19 out of 20 PC gamers have limited disposable income

A repost of what I posted on the escapist:
What Ubisoft did with Prince of Persia (the confeti-colored one) was absolutely obnoxious. Yes, pirating is high on the PC... in developing nations and amongst middle-school kids that don't know any better (What's steam?; I got this game from a friend), but guess what else is higher in developing nations: the desktop PC install base. Computers are a modern middle class necessity, like dishwashers. Consoles are not. I'm sure there are plenty of people in Africa/South America/South East Asia willing and ready to throw in an 80 USD radeon 6670 into the 8x PCI express slot of their 300 USD Athlon-II/Pentium Dual Core machines. If they continue to be so intent on turning their back on that market, they will be hurting themselves far more than they hurt potential pirates.

The US has over 4000 fighter jets and the single most advanced technology in the field. Excellent missile systems and rapemachines like the F-22.

Furthermore there's still stealth bombers like the B-2 and the upcoming stealth complement to that and the F-22, being the F-35.

US air dominance would be there without question. There is no way any country in the world at this moment could resist a US air invasion.

Just for perspective, while Iraq sucked, it had the 4th largest airforce in the world. It was decimated with very minimal losses in just a couple weeks at most.

I found this gem in a 4chan /b/ thread about Chinese military hardware.

FINAL BOSS

First off, I am glad just about nobody reads this blog. I am not dumb, in fact I have forgotten more math than most people care to remember, but I do have a habit of putting my foot in my mouth. When I am not eating my toes, what comes from my mind (in the raw) can be rather incoherent if not out and out incomprehensible. For example, when I was giving prices for ER visits in “random discovery,” my basic point was that in general, emergency care is expensive, but not so expensive as to be impossible to pay in most cases. I doubt anyone got that when they read the first two sentences of “random discovery.” Hopefully with time and editing the content here will be ready for a large audience, but until then:

I'll just go ahead and make a guess here:

My guess is that the successor to AMD's Hollywood gpu will be very similare in arrangment and clocks to the 6450: namely that it will have 2 4x4 blocks of superscaler units, as compared to 3 in the xenos (or the 24 in the radeon 6970), but it will be clocked alot higher, at 700~800mhz (unlike the 500mhz xenos). In terms of performance, that will get it within spitting distance of the xenos, but with far fewer transistors, making it more practical to manufacture in volume. Also, I will guess that it will be made on a much more "mature" lithography node: say 65nm, maybe 55nm if there is enough fab capacity available at that resolution.

The sad result of IMDB exploration...

Whatever happened to the great animation tradition in the United States? The style of Disney’s studios was adopted by Japanese animation pioneers, and many of the methods and techniques of animation where created here, in the most prosperous and innovative nation on earth… for now.

I found full episodes of Batman:TAS on Warner Brother's Television website, and took the opportunity to do an IMDB search for some of the names in the credits. I entered "Boyd Kirkland", only to come across this:

Coming on the tail-end of 2007 and the start of 2008, one would expect a decent amount of increase in quality in animated movies, especially considering the detail and flow of Anime that comes from across the pond, in Japan. ... The animation itself was choppy and poorly drawn. It made me believe that we haven't improved anything since the days of Thundercats and He-Man.

Reunite Isaac and Ishmael

From what I have seen of what has been said about a certain micro-nation about the size of New-Jersey, I can say this much: There is no two state solution. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

Israel cannot not remain half prosperous and half indignant.

So... I went from this:



To this...

To, um... this:

>daewoo DVD player

Irrational Exuberance

Just wow...

So far the big winner from the AMD-ATI deal is clearly NVIDIA. Today NVIDIA is worth two times and a half more than it was one year ago, while AMD is worth less than it was before buying ATI!

This is simply amazing, AMD bought a 5 billion dollar company and instead of becoming a 15 billion dollar company NVIDIA was the one that became such company!

I feel the same way about this article as the current price of gold. The sensationalism does not reflect reality "on the ground." So Intel and nVidia basically have bond holders instead of share owners. They have lots of cash on hand, but lots of promises to keep to their new-found bondholders.

Speaking of promises, by the time the Llano fusion cpu launches, it will be more than 5 years since AMD announced its intention of making a true asymmetric "mainstream" processor. And when it does launch, it will be based on the Phenom CPU from 2007 (revised 2009), not Bulldozer; And the GPU side will be based on the Radeon 5000 series, not the 6000 series currently on the market or the next generation of radeons that recently taped out; and it will go into a different socket than Bulldozer. Not only that; the socket for llano may or may not be compatible with Trinty, the Bulldozer based APU that will be released in 2012.

I'll just leave this here...

This is a comment by robcat2075 on an article about how the heartless bourgeoisie are scattering the the truly creative proletariat

The next time Floyd Bishop pops into one of my threads on CGTalk to ridicule artists’ work that isn’t up to his very lofty, cutting-edge CG standards I’m going to remember this thread where he’s endorsing the look of… “My Little Pony”

If someone who’s not gate-keeper approved dips their toe into CG, Floyd Bishop is ready to swat them down. But he is eager to go to bat for a blight like… “My Little Pony”?

And we ponder why the biz is going in such absurd directions?

Well hello Robcat/Tim Buckley. I didn't know you were trying your hand in animation. Just remember, "You are not your work."

random discovery

Typically a visit to the emergency room cost under $1500, and a medical bankruptcy is usually against a debt that is under $10,000. Yeah, it's expensive (and justifiably so), but people are quite happy to take out car loans for much more than that.

About one out of every five dollars of the United States Federal Budget is for health expenses; e.g. medicare, medicaid, and tricare.

And yet all that money from the fed is not enough to keep medical expenses from being the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. When will the politicians finally learn that free-market =/= anarchy?

the people's republic of a STD ridden budget

My uncle just posted this on his facebook profile 10 minutes ago, and I thought it would be worth sharing:

"The government today announced that it is changing its emblem from an Eagle to a CONDOM because it more accurately reflects the government's political stance....A condom allows for inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of dicks, and gives you a sense of security while you're actually being screwed!"