[The 68000's] ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example).
That's what I meant when I said it was 32-bit internally.
I wasn't disagreeing with you... I thought I was supporting you:) The ISA supported 32-bit operations but the ALU was 16-bits wide. The add.l would use two passes of the 16-bit ALU to complete the operation (effectively an add.w on the lower 16-bits followed by an addx.w on the upper 16-bits, but slightly more efficient). However, for the programmer, it certainly appeared to be, and behave like, a 32-bit processor (personally, I considered it a 32-bit CPU because the programmer's model was 32-bit... 32-bit registers, 32-bit operands for instructions... if it looks like one and smells like one, it probably is one).
The ST definitely seemed to stand for S(ixteen)T(hirty-two). The follow-on machine was the Atari T(hirty-two)T(hirty-two) based on the 68030.
"Back in the day", while you *did* need to be very clever to extract performance out of the hardware you had, you didn't need to know how to do great graphics, realistic physics, or a host of other things that require a fair amount of mathmatical knowledge. Also, your program usually had full control of the machine it was running on, which can make some things more simple (it can also make things more complex as you have to hand-time some of the loops and code counting clock cycles to make it run fast enough). The programming models of today are a bit more complex as are the maths behind them.
However, gameplay was first and foremost back then because you couldn't have great graphics and, therefore, couldn't be used as a crutch (eye-candy). This didn't prevent plenty of games from being crap, but there are many games from back then that are clever and fun (still fun to play even).
Just as an example of complexity (both programming and graphics/content), there are lots of games from back in the 70s and 80s that were written by one or two coders, or a team of two to twelve people total when you include even the box cover artists. Compare that to today... how many people were involved with GTA4? Halo? etc. Although, you should also look at how many people are actually coders vs. the artists and 'overhead' types (managers, marketing, etc.);)
Yes, but by that time, most machines did not have a ROM based BASIC and other languages "cost extra". I'm not from the UK but I owned an Atari ST and coded with Laser C (and GFA Basic some, I think that's the one... it was a structured BASIC).
That depends how you define "32-bit". The 68000 was internally 32-bit, but its data bus was still only 16-bits. (Sinclair's QL, which was hyped by them as a "32 bit" computer was considered by others to be an 8-bit machine because its 68008 only had an *8* bit data bus).
Yeah, but they'd be wrong;) The 68k has 32-bit wide registers, 16-bit wide ALU, and 16-bit wide external data bus. Its ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example). The 68008 was the same processor (internally) as the 68000 except it only externalized an 8-bit wide data bus to save on pin count. You could actually build a machine around the 68k with 8-bit wide memory (the address/data buses allowed this) and it would have "looked" like a 68008.
The people who would have classified the 68k according to its external data bus width would have classified the original Pentium as a 64-bit processor;) and it was clearly a 32-bit processor (at least, I have never seen anyone try to assert that it was 64-bit). People did try to say the i386SX was a 16-bit processor because it externalized a 16-bit data bus while being, internally, an i386 (complete with 32-bit wide registersr and ALU).
I owned an Atari 1040STf at one point and really liked the machine. My friends all had mixes of Atari STs and Amigas and the Amiga was a bit neater but the ST was still pretty neat.
Well... yeah. "Fighting to win" does not indicate nor require the outcome that you actually win. You fight to win and when you can't, you have to rethink.
I was going to post exactly the two points about vegetation and the steepness of the walls. But as you also say, there are many similar looking places all over the world. Hiking pictures in a forest, for example, would be almost impossible to match, even if you could narrow the lattitude/altitude down by the species of plants seen in the image unless the plants were unique to a particular forest/mountain/etc.
Uh... yes? When you fight a war, you need to fight to win it. Otherwise, you get into a situation like Vietnam where the people on the ground don't know what they're supposed to be doing and just end up getting killed. Similarly, you shouldn't be sending soldiers into a situation where you should have police. Police and soldiers aren't the same thing.
Now, there *are* options that typically aren't on the table like nuclear weapons and chemical agents, but other than that, yeah... fight to win, otherwise, you're just wasting lives.
Actually... the term usually is "macroevolution" that the Creationists seem to have a problem with. So, unless this bacterium suddenly became a dog or something, which it didn't, evidently... it just gained the ability to eat something that it hadn't been eating before... I think it may still fall outside of macroevolution.
