Turning your monitor brightness up / reducing texture detail for a higher frame rate does not let you see through walls. Have you ever played Counter-Strike? In CS bullets can go through walls - fire up the see through walls drivers, grab a high powered rifle and you can pick people off all over the map. CS is the most popular FPS game on the internet by a very long way, and these drivers can ruin the game for a whole server's worth of people thanks to just one cheater.
You make a very good point. Unfortunately, reading the spiel on the Asus product page makes it abundantly clear that they are releasing these drivers not to give people more control but to enable them to cheat in games (both online and offline). As a large and supposedly "responsible" hardware company they should know better.
Up until 11am Monday morning (when I was made redundant - yet another victim of the dot com crash) I worked for Wireplay - an online gaming service provider in the UK. The Wireplay community is truly enormous - our forums have nearly 2 million posts and we run a huge array of leagues, tournaments and other competitions.
You may laugh at online gaming but it is an incredibly rewarding hobby. I've been involved with online games for over two years now, having run a 500 player league in my spare time before landing a job at Wireplay. The average gamer in the league I was running would spend 2 or 3 hours a night online doing online gaming related things - playing on servers, talking with their clan mates on IRC or discussing league matters on the forums. Many people are even more commited - one UK clan that started out on Wireplay has now started playing in American leagues which requires them to get a team of 8 or 9 people together for amatch at 3am in the morning.
Online gaming is not just a casual passtime any more. It is a full blown hobby, comparable to real life sports such as golf, football or whatever. Leagues are hottly contested, friendships are forged and a whole internet sub culture has built up around gaming. All You Base is an obvious example of the kind of thing I'm talking about - an in joke fostered by the online gaming community which went on to (breifly) take the net by storm.
Cheating is a huge problem in online games. It destroys trust and means that truly talented gamers are often branded "cheats". It disrupts leagues, ruins people's enjoyment and can kill off entire communities. The new asus drivers are actively encouraging this kind of behaviour. They actually say as much on their site:
Not only will novice players acquire a faster learning curve when playing 3D games with this secret weapon, the professional gamers will also have a chance to test their skills with a new challenge in online gaming tournaments.
Secret Weapon sure sounds like a cheat to me.
I'll admit that the wireframe mode could be interesting, but it seems to me that Asus' primary reason for releasing these drivers is not as an educational tool (the claim on their website saying "It also allows users to learn more about 3D graphics rendering" seems pretty flimsy to me) but as a tool for cheating.
The company I work for went the other way and tried to stick EVERYTHING on the same domain name. Talk about a chatoic shambles... Personally I see nothing wrong with companies using more than one domain as long as they do it in a logical manner - for example as a network of related sites like SitePoint.
The overall network has close to 2,000 devices on it, split between embedded computers and Windows NT-based computers. However, the NT computers aren't your usual office applications. "No one is using these NT machines to run Word or Excel," Tamalunas says. "These are all custom applications for our attractions that we wrote ourselves."
Does that mean the rides are gonna be controlled by windows NT? I don't know ab out you, but I'm not overly keen on letting that particular operating system swing me around at 40 miles per hour...
Still, this guy seem pretty insistent that the thing's based solidly on linux technology. It's basically down to whtere you're going to go with common sense or believe the conspiracy theory.... I'm highly skeptical but it's still an interesting thought.
Someone I work with is on the microsoft development circuit (fully subscribed member of MSDN, codes stuff involving multiplayer gaming systems so he's been to a few of their presentations). I don't know him very well, but a friend of mine who works with him says that he went to one of their "closed presentations" and discovered that the X-Box operating system is based on Linux. Obviously there's very little reason for anyone to believe this statement but personally I trust the source it came from.
Slashdot Mirror
Turning your monitor brightness up / reducing texture detail for a higher frame rate does not let you see through walls. Have you ever played Counter-Strike? In CS bullets can go through walls - fire up the see through walls drivers, grab a high powered rifle and you can pick people off all over the map. CS is the most popular FPS game on the internet by a very long way, and these drivers can ruin the game for a whole server's worth of people thanks to just one cheater.
You make a very good point. Unfortunately, reading the spiel on the Asus product page makes it abundantly clear that they are releasing these drivers not to give people more control but to enable them to cheat in games (both online and offline). As a large and supposedly "responsible" hardware company they should know better.
You may laugh at online gaming but it is an incredibly rewarding hobby. I've been involved with online games for over two years now, having run a 500 player league in my spare time before landing a job at Wireplay. The average gamer in the league I was running would spend 2 or 3 hours a night online doing online gaming related things - playing on servers, talking with their clan mates on IRC or discussing league matters on the forums. Many people are even more commited - one UK clan that started out on Wireplay has now started playing in American leagues which requires them to get a team of 8 or 9 people together for amatch at 3am in the morning.
Online gaming is not just a casual passtime any more. It is a full blown hobby, comparable to real life sports such as golf, football or whatever. Leagues are hottly contested, friendships are forged and a whole internet sub culture has built up around gaming. All You Base is an obvious example of the kind of thing I'm talking about - an in joke fostered by the online gaming community which went on to (breifly) take the net by storm.
Cheating is a huge problem in online games. It destroys trust and means that truly talented gamers are often branded "cheats". It disrupts leagues, ruins people's enjoyment and can kill off entire communities. The new asus drivers are actively encouraging this kind of behaviour. They actually say as much on their site:
Secret Weapon sure sounds like a cheat to me.I'll admit that the wireframe mode could be interesting, but it seems to me that Asus' primary reason for releasing these drivers is not as an educational tool (the claim on their website saying "It also allows users to learn more about 3D graphics rendering" seems pretty flimsy to me) but as a tool for cheating.
I've ranted enough...
Skunkeh
Could this be the new Indrema?
The company I work for went the other way and tried to stick EVERYTHING on the same domain name. Talk about a chatoic shambles... Personally I see nothing wrong with companies using more than one domain as long as they do it in a logical manner - for example as a network of related sites like SitePoint.
exactly :)
Now that's scary!
Bah - who needs non-geek friends anyway :o)
/me shrugs You're probably right :o)
Still, this guy seem pretty insistent that the thing's based solidly on linux technology. It's basically down to whtere you're going to go with common sense or believe the conspiracy theory.... I'm highly skeptical but it's still an interesting thought.
Intriguing or what?
That article suggests these sites tend not to have any links to contact the author (among other clues). Anyone spotted any dodgy sites yet?