"When was the last time you heard some really unique sounding music come out of your radio?"
If you're relying on the RADIO for innovative music, that's your first problem. There's loads of amazing music coming out these days if you know where to look.
I had both, but amongst my friends, the EA Sports games on Genesis made it the preferred system- especially Madden Football. SNES was what you used when you wanted to play girly pastel-colored kids' platform games or an RPG. Well, actually I preferred those SNES games most of the time, but I speaking for the majority of people I knew here.
It would have to be comparable in cost to an iBook, the LCD being the most expensive part.
It shouldn't add more than a few hundred dollars to the price... you can get a nice 15" 1024x768 LCD for not much over $300 retail these days. On an iMac, they'd probably go with a smaller screen that would be even cheaper.
One day people will learn that video game gameplay doesn't translate to film
The Final Fantasy movie had absolutely nothing to do with any video game, other than the title (there's not even continuitity between episodes of the video game)
Having said that, though... yes, the script was mediocre. I think that fact that it's an animated film is what killed it in the marketplace, though... outside of Japan, I just don't know if an animated film targeted at an older audience can make money. And this is coming from a huge fan of animation.:-(
LOL, "Insightful Flamebait". That's pretty cool, though.... that's worth way more than Karma in my book! (of course, everything's worth more than karma in my book)
Well, if you say the "He" was unintentional then I believe you.:-)
I love Bruce Campbell, Army of Darkness is one of my favorite things ever, I agreed with your post, and you know I'm a big fat geek if you've seen our website... but really, I'm just saying that writing He instead of he when referring to Bruce or anybody is going a little too far... actually way too far. Was the capitalization intentional?:)
Part of Mr. Cambell's over all glory is the method in which He Conveys Himself.
Brother, if you've got to capitalize the "H" in "He" when referring to Bruce Campbell in the 3rd person, you are WAY too much of a fanboy to be taken seriously. By anyone. Now, back on your meds, otaku.
"The bottom line is, CDs encode the entire range of human hearing"
i'm not qualified to debate that point. but consider this: people may actually LIKE the imperfections inherent in record players. even if the CD is scientifically better, a record be more subjectively pleasing to some peoples' ears.
To me, translucency in apps would be much more useful if you could have varying levels of translucency within the same app. For example, when you make a text-editor window transparent, it gets really hard to read because the text gets transparent too.
So it would be nice to vary the translucency of window text/icons separately from the rest of the window, if desired.
"Bleem took a look at the hard ware instructions as they were generated in the game and decided what instructions could best accomplish the same end on the PC. This allowed for much more streamlined code without the normal performance hit you typically see with emulated hardware."
That's probably why they had so much difficulty emulating things correctly. If I understand correctly (and I'm no PSX programmer) as more advanced games started coming out for PSX, they were using something close to pure assembly. Looking at the leap between first- and last-generation PSX games, it seems feasible.
But anyway, such a high-level emulation approach might have had its disadvantages trying to emulate close-to-the-metal code, a place where a hardware emulator might shine?
I was initially very excited about the PC version of Bleem!; I even pre-ordered it. Well, after getting my disc 6 weeks late because they screwed up the order (their fault) I finally got it and was disappointed. Even up to and including their final release, Bleem! on the PC was buggy as hell.
Out of all the games I tried, very very few of them actually worked toally okay. I wasn't expecting perfection, but most times the graphics glitches were so significant that I didn't really consider the game playable. When I say "graphics glitches", I'm talking about texture corruption, 99% of the time. I had bought Bleem specifically to get higher visual quality out of these games (bilinear filtering, higher res, etc) so I wasn't as tolerant of graphics glitches as I otherwise might have been.
Also, Bleem! for Dreamcast was just executed very poorly. For those who don't know, they originally planned to sell three or four "Bleempacks" that would each run 30-40 PSX games. I guess the idea was to get a limited number the games working *perfectly* on each disc, as well as to charge the customer numerous times. Alas, even that was unacheivable, and they had to create versions of Bleem! that ran only ONE GAME- they released Bleem! Metal Gear and Bleem! Gran Turismo.
Sorry, but it was WAY too expensive. I'm not paying $20 or whatever for a graphical upgrade for a single 3-year old game... especially considering that they don't look THAT much better than the originals and even the enhanced versions were far surpassed by other Dreamcast games.
