Now all I need is a new copy of the "The Cast of Friends Introduce Us to Windows 95" video... No, seriously.
I didn't know who those people were in 1995. I only vaguely have an idea today. But I saw that video in 1995 and it was fucking hysterical, even setting aside the celebrity kitsch.
Sadly, part of the original appeal of the game for me was the lack of PvP and loot. I want to be "Super", and I felt I had that playing against just the environment.
PvP was a restructuring of the original, fun game. It brought in new and more obnoxious players, and a whole bunch of "improvements" were added to balance PvP play that made the non-PvP game less fun.
The funny thing is, I don't know anyone who plays or is even interested in the PvP aspect of the game. Walk around getting info on the other characters around you, and you'll find scores of folks with 0-0 W/L records in the arena before you find someone who has PvP'd. It's not popular. Honestly, given the game mechanics, I can't see it as anything other than Rock-Paper-Scissors (You're an unhittable Super-Reflexes Scrapper? Well I'll go get my defense-debuffing Radiation Defender!)
Cov/Bases also added Loot. Fortunately, it's only useful in a super-group, rather than for an individual, but I have a feeling that there will be complaints starting any day now about how much and how often it drops. I'm sure there will be people farming for it.
CoV is a fun place right now. I'll give it that. There's more "meat" to the missions and story arcs, and with the new classes I'm less aware of how fucked up the game is for high-level types (I can't bear to log into CoH right now. I have 20 or so toons that have been destroyed by I5 and I6 changes, and I'd have to respec any of them I might choose to play with). The art is nicer. Less bright and clean. I am annoyed that no one bothered to write full descriptions for each different villain; members of a faction all seem to have common Info screens now. Boo to that.
I think you need to look at your distributor's shipping methods if you're having those kinds of issues with Samsung. I'll grant that Samsung 6 and 8GB models were less than stellar (if you remember back that far), but the 20GB+ models have been standouts for reliability.
It's actually about 8TB of real space, not counting spares and redundant drives.
I sorta-kinda built a system for managing a staggering amount of multimedia content + limited metadata, around the idea of having a great deal of disk space and lo and behold, I keep adding more.
I've got a pretty big library of stuff I've vidcapped - VHS movies that won't ever be made into DVDS, a lot of porn (it's fair to say that I have a fairly expansive definition of "a lot"), pictures I've snagged from online... It's all for my own amusement. I like collecting data. And I'd like to add that I managed to accumuluate well over half that amount of data before I got a broadband internet connection.
400GB drives+ are a blessing; now I can keep more of my collection of stuff online at any one time.
SR makes a habit of forgetting about the other commodity drive manufacturer, Samsung. How much do they forget? Well, at one point at least, an Australian forum member (Tannin, if you know SR's forums) had to send them a drive to review because they couldn't or wouldn't make the effort to get one themselves. Also interesting is that Samsung has no relationship with SR as far as advertising.
Which is a goddamned shame, because they really are genuinely good drives (far better than the for-shit products Maxtor and WD are shoveling out these days), ones I buy in preference to any other vendor's. They've been extremely reliable for me and have a nice mix of performance characteristics.
I'm not a big fan of their self-reporting reliability database, and I can't hazard to guess why they're testing "desktop" performance in their Enterprise-I/O Xeon system... nor why they can't do any testing on *nix. But those are all are reasons why I have become frustrated with SR over the last few years.
I'm just one person. My opinions aren't going to mean shit to anyone here. But then, I'm one guy with around 12TB worth of Hitachi and Samsung drives keeping his apartment warm, so it's not like I don't have a little bit of experience with commodity hard disks.
I refuse to play a single-player game that requires regular connection to the internet. I should be given the choice to download patches or anything else that requires online activity. I spent a very long time (around 10 years) on a 9600bps connection to the internet. Just because I live someplace where I have a faster connection today doesn't mean that in the future I wouldn't have that problem again, and requiring an internet connection to either download the program or authenticate the DVD for a single player game is utterly moronic.
Steam uses assloads of memory and it tries to be a resident application/chat client/game browser thing. Fuck that! I just want to play a SINGLE PLAYER game. I want to run a command and play a game. I don't want a bunch of extra daemons/services/whatever bullshit on my machine and certainly don't want a major extension to my operating system installed. That's what steam looks like to me. Who knows what the fuck it's doing?
