Although Sega's consoles and games have always been an exciting crossover from the arcades, in the past they have never put enough weight on the console market. Just think of the Sega Saturn that failed miserably in North America, despite extremely sturdy controllers and great games. You just don't see Sega commercials on TV anymore (remember the yelling "Sega" dog?), as opposed to Sony's incredibly retarded Playstation ads where they basically just throw any unrelated crap at your senses and cram that ugly PS logo at the end. Sega's marketing is just too honest and not aggressive enough to keep up with the other mind-raping giants of the industry. Their stronghold has always been the arcades and they seem reluctant to shift their investment toward the console. The dreamcast is a nice all-around box but it won't go far unless they change their marketing strategy.
"Now even blind people can get a feast of Pamela Anderson's amazing breastesses with our latest Silicone Eye Implants - a pair of fake boobs in each eye!"
Ratios are practical only when they can be verified and human-approved in a timely fashion. With a BBS this was made easy since the transfer speeds were very low and we had fancy-shmancy Dos utils to test/scan/repack/sort the archives. The common file-uploading BBS user was also expected to know a thing or two about PC's, unlike the flood of MP3 lusers who think that Zipping their music to save 12kb is a "leet thing". These two dramatic changes have led the traditional ratio-based currency system into the flaming pits of Hell. The typical mp3 serving geek doesn't necessarily have the time to listen to each and every uploaded mp3 to check its validity and subsequently give download credits to the sender. It's too much hassle for next-to-nothing. However the concept of "leasing" disk space/bandwidth as in MojoNation seems promising. When people have to pay (even if it's a microscopic fee) to store/xfer files, they'll usually think twice about wasting that precious bandwidth with mindless filler. Of course you'll always run into a rich idiot with time to waste and people to piss off, but that's beside the point.
Are we going to receive Cease and Desist letters ordering us to stop using the Furby in ways it wasn't intended ? How about implanting a wavelan rig inside the furby to have it transmit a serial number to Digital Convergence =)
I personally don't think a burn-in can make a cpu/chipset more stable. It will certainly help spot any elusive glitches that might otherwise not show up. For example I've had software report minor math inaccuracies on a sickly overclocked CPU which seemed fine otherwise. It didn't crash but it was giving the FPU a hard time, and that kind of problem is the most daunting since it will cause incorrect calculations for example in spreadsheets or other floating-point data, and can go unnoticed for a long time until someone double-checks.
Other times, you might be right on the fine dotted line of heat tolerance. If your cooling is just barely adequate, the CPU might develop problems over time even though it seems to be running just fine. Eventually you notice instability and you find yourself dropping the speed a notch or two. Here again a burn-in test will accelerate this process and you'll see the possible causes of failure in time to resolve them (like using a better heatsink+fan).
Bottom line: burn-in tests should be performed routinely on overclocked CPU's to ensure they are running error-free and to spot possible chip deterioration before it gets too severe.
That guy's gone completely senile. Yapping about "I don't do Open-source, I do free software" for 3 consecutive emails seems to me like enough nagging to warrant a good dose of ritalin (or a shovel on the forehead). We don't need religion, we need solidarity and dedication to what we envision as the ideal software model, something our old fart RMS seems to totally ignore in favor of his Jimmy Swaggart brainwashing. Somebody get some duct tape and shut him up please!
The fun thing is that this is in Hong Kong, which is well known for its extensively perfected suite of "shady businesses" and the generally acute paranoia that resides with the intellectual crowd. Someone's certainly going to invest huge capital to have this thing cracked since it would open up a wide gamut of security holes if/when the entire government switches over to these high-tech ID cards. If a 16 year old could crack the DVD encryption, I'm quite confident that a team of well-funded asian tech experts can crack this little device.
I can't wait to play Street Fighter 4 on an iMac running Virtual PC in WinNT running VMware running Linux running Netscape running a Java version of Capcom's game. Cross-platform, we emulate them all in cascade!
Yes but Diablo 1 was an exception to the rule, which has obviously gone to the dogs for Diablo 2 since it eats up over 700mb's for the full install. Strangely it doesn't look strikingly different from its predecessor. Certainly not 700mb's worth of improvement. Executable code bloat is difficult to avoid thanks to absurd compilers, but data bloat is something that can (and should) be taken care of by the designers and coders.
