Basically the most minuscle change in an interface is hyped as if it was the pinnacle of development (wow, in Supreme Commander you can now zoom in and out all the way, what innovation! This will change the world of RTS forever!), and a few new units that do essentially the same they did in earlier incarnations, just with different animations, are enough to make a game "totally new and improved".
Yeah, I was also really disappointed with Supreme Commander. After waiting 10 years, you would think it would add more than pretty graphics.
The zoom mode, IMHO, only makes up for the poor interface. I mean, the scroll rate is too fucking fast to use unless you scroll out to maximum distance, and of course the scroll rate is not adjustable. This means you're left memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts that are only marginally useful, all in order to avoid using the scroll "feature."
In addition, Gas-Powered Games managed to innovate their way OUT of existing features. For example, in Supreme Commander, you cannot automatically assign new units to preset groups like you could in Total Annihilation. Yes, that's right, with all the flash and hype, the idiots at GPG dropped an essential feature.
Like you said, there's really no major innovation. For example, the ONLY improvement with new units is you can now give them queued orders, as-opposed to the single order you could give new units in TA.
Here's a genius idea: how about you allow for "add to group" to be a queued order? This way, you can create a preset maneuver order list to get your new units to a rallying point, then add them to a group automagically! Of course, the game developers cannot think of something as complex as this...or maybe they have, but they plan to sell it as a part of "Supreme Commander II: More Supreme-er!"
You would expect to pay $500, but we won't charge $400, nor even $300!
You get it all right now for four easy payments of just $49.95!
And if you call now, we'll make that last payment for you!
But wait: if you're one of the first 100 callers, we'll give you $50 off the price instantly!
And if you call now, you'll receive a bonus set of coupons, a $50 value!
** I actually saw this on a juicer infomercial on Saturday (some 80-year-old star selling a juicer with his name on it). I couldn't stop laughing as I watched a $500 pricetag drop to $100, because I knew that the build cost of the cheap Chinese-made juicer would be covered by the shipping and handling charges alone.
I'd invoke the Broadband demon- nice and convenient for filesharing- except that Napster kicked off when everyone was still on dial-up, so it's probably not the most significant factor.
It's a mixed-bag, really. It was a combination of bandwidth improvements across the board, including colleges and dual-up users.
Some of the biggest (ab)users (and suppliers) of Napster were college network users with fat pipes. You need to realize that, up until the late 90s, even most colleges had very anemic internet access. A bit of perspective: my sister went to GWU in 1994, and they were still doing internet via modem pools up until her last year. When I went to college in 1997, my college had a blazing-fast 4Mbit token ring network and a T1, and that was pretty impressive, because most of the traffic was pure research. By the time I graduated, it was 100Mbit ethernet with a fractional T3 feeding the fire: 1/2 of the traffic was P2P, and 1/3 was IM traffic.
Modems saw the same rise in usability: I remember waiting 45 minutes per meg downloading stuff over 2400 baud in the mid 90s. Then within a year I got the super-fast 14.4k, and two years after that we were cruising at 56k. You may think of 56k as "slow," but compared to previous technologies it was quite usable for downloading things like mp3s. You could download a 4-minute song in 15 minutes, provided the "server" had a decent connection.
The revolution came because ALL these parts fit together so snugly. Mp3 reduced the size of audio by a factor of 10, 56k doubled the potential download speed, hard drives broke the 10GB barrier (more space than most people knew what to do with), and fat college campus pipes provided high-speed serving of music to all those involved.
Not only that, but in my experience the fraps hook can have huge impact on your framerate.
I doubt the overhead of FRAPS is all that significant these days. Most games aren't heavily multithreaded to the point that they can stress two cores, so there's plenty of horespower leftover in all these multicore CPUs to power FRAPS.
And even if the FRAPS overhead is significant, you do realize that this will actually hurt the lower-end CPUs more in a comparison like this, right?
If you're worried about variances caused by FRAPS, the FRAPS-captured tests (all two of them!) were the average of five runs, which pretty much removes this issue.
On top of that the motherboards are running different chipsets, simple stuff like drivers for onboard sound cards can have a huge impact on the processing power if they are written poorly.
The motherboards chosen are the best you can get on their respective platforms, and are priced at about the same. You really think using the best motherboards available to both camps is going to negatively affect the results of this review?
