That's interesting. I've been really wanting to try out Oblivion. Sooner or later I'll get around to it. I still feel a need to play all the way through Morrowind first, which I got a pretty late start on... (so much to do)
I always wanted to play daggerfall after it being hyped and hyped back in the day. I was always a big fan of Ultima and japanese RPGs and even enjoyed a good bit of eye of the beholder II. I never got to play daggerfall until years later I found it on some abandonware site. The first thing I noticed was how generic every NPC basically was. Even the story NPCs were about as flat as a cardboard cutout. Secondly the dungeouns were incredibly random and boring. For those of you that think that morrowind was like walking through a database (as one slashdotter pointed out) playing daggerfall is like playing through a randomly generated database. NPC interaction is pretty similar to Morrowind, where generic npcs pretty much have the same response, though the amount of information they give is far more interesting in Morrowind. Do the towns even have the same layout when you revisit them? Not that it matters, they all pretty much look exactly the same. This is the one thing that Morrowind really improved on and they created such a large (relative to other 3d games) cohesive world, and while I have never played Oblivion, I was really immediately turned off by the terrain generation. I loved how in Morrowind you could explore every nook and cranny and find little hidden caves, tombs, camps, and secrets everywhere. I loved the exploration. Maybe when I get a better computer running again I'll have to check out Oblivion, though I'd really love to check out Fallout 3, though I am immensely saddened that Fallout never got the sequel it deserved. The one from the original team. Outside of the fallout name, Bethesda could have just made a post apocalyptic rpg and it would have sold very well just based on their name alone. Hell, Fallout was a spiritual successor to Wasteland.
If you can afford an xbox you can afford a pc that will play fallout 3. last time I priced one I came in at around the $400 mark. Pretty cheap these days if you ask me.
Why should I care? If I type in google.com and it gives me google what is the problem? If I misstype and it sends me to some cybersquatting bogus search page then oh well, I just type it again. This isn't anything new. I'm sure someone has registered gooogle.com, just to use an example. (well, not totally sure) So now cockcast is doing it on their level. I understand it might suck once in a blue moon when you type something in wrong, but is it the end of the world or a massive loss of our rights? Doubtful. Unless there is something I'm missing here, like it fucking up legitimate dns requests. Oh and has anyone been having a problem maintaining video streams over cockcast lately? Seems like anything streamed is immediately penalized or something. Doesn't matter if it is youtube or anything else......
Don't know if you will get to reply to this, but have you toyed with the notion that Cbrist never existed at all and was fictionalised by the Romans as way of uniting an empire? It seems that the general consensus is that a person named Jesus did historically exist, but we all know how easy it is to fabricate history. There were some interesting treatments I've read on the concept.
Does swap really erase? I was always just under the impression that if a block was no longer used it was just demapped. If the OS decides to write to that block again it just merely overwrites that block. Unless I'm missing something here? I thought the problem with running swap on a flash was the sheer number of writes involved, not the erases. The problem with erasing, from what I can tell, is when you have a temp folder that keeps erasing and further reducing the number of free whole blocks by fragmenting them with new files....
So I RTFA to see if it answered any of my questions and it seems that they are just saying that they don't have the answers either. I don't know if I agree with their use of flash as extended ram. Why not just make it a super fast drive that sits close to the cpu and give it the illusion of being an IDE drive so us normal users can just make it a swap partition. Oh, and give the chip a socket so we can upgrade/replace it later. I don't think it would cost manufacturers a great deal more to add one more socket, but it might cost a bit more as its hard to find cheap motherboards with say more than one PCIex16 slot or more than 2 DIMM connectors. Or maybe it is that they want you to spend the extra $20 for such features......
Isn't it still the case the flash drive speed slowly degrades as they fill up and delete blocks, as it marks blocks off as used even though they are half full, etc? And that windows 7 is going to somewhat address this issue? Also, are their claims now that you can get millions of writes still holding water? I'm not real convinced yet. The speed is there, but there still seem to be fundamental issues. Like for instance, this PC I'm using right now is a backup machine, and its old 40gig drive is really slow. I can boot linux off a USB flash drive. Would that be any faster, and more importantly, how long would the usb drive last from swapping? Theoretically it should be faster and throughput should be higher with USB 2. I'd only need like a 16 gig stick or something......
