Well, just between you and me: thanks to my dropping a class I really hated last fall, I got to experience BF2 in all its glory.
It was one of those rare situations where I get to play a game hardcore for more than a few weeks. Battlefield 2 is everything I ever wanted from Team Fortress 2, so I'm happy Valve's version is MIA. I would like it even more if they kept the pilotable ships and the support fleets from Battlefield 1942, but I can understand why they got rid of these things (asshole players driving them off the map, too much lag, too easy to kill, etc.)
I play anti-tank, which I feel is closer to the original TF engineer class than the actual BF2 engineer class. Since there is no personal armor to repair, and no such thing as a mobile gun emplacements, BF2's engineer is somewhat boring. Anti-tank has the advantage of a weapon which can be adjusted in-flight, which really benefits from my fine mouse ability (I think my stats are over %50 hit rate with the anti-tank missile), and the mp5 can be used for medium-range in a clutch, something the engineer's shotgun cannot do.
My choice of anti-tank also reflects the fact that I've slowed down a bit over the years; you had to be frantic to play the engineer in TF and stand one-to-one with soldiers and hw guys. Now I just play swing team, grabbing armor when I can, spotting hostiles and taking opportunity shots at all vehicles.
Which is why these 64-bit Linux benchmarks show that Woodcrest scales as good as (and sometimes better than) Opterons at 4p. The vast majority of x86 servers are in the 4p range. Even Opterons have a worse-than-expected scaling issue past 4p, anyway, if you bother to look around to find the benchmarks.
The Optron's scaling issues beyond 4P is not "worse then expected," because it is entirely expected of the architecture.
The high-end Opteron has 3 HT links. This means it can work with up to 8 sockets "gluelessly," but it really performans much better with 4-socket systems. The architecture for a 4-way Opteron server uses the extra HT link to reduice the number of hops, so only one case has two hops.
But you can imagine that the 8-way configurations have a much higher average number of hops between processors, PLUS much more data flowing over the same HT links. No, the K8 Opteron is not really designed well for 8-socket systems.
4-socket K8L systems benefit because they take advantage of the 4 HT links to provide 1-hop latency to all sockets in the mesh, and can now have external I/O hooked up to ALL processors.
8-socket K8L systems take advantage of two things: the extra HT link is beneficial, and the advanced mesh created by splitting up the HT bus widths means MUCH better performance for 8-way systems.
Woodcrest is impressive as hell, but I will tell you one thing: there's no way in hell it's going to scale well beyond 4-socket systems. This is for the same reasons that have been holding back performance on 4-way Xeon syetems (reduced bus speeds with 4 processors on the bus, too much traffic). The Dual-Independent Bus allows Intel to scale well to 4-way, but no higher. K8L will allow for glueless scaling to 8-way, and will still provide a a cheaper solution than Intel's Dual-Independent Bus for 4-way chipsets and motherboard designs.
Yeah, I just love nagware that asks me to upgrade to Quicktime Pro each and every fucking time I use it. I also love a "free" media player that won't let me view videos full-screen unless I pay 20 bucks. Even Mac users (myself included) STILL have to pay 20 bucks to get a fully-functional media player (unless you use Applescript hacks).
And the fact that on Windows, Quicktime HIJACKS your browser MIME settings for all media types WITHOUT ASKING - yeah, I really enjoy that.
And oh, you MUST download Itunes if you want Quicktime unless you know where to go digging. I still havn't forgiven Apple for this Quicktime bullshit.
Quicktime is a trojan horse. It presents itself as shiny and new; people either download it as part of Itunes, or because they want to see those cool movie trailers. Nobody tells them about how the free version is feature-limited, or how it takes over your browser settings without asking. I boycott Quicktime movies on principle...I sure as hell could watch them (VLC on Windows, and of course, it comes with the Mac), but I won't.
Before there was even a hint of an OpenGL port in John Carmack's mind, there was VQuake, the first 3D-accelerated version of Quake. VQuake was designed for the Rendition Verite 1000 chipset, one of the first fully-featured 2D/3D combo cards. Boy, was it sweet looking - it featured edge and particle anti-aliasing and better lighting than even GL Quake.
Unfortunately, Rendition turned out to be a bitch of a company to work with, so Carmack swore off hardware-specific ports and made an OpenGL version. But, until Quake was open-sourced, VQuake was by-far the best implementation of hardware-accelerated Quake. Too bad Rendition never made a QuakeWorld-compatible VQuake renderer, I could have used the better performance. I always found it funny that I bought a Rendition card for VQuake, but my favorite aspect of the game - QuakeWorld TF - required me to use OpenGL.
You people just weren't paying attention with the release of Windows 95. It bright SO MANY new features, big and small.
Win95 / Win95a
* Totally new shell * Pre-emtive 32-bit multi-tasking * Plug 'n Play that actually WORKED * Built-in TCP / IP, IPX networking, with easy-to-configure components * Standardized interface for manipulating video settings (used to depend on the maufacturer of the video card) * Added WordPad, Wang Imaging for Windows, and other applications * Long File Name support, even on existing FAT16 * Added IE 2.0 (Win95a)
Win95b
* Added FAT32 * Added IE 3.0 * Added OpenGL support, and the ability for manufacturers to design ICDs * Added support for DMA bus mastering * Added on-the-fly resolution and color-depth switching
Win95c
* Added USB support * Added preliminary AGP support * Added IE 4.0, with active desktop.
That's a lot of new crap. How can you just gloss over this as if it were not a "major" change?
They talked about a design like this in Popular Science Magazine. Before I graduated from High School. In 1980.
And that was due to Burt Rutan building and showing off the AD-1 in the late 70s / early 80s. Show a prototype concept vehicle, and people's minds start racing at the possibilities. The problem was, it was difficult to fly, so the design needed a little time on the shelf to allow AI concepts and processing power time to catch up. 40 years after proving the concept (assuming this program isn't cut), we will have our swing-wing bomber.
This is much like the "flying wing" concept conceived and tested by Jack Northrop in the 1920s. There were production models made in the 1940s, such as the Northrop B-35, but the flight characteristics were still touchy. Ultimately, the design had to wait until the 1980s for the B2, for fly-by-wire and enough procesing power to keep the wing stable.
Believe me, you have no idea just how broken your machine is until you use OS X for a length of time.
I couldn't agree more! Once you use OSX with the default application set, you realize how limited it is.
