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TwoCrows

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TwoCrows last won the day on May 10 2010

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  1. As a preface....I am not in some back-water mountain top where only helicopters can reach, I am literally, 10 minutes away from one of the largest hubs in Virginia for Comcast; One of their major satellite uplink centers which makes the following all the more insane. The service to my house, my neighborhood, and lots of chunks of the county I live in is utter trash. In the past 6 years that I've had it (this is 100% not an exaggeration): ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MAJOR trunk replacement to my neighborhood : 4 times The line from the pole to my house : replaced 9 times. The first FOUR, the install techs used the worst possible grade of cable, and left it on TOP of the ground.....The next few they couldnt seem to figure out how to properly terminate wire, use the correct splitter/balun/coupler, etc etc. I've never run it over, cut it/etc. They finally managed to figure out how to bury it the last two times they have come out. Only a few of the people who have ever come out have the right tools. A couple of them thave taken out their little line meters and go, golly gee! you have 80% noise in this line! no wonder the signal is so bad! The junction box to my section of the neighborhood : 3 times I dunno, perhaps sealing the box or making sure the weather seals are good might be something you want to check when you leave? Nope. Two of the times the box has literally been full of water. I watched the guy open it, and jump back as this column of water splashed/poured out. He was just standing there looking like he had seen a ghost. My primary cable box has been replaced, and this is no joke : 13 times. We have a little counter on our fridge of our cable box replacements as a joke. Yup, this is lucky #13. The HD dies in it, one time it started smoking and i had to get an extinguisher just in case. Three of them went into a permanent reboot cycle after one month of use. It's hilarious, you take a box in, they put it on a shelf, and hand it to the next guy! I am dead serious. I watched it happen. I'm like, uhm, he just said that didnt work, and you're handing it to me? The counter-lady looked at me with this blank, what am i supposed to do stare. The T.V is not on all the time, we watch at night, and sometimes some on-demand. My cable modem replaced : 11 times. Same problem. 4 different models. I've had these people tell me everything from the copper in the lines shrunk so my signal was degraded (mind you, the temps here never get below 20ish for a month or two a year tops). That the connectors the installers used in the trunk lines were totally the wrong kind. That they got the cable order messed up and bought the wrong grade of coax and decided to lay it anyway. They couldnt "find" my house (dozens of times) so they closed the ticket rather than call (guess they couldnt "find" a phone either). Over the course of having this trash at this house, I've gotten around 8 months of free service because it's been out almost as much. For one outage it took them two weeks to even get someone to come look, then they said, oh, we're the wrong unit for this problem, we need to get the line guys our here...another week.... Aside from all that fun? For a while I had my own modem and they were charging me their rental fee. I took mine in there, with the box, the receipt, and had it out with them. It was a model they don't even offer and the counter-idiots tried to argue with me that i was just trying to get out of paying for renting their modem. I said, "so I went to a store, bought one, paid $135 for it, kept it in the box, and came here all to avoid the what, $8/month charge? How can you say that with a straight face.". Calling their customer service is a joke. One call the guy picks up, and you can clearly hear him say "watch this", he puts the phone down, THINKS he presses mute, and leaves it there, waiting for me to hang up. You can hear him and his office friends laughing and taking bets on how long I'd stay on the line. They talked about their girlfriends, food, the bathroom, all kinds of awesome topics. I called again, with another moron who also thought he pressed the mute button, and proceeded to tell his buddy he was going to pretend he was checking the system and then say he didnt find anything so he could get off the line. When he got back I asked how his friend was doing with his new house, what was the recipe for his wifes crab dip that he was talking about and oh by the way, how was that check you didnt do. He was mortified, I asked to talk to his supervisor, who was able to pull up the recorded call, and wasnt laughing either. If it was just once, or their people actually knew anything about how to troubleshoot anything, it would be one thing. But I can count on one hand, the number of folks who actually knew anything about how their system worked, or how to even diagnose a problem. We don't have FIOS in my area yet, satellite sucks, and there are no other providers. I pay something like $190 a month in cable bills (just T.V and internet) and it is the worst service i've ever experienced. I reported them to the BBB and the guy just laughed, he said you are like the millionth person ive talked to in the past few months with complaints like this. Some of my friends who have it here also joke that we could probably get better service by hanging up some twine and using soup-cans on each end.
