Father Xmas

Even though the transfer rate of SATA II SSDs are in the 200MB/s+ range while the current crop of 1TB, 7200RPM hard drives are in the 100MB/s range, that doubling of speed isn't what makes SSDs seem fast, it's the nearly non-existent seek times.

Conventional hard drives, even the 10K RPM raptors, still have seek times in the 10-15ms range. That may not seem like a lot but that's 1 to 1.5MB worth of data NOT being transferred because of the average time for a single seek.

Let's look at it another way. HD Tune, a drive benchmarking tool, has a random seek test that will report the time it takes to randomly seek and read X amount of data. On a 1TB hard drive it takes 15 milliseconds, 0.015 seconds, to randomly read 4KB of data and 24 milliseconds to read 1MB of data. For a run of the mill year old SSD the times are 0.04 milliseconds, 0.00004 seconds, for 4KB and 3.7 milliseconds for 1MB (times taken from here, using the IBM X25-M as the SSD). That's 275 times faster for 4KB, 6.8 times faster for 1MB. The sequential transfer rates on average are 242MB/s for the SSD and 116MB/s for the hard drive, which is only a 2.1 times difference.

So while the next gen SSD will have even faster sequential transfer rates, over 400MB/s, it's still the near zero time "seek" that really makes an SSD fast compared to a hard drive.

I think everybody has a different idea as to what "Amazon" is. Problem is finding a tall woman in Hollywood who has the acting chops, the body tone and the curves. I think that's because some of those traits have been selected out of the Hollywood gene pool for a couple of decades now. That's why they are mostly 5' 6", 100lbs, with breast implants and the acting skills of a rutabaga.

At least Palicki is 5' 11".

As for the top being tight, I think that's to keep her from having a costume malfunction while doing those action scenes, and to keep down the chaffing.

Okay I may be especially dim here but before Rose I don't remember the Doctor getting romantically involved with his female companions. It always struck me, with maybe Romana being the exception, that he thought of his companions as clever curious children than potential bed warmers. I never thought of the Doctor's companion is to the Doctor as a Bond girl is to Bond.

As Amy pointed out last season, she likes winding the Doctor up when she flirts with him since he gets all flustered. Heck, she's just flirty, even with herself. If anything Rory is someone the Doctor can throw at Amy when he doesn't want to deal with her, like in the Red Nose Special Time and Space.

What I would love to see is an episode where Rory gets some attention and see Amy get jealous.

You all are a bunch of wimps. I remember needing to circumvent Britannia in Ultima IV like three times on a quest just to get everything to make climbing gear so I can cut through the mountains instead of going around and around.

And with all the various short cuts now in CoH/V that make travel many times faster between zones, the only problem you could have is keeping the team together as you travel to the next mission since the longer the time between missions, the greater the chance someone will go off and train or hit the stores along the way.

I swear half the people who hate AE babies want exactly what they have for regular play, near zero travel time between missions. Then what's the point of zones to begin with? What's next, complaining the zone is too big like IP? Well boo flippin hoo!

[/rant]

I wouldn't recommend the heatsink in my $1350 build due to the constant movement of the rig. It's a great heatsink but as one review pointed out it can twist due to the how it's held in place. A heatsink with multiple connections between the heatsink and the bracket used to connect it to the motherboard would be better. A good source for heatsink reviews for me are the ones at FrostyTech. Also X-Bit Labs have numerous reviews of heatsinks but not a simple chart like you find in whatever latest review at FrostyTech that ranks them.

I'm sorry I can't be more helpful in this as my experience with any real time encoder is basically nil. The product page says anything faster than a 933MHz PIII but they also say you should keep CPU usage below 75%, hence the multiple cores and fast clock speed. The extra cores should help handle any miscellaneous processes while the encoder is blasting away on it's own core (assuming the encoder isn't multithreaded).

The 4GB of memory should be enough for that app and the OS to coexist without the need for any paging to disk.

Again sorry I can't be more help. Have you tried any AV forums or web sites that cater to real time encoding, they may be able to provide better recommendations.

As long as it doesn't try to use the Intel graphics for the desktop and switch to the nVidia discrete GPU for gaming (nVidia Optimus Technolgy). There seems to be a problem with laptops that use that and this game. Otherwise it should rock.

Yes, microATX should fix in an ATX case fine, there are mounting points shared in common between microATX and ATX however the case does need to have the mounting points for the "bottom" edge of the microATX board. I haven't come across a case yet that can't handle it. Other than that the primary difference is an ATX MB has up to 7 expansion board slots where the shorter microATX only has 4.

The stock heatsink should be adequate but it's not very good. Expect the CPU to run hot so hopefully you have good air flow.

Interesting thing I found out last night. I'm on dial-up and I have two different Internet backbones I can connect to. Right now I can look at the boards from either network but I can only login on one, the other reports back with some kind of failure. I'll try to see how different their routes are tonight.

Okay, they fixed the costume to my satisfaction. Now it's a matter of story whether I like it or not.

First I hated Marcel every time he was on Top Chef. However molecular gastronomy is an interesting, high tech way of preparing foods and flavors. Should it be on SyFy, no. Faceoff, the makeup effects reality show at least had some relationship to science fiction/fantasy TV and movies.

