The essential thing in BG is Balance. You won't get anywhere with a bad team. A good team has a bit of everything. All fighters, wizards, or anything else will make the game really hard. A wizard that only has offensive spells is also hard to play, s/he will need defensive, protective and healing spells. This is pretty logical. In reality, if you had a group of really strong barbarians you'd be able to kill pretty much anybody, until you met a few archers.
After you get a good team, with good stats (not trivial), you need to learn the right skills. A bit part of BG is to understand what to use against your enemies. Say, dragons have magical resistance, you need a spell against that, keep them busy with what you can, and meanwhile use every offensive spell you have against them.
All this makes the game really different from say, Diablo. Just walking around and clicking won't get you very far. If you don't like this kind of game then obviously you should try something else.
Well, I doubt that it's 100% effective. The more complicated something is, the more can go wrong. Heat signature and capacitative sensors can be foiled quite easily, see this article, for example.
Even if you have a 100% effective scanner that never has a false positive, and can tell a real finger from anything else, you still have a problem: The system doesn't know your finger. It knows the data produced from your finger. Feed it to the system in any other way, and it's going to accept it just fine. It doesn't matter if it's difficult, somebody will figure it out sooner or later. When somebody can impersonate you it will create big problems. You may not believed because "the system is perfect", or in any case will have to use other fingers, and you don't have an infinite amount of them.
Oh, that's inconvenient too. Every security system involves major inconveniences if you lose your token. For example, you have to be really careful with your hands if you use fingerprints. If you lose your card the door won't open, if you cut your finger it's possible that it won't open either, and you can also have an eye infection. Sometimes you may need to have your eye operated, too.
And anyway, fingerprints are extremely unreliable. It's possible to lift fingerprints from the sensor, and fake a finger with cheap replacements. It will also get dirty fast and of course will start having problems. See this article, for example.
Retinal scanners probably are more effective, but like all biometric solutions have a BIG problem. If somebody manages to repoduce your fingerprint or retina, what can you do about it? Get a new eye? See? It's all very inconvenient.
SSO is flawed by design. It's an attempt of getting security without the inconvenience, but this is practically impossible. You either have to re-authenticate continously, or risk somebody using your account while you go to the bathroom.
Security is never convenient. It always involves doing something unpleasant, like typing your password every 5 minutes, carrying a card with you all the time to insert in a reader and that you must not forget to take with you to the bathroom, accept being searched, etc.
At least the 3 ones I have don't. The image looks fine and the sound sounds fine, but according to mplayer the sound codec takes an awful lot of CPU time, and I get a really horrible loss of sync between audio and video. Video goes something like two times slower than it should.
I can play other movies just fine, with a CPU usage of under 10%, but these ones keep my CPU at maxium. I suppose that an Athlon MP 2000+ should be enough to decode these ones, right?
What we need is a transactional filesystem. It'd either work like a database, requiring you to commit a transaction, or have an 'undo' command. Did something wrong? No problem, just run the undo command, confirm what you want to be undone, and your files or permissions are back where they were.
VESA FB is painfully slow indeed. You can see the slowness when scrolling text in less(1)
Now, if you have a card that's supported natively it's going to be fast, maybe as fast as the text console. I've been using the rivafb driver for a while and it was fast, but it conflicts with the binary nvidia drivers.
It's an "artificial life" game, you have to take care of your virtual creatures, feed them, teach them and you can mess with their genetics too. Several years ago I got it, and was hooked. I'm still very attached to it, all my online friends come from the creatures online community. It's a fun game to play, and if you get tired of that you can make stuff for it, or new species of creatures. I made two tools for it several years ago.
Recently the company that made it died due to bad management. I'm not sure exactly why but I suddenly decided to reverse-engineer the docking station protocol and write a server for it. Which is what I'm currently doing in my free time.
Currently all the official sites are down, but there are still many fan sites around.
