While I have absolutely no doubt that $300 netbooks die more often, there's no way I'm going to trust the numbers from a company that primarily offers warranty service to computers sold on Ebay.
I strongly suspect that a lot of the Apple, Dell and (especially) Lenovo notebooks they're servicing are several years old and are probably used or lease return models to begin with.
As with many other sites that have user-written reviews, most people offering a review are not qualified to do so. Editorial reviews should be held to the same smell test as is frequently given to Ziff-Davis and other large publishers; many larger companies are big advertisers.
Antivirus software is a place where it can be very difficult to sort real, effective tools from garbage, and for as much as big security vendors would like you to believe otherwise, the bigger the company, the worse the security product.
I recognized words that have meaning in English, but the person asking the question clearly had no intention or ability to combine those words into any language spoken by human beings.
Microsoft's Open Licenses generally allow for downgrades to previous versions as part of Software Assurance, and for that matter, retail copies of current "Business" products can likewise be downgraded, and even more than that, any white box vendor can still obtain OEM XP Licenses for new systems. That means not buying Dell or HP desktops (though at the moment Dell and Lenovo at least are still offering XP on some configurations), or for a small organization, tempering the desire to buy a new box from Best Buy, but it is by no means impossible to obtain XP.
In my experience I see considerably lower failure rates from Samsung hard disks than any other vendor; around.5% (half of one percent), compared to ~2% to 3% for Hitachi and Seagate units in the three year lifespan of the drives. My sample size is only about 2000 drives total in their current warranty period, but for as long as I've been tracking hard disk reliability over my sample of client systems (roughly 10 years), Samsung has consistently been better than other brands.
My highest rates of failure in the warranty period were with IBM 60GXPs (18%) and original 36GB Western Digital Raptors (33%, high enough that I pulled them all from service after 18 months).
Anyway, the last time Samsung was making consistently bad disks was probably around 1998, when its drives were typically ~5 - 10GB. Nowadays they're very conservative in almost everything they make, but usually have an excellent mix of performance, thermal and auditory characteristics when compared to other drives.
My home storage setup uses four 16-port 3ware controllers (on four different servers) consisting of 14 1TB Samsung F1 + 1 hot spare in a RAID6 configuration (12TB per server). I use rsync to duplicate the data between each pair of servers.
Also, yes, that configuration was horribly expensive, about $3500 per server.
If my contracting work ever comes back to what it was 18 months ago, I'll probably add an LTO4 changer to the mix, which will be another $3500.
Based on my recollection of the original Mechwarrior RPG, the Inner Sphere states controlled between them somewhere between 300 and 400 regiments, each consisting of roughly 100 battlemechs. Add in all the mercenaries, pirates and periphery powers and figure that maybe there might be a total of 50,000 mechs.
That's for the whole of human space in the Battletech Universe of 3025 (the fiction also suggests that Comstar had its Com Guards, which had some vast and uncounted number of mechs).
Going by the game fiction the largest planetary conflicts (Twycross) might have involved 4000 - 5000 Mechs, while a heavily guarded single planet like Tharkad might have 8 regiments acting in defense. Huge hellish battles certainly could happen.
At the same time, a multiple-planet Bandit Kingdom might have been formed by somebody with four mechs and a dropship, outside the general area of organized civilization. If you have giant war machines and the only means of providing things like water and food, you are in charge.
The game also makes clear that some worlds would have no mechs and for that matter only a 19th century technology base, either because of the size of the state vs. the importance of that planet, or because of the feudalist attitudes of that planet's ruler. Or both.
Yes and no. SSDs use less power, but make it a lot easier to keep the CPU fed, and the CPU uses tons of power on its own.
In my case, "normal use" means having 802.11 running. I'm sure I could get more out of what I have but not at the cost of the utility of having that machine to begin with.
Apple notebooks are manufactured by Asus. Don't you think that if there were some kind of significant gain in technology for battey life that it would show up in other Asus-manufactured products?
Here's another idea: Apple lies about battery life just like everyone else.
I get seven to eight hours of normal use on a 14" T61 with the nine cell primary and the ultrabay battery, using an Intel SSD. I really CAN run my system all day off batteries, if I need to, but given the number of cells I'm using, that's something I really expect to be able to do.
I keep a Hewlitt-Packard oscilloscope out in my car that was manufactured sometime in the mid-50s. It still works, but I've only had to use it about three times in my professional life.
Signature characters exist in MMOs to give the developers a basis for content. You can't be a signature character; people playing DCUO won't ever get to be Batman, either.
