I AM NOT ALONE

The title for this piece hit me immediately due to the realisation that there are many out there with a similar view or opinions to me.

In many of my subjects this happens a lot.

Yet one particular and very miserable but necessary blog subject I am not so sure, despite it being the most popular subject by several country miles.

But I am expecting this to change this year by quite some margin too?!

But I spotted this link of someone speaking about gaming and the different platforms and controllers available. He is covering a preview of Valve's Steam OS for PCs. Valve were the people behind the Half Life games originally and I say that because it has been ten years I think now since I played Half Life 2 and quite disappointingly finished it within 48 hours or so!

Now for me at the time this here highlighted the absolute largest and primary problem for games. It took an absolute age for them to surface, sometimes with a lengthy and frustrating series of false starts, and then after the wow period had barely did down they were over in a little bit longer than the blink of an eye.

For the most part this was largely why it was not THAT disappointing to be without a gaming computer for some of the periods that I have.

Things have improved albeit extremely slowly and very little. But improved they have.

Well except there is no Half Life 3!

In these last ten years Valve have instead been concentrating on their Steam platform. Essentially a short of browser but only their channels and fit downloading their offerings... or rather other people's offerings. For a small percentage of course. It was supposed to change everything... in reality it had changed very little except Valve's bank balance.

It arrived at the same time that Half Life 2 did. When I discovered that the box I just paid for did not have Half Life 2 in it I was furious. When I got my next bill from the phone company for the download data charges I had a coronary! It was hailed as the future of gaming while I thought it was a big streaming pike of dogs poo and saw an example of yet another lazy fat bastard wanting to earn shit loads while sitting on their arses playing games and surfing their pie hole with.... PIES, coffees and doughnuts?!

As it turns out I never downloaded anything else on Steam for over ten years!! Weird, huh?

What never occurred to me despite the fact I knew that it's existence continued was that I could still walk into a Game store and see PC Titles on a rack?! After more than ten years to?!

So what happened?!

Will quite obviously the majority felt as I did. I still prefer to walk into a store and then buy a case of my beloved title, especially if it's a special edition with bigger box, maps, bumper size manual and the like. Nothing can compare to that feeling of opening the box and seeing the extra bumpf inside. NOTHING!

My other problem was with prior that stated that the consoles would eventually kill the PC of and this was so deluded for so many reasons and on so many levels. As far as I was concerned any tech journalist who stated this should be whether if themselves and fired?!?!

Well ten years have passed since it's inception and yet it had not taken over the world. Not had the PC been confirmed to history just yet. Still the statements are made though, only this time around the landscape is somewhat markedly different to what it was teen years ago!

Back then there was no Windows 8... sorry I meant Windows H8! Or Windows 80 to 83, lol.

Steam has not taken over the world but after some noises emanating from their direction and everyone and his brother thinking it would be Half Life 3 it turned out to be a Steam Operating System!!

Still I thought this had more potential than Steaming piles of... downloads, lol.

Immediately there was talk of the double touchpad controller and I thought that these controllers must be better then even I thought as they are still sticking with a gamepad?!

But today I find this report by someone with both a brain and and a good memory?!

Lmao!

Opinion: What is the point of SteamOS? I can't think of a single one - http://pulse.me/s/KZiSN

AMD A10-7850K

When I started this blog I wanted to do something a little different.

I have spent years waiting for launches and then days waiting for benchmarks. Over all this time several things started started to appear to me.

1) More and more benchmarking programs started to appear

2) Stupid people started to work for free for a number of companies by becoming pay per free sales executives (read: very sad fanboys)

3) More and more people both doing benchmarks as well as rowing in forums did not know what they were talking about

So I picked up a few techniques.

When I buy a CPU I do so by looking forwards and NOT BACKWARDS! Quite how some numb-skulls can justify a thousand quid chip because of some very quick number in a three year old program is beyond all understanding. Anything currently out there will run just fine too and you would be hard pressed to notice. However many out there come across in reviews to insinuate that you would. NO!

