And yes, I'm sure. I just installed Ubuntu on a second computer, and it works, so something is seriously messed up on that one. Must've happened when xorg.conf took a dump. (got replaced with a generic empty one) I'm betting more than just it got messed with.
Simple solution for a beginner: Always use absolute paths until you understand relative paths.
Absolute paths don't seem to be working on my Ubuntu install? I have to change dirs one at a time.
I just verified this doesn't work:
cd/etc/X11
If you know why, let me know. It's very annoying.
Oh - I wouldn't type in "cd Windows" - I'd type in cd %windir% - and yes, it'd go there instantly.
I'm well aware of how relative paths work. I wasn't aware that a preceeding slash indicates root.
1) Wouldn't it be as simple as establishing a couple links or scripts named specific things, which apply to most distros? If file-browser is KDE's varient on one distro, and Gnome's varient on another, it doesn't matter, since you don't need to know the name of the executable - only the guy that made the script needs to know.
When anyone executes file-browser, they get Nautilus or whatever program is the default one...
2) I was hoping I wouldn't have to replace all the default applications.
4) Handy. Got any tips on where I should throw all these aliases?
5) I don't navigate in explorer. I said I used a smart run box. (which opens the correct dir in explorer)
6) O...kay. Googling symlinks next.
7) I'm not going to rename a million files or folders at this point. I'll just live with it and get annoyed.
8) It may be by design, but it'd still be nice if it were faster.
9) I just said I figured out how to set the permissions properly for something I unzipped. The problem is probably that most of the tasks I was doing required higher privs. (compiling, unzipping to/usr/share, editing xorg.conf, etc.)
Mod this guy up! He answered a lot of my questions.:D
And regarding #3 - no, they don't work. I think my terminal is messed up somehow. It doesn't seem to want to change dirs if I enter more than a single one.
cd/etc/X11 does fail.
Trailing slashes may be redundent, but on Windows they ensure the filename is treated as a folder. Old habbit, I guess.
WARNING: The following post is spazzy, and also a huge wall of text. Don't get flattened.
Linux has an annoying security model, for one reason - it's not very unified between cmdline and GUI.
I've been using Ubuntu for about a month now. There's a few things that just don't make sense, but most do. Now that I'm thinking about them, I may as well list them.
1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?
2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?
3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal.
These fail:
cd etc/X11/
cd etc/X11
cd/etc/X11/
cd/etc/X11
cd etc cd/X11
cd etc cd X11
This doesn't:
cd/etc cd X11
Would it hurt to be a little intuitive about where I wanted to go? Apparently so...
4) More #2. It would be much easier to have a way to kick gedit up to root so I can save xorg.conf. That'd save me having to navigate to that folder, which took 10 minutes the first time.
5) Argh. More #3. My Windows partitions often have folders about 8-20 deep. Navigating with the terminal is... horrible. I may have to resize my linux partition and just stick everything on it, because accessing stuff on a shared partition with good organization is such a huge PITA.
6) Oh dear god. I made a shortcut to a file on an NTFS partition and put it on the desktop. The thing is, when I open it, I can't go "up" to the folder's parent folders - it takes me "up" (back) to the desktop. Great. I guess I'll get into the habbit of opening the terminal, typing "gksudo nautilus" in, then navigating manually to the folder I need on my NTFS partition, so that I can go "up" properly and copy stuff around...
And btw, this only takes 1-3 seconds on Windows, because I have a modified run box that opens the correct folder based on the name and some simple heuristics. Why can't linux have a decent find feature? And for that matter, why can't Microsoft create one for Windows? Bleh. They both fail at finding - but at least I can navigate quicker under Windows thanks to brilliant third party coders.
And now some more subjective personal peeves...
7) I hate bash. I really really hate it. A misplaced space, and the whole script breaks down. It's actually simpler for me to script stuff in java than in bash - perhaps because of the more lenient syntax of java. O_o
8) What is up with all that MIME handling rather than extention handling? I have some folders that take a second to display on Windows, but literally take 25-40 seconds in Ubuntu, because of all the identifying of file types.
