Napalm Riot

Currently, there are 11 million subscribers to World of Warcraft.
These subscribers pay $15/month.

This means Blizzard is netting over $2B/year. 'Nuff said.

If I want to install a 64-bit operating system on my Intel-based computer (I.E. Linux or Vista 64-bit), what do I need? Does it require specific hardware or do I just need to have components that have 64-bit drivers available? Is there a website or tool that can interrogate a system and declare it 64-bit-ready??

There is a fun new game coming for the Nokia, but you can play it online at http://resetgeneration-site.arena.n-gage.com/ Kind of an old school/Tetris hybrid game. I hope that they eventually release it as a full-screen game for the PC instead of a tiny Java app.

You can also download the soundtrack which has some great little retro-sounding tunes and an awesome spoof on American Pie called "2D Died". The lyrics for that song are here: http://blog.n-gage.com/archive/ftlog/

Well, after weighing the pros and cons of PS3 vs. XBox, I went with the PS3. Enjoying Rock Band and a few other games. I find it nearly impossible to play FPS games with that controller, though. Good thing most of them are available on the PC.

Oh, and the Blu-Ray is nice, too.

Has anyone played this game? I bought it, installed it, and patched it and it stutters so badly I can't play it. I've made numerous attempts to contact support and they won't respond. Funny how I can play UT3 maxed out and it's super-smooth and this little budget game runs horribly! I've tried it on two different machines (one running Vista and the other XP) and got the same results. I guess maybe that explains the "Madness" part?!

...but I don't have an XBox or a PS3. So now I'm looking (for the first time ever) at game consoles. Since I don't own a Blu-ray or HD DVD player, this would be a great 2-for-1 investment. However, Blu-ray won the battle so for now getting an XBox doesn't seem to be a smart move. On the other hand, something is going on at Sony behind the scenes, so I don't know what their status is. Earlier this year, there were 3 versions of the PS3. Now there is only one and it's got the smallest hard drive and no backwards compatibility. So right now, I don't like either option. I guess I'll wait and see what happens before I throw some money at potentially obsolete hardware.

Just found out that Gary Gygax passed away. He will be missed.

http://www.theregister.co…04/gary_gygax_dies_at_69/

Just curious if anyone has their system configured for RAID 0 or 1? I just bought a 500GB drive, so now I have 2x250GB drives and the 500GB drive. It got me to thinking about setting up the 250's as a RAID array.

What I'm wondering is how much is really gained? It's my understanding that if I went with RAID 0 (which isn't even really RAID, because there is no redundancy) then I would end up with 1x500GB drive that would split reads/writes across both physical drives. The downside is that if either drives fail, I lose everything. This means my MTBF gets cut in half (not really, but it definitely doesn't help). So how much faster is a RAID 0 config? Would I notice? Also, just out of curiosity, where do you put the swap file? Should it go on the 3rd drive? Or is the RAID 0 benefit enough so you just locate the swap file on the array?

RAID 1 seems like you cut the capacity in half, but also the data loss risk. Is there a performance boost for RAID 1? Again, is it noticeable?

Having said all of this, I don't think I will switch to RAID because it means the drives have to be reformatted and I'd probably have to rebuild Vista from scratch which is a big effort IMHO.