I bought myself an Intel Mac Mini about two months ago, and so far I havn't been incredibly impressed with OSX:
* If you want your Mac to output the sound from the line in (audio pass-through), you have to use a third-party application. Windows and Linux have a checkbox that turns this on and off. Funny, this feature used to be available in OS9.
* If you want any themes besides the overly bright (for my tastes) blue or grey, you have to download a 3rd-party theme manager...which century is this again?
* If you want to play an m3u playlist file, both Itunes and Quicktime will cough and die if your m3u file contains backslashes. This is opposed to more robust players like Winamp and XMMS, which will decode m3u files correctly regardless of whether they use "/" or "\" to denote *relative* paths. Even third-party players available for OSX had this issue, so I gave up and went through the painful process of installing X11 and XMMS. I mean, these are *relative* paths, they should work on any file system that supports a directory structure.
And no, I don't want Itunes to import my library and manage my music...I've been doing a good job of that just fine for the last decade. My system is just as easy to use as Itunes is, but with the benefit that I actually KNOW where my music is and how my music is organized.
* The home and end keys go to the start and beginning of the document, rather than the start and end of the line. As a coder, I can tell you, I rely on the home and end keys for my sanity. Apple key + arrow left and arrow right are a clumsy replacement - the whole point of using home and end to do that is you only have to use one hand.
That's not to say I havn't enjoyed getting to know OSX. If I really thought it sucked, I would have used Boot Camp to switch to Windows a month ago. But it is not the utopia that you people make it out to be. For laptops, yes, OSX can be pretty slick, but for desktop users there's no real benefit.
I'm spending a chunk of time running Spybot S&D, ZoneAlarm, and Lord know what else making sure I'm keeping my head above water. I've got too many other things to think about without worring over a high-maintenance "tool".
I think the original poster got it right. You are a prime example of user error. Do you know how often I run a virus scanner on Windows? Perhaps once every 6 months, or on the rare occasion when I download a file I can't trust. You know how often I run Ad-Aware? Maybe every 6 months. You know how many viruses and spyware infestations I've had in the last 5 years? NONE.
And if you want to complain about COMPLEXITY...it's not as if these programs are that hard to use. Run the program, let it update automatically, then let it run a scan. It's really easy if you're a responsibe computer user because the scan report will always come up clean. It only becomes complicated if you're the type of person who does stupid things on the internet. Then, you're constantly finding infections and having to fight them off.
People who download tons of software they can't trust without scanning it...people who visit sketchy webpages that have tons of "free" offers that are too good to be true...people who hook their computers to the net without a firewall...people who use old versions of Internet Explorer instead of the latest Firefox or Opera - THESE are the reasons Windows is considered such a mess. The sad thing is, this is terrible behavior REGARDLESS of the OS you use.
If you act responsibly, I %99.9 guarantee you a virus-free and spyware-free Windows experience, even without using tools like virus scanners and Spybot that often. If you are incapable of controlling your own actions on the internet, or you are so parinoid that you have to run multiple scanner suites and update them on a daily basis just to "be sure," perhaps you DO need to hide out on a minority platform that no hackers target.
And that is the point. Amazon has checked their records, have processed billions of data points, and have reached the simple conclusion: only a handful of shoppers buy something regularly from Amazon. Most Amazon shoppers (from my experience, and people I know) buy things in spurts (for birthdays and christmas), and then make a rare purchase.
From what I've seen, this is how Amazon works: the "free shipping" means that, on price search engines which include shipping costs, Amazon's prices are really low. Most of the regular buyers use the free shipping option, but usually that free shipping takes over a week. Unfortunately for Amazon, most people who are too lazy to go to a store to do their shopping still "want it now," so they end up paying for standard shipping or better. So why is it unfortunate that people "want it now?" Simple: after a few times shopping Amazon, people begin to calculate shipping into the cost of the item, and suddenly Amazon's prices aren't so great, so they start shopping around.
And that is why they're launching this Prime crap. I agree with the grandparent that the grocery service is meant to drive Prime. Prime is meant to keep customers coming back, and THAT fuels your ability to expand into new markets, so you have to start the system going by dangling a goodie (groceries) at the end of a stick. Amazon sees the opportunity: people always think they will get the better end of the deal with subscriptions, but they rarely take advantage of it. I knew guys who would waste $20/month on a Netflix subscription back in the day, and never see more than 2 movies. People sign up for monthy cable fees larger than a YEAR of prime, but don't watch more than %10 of their channels. Folks buy up BJ or Costco cards and never use them. It's the nature of the business.
That said, Prime is a win-win situation for Amazon. If people don't increase their shopping habits, they likely won't cancel the Prime account so long as they remain a customer. If people DO increase their shopping habits, Amazon still makes money, because even their heaviest shoppers wouldn't order more than a couple dozen times a year, and the extra sales would easily make up for a few abusers.
Look at me: I typically buy from Amazon about 4-6 times per year. Prime would not be worth it to me because I can do math, and I usually just pay for standard shipping, which is nearly as fast. But to most people, the free "trial" is enticing, and they figure they'll get their money's worth in the long run. To Amazon, this is money in the bank. I'll bet even with half-a-dozen orders from me (some hundreds of dollars) and standard shipping, Amazon doesn't make $40 off me, let alone the $80 it costs to join Prime for a year.
Amazon needs all the hooks they can to get people to sign up for Prime. Expect them to offer even more stuff for sale in the coming years.
I used to play Freelancer online...and although it is relatively simplistic compared to MMORPGs, each server is a persistent world.
I'd almost always play a pirate and hunt down random players to give them some excitement. Most of the community was into trading, so I added a little spice to their runs.
Sure, some of them would whine, but most of them realized it made the game more fun, because there was no loss of status associated with death, just cargo loss. Sometimes I would be on the short end of the stick, having taken on a betetr pilot. For those that died, some of them actually recognized that retaliation would make the game even more fun. They organized groups and hunted pirates like me down. Deep down inside, these people craved excitement...if they didn't, they would have signed up to a non-pvp server. Good times.
Of course, there were people who took the concept too far: clans formed for the sole purpose of blowing anybody out of the sky, and camping planets and stations so people couldn't launch. Complete assholes. But the good thing is this sort of behavior was self-regulating: it was rare to see even a quarter of the clan's members on the server at once, and the members tended to break the server rules (few that there were) so fraglantly that they would be banned.
