Actually Company of Heroes and Flight SimX (a microsoft game) were amongst the first "Games for Windows" - supposedly coded for Vista compatibility - and COH in the article is highlighted as having Vista performance issues - probably Nvidia driver related.
I wonder how much less ink they are talking about - the cartridges for my HP photosmart 9600 (I need 3 of these) only contain 17ml!!! and for 300 swedish kronor (about $45) they are not even close to reasonably priced - and seem to be run out it next to no time. I fully expect HP to loose all market share - needless to say I'm on the lookout for a reasonable cost replacement - perhaps canon or epson - or perhaps somekindof continuous ink flow system. BUT NEVER HP!
Consoles will never win out - and without PC gaming - they'll be non existent. Has no one ever sat down to figure out where do games programmers learn their trade? - on what platform? I'm pretty sure they don't start off by coding direct on their PS3s or Xbox 360s - they'd need a keyboard for that - and oh yeah a development environment or 2. If the day comes when all PC games are dead - then where will all the new console programmers come from - where will they learn their trade? The PC is the platform for games developers to learn their trade - without this there will be no consoles at all. The Console market has to wake up to the fact that without a strong PC games market - they too are consigned to history - no PC games programmers = no new console programmers either.
The massacre at Virginia Tech has, yet again, focused attention on the culture of guns and the ease of obtaining firearms in America, an unending source of amazement to most of the rest of the world. Roughly 29,000 people are killed by firearms every year - 10 times as many as died on September 11, 2001. Of the victims, some 11,000 are murdered, 17,000 use a gun to commit suicide, and almost 1,000 die in accidents. Some sub-statistics are even more disturbing. Every day three children under 19 die from a gun wound. Across the country, roughly 1,000 crimes involving firearms are committed every 24 hours. The rampage of Cho Seung-Hui, the deadliest mass shooting in US history, will merely add one suicide and 33 murders (at the latest count) to these grim totals.
As someone who loves building PCs and so wont go near a Mac until there are equal possibilities I found this article amusing - Charlie Brooker (ex pczone games journalist + comedy writer) has an amusing mickey take- initially a tirade against Apple's switching campaign in the UK and why he hates Mac owners - below's a snippet from the article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2005931,00.h tml "I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui."
Well the chap at http://www.nvidiaclassaction.org/ is so upset with the Nvidia 8800 drivers that he has set up this site for all aggrieved to register for a class action suit. I find it very hard to reconcile the "25 games all working fine" articles with the existence of the class action lawsuit website- which arose as a result of literally thousands of complaints at the Nvidia website. Now given the fact that Nvidia is the only company offering a DX10 compliant graphics card - I would hold this article under some suspicion... Someone here is lying / or at least bending the truth in some way.
OK slightly off topic - but here in Europe we can buy retail Vista Ultimate for $692 (price from amazon.co.uk and currency conversion from Yahoo finance) (and theres no family pack for us). If you're in the US and you think $400 is expensive - check out our European prices. What I wanna know is - can Microsoft not do currency conversions or something? - or is import + tax costs really = $292? or is Microsoft just taking us all for a ride?
Well here in Sweden where we usually (not this year though its been really warm this year) get winter temperatures as low as -20 and lower - probably 50% of the accommodation is concrete appartment blocks - and I can guarantee you from living in one for the last 5 years - that they are a damned site warmer than the typical British construction for a modern house - which in my experience is mostly plywood and insulation foam - with a fake brick exterior. Concrete is an exceptionally good and cheap building material - that only has a bad rep in the UK due to a building boom in the 60s and 70s when they really didnt know how to design decent concrete buildings (these will be your 30 year old knockdown buildings).
"Most games are about precision, which involves precise positioning, and timing. Only a few fit your description, like say rugby:)" OK so this maybe getting off topic but I'll bite anyway as above poster is modded to 4 insightful.
Rugby is only about brute force if thats the way you choose to play the game - but arguably the most exciting - and greatest teams play with skill levels to match any top nba basketball team - this isnt always apparent to the casual observer who has never attempted to learn the game. Rugby played right is an artform as anyone who was a kid and grew up watching JPR williams, Cerge Blanco, Barry John etc can tell you. If you've played it ever you would know this. Even the parts of the game that appear most brutal involve surprising levels of skill - this quote taken from the wiki description of a maul.
"The tactic of the rolling maul occurs when mauls are set up, and the ball is passed backwards through the players hands to one at the rear, who rolls off the side to change the direction of the drive. This tactic can be extremely effective in gaining ground and takes great skill and technique both to do properly and to try to prevent."
