Humodour

1.9% of smartphones sold these days are Windows phones 7% of smartphones sold these days are Blackberries 23% of smartphones sold these days are iPhones 56% of smartphones sold these days are Android phones I think Android does interest casual users. Just because something is open source doesn't mean it isn't good for casual users. Do you use Firefox or Chrome or Libre Office, for instance?

Have a link? that could be worth picking up from the site if true. Haha, I kind of don't want to share the link since I believe they have limited stock. But whatever, sharing is caring. It's an Australian store, but that probably won't matter - might want to check though. http://www.catchoftheday.com.au/ I don't have the stomach for hardcore mode. I'd constantly be in fear of losing my character - it'd take all the fun out of it for me. Hardcore mode makes the game a lot more tactical and I think that translates to a lot more fun. If you play in hardcore mode from the outset, you quickly learn how to survive in it. It's a completely different mindset to playing in softcore, and the mistake people often make is thinking that they can do the same sorts of things in hardcore as they do in softcore. For example, rushing becomes a fairly bad idea.

Um, you don't like the Steam cloud? Do you even comprehend what it does, Blodhemn? I highly doubt it. The Steam cloud is an optional feature games can use to store your save games onto so that things like hard drive failure or switching to a different computer to play the game don't mean you have to start the game from scratch! Steam Cloud is even more beautiful when you realise that it means you can play your game from where you left off across DIFFERENT operating systems. Hate on it if you must, but voicing such a ridiculous opinion just devalues the rest of your post. I highly doubt Steam Cloud is intrusive to your Steam experience, given that you, personally, don't interact with it in any way - it's a passive service. You had a valid point with Steam annoyingly constantly trying to auto-update all games, and you ruined it with your throwaway line about the Steam Cloud. Your pointless whining becomes even sillier given that you can turn off the Steam Cloud easily in Steam settings. Now, I personally just prevent the autoupdate annoyance by going into offline mode, or pausing the game's update, or going to the game's settings and changing update frequency to 'manual' (and thus it won't ever update again until I tell it to - you could have done this with TF2). It would be nice to have a feature in Steam to set all games to update manually by default, that's for sure. As for alternatives to Steam - anybody who complains about Steam's monopoly with a straight face and then suggests EA's Origin as a good alternative is a smegging hypocrite. EA's Origin is the LAST thing you should be recommending over Steam if your concern is healthy competition. How about suggesting some real alternatives that actually will inspire healthy competition instead? Instead recommend that people use Good Old Games and Desura - two excellent digital game stores don't use DRM and don't see the customer as purely $ signs. Beyond that, you've got Direct2Drive, Impulse, and GamersGate. Green Man Gaming is also an interesting digital game store because it allows you to 'sell' back your purchased games once you're finished with them for store credit to buy new games with.

So my current Nokia N900 (runs Linux), as much as I love it, is nearing the end of its useful life. I got it in either 2008 or 2009. I can't recall. I wish I could say it is actually broken, but it's not, besides the headphone jack (despite throwing it at a wall in a drunken rage, and dropping it in goon twice, all years ago). But the screen is only 3.5 inches, and the Firefox browser struggles with YouTube playback because the processor is only 600 mHz. I'll keep it around as an excellent backup phone, and a phone to take overseas, but I want access to the Android ecosystem. I want to play Plants vs Zombies on my phone and have easy access to netbank via an app rather than a website. And that's the tip of the iceberg. So I want your thoughts on the best new Android phone to buy? I am seriously contemplating the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, at $400 AUD. It's got great reviews and root access is available by default. It doesn't have exapandable storage, though, and it is only dual-core instead of the quad-core of the Samsung Galaxy S3 (and while this may not matter at the moment, it might as developers produce more intensive apps in the coming years). I'm also concerned that developers developing for Android are going to make sure their apps work on the Galaxy S3 before anything else, since it's the flagship Android phone, and the Nexus may be a brief afterthought. I buy phones to last. So while the Nexus is great value at $400, I plan to still have my phone in 3-4 years time. So would paying the extra $400 for the Galaxy S3 (costing around $800 AUD) be worth it in light of that? P.S.: If you suggest I buy a ****ty iPhone or Windows Phone, I'll hate you forever.

