People like to chalk it up to nostalgia but it's not true. Many older games are better in every way than their modern counterparts save for the graphics and physics.
I played Deus Ex and System Shock 2 for the first time in 2008, nearly a decade after they were released. They're now my favourite games of all time.
My favourite strategy game is X-Com. I played that for the first time in 2009, 15 years after release.
I played Doom 2 in 2007, three years after Doom 3. The latter is fun, but a stinking turd in comparison to its masterfully designed predecessor.
The list goes on and on. I've played almost every major modern videogame released for the PC. In a lot of genres the bar was set a decade ago and has yet to be reached again.
We like to hear our beliefs re-enforced. If the facts match our beliefs, more the better; if they don't, well people will just consider it false - regardless of the truth.
Lower power consumption, good for laptop battery life and energy bills
That hasn't held true in the benchmarks I've seen.
Your typical 2.5" 5400RPM HDD uses ~1.5W when busy, the same as an Intel SSD. The idle figures have the same relationship. A HDD might even be better in some cases.
Even if there were a gain, the benefit to your energy bill would be negligable. Even a 3.5" 7200RPM HDDs uses only 6W or so. The idle consumption of the average system is over 80W.
They assume the same thing. Somehow I doubt they bothered to test their ideas.
Your typical forum suffers from a huge number of systemic problems and anonymity is only a small part of it. Trolls get rewarded with attention, flamewars command more, and good posters don't get a damn thing. Moderators get a shit job that doesn't pay and they're probably assholes and sycophants to boot.
Now take Slashdot for example. It's a forum with a structure fit for online discussion. Trolls get modded down so hardly anybody reads them. Flamewars get filtered down to the useful or witty posts. Good posters get their posts modded up, and consistently good posters get to moderate for a limited time.
Result: high quality comments are brought to the forefront, trolls are hidden, and flamewars are curbed. The best posters are encouraged to post more often, creating a positive feedback loop.
As a result this site has some of the best discussion on the Internet. Despite the frequency of bad topics, there are always a number of great comments. Even contentious subjects like religion and politics produce readable threads here. No small feat.
eSATA is [...] marginally faster than USB2 for external drives only and few drives can steadily saturate a USB2 link at all. I'm not saying 480Mbps are enough for everyone [...] FireWire is dying. Zealots are drawing their knives now, but it adds nothing to USB2 or 3. Same for eSATA.
I thought the same thing until I actually tested it. USB2 is very slow; it was probably a bottleneck ten years ago, let alone now.
I have an external HDD with all three interfaces. How long do my backups take on each?
eSATA: 2.2 hours (70 MB/sec, 560Mbps, limited by HDD)
FW400: 3.8 hours (40 MB/sec, 320Mbps)
USB2: 4.8 hours (32 MB/sec, 256Mbps)
This is with a three-year-old 5400RPM 750GB model. In short, any old piece of crap can saturate USB2.
Then about an hour into it I find this room with a ladder where you have to turn around and jump onto a pipe then walk on it to get to the next room. Dang I did it once then fell back down... after 10 tries I decided to go to bed.
Press E. It automatically moves you onto the pipe.
I got stuck there for a while myself. One of the few failings of the game is how it never makes the mechanics of ladders particularly clear.
I haven't seen ANY GPU's that came with on-board RAM that is any different than what you can mount as normal system RAM, however.
You haven't been looking very hard. Most GPUs have GDDR3 or GDDR5 running at very high frequencies.
My system for example:
Main memory: DDR2 400Mhz, 64-bit bus. 6,400 MB/sec max.
GPU memory: GDDR3 1050Mhz, 448-bit bus. 117,600 MB/sec max.
Maybe double the DDR2 figure since it's in dual-channel mode. I'm not sure, but it hardly makes much of a difference in contrast.:)
That isn't even exceptional by the way. I have a fairly mainstream GPU, the GTX 260 c216. High-end cards like the HD5870 and GTX 480 are capable of pushing more than 158,000 and 177,000 MB/sec respectively.
Working more than 40 hours per week leads to decreased productivity
- Less than 40 hours and people weren't working enough.
- Greater than 40 hour work week gives a small productivity boost.
- The boost lasts three to four weeks and then turns negative.
