JB0

Despite all those strikes against it, I think I'll keep my Quakewave pre-order because, apparently, he's over an inch taller. That puts him at the same height as Apollyon, which makes Quakewave believable as a usurper.

They're releasing a darker version so the color is no longer an issue. I can live with the legs, especially since they're metal. I like that the barrel actually transforms into his backpack.

The official one does look cleaner and more show accurate. I may buy it too if I find a bargain.

Apparently, the Takara MP Shockwave has the barrel combine with the gun mode display stand to form a backpack.

What's wrong with Fans Toys sculpt?

Legs are huge.

Head is super squat, eye is too small and recessed too far back. It's... pretty wrong.

The backpack is WAY too busy. Even ignoring the big transparent purple piece sticking out, it looks like he forgot to put his access plates on when he got up in the morning.

The back half of the lasergun mode is wonky as all get-out, and the gun lacks a trigger entirely.

While not actually a sculpt issue... dear Primus that purple is a menace. Shockwave is DARK purple, not Barbie Fun House Purple.

Note that I am extremely toy-biased on Shockwave's looks.

I'm not such a huge fan of onboard peripheral controllers, though. I mean A) there's only so much room in an ATX-compliant IO form factor, and B) I've had enough integrated peripherals fail with the only way to replace them being replacing the whole mobo, which is usually more money than I have to spend to fix a sound controller dropping out or a fixed USB bus freaking out because it thinks it's saturated on a keyboard because mobos are built too cheaply. Maybe the problem is I keep owning junk mobos. Maybe that's everybody's problem. Maybe that is the single greatest problem in modern computing:

You know, I've thought before it'd be great to make the entire ATX backplane out of little lego blocks. Just run some PCIE lanes back there, and start snapping bricks on.

Heck, even shifting to mini-PCIE cards for most purposes would be awesome. There's not really a good reason for us to be using the same expansion card form factor that we used in 1981 for the most part.

Motherboards suck. And making the motherboard do more things may be marginally faster, but I'd really just rather make them better at letting a bunch of expansion cards use other system resources more efficiently. Then I wouldn't be so tied down by making the choice between one set of features I want and another, like having a lot of stock IO but not a lot of expansion capacity, or having the choice of either SATA 3.0 support OR USB 3.0 support between 2 boards. Just give me a lot of expansion capacity so I can build the computer I need. You know, I mean, we've already detached graphical output from most non-OEM mobos. Of the two human interface devices a computer needs, the market has already decided that the output device is suitable to be left to expansion controllers alone.

I'm just a little tired of dead USB buses trashing an entire motherboard.

Actually, we're shifting back towards integrated graphics for everything that isn't a gaming build. Intel builds a quite functional graphics chip into almost every processor they make these days.

Incidentally, the reason IBM didn't make heavy use of integrated peripherals originally was reliability concerns with the parts of the era. And, of course, it kind of caused problems because the 5150 only had 5 slots, and any sort of functional machine was using ALL OF THEM.

As reliability went up, and component size went down, we started seeing more integral peripherals(starting with serial ports and disk controllers).

Now we're at a point where there simply isn't enough IO on offer to hook up everything people want, so you have to choose between more USB3 or more SATA or a second graphics card... you know what, if you have multiple graphics cards you deserve to suffer. Using multiple cards to render one screen is stupid and has been for a long time and you can quote me on that.

It's funny they are including that fishing rod with Hot Rod. I would've said the same thing about Optimus's Energy Axe. I don't know why that throwaway bit from one episode of the cartoon has resonated so much with fans that it appears on toys and video games.

It's a little odd, but it makes me smile.

And we can add Shockwave carrying a laser gun that looks like him to the list.

Well, PCIE lanes don't always go to PCIE slots. Interfaces for onboard controllers wire to PCIE, as does an M.2 SSD slot.

And I would LOVE to see boards sporting M.2 become the standard.

But but but but it's faster!

It is. And the obvious solution is to not just add enough PCIE lanes to cover current usage, but to add WAY MORE PCIE lanes.

I'm actually serious here. We need motherboards with far more PCIE lanes than they have, though Intel's newest chipsets go someway towards alleviating the situation.

Aww yeah! Chest electronics even look right!

Shockwave is awesome. From the Back shot the eye seems to be light-piped. Interesting. Not a fan of the light-up gimmick in alt-mide especially if this is the reason why the hose is on the wrong side of the forearm. The arms seem to be symmetrical though so they can probably swing around 180 degree so that the hose is on the backside of the arm. The backpack looks massive. I wonder if there is a strut on the underside of the arms in alt-mode to allow for perfect transformation.

Cable looks to be on the right side to me. They always got that wrong in the cartoon. Half the time it looked like he didn't even HAVE a cable.

Cartoon had a crappy opaque chest panel too. Shockwave without an image of capacitors and whatnot sticking out just isn't right.

TOY ACCURACY YEAH!

SATA 3.2 runs to a maximum 16Gb/s bandwidth. The only SCSI standard that exceeds that is SAS 4.0 which is just SATA with the voltage turned up and different software. Even Fibre Channel 16 only runs 13.6Gb/s maximums. Thunderbolt 2 does reach 20Gb/s throughput, but let's not give credit to Apple for that one. Intel made it when they decided it would be cheaper to modify a USB standard instead of making a new optical standard.

I just meant SCSI was a better standard than ATA, and would've mostly removed any need for SATA in the first place. Not that it was faster.

Speed of the interconnect is not the limiting factor on hard disks, and flash drives are gradually getting off of hard drive interfaces entirely.

