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Blogs -
Commendation given where earned.
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The computer industry has grown stale. PC users experience constant
innovation, but never anything spectacular. Another month, another new
video card. Guess what? It outperforms last month's model! Which is now
conveniently $50-$100 cheaper, to make the newest card more elusive.
But really, do we need
more video performance? Sure, games are getting more advanced, but...
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Blogs -
Customer Service related blogs
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So, I'm not prone to bashing companies often. In fact, you'd have to look back quite a few months to find another rant equal to this. But, there's just so many important things wrapped up in this story that I feel its worth telling. It all started when my wife and I decided that we wanted to get a new HDTV. If you know me at all ...
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News -
Site News
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Here's the latest in our series of article based on the wiki. This is a how-to for overclocking your Nvidia 8800 GTS, a database of results from the internet and other useful information.
Introduction
In late 2006, NVIDIA announced the world’s first DirectX
10-capable mainstream GPUs to the market in the form of the top-end
GeForce 8800GTX and the slightly lower performing (but still very
powerful) GeForce 8800GTS, both based on the G80 graphics core. The GTS
provided a video card that maintained much of the high performance of
the GTX but at a significantly reduced cost. At the time of its
release, the 8800 series firmly bested the performance of any of ATI’s
high end parts, including the X1950XTX. When overclocked, the cheaper
8800GTS is capable of performing better than the more expensive
8800GTX, with many 8800GTS cards achieving GPU overclocks in the range
of 20%.
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News -
News from the Internet
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Paramount, New Line and Warner Brothers has all announced in the last week that they are completely adandoning HD-DVD for the BluRay camp, exclusively. While I confirmed these stories there will no doubt be billions of dollars of pressure exerted on the remaining studios. So, I'm not ready to call it yet, but to all appearances, BluRay has already won the format wars.
Perfect timing as I was just trying to decide which one to buy.
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Blogs -
Commendation given where earned.
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This is a listing of recommended chemicals and cleaning products for heatsinks, processors, RAM chips and GPUs.
Please note, these chemicals can potentially harm the product you are
attempting to clean, damage paint, rugs, walls, your skin or eyes or
other surfaces. They can potentially result in bodily harm to you and
others around you. Please make sure you use all products safely.
Read their instructions and use any needed personal protective
equipment like protective goggles or gloves. be careful of fumes and
make sure you are working in a well ventilated area.
Yuck, with that out of the way, here's the listing. :)
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Blogs -
Commendation given where earned.
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One of the biggest projects going on right now is the digitization of millions of older books, newspapers and other documents. Obviously, any significant document is already available electronically but what about the millions of smaller and less significant books? These still contain very valuable information, history and other perspectives. Maintaining that resource and making it more widely available is a tremendous way to deepen the knowledge that humanity possesses.
The best way to accomplish this is to scan the texts and let a computer automatically recognize the characters and words. Unfortunately this is extremely difficult to do accurately on some older texts since the paper is degraded, the ink bleed or simply the font used to too hard to read for a modern OCR system. How can this be fixed?
A project lead by the Carnegie Mellon University has worked with one of its professors, Luis von Ahn, to solve this problem. Luis von Ahn developed the CAPTCHA engine which if you are a member of this site you've already used. Its a simple tool which display random number or letters on a colored background. You are supposed to decifer that code and enter it into the website to help prevent spam. Its a tremendously useful tool and is highly effective. But, Luis von Ahn looked at all the work being done on those random letters and numbers and decded that a more useful work could be performed.
He and his team have developed a system which extracts those impossible to recognize words from older texts and displays those to users. In turn, those users are helping to fight spam AND process the backlog of millions of books and other texts that need to be recognized and made available online.
You can see how the millions of daily users of the CAPTCHA system can now become a boost to the online development and display of these valuable texts. I believe in this project and so this site has been converted to use the new and improved reCAPTCHA system immediately. There's a few links here you are welcome to explore if you'd like more information. If you are not yet a member of this site just register and you'll be able to help the book project and join a great community at the same time.
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Site News
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As you probably know we're working with some new features on the site we think you'll be really excited about. The user profile page has been substantially upgraded. For example, you can now host photo galleries here and leave posts for others on their photos. You can create a friends list, post profile pictures and create social groups with anyone you want. Make sure you start clicking on the usernames of your friends here on the site, its a great way to get to know a little more about them and let them know what you think about them. :)
Also, the photo galleries are going to be a big feature, I'm sure. There's quite a few ways to have fun, you can post multiple albums and show off some of your best builds. Then, just wait to hear from your friends as they post their thoughts on your profile page.
The profile pages are now significanly customizeable so you can change the color, font, background image and much more. Take a look, I think you'll be impressed.
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Site News
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We're working with some new and improved software on the forums. One of the cool features is a tagging feature allowing you to specify what the key words of a thread are. Plus, if you don't like the key words someone else put on a thread you can add your own. Its a great way to really improve the accuracy of searches and find just what you are looking for.
You'll see a small tag field at the end of every thread and also when you are posting a new thread. Feel free to enter whatever key words you think fit. Up to 25 key words can be added to each thread allowing quite a bit of detail. Most threads will probably have only 2 - 5 though. If you'd like to see the most popular tags or search tags here's the main tag page . Now, make sure you tag your posts!
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