I keep hearing people say that A Beautiful Mind was a "best case scenario" for schizophrenia. OK... so he actually seemed to recover from it after YEARS, but he certainly went through hell to get there. I have trouble believing that there aren't many more milder cases of schizophrenia. If you mean that the movie was innacurate, then what did you find innacurate about it (other than the liberty they took with facts about Nash's life)?
I don't see how prior knowledge of "Three Faces of Eve" matters. If a person were truely trying to fake it, they probably would tell you they haven't seen the movie. If they aren't faking it and have seen the movie, it doesn't really matter if they think they have multiple personalities because they saw a movie or because they spontaniously got it on their own. The final result is still a person with multiple personalities...
Well, as most people around here already know, if you past the link into google, and then click on the link google gives, NYTimes will let you in without registering.
According to the article, and FX-51 is the same as an Opteron 148. Looking at newegg, you can see that the Opteron 148 is $404 while the FX-51 is $689. Interestingly, you can see that the FX-51 has a LOT more reviews (and I would assume more sales) so their marketing strategy seems to be working, but I sure would feel cheated to find out I had paid ~300 more than I could have for a product.
Unfortunantly, the masses will prove you wrong. Check out some of the recentNielson ratings. American Idol and Survivor take the top 4,5,6,8, and 11th spots. Not to mention the huge Jerry Springer craze, as well as MTV's real world. I think TV Ratings do a lot to show why a pure democracy would be a catastrophic failure. I rest a lot better at night knowing that only 55% of the population voted in the 2000 election, as I can at least hope most of those not voting were sitting on their couch watching re-runs of Jerry Springer and Real World. It is also a good arguement against making voting any easier than it already is. I think people should be made to go to some trouble to vote, so that those who know nothing about the candidates and really don't care anyway are naturally weeded out.
In reference to your Richard Dawkins quote, I think he fails to realize that what the gardener or the chef believe is simply their "religion", whether or not they call it that. Religion is people's beliefs about the answers to quesitons about the world we live in. The more rational amung us only use religion for the asnwers to questions that science is unable to answer. It doesn't matter if religion was wrong about things in the past, as those were simply beliefs held by certain people at the time and says little about the truth of a current belief. No one has suggested that we stop taking science seriously, despite the embarrassingly large number of times science has offered false answers.
I hear this from a lot of people and, no offense, but they don't know what they are asking for. The only way to have a truely "dynamic plot" in the way you speak of it, is to have a world you are plopped in to in the way that many single player RPGs are done. In that case, there really isn't a plot, you are making it up yourself as you go.
Ever try one of those "choose your own adventure" books? They tended to be about 200 pages long, but the actual story would be at most 10 pages. It was dynamic in the sense that it gave you several different branches to choose from, but it was still static. You would often times come to a branch you had visited in the past. This could be done with games, but, just as it is with the book, the actual game play time to "beat" the game would be much less. With games, it is worse than a book, because as games get more sophisticated, the content becomes more time consuming to produce, and "dynamic" games become somewhat impossible.
But I have failed to adequetly discuss the main problem with dynamic plots. A "dynamic" plot ISN'T a plot. A plot is by definition a narrative... something that is being told, and not influenced. If you are asking for a dynamic plot you are asking for a game without a plot. That's fine if that is a type of game you like, but you shouldn't dismiss plot driven games as restrictive or unimaginative. Think of all the great movies or books you have read. Did you ever feel that you wanted to influence those in anyway? Why should a game be different? Games offer the ability to make player feel a part of the plot more than any other medium, but not necessarily in control of it. In a game with a good plot, the motivation should be finding out what happens next, just as it is when you are reading a good book or watching a good movie. The only problem is that very few games offer anything better than a different version of the same plot that has already been told in a million games already. What's worse, even when game developers actually do manage to make a decent plot, most gamers are so jaded by the 100 past poorly written games they have played that they just skip through the storytelling sections of the game. They are focused on beating the game, and not playing it.
I think it is silly that game developers, and players, have created so much hype about "interactive" and "dynamic" games. There's only a hand full of games that have been able to tell a fresh, interesting plot since the inception of games, and players and developers are basically throwing up their hands and saying, "well lets just not have a plot, and call it dynamic". Games need to figure out how to create and tell stories effectively before they start worrying about taking on ideas that are as man-power intensive as even a simple "choose your own adventure" type book.
