JediMaster

Depends on the application. I went from 2GB of 800MHz to 4GB of 1066 and noticed a real improvement in speed in many areas. I don't recall offhand what the CL levels for the 2 sets of RAM were, but they were equivalent IIRC. My gut says faster at the same latency is better than lower latency at the same speed, so I'd go for the 1866 over the 1600 CL7, but I know some people think differently. If they're similar price, though, you can expect similar performance. As to whether that's worth the money for the improvement you get, I can't say. You're already going to be faster than your previous system with the cheaper memory anyway. Make sure the RAM you buy is listed on the site for the mobo as being compatible. My 2GB of RAM was listed as 1066...but only under certain circumstances and my mobo didn't support that, so it ran at 800! If your board doesn't support it, you may find it runs slower than the rated speed or at a higher latency or both! That would be a major bummer. When I bought this new 4GB set I made sure my mobo listed it specifically by model and speed and all so as not to waste my money. Not to say unlisted RAM won't work, it could be fine, but there's no guarantee. Anyway, that's not a trivial amount of money, so I can't say it will or won't be worth it to you because you may or may not see a difference, and if you do you may not think it was worth that much. You'll have to go with your own feelings on that.

Really? You mean you can take a weapon and fire on full auto and it doesn't budge? Geez. Is that in SP as well as MP? I'm not much interested in the MP, but I was hoping when it comes down in price the SP would make the game worth it (like I bought CoD4 earlier this year when the price came down finally).

Now I'm free! Free fallin!

Arguments over whether a particular title is a sim or just a game are neither here nor there, I just mean the types that only fly F4 or Il-2 or whatever and say they don't touch anything else because the ones they fly are "sims". Of course some people enjoy the more educational button-pushing nature of the hardcore sims and others enjoy just hopping in and flying around for 30 mins without having to put their study cap on, there's nothing wrong with either idea. I don't have a problem on paper with such games as Ace Combat and HAWX, it's when people say "they're pretty realistic" that I spit up whatever I was drinking. For some people, "excellent graphics" = "realistic" regardless of modeling of how things are! It's a circular ego stroke. By saying such and such is a sim, they inflate its rep, then they state that they only fly that, to inflate their own rep. Another hallmark of the "wannabe officer" vs the normal sim pilot is that they complain when a new sim coming out will need more than their 4 yr old PC can handle that "I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade just for this". Well, no, you shouldn't "just for this", you should because EVERY newer game will run better, but since they ONLY play 1 or 2 sims the cost is harder to justify so instead they wail about how the developers want everyone to be rich or something. I never have fewer than a dozen games on my PC (that's counting every TK sim as ONE), from flight sims to racing sims to FPS to RTS to the occasional Tomb Raider or other oddball genre. I'm a gamer, and it's not something to be ashamed of, but these people think it is so they have to emphasize just how real their sim of choice is and how they're better than "gamers". The F4 and Il-2 sites are full of these people. They're like the ones that claim they don't ever shop at Walmart because it's so low-brow, like there's something wrong with buying the same bottle of milk they sell at the grocery stores but for 50 cents less. It's all about making themselves feel better at the expense of putting others down.

Don't forget a personal peeve of mine, the "I'm a SIMMER" types. The ones who will get upset if you call DCS/F4/whatever a "game" and say "it's a SIM not a GAME" because, after all, they play it and are obviously above such childish things as playing a mere GAME. They handily ignore the fact that these sims use all the same methods GAMES do, including awarding points, saying you won or lost, mission fail/complete, etc. I just want to tell them to get over themselves, they're not above the rest of us or superior in any manner because they only fly sims with everything set "full real."

Of course, there's no such thing as an absolute stat of "F-4 performance" or "MiG-21 performance." The model, the funding and logistics behind it, the training for the pilot, the environment they're kept in, etc. Unless plane A soundly beat B every time (rarely happens) you can always argue one way or the other. I mean, on paper the Me-262 bested the P-51 in almost everything, yet many a 262 were shot down by P-51s, so...

