Humanoid

I bought the Broken Sword "Director's Cut" which had bit of added content towards the start of the game, so yeah, sort of. And apparently it's one of the most successful games on iOS, proving yet again that Mac users are easy to please.

Given that all they need to do to ensure ME3 is a winner is rerelease ME2 without planet scanning, I fail to see how it could possibly go wrong. Oh wait....

Out here, along with many other countries, lottery winnings are not taxed. But at any rate, I'd probably try to evaluate whether the winnings would be enough to live off the interest. Probably not immediately possible out of $1m (though it'd bring my retirement forward a decade or three), but double the prize and I think I could instantly retire and live without ever withdrawing the initial amount. Can't really think of a lot of big-ticket purchases otherwise - I don't plan on buying property in the middle of a bubble (Australia is home to the #1 most overpriced housing market in the world apparently), and I won't buy any sort of flash car, given that I can't drive.

Dropping the DirectX standard may well just result in a de-facto adoption of an even more proprietary standard. See Sound Blaster compatibility back in the DOS days. The Sound Blaster itself was compatible with AdLib. If you had a Gravis Ultrasound on the other hand.... In the current competitive environment it'd probably mean you need, at the very least, two video cards on hand permanently to make sure you can run any given game. If Intel comes back in, probably three. If you have a Matrox, well forget it. Back in the early 3D Decelerator days, you'd come across games that were pretty much Glide vs software renderer. Glide was awesome relative to the hardware capability of the Voodoo chip, but it was hell for the other vendors who tried to push their own APIs - PowerVR, Rendition, S3, etc.

So, nVidia launch the GTX590 to attempt to smoke AMD ....and end up taking it a bit too literally. With some mild overclocking/overvolting within the protection parameters, several review sites, using a mix of samples and retail boards have reported their test cards blowing up - indeed one tester had both his cards independently fail. Thermal imaging of the card in a closed case have shown the PCB heating up in excess of 110

I can rationalise it as the character having better sensory abilities than the player though, what with the augmented eyes and stuff. The perception stat in RPGs in general rarely seem to do anything logical, and admittedly it's hard to scale beyond making aiming more accurate which is a bit of a non-sequitur. I wear my sunglasses at night So I can So I can Watch you weave then breath your story lines And I wear my sunglasses at night So I can So I can Keep track of the visions in my eyes

I missed the conversation, is this about a Daikatana sequel?

Hmm, I didn't get that far before quitting. Maybe I should go look for my old saved games on the old PC.

Have to admit I never played KoTOR2 despite owning it. I dislike Star Wars though, so maybe in its non-Starwarrishness I'll have more motivation to play. I like the setting best when it mostly ignores the mystical and fantastical Force/Jedi/etc stuff, a'la the original Dark Forces where you couldn't wield a lightstick, or the space combat games which were mostly conventional to the genre.

I gave him all Sten's paintings since I left Sten in the cage to rot. My character did not forgive anything, ever.

Telling Ally that Duncan deserved to die was one of the very few moments in Origins that my character could vocalise what she really felt. Shame it was only a 5 second detour before returning to the railroad tracks.

It's a fair position - as I stated at the very beginning it's personal that I feel the evidence is strong enough to form an opinion. Obviously everyone has a reasonable threshold and this was never going to be enough to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law. It is simply a combination of an incomplete number of confirmed facts, circumstantial evidence, and observation about the nature of professional sport and the inherent conflict of interest of each and every sport's governing body being a beneficiary of the commercial success of the very sport they are supposed to police. I don't think professional sports can even begin to be cleaned up until there is 100% independence between bodies like FIFA, the ATP/WTA, the UCI, the IAAF, etc; and the disciplinary body which oversees testing. Naturally this would require much more funding to WADA than what is currently available, and no small amount of political will. I'm not confident it will happen in my lifetime, if ever, but those are the stakes. In the end, when even legends like Gary Player believe that over half of all golf professionals are doping, no professional sport can, with a straight face, claim to be clean. So in the end, yes, I'm firmly of the belief that a clear and absolute majority of all professional sportspeople (and a significant proportion of amateurs) are on the juice. I don't ask anyone to follow me on that assertion, but that's not the interesting part of any discussion anyway. What I do like to discuss is what information out there can be gathered and investigated independently, against the commercial interests trying to sweep it all under the rug. Footnote: It's probably significant that all the major doping busts in memory have come as a result of police/federak action independent of sporting authorities, such as the Festina affair and the Marion Jones/BALCO case. Next on the chopping block is self-styled hero Lance Armstrong who is being pursued by multiple US federal agencies for fraud. I don't know if he'll end up in jail or even end up with a criminal conviction, but it's good to see all the same that some are still committed to doing their jobs instead of posturing and worse, being complicit in systematic cheating.

Yeah, I wouldn't put any stock on what that clown says - the man is pretty much a political corpse even in his own party, thankfully, and watching him would be comical were it not for the fact that he's the president. Political will has very little to do with it, there's a bunch of stuff related to the march 2004 Madrid attacks which for some reason Zapatero's government has no interest in investigating but the judiciary is nonetheless carrying the case forward. From what's been made available, it looks like Fuentes has been talking tough and threatening to disclose big names he could have been involved with since 2006... never to act on those threats. Call me na

Y'know, The Bold and the Beautiful would make an excellent RPG setting. Iconic characters, decades of interpersonal relationship development, cutthroat political intrigue, moral ambiguity....

