No, I'm not spending that much on video cards actually. I've never spent more than $160 on one if I recall correctly. This is precisely the effect of the point of the OP - you don't need all that for gaming. The so-called "mid range" cards quite sufficient for gaming on any size monitor nowadays.

1920x1080 is the resolution that DUMBASSES have settled upon. Ha ha. My cell phone can do 4k already BOOYAAA!

OK that was just joke-trolling. But I don't agree that we should settle for 1080p regardless. I found myself a $200 deal on a Dell Ultrasharp U2410 for my big system, where the important graphics happen. It does 1920x1200 and it's very nice. I would surely rather have a 27" monitor with the 1600p or whatnot resolution, but money has to be spent on practical things sometimes.

This also sounds like a previous Slashdot discussion about GPUs...

Man if I bought a new laptop and it smelled like cat piss, I would definitely be pissed off. Piss.

What a piss-poor excuse for a product launch. Don't these piss-ant Dell people have noses in their quality control department.

ETC

I was going to comment on here that the question nobody seems to be asking is "HOW FAR AWAY ARE THESE PLANETS?" but finally somebody did think of it I guess. I couldn't find it in the article anywhere, but I just skimmed over it a couple of times with the pattern recognition goggles brain application.

If it really is 2500 light years away, then we have no hope of getting there without quantum teleportation etc. But if we could do that, then sending a well-equipped spacecraft out there somewhere in that solar system to check it out would be a good plan I think. Get to work, folks.

yeah, you must not have played the last one. My installation with all of the expansions (that came with "Premium") of BF3 came out to at least 34GB of hard drive storage. Pretty darn redonkulous.

But hey, I only paid about $20 or something like that for all that content. No way in hell would I pay the $60-80 they are wanting for this new game. I tried the beta and didn't play it more than a couple of times and let it expire without a care. It was nifty and stuff, but it's just more of the same for the most part to me.

The other day I bought a fresh copy of Doom 3 for $2 to add to Steam, and having not played that one for several years, I was pretty impressed with the quality of it. That's a damn-well-made game right there. 1.5GB of disk space.

That stuff is built-in on OSX, check it out.

Having struggled through years of gaming on rigs with various GPUs, I have to wonder where it will hit the point that nobody needs any faster cards.
I started out gaming on the computer on computers with no GPU, and when I got one with a Rage Pro 4MB it was awesome. Then I got a Voodoo card from 3DFX with a whopping 8MB and it was more awesomer. Now you can get whatever that will do whatever for however many dollars.

I really don't see the game programming keeping up with the GPU power. I'm at least 2 GeForce's behind the latest series (560ti) and I can play any game at 1200p resolution with a very decent framerate. Yes I beta-tested Battlefield 4. How much more is enough? I don't want them to stop trying, but somebody needs to ask where it reaches the point of diminishing returns. They could focus on streamlining and cheapening the "good enough" lines...

This is a disturbing trend. I also was figuratively puking when I tested Windows 8 and it was all "MICROSOFT ACCOUNT NOW YOU SIGN IN TO EVERYTHING 24/7 MOTHERFUCKER!!". I managed to get by without the account somehow though. There's almost always a way.

BTW if you want to sign up for a throwaway Apple ID with no payment method, do this:

Go to store.apple.com online wherever and "buy" a Free app. It will prompt for a sign-in, but only with Free Apps can you create a new account with the option for No Payment Method. Use that Apple ID for whatever.

LOL that is stupid. Brushed metal was the best. Snow Leopard's UI is the peak of any operating system's design. All computers should look and work like Mac OS 10.6.8 from 2007 onward. I tried Lion and was like "bleh" and then I ended up having to use Mountain Lion to get new-enough GeForce drivers for my 560ti card, but I don't like its UI. Many tweaks and it's still not as good as Snow. So anything they can do to get back towards to impeccable usefulness of the Snow Leopard look, feel, and functions of Exposé and Spaces will be for the best.

Not really true. It just needs special bootloaders to emulate Macs' EFI, and a few customized drivers, and a healthy disregard for EULAs.

It's not necessary to fully abandon US infrastructure, but it will be necessary for people/companies inside the USA to start creating more secured endpoints. For example, it's not terribly hard to build an email server with free software, and then you just need DNS + MX records that will usually cost a little bit per year.

So just build your own stuff, and build in encryption, and build a community of folks who you (in person by hand if necessary) share keys with etc.

If you aren't the type to build your own stuff, well hopefully you can find someone trustworthy who is the type. We just need more of these.

You must be assimilated

You must comply

Exterminate

Actually it is a typical experience with the particular model I'm discussing. It has almost no air ventilation, and I even took it apart to mod the chassis a bit and gave it better airflow, after using an app to undervolt the CPU. My mods of software + hardware netted about a 20 C drop in average temps under OSX, but failed to help nearly as much under XP (though it did help enough to make it usable). This particular model just makes too much heat as it comes stock. It's the Core2 Duo with ATI X1600 graphics model. Right now browsing the web I am at 46-47 C core temp.

yes i did that already

This is sorta like Apples and Oranges, but... on my 6-year old MacBookPro that I cling to and administrate servers from, the power management is far better on the several-years-old Snow Leopard OS than when I boot it up to the even-more-years-old Windows XP 32-bit.

So much so, that when I fire up XP it goes into TURBOFAN MODE and CPU temps still climb into nutsack-roasting level. 90 to 100 C for the CPU temps (Core2 Duo) have occurred without too much heavy lifting. So forget about the battery life, there is no use without the power cord. It's more an issue to be concerned with the physical limits of the rest of the hardware, like when does it melt?