Smoke
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Posts posted by Smoke
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Ah..gotcha
EDIT: didnt work, specifically I installed "DirectX 9.0c End-User Runtime" from microsoft. Did I install the wrong thing?
That's the latest and last version for XP. If it doesn't solve your problem, you might wanna try updating your videocard's drivers. The latest version can be downloaded from the chipset manufacturer's site(Which means ATi/AMD or nVidia, NOT the card manufacturer)
If you don't know what kind of videocard you've got installed, right-click the desktop, select Properties and go to the Advanced tab. It will mention both the monitor type and videocard there.
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I would not recommend this at all, and I doubt you'd get what you want. In fact, you could risk damaging your laptop's USB ports, the wireless receiver, or worse if you're just gonna poke around without knowing what you're doing.
You'd be far better off just getting a different wireless mouse that runs on batteries and just has a receiver, along with rechargeable batteries and something like this: http://www.engadget.com/2005/08/08/the-usb-battery-charger/
Alternatively: Get a wired mouse. There's no need for wireless mice on a laptop unless you have gorilla arms.
Sidenote: This is coming from someone who's hooked up various self-built things to computers(Mainly serial/parallel) and programmed microcontrollers for self-designed circuitboards in college. If you don't have the knowledge for this, don't even consider attempting it.
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Mario Strikers: Charged gameplay and online hands-on.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/788/788419p1.html
*sigh* Sadly, it looks like we're indeed stuck with friends codes. Damn you, Nintendo! Don't go 80% on us and drop the ball!
It only takes ten seconds or so to register a friendcode, and if you had read the preview a bit more you'd see that it also involves a whole lot of other nice additional features currently not present in the DS online system.
Not to mention that you can play against random opponents without needing to add friendcodes.
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The paid version of Antivir also gives you access to a faster update server, includes e-mail scanning, and protects against adware and spyware.
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AVG Free Edition Works Really well for anti virus. For your Firewall I recomend Zone Alarm and Peer Guardian. Spybot go for SPybot S&D.
PeerGuardian is a placebo for piracy, nothing more. It blocks 30% of the IP addresses out there for no reason other than "It might be the RIAA/an organization that could be tracking you".
ZoneAlarm's rather decent, but can be a bit too active in blocking, and I've seen cases where it just screws up settings to a point where a system either becomes unresponsive or refuses network connections completely.
Actual recommendation: Ditch the McAfee, and get a paid subscription to Avira's AntiVir. It's pretty great for virus detection, and the paid version doesn't have the annoyances(Daily popup window telling you to buy it) of the free version, with the addition of a mailscanner and spyware protection. It's also low on memory and CPU use.
If you've got a router in place, you most likely won't need another software firewall in place.
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Actually, I think Nintendo would know a thing or two about trademark dilution (assuming it means what I think it means), considering all their consoles are generally referred to by parents as "the Nintendo." But so what? I mean, seriously here, what product of any sort of relative significance does LEGO make besides LEGO bricks? What do they WANT people to think of when they hear "LEGO" other than LEGO bricks? Or perhaps they should sue Eggo for using a homonym in their slogan.
The main problem is that a trademark is genericized if it's used like that, causing the company to lose the trademark itself. Outside of that, there's the risk of other compatible building systems being referred to as "legos" as well.
The process by which trademark rights are diminished or lost as a result of common use in the marketplace is sometimes known as genericide. This process typically occurs over a period of time where a mark is not used as a trademark (i.e. where it is not used to exclusively identify the products or services of a particular business); where a mark falls into disuse entirely; or where the trademark owner does not enforce its rights through actions for passing off or infringement.For example, one risk factor which may lead to genericide is the use of a trademark as a verb, noun, plural or possessive, unless the mark itself is possessive or plural (e.g. "Friendly's" restaurants).
Have a list of predecessors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks
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Man, I remember reading that message on their catalogs 10 years ago. Why don't they just give up already? It's not that friggin' big of a deal. It's like Nintendo insisting there's no "the" or "Nintendo" before "Wii."
The difference is that what the Lego company is trying to prevent is trademark dilution, while Nintendo doesn't have much to worry about there.
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Kinda, Batman LEGOs™ have been in the stores for a while now.
Special message!
"The word LEGO® is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you! Susan Williams, Consumer Services."
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Yeah, the Batman Lego stuff is a bit on the old side by now. The UCS Batmobile is pretty awesome, but still not as awesome as the recent Star Wars stuff though.
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Yeah, I always loved that game too. Really don't understand all the hate people tend to have for it.
How about mediocre controls and slow play, a limited moveset and a fairly low character count consisting of too many recolors? At least, that's how the Genesis and SNES versions of it felt.
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Have you tried a different power supply just to make sure it's not the power supply that's somehow damaged?
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Just in case you ever need a bootable Windows XP: http://www.ubcd4win.com
I use it for my job along with an external HD, since it comes preloaded with just about everything you need for recovery and backups, and if required destruction as well and boots up pretty fast.
Also note that it comes with a keyfinder
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Got my copy of Diamond today, here's the code: 0731 1376 8241
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Norton is horrible, stay the fuck away from it. Especially the Internet Security variant, whose form of protection consists of blocking the wrong things constantly.
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If your laptop really is an 800MHz box, I doubt it'll run WoW. Combined with a slow CPU you most likely have an onboard videocard that's comparably worthless for 3D.
