Naaahh I was running a Pentium D (dual core Pentium 4 pretty much.) 3.6Ghz OC'ed to 4Ghz on a 1,066Mhz bus with 8GB's of RAM (4 full slots) for Video I want to say I was still running my antique at the time 9800 Pro 128MB but I was probably running an X1950 either at launch or shortly after.
That was back in 2006 back when if you wanted a gaming PC you needed to upgrade your PC every 2 years.
So no I am not looking back with 2014 glasses lol But hey if you just got a PC with lots of RAM and a decent video card... welcome to my world circa 2006 I guess? lol (I will not bother with the specs of my current machine, lets just say Windows 7 runs like a champ.)
Yes I had better specs than your average user, and I also enjoyed a much better experience with Vista than your average user too.
I loved Vista, but I also beefed up my machine before it launched with an extra 4GB's of RAM and a better video card (brought me up to 8GB's).
Mostly the people who hated Vista had 4GB's or less of RAM and shitty video cards, toss in some off brand sound card with no driver support and no Direct Sound (MS removed it from Direct X for some odd reason. I have heard rumors it was some sort of feud with Creative?)
At launch with Vista you needed 8GB's to fully enjoy it, and if you did have 8GB's it was a buttery smooth OS. One of the features I do miss when I moved on to 7 was the animated desktop wall papers (I have heard you can "hack" them back into 7 but I don't haven't tried it.)
"Windows 9 will be a refined balanced UI. Tile applets on a Windows 7 desktop if you plug in the keyboard and mouse (mouse-first UI) if rumors are true. MS nees an answer to iOS and Android with battery life, smooth graphics acceleration, and applets. It is NOT GOING AWAY."
Honestly if Metro doesn't go away, I will... lol
Away to Linux or Android...
That will be a while though as they will have to pry Windows 7 from my cold dead hands.
It's pretty sad, I do love me some Windows and I have been using it for a long long time since the 3.11 days, I even liked Windows ME. But I just can't love Windows 8 and it's abomination of a UI. I can't count how many times I have installed Classic Shell in Windows 8 machines because the owners couldn't stand Metro.
I am sure it is fantastic on a tablet though? I have an Android tablet so yeah.... I am already in the process of ditching Windows:( If my PC didn't function as my home server and general PC work, I would probably be trying to figure out some way to go Android PC right now.
What I use is a text file on a thumb drive also backed up on several local drives.
The text file contains the first half or so of the password, enough to remind me of what the password is should I forget. The rest is stored in my brain.
For rarely used passwords and places I will put a hint under the half pass.
I am trying to get away from these long 20 character passwords though... I really wish some one would invent a better system. Maybe a thumb drive that combines storage and a thumb print scanner in one package.
Why buy something that isn't demonstratively faster than the old stuff...
I mean if the difference is so small that there is some sort of debate about if it is effectively working or not, then it seems to me at that point cost should be the deciding factor. I doubt these D Wave machines are any cheaper than the old stuff.
Yes I drive a lot less than I used to 10 years ago, but it less to do with the Internet and more to do with the price of gas....
I'm not sure why your comment and link to an ancient article on gas prices (2004?!) got modded insightful, but when you factor in inflation, gas prices aren't particularly high. They're at a pretty normal level compared to historical prices (again, inflation adjusted).
That being said, the inflation adjusted income of the middle class has been going down for decades. That's more likely to be your culprit.
Well the article we are posting in (I can hardly believe I have to explain this...) is about how teenagers are driving less now than they where 10 years ago...
I linked to an article talking about the gas prices in 2004...10 years ago.
Gas prices have doubled, wages have not, Pretty simple?
After watching his last movie "Machete Kills" I have to agree he is like James Bond and Chuck Norris rolled into one guy. If anyone could stop these Radioactive Mutant Mexican Overlords it would be him!
It's the grey areas I like to avoid... A judge having a bad day or is just in a bad mood may decide that they want to interpret the law such that you end up in prison for 20 years.
My best advise to anyone would be steer away from using anything like this. Even better would be to avoid the situation where something like this would even be useful to anyone.
That and if your companies router is compromised at the firmware, who is to say that the company even knows it's data is being compromised?
Even talking about things like a warrant to do a wire tap, I don't think the agencies are forced to tell anyone "Hey we are tapping your communications, here is the warrant."
Also some companies willingly work with these agencies so they probably wouldn't use this tag.
