PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Just doing what I can to show my support against SOPA and PIPA. Check out the Wikipedia article and do a quick Google search to educate yourself!
Also check out the WordPress.com protest at wordpress.com
Which networking site has the best designed user profile page with regards to design and usability?
I’m curious, do users prefer design and style over features? Do minimalistic layouts make for a better design as opposed to cluttering a page with functions? Do users prefer colorful pages or ones with a mono-color scheme?
This post is a continuation/update of My Favourite Movies. For a list of MANY movies and T.V. shows I have seen visit My Trakt Library.
For some reason a couple of my friends (yes I have some) have requested copies of this list so if you’re stuck in on a rainy day or just want to annoy the RIAA, download some of these.
My Favourite Movies
Note* these categories are of my own choosing and may not directly reflect the true genre of a movie; I simply chose which category seemed the best fit. For example Avatar is in “Science Fiction” but it could have been placed in “Action”.
TL;DR : I only have a vague idea what belongs where.
1. Inception
2. Fight Club
3. The Prestige
4. Pontypool
5. Avatar
6. A Beautiful Mind
7. V for Vendetta
8. Sweeney Todd
9. Sin City
10. Moulin Rouge
11. Starship Troopers
1. Inception
2. Pontypool
3. Memento
4. Donnie Darko
5. A Scanner Darkly
6. The Prestige
7. Paprika
8. Brazil
1. The A-Team
2. Watchmen
3. Ironman
4. Minority Report
5. V for Vendetta
6. The Island
7. Paycheck
8. Sin City
9. 300
10. Taken
11. Kill Bill Vol. 1
12. The Avengers
1. Mr. Brooks
2. The Last Samurai
3. Sweeney Todd
4. Moulin Rouge
5. A Beautiful Mind
6. Schindler’s List
7. Phantom of the Opera
8. Dr. Horrible`s Sing-along Blog
9. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
1. Silence of the Lambs
2. The Da Vinci Code
3. From Hell
4. Sherlock Holmes
5. Se7en
6. The Bone Collector
7. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
1. Gladiator
2. Constantine
3. Pan’s Labyrinth
4. Dragonheart
5. The Golden Compass
6. Lord Of the Rings
7. Reign of Fire
8. Pirates of Caribbean
9. Underworld
1. The Thing
2. Halloween
3. Carrie
4.
1. Avatar
2. Alien
3. A.I.
4. The Matrix
5. Sphere
6. Starship Troopers
7. The Fifth Element
8. Event Horizon
9. District 9
10. War of the Worlds
11. Serenity
1. Firefly
2. Dollhouse
3. Archer
4. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
5. Fringe
6. Futurama
7. Castle
8. Lie to me
9. How I met Your Mother
10. Scrubs
11. Big Bang Theory
1.
ENJOY !
On Monday after an annoying wait for shipping I got up close and personal with a custom built NP8760 gaming laptop from Sager PC, as you may know I considered buying a Sager notebook but ended up choosing the Asus G73JH because of it’s lower price and more appealing design. Most of my cons section for this laptop rest on the external design so lets get that over with.
My first impression at the unboxing was “This doesn’t look like $2300 worth of computer.” I expected a more polished and appealing design considering the high price, I consider it quite a mark against it given the cost. Other than the bland design (based on the Clevo W870CU), the build quality was very high all the pieces fit together tightly and perfectly, and the non-flashy appearance can be a pro or con depending on your tastes, and thank the design God that the laptop isn’t glossy. The laptop is also smaller from front to back than the Asus G73 because of the Asus’s exhaust and battery design, unfortunately it is also thicker from bottom to top (open). It has four USB ports including a USB 3.0, two are place on the back along with the power input (which I consider an annoyance) and four audio input and outputs (line in, headphone, S/PDIF, mic), I was extremely happy to see the full sized chiclet style keyboard and several dedicated function keys near the base of the screen. I can also tell you that the fingerprint reader works very well and accurately and gives you a serious James Bond kick when you can log in or out with the swipe of a finger.
From the look of it the laptop appears to be covered in speakers and I was hoping for superior audio quality but alas while it’s better than average it still suffers from the tinny audio that plagues most laptops. The mic is also placed right near the touchpad which I would assume brings it somewhat closer to your mouth but seem like it might be covered by your hands occasionally. Video good audio
The 17.3” LED backlit screen runs at 1080p and is a pleasure to watch offering an incredible viewing experience for movies and games, probably one of the highest quality screens I have seen on a notebook. From the first boot we noticed a one dead pixel and later four more which marred the screen quality, but could just be bad luck. Still an expensive machine like this needs to be near perfect.
