I appreciate this might not seem like helpful advice, but...
If you've been asked to do something this by a company that can afford to buy one commercial off-the-shelf high volume storage solutions, then I honestly can't imagine any solution they try and knock up will actually work (as I'm not aware of any free software solution that's currently up to the task).
If your company doesn't have / can't raise the capital to buy a commercial system for a project of this scale, I can't possibly see how they could afford to screw up on this and go with an untested idea that could very well end up being a huge money sink they wouldn't be able to dig themselves out of - one that could doom the entire company and all it's investors given the cost it could run to.
And of course, for such a big project, they should hire people who would already know how to do something like this (which is not a dig, it's just crazy to skimp on staff when you have an ambitious project which requires large amounts of capital investment).
That said...
I were going to do large scale storage on the cheap, depending on the design of the software and the specific requirements (particularly if I was also developing the software we were going to use, or was able to set feature requirements and/or was able to make the modifications myself) I would build the largest standard file shares I could with SATA disks (using commodity hardware, hot swappable, running linux, with front loading drive bays).
The specifics of handling the load balancing (via multiple front ends, multiple mount points, pre-deteremined hashing to balance things out, proxies/caches, hooks in the file system calls, hooks in the application to talk to a controller, etc) depend entirely on the sort of application however.
It's definately likely to be far easier (and more cost effective) to have the software take care of knowing where the data is stored, rather than trying to build a single really large file share. I know at least one very known large company who've went down this route (with essentially elaborately hacked up versions of common OS software).
The downside is you have to support whatever hack you come up with to do this, but that shouldn't be an enormous amount of work (and you can probably afford to hire someone to support it full time for significantly less than the cost of a support contract for a commercial solution).
within the next few years, computer interaction online and human interaction online will INCREASINGLY pass the sniff test as undifferentiable. a few years after that, there will clearly be no way to tell if online text is human or computer generated.
"Clearly" indubitably!
what I say is -- why stop it? why give moral preference to human thoughts vs. computer output?
Because computer output isn't thought. Unless your Commander Data and have a Magical Positronic Brain (TM).
frankly, in most interactions, my expereince tells me to trust the silicon machines over the carbon ones.
I trust the hard electric ones even less than the squishy biological ones, primarily on the basis that the squishy biological ones built the hard electric ones in the first place (and my experience is that the squishy biological one's are not all that trustworthy, which I have concluded can't bode well).
This is further re-enforced by my experience of the specific type of squishy biological ones that are usually responsible for developing the software for the hard electric ones - I've found them to be often irrational, weird, oversized, hyped up on mind and mood altering chemicals, socially malfunctioning and generally a bit hatstand.
In fact, it's probably one of the most ebay-plagued games along with Lineage 2 and FF-IX because of its money-intensive PvP. Ironically, especially pirates (who consider resource gathering and trading as a means of income as boring) are among the prime ebayers.
Agreed. I'd certainly say it's the game worst hit by people buying in game currency. It has less players, but the impact is devastating, and noting that it's all on one server is a particularly salient point.
As you say, it's because of all costs associated with PvP (which are higher in Eve than any other game). Virtually all the big pirates are at it, it's the only way they can stay in ships and equipment - it's not like they spend time grinding out by asteroids trying to raise cash. These guys don't just buy once in a game either - like a SWG, EQ or WoW player who might do it just to get 'that epic armour set', or 'that really cool mount' - they keep coming back, for more and more cash because it's a pre-requisite for PvP (and EVE is entirely about PvP).
CCP do come down hard on bot users - but that's people using bots gain the advantage in PvP as much to just make money. In EVE it's really easy to make money fast if you manage to get enough together in the first place. CCP do nothing to stop known ISK traders. Absolutely nothing. Trapping them would be trivially simple for them, they have access to all the relevant data (user IP's, the ability to easily trace ISK money laundering via the DB) they just don't care. That's why I don't play Eve any more, it's also why I don't play L2 anymore.
Eve consists of a majority of 'bottom feeders' who play the game, grinding away in a small corporation, getting ganked and muscled out of all the non-NPC faction controlled areas by other corporations and alliances. In order to maintain control of their territory other alliance corporations are compelled to buy ISK themselves, so everyone can keep up with enough battleships, and so the whole system is perverted and the entire Eve Universe is controlled by those players (especially now there are no 'free' areas outside NPC faction controlled space in the centre, since the Coalition of Free Stars alliance was stabbed in the back - all alliances operate Kill On Sight policies).
In principle, Eve has the mechanics for a good game (minus meaningful content). In practice, it's horrible, for the reasons elaborated on above.
I think treo type devices are the future. It doesn't need a 60GB hd because it has internet access to your home machine with a 500GB harddrive, and realtime access to sites with far more storage than you will ever be able to carry around in your back pocket.
Try thinking about battery life, for an open active wireless connection - on a device as small as the nano or iPod.
Given the costs and technical hurdles (battery life, range, QoS, bandwith), storage - rather than streaming - is likely to be far more viable for decades to come yet.
Ok, so as a USER, why would you care about MySQL? Because as a SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR, what I really care about is stability and easy of administration. Once performance reaches "good enough", I could give a shit about improved performance. Hardware is cheap, a $5,000 1U MP system can blast down just about anything I'm going to care about.
It's fair to say then, you obviously have very modest requirements.
Unless your technology depends on Windows (I feel for you if it does) any of the *nixes out there are "good enough" to do just about anything up to the very high end. (Linux/BSD/Solaris/AIX/OSX/etc)
Wrong (sadly).
Even at the very high end, it's unlikely the choosing the "worst" OS will cost more than switching to the "best" OS!
Also wrong, there is a huge difference, though the gap varies depending on the role.
For example, Mac OS X - which I love dearly - is the slowest operating system this side of 'Slowaris' (which has that nickname for a reason), and is many times slower than Linux (on the same hardware). It's embarrassingly slow at some things. If it was a person, it would be part of a 'Care in the Community' program. It's as close to being 'autistic' as an operating system can be.
However, it has some really great features, including the quartz UI and really good multitasking for user software, which are what make the poor performance otherwise very bearable.
We have lots of FreeBSD systems here, while there are no issues with lower end systems (where there are multiple systems in a load balanced group not doing very much) they don't live up to our needs under stress, you start finding bugs with software under high load (often these are not always the fault of the OS - but exist none the less). You can also run up against kernel limitations (and find FreeBSD doesn't like really large file shares, or it buckles under certain types of load, or it behaves in a way that is not agreeable with some existing software you need to use).
This is especially with multiple CPU dual HT systems IME, even with just regular dual CPU HP DL360/DL380 systems. You can certainly coax better performance out of the FreeBSD systems but for a whole host of tasks (mail, web, dns, proxies, databases, etc) even after significant time doing manual optimisation of your software and multiple kernel recompiles (to determine optimum settings) Linux wins hands down every time IME, not least because more developer hours are spent optimising and testing those applications (and libraries) on Linux.
Odd there's nothing there , oh that's right - because none was put fourth.
If that sort of content free post is more your level, just let me know if I use to too many big words for you. You'll have to add your own bangs though.
