Why don't we have more alcohol - ethanol or methanol - based cars? I believe in Brazil they have (had?) more than 50% of those? I mean - bio-matter (woods etc) to fuel conversion cycle can be decades or even months which take the tree or plant to grow and days for wood to be processed instead of hundreds of thousands of years for them to rot underground. Also - less polution when burned AFAIK.
Modern games do benefit from having 1GB at least accessible per process and as we can only have 2-3GBs available for apps in 32bit mode... I'd say 2-3 years till 64bits is necessary, not a decade. But then - given the record of 32bits acceptance (x86-32 appeared in bloody 1987!! and Win9x just now has died) - I'm not sure how long till we have x86-64 as a desktop majority.
Except it's not an extension. Resemblance is irrelevant. While we are at it - 32bits x86 instructions set is also not an extension for 16bits x86. Recall addressation(?) rules - EG: mov si, [ax] is illegal in 16bits, mov esi, [eax] is no problem in 32bits etc. Likely there are totally new ideas in AMD64, like they dropped a normal segmentation but there is some new global data area, and there are twice the amount of GP registers. Ok, I just skimmed over the specs but it was enough to see the differences.
Oh, sorry, now I see - they will sell you another same item (book or whatever), not the item you're snapping. As such - you can indeed sell them a barcode of the thing you liked at your friend's (for example) and they will send you the same. Cool.
Arigatou gozaimasu, anou - anata wa nihon-jin desu ka? If so, I wonder why you have.se domain email. If not, why are you so sure about that? Just curious.
Ok, I snap a product in the shop, but can I shove it into my pocket right then? What reason the guards have not to detent me? How does the physical stuff move? If I snap something in my home (and by some strange coincidence post the picture to processing number) would they still bill me?
How do we guesstimate how much money they are gonna loose due to negative reactions (including "word of mouth" and rumours) relative to _stupid_ would-be "pirates" that don't know how to find/use properly cracked version (and that won't probably buy the game anyway)? What is the probability that the "pirates" and P2P nets would be blamed for this losses. Oh, don't bother with the second question.:)
I tend to use FirebirdSQL these days. I've used it (IB in fact) before w/ standalone apps and was reasonably happy. But it was some time ago. Then when PHP/MySQL schism hit I tried it w/ PHP and to my amusement it is as fast as MySQL if not faster. Plus - you have transactions and stuff, minus - some syntactic peculiarities (no "SELECT" without "FROM" for example), and autoinc->explicit_generators issue. Otherwise - it rocks! Now I can hardly see a reason to go with MySQL instead of FB. Oh! And if you want to use it elsewhere, not from the web server only, there's no licensing bullshit about that. Nice. Don't forget to try IBExpert for "post-CASE" DB management.
You know, if you run Windows Update you should _carefully_ check what it offers. On my machine it tried to replace all my carefully selected drivers (ATI, modem, sound blaster) drivers with obsolete MS shit. Good thing I noticed.
PS: ATI - Omega Drivers; SB - 5880=ES1371 Ensoniq drivers - the only ones I tried that do not fscking stutter with DX9!!! WTF is wrong with that? It's too popular card (it was at least) to have a silly problem like that. Yes, it's on separate IRQ. Of course, MS drivers also do not support hardware MIDI synth.
I note it's against American tradition to regard workers coming from across the ocean as human beings, but please - can the summary be a little bit more... humanistic, I dunno. It sounds like H1Bs are in the same league as R2Ds and C3Ps. They don't come to US just for kicks, usually, you know.
Depends on what you backup. If you backup your DVD/DivX movies collection, then undoubtebly, it's too small. But it can be argued that _everything_ will be too small. Now - care to calc how much your documents, and, all right, programs you use take up combined? As for reliability - do you seriously suggest that packing 6x(?) data onto the same are as DVD would be more reliable?
16.2 is the same as 16.7 and equals to 2^24. Depends on whether you speak "binary-close-to-decimal" (like all computer-literate people do:) ) or pure decimal. Pay no attention to it. The fact of life nowdays (AFAIK) is that all the LCDs with 12-16ms response times use temporal dithering, at least those that are in mainstream price range (TN+Film technology if you want to research it).
