I don't believe pirates are likely to even be playing multiplayer in the first place. Everything is tied into Steam this time around, even for those who bought the box off the shelf.
Eve Online stole 200 billion "kredits", which he then used as a deposit on a real-world house
What kind of a bank would take 'kredits' as deposit for a house and where can I sign up for an account? I have 500 billion ZWD to use as collateral for a loan.
In-game currencies are commonly traded for real-world cash. Right now it looks like 200 billion ISK is worth about US$8000.
If you actually read the filing with the FCC, you'd find that so long as the overall bandwidth limit at the the CMTS are not exceeded, a user can use 100% of his provisioned bandwidth indefinitely. It is ONLY after network congestion reaches its limit that the system searches for high-usage users and moves them to a lower priority.
The summary and TFA incorrectly state that when EITHER condition is met, a user's connection will be throttled, when actually BOTH conditions need to be true.
The iPhone definitely expands the (Things I can do):(Things in my pockets) ratio by an order of magnitude or two, but I don't think it will ever deliver the same kind of gaming experience as a DS or PSP. Maybe it's my dislike for EA or my refusal to pay +$10 for a game when there are so many thousands of options in the $0-$1.99 range, but it seems like games approaching the sort of quality we take for granted on a DS are few and far between.
I'll never carry a DS because, as you said, the iPhone is good enough to kill some time on the bus or standing in line. But after a long day of texting, facebook, internet browsing, phone calls, etc., etc., if you fire up a 3D game like minigore or dungeon hunter you can almost hear the battery scream. While the accelerometer and multi-touch screen allow quite a bit of flexibility, sometimes you just can't beat a D-pad and a couple of real buttons.
In spite of the convenience of the one-device-to-rule-them-all, I think there will always be a market for some sort of game-centric portable device.
I merged my account as soon as I could to take advantage of the authenticator app for the iphone. The first week or so there were some connection issues once in a while, but they worked the kinks out and it's been smooth as butter for many months.
The only difference now is that your login is your full email address instead of an arbitrary user name.
About a year ago, I was asked to be the guinea pig and test out all our engineering applications in Vista. I immediately cringed at the thought of running our 3D Solid Modeling software in the new OS.
My fears were quickly put to rest though. It turns out Solidworks ran flawlessly, and turned out to be far more stable than it was in XP64. Additionally, I found that it would start in a fraction of the time every morning, and I was no longer subjected to 5 minutes of hard disk grinding if I left the application open when I went to lunch. AutoCAD and our 8 year old ERP software had no issues, either. I make frequent use of the improved search features to find a particular drawing or part file lost in a sea of many thousands of engineering files and directories across a network in a couple of seconds.
Today, our entire department is on Vista. Given the opportunity, would we go back to XP? Not a chance.
Just yesterday I called to inquire about acquiring another HD cable box for a new TV in my home. They quoted me an approximate $5/mo. to lease the additional box. When I went to pick it up they told me the lease on the FIRST box is $5 and each additional is $15/mo. Then they told me I needed to have a technician come out and run a new cable because connecting to the same line that my cable modem is on wouldn't work.
I explained to them that they weren't dealing with your average garden variety mindless idiot, and that I'd like to cancel my service. At that point they offered me the additional box at the $5/mo originally quoted, and knocked an additional $20/mo off my bill to keep me as a customer.
I guess the moral of the story is that they love to prey on the stupid but are quick to change their tune when you call them out on it.
When the Google Deathbot (Beta) robotic army goes berserk and attempts to wipe its creators off the face of the planet, the last thing you'll be worried about is how you accessed your reading material.
During the murky period between earning my degree and finding a real people job, I spent some time as a computer salesman at a big-box electronics retailer.
I often found myself in a position where I not only had to accept a customer's ignorance, but also had to go along with it as if they knew what they were talking about. Correcting a customer, no matter how polite you are, makes them feel stupid and less likely to buy from you.
I sold a great many systems by avoiding any sort of discussion regarding the guts of a particular PC at all, instead opting to figure out what they were planning on doing with it and pointing out several systems that would just get the job done.
Try taking your Linux box down to your local Geek Squad desk and watching the kid behind the counter squirm as you explain that GDM fails to start, leaving you at a console login prompt.
If some ignoramus were to threaten me legally over my voluntary contributions to a worthy, harmless, and completely legal cause, without conducting any prior research in an attempt to educate themselves about the issue they are attacking, my response would have been far less eloquent than Mr. Starks'.
