D&D 4e among many other things eliminated enemies that drain levels on touch since permanently weakening a PC sucks, it disproportionately hits melee classes, and it brings the game to a halt as you recalculate everything every time someone gets hit.
IIRC, there were also spell effects (either actual spells or enemy abilities) that did this same sort of drain to various stats (including level), but only temporarily.
Although not permanently crippling, they were just as much of a pain for recalculating stats for the next attack.
Performance isn't doubling anymore. Cores are increasing, and the pipelines are being reworked, cache is increasing, but PERFORMANCE isn't doubling.
It really is, if you have software that takes advantage of all those core. If you have a single-threaded task, then you probably aren't seeing an increase in performance of that task, but you can now run that task plus something else at the same time.
I have been encoding audio to Dolby Digital recently, and the single-threaded compressor finished the job in about 1-2% of the length of the audio, so, 1 hour of audio took about a minute to encode. Although it has been available for a long time, I had not tried the Aften AC-3 encoder before, but after discovering that it is multithreaded and can encode that same hour of audio in less than 5 seconds on an 8-core machine, I'm never using anything else.
There are many other examples like mine that show overall performance is increasing. Even games now benefit from more cores, although 4 is about the limit of increasing performance for most current titles.
Nobody expects clock speeds to advance much beyond the several GHz possible today.
With the Sandy Bridge chips overclocking about 20% faster at the same temperature, it will only take about 3 more iterations before we are nearing 10GHz.
Given the 90%+ piracy rates these sorts of games see, they'd need to lose a hell of a lot of users to bad DRM if it's actually effective at stopping piracy.
Since most people who don't pay for games won't ever pay for them, it only takes a small percentage of actual purchasers being pissed off about DRM to really cause a dent in the bottom line.
Unfortunately I should have sprung for enterprise class (read RAID approved) drives, as the timeouts are causing drive dropouts. It's nice that a firmware update on the same hardware can cause a drive to not work in a RAID setup, thus ensuring the RE models sell.
I have quite a few of the WD "black" drives in RAID with no issues. I even tried to change the TLER setting, but my drives all have the firmware that prevents that.
I use nothing but LSI controllers, so perhaps that has something to do with it.
That particular space is always hungry for more storage capacity. The difference between populating a 16 bay storage array with 3TB drives vs. 1TB drives is substantial.
That's why smaller is just as important for datacenters.
You can fit two to four 2.5" drives in the same volume occupied by a single 3.5" drive. More drives mean more spindles, which generally means faster speeds. Smaller drives also mean shorter physical seeks, which sometimes means faster seeks. And, the two to four smaller drives generally use less power and run cooler than the single larger drive.
So, as the smaller drives start to hold more data, datacenters win in every way: higher storage density, faster arrays, and cheaper power and cooling costs.
If you run your own caching nameserver, then the only thing you have to trust is the authoritative server for the domain you look up, which you always have to trust.
Adding any other layer (Google, OpenDNS, your ISP, etc.) adds another entity that you need to trust.
Note that if your ISP blocks DNS requests to any server but their own, then there is nothing you can do without trickery like tunneling DNS through a VPN.
With all the hijacking of responses that every public DNS server seems to have, I don't trust any of them to return the correct answer.
And probably faster too, since you'll have a much larger cache and will end up doing less DNS queries past the recursing server.
As another comment mentioned, namebench is a good tool for showing just which DNS server is fastest.
For me, my caching server answered 30% of requests in less time than the fastest response from any external server, with about 50% of requests answered in less time than the average for the fastest external server.
Also, the whole point of TFA is that some content will be much slower if you use a public DNS server, even if the DNS response is faster.
Forget my stupid response, by custom firmware you mean like Tomato firmware for routers?
I don't use a "home" router, so I can't say exactly which firmware has a caching DNS server, but, yes, Tomato is an example of the kind of custom firmware I meant.
The results returned when checking the 'censorship tests' were interesting. Seems a number of sites (wikileaks, isohunt, stormfront) returned 'incorrect' results across DNS servers.
I suspect there is something wrong with their database, as my local DNS server is returning the exact same IPs as all the public DNS servers.
