syn2083

i was never a fan of multi monitor gaming, the borders kill it mostly for me, seeing giant black lines between screens is to jarring for me.. and beyond that the cost of this setup is ridiculous.

TKAM is an excellent story. My mother had me read it when I was about 10, to which I didnt appreciate it, then rereading it later I really saw it.. what a wonderful book (not the subject matter, clearly, but the writing).

His writing gets more boring the further in we go, he has so many characters and so many doing relatively nothing it gets quite boring.. stop the character creep!

Well hopefully it helps at least point you in the right direction. Its possible that securom unintentionally helped 'break' it. Weirder things have happened, like the first tech job i had where the vibrations from the computer would actually unseat video cards leading to 'dead like' systems. Sometimes freak stuff happens. I would say if issues/the issue follows the drive itself then that would be a decent indication, if its attached to a 'virgin' system and is still not working then there shouldn't be any registry keys or the like recording it as 'violated' or the like. So if you have an ancillary system or a friends or something and its still not working right... regardless of the initiating cause it sounds like the drive itself has lost the battle.

True enough, be sure to check you local laws! Better safe than sorry

It's basically never legally sound to suggest that a crack is legal unless there is specific evidence holding it up for the specific item in question. When you buy a piece of software, or a movie, etc you do not own the actual content/media. You may possess the physical item that holds the software or movie or item, but beyond that all you have is a license to view/use/display. Copyright/Intellectual Property law gets incredibly complex, let alone adding in EULAs which in the case of most software are implicit on install/use and there could be a lot of stuff in there. http://lifehacker.com/5888488/how-youre-breaking-the-law-every-day-and-what-you-can-do-about-it That does a pretty good job of explaining, but by and large, no its not legal to crack or download a cracked/hacked game even if you actually 'own' a disc containing the game. The difference between Joe Schmoe cracking an EXE and GoG is that GoG got permission as a company to do so, and shares sales with the company in question.

Saw Pacific Rim earlier with the wife in IMAX, was surprised how not terrible the story actually was. It wasnt spectacular by any stretch, but it was consistent. Acting was good enough to get you through to the action. Overall, predictable but fun. Great action flick if you dont want to have to think much about it. IMAX with the rumble seats was great!

Newer isn't always better... Insulation improvements aside, your average house built in 1801 is typically going to be standing a lot longer than the average house built in 2013 and will be more structurally sound in almost every way, even though the 2013 house will hold it's heat better and be more easily rewired for electricity than it's 1801 counterpart. With most things as time goes on there are improvements available. Not often enough these days however are those improvements incorporated without sacrificing something else, and often needlessly (housing construction is a good example of this, though skyrocketing costs of the better materials in relation to your average person's income and the currency (inflation is bad, very bad) has a bit to do with this.). Improvements or not though, all too often some folks are trying to reinvent the wheel. With all improvements considered, as far as houses go, I'd generally rather have a house built towards the end of the 19th century or beginning of the 20th as you'd get the most bang for your buck in materials with such a house and houses built then were still built to last, yet upgrading windows and insulation to modern standards is generally no biggie. And as far as CRPG games go, and all 'improvements' considered, I'd rather have a game from the 90s. There are many more games from that decade that stand the test of time than games of the last decade. Too many of the 'improvements' of modern RPGs (both PnP and CRPG) consist of shallow balance acts at the cost of substance done by folks lacking from imagination. A good game stands the test of time. And with all of the modern improvements to video gaming available there are very very few things I'd alter in many of the great games of the past such as Baldur's Gate or Planescape Torment (or Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past, Starflight 1/2, nethack, FF6, et al) and they'd mostly if not entirely have to do with improving graphics and UI (namely just higher resolution art (what would have been nice in BG:EE) and better inventory management (something I still have yet to see be done very well in any CRPG excepting WoW (where an addon called 'arkinventory' does the job)). Dragon Age is a good example of a game that, while good on it's own, falls far short of the spiritual successor to the IE games, and is not something I'll be playing again, where I very likely will be playing BG 1/2 and PST at some point again in the future. And his analogy does work... The portions about houses is relatively moot, that being said. It is not possible to argue that point (structural/test of time). We would need to time travel a few hundred years into the future to be able to do so and that is impossible, clearly. Much the same regarding games. When they moved from text based to graphical, the air was filled with bemoans of how terrible they had become, and how much was lost from text to rudimentary graphics. The death of us. MUDs gave way to the original graphical MMOs, and the likes of EQ AC and DAoC were born (one directly from a company who made commercial MUDs). These days DAoC is either forgotten or maligned but was quite a bright shining star for a very very long time (relatively speaking... software and technology increase the speed clearly). Then came WoW. To simple, and to much mass appeal, it lost the core! The core of what they were about, and there was no place for Hardcore MMO. Quest Markers?! Phaw! Well we know how that turned out. Every generation makes way for the next. A kid of 10 today, after living a normal life, being handed a psx and diablo1 might think your insane, they might like it, but I feel its safe to postulate that in general they would laugh and go play Call of Whatever the heck 9000. As we mature, and become more set in our memory, nostalgia ruminations, and likes we cement certain things. Music is a pretty classic example of something that is hard for general generational acceptance from one to the next. Which brings me back home. Just because a Dragon Age exists does not mean that 1, all games are like Dragon Age, 2, all developers are like the developers of Dragon Age, and 3, that we should shun all things new because "its probably just like that Dragon Age thing". Correlation != Causation Coincidence != Universal Truth If OE gave me a good reason to believe that they were incapable of making something in the Spirit of an IE game, then I would have evidence to form an opinion. If some other RPG is not like an IE Spiritual game (which is hard to quantify, but is NOT a carbon copy....) that has nothing to do with OE and their current development. Penn and Teller did an excellent episode of Bull$h!t on 'The Good Ole Days' which gets into this mentality fairly well. Improvements, new technology, and matured thinking are not what we should be afraid of. Bad story tellers, bad imagination, and poor planning are. OE has not given me any reason to suspect the latter. If they do, then I will re-evaluate. As the market expands, and adds more People (both consumers and creators) we see dilution of the medium. This is normal. Saturation is a real thing. That doesn't mean that all items are then bad, theres just more companies able to be bad in the sea making it appear that way. Good Day.