So I started to flick around different websites that are just begging like besotted love struck dogs on heat for site hits. Scrabbling around for words and graphs that extend over many pages to make you think they know what they are talking about when they give you their conclusion.

The truth is I wade through them all looking for one or two signs that lead me to the truth.

Today I did just that and I found it too!

I was specifically looking for something that showed the benefits of all the goodies AMD had included within their new Kaveri chip and specifically the A10-7850K. I also reminded myself that whatever I found would only be an early example of improvement and that this would gradually get better and better over time. I was in for a surprise.

Now I cannot recall what the benchmark was, may come back and edit this at a later date, but what I found kind of blew me away!

While wading through a great many pages of people muttering on about useless and pointless i3 chips I found a benchmark whereby the A10-7850K was 5 times faster than an i5?! Not an i3 but an i5!! Five times faster!!

Now here is where I use my noggin whereas many do not...

Now once I have seen these few benchmarks that show these kinds of speeds and improvements my brain then decides on the following...

1) Everythiong else is badly programmed or just not programmed to show the benefits and so redundant..

2) No coder worth his salt would code their new software in the same manner currently and ignore all the extra processing power on offer, ergo making said benchmarking software redundant.

3) If any of the benchmarking programs were any good they would not be plowing through loads and loads of software making most of them...REDUNDANT!!!

4) Any software engineer wants his, hers of their software to sell and be more popular over all others and so will want it to be faster and  look better than all their rivals, therefore NOT ignoring all the extra processing power on offer, making all benchmark programs....well REDUNDANT! LOL.

What I find highly amusing is that I am always excited about a new CPU or GPU because I am thinking that when software and games come out FOR this chip that they will be several steps ahead over whats currently available. Now I assume that is what everyone else thinks and it IS what they should think!!

But they start harping on about an extra second in this program or a few frames per second in that program as if this renders the chip unusable?! Stoopid!!

Now factor in on top of what I said about the HSA making it five times faster in one benchmark, 45% faster in Battlefield 4 and the fact that much of the future software will be coded for the next generation consoles which will be VERY PC like and it will be a very good time.

There is just one other thing that no one has mentioned within all this!!

What benefits will Valve's Steam OS bring to the table?

Linux users have been crowing on about how Linux is much faster than Windows, excluding Ubuntu and Unity in that statement, and if Valve can prove that is certainly the case right across the board then oh my god!!

I have been hearing of some noise along the grapevines of many developers, coder and software houses being a little bit more than excited and making motions to move towards certain coding techniques with the AMD hUMA and HSA in the forefront of their minds.

I think I am now beginning to see why and as much as I would still like to see a 6 CPU and 8 GPU APU I think that at the earliest possible opportunity I will start gathering together some bits and pieces to finally build that rig I am 6 years overdue of building?!

Still I saved a lot of money from all those rigs I never built! LMAO!!

Now I cannot wait for all that software to be released that will take advantage of it all, I think give it a month or two should start seeing some things appear?!

Woohoo!

Interesting link...

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=747091

THE GADGETS OF TRINITY PART 1-4

Here are a few videos of me linking up largish monitors to my tablet and thethered to my phone via wireless...

THE ONE EIGHTY DEGREE TURN

Intel has a long history of deliberate over pricing, anti-trust along with anti-competetive behaviour. I have noted that they have reached such a size that they do not really worry about breaking any laws. They always look for other ways to gain an advantage even though they have had a huge one for quite sometime now.

A couple of years back I was quite interested in AMD's new APUs like their first one of Llano. I intended to get a laptop with one in bit ended up getting something else. A little time later I remember visiting retails stores expecting over half the stock to be powered by AMD's APUs with just one or two GPUs. It never quite happened.

Instead what did curiously happen was something that did not make sense to me and that was the talk of Ultrabooks. These things looked very svelte in all honesty but if I wanted that I would go with an Apple (ugh). They were also graphically underpowered and had the first solid state disk drives has opposed to the spinning hard drives. Only these were mostly 128BGB and were not even enough to store what I had on my current laptop!

