@chibacityblues said:

Nice card but hard to recommend at this price point. In Europe even more so: 649€ means a 53% premium over the 7970GHz - rather ridiculous for a ~20% improvement in performance.

Yeah, but that's how these things go. Especially considering AMD's position and timing, it's hard to whine too much. There's a lot more to these cards than simply 20% more performance anyway, such as CUDA (which depending on what you do with the card, is incredibly important) and PhysX, and if you do a lot of gameplay capture it sounds like their hardware solution will be excellent for that sort of thing. I'm happy to pay the premium when it means better driver support (people really need to stop arguing against this, nVidia has more features and better stability, period. See Crossfire vs SLI for stark example), meaningful features (CUDA is a huge plus for me, I do a lot with it) and even the silly features like PhysX, which makes Borderlands 2 look even more ridiculous and awesome.

Then there's power consumption and noise profile. For the increase in speed and features you see a very small increase in power draw and we all know how effective and quiet those Titan coolers are.

If it was all about pure performance, I'd agree. But for my money, nVidia's typical premium is worth it. It's not an empty and pointless premium, it comes with something. The question is if that something is valuable to your situation or not.

A little weird that they are just doing the GLaDOS voice. Looks like a fun flick if nothing else. I like the concept of two pilots.

BUT THERE ISN'T GRAVITY IN SPACE.

Pretty badass for a bunch of kids though.

You know you've made it when you fucking make a video with an astronaut. Awesome video. I got a hell of a laugh out of the "asparagus explosion."

That thing looks so weird...

@Rallier said:

The content of this videos is pretty underwhelming.

What i'm surprised about it that this video is available in 1080p in 3D. They really wanted this to look impressive i guess.

Not really, if you know what's going on. It's pretty cool.

@Toxeia: I've yet to get a chance to test that iso.

As for piracy, it's not as easy as it sounds. Almost all torrents have cracks in them these days, and I'm not going to download anything with a crack. It's not easy to find the exact right version I need, unfortunately.

I think any iso will work, the difference is you have to bypass the activation initially and then activate once the install has finished. I think I had to do that in the past when my first disc came from Newegg with a big ol' scratch and didn't work. At that time it was easy to download a clean iso. Now, not so much.

@JustinNotJason: For some stupid reason, you can't download directly from MS without giving a "valid" key first. And there are I believe two different direct from MS downloaders, and neither work with a System Builder key.

There is a sort of "nuclear" option, that I believe will let me reset my primary hard drive but I can't apparantly keep my old files or programs. Not worried about programs because I keep nearly everything installed to my secondary. I do however use my primary for media and storage, so having to move all of my various sources and projects and documents over would be a fucking huge pain in the ass, so I'm avoiding that option until it's my only one.

@atzfratz said:

Wow, way to miss the point on creative cloud. First of all the pirates couldn't care less. They have never paid a dollar and will continue to enjoy photoshop without paying. For everyone else the cost of photoshop was not 600$, you paid that once some time ago and would upgrade every 2 or 3 year.

But apart from the price what gets people really angry is the fact that adobe is holding your files ransom. If you stop paying you cant open your own work anymore. Tell me, how likely are you going to change the software you are using when a) you can always start up your old photoshop version and access your old work or b) your whole work is inaccessible as soon as you stop paying them.

Plus there is no incentive for them to build new great features because your stuck with them anyway. And what happens if they double the price in 2 years from now? Right, you can either pay or loose all access to your workfiles.

You are right WIll, this is really great.

If people liked the subscription so much, then fine. Why don't they keep the both side by side and sell the current status of creative cloud every year as the new creative suite version.

This is the thing. I don't see why they can't just get more money out of you for a period, and just release all of the cool features they want over time anyway, and give you all features up that point and then 3 years or whatever of free upgrades, after which point you can either switch to a sub or just deal with the features you have but still own the software.

The idea of having to pay regularly, or worse: connect to the internet regularly just to have access to the latest features is kind of bullshit.

I'm not sure these guys are the best people to talk about Photoshop and how it's business model should be structured. As far as I know, they don't use photoshop for much of anything themselves. I use photoshop on a regular basis for everything from processing photography to manipulation to texturing.

CC isn't the end of the world, but it is really annoying not to give customers legacy options. The features of CC look compelling and I like the idea of photoshop being updated more frequently, but there should be an option for me to pay a premium and get some sort of "2-3 years of updates and then a static client" license.

@Rallier: Ah, that explains it. I dunno, on the one hand, I feel for ya, but on the other, I suspect the majority of users on the site would prefer 720p. Either way though, it doesn't matter. Clicking the button to change the resolution isn't hard for either side.

