Humanoid

CPUs these days tend to handle overheating a bit more intelligently than in the past, both AMD and Intel CPUs now should throttle instead of just instantly shutting down if they're overheating. Do you notice any slowdown or other performance related issues occuring before the shutdown? I'd run the PC under load while monitoring temperatures. Run something like HWinfo64 to monitor temps while you test - I'd recommend two tests: something that pushes the CPU/RAM only, and then something that pushes the graphics as well - say OCCT then Unigine Heaven. HWinfo64 has the benefit of being able to monitor live clock speeds and the CPU voltage (Vcore) as well so you can tell if it's throttling before it dies (I think Bulldozer drops to 1.4GHz when it throttles). What's a safe temperature? Chips these days are pretty resilient, I'd only get really concerned at 70+ (but a quick search shows that Bulldozer may begin throttling at 61+). If that's not a problem, then I'd move on to testing your memory specifically using Memtest (you'll need to boot into it from a disc or USB stick). If it passes that then it's a bit trickier because other potentially faulty components are harder to test. The PSU might be at fault, as could be the motherboard. For the latter you can use a multimeter (onboard readings of PSU numbers are horribly unreliable) and test using the back of the ATX connector while running under load (like so).

Finished Honest Hearts. It's, eh, okay. Pretty to be sure, the kind of thing I'd like to see more in the genre, as opposed to every square inch of the world being bombed out rubble. But it was an uphill battle from the start as I've never really liked the concept of mostly-stereotypical tribal societies in future settings, and ultimately I could sympathise with neither of the two leaders' agendas. I guess I really am a sneering imperialist, even though I didn't actually take the perk. And then the MMO-esque fetch quests and simplistic "kill X" quests and the result is really just a standard sidequest just with an alternate landscape. I mean ultimately, there's wasn't any reason for the hoop-jumping when in terms of the narrative, you could have just marched into the hostile tribe's territory and taken them all out singlehandedly, thus solving everyone's problems in a fraction of the time. (Also, I have a problem with the alliteration causing me to say 'honest' with a hard H sound. Yeah. ) And the Narrows. Oh god, the Narrows. Anyway - what's next? Dead Money or Old World Blues? At 30 I'm pretty much overlevelled for everything so that shouldn't be a factor.

Hmm, a week to the year of the last system update. I've just bought ALL THE DISKS. It's not actually installed yet, but on the way. I was a bit suspicious of some parts possibly on the brink of failure, and also wanted a clean Windows install - the repair install I did a couple months back was useful, but still too much cruft (and sfc is reporting another corrupt system file). So instead of mucking about with old stuff and trying to find issues which may or may not be there, I decided to go for a proper cleanout. In: 240GB Sandisk Extreme II, 250GB Samsung 840 EVO, 4TB Western Digital Red, 8GB G.Skill DDR3U-1600 Out: 128GB G.Skill Falcon II, 808GB Western Digital Green the remaining 4GB G.Skill ECO DDR3L-1333 (removed a pair in the interim when one stick failed) CPU: Intel i5-750 @ 3.33GHz, Prolimatech Megahalems, 2x Nexus Real Silent 120mm M/B: Gigabyte P55A-UD4P RAM: 2x4GB G.Skill Sniper DDR3U 1.25V HDD: 4TB Western Digital Red SSD1: 240GB Sandisk Extreme II SSD2: 256GB Crucial m4 SSD3: 250GB Samsung 840 EVO Video: MSI Radeon HD7950 Twin Frozr III, Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970 cooler Sound: Asus Xonar Essence ST ODD: Pioneer DVR-216 DVD-RW FDD: Sony 3.5" Case: Antec P182B, Scythe Slipstream 800-1200rpm case fans PSU: Seasonic X-650 O/S: Win7 Pro 64-bit OEM Mouse: Logitech M950 Keyboard: Das Keyboard Professional Silent (Cherry Brown) Display: 2x Dell U2711 27" IPS Speakers: Audioengine A5 2.0 Headphones: Alessandro MS-1i Gaming Peripherals: - CH Products F-16 Fighterstick USB - Thrustmaster HOTAS Cougar - XBox360 Wireless controller for PC

Not true! They made some pretty decent Australian Rules football games back in the late 90s. :D

I thought that too initially, but really, loan repayments are pocket change - even taking the easiest jobs every day your loan repayment component is a drop in the ocean. So now (well, not now since I haven't played for a while) I max out my loans and get as many trucks on the road as possible. And remember to focus your hired drivers' training on long distance or they might end up idle a lot.

