BaRRaKID

I really think you should reconsider your stance on the page width. Even if your target audience usually use large monitors, these days many people probably use netbooks or smartphones for browsing which have much lower resolutions, and the way it is now it's really frustrating to navigate your site. That's the thing with web design, there are conventions that people are used to, and when you deviate too much from them you're sacrificing the user experience. Concerning the width, 960px is considered to be the ideal value for a fixed layout these days . If you don't enjoy that then consider changing to a liquid layout. But you probably knew this already, since the initial value for the width on the CSS is 960px, but it was intentionally changed to 1260px leaving a mess of unused style rules behind. Also since your "content" column is so wide the sentences become too long making them harder too read (remember that people don't really read the content on a web site, they scan it). Another convention you should use here is that a content column width should be of about 2 or 3 alphabets, that means that given your font family and size, write the entire alphabet 3 times and you get the optimal width for your content. That means that no single line of text should have more than 80 characters, yours have around 150 now, which is almost twice the ideal value. For more info check out Mark Boulton series of articles called Five Simple Steps. If you're worried about the images size then just use a resize script, there are tons of them on the web and everyone is used to them by now anyway.

I think you should change the lights to something in-between the last two shots. ATM it looks too bright, without any interesting shadows. Also, the interior lights seem to be on, which doesn't make any sense since it's daylight outside, and there is enough light coming trough the glass ceiling to illuminate the entire room. If you lower, or remove those lights you will probably get more interesting and natural shadows on the corridors which might improve the scene.

I find that for most companies self hosting is the cheaper and most viable option, if you've the resources to do so. What you should do is first estimate how many users visit you site daily, there are many tools that can do that for you (like google analytics for example). Next you should estimate what's the average size of your website pages, if it's mostly text and images (without heavy graphics, scripts, animations or videos) they should have less than 1Mb in size, which means that your 512K upload speed could easily handle around 3000 daily visits, thats two simultaneous users per minute, which is far less traffic than most companies websites usually have (the company i work for, for example, has around 200 visits per month).

The truth is actually the opposite of what you said, the probability of two HD failing simultaneously is really, really low. I've never seen it happen in my experience, neither did my co-workers. Power surges are really not one of the main causes of HD failure, it's really unusual for it to happen, and you should be using a UPS with surge suppression anyway to protect your other components. The biggest cause of HD failures is in fact dust. If particles of dust get inside the HD drive you will start to get lots of bad sector warnings, and eventually the read/write head will stop working making the HD useless. And again external hard-drives are not as reliable as you might think, most of the enclosures don't keep dust away from the inside, if you ever open a external hd you will find lots of dust in there, and the fact that people carry them everywhere causes much more physical damage than having a internal HD properly secured inside your computer case. The circuit boards inside external HD also break very easily, but that's because most companies use really cheap components and bad manufacturing processes to build them. Like i said before I've 3 of them sitting in my desk at the moment which are completely dead. I'm sorry to insist on this but you really shouldn't be misinforming people about proper ways to secure their data. RAID1 arrays are a standard in any system in which data protection is important these days, along with having a (usually) off-site backup server (this only applies to companies), and doing regular backups to an external support to quick fixes.

RAID is not a backup. It is not file protection. Do not use RAID expecting it to save your shit. Running two drives at once, putting them both through the exact same workload next to each other inside the same computer, attached to the same power supply and motherboard, means that if one has catastrophic failure most likely both will. Take that extra HD and stick it in an external enclosure. Keep it off unless you're actively using it and make backups every time you do something worth backing up. Sorry but that is simply not true, at all! I don't know where your getting that information from, but having two HDs working simultaneously in a RAID array is being done for at least 20 years, and every motherboard on the market today can easily handle much more than that (I've personally set up a 4 HDD RAID array and it's working flawlessly). They may be connected to the same motherboard but the "circuits" are isolated from each other, if that didn't happened every time one of your hard drives failed you would have to buy a new motherboard as well. The same goes for the PSU, having two HD puts almost no stress on the PSU, if you check for example this PSU calculator http://www.silentmods.com/modding/PSU_W ... lator.html you can see that for example having two DVD drives uses more power than having two hard drives. As for the fail rate of using a RAID array I'll just quote wikipedia: And i never said that RAID was the same as a backup (I even said that you should keep doing regular backups while using a RAID array), but it is in fact, by definition, a method (and a very efficient one) of file protection. And it's funny that you mention external hard drives, because they have a much higher failure rate than internal hard drives tend to have. I've 3 of them sitting in my desk atm which are as useful as brick, luckily we have a 4 HDD RAID1 array