Beyond that, what games push the card? WoW? Doom 3? Half-life 2? Add in Far Cry and UT, and that's pretty much it for 3D games.
It's absolutely all about games sure. Doom 3, Half Life 2, Far Cry and even the modest graphics of WoW will push any single card currently on the market at moderately high resolutions if (and that's the kicker, if) you have the quality turned up.
It's fair to say people don't actually set the high detail options though, they just set the in-game quality to 'High' and leave it at whatever that is. However, you can make them look noticeably much better, specifically you can really improving texture quality and remove jagged edges (both on items and objects, and inside partically transparent textures) - by turning on the appropriate opions in your graphics card control panel. They almost always need to be manually turned on, as games almost never take advantage of them, or make them accessible or activatable in-game.
My single 7800 GT (256MB VRAM) actually stuggles at the high end at 1280x1024 in some areas in all of the aforementioned titles, when I crank up the detail (this is why I got an SLI board), the GTX is a bit better, but I imagine a single one of those would struggle too (and the same for the new ATI's) - especially a game like BattleField 2. For example, if you have AA (e.g. at full 4x or 6x, or higher) and Ansitropic Filtering at 16x (where you can really see a noticeable improvement in games like HL2) and things like options to take care of transparent textures (this usualy applies to grass, trees, fences, and grid-like flooring) performance takes a BIG hit.
So it's not just crazy guys running at ultra high penis-extending resolutions (which is also increasingly becoming an issue for regular players, with really cheap high resolution widescreen TFT displays from Dell, etc) it's people running at modest, standard desktop resolutions (like 1024x768, 1280x1024) but who just want to have better quality in game rendering.
Some games benifit more than others and in different ways. HL2 benifits from Ansiotropic filtering (a lot), Doom 3 is really intensive in some areas with real time lighting (but who's texture quality is otherwise poor really), BattleField 2 particularly benifits from smoothing out textures (with all the trees, grass and fences around). Something like WoW doesn't benifit much from 16x Ansiotropic filtering or AA above 4x, because things are simple to begin with but it's still a bit better as texture quality is improved.
Most new games look great to most people at the default High settings of course (usually without Ansiotropic Filtering on and often with AA off entirely), it's only when you turn some of the quality options up you realise that how much better things can actually be rendered.
If you spend that same amount of money on any console, you can buy more than double those number of games.
You left out a lot of very popular main stream 3D games (just off the top of my head games like BF2, EQ2, SWG, L2, JointOps will all also tax existing sytems with the options cranked up), and then there are upcoming games, like QW:ET and U3 are certainly going to require all new hardware, or top end SLI setups that use the very highest end cards currently avalible - if you intend to play them with high quality textures and edge smoothing.
Even the upcoming Quake IV will solidly test all systems I'd imagine (given it's just Doom 3 with the lights on and more bad guys moving around at once). I played the new Call of Duty 2 demo this week, it's another that is crying out for an SLI setup (or a card like this). It even has a menu option for SLI support, so apparently the developers realise this too. Half Life 2 texture quality, with Doom 3 lighting in large MMO / multiplayer environment is the next step.
Actually the resolution 320 x 240 (the same resolution as the new iPod). I'd stick with the DVD for Firefly though I think. I could watch a show like Lost at a low resolution though, but a bit higher (like ~ SVCD @ 480x576 [PAL] ) would make me a lot keener and encourage me to buy more.
Hopefully the BBC (who held a media event for this broadcast) will also make content available in the not too distant future (even though they have their own Windows-only P2P system in the works). Hopefully there will be more announcements at MacWorld SF in January.
That's not actually what was asked for, which was some specific Java games anyone would stand behind and say 'yeah they are good games, they are fun to use and responsive.'.
What you provided was a series of links to a of sites that carry a lot of very similar and really basic titles (the sort of stuff you see in 'Games Programming for Dummies' books), as well as a bunch of better but still poor quality games that are mostly selling of the back of names of triple A title licenses.
I should point out that some of the games on those sites arn't actually written in Java, they are just simply games for phones that are avalible for multiple platforms (e.g. that use BREW, but are written in C). Unfortunately for most of them, you'd actually have to buy the title and check it out to see if it is written in Java or not, as the developers often don't say. It's clear the web content providers for of some of the sites think all games for phones are written in Java and so just mislabel stuff - which doesn't help either (Mobu.com, I'm looking at you suspiciously).
The saddest part is, even the best titles I can see listed are still ropey compared to first generation (~15 year old) GameBoy titles - let alone titles on the more recent GBC or GBA. Many look really good in screen shots, but that's not much help when your fast paced action game is running at 5 FPS and you are at the verge of bashing your screen to bits in frustration at trying to get it to acknowledge basic user input more than perhaps at just one fixed interval every second. Or at least, as I say, that's my experience of them.
The only actual specific game on thelist is 'Doom RPG' - which is a Doom clone that runs at a resolution of 176x203 (which is about half the resolution of my phone). I do think it looks intriguing. Seriously though, are you saying it's not just purely gimmcky and that it's actually an enjoyable fast paced action game in it's own right? Are you sure it doesn't run at slideshow of 5-10 FPS? Can you really move, turn and shoot quickly and responsively?
And this article shows that these games are getting better and better.
I can honestly say that doesn't ring true for me at all. They've been out for years, and I keep seeing the same awful software at trade shows and developer conferences (where there is a lot of hype from vendors that don't seem to acknowledge reality).
That is just FUD. I have played plenty of fun and responsive Java games.
I'd really like to see you name some and link to them, even just 3 or 4, I'd really like to see some good examples.
I've tried loads of games (including commercial titles I've paid for) and on a variety of handsets, and found them almost all to be awful (though a few have been 'tolerable' they have still have annoying load / reload times and been very modest in functionality).
Having written Java software myself, I know most Java software that's bad is because most developers are really, really bad (and that's a primary - and unfair - reason why Java gets such a bad rap). From what I've seen though, all mobile software in Java seems to be poor, so I've assumed that the JRE is either so bad or the hardware so limited that it's just not possible to write decent software for mobile phones in Java. I'd really like to be wrong about that.
I agree the potential market for simpler games on phones is bigger in terms of customer base, but isn't worth anything if they don't want to buy it because the software is worse than the built-in (non Java) software they have on their phones
I should also point out, that although there are indeed ~1 (US) Billion mobile phone users compared to ~110 Million mobile gamers (i.e. GB/DS/PSP owners), there is a lot more money in the dedicate gaming space.
The dedicated gaming market is made up of people who are typically willing to pay 25-45 UKP per game on a regular basis (once every month or two, or more), compared to mobile users who pay between 0.50p and 1.50 UKP per game, and usually do that just a handful of times at most (and only some of them will be Java).
That said, I don't think the parent article is accurate when it says "Java seems to be helping to drive the market in a very definite direction", as it barely warrants a footnote in terms of actual impact.
A new way to make EVEN SLOWER crummy Java games indeed! Because playing Rayman at really low res @ 5-10 FPS on the N-Gage was just so much fun, everyone should be able to re-create the experience!