Interestingly, Connectix's VGS emulator worked almost flawlessly with all the PSX games I tried, although it didn't run on NT/2K, and didn't support 3D hardware so the games weren't graphically enhanced at all. This is the emulator that Sony bought and then yanked from the market.
"OTOH, if there are any witnesses at all, it's not like they're not going to notice, or write it off as something possibly legitimate. It would be a *very* memorable event."
i dunno. if you did it from a roof or something, who would see, really? someone could be randomly gazing out of the window and staring at the roof you're on, but what are the odds of that? low i'd say, due to the amount of roof-gazing i do every day (zero)
also New York is not all crowded bustling city streets. of course someone is gonna notice you firing a SAM from the middle of Wall Street. but New York is suburbs too, like Long Island, etc... so then you spend five minutes firing from someone's backyard after the entire neighborhood has headed off to work/school for the day... it would only take a few minutes ya know, and planes fly right over residential areas every day.
and obviously customs is gonna notice a SAM in your luggage as it goes through the Xray machine... but you could smuggle one in piece by piece, spread out over multiple people and mutiple trips in the country. or do a trojan horse thing... a shipment of 100 varied lawn mower parts, with a few Stinger components thrown in there. who would notice?
Work makes school seem very, very fun in comparison.
YMMV, but I find the opposite to be true. It was hard for me to get motivated for school... if I had to write "Towers of Hanoi" in one more freaking language for one more class, I would have screamed and punched someone in the face, possibly myself. I could not get excited about those stupid pointless programs we had to write.
However, the real world is a whole different story. You get to solve REAL problems and help REAL people with your code. I get a huge kick out of seeing people actually using my software for REAL work. To me that's much more enjoyable, and inspires me.
The main downside to real-world programming vs. in-school programming is that you'll be programming for the clueless (moreso than in school, anyway). They don't care if you stayed up all night, downed 5 liters of Jolt, invented your own revolutionary sorting algorithm, and re-wrote the report-generating code in assembly language just so it would run 10% faster and make their day a little better. No, they only care that you missed a comma on page three, and that the company's logo isn't properly aligned... because they know nothing about code, and they like it that way- they think you just have to click your mouse a couple of times to create software. But with good communication skills this can be handled too, or so I'm slowly learning.
Oh yeah, and I nealy forgot the other main advantage to coding IRL: they're paying YOU.:)
Of course, just like in school, you sometimes get ridiculous deadlines and stupid requirements and outdated hardware, but frankly it's easier to deal with these things in real life... as clueless as many bosses are, the truth is their their ass is on the line if you fail too, so your success is generally in their best interest. A good manager (yes there are many, actually) will work with you to set reasonable deadlines and get you the tools you need to do the job.
So if you like programming, but are just tired of coding stupid pointless exercise assignments for your profs, you may be pleasantly suprised by the real world, and rediscover your passion for coding.
Yes! Thank you! I, for one, find signing up for free things exceedingly annoying. If it's free, WHO CARES WHO I AM? And even if it's not free? Oh, well. Thanks!
I have more of a problem giving out my personal information for things I AM paying for. Like when Radio Shack, or some other stores, ask you for your address after a purchase, so they can mail you spam, I suppose.
I don't like having to sign up for free stuff either, but I guess I feel like I've got no right to complain, since I'm not paying for it. Usually I just choose to not sign up for it, or I use fake information.
It really depends on the situation. In the case of the AOTC teaser, I dont want to give out my personal information just to watch advertising. That's silly. On the other hand, I didn't have a problem giving a fairly large amount of personal information to AMD after I won a sweet Athlon 1800XP and motherboard combo at one of their giveaways.:)
Still, running a website isn't free though, it's actually quite expensive. Some things on the web are worth giving up a little harmless personal info for, if that's all they're charging you for a valuable service (I wouldn't put the AOTC trailer into this category however). Just keep that in mind...
My computer at Work (Win NT) is constantly getting blue screens, unexpected errors (access violation), and other freezes
I'm not doubting your word, I fully believe, but your experience is absolutely contrary to the norm.
