Amen! I am also a convert, I had been holding off for a very long time, but since I bought my Vertex 6-7 months ago I feel like everything else is crap. I still use spinning disks for storage, but for a boot drive I gotta have my solid state.
Does your XP machine have an EGA graphics adapter ? No ? Then it needs to be emulated. Emulation is, be definition, less efficient than native execution, because you have to intercept the memory accesses and port I/O and translate those to suit your current system. Another important distinction is that DOS games had exclusive access to your hardware, whereas Windows needs to make sure all software plays nice with each other.
DOS game emulation is particularly difficult, because of the many dirty optimizations used to achieve reasonable performance on the limited hardware of the DOS era. A modern emulator has to be able to untangle all those weird code paths and replicate the unique quirks they unleashed.
EGA itself isn't as trivial as most people assume, as it uses planar addressing. Palette cycling was also very popular at the time, since blitting was not fast enough for smooth animation. Well it's 2010 and graphics adapters don't use palettes much anymore, it's all about 16/24 bit "true" color these days. That means for each pixel drawn by a DOS game, the emulator has to reference the current palette, find out the actual color values for Red/Green/Blue, and plot that to the graphics context (virtualized display buffer). If the game starts cycling the palette, the emulator must update every single pixel on the screen, up to 60 times per second.
These are all things a modern graphics accelerator does not touch, because these techniques are very much obsolete, so the emulator has to do all the heavy lifting on the CPU. This is why that old 8Mhz PC game might require 100 times as much CPU power today.
Fibe would probably be faster as it uses ADSL2. I do not know the details, as I am a firm hater of ADSL, but my understanding is it uses a different modulation to achieve those speeds, so while your line is only delivering 60% of 5mbit, it might be able to provide close to 60% of 20Mbit using ADSL2... again I'm no expert on this, but unless you've got some funky bad wiring, I would expect the scaling to be linear.
Slipstreaming a service pack, sure... nLite just provides a two-click way to do the same, but for drivers the procedure is a bit more involved, and requires modifing INF files and repackaging CABs.
I was TV-less for a long time, technically I still am, but the various women in my life were all TV junkies. Our cable bill is rather obscene (by my standards at least), but the wife can't live without her Survivor/Lost/Heroes/WB. We have an "everything" package, because they bundle things in such predatory fashion that she can't trim off the fat without losing some essential channel.
This isn't to say I don't watch shows, but I can count them on one hand and it's trivial to find them online. Would I pay for these shows a-la carte ? Sure! Price them a buck per episode, yank out all the ads and I'm there... but I don't see that happening in this universe.
Even when there's a show I want to see with the wife, I prefer to download it without commercials, rather than tune in at a specific time, or time-shift with the PVR. For one, the interruptions annoy me, and frankly I can find better things to do with the 18 minutes they waste for every hour. I also don't give a flying fuck about the latest tampon marketing buzzword or the local "news" about some ginger kid curing a 3-legged puppy of canceraids.
Let me put it this way: if the wife ever leaves me, or drops dead, I will suddenly have $200 more to blow on hookers and booze. Hmmm... tempting!
I was one of the early ICQ users in the 90s, 6-digit UID, yadda yadda. It was ground-breaking for the time, but that time has come and gone. Everyone I know moved to MSN Messenger, and ICQ pretty much died overnight.
Me, I don't even bother with IM anymore. If I had a business use for it, I'd be fine, but for just keeping in touch with friends I'm quite content with Facebook and that century-old tech the telephone.
What you correctly identified is the impact of idiot consumers on product lines and marketing. People liked the cute 7" EEEs, but they lacked a few creature comforts so the masses complained. Asus responded by creating shitty laptops that addressed these complaints.
It is a lost cause to explain to some people that a large EEE offers worse value than a small conventional laptop. They also think Microsoft owns Intel and AMD is a kind of "Lunix".
What I never understood is if these Atom-based netbooks use 10-15 watts, and my full-power laptop draws 95 watts, then why can't they put a man-sized battery in a netbook and have it last 12+ hours ? I just want a machine that will get through an entire day without charging; a programmer's notepad so I can type and test my brilliant code snippets whenever and wherever they materialize.
The problem is we will keep finding uses for the extra power, ensuring that "good enough" is only valid for conservative users.
For the average user, they just want to click "Like" on Facebook and send out a few blobs of text per day. These are the target market for netbooks and nettops, and that's fine. There are quite a few of us (I hope) who actually want to push the boundaries and see just what we can achieve with faster CPUs and greater RAM. Scientists, researchers, hackers, imagineers... For these fertile minds, there is no such thing as "enough".
