You try running dungeon siege with 3 anti virus programs, a scanner program polling the usb port every second, and then throw in 10 random other programs that could be running, and then trying to get 60fps, its not gonna happen. =)
Im sorry, I should have been a bit more specific I guess. I'll break down what I was talking about..
a - outdated drivers. I used to do game support, and most of the games required hardware accelleration of video by a video card that had drivers that were at least dx7 compatable lets say. Microsoft seems to make games that people will buy as thier first game it seems like, as people are still using a video driver that was 3 years old, about as long as they have had the machine. You aren't going to be able to play games on a video driver like that. This was easily my number one call generator, especially when a new wave of games came out that used a new directx for example.
b - similar to above, call comes in, customer says, I have an xyz machine and it has this cool abc video card in it, but im only getting 20fps. Of course since this is a performance related call I want to check his video driver, but a lot of times it was just too many programs running in the background. More often it was just mcaffee or something, but it usually involved having too many things running / system only has 64mb of ram. (remember these are home users not people that understand the fact that you need to upgrade your machine and maintain it every once in a while).
3 - Lack of knowlege. This happened a lot, more often when I was doing windows support. Some guy from kentucky would call up with 2 computers, a null modem cable, and was calling because his friend said he used a cable to hook up 2 of his computers and they both could go to the internet. This happened quite a bit, probably not as bad as above, but just users do not know how to do what they were trying to do. Probably the reason why this was is that none of the software I supported really came with any good written documentation, just pdf files on the cd, or text files hidden here and there. The people needing the help are not going to be able to find that stuff very easily..
Ahh well, I just wanted to say what I had experienced doing ms support in the past. I know that windows has its problems, as someone doing support, you just have to live with those things and find other ways of doing what the customer wants. Microsofts kernels may be designed wrong, but I really dont think it comes into play too much when your dealing with the support talked about in the article. There was quite a bit of cases where the cause was some strange sql bug that only happened in x situation in y time, etc etc. I never ran into any of that helping grandma jane print her pictures from her daughter..
I used to work at a company who did MS support, and the Knowledge Base is probably the most helpful tool I had. It was fairly fast, and I heard the database we searched thru was quite a few terabytes. The only thing that I would liked would have been a way to link between articles and such, as they were just text files.
I would also have to say that from my 4 yrs of phone support experience with MS products, not very many of them were because of *bugs*. I was able to pull up cases where the problem was a bug, but that usually happened with fairly large buisness accounts that didn't use frontline support so we never saw any of that. Probably the biggest causes of support calls were these:
a - Outdated drivers b - Just too much installed to where they had 20+ icons in the system tray c - how-to issues, people not knowing how to do something, etc.
I think the support there is pretty good, it all matters if you get a good tech or not, but overall its pretty good.
Im pretty sure that all films nowadays are filmed at a 16:9 aspect ratio. I've seen on a lot of special "directors edition" dvd's that say its in widescreen because thats the way the director had viewed it when they made the movie, and it should be watched like that (something to that effect). When you take a new movie and watch it on normal TV in a 4:3 aspect ratio, you get a little disclaimer saying that the film has been modified to fit the viewing screen. What they do is chop the sides off of the 16:9 version, so what you are seeing is just the middle part of the movie, where *most* of the action is taking place.
I myself love watching movies in widescreen, it makes for great panorama shots, and I think is more natural to watch. This is my opinion though, and you may think differently, but I like knowing when I watch a movie that im not missing anything.
I think its more that Carbon apps run natively in OSX. Cocoa apps are ran in the classic enviorment (OS9). I could be wrong its been a few months since I had to deal with macs.
My point being is that this system of *borrowing* the games isn't any better then downloading the roms. If you go and play these games online, your still taking that market share away from Nintendo and Animal Crossing (which I own btw). So, if you can live with yourself for doing that, you may as well go and download the rom and not go to some page and register an account with them to *borrow* the games for a certain time.
Im sorry im replying to you, im a bit drunk and in an argumentative atitude you could say.. =)
What I am seeing here is pretty sad though. Your sig says, "YES, I'm a Christian... and a RPG gamer." but I really dont see any point of stating that fact. My house is tan and I have a black cat, but who really gives a shit? All I see is a troll who just wants everyone to know hes a christian just in case any of us wanted to know, and hey, he also sits around and plays games!!
I think id rather deal with the satanists then a bunch of people who go out of their way to let me know what religion they happen to believe in.. at least satanists seem to be quieter about their worships..
Meh, I have a better idea. First lets skip the step of going to your webpage and registering to *borrow* files from you. Next step, go to a page that has nes roms (you can't feel that bad about downloading them, they are old =), download them, and have the ability to play anytime you want, online or not =P
So Sony is merely doing what any wise artist, writer or businessman would do.
