Zoraptor

Well could argue it is, external server is as bad as your own. Is a fun situation for types like Pence harping on about integrity or justice or whatever moralizing hill they want to shoot from. Eh, don't think you really can. It's comparing the governor of a fairly unimportant state- with appropriate apologies to any Indiana natives- with the country's Secretary of State when it comes to things like email security expectations. In terms of civilian positions SoS is top 3? in terms of the security that is required and it's a massive deal if their correspondence is being read by 3rd parties, I'd doubt Governor Pence would come close to cracking the top 100 (and likely not even the top 1000) on the importance level. There's also the other Hillary baggage, like archiving avoidance and it being potentially outright illegal for her to have the server. Pence seems to have been nothing other than typical Internet Grandad dumb, it's pretty easy to argue that Hillary was considerably worse than merely dumb, as well as being in a more important job.

Is anyone really surprised that Pence uses AOL? Hardly seems equivalent in any way to Hillary's situation.

Used to like RPS, and Tim Stone's Flare Path was absolutely brilliant for strategy/ simulation stuff even when it was on subjects I'd normally have no interest in. Got heartily sick of their political stuff though, and of the newer writers the only one I liked was Adam Smith.

Low level archery was semi useful for kiting, and that's it. [actually it was useful if you could get into an inaccessible position and snipe as well, that just took ages but for most enemies was zero risk] As people get older their capacity and will to respond to people who are WRONG! diminishes noticeably? Realistically, you're not going to get as much of a reaction for a game that is 15 years old whether it's negative or positive. You also tend to get more new gen gamers who think that Oblivion and Mass Effect are classic RPGs and can't handle a Gothic at all as time goes on. I've seen plenty of criticism for BG2 as well recently, and 10 years ago it was pretty much gold standard.

For RPG news RPGWatch is the best, Gamebanshee a bit behind. Codex really ain't for news anyway. Anyone who takes things seriously is better off avoiding it since it'll just raise the blood pressure.

Yeah, benchmarks are all over the place. 50% variance over what seems to be the same test from two different sites seems... extreme, and presumably (presumably) the higher value is more indicative of what can be expected with stable/ optimised hardware. Some benchmarks even put the 1800x worse than Vishera which seems highly unlikely. The R5 should be far better value for money in games anyway (still won't beat a 7700k often though). For productivity it looks very competitive vs the 6900K so far as price performance goes since it has close performance at less than half the 6900k's price. Plenty of ammunition for both Intel and AMD fanboys there.

Plus engineering sample MB and CPU, which means they may differ significantly from release models. Or may not, no real way to tell until 12 hours time or whatever. Since some of the slides have Farsi on them I'd guess they're older ES, but that's a guess. I really wouldn't be expecting an R7 to beat a 7700k in many current games and whatever the set up, though it probably will beat it for most future games that take advantage of more cores. The R5s ought to be better than an R7 for most current games as well.

So it's true to PST, then. The actual end sequence of PST was fantastic (so long as you didn't spend ages fighting the shadows and just ran for the wotsits). Probably the best I've played of any game as it fit so very well. The Curst to Fortress section was certainly worse than the rest of the game though.

The current Broadwell E varieties don't have an iGPU either. But like that 5820k was they're also comparatively expensive and decidedly workstation/ top tier enthusiast orientated. I've always found Intel's semi obsession with integrated graphics to be strange, especially so on anything not aimed at corporate McBoxes or laptops. Suppose they're useful if your main graphics card packs up or if you want to buy a dedicated GPU later, but I don't imagine that fits into Intel's thoughts too much.

None in that long list of reviews are lower tier? InXile/ Techland had a list of tier 1 websites that they'd be bothered dealing with and lower tier websites they wouldn't be bothered with- that came out when they cancelled an interview with the Codex- so early review copies probably indicates tier 1 status pretty well. Irony being that a lot of the tier 2 websites like the Codex, GameBanshee or RPGWatch would at least get fundamental stuff like name of the company making the game correct. They might duplicate a list of reviews though, making it appear twice as long as it is, and have scores like 80/10 snuck in there as well. Basically I'm being snarky because I'd rate a review from any of those 3 sites I named better than the vast majority of the sites on that list. Not that it matters, since I backed the game anyway.

