When arrived at my school a lot of (CS,PMATH) professors told me that they didn't believe that Calculus should be anyone's introduction to mathematics. Unfortunately, a lot of Calculus tends to be taught with "tricks" (this includes a fair number of proofs) that while are neat to look at as a math major provide very little benefit to most people.
One of the best things that happened to me was our first year classical algebra. It starts from the very basics of logic, surveys elementary number theory, modular arithmatic, complex numbers and puts a very large emphasis on constructive proofs. It was a course where you actually began to understand mathematics rather than just use it. I think I realized I was studying the right subject when I spent about six hours in our tutorial centre proving some arbitrary property about GCDs with about ten other people. Anyway, after I had finally solved it, I rode my bike home, collapsed in my bed out of mental exhaustion. Of course, when I awoke I realized how much I had learned in the process of the proof.
After learning logic and the basis of proofs, Calculus begins to make *a little* more sense. A lot of people get scared the first time they see something like the precise definition of a limit; but a strong logical background makes it quite seemless.
Anyway - it might be worthwhile to see if the school has a first year "proofy" class that you can get yourself into. Otherwise, it might be worthwhile to read a book on basic mathematical logic or number theory. Even if you can't recreate proofs, there is a lot of benefit in reading them. Of course, if it is just manipulating equations that you need help with I'm sure it will come in time.
(That course is Math 135/145 for anyone at Waterloo)
I do not think there is a recipe for the 'proper' child.
A lot of the best times of my childhood was spent speaking to older folks on IRC and Meridian 59. It seemed like wasted times to my parents, but it was essentially another social life that was equally as valid as any other. I would have been quite angry if I was limited to an hour a day.
A lot of my early vocabulary came from the school nights I spent playing Final Fantasy II. By most logic, my parents should have placed rigid rules on me to prevent the 'corruption' of my brain.
I'd say that most people need to speak to their child and figure out the reason they want to play their games every night.
I believe that the article is either mistaken or the legislation has been changed in a couple of days. I know that when I went to purchase GTA: SA at an EB in Ontario I was carded for the first time. They let me have it with my ID being 17.
Anyone shed light? Maybe it was just EB's policy that was 17 and the actual legislation is 18 now. Either way, it's pretty interesting and after playing GTA:SA I can't say I fully disagree with the policy in spite of free market and parents not being able to parent blah blah.
Sorry to latch on to your question, but I've been wondering...
Personally, I need more music than a CD-R player can offer. Currently, I have an iPod and find it great, other than the fact that it was overpriced and a little bit fragile (AA batteries would be nice, though I can live without them). DVD burners are gaining marketshare quickly. Why don't we have some portable DVD-R mp3/ogg/FLAC/yatta players? I think most of the geeks here could use a player that had removable 4.7gig storage, and it would eliminate the worry of a head crash (which is why I'm paranoid of snowboarding with my iPod).
Just wanted to put the information out there that the current Meridian 59 client works very well with WINE. I didn't get a chance to test sound, but I had no problems walking around and killing a few monsters in the world while I was on my FreeBSD box. Doesn't even require WineX (the client is THAT old). I'll admit that it looks like shit, but that's the fault of the game and not WINE. Anyone using WINE shouldn't care too much about graphics anyway:)
I know that the developer has stated some interests about creating a true Linux port of the new client, which would definitely be neat, but I'm not sure how that is going to work out.
You're absolutely right. There is no god-given atmosphere in Meridian 59. For the most part there never has been and probably never will be. Hell, you can run the thing in a window and dock ICQ right next to it. You can't go in expecting Doom III.
At the same time, for whatever reason, Meridian 59 remains as the most fun I've ever had online. Anyone can tell you fun can not be manufactured for the people, it has to be created by the people.
