Joel Schultz

There's too many naive users who think an 6-year old OS can hack it security-wise and otherwise. I blame this on them. /evil_laughter=on, rant=on Sometimes I laugh when I hear them complain about performance (NT 4 on same box as Win98 can leave Win98 in the dust doing heavy-duty number crunching, somewhere 3 to 6 times faster in my experience -- and NT 4 is a dinosaur itself). Or when they get mad when MS announces they won't fix a bug because the OS is too old and about to go obsolete anyway. Hello! You think after 8 years maybe its time to upgrade? Or do you still like to use DOS 3.1 too? /evil_laughter=off, /rant=off Do you realize how infuriating it is to code up some cool stuff only to have your testers come up to you and say, "When I run the program I get a message 'DLL missing export symbol ' and it quits"? Stupid OS variations. Actually, in all honesty now that I think about it the last time I got that error was due to an IE version issue. Certain "coolified" desktop features aren't necessarily included in even more recent versions of IE if you have an older OS (e.g. NT 4.0). I had assumed otherwise. Old OS support and IE version issues. Ugh.

Oh God, look what I started... OK, that does it! Time to bring out the BIG GUNS!!!

Heh, you got to love the British. Do they have a unique sense of humor or what? (Refering to overall tone of article)

So I guess I'm alone on this? No one else has watched Big O and understands the ending? Oh well...

Hey!

Eclipse: Yeah, I know that those last forums on my list are not available for the reasons I stated and you reiterated. I just listed them for completeness. (In case you wonder why I did this I ran into the issue in one of the forums and in a spate of boredom/helpfulness and otherwise being too tired to hold a coherent train of thought decided to test all of them). SC: As I figured... I guess it was "not so oddly enough" after all; I kind of suspected that UBB may been that way after I looked at the final lists. Just trying to be helpful... Anyway, allow me to smack myself with a fish on your behalf.

Um, this is probably a configuration bug, or else a deliberate configuration policy on the part of board Admins. Why is using HTML in a post not enabled in all forums? For your edification, I did a not-so-quick rundown trying to post a topic in each forum section. The results are below. Oddly enough (or perhaps not so oddly) most of the forums which have HTML posting disabled are the "new" forums that what I assume became the Rubbish Pit spawned. HTML disabled News & Announcements General Discussions - Gaming General Discussions - The Arts General Discussions - Health & Sciences General Discussions - Technology General Discussions - Politics & Religion HTML enabled General Issues Video Issues Sound Issues Multiplayer Issues UC General Discussions BCM/BCM Gold General Discussions Multiplayer Discussions Tips, Tricks & Techniques Newbie Discussions Fun Stuff Demo Discussions Game Builder System, Cheats, Hacks Role Playing Discussions BC Legacy Discussions Community Discussions General Discussions - The Rubbish Pit General Fleet Discussions Prime Fleet Wraith Fleet ISS Fleet Orion Fleet EarthCom Fleet Insurgent Fleets Gammulan Fleets Misc. Race/Caste Affiliations No posting permissions and/or ability and/or access rights In other words, I couldn't test these Development Discussions Area 51 Patch News Forum Archives

So, does anyone else watch Big O on the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" anime schedule? I'm on my second viewing of the 26 episode series. Why? Because one, I really, really like it. And two, the ending was confusing and I'm trying to see if paying attention will make a difference. Plus, ask around here some ... SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . So, what exactly happened in the last few episodes anyway? Is Paradigm City some kind of Star Trek holodeck? What on earth was Angel's connection to it and Big Venus? What was happening at the end when the city faded out around Big Venus as it approached Big Fau and Big O? Why did Big Venus and Big O (along with its pilots Roger and Dorothy) merge/dissolve at the end? In a word: huh? Anyone have thoughts on the ending? (Mods: assuming this is the right forum for TV. If not, please move.)

Smirnoff Ice I really don't have a taste for beer. I can almost tolerate Yuengling...

