Father Xmas

If it's anything like my parent's Dim 4600, there are two SATA I ports on the motherboard so why would you need an adapter? I believe you would need to set a jumper on the drive for SATA I compatibility/speed.

I have no experience with an adapter like that but I did use a PCI to ATA 66 controller card a very long time ago (circa 1999) and it worked well enough. I imagine that a SATA controller card is similar.

They would just give him a bad case of acne.

The 7th is also launch day for that other expansion for that other MMO.

If you didn't notice the link from where those pictures first came from, here. More winged vans. And I thought Dekotora was funky.

Her face looked thinner than I remembered it from Terminator. And yes, in heels and a short skirt her legs look like they go on forever.

Good job Mr. Paris.

When they confronted the Chinese workers we spoke to them in Chinese (something like "tell her where he is or she'll start shooting because she's crazy" or something like that).

Beckett asked if he learned to speak Chinese while on an exchange program and he said no he learned it from his favorite TV show from 5 years ago.

Oh no, there not the same. The HD 5870 is faster than the HD 6850, at least at stock clocks by around 20-25%.

Also note that the HD 5870 uses, worse case, about 60 watts more power, hence the need for a 2nd PCIe power connector (one 6-pin and one 8-pin in this case). Not to mention that the HD 5870 is a long card.

That all said, a card that's 20% slower for 1/3rd of the cost and uses a lot less power, which means less heat produced, is attractive. Now if you think the HD 6750 is a slouch it's performance is similar to the GTX 285 or a stock clock GTX 460 1GB card.

Spider-Man's webs from the 70's TV show look suspiciously like 3/8" nylon rope.

Still I'm of the opinion that if the special effect can be done with practical with a bit of digital touchup Vs total CGI, practical looks better.

Not only we had the regular Adam Baldwin on Chuck but Summer Glau as this week's Gretta. Is she ever offered a role where she isn't crazed in some way?

And Nathon Fillian slipped another subtle (or not so subtle) Firefly reference in tonight's Castle.

Well NewEgg is actually a little cheaper before rebate but I can understand the attraction of being able to touch it, pick it off the shelf and bring it right home to install it.

That's because the superhero universes tend to sold of piecemeal to movie studios. The surprising thing is Superman and Batman franchises are WB which own DC. You would think they would embrace the shared universe the way Marvel did with Iron Man, Hulk and their planned Avengers related properties.

But I think WB movie division simply thinks about movies one franchise at a time. The idea that multiple franchises are related is something so foreign to them that they haven't come up with a way to share/hide profits from such a venture.

Well, marketing.

For a while the rumors had what we have today as the HD 6850 and 6870 possibly being called the HD 6750 and 6770. But performance and price wise AMD were targeting nVidia's GTX 460 1GB and GTX 470 and at those price and performance points they thought they should have the HD 68xx designation.

Now to compete with the GTX 580 and a possible future GTX 570, AMD is going to have the HD 6970 and HD 6950 and they will replace the HD 5870.

The HD 5870 is faster than the HD 6870 and AMD should be releasing the HD 69xx series mid December, at least that's what the various sites say the NDA about them expires. But there are likely to be competing with and priced similar to the GTX 580 at around $500.

And there can be something that resembles a bargain at BestBuy. This GTX 460 768MB for $175 is a steal if you consider the fact that they are selling HD 5770s in the $180-200 range. NewEgg has that card for $170, $140 after rebate (and with HAWX 2).

It's Nolan who wants to stay away from the super powered, supernatural or super science characters. It's Nolan who wants to stay close to realism or at least a reasonably believable facsimile of one.

Yes you could have Poison Ivy as an eco-terrorist with bioweapons derived from nature. Too bad they already sort of played that card with Scarecrow.

Yes they could have a Catwoman, but she really isn't a big heavy, merely a talented thief.

Zombies at the door, panic sets in, you saw off what's fastest. But how did he get off the roof of a multistory building with one hand and not be street pizza for zombies?

Shane took advantage of the situation. No sympathy for him. I don't blame Laurie because we have no idea how long it's been. It may have taken Shane a quite a bit of time to wear her down.

As for Shane's leadership, he's being very conservative with the limited resources they have. But his points were quite valid. If it wasn't for the weapons cache, I could see him rally people to his side since Merle had few friends among the group.

As for the stereotypical redneck in a wife beater, again the more removed from the rest of civilization you are, the less likely you would have likely been overrun. I'm guessing that they really didn't have a lot of neighbors nearby before the ZA so he could get away with his archaic attitudes. I'm betting these are the first women his wife has been able to socialize with in a very long time.

Of course Shane going off on him was a bit much. Authority good, tyranny bad.

Well over the years with the tweaking of the XP curve, by adjusting the XP of critters at certain levels, the addition of Patrol XP to provide a bonus and the lowering of the debt cap to something like 40% of what it was back in the day, you no longer seem to languish in the 30s as I remembered it.

Also remember at the higher levels, after 32, you only get level picks every three levels with two doses of three slots in between. So the thrill of new powers comes less often which might also be why leveling feels slower. It's more about making your existing powers better than getting a new one that feels like a game changer.

Well it seems you have enough power available for pretty much anything, assuming you are reading that sticker right. I assume it was one the the Dell XMS gaming PCs.

The HD 5850 may be disappearing off of the shelves because the HD 6870 essentially replaces it. A little faster than the HD 5850. The HD 6850 is a little slower than the HD 5850 but much faster than the HD 5830 it's replacing in the lineup.

On the nVidia side of things we have the GTX 460. It comes in two varieties, a slower one with 768MB of memory and a faster one with 1GB of memory. The difference besides the amount of memory is the width of the memory bus (192bit Vs 256bit) and the number of raster backends, 24 Vs 32.

Performance wise it's all over the charts depending on the game and settings and how overclocked the card is, the GPU on a GTX 460 is very overclockable, I've seen factory OC as high as 20% above stock. Performance at stock clocks for the 768MB version is about 180% of an 8800GT, the 1GB version about 195%.

Compare that to 145% for an HD 5770, 200% for an HD 6850, 210% for an HD 5850 and 235% for an HD 6870. These are all averages of benchmarks across a number of games at 1920x1200 with 4xAA when available, according to the charts at TechPowerUp (I'm using the similar 9800GT as the baseline). No idea how well those numbers would match performance gains in this game.

There is also the slower GTS 450 which is slower than the HD 5770 and the GTX 470 which is about the same performance as the HD 6870, again at original stock clocks.