People are so infatuated by the 650mb storage unit that they've been filling it up to the brim for over 7 years now, with useless crap, poorly-compressed cheap video, and a bunch of stuff we don't even want in the first place like Compuserve 30-day trial kits. It seems they're more focused on filling the CD-Rom to full capacity instead of using it efficiently. Back when games were all on floppies, people took the time to squeeze, trim and pack everything tightly because every wasteful meg was wasted money. Now with CD's it's the other way around : every unused meg is wasted money. Well to the user, every bloated meg is wasted time, and time eventually translates to money.
It may seem far-fetched, but these huge data chunks aren't doing the gamer any good. We're stuck buying more and more ram and disk space to experience the same sort of enjoyment as we did 5 and 10 years ago. So shoot me, I still have an old PC running Dos and all my favorite old games. It has less hard drive space than my main PC has Ram, still it provides just as much enjoyment and the games are as good if not better from a fun-factor perspective. Game developers have to take a step back and look at what they're doing and where they're NOT going. It's easy to waste when you're coding on a dual P3-933 with 768mb and a 36gb scsi hd, but gamers don't have such bottomless corporate bank accounts. Just look at how many large game companies have failed, and how many lone-wolf coders have succeeded on shoestring budgets simply because they didn't give in to unjustified excess.
Let's take this matter out of context, blow it up to obscene proportions, and make an NBC miniseries out of it.
What would you do if your child's grade school decided to keep your child at the end of the school year asking for a ransom ? You'd hire the biker gangs and have everyone shot and blown to pieces (excluding your kid of course).
Clue : If game developers would take the time to compress and organize the data more efficiently, load times would be much less of an issue. How many times have we seen 400mb games comprised of thousands of tiny files ? On the other hand we also see 400mb games with only a few large archives (like ID Software with their PAK/WAD files). I think if you're smart enough to code a game, you're surely smart enough to link in zLib and libJpeg to squeeze those data files down to a more reasonable size, not because of disk space, but because of access times/transfer rates. I'm sure if this practice were generalized, we could run most games right off a 32x cdrom with reasonable load times, reasonable meaning less than 10-15 seconds per level. Unreal Tournament for example uses both compression and a well conceived caching scheme, and consequently it takes less than 3-4 seconds to load up a new level on my box.
The bottom line is : slow loading games are a result of bad design. These days it takes merely a few seconds to load up 32 mb's of graphics data from a typical 32/40x cdrom. Games are still software like any other application, and like in any good application, even the most trivial functions should be examined and optimized, not just the graphics, sound and input. Quick (to code), unoptimal hacks are for Perl one-liners, not for full-fledged games and apps.
Why reboot just to play a game ? I don't like the idea of turning my high-end PC into an expensive console. If I had nothing better to do with my PC than play games, I wouldn't have bought a PC, I'd have stuck with PSX/DC/N64 instead.
I think a fully versioned file system would be overkill, you'd just end up wasting alot of space and would require some sort of garbage-collector to wipe out the antique, useless files. What I've been doing for the past few years is simply to use a version-controlling archiver, but since I'm more of a Windows geek than a Linux geek, I have no idea if they make Jar32 for Linux. I use it to archive all my important projects since it incrementally stores everything with cross-compression, so modifying a 10mb file a dozen times doesn't cost you 120mb, it only stores what's been changed and in a very efficient way, making it perfect for keeping a permanent history of your entire project including all associated media files, not just the code. So if your marketing moron likes the old v1.0 logo better than the latest v3.2 logo, you can still pull it out. It's pretty sweet.
The problem with elaborate moderation schemes is that the more complex the system becomes, the less people will understand it correctly, and as a result it will be misused and abused. We're not playing D&D here with zillions of rules and dice rolls, we're just voicing opinions and silencing pranksters.
Maybe I've spent too much time trying to learn the ways of Linux these past few months, but what the heck is a Journaled FS and where can I read up on it ? Journaled as in "hierarchical" ? retaining older versions of files for rollback purposes ??
I don't mean to bash any operating system, I publicly admit to running Win M.E. at home, but it would seem that for your particular implementation you would be best served by a smaller real-time OS that could fit on a CompactFlash drive. QNX quickly jumps into most minds. The problem of course is finding software for the OS. We all know the problem with DVD software only being commercially made for Windows and MacOS (that excludes css-auth).
Depending on the kind of CPU you're going to use, wouldn't a small cheap low-power CPU suit better than a hungry Wintel chip ? You could then offload the MP3 decoding to a dedicated processor like the MAS3507D.
I could tell you more, but then I'd have to kill you. If you're really designing a car-based PC for audio and video, you should know better than to use desktop hard and software.
