Yeah great; now let's see you change the speed of the animation, or maybe pick a range of times to view in it, hey and run it backwards, zoom in and alter the colour scheme while you're at it.
It is what it is, an animated gif. Hardly compares to a programming language.
I have to say that after looking through the screenshots from the link there, the engine behind HL2 doesn't look a patch on the Doom 3 engine. In fact, closer to GTA2! The vehicles look pretty angular, and the characters more "cartoony".
I'm in the middle (?) of D3 at the moment, getting the hell scared out of me (only playing at night, with headphones;-) I just don't think HL2 would feel as immersive...
I have to agree that there's a dearth of OpenSource projects aimed at commercial usage. I'm currently writing a warehousing system to run on Linux+PHP+MySQL+Apache for a large haulage/storage company. When finished, it'll be up at source-forge. I don't want to put it there until it's working to spec though, as there's too many projects up there now that seem to have been abandoned half way through.
It's taking me a little extra time, since I'm making the system much more flexible than the client requires so as not to chain it to their specific patterns of usage. In the end though, I think it'll be useful for anyone else who wishes to deploy a warehouse management system (multiple warehouses, each with X loading bays, X storage locations/types, handling X customers, tracking storage costs down to the item level - tracking the lifetime of any item from the vehicle it arrive on, through stock movements, to the vehicle it left on. It can handle simultaenous incoming/outgoing loads, with auto-location allocation for storage etc, everything most people could want I think).
Oh my god, it absolutely fucking sucked! All that build-up, the suspense; and what does she find after blasting off in the egg? The alien looked like her dad. How bloody lame is that?! They could've at least had a few Doom 3 style fireball slinging monsters chasing her around and stuff...
I actually preferred the movie with the dialog left in. I've heard that Ford hated having to recite the lines, so purposely sounded bored, but I think it adds to the film. Of course, the really stand-out dialog is from RH. The "Tears in rain" speech was a bit of a master-stroke...
You're out of your mind. You really think people say to themselves "well, I would go to the Olympics, but I can't wear my Adidas shirt...maybe in 4 years..."? Come on.
I don't think they say that; I think they, and I don't like being treated like mindless cattle. It's also insulting that the sponsors think that having any competitor's products on show will instantly convince an army of drooling simpletons watching to run out and buy their products. Maybe that's their demographic, though...
So no, not "maybe in 4 years", but "maybe when the focus is on the competition, and not pushing (ironically) fat-burgers, fizzy drinks and clothes manufactured in third-world sweat-shops."
Is anyone else deliberately NOT watcing the Olympics in light of this corporate assholery? I'm in the UK, where we're not being censored, but I'm not going to encourage the corporate ad campaign that's masquerading as a sports event by tuning in.
The funny thing is, that previous stories posted here about China's restrictions, firewalling off any sites promoting freedom of speech etc have evoked harsh criticism of the regime. This is no different though, except the control isn't in the hands of a political party, but a few greedy corporations.
I can't believe that after charging people to come and watch the games, they're now telling them what to eat, drink, wear and think while there. I'd ask for my money back; no actually I'd ask for payment for them employing me as some fucking walking advert.
No wonder attendance is only just hovering above 50% this year, even though it's in Athens. Seems like people don't like "controlled fun"... Funny that...
Ok, I was using 2 scenarios there, a high-altitude bomber will generally not make a descision based upon the pilot's assessment of the ground (too high up), hence the "Go bomb" button - they're going to bomb regardless.
A pilot controlling the aircraft via a VR link could do all the same things a pilot in the craft could do, no? It's not like these guys are hanging out the top of an open cockpit, gritted teeth and faces blackened by exhaust fumes any more - it's HUDs and laser guidance. They have no more of a feel for the terrain than the guys following the action on the monitors back at base.
I take the point about jamming the communications, though I'm guessing the military would have some comm setups that are pretty tough to block, and probably well beyond the tech savvy of a bunch of backward misongynistic religious zealots taking pot-shots from a mosque in outer nowhere....
Since the VR is so realistic, why not use it instead of sending the pilots up in tin cans to get blown to pieces by the enemy? Actually, for the bombing runs, you wouldn't need any simulation - program the plane with a target, press the big red "Go Bomb" button and sit back to watch the wacky results. Same goes for the tanks - in fact they're even more simple (much like the people who usually drive them I guess).
