That's like Leonard Nimoy getting upset over people calling him Spock. It is unrealistic to expect people to visualize him any other way.
If you want the money and fame of the limelight, you will have to put up with the persistence of the memory of the masses.
Privacy is not an inherent right in modern society. Your right to privacy depends on you actively protecting it.
Of course, with a new take on right to privacy comes a new understanding of the human condition. People are becoming more and more desensitized to outrageous behavior, so what was once a scandalous and career-ending pastime 40 years ago might simply raise a few eyebrows today.
You get the same effect with optimizinbg VBR mp3 encoders like lame --alt-preset standard. I always find it funny when people conveniently forget that mp3 has had VBR support from the very beginning, just because the feature was ignored for the first few years of mp3's rise to popularity.
Even funnier that someone would compare a VBR optimized encoder mode like q(6) to CBR mp3.
You do know that lame standard encoding produces files in the same size range as Vorbis, and with similar quality level (it is largely transparent to the original)?
While Vorbis certainly has a leg up on mp3 in bitrates 128k and below, if you take advantage of VBR on both platforms, their quality levels and file sizes are very similar above that point.
That is just one of the many reasons why Vorbis is not gaining on mp3. It turns out that mp3 as a format is MUCH more extensible and affordable than people first thought back in the day when the idea for Vorbis was hatched. Of course, it doesn't help that Vorbis is one of the most expensive (in power) to decode, and that competitors like AAC and WMA can compete with OGG even in the lower bitrates.
Re:I realise I couldn't remember if I had a drive
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The End of a Floppy Era
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a much more insane situation here.
The company I work for up until now has been very trustworthy of employees...and why not? We all have DOD security clearances. Sure, some areas have harsher limitations on media (based on the contract for work done in those areas), but for the most part you can freely put data on CD-Rs, DVD-Rs or Zip disks, and take them with you.
Recently though, someone got a bug up their ass and banned all USB mass-storage media in secure areas, and banned all but 'approved' IBM thumb drives in open areas. This is ignorant of the fact that, unless contract stipulates against it, other writeable media (floppies, CDs, DVDs, Zips) are allowed freely to pass in and out of secure areas, provided they're marked 'Unclassified'.
The best part: the only REAL reason given for this ban is the fact that 2000/XP logs disk transactions, but it doesn't log USB mass storage transactions. While this is true, the sad fact is the logs are not turned on on ANY PC IN THIS COMPANY. They have basically sold the ban to other managers using this reason, and a bunch of fearmongering.
*Sigh* Looks like I'm going to be using CDs for the next 20 years. Hopefully Longhorn will have Mt. Ranier support built-in so we can finally treat CD-RWs like floppies.
In addition, real-world performance sucks without tons of cache and memory bandwidth. In fact, the original Itanium's entire bus and cache subsystem were redesigned for the release of Itanium 2, doubling the bus width, increasing the L2 cache size and tweaking the latency on the L3.
No surprise, the Itanium 2 performs much better than the original Itanium, but it's name was alreay soiled by the mediocre preformance of the original.
In addition, all that cache and high-performance bus architecture means the Itanium can't be priced competitively with anything, due to the hulking die size. I2 NEEDS a minimum of 6MB L3 cache to shine, and 9MB doesn't hurt. Note that the "affordable" I2 chips have a paltry 1MB L2 cache, and perform like crap.
All joking aside though, he's actually quite right. Games with significant slowdown in ANY play mode in this generation of consoles is unacceptable. They are perfectly capable of handling even 4-way multiplayer without a hiccup, unlike the Playstation / N64.
In addition, programmers have gotten smarter. Ever play F-zero GX? The single-player mode is immensely detailed, and runs smooth as silk, necessary for such a fast-paced racer. But kick it over to 2-player competition, and some background details are subtley removed. Move up to 4 players and even more subtle detail is missing. But you don't care, because the game still looks impressive, and runs without slowdown.
It's not really necessary to know every intracacy of the engilsh language to speak and write it properly.
Pronouns, adverbs, participles and clauses are things I don't conciously think about while writing. Instead, my mind recalls real-world examples, and pieces them together to form unique expressions. My test for properness is simple: if I read it, and it doesn't sound right, then it cannot be correct. As crazy a language as English is, it has a certain flow to it you can't miss, provided you've been exposed enough to its proper forms.