One thing running that benchmark showed is that although most public DNS servers are better on average than my local server at handling hundreds of simultaneous requests, 20% of the requests to my local server were answered in 1ms, and nearly 30% were answered before the fastest public DNS server returned an answer (in 9ms).
Considering how easy it is to set up your own DNS server, and how many advantages it has as far as getting correct answers, and the fact that most queries will return much faster, I don't know why anyone would rely on a public DNS server.
Sure you can, Primary and secondary are setup to openDNS on my router...
I really don't understand why such a high percentage of/. readers use anything other than their own DNS server (i.e., a DNS server in or behind their router).
It's insanely trivial to install a caching DNS resolver on just about any OS and there is also custom router firmware that does this.
You don't really need tools for it. MS allows you to use the WINNT.SIF file for that purpose.
I don't think you can do the job with just WINNT.SIF, since you need a disk with two partitions.
The config options in WINNT.SIF allow you to tell Windows Setup to either wipe the disk completely and use the whole drive or to use first empty space, but you can't do anything else. If you want a custom partition layout, that has to happen before WINNT.SIF is being parsed.
Directory linking goes back to Windows 2000 but mapping c:\Users to it is a bit more difficult as the currently logged in users profile is always in use thus locking the folder.
There are quite a few ways to deal with this issue:
You can schedule the mapping to take effect during a reboot (after copying the files)
You can boot off another disk, copy the files and create the mapping. If you do this, you have to make sure to map to the drive letter that will be used when you boot from the first drive.
Log in as the first created user, enable log in as "Administrator", log in as "Administrator", delete the first user, then set "D:\Users" as the profile directory. Every user created after that point will have their profile in the new directory, while "Administrator" will still be on C:, which is very similar to Unix where the root home dir is on/, not/home.
There are also tools from Microsoft designed to automate installs that will allow the mapping to be set at install time.
No SATA SSD pushes even 250MB/sec for continuous reads in the real world, even when connected to a 6Gbps SATA controller. See the latest comparison benchmarks.
This is because the entire SATA controller typically gets a single PCI Express lane, which is a 500MB/s max. The OCZ cards use 4 lanes, so 550MB/sec or so (which are the actual benchmarks) is pretty poor use of a 2GB/sec max bandwidth.
The 6 and 8-pin PCIe connectors are identical. They have the same number of ground and 12V wires between the GPU and the PSU, the same wire gauge and can carry the same amount of power.
Right, but the HD6970 has a 6-pin and and 8-pin, while the HD6950 has only the 6-pin.
So, the real 6970 should be able to draw more power than a 6950 with the 6970 BIOS, as it has a thicker wire total.
That probably will work for some games, but honestly, given the fact that millions of people do shell out for expensive games, its more likely that your indie game didn't sell for other reasons such as: no publicity, significantly less polish, no franchise tie-ins, etc.
The key point you are missing is the "it's just $X" issue that causes $0.99 iPhone apps to sell millions of copies.
Once the threshold is low enough, you get a vastly greater number of people willing to pay. Then, if your product is good, word of mouth will keep the sales up. If you have more than one good product, you might even start to get loyal customers who will buy simply because of your brand.
Also, "pay what you want" allows people to treat the product as shareware...pay $5 for 5 games and then play for a while and realize two of the games are "worth it", so you "buy" the five pack again, this time paying $20-30. Of course, this model really does only work for items where the marginal cost to produce another copy is very small.
You can't access character by watching a persons eyes or body language.
What do you mean by "character"?
If you mean their general morals, how they conduct themselves, etc., then you're probably right, at least for limited observation.
But, if you mean their "current" character, like whether they intend to rob you, or if they are lying, then you most certainly can "access [sic] character" by watching them.
The Law: SWAT team, flashbangs, CS grenades, door-breaching revolving shotgun, high-powered sniper rifles, professional police with training in simulated urban combat.
If it ever gets serious enough where a significant percentage of the population decides to take up arms against the government, then there will be plenty of people building devices that remove most of the advantage the government starts out with.
