CobraA1

Reply to GalCiv II on Linux? Should I bother? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Yeah, you'll be very productive by spending 50% of your time keeping your system virus free. More seriously spoken, Windows lacks all the tools you need for productivity, like a good command line, PDF file creator, SSH client, a good scripting language.[/quote] Haven't had a virus in years - and I don't use much of the tools you've mentioned. Different people have different needs and different tastes. I've been there, tried that, and it just wasn't right for my needs.</

Reply to GalCiv II on Linux? Should I bother? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

In my experience, Linux is simply not a gaming platform. In fact, I don't even bother with Linux for productivity applications. It's a fun OS for tweaking - but I got tired of tweaking and decided that it was more of a toy and not really a serious or productive OS. These days I use Windows as my primary OS and run Linux on a virtual machine.

Reply to Dreadlords kicking my a**. whats with them? in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

My advice - put as much research into miniturization and offensive weapons as you can. Keep in mind that they do indeed kill pretty much everything with one hit. Hit them early in the game, hit them hard, and hit them with the intent of totally eliminating them. The last thing you want is for them to stick around getting stronger.

Reply to Windows 7 it is...now for my wish list in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I understand that AWT uses native controls on each platform while Swing draws controls itself. [/quote] AWT draws contols natively, yes. Swing is skinnable, and each skin is written in Java. Most downloads of Java include the Metal skin and a skin that looks like the OS. In recent versions of Java some Java skins that look like the OS are using native APIs to render their controls. . . . and most Java devs will use the term "look and feel" rather than "skin." Do

Reply to Windows 7 it is...now for my wish list in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Does your program run on Mac OS X? If not, it's not a very good comparison.[/quote] Never tested it on Mac OS X, but theoretically there should be no troubles. [quote]Java has two or three GUI toolkits if I recall correctly, one of them (Swing?) doesn't use native widgets.[/quote] It has two officially supported toolkits, although I have seen other toolkits available by other developers. The two toolkits are AWT and Swing. AWT is the older one, and has c

Reply to Windows 7 it is...now for my wish list in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]and right now im talking about rlly old games like starcraft, red alert 1 etc.[/quote] I haven't tried either game, but I'd wager that if Red Alert 1 doesn't work, would be because it's a 16 bit ececutable using a 32 bit extender and is thus not a "true" 32 bit application. But I haven't tested it. So what you'd be seeing is not that 64 bit Vista doesn't support 32 bit applications (it does), but rather that 64 bit Vista does not support 16 bit applications. 32

Reply to Windows 7 it is...now for my wish list in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

Astyanax typed at the same time I did . . . Astyanax, you need to check the source of info. AFAIK, 32 bits does not affect how the third and fourth cores are used.

Reply to Windows 7 it is...now for my wish list in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]never got vista.... knew there were so many troubles with it[/quote] Most of them are fixed. [quote]The UAC is completely unacceptable to me. I won't use ANY version of windows that does that to me. I'll buy a Mac first (shudder) or find a utility that shuts it down!![/quote] . . . except that Macs and *nixes have elevation dialog boxes too. Windows is just borrowing it from the other OSes. [quote]tough rlly, why 64-bit only :/? ive got

Reply to Let's solve the piracy problem. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I just want to say that demos are RUBBISH at showcasing a game. I haven't seen a decent demo since time immemorial, especially considering that most games tend to showcase all their features cramped into a very tiny space at the beginning, just to afterwards kinda float out.[/quote] Sooo . . . we work on making better demos? Truth be known, demos aren't really meant to be complete games themselves. If they were, they would take demand away from the real game. So t

Reply to 64-bit Windows is better than getting an SSD if you have the RAM in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

BUG: Next page doesn't appear until it has two posts . . .

Reply to 64-bit Windows is better than getting an SSD if you have the RAM in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]The trick with multi-core systems is that the SOFTWARE needs to be written multi-threaded to take advantage of it. [/quote] This part is true. An application takes a single core unless it's designed with several threads. I should point out, however, that having dual cores does help responsiveness a bit since it can spread the tasks between cores. This has diminishing returns as the number of cores increases, though. The best way is to use applications designed for multi

Reply to 64-bit Windows is better than getting an SSD if you have the RAM in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I have disabled disk caching completly and it works great.[/quote] Which cache? Completely disabling the OS disk cache would mean that any application that writes to disk will pause while the write is taking place. It would be painfully slow. I'm guessing you just turned off SuperFetch. I don't think you completely disabled caching. [quote]As for solid state disk, their read time is great, their write time sucks, so if you wanted one to just dump your paging file on, li

Reply to 64-bit Windows is better than getting an SSD if you have the RAM in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]So when Vista came out and everyone was complaining about it expanding to fill the space, actually pre-caching was a great move with very real usability benefits?[/quote] Yes. A program in memory is going to load and run much faster than one sitting on the hard drive. [quote]I must confess, I'd gone along with the received wisdom that "except maybe for Crysis or graphics editing", 4GB was more than I could possibly find a use for.[/quote] Yes and no. For basic a

Reply to 64-bit Windows is better than getting an SSD if you have the RAM in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

You can get more info at Microsoft's website . It has a link to begin the order process for 64 bit versions of their OS at the bottom of the page. You will need to repartition and/or reformat the drive, sorry. Backup your data first. I personally did the upgrade when I built a new computer, so I had a clean drive to put it on.