You claim that it sucks that you can't blend in with a crowd and ignore the person you pissed off. Quite the opposite, the beauty of the game is that there is no escape. You screw up, you're getting killed and all your items (along with enough spells/skills to take off about an hours work off your game). Of course, maybe you are in a guild so now the person is kill-on-sight by the guild. Meridian puts the least limits on player's actions as possible and thus becomes the only true player-oriented online RPG. I'm sorry that weinnies from Everquest can't take the fact that Player-vs-Player is fun, not in the Quake sense, but when you have everything to lose going into the battle.
Meridian 59 may be as old as dirt but it remains unchallenged by any online RPG today.
N2H2's Bess currently blocks an extremely large amount of sites, including google's image search (but not the main google site). It also seemingly blocks by a number of things, including ip address (I think it performs a reverse DNS lookup on every ip as it blocks the octal and hexidecimal ips of site as well) and string. What I mean by string is that you can get to the main Web Archive site (as a loophole), but you can't enter a blocked address there and try to recieve an archive of it. Same deal with google cache.
Another thing is the shear rapidness of blocking. I started playing FlashFlashRevolution.com for about a week, and when I got back to school on monday it was blocked. I asked my Systems admin and he told me he didn't block me, so they must be monitoring bandwidth at some central station.
The FlashFlash ban got me pissed off, so I found some open proxies at my house and manually searched out the internet options control panel file (InetCpl.cpl) to change my proxy settings. Sure enough, this worked. Of course, if you need a new proxy server absolutely every web-based proxy or open proxy list is banned (and you wouldn't believe the number of bans), so I had to VNC to my freebsd box at home to get a list. Sure enough, I can now play flash flash revolution during those boring high school comp science classes.
If anyone has any other suggestions I'd love to hear them
Well, to start off the whole thing that made the Matrix famous was the effect I am talking about where everything slowed down and Neo [or whoever] would move nearly at a normal pace. This made you feel the speed and you got he sense that Neo was moving faster than normal (while it retained some realism).
I agree with you about the character and focus part.
As for what I was talking about with Spider-man, it was the quick jump scenes that bothered me a lot. When he swings around flag poles with 0 effort and 0 acceleration/decceleration/etc it bothers me. Sure, it's meant to be unrealistic but it's supposed to look as if it were physically possible if you were strong.
The most glaring example in spider man was definitely when he swung around the pole of the empire state building. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it didn't look 'real' in the sense that it would be possible should you have spider-slinging abilities.
I realize that it seems nitpicky, but as far as I can see this is the problem with CG right now.
I don't know but in every movie I have ever seen that has used CG it looks a little fishy. Things like Spider-man, which is said to have great CG graphics I found rather mediocore when it comes to the look of it.
I attribute it to the physics. I could be totally wrong, but I think that the world of artist and more importantly, the world of animator is not governed by earthly physics. I think the computer is not set properly to account for the subtleties of the world and the further subtleties of the human eye. When I see CG in movies I see motion that happens too fast for motion. Spider-man was a huge victim of this, with Peter Parker moving faster than the world would ever allow (I'm aware that he is supposed to have super speed, but speed is best shown in film by slowing everyone else, not speeding the rate of one person up).
To continue with my all-ready used Spider-man example I do notice that even gravity isn't obeyed in half the scenes. Taking into account a certain amount of 'push' force at a certain altitude, Peter Parker would not fly in the air at that angle. He failed to arc in half the scenes and it gets really unrealistic when he exerts minimal force in order to actually gain ground by 'swinging' upwards.
I've seen a lot of CG capes that mysteriously defy gravity too.
I'm sure some 'crazy physics d00d' here could point out a lot more problems with a lot more CG. I think that every CG studio should have a Physist look over their work.
Sometimes the most glaring things in movies is that the CG seems to move at a higher frame rate than the rest of the movie. The character just moves too fast in too short of time and never really looks right.
I'm very sorry, but this a pretty ignorant viewpoint. Why do we need better video cards? GLQuake on my GeForce 256 always looked fine. Of course, my GeForce 256 doesn't support any neato pixel shader 2.0 and Direct3D 8 (nevermind Direct3D 9), but it is fast enough right? Wrong.