Pretty much all consoles now have an API. The only exceptions are probably like the game boy DS. Even the PSP has an OS. The XBOX runs direct X as its api. Don't know about the PS3, but I'm sure they do have some operating system to make calls to. Sure a lot of programming is still being done directly on the hardware via assembly, but we are not in the DOS days where the OS just took a back seat to the hardware.
Sorry you ended up with that piece of crap. This fully reinforces why I want my cellphones to be cheap and single purpose. All I need is a number pad and an address book, preferably in a flip format, so I can at least feel like I am talking into a phone. Something like a plain small tablet like something maybe a bit bigger than a touch would be really appealing. My desktop finally died, so I decided that my next computer would just be a laptop. I can get cheap laptops that are faster than my desktop ever was. With prices where they are, I can easily see why most people are just springing for the notebook these days.
I've been waiting for someone to do the real math on how much it costs to recharge. $23 a recharge is not an insignificant cost, and while a good deal less than what it would cost for the average car to reach 300 miles, when compared to something more fuel efficient its clear that electric is nowhere near as cheap a fuel source as people believe it to be. People see the electricity as nearly free, but if they racked up a $700 electric bill, they might feel a bit differently about it. Considering that the average gasoline engine is about 20-30% efficient at best and a good electric motor is about 90-95% efficient it would point to gasoline being cheaper per joule than electricity. At 30MPG, it would cost you 10 gallons of gasoline to travel the same distance. At $3 a gallon that would be $30. You only used 30% of that energy (the rest was wasted) so you wasted $20 (in theory). You now pay $23 to run your electric the same distance and you only waste $2.30, however this illustrates the point that you are using 3x the potential energy with gas for $7 less. Maybe I should lay off the crack pipe, but I noticed that electricity is getting fairly expensive, and I remember it being on the much cheaper side back in the day. Also people in different states pay vastly different rates. Like my dad's electric bills are like $30, whereas I would probably pay $100 for the same bill. I live in Pennsylvania, coal rich, and the first or second largest producer and exporter of coal fired electricity. That with a couple of nuclear power plants within 20 miles of my city should mean that electricity should be dirt cheap right? My dad? He lives in Idaho. I believe they probably use more expensive natural gas burners, but they are not energy rich out there by any means anyway. Why do I pay like 3x as much for electricity and at least 2x as much for natural gas as him? (Our winters are pretty similar) Does it all boil down to taxes?
What's the matter, boy? I bet you squeal. I bet you can squeal like a pig. Let's squeal. Squeal now.
Squeal.
Squeal.
Squeal louder. Louder.
Louder.
Louder.
Louder!
Louder! Get down now, boy!
There, get them britches down. That's that. You can do better than that, boy. Come on, squeal. Squeal! What's you wanna do with him? He got a real pretty mouth, ain't he? That's the truth. You're gonna do some prayin' for me, boy. And you better pray good.
thanks for sharing this. reason has long been a reason to keep me in windows only land. if I could get all my productivity stuff under vmware, it might not be so bad.
So the immune system will actually fight cancer, but the cancer negates this by turning off the T-cells. This is fascinating. The problem, from what I understand, is that cancer cells reproduce indefinitely as their DNA does not slowly break down. It seems like this could be a real breakthrough for lots of cancer patients.
Perceived value. The value of something increases in peoples' minds with the cost. It all has to do with how informed the consumer is. A lesser informed consumer would see something that is free as worthless, otherwise, why would it be free?
I was thinking about the brave men and women who served in World War II. I'm guessing if there were a greater threat to our nation that many people would again join the fight, but in actuality, I think war on that sort of massive level is probably something for the history books for foreseeable future. Anyways this is probably for the best. Can you imagine the emo kids getting drafted?
I think the south wanted the war a lot more than the north. Its not hard to get a bunch of southerners drunk and pissed off, and they all have guns. I can see some of their arguments having merit though.
The old palms were great for battery life, but at the cost of being painfully slow. 16mhz slow. I used to have one of the redesigned zires or whatever and it was not terribly reliable, nor would it multitask, etc, but it still lasted for days, even weeks on a charge. I felt like that was a cornerstone in pocketable computing, and now it seems like the idea never really gained much traction. Didn't they make palm based watches? and the fossil watches that connected to MSN? Geeky computer watches are cool, but the screens are way too small.