1) SLi on these cards is just as buggy in Vista 64 as it was in Vista 32, but no worse as far as I can tell: lots of program crashes, display adapter not responding and restarting, and occasional BSODs. I haven't been able to decipher if it is the drivers, the cards, or even worse, my funky mobo.
Update: It turns out all the trouble was due to a BIOS setting. Turning off "SLI BROADCAST APERTURE" made the instability go away entirely.
It turns out that hardly anybody knows what the setting even is or does, and I have no noticable drop in performance by having it disabled. One comment did say that it allows your graphics cards to operate in SLi even in the absence of an SLi bridge, but I haven't been able to confirm this. I haven't even seen a bridge-less SLi capable card since the 6800.
If anyone actually knows what the setting does for sure, i'd love to know.
It's also worth noting that at least when I bought it, the 64-bit DVD only comes in the box with Vista Ultimate. For all other editions, you'll need to either have MS ship you the disc via snail mail for 10 bucks, or find some place to download the.iso.
I don't know about you, but I haven't played any 3D games lately where I stare at a static image for 2 minutes. The shader effects are what REALLY set DX9 and DX10 apart, and screen shots don't really do shader effects justice. I assure you, there is a notable difference.
Fross, my setup is somewhat similar, and though I stopped considering myself a computer whiz a few years ago, I can tell you what I've learned through the experience. First, my system:
C2D E6420 ASUS P5N32-E SLi Plus mobo (hybrid chipset incorporating a 650i and somethin else i can't remember... dual 16x PCIe!) 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM (currently OC'd to 1066 to match FSB. OCZ Reaper series looks funny but good stuff!) Vista 64 2x eVGA 8800GT in SLi
What I've learned:
1) SLi on these cards is just as buggy in Vista 64 as it was in Vista 32, but no worse as far as I can tell: lots of program crashes, display adapter not responding and restarting, and occasional BSODs. I haven't been able to decipher if it is the drivers, the cards, or even worse, my funky mobo. These problems get worse as the games get more complex. WoW has no trouble, but I'm lucky if Crysis runs for 15 minutes.
2) In non-SLi, even under Vista 64 with modest overclocking, the cards are as solid as a rock.
3) It seems that moving from vista 32 to vista 64 and 4GB RAM, loading times have actually slightly INCREASED. (It's also worth noting that my $7000 3D CAD workstation at work takes longer than I would expect to load things. It's running XP x64.) No clue why this happens, but once games are loaded, they are smoother, probably due to the crapton of new memory available.
4) Not smooth enough to say I got a huge benefit from upgrading from 2GB of memory. Crysis WAS playable with 2GB after all. Vista eats up tons of memory at idle but I believe it offloads as much OS stuff to the swap file as possible while you're playing full-screen games, so games actually run much better than you'd think. Just don't try to alt-tab!
5) You may already know this but in case others dont (I didn't): Microsoft will tell you (and is correct in the fact that) Vista 32 can utilize 4 GB of memory. What they don't tell you is that the limit INCLUDES the memory of every other component in your system, INCLUDING your video cards. When it was all said and done, with my SLi setup, Vista32 only saw 2.5.
6) As a whole, am I disappointed in Vista's performance for gaming? Absolutely not. HL2:EP2, TF2, Bioshock, CoD4 to name a few ran exceptionally WELL in Vista even with only 2GB memory. Even Crysis was playable on High. In my own experience, Vista manages its bloat impressively well. Contrary to popular belief, Aero does NOT cripple your gameplay on recent graphics cards. On full screen games, it gets turned off automatically (and quickly). For an even better example, I play WoW at 1680x1050 in full-screen windowed mode (it makes sense if you play) to make alt-tabbing faster and easier. WoW will fully render with NO drop in fps when I use flip 3D, with the Aero UI remaining as fluid as could be in the process. I don't care who you are, that's impressive. Vista has it's issues, and I can see how it would absolutely cripple an older PC, but with modern hardware it's definately not as bad as people make it out to be. So far, I have not experienced a single issue which makes me regret moving from XP. All this coming from a pessimist.. Sheesh.
7) I will point out that if you have a Creative X-Fi sound card, Vista's new sound system will go to war with it. I'd imagine older cards would be even worse. I can't help but blame Creative though... If I can get 64 bit Vista drivers for my 6 year old printer which work just fine, then why can't Creative muster some appropriate drivers for its FLAGSHIP LINE?
Fross, you're going to need to go 64 bit to take advantage of your memory. Whether you go XP 64 or Vista 64 is up to you, but I can tell you that Vista wasn't all bad.
