Twilo

Yes, I help to stoke the furnace of off-topic digression. Recently. Face it, I'm INDISPENSABLE

100% success record!

I think it is safe to say that I don't know anybody you know, or people you want to know. I don't mean that it would be safely accurate, I mean that I would be safest if I OBSCURE all connections (via Kevin Bacon or otherwise). FIVE PAGES OF MADNESS edit: the WHITE DUST is FLOUR from which BREAD IS MADE

I still use my Voodoo 3 3000 (which was the best purchase I ever made) in the p450. 3dfx made the Voodoo 5, competing with nVidia's GeForce 2, and lost. ATi's TNT of the time sort of floated around as an alternative. 3dfx was "0wned" and eventually got bought up by nVidia, which left itself and ATi as the only real competitors. ATi shed it's budget card image (ATi Rage, oh man) and came out with the Radeons and stuff. nVidia brought back SLI'd cards recently (hooking two graphic cards together for MAXIMUM GRAPHICS) which was a 3dfx invention (voodoo2's could do it)

There's a pub in Dungarvan called John Keanes, but, being in Dungarvan (and by extension, Waterford) means that this pub sucks.

You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel if you're counting Tramore as a PLUS. Tune in every morning to the Big Bla! Waterford has it ALL Edit: Post #100 in this MIRE of DEPRAVITY

Unless they have a World Class UNIVERSITY in Dalkey, then Ray "Fucking" D'Arcy isn't going to protect you from Jimmy "The Hook" Maloney in the City Centre.

And the streets are paved with Gold! And vomit!

to death... AT THE PROM. Also, Yufster: Dungarvan is in Waterford, you Waterfordish Skank-monkey! It's where everyone who can't STAND the FACEMELTING TERROR the average Waterford City citizen inspires flee when they can't raise the money to buy a train ticket to CORK because they didn't get their CHRISTMAS BONUS and little BILLY lost his HAND and can't work on the DOCKS this year. Take that, right up your City Square Shopping Centre! The Book Centre is cool though.

Who the hell would want a $200 bass guitar? Also, rich farmers in Ireland buy Dell, which have onboard Intel EXTREME graphics on them. EXTREME Graphics. So too, I bet, do PC World PCs

I second: Doom and Grim Fandango. And also nominate: Quake 2. A full episode (3 levels) and all the weapons apart from the BFG; as well as full multiplayer is pretty damn generous of id. Half Life Uplink: A strange beast, not really a demo in the traditional sense, but it was the right decision. Any demo of ingame levels wouldn't make sense storywise, so it'd be hard to get involved. Age of Empires: Rise of Rome: I got months of gameplay out of the multiplayer mode on this. Seemingly unique in that the demo had its own seperate gamer community to the full game, including specialised maps. MSN Zone's matchmaking facilities made good for once. Thumbs: Perhaps a demos feature is in order?

ATi are pretty good for their drivers, they even made some 64-bit drivers for XP x64 and Linux, which is more than most manufacturers do. Very tweakable too.

Four Pages?!?!?!

Well the point is that Quake 4 carries on from Quake 2 (remember landing the escape pod and raising that fist to the sky?), so it doesn't really gel that everything suddenly looks so different. Storywise it would figure that earth is launching a follow-up attack (more live marines, and now tanks) which makes sense because you blew up the Big Gun in Quake 2. The only real tie to quake 2 I could see was a faint small Stroggos logo (a skull with wings) on one of the doors in one of the shots. The different weapon designs is ok I guess, as the weapons in Quake 2 (with a few exceptions) were supposed to be Stroggos weapons you salvaged. Whether you play as Bitterman (as in quake 2) or as someone new remains to be seen. Bitterman was supposedly warped into the Quake 3 arenas, but we'll pretend that never happens. In any case, none of those models look like him. What the game really needs to stand on its own are big epic-style setpieces, marine squads, tanks and that, storming bases and air strikes and fun. They have time to work on the AI (lacking in doom). Twilo - Official Quake 2 fanboy Someone's got to do it.

I would make out with her... AT THE PROM

Like Quake 2 stylistically. It already has the doom 3 grey filter on. Nothing looks like quake 2: The marines are little rubbish Doom 3 men The enemies are, as has been said, straight out of any other FPS game you care to mention (none of the gruesome cyborg splendor of Quake 2, low-poly models and all) The weapons don't look alike at all, and you can't guess the function of any just by looking. No daytime areas, and indoor areas have morphed from the industrial gritty Strogg plants into the doom 3 mars station. Also, it needs more LIGHT. Quake was never a dark game.