I think that should be changed to any *rich* artist, writer, etc.. The only reason why this game didn't get released is because Sony is a big company with a lot of money. If this was some smaller game development company, and they spent over 4 years of their time making a game, and scrapped it, they will probably go out of buisness. If it was a smaller company making this game, my guess is that the game would have released and would have probably not done that well. That happens a lot more then a company just giving up after 4+ years..
It was wise for them to do this though, I believe that the market for games that require a monthly charge (which im guessing this game would have done, i couldn't find anything mentioning that) is a pretty hard one to break into, you are going to need something thats gonna hook a lot of people for many many months to make money on somethin like that. I just hope they do something with all the work they did...
Actually Half-Life uses more Q1 code then Q2 code:
Half-Life was built on the solid foundation of id Software's Quake engine and QuakeWorld network code. While Valve made some extensive additions and even threw in a smattering of Quake II code, Half-Life's core is basically heavily remodeled, prettied up Quake tech.
There was an interesting top 10 done on Half-Life on gamespy the other day, thats where I got the above info:
Im really not too sure where they were at, it didn't look like what I thought the inside of a big tank should look like, but they made sure that they were prepared for it, they had to drag around their own oxygen tanks and everything.
I would have to say that it is overexaggerated, and they probably told people that they could get damaged by the chemicals as a way of keeping them away from anything that someone might want to steal.
Keep an eye out on CNN for that show, im sure they will rebroadcast it again.. The footage was from 2001, and just about all the maintance people were saying that the shuttle just wasn't meant to be taken apart so much, but it really showed me that they take every precaution they can. They were about to launch a shuttle, and they had this manager guy who inspects the whole thing once it gets vertical on the launch ramp. He found a small 5-inch pin that wasn't supposed to be there, and they had someone go up and take it off. It was pretty amazing because you have to have some good eyes to see a small pin and recognize it shouldn't be there on something the size of a shuttle..
There was some footage they showed on CNN that was taped in 2001, and they were showing when they had to replace some battery or something like that in one of the fuel tanks. They had to get into suits that are similar to the ones used when working with nasty virus's like ebola and such. I believe the tanks were empty at that point, as they were just refitting the shuttle for another launch. The chemicals they were talking about sounded pretty nasty, even if there was very little there. Id say that their fear of people getting hurt by leftover fuel is warranted...
I worked for a company recently, for about 4 years or so. About 3 years into my employment with them, they had come out with a revised employee handbook (pretty much a set of rules and regulations, etc.) Part of this change they made stated that anything that I had created, that could get a copyright on, *could* be taken from me by my company, if the company deemed that whatever I had created was useful to them. At first I told them I wouldn't sign this, it seemed a bit open ended for being a legal document. When it got to the point where either I signed it, or left, I wrote on the document saying that I do not agree to this but I have to sign it to stay employed. About 3 weeks later, we all got this little note in our paychecks saying that the part of the new policy that I just described above was against the law in the state the company was in, they had to change the wording to say that if I created something that competed against what my company was doing they could say it was theirs. Just goes to show you that corporations might not really check to see if things are legal before trying to do so...
First the vulnerability was clearly there before the trustworthy computing initiative, a patch was released in June that almost certainly was as a result of the vulnerability being discovered as part of that initiative.
I think what irks most people is the fact that Microsoft themselves were hit by this, as in they didn't patch their own servers. Mind you this isn't the first time either. They were hit pretty hard with a few of those email worms (code red, melissa, etc). With all the problems with passport, and people not really knowing what they are doing with.net, they aren't really doing a good job at showing the public that they can be a secure, service oriented company of the future...
I am not really saying that UNIX is the best there is, or that the Microsoft OS's are the worst. You do have to admit that a company who was supposed to be focusing on security this past year failed the test.
I recently read the new Michael Crichton book called Prey. This company had built these very small machines that had a very small "camera" on it I guess you could say. They would take millions of these very small cameras, and be able to recieve video from them, but they looked like a swarm of bees or somethin.
Pretty interesting book, i haven't been able to read the whole article yet but it sounds similar.
Normal Digital Camera (CCD Based im guessing) Each pixel only records one of the primary colors and its intensity. The rest of the light that goes into the camera is thrown out. The camera then has to look at the surrounding pixels to recreate the missing color information. This is why digital pictures a lot of times has artifacts (there are probably other reasons as well)
This new digital camera (CMOS based im guessing) Each pixel can record each primary color and intensity, and it does not have to recreate any 'missing' information, because the camera uses all the light that comes into it. What they have done is take advantage of the fact that when you shine light on silicon, the different colors of light get absorbed into the silicon at different levels, which they can put sensors at those levels and capture each of the primary colors. I guess this is very similar to how triple immersion works with normal film.
Its actually a great article I would recommend reading it.
