chw42

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Nov 13, 2013 -> 11:02 AM) I'm going to have to wait for reviews. I just - I don't know. It looks beautiful, but I hope that they didn't sacrifice gameplay and start anew. Rarely would you see Tyson Chandler guarding Steph Curry at the 3 point line like you do in that video in the current gen version. It got an 8.9 from IGN. BTW, if you have the PS3 version, you can upgrade to the PS4 one for $22 (it'll be a digital download).

NBA 2K14 PS4 Gameplay: http://www.twitch.tv/2k/c/3234301

Motorola just announced a toned-down version of the Moto X for $179 off-contract. 4.5" 720P screen, Snapdragon 400 Quad Core processor, 1 GB of RAM, and what they deem as "all-day" battery life. Very decent phone for the price.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Nov 11, 2013 -> 09:00 PM) And that statistic only includes offensive statistics? Because valuing him as a 1B but still using old defensive metrics which boost his value due to his defensive abilities as a catcher in his prime aren't very relevant. wRC+ only accounts for offensive contribution.

I went to the Rockets Clippers game last night. Dwight Howard is something else when you watch him live.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Nov 10, 2013 -> 06:45 PM) Thanks guys. negative points rule! Should have listened to me, I said Foles.

QUOTE (ZoomSlowik @ Nov 8, 2013 -> 11:54 AM) Supposedly he would have signed for the $60 million contract instead of the $52 million they offered. Who knows though none of us can read his mind. He definitely got more money by going to Houston. You'd think $8 million wouldn't mean that much.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Nov 8, 2013 -> 12:10 PM) I actually like G+ better than FB, but it's a barren wasteland. I can't say I really like the change, but I don't really care, either. Some people don't want their G+/real lives as easily connected to YouTube, I know I don't. Then again, as with all free services supplied by someone, deal with it...or stop using it. I use G+ mainly to join communities and see what people I don't know in real life have to say about certain things. I actually like it better than Twitter, but it's no Facebook replacement.

So Google recently decided to make it so that you need a Google+ account to comment on YouTube. You'd think that this would make the YouTube comments section less s***ty and that a lot of people would welcome it and a lot probably do. But there's also a group of people who think Google's pushing Google+ down their throats (they kind of are, but so what?) and that this is the worst thing to ever happen to YouTube. It's like people don't understand that YouTube is owned by Google and that there is nothing wrong with Google requiring you to have a Google account to comment on it (comment, not view, mind you). This is like saying you shouldn't be able to use your Facebook account to use Instagram or you shouldn't be able to use your Twitter account to use Vine. These same people also act like Google shouldn't try to expand its social network site, but that's kind of Google's goal. They're a business after all. If you want to use their services, you need to give something in return. Google isn't a damn charity.

Dolphins' GM told Martin's agent that Martin should punch Incognito the day before Martin walked out... This just got weirder: http://profootballzone.com/nfl/report-jeff...chie-incognito/

There's an option in Android 4.4 to use ART as a runtime as opposed to Dalvik. I just switched to it today and I like what I see so far.

This team is so boring to watch right now.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Nov 6, 2013 -> 10:30 AM) It's been a while since you've done it. You no longer have to log back in as that user to download the updates (not that this was very hard), it just prompts you for that users password to authorize the update these days. Takes about 8 seconds. That does make it a hell of a lot better. It used to be that you can only have one iTunes account at a time.

Shea gets defensive player of the week award for breaking Aaron Rodgers.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Nov 6, 2013 -> 08:25 AM) Worth noting: Being that your wife already has an iPhone, if you went with an iPhone yourself, you can login to your phone with her iTunes account and download any apps/music she's already paid for without having to repurchase it for yourself. You can then log her off, and log yourself back in with your own account, and all the apps she's purchased will still run. If she's already significantly invested into the Apple ecosystem, you can leverage that investment free of charge to yourself. There are a lot of good phones out there these days, it's less about the phone and more about the ecosystem you want to buy into at this point. I've done this before. It's great until you have to update those apps.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 11:14 PM) Get the Moto X from AT&T. It's a nice phone and you can customize the appearance and internal storage size. MotoMaker is opening up for all carriers now. Nonetheless, the Moto X would be a good first smartphone. It's not too big (slightly bigger than the iPhone, but with a 4.7 inch screen though), it's not so full of bloat like a lot of other Android phones are, and it's a very good performer (adequate specs, great battery life). And as Sqwert said, you don't have to live with the mundane black/white options. You can customize pretty much everything on it and end up with one of thousands of configurations. You can play around with the configurations here: https://www.motorola.com/us/motomaker?pid=F...erior/backplate

