Quote from SteppenwolfStill your onboard doesn't sound half as good as the x-fi. Especially when listening to compressed music (mp3) the sound chip of the x-fi is worth gold. Makes it sound clearer and better then uncompressed music straight from a audio CD.I never was a audiophile person but the first time i heard the difference it really was a "wow!" moment.
The X-Fi is a great card, but it's hardly an audiophile sound card.
You and me both 
Quote from jaboo224Hopefully windows 7 will be around by then because vista tbh works but is far from being a good stable gaming platform. sadly microsoft is not all to blame, intel/nvidia/ati/amd are all experimenting with new technology a little too much isntead of giving us solid well rounded stuff that works with the operating system.
If microsoft actually documented their shit, maybe they wouldn't have to? 
Don't watch the sequel :
":29qkmigb]you and everyone else!! using on-board sound should be considered a crime!
Don't even start with me. Seriously.
I've been using dedicated sound cards for as long as I can remember (Creative), and I've been hanging on to my Audigy 2 Platinum, which, by the way, has awesome sound.
Until recently. I've been having a number of crashes, bluescreens and odd bugs, and I've always dismissed them for something else, but recently I found out they were caused by my sound card. "Great," I thought, "now I just need to find new drivers."
I was wrong.
I went through creative's driver database, I went through the open source solutions (kX project, anyone?) and nothing worked at all. I still had my issues. Then I just finally gave up, unplugged my card and reinstalled my onboard sound drivers, and now I have no issues whatsoever. Now I have the card I've had such a great relationship with for more than quite a few years, along with a Live! drive, lying around on the floor just looking sad at me and weeping. But hell if I'll ever give creative a second chance. I was gonna buy an E-MU 0404, for my music and sound recording, but now I really don't know. They have their own drivers, but it's still built on Creative technology - and I just learned that it was the technology that fucked me over and not the drivers...
Not to forget mentioning the time you spent waiting for someone to reply on your thread. Don't even try to deny it, I know you did. I know I often do, anyway Anyway, maybe I should do what I should have done a long time ago.. I've downloaded all I need to continue studying, so I'm gonna close off firefox, outlook, MSN messenger and whatever else is keeping me busy and start focusing. I have 13 weeks of stuff I need to learn - today. Here's hoping the next semester will be better if I put an effort. Nice to know I'm not alone about this though
I can definitely see and feel all of those points you've just made. I have it a lot the same way, and while I believe part of it stems from my own excessive computer usage, I also feel it might be stress related. I'm having a hard time focusing and concentrating, in class, when doing homework, and a lot of other things. However, I don't have these issues when I sit back and play guitar or start drawing or anything else that I find is stress relieving. I think it's pretty natural to reach this point at times.. I don't know, but I think so. In my case, I think, while I have a hard time focusing, maybe I'm just losing sight of my goal and losing interest on top of everything taking a lot more effort than any educational thing I've attended before.
I think you're partly right, though. I'm not a slave to news in any way - I hate news and refuse to read, watch or hear it because it really does nothing for me. Most of it's bad and if I had to take a stand on every bad thing happening in the world I'd go insane. But I do use a lot of time surfing mapcore.net and facebook. I've recently dropped IRC (I'm sure some of you have noticed. If not, I'm kinda sad ). This was initially because I reformatted and hadn't gotten around to reinstall it, but I've known for a while now I really don't have time for it - especially not the way I use it. I've always had it running on top on my second monitor for quick access, and it's a huge distraction. I think getting rid of it has helped, yet I have an exam tomorrow and here I am posting in this thread instead of reading up. With everything being so available and things happening around us so fast and so frequently, I think it's essential we need to know how to limit and restrain ourselves so that we can use these things as tools for productivity and save the recreational part of it for later. It's just gotten harder as the line between those two things have become thinner and thinner. I think it's actually gotten harder to study as more and more educations require you to have and operate a computer to do your work, as it's a multimedia and can - and will - be used for a lot of other things at the same time. Having a clear focus becomes harder.
But as I said earlier, I'd like to think stress has a lot to do with it too. But I definitely don't think the computer helps at all.
I'd still like to claim music helps me be more productive, but the fact probably is that it doesn't. It does, however, relax me, and I find that's important too.
