Movement ? Hell no, I just dangle my wrist off the edge of the desk, crank up the mouse sensitivity and wiggle the rodent with my fingertips. When my hand turns blue, that's how I know it's time for more pain killers.
Speaking of which, can anyone spare me a buck for some tylenol ?
You're not recycling that energy nearly enough unless you've got an Athlon XP2800 laptop. Buy now and Dell will include a voucher for a free ambulance ride to the hospital for your 2nd degree thigh burns
The common inbred mortals that use Hotmail aren't going to bother switching over to Gmail. It's called laziness.
Heck, how long did it take for those inbreds to just start USING Google search ? WE THE NERDS had to change their start page to Google.com because they were still using the default MSN page. And then we had to teach them how to use a fricking SEARCH ENGINE.
Gmail is cool, but they won't steal many Hotmail users. They earn a whole bunch of new users though, as well as us geeks who typically run our own mail servers and/or pay a nominal fee for a true POP/IMAP account.
That's because Super Metroid was so amazing we didn't expect anyone could top it.
And in a sense it hasn't been topped, I think. Fusion was fun but short-lived, since as soon as you get the big guns you're already at the last boss fight and it's all over in a blink.
If they could come up with a 2D-scrolling Metroid but with today's graphics realism.... hmmmmmm.. maybe:)
Console + portable LCD screen, network patch, gamepad: 2 minutes to set up.
PC + monitor + keyboard + mouse + TCP settings + installing every fricking game + idiots who have half-assed rigs that can't run the latest games and don't listen when you tell them so = wasted day of non-gaming.
Some people have fun lan parties, but it's not for everyone. On the other hand, most everyone who can operate a game console, can figure out how to connect one cat-5 between two consoles and plug them both in the wall. And those who can't, are probably still playing on PSX or N64.
The sonic boom is constant. It is because the sound source is travelling than the sound itself, thus the wave doesn't have a chance to decay before it is regenerated by the travelling object. The individual waves add up to form the sonic boom.
When a jet flies by, you would hear two booms: one at the front when the nose pierces the air, and another at the rear when the air fills the void behind the aircraft (in theory its polarity would be opposite that of the first).
I'd much rather see a Honda Wigger blasting Mozart in his car, than the wretched "Niggas N Hoes" shake-fest. If it has any positive effect on his intelligence that's a much needed bonus.
But I think these research efforts would be better invested towards designing rap music that kills its listener.
Being one disappointed server admin that was forced to use FreeBSD, I wholly agree with you. It may be a rather pure OS, but I prefer Dirty Linux and the non-sextagenary developers that spend more time building neat and useful features, rather than complaining about how us young folk have it too easy:)
As a member of the other 90% of the world that is not in the United States, I would like to say that US taking control of oil is quite likely to be the worst possible global disaster. Gas prices WILL rise to 2$ a liter (almost 10$ a gallon for you yankers), if not more, simply because the US government has never had a clue how to properly and responsibly wield any form of power.
"Kill everything, take it over and then sell it back to them" is the country's business plan. The problem is that a country is not meant to be operated as a for-profit corporation, it is meant to be operated as a for-the-people co-op. That's why we formed countries in the first place: to pool our forces together and improve the quality of life for all.
Anyways I can understand being pissed at the Military for using Linux if one disagrees with the military's actions, or in my case I disagree with the military's reasons to exist. If anyone really wants to conquer Iraq for their petrol, I think they should take their own guns and go fight their own war. I'd rather sit here and eat the steak I bought with the money I earned working the crappy job that is slowly devouring my soul. If you want to trade your steak for a dead person, then go right on ahead, I wont' stop you but I won't help you.
We all know what this is going to be: an XML definition like everything else these days.
Universal everything is a misnomer, because everything is in a constant state of evolution. What works today, will be passé in a year or two when DirectX n+1 is released with new gimmicks. Standards are good for fixed concepts, or at least ones that take a long time before having significant changes. 3D ain't one of them.
No you have it all wrong. I'm a taxi driver, a laptop-toting mp3-playing stat-gathering taxi driver, and believe me when I say from experience that everyone's an asshole, even me.