I enjoyed the first Half Life because there was a decent, compelling story that went along with it. I'd like to find that Half Life 2 is, also, but unless they release a non-fucked version, I'm never going to find out.
I just recently upgraded my "toy" PC. I've been looking for something fun to do with it ever since.
HalfLife 2 has totally stupid Steam. Doom3 was awesome for about two minutes, then boring. Every other FPS is a clone of UT or whichever of the indistinguishable WWII shooters came first.... or its a console port, and therefore both evil AND stupid.
But Serious Sam is different. It's the proper Doom mentality of "No way I'm beating all six dozen of those guys all at once" and then doing it anyway, or even better, "No way I'm beating all 12 of those bosses all at once". I like the utterly massive scale (bad guys that're 20 or 30 times taller than you are, etc). I like the ridiculous weapons, although I wish the escalation continued past the point it does (Rise of the Triad was great in that regard! You could use "The Hand of God" as a weapon. Sam needs the hand of God). I like the attitude of corny jokes (shades of good ol' MDK).
The cutscenes are skippable, if you aren't into 'em.
Personally, I like the game. I haven't finished it yet, but it's entertaining in a way that realistic shooters like, say, Farcry, just aren't. The weapons are kind of weak, but it's still fun to use them all. I'm a little disappointed that their sound engine isn't terribly immersive, but that's hardly a big deal in the context of this particular game. Oh, and I miss the gravity changes. Those were cool.
Personally, I'm a slaker
on
Slacker or Sick
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Personally, I'm a slaker. But I come by that naturally. My father, and his father, and his father, were all slakers. It is the way of our people.
I did a bathroom PC once. I set up a 15" LCD, covered with a clear plastic dust shield, on a swingarm and used an industrial membrane keyboard - I could use the display either in the bathtub (sorta) or on the john. I set machine (a Compaq thin client, actually) for it a spare vanity I never use since I am the kind of pathetic geek who would never have a second person using my bathroom. I put a plastic seal on the vanity doors to keep moisture out, just in case.
Mostly I used that machine so I could sit in the tub and read.CBR formatted comic books.:D
Personally, I consider the time I spent screwing around perfecting my PVR as a replacement for the time I could spend with non-existant females who want to hang out with me.
It's slightly less pathetic than just having an imaginary girlfriend.
Clearly, you never saw the trailer to "Stealth", 'cause if you had, you'd never say something like what you said, and more than that, I think you'd probably want your 20 IQ points back.
Actually, there are a few porn titles shipping now that have HD support. Tera Patrick's beautifully filmed "Island Fever 3" includes both a standard DVD and an HDDVD in the package.
Personally I roll my eyes when I find a porn disc with 5.1 AC3, but in this case, a large part of the appeal is the tropical setting - it's flat-out gorgeous. It's no joke that you can see imperfections on the skin of the performers, but you can also identify the texture of their clothes. From a porn standpoint, it's the kind of movie you can watch with a girlfriend. Not really raunchy at all (for a porno movie, anyway), and makes a really nice change of pace from the same four things they show over and over on DiscoveryHD.
Sandman - the regular one - got his powers due by being irradiated while he was resting on a beach, giving him the power to turn his body into sand. He's basically a standard Spiderman thug/villian, other than that. He has tried to go straight in the past.
The Ultimate Universe version has a less silly origin as a failed attempt at making a super soldier by OsCorp. That version seems more dangerous as well.
I'd just like to add that HEC power supplies are also surprisingly quiet and generally very reasonably priced. Sparkle PSUs are loud SOBs, but the parent here is absolutely right: Sparkle and HEC units are generally so reliable that they verge on boring. Which is very good thing to say about power supplies.
People don't *need* boats or brand new cars, yet some people have those, too.
I have a great deal of original content, mostly things that I have video-captured myself over the last 10 years or so. I actually had about 4TB of material on my hard disks before I got broadband (and another five or six on CDs or DVDs), which was only a couple years ago for me.
