That can't be true. I've driven about 20 different models of cars, a couple of light trucks, a couple of SUVs. Manuals and automatics. It was blatantly obvious when the A/C was on vs off in every one of them.
To most people I know, it is again blatantly obvious how a car 'struggles' with the a/c on vs off. I'm pretty sure we're not some odd minority either, because most of us aren't particularly interested in cars or anything.
How do you decide if the person is charging people to play, versus charging them to sit at some table they own, and playing a game with them for free? This kind of attempt to suck money out of your customers never works.
If we're ever going to be able to defend ourselves against an alien invasion, we're going to have to know how to fight effectively in space. What better way than to practice against ourselves in preparation?
Well, from what I've seen, in #1, itanium is rarely the faster solution. Particularly in, say, desktop productivity suites. But even if it is close or marginally faster, it still has to contend with #2, which may well improve with motherboards that support xeon/itanium, but my guess is that pentium optimized motherboards will continue to rule the desktop. You certainly may start to see more itaniums in servers if the price is more competitive. As to #3, AMD64 retains the enormous advantage that even if you can't get 64-bit drivers, you can sit in 32-bit mode and still get a great price/performance deal.
The people who work on scientific applications take performance seriously. They put a lot of effort into optimization. The itanium architecture is hard to optimize for, and the compilers just aren't there yet for the general case. So you wind up with a disparity between the performance in scientific applications and general purpose applications.
Other reasons itanium can't compete:
1) Compare the performance of itanium with xeon/opteron in running native x86 code.
2) Compare the costs of building real end user systems.
3) Compare the availability of windows xp drivers.
I'd just pick it up and put it down wherever you want it. Don't believe I can do it? Let me prove it to you. (That's how I got my free vacation to Mt. Fuji.)
The amount of data, and the amount of players involved in legit farming is absolutely tremendous, and the people cheating aren't dumb. They can hide their activity by deliberately attempting to make their behavior closely match the behavior of legit farming players.
It's more expensive than you might guess to try to monitor unusual activity. Blizzard does ban (close the cd keys) for dupers and cheaters, but people who are doing legit farming just using bots are much harder to catch.
Actually, the eye candy could speed the machine up. As windows moves from 2d to 3d architecture for its GUI shell, there are big opportunities to do the hardware acceleration api better than before, and thereby improve the performance.
It doesn't really matter which it is. If you were to hide the details from the player, then the experience is the same: it takes longer and longer to gain power. What really has to be done to make the experience work for everyone is to implement breadth features in the game that make it interesting to play without gaining power relative to other players.
There is no reason that MMOGs have to be designed this way, it's just currently popular with the designers.
Consider how trivial to defeat each of these:
Gamers with more time: make advancement fast, with a large dynamic range, and taper off the power growth in the 80+ hour range.
Your experience as a low time player is that you get a lot of power quickly. As a long term player you can continue building power, but things get slower. Short time players can reasonably expect to get most of the power of a long time player.
Gamers with more money: same solution above.
Companies that sell good accounts: what do you know, same solution.
It turns out to be an easy problem to solve, just no one is very interested in doing it, yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it is. It's just not as profitable as semi-suspension-of-disbelief-with-ads.
Depression isn't due to problems in the brain!
That can't be true. I've driven about 20 different models of cars, a couple of light trucks, a couple of SUVs. Manuals and automatics. It was blatantly obvious when the A/C was on vs off in every one of them.
To most people I know, it is again blatantly obvious how a car 'struggles' with the a/c on vs off. I'm pretty sure we're not some odd minority either, because most of us aren't particularly interested in cars or anything.
Crap, now I have to wake up in time to make it to work by 10?
I'm pretty sure that's what makes it a science fiction show. The rest is all pretty well documented fact I believe.
On the other hand, in real life I could introduce you to quite a fair number of mananizing women.
Actually, she's a mananizing woman, unless this season has some surprises for us.