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Private server hacks nonwithstanding, of course.
I don't believe pirates are likely to even be playing multiplayer in the first place. Everything is tied into Steam this time around, even for those who bought the box off the shelf.
Eve Online stole 200 billion "kredits", which he then used as a deposit on a real-world house
What kind of a bank would take 'kredits' as deposit for a house and where can I sign up for an account? I have 500 billion ZWD to use as collateral for a loan.
In-game currencies are commonly traded for real-world cash. Right now it looks like 200 billion ISK is worth about US$8000.
If you actually read the filing with the FCC, you'd find that so long as the overall bandwidth limit at the the CMTS are not exceeded, a user can use 100% of his provisioned bandwidth indefinitely. It is ONLY after network congestion reaches its limit that the system searches for high-usage users and moves them to a lower priority.
The summary and TFA incorrectly state that when EITHER condition is met, a user's connection will be throttled, when actually BOTH conditions need to be true.
Also, TFA is from January 2009...
The iPhone definitely expands the (Things I can do):(Things in my pockets) ratio by an order of magnitude or two, but I don't think it will ever deliver the same kind of gaming experience as a DS or PSP. Maybe it's my dislike for EA or my refusal to pay +$10 for a game when there are so many thousands of options in the $0-$1.99 range, but it seems like games approaching the sort of quality we take for granted on a DS are few and far between.
I'll never carry a DS because, as you said, the iPhone is good enough to kill some time on the bus or standing in line. But after a long day of texting, facebook, internet browsing, phone calls, etc., etc., if you fire up a 3D game like minigore or dungeon hunter you can almost hear the battery scream. While the accelerometer and multi-touch screen allow quite a bit of flexibility, sometimes you just can't beat a D-pad and a couple of real buttons.
In spite of the convenience of the one-device-to-rule-them-all, I think there will always be a market for some sort of game-centric portable device.
I merged my account as soon as I could to take advantage of the authenticator app for the iphone. The first week or so there were some connection issues once in a while, but they worked the kinks out and it's been smooth as butter for many months.
The only difference now is that your login is your full email address instead of an arbitrary user name.
About a year ago, I was asked to be the guinea pig and test out all our engineering applications in Vista. I immediately cringed at the thought of running our 3D Solid Modeling software in the new OS.
My fears were quickly put to rest though. It turns out Solidworks ran flawlessly, and turned out to be far more stable than it was in XP64. Additionally, I found that it would start in a fraction of the time every morning, and I was no longer subjected to 5 minutes of hard disk grinding if I left the application open when I went to lunch. AutoCAD and our 8 year old ERP software had no issues, either. I make frequent use of the improved search features to find a particular drawing or part file lost in a sea of many thousands of engineering files and directories across a network in a couple of seconds.
Today, our entire department is on Vista. Given the opportunity, would we go back to XP? Not a chance.
Just yesterday I called to inquire about acquiring another HD cable box for a new TV in my home. They quoted me an approximate $5/mo. to lease the additional box. When I went to pick it up they told me the lease on the FIRST box is $5 and each additional is $15/mo. Then they told me I needed to have a technician come out and run a new cable because connecting to the same line that my cable modem is on wouldn't work.
I explained to them that they weren't dealing with your average garden variety mindless idiot, and that I'd like to cancel my service. At that point they offered me the additional box at the $5/mo originally quoted, and knocked an additional $20/mo off my bill to keep me as a customer.
I guess the moral of the story is that they love to prey on the stupid but are quick to change their tune when you call them out on it.
When the Google Deathbot (Beta) robotic army goes berserk and attempts to wipe its creators off the face of the planet, the last thing you'll be worried about is how you accessed your reading material.
During the murky period between earning my degree and finding a real people job, I spent some time as a computer salesman at a big-box electronics retailer.
I often found myself in a position where I not only had to accept a customer's ignorance, but also had to go along with it as if they knew what they were talking about. Correcting a customer, no matter how polite you are, makes them feel stupid and less likely to buy from you.
I sold a great many systems by avoiding any sort of discussion regarding the guts of a particular PC at all, instead opting to figure out what they were planning on doing with it and pointing out several systems that would just get the job done.
Try taking your Linux box down to your local Geek Squad desk and watching the kid behind the counter squirm as you explain that GDM fails to start, leaving you at a console login prompt.
2GB ASCII art would seem pretty suspicious to me.
