You mean the genre of no save points and long [pointless] quests to power up an imaginary character?
Yeah, I fucking hope so.
I'm all for fantasy role playing. It's fun, it's healthy.
But if you have to play for hours straight to "enjoy it" it's clearly not good. I mean many drug addicts enjoy their drug. Doesn't mean it's good for them. All in moderation [same goes for the "legal" drugs like tobacco and caffeine].
In the BBS day we had a solution which was to time limit your connection. Of course that was because most BBSes had only 1 line [sometimes a couple] and wanted to share with others.
So why not make RPGs where you can only play 1 hour per 24 hour period?
In the grand scheme of things it makes sales sense since the player progresses EVEN SLOWER through the game and it has the social benefit of not having losers play 24 hours a day.
Of course this won't stop people from making 24 accounts... I guess you can limit it to one per credit card or something...
Point is, it's trivial to solve WITHOUT modifying gameplay.
See a normal person would just get annoyed and stop playing...:-)
Sorry, but "game lengtheners" [a technique not limited to RPGs] are really annoying and drive me to stop playing a game [or at least the way intended].
A "game lengthener" is a device in a game [e.g. "strategy"] that doesn't add to the story line but takes a long time to complete [usually because you have to redo the challenge over and over and over]. GTA is famous for those with timed missions were your margin of error can be as short as a matter of SECONDS in a mission that can last minutes.
Most puzzle type games use these as well. You can tell you've been had when either you realize you're on a mission for the 18th time or you finish the game in a weekend and go "that's all?" In the case of GTA I rarely do missions and mostly just drive around blowing shit up [and finding bugs in the engine]. The missions are mostly retarded anyways "pick this up, blow that up, catch this guy who is 84 miles away".
In games like WoW where you have to "gain EXP" to level up and some missions clearly require high levels it's just a matter of getting you hooked to play more and more and eventually pay Blizzard more monthly fees.
Personally if I were to sit down to "power up" something it would be my mind by reading more books not my imaginary character on a game server...
I don't buy it [literally and figuratively]. I have made stupid choices in my life [e.g. buying video games over the net when I really shouldn't have] but I know when to quit. I pull myself away from it and do something else.
These kids getting super addicted to WoW and other RPGs are just kids who don't have proper perspective on life. They place an over abundance of importance and value in the games when personal and professional development is more important.
For instance, I don't spend all day on slashdot or gaming because I have projects to work on that help pay the rent, buy food, get invites to conferences, etc. I realize that thre are MORE IMPORTANT things than gaming.
For young kids I totally blame the parents. It's really quite simple. Unplug the computer, lock up the HD, etc. If an 8 yr old kid can run around buying computer parts that you locked up you're giving your kids too much money or you should teach them stealing is wrong. When I was a young kid my parents would just put the NES away when I had other things to do [homework, piano, cubs/scouts, etc]. I don't view them as evil or mean for it and I look back and say "thanks for helping me balance my life".
You'd be wrong. The two L2 caches on the AMDx2 allow them to have access in parallel. Had they been unified you'd either have to make it dual-ported [e.g. larger and possibly slower] or have access in sequence [e.g. double the latency].
If you're running tasks that share [e.g. write to] the same small pocket of memory you're right. However, many tasks don't do that. Often a server will spawn an entire new thread [e.g. unique stack and heap objects] to handle connections.
It also makes sense in the desktop scene. Why would X11 and XMMS be accessing the same code? One is a media player and the other is a windows server. They have different data objects in their own respective process spaces. So a unified cache doesn't help. Also keep in mind that smart OSes keep tasks in a given CPU so the cache doesn't get killed as quickly.
Hahaha, nice. I'd say wait for the xbox. Let yer friends buy it then lets see what the fallout is. Could be the first round of 360s are bunk [or the games suck] who knows.
That and I'm tired of their little "supply stunts". I want a 360,..., I also want an Apple laptop [to do MacOS testing of my libraries] but I don't just go around "paying anything" because the say so. If the xbox360 costs 400$ USD this xmas [for the one with the 20GB drive] then they can keep it. It's a fucking toy and I won't pay nearly $500 CAD for it.
Get your sister to ask for a shuffle and be done with:-)
How about this? You're 17 or 18 years old. Grow up. If you can't be bothered to pay attention in class you fail.