Nokia is close to bankrupt, because they have no future in phones. They're spending literally billions (mostly in advertising) to try and build a future in phones with the Windows phones (Lumia), but it's not working, because people do not need a ****ty alternative to Android and iPhone and plastering Sydney with ads about how "great" the Lumias are won't change that. Meanwhile, Microsoft is also pouring its heart and soul into the Lumia Windows phones, because Microsoft, too, was too slow to enter the smartphone race, and sees its deal with Nokia to make all Nokia smartphones run on Windows Phone OS as its last chance. So if Nokia is about to go under, can anybody really see Microsoft just sitting around and taking it? I can't. Microsoft is still to this day pumping money into the Zune and Bing, even though they're haemorrhaging money. I imagine they'll buy Nokia outright if they have to, just to ensure Windows Phone OS still has a piece of the smartphone pie, however miniscule. http://technologyspe...serves-analysts

EA is a pretty disgusting company. It's sad to see Brian Fargo, somebody who has complained time and again about how Big Publishers are destroying the game industry, only to see him palsy up with them because they threw a little cash his way.

I do really recommend putting it together. You're intelligent Monte, so it would be well within your ability. And it's always nice to be able to add a new skill to the list, right? Plus, it's cheaper. Alienware is Dell's range of waaaay overpriced PCs. They're NOT worth it. It's like buying Apple. Still, if you're as lazy as I was last time I got a new PC, the Dell XPS range has worked out really well for me. For example, for 1000 pounds, you can get this: Intel

Diablo 3 is selling for $20 in 3 days for a few hours on an Australia discount website. If I can buy it then, I will. Otherwise it could be a loooong time before it ends up on my computer. But hey, if the game is as good as you guys claim it is, that shouldn't matter right? If it's as good as Diablo 1 and 2, lots of people will still be playing it online many years later.

I hear they're going to set part of it in Melbourne, Australia.

http://craphound.com/makers/download/ Download that book. Don't pay the author. Or do. Enjoy!

RAM (as main memory) will disappear. 'Secondary memory' will no longer be HDs or SSDs. It will be MRAM. Because of this, the concept of 'paging' algorithms will be redundant and fall by the wayside. The I/O bottleneck (the entire reason SSDs are better than HDs) will thus also disappear. Computers, due to MRAM being non-volatile, will boot in around 1 second. And they will boot to exactly the last state they were when they were turned off - just like hibernation mode. MRAM, being made of magnets and not electric charges, will consumes close to zero electricity. It will also be close to impervious to EMP attacks. The lowest level of CPU cache will probably still be SRAM, as it is slightly faster than MRAM, but there will be a level of cache above that made of a huge amount of MRAM. Or, possibly, there won't be any MRAM cache at all, since the MRAM main memory will be sufficiently fast. I might be wrong in choosing MRAM as the likely victory in the race to universal memory, but the general points are all valid regardless of what universal memory technology wins (except maybe the radiation resistance point - only really applies to non-electric memory like MRAM). The largest size of MRAM today is 8 megabytes - it is being built into SSDs just this year to replace the existing volatile cache for these devices, which is very vulnerable in power failures. Apply a variation of Moore's law (for instance, in 2010 the largest MRAM size was 2 meg). It's not difficult to see hard drives, SSDs, and DDR RAM all being made redundant as MRAM develops. Obviously they'll still be around, just like magnetic tapes are still around today. But not in mainstream use. Nifty concept huh? Turing never envisaged his machines needing multiple types of memory. And they needn't. Edit: As far as speed goes, MRAM has been built which has a speed of 2 Gbit/s on write cycles. This will improve over time, but is already more than 4 times that of current SSDs. By comparison, the fastest DDR RAM at the moment (caveat: haven't checked DDR4 speeds) is around 12 Gbit/s. So MRAM isn't as fast as RAM yet, but it's getting there. So MRAM is at around the same speed as DDR1 RAM running at 266 Mhz. DDR3 which is common in premium-end PCs today runs at 1600 Mhz (directly translating to a proportional increase in data transfer rate). Does anybody remember the RAM wars that popped up when DDR first came out and replaced SDRAM and was competing with RDRAM? Wasn't too long ago.

Oh, I'm well aware you're an atheist. This has nothing to do with your religion or lack thereof. It has to do with you being wrong to hand-wave gay marriage away as being unnecessary because you feel that marriage is a religious institution. You're wrong; it's not. The end. Yeah, I see what you did there.

But it becomes a civil rights issue because married couples are afforded more rights by the state than non-married couples, no? In the case of straight people, you could argue this doesn't matter, because they have the choice to marry and receive those extra rights or not. But in the case of gay people, they have no such choice. Not quite. This discriminatory federal-level bill needs to be repealed before it can be claimed that gay marriage is an issue for the states to deal with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act The most effective way to solve this problem in its entirety would be to treat all social contracts related to love between people as either civil unions or de facto partnerships. There should be no de jure recognition of marriage. At all.

So I just discovered this card requires 300 watts under load. And 150 watts at idle. That's probably the worst power consumption I have ever seen for a processing unit. Not only is the card expensive, but so is the yearly electricity bill!

