Kitsune Knight

Having black bars on both sides is normal if you have a non-4:3 monitor, because the background image on the login screen is 4:3 (and doesn't stretch anymore). The OP said, though "its off to the left with a huge black bar on the right hand side of the screen." so it would appear that there's not bars on both sides that are equal size. Plus, also happens in game, passed the login screen.

And pressing the back button asks about leaving the queue. It seems very likely to me that's simply artifacts of the UI design, not evidence of being in an actual queue.

Energy Transfer doesn't get boosted damage on a critical (it only loses the -health portion), and Total Focus only gets a partial crit.

ET also does more self-damage to a Stalker than a Brute... that's in addition to a Stalker having far less HP.


The only thing Stalkers have going for them is Assassin's Strike, which actually does very good damage mid-combat now. Before the buff, Brutes could have easily out damaged Stalkers... but now, Stalkers might have the edge.

Using something like the TOTP Algorithm would greatly enhance security, especially on master accounts. The nice benefit of this is they could just piggyback on the Google Authenticator app (which is simply an implementation) and other devices that support the same format.

It would actually defeat keyloggers. For your account to be hijacked in that case, the attacker would need a much more specific, targeted attack (such as hijacking your session in real time).

This, at best, would only help with primitive keyloggers. Many keyloggers also take screenshots on mouse clicks, which would completely defeat this technique... it's not hard to do at all.

IvB has a few differences from SB in regards to the 'k' series. 'k' parts are 100Mhz faster than their normal counterparts (3.3 vs 3.4), with also 100Mhz higher max turbo speed (3.7 vs 3.8). 'k' parts lack some enterprise/virtualization (VT-d) related extensions, but it's unlikely the OP or anyone else in this thread would really care (well, I care about VT-d, but I'm weird ). Doesn't apply to the i5 'k' part, but the i7 'k' part (ignoring the GPU-less parts) has the same GPU as it's non-k counterpart.

If you're familiar with how things worked with the SandyBridge lineup, be careful when you're glancing over IvyBridge's lineup, because there's a few differences.

It used to be that the North and South trams were part of different networks. It's been possible to jump between them without loading since they merged the networks.

I think they should let you... but make it completely 100% absolutely clear that you must also buy X, Y, and Z to be able to actually play it. Not a simple click-through dialog that no one will ever read.

No sane person would.


I've played a high-APM RTS (the one with a similar name to that MMO everyone knows... no, not THAT one, slightly less similar!) and CoH at the same time... no one on CoH noticed, but I certainly wasn't winning any matches in the RTS...

Everyone seems to keep overlooking how I said that AV should be your last layer of defense My point was that people ignore every other layer, especially by far the most important and effective, which is patching the hole in the first place.

There will always be malware targeting zero-days, but they are extremely rare by comparison (they sell for a small fortune on the black market). I would much rather run the latest version of IE with no AV software, than running IE 6 from a fresh install of Windows XP with the best AV software in the world.

And, again, my point isn't to do one instead of the other, it's do both. Get good AV software (I use MSE, simply because it's the least 16-year-old-girl-always-wanting-your-attention-ish), and keep all the software on your system up to date (especially Java and Flash, because they have updaters that are total crap... and are prime targets).

Except it's trivially easy to change the signature of a virus. It might be slightly faster to create the signature, but nothing stops the malware author from modifying it in such a way that the current signature is useless. Many have even developed automated tools that modify it in such a way that the signature is changed without them having to do much of any work.

And as history has shown, the vast majority of malware out there, even when new, targets patched security vulnerabilities. Zero-day exploits are hard to get their hands on, and extremely valuable... so most won't waste their time, when it's easy to find holes just by seeing what's been patched and public knowledge.

In practice, AV software is your last line of defense... and is by far the weakest and least likely to work.