One of smart things to do these days is to buy a small (32 or 64 GB) SSD (Solid-State Drive) where you install the SO and other "heavy" applications, since SSDs are substantially faster than regular HDDs you will get a significant performance boost while runnings the applications installed on them. You then set two 500Mb/1Tb HDDs in a RAID1 array for storage. Using a RAID1 array your files will be saved on both HDDs at the same time (one of the HDDs mirrors the other) so when one of them fails (and they will fail) all your files will be safe in the other HDD. The only downside is that the writing speed decreases when using a RAID1 array, but it's the best way to avoid loosing important files. Off course you should to keep doing regular backups to an external hard drive just in case As for brands/models, for the SSD I would choose a model from the Kingston SSDNow V Series (they are more reliable), and for the HDD I personally prefer the Western Digital Caviar or Velociraptor series (depends on your budget), but the Samsung Spinpoint series are also a good choice. And don't buy a cheap motherboard or power supply, buy the best you can from a brand with good reputation (usually Asus motherboards and Corsair PSUs are the best choice). Buying a cheap MB or PSU usually leads to a unstable system and can damage your other components.

Just read that the original announcement was fake, so you're right http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3179684

I've read somewhere that respawn will be showing "something" at E3 as well, so that might be the new IP that everyone wants

I've read on Interlopers that Valve has update HL2 and Ep1 to the Orange Box engine and broke the SDK again, so if you have any new problems is probably due to that. On the other hand it seems like HL2 and EP1 have new achievements and graphic enhancements, so it's a good excuse to replay both games http://www.interlopers.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=417892

I personally enjoyed TR Legend and TR Underworld a lot. They where actually fun to play, and had a couple of complex puzzles that made me feel smart once a found out how to complete them. Plus the visuals where really nice (and I'm not talking about T&A ). The only bad part, imo, is the shitty aim system, TR without guns and more puzzles would probably be much better.

www.torrentfreak.com as several news and opinion posts about this if anyone is interested.

? The funny part is that after googling the name i remembered that I used to play that game a lot when i was a kid on my "family system" console.

I suck at remembering video game titles. but strangely i managed to get all the 56 by just guessing :megaman:

I've seen other shots from this area an the shadows don't look like that at all, it's probably due to the image compression or something like that.

I think you should desaturate the blue from the roof a bit, it looks too strong as it is now. Also the house bricks look a bit glossy in some places, might be because of the normal map, you should maybe soften it a bit.

Got that one too, by far the best mobile poker game.

FFs Porto is ugly as hell If you come to Portugal I recommend that you visit Aveiro . The city has some of the best examples of art nouveau in Europe (Porto also has some nice ones, but everything is falling apart there ), its has a water canal running across the middle of the city, it also has some nice monuments scattered all over the city but since it's not that big it's easy to see most of them in a day or tow. It's also really close to the sea (5/10min drive), has some nice weather, nice food and easy going drunk people. Beer is also cheap.

Since I usually only play on my phone while I'm on the toilet, i prefer simple games that don't take too much time, so i recommend any game from Digital Chocolate. The last ones i got where Gold Rush, Pyramid Bloxx and Diamond Islands and they are great for when you have 10/15min to waste. Every now and then Gameloft also publishes some decent games, but they also do all the movie, tv shows, and game franchises mobile adaptations, which most of the time are complete shit. So try to look for unfamiliar names, or game genres that are so simple that they can't fail (like card games, monopoly, mah-jong, etc) while choosing a Gameloft game and it will probably end out being good

You should check the comments on RPS: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/01/13/zero-gear-free-until-sunday/ Some really harsh critics there :\

Anyone having problems with forwarding ports should check out http://portforward.com/ you just have to choose your router model on the first screen, and then the application on the second screen, and you will get a step by step guide for that specific router and application.

That's insane

The article is just 20 pages long actually, the rest of the pages only have the pictures at a bigger res :\

That's a very confusing article, i read it twice and it's still a bit hard to understand the point (if there is one) but i don't think piracy is to be blamed in this case. They make "games for others, Baby games, teddy bear and pony games", they depend on 3 or 4 other companies to get the game published, they apparently don't invest enough or efficiently on publicity since "the shop 100 meters from the studio didn’t even know the game was in their stock", and then they are surprised that they don't make enough money to create their own projects? What's there to be surprised about? They have a bad business model, they create games for very small demographic (babies and small children who own a NDS) that has a overly saturated market (there are hundreds of DS games for children) and have to split the profits with 3 or 4 companies and then they try to blame it on piracy?! Looks like just another case of bad management for me tbh...

I might be wrong, but it seems like the cactus spikes are going through the helmet

The quote in the article on joystiq is cut off, here is what Shacknews cites: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/60781 Which is still not true, as Garry from Garry's Mod pointed out: http://www.garry.tv/?p=1144 http://www.garry.tv/?p=1136