Alternatively, where do you get this 792MHz report from? If it's a more recent laptop, it most likely has some form of speed-stepping in order to keep its operating temperature down(As in: Slow down the CPU when there's less work to be done, speed it back up when there's more) Because of this, some utilities and Windows itself might incorrectly report the CPU speed.
Your best option for checking beforehand is googling the laptop's model number(Printed on the bottom) and finding the official specs for it.
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And about the "Zelda Series"...both N64 Zelda games had different soundtracks and in my opinion, one was better than the other, with some games in between. This confuses me as to why he grouped them together like this....
Because some people just don't know there was Zelda before the N64(there's even some that think Majora's Mask was Zelda 2) and don't realize the difference between the two games in terms of music and atmosphere.
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aside from this one, which runs Gentoo Linux because I like having full control over every single piece of my computer and tailoring it to sqeeze out the most performance for the least hard drive consumption.
Ah, good old Gentoo ricer talk
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It says on the CD itself:
Operating System CD
Contains software and drivers already installed.
For software reinstallation and repairs only.
So I don't think I need it, my problem is just a little annoying. I'm afraid I'll mess up my computer or something. I want to get Vista soon anyway, maybe I'll just wait.
Depending on how the OEM set up the CD, it can be either an XP install disk, or a special recovery disk that just restores an image of the OS. In case of the former, you can reinstall the OS with little data loss(Just installed programs), and in case of the latter it normally wipes your entire C drive. Find out what it does first before running it, and always make backups.
As for Vista, I'd wait until the first service pack or until it's been out for at least 6 months, if only for the sake of stability and driver availability.
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Fairly simple:
Boot from your Windows XP installation disk, select option R when presented with the options to start installation, start the recovery console or quit setup.
You'll find yourself in the recovery console. Log on to your XP installation(Admin password required) and type "fixmbr" without the quotes.
Follow the onscreen instructions and reboot from your harddisk(Type exit, remove CD, let your system boot)
GRUB should be uninstalled now, and you'll end up going straight to Windows XP.
Once in XP, go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management. Go to Disk Management in here.
You'll see the partitions on your harddisk(s). Some of them will be labeled with an Unknown filesystem. Right-click and Delete these partitions(You'll find at least two)
You'll be left with some available space, which can be turned into a new formatted partition. See note 5 for more details.
Once the partition is made and formatted(as NTFS, since FAT32 sucks), your Ubuntu installation will be gone.
Some things to note:
1) Since you are deleting the partitions, all data on them will be removed. Make backups of everything you wish to keep.
2) Some computer manufacturers include a hidden recovery partition, which tends to be marked as Unknown too. Make sure you don't delete this.
3) Follow these steps as described. Do NOT delete the partitions first, because you'll fuck up GRUB that way and won't be able to boot into XP.
4) If you don't have an XP installation disk, there's not much you can do, except for getting one. Note that you don't need the one that came with the system, any bootable Windows XP installation disk will do.
5) You cannot merge partitions with XP itself, you'll need a third-party tool like PartitionMagic for this. PartitionMagic is actually a better option to manage the partitions with, since it can detect filesystems XP doesn't know(or care about) and is able to merge partitions, as well as perform various conversions between filesystems.
As a side note: Your drive is always partitioned, even if you have only one partition
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Agreed. By his reasoning, music albums and movies aren't art, either.
Not just that, a lot of paintings and classical music that we consider "art" these days were produced for commercial reasons.
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Frankly, in my experience of using Gamespy, it frankly was below expectations. I tried it for the Dreamcast, Xbox and etc and it's simply too clunky to use efficiently. Maybe the channel option could make things easier, but Gamespy is still a middleman to muddle through.
As for Sony's plans, it is still a bit clunky, but I don't see it as any better or worse than going the Gamespy route. I wish both companies take 360's cues and go for the totally embedded online gaming functionality instead.
The DS's online has always worked through Gamespy, and I haven't seen much reason to complain about that(Other than the sometimes long time it takes to find opponents in particular games)
My guess is that it'll work pretty much the same as DS online(Only with a single system-wide friendcode rather than on a per-game basis, with some exceptions), with matchmaking and multiplay options/features varying per game. You might never even see anything Gamespy-related other than the IPs you connect to, and stat keeping would be on Nintendo's own sites(Like they do right now)
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My site turns out to be worth $14,690. Maybe I should sell it.
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Hey, got a random question about the DS. If I change my DS username, will I lose my stats for online games such as Mario Kart and Hunters (or any game for that matter)?
Nope. Only if you get a new DS and don't transfer the NWFC settings.
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The WebDeveloper toolbar for Firefox allows you to specify a custom size and use it as window size.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/
Install it, restart Firefox, enable the toolbar and go to Resize. If you size your window the way you want it to be, you can go to Resize > Display Window Size and copy the relevant information(Window size) Afterwards, go to Resize > Edit Resize Dimensions and add your desired windowsize. Now you can go to Resize and select the entered size to use it.
Normally this should also be stored in Firefox after exiting, might be a profile quirk, or it could be Javascript fucking up on your homepage or any other page you visit regularly. Go to Tools > Options > Content and click Advanced next to Enable Javascript to disable some of the standard Javascript annoyances that might be interfering.
Nintendo Wii
in General Discussion
Posted
Got my Strike on earlier today as well. Officially it's not out until tomorrow, but some stores are selling early(I walked in, asked for it, and bought it)
Pretty entertaining so far, matches are short enough to keep them interesting, and the online gaming is fairly lag-free.