Why are the machines of war still designed to carry meat-sacks around inside them?!
Yep, not only that but as we know (in the UK), the govt are pushing for country-wide road tolls (like we don't already pay fucking ridiculous amounts of tax to drive - tax when you buy the car, tax on petrol, then "value added tax" on the petrol+tax (hey, we now pay over £4.00 a gallon! Whoopee!), then road tax on top of that). So now, there's an incentive for people to black-box themselves, and won't that be convenient for the road toll idea? Oh, and as you mentioned, it'll also help the lazy fucking sods, erm I mean, hard working police officers to cut crime by sending us all nice little tickets the morning after we drift over 70mph on an empty motorway at night.
Thin end of the fucking wedge; the wedge being hammered up our asses by the grinning, pumpkin-headed Blair and his army of meddling control-freak cunt-monkeys.
And another thing, why is it I can be fined 200 quid and have 3 points added to my licence for eating an apple as I drive, but if I choose to drive along with a burning lump of paper and tobacco dangling out of my mouth, filling the car with smoke, that's ok? Answer me that?! Fucking interfering bollock-brained clock-punching misanthropes over in whitehall, that's fucking why.
Scaling or upgrading these systems requires much more than simply ordering more parts; it opens up the whole integration exercise. From an application perspective, clusters limit application scaling. Bandwidth and latency restrictions significantly constrain performance as more processors are applied to a problem.
Has this guy ever heard of Google? I can see his point to an extent; in fact his whole q&a session/blatant advert really boiled down to a single point: If you need to move a lot of data between processors, then a cluster will faire worse than one of Cray's supercomputers which have (obviously) more bandwidth between the CPUs and shared memory. It really does depend on the application, but for him to suggest an HPC is always a more economic, or even better option than a cluster of cheap x86 boxes is demonstrably false...
This argument leaves me always wondering, how many company have the IT staff really competent enough to manage their Windoze-based IT environment efficiently, and most importantly, more efficiently than OSS alternative.
I think the answer is most. It seems that the least tech-ignorant member of staff is often elevated to the status of admin after demonstrating the skills required to change the resolution on the desktop, or clicking the buttons on a pdc's dialog boxes without screwing it up (too much). I admin Linux servers at work, but routinely end up fixing config screwups with Windows servers or desktops; or offering hints to the admin about the causes of problems.
It seems to me that the Win admins like the fact that Windows is so unreliable and bug-ridden as it gives them a scapegoat for their own lack of knowledge. The SP2 update to XP has introduced horrendous problems for us, since the admin decided to just start installing it across the machines, causing many to become unusable, and the users twiddling their thumbs. Sadly, management have become used to this type of thing and so consider it "normal". If anyone even notices my servers, I consider it a problem...
No, Windows seems to be a godsend to admin wannabes, and a nice "safe" route for lazy, disinterested, mindless clock-punchers...
It's you. I've just visited using FF, and watched the demo through it too. You're not missing much, mind. Looks like it's just a bunch of canned 3D effects to make PP presentations even more pointless - and probably drag out boring meetings even longer;-) I'm thinking that by the 10th time you have to sit through the "Dolphin swims through text" animation, you'll be wanting to start fragging for real, sod the 3D card upgrade...
It depends on the resolution you're running the game at. If you're running Doom 3 at 800x600 on a 6800GT then the CPU *IS* almost certainly the limiting factor for the framerate; you would probably see the exact same fps on a 5900. However, moving up to 1600x1200 (or above) and the rate's going to drop as the graphic card struggles to render the much larger images (the CPU is doing pretty much the same work as it was at 800x600).
Of course, once you're running dual 6800GTs, then it's back to the CPU (and probably the System RAM) being the bottleneck again; but then someone with the cash to run a system with dual 6800GTs can probably also afford a couple of Opterons or a few Xeons to throw in the box;-)
Hey, watch it, this 700000+ UID has mod points today... =P
Heh! The reason I chose 700000 was that statistically speaking, more people under that number than over it are likely to have mod points. If I'd gone with 300000 I think I'd have been beaten down to -1 much faster;-))
Well, we've only tried installing the upgrade on 3 machines at work: 2 failed to boot afterward; the third is ok though, we suspect it's something to do with Office, but being Windows you're never sure what the hell's going on under the hood!