9) I love the desktop security. Just about everything I try to run off the desktop fails. I tried running a java jar that loads and displays a PNG file from the same folder. It failed - no read permissions! Then I tried un-taring something, and that failed too! (tar -xvvf blah.tar?) I tried to copy it to my NTFS partition, but that also failed, so I re-downloaded it. After verifying they had identical MD5's, I deleted the one on the desktop and un-tar'd it successfully from the NTFS partition. Very cool desktop security. I'll make a note not to download stuff there. That's not really a peeve, to be honest - it was more fascinating to me than anything else.
Final Note: Right now I'm happy and a bit annoyed.
I got systester to compile a little while ago. After that, I installed Fennec, which I had to manually un-tar into/usr/share/, then set up privs so th
I know someone that signed up for with DreamHost last year when they had the $9.99/yr promo one day.
He's been pushing about 3TB per month from his fileserver.:P
Lucky him, I guess?
Even going with a webhost a bit more professional, which won't oversell... like say VPSville or VPSlink, you can get about 1TB of bandwidth for about $60/mo, which comes out to about $0.06/GB.
Plus you get a bunch of beefy VPS's you can use for whatever you want, in addition to the downloading.
Seems like a fine solution to me. VPSville has their own control panel that lets you add more VPS's as needed, and apply an image to them. Setting up another download server when you need it can't be that difficult - although it probably wouldn't work for PSN/XBL stuff.
I agree that Nuclear is one of the cleanest. If you contain the waste properly, it's almost perfectly clean.
But wind really isn't that bad, and compared to solar, it's very economically viable.
I was looking into wind power a while ago, and found some interesting documentaries. Apparently Denmark has turned it into a national industry. They can produce wind turbines so affordably that they pay for themselves in just ~4 years! (well positioned, obviously. Denmark has quite a bit of coast)
Wind power has a lot of myths surrounding it, which may or may not be true in North America, but are certainly not true in Denmark.
1) Wind turbines are noisy. Only when they're malfunctioning. They don't increase ambient noise all that much. Having a busy 2 lane road next to you is probably more disruptive. (subjective)
If the wind is blowing too hard, they can get noisy - but if the wind is blowing "too hard", you have other problems.
2) Wind turbines are high maintainance. In Denmark it has been reported that most last a decade or more with no maintainance. If you maintain them well, they could potentially last a very long time. The industry is somewhat new, so nobody really knows lifespans yet to any statistical certainty.
I imagine in North America, the land where contracts go to the cheapest bidder, we may have more issues.
3) Wind turbines kill birds. Yeah, maybe. Less than Window panes and other glass objects, though.
Bird sees fast moving object -> bird feels strange wind turbulence -> bird heads away from fast moving object.
Bird sees nothing -> bird breaks neak on glass pane.
Killing birds didn't stop windows from becoming very popular. Killing bugs didn't stop windshields from becoming standard on every car.
Clearly it doesn't matter that much to most of us. Even if I'm wrong, natural selection dictates that only the smart birds are going to pass on their genetics thanks to our wind turbines.
I can see not advocating solar, because of the chemicals used to create photovoltaic cells, and the relatively low power output compared to alternatives - but Wind really is quite good at generating electricity. A single turbine in the right location could easily produce 4kw, 24/7.
Wind is abundant all over the place. Areas where solar may be restricted due to space (such as densely packed cities with tons of skyscrapers) are the perfect locations for wind power.
It's a well known fact that city streets act like wind tunnels. It may take a shift in construction architecture, to position wind turbines in the right spots(between buildings, up high, where the wind likes to go), but it is doable, and it'd reduce the burden on the power grid a bit.
I'm sure someone will come and say it isn't feasible - but up here in Vancouver, BC (Canada), many tall buildings are being replaced with earthquake-immune ones. They aren't tall like New York - most are just ~30 stories or less - but many actually dangle off central pillars, which is pretty neat.
If they can be rebuilt for a purpose like that, they could also design them to support wind turbines at the top.:P We just have to start planning now, so it can be done in 15 years.
The XBox360 is not faster than a PS3 - it is significantly slower. The only area it competes is the amount of RAM, and GPU performance.