Now, they could have gone to the trouble to get matching sound chips, but it ultimately doesn't matter. The benchmarks they published are very close to those I've seen on other websites, making your arguement moot.
There are also only two tests that could be affected by the sound chip used: the two game tests at the start. Ever other test uses ZERO sound.
They really aren't testing anything when they don't have a uniform rig to do so.
Well, I'm still waiting for you to conjure me a motherboard that takes both AMD and Intel processors, all without stupid hacks like entire motherboards on an expansion card. Until you have that, there's obviously NO WAY we can compare these two chip lines in any way.
Just to add a little extra info, and clarify a bit:
The reason you want a 2:1 ratio in FSB vs ram speed is because the FSB for Intel systems is 64 bits wide. Dual-channel ram is 2x64, or 128 bits wide. 128 * 667 = 64 * 1333.
The only reason why DDR 800 or faster memory is important is if you plan to use an integrated graphics solution, because that data doesn't have to travel over the FSB.
History repeats itself. The release $250 MSRP x1600 XT (a MUCH more cut-down card compared to the x1650 XT) only offered slightly better performance than the $150 6600 GT, and got lost among the plethora of better-performing 6800 GS / x800 GTO cards already plunging below $200.
I found the x1600 reviews especially funny because reviewers blamed the poor performance on the 128-bit memory bus, and not on the anemic number of ROPs/TMUs compared to shader units. Once the 7600 GT was released with the same memory bandwidth and same shader power, but three times the TMUs (and %50 better performance), the truth of the x1600's shortcomings became clear: modern shader-heavy games use textures just as previous-generation games.
Prior to that, the x700 Pro got toasted by the similarly-priced 9800 Pro and 6600 GT cards. ATI made the mistake here of dropping their x700 XT (a solid performance compatitor to the 6600 GT), and letting Nvidia gobble up the entire midrange market. They also didn't concentrate resources on their own AGP to PCIe bridge chip, foolishly leaving the 9800 Pro as the sole AGP card to compete against the 6600 GT AGP.
I love how ATI always prices itself into a corner, never willing to break the price/performance barriers already set by Nvidia and their own previous products. I keep thinking ATI will "get it" with their next generation of cards, but they never do.
Unfortunately for gamers everywhere, ATI hasn't "gotten it" since the 9600 series. Success goes to your head, and suddenly you think you're too good to break new ground.
You're not seriously comparing the complexity of a Gameboy emulator to that of a Nintendo 64 emulator, are you?
Sure he is, and with good reason. The DS actually has quite a complex architecture (main CPU, one 3D rasterizer + T&L unit, two 2D rasterizers), with most of the features offered by the N64.
The typical size of N64 emulators on the PC/Mac are in the 1-3MB range, even with all the fancy features you expect. You can also find them in the Sub-1MB range for platforms that are short on memory.
So yes, it is certainly reasonable.
Some advanced features like JITting (an actual possibility since Nintendo knows both their system and their software) will chew through memory like candy.
Why would you waste time with JIT recompilation when you know the source and target platforms, AND control distribution? You can do an optimized conversion before you even offer the game for download, and save yourself the memory.
No, it uses more power (about 2x more), but the 8800 series has a wonderfully engineered heatsink that is better than anything previously offered as standard.
Of course, you'll only find it on the high-end cards, because those are the only cards where they can actually afford a quality cooler. Stock midrange cards use the cheapest coolers manufacturers can find, and you have to pay extra for a good cooler (or passive cooling solution).
For example, Belafonte's Carnegie Hall concert, which maxed out two LPs, is now crammed onto two CDs, by chopping out large parts of the concert - not only the introductions and talks between songs, but even sections of the songs themselves
There's nothing technical in the CD holding this production back. You can fit 72 minutes on a CD without pushing things. The best LPs can do is around 25 minutes per side, giving you around 100 minutes of music tops.
In fact, some double-LP releases from the 70s (e.g. ELO's "Out Of The Blue") are now re-released on a single CD, while longer creations are still released on two discs.
Maybe some idiot mixer is to blame for your poor CD? Or could the problem possibly be caused by the fucked-up permissions and red tape surrounding the license for the CD re-release? Is it possible some sections of the master tapes were just damaged beyond recovery?
