Reigning in the used game market is obviously a stupdid statement. First sale doctrine, etc., etc.
I'm more concerned about the number of times I've heard variations of this statement made by otherwise intelligent people: "There is no better opportunity than now to try to engage Obama in open dialogue about our industry and correct some of these mistruths. I implore ECA President Hal Halpin, ESRB President Patricia Vance, head of EA Sports/industry veteran Peter Moore and a journalist of proper caliber (Geoff Keighley, Rob Fahey and Dan Hsu all come to mind) to approach President-Elect Obama about having an open dialogue with the industry"
The problem (if you can call it that) with charismatic people is that we tend to project our own desires onto them. Hence all the ninnies saying that Obama will pay for their gas, and everything else under the sun, and the people (some of my friends included) sending in their resumes for positions in his administration. Because he's listening.
Even though Obama is inexperienced, per se, he's shown himself to be an experienced politician, and the best politicians are capable of making it sound like they're listening to you and even agreeing with you while politely shooing you out the back door.
>>Holder is in favor of censorship, massive gun control, a drug war hawk... and you *ahem* hoped for change from Obama. How is this any different than Gonzalez, Ashcroft or Reno, except maybe a squeamishness about torture?
Ashcroft and Gonzalez were behind sending people, mainly terrorists, to Cuba.
Holder was behind sending Elian Gonzalez to Cuba.
He was also behind the Mark Rich pardon, Weather Underground pardons (which Obama criticized Hillary for in the debates before, you know, picking the dude as his AG), and the pardon of 16 FALN members.
As much as it hurts me to say it, give me Ashcroft any day...:(
Uh, Obama already knows that Holder is about as corrupt as people get. Holder engineered the Mark Rich pardon, and the pardons of two Weather Underground members, which Obama criticized Hillary over during the democratic debates.
This naive projection onto Obama that he's listening, when he's repeatedly shown his enormous... well, let's call it "bad judgment" in choices of people that he chooses to listen to is, frankly, quite disturbing to me, since so many people are doing it.
>>4.) Send a crew entirely of gamers, give them plenty of compressed munchies, use an even smaller enclosure than the one suggested above, and leave them to six months of uninterrupted gaming.
Sign me up!
Of course, the lag for Team Fortress would mean just playing Engineer, but that's acceptable.
Heh, I was a HPC grad student, but I worked in Fran Berman's lab for a while, which revolved around Grid computing. A great group of people to hang out with. She's head of the supercomputer center now, I think. It's an interesting field, but not exactly my cup of tea.
>>and the fact that the effort described in TFA was funded by the EU doesn't make me feel any better about it.
This is hardly new stuff. The term Grid was coined in... hang on, lemme check my Grid textbook from 1999, it's holding up my Linux monitor... well, hmm, it doesn't say when it was coined, but I found a reference from at least 1997. In any event, instrumentation of Grids has been one of the four major areas in the field for a long time. When I was at the San Diego Supercomputer Center as a grad student (specializing in HPC), I knew various people working on it, including some of my lab mates.
While this piece of software in the TFA looks vaguely interesting, I don't think it looks particularly revolutionary at all.
I think what's throwing off most people here on Slashdot is the term World Wide Grid, which is exactly the same thing as The Grid, as The Grid has always been an (amorphous) hetereogenous worldwide cluster running via various software layers. I guess if you've never looked at Grid Computing before (as apparently Ronald Picquepalle hasn't), the concept is kind of neat, but this package is pretty non-revolutionary. Just a GUI for resource discovery packages.
>>We don't know what consciousness is and calling it an emerging property is not really much of a progress.
Well, we know what consciousness is, we just don't know how the hell it happens. We understand the mechanics of consciousness rather well (poke this section of the brain and this happens to the conscious experience) but the phenomena of consciousness is a complete mystery.