Finally someone makes good use of the Scumm Bar's bandwidth. Give that man a hat. Also, I am gravely disappointed with these shots. It looks nothing like quake 2, and must be fixed. It's a glorified Doom 3 mod. Shame on Raven, hopefully they can maintain their track record and sort things out before the release. It has to stand on its own.

If you want something between 0.999... and 1, try: inf --- \ 1+ / (10^-k) - (10^-(k+1)) --- k=1 the series converges on 0 as k tends to infinity, but the sum is always greater than it. Adding this series to 0.999... gives 1

The whole point of my proof (which is not an incorrect proof) is to illustrate to farbror how you get an 8.99.. as he expects. 8.99.. is, of course, limited at 9. Is 0.999... equal to 1? No. It's a series that approximates it. My own favourite "book about limit theory" illustrates this finely as part of its definition of a limit: "..in finding the limit of f(x) as x approaches a, we never consider x = a." -Calculus - J. Stewart The series can't consider 0.999... as it can't consider k = (infinity), instead we consider a limit, which is "arbitrarily close" to 0.999... (and as we don't know of any number > 0.999... and <1, then 1 is as close as we can get.) Less pretentious please.

this is aberrant because the series has a limit at 1 as k goes to infinity This is quite different to being equal to it.

I proved a similar problem to this before with an infinite series, I'll get back to you on that Update: OK, here it is: I don't have the fonts for proper notation here, so I'll try and approximate the characters. The function is sum of all the terms in a sequence from n to p. In this case, n is 1 and p is infinity, so this is the sum of all the terms of the form: 9(10^(-n)) or 9 times 1/10^n for various n's, this might be 0.9, 0.009, 0.00000000009 etc Now if we add all of these up we get 0.99999.... recurring. The function in standard notation looks sort of like this: infinity S (9*10^-n) n=1 "S" is sigma, meaning sum of. I don't know if there's ascii for that. We will call this function X as you have. now, 10X = infinity 10*(S(9*10^-n)) n=1 (ie, 10 times the Sigma Function) And then if we substract X from that, we get: infinity 9*(S(9*10^-n)) n=1 (ie, 10 times the sigma function, minus 1 times the sigma function) or infinity S(81*10^-n) n=1 which produces, rather nicely, 8.99999999999... (ie: 8.1 + 0.81 + 0.081 + 0.0081 etc) which is exactly what we should expect.

Or the diminishing scope of the public's musical exposure and imagination.

I'm playing the (multiplayer only, with one singleplayer tutorial game) beta for Relic's soon-to-be-released RTS Dawn of War and I must say it's pretty damn slick. Deftly manages to keep the "cool" aspects of Warhammer, while dispensing with the geeky and expensive parts, and slaps a bunch of annoying chatroom dweebs in the mix for extra flavour-sauce. Buildings drop in from orbit, troops appear from dropships, individual squad members can have individual upgrades (stick a sniper rifle on one of a two-man scout squad and head for the cover. oh yes), and the commander units (sort of like heroes in Warcraft3) are FANTASTIC. Gape in awe as the Eldar avatar leaves scorched craters in the earth as he continues his lumbering *whump-whump* advance on enemy positions, and EXPLODES THE GROUND SENDING THE LITTLE ORC SHITS FLYING. Wraithlords strafe the enemy, casting flamy death in vast arcs; one picks up an enemy unit and rips it in half with its 2-metre long hands, blood drips from its fingers. Assault marines take to the air on jetpacks, drop down behind the enemy and flank them with chainsaw-swords and hand grenades, casting their flak-riddled foes aside. Dropships bring reinforcements. Dreadnoughts; Massively armoured robots powered by the brains of dead marines: "I live to serve. Again." YES

In all cases, cursing fileplanet is a pretty safe course of action.

SUPER TIP 54 Decompress your *.pk4 files (found in doom3/base) to your doom3/base folder (Note: not doom3/base/pak0 etc). WinRAR works a treat. This has the effect of reducing or eliminating slight pauses when entering new rooms (caused by the game frantically decompressing textures and shoving them into graphics memory). If you're using any mods (duct-tape etc) you'll have to unpack those to the same place too. This will have the effect of overwriting whatever script files the mod modifies (eg the flashlight, shotgun and machinegun scripts in the case of duct-tape mod), so back those up if you want to switch back at a later point. Running Doom 3 at 1024*756 High Quality with all advanced settings on. FSAA x2