Thanks for having common sense. Not all of us are fortunate enough to have enough money to burn on a GeForce 4 Ti4600 to run Quake 3 at 400FPS. Some of us are content with a mere 200FPS that an integrated GF4MX will provide.
Six months down the road when Doom 3 is out, those who don't go for bloody overkill now will have the last laugh when they have enough spare cash to spend on the latest and greatest video hardware.
>>Don't judge a HDD by the brand alone. It's the model/batch that counts.
True. Many still condemn IBM for a bad batch of "Deathstar" 40GXPs, but I still think the GXP line is still very good.
The WDDs I've seen dead were from a bunch of machines at work, I believe they came from old Dell workstations which were presumably all the same model. The sheer volume of broken harddrives was terrifying. We also had a lot of Compaq workstations that used Quantum SCSI harddrives which ran at higher RPMs and produced lots more heat. But the number of dead Quantums was nowhere close to the number of dead WDDs. We were even confident enough in the used Quantums to add them to our personal machines when we needed more space.
>>Trouble is: seems MOST of them suddenly shifting to 1 year warranties. Not a good sign.
This could mean one of two things--They want to fire a bunch of tech support guys so they can drop prices or they are losing confidence in their own products. Personally, I'd be more inclined to buy a harddrive with a long warrenty (5+ years) even if it cost me $30 or $40 more. Data loss can easily cost more than that in the time it takes to recover from backups or re-write lost work. At least when a company has a long warrenty for their product they are usually confident enough that the product will last that long.
Seagate owns. Those Barracuda IV's are one of the 'older' 80GB HDDs on the market and I still prefer them over new harddrives from Western Digital and Samsung. They're just well-built drives that I can depend on, as well as a number of my friends who have bought them. IBM's are still great too, but I'm uncertain as to what to think of Hitatchi's aquisition of IBM's hard drive technology.
On a side note: NEVER EVER buy a Western Digital. Those are the most unreliable pieces of crap ever. I'm sorry if I sound like a troll, but I've personally seen more broken WD hard drives than all other brand HDDs combined.
Holy crap, I wasn't really serious. And yes, I knew about the Quadro switch for some time. Guess what? Chipmakers like AMD and Intel sometimes market their products as something else than what they really are. Such examples include the Celeron 300A and C333 which were famous for being overclockable to 450MHz and 500MHz. Why? Because they were just underclocked versions of faster CPUs. Neither Intel nor nVidia count on their customers being smart enough to figure out the tricks to unleash the full potential of their products, and for the most part they're right. Or perhaps they simply know OEMs like HP and Dell aren't going to overclock their products. It's just cheaper for them to castrate a fast product rather than produce two signifficantly different products.
So tell me, what is your response to the legal issues that other posters are talking about? You're so smart that you can simplify the whole issue in an if-else statement, so you must be smart enough to decipher the legal jargon.
He might also need to tinker with AGP strength, like going from 4x to 2x. The Gentoo page linked to earlier has some suggestions on improving stability.
I used a GeForce 3 on a dual-AMD system on a Tyan Thunder K7 without problems. I was able to run SPEC benchmarks as well as Q3 (/r_smp 1) without problems. I hope that helps.
Check. The game owns in the demo levels, I can't wait to see what else they have and try out more modes of play. Bombing Run is fun if you have at least 10 players, which is perfect for small LAN parties.
Why do we like to buy new games? Because we're bored of playing the same thing for three years. Simple as that really. Change is good. I bought Q3 as well, specifically the Loki boxed version. However, you can only play a game for so long before becoming bored of it.
Why should they rush the Hammer when the Itanium is failing as is? They know they can't push people to use their 64-bit capabilities, just like people didn't switch to Alphas. Squeeze every ounce of strength from the Athlon as they possibly can for now. Let Intel push the IA64 standard on everyone first to create a demand to migrate from 32-bit to 64-bit. That's where AMD plans to make their killing.
I would imagine it would be better to release Hammer ASAP and create the 64-bit market themselves. Then again, I don't know the logistics required for such a launch, nor do I know exactly how much better, if any better, x86-64 would perform. Let's face it, not many people care about 64-bit versus 32-bit, they only know what the dork at CompUSA tells them. And if Hammers can't outscore P4's in the 32-bit apps that very short-sighted people care about, then there is really no place for Hammer in the consumer market.
From what I've heard, mostly from internet gossip, is that AMD is having problems making Hammer scale high enough to beat the P4 in 32-bit apps, although it only requires roughly 1 Hammer MHz to beat 3 P4 MHz. I've also heard that AMD is having problems making Hammers run above 800MHz. With the expected debut of the P4 at clock speeds above 3GHz, the Hammer doesn't stand much of a chance in 32-bit apps.