One word (sorry Ep 5 ): W00t!

quote: Originally posted by Epsilon 5: I have folded paper towers under the 2 front "feet" of the casing of my secondary pc, cos otherwise it would make an horribly loud noise. I also had to play with the cpu fan screws every night for about 2 weeks to remove the vibrations between the fan and the heatsink and its intermittent noise, but now both my systems are making as little noise as they could Same here, only its a faux-rubber non-slip matting. That isn't such a bad idea, though, about the fan screws, except mine is held on by two spring-loaded metal clips. Maybe one day I'll mess with that some more, but I wasted enough time on it already as it is quote: Originally posted by Alacard: In the military, we start out by making sure the 2 cent plastic hinges used to mount the RAM aren't bent... Save the wind tunnel and supercomputers for other stuff Heh -- I thought of that and they were rock solid; I just didn't mention it. The story was getting long enough as it was Supercomputers? Nah, anyone can do this on a run-of-the-mill desktop PC; besides, with end-of-year slowdown I have some time on my hands.

A lot of hardware review sites I know of, when discussing "noise", tend to focus on the obvious causes of noise: fans. The lower the decibels, the lower the noise generated by whatever the device. So if you have not-so-noisy hardware, you should end up with a not-so-noisy machine, right? Well, things aren't so simple and I suppose this should have been more obvious given whom I work for. True story: I recently upgraded my memory from 256MB to 512MB for a good cause: Tron 2.0. (Aside: that game rocks! It captures the spirit of the original movie perfectly and was just all around excellent -- but that's a topic for another thread...) So I figured to get maximum airflow, I'd mount my existing 256MB stick closest to the CPU and the new one farthest, leaving one intervening and empty RAM slot open on my motherboard. Well, after I buttoned up the case and restarted the system, I noticed things got noisier. I chalked this up to me nudging a cable or something into a fan or whatever. But I wasn't about to drag the PC out of the desk again just over a wire; I need a better excuse to go through that kind of pain than that. Two months go by. I now have an excuse to attack the problem because I need to install an Ethernet card in preparation to getting broadband via cable. (Another aside: broadband rocks!) I put the card in, jiggle the wires around some, button it up and restart. The machine is just as noisy. No, its worse. Much worse. Fortunately my machine's front face removes allowing me access to the drive bays, which are on slide-out rails (kudos to whomever thought up that configuration). So, I get a drive out of the way and poke my hand inside and start tugging cables, with mixed results. Sometimes the noise gets better. Sometimes worse. OK, I think: let's go back to the beginning. What causes the vibration? Obvious: the CPU fan. I touch it with my finger and its got the vibe pretty good. Maybe that means its off-balance or something, I don't know, but I have to live with that. I follow the power wire from the fan to the knot of power cables. That small wire got the vibe but the cables aren't even vibrating in the least. So if it isn't the cables, what is it? To make a long story short (too late?) I started feeling around the internals. And guess what? Remember that new RAM stick I put in? It is vibrating incredibly strongly. Suprised, I touch its mate closest to the CPU. No vibration. Touch the new one again and apply pressure -- the vibration stops. In a moment of inspiration, I powered down, unplugged and moved that new stick closer to the CPU (the middle RAM slot). Power back up -- and the computer is much, much quieter. Actually, I think I do have a cable vibrating on something now, but I can do something about that. So what was happening? I work for an engineering company, and although I don't know much about the finer points of mechanical engineering my theory is that the vibrations of the fan travel through the motherboard, and that RAM stick was at just the right location such that the frequency of vibration set off a harmonic reaction in the RAM stick causing it to vibrate in sync, amplifying the fan's vibrational frequency. Just like a tuning fork vibrating in reaction to a note being played. Moving the card changed the distance to the CPU fan, and/or moved it to a region of the board that may have been vibrating with a lesser amplitude or different frequency, thus dampening the noise. I'm going to talk to one of our real engineers tomorrow and see how involved creating a model for analysis of this would be. It'd have to be simplified, but I figure a vibrating block attached to a thin plate with another plate jutting out should be sufficient. Of course, to be really accurate I'd need to know the exact dimensions of the mobo, the exact positions of the screw holes, etc. I just may create an arbitrary mock-up and experiment some. Moral of story: having quiet parts is a good start, but never underestimate the havoc harmonic physics can wreak on you eardrums. Another moral learned today: never wear earphones when you are blindly searching for the "headphone out" jack on a sound card while playing music and your software volume control is set to high volume. Not if you value your hearing, anyway.