My point? A little grief is a good thing. And, so long as you don't limit players, they can largely self-police excessive griefers. I would never play ANY multiplayer combat game without pvp, otherwise you're just fighting the AI.
Who has been blocked? The games may say "requires XP," but I have yet to see one actually block installation on 2000.
Two examples:
Battlefield 2. Says on the box: requires Windows XP. Does it work on Windows 2000? Hell yes, just reminds you that the game is only supported on XP before installation.
Fable: The Lost Chapters. Says on the box: requires Windows XP. Says on the box: requires Windows XP. Does it work on Windows 2000? Hell yes, doen't even bug you about it.
What game are you using that actually PREVENTS installation?
I know what you're thinking. Those arrows look a long way away from any other buttons.
Sure, they are...but that's the beauty of it! You don't have any extra keys to stumble over. I think about it this way: %99 of the time I'm using movement keys, and most of the time using movement keys CORRECTLY is what saves my ass. An incorrect key mash can lead to death.
To top it off, even though there's a gap between keys, they're not that far away. Ctrl, Shift, Enter, \, Del, End, PgDn (and Ins, Home, PgUp if I really need them), 4, 1, 0 are my typical keyset. Really, if you're playing a game that requires more buttons than these, the game is probably too complicated to be fun.
But yeah, if I didn't have such a cool setup in the arrow keys, I'd use the number pad. At least the damn buttons are symmetrical.
I have to agree. And the high-end system with only 1GB ram and a 7600 GT?
I spent only $1100 recently (would cost around $1000 today) buying a system with 2GB ram, an A64 3800+ X2 and a 7900 GT. This included a 250 GB hard drive (remember folks, Raid 0 does NOTHING for game load times), optical drive and case + PS. Not only is my system CHEAPER than Tom's top-flight system, it also performs substantally better, uses less power and DOESN'T require you to mess with annoying water cooling. It's even overclockable, I clocked it up to 2.4 GHz on stock voltage using the RETAIL AMD COOLER, and it could go much higher if I kicked up the voltage and shelled out 30 bucks for a better cooler.
Ultimately, you could build the low-end box for a similar price with a 3800+ X2, and again you could do away with that annoying watercooling. Anyone who has ever wasted a weekend chasing leaks knows what I'm talking about. If you actually want to PLAY your games instead of spending all your time fixing your system, air cooling is king.
However, those who drank both alcohol and coffee had lower levels than those who drank alcohol but did not drink coffee
WOAH! You mean to tell me that people who drink half a dozen cups of coffee or more a day DON'T drink excessive amounts of alcohol? You mean to tell me that people who drink enough alcohol to pass out every night don't rtend to drink coffee? WHO WOULD'VE THOUGHT!
Really people, have you EVER seen an alcoholic who is a coffee freak? Most people tend to be one or the other. Some hardcore alchys mix, getting high by day and trashed by night, but most alcoholics don't really want the "pick me up" associated with coffee.
Have you ever seen a coffee freak get blitzed? It is a rare event.
Coffee and alcohol are polar opposites. You usually abuse one or the other, but not both. This study's conclusion assumes there is no relationship between alcohol use and coffee use, but that's just ignorant. That's like the RIAA pretending DVDs and video games don't eat into their sales, that pirates are the sole cause of their loss of marketshare. You can only drink so much of anything.
Yeah, this is hardly a scientific rebuttal, but since when did you need science to spot something so blatantly obvious?
And, even applying my most friendly view on it, there is nothing clever about powering a (5V) fan from the (12V) power supply on a portable hd.
No, it's even sadder than that. He ran a 12v fan off a 12v powersupply.
Hell, when I was 16, I lost the powr adapter to my model 1 Sega Genesis. Unfortunately, all the stores carried were the model 2 power adapters, which supplied less voltage and had a different jack (for obvious reasons). I took a printer powersupply (with the wrong jack, but the right voltage / current) and "modded" it with the jack of another powersupply (that fit properly).
Why wasn't I on Slashdot? I blame it on Microsoft.
The RSX on the PS3 has a 128-bit bus, so real performance will be somewhere between a 7600 GT and a 7900 GT. The 7600 GT can be had for $160, and the 7900 GT can be had for $270.
As for a PhysX card, unless you like massive slowdowns, I would say that technology is too early to call "necessary."
If Ageia is not up to the task of providing multi-threaded physics acceleration on hardware THEY designed, I seriously doubt any of the other major vendors are up to the task. For example, Oblivion employs the Havok physics engine, but even though it supports multiple threads, the benefit is tiny, both on the X360 and dual-core PCs. Point is that NOBODY has proven that game designers will be able to construct incredible multi-threaded physics engines that actually take advantage of 7 SPEs anytime soon, so making that assumption is foolhardy.
Sure, in 5 years, the PS3 may have an excellent, optimized physics engine available...but so will quad-core K8L and Conroe PCs, with dedicated 100-pipe GPUs featuring physics acceleration. The point is, RIGHT NOW you can buy a midrange PC and actually get the most out of it, then sell it in a couple years and upgrade.
That's the point of all this rambling: If you buy a PS3 on release day, I guarantee a game fully utilizing the specs will not appear for 2-3 years. In that time, the high-end PC market will improve to FAR beyond what a PS3 is capable of, and even the midrange market will be able to match the best PS3 games. This is the benefit of constant upgrade cycle. Don't diss it with completely untrue fabrications just because you don't like it. I spend about $500 (net) on an upgrade every two years, and my sstem has rarely been less powerful than [insert console here].
I insist that the PhysX model is MORE CAPABLE. That cannot be denied, regardless of the piss-poor performance. It is impossible for the current crop of Havok acceleration via Nvidia and ATI cards to accelerate interactive objects. This means you can have flowing hair and clothes, things you don'tinteract with, but everything else will be "normal."
The only way to solve this issue is to:
A: do it the PhysX way, and put another triangle processing layer in-between the CPU and the video card, thus adding latency.
B: move the ENTIRE physics / collision program onto the GPU. This will take a huge leap of faith for programmers, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
All games are "like jobs"...they wouldn't be a challenge, otherwise. Twitchy, reflex button-mashers with limited credits like Ikaruga and other shooters are like working on an assembly line. Deeper games like GTA and Oblivion are like being a manager.
But Oblivion is an excellent balance, because it lets you do what you want.
