It's a damned good thing this is a workstation card. I've never really understood the true purpose of these beasts, and how they are supposed to differ from gamer-class graphics cards, but I'd hate to see what kind of idiot mayhem would ensue if ATI released a 1gb gamer card to the public.
I remember when they started having 256mb budget cards and I kind of scratched my head over the concept of a card that sports as much RAM as its host PC (in many cases), and more importantly why the hell would anyone want 256mb of textures on an already stuttering GPU.
Sure enough, the imbeciles would bowl into the store, fresh off the short bus and ask for the 256mb card, with the religious belief that it was "better" than the 128mb version. What's even funnier is the concept of "TurboCache", in which a card will advertise 256mb of display memory, yet only have 64mb onboard - it borrows the balance from your system ram as needed. Funny, back in the good old days we called it AGP GART.
I'm sure if ATI Released a 1gb Radeon 9200, a whole nation of ignorants would snap it up and think it's a significant upgrade. Hell, Future Shop (Best Buy) would probably dedicate a whole freakin' aisle to stocking them because it would be their top seller. Ironically, the recent leaps in graphical detail have not spawned from insane texturing, they've been driven by elaborate pixel shaders, because really the biggest difference between a 256mb budget card, and a 256mb 7900GTX is the number of simultaneous shader ops, followed by clock speeds.
Graphics cards are a fun portion of the market. It's one of those things where I can openly mock cheapskates without repercussions because 99% of them are uniformly stupid. It's kind of like the used car market with two less digits on the price.
It doesn't matter what kind of card you buy, or how cheap it is. If you intend to use its 3d capabilities at all, it's going to cost you AT LEAST 50$ a year. That means the crappy Radeon 9250 you bought for xmas will need to be replaced by next xmas with another $50 card if you want to keep up with the bottom-of-the-barrel for gaming. At the other end of the scale, the $200 Geforce 4200 your cousin bought four years ago still keeps its nose above water. $200 over 4 years that's $50, except your cousin enjoyed stellar performance for the first year or two, while your budget card sucked before you ever took it out of the bubble wrap.
Myself, I'm stuck with a mid-range card for the time being, a Radeon X700. It's a little over a year old and still plays just about anything I throw at it, 1280x1024 medium-high detail. I'd like to get something faster but I personally don't feel I've gotten my money's worth out of it yet. Maybe next xmas the two companies will release another whopper that will seduce my pocketbook. I set my graphics budget a little higher, say $100/year. That doesn't mean I'm buying a low-end card every year, it means I buy a kickass one and stretch it out over time. As an added benefit, I can sell my used hardware for a reasonable price to offset the cost of upgrading. How much can you sell a year-old card that was only $50 to begin with ? ten bucks ? ho-hum!
You should have brought an expert witness to explain exactly how dangerous a cigarette butte can be in pouring rain against non-combustible materials, aka a 9th grader. Hell I'd chop the cop's balls off to make sure they don't make more retarded kids.
Who did you piss off enough for them to suggest that you try Gentoo as your first step into linux or unix?
First step ? haha no.. my first step was Slackware 2.0 in 1994 on a 486. Gentoo is the first distro I've successfully installed on my spanking new Athlon X2 4gb 2tb workstation, and only because I was able to tweak the hell out of it. I was rather surprised to learn that Grub doesn't work on 4gb memory yet. Boot loaders are something I don't dare hack, but you'd think someone would have fixed that by now, seeing as RAM grows on trees nowadays.. and then the kernel tends to stall on my USB mouse, trying to handshake it at USB2 speeds.. oh well. Little nags that are easily patched, but it still makes me wonder why in 2006 we still have difficulty handling mid-range hardware.
So far Gentoo's been nice though, after getting over the learning curve I find it does precisely what I expect from it.
Debian is fine for what it does, I swear by it for servers and "work" machines, and haven't had APT break my system in years.. it's all a matter of avoiding the unstable branch.
My gripe with Debian is for work&play home use. It's just not tailored for that. It's fine for running vanilla X with some dev tools or traditional office-type work, but I couldn't bear using it 24/7 on my home rig, it's just not flexible enough. Getting any sort of video/audio is a minefield of packages that are either outdated or compiled with overly conservative features. Now I don't mind compiling my own Apache or MySQL as needed, but it's hell building hand-tuned X apps trying to mesh with APT's database without it breaking at the next update.
