Humanoid

Slightly confusing naming scheme but the 840 Pro > 830 > 840. Not a 4TB SSD as such, but a 4TB array of SSDs should only cost about $3000. Mmmmm.....

Well there was the incident, think it was with that Vertex 2, in which they switched to a slower NAND - on a smaller node to save costs - without telling anyone. To add insult to injury, changes to overprovisioning meant it had reduced capacity as well. It was only found out when users found speeds were significantly below those in prior reviews and did some digging to get to the bottom of it. Not so much a technical issue as much as business ethics.

RAM (and PSUs) you can just rebrand, but SSD controllers are in a completely different league, and to an extent it's not unfair to say that OCZ's engineers have been coming up a bit short in that regard. Still, we need to keep the big picture in mind in saying that one is still far more likely to not notice any problems no matter what product you pick - the scale of any issue is still far smaller than say, the notorious IBM Deathstars.

Spider Solitaire could be considered a new release if you count the Win8 version of it.

Damn those humans and their lack of respect for reaper intellectual property!

The links were to a PNY reference-cooler 670 and a Windforce 7950. For what it's worth, looked through all the 670s on NCIX and the cheapest ones with custom coolers are the $330 MSI and the $340 Gigabyte. EDIT: The Windforce 7950 is $280 for comparison, and while there's a $260 XFX one with a custom cooler, I've heard disappointing reports of the XFX custom design. EDIT2: Looking at Newegg, their 670 pricing is rubbish so the candidates appear to be the Gigabyte 7950 from NCIX for $280 (after rebate, no bundle?*), the Sapphire 7950 from Newegg for $290 (after rebate, bundled games) and the Gigabyte 7950 from Newegg for $300 (no rebate, bundled games). * While there's no note on the item listing on NCIX, a googling of "Never settle bundle NCIX" does show that they're part of the scheme, so I'm not sure whether it's active for the particular card or not - might be worth contacting them to see whether that's the case.

No experience with stores on that side of the pond so no idea how that kind of thing works normally - there's no real culture of vendor cashbacks or coupon options over here. Pretty hard to say no to three new release games for $10 of course.

Yeah - not a fan of the stock reference "blower" type coolers from either nV or AMD. That Gigabyte custom cooler is a pretty good one, as far as factory-installed ones go.

Only one real choice at $300, and that's a HD7950 as the competitor product at the same price point is a fair bit behind. If you're inclined towards nVidia then the only realistic option is ponying up another ~$50 for a GTX670, which performs much the same, so less value but can be argued for.

I'm not familiar with much FR stuff myself, but I know that the first release was the "grey box" edition, and so a quick googling of what's purportedly the map that came with that edition reveals it's been there since that first commercial release - http://www.mimbral.c.../9279/frmap.jpg As to when Greenwood introduced it into his campaign ....well. EDIT: Ninjaed.

Is it possible that all the (minor) issues are just smoke and mirrors and that the problem was that they had judged your wife from day one due to her background as a showgirl (amongst other things)? Followed then by ten years of actively trying to find faults because of that pre-judgement? I say this because of your comment about bible verses and such - while not necessarily an indicator of their conservatism or even prudishness, it may be that the deck was loaded from the start.

After the first month or two of "oh shiny new stuff", Alien Crossfire is something I always put away for the occasional novelty game. Finally getting to play Righteous Fire again on the other hand without my CD is great. Sale's been slim pickings this time around though due to essentially having all that I genuinely want - heck, I was even thinking about picking up outright rubbish like MM9 due to there being nothing else that drew my eye. Might pick up the Daedalic pack which is today's special due to the various posts praising Deponia above, but no idea what the other stuff in the pack is about.