Man, I hate reading threads like this. You get some really warped and twisted minds trying to argue against equal rights for all. It's sickening. And Monte Carlo, your "marriage is a religious thing" argument is BULLDUNG. Marriage is a custom thousands of years old which Christianity has ZERO claim to inventing and which absolutely does not require a) a religion, b) monogamy, or c) heterosexuality. Further, we all live in SECULAR states, not Christian states. Moreover, regulation of marriage should not be the role of the state to begin with. All you "small government" conservatives are flat-out hypocrites here! But since marriage does fall under the jurisdiction of the state, which, again, is smegging stupid, then that state regulation of marriage damn well needs to be made egalitarian because the state is involving itself.

Yeah, take your important stance on true faith in video games! You go girl! Not even. I'm just pointing out that Torchlight 2, at 1/4 the price, no extremely intrusive DRM, no requirement of your personal details, no ability for people to buy powerful characters and items, being made by the original Diablo developers, and actually still having the gameplay elements and dynamics that made the original Diablo 1 and 2 fun, well, Torchlight 2 is a superior choice for people who want a Diablo sequel, and they should seriously consider it over this game Activision has pumped out and slapped the 'Diablo' brand name onto. Activision being a company that doesn't even contain many, if any, of the original Diablo employees (Condor/Blizzard North). Diablo 3 is for people who want a dumbed-down, buy-once version of WoW with some Diablo lore thrown in.

Here's a really good (and polished) list of Linux games (some that were missed above and on Desura), with mini-screenshots and editor's pick recommendations for the really good ones. It's not a store, just a constantly updated compilation of Linux games, both open and closed source, and free and commercial: http://www.penguspy.com/#/All/free_and_commercial/open_closed/sort=3/view=1/limit=0

With the news that Steam and the Valve games are being ported to Linux, I thought I would take the opportunity to highlight to the community other games that have already been ported to the Linux platform. Plants vs Zombies (via Chrome Store at the least) Bastion (via Chrome store at the least) Fallout 1 Fallout 2 Braid Trine 1 Trine 2 Minecraft World of Goo Zeno clash Depths of Peril Heroes of Newerth (awesome and highly popular DotA clone) Realm of the Mad God Dungeons of Dredmor Amnesia: The Dark Descent Mount and Blade (including Warband) Dungeon Defenders Shadowgrounds (including Survivor) Frozen Synapse Cave Story+ Savage 1 (devs of HoN) Savage 2 Sanctum Osmos Machinarium Soldat Fallout Tactics Botanicula Doom (all versions) DEFCON Darwinia Machinarium Quake (all versions) Return to Castle Wolfenstein Most of these games can be purchased through this online store called Desura. So for those you who want to stick it to the man (Steam), here's an opportunity to do so. Actually, there is a huge number of indie titles for Linux on Desura. When I move this comp to Ubuntu (I've been very lazy) I'm definitely not going to be bored. I <3 indie games. They're more like the ones from my childhood. Desura (click the Linux button at the top): http://www.desura.com/ And then, a further huge array of Windows games work flawlessly on Linux under Wine, such as Divine Divinity and all Valve's games. It's also worth checking out the games section of the Ubuntu package manager (or whatever distro it is you use). There are some gems there like a Mario clone (SuperTux) and a Civ clone (Heroes of Linux) Finally, it's worth pointing out that the following Kickstarter games will run on Linux: Wasteland 2 Double Fine Adventure Shadowrun Returns The Banner Saga =)

TL2 isn't even out yet, so that's a rubbish claim, unless you beta-tested? The fact of the matter is, all Diablo clones (including D1 and D2) are boring single player. Some of them last longer than others, but I think you need to possess some obsessive-compulsive skills to finish Diablo clones in SP. Somehow, the magic occurs when you add people.

**** Diablo 3. I preordered 4 copies of Torchlight 2 so me and my friends can play a true sequel to Diablo 2 instead of this Activision bull****.

It has a TDP (thermal design power - basically max power draw) that would be perhaps twice that of the system without it, at 170 watts. That's one of the worst electricity guzzling cards I've come across so far! No thanks. If I need a discrete graphics card (gonna see how the inbuilt HD Graphics 4000 core of the Intel i7 CPU goes), then I'll grab the Radeon 7750, which has a TDP of 55 watts while still producing really decent graphical output.

Having read Valve's employee handbook, all the work Zoraptor did convincing me that Steam is bad just melted away into nothingness. They aren't bad now and they are a de facto monopoly (in the same sense Google is - few people actually want to use the other search engines/digital stores). Their corporate structure is even less evil than Google's (the other allegedly "bad" monopoly). And finally, Steam isn't beholden to money-hungry share holders, as they are privately owned and thus not listed on the stock exchanges. When - if - any of this changes, I may change my opinion of Valve. The most you could say while remaining truthful is that Valve are not as good as PD Projekt Red (Good Old Games).