It's also failed to fix the performance "bug" with MySQL via ODBC. I'm sure others saw this after SP1 - reports from Access using MySQL suddenly became 40-50 times slower. One of my rolls is to rewrite slow Access reports using perl on the server, and I've always managed to decrease the run-time by 80-90%. Now with new XP SP2, my perl version of access reports are about 99% faster!!! Well done MS!
Microsoft has again delayed a long-awaited update to Windows XP, citing quality concerns.
Wow, now that's what I call a policy change! It's only taken them what... 20 fucking years to realise it might be a good idea to test their products in-house. You know, instead of just releasing the alphas as "stable" 2 minutes after the source hit the compiler and crossing their fingers over in Redmond...
On the other hand I have to wonder just how bad a problem they could possibly have to force them to dig out their debuggers...
So they're still leaving it as the default even though it's obviously an incredibly stupid idea? Guess it's easier than admitting it's a stupid idea;-) Dunno why I'm moaning though, it just convinced me to return to KDE (after searching for the disable switch for 10 minutes - there isn't one in FC2, although there's apparently some command-line tool to do it - kind of defeats the purpose of a GUI, but still;-) and I doubt I'll bother with Gnome again.
...the rendering bug I've had with Firefox since... well... forever! Only on Slashdot - for the disbelievers I've slapped a couple of screenshots up here. These are with the latest STABLE release, not a nightly bugfest, BTW...
If you've learned nothing else about Microsoft over the years, you should at least know that they haven't grown by being "better" at anything. They don't have to be better than Google; they just have to integrate their search engine in the desktop of Longhorn and its embedded web browser. Microsoft is all about removing choice and keeping its customers ignorant, so it's the logical next step.
Google is going to have a fight on its hands in a few years time, as it will be rendered invisible to people with new PCs, hidden behind MS' own search engine...
Slashdot Mirror
[x-mixed-replace]
This isn't commonly done anymore...
Probably the biggest reason being that IE on Windows doesn't support it (surprise, surprise)...
Yeah great; now let's see you change the speed of the animation, or maybe pick a range of times to view in it, hey and run it backwards, zoom in and alter the colour scheme while you're at it.
It is what it is, an animated gif. Hardly compares to a programming language.
I have to say that after looking through the screenshots from the link there, the engine behind HL2 doesn't look a patch on the Doom 3 engine. In fact, closer to GTA2! The vehicles look pretty angular, and the characters more "cartoony".
;-) I just don't think HL2 would feel as immersive...
I'm in the middle (?) of D3 at the moment, getting the hell scared out of me (only playing at night, with headphones
I have to agree that there's a dearth of OpenSource projects aimed at commercial usage. I'm currently writing a warehousing system to run on Linux+PHP+MySQL+Apache for a large haulage/storage company. When finished, it'll be up at source-forge. I don't want to put it there until it's working to spec though, as there's too many projects up there now that seem to have been abandoned half way through.
;-)
It's taking me a little extra time, since I'm making the system much more flexible than the client requires so as not to chain it to their specific patterns of usage. In the end though, I think it'll be useful for anyone else who wishes to deploy a warehouse management system (multiple warehouses, each with X loading bays, X storage locations/types, handling X customers, tracking storage costs down to the item level - tracking the lifetime of any item from the vehicle it arrive on, through stock movements, to the vehicle it left on. It can handle simultaenous incoming/outgoing loads, with auto-location allocation for storage etc, everything most people could want I think).
Better get back to it I guess
Oh my god, it absolutely fucking sucked! All that build-up, the suspense; and what does she find after blasting off in the egg? The alien looked like her dad. How bloody lame is that?! They could've at least had a few Doom 3 style fireball slinging monsters chasing her around and stuff...
I actually preferred the movie with the dialog left in. I've heard that Ford hated having to recite the lines, so purposely sounded bored, but I think it adds to the film. Of course, the really stand-out dialog is from RH. The "Tears in rain" speech was a bit of a master-stroke...
Conversely, if you program a web-based app in C, you're a fucking moron.
Isn't Google a web-based app, written in C?
You're out of your mind. You really think people say to themselves "well, I would go to the Olympics, but I can't wear my Adidas shirt...maybe in 4 years..."? Come on.
I don't think they say that; I think they, and I don't like being treated like mindless cattle. It's also insulting that the sponsors think that having any competitor's products on show will instantly convince an army of drooling simpletons watching to run out and buy their products. Maybe that's their demographic, though...