Protected species. When you have the clout that comes from being Sega's golden goose, you can get away with it. Not so the developers of a certain espionage thriller RPG.

It's sort of already happened, albeit in an extremely telegraphed way. But still, I liked having the "option" for the non-standard game over, which is a refreshing change over having three options leading to the exact same result. I mean I just started Honest Hearts and had an ....incident that short circuited the whole DLC. I reloaded, natch, but still, I like the option of being able to live with it. I wish there were options to short-circuit the base game too, and legitimise the ending with the closing slides and all that. I mean the gate's already there in the Mojave outpost, just make it interactable - make "screw this, I'm going home" a valid ending. Starting to feel I'm in the wrong thread, but I think I've ODed on that game in the last few days. Steam says 66 hours in the last two weeks, but that's heavily, heavily backloaded.

Perhaps not the intention, but my first thought is: "and this is a company hundreds of millions of people trust to operate their e-mail, act as a front door to the internet for, and control their mobile telecommunications?"

Hmm, looked into it: It looks like that's true. Crouching, zooming, weapon skill and limb injury only affect sway of the crosshairs, but the only thing that affects accuracy relative to the crosshairs themselves is the inherent accuracy of the given weapon itself. That said, it also looks like no "normal" weapon is 100% accurate, only Alien Blaster and one of the unique Tesla Cannons have an inherent weapon spread of zero, though it's not hard to find something accurate to within 0.1° (most non-automatic rifles).

I've started four games of New Vegas in a month, all of which bar the current one ended in and around Vegas. Just now, for the first time since the game's launch, I spoke to Caesar. I know there's an incredible amount of content in the game I've never seen, but I'm not sure I have the determination to go that route. At any rate, I can put off any thinking for now, about to tackle the DLC for the first time ever (again, after owning it for quite a long time). Going with Honest Hearts when I fire the game up tomorrow, at a few levels shy of 20 - unless someone thinks I should do them in a different order? I admit some temptation to play XCOM due to all the recent chatter - and I really do intend to play vanilla XCOM once more before getting into the expansion - but I really should stick with one thing for now.

I had to look up what iron sights were... yeah. In NV I never really could tell for most weapons what part of the mechanism I had to put over the enemy, what with all the bizarre shapes and sizes they came in - something that's not an issue with an old-fashioned crosshair.

I remember in photos taken back in the BIS days he looked barely twenty. Happy birthday.

The threat of Thinmen subsides is reasonable time, yeah. But early on, with only conventional weapons and grenades, they present a new challenge. Rockets aside, nothing in your arsenal is capable of reliably taking them out in one hit due to the extra HP they have (4hp in classic and 6hp in impossible). Arguably the +1 they get for classic probably means more as it means doubling the firepower required to kill them: whether 4 or 6 hp, it's two grenade or on average two shots with ballistic weapons. And as per any difficulty, it's harder to flank them and easier for them to flank you due to their extra mobility. The risk of a panic chain is also much larger and is arguably the bigger threat from the poison, as opposed to the actual damage. Unfortunately it also means they promote somewhat boring play early on: the scripted ones in council missions in particular are best dealt with by mass overwatch fire the moment they spawn, so it enforces the strict conga-line strategy even moreso than usual.

I don't know what about Wals has done this to me, but now I'm also tempted by another gadget, the Asus Transformer Book T100. Yeah, it looks like one of those woefully underpowered netbooks from years gone by, but with Bay Trail, it looks as if Intel finally has Atom performance at a point where it's useful for more than being a punchline in a joke. I'd prefer it a little larger than 10" (oooh, matron), but at under $400, when I'd been sort of thinking about alternatives like the Dell XPS 12 and Lenovo Helix/Yoga/whatever convertibles at well over $1000, it's probably a safe investment. The gimmick isn't new, the form factor isn't new, but for my purposes I just needed the design translated into a Wintel machine instead of the ubiquitous ARM-Android devices. It also means I no longer have to umm and ahh over whether the Haswell notebook I intend to purchase next year should be a ~12" device like the aforementioned, it probably seals my choice of a Lenovo T440s.