If I remember correctly, they used to charge a ridiculously small fee for this SDK, like 99$. It's not much, but considering the typical indie game developer will spend enough time coding and developing content that he won't have time left to hold a steady, bread-winning rent-paying job, releasing Torque as GPL is a wise move. Besides, they probably have something even better up their sleeve, a revamped engine that will replace Torque as the 'commercial' SDK.
For the last time (I swear) if you want to use your PC like a console just buy a friggin' XBOX. It reboots whenever you swap discs and it doesn't need driver updates or swap space and you can slap it on a 61" LCD television.
I'm even worse: my XBOX is plugged into my PC's video capture card so I can play a quick game on the same screen as whatever 'work' I promised myself I'd finish. The best part ? The game alawys runs, rarely crashes if ever, and uses up NO cpu power.
I've got an ancient Promise FastTrak66 in my desktop PC. I can attest to it being a potential source of problems. I haven't had any specific crashes since installing it, but I can tell it's not playing nice with IRQs and whatnot (i.e. the mouse locks hard for a moment when doing big-time disk thrashing). I could see this causing problems with PCI cards (network adapters / other raid controllers). Luckily for me, the only other card in my rig is the AGP video, and games usually don't thrash during fps-sensitive action sequences.
But yeah, Promise raid controllers are cheap. They work well, but they're certainly not the greatest things on earth. I've been lusting after a 3Ware card for some time.. now there's a pro-quality ata-raid controller.
I totally agree. The need is not for bare-metal assembler code all the time, but I can say that by knowing what happens at the lowest levels, I can easily guess what a high-level function is doing and whether it's doing it efficiently or not. Without whipping out the profiler I can 'feel' if something is taking too long, meaning that the function is performing unnecessary tasks. If I can't 'feel' the problem then "it doesn't exist", or more precisely it doesn't need fixing and I can move on to some more important task.
Knowing what the compiler is doing is probably the most important aspect of high-level code optimization; understanding the cost of this-or-that function and being able to consider alternatives that may or may not be faster/smaller/more appropriate.
It's not about high-level vs low-level, it's about using the right tool for the job. I'm not that much of a freak really, I still use C++ and Delphi to do most of my work, but when a certain function calls for hardcore optimization, I'm already ready to whip out the assembler. For some things like heavy math, or processing gobs of binary or string data, the performance gained by writing a tight assembler loop can be 1000% (that's one-thousand). If it saves me from using a fat library then bonus! My favorite example of assembler efficiency is file decompression. Compressors are more complex, with lookup tables and string searches etc. A decompressor just walks through the bitstream expanding data according to simple instructions. It doesn't need to "think", it's just "work". Decompressors are often written in 10-15k of compiled code and as such they fit in even the lamest CPUs' L1-caches, running at their maximum potential. Considering the relative ease of programming such a decoder, and the tremendous performance benefit, it is well worth it.
Wouldn't it be possible to use the fast Fiber network as a regular Ethernet-workalike ? In such a scenario, one could simply build a fileserver, stash it in a soundproof closet and run a cable.
I already have a linux fileserver here, but 100base-T just isn't fast enough, and Gig-E doesn't tickle my fancy all that much given the cost.
It's okay to be ignorant when you graduate, because you don't learn all that much in school, you learn from experience. What's irritating is when everyone you meet claims "Oh yeah I took a course, now I'm a programmer". Sure they know what CPU, ALU, RAM means but they have no grasp of what's really going on. They learned VB, and they know how to unzip things *applause*. So they dream of six-figure income and start writing the lamest me-too apps the world has ever dared see, and when confronted with very real problems like non-scalable code or "inexplicable version conflicts" they just roll their eyes and blame it on Microsoft.
Here's one of my nasty pet peeves: XNews, the binary-oriented newsreader for Windows. XNews is written in Delphi (Pascal) and maintained by one single guy: Luu Tran. I like the app because it's no-nonsense and works good, except for one thing: it's horribly inefficient. It suffers from O(n^2) and the author adamantly refuses to work around it. So load a newsgroup approaching 300K articles and it starts freaking out, then every operation takes about a minute before the app even redraws, and it's been like that for about 6 years now. It runs no better on my 2ghz Athlon than it did on my Pentium 200mhz due to this crippling 'feature'. So what did I do about it ? (after being gratuitously flamed by the author) I just built my own frickin' newsreader, I even went frugal and used multiple threads (GASP!). I admire Tran's efforts in making the app flexible in dealing with not-so-compliant servers, but if he's not going to maintain it he should just opensource it and let the rest of the world solve its little issues because it is used by hundreds of thousands of alt.binaries whores with the same woes.
