GMT

rather look at MS here and their xbox online policy. no need to blame the game producers for using utilities offered. I mean, on PS and PC, you don't have to pay for an online membership to play the games, unless you jump on the edge-giving purchases or micro-transactions. If you wanna blame the producers/publishers for cash-cowing gamers, join the DLC-spitstorm. cutting stuff from the game or intentionally not producing it to make money from DLC and micro-DLC is even far more a problem imho

I grant my drive time to spin up, but not like half a day. I mean, sunday I ended up with about 40 minutes, yesterday it wasn't even booted after 3 1/2 hours, always at A2. Not exactly what I consider "spin up time". Especially since the system boots immediately w/o this drive plugged and only a few seconds longer with the drive in times w/o this problem. As for reproducing it.... let's say it reoccurs. I can't put my finger down on that exact cause but since it "comes and goes" and messing around like crazy, mainly on the software side in Winki (which is MSI's linux based light-OS) I can rid myself for a while at least, but seemingly not permanent. I'm at work right now so I can't really look into things, but I guess once I'm home, the extended test run of HDtune should be done... maybe I swipe the drive clean then and see what happens from there on. If the problem still persists, I guess I gotta RMA the drive despite all these fancy test tools telling me it has no faults. Not sure about the dust thing, but also a possibility. I recently cleaned the system from any dust and also have these cool filters at the inlets (luckily because the neighboring lot has been sold and construction started in january, you can guess the dirt), this doesn't block out everything but really helps w/o too much impact on the case airflow. There was only little dust and hairs from my cat in there but of course that can't be ruled out. EDIT: as expected, the full HDtune test came up empty. I let chkdsk run and it found one wrong index on one of the partitions, everything else fine. Could this be the root of all evil? I have a small feeling it can't... EDIT2: what I did now was messing around with Winki again. Fine thing that this OS simply ignores any read/write restriction flags Windows sets on files and folders. This way, I was able to access the otherwise locked system volume information folder. in here, I found on 3 the partitions on the HDD discussed, an equal file I didn't find on any other partitions. A seemingly empty text-file called something along the lines of "mount point remote manager database" I deleted all 3 instances throughout the 3 partitions I found this file on and guess what? perfect boot with both HDDs in place. I googled for the purpose of this file and frankly, I didn't understand a thing what it said about this file.

I wanna contact the real support only once I have something in hand - or nothing but have tried most steps - because only recently on an unrelated problem, I was confronted with the obnoxious "have you tried turning it on and off again" after a problem description that literally ruled this out as a help and maybe this might be policy, but still I felt a bit offended. Therefore, So far, I'm only in contact with the MSI support forum, as my board manufacturer. I should check the HDD in a different pc, which I can't for I don't have access to any, not at home, not at work and even more so not among my friends. I was handed another diagnosis tool and are about to get a 4th one. I don't see how this could help any but yeah, let them run, I don't have much use of the PC anyway atm. I also just posted my problem in the WD community, let's see what they say.

also, sc4 always loads everything it finds in the plugin folders so - next to the very likely chance of conflicting files - your game loads several GB of data it'll never use, clogging your RAM and pagefile. only get the stuff you actually need and keep it organized so you can add/remove it as you see fit. trust me, over time, you end up with loads of plugins, no need to hurry. as for your question... hm... all currently available stuff from all sites I guess it'll be in the low 2 digit GB range, ignoring redundancy. If i had to point my fingers at it, I'd say between 20 and 30 GB, leaning towards 30.

