Mordent

Ironically, whenever people I know talk about Assassin's Creed one of the very first comments that come up is, without fail, a variation on "it's so repetitive". Sure, I'm hardly a number one source of gossip or reviews, but the fact that I hear it so often does at least imply that there's a fair element of truth in it.

From Doctor Who himself: Probably not helpful, but amusing nonetheless.

Or just unnecessary. If one of your machines fails (for whatever reason) surely the priority is in fixing it / replacing it rather than just moving on to the next one and hoping that it doesn't break too? As for the desktop/laptop combination, that's understandable because of the portability of laptops. I'd still rather have a powerful desktop machine (which would be both my gaming rig and general purpose one), with a laptop that's slightly older so I can still run some fairly nice programs on it without it just generally dying on me, and if nothing else it would serve as forementionned "backup" should something go wrong with the desktop. Still, I find having two seperate computers for relatively low-resource tasks (last time I checked, a fair number of my projects require internet access ) a bit over the top, and I never really got in to the solo aspect of the Wii. Sure, it's a great group console, but I'd never fall back to it if I find myself unable to run a game on another machine for whatever reason. It's a novelty, nothing more. Currently, my ideal expenditure would be getting a console (I'm undecided betweeen the Xbox and the PS3, both have pros and cons) and an awesome desktop machine. I'm not really working on the move at the moment, so the portability of a laptop isn't what I really need. If I had to choose between a console and a desktop computer, though, the desktop would win every time. As I said, there's little a console can do that a desktop can't, but definitely not the other way around. Also, desktops are potentially upgradeable (if you don't mind spending a bit of cash on new video cards and so on occasionally), whereas consoles - although they come in different "versions" - are pretty much static. Sure, a new console will come out, and there might be a few updates/upgrades/widgets that you can get for your current one, but it's not going to be top of the range for long. Sure, desktops aren't either, but at least you can do something about that rather than having to buy a new console each Christmas. As for why I prefer WASD and the mouse, something about the joystick things on console controls never really appealed to me, and although I'm by no means a disaster waiting to happen with them, give me a mouse, a keyboard, and a decent framerate and I'm very happy... Why alter perfection itself? I love the feel of the PS controller, and although the Xbox is growing on me the PS one will always be the shape my hands mould to every time I try to pick up a console controller. Despite what I said previously about the Wii, though, there is one awesome aspect of it that everyone should try: Anyone know the "Smartboard" projectors that are becoming more popular in schools and colleges? Picture one of them, with a Wii...turn off the lights, get a second player in, and it becomes a true pleasure to both play and to watch.

Computers, desktops as opposed to laptops especially, are the way forwards in my mind. The sheer versatility of them means that instead of having two seperate machines (one computer for work etc. and a console for gaming) you can quite happily get away with just one pretty powerful desktop computer that you can upgrade as necessary. Besides, the WASD controls and a mouse are superior to any console controller you care to mention anyway.

Out of idle curiousity, I'm trying to work out even vaguely how this could be a viable means of powering anything. Let's say you use a very small wavelength (high frequency) to minimise the amount of diffraction (namely allowing you to "target" the energy). That way, it only works if the object is in line-of-sight (or near enough), so you'd might as well just plug it in. If you choose a higher wavelength, the level of diffraction increases, so the waves "spread out", meaning that although you could potentially charge things round corners (at least a little), the amount of wasted energy would be astronomical. When there's people looking at ways of using energy more efficiently to save the world's resources, I honestly can't see this working too well. My next little argument against this idea is that, should we ever develop some method of making it physically viable, what would the point be? Surely it would make more sense to spend time on either ways of conserving energy, using it more efficiently, or being able to create batteries that either "recharge themselves" (there's some other topic in this forum about it somewhere...EDIT: found it here) or ones that are capable of storing far more energy at a time, so their battery life is far longer. I'm not saying it won't happen, I just can't see there being a reason for it...*shrugs*

