Posted 09/29/2009 at 10:51:00am

All this really does does is give the thieves another excuse, as if they ever needed one or cared, to just steal a copy.

For me, either they come out with a demo or they don't, if they don't they won't get my business no matter what the reviews are, or how big a "6 billion" copy fad it is. 

With caveat emptor being the only warranty software has, added to the 100% no return, no matter how badly we have ripped you off, policy there isn't ANY software worth buying unless you can test it first.

MaxPC has proven time and again that there is no such thing as 100% software compatibility across hardware lines, so why would anyone blow $50 just to find out, again, that the software doesn't run on their machine, that the developer doesn't care and will never fix it and is under NO economic insentive to do so because they already have your warranty free money!

Will people never learn?

VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 09/28/2009 at 01:11:28pm

I don't believe there is news source anywhere in this country that is unbiased, and if polls are to be belived neither does hardly anyone else. A better indicator might be that newspapers are going bankrupt and "The Evening News" on the "Big Three Networks" is getting beaten in the Nielsons by RERUNS of the Simpsons on Fox!

We don't have news we have thinly veiled political opinion masquerading as news

Every time the major media tries to sell the public on the idea that every word they print, speak or show does NOT reflect their editorial bias, be it "political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism", they simply lose more credibilty.

The very idea that they honestly think anything could FURTHER "tarnish our journalistic credibility" is ludicrous, the fact that they expect the public to actually belive they have anything even vaguely approaching integrity is just plain insulting.

VaMage

P.S. Please note, I don't care if the source is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist, Communist, or ALIEN. Nor do I care if it's ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, CNN, the Tribune, the Times, People or the National Enquirer, all of which are about on an equal moral plain. I'm old enough to remember Edward R. Murrow and these people who claim to be his journalistic decedents are nothing more then snake oil salesman by comparison.

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 09/23/2009 at 09:17:27pm

A recent article in MaxPC, and on this site, detailed what a pain in the ass the Win7 upgrade option is, so why are you telling this guy to live with it?

The OEM pricing at most of the top integrators doesn't save you enough to notice, and you have to live with a bloody OEM, AND you have to put up with the "Install Vista -> Apply Upgrade" routine. 

 There are several kick ass integrators out there , Digital Storm and AVADirect come to mind, that won't shove a copy of Windows down your throat, so buy it from one of them. 

I have a new rig on the way, should be here around Oct 2nd, when it gets here I'll run a copy of XP on it until I can pick up a RETAIL verison of Win7 on the 22nd. I'll very likely want to dual boot into XP anyway, but even if I didn't, it would still be worth it, or going to the RC but then I'd have to do a full new install on the 22nd anyway.

VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 09/09/2009 at 11:36:59pm

It's funny how every time AMD comes up short in the CPU war they start talking about objective this, or real world that, and of course confusing consumers. This isn't the first time I've heard this rhetoric, and not just from AMD, ATI loves to pull the same rabbits out every now and then.

Does any one else remember when clocks were down played in favor of cores, not that this was a bad thing, but now we're back to clocks...

If memory serves, and I know it does, whenever AMD holds the performance crown all this talk suddenly disappears.

Though I would bet Nvidia and Intel would do the same if either ATI or AMD could ever take and hold that crown long enough to really matter.

VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 09/08/2009 at 12:58:18pm

Any one have a guess about how long it will be before we see these new procs cause a price drop in 920's? If at all that is.

VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 09/08/2009 at 12:40:38pm

I actually own the books I'm buying for it. NO, "oops sorry but the book we sold you is gone", and I don't care what the reason was.

I buy, on average, 3 paperbacks, and 2 hardcover books a month, plus 3 magazines, not counting AD ASTRA and The Planetary Report. No way on earth I'm going to pay the prices Amazon wants for them, much less for only a "license to read them subject to the providers whim". Screw that.

When I buy a REAL book I OWN it, unless you come into my home and go Fahrenheit 451 on it. So no way, at least until the damned DRM is history. I'll think about it when I can copy it out to disk; so Amazon, or who ever, can't suddenly decide they don't like me and pull my books, as has already happened at least once, as reported right here on MaxPC.

Why don't people ever learn? I said this for years about DRM music, and now it's just about history, AND a lot of you are finding out that so is your music as the RIAA insists it has the right to pull down the DRM servers. Do you honestly think that these readers will be any different?

Last point, you have how many different competing formats that are 100% propietary, and 100% incompatible? When the one you picked, and bought a couple hundred books for, LOSES, what-cha-gonna-do?

VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 09/04/2009 at 02:22:33pm

Remember how Apple sued Microsoft over using the GUI it stole from the Xerox Palo Alto labs? Well this is the same thing only with mechanized armor.

