ATI decided to be a bunch of sissies and implement HyperZ technology. 'Discard unseen pixels'? BAH! I'd much rather have these unseen pixels rendered than let them go to waste.
Instead of fudging around with names like ATI does, they've simply decided to follow 3DFX's naming scheme and simply name their cards GeForce(n + 1).
But they do this so badly. 1 -> 2 was just an increase in clock rate. 3 was a new generation. 4 is a clock rate increase -- except for the G4 MX, which is SLOWER than any of the G3 cards. Stupid.
And if you bust your ass, working 60 hour weeks putting your natural talent into delivering projects, you get to watch the 9-to-5 button pusher morons reap the rewards of your efforts. Yay!
A few countries in eastern Europe tried out that philsophy, it didn't work so hot.
The ALTNET / b3d client does seem to install itself without asking you, but it sits quietly in the "installed programs" list, and can be uninstalled in 3 clicks
Do that. Then search for bde* in your Windows system(32) directory, and then explain to us just how effective your "3 click uninstall" was.
How is this an improvement on simulated translucency with a normal LCD screen?
The slight difference in depth just makes it easier for your mind to process the two layers separately. With simple alpha blending, two windows overlaid often just look like a mess.
It is in the shot, you can see it on the lower right of the backside image. It's very small, no one that wasn't looking for it specifically would notice it.
Actually, I think Forever Peace would have been a much more "TV friendly" novel. It's a bit less deep, and the soldierboy sequences would have been amazing!
Apart from the obvious fact that you're making the software non-free-as-in-speech, this makes the dubious assumption that software always gets better with each version.
What about the case where a new version is released to fix a minor performance problem, and a new security bug is introduced? Even with rigorous testing, massive security holes do slip though. No process should be automated that has even a CHANCE of making things worse.
That, or Thinkgeek is just entirely unethical. I think the latter is true unfortunately.
They're advertising that unit as a "High resolution flat panel with 3.1 mega pixels (3 x 1024 x 1024 pixels).". That's a flat-out lie. The real resolution is 1024 x 1024.
More likely it's a DVD decoder card, they use loopbacks too.
Re:Doesn't it say something about society?
on
AdCritic To Return
·
· Score: 2
it also happens to be the only thing on broadcast television that is brilliant. Full stop.
That is occasionally brilliant, maybe. The percentage of good ads is still in the low single digits, though I'd say it is actually climbing. But the sheer volume of formulaic baby-in-costume diaper ads, et al, drags the average down to sub-tolerable levels.
The lame old "Television sucks! Why would you watch TV rather than read a good book?" line is a worse cliché than anything that ever appeared on television itself.
You're either fooled by the pretense and you consider television an artistic medium, or you watch TV and appreciate it for exactly what it is: mildly entertaining shows trying to sell stuff. It can be enjoyable either way.
If you're too smart to enjoy it one way, and too stupid to enjoy it the other, don't blame the rest of us. Just shut up.
I had a copy of that one. I recall it was one of very few games that I couldn't figure out how to play by just playing around pressing all the keys. So no *good* memories, anyway.
Remember site like slashdot are database backed and update very quickly. Sure slashdot caches pages, but many things like user preferences and comments are updated way to quickly for a P2P network too distribute it.
Do you even know what the slashdot effect is?
This has nothing to do with changing slashdot itself, it's about the possibility of using software to help distribute the load that slashdot dumps on third party web sites when their home page becomes the subject of a hot story. Slashdot readers could become temporary mirrors for the links.
Framerate is the rate at which you may draw frames, wouldn't you agree?... Therefore it sounds to me like what you're describing is "framerate," the rate of doing the work of preparing images.
Framerate is the number of completed frames per second that are written to the framebuffer. Hence, any excess beyond the refresh rate of the monitor make no difference whatsoever to the viewer. The intricacies of the internal rendering procedures are irrelevant to the measure of framerate.
you may either draw more frames than you render (which is foolish, unless you combine them, somehow - as in motion blur, anti-aliasing, soft shadows), or you can simply delay drawing the frame until the last possible instant before you need it.
You're mixing your terminology. If you "draw more frames than you render", framerate is a function of how many times per second you "render". If you "delay drawing the frame until the last possible instant", the framerate is a function of how many times per second you "draw the frame".
My analysis is that you're saying that "higher framerate is better,"
But there are a lot of reasons to have a much higher frame rate.
Wrong. Excessive framerate is pointless.
What you mean is "It's good to have the power capable of rendering 700 fps in benchmark X, because that much power will allow you to maintain the optimum framerate in all circumstances.".
There's no point in having a framerate any higher than the refresh rate on your display
Your points have nothing to do with framerate. Yes, more power for more visual quality is better, but a higher number of frames per second makes ZERO difference, once you surpass the refresh rate of the monitor. In fact, it's worse, since you're wasting resources that could be allocated to other parts of the system.
How do you audit that? All an auditor would find would be a VNC server running on the XP box, and a VNC client installed elsewhere. Neither of those, if not used together, are illegal, even under MS's silly license.
You can't give someone a speeding ticket by auditing their garage and finding a car that is capable of going 100mph.