Don't want to micro-manage? YOU DON'T HAVE TO. Play the game like a traditional RPG. Get a dumb warrior on steroids as your character. Don't do alchemy. Don't do magika. Don't bother with sneak, security, or any of those extras. Just build a super warrior.
And do what super warrior idiot jocks do - kill chreatures, sell your loot, buy more equipment, buy essesntial potions, and go sleep at the inn. Even more: if you just do the main quest, most of the equipment you need will be provided for you, FREE. I mean, you can get a set of chainmail and longsword while doing the Kvatch portion of the main quest, and Blades weapon and armor set shortly thereafter.
But the option is THERE for you to micromanage if you want to, to any extent you want to. Want to save some cash? Start repairing your own armor, it will become cost-effective once you reach Apprentice. Want to make questing easier on yourself? Take the Nirnroot sidequest to get excellent potions for a decent price. Want to make your character more flexible? Start micro-mananging, using alchemy and magic, and taking side quests.
Oblivion is unlike any job I've ever had, because you can tailor how you play based on how much repetition you can handle. This is, as opposed to, say, Soul Calibur II:
The basic multiplayer the game ships with gets boring really quick, because not only do you have to unlock characters - you have to unlock MAPS, WEAPONS, and NEW GAME MODES just to get the full functionality of the game, and make multiplayer fun. If you want to unlock most of the crap, you have to play the Weapon Master mode for hours on end. Weapon Master mode consists of boring, repetitive "challenges" that either involve you tackling yet another repetitive dungeon with one character, or surviving ridiculous rounds with the odds firmly stacked against you.
To top it off, as you collect gold, you have to proceed backwards and remember what items you've already purchased. With so much micro-managing and repetitive play, I got bored of Weapon Master mode in a few hours. If it were not for the fact that we want the full multiplayer functionality, I would have dropped it, but my roomate and I still occasionally play Weapon Master for an hour or two to unlock more crap. Now THAT is piss-poor game design.
Tell me, have you ever tried benchmarking with the sound turned on, and then turned sound off?
Makes a helluva difference in most games, usually between %5-20 of your performance, even with a hardware-assisted sound card like an X-Fi.
The PhysX is like a soundcard, in that it is yet another device saturating the already heavily used PCI bus, and like the soundcard, it has a driver sapping your CPU...yes, there is some overhead for a HARDWARE solution. Hell, I remember seeing benchmarks of Quake on a Pentium 75: the framerates WITH hardware acceleration at ANY resolution were actually much lower than the software engine at 320x240. Sometimes you just can't avoid the overhead.
The PhysX has another problem that sound cards don't have: the physics calculations have to be synchronized with the triangle data sent to the video card from the CPU. So, if the physics card has a high latency, the triangle data that must be sent to the video card for each frame has a high latency, and framerates go way down because the video card has idle time where it cannot draw the next frame. The fact that the framerates are consistently below 30fps regardless of the game just screams "latency issue."
I'll be interested to see how they battle these issues. The easy solution is to combine physics processing on the GPU, because this would make the triangle data latency go away, but it significantly reduces the scope of what you can "accelerate." You can't accelerate interactive physics on the GPU, not unless you do something really drastic, like move the ENTIRE physics engine off the main CPU, and onto the GPU.
The harder solution would be to retain the current physics card format, but it is possible to reduce the latency of the physics accelerator.
Lots of possibilities for the future of physics accleration, and it's going to be interesting watching it unfold. Until then, let the enthusiasts deal with the buggy, unoptimized, cutting-edge hardware and software.
I was so hardcore, I'd find ways around the limitations of the game engine. I was always pissed off that the best you could do was parallel tracks, and that low-reliability trains could even bring those to a halt.
I discovered that, even though the game doesn't support it, you can build automatic parallel switching trunk lines if you're willing to devote the extra land required. WARNING: back in the day I hosted this on my buddy's old Geocities site, please tread lightly.
You can also do fun things like switch over to world-encompassing single-rail loops, and build distributed industries. This way, your commodity trains are always carrying a load, and are making much higher earnings to upkeep ratio. You can even adapt the switching mechanism I outlined in the link above to these lines without requiring so much land.
Right, there is really a ton of flexibility. Not only could you beat dungeon levels out of order, you could also pick up items almost anytime you wanted.
You get bombs as soon as you want.
You get the power bracelet whenever you want, provided you figure out the lost woods combo. The ladder just makes getting this easier.
You can pick up the white sword without ever setting foot inside a dungeon.
You can save keys from dungeon-to-dungeon, and even buy more keys if you get sick of searching for them.
Most items are located no deeper than half-way into a dungeon, or on some alternate path that doesn't get anywhere near the boss, so you can grab items, and save the rest of the dungeon for later.
IIRC, you could beat them in the following order:
Level 1: anytime Level 2: anytime Level 3: anytime Level 4: after you get the raft (Level 3) Level 5: anytime Level 6: after you get the bow (Level 1) and the ladder (Level 4) Level 7: after you get the ladder (Level 4) and the whistle (Level 5) Level 8: after you get the bow (Level 1)
I used to routinely beat Level 7 and 8 before Level 6. More heart containers to fend off those annoying wizrobes.
Hyperthreading was added to the Pentium 4 to counter the defficiencies of the architecture:
* DEEP pipeline * relatively small (12K words) trace cache * tiny 16KB L1 data cache * huge main memory latency (compared to on-die memory controllers)
By running two threads in parallel, if one thread encounters a cache miss or a branch mispredict, the execution units are not left entirely empty while waiting for a pipeline flush or context switch. Instead, the parallel thread takes over and makes good use of the core.
You are correct that it is no longer necessary. The much shorter pipeline, combined with larger, lower-latency caches of Core and Core 2 make cache misses much less likely, and reduce the performance hit for branch mispredictions, which allow the processor to more fully utilize performance units.
After reading the article, I realize that these are numbers for Cell and RSX local memory. Of course, our stupid submitter wanted to make us think this was the SPE's local memory, and purposefully put a DIRECT LINK to the photo in addition to the article link when he knew it would be taken out of context.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, just between you and me: thanks to my dropping a class I really hated last fall, I got to experience BF2 in all its glory.
It was one of those rare situations where I get to play a game hardcore for more than a few weeks. Battlefield 2 is everything I ever wanted from Team Fortress 2, so I'm happy Valve's version is MIA. I would like it even more if they kept the pilotable ships and the support fleets from Battlefield 1942, but I can understand why they got rid of these things (asshole players driving them off the map, too much lag, too easy to kill, etc.)
