SWG actually had more facial modifiers than CoH/CoV (and yes I've played CoH recently so I'm aware they updated it). One thing that SWG allowed you to do was make player characters that were overweight. I know CoH could do this since they have fat NPCs, but as far as I can tell there is no way to make a fat hero.
An Equinix datacenter hosts the main metropolitan area exchange here in Honolulu. When we had the earthquake on Oct. 15th Hawaiian Electric took down the power grid on the island to prevent any major damage from occurring. Power was out in most areas until at least the evening. Equinix (and everyone hosted there) did not go down during the outage. I know they run a combination of high end UPS systems and diesal generators allowing the data center to run "off the grid". The last time I toured the facility they stated that they could run off generators indefinately - short of a major disruption in fuel provisions on the island. It was pretty funny, local people were calling the mainland to have them check Hawaiian new sites (hosted locally) for updates on the situation.
I hate the way WoW only has one body shape per race/gender. All of the males are over muscled. I suppose that's fine for a warrior but why should a mage have biceps like Ahnold? The same goes for rogues, you can't make a slender male thief.
And speaking of sequels, Heretic II's multiplayer was a blast as well. They had some really inventive weapons and power ups. I loved the giant bouncing spiked balls and the acid rain clouds. Turning enemies into chickens was great fun and occasionally they turned into a giant chicken and stepped on you. Whacking players limbs off was also a blast. Nothing like seeing someone running crazily with blood spurting out where their arms used to be.
I had a friend who took a boot to the head at a concert (in the "pit") and had all kinds of speech problems. Stuttering, inability to pronounce words properly etc. After about a year the problem mostly fixed itself.
I was thinking that most MMOs are holding out until after Blizzard to releases the expanansion. There hasn't been a decent MMO released all year. Most of what I've seen are conversions of bad Korean MMOs (Hero Online, Ares, Archlord, RF Online etc.). I'm beta testing 9 Dragons right now, but it too is a grind fest although a cut above some of the others. I have half a mind to go back to EQ2 when the expansion launches in November.
I know iTunes tells you to back it up, but I really wonder about the reason why you can't re-download. Services like Direct2Drive let you re-download a multi gigabyte game if you lose it.
No I wasn't. It's the same with any GUI that lets you put stuff on the desktop. Of course this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the user likes to work that way it's fine. I myself have all the icons for my most used applications in the middle of my desktop.
Yeah I was going to say - after a period of usage most of my OSX users at work end up with cluttered desktops and overflowing docks. A default install of Windows XP has almost no icons on the desktop either. It's just the bundleware most PCs ship with that cruds it up.
Half a gig is enough to "run a machine on". Same as with Windows XP. However, for most users on either platform 1GB is the sweet spot in terms of overall system speed particularly if you have a few memory hungry applications you like to run (i.e. games or some graphics work). For high end applications (video, audio, 3D modelling etc.) more than 1GB is great. For my work 1GB is pretty good but 2GB gives me enough elbow room that I rarely hit swap.
The type of dongle was made by a copy protection company that sold it to various manufacturers. There were some hacked versions (essentially software that intercepted the calls to the device). The encryption used was configurable on the device and tied to the software application. Version upgrades to the application sometimes required either reconfiguration of the dongle or a new dongle. The only hacks I saw were for specific applications that used the dongle and the application we used was too niche to have one made for it. I'm sure someone with more "leet" skills could have hacked it. The beauty of it is that in the niche there were two software companies with comparable products. BOTH of them used stupid dongle schemes. We had a service contract with the company, but get this when we had problems with the dongle after a software upgrade we got charged over $200 for the support call! When it was time to move to the USB dongle they wanted us to send our old dongle out before they would ship the new one! This for a production system in use every day. Eventually we had to have our printing company provide us with a spare dongle (they could justify the cost to have an extra license - well over $10,000) while we shipped ours back. In the end we were so pissed off that we started to look for a way to get around using the software. At the time we were switching to OS X for the prepress department and developed a workflow that used OS X's internal PDF rendering component to rasterize the files. So we dumped the old software and never looked back. Treat your customers like crooks long enough and they'll cease doing business with you. The next time I see a software package requiring a hardware dongle of any sort, believe me I'll look for an alternate option.
