ATI is in no position to point fingers. At all. There's the upclocking of their card's frequencies and not changing model numbers, and there's the application-specific driver optimizations to start.
No right at all to accuse NVidia of anything. Might as well accuse themselves of producing better hardware than they can cater for driver-wise. Now THERE's a company that would benefit from opensourcing their drivers.
If your goal is to play JC games, you should NOT get a GeForce 4 card with the MX suffix. These cards do not feature the pixel shader engine and vertex programming that Carmack so loves.
Get either any type of GeForce 3, or a GeForce 4 Titanium of some denomination.
As all wethered forumites know, a Turing test is not entirely accurate. We have all met "humans" who would most certainly fail the test, even though they are supposedly sentient biological intelligences.
"Hotmail has ads with it, so hotmail pays for itself as long as a user has a graphical browser."
One time at work, for a very short period of time while I was intoxicated and suffering from temporary insanity, I used Microsoft Outlook Express to check my hotmail without having to browse their ads. Explain why this is allowed?
You mean you are completely unable to bother because even if you did, you'd have to emulate another OS in order to do so. Also, it seems very few have even cared to mention that Trillian incorporates an IRC client as well - with multi-server operability, causing me to switch from pIRCh after 6 or 7 years of faithfulness.
If one million people are using Trillian instead of AIM, what makes you think any of these people would be using AIM if they weren't using Trillian? I for one have never seen the AIM client in my life, and I still use that portion of Trillian since it allows me to contact even more people. If I wasn't using Trillian, I would simply not be in touch with these people. I'm not prepared to run yet another IM program to do the exact same thing and I would rather just stay away from it. Especially with some security issues that have come up, and the potential bulkiness and advertisements of the AIM client.
Your idea is a valid thought at first glance, the comparison that 1M-people using Trillian "instead" of AIM means a 1M-ad-viewer loss to AIM. This is simply not true. It's the same kind of logic that applied when game publishers back in the heyday of Commodore 64 games pirating said that they were losing N times X dollars from piracy, where N is the number of pirate copies and X is the price per unit. Most of these N people would not pay the X dollars, or view the X advertisements and produce the N*X revenue the company claims to be losing.
If Trillian is forced to fall back to older AIM compatibility, or even drop AIM alltogether, I am hardly going out to get the AIM client. I'll badmouth the company by retelling this story when people ask me to go on AIM, and maybe I'll even win a few more contacts over to Trillian or ICQ or whatever service might be the most interesting.
I changed from ICQ to Trillian and found that I could even drop my old pIRCh as well. *I'm*not going to change IMs a second time. I'm staying.
I'm guessing cost versus performance here. It's been shown in tests such as running actual application-like benchmarks rather than theoretical tests, that a low memory fetch latency is more important to memory performance than max burst transfer rate. That's why RDRAM suffers in many cases, since it still runs at a latency compared to 100MHz SDRAM. Most applications just favor short-latency fetches to high-speed large-block transfers in order to run the best.
But it is odd. There's no real latency difference between PC133 and DDR2100, and there IS a difference in sustained transfer rate, so I suppose they just didn't think the sustained transfer rate increase was worth the extra cost (as well as design time).
You stick that card on your supercomputer and you put yourself up crap creek. Heh. You just might get better scores than that if you ran a software GL driver.;)
No, that's not my problem, that's your problem.:) That is not unified all over Europe. If I sued, I would get the job back, after which they may choose to buy me out again and that way I could get a couple of extra paychecks, but as it is I prefer being able to sue, to actually suing. I'm not poor enough to milk them for money and I sort of like having the upper hand here.
No, that's not true. Your doctor might use harsh words and your employer might be unwilling to let you back until the doctor says so but there's nothing like a law. Do we need a new topic about international health care or could people maybe start reading the CIA world factbook again?:)
"Not counting the cost of being a parasite on other, less socialist nations, for real R&D into medical advances that their wonderful system doesn't generate because profits are stripped out."
Interesting way of putting it. We pay taxes for our medical care, and Swedish medical R&D is not part of that. Instead companies such as Astra & Pharmacia (both of which I believe have changed names since) stand for development.
