Okay, I can appreciate the novelty factor, as this is very much one of those things guys like me would toy around with, maybe for an evening or two. I don't see a demoscene rising out of this, at best a few dozen guys circle-jerking on Facebook about it. To say it could display MS-DOS as a "platform" is to completely ignore the fundamental tenets of the demoscene. Rotozooming tunnel-mapped munching squares are what you do when you're learning to code graphics effects, and this IBNIZ tool abstracts the real math away in favour of random-looking gibberish. Just because typing "7KJHBB&*@#$B" yields a spinning bitmap doesn't teach the user anything about how to actually spin a bitmap on an algorithmic level, nor the problem-solving methodology involved in building far more impressive effects upon those foundations.
It used to be that demo coding was a precursor to game programming, at least in the Amiga and DOS days. Now with all these abstract graphics and sound APIs, it's a bit less so, though there is still plenty of opportunity for new demo sceners to cut their teeth on DirectX demos, focusing on graphical polish and synced A/V interplay rather than the vicissitudes of software rendering. IBNIZ really misses the boat for all of that, it's more like a Winamp visualizer with its own crappy digital monosynth, and who's going to bother with that illegible syntax ?
Sorry but I don't see the technical merit in a virtual machine that basically shifts garbage around. You could accomplish the same by feeding random noise into your TV's composite input.
Re:Ken Murray's blog
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No, he's just conscious, and right.
I drink coffee maybe 5 times a year, if that. It just isn't my thing, but I know caffeine addiction from the absurd quantities of pop I used to consume. It's as strong an addiction as any other drug. One day, I tried quitting cold turkey - big mistake! I would get these killer headaches that no painkiller could beat, so instead I had to wean myself off, very gradually. I still go through a cycle in the afternoon, just a few hours after waking up, where I get very sleepy for maybe a half-hour - that's caffeine withdrawal! I'm not actually tired, it's a programmed nervous response.
Moreover, caffeine doesn't perk me up at all. I could chug a gallon of Jolt cola before bed and sleep like a log. I even tried using coffee once, to power through a 48-hour death march... didn't work! That tells me that I've been consuming so much excess caffeine since childhood, that my brain's receptors are just fried from overstimulation. A lot of people are like this, so it's just not some random conjecture to say that caffeine has negative effects.
If XBMC isn't wife acceptable, then your wife isn't Billco-acceptable:)
My wife has been quite happy with her XBMC for years, first with the old-school Xbox, and now with a dedicated HTPC running the XBMCFreak builds, which are a respin of XBMC-Live with a few preconfigured add-ons and tweaks. Sure, the ION boxes cost us about $400 a piece a couple of years ago, but they are flawless.
I ditched GoDaddy a while ago, must be 2-3 years now, so the boycott is a non-issue for me. Funny thing is, I can't quite remember why I switched in the first place. Could be pricing, could be that I was tierd of clicking through 5 pages of upsells just to buy a domain, could be their "holier than thou" attitude of preemptively seizing domains they don't like... Either way, GoDaddy was never a reputable company to begin with. I mean, really, Danica Patrick as their mascot ? She's only famous for not looking like a man.
I'm still a million times more afraid of the American government with their mass media, than the Russian government with their nukes, because there's a lot less ambiguity around a nuke. You either blow shit up, or you don't. There is no profit motive if everyone's dead.
How much did said Boxee pay XBMC when they used it as their starting point ?
Oh, right. NOTHING!
They took years of public work, slapped on a watered down skin, got a chinese manufacturer to poop out a cheap media box, and plastered the resulting mess with a gazillion monetized links and ads. It seems it would only be fair that they continue producing the desktop port as a thank-you to the community that made their company possible in the first place, or at least provide the FULL SOURCE so someone else can produce binaries. The GPL doesn't require it, but it would constitute a good faith gesture that might actually get us open-source types to contribute patches and bug reports back to the project, which judging by the majority of user complaints are both things it sorely needs You could have a million non-techy people shit all over your forum, but it won't even come close to the positive impact one benevolent coder can impart with a few hours of volunteer debugging.