I think people are going a little overboard on exactly what happened, here.
Because chatting via typing is difficult when you don't have a keyboard. The other option is to use voice communication and it's hard enough dealing with text chat much less several dozen people all talking at once... seriously, could you imagine Barrens chat if it were voice? or the chat inside Ironforge? How about all the gold/isk sellers spamming voice chat? Many people use most MMOs as a fancy graphical chatroom. When you can't chat... well, there you go.
Voice works great for guilds/corps/groups/raids but that is selective admission into the channel(s) already.
And then you get into needing lots of buttons for game play. You need how many for your spell icons in WoW? How about adding attack and all the other commands as well? (crafting/harvesting/etc).
There just aren't enough buttons on a gamepad for them all, and if you did have them, it'd turn into a keyboard of some kind (maybe a chorded one).
PvP can happen anywhere in EVE. If you don't wardec an opponent, you can still attack them. You just have to pay the price for attacking someone in highsec without a wardec. CONCORD provides consequences, not invulnerability. In fact, suicide ganking freighters is a tactic used to kill freighters who you can't wardec (no player corporation can wardec an NPC corporation, and everyone starts out in and can rejoin an NPC corporation) to cause economic loss to your enemy. You'll lose your ships in the process but you can destroy massive amounts of materiel if you get lucky.
As we frequently tell our new recruits... you are not safe *anywhere* in EVE if someone wants to kill you bad enough. CONCORD (the guards/police) is a deterent sometimes but they do not prevent you from being blown up... they just blow up those who attacked you.
1st point takes 1 hour 2nd point takes (1 hour) * 5 = 5 hours 3rd point takes (5 hours) * 5 = 25 hours 4th point takes (25 hours) * 5 = 125 hours 5th point takes (125 hours) * 5 = 625 hours
So, 156 hours to get from 1 to 4, another 625 to get to 5. 625/156 = 4, so you can get 5 skills to 4 in the time it takes to get one skill to 5 (assuming all the skills have the same Rank, which indicates training time).
Not quite... EVE has skills that you train (takes time, but luckily training happens even when you're offline at the same rate it happens if you're online). However, even a two-week old character has the basic capabilities to be effective in PVP even against much 'older' opponents.
For example, a corporation had declared war on us once and several of us 'older' characters were flying battleships to fight them because of the firepower we needed in combat. However, battleships are slow and aren't necessarily good at 'tackling' (keeping an enemy ship from warping off, usually you need to close with the enemy fast and stick with them to prevent them from simply warping away from the fight). Some of our youngest members flew fast frigates with the sole purpose of tackling the enemy (warp jammers and webifiers to slow down their ships) so the battleships could bring the firepower onto the enemy's ships. Without our young players in tacklers, all of our firepower would have been useless as the enemy would have just warped away. However, since our younger players were able to tackle the enemy ships, our battleships were able to blow up the tackled enemy ships, almost completely due to the fact that our younger players tackled the targets.
Plus, the way skills work in EVE is that it may take a lot of time to train a skill to the 5th point (the highest any skill can go) but the 5th point only increases the bonus by 25% total (for example, Sharpshooting is 3% increased damage per point, so at 4 points in the skill, you're at 12% additional damage and at the 5th point, you have 15% bonus damage. However, going from 1 point in the skill to 4 points in the skill may take you a total of 5-ish days. The 5th point alone may take 20+ days to complete - of real time...)*. Plus, there are many skills that apply to only certain things. Battleship skill, for example, doesn't help you at all if you're flying something other than a battleship class vessel. If you have Battleship 5 and are flying a cruiser, that 40+ days that you used to train Battleship 1-5 doesn't give you *any* benefit for flying the cruiser. So, while character age does give you an idea of the versitility of a particular character, it isn't the end-all, be-all measurement of how powerful the character is.
