Because JPG is completely inappropiate for screenshots, that's why.
JPG deals *very* badly with straight lines and black/white transitions, both of which are really common in screenshots, like interface elements and black text on a white background. 500KB screenshots mostly happen because people take a screenshot of their background image.
Figuring out how to best represent a document in memory can be more complicated than it would seem. Say, the easiest way would be just to malloc a chunk of memory for the whole document, but try to insert text into the middle of a 100 page document if you do it that way.
A more workable approach is to make it be an array with one entry per line, but that can run into exactly the same problem if you write a long enough paragraph.
So perhaps you go with something even more abstract, say, some kind of structure that contains pointers to words, which allows you to insert several invisible blanks every time you need to make space for stuff to reduce the time spent on memory management.
I think the article meant something similar to that last one.
Nope, I don't. They're pronounced noticeably differently.
"Nova" is pronounced all together, with the emphasis on "o" "No va" is pronounced with a pause between the words, and the emphasis is on "a". As snopes says, this is more or less equivalent to "notable" vs "not able", or "no table".
Most people probably would relate "nova" to "supernova" more than "doesn't go". Also, since Spanish comes from Latin, "nova" isn't such a strange thing, and quite related to a few words like "novedad" for example.
Besides, it's a stupid criticism. "Har har, if you pronounce it incorrectly it means 'doesn't go'". Now, "pajero" (wanker), or "laputa" (la puta - the whore) is somewhat more inconvenient to say in public.
Note that "laputa" is different from "nova", since "laputa" means absolutely nothing in Spanish by itself, and people would pronounce it exactly the same as "la puta", except without a pause.
This one looks fine, but I'd add a LCD display over the numeric pad. It'd have to work as a calculator, or it could be taken over by the computer to show the load average or something else.
Just stop plugging this stuff already. As somebody who has lived in Spain for the last 14 years I can tell you with 100% certainty that "nova" and "no va" are pronounced differently, and nobody says "no va" referring to cars here anyway.
Bullshit. The US military killed plenty civilians, just like other armies. And don't get me started on Iraq, which never posed any danger to the US anyway. The only different thing about the US is its damned superiority complex.
The best way to do things is to always thoroughly research a product and maybe even list out the pros and cons of competing products so that you always choose based on an educated dection. This way you don't have to miss out on life --not talking about ads, here, just anything that might, in a miniscule way, influence your decision unfairly--.
Of course I can't get rid completely of my human defects, coming from things like heuristics and fuzzy processes in the brain. However, I can perfectly take steps to reduce outside influences on me. Ads exist only because they work. I decided I don't want to apply that to me, so I take steps to prevent it.
And I didn't bring the law into it. I said immoral. If a company pays the bandwidth for a website in return for a small bit of screen real estate in which to show an ad to the viewer, it could be considered immoral to trick them into thinking you'd viewed an ad so your favorite website gets paid. I didn't say anything about agreements of your company's public webserver, and I didn't say anything about the law.
You didn't get it. Their expectation is wrong. They should expect no screen estate. Data transfer over HTTP doesn't imply it will end on the screen or anywhere a person will notice its existence. The fact that they naively expect me to render the content on my screen has absolutely nothing to do with me. I don't see how using a text browser to read slashdot would be immoral for example.
Also, I don't see why my indifference to some company's unsustainable business would be immoral. If a business naively assumes I will render their site exactly as the webmaster thought I would, or that I won't eat more than X amount of food, or not use more than 4 GB of bandwidth a month, that's not my problem.
Web servers transfer bits from one place to another. It's perfectly fine for me to write a program that downloads a page with images and everything and sends it to/dev/null.
Then you will likely get left behind on the web, where glitz and flash bring everyone in and sooner or later, the most popular websites will get around ad-blocking leechers.
And why would I care about that? I'm not a webmaster. I'm mostly a programmer and sysadmin, and my web server is mostly a file dump. That doesn't stop it from doing exactly what it's supposed to, though.