Unless Quake 1 and Need for Speed 3 are your top games, a sub-1000$ PC will leave you hungry for more. You can only get so far on a 64mb AMD K6 and Voodoo3 2000 and a 6.4gb drive.
My personal gaming (and everything else) rig can hardly be labeled a sub-1000 box. Celery 667 @ 1000, 128 ram (going for 256 next time the price drops), 57gb hard drives, 72x cdrom, 10x dvd, cd-r, Geforce 2 ddr/vr, SB Live, and a nice fat 20 inch monitor.. oh don't forget the Boomslang 2000. Now that's what I call a decent gaming system =)
A giant slime was found living in Redmond,WA with its spouse and offspring. The specimen voided all scientific proof of primitive intelligence as soon as we pointed our cameras upon the creature, which immediately started conversing in a seemingly incoherent language tentatively named FudSpeak. Further tests will be performed to find out where these slimes come from.
Just think about it for an instant. InterNap.. InterNapster.. who says these guys aren't just trying to find optimal routes so the mp3's will transfer more efficiently ? I'm sure the RIAA will come up with some similar to force-feed the judge, just to get even more media attention.
The thing I see most about Athlons is the power supply being too weak. Do yourself a favor : spend a few more bucks and get a 300w power supply. The Athlon cpu itself isn't that power hungry (esp. in the case of Durons), but the motherboard's chipset more than makes up for it. Also if your video card is monstrous (Geforce2 and Voodoo5), that will also be sucking down alot of juice.
You people are so easily provoked.. i dare express my personal view on the olympics (albeit a very negative view) and your response is to insult me personally even though you have nothing to do with the olympics and can't even risk showing your true identity for fear of reprisal. Who cares if I can't hang stiffly from a set of suspended rings ? Neither can you, only I don't need to disguise my ineptitude simply because I think it's normal to not be excellent at everything and I don't need to fill myself with your airborne lies. If you're going to be assholes, at least be proud of it instead of being chicken.
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Although Sega's consoles and games have always been an exciting crossover from the arcades, in the past they have never put enough weight on the console market. Just think of the Sega Saturn that failed miserably in North America, despite extremely sturdy controllers and great games. You just don't see Sega commercials on TV anymore (remember the yelling "Sega" dog?), as opposed to Sony's incredibly retarded Playstation ads where they basically just throw any unrelated crap at your senses and cram that ugly PS logo at the end. Sega's marketing is just too honest and not aggressive enough to keep up with the other mind-raping giants of the industry. Their stronghold has always been the arcades and they seem reluctant to shift their investment toward the console. The dreamcast is a nice all-around box but it won't go far unless they change their marketing strategy.
"Now even blind people can get a feast of Pamela Anderson's amazing breastesses with our latest Silicone Eye Implants - a pair of fake boobs in each eye!"
(sorry I just had to =)
Ratios are practical only when they can be verified and human-approved in a timely fashion. With a BBS this was made easy since the transfer speeds were very low and we had fancy-shmancy Dos utils to test/scan/repack/sort the archives. The common file-uploading BBS user was also expected to know a thing or two about PC's, unlike the flood of MP3 lusers who think that Zipping their music to save 12kb is a "leet thing". These two dramatic changes have led the traditional ratio-based currency system into the flaming pits of Hell. The typical mp3 serving geek doesn't necessarily have the time to listen to each and every uploaded mp3 to check its validity and subsequently give download credits to the sender. It's too much hassle for next-to-nothing. However the concept of "leasing" disk space/bandwidth as in MojoNation seems promising. When people have to pay (even if it's a microscopic fee) to store/xfer files, they'll usually think twice about wasting that precious bandwidth with mindless filler. Of course you'll always run into a rich idiot with time to waste and people to piss off, but that's beside the point.
Are we going to receive Cease and Desist letters ordering us to stop using the Furby in ways it wasn't intended ? How about implanting a wavelan rig inside the furby to have it transmit a serial number to Digital Convergence =)
I personally don't think a burn-in can make a cpu/chipset more stable. It will certainly help spot any elusive glitches that might otherwise not show up. For example I've had software report minor math inaccuracies on a sickly overclocked CPU which seemed fine otherwise. It didn't crash but it was giving the FPU a hard time, and that kind of problem is the most daunting since it will cause incorrect calculations for example in spreadsheets or other floating-point data, and can go unnoticed for a long time until someone double-checks.
