The poster describes his PC as a "1GHz+" machine. First of all 1GHz is old news. Modern machines go up to 3GHz. And the speed of your CPU matters little in 3D Mark, compared to the speed of your graphics card. Are you sure you're running the same card as the other folks? A "1GHz+" system with a Geforce2 will always perform much much worse than a "1GHz+" system with a Geforce 4! A difference of 3000 3D marks definitely sounds like your graphics card sucks and theirs dont: Tweaking, in the past, has gotten me 3 or 5 hundred 3D Marks, but never 3000... You might want to "tweak" your graphics card then. Download the latest drivers, since they often give performance bonuses. You can also overclock it: Dont forget that people who get top scores in 3DMark often are nutcases who have their test computers running at twice the original speed, with weird liquid nitrogen cooling schemes... I used to use Powerstrip for overclocking but now all the drivers come with speed adjustments. And, like the other posters said, check your software first.
Could you please explain to me how can anyone love a game where every single person you talk to knows pretty much the same set of things, which by an amazing coincidence is exactly what you need to know in order to complete your quests?
"The game was designed to be the most accurate computer game that follows the D&D 3rd edition rules."
This is exactly the problem. They are so absorbed by their stupid "system" that they forgot to make it an enjoyable game. It's simply shallow. Way too much repetitive hack and slash, reminiscent of the same kind of high quality mindless button-mashing gameplay that most Square RPGs have offered since 1986. That's nearly 20 years of the same crappy button-mashing, people! Give me a game with something slightly more innovative please! Even the graphics look a bit dated. And there is no excuse for not having a full voiceover, let alone repeating the character pics so often you'd think this was a game about cloning. When are people going to dump the stupid CDROM format, anyway? Everyone I know has at the very least a DVDROM and has been able to read DVD discs for the past couple of years. Even Linux distros are shipping a DVD version already! Where are my DVD games?
I havent worn a wristwatch in over 10 years
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Assorted CES Gizmos
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· Score: 2
And now they expect me to buy one just because it does, uh, one heck of a lot less than my cell phone does? My watch is my phone and I hardly ever need to look at it. There are watches everywhere these days. you can't walk or drive around Lisbon for very long without seeing one of those crappy watches that also say the temperature... it's a "public service" excuse to throw more advertising in our face since each of them is basically a tall metal pole with a big ad-rotator on top. I wish I could live in a world where business people would at LEAST be honest about their greed instead of trying to look like they're some sort of benefactor. *sigh*
I'm not an expert on anything, but a friend of mine teaches at a local university, and when we were at my birthday party he mentioned having compiled an old encryption proggy he made (codigo pro) both under the ancient Turbo C and the most recent version of GCC. I dont know what settings he used, but he said it was like 3 times faster for the same code running on the same platform. Of course he made the software ages ago when he knew very little about programming compared to now, and the source was probably lacking every possible optimization that an expert coder would introduce, so YMMV. I never mess with settings when compiling programs under Linux, since I'm pretty much a newbie and often have trouble installing things from source. However, an expert friend of mine who has a very old PC always goes for an LFSish setup where he compiles everything and tweaks all the settings by hand. He claims it works miracles, and I believe him. I know from my old MS-DOS graphics programming experience that small source and compiler tweaks could be the difference between a professional-looking program and a crappy amateurish app full of flicker. I could ramble endlessly about all the optimization success stories from my youth, starting with the classic "DEFINT A-Z" QBasic trick, then progressing through Turbo Pascal compiler tweaks and finally achieving C + ASM goodness, but I shall not bore you any further:)
Why the heck are they dumping it? Why not sell the salt? Around here, salt is generally obtained in much the same way it has been obtained for thousands of years, by letting sea water evaporate. The only reason I can come up with for them not to sell the salt is that said water is heavily polluted and maybe it would be hard to clean??