And they won't get around it. It's ultimately impossible to determine what happens with your website after it gets received by the client. It may get rendered on screen, converted into voice and sent to/dev/dsp, filtered through babelfish, have all the vowels removed from the text, or sent to/dev/null and there's absolutely nothing you can do to find about it, nor is anything wrong with it.
Sorry, I missed the part where ads were inherently a bad thing. The only thing I dislike about ads are the really flashy annoying huge ones that take up too much of my bandwidth and distract me from the page. Google Ads, as a counterexample, are lovely.
Yes, actually I consider them mostly an inherently bad thing. The idea behind ads, at least originally is not that you'll run into a shop right after seeing the ad on TV, but that it will make you aware of its existence, and leave a slight familiarity with the product. Say, I'm fairly sure people are more likely to buy cars from Ford than from some little known maker because at least they heard of Ford. And this is the part I precisely don't like.
I don't like the idea that when I go to buy something, I'm at least slightly influenced by what I watched on TV (which is why I almost never watch it). I'd like to know that I bought my stuff because I decided on my own it was what would work for me, and not because some marketer drilled it into my head.
I don't mind the Google ads because I simply don't see them. I have a big monitor, high resolution and maximized browser. In fact, for months I didn't even know Google had ads.
Oh, so you don't like tracking, is that it? That's why I don't let ad-servers set cookies.
That's only a partial solution. They'd still known somebody seen it, or clicked on it, even if they couldn't link it to some ID number.
Yes. I expect that if I leave my laptop in plain sight in my car with the windows rolled down, that it won't be there when I return. So since I expect it, it's not immoral of someone to steal it. Gotcha.
Nope. This has nothing to do with law. My use of a company's public web server is in no way conditioned by any kind of law or legal agreement that says that I have to do something specific with the bits they send me. I don't see how your laptop has anything to do with that.
The HTTP protocol is blurred most of the time to say the least. The hot thing now is selling the experience of using a website, which can include a lot of features that are not a part of the HTTP protocol.
Pfft. They can keep their "experience" for themselves. I don't look for strange blurry things like "experience", but much more identifiable ones like "information" and "data transfer".
Avoiding to load ads really solves nothing on the long run. The advertiser probably doesn't care at all. The site simply doesn't get paid, so who'd be concerned is whoever hosts the ads. I'm sure the advertisers are really happy to let the sites deal with that. And it all ends in an unending race of blockers vs advertisers.
This on the other hand, directly messes with the advertiser, who will have absolutely no way of finding what part of their statistics are good and which aren't. That'd bring Internet advertising on the same level as ads in magazines and TV, and perhaps contribute to the elimination of concepts like "pay per click".
100mbps connections aren't needed, anyway. Most ads aren't that big, and you could always try to prioritize loading the important stuff first, and making the ads load after everything else is done. Of course this has the downside of that it can be detected.
I don't really consider it immoral. The advertisers should actually *expect* this to happen. After all, there's absolutely nothing in the HTTP protocol that says what I have to do with the images after they loaded, or that anything at all should be shown on screen. IMHO, using wget is as valid as using Mozilla.
Instead of blocking advertisements, the good strategy is to load them, but just don't display them. I was even thinking here of trying to patch some ad-removing proxy for that, and also making some kind of program that would "click" on ads at night.
Main point of that is that you get to see the site, and if it's well done, neither the advertiser nor the site have any way of finding what are you doing on your end, so the site still gets paid.
Of course, that'll probably accelerate the inclusion of links to ads in content, but that can be easily dealt with by the same proxy which already does pattern matching for URLs anyway. It won't take long until ad blockers start appending [ad!] after those links.
Hey. I programmed in QBASIC quite a lot when I was about 13, so I feel I'm knowledgeable enough about this.
Well, QBASIC started up pretty much instantly (less than a second) on my 386 DX 40 with 4 MB RAM, and no disk cache. There was no delay for executing anything. That was the cool thing of it, you could execute code instantly. You could stop it at any point, make small corrections and continue.