The CD format itself isn't causing ANY of your problems, but since you don't KNOW WHY, you're just blindly blaming the technology. If the production sucks, throw it in a trash can; I can honestly say I've done that with some shitty CDs. But there are far more good CD re-releases than not, so quit your bitching.
Most employers hiring recent college grads have minimum HR barriers to get past, usually a GPA of 3.0 or higher. This also happens to be the baseline "minimum" GPA for a lot of part-time grad schools. If your GPA meets this minimum, then I say don't bother taking the courses again.
Of course, you can do a lot with mitigating factors, so long as you know how to talk it up with the interviewers. My GPA (BS ECE) is just slightly under that magic 3.0 barrier, but it hasn't stopped me from getting a good job, or entering grad school part-time. My key mitigating factor: I hated my "core" classes, and did terribly in them. I did significantly better the last three years of school, despite the harder classes.
I tried to install Windows last week, and it required special drivers to recognize the hard drive.
Most modern consumer motherboards ship with the SATA controllers in "Compatibility" mode, which means the drive will be recognized as an IDE disk with the benefits of SATA speed. Windows will install to just about any SATA drive running in this mode without a driver, and you will still get impressive performance.
If you must have features like NCQ or RAID (usually only beneficial to servers), then you can change the mode in the BIOS and install the driver when requested. Additionally, Vista will install your drivers from MANY different sources, including a CD or USB key drive.
I think this is a good thing, myself. Earlier motherboards lacked this compatibility feature, or did not have it enabled by default. This should have been the default from the beginning, and the lack of this compatibility mode is why SATA on Windows has such a bad name.
The curve exists as an admission by the tester / instructor that they cannot create a perfect test, and that they cannot fully understand their students prior to testing.
If you fail people for being less than perfect, they won't LEARN anything. This is how you teach people HOW to learn.
Grenade jumping may even still be in, but limited to the only class with grenades now, the demo man.
I'm officially disappointed. This is the very first time I can say that regarding TF2.
I've been waiting 8 years for a proper sequel to QuakeWorld TF, and I guess I'm still going to be waiting. Grenades are an integral part to the TF concept: the standard grenades level the playing field between classes (even the lowly Scout can blow a HWG to bits with a well-timed prime-and-toss), and the class-specific grenades make for fun gameplay.
Worse yet, I'll bet the demoman can't even prime a grenade while shooting with the gun! Such a terrible thing. Team Fortress isn't about realism, it's about bad-asses that can rocket jump, survive shotgun blasts and prime grenades while jumping, while shooting at the other team. It just so happens they work as a team.
I love it how Slashdot can suddenly defend Ebay, the playground of fraud on the internet, where the masters don't even care what's going on. But, I guess you have to stick to your principles. Mark Bowness
Yes, but if you don't TRY at all in the first place, the justice system has no balls, and thus there's no crime PREVENTION.
Will a small-time thief really think twice about illegal acts if they know they will always get probation? What happens if the small-time thieves start getting heavy sentences? Wouldn't you think the caseload would be reduced by the threat of long imprisonment?
That's the real problem with the justice system: every cog in the chain assumes it's not their responsisbility, and they they can't make a difference, so the system as-a-whole becomes a joke.
That or they see a nice, easy way to cut down on the amount of bandwidth they're having to provide.
Exactly my thoughts. Illegal downloads are probably more than half the total bandwidth used on these networks. I'm not surpsied that an ISP wants to filter this traffic, because colleges have been doing this for almost a decade just to keep-up with bandwidth demand.
Welcome to the private corporate-run internet. I'm sure AT&T will offer an enormously overpriced "unfiltered" plan to line their pockets, while feeding us bullshit about how a tiered internet and the free market are so wonderful.
but, for instance, on my Core Duo Mac mini with Intel "graphics", I saw FPS just about double when multi-threaded OpenGL was added.
As already mentioned by another poster, OpenGL is already multithreaded on Windows and Linux - Apple just joined the party.
But the major reason Apple just now joined the party is because of two things:
1. They've only recently had multiprocessor machines in the mainstream (less than 10 years).
2. Most of these multi-processor Macs have had the benefit of video cards with hardware T&L or vertex shader units.
Seriously, why improve the software lighting path if nobody uses it? The fact that NOBODY made an integrated chipset for G4 or G5 meant that Apple was using discrete graphics in every machine, and eventually even the lowest-end multi-processor machine had hardware T&L / vertex shaders. There was no benefit, until now...