*Skill progression in EVE is that each point costs 5x the real-time of the previous point. If the first point of a skill takes 1 hour to learn, the 2nd will take 5 hours, the 3rd will take 25 hours, the fourth will take 100 hours, and the 5th will take 500 hours. The bonuses for each point is linear, each point gives the same amount of bonus more. For example, if the 1st point gave you a 5% bonus, the 2nd point will give you 5% more bonus for a total of 10%, the 3rd will give a total of 15%, 4th is 20%, and 5th is 25%. A good thing to remember is that you can train 131 hours per 4 points in a skill like the one mentione before... you can train four skills to the 4th point in just a little longer as training that one 5th point for the skill. Sometimes it's better to have five skills at the 4th point than it is to have one skill at the 5th point.
I only have seen ME on a few machines and on every one of them, ME leaked memory like a sieve. Some so badly that the machine had to be rebooted every couple hours to recover.
I've only had very limited exposure to Vista and am kind of just neutral towards it. Yeah, everything is in a new place (which is what I think most complain about) and the dialog box comes up sometimes asking if you really want to do what you asked it to do, but other than that, it works (granted, I've only seen it on two machines, one of them is my wife's machine and she likes it).
If all you do is push around documents at work (word processing), write/answer email, and browse the web, then you can use anything you want as long as it's not a problem with your boss. However, many of us here on these boards do things more platform specific... whether it's admin a bunch of Linux servers or write/maintain Windows or OSX platform software. If you are tied to doing something more platform specific, it's just more work to install some-other-OS that you won't use except maybe as a host OS for some VM software that you'll use to run VMs of your platform. IT doesn't necessarily want to support you (or let you support yourself), either.
It would be "bad" for me to just decide to switch OSs at work for the fun of it and it would buy me practically nothing (in fact, it would probably result in a huge problem) even though we already use VMs for 100% of our 'real' work (I only use the host for word processing, email, and surfing the web). The 'badness' would come from our IT people having support issues and probably numerous issues with security assessments and such that the IT people are (ultimately) responsible for. It'd just be too much hassle and I'd be singled out as 'that ass who is trying to be self-cool by going against the grain'.
Slashdot Mirror
Just in time for 'Limbo of the Lost' (developed by Majestic and sold in the U.S by Tri Synergy), I guess, since all the buildings/etc. are models?
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/18/1938223
I wasn't disagreeing with you... I thought I was supporting you :) The ISA supported 32-bit operations but the ALU was 16-bits wide. The add.l would use two passes of the 16-bit ALU to complete the operation (effectively an add.w on the lower 16-bits followed by an addx.w on the upper 16-bits, but slightly more efficient). However, for the programmer, it certainly appeared to be, and behave like, a 32-bit processor (personally, I considered it a 32-bit CPU because the programmer's model was 32-bit... 32-bit registers, 32-bit operands for instructions... if it looks like one and smells like one, it probably is one).
The ST definitely seemed to stand for S(ixteen)T(hirty-two). The follow-on machine was the Atari T(hirty-two)T(hirty-two) based on the 68030.
"Back in the day", while you *did* need to be very clever to extract performance out of the hardware you had, you didn't need to know how to do great graphics, realistic physics, or a host of other things that require a fair amount of mathmatical knowledge. Also, your program usually had full control of the machine it was running on, which can make some things more simple (it can also make things more complex as you have to hand-time some of the loops and code counting clock cycles to make it run fast enough). The programming models of today are a bit more complex as are the maths behind them.
However, gameplay was first and foremost back then because you couldn't have great graphics and, therefore, couldn't be used as a crutch (eye-candy). This didn't prevent plenty of games from being crap, but there are many games from back then that are clever and fun (still fun to play even).
Just as an example of complexity (both programming and graphics/content), there are lots of games from back in the 70s and 80s that were written by one or two coders, or a team of two to twelve people total when you include even the box cover artists. Compare that to today... how many people were involved with GTA4? Halo? etc. Although, you should also look at how many people are actually coders vs. the artists and 'overhead' types (managers, marketing, etc.) ;)
Yes, but by that time, most machines did not have a ROM based BASIC and other languages "cost extra". I'm not from the UK but I owned an Atari ST and coded with Laser C (and GFA Basic some, I think that's the one... it was a structured BASIC).
Yeah, but they'd be wrong ;) The 68k has 32-bit wide registers, 16-bit wide ALU, and 16-bit wide external data bus. Its ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example). The 68008 was the same processor (internally) as the 68000 except it only externalized an 8-bit wide data bus to save on pin count. You could actually build a machine around the 68k with 8-bit wide memory (the address/data buses allowed this) and it would have "looked" like a 68008.