Perhaps, but it is soon going to become rather complicated and not as clear cut. What happens when cell phones become digital video cameras, rather than just still picture cameras? What happens when people start wearing devices that record everything they see so they can remember them? What happens when it is medically implanted? I sure hope the MPAA won't be standing there with a drill and a pair of tweezers saying, "Sir, we are going to need to temporarily remove your temoporal lobe implant".
I was reading the history of the laser here and found no mention of your story about a laser patent. The only mention of patent troubles actually had to do with the original inventor NOT recieving a patent. Are you sure your story is accurate? I always thought the reason for the "explosion" of lasers had nothing to do with patents but rather that there were technological developments that made the lasers cheap enough to be used in every day applications.
We create a sort of Noah's ark, a place where we take every plant/animal we like, and enclose it. Then we go about killing off everything on the planet. Once everything is dead, we let everything we like back out on to the planet, and live happily ever after.
Probably because the US is the United States of America. Most names for people from a country are a short version of the country's name with "an" on the end. Lets not try to read arrogance into EVERYthing having to do with the US...
Well, I personally think some people should learn to not take anything modded +5 Funny so seriously. People make fun of stereotypes. That doesn't mean everyone who finds those jokes humorous, or even the people who make them, are "bigots" and are really in any way prejudice. If you ask me, people like yourself are some of the people most sucked in to whatever the "popular opinion", according to them media, is. In the US at least (can't speak for other countries) the "politically correct" explosion is still very strong, where every statement is taken with deathly seriousness and words are twisted into the most devious and evil of meanings possible. I find it ironic that, in a country whom has such strong roots in the ideal of free speech, that a lot of the population's energy is spent worrying about what is and what is not "acceptable" to say, and how to prevent or punish people who continue to say those "unacceptable" things.
Seriously, how about the Sci Fi channel makes one out of "The Number of the Beast". Now THAT would turn some heads! Or perhaps "Time enough for love" where the main character travels back in time to have sex with his own mother? Really Heinlein has some great ideas, such as; Transplanting yourself into the opposite sex so that you can have sex with your (formerly) same sex. Having breasts burned off by lasers. Cloning yourself as the opposite sex, and then having sex with the clone. Having a world where mothers have sex with their sons, and fathers with their daughters. I do believe that Heinlein was born to terrorize the censors.
At any rate, I may be desensatized to it by Heinlein, but I don't find Niven over the top in that department. Also, while I agree that everything you named is a cliche now I'm not sure how cliche they were back when he wrote it. I certainly think the puppeteers where original, especially when you take into account the irony of their cowardice given their immense power, and the way the puppeteer in the book was viewed by his fellow aliens back home. And really, a LOT of good books can be made to appear simple if their details are stripped away. Tolkein's books all start looking like simple "quest" plots. Star wars ditto. Really, it seems to be the case with most any author that puts the kind of thought and detail into the world of their books that authors like Niven and Tolkein do. In these books, the scenery is what makes the book interesting, not so much what happens. If you don't like those types of books, fine, but there are quite a few that do.
Slashdotters lamenting the cracking of AAC and looking down their noses at the authors of this program need to wake up. You're spitting in the wind. This was GOING to happen, just like every single lock companies have put on their programs has been broken in the past. This should be further proof the the record companies that DRM does NOT WORK. If they want to switch to WMA fine... but no matter how hard Microsoft tries, it will be cracked too, just like it HAS been cracked over and over. Any time a company makes a product and says, "Don't do this, whatever you do please don't do this!" some nerd is going to wet himself in the anticipation of doing just whatever it was that company didn't want done. Like Steve Jobs himself said, it doesn't matter how good the lock is, because all it takes is ONE person getting in ONE time, and the whole thing is worthless. I totally agree that a solution to mass pirating needs to be found, but it isn't DRM. If we can't find a socially exceptable way of stopping pirating, then maybe someone is just going to pull their head out of the sand and change their business model...
OK so I have to ask... if open sourcing Java is such an outstanding idea, what other highly successful languages are there that are open source? I am not being fecicious, I really don't know much about the which side of the line different languages fall on. What exactly designates a language as "open source"? Having the compiler/interpreter/VM source available? I've read Perl and Python are open source. Are C/C++ open source? Lisp? Basically all the old languages?
Hmmm. Look at all this anti-american sentiment around here. I think the US should nuke slashdot, as it is obviously a haven for terrorists.
Kidding. But I think your statement is just as ridiculous. Do you really mean to say that you believe that the US is the only country that would ever want to attack another country, and the only one that would ever be suspicious of other countries. Believe me, world politics are mostly suspicion, as for the most part, every country is just look out for themselves. It's called "national security". That's what drove the cold war, that's what drove the Iraq war, and that is what is going to drive the space war, whether or not the US "starts it".