"Do something you like" What if "what I like" is defined as "not having to work"? I can't think of anything, off the top of my head, that I would absolutely love to do 8 hours a day, for the rest of my life. Not even sex. I have a very low threshold for boredom. Everything bores the crap out of me. Even the fun stuff like gaming and being with my girlfriend. Do I need a shrink or something? I think it's fairly natural that if you eat nothing but your favorite dish for the rest of your life you'll become nauseous at the mere mention of it pretty soon. But maybe I'm weird:|
He sells and repair cell phones, as well as regular PC hardware. I can ask him about your cell phone if you want, but mind you, we're in Portugal, and with the holidays and all, snail mail could take two weeks. I dont know how good his English is though, I guess I could relay messages between you two if you can't really find any local repair shops. His website is at http://www.telespot.pt I made it =) Anyway, I'm sure there's lots of "unofficial" phone shops around there too and they could work on your cell for a small fee.
People who drive trains are often referred to as "engineers". Got it now?
Re:I still haven't filled my 60GB HDD...
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1.5 TB DVD by 2010
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· Score: 2
Let's put it this way. When recordable CDs came out, I backed up my entire floppy-based game collection to one. Games have been using multiple CDs for a while now, I expect them to use multiple DVDs a few years from now. And you know it won't really be 1.5TB... They said DVDs could hold 34 gigs, then they said 17, then they said 9, and sadly what most people have are 4 gig DVDs...
7. A few bajillion exotic particles impacting it at insanely high speeds and energies... Seriously, your post connotes a severe lack of understanding about space. It is the single most hostile environment in existence. Ok, maybe slightly less hostile than the center of a star, or a black hole, but you get the picture: Everything known and unknown is out there, traveling through space. It is everything BUT a vacuum, not that a vacuum is an especially healthy environment either... From micrometeors to smaller dust particles, ions from the solar wind, extreme temperature variations, you have no idea what Pioneer has had to endure for the past 30 years! A tiny speck of paint bordering on invisibility, but orbiting at insanely high speeds, once cracked a thick quartz window, and you know that few things are harder than quartz, imagine what it would do to your body. Comparing that to some minor peanut butter smudging has got to be a joke. As for dust, well, you do realize that you're sitting on what's basically a very large space-dust-bunny? Planets and stars are formed from the most abundant form of matter in the "vacuum" of the universe: Dust. The lighter, gaseous "dust" such as hydrogen condenses under the from of stars and the rest, well, you have it in you, around you, above and below you. I have no doubt that Pioneer has only managed to function properly for the past 30 years due to masterfully executed shielding that protects its components from the various hazards of space such as radiation and dust.
Well, let's put it this way, expansion packs are dirt cheap compared to the original game, like a third of the price. It might seem that you dont need no steenkeen expansion packs, but play a full sims with every expansion for a month and then try and go back to the original game. You will be saying "I can't believe how I got addicted to something so crappy!" like I did. It's one heck of a lot better after the expansions IMHO.
MAKE MONEY FAST!!!! With this new program seen on National Television! Step 1: Play the colonizers Step 2: Trade Step 3: Profit!!!
Yes this article is offtopic. Sue me, I am bored to death. Mod me to whatever you want, I have plenty of karma and consider it meaningless enough. Have fun.
Erm, there is no such thing as abandonware... All PC game copyrights will expire long after we're all dead and buried unless someone in the government decides to shorten them or the original author forfeits them. Downloading old games is as illegal as downloading newer ones. Even if no one is selling them. Even if the company is long gone and all programmers died. It's still copyright infringement because it's still copyrighted, what with the insane length copyrights have these days...
Hey guess what, I'm not american! No FBI for me. Or DMCA. Or any other kind of insane law enforcement. Or hardly any law enforcement, lol. Maybe I should put my nationality in my sig or something. I am from Portugal:) Why don't you all move here, there's also hardly any unemployment and a great lack of qualified people since half the ppl around here don't go beyond the mandatory 9th grade in their schooling. And the weather's great too!
Now you answer me two questions: 1)What would I lose if someone stole my car? 2)What would I lose if someone hacked into my pc?
I'll answer that for you. 1)I dont have a car, but if I did, I would lose valuable property that cost me lots of cash and hard work.