It's not really that odd. Since the term PC is no longer generic but in most people's minds represents Windows PCs the best marketing option for Apple it to differniate themselves from that term. Apple doesn't want people to say they make PCs because that would bring the typical negative associations (viruses, spyware, crashing etc.) to their brand. Apple is doing everything it can to associate the term "Mac" with something that is better than "PC". The current ads are simple and reinforce that positive/negative both in audio and visual cues. Oh look the PC is a fat business dork, the Mac is a cool young guy. The Mac guy gets to hang out with hot Japanese chicks, oh look the PC hangs out with an ugly transvestite, the Mac is healthy but the PC get's sick etc. Basic strong symbols.
Uh, he goes to scifi.com and clicks on all their ad banners for 20 minutes a week.
Seriously though, the webisodes were free to view online. I think getting a torrent of them serves the same promotional purpose. IMO the best way to watch the 10 that were released is as the single recut episode that combines them all.
Considering that for the majority of the population PC has become synonymous with "computer running Windows" - to the point that Apple in their own TV ads uses the terms to mean exactly THAT ("I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC") - I'm not sure how I would consider this effective application.
"My current Gigabyte motherboard came with a boatload of USB ports and some 1394 ports too, but several of them had to be connected using one of those cables attached to a PCI slot, wasting one of my open PCI slots in the case."
Most modern PC cases have connectors for additional ports on the front or side of the case. While my motherboard has 4 USB, Firewire, 2 ethernet, ESATA plus the usual audio and legacy ports, I also have connectors on the side of my case for 2 more USB, Firewire and headphone/mic. Internal USB connectors are nice for driving 3.5" bay flash card readers as well.
What Apple did was drive USB into the mainstream. No, they weren't the first ones, but by dropping all the legacy support and going USB-only, they signaled a change, which has yet to be completed on the PC side (most PCs still come with COM and PARALLEL ports.. God help us all).
Sometimes you need those ports. We used to use high end RIP (raster image processing) server software that required the use of a parallel port dongle. We got bit by the no legacy port problem when upgrading to a new server. That new server sat unused for over 6 months until the company released a USB dongle. And yes we tried adding in parallel port card, but the damn dongle required an onboard port.
We're a mixed shop with employees using both Macs and Dells (Optiplex and Latitude). Here's my experience - we've brought in 4 Mac laptops over the last year. 3 MacBook Pros and a MacBook. We have had:
1 MacBook Pro needing motherboard replacement 1 MacBook Pro dies the day after it was received 1 MacBook internal wiring melted next to heatsink causing heat monitor to trigger shutdown
The 2 MacBook Pro's had to be mailed out for repair. This took two weeks (both have Applecare btw) to get the computers back.
The Macbook was able to be repaired at the local Apple Store. Of course to find this out, we had to book a time to meet with a "genius" and take the thing down to the store for evaluation.
We've purchased 7 Dell Latitudes in past year. We have had exactly zero failures. If we did have a failure, we have a support plan which means a tech will show up onsite and fix it. We pay for next day coverage on the laptops although you can get 4 hour if you want. When is Apple going to offer a proper corporate service option? I don't want priority for booking meetings with geniuses. I want a real service plan that means I don't have a computer I paid $2000 down for two weeks. We have been deploying more Macs in the office and I am a supporter of OSX but I hate the fact that I need to have a higher ratio of spare Macs on the side than PCs because I may need to wait two weeks before I can get one fixed.
One early use of the term "personal computer" appeared in a November 3, 1962 New York Times article reporting John W. Mauchly's vision of future computing as detailed at a recent meeting of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers. Mauchly stated, "There is no reason to suppose the average boy or girl cannot be master of a personal computer."
The term is much older than Apple. What Apple did is popularize it. It became synonymous with IBM compatibles because of the name of the original IBM PC (PC for short).
"So.... if China tries to establish a moon base... we'll attack it?"
I don't think you can make a moon base without someone noticing before it becomes a fully operational battle station of death. It does make you wonder about the motivation behind Bush's push for another moonshot. Maybe someone in the administration has read Heinlein's "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" recently?
I think the incident also underscores that USB devices have become the "stealth" vector for virus infection. Control over USB device insertion is a lot more uncommon than anti-virus or locked down computers. You're right that the computer wouldn't have needed to be connected to the Internet or to have even ever run Internet Explorer. In the old days floppy disks were the key vector for virus infection - I think now that USB devices are so common, we're just seeing the same thing all over again.
Slashdot Mirror
SWG actually had more facial modifiers than CoH/CoV (and yes I've played CoH recently so I'm aware they updated it). One thing that SWG allowed you to do was make player characters that were overweight. I know CoH could do this since they have fat NPCs, but as far as I can tell there is no way to make a fat hero.