The way it stands now, Boxee sold out, and like most things that sell out, obsolescence typically follows shortly thereafter.
Boxee serves a very narrow and tightly defined purpose: it's XBMC for dummies. If you want less dummyness, it's time you switched to full-on XBMC. No Vudu links plastered all over your face, good customization, and far better Linux support.
The Boxee box is nice if you want to shut up a non-tech-savvy friend or relative, because it is plug-and-play. For us geeks, XBMC on either an old gaming PC or a nice compact ION box is a better fit.
The whole "money for nothing" bullet point means there is no shortage of suckers jumping on the bandwagon. Just like people were launching countless random crap blogs a decade ago, in the hopes of raking in beaucoup AdSense bucks (and failing), those same suckers are deploying half-baked mining clusters.
The very fact that a Bitcoin's trade-in value is inversely linked to popularity means this system has absolutely no hope of getting anywhere. It does not represent actual value, because the only way you can turn a Bitcoin into value is by suckering someone else into buying it. How this is considered an improvement over the current financial system is proof that people have no understanding of money.
Indeed, legal tells us what to do, and we implement it. If that means your beloved $69 Android tablet doesn't make the cut, so be it.
The #1 problem in I.T. is users antagonize their sysadmins, instead of playing nice. A job is a privilege, one that can be revoked if you purposely circumvent the sound rules put in place to cover everyone's asses.
I don't care what the establishment is saying. From the day I found out about Bitcoin, crunched some numbers and made sense of it all, it seemed to me like a self-defeating system. The fact that are limited "coins" but exponentially increasing miners, combined with the fact that the current value of a coin is less than the cost of electricity to mine it, and has been for a long time now, have already doomed this concept beyond recovery.
The only good to come of this, is if I ever meet someone who blew a wad of cash on fancy GPUs to mine, I'm going to buy him a beer and laugh my fuckin' tits off.
Face it, IT's job is to facilitate the rest of the company's performance of the real purposes of the company. IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money.
That's only half the job. The other half is protecting the company from nasty lawsuits by ensuring license adherence, data security, compliance with various tech-related laws, and proper access control.
Deploying servers and workstations is only week 1. Weeks 2 to 52 are all about keeping the boat afloat.
Except it's already been used elsewhere in Europe to sell the aforementioned smokes and booze, and was indeed defeated by simple photos and newspapers.
I propose an alternative solution where the machine actively scans for circumvention efforts, shoots offenders with a sedative, and stores them for later processing via wood chipper. Merry fuckin' christmas everyone!
The problem lies not with the "internet mob", nor traditional media reporting, but with the viewership. People are been conditioned to guzzle up any oversensationalized content. It's like when you're used to beating off to increasingly shameful porn, regular old T&A doesn't do it anymore. Well the average "news" consumer has been flooded with the equivalent of japanese torture scat, and barely notices when something perfectly reasonable occurs, or in this case: when a loaded prank gets shoved down their gullible throats. This steady diet of hype and hyperbole is ruining the frail mind of the common imbecile, and since those imbeciles are now all over the internet via Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, they are empowered to spread their unchecked bullshit in geometric fashion.
Optimized, in this usage, means the game engine scales with upgraded hardware. There are numerous games that simply cannot use hardware efficiently, where throwing it 4 times more GPU power results in perhaps a 50% increase in rendering speed. There are even more games that chug as soon as you exceed 1280x1024 or some other token resolution. Crysis is not one of those offenders, because it can take advantage of those extra GPUs and deliver jaw-dropping graphics on displays that exceed its original design specs fourfold. The more power you give it, the more it impresses you with its capabilities. This, to me, as a programmer, says the engine is very well designed and efficiently coded. This ain't no goddamned Gamebryo shit show.
Take any other game from 2007, run it on dream machine, and compare it with Crysis. Even the fanfared Bioshock and Stalker show very cruel signs of aging while Crysis could very easily pass for a current-gen title, while delivering higher framerates and greater photorealism than just about any 2011 release. Yes, even that mediocre CoD knockoff they call Battlefield 3.
Replace "phone" with "vagina" in the summary, and bask in my glorious wisdom.
