Anomnomnomaly

2070 super is basically a 2080 for a lot less and a couple % slower... So yeah... if you bought any RTX card... you'd have to be a gullible fanboi to not feel a little cheated right now. But when you jump on the bandwagon to have the latest and allegedly greatest hardware... you pay the price for it... RTX was for bragging rights only, 3 games that have it 9 months later, and only another 3 in the works, some of which aren't out for another 10 months... and that's if they don't get delayed... and then outdated and obsolete after only 9 months. Those of us that refuse to buy into the bullshit hype train of tech hardware... are probably chuckling right now.

Isn't the new 2070 Super, basically a 2080 as it uses the same die but is a couple % slower... but is cheaper. Basically nvidia are screwing everyone who bought into the rtx hype by releasing slightly faster cards 9 months later at cheaper prices... all because they're worried about the AMD release of the RX5700 series and the upcoming 5800 & 5900 series cards.

Not been a BT customer in around 10yrs... thankfully they deregulated the system in the UK, so any company can install equipment in the telephone exchanges. They also broke up BT so that Openreach (who build the lines and cables) is separate to BT and they have to charge the same prices for access to lines as everyone else does. It's one of the reasons ISP services in the UK have really dropped in price... but the speeds haven't improved as much as they should because BT kept delaying and holding back the roll out of fibre... Which was part of the reasoning for the company being broken up.

We got fibre to the cabinet about 4yrs ago, but won't be getting fibre to the home for a few more years. We do have cable in my area, but it's Virgin Media and they're awful... The lines are so oversubscribed that my 100Mbps service was struggling to get 15Mbps for months and was actually grounds for me terminating my service early and getting some of my money refunded. I'm now with a company called Zen and am getting around 60Mbps as the fibre to the cabinet is about 1000 meters away and that last 1000m is copper. Can't wait for FTTH, as my ISP can do a cheaper service without phone for less than I currently pay... and it's 5x faster (300Mbps)

You can always try out a... erm... 'evaluation' version of the game to see if it's worth getting

When you have issues with something you've purchased that has died within the warranty period... and the company is being deliberately unhelpful or downright refusing to honour the warranty... and if you can't be bothered to deal with them, and take the steps required to deal with trading standards and so forth. It might be easier to purchase another one, and upon receipt of it.. you just happen to realise it's faulty and have to return it for a full refund... Oh dear, what a shame... No... I wouldn't like a replacement, if it arrives broken... I'd have faith that a replacement would be any good.

If they bring you joy,and I know one of them does me... then have at it. ?

In 13 minutes, they lost the current production run... that's stuff being created, stuff being prepared, processed and so forth. So get the line back up and running, calibrated, test runs, quality control and so forth... can take a few weeks. This isn't a single line, this is dozens and dozens of them... and each one has to be restarted from scratch. I have a friend who works making silicon wafer machines for the industry here in the UK and has been out to thailand, china and so forth to install and get them up and running.,, He confirmed it would take more than 2 weeks to start a line up.

Never let anyone tell you something is immature, if you have a passion for something... enjoy the fuck out of it for as long as you like. The immature ones are those who try to deny you something that brings you joy.

So I picked up Rocket League GotY in the steam sale yesterday... Played some of it offline this morning first 1v1 against easy bot, then 1v1 against pro and finally 2v2 against pro bots. So far I've found it kinda easy to win... Gonna raise the number of bots and get some more practice in... and then maybe try an online game in a larger team rather than 1v1 because I know I'll get creamed. Also picked up Agents of Mayhem... which is basically Saints Row 6 with different characters and loactions... Which is ok as I enjoyed those games... and on sale it was nice and cheap. I then grabbed WRC7 as I've already got WRC6 and I like Rally games. When I was a kid, an arcade opened in my town... Never had the latest and greatest games, but still some good ones. But my all time faves were Bubble Bobble and 720º. In BB me and a friend used to play together and got close to a perfect game without continues... But 720º was where I shone... I never knew who the other player was but we had a running battle for top score, leap frogging each other time after time. When I moved away, I still had the top score. In the latter half of the 90's I entered a Gran Turismo tournament in my home town on the Playstation and came second... The only defeat I suffered was from the winner. But it's really hot here today, too hot to be outside in direct sunlight (I suffer easily with heat stroke in these temps), so I'm in my home office, windows open, fan blowing across my upper body and about to go kick some Bot Butt in RL again for practice.

