Dell price does include Windows XP (Home, not Professional), because there's no way to not buy Windows XP from Dell. So, yeah, that's $100 there.
As for the productivity software, to get that price, I selected the crappiest (read: cheapest) of the possible options, which is the WordPerfect Family Pack, for $60.
That's $160 worth of questionable stuff, and it still leaves dell at slightly under $1100.
Yeah, sure, for someone who doesn't know anything about computers and doesn't want to know, I wouldn't recommend they go out and do put one together. But for anyone who does have a clue, I can't imagine buying from Dell. Even if you're going to buy a full system, buying from a place like Tiger is cheaper. I'd only recommend Dell to someone who needs the 24/7 technical service, and has no other alternative for it.
Yeah, yeah. IHBT. IHL. IWHAND. You don't build it to get the speed machine; you do it for the price.
Eg: my latest computer, I bought piecemeal; ended up with an Asus Nforce2 (400 Mhz FSB) motherboard, 2500+ Mhz Athlon Barton (actually speed: 1833 Mhz), 120 GB HD, 1 gig of 400 Mhz RAM, and a 256 MB GeforceFX card. Along with everything else new but a monitor, and it came in at just over $600.
I did some research, but not an extensive amount -- certainly not anything at the Tom's Hardware level.
Pricing something similar at Dell (2400 Mhz Pentium 4, only a 128 MB GeforceFX) comes out to $1258, after the $100 coupon. Granted, the Intel motherboard has a 800 Mhz FSB, but I'm sure that you couldn't tell a difference between using the two computers. Except that the Dell solution is a 200% price increase.
Non-amusing to anyone but me anecdote: When playing Vice City, I took on the persona of the dirty cop -- Tommy was always wearing the cop uniform, and driving around in some sort of law enforcement vehicle.
Anyways, I go on to do the biker missions (for Mitch whats-his-name). In the beginning of the cut scene when you first meet Mitch, he looks you over and says, "You don't look like the law to me." Despite the fact that I'm wearing a cop uniform and have a cruiser parked outside.
(Got a similar reaction from the Cuban gang leader; walked in wearing the Cuban gang outfit, and one of his lines in the cutscene is, "You're wearing woman's clothes!")
Well, this is copy/pasted from MythTV's documentation; these numbers are given for software, not hardware, encoding:
Here are a few data points:
A PIII/733MHz system can encode one video stream using the MPEG-4 codec using 480x480 capture resolution. This does not allow for live TV watching, but does allow for encoding video and then watching it later.
The developer states that his AMD1800+ system can almost encode two MPEG-4 video streams and watch one program simultaneously.
A PIII/800MHz system with 512MB RAM can encode one video stream using the RTJPEG codec with 480x480 capture resolution and play it back simultaneously, thereby allowing live TV watching.
A dual Celeron/450MHz is able to view a 480x480 MPEG-4/3300kbps file created on a different system with 30% CPU usage.
A P4 2.4GHz machine can encode two 3300Kbps 480x480 MPEG-4 files and simultaneously serve content to a remote frontend.
With a 300 Mhz, you won't be able to do software encoding in real time; the processor just won't be able to handle it. So you're going to need to blow ~$150 or so on a tuner card that can also do hardware encoding. Hauppage is the name I hear most in this area; take a look at their WinTV 250 or 350 cards.
As far as programs, there's MythTV, which is open source, and is supposed to work well under Mandrake, which means it should be able to work well under anything.
The other option would be Sage TV, which is not open source and costs money, and, so, I'm unfamiliar with it.
Every description of why someone should buy a TiVo sounds like it's aimed at people who have never seen a VCR.
Comparing a TiVo to a VCR is kind of like comparing a computer's word processor to a typewriter. Sure, you use both of them to type letters and documents and whatnot, but the only people who would ever say that the two are the same are those who have never used a word processor, or for some maniacal reason like to use white-out on their mistakes.
Took a week's vacation recently. When I got back home, there was 22 hours of new programming for me to choose from.
The cable companies can't do it either. Just like the satellite setup, the cable company broadcasts all channels to all users, and it's the set top box that does the decoding.
(That's how the "digital cable descramblers" -- the ones that purport to let you watch PPV for free -- work. You order the PPV as normal, and they block the set top from sending the notification back to the cable company -- but the cable box still descrambles the show.)
