Worse...country and western...shudders. Needless to say she don't like me blasting Five Finger Death Punch and Rammstein and I sure as fuck can't stand listening to that damned whiny tear in my beer crap, so we pick classic rock as a middle ground, not to heavy for her, not too damned whiny for me.
Should have made myself clearer, she likes Native American art and since the best source for that is the southwestern stuff that is what she goes for.
Kinda sad in this day and age we still have the politically correct ready to scream "that's racist!" instead of actually using common sense. Common sense..its a God damned superpower.
BTW she often goes to OK and MO, can't find shit for Native American art there, even on the rez. Much better choices in the southwestern art section than anything from the plains anymore.
But since I haven't look at the non X86 chips in awhile my question is...what advantage do they give over the AMD and Intel X86 cores? i mean I could understand using MIPS, SPARC, POWER back in the day because X86 was slower at certain tasks but now the amount of IPC on the Intel side is just nuts and AMD is going with an insane numbers of cores for cheap...so what's the selling point?
I mean I can understand those that already have significant resources tied up in SPARC as it'd be cheaper to stay with what they have than to switch, but what do they use as selling points to get new customers?
My GF isn't, but then again her company is VERY precisely targeting their potential customers, no cold calling allowed, and the people that sign up for the contests they have are interested in the kinds of things they sell vacation packages for, and the contests are tied into specific packages so they can target the demographic that likes that sort of thing, like a bass boat for their fishing vacation package, a nice set of golf clubs and lessons with a pro for the golfing vacation, things like that.
What i find funny is that none of the other telemarketers can figure out why she is able to sell so many packages to the coasts and up north...its the accent. My little Cherokee princess has a thick classical southern belle accent and the coasters and northerners just find it adorable. I don't know how many times she has come home and told me she ended up staying on the line for an extra 20 minutes plus with a sale because they were like "Hey Joey, i gotta put this girl on the speakerphone and let you hear her, its like something outta "Gone With The Wind" I shit you not!". I guess they just don't get to hear southern belles where they are, but if it gets her more sales my princess will happily play along.
That's funny, I used to have this little bitty Indian gal that worked at the same shop as me and I LOVED when we'd need an RMA and they'd try giving us the "Have you tried a reboot?" Indian tech support as I'd just pass her the phone and say 'Indian tech support" and she would just go OFF on their ass. I used to love to watch her get into a huff and be telling them things like NO! You did NOT just tell me to reboot, I've been building and programming computers since before your little butt was born so you do NOT tell me to reboot the stupid thing!" followed by a long string of words in Hindi I'm sure were very naughty...damned shame I never knew what those words were, i'm sure I'd have been laughing even harder.
What I want to know is why the hell doesn't this apply to ALL works where the authors are missing/dead/unknown is beyond me. How many games from the 70s through mid 90s are in this kind of limbo where nobody knows who owns what anymore? And what about all the indie labels that have died out in the past 30 years?
We are allowing too damned much of our history to end up in these "legal limbos" where nobody can do a damned thing with it and that is just wrong. All content that an author can't be easily found should be allowed to be treated as Public Domain unless/until someone who can actually show ownership shows up, otherwise all this great stuff is gonna end up lost.
But of course i've supported a "use it or lose it" clause for patents and copyrights for years, where if you don't offer it at a reasonable price somewhere easily accessible it should revert to PD, just so we don't end up with a ton of work in limbo where some corp doesn't want to do anything with it but doesn't want anyone to have it either. For an example look at something like the cult game Wild Arms, where the developer tried to buy the rights back several times only to have the publisher refuse to sell yet refuse to do anything more with the IP either. in cases where they aren't gonna use it they should lose it, simple as that. At the very least force them to renew the copyright at set intervals with a higher fee for each renewal, that way they'd have incentive to decide whether to actually use the property or give it to the Public. As it is now they can sit on stuff for decades and not do a damned thing with it so by the time anything DOES end up PD frankly there aren't any copies left worth having, its just wrong no matter how you slice it.
But the problem is as I said those chips tend to be gone from NewEgg and Tiger a LOT quicker than they are from Amazon, hell some chips you'll be lucky to have them 2 months on NewEgg and Tiger because they tend to have more churn.
And like I said nobody seems to review a lot of the midrange chips, I've seen several where mine is the ONLY review because those buying midrange chips don't bother to review, like the tech sites you'll get a bazillion talking about top end chips, a few talking about the lowest chips, hardly anything in between which frankly is where most folks buy.
But if things were set up your way frankly you wouldn't find any reviews at for the chips I've been reviewing as of late, because I ended up getting them in Tiger kits so unless you were looking for the same kit, which is usually "here today, gone 3 hours later" then you'd never see it and nobody else bothers. believe me I'd much rather have the pro reviewers put these chips on a test bed and run a full review, but especially with the AMD desktop chips they really only run the absolute top and absolute bottom and sometimes not even that, most will simply take the highest SKU and run it against a midrange i5 and call it a day.
That is fine if the ONLY thing you are buying is the high end but I have a feeling there is a lot more people buying midrange units, they just don't hardly ever seem to be reviewed.
Dude...why in the name of God are you looking at their feet? Hell my GF could be wearing clown shoes and I'd never know it, too busy enjoying how nicely she fills out her top or how her behind looks in the 501 jeans, I ain't wasting my time looking lower.
Hell I had to Google WTF a Birkenstock was because i pay so little attention to shoes I didn't have a clue..the brown loafer things, right? If she is looking good in them jeans and filling out that top nicely she can wear clodhoppers for all i care, but maybe its just because I ain't into feet. I know some guys are, nothing wrong with that, just not my thang if you know what I mean.
And don't forget when their feet hurt? they tend to get bitchy. I'd MUCH rather her feet not hurt and not catch the overflow than have her wear fuck me pumps and hear half the night how bad its killing her ankles.