$(SUBJ). I mean - DVDs (DVD-R/RWs) are just now getting widespread and if in a year's time we see that we all were stupid to move from CDs to DVDs and should've skipped them to get directly to BR then I don't think many would be happy and eager to get f'd up again by BR. Instead I'd expect them to get a bit pessimistic about new media "hypes". Really - is 4.5G (or 9G when (if?) dual-layer kicks in) too small for _anything_ in the nearest 5-7 years? High res video? What if they move from MPEG2 to MPEG4 instead? That would be a kick-ass amount of quality per one DVD. Everything else - like games - either their producers are stupid and don't know how to pack or their wares are really bloated.
First - they have removed "bobbing-and-swaying" when you walk, it's like you're riding on a Segway, just like it was in "Wolfenstein 3d" (1992). People are complaining of motion sickness and I say that IS THE reason! Pretty silly. Then the story is kinda jerky - ok, it starts great, just like adventure game (though "on the rails"). But then all of a sudden (I did not get why) you have to run somewhere with "energetic" music playing in background, then you shoot... Well - I tested it only for one late evening, so I may change my mind later;)
Also - the whole Steam registration business is SO silly. I mean - warezed version is everywhere and runs seemingly problem-free w/o any registration. Oh, well, these days there is a new ironic meaning to the word "paying" in "paying customers".
Having read all the "wowed" reviews I expected a bit more, it's not bad, but not earth-shattering: you do need good hardware (my 8500 is barely usable, even though it's definitely faster than all the 9200s), fully-physical world is not so fully physical, not to say that someone aparently scripted all the holes and ladders - it's all on the rails I tell you. Gordon Freeman is the "Invisible Man" (and totally dumb. Speechless). And of course - the environment is a mix of post-soviet Russia - everything's dirty and broken - and that "Equilibrium" movie (talking man on the screens is a strong flashback:)
Well - maybe I will force myself and finish it though. Some day. I've spent over a year of sporadic play on the first Half-Life after all;)
- There are no just "CRT"s - there are older "shadow mask" CRTs (where luminophore spots are round and arranged in triangles, kinda) and there are ***trons (Trinitrons, Flatrons, etc) where luminophore is arranged in vertical bands. Very different beasts:
- Don't even bother with *trons. They are very harsh on the eyes for "18 hour days", I've never worked on one (or seen one) that would've been suitable for prolonged programming or even office work. This is a TV technology and only good for watching movies or occasionally playing games on your computer.
- "Shadow mask" CRTs are all but close to extinction now. Only Samsung AFAIK manufactures them en-masse. Also - most of them are totally flat or close to that (glass w/ variable thickness - "Dynaflat" in Samsung-speak) which makes it hard to get good focus in the corners (the ray falls at the angle to the surface). Theses are cheap at the expense of quality now. If you see a good sample of such a monitor in the shop (presumably older model, sigh) you should seriously consider getting it while it is still there. I have Samsung 950p at home for three years now and has been reasonably happy with it (and I'm very picky). Or maybe you should not rush, because...
- LCDs now are surprisingly quite ok! Got a Samsung 710N at the work. Good things about it: a) Brightness can be tuned down very well (beware that many LCDs are too bright even at zero brightness). b) Small response times really show - at 12ms smooth text scrolling does not make letters bold like on all the other LCDs I've seen before. c) Good backlight (no flickering). Bad things about it: a) These modern high-speed panels can only show 262k colors or smth and if you have truecolor desktop they will "time-dither" 24bit color to what they can produce, funny thing is that I definitely can see this "micro-flicker"! It even can produce some kind of a white-background texturing if you look at it a certain way. I did not expect that. Though when I switched to 75HZ it is less noticeable than at 60HZ. b) Auto-setup function does not properly adjust the screen. Black letters on gray background drop shadows to the right. A big deal, BUT with proper manual tuning this has gone away. Do the setup without font smoothing and then turn on "ClearType" or your OS's equivalent and don't forget to adjust its smoothing parameters. Yes, smoothing helps on both LCDs and ***trons but completely unnecessary (and even bad if you cannot turn off the "color shift") on "older" technology CRTs.