I think another thing to consider is that unlike nukes, these weapons will not have any deterrent to them, and once someone gains superiority in space, I would think it would become next to impossible to take it back. The reason being that once something is in space, it has a huge advantage over anything comming up to it. Things in space can move quickly very easily, while something comming up through the atmosphere is a sitting duck. Missles would certainly have no chance comming up out of space. The only way I could think of to try to take space back after a country gained dominance would be to build a whole bunch of ground based, super strong lasers. Then, all at once you could bring them up out of siloes and fire them at satallites above you. Of course, you wouldn't be able to take out anything over the horizon, but it might give you a chance to get your own space weapons up. Of course, there could be space weapons just over the horizon, waiting for you to send something into space, and then it would zap it down as soon as there was little enough atmosphere for the lasers to work.
Anyway, I think what the scariest prospect would be a sneak attack by another country. Lets suppose that we, for diplomatic reasons, go easy on the militarization of space. Suppose that in secret, a country like China develops massive amounts of space weapons, and then shoots them up all at once. Now they would have control of space, and would be able to strike anywhere they wished. I think that this is going to become a HUGE deal in the future, because no one wants anyone else to have superiority of space. I wouldn't be surprised if some countries started using their nuclear weapons as leverage to prevent other countries from sending any weapons up into space. That could produce something even worse than the cold war, because nuclear war would become more and more thinkable, since we'll believe we'll have the capacity to avoid total annihilation. But what if we don't?
This is rather interesting:
"One of them would turn the mobile phone into a sort of tracking device to help find a friend in a crowded public place with no landmarks, something for which current phones are of limited use."
So, it just broadcasts your GPS position whenever you make a call? Not sure how comfortable people would be with that...
I would think stuff like VapoChill would be more likely. The biggest drawback of watercooling is that it well... uses water. Installation is still less than easy for vapochill, but I expect that to be something that can be made much easier, and besides, most people don't ever touch their CPU anyway. That's another thing, you can set this up and ship it, but you probably wouldn't want to do that with a watercooling system. Also, if companies are going to invest in this sort of thing, the longest lasting solution should be sought. Watercooling is better than aircooling (usually) but even it will hit a wall fairly quickly, because it still uses room temperature to cool the CPU. Vapochill keeps the processor -20 C to 20 C, and there's room for improvement on that with better refrigerant tech.
"God, have they not heard of a successful strategy called "Ethics?, profit is prime""
I don't see anything unethical about what they are doing. Like everyone else, I find it annoying in the extreme that I should be inconvenienced by DRM protection. However, implementing DRM isn't unethical, in fact, it is easily argued that it IS ethical to try to stop people from using your product to break the law, especially in this case where there is no proof that Nvidia will benifit financially from this move.
That said, I think it a bad business move for anyone to enforce measures that don't prevent copyright circumvention at all, with the result that they only inconvenience people. It may not be unethical, but it certainly shows a lack of respect for the needs of the consumer. That is why I think it absurd that removing DRM protection just so that you CAN use a product in a legal way should be illegal. The politicians that brought about the DMCA had no consideration for the rights of the consumer, which is their JOB to protect, and were swayed by the financial backing of companies. That I DO fine unethical, just not DRM itself.
I've built/upgraded my machine over and over, and it has probably saved me several thoasands of dollars. For those of you who are tight on money but want a decent machine, this is the way to go. HOWEVER, the temptation is to just go out and buy whatever parts give you the best price/performance ratio. This sounds like a good idea, but if you're unlucky, you could easily come across one of the many odd incompatibilities that creep up between computers parts that are suppose to be compatible. The three parts that are most likely to cause you trouble are the sound card, motherboard, and video card. Do your best to find someone else who has used that combination of video card/sound card/and motherboard with success. Also, these days it is VERY important not to skimp on the power supply. A 250w PS is just not going to cut it these days, and really it is getting where a 400w PS is the minimum of what you aught to have. You can't get a PS that is too big, so save yourself the pain of upgrading it in the future and get the biggest one you can. It's a real bummer to get everything set up to find your machine constantly rebooting because it can't suck off enough power. I guess my only other advice is to research your parts not just buy visiting the review sites and reading customer reviews at stores, but by visiting technical help sites for that part as well. (Specifically again, motherboard, sound card, and video card) Some parts have problems with specific games, and it is best to find out about this on their forums than after you've bought the part and can't play your favorite game. It also helps you see through the hype, as an example, I bought an ATI graphics card and have had loads more problems with it than I ever did with Nvidia cards. Had I visited tech help forums on the two cards, I probably could have gauged better and seen through the marketing BS (No, their drivers are NOT as good as Nvidia's now). I'm not saying never buy ATI, but find out if one of the games you want to play has lots of trouble with that hardware first.