I've been reading quite a bit on the subject over the last year. Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained (which does anything but, unfortunately - it's a terribly misleading title), Searle, Crick & Koch, Ramachandran, the Churchills, Jeff Hawkins, Penrose, etc., without finding the slightest clue as to what causes the phenomena of consciousness. We know some necessary parts of the brain for consciousness (if you knock out one of the central ethernet hubs of the brain, people lose consciousness), and which parts of the brain are not involved in conscious experience (the lower brain functions, which function subconsciously) but not the sufficient set of components for consciousness.
I imagine that we could replicate the electrical and chemical processes inside the brain in a test tube, but whether or not said test tube would be conscious for the second or two it took to reach equilibrium is a very tough question to answer. If you say "no", then you're making a special pleading for the brain, and what is so special about the brain anyway? Quantum Nanotubes? (Penrose's idea, even though there's no evidence for them.) If you say "yes", then consciousness is a byproduct of chemistry, but a mysterious byproduct we have no means of testing or detecting. Penrose claims that nothing in our current understanding of physics can account for the phenomena of consciousness, and I am inclined to agree.
From the summary: "And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property."
Kurzweil is making a very big leap with that "therefore". He doesn't know. Hell, I don't know either. We don't even know if you replace a person's neurons one at a time (Bart Kosko's idea in Fuzzy Time) with artificial neurons if they'll preserve conscious experience. If they don't, then you again have some sort of special pleading for our neurons. If you do, then you should be able to hook up your consciousness to the internet and all those trippy Ghost in the Shell type things.
Anyhow, it's an interesting field, and I agree wholeheartedly that calling it an emergent property doesn't really help very much. Especially because they don't actually know if it is an emergent property at all. =)
>>Otherwise, it is no different to simply making answers up, which anyone can do.
Philosophies and religions can be incoherent or have an internal consistency, and can or can't jibe with science, and may or may not be beneficial to a person or humanity as a whole. Any time you have something that can't be empirically verified, these are the criteria to use, not science.
>>Nope, all I'm requiring is that we have some way of knowing how likely these "answers" are to be true or not.
Is murder evil? Or, more specifically, is going up to a baby in a baby carriage and shooting it -- just for the hell of it -- evil?
How would you like to ascertain that "murder is evil" is wrong or not, scientifically?
Because, in fact, if you look at humans in a natural state, murder is actually quite common, and so if we're basing these claims solely on the evidence of what science can tell us about human nature, I think we'd be forced to conclude that murder is natural.
>>But religion doesn't provide an answer for the first question either
Sure it provides an answer. The problem you're having is requiring everything to be empirically provable, when it's empirically provable that not everything can be empirically provable. =)
>>Moreover, if things did have a purpose, and this was something that we could find out about, then that would be in the realm of science (in principle at least).
Nah, things like, "What is the meaning of life?" or "How should a person live their life?" can never be answered by science. That's why religion is complementary.
Sure, but what relevance does the P4 discussion have to the chips today?
Besides, you can't see much difference in performance when you have a 10s compile time.
When looking at benchmarks in games (which is the primary thing that interests me besides MATLAB performance) the Intels again blow the AMDs out of the water. As you say, AMD can't compete in the upper segment. However, whereas "upper segment" processors used to mean you were paying $600 to $1000 for a chip, the E8500 is $180 or so, which is consumer-priced, in my book.
>>And there are LOTS of people out there who's delusions on religon are having a "deleterious effect on the [their lives]."
Sigh... when I read that line in the summary I knew it'd bait atheists out.
I mean, yeah, geez, I'd sure be happier if I didn't have to subscribe to that whacky belief in Universal Charity, and could just be a dick to everyone I felt like. Being nice to everyone is having an incredibly deleterious effect on my life.:p
The sad thing that atheists miss is that Christianity really does have a transformative power for good on people's lives. Setting aside the metaphysics, and just looking at it pragmatically -- if Christianity makes the world a better place, and makes peoples' lives better, why the fuck are you all so against it? Christianity (and I don't mean fundamentalism, which is a nutty luddite response to the 21st Century) and a scientific outlook are compatible and complementary viewpoints, just like how "how?" and "why?" are complementary questions.