Cue SSD price gouging from multiple retailers in 3......2.......1.........

Always wanted to try rocket league, but seemed to be a little bit of a pay to win type of game.

I've got Cities Skylines and Planet Coaster but they're kinda resource hogs... Planet Coaster especially. Add a few rides from the steam workshop that people have created and it slows to a crawl due to trying to render thousands of individual scenery items on each ride. Which kinda makes the game unplayable even on my new system. I've not played Skylines in a while because it kept crashing. Had to remove all of the steam workshop mods as I couldn't pin down which one was to blame... and that kinda makes the game bland after having some of the sweet extras. My first multiplayer experience was on an office LAN at my friends old place of work... Marathon II on their Mac's... Kill the man with the skull sub game and so forth... Great fun and I was pretty good. Had a couple of systems, a 386 and a 486... then my first system with a modem was a Pentium 200mhz with a 2GB hard drive around 98... Didn't really start playing online multiplayer until Unreal Tournament came out in 99... and I loved that game... Instagib capture the flag and assault were my faves. I never really scored very highly due to lag.. and always wondered if I was actually any good. So when I got my first DSL line in early 2002... I started playing as part of a clan I helped setup from the old alt.games.wolfenstein newsgroup... Called ourselves [AGW] and had an irc chatroom and our own server for Return to Castle Wolfenstein and later, Battlefield 1942 with the desert combat mod (I was part of the DC team for a while too). Turned out I was rather good after all when everyone was playing with an equal ping... Not brilliant, but tactically very good and my K:D ratio was always around the 3 or 4 to 1 range. But as consoles started becoming more common and the audience for online PC gaming grew... it was ruined by smacktards... and as you pointed out... Playing with selfish people who expect everyone to know everything completely ruins the experience for everyone. That kind of attitude is still very present in online gaming, no one is willing to help newbies out and explain stuff and many of these games offer no way to play off line against bots to learn the ropes before venturing online.

Everyone is banned for starting this stupid game

Have you seen that little chart comparing a burger, fries and drink to how games used to be vs now? It so fucking accurate that every time I see it... I still chuckle and then feel sad at how true it is. Have you seen that little chart comparing a burger, fries and drink to how games used to be vs now? It so fucking accurate that every time I see it... I still chuckle and then feel sad at how true it is. I can spend about £20-30 during a sale and can pick up anywhere between 3-20 games... Bundles can often be good. I picked up the entire quake series for about £5 around the xmas sale, and all but the latest doom games for less than that. I've currently got a few games sat in my basket... waiting to see if anything else on my wishlist goes on sale in the next few days. My current steam account has around 200 games in it, Uplay has about 30, gog has another 15 or so. I refuse to have a windows account so they can track me through W10 (and I have software to block and disable most of the built in tracking), so no games through there... But I can't think of anything that I really want anyway. I'll never have an EA account, nor will I get an Epic one... Fuck exclusives that only serve to fracture the market and reduce sales. I see the games market becoming much like the video streaming one... where there are so many players now and more coming... that it dilutes the market so much that it becomes pointless having a streaming account with any of them. I'm not objecting to exclusives from any company that produces their own stuff... But how about after 6-12 months of having that exclusive you offer it to all the other services (same with games). Take all those marvel TV series... that have all been cancelled and pulled from netflix... Because Disney is launching their own streaming platform and I will say with 100% certainty that those shows will be back exclusive to the Disney service (maybe not with the same cast or anything) I'd actually like to play Red Dead Redemption 2, but I can't due to bullshit exclusives... It's not going to make me buy an entirely different platform just for one game though.. fuck no! And to go off on a completely different tangent yet again... In the UK a few years ago they tried to break the monopoly that Sky sports had with the Premier league football... They forced it to be divided up between 3 companies... The reasoning was that it would make it cheaper for consumers... The exact opposite has happened. Say you want to follow your fave team and watch every game that season... The only way to do that is to have the sports package from Sky, BT & Virgin media... They TRIPLED the cost when they were trying to reduce it. I was a big fan of the Formula 1 races, used to watch all of them... Sky purchased the rights... made promises that I would never go behind a paywall and always be part of their TV/HD package... A couple of years later... it goes behind a paywall. If you want to watch the F1 now, you have to pay for the TV pack, HD pack and now the sports pack... Which comes to around £55 and that doesn't include 4k broadcasting, or movie channels or other sports channels. If you want all of it... expect to be paying in excess of £130 a month. It's disgusting. It's no wonder that so many people turn to... let's call them 'evaluation' versions of tv/movies/games to try them out and see if they would like to purchase them. I no longer have any sympathy for these greedy companies who cannot see the long term damage they are doing to the all of the industries for some short turn profit for their shareholders... yet they're the first ones to complain when people stop paying for their over priced, stripped down crap.