Other times, you might be right on the fine dotted line of heat tolerance. If your cooling is just barely adequate, the CPU might develop problems over time even though it seems to be running just fine. Eventually you notice instability and you find yourself dropping the speed a notch or two. Here again a burn-in test will accelerate this process and you'll see the possible causes of failure in time to resolve them (like using a better heatsink+fan).
Bottom line: burn-in tests should be performed routinely on overclocked CPU's to ensure they are running error-free and to spot possible chip deterioration before it gets too severe.
That guy's gone completely senile. Yapping about "I don't do Open-source, I do free software" for 3 consecutive emails seems to me like enough nagging to warrant a good dose of ritalin (or a shovel on the forehead). We don't need religion, we need solidarity and dedication to what we envision as the ideal software model, something our old fart RMS seems to totally ignore in favor of his Jimmy Swaggart brainwashing. Somebody get some duct tape and shut him up please!
The fun thing is that this is in Hong Kong, which is well known for its extensively perfected suite of "shady businesses" and the generally acute paranoia that resides with the intellectual crowd. Someone's certainly going to invest huge capital to have this thing cracked since it would open up a wide gamut of security holes if/when the entire government switches over to these high-tech ID cards. If a 16 year old could crack the DVD encryption, I'm quite confident that a team of well-funded asian tech experts can crack this little device.
Not e-mail nor email, nowadays it's all SPAM.
I can't wait to play Street Fighter 4 on an iMac running Virtual PC in WinNT running VMware running Linux running Netscape running a Java version of Capcom's game. Cross-platform, we emulate them all in cascade!
Yes but Diablo 1 was an exception to the rule, which has obviously gone to the dogs for Diablo 2 since it eats up over 700mb's for the full install. Strangely it doesn't look strikingly different from its predecessor. Certainly not 700mb's worth of improvement. Executable code bloat is difficult to avoid thanks to absurd compilers, but data bloat is something that can (and should) be taken care of by the designers and coders.
People are so infatuated by the 650mb storage unit that they've been filling it up to the brim for over 7 years now, with useless crap, poorly-compressed cheap video, and a bunch of stuff we don't even want in the first place like Compuserve 30-day trial kits. It seems they're more focused on filling the CD-Rom to full capacity instead of using it efficiently. Back when games were all on floppies, people took the time to squeeze, trim and pack everything tightly because every wasteful meg was wasted money. Now with CD's it's the other way around : every unused meg is wasted money. Well to the user, every bloated meg is wasted time, and time eventually translates to money.
It may seem far-fetched, but these huge data chunks aren't doing the gamer any good. We're stuck buying more and more ram and disk space to experience the same sort of enjoyment as we did 5 and 10 years ago. So shoot me, I still have an old PC running Dos and all my favorite old games. It has less hard drive space than my main PC has Ram, still it provides just as much enjoyment and the games are as good if not better from a fun-factor perspective. Game developers have to take a step back and look at what they're doing and where they're NOT going. It's easy to waste when you're coding on a dual P3-933 with 768mb and a 36gb scsi hd, but gamers don't have such bottomless corporate bank accounts. Just look at how many large game companies have failed, and how many lone-wolf coders have succeeded on shoestring budgets simply because they didn't give in to unjustified excess.
Let's take this matter out of context, blow it up to obscene proportions, and make an NBC miniseries out of it.
What would you do if your child's grade school decided to keep your child at the end of the school year asking for a ransom ? You'd hire the biker gangs and have everyone shot and blown to pieces (excluding your kid of course).
Wishful thinking =) Die NSI die!
Clue : If game developers would take the time to compress and organize the data more efficiently, load times would be much less of an issue. How many times have we seen 400mb games comprised of thousands of tiny files ? On the other hand we also see 400mb games with only a few large archives (like ID Software with their PAK/WAD files). I think if you're smart enough to code a game, you're surely smart enough to link in zLib and libJpeg to squeeze those data files down to a more reasonable size, not because of disk space, but because of access times/transfer rates. I'm sure if this practice were generalized, we could run most games right off a 32x cdrom with reasonable load times, reasonable meaning less than 10-15 seconds per level. Unreal Tournament for example uses both compression and a well conceived caching scheme, and consequently it takes less than 3-4 seconds to load up a new level on my box.
The bottom line is : slow loading games are a result of bad design. These days it takes merely a few seconds to load up 32 mb's of graphics data from a typical 32/40x cdrom. Games are still software like any other application, and like in any good application, even the most trivial functions should be examined and optimized, not just the graphics, sound and input. Quick (to code), unoptimal hacks are for Perl one-liners, not for full-fledged games and apps.