2)NOTHING! There is nothing of value in my pc! Zero! If someone came and deleted all my files, why should I care? I can restore everything to working order in 3 minutes by getting my disk image CD. So I might lose some porn or mp3s. It's not like I dont delete everything on a regular basis myself!
Most people dont worry about security because they dont need it! A bigass company with mission critical data should definitely worry about security but you cant criticize someone for not locking their electronic toybox.
Speaking of which, have you locked your fridge recently? How about your oven? Your closet? Do you have locks on everything you own? You dont, do you? Well I dont either, and I dont use a firewall or anti virus or anything... and guess what, no computer problems whatsoever...
Well I'm not an expert on anything but I studied them in my third year of college... Pthreads stands for POSIX threads. Threads are different "paths of execution" through a program that can be run in parallel. They have both advantages and disadvantages, without getting into a lot of technical details, they are generally regarded as "lighter" in terms of resource consumption and easier to code for. The general idea is that when launching a new thread you launch a function in your program, so you can launch the music function in a game and then the graphics engine function and the keyboard reading function, etc, having them run simultaneously.
Uh, I understand what you're trying to say but... I've never seen a CPU fail in my entire life. Usually when a CPU fails it's as a result of an accident, such as heat sink falling off or excess voltage being applied. I'm not saying it can't happen, I'm just saying you shouldn't be too quick to bash Intel for making unreliable chips. As for space-faring hardware, it's custom built both to last and to resist radiation... surely we wouldn't use a P4 on a space probe, but it's more due to its huge power consumption than any inherent unreliability. I'm sure if NASA wanted to send out some P4s, Intel could very well provide suitable chips. Note that I'm not at all Intel biased, I run a 1333 Tbird.
For those of you who didnt read the article pointed by the parent poster before listening, that is NOT music being played by the CSIRAC itself but rather a software recreation of the original hardware, and a modern recreation of the original speaker. It basically sounds like my old spectrum, only a bit worse:) I wonder what all the background noise on it is, though, it certainly sounded like they had a massive computer in the room while playing it.
Heck my old 256 and 170 meg drives are still around and fully functional. Maybe it's because they were built in the UK, before the age of massive 3rd world outsourcing? A friend of mine had an 8086 that worked fine on 512k and 20 megs of disk, and i have no doubt that i will be married and with children before my 12 yr old 486-33 hits the dumpster...
I thought that was a game where people put in a cheat code to get boatloads of cash and then went on to pretend they were interior decorators. But I guess that's just me.
Pirate consoles have always been made. SMS, NES, I think I even saw a SNES clone once. Heck you can still find plenty of Atari 2600 clones with 100 built-in games and, of course, a playstation-like case to fool the illiterate. You can even get bootleg cartridges for them, with really weird games. Like, I once saw (and played) a Famicom clone with a cartridge that claimed to be "Street Fighter IV". And this was around the time that SF2 was still pretty popular. The graphics were crap, even by NES (or Famicom) standards, and the game was very buggy and amateurish. Stay away from consoles who claim to have a bazillion games built-in: They're usually just different entry points into the same crappy game.
I would like to see if I can set up a lighter system on my 486, so my mom can use the web and email. A GUI, compatibility with modern webpages and ease of use are a requirement. Presently I have windows 3.11 + Calmira (a very lightweight program that gives you a win95 interface under 3.x). I can run the 16-bit version of IE5 there just fine, though it takes a few seconds to boot. Can I do this with an older Linux kernel? I remember that 2 year ago your average distro ran very slowly on my recently deceased MMX pentium so I definitely cant use anything standar like that on my 486. I was thinking that given its infinite customizability an LFS setup could breathe new life into the ole bugger. Is it worth it to move to an older kernel and lose compatibility with modern apps? Wouldnt the apps be more resource-intensive than the kernel? I shudder at the thought of how slow mozilla would be on that box. Does opera require a 2.4 kernel? Does IceWM? Is there anything lighter than IceWM with a win95 look? Any general advice?
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The poster describes his PC as a "1GHz+" machine.