I never had a 3dfx card, my first 3D accelerator was actually an nVidia, heh - their first serious effort, the Riva128, which replaced my S3 VirgeDX. It was faster than a Voodoo1, but made some terrible tradeoffs in terms of image quality, most noticeable in the primitive dithering of greys, which looked mostly like white with black pepper applied to it. Fortunately they managed to turn it around, and with the TNT/2, overtook 3dfx by virtue of doing 32-bit colour just about as fast as the Voodoo3 could do 16-bit colour. Also on topic, and by a sort of coincidence, I see the Antec ISK300/310 case that I want is also out of stock in most reputable stores. Am in no rush to build my miniITX system since I have other ongoing projects (such as building two road bikes) but I did want to try to get the parts while I'm on holidays in Melbourne.

One factor in the loyalty of a non-trivial subset of customers is likely whether they were affected by nVidia's "bumpgate" - an systematic engineering flaw to do with thermal cycling that took a good while to be fixed (or even admitted to) that caused a large range of their chips to degrade and fail unusually fast. I had a 7900GT fail in this manner, and a similar-generation notebook GPU that would have almost certainly suffered the same fate (based on reports from owners of the same chip) if that notebook wasn't stolen. This problem also spawned the vaguely comedic, but effective notion that you could bake your video cards in the oven to fix them. It did sort of work as a stopgap, restoring function for a few months at a time perhaps, if you were comfortable with the idea of having toxic chemicals at high temperatures sitting in your oven. Fortunately there's been no problems of that magnitude for either vendor since then, a good 4-5 years ago now, so fairly comfortable going either way. Personally I weigh price:performance but the price side of the equation is inclusive of third party cooling since I'm yet to find factory cooling I would remotely label as satisfactory in terms of noise in any recent product.

Christmas means my semi-annual trip back to Melbourne to see family. Not so much for the occasion itself, but because unlike me, they don't tend to have flexible holidays that we can sync up any other time of the year. Typically a shopping trip on the 27th to get belated (and frequently silly) Christmas presents - we're all the type to avoid crowds - and besides that, not much due to the typical 35-45C degree days around this time of year. Some classic movies, multiplayer console games, that kind of thing mostly. No specific foods we associate with Christmas - except maybe some stollen - I'm guessing it'll be probably something like a regular BBQ for dinner on Christmas day. Oh, parents will probably go to the church service in the morning while I sleep in - they're mildly devout Christians, I'm not religious, and my siblings are somewhere in between. It's never something that gets in the way in any situation, fortunately.

Haha, well my definition of opening is rather broad, but I'd say up until it's established *why* you have to go to Mars - at which point the game has established these points: - Earth is the most important place in the galaxy! Go tell the other races their home worlds are expendable and that they should help us - this is by far my biggest beef with the set up of the game. - A kid died! You're now emotionally traumatised! - We're totally going to mount a resistance movement against the reapers, using infantry! - The MacGuffin was something we had access to all along ....on Mars! (But no one's bothered reading it until our blue space-babe buddy decides to go through the volumes of material alone) - Cerberus is the strongest military force in the Galaxy! (okay, I admit this point doesn't quite get fully established during the Mars mission, but it builds up improbably until they somehow take over the Citadel) Maybe that's nitpicking, but I don't feel it is. Nitpicking would be complaining about the stuff like the silly "We fight or we die!" speech, the Reaper opting to blow up the oven-mitt cars instead of the Normandy, the cable car rail mine - but that's stuff that the prior instalments did no better at. EDIT: Expanding a bit on the primary gripe, I'll draw a comparison between the setup of ME3 and that of DA:O. DA:O's opening is something I've criticised repeatedly for undermining player agency. Yes, I object to my character being conscripted into being a Warden, but at the same time I recognise that at least fighting off baby-eating abominations is still a rather sensible course of action, so that I can give it a pass, although just barely. Shepard's initial goal in ME3 is none of those things - it's not sensible, practical or in any way justifiable in the gameworld logic that Earth should be the sole staging point that the whole galaxy should rally around. Indeed the game's depiction of the relative situations in the various homeworlds tend to show that Earth, which is putting up far worse of a fight than the other locations you visit, should be the first domino to be allowed to fall. Even if you were playing Shepard as a super space-racist who believes that goal is the correct one, there's no way you should be able to get the other races to fall in line with that viewpoint.

