Did you ever see a movie or read a good book where at key points in the plotline anywhere from 5 to 500 OTHER main characters show up, are standing in line, or just exit the conflict the character you were identifying with was headed to? *Thats* unnatural. There's an astoundingly obvious, and good reason why stories don't progress that way. If you want to play one of the random ants in a swarm, be my guest.
That's why the world needs to be big enough. And "respawns" rare enough. So that a team of 5-10 main characters (each different, cooperating) enter a conflict, fight it through, win, and come back to town to boast about what they achieved. Or have their ass kicked and look for more people to join and come with them. And others listen with interest, because nobody has ever been there before. With classic development model: Forget about it, there's too many players, they finish quests too fast, and creating a quest takes way too long. So, instances. Each main character faces the same challenges, but they don't see, don't feel, don't know about each other. Here the developers could not only catch up, but seriously overtake the speed at which players explore and play, and provide them with enough original content that every main character would have a totally different story.
Just try installing any of these on 200MB harddrive, with X and networking in working order. And preferably kernel sources + development tools to compile the kernel. Good luck.
One more thing... To get mom from hanging over my shoulder and requesting "find that, check this", I bought her a computer. A Pentium 160 MMX. The old 2GB drive went to it, 64M RAM, an old 17" monitor, SoundBlaster16 ISA, network card, whatever spares I found. And now considerations... She's computer-illiterate. I need to teach her from scratch. I can get a nice easy user-friendly Linux desktop manager, but most of them require at least twice-thrice as much in hardware. Or I can get her a lightweight one... but none of the simple ones I know are really foolproof and easy enough. Final solution: Windows 98 SE + Firefox + Thunderbird The box is firewalled, she doesn't even know how MSIE looks like, she doesn't use anything else, just these two and Winamp. It was easy to set up, it is easy for her to use, it didn't take much diskspace (the rest is packed with MP3s), and it runs generally without problems. A BSOD from time to time is not such a high price...
Debian runs fine. A bunch of services, 24/7 server with shell accounts, mail, www, ftp and a bunch others. Upgrade from 16 to 24MB RAM gave it a new lease of life. Upgrade from 2GB to 20GB drive - another. And thanks to low power CPU, I just slapped an Athlon radiator on it instead of the original 486 one, then removed the fan. The drive is silent, the cooler in the PSU is dead already, so the machine is exceptionally quiet. Recently I bought a serial terminal, an original 80-column amber screen Wyse, and pulled the serial cable to my bed. And now I find myself spending more time online chatting with people over IRC from that terminal, connected to the 486, than on the bulky Sempron box.
Designed for Windows sticker on the trashcan, that's a regular. I do it whenever I see one. But a warning label about risk of irritation and all kinds of such warnings on the Windows CD (label taken from a pepper spray can), Intel Inside Pentium III on my pocket calculator, and neat "barbed wire" sticker on the firewall are some of nicer applications.
and the guy can be sued for total loss of revenue of $0, unless they prove his game can somewhat compete with FarCry. ATM the most they can do is to C&D him, which he will do, just removing the gun.
Article written by marketoids without understanding of the real value of Google... Some bloppers:
That's not to say Google could afford to go out and do a big deal just for the sake of it. A mega-takeover potentially could wreak havoc on Google. Even Piper Jaffray Co's. (PJC ) 11/18/05 @ 9:05 PM --] Internet analyst Safa Rashtchy, one of Wall Street's biggest Google bulls, says: "If they were to buy AOL or eBay, it would hurt the stock."
Google buying one of the Evil Giants would certainly hurt the stock, by damaging reputation of Google. People hate AOL and at least mildly dislike eBay. Loss of capital by Google has nothing to do with it. Loss of trust does.
All the same, the lure of a big deal could prove hard to resist, particularly if Google's strategic position is threatened. For the past two months, Google has been battling Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) at the bargaining table for a stake in Time Warner Inc.'s (TWX ) AOL unit
Whoa, Google lost such a deal to Microsoft, such a big battle, such juicy morsel...? No. Google was acting as a shill, for its own interest. Bloat the price of a mostly worthless piece of junk, make the competition offer way more than they would offer initially, and then let them have the rotten carcass for price of luxury dish. Losing some battles gives more profit than winning them.
Young Googlers' preoccupation with these perks tend to drive mature VCs to distraction. "If I hear one more [punk] complain about his omelet, or tell me he's bored with the smoothie selection, I'm gonna, I don't know," splutters one.