Any MMO world does have to remain largely static. Changes happen in CoX when new updates are released. I'm fine with that. From a mechanical standpoint I don't see what the developers could do that would allow players to legitimately change the game world.
Still, my level 50s are considered peers of their villainous patrons. They've rid themselves of Recluse's influence as a potential "Destined One." They've saved the world from the Praetorian Earth, prevented the destruction of a Nuclear Power Plant and brought down Rikti Dropships (did you know you can do that?). I feel like my toons have plenty of awesome super hero things.
In terms of both surface area and cubic volume my understanding is that CoX is significantly larger than WoW. Of course, we also move perhaps an order of magnitude faster and experienced players may have four or five ways to teleport between locations without even having to make use of the built-in transportation systems.
2. It does not particularly respect the source material. Champions as a pen and paper franchise is at least 20 years old, but it was essentially pasted on the CO game engine.
3. It's being run by Jack "Statesman" Emmert. I've met the guy. He's a comic book fan. But he has a particular idea of fun, and anything that does not match his vision isn't going to be part of the game. A lot of the issues that CoX had in the past stem from some awful decisions that Mr. Emmert made, and CoX has become a much, much better game since he left. I don't know of any long-time CoX players who are willing to say they are fans of his work at this point. It's only a matter of time before CO players realize the same thing.
While I'm at it, DCUO looks like it's going to have some of the same problems. It's more of an arcade game that uses console controls than what I would think of as a role playing game. I'd also argue that being based on DC Comics' source material isn't going to do it any favors, either, but that's largely because I don't like DC Comics.
I actually enjoy the low-level game more than the level 40 - 50. I like the progression, and feeling like I've become a more powerful and notable hero or villain.
Of course, everyone has a different idea of fun, but I'd rather enjoy the progression again than play loot collector to obtain yet another Luck of the Gambler on a level 50.
Of course, the other side to that is that I've STILL never gone through all the missions available from the level 50 contacts, despite the fact that I've been playing both games for as long as they've been out. I do still like playing to see the missions and read the clues, and even after five years that's still fun to me.
But hey, if you like running the same raid for the 40th time while you wait for your special purple gloves to drop, you aren't going to get that experience from CoX.
I don't PvP and generally view PvP as an anti-social behavior, or at least an anti-social player base.
At this point CoX does have crafting and loot, though I'm not terribly interested in it, either.
Mostly what I see about travel in WoW is that it's some kind of punishing time sink. I rather like being about to move so freely about the game world as I can in CoX. Christ. Players in WoW can't even walk faster.
CoX also has the Mission Architect now, which is the ultimate creative outlet for players with such urges, and we have the ability to redesign our avatars, right down to the size, shape and placement of our noses.
That beats fishing any day.
Also, CoX has about 100,000 subscribers and an astonishingly loyal player base; unlike a lot of MMOs, people who subscribe tend to stay subscribed, while Fantasy MMO players frequently switch from whatever game has the most scantily clad elves or whatever.
Weird that I've seen four or five different takes on the Wizard of Oz among MA missions. They've all been pretty good, too. "Oz" must be a code word for someone trying to actually use the storytelling aspect of the MA.
I have the impression that the current developers, people I really, really like for their stewardship of my favorite game, have an idealistic vision of the game as it is, and are not fully in touch with the player base. I like the game as it is envisioned by the developers, and that's the game I generally try to play. I run through the missions, do task forces and don't give all that much thought to metagame stuff like merit/ticket collection.
But I do wish that they would acknowledge that those things ARE the game for some people, and find a way to level out the value of all in-game activities and forms of currency.
The converse of that is that sometimes the high level content would be downright unbalancing to obtain at a lower level. Fire Controllers have a long hike to Fire Imps; Psychic Dominators have an even longer run to Psychic Shockwave, but if those powers were available at a low or modest level, no one would bother to make anything else.
I just tried WoW for the first time this weekend, and I have to say that all the people who are complaining about CoX's lack of content have obviously been smoking something. To date, having started four different classes in five different races in WoW, I've found myself doing nothing but killing animals for their meaty bits, meaty bits they only occasionally drop. I can't imagine anything less exciting than that, and nothing in the game makes me think that it's going to get any better, either. CoX's content is largely textual, found in clues and NPC dialog. Sometimes it's difficult to pay attention to in the heat of the moment, but it's all there, and it's certainly more compelling than wandering around the game world collecting kobald hooves or whatever.
That's only true if you want to play that way. Which not everyone did. And just so we're clear, there have been folks who managed to do 1 - 50 in 10 or 12 hours with regular "farm mission" content made by the developers.