It's a horrible pain in the ass to keep anything archived on DVD. 4GB just isn't very much space these days. They take far too long to make (around 4 minutes, even at 16x, which is too short to really be able to do anything else, and too long to sit and watch over and over and over) and media quality can be a real gamble, even with top-tier stuff. Plus, that leads to problems in organizing hundreds of DVDs, which is its own yucky problem.
I don't think you want to know, but...
on
Data Storage For Home?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'm a believer in segregating storage from the machines I'm likely to use/want to reload etc. And I've spent thousands of dollars on my home network and attendant PCs, to solve the problems that the original poster will only have if he manages to actually get enough storage for his needs.
Presently I have four identical storage servers, with the following characteristics: Athlon64/3000, 1GB RAM, Gigabyte K8VM800 motherboards, 4 Hitachi 7k250s (RAID5 on 3ware ), 2 Hitachi 7k400s (soft RAID0, stores a daily snapshot of the RAID5, which is the data that is actually shared), 1 Samsung SP1614 Boot/OS drive, a 3Ware 8506-4LP, Intel Gbit NICs.
These machines run a series of scripts that collect and copy (pictures or MP3s) or move (video) whatever I happened to have dropped on my various workstations (each have between 300GB and ~1.7TB) to appropriate filesystems on the various servers (one for porn, one for ripped DVDs and TV shows, one for music, one for pictures); those filesystems are then exported via NFS to another Linux machine where the whole mess is presented back to all my machines as a single file system.
Getting enough storage is simply a matter of applying money. 250GB drives are quite reasonable nowadays and 160GB drives are downright cheap, but dealing with dinky little disks make getting enough SATA ports problematic. Sub-$100 2- and 4-port SATA controllers from the likes of Adaptec, Promise and Highpoint have their own problems. Most don't do online volume management and REALLY only do RAID through a driver, rather than an actual onboard processor. They're fine for storage expansion, a JBOD or RAID0 (note: RAID0 is normally a VERY stupid thing to do, since most people aren't doing STR-intensive things with their PCs and the chance of losing data is substantially higher than for any single disk), but as with everything else, you get what you pay for, and ports on a proper controller are probably worth more than the disks you're attaching to them. RAID5 is also kind of a bad deal for write-intensive data - lots of little files that get updated a lot, while I'm at it. Do RAID1 or RAID10, (or maybe RAID3 if you can find a controller that supports it) for data you care about. Spend money.:)
USB2 and Firewire enclosures are NOT a good solution for adding primary storage most of the time. Generic enclosures frequently have difficulty with larger drives, and often have VERY cheap fans that either fail quickly or detriorate to the point that they sound like a penny in a vaccuum cleaner. Additionally, the performance and CPU utilization of USB2 enclosures both tend to be god-awful. Brand-name enclosures have a few different problems: many use 2.5" disks, which in my experience are rather delicate. Others are not properly cooled, and almost all of them are sealed enclosures. Better to put a drive inside a computer if possible. I tend to think of USB2/Firewire drives drives as backup devices only.
Disk-wise I tend to prefer Hitachi 250 and 400GB models, or Samsung 160s or 200s, and SATA over PATA when possible. The Hitachi 500GB models get too damned hot, and it's the only one that's out (available for purchase) at the moment. Seagate and Maxtor ATA products tend toward tepid performance, and in the case of Maxtor, quality hasn't been good since the Quantum merger in 2001. I will not purchase a Western Digital drive for any reason, but specifically I avoid the geek-favorite Raptor 360GD; I was party to the construction of a small 20-drive SAN using Raptors (client's spec, not my idea) a couple years ago where the drive failure rate was approximately one drive every 33 days.
Slashdot Mirror
Now all I need is a new copy of the "The Cast of Friends Introduce Us to Windows 95" video...
No, seriously.
I didn't know who those people were in 1995. I only vaguely have an idea today. But I saw that video in 1995 and it was fucking hysterical, even setting aside the celebrity kitsch.
City of Heroes runs fine under WINE. Linux users can play that way.
Personally, I've never enjoyed a Blizzard game. WoW looks like a slightly cartoony version of EQ, and hey, remember Bnetd?
Sadly, part of the original appeal of the game for me was the lack of PvP and loot. I want to be "Super", and I felt I had that playing against just the environment.