The difference is, there the name serves a good purpose. First, the kernel tells you the driver is there, and at least one line is going to be spent already, so adding the author's name won't hurt. Second, if while your kernel boots it freezes right after displaying that line you know who could help you.
What Hans Reiser wants is mandatory publicity for no good reason at all. I think it's quite different.
Ah, but if you've got to do something that requires a supercomputer then you have to look at the whole instead of just the CPU. For a consumer it makes sense to replace a 1Ghz CPU with a 2 Ghz one and see games work two times faster. But if you are processing GBs of data and accessing memory very randomly then it might not help much if your CPU spends most of the time waiting for the RAM.
In these cases you'd have to consider everything, for example, which CPU is better suited to the task, up to how many CPUs can your architecture scale, what's the memory bandwidth, what's the latency, etc. Perhaps the task can be done cheaply with a cluster, or you need Rambus memory.
Then, after thinking about all that you might decide that it's a good idea to pay IBM to provide a supercomputer to do your stuff on.
Well, unless your budget is unlimited, or whatever you're working on is not paralellizable, price/performance is still more important than the performance of an individual CPU. I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll have to switch to using multiple CPUs anyway.
No, I meant that the only meaningful way of comparing processors is provided power for the same amount of money. If I need a server can can handle X load, and I can either get a dual AMD machine for $3000, or a single CPU Itanium for $6800, then the AMD one clearly wins, even if the CPU can do less work per second than the Itanium.
Now, I didn't research this much, but my point is that all that matters is the cost of doing X task with AMD processors vs Intel ones. Clock speed is irrelevant when comparing completely different architectures. And the comparison of the fastest AMD CPU with the fastest Intel one is also mostly useless.
The only meaningful benchmark IMO is processing_power/cost. A comparison based on clock speed would be pretty useless since architectures are different, and Itanium is so incredibly expensive. I'm pretty sure that even if x86_64 is slower it's much cheaper to get enough CPUs for your needs than to buy an Itanium.
This is a bit OT, but one thing I've been wondering for quite a while is whether we all perceive colors in the same way. Do we all see red the same way, or perhaps some people say, swap red and green?
This article made me wonder something else. Turns out a colorblind person's brain can see the color the eyes won't process correctly. Supposing I could mess with my brain's wiring, could I see some new color I've never seen?
For example, imagine having electronic eyes that can see infrared at the same time as normal colors. Could the brain give a new representation to infrared so that it'd look different from all the normal colors?
I have an old Minolta SP 1000 (B&W). If all you need is printing stuff every once in a while it's just fine. No weird stuff on the toner cartridge, prints reasonably fast, and you can get an used one for about $40. That's about the same as the ink cartridges used to cost me. But the ink was only good for 100 pages, and the toner in the Minolta should be good for about 8000. Now instead of only printing the necessary stuff I can print anything I want, like HOWTOs and manuals that came as PDF and know I won't have to pay $40 for that.
Even $800 isn't that much money for a printer if you think about that it's not hard at all to spend $500 on ink in a year or two, and laser printers usually last a very long time.
PNG can also store true color images, while GIF is limited to 256 colors. If you have a picture with many colors and things like lines or text then PNG is the only thing that will work well. JPG will mess the text and thin lines, GIF will remove colors.
No, we have to go after both. What you suggest is something like going after the person who hired an assassin and leave the assassin go free because he was doing it for the money.
I know this isn't a very good analogy, but the point is: Everybody involved in commiting a crime should suffer the consequences. Not just who paid for it.
At consumer level I'd get serial ATA, which has a thin cable and is hot swappable, although I think the drive has to suppport how swap.
About speed, I'm not really sure, I only have 2 drives at the moment, and nothing in the PCI 64 slots, but at least the available bandwidth wouldn't be a bottleneck. Of course, it also depends on how fast those drives are. I'm pretty sure there are drives that are noticeably faster than mine.