What I don't understand is: how can a school teach game design and development, if they're not themselves a game shop ? The old adage "Those who can't do, teach" seems sharply applicable here. I know my own college experience consisted mostly of telling teachers they were wrong, publishing errata for their courseware, and watching utterly dry minds try to not laugh as they strung us along for our tuition money. We had a DOS prof who was a former used car salesman, a Windows prof who read his slides off a Mac, and an assembly language prof that had probably never written a line of code their whole life. Oh, and a C++ prof who was also a Cobol prof, who was also running for mayor.
Now you might think I just went to an awful college, and you'd be right, except I went to three of them. Among all three colleges, I can count only three truly competent profs: one was a true hacker, one was a business-savvy application developer, and the other was a godly sysadmin. Everyone else was a carbon-based text-to-speech engine.
It's hard to learn something from people who know even less about the subject matter than you do. When that subject is trendy bullshit like game dev, no good can possibly come out. Wake me when they create a program where Meier teaches design, Carmack teaches programming, and Will Wright teaches redundancy.
Many seemed to be there because "they liked computers" and/or "there's money in computers"
The first type is salvageable, but the 2nd type should be shot on sight. Going into a career path because "there's money there" is a great way to become terrible at whatever it is you chose to do. The greatest workers are those who truly enjoy what they do, and thrive on the challenge of always pushing farther. If your only goal in life is to amass imaginary currency, that belief system can only carry you so far...
The fallacy is that the longer you do one job, theoretically the better you get at doing that one thing. Just because you've been testing games for four years doesn't mean you have any value as a coder or designer. Besides, the great bulk of your learning happens on the job. You don't start out in one field, then cross over as a senior in a different field... no, you start out as a shitty coder, then after a while you ideally become a great coder.
Crossover is for people who either have ADHD, or have no idea what they should be doing in the first place.
That is the kind of company that'd be fun to work for: Where you can take risks in producing a new game even if people don't like it, because you know it'll sell decently regardless.
That has to be the most short-sighted comment I've read all day. It's the other way around: when you know so many eyes are watching your every move, many concessions need to be made to avoid mass backlash. The game industry is fickle, and if Bioware were to release a real stinker, they'd go out of business shortly thereafter.
What makes Bioware so different from the rest is their reliance on well-written stories and dialogue. How much one adores them is entirely dependent on their definition of "fun". Me, I don't read much, I just don't have the patience. I enjoyed Mass Effect, but a lot of it felt rather tedious and, dare I say, "quantity over quality". It was neat to have a gazillion playable characters, each with a little plot variation here and there, but I found myself spending far too much time doing pointless crap, just to reach the next little bit of dialogue or factoid about the uber evil aliens. Tweaking stats and equipment didn't seem to impact my survivability much at all. I didn't care which toons were in my party, because they all played exactly the same. Some cutscenes would change but ultimately they were all as interchangeable as redshirts.
I knew this would be one of the complaints, but upon thinking it through I realized I actually enjoy the writing, and the fact that it comes in tiny little morsels. The heavy masturbatory prose of most navel-gazing writers, I can't stand, but PA is just a tiny bit of flourish to liven up what would otherwise be "This game rocks, sucks, and/or eats babies. I (dis)liked it because of X, Y and that native-american allegory tomato."
There are only so many ways to criticize the game industry and its excrement. Clever wording makes it a lot less boring.
The way I see it, there's mostly just two choices. The cheap option is to throw DD-WRT or Tomato on a $30 801.22n router. The expensive option is to use a real PC.
I had been using an old Pentium 166mhz, running Debian (yuck), for over ten years. I recently retired it and replaced it with an Atom-based mini PC. Figure $150 to $200 for an Atom PC, if you build it yourself. If you want something with a web interface, pfSense or SmoothWall are quite decent.
The PC option is much costlier, but you do get a lot of flexibility. If 802.11n is made obsolete tomorrow by some other bullshit spec, you can simply replace the WiFi card (or USB dongle). If you want to do funky routing or load-balancing, you can add more NICs. Your router can double as a file server, or a home automation hub, or even an HDTV media player with XBMC if your hardware can handle it.
The big downside to a PC-based router is the power consumption. It's not too bad with an Atom (~25w), but a full ATX system will draw at least 50-60 watts, while a Linksys/Netgear probably draws less than 10 watts. Either way, The cost of electricity will far exceed the hardware investment after 2 or 3 years.
SP2 may have a few newer drivers, but for any recent machine you still need that floppy. By recent, I mean 2005 and later. If you use RAID or AHCI, you definitely need that floppy.
