Just because you don't know how to use email productivly doesn't mean there isn't a world of us out here for whom it has replaced most nonverbal forms of office communication. My office recently cut back on the interoffice mail runs (to once a day) because the volume of mail had dropped so drastically.
I think the point is that this is for games where the bottleneck is in the CPU and the graphics card is sitting idle half of the time. By pulling 10% of the graphics card's resources to physics calculations, you could offload enough of the work from the CPU that it could keep the rest of the card completely fed and see a framerateimprovement with no additional hardware or loss in video quality.
You're not the first one to think of that. Of course this is the old cycle of reincarnation rearing its ugly head again. Sadly, I don't think the PhysX card will be that great of a success unless a LOT of game developers get on board. It's just rather expensive for what it offers and adds yet another layer of complexity to a system that can already be hard to get running correctly.
I think the point is that most SLI systems are bottlenecked on the CPU, whereas most single card systems still bottleneck on the Graphics card. I'm not sure if this is actually true, but that's the impression I got from the article. By offloading some of the physics processing, you can theoretically remove that bottleneck and get slightly better performance (until you bottleneck on something else, perhaps even the CPU again).
This also means that the bottleneck will more often be the graphics card, which nVidia likes because it means people will have a reason to buy a faster (more expensive) card.
Also, MEPIS? I've been in the scene long enough to remember when Slashdot didn't have user accounts and I've never heard of it before. I had to do a Google search to find out what it is.
of course there are enough Linux distros that I don't even try to learn them all, but when one that I've never heard of appears in the top 5 I get suspicious. Are there really more MEPIS users than Debian users?
Well it is WINE after all. Admittedly, the Wine team has done an amazing job at what is an almost impossible task, but I'm always surprised and delighted too when an application just works under Wine.
T-Mobile gives out the unlock code if you contact them after a month. I don't plan on switching networks anytime soon, but I went ahead and unlocked my phone anyway just in case.
That's the rub. When SciFi decides to redo a series, they seem to follow an inverse quality rule. The worse the original series, the better the scifi remake, and sadly, vice versa. There was talk of having them redo Manos: The Hands of Fate, but the resulting movie would probably be so good that it would be dangerous to watch.
Why compare it to MP3? Why not just compare the encrypted vs. nonencrypted (m4p vs. m4a) versionf of what are otherwise the same file (128kbps encode of the same song)?
I think the problem comes from the decryption step. DRMed formats don't just have some license bits on the front, they also encrypt the rest of the payload to insure that nobody can just come by and rewrite (or erase) the license info.
Blank media is always expensive when it first comes out. I remember when CDrs were $5 a pop. Now they're 1/100 of that. It's what you pay for being an early adopter.
This leads to one of the weird things about TV. Crime show writers love to talk about stalkers, spending hours discussing how the stalker obsesses over the perfectly normal healthy human on the other end. So finally, the stalker gets the guts to go meet up with their single desire in life and what do they do? Of course they murder them, usually in the most messy way possible. I would think if your average stalker managed to get the drop on their victim and had them subdued/tied up, murder would not be the top of their to-do list.
Frankly, I'd rather have only a new media player and better video drivers if it means not having yet more security holes in the base OS.
The message shouldn't be: Don't implement new features. It should be: Think about security when implmenting new features. Remember that attacks come from below your level of abstraction as well.
What's worse is when they add a random "party wipe" button on the boss, so 1/4 of the time he'll just kill you pretty much no matter what. I remember the final boss in Chrono Trigger was like that. Occasionally he'd use his ultimate physical damage attack immediately followed by the ultimate magical damage attack. The mage guys die in the first attack, and the melee guys die in the second. You either had an auto-life on your guys or it's game over.
Yeah, I think that's the spot. Basically, if you don't level up to the point where the Ice patch is a piece of cake, the boss will wipe the floor with you.
Yeah, you often see this from people who come up with a good idea but then are stuck trying to come up with another. Instead of the obvious: "I can't think of anything good", they make an ass out of themselves and proclaim that "Everything has been invented already, there's nothing left!"
There's a point where a boss battle moves from "challenging" to "tedous". IMHO, it is when the boss requires you to level up your characters to a super high level, and even then it takes 30+ minutes of just whacking away at his HP bar to finally win.
