This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - Weeblie
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 ... 59
61
« on: September 05, 2008, 06:31:12 am »
Heh, I see no reason to use Google Chrome when one can instead use a combo of Firefox 3 and IE 8 (Beta 2).
Many of the "improvements" found in Google Chrome are also available in IE 8. IE 8 is currently also rendering a lot of websites incorrectly (broken menus tend to be classical case), the fix there is just a matter of activating "compatability mode" (which also can be activated permanently for all websites if one so wishes to).
Google Chrome is nice with its simple and small "look" and definitely something one would consider on, say, an Asus EEE PC. But for an everyday desktop computer? Ugh...
Google was once considered not to be evil but that's surely no longer the case now. ECHELON killing off privacy on the net? That's a joke compared to how much internet monitoring Google is doing. It's all good and nice if Google itself is honorable. But what if someone else gets their hands on all the info that Google has gathered?
62
« on: September 04, 2008, 01:34:45 pm »
Happy birthday!
63
« on: September 03, 2008, 04:53:35 pm »
There are in fact one way to easily test if it's a PSU or a motherboard problem. But that unfortunately requires shorting two pins on the power cable (in order to "simulate" a power button "push" without having the motherboard connected) so I'm not sure if that's such a good idea, unless one's really sure about it oneself, hehe.
64
« on: September 03, 2008, 02:51:22 pm »
A big word of warning.
Dell is sometimes using non-standard cases/PSUs/screw holes which makes it impossible to update/change the motherboard.
As for whether it is a sweet time to get a new computer now? Hmmm... I think the prices are extraordinary reasonable nowadays if you are building your own computer (which tends to be a very easy thing to do). Most of the components are currently in a state where they can hardly drop their prices anymore.
May one inquire what your current computer is?
ps. Is the PSU fan turning on? Your current problem description sounds like a PSU problem. Could be as little as a blown fuse inside it... though changing the fuse by oneself is not recommended. If the error can be tracked to the PSU (by using a PSU from another computer)... getting a new one (after seeing that it would in fact fit in the Dell case) should be rather cheap and easy.
65
« on: September 03, 2008, 01:24:08 pm »
You should check the manual or any other support page found on their homepage for how to do this.
Generally, it's just a matter of losening two or three screws found on the back and opening the panel on a single side (it will become obvious if you picked the wrong one, hehe).
66
« on: September 03, 2008, 01:09:22 pm »
All of them. But most of the cables are very difficult to get loose.
There should be some very small and fragile looking cables generally located at the bottom right corner of the motherboard. One of them should be your powerbutton cable. Is that one connected? (though getting that one loose should not shut your computer down but merely make it impossible to start)
Oh, heh... and did you perhaps touch any "power switch" button on the back of the computer? Most PSUs have such a one and flipping it to off... well... the power would go off.
67
« on: September 03, 2008, 12:57:48 pm »
Check cables, first the ones found on the outside of the computer, and then the cables inside the computer.
Perhaps by touching the tower, you accidentally made a loose one fall off?
While it's not impossible that the ethernet cable did kill the PSU off, it do sound extraordinary unlikely. Frying the ethernet chipset is a possibility, but even that is veeeery unlikely.
68
« on: September 02, 2008, 04:03:09 pm »
This is no way any official answer, but from my own gut feeling: 1) No unless this is a truly extraordinary (WLDQ? Plot quest?) situation. Changing items from one type to another tends to be a fundemental change in power too (if we use "price" as a way to compare the value of items, a +3 wisdom ring can most likely be sold for about 150,000 trues while a +3 wisdom helmet would most likely reach 300,000+). 2) No unless the item primary only has RP value and is very "weak" and not "really" mechanically useful. If druid items are wanted for number two... there are wooden shields present in game. 
69
« on: September 02, 2008, 12:57:23 pm »
I thought more wanted to have Paladin classes removed from some of the deities rather to add new deities to the list. :p
70
« on: August 31, 2008, 06:24:46 pm »
The only sad thing in this is that, the rolls gets distributed across the whole server.
1 it makes the % that you see of your chances of success skewed.
2 it doesn't reflect a very balanced system.
