Anywhere from 60ms to over 100ms is common. Apparently gamers start to notice input lag at 166ms.
I notice input lag in the sub-30ms range. That's why I disable triple buffering and set Prerender limit to 0, to force my games to spit frames right into the buffer that draws the screen. At 60fps, I want my input lag to be as close to 16.67ms as possible. There's already lag from my LCD changing all the pixels, and lag from my brain registering the change. I don't need any more.
There's a hilarious side effect to this. In some games you can actually shoot near where someone was and score a hit. In TF2 I've headshotted people by firing where their heads used to be. Some games opt to include a 1-2 frame hit detection grace period - I've heard that on consoles, where TVs often have nasty input lag, it can be as high as 6-10 frames. If you're aware of it for the games that have it, you can put it to very good use.
(Also, note that x264 is only one implementation of an H.264 encoder. There are other implementations that will make different tradeoffs to get better compression efficiency at the cost of performance).
Really? Could you cite some examples?
The impression I got was x264 is one of the best, or perhaps the best one out there.
I see some people criticizing VP8 maximum for only matching H.264 baseline. I have to say... I don't care. I care about encoding time. On modern 6+ core systems, x264 encodes faster than XviD, even with tons of quality settings enabled. If VP8 can encode faster with a similar bitrate, for the same perceived quality, it's useful.
Sorry, but there's no such thing as "DRM done right".
What if that DRM results in vastly lower prices?
Here, I'll give you an option. Steam DRM + $3.33 for the game, or NO DRM + $20 for it.
Unrealistic? Nope. Steam is a market, where games easily get 20x the sales as other places. Because of that, sale discounts are extreme, and anyone willing to deal with the DRM (which only ever seems to have issues with Offline Mode - nothing else) can reap the benefits.
If you really hate DRM that much, go to GOG. They have excellent support. I buy stuff off both sites.
a good run-of-the-mill PC, for Office, internet, HTPC... can be had for $300-500. A gaming PC needs more CPU and GPU horsepower, and probably more RAM and HD, which can easily double the price. You've got to buy a whole lot of games to amortize that.
Only if you're buying pre-built.
If you build it yourself, and know where to look for deals, $500 will get you a fast quad-core(or six-core), 4GB of RAM, a motherboard, case, PSU, and a Radeon 4870. You can reuse your HDD/DVD drive from your last PC, and pirate Windows if you aren't a student ($20 licenses) or can't afford it. (I'm being realistic here)
Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking PC resources are there to be used not to just sit there. One of the things I like the most about Windows 7 is that unlike XP my RAM actually is being used for something useful, instead of sitting empty most of the time. I have about 500Mb of my 8Gb free, because thanks to Superfetch Windows knows which programs I use and when and has them waiting in RAM for me.
I'd be fine with things like superfetch if there was a way to signal apps to dump non-essential memory when it's needed. And also a way to signal them to STOP HOGGING I/O.
But as is, slimmed down XP feels faster than Win7.
Not using resources may be a waste, but the algorithms aren't perfected yet, so that's what I choose.
What does this prove? Different versions of IE's can obviously provide the system and application wide libraries too, but there has to be at least one of them installed for it to work.
Microsoft claimed in the past that they couldn't remove IE because so many applications depended on it. (The trident rendering engine is used in many programs - although now webkit is taking over)
They made similar excuses for WMP.
Of course, it's quite possible to upgrade to IE8 without disrupting applications depending on IE6's embedded controls.
And nLite proved years ago that you can remove IE/WMP without removing trident/WMP-codecs - but acknowledging that would be heresy.
Disagree, if you've ever competitively gamed, you're wired. Minimal signal interference, no loss of signal due to dead or dying battery.
One of my friends uses a wireless trackball. It's hilarious listening to him when his batteries start to die. We don't competitively game - but we do stomp newbies and teams into the ground.
I myself use a 3500DPI Razer mouse. Before I begin playing, I blow the dust off my mousepad and dampen it, because it affects my accuracy. I play games like TF2 at sensitivity 20.
When I was in college one of my physics professors told us he doubted programs would ever get bigger than a few hundred kilobytes because cosmic rays would cause the larger programs to fail too frequently.
To be fair to him, a lot of modern programs aren't all that large. Oh sure, there's icons and text and tons of data - but executable code is usually a couple megabytes or less, even for large games. And usually those megabytes can be stripped away by turning off optimizations like inlining, or using one of those strip tools that removes duplicate code or debugging data.
Even though modern OS's are very complex, and guzzle down memory, it's still a whole bunch of tiny programs running, and surprisingly little of that memory used is executable code.