Ford chewed on this problem for 12 years and ran dozens of experiments. As a result of Ford's experiments, he and his fellow industrialists lobbied Congress to pass 40 hour a week labor laws. Not because he was nice. Because he wanted to make the most money possible. We like to think of a 40 hour work week as a 'liberal policy' when in fact it was hard headed capitalism at its finest.
I imagine they want this one to last longer than has been the norm. They make more money from games and upgrades than the actual console. They haven't got much of an incentive to replace it now that they've finally got a design that won't fail in under a year.
Strange. Isn't that in the USB specs? Well if your PC has any spare USB ports you can hook the controllers up and charge them from there. It will work even if it's off.
The Kinect demonstration was the worst presentation I've seen in years. A bunch of insincere, over-rehearsed routines performed with the most poorly feigned enthusiasm a human being can muster. Direct line to the cringe button in my brain.
Unfortunately they didn't demonstrate the tech very well either - just a bunch of minigames and emulations of things we've all seen before. Some of them were really awful. It has potential but I don't think we say it implemented today.
The actual tech was interesting. They've certainly got the full-body tracking down well. That said, it appears to have substantial latency; I'd estimate >750ms from the video. Maybe it varies depending on the level of tracking being done? They were playing racing games on it, and that just wouldn't cut it for those.
I didn't hear mention of the price. I seem to remember that all the processing was supposed to be done on the 360's CPU, so it shouldn't be that much. Anybody know?
Slashdot Mirror
People like to chalk it up to nostalgia but it's not true. Many older games are better in every way than their modern counterparts save for the graphics and physics.
I played Deus Ex and System Shock 2 for the first time in 2008, nearly a decade after they were released. They're now my favourite games of all time.
My favourite strategy game is X-Com. I played that for the first time in 2009, 15 years after release.
I played Doom 2 in 2007, three years after Doom 3. The latter is fun, but a stinking turd in comparison to its masterfully designed predecessor.
The list goes on and on. I've played almost every major modern videogame released for the PC. In a lot of genres the bar was set a decade ago and has yet to be reached again.
Good demonstration. Spin your attitude problems into a positive, then shift the blame to the user. You'll be a star developer in no time.
You'd think the technically-minded audience of Slashdot would know better.
What's the best way to represent this analogue dataset? I know! A boolean!
Presumably most players aren't stupid enough to transport it around. It's a completely voluntary activity.
Why? He knowingly put it in a position where it could be destroyed according to the rules of the game, and it was.
this opens the door for the law to come in and for real world jails and courts for in game stuff.
How? The fact that the guy paid for the cargo with real money doesn't change anything.
The rules of the game weren't even broken, let alone the law.
We like to hear our beliefs re-enforced. If the facts match our beliefs, more the better; if they don't, well people will just consider it false - regardless of the truth.
For the record the phenomenon is called confirmation bias.
:)
One of the many errata in the human mind. If it was a commercial product there'd be a recall.
Lower power consumption, good for laptop battery life and energy bills
That hasn't held true in the benchmarks I've seen.
Your typical 2.5" 5400RPM HDD uses ~1.5W when busy, the same as an Intel SSD. The idle figures have the same relationship. A HDD might even be better in some cases.
Even if there were a gain, the benefit to your energy bill would be negligable. Even a 3.5" 7200RPM HDDs uses only 6W or so. The idle consumption of the average system is over 80W.
They assume the same thing. Somehow I doubt they bothered to test their ideas.
Your typical forum suffers from a huge number of systemic problems and anonymity is only a small part of it. Trolls get rewarded with attention, flamewars command more, and good posters don't get a damn thing. Moderators get a shit job that doesn't pay and they're probably assholes and sycophants to boot.
Now take Slashdot for example. It's a forum with a structure fit for online discussion. Trolls get modded down so hardly anybody reads them. Flamewars get filtered down to the useful or witty posts. Good posters get their posts modded up, and consistently good posters get to moderate for a limited time.
Result: high quality comments are brought to the forefront, trolls are hidden, and flamewars are curbed. The best posters are encouraged to post more often, creating a positive feedback loop.
As a result this site has some of the best discussion on the Internet. Despite the frequency of bad topics, there are always a number of great comments. Even contentious subjects like religion and politics produce readable threads here. No small feat.
eSATA is [...] marginally faster than USB2 for external drives only and few drives can steadily saturate a USB2 link at all. I'm not saying 480Mbps are enough for everyone [...] FireWire is dying. Zealots are drawing their knives now, but it adds nothing to USB2 or 3. Same for eSATA.