In short, don't expect to see Hammers until Intel manages to salvage the Itanic.
I agree. with RoundSparrow on this one. People always bring down companies like Redhat and Transgaming when they try to make a buck or two. These companies need to earn revenue somehow, and panhandling is not a permanent solution.
Maybe once Windows is dead and there's no more competition from MS, then we can focus more on ethics. But for now, it's about gaining the necessary monetary resources to fund programmers.
Agreed. Games like CStrike which try to compensate for lag make the game so unfair! You think you're getting out of the line of fire by walking behind a wall, but then you suddenly drop dead when you think you're safe (And I'm not talking about assault rifles in that game).
The best on-line multiplayer experiences I've had were with Threewave Q2 and Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. In both cases, your ping was directly responsible for how far you had to manually compensate. It was consistent and it was fair. If you were dead, you knew it right away. With newer games, it feels like someone else is aiming for you.
Good reasons. I don't think Transgaming is being evil or anything, they just can't afford the legal muscle required to fend for themselves should someone try to sue them. I don't blame them for being paranoid. I see a lot of contradictions reading user feedback on/. Everyone rants about how horrible the DMCA is, and I won't argue with them on that. But then they go off and complain about a company who is taking necessary precautions to avoid being prosecuted under the DMCA. Some day the DMCA may be repealed, but for now we just have to live with it. We can't expect the few commercial developers the Linux communty has to put their jobs at risk simply to 'do the right thing' or 'stand up for what we believe in.' Welcome to Corporate America. They are no match for lawyers from companies like Vivendi, Sony, Geffen, etc. And even if these companies aren't American, most of their money comes from America so they can't just ignore American law.
I subscribed for three months ($15) once I got Max Payne working with their source. The game only took a few hours out of my spare time (Spread over a couple weeks) to complete, but it was well worth the money for the full three months. The price difference didn't really matter to me. I picked the game up cheap long after it's initial release, so the price I paid for the game + WineX was less than what I would have paid had I been able to rush out to buy / play the game at it's initial release.
Anyway, I think Transgaming is doing a very good thing. Anything that helps people make the transition from Windows to any form of Unix is good, IMO. Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of you readers who are going to try to create some oddball scenario in which it could be a bad thing. Try not to make yourselves look too stupid.
I don't think Transgaming is out to make a killing. Their licenses are cheap and they know their jobs are reasonably likely to become obsolete within a few years should more game developers start putting their games out for Linux as well as Mac and Windows platforms. I won't compare them to Loki, but I do think that like Loki we'll later look back on Transgaming's work from today and see the positive impact it has. They're a catalyst for gaming in Linux, and I think those who want to play a game in Linux should head straight to their source download page and try it out, then get a license if it works.
...mean absolutely nothing, as ATi doesn't even have their own driver set out for Linux.
I've heard some good things about DRI, but nobody using ATi hardware that I know has been able to tell me with a straight face that their card performs as well in Linux as it does in Windows like nVidia cards do.
There is no set method for playing the game. Like Starcraft, once you get a couple of basic units out then it's all up to the player to control their fate. You don't even need a large army to overwhelm your foe if you can manage a few units intelligently.
As a beta tester, I've been playing the game for months. The final version was released to the beta testers. So here's my review:
Great game! Only three things wrong with it:
1. The human archmage casts blizzard way too fast. It should require more mana to cast, or should take longer to cool down.
2. Starfall is way too powerful against buildings. It's fine against humans since it's stopped reasonably easily, but it's pretty lame how you can sneak a priestess into an enemy base while they're distracted and completely level it with a single starfall. It would be great if starfall only did half damage to buildings. It would still take out towers, but wouldn't destroy barracks and town halls.
3. Offensive towers are LAME! In Starcraft, it was a lot more difficult to OT, even with Protoss. At least then you either had to: a) build on creep with zerg b) fill a bunker with marines c) build a pylon first to make canons And in Starcraft, 'towers' were much easier to defeat. In Warcraft, however, towers are not only inexpensive, but are extremely difficult to take down without siege units (Which all require upgrading the town center first). They should make it much easier to take down towers without siegecraft. This won't hurt using them for defense since you can place them behind other structures to prevent non-siege units from reaching them early in the game.
The unit cap in the game should be changable. I suspect they only allow 90 control points because the game is graphically intense and they didn't want to alienate those without extremely fast hardware. However, for those of us fortunate enough to own GHz+ machines with GeForce 2 or better graphics hardware, it would be nice to be able to be able to use more units.