Hey, I don't need expensive hoppy microbrews in my beer fridge, but that doesn't mean I'm going to replace my premium beer with cheap megaswill. If luddites are happy being luddites, good for THEM. Also, get the fuck off my internets.
The entire field of politics is a collection of dirty tricks. If those fuckwits wanted to contribute anything of value to the world, they'd have become engineers instead.
Smear campaigns are the truest form of political asshattery, because these supposed men are all bitchy little cunts who never recovered from childhood bullying, but failed the police college admission exam.
[This episode of knee-jerk generalizations brought to you by the Church of Fnarg]
Back in the 90's, many top-selling PC games ran at 30 or even 15 fps, and were perfectly playable. I played the fuck out of Doom and Quake at then-acceptable framerates, which today would be considered slideshows. I sometimes play WoW on my laptop, where it can drop to 20-25 fps during intense fights, and it's just fine.
The only place where absurdly high framerates are mandatory are fast-paced shooters like Quake 3/4, Call of Duty, Team Fortress etc. Racing titles also benefit from a steady 60fps to enhance realism, but are otherwise perfectly manageable at 30.
When I'm looking at graphics upgrades, I don't want higher framerates, I want better post-processing quality or increased resolution.
Pretty sure today's mid-range PCs trounce 2007's high-end with ease.
Just for shits, when I got my current rig just a couple years ago, I played through Crysis again. On a single GTX260, it was butter smooth at 1680x1050. When I switched to quad-SLI 295's, it was butter-smooth in triple-wide surround.
People who continue to claim Crysis is an unoptimized mess are:
- not programmers - not owners of high-end hardware
Could it be improved ? Sure. Is it the worst optimized game of the 21st century ? FUCK NO, not even close, and subsequent patches greatly improved the situation.
Depends on the type of processing. GTX and Radeon cards artificially limit their double-precision performance to 1/4 of their capabilities, to protect the high-margin workstation SKUs. If all you're doing is single-precision math, you're fine with a gaming card.
Hey now! The last guy who called me an idiot got shit on by a transgendered midget.
Depends on your resolution, but yes. Those of us with beefy GPU setups tend to be doing 3D, multi-display, or bitchy resolutions like 2560x1440. Or in my case, CUDA processing and 3D raytracing. A lot of people forget that GPUs can do a lot more than just games. For some of us, those non-gaming uses are our day jobs.
I've never had an overclocked rig "burn out" before it's end-of-life, so the whole lifespan argument seems unfounded to me. Yes, I know in theory we're stressing these components a lot harder than spec, but I've never seen it happen myself. I've beaten the crap out of past PCs, then turned them into perfectly stable servers a few years in, or sold them to lesser minds to make room for the new hotness. The only CPU I actually killed was an old Athlon T-bird, the kind that would hit over 9000 degrees under normal operation. I don't think a 40% overclock did much to hasten its demise; if nothing else, the upgraded heatsink and deafening Delta fan probably bought more time, compared to the shit cooler it came with.
But you're right about the games though, there hasn't been anything revolutionary on the graphics front since Crysis. Even Crysis 2 was a half-assed sequel that looked worse than the original. Quite a few recent A-list titles have been nothing more than cheap console ports that look like ass, and countless PC-native games are so poorly programmed. they make your balls-out SLI/Crossfire rig chug like an ATI Rage Pro. Those boneheaded game houses couldn't even begin to deliver Crysis-level graphics 4 years later, because they can barely push 10k single-textured polys on bleeding-edge hardware. PEBKAC, I say!
Do I care what some Romanian attention whore benched with LN2 ? No. I care about real-world, sustainable results in a permanent installation. I can't do my work if I have to pause every 10 minutes to pour more nitrogen into an open-air cooling column. This would be an example of masturbatory overclocking, kind of like blowing $50k pimping out an old Shelby, then carting it out to the Sunday car show in a trailer "look at me, I did this, aren't I cool ?". There's a big difference between TFA and normal overclocking like you do. Even your water cooled rig, you can still use it as a regular PC, play your games, transcode video and render 3D scenes of a yet another coffee table with plastic fruit. Buddy boy in TFA, on the other hand, will be lucky if the board is still usable after his little experiment. The funny thing about thermal stress is it's great at taking all the impurities and turning them into tiny little cracks, which then cause the board to fail prematurely, but hey at least he got to show off his ePeen, right ?