Before long every store I walked into was awash with these Ultrabooks?! AMD based laptops did not amount to half the number of Ultrabooks on offer. Then there were the All-In-One PCs that mostly had Intel Core i3 CPUs in them?! I lost count of the number I walked straight by because they had Intel's i3 and i5 and very few AMD APUs?!

I also never saw anyone actually seriously looking at them and I did fancy a Lenovo model that did have an APU because it did look good. But I did not. I thought at the time how mad it was and simply could not understand how these manufacturers thought for one moment that people were going to buy them. Not anyone that understood their hardware, that is for sure. Yet they were slightly over-priced too and everywhere.

After all this time I now see this report with the link provided below that states that Acer got into troubles and they blame it on the Ultrabooks?

What you mean that not everyone thinks that Intel CPUs on their own are all that?! Even in slim and sexy metal chassis with nice keyboards?! Should not believe all the forums you read on the Internet, nor Intel for that matter.

The funny part about all this is that Intel's own questionable behaviour may well be coming back to bite them in the arse?! Ultrabooks making everyone a little touchy and wary and with AMD chips going inside the consoles and not the talk about Kaveri and its four different approaches to gaining speed on Intel.

Should be an interesting year for sure.

New CEO pins Acer's troubles on Ultrabooks - http://pulse.me/s/Jf9eA

WINDOWS 90 ANNOUNCED

Oh stupid me I added a zero...or is that I forgot the decimal point? Lol.

Hmm I am not sure if this linking thing is actually working?

I just noticed that at the bottom of the page to words saying 'Top Stories' but I hit the link button within the Flipboard app. Sorry if it not working but seems to be the app not actually doing what you ask it to do, finding it a real pain in the posterior if I am honest and may go back to Pulse, which is the linked In News app.

The trouble with News apps you would have to be extremely short sighted to just have the standard apps to the usual suspects. it does not matter that your a Tory or a Labour supporter as the name of thew game these days is to lie, set up a false image intentionally and chose NOT to report on real people that shows you the truth but instead go chasing around after celebrities and turn yourself into a gossip programme over time.

I prefer to use an app that brings you stories from a number of different sources and mainly those that are none of the big names except for The Guardian and the Independent. Possibly The Telegraph too.

Now back to the subject that the link below is supposed to take you to!

It seems that there is going to be yet another version of Windows and I had to chuckle a bit over what it stated as it said that Microsoft want Windows 8, all of them, to be like Windows Vista whereby they got it wrong. Well that is that they did it twice! At least.

Whether or not its an official name the new Windows is being called Windows 9 in the report and I am not sure what it is with American big businesses as they seem to either go with odd numbers or even numbers to get it right. Well I say that as a bit of fun poking at what they used to say about the Star Trek films whereby it was a joke that it was only worth going to the cinema to see the even numbered films. Well except my least favourite ones were number 4. Umm and err....Generations was a bit disappointing, whatever number that one was. The one with God in it was not all that either, lol.

The trouble is for Microsoft is that they doggedly refuse to learn from their mistakes. They think that trend setting comes naturally because they are so big a company but it does not. In fact they have single handedly almost destroyed the PC industry and I think now there will be a big turn around because of Valve and their Steam OS. In fact it would NOT surprise me one bit to discover that Microsoft are now being motivated to get off their arses because of Valve?!

There was also no way you was going to earn from charging way to much for an Office Suite and now they want a monthly fee? They are lucky that most people simply do not realise that most Office programs are compatible with Microsoft's Office and they are free. Even on Windows you can get Open Office and even on Android there is Quick Office, Documents to Go, Smart Office and many others besides.

There are some silly headlines too about Sony's PS4 crushing Microsoft's XBone in sales but this is greatly exaggerated but even so....they will not want Sony to go running away with sales and the gap to start increasing. Oddly the sales are going just as I thought they would. Personally I like the look of the XBox and its connect gadget but the PS4 has more power. The funny thing is that I have from the beginning found their hardware to be somewhat strange! There are EIGHT CORES on the CPU side and the gaming side they have a single chip?! Four CPUs and 2 GPUs would have been perfectly understandable and quite expected.