My style isn't perfect by any means, but it's good enough to make people think what I have to say is important enough to be heard. Unfortunately, kids these days aren't getting such exposure to build on because the quality of ALL the language around them sucks.
But when you look at it, most of the time they are talking about +20% on framerates that are already twice the refresh rate. It's completely artificial - in the FPS benchmark they turn off the Vsync to be a more informative test, but not in the game. In the game, the drawing code will wait for a Vsync before drawing a new frame, so both cards will end up rendering the same frame rate when you actually play the game.
Not true. Both Nvidia and ATIs' driver sets default profiles have force v-sync disabled. Most games don't have it enabled by default, and few offer an option to enable it.
What's the difference? With v-sync enabled, anytime the video card needs longer than one sync period to draw a frame, the video card displays the same frame as the last one. This, to the end user, looks like your framerate literally dropped in half, and feels jerky because it usually happens intermittently.
With v-sync disabled, the video card always draws the next frame, even if the drawing is still in progress. This means if you suddenly have to take a little longer to render a frame, you will get a torn frame, but at least the update rate to the screen will be consistent.
So, why do people want higher framerates than their monitor's refresh rate can handle?
* If you're using v-sync, you want to make sure the minimum framerate never falls much below you monitor's refresh rate, or risk the display feeling randomly sluggish during frames with significantly higher processing requirements.
* If you have v-sync disabled, the less often the minimum framerate drops below the refresh rate of your monitor, the less tearing you encounter. Of course, tearing is not as noticeable as you would think. You tend to notice tearing only on vertical polygon edges, and then only when the polygon has moved significantly in your view between frames. That's why this is typically the default in most games...it SOUNDS like it should look bad, but it rarely does.
It's basically a user preference: inconsistent sluggishness, or inconsistent bouts of tearing, but they both benefit from having an AVERAGE framerate much higher than the 85Hz refresh rate of your monitor.
When was the last time a plane left on time or you didn't have to spend an hour for security checks?
My recent vacation to Puerto Rico comes to mind. I left on a Friday morning, and returned on a Monday afternoon. Despite leaving from BWI, an extremely busy airport, there was little hassle because I wasn't traveling during peak times. Got to the airport an hour before takeoff, took 15 minutes for e-checkin, 20 minutes in security. The flight left on-time.
Funny that, except for isolated incidents, most of the delays I've experienced in all my years of air travel have been when I was flying during the busy weekend (Friday afternoon to Sunday evening), when everyone else wants to fly.
Use your head.
When was the last time you didn't hit a traffic snarl in a big city?
When I didn't insist on getting into the city during the hours of 7AM-9AM, or 4PM-6PM weekdays. People obey the schedule imposed on them like good little cattle, regardless of whether it's really beneficial that they all get to work at the same time. I arrive at work at 10AM when my presence is not required earlier, and you'd be amazed how little traffic I encounter.
My limited experience with rail transport in this country (commuting on subways and regional trains) is very similar. Using the rail during rush-hour? Expect to pay substantially more in some cities, and expect more delays and crowded cars.
You complain about price, but with the exception of key highly-competitive markets, and bundle discounts, the average price of broadband in the US is in the $40-50 range.
I have Comcast in Maryland, and I'd give them a 7. When it works, the speed is as-advertised, and pings are excellent. The system has only gone down occasionally over the last 2 years, and we've never had to call out for a tech. The original install was on-time, within their 3-hour window, and took about 20 minutes.
My only complaint: for about 2-3 months about a year ago when the blaster worm was making the rounds, Comcast was pathetically slow at filtering out the effects on their internal network, making service spotty. Once that passed, service was excellent.
Given the fact that Comcast is the only game in town in this neighborhood (more than 20k feet away, and they have a DLC preventing DSL), I'm impressed the quality of service is so high.
Two years ago I used Speakeasy in Baltimore, and I'd give them an 8. The price was a bit high at the time ($50 for 608Kb/s down, 128Kb/s up, $10 more for static IP).