First of all 1GHz is old news. Modern machines go up to 3GHz. And the speed of your CPU matters little in 3D Mark, compared to the speed of your graphics card. Are you sure you're running the same card as the other folks? A "1GHz+" system with a Geforce2 will always perform much much worse than a "1GHz+" system with a Geforce 4!
A difference of 3000 3D marks definitely sounds like your graphics card sucks and theirs dont: Tweaking, in the past, has gotten me 3 or 5 hundred 3D Marks, but never 3000...
You might want to "tweak" your graphics card then.
Download the latest drivers, since they often give performance bonuses. You can also overclock it: Dont forget that people who get top scores in 3DMark often are nutcases who have their test computers running at twice the original speed, with weird liquid nitrogen cooling schemes...
I used to use Powerstrip for overclocking but now all the drivers come with speed adjustments. And, like the other posters said, check your software first.
http://www.havenco.com
http://www.sealandgov.com
What, this? --> --
Could you please explain to me how can anyone love a game where every single person you talk to knows pretty much the same set of things, which by an amazing coincidence is exactly what you need to know in order to complete your quests?
"The game was designed to be the most accurate computer game that follows the D&D 3rd edition rules."
This is exactly the problem. They are so absorbed by their stupid "system" that they forgot to make it an enjoyable game. It's simply shallow. Way too much repetitive hack and slash, reminiscent of the same kind of high quality mindless button-mashing gameplay that most Square RPGs have offered since 1986. That's nearly 20 years of the same crappy button-mashing, people! Give me a game with something slightly more innovative please! Even the graphics look a bit dated. And there is no excuse for not having a full voiceover, let alone repeating the character pics so often you'd think this was a game about cloning.
When are people going to dump the stupid CDROM format, anyway? Everyone I know has at the very least a DVDROM and has been able to read DVD discs for the past couple of years. Even Linux distros are shipping a DVD version already! Where are my DVD games?
And now they expect me to buy one just because it does, uh, one heck of a lot less than my cell phone does? My watch is my phone and I hardly ever need to look at it. There are watches everywhere these days. you can't walk or drive around Lisbon for very long without seeing one of those crappy watches that also say the temperature... it's a "public service" excuse to throw more advertising in our face since each of them is basically a tall metal pole with a big ad-rotator on top. I wish I could live in a world where business people would at LEAST be honest about their greed instead of trying to look like they're some sort of benefactor. *sigh*
I'm not an expert on anything, but a friend of mine teaches at a local university, and when we were at my birthday party he mentioned having compiled an old encryption proggy he made (codigo pro) both under the ancient Turbo C and the most recent version of GCC. I dont know what settings he used, but he said it was like 3 times faster for the same code running on the same platform. :)
Of course he made the software ages ago when he knew very little about programming compared to now, and the source was probably lacking every possible optimization that an expert coder would introduce, so YMMV.
I never mess with settings when compiling programs under Linux, since I'm pretty much a newbie and often have trouble installing things from source.
However, an expert friend of mine who has a very old PC always goes for an LFSish setup where he compiles everything and tweaks all the settings by hand. He claims it works miracles, and I believe him. I know from my old MS-DOS graphics programming experience that small source and compiler tweaks could be the difference between a professional-looking program and a crappy amateurish app full of flicker.
I could ramble endlessly about all the optimization success stories from my youth, starting with the classic "DEFINT A-Z" QBasic trick, then progressing through Turbo Pascal compiler tweaks and finally achieving C + ASM goodness, but I shall not bore you any further
Why the heck are they dumping it? Why not sell the salt? Around here, salt is generally obtained in much the same way it has been obtained for thousands of years, by letting sea water evaporate. The only reason I can come up with for them not to sell the salt is that said water is heavily polluted and maybe it would be hard to clean??
"No, you just missed your calling in Marketing and Advertising."
Why do you say that?
"Do something you like" :|
What if "what I like" is defined as "not having to work"?
I can't think of anything, off the top of my head, that I would absolutely love to do 8 hours a day, for the rest of my life. Not even sex.
