I say the following without any intention of sounding rude: Live with it. We all have to make sure we don't run out of unlocks (you get one every week, up to a max of 2). Even with a new box every week you should be able to keep LFS unlocked.
Uplink's final mission (on the Arunmor side). Nothing beats the adrenaline rush of trying to hack 3 or 4 machines every 2 minutes just to stop the spread of Revelation. Love it
Oh god - you mean the Barcelona '92 one? I remember that game and maintain nothing but hatred for its horrible button bashing control system. HATE HATE HATE :chair: (I did manage to do the running style event, as well as the swimming, but the diving was just impossible)
All these people saying that it's being run in an emulator - no, it's not. It's being run inside virtualisation software. There's a difference. Emulators imply that it's a different architecture completely (such as x86>M68k in the case of Amiga/Atari ST/Mega Drive emulators). Virtualisation creates a machine of the same architecture and places it inside a hypervisor, so the virtualised OS thinks it's actually running on the main machine.There's much less overhead involved in running inside a virtual machine and that's why you have 30FPS in LFS. If it was an emulator (such as the old Virtual PC for Mac that Microsoft produced, in which the title was a lie) then even if 3D acceleration was implemented then you'd be lucky to get 1FPS out of LFS. If you want an example of a PC emulator nowadays try Bochs - it'll run Windows XP...if you let it install for about 2 days.
You obviously didn't read the Op properly - he's going to be doing a lot of rendering, which is primarily CPU based (and scales VERY well to multiple threads). So I'd say an octo-core machine wasn't over the top of he is doing that as the primary use for the machine
You'll need a much better PSU than that - 650W just isn't gonna cut it for 2 quads and 2 GTX280s. I'd be looking more like double that (or even higher). Other than that, it should totally tear through 3DS Max and LFS on a GTX280 is a dream. Also, you'll need FB-DIMM RAM instead of unbuffered.
EDIT - realised the mobo will only take 667MHz RAM - duh The FB-DIMM thing still applies though!
Banning for wrecking is (in my mind) equivalent to, say, the FIA banning somebody for purposefully crashing into others and thus bringing the sport into disrepute. Wrecking in LFS ruins the experience for everybody else and if one person goes around wrecking everybody they can it'll eventually drive people away from the sim as they get frustrated with it. It's not just a matter of server rules, it's a matter of keeping people racing too.
Back onto the FIA analogy, if they DIDN'T ban somebody for crashing imagine the backlash from the rest of drivers! There'd be HUGE fallout from it, probably ending in many drivers leaving the series in question. So, in my mind at least, cheating and wrecking are both on about the same (awful) level.