Why reboot just to play a game ? I don't like the idea of turning my high-end PC into an expensive console. If I had nothing better to do with my PC than play games, I wouldn't have bought a PC, I'd have stuck with PSX/DC/N64 instead.
I think a fully versioned file system would be overkill, you'd just end up wasting alot of space and would require some sort of garbage-collector to wipe out the antique, useless files. What I've been doing for the past few years is simply to use a version-controlling archiver, but since I'm more of a Windows geek than a Linux geek, I have no idea if they make Jar32 for Linux. I use it to archive all my important projects since it incrementally stores everything with cross-compression, so modifying a 10mb file a dozen times doesn't cost you 120mb, it only stores what's been changed and in a very efficient way, making it perfect for keeping a permanent history of your entire project including all associated media files, not just the code. So if your marketing moron likes the old v1.0 logo better than the latest v3.2 logo, you can still pull it out. It's pretty sweet.
The problem with elaborate moderation schemes is that the more complex the system becomes, the less people will understand it correctly, and as a result it will be misused and abused. We're not playing D&D here with zillions of rules and dice rolls, we're just voicing opinions and silencing pranksters.
Maybe I've spent too much time trying to learn the ways of Linux these past few months, but what the heck is a Journaled FS and where can I read up on it ? Journaled as in "hierarchical" ? retaining older versions of files for rollback purposes ??
I don't mean to bash any operating system, I publicly admit to running Win M.E. at home, but it would seem that for your particular implementation you would be best served by a smaller real-time OS that could fit on a CompactFlash drive. QNX quickly jumps into most minds. The problem of course is finding software for the OS. We all know the problem with DVD software only being commercially made for Windows and MacOS (that excludes css-auth).
Depending on the kind of CPU you're going to use, wouldn't a small cheap low-power CPU suit better than a hungry Wintel chip ? You could then offload the MP3 decoding to a dedicated processor like the MAS3507D.
I could tell you more, but then I'd have to kill you. If you're really designing a car-based PC for audio and video, you should know better than to use desktop hard and software.
Good luck!
Unless Quake 1 and Need for Speed 3 are your top games, a sub-1000$ PC will leave you hungry for more. You can only get so far on a 64mb AMD K6 and Voodoo3 2000 and a 6.4gb drive.
My personal gaming (and everything else) rig can hardly be labeled a sub-1000 box. Celery 667 @ 1000, 128 ram (going for 256 next time the price drops), 57gb hard drives, 72x cdrom, 10x dvd, cd-r, Geforce 2 ddr/vr, SB Live, and a nice fat 20 inch monitor.. oh don't forget the Boomslang 2000. Now that's what I call a decent gaming system =)
A giant slime was found living in Redmond,WA with its spouse and offspring. The specimen voided all scientific proof of primitive intelligence as soon as we pointed our cameras upon the creature, which immediately started conversing in a seemingly incoherent language tentatively named FudSpeak. Further tests will be performed to find out where these slimes come from.
Just think about it for an instant. InterNap.. InterNapster.. who says these guys aren't just trying to find optimal routes so the mp3's will transfer more efficiently ? I'm sure the RIAA will come up with some similar to force-feed the judge, just to get even more media attention.
All these talks about linux on big iron.. so when will I finally be able to run Apache on a tire iron ?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of tire irons. Now that would make a great stress reliever.
The thing I see most about Athlons is the power supply being too weak. Do yourself a favor : spend a few more bucks and get a 300w power supply. The Athlon cpu itself isn't that power hungry (esp. in the case of Durons), but the motherboard's chipset more than makes up for it. Also if your video card is monstrous (Geforce2 and Voodoo5), that will also be sucking down alot of juice.
You people are so easily provoked.. i dare express my personal view on the olympics (albeit a very negative view) and your response is to insult me personally even though you have nothing to do with the olympics and can't even risk showing your true identity for fear of reprisal. Who cares if I can't hang stiffly from a set of suspended rings ? Neither can you, only I don't need to disguise my ineptitude simply because I think it's normal to not be excellent at everything and I don't need to fill myself with your airborne lies. If you're going to be assholes, at least be proud of it instead of being chicken.
- Start off with a totally absurd topic that's an extreme aberration of reality.
- Reach into every geek's darkest corners and excite their hatred for common fools
- Subtlely imply that they're all out to get us
- Delete last paragraph of article in order to make it look like an "open" topic
- Watch angered readers' karma drop when they criticize the numbness of your story
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Lordy! Mod this up! Score 5 (Funny, Insightful)