The service also didn't deliver the advertised download speeds (typically 400Kb/s. even with TCP/IP overhead, this is too low), however ping times and gaming were excellent.
The customer service was top-notch.
Sure, they're both expensive, but they're hardly the exception. The only way you'd get under the $40 mark around here would be to go with Verizon, and that's just insane. They have no concept of how to run a solid broadband ISP. In addition, you'd have to have local phone service, which I do not, making the price less competitive.
I saved my pennies and bought a GeForce2...MX...and found out what a horrible decision that was. That card was actually worse than the card I already had AND the GeForce 1 Ultras
This was standard practice well before Nvidia released the GeForce 2 MX. Nvidia already pissed off the world by releasing the TNT2 M64, which performed worse than the original Riva TNT.
Your venerated 3DFX is also guilty of such actions, by releasing the Banshee six months after the Voodoo 2. This single-pipe combo card performed worse than a single Voodoo 2, and offered no SLI upgrade path.
You'll get no condolences from me. Price normally relects performance in this market. The GeForce 2 MX was actually a steal at the time it was released; it was one of the best-performing budget cards ever. It bested the previous generation GeForce SDR in performance, something you wouldn't expect from a budget card. It was, however, beaten in performance by the GeForce DDR...and the later breakdown into the models 200 (64-bit) and 400 (128-bit) only cheapened the MX brand.
As far as I know (as in, this might not be the case in the recent past with the new PCI-X cards) ATI's numbering scheme is straightforward.
Actually, ATI has been the WORST offender in this category, especially in the 9xx0 series of cards. For a simple example, the Radeon 9000, 9100, 9200 and 9250 are all DirectX 8.1 cards, and are all actually slower revamps of the Radeon 8500. This is contrary to the "9000" series numbering, which at the very least would imply these cards would have *some* defining new features.
But let's look at your examples, thay have issues too...
A 9600 is worse than a 9700. A 9600 Pro is worse than a 9700.
True, but is a 9600 XT faster than a 9700? The performance is closer than you'd think. IS there really a need for the 9600 XT when the 9700 already exists? ATI sure thought so.
There was little change in the core between 9700 and 9800, so the clock speeds can be directly compared.
This, of course, ignores the extremely annoying lower cost "128-bit" Radeon 9800 cards (which are not well marked), 9600 SE cards that are barely as capable in performance as a 9200, the 9550 series (introduced well after the 9500 was replaced by the 9600).
Its much easier than trying to explain to them "Oh, get the 7800GT, not the 7800LT" (or whatever their latest business-class card is for that generation)
While Nvidia is just as guilty as ATI of playing the name game and causing ludicrous overlap (Nvidia FX series especially), they have really cleaned up their act with the 6000 series.
This is the entire lineup:
6200 TC, 6200
6600, 6600 GT
6800, 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra
That's it. Compared to ATI's xXX0 PCIe lineup numbers, this is a walk in the park. Furthermore, there is no overlap between series (except say, overlap created by companies like BFG Tech who sell overclocked parts, but that's out of Nvidia's hands).
Folders allow for passive file metadata. Basically, by placing it in some folder under some heiarchy, you are automatically giving the file metadata. In addition, the hiearchy already exists, so deciding the correct position for a file within a tree is intuitive, once you have built the tree.
But what about files sorted purely by metadata? You have to actively add metadata to every file you create, instead of automatically inheriting it from an obvious folder structure. Every time you create a file, you have to actively think about what metadata should be associated with this particular file, and remember how it should be related to all the other files you've worked with recently. You have to make sure you don't misspell the metadata, or you risk losing your file into oblivion.
So, how can you make metadata easier to work with? You can have a list of pre-defined metadata catagories to apply to files. Even better, you could take into account the relationships between these pre-defined categories, and create a heiarchy of interdependency...and have yourself a folder-based filesystem, by any other name.
Pure metadata systems are clumsy. Use the metadata for your home directory if you must have it, but leave the rest of the system free to use concrete folders.
Very limited due to hardware of the day. Desperately needs a remake to at least bring it up to the level of 6. Magic system was far too simple. Item system was OK.
Agreed, I thought Dragon (Warrior/Quest) 2, which came out at the same time, was a superior game.