(I apologize for any errors im no expert in this, I just read the article)
Slashdot Mirror
You try running dungeon siege with 3 anti virus programs, a scanner program polling the usb port every second, and then throw in 10 random other programs that could be running, and then trying to get 60fps, its not gonna happen. =)
a - outdated drivers. I used to do game support, and most of the games required hardware accelleration of video by a video card that had drivers that were at least dx7 compatable lets say. Microsoft seems to make games that people will buy as thier first game it seems like, as people are still using a video driver that was 3 years old, about as long as they have had the machine. You aren't going to be able to play games on a video driver like that. This was easily my number one call generator, especially when a new wave of games came out that used a new directx for example.
b - similar to above, call comes in, customer says, I have an xyz machine and it has this cool abc video card in it, but im only getting 20fps. Of course since this is a performance related call I want to check his video driver, but a lot of times it was just too many programs running in the background. More often it was just mcaffee or something, but it usually involved having too many things running / system only has 64mb of ram. (remember these are home users not people that understand the fact that you need to upgrade your machine and maintain it every once in a while).
3 - Lack of knowlege. This happened a lot, more often when I was doing windows support. Some guy from kentucky would call up with 2 computers, a null modem cable, and was calling because his friend said he used a cable to hook up 2 of his computers and they both could go to the internet. This happened quite a bit, probably not as bad as above, but just users do not know how to do what they were trying to do. Probably the reason why this was is that none of the software I supported really came with any good written documentation, just pdf files on the cd, or text files hidden here and there. The people needing the help are not going to be able to find that stuff very easily..
Ahh well, I just wanted to say what I had experienced doing ms support in the past. I know that windows has its problems, as someone doing support, you just have to live with those things and find other ways of doing what the customer wants. Microsofts kernels may be designed wrong, but I really dont think it comes into play too much when your dealing with the support talked about in the article. There was quite a bit of cases where the cause was some strange sql bug that only happened in x situation in y time, etc etc. I never ran into any of that helping grandma jane print her pictures from her daughter..
I used to work at a company who did MS support, and the Knowledge Base is probably the most helpful tool I had. It was fairly fast, and I heard the database we searched thru was quite a few terabytes. The only thing that I would liked would have been a way to link between articles and such, as they were just text files.
I would also have to say that from my 4 yrs of phone support experience with MS products, not very many of them were because of *bugs*. I was able to pull up cases where the problem was a bug, but that usually happened with fairly large buisness accounts that didn't use frontline support so we never saw any of that. Probably the biggest causes of support calls were these:
a - Outdated drivers
b - Just too much installed to where they had 20+ icons in the system tray
c - how-to issues, people not knowing how to do something, etc.
I think the support there is pretty good, it all matters if you get a good tech or not, but overall its pretty good.
Although its not really what the story is about, I always had thought that the Google Zeitgeist was a good indication of "new crazes".
I myself love watching movies in widescreen, it makes for great panorama shots, and I think is more natural to watch. This is my opinion though, and you may think differently, but I like knowing when I watch a movie that im not missing anything.
I thought I was doing pretty good with about 5400 mp3's...
I think its more that Carbon apps run natively in OSX. Cocoa apps are ran in the classic enviorment (OS9). I could be wrong its been a few months since I had to deal with macs.
I thought that was Montana
My point being is that this system of *borrowing* the games isn't any better then downloading the roms. If you go and play these games online, your still taking that market share away from Nintendo and Animal Crossing (which I own btw). So, if you can live with yourself for doing that, you may as well go and download the rom and not go to some page and register an account with them to *borrow* the games for a certain time.
Its a sad day when this is moderated +2 insightful, and where are my mod points when I need them..
What I am seeing here is pretty sad though. Your sig says, "YES, I'm a Christian... and a RPG gamer." but I really dont see any point of stating that fact. My house is tan and I have a black cat, but who really gives a shit? All I see is a troll who just wants everyone to know hes a christian just in case any of us wanted to know, and hey, he also sits around and plays games!!
I think id rather deal with the satanists then a bunch of people who go out of their way to let me know what religion they happen to believe in.. at least satanists seem to be quieter about their worships..
Meh, I have a better idea. First lets skip the step of going to your webpage and registering to *borrow* files from you. Next step, go to a page that has nes roms (you can't feel that bad about downloading them, they are old =), download them, and have the ability to play anytime you want, online or not =P
I think that should be changed to any *rich* artist, writer, etc.. The only reason why this game didn't get released is because Sony is a big company with a lot of money. If this was some smaller game development company, and they spent over 4 years of their time making a game, and scrapped it, they will probably go out of buisness. If it was a smaller company making this game, my guess is that the game would have released and would have probably not done that well. That happens a lot more then a company just giving up after 4+ years..