I'm all for helping students who ask for help [before the end of the semester that is] but if you think you can just show up, play GBA all day and still pass you're in for a surprise...
Oh wait, that's what I did...
Of course I'm sorta of a "self-study" type.... hehehe:-)
On my prescott box I've noticed marginal improvements in latency on things like compiles. A build of LTC takes ~37 seconds and around 34 with HT turned on. It takes about 16 with my AMDx2 and about 19 with the Intel 820.
[Both the prescott and AMDx2 have PC-3200 CAS3 memory, the 820 has 533Mhz DDR II].
But then you get into the camp of single task things [e.g. bulk encryption] and the performance hit is there.
You're better off getting at least a dual-core P4 [e.g. 820] rather than an HT enabled P4.
The AMDx2 has separate L2 caches per core, they can communicate via a dedicated HT link [between 3.2 and 4 GiB/sec] and share one memory controller.
So if one core requests cache line $x and the other core has it the data will be sent over the internal HT link and not even hit the memory bus. The memory controller is pipelined [I suspect] so even while the L2 fulfillment is going on the memory bus can be busy fetching another cache line.
The HT cores have *one* L2 cache per physical core [so for instance, a dual-core HT processor has 4 "logical processors" but only 2 L2 caches]. The prescott [and later] cores have a deep memory read/write pipelines to queue up many memory operations at once. The dual-core P4s have their own cache per physical core which communicates on a FSB that is shared between everything [including the memory bus].
Though in reality the dual-core P4 [e.g. 8xx series] do achieve 2x performance on totally unrelated [and not memory bound] tasks. For instance, doing RSA computations with CRT in two threads gets you a result with half the latency. [same is true for the AMDx2].
So the dual-core P4 isn't a bad buy if money is strapped. You'll get more performance from an AMDx2 though as the individual cores are so much faster.
Not really. You're trying to run two threads inside the L1 caches, the decoder bandwidth, etc. So the 16KB of cache turns back into [effectively] 8KB.
The P4 can issue 3 uOPs per cycle but IIRC only from one thread. They alternate [stalls free up slots though]. Also the decoder can only decode ONE x86 opcode per cycle. Then you have expensive memory ports. Fetches to L2 [or alternatively to system memory] are done one at a time per thread [with deep queues which were lengthened in the Prescott core].
Aside from the stronger ALU and the fact there are two of them, the AMDx2 also benefits from having dedicated caches per core and a dedicated HT bus between the cores that doesn't sit on the external bus. If you want SMP performance just get opterons or amdx2 cores. Really that simple.
We all know HT was a kludge hack at the last minute to gain some marketting press. If Intel really wanted to boost the performance of the P4 they would strengthen the ALU [at a cost of clock frequency]. If a 2.2Ghz AMD64 can ROUTINELY beat a 3.2Ghz P4 then a 2.5Ghz optimized P4 variant [with a stronger ALU] could hold it's own.
Oh wait, that already exists. It's called the Pentium M.:-)
Oh, don't get me wrong. The historic implications are there.
My point though is for something that stores several [to many] orders of magnitude more bits of entropy per inch, at higher transrates [and more access times] it's hard to compare. I mean a recording cylinder is probably a 1,000 times less dense than a CD. It can't be read a 1,000 times without wearing out. You can't transfer several MiB/sec off it, etc, etc, etc.
A hard drive can store even more, even faster and with even more accesses during the lifespan of the device.
Yeah but then they come bundled with some cheapas broadcom 4400 series eth card that doesn't work in linux or whatever.
Why don't laptops just come with a couple mini-pci, maybe a mini pci-e, cpu, ram and HD ports and just let you sort it out. Make the motherboard replaceable [and the lcd] and voila. The only significant challenge is matching the lid to the case. Maybe sell the case and make the LCD insertable.
Point is I should be able to build my own laptop given the major components. I wouldn't mind a new Intel Pentium M based laptop if I got to choose what else went in it.
The macmini must be different or my "mac compatible logitech keyboard" must be defective. Because I was TOTALLY unable to use ANY of the boot keyboard combos on it.
I'm sure OF is great, unfortunately I was totally unable to use it.
