Hyperstrike

When the person who produced the content says that it's okay or when it hits the public domain. Not a nanosecond before.

Please understand what you're talking about then before posting. And be prepared to have someone disagree with you when you use qualitative terms when you should be using quantitative terms.

The long and short of it is that there's an excessive amount of greed and entitlement issues on BOTH sides of this argument and no real desire to find a happy medium.

Not that I think stealing this stuff is right, but there's a fallacy in here.

You're assuming that the people who pirate the stuff would have paid for it in the first place.

In a surprisingly large number of cases, this is Just Plain Wrong. So counting every instance of piracy as a "lost sale" is boneheaded (and I'm putting it politely).


Actually what's causing the price to rise are all the ludicrous forms of access control the content providers (not necessarily the content owners and producers) are opting to put into new content. Some of it so bad that it actually winds up penalizing legitimate users more than the lousy *bleep!* who steal the stuff.

Not quite correct.

Is torrenting legal?
Maybe.

Is torrenting content that doesn't belong to you legal?
No.


If I produce Hyperstrike's Happy HD Hum-Along, use all original music that I've written myself, encode it with an unencumbered codec and kick it up on BT, that's perfectly fine.

If I produce Hyperstrike Horrendous HD Hum-Along, use songs written by other artists (or just rip CDs of the songs), pirate some A/V software to produce and encode it, then kick it up to BT, it's NOT fine.

As with all things, the devil's in the details.

Currently running:

• Intel Core2 Quad 2.5Ghz
• 8GB DDR2
• nVidia GTX460
• 240GB (2x120) SSD RAID array.
• Windows 7 Ultimate Edition

My system rating comes in at 7.2 (meaning all components rate 7.2 or higher on a scale that caps at 7.9) and my disk throughput is ridiculous.

I still get lag in high lag situations (Lag hill, ship raids, invasions...)
I still get lag, occasionally, on teams.
I still get slow-loading zones.
I still crash out fairly frequently (at least once a week).

Simply throwing hardware will not make these problems go away. They MAY help to MINIMIZE them, but the hardware itself isn't the sole contributor to these issues.

Nope. Not even a little one.

Tanking LR is a HIGHLY specialized situation. And achieving the requisite defense and resist numbers CAN be done with inspies and team buffs. As such, just about ANY AT could reasonably tank LR if it were truly necessary. Tanks are just better equipped for it out the door.

Additionally, there are other strategies for tanking LR that don't involve sitting your entire time at 75% defense. They're TOUGHER, but they still work.

You do NOT need Tower-Buffed LR levels of defense for the rest of the game. And simply because a tank isn't running around with these levels of defense permanently does NOT make them broken or deficient or anything like that.

A decently built, non-set-IO-having Inv tank is actually sitting at close to 30% defense S/L/E/N/F/C.

Real arguments and numbers please. Not poop-hole-pulling.

Just read the spec page. They're standard 120x25mm fans. If you replace them you should be good to go.

Not QUITE. As stated, in RAID arrays, there is currently no TRIM support. As such, you caught between the rock of drive wear and the hard place of drive performance degradation.

One solution to this is a semi-manual process consisting of:

1. Doing a defrag for the SOLE purpose of consolidating free space.
2. Running a tool that essentially does what TRIM does to the free space.

Now, on an array of sufficient capacity (one that's not in danger of going below 20% free space any time soon), one would perform this action on a quarterly, semi-annual or annual basis.

Performing this more often merely wears out your drives faster.

I'm fully aware that not everyone has the financial resources I do.
A few things led me here.

1. I had the spare cash. I could have done two things, upgrade my existing machine (which now ranks 7.2 on Windows system rating) or built a new system, but kept my mechanical hard drives. I opted for the former.
2. Having dealt with space issues with numerous customers (Damn Dell and damn their stupid default 40GB OS system partitions!), I'm somewhat paranoid about running out of space. Granted, I have a couple TB worth of mechanical storage and a few hundred gigs online. But still. I try to plan for headroom.
3. I'm a recovering frothing hardware loonie! Except now, I no longer spend cash on crazy stuff like full-immersion fluorinert cooling and do-it-yourself phase change setups. Mostly because I'm too busy at work to spend time on this stuff anymore.

This is kinda why I shied away from 60-ish gig disks. My OS plus app install weighs in at about 43GB on my C:\ partition. That only leaves about 20GB free on a 64GB disk. Windows Updates, additional software installs, etc in the future could eat that quite easily. Also, performance on NTFS file systems begins falling off a cliff quite drastically once your free space drops below 20% (48GB).

