That is not a surprise. AMD is the red headed step child of the PC community. People who buy AMD CPUs or video cards do it because they cannot afford Intel or Nvidia, or because they have something to prove. I get the mentality. I used to drive a highly modified Datsun 510 and the most joy I got out of that car was out driving people in Porsche's and other nicer, more expensive cars in my "piece of junk Datsun".

It seems like AMD buyers have a similar mentality. They will go on for days about how AMD chips and cards get similar benchmarks as Nvidia and Intel hardware. But at the end of the day, you'll get a game like Rage that just does not run for shit and then what? Who cares about benchmarks when you are losing FPS?

My experience was the same. The first computer I built myself was a 486DX2/66 and over the years I have tried out AMD cards on numerous occasions. Every time I do, there are driver issues that make me regret it. The last time I bought an AMD card it was a Radeon series right around the time PlanetSide came out. As soon as I saw that Optimized for Nvidia splash screen, I once again knew that I had made a mistake.

Anyone who reads game sites has seen the problems that AMD cards have been having with major releases like Witcher 3 and the latest Batman. Now part of that is not necessarily AMDs fault because the publishers and Nvidia are working closely together to implement Nvidia specific technologies. Having said that, it says something that Nvidia has the resources to dedicate developers to work alongside major studios to optimize their games to run on Nvidia hardware.

While I am as big of a fan of a level playing field as the next guy, I have a hard time caring when it comes to video cards. If Nvidia wants to invest the money to hire more people to work alongside major game companies, and by doing so the games from those companies run better on Nvidia cards, then that is just smart business. I will continue buying Nvidia cards and be happy knowing that Nvidia is investing my money in putting themselves further and further ahead of the rest of the market with each subsequent generation of hardware that they put out.

But you get the joys of AMD's great drivers!

You'll have to excuse me if I am not chomping at the bit to go buy this card.

According to Dice's data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice's ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline.

In other words,

"We cannot figure out what is going on in the IT marketplace, but we are supposed to be a resource for the IT marketplace. Please, help us analyze these trends because we cannot reconcile the differences ourselves!"

You are right. Thanks for the correction.

That is an interesting question. When I was consulting, I worked for one of the accounting firms in Santa Monica, California that tracks the royalties paid to artists for their songs. Now granted this was back in 2006, but the model at the time was pennies per song. The radio stations were required to track the plays and reimburse the labels, who then reimbursed the artists.

While Apple may set aside a whole slew of money to pay out from, I have a suspicion that the pennies per song model will stay in place.

You mentioned that you have to have their managed modem. Time Warner has a similar requirement to have a modem that they support. In my case, I was able to buy a basic Motorola DOCCIS 3.0 modem at Target that was on Time Warner's compatibility list. It was less than $100.

Not only does the modem work better, I no longer pay the monthly rental fee.

Exactly.

I am running a

i7-960 on an Asus board
12GB RAM
SSD primary (Evo840)
RAID1 7200 SATA secondaries (WD w 64MB cache)
GFX660s in SLI

It handled games just fine until Witcher 3. In that game the CPU lag is noticeable to the point where it impacts game play.

I doubt that I will upgrade it any time soon with a baby and new house on the way.

If I need real computing power, I am working on something that I am getting paid for and they are providing the hardware. I am too lame to be doing anything cool in my spare time like security research.

It is okay to say, "I do not know." or "I need to do some research and get back to you."

If you have ANY hesitation about making a change to a production system, DO NOT MAKE IT. We all have shot ourselves in the foot at one time or another. Learn from our mistakes. Do not be that guy (or girl).

Until you get good at estimating how long it takes to complete a task or project, double your estimates when someone asks you how long it will take you. It is better to over estimate and get it done sooner, than to under estimate and have people waiting on you. (BTW - Any non-trivial task will ALWAYS take longer than you think it will.)

Before making any changes, make sure that you have a good backup and that you have tested your ability to restore it. Yes, it will make things take longer but it is better to have a fallback position. This is doubly true in production. NEVER MAKE PRODUCTION CHANGES WITHOUT A BACKUP.

Be humble. The days of being a jack of all trades IT practitioner are dead and gone. There are too many things to know and not enough time to learn them all. By and large, IT people can be cooperative and supportive.... if you are humble. If you act like you know everything and fail to ask for help, you will find everyone lining up to watch you fail and snickering at you when you do. Check your ego at the door, learn from others and when you have the opportunity to, help others out when they ask for it. Do not be that dick who tells everyone to RTFM. Having said that, if someone asks the same question over and over again... feel free to tell them to RTFM. Nothing is worse than a freeloader. We all have jobs to do and while helping new people out is part of the job, doing their job for them is not.

Well played sir.

They suffer from a condition called "being human". It causes occasional failures in an otherwise operational controller-human, some very small percentage of the time. Even the highest-quality controller-humans have a non-zero failure rate.

I am certain that every logical person understands and accepts the risk as you explained it.

The fallacy in the argument is that the presence of a camera is going to increase the incidences of failures.

At the core, if being held accountable makes someone perform poorly, they are in the wrong profession and should find another way to earn a living. There are plenty of jobs out there that do not involve a person's actions (or lack of actions) having the potential to detrimentally affect the lives of others.

As an example from the work place, an effective technique for encouraging someone to complete their tasks on time is to setup a regular meeting with them and their peers. Often times I have found that people who seem to always have excuses for why they need just a little bit more time to get something done, all of a sudden, as if by magic, become able to get things done on time if the only alternative is for them to admit to their peers, again, for the umpteenth time, that no... they still aren't done.

While a weekly meeting is not a direct parallel to always on video monitoring, the underlying purpose of providing accountability is the same.

While I have not worked on the rail roads, I do know someone who works for BNSF and he assures me that those engineers have an SOP for everything. Amtrak might not be quite as organized, but they probably have similar training materials. In situations like that, either the engineer is doing things by the book or they are not.

If the engineers' concentration is so fragile that they are going to be distracted by a camera, they are obviously not the right people to be operating complex machinery.

Maybe we should just replace them with automation and run the trains remotely. They could keep one engineer per train to engage the manual override in the event that someone hacks the control infrastructure and tries to do Bad Things(tm) to the trains.

Wanting to crack copy protection and write trainers is what led to me learn x86 assesmbly, specifically 80386 assembly.

That understanding of assembly gave me a solid foundation for the rest of my career. Once you understand interupts and memory registers, you can grasp the basics of everything from applications, to networking to storage systems. Fundamentally they are all doing the same thing.... reading something from one memory register, modifying it with the contents of another memory register, and pushing the results to somewhere else.

The game is setup for a very gradual progression if you just want to quest and explore the world. My wife plays the game just for questing, she hates raiding. The allure of the game for her is the expansive world and having a place to escape to for an hour or two. She never got into the playing for hours at a time and raiding all weekend style of game play. To me, it seems like a waste of time to level characters and never raid, but it keeps her entertained. Different strokes for different folks and all that.

What is your solution for preserving anonymity but verifying the vote?