So far Gentoo's been a little baroque but it's done everything I've asked of it, with minimal fuss.
The biggest issue I see as a daily user of both Windows and Linux is that Linux is such a bitch to install, not just initially but ever after. With all the dependencies and whatnot, it's a disaster. Package management tools go only part-way. I still can't download a zip file from some web site, click "Setup" and quickly load it onto my hard disk.
I've recently gone through a Gentoo install, and it took me 4 days before I finally got my X working with ATI binary drivers. I don't expect the average monkey to go through the hell I suffered just to load a device driver. I don't expect the average techie to put up with that level of mediocrity either. Thank god it was Gentoo, as I was able to pinpoint the problem and code a quick workaround.
Then I tried to load Mandrake, and of course the installer crashed trying to load (you guessed it) ATI drivers. Same with Red Hat.. the only other distro I could load was Debian, and well, we all have our opinions about Debian now don't we.
For Linux to be accepted as a desktop OS, we need to trim off the fat, prune or at least hide the dangerous/baroque parts, and make it click-friendly. There will always be a market for hacker distributions like Slack or Gentoo, but for the rest of the world, Lindows is a step in the right direction. It's not just a matter of distribution and tweaks, it's also a kernel issue. How about a standardized binary driver interface for those who need it ? Simplify the things common people are most likely to work with and we will eventually have a usable OS for common people.
I look forward to the day when people are using Linux and have a reliable framework for us tech support guys to work with.
-Which distro are you using ? -Which terminal emulator are you using ? -Are you on Ext2, Ext3, Reiser ? -What's the device node of your root partition ?
I don't expect the casual user to know any of that crap. They know they're running Windows (even if it's Xorg), they call any black text box DOS, and they know they have a C: drive and their CD player is D:. Why can't we make Linux that obvious ?
Leading swiss researchers have also come to the dramatic conclusion that electronics break down all the freaking time. In other breaking news (*rimshot*), young people are believed to have less experience than old farts.
This shouldn't be surprising that new gadgets break down and/or kill their owners. Part of it has to do with the mad dash to release the newest gadget and beat your competitors to market. Part of it has to do with staffing practices, hiring young dumb cheap kids (and by kids I mean inexperienced graduates) who screw up.. driving manufacturing costs down to increase profits. Why hire a 90$/hr engineer when a corn-fed teenager will do it for 20$ ? The real cost of mediocrity goes to the end-user; as long as the TV/computer/dvd player outlasts the 90-day warranty who gives a crap ? That's the corporate mentality that's ruining the biz.
Isn't it funny that they hide reality when it doesn't fit the network's sheltered view of society. I think this sort of thing should be embraced rather than suppressed, as it really does happen.. more and more these days with ever-dumber kids. I'd rather be exposed to the situation and raise public awareness, maybe even get some folks to discuss it with THEIR teens. Hiding a problem doesn't make it go away, it just makes you that much more ignorant.
Since you've obviously just landed off of Elvis' rocket ship, here's a little history for you my friend: graphics cards from 2004 weren't nearly as powerful as those from 2005. Surprisingly enough, game sales in 2004 didn't suffer, and you could even manage a very enjoyable experience with mid-range hardware back then. Fast-forward a year, Doom 3, Quake 4.. oooh eye candy. The mid-range cards of today can run today's games just fine.
And next year, when they come out with Halo 3 / Half Life 7 / Need For Speed Wetware Edition, the mid-range graphics cards current at their release will be capable of sustaining most people's entertainment levels at perfectly satisfying levels.
You have to realize game developers use whatever hardware is available just like us. They might get the highest-end cards just to have as much headway as possible, but if every Quake fan needed a 900$ graphics board to play a 40$ game title, the game company would die a quick, humiliating death because their target market would be ridiculously small. Now I'm not saying they're going to try hard to accomodate that TNT2-M64 piece of shite you bought in '99 because it was under 100$, but spend that same 100$ on a current product and it will run current games at modest yet thoroughly enjoyable frame rates.
And another note (yes, I love you that much), a graphics card may cost 300-400$ for the higher-end stuff, but how much did you spend on your processor ? How much did your mainboard cost ? How much ram do you use ? If you're the kind of chump who is proud and happy with a 199$ Celeron system then obviously the cost of a gaming card is obscene for you. If on the other hand, you're a die-hard computer enthusiast with the latest dual Opteron dual-core (that's four cores!), 4 gb of ram and 2 tb of scorching-fast RAID storage.. putting a 400$ gaming card in a 4'000$ powerstation almost feels lame.