The people who would have classified the 68k according to its external data bus width would have classified the original Pentium as a 64-bit processor ;) and it was clearly a 32-bit processor (at least, I have never seen anyone try to assert that it was 64-bit). People did try to say the i386SX was a 16-bit processor because it externalized a 16-bit data bus while being, internally, an i386 (complete with 32-bit wide registersr and ALU).
I owned an Atari 1040STf at one point and really liked the machine. My friends all had mixes of Atari STs and Amigas and the Amiga was a bit neater but the ST was still pretty neat.
Nor many/most of the guys who designed rockets back in the 50s and 60s.
Well... yeah. "Fighting to win" does not indicate nor require the outcome that you actually win. You fight to win and when you can't, you have to rethink.
The quote you quoted from my post indicates that I don't believe it is absolute since I state there are options that are not on the table.
I was going to post exactly the two points about vegetation and the steepness of the walls. But as you also say, there are many similar looking places all over the world. Hiking pictures in a forest, for example, would be almost impossible to match, even if you could narrow the lattitude/altitude down by the species of plants seen in the image unless the plants were unique to a particular forest/mountain/etc.
LoL... I don't have any mod points or you'd get one :)
Uh... yes? When you fight a war, you need to fight to win it. Otherwise, you get into a situation like Vietnam where the people on the ground don't know what they're supposed to be doing and just end up getting killed. Similarly, you shouldn't be sending soldiers into a situation where you should have police. Police and soldiers aren't the same thing.
Now, there *are* options that typically aren't on the table like nuclear weapons and chemical agents, but other than that, yeah... fight to win, otherwise, you're just wasting lives.
Error: Infinite loop! *boom*
Yup... this is what I was going to post... This is another case of Linux pushing out other flavors of Unix more than one of Linux pushing out Windows.
Actually... the term usually is "macroevolution" that the Creationists seem to have a problem with. So, unless this bacterium suddenly became a dog or something, which it didn't, evidently... it just gained the ability to eat something that it hadn't been eating before... I think it may still fall outside of macroevolution.
I think people are going a little overboard on exactly what happened, here.
Because chatting via typing is difficult when you don't have a keyboard. The other option is to use voice communication and it's hard enough dealing with text chat much less several dozen people all talking at once... seriously, could you imagine Barrens chat if it were voice? or the chat inside Ironforge? How about all the gold/isk sellers spamming voice chat? Many people use most MMOs as a fancy graphical chatroom. When you can't chat... well, there you go.
Voice works great for guilds/corps/groups/raids but that is selective admission into the channel(s) already.
And then you get into needing lots of buttons for game play. You need how many for your spell icons in WoW? How about adding attack and all the other commands as well? (crafting/harvesting/etc).
There just aren't enough buttons on a gamepad for them all, and if you did have them, it'd turn into a keyboard of some kind (maybe a chorded one).
PvP can happen anywhere in EVE. If you don't wardec an opponent, you can still attack them. You just have to pay the price for attacking someone in highsec without a wardec. CONCORD provides consequences, not invulnerability. In fact, suicide ganking freighters is a tactic used to kill freighters who you can't wardec (no player corporation can wardec an NPC corporation, and everyone starts out in and can rejoin an NPC corporation) to cause economic loss to your enemy. You'll lose your ships in the process but you can destroy massive amounts of materiel if you get lucky.
As we frequently tell our new recruits... you are not safe *anywhere* in EVE if someone wants to kill you bad enough. CONCORD (the guards/police) is a deterent sometimes but they do not prevent you from being blown up... they just blow up those who attacked you.
My math-fu failed me... that should read:
1st point takes 1 hour
2nd point takes (1 hour) * 5 = 5 hours
3rd point takes (5 hours) * 5 = 25 hours
4th point takes (25 hours) * 5 = 125 hours
5th point takes (125 hours) * 5 = 625 hours
So, 156 hours to get from 1 to 4, another 625 to get to 5.
625/156 = 4, so you can get 5 skills to 4 in the time it takes to get one skill to 5 (assuming all the skills have the same Rank, which indicates training time).
Maybe we can require all governmental writing on it and it would be safe from the shredders!