I have a very low threshold for boredom. Everything bores the crap out of me. Even the fun stuff like gaming and being with my girlfriend.
Do I need a shrink or something?
I think it's fairly natural that if you eat nothing but your favorite dish for the rest of your life you'll become nauseous at the mere mention of it pretty soon.
But maybe I'm weird
He sells and repair cell phones, as well as regular PC hardware. I can ask him about your cell phone if you want, but mind you, we're in Portugal, and with the holidays and all, snail mail could take two weeks.
I dont know how good his English is though, I guess I could relay messages between you two if you can't really find any local repair shops.
His website is at http://www.telespot.pt
I made it =)
Anyway, I'm sure there's lots of "unofficial" phone shops around there too and they could work on your cell for a small fee.
People who drive trains are often referred to as "engineers". Got it now?
Let's put it this way.
When recordable CDs came out, I backed up my entire floppy-based game collection to one.
Games have been using multiple CDs for a while now, I expect them to use multiple DVDs a few years from now. And you know it won't really be 1.5TB... They said DVDs could hold 34 gigs, then they said 17, then they said 9, and sadly what most people have are 4 gig DVDs...
7. A few bajillion exotic particles impacting it at insanely high speeds and energies...
Seriously, your post connotes a severe lack of understanding about space. It is the single most hostile environment in existence. Ok, maybe slightly less hostile than the center of a star, or a black hole, but you get the picture:
Everything known and unknown is out there, traveling through space.
It is everything BUT a vacuum, not that a vacuum is an especially healthy environment either...
From micrometeors to smaller dust particles, ions from the solar wind, extreme temperature variations, you have no idea what Pioneer has had to endure for the past 30 years!
A tiny speck of paint bordering on invisibility, but orbiting at insanely high speeds, once cracked a thick quartz window, and you know that few things are harder than quartz, imagine what it would do to your body.
Comparing that to some minor peanut butter smudging has got to be a joke. As for dust, well, you do realize that you're sitting on what's basically a very large space-dust-bunny? Planets and stars are formed from the most abundant form of matter in the "vacuum" of the universe: Dust.
The lighter, gaseous "dust" such as hydrogen condenses under the from of stars and the rest, well, you have it in you, around you, above and below you.
I have no doubt that Pioneer has only managed to function properly for the past 30 years due to masterfully executed shielding that protects its components from the various hazards of space such as radiation and dust.
Well, let's put it this way, expansion packs are dirt cheap compared to the original game, like a third of the price. It might seem that you dont need no steenkeen expansion packs, but play a full sims with every expansion for a month and then try and go back to the original game. You will be saying "I can't believe how I got addicted to something so crappy!" like I did. It's one heck of a lot better after the expansions IMHO.
MAKE MONEY FAST!!!!
With this new program seen on National Television!
Step 1: Play the colonizers
Step 2: Trade
Step 3: Profit!!!
Yes this article is offtopic. Sue me, I am bored to death. Mod me to whatever you want, I have plenty of karma and consider it meaningless enough.
Have fun.
Erm, there is no such thing as abandonware... All PC game copyrights will expire long after we're all dead and buried unless someone in the government decides to shorten them or the original author forfeits them.
Downloading old games is as illegal as downloading newer ones. Even if no one is selling them. Even if the company is long gone and all programmers died. It's still copyright infringement because it's still copyrighted, what with the insane length copyrights have these days...
Hey guess what, I'm not american! :)
No FBI for me. Or DMCA. Or any other kind of insane law enforcement. Or hardly any law enforcement, lol.
Maybe I should put my nationality in my sig or something. I am from Portugal
Why don't you all move here, there's also hardly any unemployment and a great lack of qualified people since half the ppl around here don't go beyond the mandatory 9th grade in their schooling.
And the weather's great too!
Now you answer me two questions:
1)What would I lose if someone stole my car?
2)What would I lose if someone hacked into my pc?
I'll answer that for you.
1)I dont have a car, but if I did, I would lose valuable property that cost me lots of cash and hard work.