The Mac Mini is the first Macintosh released in years that lacks hardware vertex shader or T&L support. Thus, it has to fall-back on the software pipeline, which utilizes the CPU. It's no wonder, with the move to integrated GPUs, that Apple would take the time to make their OpenGL software lighting multithreaded. It's also no surprise that performance doubled with the move to multithreading, because the GMA 950 is definitely vertex-limited in modern games.
I played through most of Doom 3 on a Radeon 8500, it's choppy but playable. I don't know how the 8500 and the 9200 compare, though.
Yes, the Radeon 8500 64MB was originally the target platform for Doom 3, although it soon became the low-end when ID delayed the game a year to polish it up.
The 9200 is a replacement for the 9000, which is a cut-down version of the 8500. It has half the texture units of the 8500, and slower ram.
The onboard 9200 GPU in the Mac Mini is actually a 9200 SE (64-bit memory bus). The 32MB ram also prevents you from playing Doom 3 (requires 64MB ram unless you do some hacking). In addition, unlike the Windows version, on the Mac the R200-series cards are not supported, so even if you had the memory you'd still be dead in the water.
Really, the only reason Apple went with a discrete graphics chip was because NOBODY made an integrated graphics chipset for the G5 platform. The Radeon 9200 SE they plopped in was outdated from the beginning, and it's no wonder that their low-end products now take advantage of the (much cheaper) GMA 950.
I'm actually glad someone has taken Microsoft to-task on this one, because the overall picture I'm getting from the online review world is ReadyBoost doesn't really help performance.
I don't think the feature is "broken" by definition, in fact I think the intended benefits are so tiny that people are left confused. According to this FAQ page, we know the following:
1. This is designed "at best" to deliver a few percent faster performance, targeting smaller files. It is intended as an upgrade path of last resort.
2. It requires incredibly fast flash memory for small block sizes (compared to your average drives on the market).
3. The software uses compression to improve thoroughput performance and AES-128 for security.
MY TAKE ON THIS: ReadyBoost is an expensive way to improve your performance by a few percent. ReadyBoost may actually be detrimental to performance if you're not COMPLETELY IO-bound because data on the flash drive has to both decompressed and decrypted during every access. The current capabilities are so unclear that it's no wonder people would call the feature "broken."
I can't believe I've seen THREE critical replies that totally miss the point of the original poster.
The original poster made the claim that the Space Shuttle launch represents a huge carbon footprint, and he's absolutely right.
Yes, the fuel powering the Shuttle is H and O, but the power required to produce liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen is NOT FREE. One of the cheapest and most common power sources in the world is dino power, and it is the largest source of power in the US.
I would certainly call that a huge carbon footprint, the carbon has simply been removed by the time it reaches the Shuttle. Sure, you can make the fuel in more environmentally-friendly ways, but that's not how we do things in this country. Pretending that the fuel in the Space Shuttle doesn't have dino roots is a fool's errand.
I'm not going to step into your argument, just want to clarify a point.
The GMA 950 needs as much memory bandwidth as it can get. Populating both slots on the Mac Mini means double the memory bandwidth. I imagine that if Apple shipped the system with a single slot populated, the already slow Quartz Extreme performance would be a slideshow.
I agree that for $600 Apple ought to provide either a discrete grahics core, or 1GB standard. I bought a Mini a few months after release (they were a pretty good deal then), but even then I upgraded to 1GB ram. The Mini is desperately in need of a refresh.
It's a recent development. The NOR market is not growing as fast as NAND, and cellphone makers are starting to use more NAND thank NOR in new products. Intel is taking direct aim at Samsung, who is the NAND market leader.
AMD is also working on a "hybrid" ORNAND flash with NAND interface and NOR device complexity, but it's not that impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically the most minuscle change in an interface is hyped as if it was the pinnacle of development (wow, in Supreme Commander you can now zoom in and out all the way, what innovation! This will change the world of RTS forever!), and a few new units that do essentially the same they did in earlier incarnations, just with different animations, are enough to make a game "totally new and improved".
