Since I've been posting here what feels like a few years now, I thought I'd share with people a few tips on posting in a way that makes others believe you're stupid... First tip is... Don't read reviews or forum posts properly but try to skim over them and pick out key words. This ensures you miss out on important parts of the dialogue and is a crucial step for coming across as a numpty. Once you're able to skim sufficiently fast to the point where you're just reading perhaps a couple of words in a thread or article, you can then move on to step 2 which is responding. There is another trick you can do and that's just skip the words in the review entirely and just read the first response someone posted. That gives you a basic idea of what the review may have been focused on while relieving you of the tedium of reading through several pages of text which can often contain hundreds of words. I'll give you an example of this now... http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/06/22/amd-7970-ghz/1 "AMD announces Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB" - I read the title and so I know it's about an ATI 7970. Clicking the link and the first few paragraphs are as follows: "AMD has announced the launch of the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB, a new revision of the company's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and - it claims - the industry's fastest single-GPU implementation. 'The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition rounds out our award-winning GCN family, providing world-class gameplay thanks to the industry’s fastest single GPU,' claimed Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's GPU division, at the launch. 'Gamers have been hungry for our AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series since our launch last December. We have been able to meet that growing demand as we expanded our AMD Radeon HD 7000 offerings and brought the industry's most advanced graphics across a complete family of leading-edge desktop and notebook graphics cards.'" What I did was skim through this looking for key words relating to clock frequencies... the skimming should take no more than 3 seconds... if you're taking longer than this then you need to go to skimming school. The 3rd paragraph contains: "The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB boasts, as the name implies, 3GB of GDDR5 memory and a core clock running at 1GHz - a not-insignificant boost over the original Radeon HD 7970 3GB's 925MHz. The boosted core clock, combined with an effective memory clock of 6GHz compared to 5.5GHz on the non-GHz Edition board, means an increase in raw performance from 3,789 gigaflops to 4,096 gigaflops." You should have skimmed through until you saw 1ghz and "a not-insignificant boost over the original Radeon HD 7970 3GB's 925MHz. " The crucial points are 1ghz and original 925mhz... You have successfully skimmed through the text and have all the information you need to post your response... Now on to the follow up comments and my comment is the second post in... "feathers 22nd June 2012, 10:40 Not much of an increase in clock speed then." So you can see what I did here yes? I concluded that 1ghz versus 925mhz isn't much of an increase in clock speed and I posted my verdict for all to see. I'm not stupid... One of the pitfalls of skimming is that you can miss some useful information like benchmarks etc so you must be prepared for people to challenge your conclusion... "Harlequin 22nd June 2012, 11:04 Quote: Originally Posted by feathers Not much of an increase in clock speed then. and as if by magic feathers arrives in an AMD article with a negative comment.... getting old really fast." This comment from Harlequin wasn't really relevant to the discussion but nevertheless I chose to respond by using reverse psychology (I skimmed through psychology articles over the internet some years ago). "mi1ez 22nd June 2012, 11:11 He does have a point though, In order to beat the GTX680 I would have thought it would need more than a 75MHz boost. They must surely need the 50MHz boost to beat it?" This response from mi1ez is great because it means my skimming may have resulted in at least one valid point that others may pick up on. I won't bother quoting much more except to say that this skimming resulted in me yielding to others who probably read more of the words of the review... "feathers 22nd June 2012, 15:16 I see. Any increase is a good thing though. Roll on 1800mhz." I could have responded in a non-yielding way though which could have resulted in a long argument with other members, perhaps lasting for days before receiving a warning or a ban. Skimming is useful for a number of reasons... It saves you time. Time = money. By saving time I get more money. By not reading through page after page of text you are not overloading your brain with information. Thus you can be more relaxed while others around you may be stressed and angry. I suspect those forum members who read every word of a review are somewhat stressed because their brains are overloaded. Will skimming make you more popular? No, that is something skimming won't do and I am not going to feed you false information. Skimming is good for avoiding brain overload and it saves time and thus makes you more money. Should skimming be used when making important decisions? Yes. If you're buying new hardware, it's not necessary to read through many pages of useless information. Go to the last page, then skim through to the conclusion, then skim through to the final score and thus you know if it's the right choice for you. So I think that's it for the skimming tutorial. One thing I must tell you now is that... If you read through this text and digested it fully then you have FAILED... What you should have done is skimmed through it looking for keywords or even not bother to read any of the tutorial but just skip through to the responses and copy what others are saying.
The art of skimming is dependent on the art of writing. Clearly headed text, with introduction, core message and conclusion, followed by a summary at the end makes it a lot easier to pick out the most important information. A more important rule of thumb is: when someone points out something you got wrong, go back, re-read and concede gracefully if indeed you did.
Yes, articles ideally are written to facilitate fast skimming and as you say - one should be prepared to go back and read a skimmed section in the event of bad skimming.
Three reasons I can't stand you. 1) You can't quote messages - this thread being a prime example. 2) You're a sarcastic p***k most of the time - this thread being a prime example. 3) You have an incredible ability to contribute nothing but negativity to the forum - this thread being a prime example. I think we can lock it at that, mods. It's quite obvious he was just on a trolling spree yesterday.
I LOL'd. TLDR most then the last paragraph... Priceless. Re-read in a none skimming way, found the argument on skimming to be most educational and for that I applaud you. Made me chuckle.. Im not too sure if It was meant to but never mind Oher need to chill out and take a step back if things like this anger them. Yes it can get annoying but it boils down to what frame of mind you are in as to whether or not it riles you.
To be fair, Unicorn, you're hardly one to talk. feathers has just been banned for one infraction too many, but that does not exonerate other members from their own attitudes.
