Re:It gives you something just as bad...
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
Given that my machine has been acting funny since installing Spore, I'm getting firmly pissed off at this SecuROM. Explorer has already frozen several times in the last two days, yet didn't use to mess up at all.
Considering SecuROM is a Sony product, I'm not entirely surprised. That company deserves to burn.
It's not so much that we've been lagging at the terabyte, it's that the increments are getting bigger. Platter differences aside, the increment is usually 33% or more.
40gb, 60gb, 80gb, 120gb, 160gb, 200gb, 250gb, 320gb, 400gb, 500gb, 750gb, 1000gb, and soon we'll have 1500gb drives.
Once in a while, some idiot will release a smaller drive as an in-between step, as was the case with 60gb and 640gb: 750gb drives were overpriced, so they took 320gb drives and doubled the platters for a cheap (and slow) alternative.
There would be little point in releasing, say, an 1.1tb drive. It will only cannibalize sales of the 1.0tb model. You have to consider the fact that the industry is used to a few specific price points. The 1.0tb drive currently goes for $150-160, so you couldn't realistically charge $260 for a 1.1tb drive, even if it is the biggest drive available. We've also reached the point where the average consumer doesn't need nor want such a large drive, so there is much less pressure to bring products to market as quickly as in the past.
It is more efficient (and marketable) to concentrate on a significant step up. I believe Seagate has roadmapped the 1.5tb for Q1 2009, with 2.0tb coming later in the year. Two terabytes! Imagine all the pr0^H^H^Hrips^H^H^H^Hlinux isos you could put on there.
So will a pair of standard 7200rpm drives in RAID-0, that will cost you 1/10th the price of this one SSD.
SSDs excel at random seeking, not sustained throughput, though for most common uses the same performance benefit can be obtained by adding Ram for the system to use as a disk cache. Linux and Windows are both pretty good at this.
It's nothing that couldn't be done with "copy myapp.exe nul:" under XP, or even DOS for that matter.
As a matter of fact, I wrote a quick precaching script in Perl a while back, that I use extensively for thrash-heavy jobs like compression/decompression and some games. I wish those apps would just learn to make use of my Ram, but obviously the concept of efficiency died out, right around the same time Windows 95 was released.
The day the gaming industry stops referring to women as a separate market, I'll stop treating them as such.
The day my wife starts playing Doom, UT3 and others, instead of watching me play... well, I'd better brush up on my skills.
To pretend there is no difference between men and women, is a feat of great ignorance. The same can be said of racial differences. The solution is not to ignore or hide these differences, but to learn from them and embrace them.
If women weren't women, they'd be men, and we'd be a very boring planet.
We weren't talking about safety/longevity, we were talking about raw gaming performance.
Speed, reliability, affordability: choose any two.
I'm perfectly happy running 4x Raid-0 stripes for performance-critical things. If it dies, I'll pop in a new drive and reload the data. My important files are stored on a Raid-1 pair, and the even more important stuff is backed up through various methods. For business-critical server stuff, I do RAID-10. Yes, I have to buy twice as many drives, but I get the increased throughput and the reliability bump. It's either that, or I could spend the same amount of money on a craptacular RAID-5 accelerator that will leave my drives unusable when its cheap chinese workmanship goes poof!
That said, I would never run a desktop with just a Raid-0 stripe for everything - that's suicide. It's all about risk management. I don't mind reinstalling a game or losing a few hours' worth of intermediate data files, but my home directory is golden and I treat it as such.
Yeah I ran into the same issue. You *can* save in space, but not all the time. I've only played a couple of times, but I think you can't save if you're within a planet's atmosphere... in other words, you have to fly out to the star map. Or it could be the other way around, I can't quite remember.
Either way, the game itself is absolute crap. I wholeheartedly agree with you, it doesn't live up to even 1% of the hype. I thought the creature creator was a slimmed-down tech preview, and that the full game would have at least an order of magnitude more parts for each limb. As it is, the whole experience is incredibly disappointing. I played through to the space stage, and the game has made it painfully obvious that there is nothing left to actually explore or evolve. I got maybe 3 hours of mild entertainment out of it, and now I'm done.
I bet even Fallout 3 won't suck half as bad as Spore did.
Such a beautiful and well executed concept has been ruined by Will Wright's desire to go for the Sims-level market.
Of course he did, it's the only market he knows. The only non-Sim thing Will Wright has ever done (until Spore) is Raid on Bungeling Bay, and that was over 20 years ago. It was all downhill from there.