Actually she tends to prefer more of a southwestern thing which with her being Cherokee I can understand and think looks quite nice. Speaking of pink when I first moved into my apt one of the first things she did when she spent the weekend was say 'Who in the hell decided a pink tiled bathroom was a good idea?" and immediately went about trying to draw your eyes AWAY from the pink tile with decorations.
As for the guy that said not being able to cook is like not being able to swim? So sue me, i live in a college town with a bazillion different kinds of takeout and if it doesn't come out of a nuker you are SOL when it comes to me. As for grilling? Depends on where we are, if we are up at her relatives her nephew usually does the grilling, he has a really nice grill and spends so much time using the thing everything always comes out perfect, and if we are at home I'll bring some beer and let the super do it, he makes a mean homemade BBQ sauce and has 3 BBQ grills he'll get going on nice weekends out behind the building so if you bring him a 6 pack he'll be happy to throw your burgers or dogs or whatever on there with his.
The closest i get to grilling is a "hobo BBQ" where you dig a pit and build a fire until you have a nice pile of coals, then you wrap everything in foil and bury it with the coals for a few hours. Kinda hard to fuck that one up.
Exactly and this is one of the reasons that while I don't personally care for the UI of IE I can say compared to Chrome and Firefox the new IE? Really not bad, and they do seem to be actually listening to users on this unlike other projects i can mention (Cough..Metro Sucks..Cough) so frankly who gives a rat's ass if some advertisers can't go Big Brother on us?
Riddle ME this...how many have gotten any "targeted advertising" that was worth a fuck? i don't know about everyone else but the ONLY thing their shitty targeted advertising seems to be good at is showing me things I USED to want several months ago, nothing close to what I'm looking for now. Hell I still get tons of netbook ads...ummm advertisers? Bought my netbook two years ago, quite happy with it, don't need another one. Meanwhile I'm researching SSDs planning to snatch one after the holidays, do I see a single ad for SSDs? Even when just to test i left all adblocking off for nearly a week while going to review after review of SSDs? Nope ALL I saw was laptops, netbooks, and graphics cards, things I was looking at over a year ago and haven't looked for since.
So I just don't see a damned point in it and now block ALL ads unless the site makes a pledge not to show me flashy soundbyte blasting ads, then and ONLY then will i unblock. All these targeted ads are frankly worse when they just guessed based on whatever site you were on, at least when they'd show me random tech when i was on a tech site they'd occasionally show me something I might actually want to buy. With targeted ads its like "hey, remember what you were looking for last year? Well even though you don't want it now here ya go!"...wow...thanks for nothing.
Ya know that is something I have NEVER understood...what is it with women and shoes? my GF has a closet full of the things but if it covers my feet and doesn't have holes? i'm a happy camper. I'll never forget soon after we got together we were gonna spend a nice weekend afternoon hitting the little flea markets, she likes looking for decorations and i like finding cool tech junk like flight sticks cheap, when she practically came unglued when i came out of my apt because my shoes had velcro tops. I just thought they were comfortable and didn't care but she was like "My BF is NOT wearing grandpa shoes!" and the next thing i know we are at the shoe store for a good hour while she found me a pair of "weekend shoes" as she called them...okay.
I'll just never understand why anyone would care about what covers their feet as long as they are comfortable. A couple of my guy friends were like "Yo bro, you should have said you were keepin them velcros!" and I was like...why? Why would I give a rat's ass one way or another what kind of fucking shoe is on my feet if they are comfortable? If she is trying to drag me to see some Notebook style chick flick THAT is when to say "Oh HELL no!" but footwear? Who gives a crap?
Besides...isn't that what your woman is for? before any ladies start throwing shit at me the average guy knows we have no taste especially when it comes to clothes and since most women want their men not to look...well like bachelor slobs, are happy to do that task. The same thing at least to me when it comes to food, my GF likes to cook and likes variety, and she knows i can burn water and my idea of breakfast is pizza from the night before so she decides what we are gonna have and i'm happy to go along with it.
So if you have a partner why not actually...well...have a partnership on such things? She gets to be in charge of things she does better than me, food and clothes and what the place looks like as far as decoration, i get to be in charge of things she doesn't care about like tech, and we agree to disagree when it comes to things like music. Works great for us and I don't have to worry about wasting time with things i don't care about and she doesn't have to go "You aren't seriously going out looking like THAT are you?" so its a win/win in my book.
But if they only accepted reviews from ones that bought from them they'd frankly be giving up a lot of good honest reviews...well like mine actually. i buy CPUs and components from Amazon, NewEgg, TigerDirect, and a couple of little chip shops like StarMicro and once i've put a chip through its paces i tend to post a review to all of the above, why? Well because I don't buy many of the highest end chips and those and the bottom of the line chips are the only ones the review sites ever seem to test so I've found a lot of times those middle chips, your MOR chips, simply don't get really tested or reviewed and since that's the chips I use the most I review them.
I've not seen a dime from any of the above, hell neither they nor the CPU manufacturers have ever even given me a fricking t-shirt, but it'd always bug the shit out of me when i'd go looking for info on a chip or board and find there were ONLY reviews for the uber hot or the uber cheap, nothing in the middle, so I like to think I'm helping out all the guys like me that use those chips. I'll encode a couple of videos, run a few games, maybe use a benchmarking test or two and post what i find and from all the positives I've gotten i guess there are others like me looking for this info but if the only sites I was allowed to post to were the ones that I had bought that particular chip from? Well then a lot of those hunting for that info wouldn't find it, as chips for example seem to stay on Amazon longer than they do NewEgg or TigerDirect.
So you can't really judge only by whether they've bought from that site or not, you really need to look at the review as a whole and see if it and the poster's history is generally unbiased and thoughtful. If a poster has a history its really not hard to look at their reviews and see whether there is a pattern or not. I can understand that requirement from like hotel booking sites though, that is such a specialized niche that it really wouldn't be too hard to game that system whereas so many people buy chips that if someone like me was posting totally false info it wouldn't take long for someone to post "That's not what I'm seeing from the same chip" and get the post modded down appropriately.