Java is in no way driving 3D games development - on mobile platforms or otherwise, this is just a bizarre article. It comes as no surprise to me the IBM/SUN employee who submitted this article wishes to remain 'anonymous'.
There are currently zero mobile Java games available that compare even remotely favourably to a decent GBA title, let alone with any titles available on the DS or PSP.
Typically, the frame rates are awful, the interfaces are not responsive, the sound is often out of sync and of poor quality (as are the often tiny sprites). Even something like a Java based chess game with a slow and unresponsive interface can be frustrating to use.
Mobile devices are constrained by battery life, which in turn means they tend to be fairly modest devices. They simply don't have time to waste on a JRE and titles need to be heavily optimised on a per-platform basis, even for very simple games (because games software in particular has to be responsive, or users will very quickly become frustrated).
Of course if your writing reasonable code in the first place, it shouldn't be all that difficult to keep it portable (something that most game developers manage without too much trouble anyway).
.After years of console development on a large number of platforms I can say:
You're an idiot.
Please shutup in the future.
How marvellously refuted. I'm convinced by your persuasive argument that my own years of experience of using Microsoft development tools (as much as I prefer Cocoa) has been some sort of bizarre dream.
Yeah, Microsoft and there stupid XNA and directx is so much less easier to use than manually optimising for individual vendors unique hardware, even when (like Sony [1]) they dick you around over specs and access to the hardware.
[1] Oh, I know we said it's was going to run 300 Mhz and that your units run at that speed, but you can only use 200 Mhz of that or we won't release it, and no you can't have a UMD burner, you'll just have to send it to us hope your game doesn't have horrible loading issues that you don't have enough time to resolve before release.
I bet you hated the Dreamcast and it's stupid SDK's (including Win CE kits) too! Easy to develop platforms are for noobs huh?
Microsoft, however, seems to know the magic word that keeps developers coming back for more every time the folks up in Redmond decide to sick it to them. It's uncanny. If any other company treated third party developers the way Microsoft does (And I'm talking on all platforms here, Whatever version of Windows you can think of counts), they wouldn't have any developers left.
As much fun as most/.'ers have Microsoft-bashing at every available opportunity, that's just not true. As a games company there is nothing to suggest they treat their developers no worse than the competition, in fact probably a lot better than competitors Sony and Nintendo (who have both spectacularly shafted developers).
Microsoft make significant effort in providing SDK's and development resources (knowledge bases, code samples, easy to use libraries) to developers, they are also pretty up front about their plans for the console - if you are sceptical compare them to Sony or Nintendo who are being at best very elusive about their consoles, and in Sony's case telling outright lies about it (just as they did with the PS2).
It's true I find Apple's information a lot more useful (probably knowledge base aside, but it's the developer documentation I'm usually most interested in), but at the same time I find Sun's information a lot worse (it's wonderful if all you care about is re-writing all your existing applications in the latest version of Java - otherwise it's enough to make you want to never develop anything that runs on Solaris, on purpose, just to spite them). In this respect MS are not The Great Evil, they are doing a perfectly competent job.
As much as I prefer Mac OS X (or even just any Unix system) for 'Serious Applications', there are a whole bunch of things (games development particularly) that are a lot easier to do on Windows than any other platform due to the libraries, SDK's and documentation provided by the vendor.
In the business world, people buy the platform their application runs on.
That's true for a comparatively small set of specialist software (on the server side, at utilities companies (power/telco/etc), and for things like financial traders) but not for the vast majority of systems, which are traditional (very dull) desktops.
They run Windows because they always have, everybody else does, and MS Office (particularly Outlook) runs on it - and because it also runs a bunch of other applications they also use (be that Sage, Visio, Visual Studio, MS Project, or whatever floats their boat).
It's a collection of reasons, and if one application on it's own stops being available, people will either stop using it and switch, or if it's really vital to their business, they will by a additional systems dedicated to running it only for those that really need it (and either give those people X11 software on their Windows system so they can access it, or just give them a second desktop).
Now application vendors are under the false assumption that if they don't write for Windows, nobody will buy their product.
That's essentially true though, because if they don't write for Windows most there customers will just switch to an alternate product, rather than switch OS on all their systems (because that would require switching all their other applications too, and IT staff with new skill sets and putting up with lost productivity and additional expenditure of switching to a new system).
If their product is the only one in the market - or is regarded as best by a significant margin - they will have the option to survive for a time with a much smaller user base (though this is almost certainly just a long, protracted death as they won't be able to put enough resources into new development to stay competitive in the long run).
That's the best case likely scenario though, if there is reasonable competition then they will simply die very quickly (probably within 5 years) as everyone jumps ship. It's a lot easier to switch a single application vendor than switch all your desktops, your server infrastructure, your IS/IT staff and all your other software.
What gets me is, aside from the extra VRAM my 1.5 Ghz PowerBook effectively the same speed as my previous 500 Mhz version for everything I do on it. Both have 1 Ghz RAM, and I don't use that much on it, the bottle neck seems to be the CPU / and the appallingly slow 167 Mhz FSB.
I'd really hope they come out with seriously revamped PowerBooks in January (though I am not hopeful it will be that soon, and that we will have to wait for Intel versions later, around later next year or early 07 for them).
While OS X is very stable, the multitasking is superb compared to Classic or Windows, and I really like that it's got a GNU tool chain out of the box and that I can run Apache / PHP and SQL DB on it really easily, I've never regained the huge effective performance hit (~ 50%) I've taken in a lot of applications since switching from Classic (especially the Finder).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The internet root servers are working fine.
There are no 'root servers' required for the Internet, so you can only mean just the DNS root servers.
Wow you think they work fine? Really? You don't think ICANN have completely dropped the ball on new TLD's and that they've pissed about as much as the UN manage to do? You don't they have been just a tiny bit shady in they way they've carried on with NetSol?
The DNS service is really not a big deal, it's a political issue more than a technical one, and needs a political solution.
If it came to it really wouldn't take long to setup new root name servers in a elsewhere (e.g. in Europe, even in individual countries like the UK) and just say "Okay everyone, you know the list root name servers in Bind? Well change them to this list." and your good to go, which is what people did for AlterNIC.
You wouldn't want to hack that together unplanned of course, and there would be a brief period of chaos, but it's running DNS servers isn't rocket science and incumbent telco providers could provide the bandwidth and hosting at short notice without issue. It's arguably more sensible to allow individual countries more control.
The Internet has been and will continue to be a force for globalisation and bringing people together, but those are still social and political issues that require social and political solutions - you can't expect the Internet to usher in a new world order all on it's own.
Having a single country run the root DNS servers unilaterally is clearly a bad ideal from a technical and political standpoint, there is no way the current situation is going to continue indefinitely.
It's not like they have any real control. If they screw up DNS, even once, or if they continue to be uncooperative then *poof* their one and only card will be gone, and alternate root servers will be set up overnight.
Unless your looking at it from Microsoft's perspective, which case:
The future of web processing to be entirely Word based and saved on somebody else's machine.
