Apollo

Hak5 community, I am turning to you in this time of great wonderance (yah that is definitely not a word). I am currently a mechanical engineering major at a decently prestigious college (no Harvard or Yale, but not bad), however, as time goes by I realize that I am more a person that tinkers and takes apart and tries to put things back together.... which is what I thought an engineer was supposed to do but apparently it involves a lot more math and less creativity then I thought it would be. *Note: I can do the math I am just not a fan of it* I am considering switching my major to "Computer Information Technology." I was wondering if any of the Hak5 community had a degree like this and if it is a good idea or not. It is something I think I would like much better than what I am doing now. Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks, Apollo

I was at Quakecon last year so I got invited to the closed Beta there and got re invited after the con, I really like it because I can just sign on and play a quick game of a nice old school twitch shooter. Here's hoping this catches on and we see more like this in the future.

So what you are saying is that instead of the crisp clean graphics with no artifacts or whatever I get on my PC now, it is going to look like an avi rip of a movie? Not really my cup of tea, I like to see the game for what it is supposed to be, oh and sorry Vector for bringing this one back up....my bad.

Alright, I don't know if you guys saw on the web but there is alot of buzz going around for OnLive. OnLive is basically streaming video games. They use servers on their side and the client just runs an app on his PC or Mac (they also have a 199 set-top box that you can use for a tv) and you can stream any video game they have on their servers. Pricing is unknown and currently there are going to be 16 games released. ETA Winter 2009. OnLive Official Website OnLive Wikipedia Article Engadget Article Here is my question to you... Do we have another Phantom Entertainment? Yah you remember the guys that wanted to start basically what Steam is now and I think they have somekind of super awesome keyboard mouse combo thing. If I'm not mistaken, they are going to have to have basically a gaming grade computer amount of hardware in their servers for each person that subscribes....am I right? Plus HD gaming would run around 4-5 MBps which means that if 100,000 people were all playing Crysis on their servers which would be a really low estimate if it had the players of any one of the current gen systems or PC (my system of choice :)) they are going to have to be uploading massive amounts of data constantly. I think it is a good proof of concept but I don't think it will catch on or they will figure out that it is not economically viable in terms of shear amounts of hardware and bandwidth (idk how server farm bandwidth works lol so I don't even know how their payment works). I don't know, askin for opinions on this one. I mean I lag on YouTube videos and I have to download Hak5 most of the time just to watch and I am running on a College network with 3Mbps (constantly) down 40Mbps up. I mean I can download torrents (legal ones) at 5MBps, on a home network....I just don't know.

Alright, I was watching some old episodes of Hak5, and I think it was episode 2 that Wess did a session on painting an old IBM keyboard. Well I was looking around and I found a nice old keyboard and matching mouse and was like...hmmm I have time I wanna paint this. There is only one problem, the mouse scroll wheel is orange... my color scheme is black and blue (creative I know) but the orange really throws it off. I was wondering if anyone out there knew if there is a way to paint a scroll wheel. I did some searching and it appears the major consensus is that even if the paint sticks it will wear off pretty quickly. Anyone know how to remedy this or am I just going to have to deal with an orange scroll wheel?

I bought UT3, which in my opinion is a pretty awesome game, but anyways, I was playing insta-gib and got up to Monster Kill but no matter how many kills after that I couldn't get Ludicrous kill or Holy Sh**. Did they take that out in UT3?

Thanks all, yah he is getting a new processor, he was following someone elses advice on the processor instead of listening to what I said about it, that's a mistake he is going to have to learn the hard way. That is what I thought it was but I just wanted to make sure before I told him to go drop more money on a proc.

Alright, Hak5 I need some help. My friend has the following computer and it keeps slowing down on GTA 4 even on medium settings at 1440 X 900. I need some help figuring out what is wrong with it. Friend's Rig: AMD 64 X2 6000+ (O.C. to 3.14ghz) 4gb DDR2 1066 Sapphire 4870 1GB We have it set to medium because on high (which it should be able to handle no problem in my opinion) runs at about 12fps average. Any ideas on the problem will be greatly appreciated.

I am looking for an answering machine for skype similar to KishKish's SAM or Skype Answering Machine. Anyone out there know of any? Thanks Edit: Nevermind I thought it was a pay only program. Sorry all.

That's what I heard too gcninja, thanks for the response I think I am gonna go buy COD4 while it is on sale on Steam.

Games: Call of Duty 4 and/or Call of Duty 5: World at War, Gears of War 2, maybe Halo 3, Fable 2, Fallout 3, Rock Band 2 if you're into that sort of thing Accessories: Rechargeable wireless controller, Plug and Play kit (charges your controller while you play), maybe think about upgrading your headset to something a little nicer but other than that you should be good to go. Hope this helps, Apollo

Alright, I just dropped some money on a new gaming PC and I was wondering which one of the Call of Duty games would be the best investment in terms of people online and longevity of online play. I have COD 4 for the PS3 and have played COD 5 so I don't need to know which one is better I like them both but I would like to know which one has the most people online and which one will stay around longer.

Can someone tell me what kind of latency issues you would see if you were to plug multiple 10/100 network switches together? Like instead of using a 24 or 48 port single switch, you used multiple 4 to 8 port switches.

My friend has a gaming pc running windows xp. He was having some problems with stability and it locking up on him so I did a reformat since he is still new to the "I can't call Dell customer support" because I own a custom pc world. So I got it up and running and all the drivers installed but now the frakin think starts restarting at random. Like power off power on real quick restart not the proper save all the files open restart. Any ideas on what could be wrong?

Alright, a friend just asked me if I think it is a good idea for him to convert his current Windows XP 32 bit Gaming PC to a Linux Gaming PC. In my opinion a terrible move but I figured I would expand the question base to include you guys. Any and all comments welcome. System Specs: AMD Phenom 9750 (2.5 Quad) 4 GB DDR2 800 Nvidia 280GTX w/ 768mb GDDR3 All the relevant sys specs (I think)