So while you are correct that our tax-financed domestic health system doesn't produce medical R&D, that's not even relevant.
Crap, did I have to get lured off-topic so quickly?
hiring hitmen to take out some other player you dont like
PKing in Project: Entropia is supposedly combined with serious drawbacks. If you PK - player kill - you lose your "insurance" meaning that the items on your body are now possible to steal off it if you were killed. I also believe that someone who has the status of a player killer is possible to kill at no penalty (as well as being lootable). With these rules, there have sprung up player guilds that intend to endure these drawbacks in exchange for payment and for that payment kill, steal or otherwise break the rules and take the punishment.
The fandom pages for Project: Entropia, guilds especially, make for an interesting read.
"I guarantee you I will never choose Sweden as a place of operations for a business. Laws like this make it unnecessarily difficult to run a successful one."
Well that's good. Some countries focus on laws that benefit the employer. Sweden is one of those countries that think it's also fair to benefit the employee. The sheer employee==liability mentality is shunned here. You take care of your employees and they stick around. If you don't, you're screwed. Personally, being an employee, I sorta like that thinking.
So yea, it's "unnecessarily difficult" to hire&fire. Boo hoo.:)
Correct, short-term illness is paid by the state. Well in first hand it's paid by the person who's sick (what's the English term for "karens", anyone?) by not getting any reimbursement what-so-ever during the first few days. Then, during another two weeks like you said, the company pays the wages despite you being sick. But after that, if there are more than six instances of sick leave over a 12 month period, or if there is one instance longer than 14 days, or if the employee him- or herself requests it or if the company finds it motivated, the company is obliged to investigate the matter or if they so choose to request help from the state in order to investigate the health of the employee.
The company can do this as soon as they feel that there might be a risk of long-term sickness and such investigations were ordered by MindArk regarding a few employees who interpreted this as a covert threat for some reason, I don't know why. Personally, when I heard I was up for a health checkup I was glad. I had been wondering myself how come I had gotten the flu TWICE the same autumn and so I was looking forward to recieving my law-given health exam on the first of September, as the company was obliged to order for me (the checkup itself being paid by the state, Försäkringskassan to be specific) but I never did get that physical because they fired me on August last. As far as I know, this is also not permitted. Once you have initiated the health investigation you can't just fire the employee you were supposed to check up on.
Listen to it, Krapangor. You're entirely correct. I could have sued Mindark for firing me without legal grounds, but that wouldn't mean they gave me a truckload of cash, it would mean they gave me my job back. Now think about that. Do I sound like a guy who would have loved to go back there?:)
So it's not a question about Sweden being sloppy on that law, it's a question whether I wanted the job back or not, and I decided not to. I won't sue unless provoked. The others I can't vouch for. My first friend who got fired for working on something overnight didn't want to go back either. In fact, he found a woman he would like to share his life with and 2 weeks later he's working as a webdesigner out of London. The lead artist kind of person, I really have no idea why he didn't sue, or IF he did sue really.
Swedes also have sort of a humility problem when it comes to standing up for ourselves. Yes, it's silly, like Mojojojo said that we don't bring up our actual rights when we're mistreated by employers. Heck, a lot of people don't even KNOW their rights, and a lot of employers take advantage of that fact.
Hm.. this discussion just became a little personal, but what the hey.
But no, you can't sue for doing overnight freely because you thought it needed to be done. You COULD sue if the company tried to order you to work overtime without any reinbursement however, and MindArk never did order anyone to work overtime, they just leaned on you very hard and if you brought up the question of reinbursement they pointed out that all extra hours (or ANY particularily outstanding work) earned you stock options.
Again, without saying too much about whether MindArk is gold or feldspar, I think it's safe to tell you that "stock options" was a running joke while I worked there. Someone had, for example managed to recieve some 50,000 US$ worth of stock options for doing a single favor to the company somewhere along the line. Oh, and take the "worth" of those with a bit of salt please. Like we did.