I have a rule... I will no longer pay full price for a game that has 50% or more of it's content removed so it can be sold back to you later at ever increasing prices. The last game I paid full price for was Civ 5, and I bought the expansions (on sale I think). I won;t buy Civ 6 because it's... 1: Pretty bad 2: The base game costs £60 and the DLC costs a further £70. So my rule now is wait until the steam sales come along and then pick up games proving these 2 criteria are met. 1: It must be the full game with all DLC (cosmetic stuff is irrelevant) 2: It must be 60% or more off. So when Civ 6 is on sale inc everything for £30 or less... Only then will I pay for it. Same applies to everything else.

Curious to know how many of you lot are older than 40? I am... in fact I'm closer to 50 than 40... but still playing games like I have done since my dad got us a Binatone pong machine when I was a little kid... Then I had an Atari 2600, a Commodore 64 (where I first played around with programming basic), Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, SNES, Megadrive, PSX, N64, Gamecube, PS2, Xbox, Wii...and that's kinda where my console use stopped. I've been building my own PC's for over 20yrs now, I've been online since around 95. No longer bother with multiplayer games... don't really have many gamer friends and those that are play different types of games to me... Plus my reflexes aren't whatt hey were, so I just can't compete properly in fast paced games like FPS and I can't abide these battle royale type games. Too many smacktards. So I stick to SP FPS, 3PS, RTS and so forth.. along with the odd sim game.

I try to avoid monthly subscriptions where possible to save a little extra. I pay for my VPN in full each year (save 50% over the monthly sub), I pay for my car insurance in one hit rather than monthly. The only sub I really have is Netflix.

Now that would have been grounds for returning the game in the UK, the game was 'not as advertised' and as such entitles you to return for a replacement or full refund. If they failed to refund/replace you would have had grounds to invoke the sale and supply of goods act and if you bought online... the distance selling regulations... and if they still tried to refuse, you've got grounds for a chargeback on your card and then it's down to them to arrange to have the item sent back to them.