That's why I like the reviews on geek sites like NewEgg and even Amazon, its pretty easy to spot the actual owners and users and weed out the shills. Hell on my reviews on Amazon I've even had several nice back and forth conversations where someone will ask about this feature or that, or want to know what i thought of something like the TDP of a chip or how well it performed some task and I was happy to answer and even run benches or tests, whereas the shills are just gushing and glossing over any problems the average user might have.
This is why I tell folks looking at reviews to take everything they see with a LARGE grain of salt, because until there is an actual community built up where they can respond to shills and sorta self police the place you can't really trust anything you read. Worse you get sites that as you say actively engage in shilling and trolling for dollars where everything there is bought and paid for, those sites I consider beyond worthless and we geeks should be quick to point those out to everyone around us.
Remember guys WE are the ones the normals look to for advice, we the geeks of the world, its our duty to try to steer the normals away from the bad and toward the good because they just aren't jaded cynical bastards like we are and are easier to dupe.
According to posters at Neowin yep and a Google search shows several posts at sites owned by them with the same text so I'm thinking...yeah we might ought to be looking for another geek site to hang our hats as the last thing the world needs is another EnGadget or Gawker where only corporate approved postings are allowed. If they could do something about Thom and his biases OSNews is pretty geeky but not up to/. standards, but if the Dice crap becomes SOP here I'll have no choice but move on, not dealing with corporate censorship.
Damn, you just hate to see a site go down the shitter like that. I agree we'll need official confirmation but if this is policy frankly with all the differing opinions here it won't take long before we'll see that text more often if its corporate policy. if it is? Then so long Slashdot and thanks for all the fish.
Actually there are a ton of fan sites still talking about how the Newton was great but that Jobs HAD to kill the Newton because he already had the idea for the iPod/iPad. If you refuse to believe your lying eyes? that's fine by me but I'd point out there is ONLY ONE OTHER PRODUCT that gets people literally camping out and even hiding in dumpsters trying to get one on release....and that is the Air Jordan.
Now are you gonna sit there and tell me how the Jordans are insanely good products? Or are you gonna accept its fashion that makes it uncool to be having last year's Jordans on your feet just as its uncool to be carrying last year's iPad?
What I wouldn't give to be a reporter standing in front of one of those lines on release day, i'd kill to hear a reporter talk to these people and ask them questions like "What makes this product better than the one in your hand? What does the new one do that the one in your hand don't?" because you and i BOTH know they would have NO answer to that, in the end it'd be because its just like this cartoon, kinda sad even the cartoonist can see it but you can't. Still got that little niggler on your shoulder telling you that you paid too much? Don't worry go to some of the fan sites and they'll drown out that little niggler talking about what an incredible device the iFoo 6 is over the iFoo 5 which is inferior in every way.
Uhhh since we were talking about pads and WinRT I thought it would be obvious that is what is being discussed. Sure Win 8 X86 runs X86 code, although I think Metro is gonna bomb on the desktop, but the thing MSFT just seems to refuse to accept is that people don't buy Windows because MSFT gives them a warm fuzzy like Apple does, they buy it to run Windows X86 code which makes WinRT? Totally fucking pointless and beyond retarded to put the Windows name on.
They should have spun off the Metro division, so they wouldn't have the constant "You gotta tie everything to Windows and Office" PHBs breathing down their necks, and the ONLY connects between them should have been a focus on easy of connectivity between Windows, Metro, Office, and Xbox. As it is it'll be just like I saw a few years back when a local retailer was selling these "Windows tablets" that were WinCE. The average customer doesn't know ARM from leg and got them home and when they found it wouldn't run their Windows software? they were returned en masse. the shop ended up taking a bath on the things and after a few retailers take a bath on winRT the word will get around and these things won't be found anywhere but the MSFT stores, where nobody will buy them after the MSFT floor people explain it won't run their Windows software. Stupid.
I've tried 'em, don't like 'em. yeah they come close but a 128bit pipe vs a 256bit pipe and when push comes to shove that 256bit pipe can just keep all those cores fed better, worth the extra 30w IMHO.
Damned shame you don't live somewhere where they deliver, or don't have a bud that lives where they deliver so he could just pass it on, because both cards are pretty insane values when you look at the amount of raw GPU power VS what you pay, its just nuts. Now for non gaming jobs the HD4770 rocks your socks off, i have a customer running the latest Solidworks on one and no matter how intricate his engineering gets it never chokes, he can spin and manipulate the living hell out of everything for his customers with a Phenom I X3 CPU and it NEVER stutters or skips, just great for that task, but in really heavy games like Just Cause II or the Crysis series I'll take the 256bit pipe. That's why in another year when Geeks has the HD6850s at the same price I'll swap up, after going 256bit I just can't go back to 128bit.
But it really shouldn't be surprising they still make 'em, after all Nvidia still makes the 8600 chips. they are mature, have high yields, and do most everything your average user wants them to do at a VERY cheap price point, its a win/win. Like I said we all game our butts off and neither me nor the boys have a single complaint about our HD4850s, they play in those huge MMOs like LOTRO and no matter how huge the raiding gets they don't skip, and I'm playing Crysis and sandboxes like SR 3 and JC2 and no matter how much exploding death i spray across the screen its all above 30 FPS and smooth as butter, couldn't be happier and well worth the extra 30 watts.
But its still a BAD idea and the reason is because in games and multimedia the extra load of doing BOTH all the onscreen drawing, resizing, and buffering AND having to do all the FP work is gonna just be deep fried assholes as far as performance goes. remember we are already SEVERELY constrained when it comes to badwidth between the APU and memory, you have both the CPU and the GPU fighting over the same bus for memory, and you are gonna add FP work on top of an already stretched to the max bus?