It was wise for them to do this though, I believe that the market for games that require a monthly charge (which im guessing this game would have done, i couldn't find anything mentioning that) is a pretty hard one to break into, you are going to need something thats gonna hook a lot of people for many many months to make money on somethin like that. I just hope they do something with all the work they did...
I think it was a joke =)
Half-Life was built on the solid foundation of id Software's Quake engine and QuakeWorld network code. While Valve made some extensive additions and even threw in a smattering of Quake II code, Half-Life's core is basically heavily remodeled, prettied up Quake tech.
There was an interesting top 10 done on Half-Life on gamespy the other day, thats where I got the above info:
Top 10 reasons why Half-Life is still #1
Here is some better info about the 855 chipset and the rest of it.. Im not sure why this wasn't linked instead of a press release..
Toms Hardware
Im really not too sure where they were at, it didn't look like what I thought the inside of a big tank should look like, but they made sure that they were prepared for it, they had to drag around their own oxygen tanks and everything.
I would have to say that it is overexaggerated, and they probably told people that they could get damaged by the chemicals as a way of keeping them away from anything that someone might want to steal.
Keep an eye out on CNN for that show, im sure they will rebroadcast it again.. The footage was from 2001, and just about all the maintance people were saying that the shuttle just wasn't meant to be taken apart so much, but it really showed me that they take every precaution they can. They were about to launch a shuttle, and they had this manager guy who inspects the whole thing once it gets vertical on the launch ramp. He found a small 5-inch pin that wasn't supposed to be there, and they had someone go up and take it off. It was pretty amazing because you have to have some good eyes to see a small pin and recognize it shouldn't be there on something the size of a shuttle..
There was some footage they showed on CNN that was taped in 2001, and they were showing when they had to replace some battery or something like that in one of the fuel tanks. They had to get into suits that are similar to the ones used when working with nasty virus's like ebola and such. I believe the tanks were empty at that point, as they were just refitting the shuttle for another launch. The chemicals they were talking about sounded pretty nasty, even if there was very little there. Id say that their fear of people getting hurt by leftover fuel is warranted...
I worked for a company recently, for about 4 years or so. About 3 years into my employment with them, they had come out with a revised employee handbook (pretty much a set of rules and regulations, etc.) Part of this change they made stated that anything that I had created, that could get a copyright on, *could* be taken from me by my company, if the company deemed that whatever I had created was useful to them. At first I told them I wouldn't sign this, it seemed a bit open ended for being a legal document. When it got to the point where either I signed it, or left, I wrote on the document saying that I do not agree to this but I have to sign it to stay employed. About 3 weeks later, we all got this little note in our paychecks saying that the part of the new policy that I just described above was against the law in the state the company was in, they had to change the wording to say that if I created something that competed against what my company was doing they could say it was theirs. Just goes to show you that corporations might not really check to see if things are legal before trying to do so...
I think what irks most people is the fact that Microsoft themselves were hit by this, as in they didn't patch their own servers. Mind you this isn't the first time either. They were hit pretty hard with a few of those email worms (code red, melissa, etc). With all the problems with passport, and people not really knowing what they are doing with .net, they aren't really doing a good job at showing the public that they can be a secure, service oriented company of the future...
I am not really saying that UNIX is the best there is, or that the Microsoft OS's are the worst. You do have to admit that a company who was supposed to be focusing on security this past year failed the test.
I recently read the new Michael Crichton book called Prey. This company had built these very small machines that had a very small "camera" on it I guess you could say. They would take millions of these very small cameras, and be able to recieve video from them, but they looked like a swarm of bees or somethin.
Pretty interesting book, i haven't been able to read the whole article yet but it sounds similar.
I guess you guys are right, how could I forget about the mighty BSOD, our favorite friend Clippy, and.. of course BOB!
In fact their laywers may have invented a way to run a Monopoly and only get a smack on the wrist...
Actually USB was invented by Intel, I really don't think Microsoft has ever invented anything =)
The sony camera uses a CCD, or it looks like 3 actually, while this X3 uses CMOS technology, which is much faster to operate then CCD's..
Here is a better explination of it..
Normal Digital Camera (CCD Based im guessing)
Each pixel only records one of the primary colors and its intensity. The rest of the light that goes into the camera is thrown out. The camera then has to look at the surrounding pixels to recreate the missing color information. This is why digital pictures a lot of times has artifacts (there are probably other reasons as well)
This new digital camera (CMOS based im guessing)
Each pixel can record each primary color and intensity, and it does not have to recreate any 'missing' information, because the camera uses all the light that comes into it. What they have done is take advantage of the fact that when you shine light on silicon, the different colors of light get absorbed into the silicon at different levels, which they can put sensors at those levels and capture each of the primary colors. I guess this is very similar to how triple immersion works with normal film.
Its actually a great article I would recommend reading it.
(I apologize for any errors im no expert in this, I just read the article)