What would YOU prefer to do? Make the job fun and it will be efficient. Not in terms "lines of code per day" but in terms "satisfied customers per day". Still hard to get for some.
Says the aggrieved VC: "Did it ever occur to them that this was like asking us to do their homework for them? It's the height of arrogance." It's lots of VCs who hope to make a lot of money on that. Google just does the usual thing, and is only one. So, usual marketing rule, if the sales outweight demand, sellers must look for ways to attract the customer and the customer may afford demanding much more for the same price. I thought these guys are businessmen? You don't want to do the homework for Google? Someone else will, and they will get the candy, not you, mr Very Senior Partner.
The suits inside Google don't fare much better than the outside pros. Several current and former insiders say there's a caste system, in which business types are second-class citizens to Google's valued code jockeys. As opposed to the caste system where the business types rule the second-class "production crew".
They argue that it could prove to be a big challenge in the future as Google seeks to maintain its growth. They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers. I think they just misunderstand "corporate development". Google took this term right. Marketoids still think it means themselves.
The candidate, a Wall Street tech M&A specialist who was looking for a change of scenery and a more relaxed lifestyle, calls the experience "chaotic, bureaucratic, and very rigid." Strung out over more than nine months and numerous coast-to-coast flights, the courtship culminated in a jarring "pop quiz."
Drummond rejects the accusations that Google is anti-businesspeople. He says Google has hired many MBAs and bankers and is constantly assessing its dealmaking strategy.
Google is just anti-assholepeople. Jerks who hope to get cash from the suckers. And they get punished pretty cruelly for attempts to pick on Google.
What's more relaxing for the coders crew than to see a super-important suit, a stockmarket shark to jump through loops and sweat heavily just to get a candy they wave in front of his nose? Less bull from your side and deals with Google would become pleas
...Why is Microsoft software so popular all over the world? Because you can get it for free (illegally) so easily, and Microsoft really doesn't give a shit about it. PS, XBOX were moddable so you could play pirated games. All thorough the history Nintendo was hack-proof. As long as Revolution isn't crackable, it won't take off as much as the competition. Sorry.
Well, there still are effects (like tunneling) that while not directly proving the probability cloud is THE true form of matter down there, pretty much disprove "planetary model". We may not be completely sure what shape is an electron, but it is way more likely just a loose cloud, than a tiny quickly spinning ball circling the core at insane speed. And this all completely notwithstanding the fact that modelling it as a cloud will be vastly more convenient for computations than modelling it as a ball. In tunelling, the ball would have to physically cross a barrier of potential, for a short while to be in a place where it can't physically be. If it's a probablility cloud, simply its existence on one side becomes less likely, on the other more likely and no matter/energy transfer -through- the illegal zone occurs.
...that uses Google Images API with the SafeSearch in "reverse" mode, that is performs search twice, with SS on and off, and displays only images that would are filtered off by SS?
The problem is these down the foodchain are still significant. Not directly, not as single instances, but a botnet, an army of zombies is not something you want as your enemy. There's still no defense against a DDOS attack whatsoever, 200 or so zombies can kill any medium-sized site, five thousands are a major threat to the giants. And with an exploit that affects 90% of a webpage visitors, gathering an army of five thousand zombie computers may be a matter of hours, days at most. Now how happy would you be if some script kiddie bloated your bandwidth bill to a 6-digit figure while bringing your network down to its knees for a week? The fact we are high in the food chain does only mean we are more likely a target of actual malicious attack, not just a tool.
With 3.5 petabyte storage and 5K processors, plus some smart software, taking offline one CPU or two harddrives will have hardly any impact. And when performance of given container drops by 3% (that is 150 nodes have already failed and are offline) they send someone to replace them. Or even not then, just a single truck running around the country replacing broken nodes during each visit. Just like painting the Golden Gate bridge. There's a small crew of painters assigned to that work. It takes them 4 years to paint the whole bridge, but when they finish at one end, the other already requires repainting, so they start over. The bridge is never 100% "brand new" painted, but it remains in acceptable state at all times.
Yes, hold the button for 5 secs. Wait some 2 mins so all caps will leak all the accumulated energy. Then open the computer. Take a piece of wire and start connecting random pins on the motherboard for a while. It's powered off, there shouldn't be any electricity, no current between 0 and 0. So now try powering it on. Whoops, doesn't? There's +5V on the motherboard at all times and quite a few chips use it. Wake-on-LAN, Wake-on-Ring, timed power-up, system clock (uses battery only when external power is all gone), and quite a few devices that are just attached to the +5V bus and don't do anything at that time, just leak current.
