But 2GB memory on a graphics card today feels a bit useless, unless you're into high resolution medical imaging. The card isn't powerful enough to require 2GB if you want playable speed.
Maybe if you could use that RAM as an application cache in, say, Windows... =) BTW, wonder how this affects a 32 bit system. Should bring maximum system RAM down below 2GB, since those only have 4GB address space. Would make it even more useless to have a card like this. =/
Oh? I simply deleted all my characters, ended my subscription and then e-mailed them, requesting for my account to be deleted since I didn't have any intention of ever playing again and that I didn't like having unused, active accounts lying around the internet. They replied that they would delete my account but that they, for legal reasons, had to keep my customer information in their administrative systems. A few days later, I could no longer log into the account-management on their homepage or into the game, so I assume that they did delete it, or at least disabled it.
This was Blizzard Europe, though. If you're in some other part of the world, they might have other practices there, or maybe I just had the luck of reaching a customer-friendly person at Blizzard.
In a console RTS-game, it would be insane not to add support for keyboard/mouse, even if you don't make it a requirement, if the console has USB-ports or bluetooth-connectivity. The same people who complain about how console RTS-games suck because they lack a keyboard and a mouse would probably get a keyboard and mouse if the game-designers added support.
And, honestly, how much work would it be to add that support to the game, especially if you're doing a port of a PC-game that's already designed with that in mind?
On the other hand, you are quite correct in that many console game-designers seem to have a very consumer-hostile view on control-customization.
Don't quite follow what you mean with "3-D desktop". I certainly wouldn't want any 3-D effect on my desktop. I'm content with having the 3-D engine of the gfx-card drawing everything as if it's 2-D, like WDM does it in Vista today.
2.
Yes! That's been one of my biggest complaints with MS ever since W95. Let me select what to install! But if a minimal install with only basic GUI and basic OS programs/services reach a whopping 1GB, something is gravely wrong.
3.
I agree that they should have the option of installing more themes and that third-party themes should be available and user-installable, but MS can not make a System 7,8,9,whatever or OS X theme without getting royally sued by Apple. Personally, I also think OS X standard look isn't that nice and that OS X really need user customizable themes as bad as Windows do, but each to his own.
4.
Don't think MS uses GCC, and they probably wouldn't gain very much since they already have different kernels loading depending on the capabilities of your CPU. Also, this would mean even more redundant versions of Windows and adds the possibility if incompatibilities between different OEM-version. They should make only one version of Windows and then have the rest as installation choices.
5.
That's also one of the biggest omissions they've done. On the other hand, they do have a very functional and easy to set up multi-head system. Having three or four independent displays is really great. =) If I also had multiple desktops, I'd like them to have display-affinity, so that I can have, say, 4 desktops per display and switch them individually while keeping the ability to span windows over all my displays. Support for several mice and keyboards, complete with configurable display-affinity would be nice too. =P
Vista is just fine beneath the shell, but they really need to fix the UI. They've relocated, renamed and broken apart stuff and spread them over a huge amount of different, inconsistent configuration panels and tools without any visible reason beyond the "Whooo! Look at how much we've changed! And look at all the flashy animation and stuff!". What's wrong with simply having all the configuration panels directly accessible via the control panel? What's wrong with having all the network setting under one configuration panel, all the power settings under one configuration panel, etc, etc. Vista feels like a 8 year old RedHat installation when it comes to the UI.
And in the next version, they should really let the user shut of the themes-service without disabling the composition window manager...
Most current consoles has support for keyboards and mice, so the "Consoles haven't got the right input-devices" argument don't hold true anymore. It's like saying you can't play games that require a joypad or such on a PC, because they don't come with that when you buy one.
One of the problems with windows is that I, as a license owner but not a MSDN-licensee, can not download an updated version of the windows install-cd. When doing a new RedHat installation, I can easily go to their web-site and download the latest version. I can of course download the patches and then slipstream a pre-patched XP cd, but this is a more complex operation than simply downloading an.iso and burn it before making a new installation.
Burning a cd is a mainstream, average computer-user operation. Slipstreaming a servicepack is not.
Large memories on graphics cards need at least that amount of addressing, but sometimes use much more.