If ED ignores my concerns, that's their right, but some of the people in that thread seemed to feel I should just STFU and dance a naked jig for the honor of being allowed to buy a study sim. I've been simming for over 20 years, and I love study sims as much as survey sims, but for different reasons. No one laments their virtual elimination from the scene more than I, but to blow sunshine up a dev's ass is counterproductive. I understand why they started DCS with Ka-50, and as it's never been in a sim before (although similar to the Ka-52 in EECH) I was happy with that choice. The A-10C I was happy with for those reasons plus I wanted something more accurately modeled than the A-10A in FC (which was always overly easy to fly and fight in, it's barely more difficult than TK's A-10). I'm just worried what may (or may not) come next, and I think every ED customer should have their say. I've never used the forums over there, only read some things, so I can't comment how people are or aren't treated, but if that thread at SimHQ is an indicator, that's not beneficial. I didn't demand "do this plane!" or "don't do that or I refuse to buy!" even though a differently worded request saying the same thing wouldn't be out of line, I just think what they've said about how they're going to proceed and the timeline of that path is very worrying and it got me emotional. That was weak of me to allow that, I should've posted a day later after I'd had some time to cool down.

Especially at $500!! I bought my G940 right as the Warthog was announced, leaving me with some buyer's remorse. Hearing it would be $500, though, I was relieved in retrospect as I wasn't going to go that route. For $300 I got a stick, throttle, AND pedals with FFB. I also have more faith in Logitech, as a large company, to keep up with its drivers and any possible hardware fixes while TM's record with the Cougar made me lose faith in them.

The Tesla is a measurement of the strength of a magnetic field, a rather large one at that. A 1T field is very strong. A little of this real-life battle with Edison is shown in the film The Prestige, where Tesla is played by none other than David Bowie, with Andy Serkis of LOTR fame as his assistant.

I still remember an old cartoon from the Reagan years of a king walking down a review line of suits of armor standing at attention, his aide telling him "only some of them contain knights."

I guess it's the fault of the parents who had children in the late 80s/early 90s. They allowed their kids to be spoiled brats and now if the military wants to keep recruitment up they need to make allowances for the new generation of wussy narcissists. They can lower their standards, or they can have a force that shrinks by attrition and doesn't regenerate. I guess they chose the former.

Stupid DoD proxy filters are a blight upon the face of humanity. As for our land combat area, I wish we had more too. Unfortunately, you can't force people to show! I don't think enough of our TK fans are into the ground stuff, and the ones that are must visit other sites.

I think so. Some of the mods over there know me well and apparently stood up for me as I was being seriously misunderstood. I never saw all of what happened because it was apparently edited out, but you'd think I'd expressed the opinion that Hitler was actually a pretty good guy or something. Apparently my association with this site colored some opinions as well, which is ridiculous because while I'm aware of the feelings some here have to SimHQ I've never been a party to them. You have your opinions, I have mine, none are to be belittled, but that's that. I was never a mod there, but I've been there for almost 10 years. I've seen a lot of people have serious disagreements over that time, it happens. My irritation at the time probably led me to type more than was necessary and ramble a bit, but it boiled down to: I like Black Shark, I'm getting A-10C because I know I will like that, but I've just had my faith in ED shaken by their statements about the future of DCS and the apparent abandonment of whatever was supposed to follow A-10C (because 2 yrs ago it was said the 3rd DCS module would be out in 18 months, and you CAN'T think of a timetable like that without having something in the pipeline half-done already). Then I read that they said whatever comes next will depend on getting a military sim contract for it and I lost it. Almost no other sim devs have needed a military contract to make a sim, including ED itself just a few years ago, so I don't understand that at ALL. I support sims by buying them, not playing sycophant to the developer. As someone who buys them, I then feel I have a voice in the future plans of the company as opposed to being the guy in the corner saying "I won't buy it until they put plane X in theater Y in" plus I'm feeding funds back into the company for said development. The whole "you should be thankful they make anything for you to buy, and you should pay 2x as much and be happy about it!!" attitude doesn't fly with me. If I think a company I've supported for 15 years with my money is losing their vision, I'm going to speak up and say so, regardless of whether they or anyone else agrees that they are. I don't think they "owe" me any more than I "owe" them loyalty, but any intelligently run company is going to want to hear their customers' feedback even if they decide not to factor it into their path. Remember, if you build it, they will come (unless they get this bizarre hatred of the Caucasus and won't buy a plane they like because it's NOT set in Europe). But if ED doesn't build it, no one else will either. The study sim market has contracted beyond the minimum.

