""We've fought in wars all over the world and never took any more ground than was necessary to bury our dead."
While this has been true in the 20th century, I can't believe he would say that with a straight face. Was North America completely unpopulated by Native Americans, the French, the English, the Spanish, and Mexico in his version of colonial history? Do the borders that currently describe the United States exist in a timeless continuum?
Actually, OpenGL is just for graphics rendering. The "GL" stands for Graphics Library, IIRC. The game may still use things like DirectSound, DirectSound 3D, DirectInput, and other DX odds and ends. That's why the installer requests that you have DX9.0b on your rig before running the game.
...To Mr. Zdziarski--until his data is independently audited, he's a soapbox blowhard. He may be right on the money with his argumentation, but he really has to get his numbers vetted. Without providing any charts or even mentioning the size of the survey sample, I can't in good conscience recommend the article.
Sure, maybe I should cut him some slack, since he's just one guy collating the data. But maybe he could cut me some slack by gathering resources commensurate to the size and nature of the sample.
This does not mean the game has gone gold or is necessarily going to go gold soon, as I've seen reported since this announcement. Several candidates can and will be delivered to the publisher before one of them gets approved. Granted, since Steam has already preloaded the sounds, textures, and models, the bulk of the game is set in stone. But that still leaves the executable, overall stability, multiplayer, maps, and other QA odds and ends.
...the genre may be a thing of the past, even if its trademarks are gradually being co-opted into the mainstream: Witness Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-nominated Oryx and Crake, for instance...
Hasn't this guy ever heard of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale? Published fifteen years ago, IIRC. Blurb: "respected Canadian poet and novelist Atwood presents here a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives. The tale is told by Offred (read: "of Fred"), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be." link
There was a feature film as well, starring Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, and other fairly well-known actors. This book didn't exactly slip under the radar.
Lemme tell you what. Every genre has an ebb and flow. Every style has its historical nadirs of quality. I mean, for Pete's sake, when's the last time you read a 1940s pulp serial? It was crap back then, and everybody knew it, but it sold and made people money, and that was that until the Futurians came along and got serious. And we had some great socially conscious sci-fi in the 60's and 70's (Stranger in a Strange Land, Gateway, Lord of Light, Dune).
Then it went downhill in the Reagan era, IMHO, and really hasn't bounced back. Ever since the prophets ran out of ideas, and the kids these days get their sci-fi from (honestly) shitty TV and shitty movies, few have picked up the reins. Gotta get kids to stop watching crap like Andromeda, Stargate SG-1, and Enterprise. It's all half-baked. It has no edge. It's watered down. I loved ST:TNG back in the day, but I look back on it now and there aren't a lot of episodes I'd bury with me.
And let's face it, genre fiction is overpoweringly name-oriented. As in, you shop by author name before any other consideration. "Yeah, that book over there looks potentially interesting, but I've never heard of her."
I think the genre also did itself a disfavor by heaping such accolades on American Gods. I know this position probably won't win me many friends, but it's a work that has some excellent moments but a hilariously underwhelming climax and denouement--the same problem I had with Neverwhere. The turn is so miniscule that merely describing my reaction could be qualified as a spoiler. I don't know, I just felt a little burned after a 600-some page build up leading toward a climax about as satisfying as the end of Matrix Revolutions. The book has some interesting ideas and touching moments, but the narrative flow is too episodic and the characters too shallow and uninteresting to me beyond their thumbnail description. If you liked it, more power to you. If you loved it, stop reading this instant and dive into Lord of Light . If you've already read it, read it again.
the Geforce 6800 and ATI X800 both have 6 vertex pipelines and 16 pixel pipelines.
Just a small clarification: The 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra, Radeon X800 XT and X800 XT PE have 16 pixel pipelines. Yes, the other cards have 16 pipelines physically, but they are not functional by default; they did not pass the QA to earn the higher rankings, although modifications can be made to attempt to enable all 16. The vanilla 6800 and the X800 Pro use 12 pixel pipelines.
Is this really useful? I mean, I have never had a problem with my mouse not having the resolution to click the "submit" button.
And the MX1000 won't change this, as it turns out. It's 800 DPI, just like the MX510. I think "20x the tracking of optical mice" refers to how accurately the sensor updates pointer location according to how the mouse is being physically moved. But it won't give you more precise aim.
Re:SP2 Borks iPODS it seems...