Also, it is not immediately obvious that they do fire because of illness. I will bring that up in reply to the AC below
The decay model is in the game instead of a tax or exchange rate imbalance. By decaying, objects will lose value and the end result is just like a tax on usage. You would also do well to realize that as soon as in-game money becomes immediately interchangeable with "real money", like in this game it too is real money, not "virtual".
All of the game designers working at MindArk have read the Habitat Lessons, I helped them to it.
No, wait.. Correction: All of the game designers who worked at MindArk when I left there in Septeber 2001, had read it. I do not know how many of them remain and how many were replaced by recent college graduates with Delphi skills and breasts.
And no, I have nothing against women in the business, I would like more women game designers to be employed based on their skill. It's just a funny fact of life that MindArk have gone from 2 to 5 female employees in less than 6 months, and all of those new recruits being in the system design area.
From January to September of 2001 I was employed by MindArk AB in Gothenburg, Sweden, doing some of the game design work, especially bunches of scripting in an odd in-house OO language they made up themselves so that even the designers could produce useful code...which, I suppose, in essense means that there were no designers... but I suppose I had better take care what I say about my former employer lest they sue me or something.
Not that I'm really afraid they would, 'cause I would sue them right back. I didn't particularily enjoy working at MindArk. Oh, the people were nice, especially the ones that got fired whenever some high-up thought they looked too scruffy from working overnights. Whoops, there I go with the legally flammable stuff again. Thing is, MindArk like firing people who get sick and stay at home to take care of themselves. This might sound natural and reasonable to some of our US readers, but here it's illegal practice. Here in Sweden a company is legally bound to monitor the health of employees, because if they don't, they can be forced to pay for work-related damages. If they DO monitor health, dealing with sickness is a paid by the state, so there's no cost attached.
MindArk doesn't like doing things by the book though. One co-worker was fired for working over night, bumming out on the couch when the brass came to visit. Nevermind the fact that he just got the community forum online, that was apparently secondary. Then there's me, who originally was proud enough to think that I was (also illegaly) fired for being too critical.. turns out I had had one flu too many (no, I don't drink). After that, I also heard that the most driven of the artists got fired, and the effect these kinds of things have on co-workers.. well, I don't have to tell you, do I?
But I suppose most of you want to know about THE GAME, right? Well, that's where I don't want to go. I probably can't say jack squat about the game. If I did, I'd better play some Frank Black "Men In Black" real loud and hope they mistake me for one of them when they come knocking speaking in legalese.
However, I'm a clever guy.. what I can't say I can still insinuate, so read carefully between the lines here. I may only have 4 years of experience in the business, and granted that P:E was my first and only MMORPG, and the work I did was partially generic sound system design and partially extremely high-level theoretic community system design (that I doubt anyone will read my documentation for, or implement my classes for) but..did you see the guy here on/. who said that the NDA "sounds a little too convenient"? Have you noticed how few have ever even seen the game? I've seen it. Eddy has seen it, so it does exist.. but how come nobody has really played it and told us about it yet? I can't answer that because I would get sued. I can't suggest an answer to that. Too bad because I could probably have told the lot of you a bunch of interesting stuff.
What I think I am allowed to say however, is that I will not be playing Project: Entropia. Maybe nobody ever will. Maybe I already said too much.
Scandinavia Online, the ISP for Passagen, has already terminated ELOJs web hosting. They fell for the threats of a lawsuit against them, because ELOJ sure as hell did not break their rules. They probably did not even check the vailitidy of the lawsuit, because if they had done that they would have noted that they could even have produced a counter-suit on the charge of unlawful lawsuit..
But noo, the people behind Passagen have always been pooftahs.
Slashdot Mirror
ATI is in no position to point fingers. At all. There's the upclocking of their card's frequencies and not changing model numbers, and there's the application-specific driver optimizations to start.
No right at all to accuse NVidia of anything. Might as well accuse themselves of producing better hardware than they can cater for driver-wise. Now THERE's a company that would benefit from opensourcing their drivers.
If your goal is to play JC games, you should NOT get a GeForce 4 card with the MX suffix. These cards do not feature the pixel shader engine and vertex programming that Carmack so loves.