In my machine with 4GB RAM and 32bit OS, I get ~3.4GB with a 256MB card, but if I put a 8MB pci graphics card in there in order to get 3 heads instead of 2, I lose another 400MB RAM. =)
In my girlfriends machine, which is identical except that it has a 512MB card, we actually get more usable RAM than in the one with a 256MB card. (When I leave out the pci card) %)
I would say that as long as you still have an account, you are entitled to run the the game since reactivating the account is just a matter of making a payment. If you, like I did, contact Blizzard and ask them to delete your account, you have no license anymore. Your registration-code is used up and you have no account...
But if making a copy into RAM is copyright infringement in the absence of a valid account, so is having a copy on you harddrive or even on the original retail cd's...
Hmm... Wonder how much performance gain there would be with 2GB of RAM with L2 cache performance. =)
That would lead to a similar situation as with the Chip-RAM/Fast-RAM architecture used in the old Amiga architecture, where there's one area of RAM that the CPU has blazing fast access to and one where the CPU has as slow access as the other devices.
The power-adapters shipping with most consumer-grade routers are crap too. Might help to simply get a regulated adapter. Most that come with routers are unregulated, so the voltage will vary depending on variation on the powerlines and current load.
I've also seen this behaviour. One or two CF-cards on one IDE-bus: No problems One CF-card and anything else on the same bus: The CF-card fails to enter ATA-mode, which means that it tries to talk to the IDE-bus as if it's a CF or PCMCIA-port.
Haven't seen any card that doesn't show this problem, but I've only tried about 8 - 10 different cards.
To see if you get real UDMA, put the card in a ATA->CF adapter and see if you can use UDMA. Since you then are using it as a regular IDE-device, you can easily verify it.
The problem with granting a government the right to have secrets from their people is that it in a way gives the government immunity against the law. "So, you say we did something illegal. Sorry, the evidence is a state secret, so you can't prosecute."
I've said this before but I think people in a position of power should face logarithmic scaling punishment for their crimes, based on how much power they have and no one in the government should have the right interfere with the legal system in any way. That way, the higher up you are, the more motivation you have to stay within the law.
I have to take my shoes off before I step through the metal-detectors. Which is, at most, a minor annoyance.
Hehe. I know quite a few people who uses 20 to 30 hole boots as their everyday shoes. Would be a fun sight seeing a group of them going through that kind of inspection. ^_^ Holding up the queue for half an hour while they untie their boots... X-)
Note that the last few times I flew, the planes were pretty much full. Hardly a sign that security regulations have impacted ticket sales all that much.
That would depend on if there's as many departures as it used to be for that particular destination or not.
and making people live in fear is not known to give a great stimulus to your economy.
Which is the exact purpose of terrorism. Terrorists want to hurt their targets by making them live in fear. Killing people is simply a side effect of the methods most terrorists use to achieve this.
So in this regard, the US and some other governments is pretty good at helping the terrorist they claim to wage "war" against. "News" media, like Fox and such, is big villains when it comes to aiding terrorists towards their goal of instilling fear too.
The problem with fanatics is that they can not imagine themselves as being wrong.
Any non-fanatic atheist would answer that it is unknown but current hypotheses is X to such a question.
The problem with many people who has faith in a religion or for other reasons believe in one or another version of "Intelligent Design" is that they for some reason believe that if modern science hasn't come up with an answer, that "We don't know yet" somehow proves their faith.
"Science" can never be proven wrong, since once you prove a scientific theory to be wrong, "Science" no longer hold that theory as true. If, say, the existence of Thor is confirmed and that it is proven scientifically that he is responsible for lightning, then the current theories regarding lightning would have to be changed to include the new findings about Thor.
Nope. Making something you've programmed free or public-domain doesn't require you to host said software. You just allow anyone to host it, copy it and use it in any way they see fit. Also, making something free or public-domain doesn't require you to support it.
Most public-domain software isn't being distributed and hosted by the person/corporation that created it.
BTW, my definitions of free vs PD: Free == Open-source PD == Not open-source but free of copyright
What they charge you is the extra work of developing pro-quality drivers and the cost of adding support for professional engineering and modelling software.
The hardware cost the same to produce no matter how many man-hours and licensing fees you spend on developing drivers. They could of course sell you the card and the license to use the drivers as separate products, but then they would face the problem of people pirating their drivers instead of buying a license.
English works ok in most places, at least as a starting point.
What you absolutely must learn if you want to work as an engineer outside the US is to work and think comfortably using the metric-system and SI-units, since this is what most people use.