Your statement is rather like saying "crappy_sound_mixer_A is faster than expensive_fancy_mixer_A because they both play audio and it is cheaper". If your only criteria is that it plays audio(or in the case of the XBox360, the graphics look good), then clearly the cheaper one is better - but your statement of it being faster is still false.
PS3 vs XBox360 specs have been debated endlessly in the past. I don't care to argue. It's quite subjective figuring out which hardware is most important, to determine whether the price is justified.
What I can tell you is, the XBox360 isn't fast enough for this game:
But I have something to add, regarding player count... the number of players possible has been overshadowed by more complex physics. Different kinds of weaponry with more data synced to the server means more bandwidth usage and less players possible.
Companies are also reinventing the wheel over and over. How many games can you think of that sync the positions of everything every "tick"? The Battlefield line is notorious for this. Developers need to take a cue from HTML; if you move a div, the div contents move without having to update the positions of all the contents. Tricks like that can be used for games like BF2142 (vehicles, the Titans, etc.) to cut bandwidth usage down to 1/20th of what it is.
Using more bandwidth to predict movement is important when your position is important to the gameplay - but don't just brute-force it!
Games like Left4Dead really showcase efficient netcode. Even during the worst panic waves on expert, with 100+ zombies, tons of action, etc., it peaks at around 30KB/sec upstream for 4 players. Versus is worse - to do eight, you need about 150KB/sec bandwidth - but considering how much data it's syncing, it's impressive. A game like BF2142 would use 300KB/sec per player to sync that much stuff (about 14MB/sec), which is probably why it lags like shit when Titans start moving, and the 10mbit servers surpass their max.
Final Note: I last played BF2142 about a year ago. It may be better now, but knowing EA and the rest of the battlefield franchise, probably not.
Adblock kills a lot of those ads, but it still happens.
Adblock won't save you from meatspin, goatse.cx, or encyclopediadramatica.
I google a lot of domains first to check out what they are, but I did get tricked into going to encyclopediadramatica to "help with a research report".
I got a kick out of reading his blog. Seems like a really neat project to learn how computers work at the lowest level.
I agree with you about the choice of microcontroller, though. Atmel AVRs are very popular, and are available in significantly more powerful varieties. Check out this one; it has 16KiB of S-RAM on the CPU, so you can save yourself the 2x8KiB chips he used, which means reduced cost.
Another one to consider is the Parallax Propeller. They aren't too popular, but have impressive capabilities, ignoring the price. It's basically an ultra-low-power 8-core microcontroller. The design is... fascinating. They created it with the same philosophy as older CPUs; rather than stamping big blocks together, every transistor was charted out by hand. (well, for the most part:P ) Apparently it has no interrupt handling, which introduces some different programming philosophies as well.
And failing that... a Cortex m3. That's a powerful one. Although it uses a standard un-interesting architecture, it's also quite fast. With enough RAM you could do SNES-level stuff quite easily.
Yep, Australia certainly blows as far as ISP choice. I have a friend that lives there, and he's always complaining about it.
We play Left4Dead at night, the first three weeks of the month. Then he hits his cap and the traffic shaping kicks in, knocking him down to 56k speeds.:P
Often when he gets close to the limit, he stops playing with us, and only plays with Aussies. That's because Australian Steam servers are unmetered on his current plan.
I believe he pays something like $70/mo for 25GB. That's insanely high - but so is his connection speed. He can download about 2.2-2.4MB/sec.
I'm in Canada. I'm stuck on a 3mbit/512kbit ADSL line, for $30/mo. My ISP doesn't screw me though; 200GB/mo, so I can basically torrent 24/7 without reaching it.:D
Flash certainly is popular, but I would not describe it as "fast". Its power comes from how easy it is to create flash stuff. Not from having a great backend.
Problems with Flash: -Huge memory leaks -Shitty scripting performance -Mediocre rendering performance of rasterized graphics -Poorly designed input handling (makes it unsuitable for games - ironically)
Problems with Java: -Slow start time -No easy to work with vectorized graphics -Java is "Java", and thus is bad (because java is bad)
Most flash game designs do silly stuff like putting a semi-transparent invisible square over the screen to manage fading. Those alpha-shades every rendering operation on the CPU, and precludes all hardware acceleration.