In the UK we actually have some pretty decent consumer laws... it can occasionally be hard to get companies to respect them... the attitude you tend to get is one of refusal in the hope that you aren't aware of your consumer rights. So it helps to make sure you are aware of a few little bits of regulations. The sale and supply of goods act for example... to put it simply, means that any thing purchased must of sufficient quality and durability. What this means is that an item you purchased should have a reasonable expectation of longevity. So that TV you paid 1000 for shouldn't fail after the warranty runs out. but should last for at least 5yrs or more. Most 'extended warranties' they try to get you to buy aren't really worth anything, as if the item fails in the first 2yrs you're covered under the initial guarantee and if it fails within 3-4yrs you have a right to expect it to be repaired or replaced. We also have the unfair terms and conditions in consumer contracts legislation. This is handy when fighting back against companies that include loads of ridiculous things in their terms of service and so forth. When it comes to hire purchase agreements (Buy now pay later kind of thing) there is a cooling off period where you can return something and cancel within 14 days without penalty. Great for people who fell victim to pressure sales tactics... Oh and those high pressure sales tactics... also illegal. There are no laws that state you cannot fix your own stuff, I do it all the time... but you do so at your own risk and any self or non authorised repair comes with no warranty of any kind (unless the repair place offers one of it's own) So there aren't any companies being sued in the UK that I am aware of.. nor within the EU (Norway is not part of the EU, so the Apple vs small repair shop doesn't count in this analogy). There are also laws in place that state all companies must have a complaints procedure in place, and supply that to the customer on request... This one can get companies into trouble and fined if they fail to adhere to it. Then there's the 'subject access request' or SAO, this allows a customer to request a copy of ALL the data a company holds on you. Every company must have a data controller who deals with such requests and companies must provide you with the procedure to contact them upon request. Again, there are fines and penalties that can be incurred if they fail to do so. What this means is that they have to literally print out a copy of every page of every screen of your account... this can be time consuming to companies and thus costly. It used to come with a £10 fee, but a few years ago this fee was eliminated and it's now free to request. Companies have a timescale to deal with these request or again, face investigation and fines. The laws are not perfect, and it's kinda down to the individual to pursue them and you'll often meet a brick wall of uncooperative people and denial of your rights... So you have to decide if you are prepared to fight it or not. Then there's the small claims courts, which allows you to file a claim against companies or individuals. It's costs less than £40 to do so and this is often enough to make companies take things seriously. In your claim you can only claim for what you are owed.. but you can add on interest for each day you are owed that money. This worked out at roughly 8% per annum and applied as a daily rate of that. You also claim your costs which can include reasonable time for dealing with the issue, costs of phone calls, letters and so forth. If they fail to respond then they will find in your favour, so it's up to the company (can also be used on individuals) to prepare their own defence and appear in court. If they find in your favour, they have normally about 28 days to pay up the amount set by the court... after that you can enter a default against them and depending on the amount owed... can send in court appointed bailiffs to collect. This last part will significantly increase the costs as each visit from a bailiff can add upwards of £100 to their debt, and if they have to remove items to sell to cover the debt... that adds yet further fees. I've had a few battles in recent years and had to use some of these laws. Last year I switched my ISP and my new one was such a disaster, they lied about everything and never delivered what I signed up for. So I cancelled within the 4 week period (some are 2 some 4) and then had to put in an official complaint (I was able to direct that complaint to the CEO). The end result was an apology, cancellation of my service and a complete refund. So I had almost 4 weeks of free internet... But due to their screw ups and lies... I ended up being without phone or internet afterwards for just over 2 weeks. It's also worth noting that we have a bit of a plague of debt recovery companies that operate with very dubious methods... They have no power to collect a single penny from anyone in spite of the threatening language contained in their letters (that's also been legally tightened up as they were making false statements to scare/threaten people which amounted to an attempt to threaten to obtain money with menaces)... Unless they have a court order that allows them to collect alleged monies owed, they can't do anything. You have no obligation to respond, nor to acknowledge anything. You can simply bin any letters that arrive. If a debt has had no contact or acknowledgement for 7yrs it cannot be collected at all. When it comes to utility companies that screw up and fail to send you bills, or under estimate your useage and then suddenly try to hit you with a massive bill... They cannot backdate it more than 12 months if they have failed to supply you with bills. There are resources you can fall back on for advice. There's trading standards, the body set up to deal with customer issues... normally that's just advice on what steps you need to take yourself... But if it warrants it they can take direct action themselves on more serious matters. The Citizens Advice Bureau is another good resource for help and info, they're often stretched quite thin but can do really good things. Then you have online communities such as the consumer action groups.who can offer advice and help with a whole range of issues... whilst it's staffed mainly by volunteers, there are many people who are or were lawyers and who work in or for consumer groups in general. They had a hand in getting excessive bank charges banned and were part of the campaign that saw the whole banking PPI scandal resolved with billions having to be put aside to repay customers. they've also been involved in a scandal where the govt deliberately tried to deprive those most in need of the benefit payments they were entitled to from 2010 until around late 2017... Which at first was thought to affect around 75000 people and was going to cost the govt tens of millions (people were owed any thing up to 10-12k)... and then turned out to affect more than 200,000 and is going to cost more like half a billion to fix. I personally know a vulnerable person with a disability who's unable to work who was forced to scrape by hand to mouth for 7yrs... never enough money to pay the bills or feed themselves and had to rely on foodbanks and friends/family to do simple things like fix their car or buy clothes (thankfully charity shops are plentiful because of poverty). I don't know the exact amount they were owed... but it was in the region of 6-7k... all because rich fuckers decide that punishing the poor, the vulnerable and those most in need is the way to go... because they're the ones who probably won;t speak up for themselves. So we have advocacy groups who help... Such as local community law services that are staffed by volunteers and lawyers who can help people fight for their human rights and claim benefits they may be entitled to, just so they can survive and hopefully improve their life to a point they no longer need them. Long post... tl:dr Laws and help available to people on consumer rights is pretty good but be prepared to fight for them.