Fact is, my PC is now a work machine, not a toy anymore. I just don't relish the idea of losing a week to overclocking endeavours anymore, because I have more pressing shit to do with my PC, like getting paid. Actually my previous PC had one of those sealed water rigs from CoolIT, and sure enough, it overclocked quite well with minimal effort. My current rig, well it's running at stock speeds and my board doesn't even have OC settings in the CMOS setup (it's a server board). I still sell overclocked PCs to those who want them, that's been a decent chunk of my business for nearly a decade, but my personal builds tend to favour noise reduction and energy savings over Ghz. If I need more compute power, I'd rather assemble an $800 node than spend a few days overclocking the ones I already have. Cluster > clock speed.
True, life is indeed busy, but I am as irresponsible today as I was in the 90's. Well, okay, I've ditched the coke habit... But like I said, the guys who used to LAN party, well now we just party normal. We've all got pimped-out gaming rigs, and we're not all that interested in moving said rigs from their carefully arranged nests. And the monitors, they're big and heavy, sometimes mounted on flex arms for triple-surround EyeFinity or what-have-you. We've got our fancy gaming peripherals, be it a programmable keypad, macro-button mouse or $1500 driving cockpit.
Back in the DOS days, it was easy to pick up and go, but today high-end gaming is a very elaborate hot-rodding hobby. Do today's active LAN players keep a separate, transport-friendly PC on standby and leave the big rig at home ? That's pretty much the only way I could pull it off, and it would kind of suck because I'm used to my giant LCDs, studio-grade sound and ergonomic layout. It would take me a couple hours to teardown and rebuild my kit.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of the U.S. system isn't to rehabilitate criminals, it's to generate profits.
Okay, I can appreciate the novelty factor, as this is very much one of those things guys like me would toy around with, maybe for an evening or two. I don't see a demoscene rising out of this, at best a few dozen guys circle-jerking on Facebook about it. To say it could display MS-DOS as a "platform" is to completely ignore the fundamental tenets of the demoscene. Rotozooming tunnel-mapped munching squares are what you do when you're learning to code graphics effects, and this IBNIZ tool abstracts the real math away in favour of random-looking gibberish. Just because typing "7KJHBB&*@#$B" yields a spinning bitmap doesn't teach the user anything about how to actually spin a bitmap on an algorithmic level, nor the problem-solving methodology involved in building far more impressive effects upon those foundations.
It used to be that demo coding was a precursor to game programming, at least in the Amiga and DOS days. Now with all these abstract graphics and sound APIs, it's a bit less so, though there is still plenty of opportunity for new demo sceners to cut their teeth on DirectX demos, focusing on graphical polish and synced A/V interplay rather than the vicissitudes of software rendering. IBNIZ really misses the boat for all of that, it's more like a Winamp visualizer with its own crappy digital monosynth, and who's going to bother with that illegible syntax ?
Sorry but I don't see the technical merit in a virtual machine that basically shifts garbage around. You could accomplish the same by feeding random noise into your TV's composite input.
No, he's just conscious, and right.
I drink coffee maybe 5 times a year, if that. It just isn't my thing, but I know caffeine addiction from the absurd quantities of pop I used to consume. It's as strong an addiction as any other drug. One day, I tried quitting cold turkey - big mistake! I would get these killer headaches that no painkiller could beat, so instead I had to wean myself off, very gradually. I still go through a cycle in the afternoon, just a few hours after waking up, where I get very sleepy for maybe a half-hour - that's caffeine withdrawal! I'm not actually tired, it's a programmed nervous response.
Moreover, caffeine doesn't perk me up at all. I could chug a gallon of Jolt cola before bed and sleep like a log. I even tried using coffee once, to power through a 48-hour death march... didn't work! That tells me that I've been consuming so much excess caffeine since childhood, that my brain's receptors are just fried from overstimulation. A lot of people are like this, so it's just not some random conjecture to say that caffeine has negative effects.