It's the same thing with sound cards. Sure, 44khz may be enough for you right now but you must realize that when DVD-A rolls around you are going to feel pretty stupid getting half the samples. The features are always being expanded for everyone. With every revision of a sound card features get added, noise gets reduced, the latest API support (new EAX, etc) gets in and the cards get faster. There are an unbelievable amount of limitations on the current level of soundcards simply becuase people like you claim there is no reason to upgrade them.
You may like good stereo sound but nobody cares about stereo sound now. 5.1 isn't enough, 6.1 isn't enough, 7.1 is adequete and just wait until we start adding multiple subwoofers and even more speakers. Just because you don't want to buy new speakers doesn't mean the new sound cards are worthless.
Do you know what the next major thing with sound cards is? Dolby Digital. Sure, Creative may claim that their Audigy does dolby digital but wait until you bring it home. It only outputs dolby digital (through coaxial or optical) in specialized applications (which there are nearly none of) or in DVDs. For those of us with home theater systems used on their computer this is totally unacceptable. No respectable speaker set is going to use analog 5.1, so all of creative's claims that they support up to 7.1 speakers are in vain.
Right now there are no cards on the market (that I know of) that support Dolby Digital. The only thing that outputs all sounds in Dolby Digital right now is the Nvidia soundforce chip (which has been vastly overlooked IMHO). This is motherboard sound and it's more advanced than sound cards! It's pointless. Once we get dolby digital in our sound cards and lose one less processing step (the DAC on the sound card) then maybe we will have reached some sort of a limitation to the abilities of sound cards. Our sound cards just aren't there yet and because you don't want to use it doesn't mean that others don't.
Great! Because we all know how good the Athlon naming conventions have been in the past!
I mean, my 2400+ Athlon that runs at 2.0ghz? No problem! My 2700+ Athlon that runs at a higher clock speed than a 3000+ Athlon? What? No worries. Thunderbird, Barton, ThoroughBred A, Thoroughbred B? Know it like the back of my hand
Thank god AMD is clearing up the confusion caused by intel (Oh my god! Two different processor names! ahhh!!!!) by setting an example with it's own naming conventions!
No, this isn't a comic strip but it is the Penny-arcade 'guy' explaining his life as a video game developer. It's basically a rant, but it's a first hand experience from the tester himself. I now have respect for people who play video games all day and it's written very well.
Replace every three generations, or when things are three times as fast as your current device.
Simple, isn't it? For the past 10 (or so) I've worked on that little rule and it's lead me exactly where I want to go.
My 486 became a Pentium II 266 became a Pentium III 800 became an Athlon 2400+.
My something rather (I think it was an S3 Virge, but this was in the days when no one cared anyway) became a Voodoo 2 became a Geforce 256 became a Radeon 8500 (Which I bought budget at $100 canadian).
My Gravis Ultrasound became a Sound blaster Live became a Hercules Game Theater XP became Nforce2 Dolby Digital output.
It's strange how well this system worked out. Just as my machine became almost unbearable for games (About a 30FPS average for most games) I've upgraded because of this 3x rule. Sure, it means that you won't be at the bleeding edge for very long but the edge is too easy to fall off anyway. Only idiots would skip from a Radeon 8500 to a 9700, just as it would be stupid to ditch a 2400+ Athlon for a 2.8ghz P4. At the same time, people who tell that a 500mhz and a Voodoo 3 is enough for anyone are obviously not playing any modern games. The trick is to get caught in between the two extremes.
Whenever I see an article like this I tend to think that some fanboy's trying to make a joke of us all.