Love em or hate em... When it comes to games companies, some can be good, some can be bad and some can be plain EAvil. But what happens when you actually 'need' support... who are the good, who are the bad and who are the worst? My contender today is Ubisoft, who have basically stolen my money and refuse to give me the product I purchased unless I give up my consumer rights and bow down to their threats. It started a few weeks ago, I purchased a game that was on sale... Payment went through using the same method I'd used to purchase many other games with them (paypal), money comes directly out of my account as it's linked to my card. Now every time I've bought a game from them (or from anyone else using the exact same payment method over the last 15yrs or so) the game has immediately been available to download and install. Except this time it's not. I give it a few hrs, still not there... Contact support and chat with some random drone in a 3rd world country... Get asked to wait 24hrs for it to process. Wait the 24hrs... still no game, money paid out showing on my bank statement. Contact them again... ask me to wait... I say no, you've taken the money please supply me the product I've paid for. Get told they need to escalate it... ask how long that will take... no idea, could be a week or two... Not acceptable in my book. So I ask for a refund. They claim they can't give refunds and it needs to be escalated and I might get my money back in a week or two. F that I think... ask them to escalate as a complaint... they refuse. I ask for the contact details for their complaints dept... they refuse to give me them (now this is a legal requirement in the UK under our consumer laws). I tell them that they have 24hrs and if the refund hasn't been done I would go through paypal and file a dispute and/or do a chargeback on my card. They ignore the support ticket for two weeks, in that time not only have I raised a dispute, but ubisoft have ignored it so I escalate it to a claim and paypal set a date of 30th to allow them time to respond (they can't be bothered). After 2 weeks, random 3rd world support guy (it's a different one each time) replies to the ticket and blathers on about how they can't escalate it unless I remove the chargeback (at this time it's a paypal dispute that they can respond to not a chargeback with my card/bank). Now for those of you who use/know paypal... if you cancel a dispute, it cannot be reinstated. So I refuse and once again ask for it to be escalated to a complaint... they refuse... they then start threatening my account if I don't remove the chargeback and point blank refuse to do anything until I do. threatening to remove my access to my account and so forth. I point that under UK law they are not only required to have a complaints process, they are required to inform customers of that process and how to go about it. Once again they refuse to escalate it. So I then ask for the contact details for their data controller... because under UK law you can also do what's called a subject access request. This is done by a companies data controller and must be completed within a certain amount of time. Failure to adhere to these laws can result in companies being fined. Once again they refuse to give me those details... at this point they are in breach of two laws in the UK. By now they are actively engaging in what's known as 'customer baiting' So after about 30 back and forths of me asking for information they are required to give me... I decided to take a more aggressive stance. I've printed out the entire lack of 'support' thread and got the name and address of the UK offices managing Director... and a complaint and a copy of all of their crap is on it's way to him. Instead of actually dealing with an issue, the idiots buried their heads int he sand and pretended they couldn't do anything, they breached uk consumer laws in the process and have effectively stolen from me.... Not sure if that's actually theft or just fraud. by threatening me with retaliation over my account and telling me that unless I give up my consumer rights before they will 'potentially' help... they've potentially committed an act of extortion. What's the end story... 