While it is true 3D done wrong can look horribly artifical, this is not necessarly the case. Spirited Away was done completly in SoftImage with hand drawn textures. Some more info here:
http://www.softimage.com/community/xsi/mag/cs/vo lu me_2/issue_1/ghibli.htm
Actuially, modern salt schemes go a step further. Instead of storing a plaintext salt and then "Adding" it to your password before hashing it, now what happens is in addition to a "public" salt which is as the parent describes, a completly small amount of "private" salt is generated -- and never stored. Every time you log on, the computer has to try to figure out this random salt by trying every possible combination of private salt + public salt + your password. Essentially, on modern unix systems every time you are loggin on, you are trying to crack your own password!
Am I the only one who noticed that the sponge linked by the parent is TWENTY SIX DOLLARS? I mean, do people really have so much money that they must go for designer cleaning supplies as well?
Consumer privacy concerns? They already know what you are buying because, well, you do scan the barcodes already. Also, RFID tags are destroyed when you do buy something, for one reason among many being that you don't want to wreck havock with security when people who buy products with embedded RFID tags (i.e. some clothing) bring their products back in with them on subsequent visits.
In the early days of Asheron's Call, Turbine had a policy that all bugs were their fault, and thus people abusing them would not be responsable for it. What was the result? Cheating became rampant. All sorts of matters of bugs were abused during this (long) time period, from ways to cast spells without delays, to being able to run at incredible speeds to outdistance any enemy.
Harmless you say? Well, besides severely pissing people off, there was one huge effect that cannot be ignored. A certain guild discovered a dupe bug in the game, and used it to dupe a certain item that went for $100+ on ebay. With the profits they started buying up all the high level characters on eBay, and essentially took over the PvP server. It got so bad (and I have no clue if it got better or not, I got sick of it fairly quickly and left) that the ONLY way you could servive on the PvP servers was to know someone in real life to either get you in the clan, or someone to clear the "newbie spawn" long enough so you could live long enough to get to a location where you could set your spawn elsewhere.
Ironically, the best feature of IPv6 is also probably its Achilles heal. Until corporate isp's figure out how to price Multicasting without shooting themselves in the foot, IPv6 will never make it to the forefront.
1. The Doom3 demo was tweaked for the Radeon9700pro, since this was the card they were demoing on. The optomizations for nvidia cards was nonexistant.
2. The most important factor in 3d proformance is your video card. The minimun reccomended is a GeForce3. The nForce2 is about the equivalent of a GF4MX, which is pretty much just a super-high cocked GeForce 2.
Most windows users know what to do with a.zip, and exactly what a.zip file is. Most unix/linux users know how to deal with.zip. Most windows users will not know what to do with a.tar. If you really want to package all of your files in an archive format, I think.zip is the correct choice here.
P.S.
That 90% figure is also a bit suspect, especially considering the target audience. Using your production servers to grab archives of mp3's is a definate nono. The target here is end users, which for all intents and purposes means windows users. Also, as above, most mac users grin and bear it when they have to deal with zip files. In fact,.tar is probably harder for the average mac user to deal with then.zip even though OSX is bsd at its core since.sit is the standard archive format over there.
I am in the market for a new case for my primary computer. I am willing to spend a LOT OF MONEY on one if it looks damn cool (those clear uv-sensative ones are nice).
I have a big problem with all these "cool" cases though. My computer currently acts as a file server, and I have a Raid0 array for some IO-intensive work I do. This means I have 7 hard drives. This produces a HUGE amount of heat.
I know I'm not the only one with this many hard drives, and I know I'm not the only one who is concerned with the heat these generate (somewhere on IBM's site there is a study done on failure rates vs. temperature in hard drives. The curve is EXPONENTIAL, not linear). For *YEARS* real server cases have had the option to stick an 80mm fan in front of the hard drive bays to help deal with this. The lack of this small feature keeps me from buying one of these cool cases, and I am assuming I am not the only one.
In short, whoever designs these things, PLEASE add the 80mm fan bracket in front of the hard drive bays. The $0.0x extra it costs you will probably be offset in sales to people like me if your the first one to do it.
>> No no no! Why do people always believe what they want to belive.