Some people want the ultra-high end gear.. me, I'm still chugging along with an old Radeon X700, I'm waiting for the next whopper from NVidia to come out. I know it's going to cost 800$ or more, I don't care. That 800$ is going to please me for YEARS, and that's what matters.
Poll: Name ONE Bethesda title that didn't suck! I remember back in the early 90's when Doom was all the rage, and everyone was making FPS games, few had the smooth feel of Doom. I had a demo of Terminator Future Shock by Bethesda and holy hell, it felt like I had downgraded back to a 25mhz 386 with EGA. It felt like this game was not only rushed, but 2 years late to market.
They're not known for making innovative eye-popping works of interactive art, they're known for doing piss-poor me-too ripoffs of whatever's trendy. Just look at their list of releases over the last 15 years.. they don't even have a specialty. You can't really play a game and say "Ooh that's a Bethesda".. At least EA, hate them as we may, they have recognizable sports titles and solid (if cheapened) franchises like Need For Speed. A game house needs to be more than just generic coders with a big-ticket license.. it needs creative direction.
Statistically speaking it doesn't matter what the digits are, but the fact that it's a human process means you have insight on typical behavior and each combination is no longer equally weighted. Some combinations or patterns are more appealing because we are trained to not trust our numeric memory, so we pick something that has low entropy in the hopes that it will be easier to remember.
Refusing to help can put an individual at a grave disadvantage since they my be seen as less worthy as a breeding partner
Whoa there Morpheus! breeding partner ? This isn't the discovery channel, and if being a hardass means I can have a drink without gold diggers littering my personal space then I'm even happier!
I see people as investments on a holistic scale. If you put time, effort, money (which really are all the same) into someone that's not likely to pay it back (or forward), then it's a poor investment. This isn't cruel or unfair, this is nature. Unhealthy and unsuccessful businesses fail, so should unhealthy and unsuccessful humans. Same game, different scorekeeping. The question is: how do you measure a life ?
Okay good point, but why not just use a dedicated runic font for that specific purpose ? We already have those, they're just poorly supported in general-purpose software. Why the hell would general-purpose applications need to know foreign charsets ? Just because a handful of people want a feature does not mean the whole world should change the way they write code just to accomodate that minority. Unicode is such a big deal yet I can't justify the need in my daily computing tasks. Even if I spoke a foreign language that requires non-latin characters, I would simply use that specific font, I don't need the other 2700 languages along with it. I think it would be far easier for an application to support two or three individual charsets than 32-bit character spaces.
You didn't get the point of my post. The fact is that Intel's future chips are going to beat AMD's current chips. Well yes, DUH, but AMD will also release new, faster products. The performance race never ends, I just feel that AMD is better at squeezing the most out of current manufacturing processes and IMO better architecture designs. It took Intel how long before admitting Netburst was a lost cause ? Pentium-M is great, had it been out three years ago they might have given the Athlon T-Bird a good beating, but that's not how history was written.
I don't have much to add to this rant, but Bell Canada is godawful for broadband, I can vouch for that. They don't seem to distinguish between consumer and business-grade service, the performance and uptime are shameful. I won't get into details about their tech support, because the only good thing about them is creating jobs for the awful techs, keeping their dangerous incompetence away from real I.T. work. The reason they have survived like this is because most other broadband ISP's in Canada are just as bad or worse. Rogers is slow and has extremely aggressive filtering, their routers probably spend more cycles castrating traffic than serving it. Just about everyone else is piggybacked onto Bell's lines, reselling DSL for the privilege of having lesser DNS and mail servers. There are a few noted exceptions such as IGS, whose DSL offering seems actually faster and more reliable than Bell's.. not quite sure how that works.
The one towering demon that stands above all, and the reason why some of us are so hostile toward DSL, is Videotron cable in our beloved province of Quebec. Low latency, uberhigh bandwidth, an "extreme" package for alpha geeks that's actually twice faster than the standard service (10mbps down, 1mbps up) and you really see the full advertised speeds. I routinely kick 1150k/sec on torrents, heck my home box has better throughput than my ded server down in the states. My uptime over the past year has been five nines (yes, that means 5 minutes down - for RESIDENTIAL). Uncapped for the extreme package... so what's the negatives ? Ports 21,25,80,139 and maybe others are blocked, so no ftp/spam/web servers on your home box. They don't throttle, they don't "soft cap". I can live with the blocked ports, everything else kicks ass.