Okay so it is will be your machine (they have to sell you new Window versions somehow) it will just seem like it's theirs due to all the restrictive DRM.
If you've absorbed the above, you'll realize that PvP in Guild Wars is either fantastically brilliant (if you like PvP) or appallingly dreadful (if you're a PvE-only fan), because GW's PvP is trully player-skill-based: ie. the best man/woman wins, regardless of equipment. This is why the Koreans own GW's PvP space --- they work hard to understand the game, and it's their human skill/experience as players that makes them use the in-game skills so devastatingly. (America comes a beleaguered and very battered second, and the chewed up and splattered remains of Europe a very distant
Not that people from Asia aren't freakishly intelligent super beings (which they are), I think this has as much to do with the same reason big countries (i.e. US, Russia, China) dominate the Olympics - there are just a wider pool of contestants, so they are bound to have better players. This would follow as GW has a much bigger following in Korea than in the US, and a far bigger following in the US than Europe.
That said, there is an enormous difference between say L2 players in Korea and in the US/EU in that the seem to have less jerks and grief'ers (they are well known for being more co-operative and less abusive to each other in game and don't usually go around ganking people just to piss them off which is like a #1 sport on other servers, especially US servers), so perhaps you are on to something.
What this actually means that if you don't want to play CoH any more and try out CoV instead, your CoH chars are still active for the entire duraction of your CoV play. Your payment scheme doesn't change; you can play both sides at once.
The OP is correct. CoV is really just an expansion in every sense (NC Soft have even explicitly referred to it an expansion), other than apparently it doesn't require the original title if you only want to play the CoV elements. I'm sure the two will be bundled for the original RRP or less within 12 months.
It's not 'news' as they were clearly going to do this all along, it's not like your average user would actually be willing to pay for a separate monthly subscription for both. Did you really expect that they would ask for a separate additional monthly fee for CoV?
I've been looking forward to this expansion, and I don't begrudge them the money. I appreciate they are a relatively small developer, and it's a solid and well built title to which CoV will add some much needed value. Beyond the initial fun of creating and being your own super-hero, while is awesomely done, CoH is underneath is pretty dull in single player (depending on how much you like being a super-hero, if your really keen and play with a bunch of RL friends all the time I'm sure it's a lot more entertaining).
However, it's not like other RPG's like WoW or EQ2 charge extra to allow people to play 'evil' Horde or Freeport citizens. Though EQ2 does have the cheek to charge people to PvP via the expansion, the monthly cost of course remains the same. The main reason why I'm not playing EQ2 any more as it's not even a very good implementation of PvP and more a sort of throwaway implimentation. Though I really like the game itself and think EQ2 is a solid title that is great for grouping (more so that WoW), there are not that many players on the Europe servers there is no PvP server as there was with the original EQ.
Once it's been out a bit (so I can see what people think of it) I'll probably get it and try out CoV, hopefully there will be some new contested zones and battling won't be restricted to some lame arena areas.
I have a 19" Sony X-Black TFT, which is quite responsive, reasonably large display and has really vibrant colour reproduction, I prefer it to my 19" CRT as I can use it for long periods without feeling fatigued. This means I never play above 1280x1024 (and at 60 FPS, as I like to play in vsync with the display to prevent tearing, which on a TFT is enough FPS for anyone).
I am primarily concerned about image quality, which means Anti Aliasing (4x or higher), Anisotropic filtering (x8 or x16) and smoothing on edges of transparent textures. My AMD64 3500+ w/ dual DDR400 and 7800 GT 256 MB are not quite able to deliver high end quality at 1280x1024 in games like Battle Field 2, Half Life or Doom (close, and certainly 'good enough', but not with high end quality details - I still have to put up with slow frame rates or have blurry textures and jagged edges all over the place, which break the immersion in an 'uncanny valley' sort of way due to the otherwise very high quality environment).
TBH my CPU is the bottleneck at the moment (I'll probably get a dual core AMD64 4200+ which will resolve that, the 4800+ is just a bit _too_ expensive to justify), once I have sorted out the CPU bottleneck I'll have to add the other card to my free PCI-Express slot and only then, with both cards in SLI mode, will I get MUCH better image fidelity (and drastically reduce blurred textures, missing lines and remove all jaggies).
The quality, rather than FPS or resolution is all I care about, even on there own the best cards in the market can't quite cut it (like the 7800 TGX) with really high quality textures and smoothing on games that use the HL2 or Doom engines (even games using the Unreal engine like WoW or Lineage are pushing it with the quality options turned up in the driver control panel). There is a massive noticeable difference between the quality of say a game with 12 x FSAA and 16x Anisotropic Filtering than a game without (or even at lower settings), blurry textures and sharp edges are what I find the most distracting though.
I don't know how much this consciously applies to most people though, I suspect few people other than a few select gamers even really play with the advance settings in their driver control panels an understand just how much better they could make their games look if they knew the options existed (typically the in game settings in most titles are very limited and don't enable the really nice features that make all the difference to high end quality, they are more there to just allow people to change settings in a broad way - usually so they can easily downgrade the detail to play on older systems).
There are a few titles that will use some of the features (like Shader 3.0), but it's fair to question them. However it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario there of course. I know I'm going to need an SLI setup to run something like Quake Wars Enemy Territory at something approaching this level of detail.
It's locked in to iTMS as far as DRMed music stores go. eMusic is great, and the way forward, but a lot of major labels just won't contribute material to non-DRMed stores. The article is talking about popular, chart music. In this respect, you are locked in to iTMS, because you are locked into Apple's proprietary DRM technology.
I appreciate the point your trying to make, and it's not entirely invalid (and I'm not just trying to be perverse:-), but effectively all the vendors are using proprietary DRM technology - sometimes their own (in the case of Sony and Apple) and sometimes from 3rd parties (in the case of DRM's Windows Media content players). AFAIK none of them really open in any meaningful sense though, even Real's Harmony.
It's correct to say that it does not support other vendors proprietary DRM technology - any more than they support the iTMS - it's still true to say that it plays music from other vendors though, it just depends on how the other vendors encode their music (which really, is up to them and the record companies).
Given this and overwhelming dominance of the iTMS in online music sales, it seems absurd for the author to claim the iPods are 'locked in' and assert the other players are 'open', when the other players are just as locked, but to different systems (and a smaller share of the market to boot).
This is not an attempt at a fanboy post defending the iTMS - I'd prefer non DRM'd music too (even though the iTMS lets you burn unencumbered to audio CD, which is at least something - I just think the assertion made in the article is false and that its the music stores and their proprietary non-interoperable formats that are the problem, not the players, which by and large handle common formats (would be nice to see more Ogg Vorbis support though).
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I appreciate this might not seem like helpful advice, but...
If you've been asked to do something this by a company that can afford to buy one commercial off-the-shelf high volume storage solutions, then I honestly can't imagine any solution they try and knock up will actually work (as I'm not aware of any free software solution that's currently up to the task).
