No, but a DVD player that bests the quality of the one in the PS2 was readily available for less than $100. The prices still don't really justify the integration.
I bought a PS2 for the games, Final Fantasy, DDR, GTA, Gran Turismo, etc. I'm packing up to move and have my stand alone DVD player packed up, but not the PS2. Feeling like watching a DVD today I popped one in the PS2, nice to have that ability certainly. The quality from the PS2's DVD playback, however, is just plain lacking in comparison.
For reference, I have an old Apex DVD player, one made right after the hidden no macrovision menus were cleaned up but before the players were produced as cheap as possible. It wasn't terribly expensive, I think I got it on sale for a little over $100. The picture quality just blows the PS2 away though.
I'll give you that getting one big item is easier for a kid than two, but now a kid could ask for a cube and a game, and spend some of the money grandparents always send on a DVD player. The game is related enough to the cube that it could be plausable. Also, perhaps I'm lucky in that my girlfriend tolerates and sometimes encourages electronic equipment. =D
The real argument I can see is the clutter factor. Many people don't have much room for more boxes. The TV is on a little stand that has a VCR and a few movies and there is no more room except on the floor for another box. In this case I can certianly see the wisdom in getting an integrated DVD player/console.
I personally prefered the game dynamics of Nahlakh, the precursor of Natuk. I never did manage to beat the game but I was pretty deep into the second island before I just couldn't get any further. Sadly the game doesn't seem to want to run on my current hardware.
I tried the trial of Natuk that cut out at some point and wasn't quite as impressed. I've since gone back to Nethack for my fix of computerized dungeon crawling.
Actually, you didn't have to play with two players to get the good ending, but you had to be better than normal to do it. When you get the big guy in the bubble after hitting him with countless lightning bolts pause the game and hit select. If you have at least one spare life it will give it to your buddy, player 2. I don't think you have to be playing two player mode to do that at the end guy even. If so, simply continue in two player mode and give the life at the end the same way. Both players are then alive and the good end is yours.
You can also do this throughout the game in two player mode (possibly single, don't remember) to give your friend a spare life. With infinite continues it makes it nice in that the dead player doesn't have to wait for the continue but it doesn't really hurt the first player in the long run. Also I think player one can steal player two's lives this way.
After getting the NES my parents put a condition on getting new games. I had to beat the one that came with the NES first, Super Mario Brothers. No problem I thought after playing a bit, there are warp zones that'll get me to the end quick. I used them and my mom told me I cheated.
So I can honestly say that I beat all 8 levels of 4 boards each, no warping, in Super Mario Brothers. No continues, no saves, just hours of stomping baddies and eating mushrooms. Luckily I was rewarded with another game in addition to the ending.
And 8-4 sucked so bad with the looping until you got the right pattern. Ugh.
Yeah, I know. I feel bad about it too.:) Damn my inability to consume fast enough. However, sometimes I shell out the big bucks for games. I'll get Soul Calibur 2 within a week of its release. I got Final Fantasy X when it was expensive too. Its just most of the time I'm behind enough that I can take my pick of games I really want and some are at the cheap end.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but as a college student with too little time and money already, I tend to wait on games to buy them, if only because there are more pressing matters. I'll also buy the game used if the case and instructions are in good shape and there's a good dip in price, 20% will usually do it.
I think the real trick is being behind enough in games when you're ready to make a game purchase. It isn't that I don't want the games when they come out, it's just that I wanted another game when it came out and it is currently a meager $20-$30. I can spend my time on that game I wanted previously and be in the same position later on with the currently new game. I hope I can resist the urge to drop this trend when I get a disposable income.
I think your observation about buying new hardware may be pretty well on. If I could get four games I wanted to play for a while on a different console along with the console or five games on my current console I'd probably pick option one. Of course, that would require a decent amount to spend on games at once. Reduce the amount you have to spend to $170 and you're looking at 3 new $50 games and some change or a new console and one game. Suddenly it isn't as attractive. Also making somebody of the new attention deficit generation save enough not to blow the $50 as soon as they have it could be a trick.
I never really had the problem of my colony dying out, it just got to be an exercise in pointlessness after a while. I actually let the thing skip 100 turns once, just to see what would happen. Well, it ground overnight on a POS Cyrix 486DLC and guess what, not much, I had more useless tech and that was it. Getting to the point of being self sustaining was, I thought, easy enough. There was just nothing to do after building that far. No branching out, no exciting new buildings, nothing to do but hit turn at that point. Yay. Had there been the option of a second, third, fouth colony and so on, and linking them together, that would have been something, and I would have played it longer.
You're right, there was so much potential. Part of the reason I rushed to the store and parted with my money at 13 was the potential. I hoped they would patch it or even make an expansion that would make the game whole, but no. Sierra made the game a tragedy alright.
Funny you should mention Outpost, it's one of the games I was considering for worst game I've played. I'm certain I've played worse games, but I can't think of another that let me down in the same way that the original Outpost did.
I think I still have the manual around; I should go and dig it out for a laugh. If I remember correctly, there were a whole ton of things that got cut from the game as it ran behind, like creating a second colony and all the stuff that went along with that. Oh goody... Also the CD version needing a disk to launch the install from the CD was a nice touch. Way to go Sierra. Nothing says rushed out the door like a game that's half complete and can't install itself without helper media.