The thing with most RPGs is that they're easy if you spend a lot of time doing random battles and finding the best equipment along the way. By the time you get to the end boss your characters are so tweaked out that he doesn't stand a chance. I know Final Fantasy 8 scaled bosses based on your levels to avoid this, but that was somewhat unpopular with the players from what I can tell.
On the other hand, there's my old roommate, who played the games for the stories and cutscenes. He was a big Final Fantasy nut, but he never managed to beat 10. He got to a boss (at the end of the long robot filled ice gorge IIRC) that he just couldn't beat. It didn't help that he pretty much skipped the random encounter field before that, and only barely made it through the ice gorge by cheating and having the thief (forget her name, but she was the theif character) disassemble the robots in every fight.
I remember playing through his copy of FFVI in college and getting to some encounter where two giant bosses attack you from either side. It was an optional encounter and he'd never beaten it because the bosses always clobbered his guys. I'd spent some time playing around in the fields to learn Blue magic (and just happened to level up along the way) and ended up just laughing off the ambush as my dual weilding (with both of the best swords) knight-king turned them into dogfood.
I think we may be thinking about slightly different markets. I was thinking about villages that don't even have power (making the hand crank necessary), you're thinking about the ones who probably stand a better chance of making this whole thing work.
They're going to crank out thousands of these things, is there really that much old HAM equipment lying around ready to be donated? Beyond that, how is some poor backwoods village supposed to figure out how to use some ancient HAM equipment?
There is a bit of a dilemma with these laptops and connectivity. You can try to build a cell infastructure, but for many poor areas with low population density it's going to be hard to convince anyone to do that. You can give them satellite links, but that's going to cost way more than the $100 you spent on the laptop. Old HAM equipment might work if you have a pair of people who know what they're doing, although keeping your average 1970 ham equipment running with just a hand crank is going to be a trick.
It'd make the old Concorde ticket cost look pretty pathetic too. There might be a tiny niche market for people who have money to burn and absolutely positivly must be in Europe or the US ASAP.
Yeah, that's been my experiance too. Tape drives are insanely overpriced, slow, and more difficult to work with than hard drives. Unless you're looking at truly enormous amounts of data, hard drives are almost always the way to go. For home users tape drives are not even close to competative.
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Just because you don't know how to use email productivly doesn't mean there isn't a world of us out here for whom it has replaced most nonverbal forms of office communication. My office recently cut back on the interoffice mail runs (to once a day) because the volume of mail had dropped so drastically.
I think the point is that this is for games where the bottleneck is in the CPU and the graphics card is sitting idle half of the time. By pulling 10% of the graphics card's resources to physics calculations, you could offload enough of the work from the CPU that it could keep the rest of the card completely fed and see a framerateimprovement with no additional hardware or loss in video quality.
You're not the first one to think of that. Of course this is the old cycle of reincarnation rearing its ugly head again. Sadly, I don't think the PhysX card will be that great of a success unless a LOT of game developers get on board. It's just rather expensive for what it offers and adds yet another layer of complexity to a system that can already be hard to get running correctly.
I think the point is that most SLI systems are bottlenecked on the CPU, whereas most single card systems still bottleneck on the Graphics card. I'm not sure if this is actually true, but that's the impression I got from the article. By offloading some of the physics processing, you can theoretically remove that bottleneck and get slightly better performance (until you bottleneck on something else, perhaps even the CPU again).
This also means that the bottleneck will more often be the graphics card, which nVidia likes because it means people will have a reason to buy a faster (more expensive) card.
Also, MEPIS? I've been in the scene long enough to remember when Slashdot didn't have user accounts and I've never heard of it before. I had to do a Google search to find out what it is.
of course there are enough Linux distros that I don't even try to learn them all, but when one that I've never heard of appears in the top 5 I get suspicious. Are there really more MEPIS users than Debian users?
Well it is WINE after all. Admittedly, the Wine team has done an amazing job at what is an almost impossible task, but I'm always surprised and delighted too when an application just works under Wine.
So a feature is only a feature if it clutters up the front page?
T-Mobile gives out the unlock code if you contact them after a month. I don't plan on switching networks anytime soon, but I went ahead and unlocked my phone anyway just in case.
That's the rub. When SciFi decides to redo a series, they seem to follow an inverse quality rule. The worse the original series, the better the scifi remake, and sadly, vice versa. There was talk of having them redo Manos: The Hands of Fate, but the resulting movie would probably be so good that it would be dangerous to watch.