I had my WoW account banned.... It was nothing I did at all, so I can share my story here!!! lol
Started off a few years back when Google had it's Gmail servers hacked, my account was one of these accounts that got hacked into. According to the email Gmail sent me my account was accessed by "unknown means by some one in China" alright what ever.... I change all my passwords and try to log into WoW to do the same... no dice my password has been changed, ok so I have them send me a password reset to my email and everything is fine. The hackers had gained me 2 levels on my main (was right as the expansion hit that raised the cap to 85) no problem I played for like 15 minutes and logged off to go to work. I come home from work and wanted to explore some of the new expansion I had just paid for... My account was banned because who ever had been using my account my account was selling gold or something.
I contact reps on the phone from Blizzard and am told "We do not reset passwords via email!" rotflmao hmmm ok I tell him I can forward the email if he would like. He doesn't want it of course. After dealing with this idiot for about 15 minutes I ask if I can speak to supervisor as being nice is getting me no where fast. No dice there are no supervisors on the floor that can help me. I kindly tell the rep that Blizzard will never see another dime from me and they have lost a customer that has been with the company since Diablo 1.
I had been playing WoW since the day it had come out and spent quite a bit of money playing the game (paying the fee's to play.) and true to my word since that day I have not bought any Blizzard products. The customer service was horrible.
So yes they do ban people for nothing and when you try to work with them they don't care about lost customers.
Enigma was awesome!!! Of course getting a legit one was pretty much a pipe dream. (by legit I mean making it with non duped runes.)
That was my problem with Diablo 2 -- all the good stuff was (mostly) only available through cheatery. Were real drop rates modified by the expectation/reality of duping bugs?
I have recently started playing Diablo 2 LOD on the ladder again (about a week ago.) and the drop rates seem to be higher. I have already found a Pul, not that it's a very high rune but I am only level 84 right now and I have been soloing everything. (no public games.) about to finish up act 5 in hell mode and start farming Baal. That's when I will know if they have really changed the drop rates or not.
But my gut feeling is that if you still wanted Enigma on the ladder you would be farming runes for months to make one legit.
Yeah I played the hell out of Diablo 1, Diablo 2 and LOD, Starcraft and Broodwars, Warcraft Bnet Edition, and WoW I played and bought all the expansions after getting level 80 a couple of times on WoTLK and getting all the epic loot I got bored with it and haven't been back the new expansion looked like hell and judging from the number of subs they lost I can tell I am not the only one who jumped ship.
Sad to see such a great company go down hill, but I do remember dimly that some of the people responsible for Diablo II and LOD left Blizzard to form a different company and that could be part of the reason Diablo III is such a mess.
What I don't understand is how you can go from Diablo II LOD to Diablo III... I bought Diablo 1 maybe a year after it came out (hey computers where expensive back then! lol) when Diablo II came out I had it on pre order at Electronics Boutique and managed to get my copy a day early... So awesome!!! Then the expansion came out LOD and holy shit it was fucking awesome, the patches only made it (mostly) better and I still play on the ladder to this day. I may have spent some money on the game but I feel like I have gotten 10 times my money out of it in value. I got Diablo III the day it released, I have a barb about half way into inferno and even made some money (more money than I spent on buying the game!) at the RMA and holy shit you can't even pay me to play the game.... (I mean that literally I can make money playing it and I still just can't bring myself to do it. The game is boring....)
Maybe the expansion will fix some things, but after reading up on it and watching the video's a couple of times each trying to see what was new... I don't see any sort of in depth crafting system or runewords. I probably will skip the expansion unless it gets insanely good reviews months after release (you can't trust new reviews on a new game those are prime selling material....)
whilst a console gets more powerful throughout its generation.
I laughed.
The reason I laughed is that, I believe what you meant to say with out understanding what you where saying...
The reason graphics improved on the older generation of consoles in ye olde days, was that these where entirely new systems each one had all kinds of quirks to learn the CPU's where not usually the same ones used in PC's the Graphics chips usually where custom jobs same with the sound processors in most machines.
The PS4 and the Xbox One, are both pretty much PC's, there is no new hardware to learn, the graphics cards are a couple of generations back PC hardware the CPU while new is AMD's weakest CPU currently available so much so that is it even under-clocked for the consoles at 1.6Ghz (You can get them in PC's now they come in the $299 E-Machines with less cores but much higher clocked.) So the software you see on the PS4 and the Xbox One, will see ever so slight improvement as developers "master" the systems but don't expect the giant leap in graphics quality like the PS1 or PS2 enjoyed with later games in the lifespan of those systems making the launch software look bad. That's not going to happen this time.