The main problem I have with the Mission Designer is that everyone does the same thing over and over. I like some of the user created missions. Some of them are really well done or very funny, but not everyone I play with wants to read the clues or stop for the enemy speeches.
But then, at some point, it's also nice to have a three-hour path to level 25 or so, to not have to wait for a particular character to mature. For experienced players, I'm fine with not having to slog through 30 or 40 hours of play to get a Dominator or Controller (characters that are hard to solo) to the point where they have enough tools to be effective for high-level play. Some CoX players, like me, have been in the game for every bit of five years, and we know what we're giving up with that trivialized content. If the mechanic exists to make some of those things easily skipped, at least treat us like adults and let us, the players, decide if we want to or not.
I've been against CoX PVP from the start and I really hope the "hardcore" leave the game for Counterstrike or somewhere else where their mating call of "Faggy faggot fag fag" can be adequately responded to. CoX launched without PVP and I felt it was a betrayal to add it after the fact. It brought out a great deal of the worst sort of people.
CoX has genuinely responsive devs; I have a few private messages from Castle and BaBs in my inbox at the forum site. They aren't perfect, but they DO think of the game more as the experience of playing than the ability to quickly level up to 50, which is their specific bias. The game has gotten significantly better since Statesman left, and since I choose not to participate in the farming and "gaming the system" but instead go looking for story content to share with my friends, I'm having the intended experience and I'm not embittered by the things the parent poster is talking about.
I suspect my experience is closer to the average player's than his.
The game is rated IIRC as appropriate for ages 10+ or so (varying by national rating service), and the thrust of Game Master moderation is to keep the whole game as close to that as possible in public areas of the game.
There are already something like 70,000 published Mission Architect modules available. Even a very dedicated user can't play through everything that's been created in just two weeks.
I think, given the volume of user creativity, they're just taking a zero tolerance approach to everything. I actually stopped making the first thing I was planning to make, just because all it would take is one humorless ass to moderate my work as inappropriate.
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While I have absolutely no doubt that $300 netbooks die more often, there's no way I'm going to trust the numbers from a company that primarily offers warranty service to computers sold on Ebay.
I strongly suspect that a lot of the Apple, Dell and (especially) Lenovo notebooks they're servicing are several years old and are probably used or lease return models to begin with.
As with many other sites that have user-written reviews, most people offering a review are not qualified to do so. Editorial reviews should be held to the same smell test as is frequently given to Ziff-Davis and other large publishers; many larger companies are big advertisers.
Antivirus software is a place where it can be very difficult to sort real, effective tools from garbage, and for as much as big security vendors would like you to believe otherwise, the bigger the company, the worse the security product.
I recognized words that have meaning in English, but the person asking the question clearly had no intention or ability to combine those words into any language spoken by human beings.
Descent was a true 3D game. I know it wasn't widely licensed but it did have full 3D maps and complete freedom of movement in its environment.
Microsoft's Open Licenses generally allow for downgrades to previous versions as part of Software Assurance, and for that matter, retail copies of current "Business" products can likewise be downgraded, and even more than that, any white box vendor can still obtain OEM XP Licenses for new systems. That means not buying Dell or HP desktops (though at the moment Dell and Lenovo at least are still offering XP on some configurations), or for a small organization, tempering the desire to buy a new box from Best Buy, but it is by no means impossible to obtain XP.
In my experience I see considerably lower failure rates from Samsung hard disks than any other vendor; around .5% (half of one percent), compared to ~2% to 3% for Hitachi and Seagate units in the three year lifespan of the drives. My sample size is only about 2000 drives total in their current warranty period, but for as long as I've been tracking hard disk reliability over my sample of client systems (roughly 10 years), Samsung has consistently been better than other brands.
My highest rates of failure in the warranty period were with IBM 60GXPs (18%) and original 36GB Western Digital Raptors (33%, high enough that I pulled them all from service after 18 months).
Anyway, the last time Samsung was making consistently bad disks was probably around 1998, when its drives were typically ~5 - 10GB. Nowadays they're very conservative in almost everything they make, but usually have an excellent mix of performance, thermal and auditory characteristics when compared to other drives.
My home storage setup uses four 16-port 3ware controllers (on four different servers) consisting of 14 1TB Samsung F1 + 1 hot spare in a RAID6 configuration (12TB per server). I use rsync to duplicate the data between each pair of servers.
Also, yes, that configuration was horribly expensive, about $3500 per server.
If my contracting work ever comes back to what it was 18 months ago, I'll probably add an LTO4 changer to the mix, which will be another $3500.