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There are many, many reports on iPODLounge (the main iPOD support forum) of people who install SP2, lose their iPOD functionality, and then need to roll back their XP system to pre-SP2 in order to get their iPODS to function again.
I can confirm this. My iPod Mini will not sync with iTunes. Further, iTunes cannot be uninstalled or re-installed. Each of these activities is blocked by an (unhelpfully cryptic) error notification. Attempting to manually install the InstallShield script...produces an error notification. Had to roll back to SP1 to get functionality back.
This does not appear to be a general USB issue, as I'm attempting to sync with FireWire as well, and I have other USB devices connected without issue.
What kills me is how the wonder and magic of the movies I loved is gone. And it's not that I don't crave such experiences still (a good Disney movie like Aladdin or a Looney tunes cartoon still enthralls me), it's just that those things are lacking completely from the prequels.
I'd like to submit that the reason the thrill is gone is due to how much and how often we got hyped up as kids, for those blockbuster summer movies, only to find out we'd been duped into paying to see another expensive but mediocre advertisement for franchise memorabilia. You can only get tricked like that so many times before you finally lose your sense of cinema wonder (although Spiderman 2 came close to resurrecting those old feelings). The anticipation was everything, when we were kids. Now, because of all the commercialized pabulum I sat dutifully through as a teenager, I go out of my way to avoid getting excited about any movie. Fool me once...
Saying you did something on the Internet isn't *quite* the same as having an agent of the RIAA/MPAA logging and tracking the actual illegal files being transferred from IP to IP. Relax.
Why is this story in the Apple category? Sure, the iPod may be considered to be the "gold standard" for music players by many people, but Apple certainly weren't first, and although they have a sexy design and a great UI, there are plenty of competitors who are shipping thousands of units who do everything nearly as well, and some things better, often for a significantly lower price.
Some things better, other things worse. The Rio Karma is probably the closest competitor, but for its relatively iffy hard drive quality.
You know what, though? There's something people forget about when they go from the computer hardware section to the electronics section of the store: warranties. Every single hard drive-based MP3 player on the market that I looked at while making my purchase choice gives you a measly ninety days. Who in the holy hell buys a hard drive with a ninety day warranty? Why is this suddenly okay? Because it's inside a gadget with a familiar corporate logo on it? If Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi et al tried to slap a ninety day warranty on one of their drives, they would be laughed out of the building.
Apple gives its iPods a one year limited warranty, with the option to extend to 2 years for $60. It also has iTunes, the music store, rechargeability through a FireWire or USB port (while playing your music at the same time), a fantastic interface and control scheme, multiple format support, and a few other odds and ends. Like, if someone on my network has iTunes and some music in their library, I can automatically stream it, and check out their playlists, most played songs, etc.. You can copy music from iTunes to your computer with free, third-party software, or replace iTunes altogether. Then there's the wireless speakers. I chose an iPod not because it's hip, but because it's the most complete and most customer-friendly package I could find. This is why you pay more money for one.
Or, I'll go out and buy a 5500 for $76.00 [newegg.com], and play it in medium resolution. Or the best solution of all. I will wait until Christmas, when NVIDIA and ATI bring our their next card, and the 6800 256MB is old news, and can be purchased for $99-$20MIR=$79.
As it turns out, the 5500 is actually a weaker card than the GeForce 4 Ti line. Compare and contrast:
Geforce FX 5500 (the page is titled "5200" but features the 5500 specs)
--Memory bandwidth: 6.4 GB/s --Fill rate: 1.1 billion texels per sec. --Vertices per sec: 68 million
--Memory bandwidth: 8GB/s --Fill rate: 4 billion AA samples/sec. --Vertices per sec: 113 million
And come X-mas, nVidia and ATi will likely come out with 512MB versions of their cards, instead of higher model numbers. It was about a five-month gap between the 128MB and 256MB 9800 Pro.
You'll also likely never see the 6800 GT or Ultra anywhere near $100--not until they're certifiably ancient. 256MB of GDDR3 is expensive, no matter how you slice it. DDR2 currently costs about twice that of DDR1, per megabyte. The price of the card just won't come down that fast. I expect more than a few jaws to drop when the MSRPs for the 512MB cards are revealed.