An on-topic post! Burn it! Couldn't say anything about the last few days of posts because Star Wars is not something I know - I've still yet to watch any of the movies in full - so therefore something I can't whinge about. ME on the other hand.... well if I had to pick "what has annoyed me the most" it'd be the ME3 opening, *not* the ending, because from a personal perspective, that's where any interest remaining in the property finally keeled over and sank into the icy depths.

Only ever played it once (not meant to be a slight on it), so it'd be assured that it's been a decade or more since I last played it. Heck, I completely forgot about the existence of that crystal room with the genie shown just then. >.>

One thing I noticed is the UI elements were all stretched and weird. Only two years between them, but it's interesting to see how ME has aged, technologically at least, so much better than JE. I've only played the tutorial, several months ago, and haven't really had the urge to pick it back up since then.

I quit early this year and haven't had even the slightest urge to come back, and as I recall I've been playing slightly longer than you have. That Annual Pass thing was a clever ploy, fortunately as someone with no interest in D3 I could avoid being tied up. Hypothetically, if I were to even try to come back, I think the attempt would burn out pretty quickly - my old guild, co-founded in 2007, no longer has the critical mass to even regularly do ten-person content: at its peak in 2008-2010, it was a fully fledged 25-person raiding guild. I have neither any inclination to attempt to rebuild (having quit any leadership roles at the end of LK) nor any drive to find a new home - which, aside, would involve paying the extortionate server transfer fee multiple times over as the old guild was the sole Australian/SEA guild on that US-Pacific time server. $250 to transfer them all? Good god.

They're closer to the goal than Hero-U was at the same stage of the project I think? In terms of percentage and not in absolute dollars however. Pretty sure they'll make it, though none of the cash is mine, yet.

No personal experience, but obviously sounds like you want the e-ink versions instead of the hybrid reader/tablet versions like the Kindle Fire or Nook HD which use regular LCD screens. The former being easier on the eye, being made for purpose (that is, extended viewing of text only), while forsaking other types of media. While various e-book vendors have differing file formats, you can use the free Calibre software to convert them, making it a non-issue. (But yes, Amazon does the mobi/azw format as opposed to the open epub format, though they provide a conversion tool)

Watched Ingmar Bergman's 1955 Smiles of a Summer Night. First Bergman I've seen in years, so it felt odd to come back to what is essentially a rom-com, but hey. Though I can't see why it made Time's 100 movies list, it was fun, particularly Eva Dahlbeck's performance. In the meantime, picked up a five film box set of Bergman's earlier work which I will work my way through. Aside, I'm still waiting on a Barnes and Noble order of twenty Criterion Collection movies from their early November sale to come through, they've always been slow but this time even moreso. Not that I'm short on stuff to watch, but still, there's a few titles in that bunch I'd like to prioritise.

If anything, Game Company Executive should be the top level node of the Criminal career path. :D

See, not having grouped in any serious way, I already had too much trouble keeping up with them, so yeah, just illustrates the problem further. And at the risk of droning on too much about WoW (a game I haven't played in some time now), a simple mod like the popular NeedToKnow surely couldn't be seen to be damaging gameplay in any reasonable way. All something like this does is change the display of various statuses from a tiny square with a hard-to-see radial grey overlay to a simple horizontal bar that you can place where it's most comfortable to view. In an attempt to stamp out the more extreme edge cases (like the infamous AVR, which allowed you to draw simple geometric objects directly onto the gameworld and broadcast it to your group) that the WoW API allowed for (or at least used to), they've wiped out the simple quality-of-life mods like the former. Good point on the prevalence of group quests too - fortunately they're strictly optional (the nature of repeatable quests, of which they all are), although the point is not communicated to the player all that well. The story development in them tends to be tangential to whatever you're currently doing, and is usually pretty trivial, so you don't miss out on much in that regard, but a side-effect tends to be that skipping them will end up in you doing the "bonus" lines later on to catch up.