When someone makes a painting, his chance of making it right is not affected by 20 other people painting at the same time around the world. I know that unfortunately it's probably some coded thing in the core system of the game. But it is still sad. For a normal RNG, it has no bearing if you have "your own RNG" or "you are sharing RNG output with others". Just because the previous roll was a 20 (for someone else) does not mean that the chance for the roll after (for you) to also be a 20 is far less than the chance of it being a 4. The NWN RNG is very unlikely to be cryptographically secure as it is "half proven" to have a somewhat faulty seeding mechanism. But that is not related to what you just mentioned. So, in summary, do you have any proof at all that the rolls of others (or your own previous rolls) have any meaningful impact on the "future" rolls? In this case, meaningful means that the rolls outputted would be less pseudo random than they otherwise would have been (i.e. compared to if you had your "own" RNG).
71
« on: August 30, 2008, 01:26:39 pm »
I think I've seen somewhere but I can't remember nor where nor when:
- When an IT person says "it's repaired in 1 minute" always use a lie detector. 
This rule can also be use when IT project manager promises to deliver on time and within the budget.
Now guess if I'm an IT person or not. jokes > Stroustrup C++ 'interview'
72
« on: August 30, 2008, 02:29:45 am »
The NWN RNG is faulty, and forces "apparent randomness," rather than generating truly random numbers.
What this means is, for every person that gets a string of good numbers, someone else gets a string of bad ones. It seems less apparent in a single-player game, but when it's trying to balance it all server-wide, you get these anomalies.
This is a Bioware Bug, and cannot be fixed. There are no proof of that but rather being a wild guess. Few other games explicitly give you the rolls which could explain why there are very few remarks about them. What is heavily suspected though, is that the RNG is seeded in a faulty way. First of all, the RNG seems to be seeded per area, and not server wide, which would negate your statement of that someone else on the server would be affected by "your" rolls. The seed seem to consists of the state of the area (static ones like module placeables and creatures and PCs) with time not (?) being involved. A way to check that? Well... create a module of one's own, save it, perform a roll of some kind, reload and retry. If Bioware has not changed it since... um... 1.64 or something... then the result will be exactly the same everytime. The game does not keep track of which numbers it "already has given out" and try to balance the number output...
73
« on: August 29, 2008, 03:32:22 pm »
Without bulk creation and with that successful round added into the calculation... 35 or less out of 70 gives you odds of 0.7% which IMO is still very unlucky... but cannot truly be explained other than by bad luck.  Oh, by the way, was any obvious pattern shown for the 6 successes out of 14? Like 1-4 = failure, 2 = success, 3 - 7 = failure, etc...? I have known other people having he same problems with the same odds. with 65% chances on ten attempts per session only making 2 success. Mathematically if you have 65% chances to make an item, on 10 tries you should get a result of 6. Unless I'm wrong which can also happen 1 on 3 times *grins* When probability is involved, there are really no "should". Logic is lucky completely in black and white. "Should" means "must" which implies "0 or 100%".
74
« on: August 29, 2008, 07:20:29 am »
What I'm pointing out is that your "unlucky" outcome still had a very high chance of happening (a little bit more than 5.1%) and there are no strong reasons to believe that something weird is going on here, especially considering that no one has touched this part of the system for probably a very long time.
If you toss in your "lucky" run, you will likely notice that this outcome had an even greater chance of occuring.
As a side note... the probability of that you would have succeeded 36+ out of 56 would have been ~60.4%.
Because of this whole thing is done in a pseudo-random fashion, we can really only talk about probabilities and compare them to see if it's reasonable or not. Rolling a 1 on a d20... do you consider that reasonable? If so, then that was exactly what happened to you.
Edit: Oh, wait... 24/56? Not 30/56 gotcha... That has a considerable lower chance: 0.0005810... which is one chance in 1721 and makes one raise some greater doubts but still, the code has not been modified to my knowledge. It would still be highly benefical if you could also state the success rate of a greater sampling (i.e. the successful round?).
And also... did you do "bulk creation"? Like creating 2 or 4 items at once?
75
« on: August 29, 2008, 04:26:31 am »
To have less than or equal to 30 successes out of 56 at a 65% chance each, the probability for that to happen would be: 0.051... which is about 5%. In other words, on par chance as with rolling a 20 on a d20. Reasonable enough, is it not? To have less than or equal to 6 successes out of 14 at 65% chance each, the probability for that event would be: 0.075 I'm sure that if you are tossing in the "successful attempt" and/or all successful attempts you have ever had, the chance of success truly is rather reasoanble.