This laptop had been customized with an 80GB SSD drive which boosted the already blazing fast performance of the NVidia GeForce GTX 460m graphics card, coupled with 8 GB of 1333MHz DDR3 RAM and a an Intel Core i7 Q740 quad core running at 1.73GHz, to make this system simply FAS.T Games such as Cysis and StarCraft 2 should max out and barely cause the system to blink, as well as improving boot times on a clean install of Windows 7 Premium, by almost half, by my totally informal guess over the Asus G73JH.
This laptop might be a plain Jane when it comes to looks but for most gamers looking for performance at a reasonable price beauty is all about what’s inside, and with that 1.5 GB graphics card and 1.3GHz RAM and SSD she is one beautiful laptop. I prefer function over style in almost everything but when I shelled out $1900 Canadian (after taxes and shipping) I wanted a good looking machine and so the Sager’s took a backseat, however for $2300 Canadian (after taxes and shipping) the NP8760 is hardly a poor choice for a gamer.
I’ve had my brand new G73JH for a couple of weeks now and feel that I can comment on it, and so I will. First off I ordered mine online from TigerDirect.ca for exactly $1900.97 dollars Canadian after tax and shipping and I can say that I do not regret a single cent. I’m not here to review TigerDirect but I will say that their shipping was quick and buying was easy, I highly recommend them for Canadian customers looking for an alternative to Newegg.com.
Now on to the main event: the box it came in was large and well padded as it should be when shipping internationally. The box prominently showed the very impressive warranty Asus includes wit
h this laptop, a two year accidently damage, surge, water, fire all included and it’s the best one I’ve ever seen without extra charge. My first impression when sliding the laptop out of the box and getting over the giddiness brought on by unboxing a new gadget for the first time was “man this looks menacing” and it really does. The laptop is large the biggest I’ve ever seen partly due to the massive 1080p, 17 inch screen and partly because of the design of the heat exhausts and battery compartment. I say heat exhausts b
ecause they really are, the design of this laptop is based on a stealth bomber which actually comes though and makes the shape seem ominous and rather alien especially when closed. Also of note the power brick is quite large, not anywhere near XBox 360 large but bigger than average.
The keyboard is a chicklet style board and very well spaced making the keyboard on par with an expensive desktop one. The keyboard is also backlit which if nothing else makes it look cooler, not quite as cool as the more expensive Alienware laptops but much more so than some in the same price range and if you would prefer a more toned down look you can change how bright the backlights are or if they are even on. The hand rests are some sort of rubber that along with the back of the screen will thankfully not smear. The touchpad is just massive almost double the one on my old laptop and is pretty responsive,
All the ports on this laptop are thankfully on the sides, one side has your ethernet/LAN, mic, 3.5mm headphone jack, two USB ports, the other has a VGA, HDMI, card reader slot, and two more USB ports for a total of four available. All indicator lights are on the front, battery, wifi, disk usage, ect.
Near the bottom of the screen are four buttons one on the right for power and three on the left for the keyboard and glow lighting, the twin turbo mode and one for switching the screen modes between Gamma correction, Vivid, Theatre, Soft, Normal modes.
The twin turbo mode overclocks your 1.6GHz Quad core i7 720QM to about 2.53GH
z but from what I’ve been reading this can actually hurt performance because it conflicts with the Intel Turbo boost software which allows your processor to run faster when an application requests more power. I did miss dedicated hardware buttons for media control but its a relatively small gripe and one that very few people will require.
Graphics performance is impressive as it should be in a gaming laptop not quite the extreme power you can get from the best of the best but the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 is still one of the most or possibly the most powerful single mobile graphics card. Some other gaming rigs come with dual GPU’s but the 5870 is more than enough, I can run Crysis at max setting except for the Anti aliasing and Starcraft 2 totally maxed without slowing down anything else. When I was researching I had trouble finding the Windows Experience Index ratings online so here:
As you can see your RAM is very close to Windows max rating of 7.9 and your graphics are not far behind, its a shame that it is all dragged down to 5.9 by the dual 320 GB 7200 RPM drives, but if you feel up to voiding your warranty or I believe you can send it to Asus to install a SSD to bump that score up a lot. The Experience index isn’t the best judge of your PC but I’ve always found it quite useful and accurate. One other thing I’d like to mention along with the impressive video quality and performance is the audio: I’ve never owned a laptop worth quite this much but the built in sub woofer makes the sounds coming out of this otherwise silent machine beautiful.
That’s all I can say for the hardware, and the software is pretty much up to you you do get some bundled software, a face recognition program that allows you to log in to Windows without a password, an audio enhancement program (Creative, I’ve seen many people who have this program cause system instability and crashes), a program for customizing your BIOS start screen, Asus Fastboot which actually could be useful because it delays programs from starting up until Windows is ready resulting in faster boot times. Other than that there are a bunch of other bloatware apps that come included against your will I suggest removing them but they won’t make a huge impact on this powerhouse.
XKCD Asofterworld