Gee. I just went back to the newer d2 system and it won't even display any comments at all in FF 3.5. It just says "79 hidden" or whatever and clicking on the "show more" does fucking dick. That's pretty lame. It does at least show my comments though.:)
Why is slashdot so broken lately? I just upgraded to Firefox 3.5 a while ago and assumed I was just seeing rendering errors. I browse the conversations in the old style nested mode and the graphics float all over the text in bad, bad ways. Naturally I assumed that it was Firefox and I've been too lazy to notice if it does it on version 3,0x, but I guess I am now not alone in experiencing this phenomenon. I'd send someone at slashdot an e-mail, but I have a feeling that it would just end up on the damned idle page as a joke. I'm out of mod points, or I would have just modded the GP up, but hey, lets at least try to keep this up for a while...:)
How would this be a "game changer"? Did Tienanmen Square not just have its 20th anniversary? Of course the chinese suppressed what happened, but I'm sure as a society they still know the truth even though they don't speak of it in schools. For what it matters, what effect did the event have on our interaction with China? It seems to me like greed over ideals won the day as usual. When people start getting killed en masse they usually give in. Nobody really wants to die. Society has become soft. A few hundred years ago, whole populations would gladly give up their lives for a cause they believed in. Now it seems like that this number is down to a select few.
I took the liberty of comparing some systems. A Phenom II 940 x4 is about $200 with a board. A Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 is about the same. The Phenom is 2.5 ghz, the Core is 2.2ghz. According to this page, http://www.dexternights.com/2009/05/29/intel-vs-amd-desktop-quad-core-processors-comparison-price-vs-performance-ratio/, They are pretty much equal. It is pretty amazing how much intel has dropped pricing in comparison to AMD. Performance wise, those two parts are pretty similar, so I don't think the performance argument holds water. Also note that on the low end, AMD has some really pretty good offerings and has at least left somewhat of an upgrade path for people over the years. Its funny how anti-intel everyone was until they took the lead again and now they are the new darling.
Slashdot Mirror
That's interesting. I've been really wanting to try out Oblivion. Sooner or later I'll get around to it. I still feel a need to play all the way through Morrowind first, which I got a pretty late start on... (so much to do)
Thanks for clearing that up!
I always wanted to play daggerfall after it being hyped and hyped back in the day. I was always a big fan of Ultima and japanese RPGs and even enjoyed a good bit of eye of the beholder II. I never got to play daggerfall until years later I found it on some abandonware site. The first thing I noticed was how generic every NPC basically was. Even the story NPCs were about as flat as a cardboard cutout. Secondly the dungeouns were incredibly random and boring. For those of you that think that morrowind was like walking through a database (as one slashdotter pointed out) playing daggerfall is like playing through a randomly generated database. NPC interaction is pretty similar to Morrowind, where generic npcs pretty much have the same response, though the amount of information they give is far more interesting in Morrowind. Do the towns even have the same layout when you revisit them? Not that it matters, they all pretty much look exactly the same. This is the one thing that Morrowind really improved on and they created such a large (relative to other 3d games) cohesive world, and while I have never played Oblivion, I was really immediately turned off by the terrain generation. I loved how in Morrowind you could explore every nook and cranny and find little hidden caves, tombs, camps, and secrets everywhere. I loved the exploration. Maybe when I get a better computer running again I'll have to check out Oblivion, though I'd really love to check out Fallout 3, though I am immensely saddened that Fallout never got the sequel it deserved. The one from the original team. Outside of the fallout name, Bethesda could have just made a post apocalyptic rpg and it would have sold very well just based on their name alone. Hell, Fallout was a spiritual successor to Wasteland.
If you can afford an xbox you can afford a pc that will play fallout 3. last time I priced one I came in at around the $400 mark. Pretty cheap these days if you ask me.
Why should I care? If I type in google.com and it gives me google what is the problem? If I misstype and it sends me to some cybersquatting bogus search page then oh well, I just type it again. This isn't anything new. I'm sure someone has registered gooogle.com, just to use an example. (well, not totally sure) So now cockcast is doing it on their level. I understand it might suck once in a blue moon when you type something in wrong, but is it the end of the world or a massive loss of our rights? Doubtful. Unless there is something I'm missing here, like it fucking up legitimate dns requests. Oh and has anyone been having a problem maintaining video streams over cockcast lately? Seems like anything streamed is immediately penalized or something. Doesn't matter if it is youtube or anything else......
