little flag, no such thing as hypocrisy or bullshit as long as the one shoveling the shit is on the "right" side. I mean did ANY OF YOU even read TFA? The ONLY way you can call that in ANY way valid is if and ONLY if you were testing the risk of working in a hot house, that's it, that's all, no fucking way in a million damned years would you have conditions even SLIGHTLY like this in real life but "Its science herpa de derp".
Well fuck that, bullshit is bullshit and whether its slung by someone in a white coat or not its STILL BULLSHIT. Again use the EXACT SAME CONDITIONS they use to test any substance and replace that substance with water, what will happen? Dead animal because NOTHING IS GOOD IN MEGA-DOSES,okay? Nothing, even the things our bodies require to live can kill you dead if you do nothing but mainline that shit, yet we are supposed to accept results from a test where they practically tied the sick animal and the healthy one together in an environment designed to make germs flourish?
Bad science is bad science and the fact so many of you run to blindly defend it without even reading TFA just shows how God damned knee jerk flag waving bullshit has embedded itself like cancer in this society, its sad and pathetic, that is what it is, someone in a whit coat could tell you the moon is made of green cheese and you'd probably buy it, fucking pathetic.
If you want a non nuke you'd be a fool to buy from anybody but Russia, they are so far ahead of everyone else when it comes to diesel boats its not even funny.
But since we are talking Canada I'm sure the USA would have no qualms leasing them a boat, we still have the shipyards making LA class last I checked along with the new cheaper design (can't remember if its the Virginia class or if that was the expensive one and the other is the cheaper) so all they would have to do is pick up the phone and I'm sure we'd lease them a couple.
I do think its funny how just about every war since the end of WWII has been either USA or Russian tech, sometimes even USA VS USA or Russian VS Russian because a good 90% of the world's arms are built by those two countries. Hell in Vietnam it was the Sidewinder VS the Sidewinder as the Chinese managed to get their hands on a dud Sidewinder in the early 60s when it got stuck in a MiG and didn't go off and the Russians just bought it off the Chinese and copied it. They say you can take an Atoll and a Sidewinder and mix and match parts, their copy is so good that it'll fly straight with any combo of USA and Russian parts.
I saw an interview with a PR rep for MSFT and even he admitted the days of console exclusives are just about gone, the high cost of a triple A title makes console exclusivity almost a guaranteed money loser so that all they are really gonna get is a little exclusive DLC and a handful of in house franchises like Gear Of War and Halo...who gives a crap?
I'm sorry but a dozen exclusives over the life of the console doesn't make up for the higher price of games, the cost of the console, the always online bullshit, it just don't. They have taken every positive the console had over the PC and crapped all over it in their desperate desire to get Apple style "lock in" and in doing so they have taken away every. single. positive. that the console had. Can you just grab your disc and go play at a friend's house? Nope. Sell, trade, borrow? Nope nope and nope. Can you just plug it and go? Nope because now its always online, no net and no console...fucking retarded, that's what it is. There is not a single positive for having a console with this next gen and a shitload of negatives because unlike the PC where I can buy from multiple vendors and use competing services to get me the best prices it all goes through MSFT which has shown with their SurfaceRT they have no qualms about charging even more than Apple, even when the system is failing.
The only nice thing I can say about the new console is since it runs on X86 maybe when it bombs the crackers will figure out how to jailbreak it and we can get some cheap PCs out of the deal, otherwise its a failwhale.
No it don't, its already been reported with the Steambox you'll be able to go from your PC to the console and back at ANY time hassle free, you buy something through GFWL and even if its also on XBL they make you buy a second copy, that is bullshit.
And we haven't seen how the Xbox S (not calling that damned thing the One, that is just retarded) is gonna handle accounts yet, with Steam if my nephew comes over he can just log into his account on my PC and it'll carry over all his achievements, saves, etc, and with this thing having a piddly 500GB HDD I don't see that working out very well without a LOT of de-authorizing and re-authorizing which is gonna be a PITA. With Steam I went from a 250GB to 500GB to 1TB to 2TB, know what I had to do? Drag the folder over and let Steam hook up, that's it, no registry bullshit, no keys, just drag and drop simple.
I think Angry Joe is right in that they have lost their way, they are so hard thinking about having "An Apple Ecosystem" where they can have little walled gardens where they get a cut of every show, song, game, everything else that they are making devices that are jacks of all trades and masters of nothing.
And dude its NOT about price, unless you are talking about how much a bigger profit margin would give Wall Street a stiffie, because both consoles are expected to retail at $450-$550 which anybody that knows anything about retail will tell you that is too damned high for a game console. Frankly you can get a hell of a lot nicer system from Tiger for cheaper and with Phenom II quads going for $50 a pop the only real reason to go with netbook chips is so they can have the thing constantly shitting out app updates...and ads to sell you more shit.