I'm pretty ridiculously pissed off right now. I managed to fuck up an install of windows for the first time in a long ass time, because I wasn't really paying attention to an installer. So, I did a system recovery to fix that problem. Which it did very well, except now my sound drivers aren't working, and I seem to be having other issues with drivers as well.

Now, there are a couple of ways to theoretically download Windows 8 direct from MS. But, apparently the fucking OEM version (ie the $99 version) doesn't work for that. The simple fact that there isn't an easy and built in fucking way to just get access to the ability to reinstall the fucking OS is pissing me off enough as it is, when I put in my completely legitimate product key, it just told me to fuck off.

I lost my disc because the guy I lent it to turned out to be a massive biggot and is not blocking me on any mode of communications with the idiot I have. I don't have a job at the moment and am 100% broke, so I can't just waltz down to the store and pick up a new disc.

Is there anything I can do? I'm not looking to pirate it, I have two damn product keys but neither are useful to me if I can't reinstall the fucking OS.

Considering there are ways to install the OS entirely from a hardrive source, why the fuck aren't the files to reinstall the OS just included with every install? It'd be a great way to allow people to maintain a PC without having to worry about the license being overused on multiple PCs and would make the issue of "oh shit, my PC broke, now I have to find the optical drive I took out because I never use the bloody thing and great, now I have no media to use in the drive anyway so fuck it all."

Most of all, I'm pissed off I fell for MCPatcher.net's fake ass installer considering MCPatcher DOESN'T EVEN HAVE AN INSTALLER.

I know if I can get something to install windows, I'll be fine. I'd prefer not to have to burn shit to a fucking disc but if I have to I can.

It's times like this, I fucking hate when products don't give common sense features.

I'm guessing this is because people like to watch full screen, and Youtube can be really dumb about moving up in resolution when it should?

I'm curious why the video becomes unwatchable for you though.

@will: That doesn't change my question, or the fact that the start menu and start button don't need to exist.

So, does anyone know if the start button will be optional? I have a reasonable fucking keyboard, and the start menu is worth far fucking less to me than an extra icon on my taskbar.

I still can't believe how silly the guys are about the fucking start menu. It's pointless. If you run your desktop properly, you don't need the damn thing. That System Admin menu is so much more useful and less intrusive. It gives better access to the things I actually want to not have to dive down into, and it's hidden sure but most who would use it know how to use it.

The cast commentary for the entire Extended Edition Lord of the Rings collection is excellent. Fellowship is probably the best for cast commentary, but it's all fantastic. You really get a true sense of how incredibly close the actors got in the process of filming the trilogy I know a lot of actors always say politely "Oh it was so great working with so and so" but there's none of that, the stories and their interactions all speak for themselves. It's clear that they all got very close to one another, and had a real camaraderie together.

Learning more about the techniques they used to shoot various scenes, especially with the issue of size differences and the like is pretty cool as well.

Also, there are some really hilarious stories, especially from the Hobbits.

Hell, I've consumed all of the extra features for those movies so many times, it's all so goddamn good and there is so effing much of it.

@will Cola uses Cola Nut extracts. Mountain Dew doesn't have Cola Nut anything as far as I know.

I do appreciate low carbonation but I also enjoy high carbonation. If it's something like sprite, which is more refreshing, I would want less carbonation, but root beer I like high because I don't feel the need to guzzle a good root beer.

Also, the few DSLRs that I've used have had 3 output format options: JPEG, PNG, and RAW. So PNG is an option out there at the very least.

The most exciting... What?

@donpixel said:

Wondering if we ever gonna get to the point dedicated GPUs are no longer needed...

Double what it was before still isn't any good really. This is a low end gaming PC at best. And that's with current games. You need something that can play Witcher 2 and Metro 2033 to be competitive for more than 6 months at this point.

That thing has an easier time picking up keys and business cards than I ever had, shit.

There is no way that thing doesn't look like a dildo.

This sort of visualization would be a really cool easteregg to have in something like a Forza game.

@youngpaddy1: Which is a way in which this will potentially increase safety over a human driver. In reality, it's usually pretty tricky to see past other vehicles even as a human. You can do it if the vehicle is similar to yours and doesn't have a bunch of tinted windows, but if you're in a small sedan and you're next to a big black SUV, you have no awareness. Networked cars would be more aware in every direction and even be able to "see through" objects.

STOP KEEPING US DOWN, MAN. WE JUST WANT AWESOME NAMES FOR OUR PLANETS DUDE.

Cool, but I have to wonder how useful the landing bit is. It's not going to be coming down from a height of 840 feet... How is it going to get low enough for that to actually be useful? It takes a lot to get a rocket up out of the atmosphere, but it also takes a lot to get it down without it breaking up/smashing into the ground. This is impressive, don't get me wrong. It can't be easy to get a big tower shaped VTOL working right. I just have to wonder how this'll actually work to bring a rocket down safely from atmosphere.