Get either any type of GeForce 3, or a GeForce 4 Titanium of some denomination.
Yes, it's a lot more. Northwood is somewhere along the lines of 45M-transistors. The GeForce 3 series of cards already were 57M-transistors.
As all wethered forumites know, a Turing test is not entirely accurate. We have all met "humans" who would most certainly fail the test, even though they are supposedly sentient biological intelligences.
I'm showing an example of that right now.
I saw no banners inside of that version of Outlook Express. Where are they? Screenshot prefered as I'm not likely to install the mofo.
"Hotmail has ads with it, so hotmail pays for itself as long as a user has a graphical browser."
One time at work, for a very short period of time while I was intoxicated and suffering from temporary insanity, I used Microsoft Outlook Express to check my hotmail without having to browse their ads. Explain why this is allowed?
"I use Linux and dont have to bother"
/me smiles a brotherly smile.
You mean you are completely unable to bother because even if you did, you'd have to emulate another OS in order to do so. Also, it seems very few have even cared to mention that Trillian incorporates an IRC client as well - with multi-server operability, causing me to switch from pIRCh after 6 or 7 years of faithfulness.
First of all, I thank you for mentioning Adium. I shall find information about it Elsewhere.
Second, I like your idea of using TOC. Perhaps it could be a fallback protocol if connection fails using the newer protocol?
Third, I point out the fact that Trillian skinning is Awesome.
If one million people are using Trillian instead of AIM, what makes you think any of these people would be using AIM if they weren't using Trillian? I for one have never seen the AIM client in my life, and I still use that portion of Trillian since it allows me to contact even more people. If I wasn't using Trillian, I would simply not be in touch with these people. I'm not prepared to run yet another IM program to do the exact same thing and I would rather just stay away from it. Especially with some security issues that have come up, and the potential bulkiness and advertisements of the AIM client.
Your idea is a valid thought at first glance, the comparison that 1M-people using Trillian "instead" of AIM means a 1M-ad-viewer loss to AIM. This is simply not true. It's the same kind of logic that applied when game publishers back in the heyday of Commodore 64 games pirating said that they were losing N times X dollars from piracy, where N is the number of pirate copies and X is the price per unit. Most of these N people would not pay the X dollars, or view the X advertisements and produce the N*X revenue the company claims to be losing.
If Trillian is forced to fall back to older AIM compatibility, or even drop AIM alltogether, I am hardly going out to get the AIM client. I'll badmouth the company by retelling this story when people ask me to go on AIM, and maybe I'll even win a few more contacts over to Trillian or ICQ or whatever service might be the most interesting.
I changed from ICQ to Trillian and found that I could even drop my old pIRCh as well. *I'm*not going to change IMs a second time. I'm staying.
It's not different. Payback's a bitch, now laugh.
I'm a game dev. I'll get a Mac whenever I feel like shooting myself in a foot. I'm also a gamer, so I suppose that'd mean both feet.
But heck those specs are sexy.
I'm guessing cost versus performance here. It's been shown in tests such as running actual application-like benchmarks rather than theoretical tests, that a low memory fetch latency is more important to memory performance than max burst transfer rate. That's why RDRAM suffers in many cases, since it still runs at a latency compared to 100MHz SDRAM. Most applications just favor short-latency fetches to high-speed large-block transfers in order to run the best. But it is odd. There's no real latency difference between PC133 and DDR2100, and there IS a difference in sustained transfer rate, so I suppose they just didn't think the sustained transfer rate increase was worth the extra cost (as well as design time).
You stick that card on your supercomputer and you put yourself up crap creek. Heh. You just might get better scores than that if you ran a software GL driver. ;)
No, that's not my problem, that's your problem. :) That is not unified all over Europe. If I sued, I would get the job back, after which they may choose to buy me out again and that way I could get a couple of extra paychecks, but as it is I prefer being able to sue, to actually suing. I'm not poor enough to milk them for money and I sort of like having the upper hand here.
