Posted 11/02/2009 at 02:35:08pm

I am a graphic designer and there is zero reason to buy a Mac. Sure I've worked on them, but meh. Right now Adobe CS 64 supports 64 bit on Windows but not on Mac. It also has GRU acceleration for the first time, so you'll be spending money to get a better card than the Mac Pro ships with anyway.

Posted 11/02/2009 at 02:23:49pm

I don't think this is what's happening at all. I think with the downturn we're seeing a record number of people going back to school and a lot of them are buying the hype of picking up a Macbook.

Provided you have relatively new hardware, the arguement that you might as well switch to Mac makes no sense. So you're going to have to reformat if you have XP. So what they're saying it's that it's more compelling to spend a few grand to get a Mac than say a few hundred for a full retail copy of 7 Home and a backup drive if you don't have one. 

This is the same arguement with the whole 'PCs get viruses' arguement. Sure. You could spend a grand more on a Mac or $70 on antivirus.

We also have to remember that new XP users in the form of netbook consumers are growing rapidly and XP is 'competing' with 7.

Posted 10/15/2009 at 08:32:45pm

It seems like this is more of a consequece of game design than character design. I give all the war games a pass. People shoot each other in a war.

I don't know about casual killers. Does it seem off for Nathan Drake? It does, but thats game structure. Indiana Jones kills a few Nazis per movie. He also punches a lot of people. The way the movie is written he confronts every situation as it stands. It always seems acceptible because he's not out killing people for fun.Likewise take the Jedi. The protagonists of the Star Wars movies seem like pretty decent people, but they all kill. Nice farm kid Luke is cutting people to pieces by Jedi.

The problem is game structure. Most action games are about fighting a ton of enemies. Fighting them usually invovles shooting them. The game structure pits the averge protagonist against more enemies than anyone would 'realistically' see.

You could also go through all the Theif games without killing anyone. You got a lot more money for doing it that way. Somewhat ironically the Hitman games rewarded you for minimizing the bodycount, the best outcome involved only killing the targets.

Posted 05/21/2009 at 01:06:07pm

This is basically written by someone that is not really strong in the ways of computers.

The iPhone requirement is ridiculous, just like... you can't download the files on a PC or Mac and view them there? You have to have a Touch or iPhone. Is the college going to reimburse the kids for their data plans or any contracts they have to break?

 "By the time you purchase photo, audio and video software for a PC, you probably will have spent more than you would if buying a comparable Apple Computer."

 Or you could run Ubuntu Creative and get that all for free on your cheap laptop of choice. If you want to pay for stuff you could get any Corel product and save over the cost of Adobe still. That just doesn't make sense. iLife is like doable stuff, it's not a competitor of Creative Suite, so basically any open source app should get the job done. Just like OpenOffice.

" which the School has designated as its preferred provider" - Kids, buy Apple stuff so we can get kickbacks!

Posted 01/20/2009 at 11:51:53am

I just bought Zero Assumption Recovery to pull some files off an IDE hard drive that was too corrupt to access. It was $50 for the single user licesnse and I think worth it to get my old data back. Drive I was trying to access was an NTFS drive, and I was running ZAR under XP 32-bit. These reviews say two things to me. You can't get top quality recovery software for free or cheaply and 64 bit OSes are still not quite ready for prime time.

Posted 08/05/2008 at 09:25:10pm

I just repackaged my old Socket 939 box in here. A G80 8800 GTS fits fine. It's a nice case, although as they say, its tight to work in. Those 'screwless' mount systems annoy me, since you can't put anything that isn't a full length drive in (like a fan speed controller) without difficulty. The motorized door feels kind of delicate.