Well - I have not played anything on this LCD but from what I've seen non-native resolution upscaling works quite ok, so running your FPS at 800x600 should be no problem I guess. Definitely no motion-smearing of the old days (25ms+). And if you have a card capable of running your games at native 1280x1024 there's nothing to talk about at all.
All in all I would've gone with LCD when purchasing a monitor now but I'm also pretty happy with my old CRT. I wouldn't touch a ***tron with a polestick though.
Isn't that what modern (Western at least) concept of warfare looks like? A soldier now does not have to kill anyone! Machines will. One man designed the said machine, others built it, then some "operator" let it on a rage. No one feels morally or otherwise guilty. "Enemy" guys are gettting dead though. If you think that's not the case, well, there are pilot-less planes already and if you track the history of warcraft that's clearly the general tendency. First - you had to use your sword and kill the people in your immediate vicinity, then gunfire - you may be a mile away and you won't hear him screaming, agonizing, whatever. Then aviation came - you push a button and bombs away! You can't control really how much of population dies, not your fault then. And the whole idea of nukes is just that - kill everyone. Now we are close to robotic warfare where you won't even feel guilty of "poluting the environment", wonderful! If you want to get all morally and politic this should be your bigger concern then "Internet controlled rifle" (where the rifle physical owner can be easily held responsible for safety).
I noticed that every x86 CPU architecture in the past decade climbed 4-5 times in MHz from inception to the "end of the line" model: 486 - 25..100(???, 133 is AMD's version and those started higher than 25), Pentium - 50..200, Pentium4 - 1200..3600 now and still has a tad in reserve as shown by extreme overclockers; similarly for AMD, K6 - 166..550; Athlon - 500..2.x(?). And now Pentium2/3 - started at 233 and climbed until around 1300, which is higher than 4/5x. But maybe there's been some really notable arch changes since P2? What're your thoughts?
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we have more alcohol - ethanol or methanol - based cars? I believe in Brazil they have (had?) more than 50% of those? I mean - bio-matter (woods etc) to fuel conversion cycle can be decades or even months which take the tree or plant to grow and days for wood to be processed instead of hundreds of thousands of years for them to rot underground. Also - less polution when burned AFAIK.
Modern games do benefit from having 1GB at least accessible per process and as we can only have 2-3GBs available for apps in 32bit mode... I'd say 2-3 years till 64bits is necessary, not a decade. But then - given the record of 32bits acceptance (x86-32 appeared in bloody 1987!! and Win9x just now has died) - I'm not sure how long till we have x86-64 as a desktop majority.
Except it's not an extension. Resemblance is irrelevant. While we are at it - 32bits x86 instructions set is also not an extension for 16bits x86. Recall addressation(?) rules - EG: mov si, [ax] is illegal in 16bits, mov esi, [eax] is no problem in 32bits etc. Likely there are totally new ideas in AMD64, like they dropped a normal segmentation but there is some new global data area, and there are twice the amount of GP registers. Ok, I just skimmed over the specs but it was enough to see the differences.
Oh, sorry, now I see - they will sell you another same item (book or whatever), not the item you're snapping. As such - you can indeed sell them a barcode of the thing you liked at your friend's (for example) and they will send you the same. Cool.
Arigatou gozaimasu, anou - anata wa nihon-jin desu ka? If so, I wonder why you have .se domain email. If not, why are you so sure about that? Just curious.
Ok, I snap a product in the shop, but can I shove it into my pocket right then? What reason the guards have not to detent me? How does the physical stuff move? If I snap something in my home (and by some strange coincidence post the picture to processing number) would they still bill me?
How do we guesstimate how much money they are gonna loose due to negative reactions (including "word of mouth" and rumours) relative to _stupid_ would-be "pirates" that don't know how to find/use properly cracked version (and that won't probably buy the game anyway)? What is the probability that the "pirates" and P2P nets would be blamed for this losses. Oh, don't bother with the second question. :)
The ad for this slashdot page says - "In Stores Now! Half Life 2. Buy Now!". Ah-hah, right.
Wanderful! :)
Uhm, what college have you studied at? Please share so that others know to avoid it.
Google has oogles of cash, buys MacOS, releases it on PC. Wanna puff?
Generalization - a sure sign of an intellectual. Or not.