Second, SyFy/Sci-Fi Channel has been a part of USA Networks since 1992. Now USA Networks was originally owned by both Paramount and Universal. Paramount was sold to Viacom in 94 and in 97 sold it's rights to USA to Universal. Universal sold it off in 98. In 2000 Universal was bought by Vivendi who bought back USA Networks. In 2004 USA was partially sold off to NBC which which changed USA Networks to NBC Universal.

That's when it started to move away from old sci-fi series and movies into new broader range of shows. The rebranding and name change to SyFy simply gives up any remaining pretext that this is a channel devoted to sci-fi TV, movies and mini-series.

I always liked Footfall (US builds an Orion to fight them) but it'll be too strange for the general public to succeed.

The War Agaist of Chtorr series is also too unusual for the general public due to the unique way the Earth is invaded. Of course you could say the same thing about the movie version of The Day of the Triffids but at least Triffids' movie had an upbeat ending, at least on a small scale, where all of the Chtorr novels are just depressing.

For video compression I believe more cores/threads the better. Not sure about that Adobe product however. The cheapest tri-core at NewEgg is a 2.9GHz Athlon II X3 435 for $72, the 3.2GHZ X3 450 for $80. The cheapest quad is the $100 3.0GHz Athlon II X4 640 and I think that's too much of your limited budget.

DDR3 memory is fairly cheap today, less than $15 a gigabyte for basic memory. Actually it's more like 2GB (2x1GB) DDR3-1333 CAS 9 for less than $30, 4GB (2x2GB) for less than $50.

As for a motherboard one based on the 880G chipset. There are still a few motherboards using one of the AMD 7xxG series chipsets but not from any of the big name motherboard companies.

Most of the 880G microATX MBs still use the older SB710 southbridge so they don't support SATA III (6.0Gb/s), no loss since I doubt you are planning to use one of the new SATA III solid state drives on the market. They are split between having 2 or 4 DDR3 memory slots and most are under $80 new.

You should be able to find an acceptable combo for around. Here is an example.

BIOSTAR A880G+ - $70
AMD Athlon II X3 450 - $80
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 Model F3-10666CL9D-4GBNS - $40

Total - $190

Only drawbacks with the motherboard is no SATA III, only 2 ram slots and 6 speaker audio.

I'm the same opinion as Rodion, SJ for melee, flight for ranged. Not a hard rule but 90% of the time true. Only break it for theme reasons.

I still come up with 3GB down per month. Toss in a 100MB a month on average for patches (yes that's Issue sized patches). Problem then is web browsing and forum access (animated avatars can be a b****).

Using the somewhat large 10KB/s as an average.

20 hrs/week = 72,000s x 10 KB/s = 720,000 KB/w

720,000 KB/w / 7 * 365 / 12 = 3,128,528 KB/m / 1024 / 1024 = 2.98 GB/m

As an subscription based game, I kept everything. As for e-mails, I have all of them since 1988 when I first went online with Compuserve, archieved away. Having all of the ones for NCSoft that list all of the codes I've used since 2004 is trivial in comparison.

Well CPU-Z can show you the current memory settings. Probably some utility bundled with the motherboard can as well.

For CPU temps I would say anything under 60C is good, 50C great, even fantastic if you already tried OCing.

I simply gave up because of dynamic IPs. Remember if you are in this situation, the IP you have today can be someone else's tomorrow. Likely not a problem with this game due to it's relatively low population but may be a worry for something like bank account access.

I think he means animated series only had 13 episodes. Computer assisted paint and compositing has made animation a bit less tedious and that allows more than a 13 episode season run for the same budget.

For me at least, knock on wood veneer, I can get back on reliably again. Maybe it was some routing issue between me and the servers.

It depends on the mood I'm in.

If I feel playful, I play my Illusion/Kinetic controller because deceiving critters so they smack each other around, heal me instead, protect my with a force field generator, trundle into the middle of their group and explode, pound on a barrel full of dynamite until it explodes, etc. NEVER GETS OLD.

If I feel the need to let out some aggression I run one of my scrappers or brutes because cutting down hoards of critters is FUN.

If I feel the need to be protective I play my tank. "Over here you uglies, come get some!" and pull the alpha strikes.

So it depends how I'm feeling that day.

Pre-SSS Rodgers is probably a different actor with a mapped Chris Evens face. Did you see The Social Network? The twins were two unrelated actors with one's face mapped onto the other.

But what do I do with the shipping container full of strawberry toaster pastry I was planning on sending to Fox?

I have the same problem Zombie. I'm now up at the public library and got on but gave up after an hour at home. The pages partially load, adblock shows me that several elements are loaded, namely vBulletin scripts but then nothing. I did get to the tech board once but hung when I tried to login.

This is annoying the crap out of me.

It was on 6:30 PM EDT on CN Friday night.

It was an episode based around Superdickery.

Lex exposes Superman, without his knowledge, to Red Kryptonite. Hilarity ensues as various classic SD covers are recreated until the effects wear off.