In contrast, now sometimes I start Java apps on my dual Athlon 2000+ with 1 GB RAM. It takes *several seconds*. And it's simply unacceptable that while my computer is probably at least 100x more powerful than my first one, the startup time of programs that don't do that much is still awfully slow.
Well, to expand more on that, I just see JIT as a clever runtime optimization that the programmers could make themselves if they wanted, probably better. After all, JIT can't do magic.
What I object to is when people say strange things like "Java is faster than C because JIT can optimize things at runtime that gcc can't". Well, IMHO one doesn't choose Java because of the speed, which at least in my experience (not trying to troll here). I seriously haven't seen a fast Java program, so if somebody can show me an example of a real Java application of a decent size that runs faster than I'd expect something equivalent to run in C without consuming gigabytes of RAM in the process, I'd love to see it.
Sure JIT can be very clever, but if you want, you can fairly easily be even more clever. JIT won't turn bubble sort into quicksort, and by the way, I'm pretty sure it won't distinguish the interesting cases where bubble sort is actually *faster* than quicksort, because the data happens to be close to being the worst case for quicksort. Now, a clever programmer could fairly easily notice this possibility, code several sort algorithms, and make the program try use another if sorting starts taking too long.
The description of what JIT does seems to go along the lines that it examines frequently executed code, and finds a way of optimizing it. Maybe it inlines a small function directly into the code that calls it, or changes the order of the options in a switch statements. But all those are quite unlikely to bring a very noticeable speed improvement, and if you needed it all that much you could just do that yourself, probably better.
It's pretty easy, you can't make anything perfect. You *can* do a XML parser in Perl, it just won't be as fast as in C, because ultimately Perl is interpreted.
It's like when some time ago on this site somebody said Java could be faster than C due to JIT and all that. I replied that no way, Java could never be faster than an optimal implementation in machine code, and C is only a bit above it. S/he argued again that the magic of JIT could somehow make the code be faster at runtime.
To this what I say is: If you really needed it, you could use C to write your own bytecode interpreter in it, with its own JIT, that would be faster than Java's because you could make it optimal for your application.
The point of all this is: Any language that's somehow interpreted, even with a JIT and all that stuff, can never be faster than something clever enough written in assembler or C, because it's practically certain your interpreted language is coded in such a way that it makes your algorithm execute at least a bit slower than it could be if you spent enough time coding it with the underlying hardware in mind.
When I use things like Perl is when I think that it's more important to get something done faster, than getting the ultimate efficiency from the code. Perl certainly lets you write clever regexps that will produce in one line a result that would require 200 lines of C. But, what you don't get is the ability of taking those 200 lines of C, and spending a few days profiling them, writing a version that takes advantage of MMX or the latest technology, etc.
You could hide information even in Kaaza. Just share files, and establish some kind of code, like that the second digit of the duration of the songs that have a "t" in the name sorted in reverse alphabetical order indicates the time of the attack.
This is probably the only reason why I paid for NWN, and both expansions, twice (one as a gift). Besides multiplayer being pretty nice, running in Linux was vital since it's a long game.
If it runs on Linux, I can use my laptop as a second monitor to display KDE on it while I play (it's not powerful enough on its own, P200, 64MB RAM). If I was stuck with having to use Windows then it'd be much more annoying, as I'd lose the ability to do some things I need.
So, if it runs on Linux well (I can live without the movies, there's BinkPlayer, and they weren't too impressive anyway), and plays well of course, it's almost certain I'll buy it.
I doubt this will happen, but it'd be nice if the dedicated server could support SMP. By 2006 my current SMP machine will probably replace my server, and I suppose it should work quite well for hosting games.
Email loss almost never happens because the system is designed well. If my connection to my ISP goes down, then my mail server becomes unreachable. The SMTP server that was trying to deliver the message will keep trying, and it's almost certain my connection will come back in time.