Needless to say that there are no computer games (especially no easports!) that have even come close to simulating the tactics, strategy and skills required for playing a game of rugby.
Personally I prefer games to get harder the longer I play them than for them to get easier - a boring game is an easy one - and for me Oblivion would have been a let down if the leveling system made things easier the more you advance your character - where's the challenge in that? Surely the more you play the game - the more you want it to challenge you. I just don't get why the Oblivion leveling system is so despised - and I hold with another comment here - its the vocal minority. Personally I found Morrowind less accessible - and I couldn't give a stuff about the graphics not being as good - but the agelong quests for the mages guild in Morrowind where for example you have to go find a bunch of mushrooms - is enough to put any gamer off.
I used to think headphone use was the best solution - now I have Tinnitus - and so I would recommend caution... Its better to just try to ignore the sound - if you get tinnitus - you basically have to learn to do this in any case - and it doesn't go away when you go home from work either...
Lucasarts finally released the rights to Sam and Max (plus some of the dev team) to Telltale games - and its due for an episodic release starting sometime this fall. So maybe adventure cames can still live on at least in episodic form in this case - check out http://www.telltalegames.com/comics/samnmax
"Seriously, how many people have ever had a chance to glimpse into the dark heart of SAP? It's very ugly. Hedious even.It might run business well, but it's hardly very extendable or flexible. Given the price you're better off writing your own system, IMO."
5 years ago I think this comment was valid. Having worked in SAP for over 10 years I can partially agree with your comments. Historically SAP has been slow to adapt its central ERP system (R/3). However thats not where the battle is being fought at all - and I think you've missed the point of the article. SAP's new platform - Netweaver really isn't one single system - its a complex architecture not a single platform any more. Its this architecture that Oracle is competing against by acquiring as many of the competition as possible and then trying to integrate them into a single solution. SAP have had a smarter approach where they have mostly not bought out the competition (althought thats not the case with MDM or Toptier). SAP have instead realised about 5 years ago the direction where things were heading and I really believe they are several steps ahead of Oracle now in terms of building a full blown Enterprise Services enabled architecture. In my opinion SAP have neglected updating the central (legacy) ERP system (R/3) in favour of building an enterprise services / integration architecture around the old central product - so much so that the old legacy R/3 system isnt really central anymore - the systems around it such as business intelligence, CRM, APO, Xi, solution manager have taken a much more prominent role - and each of these new systems - whilst running on the same base kernels really are completely reworked in terms of the architecture and APIs on offer. SAP still have a long way to go - and they could really do with reworking some of those older "hideous" code libraries - particularly on their R/3 platform. With Netweavers Enterprise service architecture - SAP looks to be truly flexible and extensible and leaving its old "hideous" code behind - and I suggest the previous poster take a read on http://sdn.sap.com/ for a more up to date understanding of what SAP today is all about.
In terms of LCD framing - it has been done - check out the Olympus E330 - they're marketting it as the World's first digital SLR with continuous live view: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0601/06012606olympuse 330evolt.asp Personally I prefer to use the viewfinder everytime - but put that down to what I'm used to. I'll bet Olympus will sell alot of these cameras to those like you upgrading from a digital compact who demand the lcd viewpoint. The real sales point for this particular DSLR though is the ultrasonic CCD dust cleaner - I'm really hoping Olympus licences this technology out to other manufacturers... cleaning the CCD every couple of months with a swab and alcohol is something I'd like to lay rest to history - and something that most DSLR manufacturers choose to keep quiet about when selling their cameras...
I wasn't actually shooting anywhere near a train tunnel / platform - but in a pedestrian tunnel that connects - certainly not in visual range of a platform / or train - so I think he was being a little hard on the rules - but I accept that it wouldn't be dangerous to use flash photography anywhere near a train.
This was the case even before the recent terrorism in London. I got stopped 5 years ago - whilst taking candid photos of people on a walkway / escalator in The Bank underground station. The security guard came up to me and said we dont allow unauthorised photography without an official permit - and insisted I move along. He claimed the London Underground own the copyright to any images taken on their property... not sure if thats correct or not - in any case I did not publish my shots. Fortunately I'd already shot 2 reels of film by this point - and he didn't try to confiscate any of my films or equipment. I was just trying to capture the effects of the movement of people along the walkway with some slow shutters and flash - on Ilford Delta 3200 (real grainy BW film) - got some quite good shots too. I think this kind of restriction is a real tragedy as in my opinion some of the greatest photographs of alltime come from candid street photography - of the public - eg Cartier-Bresson.