Geez, I was all of 13 when I bought the game. Being 13 I didn't have much income and I felt really abused by Sierra. Still, I played the game for a little while, but it wasn't anywhere near the expectations I had. If I remember right, the fun thing to do was to get the colony big enough and kill it off, because after a while there seemed to be no point.
Also, does anybody remember picking a planet to colonize in Outpost to have the conditions be wrong and you would lose before you even started the game? What the hell was that?
I got the opportunity to play Outpost 2 and didn't care much for the RTS aspect of it. I wanted to build and create, not destroy and defend. They should have finished Outpost before creating a sequel if you ask me.
No, shorting involves selling somebody else's share with promise to rebuy it later, hopefully at a lower price. People beginning a short sale would actually increase the number of buyers needed. People finishing a short would be rebuying, but lets look at this, who's going to rebuy now when the price is up but going to crash?
Supposedly more money is being poured into high tech weapons to try to prevent this sort of thing from happening, to prevent lives lost. We've come a long way from saturation bombing a whole city to take out a single factory.
Supposedly betting on when major events would happen could help to ready everybody for the event, but I don't think the same parallel can be drawn.
But it does cost them money. If a player wants to get a high level character then they need to play up to that level or find somebody willing to hand over a character that has been played to that level.
In case one they happily make their monthly money as people play up to that level. The powers that be are happy because they get their check.
In case two, somebody that is probably trying to get out of the game is handing over stuff including a character with tons of time in it that would otherwise be deleted. Okay, so some stuff might not be, but the character would. Now when the user gets their hands on the powerful character and finds the game no more fun at high levels than low because you still have to repetitively camp everything, they just sell the character and move on. No real loss, no trying to scramble to the top over months and months to find it isn't worth it. Repeat until we've found somebody who will actually keep the character around.
All the time that the experienced player put in isn't duplicated. Further, the people selling characters are probably those sorts that are "good" at the game, e.g. have lots of free time to quickly climb levels, whereas those buying don't. The fees it would take for those buying to get to the top via normal play would probably be quite high, rather than a month or two from the people with too much time on their hands. As far as I know there isn't anything stopping an experienced player from starting the cycle anew, either. So then somebody sits playing new characters up in power, which can be fun and rewarding too, in a very short amount of time.
Yes, it is dependent. I tried to make it abundantly clear that puting the song back together in order to pirate it would be an illegal act.
However not having rights to listen to the song and doing so would constitute piracy, not theft. Just as there are legitimate uses of P2P software to download songs in whole I'm sure there could be legitimate uses of this idea towards a distribution method.
I've had CDs stolen before. I've downloaded the songs that were on the stolen CD as I've paid the compensation to the artists and the industry to listen to those tracks. In some instances I have the empty jewel cases with liner notes and all but no original CD but some of the CDs were taken in their cases. I'd be pissed if the RIAA decided that they were going to go after me for 'pirating' a whole CD off a P2P network, but guess what, I wouldn't be able to fight it beyond representing myself. In that case I probably wouldn't have half a chance with the ones where I still have cases, not to mention the CDs I have no proof of ever purchasing.
Besides the point that you cannot steal by copying a copyrighted work, I never once said it was either right or a right to pirate anything. It would be nice to have a method to replace things I've paid to have the right to listen to which had no chance of placing me on a list of supposed pirates. There is zero damage in my restoring my ability to listen to what I purchased originally except that my sound quality will be diminished and I'm forced to use my and somebody else's bandwidth.
Fair use is very important, don't get me wrong. I was just placing a mere idea that would hopefully not allow powerful organizations an ability to cripple people at their discretion without proof that somebody was doing something illegal.
Beside all those points is that the 30 second clips are not supposed to encompass the whole spirit of the song so it does not diminish the original work. As such it could easily be argued by RIAA lawyers that certain pieces of the song do just that and no 30 second clip would be allowed to contain that portion. End game for the reconstruction method since you can't get all the pieces.
Were I interested in piracy I'd either be looking for secure, anonymous, serverless transfer or I'd jump a plane to a piracy hotspot and pay a couple bucks for more pirated music, movies, and software than I could shake a stick at.
Not saying that it was something to get excited over in the sense that suddenly it would be legal to make duplications of a music track. All I was saying was that if there were enough 30 second clips all over the place then the legality of downloading or serving those said clips would not be in question, there are plenty of places that already do it. The legality would then come into play with what the person did with the clips, rather than the downloading itself being illegal.
Were it the case that people were pirating in this way the RIAA would have to show some proof of pirating, rather than just saying the people were using P2P networks and they should be ready to prove their innocence in court or hand over their savings. Or they harass any customers that have downloaded a good number of clips, hurting their image further, not that they seem to care. The piracy itself is the end result of either method and the legality of that obviously will not change. However, the distribution method, slicing up the song into legal clips for download, would have changed. Thus it would make it more difficult for the authorities to say Joe User has a pirate copy of a song though not making it any less illegal for Joe User to have it.
Of course, to do this reconstruction a 30 second clip would have to have some idea as to where in the overall song it fit. Though that could probably be done with something in ID3 tags for MP3s. Technical details aside, it would make for an interesting distribution method for songs, in my opinion.