Technically you can get up to three rockets - shredder rocket adds one (albeit with different properties), and another normal one with Rocketeer. The double grenade one isn't taken so much either, but is also a viable choice. Regardless though, one rocket makes a huge difference, and there typically are only 6-8 aliens (typically in three packs) in early missions anyway. That one rocket is therefore potentially up to 1/3rd of the mission objective completed in one shot. The poor aim part is true, but is more than compensated for by the Bullet Swarm ability which can be taken very early. I mean Assaults get two shots a turn too, but it requires a higher level, is restricted to one target, and gives an aim penalty to each shot (which probably takes each shot to under the hit chance of each of the heavy's). And while less ammo is annoying, Bullet Swarm also means you get more opportunities to reload - i.e. no one else can fire then reload in the same turn. Aside, it's common practice to take the heavy's actions last in each turn. Arguably their greatest asset is insurance - let the rest of your squad try to kill all the aliens earlier in the turn (keeping resource waste to a minimum), and if that fails, either finish them with your rocket or suppress them (and you can shoot then suppress in the one turn, bonus). More of a fun fact than a tip, but rockets and suppression count for the purpose of Holo-targetting. While skipping Bullet Swarm for Holo-targetting makes for an extremely speclaiised heavy, it can be oodles of fun. Fire a rocket (danger zone!) to take our a bunch of cover, then have an In The Zone sniper take *all* of the aliens out without spending a single action.

By pure coincidence I ended up buying two new SSDs today. Wasn't planning to bite so soon, but eh, $10 off each as long as I buy two in deal ending today, so why not. Samsung 840 EVO 250GB for $175AUD and a regular 840 120GB for $89AUD, that's cheaper than the cheapest prices listed on that part picker site, even if you take the exchange rate as 1:1. It isn't, so it works out even cheaper comparatively to me. And that's with 10% tax. So yeah, no brainer in the end. The smaller drive will go in my planned NAS (if and when it goes ahead), and the EVO will probably be my Steam drive, as at the moment my Steam games are kind of split between my spindle drive and another SSD. Both the spindle drive (it's only 800GB) and that SSD are full, so I really should grab another of each, but the WD Red 4TB was only just released so I'll wait a bit to make sure there are no technical issues discovered with it. If I was lazy I'd use it as a system drive instead to replace my decrepit, near-four-year-old Indilinx SSD. Kind of sad, but it's now by far the weakest of the three that will be in my system. I also really shouldn't think about it, but that 120GB G.Skill Falcon 2 Indilinx drive I bought in January 2010 for $400+. And now I've bought a 120GB drive for $89. It stings a bit, given I'd get change out of $400 buying a 500GB drive now, but no regrets, I wouldn't change things if I could go back. EDIT: Don't let anyone tell you they aren't addictive. By my count I've now installed nine of them in various systems. My desktop - 120GB G.Skill Falcon 2, 256GB Crucial m4, 250GB Samsung 840 EVO Old laptop - 250GB Samsung 830 HTPC - 128GB Crucial m4 NAS - 120GB Samsung 120 Old desktop I revived - 60GB Corsair Force 3 (was an RMA) Parents' PC (gift) - 120GB Intel 320 Sister's PC (gift) - 120GB Samsung 840

They did for all the Bullfrog games a few weeks ago, so Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet and Populous also got their expansions. They've also added other EA-owned expansions over the past couple years, which I was not also aware of, such as Privateer and Wing Commander, not sure if Strike Commander's was there from the start.

The game I would compare Fallout 3 to is Super Mario Bros 2. Not a terrible game as such, but only superficially related to the rest of the series. I argue this because I feel what Bethesda did was to create a pretty dang reasonable post-apocalyptic gameworld, while incorporating elements of Fallout lore without really understanding how it all fits together. I've posted some of this before somewhere here, so I'm repeating myself somewhat, but for example, the world they built feels like one fairly recently devastated by the bombs, and would have been a good setting for such a game story. But as a sequel to Fallout 2 they had to shove the timeline further into the future, to the point where the devastation no longer felt fitting to the backstory given. This hurt the game. They took MacGuffin-like concepts like water purification and the GECK, and shoehorned them into their story. While nods to previous games are not unwelcome, tributes are better presented as side-plots or even easter-eggs, rather than something that takes over the entire plot. This hurt the game. And the old timey-time stuff - well in the end it's pretty irrelevant. It's put in there almost as an afterthought, and while I don't think it's necessarily bad, it's hardly something that makes the game either. In the end I think in that, in terms of the product at least, it was a bit of a lose-lose. Old-time Fallout fans can with some justification rail against a good portion of what Bethesda has done to the property. But the opposite is also true - in trying to keep at least some elements of Fallout into their post-apocalyptic game, they made a game that wasn't as good as it could, and indeed probably should have been. There's some damn good world-building in Fallout 3, with lovely little subtle environmental touches. But they're elements that needed no context, and that would have worked just as well, if not better, under its own, new title. If I was to present this viewpoint as a troll, I would say "hurr durr, that stupid Fallout stuff ruined Bethesda's game." I've heard the plotting of Fallout 3 be described as what one would expect of a Fallout fanfiction, and I don't think that's unreasonable.