I thought the same thing until I actually tested it. USB2 is very slow; it was probably a bottleneck ten years ago, let alone now.
I have an external HDD with all three interfaces. How long do my backups take on each?
eSATA: 2.2 hours (70 MB/sec, 560Mbps, limited by HDD)
FW400: 3.8 hours (40 MB/sec, 320Mbps)
USB2: 4.8 hours (32 MB/sec, 256Mbps)
This is with a three-year-old 5400RPM 750GB model. In short, any old piece of crap can saturate USB2.
A vague allusion and a car analogy. Yup, this will suffice to describe this complex phenomenon. What an insight.
Shut up retard.
You too!
The man leaves the playground, but the playground never leaves the man. [to both]
A very wide asshole? Hell, that's half the people online. :)
"Look at the fucking picture in the fucking article."?
Then about an hour into it I find this room with a ladder where you have to turn around and jump onto a pipe then walk on it to get to the next room. Dang I did it once then fell back down... after 10 tries I decided to go to bed.
Press E. It automatically moves you onto the pipe.
I got stuck there for a while myself. One of the few failings of the game is how it never makes the mechanics of ladders particularly clear.
I haven't seen ANY GPU's that came with on-board RAM that is any different than what you can mount as normal system RAM, however.
You haven't been looking very hard. Most GPUs have GDDR3 or GDDR5 running at very high frequencies.
:)
My system for example:
Main memory: DDR2 400Mhz, 64-bit bus. 6,400 MB/sec max.
GPU memory: GDDR3 1050Mhz, 448-bit bus. 117,600 MB/sec max.
Maybe double the DDR2 figure since it's in dual-channel mode. I'm not sure, but it hardly makes much of a difference in contrast.
That isn't even exceptional by the way. I have a fairly mainstream GPU, the GTX 260 c216. High-end cards like the HD5870 and GTX 480 are capable of pushing more than 158,000 and 177,000 MB/sec respectively.
'Obviously'? I'd love to hear how an unfalsifiable assumption fits that criterion.
It's default equipment; the catch is that you have to configure it before use. Or in common Internet parlance: lurk more.
Many of the other developers in their 50's are putting in 60+ hour weeks (and have been for several months).
Here's a graph you might find interesting: Productivity, 40 hours versus 60 over eight weeks.
From the same presentation:
Working more than 40 hours per week leads to decreased productivity
- Less than 40 hours and people weren't working enough.
- Greater than 40 hour work week gives a small productivity boost.
- The boost lasts three to four weeks and then turns negative.
Ford chewed on this problem for 12 years and ran dozens of experiments. As a result of Ford's experiments, he and his fellow industrialists lobbied Congress to pass 40 hour a week labor laws. Not because he was nice. Because he wanted to make the most money possible. We like to think of a 40 hour work week as a 'liberal policy' when in fact it was hard headed capitalism at its finest.
Wow, that's pretty amazing.
;)
Not so amazing: I missed that and modded the guy up. Posting to undo.
Pretty hypothesis. When the data comes along you can have a theory. :p
I imagine they want this one to last longer than has been the norm. They make more money from games and upgrades than the actual console. They haven't got much of an incentive to replace it now that they've finally got a design that won't fail in under a year.
Strange. Isn't that in the USB specs? Well if your PC has any spare USB ports you can hook the controllers up and charge them from there. It will work even if it's off.
The Kinect demonstration was the worst presentation I've seen in years. A bunch of insincere, over-rehearsed routines performed with the most poorly feigned enthusiasm a human being can muster. Direct line to the cringe button in my brain.
Unfortunately they didn't demonstrate the tech very well either - just a bunch of minigames and emulations of things we've all seen before. Some of them were really awful. It has potential but I don't think we say it implemented today.
The actual tech was interesting. They've certainly got the full-body tracking down well. That said, it appears to have substantial latency; I'd estimate >750ms from the video. Maybe it varies depending on the level of tracking being done? They were playing racing games on it, and that just wouldn't cut it for those.
I didn't hear mention of the price. I seem to remember that all the processing was supposed to be done on the 360's CPU, so it shouldn't be that much. Anybody know?