Humanoid

It's a shame XFX were nVidia-exclusive back in the R500 days, denying us from seeing the glory that would have been the XFX X1800XTX XXX-edition, or indeed the XFX X1800XTX XXX Fatal1ty DD Extreme Black Alpha Dog Pro edition.

I don't know about lower-end Powercolors, but apparently their 280/290 custom coolers were among the best, possibly the quietest, custom factory coolers around. I do remember disliking them about a decade ago for creating several neutered variants of their various cards and deceptively marketing them, but that seems in the past now. That said, with the greater customer protections in Australia (and the EU), maybe their in-house customer service gets less of a bad rep - here the customer keeps dealing with the retailer instead of being shoved off to deal with the manufacturer direct. Hopefully XFX are over their problems - last gen they had a problem where they somehow managed to make their custom coolers *worse* than AMD's crappy stock cooler.

That is a particularly expensive example of a 260X, could probably get a 265 which is a fair bit (20-25%) faster for less. Or a quick look, other 260X cards for $110. EDIT: 265 for $120 after MIR? With no 2GB 260X examples for under $110, I'd say that's a no-brainer. Though there is a bargain basement 1GB example for $70 after MIR that could be an option for lower-res, no anti-aliasing gaming.

I was disappointed to find that it did not involve sniping people *with* V2 rockets.

I see Amazon UK have it listed, and while Amazon don't ship games here, it hopefully means there are no exclusivity agreements and that the usual suspects like OGS, Zavvi/TheHut and Base will carry it. Amazon's list price is 95GBP, so about 80GBP without VAT, which is ~$135USD, so it works out cheaper than the US. Aside, I have a couple credit cards which have no foreign transaction/currency conversion fees, so that aspect's not been a worry for me as well, and these are commonly available Australian cards, not foreign cards. No idea if that kind of deal is available in NZ of course. For the Aussies out there, you really should get either a 28 Degrees (GE Money) card or a Bankwest Zero Platinum card, if not both. (I've also heard that Citibank offers a fee-free Visa Debit card, but haven't really looked into it myself) EDIT: Bankwest also has the More Rewards Platinum card with no foreign fees, but unlike the other cards listed has an annual fee of $130. On the flipside, it has, as the name suggests, rewards points. Apparently the calculation is that you'd need to spend about $15000 on it annually to break even with the annual fee, but if you do then it's a great choice for an all-in-one solution for both local and international spending. Otherwise you'd be better off going with one of the listed completely fee-free card for foreign purchases and a no-annual-fee rewards card for local spending.

Off on a bit of a tangent, but so I bought a Wii U Pro controller yesterday, and irritatingly the charging cable is mini-USB. Who else even makes mini-USB stuff today? I think the only other mini-USB device I have is a mothballed camera from the previous decade that I have lying around somewhere, so essentially this is a new connector I'll have to keep lying around. Doubly irritating because the Wii U Gamepad has its own proprietary charging connector which is pretty much the size of a mini-USB connector. Dammit, just pick one or the other and stick with it at least.

Haven't adjusted to Geralt's new look in the trailer, wouldn't have known it was him initially. But yeah, that didn't really tell me anything, and I'd personally just a character sculpture like the CE for Twitcher 2 than a somewhat awkward battle scene. But you can't win them all - I'll probably bite anyway provided I can fine an EU internet retailer who's prepared to send me one - the W2 CE wasn't sold in Australia, suspect this one won't be either. The other thing is regional pricing for the game on GOG right now is $90 reduced to $72, which doesn't compare well to the $90-something I managed to import the old CE from the UK for. Exchange rate is worse now though so I expect to pay more. Kickstarter's sort of conditioned me to be happy to pay triple figures for a game provided it's a game I like, by a company I like, and it gives me commensurate extras. As for the carryover choice between games - well, previously it's been demonstrated that while there's a lot of care in handling C&C within a game, they're less shy about changing continuity between titles. I do wonder though that perhaps they feel more obliged to cater for it because of their reputation for 'choice'.

Well one benefit is that you can leave all but the power and reset switches disconnected, because screw the obsession with bright blue LEDs.

Sick is the feeling when you hit the power button and nothing happens. But then it turns out it's only because you forgot to flick the switch at the back of the PSU. At least, that's how it is for me. That, or the power switch wasn't properly connected to the motherboard header. EDIT: Yeah, the Intel heatsink doesn't feel very substantial. But take comfort in the fact that the dual-core Intel CPUs come with somehow even flimsier units, which amazingly is possible. And at least your case has a cutout in the motherboard tray so you can check the push-pins are installed correctly. I refuse to install an Intel HSF without being able to see reverse of the motherboard, even if that means having to pull the board and all components out of the case.

Well if you can't beeeeeee, with the one you love.... Love the one you're with. Doodoodoodoodoodoodoodoo Doodoodoodoodoodoodoodoo

Shouldn't mods by definition be Lawful Neutral?