Depends how it's done. If you consider games like Team Fortress to be a form of an MMO (especially if you have cross server stats tracking and a sort of XP system), then all the user created mods and maps have not only not caused a moral panic (even with maps like 2girls, where you shoot rocket launchers out of the front door/vagina) but have contributed greatly to the ongoing popularity of the games.
Even the MUDs I played on had a sort of vetting process before they'd be linked in to the main world. It's not unreasonable to assume that Blizzard could spent a percentage of the silo of gold they're swimming around in to hire some gamers to, you know, play games. Further, you'd just add the disclaimer that user-created stuff isn't rated by the ESRB.
>>On the other hand, besides the PC game being buggy, it is also more "open" in that it can be modded.
Yeah, in theory a mod or two might make it to the PS3 as for-pay DLC, but modding was the only salvation for the steaming-pile-of-crap game mechanics that was Oblivion, but mod issues also caused a huge number of crashes in Oblivion. So again, I kind of dithered on the purchase on that front. Do I want to be able to fix any bread-dead decisions Bethesda made? Or do I want a game that doesn't crash?
In the end, I was very pleasantly surprised that they actually did the game mechanics near-perfectly in Fallout 3, so the lack of mod tools hasn't been an issue yet.
Eh, I'm basing this on actual benchmarks. (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html)
As far as dual-cores go, the 3.16GHz E8500 is king, and isn't that expensive (I think ~$180), whereas a 3.1Ghz 6000+X2 is $90, but the 8500 is twice as fast and is exceptionally overclockable. So price/performance-wise, if I had to buy a CPU today, it'd be an Intel, and this is coming from a person who has never bought an Intel (except for the heavily OCable original Celeron line back in the day). Quite simply, Intel has won this round of the CPU wars.
I did buy a Phenom 9500 for the last machine I put together, since I did a lot of MATLAB coding on it, and MATLAB autoparallelizes its matrix math, but the gaming performance on it was pretty meh.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I was seized by a sudden crisis when I picked up Fallout 3 at the Gamestop. PC version or PS3? On one hand, the PS3 version runs better, and plays on a 46" LCD television. The PC version crashes occasionally (as do all Bethesda games -- they're allergic to making quality software), but... the PC has a mouse. While the VATS system kind of cheats for you on the whole aiming issue, playing something that requires aim (aka COD4) is still much more enjoyable on the PC than a console.
>>User-created content in a modern video game? What, and let some user rip off some company's IP for use in their content, and thus letting the game designer get potentially sued?
I should note that user-ripped-off-company-IPs, also known as "mods" have been rather popular with the young whippersnappers in the last 10 years. With the companies too.
While I think someone should sue over the travesty that is the user-mod-cum-official-mod Counterstrike, I don't believe anyone has. (And that's more because the mod sucks balls, rather than because I'm offended at its portrayal of terrorists or something.)
It's about time... I mean, seriously. The CPUs coming out of AMD have stagnated in the last few years. The Phenoms are decent enough, I guess, if you have apps that can take advantage of the three or four cores, but they clock at slower than comparable X2s, and two cores is still the optimal point on the diminishing returns curve (on adding more cores).
I remember the 90s and early 00s when you were basically required to upgrade your processor every year or two or be hopelessly behind when the latest game came out. Now, I'm running the same machine I was back in '04, except with a new video card and an upgrade from a 3800+ (2.4Ghz) to a 4800+X2 (2.6Ghz) a year and a half ago.
I got curious how far I was behind these days, and found that as far as everything goes, a 4800X2 is still about as good a chip as anything AMD produces, only about 30% below the top chips AMD makes right now.
