The American DSL monopolies are very unfortunate and entirely avoidable. In Toronto, Canada, there are over 160 ISPs in addition to the major ones, and 56 of those are DSL. The mom and pop DSL ISPs are just as fast as the big boys (at 3.0Mb, though we have a cable internet monopoly and that network offers at least 6.0Mb for a similar price) but the little guys are cheaper and more flexible. For instance, little ISPs tend to have no monthly transfer caps, allow you to buy your own modem instead of renting, allow you to run servers, don't throttle Usenet or common P2P ports, etc. Plus, due to all the competition, the little guys work their asses off to keep their fickle customers on board. Competition is a great thing!
These "service charges" should be illegal as they stand today. Many Canadian cellular carriers use this very same practise. There was some sort of meeting between the heads of the carrier families where they all agreed to introduce a "government licensing fee" or "federal satellite licensing fee" of $6.95 per month. This went on for years. The government finally perked up and said "Hey, we don't charge that licensing fee" and demanded the charge to be dropped (though not refunded, naturally). The carriers eagerly complied by renaming it a "system access fee", and it is still in place today.
These fees are nothing but a vehicle for false advertising and a covert way to increase prices unannounced. Carriers can legally advertise a plan to be $20 per month when in fact it is $26.95. Thus, no carrier can afford to be honest or they will appear to be the most expensive service.
From my research and experience your advice on WinXP is spot-on. The only thing I'd add is that the swap file itself can become fragmented (though not so much when you make min/max sizes the same) and the Windows GUI and commandline defragmenters don'don't touch that protected space. If you want to keep the swap file defragmented the only solution I know of is to use the excellent Diskeeper defragmenter. Diskeeper also tidies up the MFT (master file table) which can also speed up memory paging if the swap file is on the same drive as the OS or data.
Finally, I would recommend putting the swap file on a separate physical drive than the system partition, or from disk-intensive applications like a database or game. However, WinXP becomes unstable if there is no page file on the system drive so you should create at least a 256MB file on C.
As if paying for another Windows upgrade wasn't torture enough.:) Thanks for the tip!! I wonder if MS will crack down on these deals in time for Vista.
In order to buy a cheaper OEM copy of Windows you need to qualify as an equipment manufacturer. The easiest way to do so is to purchase the prerequisite hardware from a vendor to prove that you are a PC builder. Some vendors require you to purchase as much as a motherboard and CPU, while others simply require a $10 mouse. Check into some such online retailers (sorry I have no examples) to land yourself an OEM copy of Vista.
This is a cool bundle of torrent utilities but it's really not anything groundbreaking. Azureus has had the ability to automatically start downloading when.torrent files are in a specified directory for some time now. Still, every increment of functionality means that many more people sharing their content so that's nice for everyone!
Dunno, I didn't like the atmosphere and the scripted sequences. The former made me want to stop playing, the latter made the whole thing look like an animatronic display since noone ever reacted to what your character did outside of pushing the button he was prompted to push.
You've got to have scripted sequences in a story-based shooter. There's really no other way to do it. At least HL2 adds a little immersion to these sequences since the NPC eye tracking is EERILY realistic - when they look at you they look right into your eyes and follow you around the room. Also, for example in the gravity gun introduction area, there are areas in the lab that trigger additional optional dialogue if you use or even just look at certain objects. I've never seen that in an FPS before.
At least the scripted sequences are in sensible places. In games that give the illusion of an open-ended environment, like Call of Duty, scripted sequences sometimes look silly and out of context. In HL2 the scripts occur in quiet areas or in time with the action. It's done even more effectively and transparently in Episode One as Alyx has all kinds of hand-to-hand combat scripts that activate SEAMLESSLY with enemies.
I'm sure you're getting tired of all my praise so I'll go easy on you.:) All I can say is to play all the way through HL2 when you feel like it. Wait for a dark, rainy evening, turn off the lights, and turn up the sound. If you're a real pro, crack open a window so that you feel a chill while you play. There are fewer virtual worlds more enveloping as those in the Half Life universe and I love just examining the environments aimlessly as much as I enjoy blasting through them.