2 - Needs a *real* US release. Playstation ports are slow and sucky. GBA lacks the living-room-comfort factor Also should get "the treatment" and bring it up to more modern standards. Once they've done that, I could play it and comment on it as a game.
I can comment on it right now (you do know there's a translated NES ROM available for 2 and 3, right?). This game is terrible...there's more storyline than ff1, but it all revolves around coming to this one town, going off and doing a quest, then coming back to that town for the next quest...over and over again.
In addition, the experience system is a "use it or lose it" type that never appeared in any other Final Fantasy, for good reason. It is annoying enough to have to level grind, but it is even more annoying to have to think carefully during every moment of level grind. Let's say you meet some easy weenies...boring, easy to kill, right? Well, if you have your mage use melee, it could lower his INT, and possibly raise his STR. Better to use an item, or waste a spell, because in FF2 skill specialization is key. In other words, you have to think about EVERYTHING, even the things that should be mostly mindless. Gets annoying really fast.
3 - Has anyone that doesn't read/speak Japanese even seen this one? Same stuff as 2.
This is not a bad game, and it would be better if remade for a modern susyem. However, like FF5, I think the job system is too easy. Make it harder to switch jobs than just building up a few points, make later jobs completely dependent on having mastered previous jobs.
4 - Fuck "easytype". Give me the real deal. And a sequel. They did X-2, why not IV-2? Then again, there really wasn't much left to do at the end. As far as the game goes, Magic left much to be desired, though weapons/armor were fleshed out quite nicely. Needs a few more special items (tails and such) and some side quests.
This "easytype" whine-fest is just a fad perpetuated by people who have nothing better to whine about. I bothered to play through the Japanese (translated) version to see what all the fuss was about, and 3/4 of the way through the game I was not convinced it was significantly harder or more storied. Of all the fights, only two were 'harder':
Dark Cecil had about 3x more hitpoints. But at the same time, the Japanense version also has a number of helpful items that you pick up by that point in the game, which give you useful effects like direct damage, Haste (for you) and Slow (for Dark Cecil). The 'easy' US version at best makes you face him with only 1-2 Cure 2s, assuming you didn't miss them. This is just as hard because of your limited ability to heal faster than damage accumulates, it's just not as dragged out a fight.
Also, the fight with Yang and the guards is 'harder'. But I don't think much of the difficulty...with the 'easy' version, I use a single Fire 3 from Tellah...with the hard version, I had to use two. Big deal.
I didn't notice anything else that was 'harder'. All the fiends were exactly the same difficulty as the US version. In addition, I saw nothing new in the dialog that added anything to the game.
5 - Ownage. Needs an update, but not much of one. A few more secrets and side quests would be nice. The Job/Ability system kicks ass, as does most of the magic. It would be nice if you couldn't just walk into shops in the first 3 towns and buy 90% of the black/white spells in the game, though. 1 had them spread out through the entire game, which was nice.
Meh, I've already commented on the job system, but here's what made me stop playing this game:
Galuf dies at the hands of the big evil guy. I was impressed, because Square rarely
The simple fact is that labelling what are primarily domestic US sports as world championships is silly, one of those 'only in America' things.
Chill out man, it took soccer a long time to become the worldly sport that it is, with local leagues feeding players into international contests.
The following is REALLY off topic, but needs to be said:
The US sports make these "World Champion" claims because they have similarly high hopes for their sport, and they're all making gradual headway. For football, there's the CFL and NFL Europe, but I expect it to be a long time before they organize some international competition between leagues.
Baseball, on the other hand, is ripe for such an expansion. The Japanese leagues are quite good, and although it's logistically impossible to add an MLB team in Japan, there's nothing wrong with allowing the top Japanese teams into the MLB playoffs. They may, of course, have to adjust venue rules, but that's all in the details.
I mean, MLB is dying, slowly, by the onrush of the NFL, America's new favorite pastime. They need to take advantage of baseball's world-wide popularity and turn it into an international contest like the World Cup or face certain death. They can start with Japan, and others will follow suit.
I had problems with monster (~250ms) latency to the UK, and they pretty much told me that you cant get broadband speed internationally.