Sim City was great. The Sims was interesting (but dumb). Spore continues this downward spiral into mindless chick-friendly games. Wright is a one-trick pony.
The DRM isn't helping, but the biggest problem with Spore is it's a huge disappointment.
I don't know about you, but I played through most of the game in one sitting. I started out as a little googly-eyed bacteria, and got to the space exploration stage. At that point, I got so intensely bored I just stopped playing.
There isn't anywhere near enough variety in the game to keep things interesting. The only challenge is patience, there is no skill involved, and very little thinking. The various creatures are interesting to see at first, but after a dozen races they all start looking the same. It's hard to specialize your critter, because the parts look different but have very similar stats. You can get the fastest legs, the meanest teeth, the strongest arms, all on the same char. There are no tradeoffs.
What's worse is one stage has little or no bearing on the next one. It feels less like evolution and more like 5 mini-games bundled together. Your race's appearance carries over, but the abilities/stats become irrelevant. It is difficult to lose in any phase, and downright impossible in some, thanks to unlimited lives.
I think we all got hyped up about the potential, but reality (EA) came along and made sure this game was anything BUT epic. They probably did this so they can release expansion packs later on, because had they delivered the game we thought we were getting, there would be no room for expansion.
FWIW, I recommend a pair of cheap ordinary SATA drives in RAID-0 for gamers. If you want mega bang for the buck, buy four 320gb drives - the total is still less than ONE Velociraptor.
Seek time isn't quite so relevant when you're reading a few gigabytes of closely-packed data, as most recent games tend to do. A properly defragged system will result in your game being stored in contiguous tracks, where the seek time is in the sub-msec range. If your heads are jumping halfway across the platter several times per second, you're doin' it wrong!
I take the same flak for speaking English in Quebec. I usually respond with a few French verbal threats and a shaking fist, but it hasn't yet escalated to actual violence (sadly).
Lots of visible minorities are sensitive about their dying language/religion/race. It is a sign of desperation.
I was dumbing it down because quite frankly, I'm not an EE, but I am a PC veteran. I'd love to be able to say things like "Ohm's law, bitches!" but I can't back it up.
My layman's understanding is that in that brief moment, between pulling the plug/flipping the switch and the power actually draining from the caps, the feedback loop in the PSU goes a little haywire as it tries to compensate for the sudden voltage change. That's what I mean by "panic", not "jesus christ it's a lion" kind of panic.
I suspect older AT power supplies didn't have that problem because today's power supplies are designed in china, made in taiwan, assembled in mexico and then ridiculously marked up. The common power supplies used by major OEMs (and a lot of small frys) costs $6.50 at wholesale. That means it probably cost $2.00 to build and $4.50 to freight.
Back in 2004, we didn't have whooshes. What we did have is a 15-mile walk to the shared terminal, uphill both ways, so we could refresh the home page on the big fast ISDN line.
I wish that were true. I'm plenty cynical enough to entertain the idea of human cattle.
The problem is that cattle has to be grown to a certain size before harvesting. Somehow I don't think grain-fed humans would yield enough meat to be worthwhile. I've yet to come across a vegan I wanted to eat:P
Wouldn't it be easier and more predictable to just spend 2.65 billion building artificial forest islands in the ocean ? This salt-cloud idea sounds like an endless chain of undesirable consequences and side-effects.
Why not just kill 5 billion humans so pollution won't be a problem anymore. It certainly would be an easier task.
This is what I've been saying forever!:)
We can fight this climate change all we want, the fundamental problem is our planet cannot sustain the rapidly expanding population and all of our selfish creature comforts. The irony is that the more people we make, the more people Bush kills, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize wars are a pretty significant source of pollution and waste heat:P
I think we should post bounties as well... to move people AWAY from OS/2. If you convince one of those hippies to switch to Linux, you win a prize!
Just let the goddamned bastard OS die with some dignity! It was interesting in, oh, 1994 ?:P Then NT4 came along and made OS/2 pretty much obsolete. Don't get me wrong, OS/2 had quite a few brilliant elements, but it doesn't hold a candle to modern OS' stability and user-friendliness.
Having worked there (briefly), I was under the impression that the laptops were already being farmed out to Flextronics and Foxconn, and Dell staff only did minor customizations to the pre-assembled product (accessories, upgrades etc).
The way I see it, either this press release is some weird CYA bullshit, or Dell lied to its employees about its manufacturing processes (but what for?). Either way, something's fishy.