This game has very poor performance on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP w/ 1GB RAM + 7800GS. It uses many final-fantasy-style sprites/graphics, in addition to vectorized graphics for dialog and the interface.
In Java, even in an applet, simple sprite blits like that would run fine on a 300mhz P2. However, character portraits and the interface would have to be rasterized to work in Java.
Verdict: Both have negatives. Flash runs (very) slow, but is fast to create. Java runs fast(er), but is (very) slow to create.
When a flash "movie" tries to run at a high framerate... Flash allows it. And then it fails.
Flash rendering slows down, but input does not. This means that if a game wants 200fps, but the computer can only render 20fps, input can lag up to ~10 seconds because of how the flash input handling works. It buffers input, but doesn't skip any slots in the buffer. You get 200 slots per second at 200fps, but if it takes 10 seconds to clear the buffer, oh well. Once the buffer is clear, it accepts another second of input, then waits for it to clear again.
This makes playing flash games on slower computers (such as netbooks) quite challenging.
It's worth noting that flash also interferes with general IO. While the input buffer is overflowing (the time between the first second of receiving input until the buffer is clear) it garbages your keyboard presses and mouse movement/clicks, and also does something that screws up other IO on your system.
It has been reported that flash messes up monitoring software like SpeedFan, MBM, etc.; it's like it gets caught in an endless loop saturating all IO. I've seen systems reboot because they thought they were overheating, because of a flash movie not playing at 100% speed.
Adobe is ignoring these issues.
Verdict: It falls to the developer to pick a framerate that will run on slower systems.
Remarkable game. Unfortunately, your saved games may be cleared upon upgrading your flash player. Also, there's the insane input lag on slower systems.
Frequently I go to a website after upgrading my flash player, and all my old scores are gone. Oh well? I guess that may be a good thing - it also means every flash tracking cookie vanishes at the same time.
Verdict: Flash needs a second kind of storage - persistent storage - which is guaranteed not to be cleared at random intervals, or by upgrading the player.
He's being sarcastic. He's saying we should start by redesigning Flash and Java. (or basically, cutting their backwards compatibility to glean a simpler non-bastardized codebase)
It seems like every open source project eventually swerves off the road and into a ditch.
-OpenOffice v3.0 (fails to register extensions on many Windows systems; no file extension dialog) -Deluge Bit Torrent (Options to start in a paused state removed; blocklists now load after torrents start and connect to seeds/peers) -CVS (I've never used it, but why do you think SVN and GIT now exist?) -Gnome (Kills apps instantly. I don't mind, to be honest. I even use this feature to my WinXP box - although it waits 5 secs before killing them off.) -GIMP (Now out of the ditch, but around v2.2, "stable" meant it ran at least 2 minutes without crashing, and 75% of the plugins can be used without an instant-crash.) -Firefox v1.5 (Hehe... I still rememeber the leaks and crashes. And the swallowing my profile whole, and spitting out an empty one. And the erasing 60% of my bookmarks for a laugh.)
Slashdot Mirror
Neato. :)
And yes, I'm sure. I just installed Ubuntu on a second computer, and it works, so something is seriously messed up on that one. Must've happened when xorg.conf took a dump. (got replaced with a generic empty one) I'm betting more than just it got messed with.
Denmark produces 20% of their power from wind turbines scattered all along the coast.
That's about as de-centralized as you can get. A good example, if us in North America would like to do the same.
Simple solution for a beginner: Always use absolute paths until you understand relative paths.
Absolute paths don't seem to be working on my Ubuntu install? I have to change dirs one at a time.
I just verified this doesn't work:
cd /etc/X11
If you know why, let me know. It's very annoying.
Oh - I wouldn't type in "cd Windows" - I'd type in cd %windir% - and yes, it'd go there instantly.
I'm well aware of how relative paths work. I wasn't aware that a preceeding slash indicates root.
1) Wouldn't it be as simple as establishing a couple links or scripts named specific things, which apply to most distros? If file-browser is KDE's varient on one distro, and Gnome's varient on another, it doesn't matter, since you don't need to know the name of the executable - only the guy that made the script needs to know.
When anyone executes file-browser, they get Nautilus or whatever program is the default one...
2) I was hoping I wouldn't have to replace all the default applications.