I play anti-tank, which I feel is closer to the original TF engineer class than the actual BF2 engineer class. Since there is no personal armor to repair, and no such thing as a mobile gun emplacements, BF2's engineer is somewhat boring. Anti-tank has the advantage of a weapon which can be adjusted in-flight, which really benefits from my fine mouse ability (I think my stats are over %50 hit rate with the anti-tank missile), and the mp5 can be used for medium-range in a clutch, something the engineer's shotgun cannot do.
My choice of anti-tank also reflects the fact that I've slowed down a bit over the years; you had to be frantic to play the engineer in TF and stand one-to-one with soldiers and hw guys. Now I just play swing team, grabbing armor when I can, spotting hostiles and taking opportunity shots at all vehicles.
Which is why these 64-bit Linux benchmarks show that Woodcrest scales as good as (and sometimes better than) Opterons at 4p. The vast majority of x86 servers are in the 4p range. Even Opterons have a worse-than-expected scaling issue past 4p, anyway, if you bother to look around to find the benchmarks.
The Optron's scaling issues beyond 4P is not "worse then expected," because it is entirely expected of the architecture.
The high-end Opteron has 3 HT links. This means it can work with up to 8 sockets "gluelessly," but it really performans much better with 4-socket systems. The architecture for a 4-way Opteron server uses the extra HT link to reduice the number of hops, so only one case has two hops.
But you can imagine that the 8-way configurations have a much higher average number of hops between processors, PLUS much more data flowing over the same HT links. No, the K8 Opteron is not really designed well for 8-socket systems.
But K8L IS designed for 8-socket systems.
Take a look at a page on this in the K8L preview article on Real World Technologies. Adding a 4th HT link will really make a difference.
4-socket K8L systems benefit because they take advantage of the 4 HT links to provide 1-hop latency to all sockets in the mesh, and can now have external I/O hooked up to ALL processors.
8-socket K8L systems take advantage of two things: the extra HT link is beneficial, and the advanced mesh created by splitting up the HT bus widths means MUCH better performance for 8-way systems.
Woodcrest is impressive as hell, but I will tell you one thing: there's no way in hell it's going to scale well beyond 4-socket systems. This is for the same reasons that have been holding back performance on 4-way Xeon syetems (reduced bus speeds with 4 processors on the bus, too much traffic). The Dual-Independent Bus allows Intel to scale well to 4-way, but no higher. K8L will allow for glueless scaling to 8-way, and will still provide a a cheaper solution than Intel's Dual-Independent Bus for 4-way chipsets and motherboard designs.
And nearly everyone has Quicktime installed.
Yeah, I just love nagware that asks me to upgrade to Quicktime Pro each and every fucking time I use it. I also love a "free" media player that won't let me view videos full-screen unless I pay 20 bucks. Even Mac users (myself included) STILL have to pay 20 bucks to get a fully-functional media player (unless you use Applescript hacks).
And the fact that on Windows, Quicktime HIJACKS your browser MIME settings for all media types WITHOUT ASKING - yeah, I really enjoy that.
And oh, you MUST download Itunes if you want Quicktime unless you know where to go digging. I still havn't forgiven Apple for this Quicktime bullshit.
Quicktime is a trojan horse. It presents itself as shiny and new; people either download it as part of Itunes, or because they want to see those cool movie trailers. Nobody tells them about how the free version is feature-limited, or how it takes over your browser settings without asking. I boycott Quicktime movies on principle...I sure as hell could watch them (VLC on Windows, and of course, it comes with the Mac), but I won't.
Before there was even a hint of an OpenGL port in John Carmack's mind, there was VQuake, the first 3D-accelerated version of Quake. VQuake was designed for the Rendition Verite 1000 chipset, one of the first fully-featured 2D/3D combo cards. Boy, was it sweet looking - it featured edge and particle anti-aliasing and better lighting than even GL Quake.
Unfortunately, Rendition turned out to be a bitch of a company to work with, so Carmack swore off hardware-specific ports and made an OpenGL version. But, until Quake was open-sourced, VQuake was by-far the best implementation of hardware-accelerated Quake. Too bad Rendition never made a QuakeWorld-compatible VQuake renderer, I could have used the better performance. I always found it funny that I bought a Rendition card for VQuake, but my favorite aspect of the game - QuakeWorld TF - required me to use OpenGL.
Yup. QuakeWorld + TF = multiplayer team FPS nirvana.
Client-side prediction made it playable even on a modem!
I used to own with the Engineer. Too bad I just don't have time for those type of games as much these days.
You people just weren't paying attention with the release of Windows 95. It bright SO MANY new features, big and small.
Win95 / Win95a
* Totally new shell
* Pre-emtive 32-bit multi-tasking
* Plug 'n Play that actually WORKED
* Built-in TCP / IP, IPX networking, with easy-to-configure components
* Standardized interface for manipulating video settings (used to depend on the maufacturer of the video card)
* Added WordPad, Wang Imaging for Windows, and other applications
* Long File Name support, even on existing FAT16
* Added IE 2.0 (Win95a)
Win95b
* Added FAT32
* Added IE 3.0
* Added OpenGL support, and the ability for manufacturers to design ICDs
* Added support for DMA bus mastering
* Added on-the-fly resolution and color-depth switching
Win95c
* Added USB support
* Added preliminary AGP support
* Added IE 4.0, with active desktop.
That's a lot of new crap. How can you just gloss over this as if it were not a "major" change?
They talked about a design like this in Popular Science Magazine. Before I graduated from High School. In 1980.
And that was due to Burt Rutan building and showing off the AD-1 in the late 70s / early 80s. Show a prototype concept vehicle, and people's minds start racing at the possibilities. The problem was, it was difficult to fly, so the design needed a little time on the shelf to allow AI concepts and processing power time to catch up. 40 years after proving the concept (assuming this program isn't cut), we will have our swing-wing bomber.
This is much like the "flying wing" concept conceived and tested by Jack Northrop in the 1920s. There were production models made in the 1940s, such as the Northrop B-35, but the flight characteristics were still touchy. Ultimately, the design had to wait until the 1980s for the B2, for fly-by-wire and enough procesing power to keep the wing stable.
This is because the CD-ROM (Mode 1, "Data") standard added an additional ECC layer which takes up aditional bytes.
