I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry when I saw this. The text at the top reads:
i bought one of these and tried putting in my dell dimension 2350. my friend said that the shiny metal part on the bottom looks like it has lines because you cut at the lines if it doesnt fit. so i carefully cut off the bottom so that it fit into 1 of the slot things in my computer. now it doesnt work. did i cut it wrong? id post pics, but no camera. is there anyway i can fix this? thanks for any help.
For those who have never seen one of these before, it’s a graphics card. A very EXPENSIVE graphics card. One of these will set you back over $100.
Here’s a clue – you should NEVER, EVER have to take a hacksaw or other cutting implement to a piece of hardware. They’re built the way they are for a reason, and that reason is that if it doesn’t fit then it’s not meant to fit. Either it’s not compatible or you’re trying to fit a right bit but in the wrong place. Either way, if you try and force it, you’ll either wreck it, or the rest of your PC or both. Probably both. Voltage going where voltage isn’t supposed to go owing to short circuits is not good.
Unfortunately I see a lot of penny pinching. “Oh, don’t bother paying that guy a fee, I can tell you how to do it for free.” Problem is, if that advise is flawed – like this was – then you’ve not only thrown away the expensive upgrade but you might have wrecked your PC too, and your friend isn’t going to stump up the money for a new one. After all, if you take a friends advise, there’s no liability there. No way you can prove it. And no chance of a refund, you’d get laughed out of the store if you tried to take that back.
Ultimately, it’s your choice. Take a gamble or get a professional. All or nothing. But if you lose – don’t expect even the best of tech professionals to be able to bail you out of THIS kind of mistake. It ain’t happening.
This is absolutely fascinating:
Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have found that robots equipped with artificial neural networks and programmed to find “food” eventually learned to conceal their visual signals from other robots to keep the food for themselves. The results are detailed in an upcoming PNAS study.
Although I have to wonder, is it really a lie or is it just evolved selfishness as a mechanism for “survival”? The robots are programmed to find food, a kind of “find the food or starve to death” directive. I don’t find it surprising that these robots determine they have a better chance of survival if they don’t tell everyone else where the food is. I wonder if some will “evolve” to signal where poison is, in order to bump off the opposition. If this becomes the case, it starts raising interesting ethical questions about neural networks.
Maybe all those films where the neural network decides humankind is a threat or unnecessary to its own survival aren’t too far off the mark…
A while ago I was browsing websites when I came across this image, a screencapture of a live Fox News broadcast. It should go without saying that the country in between Syria and Iran is in fact Iraq, not Egypt. I submitted it without hesitation to failblog.org who have now published it.
Reading through the comments, one thing shocks me completely. This comment:
Curbie says:
I hate to do this, because there is obviously a lot of hate for fox news here, but they were probably high lighting those two regions by magnifying or enlarging them on the map. I’ve seen every single news source do this, not just fox news. This was just a creative, convenient screen capture for the person who submitted this. That is all.
I had to read it several times before I could come to terms with how many ways this fails in itself. In fact, it made me quite sad, because this poster appears to be serious. First he says that there is a lot of hate for fox news (he’s evidently an avid viewer and dislikes seeing the site ridiculed) and goes on to talk about the highlighting. Yes, he’s quite correct, news sources do indeed – and have here – highlight countries they are specifically talking about – but that wasn’t the reason this was posted, and the fact that he can’t even spot that the country in between those two highlighted groups of countries is wrongly named is extremely sad.
There are a few accusations that the picture is photoshopped; it was not. Fox News broadcast that Iraq is actually Egypt. While it’s sad enough that such a mistake made it through to broadcast, it’s even sadder that some people would criticize the screengrab for being hatred towards the news station that broadcast it and of being edited, and yet not spot the actual problem.
What is the world coming to? Is this the state of American education nowadays?