Good idea! And thanks for the image/table. I'm actually also really interested in lowering the greenhouse gas footprint of my computer, as well as the power bill. And if she is also going to have a desktop too, that becomes doubly important. (Several days have passed since I wrote the above - it was left lingering in a tab while I browsed other tabs and while my comp hibernated, but now I have returned to it) I have decided that initially I will buy these components and place them in my current PC: * An Intel SSD 320. This seems like the best bang for buck and also a really energy efficient drive (not the best around, but it's a jack of all trades, and consumes about 3 watts at peak load). * 16 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM (then I will turn off paging memory management) I'm hoping that with the combination of a huge amount of RAM and the SSD, any visage of the I/O bottleneck that plagues hard drives will completely evaporate. Further, with no moving parts, the SSD should draw a fair bit less power than my RAID 0 array of two hard drives. Even further to that, because the main memory will be so large, there will be no paging, and thus the SSD will remain in the less power-intensive idle state far more often. So a huge performance boost and a nice power consumption drop. Not bad. I have also dimmed my monitors to 30 brightness (the lowest comfortable level I was willing to go). Compared to 100 brightness, and since I have two monitors, this is almost equivalent to only running 1 monitor instead of 2, in terms of power savings. And then I'm also running a programme called DXTory, which is designed for video capture, but has a nifty little feature to cap frame rate at 30 FPS (the lowest level that still produces smooth gameplay - roughly the same level used on TVs and exactly the same level used on consoles). Considering that even when V-sync is turned on, games are running at roughly 60 FPS, this actually equates to a fairly large power saving because the GPU is not used as often (a nice side effect: less heat). Considering this is a software tweak, the saving in watts is phenomenal! This is only really relevant to systems that have a PCI-E card, though, because PCI-E cards are ****ing huge watt guzzlers. When Intel releases their next round of Ivy Bridge processors in June, I will buy the Intel Core i7-3770T processor. It's extremely fast, has 4 cores, 8 threads, and is generally just top of the line (ignoring the $1000 Intel chips). It's not quite as fast as the chips above it, but the difference is slight, and instead of consuming 77 or 65 watts, it only consumes 45 watts! Which leads into why I've suddenly decided to buy Intel again: as far as ethical concerns go, global warming ranks waaaaay above anti-competitive practices. AMD's Phenom processors consume 95 or 125 watts. I have a feeling my current Thuban is the 125 watt model. That's almost 3 times as much power draw as the Intel chip I'll be buying. Ouch! Now, once Intel does release that processor, I'm going to build a new system with it. I'll also take the new SSD and memory I've bought and place them in the new system. The old RAID 0 array and old RAM will return to their original box, and I'll give that box to my girlfriend. It's actually an extremely energy inefficient box with the 2 hard drives, the Thuban AMD processor and a power guzzling Radeon 5870. But she won't use it anywhere near as much as me, so with me using a new super-efficient computer and her rarely using a super inefficient computer, the energy bill should fall a fair bit. My final note is that I am going to test how the Ivy Bridge's integrated graphics performs, and not buy a Radeon GPU unless I need it! The HD Graphics 4000 looks like it might be able to handle the games I actually play, like the Source engine games, Torchlight 2, and lots of old games. If that's the case, then that's at least 60 watts saved right there (65 watts is the peak consumption of the Radeon 7750, which is ATI's most energy efficient GPU which still provides great performance... their worst cards consume can consume around the 150 watts mark). If the Ivy Birdge's graphics core isn't able to play one or two games, I will just play them on my old comp. I really can't see how I will need to buy a graphics card. Oh, I forgot the PSU! I doubt Dell chose a good PSU for the box I bought. I'm going to check, and if it isn't above 90% efficiency, then it's gone (90% efficient PSUs have the 20PLUS Platinum certification). The PSU is actually probably the best place to look to reduce power consumption, because if you're drawing say 200 watts, and your PSU is only 70% efficienct, then you're actually drawing 285 watts and wasting 85 watts as heat! If it's 90% efficient, you're only wasting 22 watts as heat. A 63 watt difference. http://ecogamer.co.u...-for-Efficiency

Double that price for the Australian market... This. I think that once you're computer has reached 473 degrees Celsius (autoignition temp of magnesium), you've got other problems besides your graphics card burning.

To be fair, the Telegraph is a sensationalist piece of **** newspaper that takes things that MIGHT be true, acts like they are DEFINITELY true, and then blows them out of proportion. In fact, I'm surprised it's not run by News Corp. Still, a rather silly policy should it be correct (and again, it's hard to tell, given the source).