I don't mind a merger as long as it is not essential to play/finish the game. Watch Dogs does a pretty good implementation of this, no hassle playing single-player alone still you can always expect you're not alone on the map. totally adds to the atmosphere of the game. but I don't like to have the multiplayer experience an essential part to play the singleplayer game... or even worse, you pay 50 60 70 bucks for a game that hooks you up with a cool single-player teasing and then turns out to have it's main focus on the multiplayer experience... *cough* GTA5 *couch*

you don't play with NAM, NAM plays with you

it seems WD still has this reputation, that's why I got them, can't harm to have quality built material, especially if you use it all day long. Not that I'm in to practice my pitch with it, I'm very responsible treating my stuff, my 5yrs old smartphone has no scratches or dents all around... but that's off topic. Win7 Diagnosis came up empty, same for the quick search of the WD tool. I've also run the extended test over night (took 5hrs 3mins) and it came up clean, as expected. So I can definitely rule out a bad HDD which accounts for approximately 75% of the solutions I find on the internet for my problem.

yep that WB was a typo, corrected. and yes both listed HDD are internal drives and handled as such, it's just that I can swap them easily because of the server-like HDD frame and I am able to hook actually any HDD up via USB as I have a set of powered adapters to do so. Another thing that I should have mentioned, prior to running with Win7 I was on Vista for about a year with the very setup above and never ran into this problem. There was only a Vista problem with drives bigger than 1TB that could easily be solved with respective drivers. It was also no problem on Win7 for a while, maybe the first 3 4 weeks and then for no apparent reason started. Anyhow, I was curious and had a few hours stuff to do so I just let the pc be stuck in A2 on startup. When I came home, it was on my Win desktop just fine. More curious now I rebooted it and came to the find that it obviously doesn't freeze in A2, but it rather took about 40minutes to go beyond A2 and then it runs just perfectly fine, just the way you want a pc to run. I give Win's hdd diagnosis tool a run over this drive now and thereafter WD's tool, so far it seems to turn up ok but I'm not done yet, takes it's time. Just wanna make sure that my initial asumption of a healthy drive is right.

It wouldn't need no highly trained professional either to just activate this system and make it fire on something. On the other hand, it is not said that it was "armed peasants", there's plenty military among the rebels, so it sounds logical that there might be someone, who knows at least knows which buttons to press to take down an aircraft with this system. to work beyond the IFF, fill the gaps this system has, is up to professionals tho. I don't know which - if any - IFF system is installed on the BUK, but it might be anything from a simple "friend or everything else" to a highly sophisticated system actually interrogating transponder signals to verify the target status. EDIT: and the blackbox is going to russia cuz separatists collected it and since they're pro russian, the hand it to them. nonetheless, enough worldwide officialls MUST be involved by international law / icao treaty. basically every nation/company involved in the construction and operation of the plane has a legal right to join the investigation into this - assumed - takedown... and I think even the countries suffering fatalities from an aircraft accident may be involved aswell.

first off, this is not an officially declared warzone. second, the airspace was never closed to civilian operation (unlike crimean airspace which is closed to civil aircraft). and third, there's been thousands of civil flights over iraq and afghanistan in the last 10 years despite the war going on below, simply because even the regular surface to ground missile ops are almost only a matter of close-range, mainly shoulder-mounted rocket systems to attack starting/landing planes, helicopters and lowflying bombers, so there's a very very remote danger for civil aviation. furthermore, both the FAA and ICAO issued a warning for the russian/ukrainian border, ironically the area this happened was outside the area warned about. and on a sidenote, this airway is one of the main routes from europe to asia. there's probably over 100 flights daily on this route as it is the most economic. actually, even a friend of mine flew there just minutes before this incident. an incident which now even US officials (Pentagon) say was definitely a take-down. There's active intelligence operations in the area for a long time now and they collected data showing that a missile system's radar was locked onto an aircraft at that time and also ir signatures suggesting a high altitude explosion at about the same time and possibly even a trackable missile trajectory.

interesting how the amount of counties per state reduces to the west... never thought of that. and funny how you can actually see the big cities on this map. but it's like jmsepe said already, cities offer everything you need on a small area, this attracts people. and the more people live there, the more services are provided, so even more people come and if area permits - especially in the us - the city sprawls, swallowing smaller towns in the vicinity and sooner or later you have giant metropolitan areas (LA, Phoenix, NYC) with millions of residents.