So then if tons of people took different 30 second clips and posted them, with said links, maybe we could create some software to grab enough clips to reconstruct. The grabbing the clips couldn't be inherently illegal since we're allowed to harmlessly do so now. Probably the process of reconstruction would be made to be the illegal act. However, if that takes place client side, the RIAA would be hard pressed to track illegal downloaders, since the downloading aspect wouldn't be illegal. Then maybe they'd have to come up with ideas to really pester fans.
Dell, HP, Gateway, et al. are doing fine selling Windows PCs. I somehow doubt that Microsoft charges a whole lot to them for the OEM licenses since they're pushing a whole lot of Windows machines. And more Windows machines means more people that may upgrade in the future and will possibly run things like Office. Microsoft would be winning by keeping the cost of their OS cheap on OEM machines. When I bought my Dell they refused to lower the price if I didn't want Windows on the machine. I think they said if they could it would only save me around $10-$20.
Server machines, on the other hand, is where I personally believe that Open Source can be of real use, and is oddly enough where we see a lot of it used. Microsoft's overly restrictive license terms, requirement of per client licenses to access the server which requires a license itself, sometimes per processor, makes for an expensive software setup. Plus that's on top of licenses for the OS.
Now, I'm not going to argue that some of Microsoft's products doesn't post some impressive speed, but sometimes a smaller business needs a server. Sure, you may save on the per client licenses if you're smaller, but every dollar spent on software or licenses is a dollar not spent on hardware. Personally, if I had the choice between perhaps a slightly slower but free piece of software and a faster yet expensive piece of software and I knew that the reliability was similar, I'd sink every dollar into hardware. That means more money for hardware vendors, which can only be good for them.
Which costs more: a GB of bandwidth at a guaranteed minimum rate of 128kbps or a GB of diskspace which is guaranteed to stream that quick to your software of choice?
Hint, there are many, many people still using dialup today. Don't look for compression to save much streaming mp3's they're already squeezed hard. There you're lucky to get 53kbps anyway, not enough for the purpose of a central file store. Further, if you intend to serve more than 12 people in perfect conditions with 128kbps encoded files you're looking at a T1 on the serving side, and last I checked those run around a grand a month. Scaling gets ugly. Increase the number of users by several factors of ten and you're going to need some decent disk access on your central location in addition to massive amounts of bandwidth. Eventually you have too many simultaneous reads that even buffering the client won't allow you to keep up.
With mass storage as cheap as it is and the costs to push hour after hour of 4 MB files down a pipe it's much easier to let the end users cover the meager costs of keeping redundanies.
Without extravagant costs it is too easy to break the streaming model. Wireless gives only so much bandwidth to all users. There are other uses for this bandwidth besides just streaming music that would be better situated locally. Broadband is over sold, the theoretical bandwidth a user could get is rarely there for the taking. Add more and more people actually streaming music and the lines will be saturated even further. It's bad enough with people constantly sitting on Kazaa and downloading files just once. What makes you think things would improve by making them do it repeatedly?
If you run your own private network then by all means keep a single copy (and backups of course). Home users so rarely saturate their 100 Mbps switches and you're guaranteed a reasonable number of max clients. If you're keeping a few gigs of data on all your machines in this instance then you're plain daft, your internal bandwidth is practically limitless in comparison to your need and it is free beyond setup costs. You could probably use that extra disk space for something more useful.
My Pentium Pro 200 can play a single mp3 stream at good quality but is put under considerable load to do so, doing anything else trashes the stream if there isn't enough of it cached.
However, move up to a Pentium 3 and it seems there's plenty of room to play multiple streams of music, even by just going to a 450 Mhz chip. I would bet that an old 450 Mhz Pentium 3 would be enough to provide 6 streams of quality music.
Like others have said though, get a bunch of cheap client machines, one for each room, and run a file server instead of stringing up a ton of cable. You'll lose audio quality a lot faster by pushing it analog from the PC to speakers located throughout the house than you will pusing it as a digital file over Cat5 to a client which will give the final push over the analog speaker wire. Also, last I checked you could get a spool of Cat5 much cheaper than a spool of Monster Cable. That should offset some of the client costs. Remember, if all the clients are doing is playing music they don't have to be powerful. If you watch eBay a bit you could probably pull the machines in for under $75 each (w/ shipping).
Besides, then you'll have a perfectly good file server to put on your home network as well.
Not saying anybody that gets a G5 shouldn't be happy with it. It looks to be a quite capable machine that's probably in the near performance neighborhood of PCs, whether higher or lower I don't know. If nobody ran anything different than the mainstream there certainly wouldn't be as big of a push for improvements anywhere. I certainly wasn't trying to advocate one machine or another with my previous post (though I do constantly question Apple's claims about their machines more than some other companies'), but instead I merely intended to question whether the live comparison was fair or like the SPEC numbers. It was perhaps a cynical response to the question about the live tests being realistic representations of performance though the benchmarks may not be. Perhaps my intentions are not clear or it is easier to assume that I'm on the Mac hating platform because I'm willing to question Apple's claims. For the record I'm more wary of what Apple is saying than about their new machines. I rather think the G5 looks like a pretty nice computer and the Unix underpinnings make it intriguing as well.
Not that it really makes much difference to me either, but congrats on sticking up for your platform of choice without the need to "validate your purchase" if you will. As long as your machine interfaces with mine (or the machines it needs to rather) then it hardly matters what the machine is.
Don't everybody yell at me at once because I honestly don't know the answer to the question I'm about to ask. I haven't seen any of their live demos.