Sure we do. It seems that now the CPU is rarely the bottleneck anymore, and instead it's the PCI bus or the hard disk. For example, I upgraded from a Duron 850 to an Athlon MP 2000+. But the time KDE takes to load didn't decrease very noticeably, because now it spends reading the disk all the time during loading. Now if I close it after that, and start it again it loads noticeably faster than before.
Yeah, that'd be real fast. The bandwidth of Firewire is less than PCI. But okay, suppose you get several cards. In this case, the bandwidth is still 133MB/s. Assuming that you have all that for your disks, which doesn't include the network card, sound card, overhead, and whatever else you have, that gives 2MB/s per disk. Real fast.
Now, my motherboard supports PCI 64 at 66Mhz, with a bandwidth of 532MB/s, this would give 8.3MB/s per disk. Still not a lot, and you'd have to find a PCI 64 Firewire card with a lot of connectors, because at least my motherboard has only two slots.
My 80GB disk can do 40MB/s quite easily according to hdparm, so with my available bandwidth I could support about 13 drives, let's say 10 to compensate for overhead and other things on the bus. I think that 40MB/s is quite near the limit of Firewire, so I might need ATA instead. With two serial ATA cards with at least 5 connectors on each I suppose it'd be possible. Parallel ATA would also work, I guess, but the wiring would be really complicated with so many drives, especially because you want to have a drive per cable for maximum performance.
Not the vast majority I see here, definitely. Pretty much every Windows computer I've seen has a custom desktop background, fonts, or even a mouse pointer. And almost everybody has a shortcut for their games and stuff on the desktop.
If you say that there should be intuitive aliases, sure, why not. In fact I think Mandrake does exactly that already. This brings another thing: at least in Linux, there's almost no such thing as "default settings". Distibutions are what define them for you. Want DOS aliases for Unix commands? Mandrake has that. Want a system with minimal configuration you can tweak comfortably? That's Debian. Want a system ready to use with no configuration at all? Try Knoppix.
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BG is easy to play if you know to how.
The essential thing in BG is Balance. You won't get anywhere with a bad team. A good team has a bit of everything. All fighters, wizards, or anything else will make the game really hard. A wizard that only has offensive spells is also hard to play, s/he will need defensive, protective and healing spells. This is pretty logical. In reality, if you had a group of really strong barbarians you'd be able to kill pretty much anybody, until you met a few archers.
After you get a good team, with good stats (not trivial), you need to learn the right skills. A bit part of BG is to understand what to use against your enemies. Say, dragons have magical resistance, you need a spell against that, keep them busy with what you can, and meanwhile use every offensive spell you have against them.
All this makes the game really different from say, Diablo. Just walking around and clicking won't get you very far. If you don't like this kind of game then obviously you should try something else.
Well, I doubt that it's 100% effective. The more complicated something is, the more can go wrong. Heat signature and capacitative sensors can be foiled quite easily, see this article, for example.
Even if you have a 100% effective scanner that never has a false positive, and can tell a real finger from anything else, you still have a problem: The system doesn't know your finger. It knows the data produced from your finger. Feed it to the system in any other way, and it's going to accept it just fine. It doesn't matter if it's difficult, somebody will figure it out sooner or later. When somebody can impersonate you it will create big problems. You may not believed because "the system is perfect", or in any case will have to use other fingers, and you don't have an infinite amount of them.
And anyway, fingerprints are extremely unreliable. It's possible to lift fingerprints from the sensor, and fake a finger with cheap replacements. It will also get dirty fast and of course will start having problems. See this article, for example.
Retinal scanners probably are more effective, but like all biometric solutions have a BIG problem. If somebody manages to repoduce your fingerprint or retina, what can you do about it? Get a new eye? See? It's all very inconvenient.
SSO is flawed by design. It's an attempt of getting security without the inconvenience, but this is practically impossible. You either have to re-authenticate continously, or risk somebody using your account while you go to the bathroom.
Security is never convenient. It always involves doing something unpleasant, like typing your password every 5 minutes, carrying a card with you all the time to insert in a reader and that you must not forget to take with you to the bathroom, accept being searched, etc.
