Father Xmas

Computer hardware that is.

Drives have names. Systems have names. I picked up a Black Friday external 2TB drive which I have named "Hammer Space" to offload backups and media files. The rest of my hard drives are named after characters from various anime series I was watching around the time I first formatted them.

So my question is do you name your hard drives/system and if you do after what?

I bought five things without a problem. Logged into my account first and then went to the store. Also made sure I enabled all the scripts at the site (I use noscript) and made sure Adblock Plus wasn't filtering anything either.

Yes the lack of a shopping cart is annoying. I bet someone has a patent on that for e-commerce.

I noticed that the full Mac and Architect Editions are no longer for sale. This makes the Mac pack and getting one of the first two boosters for $5 impossible without the sale now, reason why I bought two more things than I planned to.

Pick up several once I noticed that the Arch and Mac full editions aren't for sale anymore so that was no longer an option for their "cheap" goodies. Also got the wedding pack, I have a character in need better formal wear.

Also bit the bullet and got the science pack so I finally can height change so I can have a normal size person inside my large power suit. I'm still mad that they made that a booster feature however.

I'm expecting a call from my credit card company about multiple $5 purchases within 10 minutes. NCSoft needs a store with a shopping cart.

Sadly what Jeff and Lester try to do I know people who do that type of thing for extra income.

An acquaintance of mine works at Toys R Us, for years. He picks up the rare collectible toys out of the incoming shipments, buys them with his employee discount, and stores them for six months and then sells them on e-bay for multiple times what he payed for them. Things like sports figures, Transformer variants, etc.

I remember him trying to figure out a non-invasive method to determine which Yugioh booster pacts had the ultra rare foil cards using a very precise scale and a very sensitive metal detector. Don't think he ever solved that problem.

Yes it's a big difference between that and back paying hot merchandise you squirreled away.

Gee, did you try GOOGLE?

This was the 2nd link it gave me for "pvponline city of heroes", a post from back from the old forum days.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/archi.../t-113161.html

Has the links to nearly all the strips about CoH/V from webcomics.

The actual links may not work as PVPOnline revamped it's website since then but it does have the dates of the strips so you can look it up in PVPOnline's current archive.

Yea, it's a ploy to attract the youth crowd to watch. Look pretty young people, we're just like MTV, please stay and watch and give us good 18-39 ratings, pretty please.

Still, a 3/4 panel weekday strip will usually be in the format of;

Panel 1) repeat of previous last panel, maybe from a different viewpoint
Panel 2/3) something new story related
Panel 4) either something new story related or micro cliffhanger for a fight scene

rinse and repeat. Can't really move the story along quickly that way. One reason I don't read Spider-man, The Phantom or Flash Gordon anymore. I use to eat them up, including Dick Tracy, when I was a kid, now it's just to glacially slow.

It was only easy to hit the cap after the market came into being. Before then it was a lot of work for nothing but bragging rights, now with something to spend all that inf on, it has become more mainstream.

... and don't call him Shirley.

No, always been. It's a derogatory term derived from Gypsy. Gypsies are another name from the Romani, a European ethnic group that is still being persecuted today in France as well as other European countries, not to mention being rounded up and killed in WW 2 in Germany or by Stalin in the Soviet Union as undesirables.

Peruse this, antiziganism.

That came out darker than I intended. More like knowing that you had died triggered a conflict in your psyche that rejects whatever it was that reanimated you.

Those that stayed behind were fairly religious, if they were all like Caine, and believed that they are merely shadows of their former selves, soulless copies, it's that self awareness that triggers the shutdown. Can you live with yourself if you don't think that you are you? The aliens may simply considered it would be cruel to those who were reanimated to be burdened with such thoughts.

It's the old transporter debate. When you are teleported, is the you that materialized at the other end the same person that was dematerialized?

I saw it, it was good. Now how many of you were mentally comparing each scene in the movie with the one from the novel? That actually was the most distracting part to me as I couldn't help myself doing that rather than simply enjoying the film. Didn't really miss the parts they dropped and I liked showing instead of explaining, such as what Hermione did to protect her parents. Too many instances of "lets explain things in great detail" in the last few novels.

I also may have been in mourning over my favorite theater which was bought out back in March. For a while they were keeping all the specials from the old management including discount Tuesday's where all tickets to all showings, including 3D, was at one low price, less than even the standard matinee price along with a couple dollar discount on a small soda and popcorn. It was still in effect last August when I went to Scott Pilgrim but alas that's all gone now.

Finally watched this tonight. Interesting.

Now here's a thought, they only stayed alive as long as they didn't remember. Ignorance is life, knowledge is death.

I wonder if Rush can use the restored shuttle's systems as a baseline to help him understand Destiny more.