The only real disadvantage I've run into in SATA is the inability to chain drives through the controller standard. The physical standards for SATA work well enough, given SAS 4.0's performance on the same, and notably its ability to chain SATA drives to a SATA-based controller with SCSI logic. (Though, given, the controllers all seem to interface with PCI; mobo-bound SATA buses are slow) The only reason the connectors are junk is because you buy junk connectors. (Or they come with your junk Mobo) I've seen all kinds of SATA connectors, and some are trash and some are quality pieces. It's not the connector standard's fault, blame the manufacturer. But the connectors do have a good bit of thought given to them. There are 3 pin lengths between the male and female ends, which natively allows for hot-swapping drives without damage or discontinuity, something that has to be shoved off onto the controller standard in other attachment standards.

They're still flimsy connectors. The dang tongue is too narrow for my comfort.

And yes, my very first SATA mobo(An Abit, may they rest in peace) DID have a connector pull up off the board while I was trying to route a locking cable. Plastic shell just came straight up, and I broke a pin off while trying to get it to line up and go back down.

I studiously avoid using locking cables on SATA ports that stick straight up because of that experience. Try to avoid straight-up connectors entirely. Right-angle or GTFO.

Actually, I'm starting to think we should just cover mobos in PCI-E slots and run all peripherals off the PCI buses rather than trying to build a hard disk bus directly into a motherboard. I mean, if you want performance, that does seem to be the way to go, either through direct PCI hard drives, or PCI-based drive controllers running your SATA/SAS/Favorite Standard drives. Who needs thermal control?

MORE PCIE LANES! MORE!

Actually, it seems to me like a lot of boards have been IO-starved lately, and we really DO need more PCIE lanes in general. Putting drives directly on the bus just exacerbates an already-bad situation.

any clue as to when the next gen nvidia architecture will be out? Im holding off upgrading my vid card till then..

In my experience, they typically announce two weeks after you buy an upgrade.

There's a surprising amount of thought that's gone into SATA. The only thing I really mind about it at this point is the maximum 6GB/s throughput. Everything else is intelligent enough to kind of just work, but the data bandwidth is sorely lacking compared to other standards that have improved in recent time, particularly PCI-E.

The connectors are flimsy garbage they found in a cereal box, and the inability to chain multiple drives off one base connector is completely inept. Just because IDE did it wrong is no reason to insist it can't be done reasonably.

...

We shoulda all just converted to SCSI in the 90s. You know it's bad when I'm advocating that we follow APPLE.

The 6GB/s thing is because SATA wasn't ever designed for flash media. Solid state drives saturate every new version of the standard as fast as it's introduced, and hard disks still can't saturate the 3GB/s outside of cache hits. Not to mention high performance hard disks have followed the dodo and passenger pigeon into the next life.

SATA folks basically decided to let PCIe take the SSD market instead of continuing to try and keep up with SSD, which was a losing proposition.

But she's out of scale with EVERYTHING ELSE YOU OWN. It will RUIN your display case!

Or I might just break down and get them all. I don't know what to do!!

In times like these, I like to ask ... What Would Ash Ketchum Do?

The answer usually comes back to me, a voice in my head that tells me "gotta catch 'em all."

Well, the F117 isn't really a fair demonstration of ANY aerodynamic principle except "enough thrust will make anything fly". With aerodynamics like that, it's more surprising that they managed to get it to NOT fall from the sky like a bird having a stroke, elevons or not.

Nope. Is the Metal Siren from Macross II.

Are you sure? It doesn't look like Macross to me.

SATA is just a crap standard, no two ways about it.

:'(

California has plenty of salt water already, though.

Is that from Orguss?

Nice squadron!

...

Now you just need the coneheads.

I thought I read somewhere that it was flowing water too?? It would be cool to see if Elon Musk's idea of nuking the poles to melt the ice would actually do anything toward restarting the planets environment or would it just radiate the water and evaporate / escape into space..?

It's very faint amounts of very salty flowing water.

There's serious questions about how it's GETTING to the equator, since there shouldn't be enough atmosphere to carry water vapor that far and any near-surface ice should've evaporated ages ago.

Nuking the poles is a bad idea. Better to attack an ion engine to an asteroid and drop THAT on the poles. Easier, cheaper, more effective.

I used to could spend an entire day mucking with Windows, back when I was in high school. Change the wallpaper, change all the colors to match it, change the system icons, change icon layouts to keep them in places they lookd good, and holy crap is it that late already?

Thank goodness we moved to bitmapped themes and I can't do that anymore, right?

I just changed up my cellular PDA background. I have a theme going of only using androids and cyborgs for my Android wallpapers. It's nerdy as hell, but it makes me a tiny bit happier.

We'll see how long it lasts. The last one didn't make it a day. It looked okay at first, but it just didn't sit right with me.

Next time I change this up, I'm probably gonna find some good Ghost in the Shell cover/color page scans to use. The Major would be faithful to the theme, I like Shirow's stye, and I don't know why I only just now thought of it.

I've ridden some shonky bikes in the past, many of them not even worthy of "farm yard gate" status but I wonder what a bike like this would be like to ride! Quick in a straight line but corners? forget about it! Drag bike comes to mind..

Yeah yeah its anime and I must suspend my disbelief I know.. hehe!

Cool looking toy though!

OBVIOUSLY it uses force projectors to turn, enabling it to spin on a dime. The power of the future, man!

Are you talking AI harem kinda like Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio (of Blue Steel)? Cause I would be ok with that.

Takao is best boat, BTW. Jury still out on best valk.

Kirishima is best boat bear.

(brings a whole new definition to "shipping", though)

I wonder how many of those wars Isamu STARTED.