Even with the cable modem, all cable modems will receive packets for other cable modems in the same area; they just ignore them. The laid cable simply doesn't have the capacity to send to one user directly.
Sure, I guess GTA can be used as a rehearsal for real life crimes, as long as those real life crimes assume the following facts apply in the real world...
Police are willing to overlook any crime -- even the slaughter of dozens of policeman -- with a few bribes. Or, even easier, by having your car spray painted another color.
A car can undergo any trauma -- even falling from the roof of a building or cliff or ramming another car at full speed -- and still provide complete protection and allow at least seven seconds getaway before it blows up.
High powered weapons can be found in obscure corners.
You never run out of gas.
Car doors are hardly ever locked.
You can carjack any car you want simply by stepping in front of it, waiting for it to stop (which it will always do), and then removing the driver from the car, which is never resisted.
Cops don't care if you flagrantly violate traffic rules.
If, somehow, you die or get arrested, you only lose a little amount of money, and your weapons.
Yep, assume all that, and it is a highly useful simulation.
According to the FAQ, the engine is the only thing they're planning on releasing. They're not planning on releasing the game data at all, currently. I quote:
This is not to say that the content, such as the original artwork, audio, movies, maps, cut scenes, etc. will be available for free, but anyone who wants a copy of the source code will be able to get it.
Still, very nice of them, even if it never actually happens. I'll probably buy a copy.
The hardcore gamers aren't going to buy an NVidia or an ATI based on branding or some promotional material -- they'll buy it based on performance. They don't care about branding; they care about being able to go from 120 to 123 fps.
It's the casual gamers who are the target -- they're less fixated on more performance, and thus easier to sway. A casual gamer is more likely to let other considerations affect the buying decision, such as, to name a Slashdot example, whether or not NVidia or ATI are currently doing good in the "supporting linux" department.
My first thought upon reading this was team based games, mostly FPS or RTS -- Tribes2 and Starcraft popped into my head immediately.
But upon rereading it, I can't imagine why you'd bother, from a corporate perspective. Unless you're planning on pitting department against department or project team against project team.
(I totally get it from a recreational point of view; but I can't imagine a corporation shelling money or space for this unless they've just got too much to burn.)
If you're deadset on the competitive game play, I'd split it into two or more rooms, of course, so that teammates could talk to eachother without having the "enemy" overhear. And, you'd want, whatever game you picked, some method so that people could store their profile, so that no matter which computer they sat at, they'd have it set up to their liking. Windows on a domain can do this with roaming profiles, or if you have a small number of games, you can simply see how they store their config files and write a small app to fetch someone's specific files from a repository and overwrite them on a computer.
Thief 2 had some decent voice acting...with the noted exception of one of the voice actors for the guards, who was downright _terrible_. I mean, monotonous reading, stupid phrasing...everytime one of the guards with that voice would speak, I would cringe.
How will I answer to drug peddler who asks "What are you in for, huh?"
He said, "What'd you get, kid?"
And I said, "I didn't get nothing. I had to pay fifty dollars and pick up the garbage."
And he said, "What were you arrested for?"
And I said, "Littering."
And they all moved away from me on the bench there, with the hairy eyeball, and all kinds of mean, nasty things, until I said, "And creating a nuisance," and they all came back, we had a great time, on the bench, talking about crime, mother-stabbing, father-raping, all kinds of groovy things that we were talking about...
Or did anyone else find that they would've enjoyed Metal Gear Solid 2 more, ending included, if they had just skipped through every cutscene in the game instead of trying to make sense of the so-called plot?
Never having stepped into a casino, I don't understand what all the fuss is about. As I undertand it, the cards are placed at the bottom of the deck after each hand and if someone can keep track of them for a few hands they will know the order of the cards and gain a huge advantage.
Not quite. In a "counting friendly" blackjack game, you have the shoe (the undealt cards), which is usually 2 decks. You run through the shoe until it's empty, and then reshuffle.