Sure, Windows COULD be built on top of the Linux kernel, but why in the hell would you want it to be? Other than being closed-source, what is wrong with the current NT Kernel? Despite what a lot of./ers say it is pretty solid, runs cleanly and does everything the desktop OS could want. It seems to me that running the Linux kernel would just complicate things and try to fix something that isn't wrong. I'm really curious on what the horrors of the NT kernel are, as I've never seen them (I'm talking about desktop OS here).
Plus, the last thing I want to see is "You've installed a new device! Please wait while Microsoft (R) Windows recompiles the kernel in order to have support for [device name]"
You bring up an interesting point. As one could expect, an injury/death in a theme park is the absolute worst thing for business possible. While a lot of people think theme parks are safe, and they are (to an extent), there is a lot more going on then they might not know about. I'm pretty sure every park basically wants a NDA from anyone who got hurt on a ride.
So, we are reduced to the employees (myself included, I work at a Canadian theme park) and rebellious victims to give us any information. Try this site if you want to see more or don't believe me.
Personally I don't see anything wrong with brute forcing it for now, as long as we can brute force it we might as well.
Getting away from opinion for a while, I wouldn't worry about the slaughter of your innocent little P.S.U. (which really should be a good 400 watts for modern computers) as the card requires external power. To quote [H]ardOCP...
"You will also note that there is a Molex connector on this card to plug in for the extra power that's needed. The power the AGP port supplies just isn't enough to run the card stably. Just like the Radeon 9700 Pro, you must plug in external power to the card."
Nah, I'm fairly sure you read wrong. What nVidia is stopping production of is the ti4400 GPU. This wasn't really upsetting anyone anyway since it was pretty close to the Ti4200, especially when you overclock it.
And the card still has a good 3 months of production time, and an easy 1-3 months after that of selling them off. For example, you can still pick up Radeon 8500s right now...
Not only was this article a total letdown, a mysteriously (*wink wink*) similiar thing was posted somewhere else. Take a look at [H]ardNews 3rd Edition for tuesday on [H]ardOCP. I guess it's a little too much to expect from editors to look around the internet, but never the less, it seems stupid to totally rip something from another site directly, especially when the article sucks =).
Out of plain curiousity (and probably because of inexperience) I'm curious on what exactly vacuum tubes are in relationship to sound, what advantages/disadvantages they offer and anything else interesting to know. Also, if they are as good as they look, are there any PC sound cards that use vacuum tubes for audio? It is kind of funny to note that we have a consumer level 64 bit processor on the hand and all we can talk about is the vacuum tubes:).
I know I am really going to get nailed for this (I know, I'm just a windows kiddie) but I've been curious about this for a while. What exactly is 'journalling'? I've bene hearing plenty of buzz about ext3 being a journalling system, but I still don't have any clue what the hell journalling is. Any links, responses, etc. would be appreciated...
I see the majority of this discussion is pointing out the problems with Tom's Hardware. No complaints, as I completely agree with you.
Anyhow, if you want a preview that gives the facts properly try [H]ardOCP's (and if that link doesn't work, just go to the front page and click). They are usually opinioned to boot, but they know their stuff and post links to informative articles throughout the preview.
To get right down to it, I doubt that this "Kazaa Kut-off" (like my title =D) has anything to do with bandwidth and everything to do with Tech support. Perhaps not everything, but a good deal.
I can't count the number of times that a few of my buddies have to get me over to fix their computer because they downloaded a virus while trying to download some porn of Kazaa. Hell, just last week I ran a Adaware test on my friends (note: pretty decent) PC, and it came up with 300 instances of spyware found. 300! I have a feeling that RoadRunner is fed up with getting thousands of people calling everyday saying that they have viruses/whiped out computers.
Slashdot Mirror
When arrived at my school a lot of (CS,PMATH) professors told me that they didn't believe that Calculus should be anyone's introduction to mathematics. Unfortunately, a lot of Calculus tends to be taught with "tricks" (this includes a fair number of proofs) that while are neat to look at as a math major provide very little benefit to most people.
