AMD IS BACK BABY!!!

as a certified fan of the UAE owned semiconductor giant, and as a long time athlon fan, i am tremendously excited to see AMD's fine return to form with the phenom 2 x4 920 and 940 processors.

i know that benchies on the net give them a negative rating vis a vis core i7, but for me it was interesting to note that clock for clock, outside of hardcore video editing environments, they ran neck and neck with the core 2 quads (45 nm) and almost matched the core i7 in a few benchmarks.

for me, that's a tremendous achievement if you consider the fact that right now, the phenom 2 is only working with DDR2 ram. once we get the AM3+ mobos readied and throw in a couple of DDR3 sticks in, i fully expect the phenom 2s to leave the C2Qs in the dust.

but let's get down to where it really matter, gaming. i was most excited to see the phenom 2 perform outstandingly in games, where it was a 30-40 % faster than the older phenom quads. 

and the price!!! for the price of a phenom 2 quad, and with AM2 mobo and a 4 gig stick of DDR2 ram, i will have more than enough cash to throw in a 4850x2, a 260 core216 or even a 280 video card, for the same price as a bare bones core i7  setup.

that to me seems like a tremendous value for money proposition, which will give us a reasonable system that can finally answer the only question that has mattered to PC hardware in the last year and a half.

yup, we got an answer to " Can it Run Crysis Bro?"

yeah man, 1250 $ will give you what you need

grant morrison is a #!@$#@$ genius

damn, just finished reading Final Crisis 6. to say that it is a culmination of one of the most well connected and well conceived arcs i have read is a massive understatement.

spoiler warning for those who have somehow managed to navigate the web without running into the finale of FC6.

batman's death is a fitting conclusion to his gradual deconstruction that grant began with RIP. i know that a lot of fanboys have cried themselves hoarse over the apparent low payoff that bruce's death was given ("Just two pages, count them, Two Pages, TWO!!!")

my take on it is, you cant read final crisis like any regular summer crossover event. Grant Morrison has delivered an innovative experiment, where rather give us a third person view, similar to the isometric experience that we get in RTS games, he actually gives us an upclose and extremly intimate look at how even superheroes are affected in face of an evil that you dont have an answer to.

by not focusing on action pieces, and giving us page after page of character interaction, we finally get to see how people react when the world around them is falling apart.

for those who found it very confusing, i admit it requires quite a bit of knowledge of DC folklore, but there are pleanty of FC annotations available on the web. while you dont really need to know much about Anthro or Kamandi to get to the gist of FC, knowing about kirby's tremendous work with the fourth world will give you a greater appreciation of what a real crisis should be.

not some all powering sci fi villain who merely absorbs universes, not some angst ridden hero turned villain who wanted to recreate the universe. no, the greatest evil has to be a god who wants to remake the world in his image.

for 5 issues, we have seen our heroes become helpless as the skies turned red. helpless as their loved ones succumbed to the anti life equation. helpless as 6 billion eyes and 3 billion voices spoke out in the voice of Darkseid.

the highlight of FC for me, will be Turpin giving into darkseid, and the thumbs up splash will forever remain as wallpaper material.

the other highlight for me, will be the apparent death of batman. a lot of batfans will complain that bruce picking up a gun and firing on someone is totally out of character. that point i agree on.

but, when bruce confronted darkseid, he was not the same bruce we know. think about it. the guy just endured insane levels of mental torture at the hands of the black glove i RIP. he was pushed beyond breaking point and managed to overcome all odds in the end.

then he got captured and had to relive all the painful memories of his life again. scene by scene. think about reliving your nightmares for over a month, every single day. that's what he managed to overcome. WITH ONLY HIS MEMORIES!!!

before firing the gun, bruce broke his cardinal vow of never killing anyone. he drove The Lump to death by using his memories as a weapon. even though he promised lump that a part of him would live on in bruce's mind, lump did die thanks to bruce.

so when he confronted darkseid, he was at the end of the tether, mentally. he saw that there was just no way out of this. coupled with his total inabilty to affect any of the outcomes in the previous crisis' he finally snapped as he saw the total fall of his world.

his refusal to give into the antilife equation in the face of certain death makes him the ultimate badass of FC. superman was missing, wonder woman gave into the ALE, but Bats hung onto his humanity and made the greatest sacrifice.

for those complaining that superman's entry wasnt dramatic enough, please.. did you even read the page again? remember how the furies werent even tickled by the entire superheroes team minus the trinity? 

kal el flies in through the red skies, burns his way to the bludhaven bunker, lays waste to the furies and emerges with a smoking corpse wearing batman's costume.

i dont think it's bruce by any shot. i think that it is turpins' body wearing the batman costume. i think that darkseid has transfered himself into bruce's body. but next issue, we will see him finally lose to bruce's willpower. i think the end of bruce will be him shutting down mentally and living in a vegetative state, to prevent darkseid from breaking out again.

that would explain the whole thorgal preparation that bruce underwent for over a year. 

once again, morisson shows a tremendous abulity to weave a tapestry of events that are held together by strands of  providence. 

this is the most uncrossover crossover event i have read in a long time and for the guts displayed, i give hime 4 stars out of 5.

now, if only DC had managed to get out all books on schedule. i mean it's ridiculous that we are yet to see what clark kent did in superman beyond and legion of three worlds and yet see his return into the regular world this week.

DC editors, you must take a blow to the nose for this.

what a happy new year

ladies and gentlemen, and whoever reads my blog, (yeah, u are a separate entity altogether) i am back again for the umpteenth time. like the comic character who dies, to get resurrected, only to die again.

quite a lot has happened since i last posted. we somehow made it through to a new year. but with the same headlines for the last two months. time seems to be stuck in a loop. 

"pakistan rejects indian evidence" "india says pakistan must take concrete steps" " economy witnessed a decline of <%> in 2008" " declares record loss, to layoff employees"

yup, its a good time to be a scrooge, no matter how oxymoronic the sentence reads.

for those concerned about my welfare who number the same as a million divided by a million, well i got some good news and bad news.

good news is, i am on a payroll. bad news is this is the worst time to be, in the middle east. for too long now, governments have invested way too much into the economies, without serious development of local manufacturing industry. falling oil revenue, and rising budgetary allocations coupled with serious hedging of funds in the american economy has left the region exposed.

the biggest employer here, apart from the government, is the real estate. the real estate market witnessed a boom in the UAE because of the freehold visas, wherein anyone purchasing property here in dubai was promised a long term residency visa. rising demand led to the influx of a lot of speculative buyers, who were looking to make quick profits in short term.

as prices rose, higher bonuses had to be paid, which soon rubbed off on other sectors as well. salaries for the upper management rose faster than the airbus a340, and the great middle eastern boom was born.

needless to say, as property prices crashed in the aftermath of the subprime fiasco, the rulers here lost a huge amount of investment. now, the media has finally gotten around to admitting that all's not well here, and officially, 3200 people have lost jobs in the last quarter. conventional wisdom tells me you multiply that number by about 20, to get the real picture.

newer construction projects have been put on hold, and existing ones have witnessed a tremendous slowdown. property prices are in a freefall, as buyers are indulging in panic selling, to recover whatever amount they can, frmo their investment.

now, here's where we come in with the killer punch. 

i work as a PR Coordinator remember? well, i am a PR Coordinator for a construction material manufacturing company. go ahead and laugh for a good 5 minutes. man, i've got my work cut out for the next few months