You can still use these extra bytes for extra capacity if you use Mode 2 (VCDs use this), at the cost of ECC.
In either case, the CD (assuming 1x read) still rotates at exactly the same speed, whether it is a CD-DA, CD-ROM Mode 1 or CD-ROM Mode 2 disc.
Hey baby....
Wanna stroke my beard?
I couldn't agree more! Once you use OSX with the default application set, you realize how limited it is.
I bought myself an Intel Mac Mini about two months ago, and so far I havn't been incredibly impressed with OSX:
* If you want your Mac to output the sound from the line in (audio pass-through), you have to use a third-party application. Windows and Linux have a checkbox that turns this on and off. Funny, this feature used to be available in OS9.
* If you want any themes besides the overly bright (for my tastes) blue or grey, you have to download a 3rd-party theme manager...which century is this again?
* If you want to play an m3u playlist file, both Itunes and Quicktime will cough and die if your m3u file contains backslashes. This is opposed to more robust players like Winamp and XMMS, which will decode m3u files correctly regardless of whether they use "/" or "\" to denote *relative* paths. Even third-party players available for OSX had this issue, so I gave up and went through the painful process of installing X11 and XMMS. I mean, these are *relative* paths, they should work on any file system that supports a directory structure.
And no, I don't want Itunes to import my library and manage my music...I've been doing a good job of that just fine for the last decade. My system is just as easy to use as Itunes is, but with the benefit that I actually KNOW where my music is and how my music is organized.
* The home and end keys go to the start and beginning of the document, rather than the start and end of the line. As a coder, I can tell you, I rely on the home and end keys for my sanity. Apple key + arrow left and arrow right are a clumsy replacement - the whole point of using home and end to do that is you only have to use one hand.
That's not to say I havn't enjoyed getting to know OSX. If I really thought it sucked, I would have used Boot Camp to switch to Windows a month ago. But it is not the utopia that you people make it out to be. For laptops, yes, OSX can be pretty slick, but for desktop users there's no real benefit.
I think the original poster got it right. You are a prime example of user error. Do you know how often I run a virus scanner on Windows? Perhaps once every 6 months, or on the rare occasion when I download a file I can't trust. You know how often I run Ad-Aware? Maybe every 6 months. You know how many viruses and spyware infestations I've had in the last 5 years? NONE.
And if you want to complain about COMPLEXITY...it's not as if these programs are that hard to use. Run the program, let it update automatically, then let it run a scan. It's really easy if you're a responsibe computer user because the scan report will always come up clean. It only becomes complicated if you're the type of person who does stupid things on the internet. Then, you're constantly finding infections and having to fight them off.
People who download tons of software they can't trust without scanning it...people who visit sketchy webpages that have tons of "free" offers that are too good to be true...people who hook their computers to the net without a firewall...people who use old versions of Internet Explorer instead of the latest Firefox or Opera - THESE are the reasons Windows is considered such a mess. The sad thing is, this is terrible behavior REGARDLESS of the OS you use.
If you act responsibly, I %99.9 guarantee you a virus-free and spyware-free Windows experience, even without using tools like virus scanners and Spybot that often. If you are incapable of controlling your own actions on the internet, or you are so parinoid that you have to run multiple scanner suites and update them on a daily basis just to "be sure," perhaps you DO need to hide out on a minority platform that no hackers target.
And that is the point. Amazon has checked their records, have processed billions of data points, and have reached the simple conclusion: only a handful of shoppers buy something regularly from Amazon. Most Amazon shoppers (from my experience, and people I know) buy things in spurts (for birthdays and christmas), and then make a rare purchase.
From what I've seen, this is how Amazon works: the "free shipping" means that, on price search engines which include shipping costs, Amazon's prices are really low. Most of the regular buyers use the free shipping option, but usually that free shipping takes over a week. Unfortunately for Amazon, most people who are too lazy to go to a store to do their shopping still "want it now," so they end up paying for standard shipping or better. So why is it unfortunate that people "want it now?" Simple: after a few times shopping Amazon, people begin to calculate shipping into the cost of the item, and suddenly Amazon's prices aren't so great, so they start shopping around.
And that is why they're launching this Prime crap. I agree with the grandparent that the grocery service is meant to drive Prime. Prime is meant to keep customers coming back, and THAT fuels your ability to expand into new markets, so you have to start the system going by dangling a goodie (groceries) at the end of a stick. Amazon sees the opportunity: people always think they will get the better end of the deal with subscriptions, but they rarely take advantage of it. I knew guys who would waste $20/month on a Netflix subscription back in the day, and never see more than 2 movies. People sign up for monthy cable fees larger than a YEAR of prime, but don't watch more than %10 of their channels. Folks buy up BJ or Costco cards and never use them. It's the nature of the business.
That said, Prime is a win-win situation for Amazon. If people don't increase their shopping habits, they likely won't cancel the Prime account so long as they remain a customer. If people DO increase their shopping habits, Amazon still makes money, because even their heaviest shoppers wouldn't order more than a couple dozen times a year, and the extra sales would easily make up for a few abusers.
Look at me: I typically buy from Amazon about 4-6 times per year. Prime would not be worth it to me because I can do math, and I usually just pay for standard shipping, which is nearly as fast. But to most people, the free "trial" is enticing, and they figure they'll get their money's worth in the long run. To Amazon, this is money in the bank. I'll bet even with half-a-dozen orders from me (some hundreds of dollars) and standard shipping, Amazon doesn't make $40 off me, let alone the $80 it costs to join Prime for a year.
Amazon needs all the hooks they can to get people to sign up for Prime. Expect them to offer even more stuff for sale in the coming years.
I used to play Freelancer online...and although it is relatively simplistic compared to MMORPGs, each server is a persistent world.
I'd almost always play a pirate and hunt down random players to give them some excitement. Most of the community was into trading, so I added a little spice to their runs.
Sure, some of them would whine, but most of them realized it made the game more fun, because there was no loss of status associated with death, just cargo loss. Sometimes I would be on the short end of the stick, having taken on a betetr pilot. For those that died, some of them actually recognized that retaliation would make the game even more fun. They organized groups and hunted pirates like me down. Deep down inside, these people craved excitement...if they didn't, they would have signed up to a non-pvp server. Good times.