Its retarded and the ONLY place it will work is in small laptop where you simply aren't gonna be doing anything heavier than watching The Avengers in 1080p. We've been down this road before, with dumping more and more on the CPU, and always the memory ends up a seriously bad bottleneck simply because you can't put enough traces on a board to feed the chip. Hell even on the weaker chips like Brazos and Liano we are seeing that, where OCing the memory can give you a 20%+ performance boost simply because all the bottlenecking is in the memory while the CPU/GPU is stuck waiting on data, its just stupid.
Intel can do this because they know their APUs will not be used for anything but playing The Avengers at 1080p, they are office chips NOT gamer chips but with AMD's lower IPC the only real selling point they have is gaming and they are slitting their own throats with this design. They should have kept Bulldozer in the server room where integer heavy code is king, kept the weaker FP units in Bobcat where nobody is gaming, and had strong FP in Liano and their replacement for Thuban where they could still tout gaming performance. Look up ANY reviews of their APUs and you'll see you simply can't feed the GPU cores enough memory, this is why you end up with framerates worse than a $20 HD5450, because you just can't feed the chip enough memory to really be useful. Dumb, stupid, retarded...sadly this has been words that describe AMD pretty well since Faildozer came out and this is coming from someone who sells AMD exclusively, but I'm sticking with Thuban until something truly better comes out.
Not to mention if they actually NEEDED tech support, why not just contact someone locally, where they could meet them face to face? Hell if they have Win 7 most of us little shops will be happy to set up a time and do a remote session so they don't have to bring the unit in, its actually one of my more popular services with the older folks as they don't want to have to unhook everything. I just sit there on the phone with them and walk them through starting a remote session and then while I'm in control of their desktop they can tell me what the problem is and even take over the mouse and show me what its doing. Things like realigning printer heads and running test pages, some website they like isn't loading, browser troubles, sound issues, I can do it all from my nice comfy chair and they don't have to deal with a tear down and dragging it to the shop, its a win/win.
I never did understand why someone would trust their computer, with all their pics and docs and private stuff, to some guy halfway across the planet. I'm personally quite proud of the fact i have no damned clue what is in my customers docs folders, its not my job to snoop, its my job to fix the problem and hand it back. I always looked at repair like being a plumber, its my job to fix the sink not go through their underwear drawers, but the fact that someone will just hand control to somebody they've never met halfway across the planet is just insane. Hell I don't care if the guy really WAS from MSFT or Google or fricking Tigerdirect, if I can't see the guy in person I'm sure as hell not gonna trust him with my computer.
Yes but as we have seen here its usually pretty easy to spot the difference between pissed off consumers and astroturf and shilling. If a company is providing shitty service? Well there will be plenty of people bitching, nothing in the world folks love more than to bitch, but if its just one or two and they have very similar language and tone and feel? Yeah probably written by the same guy or from a script.
As a small town retailer I know all about how a bad rep can bury you, but if you were to find every single person that had ever been unhappy with my work? you'd have one hand, maybe two hands to count them on if you were lucky. But if you wanted to talk to people that were perfectly happy with my work and wouldn't mind recommending me to friends and family and often do? I could fill up the local HS gym easily.
You will ALWAYS have a few customers that frankly you just can't please, such as the idiot that demanded I give him a new PC after he ignored everything I told him, removed ALL security features and antivirus and promptly installed malware, all because he simply refused to accept that Limewire didn't exist anymore. if you could find an.exe labeled "Limewire" on the net, even if the icon was a fricking Goatse, well that was proof that Limewire still existed and you were supposed to magically make Limewire work again. But it should be pretty easy to spot a "bad customer" and tell them from someone trolling for SEO cash.
Too bad, your loss as I've been buying kits and parts from them for several years now without a hassle one. The few times they did fuck up an order it was all "We're really sorry and here is an RMA" and I got credit for any shipping that I paid, hell they even told me to just keep a brand new board once when they screwed up and sent a 65w board instead of the 95w board that I needed, they next day delivered me a new 95w board and just told me to keep the 65w as an apology. I ended up using that to build a new PC for my GF so I ended up having to buy some more parts from them to fill it out, but I thought that was a nice touch and other than the board not being the right wattage it was actually a nice board.
So maybe you ought to sign up for their sales flyers or emails and try them again on some small things to see how they go for you. I was just like you in the late 90s when their service was piss poor but they really straightened up. Plus you gotta like anybody who'll sell you a quad kit for just $270 and unlike NewEgg I've never had a bit of trouble getting my rebates back from tiger. I've got no less than 6 desktops in my family counting my GF and ALL were built from Tiger kits and we all couldn't be happier. So maybe its time to give them another go?
Plus you can get the HD4850 Lonewolf, which STILL just chews through games like Just Cause II, Cryisis 1&2 and Saints Row 3 for just $40 new and that's for 800 stream processors, a 256bit pipe, and easy OCing in Catalyst if you want to bump it up even higher. I have one exactly like the pic and it came from the shop with a "turbo boost" setting of 625Mhz GPU/993MHz memory over the stock 500/750 and since this only kicks in when i'm slamming the card it runs quite nicely without getting insanely hot.
So if you'd like a pretty damned powerful GPU for just dirt cheap i'd highly recommend. As I said I put me and both my boys on these, they tear through the latest games at our monitors 1600x900 with plenty of bling and just $40? Hell you can't even buy a halfass midrange card for that, its a no brainer.
Works just fine in Windows, I'm running HD4850s in mine and the boys PCs, run just fine under Win 7 X64 and since they have squeezed every drop of horsepower they can out of the chip already I honestly don't care if the drivers are put into legacy now or not.
Hell I've been using AMD GPUs in my builds for nearly 5 years now and the ONLY problem I ever saw was back when they used.NET for the CCC occasionally.NET would bork itself with an update and you couldn't launch the CCC, though the drivers worked just fine.
so I don't see what everyone bitches about, I've used Nvidia, I've used AMD, unless you are using either company's beta drivers (which if you are running beta drivers you know what you're getting into) the drivers from BOTH companies have been pretty damned solid.