If you need a good power-off, get a power supply with a switch. Quite a few power supplies have a normal switch that cuts off all the power. Still you have to reach to the back of the computer... Another option is to keep your power filter within reach, just switch off all that's plugged in, PC, monitor, printer, speakers and whatever else.
First, position of the room is more meaningful than icon. In labyrinth-based games I more often tend to refer to room layout than other features. But even if I developed 4-room icon-based language, I'd likely replace it with location-based one for 9-room, and certainly for 16-room. I'm not able to remember 16 separate icons on the fly, but the "geography" is pretty obvious.
was writing from memory. Yeah, pair 6 then. Well, "You cannot use your brain to decide, it's luck...", the answer is "No, YOU cannot, I can.":)
Likely first 2-3 minutes on establishing the dictionary. Forget icons, won't remember them. Use "door locations", L, +, =| |= etc. symbols. Easy to scale.Game 1, answer with target location, self - not moving, or common meeting point, move in there. Prey: Yes, split search, mark location, split in map in 2 unequal ownership shares, call when prey found. Foes: Again split ownership, if chased indicate room where I want to meet, near the middle, subject of negotiation. If found inactive enemy on my half, warn of its location only after finding the prey on my side, if there's risk of walking into it. Besides, if the nerd on the other side was smart enough, with some imagination, B, C, D, E, F, G, I, J, L, P, R, S, T, Z are easy to recognize, with a bit more IQ, "rotate" mark added for easy A, H, M, N, U, V, W, Z, the rest could be explained as two-stroke like O = ( ) and we can chat:)
Be good in games generally Be especially good in this or similar kind of games (topics), there are just as many. Make sure the game will get popular/make it to front page. Do/write something interesting in the game/story Post early.
Freebies? Yes, we do. That's nothing special, just happens. OS X? Sorry, too expensive. Start over? And discard perfectly good engine, no. DRM? Won't do. Late announcement? We screwed royally, we'll try to fix as far as we can. Not a thing you hear from marketoid! Why/. not forums? But we do forums too! (and the aforementioned screwup would be just the same) Few non-violent classes? Fuck you, we want the game to be fun, not to force players to nurse your kid. Trial versions? Yes. Why not fix bugs instead? The previous game was screwed up on the design level, made unmaintainable, can't be just fixed. We scrap all that was broken in the design and leave only relatively good engine.
Or actually most of the paper, grokking through boring parts, reading the more interesting ones. Conclusions from a nerd's point of view: Cool game with some nice catches. I'd probably love to play it with some other nerd, and we would probably sweep the board. But there is one problem: moron co-players. If I was pitted with a cretin like player A from game 5, I'd likely tear my hairs or just quit after 5 mins. The game does force thinking and developing cooperative strategy, and if one of players isn't willing to follow, the other is helpless.
I seriously regret there wasn't comparison between the players' IQ and final score...
Heat guides: Think standarized metal tubes that are connected with the core by metal connectors able to remove any amount of heat the CPU can produce. Then slip the tubes onto special bolts of the radiator, with minimal (0.01mm) tollerance so the heat conductivity is guaranted, no matter what. No more misaligned fans, too thin or too thick thermal paste layer etc. Alternatively instead of bolts of the radiator use water pipes. If your water cooling gets clogged, that means you're a moron. Use demineralized pure water, not Kool-aid. Redundant 20 pins mean cost increased by $1 max. I prefer to pay $1 extra and know the hardware will be supported in 3 years. Stacking CPUs: Removing heat through vertical bars/pipes through. Just move a few pins to sides.
"There's a reason we don't tie disparate types of hardware together unless they're cheap" You mean, like, the industry is heading more for multi-socket motherboards than multi-core CPUs?
WHEN did these people create their accounts? The politics of "restricting alpha-only usernames" appeared just a few years ago. On many sites... (check Hotmail. Even worse.) Accounts created before that on some sites remained available, on others were cancelled or forced to be changed. BTW, somehow once I managed to create an alpha-only mess of characters username on Yahoo. Nothing near to pronounciable but... well.
Slashdot Mirror
Eolas will sue that person for doing that. Or not.
Nothing more, for sure.
Did you ever see a movie or read a good book where at key points in the plotline anywhere from 5 to 500 OTHER main characters show up, are standing in line, or just exit the conflict the character you were identifying with was headed to? *Thats* unnatural. There's an astoundingly obvious, and good reason why stories don't progress that way. If you want to play one of the random ants in a swarm, be my guest.