Did they show the configuration of the competition or just show two machines run side by side?
I have no doubt that they could cripple or at least harm the performance of their competition and with no basis of comparison other than the G5 it may seem like the G5 really was just fast. Also, even with live demonstration it isn't like they couldn't cheat by telling the G5 to run optimized code (or do the nVidia thing and run different code) while making sure things like quality settings were all the way up on the Xeons.
Hell, how different would it be to cheat during a live demonstration than with benchmarks? Turn off SSE2 use and Hyperthreading in a live demo and you get dips in PC performance just like in benchmarking. Maybe that's just the cynical view of things, but frankly I don't trust benchmarks for much either, especially when they're trying to sell something.
On the side, it would appear that Apple does have a nice product here. They were in desperate need of something faster than the G4s. Now if they could leash their marketing machine a little bit they might gain a little more respect. How many techies ask where the catch is when they see a number from Apple?
I think the moral of the story is don't be a lazy idiot and type your username and password into the address bar of IE. Type the url with your username and no password and let it prompt you upon resolution of the address. There, now you're that much safer!
On the other hand, there's really no need to submit what you just typed to MSN's crappy search engine. There's no need to do anything with the data, just let it sit. If MS wanted to enhance the user's experience without intruding in any manner they could make the no page available default error page look a little prettier in IE and point them at a search engine or two, without the attempted url plugged in already. It'd be an extra click, but no intrusion. It at least makes me wonder why they need to drive traffic to their search engine thing.
Why couldn't we have a good time with this ourselves? I'm not saying I'm for this idea in the slightest bit, but lets not just consider the negatives.
The RIAA has shown time and again that their computer security is just plain lackluster and pathetic. How many times has their site been hacked now? One would think that the right person shouldn't have too much difficulty getting into the RIAA's machines.
The next question becomes, would this remote kill switch for copyright owners be given out to any copyright owner that thinks their copyright has been infringed upon? Perhaps you can see where I'm going here. Simply copyright something, a crappy little made up song is good enough I'd guess, it just has to be something, not good (as the RIAA has shown time and again). Gain access, plant file, capture that the file is there, justifying your hacking to check, detonate legally granted bomb. Hurray, you've just killed an RIAA computer with evidence that they were infringing upon your copyrights. If the machine is truly hosed then there should be no evidence they can muster to claim otherwise, except maybe some personal statements. Of course, you're just doing this to protect your copyrights.
Hell, if we can't justify the hacking part to drop the file and make it so they possess copyrighted material they don't own and haven't "licenced" then lets just let acusations fly and nuke anyway. With a destroyed machine how can they prove otherwise? While we're at it, don't we happen to know that a bunch of MPAA, government, and perhaps even charity machines (which happen to be charities we don't like?) have infringed on our copyright? Lets just disrupt every single system in the country to be sure that nobody, and I mean nobody, can infringe our copyrights. It's the only way to be sure.
Ah, wouldn't that be great? The only way to safety would be to not be on the internet or to have a machine so obscure (and probably obsolete) that these fancy death commands wouldn't do a thing.
Normally I would be inclined to agree with you, but I just built a computer for somebody where I don't think this is really the case. Were I building it for myself I would put it off until a week before needing it and then be building it in that week.
Anyway, the person I built this machine for has had crap for computing machinery in their life before. We're talking about machines that are lucky to be running solitare. I was somewhat shocked that his parents were running Windows 95 in 2002. My thought is that making a decent machine available to him now would give him time to try it out, explore, and maybe learn a little bit before he gets to college and is working to learn how to use something more advanced than 95. A full summer with the machine, even if there's a bit of game playing with it, should be enough to make him comfortable with it and afford them time to ask any necessary questions before getting to school and not knowing how to use it.
So what you're saying is it is (or should be)legally wrong for a company to optimize for one application and not for another? That somehow benchmark software is something that is off limits for writing optimizations?
Lets put it this way. nVidia optimizes drivers for UT and squeezes out an extra 10 fps. Everybody is happy, nobody really complains, despite the fact that in maybe a couple instances there's a non-antialiased line that shows up in the distance (or something, probably not a great example as not antialiasing distance probably wouldn't give a big boost, but bear with me). Performance has been boosted at the cost of a little quality.
Now nVidia does the same or similar for a benchmark and the world is up in arms. Benchmark software is sacred, blah, blah. You can't just do something different for that to get higher numbers. Well why not? I highly doubt that anybody at nVidia or ATI has ever officially stated that the benchmark numbers are ground truths about how their hardware performs relative to other hardware in other programs.
The difference is that you don't want to sit and look at a benchmark all day, you want to play games. If you feel that the company you bought your card from isn't interested in providing your dollar's worth in driver updates and would rather spend their time baiting gullible people who actually believe benchmarks and this bothers you then don't buy another card from them. In all honesty we all know that the benchmark inflation is done to look good. There just isn't deceit in optimizing something for a piece of code unless you're simultaneously saying that the code represents some sort of unoptimized performance.
If you think that this optimization is somehow reprehensible write the customer service departments involved and tell them you want to see a reversal in the behavior, no benchmark optimizations, or you'll never plunk down $400 on their card again. If others like you think it is reprehensible then they should do the same. If enough of the small population that spends $400 on a consumer video card makes themselves heard then they'll change their ways out of fear of losing that profitable niche. Hell, even with your ATi card you can write to nVidia and say you won't drop $400 on a video card if they keep it up. If you can spend the time to rant about it on/. you can open your email client and do the same to the people who actually make decisions about these things.