Well, definitely don't play Episode One before finishing the original. Are you really forced to buy it for 20 though? I'm in Canada and I bought the game on Steam for $20 USD with no tax.
If you play shooters to shoot then definite get Prey as it's a great action game with cool weapons. But if you play shooters for the experience of a virtual world then DEFINITELY play through HL2 because its world just keeps getting more beautiful and believable with every step.
I finished the game on release day and I was really disappointed when it ended, but in retrospect I definitely feel like I got my $20 worth.
Also, one of HL2's best features is its autosave function. I dropped the habit of F5ing all the time after playing HL2, and I don't think I regretted relying on autosave even once in Episode One. It's so well done that I neglect to save while playing other FPS titles and I often get disappointed when I have to replay an entire level.
Well, if you care, here's a review of HL2:E1 that I wrote shortly after completing the game for the second time. Buy or don't buy whatever you wish, but you're missing out on something grand, sez I!
If you own HL2 and you have a fairly beefy computer (good enough to run HL2 at max detail at a good resolution and framerate) do yourself a big favour and drop $20 on Episode One. I was really skeptical at this episodic release and pricing scheme but Valve packed a whole lot of gaming goodness into the 4.5 hour first expansion. I really love Episode One and you will too.:) When all is said and done, $60 for about 14 hours of expansion packs amounts to a very fair price - especially since each of the 3 episodes are designed with mega intensity in mind!
Unquestionably, there are more powerful tools for doing layouts like Adobe InDesign and Framemaker, but I'm quite pleased at Word's toolset for composing prose. I'm curious what you think needs improvement to make Word a better production utility.
Really, the only improvement I can think of is that the grammar engine is really crappy. About 99% of green squiggly underlines are false positives that make absolutely no sense.
That makes sense, actually. This is why, I've heard, they sold EGA and VGA versions seperately, and EGA was often more expensive. Older Sierra games used to "dumb down" the colours for lesser graphics adaptors which created some ugly colour conversions with blotches and bands of odd hues. They later hired their artists to recolour entire games with a proper EGA palette which looked much nicer, but the consumer absorbed the cost of that effort.
It's the reduction in height I was lamenting, not the assumption that they were going to change the layout. I mentioned in my post that the oversized ribbon makes options easy to read and click.
That's interesting to hear that your vertical resolution is relatively low, yet you don't mind the height. Hopefully any changes MS makes will be an improvement.
As for zero day juarez, MS is starting to scare me with their Tolkienesque all seeing eye. I'm not thrilled that the so-called "Windows Genuine Advantage" is to be spied upon every minute of every day, but I love Office enough to pick up the real deal. Especially if my sister is still in college and I get a tasty student discount!
PC Gamer magazine's previes of Episode Two a couple of months ago confirmed that yes, a Half Life 2 complete compilation will be for sale after the third episode is released. No doubt they'll sell a mega pack including Half Life Source and its expansions as well.
Where's the problem coming from? Overaggressive scheduling?
Definitely. Extending the schedule means paying a lot of people's fulltime salaries and publishers and financiers have little patience for this.
You're 100% right that Valve games have benefitted greatly from extending release dates. I replay their games on a pretty much annual basis and the high quality is what makes games as old as Half Life still enjoyable today. 5 years from now everyone will remember Half Life 2 for its outstanding quality, not its release date or stolen source code.
I had a small problem with HL2 a while ago. I had some difficulty contacting Valve's tech support (the FAQ said to click a link that wasn't there) but when I finally wrote to them they got back to me within 48 hours. Otherwise I've had no trouble.
For the record, I bought HL2 in a box and Episode One on Steam. I've been so incredibly satisfied with Steam that I've bought a couple more games and don't regret for a moment not owning a box. I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble playing such fantastic games.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely why I'm about to switch to prepaid. I'll probably go with Virgin Mobile who offers all kinds of extras for a lower price.
The American DSL monopolies are very unfortunate and entirely avoidable. In Toronto, Canada, there are over 160 ISPs in addition to the major ones, and 56 of those are DSL. The mom and pop DSL ISPs are just as fast as the big boys (at 3.0Mb, though we have a cable internet monopoly and that network offers at least 6.0Mb for a similar price) but the little guys are cheaper and more flexible. For instance, little ISPs tend to have no monthly transfer caps, allow you to buy your own modem instead of renting, allow you to run servers, don't throttle Usenet or common P2P ports, etc. Plus, due to all the competition, the little guys work their asses off to keep their fickle customers on board. Competition is a great thing!