Myself, and literally everyone else I know (quite a few programmers), gets weeks and weeks if not months of uptime with WinNT. If you're getting instability with WinNT, something is fscked up with your computer- drivers, hardware, something. That's not normal for NT at all... of course, I dunno what you're doing with that machine...
The cpu would probably die before it hits 200F and then would cool down after it officially is toasted. It would not reach anywhere close to 700F or even 550F before death in his supposed tests.
My knowledge of electronics is limited at best, but it sounds as though you're assuming the CPU would stop conducting electricity as soon as it's "toasted" and would therefore cool down immediately. However, it seems more likely to me that once the CPU is toasted, the trace paths on the die are literally melting together inside and you basically have a big blob of nicely conductive material before long that's gonna conduct as much electricity as your power supply will provide. Just a thought. I could be totally wrong, perhaps once the CPU kinda melts it short-circuits the whole thing. This is Slashdot, I'm sure someone will correct me.:)
Pros: Extremely high write speed
Cons: Hard to get data back out, but since "Retrieval... can be essentially arbitrarily slow" you've can just re-film whatever it was that you missed. With the money you save on the video gear, you should have a nice little production budget, too...
The only reason potential customers have for paying attention to Quake3 benchmarks is because thats what they plan on running.
No, wrong. A lot of gamers, like me, use Q3 benchmarks to roughyl measure how well a piece of hardware performs on games in general, not just on Q3. Obviously you can't find benchmarks on every freaking game you plan on playing on your video card. (I don't know about you, but if I'm dropping $300 on a video card, I'm planning on playing future games on it, too. Kind of hard to find benchmarks for those) So, what you do is read a few benchmarks, get a general idea of the card's performance relative to other cards, and base your buying decisions on that (and other factors).
Not saying the ATI "cheating/optimization" for Q3 is "wrong", but it's definitely a highly relevant issue, and one people need to be aware of. It's also worth noting that ATI's "optimizations" for Q3 consist of lowering th visual quality settings in order to boost framerate.
So indeed, it's not rendering the page correctly which is exactly why Microsoft is blocking those browsers. It's about time more sites started doing this instead
No, it's about time they spend more time on content rathera than presentation. Jesus christ, the web is about information, not presentation... ask any web designer, HTML is not designed to render visual information exactly.
If exact freaking visual presentation ("you can't view our page if its even a pixel off!") why are they using the web as a medium anyway? They should be using PDF or Quark or dead-tree mailings or something. Now who's too stupid or too stubborn to use the best tool for the job?
Anyway, wow would you like it if television stations only let you use televisions from a certain manufacturer? I mean, shit, I'm sure the director of Friends wants you to watch the show in color on a nice 57" screen... but it still works on a 7" black-and-white TV.
"Too bad you've got a Sony TV... ABC's broadcasts only work on Mitsubishi TV's... too bad you're too stupid or stubborn to buy one"
"Sorry, Fords only work with Exxon gas now... are you too stupid or stubborn to drive to an Exxon?"
"Have they tested other games as well to see?"
"how do we know that these optimizations don't indeed effect other games as well"
If you actually read the article, you'd know the answers to these questions. I suggest reading the HardOCP article... it's a good article.
I highly disagree with the original posters assertion that "The slant seems to be that there is something inherently wrong about writing game-specific optimizations into drivers"... I think that HardOCP is completely NEUTRAL about the issue; they simply want to know the truth.
Remember, they run a LOT of benchmarks on video cards. Q3 is a common benchmark program... lots of people buy cards based in part or in whole on Q3 performance, under the assumption that Q3 performance is fairly representative of the card's performance in other games. So if ATI is skewing results only for Q3... well that's not "wrong", but testers and buyers NEED TO KNOW THIS that so that they can interpret Q3 benchmarks accordingly. I applaud HardOCP for raising this important issue.
Slashdot Mirror
"When was the last time you heard some really unique sounding music come out of your radio?"
If you're relying on the RADIO for innovative music, that's your first problem. There's loads of amazing music coming out these days if you know where to look.
I had both, but amongst my friends, the EA Sports games on Genesis made it the preferred system- especially Madden Football. SNES was what you used when you wanted to play girly pastel-colored kids' platform games or an RPG. Well, actually I preferred those SNES games most of the time, but I speaking for the majority of people I knew here.