I tend to use FirebirdSQL these days. I've used it (IB in fact) before w/ standalone apps and was reasonably happy. But it was some time ago. Then when PHP/MySQL schism hit I tried it w/ PHP and to my amusement it is as fast as MySQL if not faster. Plus - you have transactions and stuff, minus - some syntactic peculiarities (no "SELECT" without "FROM" for example), and autoinc->explicit_generators issue. Otherwise - it rocks! Now I can hardly see a reason to go with MySQL instead of FB. Oh! And if you want to use it elsewhere, not from the web server only, there's no licensing bullshit about that. Nice. Don't forget to try IBExpert for "post-CASE" DB management.
You know, if you run Windows Update you should _carefully_ check what it offers. On my machine it tried to replace all my carefully selected drivers (ATI, modem, sound blaster) drivers with obsolete MS shit. Good thing I noticed.
PS: ATI - Omega Drivers; SB - 5880=ES1371 Ensoniq drivers - the only ones I tried that do not fscking stutter with DX9!!! WTF is wrong with that? It's too popular card (it was at least) to have a silly problem like that. Yes, it's on separate IRQ. Of course, MS drivers also do not support hardware MIDI synth.
When the GWB mod is due out?
Huh! Imagine when on higher levels there are HUNDREDS! of limos with Kennedies rushing at you! Like in old arcades.
I note it's against American tradition to regard workers coming from across the ocean as human beings, but please - can the summary be a little bit more... humanistic, I dunno. It sounds like H1Bs are in the same league as R2Ds and C3Ps. They don't come to US just for kicks, usually, you know.
Depends on what you backup. If you backup your DVD/DivX movies collection, then undoubtebly, it's too small. But it can be argued that _everything_ will be too small. Now - care to calc how much your documents, and, all right, programs you use take up combined? As for reliability - do you seriously suggest that packing 6x(?) data onto the same are as DVD would be more reliable?
16.2 is the same as 16.7 and equals to 2^24. Depends on whether you speak "binary-close-to-decimal" (like all computer-literate people do :) ) or pure decimal. Pay no attention to it. The fact of life nowdays (AFAIK) is that all the LCDs with 12-16ms response times use temporal dithering, at least those that are in mainstream price range (TN+Film technology if you want to research it).
$(SUBJ). I mean - DVDs (DVD-R/RWs) are just now getting widespread and if in a year's time we see that we all were stupid to move from CDs to DVDs and should've skipped them to get directly to BR then I don't think many would be happy and eager to get f'd up again by BR. Instead I'd expect them to get a bit pessimistic about new media "hypes". Really - is 4.5G (or 9G when (if?) dual-layer kicks in) too small for _anything_ in the nearest 5-7 years? High res video? What if they move from MPEG2 to MPEG4 instead? That would be a kick-ass amount of quality per one DVD. Everything else - like games - either their producers are stupid and don't know how to pack or their wares are really bloated.
First - they have removed "bobbing-and-swaying" when you walk, it's like you're riding on a Segway, just like it was in "Wolfenstein 3d" (1992). People are complaining of motion sickness and I say that IS THE reason! Pretty silly. Then the story is kinda jerky - ok, it starts great, just like adventure game (though "on the rails"). But then all of a sudden (I did not get why) you have to run somewhere with "energetic" music playing in background, then you shoot... Well - I tested it only for one late evening, so I may change my mind later ;)
:)
;)
Also - the whole Steam registration business is SO silly. I mean - warezed version is everywhere and runs seemingly problem-free w/o any registration. Oh, well, these days there is a new ironic meaning to the word "paying" in "paying customers".
Having read all the "wowed" reviews I expected a bit more, it's not bad, but not earth-shattering: you do need good hardware (my 8500 is barely usable, even though it's definitely faster than all the 9200s), fully-physical world is not so fully physical, not to say that someone aparently scripted all the holes and ladders - it's all on the rails I tell you. Gordon Freeman is the "Invisible Man" (and totally dumb. Speechless). And of course - the environment is a mix of post-soviet Russia - everything's dirty and broken - and that "Equilibrium" movie (talking man on the screens is a strong flashback
Well - maybe I will force myself and finish it though. Some day. I've spent over a year of sporadic play on the first Half-Life after all
My not so H.O. on this:
- There are no just "CRT"s - there are older "shadow mask" CRTs (where luminophore spots are round and arranged in triangles, kinda) and there are ***trons (Trinitrons, Flatrons, etc) where luminophore is arranged in vertical bands. Very different beasts:
- Don't even bother with *trons. They are very harsh on the eyes for "18 hour days", I've never worked on one (or seen one) that would've been suitable for prolonged programming or even office work. This is a TV technology and only good for watching movies or occasionally playing games on your computer.
