Leandro

That's what I normally do. I've had the same processor for over three years now, a Core2Quad Q9550. At the time it cost $300. Now, I know that even an i3 2100 would perform similarly for $120, but why go through the whole upgrade if it's just going to perform marginally better? It works very well with everything I throw at it; so, I am waiting until I have an actual *reason* to upgrade it. When I do, it'll most likely be a jump to another high end processor that will also last me 5 years.

I've upgraded "around" the processor, though. New motherboard for DDR3 memory support, a bunch of RAM, 2TB hard disks (fortunately before the price went to heck last year). But the processor itself? Haven't felt the need for more speed.

You're welcome. And thanks @Dalghryn for giving up his thanks so I could get double thanks.

Ponies aren't kittens. Cats are evil, man. And catgirls are worse.

I've been telling you it was easy for months. But noooooo, you have to be all cautious and take forever to slap a few kittens.

They're in the Pacific timezone, right? That's a 5 hour difference. In which case my account expired at 3:56 PM on March 1st, and was reactivated at 3:41 AM on March 2nd. Almost 12 hours. @#$%.

I would if the freaking tip missions for all level ranges were in Ouroboros.

I used the Mozilla template for my sites, because it has a lot more information, and the spotlight effect probably doesn't work well with people who are stuck on older versions of IE and don't even know that a web browser is supposed to be updated.

The wording in your post is confusing, but I believe your interpretation is correct. DNS is like a giant phonebook of the internet, which says "the site at cityofheroes.com is at 64.25.35.207". Tampering with DNS is like burning a phonebook. You can still figure out the phone numbers by asking friends who know them, but you don't have the ability to look them up yourself.

Result: pirates will still share the location of pirate sites via alternative means, but small sites that happened to be caught in the crossfire can no longer reach their audience.

WARNING: TECH AHEAD

When you request a webpage from a server, you send something that looks like this:

GET /newreply.php HTTP/1.1
Host: boards.cityofheroes.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Chrome/16.0.912.75 Safari/535.7
Referer: http://www.google.com/

I simplified it for our purposes, but that's a valid request. It contains these bits of information:

"GET" the file "newreply.php" from the server. The web browser is asking this page from the domain "boards.cityofheroes.com", using "Chrome" as a browser, and the last page it visited was "www.google.com".

The part that matters to us is the "Host" bit. In this field, the browser tells the server that the user wants a page located at that particular domain and subdomain, boards.cityofheroes.com.

Why is this important? A lot of web hosts (most, really) share the same IP address with a bunch of different sites. This simplifies things from the server side, and reduces costs. But because of this, that IP cannot be mapped to a single site. When you enter the IP in the address bar, you either get an error, or you are directed to the main page of the hosting service. Without the "Host" field to tell the server what domain you are trying to access, the host has no way to know which of the many sites it hosts should be sent to you.

So how do you access those sites in the event that DNS is crippled and doesn't give you an IP for a domain? Simple: every operating system has a file named "hosts" in which you can enter a domain and an IP, an the OS will use that information, without asking a DNS. In Windows, that file is located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Go ahead, open it with Notepad, it won't break anything. You will most likely only see a single line:

127.0.0.1 localhost

That means that any program that tries to contact the server name "localhost" will be directed to the IP 127.0.0.1, which is the IP of your own computer (always; that IP is reserved to always mean "this computer").

Google's IP address is 74.125.229.177. So, you can add this line to the hosts file:

74.125.229.177 leandroisawesome.com

And save it. Now, if you try to go to leandroisawesome.com, it will load Google! That domain name is unregistered and doesn't actually exist. You can enter any valid server/domain name in there, and you will be directed to Google when you enter it in your browser, because you manually mapped Google's IP to that server.

So, if DNS were to block the City of Heroes website, all you would need to do is add this:

64.25.35.207 cityofheroes.com

And you'll be perfectly able to access the site again, even if it shared an IP with a bunch of other websites, because you will be accessing the file by typing in its domain name -- and thus, sending the correct "Host" header that the server needs to work.

This is, by the way, why the DNS provisions in SOPA are a major problem for legit sites but at most a minor nuisance to pirates. There are already addons for Chrome and Firefox that redirect people trying to go to a bunch of pirate sites to the proper IP in the event of a DNS meltdown. Messing with DNS will not stop piracy.

I really fail to see why some people think COH has to keep my attention all the time or it's doing something wrong. I take breaks from COH frequently (I didn't even log in for two months recently) and I'm still here after 6 years. Yes, I'd like it if new content were released more frequently, but I also like the quiet times so I can work on all the other games I have on Steam that are begging me to play them.

The star landed on a random member of the league who did not give the star back to the league leader for a looong time.