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I keep hearing people say that A Beautiful Mind was a "best case scenario" for schizophrenia. OK... so he actually seemed to recover from it after YEARS, but he certainly went through hell to get there. I have trouble believing that there aren't many more milder cases of schizophrenia. If you mean that the movie was innacurate, then what did you find innacurate about it (other than the liberty they took with facts about Nash's life)?
I don't see how prior knowledge of "Three Faces of Eve" matters. If a person were truely trying to fake it, they probably would tell you they haven't seen the movie. If they aren't faking it and have seen the movie, it doesn't really matter if they think they have multiple personalities because they saw a movie or because they spontaniously got it on their own. The final result is still a person with multiple personalities...
Well, as most people around here already know, if you past the link into google, and then click on the link google gives, NYTimes will let you in without registering.
According to the article, and FX-51 is the same as an Opteron 148. Looking at newegg, you can see that the Opteron 148 is $404 while the FX-51 is $689. Interestingly, you can see that the FX-51 has a LOT more reviews (and I would assume more sales) so their marketing strategy seems to be working, but I sure would feel cheated to find out I had paid ~300 more than I could have for a product.
Unfortunantly, the masses will prove you wrong. Check out some of the recentNielson ratings. American Idol and Survivor take the top 4,5,6,8, and 11th spots. Not to mention the huge Jerry Springer craze, as well as MTV's real world. I think TV Ratings do a lot to show why a pure democracy would be a catastrophic failure. I rest a lot better at night knowing that only 55% of the population voted in the 2000 election, as I can at least hope most of those not voting were sitting on their couch watching re-runs of Jerry Springer and Real World. It is also a good arguement against making voting any easier than it already is. I think people should be made to go to some trouble to vote, so that those who know nothing about the candidates and really don't care anyway are naturally weeded out.
In reference to your Richard Dawkins quote, I think he fails to realize that what the gardener or the chef believe is simply their "religion", whether or not they call it that. Religion is people's beliefs about the answers to quesitons about the world we live in. The more rational amung us only use religion for the asnwers to questions that science is unable to answer. It doesn't matter if religion was wrong about things in the past, as those were simply beliefs held by certain people at the time and says little about the truth of a current belief. No one has suggested that we stop taking science seriously, despite the embarrassingly large number of times science has offered false answers.
Ever try one of those "choose your own adventure" books? They tended to be about 200 pages long, but the actual story would be at most 10 pages. It was dynamic in the sense that it gave you several different branches to choose from, but it was still static. You would often times come to a branch you had visited in the past. This could be done with games, but, just as it is with the book, the actual game play time to "beat" the game would be much less. With games, it is worse than a book, because as games get more sophisticated, the content becomes more time consuming to produce, and "dynamic" games become somewhat impossible.
But I have failed to adequetly discuss the main problem with dynamic plots. A "dynamic" plot ISN'T a plot. A plot is by definition a narrative... something that is being told, and not influenced. If you are asking for a dynamic plot you are asking for a game without a plot. That's fine if that is a type of game you like, but you shouldn't dismiss plot driven games as restrictive or unimaginative. Think of all the great movies or books you have read. Did you ever feel that you wanted to influence those in anyway? Why should a game be different? Games offer the ability to make player feel a part of the plot more than any other medium, but not necessarily in control of it. In a game with a good plot, the motivation should be finding out what happens next, just as it is when you are reading a good book or watching a good movie. The only problem is that very few games offer anything better than a different version of the same plot that has already been told in a million games already. What's worse, even when game developers actually do manage to make a decent plot, most gamers are so jaded by the 100 past poorly written games they have played that they just skip through the storytelling sections of the game. They are focused on beating the game, and not playing it.
I think it is silly that game developers, and players, have created so much hype about "interactive" and "dynamic" games. There's only a hand full of games that have been able to tell a fresh, interesting plot since the inception of games, and players and developers are basically throwing up their hands and saying, "well lets just not have a plot, and call it dynamic". Games need to figure out how to create and tell stories effectively before they start worrying about taking on ideas that are as man-power intensive as even a simple "choose your own adventure" type book.
