RIP-Felix

Well my fuzzy feeling wore off! Apparently we're not going to be boosting around the solar system with our EMdrives anytime...ever. Science giveth, and science taketh away!

Found this while digging through my old posts. I was basically describing Steam-link..lol! Funny that most TV do now have USB ports. I'll take credit for that, thank you very much!

Bubble Bobble peaked my interest. That's my favorite arcade game! Cycle accurate, no lag, perfect upscale? Hell yeah, sign me up! This is one of 2 games I have always have running on my GameEX vert-screen arcade when people come over. I like the Idea of having a MISTer in there also, just for the games I like the most (mainly for the reduced input latency). This has been eating away at me for awhile now, as I want the arcade to be as competitively accurate as possible. Software emulation makes getting Hi-score more difficult. Sigh...yeah, I want one now!

Sounds like you two have a better opinion of the movie than I do. While my negative opinion has softened into, "it's fine for what it is", I am still VERY disappointed. Have you seen Scott Pilgrim vs the world? First, I love that movie. Second, it feels like it takes place in the OASIS. THAT is how I envisioned the cinematic transition. Live action, real actors with CGI used to accentuate the world, death animations, weapons, etc. Not CGI Humanoid. There was too much CGI done on the characters themselves and the world inside the Oasis. I thought that of all the CGI friendly movies, ready player one would be at the top of the list. After all It takes place inside a freaking CGI. But it didn't feel right! It felt like I was watching a CGI film, like final fantasy. In the book, the CGI inside the OASIS was supposed to be so convincing that you couldn't tell the difference from reality, if you had top of the line haptics and VR headset. Scott pilgrim feels right, given what I imagined in my minds eye. Take that cinematic style, and tailor it RP1 and you have the right formula. I know that Spielberg directed it and Cline signed off on it. I just don't care. It could have been much, much better. I just wish they had chosen a different cinematic style to bring out the characters and world more artfully, instead of taking the obvious and easy overly CGI paved road.

I saw that one. He did a good job...much better than I did on my cab. Custom bent acrylic? I didn't even route slots for rubber edging...lol!

I'm younger, but have lost 3 of my grandparents in the last few years. My remaining grandfather is in assisted living now and we couldn't go see him about a month back when he had a stroke. He's lost the ability to speak as cogently as he used to, struggling to find the words to match the thought. For him this is very frustrating, as he always prided himself on saying what he meant. While we would like to see him, and encourage him during the last stage of his life, we can't because the risk this poses to him and the other elderly tenants. I struggle with the guilt of placing our elderly in assisted living facilities - the morality of it. The truth is that at a certain point we cannot care for them and it's too dangerous to leave them alone. If I didn't have to work, I could help out more. If the facility were closer to home, I could visit more. Did I visit enough? These are the choices and hard questions that make it so difficult. And I haven't even had to deal with it a happening to a parent yet! With a grandparent, you're not as close or as responsible for them. I suppose the blessing is that it prepares you more gradually for someone closer to you. Barring tragedy, perhaps this gives you more experience of what to expect and do. What I've learned is that it's a lot of work to die. Besides the emotional loss, there's the paperwork. And once all that's done, there's a void in your support structure. I feel far more alone and disconnected after loosing my grandparents, who kept the aunts, uncles, and cousins together. Now my family feels smaller. It makes me fearful. It makes me want a family of my own, to still have people in my life when my parents pass. It must be...scary, in addition to more difficult. I'm very sorry for your loss!

So I Just beat Castlevania (NES). NO, I didn't really beat it legit. Yes, I used save states...but...it was still a fun game that I cannot believe I had never played before. Makeing it through some sections without dying or loosing patience and giving up must have been really hard. I guess you just have to accept that you are going to die and have to backtrack over and over again. Perhaps that rhythm, memorization, and repetition accentuates the accomplishment? IDK, I cheated. But I still enjoyed the game, which helped me get past the hardest parts. Even then, it was grueling at times. It's seriously difficult to learn enemy patterns and combinations of enemy's. Then knowing what special weapon to have for each boss. I got stuck hard on that ghost boss that materializes 4 boomerangs it throws around. Holy water is the correct answer. So backtracking ensued, despite save states. Now I know that Holy water is pretty much the answer to every boss. I do have one problem with the game, besides it being unfriendly to beginners (which I don't actually have a problem with. It's old skool hard, and that's intentional). You have to get really good at the controls and be extra careful not to get hit over cliffs or floating platforms. The hit mechanics are unforgiving, sending you flying backwards without being able to recover mid air. That's my issue. I can learn enemy patterns and figure out bosses, but it's unfair getting thrown off a floating platform because I jumped and an enemy flew from off screen, out of nowhere, to nail me. At least it doesn't happen while you're climbing stairs, if it did the last level would be nearly impossible. Actually theres a patch (hack) that allows mid-air recovery. I'm gonna try that patch and perhaps that'll be the definitive version for me. IDK. I have mixed feelings about patches like this. On the one hand, it fixes a big gripe. On the other, it changes the difficulty and OG'ness. It's such a subtle quality of life change, that I don't think I have an issue with it. Kinda like fixing the flickering sprites in emulators or FPGA. The devs themselves would have done this if they could have. So what games have you played recently that you had put off for too long?