A workaround is to remaster the Windows CD with your additional drivers, most easily done using a tool like NLite. I typically produce such a disc when I build a PC for someone, with all the drivers and a few unattented installs. This results in a hands-free recovery disc, not unlike the ones you get with brand-name PCs.
Agree 100% on the insurance scams (and the killing thereof), but do you really expect law enforcement to do anything about it ? It's much easier (read: lazier) to put one guy behind bars over trifles, than it is to take down an empire that has more resources than all the country's police forces put together.
You know that corporate apocalypse sci-fi writers love to milk (a-la Soylent Green) ? You're in it. It's already too late.
That's real nice, and in an ideal world I would agree with you, but the reality is that the so-called "authorities" have clearly failed to deal with this particularly troubled individual.
And the whole volunteer thing ? Puh-leeze. When even clean law-abiding citizens have lost faith in their local police, why in the fuck would they volunteer to do their job for them ? I'm not saying all cops are crooked, but I am saying the system itself is broken and in most of the cities I've lived, they're little more than another splotch on the broad palette of not-so-hidden municipal taxes. Much like a capitalist will incessantly increase prices until the customer stops buying, a municipality will increase fines, fees and frustration until the angry citizens leave and make room for a whole new batch of suckers, and the police play an active role in that.
There's a lot more money to be made in issuing frivolous fines, than catching some elusive predator who is obviously smarter and faster than any group of uniformed men.
No need to protect the guilty, Bell and Rogers are attempting to stop Hulu from entering the market, because they know the first thing that will happen is users will blow their unreasonably low caps and yell at CS reps until their useless little heads explode.
The last thing the Canadian Duopoly wants is a legitimate use for all the bandwidth they've been keeping from us.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen! I am also a convert, I had been holding off for a very long time, but since I bought my Vertex 6-7 months ago I feel like everything else is crap. I still use spinning disks for storage, but for a boot drive I gotta have my solid state.
Does your XP machine have an EGA graphics adapter ? No ? Then it needs to be emulated. Emulation is, be definition, less efficient than native execution, because you have to intercept the memory accesses and port I/O and translate those to suit your current system. Another important distinction is that DOS games had exclusive access to your hardware, whereas Windows needs to make sure all software plays nice with each other.
DOS game emulation is particularly difficult, because of the many dirty optimizations used to achieve reasonable performance on the limited hardware of the DOS era. A modern emulator has to be able to untangle all those weird code paths and replicate the unique quirks they unleashed.
EGA itself isn't as trivial as most people assume, as it uses planar addressing. Palette cycling was also very popular at the time, since blitting was not fast enough for smooth animation. Well it's 2010 and graphics adapters don't use palettes much anymore, it's all about 16/24 bit "true" color these days. That means for each pixel drawn by a DOS game, the emulator has to reference the current palette, find out the actual color values for Red/Green/Blue, and plot that to the graphics context (virtualized display buffer). If the game starts cycling the palette, the emulator must update every single pixel on the screen, up to 60 times per second.
These are all things a modern graphics accelerator does not touch, because these techniques are very much obsolete, so the emulator has to do all the heavy lifting on the CPU. This is why that old 8Mhz PC game might require 100 times as much CPU power today.
Fibe would probably be faster as it uses ADSL2. I do not know the details, as I am a firm hater of ADSL, but my understanding is it uses a different modulation to achieve those speeds, so while your line is only delivering 60% of 5mbit, it might be able to provide close to 60% of 20Mbit using ADSL2... again I'm no expert on this, but unless you've got some funky bad wiring, I would expect the scaling to be linear.
Slipstreaming a service pack, sure... nLite just provides a two-click way to do the same, but for drivers the procedure is a bit more involved, and requires modifing INF files and repackaging CABs.
You do realize judges aren't morons
I've been trying to come up with an intelligent rebuttal, but all I can think of is Corpus Christi, Texas - specifically Nueces County.
What's funny is Googling "corpus christi texas crooked judge" returns the Republican Party of Nueces County as the first result. Funny ho-ho.
I was TV-less for a long time, technically I still am, but the various women in my life were all TV junkies. Our cable bill is rather obscene (by my standards at least), but the wife can't live without her Survivor/Lost/Heroes/WB. We have an "everything" package, because they bundle things in such predatory fashion that she can't trim off the fat without losing some essential channel.
This isn't to say I don't watch shows, but I can count them on one hand and it's trivial to find them online. Would I pay for these shows a-la carte ? Sure! Price them a buck per episode, yank out all the ads and I'm there... but I don't see that happening in this universe.