Now, what a card counter does isn't keeping track of where the cards are (the shoe gets shuffled after it's done, after all), but how many high cards (face cards, tens, sometimes nines) have been played, against how many low cards have been played. If more high cards have been played than low cards, the shoe is bad -- it's less likely you'll get a blackjack, and since the dealer wins on ties, it's more likely you'll lose. Conversely, if less high cards have been played than low cards, the shoe is good -- your odds of getting a blackjack (or the dealer busting), and thus beating the dealer, go up. An obvious card counter will play, making the minimum bet, until the shoe is good, and will then raise his bets. When the shoe is no longer good, the counter goes back to making the minimum bet. (The more obvious counter doesn't even bother to play unless the shoe is good, but that's _really_ obvious.)
Why don't they just shuffle the deck after each hand if this is a problem?
They can. Some places have machines to do this. But it's not really necessary. Shuffling halfway through the shoe is good enough as well.
Well, there's nothing wrong with it. More power to you for having a skill that others lack.
But the casinos, despite advertisement to the contrary, are in this to make money. They are not, despite advertisement to the contrary, in this to provide a fair and equitable gambling environment. They don't care about being fair. They don't care about your good time, except to the extent that they'd rather steal the eggs than kill the goose.
So if card counters can actually win money, over time, at blackjack, the casinos don't like it. And they can eject anyone they want from their premises for any reason at all. It has nothing to do with being fair. It has to do with keeping their money.
(Although, to be honest, this whole setup seems kind of stupid as a means of detecting card counters. Using a six-deck shoe and shuffling halfway through it is destined to be a much cheaper, and no doubt more efficient, method.)
Just because a game accounts for skill doesn't mean it's based entirely on skill. You can easily have a game that is part skill, and still have the majority be luck driven (such as, say, poker).
Unskilled people play arcade games and lose money, so there's no reason as to why they wouldn't play a game that would occasionally give them some money back. As for skilled people, you just need to make sure that luck is enough of a force to keep the skilled player from being able to consistently beat the machine. That would involve making the game "unfair", but, hey, it pays money out occasionally.
Wonder why it took so long. Any arcade game designer knows that if your game is fun, there are people who will be willing to pump quarters into it all day long for a zero percent return on their investment. Given that, actually getting something back, even if it's only thirty percent of what you put in, would seem to just be an additional draw.
The guy in that video was handling that Diet Coke bottle and that 3M spray can without any sort of protection at all, and those readings were through the roof!
I give him two to four hours, tops. Oh, what a brave sacrifice for research. I hope his suffering isn't prolonged needlessly.
Slashdot Mirror
Some notes:
Dell price does not include monitor.
Dell price does include Windows XP (Home, not Professional), because there's no way to not buy Windows XP from Dell. So, yeah, that's $100 there.
As for the productivity software, to get that price, I selected the crappiest (read: cheapest) of the possible options, which is the WordPerfect Family Pack, for $60.
That's $160 worth of questionable stuff, and it still leaves dell at slightly under $1100.
Yeah, sure, for someone who doesn't know anything about computers and doesn't want to know, I wouldn't recommend they go out and do put one together. But for anyone who does have a clue, I can't imagine buying from Dell. Even if you're going to buy a full system, buying from a place like Tiger is cheaper. I'd only recommend Dell to someone who needs the 24/7 technical service, and has no other alternative for it.
Yeah, yeah. IHBT. IHL. IWHAND. You don't build it to get the speed machine; you do it for the price.
Eg: my latest computer, I bought piecemeal; ended up with an Asus Nforce2 (400 Mhz FSB) motherboard, 2500+ Mhz Athlon Barton (actually speed: 1833 Mhz), 120 GB HD, 1 gig of 400 Mhz RAM, and a 256 MB GeforceFX card. Along with everything else new but a monitor, and it came in at just over $600.
I did some research, but not an extensive amount -- certainly not anything at the Tom's Hardware level.
Pricing something similar at Dell (2400 Mhz Pentium 4, only a 128 MB GeforceFX) comes out to $1258, after the $100 coupon. Granted, the Intel motherboard has a 800 Mhz FSB, but I'm sure that you couldn't tell a difference between using the two computers. Except that the Dell solution is a 200% price increase.
Non-amusing to anyone but me anecdote: When playing Vice City, I took on the persona of the dirty cop -- Tommy was always wearing the cop uniform, and driving around in some sort of law enforcement vehicle.
Anyways, I go on to do the biker missions (for Mitch whats-his-name). In the beginning of the cut scene when you first meet Mitch, he looks you over and says, "You don't look like the law to me." Despite the fact that I'm wearing a cop uniform and have a cruiser parked outside.
