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9351

Living Room / Re: Low energy use always on pc -- what's better, a laptop or a mini (htpc) pc?

« Last post by wraith808 on March 31, 2010, 03:54 PM »

Ick... Thinkpads and HP.  When I was running those, I did have problems.  But I went to Dell, and had no problems... and now my wife and I are running VAIOs.  I've had mine on pretty much continuously as a desktop replacement since October, and before I moved in October, had it up in the same capacity for a year before that.  I've only actually used it away from home at a LAN party... a 17" widescreen is pretty nasty to carry around.  My wife's is actually my old laptop, so I've had it since 2005 or so... never had a hardware problem, and the only software problems I've had are her picking up a virus from one of those Myspace games.  She has had it docked as a desktop replacement since we moved- before that she used it as a laptop most of the time... but that's still 6 months+ plugged in and on 24x7.

9352

Living Room / Re: Low energy use always on pc -- what's better, a laptop or a mini (htpc) pc?

« Last post by wraith808 on March 31, 2010, 02:47 PM »

I've always had my laptops on 24x7 and haven't had any problems with any of them (other than the one my ex had put a picture on and turned off the power management so it had one picture on the LCD for weeks... burned in (and out) the lcd.  but the other components still worked)  So IME having the laptop on continuously won't be a problem.

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DC Gamer Club / Re: Torchlight 50% off until Monday at Steam

« Last post by wraith808 on March 26, 2010, 08:37 PM »

And it's not just on sale on Steam... it's on sale everywhere...

9354

Living Room / Re: Howto: Torture people for money:French Contestants Torture People With Electric!

« Last post by wraith808 on March 20, 2010, 10:01 PM »

I was being sarcastic

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Living Room / Re: Command & Conquer Copies Ubisoft's Awful DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on March 19, 2010, 08:01 PM »

Well, I haven't heard anything about the game until reading that article (and some of the comments), but apparently it requires an internet connection because it's like an MMO or something:

Here's the thing though, Ubisoft does it for piracy, EA does it to keep track of your leveling experience and unlocks. Singleplayer (which is arguably more fun in co-op anyways) experience goes towards your Skirmish and Multiplayer leveling, and vice versa. It's actually a smart move since it's more persistent like a standard MMO and cuts down on people who hack to get level 20 and dominate level 3 folks, but of course people complain about the whole "online only".

Does it have SecuROM? No. Do people treat it as such? Yes.

-Keerosene

It still sucks, but I guess people don't expect to be able to play World of Warcraft without an internet connection, do they?

-Deozaan (March 19, 2010, 04:56 PM)

For world of warcraft, everything is online.  It's an online game, and not single player as the term generally means.  This is an excuse.  As Lashiec said, they could have devised a way to store things offline and upload.  Especially not to just lose progress.  All you have to do is look at the battlefield games to see that they're lying.  Those are multiplayer games, but each one of them has a single player mode that you can play offline.  Even their newest, BFBC2 has a single player mode that you can play without being connected.

I call shenanigans.

9356

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by wraith808 on March 19, 2010, 11:54 AM »

One more question-

The combo with this motherboard, http://www.newegg.co...Item=N82E16813131622, includes DDR2 800 memory.  The motherboard says DDR3 in the specs- but I'm assuming it will take DDR2 800 memory?

UPDATE: Nevermind... I see now. 

9357

DC Gamer Club / Re: Sniper Elite for $2 on Steam

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 08:23 PM »

Maybe with all of these people on steam with it, we can get some matchmaking together for a DC sniper hunt

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Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 08:22 PM »

Yeah, but I've had a bad experience with stock fans/pads... so I'm waffling on which to use.

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Living Room / Re: Command & Conquer Copies Ubisoft's Awful DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 08:20 PM »

That's cool... cooler if they'd abbreviated plz better

Oh... and notice that I put a reference to what the link goes to as a nod to f0dder.

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Living Room / Command & Conquer Copies Ubisoft's Awful DRM

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 01:13 PM »

http://bit.ly/acfGHj - (via Kotaku)

It seems that the wave has picked up speed... C&C requires that you have an internet connection to play.  And the representative had the nerve to advertise that C&C had no DRM...

9361

Living Room / Re: Howto: Torture people for money:French Contestants Torture People With Electric!

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 12:48 PM »

Well, they're just catching up to the Japanese level of game show it seems.

9362

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 12:22 PM »

That's what I thought... but this time I went on newegg and looked up arctic silver and got more than a page of hits, so I felt a bit overwhelmed

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DC Gamer Club / Re: Sniper Elite for $2 on Steam

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 12:21 PM »

I'm not sure what difficulty level I'm on... but depending on the range, it's almost *impossible* to get a headshot if a target is moving, and anything other than a headshot means that you're pretty much re-loading in many (most?) cases.  Contrast that with TF2, the BF series, CS... where I get headshots without thinking about it... and that's why I give it the hardcore when juxtaposed with them.  And yes, aim a bit higher... but then there's the breathing and heart rate to consider.  But it's fun nonetheless

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Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 09:57 AM »

Good points.  Thanks for the info!

One last question.  They have soooo many types of arctic silver... what's the difference?  I've always just bought a middle of the line one (last time I got AS5), but never really understood...anyone want to take a crack at that?

9365

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 07:47 AM »

What about the motherboard?  And suggestions on that?  I just didnt see the difference...