4) Handy. Got any tips on where I should throw all these aliases?
5) I don't navigate in explorer. I said I used a smart run box. (which opens the correct dir in explorer)
6) O...kay. Googling symlinks next.
7) I'm not going to rename a million files or folders at this point. I'll just live with it and get annoyed.
8) It may be by design, but it'd still be nice if it were faster.
9) I just said I figured out how to set the permissions properly for something I unzipped. The problem is probably that most of the tasks I was doing required higher privs. (compiling, unzipping to /usr/share, editing xorg.conf, etc.)
Mod this guy up! He answered a lot of my questions. :D
And regarding #3 - no, they don't work. I think my terminal is messed up somehow. It doesn't seem to want to change dirs if I enter more than a single one.
cd /etc/X11 does fail.
Trailing slashes may be redundent, but on Windows they ensure the filename is treated as a folder. Old habbit, I guess.
WARNING: The following post is spazzy, and also a huge wall of text. Don't get flattened.
Linux has an annoying security model, for one reason - it's not very unified between cmdline and GUI.
I've been using Ubuntu for about a month now. There's a few things that just don't make sense, but most do. Now that I'm thinking about them, I may as well list them.
1) Apps are labelled by task rather than name. I had to use google to find out that the "File Browser" was called "nautilus". Gee - could you label it using the app's name, or make it launchable by entering something like "file-browser" in the run box?
2) No easy way to sudo GUI stuff. Often I have to open a terminal and use sudo to complete a task, which is annoying. Why can't there just be a button to kick me up to root for a minute or two?
3) Navigating folders is a PITA in the terminal.
These fail:
cd etc/X11/
cd etc/X11
cd /etc/X11/
cd /etc/X11
cd etc /X11
cd
cd etc
cd X11
This doesn't:
cd /etc
cd X11
Would it hurt to be a little intuitive about where I wanted to go? Apparently so...
4) More #2. It would be much easier to have a way to kick gedit up to root so I can save xorg.conf. That'd save me having to navigate to that folder, which took 10 minutes the first time.
5) Argh. More #3. My Windows partitions often have folders about 8-20 deep. Navigating with the terminal is... horrible. I may have to resize my linux partition and just stick everything on it, because accessing stuff on a shared partition with good organization is such a huge PITA.
6) Oh dear god. I made a shortcut to a file on an NTFS partition and put it on the desktop. The thing is, when I open it, I can't go "up" to the folder's parent folders - it takes me "up" (back) to the desktop. Great. I guess I'll get into the habbit of opening the terminal, typing "gksudo nautilus" in, then navigating manually to the folder I need on my NTFS partition, so that I can go "up" properly and copy stuff around...
And btw, this only takes 1-3 seconds on Windows, because I have a modified run box that opens the correct folder based on the name and some simple heuristics. Why can't linux have a decent find feature? And for that matter, why can't Microsoft create one for Windows? Bleh. They both fail at finding - but at least I can navigate quicker under Windows thanks to brilliant third party coders.
And now some more subjective personal peeves...
7) I hate bash. I really really hate it. A misplaced space, and the whole script breaks down. It's actually simpler for me to script stuff in java than in bash - perhaps because of the more lenient syntax of java. O_o
8) What is up with all that MIME handling rather than extention handling? I have some folders that take a second to display on Windows, but literally take 25-40 seconds in Ubuntu, because of all the identifying of file types.
9) I love the desktop security. Just about everything I try to run off the desktop fails. I tried running a java jar that loads and displays a PNG file from the same folder. It failed - no read permissions! Then I tried un-taring something, and that failed too! (tar -xvvf blah.tar?) I tried to copy it to my NTFS partition, but that also failed, so I re-downloaded it. After verifying they had identical MD5's, I deleted the one on the desktop and un-tar'd it successfully from the NTFS partition. Very cool desktop security. I'll make a note not to download stuff there. That's not really a peeve, to be honest - it was more fascinating to me than anything else.
Final Note: Right now I'm happy and a bit annoyed.
I got systester to compile a little while ago. After that, I installed Fennec, which I had to manually un-tar into /usr/share/, then set up privs so th
That voice is neat. It's obviously computer generated, but still neat!