A hack like renaming the .WAV to .BAK? Better get Kevin Mitnick on the horn for that monumental feat.
These "service charges" should be illegal as they stand today. Many Canadian cellular carriers use this very same practise. There was some sort of meeting between the heads of the carrier families where they all agreed to introduce a "government licensing fee" or "federal satellite licensing fee" of $6.95 per month. This went on for years. The government finally perked up and said "Hey, we don't charge that licensing fee" and demanded the charge to be dropped (though not refunded, naturally). The carriers eagerly complied by renaming it a "system access fee", and it is still in place today.
These fees are nothing but a vehicle for false advertising and a covert way to increase prices unannounced. Carriers can legally advertise a plan to be $20 per month when in fact it is $26.95. Thus, no carrier can afford to be honest or they will appear to be the most expensive service.
Hello, legislation?
Sweet! Thanks for the suggestion! I hate it when my SAM file gets fragmented!
It makes the populace doubleplus obedient
From my research and experience your advice on WinXP is spot-on. The only thing I'd add is that the swap file itself can become fragmented (though not so much when you make min/max sizes the same) and the Windows GUI and commandline defragmenters don'don't touch that protected space. If you want to keep the swap file defragmented the only solution I know of is to use the excellent Diskeeper defragmenter. Diskeeper also tidies up the MFT (master file table) which can also speed up memory paging if the swap file is on the same drive as the OS or data.
Finally, I would recommend putting the swap file on a separate physical drive than the system partition, or from disk-intensive applications like a database or game. However, WinXP becomes unstable if there is no page file on the system drive so you should create at least a 256MB file on C.
This extensive and fantastically informative guide on tweaking virtual memory was a huge help and a fascinating read.
PLEASE no feature creep, Mozilla! Keep it thin and light and extend optionally with extensions.
As if paying for another Windows upgrade wasn't torture enough. :) Thanks for the tip!! I wonder if MS will crack down on these deals in time for Vista.
I was right about to post about OEM pricing.
In order to buy a cheaper OEM copy of Windows you need to qualify as an equipment manufacturer. The easiest way to do so is to purchase the prerequisite hardware from a vendor to prove that you are a PC builder. Some vendors require you to purchase as much as a motherboard and CPU, while others simply require a $10 mouse. Check into some such online retailers (sorry I have no examples) to land yourself an OEM copy of Vista.
So what are we going to get? Shockwave ring around explosions? CGI Scotty the Hutt animations showing his haggis-worn bulk? Spock shoots first?
Screw CGI updates. Practical effects FTW.
This is a cool bundle of torrent utilities but it's really not anything groundbreaking. Azureus has had the ability to automatically start downloading when .torrent files are in a specified directory for some time now. Still, every increment of functionality means that many more people sharing their content so that's nice for everyone!
Dunno, I didn't like the atmosphere and the scripted sequences. The former made me want to stop playing, the latter made the whole thing look like an animatronic display since noone ever reacted to what your character did outside of pushing the button he was prompted to push.
:) All I can say is to play all the way through HL2 when you feel like it. Wait for a dark, rainy evening, turn off the lights, and turn up the sound. If you're a real pro, crack open a window so that you feel a chill while you play. There are fewer virtual worlds more enveloping as those in the Half Life universe and I love just examining the environments aimlessly as much as I enjoy blasting through them.
You've got to have scripted sequences in a story-based shooter. There's really no other way to do it. At least HL2 adds a little immersion to these sequences since the NPC eye tracking is EERILY realistic - when they look at you they look right into your eyes and follow you around the room. Also, for example in the gravity gun introduction area, there are areas in the lab that trigger additional optional dialogue if you use or even just look at certain objects. I've never seen that in an FPS before.
At least the scripted sequences are in sensible places. In games that give the illusion of an open-ended environment, like Call of Duty, scripted sequences sometimes look silly and out of context. In HL2 the scripts occur in quiet areas or in time with the action. It's done even more effectively and transparently in Episode One as Alyx has all kinds of hand-to-hand combat scripts that activate SEAMLESSLY with enemies.
