And to my delight, someone used that epic Hitler scene from the 2004 film Downfall and added the subtitles that fit AMD’s epic disaster. People have used this video to suit all sorts of failures. I love it.

The Egyptian, a great 1950s film, was released at $40 on Bluray and limited to just 3000 copies. As much as I would have liked to have bought the film, there’s no way I’m going to pay that much for it. Drop the price and raise the number of copies available and you’ll do better.

Limiting your release to 3000 copies is almost begging pirates to make your movie available on bittorrent. You might as well just send them a copy!

I realize that OnLive, the online service in question, is a competitor of the one that GameStop has, but how on Earth is what GameStop is doing even remotely legal? You can’t open a brand new game, remove a coupon, and sell the game as brand new! But tell that to GameStop.

Now that media reports have circulated and after talking to Square, GS has stopped selling physical copies of the game [they still sell digital versions] until Square ships them copies of the game without the free coupon for the rival service.

GameStop’s actions are completely ridiculous in my view, and I’m sure illegal as hell. I hope to see some sort of lawsuit come from this, whether it’s from Square or a consumer who bought the game as new, but it clearly wasn’t sealed.

GameStop was in essence really just selling used copies of Deus Ex at the “new” price. I guess GameStop really is only good for selling used games after all.

These high temps would be expected in July/August, but early June? It’s made for a miserable week. You just can’t escape the sweltering temperatures. It’s taxing on the air conditioning as it not only tries to cool the rooms, but remove the high humidity. Both tasks have been difficult for my little window unit to manage.

There appears to be some relief on the horizon. Tomorrow, it’s not even supposed to hit 70 degrees all day! If the humidity isn’t bad, it’s going to be an incredible day.

I expect to be quite busy the rest of the week because you really shouldn’t exert yourself very much outside with this type of weather. A lot of people end up in the hospital with sunstroke and all manners of heat-related medical problems.

I tend to follow the Weather Channel’s advice regarding these hot days of summer: relax, stay inside or in the shade if outdoors, and drink plenty of water.

Had I not had a second computer to look for help with the removal of this piece of malware, I may never have gotten it removed. The malware hijacked the web browsers on my PC, making it impossible to search for help on the infected PC.

I tried transferring the required removal tools via Google Desktop, but the file transfer was rejected by the malware. I ended up wasting a perfectly good DVDR on less than 1 MB of software because I couldn’t find my damn USB thumb drive.

Zap2it’s issues now have me looking for a new TV Listings site. They were by far the best listings site.

The 512MB Geforce 8800GT was the top of the line at the time, but over time I’ve come to regret buying it. It was serious overkill and I haven’t played any games that needed that sort of horsepower in some time.

After taking a look at the IO panel of the Dell, I couldn’t find any monitor hookups that weren’t part of the Geforce card itself, so it looks like Dell tried to save a few bucks and went with a cheap motherboard that didn’t feature onboard video.

One solution would be to replace the card. I don’t really like this idea because it obviously means money out of my pocket.

The other solution I’m considering is removing the power cable to the video card and using remote desktop (actually Teamviewer) on my other system to use the Dell with the bad video card. Will this even work? Does the Dell need a video card since there doesn’t appear to be any onboard video? I’m worried about it not POSTing.

UPDATE: It may not be the video card afterall…. more in the comments.

I’m still happy with my Windows XP and Vista installations. I haven’t even considered making the jump to Windows 7 until I build a new PC. The issues I have with my two current PCs are nothing to do with the OS, but rather the limitations of the old hardware which is tasked with running those two operating systems.

I can’t imagine a feature in Windows 8 that would make everyone want to upgrade from Windows 7. I would imagine Microsoft’s going to make an even harder push on the people like myself who have been resistant to move to Windows 7 and instead convince us to get their new Windows 8.

I just don’t see Steve Ballmer or anyone within Microsoft creating an advertising campaign that would win me over. For me, it’s all about the Benjamins. I don’t have enough cash to build a new system right now or anytime in the near future. So Microsoft can’t count on me getting on the Windows 8 bandwagon just yet.

A new PC’s hardware is expensive enough. A new OS is going to set a guy back another $100-200, depending on the feature set he wants.

It’s not as convenient as it was in v3, but I’m glad Mozilla didn’t ditch it altogether, which is what I feared.

I wish all software companies had informative portions of their site like Mozilla does. They have a lot of contributors to help with questions.

One would think that AMD would release something impressive now, but it seems like they’re just trying to add another chip to the X4 stable, which is looking pretty full at the moment.

The biggest surprise came when I read Anandtech’s review of the new X4 980 chip. Even when you overclock the X4 980 to 4.2GHz, the Intel i5 2400 beats it when doing x264 encoding and the Intel is only running at 3.1GHz. Sure, the numbers are almost the same, but if I were to ramp up the chip to 4GHz, I would be awfully disappointed to see it tied or slightly below the i5 2400.

AMD’s X4 980 just doesn’t seem to offer a whole lot of value.

I think one of Anandtech’s readers has it right when it comes to AMD:

Bulldozer needs to be OUT NOW. AMD makes great products, but they are late to the party.

I’m surprised that more data about Bulldozer hasn’t been leaked. Early numbers are often questionable due to their source, but I’ve found almost nothing regarding Bulldozer. It reminds me of how movie studios don’t usually give screenings of the worst of their movies to movie columnists. I’m certain AMD will come around eventually, as the release date approaches. However, I’m skeptical about AMD’s Bulldozer coming anywhere near to where Intel is with their Sandy Bridge line of processors.

Instead of the usual redness and obvious pain, I actually got a blood blister, something I’ve never had before. It’s very strange and is has formed right where the hammer hit my thumb, to the left of the thumbnail (since I’m a right-handed person). You can see a photo of what a blood blister looks like on wikipedia. It’s not very attractive. It is tender to the touch, however.

All of this happened before the evening news when I was shocked to learn of the Osama Bin Laden mission in Pakistan. That was a nice piece of news to go to bed with. A lot of countries have sacrificed a lot of lives and money in the pursuit of this man and I’m glad he’s finally dead. I’m not one to wish bad things to people, but Bin Laden had it coming.