Don't know if you will get to reply to this, but have you toyed with the notion that Cbrist never existed at all and was fictionalised by the Romans as way of uniting an empire? It seems that the general consensus is that a person named Jesus did historically exist, but we all know how easy it is to fabricate history. There were some interesting treatments I've read on the concept.
Does swap really erase? I was always just under the impression that if a block was no longer used it was just demapped. If the OS decides to write to that block again it just merely overwrites that block. Unless I'm missing something here? I thought the problem with running swap on a flash was the sheer number of writes involved, not the erases. The problem with erasing, from what I can tell, is when you have a temp folder that keeps erasing and further reducing the number of free whole blocks by fragmenting them with new files....
So I RTFA to see if it answered any of my questions and it seems that they are just saying that they don't have the answers either. I don't know if I agree with their use of flash as extended ram. Why not just make it a super fast drive that sits close to the cpu and give it the illusion of being an IDE drive so us normal users can just make it a swap partition. Oh, and give the chip a socket so we can upgrade/replace it later. I don't think it would cost manufacturers a great deal more to add one more socket, but it might cost a bit more as its hard to find cheap motherboards with say more than one PCIex16 slot or more than 2 DIMM connectors. Or maybe it is that they want you to spend the extra $20 for such features......
Isn't it still the case the flash drive speed slowly degrades as they fill up and delete blocks, as it marks blocks off as used even though they are half full, etc? And that windows 7 is going to somewhat address this issue? Also, are their claims now that you can get millions of writes still holding water? I'm not real convinced yet. The speed is there, but there still seem to be fundamental issues. Like for instance, this PC I'm using right now is a backup machine, and its old 40gig drive is really slow. I can boot linux off a USB flash drive. Would that be any faster, and more importantly, how long would the usb drive last from swapping? Theoretically it should be faster and throughput should be higher with USB 2. I'd only need like a 16 gig stick or something......
I adhere to the 30 second rule myself.... :)
Pretty much all consoles now have an API. The only exceptions are probably like the game boy DS. Even the PSP has an OS. The XBOX runs direct X as its api. Don't know about the PS3, but I'm sure they do have some operating system to make calls to. Sure a lot of programming is still being done directly on the hardware via assembly, but we are not in the DOS days where the OS just took a back seat to the hardware.
Sorry you ended up with that piece of crap. This fully reinforces why I want my cellphones to be cheap and single purpose. All I need is a number pad and an address book, preferably in a flip format, so I can at least feel like I am talking into a phone. Something like a plain small tablet like something maybe a bit bigger than a touch would be really appealing. My desktop finally died, so I decided that my next computer would just be a laptop. I can get cheap laptops that are faster than my desktop ever was. With prices where they are, I can easily see why most people are just springing for the notebook these days.
I've been waiting for someone to do the real math on how much it costs to recharge. $23 a recharge is not an insignificant cost, and while a good deal less than what it would cost for the average car to reach 300 miles, when compared to something more fuel efficient its clear that electric is nowhere near as cheap a fuel source as people believe it to be. People see the electricity as nearly free, but if they racked up a $700 electric bill, they might feel a bit differently about it. Considering that the average gasoline engine is about 20-30% efficient at best and a good electric motor is about 90-95% efficient it would point to gasoline being cheaper per joule than electricity. At 30MPG, it would cost you 10 gallons of gasoline to travel the same distance. At $3 a gallon that would be $30. You only used 30% of that energy (the rest was wasted) so you wasted $20 (in theory). You now pay $23 to run your electric the same distance and you only waste $2.30, however this illustrates the point that you are using 3x the potential energy with gas for $7 less. Maybe I should lay off the crack pipe, but I noticed that electricity is getting fairly expensive, and I remember it being on the much cheaper side back in the day. Also people in different states pay vastly different rates. Like my dad's electric bills are like $30, whereas I would probably pay $100 for the same bill. I live in Pennsylvania, coal rich, and the first or second largest producer and exporter of coal fired electricity. That with a couple of nuclear power plants within 20 miles of my city should mean that electricity should be dirt cheap right? My dad? He lives in Idaho. I believe they probably use more expensive natural gas burners, but they are not energy rich out there by any means anyway. Why do I pay like 3x as much for electricity and at least 2x as much for natural gas as him? (Our winters are pretty similar) Does it all boil down to taxes?