And no I don't work for the cable company (sadly, I need a job!). I don't expect every ISP to be so fast and cheap, but the others could definitely try harder.
That's the beauty of it. Intel is (as always) desperately throwing in new technology that has more often than not backfired. AMD is calculating its move and waiting for the right time to nail Intel square between the eyes, as it has done for the past 3 years now. AMD still has old 130nm dies at 2.6ghz coming within 80% of Intel's 3.4ghz Xeons, to speak nothing of the latest 90nm cores that are more efficient both in performance and power consumption. Intel is moving to a 65nm process to ramp up clock speeds, of course the highest clocked cores will beat out current Athlon 64's, but what will happen once AMD follows into the 65nm arena ? What will Intel do when a finely tuned 65nm 3.6ghz dual-core Athlon64 comes rapping on the door ? I'll bring the popcorn, it's going to be a fun show!
I mean for good freaking grief for all we know he will be working in a drug rehab program or a food kitchen!
That's all fine and dandy until you hit a die-hard darwinist such as myself who thinks drug addicts should deal with their own goddamned problems. I did, and I have no pity for the weak. If you don't have the brains nor willpower to get out of your own hell, then you're better off as compost to fertilize my lawn.
don't try to tell me that 16 bits is enough bits to store every character you'll ever want to display or print.
Okay, I won't, but can you tell me why I would need more than 16 bits to store a single character ? Why the hell do we need so many characters in the world ? Are there so many ways to say "Hello" that we need millions of characters to communicate with our neighbors ? I'm not saying everyone should speak english (I'm french myself), but eventually the various dialects will condense into more portable languages.
Maybe in a few decades, maybe in a century.. sooner or later the concept of unity will be more than just words on the back of a student flyer, and we will want to understand others no matter what land they hail from. Why should a computer understand 4 billion characters when humans only use a few hundred at best, for most of us just a few dozen.
It's funny but I never considered Novell to be a major player in anything. From the early 90's with DOS Netware, up to 2004 the last time I logged into a Novell network, there's always been an element of disdain in using Novell software, something bloaty, unpolished, baroque about it. On the surface it almost looks like a "networking for dummies" product, yet it's not.. or at least it doesn't try to be. They're trying to hold a seat in a market that is dominated by Windows on one side, Unix on the other.. in both situations it's TCP/IP and we don't need Novell's help.
Old coders hate VB because VB used to be shite. VB.NET is wholly new and redesigned from the ground up as a CLR dialect. I had given up old VB in favor of Delphi because it was easier to interface with 3rd party software, and of course much much faster since Delphi is compiled rather than interpreted. This is no longer true with VB.NET, which is now perfectly acceptable as more than just a RAD tool, yet still "easier" than C++ (hell, INTERCAL is easier than C++:P)
The problem with strategy guides is they don't offer any new strategies. Long gone are the days when one could actually learn insider secrets on a game from reading the guide. I look back to the days of Mortal Kombat. How the hell were we ever supposed to guess those nonsensical finishing moves ? The game designers were involved with the guide publishers and magazines such as GamePro and EGM.
Any chump can play a game and write what he learns from that first playthrough, and they post it on Gamefaqs. Why would anyone pay for the same goddamned thing in hardcopy (and rather pricey too).. that eludes me. You won't learn any big secrets, you won't get dibs on a weathered, refined strategy to vanquish your opponents, you won't even get factual information half the time because they make tons of mistakes that don't get checked due to deadlines and the fact that commercial guide publishers are often poor writers AND poor gamers.
The last guide I bought was Final Fantasy 7, and while it's relatively clean as a walkthrough, it is nowhere near complete and pales in comparison to the huge texts found on GameFaqs. The one thing I like about my book is the bestiary and materia list, which are handy to have on my lap when I'm level rushing, but it's nothing I couldn't have printed off the net.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a damned good thing this is a workstation card. I've never really understood the true purpose of these beasts, and how they are supposed to differ from gamer-class graphics cards, but I'd hate to see what kind of idiot mayhem would ensue if ATI released a 1gb gamer card to the public.