If it is actually stuck in PIO are you able to see that through device manager? The following walkthrough is for hard drives but applies equally to any device in PIO mode: http://techlogon.com/2011/03/28/how-to-fix-hard-drive-stuck-in-pio-mode/ If it is a PIO issue this should be able to tell us, and if so steps to 'force' it into DMA, seems to work for quite a few people so i hope this does the trick. If not it could be the worst coincidence of all time and just that the DVD drive is actually dying/broken. Not sure what the money situation is but good externals and internals are really cheap these days. Got a great usb3 DVD RW drive thats external not long ago for ~19$

That sounds terrible terrible terrible.. I havent run into any real issues with securom stuff i did have in the past however this FAQ has some decent ways to fix a lot of the things you are talking about when it breaks. Most of it is duplicated in win7 so it should be able to fix that as well, beyond that if you install it on a system that wont change, and have nothing like poweriso or the like installed it should be ok. http://secusphere.com/smf/index.php?topic=6.0

I think productivity becomes relative really. If you need to heavily use things like excel style sheets or word docs etc, your better off with either a netbook (if you need ultra portability) or one of the tablets running a more 'common' OS style that has a keyboard, or keyboard dock as others have mentioned. If you really only need something more like emails, and basic basic basic word processing, a real tablet could work fine, then its just a matter of finding one you like best and can utilize the fastest with an OSKB. Really the best option in that case is to, if possible, get to something like a best buy and just try some out for a while. Hands on experience is pretty key with these I have found. Some tablets that I read of that sounded awesome I hated when I got to a store. Turns out one I really really like is the sony tablet, they do a horrendous job of marketing it though: http://discover.store.sony.com/tablet/#intro Its really cool, and with stuff like one-note for not intensive things it works really well. I use it more as a general tool (control the tv/receiver/takes notes/write important stuff down/light surfing/watch stuff) things like that. In my job it wouldnt be that great productivity wise, but generally good. So, with the meandering, really it can come down to personal preference, and if you use/need to use certain applications or software (eg MS branded stuff, or Apple, etc).

that sounds pretty cool, ill have to check that out

That's just nutty. I can't fathom doing a prank like that, let alone it leading to someones death, and then saying woe is me twas unsafe conditions! I just can't wrap my head around that kind of non logic.

Mmm first builds. Mine involved the p3 coppermine and a heatsink put on backwards back when lips on the bottoms of heatsinks were still a thing.. Damn box wouldnt get past the ram check before freezing. Thankfully no lasting damage! My friend on the other hand.. he built his at our computer shop at school where the teacher decided it would be funny to put his finger near the turned on computer's cpu.. not on it, but near.. one static discharge arc later, lots of swearing and finger holding, and a cloud of smoke later and my friend was out a computer..

Reminds me of Fahrenheit 451... I need another screen! All my friends have another one! Oy *shudder*