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Worse...country and western...shudders. Needless to say she don't like me blasting Five Finger Death Punch and Rammstein and I sure as fuck can't stand listening to that damned whiny tear in my beer crap, so we pick classic rock as a middle ground, not to heavy for her, not too damned whiny for me.
Should have made myself clearer, she likes Native American art and since the best source for that is the southwestern stuff that is what she goes for.
Kinda sad in this day and age we still have the politically correct ready to scream "that's racist!" instead of actually using common sense. Common sense..its a God damned superpower.
BTW she often goes to OK and MO, can't find shit for Native American art there, even on the rez. Much better choices in the southwestern art section than anything from the plains anymore.
Bah! I bet you are saying that just cuz you don't want to vote for somebody green you racist!
But since I haven't look at the non X86 chips in awhile my question is...what advantage do they give over the AMD and Intel X86 cores? i mean I could understand using MIPS, SPARC, POWER back in the day because X86 was slower at certain tasks but now the amount of IPC on the Intel side is just nuts and AMD is going with an insane numbers of cores for cheap...so what's the selling point?
I mean I can understand those that already have significant resources tied up in SPARC as it'd be cheaper to stay with what they have than to switch, but what do they use as selling points to get new customers?
My GF isn't, but then again her company is VERY precisely targeting their potential customers, no cold calling allowed, and the people that sign up for the contests they have are interested in the kinds of things they sell vacation packages for, and the contests are tied into specific packages so they can target the demographic that likes that sort of thing, like a bass boat for their fishing vacation package, a nice set of golf clubs and lessons with a pro for the golfing vacation, things like that.
What i find funny is that none of the other telemarketers can figure out why she is able to sell so many packages to the coasts and up north...its the accent. My little Cherokee princess has a thick classical southern belle accent and the coasters and northerners just find it adorable. I don't know how many times she has come home and told me she ended up staying on the line for an extra 20 minutes plus with a sale because they were like "Hey Joey, i gotta put this girl on the speakerphone and let you hear her, its like something outta "Gone With The Wind" I shit you not!". I guess they just don't get to hear southern belles where they are, but if it gets her more sales my princess will happily play along.
That's funny, I used to have this little bitty Indian gal that worked at the same shop as me and I LOVED when we'd need an RMA and they'd try giving us the "Have you tried a reboot?" Indian tech support as I'd just pass her the phone and say 'Indian tech support" and she would just go OFF on their ass. I used to love to watch her get into a huff and be telling them things like NO! You did NOT just tell me to reboot, I've been building and programming computers since before your little butt was born so you do NOT tell me to reboot the stupid thing!" followed by a long string of words in Hindi I'm sure were very naughty...damned shame I never knew what those words were, i'm sure I'd have been laughing even harder.
What I want to know is why the hell doesn't this apply to ALL works where the authors are missing/dead/unknown is beyond me. How many games from the 70s through mid 90s are in this kind of limbo where nobody knows who owns what anymore? And what about all the indie labels that have died out in the past 30 years?
We are allowing too damned much of our history to end up in these "legal limbos" where nobody can do a damned thing with it and that is just wrong. All content that an author can't be easily found should be allowed to be treated as Public Domain unless/until someone who can actually show ownership shows up, otherwise all this great stuff is gonna end up lost.
But of course i've supported a "use it or lose it" clause for patents and copyrights for years, where if you don't offer it at a reasonable price somewhere easily accessible it should revert to PD, just so we don't end up with a ton of work in limbo where some corp doesn't want to do anything with it but doesn't want anyone to have it either. For an example look at something like the cult game Wild Arms, where the developer tried to buy the rights back several times only to have the publisher refuse to sell yet refuse to do anything more with the IP either. in cases where they aren't gonna use it they should lose it, simple as that. At the very least force them to renew the copyright at set intervals with a higher fee for each renewal, that way they'd have incentive to decide whether to actually use the property or give it to the Public. As it is now they can sit on stuff for decades and not do a damned thing with it so by the time anything DOES end up PD frankly there aren't any copies left worth having, its just wrong no matter how you slice it.
But the problem is as I said those chips tend to be gone from NewEgg and Tiger a LOT quicker than they are from Amazon, hell some chips you'll be lucky to have them 2 months on NewEgg and Tiger because they tend to have more churn.
And like I said nobody seems to review a lot of the midrange chips, I've seen several where mine is the ONLY review because those buying midrange chips don't bother to review, like the tech sites you'll get a bazillion talking about top end chips, a few talking about the lowest chips, hardly anything in between which frankly is where most folks buy.
But if things were set up your way frankly you wouldn't find any reviews at for the chips I've been reviewing as of late, because I ended up getting them in Tiger kits so unless you were looking for the same kit, which is usually "here today, gone 3 hours later" then you'd never see it and nobody else bothers. believe me I'd much rather have the pro reviewers put these chips on a test bed and run a full review, but especially with the AMD desktop chips they really only run the absolute top and absolute bottom and sometimes not even that, most will simply take the highest SKU and run it against a midrange i5 and call it a day.
That is fine if the ONLY thing you are buying is the high end but I have a feeling there is a lot more people buying midrange units, they just don't hardly ever seem to be reviewed.
Dude...why in the name of God are you looking at their feet? Hell my GF could be wearing clown shoes and I'd never know it, too busy enjoying how nicely she fills out her top or how her behind looks in the 501 jeans, I ain't wasting my time looking lower.
Hell I had to Google WTF a Birkenstock was because i pay so little attention to shoes I didn't have a clue..the brown loafer things, right? If she is looking good in them jeans and filling out that top nicely she can wear clodhoppers for all i care, but maybe its just because I ain't into feet. I know some guys are, nothing wrong with that, just not my thang if you know what I mean.
And don't forget when their feet hurt? they tend to get bitchy. I'd MUCH rather her feet not hurt and not catch the overflow than have her wear fuck me pumps and hear half the night how bad its killing her ankles.