If XBMC isn't wife acceptable, then your wife isn't Billco-acceptable :)
My wife has been quite happy with her XBMC for years, first with the old-school Xbox, and now with a dedicated HTPC running the XBMCFreak builds, which are a respin of XBMC-Live with a few preconfigured add-ons and tweaks. Sure, the ION boxes cost us about $400 a piece a couple of years ago, but they are flawless.
I ditched GoDaddy a while ago, must be 2-3 years now, so the boycott is a non-issue for me. Funny thing is, I can't quite remember why I switched in the first place. Could be pricing, could be that I was tierd of clicking through 5 pages of upsells just to buy a domain, could be their "holier than thou" attitude of preemptively seizing domains they don't like... Either way, GoDaddy was never a reputable company to begin with. I mean, really, Danica Patrick as their mascot ? She's only famous for not looking like a man.
I'm still a million times more afraid of the American government with their mass media, than the Russian government with their nukes, because there's a lot less ambiguity around a nuke. You either blow shit up, or you don't. There is no profit motive if everyone's dead.
How much did said Boxee pay XBMC when they used it as their starting point ?
Oh, right. NOTHING!
They took years of public work, slapped on a watered down skin, got a chinese manufacturer to poop out a cheap media box, and plastered the resulting mess with a gazillion monetized links and ads. It seems it would only be fair that they continue producing the desktop port as a thank-you to the community that made their company possible in the first place, or at least provide the FULL SOURCE so someone else can produce binaries. The GPL doesn't require it, but it would constitute a good faith gesture that might actually get us open-source types to contribute patches and bug reports back to the project, which judging by the majority of user complaints are both things it sorely needs You could have a million non-techy people shit all over your forum, but it won't even come close to the positive impact one benevolent coder can impart with a few hours of volunteer debugging.
The way it stands now, Boxee sold out, and like most things that sell out, obsolescence typically follows shortly thereafter.
Boxee serves a very narrow and tightly defined purpose: it's XBMC for dummies. If you want less dummyness, it's time you switched to full-on XBMC. No Vudu links plastered all over your face, good customization, and far better Linux support.
The Boxee box is nice if you want to shut up a non-tech-savvy friend or relative, because it is plug-and-play. For us geeks, XBMC on either an old gaming PC or a nice compact ION box is a better fit.
The whole "money for nothing" bullet point means there is no shortage of suckers jumping on the bandwagon. Just like people were launching countless random crap blogs a decade ago, in the hopes of raking in beaucoup AdSense bucks (and failing), those same suckers are deploying half-baked mining clusters.
The very fact that a Bitcoin's trade-in value is inversely linked to popularity means this system has absolutely no hope of getting anywhere. It does not represent actual value, because the only way you can turn a Bitcoin into value is by suckering someone else into buying it. How this is considered an improvement over the current financial system is proof that people have no understanding of money.
Indeed, legal tells us what to do, and we implement it. If that means your beloved $69 Android tablet doesn't make the cut, so be it.
The #1 problem in I.T. is users antagonize their sysadmins, instead of playing nice. A job is a privilege, one that can be revoked if you purposely circumvent the sound rules put in place to cover everyone's asses.
I don't care what the establishment is saying. From the day I found out about Bitcoin, crunched some numbers and made sense of it all, it seemed to me like a self-defeating system. The fact that are limited "coins" but exponentially increasing miners, combined with the fact that the current value of a coin is less than the cost of electricity to mine it, and has been for a long time now, have already doomed this concept beyond recovery.
The only good to come of this, is if I ever meet someone who blew a wad of cash on fancy GPUs to mine, I'm going to buy him a beer and laugh my fuckin' tits off.
Face it, IT's job is to facilitate the rest of the company's performance of the real purposes of the company. IT doesn't make money for the company it enables the money making areas to make the money.
That's only half the job. The other half is protecting the company from nasty lawsuits by ensuring license adherence, data security, compliance with various tech-related laws, and proper access control.
Deploying servers and workstations is only week 1. Weeks 2 to 52 are all about keeping the boat afloat.