Based on my recollection of the original Mechwarrior RPG, the Inner Sphere states controlled between them somewhere between 300 and 400 regiments, each consisting of roughly 100 battlemechs. Add in all the mercenaries, pirates and periphery powers and figure that maybe there might be a total of 50,000 mechs.
That's for the whole of human space in the Battletech Universe of 3025 (the fiction also suggests that Comstar had its Com Guards, which had some vast and uncounted number of mechs).
Going by the game fiction the largest planetary conflicts (Twycross) might have involved 4000 - 5000 Mechs, while a heavily guarded single planet like Tharkad might have 8 regiments acting in defense. Huge hellish battles certainly could happen.
At the same time, a multiple-planet Bandit Kingdom might have been formed by somebody with four mechs and a dropship, outside the general area of organized civilization. If you have giant war machines and the only means of providing things like water and food, you are in charge.
The game also makes clear that some worlds would have no mechs and for that matter only a 19th century technology base, either because of the size of the state vs. the importance of that planet, or because of the feudalist attitudes of that planet's ruler. Or both.
Battletech has really awesome source material.
Yes and no. SSDs use less power, but make it a lot easier to keep the CPU fed, and the CPU uses tons of power on its own.
In my case, "normal use" means having 802.11 running. I'm sure I could get more out of what I have but not at the cost of the utility of having that machine to begin with.
Apple notebooks are manufactured by Asus. Don't you think that if there were some kind of significant gain in technology for battey life that it would show up in other Asus-manufactured products?
Here's another idea: Apple lies about battery life just like everyone else.
Really, now, which idea is more likely?
I get seven to eight hours of normal use on a 14" T61 with the nine cell primary and the ultrabay battery, using an Intel SSD. I really CAN run my system all day off batteries, if I need to, but given the number of cells I'm using, that's something I really expect to be able to do.
That was kind of my point.
I've moved it from car to car. It's been in auto accidents.
The damned thing still works.
I don't have a garage to keep it in, which is why it stays in the car.
I keep a Hewlitt-Packard oscilloscope out in my car that was manufactured sometime in the mid-50s.
It still works, but I've only had to use it about three times in my professional life.
Tyan and Supermicro server boards, if nothing else.
Signature characters exist in MMOs to give the developers a basis for content. You can't be a signature character; people playing DCUO won't ever get to be Batman, either.
Any MMO world does have to remain largely static. Changes happen in CoX when new updates are released. I'm fine with that. From a mechanical standpoint I don't see what the developers could do that would allow players to legitimately change the game world.
Still, my level 50s are considered peers of their villainous patrons. They've rid themselves of Recluse's influence as a potential "Destined One." They've saved the world from the Praetorian Earth, prevented the destruction of a Nuclear Power Plant and brought down Rikti Dropships (did you know you can do that?). I feel like my toons have plenty of awesome super hero things.
In terms of both surface area and cubic volume my understanding is that CoX is significantly larger than WoW. Of course, we also move perhaps an order of magnitude faster and experienced players may have four or five ways to teleport between locations without even having to make use of the built-in transportation systems.
I don't think that's a bad thing.
CO is maddening for several reasons:
1. It's dumbed down for console play. Ugh.
2. It does not particularly respect the source material. Champions as a pen and paper franchise is at least 20 years old, but it was essentially pasted on the CO game engine.
3. It's being run by Jack "Statesman" Emmert. I've met the guy. He's a comic book fan. But he has a particular idea of fun, and anything that does not match his vision isn't going to be part of the game. A lot of the issues that CoX had in the past stem from some awful decisions that Mr. Emmert made, and CoX has become a much, much better game since he left. I don't know of any long-time CoX players who are willing to say they are fans of his work at this point. It's only a matter of time before CO players realize the same thing.
While I'm at it, DCUO looks like it's going to have some of the same problems. It's more of an arcade game that uses console controls than what I would think of as a role playing game. I'd also argue that being based on DC Comics' source material isn't going to do it any favors, either, but that's largely because I don't like DC Comics.
I actually enjoy the low-level game more than the level 40 - 50. I like the progression, and feeling like I've become a more powerful and notable hero or villain.
Of course, everyone has a different idea of fun, but I'd rather enjoy the progression again than play loot collector to obtain yet another Luck of the Gambler on a level 50.
Of course, the other side to that is that I've STILL never gone through all the missions available from the level 50 contacts, despite the fact that I've been playing both games for as long as they've been out. I do still like playing to see the missions and read the clues, and even after five years that's still fun to me.
But hey, if you like running the same raid for the 40th time while you wait for your special purple gloves to drop, you aren't going to get that experience from CoX.