Singing an old tune here, the problem is the uncontrolled growth in the inf supply due to high inf payouts and precious little in the way of inf destruction. Older inf sinks are no longer significant and the side effect of farming for purples is the creation of a whole lot of inf or simply farming FOR inf so they can buy want they want.

Hey before IOs, standard enhancement decay was the way that eliminated a good chunk of inf before your 30s. Next was the tailor whose prices rose with your level. But now, IOs you make once and there are more ways to get a free or discount costume change than I care to list.

Maybe the conversion of merits to A-merits could eat some of the money supply but I doubt it. Players would simply inf farm to get their 50 million.

So very soon, maybe we are already there, the IO economy is going to be like Zimbabwe.

I caught bits of it last week, between commercials of whatever I was watching. Superficially it has the same look, aircraft hanger, audience standing, a Stig, guests driving the course (look it's Buzz Aldrin) but I didn't watch enough of it to get a feel of the interaction of the hosts. That's where the BBC version excels. There is a genuine chemistry there and that's going to be the toughest thing to achieve.

Looks good.

As for the memory confusion, that's why I prefer using the DDR3-xxxx designation rather than the PC3-yyyyy designation for memory. yyyyy = 8 times xxxx and then truncated, sometimes to the nearest 100 or 10. NewEgg for instance list three different PC3- selections for DDR3-1333 memory, PC3-10600, PC3-10660 and PC3-10666. 1333 is the effective clock speed of the memory in MHz, 10666 is the maximum bandwidth speed of the memory in megabytes per second.

As for memory timings, the "standard" timings for DDR3-1333 is Cas 9. The other three timing numbers tend to relate to the first so I tend to ignore them. Also simply for information sake the standard voltage for DDR3 memory is 1.5 volts. One way, the most common way, to get better timings is to overvolt the memory, which is why you see a lot of memory running at 1.65 volts with Cas 7 or 8 timings.

For memory clocked at the same speed, a lower Cas number means higher memory performance. A poor analogy is Cas timings are to memory as average seek times are to hard drives. However with the rest of the memory subsystem, the memory caches in the CPU, the actual performance improvement isn't all that much in most real world applications, only a couple of percent.

I concur. First use /showfps 1 to display your frame rate and travel somewhere where the terrain is reasonably complicated like the Rogue Isles or Faultline looking toward the dam. Adjusting your graphic settings from these locations to find what's acceptable for you, trading pretty for frame rate, is better than somewhere less complex like indoors at the tailor.

1920x1200 is much too high for a middle to low end GPU. Don't forget that laptop GPUs are less powerful than similarly named desktop GPUs. The 8700M is about as powerful as a desktop 8600GT. So drop the resolution to a lower 16:10 ratio such as 1680x1050 or 1440x900. Sadly display resolution has increased much faster for a fixed price than GPU performance, meaning it's too easy to get a high resolution display but not a GPU that could drive games at the full resolution at a reasonable frame rate.

Also since the resolution setting is one of the few if not only graphics setting that requires you to restart the game, I find it's best to adjust this first before tuning the rest of the options.

It's best to start adjusting from a reasonable baseline. So no AA, none of the UM settings so simple shadows, no environmental reflections. World detail should be 100%. Check your frame rate and if it's acceptable then start trying out the higher option settings, one and a time while checking how each affect your frame rate, until you find settings that you can live with.

I have a character who's a "Gray" Roswell alien. I went out of my way not to take the fitness pool, not even swift to improve his flight speed (he doesn't walk/run at any time due to his diminutive body and large head).

But now like a player with a costume piece that's been removed from the game and can't visit the tailor to tweak his costume because they would lose that piece, I'm in the similar situation with respec because it would grant this character all of the fitness pool.

Sorry, often I over explain things and confuse the listener about their issues.

Yes, the "official" memory speed for an i7-920 is DDR3-1066, anything faster is considered a hack by Intel. But everyone, as in motherboard manufacturers, does it anyways.

I don't see how system memory would affect what seems to be a driver/card issue. Maybe if the memory is glitchy but if that's the case you should see more software crashing. You could download the memtest86+ ISO, burn a CD (not a DVD) with it and then run it overnight.

Yes, it's called retooling the show. Someone somewhere thought the show needed female regulars that help than simply being the damsel/love interest of the week.

CW is also retooling Nikita because they are losing a large chunk of young women from Vampire Diaries, so they are going to add a some romance for Nikita during the 2nd half of the season.

No MaelwysAlts, you still multiple by 2 with DDR3 memory to get it's rated speed. You are thinking about maximum memory bandwidth with triple channel memory.

Actually memory seems to be running a tad slow, more like DDR3-1066 than either 1333 or 1600. I don't believe idle CPU multiplier reduction affects reported memory speed, notice your CPU in the first screenshot is only running with a 12x clock multiplier instead of 20x or more if the CPU is busy.