And the right mouse button! Gotta have weapon alt-fire!

Unfortunately game servers are typically not that "local", at least for most of the people on it. I usually find around 90+ms are as far down as they go for me anyway. But as long as it doesn't get too far past 100ms it's hardly even noticeable.

I dunno, people keep saying that and assuming it (and I've thought it myself) but I'm not really sure that's the way it is. Blizzard still has some of the older blood in it, and I really am starting to think they are on board with it. As far as Diablo III goes though, RMT has probably greatly encouraged them to go this direction. And people playing offline means nothing for trading revenue. The one thing that could make me more OK with the forced on-line aspect is if Blizzard provides frequent content updates and new areas. Even if they bundled it with some kind of micro transaction fee, something to keep the game fresh and re-playable. I keep looking back at Diablo II, but I really don't think I can get myself excited about *another Baal run* anymore.

I don't think there is really any accepted definition of what exactly "Space Opera" is. If I had to define it, I'd point to something more like Crest of the Stars.

Although without a generally accepted standard, people are pretty much free to label stuff as they will.

Well, technically it probably *could* be reproduced. If it can not be reproduced then scientific method was not followed very well.

Although I assume your point being it *should not* be reproduced, at least not intentionally.

McAfee is confident this new security implementation will delete system files even less than prior software offerings by preventing access to the disk entirely!

I'd expect them to NOT DO IT in the first place. I can't even recall having a flashable BIOS that was actually broken in some serious way that would make a fix mandatory. The majority of my BIOS upgrades have been to support some newer CPU that still fits the same socket, something I'd expect the unwashed masses are not going to change anyway.

Once something has been done well, the expectation becomes that all future products will continue to do it that way. Of course, in some cases what people consider the correct way of doing things might be entirely opposite of what others believe, which further fuels the fire of complaints. It's also why every MMO released in the past few years gets compared to WoW. Enough things done right and that becomes the minimum standard, and all future products are either above or below spec in areas when compared to it.

Even "Yahtzee", who is perhaps one of the most brutally honest critics I've ever listened to, takes the time to point out specifically what things a game has done right. The stupid criticisms seen of DXHR did nothing to stop my personal enjoyment (well, of course I didn't read anything about it until winning). Hell, I actually liked the black woman, I thought she added some flavor, and political correctness be damned. I'd rather see something in a game that could be somewhat offensive than have it be entirely bland and unpalatable.

Huh... how fast is your network?

That 6 GB figure for RAM seems a bit excessive (although with cheap RAM prices, probably no big deal). I'm running a 4x1TB ZFS on OpenSolaris and it hits Gigabit Ethernet speed with 2 GB RAM (not actually sure it's even using all that).

Although Intel has been catching up gradually, it probably won't be too long before they actually have a usable product, like one that you can actually play some games on. And there is some advantages to sharing one memory space, particularly if new engines start trending towards heavy texture replacement. Serious gamers are still going to be buying the discrete cards with 10x the capability of consoles anyway. Carmack actually admitted that he does have RAGE working on the latest Intel graphics (but he admits not at a smooth 60fps).

Considering that Game for Windows Live was practically stillborn, I'm not really sure how much murder was really necessary...

Perhaps this cluster can load Deus Ex : Human Revolution levels in a reasonable amount of time!

Seriously, I didn't even know it was still alive. Even non-techie people had picked up on the fact that installing Real Player was completely screwing their machines over. Way back in the day, on dial-up connection speed, it was possible to find some fansub anime floating around in real media format since size was everything and quality a luxury we didn't have the download time for. With how good H.264 stuff is these days, and the size / quality ratio being quite respectable, it's hard to imagine a world where Real Player still exists.

Huh... seems odd to me everyone is reading a lot into it. For me, it looked more like she just had a thought to inspect the wall and happens to find a portal gun there, not that she had any particular foresight on the matter. Just like in games when something looks slightly out of place and you start prodding it for a secret passage. Maybe you find something, and maybe it's just an odd part of a level.

I am disappoint. What I really want to know is how big the version number will be. Can we expect the release of WebAPI to start at 11.0?