And in tribute to the original, she is a cigar-smoking mananizing woman who knows when to waggle her cylon fighter.
It's sci-fi friday!
How do you decide if the person is charging people to play, versus charging them to sit at some table they own, and playing a game with them for free? This kind of attempt to suck money out of your customers never works.
I'm guessing he meant that their fp performance has always been poor due to the stack vs register issue in the x87 design.
If we're ever going to be able to defend ourselves against an alien invasion, we're going to have to know how to fight effectively in space. What better way than to practice against ourselves in preparation?
I'm not sure if you missed the sarcasm, but i'm pretty sure he was implying the US isn't exactly unfrank or covert about its evil nature any more.
The slowdown only applies to intel compiler compiled applications. Most games (and most applications on the market) are MS compiler compiled.
They may not have, but i've started a game where I play the blue jouster using my car. I'm sure if they hit me just right with their bikes, i'll lose.
Well, from what I've seen, in #1, itanium is rarely the faster solution. Particularly in, say, desktop productivity suites. But even if it is close or marginally faster, it still has to contend with #2, which may well improve with motherboards that support xeon/itanium, but my guess is that pentium optimized motherboards will continue to rule the desktop. You certainly may start to see more itaniums in servers if the price is more competitive. As to #3, AMD64 retains the enormous advantage that even if you can't get 64-bit drivers, you can sit in 32-bit mode and still get a great price/performance deal.
The people who work on scientific applications take performance seriously. They put a lot of effort into optimization. The itanium architecture is hard to optimize for, and the compilers just aren't there yet for the general case. So you wind up with a disparity between the performance in scientific applications and general purpose applications.
Other reasons itanium can't compete:
1) Compare the performance of itanium with xeon/opteron in running native x86 code.
2) Compare the costs of building real end user systems.
3) Compare the availability of windows xp drivers.
They meant that prior to Doom 3, every time id brought out a new game, it was king of the market for a while, and that did not happen with Doom 3.
I'd just pick it up and put it down wherever you want it. Don't believe I can do it? Let me prove it to you.
(That's how I got my free vacation to Mt. Fuji.)
How about staying in an unlocked home with a sign on the door that says 'come on in and stay a while!'.
The amount of data, and the amount of players involved in legit farming is absolutely tremendous, and the people cheating aren't dumb. They can hide their activity by deliberately attempting to make their behavior closely match the behavior of legit farming players.
It's more expensive than you might guess to try to monitor unusual activity. Blizzard does ban (close the cd keys) for dupers and cheaters, but people who are doing legit farming just using bots are much harder to catch.
> > I wouldn't be surprised if he got 10 years in the electric chair.
>I believe that you may have a somewhat less than complete understanding of the operation of an electric chair.
I believe that you may have a somewhat less than complete understanding of the operation of the florida justice system.
Actually, the eye candy could speed the machine up. As windows moves from 2d to 3d architecture for its GUI shell, there are big opportunities to do the hardware acceleration api better than before, and thereby improve the performance.
It doesn't really matter which it is. If you were to hide the details from the player, then the experience is the same: it takes longer and longer to gain power. What really has to be done to make the experience work for everyone is to implement breadth features in the game that make it interesting to play without gaining power relative to other players.
Except what you just described is my cap, and you decried it both as forcing advanced players to leave the game and keeping them involved.
There is no reason that MMOGs have to be designed this way, it's just currently popular with the designers.
Consider how trivial to defeat each of these:
Gamers with more time: make advancement fast, with a large dynamic range, and taper off the power growth in the 80+ hour range.
Your experience as a low time player is that you get a lot of power quickly. As a long term player you can continue building power, but things get slower. Short time players can reasonably expect to get most of the power of a long time player.
Gamers with more money: same solution above.
Companies that sell good accounts: what do you know, same solution.
It turns out to be an easy problem to solve, just no one is very interested in doing it, yet.