I think it is bad too, honestly, but I'm not about to go publically accuse some company of fraud on some board where nothing will ever come of it when all they're doing is some optimization. Were there rules against optimization for benchmarks or had I ever heard nVidia say they had the better card because they had more 3Dmarks or something it would be a different story, but then I'd probably write the companies before posting here.
Let me play devil's advocate. IANAL and all, but here's my devil's advocate view.
Has nVidia (or ATI for that matter) ever claimed that any benchmark was indicitive of real world performance? Sure, they may boast individual benchmark numbers and say that their card is fast, despite having optimized routines for individual benchmarks, but they're really only claiming that their cards are fast, which is a subjective measure, and achieve those numbers on those tests, which they do. The benchmark writers may try to claim that their tests are somehow indicitive of the real world, but that doesn't really concern the hardware companies, but rather the benchmark writers themselves.
Yes, they would love for you to believe this on your own, and I doubt that they're going to come forward and say that these third party benchmarks were optimized for (until they're caught, but then only maybe). They may even go so far as to say that card X outperforms card Y by Z amount in a certain benchmark when it does, despite not being indicitive of that relative performance in other arenas. Any tie between benchmark scores and real world performance is implicitly created by those who look at the benchmark expecting real world scores. There's not some grand rule anywhere saying you cannot write optimizations to execute some piece of code, benchmark or otherwise. Besides, those who actually follow computing hardware know not to rely on benchmarks for the true numbers. Sometimes they can be useful tools, but they certainly should not be used as a ground truth of performance. If everything that's been said is true and they aren't making any sorts of claims about relating where they have cheated to real performance, where is the fraud?
Personally I'm saddened that this happened, but not really that suprised. I think if hardware manufacturers would stop doing stupid things like this then maybe benchmarks would be a little more useful. I'm sure that there's a more useful use of time than writing optimizations for benchmarks. It brings the companies down a bit in my eyes and now I'll be watching a bit more for any sort of doublespeak or implicit statement that isn't really there from these two.
Just a word of advice, your corn will never have enough of a root system to be safe from strong winds. They can and will blow over in a strong wind. However, you can just go out and set the corn upright, cover the roots again and it should be fine. So nothing to worry about really, except having to reset the corn not too long after the winds. Don't leave it a couple days and let the roots bake in the open air. As you'd probably expect, the taller the corn gets the more prone it is going to be to blowing over.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a PS2 for the games, Final Fantasy, DDR, GTA, Gran Turismo, etc. I'm packing up to move and have my stand alone DVD player packed up, but not the PS2. Feeling like watching a DVD today I popped one in the PS2, nice to have that ability certainly. The quality from the PS2's DVD playback, however, is just plain lacking in comparison.
For reference, I have an old Apex DVD player, one made right after the hidden no macrovision menus were cleaned up but before the players were produced as cheap as possible. It wasn't terribly expensive, I think I got it on sale for a little over $100. The picture quality just blows the PS2 away though.
I'll give you that getting one big item is easier for a kid than two, but now a kid could ask for a cube and a game, and spend some of the money grandparents always send on a DVD player. The game is related enough to the cube that it could be plausable. Also, perhaps I'm lucky in that my girlfriend tolerates and sometimes encourages electronic equipment. =D
The real argument I can see is the clutter factor. Many people don't have much room for more boxes. The TV is on a little stand that has a VCR and a few movies and there is no more room except on the floor for another box. In this case I can certianly see the wisdom in getting an integrated DVD player/console.
I tried the trial of Natuk that cut out at some point and wasn't quite as impressed. I've since gone back to Nethack for my fix of computerized dungeon crawling.
You can also do this throughout the game in two player mode (possibly single, don't remember) to give your friend a spare life. With infinite continues it makes it nice in that the dead player doesn't have to wait for the continue but it doesn't really hurt the first player in the long run. Also I think player one can steal player two's lives this way.
So I can honestly say that I beat all 8 levels of 4 boards each, no warping, in Super Mario Brothers. No continues, no saves, just hours of stomping baddies and eating mushrooms. Luckily I was rewarded with another game in addition to the ending.
And 8-4 sucked so bad with the looping until you got the right pattern. Ugh.
Yeah, I know. I feel bad about it too. :) Damn my inability to consume fast enough. However, sometimes I shell out the big bucks for games. I'll get Soul Calibur 2 within a week of its release. I got Final Fantasy X when it was expensive too. Its just most of the time I'm behind enough that I can take my pick of games I really want and some are at the cheap end.
I think the real trick is being behind enough in games when you're ready to make a game purchase. It isn't that I don't want the games when they come out, it's just that I wanted another game when it came out and it is currently a meager $20-$30. I can spend my time on that game I wanted previously and be in the same position later on with the currently new game. I hope I can resist the urge to drop this trend when I get a disposable income.
I think your observation about buying new hardware may be pretty well on. If I could get four games I wanted to play for a while on a different console along with the console or five games on my current console I'd probably pick option one. Of course, that would require a decent amount to spend on games at once. Reduce the amount you have to spend to $170 and you're looking at 3 new $50 games and some change or a new console and one game. Suddenly it isn't as attractive. Also making somebody of the new attention deficit generation save enough not to blow the $50 as soon as they have it could be a trick.