lotta bull these days on the internets. but its a matter of fact that there's always been bright minds messing with game cardridges or rather the content stored on them. just that it wasn't as easy to distribute hacked games back in the days, so it basically came down to know someone who knows someone who can make things happen... and evey now and then these cardridges pop up at a garage sale. dunno bout these arcade boxes tho, sounds like their content hasn't been messed with. of course gaming can result in hazardous situations. the wellknown photosensitive reactions every game or console warns us about are just one of these, same for the occasional news of ppl, preferably in southeastern asia, that played themselves to death in several days long sessions... Fair enough to suppose that the adrenaline rush and excitement of setting new highscores can lead to lifethreatening conditions too. not with a healthy person as claimed in this video tho.

if they'd make any money at all from a pc port of halo, given the age of the game. best they could do is throw out a collectors edition for like 20 bucks on steam, origin at al. ok this might sell ok but its by far not the cashcow they're after. even worse, they have to spend a lot on it to provide the infrastructure and I guess they even have to pay the online teams for their services... wont leave that much green in the end so I doubt they'll go for it

both to a varying extend. If I start a region I have a certain idea in mind and look for a suitable map. once I got the map - which sometimes includes modifing a released map - I start planning in mind which big features go where, downtown, sprawl, harbor, airport, small towns in the vicinity... aswell as major highway, road and railway network which I start building then. thereafter I go ahead and think of a bit more detailed layout and start with the road network. here comes google earth to work which helps me with the layout of different parts of the city or at least as an inspiriation for it, keeping in mind the general direction I want to go with my region (which is usually north american). every now and then I even recreate certain areas - at least the networks or features located relative to each other - to scale as far as possible, mostly when building the countryside around the main city. when it gets hilly, I have a body or any other terrain feature I plan to extend the city to, I try to work with the terrain rather than a detailed plan and only follow a general direction and then see what the terrain allows me to do and what I end up with.

I dont get all this sc2013 hatin goin on. yes, it's not what we wanted because what we wanted was an sc4 in 3d. yes, the launch was pretty messed up (to keep it nice). yes, the lack of modding until it went offline is a downer. yes, a big flaw is the small city size. yes, the "social" gaming part was bull. yes, the specialization could've been better thought thru. but on the bottom line, it's not as bad as it's reputation. societies on the other hand is handsdown a pretty darn bad sim city, maybe second only to early cellphone implementations.

do u know what fps means? first person shooter... none of the games you mentioned are fps

I cant take a srceeny of my desktop atm as my pc is undergoing maintenance (or better, one ram stick died on me, I have to send in all the ram for a replacement and I don't have no alternatives), but I can happily explain it: this picture and NOTHING else. no files no nothing, unless it's a recent download - which I route to my desktop - or somehow else in use and not archived yet. I like it neat and clean... and I really really really like this picture.

anyone wanna join my crew (ps3)? I only created it for the sake of better rewards soloing through missions but maybe we can hook up n help levelup and unlock mods each other? my psn is gm-t- and my social club id is -gm-t- ...

hm... 1. half life 2. duke nukem 3d 3. cod mw

sunny, little clouds passin thru erry now n then some 20°C n a serious lack of love for mature grammar... yo...

looking good there durf... mind sharing another closeup of the terminal area? speaking of it, maybe you can reestablish a cargo terminal somwhere to the left of the hangar area?

7555 files in 614 folders at 1.57gb in the documents/plugins folder where I try to keep only the actual lots 4635 files in 172 folders at 3.61gb in the simcity4/plugins folder where I try to keep all the dependencies (models, description files and so on) and "core" mods (nam, terrain mod, data mods and the likes) all trying to keep a - at least for me - logical sorting aswell as 3136 files in 90 folders at 2.55gb of inactive plugins makes 15326 files in 876 folders at 7.73gb of total plugin data