9366

DC Gamer Club / Re: Sniper Elite for $2 on Steam

« Last post by wraith808 on March 18, 2010, 07:41 AM »

Sniping in Sniper Elite is as different from sniping in other games as ... I can't think of a metaphor.  But it's *really* different.  But it's a decent enough game for $2- I got it for $2.50 at the Christmas Sale, and haven't regretted it.

EDIT: I didn't really tell what the difference was.  You have to think and reason like a sniper- that includes heart rate on shots, awareness of muzzle flash and report for relocation, windage... and you're using WW2 era rifles, so it's worse than a modern game is with these factors.  And there's also the patience factor.  There's not really been a WW2 era shooter with this level of detail towards sniping that I can remember.  So if you like being a sniper in other games, this will be cool.  If you like using the sniper rifle in other games (i.e. like the kills and such), this game will be a bit frustrating.

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Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by wraith808 on March 17, 2010, 08:22 PM »

Yes, it's very timely- I'm checking into upgrading my wife's computer after I finish my daughter's, and it seems that it's not as costly as I originally believed!

Two comparisons if anyone can weigh in.

Motherboard

• ASUS P5G41-M LE
• ASUS P5G41T-M LE

I don't see the difference... I would go with the cheaper one, but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything...

Processor

• Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5400 Wolfdale 2.7GHz
• Intel Celeron E3300 Wolfdale 2.5GHz

My wife does Sims3 and browse and some homeschool stuff... so Sims 3 is as intense at it gets.  Will the Dual Core be worth the $20 diff over the Celeron?  Is it something that she'd notice?  For video she'll have an x800 that I have laying around... AGP 256MB.

Thoughts?

9368

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by wraith808 on March 17, 2010, 02:01 PM »

Or for $200 you could get a Case+PSU (dunno how quiet), motherboard, CPU, and RAM that ought to best your current system in basically every way:
http://www.newegg.co...temList=Combo.352997
(onboard graphics)
Add your own hard drive, transfer the DVD-ROM from your old system, and you're set.

-JavaJones (March 17, 2010, 12:33 PM)

Actually, I don't know if this would be better than his current system, merely b/c of the CPU- celeron (even dual core) I'm really leery of vs a full P4... unless they've done some serious work on celerons that I don't know about in the past few iterations.

UPDATE: I did some research, as I've always dismissed Celerons, and it seems that they changed the die and increased the L2 cache, which are promising changes.  Does anyone know where there are comparisons of this new breed of Celerons vs non-Celeron processors?

9369

Living Room / Re: Ars Technica on the problem with adblocking

« Last post by wraith808 on March 16, 2010, 05:17 PM »

I don't buy it.  Their argument is that Ars is lying (basically) and that advertisers won't pay for impressions.  TV has done this for ages, and I can see where a firm would pay for impressions rather than clicks, as some sites generate loads of traffic and could bargain based upon that.

9370

Living Room / Re: Anyone playing Mass Effect 2 game yet?

« Last post by wraith808 on March 16, 2010, 05:14 PM »

Actually, I liked dungeon siege... 2 and the expansions, not so much, but the original was pretty fun.

9371

Living Room / Re: Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

« Last post by wraith808 on March 16, 2010, 04:36 PM »

It really depends on what you're *doing* with your computer whether spending more will get you the gains that justify the money, IMO.

9372

Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« Last post by wraith808 on March 16, 2010, 10:08 AM »

There is no excuse or justification to pirating someone's work.

-y0himba (March 16, 2010, 07:23 AM)

QFE. And your thoughts pretty much mirror my own.  I thought it very telling when someone in another thread on DC was very skeptical that all of the music on my computer was purchased in one form or another.  It's not that hard not to pirate- just decide not to do it and don't.  For any reason or no reason.  Two wrongs has *never* made anything right. 

But everyone has to realize that for themselves- or not.  No matter how much you tell someone, no matter how much protection that you put in, no matter how many PSAs you annoy your paying customers with, pirates will pirate, because it's a state of mind that *none* of that will change.

9373

Living Room / Re: Stephen's Weekly Tech News - Edition 5

« Last post by wraith808 on March 14, 2010, 10:31 PM »

(where he basically said "while we're aware of what we've advocated, please understand we're not willing to go to jail for standing by it")

-40hz (March 14, 2010, 09:16 PM)

Did you really expect him to go to jail for this?

9374

Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« Last post by wraith808 on March 13, 2010, 11:57 AM »

Well, the article was articulating something I said earlier- about the rock and a hard place this sort of DRM puts gamers in.  You either deny yourself the enjoyment of what is most likely a very good game- invariably doing nothing other than hurting yourself or contributing to the lower sales of the game which they will blame on the PC market dying rather than their DRM system.  Or you buy it, and support their decision to use DRM.

9375

Living Room / Re: Pirate vs. Paying Customer illustrated

« Last post by wraith808 on March 13, 2010, 10:53 AM »

I think there are:
1. I know what URLs I've posted and have a record of them.  This helps me not to post the same thing over again, and be able to go back to the reference for something that I've posted earlier more easily.
2. There are several developer tools that I've been experimenting with for posting from bit.ly automatically to other places (and they've been experimenting with them too- they already have an interface to gmail, facebook, and pop in addition to twitter).  I have various groups of people that I interact with over different mediums (including print), and to be able to post all at once rather than from each individually is a great timesaver.
3. I'm already using it for twitter, so not to have a different URL to use for different mediums helps also.

I've thought about creating my own url shortening service to address issues 1 & 3 ... maybe I should take that approach (though using bit.ly is so easy...)