I don't understand the base that they use for suing. Is it illegal for municipalities to offer services that can compete with corporations in the US?
Or are they suing because they feel that they're choosing the wrong ISP?
If it's the later, the municipalities should build the infrastructure and offer all ISP's to compete inside this at equal terms... I sit on such a network and have about 8 competing ISP's to choose from inside the same physical network. Competition has a great impact on quality and pricing. ^_^
Getting accelerated 3D, 2D and Video-playback working at the same time is really tricky in Linux, you really have to research in depth what cards will work and which distributions they work well with.
You can't develop closed source, for profit games in that environment. You have close to zero potential customers.
If most modern cards worked 100% out of the box, and there where a stable game-API or game-HAL, then it would make sense to develop for it. The API or HAL must not only do 3D, but the 2D part, sound, joystick support, etc, together with a standardized way of installation and something that would make it possible to distribute binary games that ran on almost all distributions.
Then this system can be ported to OSX, Windows, PS2/PS3/PSP, XB/XB360 and GC/Wii/DS, and we'll have plenty of games on Linux since if you develop for one platform, the work required to port it to the others is slim. =)
Conformity for the win! (At least when it comes to multi-platform development. ^_^ )
1. Put Quadro/FireGL card in computer 2. Have a modified driver save the content that it reads from the EPROM into a file 3. Put Non-Quadro/Non-FireGL card in computer 4. Have a modified driver read the file instead of the EPROM Viola. Your cheap gamer-card is now an expensive professional CAD/CAM-workstation card.
It's already been done with proprietary drivers via stuff like the SoftQuadro hack The problem is that it's not the card doing something special due to special drivers, that could have been hardcoded. It's that the drivers act upon information read from the card. "Oh, so you're a Quadro-card. Well, then I'll fire up my Autocad-optimizations and use multi-threaded code."
They could do that with a nag-screen at boot. "You have unsanctioned software installed! You might experience a non-Nintendo sanctioned experience. Beware!" They don't have to inconvenience their customers just because they want remind them that they bought a game-console, not something that you should tinker with.
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But 2GB memory on a graphics card today feels a bit useless, unless you're into high resolution medical imaging.
The card isn't powerful enough to require 2GB if you want playable speed.
Maybe if you could use that RAM as an application cache in, say, Windows... =)
BTW, wonder how this affects a 32 bit system. Should bring maximum system RAM down below 2GB, since those only have 4GB address space.
Would make it even more useless to have a card like this. =/
Oh?
I simply deleted all my characters, ended my subscription and then e-mailed them, requesting for my account to be deleted since I didn't have any intention of ever playing again and that I didn't like having unused, active accounts lying around the internet.
They replied that they would delete my account but that they, for legal reasons, had to keep my customer information in their administrative systems.
A few days later, I could no longer log into the account-management on their homepage or into the game, so I assume that they did delete it, or at least disabled it.
This was Blizzard Europe, though. If you're in some other part of the world, they might have other practices there, or maybe I just had the luck of reaching a customer-friendly person at Blizzard.
In a console RTS-game, it would be insane not to add support for keyboard/mouse, even if you don't make it a requirement, if the console has USB-ports or bluetooth-connectivity.
The same people who complain about how console RTS-games suck because they lack a keyboard and a mouse would probably get a keyboard and mouse if the game-designers added support.
And, honestly, how much work would it be to add that support to the game, especially if you're doing a port of a PC-game that's already designed with that in mind?
On the other hand, you are quite correct in that many console game-designers seem to have a very consumer-hostile view on control-customization.
1.
Don't quite follow what you mean with "3-D desktop".
I certainly wouldn't want any 3-D effect on my desktop. I'm content with having the 3-D engine of the gfx-card drawing everything as if it's 2-D, like WDM does it in Vista today.
2.
Yes! That's been one of my biggest complaints with MS ever since W95. Let me select what to install!
But if a minimal install with only basic GUI and basic OS programs/services reach a whopping 1GB, something is gravely wrong.
3.
I agree that they should have the option of installing more themes and that third-party themes should be available and user-installable, but MS can not make a System 7,8,9,whatever or OS X theme without getting royally sued by Apple. Personally, I also think OS X standard look isn't that nice and that OS X really need user customizable themes as bad as Windows do, but each to his own.
4.
Don't think MS uses GCC, and they probably wouldn't gain very much since they already have different kernels loading depending on the capabilities of your CPU.