This is an urban myth. MS does *not* lose money on the sale of an XBox. It has lost money *so far* when incorporating all the development costs, but it doesn't lose more money each time someone buys one - it makes a small amount of the already lost/spent money back. The cost of the box easily covers the production cost of the unit and also incorporates a small profit for both MS and the retailer/distributor. Admittedly it probably makes more money out of the games, but buying loads of XBoxen will not send MS off into Chapter 11. >>
If microsoft can truly put together a computer with a 20 gig drive, ethernet, 5.1 audio, dvd player, PentiumIII 700 equivalent, Video out, Component out; and sell it through retail channels, while still making profit at $200, well, Dell and company should be quaking in their boots. Considering the slice distributors take out of the pie, I cannot see how microsoft could possibly be making a cent off the XBox -- especially considering that intel still charges a VERY nice premium on Pentium3 chips. They haven't really gone down in price in a year.
I do agree with you, but the thing is there are comporable companies that are charging nowhere near the 100% markup. Alienware is the most popular name on the list, I've done quick tallies on them and come up with markups of ~10-30% on average, which is very reasonable considering the included support package and software (this $6500 machine comes bare). The number one draw on this overpriced monster is the case -- and I swear i've seen it somewhere before on a high end case website for ~$300 or so. I just have a viseral reaction when I see just blatent rip-off's like this. Hense the reason I try to avoid stores like Microcenter like the plague.
I have been building my own systems for quite a while. This system is a nice one . . . but $6500 jesus christ! And it's not even top of the line -- for some reason they are using a P4 2.5ghz @ 3.0ghz, instead of a true 3.0 with hyperthreading. This leads me to believe it was an old review. Anyways, back to the price issue, if I was to put an equivalent to that system (i.e. top of the line now, instead of top of the line then) into a decent case:
Equivalent watercooling System: $300
Enermax 550W Quiet Power Supply: $180
Case Fans: $20 (They're using panaflo L1A's for everything, an excellent choice for a watercooled system, but yes they really are this cheap)
Babybus: $40
Pentium4 3.0ghz/w HT gaurenteed to overclock nicely: $700 (note this is about $400 more then the CPU they are using)
2x HDD Cooler: $25
Top of the line Granite Bay Motherboard: $200 (includes intel 10/100/1000 ethernet)
2x Sticks of 512mb Insane DDR of a brand of your choice : $400
Radeon 9700 pro : $270
Sound Blaster Live! Audigy Platnium : $200 (To anyone considering this -- DO NOT BUY IT -- go with terratek if you truly care about sound!)
2x WD1200JB Hard Drives: $280
Plextor CD-RW + HP DVD+RW Drives : $450
Zip Disk + Floppy: $35
Hardware Modem: $50
WinXP Pro: $170
Total: $3662
That is a FREEGING HUGE PRICE DIFFERENCE. Your paying about $3000 for the case plus them putting it together. I mean, I know that there are people willing to pay quite a premium for a well built system they don't have the time to research -- but jesus chrirst $3000 is nuts. This article is just more free advertising for some random company.
I believe that you do you have to pay taxes on internet purchases -- it's just that the burden is on the purchaser, not the seller, do to some archanic law reguarding purchases across state lines. In effect, you'll probably never have to pay a cent on these purchases (even though you should), but if you ever get audited -- watch out.
I'd be perfectly happy to sell drives that were 25% more expensive than the current industry price averages if the drives could be guaranteed for a three year period and have proven reliability. But then, that goes against our ideals of filling landfills as quickly as humanly possible, so that would never fly.
You do realize that you can purchase a 3 year warranty on a 1 year warranty drive from $15-$30, depending on who made it? Western Digital has a link to it right at the top of their warranty section, but Maxtor and Segate offer this service as well, just buried a little deeper.
I know a lot of people have brought this up the issue of the HK bootleg. Yes, it is cheaper, yes, it does not support the original authors, but this is one case where you should go with the HK version (I know, I bought the R2 and got burned).