Well that blows.
I know someone that signed up for with DreamHost last year when they had the $9.99/yr promo one day.
He's been pushing about 3TB per month from his fileserver. :P
Lucky him, I guess?
Even going with a webhost a bit more professional, which won't oversell... like say VPSville or VPSlink, you can get about 1TB of bandwidth for about $60/mo, which comes out to about $0.06/GB.
Plus you get a bunch of beefy VPS's you can use for whatever you want, in addition to the downloading.
Seems like a fine solution to me. VPSville has their own control panel that lets you add more VPS's as needed, and apply an image to them. Setting up another download server when you need it can't be that difficult - although it probably wouldn't work for PSN/XBL stuff.
If EEPROM isn't ROM, then DRAM must not be RAM, and Firefox must not be a web browser.
"ROM" is generic, just like "RAM" and "web browser".
You're probably thinking of PROM. (there's no erasing that stuff)
Neat! Didn't know that.
Well, I don't know any uninhabited cities requiring lots of power, so I suppose that rules that out!
I agree that Nuclear is one of the cleanest. If you contain the waste properly, it's almost perfectly clean.
But wind really isn't that bad, and compared to solar, it's very economically viable.
I was looking into wind power a while ago, and found some interesting documentaries. Apparently Denmark has turned it into a national industry. They can produce wind turbines so affordably that they pay for themselves in just ~4 years! (well positioned, obviously. Denmark has quite a bit of coast)
Wind power has a lot of myths surrounding it, which may or may not be true in North America, but are certainly not true in Denmark.
1) Wind turbines are noisy.
Only when they're malfunctioning. They don't increase ambient noise all that much. Having a busy 2 lane road next to you is probably more disruptive. (subjective)
If the wind is blowing too hard, they can get noisy - but if the wind is blowing "too hard", you have other problems.
2) Wind turbines are high maintainance.
In Denmark it has been reported that most last a decade or more with no maintainance. If you maintain them well, they could potentially last a very long time. The industry is somewhat new, so nobody really knows lifespans yet to any statistical certainty.
I imagine in North America, the land where contracts go to the cheapest bidder, we may have more issues.
3) Wind turbines kill birds.
Yeah, maybe. Less than Window panes and other glass objects, though.
Bird sees fast moving object -> bird feels strange wind turbulence -> bird heads away from fast moving object.
Bird sees nothing -> bird breaks neak on glass pane.
Killing birds didn't stop windows from becoming very popular. Killing bugs didn't stop windshields from becoming standard on every car.
Clearly it doesn't matter that much to most of us. Even if I'm wrong, natural selection dictates that only the smart birds are going to pass on their genetics thanks to our wind turbines.
I can see not advocating solar, because of the chemicals used to create photovoltaic cells, and the relatively low power output compared to alternatives - but Wind really is quite good at generating electricity. A single turbine in the right location could easily produce 4kw, 24/7.
Wind is abundant all over the place. Areas where solar may be restricted due to space (such as densely packed cities with tons of skyscrapers) are the perfect locations for wind power.
It's a well known fact that city streets act like wind tunnels. It may take a shift in construction architecture, to position wind turbines in the right spots(between buildings, up high, where the wind likes to go), but it is doable, and it'd reduce the burden on the power grid a bit.
I'm sure someone will come and say it isn't feasible - but up here in Vancouver, BC (Canada), many tall buildings are being replaced with earthquake-immune ones. They aren't tall like New York - most are just ~30 stories or less - but many actually dangle off central pillars, which is pretty neat.
If they can be rebuilt for a purpose like that, they could also design them to support wind turbines at the top. :P We just have to start planning now, so it can be done in 15 years.
To block it like that, I'd need a list containing all of them.
I was hoping for a list or tool that blocks the ones I don't know about. ;)
Your statement is false.
The XBox360 is not faster than a PS3 - it is significantly slower. The only area it competes is the amount of RAM, and GPU performance.
Your statement is rather like saying "crappy_sound_mixer_A is faster than expensive_fancy_mixer_A because they both play audio and it is cheaper". If your only criteria is that it plays audio(or in the case of the XBox360, the graphics look good), then clearly the cheaper one is better - but your statement of it being faster is still false.