Yeah, I was also really disappointed with Supreme Commander. After waiting 10 years, you would think it would add more than pretty graphics.
The zoom mode, IMHO, only makes up for the poor interface. I mean, the scroll rate is too fucking fast to use unless you scroll out to maximum distance, and of course the scroll rate is not adjustable. This means you're left memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts that are only marginally useful, all in order to avoid using the scroll "feature."
In addition, Gas-Powered Games managed to innovate their way OUT of existing features. For example, in Supreme Commander, you cannot automatically assign new units to preset groups like you could in Total Annihilation. Yes, that's right, with all the flash and hype, the idiots at GPG dropped an essential feature.
Like you said, there's really no major innovation. For example, the ONLY improvement with new units is you can now give them queued orders, as-opposed to the single order you could give new units in TA.
Here's a genius idea: how about you allow for "add to group" to be a queued order? This way, you can create a preset maneuver order list to get your new units to a rallying point, then add them to a group automagically! Of course, the game developers cannot think of something as complex as this...or maybe they have, but they plan to sell it as a part of "Supreme Commander II: More Supreme-er!"
You would expect to pay $500, but we won't charge $400, nor even $300!
You get it all right now for four easy payments of just $49.95!
And if you call now, we'll make that last payment for you!
But wait: if you're one of the first 100 callers, we'll give you $50 off the price instantly!
And if you call now, you'll receive a bonus set of coupons, a $50 value!
** I actually saw this on a juicer infomercial on Saturday (some 80-year-old star selling a juicer with his name on it). I couldn't stop laughing as I watched a $500 pricetag drop to $100, because I knew that the build cost of the cheap Chinese-made juicer would be covered by the shipping and handling charges alone.
I'd invoke the Broadband demon- nice and convenient for filesharing- except that Napster kicked off when everyone was still on dial-up, so it's probably not the most significant factor.
It's a mixed-bag, really. It was a combination of bandwidth improvements across the board, including colleges and dual-up users.
Some of the biggest (ab)users (and suppliers) of Napster were college network users with fat pipes. You need to realize that, up until the late 90s, even most colleges had very anemic internet access. A bit of perspective: my sister went to GWU in 1994, and they were still doing internet via modem pools up until her last year. When I went to college in 1997, my college had a blazing-fast 4Mbit token ring network and a T1, and that was pretty impressive, because most of the traffic was pure research. By the time I graduated, it was 100Mbit ethernet with a fractional T3 feeding the fire: 1/2 of the traffic was P2P, and 1/3 was IM traffic.
Modems saw the same rise in usability: I remember waiting 45 minutes per meg downloading stuff over 2400 baud in the mid 90s. Then within a year I got the super-fast 14.4k, and two years after that we were cruising at 56k. You may think of 56k as "slow," but compared to previous technologies it was quite usable for downloading things like mp3s. You could download a 4-minute song in 15 minutes, provided the "server" had a decent connection.
The revolution came because ALL these parts fit together so snugly. Mp3 reduced the size of audio by a factor of 10, 56k doubled the potential download speed, hard drives broke the 10GB barrier (more space than most people knew what to do with), and fat college campus pipes provided high-speed serving of music to all those involved.
Not only that, but in my experience the fraps hook can have huge impact on your framerate.
I doubt the overhead of FRAPS is all that significant these days. Most games aren't heavily multithreaded to the point that they can stress two cores, so there's plenty of horespower leftover in all these multicore CPUs to power FRAPS.
And even if the FRAPS overhead is significant, you do realize that this will actually hurt the lower-end CPUs more in a comparison like this, right?
If you're worried about variances caused by FRAPS, the FRAPS-captured tests (all two of them!) were the average of five runs, which pretty much removes this issue.
On top of that the motherboards are running different chipsets, simple stuff like drivers for onboard sound cards can have a huge impact on the processing power if they are written poorly.
The motherboards chosen are the best you can get on their respective platforms, and are priced at about the same. You really think using the best motherboards available to both camps is going to negatively affect the results of this review?
The platforms are exactly the same within Intel models and within AMD models. Even the FX-series has the same sound chip and driver as the rest of the Athlon 64s.
Now, they could have gone to the trouble to get matching sound chips, but it ultimately doesn't matter. The benchmarks they published are very close to those I've seen on other websites, making your arguement moot.