Way way way back in the day Robert A. Heinlein, The Dean of Science Fiction, wrote a little book called Starship Troopers. In that little book his Mobile Infantry were pretty much exact copies of RoboTech and MechWarrior, except of course that it was written 26 years before the RoboTech TV series in '85.

The Japanese are HUGE Heinlein fans, and given that pretty much the only copyrights they ever cared about were Japanese, the creators of RoboTech simply lifted the M.I. from Troopers like a music junkie hitting Pirate Bay.

If I owned MechWarrior I'd just claim "prior art" and make Harmony Gold prove that RoboTech wasn't stolen from R.A.H. It was, so end of case, unless the Heinlein estate finally decides to sue BOTH OF THEM! <GRIN>

VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 09/02/2009 at 04:42:16pm

I didn't so much get tired of WoW as I did of MMO's Maxium B.S. In no time at all, in all the MMO's I've tried, you are reduced to PvP & Raids. For both of these you get to choose between guild polictics, assholes, and egomanics, and / or PvP politics, assholes and egomainics, or the same combo only with a P.U.G.

Both of which get old pretty fast, but there is virtually nothing to do in, say, WoW, unless you have a bunch of people on tap AND you have the time to keep them happy AND you are good enough to "earn your keep". I do all that every day and I get paid a significant amount of money for it, but I have no real interest in doing it for free!

Also, just TRY to join a P.U.G., much less a guild, unless you already have pretty much all the uber gear. It's worse then interviewing for a job these days, and just like the job market if you don't already have everything you need you can't get the job, or a loan, where to get one all you need is to NOT need one. 

So, imo, after just a few weeks there is nothing for a person in any MMO unless they have 20+ hours a week to spare. I'm praying that Blizz doesn't actually figure out how to eliminate solo play from D3, but then I also pray my wife will hit Lotto, both of which are about equally likely.

VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 08/31/2009 at 04:52:55pm

Best two words I can think of to describe the shift of power to the White House over the last 7 months, this is just another step in that process. Note it's not even the ability, it's the reporting the bill requires that is scary bad.

If you aren't scared you should be, even if you think Mr. Obama is the best thing since the 8086 you should be. That is unless you honestly think that who ever you consider your political opposition to be, will NEVER gain power again. If you really think there will never again be a Republican president, for example, then you are a fool.

The problem with granting power to the govenement, in anything other then a totalitarian state of what ever stripe, is that eventually that power will be wielded by your political enemies.

I've been over this with my daughter on the subject of national health care. She's all for it, she's young and a senior at NYU so this is understandable.

The point I've made to her is to imagine, no matter how improbable it may be, that Ms. Palin gets elected to the Presidency, and that her first appointment is Dr. Wanda Franz, the current president of the National Right to Life Committee.

As national health care is currently proposed the President's "health czar" is NOT a cabinet level post and so is NOT subject to approval by the Senate. Now, I asked her, do you want Dr. Franz to have that kind of power? Because just as sure as taxes, which ever side you are on will lose the Presidency sooner or later.

Point of fact, since 1949 the U.S. has had 16 Presidential terms, we are in the 16th now, starting with Truman, of those 16, 9 have been Republican and 7 have been Democratic. If I were in week 16 of the season and my team was 9 - 7 I wouldn't be betting on a Super Bowl, of course it can happen, but it ain't likely.

 VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.

Posted 08/26/2009 at 05:12:30pm

For someone to finally get around to writing a decent anti-HIP app. Come on, once it gets annoying enough it will be worth the effort.

Until then just skip it or use another page to get to the same data, rarely is anything exclusive enough to be worth dealing with a big pain in the ass. Of course MS has perfected little OTHER then being a pain in the ass, so this seems like a natural enough fit.

 But think about this seriously for a minute. It's one thing to live through the CAPTCHA to create a new email account, or join a forum, but typing in "XBOX 360" every time you hit a certain page? Not going to happen.What happens when you end up going to the same page 5 or 6 times a day, much less change pages.

Imagine this site using this, every article you click on up pops a CAPTCHA, think it won't, look at how many ads you currently block in a typical site, not here though, thanks MaxPC.

Hell, I quit using my Yahoo Verizon home page when my Firefox app that overrode the autocomplete=”off” tag quit working. Without it you end up typing in your password over and over even with the Yahoo home page still up in a tab and with you fully logged in! Yahoo still hasn't figured out that they are not my freakin bank, and they really don't have anything that needs to be all that damned secure in the first place.

I expect the same thing will happen here, some sites are going to think they are important enough to us to make us CAPTCHA every two seconds and that will be the end of them.

VaMage

American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.