With Doom3 and HL2 comming out very soon, I am interested to see how this will affect sales in new CPU's and video cards. Will there be a great boost in sales so people can play these games? I for one have just bought a new computer to allow me to play these--although it is a laptop, and I need to get a faster HD for it.. heh
It's been horrendous with video cards, especially the 6800GT OC, which is regarded as Doom 3's "sweet spot" for price-performance ratio. I lucked out, apparently, buying that card right after reading [H]'s review of it. I got one of the last few in stock at chumbo.com (a place I'd never heard of, despite my extensive online hardware shopping).
Now, I got the card for $399.99 and free shipping. Good luck finding it anywhere now, at any price. Even those who ran out of stock have pegged the card at at least $420, with $459 being the new baseline. Sales tax and/or shipping can and will push the total up to $500. I saw one place selling the BFG OC for $525. Best Buy, Chumbo and EVGA appear to be the only places on the Internet that still have the GT variant at $400. The 6800 Ultra is only slightly less impossible to get and is that much more expensive, with the Radeon X800 Pro trailing closely behind that.
Last I heard/saw, the 6800 still needed 2 molex connectors, and took up two expansion slots, sounded like a jet engine, and required a minimum 400 watt power supply.
This turns out not to be the case. The 6800GT uses one Molex, one slot, is not loud, and runs just fine with a 300W PSU or thereabouts. The 6800 Ultra, however, does indeed fit your description, although I have heard no particular complaints about noise.
Hey, fair enough, I know what that's like--I did it myself for a while, for a major computing publication. I'm looking forward to reading it, and I hope he lists min frames. They always do a satsifying job, in my opinion.
But I would not recommend that he publishes benchmarks that he did not do on his own turf, using his own strict and public guidlines, examining IQ and visual glitches, et cetera. I would not want to be in the position of being offered the test results for DooM 3, so I can't judge his decision too harshly. But I don't think I would have been so quick to take the numbers and go with them, nor, respectfully, would I have been caught dead doing so for the publication I worked at.
I have a great amount of respect for hardocp.com, despite Kyle Bennet's occasional frothing rants. I've been reading the site for years. That said, these benchmarks are only partially useful without knowing the minimum framerate. Did it plummet anywhere? Did it only plummet on ATi cards?
Second, they did not run these benchmarks, and they were done at the iD offices: "Today we are sharing with you framerate data that was collected at the id Software offices in Mesquite, Texas. Both ATI and NVIDIA were present for the testing and brought their latest driver sets." It sounds as though Hardocp was not even present for the tests.
Their review of the BFG 6800GT OC convinced me to get that card. This article, however, does not convince me of...much of anything. I do have certain questions about their journalism, but it's best saved for a more appropriate time.
Doom played fine full-screen on a 386/40 with 8 megs of ram (if you had more than 8 megs, you had to disable hidden refresh, so it actually played slower on machines with more memory).
I don't know--I remember struggling mightily on my parents' 386 back in the day. And I'm pretty sure it had the math co-processor. Then again, I think the hard drive might have been DoubleSpaced. At any rate, people upgrade to DVD players, flat-screen TVs, Digital surround, broadband Internet. Maybe not to support a single product, but upgrading hardware for a single product to support a single game doesn't say "I need a life" so much as it says, well, "I need to upgrade, and this is a good reason."
Besides, can you expect a fan of first-person shooters to wait six months while his friends play it? Pick the best book you've ever read, then imagine a hypothetical sequel you couldn't read for six months. Pick your favorite OS, which is hypothetically coming out with a huge upgrade. Now wait six months before you can taste it.
Don't you think that upgrading hardware just for a game sort of says "I need a life"? Wait 6 months. After the initial surge, everyone will be overstock, and prices for better hardware will fall.
If you have such an apparent distaste for gaming and a disgust for its customers, why are you wasting your precious time in this thread?
As graphics become more advanced, you run into a problem a Japanese researcher discovered called the Uncanny Valley which I believe has been mentioned here before. Basically, there is a zone right before true biomechanical and visual accuracy where the viewer's affinity plummets. Thus the success with anthropomorphic game characters--Jak, Sonic, Conker, et al--and the intentionally lowered parallelism in GTA3, Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil...et al. Thus contriubting to the underwhelming sales of Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 (which were also a bit buggy and not sufficiently optimized for the PC).
Despite that, the valley can be overcome by providing a generally lush environment, like in Far Cry and Doom 3. In Deus Ex and Thief 3, the "funereal" nature of the character models stands out like a sore thumb because the environments are relatively middle-of-the-road, Thief 3's lighting model notwithstanding. They *do* look a little creepy and waxy.