One of the best things that happened to me was our first year classical algebra. It starts from the very basics of logic, surveys elementary number theory, modular arithmatic, complex numbers and puts a very large emphasis on constructive proofs. It was a course where you actually began to understand mathematics rather than just use it. I think I realized I was studying the right subject when I spent about six hours in our tutorial centre proving some arbitrary property about GCDs with about ten other people. Anyway, after I had finally solved it, I rode my bike home, collapsed in my bed out of mental exhaustion. Of course, when I awoke I realized how much I had learned in the process of the proof.
After learning logic and the basis of proofs, Calculus begins to make *a little* more sense. A lot of people get scared the first time they see something like the precise definition of a limit; but a strong logical background makes it quite seemless.
Anyway - it might be worthwhile to see if the school has a first year "proofy" class that you can get yourself into. Otherwise, it might be worthwhile to read a book on basic mathematical logic or number theory. Even if you can't recreate proofs, there is a lot of benefit in reading them. Of course, if it is just manipulating equations that you need help with I'm sure it will come in time.
(That course is Math 135/145 for anyone at Waterloo)
I do not think there is a recipe for the 'proper' child.
A lot of the best times of my childhood was spent speaking to older folks on IRC and Meridian 59. It seemed like wasted times to my parents, but it was essentially another social life that was equally as valid as any other. I would have been quite angry if I was limited to an hour a day.
A lot of my early vocabulary came from the school nights I spent playing Final Fantasy II. By most logic, my parents should have placed rigid rules on me to prevent the 'corruption' of my brain.
I'd say that most people need to speak to their child and figure out the reason they want to play their games every night.
I believe that the article is either mistaken or the legislation has been changed in a couple of days. I know that when I went to purchase GTA: SA at an EB in Ontario I was carded for the first time. They let me have it with my ID being 17.
Anyone shed light? Maybe it was just EB's policy that was 17 and the actual legislation is 18 now. Either way, it's pretty interesting and after playing GTA:SA I can't say I fully disagree with the policy in spite of free market and parents not being able to parent blah blah.
Sorry to latch on to your question, but I've been wondering...
Personally, I need more music than a CD-R player can offer. Currently, I have an iPod and find it great, other than the fact that it was overpriced and a little bit fragile (AA batteries would be nice, though I can live without them). DVD burners are gaining marketshare quickly. Why don't we have some portable DVD-R mp3/ogg/FLAC/yatta players? I think most of the geeks here could use a player that had removable 4.7gig storage, and it would eliminate the worry of a head crash (which is why I'm paranoid of snowboarding with my iPod).
Anyone heard of anything?
Just wanted to put the information out there that the current Meridian 59 client works very well with WINE. I didn't get a chance to test sound, but I had no problems walking around and killing a few monsters in the world while I was on my FreeBSD box. Doesn't even require WineX (the client is THAT old). I'll admit that it looks like shit, but that's the fault of the game and not WINE. Anyone using WINE shouldn't care too much about graphics anyway :)
I know that the developer has stated some interests about creating a true Linux port of the new client, which would definitely be neat, but I'm not sure how that is going to work out.
You're absolutely right. There is no god-given atmosphere in Meridian 59. For the most part there never has been and probably never will be. Hell, you can run the thing in a window and dock ICQ right next to it. You can't go in expecting Doom III.
At the same time, for whatever reason, Meridian 59 remains as the most fun I've ever had online. Anyone can tell you fun can not be manufactured for the people, it has to be created by the people.
You claim that it sucks that you can't blend in with a crowd and ignore the person you pissed off. Quite the opposite, the beauty of the game is that there is no escape. You screw up, you're getting killed and all your items (along with enough spells/skills to take off about an hours work off your game). Of course, maybe you are in a guild so now the person is kill-on-sight by the guild. Meridian puts the least limits on player's actions as possible and thus becomes the only true player-oriented online RPG. I'm sorry that weinnies from Everquest can't take the fact that Player-vs-Player is fun, not in the Quake sense, but when you have everything to lose going into the battle.