And that's good, because big programs inevitably crash.:P
Google's is probably better than Yahoo or Hotmail because it does search and pattern matching better.
This.
My hotmail gets endless amounts of spam. Yahoo, all I get is spam. Both of these also nuke forum registrations and stuff. Gmail? Thousands of spam messages get filtered out per week, and I've never had a false positive.
Vorbis and Theora are comparable to their best closed counterparts. VP8/WebM has totally closed the gap with H.264, for those who like to split hairs about Theora.
Vorbis is awesome. It's on par with the best AAC encoders, and better than the average ones.
Ogg as a container is quite lackluster - it's not really suitable for video; tons of people have seek lag with it, which other containers like mkv don't have.
Theora is laughable compared to H.264, but it is decent compared to MPEG2.
VP8 is rather close to H.264 Baseline, but for PC-streaming, you should be enabling all the advanced stuff in the High profile. x264 tweaked properly can halve the bitrate over again, with no perceived quality loss.
My Aussie gamer friends are all on Internode, so there must be a reason.;)
I believe their ping is quite low to North America. (Something like 220ms for L4D - BigPond is apparently 250+ ms, in addition to their caps being horribly low)
Someone already commented that the Market app likely pushes such commands to your phone.
If true, then I have to ask - do you get any confirmation popups after clicking the install button? (I don't have an Android phone or device, so I wouldn't know)
But I've been tinkering with Linux a lot recently, and wanted to point one thing out. Distros like PuppyLinux can actually save your session onto write-once multisession DVDs, so settings like your Wifi SSID and password can easily be saved/restored.
I totally agree about the loading times. I've wondered for a long time about why consoles lacked HDDs.
Two things. First - it sounds like you're in basically the same boat as us. (Canada)
CanadaPost/Purolator (Mail/Courier) are basically the best way to move stuff around up here. There is Fedex - but they cost a fair bit.
UPS is on-par with Purolator's pricing, but offers sub-par service. Most packages look like they were drop kicked. In recent months, they've started subcontracting all deliveries to Purolator where I live. DHL is better than UPS, but that doesn't say much.
Nothing beats Purolator for delivery condition (not even Fedex), and nothing beats Fedex for tracking.
Unlike the US, UPS is really bad up here. A great example of how much private corporations can suck. A couple times they've tried to deliver 5-sided boxes with packing peanuts and items leaking out, while requesting $40+ in on-delivery handling charges, for orders that should've cost nothing extra. Fees like that make them more expensive than Fedex, so it's no surprise that CanadaPost, Purolator, and Fedex are top dogs up here.
It's interesting that I've never received a DOA hard drive via Purolator. Newegg is full of DOA comments, so I wonder how much UPS and other sub-par couriers are thrashing your equipment?
Second, wouldn't a 2-5% increase in postage costs solve all of USPS's money woes? This isn't like taxes, where if it goes up, companies get creative. USPS has to deliver service in addition to low rates - if quality service and cheap prices are at the right mix, companies use them. If either one falls or rises too far, companies find alternatives. Raising rates won't lose any customers, as long as service stays good or improves, and they're still cheaper than most couriers. Keeping rates stable but reducing service will lose customers, which starts the downward spiral of less mail volume, leading to higher prices.
Micropayments are any payment where the traditional transaction fee makes up a large percentage of the payment.
So for Paypal, a $1.00 transaction would have about 33% overhead. Anything over ~20% I consider a micropayment - but this would vary from person to person.
It's a bit silly... I suspect they could still rake in cash even if they only charged $0.01 per transaction.
Slashdot Mirror
Anywhere from 60ms to over 100ms is common. Apparently gamers start to notice input lag at 166ms.
I notice input lag in the sub-30ms range. That's why I disable triple buffering and set Prerender limit to 0, to force my games to spit frames right into the buffer that draws the screen. At 60fps, I want my input lag to be as close to 16.67ms as possible. There's already lag from my LCD changing all the pixels, and lag from my brain registering the change. I don't need any more.
There's a hilarious side effect to this. In some games you can actually shoot near where someone was and score a hit. In TF2 I've headshotted people by firing where their heads used to be. Some games opt to include a 1-2 frame hit detection grace period - I've heard that on consoles, where TVs often have nasty input lag, it can be as high as 6-10 frames. If you're aware of it for the games that have it, you can put it to very good use.
(Also, note that x264 is only one implementation of an H.264 encoder. There are other implementations that will make different tradeoffs to get better compression efficiency at the cost of performance).
Really? Could you cite some examples?