Even when there's a show I want to see with the wife, I prefer to download it without commercials, rather than tune in at a specific time, or time-shift with the PVR. For one, the interruptions annoy me, and frankly I can find better things to do with the 18 minutes they waste for every hour. I also don't give a flying fuck about the latest tampon marketing buzzword or the local "news" about some ginger kid curing a 3-legged puppy of canceraids.
Let me put it this way: if the wife ever leaves me, or drops dead, I will suddenly have $200 more to blow on hookers and booze. Hmmm... tempting!
What's 187.5 million for a dead IM network ? :P
I was one of the early ICQ users in the 90s, 6-digit UID, yadda yadda. It was ground-breaking for the time, but that time has come and gone. Everyone I know moved to MSN Messenger, and ICQ pretty much died overnight.
Me, I don't even bother with IM anymore. If I had a business use for it, I'd be fine, but for just keeping in touch with friends I'm quite content with Facebook and that century-old tech the telephone.
Information can be shared freely (which is part of the problem) but money is finite.
The fractional reserve banking system says you're wrong. Today's money IS information, and is therefore infinite (or more accurately: nonexistent).
What, did you think your employer shipped truckloads of silver bars to back those biweekly electronic deposits to your account ?
What you correctly identified is the impact of idiot consumers on product lines and marketing. People liked the cute 7" EEEs, but they lacked a few creature comforts so the masses complained. Asus responded by creating shitty laptops that addressed these complaints.
It is a lost cause to explain to some people that a large EEE offers worse value than a small conventional laptop. They also think Microsoft owns Intel and AMD is a kind of "Lunix".
What I never understood is if these Atom-based netbooks use 10-15 watts, and my full-power laptop draws 95 watts, then why can't they put a man-sized battery in a netbook and have it last 12+ hours ? I just want a machine that will get through an entire day without charging; a programmer's notepad so I can type and test my brilliant code snippets whenever and wherever they materialize.
The problem is we will keep finding uses for the extra power, ensuring that "good enough" is only valid for conservative users.
For the average user, they just want to click "Like" on Facebook and send out a few blobs of text per day. These are the target market for netbooks and nettops, and that's fine. There are quite a few of us (I hope) who actually want to push the boundaries and see just what we can achieve with faster CPUs and greater RAM. Scientists, researchers, hackers, imagineers... For these fertile minds, there is no such thing as "enough".
And that is different from non-game offices how ?
What I don't understand is: how can a school teach game design and development, if they're not themselves a game shop ? The old adage "Those who can't do, teach" seems sharply applicable here. I know my own college experience consisted mostly of telling teachers they were wrong, publishing errata for their courseware, and watching utterly dry minds try to not laugh as they strung us along for our tuition money. We had a DOS prof who was a former used car salesman, a Windows prof who read his slides off a Mac, and an assembly language prof that had probably never written a line of code their whole life. Oh, and a C++ prof who was also a Cobol prof, who was also running for mayor.
Now you might think I just went to an awful college, and you'd be right, except I went to three of them. Among all three colleges, I can count only three truly competent profs: one was a true hacker, one was a business-savvy application developer, and the other was a godly sysadmin. Everyone else was a carbon-based text-to-speech engine.
It's hard to learn something from people who know even less about the subject matter than you do. When that subject is trendy bullshit like game dev, no good can possibly come out. Wake me when they create a program where Meier teaches design, Carmack teaches programming, and Will Wright teaches redundancy.
Many seemed to be there because "they liked computers" and/or "there's money in computers"
The first type is salvageable, but the 2nd type should be shot on sight. Going into a career path because "there's money there" is a great way to become terrible at whatever it is you chose to do. The greatest workers are those who truly enjoy what they do, and thrive on the challenge of always pushing farther. If your only goal in life is to amass imaginary currency, that belief system can only carry you so far...
The fallacy is that the longer you do one job, theoretically the better you get at doing that one thing. Just because you've been testing games for four years doesn't mean you have any value as a coder or designer. Besides, the great bulk of your learning happens on the job. You don't start out in one field, then cross over as a senior in a different field... no, you start out as a shitty coder, then after a while you ideally become a great coder.
Crossover is for people who either have ADHD, or have no idea what they should be doing in the first place.
That is the kind of company that'd be fun to work for: Where you can take risks in producing a new game even if people don't like it, because you know it'll sell decently regardless.
That has to be the most short-sighted comment I've read all day. It's the other way around: when you know so many eyes are watching your every move, many concessions need to be made to avoid mass backlash. The game industry is fickle, and if Bioware were to release a real stinker, they'd go out of business shortly thereafter.