I remember when they started having 256mb budget cards and I kind of scratched my head over the concept of a card that sports as much RAM as its host PC (in many cases), and more importantly why the hell would anyone want 256mb of textures on an already stuttering GPU.
Sure enough, the imbeciles would bowl into the store, fresh off the short bus and ask for the 256mb card, with the religious belief that it was "better" than the 128mb version. What's even funnier is the concept of "TurboCache", in which a card will advertise 256mb of display memory, yet only have 64mb onboard - it borrows the balance from your system ram as needed. Funny, back in the good old days we called it AGP GART.
I'm sure if ATI Released a 1gb Radeon 9200, a whole nation of ignorants would snap it up and think it's a significant upgrade. Hell, Future Shop (Best Buy) would probably dedicate a whole freakin' aisle to stocking them because it would be their top seller. Ironically, the recent leaps in graphical detail have not spawned from insane texturing, they've been driven by elaborate pixel shaders, because really the biggest difference between a 256mb budget card, and a 256mb 7900GTX is the number of simultaneous shader ops, followed by clock speeds.
Graphics cards are a fun portion of the market. It's one of those things where I can openly mock cheapskates without repercussions because 99% of them are uniformly stupid. It's kind of like the used car market with two less digits on the price.
It doesn't matter what kind of card you buy, or how cheap it is. If you intend to use its 3d capabilities at all, it's going to cost you AT LEAST 50$ a year. That means the crappy Radeon 9250 you bought for xmas will need to be replaced by next xmas with another $50 card if you want to keep up with the bottom-of-the-barrel for gaming. At the other end of the scale, the $200 Geforce 4200 your cousin bought four years ago still keeps its nose above water. $200 over 4 years that's $50, except your cousin enjoyed stellar performance for the first year or two, while your budget card sucked before you ever took it out of the bubble wrap.
Myself, I'm stuck with a mid-range card for the time being, a Radeon X700. It's a little over a year old and still plays just about anything I throw at it, 1280x1024 medium-high detail. I'd like to get something faster but I personally don't feel I've gotten my money's worth out of it yet. Maybe next xmas the two companies will release another whopper that will seduce my pocketbook. I set my graphics budget a little higher, say $100/year. That doesn't mean I'm buying a low-end card every year, it means I buy a kickass one and stretch it out over time. As an added benefit, I can sell my used hardware for a reasonable price to offset the cost of upgrading. How much can you sell a year-old card that was only $50 to begin with ? ten bucks ? ho-hum!
You should have brought an expert witness to explain exactly how dangerous a cigarette butte can be in pouring rain against non-combustible materials, aka a 9th grader. Hell I'd chop the cop's balls off to make sure they don't make more retarded kids.
Who did you piss off enough for them to suggest that you try Gentoo as your first step into linux or unix?
First step ? haha no.. my first step was Slackware 2.0 in 1994 on a 486. Gentoo is the first distro I've successfully installed on my spanking new Athlon X2 4gb 2tb workstation, and only because I was able to tweak the hell out of it. I was rather surprised to learn that Grub doesn't work on 4gb memory yet. Boot loaders are something I don't dare hack, but you'd think someone would have fixed that by now, seeing as RAM grows on trees nowadays.. and then the kernel tends to stall on my USB mouse, trying to handshake it at USB2 speeds.. oh well. Little nags that are easily patched, but it still makes me wonder why in 2006 we still have difficulty handling mid-range hardware.
So far Gentoo's been nice though, after getting over the learning curve I find it does precisely what I expect from it.
Wasn't that a kickass asteroids clone on the Amiga ? :D
Ohhhh how I miss that useless toy of a computer. The pirate intros were better than the games themselves!
Debian is fine for what it does, I swear by it for servers and "work" machines, and haven't had APT break my system in years.. it's all a matter of avoiding the unstable branch.
My gripe with Debian is for work&play home use. It's just not tailored for that. It's fine for running vanilla X with some dev tools or traditional office-type work, but I couldn't bear using it 24/7 on my home rig, it's just not flexible enough. Getting any sort of video/audio is a minefield of packages that are either outdated or compiled with overly conservative features. Now I don't mind compiling my own Apache or MySQL as needed, but it's hell building hand-tuned X apps trying to mesh with APT's database without it breaking at the next update.
So far Gentoo's been a little baroque but it's done everything I've asked of it, with minimal fuss.
