Actually, recent studies have shown some minor good news. If you live past your mid-70s or so with no sign of Alzeimers, you probably won't get it.
Talk of these diseases want me to run folding@home again. But I'm a dnet man myself...
Yeah, don't sweat it, I get preachy about things too. For example I'm pretty die-hard AMD these days, but most computer novice people I speak to won't even consider anything besides a Pentium 4. It also doesn't help that Dell and Gateway don't offer AMDs (at least, last time I checked they don't).
That does a lot to alter public perception... which sucks. I mean I even have a really big anti P4 rant on my silly site, though it is a bit out of date at this point, and people that I know have read it still act all surprised when I mention I don't like P4s. So all us geeks have issues that we get rabid about, right?;)
You kinda missed my whole point there buddy. I was making fun of my own hardware, and you pointed out that I had shitty hardware... Obviously I knew it then, I know it now, I was trying to make a joke.;)
Back then I was a very, very broke high school student and cheap "office" hardware was all I could afford. In fact most of that hardware was given to me by friends who knew of my desperate need for it. You're 100% right about it being horrid for games, but that was the point of my post... trying to be amusing in the sense that college kids eating all-ramen diets is also amusing.;)
And while I will certainly admit the second machine wasn't very good either, it was about a billion and half times faster than the Cyrix, and more than enough to run the orginal Half-Life.
Heh... was it an old socket 7 board? Cause that's what I had back then... those were the days. Then when I upgraded to a celeron I went with an Abit ZM6 (cheap board, capped at 256MB of ram). Main reason I got it was for the jumperless overclocking features of the BIOS, I figured I'd be tweaking it a lot and being able to alter the voltage and bus speed from the BIOS would be handy. Later on I ended up building a second computer, and I got another ZM6. I tried putting in a Celeron 566 and clocking it up to 850. No go in the new ZM6 board, so I tried the old one and it worked fine. Overclocking is pretty weird like that. Anyway, the new chip ran from about 2001-mid 2003 without issues until the ancient board finally gave up. So then I was forced to use the second board, and I'm down to 707 MHz (this board refuses to let me do 850).
I'm long overdue for an upgrade (obviously) and HL2 might be enough to push me over the edge and splurge. I don't really have the funds right now but if it's good, I do have credit. Heh.;)
Oh well, at least this antique can still play HL1 and Counter-Strike.
You just reminded me of a story... one that took place six years ago, on a dark and stormy night. Well I don't think it was dark or stormy, but it was involving hardware that would make anyone shudder. Half-Life had just been released, and all the gaming sites were raving about it... so much so that I decided to buy it when I saw it on a shelf at a local Best Buy. I sorta glanced at the min requirements, and I thought I was close enough.
I was very, very wrong. I inserted the Half-Life disc into my 4x CD-ROM and started to install it to my PC... It had 24MB of memory, a "PR233" Cyrix Processor, and I believe the video card at the time was a 4MB card with "pretend" support for Direct3D.
The pain.
The horror.
You know those Houndeye creatures I think they're called, the ones that create a blue circle of hurt? One of those would bring that computer to a complete standstill when it did its little attack.
The poor Cyrix also over-heated often, so often that I renamed the short-cut to the game "Crash-Life" and felt better somehow.
This story does have a happy ending though. After a few days of suffering, I got myself a Celeron 366 and clocked that baby at 550 MHz, I got a voodoo2, and i think a massive 96 MB of ram. If it hadn't been for Half-Life, I likely would not have upgraded for months, maybe even years. Behold the Power of a Computer Game!
Of course, the question is, will HL2 be good enough to cause people like me to run out and do the same thing we did six years ago? Perhaps that will be the true measure of its success; not that it is hardware hog, any game can be that, but that a game can be good enough for folks to plunk down three or for figures worth on hardware to play it.
heh yeah i never went to those lengths, but then the most i ever did with assembly was unlock a few shareware demos and write a "hello world" program of course. beyond that assembly is just plain gibberish to me. I have this habit of learning a little bit of a lot of languages instead of actually learning a useful amount in any one particular.
However, the highlight of my programming career was teaming up with a friend of mine in high school to make a game of Pong in "TrueBASIC" on the old Macs there. We found out it was impossible, because TrueBASIC didn't allow us to throw more than one keystroke into a variable at a time. And obviously we'd need that for 2 player pong... Ahh memories.
Heh... The volume levels were loud enough that her neighbors complained on a few occasions.
And yes the nameless friend was female, though I refained from mentioning it in the other post. I had a funny feeling I might get up modded (though I was expecting a funny mod) and based on past experience it is unwise to mention females on slashdot since I'm usually swamped with "No way!" and "Impossible!" and "I slept with her!" comments. Know what I mean?