Their 100% chance to hit AoE poison spit is the biggest offender, feels like almost guaranteed panic at the level some of your squad will inevitably be when first encountering them (which will probably be your first council mission). They also wield light plasma rifles (even though the character model uses a pistol), which means they get an extra 10% chance to hit *on top* of the 10% higher chances to hit all aliens get all round compared to easy/normal. That extra 20% is why they tend to get singled out by people complaining about sniping thinmen one-shotting their squad over high cover at long range. I've seen solid advice that if your first council mission is bomb disposal on higher difficulties, it may be better to skip it. There's little penalty for skipping council missions, unlike most anything else, and the scripted Thinman ambush once you disarm the bomb has a very high chance of overwhelming your tired squad.

Marantz make slimline receivers if what you're asking for is something less bulky than the usual. They're pretty much fully featured, though obviously you pay a little premium for the privilege. This is their basic unit, which is more than good enough for your needs. Bear in mind that all hi-fi electronics tend to get almost-annual refreshes in the product line, so if you find a dealer selling last year's model for cheap, jump on it. Onkyo receivers run particularly hot and so require more ventilation than normal, so given the same circumstances I'd give them a miss. I like Onkyo and run a unit myself, but I admit it's pretty ugly having a big gap above it in my entertainment unit.

No idea, never used that site before. But yeah, just sorted the list by price and picked the cheapest 8GB option. I suppose SSDs are one of those things one is conditioned into. The broader appreciation factor is more down to responsiveness rather than load times as such - it makes the difference in feel between a shiny new toy and an old clunker. But yeah, dropping it is a straightforward enough change, and either pocket the savings or go back to the FX.

For reference, the stated differences in difficulty are listed here. But that's not the full story. For a while there's been no good comprehensive listing on the hidden mechanics in your favour in easy/normal, but there is now. Copied for convenience: All of the below only apply if you have four soldiers or less in play: Easy & Normal modes Chance to hit is 120% of the displayed value. Hence if you see 84% or above, the shot should always hit. Alien aim get a cumulative -10% for every consecutive hit on your units, resetting when they miss. Easy mode only Missing a shot which had at least a 50% chance to connect adds +15% to the next such shot you make, cumulative. The counter resets when a shot hits, and is capped at 30%. Your aim is increased by four minus the amount of soldiers you have, times 15%. Hence having one soldier in play grants him a +45% aim bonus. Alien aim is reduced by four minus the amount of soldiers you have, times 25%. Hence having one soldier in play grants him a +75% defence. Normal mode only Missing a shot which had at least a 50% chance to connect adds +15% to the next such shot you make, cumulative. The counter resets when a shot hits, but otherwise has no cap. If on easy with exactly four soldiers active, or normal with four or less, shots with a stated accuracy higher then 95% are capped down to 95% - unless they would reach 100% or more, in which case they are unaffected and should always hit. Adjustments are made on a side-wide basis - for example, if a given soldier misses, he's not the only one who could benefit from the resulting bonus for your team's next shot.

I think most hi-fi speakers at 6ohm actually, and most mainstream AVRs are not rated to go lower - as in they'll probably work but are not warranted for it. Many HTIB type packages like you see in the box movers like HN go even lower, a Sony system I know of is 3ohm for example.

Hmm, I stand corrected, they're 8ohm satellites, assuming you're talking about the Gigaworks S750. Unusual for all-in-one systems, but does mean you can probably drive them safely with an off-the-shelf amp. I think the speaker cable terminates in a 1/8" stereo jack? You'd just snip them off I guess, and hopefully there's an easy indication of which wire is which....

And refudiate.