Firmware is just regular software. It is stored in non-volatile memory (usually flash), and is loaded and executed by the processor like any other software.
The main reason why your DVD never required updates is because Blu-Ray is a trainwreck of a spec that is still in heavy flux, while DVD was finalized and stable by the time players started shipping.
Well I don't know about you, but I'm not too thrilled at the prospect of paying Pfizer $200 per gram for cocaine.
The biggest problem with legalization is the "legal" drug cartels are even more crooked than the underground ones. They just use lobbyists to do their dirty work instead of gun-wielding retardo-thugs. At least it's easy to tell exactly what's going through the thug's head.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I think some people wield cars like weapons and should be treated as such, but I've never been mugged at car-point. There's a big difference between accidental death and homicide. People don't buy cars with the express intent to kill, they buy them so they can get around our idiotically designed cities. Guns exist ONLY to kill, whether the victim is animal or human. They have no other purpose.
If two people have hammers, yeah someone might manage to get killed, but most likely you'll both end up with a bump on your head and a really lame story to tell your idiot friends.
If two people have guns, at least one person is going to die, and the other is going to sell a million albums rapping about how he "fucked" your "bitch" and "capped" your "ass". The good news is, one of the idiots is dead. The bad news is, the other idiot is recruiting more followers.
The only thing carrying a gun will do is make it far more likely that YOU will get shot. Hell, I'd steal your gun and shoot you if I felt threatened!
It's rather simple, really. If you don't know how long something should take, try to ask someone with experience in the field. If you can't find a good answer, and your boss gives you a hard time, call his bluff!
If he can do the job faster, or can get someone else to do it, ask to be coached so you can learn. If he's bluffing, he either has to back down, or cover his ass and find someone else to do it (poorly/slowly), and then he will learn from his mistake. There are just a lot of bosses who are obsessed with cost-cutting to the point where it actually hurts their profits by reducing efficiency, and these people need to be shown the error of their ways.
Disclaimer: I'm a professional asshole. I'm really nice until a point, then I turn evil >:-#
My single most effective tactic for managing those squirrelly types who throw a goddamned tantrum at you every time they forget their 6-letter password, is to throw the abuse right back at them. Don't take the abuse, don't get defensive and apologetic, stand up and tell them exactly how annoying, ineffective and downright juvenile their behavior is. If you give them the satisfaction of belittling you, they will keep coming back for more, but if you put them in their place, they just might learn to change their childish ways.
Go right up and ask them "What the hell is your problem ?" Big hint: the problem isn't their computer, the problem is everything else in their life that's stressing them out, and that they are now throwing at you in desperation. That's my stress management tactic: kill it at the source. Control, or be controlled.
If you want to be treated with maturity and respect, you have to command it. I've seen too many well-meaning techies cower in fear when aggressed. You don't have to be a tough guy, just stand your ground. You could be working any of the millions of shitty IT jobs in the world, so if someone takes you for granted, reign them in or find another job.
4 years of college, 4 years of med school, and X (up to 5 or 6) years of fellowship/residency is a lot of money
So because these people had their finances raped by the educational system and predatory employers, that grants them the right to rape everyone else's finances ? That's abuse by proxy, which is pretty much the core of all Americans' problems. Fuck the world before/because the world fucks you, what a mess!
How many years of cumulative instruction do you think the average sysadmin has under his belt ? The college years are shorter, but I spend at least 10-15 hours each week reading about the latest products/trends, lest I become obsolete, and that time is usually outside of paid working hours. By that metric, I've spent more time learning my trade than any doctor or lawyer I know. It doesn't translate into a bigger paycheck, but I'm doing what I enjoy, which is the reason I do it in the first place.
If a doctor doesn't like working in medicine, well they'd better close up shop and find something else. Working longer hours to bring in more money is not going to make them happier, quite the contrary.
Here's a dumb question for you: in which direction is the PCI slot fan blowing ? Most of the ones I've seen pull air into the fan, and out the rear, which means it would be working against your GPU's fan.
That card does run hot, but it should idle around 55-60'C.
Scaling artifacts that are far less noticeable on today's LCDs than they were in the past, thanks to greatly improved scaling, and in many cases the GPU can do its own scaling which is even better.
Some people don't mind the scaling, as it masks jagged edges like ghetto anti-aliasing.
Right, but I don't know very many people with 1920x1200 displays. I have one, and my 18-month old GPU can run Crysis and any other game just fine at that rez, but practically everyone else I know is still at 1280x1024 or 1680x1050.