Also, this would mean even more redundant versions of Windows and adds the possibility if incompatibilities between different OEM-version.
They should make only one version of Windows and then have the rest as installation choices.
5.
That's also one of the biggest omissions they've done.
On the other hand, they do have a very functional and easy to set up multi-head system.
Having three or four independent displays is really great. =)
If I also had multiple desktops, I'd like them to have display-affinity, so that I can have, say, 4 desktops per display and switch them individually while keeping the ability to span windows over all my displays.
Support for several mice and keyboards, complete with configurable display-affinity would be nice too. =P
Vista is just fine beneath the shell, but they really need to fix the UI.
They've relocated, renamed and broken apart stuff and spread them over a huge amount of different, inconsistent configuration panels and tools without any visible reason beyond the "Whooo! Look at how much we've changed! And look at all the flashy animation and stuff!".
What's wrong with simply having all the configuration panels directly accessible via the control panel?
What's wrong with having all the network setting under one configuration panel, all the power settings under one configuration panel, etc, etc.
Vista feels like a 8 year old RedHat installation when it comes to the UI.
And in the next version, they should really let the user shut of the themes-service without disabling the composition window manager...
Most current consoles has support for keyboards and mice, so the "Consoles haven't got the right input-devices" argument don't hold true anymore.
It's like saying you can't play games that require a joypad or such on a PC, because they don't come with that when you buy one.
One of the problems with windows is that I, as a license owner but not a MSDN-licensee, can not download an updated version of the windows install-cd. .iso and burn it before making a new installation.
When doing a new RedHat installation, I can easily go to their web-site and download the latest version.
I can of course download the patches and then slipstream a pre-patched XP cd, but this is a more complex operation than simply downloading an
Burning a cd is a mainstream, average computer-user operation.
Slipstreaming a servicepack is not.
Large memories on graphics cards need at least that amount of addressing, but sometimes use much more.
In my machine with 4GB RAM and 32bit OS, I get ~3.4GB with a 256MB card, but if I put a 8MB pci graphics card in there in order to get 3 heads instead of 2, I lose another 400MB RAM. =)
In my girlfriends machine, which is identical except that it has a 512MB card, we actually get more usable RAM than in the one with a 256MB card. (When I leave out the pci card) %)
I would say that as long as you still have an account, you are entitled to run the the game since reactivating the account is just a matter of making a payment.
If you, like I did, contact Blizzard and ask them to delete your account, you have no license anymore.
Your registration-code is used up and you have no account...
But if making a copy into RAM is copyright infringement in the absence of a valid account, so is having a copy on you harddrive or even on the original retail cd's...
I thought the commonly used unit was Library of Congress. =/
How many pictures are there per LOC, so that I can do a conversion?
Hmm... Wonder how much performance gain there would be with 2GB of RAM with L2 cache performance. =)
That would lead to a similar situation as with the Chip-RAM/Fast-RAM architecture used in the old Amiga architecture, where there's one area of RAM that the CPU has blazing fast access to and one where the CPU has as slow access as the other devices.
The power-adapters shipping with most consumer-grade routers are crap too.
Might help to simply get a regulated adapter.
Most that come with routers are unregulated, so the voltage will vary depending on variation on the powerlines and current load.
I've also seen this behaviour.
One or two CF-cards on one IDE-bus: No problems
One CF-card and anything else on the same bus: The CF-card fails to enter ATA-mode, which means that it tries to talk to the IDE-bus as if it's a CF or PCMCIA-port.
Haven't seen any card that doesn't show this problem, but I've only tried about 8 - 10 different cards.
To see if you get real UDMA, put the card in a ATA->CF adapter and see if you can use UDMA.
Since you then are using it as a regular IDE-device, you can easily verify it.
The problem with granting a government the right to have secrets from their people is that it in a way gives the government immunity against the law.
"So, you say we did something illegal. Sorry, the evidence is a state secret, so you can't prosecute."
I've said this before but I think people in a position of power should face logarithmic scaling punishment for their crimes, based on how much power they have and no one in the government should have the right interfere with the legal system in any way.
That way, the higher up you are, the more motivation you have to stay within the law.
I have to take my shoes off before I step through the metal-detectors. Which is, at most, a minor annoyance.
Hehe. I know quite a few people who uses 20 to 30 hole boots as their everyday shoes.