Ok so I rant. It's just that people like that aren't true coders to my eye. They are C.S. graduates biting off more than they can chew.
The intel386.txt was floating around just about any coder-friendly BBS thanks to Fido file transfer. 350kb zipped, 900kb unzipped; just small enough to fit on a 3.5" floppy with enough space left over for build tools.
I never said it was absolutely required. The problem is that people don't dare use it anymore, heck they probably think Assembler is that ancient magic thing we used "when computers had punchcards instead of keyboards".
I'm just saying the whole world could use a little optimization theory, and this means all you VB coders out there. Pure ASM isn't a magic wand that makes everything 500% faster, but with experience you learn how to apply it sparingly for the greatest effect. Choose the most often (ab)used funcs, figure out which aspects are the most wasteful : small tricky nested loops that don't optimize well, or contorted string manipulations that just don't "fit" in the C library's methodology.
I think my proudest accomplishment would be the scripted installer I built in 90% assembler. No external DLL's required (other than win32 essentials of course), no need to unpack the installer set to a temp folder, no things that can break. And I'd also like to add that my decompression routine is blindlingly fast:) Why did I build this ? Because Installshield and friends are horribly inefficient and overbloated for what was once handled by "COPY A:*.*". What does one really need more today ? Version checking, registry inserts, and the occasional RunDLL call. Certainly not 600kb of empty code.
Slashdot Mirror
Movement ? Hell no, I just dangle my wrist off the edge of the desk, crank up the mouse sensitivity and wiggle the rodent with my fingertips. When my hand turns blue, that's how I know it's time for more pain killers.
Speaking of which, can anyone spare me a buck for some tylenol ?
That's why his girlfriend lives in a cardboard box next to the lube.
Underachiever!
You're not recycling that energy nearly enough unless you've got an Athlon XP2800 laptop. Buy now and Dell will include a voucher for a free ambulance ride to the hospital for your 2nd degree thigh burns
The common inbred mortals that use Hotmail aren't going to bother switching over to Gmail. It's called laziness.
Heck, how long did it take for those inbreds to just start USING Google search ? WE THE NERDS had to change their start page to Google.com because they were still using the default MSN page. And then we had to teach them how to use a fricking SEARCH ENGINE.
Gmail is cool, but they won't steal many Hotmail users. They earn a whole bunch of new users though, as well as us geeks who typically run our own mail servers and/or pay a nominal fee for a true POP/IMAP account.
That's because Super Metroid was so amazing we didn't expect anyone could top it.
:)
And in a sense it hasn't been topped, I think. Fusion was fun but short-lived, since as soon as you get the big guns you're already at the last boss fight and it's all over in a blink.
If they could come up with a 2D-scrolling Metroid but with today's graphics realism.... hmmmmmm.. maybe
Console + portable LCD screen, network patch, gamepad: 2 minutes to set up.
PC + monitor + keyboard + mouse + TCP settings + installing every fricking game + idiots who have half-assed rigs that can't run the latest games and don't listen when you tell them so = wasted day of non-gaming.
Some people have fun lan parties, but it's not for everyone. On the other hand, most everyone who can operate a game console, can figure out how to connect one cat-5 between two consoles and plug them both in the wall. And those who can't, are probably still playing on PSX or N64.
The sonic boom is constant. It is because the sound source is travelling than the sound itself, thus the wave doesn't have a chance to decay before it is regenerated by the travelling object. The individual waves add up to form the sonic boom.
When a jet flies by, you would hear two booms: one at the front when the nose pierces the air, and another at the rear when the air fills the void behind the aircraft (in theory its polarity would be opposite that of the first).
Read about it here: Doppler Shift
I'd much rather see a Honda Wigger blasting Mozart in his car, than the wretched "Niggas N Hoes" shake-fest. If it has any positive effect on his intelligence that's a much needed bonus.