- "Shadow mask" CRTs are all but close to extinction now. Only Samsung AFAIK manufactures them en-masse. Also - most of them are totally flat or close to that (glass w/ variable thickness - "Dynaflat" in Samsung-speak) which makes it hard to get good focus in the corners (the ray falls at the angle to the surface). Theses are cheap at the expense of quality now. If you see a good sample of such a monitor in the shop (presumably older model, sigh) you should seriously consider getting it while it is still there. I have Samsung 950p at home for three years now and has been reasonably happy with it (and I'm very picky). Or maybe you should not rush, because...
- LCDs now are surprisingly quite ok! Got a Samsung 710N at the work. Good things about it: a) Brightness can be tuned down very well (beware that many LCDs are too bright even at zero brightness). b) Small response times really show - at 12ms smooth text scrolling does not make letters bold like on all the other LCDs I've seen before. c) Good backlight (no flickering). Bad things about it: a) These modern high-speed panels can only show 262k colors or smth and if you have truecolor desktop they will "time-dither" 24bit color to what they can produce, funny thing is that I definitely can see this "micro-flicker"! It even can produce some kind of a white-background texturing if you look at it a certain way. I did not expect that. Though when I switched to 75HZ it is less noticeable than at 60HZ. b) Auto-setup function does not properly adjust the screen. Black letters on gray background drop shadows to the right. A big deal, BUT with proper manual tuning this has gone away. Do the setup without font smoothing and then turn on "ClearType" or your OS's equivalent and don't forget to adjust its smoothing parameters. Yes, smoothing helps on both LCDs and ***trons but completely unnecessary (and even bad if you cannot turn off the "color shift") on "older" technology CRTs.
Well - I have not played anything on this LCD but from what I've seen non-native resolution upscaling works quite ok, so running your FPS at 800x600 should be no problem I guess. Definitely no motion-smearing of the old days (25ms+). And if you have a card capable of running your games at native 1280x1024 there's nothing to talk about at all.
All in all I would've gone with LCD when purchasing a monitor now but I'm also pretty happy with my old CRT. I wouldn't touch a ***tron with a polestick though.
A return of quality Portman and grits stamp-jokes! Not the inferior "Soviet Russia" or "overlords". Yay!
Isn't that what modern (Western at least) concept of warfare looks like? A soldier now does not have to kill anyone! Machines will. One man designed the said machine, others built it, then some "operator" let it on a rage. No one feels morally or otherwise guilty. "Enemy" guys are gettting dead though. If you think that's not the case, well, there are pilot-less planes already and if you track the history of warcraft that's clearly the general tendency. First - you had to use your sword and kill the people in your immediate vicinity, then gunfire - you may be a mile away and you won't hear him screaming, agonizing, whatever. Then aviation came - you push a button and bombs away! You can't control really how much of population dies, not your fault then. And the whole idea of nukes is just that - kill everyone. Now we are close to robotic warfare where you won't even feel guilty of "poluting the environment", wonderful! If you want to get all morally and politic this should be your bigger concern then "Internet controlled rifle" (where the rifle physical owner can be easily held responsible for safety).
I noticed that every x86 CPU architecture in the past decade climbed 4-5 times in MHz from inception to the "end of the line" model: 486 - 25..100(???, 133 is AMD's version and those started higher than 25), Pentium - 50..200, Pentium4 - 1200..3600 now and still has a tad in reserve as shown by extreme overclockers; similarly for AMD, K6 - 166..550; Athlon - 500..2.x(?). And now Pentium2/3 - started at 233 and climbed until around 1300, which is higher than 4/5x. But maybe there's been some really notable arch changes since P2? What're your thoughts?