There is a *SEVERE* color problem with the R2 release. Yes, the Japanese NTSC and usa NTSC standards are slightly different in their white point, but this has nothing to do with that. They red has been cranked all the way up, so much that the white walls in the entrance to the park look like they are made of adobe, and what should be puffy white clouds look like they are stained with blood. Unfortunately, since they already pressed many millions of these DVD's, they decided to call this a Feature in the official press release (look around for it if you really want to read it). I hope that this color error doesn't make its ways to the US shores. If Buena Vista wouldn't take responsibility for their mistake (and it was certainly one, even Miyazaki has commented on it), I see no reason to give them my money. It is such a shame too, the DVD's are some of the best authored I have ever seen. I hope the R1 release is worthy of my money.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The HK bootleg I am referring to is not the one that is just a copy of the R2 dvd, which is the one out there now. Obviously that one will have the same color problem.
Even if that card did exist, it would have quite a hard time keeping up with the first GeForce cards to incorporate some of 3DFX's inherited technology. Take a look at the GeForce5 6000, which on beta silicon posts 50,104 3DMarks, although I doubt that kind of performance would be possible without a sufficiently powerful CPU . . .
Digital technology has, for the first time in human history, eliminated a scarcity. Before, there was always a scarcity in terms of information that could be stored. Books, vinyl albums, papers, documents, and the like had to be stored. They could be duplicated, but only at a relatively high expense.
Ohh . . . so where do I get a free hard drive too?
There are still costs associated with duplicating and storing information. Much cheaper, but nevertheless, they are still there.
If you *REALLY* want this game, but could care less about the fluff around it (packaging, etc.), dragons.ca has the 'small box' edition of the game for $39.99 + Shipping. They already sold out the first three shipments of this edition, however I have not seen anywhere come even close to that price.
I also have been looking hard at DVD-R/+R as a backup solution, but two things worry me greatly.
#1. I want to be able to access this material 5-10 years from now. With CD-R's, if you want to protect your data we now know that you are best off with Tayio Yuden or Kodak. With DVD mediums though . . . no one has any clue what the real life on these discs are, especially since most are apparently using a different dye then CD-R's do (if you've never seen a DVD-R, on most the bottom is a light blood red).
#2. Cost. CD-R's are pretty much the cheapest backup medium now. DVD-R's are still fairly expensive, but the third option is what intrigues me. IDE drives are easily available now for $1/gig. A hot swappable IDE drive bay from Vantec runs you about $40 retail. I have seriously considered just buying IDE drives for backup, and using the hot swappable bay to change them. Much easier, much faster. What makes me nervous about this is the 'all your eggs in one basket' problem, but from my experience with hard drives, if they survive the initial part of their 'bathtub' failure cure, they are good for years.
>> Blacksnow had people using macros and other aids to build characters fast within Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot MMORPG
I think this point needs a bit of clarification. Blacksnow didn't just just macros to build up characters, they also used many exploits, and bragged about it. When Mystic got fed up, they cried all the way to the courts. This in itself is also quite a simplification of the sistuation, but if you want a much more detailed explanation, check out http://www.skotos.net/articles/BTH_22.shtml for an extreemly well written article.
Was this the right thing for Mystic to do though? Well, let's look at another case. Asheron's Call was released with a policy with "if you find a bug, it is our fault, and there will be no penalty for using it." Well, on the PvP server, the Blood clan discovered a dupe bug, and duped quite a few of a valuiable item (i.e. $100+ on ebay). With that money, they essentially bought power on the server, and now Darktide is completly unplayable for anyone without real life connections.
Metropolis definatly is an anime. The short blurb going around is:
This exceptional animated film is based on the classic manga by the late, great Osamu Tezuka -- with whom director Rintaro worked on such '60s classics as Astro-Boy and Kimba -- and is scripted by Katuhiro Otomo (Akira). In an enormous, retro-future city where robots and androids do most of the work, there is nonetheless great unrest. The government is really a tool of evil billionaire Duke Red, and the seeds of rebellion grow underground. Stir into this crucible of turbulence a young man, his detective uncle, a youthful assassin, and an angelic blonde who doesn't realize just what she really is, and the result is as compelling as it is eye-popping, and as unusual as the swing-era music on the soundtrack. Original Japanese version with English subtitles.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is true 3D done wrong can look horribly artifical, this is not necessarly the case. Spirited Away was done completly in SoftImage with hand drawn textures. Some more info here :
o lu me_2/issue_1/ghibli.htm
http://www.softimage.com/community/xsi/mag/cs/v
Actuially, modern salt schemes go a step further. Instead of storing a plaintext salt and then "Adding" it to your password before hashing it, now what happens is in addition to a "public" salt which is as the parent describes, a completly small amount of "private" salt is generated -- and never stored. Every time you log on, the computer has to try to figure out this random salt by trying every possible combination of private salt + public salt + your password. Essentially, on modern unix systems every time you are loggin on, you are trying to crack your own password!