You don't need a classic car and a race track to test this - just get them all to drive almost any of the vehicles in Sinbins "GT Legends" - this PC game is so good - it really captures the driving model of the old (60s/70s GT cars). Highly recommended for improving your skills at driving the older classics.
Anyone interested in this subject should read "Almost like a whale" (publisher black swan isbn 0-552-99958-X) by Steve Jones 1999 - this is a modern rewrite of Charles Darwins Origin of species - in this book Jones really builds up step by step the arguments for evolution - whilst at the same time placing the creationist argument in the place where it truly belongs. An interesting/relevant observation Jones makes in the intro "At the end of the last century few clerics opposed the idea of evolution, most were ready to accept a compromise between 'The Origin' and the Bible. A day of creation might be a millions years long, or might represent six real days that marked the origin of a spiritual man after the long ages it took all else to evolve. Real bigotry had to wait for modern times."
Well I'm an expat living in Sweden - and I'd be more than happy to pay an expat/export licence if there was such a thing - and then get access to BBC shows from overseas. Why can't the bbc create an expat licence? I'd be willing to pay more than the standard UK licence, and I'm sure that there are countless other expats around the world who would too.
I guess you want to sue your antibodies everytime you get sick too. I think you have to take this with a dose of reality - if you have 100000 lines of code there are going to be vulnerabilities - you're the one thats at fault for trusting it - get real. There is no invulnerable program, all software has bugs and vulnerabilities, wake up to reality!!! Its not the programmers that are stupid - but its the end users that think that the programs are in some way free from error. All complex systems are vulnerable to attack whether biological or binary.
And any serious photographer wont go near a zoom lens either - fixed focal point lenses give far less/no image distortion. All zoom lenses suffer from barrel distortion at wide angles and pincushion distortion at telefocal distances to varying degrees - nothing beats a fixed focal point lens.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Company of Heroes and Flight SimX (a microsoft game) were amongst the first "Games for Windows" - supposedly coded for Vista compatibility - and COH in the article is highlighted as having Vista performance issues - probably Nvidia driver related.
I wonder how much less ink they are talking about - the cartridges for my HP photosmart 9600 (I need 3 of these) only contain 17ml!!! and for 300 swedish kronor (about $45) they are not even close to reasonably priced - and seem to be run out it next to no time. I fully expect HP to loose all market share - needless to say I'm on the lookout for a reasonable cost replacement - perhaps canon or epson - or perhaps somekindof continuous ink flow system. BUT NEVER HP!
Consoles will never win out - and without PC gaming - they'll be non existent. Has no one ever sat down to figure out where do games programmers learn their trade? - on what platform? I'm pretty sure they don't start off by coding direct on their PS3s or Xbox 360s - they'd need a keyboard for that - and oh yeah a development environment or 2. If the day comes when all PC games are dead - then where will all the new console programmers come from - where will they learn their trade? The PC is the platform for games developers to learn their trade - without this there will be no consoles at all. The Console market has to wake up to the fact that without a strong PC games market - they too are consigned to history - no PC games programmers = no new console programmers either.
Let the statistics speak for themselves:
c le2458855.ece
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/arti
The real question is what will it take for America to wake up to reality? The Second amendment is a joke to most non Americans.
from The independent 18/4/2007
The massacre at Virginia Tech has, yet again, focused attention on the culture of guns and the ease of obtaining firearms in America, an unending source of amazement to most of the rest of the world. Roughly 29,000 people are killed by firearms every year - 10 times as many as died on September 11, 2001. Of the victims, some 11,000 are murdered, 17,000 use a gun to commit suicide, and almost 1,000 die in accidents. Some sub-statistics are even more disturbing. Every day three children under 19 die from a gun wound. Across the country, roughly 1,000 crimes involving firearms are committed every 24 hours. The rampage of Cho Seung-Hui, the deadliest mass shooting in US history, will merely add one suicide and 33 murders (at the latest count) to these grim totals.
As someone who loves building PCs and so wont go near a Mac until there are equal possibilities I found this article amusing - Charlie Brooker (ex pczone games journalist + comedy writer) has an amusing mickey take- initially a tirade against Apple's switching campaign in the UK and why he hates Mac owners - below's a snippet from the article here:h tml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2005931,00.
"I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui."