PvP was a restructuring of the original, fun game. It brought in new and more obnoxious players, and a whole bunch of "improvements" were added to balance PvP play that made the non-PvP game less fun.
The funny thing is, I don't know anyone who plays or is even interested in the PvP aspect of the game. Walk around getting info on the other characters around you, and you'll find scores of folks with 0-0 W/L records in the arena before you find someone who has PvP'd. It's not popular. Honestly, given the game mechanics, I can't see it as anything other than Rock-Paper-Scissors (You're an unhittable Super-Reflexes Scrapper? Well I'll go get my defense-debuffing Radiation Defender!)
Cov/Bases also added Loot. Fortunately, it's only useful in a super-group, rather than for an individual, but I have a feeling that there will be complaints starting any day now about how much and how often it drops. I'm sure there will be people farming for it.
CoV is a fun place right now. I'll give it that. There's more "meat" to the missions and story arcs, and with the new classes I'm less aware of how fucked up the game is for high-level types (I can't bear to log into CoH right now. I have 20 or so toons that have been destroyed by I5 and I6 changes, and I'd have to respec any of them I might choose to play with). The art is nicer. Less bright and clean.
I am annoyed that no one bothered to write full descriptions for each different villain; members of a faction all seem to have common Info screens now. Boo to that.
I think you need to look at your distributor's shipping methods if you're having those kinds of issues with Samsung. I'll grant that Samsung 6 and 8GB models were less than stellar (if you remember back that far), but the 20GB+ models have been standouts for reliability.
In 2003 I RMA'd 14 WD drives, which is hilarious, 'cause I only actually owned nine WD drives.
They're OK for you, great. Me? I like my data.
It's actually about 8TB of real space, not counting spares and redundant drives.
I sorta-kinda built a system for managing a staggering amount of multimedia content + limited metadata, around the idea of having a great deal of disk space and lo and behold, I keep adding more.
I've got a pretty big library of stuff I've vidcapped - VHS movies that won't ever be made into DVDS, a lot of porn (it's fair to say that I have a fairly expansive definition of "a lot"), pictures I've snagged from online... It's all for my own amusement. I like collecting data. And I'd like to add that I managed to accumuluate well over half that amount of data before I got a broadband internet connection.
400GB drives+ are a blessing; now I can keep more of my collection of stuff online at any one time.
SR makes a habit of forgetting about the other commodity drive manufacturer, Samsung. How much do they forget? Well, at one point at least, an Australian forum member (Tannin, if you know SR's forums) had to send them a drive to review because they couldn't or wouldn't make the effort to get one themselves. Also interesting is that Samsung has no relationship with SR as far as advertising.
Which is a goddamned shame, because they really are genuinely good drives (far better than the for-shit products Maxtor and WD are shoveling out these days), ones I buy in preference to any other vendor's. They've been extremely reliable for me and have a nice mix of performance characteristics.
I'm not a big fan of their self-reporting reliability database, and I can't hazard to guess why they're testing "desktop" performance in their Enterprise-I/O Xeon system... nor why they can't do any testing on *nix. But those are all are reasons why I have become frustrated with SR over the last few years.
I'm just one person. My opinions aren't going to mean shit to anyone here. But then, I'm one guy with around 12TB worth of Hitachi and Samsung drives keeping his apartment warm, so it's not like I don't have a little bit of experience with commodity hard disks.
I refuse to play a single-player game that requires regular connection to the internet. I should be given the choice to download patches or anything else that requires online activity. I spent a very long time (around 10 years) on a 9600bps connection to the internet. Just because I live someplace where I have a faster connection today doesn't mean that in the future I wouldn't have that problem again, and requiring an internet connection to either download the program or authenticate the DVD for a single player game is utterly moronic.
Steam uses assloads of memory and it tries to be a resident application/chat client/game browser thing. Fuck that! I just want to play a SINGLE PLAYER game. I want to run a command and play a game. I don't want a bunch of extra daemons/services/whatever bullshit on my machine and certainly don't want a major extension to my operating system installed. That's what steam looks like to me. Who knows what the fuck it's doing?
