 | Kudos to XFX October 29, 2007 10:00am in thoughts |
About a year and a half ago, I bought a XFX nVidia GeForce 7900GT graphics card for my desktop. The card was great. A couple months ago, it started dying. Games would clip, the BIOS screen was all colorful, and even the simplest of graphical operations on the operating system lagged and flickered. I was like "shit" it was over a year old so I figured the warranty was out. I put in a ticket seeing if I could fix the issue. They replied saying that all I would have to do is register the card and that the warranty was still fine. I registered the card and it led me to finding out that the card probably went bad and I would have to send it back to them via RMA. For $8 I sent it back and they confirmed what I already figured. About a week later they told me that the 7900GT is no longer in stock and I had the choice between an 8600GTS 256MB card or I could pay an extra $150 and get the 8800GTS 320. Being that my MacBook Pro has pretty much become my primary machine, the 8600GTS would suffice and it has DirectX 10 too which was great. So I'm getting an $8 GeForce 8600GTS. I find it nice that XFX was willing to help me out in getting my hardware fixed. I know I read that in order for the warranty to be valid I have to register the card within 1 year of purchasing it. The fact that they helped me out when I was a slacker and didn't register speaks volumes on how they treat their customers...in my opinion, well. So in a couple days, I will have a brand new video card. People can say that well if it's a good company then the hardware shouldn't break/fail. I take the approach that even the best hardware fails on occasion. I've done tech support work, I know about hardware failure. What matters is how the manufacturer deals with these failures. XFX was good about making sure they got back to me in a timely fashion and fix the issue. Definitely good customer support. |
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| Google Gives GMail IMAP Support October 25, 2007 1:24pm in tech |
Google is apparently adding the long awaited, long missing feature of having GMail support IMAP. Google has since launch supported POP3, but never IMAP. The main difference between the two of them is that POP3 only has 1 way communication with GMail. While IMAP has 2-way communication. This means that POP3 just downloads the messages to your e-mail client be it Thunderbird, outlook, etc. but it doesn't communicate what you do with that message. If you delete it, it will still be there on the server, just not on your machine. IMAP can do things both ways. It keeps your online GMail and the messages in your client synchronized. You delete it on one side, it's deleted on the other too. I don't know how they're implementing it exactly or how they're gonna deal with the labels and folders, cause I'm still waiting for my account to support IMAP. Google is apparently slowly rolling it out and I guess my account just hasn't been set up yet. IMAP just might make it easier to keep my computers and various operating systems somewhat synchronized. Compared to the way I'm doing it now, it's gotta be faster, but we shall see. |
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| What the Hell October 18, 2007 12:07am in thoughts |
 So I was playing Halo 3 on XBOX Live, as I have been doing a lot lately. It's a fun game, especially with friends, getting the whole rivalry going as to who's going to kick more ass. Well today I ended up going onto matchmaking alone while I was waiting for my buddies to get on. I was placed in a room with 4 others, an every man for himself match to 25 kills or 8 minutes. All of my opponents sounded like they were barely 10 years old. All of them are using more foul language than I do. What the hell, these kids are less than half my age, and I'm only 23! If I were to say half the things that I heard over the headset when I was their age, I wouldn't be able to talk anymore, my mom woulda ripped my throat out. Then again, my Mom wouldn't have even let me on something like XBOX Live, or even play any game rated higher than Teen. Yet there I was sitting there listening to them trash talk everyone in the room with less than polite phrases and words. While I'm not so much surprised at this, its kind of sad to think that these kids are acting like this. What's sadder still is that some of them probably have little to no idea what exactly the words they're saying truly mean. I'm sure some do, but I'm also sure, some are just repeating what they heard others say. On a side note, despite all their trash talking, I stayed quiet and kicked their asses, I was the first to 25 and the person in 2nd only had 16. Yes, I'm sure beating a bunch of preteens is such an amazing achievement. |
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| Astrophysics Lab Replaces Supercomputer with 8 PS3s October 17, 2007 12:19pm in science |
 An astrophysics lab has replaced a supercomputer they use for research with 8 PlayStation 3 consoles. Some reasons behind this include the fact that using the supercomputers cost them $5000 a pop which adds up rather quickly. The whole idea that the PS3 can run Linux is also a plus as it allows the lab to run them the way they want uninhibited.
"The interest in the PS3 really was for two main reasons," explains Khanna, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth who specializes in computational astrophysics. "One of those is that Sony did this remarkable thing of making the PS3 an open platform, so you can in fact run Linux on it and it doesn't control what you do."
The 8 PS3s were donated by Sony and stringing them together with proper otimized code allows them to function very much like a supercomputer. The experiment they're running is to calculate the amount of gravity that would be generated should a black hole swallow a star. This grid has apparently been up for a month and the 8 PS3s apparently generate the processing power of about 200 supercomputer nodes that they used to use. Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s [wired.com] Tags: astronomy, playstation, linux, tech, news |
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