The biggest issue I see as a daily user of both Windows and Linux is that Linux is such a bitch to install, not just initially but ever after. With all the dependencies and whatnot, it's a disaster. Package management tools go only part-way. I still can't download a zip file from some web site, click "Setup" and quickly load it onto my hard disk.
I've recently gone through a Gentoo install, and it took me 4 days before I finally got my X working with ATI binary drivers. I don't expect the average monkey to go through the hell I suffered just to load a device driver. I don't expect the average techie to put up with that level of mediocrity either. Thank god it was Gentoo, as I was able to pinpoint the problem and code a quick workaround.
Then I tried to load Mandrake, and of course the installer crashed trying to load (you guessed it) ATI drivers. Same with Red Hat.. the only other distro I could load was Debian, and well, we all have our opinions about Debian now don't we.
For Linux to be accepted as a desktop OS, we need to trim off the fat, prune or at least hide the dangerous/baroque parts, and make it click-friendly. There will always be a market for hacker distributions like Slack or Gentoo, but for the rest of the world, Lindows is a step in the right direction. It's not just a matter of distribution and tweaks, it's also a kernel issue. How about a standardized binary driver interface for those who need it ? Simplify the things common people are most likely to work with and we will eventually have a usable OS for common people.
I look forward to the day when people are using Linux and have a reliable framework for us tech support guys to work with.
-Which distro are you using ?
-Which terminal emulator are you using ?
-Are you on Ext2, Ext3, Reiser ?
-What's the device node of your root partition ?
I don't expect the casual user to know any of that crap. They know they're running Windows (even if it's Xorg), they call any black text box DOS, and they know they have a C: drive and their CD player is D:. Why can't we make Linux that obvious ?
Early adopters experience more bugs.
Leading swiss researchers have also come to the dramatic conclusion that electronics break down all the freaking time. In other breaking news (*rimshot*), young people are believed to have less experience than old farts.
This shouldn't be surprising that new gadgets break down and/or kill their owners. Part of it has to do with the mad dash to release the newest gadget and beat your competitors to market. Part of it has to do with staffing practices, hiring young dumb cheap kids (and by kids I mean inexperienced graduates) who screw up.. driving manufacturing costs down to increase profits. Why hire a 90$/hr engineer when a corn-fed teenager will do it for 20$ ? The real cost of mediocrity goes to the end-user; as long as the TV/computer/dvd player outlasts the 90-day warranty who gives a crap ? That's the corporate mentality that's ruining the biz.
Sadly enough, I remember that title. Even sadder, I agree with you. Man, I miss that old Amiga.
Isn't it funny that they hide reality when it doesn't fit the network's sheltered view of society. I think this sort of thing should be embraced rather than suppressed, as it really does happen.. more and more these days with ever-dumber kids. I'd rather be exposed to the situation and raise public awareness, maybe even get some folks to discuss it with THEIR teens. Hiding a problem doesn't make it go away, it just makes you that much more ignorant.
Well jiminy the man doesn't have RSI, he just hasn't paid his heating bill since the dot com bust!
Boy meets world!
Since you've obviously just landed off of Elvis' rocket ship, here's a little history for you my friend: graphics cards from 2004 weren't nearly as powerful as those from 2005. Surprisingly enough, game sales in 2004 didn't suffer, and you could even manage a very enjoyable experience with mid-range hardware back then. Fast-forward a year, Doom 3, Quake 4.. oooh eye candy. The mid-range cards of today can run today's games just fine.
And next year, when they come out with Halo 3 / Half Life 7 / Need For Speed Wetware Edition, the mid-range graphics cards current at their release will be capable of sustaining most people's entertainment levels at perfectly satisfying levels.
You have to realize game developers use whatever hardware is available just like us. They might get the highest-end cards just to have as much headway as possible, but if every Quake fan needed a 900$ graphics board to play a 40$ game title, the game company would die a quick, humiliating death because their target market would be ridiculously small. Now I'm not saying they're going to try hard to accomodate that TNT2-M64 piece of shite you bought in '99 because it was under 100$, but spend that same 100$ on a current product and it will run current games at modest yet thoroughly enjoyable frame rates.