However, money has to be made in PC gaming, much of which is pushed by the inevitable upgrade cycle. This is mainly brought on by competing titles and publishers, instead of being demanded or even requested by the buying public. We just want the game to work, really, and looking nice is also good, but not necessary. However, the upgrade cycle creates a cognitive contradiction, where we *need* the games to look nice because we've spent so much money keeping our systems upgraded--a requirement spawned by industry competition. It becomes a vicious cycle--for the gamer. The industry reaps the rewards either way.
But, with the increasingly impressive spec lists on consoles these days, with the price tags remaining relatively static (around $300 at launch), it becomes increasingly difficult to convince the PC gamer to plunk down more money for a videocard than he would pay for both the console and the game. Heck, you can get a GameCube, the game, and a brand-new TV for less than the cost of an X800 XT.
So many people ask, "Will my system run this game?" And it's getting difficult for the undustry to convince them *not* to buy a console, especially when many within it have made that decision already. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 will just work on the Xbox. One disc, no driver issues, and if you find out that you don't like it, you can just return the game or sell it back to the retailer for, typically, twice the money you'd get for the PC version. Or you can rent it for the tenth of the cost of the PC version.
In the end, if the PC gaming industry wants to retain its user base, I think it needs to innovate in design, not in visuals. Easier said than done, granted. But the PC still has capabilities that the consoles can't touch, like online communities, mods, and other various sundry. If a dev can integrate things like patch updates and the above items into the game design, seamlessly, they might be able to keep ahead of the tide. Some of them do these things already, but there needs to be a standard, IMO.
Well I think part of the problem there is that high schools have trouble teaching good novels. I appreciate that kids do need some exposure to classic literature, but in my high school that's like ALL it was. We read book after book after book of "great" literature which more or less meant old, and hard to read. Anything new was crap, anything kids might enjoy was crap. I mean there was like NO sci fi. Well I must ask why that is the case. There is GREAT sci fi. Ender's Game ought to be required reading. It is interesting, easy to read, and speaks to adolescents. This is the kind of book that will make kids want to read, not Great Expectations or Jane Eyre.
Hear, hear. The Stars My Destination, Lord of Light, Stranger in a Strange Land, Gateway, When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress... don't get me started. I found all of these challenging and fascinating. Meanwhile, I struggled mightily through school-proscribed tomes like Moby Dick, Canterbury Tales, and the aforementioned Jane Eyre, to name a few. I'm sure this must break the heart of an English professor, but the truth is that most of the perennially approved tomes do not speak to our life and times. Reading Chaucer was like taking cough syrup. I speak as someone who got a degree in creative writing, for what that's worth.
The problem with sci-fi is an academic perception as stiff and dusty as the books they pummel us with. It's still seen as a Buck-Rogers-laser-gun-alien-invasion-from-Jupiter, with a little condescending Freudian interpretation for good measure. Penile spaceships! To be fair, the overwhelming bulk of SF books on the shelf are generally graced with space ships and people in jumpsuits, with an interchangeable backdrop of galaxies, planets and stars, so the publishers aren't doing us many favors.
On a side note--but still relevant to the topic--I hate it how people say that the Harry Potter books get kids to read. They don't. They get kids to read Harry Potter books. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell Harry Potter books. You want child-accessible books that can actually spark an interest in the habit of reading, try Roald Dahl.
I do believe the Internet has impacted both our print reading habits and our ability to write well. Anyone who doubts the downturn can check the American Bureau of Circulations database, which tracks single-copy and subscription sales for, I don't know, a lot of magazines. It's not free, unfortunately, but the numbers are there. Whichever rag has managed to stay afloat has done so by maintaining subs, not by single-copy sales. In other words, they retain people who already read, while losing new customers to (1) another medium or (2) an aggressive competitor who will also eventually experience decline as its readership moves on to the next big thing. Again, there's the theme of retention of the core with the inevitable trickle of attrition.
Microsoft bundle pieces of software made by Microsoft designed to be integrated with the system in a way that unrelated functions depend on said bundled app, making it impossible to remove.
Not only that, but the bundled applets are often designed by MS to tie the consumer to MS's retail environment, assuming they haven't bought the competitor outright. WMP9 vs. RealMedia Player, IE vs. Netscape, built-in file compression vs. WinZip. Further, the integration of MSN.com with IE, which you also get bumped to every time you log out of Hotmail. And MSN Search as the default in IE. MS makes a makes a bunch of free, bundled things that are just good enough to keep the general Windows-using public from being curious about alternatives.