What will this mean for PC gaming? Well any sort of console to PC ports will not require much in the way of hardware... Give PC's 2 years and the lowest of the low end E-Machine will be bumping up against the PS4 and Xbox One in terms of power, especially since AMD and Intel are both doing the integrated CPU/GPU thing.
Long story short, you don't buy a console because your worried about how powerful it is, that's just dumb. Buy a console if you have the extra money and it has some games you really want to play. If you have to pick between owning a PC and a console... get the PC it can do things like "work" and if you happen to spend enough on it you can also play games too, many of the times the exact same games released on the consoles. (Making owning a console seem outright redundant.)
That and consoles used to cost about 200 bucks at launch, sometimes a little more, and PC's used to cost 3,000 for a decent gaming PC (yeah you can still spend 3K on a machine but those are insane machines...) Meanwhile these days launch consoles have jumped in price and PC's have fallen to the point where there almost is no difference in price.
If not for exclusive games consoles would be all but a waste of time, and that's getting harder and harder to justify not saying "Ahhh hell with this I will just build a HTPC throw MAME and every other emulator on it and buy a wireless gamepad."
You can get a gaming PC for about $400 but it will be entry level, when it comes to PC's better to spend at least a little bit more and get something that will last a while.
This one is $529 and is more than a match for the new generation of consoles.
The biggest thing about investing in the price difference on a gaming PC is that when your not playing games, you can do a LOT of other things on a PC. So the price difference is more than made up for.
All this being said, I am lucky and have enough money to do both, I tend to buy 2 consoles from each gen and keep a gaming PC around. This will be the first gen I do not buy at least 2 of the consoles at launch. I own a Wii-U and I don't plan on getting a Xbox One, I also do not trust Sony enough to pick up a PS4 at launch my PS3 was not a good experience for me... Always seems like I spend more time updating the firmware than actually playing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Naaahh I was running a Pentium D (dual core Pentium 4 pretty much.) 3.6Ghz OC'ed to 4Ghz on a 1,066Mhz bus with 8GB's of RAM (4 full slots)
for Video I want to say I was still running my antique at the time 9800 Pro 128MB but I was probably running an X1950 either at launch or shortly after.
That was back in 2006 back when if you wanted a gaming PC you needed to upgrade your PC every 2 years.
So no I am not looking back with 2014 glasses lol But hey if you just got a PC with lots of RAM and a decent video card... welcome to my world circa 2006 I guess? lol (I will not bother with the specs of my current machine, lets just say Windows 7 runs like a champ.)
Yes I had better specs than your average user, and I also enjoyed a much better experience with Vista than your average user too.
I loved Vista, but I also beefed up my machine before it launched with an extra 4GB's of RAM and a better video card (brought me up to 8GB's).
Mostly the people who hated Vista had 4GB's or less of RAM and shitty video cards, toss in some off brand sound card with no driver support and no Direct Sound (MS removed it from Direct X for some odd reason. I have heard rumors it was some sort of feud with Creative?)
At launch with Vista you needed 8GB's to fully enjoy it, and if you did have 8GB's it was a buttery smooth OS. One of the features I do miss when I moved on to 7 was the animated desktop wall papers (I have heard you can "hack" them back into 7 but I don't haven't tried it.)
"Windows 9 will be a refined balanced UI. Tile applets on a Windows 7 desktop if you plug in the keyboard and mouse (mouse-first UI) if rumors are true. MS nees an answer to iOS and Android with battery life, smooth graphics acceleration, and applets. It is NOT GOING AWAY."
Honestly if Metro doesn't go away, I will... lol
Away to Linux or Android...
That will be a while though as they will have to pry Windows 7 from my cold dead hands.
It's pretty sad, I do love me some Windows and I have been using it for a long long time since the 3.11 days, I even liked Windows ME. But I just can't love Windows 8 and it's abomination of a UI. I can't count how many times I have installed Classic Shell in Windows 8 machines because the owners couldn't stand Metro.
http://www.classicshell.net/
I am sure it is fantastic on a tablet though? I have an Android tablet so yeah.... I am already in the process of ditching Windows :( If my PC didn't function as my home server and general PC work, I would probably be trying to figure out some way to go Android PC right now.
This would explain why the room spins too... Like a galaxy!!!
New Kraft Mummies!!! The cheesiest!!!
Oh that is a nice thing!!!
Thank you!!!
Yeah a little pricey but not crazy expensive at all and totally worth it.
What I use is a text file on a thumb drive also backed up on several local drives.
The text file contains the first half or so of the password, enough to remind me of what the password is should I forget. The rest is stored in my brain.
For rarely used passwords and places I will put a hint under the half pass.