Bill Gates is Microsoft. Whether he "works" there or not, it's his company. He started it, he made it big, and just about everyone in the world recognizes his name and likeness. Like it or not, in the eyes of Joe Random he is the Alpha Geek Overlord.
Fack... every time I meet new people and they find out I'm a tech freak, they say "Bill, just like Bill Gates ?".. Yeah, I'm the other Bill, the broke one!
Wehell I have to say, comedy clubs can get real sketchy (*rimshot*). So he said a few things he shouldn't have, but then so did the hecklers he insulted. Everyone's going to point the finger because he dropped the holy N-word, but no one should ever chastise Dave Chappelle, Eddie Griffin, Eddit Murphy and the godfather himself Richard Pryor for calling everyone crackers, faggots and bitches. Oh noes!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The people who are the most offended by racism are white people, meanwhile the rest of the world's nations are happily killing each other over land, language and religion. I'm not saying racism is a good thing, but we shouldn't blow it out of proportion either.
Yeap... though even as a Seinfeld fan, I found the ad a bit too random and empty. There was nothing memorable in this one, but it is obvious they are setting the stage for a series of ads that will (hopefully) have half of us in stitches and repeating silly catchphrases around the office, while the other half watch their Nascar and WWF.
You mean like how you can be flagged as a terrorist organization if you sold meat that went into a suicide bomber's sandwich ?
The legal and privacy ramifications of what you're suggesting are very good reasons NOT to follow that path. I hate spammers as much as the next guy, but I'm cynical enough to know that more legislation is not going to solve the problem.
I'm with ya. I like the idea of SSDs in specific applications like portables and other quiet, low-power rigs, but for general purpose computing they're kinda pointless.
It's still far better to throw a ton of Ram into your PC and let the disk cache work its magic.
I second this. Even if your files survive, every time the power is yanked, the power supply takes a hit during that split second where all the circuitry panics: "Oh noes! I need that power!". A good PSU will survive for a while, but eventually it will cross the threshold and go POOF!
Me, I think they should start building the UPS right into the power supply.
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Given that my machine has been acting funny since installing Spore, I'm getting firmly pissed off at this SecuROM. Explorer has already frozen several times in the last two days, yet didn't use to mess up at all.
Considering SecuROM is a Sony product, I'm not entirely surprised. That company deserves to burn.
It's not so much that we've been lagging at the terabyte, it's that the increments are getting bigger. Platter differences aside, the increment is usually 33% or more.
40gb, 60gb, 80gb, 120gb, 160gb, 200gb, 250gb, 320gb, 400gb, 500gb, 750gb, 1000gb, and soon we'll have 1500gb drives.
Once in a while, some idiot will release a smaller drive as an in-between step, as was the case with 60gb and 640gb: 750gb drives were overpriced, so they took 320gb drives and doubled the platters for a cheap (and slow) alternative.
There would be little point in releasing, say, an 1.1tb drive. It will only cannibalize sales of the 1.0tb model. You have to consider the fact that the industry is used to a few specific price points. The 1.0tb drive currently goes for $150-160, so you couldn't realistically charge $260 for a 1.1tb drive, even if it is the biggest drive available. We've also reached the point where the average consumer doesn't need nor want such a large drive, so there is much less pressure to bring products to market as quickly as in the past.
It is more efficient (and marketable) to concentrate on a significant step up. I believe Seagate has roadmapped the 1.5tb for Q1 2009, with 2.0tb coming later in the year. Two terabytes! Imagine all the pr0^H^H^Hrips^H^H^H^Hlinux isos you could put on there.
So will a pair of standard 7200rpm drives in RAID-0, that will cost you 1/10th the price of this one SSD.
SSDs excel at random seeking, not sustained throughput, though for most common uses the same performance benefit can be obtained by adding Ram for the system to use as a disk cache. Linux and Windows are both pretty good at this.
It's nothing that couldn't be done with "copy myapp.exe nul:" under XP, or even DOS for that matter.
As a matter of fact, I wrote a quick precaching script in Perl a while back, that I use extensively for thrash-heavy jobs like compression/decompression and some games. I wish those apps would just learn to make use of my Ram, but obviously the concept of efficiency died out, right around the same time Windows 95 was released.
The day the gaming industry stops referring to women as a separate market, I'll stop treating them as such.
The day my wife starts playing Doom, UT3 and others, instead of watching me play... well, I'd better brush up on my skills.