2)NOTHING! There is nothing of value in my pc! Zero!
If someone came and deleted all my files, why should I care? I can restore everything to working order in 3 minutes by getting my disk image CD.
So I might lose some porn or mp3s. It's not like I dont delete everything on a regular basis myself!
Most people dont worry about security because they dont need it! A bigass company with mission critical data should definitely worry about security but you cant criticize someone for not locking their electronic toybox.
Speaking of which, have you locked your fridge recently? How about your oven? Your closet? Do you have locks on everything you own? You dont, do you? Well I dont either, and I dont use a firewall or anti virus or anything... and guess what, no computer problems whatsoever...
Well I'm not an expert on anything but I studied them in my third year of college...
Pthreads stands for POSIX threads.
Threads are different "paths of execution" through a program that can be run in parallel. They have both advantages and disadvantages, without getting into a lot of technical details, they are generally regarded as "lighter" in terms of resource consumption and easier to code for.
The general idea is that when launching a new thread you launch a function in your program, so you can launch the music function in a game and then the graphics engine function and the keyboard reading function, etc, having them run simultaneously.
Uh, I understand what you're trying to say but... I've never seen a CPU fail in my entire life.
Usually when a CPU fails it's as a result of an accident, such as heat sink falling off or excess voltage being applied. I'm not saying it can't happen, I'm just saying you shouldn't be too quick to bash Intel for making unreliable chips.
As for space-faring hardware, it's custom built both to last and to resist radiation... surely we wouldn't use a P4 on a space probe, but it's more due to its huge power consumption than any inherent unreliability. I'm sure if NASA wanted to send out some P4s, Intel could very well provide suitable chips.
Note that I'm not at all Intel biased, I run a 1333 Tbird.
For those of you who didnt read the article pointed by the parent poster before listening, that is NOT music being played by the CSIRAC itself but rather a software recreation of the original hardware, and a modern recreation of the original speaker. :)
It basically sounds like my old spectrum, only a bit worse
I wonder what all the background noise on it is, though, it certainly sounded like they had a massive computer in the room while playing it.
Heck my old 256 and 170 meg drives are still around and fully functional.
Maybe it's because they were built in the UK, before the age of massive 3rd world outsourcing?
A friend of mine had an 8086 that worked fine on 512k and 20 megs of disk, and i have no doubt that i will be married and with children before my 12 yr old 486-33 hits the dumpster...
I thought that was a game where people put in a cheat code to get boatloads of cash and then went on to pretend they were interior decorators. But I guess that's just me.
Pirate consoles have always been made. SMS, NES, I think I even saw a SNES clone once. Heck you can still find plenty of Atari 2600 clones with 100 built-in games and, of course, a playstation-like case to fool the illiterate.
You can even get bootleg cartridges for them, with really weird games. Like, I once saw (and played) a Famicom clone with a cartridge that claimed to be "Street Fighter IV". And this was around the time that SF2 was still pretty popular. The graphics were crap, even by NES (or Famicom) standards, and the game was very buggy and amateurish.
Stay away from consoles who claim to have a bazillion games built-in: They're usually just different entry points into the same crappy game.
I would like to see if I can set up a lighter system on my 486, so my mom can use the web and email. A GUI, compatibility with modern webpages and ease of use are a requirement.
Presently I have windows 3.11 + Calmira (a very lightweight program that gives you a win95 interface under 3.x). I can run the 16-bit version of IE5 there just fine, though it takes a few seconds to boot.
Can I do this with an older Linux kernel? I remember that 2 year ago your average distro ran very slowly on my recently deceased MMX pentium so I definitely cant use anything standar like that on my 486.
I was thinking that given its infinite customizability an LFS setup could breathe new life into the ole bugger. Is it worth it to move to an older kernel and lose compatibility with modern apps?
Wouldnt the apps be more resource-intensive than the kernel? I shudder at the thought of how slow mozilla would be on that box. Does opera require a 2.4 kernel? Does IceWM? Is there anything lighter than IceWM with a win95 look? Any general advice?