Now watch everyone that read the other post read this one, and defeat the whole purpose of not stating the fact... Oh alright... Bring on the lame opposite sex jokes everyone!;)
I was using a friend's computer... this friend just happened to have the fancy Klipsch THX certified speakers, which cost a pretty penny... Anyway, we got to talking about old DOS games and this one called "Acid Tetris" came to mind, and for nostalgia purposes, we decided to download it. My friend was a little concerned something "bad" would happen running such an old DOS game in XP, but I was confident since I've run games like Dune II without any major issues, and besides, the worst that can happen is it just won't work... right?
So, so very wrong. The instant it opened an eardrum-shattering scream let loose through the mighty, three figure dollar amount speakers. I instantly closed out the game only to find that a persistent buzzing sound was present. At this point I think my friend stopped breathing (fearing the speakers were totally ruined) and I thought, hey no big deal, I'll just reboot. Buzz sound was still there. Well no big deal, let's just power down and unplug everything. Buzz sound still there. I didn't think it was that bad, but this nameless friend of mine couldn't stand it and bought new speakers.
And I now have a pair of Klipsch speakers that make a rather obnoxious buzzing noise. But they were free! So, in a sense, this bad sound code that almost ruined these speakers (they're worthless in dollar terms, no way I could sell them on eBay, etc) also provided me with free speakers that I never would have bought with my own funds.
I must therefore both curse and thank the developers of Acid Tetris, and more likely the folks in charge of backwards compatibility at Microsoft, and my own stupid self for running an old program and trusting XP to not bork itself.
If you've read this whole thing you're a brave, yet sad soul... but stay tuned for further adventures in computing with your hero(or nemesis?), the one and only Michael "Mad" Raymer!
Everyone remain calm. I spent countless hours in arcades preparing for such an impact. That's the real reason the dinosaurs died: they didn't have arcades.
Dude, you totally could have posted "In a word, no." without explanation. Then you'd have gotten +5 funny instead. I suppose that's a bad thing without the karma bonus though.
It was my intention to simply post, "No." but I'm too late for that.;)
The aliens were too busy messing up perfectly good fields of barley with a 2x4 and a rope to spare the time.
Yeah, after mastering the non-trivial matter of interstellar travel, what's left?
But in all seriousness, I'm quite certain the Egyptians simply knew more than we do about putting heavy things on top of other heavy things and, as you once mentioned, I guess it is best to adopt a "they weren't dumb" rule when it comes to ancient peoples and their accomplishments. Though I honestly do tend to believe that the Sphinx may predate the Fourth Dynasty... But then just like Shakespeare's plays, who really cares when or who did it when the only obvious thing is that it was done and we can simply admire that.
Duh, they were built be ALIENS. You know, little green men from outer space, that sorta thing. It amazes me that someone so well informed and so wise could make such an obvious mistake. I mean, if such amazing structures were created by ancient peoples, it means that they knew things we don't! That's impossible! Had to be the aliens...;)
My name is Mike, and I'm a Diablo II addict. Anyway, since before the game's release, people constantly insulted its graphics. While indeed, the graphics were 2D, calling them "pixelated" seriously undermines the excellent and detailed work the artists did.
So, in an effort to appease the 3D obsessed masses, Blizzard included buggy, hacked, ugly 3D modes. Both Glide and Direct3D ran slower and, in many ways, actually looked worse than DirectDraw. In fact, acting as vigilante tech support, I would recommend fellow battle.net-ers to switch to DirectDraw. Many of them couldn't believe the difference in performance and the lack of graphical glitches.
The lesson of this long story? The average game customer today simply refuses to accept 2D. The average customer doesn't care about gameplay or detailed art, but only flashy gee-wiz graphics, because the average customer doesn't play for hours on end. And it is the average customer that lines the wallets of companies, such as Blizzard.
And that, fellow gamers, is why 3D graphics have not surpassed 2D art.
Same as the last time I saw you post about playing with toys and the vroom vroom thing, I had to grab my Micromachines Starship Enterprise thingie from my desk drawer and fly it around while making "impulse" and "warp" noises.
Sometimes I'll even put up a nifty space wallpaper and vroom it around the screen. It just so happens that I have the Earthrise thing up right now (what with it being the anniversary and all) so that makes for good wooshing fun.
I've learned not to do this in front of other people, they tend to find it extremely distracting.
The stupid analogy act.
Whereby, if someone uses that stupid shoplifting analogy to compare to copyright infringement, they get sentenced to 1000 years and regular beatings with a baseball bat.