I enjoyed the first Half Life because there was a decent, compelling story that went along with it. I'd like to find that Half Life 2 is, also, but unless they release a non-fucked version, I'm never going to find out.
I just recently upgraded my "toy" PC. I've been looking for something fun to do with it ever since.
... or its a console port, and therefore both evil AND stupid.
HalfLife 2 has totally stupid Steam.
Doom3 was awesome for about two minutes, then boring.
Every other FPS is a clone of UT or whichever of the indistinguishable WWII shooters came first.
But Serious Sam is different. It's the proper Doom mentality of "No way I'm beating all six dozen of those guys all at once" and then doing it anyway, or even better, "No way I'm beating all 12 of those bosses all at once". I like the utterly massive scale (bad guys that're 20 or 30 times taller than you are, etc). I like the ridiculous weapons, although I wish the escalation continued past the point it does (Rise of the Triad was great in that regard! You could use "The Hand of God" as a weapon. Sam needs the hand of God). I like the attitude of corny jokes (shades of good ol' MDK).
The cutscenes are skippable, if you aren't into 'em.
Personally, I like the game. I haven't finished it yet, but it's entertaining in a way that realistic shooters like, say, Farcry, just aren't. The weapons are kind of weak, but it's still fun to use them all. I'm a little disappointed that their sound engine isn't terribly immersive, but that's hardly a big deal in the context of this particular game. Oh, and I miss the gravity changes. Those were cool.
Personally, I'm a slaker. But I come by that naturally. My father, and his father, and his father, were all slakers. It is the way of our people.
I did a bathroom PC once. I set up a 15" LCD, covered with a clear plastic dust shield, on a swingarm and used an industrial membrane keyboard - I could use the display either in the bathtub (sorta) or on the john. I set machine (a Compaq thin client, actually) for it a spare vanity I never use since I am the kind of pathetic geek who would never have a second person using my bathroom. I put a plastic seal on the vanity doors to keep moisture out, just in case.
.CBR formatted comic books. :D
Mostly I used that machine so I could sit in the tub and read
...But this guy sounds a lot better, regardless.
OK, actually, it sounds a lot better when it's connected to a Home Theater receiver/amplifier. Whatever. It's a far better way to spend your $100.
Personally, I consider the time I spent screwing around perfecting my PVR as a replacement for the time I could spend with non-existant females who want to hang out with me.
It's slightly less pathetic than just having an imaginary girlfriend.
Clearly, you never saw the trailer to "Stealth", 'cause if you had, you'd never say something like what you said, and more than that, I think you'd probably want your 20 IQ points back.
I defy anyone to watch this fucker five times in a row and still be able to feed and dress themselves.
Fine. I'll seed it and post a link when I get home tonight. :P
Everyone needs HD Porn!
Here's a torrent to a nice 720p .WMV file :D
You may all mod me up or "friend" me now.
Actually, there are a few porn titles shipping now that have HD support. Tera Patrick's beautifully filmed "Island Fever 3" includes both a standard DVD and an HDDVD in the package.
Personally I roll my eyes when I find a porn disc with 5.1 AC3, but in this case, a large part of the appeal is the tropical setting - it's flat-out gorgeous. It's no joke that you can see imperfections on the skin of the performers, but you can also identify the texture of their clothes. From a porn standpoint, it's the kind of movie you can watch with a girlfriend. Not really raunchy at all (for a porno movie, anyway), and makes a really nice change of pace from the same four things they show over and over on DiscoveryHD.
How can Showgirls be bad? No movie with that many boobies and thong-clad women in it can truly be bad!
Hating Showgirls is like hating electricity or modern sanitation!
Sandman - the regular one - got his powers due by being irradiated while he was resting on a beach, giving him the power to turn his body into sand. He's basically a standard Spiderman thug/villian, other than that. He has tried to go straight in the past.
The Ultimate Universe version has a less silly origin as a failed attempt at making a super soldier by OsCorp. That version seems more dangerous as well.
I'd just like to add that HEC power supplies are also surprisingly quiet and generally very reasonably priced. Sparkle PSUs are loud SOBs, but the parent here is absolutely right: Sparkle and HEC units are generally so reliable that they verge on boring. Which is very good thing to say about power supplies.
