optimizer
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Arcane Brilliance: Optimizing your mage's gear through Rawr
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're talking about what is arguably the game's most trusted gear optimization program: Rawr. Also, we're planning to see how many times I need to type the word "rawr" before my spellchecker snaps and murders me through my computer screen. Close your eyes. Imagine, if you will, that you have a mage. Ha ha, of course you have a mage. Sometimes I crack myself up. Now imagine that your mage has gear, but that gear is not optimal. Now open your eyes. Hello, every mage ever. Yeah, chances are pretty close to 100% that no matter who you are and how religiously you play the game, your mage, beloved though he may be, does not have every slot filled with best-in-slot gear and does not have every item perfectly gemmed, enchanted and reforged so that your DPS is up to its fullest possible potential. WoW is a computer game -- an old one, sure, but still home to millions of algorithms and formulas and computations and other math terms that I don't fully understand. It would take, I firmly believe, a robot from the future to calculate all of those numbers and variables and turn them into something a human brain can parse accurately enough to actually benefit from. Well, mages and magesses, I have recently contacted Kavan, one of the main authors of the ubiquitous gear optimization program Rawr, and I can tell you that he is that robot from the future. I only pray he can protect us from whatever other, more evil and technologically advanced robot from the future that might at some point follow him through the wormhole with a directive to kill our unborn children or something, because you know that's what's happening.
THX to release Optimizer Blu-ray disc
It's apparently not too late for THX to squeeze its high definition test material onto a Blu-ray disc, as it's informed CNET of plans to do just that. Look forward to an "expanded version" of the THX Optimizer that ships with certain movies, but built for a less technical audience than a disc like Digital Video Essentials. Of course, the box probably won't include a sticker to proclaim your generic LCD THX-Certified, but you'll always know it is in your heart (or maybe you won't, since the company declined to say exactly what the "secret sauce" of factors is that garners a display the special label).
Linksys intros EC1000 ExpressCard and OGV200 traffic optimizer
Linksys had some gear to announce at this year's E3, and when we caught up with them last night they hooked us up with the skinny: they've officially gone ExpressCard with the EC1000 gigabit Ethernet adapter, the followup to the PC Card PCM1000, which will have an integrated pop-up RJ45 jack and will fit in your 34 or 54 slot. They also had a dedicated hardware network traffic optimizer which goes by the callsign of OGV200. This one will make sure your game and VoIP traffic will make it to its intended destination faster than any other traffic traveling out of your home's data pipe -- simple enough. Both are available now for $59.99 and $69.99, respectively.
iWeb Optimizer - easily shrink oversized images
iWeb Optimizer is a simple Automator app that allows you to easily compress PNG images inside your iWeb site into JPG files, but it maintains the same file name so it doesn't break any of your links or images. Simply drag and drop the site folder that iWeb creates (be it in your iDisk or an exported directory you specified) onto iWeb Optimizer and let it work its magic. The handy little utility will also parse all your subdirectories, making sure no PNG is safe from a little JPG compression.iWeb Optimizer is free and available from Automator World.