Not quite... EVE has skills that you train (takes time, but luckily training happens even when you're offline at the same rate it happens if you're online). However, even a two-week old character has the basic capabilities to be effective in PVP even against much 'older' opponents.
For example, a corporation had declared war on us once and several of us 'older' characters were flying battleships to fight them because of the firepower we needed in combat. However, battleships are slow and aren't necessarily good at 'tackling' (keeping an enemy ship from warping off, usually you need to close with the enemy fast and stick with them to prevent them from simply warping away from the fight). Some of our youngest members flew fast frigates with the sole purpose of tackling the enemy (warp jammers and webifiers to slow down their ships) so the battleships could bring the firepower onto the enemy's ships. Without our young players in tacklers, all of our firepower would have been useless as the enemy would have just warped away. However, since our younger players were able to tackle the enemy ships, our battleships were able to blow up the tackled enemy ships, almost completely due to the fact that our younger players tackled the targets.
Plus, the way skills work in EVE is that it may take a lot of time to train a skill to the 5th point (the highest any skill can go) but the 5th point only increases the bonus by 25% total (for example, Sharpshooting is 3% increased damage per point, so at 4 points in the skill, you're at 12% additional damage and at the 5th point, you have 15% bonus damage. However, going from 1 point in the skill to 4 points in the skill may take you a total of 5-ish days. The 5th point alone may take 20+ days to complete - of real time...)*. Plus, there are many skills that apply to only certain things. Battleship skill, for example, doesn't help you at all if you're flying something other than a battleship class vessel. If you have Battleship 5 and are flying a cruiser, that 40+ days that you used to train Battleship 1-5 doesn't give you *any* benefit for flying the cruiser. So, while character age does give you an idea of the versitility of a particular character, it isn't the end-all, be-all measurement of how powerful the character is.
*Skill progression in EVE is that each point costs 5x the real-time of the previous point. If the first point of a skill takes 1 hour to learn, the 2nd will take 5 hours, the 3rd will take 25 hours, the fourth will take 100 hours, and the 5th will take 500 hours. The bonuses for each point is linear, each point gives the same amount of bonus more. For example, if the 1st point gave you a 5% bonus, the 2nd point will give you 5% more bonus for a total of 10%, the 3rd will give a total of 15%, 4th is 20%, and 5th is 25%. A good thing to remember is that you can train 131 hours per 4 points in a skill like the one mentione before... you can train four skills to the 4th point in just a little longer as training that one 5th point for the skill. Sometimes it's better to have five skills at the 4th point than it is to have one skill at the 5th point.
You should play EVE some, then. The only difference is that you'll need some friends with you to pull off some things (like locking a system down).
I'm a drive by contributor to the "Drive-By Contributors to the Linux Kernel" thread!
Quick... somebody run find Leeloo...
I only have seen ME on a few machines and on every one of them, ME leaked memory like a sieve. Some so badly that the machine had to be rebooted every couple hours to recover.
I've only had very limited exposure to Vista and am kind of just neutral towards it. Yeah, everything is in a new place (which is what I think most complain about) and the dialog box comes up sometimes asking if you really want to do what you asked it to do, but other than that, it works (granted, I've only seen it on two machines, one of them is my wife's machine and she likes it).
No joke... ME is universally known as the worst of the Windows versions of all time (even worse than Vista).
If all you do is push around documents at work (word processing), write/answer email, and browse the web, then you can use anything you want as long as it's not a problem with your boss. However, many of us here on these boards do things more platform specific... whether it's admin a bunch of Linux servers or write/maintain Windows or OSX platform software. If you are tied to doing something more platform specific, it's just more work to install some-other-OS that you won't use except maybe as a host OS for some VM software that you'll use to run VMs of your platform. IT doesn't necessarily want to support you (or let you support yourself), either.
It would be "bad" for me to just decide to switch OSs at work for the fun of it and it would buy me practically nothing (in fact, it would probably result in a huge problem) even though we already use VMs for 100% of our 'real' work (I only use the host for word processing, email, and surfing the web). The 'badness' would come from our IT people having support issues and probably numerous issues with security assessments and such that the IT people are (ultimately) responsible for. It'd just be too much hassle and I'd be singled out as 'that ass who is trying to be self-cool by going against the grain'.