I would suspect at this point no contract with any shirt printer has been signed yet, the specifics of the shirts (brand, styles, etc) would be unknown at this point. If you look at Darren's blog post on the right sidebar of the forums, the one about XXXL shirts, that's probably the latest information available - though I don't read the PE subforums so I don't know if anyone has posted any nuggets of information there.

Are we to conclude the price of including a proper printed manual is $30 then?

My Archer Season 4 Blu-ray disc was faulty out of the box, trying to play it would result in unwatchable stutter about 5-10 minutes in, and AnyDVD couldn't handle it. It was outside the Amazon return window so I couldn't automatically process a return. Decided instead to try to force a read using ImgBurn. It came up with hundreds of errors in the process and took over a day to rip to an ISO (the recorded figure was 41 hoursish, but I went to sleep a couple of times during, of course), the final read retry count was 1230 - how it worked was that ImgBurn would retry automatically up to 20 times on an error, after that I had to manually hit enter for each subsequent retry. I think the highest retry count I went through for a single sector read error was something like 170 - i.e. sitting there hitting enter 150 times. Sometimes it'd work with sufficient repetitions, other times it'd only work after waiting 10-20 minutes (maybe waiting for the disc to cool?). Fortunately after about 50%, it switched to reading the second layer, which was flawless and completed in 30 minutes, so I have a mountable ISO that I could subsequently rip to a raw directory structure. In hindsight it'd have been much less painful to just pirate it.... Still, over 500 discs and only the second faulty one I've received, so not a terrible strike rate. (The first was obviously cracked through the centre ring and therefore a straightforward return, this one exhibited no physical flaws whatsoever)

All-in update since the great parts reshuffle. Desktop is now internally all-SSD, new HTPC and NAS, old HTPC parts repurposed as spare box. Desktop HTPC NAS Notebook Spare box

Those aren't romance missions, they're parenting missions.

It could be the opposite: perhaps they've taken into account that tendency and therefore increase your "native English speaker" weighting when you make that kind of mistake.

I don't know, if you catch your children listening to the latest pop sensation, you might want to take matters into your own hands....

I went back to check, and yeah, the statement as quoted is, erm, correctly incorrect. I had to do the bloody thing twice because the test lacks a simple 'back' button, urgh.

True, does seem a pretty big oversight. That said, the validity of the conclusion would depend on whether those pre-70s death figures are higher or lower than the average of the more recent data: the difference might end up skewing even higher.

Teaches me to do exams at 1am. Although I'm loathe to go back and check the actual test because I gather this is for genuine research rather than for amusement.

Final leg of my project is just throwing together the parts from my old HTPC into a new case to use as a backup PC. It's a BitFenix Prodigy M. This case is ....terrible. It's a mATX case, sure, so I expect cramped conditions, fair enough. But it's a pretty big case by mATX standards, yet it's an absolute pain to work in. The "front panel" is on the side door, but I knew that and fair enough, running all the front panel cables - the buttons, LEDs, USB ports, audio connectors - was a mild inconvenience. On the other hand, 2.5" drives have to be mounted either directly onto that same door, or on a metal bracket that forms a 'bridge' behind the door. Terrible access. The final kicker is the PSU installation, and it's a double whammy: in one orientation, the retaining bracket for the PSU hasn't been cut away at the right points so having all four screws installed in the PSU prevents it from being mounted in the case. Secondly, the external power plug to the PSU literally CANNOT BE ATTACHED. It's a sideways L-shaped connector which causes the cable to bump up hard against the case, and it can't be realistically bent enough to fit without risking damage to the cable (and a damaged cable running mains power is something that'd likely kill me). Looks like what's happened here is the designers assumed all PSUs had the same power socket orientation and failed to allow for any other configuration. Well screw you too BitFenix. I can get around this by routing a straight-connector power cable directly to it, and this bypasses the 'neat' internal routing the case was designed for. (If this is hard to picture, what's happening is that the PSU is mounted internally such that the exhaust points to the floor. The problematic internal power cable is nothing more than an extension cable that reroutes the PSU's power connector back through the case and terminates in a connectors on the rear panel) EDIT: Or just take a picture, Captain Obvious.

Been playing it as well. I know folks are all about Watch Dogs right now, but SR4 is just on a different level from all the other sandbox games. I've tried going back to it a couple of times, but I feel it's a regression from the previous game in almost every way. It starts off well enough but once the superpowers came in, the gameplay completely fell apart. In the end I think I'd rather play SR3 over than play SR4. Identifying a couple of the bigger complaints I guess - the almost complete loss of visibility and positional sense during fights due to the super sprinting ability (and the expectation that it be used), and the platforming bits, notably tower climbing.

Hurricanes with feminine names almost three times as lethal as their masculine counterparts, BECAUSE OF SEXISM.

Does the test actually tell you at any point that it's incorrect? I saw no grading of any of the actual individual answers. I do agree that it's a valid sentence though, particularly if it's in response to the question "Did you end up going to the beach today, or did you go somewhere else?" "We *did* go to the beach, and it was lovely".