Actually she tends to prefer more of a southwestern thing which with her being Cherokee I can understand and think looks quite nice. Speaking of pink when I first moved into my apt one of the first things she did when she spent the weekend was say 'Who in the hell decided a pink tiled bathroom was a good idea?" and immediately went about trying to draw your eyes AWAY from the pink tile with decorations.
As for the guy that said not being able to cook is like not being able to swim? So sue me, i live in a college town with a bazillion different kinds of takeout and if it doesn't come out of a nuker you are SOL when it comes to me. As for grilling? Depends on where we are, if we are up at her relatives her nephew usually does the grilling, he has a really nice grill and spends so much time using the thing everything always comes out perfect, and if we are at home I'll bring some beer and let the super do it, he makes a mean homemade BBQ sauce and has 3 BBQ grills he'll get going on nice weekends out behind the building so if you bring him a 6 pack he'll be happy to throw your burgers or dogs or whatever on there with his.
The closest i get to grilling is a "hobo BBQ" where you dig a pit and build a fire until you have a nice pile of coals, then you wrap everything in foil and bury it with the coals for a few hours. Kinda hard to fuck that one up.
Exactly and this is one of the reasons that while I don't personally care for the UI of IE I can say compared to Chrome and Firefox the new IE? Really not bad, and they do seem to be actually listening to users on this unlike other projects i can mention (Cough..Metro Sucks..Cough) so frankly who gives a rat's ass if some advertisers can't go Big Brother on us?
Riddle ME this...how many have gotten any "targeted advertising" that was worth a fuck? i don't know about everyone else but the ONLY thing their shitty targeted advertising seems to be good at is showing me things I USED to want several months ago, nothing close to what I'm looking for now. Hell I still get tons of netbook ads...ummm advertisers? Bought my netbook two years ago, quite happy with it, don't need another one. Meanwhile I'm researching SSDs planning to snatch one after the holidays, do I see a single ad for SSDs? Even when just to test i left all adblocking off for nearly a week while going to review after review of SSDs? Nope ALL I saw was laptops, netbooks, and graphics cards, things I was looking at over a year ago and haven't looked for since.
So I just don't see a damned point in it and now block ALL ads unless the site makes a pledge not to show me flashy soundbyte blasting ads, then and ONLY then will i unblock. All these targeted ads are frankly worse when they just guessed based on whatever site you were on, at least when they'd show me random tech when i was on a tech site they'd occasionally show me something I might actually want to buy. With targeted ads its like "hey, remember what you were looking for last year? Well even though you don't want it now here ya go!"...wow...thanks for nothing.
Ya know that is something I have NEVER understood...what is it with women and shoes? my GF has a closet full of the things but if it covers my feet and doesn't have holes? i'm a happy camper. I'll never forget soon after we got together we were gonna spend a nice weekend afternoon hitting the little flea markets, she likes looking for decorations and i like finding cool tech junk like flight sticks cheap, when she practically came unglued when i came out of my apt because my shoes had velcro tops. I just thought they were comfortable and didn't care but she was like "My BF is NOT wearing grandpa shoes!" and the next thing i know we are at the shoe store for a good hour while she found me a pair of "weekend shoes" as she called them...okay.
I'll just never understand why anyone would care about what covers their feet as long as they are comfortable. A couple of my guy friends were like "Yo bro, you should have said you were keepin them velcros!" and I was like...why? Why would I give a rat's ass one way or another what kind of fucking shoe is on my feet if they are comfortable? If she is trying to drag me to see some Notebook style chick flick THAT is when to say "Oh HELL no!" but footwear? Who gives a crap?
Besides...isn't that what your woman is for? before any ladies start throwing shit at me the average guy knows we have no taste especially when it comes to clothes and since most women want their men not to look...well like bachelor slobs, are happy to do that task. The same thing at least to me when it comes to food, my GF likes to cook and likes variety, and she knows i can burn water and my idea of breakfast is pizza from the night before so she decides what we are gonna have and i'm happy to go along with it.
So if you have a partner why not actually...well...have a partnership on such things? She gets to be in charge of things she does better than me, food and clothes and what the place looks like as far as decoration, i get to be in charge of things she doesn't care about like tech, and we agree to disagree when it comes to things like music. Works great for us and I don't have to worry about wasting time with things i don't care about and she doesn't have to go "You aren't seriously going out looking like THAT are you?" so its a win/win in my book.
But if they only accepted reviews from ones that bought from them they'd frankly be giving up a lot of good honest reviews...well like mine actually. i buy CPUs and components from Amazon, NewEgg, TigerDirect, and a couple of little chip shops like StarMicro and once i've put a chip through its paces i tend to post a review to all of the above, why? Well because I don't buy many of the highest end chips and those and the bottom of the line chips are the only ones the review sites ever seem to test so I've found a lot of times those middle chips, your MOR chips, simply don't get really tested or reviewed and since that's the chips I use the most I review them.
I've not seen a dime from any of the above, hell neither they nor the CPU manufacturers have ever even given me a fricking t-shirt, but it'd always bug the shit out of me when i'd go looking for info on a chip or board and find there were ONLY reviews for the uber hot or the uber cheap, nothing in the middle, so I like to think I'm helping out all the guys like me that use those chips. I'll encode a couple of videos, run a few games, maybe use a benchmarking test or two and post what i find and from all the positives I've gotten i guess there are others like me looking for this info but if the only sites I was allowed to post to were the ones that I had bought that particular chip from? Well then a lot of those hunting for that info wouldn't find it, as chips for example seem to stay on Amazon longer than they do NewEgg or TigerDirect.
So you can't really judge only by whether they've bought from that site or not, you really need to look at the review as a whole and see if it and the poster's history is generally unbiased and thoughtful. If a poster has a history its really not hard to look at their reviews and see whether there is a pattern or not. I can understand that requirement from like hotel booking sites though, that is such a specialized niche that it really wouldn't be too hard to game that system whereas so many people buy chips that if someone like me was posting totally false info it wouldn't take long for someone to post "That's not what I'm seeing from the same chip" and get the post modded down appropriately.