Meridian 59 may be as old as dirt but it remains unchallenged by any online RPG today.
Just a heads up for everyone:
N2H2's Bess currently blocks an extremely large amount of sites, including google's image search (but not the main google site). It also seemingly blocks by a number of things, including ip address (I think it performs a reverse DNS lookup on every ip as it blocks the octal and hexidecimal ips of site as well) and string. What I mean by string is that you can get to the main Web Archive site (as a loophole), but you can't enter a blocked address there and try to recieve an archive of it. Same deal with google cache.
Another thing is the shear rapidness of blocking. I started playing FlashFlashRevolution.com for about a week, and when I got back to school on monday it was blocked. I asked my Systems admin and he told me he didn't block me, so they must be monitoring bandwidth at some central station.
The FlashFlash ban got me pissed off, so I found some open proxies at my house and manually searched out the internet options control panel file (InetCpl.cpl) to change my proxy settings. Sure enough, this worked. Of course, if you need a new proxy server absolutely every web-based proxy or open proxy list is banned (and you wouldn't believe the number of bans), so I had to VNC to my freebsd box at home to get a list. Sure enough, I can now play flash flash revolution during those boring high school comp science classes.
If anyone has any other suggestions I'd love to hear them
Well, to start off the whole thing that made the Matrix famous was the effect I am talking about where everything slowed down and Neo [or whoever] would move nearly at a normal pace. This made you feel the speed and you got he sense that Neo was moving faster than normal (while it retained some realism).
I agree with you about the character and focus part.
As for what I was talking about with Spider-man, it was the quick jump scenes that bothered me a lot. When he swings around flag poles with 0 effort and 0 acceleration/decceleration/etc it bothers me. Sure, it's meant to be unrealistic but it's supposed to look as if it were physically possible if you were strong.
The most glaring example in spider man was definitely when he swung around the pole of the empire state building. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it didn't look 'real' in the sense that it would be possible should you have spider-slinging abilities.
I realize that it seems nitpicky, but as far as I can see this is the problem with CG right now.
I don't know but in every movie I have ever seen that has used CG it looks a little fishy. Things like Spider-man, which is said to have great CG graphics I found rather mediocore when it comes to the look of it.
I attribute it to the physics. I could be totally wrong, but I think that the world of artist and more importantly, the world of animator is not governed by earthly physics. I think the computer is not set properly to account for the subtleties of the world and the further subtleties of the human eye. When I see CG in movies I see motion that happens too fast for motion. Spider-man was a huge victim of this, with Peter Parker moving faster than the world would ever allow (I'm aware that he is supposed to have super speed, but speed is best shown in film by slowing everyone else, not speeding the rate of one person up).
To continue with my all-ready used Spider-man example I do notice that even gravity isn't obeyed in half the scenes. Taking into account a certain amount of 'push' force at a certain altitude, Peter Parker would not fly in the air at that angle. He failed to arc in half the scenes and it gets really unrealistic when he exerts minimal force in order to actually gain ground by 'swinging' upwards.
I've seen a lot of CG capes that mysteriously defy gravity too.
I'm sure some 'crazy physics d00d' here could point out a lot more problems with a lot more CG. I think that every CG studio should have a Physist look over their work.
Sometimes the most glaring things in movies is that the CG seems to move at a higher frame rate than the rest of the movie. The character just moves too fast in too short of time and never really looks right.
I'm very sorry, but this a pretty ignorant viewpoint. Why do we need better video cards? GLQuake on my GeForce 256 always looked fine. Of course, my GeForce 256 doesn't support any neato pixel shader 2.0 and Direct3D 8 (nevermind Direct3D 9), but it is fast enough right? Wrong.