So i am having to go with Angry Joe, i think the thing is gonna bomb. Not only is it gonna cost more than a PC does today but with such weak chips the devs will max the thing out in under 2 years, hell maybe even under a year since we are talking about a netbook chip, and its gonna quickly get slammed when we are talking about how physics heavy both the third and first person games are getting...its just not a smart move. Hell I'd take an Athlon quad over this thing, I bet you'll get a hell of a lot more IPC compared to a netbook chip with HT.
And this isn't slamming AMD nor Bobcat, hell i have a netbook with a Bobcat dual and i love the hell out of it but its big selling points are battery life and multimedia, NOT hardcore gaming.
Hell I work in computer retail and have encountered it exactly ONCE, and it was a gaming mouse that charged off the pad. This to me sounds like how they argued over DVD-A and SACD and in the end nobody gave a rat's ass about either tech so they both went exactly nowhere.
If anything from what I'm seeing everything powered by USB is the wave of the future, damned near every laptop brags about how you can charge phones off their USB, you see USB disposable "quick charge" power packs at every checkout here, it looks like my dad is right in that everything is gonna end up USB.
Frankly most of their "tests" I have to call bullshit, its like scientists aren't happy unless they rig the living fuck out of tests.
I mean look at their tests that say "This or that causes cancer!" you go "Ohh, that is interesting, I think I'll look at the tests" and what did they do? pumped them so full of the shit it would be no different than if a human mainlined that and ONLY that 24 hours a day for several years....yeah, not really seeing that as a valid "test" for anything.
I don't know how many years they have been pulling this bullshit but I first started looking into it when i saw one of their "tests" which "showed" cigarettes cause cancer by putting a poor monkey in a box with a dozen cigarettes at a time blasting in it so you literally couldn't see the fucking monkey...now who in the fuck would EVER be in a similar situation? Hell I've played in redneck bars and the smoke was never even a tenth as bad as what they were subjecting that poor monkey to, no fucking way in hell anybody in real life would be exposed to anything like that.
So now unless they show that the test was done in realistic conditions I automatically call bullshit because real life just doesn't work like that. hell if you used the same methodology with fricking water you'd have it banned as you can't mainline water 24/7 for 6 months without it killing you either. As the poster above pointed out they cooked up conditions that you would NEVER have IRL with the poor animals practically in a hothouse to keep it as germ positive as possible, and this is supposed to "prove" anything?
The only thing it proves to me is we give too many grants for shitty science.
Exactly, I really don't get this trying to shoehorn ARM into places where it just don't make any damned sense, its just as stupid as how they tried pushing ActiveX "cloud apps" a few years back for every damned thing and it was retarded then and retarded now.
Does that mean ARM doesn't have a place? of course not, I could easily see new hybrid servers that have an ARM chip for when its not doing much and then hand it off to the X86 when it needs the power but lets face it, the IPC of ARM is just piss poor, it really is. To get ARM up to the level of an 8 year old Core based Xeon or AMD Opteron causes it to blow its power budget all to shit, to use a /. car analogy it would be like buying a Kia for the gas mileage and then rebuilding the thing to haul boats, you've just destroyed the reason for buying the Kia in the first place by forcing it to do a job it just isn't good at.
Lets face it folks, that 6 year old C2Q or Phenom X4 just curbstomps the latest and great ARM chips when it comes to IPC and I don't see that changing in the future, you can have low power or high performance, NOT both.
Anybody that would want to go to a place where they demand their fricking passwords is batshit and deserve what they get, what's next, asking to go through her underwear drawer to make sure her panties meet their approval?
But I too am a big believer in using nicknames, I don't think there are 3 pics of me on the whole net that aren't using my nick and I taught both boys to only use their nicks, its just too easy to find out all kinds of stuff on a person otherwise. And its not just employers you gotta worry about friend as there are all kinds of folks out there with a few screws loose and if you leave too big a trail online you'd be surprised how much stuff a stalker can pick up.
You never went to a keg party? Because we have seen people not get a job, one teacher even got fired for a pic of her at a keg party in college.
The problem is many an HR dept is run by prissypants that couldn't get laid in a women's prison with a fistful of pardons and take out the fact that they had a miserable life on everybody else.
As another pointed out what these people are calling mistakes and judging people over and things that the last couple of presidents did, so its being a hypocrite to the billionth power to say someone can be POTUS but isn't "pure" enough to work as a corporate drone.
While I can understand a personal preference for text when it comes to some of these concepts I seriously doubt that anything less than video would work, I mean imagine trying to lay out a 27 dimension universe in flat pics, I really don't think it would be possible to do it justice.
And if you like a good, well written horror flick where you aren't sitting there going "Oh you SO deserve to die for being an idiot" then you'll like Event Horizon, I thought it was really well written with people acting more like people would act in such a situation.