You're right, there was so much potential. Part of the reason I rushed to the store and parted with my money at 13 was the potential. I hoped they would patch it or even make an expansion that would make the game whole, but no. Sierra made the game a tragedy alright.
I think I still have the manual around; I should go and dig it out for a laugh. If I remember correctly, there were a whole ton of things that got cut from the game as it ran behind, like creating a second colony and all the stuff that went along with that. Oh goody... Also the CD version needing a disk to launch the install from the CD was a nice touch. Way to go Sierra. Nothing says rushed out the door like a game that's half complete and can't install itself without helper media.
Geez, I was all of 13 when I bought the game. Being 13 I didn't have much income and I felt really abused by Sierra. Still, I played the game for a little while, but it wasn't anywhere near the expectations I had. If I remember right, the fun thing to do was to get the colony big enough and kill it off, because after a while there seemed to be no point.
Also, does anybody remember picking a planet to colonize in Outpost to have the conditions be wrong and you would lose before you even started the game? What the hell was that?
I got the opportunity to play Outpost 2 and didn't care much for the RTS aspect of it. I wanted to build and create, not destroy and defend. They should have finished Outpost before creating a sequel if you ask me.
No, shorting involves selling somebody else's share with promise to rebuy it later, hopefully at a lower price. People beginning a short sale would actually increase the number of buyers needed. People finishing a short would be rebuying, but lets look at this, who's going to rebuy now when the price is up but going to crash?
Supposedly betting on when major events would happen could help to ready everybody for the event, but I don't think the same parallel can be drawn.
In case one they happily make their monthly money as people play up to that level. The powers that be are happy because they get their check.
In case two, somebody that is probably trying to get out of the game is handing over stuff including a character with tons of time in it that would otherwise be deleted. Okay, so some stuff might not be, but the character would. Now when the user gets their hands on the powerful character and finds the game no more fun at high levels than low because you still have to repetitively camp everything, they just sell the character and move on. No real loss, no trying to scramble to the top over months and months to find it isn't worth it. Repeat until we've found somebody who will actually keep the character around.
All the time that the experienced player put in isn't duplicated. Further, the people selling characters are probably those sorts that are "good" at the game, e.g. have lots of free time to quickly climb levels, whereas those buying don't. The fees it would take for those buying to get to the top via normal play would probably be quite high, rather than a month or two from the people with too much time on their hands. As far as I know there isn't anything stopping an experienced player from starting the cycle anew, either. So then somebody sits playing new characters up in power, which can be fun and rewarding too, in a very short amount of time.
However not having rights to listen to the song and doing so would constitute piracy, not theft. Just as there are legitimate uses of P2P software to download songs in whole I'm sure there could be legitimate uses of this idea towards a distribution method.
I've had CDs stolen before. I've downloaded the songs that were on the stolen CD as I've paid the compensation to the artists and the industry to listen to those tracks. In some instances I have the empty jewel cases with liner notes and all but no original CD but some of the CDs were taken in their cases. I'd be pissed if the RIAA decided that they were going to go after me for 'pirating' a whole CD off a P2P network, but guess what, I wouldn't be able to fight it beyond representing myself. In that case I probably wouldn't have half a chance with the ones where I still have cases, not to mention the CDs I have no proof of ever purchasing.
Besides the point that you cannot steal by copying a copyrighted work, I never once said it was either right or a right to pirate anything. It would be nice to have a method to replace things I've paid to have the right to listen to which had no chance of placing me on a list of supposed pirates. There is zero damage in my restoring my ability to listen to what I purchased originally except that my sound quality will be diminished and I'm forced to use my and somebody else's bandwidth.
Fair use is very important, don't get me wrong. I was just placing a mere idea that would hopefully not allow powerful organizations an ability to cripple people at their discretion without proof that somebody was doing something illegal.
Beside all those points is that the 30 second clips are not supposed to encompass the whole spirit of the song so it does not diminish the original work. As such it could easily be argued by RIAA lawyers that certain pieces of the song do just that and no 30 second clip would be allowed to contain that portion. End game for the reconstruction method since you can't get all the pieces.
Were I interested in piracy I'd either be looking for secure, anonymous, serverless transfer or I'd jump a plane to a piracy hotspot and pay a couple bucks for more pirated music, movies, and software than I could shake a stick at.
Were it the case that people were pirating in this way the RIAA would have to show some proof of pirating, rather than just saying the people were using P2P networks and they should be ready to prove their innocence in court or hand over their savings. Or they harass any customers that have downloaded a good number of clips, hurting their image further, not that they seem to care. The piracy itself is the end result of either method and the legality of that obviously will not change. However, the distribution method, slicing up the song into legal clips for download, would have changed. Thus it would make it more difficult for the authorities to say Joe User has a pirate copy of a song though not making it any less illegal for Joe User to have it.
Of course, to do this reconstruction a 30 second clip would have to have some idea as to where in the overall song it fit. Though that could probably be done with something in ID3 tags for MP3s. Technical details aside, it would make for an interesting distribution method for songs, in my opinion.
So then if tons of people took different 30 second clips and posted them, with said links, maybe we could create some software to grab enough clips to reconstruct. The grabbing the clips couldn't be inherently illegal since we're allowed to harmlessly do so now. Probably the process of reconstruction would be made to be the illegal act. However, if that takes place client side, the RIAA would be hard pressed to track illegal downloaders, since the downloading aspect wouldn't be illegal. Then maybe they'd have to come up with ideas to really pester fans.