Israel exists because of Western guilt over the Holocaust, plain and simple. If that hadn't happened, the West wouldn't have been so sanguine about it. But it did happen and they did nothing to stop it until it was far too late, so it was felt, consciously or unconsciously, that they needed a place of their own, why not let them keep the place they already took themselves? It's far easier for nations to FAIL to act than to act, so letting Israel form was far simpler than preventing it and engineering some other solution, which would have meant DOING something.

They're just cargo planes. Would it be better to deny them planes with a proven record of assisting in domestic disaster recovery and increase the enmity the newer generation of PLA officers feel towards the US over Taiwan just to let them know "who's boss"? Before 1988 we were helping them develop WARPLANES for crying out loud. They're not worse now than they were then, and quite frankly we don't need a new superpower enemy. We're holding ourselves at arms' length. As for buying China, that's going to be tough with them holding billions in our debt that no realistic number of C-130s will be able to offset. Frankly, if we can give them a huge fleet of cargo airplanes in return for reducing the financial stranglehold we've allowed them to get on us, that's great! There's also no dispute with the US over any territory because we don't have any adjoining territory. Some of their neighbors do, some of which are our allies, but strictly speaking that is NOT our affair. Let China and Vietnam and S Korea and Japan and the Phillippines bicker over a bunch of islands, that's THEIR business, not ours. Frankly, whether or not Taiwan stays under its own gov't or gets absorbed again is immaterial. China is no longer the backwards-hick wannabe-superpower it once was. Now that Russia is no longer any threat but a nuclear one, why MUST we paint China as our "big bad enemy"? They're not our enemy or our friend, but they don't have to be one or the other! Politics isn't binary.

I read an article today about how the failure to react from 2 different administrations emboldened Al Qaeda and started the path to 9/11. When you're attacked, you can't do NOTHING, you just invite more vicious attacks.

Right, they must be installed in release order, THEN patches applied. Beyond that, I presume you are running with no mods as you didn't list any. If you are, they can ruin things if they're not installed properly. Another thing, the install directory is not the only place the game puts files. In addition to Program Files/Thirdwire, check your documents/saved games folder and delete those folders (one for each one installed, in your case SF2 and SF2I) as well. There's also a thirdwire folder placed under appdata, the hidden folder in your user profile. If you turn on hidden folders, you'll be able to find that and delete it as well. The registry stuff is immaterial for SF, it's not needed to run the game. If you've got a bad file in one of those locations, uninstalling may not fix it.

The A-10s gun ripped thru everything but MBT's with ease in FC2, and even MBTs it usually only took 2-3 passes to get them to catch fire. I'm surprised they dialed it back that much.

I dub thee unforgiven!! Not getting a shot of the Buff pilot is a capital crime here!!

GA has made the best films with ED's sims over the years, all top notch.

This seems premature. One success after a string of failures and they're talking like the thing is ready for prime time, even though they quietly add "oh, and we need 2 more successes first". Anyway, treaties like START are always about restrictions on total capabilities and numbers. Replacing 100 crappy missiles with 50 great ones is a 50% reduction in number while also being an even greater increase in capability. It's like turning in your fleet of hundreds of F-4's for a couple dozen F-22s. Look, we've reduced how many fighters we have!

Better than falling on a driving car or people walking.

Uh, ok, I thought Israel was getting them anyway. Painting this as some sort of "carrot" for playing ball on the settlement issue seems bizarre.