That's why I like the reviews on geek sites like NewEgg and even Amazon, its pretty easy to spot the actual owners and users and weed out the shills. Hell on my reviews on Amazon I've even had several nice back and forth conversations where someone will ask about this feature or that, or want to know what i thought of something like the TDP of a chip or how well it performed some task and I was happy to answer and even run benches or tests, whereas the shills are just gushing and glossing over any problems the average user might have.
This is why I tell folks looking at reviews to take everything they see with a LARGE grain of salt, because until there is an actual community built up where they can respond to shills and sorta self police the place you can't really trust anything you read. Worse you get sites that as you say actively engage in shilling and trolling for dollars where everything there is bought and paid for, those sites I consider beyond worthless and we geeks should be quick to point those out to everyone around us.
Remember guys WE are the ones the normals look to for advice, we the geeks of the world, its our duty to try to steer the normals away from the bad and toward the good because they just aren't jaded cynical bastards like we are and are easier to dupe.
According to posters at Neowin yep and a Google search shows several posts at sites owned by them with the same text so I'm thinking...yeah we might ought to be looking for another geek site to hang our hats as the last thing the world needs is another EnGadget or Gawker where only corporate approved postings are allowed. If they could do something about Thom and his biases OSNews is pretty geeky but not up to /. standards, but if the Dice crap becomes SOP here I'll have no choice but move on, not dealing with corporate censorship.
Damn, you just hate to see a site go down the shitter like that. I agree we'll need official confirmation but if this is policy frankly with all the differing opinions here it won't take long before we'll see that text more often if its corporate policy. if it is? Then so long Slashdot and thanks for all the fish.
Actually there are a ton of fan sites still talking about how the Newton was great but that Jobs HAD to kill the Newton because he already had the idea for the iPod/iPad. If you refuse to believe your lying eyes? that's fine by me but I'd point out there is ONLY ONE OTHER PRODUCT that gets people literally camping out and even hiding in dumpsters trying to get one on release....and that is the Air Jordan.
Now are you gonna sit there and tell me how the Jordans are insanely good products? Or are you gonna accept its fashion that makes it uncool to be having last year's Jordans on your feet just as its uncool to be carrying last year's iPad?
What I wouldn't give to be a reporter standing in front of one of those lines on release day, i'd kill to hear a reporter talk to these people and ask them questions like "What makes this product better than the one in your hand? What does the new one do that the one in your hand don't?" because you and i BOTH know they would have NO answer to that, in the end it'd be because its just like this cartoon, kinda sad even the cartoonist can see it but you can't. Still got that little niggler on your shoulder telling you that you paid too much? Don't worry go to some of the fan sites and they'll drown out that little niggler talking about what an incredible device the iFoo 6 is over the iFoo 5 which is inferior in every way.
Uhhh since we were talking about pads and WinRT I thought it would be obvious that is what is being discussed. Sure Win 8 X86 runs X86 code, although I think Metro is gonna bomb on the desktop, but the thing MSFT just seems to refuse to accept is that people don't buy Windows because MSFT gives them a warm fuzzy like Apple does, they buy it to run Windows X86 code which makes WinRT? Totally fucking pointless and beyond retarded to put the Windows name on.
They should have spun off the Metro division, so they wouldn't have the constant "You gotta tie everything to Windows and Office" PHBs breathing down their necks, and the ONLY connects between them should have been a focus on easy of connectivity between Windows, Metro, Office, and Xbox. As it is it'll be just like I saw a few years back when a local retailer was selling these "Windows tablets" that were WinCE. The average customer doesn't know ARM from leg and got them home and when they found it wouldn't run their Windows software? they were returned en masse. the shop ended up taking a bath on the things and after a few retailers take a bath on winRT the word will get around and these things won't be found anywhere but the MSFT stores, where nobody will buy them after the MSFT floor people explain it won't run their Windows software. Stupid.
I've tried 'em, don't like 'em. yeah they come close but a 128bit pipe vs a 256bit pipe and when push comes to shove that 256bit pipe can just keep all those cores fed better, worth the extra 30w IMHO.
Damned shame you don't live somewhere where they deliver, or don't have a bud that lives where they deliver so he could just pass it on, because both cards are pretty insane values when you look at the amount of raw GPU power VS what you pay, its just nuts. Now for non gaming jobs the HD4770 rocks your socks off, i have a customer running the latest Solidworks on one and no matter how intricate his engineering gets it never chokes, he can spin and manipulate the living hell out of everything for his customers with a Phenom I X3 CPU and it NEVER stutters or skips, just great for that task, but in really heavy games like Just Cause II or the Crysis series I'll take the 256bit pipe. That's why in another year when Geeks has the HD6850s at the same price I'll swap up, after going 256bit I just can't go back to 128bit.
But it really shouldn't be surprising they still make 'em, after all Nvidia still makes the 8600 chips. they are mature, have high yields, and do most everything your average user wants them to do at a VERY cheap price point, its a win/win. Like I said we all game our butts off and neither me nor the boys have a single complaint about our HD4850s, they play in those huge MMOs like LOTRO and no matter how huge the raiding gets they don't skip, and I'm playing Crysis and sandboxes like SR 3 and JC2 and no matter how much exploding death i spray across the screen its all above 30 FPS and smooth as butter, couldn't be happier and well worth the extra 30 watts.
But its still a BAD idea and the reason is because in games and multimedia the extra load of doing BOTH all the onscreen drawing, resizing, and buffering AND having to do all the FP work is gonna just be deep fried assholes as far as performance goes. remember we are already SEVERELY constrained when it comes to badwidth between the APU and memory, you have both the CPU and the GPU fighting over the same bus for memory, and you are gonna add FP work on top of an already stretched to the max bus?