-Chu
Am I the only one who noticed that the sponge linked by the parent is TWENTY SIX DOLLARS? I mean, do people really have so much money that they must go for designer cleaning supplies as well?
-Chu
Consumer privacy concerns? They already know what you are buying because, well, you do scan the barcodes already. Also, RFID tags are destroyed when you do buy something, for one reason among many being that you don't want to wreck havock with security when people who buy products with embedded RFID tags (i.e. some clothing) bring their products back in with them on subsequent visits.
Also, for those of you who do not know, 42 is the number of rules in cricket. If you read the hitchhiker's guide -- you'd get the reference.
In the early days of Asheron's Call, Turbine had a policy that all bugs were their fault, and thus people abusing them would not be responsable for it. What was the result? Cheating became rampant. All sorts of matters of bugs were abused during this (long) time period, from ways to cast spells without delays, to being able to run at incredible speeds to outdistance any enemy.
Harmless you say? Well, besides severely pissing people off, there was one huge effect that cannot be ignored. A certain guild discovered a dupe bug in the game, and used it to dupe a certain item that went for $100+ on ebay. With the profits they started buying up all the high level characters on eBay, and essentially took over the PvP server. It got so bad (and I have no clue if it got better or not, I got sick of it fairly quickly and left) that the ONLY way you could servive on the PvP servers was to know someone in real life to either get you in the clan, or someone to clear the "newbie spawn" long enough so you could live long enough to get to a location where you could set your spawn elsewhere.
Ironically, the best feature of IPv6 is also probably its Achilles heal. Until corporate isp's figure out how to price Multicasting without shooting themselves in the foot, IPv6 will never make it to the forefront.
Two things.
1. The Doom3 demo was tweaked for the Radeon9700pro, since this was the card they were demoing on. The optomizations for nvidia cards was nonexistant.
2. The most important factor in 3d proformance is your video card. The minimun reccomended is a GeForce3. The nForce2 is about the equivalent of a GF4MX, which is pretty much just a super-high cocked GeForce 2.
Most windows users know what to do with a .zip, and exactly what a .zip file is. Most unix/linux users know how to deal with .zip. Most windows users will not know what to do with a .tar. If you really want to package all of your files in an archive format, I think .zip is the correct choice here.
P.S.
.tar is probably harder for the average mac user to deal with then .zip even though OSX is bsd at its core since .sit is the standard archive format over there.
That 90% figure is also a bit suspect, especially considering the target audience. Using your production servers to grab archives of mp3's is a definate nono. The target here is end users, which for all intents and purposes means windows users. Also, as above, most mac users grin and bear it when they have to deal with zip files. In fact,
I am in the market for a new case for my primary computer. I am willing to spend a LOT OF MONEY on one if it looks damn cool (those clear uv-sensative ones are nice).
I have a big problem with all these "cool" cases though. My computer currently acts as a file server, and I have a Raid0 array for some IO-intensive work I do. This means I have 7 hard drives. This produces a HUGE amount of heat.
I know I'm not the only one with this many hard drives, and I know I'm not the only one who is concerned with the heat these generate (somewhere on IBM's site there is a study done on failure rates vs. temperature in hard drives. The curve is EXPONENTIAL, not linear). For *YEARS* real server cases have had the option to stick an 80mm fan in front of the hard drive bays to help deal with this. The lack of this small feature keeps me from buying one of these cool cases, and I am assuming I am not the only one.
In short, whoever designs these things, PLEASE add the 80mm fan bracket in front of the hard drive bays. The $0.0x extra it costs you will probably be offset in sales to people like me if your the first one to do it.
