Obsidian

The recording light on your VCR isn't sending subliminal messages to your brain, Freeman. You're just being paranoid.

Every forum does, some more so than ours. Why did people hate Unity? (tech peeps should get this)

Banned because you didn't put the zombies in the leotards.

I'm really getting sick of my current job. If we had a counter for "days gone without being short-staffed," we would never get above a 3. And the store has been open for over a year, isn't a small business, and the management is very much aware of the problem. They interview people, but only hire for cashier jobs. We don't NEED more cashiers, you dumbasses! We need more people to do the actual labor (if this offends any one with a cashier job, then take it elsewhere. Of every job I've worked, the easiest ones are behind the cash stand). Then, for the candidates that would be good for the manual labor spots, the managers get picky as hell about the little things and don't hire any of them. They bitch, moan, and gripe about how our survey scores and comments aren't good (one of which called out our GM for being an incompetent idiot who can't put his phone away on the job), but insist that it's the current staff's fault. Yeah, sure, all 3 of us. Here's to hoping some of the applications I've passed out this last week bear some fruit!

Foal, c'mon, you're living in the dark ages. You've been able to update your iPhone/touch without plugging into a computer for a while now. I wouldn't do it with any phone that had sensitive data on it (Androids and Apples can both suffer fatal crashes when updating, so I'd rather have a current backup at any rate), but the option is there. Plus, Android updates brick phones and break apps more frequently than iOS do (if my work experience is any indication of this), so boom. Here's for a Ubuntu Mobile OS; we need more choices in the mobile marketplace. And if I uploaded content to YT, Shiny, I would care, but their stupid automated system flagged two of my videos for illegal content, when it was being used under Fair Use. I refuted the cases, but they never got back to me and the flags or strikes are still on my account. I got one waiting to get removed for taking that piracy BS test thing, but the other one will be there forever. I don't entirely blame YT/Google for that, since it's copyright holders that made them resort to the automated filters in the first place.

The first 2 Hellraiser films are decent scary movies (fun thought I've had about the series, it's a perfect encapsulation of the progression of horror franchises through the ages), but the rest are silly/non-scary. Another horror franchise you could check out is the Children of the Corn movies (these are super cheap on DVD right now). The first, sixth, and 2009 remake of the first are the only ones worth watching, in my opinion.

No surprise there, BTG. Older tech isn't widely produced (if produced at all) once the newer stuff takes hold, so old standards like DDR, DDR2, and IDE will be more expensive than DDR3 and SATA devices. Oddly enough, you can buy IDE SSDs.

I did google it. Not alot of answers that didnt contain: "upgrade to linux" Depending on how you download things, you should be able to limit the speed through the application. The steps to do this vary for each program, so I really can't go into any meaningful detail with it. You could do it on the operating system level, but that's more than I feel like explaining here. Next time, google something like "limit download speed windows 7" this will get you more concise results than if you didn't specify the OS.

Then those seem pretty darn good for a laptop when under a load. Definitely beats this laptop I had a few years ago, especially when it's TIM completely dried up. That wasn't a fun repair.

Sheesh, are those temperatures the idle temps? I forgot how hot laptops run (my desktop peaks out at those temps while rendering on an average day).

On my desktop however, I can do like 3 things like this at the same time. Could it just be that the laptop HDD is slower? It's a definite possibility, since a lot of laptops use 5400rpm drives versus the 7200rpm drives users typically have in their desktop. If you want to avoid lag in multi-tasking between downloading and gaming in the future, you could always put an artificial cap on your download speeds to keep write speeds to the HDD at an acceptable level.

I would hope the PileDrivers would be better than the Bulldozer, and I hope they're better than the Phenom chips (if I recall, Bulldozer was a step back compared to Phenom performance). Granted, my most recent build is Intel-based, I'm always open for more options and competition in the world of CPUs... which, sadly, is a small, small world these days.