Gentoo built fine on my Mac Mini. It's the boot loader that failed to work. And *all* of the key combos I read about online [none of which were documented by Apple btw] failed to work.
Once the boot loader was installed [and failed to boot linux] the box was hosed. The Mini would always load the bootloader [regardless of whether my gentoo boot cd was in or the OSX install cd] and the keyboard combos failed to persuade it.
That's what I call OS lockin.
At least on the PC it's a simple matter of changing boot order in the BIOS even if the disk is hosed you're not lost.
Actually I'd say Apple should come under fire for locking users into MacOS. I bought a computer not an OS. I want to run whatever I want on my Mac.
Installing things like "yaboot" on a MacMini can be really dangerous. Following the instructions to the T I ended up with a MacMini that I couldn't boot, boot from CD, etc [the lack of a BIOS is really annoying btw]. Fortunately I bought the thing at Best Buy and they allowed me to return a "non booting box":-)
Point is, Apple is just as guilty as say Dell for forcing users to use one particular OS.
Why not go after these Dell, Lenovo, etc for only selling wintel machines?
I want a laptop but I don't want to be told what processor or OS I should run. Shouldn't I be able to determine that?
So if the distributors don't want to embrace openness the solution isn't to excuse Microsofts evil deeds, it's to continue punishing those that would abuse their position in the market to continue a train of vendor lockin.
One day laptop parts will be like desktop parts, e.g. go to the store and get a standard 15" laptop "Shell", snap on a standard 15" LCD, put in a motherboard of your choosing, etc... One day. Sadly nowhere in the near future... But when that happens I'll be uber happy.
That's a bit misleading. Nobody is massproducing cylinder readers today. I suppose in 50 years you could build a "compact disk" reader.
Though the longevity of the media is another issue. Keep in mind we are not comparing the same thing in that regard. The density of bits per inch [yes, you could say those analogue recordings are storing "information" and hence can be coded in bits] is FAR less than that of a CD or hard disk.
Let's see a 400GB cylinder made in 1890?
I'm sure it's possible to make a 1MB CD that is HIGHLY redundant [you could do this in software] and likely to last a long time even as pits and scratches form on the media. If you have 650 copies [or 700 or whatever] of the same megabyte on the disk the likelyhood of them all being unreadable [with specialized equipment] is fairly low.
Average 8-track [because I won't be bothered to figure this out for a cylinder but the same point applies] ran at most 60 minutes [or so]. With a dynamic range of about 60dB or so [10-bits] with a freq response bandwidth of about 12Khz [24,000 samples per second] that's 29.29KiB/sec [thereabouts] , say 60KiB/sec for stereo. That's 210.93MiB of storage, at ~3.5ips that's 13500 inches of tape in bands of 1/16th of an inch for a total of 843 in^2 of material or a density of 2,098,943 bits per inch.
A CD can store about 695MiB of data in far less area with a density of about 46 million pits per in^2.
So you're saying something that stores 23 times the information having a lower longevity is a negative quality? It's even worse for a cylinder where the ratio is likely over 100x in favour of CDs [let alone DVDs].
All I'm saying is you can make a DVD or CD have an exteremely long shelf life if you record with pre-1920 densities:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Your idea would kill the genre.
You mean the genre of no save points and long [pointless] quests to power up an imaginary character?
Yeah, I fucking hope so.
I'm all for fantasy role playing. It's fun, it's healthy.
But if you have to play for hours straight to "enjoy it" it's clearly not good. I mean many drug addicts enjoy their drug. Doesn't mean it's good for them. All in moderation [same goes for the "legal" drugs like tobacco and caffeine].
Tom
In the BBS day we had a solution which was to time limit your connection. Of course that was because most BBSes had only 1 line [sometimes a couple] and wanted to share with others.
... I guess you can limit it to one per credit card or something...
So why not make RPGs where you can only play 1 hour per 24 hour period?
In the grand scheme of things it makes sales sense since the player progresses EVEN SLOWER through the game and it has the social benefit of not having losers play 24 hours a day.
Of course this won't stop people from making 24 accounts
Point is, it's trivial to solve WITHOUT modifying gameplay.