If your company doesn't have / can't raise the capital to buy a commercial system for a project of this scale, I can't possibly see how they could afford to screw up on this and go with an untested idea that could very well end up being a huge money sink they wouldn't be able to dig themselves out of - one that could doom the entire company and all it's investors given the cost it could run to.
And of course, for such a big project, they should hire people who would already know how to do something like this (which is not a dig, it's just crazy to skimp on staff when you have an ambitious project which requires large amounts of capital investment).
That said...
I were going to do large scale storage on the cheap, depending on the design of the software and the specific requirements (particularly if I was also developing the software we were going to use, or was able to set feature requirements and/or was able to make the modifications myself) I would build the largest standard file shares I could with SATA disks (using commodity hardware, hot swappable, running linux, with front loading drive bays).
The specifics of handling the load balancing (via multiple front ends, multiple mount points, pre-deteremined hashing to balance things out, proxies/caches, hooks in the file system calls, hooks in the application to talk to a controller, etc) depend entirely on the sort of application however.
It's definately likely to be far easier (and more cost effective) to have the software take care of knowing where the data is stored, rather than trying to build a single really large file share. I know at least one very known large company who've went down this route (with essentially elaborately hacked up versions of common OS software).
The downside is you have to support whatever hack you come up with to do this, but that shouldn't be an enormous amount of work (and you can probably afford to hire someone to support it full time for significantly less than the cost of a support contract for a commercial solution).
within the next few years, computer interaction online and human interaction online will INCREASINGLY pass the sniff test as undifferentiable. a few years after that, there will clearly be no way to tell if online text is human or computer generated.
"Clearly" indubitably!
what I say is -- why stop it? why give moral preference to human thoughts vs. computer output?
Because computer output isn't thought. Unless your Commander Data and have a Magical Positronic Brain (TM).
frankly, in most interactions, my expereince tells me to trust the silicon machines over the carbon ones.
I trust the hard electric ones even less than the squishy biological ones, primarily on the basis that the squishy biological ones built the hard electric ones in the first place (and my experience is that the squishy biological one's are not all that trustworthy, which I have concluded can't bode well).
This is further re-enforced by my experience of the specific type of squishy biological ones that are usually responsible for developing the software for the hard electric ones - I've found them to be often irrational, weird, oversized, hyped up on mind and mood altering chemicals, socially malfunctioning and generally a bit hatstand.
In fact, it's probably one of the most ebay-plagued games along with Lineage 2 and FF-IX because of its money-intensive PvP. Ironically, especially pirates (who consider resource gathering and trading as a means of income as boring) are among the prime ebayers.
Agreed. I'd certainly say it's the game worst hit by people buying in game currency. It has less players, but the impact is devastating, and noting that it's all on one server is a particularly salient point.
As you say, it's because of all costs associated with PvP (which are higher in Eve than any other game). Virtually all the big pirates are at it, it's the only way they can stay in ships and equipment - it's not like they spend time grinding out by asteroids trying to raise cash. These guys don't just buy once in a game either - like a SWG, EQ or WoW player who might do it just to get 'that epic armour set', or 'that really cool mount' - they keep coming back, for more and more cash because it's a pre-requisite for PvP (and EVE is entirely about PvP).
CCP do come down hard on bot users - but that's people using bots gain the advantage in PvP as much to just make money. In EVE it's really easy to make money fast if you manage to get enough together in the first place. CCP do nothing to stop known ISK traders. Absolutely nothing. Trapping them would be trivially simple for them, they have access to all the relevant data (user IP's, the ability to easily trace ISK money laundering via the DB) they just don't care. That's why I don't play Eve any more, it's also why I don't play L2 anymore.
Eve consists of a majority of 'bottom feeders' who play the game, grinding away in a small corporation, getting ganked and muscled out of all the non-NPC faction controlled areas by other corporations and alliances. In order to maintain control of their territory other alliance corporations are compelled to buy ISK themselves, so everyone can keep up with enough battleships, and so the whole system is perverted and the entire Eve Universe is controlled by those players (especially now there are no 'free' areas outside NPC faction controlled space in the centre, since the Coalition of Free Stars alliance was stabbed in the back - all alliances operate Kill On Sight policies).
In principle, Eve has the mechanics for a good game (minus meaningful content). In practice, it's horrible, for the reasons elaborated on above.
What's difficult about it is 99% of my videos are mpeg2.
iPod entirely aside I would really recommend batch converting the lot to MPEG4.
I think treo type devices are the future. It doesn't need a 60GB hd because it has internet access to your home machine with a 500GB harddrive, and realtime access to sites with far more storage than you will ever be able to carry around in your back pocket.
Try thinking about battery life, for an open active wireless connection - on a device as small as the nano or iPod.
Given the costs and technical hurdles (battery life, range, QoS, bandwith), storage - rather than streaming - is likely to be far more viable for decades to come yet.
Ok, so as a USER, why would you care about MySQL? Because as a SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR, what I really care about is stability and easy of administration. Once performance reaches "good enough", I could give a shit about improved performance. Hardware is cheap, a $5,000 1U MP system can blast down just about anything I'm going to care about.
It's fair to say then, you obviously have very modest requirements.
Unless your technology depends on Windows (I feel for you if it does) any of the *nixes out there are "good enough" to do just about anything up to the very high end. (Linux/BSD/Solaris/AIX/OSX/etc)
Wrong (sadly).
Even at the very high end, it's unlikely the choosing the "worst" OS will cost more than switching to the "best" OS!
Also wrong, there is a huge difference, though the gap varies depending on the role.
For example, Mac OS X - which I love dearly - is the slowest operating system this side of 'Slowaris' (which has that nickname for a reason), and is many times slower than Linux (on the same hardware). It's embarrassingly slow at some things. If it was a person, it would be part of a 'Care in the Community' program. It's as close to being 'autistic' as an operating system can be.
However, it has some really great features, including the quartz UI and really good multitasking for user software, which are what make the poor performance otherwise very bearable.
We have lots of FreeBSD systems here, while there are no issues with lower end systems (where there are multiple systems in a load balanced group not doing very much) they don't live up to our needs under stress, you start finding bugs with software under high load (often these are not always the fault of the OS - but exist none the less). You can also run up against kernel limitations (and find FreeBSD doesn't like really large file shares, or it buckles under certain types of load, or it behaves in a way that is not agreeable with some existing software you need to use).
This is especially with multiple CPU dual HT systems IME, even with just regular dual CPU HP DL360/DL380 systems. You can certainly coax better performance out of the FreeBSD systems but for a whole host of tasks (mail, web, dns, proxies, databases, etc) even after significant time doing manual optimisation of your software and multiple kernel recompiles (to determine optimum settings) Linux wins hands down every time IME, not least because more developer hours are spent optimising and testing those applications (and libraries) on Linux.
Look up. That's his point, going over your head.
Odd there's nothing there , oh that's right - because none was put fourth.
If that sort of content free post is more your level, just let me know if I use to too many big words for you. You'll have to add your own bangs though.
Beyond that, what games push the card? WoW? Doom 3? Half-life 2? Add in Far Cry and UT, and that's pretty much it for 3D games.
