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'Oh... Sir!' is our favorite insult-em-up
Officially, it's day two of Gamescom here in Cologne, Germany. For us, though, it's day four of Nick Summers and I marching up and down a vast convention center, visiting developers to find out more about their games. It's been a stressful 100 hours or so, working together without a break, but we finally got to let off some steam today with Oh Sir. It's a game that let us sling abuse at one another in a way that wouldn't involve a call to HR in the morning.
Dell CEO jabs at Apple, forgets how to count
Michael Dell, amidst lackluster growth reports and a dismal earnings warning, has fired a couple more potshots across Apple's bow. During a recent Q&A, Dell's CEO cited MTV's new URGE music service as one reason why he is skeptical of the iTMS market dominance over the next ten to twenty years. I guess we'll have to see how well Microsoft irons out their Plays for Sure, er URGE, er Zune project (indecisive, anyone?), and how upset users get when the Zune crashes with a BSOD right in the middle of a wireless purchase, accidentally charging their credit cards for 5 additional albums that weren't even in their shopping cart.Going further, Mr. Dell also bragged about Dell's market share statistics, stating that Apple isn't a threat because they haven't broken into the list of top five market share holders. All debates as to whether Apple is trying to, or even should, dominate the world with their shiny computers aside, Michael is only half right: Apple's market share in the U.S. has actually jumped high enough to rank them 4th in PC manufacturers (again, in the U.S.).How many times do we have to tell you this, Mr. Dell? Insulting Apple won't make them open up OS X for you.[via MacNN]
NVIDIA denies enthusiasts the Quad-SLI goodness
Techreport has posted a review of nVIDIA's latest dual-GPU graphics card, the GeForce 7950 GX2, which also happens to be capable ("capable" being the key word) of Quad-SLI. You won't be surprised to read that this card is fast when compared to its predecessors. It positively destroyed all the other single-GPU cards the Techreport guys tested it against; in Battlefield 2 the GX2 managed "twice the average frame rate of the GeForce 7900 GT." As you probably already know, this kind of performance doesn't come cheap. NVIDIA expects the 7950 GX2 to cost around $599 to $649, and that's before you check your power bill: in tests the card drew 133 Watts at idle and a whopping 237 Watts under load. In comparison to the card's main single-GPU rival, ATI's X1900, the 7950 featured similar levels of power consumption, size and heat output but performed significantly faster in all the benchmarks. The 7950's dual-GPU solution also surpasses the performance of traditional SLI configurations like dual 7900 GTs, with the added advantage of being compatible with any PCI-e motherboard chipset. Strangely, the biggest problem that the review found had nothing to do with the card itself. Although the 7950 GX2 is perfectly capable of being partnered up with another card to make a Quad-SLI system, nVIDIA refuses to support this type of configuration, citing the "complexity" involved. The only way you'll be able to get a Quad-SLI setup is by either hacking two cards together or by purchasing a (some say overpriced) system from Alienware, Falcon Northwest or Dell.The company went as far as refusing to supply the website with a second review card. As the reviewer points out "when explaining to your best customers why they can't purchase two of your $649 video cards for themselves without also buying a $5K PC built by someone else, it's probably not good idea to use a shaky excuse with an embedded insult."
Breakfast Topic: The N-word
There's one word that gets my goat in WoW: "noob". With spellings as diverse as "nub", "n00b" and "nubcakes", dropping the N-bomb is seen by many players as a way to enhance their own social standing -- often with the opposite effect.I'm tired of "noob" being the default insult -- of Trade, General, LFG and local channels filling up with the word time and again. Of being called a "nub" for reasons as diverse as refusing a duel, wanting to find a group and capturing the flag in WSG. Of course, sometimes we do behave in ways that deserve reprimand -- but can't anyone come up with a more original insult? Perhaps that should be the next Blizzard competition.
