Father Xmas

I haven't seen the Jersey Shore either, simply because I still remember MTV as a channel that ran music videos and not reality shows.

However there was an episode of the show Bones this season where the title character (a hot, brilliant but utterly lacking in awareness of popular culture), a forensic anthropologist, got hooked on the Jersey Shore but thought it a documentary about a unique sub-culture. Most of her commentary to her FBI partner during the episode sounded like it was lifted from a nature documentary when the case they are working on leads them to, the New Jersey shore.

Well I thought it was funny.

I wonder how much of this is caused by overly positive TV of the 70s conflicting with the reality of the 70s and how that had an impact on the psyche of creators starting in the mid 80s.

We had the TV world of The Brady Bunch, Good Times, other TV family sit-coms. Dramas where good always defeat evil. The police always caught the bad guy. The PI's always solved the mystery. Tragedy rarely happened. Now conflict it with the reality of recession, the "loss" of Vietnam, the Nixon near impeachment, the oil crisis, Three Mile Island. Escalating divorce rates. Inflation.

The real world was nearly the antithesis of the world portrayed on TV and in comics. It only seems natural for all of those real world influences to burst the dam of unreality on TV and in comics. And in cases of extreme repression, the pendulum swung a bit to far the other way. Now everyone is deeply flawed. Not with just one or two problems but the whole list of maladies mentioned in a Psyche 101 textbook.

It's swung so far over that we have become cynical to the extreme. We don't believe there are heroes anymore. And if we found one we would dredge through their lives looking for a flaw that could be amplified by mass media to tear them down. Everyone must have an ulterior motive. A hero must be overcompensating for something horrible he did in his past. "So when have you stopped beating your wife?"

It's not enough to provide an outline of a character's history to an actor so they can understand the motivation and use it to create a believable but character. No we have to have episode upon episode where their past is brought up instead of providing just a hint of insight every so often. No, if we don't spell it out in 50 foot tall letters what their problems are the audience simply won't get it.

So now instead of providing a false but happy world on TV, we get one with characters so flawed that we actually feel good that we aren't as screwed up as them. That our day to day lives feel peachy in comparison.

Sounds like a 3rd person version of Cloverfield. You just have a camera follow a group of bystanders while stuff happens all around them, and you root for them to die.

Finally got around to watch it today, it was enjoyable. Seriously disliked her parents for all the reasons given. The fixing the car at the end bit was fun.

So the daughter can probe deeper if she touches the subject. There is a good chance for trauma in that. Then again most of her mistakes over the last few episodes could have been avoided. Not sure if she's going to get all "touchy" with her classmates.

The Stig farm was funny. Very Monty Python "twit" humour.

It was a reasonable episode. Explained a lot about Kurt being targeted.

Puck is reformable, the time in Juvenal showed Puck that he's only a big fish in a small pond. That should encourage him to change.

Brittany was very Lita Ford in that girls number.

I think in relative terms. While the performance difference between a $75 and a $300 video card is around 3x, the performance difference between a $75 and $300 cpu in gaming with a single GPU, assuming the game doesn't scale beyond two cores, is only 25-30%.

A 2.8GHz Athlon II dual core is faster than the 3.0GHz Athlon X2, any Pentium D ever and even the lower clock speed 1st generation Core 2 Duos. Yes it's a low end CPU today but it isn't a slouch either.

One odd thing about the 580 is nVidia's drivers cap power use, by down clocking the card and only for the extreme burn in apps FurMark and OCCT saying it's not needed in normal games. These two apps are used by the majority of review sites to determine worse case power requirements for a video card. So nVidia tweaked a driver to "game" a power usage benchmark.

By capping power use the FurMark scores for this card, which does report a card's performance in FPS, a GTX 580 is reported as less powerful than an HD 5850. Heck a factory OC GTX 460 768MB is faster than the "power fudged" GTX 580. AnandTech found another stress testing app (they won't reveal the name to prevent nVidia from adding it to their exception list) shows the card drawing 25 watts less than the GTX 480 under stress but still 75 watts more than the HD 5870.

nVidia did fix some of the power problems the GTX 480 had, for instance simply idling or playing back video, power use is significantly lower on the GTX 580. Of course you don't spend $500 on a video card to play back video or idle at the desktop.