Just on a slightly random side note, I believe that the previous limitation of 4GB of RAM (pre-64 bit processors) was the lack of possible numbers to expand to:2^32 = 4,294,967,296 possible addresses1,024^3 = 1,073,741,824 (bytes in a GB)4,294,967,296 / 1,073,741,824 = 4 (GB of RAM)So, until the 64-bit processor came along, 4GB of RAM was the maximum available that made each address equally accessible (correct me if I'm wrong on that one). With the introduction of 64-bit processors, though, the maximum becomes 17,179,869,184 GB, or 16,777,216 TB. This boost in hardware capability should see us well in to the future (despite the fact that the 4 GB limit was originally perceived as more than people could ever need).So, with 64-bit processors around relatively recently we should see the RAM available start rocketing, which means that sooner or later it should just become a simple question of how much you're actually willing to spend on your RAM, and how quickly miniaturisation can keep up with the memory available.Also, as I forgot to talk about flash disks and hard drives in my last post, I should probably say something about them now:A hard drive is a slower, less reliable, larger (in terms of physical size), and moving (so it wears out) form of data storage than flash memory. If flash memory was available in the sorts of quantities that could compare with hard drives for a comparable price, I couldn't see any reason for people not to "upgrade" to them. Based on the wonders of learning a little about electronics, the only reason we haven't yet is because of the financial cost of doing so. Flash memory currently costs far more than a hard disk byte for byte, but it's certainly coming down in price. It will certainly be interesting to see how far they've developed in as little as a year's time.

CDs of 5 GB? Ever heard of DVDs? They've got 4.7GB worth of storage as it is, at it's not as if there's no new "CD-sized" storage technology in development. :rolleyes:On a slightly random note, too, hard disks have broken the Terabyte limit a little while ago, but they're not really in common-usage yet (as far as I'm aware). RAM, however, is something I'd love to see improve, although I do disagree with your comment about running so many programs at once to at least some degree: if technology advances enough to make that much RAM readily available it would only make sense for people to write programs which make use of it to the full. While we're about it, thoughts on there being ridiculous levels of graphics card memory available in the future?Also, before I forget to mention it, the TB equalling 10^3 GB annoys me slightly. Technically, it's correct, but I prefer using gibibyte (1024 GB), simply because it makes for nicer binary-based numbers.

Odd, I'll admit. I've had a few similar(-ish) problems, but only because I probably left the browser page open too long and caused the session to time out before I'd sent the message, so I suppose Windows Live didn't really appreciate that. :rolleyes:EDIT: Just realised that I've reached 100 posts. Cheers, Xisto.

Ah, Linkin Park...I don't know anyone who can say they don't recognise at least one of their songs, even if they're not sure of the names. If I had to name my favourite album, it'd be Hybrid Theory, because it was the first one that introduced me to the group - and has a good few of their better-known tracks on it - plus I've yet to really listen to much of the other albums.

While I'm by no means an expert on exchange rates, economic fluctuation, stocks/shares and anything else you care to name in the financial field, all I know is that, despite living in the UK, I tend to get paid (and pay) online in USD. While they may vary a fair amount, and are (relative to Pounds Sterling) falling, I have the same problem as a fair number of people out there and have to work a little harder to earn the same amount when the conversions are dealt with. I'll give you an example: I write articles for people online (I'm not going to go in to exacting detail as to how/where/etc.) and as a majority of online communities have members from many different countries, those I work with use USD as a standard medium to pay by. A fair number, of course, live in the US as well, but anyway... Doing approximate conversions in my head, I tend to work with 1.00 GBP being around 2.00 USD, and have for some time. Sure, it varied about there for a little while, but recently (as I mentionned) I'm getting less pounds to the dollar. It's not by much, but it's certainly enough to warrant taking in to account. So, what do I do? I just buy everything online in USD, and figure that (provided the retailers don't boost their prices) I can quite happily get relatively the same deal for exactly the same work. Why's that? $100 at, say, $2 to £1 is worth the same in the US regardless of the exchange rate. That is the whole point of exchange rates (or so I'm lead to believe), after all. When we start mixing Canadian Dollars, Australian Dollars, and any other sort of dollar in to the equation, and live in a country with a currency that's falling compared to others, I can certainly understand there being problems, though.

It seems a little repetitive for a desktop wallpaper for me, but that's just personal preference I guess. I tend to prefer single images, like my current Firefox one (blue FF logo in the top right-ish, with a light blue "halo" dimming to dark blue), which lets me see my icons easily. Your one just looks a little busy for my liking. Again, though, personal preference. :rolleyes:It's still a fairly cool effect, regardless, though.

Actually, before I forget to talk about cameras, the idea of a "modulated" design - so that you can quite literally build your own system from a large number of seperate chunks of hardware (ranging from, say, RAM to a built-in camera) strikes me as a damned awesome idea. Imagine being able to replace parts of your phone / PDA / whatever with a few simple flicks of a switch. Compatibility could be an interesting problem, but if all of the parts identify what they are and the component is in the "knowledge-base" of the rest of the system then it would know what to do with it. Think of it as the next level of plug-and-play.