So no, not "maybe in 4 years", but "maybe when the focus is on the competition, and not pushing (ironically) fat-burgers, fizzy drinks and clothes manufactured in third-world sweat-shops."
Is anyone else deliberately NOT watcing the Olympics in light of this corporate assholery? I'm in the UK, where we're not being censored, but I'm not going to encourage the corporate ad campaign that's masquerading as a sports event by tuning in.
The funny thing is, that previous stories posted here about China's restrictions, firewalling off any sites promoting freedom of speech etc have evoked harsh criticism of the regime. This is no different though, except the control isn't in the hands of a political party, but a few greedy corporations.
I can't believe that after charging people to come and watch the games, they're now telling them what to eat, drink, wear and think while there. I'd ask for my money back; no actually I'd ask for payment for them employing me as some fucking walking advert.
No wonder attendance is only just hovering above 50% this year, even though it's in Athens. Seems like people don't like "controlled fun"... Funny that...
From the rumors I've heard and interviews I've read, they hardly make fun of Bush at all...
Dude, look at the title of the film... The whole damned movie is aimed at making fun of that idiot's foreign policies...
Ok, I was using 2 scenarios there, a high-altitude bomber will generally not make a descision based upon the pilot's assessment of the ground (too high up), hence the "Go bomb" button - they're going to bomb regardless.
A pilot controlling the aircraft via a VR link could do all the same things a pilot in the craft could do, no? It's not like these guys are hanging out the top of an open cockpit, gritted teeth and faces blackened by exhaust fumes any more - it's HUDs and laser guidance. They have no more of a feel for the terrain than the guys following the action on the monitors back at base.
I take the point about jamming the communications, though I'm guessing the military would have some comm setups that are pretty tough to block, and probably well beyond the tech savvy of a bunch of backward misongynistic religious zealots taking pot-shots from a mosque in outer nowhere....
Since the VR is so realistic, why not use it instead of sending the pilots up in tin cans to get blown to pieces by the enemy? Actually, for the bombing runs, you wouldn't need any simulation - program the plane with a target, press the big red "Go Bomb" button and sit back to watch the wacky results. Same goes for the tanks - in fact they're even more simple (much like the people who usually drive them I guess).
Why are the machines of war still designed to carry meat-sacks around inside them?!
Yep, not only that but as we know (in the UK), the govt are pushing for country-wide road tolls (like we don't already pay fucking ridiculous amounts of tax to drive - tax when you buy the car, tax on petrol, then "value added tax" on the petrol+tax (hey, we now pay over £4.00 a gallon! Whoopee!), then road tax on top of that). So now, there's an incentive for people to black-box themselves, and won't that be convenient for the road toll idea? Oh, and as you mentioned, it'll also help the lazy fucking sods, erm I mean, hard working police officers to cut crime by sending us all nice little tickets the morning after we drift over 70mph on an empty motorway at night.
Thin end of the fucking wedge; the wedge being hammered up our asses by the grinning, pumpkin-headed Blair and his army of meddling control-freak cunt-monkeys.
And another thing, why is it I can be fined 200 quid and have 3 points added to my licence for eating an apple as I drive, but if I choose to drive along with a burning lump of paper and tobacco dangling out of my mouth, filling the car with smoke, that's ok? Answer me that?! Fucking interfering bollock-brained clock-punching misanthropes over in whitehall, that's fucking why.
Scaling or upgrading these systems requires much more than simply ordering more parts; it opens up the whole integration exercise. From an application perspective, clusters limit application scaling. Bandwidth and latency restrictions significantly constrain performance as more processors are applied to a problem.
Has this guy ever heard of Google? I can see his point to an extent; in fact his whole q&a session/blatant advert really boiled down to a single point: If you need to move a lot of data between processors, then a cluster will faire worse than one of Cray's supercomputers which have (obviously) more bandwidth between the CPUs and shared memory. It really does depend on the application, but for him to suggest an HPC is always a more economic, or even better option than a cluster of cheap x86 boxes is demonstrably false...
This argument leaves me always wondering, how many company have the IT staff really competent enough to manage their Windoze-based IT environment efficiently, and most importantly, more efficiently than OSS alternative.