No, that's not true. Your doctor might use harsh words and your employer might be unwilling to let you back until the doctor says so but there's nothing like a law. Do we need a new topic about international health care or could people maybe start reading the CIA world factbook again? :)
"Not counting the cost of being a parasite on other, less socialist nations, for real R&D into medical advances that their wonderful system doesn't generate because profits are stripped out."
Interesting way of putting it. We pay taxes for our medical care, and Swedish medical R&D is not part of that. Instead companies such as Astra & Pharmacia (both of which I believe have changed names since) stand for development.
So while you are correct that our tax-financed domestic health system doesn't produce medical R&D, that's not even relevant.
Crap, did I have to get lured off-topic so quickly?
hiring hitmen to take out some other player you dont like
PKing in Project: Entropia is supposedly combined with serious drawbacks. If you PK - player kill - you lose your "insurance" meaning that the items on your body are now possible to steal off it if you were killed. I also believe that someone who has the status of a player killer is possible to kill at no penalty (as well as being lootable). With these rules, there have sprung up player guilds that intend to endure these drawbacks in exchange for payment and for that payment kill, steal or otherwise break the rules and take the punishment.
The fandom pages for Project: Entropia, guilds especially, make for an interesting read.
"I guarantee you I will never choose Sweden as a place of operations for a business. Laws like this make it unnecessarily difficult to run a successful one."
Well that's good. Some countries focus on laws that benefit the employer. Sweden is one of those countries that think it's also fair to benefit the employee. The sheer employee==liability mentality is shunned here. You take care of your employees and they stick around. If you don't, you're screwed. Personally, being an employee, I sorta like that thinking.
So yea, it's "unnecessarily difficult" to hire&fire. Boo hoo. :)
Correct, short-term illness is paid by the state. Well in first hand it's paid by the person who's sick (what's the English term for "karens", anyone?) by not getting any reimbursement what-so-ever during the first few days. Then, during another two weeks like you said, the company pays the wages despite you being sick. But after that, if there are more than six instances of sick leave over a 12 month period, or if there is one instance longer than 14 days, or if the employee him- or herself requests it or if the company finds it motivated, the company is obliged to investigate the matter or if they so choose to request help from the state in order to investigate the health of the employee.
The company can do this as soon as they feel that there might be a risk of long-term sickness and such investigations were ordered by MindArk regarding a few employees who interpreted this as a covert threat for some reason, I don't know why. Personally, when I heard I was up for a health checkup I was glad. I had been wondering myself how come I had gotten the flu TWICE the same autumn and so I was looking forward to recieving my law-given health exam on the first of September, as the company was obliged to order for me (the checkup itself being paid by the state, Försäkringskassan to be specific) but I never did get that physical because they fired me on August last. As far as I know, this is also not permitted. Once you have initiated the health investigation you can't just fire the employee you were supposed to check up on.
Anyway. More questions?
Listen to it, Krapangor. You're entirely correct. I could have sued Mindark for firing me without legal grounds, but that wouldn't mean they gave me a truckload of cash, it would mean they gave me my job back. Now think about that. Do I sound like a guy who would have loved to go back there? :)
So it's not a question about Sweden being sloppy on that law, it's a question whether I wanted the job back or not, and I decided not to. I won't sue unless provoked. The others I can't vouch for. My first friend who got fired for working on something overnight didn't want to go back either. In fact, he found a woman he would like to share his life with and 2 weeks later he's working as a webdesigner out of London. The lead artist kind of person, I really have no idea why he didn't sue, or IF he did sue really.
Swedes also have sort of a humility problem when it comes to standing up for ourselves. Yes, it's silly, like Mojojojo said that we don't bring up our actual rights when we're mistreated by employers. Heck, a lot of people don't even KNOW their rights, and a lot of employers take advantage of that fact.
Hm.. this discussion just became a little personal, but what the hey.
But no, you can't sue for doing overnight freely because you thought it needed to be done. You COULD sue if the company tried to order you to work overtime without any reinbursement however, and MindArk never did order anyone to work overtime, they just leaned on you very hard and if you brought up the question of reinbursement they pointed out that all extra hours (or ANY particularily outstanding work) earned you stock options.