It's the same thing with sound cards. Sure, 44khz may be enough for you right now but you must realize that when DVD-A rolls around you are going to feel pretty stupid getting half the samples. The features are always being expanded for everyone. With every revision of a sound card features get added, noise gets reduced, the latest API support (new EAX, etc) gets in and the cards get faster. There are an unbelievable amount of limitations on the current level of soundcards simply becuase people like you claim there is no reason to upgrade them.
You may like good stereo sound but nobody cares about stereo sound now. 5.1 isn't enough, 6.1 isn't enough, 7.1 is adequete and just wait until we start adding multiple subwoofers and even more speakers. Just because you don't want to buy new speakers doesn't mean the new sound cards are worthless.
Do you know what the next major thing with sound cards is? Dolby Digital. Sure, Creative may claim that their Audigy does dolby digital but wait until you bring it home. It only outputs dolby digital (through coaxial or optical) in specialized applications (which there are nearly none of) or in DVDs. For those of us with home theater systems used on their computer this is totally unacceptable. No respectable speaker set is going to use analog 5.1, so all of creative's claims that they support up to 7.1 speakers are in vain.
Right now there are no cards on the market (that I know of) that support Dolby Digital. The only thing that outputs all sounds in Dolby Digital right now is the Nvidia soundforce chip (which has been vastly overlooked IMHO). This is motherboard sound and it's more advanced than sound cards! It's pointless. Once we get dolby digital in our sound cards and lose one less processing step (the DAC on the sound card) then maybe we will have reached some sort of a limitation to the abilities of sound cards. Our sound cards just aren't there yet and because you don't want to use it doesn't mean that others don't.
Great!
Because we all know how good the Athlon naming conventions have been in the past!
I mean, my 2400+ Athlon that runs at 2.0ghz? No problem! My 2700+ Athlon that runs at a higher clock speed than a 3000+ Athlon? What? No worries. Thunderbird, Barton, ThoroughBred A, Thoroughbred B? Know it like the back of my hand
Thank god AMD is clearing up the confusion caused by intel (Oh my god! Two different processor names! ahhh!!!!) by setting an example with it's own naming conventions!
No, this isn't a comic strip but it is the Penny-arcade 'guy' explaining his life as a video game developer. It's basically a rant, but it's a first hand experience from the tester himself. I now have respect for people who play video games all day and it's written very well.
Here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/porktester.php3
Mine is simple enough...
Drugs are overrated.
Your mind is screwed up enough already, why fuck with it?
Here's my little rule for upgrading my system.
Replace every three generations, or when things are three times as fast as your current device.
Simple, isn't it? For the past 10 (or so) I've worked on that little rule and it's lead me exactly where I want to go.
My 486 became a Pentium II 266 became a Pentium III 800 became an Athlon 2400+.
My something rather (I think it was an S3 Virge, but this was in the days when no one cared anyway) became a Voodoo 2 became a Geforce 256 became a Radeon 8500 (Which I bought budget at $100 canadian).
My Gravis Ultrasound became a Sound blaster Live became a Hercules Game Theater XP became Nforce2 Dolby Digital output.
It's strange how well this system worked out. Just as my machine became almost unbearable for games (About a 30FPS average for most games) I've upgraded because of this 3x rule. Sure, it means that you won't be at the bleeding edge for very long but the edge is too easy to fall off anyway. Only idiots would skip from a Radeon 8500 to a 9700, just as it would be stupid to ditch a 2400+ Athlon for a 2.8ghz P4. At the same time, people who tell that a 500mhz and a Voodoo 3 is enough for anyone are obviously not playing any modern games. The trick is to get caught in between the two extremes.
Whenever I see an article like this I tend to think that some fanboy's trying to make a joke of us all.
./ers say it is pretty solid, runs cleanly and does everything the desktop OS could want. It seems to me that running the Linux kernel would just complicate things and try to fix something that isn't wrong. I'm really curious on what the horrors of the NT kernel are, as I've never seen them (I'm talking about desktop OS here).