Tom
See a normal person would just get annoyed and stop playing ... :-)
Sorry, but "game lengtheners" [a technique not limited to RPGs] are really annoying and drive me to stop playing a game [or at least the way intended].
A "game lengthener" is a device in a game [e.g. "strategy"] that doesn't add to the story line but takes a long time to complete [usually because you have to redo the challenge over and over and over]. GTA is famous for those with timed missions were your margin of error can be as short as a matter of SECONDS in a mission that can last minutes.
Most puzzle type games use these as well. You can tell you've been had when either you realize you're on a mission for the 18th time or you finish the game in a weekend and go "that's all?" In the case of GTA I rarely do missions and mostly just drive around blowing shit up [and finding bugs in the engine]. The missions are mostly retarded anyways "pick this up, blow that up, catch this guy who is 84 miles away".
In games like WoW where you have to "gain EXP" to level up and some missions clearly require high levels it's just a matter of getting you hooked to play more and more and eventually pay Blizzard more monthly fees.
Personally if I were to sit down to "power up" something it would be my mind by reading more books not my imaginary character on a game server...
Tom
I don't buy it [literally and figuratively]. I have made stupid choices in my life [e.g. buying video games over the net when I really shouldn't have] but I know when to quit. I pull myself away from it and do something else.
These kids getting super addicted to WoW and other RPGs are just kids who don't have proper perspective on life. They place an over abundance of importance and value in the games when personal and professional development is more important.
For instance, I don't spend all day on slashdot or gaming because I have projects to work on that help pay the rent, buy food, get invites to conferences, etc. I realize that thre are MORE IMPORTANT things than gaming.
For young kids I totally blame the parents. It's really quite simple. Unplug the computer, lock up the HD, etc. If an 8 yr old kid can run around buying computer parts that you locked up you're giving your kids too much money or you should teach them stealing is wrong. When I was a young kid my parents would just put the NES away when I had other things to do [homework, piano, cubs/scouts, etc]. I don't view them as evil or mean for it and I look back and say "thanks for helping me balance my life".
Tom
When I was in Paris [last november] I was making calls in the subway without excessive noise or trouble.
:-)
I'm glad they're getting wireless though. So I'm not complaining, just comparing
Tom
You'd be wrong. The two L2 caches on the AMDx2 allow them to have access in parallel. Had they been unified you'd either have to make it dual-ported [e.g. larger and possibly slower] or have access in sequence [e.g. double the latency].
If you're running tasks that share [e.g. write to] the same small pocket of memory you're right. However, many tasks don't do that. Often a server will spawn an entire new thread [e.g. unique stack and heap objects] to handle connections.
It also makes sense in the desktop scene. Why would X11 and XMMS be accessing the same code? One is a media player and the other is a windows server. They have different data objects in their own respective process spaces. So a unified cache doesn't help. Also keep in mind that smart OSes keep tasks in a given CPU so the cache doesn't get killed as quickly.
Tom
Is that the guy on the corner with the bin full of $2 DVDs?
Tom
Hahaha, nice. I'd say wait for the xbox. Let yer friends buy it then lets see what the fallout is. Could be the first round of 360s are bunk [or the games suck] who knows.
..., I also want an Apple laptop [to do MacOS testing of my libraries] but I don't just go around "paying anything" because the say so. If the xbox360 costs 400$ USD this xmas [for the one with the 20GB drive] then they can keep it. It's a fucking toy and I won't pay nearly $500 CAD for it.
:-)
That and I'm tired of their little "supply stunts". I want a 360,
Get your sister to ask for a shuffle and be done with
Tom
How about this? You're 17 or 18 years old. Grow up. If you can't be bothered to pay attention in class you fail.
:-)
I'm all for helping students who ask for help [before the end of the semester that is] but if you think you can just show up, play GBA all day and still pass you're in for a surprise...
Oh wait, that's what I did...
Of course I'm sorta of a "self-study" type.... hehehe
Class of '04 y0!
Tom
On my prescott box I've noticed marginal improvements in latency on things like compiles. A build of LTC takes ~37 seconds and around 34 with HT turned on. It takes about 16 with my AMDx2 and about 19 with the Intel 820.
[Both the prescott and AMDx2 have PC-3200 CAS3 memory, the 820 has 533Mhz DDR II].