I doubt that Intel will be gutted, they're too big and have a large war chest with plenty of scope for price cutting to induce competitiveness. Same as nobody got fired for buying IBM nobody will get fired for buying Intel and their brand recognition is very high, as are their contacts/ PR. They'll definitely lose a lot of the highish end workstation and enthusiast/ gaming market though, and both pretty quickly*; and their days of price gouging are over which will hurt their bottom line a lot. Casual retail and a lot of beige box corporate stuff will probably stay staunchly Intel though. End of the day, AMD had some solid years with superior processors in the 2000s, and didn't really get rewarded for it then. If AMD can get a killer laptop chip out there for cheap Intel may be in real trouble though, their i5/i7 (2 core i7? hmm) branding there is terrible and a low draw Ryzen based APU even with 460 level graphics would be trouble. That's still months off though, assuming they'd use R3s as the base. Peripheral, but Vega press conference today as well. *We're already getting shops trying to unload Broadwell-E quickly here- got an email last night for 68__X systems with a $400 price cut- as that platform looks near dead at current price point.

Oddly enough I found the combat in 3 far superior to 2. Two was almost completely repetitive and very plink plink especially on high difficulty (which wasn't, really, high difficulty- it just took far longer to kill the enemies exactly the same way instead of being more challenging) while 3 actually was more difficult and had some enemies that were properly challenging as opposed to just being popamole bullet sponges. Hated the change to contextual control for cover etc though, made it far too easy to jump barriers rather than go behind them.

You know what they say, without IGN you can't spell ignorant. Guess that's tier 1 gaming websites for you. I'll decide what I think of the game when the lower tier web reviews come out.

It's a drop down menu after pledge/ reward/ redeem key, and it defaults to blank so it would be pretty difficult to stuff up.

Have to say that Bioware's choice of voice actor for Daddy Lawson was spot on, even if their face scan of Strahotski was... slightly reminiscent of a waxwork in an overly warm room. And while I'm hardly an SJW, Bioware's obsession with Miranda's butt at best verged on being creepy. I just don't get the appeal. From Bioware's perspective Fox News 'controversy' incoming--> free publicity. Won't even be fake news this time around, it seems. From the buyer's perspective, well, I guess some people don't know about certain, uh, specialist sites that already feature Mass Effect characters. [triggered]

IIRC the boy was 12 when the relationship started, he was 14 when it was discovered/ she was prosecuted. Not that that invalidates the rest of the post of course, it rather reinforces it.

To be fair, the 480 was exactly where AMD said it would be- around 390-/x level. Well, apart from PCIe power draw, at least. People got over hyped by things like its async compute scores which were always going to be better than nVidia as their cards are crap at that, same as nVidia would murder AMD cards at tesselation. So long as people keep their expectations reasonable and accept that there will be limitations and problems with a new launch the hype train should not derail. Then again, while beating the 7700k in single threaded in a like-for-like (ie not overclocked 1800x on very good cooling in a top line MB vs stock 7700k in a low cost B or H MB) test is not a reasonable expectation given the Ryzen has twice the cores I've seen an awful lot of people who suddenly think that ST performance is the paramount factor in choosing a chip and that cores/ threads are unimportant around the net lately. Fanboys gonna fan, for both sides.

Turks/ rebels captured Al Bab a day or so ago, though it seems that ISIS retreated more than anything- probably to defend the far more important Raqqa from the SDF (Kurds+allies). What Turkey does next will be interesting, since it will probably determine whether Raqqa falls in the next six months or gets a reprieve while the SDF fight Turkey instead. Erdogan has a referendum to win in his quest to make himself emperor, so he has to balance the nationalist/ religious agenda against the negatives lots of body bags could result in, plus whether it's worth annoying the US significantly (probably a vote winner in itself, though most of the people who like that idea already vote for him anyway).