(Got a similar reaction from the Cuban gang leader; walked in wearing the Cuban gang outfit, and one of his lines in the cutscene is, "You're wearing woman's clothes!")
Here are a few data points:
codec using 480x480 capture resolution. This does not allow for live TV
watching, but does allow for encoding video and then watching it later.
encode two MPEG-4 video streams and watch one program simultaneously.
stream using the RTJPEG codec with 480x480 capture resolution and play it back
simultaneously, thereby allowing live TV watching.
created on a different system with 30% CPU usage.
simultaneously serve content to a remote frontend.
With a 300 Mhz, you won't be able to do software encoding in real time; the processor just won't be able to handle it. So you're going to need to blow ~$150 or so on a tuner card that can also do hardware encoding. Hauppage is the name I hear most in this area; take a look at their WinTV 250 or 350 cards.
As far as programs, there's MythTV, which is open source, and is supposed to work well under Mandrake, which means it should be able to work well under anything.
The other option would be Sage TV, which is not open source and costs money, and, so, I'm unfamiliar with it.
Every description of why someone should buy a TiVo sounds like it's aimed at people who have never seen a VCR.
Comparing a TiVo to a VCR is kind of like comparing a computer's word processor to a typewriter. Sure, you use both of them to type letters and documents and whatnot, but the only people who would ever say that the two are the same are those who have never used a word processor, or for some maniacal reason like to use white-out on their mistakes.
Took a week's vacation recently. When I got back home, there was 22 hours of new programming for me to choose from.
1) In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster of TPS Reports puts a cover sheet on YOU!
2) ???
3) Profit!
4) Spend profit on Natalie Portman (petrified), grits (hot), and goats (ecx).
(And don't forget to welcome our new cliche overlords.)
but a new way of doing games; nobody else is transferring whole games across the Net
No one except for a small company called Yahoo.
The cable companies can't do it either. Just like the satellite setup, the cable company broadcasts all channels to all users, and it's the set top box that does the decoding.
(That's how the "digital cable descramblers" -- the ones that purport to let you watch PPV for free -- work. You order the PPV as normal, and they block the set top from sending the notification back to the cable company -- but the cable box still descrambles the show.)
Even with the cable modem, all cable modems will receive packets for other cable modems in the same area; they just ignore them. The laid cable simply doesn't have the capacity to send to one user directly.
Yep, assume all that, and it is a highly useful simulation.
ObPollAnswer: I don't play Final Fantasy, you insensitive clod!
According to the FAQ, the engine is the only thing they're planning on releasing. They're not planning on releasing the game data at all, currently. I quote:
This is not to say that the content, such as the original artwork, audio, movies, maps, cut scenes, etc. will be available for free, but anyone who wants a copy of the source code will be able to get it.
Still, very nice of them, even if it never actually happens. I'll probably buy a copy.
So, let's see. I can pay a monthly subscription fee, and get all the stuff that Valve releases in the future for free.
And it only took them...what, six years to go from Half-Life to Half-Life 2?
Sounds like a deal to me!
The hardcore gamers aren't going to buy an NVidia or an ATI based on branding or some promotional material -- they'll buy it based on performance. They don't care about branding; they care about being able to go from 120 to 123 fps.
It's the casual gamers who are the target -- they're less fixated on more performance, and thus easier to sway. A casual gamer is more likely to let other considerations affect the buying decision, such as, to name a Slashdot example, whether or not NVidia or ATI are currently doing good in the "supporting linux" department.
My first thought upon reading this was team based games, mostly FPS or RTS -- Tribes2 and Starcraft popped into my head immediately.
But upon rereading it, I can't imagine why you'd bother, from a corporate perspective. Unless you're planning on pitting department against department or project team against project team.
(I totally get it from a recreational point of view; but I can't imagine a corporation shelling money or space for this unless they've just got too much to burn.)
If you're deadset on the competitive game play, I'd split it into two or more rooms, of course, so that teammates could talk to eachother without having the "enemy" overhear. And, you'd want, whatever game you picked, some method so that people could store their profile, so that no matter which computer they sat at, they'd have it set up to their liking. Windows on a domain can do this with roaming profiles, or if you have a small number of games, you can simply see how they store their config files and write a small app to fetch someone's specific files from a repository and overwrite them on a computer.