But then you get into the camp of single task things [e.g. bulk encryption] and the performance hit is there.
You're better off getting at least a dual-core P4 [e.g. 820] rather than an HT enabled P4.
Tom
Twice the ALU power and half the power.
;-)
That's not a hard sell. If you're doing number crunching of any kind in a professional setting an AMDx2 or opt will pay for itself quickly.
Oh that and you're not funding the never ending chain of stupidity that is the P4 design team
Tom
The AMDx2 has separate L2 caches per core, they can communicate via a dedicated HT link [between 3.2 and 4 GiB/sec] and share one memory controller.
So if one core requests cache line $x and the other core has it the data will be sent over the internal HT link and not even hit the memory bus. The memory controller is pipelined [I suspect] so even while the L2 fulfillment is going on the memory bus can be busy fetching another cache line.
The HT cores have *one* L2 cache per physical core [so for instance, a dual-core HT processor has 4 "logical processors" but only 2 L2 caches]. The prescott [and later] cores have a deep memory read/write pipelines to queue up many memory operations at once. The dual-core P4s have their own cache per physical core which communicates on a FSB that is shared between everything [including the memory bus].
Though in reality the dual-core P4 [e.g. 8xx series] do achieve 2x performance on totally unrelated [and not memory bound] tasks. For instance, doing RSA computations with CRT in two threads gets you a result with half the latency. [same is true for the AMDx2].
So the dual-core P4 isn't a bad buy if money is strapped. You'll get more performance from an AMDx2 though as the individual cores are so much faster.
Tom
Not really. You're trying to run two threads inside the L1 caches, the decoder bandwidth, etc. So the 16KB of cache turns back into [effectively] 8KB.
:-)
The P4 can issue 3 uOPs per cycle but IIRC only from one thread. They alternate [stalls free up slots though]. Also the decoder can only decode ONE x86 opcode per cycle. Then you have expensive memory ports. Fetches to L2 [or alternatively to system memory] are done one at a time per thread [with deep queues which were lengthened in the Prescott core].
Aside from the stronger ALU and the fact there are two of them, the AMDx2 also benefits from having dedicated caches per core and a dedicated HT bus between the cores that doesn't sit on the external bus. If you want SMP performance just get opterons or amdx2 cores. Really that simple.
We all know HT was a kludge hack at the last minute to gain some marketting press. If Intel really wanted to boost the performance of the P4 they would strengthen the ALU [at a cost of clock frequency]. If a 2.2Ghz AMD64 can ROUTINELY beat a 3.2Ghz P4 then a 2.5Ghz optimized P4 variant [with a stronger ALU] could hold it's own.
Oh wait, that already exists. It's called the Pentium M.
Tom
I'm getting a 360 already, shut up about the slashvertisements!!! ... Though I'll wait till next year [e.g. March] to pick mine up.
Tom
Oh, don't get me wrong. The historic implications are there.
My point though is for something that stores several [to many] orders of magnitude more bits of entropy per inch, at higher transrates [and more access times] it's hard to compare. I mean a recording cylinder is probably a 1,000 times less dense than a CD. It can't be read a 1,000 times without wearing out. You can't transfer several MiB/sec off it, etc, etc, etc.
A hard drive can store even more, even faster and with even more accesses during the lifespan of the device.
Tom
Yeah but then they come bundled with some cheapas broadcom 4400 series eth card that doesn't work in linux or whatever.
Why don't laptops just come with a couple mini-pci, maybe a mini pci-e, cpu, ram and HD ports and just let you sort it out. Make the motherboard replaceable [and the lcd] and voila. The only significant challenge is matching the lid to the case. Maybe sell the case and make the LCD insertable.
Point is I should be able to build my own laptop given the major components. I wouldn't mind a new Intel Pentium M based laptop if I got to choose what else went in it.
Tom
The macmini must be different or my "mac compatible logitech keyboard" must be defective. Because I was TOTALLY unable to use ANY of the boot keyboard combos on it.
I'm sure OF is great, unfortunately I was totally unable to use it.
Tom
Gentoo built fine on my Mac Mini. It's the boot loader that failed to work. And *all* of the key combos I read about online [none of which were documented by Apple btw] failed to work.