By contrast, Intel has the E8500 which is not only significantly faster, but is heavily, heavily OCable as well. I think Moore's Law has finally broken down for AMD.
It was like this for a long time, but they changed it near the end. It's now a very different much much deeper game. There's infinite resources, but a more linear growth curve thanks to capped building speed, in addition to making the economy generating structures much more expensive.
Unfortunatly, the community is basically dead, because they left the game in a fucked up state for too long and a lot of people left.
>>disastrously bad sequels and prequels by Herbert and Anderson.
You mean Sanderson?
Obviously AMoL isn't out yet, but every book he's written to date has been bloody brilliant.
He's not Jordan, sure. He might not use Jordan's attention to ridiculously unimportant detail, or Jordan's reuse of every plot thread multiple times, or Jordan's complete inability to handle plot and multiple viewpoints, but... oh wait, yeah. They'll probably actually be pretty good.
According to Ryan Dancey (one of WOTC's ex-vice presidents) when I talked to him years ago, was that Robert Jordan actually pitched the series as a series that would never end. He could just keep churning out product, and people would keep buying it, indefinitely.
>>we can look forward to a few Twin Peaks sequels!
Or a Twin Peaks MMORPG.
Hmm.
Couldn't be any more horrendous than the current crops of MMORPGs.
IMO, what made the old school MUDs better than MMORPGs is that players (when they hit a certain level) were oftentimes allowed to make new dungeons. So as your playerbase went up, so did the amount of content available. It's an idea that I'd love to see get transferred to one of the major MMOs.
Slashdot Mirror
Reigning in the used game market is obviously a stupdid statement. First sale doctrine, etc., etc.
I'm more concerned about the number of times I've heard variations of this statement made by otherwise intelligent people:
"There is no better opportunity than now to try to engage Obama in open dialogue about our industry and correct some of these mistruths. I implore ECA President Hal Halpin, ESRB President Patricia Vance, head of EA Sports/industry veteran
Peter Moore and a journalist of proper caliber (Geoff Keighley, Rob Fahey and Dan Hsu all come to mind) to approach President-Elect Obama about having an open dialogue with the industry"
The problem (if you can call it that) with charismatic people is that we tend to project our own desires onto them. Hence all the ninnies saying that Obama will pay for their gas, and everything else under the sun, and the people (some of my friends included) sending in their resumes for positions in his administration. Because he's listening.
Even though Obama is inexperienced, per se, he's shown himself to be an experienced politician, and the best politicians are capable of making it sound like they're listening to you and even agreeing with you while politely shooing you out the back door.
>> A Moogle Kupo d'Etat - Evil in Small Doses
Heh, I always thought the Moogles hanging out in *every single adventurer's room* had to have some sort of shady purpose.
My guess was they were stealing the office supplies, but a coup d'etat sounds much cooler.
>>Holder is in favor of censorship, massive gun control, a drug war hawk... and you *ahem* hoped for change from Obama. How is this any different than Gonzalez, Ashcroft or Reno, except maybe a squeamishness about torture?
Ashcroft and Gonzalez were behind sending people, mainly terrorists, to Cuba.
Holder was behind sending Elian Gonzalez to Cuba.
He was also behind the Mark Rich pardon, Weather Underground pardons (which Obama criticized Hillary for in the debates before, you know, picking the dude as his AG), and the pardon of 16 FALN members.
As much as it hurts me to say it, give me Ashcroft any day... :(
>>Obama and Biden say that they are listening
Uh, Obama already knows that Holder is about as corrupt as people get. Holder engineered the Mark Rich pardon, and the pardons of two Weather Underground members, which Obama criticized Hillary over during the democratic debates.
This naive projection onto Obama that he's listening, when he's repeatedly shown his enormous... well, let's call it "bad judgment" in choices of people that he chooses to listen to is, frankly, quite disturbing to me, since so many people are doing it.