Between IEDs, radio jammers, computer viruses, and who knows what else, the authorities would be in tough shape if they had essentially only better hand weapons as their only advantage when outnumbered 100:1
You make it sound like you are payinf $45.72 per blank CD. I normally get my blank media at about or under 5-10 cents per disc.
Perhaps the GP is in Canada, where there is a C$0.21 levy on each blank CD-R or CD-RW.
Since the best price in the US is about US$0.15 per disc in lots of 100, that means the levy is over 100%. Note, also, that this means that you probably aren't getting CD-Rs for the $0.05 per disc that you claim, except maybe at Black Friday prices.
The URL bar now drops down a list of random URLs that has absolutely no relation to anything I have recently entered manually.
It's quite easy to restore the functionality to what you want...just set browser.urlbar.default.behavior to 49 in about:config. I find that "17" works better for me, as it will also search for non-typed URLs.
To restore the URL bar to its former appearance, add the following lines to "userChrome.css" (in your Firefox profile):
/* Hide the "bookmark star" and the "Go button" on the location bar */
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #star-button,
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #go-button
{
display: none !important;
}
/* Set the location bar to show only URLs, on one line */ .autocomplete-richlistitem spacer,.autocomplete-richlistitemlabel{display:none} .ac-title description{font-size:11px!important} .autocomplete-richlistitem{border:none!important} .ac-title{margin:-4px 4px 0px 0px!important;display:none} .ac-url{margin:-19px 0px 0px 20px!important} .ac-url description{color:MenuText!important} .ac-url description[selected="true"]{color:White!important}
Are you really surprised that someone who made his fortune working for Hollywood would vote for legislation that guts the 1st amendment to protect their outdated business model?
No, I'm not, so I'm wondering what his real agenda is with TFA, because the tools that ISPs would use to destroy net neutrality are also very good at doing the kind of things that COICA wants to do.
Would you care to name some major games using tesselation?
Pretty much every new game is using it (at least as an option), although none are as pathological as HAWX-2 (which basically uses it poorly). For example, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Metro 2033, Aliens vs. Predator, Lost Planet 2, and Dirt 2 all use DirectX 11 tessellation.
The other point is that nVidia cards are very good at tessellation, so games are going to really start using it, yet the biggest and best AMD cards still aren't really any better than the last generation, at least as far as price/performance.
Slashdot Mirror
D&D 4e among many other things eliminated enemies that drain levels on touch since permanently weakening a PC sucks, it disproportionately hits melee classes, and it brings the game to a halt as you recalculate everything every time someone gets hit.
IIRC, there were also spell effects (either actual spells or enemy abilities) that did this same sort of drain to various stats (including level), but only temporarily.
Although not permanently crippling, they were just as much of a pain for recalculating stats for the next attack.
Things were a lot smoother at that facility after we found out that the harbor master liked jelly donuts.
I have to wonder why this wasn't your first strategy.
Or, am I the only one where the phrase "harbor master" conjures up an image of someone like Homer Simpson or Louie DePalma?
Performance isn't doubling anymore. Cores are increasing, and the pipelines are being reworked, cache is increasing, but PERFORMANCE isn't doubling.
It really is, if you have software that takes advantage of all those core. If you have a single-threaded task, then you probably aren't seeing an increase in performance of that task, but you can now run that task plus something else at the same time.
I have been encoding audio to Dolby Digital recently, and the single-threaded compressor finished the job in about 1-2% of the length of the audio, so, 1 hour of audio took about a minute to encode. Although it has been available for a long time, I had not tried the Aften AC-3 encoder before, but after discovering that it is multithreaded and can encode that same hour of audio in less than 5 seconds on an 8-core machine, I'm never using anything else.
There are many other examples like mine that show overall performance is increasing. Even games now benefit from more cores, although 4 is about the limit of increasing performance for most current titles.
Nobody expects clock speeds to advance much beyond the several GHz possible today.
With the Sandy Bridge chips overclocking about 20% faster at the same temperature, it will only take about 3 more iterations before we are nearing 10GHz.
Given the 90%+ piracy rates these sorts of games see, they'd need to lose a hell of a lot of users to bad DRM if it's actually effective at stopping piracy.