Yes, it is the fastest single GPU video card out there. It's about 1/3rd faster than an HD 5870. It's about 15% faster than the GTX 480. The HD 69xx series is suppose to off of NDA mid December. So if you want to spend more than $250 on a HD 6870 I would also counsel waiting a month and see what AMD has.

Problem is being an HP you can't expect them to have released any BIOS upgrades that would allow it to recognize anything other than the original 1st generation of the Core 2 Duo E6xx0 family. And I mean Core 2 Duo, not the Pentium E6xxx series since they run at a lower voltage. A voltage the BIOS wouldn't know to set. You may be able to find on e-bay or a store that sells used system one of these older Core 2s. No idea at what price.

As for the video card, I believe the wattage range for an x1650 is in the same range as a HD 5570 so it should work. The HD 5570 should be noticeably faster.

Actually I was commenting about Mandu's initial assessment.

Hey, you just got superpowers, you earn the right to be a bit giddy until you learn what it means to be a Lantern.

Had a group of anime/comic book/video game friends try out the game back in August of 2004 and decided to tag along.

We had played Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast together a few years before and decided to give this a go. After all, it was superheroes and the costume creator was great.

Let's toss in Battlestar while we're at it.

"This has all happened before, and it will happen again."

First, 2.8GHz Athlon II X2 isn't too slow. I honestly don't know where people get these ideas. Yes it's "slow" compared to a $1000 Intel hex core compressing video but for gaming it's not half bad. Anyways that isn't their limiting factor, graphics is.

Looking at the general specs it's a low profile system with a 220 watt PSU. I'm not familiar with suitable replacements for that, not that it matters too much due to the low profile card nature of the system. It does have one x16 slot.

The good news is just about everything is faster than integrated graphics. The "best" I think you could hope for is a low-profile HD 5570 like this one, it comes with the low profile brackets so it can fit in your system. It only maxes around 45 watts.

The HD 5550 uses only a couple of watts less, if power use is a concern. nVidia doesn't have much in that size and power use range. The GT 220 uses 10% more power but is 20% less powerful than the HD 5570 and the GT 430 may be similar in performance to the HD 5570 but it is still similar in power use with the GT 220.

Now the extremely paranoid will point out that the HD 5570 recommends a 400 watt PSU. Which is a good point, AMD also says that about the HD 5450 which draws less than half the power of the HD 5570. The HD 5450 is also a bit less than half as powerful as the HD 5570 but still substantially faster than that integrated nVidia 6150.

Well I'm going to guess that all the "cool" and obvious one word names based on that power have been taken by energy blasters say ... about six years ago. So good luck with that.

When I think of matter and energy I think of physics. I would suggest finding a few articles about plasma or fusion physics that may have cool sounding terms relating to matter and energy.

For example Quintessence is a hypothetical form of dark energy. It's what the ancient Greeks called their "fifth element". Maybe Quint for short.

So much for Fi's new place.

Well now we'll get all the spy craft advice for when you're not fully healed after a traumatic gunshot wound. This'll mean we will have a grumpy Jesse as the muscle this season.

Well the game has had multicore support on for quite a while now, which is why the "-renderthread 1" doesn't seem to do anything anymore.

When it was decided the script was going to have Britt Reid to be a hedonistic playboy who's changed his ways when his father is killed, the role was written for Seth Rogen. That's his character's MO in his more successful movies. Irresponsible at the beginning, reforming himself by the end.

The thing is if you want to attract Seth Rogen fans, you have to portray him in the trailer as a Seth Rogen classic lead character. IIRC the trailers for Spanglish still had the parts showing Adam Sandler as his classic good nature goof ball to pull a bait and switch so his fans would show up opening night of what wasn't a distinctly classic Adam Sandler movie.

It may be the same here. It's crazy production history and studio demand to "3D" it doesn't bode well but who knows.

