I bought a Kocaso M1400 13.3" Android tablet a while back for the specifc purpose of reading comics in as close to a 1:1 ratio as I could get. Great for that purpose, but it is heavy and unweildy. Also, not nearly as speedy or responsive as an iPad. But it works for the purpose I got it for.
Grid2 on medium is pretty amazing looking. You’d be hard pressed to see the difference between high and medium.
And “native resolution” of current gen consoles is 720p, just like I’m running on this Haswell HTPC myself, for recent games at least.
I’m not sure how many new consoles are actually going to sell through this holiday season. I’d say x360 and ps3 games have another 2 years in them at least. And by the time the new, expensive consoles are more prevalent, I’d expect the sequel to Haswell to be around with another 2x of GPU power.
720p on medium. You popped my monocle. How can a hardware wonk have played a PC game at 720p since 2000 or 2001?
On the living room plasma TV at ten feet away, via the HTPC? That’s console standard.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/09/the-2013-htpc-build.html
Anyways, TL;DR Haswell is frigging great even in mid-range HD 4400 form! First Intel GPU ever that actually works for any game you’d give a shit about.
I’m a PC curmudgeon, so I was joking, mostly. Great build. I have a far bigger & less efficient HTPC, but it’s quiet and tucked in a cabinet. What front end do you use aside from Steam Big Picture?
Just Windows 8.1, which is great for 10-foot work.
I seem to be their target market. I really like my Asus ep121 tablet. 16:10 12" screen in a package that I have no problem holding or using. It’s heavy and unbalanced for holding in one hand like a paperback but its perfect for tucking into the crook of your arm while sitting. With the pen interface its like having a magical clipboard. The graphics are two generations behind those of the Surface but who cares; I can run CK2, Wargame ALB, FM2013, Dom4, Eador, and more (should also play EU4 but I haven’t bought it yet). The games that it can’t play are normally the games that wouldn’t play well on a touch/pen interface anyway.
If a Surface had a Wacom pen interface I’d lust after it. With just touch I’m less interested but its still a nice package for what I use. I like having my consumption tabet combined with my laptop. But I’m not a big enough market so it will continue to fail.
The Surface Pro does have a Wacom pen digitizer built in.
So it does. The wonderful confusion of having two different products (tablet and tablet pc) with the same generic sounding name.
Now I’ll officially lust after one but refuse to buy it because the Asus I already have will be serving my needs for at least another 2 years by my estimation.
I have trouble visualizing that. Propping against your arm seems like it’d be too close.
I’m nearsighted and not correctable to 20/20 so I do desire my screen closer than most people.
Wait until you are in your mid-40’s, and you can’t focus at that distance. Goddamn but I hate presbyopia.
I’m in my late 40’s so I know what you mean.
At least at present I’m still able to read fine at that distance for most things on a computer. Very small stuff (such as the text in Dom4) ends up making me hold it a little closer and read over my glasses. Farther away such as laptop distance doesn’t work with the nearsightedness and nastigmous.
My mother purchased a Surface RT for my Dad (late 70s) for a tablet he can use in his easy chair. Mainly for email, books, simple games like Solitaire, Facebook, etc. She decided that, since he uses their computer (at the same relatively shallow level) it would be easier for him to use the Surface than, say, an iPad.
I was visiting last week when he was trying to use it, and it looked like a sharp device. However, it seemed to be plagued with little things that made it a pain. He wanted to lengthen the amount of time between the tablet turning the screen off. He looked for a way, couldn’t find it, gave it to me, I couldn’t find it. I had to Google to figure out how to do something that simple. The first 3 books he brought up in the Kindle app for the Surface resulted in warning messages, and they would flash when he tried to read them. Another had a weird page configuration. It just didn’t work well, and looking online revealed a lot of people frustrated with the Kindle app on the Surface RT.
And it seemed that it had a number of relatively trivial, but irritating issues like that. When I first picked the RT up, I thought, hey, this looks like a cool tablet, why in the world has it had such poor sales? By the end of the week my feeling was that I wouldn’t buy one for myself.
Yeah. We’re at work where we’re being offered Win8 tablets FOR FREE and we’re considering not taking them after the disaster of the last year of trying to use them with our participants.
If you don’t already have a tablet, it is a life-changing bathroom device. Pooping is much more entertaining than it ever was.
Unless you have children. And one bathroom. In that case, it’s just a bunch of annoyed knocking on the door and the occasional “JUST A MINUTE!”
“Mom, Dad’s taking the iPad into the bathroom again!”
Note that proctologists do not recommend you spend a lot of time sitting on the toilet.
Seriously.
Sometimes it’s not a choice.
Great finally I can take pooping to the next level