It's absolutely all about games sure. Doom 3, Half Life 2, Far Cry and even the modest graphics of WoW will push any single card currently on the market at moderately high resolutions if (and that's the kicker, if) you have the quality turned up.
It's fair to say people don't actually set the high detail options though, they just set the in-game quality to 'High' and leave it at whatever that is. However, you can make them look noticeably much better, specifically you can really improving texture quality and remove jagged edges (both on items and objects, and inside partically transparent textures) - by turning on the appropriate opions in your graphics card control panel. They almost always need to be manually turned on, as games almost never take advantage of them, or make them accessible or activatable in-game.
My single 7800 GT (256MB VRAM) actually stuggles at the high end at 1280x1024 in some areas in all of the aforementioned titles, when I crank up the detail (this is why I got an SLI board), the GTX is a bit better, but I imagine a single one of those would struggle too (and the same for the new ATI's) - especially a game like BattleField 2. For example, if you have AA (e.g. at full 4x or 6x, or higher) and Ansitropic Filtering at 16x (where you can really see a noticeable improvement in games like HL2) and things like options to take care of transparent textures (this usualy applies to grass, trees, fences, and grid-like flooring) performance takes a BIG hit.
So it's not just crazy guys running at ultra high penis-extending resolutions (which is also increasingly becoming an issue for regular players, with really cheap high resolution widescreen TFT displays from Dell, etc) it's people running at modest, standard desktop resolutions (like 1024x768, 1280x1024) but who just want to have better quality in game rendering.
Some games benifit more than others and in different ways. HL2 benifits from Ansiotropic filtering (a lot), Doom 3 is really intensive in some areas with real time lighting (but who's texture quality is otherwise poor really), BattleField 2 particularly benifits from smoothing out textures (with all the trees, grass and fences around). Something like WoW doesn't benifit much from 16x Ansiotropic filtering or AA above 4x, because things are simple to begin with but it's still a bit better as texture quality is improved.
Most new games look great to most people at the default High settings of course (usually without Ansiotropic Filtering on and often with AA off entirely), it's only when you turn some of the quality options up you realise that how much better things can actually be rendered.
If you spend that same amount of money on any console, you can buy more than double those number of games.
You left out a lot of very popular main stream 3D games (just off the top of my head games like BF2, EQ2, SWG, L2, JointOps will all also tax existing sytems with the options cranked up), and then there are upcoming games, like QW:ET and U3 are certainly going to require all new hardware, or top end SLI setups that use the very highest end cards currently avalible - if you intend to play them with high quality textures and edge smoothing.
Even the upcoming Quake IV will solidly test all systems I'd imagine (given it's just Doom 3 with the lights on and more bad guys moving around at once). I played the new Call of Duty 2 demo this week, it's another that is crying out for an SLI setup (or a card like this). It even has a menu option for SLI support, so apparently the developers realise this too. Half Life 2 texture quality, with Doom 3 lighting in large MMO / multiplayer environment is the next step.
To some extent EQ2 actually lets you do this if
Or, you know, you could just down load the much higher resolution non-DRM'd versions already on The Pirate Bay.... ;-)
Actually the resolution 320 x 240 (the same resolution as the new iPod). I'd stick with the DVD for Firefly though I think. I could watch a show like Lost at a low resolution though, but a bit higher (like ~ SVCD @ 480x576 [PAL] ) would make me a lot keener and encourage me to buy more.
Hopefully the BBC (who held a media event for this broadcast) will also make content available in the not too distant future (even though they have their own Windows-only P2P system in the works). Hopefully there will be more announcements at MacWorld SF in January.
Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!!
Or, you will pay for it and it will still have ads, just like erm, most subscription TV channels (cable or satellite).
11oneiii (etc)
I only get mod point when there are lousy stories on the front page...
Oi, no bragging!
That's not actually what was asked for, which was some specific Java games anyone would stand behind and say 'yeah they are good games, they are fun to use and responsive.'.
What you provided was a series of links to a of sites that carry a lot of very similar and really basic titles (the sort of stuff you see in 'Games Programming for Dummies' books), as well as a bunch of better but still poor quality games that are mostly selling of the back of names of triple A title licenses.
I should point out that some of the games on those sites arn't actually written in Java, they are just simply games for phones that are avalible for multiple platforms (e.g. that use BREW, but are written in C). Unfortunately for most of them, you'd actually have to buy the title and check it out to see if it is written in Java or not, as the developers often don't say. It's clear the web content providers for of some of the sites think all games for phones are written in Java and so just mislabel stuff - which doesn't help either (Mobu.com, I'm looking at you suspiciously).
The saddest part is, even the best titles I can see listed are still ropey compared to first generation (~15 year old) GameBoy titles - let alone titles on the more recent GBC or GBA. Many look really good in screen shots, but that's not much help when your fast paced action game is running at 5 FPS and you are at the verge of bashing your screen to bits in frustration at trying to get it to acknowledge basic user input more than perhaps at just one fixed interval every second. Or at least, as I say, that's my experience of them.
The only actual specific game on thelist is 'Doom RPG' - which is a Doom clone that runs at a resolution of 176x203 (which is about half the resolution of my phone). I do think it looks intriguing. Seriously though, are you saying it's not just purely gimmcky and that it's actually an enjoyable fast paced action game in it's own right? Are you sure it doesn't run at slideshow of 5-10 FPS? Can you really move, turn and shoot quickly and responsively?
And this article shows that these games are getting better and better.
I can honestly say that doesn't ring true for me at all. They've been out for years, and I keep seeing the same awful software at trade shows and developer conferences (where there is a lot of hype from vendors that don't seem to acknowledge reality).
That is just FUD. I have played plenty of fun and responsive Java games.
I'd really like to see you name some and link to them, even just 3 or 4, I'd really like to see some good examples.
I've tried loads of games (including commercial titles I've paid for) and on a variety of handsets, and found them almost all to be awful (though a few have been 'tolerable' they have still have annoying load / reload times and been very modest in functionality).
Having written Java software myself, I know most Java software that's bad is because most developers are really, really bad (and that's a primary - and unfair - reason why Java gets such a bad rap). From what I've seen though, all mobile software in Java seems to be poor, so I've assumed that the JRE is either so bad or the hardware so limited that it's just not possible to write decent software for mobile phones in Java. I'd really like to be wrong about that.
I agree the potential market for simpler games on phones is bigger in terms of customer base, but isn't worth anything if they don't want to buy it because the software is worse than the built-in (non Java) software they have on their phones
I should also point out, that although there are indeed ~1 (US) Billion mobile phone users compared to ~110 Million mobile gamers (i.e. GB/DS/PSP owners), there is a lot more money in the dedicate gaming space.
The dedicated gaming market is made up of people who are typically willing to pay 25-45 UKP per game on a regular basis (once every month or two, or more), compared to mobile users who pay between 0.50p and 1.50 UKP per game, and usually do that just a handful of times at most (and only some of them will be Java).
That said, I don't think the parent article is accurate when it says "Java seems to be helping to drive the market in a very definite direction", as it barely warrants a footnote in terms of actual impact.