If some ignoramus were to threaten me legally over my voluntary contributions to a worthy, harmless, and completely legal cause, without conducting any prior research in an attempt to educate themselves about the issue they are attacking, my response would have been far less eloquent than Mr. Starks'.
I guess now we can only get images in 640x480 with 256 colors...
Update: It turns out all the trouble was due to a BIOS setting. Turning off "SLI BROADCAST APERTURE" made the instability go away entirely.
It turns out that hardly anybody knows what the setting even is or does, and I have no noticable drop in performance by having it disabled. One comment did say that it allows your graphics cards to operate in SLi even in the absence of an SLi bridge, but I haven't been able to confirm this. I haven't even seen a bridge-less SLi capable card since the 6800.
If anyone actually knows what the setting does for sure, i'd love to know.
It's also worth noting that at least when I bought it, the 64-bit DVD only comes in the box with Vista Ultimate. For all other editions, you'll need to either have MS ship you the disc via snail mail for 10 bucks, or find some place to download the .iso.
I don't know about you, but I haven't played any 3D games lately where I stare at a static image for 2 minutes. The shader effects are what REALLY set DX9 and DX10 apart, and screen shots don't really do shader effects justice. I assure you, there is a notable difference.
Fross, my setup is somewhat similar, and though I stopped considering myself a computer whiz a few years ago, I can tell you what I've learned through the experience. First, my system:
C2D E6420
ASUS P5N32-E SLi Plus mobo (hybrid chipset incorporating a 650i and somethin else i can't remember... dual 16x PCIe!)
4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM (currently OC'd to 1066 to match FSB. OCZ Reaper series looks funny but good stuff!)
Vista 64
2x eVGA 8800GT in SLi
What I've learned:
1) SLi on these cards is just as buggy in Vista 64 as it was in Vista 32, but no worse as far as I can tell: lots of program crashes, display adapter not responding and restarting, and occasional BSODs. I haven't been able to decipher if it is the drivers, the cards, or even worse, my funky mobo. These problems get worse as the games get more complex. WoW has no trouble, but I'm lucky if Crysis runs for 15 minutes.
2) In non-SLi, even under Vista 64 with modest overclocking, the cards are as solid as a rock.
3) It seems that moving from vista 32 to vista 64 and 4GB RAM, loading times have actually slightly INCREASED. (It's also worth noting that my $7000 3D CAD workstation at work takes longer than I would expect to load things. It's running XP x64.) No clue why this happens, but once games are loaded, they are smoother, probably due to the crapton of new memory available.
4) Not smooth enough to say I got a huge benefit from upgrading from 2GB of memory. Crysis WAS playable with 2GB after all. Vista eats up tons of memory at idle but I believe it offloads as much OS stuff to the swap file as possible while you're playing full-screen games, so games actually run much better than you'd think. Just don't try to alt-tab!
5) You may already know this but in case others dont (I didn't): Microsoft will tell you (and is correct in the fact that) Vista 32 can utilize 4 GB of memory. What they don't tell you is that the limit INCLUDES the memory of every other component in your system, INCLUDING your video cards. When it was all said and done, with my SLi setup, Vista32 only saw 2.5.
6) As a whole, am I disappointed in Vista's performance for gaming? Absolutely not. HL2:EP2, TF2, Bioshock, CoD4 to name a few ran exceptionally WELL in Vista even with only 2GB memory. Even Crysis was playable on High. In my own experience, Vista manages its bloat impressively well. Contrary to popular belief, Aero does NOT cripple your gameplay on recent graphics cards. On full screen games, it gets turned off automatically (and quickly). For an even better example, I play WoW at 1680x1050 in full-screen windowed mode (it makes sense if you play) to make alt-tabbing faster and easier. WoW will fully render with NO drop in fps when I use flip 3D, with the Aero UI remaining as fluid as could be in the process. I don't care who you are, that's impressive. Vista has it's issues, and I can see how it would absolutely cripple an older PC, but with modern hardware it's definately not as bad as people make it out to be. So far, I have not experienced a single issue which makes me regret moving from XP. All this coming from a pessimist.. Sheesh.
7) I will point out that if you have a Creative X-Fi sound card, Vista's new sound system will go to war with it. I'd imagine older cards would be even worse. I can't help but blame Creative though... If I can get 64 bit Vista drivers for my 6 year old printer which work just fine, then why can't Creative muster some appropriate drivers for its FLAGSHIP LINE?
Fross, you're going to need to go 64 bit to take advantage of your memory. Whether you go XP 64 or Vista 64 is up to you, but I can tell you that Vista wasn't all bad.