76
« on: August 20, 2008, 11:52:41 am »
A low level byte-for-byte copy to another disk with a tool like, say, "dd" will make you a fully bootable copy, as long as you make sure to unplug the first source disk and connecting the copy to the same SATA port (or whatever) whenever you want to boot into the copy. Or you can have both plugged in, but make sure to swap the cables, at least. That will work with a 99% probability.
But to have both bootable at the same time without performing the cable-swapping magic, that requires some experimentation.
As long as you can make "Disk 1 showing up as C:\\, Disk 2 showing up as X:\\ while being logged in on OS 1" and "Disk 1 showing up as X:\\, Disk 2 showing up as C:\\ while being logged in on OS 2", it will surely work. It might potentially be very easy to do that, perhaps even if you do nothing. Edit the boot.ini file on the first disk and try to boot into the OS found on the second disk? What happens?
Sponanteous, it feels like Windows might skip assigning the first disk any drive letter and instead just letting the second disk be your "C:\\".
There are also other possibilites, of course. Like perhaps using a better boot manager which is capable of "swapping the drive IDs" on booting... though I'm not sure if that will work against a non-DOS-like OS like Windows nowadays are...
All in all, heh, the risk of data corruption is potentially high if you try to do this. I personally would not attempt it before at least trying it out in VMware or similar.
ps 1. Oh, by the way, what you try to do sounds more like you want to "branch off" (to steal a term used in source control software). If I understand you right, you want to install Windows + Basic apps only once but then split it into two, the first "branch" would be used for, say, office applications, while the second "branch" would be used for games.
This is far, far easier done with merely installing Windows twice, heh.
ps 2. Had this been any *nix-like OS, it would have been trivial. :p
77
« on: August 15, 2008, 09:10:26 am »
A few words of wisdom for today: Do not wait for quests geared towards evil characters.
Instead, join a "good" quest and make a bargain with the other side.
78
« on: August 09, 2008, 02:06:33 pm »
@weebs I wish it was just in my mind but I stood in tiananmen square across from the historic area that was torn down to build the Olympic village with two CHINESE historians and they told me about what was really happening to the displaced people and the slums and tiny "apartments" they were being forced into. They took me to one of the structures that was to be torn down, it was where ghengis khan had once occupied. I'm not aware of the exact situation around the Olympic Village itself. My own accounts are based on what those who are considered very close friends to my family have been through. Due to the cities expanding in a rapid rate, it's quite the norm for one to face a "relocation" and/or "we need to raze your house and build a new one". In all the cases, they have been rather happy and profited from it too. While it is possible that these being moved away in this situation could have faced a much worse fate, it's also probable that one has stumbled upon a few "disgrunted people" or misunderstood what they meant. Heh, it's rather simple. Either their original apartment was a large one, or it was really tiny too (remember that probably 99% of the apartments in China are considered to be "increadible super tiny" according to the standards we have here). If it was tiny... then the compensation are most likely fit anyway (you get a newer house which is valued to be higher). If it was an unlikely large apartment... then that person would have to be rather rich to start with (or if OV lays very far on the outskirts of any of the large cities). And if that was the case, then the relocation to a tiny apartment would almost definitely be false. The rich person would likely have a strong enough contact net so the government would very unlikely want to make a big issue of it with him. After all, the government could as easily make the people happy as to make them unhappy. It becomes pointless not to relocate the people into some random nice house (which are trivial to find, considering how many new houses are being built and as generally, not all apartments are sold directly). Side note: Hehe... No matter how good an intro is, I tend not to watch them. I find them... extraordinary boring. :p
79
« on: August 09, 2008, 04:47:20 am »
Not only wiped out a lot of generational homes but told the people living there to just get out. Classical "western" mindset, heh. The people originally living there are offered better houses (or rather apartments; it's very rare to own an own house in China) than the one being razed. Momentary compensation is sometimes given too. The only quirk in there is that you cannot really say no to the offer. Though, unless to just say no for the sake of saying no, the compensation tend to far outweight the original value of the house/apartment, so no one in their right mind would say no anyway.
80
« on: July 26, 2008, 08:19:29 am »
Unless Ed or someone tells otherwise, my own common sense tells me that oil is just oil and burns equally hot in no magic zones as in normal magic zones. :p
I.e. I strongly believe that fire and acid bombs work in those areas!
Pages: 1 2 3 [4] 5 6 ... 59
|
Forums
Show Posts