It would have to be comparable in cost to an iBook, the LCD being the most expensive part.
It shouldn't add more than a few hundred dollars to the price... you can get a nice 15" 1024x768 LCD for not much over $300 retail these days. On an iMac, they'd probably go with a smaller screen that would be even cheaper.
One day people will learn that video game gameplay doesn't translate to film
:-(
The Final Fantasy movie had absolutely nothing to do with any video game, other than the title (there's not even continuitity between episodes of the video game)
Having said that, though... yes, the script was mediocre. I think that fact that it's an animated film is what killed it in the marketplace, though... outside of Japan, I just don't know if an animated film targeted at an older audience can make money. And this is coming from a huge fan of animation.
I am now the author of "Insightful Flamebait".
:-)
LOL, "Insightful Flamebait". That's pretty cool, though.... that's worth way more than Karma in my book! (of course, everything's worth more than karma in my book)
Well, if you say the "He" was unintentional then I believe you.
I love Bruce Campbell, Army of Darkness is one of my favorite things ever, I agreed with your post, and you know I'm a big fat geek if you've seen our website... but really, I'm just saying that writing He instead of he when referring to Bruce or anybody is going a little too far... actually way too far. Was the capitalization intentional? :)
Part of Mr. Cambell's over all glory is the method in which He Conveys Himself. Brother, if you've got to capitalize the "H" in "He" when referring to Bruce Campbell in the 3rd person, you are WAY too much of a fanboy to be taken seriously. By anyone. Now, back on your meds, otaku.
"The bottom line is, CDs encode the entire range of human hearing"
i'm not qualified to debate that point. but consider this: people may actually LIKE the imperfections inherent in record players. even if the CD is scientifically better, a record be more subjectively pleasing to some peoples' ears.
To me, translucency in apps would be much more useful if you could have varying levels of translucency within the same app. For example, when you make a text-editor window transparent, it gets really hard to read because the text gets transparent too.
So it would be nice to vary the translucency of window text/icons separately from the rest of the window, if desired.
"Bleem took a look at the hard ware instructions as they were generated in the game and decided what instructions could best accomplish the same end on the PC. This allowed for much more streamlined code without the normal performance hit you typically see with emulated hardware."
That's probably why they had so much difficulty emulating things correctly. If I understand correctly (and I'm no PSX programmer) as more advanced games started coming out for PSX, they were using something close to pure assembly. Looking at the leap between first- and last-generation PSX games, it seems feasible.
But anyway, such a high-level emulation approach might have had its disadvantages trying to emulate close-to-the-metal code, a place where a hardware emulator might shine?
I was initially very excited about the PC version of Bleem!; I even pre-ordered it. Well, after getting my disc 6 weeks late because they screwed up the order (their fault) I finally got it and was disappointed. Even up to and including their final release, Bleem! on the PC was buggy as hell.
Out of all the games I tried, very very few of them actually worked toally okay. I wasn't expecting perfection, but most times the graphics glitches were so significant that I didn't really consider the game playable. When I say "graphics glitches", I'm talking about texture corruption, 99% of the time. I had bought Bleem specifically to get higher visual quality out of these games (bilinear filtering, higher res, etc) so I wasn't as tolerant of graphics glitches as I otherwise might have been.
Also, Bleem! for Dreamcast was just executed very poorly. For those who don't know, they originally planned to sell three or four "Bleempacks" that would each run 30-40 PSX games. I guess the idea was to get a limited number the games working *perfectly* on each disc, as well as to charge the customer numerous times. Alas, even that was unacheivable, and they had to create versions of Bleem! that ran only ONE GAME- they released Bleem! Metal Gear and Bleem! Gran Turismo.
Sorry, but it was WAY too expensive. I'm not paying $20 or whatever for a graphical upgrade for a single 3-year old game... especially considering that they don't look THAT much better than the originals and even the enhanced versions were far surpassed by other Dreamcast games.
Interestingly, Connectix's VGS emulator worked almost flawlessly with all the PSX games I tried, although it didn't run on NT/2K, and didn't support 3D hardware so the games weren't graphically enhanced at all. This is the emulator that Sony bought and then yanked from the market.