QUOTE (IlliniKrush @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 10:48 PM) I'll pay to get something quality, I just don't think I need the most expensive, best phone "just because." I can spend hundreds of dollars if need be. Hell, I don't even know the range of what's out there. Second question - not sure. Right now I'm on verizon but wife is on ATT. So I think having it on one plan could save/help. That's why I mentioned it'd likely be ATT. Well if you're going on contract, you might as well get the phone from the carrier. The most you'll pay for a phone is like $300 then. It all depends on what you like/think is intuitive. I suggest you go to your AT&T store and just play with the phones there. Once you have an idea of what you liked/didn't like, we can probably help you narrow it down a bit more.

QUOTE (IlliniKrush @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 10:10 PM) Help Soxtalk. I'm considering getting a smart phone (or normal phone as it is now) and getting rid of my dumb flip phone. Besides the obvious iphone, which everyone knows about and my wife has, I don't know the first thing about different phones available. I don't need the fanciest one out there. I'd be using it for texting, checking sports scores (and twitter for sports), maybe watching games?, some email. I'm sure there are apps I don't know about that I could take advantage of, but I'll be more or less pretty basic with the phone, just having internet capability etc. I'm open to any opinions on which direction I should look to go here, ones to avoid, etc. I know I can do research on this as well, but getting first-hand knowledge instead of reading specs on a website is a lot easier. TIA. Edit: Not looking for this to bring out the iphone vs other pissing match...just want honest opinions/reviews. I only know some about the iphone from my wife, and know nothing about other ones. I have zero brand loyalty, so it doesn't matter to me either way. If it matters any to this, I'll likely still be using ATT for service. Name your budget. Also, are you going to be getting the phone from the carrier?

The Nexus 5's back feels like a soft touch plastic version of the HTC One. It feels nice in the hand.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 09:16 PM) He has 4.4 on whatever phone he has. EDIT: He has a Galaxy Nexus. Those are unstable ROMs ATM. Not everything works. I flashed a build for my Nexus 7 this weekend to see how it was and the camera didn't work. Google hasn't released the binaries for those devices yet (and they probably never will for the Galaxy Nexus, since they claim it is no longer supported). And Android 4.4, as nice it is (currently using on my Nexus 5), isn't different enough from 4.3 or 4.2 to rush things.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 09:15 PM) Yeah, I certainly wasn't using bWAR to make my judgement. I didn't realize that anyone actually did. Scherzer is going to win it and he should.

QUOTE (TheFutureIsNear @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 08:57 PM) Iwakuma was 3rd in ERA, 2nd in WHIP, 3rd in IP, and 1st in WAR (depending on where you look). Not sure how you could be upset with him being a finalist. Sale has an amazing year and will have plenty of more chances to win it. I'd be pretty surprised if he doesn't win 1 by the time he's 30. bWAR had Iwakuma #1? WTF?

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 08:52 PM) Just found out that an Android 4.4 update will be coming to my G2 very soon. Very nice. A buddy of mine has it and is suggesting his friends to root their phones just to get it a couple weeks or months earlier than their manufacturer will release it. He is raving about it. He has 4.4 on his G2?