That would be because you can't get low pings internationally, it's just not possible with a routed protocol, especially when both sides are not directly on the backbone.
Just take a look at the Internet Traffic Report website, the response time from backbone to backbone is well over 150ms during the day. Add in 30-50ms extra routing on both ends to make your way off the backbones, and you've got ~250ms delay easy, and no less than 150ms in off hours.
Are we talking about the same Ballroom scene here?
The scene in the picture is NOTHING like the prerendered ballroom scene. There's only one dynamic light (easy for any system even in those days), and there's no anti-aliasing just for starters. They purposefully made the scene very dark to de-emphasize the aliasing artifacts. The darkness also de-empahasizes the rendering hack that is the background. The ballroom scene in FF8 is much brighter.
The background is a hack, probably just a few dozen polygons with textures faking the dance hall background, instead of thousands of polygons depicting the contours of the walls and ornaments.
The quality of character graphics is similar to FFX real-time cutscenes, if you look at it critically. You have the dynamic level of detail, so you have tons of polys dedicated to rendering the face when it fills up half the screen, but scale it back when you're further away and need more polys for the rest of the scene.
It's nothing special, all the major consoles of this generation can do this. (Resident Evil 4 on GC,for example). The only thing is, you're only going to see it during cutscenes for two reasons:
1. You need all the console's horsepower to do it right. No time for AI or physics here, everything is scripted.
2. You really need control of the camera to create enticing movements that really show off your effects. Otherwise, the effort is wasted.
Now, I'm not down on consoles, just a realist. This generation was a step in the right direction. Now, just imagine being able to render even higher fidelity than RE4, even with real-time anti-aliasing, physics and AI. Now that will be impressive.
If you can take a note with the time and station, you can find the name and artist to almost any song played on the radio in the US.
FREE.
Just go here. Listings are updated with about 20 minutes lag.
Now, I don't know how long this is going to be around, because YES is also looking to start a phone-based service. For now the old YES site is still working, so enjoy it!
Thnk about what you're comparing. The cost of vehicles doesn't generally go down because it's a replacement market. The prices generally follow inflation, and typically car makers add features and options instead of reducing prices, because the reductions in cost are small. The new features for the reasonable price get you in the door, and they make a killing on the upsell.
If all you do is sell cars on low price, you get a bunch of cheap bastards who won't buy any options, and that's bad for business.
The console market is different in many ways: price reductions due to miniaturization and new technology are BIG.
Think about all the benefits you get if you were to say, shrink all the ICs on your mainboard into one system-on-a-chip:
* Less separate components means less cost up-front, both in purchasing the parts and labor for mounting.
* Less components means less external busses and traces, which means you can use less layers on your board, and less board area More money saved.
* You can possibly reduce power of all the components by running them at a lower voltage. This leaves room for cheaper thermal dissapation (bare chip versus passive heatsink versus active cooling), and also leaves flexibility on upselling with higher clock speeds.
And that's not the only aspect of price reduction. You want to know why games have barely crept up in price in the last 20 years? Because low-level bit twiddling on the NES has given way to high-level languages and programming APIs, and "built-in" services that all games can take advantage of like Xbox Live. Since, unlike a car, the majority of costs are in development, this provides a huge reduction in cost.
But the main reason why games and consoles have crept up in price slowly? Because gaming is still a growing market. Unfortunately I think we've reached the end of rampant growth with roughly 100 million consoles sold in the last 5 years, and improvements on the development side can only do so much. I fully expect games to begin following inflation, and even beat the rate of inflation if game houses continue to push huge hollywood budgets.
Re:It's not the specs that are important!!!
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PS3 vs. Xbox 360
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· Score: 1
What I wish for more than anything is more XCOM games, but in the same visual style as the original
It's open-source, based on the Quake 2 engine (3D, but not overly flashy). It also maintains the look and feel of older X-COM, but you can also view the entire battle map in 6 degrees of freedom if you so desire.
Currently, it is only a tech demo (no base building, no long-term storyline, no world map combat with ships), but things can only get better.
Your body makes this wonderful thing...called saliva!
Saliva is slightly basic, and it dilutes acids you ingest, as well as the acids given off by plaque. It even helps to dissolve sugars so the plaque have less to feast on.