People don't *need* boats or brand new cars, yet some people have those, too.
I have a great deal of original content, mostly things that I have video-captured myself over the last 10 years or so. I actually had about 4TB of material on my hard disks before I got broadband (and another five or six on CDs or DVDs), which was only a couple years ago for me.
It's a horrible pain in the ass to keep anything archived on DVD. 4GB just isn't very much space these days. They take far too long to make (around 4 minutes, even at 16x, which is too short to really be able to do anything else, and too long to sit and watch over and over and over) and media quality can be a real gamble, even with top-tier stuff. Plus, that leads to problems in organizing hundreds of DVDs, which is its own yucky problem.
I'm a believer in segregating storage from the machines I'm likely to use/want to reload etc.
:)
And I've spent thousands of dollars on my home network and attendant PCs, to solve the problems that the original poster will only have if he manages to actually get enough storage for his needs.
Presently I have four identical storage servers, with the following characteristics:
Athlon64/3000, 1GB RAM, Gigabyte K8VM800 motherboards, 4 Hitachi 7k250s (RAID5 on 3ware ), 2 Hitachi 7k400s (soft RAID0, stores a daily snapshot of the RAID5, which is the data that is actually shared), 1 Samsung SP1614 Boot/OS drive, a 3Ware 8506-4LP, Intel Gbit NICs.
These machines run a series of scripts that collect and copy (pictures or MP3s) or move (video) whatever I happened to have dropped on my various workstations (each have between 300GB and ~1.7TB) to appropriate filesystems on the various servers (one for porn, one for ripped DVDs and TV shows, one for music, one for pictures); those filesystems are then exported via NFS to another Linux machine where the whole mess is presented back to all my machines as a single file system.
Getting enough storage is simply a matter of applying money. 250GB drives are quite reasonable nowadays and 160GB drives are downright cheap, but dealing with dinky little disks make getting enough SATA ports problematic. Sub-$100 2- and 4-port SATA controllers from the likes of Adaptec, Promise and Highpoint have their own problems. Most don't do online volume management and REALLY only do RAID through a driver, rather than an actual onboard processor. They're fine for storage expansion, a JBOD or RAID0 (note: RAID0 is normally a VERY stupid thing to do, since most people aren't doing STR-intensive things with their PCs and the chance of losing data is substantially higher than for any single disk), but as with everything else, you get what you pay for, and ports on a proper controller are probably worth more than the disks you're attaching to them.
RAID5 is also kind of a bad deal for write-intensive data - lots of little files that get updated a lot, while I'm at it. Do RAID1 or RAID10, (or maybe RAID3 if you can find a controller that supports it) for data you care about. Spend money.
USB2 and Firewire enclosures are NOT a good solution for adding primary storage most of the time. Generic enclosures frequently have difficulty with larger drives, and often have VERY cheap fans that either fail quickly or detriorate to the point that they sound like a penny in a vaccuum cleaner. Additionally, the performance and CPU utilization of USB2 enclosures both tend to be god-awful. Brand-name enclosures have a few different problems: many use 2.5" disks, which in my experience are rather delicate. Others are not properly cooled, and almost all of them are sealed enclosures. Better to put a drive inside a computer if possible. I tend to think of USB2/Firewire drives drives as backup devices only.
Disk-wise I tend to prefer Hitachi 250 and 400GB models, or Samsung 160s or 200s, and SATA over PATA when possible. The Hitachi 500GB models get too damned hot, and it's the only one that's out (available for purchase) at the moment. Seagate and Maxtor ATA products tend toward tepid performance, and in the case of Maxtor, quality hasn't been good since the Quantum merger in 2001. I will not purchase a Western Digital drive for any reason, but specifically I avoid the geek-favorite Raptor 360GD; I was party to the construction of a small 20-drive SAN using Raptors (client's spec, not my idea) a couple years ago where the drive failure rate was approximately one drive every 33 days.
Why don't they take that $30M and make a movie people might want to pay money to go see?
IE can be downloaded, if you know how. One way to get all the client install files is to download and use the IE Administrators Kit.
But yeah, I can't pay my power bill unless I use IE, so I know you pain and think it's stupid, too.