PS3 vs XBox360 specs have been debated endlessly in the past. I don't care to argue. It's quite subjective figuring out which hardware is most important, to determine whether the price is justified.
What I can tell you is, the XBox360 isn't fast enough for this game:
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/5528.html
Too much physics crap. ;)
I wholeheartedly agree! Furthermore, I demand we ship all those tonnes of wasted Algae to the starving people in third world countries!
Side note: "Bio-" is a catch phase. Biodiesel and Oil were both created from Biological stuff, but we don't call oil "Biooil".
You're right about a lot of that.
But I have something to add, regarding player count... the number of players possible has been overshadowed by more complex physics. Different kinds of weaponry with more data synced to the server means more bandwidth usage and less players possible.
Companies are also reinventing the wheel over and over. How many games can you think of that sync the positions of everything every "tick"? The Battlefield line is notorious for this. Developers need to take a cue from HTML; if you move a div, the div contents move without having to update the positions of all the contents. Tricks like that can be used for games like BF2142 (vehicles, the Titans, etc.) to cut bandwidth usage down to 1/20th of what it is.
Using more bandwidth to predict movement is important when your position is important to the gameplay - but don't just brute-force it!
Games like Left4Dead really showcase efficient netcode. Even during the worst panic waves on expert, with 100+ zombies, tons of action, etc., it peaks at around 30KB/sec upstream for 4 players. Versus is worse - to do eight, you need about 150KB/sec bandwidth - but considering how much data it's syncing, it's impressive. A game like BF2142 would use 300KB/sec per player to sync that much stuff (about 14MB/sec), which is probably why it lags like shit when Titans start moving, and the 10mbit servers surpass their max.
Final Note: I last played BF2142 about a year ago. It may be better now, but knowing EA and the rest of the battlefield franchise, probably not.
Yes.
Adblock kills a lot of those ads, but it still happens.
Adblock won't save you from meatspin, goatse.cx, or encyclopediadramatica.
I google a lot of domains first to check out what they are, but I did get tricked into going to encyclopediadramatica to "help with a research report".
Anyone got something that'll block those?
Didn't NASA discover UV resistant microbes on the sides of their spaceships? I wonder if those are these guys?
I got a kick out of reading his blog. Seems like a really neat project to learn how computers work at the lowest level.
I agree with you about the choice of microcontroller, though. Atmel AVRs are very popular, and are available in significantly more powerful varieties. Check out this one; it has 16KiB of S-RAM on the CPU, so you can save yourself the 2x8KiB chips he used, which means reduced cost.
Another one to consider is the Parallax Propeller. They aren't too popular, but have impressive capabilities, ignoring the price. It's basically an ultra-low-power 8-core microcontroller. The design is... fascinating. They created it with the same philosophy as older CPUs; rather than stamping big blocks together, every transistor was charted out by hand. (well, for the most part :P ) Apparently it has no interrupt handling, which introduces some different programming philosophies as well.
And failing that... a Cortex m3. That's a powerful one. Although it uses a standard un-interesting architecture, it's also quite fast. With enough RAM you could do SNES-level stuff quite easily.
Yep, Australia certainly blows as far as ISP choice. I have a friend that lives there, and he's always complaining about it.
We play Left4Dead at night, the first three weeks of the month. Then he hits his cap and the traffic shaping kicks in, knocking him down to 56k speeds. :P
Often when he gets close to the limit, he stops playing with us, and only plays with Aussies. That's because Australian Steam servers are unmetered on his current plan.
I believe he pays something like $70/mo for 25GB. That's insanely high - but so is his connection speed. He can download about 2.2-2.4MB/sec.
I'm in Canada. I'm stuck on a 3mbit/512kbit ADSL line, for $30/mo. My ISP doesn't screw me though; 200GB/mo, so I can basically torrent 24/7 without reaching it. :D
Yes, but Videotron is evil, so naturally they overcharge. ;)
$1 per GB is a little steep, isn't it?
These guys only charge $0.10/GB.
Your suggestion seems like the best way to go. Up here, Telus(big ISP) has caps at 10GB, 60GB, 100GB per month based on how much you're paying.