I felt the stem and now my finger hurts...
Perhaps, but it is soon going to become rather complicated and not as clear cut. What happens when cell phones become digital video cameras, rather than just still picture cameras? What happens when people start wearing devices that record everything they see so they can remember them? What happens when it is medically implanted? I sure hope the MPAA won't be standing there with a drill and a pair of tweezers saying, "Sir, we are going to need to temporarily remove your temoporal lobe implant".
I was reading the history of the laser here and found no mention of your story about a laser patent. The only mention of patent troubles actually had to do with the original inventor NOT recieving a patent. Are you sure your story is accurate? I always thought the reason for the "explosion" of lasers had nothing to do with patents but rather that there were technological developments that made the lasers cheap enough to be used in every day applications.
Hey... it worked for God.
Probably because the US is the United States of America. Most names for people from a country are a short version of the country's name with "an" on the end. Lets not try to read arrogance into EVERYthing having to do with the US...
Well, at least they have been against American companies.
Well, I personally think some people should learn to not take anything modded +5 Funny so seriously. People make fun of stereotypes. That doesn't mean everyone who finds those jokes humorous, or even the people who make them, are "bigots" and are really in any way prejudice. If you ask me, people like yourself are some of the people most sucked in to whatever the "popular opinion", according to them media, is. In the US at least (can't speak for other countries) the "politically correct" explosion is still very strong, where every statement is taken with deathly seriousness and words are twisted into the most devious and evil of meanings possible. I find it ironic that, in a country whom has such strong roots in the ideal of free speech, that a lot of the population's energy is spent worrying about what is and what is not "acceptable" to say, and how to prevent or punish people who continue to say those "unacceptable" things.
At any rate, I may be desensatized to it by Heinlein, but I don't find Niven over the top in that department. Also, while I agree that everything you named is a cliche now I'm not sure how cliche they were back when he wrote it. I certainly think the puppeteers where original, especially when you take into account the irony of their cowardice given their immense power, and the way the puppeteer in the book was viewed by his fellow aliens back home. And really, a LOT of good books can be made to appear simple if their details are stripped away. Tolkein's books all start looking like simple "quest" plots. Star wars ditto. Really, it seems to be the case with most any author that puts the kind of thought and detail into the world of their books that authors like Niven and Tolkein do. In these books, the scenery is what makes the book interesting, not so much what happens. If you don't like those types of books, fine, but there are quite a few that do.
So what are some cars people actually mod?
Slashdotters lamenting the cracking of AAC and looking down their noses at the authors of this program need to wake up. You're spitting in the wind. This was GOING to happen, just like every single lock companies have put on their programs has been broken in the past. This should be further proof the the record companies that DRM does NOT WORK. If they want to switch to WMA fine... but no matter how hard Microsoft tries, it will be cracked too, just like it HAS been cracked over and over. Any time a company makes a product and says, "Don't do this, whatever you do please don't do this!" some nerd is going to wet himself in the anticipation of doing just whatever it was that company didn't want done. Like Steve Jobs himself said, it doesn't matter how good the lock is, because all it takes is ONE person getting in ONE time, and the whole thing is worthless. I totally agree that a solution to mass pirating needs to be found, but it isn't DRM. If we can't find a socially exceptable way of stopping pirating, then maybe someone is just going to pull their head out of the sand and change their business model...
OK so I have to ask... if open sourcing Java is such an outstanding idea, what other highly successful languages are there that are open source? I am not being fecicious, I really don't know much about the which side of the line different languages fall on. What exactly designates a language as "open source"? Having the compiler/interpreter/VM source available? I've read Perl and Python are open source. Are C/C++ open source? Lisp? Basically all the old languages?
Hmmm. Look at all this anti-american sentiment around here. I think the US should nuke slashdot, as it is obviously a haven for terrorists. Kidding. But I think your statement is just as ridiculous. Do you really mean to say that you believe that the US is the only country that would ever want to attack another country, and the only one that would ever be suspicious of other countries. Believe me, world politics are mostly suspicion, as for the most part, every country is just look out for themselves. It's called "national security". That's what drove the cold war, that's what drove the Iraq war, and that is what is going to drive the space war, whether or not the US "starts it".
Wrong, Romero programmed, he just didn't write the engine.
