Do you mean Thief: Deadly Shadows? That was the 3rd game in the series, and from what I understand it was pretty well received. The orphanage level alone is so highly regarded that it has its own Wikipedia page.
Now the 2014 reboot, just titled Thief, that was so poorly received the it basically killed the series. It might have been a decent game, but it was not a good Thief game.
Like you, OP, I benefited hugely from a car extended warranty. Audi hatchback, 4 year factory warranty was extended to 8 years for like $2k? Didn’t seem like a lot to spend for the added insurance in case something catastrophic happened. And something catastrophic did happen! In year 5, a factory sparkplug came apart and bits of it got sucked through the cylinder, gouged the cylinder walls, got sucked through the turbo, shattered all the turbo fins.
Without the warranty the car would have been a write-off. The entire engine plus turbo were replaced under warranty. They don’t make that particular engine anymore so the replacement was used but had lower mileage. A lot of parts connected the engine are considered single-use by Audi as well. Engine mount pads, bolts, nuts, hoses, clamps, etc., their policy is to replace those parts when the engine is replaced. The list of parts replaced was four pages long.
All told, between all the parts and labour I’d estimate it was at least a $20k repair. Utterly worth the $2k I paid on the extended warranty. Oh, and I had a loaner for about six months while they were sourcing the replacement engine, so six months of putting wear on someone else’s vehicle. Probably the best $2k I’ve ever spent.
Holy shit, I didn’t even notice the multiple abominations with electrical connections in that picture, I was mesmerized by the plumbing madness.
I agree that stability, durability and ease of manufacture were the likely reasons.They probably weren’t intended to be seen as webbed feet though. More likely they’re meant to depict taloned claws clutching a sphere.
I switched to AirVPN about 6 months ago and I’ve been really happy with the service. Was previously using NordVPN, which was fine, but I was looking for a VPN provider that offered port forwarding and AirVPN does that. I don’t have hard stats on this, but I do feel that having access to port forwarding has improved my overall torrent speeds since switching.
Here’s the exact post that got the Proton CEO in trouble:
Maybe Gail Slater really is a great pick for Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division. Frankly, I have no idea. But I won’t do business with any company that carries any water whatsoever for Trump.
I’d recommend AirVPN. Here’s why I’d recommend them, in their own words:
No traffic limit. No time limit.
No maximum speed limit, it depends only on the server load
Every protocol is welcome, including p2p. Forwarded ports and DDNS to optimize your software.
Be lucky if we get out of this with only a recession. The slogan might as well have been Make America Great Depression Again.
Canadians have two moods. The first is “I’m sorry”, the second is “You’ll be sorry.”
Second mood activated.
Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).
I also unplugged the psu for a while. It makes a slight buzzy noise after powering the computer, but I do not know if this is normal.
I’d recommend starting with the PSU. A buzzing noise is not a good sign. This article has details on how you can test your PSU: https://www.howtogeek.com/172933/how-can-i-test-my-computers-power-supply/
You can perform a basic test with just a paper clip or a bit of 16 or 18 gauge wire.
It sounds like the PSU is giving some power, given that the keyboard lights up. The issue could be isolated to one or more rails, e.g. it’s not delivering anything / enough on the 12V or 3.3V rail. I’m guessing 5V is OK since that’s USB voltage and your USB keyboard gets power. You’d need a multimeter to check individual power pins on the PSU connector.
Edit: if you have access to a second PC, you can swap PSUs between them. If the problem follows the PSU then that’s the faulty component. If the problem stays with the original PC then it’s likely motherboard, CPU or RAM.
If you can determine that the PSU is OK then the next step is to try booting with the bare minimum amount of hardware. That’s motherboard, CPU and one stick of RAM. If that won’t boot then you try with a different RAM. If it still won’t boot then the issue is motherboard or CPU. Before you replace either of those expensive components, try replacing the cheap CMOS battery as another poster recommended.
However, it’s worth mentioning that WireGuard is UDP only.
That’s a very good point, which I completely overlooked.
If you want something that “just works” under all conditions, then you’re looking at OpenVPN. Bonus, if you want to marginally improve the chance that everything just works, even in the most restrictive places (like hotel wifi), have your VPN used port 443 for TCP and 53 for UDP. These are the most heavily used ports for web and DNS. Meaning you VPN traffic will just “blend in” with normal internet noise (disclaimer: yes, deep packet inspection exists, but rustic hotel wifi’s aren’t going to be using it ;)
Also good advice. In my case the VPN runs on my home server, there are no UDP restrictions of any kind on my home network and WireGuard is great in that scenario. For a mobile VPN solution where the network is not under your control and could be locked down in any number of ways, you’re definitely right that OpenVPN will be much more reliable when configured as you suggest.
I use WireGuard personally. OpenVPN has been around a long time, and is very configurable. That can be a benefit if you need some specific configuration, but it can also mean more opportunities to configure your connection in a less-secure way (e.g. selecting on older, less strong encryption algorithm). WireGuard is much newer and supports fewer options. For example it only does one encryption algorithm, but it’s one of the latest and most secure. WireGuard also tends to have faster transfer speeds, I believe because many of OpenVPN’s design choices were made long ago. Those design choices made sense for the processors available at the time, but simply aren’t as performant on modern multi core CPUs. WireGuard’s more recent design does a better job of taking advantage of modern processors so it tends to win speed benchmarks by a significant margin. That’s the primary reason I went with WireGuard.
In terms of vulnerabilities, it’s tough to say which is better. OpenVPN has the longer track record of course, but its code base is an order of magnitude larger than WireGuard’s. More eyes have been looking at OpenVPN’s code for more time, but there’s more than 10x more OpenVPN code to look at. My personal feeling is that a leaner codebase is generally better for security, simply because there’s fewer lines of code in which vulnerabilities can lurk.
If you do opt for OpenVPN, I believe UDP is generally better for performance. TCP support is mainly there for scenarios where UDP is blocked, or on dodgy connections where TCP’s more proactive handling of dropped packets can reduce the time before a lost packet gets retransmitted.
The next tech bubble, IMO.
I’d wait for independent reviews. The first wave of Intel GPUs had a lot of issues, mostly related to drivers. From what I understand Intel has come a long way on the driver front in the past year, but we don’t have a clear picture on their overall state with the new parts. Reviewers like GamersNexus will call out whether the current state of the drivers are good enough for a recommendation, or if Intel still has more ground to cover.
Beware of reverse survivorship bias. We’d know relatively little about the smart deviants if they rarely get caught.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. What I’ve seen doesn’t look anywhere close to an 8+ out of ten rating. Will be interesting to see the player ratings on this one…
I don’t dislike that art style in general, but to my mind it seems like a poor fit for a Dragon Age game. I guess they’re pivotinf strongly away from the series dark and gritty roots, which is unfortunate because I think that was one of its strong points.
Watching Skill Up’s review now, and oof. That art style… that writing. Don’t know who they made this game for, but it’s definitely not me.
I must have missed that negative sentiment entirely. I played all three and had no complaints. Did some searching, and apparently a lot of the gripes were related to levels being cut down in size / broken down into pieces to allow for a console release (strict memory requirements). Also I think they changed engines for the 3rd game, or at least a lot of people complain that movement and controls were worse in DS. I guess ignorance is bliss, cause I enjoyed them all.