Other than those four things, it's a very fun game. I highly recommend that everyone interested in the RTS genre try it. As for bnetd, well, we all know that was just their (failed) attempt to curb piracy during the beta test. I'm confident that the suit will be dropped.
FAA, triple-head, etc. are all totally meaningless buzz phrases until Matrox can put together a killer set of Linux drivers. That's why nVidia dominates the graphics market--they actually give a damn about their customers, even if they are a small minority. Until Matrox or ATI can show such commitment, I'm buying nVidia graphics hardware.
Closed source drivers or not, I don't care. I just want a card that will run as well in Linux as it does in Windows, and nVidia's pulled through on that. Open-source drivers would be nice, but I'm not going to nitpick until nVidia shows signs of weak Linux support.
That's exactly it. He wanted to compare the native Linux version with the WineX emulated Windows version and the native Windows version. As you can see from the benchmarks, the native Linux version was quite a bit faster.
On the contrary, I think they'd be rather mal-adjusted to coldness. After an immeasurable amount of time spent navigating the searing hot brimstone, I'd imagine those damned would be rather accustomed to the heat.
You have no idea who your enemy is, and will always fail in your attempts to defeat him. Has history taught you nothing?
Personally, I'm against US action against the Arabs. Well, perhaps for Bin Laden's head on silver platter and a bloodbath involving those involved with the Sept. 11 attacks would be nice, but I'm confident that the others will do plenty to kill each other through religion-fueled mayhem. And once western money dries up like the oil wells in a few decades, the situation will be really amusing. Governments and leaders who base their administration on money from the oil will fall, the people will be thrown into an even more chaotic state, and I'll be watching it unfold on the TV a hemisphere away. It'll be like a large-scale "Celebrity Boxing" match.
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Oh shut the f*** up, Erik Hendriks ownz j00!
Thanks for having common sense. Not all of us are fortunate enough to have enough money to burn on a GeForce 4 Ti4600 to run Quake 3 at 400FPS. Some of us are content with a mere 200FPS that an integrated GF4MX will provide.
Six months down the road when Doom 3 is out, those who don't go for bloody overkill now will have the last laugh when they have enough spare cash to spend on the latest and greatest video hardware.
>>Don't judge a HDD by the brand alone. It's the model/batch that counts.
True. Many still condemn IBM for a bad batch of "Deathstar" 40GXPs, but I still think the GXP line is still very good.
The WDDs I've seen dead were from a bunch of machines at work, I believe they came from old Dell workstations which were presumably all the same model. The sheer volume of broken harddrives was terrifying. We also had a lot of Compaq workstations that used Quantum SCSI harddrives which ran at higher RPMs and produced lots more heat. But the number of dead Quantums was nowhere close to the number of dead WDDs. We were even confident enough in the used Quantums to add them to our personal machines when we needed more space.
>>Trouble is: seems MOST of them suddenly shifting to 1 year warranties. Not a good sign.
This could mean one of two things--They want to fire a bunch of tech support guys so they can drop prices or they are losing confidence in their own products. Personally, I'd be more inclined to buy a harddrive with a long warrenty (5+ years) even if it cost me $30 or $40 more. Data loss can easily cost more than that in the time it takes to recover from backups or re-write lost work. At least when a company has a long warrenty for their product they are usually confident enough that the product will last that long.
Seagate owns. Those Barracuda IV's are one of the 'older' 80GB HDDs on the market and I still prefer them over new harddrives from Western Digital and Samsung. They're just well-built drives that I can depend on, as well as a number of my friends who have bought them. IBM's are still great too, but I'm uncertain as to what to think of Hitatchi's aquisition of IBM's hard drive technology.
On a side note: NEVER EVER buy a Western Digital. Those are the most unreliable pieces of crap ever. I'm sorry if I sound like a troll, but I've personally seen more broken WD hard drives than all other brand HDDs combined.
Holy crap, I wasn't really serious. And yes, I knew about the Quadro switch for some time. Guess what? Chipmakers like AMD and Intel sometimes market their products as something else than what they really are. Such examples include the Celeron 300A and C333 which were famous for being overclockable to 450MHz and 500MHz. Why? Because they were just underclocked versions of faster CPUs. Neither Intel nor nVidia count on their customers being smart enough to figure out the tricks to unleash the full potential of their products, and for the most part they're right. Or perhaps they simply know OEMs like HP and Dell aren't going to overclock their products. It's just cheaper for them to castrate a fast product rather than produce two signifficantly different products.
