Astronomer

I've noticed the same thing over the past 3-4 weeks. Frequent micro connection interruptions. Not enough to get you booted from the game, but of a duration long enough to cause severe stuttering. Several players noted it happening to each other at the same time. It lasts between maybe 3 and 10 seconds per instance. It's frequent and severe enough to affect game-play. I'd look at a faulty network device at the host as being the cause given the disparate ISP's of those affected. <edited for spelling corrections>

Wow! Think of all that we missed before EVERYONE had a camera on them. Hilarious!...yet sad...

Hope you're having an Idiotic Birthday! Cheers, - Astro (Damn! I spelled "Idiotic" wrong the first time)

Congrats on yet another successful orbit around the Sun!

Good to know. I lost 3 ranks when my system crashed a few months ago, MAJOR piss-off. I'm doing incremental backups now with Acronis to an external 2Gc hard drive.

Great guitar work there Sykorsky. Nice to hear a good band that isn't trying to sound like what's trendy and what everyone else is sounding like. Your guitar playing in the quieter passages sounds like it's influenced by some 1980's-era guitarists - Charlie Burchill from Simple Minds, Will Sergeant from Echo and the Bunnymen, Chameleons (UK) etc. When was this recorded?

You mean like this?:

HAH! One of the best ones yet!

Wow. Hate much? Y'know, if a guy takes a lonnng look at you, it doesn't mean that he's gay. Maybe you're trailing 3 feet of toilet paper behind your shoe; or, remember that long fart you let out a while back? It wasn't just gas that you were passing.

She rocks 100%!

I have the wired model of this one, the R.A.T. 7 (white version)

Awesome!

I really enjoyed the Vietnam maps when the FT server was pure Vietnam play. I think we were limited by the # of available maps, though. My 2nd choice would be a rotation of various game types to keep things interesting and players on their toes.

Thanks for looking into it 3rd!

Checking off #2 and #3 should be adequate for auditing, or am I missing something here?

+1 Same question here. How do you unlock it?

Awesome Beers. Thanks!

Ooooooh! Pretty! The price is outrageous, but eventually they'll be within reach. I love my OCZ SATA 3 boot SSD. 18 seconds past the BIOS screen to a working desktop!

<face-palm>

Grand Marshall at Pride parade - check! Bondage session with Mistress Pain - Check! 26 Mile sack race marathon....Check!

Depends on your interests. What do you consider cool? Music? Festivals? Mountain biking trails? German Opera? Amusement parks? Jello wrestling?

...and Merlin can in turn let me know as well. I'm on the other side of London from him. I just saw that Idiot on Saturday!

.., just to reinforce, for future-proofing, go for the card w/ the most memory, and budget for a 2nd card down the road. Video cards are the one item that you don't want to cheap out on. What I have is well-suited for now, but the 550 is at the lower-end of the product line. Will games become more PC-centric (vs the current model where they are written for old-tech consoles and ported to PC's)? The trend is shifting to PC's now that the current consoles are 6-ish years old.

Agreed! Under stress my cards (2x GeForce GTX 550 Tie's in SLI) jump up to 64⁰C max ( 147 F) and just keep purring. I can't comment on the ATI/AMD cards because I don't know them that well. My two 550's w/ 1Gb memory perform much better than a 560 and just about as good as a 570 (as per several reviews and benchmarks on-line). I play COD WAW (and get 200-300FPS - I unlocked the maxframes) and BF3. Both games just fly at max screen resolution of 1920x1080 and graphics options on high. A single 550 TI is...meh, Performance is just "good enough", but FPS is mediocre. Two cards perform greater than the sum of their parts, which is crazy. If I were you (just quoting nVidia - there are equivalent AMD cards) Get a 560 or 570 and budget for a 2nd card eventually when prices drop. The 550 series w/ 2 cards is great for now and awesome value, but could be dead-ends projected 3-4 years out. Within that timeframe, these cards in tandem just rock. I'm more than pleased with their performance with the games that I play, and the price is very nice.