The impression I got was x264 is one of the best, or perhaps the best one out there.
I see some people criticizing VP8 maximum for only matching H.264 baseline. I have to say... I don't care. I care about encoding time. On modern 6+ core systems, x264 encodes faster than XviD, even with tons of quality settings enabled. If VP8 can encode faster with a similar bitrate, for the same perceived quality, it's useful.
You would be surprised at how far 512MB goes when you do not have all the extra stuff a PC does running in the background.
And you'd be surprised at all the optimizations that get canned, because there isn't enough memory to handle them all.
Crysis on PC, vs Crysis on XBox360. Vastly different.
I expect that 5 1/3 W is about the minimum achievable, which is pretty good.
The Pandora uses closer to 400mw.
I'm sure it can be improved further. It's just a question of whether it's worth spending money on R&D.
Sorry, but there's no such thing as "DRM done right".
What if that DRM results in vastly lower prices?
Here, I'll give you an option. Steam DRM + $3.33 for the game, or NO DRM + $20 for it.
Unrealistic? Nope. Steam is a market, where games easily get 20x the sales as other places. Because of that, sale discounts are extreme, and anyone willing to deal with the DRM (which only ever seems to have issues with Offline Mode - nothing else) can reap the benefits.
If you really hate DRM that much, go to GOG. They have excellent support. I buy stuff off both sites.
a good run-of-the-mill PC, for Office, internet, HTPC... can be had for $300-500. A gaming PC needs more CPU and GPU horsepower, and probably more RAM and HD, which can easily double the price. You've got to buy a whole lot of games to amortize that.
Only if you're buying pre-built.
If you build it yourself, and know where to look for deals, $500 will get you a fast quad-core(or six-core), 4GB of RAM, a motherboard, case, PSU, and a Radeon 4870. You can reuse your HDD/DVD drive from your last PC, and pirate Windows if you aren't a student ($20 licenses) or can't afford it. (I'm being realistic here)
Hell yeah. I'm a game pirate too, but I'm up to 135 games on steam now. It's just too damn convenient!.. and it's actually affordable.
Glad to see I'm not the only one thinking PC resources are there to be used not to just sit there. One of the things I like the most about Windows 7 is that unlike XP my RAM actually is being used for something useful, instead of sitting empty most of the time. I have about 500Mb of my 8Gb free, because thanks to Superfetch Windows knows which programs I use and when and has them waiting in RAM for me.
I'd be fine with things like superfetch if there was a way to signal apps to dump non-essential memory when it's needed. And also a way to signal them to STOP HOGGING I/O.
But as is, slimmed down XP feels faster than Win7.
Not using resources may be a waste, but the algorithms aren't perfected yet, so that's what I choose.
What does this prove? Different versions of IE's can obviously provide the system and application wide libraries too, but there has to be at least one of them installed for it to work.
Microsoft claimed in the past that they couldn't remove IE because so many applications depended on it. (The trident rendering engine is used in many programs - although now webkit is taking over)
They made similar excuses for WMP.
Of course, it's quite possible to upgrade to IE8 without disrupting applications depending on IE6's embedded controls.
And nLite proved years ago that you can remove IE/WMP without removing trident/WMP-codecs - but acknowledging that would be heresy.
The article contains one correct fact: The submission form is down. Apart from that, it's basically a bunch speculation based on basically nothing.
If it were a blog comment rather than an article on a semi reputable site, it'd be called trolling.
Call me when price is comparable per GB to 1.5T drives. They're about $90, so when the 3T is $180, it starts to become interesting.
Spend the extra $15 and get some 2GB drives for $105.
Disagree, if you've ever competitively gamed, you're wired. Minimal signal interference, no loss of signal due to dead or dying battery.
One of my friends uses a wireless trackball. It's hilarious listening to him when his batteries start to die. We don't competitively game - but we do stomp newbies and teams into the ground.
I myself use a 3500DPI Razer mouse. Before I begin playing, I blow the dust off my mousepad and dampen it, because it affects my accuracy. I play games like TF2 at sensitivity 20.
Also...seriously...how often do you use "lemmings" in everyday conversation?
For me?... probably 5-10 times per year.
When I was in college one of my physics professors told us he doubted programs would ever get bigger than a few hundred kilobytes because cosmic rays would cause the larger programs to fail too frequently.
To be fair to him, a lot of modern programs aren't all that large. Oh sure, there's icons and text and tons of data - but executable code is usually a couple megabytes or less, even for large games. And usually those megabytes can be stripped away by turning off optimizations like inlining, or using one of those strip tools that removes duplicate code or debugging data.
