Father Xmas

Speaking of the GETOFFMYLAWN brigade.

Last month at the market I noticed the cover of Maxim, a gorgeous lass so I pulled it up a bit out from behind the other magazines to see who she was.

It was our gawky little Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Michelle Trachtenburg, all grown up and disturbingly sexy (she's now 25).

I died a little inside.

Here's the problem. Below I listed from TechPowerUP what they rate the 3 cards as follow at 1920x1200 and 2560x1280 along with maximum power according to nVidia and the prices from Memory Express.

GTX 560Ti - 100/100 - 170 watts - $260
GTX 570 - 116/117 - 219 watts - $375
GTX 580 - 134/137 - 244 watts - $530

So going from the GTX 560Ti to a GTX 570, it will cost you 44% more for 16-17% better performance and 29% more power (49 watts).

Going from the GTX 570 to a GTX 580 will cost you 41% more for 16-17% better performance and 11% more power (25 watts).

Going from the GTX 560Ti to a GTX 580 will cost you 104% more for 34-37% better performance and 43% more power (74 watts).

So on one hand, I would normally council buying the fastest video card your budget can handle. However I have a tough time rationalizing the GTX 580 at all and have trouble rationalizing buying a GTX 570 over the 560Ti when we are talking $115 for less than a 20% performance boost.

I'm just trying to lay out the facts here. If you are frame rate sensitive the extra cost for a 570 or 580 may be justified as their modest performance gains may be able to raise the minimum frame rates to levels that are unnoticeable. On the other hand we are talking keeping $115 to $270 in your pocket.

I expect it to be very visually entertaining, much like Sin City and 300, but for a professional movie critic, I don't expect it has all that great of a story or superb acting which is what they are looking at. But for those who are into western comics and mange/anime, it will be rated fairly high.

The ogg files are in the various sound pigg files. That directory structure, the same that's used by add-ons like vidiotmaps and splasher, is a way the devs set up to allow them to try out various replacement items like textures and sounds (as well as geometry) without the need to "compile" them into the correct pigg file.

Someone needs to make the alarm sound from "A Fist Full of Yen" from Kentucky Fried Movie. It's a guy going "Waa Waa" into a megaphone. Quiet distinctive.

Then again so is "Hey over here".

2nd Guyver movie was better, well at least more serious (it stared Solid Snake ).

Not a lot you can do with rubber suited monsters in bright light and make them realistic and/or scary.

It gets strange at the end of season 1. Then they start eating the stars leaving the geek and the hot blond with the pixie cut (she's the only reason I watched season two) and Rex. I caught part of one episode of season 4 on BBC America and it still looks like they are trudging along with additional new cast members including another cute girl Jess and Dr. Bashir from DS9 playing the heavy.

But sadly in spite of itself, The Last Airbender was still one of the top 20 grossing films last year and grossed $320 million worldwide.

The problem with translating comic or animation to live action is what is very easy to do, have fantastic worlds, impossible effects, etc. is costly to do in live action. The more different a comic or animated world is from ours, the costlier it becomes to make "real". The majority of superhero films are "easy" to translate. Take the world outside your window and add a guy in spandex/leather/power suit and give him someone/thing to fight. However the more different the world is from ours, then corners start to get cut and with that some or most of the uniqueness of the setting.

So can you have rampaging motorcycle riding youth tooling through a destroyed Manhattan like some American Mad Max film. That's going to cost a pretty penny. How about Tetsuo's monstrous transformation? I have a feeling that if this honestly moves forward we will end up with cuts like the missing giant mutant psychic squid from Watchmen. They will compromise too much of the original setting so even on the surface, ignoring the Japan to US shift of location, to still be Akira.

Memory isn't as big of a factor as most people think. The cause for the performance difference between the 768MB and 1GB GTX 460 is the fact the 768MB has only 3/4rds the memory bandwidth of the 1GB version and not the difference in the amount of memory.

As for the HD 5750 Vs the GTX 460 768MB, generally the GTX 460 768MB easily beats out the HD 5770 in multiple game benchmarks.

There's just some minor disagreement on the voltage cap for memory, whether or not Intel lowered it from 1.65 volts max on the older i3/i5/i7 series to 1.6 volts max.

Hollywood doesn't believe that the North American public at large would see a movie in mass that has an Asian leading man and set in a futuristic Tokyo. Therefore they translated the location from Neotokyo to New Manhattan and the cast from Japanese to pretty white boys.

Don't see anything bad.

All that's left of the guts is your choice of memory.

The GT 430 is a strange bird. It's a mutant cousin of the 9500GT. On one hand it has 3x the CUDA processors and 2x the raster units of the 9500GT. But on the downside it has 1/2 of the texture units.

So it can compute shaders faster, write pixels out faster but handles textures slower. Tom's lists it faster than the 9500GT. Adjusted for clock speed we are talking 3x faster compute, 2.5x faster pixel processing and 2/3rds the texture processing. My SWAG is around 25% faster in modern (shader happy) games.

For what you are looking to do it should be reasonable.

Funny thing I was just reading about a zetabyte file system (ZFS). A zetabyte is 1000x bigger than an exabyte.

64-bit address space is about 18.44 exabytes.

Once upon a decade ago I was with a colleague on a business trip to Northern Ireland. The company we worked for made manufacturing equipment for the clothing industry and we were visiting customers to find out what features they would be looking for in an upgraded product.

At one plant we were talking to their senior man about how many units were produced in a week. He replied some rather large number of bras and knickers (the units he used were in hundred dozens) and my colleague, who was wearing a skirt at the time and was perched on a rather tall drafting chair, told their man that "knickers weren't popular in the US". He raised an eyebrow and I nearly lost my composure trying to keep myself from bursting into laughter. I leaned over to my comrade and told her what knickers were in this context (she thought they were little shorts for boys). She flushed red and quickly backpedaled that statement.

After Northern Island we visited London where there was a misunderstanding about "bangers and mash" but that's another story.

Glad to hear it. So what did you get?

I find hoofing it about pre travel power outside to be harder than the original CoH zones but easier than the original Hollows in terms of group size and level disparity. I find that in CoV it's so much easier to turn a corner and be way over your head than in CoH.

As for unique critter groups, they're just different and new so I hadn't had the experience to know how to tackle them with minimal effort. Which critter in that mob should I attack first? Which critter is the "sapper" or "sorcerer" or "engineer" and should be singled out? With alts over the years I've learned how to fight the mobs found from level 1-30 in CoH without even thinking about it.

Coming soon to SyFy, Aliens Vs Sharktopus.

I watched this Friday. Not a bad end for a short run series. Wifey still doesn't get it when Orwell tells her "Your husband loves you very much.", present tense. Thought she suspected back during the Lich episodes when he said some phrase he had used back before Vince "died".

I think a nice 1600x900 or 1680x1050 would work well with an HD 5770. Of course normal people choose by it's physical size and not the resolution.