Cool_Freaker

Not a bad comeback - but I'd have to say I like some of your other work better Kubi. I think the render takes a bit too much of the sig though, and we don't get to see enough of your brushing

I have heard on numerous occasions Samsung has very good quality LCD screens, both monitors and TV's. Apparantly their dead/dark/light pixel warranty is very good also, so I would highly recommend. Alternatively, I know a few people who have had BenQ's with no problem (I am/was unlucky - my BenQ had some dark pixels and I had to return it quickly for the 7 day DOA policy).

Brushing and render choice/size/placement is not too bad. Try not to desaturate your renders too much as it makes a sig monotone.

However, Lately GM and Ford are letting employees go to cut losses. Someone needs to be building the cars. Where will the major companies find workers? Foreign countries still hold large populations of unemployed workers that are willing to work for mere pennies a hour. Any good businessman would snap up an opportunity like this.

This is the rant forum right? Spent an hour this morning typing this up about outsourcing in America. It has to stop. I mean seriously. Freaked out of losing my job, and this is not cool, despite my name.Many companies are now outsourcing jobs in the United States for the more preferred work of those outside our country. Although there are many reasons why such actions should be justified, such as a cheaper workforce, this action should be reevaluated on the basis of what a company goals really are. Trading jobs here for jobs overseas is not just at all, but quite the contrary, it is rather detrimental to the United States of America.In the 21st century, businesses are sprouting up every which way from the enterprising entrepreneurs of the new generation. With a larger need for the business related field, more students are choosing it as a major in colleges. With these hopeful youths, the reason to create a business is for money, and to increase their capital. However, there is another reason why businesses are created, the reason behind why the government is willing to help small businesses grow. This reason is to create more jobs in the United States, and with it, lower unemployment, and better the economy. With jobs being shipped to foreign countries the unemployment would go upwards rather than downwards, hurting the economy. Therefore, a new company should not only think of ways to grow, but also ways to help the nation in general by what they are creating.Practicing outsourcing also hurts other countries. The way American corporations are gaining the workforce in foreign countries is because of the relatively high wages compared to other jobs in the corresponding country. This hurts the businesses inside that country, as they cannot hire as efficient workers without the proper finances. While some may argue that with the workforce of that country having jobs, it would help more than hurt them, this is only true to a point. A country can sustain itself by leaning against others and taking whatever leftovers the master country would give. However, once the greater countries that are helping the smaller countries decide to leave them for another yet even cheaper source of work, the country in which help the jobs of U.S. citizens now face a great dilemma. Thousands of workers are out of a job, and with the stunted growth of businesses in the area, few would find another. And this chain can go on indefinitely as new countries arise from the desolate ones that are now willing to work for even less!At first, the nations companies only shipped the blue-collar workers? jobs to other countries, which, in a sense, could be seen as a movement forward in the economic field. By doing this the United States would be leaving an industrial state and going into a post-industrial state focusing mostly on services. In the eyes of comparative politicians, this is indeed a great step forward and can boost the economy to new grounds. I, however, disagree on such a notion. With industrial jobs being shipped overseas, the United States would grow dependant on foreign countries. This could lead to a massive power shift in the future, if countries would start denying the United States products.The country should keep a sector of industry in the United States to not only divert attempts at such a thing, but also open up jobs for the lesser educated. With more students dropping out of school at an early age, there are more people who cannot fulfill the requirements for more complex jobs. The amount of people now dropping out must have now increased to an alarming rate, for not a few years back there were ads to convince students to go back to school. These television ads told of a lack of career opportunities for those who do not have at least a high school education. This shows that the few jobs available to the lesser educated are mostly full and cannot accommodate more people into the system. These jobs are not increasing of course, and with more people without jobs leeching on the government for money, this is an even larger problem for the nation.Japan, however, is buying up American companies, and their growth rate is amazing. Is this not an interesting approach? While we are shipping our industrial sector to other countries, Japan is happily buying up companies. If what we are thinking our strategy would help the country, then would it not follow that Japan?s strategy would bring it to it?s knees? Of course not. This is because the CEO?s of companies are not looking to help the country as much by shipping out their jobs. They are looking for ways to maximize profits or cut losses. In short, people across the nation are losing their jobs so the top echelon of American business owners can get more money. Justice comes from the Latin words ?jus? and ?justitia?, lawful and righteous. Technically people are doing nothing illegal, so such actions are perfectly just. Then one must take in the second part of the definition. By taking jobs away to get more money one is essentially stealing money from others. Would these actions be considered righteous? Would it not be more righteous if companies were willing to sacrifice a fraction of their resources so that more people benefit? Of course, greed is a flaw of humanity, and people voicing their opinions against such ideas are ostracized as being communistic. Perhaps this is why our country is slowly stumbling down the path towards destruction. With trillions of dollars in debt it would take a lot of work on the part of everyone to get this once glorious nation back on it?s tracks.

