And it's "meaning of" damnit!

Haha, well, nobody's perfect. Not only was the word usage incorrect, but I intentionally left the preposition at the end of the sentence because I was too tired at the time to change it. What kind of monster would end a sentence in a preposition on purpose, anyway?

I sure hope you get it FIXED no edit button FOREVER will be retarded and you'll loose a few of your posters.

Because, of course, people can't take 2 seconds to proofread their own posts before hitting the submit button. You'll find no sympathy from me if you don't read what you write in an environment that isn't real time. No edit button is for the better for the posting quality in the long run, as long as people use the opportunity to better their writing style (but that's pretty dumb of me to think that people would want to do that).

Simply put, do it right the first time and you won't have to re-do it. Things that are easy (and make you sound smarter), but people are too lazy to do:

1) Look up words that they don't know how to spell.
2) Look up words that they don't really know the meaning to.
3) Re-read a post before submitting it.

Well, regardless, I hope the lack of an edit button doesn't cause Blue to "loose" posters. Oops! If only there had been an edit button...

Activision's response addresses only the issue of the exclusive Call of Duty demo. Their response seems to imply that everyone was eager to try the Call of Duty demo, so they'll release it without the exclusive.

It's like they missed the broader protest about exclusive demos in general. We'll have to wait to see if Activision (and other publishers) stop these exclusive demos in the future.

Why people rag on exclusives is beyond me. Vote with your consuming dollars and don't buy the game if it bothers you that much. That speaks infinitely louder than complaints.

So you're telling me that when a company gets poor sales figures and tries to figure out what went wrong, they'll actually say "Oh, it must have been gamers protesting that exclusive demo we had." I think not.

Withholding your money without telling the company why (i.e., complaining) will get you nowhere.

I've always thought the idea of an exclusive demo was a bad idea. The concept of a demo in any industry is to provide all potential customers with an opportunity to use a product in hopes that these potential customers will become paying customers. The goal of a demo is to get it to as many potential customers as possible. Exclusives, on the other hand, are completely backwards--they rely on customers coming to the demo, as if somehow allowing me to try a company's game is a privledge for me.

Well, sorry, game companies. I'm not going to ask you if I can try your new game. It's up to you to convince me that your game is worth trying.

That said, I always use WorthPlaying (super fast, just a couple clicks initiates the download), and I'm glad to see that they're supporting this initiative.

I wouldn't take this poll too seriously. I heard that the researcher's primary method of collecting data was to log onto popular MMORPGs and just spam "a/s/l?".

it's a joke

and am i correct in assuming that you're saying i can go from FAT32 => NTFS without losing the data on a drive??

Yeah, you can use Microsoft's "convert" utility if you're familiar with the command line. Just run "convert /?" from the command line for a list of arguments for the utility. I'm sure there are loads of other freeware utilities out there that can do it, too.

As for benchmarks, the last one I ever used was 3D Mark, and I don't really like it. Using real games for benchmarking is how you should do it, but yeah, Quake 2 is a pretty old one.

So you can take complex gameplay shematics and make them easy to use then by all means do it, but dont take stuff out just because you're to lasy to code/implement it.

I can't tell if you were directing this statement at Doom 3, but I bet John Carmack's solution for "use" without a use key was probably more complex and difficult to implement than a use key.

And hey guess what, Interstate also just came out and GASP, it has MUSIC AND A BACKGROUND MOVIE!

You really judge how polished a mod is by whether it has music and a background movie?

Agreed. And no editing of posts means you'll be seeing much more spelling errors from me (and my new imposter, I'm guessing).

Didn't anyone think of Ray when making this decision to disallow post editing?! What's he going to do now?

(for those not in "the know", Ray edits almost every one of his posts to fix a typo. :))

hmmmm... well, actually i was watching TechTV and Leo gave a big lecture about how the structure of NTFS was more stable and whatnot, but he made it clear that it had slower access times than FAT32... he even specifically said that FAT32 was better for gamers. now i don't know what to believe. Leo is supposed to know his stuff, but you sound like you know what you're talking about as well.

Well, I did a little extra reading on NTFS this morning to find out if I missed anything, and I found a lot of sites referencing FAT32 being faster than NTFS, but I couldn't find any sites that actually provided any evidence for this claim (like a side-by-side benchmark, which would have been perfect to see the real-world performance). I did find http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/index3.html , which seems to have done some sort of benchmark comparison.

As for what I mentioned earlier about NTFS definately being faster, I did find an interesting tidbit that Windows 98 and above use some of the same optimizations that NTFS uses to increase the seek time (albiet not built into the file system, like with NTFS). That's interesting because it takes away NTFS's theoretical advantage.

Anyway, I'm really not on a crusade to get you to switch to NTFS, but I still maintain that if there's any performance issues, it'll be so infintesimal while you're playing a game that you won't notice.

Actually, if you're really interested in finding out what's faster on your system, and want to spend the time, you can run some benchmarks on the FAT32 partition. Then, convert that partition to NTFS and run some different benchmarks. Decide which one you like and switch it back (you can't go ntfs->fat32 without losing all data on the partition).

here's a question: can you have FAT32 in one partition and NTFS in another? if so - would it cause any problems?

No, it wouldn't cause any problems. Your operating system takes care of everything transparently, so you wouldn't even notice that one was NTFS and the other was FAT32. But hey, you've already got your system up and running, so might as well leave it alone unless you're really interested in this stuff.

i know it's better, more stable and all that... but it is a little bit slower when it comes to access-times for 3D gaming, which i do a lot of. and no, i didn't lose 20GB! i lost about 6GB...

