Remember this next time the Oil Thugs say there is no oil:


3-24-2015

Sorry, but there was never an oil storage crisis

Crude oil storage inventories in the US are at their highest levels in decades. Is that going to cause the price of West Texas Intermediate crude to crash?

Probably not, according to Robert Rapier of Energy Trends Insider.

In fact, we're not even close.

Rapier writes that "oil producers could continue to add a million barrels a week (which is about the average over the past year) for nearly four years before crude oil storage is actually full."

Over at Reuters, John Kemp writes that the market doesn't actually seem very worried about storage capacity. 


If the market was concerned about space at Cushing and onshore more generally, the contango would have widened even further as stocks rose to make it profitable to use more expensive offshore storage.

However the term structure of futures prices has remained essentially unchanged for the past two months — implying traders are not particularly concerned about storage issues and do not foresee the need for more expensive options like floating storage.

3-23-2015

We were sitting at red light across from the impact. Wish debi didn't see it :(    Pedestrian struck near Castleton in critical condition

Edit: This TV station has a close up of the car before it got towed away.

Don't pay any mind to the URL title, it was not a hit and run, hell the driver was injured and the entire windshield was smashed in the car.
He couldn't go anywhere and he was in shock.

Pedestrian struck, critically injured on NE side

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Googl...ity-133063

Quote:As we've noted previously, Google's expansion into Google Fiber isn't just about delivering 1 Gbps service, it's about using the platform to pioneer new ad technologies. For years cable operators and broadcasters have relied on Nielsen monitoring boxes to determine ad views, but Google is now pioneering new technology in Kansas City that will determine exactly how many Google Fiber TV customers ads are reaching.

According to Ad Week, Google Fiber's new ad delivery can not only tell whose watching the ads, it can deliver ads tailored to a user's geography (not defined), viewing history, or in context to the program being shown. Google insists that privacy is a top priority as it's moving forward with the trials:

http://www.maximumpc.com/apple_windows_7...me_move777
Since Jobs is no longer with us, I don't know if this is a visionary, prophetic move by Apple.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/20172...ng-systems
I really don't know if this was necessary.

Famed editor/reviewer Mark Poppin speculates yesterday that expanded readership will probably occur in less than 6 years:

http://babeltechreviews.com/community/sh...=7&page=18

apoppin Wrote:Now BTR doesn't need a team although I would welcome other writers. And it won't take 6 years neither.

To the delight of AMD Advocates everywhere, unknown Italian website "Bits and Chips" (not to be confused with the much more popular "fish and chips") told the world that "AMD has the 390X done, but is just waiting until it develops the perfect driver to release it."

(Bits and Chips web ranking 625,948 world wide, and 19098 of 19099 in Italy)

"This is concrete proof AMD is the WORLD LEADER in GPU technology!"
-Creig

"AMD has once again proven their ultimate mastery of the GPU domain!"
-Cloudfire777

"AMD has clearly (blah, blah, blah for 5 paragraphs that boils down to "Me wuv AMD!") and in conclusion, Nvidia can suck it."
-Russian Sensation

"AMD has ALWAYS had the premier drivers in gaming, I see this as a continuation of that proud legacy".
-SlowSpyder

There you have it. They're done, just trying to be ultra careful to give, the gamers, the best darn experience money can buy.



So we're supposed to believe they've been working on this thing over two years, and the drivers aren't done yet?

Bullsh*t.

More plausible theories:

1. Need more sell through on 290 gen as market share has dropped to 20% and they can't afford to take a bath on inventory already selling at razor thin margins.
2. Had to cook another revision, too many failed chips in the batch they had hoped to launch.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2...-machines/

Quote:Let’s clear something up from the start here. One common refrain I’ve heard during the discussion of Steam Machines is that no, they’re not really competing with existing home consoles. They’re trying to expand the space on their own terms, and simply offer a way for PC gaming into the living room. They’re an alternative without being a competitor.

I don’t care what phrasing you want to use, but there’s simply no way to get around the fact that whatever their intentions, in practice, Steam Machines are very much in competition with consoles like the PS4 and Xbox One. You cannot build a box that is meant to play video games on a TV in a living room and say that it does not compete with video game consoles. You just can’t.

And can they? Compete, that is? No, and I don’t even know where to begin.

We’ll start with your average console player. This type of person is likely going to choose between and Xbox One and PS4 in this new generation, considering 80% of their favorite franchises have fled Nintendo at this point, so the Wii U will often not even be on the table unless it’s a supplementary system. They want a unit with good performance, good exclusives, a good price, and above all else, ease of use. You buy a video game console for a set price, it plays all video games made for that console, period.

Sure, they may say they care about things like resolution. In fact, according to Nielsen data, most existing PS4 owners say they purchased the system because of the resolution differences between the consoles. And yet in practice, if consumers really cared about resolution and top-of-the-line performance above all else, they would already have invested in a gaming PC. But the barrier of entry to that scene? Complexity and price.

Steam Machines do literally nothing to change that.