Again, without saying too much about whether MindArk is gold or feldspar, I think it's safe to tell you that "stock options" was a running joke while I worked there. Someone had, for example managed to recieve some 50,000 US$ worth of stock options for doing a single favor to the company somewhere along the line. Oh, and take the "worth" of those with a bit of salt please. Like we did.
Also, it is not immediately obvious that they do fire because of illness. I will bring that up in reply to the AC below
The decay model is in the game instead of a tax or exchange rate imbalance. By decaying, objects will lose value and the end result is just like a tax on usage. You would also do well to realize that as soon as in-game money becomes immediately interchangeable with "real money", like in this game it too is real money, not "virtual".
All of the game designers working at MindArk have read the Habitat Lessons, I helped them to it.
No, wait.. Correction: All of the game designers who worked at MindArk when I left there in Septeber 2001, had read it. I do not know how many of them remain and how many were replaced by recent college graduates with Delphi skills and breasts.
And no, I have nothing against women in the business, I would like more women game designers to be employed based on their skill. It's just a funny fact of life that MindArk have gone from 2 to 5 female employees in less than 6 months, and all of those new recruits being in the system design area.
No.
Well okay, if you do manage to rob the in-game bank, they will send the off-game cops to your door and bring you into an off-game courtroom for fraud.
/ Per
From January to September of 2001 I was employed by MindArk AB in Gothenburg, Sweden, doing some of the game design work, especially bunches of scripting in an odd in-house OO language they made up themselves so that even the designers could produce useful code. ..which, I suppose, in essense means that there were no designers... but I suppose I had better take care what I say about my former employer lest they sue me or something.
Not that I'm really afraid they would, 'cause I would sue them right back. I didn't particularily enjoy working at MindArk. Oh, the people were nice, especially the ones that got fired whenever some high-up thought they looked too scruffy from working overnights. Whoops, there I go with the legally flammable stuff again. Thing is, MindArk like firing people who get sick and stay at home to take care of themselves. This might sound natural and reasonable to some of our US readers, but here it's illegal practice. Here in Sweden a company is legally bound to monitor the health of employees, because if they don't, they can be forced to pay for work-related damages. If they DO monitor health, dealing with sickness is a paid by the state, so there's no cost attached.
MindArk doesn't like doing things by the book though. One co-worker was fired for working over night, bumming out on the couch when the brass came to visit. Nevermind the fact that he just got the community forum online, that was apparently secondary. Then there's me, who originally was proud enough to think that I was (also illegaly) fired for being too critical.. turns out I had had one flu too many (no, I don't drink). After that, I also heard that the most driven of the artists got fired, and the effect these kinds of things have on co-workers.. well, I don't have to tell you, do I?
But I suppose most of you want to know about THE GAME, right? Well, that's where I don't want to go. I probably can't say jack squat about the game. If I did, I'd better play some Frank Black "Men In Black" real loud and hope they mistake me for one of them when they come knocking speaking in legalese.
However, I'm a clever guy.. what I can't say I can still insinuate, so read carefully between the lines here. I may only have 4 years of experience in the business, and granted that P:E was my first and only MMORPG, and the work I did was partially generic sound system design and partially extremely high-level theoretic community system design (that I doubt anyone will read my documentation for, or implement my classes for) but ..did you see the guy here on /. who said that the NDA "sounds a little too convenient"? Have you noticed how few have ever even seen the game? I've seen it. Eddy has seen it, so it does exist.. but how come nobody has really played it and told us about it yet? I can't answer that because I would get sued. I can't suggest an answer to that. Too bad because I could probably have told the lot of you a bunch of interesting stuff.
What I think I am allowed to say however, is that I will not be playing Project: Entropia. Maybe nobody ever will. Maybe I already said too much.
/ Per
Scandinavia Online, the ISP for Passagen, has already terminated ELOJs web hosting. They fell for the threats of a lawsuit against them, because ELOJ sure as hell did not break their rules. They probably did not even check the vailitidy of the lawsuit, because if they had done that they would have noted that they could even have produced a counter-suit on the charge of unlawful lawsuit..
But noo, the people behind Passagen have always been pooftahs.