Thank you.
>>
No no no! Why do people always believe what they want to belive.
This is an urban myth. MS does *not* lose money on the sale of an XBox. It has lost money *so far* when incorporating all the development costs, but it doesn't lose more money each time someone buys one - it makes a small amount of the already lost/spent money back. The cost of the box easily covers the production cost of the unit and also incorporates a small profit for both MS and the retailer/distributor. Admittedly it probably makes more money out of the games, but buying loads of XBoxen will not send MS off into Chapter 11.
>>
If microsoft can truly put together a computer with a 20 gig drive, ethernet, 5.1 audio, dvd player, PentiumIII 700 equivalent, Video out, Component out; and sell it through retail channels, while still making profit at $200, well, Dell and company should be quaking in their boots. Considering the slice distributors take out of the pie, I cannot see how microsoft could possibly be making a cent off the XBox -- especially considering that intel still charges a VERY nice premium on Pentium3 chips. They haven't really gone down in price in a year.
-Chu
I do agree with you, but the thing is there are comporable companies that are charging nowhere near the 100% markup. Alienware is the most popular name on the list, I've done quick tallies on them and come up with markups of ~10-30% on average, which is very reasonable considering the included support package and software (this $6500 machine comes bare). The number one draw on this overpriced monster is the case -- and I swear i've seen it somewhere before on a high end case website for ~$300 or so. I just have a viseral reaction when I see just blatent rip-off's like this. Hense the reason I try to avoid stores like Microcenter like the plague.
Equivalent watercooling System: $300
Enermax 550W Quiet Power Supply: $180
Case Fans: $20 (They're using panaflo L1A's for everything, an excellent choice for a watercooled system, but yes they really are this cheap)
Babybus: $40
Pentium4 3.0ghz
2x HDD Cooler: $25
Top of the line Granite Bay Motherboard: $200 (includes intel 10/100/1000 ethernet)
2x Sticks of 512mb Insane DDR of a brand of your choice : $400
Radeon 9700 pro : $270
Sound Blaster Live! Audigy Platnium : $200 (To anyone considering this -- DO NOT BUY IT -- go with terratek if you truly care about sound!)
2x WD1200JB Hard Drives: $280
Plextor CD-RW + HP DVD+RW Drives : $450
Zip Disk + Floppy: $35
Hardware Modem: $50
WinXP Pro: $170
Total: $3662
That is a FREEGING HUGE PRICE DIFFERENCE. Your paying about $3000 for the case plus them putting it together. I mean, I know that there are people willing to pay quite a premium for a well built system they don't have the time to research -- but jesus chrirst $3000 is nuts. This article is just more free advertising for some random company.
I believe that you do you have to pay taxes on internet purchases -- it's just that the burden is on the purchaser, not the seller, do to some archanic law reguarding purchases across state lines. In effect, you'll probably never have to pay a cent on these purchases (even though you should), but if you ever get audited -- watch out.
Atlantis was pretty much blatently ripped by Nadia, but what did Studio Gainix put out that was ripped for The Lion King?
>>
I'd be perfectly happy to sell drives that were 25% more expensive than the current industry price averages if the drives could be guaranteed for a three year period and have proven reliability. But then, that goes against our ideals of filling landfills as quickly as humanly possible, so that would never fly.
You do realize that you can purchase a 3 year warranty on a 1 year warranty drive from $15-$30, depending on who made it? Western Digital has a link to it right at the top of their warranty section, but Maxtor and Segate offer this service as well, just buried a little deeper.
-Chu
I know a lot of people have brought this up the issue of the HK bootleg. Yes, it is cheaper, yes, it does not support the original authors, but this is one case where you should go with the HK version (I know, I bought the R2 and got burned).
this and this
There is a *SEVERE* color problem with the R2 release. Yes, the Japanese NTSC and usa NTSC standards are slightly different in their white point, but this has nothing to do with that. They red has been cranked all the way up, so much that the white walls in the entrance to the park look like they are made of adobe, and what should be puffy white clouds look like they are stained with blood. Unfortunately, since they already pressed many millions of these DVD's, they decided to call this a Feature in the official press release (look around for it if you really want to read it). I hope that this color error doesn't make its ways to the US shores. If Buena Vista wouldn't take responsibility for their mistake (and it was certainly one, even Miyazaki has commented on it), I see no reason to give them my money. It is such a shame too, the DVD's are some of the best authored I have ever seen. I hope the R1 release is worthy of my money.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The HK bootleg I am referring to is not the one that is just a copy of the R2 dvd, which is the one out there now. Obviously that one will have the same color problem.