Non tech: Maxim and Stuff really do have pretty interesting/funny articles (and other things too)
I used to think so, too. But I read Maxim and Playboy in the same day, and FHM, and Gear on another day, and I keep coming back to Playboy, even though I'm probably smack-dab in the lad mag demographic (at 25 years of age). The lad mags tend to have a Rolling Stone-level of ads before you get to the table of contents, then you skip over the TOC because you were flipping through too fast. I think Maxim and its brethren have fantastic, consistently hilarious photo captions, but the brevity and lack of depth of the articles is underwhelming, for me. I can't count how many lad mags articles I've turned to that offered advice on this or that but ended up being a page or two of "funny" tips. YMMV.
For years when Nvidia was the only real manufacturer of GPU's, instead of resting on their laurels they pushed ahead and released new products month after month after month. A lot of companies were prevented from competing with Nvidia had raised the bar dramatically.
As it turns out, although they released a new card roughly every six months, each card was just a refined iteration of the previous one. This was why ATI was able to blow their doors off when they unleashed the 9700 Pro--precisely because nVidia [i]was[/i] resting on its laurels...gracing each new card with a few new features and faster clock speeds, but never really pushing the envelope. The reason it was so difficult to compete with them wasn't the quality of their lineup or how often it was improved, but the sheer size of the install base. ATI got its foot in the door with the Radeon 8500, and the rest was history.
That said, I agree that MS is attempting to throw a monkeywrench in Sony's works, the same way ATI did back in Fall 2002: up the ante after the competitor would be able to efficiently change gears.
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While this has been true in the 20th century, I can't believe he would say that with a straight face. Was North America completely unpopulated by Native Americans, the French, the English, the Spanish, and Mexico in his version of colonial history? Do the borders that currently describe the United States exist in a timeless continuum?
Doom3 is based on OpenGL, not DirectX-Anything.
Actually, OpenGL is just for graphics rendering. The "GL" stands for Graphics Library, IIRC. The game may still use things like DirectSound, DirectSound 3D, DirectInput, and other DX odds and ends. That's why the installer requests that you have DX9.0b on your rig before running the game.
Sure, maybe I should cut him some slack, since he's just one guy collating the data. But maybe he could cut me some slack by gathering resources commensurate to the size and nature of the sample.
This does not mean the game has gone gold or is necessarily going to go gold soon, as I've seen reported since this announcement. Several candidates can and will be delivered to the publisher before one of them gets approved. Granted, since Steam has already preloaded the sounds, textures, and models, the bulk of the game is set in stone. But that still leaves the executable, overall stability, multiplayer, maps, and other QA odds and ends.
Hasn't this guy ever heard of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale? Published fifteen years ago, IIRC. Blurb: "respected Canadian poet and novelist Atwood presents here a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives. The tale is told by Offred (read: "of Fred"), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be." link
There was a feature film as well, starring Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, and other fairly well-known actors. This book didn't exactly slip under the radar.
Lemme tell you what. Every genre has an ebb and flow. Every style has its historical nadirs of quality. I mean, for Pete's sake, when's the last time you read a 1940s pulp serial? It was crap back then, and everybody knew it, but it sold and made people money, and that was that until the Futurians came along and got serious. And we had some great socially conscious sci-fi in the 60's and 70's (Stranger in a Strange Land, Gateway, Lord of Light, Dune).
Then it went downhill in the Reagan era, IMHO, and really hasn't bounced back. Ever since the prophets ran out of ideas, and the kids these days get their sci-fi from (honestly) shitty TV and shitty movies, few have picked up the reins. Gotta get kids to stop watching crap like Andromeda, Stargate SG-1, and Enterprise. It's all half-baked. It has no edge. It's watered down. I loved ST:TNG back in the day, but I look back on it now and there aren't a lot of episodes I'd bury with me.
And let's face it, genre fiction is overpoweringly name-oriented. As in, you shop by author name before any other consideration. "Yeah, that book over there looks potentially interesting, but I've never heard of her."
I think the genre also did itself a disfavor by heaping such accolades on American Gods. I know this position probably won't win me many friends, but it's a work that has some excellent moments but a hilariously underwhelming climax and denouement--the same problem I had with Neverwhere. The turn is so miniscule that merely describing my reaction could be qualified as a spoiler. I don't know, I just felt a little burned after a 600-some page build up leading toward a climax about as satisfying as the end of Matrix Revolutions. The book has some interesting ideas and touching moments, but the narrative flow is too episodic and the characters too shallow and uninteresting to me beyond their thumbnail description. If you liked it, more power to you. If you loved it, stop reading this instant and dive into Lord of Light . If you've already read it, read it again.