Except it's already been used elsewhere in Europe to sell the aforementioned smokes and booze, and was indeed defeated by simple photos and newspapers.
I propose an alternative solution where the machine actively scans for circumvention efforts, shoots offenders with a sedative, and stores them for later processing via wood chipper. Merry fuckin' christmas everyone!
The problem lies not with the "internet mob", nor traditional media reporting, but with the viewership. People are been conditioned to guzzle up any oversensationalized content. It's like when you're used to beating off to increasingly shameful porn, regular old T&A doesn't do it anymore. Well the average "news" consumer has been flooded with the equivalent of japanese torture scat, and barely notices when something perfectly reasonable occurs, or in this case: when a loaded prank gets shoved down their gullible throats. This steady diet of hype and hyperbole is ruining the frail mind of the common imbecile, and since those imbeciles are now all over the internet via Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, they are empowered to spread their unchecked bullshit in geometric fashion.
Dear AC: go fuck yourself.
Optimized, in this usage, means the game engine scales with upgraded hardware. There are numerous games that simply cannot use hardware efficiently, where throwing it 4 times more GPU power results in perhaps a 50% increase in rendering speed. There are even more games that chug as soon as you exceed 1280x1024 or some other token resolution. Crysis is not one of those offenders, because it can take advantage of those extra GPUs and deliver jaw-dropping graphics on displays that exceed its original design specs fourfold. The more power you give it, the more it impresses you with its capabilities. This, to me, as a programmer, says the engine is very well designed and efficiently coded. This ain't no goddamned Gamebryo shit show.
Take any other game from 2007, run it on dream machine, and compare it with Crysis. Even the fanfared Bioshock and Stalker show very cruel signs of aging while Crysis could very easily pass for a current-gen title, while delivering higher framerates and greater photorealism than just about any 2011 release. Yes, even that mediocre CoD knockoff they call Battlefield 3.
Replace "phone" with "vagina" in the summary, and bask in my glorious wisdom.
Hey, I don't need expensive hoppy microbrews in my beer fridge, but that doesn't mean I'm going to replace my premium beer with cheap megaswill. If luddites are happy being luddites, good for THEM. Also, get the fuck off my internets.
The entire field of politics is a collection of dirty tricks. If those fuckwits wanted to contribute anything of value to the world, they'd have become engineers instead.
Smear campaigns are the truest form of political asshattery, because these supposed men are all bitchy little cunts who never recovered from childhood bullying, but failed the police college admission exam.
[This episode of knee-jerk generalizations brought to you by the Church of Fnarg]
Depends on the game.
Back in the 90's, many top-selling PC games ran at 30 or even 15 fps, and were perfectly playable. I played the fuck out of Doom and Quake at then-acceptable framerates, which today would be considered slideshows. I sometimes play WoW on my laptop, where it can drop to 20-25 fps during intense fights, and it's just fine.
The only place where absurdly high framerates are mandatory are fast-paced shooters like Quake 3/4, Call of Duty, Team Fortress etc. Racing titles also benefit from a steady 60fps to enhance realism, but are otherwise perfectly manageable at 30.
When I'm looking at graphics upgrades, I don't want higher framerates, I want better post-processing quality or increased resolution.
Pretty sure today's mid-range PCs trounce 2007's high-end with ease.
Just for shits, when I got my current rig just a couple years ago, I played through Crysis again. On a single GTX260, it was butter smooth at 1680x1050. When I switched to quad-SLI 295's, it was butter-smooth in triple-wide surround.
People who continue to claim Crysis is an unoptimized mess are:
- not programmers
- not owners of high-end hardware
Could it be improved ? Sure. Is it the worst optimized game of the 21st century ? FUCK NO, not even close, and subsequent patches greatly improved the situation.
Depends on the type of processing. GTX and Radeon cards artificially limit their double-precision performance to 1/4 of their capabilities, to protect the high-margin workstation SKUs. If all you're doing is single-precision math, you're fine with a gaming card.
Hey now! The last guy who called me an idiot got shit on by a transgendered midget.