If it times out, or I can't accept the message for some reason (disk full) then the email will bounce and the sender will be notified as well. The only real possibility of losing an email is things like disk corruption, and since I run my server, I can't blame them.
The more correct example would be if my mail was stored on my ISP's mail server, and the last month of it suddenly vanished. If you say you wouldn't be annoyed at that, I just won't believe you.
If the loss is because somebody came to me, beat me up, and stole all my stuff, then I wouldn't have much to complain about. If that's how the game works, it's how it works, even if the result is that my ubersword gets stolen.
Now, a completely different thing would be if a server crash obliterates my last month of progress. That I would have an issue with, because it's not my fault in any way, and could have been avoided. Same would go for things that work significantly differently from how they were advertised. Say, if I was promised that my stuff wouldn't get stolen by the nearest player if I happen to die, and it happened anyway, I wouldn't consider it completely unreasonable to demand some kind of compensation (not necessarily $$$ though)
Right. And when I go to a place that charges for entrance, a lawyer would argue that since I paid and was left in, they have no obligation of providing anything they promised, like attractions, pictures on a wall or something?
"You see, your honor, the defendant paid to enter the projection room. Sure the projector broke after half an hour, but we *did* let him in, and that's what he paid for!"
Fat chance.
See, I see where you're trying to get with that, but I doubt it'd work. It wouldn't be fair. If it was your way, any time I paid for entrance the company I paid wouldn't owe me anything, like pictures, or a movie, or anything.
When I pay at a cinema, I pay to be allowed inside a room where they're showing a movie. Any normal person would expect the movie to be actually projected as well, in its full length. I think it could be argued the same way that anybody who pays for an online game expects it to work the way it was advertised.
But see, there's a problem here. That it's a game doesn't it stop from being something you bought. If you go to Disneyland, and they fail to deliver the entertainment you bought from them, by say, having all attractions broken, or suddenly closing 5 minutes after you paid for the ticket, I'd consider it perfectly reasonable to ask your money back.
The same way, if Everkill consist in killing things to get magical items, and you lose that to a crash, you could quite successfully argue that you didn't get what you paid for. While a server crash that causes you to lose your +10 Sword of Banishment, which took you a month to get probably won't be compensated with $1000, you probably could reasonably argue that a crash that erased a month of progress in the game should entitle you to get a month of payment back.
Well, what I mean is, wouldn't you eventually bump into a limit regardless of how high is the clock speed?
Say, if you made a 200 GHz CPU, it'd probably spend a lot of its time waiting for stuff to arrive from memory. Ok, you have a cache on the CPU, but that won't help for long since at 200 GHz this cache will be exhausted a lot faster. You could put a bigger cache, but then you enlarge the size of the core, and it will probably not take very long to have exactly the same problem internally.
Of course, it can still be blazingly fast as long as stuff stays in the cache, but as soon as you started working with a big dataset it'd suffer a huge slowdown.
Say, how do I turn that into some more meaningful figure, like the distance it can fall into a stone floor? Or is there somewhere a site that details the common values for comparison purposes, like the tables that give examples for sound levels?
It's a funny thing that I might actually have been right a few years ago. I posted here on slashdot a little calculation I did that showed that as clock speed goes up, the speed of light becomes a very limiting factor.
IIRC, at 5 GHz, clock cycles would be spend simply on waiting for the data to propagate through the path between the RAM and the CPU.
While I don't really know about CPU design, I'd say that this is a possible reason for stopping clock improvements, since as speed gets higher, latency would keep growing.
Slashdot Mirror
Because JPG is completely inappropiate for screenshots, that's why.
JPG deals *very* badly with straight lines and black/white transitions, both of which are really common in screenshots, like interface elements and black text on a white background. 500KB screenshots mostly happen because people take a screenshot of their background image.
Well, it's not *that* simple.