So tell me, what is your response to the legal issues that other posters are talking about? You're so smart that you can simplify the whole issue in an if-else statement, so you must be smart enough to decipher the legal jargon.
How would you know? I thought their drivers were closed source.
He might also need to tinker with AGP strength, like going from 4x to 2x. The Gentoo page linked to earlier has some suggestions on improving stability.
I used a GeForce 3 on a dual-AMD system on a Tyan Thunder K7 without problems. I was able to run SPEC benchmarks as well as Q3 (/r_smp 1) without problems. I hope that helps.
TV-out worked beautifully on my Asus V8200 Deluxe (GF3) as well as my Leadtek A250 ultra TD. You just have to edit your X config file correctly.
In monitors:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "TV"
VendorName "Unknown"
ModelName "Unknown"
HorizSync 30-50
VertRefresh 60
EndSection
in driver options:
Option "TVOutFormat" "COMPOSITE"
# Option "Connectedmonitor" "TV"
(Remove the hash if you want X output to the TV)
and finally, screen:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "screen2"
Device "NVIDIA GeForce4 (generic)"
Monitor "TV"
DefaultColorDepth 24
Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "800x600" "640x480"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubSection
EndSection
You can view my entire working XF86Config-4 file here.
Hope that helps. Otherwise you can try the official support forum here.
Check. The game owns in the demo levels, I can't wait to see what else they have and try out more modes of play. Bombing Run is fun if you have at least 10 players, which is perfect for small LAN parties.
Why do we like to buy new games? Because we're bored of playing the same thing for three years. Simple as that really. Change is good. I bought Q3 as well, specifically the Loki boxed version. However, you can only play a game for so long before becoming bored of it.
Specify that you run it in Linux when you register.
Why should they rush the Hammer when the Itanium is failing as is? They know they can't push people to use their 64-bit capabilities, just like people didn't switch to Alphas. Squeeze every ounce of strength from the Athlon as they possibly can for now. Let Intel push the IA64 standard on everyone first to create a demand to migrate from 32-bit to 64-bit. That's where AMD plans to make their killing.
I would imagine it would be better to release Hammer ASAP and create the 64-bit market themselves. Then again, I don't know the logistics required for such a launch, nor do I know exactly how much better, if any better, x86-64 would perform. Let's face it, not many people care about 64-bit versus 32-bit, they only know what the dork at CompUSA tells them. And if Hammers can't outscore P4's in the 32-bit apps that very short-sighted people care about, then there is really no place for Hammer in the consumer market.
From what I've heard, mostly from internet gossip, is that AMD is having problems making Hammer scale high enough to beat the P4 in 32-bit apps, although it only requires roughly 1 Hammer MHz to beat 3 P4 MHz. I've also heard that AMD is having problems making Hammers run above 800MHz. With the expected debut of the P4 at clock speeds above 3GHz, the Hammer doesn't stand much of a chance in 32-bit apps.
In short, don't expect to see Hammers until Intel manages to salvage the Itanic.
I agree. with RoundSparrow on this one. People always bring down companies like Redhat and Transgaming when they try to make a buck or two. These companies need to earn revenue somehow, and panhandling is not a permanent solution.
Maybe once Windows is dead and there's no more competition from MS, then we can focus more on ethics. But for now, it's about gaining the necessary monetary resources to fund programmers.
Agreed. Games like CStrike which try to compensate for lag make the game so unfair! You think you're getting out of the line of fire by walking behind a wall, but then you suddenly drop dead when you think you're safe (And I'm not talking about assault rifles in that game).
The best on-line multiplayer experiences I've had were with Threewave Q2 and Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. In both cases, your ping was directly responsible for how far you had to manually compensate. It was consistent and it was fair. If you were dead, you knew it right away. With newer games, it feels like someone else is aiming for you.
Good reasons. I don't think Transgaming is being evil or anything, they just can't afford the legal muscle required to fend for themselves should someone try to sue them. I don't blame them for being paranoid. I see a lot of contradictions reading user feedback on /. Everyone rants about how horrible the DMCA is, and I won't argue with them on that. But then they go off and complain about a company who is taking necessary precautions to avoid being prosecuted under the DMCA. Some day the DMCA may be repealed, but for now we just have to live with it. We can't expect the few commercial developers the Linux communty has to put their jobs at risk simply to 'do the right thing' or 'stand up for what we believe in.' Welcome to Corporate America. They are no match for lawyers from companies like Vivendi, Sony, Geffen, etc. And even if these companies aren't American, most of their money comes from America so they can't just ignore American law.