I think another thing to consider is that unlike nukes, these weapons will not have any deterrent to them, and once someone gains superiority in space, I would think it would become next to impossible to take it back. The reason being that once something is in space, it has a huge advantage over anything comming up to it. Things in space can move quickly very easily, while something comming up through the atmosphere is a sitting duck. Missles would certainly have no chance comming up out of space. The only way I could think of to try to take space back after a country gained dominance would be to build a whole bunch of ground based, super strong lasers. Then, all at once you could bring them up out of siloes and fire them at satallites above you. Of course, you wouldn't be able to take out anything over the horizon, but it might give you a chance to get your own space weapons up. Of course, there could be space weapons just over the horizon, waiting for you to send something into space, and then it would zap it down as soon as there was little enough atmosphere for the lasers to work. Anyway, I think what the scariest prospect would be a sneak attack by another country. Lets suppose that we, for diplomatic reasons, go easy on the militarization of space. Suppose that in secret, a country like China develops massive amounts of space weapons, and then shoots them up all at once. Now they would have control of space, and would be able to strike anywhere they wished. I think that this is going to become a HUGE deal in the future, because no one wants anyone else to have superiority of space. I wouldn't be surprised if some countries started using their nuclear weapons as leverage to prevent other countries from sending any weapons up into space. That could produce something even worse than the cold war, because nuclear war would become more and more thinkable, since we'll believe we'll have the capacity to avoid total annihilation. But what if we don't?
This is rather interesting: "One of them would turn the mobile phone into a sort of tracking device to help find a friend in a crowded public place with no landmarks, something for which current phones are of limited use." So, it just broadcasts your GPS position whenever you make a call? Not sure how comfortable people would be with that...
I would think stuff like VapoChill would be more likely. The biggest drawback of watercooling is that it well... uses water. Installation is still less than easy for vapochill, but I expect that to be something that can be made much easier, and besides, most people don't ever touch their CPU anyway. That's another thing, you can set this up and ship it, but you probably wouldn't want to do that with a watercooling system. Also, if companies are going to invest in this sort of thing, the longest lasting solution should be sought. Watercooling is better than aircooling (usually) but even it will hit a wall fairly quickly, because it still uses room temperature to cool the CPU. Vapochill keeps the processor -20 C to 20 C, and there's room for improvement on that with better refrigerant tech.
I don't see anything unethical about what they are doing. Like everyone else, I find it annoying in the extreme that I should be inconvenienced by DRM protection. However, implementing DRM isn't unethical, in fact, it is easily argued that it IS ethical to try to stop people from using your product to break the law, especially in this case where there is no proof that Nvidia will benifit financially from this move.
That said, I think it a bad business move for anyone to enforce measures that don't prevent copyright circumvention at all, with the result that they only inconvenience people. It may not be unethical, but it certainly shows a lack of respect for the needs of the consumer. That is why I think it absurd that removing DRM protection just so that you CAN use a product in a legal way should be illegal. The politicians that brought about the DMCA had no consideration for the rights of the consumer, which is their JOB to protect, and were swayed by the financial backing of companies. That I DO fine unethical, just not DRM itself.
I've built/upgraded my machine over and over, and it has probably saved me several thoasands of dollars. For those of you who are tight on money but want a decent machine, this is the way to go. HOWEVER, the temptation is to just go out and buy whatever parts give you the best price/performance ratio. This sounds like a good idea, but if you're unlucky, you could easily come across one of the many odd incompatibilities that creep up between computers parts that are suppose to be compatible. The three parts that are most likely to cause you trouble are the sound card, motherboard, and video card. Do your best to find someone else who has used that combination of video card/sound card/and motherboard with success. Also, these days it is VERY important not to skimp on the power supply. A 250w PS is just not going to cut it these days, and really it is getting where a 400w PS is the minimum of what you aught to have. You can't get a PS that is too big, so save yourself the pain of upgrading it in the future and get the biggest one you can. It's a real bummer to get everything set up to find your machine constantly rebooting because it can't suck off enough power. I guess my only other advice is to research your parts not just buy visiting the review sites and reading customer reviews at stores, but by visiting technical help sites for that part as well. (Specifically again, motherboard, sound card, and video card) Some parts have problems with specific games, and it is best to find out about this on their forums than after you've bought the part and can't play your favorite game. It also helps you see through the hype, as an example, I bought an ATI graphics card and have had loads more problems with it than I ever did with Nvidia cards. Had I visited tech help forums on the two cards, I probably could have gauged better and seen through the marketing BS (No, their drivers are NOT as good as Nvidia's now). I'm not saying never buy ATI, but find out if one of the games you want to play has lots of trouble with that hardware first.