Now heres my opinion on USP flash drives:128 MB: Heres the standard drive for the average person with word documents to transport. Cheap, and fits your needs.256 MB: Gets your files around the place, and all sorts of random flash files you made.512 MB: Seriously now, this is the most useless size. Anything you need can fit on a 256! only thing that can't are pirated movies, which can't fit on a 512 anyway!1 GB: This is my recommendation. Fits a movie, anime, manga, you name it.

Nice concept, rather inventive use of the PoP render. Good job

As beeseven said, hopefully it doesn't cost too much. It'd definitely help give the DS an edge though - with the good pricing, and with the games finally picking up (in terms of quality and quantity). Damn that'd be cool watching TV on a DS.

These days Limewire is definitely the new Kazaa - quite quick and easy to use for small things like music files. Kazaa was never really all that good - full of spyware and wrongly named files, often corrupt of virus infected.I was a big fan of WinMX when it was around, it was fairly simple, but I found it got the job done for me anyway. Shame it was shut with a Cease and Desist order (I can't remember exactly, but a few other P2P vendors were shut down as well at the same time).I used to used DC++ for the fansubbed anime which I couldn't get by Torrent. I used to get some corrupt files and stuff - quite often it also depends on if you can get some good uploaders. I usually prefer torrents as it checks the files and redownloads if a part is no good.

As was said, 2nd and 3rd are the best. I think with that kind of style you could afford going a bit more fancy with the font choice, or adding some small vector or something to help fill up space

*starts freaking out* - when I saw this topic I thought some n00b dug up a really old post. Hey, its seriously great to see you back Johnny :huh:Nice and original overall. I'd say they'd work better if you made them on a smaller scale - minimalism looks really cool when it's small

Square tends to delay releases a lot. Everyone gets hyped up far before the game even comes out. On that note, I think Ensemble Studios (makers of AoE) were much smarter, and they themselves stated they didn't release any details of AoE3 until about 10 months before it was finished, and they had a release program on track.Anyway, the initial impressions from Japan seem to be good. Looking from the screenshots there's little graphical difference, so that could be either a good or bad thing. I just hope the FF cameos are as good as they say they are

We should probably get rid of the restrictions as well - ie render requirements or the use of filters. It might be good every now and then to have a themed SOTW, but I think we would get more entries if people didn't have to specially make a sig just for SOTW and rather could enter anything they created during the week.

It's more for the price performance ratio you get with AMD, and with gaming it works just as well as an Intel. Intel, with its Hyperthreading is much better for jobs like video editing, though with Dual Cores, you're better off with an AMD it seems. There isn't really all that much software specifically for 64bit technology yet. SLi just allows you to have two graphics cards sharing the workload. ATi's Crossfire has a little more flexibility with needing only one card to be Crossfire enabled - and I don't think you need the same card. However, there is little point getting a card better or worse than the one you have in there already, as it will bottleneck with the lower performing card. My friend said SLi was done with one card producing one half of the screen, with the other producing the other half, whilst Crossfire was done with each card producing alternating lines of pixels on the screen. I don't know how true that is though.

Yeah I didn't really find the single player all that engaging, but it's still and improvement from the sort of historical storyline that AoE2 took. Ottos are a bit different, but then again so are Russians, and then everyone else. I guess there is minimal graphical difference still when it comes to all the civilzations - everything's just not distinctive enough.