Figuring out how to best represent a document in memory can be more complicated than it would seem. Say, the easiest way would be just to malloc a chunk of memory for the whole document, but try to insert text into the middle of a 100 page document if you do it that way.
A more workable approach is to make it be an array with one entry per line, but that can run into exactly the same problem if you write a long enough paragraph.
So perhaps you go with something even more abstract, say, some kind of structure that contains pointers to words, which allows you to insert several invisible blanks every time you need to make space for stuff to reduce the time spent on memory management.
I think the article meant something similar to that last one.
Nope, I don't. They're pronounced noticeably differently.
"Nova" is pronounced all together, with the emphasis on "o"
"No va" is pronounced with a pause between the words, and the emphasis is on "a". As snopes says, this is more or less equivalent to "notable" vs "not able", or "no table".
Most people probably would relate "nova" to "supernova" more than "doesn't go". Also, since Spanish comes from Latin, "nova" isn't such a strange thing, and quite related to a few words like "novedad" for example.
Besides, it's a stupid criticism. "Har har, if you pronounce it incorrectly it means 'doesn't go'". Now, "pajero" (wanker), or "laputa" (la puta - the whore) is somewhat more inconvenient to say in public.
Note that "laputa" is different from "nova", since "laputa" means absolutely nothing in Spanish by itself, and people would pronounce it exactly the same as "la puta", except without a pause.
This one looks fine, but I'd add a LCD display over the numeric pad. It'd have to work as a calculator, or it could be taken over by the computer to show the load average or something else.
*sigh*
Just stop plugging this stuff already. As somebody who has lived in Spain for the last 14 years I can tell you with 100% certainty that "nova" and "no va" are pronounced differently, and nobody says "no va" referring to cars here anyway.
Bullshit. The US military killed plenty civilians, just like other armies. And don't get me started on Iraq, which never posed any danger to the US anyway. The only different thing about the US is its damned superiority complex.
Yeah, it's all a giant conspiracy. The US is a really really wonderful country who'll bring peace to the world.
Listen, there's no need to make shit up. There's plenty of it already.
The best way to do things is to always thoroughly research a product and maybe even list out the pros and cons of competing products so that you always choose based on an educated dection. This way you don't have to miss out on life --not talking about ads, here, just anything that might, in a miniscule way, influence your decision unfairly--.
/dev/null.
/dev/dsp, filtered through babelfish, have all the vowels removed from the text, or sent to /dev/null and there's absolutely nothing you can do to find about it, nor is anything wrong with it.
Of course I can't get rid completely of my human defects, coming from things like heuristics and fuzzy processes in the brain. However, I can perfectly take steps to reduce outside influences on me. Ads exist only because they work. I decided I don't want to apply that to me, so I take steps to prevent it.
And I didn't bring the law into it. I said immoral. If a company pays the bandwidth for a website in return for a small bit of screen real estate in which to show an ad to the viewer, it could be considered immoral to trick them into thinking you'd viewed an ad so your favorite website gets paid. I didn't say anything about agreements of your company's public webserver, and I didn't say anything about the law.
You didn't get it. Their expectation is wrong. They should expect no screen estate. Data transfer over HTTP doesn't imply it will end on the screen or anywhere a person will notice its existence. The fact that they naively expect me to render the content on my screen has absolutely nothing to do with me. I don't see how using a text browser to read slashdot would be immoral for example.
Also, I don't see why my indifference to some company's unsustainable business would be immoral. If a business naively assumes I will render their site exactly as the webmaster thought I would, or that I won't eat more than X amount of food, or not use more than 4 GB of bandwidth a month, that's not my problem.
Web servers transfer bits from one place to another. It's perfectly fine for me to write a program that downloads a page with images and everything and sends it to
Then you will likely get left behind on the web, where glitz and flash bring everyone in and sooner or later, the most popular websites will get around ad-blocking leechers.
And why would I care about that? I'm not a webmaster. I'm mostly a programmer and sysadmin, and my web server is mostly a file dump. That doesn't stop it from doing exactly what it's supposed to, though.