What's the matter, boy?
I bet you squeal.
I bet you can squeal like a pig.
Let's squeal. Squeal now.
Squeal.
Squeal.
Squeal louder. Louder.
Louder.
Louder.
Louder!
Louder! Get down now, boy!
There, get them britches down. That's that.
You can do better than that, boy.
Come on, squeal. Squeal!
What's you wanna do with him?
He got a real pretty mouth, ain't he?
That's the truth.
You're gonna do some prayin' for me, boy.
And you better pray good.
thanks for sharing this. reason has long been a reason to keep me in windows only land. if I could get all my productivity stuff under vmware, it might not be so bad.
So the immune system will actually fight cancer, but the cancer negates this by turning off the T-cells. This is fascinating. The problem, from what I understand, is that cancer cells reproduce indefinitely as their DNA does not slowly break down. It seems like this could be a real breakthrough for lots of cancer patients.
Perceived value. The value of something increases in peoples' minds with the cost. It all has to do with how informed the consumer is. A lesser informed consumer would see something that is free as worthless, otherwise, why would it be free?
I was thinking about the brave men and women who served in World War II. I'm guessing if there were a greater threat to our nation that many people would again join the fight, but in actuality, I think war on that sort of massive level is probably something for the history books for foreseeable future. Anyways this is probably for the best. Can you imagine the emo kids getting drafted?
I think the south wanted the war a lot more than the north. Its not hard to get a bunch of southerners drunk and pissed off, and they all have guns. I can see some of their arguments having merit though.
The old palms were great for battery life, but at the cost of being painfully slow. 16mhz slow. I used to have one of the redesigned zires or whatever and it was not terribly reliable, nor would it multitask, etc, but it still lasted for days, even weeks on a charge. I felt like that was a cornerstone in pocketable computing, and now it seems like the idea never really gained much traction. Didn't they make palm based watches? and the fossil watches that connected to MSN? Geeky computer watches are cool, but the screens are way too small.
Gee. I just went back to the newer d2 system and it won't even display any comments at all in FF 3.5. It just says "79 hidden" or whatever and clicking on the "show more" does fucking dick. That's pretty lame. It does at least show my comments though. :)
Why is slashdot so broken lately? I just upgraded to Firefox 3.5 a while ago and assumed I was just seeing rendering errors. I browse the conversations in the old style nested mode and the graphics float all over the text in bad, bad ways. Naturally I assumed that it was Firefox and I've been too lazy to notice if it does it on version 3,0x, but I guess I am now not alone in experiencing this phenomenon. I'd send someone at slashdot an e-mail, but I have a feeling that it would just end up on the damned idle page as a joke. I'm out of mod points, or I would have just modded the GP up, but hey, lets at least try to keep this up for a while... :)
How would this be a "game changer"? Did Tienanmen Square not just have its 20th anniversary? Of course the chinese suppressed what happened, but I'm sure as a society they still know the truth even though they don't speak of it in schools. For what it matters, what effect did the event have on our interaction with China? It seems to me like greed over ideals won the day as usual. When people start getting killed en masse they usually give in. Nobody really wants to die. Society has become soft. A few hundred years ago, whole populations would gladly give up their lives for a cause they believed in. Now it seems like that this number is down to a select few.
20 hours of rugged computing on the go. (Ok...rugged text entry.....) I want a netbook that captures the spirit of the Model 100.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100_line
People are still using them (much less, unfortunately) today. I'd say there is a market for a long lasting computing device that is rugged.
that's what I just thought. I read through the nintendo characters and just couldn't take it anymore. I want those ten minutes back. Badly.
I took the liberty of comparing some systems. A Phenom II 940 x4 is about $200 with a board. A Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 is about the same. The Phenom is 2.5 ghz, the Core is 2.2ghz. According to this page, http://www.dexternights.com/2009/05/29/intel-vs-amd-desktop-quad-core-processors-comparison-price-vs-performance-ratio/, They are pretty much equal. It is pretty amazing how much intel has dropped pricing in comparison to AMD. Performance wise, those two parts are pretty similar, so I don't think the performance argument holds water. Also note that on the low end, AMD has some really pretty good offerings and has at least left somewhat of an upgrade path for people over the years. Its funny how anti-intel everyone was until they took the lead again and now they are the new darling.