An Equinix datacenter hosts the main metropolitan area exchange here in Honolulu. When we had the earthquake on Oct. 15th Hawaiian Electric took down the power grid on the island to prevent any major damage from occurring. Power was out in most areas until at least the evening. Equinix (and everyone hosted there) did not go down during the outage. I know they run a combination of high end UPS systems and diesal generators allowing the data center to run "off the grid". The last time I toured the facility they stated that they could run off generators indefinately - short of a major disruption in fuel provisions on the island.
It was pretty funny, local people were calling the mainland to have them check Hawaiian new sites (hosted locally) for updates on the situation.
I hate the way WoW only has one body shape per race/gender. All of the males are over muscled. I suppose that's fine for a warrior but why should a mage have biceps like Ahnold? The same goes for rogues, you can't make a slender male thief.
And speaking of sequels, Heretic II's multiplayer was a blast as well. They had some really inventive weapons and power ups. I loved the giant bouncing spiked balls and the acid rain clouds. Turning enemies into chickens was great fun and occasionally they turned into a giant chicken and stepped on you.
Whacking players limbs off was also a blast. Nothing like seeing someone running crazily with blood spurting out where their arms used to be.
I had a friend who took a boot to the head at a concert (in the "pit") and had all kinds of speech problems. Stuttering, inability to pronounce words properly etc. After about a year the problem mostly fixed itself.
I was thinking that most MMOs are holding out until after Blizzard to releases the expanansion.
There hasn't been a decent MMO released all year. Most of what I've seen are conversions of bad Korean MMOs (Hero Online, Ares, Archlord, RF Online etc.). I'm beta testing 9 Dragons right now, but it too is a grind fest although a cut above some of the others.
I have half a mind to go back to EQ2 when the expansion launches in November.
Oh hi there! You must be the dick I let die because you bitched about how healers have it easy.
You must have a really small hard drive.
I know iTunes tells you to back it up, but I really wonder about the reason why you can't re-download. Services like Direct2Drive let you re-download a multi gigabyte game if you lose it.
No I wasn't. It's the same with any GUI that lets you put stuff on the desktop. Of course this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the user likes to work that way it's fine. I myself have all the icons for my most used applications in the middle of my desktop.
Yeah I was going to say - after a period of usage most of my OSX users at work end up with cluttered desktops and overflowing docks.
A default install of Windows XP has almost no icons on the desktop either. It's just the bundleware most PCs ship with that cruds it up.
"the only reason the video card has issues is Nvidia's rediculous DX9's implementation in their first batch of cards"
What do you have? A 5000 series card? An upgrade to the AGP version 7900 model that they have would fix that fairly inexepensively.
Half a gig is enough to "run a machine on". Same as with Windows XP. However, for most users on either platform 1GB is the sweet spot in terms of overall system speed particularly if you have a few memory hungry applications you like to run (i.e. games or some graphics work). For high end applications (video, audio, 3D modelling etc.) more than 1GB is great.
For my work 1GB is pretty good but 2GB gives me enough elbow room that I rarely hit swap.
The type of dongle was made by a copy protection company that sold it to various manufacturers. There were some hacked versions (essentially software that intercepted the calls to the device). The encryption used was configurable on the device and tied to the software application. Version upgrades to the application sometimes required either reconfiguration of the dongle or a new dongle. The only hacks I saw were for specific applications that used the dongle and the application we used was too niche to have one made for it. I'm sure someone with more "leet" skills could have hacked it.
The beauty of it is that in the niche there were two software companies with comparable products. BOTH of them used stupid dongle schemes. We had a service contract with the company, but get this when we had problems with the dongle after a software upgrade we got charged over $200 for the support call!
When it was time to move to the USB dongle they wanted us to send our old dongle out before they would ship the new one! This for a production system in use every day. Eventually we had to have our printing company provide us with a spare dongle (they could justify the cost to have an extra license - well over $10,000) while we shipped ours back.
In the end we were so pissed off that we started to look for a way to get around using the software. At the time we were switching to OS X for the prepress department and developed a workflow that used OS X's internal PDF rendering component to rasterize the files. So we dumped the old software and never looked back.
Treat your customers like crooks long enough and they'll cease doing business with you. The next time I see a software package requiring a hardware dongle of any sort, believe me I'll look for an alternate option.