That's why the world needs to be big enough. And "respawns" rare enough. So that a team of 5-10 main characters (each different, cooperating) enter a conflict, fight it through, win, and come back to town to boast about what they achieved. Or have their ass kicked and look for more people to join and come with them. And others listen with interest, because nobody has ever been there before.
With classic development model: Forget about it, there's too many players, they finish quests too fast, and creating a quest takes way too long. So, instances. Each main character faces the same challenges, but they don't see, don't feel, don't know about each other. Here the developers could not only catch up, but seriously overtake the speed at which players explore and play, and provide them with enough original content that every main character would have a totally different story.
thx. corrected.
Wanted to do so, but couldn't find it anywhere :( Seems none of the torrent sites has it anymore ;)
Just try installing any of these on 200MB harddrive, with X and networking in working order. And preferably kernel sources + development tools to compile the kernel. Good luck.
One more thing... To get mom from hanging over my shoulder and requesting "find that, check this", I bought her a computer. A Pentium 160 MMX. The old 2GB drive went to it, 64M RAM, an old 17" monitor, SoundBlaster16 ISA, network card, whatever spares I found. And now considerations... She's computer-illiterate. I need to teach her from scratch. I can get a nice easy user-friendly Linux desktop manager, but most of them require at least twice-thrice as much in hardware. Or I can get her a lightweight one... but none of the simple ones I know are really foolproof and easy enough.
Final solution: Windows 98 SE + Firefox + Thunderbird
The box is firewalled, she doesn't even know how MSIE looks like, she doesn't use anything else, just these two and Winamp. It was easy to set up, it is easy for her to use, it didn't take much diskspace (the rest is packed with MP3s), and it runs generally without problems. A BSOD from time to time is not such a high price...
Debian runs fine. A bunch of services, 24/7 server with shell accounts, mail, www, ftp and a bunch others. Upgrade from 16 to 24MB RAM gave it a new lease of life. Upgrade from 2GB to 20GB drive - another. And thanks to low power CPU, I just slapped an Athlon radiator on it instead of the original 486 one, then removed the fan. The drive is silent, the cooler in the PSU is dead already, so the machine is exceptionally quiet.
Recently I bought a serial terminal, an original 80-column amber screen Wyse, and pulled the serial cable to my bed. And now I find myself spending more time online chatting with people over IRC from that terminal, connected to the 486, than on the bulky Sempron box.
Designed for Windows sticker on the trashcan, that's a regular. I do it whenever I see one. But a warning label about risk of irritation and all kinds of such warnings on the Windows CD (label taken from a pepper spray can), Intel Inside Pentium III on my pocket calculator, and neat "barbed wire" sticker on the firewall are some of nicer applications.
and the guy can be sued for total loss of revenue of $0, unless they prove his game can somewhat compete with FarCry.
ATM the most they can do is to C&D him, which he will do, just removing the gun.
Article written by marketoids without understanding of the real value of Google...
Some bloppers:
That's not to say Google could afford to go out and do a big deal just for the sake of it. A mega-takeover potentially could wreak havoc on Google. Even Piper Jaffray Co's. (PJC ) 11/18/05 @ 9:05 PM --] Internet analyst Safa Rashtchy, one of Wall Street's biggest Google bulls, says: "If they were to buy AOL or eBay, it would hurt the stock."
Google buying one of the Evil Giants would certainly hurt the stock, by damaging reputation of Google. People hate AOL and at least mildly dislike eBay. Loss of capital by Google has nothing to do with it. Loss of trust does.
All the same, the lure of a big deal could prove hard to resist, particularly if Google's strategic position is threatened. For the past two months, Google has been battling Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) at the bargaining table for a stake in Time Warner Inc.'s (TWX ) AOL unit
Whoa, Google lost such a deal to Microsoft, such a big battle, such juicy morsel...? No. Google was acting as a shill, for its own interest. Bloat the price of a mostly worthless piece of junk, make the competition offer way more than they would offer initially, and then let them have the rotten carcass for price of luxury dish.
Losing some battles gives more profit than winning them.
Young Googlers' preoccupation with these perks tend to drive mature VCs to distraction. "If I hear one more [punk] complain about his omelet, or tell me he's bored with the smoothie selection, I'm gonna, I don't know," splutters one.
What would YOU prefer to do? Make the job fun and it will be efficient. Not in terms "lines of code per day" but in terms "satisfied customers per day". Still hard to get for some.