There are also only two tests that could be affected by the sound chip used: the two game tests at the start. Ever other test uses ZERO sound.
They really aren't testing anything when they don't have a uniform rig to do so.
Well, I'm still waiting for you to conjure me a motherboard that takes both AMD and Intel processors, all without stupid hacks like entire motherboards on an expansion card. Until you have that, there's obviously NO WAY we can compare these two chip lines in any way.
Just to add a little extra info, and clarify a bit:
The reason you want a 2:1 ratio in FSB vs ram speed is because the FSB for Intel systems is 64 bits wide. Dual-channel ram is 2x64, or 128 bits wide. 128 * 667 = 64 * 1333.
The only reason why DDR 800 or faster memory is important is if you plan to use an integrated graphics solution, because that data doesn't have to travel over the FSB.
History repeats itself. The release $250 MSRP x1600 XT (a MUCH more cut-down card compared to the x1650 XT) only offered slightly better performance than the $150 6600 GT, and got lost among the plethora of better-performing 6800 GS / x800 GTO cards already plunging below $200.
I found the x1600 reviews especially funny because reviewers blamed the poor performance on the 128-bit memory bus, and not on the anemic number of ROPs/TMUs compared to shader units. Once the 7600 GT was released with the same memory bandwidth and same shader power, but three times the TMUs (and %50 better performance), the truth of the x1600's shortcomings became clear: modern shader-heavy games use textures just as previous-generation games.
Prior to that, the x700 Pro got toasted by the similarly-priced 9800 Pro and 6600 GT cards. ATI made the mistake here of dropping their x700 XT (a solid performance compatitor to the 6600 GT), and letting Nvidia gobble up the entire midrange market. They also didn't concentrate resources on their own AGP to PCIe bridge chip, foolishly leaving the 9800 Pro as the sole AGP card to compete against the 6600 GT AGP.
I love how ATI always prices itself into a corner, never willing to break the price/performance barriers already set by Nvidia and their own previous products. I keep thinking ATI will "get it" with their next generation of cards, but they never do.
Unfortunately for gamers everywhere, ATI hasn't "gotten it" since the 9600 series. Success goes to your head, and suddenly you think you're too good to break new ground.
You're not seriously comparing the complexity of a Gameboy emulator to that of a Nintendo 64 emulator, are you?
Sure he is, and with good reason. The DS actually has quite a complex architecture (main CPU, one 3D rasterizer + T&L unit, two 2D rasterizers), with most of the features offered by the N64.
The typical size of N64 emulators on the PC/Mac are in the 1-3MB range, even with all the fancy features you expect. You can also find them in the Sub-1MB range for platforms that are short on memory.
So yes, it is certainly reasonable.
Some advanced features like JITting (an actual possibility since Nintendo knows both their system and their software) will chew through memory like candy.
Why would you waste time with JIT recompilation when you know the source and target platforms, AND control distribution? You can do an optimized conversion before you even offer the game for download, and save yourself the memory.
No, it uses more power (about 2x more), but the 8800 series has a wonderfully engineered heatsink that is better than anything previously offered as standard.
Of course, you'll only find it on the high-end cards, because those are the only cards where they can actually afford a quality cooler. Stock midrange cards use the cheapest coolers manufacturers can find, and you have to pay extra for a good cooler (or passive cooling solution).
For example, Belafonte's Carnegie Hall concert, which maxed out two LPs, is now crammed onto two CDs, by chopping out large parts of the concert - not only the introductions and talks between songs, but even sections of the songs themselves
There's nothing technical in the CD holding this production back. You can fit 72 minutes on a CD without pushing things. The best LPs can do is around 25 minutes per side, giving you around 100 minutes of music tops.
In fact, some double-LP releases from the 70s (e.g. ELO's "Out Of The Blue") are now re-released on a single CD, while longer creations are still released on two discs.
Maybe some idiot mixer is to blame for your poor CD? Or could the problem possibly be caused by the fucked-up permissions and red tape surrounding the license for the CD re-release? Is it possible some sections of the master tapes were just damaged beyond recovery?