You know, it really amazes me -- you think DC's own QA team would be screaming at their bosses "DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT EXPIRING MEANS?" Internal communication problems at DC in addition to the external ones? SC's e-mails did seem to be English... Maybe they needed to be Elbonian.

I had a lightning strike hit really close to my parents' house. The PC had surge protection everywhere except the phone line. The first clue that something bad happened was when I felt something like a static shock through the mouse and the graphics on the screen froze up. The second clue was the phone line being "off the hook" if the PC's modem was plugged into it. Anyway, besides a fried modem the HDD died a month later with more bad sectors than I ever saw on a disk in my life, save for one that was in a PC a UPS (pronounced "OOPS") guy dropped. Moral: surge protectors on phone lines == good thing.

I'd be willing to wait (heh, it'd be easier on my pocket book this month ) The thing is the bugs left in it aren't bad, but when you read game review sites the kind of bugs that are left are the kind that usually count for demerits. I could see items 2, 3 and 5 getting dinged for that. And when "to buy, or not to buy, that is the question!" is asked of oneself about a game you know nothing of, a trusted game review site's opinion can be the decisive factor. On the other hand, maybe that'd be offset by "honesty merits" for acknowledging them?

I read the book by Michael Creighton (sp?) It was a good story. The thing I hate about him is that lately his stories read as if he were writing for the movies; I'm totally unsurprised this one was made into a movie. If you're writing a book, write a book... That said, I can't wait to see the movie.

Wow, a few months out of the loop and look what happens Well, who cares what SC calls it (as has been adequately expressed elsewhere); we all know this is a "Derek Smart Simulation". BTW, the new UC box looks really cool. Hm...out of all the box art depicted on the product page here, I still vote the art on BCM:G best. There's just something about the simplicity of that black and orange contrast with that silver cruiser that looks good. Looking forward to the demo.

(cloaking device disengages for but a moment)

The Dark Wing by Walter Hunt. One of the best reads I've had in a while, his nice development of zor culture reminds me of another of my favorite authors, C. J. Cherryh. One of these days when my life goes back to normal I'll have to read its sequel...

quote: but visual C++ is not really supported by a few people as I have noticed... Hello, Overmind, welcome to Earth. Where did you say you are from again? Sygan? Gammula? j/k, no offense but... If there is one thing Microsoft seems to do extremely well, it is development environments and tools. They may not have a top-of-the-line compiler (Intel makes one that can optimize code a lot better than theirs) but M$ tools kick some big-time booty, IMHO. I remember reading somewhere that it was all part of their master strategy: make it easy (and relatively cheap) for developers to develop on Windows, and it will help keep Windows on top comercially.

Excellent movie! Me & the wife saw it the first afternoon it was out. I never thought I'd see the day where Logan almost gets the crap kicked out of him (though come to think of it, in the comics he got the adamantium ripped out of him by Magneto), but man that fight was good... *SPOILER ALERT* I liked Magneto's escape from prison -- I always wondered if he could "feel" humans due to our natural iron content. I guess normally humans don't have enough for him to lock onto or manipulate. I didn't like the ending so much though. I mean, here you got Drake (aka Iceman) and a breached dam. So who ends up saving the day (and getting killed -- or at least as dead as comic characters get)? Jean???? Bleah...

Same site also has "location finder" (where in Middle Earth would you most likely be to live). I'd end up in Rivendell, or perhaps Edoras or Bree.

A hearty "Yo!" to another returned vet!

Find out what Lord of the Rings character you are like at the Barrow Downs. And since I'm the one starting this one I feel it necessary to admit: Me = Samwise (also: Frodo/Aragorn)

FWIW, my $0.02. I don't really care too much about the BCM multiplayer component. I'll be buying BCG, but I don't care too much about multiplayer on that either. No disrespect to those who do, I just don't really care too much about any multiplayer games. What I do sort of care about is seeing all those low-watts *cough*Shirley*cough* who complained about there not being multiplayer "Where is it? it isn't there! You said back whenever it would be! Waaah!" (not that they really care about BCM) get egg all over their face. SC wouldn't give half a buttock (if that much) for their opinion of BCM multiplayer anyway. But still, it'd be nice ammo for those inclined to smack them around in other forums