Blatantly stolen from Anandtech . . .
The Best of Trance [JUN 7 UPDATE - 203 TRACKS - 22 HRS]
Enjoy.
Oops, munged up that link. here is the correct one.
Even if that card did exist, it would have quite a hard time keeping up with the first GeForce cards to incorporate some of 3DFX's inherited technology. Take a look at the GeForce5 6000, which on beta silicon posts 50,104 3DMarks, although I doubt that kind of performance would be possible without a sufficiently powerful CPU . . .
>>
Digital technology has, for the first time in human history, eliminated a scarcity. Before, there was always a scarcity in terms of information that could be stored. Books, vinyl albums, papers, documents, and the like had to be stored. They could be duplicated, but only at a relatively high expense.
Ohh . . . so where do I get a free hard drive too?
There are still costs associated with duplicating and storing information. Much cheaper, but nevertheless, they are still there.
If you *REALLY* want this game, but could care less about the fluff around it (packaging, etc.), dragons.ca has the 'small box' edition of the game for $39.99 + Shipping. They already sold out the first three shipments of this edition, however I have not seen anywhere come even close to that price.
-Chu
I also have been looking hard at DVD-R/+R as a backup solution, but two things worry me greatly.
#1. I want to be able to access this material 5-10 years from now. With CD-R's, if you want to protect your data we now know that you are best off with Tayio Yuden or Kodak. With DVD mediums though . . . no one has any clue what the real life on these discs are, especially since most are apparently using a different dye then CD-R's do (if you've never seen a DVD-R, on most the bottom is a light blood red).
#2. Cost. CD-R's are pretty much the cheapest backup medium now. DVD-R's are still fairly expensive, but the third option is what intrigues me. IDE drives are easily available now for $1/gig. A hot swappable IDE drive bay from Vantec runs you about $40 retail. I have seriously considered just buying IDE drives for backup, and using the hot swappable bay to change them. Much easier, much faster. What makes me nervous about this is the 'all your eggs in one basket' problem, but from my experience with hard drives, if they survive the initial part of their 'bathtub' failure cure, they are good for years.
>> Blacksnow had people using macros and other aids to build characters fast within Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot MMORPG
I think this point needs a bit of clarification. Blacksnow didn't just just macros to build up characters, they also used many exploits, and bragged about it. When Mystic got fed up, they cried all the way to the courts. This in itself is also quite a simplification of the sistuation, but if you want a much more detailed explanation, check out http://www.skotos.net/articles/BTH_22.shtml for an extreemly well written article.
Was this the right thing for Mystic to do though? Well, let's look at another case. Asheron's Call was released with a policy with "if you find a bug, it is our fault, and there will be no penalty for using it." Well, on the PvP server, the Blood clan discovered a dupe bug, and duped quite a few of a valuiable item (i.e. $100+ on ebay). With that money, they essentially bought power on the server, and now Darktide is completly unplayable for anyone without real life connections.
Metropolis definatly is an anime. The short blurb going around is:
This exceptional animated film is based on the classic manga by the late, great Osamu Tezuka -- with whom director Rintaro worked on such '60s classics as Astro-Boy and Kimba -- and is scripted by Katuhiro Otomo (Akira). In an enormous, retro-future city where robots and androids do most of the work, there is nonetheless great unrest. The government is really a tool of evil billionaire Duke Red, and the seeds of rebellion grow underground. Stir into this crucible of turbulence a young man, his detective uncle, a youthful assassin, and an angelic blonde who doesn't realize just what she really is, and the result is as compelling as it is eye-popping, and as unusual as the swing-era music on the soundtrack. Original Japanese version with English subtitles.
If you need some more info, Here's a link.