A new way to make EVEN SLOWER crummy Java games indeed! Because playing Rayman at really low res @ 5-10 FPS on the N-Gage was just so much fun, everyone should be able to re-create the experience!
Java is in no way driving 3D games development - on mobile platforms or otherwise, this is just a bizarre article. It comes as no surprise to me the IBM/SUN employee who submitted this article wishes to remain 'anonymous'.
There are currently zero mobile Java games available that compare even remotely favourably to a decent GBA title, let alone with any titles available on the DS or PSP.
Typically, the frame rates are awful, the interfaces are not responsive, the sound is often out of sync and of poor quality (as are the often tiny sprites). Even something like a Java based chess game with a slow and unresponsive interface can be frustrating to use.
Mobile devices are constrained by battery life, which in turn means they tend to be fairly modest devices. They simply don't have time to waste on a JRE and titles need to be heavily optimised on a per-platform basis, even for very simple games (because games software in particular has to be responsive, or users will very quickly become frustrated).
Of course if your writing reasonable code in the first place, it shouldn't be all that difficult to keep it portable (something that most game developers manage without too much trouble anyway).
.After years of console development on a large number of platforms I can say:
You're an idiot.
Please shutup in the future.
How marvellously refuted. I'm convinced by your persuasive argument that my own years of experience of using Microsoft development tools (as much as I prefer Cocoa) has been some sort of bizarre dream.
Yeah, Microsoft and there stupid XNA and directx is so much less easier to use than manually optimising for individual vendors unique hardware, even when (like Sony [1]) they dick you around over specs and access to the hardware.
[1] Oh, I know we said it's was going to run 300 Mhz and that your units run at that speed, but you can only use 200 Mhz of that or we won't release it, and no you can't have a UMD burner, you'll just have to send it to us hope your game doesn't have horrible loading issues that you don't have enough time to resolve before release.
I bet you hated the Dreamcast and it's stupid SDK's (including Win CE kits) too! Easy to develop platforms are for noobs huh?
Microsoft, however, seems to know the magic word that keeps developers coming back for more every time the folks up in Redmond decide to sick it to them. It's uncanny. If any other company treated third party developers the way Microsoft does (And I'm talking on all platforms here, Whatever version of Windows you can think of counts), they wouldn't have any developers left.
/.'ers have Microsoft-bashing at every available opportunity, that's just not true. As a games company there is nothing to suggest they treat their developers no worse than the competition, in fact probably a lot better than competitors Sony and Nintendo (who have both spectacularly shafted developers).
As much fun as most
Microsoft make significant effort in providing SDK's and development resources (knowledge bases, code samples, easy to use libraries) to developers, they are also pretty up front about their plans for the console - if you are sceptical compare them to Sony or Nintendo who are being at best very elusive about their consoles, and in Sony's case telling outright lies about it (just as they did with the PS2).
It's true I find Apple's information a lot more useful (probably knowledge base aside, but it's the developer documentation I'm usually most interested in), but at the same time I find Sun's information a lot worse (it's wonderful if all you care about is re-writing all your existing applications in the latest version of Java - otherwise it's enough to make you want to never develop anything that runs on Solaris, on purpose, just to spite them). In this respect MS are not The Great Evil, they are doing a perfectly competent job.
As much as I prefer Mac OS X (or even just any Unix system) for 'Serious Applications', there are a whole bunch of things (games development particularly) that are a lot easier to do on Windows than any other platform due to the libraries, SDK's and documentation provided by the vendor.
In the business world, people buy the platform their application runs on.
That's true for a comparatively small set of specialist software (on the server side, at utilities companies (power/telco/etc), and for things like financial traders) but not for the vast majority of systems, which are traditional (very dull) desktops.
They run Windows because they always have, everybody else does, and MS Office (particularly Outlook) runs on it - and because it also runs a bunch of other applications they also use (be that Sage, Visio, Visual Studio, MS Project, or whatever floats their boat).
It's a collection of reasons, and if one application on it's own stops being available, people will either stop using it and switch, or if it's really vital to their business, they will by a additional systems dedicated to running it only for those that really need it (and either give those people X11 software on their Windows system so they can access it, or just give them a second desktop).
Now application vendors are under the false assumption that if they don't write for Windows, nobody will buy their product.
That's essentially true though, because if they don't write for Windows most there customers will just switch to an alternate product, rather than switch OS on all their systems (because that would require switching all their other applications too, and IT staff with new skill sets and putting up with lost productivity and additional expenditure of switching to a new system).
If their product is the only one in the market - or is regarded as best by a significant margin - they will have the option to survive for a time with a much smaller user base (though this is almost certainly just a long, protracted death as they won't be able to put enough resources into new development to stay competitive in the long run).
That's the best case likely scenario though, if there is reasonable competition then they will simply die very quickly (probably within 5 years) as everyone jumps ship. It's a lot easier to switch a single application vendor than switch all your desktops, your server infrastructure, your IS/IT staff and all your other software.
What gets me is, aside from the extra VRAM my 1.5 Ghz PowerBook effectively the same speed as my previous 500 Mhz version for everything I do on it. Both have 1 Ghz RAM, and I don't use that much on it, the bottle neck seems to be the CPU / and the appallingly slow 167 Mhz FSB.
I'd really hope they come out with seriously revamped PowerBooks in January (though I am not hopeful it will be that soon, and that we will have to wait for Intel versions later, around later next year or early 07 for them).
While OS X is very stable, the multitasking is superb compared to Classic or Windows, and I really like that it's got a GNU tool chain out of the box and that I can run Apache / PHP and SQL DB on it really easily, I've never regained the huge effective performance hit (~ 50%) I've taken in a lot of applications since switching from Classic (especially the Finder).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The internet root servers are working fine.
There are no 'root servers' required for the Internet, so you can only mean just the DNS root servers.
Wow you think they work fine? Really? You don't think ICANN have completely dropped the ball on new TLD's and that they've pissed about as much as the UN manage to do? You don't they have been just a tiny bit shady in they way they've carried on with NetSol?
The DNS service is really not a big deal, it's a political issue more than a technical one, and needs a political solution.
If it came to it really wouldn't take long to setup new root name servers in a elsewhere (e.g. in Europe, even in individual countries like the UK) and just say "Okay everyone, you know the list root name servers in Bind? Well change them to this list." and your good to go, which is what people did for AlterNIC.
You wouldn't want to hack that together unplanned of course, and there would be a brief period of chaos, but it's running DNS servers isn't rocket science and incumbent telco providers could provide the bandwidth and hosting at short notice without issue. It's arguably more sensible to allow individual countries more control.
The Internet has been and will continue to be a force for globalisation and bringing people together, but those are still social and political issues that require social and political solutions - you can't expect the Internet to usher in a new world order all on it's own.
Having a single country run the root DNS servers unilaterally is clearly a bad ideal from a technical and political standpoint, there is no way the current situation is going to continue indefinitely.
It's not like they have any real control. If they screw up DNS, even once, or if they continue to be uncooperative then *poof* their one and only card will be gone, and alternate root servers will be set up overnight.