Even though modern OS's are very complex, and guzzle down memory, it's still a whole bunch of tiny programs running, and surprisingly little of that memory used is executable code.
And that's good, because big programs inevitably crash. :P
Google's is probably better than Yahoo or Hotmail because it does search and pattern matching better.
This.
My hotmail gets endless amounts of spam. Yahoo, all I get is spam. Both of these also nuke forum registrations and stuff. Gmail? Thousands of spam messages get filtered out per week, and I've never had a false positive.
I agreed with everything up until this:
Vorbis and Theora are comparable to their best closed counterparts. VP8/WebM has totally closed the gap with H.264, for those who like to split hairs about Theora.
Vorbis is awesome. It's on par with the best AAC encoders, and better than the average ones.
Ogg as a container is quite lackluster - it's not really suitable for video; tons of people have seek lag with it, which other containers like mkv don't have.
Theora is laughable compared to H.264, but it is decent compared to MPEG2.
VP8 is rather close to H.264 Baseline, but for PC-streaming, you should be enabling all the advanced stuff in the High profile. x264 tweaked properly can halve the bitrate over again, with no perceived quality loss.
My Aussie gamer friends are all on Internode, so there must be a reason. ;)
I believe their ping is quite low to North America. (Something like 220ms for L4D - BigPond is apparently 250+ ms, in addition to their caps being horribly low)
Someone already commented that the Market app likely pushes such commands to your phone.
If true, then I have to ask - do you get any confirmation popups after clicking the install button? (I don't have an Android phone or device, so I wouldn't know)
They buy a Linux phone from an obscure company that is also barely usable as a phone, but at least completely hackable.
Nokia?
You only really need to support Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, and Suse?
Gentoo users will figure it out themselves. :P
Many distros have Ubuntu compatibility, so if it works in Ubuntu, it'll work for them. Ubuntu is by far the biggest target.
Who needs Steam? Better, who needs to cut Steam in for a cut for something Linux has native?
Short of a few indy devs, Linux users need Steam to bring them developers and publishers.
Whatever cut Steam takes, it's worth it.
I fully agree with you.
But I've been tinkering with Linux a lot recently, and wanted to point one thing out. Distros like PuppyLinux can actually save your session onto write-once multisession DVDs, so settings like your Wifi SSID and password can easily be saved/restored.
I totally agree about the loading times. I've wondered for a long time about why consoles lacked HDDs.
Two things. First - it sounds like you're in basically the same boat as us. (Canada)
CanadaPost/Purolator (Mail/Courier) are basically the best way to move stuff around up here. There is Fedex - but they cost a fair bit.
UPS is on-par with Purolator's pricing, but offers sub-par service. Most packages look like they were drop kicked. In recent months, they've started subcontracting all deliveries to Purolator where I live. DHL is better than UPS, but that doesn't say much.
Nothing beats Purolator for delivery condition (not even Fedex), and nothing beats Fedex for tracking.
Unlike the US, UPS is really bad up here. A great example of how much private corporations can suck. A couple times they've tried to deliver 5-sided boxes with packing peanuts and items leaking out, while requesting $40+ in on-delivery handling charges, for orders that should've cost nothing extra. Fees like that make them more expensive than Fedex, so it's no surprise that CanadaPost, Purolator, and Fedex are top dogs up here.
It's interesting that I've never received a DOA hard drive via Purolator. Newegg is full of DOA comments, so I wonder how much UPS and other sub-par couriers are thrashing your equipment?
Second, wouldn't a 2-5% increase in postage costs solve all of USPS's money woes? This isn't like taxes, where if it goes up, companies get creative. USPS has to deliver service in addition to low rates - if quality service and cheap prices are at the right mix, companies use them. If either one falls or rises too far, companies find alternatives. Raising rates won't lose any customers, as long as service stays good or improves, and they're still cheaper than most couriers. Keeping rates stable but reducing service will lose customers, which starts the downward spiral of less mail volume, leading to higher prices.
lawd that's a lot of movies in a month. Watching 3 a week is stretching it for me.
:/
"Watch" them, and head to Blockbuster on Monday evening.
He's ripping them to HDD. At the end of the month, he has nearly enough movies to last a year.
Micropayments are any payment where the traditional transaction fee makes up a large percentage of the payment.
So for Paypal, a $1.00 transaction would have about 33% overhead. Anything over ~20% I consider a micropayment - but this would vary from person to person.
It's a bit silly... I suspect they could still rake in cash even if they only charged $0.01 per transaction.