OH yes please, thank you, so that I might finally have a legal reason for beating Miss Spears into a bloody pulp. The quote in question if you don't want to read all those (trust me, if you do your IQ will drop) is as follows: "Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD? It's the same thing, people going into the computers and loggin' on and stealing our music." ~Britney Spears
A while back on the Daily Show, it was mentioned that North Korea says their military is only for defense, and they showed this image which Jon Stewart said was "obviously a member of their military defending himself from our exploding capitol building."
Yeah, but would you put your brain in a robot body?
Hmm... Depends on how much better the robot body would be than my current one I guess. Sounds like it might be fun, but then again I might miss the old ugly bag of mostly water.;)
and you had an 80% chance of living five years, would you take it? What if your chances were 50%?
Yes and yes. Those aren't great odds but the odds of being safe inside a automobile aren't great either... I'd rather die doing something that no humans have ever done...
Kind of reminds of what someone much wiser than myself said on a similar subject here.
Well, my point was simply that it means we have something in common, besides of course reading slashdot. Awwwwwwww...
Though I love reading your posts (and have mentioned that some of them are at least somewhat life-altering), it's actually quite obvious that I'm quite different than the mighty KFG. First, there's the age factor... Then there's the fact I've lived in the same state all my life, quite the opposite of the well traveled KFG. Your diverse number of hobbies... Just your diverse nature in general, again much different.
So to see you post a link to a PA comic, something I've caught myself doing a number of times... It was just an "Aww... we're not that different after all!" moment I guess. Except I said "Damn..." instead, heh. Does that make any sense? Probably not, so I'll shut up and go back to stalking now.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, recent studies have shown some minor good news. If you live past your mid-70s or so with no sign of Alzeimers, you probably won't get it. Talk of these diseases want me to run folding@home again. But I'm a dnet man myself...
Stalkers everywhere rejoice! ;)
That does a lot to alter public perception... which sucks. I mean I even have a really big anti P4 rant on my silly site, though it is a bit out of date at this point, and people that I know have read it still act all surprised when I mention I don't like P4s. So all us geeks have issues that we get rabid about, right? ;)
Back then I was a very, very broke high school student and cheap "office" hardware was all I could afford. In fact most of that hardware was given to me by friends who knew of my desperate need for it. You're 100% right about it being horrid for games, but that was the point of my post... trying to be amusing in the sense that college kids eating all-ramen diets is also amusing. ;)
And while I will certainly admit the second machine wasn't very good either, it was about a billion and half times faster than the Cyrix, and more than enough to run the orginal Half-Life.
I'm long overdue for an upgrade (obviously) and HL2 might be enough to push me over the edge and splurge. I don't really have the funds right now but if it's good, I do have credit. Heh. ;)
Oh well, at least this antique can still play HL1 and Counter-Strike.
I was very, very wrong. I inserted the Half-Life disc into my 4x CD-ROM and started to install it to my PC... It had 24MB of memory, a "PR233" Cyrix Processor, and I believe the video card at the time was a 4MB card with "pretend" support for Direct3D.
The pain.
The horror.
You know those Houndeye creatures I think they're called, the ones that create a blue circle of hurt? One of those would bring that computer to a complete standstill when it did its little attack.
The poor Cyrix also over-heated often, so often that I renamed the short-cut to the game "Crash-Life" and felt better somehow.
This story does have a happy ending though. After a few days of suffering, I got myself a Celeron 366 and clocked that baby at 550 MHz, I got a voodoo2, and i think a massive 96 MB of ram. If it hadn't been for Half-Life, I likely would not have upgraded for months, maybe even years. Behold the Power of a Computer Game!
Of course, the question is, will HL2 be good enough to cause people like me to run out and do the same thing we did six years ago? Perhaps that will be the true measure of its success; not that it is hardware hog, any game can be that, but that a game can be good enough for folks to plunk down three or for figures worth on hardware to play it.
However, the highlight of my programming career was teaming up with a friend of mine in high school to make a game of Pong in "TrueBASIC" on the old Macs there. We found out it was impossible, because TrueBASIC didn't allow us to throw more than one keystroke into a variable at a time. And obviously we'd need that for 2 player pong... Ahh memories.
And yes the nameless friend was female, though I refained from mentioning it in the other post. I had a funny feeling I might get up modded (though I was expecting a funny mod) and based on past experience it is unwise to mention females on slashdot since I'm usually swamped with "No way!" and "Impossible!" and "I slept with her!" comments. Know what I mean?
Now watch everyone that read the other post read this one, and defeat the whole purpose of not stating the fact... Oh alright... Bring on the lame opposite sex jokes everyone! ;)
So, so very wrong. The instant it opened an eardrum-shattering scream let loose through the mighty, three figure dollar amount speakers. I instantly closed out the game only to find that a persistent buzzing sound was present. At this point I think my friend stopped breathing (fearing the speakers were totally ruined) and I thought, hey no big deal, I'll just reboot. Buzz sound was still there. Well no big deal, let's just power down and unplug everything. Buzz sound still there. I didn't think it was that bad, but this nameless friend of mine couldn't stand it and bought new speakers.
