Apreche

I'm getting 164kbps down and 49kbps up in MidTown Manhattan. I think I'll try again outside the building.

This story is incorrect. There were not 52,290 attendees. It would be more accurate to say that they had an attendance figure of 52,290.

You see, most conventions, PAX included, publicize a turnstile count of attendance. That means that one gamer with a weekend pass is counted three times. The true number of unique attendees is definitely below 20,000. Some conventions also count staff, volunteers vendors, etc. as part of the attendance figure. I am not sure if PAX does this.

The anime convention Otakon is one of the only conventions I know which gives a precise count of unique attendees without any additions. Otakon '09 had true attendance of 26,586. Otakon completely fills the Baltimore Convention Center to the gills. The BCC is vastly larger than the Hynes in which PAX East took place. There is absolutely no way the PAX East figure is accurate.

The same applies to numbers given for just about every other convention, such as San-Diego Comic-Con. Please get it right.

How long is this stupidity going to continue?

My computer has a Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz, and a GeForce 8800GT. I can play every PC game I've encountered at an excellent Framerate. I can even play the Crysis demo with all the goodies turned on at my full monitor resolution of 1680x1050. Oh, and my video card only takes up one slot, and I have only one of them.

If I were to buy a PC today, I might get a GTX and a Core 2 Duo, but that's it. SLi has never been a good idea for the consumer in terms of money or performance. It's just a trick NVidia uses to sell multiple video cards to morons. Am I wrong, or is there some new game out there that won't run without three f'n video cards that sound like a jet engine.

I need one

Logitech's new M555b

am I made of win?

save me big money!

Hey, I bought System Builder's Edition of Vista Ultimate 32-bit. What do I get? Do I really have to pay full price to get Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit? Apple is offering OS upgrades for $29. It's totally a shot at MS. They better make Windows 7 cheap, or they'll come out of this worse than they came out of Vista itself.

As long as the droboshare is an extra add-on, I will never buy a drobo. If the ethernet was built-in at no extra cost, I would buy it in a second. Until then, the Acer EasyStore is looking about a zillion times better. It has four drive bays, ethernet, and it comes with Windows Home Server for the same price of $400.

I'm excited about it, but my iPhone has a year left on it. I'll probably decide which direction to go in around June/July 2010. If the Pre is still around, and it lives up to the expectations, it's a very strong contender.