Its retarded and the ONLY place it will work is in small laptop where you simply aren't gonna be doing anything heavier than watching The Avengers in 1080p. We've been down this road before, with dumping more and more on the CPU, and always the memory ends up a seriously bad bottleneck simply because you can't put enough traces on a board to feed the chip. Hell even on the weaker chips like Brazos and Liano we are seeing that, where OCing the memory can give you a 20%+ performance boost simply because all the bottlenecking is in the memory while the CPU/GPU is stuck waiting on data, its just stupid.
Intel can do this because they know their APUs will not be used for anything but playing The Avengers at 1080p, they are office chips NOT gamer chips but with AMD's lower IPC the only real selling point they have is gaming and they are slitting their own throats with this design. They should have kept Bulldozer in the server room where integer heavy code is king, kept the weaker FP units in Bobcat where nobody is gaming, and had strong FP in Liano and their replacement for Thuban where they could still tout gaming performance. Look up ANY reviews of their APUs and you'll see you simply can't feed the GPU cores enough memory, this is why you end up with framerates worse than a $20 HD5450, because you just can't feed the chip enough memory to really be useful. Dumb, stupid, retarded...sadly this has been words that describe AMD pretty well since Faildozer came out and this is coming from someone who sells AMD exclusively, but I'm sticking with Thuban until something truly better comes out.
Not to mention if they actually NEEDED tech support, why not just contact someone locally, where they could meet them face to face? Hell if they have Win 7 most of us little shops will be happy to set up a time and do a remote session so they don't have to bring the unit in, its actually one of my more popular services with the older folks as they don't want to have to unhook everything. I just sit there on the phone with them and walk them through starting a remote session and then while I'm in control of their desktop they can tell me what the problem is and even take over the mouse and show me what its doing. Things like realigning printer heads and running test pages, some website they like isn't loading, browser troubles, sound issues, I can do it all from my nice comfy chair and they don't have to deal with a tear down and dragging it to the shop, its a win/win.
I never did understand why someone would trust their computer, with all their pics and docs and private stuff, to some guy halfway across the planet. I'm personally quite proud of the fact i have no damned clue what is in my customers docs folders, its not my job to snoop, its my job to fix the problem and hand it back. I always looked at repair like being a plumber, its my job to fix the sink not go through their underwear drawers, but the fact that someone will just hand control to somebody they've never met halfway across the planet is just insane. Hell I don't care if the guy really WAS from MSFT or Google or fricking Tigerdirect, if I can't see the guy in person I'm sure as hell not gonna trust him with my computer.
Yes but as we have seen here its usually pretty easy to spot the difference between pissed off consumers and astroturf and shilling. If a company is providing shitty service? Well there will be plenty of people bitching, nothing in the world folks love more than to bitch, but if its just one or two and they have very similar language and tone and feel? Yeah probably written by the same guy or from a script.
As a small town retailer I know all about how a bad rep can bury you, but if you were to find every single person that had ever been unhappy with my work? you'd have one hand, maybe two hands to count them on if you were lucky. But if you wanted to talk to people that were perfectly happy with my work and wouldn't mind recommending me to friends and family and often do? I could fill up the local HS gym easily.
You will ALWAYS have a few customers that frankly you just can't please, such as the idiot that demanded I give him a new PC after he ignored everything I told him, removed ALL security features and antivirus and promptly installed malware, all because he simply refused to accept that Limewire didn't exist anymore. if you could find an .exe labeled "Limewire" on the net, even if the icon was a fricking Goatse, well that was proof that Limewire still existed and you were supposed to magically make Limewire work again. But it should be pretty easy to spot a "bad customer" and tell them from someone trolling for SEO cash.
Too bad, your loss as I've been buying kits and parts from them for several years now without a hassle one. The few times they did fuck up an order it was all "We're really sorry and here is an RMA" and I got credit for any shipping that I paid, hell they even told me to just keep a brand new board once when they screwed up and sent a 65w board instead of the 95w board that I needed, they next day delivered me a new 95w board and just told me to keep the 65w as an apology. I ended up using that to build a new PC for my GF so I ended up having to buy some more parts from them to fill it out, but I thought that was a nice touch and other than the board not being the right wattage it was actually a nice board.
So maybe you ought to sign up for their sales flyers or emails and try them again on some small things to see how they go for you. I was just like you in the late 90s when their service was piss poor but they really straightened up. Plus you gotta like anybody who'll sell you a quad kit for just $270 and unlike NewEgg I've never had a bit of trouble getting my rebates back from tiger. I've got no less than 6 desktops in my family counting my GF and ALL were built from Tiger kits and we all couldn't be happier. So maybe its time to give them another go?
Plus you can get the HD4850 Lonewolf, which STILL just chews through games like Just Cause II, Cryisis 1&2 and Saints Row 3 for just $40 new and that's for 800 stream processors, a 256bit pipe, and easy OCing in Catalyst if you want to bump it up even higher. I have one exactly like the pic and it came from the shop with a "turbo boost" setting of 625Mhz GPU/993MHz memory over the stock 500/750 and since this only kicks in when i'm slamming the card it runs quite nicely without getting insanely hot.
So if you'd like a pretty damned powerful GPU for just dirt cheap i'd highly recommend. As I said I put me and both my boys on these, they tear through the latest games at our monitors 1600x900 with plenty of bling and just $40? Hell you can't even buy a halfass midrange card for that, its a no brainer.
Works just fine in Windows, I'm running HD4850s in mine and the boys PCs, run just fine under Win 7 X64 and since they have squeezed every drop of horsepower they can out of the chip already I honestly don't care if the drivers are put into legacy now or not.
Hell I've been using AMD GPUs in my builds for nearly 5 years now and the ONLY problem I ever saw was back when they used .NET for the CCC occasionally .NET would bork itself with an update and you couldn't launch the CCC, though the drivers worked just fine.
so I don't see what everyone bitches about, I've used Nvidia, I've used AMD, unless you are using either company's beta drivers (which if you are running beta drivers you know what you're getting into) the drivers from BOTH companies have been pretty damned solid.