Unless your looking at it from Microsoft's perspective, which case:
The future of web processing to be entirely Word based and saved on somebody else's machine.
Okay so it is will be your machine (they have to sell you new Window versions somehow) it will just seem like it's theirs due to all the restrictive DRM.
If you've absorbed the above, you'll realize that PvP in Guild Wars is either fantastically brilliant (if you like PvP) or appallingly dreadful (if you're a PvE-only fan), because GW's PvP is trully player-skill-based: ie. the best man/woman wins, regardless of equipment. This is why the Koreans own GW's PvP space --- they work hard to understand the game, and it's their human skill/experience as players that makes them use the in-game skills so devastatingly. (America comes a beleaguered and very battered second, and the chewed up and splattered remains of Europe a very distant
Not that people from Asia aren't freakishly intelligent super beings (which they are), I think this has as much to do with the same reason big countries (i.e. US, Russia, China) dominate the Olympics - there are just a wider pool of contestants, so they are bound to have better players. This would follow as GW has a much bigger following in Korea than in the US, and a far bigger following in the US than Europe.
That said, there is an enormous difference between say L2 players in Korea and in the US/EU in that the seem to have less jerks and grief'ers (they are well known for being more co-operative and less abusive to each other in game and don't usually go around ganking people just to piss them off which is like a #1 sport on other servers, especially US servers), so perhaps you are on to something.
What this actually means that if you don't want to play CoH any more and try out CoV instead, your CoH chars are still active for the entire duraction of your CoV play. Your payment scheme doesn't change; you can play both sides at once.
The OP is correct. CoV is really just an expansion in every sense (NC Soft have even explicitly referred to it an expansion), other than apparently it doesn't require the original title if you only want to play the CoV elements. I'm sure the two will be bundled for the original RRP or less within 12 months.
It's not 'news' as they were clearly going to do this all along, it's not like your average user would actually be willing to pay for a separate monthly subscription for both. Did you really expect that they would ask for a separate additional monthly fee for CoV?
I've been looking forward to this expansion, and I don't begrudge them the money. I appreciate they are a relatively small developer, and it's a solid and well built title to which CoV will add some much needed value. Beyond the initial fun of creating and being your own super-hero, while is awesomely done, CoH is underneath is pretty dull in single player (depending on how much you like being a super-hero, if your really keen and play with a bunch of RL friends all the time I'm sure it's a lot more entertaining).
However, it's not like other RPG's like WoW or EQ2 charge extra to allow people to play 'evil' Horde or Freeport citizens. Though EQ2 does have the cheek to charge people to PvP via the expansion, the monthly cost of course remains the same. The main reason why I'm not playing EQ2 any more as it's not even a very good implementation of PvP and more a sort of throwaway implimentation. Though I really like the game itself and think EQ2 is a solid title that is great for grouping (more so that WoW), there are not that many players on the Europe servers there is no PvP server as there was with the original EQ.
Once it's been out a bit (so I can see what people think of it) I'll probably get it and try out CoV, hopefully there will be some new contested zones and battling won't be restricted to some lame arena areas.
PS: WoW RPPVP servers rock! Maximum PvP taste, Minimum jerk content!
I have a 19" Sony X-Black TFT, which is quite responsive, reasonably large display and has really vibrant colour reproduction, I prefer it to my 19" CRT as I can use it for long periods without feeling fatigued. This means I never play above 1280x1024 (and at 60 FPS, as I like to play in vsync with the display to prevent tearing, which on a TFT is enough FPS for anyone).
I am primarily concerned about image quality, which means Anti Aliasing (4x or higher), Anisotropic filtering (x8 or x16) and smoothing on edges of transparent textures. My AMD64 3500+ w/ dual DDR400 and 7800 GT 256 MB are not quite able to deliver high end quality at 1280x1024 in games like Battle Field 2, Half Life or Doom (close, and certainly 'good enough', but not with high end quality details - I still have to put up with slow frame rates or have blurry textures and jagged edges all over the place, which break the immersion in an 'uncanny valley' sort of way due to the otherwise very high quality environment).
TBH my CPU is the bottleneck at the moment (I'll probably get a dual core AMD64 4200+ which will resolve that, the 4800+ is just a bit _too_ expensive to justify), once I have sorted out the CPU bottleneck I'll have to add the other card to my free PCI-Express slot and only then, with both cards in SLI mode, will I get MUCH better image fidelity (and drastically reduce blurred textures, missing lines and remove all jaggies).
The quality, rather than FPS or resolution is all I care about, even on there own the best cards in the market can't quite cut it (like the 7800 TGX) with really high quality textures and smoothing on games that use the HL2 or Doom engines (even games using the Unreal engine like WoW or Lineage are pushing it with the quality options turned up in the driver control panel). There is a massive noticeable difference between the quality of say a game with 12 x FSAA and 16x Anisotropic Filtering than a game without (or even at lower settings), blurry textures and sharp edges are what I find the most distracting though.
I don't know how much this consciously applies to most people though, I suspect few people other than a few select gamers even really play with the advance settings in their driver control panels an understand just how much better they could make their games look if they knew the options existed (typically the in game settings in most titles are very limited and don't enable the really nice features that make all the difference to high end quality, they are more there to just allow people to change settings in a broad way - usually so they can easily downgrade the detail to play on older systems).
There are a few titles that will use some of the features (like Shader 3.0), but it's fair to question them. However it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario there of course. I know I'm going to need an SLI setup to run something like Quake Wars Enemy Territory at something approaching this level of detail.
It's locked in to iTMS as far as DRMed music stores go. eMusic is great, and the way forward, but a lot of major labels just won't contribute material to non-DRMed stores. The article is talking about popular, chart music. In this respect, you are locked in to iTMS, because you are locked into Apple's proprietary DRM technology.
:-), but effectively all the vendors are using proprietary DRM technology - sometimes their own (in the case of Sony and Apple) and sometimes from 3rd parties (in the case of DRM's Windows Media content players). AFAIK none of them really open in any meaningful sense though, even Real's Harmony.
I appreciate the point your trying to make, and it's not entirely invalid (and I'm not just trying to be perverse
It's correct to say that it does not support other vendors proprietary DRM technology - any more than they support the iTMS - it's still true to say that it plays music from other vendors though, it just depends on how the other vendors encode their music (which really, is up to them and the record companies).
Given this and overwhelming dominance of the iTMS in online music sales, it seems absurd for the author to claim the iPods are 'locked in' and assert the other players are 'open', when the other players are just as locked, but to different systems (and a smaller share of the market to boot).
This is not an attempt at a fanboy post defending the iTMS - I'd prefer non DRM'd music too (even though the iTMS lets you burn unencumbered to audio CD, which is at least something - I just think the assertion made in the article is false and that its the music stores and their proprietary non-interoperable formats that are the problem, not the players, which by and large handle common formats (would be nice to see more Ogg Vorbis support though).
Instead of "knowledge management", I've often wondered if it's more appropriate to talk about "ignorance management"
:-)
ROFL. That's an awesome phrase, you don't mind if I steal that do you?