>>4.) Send a crew entirely of gamers, give them plenty of compressed munchies, use an even smaller enclosure than the one suggested above, and leave them to six months of uninterrupted gaming.
Sign me up!
Of course, the lag for Team Fortress would mean just playing Engineer, but that's acceptable.
>>Were you a grid grad? And were you happy?
Heh, I was a HPC grad student, but I worked in Fran Berman's lab for a while, which revolved around Grid computing. A great group of people to hang out with. She's head of the supercomputer center now, I think. It's an interesting field, but not exactly my cup of tea.
>>and the fact that the effort described in TFA was funded by the EU doesn't make me feel any better about it.
This is hardly new stuff. The term Grid was coined in... hang on, lemme check my Grid textbook from 1999, it's holding up my Linux monitor... well, hmm, it doesn't say when it was coined, but I found a reference from at least 1997. In any event, instrumentation of Grids has been one of the four major areas in the field for a long time. When I was at the San Diego Supercomputer Center as a grad student (specializing in HPC), I knew various people working on it, including some of my lab mates.
While this piece of software in the TFA looks vaguely interesting, I don't think it looks particularly revolutionary at all.
I think what's throwing off most people here on Slashdot is the term World Wide Grid, which is exactly the same thing as The Grid, as The Grid has always been an (amorphous) hetereogenous worldwide cluster running via various software layers. I guess if you've never looked at Grid Computing before (as apparently Ronald Picquepalle hasn't), the concept is kind of neat, but this package is pretty non-revolutionary. Just a GUI for resource discovery packages.
>>Now: demonstrate its existence.
Are you conscious?
Please demonstrate its existence.
Just because something can't be demonstrated does not mean that it does not exist or doesn't matter. This is the main fallacy of physical materialism.
>>We don't know what consciousness is and calling it an emerging property is not really much of a progress.
Well, we know what consciousness is, we just don't know how the hell it happens. We understand the mechanics of consciousness rather well (poke this section of the brain and this happens to the conscious experience) but the phenomena of consciousness is a complete mystery.
I've been reading quite a bit on the subject over the last year. Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained (which does anything but, unfortunately - it's a terribly misleading title), Searle, Crick & Koch, Ramachandran, the Churchills, Jeff Hawkins, Penrose, etc., without finding the slightest clue as to what causes the phenomena of consciousness. We know some necessary parts of the brain for consciousness (if you knock out one of the central ethernet hubs of the brain, people lose consciousness), and which parts of the brain are not involved in conscious experience (the lower brain functions, which function subconsciously) but not the sufficient set of components for consciousness.
I imagine that we could replicate the electrical and chemical processes inside the brain in a test tube, but whether or not said test tube would be conscious for the second or two it took to reach equilibrium is a very tough question to answer. If you say "no", then you're making a special pleading for the brain, and what is so special about the brain anyway? Quantum Nanotubes? (Penrose's idea, even though there's no evidence for them.) If you say "yes", then consciousness is a byproduct of chemistry, but a mysterious byproduct we have no means of testing or detecting. Penrose claims that nothing in our current understanding of physics can account for the phenomena of consciousness, and I am inclined to agree.
From the summary:
"And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging property."
Kurzweil is making a very big leap with that "therefore". He doesn't know. Hell, I don't know either. We don't even know if you replace a person's neurons one at a time (Bart Kosko's idea in Fuzzy Time) with artificial neurons if they'll preserve conscious experience. If they don't, then you again have some sort of special pleading for our neurons. If you do, then you should be able to hook up your consciousness to the internet and all those trippy Ghost in the Shell type things.
Anyhow, it's an interesting field, and I agree wholeheartedly that calling it an emergent property doesn't really help very much. Especially because they don't actually know if it is an emergent property at all. =)
>>Otherwise, it is no different to simply making answers up, which anyone can do.