Just a small clarification: The 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra, Radeon X800 XT and X800 XT PE have 16 pixel pipelines. Yes, the other cards have 16 pipelines physically, but they are not functional by default; they did not pass the QA to earn the higher rankings, although modifications can be made to attempt to enable all 16. The vanilla 6800 and the X800 Pro use 12 pixel pipelines.
And the MX1000 won't change this, as it turns out. It's 800 DPI, just like the MX510. I think "20x the tracking of optical mice" refers to how accurately the sensor updates pointer location according to how the mouse is being physically moved. But it won't give you more precise aim.
I can confirm this. My iPod Mini will not sync with iTunes. Further, iTunes cannot be uninstalled or re-installed. Each of these activities is blocked by an (unhelpfully cryptic) error notification. Attempting to manually install the InstallShield script...produces an error notification. Had to roll back to SP1 to get functionality back.
This does not appear to be a general USB issue, as I'm attempting to sync with FireWire as well, and I have other USB devices connected without issue.
I'd like to submit that the reason the thrill is gone is due to how much and how often we got hyped up as kids, for those blockbuster summer movies, only to find out we'd been duped into paying to see another expensive but mediocre advertisement for franchise memorabilia. You can only get tricked like that so many times before you finally lose your sense of cinema wonder (although Spiderman 2 came close to resurrecting those old feelings). The anticipation was everything, when we were kids. Now, because of all the commercialized pabulum I sat dutifully through as a teenager, I go out of my way to avoid getting excited about any movie. Fool me once...
Saying you did something on the Internet isn't *quite* the same as having an agent of the RIAA/MPAA logging and tracking the actual illegal files being transferred from IP to IP. Relax.
Some things better, other things worse. The Rio Karma is probably the closest competitor, but for its relatively iffy hard drive quality.
You know what, though? There's something people forget about when they go from the computer hardware section to the electronics section of the store: warranties. Every single hard drive-based MP3 player on the market that I looked at while making my purchase choice gives you a measly ninety days. Who in the holy hell buys a hard drive with a ninety day warranty? Why is this suddenly okay? Because it's inside a gadget with a familiar corporate logo on it? If Maxtor, Seagate, Hitachi et al tried to slap a ninety day warranty on one of their drives, they would be laughed out of the building.
Apple gives its iPods a one year limited warranty, with the option to extend to 2 years for $60. It also has iTunes, the music store, rechargeability through a FireWire or USB port (while playing your music at the same time), a fantastic interface and control scheme, multiple format support, and a few other odds and ends. Like, if someone on my network has iTunes and some music in their library, I can automatically stream it, and check out their playlists, most played songs, etc.. You can copy music from iTunes to your computer with free, third-party software, or replace iTunes altogether. Then there's the wireless speakers. I chose an iPod not because it's hip, but because it's the most complete and most customer-friendly package I could find. This is why you pay more money for one.
"Artificial Pr0n"?
God, I need a girlfriend.
Or, I'll go out and buy a 5500 for $76.00 [newegg.com], and play it in medium resolution. Or the best solution of all. I will wait until Christmas, when NVIDIA and ATI bring our their next card, and the 6800 256MB is old news, and can be purchased for $99-$20MIR=$79.
As it turns out, the 5500 is actually a weaker card than the GeForce 4 Ti line. Compare and contrast:
Geforce FX 5500 (the page is titled "5200" but features the 5500 specs)
--Memory bandwidth: 6.4 GB/s
--Fill rate: 1.1 billion texels per sec.
--Vertices per sec: 68 million
GeForce4 Ti:
(8x AGP GeForce4 Ti4200):
--Memory bandwidth: 8GB/s
--Fill rate: 4 billion AA samples/sec.
--Vertices per sec: 113 million
And come X-mas, nVidia and ATi will likely come out with 512MB versions of their cards, instead of higher model numbers. It was about a five-month gap between the 128MB and 256MB 9800 Pro.
You'll also likely never see the 6800 GT or Ultra anywhere near $100--not until they're certifiably ancient. 256MB of GDDR3 is expensive, no matter how you slice it. DDR2 currently costs about twice that of DDR1, per megabyte. The price of the card just won't come down that fast. I expect more than a few jaws to drop when the MSRPs for the 512MB cards are revealed.