Well the chap at http://www.nvidiaclassaction.org/ is so upset with the Nvidia 8800 drivers that he has set up this site for all aggrieved to register for a class action suit. I find it very hard to reconcile the "25 games all working fine" articles with the existence of the class action lawsuit website- which arose as a result of literally thousands of complaints at the Nvidia website. Now given the fact that Nvidia is the only company offering a DX10 compliant graphics card - I would hold this article under some suspicion... Someone here is lying / or at least bending the truth in some way.
OK slightly off topic - but here in Europe we can buy retail Vista Ultimate for $692 (price from amazon.co.uk and currency conversion from Yahoo finance) (and theres no family pack for us). If you're in the US and you think $400 is expensive - check out our European prices. What I wanna know is - can Microsoft not do currency conversions or something? - or is import + tax costs really = $292? or is Microsoft just taking us all for a ride?
Well here in Sweden where we usually (not this year though its been really warm this year) get winter temperatures as low as -20 and lower - probably 50% of the accommodation is concrete appartment blocks - and I can guarantee you from living in one for the last 5 years - that they are a damned site warmer than the typical British construction for a modern house - which in my experience is mostly plywood and insulation foam - with a fake brick exterior. Concrete is an exceptionally good and cheap building material - that only has a bad rep in the UK due to a building boom in the 60s and 70s when they really didnt know how to design decent concrete buildings (these will be your 30 year old knockdown buildings).
They should ask Nathan Fillion from Firefly instead - he'd be way better IMHO.
"Most games are about precision, which involves precise positioning, and timing. Only a few fit your description, like say rugby :)"
OK so this maybe getting off topic but I'll bite anyway as above poster is modded to 4 insightful.
Rugby is only about brute force if thats the way you choose to play the game - but arguably the most exciting - and greatest teams play with skill levels to match any top nba basketball team - this isnt always apparent to the casual observer who has never attempted to learn the game. Rugby played right is an artform as anyone who was a kid and grew up watching JPR williams, Cerge Blanco, Barry John etc can tell you. If you've played it ever you would know this. Even the parts of the game that appear most brutal involve surprising levels of skill - this quote taken from the wiki description of a maul.
"The tactic of the rolling maul occurs when mauls are set up, and the ball is passed backwards through the players hands to one at the rear, who rolls off the side to change the direction of the drive. This tactic can be extremely effective in gaining ground and takes great skill and technique both to do properly and to try to prevent."
Needless to say that there are no computer games (especially no easports!) that have even come close to simulating the tactics, strategy and skills required for playing a game of rugby.
Personally I prefer games to get harder the longer I play them than for them to get easier - a boring game is an easy one - and for me Oblivion would have been a let down if the leveling system made things easier the more you advance your character - where's the challenge in that? Surely the more you play the game - the more you want it to challenge you. I just don't get why the Oblivion leveling system is so despised - and I hold with another comment here - its the vocal minority. Personally I found Morrowind less accessible - and I couldn't give a stuff about the graphics not being as good - but the agelong quests for the mages guild in Morrowind where for example you have to go find a bunch of mushrooms - is enough to put any gamer off.
Agreed
There was a Scientific American article back in Jan 2001 on how to do this - I'd post a link - but Sciam want $76 to read the article...
Great! If this works on Vogon we can kill off our poetry recital audiences with internal heamoraging!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogon_poetry
I used to think headphone use was the best solution - now I have Tinnitus - and so I would recommend caution... Its better to just try to ignore the sound - if you get tinnitus - you basically have to learn to do this in any case - and it doesn't go away when you go home from work either...
Lucasarts finally released the rights to Sam and Max (plus some of the dev team) to Telltale games - and its due for an episodic release starting sometime this fall. So maybe adventure cames can still live on at least in episodic form in this case - check out http://www.telltalegames.com/comics/samnmax
"Seriously, how many people have ever had a chance to glimpse into the dark heart of SAP? It's very ugly. Hedious even.It might run business well, but it's hardly very extendable or flexible. Given the price you're better off writing your own system, IMO."
5 years ago I think this comment was valid.