Since most people who don't pay for games won't ever pay for them, it only takes a small percentage of actual purchasers being pissed off about DRM to really cause a dent in the bottom line.
Unfortunately I should have sprung for enterprise class (read RAID approved) drives, as the timeouts are causing drive dropouts. It's nice that a firmware update on the same hardware can cause a drive to not work in a RAID setup, thus ensuring the RE models sell.
I have quite a few of the WD "black" drives in RAID with no issues. I even tried to change the TLER setting, but my drives all have the firmware that prevents that.
I use nothing but LSI controllers, so perhaps that has something to do with it.
#1 does not account for servers and datacenters.
That particular space is always hungry for more storage capacity. The difference between populating a 16 bay storage array with 3TB drives vs. 1TB drives is substantial.
That's why smaller is just as important for datacenters.
You can fit two to four 2.5" drives in the same volume occupied by a single 3.5" drive. More drives mean more spindles, which generally means faster speeds. Smaller drives also mean shorter physical seeks, which sometimes means faster seeks. And, the two to four smaller drives generally use less power and run cooler than the single larger drive.
So, as the smaller drives start to hold more data, datacenters win in every way: higher storage density, faster arrays, and cheaper power and cooling costs.
This makes no sense.
If you run your own caching nameserver, then the only thing you have to trust is the authoritative server for the domain you look up, which you always have to trust.
Adding any other layer (Google, OpenDNS, your ISP, etc.) adds another entity that you need to trust.
Note that if your ISP blocks DNS requests to any server but their own, then there is nothing you can do without trickery like tunneling DNS through a VPN.
But why bother?
With all the hijacking of responses that every public DNS server seems to have, I don't trust any of them to return the correct answer.
And probably faster too, since you'll have a much larger cache and will end up doing less DNS queries past the recursing server.
As another comment mentioned, namebench is a good tool for showing just which DNS server is fastest.
For me, my caching server answered 30% of requests in less time than the fastest response from any external server, with about 50% of requests answered in less time than the average for the fastest external server.
Also, the whole point of TFA is that some content will be much slower if you use a public DNS server, even if the DNS response is faster.
Forget my stupid response, by custom firmware you mean like Tomato firmware for routers?
I don't use a "home" router, so I can't say exactly which firmware has a caching DNS server, but, yes, Tomato is an example of the kind of custom firmware I meant.
The results returned when checking the 'censorship tests' were interesting. Seems a number of sites (wikileaks, isohunt, stormfront) returned 'incorrect' results across DNS servers.
I suspect there is something wrong with their database, as my local DNS server is returning the exact same IPs as all the public DNS servers.
One thing running that benchmark showed is that although most public DNS servers are better on average than my local server at handling hundreds of simultaneous requests, 20% of the requests to my local server were answered in 1ms, and nearly 30% were answered before the fastest public DNS server returned an answer (in 9ms).
Considering how easy it is to set up your own DNS server, and how many advantages it has as far as getting correct answers, and the fact that most queries will return much faster, I don't know why anyone would rely on a public DNS server.
Sure you can, Primary and secondary are setup to openDNS on my router...
I really don't understand why such a high percentage of /. readers use anything other than their own DNS server (i.e., a DNS server in or behind their router).
It's insanely trivial to install a caching DNS resolver on just about any OS and there is also custom router firmware that does this.
You don't really need tools for it. MS allows you to use the WINNT.SIF file for that purpose.
I don't think you can do the job with just WINNT.SIF, since you need a disk with two partitions.
The config options in WINNT.SIF allow you to tell Windows Setup to either wipe the disk completely and use the whole drive or to use first empty space, but you can't do anything else. If you want a custom partition layout, that has to happen before WINNT.SIF is being parsed.
Directory linking goes back to Windows 2000 but mapping c:\Users to it is a bit more difficult as the currently logged in users profile is always in use thus locking the folder.
There are quite a few ways to deal with this issue:
There are also tools from Microsoft designed to automate installs that will allow the mapping to be set at install time.