  2. Well said, I would also add that even in our extremely brief period of being able to perceive past even our own earth-bound geographic regions, we have always started with the assumption that what we can see is the total truth and nothing else exists. For how long did we as a race believe the earth was the center of everything, that there were only 9 planets in all of creation (and for a time only 2-3 that they could see). We looked up, saw a bunch of twinkly lights and figured they were just pretty dots with nothing more to them. We thought we knew where our solar system ended, we thought this galaxy was all there was, we thought we knew where space "ended" (wall of galaxies), heh, we even thought that space was infinite and was always expanding; We now "think" it might actually be contracting already. As improbable as we are, and for all of our mighty achievements,we are such a tiny speck on the cosmic scale that the best answer we as a species can make about the rest of whats out there, is we really are totally blind to 99.9999% of what exists. We see big balls of matter, clustering around stars, out as far as our technology allows us at the time. We see false-color images of gas clouds so big, it would take millions of years to go from one end to the other. We "look" for things along the spectrum of light we are used to seeing and "listen" on radio frequencies we understand. This would be like a guy on a sea-shore, with big cone to his ear, listening for someone yelling, when all around him this invisible spectrum of energy is being used for communications. Can you imagine....Columbus is just now getting within sight of the "new world" and several thousand feet over his head in a cloud bank is a communications ship, talking to its forward base by tachyon tight beam transmission. He would have no clue. We can't even explore our own oceans and we as a species think we have space sorted out and nothing is out there, because we can't hear it or see it using our current ideas about communications. From a practical standpoint, I absolutely agree that contact, no matter how "good" it may seem at first, will have catastrophic consequences. Take a super simple example. Lets say "they" have wonderous medical technology. They decide to donate it, and help us out by flying down a bunch of hyper hospitals and care centers. They have hyper advanced nano-medicine making almost all "drugs" un-necessary and obsolete. Something so wonderful and generous, ends up putting tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, etc out of work. It basically halts the huge evil drug industry in its tracks and that causes a cascade failure of economies. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost, trillions of dollars (including taxes) are lost, shipping companies are impacted(they have to get those drugs to places), all the support organizations that feed that one industry suffer massive losses, many of which can't re-tool fast enough to do soemthing else and on and on. The huge up-surge in people living longer so much easier causes an impossible strain on food production and water resources. But wait! "They" have a fix for that too! A quick growing fungus/plant that is hybridized with their technology that is so nutritionally superior that it can supplement large portions of our diet. The "smart" farmers switch to this new crop (they do this now due to Gov't subsidies, it does happen), the rest who can't adapt go bankrupt. When you introduce massive changes to any system, it is very easy to throw it off balance and cause it to fail, even if those changes are on the surface, "good".
  3. It 's likely that he was a member with admin, logging in with a different name. Our admin access is controlled by GUID so you could show up with any name and you'd have the same "level".
  4. Assault : AN-96 or M-416 Engineer : UMP or Krink medic : M60 Recon : GOL or m24 A lot of what you use is just personal preference. In looking at the actual game damage values, all weapons in a certain "class" (as in all assault rifles, etc), do similar damage over time. Example (assault guns) : Weapon...........Max DMG...........RPM..............Max possible(RPM * damage per shot, excluding reload time) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AEK ....................14.3...................800..............11440 XM8.....................16.7...................750..............12525 F2000.................12.5...................850..............10625 Aug......................16.7...................700..............11690 AN-94.....................20...................600..............12000 M416...................16.7...................700..............11690 M16.....................14.3...................800..............11440 There are other factors for these of course, the f2000 has the lowest DOT and lowest damage per shot, BUT it also has the lowest spread per shot of any Assault weapon at 1.25 (compared to almost all the rest at 1.5) and the lowest spread while moving (2.0 compared to 2.5 for the rest). That does not seem like much difference, but its the difference between a headshot and not at 60 yards. It also does that same damage (12.5) at all ranges, where most other guns drop off quite a bit; The AUG for example, 16.7 up close, but 12.5 at 60 yards. You'll get lots of opinion on what the "best" gun is based purely on damage alone and to a degree that is valid, but only if you can make the gun hit the target Experiment with the weapons, you may be surprised what works for your style.