Realistically, reviewers should find the resolution and settings at which a game is playable, meaning 25-30 fps average for most games. Sure, it's funny to know that Crysis will get 8 fps at 2560x1600 with 16x AA+AF, but if that's what they reviewers think even hardcore gamers expect of their machines, they need to stop drinking the kool aid.
To make things worse, I'm not at all averse to running a game at less-than-native resolution on my bigass LCD. The scaling in today's displays is far better than it used to be (for most models). If dropping the rez down one step makes it more enjoyable, then so be it; not the end of the world!
I'll actually bite, just to show you how reasonable the hardware requirements are for Crysis. I will only price out the tower, no monitor, so you can compare this gaming PC to a console. Consoles don't come with a TV, and the display has no impact on performance.
Case: Antec Sonata - $100 Power Supply: Antec 500w PSU - comes with the case Motherboard: Asus P5KPL-CM - $55 CPU: Intel Q6600 2.4ghz quad - $190 GPU: Geforce 9800GT 512mb - $125 RAM: 4gb DDR2-800 - $50 Hard Drive: Seagate 500gb SATA - $60 Optical Drive: Any DVD-RW - $20 OS License: XP or Vista OEM - $100
So we're sitting at $700 even, so roughly $800 tax in. If you're not comfortable assembling it yourself, most shops will do it for an extra $40.
Such a PC, not at all bleeding edge nor prohibitively expensive, will run Crysis on High Detail, in 1280x1024 at 30fps. It will also run in widescreen 1920x1200, but you'll drop to 15-20 fps, which is a bit low.
Crysis runs decently on current generation gaming-class PCs. It runs just fine in 1024x768 on a Core 2 with a $150 ATI or NVidia card, with high graphics detail. 1280x1024 is manageable if you can live with 20 fps, or a slight reduction in shader and shadow detail.
Where people get tripped up is the high CPU requirements. Crysis does a lot of non-GPU processing like physics and scene setup, that other games use far less extensively. It also uses some heavy duty shader programs that can bring a low-end GPU to its knees, so you have to turn those down a notch.
I'm certainly not an "over-the-top, money-bags gamer". I have a first-gen Intel Quad from over a year ago, 4 gigs Ram and a Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb. Sure, when I bought it, it was pretty high-end, but today you could build a slightly faster machine for $600 (I checked) - with top quality components too, no off-brand junk. If an FPS gamer can't afford to spend $600 on a mid-range PC, they shouldn't be complaining about Crysis' performance.
People use it as a benchmark because it exists, and it's pretty.
As a developer, is that I know some of the crazy algorithms behind those graphics, but not all. People whine that UT3 has similar poly counts to Crysis, yet runs much faster, but poly counts are only part of the equation. Crysis does a ton of pre-processing to those polys before they hit the screen.
Could they make Crysis run much faster ? Yes, of course they could, but this would be sacrificing render quality. You could also drop down the quality settings yourself and have a normal looking game that runs at normal frame rates, but the whole point of Crysis is to show off.
Having played through both games several times, I've played around with the settings quite a lot, and I found that I preferred sacrificing a few FPS to get more eye candy. Crysis is one of those games where you take a moment to admire the scenery once in a while. You're not running blindly through endless corridors with a twitchy trigger-finger.
So could they optimize it ? Sure, a little. They won't take your 20fps and turn it into 40, because there's really that much work being done per-frame.
People used to whine just the same 15 years ago, only it was Doom vs Wolf3D. "Well, they're both 3D so why does Doom run like molasses on my 386 sx25?" Just like Mr 386, you need to get with the times.
All these laws to combat terrorism are mostly indiscriminate, in that they hurt non-terrorists just as badly, maybe even worse (probably).
Remember when you were young, and you kept getting the shit kicked out of you for being a nerd ? Did people never teach these "counter terrorists" how to deal with bullies ? You take away their motive. Terrorists are pissed the fuck off about something. Get rid of that "something" and the terrorists will go back to being normal happy humans.
Does this mean a Lexus will cost less than the identical Toyota ? You would have to pay me a lot of money to blare random "upscale" ads over my Will Smith CDs:P Actually you would have to pay me a lot more to get me to drive a goddamned Lexus, but that's beside the point.
$25+/GB is the cheapest it's ever been! What is your point ?
I do agree I7 motherboards are ridiculously overpriced and the selection is pathetic, especially considering how many i965 and P35 boards were dumped into the market below $100 just a year ago.