What makes me laugh slightly is that, given a few years or perhaps a little more, devices similar to that one might be pretty commonplace. Miniaturisation is going at such a ridiculous rate that the idea above is by no means impossible, nor unlikely. Now the slightly scary thought: if we can make computers that small that powerful, what are the desktop ones going to be like...?I'll leave that thought hanging for you to ponder...

Hmmm...well, it looks like I'm branching out towards making my own little gaming community site, and I'm curious about the difference in levels of security. For example, if I use sessions instead of cookies, and they're more secure, why would anyone want to ever use cookies? Correct me if I'm wrong, but cookies allow someone to "retain" data for however long it takes for the cookie to expire, whereas sessions only last until you close the browser window (or the like)?If so, I'd have to admit I agree with wutske, but that's just my personal preference. *shrugs*Before I forget to mention, including a nice little user database idea might not be a bad one. I'm currently toying with automatic email validation, and it's going pretty well. As a relatively experienced programmer (in general), making the move to PHP wasn't overly difficult. I'm still not a fan of the complications involved in getting the site to look nice while working fully (as echo just doesn't feel right for putting in large chunks of XHTML code, but maybe that's just me). How do you folks get around that problem?

On a fairly random note, inspired by a mix of RoDanie's post and the nearing of Christmas, anyone care to comment on the Sims 2 expansion packs? A certain relation of mine spends more time getting annoyed at her Sims for spending all day playing computer games than she does off of the computer. What ones are available, which are the best, and are they worth the money?

There are other browsers than Firefox? :rolleyes:But yeah, I'm using FF 2.0.0.9 at the moment, and nigh-on never use anything else (until they bring out a new one, of course). While I was tempted to take a look at the Firefox beta, I decided against it simply because I'm happy with v2. I never was a fan of beta-testing, anyway. I'd much rather use the latest stable release, and get it as soon as the beta lot have finished finding all of the flaws.

Urgh, now that's just nasty. On the basis that I only ever use IE to attempt to log in to sites without them remembering who I am (for testing out my login scripts etc.), it seems just a little bit far that they completely block Firefox. Sure, I accept that they may not be able to get it looking perfect, but that's surely no reason to block it?

Supposedly I should be getting 8Mbps download, but it rarely gets over 2Mbps, and come good old prime-time and it can drop to a quarter of that. Ah well, that's good old Virgin Media for you...£17.99 a month, I believe.

Pretty much the same as Mark420, really. The file manager gives you pretty much total control of your files, but for everyday work I go for FileZilla if for no other reason than the fact that I'd quite probably die of boredom if I had to upload each file one at a time.

Good old paranoid schizophrenia... Anyway, my (slightly worrying) results: Paranoid: Low Schizoid: Low Schizotypal: Moderate Antisocial: High Borderline: Low Histrionic: High Narcissistic: High Avoidant: High Dependent: Moderate Obsessive-Compulsive: Moderate ...go me?

...why would you need to know about Tic Tac Toe on PowerPoint if you were trying to make one using HTML (tricky, for one thing)?That just seems a little odd to me. The only half decent PowerPoint games out there (in my mind) are the Choose Your Own Adventure style ones, but even they are outclassed by a lot of "dedicated" programs designed to run CYOA style games (and do it very well, I might add).

*chuckles* A nice, detailed review there. ;)But yeah, I've never had a problem with Xisto, and even if I didn't have hosting here the forums themselves are worth it for the little bits of info and general chat. I don't think I've ever had to worry about hosting credits, simply because I post here enough as it is.As this seems to be a review thread, anyone care to mention any positive/negative aspects of Xisto, other than the fact that "it rulez"?

Someone who wants to host a lot of high resolution images and the like? Regardless, Xisto still strikes me as being the best free host around. I can't say I've tried many, but companies that chuck out storage space and bandwidth like they're going out of fashion care far less than their smaller scale counterparts. In short: quantity doesn't make up for quality.

So, effectively, it's offering sub-standard hosting for free, which in turn they resell from HostGator (getting it at a relatively low price for the bandwidth and space available, but only for sale in large quantities anyway)? That said, other than the limitations to your site (little PHP, amongst other things), is there any actual downside to having it? For example, if they required participation in forums like Xisto does (for example), clearly it wouldn't be worth the bother. If they had ads lining the top, bottom, side (and everywhere else) of your site, then it'd lower the quality of your site and again not be worth it. If it's almost catch free, though, is it such a bad thing?

The word "ouch" does come to mind. ;)Anyway, any resolution on the name yet?