Server machines, on the other hand, is where I personally believe that Open Source can be of real use, and is oddly enough where we see a lot of it used. Microsoft's overly restrictive license terms, requirement of per client licenses to access the server which requires a license itself, sometimes per processor, makes for an expensive software setup. Plus that's on top of licenses for the OS.
Now, I'm not going to argue that some of Microsoft's products doesn't post some impressive speed, but sometimes a smaller business needs a server. Sure, you may save on the per client licenses if you're smaller, but every dollar spent on software or licenses is a dollar not spent on hardware. Personally, if I had the choice between perhaps a slightly slower but free piece of software and a faster yet expensive piece of software and I knew that the reliability was similar, I'd sink every dollar into hardware. That means more money for hardware vendors, which can only be good for them.
Hint, there are many, many people still using dialup today. Don't look for compression to save much streaming mp3's they're already squeezed hard. There you're lucky to get 53kbps anyway, not enough for the purpose of a central file store. Further, if you intend to serve more than 12 people in perfect conditions with 128kbps encoded files you're looking at a T1 on the serving side, and last I checked those run around a grand a month. Scaling gets ugly. Increase the number of users by several factors of ten and you're going to need some decent disk access on your central location in addition to massive amounts of bandwidth. Eventually you have too many simultaneous reads that even buffering the client won't allow you to keep up.
With mass storage as cheap as it is and the costs to push hour after hour of 4 MB files down a pipe it's much easier to let the end users cover the meager costs of keeping redundanies.
Without extravagant costs it is too easy to break the streaming model. Wireless gives only so much bandwidth to all users. There are other uses for this bandwidth besides just streaming music that would be better situated locally. Broadband is over sold, the theoretical bandwidth a user could get is rarely there for the taking. Add more and more people actually streaming music and the lines will be saturated even further. It's bad enough with people constantly sitting on Kazaa and downloading files just once. What makes you think things would improve by making them do it repeatedly?
If you run your own private network then by all means keep a single copy (and backups of course). Home users so rarely saturate their 100 Mbps switches and you're guaranteed a reasonable number of max clients. If you're keeping a few gigs of data on all your machines in this instance then you're plain daft, your internal bandwidth is practically limitless in comparison to your need and it is free beyond setup costs. You could probably use that extra disk space for something more useful.
However, move up to a Pentium 3 and it seems there's plenty of room to play multiple streams of music, even by just going to a 450 Mhz chip. I would bet that an old 450 Mhz Pentium 3 would be enough to provide 6 streams of quality music.
Like others have said though, get a bunch of cheap client machines, one for each room, and run a file server instead of stringing up a ton of cable. You'll lose audio quality a lot faster by pushing it analog from the PC to speakers located throughout the house than you will pusing it as a digital file over Cat5 to a client which will give the final push over the analog speaker wire. Also, last I checked you could get a spool of Cat5 much cheaper than a spool of Monster Cable. That should offset some of the client costs. Remember, if all the clients are doing is playing music they don't have to be powerful. If you watch eBay a bit you could probably pull the machines in for under $75 each (w/ shipping).
Besides, then you'll have a perfectly good file server to put on your home network as well.
Not that it really makes much difference to me either, but congrats on sticking up for your platform of choice without the need to "validate your purchase" if you will. As long as your machine interfaces with mine (or the machines it needs to rather) then it hardly matters what the machine is.
Did they show the configuration of the competition or just show two machines run side by side?
I have no doubt that they could cripple or at least harm the performance of their competition and with no basis of comparison other than the G5 it may seem like the G5 really was just fast. Also, even with live demonstration it isn't like they couldn't cheat by telling the G5 to run optimized code (or do the nVidia thing and run different code) while making sure things like quality settings were all the way up on the Xeons.
Hell, how different would it be to cheat during a live demonstration than with benchmarks? Turn off SSE2 use and Hyperthreading in a live demo and you get dips in PC performance just like in benchmarking. Maybe that's just the cynical view of things, but frankly I don't trust benchmarks for much either, especially when they're trying to sell something.
On the side, it would appear that Apple does have a nice product here. They were in desperate need of something faster than the G4s. Now if they could leash their marketing machine a little bit they might gain a little more respect. How many techies ask where the catch is when they see a number from Apple?
On the other hand, there's really no need to submit what you just typed to MSN's crappy search engine. There's no need to do anything with the data, just let it sit. If MS wanted to enhance the user's experience without intruding in any manner they could make the no page available default error page look a little prettier in IE and point them at a search engine or two, without the attempted url plugged in already. It'd be an extra click, but no intrusion. It at least makes me wonder why they need to drive traffic to their search engine thing.
The RIAA has shown time and again that their computer security is just plain lackluster and pathetic. How many times has their site been hacked now? One would think that the right person shouldn't have too much difficulty getting into the RIAA's machines.
The next question becomes, would this remote kill switch for copyright owners be given out to any copyright owner that thinks their copyright has been infringed upon? Perhaps you can see where I'm going here. Simply copyright something, a crappy little made up song is good enough I'd guess, it just has to be something, not good (as the RIAA has shown time and again). Gain access, plant file, capture that the file is there, justifying your hacking to check, detonate legally granted bomb. Hurray, you've just killed an RIAA computer with evidence that they were infringing upon your copyrights. If the machine is truly hosed then there should be no evidence they can muster to claim otherwise, except maybe some personal statements. Of course, you're just doing this to protect your copyrights.