But I think these research efforts would be better invested towards designing rap music that kills its listener.
You are a sick yet cruelly funny trollbot.
:)
Being one disappointed server admin that was forced to use FreeBSD, I wholly agree with you. It may be a rather pure OS, but I prefer Dirty Linux and the non-sextagenary developers that spend more time building neat and useful features, rather than complaining about how us young folk have it too easy
Rap IS noise, and I'm only 24.
But then again I'm stuck on Eurodance and upper-class (but not snot-nosed) techno.
As a member of the other 90% of the world that is not in the United States, I would like to say that US taking control of oil is quite likely to be the worst possible global disaster. Gas prices WILL rise to 2$ a liter (almost 10$ a gallon for you yankers), if not more, simply because the US government has never had a clue how to properly and responsibly wield any form of power.
"Kill everything, take it over and then sell it back to them" is the country's business plan. The problem is that a country is not meant to be operated as a for-profit corporation, it is meant to be operated as a for-the-people co-op. That's why we formed countries in the first place: to pool our forces together and improve the quality of life for all.
Anyways I can understand being pissed at the Military for using Linux if one disagrees with the military's actions, or in my case I disagree with the military's reasons to exist. If anyone really wants to conquer Iraq for their petrol, I think they should take their own guns and go fight their own war. I'd rather sit here and eat the steak I bought with the money I earned working the crappy job that is slowly devouring my soul. If you want to trade your steak for a dead person, then go right on ahead, I wont' stop you but I won't help you.
Ho-rider tycoon
West Bronx tycoon
Backhand Slap tycoon
Shizzle tycoon
We all know what this is going to be: an XML definition like everything else these days.
Universal everything is a misnomer, because everything is in a constant state of evolution. What works today, will be passé in a year or two when DirectX n+1 is released with new gimmicks. Standards are good for fixed concepts, or at least ones that take a long time before having significant changes. 3D ain't one of them.
No you have it all wrong. I'm a taxi driver, a laptop-toting mp3-playing stat-gathering taxi driver, and believe me when I say from experience that everyone's an asshole, even me.
If I remember correctly, they used to charge a ridiculously small fee for this SDK, like 99$. It's not much, but considering the typical indie game developer will spend enough time coding and developing content that he won't have time left to hold a steady, bread-winning rent-paying job, releasing Torque as GPL is a wise move. Besides, they probably have something even better up their sleeve, a revamped engine that will replace Torque as the 'commercial' SDK.
For the last time (I swear) if you want to use your PC like a console just buy a friggin' XBOX. It reboots whenever you swap discs and it doesn't need driver updates or swap space and you can slap it on a 61" LCD television.
I'm even worse: my XBOX is plugged into my PC's video capture card so I can play a quick game on the same screen as whatever 'work' I promised myself I'd finish. The best part ? The game alawys runs, rarely crashes if ever, and uses up NO cpu power.
Thank you, Goodnight!
I've got an ancient Promise FastTrak66 in my desktop PC. I can attest to it being a potential source of problems. I haven't had any specific crashes since installing it, but I can tell it's not playing nice with IRQs and whatnot (i.e. the mouse locks hard for a moment when doing big-time disk thrashing). I could see this causing problems with PCI cards (network adapters / other raid controllers). Luckily for me, the only other card in my rig is the AGP video, and games usually don't thrash during fps-sensitive action sequences.
.. now there's a pro-quality ata-raid controller.
But yeah, Promise raid controllers are cheap. They work well, but they're certainly not the greatest things on earth. I've been lusting after a 3Ware card for some time
ABA Games, that wacky psychedelic asian dude writes shoot-em-ups in D. I think the D is for Drugs.
m l
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.ht
Amen brother!
I totally agree. The need is not for bare-metal assembler code all the time, but I can say that by knowing what happens at the lowest levels, I can easily guess what a high-level function is doing and whether it's doing it efficiently or not. Without whipping out the profiler I can 'feel' if something is taking too long, meaning that the function is performing unnecessary tasks. If I can't 'feel' the problem then "it doesn't exist", or more precisely it doesn't need fixing and I can move on to some more important task.