The CD format itself isn't causing ANY of your problems, but since you don't KNOW WHY, you're just blindly blaming the technology. If the production sucks, throw it in a trash can; I can honestly say I've done that with some shitty CDs. But there are far more good CD re-releases than not, so quit your bitching.
Most employers hiring recent college grads have minimum HR barriers to get past, usually a GPA of 3.0 or higher. This also happens to be the baseline "minimum" GPA for a lot of part-time grad schools. If your GPA meets this minimum, then I say don't bother taking the courses again.
Of course, you can do a lot with mitigating factors, so long as you know how to talk it up with the interviewers. My GPA (BS ECE) is just slightly under that magic 3.0 barrier, but it hasn't stopped me from getting a good job, or entering grad school part-time. My key mitigating factor: I hated my "core" classes, and did terribly in them. I did significantly better the last three years of school, despite the harder classes.
I tried to install Windows last week, and it required special drivers to recognize the hard drive.
Most modern consumer motherboards ship with the SATA controllers in "Compatibility" mode, which means the drive will be recognized as an IDE disk with the benefits of SATA speed. Windows will install to just about any SATA drive running in this mode without a driver, and you will still get impressive performance.
If you must have features like NCQ or RAID (usually only beneficial to servers), then you can change the mode in the BIOS and install the driver when requested. Additionally, Vista will install your drivers from MANY different sources, including a CD or USB key drive.
I think this is a good thing, myself. Earlier motherboards lacked this compatibility feature, or did not have it enabled by default. This should have been the default from the beginning, and the lack of this compatibility mode is why SATA on Windows has such a bad name.
If you mount the 360 in your legs, you only have to stand in Level 1 water to get this impressive cooling effect.
Then you can use your EtheR N.E.T. to pummel your enemies with packets, all while avoiding an ammo explosion or shutdown.
You know, Mark, you can append your name in a signature, and you can also set your homepage too. These are automatically applied to every post.
Just look under Preferences.
The curve exists as an admission by the tester / instructor that they cannot create a perfect test, and that they cannot fully understand their students prior to testing.
If you fail people for being less than perfect, they won't LEARN anything. This is how you teach people HOW to learn.
Grenade jumping may even still be in, but limited to the only class with grenades now, the demo man.
I'm officially disappointed. This is the very first time I can say that regarding TF2.
I've been waiting 8 years for a proper sequel to QuakeWorld TF, and I guess I'm still going to be waiting. Grenades are an integral part to the TF concept: the standard grenades level the playing field between classes (even the lowly Scout can blow a HWG to bits with a well-timed prime-and-toss), and the class-specific grenades make for fun gameplay.
Worse yet, I'll bet the demoman can't even prime a grenade while shooting with the gun! Such a terrible thing. Team Fortress isn't about realism, it's about bad-asses that can rocket jump, survive shotgun blasts and prime grenades while jumping, while shooting at the other team. It just so happens they work as a team.
It would be funnier if the ratios were right. If Pluto were that big, it wouldn't be a dwarf planet.
I love it how Slashdot can suddenly defend Ebay, the playground of fraud on the internet, where the masters don't even care what's going on. But, I guess you have to stick to your principles. Mark Bowness
Yes, but if you don't TRY at all in the first place, the justice system has no balls, and thus there's no crime PREVENTION.
Will a small-time thief really think twice about illegal acts if they know they will always get probation? What happens if the small-time thieves start getting heavy sentences? Wouldn't you think the caseload would be reduced by the threat of long imprisonment?
That's the real problem with the justice system: every cog in the chain assumes it's not their responsisbility, and they they can't make a difference, so the system as-a-whole becomes a joke.
That or they see a nice, easy way to cut down on the amount of bandwidth they're having to provide.
Exactly my thoughts. Illegal downloads are probably more than half the total bandwidth used on these networks. I'm not surpsied that an ISP wants to filter this traffic, because colleges have been doing this for almost a decade just to keep-up with bandwidth demand.
Welcome to the private corporate-run internet. I'm sure AT&T will offer an enormously overpriced "unfiltered" plan to line their pockets, while feeding us bullshit about how a tiered internet and the free market are so wonderful.
but, for instance, on my Core Duo Mac mini with Intel "graphics", I saw FPS just about double when multi-threaded OpenGL was added.
As already mentioned by another poster, OpenGL is already multithreaded on Windows and Linux - Apple just joined the party.