"OTOH, if there are any witnesses at all, it's not like they're not going to notice, or write it off as something possibly legitimate. It would be a *very* memorable event."
i dunno. if you did it from a roof or something, who would see, really? someone could be randomly gazing out of the window and staring at the roof you're on, but what are the odds of that? low i'd say, due to the amount of roof-gazing i do every day (zero)
also New York is not all crowded bustling city streets. of course someone is gonna notice you firing a SAM from the middle of Wall Street. but New York is suburbs too, like Long Island, etc... so then you spend five minutes firing from someone's backyard after the entire neighborhood has headed off to work/school for the day... it would only take a few minutes ya know, and planes fly right over residential areas every day.
and obviously customs is gonna notice a SAM in your luggage as it goes through the Xray machine... but you could smuggle one in piece by piece, spread out over multiple people and mutiple trips in the country. or do a trojan horse thing... a shipment of 100 varied lawn mower parts, with a few Stinger components thrown in there. who would notice?
Am I the only one who thought he was talking about playing Counter Strike, not Computer Science?
I must play too many games. Wait, I don't play enough.
Work makes school seem very, very fun in comparison.
:)
YMMV, but I find the opposite to be true. It was hard for me to get motivated for school... if I had to write "Towers of Hanoi" in one more freaking language for one more class, I would have screamed and punched someone in the face, possibly myself. I could not get excited about those stupid pointless programs we had to write.
However, the real world is a whole different story. You get to solve REAL problems and help REAL people with your code. I get a huge kick out of seeing people actually using my software for REAL work. To me that's much more enjoyable, and inspires me.
The main downside to real-world programming vs. in-school programming is that you'll be programming for the clueless (moreso than in school, anyway). They don't care if you stayed up all night, downed 5 liters of Jolt, invented your own revolutionary sorting algorithm, and re-wrote the report-generating code in assembly language just so it would run 10% faster and make their day a little better. No, they only care that you missed a comma on page three, and that the company's logo isn't properly aligned... because they know nothing about code, and they like it that way- they think you just have to click your mouse a couple of times to create software. But with good communication skills this can be handled too, or so I'm slowly learning.
Oh yeah, and I nealy forgot the other main advantage to coding IRL: they're paying YOU.
Of course, just like in school, you sometimes get ridiculous deadlines and stupid requirements and outdated hardware, but frankly it's easier to deal with these things in real life... as clueless as many bosses are, the truth is their their ass is on the line if you fail too, so your success is generally in their best interest. A good manager (yes there are many, actually) will work with you to set reasonable deadlines and get you the tools you need to do the job.
So if you like programming, but are just tired of coding stupid pointless exercise assignments for your profs, you may be pleasantly suprised by the real world, and rediscover your passion for coding.
Yes! Thank you! I, for one, find signing up for free things exceedingly annoying. If it's free, WHO CARES WHO I AM? And even if it's not free? Oh, well. Thanks!
:)
I have more of a problem giving out my personal information for things I AM paying for. Like when Radio Shack, or some other stores, ask you for your address after a purchase, so they can mail you spam, I suppose.
I don't like having to sign up for free stuff either, but I guess I feel like I've got no right to complain, since I'm not paying for it. Usually I just choose to not sign up for it, or I use fake information.
It really depends on the situation. In the case of the AOTC teaser, I dont want to give out my personal information just to watch advertising. That's silly. On the other hand, I didn't have a problem giving a fairly large amount of personal information to AMD after I won a sweet Athlon 1800XP and motherboard combo at one of their giveaways.
Still, running a website isn't free though, it's actually quite expensive. Some things on the web are worth giving up a little harmless personal info for, if that's all they're charging you for a valuable service (I wouldn't put the AOTC trailer into this category however). Just keep that in mind...
AC's has shown great skill in pulling together rapid/major changes
"AC"??? We're trusting the kernel to an Anonymous Coward?
"but till... the chief engineer urinates drunkenly on the packet switcher, you can't tell how your network will perform"
If anyone needs help testing this condition out, I'm available.
My computer at Work (Win NT) is constantly getting blue screens, unexpected errors (access violation), and other freezes
I'm not doubting your word, I fully believe, but your experience is absolutely contrary to the norm.