[EDIT]
Singing is actually much more difficult when playing a guitar :x Random fact.
Also, playing guitar is much more difficult while singing.
Quote from KoKo5oVaRThe best part of behind drunk is to intentionally make your friends beer glasses fall over on the table and pretend it was unintentional
OH NO YOU DIDN'T
Beer troubleshooting. A lot of those points are really great.
Quote from KoKo5oVaRI didn't found it that functional, actually, i found it pretty boring (for a movie). I didn't really liked how the characters personalities were adapted on screen, and also the colored rotoscoped style is not really how i would see one of dick's universes..But you are right, i should give it another chance, because it's already some time back.
Well, the rotoscoping is good and bad really.. Some scenes benefit a LOT from it, and it certainly sets a great overall mood and feeling.. But sometimes, it's just not as well done and ends up obfuscating some otherwise good scenes. In general, I really like how it turned out though.
Quote from ThrikI didn't play Resistance through to the end, but I was certainly impressed by its weapons — very imaginative, which is what you'd expect from the same guys behind Ratchet and Clank. I also liked the use of real-life UK cities, including York which I used to live in.
I'd say out of all the first-person console shooters out there, Resistance falls into the higher end of the bracket; there aren't that many that're actually better than Resistance.
York... Is that like.. the old New York?
Flash has come a LONG way. Their recent rework of actionscript has opened a lot of doors for the potential of flash. That being said, there's no reason it couldn't have been java. If you know how, you could just as well whip it up there, but when it's ID, they really are better off doing what they do best. Java has a nasty habit of long loading times and slow speeds. I saw a project with making quake 2 for java, but still being in beta it was lacking a bit of functionality, and it wasn't really up to speed, so I imagine there'd be some work to do with Q3.
I can't wait to get my hands on Quake Live
EDIT: Hoshit, just saw HP's post. PM sent, and here's hoping! :x
Heh, well obviously they've had to make a lot of alterations to make a functional movie off it, but I think they did an outstanding job modernizing it. Also, the movie has a lot of subtle layers and psychology that you need to open your eyes for before you can really appreciate how great a piece of work it actually is. I can't believe how they've been able to cram so much into so little, and I sincerely take my hat off for them. I've watched the movie some 9 times now, and I keep discovering small things and hints that just makes it that much more worthwhile. You really just need to give it a chance, take it for what it is and start analyzing it.
And please, no hating on Robert Downey Jr.
Don't have the time right now to go through everything, but I'll definitely add this one to the list!
A Scanner Darkly
[YouTube tags fixed by admin; read instructions]
http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scen ... -50-d.html
Seems more trouble is heading their way ;X
Quote from QuakisDisplay MoreNot long came back from picking out some games my Dad got for me. Can't have them until Christmas though, but I already have tons of unplayed games as it is anyway;Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey Limited Edition
TimeShift
SpellForce: Universe
Stranglehold
Fable: The Lost Chapters
TLJ and Dreamfall are on my top 10 games list. They're really, really, awesome games. But I recommend you play TLJ first (point and click style), and Dreamfall second (more 3rd person style), since Dreamfall is the sequel. Both TLJ and Dreamfall are in the limited edition package. It's a great universe and a great story. If you like games like that, I'm sure you'll enjoy them 
Just purchased Earth 2160 off Steam. It's quite the lovely game, but I didn't get to give it the time it deserves earlier. And now it's on for $4.99 on Steam, so I just couldn't resist it.
Well, for me, that depends on whether or not the client will actually keep trying to connect or not. If it does, I'd really prefer to be informed, since it'd save me the work of spamming reconnect if I know the server is in fact up or is going to be soon. On the other hand, (as is annoying me a lot with mIRC), I don't like to see the repeated message saying I still can't connect, especially if it steals focus everytime it pops up, so it should probably be kept short as a "Retrying..." message or so instead of a full error message for every repeated attempt. This is especially if you lose connection or know you'll be able to connect very soon, you want to know that it's still trying, but you don't want to get the error message for each attempt, when you know what's wrong.
(EDIT: I didn't vote, as I opted for somewhat of a third option)
Quote from DefragIt's a Korg TM-40, whatever that is (I know nothing about this stuff!)
Ah, another really excellent choice. My dad has that one 