1: I'll get my money back 2: Ubisoft lose that sale 3: Ubisoft spend more money paying for staff to respond 'computer says no' to me than the game cost in the first place 4: Ubisoft lose my custom forever, and if you think I'm joking... I've boycotted EA for more than a decade. So they lose even more money through future sales. 5: I'll also be making a complaint to the relevant authorities about their refusal to supply me with legally required information. I don't know the exact amount, but Ubisooft get charged a fee by the ICO (used to be around £500) to investigate a complaint like this. Hopefully, some one will learn and useless staff will get 'educated' to be more respectful and to be aware of consumer laws if they are dealing with people from other countries. My complaint to the MD also requires them to supply me the data controller information... and I will do an SAO which will get me a copy of every single piece of information they have about me... including staff comments on this ticket that I cannot see. So for the sake of trying to keep £26 of my money and not give me what I've paid for, for refusing to even attempt to resolve it and resorting to pathetic threats and extortion... it's going to cost them... I dunno 20x as much? (assuming they get charged £500 by the ICO, and a more than a few hours of various staffs time, and the data controller has to go through and print of a copy of every single screen related to my account... which may (or may not) be automated or may have to be done by hand) Idiocy never comes cheap. Now some of you... may think this is a bit petty, but the problem is that when you allow them to get away with it... they think it's acceptable to continue doing it to begin with. But attempting to screw customers, actually violating consumer laws is pathetic and they deserve to have that cost them something. Also.. if they do decide to retaliate and remove access to my account... It's grounds for taking further legal action against them, which can be done through the UK small claims courts for less than £40 and which i could claim back the cost of everything I've purchased from them... So they can choose to try and defend against it at their expense, or not bother and I'll get a summary judgement and costs awarded... and from the date it's awarded I can start adding interest (8%pa) until they pay up... and if they refuse to pay up, I can send the bailiffs in to collect it... and that adds a lot of costs onto it again. Big thanks to the consumer action groups here in the UK who've been advising me on the laws, and have offered to help with filling out and filing paper work for any claims. But let's hope... that eventually, they do the right thing and take responsibility for their failures, and deal with the incompetence and ignorance of their staff. Because if you want to create piracy... this is a perfect example of how to go about it.

I run the hoover over the outside filters every week or so, pull the front intake off and clean the inside filter every month and give the insides a quick dust/clean every 3-4 months. My house can get rather dusty, especially att he moment as I'm slowly decorating a few rooms and it involves a lot of patching a filling walls... which creates a lot of very fine dust particles... Dust sheets on floors and covering doors just don't stop it all.

I tried chrome, found it to be buggy, lacking decent privacy plugins and a colossal resource hog that kept crashing. So I went back to Firefox... then I found out that google were actively doing things to break functionality of google owned products in other browsers. So there is no way in hell, I would ever use a google browser...The first thing i do with any new OS is install firefox and my script/cookie/privacy plugins... on mobile, the first thing I do is disable chrome and install firefox. For those sites where google still actively try to break functionality with firefox... I'd rather use IE/Edge or anything else. Oh and everyone should also be using duckduckgo for ALL search stuff.

I always thought it was because the tiny parts of the toy was considered the chocking hazard rather than the egg itself.... But then again this is the same country that banned the import of Smarties because of a food colouring but is fine with chlorine washed chicken and hormone saturated beef.

Can I assume you're from the US?