And they won't get around it. It's ultimately impossible to determine what happens with your website after it gets received by the client. It may get rendered on screen, converted into voice and sent to
Sorry, I missed the part where ads were inherently a bad thing. The only thing I dislike about ads are the really flashy annoying huge ones that take up too much of my bandwidth and distract me from the page. Google Ads, as a counterexample, are lovely.
Yes, actually I consider them mostly an inherently bad thing. The idea behind ads, at least originally is not that you'll run into a shop right after seeing the ad on TV, but that it will make you aware of its existence, and leave a slight familiarity with the product. Say, I'm fairly sure people are more likely to buy cars from Ford than from some little known maker because at least they heard of Ford. And this is the part I precisely don't like.
I don't like the idea that when I go to buy something, I'm at least slightly influenced by what I watched on TV (which is why I almost never watch it). I'd like to know that I bought my stuff because I decided on my own it was what would work for me, and not because some marketer drilled it into my head.
I don't mind the Google ads because I simply don't see them. I have a big monitor, high resolution and maximized browser. In fact, for months I didn't even know Google had ads.
Oh, so you don't like tracking, is that it? That's why I don't let ad-servers set cookies.
That's only a partial solution. They'd still known somebody seen it, or clicked on it, even if they couldn't link it to some ID number.
Yes. I expect that if I leave my laptop in plain sight in my car with the windows rolled down, that it won't be there when I return. So since I expect it, it's not immoral of someone to steal it. Gotcha.
Nope. This has nothing to do with law. My use of a company's public web server is in no way conditioned by any kind of law or legal agreement that says that I have to do something specific with the bits they send me. I don't see how your laptop has anything to do with that.
The HTTP protocol is blurred most of the time to say the least. The hot thing now is selling the experience of using a website, which can include a lot of features that are not a part of the HTTP protocol.
Pfft. They can keep their "experience" for themselves. I don't look for strange blurry things like "experience", but much more identifiable ones like "information" and "data transfer".
True, but you have to look at it in the long run.
Avoiding to load ads really solves nothing on the long run. The advertiser probably doesn't care at all. The site simply doesn't get paid, so who'd be concerned is whoever hosts the ads. I'm sure the advertisers are really happy to let the sites deal with that. And it all ends in an unending race of blockers vs advertisers.
This on the other hand, directly messes with the advertiser, who will have absolutely no way of finding what part of their statistics are good and which aren't. That'd bring Internet advertising on the same level as ads in magazines and TV, and perhaps contribute to the elimination of concepts like "pay per click".
100mbps connections aren't needed, anyway. Most ads aren't that big, and you could always try to prioritize loading the important stuff first, and making the ads load after everything else is done. Of course this has the downside of that it can be detected.
I don't really consider it immoral. The advertisers should actually *expect* this to happen. After all, there's absolutely nothing in the HTTP protocol that says what I have to do with the images after they loaded, or that anything at all should be shown on screen. IMHO, using wget is as valid as using Mozilla.
Instead of blocking advertisements, the good strategy is to load them, but just don't display them. I was even thinking here of trying to patch some ad-removing proxy for that, and also making some kind of program that would "click" on ads at night.
Main point of that is that you get to see the site, and if it's well done, neither the advertiser nor the site have any way of finding what are you doing on your end, so the site still gets paid.
Of course, that'll probably accelerate the inclusion of links to ads in content, but that can be easily dealt with by the same proxy which already does pattern matching for URLs anyway. It won't take long until ad blockers start appending [ad!] after those links.
Hey. I programmed in QBASIC quite a lot when I was about 13, so I feel I'm knowledgeable enough about this.
Well, QBASIC started up pretty much instantly (less than a second) on my 386 DX 40 with 4 MB RAM, and no disk cache. There was no delay for executing anything. That was the cool thing of it, you could execute code instantly. You could stop it at any point, make small corrections and continue.