And another note (yes, I love you that much), a graphics card may cost 300-400$ for the higher-end stuff, but how much did you spend on your processor ? How much did your mainboard cost ? How much ram do you use ? If you're the kind of chump who is proud and happy with a 199$ Celeron system then obviously the cost of a gaming card is obscene for you. If on the other hand, you're a die-hard computer enthusiast with the latest dual Opteron dual-core (that's four cores!), 4 gb of ram and 2 tb of scorching-fast RAID storage.. putting a 400$ gaming card in a 4'000$ powerstation almost feels lame.
Some people want the ultra-high end gear.. me, I'm still chugging along with an old Radeon X700, I'm waiting for the next whopper from NVidia to come out. I know it's going to cost 800$ or more, I don't care. That 800$ is going to please me for YEARS, and that's what matters.
Poll: Name ONE Bethesda title that didn't suck! I remember back in the early 90's when Doom was all the rage, and everyone was making FPS games, few had the smooth feel of Doom. I had a demo of Terminator Future Shock by Bethesda and holy hell, it felt like I had downgraded back to a 25mhz 386 with EGA. It felt like this game was not only rushed, but 2 years late to market.
They're not known for making innovative eye-popping works of interactive art, they're known for doing piss-poor me-too ripoffs of whatever's trendy. Just look at their list of releases over the last 15 years.. they don't even have a specialty. You can't really play a game and say "Ooh that's a Bethesda".. At least EA, hate them as we may, they have recognizable sports titles and solid (if cheapened) franchises like Need For Speed. A game house needs to be more than just generic coders with a big-ticket license.. it needs creative direction.
Statistically speaking it doesn't matter what the digits are, but the fact that it's a human process means you have insight on typical behavior and each combination is no longer equally weighted. Some combinations or patterns are more appealing because we are trained to not trust our numeric memory, so we pick something that has low entropy in the hopes that it will be easier to remember.
Refusing to help can put an individual at a grave disadvantage since they my be seen as less worthy as a breeding partner
Whoa there Morpheus! breeding partner ? This isn't the discovery channel, and if being a hardass means I can have a drink without gold diggers littering my personal space then I'm even happier!
I see people as investments on a holistic scale. If you put time, effort, money (which really are all the same) into someone that's not likely to pay it back (or forward), then it's a poor investment. This isn't cruel or unfair, this is nature. Unhealthy and unsuccessful businesses fail, so should unhealthy and unsuccessful humans. Same game, different scorekeeping. The question is: how do you measure a life ?
Okay good point, but why not just use a dedicated runic font for that specific purpose ? We already have those, they're just poorly supported in general-purpose software. Why the hell would general-purpose applications need to know foreign charsets ? Just because a handful of people want a feature does not mean the whole world should change the way they write code just to accomodate that minority. Unicode is such a big deal yet I can't justify the need in my daily computing tasks. Even if I spoke a foreign language that requires non-latin characters, I would simply use that specific font, I don't need the other 2700 languages along with it. I think it would be far easier for an application to support two or three individual charsets than 32-bit character spaces.
You didn't get the point of my post. The fact is that Intel's future chips are going to beat AMD's current chips. Well yes, DUH, but AMD will also release new, faster products. The performance race never ends, I just feel that AMD is better at squeezing the most out of current manufacturing processes and IMO better architecture designs. It took Intel how long before admitting Netburst was a lost cause ? Pentium-M is great, had it been out three years ago they might have given the Athlon T-Bird a good beating, but that's not how history was written.
I don't have much to add to this rant, but Bell Canada is godawful for broadband, I can vouch for that. They don't seem to distinguish between consumer and business-grade service, the performance and uptime are shameful. I won't get into details about their tech support, because the only good thing about them is creating jobs for the awful techs, keeping their dangerous incompetence away from real I.T. work. The reason they have survived like this is because most other broadband ISP's in Canada are just as bad or worse. Rogers is slow and has extremely aggressive filtering, their routers probably spend more cycles castrating traffic than serving it. Just about everyone else is piggybacked onto Bell's lines, reselling DSL for the privilege of having lesser DNS and mail servers. There are a few noted exceptions such as IGS, whose DSL offering seems actually faster and more reliable than Bell's.. not quite sure how that works.
