echo1

A lot of China's success is down to things that aren't really sustainable - currency devaluation and turning a blind eye to the occasional sweatshop or two, or three, or a thousand. I don't think "communist China" will last forever, it might last longer than the USSR did, but eventually when you let people become wealthy and educated, they're going to start asking awkward questions, and all the brainwashing in the world can't stop the inevitable.

I'm not completely up to date with Intel's latest i3/i5 chips, last I checked for a cheap decent CPU was AMD's Athlon II X4 620 - a cheap yet fast quad core, lacking only the cache of the more expensive Phenom IIs. Graphics card - I think the HD5770 is the one to get if you want something decent on a budget. EDIT: Looking briefly at the Core i3s. There's some quite fast dual core variants in the same price region as the '620 mentioned above. Most games will probably benefit from a chip with higher clockspeed and less cache over two extra cores.

Ancient news is ancient, but yes - a great mod for a great game. I miss the old days of Rogue Spear...

The process varies depending on the motherboard. Your best bet is to find the manual for the motherboard (or for the system if it's a big brand computer) and find where the option is made. It is possible, although unlikely, that if you have a brand name system, that it could be impossible to turn it off. Some of the big companies impose rather retarded restrictions on what you can do with the BIOS. I doubt that this is the case though.

Has anyone tried the latest version of Opera? It's pretty swish...

Hopefully not all on the same plane.

Game stores over here enforce game ages. I agree that young children shouldn't be allowed near these games, but I don't think that it's necessary to leave it till 18... 16? 14? Chances are that if you can't play a video game by the age of 14 without turning into a psycho, you never will.

Yeah, but ultimately it's bullshit because he was likely to have killed his father for interrupting his stamp collecting...

This. This is the age of 4chan... you either grow a thick neck, or pull the ethernet cable out of the back of your computer asap...

I cite a certain "unofficial" sequel to our mutually beloved gaming franchise as a fine example of the good publishers do the development of games. It's like the record industry. They existed in the day when the distribution and marketing of their respective product cost too much and involved specialized equipment that made it simple impossible for an individual to put their stuff out there into the market. These days the internet has destroyed this. Look at OFP/ArmA. How much marketing was sunk into it? Are there gajillions of copies of it in every store? No, yet here we all are... The simple fact is that when a game sells for $50 in a store, the developer gets about $1-2 of that. You can do the math here - If someone self-publishes and sells only 1/20 of the copies that he would have under a publisher, he still makes an awful lot more money... Software publishers, like record companies are a malignancy that live off both the producer and the consumer. The producer gets most of their potential revenue whisked away, and the consumer ends up with a product that is often vastly inferior because some douchebag with an MBA calls the shots on things he knows nothing about. I don't buy into the need for huge quantities of initial investment... look at the open source market. Granted that there has been huge investment into it recently, but there were definitely times before that... It goes to show what a determined individual with the right tools can knock up either by themselves or with their friends. Hell, just look at what people did to OFP when we were waiting for ArmA. I'm pretty much convinced that if the community had access to OFP's guts, we could have made ArmA ourselves. Besides, what is the point of all the millions that go into the games? Most of it seems to go into marketing, or making glitzy graphics, or hiring in Hollywood actors to do voice-overs. Really in the scheme of things it doesn't make the intrinsic game play any better, forces people to upgrade their hardware every year and creates a cycle whereby this is perpetuated. What's the point? It serves no-one but the publisher where the illusion is created that they are needed for success.

As I said, preaching to the choir, not making a new one.

I can listen to 50c all day long without feeling the urge to kill cops or deal drugs, and so can 99% of people. If people identify with that sort of message, then it's already too late. Same with violent video games, films, porn whatever... You're either giving someone harmless fun, or you're preaching to the choir. No decent honest person ever played GTA and thought "Hey! I should kill someone!" People are a bit more sophisticated than that. Criminal behavior happens for many reasons that are long and complicated. Long and complicated is hard to market to the masses, so politicians create nice little rally points for people to get all angsty and proactive, but ultimately accomplish nothing. People singing about killing cops is the symptom, not the problem. When governments spend time and money trying to save people from 'immoral' media, they're kinda like the doctor who gives painkillers to their patient for the headaches caused by the fact they have a brain tumor, if you get me. Besides, all these folks tend to have all sorts of vested interests. Republicans protesting against that evil 'communist' health system? Surely that couldn't be to do with their financial backers being big insurance companies, right? Religious types? Sure they act like they are upholders of morality virtue, but really they want to have people live in fear of them like the good old days so that they can extort money and fuck little boys. Sometimes the good old days weren't really the good old days.

I have Polish friends who had less than flattering things to say of that President... I guess it depends on where you sit on the proverbial fence...

I don't suppose Hong Kong has an equivalent to the "3V" cards we have over here where you get a card and prepay a certain amount of cash... Like stocking up on mobile phone credit... To the best of my knowledge, there's no age limit on them and you can definitely use them on eBay, or just about anywhere that accepts Visa or the like.

Nothing but tragedy this week it seems...

If they start to go over the recommended heat limit for the CPU, then technically yes. 40C is perfectly normal though.

And here I was hoping that they'd finally have something new to benchmark graphics cards with.

So, any chance of getting that politics thread back?

Rip :(

Oh no, I see where this is going... I'm going down into my bunker. Someone wake me when the shitstorm has passed.

Bring back TEXTp!

I know a guy who had a part time job in their Dublin branch. Some religious-related matter came up and the editor gathered people around and said "So, are we Catholic or Protestant on this one?"

I think the publicizing wars probably does more good than harm - do you think that WW1 would have happened like it did if it was covered live on CNN? That's what happens when people get caught up in 'hero frenzy' - they think that their army is invisible and stand by, detached from reality, and send the boys off into messes like the Somme or Galipoli. Dulce et decorum, the old lie... War is ultimately a political matter. Politicians are elected by us, the ignorant masses, to make certain decisions on our behalf. We have a right to know what mess our votes have landed us. Obviously there's times when journalists get too eager and they damage the success of military operations, but that is something that has to be dealt with by itself.

Well, given some of the issues associate with multi-GPU setups, I'd just stick with a single fast card. Unless you are powering multiple high-res monitors, SLI/Crossfire is unnecessary.

Link.