Knowing what the compiler is doing is probably the most important aspect of high-level code optimization; understanding the cost of this-or-that function and being able to consider alternatives that may or may not be faster/smaller/more appropriate.
It's not about high-level vs low-level, it's about using the right tool for the job. I'm not that much of a freak really, I still use C++ and Delphi to do most of my work, but when a certain function calls for hardcore optimization, I'm already ready to whip out the assembler. For some things like heavy math, or processing gobs of binary or string data, the performance gained by writing a tight assembler loop can be 1000% (that's one-thousand). If it saves me from using a fat library then bonus! My favorite example of assembler efficiency is file decompression. Compressors are more complex, with lookup tables and string searches etc. A decompressor just walks through the bitstream expanding data according to simple instructions. It doesn't need to "think", it's just "work". Decompressors are often written in 10-15k of compiled code and as such they fit in even the lamest CPUs' L1-caches, running at their maximum potential. Considering the relative ease of programming such a decoder, and the tremendous performance benefit, it is well worth it.
Wouldn't it be possible to use the fast Fiber network as a regular Ethernet-workalike ? In such a scenario, one could simply build a fileserver, stash it in a soundproof closet and run a cable.
I already have a linux fileserver here, but 100base-T just isn't fast enough, and Gig-E doesn't tickle my fancy all that much given the cost.
It's okay to be ignorant when you graduate, because you don't learn all that much in school, you learn from experience. What's irritating is when everyone you meet claims "Oh yeah I took a course, now I'm a programmer". Sure they know what CPU, ALU, RAM means but they have no grasp of what's really going on. They learned VB, and they know how to unzip things *applause*. So they dream of six-figure income and start writing the lamest me-too apps the world has ever dared see, and when confronted with very real problems like non-scalable code or "inexplicable version conflicts" they just roll their eyes and blame it on Microsoft.
Here's one of my nasty pet peeves: XNews, the binary-oriented newsreader for Windows. XNews is written in Delphi (Pascal) and maintained by one single guy: Luu Tran. I like the app because it's no-nonsense and works good, except for one thing: it's horribly inefficient. It suffers from O(n^2) and the author adamantly refuses to work around it. So load a newsgroup approaching 300K articles and it starts freaking out, then every operation takes about a minute before the app even redraws, and it's been like that for about 6 years now. It runs no better on my 2ghz Athlon than it did on my Pentium 200mhz due to this crippling 'feature'. So what did I do about it ? (after being gratuitously flamed by the author) I just built my own frickin' newsreader, I even went frugal and used multiple threads (GASP!). I admire Tran's efforts in making the app flexible in dealing with not-so-compliant servers, but if he's not going to maintain it he should just opensource it and let the rest of the world solve its little issues because it is used by hundreds of thousands of alt.binaries whores with the same woes.
Ok so I rant. It's just that people like that aren't true coders to my eye. They are C.S. graduates biting off more than they can chew.
Creepy! =)
The intel386.txt was floating around just about any coder-friendly BBS thanks to Fido file transfer. 350kb zipped, 900kb unzipped; just small enough to fit on a 3.5" floppy with enough space left over for build tools.
I never said it was absolutely required. The problem is that people don't dare use it anymore, heck they probably think Assembler is that ancient magic thing we used "when computers had punchcards instead of keyboards".
:) Why did I build this ? Because Installshield and friends are horribly inefficient and overbloated for what was once handled by "COPY A:*.*". What does one really need more today ? Version checking, registry inserts, and the occasional RunDLL call. Certainly not 600kb of empty code.
I'm just saying the whole world could use a little optimization theory, and this means all you VB coders out there. Pure ASM isn't a magic wand that makes everything 500% faster, but with experience you learn how to apply it sparingly for the greatest effect. Choose the most often (ab)used funcs, figure out which aspects are the most wasteful : small tricky nested loops that don't optimize well, or contorted string manipulations that just don't "fit" in the C library's methodology.
I think my proudest accomplishment would be the scripted installer I built in 90% assembler. No external DLL's required (other than win32 essentials of course), no need to unpack the installer set to a temp folder, no things that can break. And I'd also like to add that my decompression routine is blindlingly fast