And I now have a pair of Klipsch speakers that make a rather obnoxious buzzing noise. But they were free! So, in a sense, this bad sound code that almost ruined these speakers (they're worthless in dollar terms, no way I could sell them on eBay, etc) also provided me with free speakers that I never would have bought with my own funds.
I must therefore both curse and thank the developers of Acid Tetris, and more likely the folks in charge of backwards compatibility at Microsoft, and my own stupid self for running an old program and trusting XP to not bork itself.
If you've read this whole thing you're a brave, yet sad soul... but stay tuned for further adventures in computing with your hero(or nemesis?), the one and only Michael "Mad" Raymer!
How about they work on inventing laser-based weapons that people can dodge. ;)
Everyone remain calm. I spent countless hours in arcades preparing for such an impact. That's the real reason the dinosaurs died: they didn't have arcades.
It was my intention to simply post, "No." but I'm too late for that. ;)
ha ha ha... and happy 5000th post! please keep them coming, and that means no dieing either, mister "winner" of the genetic lottery.
Yeah, after mastering the non-trivial matter of interstellar travel, what's left?
But in all seriousness, I'm quite certain the Egyptians simply knew more than we do about putting heavy things on top of other heavy things and, as you once mentioned, I guess it is best to adopt a "they weren't dumb" rule when it comes to ancient peoples and their accomplishments. Though I honestly do tend to believe that the Sphinx may predate the Fourth Dynasty... But then just like Shakespeare's plays, who really cares when or who did it when the only obvious thing is that it was done and we can simply admire that.
Duh, they were built be ALIENS. You know, little green men from outer space, that sorta thing. It amazes me that someone so well informed and so wise could make such an obvious mistake. I mean, if such amazing structures were created by ancient peoples, it means that they knew things we don't! That's impossible! Had to be the aliens... ;)
So, in an effort to appease the 3D obsessed masses, Blizzard included buggy, hacked, ugly 3D modes. Both Glide and Direct3D ran slower and, in many ways, actually looked worse than DirectDraw. In fact, acting as vigilante tech support, I would recommend fellow battle.net-ers to switch to DirectDraw. Many of them couldn't believe the difference in performance and the lack of graphical glitches.
The lesson of this long story? The average game customer today simply refuses to accept 2D. The average customer doesn't care about gameplay or detailed art, but only flashy gee-wiz graphics, because the average customer doesn't play for hours on end. And it is the average customer that lines the wallets of companies, such as Blizzard.
And that, fellow gamers, is why 3D graphics have not surpassed 2D art.
Sometimes I'll even put up a nifty space wallpaper and vroom it around the screen. It just so happens that I have the Earthrise thing up right now (what with it being the anniversary and all) so that makes for good wooshing fun.
I've learned not to do this in front of other people, they tend to find it extremely distracting.
Lock phasers on submit! Fire!
I don't think we can slashdot akamai, but that quake.de link is pretty toasted at the moment, heh...
I actually have not seen this yet (posting from 56K here) so I'm not sure what this trailer is and how it compares to the other file...
OH yes please, thank you, so that I might finally have a legal reason for beating Miss Spears into a bloody pulp. The quote in question if you don't want to read all those (trust me, if you do your IQ will drop) is as follows: "Would you go into a CD store and steal a CD? It's the same thing, people going into the computers and loggin' on and stealing our music." ~Britney Spears
Gotta love The Daily Show! Funny stuff.
Hmm... Depends on how much better the robot body would be than my current one I guess. Sounds like it might be fun, but then again I might miss the old ugly bag of mostly water. ;)
While that sounds great, if you're one of the 50,000 people in the US killed in an automobile accident each year, you're still 100% dead.
Yes and yes. Those aren't great odds but the odds of being safe inside a automobile aren't great either... I'd rather die doing something that no humans have ever done...
Kind of reminds of what someone much wiser than myself said on a similar subject here.
Though I love reading your posts (and have mentioned that some of them are at least somewhat life-altering), it's actually quite obvious that I'm quite different than the mighty KFG. First, there's the age factor... Then there's the fact I've lived in the same state all my life, quite the opposite of the well traveled KFG. Your diverse number of hobbies... Just your diverse nature in general, again much different.
So to see you post a link to a PA comic, something I've caught myself doing a number of times... It was just an "Aww... we're not that different after all!" moment I guess. Except I said "Damn..." instead, heh. Does that make any sense? Probably not, so I'll shut up and go back to stalking now.
Damn... you read penny arcade too? The list of reasons to stalk your user page just keeps getting longer!