I'm sure you're getting tired of all my praise so I'll go easy on you.
Well, definitely don't play Episode One before finishing the original. Are you really forced to buy it for 20 though? I'm in Canada and I bought the game on Steam for $20 USD with no tax.
If you play shooters to shoot then definite get Prey as it's a great action game with cool weapons. But if you play shooters for the experience of a virtual world then DEFINITELY play through HL2 because its world just keeps getting more beautiful and believable with every step.
I finished the game on release day and I was really disappointed when it ended, but in retrospect I definitely feel like I got my $20 worth.
Also, one of HL2's best features is its autosave function. I dropped the habit of F5ing all the time after playing HL2, and I don't think I regretted relying on autosave even once in Episode One. It's so well done that I neglect to save while playing other FPS titles and I often get disappointed when I have to replay an entire level.
Well, if you care, here's a review of HL2:E1 that I wrote shortly after completing the game for the second time. Buy or don't buy whatever you wish, but you're missing out on something grand, sez I!
- half-life-2-episode-one.html
http://demodulated.blogspot.com/2006/07/review-of
If you own HL2 and you have a fairly beefy computer (good enough to run HL2 at max detail at a good resolution and framerate) do yourself a big favour and drop $20 on Episode One. I was really skeptical at this episodic release and pricing scheme but Valve packed a whole lot of gaming goodness into the 4.5 hour first expansion. I really love Episode One and you will too. :) When all is said and done, $60 for about 14 hours of expansion packs amounts to a very fair price - especially since each of the 3 episodes are designed with mega intensity in mind!
Unquestionably, there are more powerful tools for doing layouts like Adobe InDesign and Framemaker, but I'm quite pleased at Word's toolset for composing prose. I'm curious what you think needs improvement to make Word a better production utility.
Really, the only improvement I can think of is that the grammar engine is really crappy. About 99% of green squiggly underlines are false positives that make absolutely no sense.
That makes sense, actually. This is why, I've heard, they sold EGA and VGA versions seperately, and EGA was often more expensive. Older Sierra games used to "dumb down" the colours for lesser graphics adaptors which created some ugly colour conversions with blotches and bands of odd hues. They later hired their artists to recolour entire games with a proper EGA palette which looked much nicer, but the consumer absorbed the cost of that effort.
Ah, kind of like Microsoft Euro 1.0 for Tweens. Pretty clever way to bridge the global economy, actually.
It's the reduction in height I was lamenting, not the assumption that they were going to change the layout. I mentioned in my post that the oversized ribbon makes options easy to read and click.
That's interesting to hear that your vertical resolution is relatively low, yet you don't mind the height. Hopefully any changes MS makes will be an improvement.
As for zero day juarez, MS is starting to scare me with their Tolkienesque all seeing eye. I'm not thrilled that the so-called "Windows Genuine Advantage" is to be spied upon every minute of every day, but I love Office enough to pick up the real deal. Especially if my sister is still in college and I get a tasty student discount!
PC Gamer magazine's previes of Episode Two a couple of months ago confirmed that yes, a Half Life 2 complete compilation will be for sale after the third episode is released. No doubt they'll sell a mega pack including Half Life Source and its expansions as well.
Where's the problem coming from? Overaggressive scheduling?
Definitely. Extending the schedule means paying a lot of people's fulltime salaries and publishers and financiers have little patience for this.
You're 100% right that Valve games have benefitted greatly from extending release dates. I replay their games on a pretty much annual basis and the high quality is what makes games as old as Half Life still enjoyable today. 5 years from now everyone will remember Half Life 2 for its outstanding quality, not its release date or stolen source code.
I had a small problem with HL2 a while ago. I had some difficulty contacting Valve's tech support (the FAQ said to click a link that wasn't there) but when I finally wrote to them they got back to me within 48 hours. Otherwise I've had no trouble.
For the record, I bought HL2 in a box and Episode One on Steam. I've been so incredibly satisfied with Steam that I've bought a couple more games and don't regret for a moment not owning a box. I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble playing such fantastic games.