On the topic of Seagate drives, they're cheaper these days because they only ship with a 1 year warranty, while WD is still on their old policy (at this time, anyway). So, if that sort of thing is important, factor in a Squaretrade warranty or something for the drive's price. On the topic of the difference between WD drives, here's an easy breakdown (you forgot Red, which I'll include anyway). Bear in mind I'll only be comparing this in relation to the WD drives, not the Seagate drives (for the record, I'd agree with Bullseye that Seagate drives are looking better than WD these days) Blue = the most balanced of the consumer lineup. Good price, speed, and decent capacity options. Green = the best drives for dedicated storage on a non-RAID desktop. The slow RPMs don't affect basic file access as much as it would if used as an OS drive, and they're the largest single disks WD offers today. Tend to be cheaper than Blacks and Blues. Black = the best consumer drive that's not the Velociraptor. Max storage is 2TB, and spins at 7200rpm, so it's a decent OS drive. Also the most expensive of the general trio. Red = a good in-between of consumer and enterprise-grade HDDs. Supposedly a fantastic choice for server-use (I don't think anyone can legitimately claim this for another few months, if not a year, to evaluate the real-world-use failure rates), but much more expensive than the Blacks. tl;dr, I'd go with Seagate for now, and the ST series isn't all that loud in my opinion/experience. Aside from the spin-up, the drives I've been exposed to are inaudible when the case fans are spinning as well.

New Humble Bundle is out! Has anyone played/heard anything about the games in this one? None of them seem familiar to me.

1592 For those who don't get the reference, that's a screenshot of Windows Defender version 1.1.1592.

Go outside, enjoy the sun; it misses you! I have a 1 to 1 ratio of "Holy Craps" per pelvic thrust... what do?

Crack and porno.

$140? You need to shop around a bit more, you can get an internal seagate 1tb drive for about $80, give or take, and an internal WD Black for about $110 (western digital is still milking the floods from Thailand to earn higher profits, go figure). However, that still leaves internal drives to be more expensive than their external counterparts. This wasn't the case until recently and I still can't wrap my mine around that. The only thing I can think of to explain that is the external drives were produced before the Thailand floods, so the HDDs in those units were cheaper to make at the time and supply/demand inflation never caught up.

Fair enough, although I never meant to imply that the gtx 680 would beat the Radeon 7970 in a price to performance ratio. Still, a benchmark from 1 game doesn't mean on its own, since some games run better with Nvidia and others with AMD. Lastly, for fair benchmarks, you should've left the processor the same on your comparisons, or offered benchmarks for both configs using both the unnamed intel (I'm assuming it was a Xeon, since 8 core intel chips don't exist outside of that family, which tells me that you paired a higher end GPU with a processor not made for gaming) and AMD processor (I'm assuming it was the fx-8150).

And that's where bronies come from

Just as a side note, the 6000 Radeons aren't in the same generation as the GTX 600 series, so that's why the HD Radeon 6800 was much cheaper than the 680. A better price comparison would be a 7970 and a GTX 680, since those two perform very similarly and are of the same generation. Also, I wouldn't trust a benchmark from a Best Buy employee unless he pulled up a benchmarking site to back up their claim.

For me, it really depends on what the hardware is and if there are equivalent devices for both internal and external use. I'll usually choose internal hardware because of faster data speeds, but there are some things where I realize an external connection won't bottleneck the performance to the point I'd notice it in real-world use (such as a card reader, most of which connect to your computer via a USB 2.0 header anyway). Plus, with eSata readily available on most motherboards, you don't really need to install your hard drive/s in your case if you don't want to or can't (small form factor cases don't always allow for multiple 3.5" drives to be natively installed). Sound cards/amps are another device which can usually perform just as well as an internal device, assuming the internal hardware of the external device is on par with the internal card. Also, with Thunderbolt now shipping on non-apple hardware, external devices will be able to compete more closely with their internal counterparts (where applicable). The tl;dr version, I prefer internal but won't discount external solutions where viable.

When I saw you mention to Back to the Future game, I was worried their Jurassic Park title would be on the list. Don't get me wrong, it's decent, but I wouldn't put it on a list like this. Edit: while I'm at it, I'll give a shout-out to Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, for the PS2 and Xbox. It was basically a theme park simulator, except with Jurassic Park.

I think if you install VLC to your flash drive, you can play .avi's on any computer, no problem. I'm watching a Heavy Rain playthrough.

Your handwriting looks clean compared to mine, which I'll post a picture of later when I feel like taking one of something I've written.