But the major reason Apple just now joined the party is because of two things:
1. They've only recently had multiprocessor machines in the mainstream (less than 10 years).
2. Most of these multi-processor Macs have had the benefit of video cards with hardware T&L or vertex shader units.
Seriously, why improve the software lighting path if nobody uses it? The fact that NOBODY made an integrated chipset for G4 or G5 meant that Apple was using discrete graphics in every machine, and eventually even the lowest-end multi-processor machine had hardware T&L / vertex shaders. There was no benefit, until now...
The Mac Mini is the first Macintosh released in years that lacks hardware vertex shader or T&L support. Thus, it has to fall-back on the software pipeline, which utilizes the CPU. It's no wonder, with the move to integrated GPUs, that Apple would take the time to make their OpenGL software lighting multithreaded. It's also no surprise that performance doubled with the move to multithreading, because the GMA 950 is definitely vertex-limited in modern games.
I played through most of Doom 3 on a Radeon 8500, it's choppy but playable. I don't know how the 8500 and the 9200 compare, though.
Yes, the Radeon 8500 64MB was originally the target platform for Doom 3, although it soon became the low-end when ID delayed the game a year to polish it up.
The 9200 is a replacement for the 9000, which is a cut-down version of the 8500. It has half the texture units of the 8500, and slower ram.
The onboard 9200 GPU in the Mac Mini is actually a 9200 SE (64-bit memory bus). The 32MB ram also prevents you from playing Doom 3 (requires 64MB ram unless you do some hacking). In addition, unlike the Windows version, on the Mac the R200-series cards are not supported, so even if you had the memory you'd still be dead in the water.
Really, the only reason Apple went with a discrete graphics chip was because NOBODY made an integrated graphics chipset for the G5 platform. The Radeon 9200 SE they plopped in was outdated from the beginning, and it's no wonder that their low-end products now take advantage of the (much cheaper) GMA 950.
I'm actually glad someone has taken Microsoft to-task on this one, because the overall picture I'm getting from the online review world is ReadyBoost doesn't really help performance.
I don't think the feature is "broken" by definition, in fact I think the intended benefits are so tiny that people are left confused. According to this FAQ page, we know the following:
1. This is designed "at best" to deliver a few percent faster performance, targeting smaller files. It is intended as an upgrade path of last resort.
2. It requires incredibly fast flash memory for small block sizes (compared to your average drives on the market).
3. The software uses compression to improve thoroughput performance and AES-128 for security.
MY TAKE ON THIS: ReadyBoost is an expensive way to improve your performance by a few percent. ReadyBoost may actually be detrimental to performance if you're not COMPLETELY IO-bound because data on the flash drive has to both decompressed and decrypted during every access. The current capabilities are so unclear that it's no wonder people would call the feature "broken."
I can't believe I've seen THREE critical replies that totally miss the point of the original poster.
The original poster made the claim that the Space Shuttle launch represents a huge carbon footprint, and he's absolutely right.
Yes, the fuel powering the Shuttle is H and O, but the power required to produce liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen is NOT FREE. One of the cheapest and most common power sources in the world is dino power, and it is the largest source of power in the US.
I would certainly call that a huge carbon footprint, the carbon has simply been removed by the time it reaches the Shuttle. Sure, you can make the fuel in more environmentally-friendly ways, but that's not how we do things in this country. Pretending that the fuel in the Space Shuttle doesn't have dino roots is a fool's errand.
I'm not going to step into your argument, just want to clarify a point.
The GMA 950 needs as much memory bandwidth as it can get. Populating both slots on the Mac Mini means double the memory bandwidth. I imagine that if Apple shipped the system with a single slot populated, the already slow Quartz Extreme performance would be a slideshow.
I agree that for $600 Apple ought to provide either a discrete grahics core, or 1GB standard. I bought a Mini a few months after release (they were a pretty good deal then), but even then I upgraded to 1GB ram. The Mini is desperately in need of a refresh.
It's a recent development. The NOR market is not growing as fast as NAND, and cellphone makers are starting to use more NAND thank NOR in new products. Intel is taking direct aim at Samsung, who is the NAND market leader.
AMD is also working on a "hybrid" ORNAND flash with NAND interface and NOR device complexity, but it's not that impressive.