I subscribed for three months ($15) once I got Max Payne working with their source. The game only took a few hours out of my spare time (Spread over a couple weeks) to complete, but it was well worth the money for the full three months. The price difference didn't really matter to me. I picked the game up cheap long after it's initial release, so the price I paid for the game + WineX was less than what I would have paid had I been able to rush out to buy / play the game at it's initial release.
Anyway, I think Transgaming is doing a very good thing. Anything that helps people make the transition from Windows to any form of Unix is good, IMO. Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of you readers who are going to try to create some oddball scenario in which it could be a bad thing. Try not to make yourselves look too stupid.
I don't think Transgaming is out to make a killing. Their licenses are cheap and they know their jobs are reasonably likely to become obsolete within a few years should more game developers start putting their games out for Linux as well as Mac and Windows platforms. I won't compare them to Loki, but I do think that like Loki we'll later look back on Transgaming's work from today and see the positive impact it has. They're a catalyst for gaming in Linux, and I think those who want to play a game in Linux should head straight to their source download page and try it out, then get a license if it works.
...mean absolutely nothing, as ATi doesn't even have their own driver set out for Linux.
I've heard some good things about DRI, but nobody using ATi hardware that I know has been able to tell me with a straight face that their card performs as well in Linux as it does in Windows like nVidia cards do.
Please explain what "their way" is.
There is no set method for playing the game. Like Starcraft, once you get a couple of basic units out then it's all up to the player to control their fate. You don't even need a large army to overwhelm your foe if you can manage a few units intelligently.
As a beta tester, I've been playing the game for months. The final version was released to the beta testers. So here's my review:
Great game! Only three things wrong with it:
1. The human archmage casts blizzard way too fast. It should require more mana to cast, or should take longer to cool down.
2. Starfall is way too powerful against buildings. It's fine against humans since it's stopped reasonably easily, but it's pretty lame how you can sneak a priestess into an enemy base while they're distracted and completely level it with a single starfall. It would be great if starfall only did half damage to buildings. It would still take out towers, but wouldn't destroy barracks and town halls.
3. Offensive towers are LAME! In Starcraft, it was a lot more difficult to OT, even with Protoss. At least then you either had to:
a) build on creep with zerg
b) fill a bunker with marines
c) build a pylon first to make canons
And in Starcraft, 'towers' were much easier to defeat. In Warcraft, however, towers are not only inexpensive, but are extremely difficult to take down without siege units (Which all require upgrading the town center first). They should make it much easier to take down towers without siegecraft. This won't hurt using them for defense since you can place them behind other structures to prevent non-siege units from reaching them early in the game.
The unit cap in the game should be changable. I suspect they only allow 90 control points because the game is graphically intense and they didn't want to alienate those without extremely fast hardware. However, for those of us fortunate enough to own GHz+ machines with GeForce 2 or better graphics hardware, it would be nice to be able to be able to use more units.
Other than those four things, it's a very fun game. I highly recommend that everyone interested in the RTS genre try it. As for bnetd, well, we all know that was just their (failed) attempt to curb piracy during the beta test. I'm confident that the suit will be dropped.
FAA, triple-head, etc. are all totally meaningless buzz phrases until Matrox can put together a killer set of Linux drivers. That's why nVidia dominates the graphics market--they actually give a damn about their customers, even if they are a small minority. Until Matrox or ATI can show such commitment, I'm buying nVidia graphics hardware.
Closed source drivers or not, I don't care. I just want a card that will run as well in Linux as it does in Windows, and nVidia's pulled through on that. Open-source drivers would be nice, but I'm not going to nitpick until nVidia shows signs of weak Linux support.
Catch me in the game, same name as I use on /.
That's exactly it. He wanted to compare the native Linux version with the WineX emulated Windows version and the native Windows version. As you can see from the benchmarks, the native Linux version was quite a bit faster.
The Seth Robinson games were always popular, but I liked Usurper.
On the contrary, I think they'd be rather mal-adjusted to coldness. After an immeasurable amount of time spent navigating the searing hot brimstone, I'd imagine those damned would be rather accustomed to the heat.
You have no idea who your enemy is, and will always fail in your attempts to defeat him. Has history taught you nothing?
Personally, I'm against US action against the Arabs. Well, perhaps for Bin Laden's head on silver platter and a bloodbath involving those involved with the Sept. 11 attacks would be nice, but I'm confident that the others will do plenty to kill each other through religion-fueled mayhem. And once western money dries up like the oil wells in a few decades, the situation will be really amusing. Governments and leaders who base their administration on money from the oil will fall, the people will be thrown into an even more chaotic state, and I'll be watching it unfold on the TV a hemisphere away. It'll be like a large-scale "Celebrity Boxing" match.