So it remains to be seen whether or not the graphics on the two next gen consoles ends up being quite underwhelming or if PC Gamers crowing about frames per second have been spending several hundreds of pounds on hardware when the game developers have been coding like crap when it comes to the PC?! Lol!

I think it will be one very interesting year this year for a whole heap of reasons.

Top Stories

LENOVO 4K GAMING LAPTOP

Well what do you know?!

Now sooner am I wondering many things and when things will be launched and a company I like, Lenovo, have created a rather interesting laptop.

Yes I think 2014 will be a great year, well for technology anyway, I would not like to be a politician, journalist, doctor or Policeman this year. There were some things linked to these I wanted to be....once upon a time and some time ago.

Well technology are tools to m and the more I can manage to acquire the better I will get at what I do and have been doing.

So yes 2014 is certainly starting off with the right sounding notes and these are promising.

Say Hello To Lenovo's 4K Gaming And Entertainment Laptop http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/01/05/say-hello-to-lenovos-4k-gaming-and-entertainment-laptop/

4K MONITOR PRICE FROM DELL SHOCK

Well this is somewhat astounding to read.

A 4K monitor, so instead of 1,080 pixels down the screen you actually have double across and down so 2,160 and 3840 across, which is less than $1,000?!

It gets better still as you may be thinking "oh so $999.99 then but no! How about $699?! Now translated into British Pounds this is, oh crap where is the 'pound key on this keyboard, so should be about GBP450?! Though it never quite works out like that as companies just love ripping off us Brits. Even so at the GBP700 its likely to cost it is still incredible.

When I built my last rig I paid around that price for my 1600x1200 Viewsonic monitor. The size of it was 20 inches in diameter and I should really tell you that this Dell 4K monitor is 28 Inches across! So your talking about something with perfect visuals like that of Apple's retina display but in 28 inches?!

Now of course this has a bit of a quandary for the use in TV. Now maybe the Blu-Ray upscale players are good enough and I simply do not know. But you will likely be in for a bloody long wait to see TV in 4K. Luckily in some cases TV's would double as computer monitors for gaming and this will be true for my system if I ever build it.

There is however one other thing and that is the new CPUs, or more correctly APUs made by AMD who are about to release their new kaveri APU in a mere few days.

I have been waiting for this particular chip fr quite some time now with its Steamroller Cores and its GCN graphics bolted onto the same chip. There is one thing I had been hoping for and that is at least a six CPU core with a GPU core bolted on. Better an 8 but then there was this talk about hUMA and Mantle. The very idea that the GPU cores could be used as CPU cores has the potential to be one hell of a game changer.  Hmm now let me think...I think there are 13 cores on the GPU side?! So added to the four steamroller cores that would be a CPU, when NOT playing games, with 17 cores thereabouts?!

EDIT: AMD KAVERI HAS FOUR CPU CORES AND EIGHT GPU CORES SO CAN BE CLAIMED TO BE A 12 CORE CHIP!

Now of course I do not know whether this will perform as well as a steamroller core, core to core? But even if they are half the speed what you have is something of the equivalent speed of a CPU with no less than ten and a half steamroller cores?! If it is about 50% the speed that is. Similar speed and your talking 17 cores!!

EDIT: AMD KAVERI HAS FOUR CPU CORES AND EIGHT GPU CORES SO CAN BE CLAIMED TO BE A 12 CORE CHIP!

These are the types of things I think about when there is talk of new tech.

The trouble is all this sounds great but can you run a 4K monitor with one? As for Crossfire does all the new toys work when it is on crossfire? Can you now add any other card in crossfire and not just an equally powered card.

Hopefully this will be answered in the next few days. It will also be very interesting to see what else will come out of the AMD APU stable throughout the rest of 2014?!

[Updated] Dell Wasn't Joking About That 28-Inch Sub-$1000 4K Monitor; It's Only $699 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/01/07/dell-wasnt-joking-about-that-28-inch-sub-1000-4k-monitor-its-only-699/