In contrast, now sometimes I start Java apps on my dual Athlon 2000+ with 1 GB RAM. It takes *several seconds*. And it's simply unacceptable that while my computer is probably at least 100x more powerful than my first one, the startup time of programs that don't do that much is still awfully slow.
Well, to expand more on that, I just see JIT as a clever runtime optimization that the programmers could make themselves if they wanted, probably better. After all, JIT can't do magic.
What I object to is when people say strange things like "Java is faster than C because JIT can optimize things at runtime that gcc can't". Well, IMHO one doesn't choose Java because of the speed, which at least in my experience (not trying to troll here). I seriously haven't seen a fast Java program, so if somebody can show me an example of a real Java application of a decent size that runs faster than I'd expect something equivalent to run in C without consuming gigabytes of RAM in the process, I'd love to see it.
Sure JIT can be very clever, but if you want, you can fairly easily be even more clever. JIT won't turn bubble sort into quicksort, and by the way, I'm pretty sure it won't distinguish the interesting cases where bubble sort is actually *faster* than quicksort, because the data happens to be close to being the worst case for quicksort. Now, a clever programmer could fairly easily notice this possibility, code several sort algorithms, and make the program try use another if sorting starts taking too long.
The description of what JIT does seems to go along the lines that it examines frequently executed code, and finds a way of optimizing it. Maybe it inlines a small function directly into the code that calls it, or changes the order of the options in a switch statements. But all those are quite unlikely to bring a very noticeable speed improvement, and if you needed it all that much you could just do that yourself, probably better.
It's pretty easy, you can't make anything perfect. You *can* do a XML parser in Perl, it just won't be as fast as in C, because ultimately Perl is interpreted.
It's like when some time ago on this site somebody said Java could be faster than C due to JIT and all that. I replied that no way, Java could never be faster than an optimal implementation in machine code, and C is only a bit above it. S/he argued again that the magic of JIT could somehow make the code be faster at runtime.
To this what I say is: If you really needed it, you could use C to write your own bytecode interpreter in it, with its own JIT, that would be faster than Java's because you could make it optimal for your application.
The point of all this is: Any language that's somehow interpreted, even with a JIT and all that stuff, can never be faster than something clever enough written in assembler or C, because it's practically certain your interpreted language is coded in such a way that it makes your algorithm execute at least a bit slower than it could be if you spent enough time coding it with the underlying hardware in mind.
When I use things like Perl is when I think that it's more important to get something done faster, than getting the ultimate efficiency from the code. Perl certainly lets you write clever regexps that will produce in one line a result that would require 200 lines of C. But, what you don't get is the ability of taking those 200 lines of C, and spending a few days profiling them, writing a version that takes advantage of MMX or the latest technology, etc.
There's a nice trick with the rocks. You take lots of them, pile them up around the enemy creature, then throw a few fireballs at them.
Due to some game defect, they'll continue glowing pretty much forever. The enemy creature will get stuck casting rain on itself all the time.
This worked in single player, might work in multiplayer too, but I haven't tried.
Pretty much the same really.
You could hide information even in Kaaza. Just share files, and establish some kind of code, like that the second digit of the duration of the songs that have a "t" in the name sorted in reverse alphabetical order indicates the time of the attack.
This is probably the only reason why I paid for NWN, and both expansions, twice (one as a gift). Besides multiplayer being pretty nice, running in Linux was vital since it's a long game.
If it runs on Linux, I can use my laptop as a second monitor to display KDE on it while I play (it's not powerful enough on its own, P200, 64MB RAM). If I was stuck with having to use Windows then it'd be much more annoying, as I'd lose the ability to do some things I need.
So, if it runs on Linux well (I can live without the movies, there's BinkPlayer, and they weren't too impressive anyway), and plays well of course, it's almost certain I'll buy it.
I doubt this will happen, but it'd be nice if the dedicated server could support SMP. By 2006 my current SMP machine will probably replace my server, and I suppose it should work quite well for hosting games.