Says the aggrieved VC: "Did it ever occur to them that this was like asking us to do their homework for them? It's the height of arrogance."
It's lots of VCs who hope to make a lot of money on that. Google just does the usual thing, and is only one. So, usual marketing rule, if the sales outweight demand, sellers must look for ways to attract the customer and the customer may afford demanding much more for the same price. I thought these guys are businessmen? You don't want to do the homework for Google? Someone else will, and they will get the candy, not you, mr Very Senior Partner.
The suits inside Google don't fare much better than the outside pros. Several current and former insiders say there's a caste system, in which business types are second-class citizens to Google's valued code jockeys.
As opposed to the caste system where the business types rule the second-class "production crew".
They argue that it could prove to be a big challenge in the future as Google seeks to maintain its growth. They deem the corporate development team as underpowered in the company, with engineers and product managers tending to carry more clout than salesmen and dealmakers.
I think they just misunderstand "corporate development". Google took this term right. Marketoids still think it means themselves.
The candidate, a Wall Street tech M&A specialist who was looking for a change of scenery and a more relaxed lifestyle, calls the experience "chaotic, bureaucratic, and very rigid." Strung out over more than nine months and numerous coast-to-coast flights, the courtship culminated in a jarring "pop quiz."
Drummond rejects the accusations that Google is anti-businesspeople. He says Google has hired many MBAs and bankers and is constantly assessing its dealmaking strategy.
Google is just anti-assholepeople. Jerks who hope to get cash from the suckers. And they get punished pretty cruelly for attempts to pick on Google.
What's more relaxing for the coders crew than to see a super-important suit, a stockmarket shark to jump through loops and sweat heavily just to get a candy they wave in front of his nose? Less bull from your side and deals with Google would become pleas
...Why is Microsoft software so popular all over the world? Because you can get it for free (illegally) so easily, and Microsoft really doesn't give a shit about it.
PS, XBOX were moddable so you could play pirated games. All thorough the history Nintendo was hack-proof.
As long as Revolution isn't crackable, it won't take off as much as the competition. Sorry.
(btw, turn by 360, you just made a revolution.)
Well, there still are effects (like tunneling) that while not directly proving the probability cloud is THE true form of matter down there, pretty much disprove "planetary model".
We may not be completely sure what shape is an electron, but it is way more likely just a loose cloud, than a tiny quickly spinning ball circling the core at insane speed. And this all completely notwithstanding the fact that modelling it as a cloud will be vastly more convenient for computations than modelling it as a ball. In tunelling, the ball would have to physically cross a barrier of potential, for a short while to be in a place where it can't physically be. If it's a probablility cloud, simply its existence on one side becomes less likely, on the other more likely and no matter/energy transfer -through- the illegal zone occurs.
...that uses Google Images API with the SafeSearch in "reverse" mode, that is performs search twice, with SS on and off, and displays only images that would are filtered off by SS?
The problem is these down the foodchain are still significant. Not directly, not as single instances, but a botnet, an army of zombies is not something you want as your enemy. There's still no defense against a DDOS attack whatsoever, 200 or so zombies can kill any medium-sized site, five thousands are a major threat to the giants. And with an exploit that affects 90% of a webpage visitors, gathering an army of five thousand zombie computers may be a matter of hours, days at most.
Now how happy would you be if some script kiddie bloated your bandwidth bill to a 6-digit figure while bringing your network down to its knees for a week?
The fact we are high in the food chain does only mean we are more likely a target of actual malicious attack, not just a tool.
I like the way you're thinking. Hmm... where do we fit the distillery into that thing yet?
With 3.5 petabyte storage and 5K processors, plus some smart software, taking offline one CPU or two harddrives will have hardly any impact. And when performance of given container drops by 3% (that is 150 nodes have already failed and are offline) they send someone to replace them. Or even not then, just a single truck running around the country replacing broken nodes during each visit.
Just like painting the Golden Gate bridge. There's a small crew of painters assigned to that work. It takes them 4 years to paint the whole bridge, but when they finish at one end, the other already requires repainting, so they start over. The bridge is never 100% "brand new" painted, but it remains in acceptable state at all times.
Yes, hold the button for 5 secs. Wait some 2 mins so all caps will leak all the accumulated energy. Then open the computer. Take a piece of wire and start connecting random pins on the motherboard for a while. It's powered off, there shouldn't be any electricity, no current between 0 and 0. So now try powering it on. Whoops, doesn't? There's +5V on the motherboard at all times and quite a few chips use it. Wake-on-LAN, Wake-on-Ring, timed power-up, system clock (uses battery only when external power is all gone), and quite a few devices that are just attached to the +5V bus and don't do anything at that time, just leak current.