Myself, and literally everyone else I know (quite a few programmers), gets weeks and weeks if not months of uptime with WinNT. If you're getting instability with WinNT, something is fscked up with your computer- drivers, hardware, something. That's not normal for NT at all... of course, I dunno what you're doing with that machine...
The difference is mini-cds can be played in a regular CD player too
My car has a slot-load CD player. Guess that's not "regular"....
The cpu would probably die before it hits 200F and then would cool down after it officially is toasted. It would not reach anywhere close to 700F or even 550F before death in his supposed tests.
:)
My knowledge of electronics is limited at best, but it sounds as though you're assuming the CPU would stop conducting electricity as soon as it's "toasted" and would therefore cool down immediately. However, it seems more likely to me that once the CPU is toasted, the trace paths on the die are literally melting together inside and you basically have a big blob of nicely conductive material before long that's gonna conduct as much electricity as your power supply will provide. Just a thought. I could be totally wrong, perhaps once the CPU kinda melts it short-circuits the whole thing. This is Slashdot, I'm sure someone will correct me.
/dev/null ???
Pros: Extremely high write speed
Cons: Hard to get data back out, but since "Retrieval... can be essentially arbitrarily slow" you've can just re-film whatever it was that you missed. With the money you save on the video gear, you should have a nice little production budget, too...
Which is suprising because, you know, none of the other Super Mario Bros. games were fun or anythng.
:-)
Seriously, he was suprised a Super Mario Bros. game was fun? Um..... okaaaay.
The only reason potential customers have for paying attention to Quake3 benchmarks is because thats what they plan on running.
No, wrong. A lot of gamers, like me, use Q3 benchmarks to roughyl measure how well a piece of hardware performs on games in general, not just on Q3. Obviously you can't find benchmarks on every freaking game you plan on playing on your video card. (I don't know about you, but if I'm dropping $300 on a video card, I'm planning on playing future games on it, too. Kind of hard to find benchmarks for those) So, what you do is read a few benchmarks, get a general idea of the card's performance relative to other cards, and base your buying decisions on that (and other factors).
Not saying the ATI "cheating/optimization" for Q3 is "wrong", but it's definitely a highly relevant issue, and one people need to be aware of. It's also worth noting that ATI's "optimizations" for Q3 consist of lowering th visual quality settings in order to boost framerate.
So indeed, it's not rendering the page correctly which is exactly why Microsoft is blocking those browsers. It's about time more sites started doing this instead
No, it's about time they spend more time on content rathera than presentation. Jesus christ, the web is about information, not presentation... ask any web designer, HTML is not designed to render visual information exactly. If exact freaking visual presentation ("you can't view our page if its even a pixel off!") why are they using the web as a medium anyway? They should be using PDF or Quark or dead-tree mailings or something. Now who's too stupid or too stubborn to use the best tool for the job?
Anyway, wow would you like it if television stations only let you use televisions from a certain manufacturer? I mean, shit, I'm sure the director of Friends wants you to watch the show in color on a nice 57" screen... but it still works on a 7" black-and-white TV.
"Too bad you've got a Sony TV... ABC's broadcasts only work on Mitsubishi TV's... too bad you're too stupid or stubborn to buy one"
"Sorry, Fords only work with Exxon gas now... are you too stupid or stubborn to drive to an Exxon?"
"Have they tested other games as well to see?"
"how do we know that these optimizations don't indeed effect other games as well"
If you actually read the article, you'd know the answers to these questions. I suggest reading the HardOCP article... it's a good article.
I highly disagree with the original posters assertion that "The slant seems to be that there is something inherently wrong about writing game-specific optimizations into drivers"... I think that HardOCP is completely NEUTRAL about the issue; they simply want to know the truth.
Remember, they run a LOT of benchmarks on video cards. Q3 is a common benchmark program... lots of people buy cards based in part or in whole on Q3 performance, under the assumption that Q3 performance is fairly representative of the card's performance in other games. So if ATI is skewing results only for Q3... well that's not "wrong", but testers and buyers NEED TO KNOW THIS that so that they can interpret Q3 benchmarks accordingly. I applaud HardOCP for raising this important issue.