Sorry... I guess I just assumed that you lost 20 gigs when you said you partitioned your 80GB hard drive into 2 30GB partitions (30+30 = 60). Anyway, you'd gain a lot more by having an NTFS drive (no more lost clusters or crap like that). Plus, NTFS uses the space more efficiently. Also, I don't know who told you that the access time is slower, because it's not. You can easily see this by how NTFS structures its files compared to FAT, but you'd need some background knowledge of basic computer-science things, like trees. Just don't make your cluster size too small (4k is the default, I think, and that's fine) and you won't have any performance issues. And even then, you'd just have longer loading times (like 0.00002 seconds slower) as your computer moved stuff into RAM.

The only reason not to run NTFS is if you dual boot to Windows 95/98, or your drive is a data-only drive and you constantly swap it to a machine running Windows 95/98.

Well, whatever. Enjoy your multiple FAT partitions and have fun running Scandisk every week to catch all those lost clusters.

anyone here have a solution?

No, not really. Depends on how Blammo does the pattern matching. There may be some way to force Blammo to match the parentheses, like entering \( and \) in the search-replace string.

Consult your Blammo manual for more help.

and i didn't want to go NFTS. or NTFS, whatever it is... so now i have 2 30GB partitions for games on my WD 80GB.

Why wouldn't you want to change your file system to NTFS? NTFS is far superior to FAT. You realize that you lost 20GB of space on your hard drive, right?

edit: end quoted block
This comment was edited on Aug 22, 15:24.

I believe that the Google toolbar that blocks popups is brand new - I think it came out Wed. So you probably need to get the new one. Btw, it seems to work for me.

No, I've been using a version of the toolbar that's blocked popups for a few months. I don't do as hard-core surfing as most people, so it's caught only 157 total. I'll have to check out the newest toolbar to see if it's any smarter about popup blocking. The version I have is pretty dumb, and you have to CTRL-click intentional popup links.

As for the popups here, I don't mind them when I hit the site from work (when I'm on a break... yeah, that's it). But from home, I have this page as my home page, and there's no way I could handle a popup window each time I started up my browser. It'd drive me insane.

it would be awesome if your links opened in a new window, too

To what links are you referring? Have you experimented with the "Launch Links" check box on the left-hand side of the page to see if that option does what you want?

Not at all. Try brushing up on your English comprehension skills.

I assure you, my English comprehension skills are far above yours, Halsy.

It only appears that way when because I end up correcting or educating people when they make erroneous statements that pertain to my field. Do you see me correcting astrophysicists about rocket science? No. Why? Because I don't know zip about rocket science.

... followed by ...

I am a better person. Not solely for posessing a higher education, but because I choose to inform myself of what's really going on in the world while most people simply accept what they're told at face value. I act to make things better while they don't. There's a word for those sorts of people...sheep.

Based on your first paragraph, I find it weird that you'd call people "sheep" because they don't have the specific knowledge that you have. By your own reasoning, aren't you just another sheep for not knowing more about rocket science?

I suppose you don't have to be a sheep when it comes to rocket science. Maybe you don't believe what a rocket scientist tells you at face value. But then when rocket scientists tell you that they sent a man to the moon, do you think you're a better person because you think the rocket scientists are lying?

Your post was awfully bipolar, and quite hypocritical.

I've read mixed things about it. Some say it is synced to the slowest player, but that doesn't make sense. I'm more inclined to believe that it works by everyone sending their data to everyone else, rather than just a central server.

I have no idea how id has implemented the game, but I just can't see them (or anyone) making a game that synchronizes to the slowest player. I guess people are associating peer to peer with the original Doom, but remember that Doom was made a long time ago, and it wasn't even made for TCP/IP networks.

I mean, think about peer-to-peer networking for a minute. What's the difference between your computer receiving the game data from a server, or from other clients? Either way, your computer is sitting there listening for incoming data. When it gets the data, it updates the game state, and if it misses the data, or the data is slow, it attempts some sort of prediction. Who cares if the data is coming from one place (a central server) or from 3 different places (peer-to-peer model)? Why should your computer or your connection slow down because one of the clients is slow? Just like with the current client-server model... a server won't sit there forever waiting for the data from all the clients. In that case, if someone lagged out, the server would stop. I just don't see why a client would care if it's getting data from a server or from other clients. Does it really make a difference whether the server synchronizes the data for your computer instead of your computer synchronizing the data itself?

Maybe I'm missing something--I don't really know what id is doing, so any intelligent discussion is welcome.

Either way, Why is that better than client-server model? What happens to cheat prevention when there is no server than can do validation?

Oh yeah, and as for this point, I'm not too sure. I've been thinking that the peer-to-peer model for Doom3 is actually going to be the basis for the next id project, except the next project will be on a much larger scale. A game that can support tons of players because for each player that joins, the game gets more processing power (although perhaps uses more bandwidth!).

And as for cheat protection, I guess it's a glass is half empty/full thing. You say that there's no server that can do validation ... I say that in a peer-to-peer game of 4 people, there's 3 servers that can do the validation! Depends on how they've implemented it, I suppose... With my outlook, you'd have a problem with 2 people. I certainly don't want to see a return of the days where a game would stop because one of the players got out of synch. heh

I'll be damned if I'm going to play a game where my 2mbit cable connection is obsolete because some asshole on dialup refuses to leave the server or something.

So you think that peer to peer means that you're synchronized to the slowest player, huh?