At least the 3 ones I have don't. The image looks fine and the sound sounds fine, but according to mplayer the sound codec takes an awful lot of CPU time, and I get a really horrible loss of sync between audio and video. Video goes something like two times slower than it should.
I can play other movies just fine, with a CPU usage of under 10%, but these ones keep my CPU at maxium. I suppose that an Athlon MP 2000+ should be enough to decode these ones, right?
Linux supports up to 64GB RAM, IIRC. See highmem support in the kernel config.
What we need is a transactional filesystem. It'd either work like a database, requiring you to commit a transaction, or have an 'undo' command. Did something wrong? No problem, just run the undo command, confirm what you want to be undone, and your files or permissions are back where they were.
It'd be a really neat innovation.
VESA FB is painfully slow indeed. You can see the slowness when scrolling text in less(1)
Now, if you have a card that's supported natively it's going to be fast, maybe as fast as the text console. I've been using the rivafb driver for a while and it was fast, but it conflicts with the binary nvidia drivers.
It's an "artificial life" game, you have to take care of your virtual creatures, feed them, teach them and you can mess with their genetics too. Several years ago I got it, and was hooked. I'm still very attached to it, all my online friends come from the creatures online community. It's a fun game to play, and if you get tired of that you can make stuff for it, or new species of creatures. I made two tools for it several years ago.
Recently the company that made it died due to bad management. I'm not sure exactly why but I suddenly decided to reverse-engineer the docking station protocol and write a server for it. Which is what I'm currently doing in my free time.
Currently all the official sites are down, but there are still many fan sites around.
*shudder* Here I bought a 512MB DDR ECC CL2 module for 85 euros.
According to the shop's price list, 186 euros is the price of a 160GB disk.
In case you're interested I'm buying at Alternate, their site is alternate.net, I think.
The difference is, there the name serves a good purpose. First, the kernel tells you the driver is there, and at least one line is going to be spent already, so adding the author's name won't hurt. Second, if while your kernel boots it freezes right after displaying that line you know who could help you.
What Hans Reiser wants is mandatory publicity for no good reason at all. I think it's quite different.
Now MicroSoft is finally doing something that matches better the toilet paper brand name they have.
Ah, but if you've got to do something that requires a supercomputer then you have to look at the whole instead of just the CPU. For a consumer it makes sense to replace a 1Ghz CPU with a 2 Ghz one and see games work two times faster. But if you are processing GBs of data and accessing memory very randomly then it might not help much if your CPU spends most of the time waiting for the RAM.
In these cases you'd have to consider everything, for example, which CPU is better suited to the task, up to how many CPUs can your architecture scale, what's the memory bandwidth, what's the latency, etc. Perhaps the task can be done cheaply with a cluster, or you need Rambus memory.
Then, after thinking about all that you might decide that it's a good idea to pay IBM to provide a supercomputer to do your stuff on.
Well, unless your budget is unlimited, or whatever you're working on is not paralellizable, price/performance is still more important than the performance of an individual CPU. I'm pretty sure that eventually we'll have to switch to using multiple CPUs anyway.
No, I meant that the only meaningful way of comparing processors is provided power for the same amount of money. If I need a server can can handle X load, and I can either get a dual AMD machine for $3000, or a single CPU Itanium for $6800, then the AMD one clearly wins, even if the CPU can do less work per second than the Itanium.
Now, I didn't research this much, but my point is that all that matters is the cost of doing X task with AMD processors vs Intel ones. Clock speed is irrelevant when comparing completely different architectures. And the comparison of the fastest AMD CPU with the fastest Intel one is also mostly useless.
How are you going to benchmark it?
The only meaningful benchmark IMO is processing_power/cost. A comparison based on clock speed would be pretty useless since architectures are different, and Itanium is so incredibly expensive. I'm pretty sure that even if x86_64 is slower it's much cheaper to get enough CPUs for your needs than to buy an Itanium.