The one towering demon that stands above all, and the reason why some of us are so hostile toward DSL, is Videotron cable in our beloved province of Quebec. Low latency, uberhigh bandwidth, an "extreme" package for alpha geeks that's actually twice faster than the standard service (10mbps down, 1mbps up) and you really see the full advertised speeds. I routinely kick 1150k/sec on torrents, heck my home box has better throughput than my ded server down in the states. My uptime over the past year has been five nines (yes, that means 5 minutes down - for RESIDENTIAL). Uncapped for the extreme package... so what's the negatives ? Ports 21,25,80,139 and maybe others are blocked, so no ftp/spam/web servers on your home box. They don't throttle, they don't "soft cap". I can live with the blocked ports, everything else kicks ass.
And no I don't work for the cable company (sadly, I need a job!). I don't expect every ISP to be so fast and cheap, but the others could definitely try harder.
That's the beauty of it. Intel is (as always) desperately throwing in new technology that has more often than not backfired. AMD is calculating its move and waiting for the right time to nail Intel square between the eyes, as it has done for the past 3 years now. AMD still has old 130nm dies at 2.6ghz coming within 80% of Intel's 3.4ghz Xeons, to speak nothing of the latest 90nm cores that are more efficient both in performance and power consumption. Intel is moving to a 65nm process to ramp up clock speeds, of course the highest clocked cores will beat out current Athlon 64's, but what will happen once AMD follows into the 65nm arena ? What will Intel do when a finely tuned 65nm 3.6ghz dual-core Athlon64 comes rapping on the door ? I'll bring the popcorn, it's going to be a fun show!
I mean for good freaking grief for all we know he will be working in a drug rehab program or a food kitchen!
That's all fine and dandy until you hit a die-hard darwinist such as myself who thinks drug addicts should deal with their own goddamned problems. I did, and I have no pity for the weak. If you don't have the brains nor willpower to get out of your own hell, then you're better off as compost to fertilize my lawn.
Hope is humankind's greatest blunder.
don't try to tell me that 16 bits is enough bits to store every character you'll ever want to display or print.
Okay, I won't, but can you tell me why I would need more than 16 bits to store a single character ? Why the hell do we need so many characters in the world ? Are there so many ways to say "Hello" that we need millions of characters to communicate with our neighbors ? I'm not saying everyone should speak english (I'm french myself), but eventually the various dialects will condense into more portable languages.
Maybe in a few decades, maybe in a century.. sooner or later the concept of unity will be more than just words on the back of a student flyer, and we will want to understand others no matter what land they hail from. Why should a computer understand 4 billion characters when humans only use a few hundred at best, for most of us just a few dozen.
It's funny but I never considered Novell to be a major player in anything. From the early 90's with DOS Netware, up to 2004 the last time I logged into a Novell network, there's always been an element of disdain in using Novell software, something bloaty, unpolished, baroque about it. On the surface it almost looks like a "networking for dummies" product, yet it's not.. or at least it doesn't try to be. They're trying to hold a seat in a market that is dominated by Windows on one side, Unix on the other.. in both situations it's TCP/IP and we don't need Novell's help.
Old coders hate VB because VB used to be shite. VB.NET is wholly new and redesigned from the ground up as a CLR dialect. I had given up old VB in favor of Delphi because it was easier to interface with 3rd party software, and of course much much faster since Delphi is compiled rather than interpreted. This is no longer true with VB.NET, which is now perfectly acceptable as more than just a RAD tool, yet still "easier" than C++ (hell, INTERCAL is easier than C++ :P)
Add more linefeeds!!! ;)
The problem with strategy guides is they don't offer any new strategies. Long gone are the days when one could actually learn insider secrets on a game from reading the guide. I look back to the days of Mortal Kombat. How the hell were we ever supposed to guess those nonsensical finishing moves ? The game designers were involved with the guide publishers and magazines such as GamePro and EGM.
Any chump can play a game and write what he learns from that first playthrough, and they post it on Gamefaqs. Why would anyone pay for the same goddamned thing in hardcopy (and rather pricey too).. that eludes me. You won't learn any big secrets, you won't get dibs on a weathered, refined strategy to vanquish your opponents, you won't even get factual information half the time because they make tons of mistakes that don't get checked due to deadlines and the fact that commercial guide publishers are often poor writers AND poor gamers.
The last guide I bought was Final Fantasy 7, and while it's relatively clean as a walkthrough, it is nowhere near complete and pales in comparison to the huge texts found on GameFaqs. The one thing I like about my book is the bestiary and materia list, which are handy to have on my lap when I'm level rushing, but it's nothing I couldn't have printed off the net.