I don't PvP and generally view PvP as an anti-social behavior, or at least an anti-social player base.
At this point CoX does have crafting and loot, though I'm not terribly interested in it, either.
Mostly what I see about travel in WoW is that it's some kind of punishing time sink. I rather like being about to move so freely about the game world as I can in CoX. Christ. Players in WoW can't even walk faster.
CoX also has the Mission Architect now, which is the ultimate creative outlet for players with such urges, and we have the ability to redesign our avatars, right down to the size, shape and placement of our noses.
That beats fishing any day.
Also, CoX has about 100,000 subscribers and an astonishingly loyal player base; unlike a lot of MMOs, people who subscribe tend to stay subscribed, while Fantasy MMO players frequently switch from whatever game has the most scantily clad elves or whatever.
Weird that I've seen four or five different takes on the Wizard of Oz among MA missions. They've all been pretty good, too. "Oz" must be a code word for someone trying to actually use the storytelling aspect of the MA.
Having seen what a 2 billion infamy build is capable of, I'm not sure how much more "epic" the game could be.
I have the impression that the current developers, people I really, really like for their stewardship of my favorite game, have an idealistic vision of the game as it is, and are not fully in touch with the player base. I like the game as it is envisioned by the developers, and that's the game I generally try to play. I run through the missions, do task forces and don't give all that much thought to metagame stuff like merit/ticket collection.
But I do wish that they would acknowledge that those things ARE the game for some people, and find a way to level out the value of all in-game activities and forms of currency.
The converse of that is that sometimes the high level content would be downright unbalancing to obtain at a lower level. Fire Controllers have a long hike to Fire Imps; Psychic Dominators have an even longer run to Psychic Shockwave, but if those powers were available at a low or modest level, no one would bother to make anything else.
I just tried WoW for the first time this weekend, and I have to say that all the people who are complaining about CoX's lack of content have obviously been smoking something. To date, having started four different classes in five different races in WoW, I've found myself doing nothing but killing animals for their meaty bits, meaty bits they only occasionally drop. I can't imagine anything less exciting than that, and nothing in the game makes me think that it's going to get any better, either. CoX's content is largely textual, found in clues and NPC dialog. Sometimes it's difficult to pay attention to in the heat of the moment, but it's all there, and it's certainly more compelling than wandering around the game world collecting kobald hooves or whatever.
That's only true if you want to play that way. Which not everyone did. And just so we're clear, there have been folks who managed to do 1 - 50 in 10 or 12 hours with regular "farm mission" content made by the developers.
The main problem I have with the Mission Designer is that everyone does the same thing over and over. I like some of the user created missions. Some of them are really well done or very funny, but not everyone I play with wants to read the clues or stop for the enemy speeches.
But then, at some point, it's also nice to have a three-hour path to level 25 or so, to not have to wait for a particular character to mature. For experienced players, I'm fine with not having to slog through 30 or 40 hours of play to get a Dominator or Controller (characters that are hard to solo) to the point where they have enough tools to be effective for high-level play. Some CoX players, like me, have been in the game for every bit of five years, and we know what we're giving up with that trivialized content. If the mechanic exists to make some of those things easily skipped, at least treat us like adults and let us, the players, decide if we want to or not.
She didn't look like it, but Fawkes was a lady super mutant.
I've been against CoX PVP from the start and I really hope the "hardcore" leave the game for Counterstrike or somewhere else where their mating call of "Faggy faggot fag fag" can be adequately responded to. CoX launched without PVP and I felt it was a betrayal to add it after the fact. It brought out a great deal of the worst sort of people.
CoX has genuinely responsive devs; I have a few private messages from Castle and BaBs in my inbox at the forum site. They aren't perfect, but they DO think of the game more as the experience of playing than the ability to quickly level up to 50, which is their specific bias. The game has gotten significantly better since Statesman left, and since I choose not to participate in the farming and "gaming the system" but instead go looking for story content to share with my friends, I'm having the intended experience and I'm not embittered by the things the parent poster is talking about.
I suspect my experience is closer to the average player's than his.
The game is rated IIRC as appropriate for ages 10+ or so (varying by national rating service), and the thrust of Game Master moderation is to keep the whole game as close to that as possible in public areas of the game.
There are already something like 70,000 published Mission Architect modules available. Even a very dedicated user can't play through everything that's been created in just two weeks.
I think, given the volume of user creativity, they're just taking a zero tolerance approach to everything. I actually stopped making the first thing I was planning to make, just because all it would take is one humorless ass to moderate my work as inappropriate.