Robot Kong is sad.

Your asking the equivalent of "Hi, we would have liked to get a Ferrari but we settled on a Mustang GT. Which rims do you think look best? How about color?"

If anything your selections simply prove you are saner than most hard core PC gamers but a Socket 1366 platform with an overclocked GTX 460 isn't exactly slumming.

The three cards in rank of overclocking are Asus (700MHz), eVGA EE (720MHz) and eVGA EE SC (763Mhz). The GTX 460 is a very overclockable card.

As for the motherboards, either are fine.

• The major difference is the Sabertooth support only two cards at x16/x16 while the P6X58D-E supports three at x16/x8/x8.
• Both can use Intel's hex cores, someone in marketing needed another bullet point for the P6X58D-E at the time it came out. It simply didn't need a BIOS flash to support the first Intel hex core when it first came out back in March.
• Both have USB 3.0 and SATA III (6.0Gb/s) ports.
• The P6X58D-E onboard sound supports DTS Surround decode.
• The Sabertooth is newer by about 4 months and is supposedly "built TUF" with mil-spec parts and uses a fancy new heatsink for the Southbridge chip. Asus has 17 Socket 1366 motherboards, they have to distinguish it somehow. It also happens to be the cheapest.

Rest of your parts list looks fine.

Thanks Work, as you can see that helped a lot.

If you have a plain old nVidia 6800 (or 6800XT or 6800LE, not sure if DxDiag would call that out) even an HD 5570 (DDR3) or GT 430 would be a big step up. I think players forget that there's a big leap in requirements between UM on low and UM off but everything else high. I have a friend with a 7950GT, can't do UM at all but it looks pretty damn good otherwise.

That said the low amount of memory and a single core (with HT) P4 are a limiting factor on how much improvement he would see. Right now 2 sticks of 1GB DDR2-533 memory is roughly $35-40 at NewEgg. The memory will help smooth out frame rate jitter caused by the system needing to swap stuff to disk while playing. Noticeable while traveling across zones but not in indoor missions.

Like 95% of all store bought PCs, it has a dinky power supply, in your case only 250 watts. This will limit your possibilities unless you upgrade it as well. Without upgrading it, the cards that would probably work with that power supply will be significantly slower than a 9800GTX.

That said, the two current top end sub $200 video cards online are the 768MB nVidia GTX 460 and the 1GB AMD HD 6850. You may be able to find the 1GB version of the GTX 460 at the $200 mark. Both cards would really like a nice quality 500 watt power supply to make them go. At stock clock speeds they are 60-80% faster than a 9800GTX.

Problem is pricing in a new PSU. If you get a new PSU, you'll only have enough money for a card that's probably less powerful than your 9800GTX. Still, compared to the integrated Intel graphics on the Core i3, anything would be a huge improvement.

If you don't plan on swapping out the PSU now, the best you can do is maybe an ATI HD 5670. Even then you may be pushing your luck with power. The nVidia card with a similar power usage would be the GT 430 but it's 30% slower than the HD 5670 which is 20% slower than a 9800GTX.

Honestly, I can't understand why they (HP, Dell, etc) bother mentioning the empty graphics expansion slot when then use such tiny PSUs. It's like a car dealer installing a trailer hitch on an AMC Pacer. Yea, you may be able to tow one of those tiny U-Haul trailers to and from college, downhill, with a stiff tailwind. But in general it's of pretty limited use.

Well it'll still be fixed FOV, just fixed vertically, not horizontally.

Assuming the the horizontal FOV is 90 degrees for a 4:3 monitor, that makes the vertical about 74 degrees (73.74).

Now if the vertical FOV is locked and not the horizontal, the horizontal FOV will be;

100.39 degrees on a 16:10 monitor, 148.95 degrees on 3, 16:10 monitors.
106.26 degrees on a 16:9 monitor, 151.93 degrees on 3, 16:9 monitors.

You can see how this, three monitors, could be an advantage in PVP, which is why it was locked on the horizontal FOV.