Depends on your resolution, but yes. Those of us with beefy GPU setups tend to be doing 3D, multi-display, or bitchy resolutions like 2560x1440. Or in my case, CUDA processing and 3D raytracing. A lot of people forget that GPUs can do a lot more than just games. For some of us, those non-gaming uses are our day jobs.
I've never had an overclocked rig "burn out" before it's end-of-life, so the whole lifespan argument seems unfounded to me. Yes, I know in theory we're stressing these components a lot harder than spec, but I've never seen it happen myself. I've beaten the crap out of past PCs, then turned them into perfectly stable servers a few years in, or sold them to lesser minds to make room for the new hotness. The only CPU I actually killed was an old Athlon T-bird, the kind that would hit over 9000 degrees under normal operation. I don't think a 40% overclock did much to hasten its demise; if nothing else, the upgraded heatsink and deafening Delta fan probably bought more time, compared to the shit cooler it came with.
But you're right about the games though, there hasn't been anything revolutionary on the graphics front since Crysis. Even Crysis 2 was a half-assed sequel that looked worse than the original. Quite a few recent A-list titles have been nothing more than cheap console ports that look like ass, and countless PC-native games are so poorly programmed. they make your balls-out SLI/Crossfire rig chug like an ATI Rage Pro. Those boneheaded game houses couldn't even begin to deliver Crysis-level graphics 4 years later, because they can barely push 10k single-textured polys on bleeding-edge hardware. PEBKAC, I say!
Do I care what some Romanian attention whore benched with LN2 ? No. I care about real-world, sustainable results in a permanent installation. I can't do my work if I have to pause every 10 minutes to pour more nitrogen into an open-air cooling column. This would be an example of masturbatory overclocking, kind of like blowing $50k pimping out an old Shelby, then carting it out to the Sunday car show in a trailer "look at me, I did this, aren't I cool ?". There's a big difference between TFA and normal overclocking like you do. Even your water cooled rig, you can still use it as a regular PC, play your games, transcode video and render 3D scenes of a yet another coffee table with plastic fruit. Buddy boy in TFA, on the other hand, will be lucky if the board is still usable after his little experiment. The funny thing about thermal stress is it's great at taking all the impurities and turning them into tiny little cracks, which then cause the board to fail prematurely, but hey at least he got to show off his ePeen, right ?
Fact is, my PC is now a work machine, not a toy anymore. I just don't relish the idea of losing a week to overclocking endeavours anymore, because I have more pressing shit to do with my PC, like getting paid. Actually my previous PC had one of those sealed water rigs from CoolIT, and sure enough, it overclocked quite well with minimal effort. My current rig, well it's running at stock speeds and my board doesn't even have OC settings in the CMOS setup (it's a server board). I still sell overclocked PCs to those who want them, that's been a decent chunk of my business for nearly a decade, but my personal builds tend to favour noise reduction and energy savings over Ghz. If I need more compute power, I'd rather assemble an $800 node than spend a few days overclocking the ones I already have. Cluster > clock speed.
Hey, that would make for an awesome sticker on the lid:
"For a good* time, steal this laptop
(small print)* good for me, bad for you"
Of course, the day a woman steals my stuff, I'll have a tough dilemma on my hands. Note to self: hire an amazon thuggette to deal with it.
True, life is indeed busy, but I am as irresponsible today as I was in the 90's. Well, okay, I've ditched the coke habit... But like I said, the guys who used to LAN party, well now we just party normal. We've all got pimped-out gaming rigs, and we're not all that interested in moving said rigs from their carefully arranged nests. And the monitors, they're big and heavy, sometimes mounted on flex arms for triple-surround EyeFinity or what-have-you. We've got our fancy gaming peripherals, be it a programmable keypad, macro-button mouse or $1500 driving cockpit.
Back in the DOS days, it was easy to pick up and go, but today high-end gaming is a very elaborate hot-rodding hobby. Do today's active LAN players keep a separate, transport-friendly PC on standby and leave the big rig at home ? That's pretty much the only way I could pull it off, and it would kind of suck because I'm used to my giant LCDs, studio-grade sound and ergonomic layout. It would take me a couple hours to teardown and rebuild my kit.