Why compare it to MP3? Why not just compare the encrypted vs. nonencrypted (m4p vs. m4a) versionf of what are otherwise the same file (128kbps encode of the same song)?
I think the problem comes from the decryption step. DRMed formats don't just have some license bits on the front, they also encrypt the rest of the payload to insure that nobody can just come by and rewrite (or erase) the license info.
Which format has porn?
Blank media is always expensive when it first comes out. I remember when CDrs were $5 a pop. Now they're 1/100 of that. It's what you pay for being an early adopter.
This leads to one of the weird things about TV. Crime show writers love to talk about stalkers, spending hours discussing how the stalker obsesses over the perfectly normal healthy human on the other end. So finally, the stalker gets the guts to go meet up with their single desire in life and what do they do? Of course they murder them, usually in the most messy way possible. I would think if your average stalker managed to get the drop on their victim and had them subdued/tied up, murder would not be the top of their to-do list.
But I already run BSD.
Frankly, I'd rather have only a new media player and better video drivers if it means not having yet more security holes in the base OS.
The message shouldn't be: Don't implement new features. It should be: Think about security when implmenting new features. Remember that attacks come from below your level of abstraction as well.
What's worse is when they add a random "party wipe" button on the boss, so 1/4 of the time he'll just kill you pretty much no matter what. I remember the final boss in Chrono Trigger was like that. Occasionally he'd use his ultimate physical damage attack immediately followed by the ultimate magical damage attack. The mage guys die in the first attack, and the melee guys die in the second. You either had an auto-life on your guys or it's game over.
Yeah, I think that's the spot. Basically, if you don't level up to the point where the Ice patch is a piece of cake, the boss will wipe the floor with you.
Yeah, you often see this from people who come up with a good idea but then are stuck trying to come up with another. Instead of the obvious: "I can't think of anything good", they make an ass out of themselves and proclaim that "Everything has been invented already, there's nothing left!"
There's a point where a boss battle moves from "challenging" to "tedous". IMHO, it is when the boss requires you to level up your characters to a super high level, and even then it takes 30+ minutes of just whacking away at his HP bar to finally win.
The thing with most RPGs is that they're easy if you spend a lot of time doing random battles and finding the best equipment along the way. By the time you get to the end boss your characters are so tweaked out that he doesn't stand a chance. I know Final Fantasy 8 scaled bosses based on your levels to avoid this, but that was somewhat unpopular with the players from what I can tell.
On the other hand, there's my old roommate, who played the games for the stories and cutscenes. He was a big Final Fantasy nut, but he never managed to beat 10. He got to a boss (at the end of the long robot filled ice gorge IIRC) that he just couldn't beat. It didn't help that he pretty much skipped the random encounter field before that, and only barely made it through the ice gorge by cheating and having the thief (forget her name, but she was the theif character) disassemble the robots in every fight.
I remember playing through his copy of FFVI in college and getting to some encounter where two giant bosses attack you from either side. It was an optional encounter and he'd never beaten it because the bosses always clobbered his guys. I'd spent some time playing around in the fields to learn Blue magic (and just happened to level up along the way) and ended up just laughing off the ambush as my dual weilding (with both of the best swords) knight-king turned them into dogfood.
I think we may be thinking about slightly different markets. I was thinking about villages that don't even have power (making the hand crank necessary), you're thinking about the ones who probably stand a better chance of making this whole thing work.
They're going to crank out thousands of these things, is there really that much old HAM equipment lying around ready to be donated? Beyond that, how is some poor backwoods village supposed to figure out how to use some ancient HAM equipment?
There is a bit of a dilemma with these laptops and connectivity. You can try to build a cell infastructure, but for many poor areas with low population density it's going to be hard to convince anyone to do that. You can give them satellite links, but that's going to cost way more than the $100 you spent on the laptop. Old HAM equipment might work if you have a pair of people who know what they're doing, although keeping your average 1970 ham equipment running with just a hand crank is going to be a trick.
It'd make the old Concorde ticket cost look pretty pathetic too. There might be a tiny niche market for people who have money to burn and absolutely positivly must be in Europe or the US ASAP.
Yeah, that's been my experiance too. Tape drives are insanely overpriced, slow, and more difficult to work with than hard drives. Unless you're looking at truly enormous amounts of data, hard drives are almost always the way to go. For home users tape drives are not even close to competative.