That's the fundamental problem with OpenID. It moves the point of failure away from the service provider, into a 3rd party's hands. It's not so bad if you run your own OpenID on a server you own, but even then you have to run that goddamned server. If you decide 2 years down the road that "ilovecrumpets.info" is no longer worth the spam revenue, are you going to hang on to it just so your OpenID stays valid ?
I tried it, once! It annoyed the hell out of me, and I never used it again.
Nice idea, but there's one problem: iPods break - a LOT! Not just because they're flimsy, but because they get dropped fairly often, and frankly any company property will get abused more than personal items, because "it's not mine so who cares".
In my opinion, people can bring their own music, and I would continue to block Kazaa and any other known P2P services at the network level. Bring a disc full of MP3s if you must, or stream them from home/radio/wherever... but opening up P2P will result in a few undesirable things:
1. It will consume all available bandwidth 2. People will spend a LOT of time searching and downloading 3. Viruses and malware galore!!!
Frankly, if a person can't find a streaming radio station to their liking, and can't be assed to bring their own discs or iPod, well they can go jump off a bridge. It should not be the sysadmin's or employer's problem.
It's not exactly difficult to build PCs that last. There's really just one component you have to not chintz on: the power supply. That's the one part that will fry your system if it's a no-name piece of garbage.
The fact that other PC vendors' systems fail so often and so brutally is almost always the result of weak unfiltered power supplies and thermal stress. A scary number of brand names build their PCs to boot, not to last. I have seen so much dumb shit while repairing/upgrading even brand new machines, I have to wonder what kind of landed idiot is responsible for prototyping these mass-produced lemons.
If Micron was smart enough to spend the extra $40 on a quality power supply and an extra cooling fan, great! But how do you position an "unshitty" PC for sales ? Clearly they did not figure it out, and that's why they are exiting the market today.
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Firmware is just regular software. It is stored in non-volatile memory (usually flash), and is loaded and executed by the processor like any other software.
The main reason why your DVD never required updates is because Blu-Ray is a trainwreck of a spec that is still in heavy flux, while DVD was finalized and stable by the time players started shipping.
Well I don't know about you, but I'm not too thrilled at the prospect of paying Pfizer $200 per gram for cocaine.
The biggest problem with legalization is the "legal" drug cartels are even more crooked than the underground ones. They just use lobbyists to do their dirty work instead of gun-wielding retardo-thugs. At least it's easy to tell exactly what's going through the thug's head.
Dude, it's called Hentai.
I'm not disagreeing with you, I think some people wield cars like weapons and should be treated as such, but I've never been mugged at car-point. There's a big difference between accidental death and homicide. People don't buy cars with the express intent to kill, they buy them so they can get around our idiotically designed cities. Guns exist ONLY to kill, whether the victim is animal or human. They have no other purpose.
Actually no.
If two people have hammers, yeah someone might manage to get killed, but most likely you'll both end up with a bump on your head and a really lame story to tell your idiot friends.
If two people have guns, at least one person is going to die, and the other is going to sell a million albums rapping about how he "fucked" your "bitch" and "capped" your "ass". The good news is, one of the idiots is dead. The bad news is, the other idiot is recruiting more followers.
The only thing carrying a gun will do is make it far more likely that YOU will get shot. Hell, I'd steal your gun and shoot you if I felt threatened!
It's rather simple, really. If you don't know how long something should take, try to ask someone with experience in the field. If you can't find a good answer, and your boss gives you a hard time, call his bluff!
If he can do the job faster, or can get someone else to do it, ask to be coached so you can learn. If he's bluffing, he either has to back down, or cover his ass and find someone else to do it (poorly/slowly), and then he will learn from his mistake. There are just a lot of bosses who are obsessed with cost-cutting to the point where it actually hurts their profits by reducing efficiency, and these people need to be shown the error of their ways.
someone else would chime in, "Yeah, it would only take me a day or two."
The first time I'd say "How would you do it ? Show me what I'm doing wrong/slow".
The second time I'd say "Well if it only takes a day, why don't you do it yourself and lay me off ?"
The third time, I'd call in sick, cash out all my vacation time and find a new job.
Disclaimer: I'm a professional asshole. I'm really nice until a point, then I turn evil >:-#
My single most effective tactic for managing those squirrelly types who throw a goddamned tantrum at you every time they forget their 6-letter password, is to throw the abuse right back at them. Don't take the abuse, don't get defensive and apologetic, stand up and tell them exactly how annoying, ineffective and downright juvenile their behavior is. If you give them the satisfaction of belittling you, they will keep coming back for more, but if you put them in their place, they just might learn to change their childish ways.