To pretend there is no difference between men and women, is a feat of great ignorance. The same can be said of racial differences. The solution is not to ignore or hide these differences, but to learn from them and embrace them.
If women weren't women, they'd be men, and we'd be a very boring planet.
We weren't talking about safety/longevity, we were talking about raw gaming performance.
Speed, reliability, affordability: choose any two.
I'm perfectly happy running 4x Raid-0 stripes for performance-critical things. If it dies, I'll pop in a new drive and reload the data. My important files are stored on a Raid-1 pair, and the even more important stuff is backed up through various methods. For business-critical server stuff, I do RAID-10. Yes, I have to buy twice as many drives, but I get the increased throughput and the reliability bump. It's either that, or I could spend the same amount of money on a craptacular RAID-5 accelerator that will leave my drives unusable when its cheap chinese workmanship goes poof!
That said, I would never run a desktop with just a Raid-0 stripe for everything - that's suicide. It's all about risk management. I don't mind reinstalling a game or losing a few hours' worth of intermediate data files, but my home directory is golden and I treat it as such.
Yeah I ran into the same issue. You *can* save in space, but not all the time. I've only played a couple of times, but I think you can't save if you're within a planet's atmosphere... in other words, you have to fly out to the star map. Or it could be the other way around, I can't quite remember.
Either way, the game itself is absolute crap. I wholeheartedly agree with you, it doesn't live up to even 1% of the hype. I thought the creature creator was a slimmed-down tech preview, and that the full game would have at least an order of magnitude more parts for each limb. As it is, the whole experience is incredibly disappointing. I played through to the space stage, and the game has made it painfully obvious that there is nothing left to actually explore or evolve. I got maybe 3 hours of mild entertainment out of it, and now I'm done.
I bet even Fallout 3 won't suck half as bad as Spore did.
Such a beautiful and well executed concept has been ruined by Will Wright's desire to go for the Sims-level market.
Of course he did, it's the only market he knows. The only non-Sim thing Will Wright has ever done (until Spore) is Raid on Bungeling Bay, and that was over 20 years ago. It was all downhill from there.
Sim City was great. The Sims was interesting (but dumb). Spore continues this downward spiral into mindless chick-friendly games. Wright is a one-trick pony.
The DRM isn't helping, but the biggest problem with Spore is it's a huge disappointment.
I don't know about you, but I played through most of the game in one sitting. I started out as a little googly-eyed bacteria, and got to the space exploration stage. At that point, I got so intensely bored I just stopped playing.
There isn't anywhere near enough variety in the game to keep things interesting. The only challenge is patience, there is no skill involved, and very little thinking. The various creatures are interesting to see at first, but after a dozen races they all start looking the same. It's hard to specialize your critter, because the parts look different but have very similar stats. You can get the fastest legs, the meanest teeth, the strongest arms, all on the same char. There are no tradeoffs.
What's worse is one stage has little or no bearing on the next one. It feels less like evolution and more like 5 mini-games bundled together. Your race's appearance carries over, but the abilities/stats become irrelevant. It is difficult to lose in any phase, and downright impossible in some, thanks to unlimited lives.
I think we all got hyped up about the potential, but reality (EA) came along and made sure this game was anything BUT epic. They probably did this so they can release expansion packs later on, because had they delivered the game we thought we were getting, there would be no room for expansion.
FWIW, I recommend a pair of cheap ordinary SATA drives in RAID-0 for gamers. If you want mega bang for the buck, buy four 320gb drives - the total is still less than ONE Velociraptor.
Seek time isn't quite so relevant when you're reading a few gigabytes of closely-packed data, as most recent games tend to do. A properly defragged system will result in your game being stored in contiguous tracks, where the seek time is in the sub-msec range. If your heads are jumping halfway across the platter several times per second, you're doin' it wrong!
I take the same flak for speaking English in Quebec. I usually respond with a few French verbal threats and a shaking fist, but it hasn't yet escalated to actual violence (sadly).
Lots of visible minorities are sensitive about their dying language/religion/race. It is a sign of desperation.
I was dumbing it down because quite frankly, I'm not an EE, but I am a PC veteran. I'd love to be able to say things like "Ohm's law, bitches!" but I can't back it up.
My layman's understanding is that in that brief moment, between pulling the plug/flipping the switch and the power actually draining from the caps, the feedback loop in the PSU goes a little haywire as it tries to compensate for the sudden voltage change. That's what I mean by "panic", not "jesus christ it's a lion" kind of panic.