Having worked in SAP for over 10 years I can partially agree with your comments. Historically SAP has been slow to adapt its central ERP system (R/3). However thats not where the battle is being fought at all - and I think you've missed the point of the article. SAP's new platform - Netweaver really isn't one single system - its a complex architecture not a single platform any more. Its this architecture that Oracle is competing against by acquiring as many of the competition as possible and then trying to integrate them into a single solution. SAP have had a smarter approach where they have mostly not bought out the competition (althought thats not the case with MDM or Toptier). SAP have instead realised about 5 years ago the direction where things were heading and I really believe they are several steps ahead of Oracle now in terms of building a full blown Enterprise Services enabled architecture. In my opinion SAP have neglected updating the central (legacy) ERP system (R/3) in favour of building an enterprise services / integration architecture around the old central product - so much so that the old legacy R/3 system isnt really central anymore - the systems around it such as business intelligence, CRM, APO, Xi, solution manager have taken a much more prominent role - and each of these new systems - whilst running on the same base kernels really are completely reworked in terms of the architecture and APIs on offer.
SAP still have a long way to go - and they could really do with reworking some of those older "hideous" code libraries - particularly on their R/3 platform. With Netweavers Enterprise service architecture - SAP looks to be truly flexible and extensible and leaving its old "hideous" code behind - and I suggest the previous poster take a read on http://sdn.sap.com/ for a more up to date understanding of what SAP today is all about.
In terms of LCD framing - it has been done - check out the Olympus E330 - they're marketting it as the World's first digital SLR with continuous live view:e 330evolt.asp
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0601/06012606olympus
Personally I prefer to use the viewfinder everytime - but put that down to what I'm used to. I'll bet Olympus will sell alot of these cameras to those like you upgrading from a digital compact who demand the lcd viewpoint. The real sales point for this particular DSLR though is the ultrasonic CCD dust cleaner - I'm really hoping Olympus licences this technology out to other manufacturers... cleaning the CCD every couple of months with a swab and alcohol is something I'd like to lay rest to history - and something that most DSLR manufacturers choose to keep quiet about when selling their cameras...
I wasn't actually shooting anywhere near a train tunnel / platform - but in a pedestrian tunnel that connects - certainly not in visual range of a platform / or train - so I think he was being a little hard on the rules - but I accept that it wouldn't be dangerous to use flash photography anywhere near a train.
This was the case even before the recent terrorism in London. I got stopped 5 years ago - whilst taking candid photos of people on a walkway / escalator in The Bank underground station. The security guard came up to me and said we dont allow unauthorised photography without an official permit - and insisted I move along. He claimed the London Underground own the copyright to any images taken on their property... not sure if thats correct or not - in any case I did not publish my shots. Fortunately I'd already shot 2 reels of film by this point - and he didn't try to confiscate any of my films or equipment. I was just trying to capture the effects of the movement of people along the walkway with some slow shutters and flash - on Ilford Delta 3200 (real grainy BW film) - got some quite good shots too. I think this kind of restriction is a real tragedy as in my opinion some of the greatest photographs of alltime come from candid street photography - of the public - eg Cartier-Bresson.
You don't need a classic car and a race track to test this - just get them all to drive almost any of the vehicles in Sinbins "GT Legends" - this PC game is so good - it really captures the driving model of the old (60s /70s GT cars). Highly recommended for improving your skills at driving the older classics.
Anyone interested in this subject should read "Almost like a whale" (publisher black swan isbn 0-552-99958-X) by Steve Jones 1999 - this is a modern rewrite of Charles Darwins Origin of species - in this book Jones really builds up step by step the arguments for evolution - whilst at the same time placing the creationist argument in the place where it truly belongs. An interesting/relevant observation Jones makes in the intro "At the end of the last century few clerics opposed the idea of evolution, most were ready to accept a compromise between 'The Origin' and the Bible. A day of creation might be a millions years long, or might represent six real days that marked the origin of a spiritual man after the long ages it took all else to evolve. Real bigotry had to wait for modern times."
Well I'm an expat living in Sweden - and I'd be more than happy to pay an expat/export licence if there was such a thing - and then get access to BBC shows from overseas. Why can't the bbc create an expat licence? I'd be willing to pay more than the standard UK licence, and I'm sure that there are countless other expats around the world who would too.
I guess you want to sue your antibodies everytime you get sick too. I think you have to take this with a dose of reality - if you have 100000 lines of code there are going to be vulnerabilities - you're the one thats at fault for trusting it - get real. There is no invulnerable program, all software has bugs and vulnerabilities, wake up to reality!!! Its not the programmers that are stupid - but its the end users that think that the programs are in some way free from error. All complex systems are vulnerable to attack whether biological or binary.
Biology 101 - The characteristics of life (Iowa state uni)
And any serious photographer wont go near a zoom lens either - fixed focal point lenses give far less/no image distortion. All zoom lenses suffer from barrel distortion at wide angles and pincushion distortion at telefocal distances to varying degrees - nothing beats a fixed focal point lens.