Hell, if we can't justify the hacking part to drop the file and make it so they possess copyrighted material they don't own and haven't "licenced" then lets just let acusations fly and nuke anyway. With a destroyed machine how can they prove otherwise? While we're at it, don't we happen to know that a bunch of MPAA, government, and perhaps even charity machines (which happen to be charities we don't like?) have infringed on our copyright? Lets just disrupt every single system in the country to be sure that nobody, and I mean nobody, can infringe our copyrights. It's the only way to be sure.
Ah, wouldn't that be great? The only way to safety would be to not be on the internet or to have a machine so obscure (and probably obsolete) that these fancy death commands wouldn't do a thing.
Anyway, the person I built this machine for has had crap for computing machinery in their life before. We're talking about machines that are lucky to be running solitare. I was somewhat shocked that his parents were running Windows 95 in 2002. My thought is that making a decent machine available to him now would give him time to try it out, explore, and maybe learn a little bit before he gets to college and is working to learn how to use something more advanced than 95. A full summer with the machine, even if there's a bit of game playing with it, should be enough to make him comfortable with it and afford them time to ask any necessary questions before getting to school and not knowing how to use it.
Lets put it this way. nVidia optimizes drivers for UT and squeezes out an extra 10 fps. Everybody is happy, nobody really complains, despite the fact that in maybe a couple instances there's a non-antialiased line that shows up in the distance (or something, probably not a great example as not antialiasing distance probably wouldn't give a big boost, but bear with me). Performance has been boosted at the cost of a little quality.
Now nVidia does the same or similar for a benchmark and the world is up in arms. Benchmark software is sacred, blah, blah. You can't just do something different for that to get higher numbers. Well why not? I highly doubt that anybody at nVidia or ATI has ever officially stated that the benchmark numbers are ground truths about how their hardware performs relative to other hardware in other programs.
The difference is that you don't want to sit and look at a benchmark all day, you want to play games. If you feel that the company you bought your card from isn't interested in providing your dollar's worth in driver updates and would rather spend their time baiting gullible people who actually believe benchmarks and this bothers you then don't buy another card from them. In all honesty we all know that the benchmark inflation is done to look good. There just isn't deceit in optimizing something for a piece of code unless you're simultaneously saying that the code represents some sort of unoptimized performance.
If you think that this optimization is somehow reprehensible write the customer service departments involved and tell them you want to see a reversal in the behavior, no benchmark optimizations, or you'll never plunk down $400 on their card again. If others like you think it is reprehensible then they should do the same. If enough of the small population that spends $400 on a consumer video card makes themselves heard then they'll change their ways out of fear of losing that profitable niche. Hell, even with your ATi card you can write to nVidia and say you won't drop $400 on a video card if they keep it up. If you can spend the time to rant about it on /. you can open your email client and do the same to the people who actually make decisions about these things.
I think it is bad too, honestly, but I'm not about to go publically accuse some company of fraud on some board where nothing will ever come of it when all they're doing is some optimization. Were there rules against optimization for benchmarks or had I ever heard nVidia say they had the better card because they had more 3Dmarks or something it would be a different story, but then I'd probably write the companies before posting here.
Has nVidia (or ATI for that matter) ever claimed that any benchmark was indicitive of real world performance? Sure, they may boast individual benchmark numbers and say that their card is fast, despite having optimized routines for individual benchmarks, but they're really only claiming that their cards are fast, which is a subjective measure, and achieve those numbers on those tests, which they do. The benchmark writers may try to claim that their tests are somehow indicitive of the real world, but that doesn't really concern the hardware companies, but rather the benchmark writers themselves.
Yes, they would love for you to believe this on your own, and I doubt that they're going to come forward and say that these third party benchmarks were optimized for (until they're caught, but then only maybe). They may even go so far as to say that card X outperforms card Y by Z amount in a certain benchmark when it does, despite not being indicitive of that relative performance in other arenas. Any tie between benchmark scores and real world performance is implicitly created by those who look at the benchmark expecting real world scores. There's not some grand rule anywhere saying you cannot write optimizations to execute some piece of code, benchmark or otherwise. Besides, those who actually follow computing hardware know not to rely on benchmarks for the true numbers. Sometimes they can be useful tools, but they certainly should not be used as a ground truth of performance. If everything that's been said is true and they aren't making any sorts of claims about relating where they have cheated to real performance, where is the fraud?
Personally I'm saddened that this happened, but not really that suprised. I think if hardware manufacturers would stop doing stupid things like this then maybe benchmarks would be a little more useful. I'm sure that there's a more useful use of time than writing optimizations for benchmarks. It brings the companies down a bit in my eyes and now I'll be watching a bit more for any sort of doublespeak or implicit statement that isn't really there from these two.
Just a word of advice, your corn will never have enough of a root system to be safe from strong winds. They can and will blow over in a strong wind. However, you can just go out and set the corn upright, cover the roots again and it should be fine. So nothing to worry about really, except having to reset the corn not too long after the winds. Don't leave it a couple days and let the roots bake in the open air. As you'd probably expect, the taller the corn gets the more prone it is going to be to blowing over.