I bought 120's just in case there was something massive and show-stopping in my plan to RAID my SSDs. At least I wouldn't wind up space constrained.




Here's an explanation of TRIM.

Essentially, over time, without trim, or functions like it, sector performance of an SSD degrades. Read and write functions in an SSD are quite fast compared to a hard drive. But overwrite/wipe operations incur a significant performance penalty. And thus, are usually deferred or deprecated until something needs to be written into that sector.

As a drive gets used more, it has more of these sectors that don't get cleaned. And, eventually, you have a performance dropoff as, more often than not, the drive needs to perform more and more wipe/overwrite functions to write things to the disk.

It's not that you're going to need a new drive every 2 years. If you buy a modern drive, it will have TRIM support (as will Windows 7). What TRIM is essentially doing is executing these wipe/overwrite cycles in the background, semi-intelligently, trying to keep ahead of the problem.

The only time it doesn't work is on RAID arrays. This is due to control issues between the SSD onboard controller and the RAID controller. AFAIK, no RAID controller currently supports TRIM (though I might not be aware of some very VERY new stuff).

And no you won't need a drive every two years. Newer drives and their controllers have wear-leveling algorithms and/or reserved space built into them to help offset issues with drive wear.

On top of that, MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is, on many of these drives, in the multiple millions of hours.

My Agility 2 series drives are rated MTBF at 2 million hours.
How long is that? 228 YEARS.

Realistically, it (and you) aren't going to last that long.

But, if you want a read on this, take a look at this site. The articles were written in the 2007-2008 time frame but they still apply. Also, keep in mind that the technology is always improving.

Okay, I am currently running Windows and CoH from a pair of 120GB SSDs in RAID-0 (striped, no redundancy) configuration.

The throughput on the RAID is phenomenal.

And YES, I've noticed a boost in speed, mostly during initial game load and zoning.

But that's it. In-game it's not really any faster (though it's faster because I upgraded from a GTX260 to a GTX460).

As I said, I noticed a boost in zoning speed. HOWEVER, it was not a HORRENDOUS boost. But it WAS noticeable. If you're having any disk-related issues contributing to slow-zoning, an SSD should eliminate them. But they're NOT going to make zone loads blazingly fast or instantaneous. There are still network and processing issues going into how fast you can load into a zone.

Ironblade is PARTIALLY right. An SSD won't make a huge difference. HOWEVER, he's wrong about throughput not being superior. Likely it's colored by his choice of SSD. Some of the new SSDs have throughput and sustained transfer rates that simply dwarf any spindle-based hard drive.

Yes. Basically when it patches a file it's adding the new content into blocks further along on the hard drive and deleting the old data on. It doesn't matter to the file itself, since the drive has pointers that direct searches from the end of one file fragment to the next, wherever it is on the disk.

However, on a spindle-based drive, this causes additional seek time, reducing throughput and performance. Doing a defrag of those file after an update restores that performance.

This doesn't quite hold true from SSDs, as "contiguous" data isn't necessarily stored contiguously. Also, due to the nature of flash memory, you don't WANT to be heavily defragging the disk or you'll send it to an early grave.

Performance will fall off (more or less) slowly with an SSD as it's used. Tools like TRIM support will help mitigate some of this performance degradation. But TRIM isn't supported on RAID arrays. For that, there are tools out there that allow you to manually perform the same function as TRIM. The first step IS a defrag. But only for free-space consolidation (DiskKeeper and PerfectDisk allow for this). Then an SSD tool like Freespace Cleaner FF performs a function similar to TRIM. Done on a monthly basis, it helps prevent performance falloff.

Again, not QUITE true. It DOES allow you to rule out disk-performance related issues on things like load-times though.

Note: ONLY be doing this on spindle-based hard drives! DO NOT use defragmentation with aggressive file consolidation on an SSD! You WILL shorten the life of your drive and you will NOT see appreciable performance gains.

The model information for a Female Huge model is present in the piggs. However, work on it was stopped at one point and never revisited (that we know of). Essentially they would have to duplicate ALL of the animations currently available in the game a FOURTH time to make it work.

I believe the devs would rather spend their development time on other things with more tangible returns.

That wouldn't be because WMM was a bondage fetishist right?

Uhm. WHAT?

Almost the entire movie is one gigantic chase scene. Just vertically, through the building.

No, but this is!

There's a BIG difference between having 60 years of content and having 60 years of content IN-GAME.

There are 5 marketing badges that provide +1 market slots, as well as the 66 Month Veteran badges with also awards another market slot.

"Paging Doctor Howard, Doctor Fine, Doctor Howard!"