Reply to .......... in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

re: The World War stuff: Maybe, just maybe, we were right to be supporting the enemies of Japan in WWII. After all, they had taken over a good chunk of China and a few other nations. This whole idea that they were just innocents doing absolutely nothing is IMHO a vast mischaracterization of the situation. re: Taxes: Taxes do create a deadweight loss if I remember correctly - since they go to the government, they reduce the amount of profit a business can make, and the amount of money

Reply to Let's solve the piracy problem. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]You get a problem with your PC and you're not likely to see a tech spend more than 10 minutes trying to resolve it. If there is nothing obvious that they can fix you'll get a rebuild of your COE and be back up and running in an hour.[/quote] This is different from the CDs OEMs already provide for computers - how? [quote]Centralised OS will mean many cool things for end users not least of which will be utter removal of their personal requirement to run and maintain

Reply to Let's solve the piracy problem. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Works in our school. Computing this way becomes more and more viable as more and more bandwidth is created on the Internet.[/quote] Yeah, but so does every other technology that helps local computing, such as computational power and storage. One issue that will never go away is latency - regardless of bandwidth, you will always get less latency by having the components as close as possible to the mouse and keyboard. This means that a "fat client" computer will always seem to be

Reply to Let's solve the piracy problem. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I believe I read somewhere (and without references that's like saying "In my opinion..") that gaming revenue will outstrip movie theatre revenue in the next 10 years. [/quote] I can believe it. Many people aren't aware of it, but games are a huge business. Especially games like The Sims and WoW. It's getting to be difficult to find somebody who hasn't played one of those games. [quote]You won't have an "Operating System" running on your hardware as this will be

Reply to Let's solve the piracy problem. in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

I think people that say "piracy will and cannot be killed" are sorta missing the point. Sure, we cannot get rid of it 100.000000%, but do we need to? All we really need to do is to minimize it. The best way to do that is to encourage legit sales and discourage piracy. IMHO a great way to encourage legit sales is to offer extra benefits to customers we know are legitimate. Offering upgrades is one way to do that, and I'd highly encourage developers to offer more

Reply to 64-bit Windows is better than getting an SSD if you have the RAM in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]but the tweak is supposed to improve overall system/CPU performance by more evenly distributing the workload between the individual cores... well that's what was claimed.[/quote] I dunno - it does seem to do a good job of distributing the load without any tweaks. I've played around with all kinds of stuff, and the only really good way to get an unbalanced workload is to force it that way. [quote]I just put an order in today for a i7 920, with the gigabite ud5 m/b, evga

Reply to 64-bit Windows is better than getting an SSD if you have the RAM in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Windows is already set to take advantage of multiple CPU's without doing that.[/quote] Correct. It should be unchecked by default, which should automatically detect how many CPUs/cores you have. [quote]I'da rather have Vista 64 with 2 64Gig SSD's in RAID.[/quote] Would striping really help a SSD? I thought the whole point of striping was to overcome some of the deficiencies of a mechanical disk, which a SSD would not have. I could be wrong, though. I wou

Reply to .......... in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

I guess the RMS Lusitania and Pearl Harbor weren't important? I'm amazed at how much our own history is contantly being rewritten. I think the reason for entering both wars was fairly clear: We were attacked. Maybe we were involved in the economics of the wars before we joined militarily, but I really don't care. That doesn't make us pathetic. What was really pathetic was other nations attacking our ships. I really don't care how much we "baited" them. If you attack somebody,

Reply to DL: Ass getting kicked on beginner in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

Remember, you can always restart. If you're playing a campaign, you can always restart a level. My advise is to revise your strategy. Think about what kind of results you want, and invest money in it. Take a close look at your tech tree and your planets. They both play vital roles in maintaining your status in the game. Spend that $150k on some improvements on your planets that benefit your strategy and invest research in your strategy. In fact, it does indeed sound li

Reply to .......... in Everything Else GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]If you don't suffer the consequences of your mistakes, you rarely learn from them, if ever.[/quote] I think this deserves repeating. Because it is true.

Reply to The Core I7 arrives in Personal Computing GalCiv2 Forums

I was sorta hoping they'd up the core count. The GHz bump is nice, but I thought everything was headed towards having more cores. 64 bit is the future of computing in any case :). It will be some time before I can afford to upgrade my computer, though.