I am trying to get away from these long 20 character passwords though... I really wish some one would invent a better system. Maybe a thumb drive that combines storage and a thumb print scanner in one package.
Why buy something that isn't demonstratively faster than the old stuff...
I mean if the difference is so small that there is some sort of debate about if it is effectively working or not, then it seems to me at that point cost should be the deciding factor. I doubt these D Wave machines are any cheaper than the old stuff.
Yes I drive a lot less than I used to 10 years ago, but it less to do with the Internet and more to do with the price of gas....
I'm not sure why your comment and link to an ancient article on gas prices (2004?!) got modded insightful, but when you factor in inflation, gas prices aren't particularly high. They're at a pretty normal level compared to historical prices (again, inflation adjusted).
That being said, the inflation adjusted income of the middle class has been going down for decades. That's more likely to be your culprit.
Well the article we are posting in (I can hardly believe I have to explain this...) is about how teenagers are driving less now than they where 10 years ago...
I linked to an article talking about the gas prices in 2004...10 years ago.
Gas prices have doubled, wages have not, Pretty simple?
Yes I drive a lot less than I used to 10 years ago, but it less to do with the Internet and more to do with the price of gas....
http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/23/news/economy/gas_aaa/
After watching his last movie "Machete Kills" I have to agree he is like James Bond and Chuck Norris rolled into one guy. If anyone could stop these Radioactive Mutant Mexican Overlords it would be him!
It's the grey areas I like to avoid... A judge having a bad day or is just in a bad mood may decide that they want to interpret the law such that you end up in prison for 20 years.
My best advise to anyone would be steer away from using anything like this. Even better would be to avoid the situation where something like this would even be useful to anyone.
That and if your companies router is compromised at the firmware, who is to say that the company even knows it's data is being compromised?
Even talking about things like a warrant to do a wire tap, I don't think the agencies are forced to tell anyone "Hey we are tapping your communications, here is the warrant."
Also some companies willingly work with these agencies so they probably wouldn't use this tag.
"you just need to emulate three relatively slow PPC cores"
That "slow" Xbox 360 CPU was a 3 core hyper threaded 3.6Ghz CPU.... I am not sure slow is exactly the word I would use to describe it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_(processor)
Reading the first really long review it seems to work best as a 1080P monitor for PC's.
http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-Digital-SE39UY04-39-Inch-Ultra/product-reviews/B00DOPGO2G/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
But I don't want to pay 4K.
I had my WoW account banned.... It was nothing I did at all, so I can share my story here!!! lol
Started off a few years back when Google had it's Gmail servers hacked, my account was one of these accounts that got hacked into. According to the email Gmail sent me my account was accessed by "unknown means by some one in China" alright what ever.... I change all my passwords and try to log into WoW to do the same... no dice my password has been changed, ok so I have them send me a password reset to my email and everything is fine. The hackers had gained me 2 levels on my main (was right as the expansion hit that raised the cap to 85) no problem I played for like 15 minutes and logged off to go to work. I come home from work and wanted to explore some of the new expansion I had just paid for... My account was banned because who ever had been using my account my account was selling gold or something.
I contact reps on the phone from Blizzard and am told "We do not reset passwords via email!" rotflmao hmmm ok I tell him I can forward the email if he would like. He doesn't want it of course. After dealing with this idiot for about 15 minutes I ask if I can speak to supervisor as being nice is getting me no where fast. No dice there are no supervisors on the floor that can help me. I kindly tell the rep that Blizzard will never see another dime from me and they have lost a customer that has been with the company since Diablo 1.
I had been playing WoW since the day it had come out and spent quite a bit of money playing the game (paying the fee's to play.) and true to my word since that day I have not bought any Blizzard products. The customer service was horrible.
So yes they do ban people for nothing and when you try to work with them they don't care about lost customers.
PS4 It only does slavery!
I jest but wow that's a pretty dick move, work the assembly line or else...
Enigma was awesome!!! Of course getting a legit one was pretty much a pipe dream. (by legit I mean making it with non duped runes.)
That was my problem with Diablo 2 -- all the good stuff was (mostly) only available through cheatery. Were real drop rates modified by the expectation/reality of duping bugs?
I have recently started playing Diablo 2 LOD on the ladder again (about a week ago.) and the drop rates seem to be higher. I have already found a Pul, not that it's a very high rune but I am only level 84 right now and I have been soloing everything. (no public games.) about to finish up act 5 in hell mode and start farming Baal. That's when I will know if they have really changed the drop rates or not.
But my gut feeling is that if you still wanted Enigma on the ladder you would be farming runes for months to make one legit.