AoE2 definitely had the huge fanbase and custom scenarios, hell the custom scen lobbies were just as busy as the normal game ones (probably still are). AoM mainly centred around 3 playable nations with some slight differences amongst the three, maybe you should try that?The reason I never got into the Blizzard games is that I found Warcraft had too low a pop limit (90?? + Upkeep?? ugh) and Starcraft was already way too hardcore online by the time I got to it IMO the SC storyline wasn't that great either.

Overused render, but some nice brushing there. Maybe because of the size it's a little hard to distinguish render from background from text, otherwise the smallness of it gives it some style.

A lot of brushes can be found for 6.0, I think you may be able to try some of 7.0's as well. Anything less than PS6 you're in trouble though. I think DevArt may have some, and I know for sure Annika Von Holt's (sp?) brushes are suitable for PS6.

Yeah, shows you can never be too careful. Start-up programs are a pain too - and if they're making security holes, I'd be damned if I ever allowed anything to run on startup.

Skype is much better in my opinion. The layout and interface is much clearer, and as a result, I believe the new MSN 8.0 (I got a beta invite from a friend), has somewhat copied it - it now definitely has some resemblence to Skype. Obviously voice calls are far better in Skype, and there aren't those freaking ads which MSN manages to fit everywhere!!! The problem with Skype is I don't know as many people that use it, and I've been using MSN for at least 5 years now, so I've got some really old contacts on it Also, some of the MSN customisation things are nice, like emoticons, backgrounds etc, but overall, I believe they're fairly minor compared to the gripes I have with the rest of the service.

Just bought a Motorola V360 on Prepaid from Vodafone. Apparantly they were selling like hotcakes, as they were underpriced due to some contract error between Motorola and Vodafone. It's pretty good, with VGA Camera with Video Capture, microSD Card Slot (with a 64mb card included), Bluetooth capable (with Bluetooth headset included), and Java and what not, plus free unlocking if you ever want to change networks :rolleyes:Not the best looking phone, but hey works for me

There's nothing wrong with striving for realism in a game. Think of the possibilities, which somehow make the player more involved in the game. Imagine a car simulator, which allows you to drive something you normally could never afford, or, as antisocial as it may be, realism of dating sims or whatever could be equally appealing to some people. There is a lot of reason for realism; why would artists attempt realistic pictures or paintings at all if realism offered "nothing".Of course more abstract and wacky graphics and art has it's own charm, and to be honest, I do prefer that kind of thing in games. I do know a lot of people who would beg to differ though, and it's an opinion I respect and understand where they're coming from.

I'd have to agree. I haven't been happy with the Age series since Age of Empires II - I bought both Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III on launch, but somehow I feel these newer 3D engines slow down gameplay. (Not that 3D RTS games need to be slow - look at War40k: DoW) and a higher reliance on hunting I find, makes villagers raided much easier. The problem also is that it's not the biggest step up from the rest of the series, and offers little in gameplay advancement. Sure, there's the Home City feature which is said to be "revolutionary" in the manual, but hell, I reckon it's just a little add-on - whilst interesting, isn't as big as it sounds. Oh and of course there's fact that there is a LOT of econ management involved overall, especially on a comparative basis to other RTS games out there. Also, the single player campaign, I found was hardly engaging - the details of the characters in the cutscenes were hardly an improvement on AoM and the storyline was fairly, say, straightforward. On standard difficulty, the missions are pretty easy, except for the last one or two in each act, where it seems the difficulty is ramped up tenfold and I need to lower it to easy. There doesn't seem to be a gradual increase or anything. Annoying to say the least (as the AI only seems to beat you because of their unlimited resources and wave after wave of small attacks). Disappointing really, but I'm always going to be an Age fan, and while the mechanics are old, I still like them (just...) - waiting for the expansion to see what they do with that.

I put together a new computer recently and installed AVG Antivirus on it thanks to the recommendation of a friend. I did find though that it scanned rather too often, and I couldn't get the auto updates to work properly. I later switched back to avast! (which I had been using previously), which works for me no problem... so I don't really know