If you want to have any chance of liking both, watch the movie first. The book upstages it to the point of disappointment, which is usually the case with movies based on books. Then when you're like, "eh, it was okay", read the book.

I've listened to RP1 20 times now and armada at least half that many. Armada is less original, but still a nostalgia trip. It's probably more special to me because it takes place in my back yard. Han, you really need to watch that movie! Then read the book...if you call yourself a science fiction / fantasy fan.

Ooooh, hell yeah! SIGN ME UP!!! I'm intentionally trying not to speculate about the plot. I'm gonna just let it happen. Maybe that'll soften the sequel blues. I do hope Will wheaton does the voice acting for the audible release. He's my guy....and Scott Brick, but for RP1/2 it has to be Will!

Yeah, but you're not likely to get much from it. I recently got my $12.34 from some data breach that took place like 8 years ago. It's a lunch, so it ain't nothing.

Standard MFG response to every negative review (especially on Newegg). They just go down the list & copy/paste the same prescribed message hoping everyone watching thinks they're being supportive. I count the number of these responses and if it's more that 1/3rd of the page, I find another product. I do read the review a bit just to see if the person making the complaint seems to have any computer experience. Many times it's just ignorance and misplaced blame from having to learn how to install something themselves. However, there's another (more sinister) reason MNF. do this. Plenty of times it's seasoned enthusiasts or pros reporting legit issues that should be mentioned. Sometimes these are just workarounds and tips that are annoying, but not necessarily deal breakers. There is no need for a MNF response, but they do it anyway. Why? To give everyone else the idea that this helpful response was a fluke, or defective product. That's a deceptive tactic, but legal because they didn't explicitly say it - the customer assumed it! Companies hire statisticians who come up with strategies like this all the time. They're still fine for discrete PC use, if you can use them (they're not SAS, right?). Throw a huge steam library on them any you should be fine, especially if you can accelerate them with an SSD like Intel optane.

This got me thinking. I haven't benched my OS drive in awhile and it's at 63% filled, which is supposed to diminish write performance... Uhhhhh...yeah. It's diminish alright, alot! When it was a fresh OS install, I was getting close to the advertised 2150MB/s Read, 1200MB/s Write. That has obviously changed. Reads are more important when it comes to snappiness, load times, and user experience in general. So this has gone unnoticed. I think I will upgrade to a larger drive so I don't come so close to filling it up. I just moved a bunch of files off my desktop because I was close to full. I think I have a pretty standard Windows installation and not uncommonly large set of programs installed. But after clenaing up my desktop and everything I can move onto a DATA drive, my widdled down OS is still 150GB/237GB. I miss the days when a 32GB drive was enough for an OS! Now they are THICK! Edit: My SSD was bought about 5 years ago and CrystalDiskInfo says I've written 12TB to it. Typically SSD's can have 500-700TB written to them. So, I shouldn't be anywhere near it's death throws. Why it's write performance is doing this, I'm not sure. I shouldn't see such a drastic loss of write performance at only 63% used (from 1200MB/s down to 245MB/s).

Yeah, me too. I have a 2TB Intel 660p in a USB3 adapter and I have been loving it. For the most part it's been great, but I was wondering why it was slowing down during large file transfers off my Desktop (OS drive is an OEM Samsung SM951, Evo is better). I assumed it was my USB controller or something. Now I know why it was so inexpensive! I originally bought it as an upgrade for my OS drive, but I'm using it for work to offload 4K footage from my phone / GoPro's SD card. Those devices are slow anyway, so I never noticed the write penalty there. I edit on my PC at home, directly off the drive so this never becomes a problem. I was planning on getting more and replacing my HDDs, but now I don't think it's a good idea. The whole idea was that I could transfer files between drives quickly, making backups and upgrades easier. Now, I'm thinking I should stick with my Samsung MLC OS drive and HD Data drives. The intel 660p makes for a great portable high capacity USB storage drive, which I serendipitously ended up using it as.