Philosophies and religions can be incoherent or have an internal consistency, and can or can't jibe with science, and may or may not be beneficial to a person or humanity as a whole. Any time you have something that can't be empirically verified, these are the criteria to use, not science.
>>Nope, all I'm requiring is that we have some way of knowing how likely these "answers" are to be true or not.
Is murder evil? Or, more specifically, is going up to a baby in a baby carriage and shooting it -- just for the hell of it -- evil?
How would you like to ascertain that "murder is evil" is wrong or not, scientifically?
Because, in fact, if you look at humans in a natural state, murder is actually quite common, and so if we're basing these claims solely on the evidence of what science can tell us about human nature, I think we'd be forced to conclude that murder is natural.
>>IIRC they did have a mechanism to counter this. That of randomly selected legislative juries.
Don't forget they also randomly elected generals from the entire populace. I can imagine that today...
"Joe the Plumber, do we launch the nukes or not?"
>>But religion doesn't provide an answer for the first question either
Sure it provides an answer. The problem you're having is requiring everything to be empirically provable, when it's empirically provable that not everything can be empirically provable. =)
>>Moreover, if things did have a purpose, and this was something that we could find out about, then that would be in the realm of science (in principle at least).
Nah, things like, "What is the meaning of life?" or "How should a person live their life?" can never be answered by science. That's why religion is complementary.
Sure, but what relevance does the P4 discussion have to the chips today?
Besides, you can't see much difference in performance when you have a 10s compile time.
When looking at benchmarks in games (which is the primary thing that interests me besides MATLAB performance) the Intels again blow the AMDs out of the water. As you say, AMD can't compete in the upper segment. However, whereas "upper segment" processors used to mean you were paying $600 to $1000 for a chip, the E8500 is $180 or so, which is consumer-priced, in my book.
>>And there are LOTS of people out there who's delusions on religon are having a "deleterious effect on the [their lives]."
Sigh... when I read that line in the summary I knew it'd bait atheists out.
I mean, yeah, geez, I'd sure be happier if I didn't have to subscribe to that whacky belief in Universal Charity, and could just be a dick to everyone I felt like. Being nice to everyone is having an incredibly deleterious effect on my life. :p
The sad thing that atheists miss is that Christianity really does have a transformative power for good on people's lives. Setting aside the metaphysics, and just looking at it pragmatically -- if Christianity makes the world a better place, and makes peoples' lives better, why the fuck are you all so against it? Christianity (and I don't mean fundamentalism, which is a nutty luddite response to the 21st Century) and a scientific outlook are compatible and complementary viewpoints, just like how "how?" and "why?" are complementary questions.
Depends how it's done. If you consider games like Team Fortress to be a form of an MMO (especially if you have cross server stats tracking and a sort of XP system), then all the user created mods and maps have not only not caused a moral panic (even with maps like 2girls, where you shoot rocket launchers out of the front door/vagina) but have contributed greatly to the ongoing popularity of the games.
Even the MUDs I played on had a sort of vetting process before they'd be linked in to the main world. It's not unreasonable to assume that Blizzard could spent a percentage of the silo of gold they're swimming around in to hire some gamers to, you know, play games. Further, you'd just add the disclaimer that user-created stuff isn't rated by the ESRB.
>>On the other hand, besides the PC game being buggy, it is also more "open" in that it can be modded.
Yeah, in theory a mod or two might make it to the PS3 as for-pay DLC, but modding was the only salvation for the steaming-pile-of-crap game mechanics that was Oblivion, but mod issues also caused a huge number of crashes in Oblivion. So again, I kind of dithered on the purchase on that front. Do I want to be able to fix any bread-dead decisions Bethesda made? Or do I want a game that doesn't crash?
In the end, I was very pleasantly surprised that they actually did the game mechanics near-perfectly in Fallout 3, so the lack of mod tools hasn't been an issue yet.