  5. Sometimes I'm slow....I finally found the commands to get your BF:BC2 guid... If you're having trouble finding the commands, its super easy : Get into a PB enabled game...hey, like our server! Do a normal chat and type the following 3 commands. /pb_logtofile 1 /pb_writecfg /pb_myguid For windows 7/vista, the log file (PBCL.LOG) will be in your Punkbuster folder similar to : C:\Users\YOUR-USERNAME-HERE\AppData\Local\PunkBuster\BC2\pb Your guid is in that file. For XP, the log file is going to be in the PB folder where you installed the game.
  6. I totally, completely apologize for what im about to say, but im laughing out loud so hard my face hurts...my sides hurt....i can't breathe..... "It take just about 10 mints to load one page on the net"... I'm not even sure why that struck me as so hilarious, but i got this image of some little unhappy dude sitting at his desk...with a huge stack of tic-tacs or Lifesavers mints....feeding them into one of the drive bays....Angry as hell, trying to get pages to load.... "this #@*@*($ computer!!! ten mints for one page?! yesterday it was 7 mints!!! soon i'll have to go to Cosco to buy in bulk to browse the intarwebs!!!!" I needed a good laugh, and that was it...Ty
  7. Best use of technology / programming I have seen today...possibly all week...
  8. I don't have any first hand observations of that particular card, BUT...if you ever want to compare graphics cards.... Compare Graphics card performance side-by-side In general, recent NVIDIA based cards usually use a couple designations that denote which market segment they are targetting....GTX and GTS..There are others to be sure, like GT, but in the past couple of years, they have stuck to the GTX/GTS designations. The GTX series are their super-performance, bleeding-edge, all-features on kind of cards and the GTS are the somewhat less expensive, some features turned off type cards. Often, a GTS and a GTX card may have a different "number" but have the same core chips, just with different clocks/features that make the GTX "faster/better". Head to GpuReview in the link above and you can do some side-by-side performance comparisions and get a better idea about the statistics of the cards
  9. Hehe, thanks. I have a long background in electronics theory/engineering and hardware repair, down to the component level (resistors, caps, etc)....So many traces, so little time....
  10. Totally funny to see the gamer generation posting comments like "aimbot!!" and "omg ban him!".. Of course they are completely kidding, but it is so hilarious the mash-up of eras, concepts and thoughts. The whole time i was watching, especially Bob Munden, the world-record holder for fast draw (and 18 other records) I always thought...yea..he is completely aimbotting. As funny as those are, shotguns just dont have several hundred yard range with any hope of accuracy or kill power, and those are the shots in BC2 im talking about. I've seen someone pop a guy from the top of the hill on that harbor map down to those under-construction multi-floor buildings, thats waaaay too far for any shotgun to ever be able to make, under any conditions hehe.
  11. There is no problem physically with defragging a hard drive. It doesnt do anything that does not already happen from reading/writing data. You could do it 100 times a day and have no effect on the drive from a mechanical or systemic(the drive as a unit) perspective. Some folks make the case for data loss or errors when moving files during defrag but the problem with that argument is it is no different than you moving files around yourself with cut-n-paste. When you cut-n-paste a file to a new folder, it is moved to a totally new set of sectors on the drive. When defrag does it, it just happens to put them in a certain order. In fact, if this were a real problem, you would see it a lot more often simply by turning the computer on and doing just about anything...clicking anywhere, opening a browser link, etc. Almost every action you take results in some kind cache hit or memory page change/lookup/etc, or disk access; Remember, your HD is used to hold the "Page file" as extra memory. Long ago, in the deep dark days of early computers, EVERYTHING in the system was far far more error prone than today and the idea of defragging too often/etc would have had a lot more actual reasoning and observable fact behind it. There is also the argument for "immovable files", such as the swap file. This really cant be moved while the computer is on, as it is always in use, always. Since it is all over the place, it can prevent the most advantageous groupings of files because it is splattered all about. Some programs take this into account and run another swipe at a defrag before the GUI of the O/S loads. Lastly, it is the law of diminishing returns. If you defrag every week, you probably won't see the same bang for your buck as when you do it over a longer span, there just isnt a lot of fragmentation...UNLESS...you delete things often or have a lot of things being installed/un-installed in short order. You will spend more time watching those nifty little blocks moving around during the defrag than doing something useful, like running someone over with a tank...then backing over them again....and again...