What makes Bioware so different from the rest is their reliance on well-written stories and dialogue. How much one adores them is entirely dependent on their definition of "fun". Me, I don't read much, I just don't have the patience. I enjoyed Mass Effect, but a lot of it felt rather tedious and, dare I say, "quantity over quality". It was neat to have a gazillion playable characters, each with a little plot variation here and there, but I found myself spending far too much time doing pointless crap, just to reach the next little bit of dialogue or factoid about the uber evil aliens. Tweaking stats and equipment didn't seem to impact my survivability much at all. I didn't care which toons were in my party, because they all played exactly the same. Some cutscenes would change but ultimately they were all as interchangeable as redshirts.
It also had "Texas" in the title, which should be a warning to all of us with triple-digit IQ.
I knew this would be one of the complaints, but upon thinking it through I realized I actually enjoy the writing, and the fact that it comes in tiny little morsels. The heavy masturbatory prose of most navel-gazing writers, I can't stand, but PA is just a tiny bit of flourish to liven up what would otherwise be "This game rocks, sucks, and/or eats babies. I (dis)liked it because of X, Y and that native-american allegory tomato."
There are only so many ways to criticize the game industry and its excrement. Clever wording makes it a lot less boring.
What exactly do you think they have to gain from making their products more expensive to pay royalties into the patent pool?
Power over smaller manufacturers who can't (won't) stomach an exclusionary fee ?
The way I see it, there's mostly just two choices. The cheap option is to throw DD-WRT or Tomato on a $30 801.22n router. The expensive option is to use a real PC.
I had been using an old Pentium 166mhz, running Debian (yuck), for over ten years. I recently retired it and replaced it with an Atom-based mini PC. Figure $150 to $200 for an Atom PC, if you build it yourself. If you want something with a web interface, pfSense or SmoothWall are quite decent.
The PC option is much costlier, but you do get a lot of flexibility. If 802.11n is made obsolete tomorrow by some other bullshit spec, you can simply replace the WiFi card (or USB dongle). If you want to do funky routing or load-balancing, you can add more NICs. Your router can double as a file server, or a home automation hub, or even an HDTV media player with XBMC if your hardware can handle it.
The big downside to a PC-based router is the power consumption. It's not too bad with an Atom (~25w), but a full ATX system will draw at least 50-60 watts, while a Linksys/Netgear probably draws less than 10 watts. Either way, The cost of electricity will far exceed the hardware investment after 2 or 3 years.
SP2 may have a few newer drivers, but for any recent machine you still need that floppy. By recent, I mean 2005 and later. If you use RAID or AHCI, you definitely need that floppy.
A workaround is to remaster the Windows CD with your additional drivers, most easily done using a tool like NLite. I typically produce such a disc when I build a PC for someone, with all the drivers and a few unattented installs. This results in a hands-free recovery disc, not unlike the ones you get with brand-name PCs.
Agree 100% on the insurance scams (and the killing thereof), but do you really expect law enforcement to do anything about it ? It's much easier (read: lazier) to put one guy behind bars over trifles, than it is to take down an empire that has more resources than all the country's police forces put together.
You know that corporate apocalypse sci-fi writers love to milk (a-la Soylent Green) ? You're in it. It's already too late.
That's real nice, and in an ideal world I would agree with you, but the reality is that the so-called "authorities" have clearly failed to deal with this particularly troubled individual.
And the whole volunteer thing ? Puh-leeze. When even clean law-abiding citizens have lost faith in their local police, why in the fuck would they volunteer to do their job for them ? I'm not saying all cops are crooked, but I am saying the system itself is broken and in most of the cities I've lived, they're little more than another splotch on the broad palette of not-so-hidden municipal taxes. Much like a capitalist will incessantly increase prices until the customer stops buying, a municipality will increase fines, fees and frustration until the angry citizens leave and make room for a whole new batch of suckers, and the police play an active role in that.
There's a lot more money to be made in issuing frivolous fines, than catching some elusive predator who is obviously smarter and faster than any group of uniformed men.
No need to protect the guilty, Bell and Rogers are attempting to stop Hulu from entering the market, because they know the first thing that will happen is users will blow their unreasonably low caps and yell at CS reps until their useless little heads explode.
The last thing the Canadian Duopoly wants is a legitimate use for all the bandwidth they've been keeping from us.
That's what the iPad is for. Or Kindle. Or whatever PDF-reading thingamajic you west-coasters hate least.
You mean Adobe's incompetent coders can't figure out how to port their own stuff ? WHO'D-A THUNK IT!