Insiders pronounce
the X of TeX as a Greek chi, not as an 'x', so that TeX rhymes
with the word blecchhh. It's the 'ch' sound in Scottish words
like loch or German words like ach; it's a Spanish 'j' and a
Russian 'kh'. When you say it correctly to your computer, the
terminal may become slightly moist.
- Donald Knuth
That last comment is one of my favourite computer-industry quotations.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, he was joking, and you're the idiot for not getting it.
Nvidia does this too. The call it Lightspeed Memory Architecture II.
Instead of fudging around with names like ATI does, they've simply decided to follow 3DFX's naming scheme and simply name their cards GeForce(n + 1).
But they do this so badly. 1 -> 2 was just an increase in clock rate. 3 was a new generation. 4 is a clock rate increase -- except for the G4 MX, which is SLOWER than any of the G3 cards. Stupid.
A few countries in eastern Europe tried out that philsophy, it didn't work so hot.
Do that. Then search for bde* in your Windows system(32) directory, and then explain to us just how effective your "3 click uninstall" was.
Not true. One doesn't need to run software to create software. How else was the first software written? It's just a luxury we've gotten used to.
The slight difference in depth just makes it easier for your mind to process the two layers separately. With simple alpha blending, two windows overlaid often just look like a mess.
It is in the shot, you can see it on the lower right of the backside image. It's very small, no one that wasn't looking for it specifically would notice it.
Actually, I think Forever Peace would have been a much more "TV friendly" novel. It's a bit less deep, and the soldierboy sequences would have been amazing!
What about the case where a new version is released to fix a minor performance problem, and a new security bug is introduced? Even with rigorous testing, massive security holes do slip though. No process should be automated that has even a CHANCE of making things worse.
That, or Thinkgeek is just entirely unethical. I think the latter is true unfortunately.
They're advertising that unit as a "High resolution flat panel with 3.1 mega pixels (3 x 1024 x 1024 pixels).". That's a flat-out lie. The real resolution is 1024 x 1024.
More likely it's a DVD decoder card, they use loopbacks too.
That is occasionally brilliant, maybe. The percentage of good ads is still in the low single digits, though I'd say it is actually climbing. But the sheer volume of formulaic baby-in-costume diaper ads, et al, drags the average down to sub-tolerable levels.
It did have more bandwidth, once. Adcritic was great when they were using Akamai. Once they couldn't afford that anymore, it became useless.
The lame old "Television sucks! Why would you watch TV rather than read a good book?" line is a worse cliché than anything that ever appeared on television itself.
You're either fooled by the pretense and you consider television an artistic medium, or you watch TV and appreciate it for exactly what it is: mildly entertaining shows trying to sell stuff. It can be enjoyable either way.
If you're too smart to enjoy it one way, and too stupid to enjoy it the other, don't blame the rest of us. Just shut up.
Can any chemists speak to the feasiblity of this? Are there ingredients safe, cheap, and efficient enough for the purpose?
Hmm. Release year 1989. Nope, after my time!
or how about the mystical SENTINEL?
I had a copy of that one. I recall it was one of very few games that I couldn't figure out how to play by just playing around pressing all the keys. So no *good* memories, anyway.
Do you even know what the slashdot effect is?
This has nothing to do with changing slashdot itself, it's about the possibility of using software to help distribute the load that slashdot dumps on third party web sites when their home page becomes the subject of a hot story. Slashdot readers could become temporary mirrors for the links.
Framerate is the number of completed frames per second that are written to the framebuffer. Hence, any excess beyond the refresh rate of the monitor make no difference whatsoever to the viewer. The intricacies of the internal rendering procedures are irrelevant to the measure of framerate.
you may either draw more frames than you render (which is foolish, unless you combine them, somehow - as in motion blur, anti-aliasing, soft shadows), or you can simply delay drawing the frame until the last possible instant before you need it.
You're mixing your terminology. If you "draw more frames than you render", framerate is a function of how many times per second you "render". If you "delay drawing the frame until the last possible instant", the framerate is a function of how many times per second you "draw the frame".
My analysis is that you're saying that "higher framerate is better,"
Sorry, no.
Wrong. Excessive framerate is pointless.
What you mean is "It's good to have the power capable of rendering 700 fps in benchmark X, because that much power will allow you to maintain the optimum framerate in all circumstances.".
Your points have nothing to do with framerate. Yes, more power for more visual quality is better, but a higher number of frames per second makes ZERO difference, once you surpass the refresh rate of the monitor. In fact, it's worse, since you're wasting resources that could be allocated to other parts of the system.
It wasn't even 3D. Sublogic's Flight Simulator and "Jet" were 3D, which is why they ran at about 1fps on a C64!
Huh? What are you talking about!?
Now I suppose you're going to call the "Man-Month" measurement of a project's size some kind of myth!!
You can't give someone a speeding ticket by auditing their garage and finding a car that is capable of going 100mph.
- Donald Knuth
That last comment is one of my favourite computer-industry quotations.
We just need to put a little of that old spin on a Mars mission:
"We must win this space race! We must reach Mars before the terrorists!"