It's been horrendous with video cards, especially the 6800GT OC, which is regarded as Doom 3's "sweet spot" for price-performance ratio. I lucked out, apparently, buying that card right after reading [H]'s review of it. I got one of the last few in stock at chumbo.com (a place I'd never heard of, despite my extensive online hardware shopping).
Now, I got the card for $399.99 and free shipping. Good luck finding it anywhere now, at any price. Even those who ran out of stock have pegged the card at at least $420, with $459 being the new baseline. Sales tax and/or shipping can and will push the total up to $500. I saw one place selling the BFG OC for $525. Best Buy, Chumbo and EVGA appear to be the only places on the Internet that still have the GT variant at $400. The 6800 Ultra is only slightly less impossible to get and is that much more expensive, with the Radeon X800 Pro trailing closely behind that.
It's ugly.
This turns out not to be the case. The 6800GT uses one Molex, one slot, is not loud, and runs just fine with a 300W PSU or thereabouts. The 6800 Ultra, however, does indeed fit your description, although I have heard no particular complaints about noise.
But I would not recommend that he publishes benchmarks that he did not do on his own turf, using his own strict and public guidlines, examining IQ and visual glitches, et cetera. I would not want to be in the position of being offered the test results for DooM 3, so I can't judge his decision too harshly. But I don't think I would have been so quick to take the numbers and go with them, nor, respectfully, would I have been caught dead doing so for the publication I worked at.
Second, they did not run these benchmarks, and they were done at the iD offices: "Today we are sharing with you framerate data that was collected at the id Software offices in Mesquite, Texas. Both ATI and NVIDIA were present for the testing and brought their latest driver sets." It sounds as though Hardocp was not even present for the tests.
Their review of the BFG 6800GT OC convinced me to get that card. This article, however, does not convince me of...much of anything. I do have certain questions about their journalism, but it's best saved for a more appropriate time.
Doom played fine full-screen on a 386/40 with 8 megs of ram (if you had more than 8 megs, you had to disable hidden refresh, so it actually played slower on machines with more memory).
I don't know--I remember struggling mightily on my parents' 386 back in the day. And I'm pretty sure it had the math co-processor. Then again, I think the hard drive might have been DoubleSpaced. At any rate, people upgrade to DVD players, flat-screen TVs, Digital surround, broadband Internet. Maybe not to support a single product, but upgrading hardware for a single product to support a single game doesn't say "I need a life" so much as it says, well, "I need to upgrade, and this is a good reason."
Besides, can you expect a fan of first-person shooters to wait six months while his friends play it? Pick the best book you've ever read, then imagine a hypothetical sequel you couldn't read for six months. Pick your favorite OS, which is hypothetically coming out with a huge upgrade. Now wait six months before you can taste it.
Don't you think that upgrading hardware just for a game sort of says "I need a life"? Wait 6 months. After the initial surge, everyone will be overstock, and prices for better hardware will fall.
If you have such an apparent distaste for gaming and a disgust for its customers, why are you wasting your precious time in this thread?
As graphics become more advanced, you run into a problem a Japanese researcher discovered called the Uncanny Valley which I believe has been mentioned here before. Basically, there is a zone right before true biomechanical and visual accuracy where the viewer's affinity plummets. Thus the success with anthropomorphic game characters--Jak, Sonic, Conker, et al--and the intentionally lowered parallelism in GTA3, Prince of Persia, Beyond Good and Evil...et al. Thus contriubting to the underwhelming sales of Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 (which were also a bit buggy and not sufficiently optimized for the PC).
Despite that, the valley can be overcome by providing a generally lush environment, like in Far Cry and Doom 3. In Deus Ex and Thief 3, the "funereal" nature of the character models stands out like a sore thumb because the environments are relatively middle-of-the-road, Thief 3's lighting model notwithstanding. They *do* look a little creepy and waxy.
However, money has to be made in PC gaming, much of which is pushed by the inevitable upgrade cycle. This is mainly brought on by competing titles and publishers, instead of being demanded or even requested by the buying public. We just want the game to work, really, and looking nice is also good, but not necessary. However, the upgrade cycle creates a cognitive contradiction, where we *need* the games to look nice because we've spent so much money keeping our systems upgraded--a requirement spawned by industry competition. It becomes a vicious cycle--for the gamer. The industry reaps the rewards either way.