Once the boot loader was installed [and failed to boot linux] the box was hosed. The Mini would always load the bootloader [regardless of whether my gentoo boot cd was in or the OSX install cd] and the keyboard combos failed to persuade it.
That's what I call OS lockin.
At least on the PC it's a simple matter of changing boot order in the BIOS even if the disk is hosed you're not lost.
Tom
Like not track me in PUBLIC with my Cell phone BROADCASTING DATA ...
... they need to get their heads checked.
If people think this is a privacy violation
It's times like this I *know* activist groups need to get a hobby to carry them through the dry spells.
Tom
Actually I'd say Apple should come under fire for locking users into MacOS. I bought a computer not an OS. I want to run whatever I want on my Mac.
:-)
Installing things like "yaboot" on a MacMini can be really dangerous. Following the instructions to the T I ended up with a MacMini that I couldn't boot, boot from CD, etc [the lack of a BIOS is really annoying btw]. Fortunately I bought the thing at Best Buy and they allowed me to return a "non booting box"
Point is, Apple is just as guilty as say Dell for forcing users to use one particular OS.
I bought a ***COMPUTER*** not a MacOS box.
Tom
Why not go after these Dell, Lenovo, etc for only selling wintel machines?
I want a laptop but I don't want to be told what processor or OS I should run. Shouldn't I be able to determine that?
So if the distributors don't want to embrace openness the solution isn't to excuse Microsofts evil deeds, it's to continue punishing those that would abuse their position in the market to continue a train of vendor lockin.
One day laptop parts will be like desktop parts, e.g. go to the store and get a standard 15" laptop "Shell", snap on a standard 15" LCD, put in a motherboard of your choosing, etc... One day. Sadly nowhere in the near future... But when that happens I'll be uber happy.
Tom
That's a bit misleading. Nobody is massproducing cylinder readers today. I suppose in 50 years you could build a "compact disk" reader.
:-)
Though the longevity of the media is another issue. Keep in mind we are not comparing the same thing in that regard. The density of bits per inch [yes, you could say those analogue recordings are storing "information" and hence can be coded in bits] is FAR less than that of a CD or hard disk.
Let's see a 400GB cylinder made in 1890?
I'm sure it's possible to make a 1MB CD that is HIGHLY redundant [you could do this in software] and likely to last a long time even as pits and scratches form on the media. If you have 650 copies [or 700 or whatever] of the same megabyte on the disk the likelyhood of them all being unreadable [with specialized equipment] is fairly low.
Average 8-track [because I won't be bothered to figure this out for a cylinder but the same point applies] ran at most 60 minutes [or so]. With a dynamic range of about 60dB or so [10-bits] with a freq response bandwidth of about 12Khz [24,000 samples per second] that's 29.29KiB/sec [thereabouts] , say 60KiB/sec for stereo. That's 210.93MiB of storage, at ~3.5ips that's 13500 inches of tape in bands of 1/16th of an inch for a total of 843 in^2 of material or a density of 2,098,943 bits per inch.
A CD can store about 695MiB of data in far less area with a density of about 46 million pits per in^2.
So you're saying something that stores 23 times the information having a lower longevity is a negative quality? It's even worse for a cylinder where the ratio is likely over 100x in favour of CDs [let alone DVDs].
All I'm saying is you can make a DVD or CD have an exteremely long shelf life if you record with pre-1920 densities
Tom
as someone of low intelligence who has setup working gentoo boxes of all shapes and sizes...
shut the fuck up.
If I can figure out how to use gentoo linux and you can't you're either really stupid or I'm really smart.
Linux is ready for mainstream use. The problem is people like you keep spreading the "linux is so hard" myth.
You can keep saying that till your blue in the face, but people like me who adapt and change will be the ones to survive and prosper.
Oh and I hate you. I've never met you but I hate you just the same.
Tom
Yes, I believe all security problems are caused by people sending in the wrong size to recv().
That is the only possible way a program can be flawed.
Tom
Ah, ok. Faith restored in system. :-)
:-)
I used itunes once [was playing with a friends ipod]. It looked neato.
I like my mp3cd player. And the wad of cash I have in my pocket.
Oh who am I kidding, I don't have money, and that joke isn't even original [sorry PA]. But I do have an mp3cd player
Tom