The 300Mbit is the wireless network speed, not the internet speed. Would require network adapters which can do that speed as well to get it working at that theoretical maximum of course.

Not read much about it outside here, but you're collectively giving the impression that the encounter design here channels World of Warcraft ....in 2005. Now admittedly it's hardly a new thing to the franchise - the first ogre encounter in Origins some people thought cool, but for me all it did was provoke a change to easy difficulty which I didn't change back until I abandoned the game about 2/3rds in. Or is the 'correct' approach to abandon your three actual characters and faff about with the redshirt generic mage running in circles?

Sometimes user reviews can go spectacularly right - Denon directional ethernet cable

I know about Messi's HGH treatment, but other than that...? Putting aside the manager's token punishment for his positive during his playing days for a moment, this, to be fair dates back a few years. First of all I should probably stress that if anyone insists on evidence that would stand up to the standards of criminal law, no, it isn't presently available and is not something I'd argue about. Now, my background is cycling. Yeah, that sport that's a whipping boy for doping everywhere. You may have heard of Operacion Puerto, a Spanish police investigation into the actions of Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, a gynaecologist who was consulting a suspicious number of male athletes. When police investigated him, there were hundreds of bags of blood with codenames, and a lodger linking those codenames to some of Spain's (and Europe's) top athletes. Fuentes himself did not publically name names but stated that his clients came from all sports, including cycling, tennis, and yes, football. Now over the next months, all manner of names started leaking, some officially some not. Some of the biggest names in cycling were the first to go - you might have heard of Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Alejandro Valverde. Predictably, the latter of the trio, the only native, was provided the thickest fog of obfuscation and protection. The investigators seemed to pick and choose which names they would confirm from the unofficial leaks. Lots of lawyers and appeals flew around. Then some other names came up via the unofficial leaks. Team doctors for a number of Spanish football clubs, including the big ones - Real and Barca. Then another, arguably even bigger - Rafael Nadal. Very quickly, the investigation was declared closed in the courts, amidst rumours of political pressure. The investigators were unhappy but powerless - the whole affair had been swept under the rug. Fuentes understandably kept quiet publically - he was receiving an increasing number of death threats as details about the affair were exposed. Anyway, it's just a summary off the top of my head and there's a lot of detail that I'd have missed. There are still some aftershocks felt four years on - last year saw another police operation, Operacion Galgo, pick up some of the dropped pieces of the original investigation. The issue remains the absence of any political will within Spain to clean up. Just last month we saw Prime Minister Zapatero unequivically claim there was no way disgraced Tour de France champion Alberto Contador would have doped, in spite of any evidence or lack thereof. Spain is in the middle of a sporting golden era and woe betide any politician willing to prick that swelling bubble of national pride. EDIT: Any old google search should bring up a healthy amount of information, even more for those who can read Spanish and/or French. First hit for Fuentes Barcelona Puerto for example: http://www.ergogenics.org/484.html

WPA2 is the current (i.e. must-have) standard in security and 300Mbit is the maximum speed standard currently available. Not a lot more I can say as networking isn't my thing.

I'm a Spurs supporter through and through and thought it was a ridiculous decision, so yeah. That said, zero shots on goal (not just zero on target) for them shows it was not an unfair result in the end. As awesome as Barcelona are though, I find I can't respect them at all. They're probably the most chemically enhanced team ever seen in professional football.

this is very helpful, but (and I'm probably wrong here) wasn't the 8800gt a high end card when it was released? or was it a midrange? I thought the midrange cards were the 8500 and the 8600? right now a high end is like the gtx580 and a midrange is a gtx 560? I guess my definition is more gamer-midrange as opposed to market-midrange. The difference is probably the $200-$250 mark vs the $100-$150 mark at the moment. Initial G80 series consisted of the 8800 Ultra, 8800GTX, 8800GTS-640 and 8800GTS-320. Then came the revised G92, consisting of the 8800GT which nominally replaced the 8800GTS-320 and the 8800GTS-512 which replaced the 8800GTS-640. The GT was faster than even the 640 as it turns out though, which made it sort of like a mid-range card encroaching on the top-end. Need to remember though that during this era, ATi were struggling so nVidia could price high, at all price points video cards were about 50% dearer than they are now. And yeah, gamer mid-range now I guess would be the 560/460-1GB and R68xx (with the R6950 rapidly dropping into the same category). Midrange in the broader market sense would still be the older tech 450/R5770.

The problem is that even 1080p is starting to push the capacity of the human eye at reasonable TV sizes. I doubt I'll ever be able to fit a TV of the size required to take full advantage of that kind of resolution. Ah, but with OLED all you have to do is roll your TV onto the wall like wallpaper!

Aren't the next gen TVs supposed to have 4000+ vertical lines or somesuch? Maybe the next gen will coincide with that (except for Nintendo who will probably release their 1080p console at that time, and top the sales chart with it). At the same time, I wouldn't be too surprised if they went back to x86 and consumer graphics chips. Even now they're pushing 5760x1080 gaming with single chips, and x86 is like COBOL, it just won't die.

I know nostalgia colours that sort of thing, but HoMM3 holds up fairly well given the 1024x768 resolution (hey, some people still use that today) and some lovely art. The older ones with 640x480 VGA I could understand a bit more.