Of course, there were people who took the concept too far: clans formed for the sole purpose of blowing anybody out of the sky, and camping planets and stations so people couldn't launch. Complete assholes. But the good thing is this sort of behavior was self-regulating: it was rare to see even a quarter of the clan's members on the server at once, and the members tended to break the server rules (few that there were) so fraglantly that they would be banned.
My point? A little grief is a good thing. And, so long as you don't limit players, they can largely self-police excessive griefers. I would never play ANY multiplayer combat game without pvp, otherwise you're just fighting the AI.
Blocked?
Who has been blocked? The games may say "requires XP," but I have yet to see one actually block installation on 2000.
Two examples:
Battlefield 2. Says on the box: requires Windows XP. Does it work on Windows 2000? Hell yes, just reminds you that the game is only supported on XP before installation.
Fable: The Lost Chapters. Says on the box: requires Windows XP. Says on the box: requires Windows XP. Does it work on Windows 2000? Hell yes, doen't even bug you about it.
What game are you using that actually PREVENTS installation?
I actually use the ARROWS for this very reason.
No, not the number pad, ARROWS.
I know what you're thinking. Those arrows look a long way away from any other buttons.
Sure, they are...but that's the beauty of it! You don't have any extra keys to stumble over. I think about it this way: %99 of the time I'm using movement keys, and most of the time using movement keys CORRECTLY is what saves my ass. An incorrect key mash can lead to death.
To top it off, even though there's a gap between keys, they're not that far away. Ctrl, Shift, Enter, \, Del, End, PgDn (and Ins, Home, PgUp if I really need them), 4, 1, 0 are my typical keyset. Really, if you're playing a game that requires more buttons than these, the game is probably too complicated to be fun.
But yeah, if I didn't have such a cool setup in the arrow keys, I'd use the number pad. At least the damn buttons are symmetrical.
I have to agree. And the high-end system with only 1GB ram and a 7600 GT?
I spent only $1100 recently (would cost around $1000 today) buying a system with 2GB ram, an A64 3800+ X2 and a 7900 GT. This included a 250 GB hard drive (remember folks, Raid 0 does NOTHING for game load times), optical drive and case + PS. Not only is my system CHEAPER than Tom's top-flight system, it also performs substantally better, uses less power and DOESN'T require you to mess with annoying water cooling. It's even overclockable, I clocked it up to 2.4 GHz on stock voltage using the RETAIL AMD COOLER, and it could go much higher if I kicked up the voltage and shelled out 30 bucks for a better cooler.
Ultimately, you could build the low-end box for a similar price with a 3800+ X2, and again you could do away with that annoying watercooling. Anyone who has ever wasted a weekend chasing leaks knows what I'm talking about. If you actually want to PLAY your games instead of spending all your time fixing your system, air cooling is king.
From TFA:
However, those who drank both alcohol and coffee had lower levels than those who drank alcohol but did not drink coffee
WOAH! You mean to tell me that people who drink half a dozen cups of coffee or more a day DON'T drink excessive amounts of alcohol? You mean to tell me that people who drink enough alcohol to pass out every night don't rtend to drink coffee? WHO WOULD'VE THOUGHT!
Really people, have you EVER seen an alcoholic who is a coffee freak? Most people tend to be one or the other. Some hardcore alchys mix, getting high by day and trashed by night, but most alcoholics don't really want the "pick me up" associated with coffee.
Have you ever seen a coffee freak get blitzed? It is a rare event.
Coffee and alcohol are polar opposites. You usually abuse one or the other, but not both. This study's conclusion assumes there is no relationship between alcohol use and coffee use, but that's just ignorant. That's like the RIAA pretending DVDs and video games don't eat into their sales, that pirates are the sole cause of their loss of marketshare. You can only drink so much of anything.
Yeah, this is hardly a scientific rebuttal, but since when did you need science to spot something so blatantly obvious?
And, even applying my most friendly view on it, there is nothing clever about powering a (5V) fan from the (12V) power supply on a portable hd.
No, it's even sadder than that. He ran a 12v fan off a 12v powersupply.
Hell, when I was 16, I lost the powr adapter to my model 1 Sega Genesis. Unfortunately, all the stores carried were the model 2 power adapters, which supplied less voltage and had a different jack (for obvious reasons). I took a printer powersupply (with the wrong jack, but the right voltage / current) and "modded" it with the jack of another powersupply (that fit properly).
Why wasn't I on Slashdot? I blame it on Microsoft.
The RSX on the PS3 has a 128-bit bus, so real performance will be somewhere between a 7600 GT and a 7900 GT. The 7600 GT can be had for $160, and the 7900 GT can be had for $270.
As for a PhysX card, unless you like massive slowdowns, I would say that technology is too early to call "necessary."
If Ageia is not up to the task of providing multi-threaded physics acceleration on hardware THEY designed, I seriously doubt any of the other major vendors are up to the task. For example, Oblivion employs the Havok physics engine, but even though it supports multiple threads, the benefit is tiny, both on the X360 and dual-core PCs. Point is that NOBODY has proven that game designers will be able to construct incredible multi-threaded physics engines that actually take advantage of 7 SPEs anytime soon, so making that assumption is foolhardy.
Sure, in 5 years, the PS3 may have an excellent, optimized physics engine available...but so will quad-core K8L and Conroe PCs, with dedicated 100-pipe GPUs featuring physics acceleration. The point is, RIGHT NOW you can buy a midrange PC and actually get the most out of it, then sell it in a couple years and upgrade.
That's the point of all this rambling: If you buy a PS3 on release day, I guarantee a game fully utilizing the specs will not appear for 2-3 years. In that time, the high-end PC market will improve to FAR beyond what a PS3 is capable of, and even the midrange market will be able to match the best PS3 games. This is the benefit of constant upgrade cycle. Don't diss it with completely untrue fabrications just because you don't like it. I spend about $500 (net) on an upgrade every two years, and my sstem has rarely been less powerful than [insert console here].
I insist that the PhysX model is MORE CAPABLE. That cannot be denied, regardless of the piss-poor performance. It is impossible for the current crop of Havok acceleration via Nvidia and ATI cards to accelerate interactive objects. This means you can have flowing hair and clothes, things you don'tinteract with, but everything else will be "normal."
The only way to solve this issue is to:
A: do it the PhysX way, and put another triangle processing layer in-between the CPU and the video card, thus adding latency.