Go right up and ask them "What the hell is your problem ?" Big hint: the problem isn't their computer, the problem is everything else in their life that's stressing them out, and that they are now throwing at you in desperation. That's my stress management tactic: kill it at the source. Control, or be controlled.
If you want to be treated with maturity and respect, you have to command it. I've seen too many well-meaning techies cower in fear when aggressed. You don't have to be a tough guy, just stand your ground. You could be working any of the millions of shitty IT jobs in the world, so if someone takes you for granted, reign them in or find another job.
So you're leading in the special olympics. That still makes you a retard.
4 years of college, 4 years of med school, and X (up to 5 or 6) years of fellowship/residency is a lot of money
So because these people had their finances raped by the educational system and predatory employers, that grants them the right to rape everyone else's finances ? That's abuse by proxy, which is pretty much the core of all Americans' problems. Fuck the world before/because the world fucks you, what a mess!
How many years of cumulative instruction do you think the average sysadmin has under his belt ? The college years are shorter, but I spend at least 10-15 hours each week reading about the latest products/trends, lest I become obsolete, and that time is usually outside of paid working hours. By that metric, I've spent more time learning my trade than any doctor or lawyer I know. It doesn't translate into a bigger paycheck, but I'm doing what I enjoy, which is the reason I do it in the first place.
If a doctor doesn't like working in medicine, well they'd better close up shop and find something else. Working longer hours to bring in more money is not going to make them happier, quite the contrary.
Here's a dumb question for you: in which direction is the PCI slot fan blowing ? Most of the ones I've seen pull air into the fan, and out the rear, which means it would be working against your GPU's fan.
That card does run hot, but it should idle around 55-60'C.
The problem is simple, it's a BFG. As a vendor, I've RMA'ed more BFG cards than any other. It's right up there with Gigabyte, Asus and XFX.
Meanwhile, I've yet to see an eVGA come back. Maybe they fail so hard it kills the owner :P But seriously, there's a lot of variance between brands.
gijantic ?
Scaling artifacts that are far less noticeable on today's LCDs than they were in the past, thanks to greatly improved scaling, and in many cases the GPU can do its own scaling which is even better.
Some people don't mind the scaling, as it masks jagged edges like ghetto anti-aliasing.
Right, but I don't know very many people with 1920x1200 displays. I have one, and my 18-month old GPU can run Crysis and any other game just fine at that rez, but practically everyone else I know is still at 1280x1024 or 1680x1050.
Realistically, reviewers should find the resolution and settings at which a game is playable, meaning 25-30 fps average for most games. Sure, it's funny to know that Crysis will get 8 fps at 2560x1600 with 16x AA+AF, but if that's what they reviewers think even hardcore gamers expect of their machines, they need to stop drinking the kool aid.
To make things worse, I'm not at all averse to running a game at less-than-native resolution on my bigass LCD. The scaling in today's displays is far better than it used to be (for most models). If dropping the rez down one step makes it more enjoyable, then so be it; not the end of the world!
I'll actually bite, just to show you how reasonable the hardware requirements are for Crysis. I will only price out the tower, no monitor, so you can compare this gaming PC to a console. Consoles don't come with a TV, and the display has no impact on performance.
Case: Antec Sonata - $100
Power Supply: Antec 500w PSU - comes with the case
Motherboard: Asus P5KPL-CM - $55
CPU: Intel Q6600 2.4ghz quad - $190
GPU: Geforce 9800GT 512mb - $125
RAM: 4gb DDR2-800 - $50
Hard Drive: Seagate 500gb SATA - $60
Optical Drive: Any DVD-RW - $20
OS License: XP or Vista OEM - $100
So we're sitting at $700 even, so roughly $800 tax in. If you're not comfortable assembling it yourself, most shops will do it for an extra $40.
Such a PC, not at all bleeding edge nor prohibitively expensive, will run Crysis on High Detail, in 1280x1024 at 30fps. It will also run in widescreen 1920x1200, but you'll drop to 15-20 fps, which is a bit low.
You're talking out of your ass.
Crysis runs decently on current generation gaming-class PCs. It runs just fine in 1024x768 on a Core 2 with a $150 ATI or NVidia card, with high graphics detail. 1280x1024 is manageable if you can live with 20 fps, or a slight reduction in shader and shadow detail.