I suspect older AT power supplies didn't have that problem because today's power supplies are designed in china, made in taiwan, assembled in mexico and then ridiculously marked up. The common power supplies used by major OEMs (and a lot of small frys) costs $6.50 at wholesale. That means it probably cost $2.00 to build and $4.50 to freight.
$2.00 electronics die if you look at then wrong.
Slow down grandpa... "whoosh" is a neologism!
Back in 2004, we didn't have whooshes. What we did have is a 15-mile walk to the shared terminal, uphill both ways, so we could refresh the home page on the big fast ISDN line.
I wish that were true. I'm plenty cynical enough to entertain the idea of human cattle.
The problem is that cattle has to be grown to a certain size before harvesting. Somehow I don't think grain-fed humans would yield enough meat to be worthwhile. I've yet to come across a vegan I wanted to eat :P
Wouldn't it be easier and more predictable to just spend 2.65 billion building artificial forest islands in the ocean ? This salt-cloud idea sounds like an endless chain of undesirable consequences and side-effects.
Why not just kill 5 billion humans so pollution won't be a problem anymore. It certainly would be an easier task.
This is what I've been saying forever! :)
We can fight this climate change all we want, the fundamental problem is our planet cannot sustain the rapidly expanding population and all of our selfish creature comforts. The irony is that the more people we make, the more people Bush kills, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize wars are a pretty significant source of pollution and waste heat :P
I think we should post bounties as well... to move people AWAY from OS/2. If you convince one of those hippies to switch to Linux, you win a prize!
Just let the goddamned bastard OS die with some dignity! It was interesting in, oh, 1994 ? :P Then NT4 came along and made OS/2 pretty much obsolete. Don't get me wrong, OS/2 had quite a few brilliant elements, but it doesn't hold a candle to modern OS' stability and user-friendliness.
Having worked there (briefly), I was under the impression that the laptops were already being farmed out to Flextronics and Foxconn, and Dell staff only did minor customizations to the pre-assembled product (accessories, upgrades etc).
The way I see it, either this press release is some weird CYA bullshit, or Dell lied to its employees about its manufacturing processes (but what for?). Either way, something's fishy.
You must have bought that low UID on craigslist.
Bill Gates is Microsoft. Whether he "works" there or not, it's his company. He started it, he made it big, and just about everyone in the world recognizes his name and likeness. Like it or not, in the eyes of Joe Random he is the Alpha Geek Overlord.
Fack... every time I meet new people and they find out I'm a tech freak, they say "Bill, just like Bill Gates ?".. Yeah, I'm the other Bill, the broke one!
Wehell I have to say, comedy clubs can get real sketchy (*rimshot*). So he said a few things he shouldn't have, but then so did the hecklers he insulted. Everyone's going to point the finger because he dropped the holy N-word, but no one should ever chastise Dave Chappelle, Eddie Griffin, Eddit Murphy and the godfather himself Richard Pryor for calling everyone crackers, faggots and bitches. Oh noes!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The people who are the most offended by racism are white people, meanwhile the rest of the world's nations are happily killing each other over land, language and religion. I'm not saying racism is a good thing, but we shouldn't blow it out of proportion either.
Yeap... though even as a Seinfeld fan, I found the ad a bit too random and empty. There was nothing memorable in this one, but it is obvious they are setting the stage for a series of ads that will (hopefully) have half of us in stitches and repeating silly catchphrases around the office, while the other half watch their Nascar and WWF.
Tooth-talker: A TV-magic-queer with a lisp so fake even gay people want to choke him.
It's like a human version of Sylvester the cat, only gay and pretentious.
You mean like how you can be flagged as a terrorist organization if you sold meat that went into a suicide bomber's sandwich ?
The legal and privacy ramifications of what you're suggesting are very good reasons NOT to follow that path. I hate spammers as much as the next guy, but I'm cynical enough to know that more legislation is not going to solve the problem.
I'm with ya. I like the idea of SSDs in specific applications like portables and other quiet, low-power rigs, but for general purpose computing they're kinda pointless.
It's still far better to throw a ton of Ram into your PC and let the disk cache work its magic.
I second this. Even if your files survive, every time the power is yanked, the power supply takes a hit during that split second where all the circuitry panics: "Oh noes! I need that power!". A good PSU will survive for a while, but eventually it will cross the threshold and go POOF!
Me, I think they should start building the UPS right into the power supply.