But, with the increasingly impressive spec lists on consoles these days, with the price tags remaining relatively static (around $300 at launch), it becomes increasingly difficult to convince the PC gamer to plunk down more money for a videocard than he would pay for both the console and the game. Heck, you can get a GameCube, the game, and a brand-new TV for less than the cost of an X800 XT.
So many people ask, "Will my system run this game?" And it's getting difficult for the undustry to convince them *not* to buy a console, especially when many within it have made that decision already. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 will just work on the Xbox. One disc, no driver issues, and if you find out that you don't like it, you can just return the game or sell it back to the retailer for, typically, twice the money you'd get for the PC version. Or you can rent it for the tenth of the cost of the PC version.
In the end, if the PC gaming industry wants to retain its user base, I think it needs to innovate in design, not in visuals. Easier said than done, granted. But the PC still has capabilities that the consoles can't touch, like online communities, mods, and other various sundry. If a dev can integrate things like patch updates and the above items into the game design, seamlessly, they might be able to keep ahead of the tide. Some of them do these things already, but there needs to be a standard, IMO.
Hear, hear. The Stars My Destination, Lord of Light, Stranger in a Strange Land, Gateway, When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress... don't get me started. I found all of these challenging and fascinating. Meanwhile, I struggled mightily through school-proscribed tomes like Moby Dick, Canterbury Tales, and the aforementioned Jane Eyre, to name a few. I'm sure this must break the heart of an English professor, but the truth is that most of the perennially approved tomes do not speak to our life and times. Reading Chaucer was like taking cough syrup. I speak as someone who got a degree in creative writing, for what that's worth.
The problem with sci-fi is an academic perception as stiff and dusty as the books they pummel us with. It's still seen as a Buck-Rogers-laser-gun-alien-invasion-from-Jupiter, with a little condescending Freudian interpretation for good measure. Penile spaceships! To be fair, the overwhelming bulk of SF books on the shelf are generally graced with space ships and people in jumpsuits, with an interchangeable backdrop of galaxies, planets and stars, so the publishers aren't doing us many favors.
On a side note--but still relevant to the topic--I hate it how people say that the Harry Potter books get kids to read. They don't. They get kids to read Harry Potter books. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell Harry Potter books. You want child-accessible books that can actually spark an interest in the habit of reading, try Roald Dahl.
I do believe the Internet has impacted both our print reading habits and our ability to write well. Anyone who doubts the downturn can check the American Bureau of Circulations database, which tracks single-copy and subscription sales for, I don't know, a lot of magazines. It's not free, unfortunately, but the numbers are there. Whichever rag has managed to stay afloat has done so by maintaining subs, not by single-copy sales. In other words, they retain people who already read, while losing new customers to (1) another medium or (2) an aggressive competitor who will also eventually experience decline as its readership moves on to the next big thing. Again, there's the theme of retention of the core with the inevitable trickle of attrition.
You think the richest man in the world lets Slate run itself?
Not only that, but the bundled applets are often designed by MS to tie the consumer to MS's retail environment, assuming they haven't bought the competitor outright. WMP9 vs. RealMedia Player, IE vs. Netscape, built-in file compression vs. WinZip. Further, the integration of MSN.com with IE, which you also get bumped to every time you log out of Hotmail. And MSN Search as the default in IE. MS makes a makes a bunch of free, bundled things that are just good enough to keep the general Windows-using public from being curious about alternatives.
For the unitiated, this business method is commonly known as "vertical integration".
I used to think so, too. But I read Maxim and Playboy in the same day, and FHM, and Gear on another day, and I keep coming back to Playboy, even though I'm probably smack-dab in the lad mag demographic (at 25 years of age). The lad mags tend to have a Rolling Stone-level of ads before you get to the table of contents, then you skip over the TOC because you were flipping through too fast. I think Maxim and its brethren have fantastic, consistently hilarious photo captions, but the brevity and lack of depth of the articles is underwhelming, for me. I can't count how many lad mags articles I've turned to that offered advice on this or that but ended up being a page or two of "funny" tips. YMMV.
That said, I agree that MS is attempting to throw a monkeywrench in Sony's works, the same way ATI did back in Fall 2002: up the ante after the competitor would be able to efficiently change gears.
Good result, confirm prediction: Tons of those I am sure. Discovery of Uranus comes to mind.
I can verify that no more than a dozen people have seen it, thankyouverymuch!