B: move the ENTIRE physics / collision program onto the GPU. This will take a huge leap of faith for programmers, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
All games are "like jobs"...they wouldn't be a challenge, otherwise. Twitchy, reflex button-mashers with limited credits like Ikaruga and other shooters are like working on an assembly line. Deeper games like GTA and Oblivion are like being a manager.
But Oblivion is an excellent balance, because it lets you do what you want.
Don't want to micro-manage? YOU DON'T HAVE TO. Play the game like a traditional RPG. Get a dumb warrior on steroids as your character. Don't do alchemy. Don't do magika. Don't bother with sneak, security, or any of those extras. Just build a super warrior.
And do what super warrior idiot jocks do - kill chreatures, sell your loot, buy more equipment, buy essesntial potions, and go sleep at the inn. Even more: if you just do the main quest, most of the equipment you need will be provided for you, FREE. I mean, you can get a set of chainmail and longsword while doing the Kvatch portion of the main quest, and Blades weapon and armor set shortly thereafter.
But the option is THERE for you to micromanage if you want to, to any extent you want to. Want to save some cash? Start repairing your own armor, it will become cost-effective once you reach Apprentice. Want to make questing easier on yourself? Take the Nirnroot sidequest to get excellent potions for a decent price. Want to make your character more flexible? Start micro-mananging, using alchemy and magic, and taking side quests.
Oblivion is unlike any job I've ever had, because you can tailor how you play based on how much repetition you can handle. This is, as opposed to, say, Soul Calibur II:
The basic multiplayer the game ships with gets boring really quick, because not only do you have to unlock characters - you have to unlock MAPS, WEAPONS, and NEW GAME MODES just to get the full functionality of the game, and make multiplayer fun. If you want to unlock most of the crap, you have to play the Weapon Master mode for hours on end. Weapon Master mode consists of boring, repetitive "challenges" that either involve you tackling yet another repetitive dungeon with one character, or surviving ridiculous rounds with the odds firmly stacked against you.
To top it off, as you collect gold, you have to proceed backwards and remember what items you've already purchased. With so much micro-managing and repetitive play, I got bored of Weapon Master mode in a few hours. If it were not for the fact that we want the full multiplayer functionality, I would have dropped it, but my roomate and I still occasionally play Weapon Master for an hour or two to unlock more crap. Now THAT is piss-poor game design.
Tell me, have you ever tried benchmarking with the sound turned on, and then turned sound off?
Makes a helluva difference in most games, usually between %5-20 of your performance, even with a hardware-assisted sound card like an X-Fi.
The PhysX is like a soundcard, in that it is yet another device saturating the already heavily used PCI bus, and like the soundcard, it has a driver sapping your CPU...yes, there is some overhead for a HARDWARE solution. Hell, I remember seeing benchmarks of Quake on a Pentium 75: the framerates WITH hardware acceleration at ANY resolution were actually much lower than the software engine at 320x240. Sometimes you just can't avoid the overhead.
The PhysX has another problem that sound cards don't have: the physics calculations have to be synchronized with the triangle data sent to the video card from the CPU. So, if the physics card has a high latency, the triangle data that must be sent to the video card for each frame has a high latency, and framerates go way down because the video card has idle time where it cannot draw the next frame. The fact that the framerates are consistently below 30fps regardless of the game just screams "latency issue."
I'll be interested to see how they battle these issues. The easy solution is to combine physics processing on the GPU, because this would make the triangle data latency go away, but it significantly reduces the scope of what you can "accelerate." You can't accelerate interactive physics on the GPU, not unless you do something really drastic, like move the ENTIRE physics engine off the main CPU, and onto the GPU.
The harder solution would be to retain the current physics card format, but it is possible to reduce the latency of the physics accelerator.
Lots of possibilities for the future of physics accleration, and it's going to be interesting watching it unfold. Until then, let the enthusiasts deal with the buggy, unoptimized, cutting-edge hardware and software.
I was so hardcore, I'd find ways around the limitations of the game engine. I was always pissed off that the best you could do was parallel tracks, and that low-reliability trains could even bring those to a halt.
I discovered that, even though the game doesn't support it, you can build automatic parallel switching trunk lines if you're willing to devote the extra land required. WARNING: back in the day I hosted this on my buddy's old Geocities site, please tread lightly.
You can also do fun things like switch over to world-encompassing single-rail loops, and build distributed industries. This way, your commodity trains are always carrying a load, and are making much higher earnings to upkeep ratio. You can even adapt the switching mechanism I outlined in the link above to these lines without requiring so much land.
Right, there is really a ton of flexibility. Not only could you beat dungeon levels out of order, you could also pick up items almost anytime you wanted.
You get bombs as soon as you want.
You get the power bracelet whenever you want, provided you figure out the lost woods combo. The ladder just makes getting this easier.
You can pick up the white sword without ever setting foot inside a dungeon.
You can save keys from dungeon-to-dungeon, and even buy more keys if you get sick of searching for them.
Most items are located no deeper than half-way into a dungeon, or on some alternate path that doesn't get anywhere near the boss, so you can grab items, and save the rest of the dungeon for later.
IIRC, you could beat them in the following order:
Level 1: anytime
Level 2: anytime
Level 3: anytime
Level 4: after you get the raft (Level 3)
Level 5: anytime
Level 6: after you get the bow (Level 1) and the ladder (Level 4)
Level 7: after you get the ladder (Level 4) and the whistle (Level 5)
Level 8: after you get the bow (Level 1)
I used to routinely beat Level 7 and 8 before Level 6. More heart containers to fend off those annoying wizrobes.
Hyperthreading was added to the Pentium 4 to counter the defficiencies of the architecture:
* DEEP pipeline
* relatively small (12K words) trace cache
* tiny 16KB L1 data cache
* huge main memory latency (compared to on-die memory controllers)
By running two threads in parallel, if one thread encounters a cache miss or a branch mispredict, the execution units are not left entirely empty while waiting for a pipeline flush or context switch. Instead, the parallel thread takes over and makes good use of the core.
You are correct that it is no longer necessary. The much shorter pipeline, combined with larger, lower-latency caches of Core and Core 2 make cache misses much less likely, and reduce the performance hit for branch mispredictions, which allow the processor to more fully utilize performance units.
After reading the article, I realize that these are numbers for Cell and RSX local memory. Of course, our stupid submitter wanted to make us think this was the SPE's local memory, and purposefully put a DIRECT LINK to the photo in addition to the article link when he knew it would be taken out of context.