Sure, some of them are premade units which takes a bit of the struggle out of building your own machine if that isn’t your thing, but I have to believe most console players are going to look at this list of fifteen different Steam Machines ranging from $500 to $5,000 and not have the faintest idea where to even begin. All the barriers to getting a gaming PC are still there, with few of the benefits of a console.
...
Past this, console players will lose their much-beloved ability to buy and trade-in used games. This console generation launched with outright panic that the Xbox One and PS4 would go fully digital and erase the used games market. The Xbox One almost did until it was beaten into submission by fans. Yes, Steam has some of the best sales in the business, but used games offer similar discounts to console players, and the market is part of a way of life for many in the space, and they’ve expressed that they can’t live without it.

And finally, there are very few games that are truly going to be “Steam exclusive” that console players care about. Microsoft has Halo, Gears of War, Crackdown and others. Sony has Uncharted, God of War, Bloodborne and The Ord—nevermind. But Steam? It has a wide smattering of smaller games you might not be able to find on consoles and a million half-finished Early Access titles, but most of the heavy hitters will be cross-platform outside of maybe DOTA. The ones that aren’t? I’m guessing you can get all these machines to play World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, League of Legends and so on, despite their existence outside of Steam, but good luck playing many of those effectively with a controller.

So if Steam Machines aren’t for console players, will existing PC gamers bite? I really don’t see a reason for them to do so. PC gamers like their mouse and keyboard, their ability to sit close to their monitor, and the probably multi-thousand-dollar rig they already have. The avid PC gamers I’ve seen look at Steam Machines as “good for people who want to check out PC gaming,” but almost none of them seem to be considering it for themselves. And why would they? It’s just a pre-built gaming rig that hooks up to their TV and runs Steam Big Picture, something all the do-it-yourself-ers out there could have made themselves for years now if they really wanted to. With the release of the new store, many veterans of the scene are looking over some of the machines and laughing about the price, knowing they could get the exact same level of performance for much, much cheaper if they did it on their own. Other than the ability to express their endless love and devotion for Valve’s Gabe Newell, patron saint of PC gaming, I don’t know what PC gamers get out of Steam Machines.
...
I was surprised to discover that in my mass dismissal of nearly all potential demographics that might consider picking up a Steam Machine, that I was probably their target market more than anyone else.

I’m someone who has been an avid console player for my entire life. I’ve dabbled in PC gaming with games like Diablo, Starcraft, League of Legends and recently Hearthstone, but I’ve never been a true PC gamer. Anything that’s crossplatform I’ll pick up for a console, and if you gave me the parts to assemble my own gaming PC, I’d stare at them blanky and call Forbes PC gaming god Jason Evangelho to come put it together for me. I’ve been interested in trying to get more into PC gaming with a good rig, and I have the disposable income to buy one. A Steam Machine would presumably be a nice middleground for me, combining the living room appeal of consoles with the customization and power of gaming PCs.

And yet, when it came time to experiment with a rig of my own, why did I buy a new desktop from Digital Storm rather than wait for one of these fifteen Steam Machines? Why didn’t I even think twice about it?

Most of my reasons can be summed up in the previous paragraphs about all console players, as I meet many of those criteria. But the simple fact is that if I’m going to spend big bucks on a gaming rig, I want to make damn sure I can still use it for regular computer duties as well. While sure, playing my Steam library on my TV in the next room sounds fun, there’s no way I want to move my entire office there. I use my desktop for all of my work related activities, be it web browsing, answering email, Photoshop, writing articles, or working on my books. I am not going to buy a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard and sit on my couch doing work while staring at my TV from 12 feet away. Nor despite having some amount of money to spend on gaming, I am not going shell out for one desktop in my office and then also for another one in my living room.

So despite being the very tiny sliver of the market that seems prime to potentially want a Steam Machine, I haven’t even considered it. Existing console players have little reason to want one, PC gamers don’t think it’s for them, and first time gamers looking to buy a new system? Just show them this new fifteen-console-deep store page and watch their eyes glaze over.

In short, I hope Valve’s Vive VR is the gift from God it’s supposed to be, because it’s hard to imagine Steam Machines going anywhere at all in their current form(s).

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/20161...on-process
They seemed so noble, but in truth they were so full of it.

http://nichegamer.com/2015/03/brad-warde...rts-games/
Hmm.

Quote:For me, it’s the tech, what is going to be the tech story that comes out of here? What I hope most users get, I’ve had a lot of meetings with Microsoft, AMD, and a little bit of Nvidia and Intel – they really need to hit home the fact that DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle, allow all of the cores of your CPU to talk to the video card simultaneously. But everyone’s really iffy about that, because that means acknowledging that for the past several years, only one of your cores was talking to the GPU, and no one wants to go ‘You know by the way, you know that multi-core GPU? It was useless for your games.’ Alright? No one wants to be that guy. People wonder, saying ‘Gosh, doesn’t it seem like PC games have stalled? I wonder why that is?’ Well, the speed of a single core on a computer has not changed in years. It’s been at 3GHz, or 2-something GHz for years, I mean that’s not the only thing that affects the speed, but you get the idea. Now, with DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle, it’s how many cores you’ve got. We’ve got lots of those. Suddenly, you go by 4x, 5x, the performance.