Would be a fun sight seeing a group of them going through that kind of inspection. ^_^
Holding up the queue for half an hour while they untie their boots... X-)
Note that the last few times I flew, the planes were pretty much full. Hardly a sign that security regulations have impacted ticket sales all that much.
That would depend on if there's as many departures as it used to be for that particular destination or not.
and making people live in fear is not known to give a great stimulus to your economy.
Which is the exact purpose of terrorism.
Terrorists want to hurt their targets by making them live in fear. Killing people is simply a side effect of the methods most terrorists use to achieve this.
So in this regard, the US and some other governments is pretty good at helping the terrorist they claim to wage "war" against.
"News" media, like Fox and such, is big villains when it comes to aiding terrorists towards their goal of instilling fear too.
Pretty absurd, isn't it. =)
The problem with fanatics is that they can not imagine themselves as being wrong.
Any non-fanatic atheist would answer that it is unknown but current hypotheses is X to such a question.
The problem with many people who has faith in a religion or for other reasons believe in one or another version of "Intelligent Design" is that they for some reason believe that if modern science hasn't come up with an answer, that "We don't know yet" somehow proves their faith.
"Science" can never be proven wrong, since once you prove a scientific theory to be wrong, "Science" no longer hold that theory as true.
If, say, the existence of Thor is confirmed and that it is proven scientifically that he is responsible for lightning, then the current theories regarding lightning would have to be changed to include the new findings about Thor.
Nope.
Making something you've programmed free or public-domain doesn't require you to host said software.
You just allow anyone to host it, copy it and use it in any way they see fit.
Also, making something free or public-domain doesn't require you to support it.
Most public-domain software isn't being distributed and hosted by the person/corporation that created it.
BTW, my definitions of free vs PD:
Free == Open-source
PD == Not open-source but free of copyright
What they charge you is the extra work of developing pro-quality drivers and the cost of adding support for professional engineering and modelling software.
The hardware cost the same to produce no matter how many man-hours and licensing fees you spend on developing drivers.
They could of course sell you the card and the license to use the drivers as separate products, but then they would face the problem of people pirating their drivers instead of buying a license.
English works ok in most places, at least as a starting point.
What you absolutely must learn if you want to work as an engineer outside the US is to work and think comfortably using the metric-system and SI-units, since this is what most people use.
I don't understand the base that they use for suing.
Is it illegal for municipalities to offer services that can compete with corporations in the US?
Or are they suing because they feel that they're choosing the wrong ISP?
If it's the later, the municipalities should build the infrastructure and offer all ISP's to compete inside this at equal terms...
I sit on such a network and have about 8 competing ISP's to choose from inside the same physical network.
Competition has a great impact on quality and pricing. ^_^
Getting accelerated 3D, 2D and Video-playback working at the same time is really tricky in Linux, you really have to research in depth what cards will work and which distributions they work well with.
You can't develop closed source, for profit games in that environment. You have close to zero potential customers.
If most modern cards worked 100% out of the box, and there where a stable game-API or game-HAL, then it would make sense to develop for it.
The API or HAL must not only do 3D, but the 2D part, sound, joystick support, etc, together with a standardized way of installation and something that would make it possible to distribute binary games that ran on almost all distributions.
Then this system can be ported to OSX, Windows, PS2/PS3/PSP, XB/XB360 and GC/Wii/DS, and we'll have plenty of games on Linux since if you develop for one platform, the work required to port it to the others is slim. =)
Conformity for the win! (At least when it comes to multi-platform development. ^_^ )
This would be circumvented.
1. Put Quadro/FireGL card in computer
2. Have a modified driver save the content that it reads from the EPROM into a file
3. Put Non-Quadro/Non-FireGL card in computer
4. Have a modified driver read the file instead of the EPROM
Viola. Your cheap gamer-card is now an expensive professional CAD/CAM-workstation card.
It's already been done with proprietary drivers via stuff like the SoftQuadro hack
The problem is that it's not the card doing something special due to special drivers, that could have been hardcoded.
It's that the drivers act upon information read from the card.
"Oh, so you're a Quadro-card. Well, then I'll fire up my Autocad-optimizations and use multi-threaded code."
They could do that with a nag-screen at boot.
"You have unsanctioned software installed! You might experience a non-Nintendo sanctioned experience. Beware!"
They don't have to inconvenience their customers just because they want remind them that they bought a game-console, not something that you should tinker with.