The investment funds help a lot. Looks like it will be around 50/50 funding from investors and 'genuine' crowdfunding, if it were crowdfunding alone it would be a lot less than P(o)E and there are less than half the number of backers. Paypal/ backer site will probably help a fair bit since many people do dislike Fig. Have to say, I did find some aspects of the PoE2 pitch rather odd. The world map and boat stuff seems very similar to Risen 2/3 with some additional 'base building', which aren't exactly the most popular of models amongst the target audience. And part of the latest stretch goal seems to be straight out of Stardew Valley (!)- again, not something I'd really expect.

I liked ME3 well enough, albeit it isn't much of an RPG, but Andromeda has a lot of red flags on it. It seems to know what it wants to be as a game even less than ME3, or even Inquisition (disclaimer, haven't played DAI, so going by commentary). A Gears of War/ relationship simulator combination with open world elements? Sounds like it has been designed by committee to appeal to the maximum number of people- and as a near inevitable consequence to appeal to none of them well.

R5 chips are now slated for Q2, R3 for 2nd half of 2017. On the positive side though at 500NZD* for a 1700 the 8 cores are within budget and I could even stretch to an X model if pressed despite having to buy a custom cooler as well. Depends if the old computer carks it soon or not. I was expecting at least $100 more for the CPU given our tech prices are usually inflated massively compared to US. *about $50 less than it 'should' be given the US price, after currency conversion and 15% GST so a very good deal.

It isn't ideological for me- I've been happy with all the Intel processors I've used and if Intel offered a better product at a better price I would still buy from them. Doesn't look like they will though, and I certainly don't have so much loyalty to Intel that I'd buy a worse product just for the brand. The feeling that they should have been offering better products for less certainly doesn't help, but that is the only ideological part. OTOH my attitude towards nVidia probably is ideological- I'd actively avoid their products if possible and would have bought a 480 over a 1060 even when the 1060 appeared to be better value. That that would have been a good decision due to AMD's driver improvement would just reinforce the decision.

I've been extremely satisfied with my now ancient Core2Duo, it would play pretty much any game up until recently and has been 100% reliable for ten years. Could not have asked for more and it will get the electronic equivalent of burial with full honours (and repeated F pressing) when replaced. I've been less happy with Intel over that time though, they've mostly coasted on their advantage and a situation with no AMD competition would mean Skylake-> Kabylake type transitions where the improvements are... limited would be further encouraged. To be honest though, their products looked significantly overpriced/ under featured even before the Ryzen leaks, and now they don't (from the leaks at least) look competitive against the AMD offerings in terms of what I want- future proofing, with things like current game performance decidedly secondary. Ideally, I want a CPU that will last for another ten years, and I simply cannot see an Intel chip doing that as well as Ryzen at this point. It's basically the same situation with nVidia, was happy with their cards but not happy with their attitude, and bought AMD (and will again) since they'd support and improve them longer.

The main problem is that it's just plain old and fundamentally needs replacing. It's not always a bsd, that's shorthand for bsds, lockups, spontaneous reboots etc. It has always been finicky about the case, only other times I've had instability problems was when I cross threaded a case screw (!!, yes, that finicky) and when I lost a screw and did the case up without it- until I got a replacement off of an old case. Everyone I asked about it thought it was a weird problem as well, only explanation I ever got was that it might be the MB warping or the case tensioning/ straining it somehow.

Should be the plain 1700 there rather than the 1600X. Despite what AMD said it looks like a non full range release with the 6 core and 4 core processors being released later than March 2. I suspect the sweet spot for price/ performance/ longevity will be somewhere in the 6/12 range (I'm looking at the 1600X myself) so not having them available as soon is a bit disappointing. (My computer is currently in desktop configuration despite being a tower because the MB is warping and it blue screens if stood up or if the case lid is attached, it's getting to the point where even I have to accept an upgrade is absolutely necessary rather than nice in theory. Hurry up, AMD)