Bad example.
Email loss almost never happens because the system is designed well. If my connection to my ISP goes down, then my mail server becomes unreachable. The SMTP server that was trying to deliver the message will keep trying, and it's almost certain my connection will come back in time.
If it times out, or I can't accept the message for some reason (disk full) then the email will bounce and the sender will be notified as well. The only real possibility of losing an email is things like disk corruption, and since I run my server, I can't blame them.
The more correct example would be if my mail was stored on my ISP's mail server, and the last month of it suddenly vanished. If you say you wouldn't be annoyed at that, I just won't believe you.
Well, for me it depends on how you lose it.
If the loss is because somebody came to me, beat me up, and stole all my stuff, then I wouldn't have much to complain about. If that's how the game works, it's how it works, even if the result is that my ubersword gets stolen.
Now, a completely different thing would be if a server crash obliterates my last month of progress. That I would have an issue with, because it's not my fault in any way, and could have been avoided. Same would go for things that work significantly differently from how they were advertised. Say, if I was promised that my stuff wouldn't get stolen by the nearest player if I happen to die, and it happened anyway, I wouldn't consider it completely unreasonable to demand some kind of compensation (not necessarily $$$ though)
Right. And when I go to a place that charges for entrance, a lawyer would argue that since I paid and was left in, they have no obligation of providing anything they promised, like attractions, pictures on a wall or something?
"You see, your honor, the defendant paid to enter the projection room. Sure the projector broke after half an hour, but we *did* let him in, and that's what he paid for!"
Fat chance.
See, I see where you're trying to get with that, but I doubt it'd work. It wouldn't be fair. If it was your way, any time I paid for entrance the company I paid wouldn't owe me anything, like pictures, or a movie, or anything.
When I pay at a cinema, I pay to be allowed inside a room where they're showing a movie. Any normal person would expect the movie to be actually projected as well, in its full length. I think it could be argued the same way that anybody who pays for an online game expects it to work the way it was advertised.
But see, there's a problem here. That it's a game doesn't it stop from being something you bought. If you go to Disneyland, and they fail to deliver the entertainment you bought from them, by say, having all attractions broken, or suddenly closing 5 minutes after you paid for the ticket, I'd consider it perfectly reasonable to ask your money back.
The same way, if Everkill consist in killing things to get magical items, and you lose that to a crash, you could quite successfully argue that you didn't get what you paid for. While a server crash that causes you to lose your +10 Sword of Banishment, which took you a month to get probably won't be compensated with $1000, you probably could reasonably argue that a crash that erased a month of progress in the game should entitle you to get a month of payment back.
Well, what I mean is, wouldn't you eventually bump into a limit regardless of how high is the clock speed?
Say, if you made a 200 GHz CPU, it'd probably spend a lot of its time waiting for stuff to arrive from memory. Ok, you have a cache on the CPU, but that won't help for long since at 200 GHz this cache will be exhausted a lot faster. You could put a bigger cache, but then you enlarge the size of the core, and it will probably not take very long to have exactly the same problem internally.
Of course, it can still be blazingly fast as long as stuff stays in the cache, but as soon as you started working with a big dataset it'd suffer a huge slowdown.
Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is 2000G?
Say, how do I turn that into some more meaningful figure, like the distance it can fall into a stone floor? Or is there somewhere a site that details the common values for comparison purposes, like the tables that give examples for sound levels?
It's a funny thing that I might actually have been right a few years ago. I posted here on slashdot a little calculation I did that showed that as clock speed goes up, the speed of light becomes a very limiting factor.
IIRC, at 5 GHz, clock cycles would be spend simply on waiting for the data to propagate through the path between the RAM and the CPU.
While I don't really know about CPU design, I'd say that this is a possible reason for stopping clock improvements, since as speed gets higher, latency would keep growing.
Nah, according to the article it seems it doesn't work that way.
So I suppose we're not going to see a real world version of Abi Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, which sounds like a rather good thing.