If you need a good power-off, get a power supply with a switch. Quite a few power supplies have a normal switch that cuts off all the power. Still you have to reach to the back of the computer... Another option is to keep your power filter within reach, just switch off all that's plugged in, PC, monitor, printer, speakers and whatever else.
First, position of the room is more meaningful than icon. In labyrinth-based games I more often tend to refer to room layout than other features. But even if I developed 4-room icon-based language, I'd likely replace it with location-based one for 9-room, and certainly for 16-room. I'm not able to remember 16 separate icons on the fly, but the "geography" is pretty obvious.
was writing from memory. Yeah, pair 6 then. :)
:)
Well, "You cannot use your brain to decide, it's luck...", the answer is "No, YOU cannot, I can."
Likely first 2-3 minutes on establishing the dictionary. Forget icons, won't remember them. Use "door locations", L, +, =| |= etc. symbols. Easy to scale.Game 1, answer with target location, self - not moving, or common meeting point, move in there. Prey: Yes, split search, mark location, split in map in 2 unequal ownership shares, call when prey found. Foes: Again split ownership, if chased indicate room where I want to meet, near the middle, subject of negotiation. If found inactive enemy on my half, warn of its location only after finding the prey on my side, if there's risk of walking into it.
Besides, if the nerd on the other side was smart enough, with some imagination, B, C, D, E, F, G, I, J, L, P, R, S, T, Z are easy to recognize, with a bit more IQ, "rotate" mark added for easy A, H, M, N, U, V, W, Z, the rest could be explained as two-stroke like O = ( ) and we can chat
Go find some other, less violent game, sissy. There are quite a few. This one is going to be violent, just because we think it will make it fun.
Be good in games generally
Be especially good in this or similar kind of games (topics), there are just as many.
Make sure the game will get popular/make it to front page.
Do/write something interesting in the game/story
Post early.
Yep, a karma whore professional.
Well, as for me the answers were very nice.
/. not forums? But we do forums too! (and the aforementioned screwup would be just the same)
Conversion from Official to Nerd:
Freebies? Yes, we do. That's nothing special, just happens.
OS X? Sorry, too expensive.
Start over? And discard perfectly good engine, no.
DRM? Won't do.
Late announcement? We screwed royally, we'll try to fix as far as we can. Not a thing you hear from marketoid!
Why
Few non-violent classes? Fuck you, we want the game to be fun, not to force players to nurse your kid.
Trial versions? Yes.
Why not fix bugs instead? The previous game was screwed up on the design level, made unmaintainable, can't be just fixed. We scrap all that was broken in the design and leave only relatively good engine.
I wish other intervievees answered so honestly.
Or actually most of the paper, grokking through boring parts, reading the more interesting ones.
Conclusions from a nerd's point of view:
Cool game with some nice catches. I'd probably love to play it with some other nerd, and we would probably sweep the board.
But there is one problem: moron co-players. If I was pitted with a cretin like player A from game 5, I'd likely tear my hairs or just quit after 5 mins. The game does force thinking and developing cooperative strategy, and if one of players isn't willing to follow, the other is helpless.
I seriously regret there wasn't comparison between the players' IQ and final score...
Heat guides: Think standarized metal tubes that are connected with the core by metal connectors able to remove any amount of heat the CPU can produce. Then slip the tubes onto special bolts of the radiator, with minimal (0.01mm) tollerance so the heat conductivity is guaranted, no matter what. No more misaligned fans, too thin or too thick thermal paste layer etc. Alternatively instead of bolts of the radiator use water pipes. If your water cooling gets clogged, that means you're a moron. Use demineralized pure water, not Kool-aid.
Redundant 20 pins mean cost increased by $1 max. I prefer to pay $1 extra and know the hardware will be supported in 3 years.
Stacking CPUs: Removing heat through vertical bars/pipes through. Just move a few pins to sides.
"There's a reason we don't tie disparate types of hardware together unless they're cheap"
You mean, like, the industry is heading more for multi-socket motherboards than multi-core CPUs?
WHEN did these people create their accounts?
The politics of "restricting alpha-only usernames" appeared just a few years ago. On many sites... (check Hotmail. Even worse.) Accounts created before that on some sites remained available, on others were cancelled or forced to be changed.
BTW, somehow once I managed to create an alpha-only mess of characters username on Yahoo. Nothing near to pronounciable but... well.