No one even offers SLC anymore. I prefer MLC for price/performance Ratio. I wasn't impressed with TLC, but dealt with speed trade-off because it made 1TB possible for a reasonable Price. I'm not impressed with QLC. Once you max out the write cache, it can be even slower than a HDD, which completely defeats the purpose. I can see this being fine for a game library, where the download process takes longer that it does to save to the drive. Playing the games would be fast thanks to SLC cache techniques. In most use cases this would be fine. However, for media content creators with large files being transferred from device to device, this would severely bottleneck workflow. If you wanted to quickly transfer folders with large files and hundreds of GBs of data, it wouldn't be an improvement over a HDD. And the longevity of QLC really has me worried. Honestly, I think QLC is the point of diminishing returns where Hybrid-HDDs (SSD cached) begin to make more sense (more reliable). I often find myself transferring hundreds of GB worth of data between drives. It would be nice to transfer hundreds of MB/s to keep larger transfers down to minutes, not hours. If I replace a HDD with a large capacity SSD, the reason I'm doing so is for that kind of speed. Otherwise, I would stick with the more reliable HDD platters. MLC was the sweet spot IMO. TLC was tolerable, but QLC is over the line.

I would hope they offer you replacements. It's the only decent thing to do. Otherwise, they deserve all the spank the legal system can manage. And I hope it leaves a mark!

I came across this watching YouTube videos of my retro gaming subs, not sure where. I don't usually like to pay for emulators, but this one might be worth it for the unique perspective. I actually think the VR version of this could work well given the limitations of resolution (screendoor effect). Usually that limits enjoyment and realism of the VR world, but in this case It might add to the retro feel of the game. Perhaps this is going to bey what we wished the Virtual Boy was. I would like to see a branch of this for Atari 2600. That should be easier to accomplish and spice up those games nicely.

Hey, try not to bug out to hard about technology traps like facial recognition, AI, spyware...governments be doin' their thang! For the most part they're trying to keep the baddies back and make it as painless for there rest of us as possible, but yeah there are some personal freedoms we give up. If/when it becomes too intrusive there will be productive discussions about how far it should be taken. I value privacy too, but that ship sailed long ago. So sit back and enjoy the view. Front row seats to the apocalypse, baby!

Isn't the first rule of online dating that no one ever remotely resembles their profile pic? It's more creepy that you're using a real one, no?

Just use a picture of you wearing your face mask.

When I looked into it, indexing was really meant for slow OS HDDs, where it took a long time to search for a file. Indexing helped speed the search up. If you use the search function alot, on HDD, then it could be useful still...but why? I don't use my HDDs that way. I use them to store my media, which I have organized in file structures that make sense. Indexing is more useful for an OS drive where the files you're looking for are buried in Microsoft's nonsensical file structure. If you're not already using an SSD for your OS (in 2020), you should be. On an SSD the extra writes from indexing just wear it out faster. An SSD is plenty fast for search functions as is. So I really don't see the point of indexing anymore. Other than causing problems and confusion.

I've had problems with that too. My OS drives always fill up over time leaving me precious little space, when I wasn't using it up. Android OS is especially rude about it too, complaining that my apps are taking it up when they most certainly are not. It's Android cumulative updates that are doing it. Windows has the WinSXS and installer folders, which grow unnecessarily big. Supposedly deleting files here can cause system instability, but a fresh install fully updated doesn't take up nearly as much space. So that explanation never sat well with me. Currently, they take up 17 of 38 GB my Windows folder. I can excuse the 12GB hiberfile.sys and 16GB pagefile.sys, because they perform useful roles and don't increase in size over time. But the other 2 piss me off. Android is worse though. They blame it on user installed apps, when it updates and system files doing it! They fill up and the phone or tablet slows down, making people assume it's just old and slow, so they buy a new one. Instead of cleaning up the files or providing larger OS drives that will not fill up so quickly, they like people buying a new device every 2 years when their device unnecessarily bloats to a crawl. It should be illegal to exploit people's technical ignorance like this. I downloaded that TreeSize free app, very useful. I had been right clicking properties on every file to track down the hogs one-by-one. This is much easier!

I don't hate this...but I might detest it a little...and rent it in the hopes its good...and most likely be disappointed. Can't this generation generate their own cult classics? Why do they have to resurrect ours just to destroy them? Maybe it'll be good, but I've been burned by this formula before.

It shines a light on a bigger social issue about objectifying women in general. It presents, to men at least, something that will catch our eye and elicit desire, drawing momentary attention away from character traits that bear larger importance to the person and her story. It's a diversionary tactic. As I said, there are reasons women choose to dress provocatively. There are times it's beneficial to evoke this response. It's a power move. On the other hand, when men force women to dress provocatively, it's about having power over them. It's demeaning, like the comic above. As a man, I would also like to point out that when a women uses our desires against us for the purposes of power, it's demeaning to us and undermines our trust in the relationship. If it's done in agreement for the purposes of fun, that's another story. Agreement is the key. Using desire as a manipulative tool is the problem.