It's not really that odd. Since the term PC is no longer generic but in most people's minds represents Windows PCs the best marketing option for Apple it to differniate themselves from that term. Apple doesn't want people to say they make PCs because that would bring the typical negative associations (viruses, spyware, crashing etc.) to their brand. Apple is doing everything it can to associate the term "Mac" with something that is better than "PC". The current ads are simple and reinforce that positive/negative both in audio and visual cues. Oh look the PC is a fat business dork, the Mac is a cool young guy. The Mac guy gets to hang out with hot Japanese chicks, oh look the PC hangs out with an ugly transvestite, the Mac is healthy but the PC get's sick etc. Basic strong symbols.
Uh, he goes to scifi.com and clicks on all their ad banners for 20 minutes a week.
Seriously though, the webisodes were free to view online. I think getting a torrent of them serves the same promotional purpose. IMO the best way to watch the 10 that were released is as the single recut episode that combines them all.
Considering that for the majority of the population PC has become synonymous with "computer running Windows" - to the point that Apple in their own TV ads uses the terms to mean exactly THAT ("I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC") - I'm not sure how I would consider this effective application.
"My current Gigabyte motherboard came with a boatload of USB ports and some 1394 ports too, but several of them had to be connected using one of those cables attached to a PCI slot, wasting one of my open PCI slots in the case."
Most modern PC cases have connectors for additional ports on the front or side of the case. While my motherboard has 4 USB, Firewire, 2 ethernet, ESATA plus the usual audio and legacy ports, I also have connectors on the side of my case for 2 more USB, Firewire and headphone/mic. Internal USB connectors are nice for driving 3.5" bay flash card readers as well.
What Apple did was drive USB into the mainstream. No, they weren't the first ones, but by dropping all the legacy support and going USB-only, they signaled a change, which has yet to be completed on the PC side (most PCs still come with COM and PARALLEL ports.. God help us all).
Sometimes you need those ports. We used to use high end RIP (raster image processing) server software that required the use of a parallel port dongle. We got bit by the no legacy port problem when upgrading to a new server. That new server sat unused for over 6 months until the company released a USB dongle. And yes we tried adding in parallel port card, but the damn dongle required an onboard port.
We're a mixed shop with employees using both Macs and Dells (Optiplex and Latitude). Here's my experience - we've brought in 4 Mac laptops over the last year. 3 MacBook Pros and a MacBook. We have had:
1 MacBook Pro needing motherboard replacement
1 MacBook Pro dies the day after it was received
1 MacBook internal wiring melted next to heatsink causing heat monitor to trigger shutdown
The 2 MacBook Pro's had to be mailed out for repair. This took two weeks (both have Applecare btw) to get the computers back.
The Macbook was able to be repaired at the local Apple Store. Of course to find this out, we had to book a time to meet with a "genius" and take the thing down to the store for evaluation.
We've purchased 7 Dell Latitudes in past year. We have had exactly zero failures.
If we did have a failure, we have a support plan which means a tech will show up onsite and fix it. We pay for next day coverage on the laptops although you can get 4 hour if you want.
When is Apple going to offer a proper corporate service option? I don't want priority for booking meetings with geniuses. I want a real service plan that means I don't have a computer I paid $2000 down for two weeks.
We have been deploying more Macs in the office and I am a supporter of OSX but I hate the fact that I need to have a higher ratio of spare Macs on the side than PCs because I may need to wait two weeks before I can get one fixed.
From Wikipedia:
One early use of the term "personal computer" appeared in a November 3, 1962 New York Times article reporting John W. Mauchly's vision of future computing as detailed at a recent meeting of the American Institute of Industrial Engineers. Mauchly stated, "There is no reason to suppose the average boy or girl cannot be master of a personal computer."
The term is much older than Apple. What Apple did is popularize it. It became synonymous with IBM compatibles because of the name of the original IBM PC (PC for short).
"So .... if China tries to establish a moon base ... we'll attack it?"
I don't think you can make a moon base without someone noticing before it becomes a fully operational battle station of death.
It does make you wonder about the motivation behind Bush's push for another moonshot. Maybe someone in the administration has read Heinlein's "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" recently?
Just look at the SIZE of that e-penis!
I prefer the word the definition used:
physiological
To differentiate from a strictly psychological addiction. I've experienced both and agree that there is a big difference.
I think the incident also underscores that USB devices have become the "stealth" vector for virus infection. Control over USB device insertion is a lot more uncommon than anti-virus or locked down computers.
You're right that the computer wouldn't have needed to be connected to the Internet or to have even ever run Internet Explorer. In the old days floppy disks were the key vector for virus infection - I think now that USB devices are so common, we're just seeing the same thing all over again.