QUOTE (Jake @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 07:48 PM) Also, I replaced my Macbook Pro about 18 months ago. My MBP's charger fried its battery and the very expensive AppleCare I bought didn't cover it...they said it was my fault. To some extent, the fact that my laptop had cosmetic issues (it was dirty and had a noticeable dent on one corner) probably biased the technician against me. On the other, it has dissuaded me from buying Apple products. I still love that OS, but I can't really afford even the low-end stuff and I can no longer justify making a reach like that by telling myself that they'll take care of me if something goes wrong. So, with some advice from folks on here, I bought a barely used laptop via eBay. It's an HP Pavilion dv6 and it has been mostly good to me. Buying used (the unit had no signs of wear, I spoke to seller on the phone and he said that he decided he needed a lighter, smaller laptop for travel after his return period ended) saved me a lot of money, paying about $600 for a laptop that would have cost about $850 from HP. It still had factory warranty, as is now standard with many PCs; the warranty is tied to the unit, not the buyer. It has 6GB DDR3 RAM, i5 2520 @ 2.5 GHz (Sandy Bridge), Radeon HD 7690M XT GPU, a 625GB HDD, Blu-Ray player, and the 15" 1920x1080 HD display. Over time, I've started to fall out of love with it. First of all, one of the first things I loved about it was how cool it ran. It had this HP CoolSense app that seemed to do a great job of regulating the fans and processor to keep it running really coolly. It now gets very warm and the fans run constantly. I think the fans are probably dirty, but I can't dismantle it to get to them. I actually think the CoolSense is still throttling the processor to try to reduce the heat, but is now just dragging down performance. The battery has also gone completely to s***. It was never rated to perform very well by current standards, I think their optimistic guess was going to be 3 hours. I was happy with the battery at first, but it now needs to be constantly plugged in. The battery from HP costs 130 bucks and I have personally experienced aftermarket batteries f***ing up a laptop. So...I had to think about whether I'd rather put that 130 towards another device. This means whenever I go somewhere other than my place to study or work for any amount of time I also have to lug around its charger. It is generally getting a big sluggish and I'm needing to do the trusty 'ol "restart it because it works and I don't know why" every day or so. Beyond that, I'm not sure if this is really the size I want. It's big and relatively heavy compared to the 13" MBP I moved from. With that said, it's been a good machine and I'm going to use it for some other things - mainly, to stream sports, movies, and things like that to my TV. The monitor quality is something I'll miss. It has a matte finish, looks beautiful, and has excellent viewing angles. So I didn't want to spend much money on this replacement at all since I have a very small budget and this is, to some extent, a convenience buy. I could certainly make it with this HP. I actually thought very hard about getting the HP Chromebook 14. It is cheap (300), portable, works fast, great battery life, etc. I think I can do almost every single thing I normally do on a Chromebook except for one. I do academic writing and use Zotero as a citation manager. While I can record citations on a Chromebook via the Zotero webapp, the greatest use of Zotero for me is its Microsoft Word/LibreOffice plug-in. I can just hit a keyboard shortcut which pulls up a dialogue where I can search for my source, find it, press enter, and it renders my citations. Beyond creating a bibliography and saving me some typing and thinking, this also allows me to reformat my documents to a different citation style with just a click. That's something I must have on my primary computer. Beyond that, I basically only use Chrome and Chrome Apps at this point. I use Outlook, but I could easily use Outlook Web App for emailing. Anyway, no Chromebook for me. I focused on 13" Ultrabooks and hoped to find another used deal. I was about to pull the trigger on a 14" Asus Vivobook Touch that had great reviews, but I realized at the last minute that this wonderful $399 price was getting me a version with a Pentium processor. No thanks. Not sure why they thought it would be a good idea to release a legit series of budget-oriented Ultrabooks and release one with a sub-standard processor under the same name. Anyway, I settled on a Lenovo Ideapad U310 Touch. I bought it on eBay for 300 bucks from a seller who seems to have hardly used it. I got the feeling from talking to him/her that they just didn't like Windows 8, lol. I'll deal. I'll be reverting to the screen quality of my old MBP, which is the main drawback of this thing. It has a 3rd gen i5, 4GB RAM, 10-point touchscreen, their typically excellent keyboard and trackpad. No dedicated GPU and a little less RAM along with the screen are the sacrifices I make here. It weighs less than half of this HP, has a metal body, and has 4-5 hours of battery life with regular use according to reviews. Some folks have had issues with WiFi, for some reason, but Lenovo has released a driver update which seems to have fixed it for the vast majority of people. That's my main fear at this point. Here's hoping it arrives in one piece and gets WiFi reception because I'm really fond of the working version of this thing! Yeah, that U310 has WiFi issues. My friend has one of those, he said the WiFi issues were pretty awful.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Nov 5, 2013 -> 10:53 AM) Go for the Nexus 7. My wife has a Fire, because she fell for the marketing and it looks fun and blah blah. In the end it's just a low-end Android device that you can't do a ton with other than whatever Amazon allows. You can side-load apps, but they look like s***. The HDX is actually on par with the Nexus 7, if not more so. I think it's got a better processor.