This is a bit OT, but one thing I've been wondering for quite a while is whether we all perceive colors in the same way. Do we all see red the same way, or perhaps some people say, swap red and green?
This article made me wonder something else. Turns out a colorblind person's brain can see the color the eyes won't process correctly. Supposing I could mess with my brain's wiring, could I see some new color I've never seen?
For example, imagine having electronic eyes that can see infrared at the same time as normal colors. Could the brain give a new representation to infrared so that it'd look different from all the normal colors?
I have an old Minolta SP 1000 (B&W). If all you need is printing stuff every once in a while it's just fine. No weird stuff on the toner cartridge, prints reasonably fast, and you can get an used one for about $40. That's about the same as the ink cartridges used to cost me. But the ink was only good for 100 pages, and the toner in the Minolta should be good for about 8000. Now instead of only printing the necessary stuff I can print anything I want, like HOWTOs and manuals that came as PDF and know I won't have to pay $40 for that.
Even $800 isn't that much money for a printer if you think about that it's not hard at all to spend $500 on ink in a year or two, and laser printers usually last a very long time.
PNG can also store true color images, while GIF is limited to 256 colors. If you have a picture with many colors and things like lines or text then PNG is the only thing that will work well. JPG will mess the text and thin lines, GIF will remove colors.
No, we have to go after both. What you suggest is something like going after the person who hired an assassin and leave the assassin go free because he was doing it for the money.
I know this isn't a very good analogy, but the point is: Everybody involved in commiting a crime should suffer the consequences. Not just who paid for it.
At consumer level I'd get serial ATA, which has a thin cable and is hot swappable, although I think the drive has to suppport how swap.
About speed, I'm not really sure, I only have 2 drives at the moment, and nothing in the PCI 64 slots, but at least the available bandwidth wouldn't be a bottleneck. Of course, it also depends on how fast those drives are. I'm pretty sure there are drives that are noticeably faster than mine.
Sure we do. It seems that now the CPU is rarely the bottleneck anymore, and instead it's the PCI bus or the hard disk. For example, I upgraded from a Duron 850 to an Athlon MP 2000+. But the time KDE takes to load didn't decrease very noticeably, because now it spends reading the disk all the time during loading. Now if I close it after that, and start it again it loads noticeably faster than before.
The editors could move the articles there after they find it's duplicated, and this way we could choose to filter them out.
Yeah, that'd be real fast. The bandwidth of Firewire is less than PCI. But okay, suppose you get several cards. In this case, the bandwidth is still 133MB/s. Assuming that you have all that for your disks, which doesn't include the network card, sound card, overhead, and whatever else you have, that gives 2MB/s per disk. Real fast.
Now, my motherboard supports PCI 64 at 66Mhz, with a bandwidth of 532MB/s, this would give 8.3MB/s per disk. Still not a lot, and you'd have to find a PCI 64 Firewire card with a lot of connectors, because at least my motherboard has only two slots.
My 80GB disk can do 40MB/s quite easily according to hdparm, so with my available bandwidth I could support about 13 drives, let's say 10 to compensate for overhead and other things on the bus. I think that 40MB/s is quite near the limit of Firewire, so I might need ATA instead. With two serial ATA cards with at least 5 connectors on each I suppose it'd be possible. Parallel ATA would also work, I guess, but the wiring would be really complicated with so many drives, especially because you want to have a drive per cable for maximum performance.
Not the vast majority I see here, definitely. Pretty much every Windows computer I've seen has a custom desktop background, fonts, or even a mouse pointer. And almost everybody has a shortcut for their games and stuff on the desktop.
If you say that there should be intuitive aliases, sure, why not. In fact I think Mandrake does exactly that already. This brings another thing: at least in Linux, there's almost no such thing as "default settings". Distibutions are what define them for you. Want DOS aliases for Unix commands? Mandrake has that. Want a system with minimal configuration you can tweak comfortably? That's Debian. Want a system ready to use with no configuration at all? Try Knoppix.