Yeah I played the hell out of Diablo 1, Diablo 2 and LOD, Starcraft and Broodwars, Warcraft Bnet Edition, and WoW I played and bought all the expansions after getting level 80 a couple of times on WoTLK and getting all the epic loot I got bored with it and haven't been back the new expansion looked like hell and judging from the number of subs they lost I can tell I am not the only one who jumped ship.
Sad to see such a great company go down hill, but I do remember dimly that some of the people responsible for Diablo II and LOD left Blizzard to form a different company and that could be part of the reason Diablo III is such a mess.
Enigma was awesome!!! Of course getting a legit one was pretty much a pipe dream. (by legit I mean making it with non duped runes.)
I can only imagine the number of runes one would have to cube to get Jah and Ber...
What I don't understand is how you can go from Diablo II LOD to Diablo III... I bought Diablo 1 maybe a year after it came out (hey computers where expensive back then! lol) when Diablo II came out I had it on pre order at Electronics Boutique and managed to get my copy a day early... So awesome!!! Then the expansion came out LOD and holy shit it was fucking awesome, the patches only made it (mostly) better and I still play on the ladder to this day. I may have spent some money on the game but I feel like I have gotten 10 times my money out of it in value. I got Diablo III the day it released, I have a barb about half way into inferno and even made some money (more money than I spent on buying the game!) at the RMA and holy shit you can't even pay me to play the game.... (I mean that literally I can make money playing it and I still just can't bring myself to do it. The game is boring....)
Maybe the expansion will fix some things, but after reading up on it and watching the video's a couple of times each trying to see what was new... I don't see any sort of in depth crafting system or runewords. I probably will skip the expansion unless it gets insanely good reviews months after release (you can't trust new reviews on a new game those are prime selling material....)
whilst a console gets more powerful throughout its generation.
I laughed.
The reason I laughed is that, I believe what you meant to say with out understanding what you where saying...
The reason graphics improved on the older generation of consoles in ye olde days, was that these where entirely new systems each one had all kinds of quirks to learn the CPU's where not usually the same ones used in PC's the Graphics chips usually where custom jobs same with the sound processors in most machines.
The PS4 and the Xbox One, are both pretty much PC's, there is no new hardware to learn, the graphics cards are a couple of generations back PC hardware the CPU while new is AMD's weakest CPU currently available so much so that is it even under-clocked for the consoles at 1.6Ghz (You can get them in PC's now they come in the $299 E-Machines with less cores but much higher clocked.) So the software you see on the PS4 and the Xbox One, will see ever so slight improvement as developers "master" the systems but don't expect the giant leap in graphics quality like the PS1 or PS2 enjoyed with later games in the lifespan of those systems making the launch software look bad. That's not going to happen this time.
What will this mean for PC gaming? Well any sort of console to PC ports will not require much in the way of hardware... Give PC's 2 years and the lowest of the low end E-Machine will be bumping up against the PS4 and Xbox One in terms of power, especially since AMD and Intel are both doing the integrated CPU/GPU thing.
Long story short, you don't buy a console because your worried about how powerful it is, that's just dumb. Buy a console if you have the extra money and it has some games you really want to play. If you have to pick between owning a PC and a console... get the PC it can do things like "work" and if you happen to spend enough on it you can also play games too, many of the times the exact same games released on the consoles. (Making owning a console seem outright redundant.)
That and consoles used to cost about 200 bucks at launch, sometimes a little more, and PC's used to cost 3,000 for a decent gaming PC (yeah you can still spend 3K on a machine but those are insane machines...) Meanwhile these days launch consoles have jumped in price and PC's have fallen to the point where there almost is no difference in price.
If not for exclusive games consoles would be all but a waste of time, and that's getting harder and harder to justify not saying "Ahhh hell with this I will just build a HTPC throw MAME and every other emulator on it and buy a wireless gamepad."
You can get a gaming PC for about $400 but it will be entry level, when it comes to PC's better to spend at least a little bit more and get something that will last a while.
This one is $529 and is more than a match for the new generation of consoles.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229285
The biggest thing about investing in the price difference on a gaming PC is that when your not playing games, you can do a LOT of other things on a PC. So the price difference is more than made up for.
All this being said, I am lucky and have enough money to do both, I tend to buy 2 consoles from each gen and keep a gaming PC around. This will be the first gen I do not buy at least 2 of the consoles at launch. I own a Wii-U and I don't plan on getting a Xbox One, I also do not trust Sony enough to pick up a PS4 at launch my PS3 was not a good experience for me... Always seems like I spend more time updating the firmware than actually playing it.