Thief 1 had some great voice acting.
Thief 2 had some decent voice acting...with the noted exception of one of the voice actors for the guards, who was downright _terrible_. I mean, monotonous reading, stupid phrasing...everytime one of the guards with that voice would speak, I would cringe.
How will I answer to drug peddler who asks "What are you in for, huh?"
He said, "What'd you get, kid?"
And I said, "I didn't get nothing. I had to pay fifty dollars and pick up the garbage."
And he said, "What were you arrested for?"
And I said, "Littering."
And they all moved away from me on the bench there, with the hairy eyeball, and all kinds of mean, nasty things, until I said, "And creating a nuisance," and they all came back, we had a great time, on the bench, talking about crime, mother-stabbing, father-raping, all kinds of groovy things that we were talking about...
Or did anyone else find that they would've enjoyed Metal Gear Solid 2 more, ending included, if they had just skipped through every cutscene in the game instead of trying to make sense of the so-called plot?
Never having stepped into a casino, I don't understand what all the fuss is about. As I undertand it, the cards are placed at the bottom of the deck after each hand and if someone can keep track of them for a few hands they will know the order of the cards and gain a huge advantage.
Not quite. In a "counting friendly" blackjack game, you have the shoe (the undealt cards), which is usually 2 decks. You run through the shoe until it's empty, and then reshuffle.
Now, what a card counter does isn't keeping track of where the cards are (the shoe gets shuffled after it's done, after all), but how many high cards (face cards, tens, sometimes nines) have been played, against how many low cards have been played. If more high cards have been played than low cards, the shoe is bad -- it's less likely you'll get a blackjack, and since the dealer wins on ties, it's more likely you'll lose. Conversely, if less high cards have been played than low cards, the shoe is good -- your odds of getting a blackjack (or the dealer busting), and thus beating the dealer, go up. An obvious card counter will play, making the minimum bet, until the shoe is good, and will then raise his bets. When the shoe is no longer good, the counter goes back to making the minimum bet. (The more obvious counter doesn't even bother to play unless the shoe is good, but that's _really_ obvious.)
Why don't they just shuffle the deck after each hand if this is a problem?
They can. Some places have machines to do this. But it's not really necessary. Shuffling halfway through the shoe is good enough as well.
Well, there's nothing wrong with it. More power to you for having a skill that others lack.
But the casinos, despite advertisement to the contrary, are in this to make money. They are not, despite advertisement to the contrary, in this to provide a fair and equitable gambling environment. They don't care about being fair. They don't care about your good time, except to the extent that they'd rather steal the eggs than kill the goose.
So if card counters can actually win money, over time, at blackjack, the casinos don't like it. And they can eject anyone they want from their premises for any reason at all. It has nothing to do with being fair. It has to do with keeping their money.
(Although, to be honest, this whole setup seems kind of stupid as a means of detecting card counters. Using a six-deck shoe and shuffling halfway through it is destined to be a much cheaper, and no doubt more efficient, method.)
Just because a game accounts for skill doesn't mean it's based entirely on skill. You can easily have a game that is part skill, and still have the majority be luck driven (such as, say, poker).
Unskilled people play arcade games and lose money, so there's no reason as to why they wouldn't play a game that would occasionally give them some money back. As for skilled people, you just need to make sure that luck is enough of a force to keep the skilled player from being able to consistently beat the machine. That would involve making the game "unfair", but, hey, it pays money out occasionally.
Blackout babies are an urban legend. Read up on it here.
Wonder why it took so long. Any arcade game designer knows that if your game is fun, there are people who will be willing to pump quarters into it all day long for a zero percent return on their investment. Given that, actually getting something back, even if it's only thirty percent of what you put in, would seem to just be an additional draw.
Hot damn! You're right! And, to think, the chance of any given date being within a month of September 11th is a whopping 1 out of 6!
That's the same chance you have of rolling a '1' on a single six-sided die!
Wow! Mind boggling improbable!
The guy in that video was handling that Diet Coke bottle and that 3M spray can without any sort of protection at all, and those readings were through the roof!
I give him two to four hours, tops. Oh, what a brave sacrifice for research. I hope his suffering isn't prolonged needlessly.