I think the answer is most. It seems that the least tech-ignorant member of staff is often elevated to the status of admin after demonstrating the skills required to change the resolution on the desktop, or clicking the buttons on a pdc's dialog boxes without screwing it up (too much). I admin Linux servers at work, but routinely end up fixing config screwups with Windows servers or desktops; or offering hints to the admin about the causes of problems.
It seems to me that the Win admins like the fact that Windows is so unreliable and bug-ridden as it gives them a scapegoat for their own lack of knowledge. The SP2 update to XP has introduced horrendous problems for us, since the admin decided to just start installing it across the machines, causing many to become unusable, and the users twiddling their thumbs. Sadly, management have become used to this type of thing and so consider it "normal". If anyone even notices my servers, I consider it a problem...
No, Windows seems to be a godsend to admin wannabes, and a nice "safe" route for lazy, disinterested, mindless clock-punchers...
It's you. I've just visited using FF, and watched the demo through it too. You're not missing much, mind. Looks like it's just a bunch of canned 3D effects to make PP presentations even more pointless - and probably drag out boring meetings even longer ;-) I'm thinking that by the 10th time you have to sit through the "Dolphin swims through text" animation, you'll be wanting to start fragging for real, sod the 3D card upgrade...
It depends on the resolution you're running the game at. If you're running Doom 3 at 800x600 on a 6800GT then the CPU *IS* almost certainly the limiting factor for the framerate; you would probably see the exact same fps on a 5900. However, moving up to 1600x1200 (or above) and the rate's going to drop as the graphic card struggles to render the much larger images (the CPU is doing pretty much the same work as it was at 800x600).
;-)
Of course, once you're running dual 6800GTs, then it's back to the CPU (and probably the System RAM) being the bottleneck again; but then someone with the cash to run a system with dual 6800GTs can probably also afford a couple of Opterons or a few Xeons to throw in the box
Hey, watch it, this 700000+ UID has mod points today... =P
;-))
Heh! The reason I chose 700000 was that statistically speaking, more people under that number than over it are likely to have mod points. If I'd gone with 300000 I think I'd have been beaten down to -1 much faster
Well, we've only tried installing the upgrade on 3 machines at work: 2 failed to boot afterward; the third is ok though, we suspect it's something to do with Office, but being Windows you're never sure what the hell's going on under the hood!
It's also failed to fix the performance "bug" with MySQL via ODBC. I'm sure others saw this after SP1 - reports from Access using MySQL suddenly became 40-50 times slower. One of my rolls is to rewrite slow Access reports using perl on the server, and I've always managed to decrease the run-time by 80-90%. Now with new XP SP2, my perl version of access reports are about 99% faster!!! Well done MS!
Simply auto-moderate all comments by UIDs > 700000 down to -1 ;-))
Still though, I find it a little disturbing that my post above is now modded troll considering it really was an honest question. Whatever though.
You're new here, aren't you?
Microsoft has again delayed a long-awaited update to Windows XP, citing quality concerns.
Wow, now that's what I call a policy change! It's only taken them what... 20 fucking years to realise it might be a good idea to test their products in-house. You know, instead of just releasing the alphas as "stable" 2 minutes after the source hit the compiler and crossing their fingers over in Redmond...
On the other hand I have to wonder just how bad a problem they could possibly have to force them to dig out their debuggers...
So they're still leaving it as the default even though it's obviously an incredibly stupid idea? Guess it's easier than admitting it's a stupid idea ;-) Dunno why I'm moaning though, it just convinced me to return to KDE (after searching for the disable switch for 10 minutes - there isn't one in FC2, although there's apparently some command-line tool to do it - kind of defeats the purpose of a GUI, but still ;-) and I doubt I'll bother with Gnome again.
...the rendering bug I've had with Firefox since... well... forever! Only on Slashdot - for the disbelievers I've slapped a couple of screenshots up here. These are with the latest STABLE release, not a nightly bugfest, BTW...
If you've learned nothing else about Microsoft over the years, you should at least know that they haven't grown by being "better" at anything. They don't have to be better than Google; they just have to integrate their search engine in the desktop of Longhorn and its embedded web browser. Microsoft is all about removing choice and keeping its customers ignorant, so it's the logical next step.
Google is going to have a fight on its hands in a few years time, as it will be rendered invisible to people with new PCs, hidden behind MS' own search engine...