Sure, Windows COULD be built on top of the Linux kernel, but why in the hell would you want it to be? Other than being closed-source, what is wrong with the current NT Kernel? Despite what a lot of
Plus, the last thing I want to see is "You've installed a new device! Please wait while Microsoft (R) Windows recompiles the kernel in order to have support for [device name]"
You bring up an interesting point. As one could expect, an injury/death in a theme park is the absolute worst thing for business possible. While a lot of people think theme parks are safe, and they are (to an extent), there is a lot more going on then they might not know about. I'm pretty sure every park basically wants a NDA from anyone who got hurt on a ride.
So, we are reduced to the employees (myself included, I work at a Canadian theme park) and rebellious victims to give us any information. Try this site if you want to see more or don't believe me.
Just something to watch out for.
I'm sorry, in every manner Kazaa is much worse than the people trying to shut it down.
I have no intentions to support software that is 50% spyware.
Do not tell me to download some bullshit hack, I don't want to support a network with a base of spyware.
In other words, I hope Kazaa gets crushed, crashed, burned, trampled on and forgotten. I will never use the words 'Go Kazaa' in my life.
Personally I don't see anything wrong with brute forcing it for now, as long as we can brute force it we might as well.
Getting away from opinion for a while, I wouldn't worry about the slaughter of your innocent little P.S.U. (which really should be a good 400 watts for modern computers) as the card requires external power. To quote [H]ardOCP...
"You will also note that there is a Molex connector on this card to plug in for the extra power that's needed. The power the AGP port supplies just isn't enough to run the card stably. Just like the Radeon 9700 Pro, you must plug in external power to the card."
Nah, I'm fairly sure you read wrong. What nVidia is stopping production of is the ti4400 GPU. This wasn't really upsetting anyone anyway since it was pretty close to the Ti4200, especially when you overclock it.
And the card still has a good 3 months of production time, and an easy 1-3 months after that of selling them off. For example, you can still pick up Radeon 8500s right now...
Not only was this article a total letdown, a mysteriously (*wink wink*) similiar thing was posted somewhere else. Take a look at [H]ardNews 3rd Edition for tuesday on [H]ardOCP. I guess it's a little too much to expect from editors to look around the internet, but never the less, it seems stupid to totally rip something from another site directly, especially when the article sucks =).
Oh god, I'm never going to get *that* picture of RMS out of my head.
Out of plain curiousity (and probably because of inexperience) I'm curious on what exactly vacuum tubes are in relationship to sound, what advantages/disadvantages they offer and anything else interesting to know. Also, if they are as good as they look, are there any PC sound cards that use vacuum tubes for audio? It is kind of funny to note that we have a consumer level 64 bit processor on the hand and all we can talk about is the vacuum tubes :).
Anyone care to answer?
I know I am really going to get nailed for this (I know, I'm just a windows kiddie) but I've been curious about this for a while. What exactly is 'journalling'? I've bene hearing plenty of buzz about ext3 being a journalling system, but I still don't have any clue what the hell journalling is. Any links, responses, etc. would be appreciated...
I see the majority of this discussion is pointing out the problems with Tom's Hardware. No complaints, as I completely agree with you.
Anyhow, if you want a preview that gives the facts properly try [H]ardOCP's (and if that link doesn't work, just go to the front page and click). They are usually opinioned to boot, but they know their stuff and post links to informative articles throughout the preview.
To get right down to it, I doubt that this "Kazaa Kut-off" (like my title =D) has anything to do with bandwidth and everything to do with Tech support. Perhaps not everything, but a good deal.
I can't count the number of times that a few of my buddies have to get me over to fix their computer because they downloaded a virus while trying to download some porn of Kazaa. Hell, just last week I ran a Adaware test on my friends (note: pretty decent) PC, and it came up with 300 instances of spyware found. 300! I have a feeling that RoadRunner is fed up with getting thousands of people calling everyday saying that they have viruses/whiped out computers.