  12. Welllll.....In that specific example, it is completely not true, because it is on the same spindle...the same physical drive... The drive head can only be in one place at a time, so if it's reading a cache for the O/S, its not reading game data. You get an apparent (and in some cases, its only apparent, not real) boost by using an array of drives because data is striped across multiple physical drives. This allows more data to be read quicker...Some things however do not benefit from this at all...BUT, some things do. The boost is not linear, that is if you have 2 drives it wont be 2x as fast, and if you have 3 it wont be 3x as fast, etc...When you look at actual performance metrics from various tools and benchmarks, depending on what you are doing, you will see varying degrees of improvement...30%...15%...50%...etc. Partitioning a single physical drive into multiple logical segments only tells the O/S that you have several distinct boundaries of storage. Some of the things that can have a positive performance impact in terms of hard-drives : 1) Configuring windows to write its cache file to a different drive than the system drive. 2) Using a system drive that is "right-sized". Don't get a 500 gig drive for your "boot" drive, if the maximum installed size of the O/S is 50 gigs. Store only the O/S on your system drive and maybe critical O/S patches. 3) Defrag, defrag, defrag. 4) If you are not concerned about restoring from a backup like Ghost, or DriveImage, a RAID 0 array for your system drive can increase performance. 5) The above point can be true for your application/game drive. A RAID 0 array CAN (can, not will) improve performance of some apps/games.
  13. I think I'm going to extend his list by a couple in short order, I disagree with him on the Recon point though. Over the past couple days since I've had the game, I've actually been getting the best player pin quite a few times playing Recon. I've got all the unlocks for Recon and Medic, halfway there to engineer, and have left assault pretty much alone. I think they should make the noob toobs non-reloadable from ammo packs. You get your couple shots, then you are done. Some games are literally nothing but grenade launcher festivals, almost to exclusion of everything else. It's like watching a Battlefield game turn into Quake where you run and jump with the stupid rocket launcher. I also think the LMGs are far too accurate, and thats after having gotten 4 gold stars with them, enough time to know they shouldnt be as accurate as a sniper rifle; And they are, i can pick people off from almost the entire map away with controlled fire. Laguna Inocentes is a prime example...I get on a nice little ledge near the top, and with just a red-dot sight I can take people down all the way down by the boat ramps, thats 85% of the entire map length. Thats without the medic LMG accuracy upgrade...... Like his 10 things article said, the shotguns have far far far too much range. I've popped people with the Saiga semi-auto from completely impossible distances. If so many games didnt turn into complete noob-toob extravaganzas, I would be 100% completely addicted. It was VERY interesting to play BC2 for almost 10 hours straight, then jump into COD4....Jeeeeeezusss......It felt like I went from swimming in mud slow (BC2) to HOLYf***WTFBBQNOWAI mach 10 in COD4. I was running into every wall, corner, stairwell, bump, brick and object like I was tweek on 10 pounds of crack and had a time-dialation field around me that sped it all up. I do love the speed-factor of COD4, its very much a reaction time game, but BC2 has it beat hands down on everything else. After they shake out the kinks of BC2, I think that will turn out to be a definite winner, especially on hardcore where you cant just run around like a wild chicken on LSD and you dont get to see where they shot you from; have to think, move as a unit, and use cover.
  14. It's gone from : Uhhh..this is TOTAL bullcrap trash..... TO Hrm....this is interesting.... TO O.K There is a LOT of BS in teh game (m60's that have infinite accuracy, a BILLION grenade launcher noobs), but its fun TO Yea, this is pretty addictive, even with the silly crap... Ive played it almost exclusively for the last 13 hours....im not addicted...really...im not... I hopped on Vent for an hour or so Illusive, but no one was on ehhee...Its like 5:30 am here (eastern).
  15. Well hot damn. Im takin a break to watch spartacus, once this is off im on Vent and in the game
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