No SATA SSD pushes even 250MB/sec for continuous reads in the real world, even when connected to a 6Gbps SATA controller. See the latest comparison benchmarks.
This is because the entire SATA controller typically gets a single PCI Express lane, which is a 500MB/s max. The OCZ cards use 4 lanes, so 550MB/sec or so (which are the actual benchmarks) is pretty poor use of a 2GB/sec max bandwidth.
The 6 and 8-pin PCIe connectors are identical. They have the same number of ground and 12V wires between the GPU and the PSU, the same wire gauge and can carry the same amount of power.
Right, but the HD6970 has a 6-pin and and 8-pin, while the HD6950 has only the 6-pin.
So, the real 6970 should be able to draw more power than a 6950 with the 6970 BIOS, as it has a thicker wire total.
That probably will work for some games, but honestly, given the fact that millions of people do shell out for expensive games, its more likely that your indie game didn't sell for other reasons such as: no publicity, significantly less polish, no franchise tie-ins, etc.
The key point you are missing is the "it's just $X" issue that causes $0.99 iPhone apps to sell millions of copies.
Once the threshold is low enough, you get a vastly greater number of people willing to pay. Then, if your product is good, word of mouth will keep the sales up. If you have more than one good product, you might even start to get loyal customers who will buy simply because of your brand.
Also, "pay what you want" allows people to treat the product as shareware...pay $5 for 5 games and then play for a while and realize two of the games are "worth it", so you "buy" the five pack again, this time paying $20-30. Of course, this model really does only work for items where the marginal cost to produce another copy is very small.
You can't access character by watching a persons eyes or body language.
What do you mean by "character"?
If you mean their general morals, how they conduct themselves, etc., then you're probably right, at least for limited observation.
But, if you mean their "current" character, like whether they intend to rob you, or if they are lying, then you most certainly can "access [sic] character" by watching them.
The Law: SWAT team, flashbangs, CS grenades, door-breaching revolving shotgun, high-powered sniper rifles, professional police with training in simulated urban combat.
If it ever gets serious enough where a significant percentage of the population decides to take up arms against the government, then there will be plenty of people building devices that remove most of the advantage the government starts out with.
Between IEDs, radio jammers, computer viruses, and who knows what else, the authorities would be in tough shape if they had essentially only better hand weapons as their only advantage when outnumbered 100:1
The answer is: that type of search engine has technically been illegal in the US since long before the internet was invented.
Really? Which chapter of 17 USC covers that?
Well, I'd expect Mastercard should reasonably be expected to stop payments from countries where such things are illegal, like the US.
When did search engines become illegal in the US?
You make it sound like you are payinf $45.72 per blank CD. I normally get my blank media at about or under 5-10 cents per disc.
Perhaps the GP is in Canada, where there is a C$0.21 levy on each blank CD-R or CD-RW.
Since the best price in the US is about US$0.15 per disc in lots of 100, that means the levy is over 100%. Note, also, that this means that you probably aren't getting CD-Rs for the $0.05 per disc that you claim, except maybe at Black Friday prices.
The URL bar now drops down a list of random URLs that has absolutely no relation to anything I have recently entered manually.
It's quite easy to restore the functionality to what you want...just set browser.urlbar.default.behavior to 49 in about:config. I find that "17" works better for me, as it will also search for non-typed URLs.
To restore the URL bar to its former appearance, add the following lines to "userChrome.css" (in your Firefox profile):
Are you really surprised that someone who made his fortune working for Hollywood would vote for legislation that guts the 1st amendment to protect their outdated business model?
No, I'm not, so I'm wondering what his real agenda is with TFA, because the tools that ISPs would use to destroy net neutrality are also very good at doing the kind of things that COICA wants to do.
Would you care to name some major games using tesselation?
Pretty much every new game is using it (at least as an option), although none are as pathological as HAWX-2 (which basically uses it poorly). For example, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Metro 2033, Aliens vs. Predator, Lost Planet 2, and Dirt 2 all use DirectX 11 tessellation.
The other point is that nVidia cards are very good at tessellation, so games are going to really start using it, yet the biggest and best AMD cards still aren't really any better than the last generation, at least as far as price/performance.