Where people get tripped up is the high CPU requirements. Crysis does a lot of non-GPU processing like physics and scene setup, that other games use far less extensively. It also uses some heavy duty shader programs that can bring a low-end GPU to its knees, so you have to turn those down a notch.
I'm certainly not an "over-the-top, money-bags gamer". I have a first-gen Intel Quad from over a year ago, 4 gigs Ram and a Geforce 8800 GTS 320mb. Sure, when I bought it, it was pretty high-end, but today you could build a slightly faster machine for $600 (I checked) - with top quality components too, no off-brand junk. If an FPS gamer can't afford to spend $600 on a mid-range PC, they shouldn't be complaining about Crysis' performance.
People use it as a benchmark because it exists, and it's pretty.
As a developer, is that I know some of the crazy algorithms behind those graphics, but not all. People whine that UT3 has similar poly counts to Crysis, yet runs much faster, but poly counts are only part of the equation. Crysis does a ton of pre-processing to those polys before they hit the screen.
Could they make Crysis run much faster ? Yes, of course they could, but this would be sacrificing render quality. You could also drop down the quality settings yourself and have a normal looking game that runs at normal frame rates, but the whole point of Crysis is to show off.
Having played through both games several times, I've played around with the settings quite a lot, and I found that I preferred sacrificing a few FPS to get more eye candy. Crysis is one of those games where you take a moment to admire the scenery once in a while. You're not running blindly through endless corridors with a twitchy trigger-finger.
So could they optimize it ? Sure, a little. They won't take your 20fps and turn it into 40, because there's really that much work being done per-frame.
People used to whine just the same 15 years ago, only it was Doom vs Wolf3D. "Well, they're both 3D so why does Doom run like molasses on my 386 sx25?" Just like Mr 386, you need to get with the times.
Social networks link people.
Guess what: terrorists are people too.
All these laws to combat terrorism are mostly indiscriminate, in that they hurt non-terrorists just as badly, maybe even worse (probably).
Remember when you were young, and you kept getting the shit kicked out of you for being a nerd ? Did people never teach these "counter terrorists" how to deal with bullies ? You take away their motive. Terrorists are pissed the fuck off about something. Get rid of that "something" and the terrorists will go back to being normal happy humans.
"Fighting" terrorism only creates more.
And I wil never ever ever ever ever write a song about ibi...
Does this mean a Lexus will cost less than the identical Toyota ? You would have to pay me a lot of money to blare random "upscale" ads over my Will Smith CDs :P Actually you would have to pay me a lot more to get me to drive a goddamned Lexus, but that's beside the point.
$25+/GB is the cheapest it's ever been! What is your point ?
I do agree I7 motherboards are ridiculously overpriced and the selection is pathetic, especially considering how many i965 and P35 boards were dumped into the market below $100 just a year ago.
That's the fundamental problem with OpenID. It moves the point of failure away from the service provider, into a 3rd party's hands. It's not so bad if you run your own OpenID on a server you own, but even then you have to run that goddamned server. If you decide 2 years down the road that "ilovecrumpets.info" is no longer worth the spam revenue, are you going to hang on to it just so your OpenID stays valid ?
I tried it, once! It annoyed the hell out of me, and I never used it again.
Nice idea, but there's one problem: iPods break - a LOT! Not just because they're flimsy, but because they get dropped fairly often, and frankly any company property will get abused more than personal items, because "it's not mine so who cares".
In my opinion, people can bring their own music, and I would continue to block Kazaa and any other known P2P services at the network level. Bring a disc full of MP3s if you must, or stream them from home/radio/wherever... but opening up P2P will result in a few undesirable things:
1. It will consume all available bandwidth
2. People will spend a LOT of time searching and downloading
3. Viruses and malware galore!!!
Frankly, if a person can't find a streaming radio station to their liking, and can't be assed to bring their own discs or iPod, well they can go jump off a bridge. It should not be the sysadmin's or employer's problem.
It's not exactly difficult to build PCs that last. There's really just one component you have to not chintz on: the power supply. That's the one part that will fry your system if it's a no-name piece of garbage.
The fact that other PC vendors' systems fail so often and so brutally is almost always the result of weak unfiltered power supplies and thermal stress. A scary number of brand names build their PCs to boot, not to last. I have seen so much dumb shit while repairing/upgrading even brand new machines, I have to wonder what kind of landed idiot is responsible for prototyping these mass-produced lemons.
If Micron was smart enough to spend the extra $40 on a quality power supply and an extra cooling fan, great! But how do you position an "unshitty" PC for sales ? Clearly they did not figure it out, and that's why they are exiting the market today.