SMS dropped network usage by replacing many phonecalls. Offering it is saving them money. They charge for it and make more money.
To them, it certainly is 24 carrot gold.
You're kidding, right? Please tell me you are...
Flash certainly is popular, but I would not describe it as "fast". Its power comes from how easy it is to create flash stuff. Not from having a great backend.
Problems with Flash:
-Huge memory leaks
-Shitty scripting performance
-Mediocre rendering performance of rasterized graphics
-Poorly designed input handling (makes it unsuitable for games - ironically)
Problems with Java:
-Slow start time
-No easy to work with vectorized graphics
-Java is "Java", and thus is bad (because java is bad)
Here's the proof.
Claim 1: Flash rendering performance is very poor.
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/408513
Most flash game designs do silly stuff like putting a semi-transparent invisible square over the screen to manage fading. Those alpha-shades every rendering operation on the CPU, and precludes all hardware acceleration.
This game has very poor performance on a 2.2ghz Athlon XP w/ 1GB RAM + 7800GS. It uses many final-fantasy-style sprites/graphics, in addition to vectorized graphics for dialog and the interface.
In Java, even in an applet, simple sprite blits like that would run fine on a 300mhz P2. However, character portraits and the interface would have to be rasterized to work in Java.
Verdict: Both have negatives. Flash runs (very) slow, but is fast to create. Java runs fast(er), but is (very) slow to create.
Claim 2: Flash input handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-542
When a flash "movie" tries to run at a high framerate... Flash allows it. And then it fails.
Flash rendering slows down, but input does not. This means that if a game wants 200fps, but the computer can only render 20fps, input can lag up to ~10 seconds because of how the flash input handling works. It buffers input, but doesn't skip any slots in the buffer. You get 200 slots per second at 200fps, but if it takes 10 seconds to clear the buffer, oh well. Once the buffer is clear, it accepts another second of input, then waits for it to clear again.
This makes playing flash games on slower computers (such as netbooks) quite challenging.
It's worth noting that flash also interferes with general IO. While the input buffer is overflowing (the time between the first second of receiving input until the buffer is clear) it garbages your keyboard presses and mouse movement/clicks, and also does something that screws up other IO on your system.
It has been reported that flash messes up monitoring software like SpeedFan, MBM, etc.; it's like it gets caught in an endless loop saturating all IO. I've seen systems reboot because they thought they were overheating, because of a flash movie not playing at 100% speed.
Adobe is ignoring these issues.
Verdict: It falls to the developer to pick a framerate that will run on slower systems.
Claim 3: Flash data handling makes it unsuitable for most games.
http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html
Remarkable game. Unfortunately, your saved games may be cleared upon upgrading your flash player. Also, there's the insane input lag on slower systems.
Frequently I go to a website after upgrading my flash player, and all my old scores are gone. Oh well? I guess that may be a good thing - it also means every flash tracking cookie vanishes at the same time.
Verdict: Flash needs a second kind of storage - persistent storage - which is guaranteed not to be cleared at random intervals, or by upgrading the player.
Claim 4: Flash leaks like a bitch.
http://www.warpfire.com/
http
He's being sarcastic. He's saying we should start by redesigning Flash and Java. (or basically, cutting their backwards compatibility to glean a simpler non-bastardized codebase)
Heh... funny, but I have the opposite.
It seems like every open source project eventually swerves off the road and into a ditch.
-OpenOffice v3.0 (fails to register extensions on many Windows systems; no file extension dialog)
-Deluge Bit Torrent (Options to start in a paused state removed; blocklists now load after torrents start and connect to seeds/peers)
-CVS (I've never used it, but why do you think SVN and GIT now exist?)
-Gnome (Kills apps instantly. I don't mind, to be honest. I even use this feature to my WinXP box - although it waits 5 secs before killing them off.)
-GIMP (Now out of the ditch, but around v2.2, "stable" meant it ran at least 2 minutes without crashing, and 75% of the plugins can be used without an instant-crash.)
-Firefox v1.5 (Hehe... I still rememeber the leaks and crashes. And the swallowing my profile whole, and spitting out an empty one. And the erasing 60% of my bookmarks for a laugh.)