Eh, I'm basing this on actual benchmarks. (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html)
As far as dual-cores go, the 3.16GHz E8500 is king, and isn't that expensive (I think ~$180), whereas a 3.1Ghz 6000+X2 is $90, but the 8500 is twice as fast and is exceptionally overclockable. So price/performance-wise, if I had to buy a CPU today, it'd be an Intel, and this is coming from a person who has never bought an Intel (except for the heavily OCable original Celeron line back in the day). Quite simply, Intel has won this round of the CPU wars.
I did buy a Phenom 9500 for the last machine I put together, since I did a lot of MATLAB coding on it, and MATLAB autoparallelizes its matrix math, but the gaming performance on it was pretty meh.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I was seized by a sudden crisis when I picked up Fallout 3 at the Gamestop. PC version or PS3? On one hand, the PS3 version runs better, and plays on a 46" LCD television. The PC version crashes occasionally (as do all Bethesda games -- they're allergic to making quality software), but... the PC has a mouse. While the VATS system kind of cheats for you on the whole aiming issue, playing something that requires aim (aka COD4) is still much more enjoyable on the PC than a console.
>>User-created content in a modern video game? What, and let some user rip off some company's IP for use in their content, and thus letting the game designer get potentially sued?
I should note that user-ripped-off-company-IPs, also known as "mods" have been rather popular with the young whippersnappers in the last 10 years. With the companies too.
While I think someone should sue over the travesty that is the user-mod-cum-official-mod Counterstrike, I don't believe anyone has. (And that's more because the mod sucks balls, rather than because I'm offended at its portrayal of terrorists or something.)
It's about time... I mean, seriously. The CPUs coming out of AMD have stagnated in the last few years. The Phenoms are decent enough, I guess, if you have apps that can take advantage of the three or four cores, but they clock at slower than comparable X2s, and two cores is still the optimal point on the diminishing returns curve (on adding more cores).
I remember the 90s and early 00s when you were basically required to upgrade your processor every year or two or be hopelessly behind when the latest game came out. Now, I'm running the same machine I was back in '04, except with a new video card and an upgrade from a 3800+ (2.4Ghz) to a 4800+X2 (2.6Ghz) a year and a half ago.
I got curious how far I was behind these days, and found that as far as everything goes, a 4800X2 is still about as good a chip as anything AMD produces, only about 30% below the top chips AMD makes right now.
By contrast, Intel has the E8500 which is not only significantly faster, but is heavily, heavily OCable as well. I think Moore's Law has finally broken down for AMD.
It was like this for a long time, but they changed it near the end. It's now a very different much much deeper game. There's infinite resources, but a more linear growth curve thanks to capped building speed, in addition to making the economy generating structures much more expensive.
Unfortunatly, the community is basically dead, because they left the game in a fucked up state for too long and a lot of people left.
Hmm, interesting.
Unfortunately, that was why I left. =)
>>disastrously bad sequels and prequels by Herbert and Anderson.
You mean Sanderson?
Obviously AMoL isn't out yet, but every book he's written to date has been bloody brilliant.
He's not Jordan, sure. He might not use Jordan's attention to ridiculously unimportant detail, or Jordan's reuse of every plot thread multiple times, or Jordan's complete inability to handle plot and multiple viewpoints, but... oh wait, yeah. They'll probably actually be pretty good.
According to Ryan Dancey (one of WOTC's ex-vice presidents) when I talked to him years ago, was that Robert Jordan actually pitched the series as a series that would never end. He could just keep churning out product, and people would keep buying it, indefinitely.
Or, I guess, until he died.
>>we can look forward to a few Twin Peaks sequels!
Or a Twin Peaks MMORPG.
Hmm.
Couldn't be any more horrendous than the current crops of MMORPGs.
IMO, what made the old school MUDs better than MMORPGs is that players (when they hit a certain level) were oftentimes allowed to make new dungeons. So as your playerbase went up, so did the amount of content available. It's an idea that I'd love to see get transferred to one of the major MMOs.