You know what all those "cavity prevention" sugar-free gums are promoting? Saliva production, as a byproduct of chewing.
So, you can still brush late at night and have a clean mouth during the day (provided you don't tank soda continuously). But what if you don't want to chew gum? You know what else can clean your mouth just as well, without laborious chewing?
WATER!
Oh my, what an amazing concept! After you drink a soda...get this...you can rinse your mouth out with water! Removes most of the sugar and acids.
I love it how people complain about problems while never thinking about how easily they could fix them.
To tell you the truth, if I was going to buy a mid range card by nvidia now I still wouldn't know which piece was the best bang for the buck, whereas ATI's I would know.
Agreed, although ATI also was guilty of this in the 9000 series (9000, 9100, 9200, 9250 are all DX8.1, 9500, 9550, 9600, 9700, 9800). And it doesn't help that both companies use crazy qualifiers like SE, LE, XT, PE, GT, Ultra to create overlapping markets.
Really, which one is faster: a 9600 XT, or a 9800 SE? Bet you wouldn't have any idea unless you thoroughly researched them.
Thankfully, Nvidia has finally recognized that all this crazy branding is a mistake. For the 6000 series, Nvidia only sells the 6200(TC), 6600(GT) and 6800(GT, Ultra) series, and there's little overlap. The lowest-end 6800 is faster than a 6600 GT, and the lowest-end 6600 is faster than a 6200.
ATI is working on this as well, but their product range still has considerable overlap, and they still suffer from "too many qualifiers" syndrome.
Oh, and we migth as well stay on-topic. Don't worry about the X-box 360 and security. Just like every "secure" platform before it, people will find ways to hack their way in.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like Leonard Nimoy getting upset over people calling him Spock. It is unrealistic to expect people to visualize him any other way.
If you want the money and fame of the limelight, you will have to put up with the persistence of the memory of the masses.
Privacy is not an inherent right in modern society. Your right to privacy depends on you actively protecting it.
Of course, with a new take on right to privacy comes a new understanding of the human condition. People are becoming more and more desensitized to outrageous behavior, so what was once a scandalous and career-ending pastime 40 years ago might simply raise a few eyebrows today.
That's nothing. Every time I see WWDC I visualize DC101 (WWDC FM, Washington).
and q6(~192k) is like 256k or higher with an mp3.
You get the same effect with optimizinbg VBR mp3 encoders like lame --alt-preset standard. I always find it funny when people conveniently forget that mp3 has had VBR support from the very beginning, just because the feature was ignored for the first few years of mp3's rise to popularity.
Even funnier that someone would compare a VBR optimized encoder mode like q(6) to CBR mp3.
You do know that lame standard encoding produces files in the same size range as Vorbis, and with similar quality level (it is largely transparent to the original)?
While Vorbis certainly has a leg up on mp3 in bitrates 128k and below, if you take advantage of VBR on both platforms, their quality levels and file sizes are very similar above that point.
That is just one of the many reasons why Vorbis is not gaining on mp3. It turns out that mp3 as a format is MUCH more extensible and affordable than people first thought back in the day when the idea for Vorbis was hatched. Of course, it doesn't help that Vorbis is one of the most expensive (in power) to decode, and that competitors like AAC and WMA can compete with OGG even in the lower bitrates.
I have a much more insane situation here.
The company I work for up until now has been very trustworthy of employees...and why not? We all have DOD security clearances. Sure, some areas have harsher limitations on media (based on the contract for work done in those areas), but for the most part you can freely put data on CD-Rs, DVD-Rs or Zip disks, and take them with you.
Recently though, someone got a bug up their ass and banned all USB mass-storage media in secure areas, and banned all but 'approved' IBM thumb drives in open areas. This is ignorant of the fact that, unless contract stipulates against it, other writeable media (floppies, CDs, DVDs, Zips) are allowed freely to pass in and out of secure areas, provided they're marked 'Unclassified'.
The best part: the only REAL reason given for this ban is the fact that 2000/XP logs disk transactions, but it doesn't log USB mass storage transactions. While this is true, the sad fact is the logs are not turned on on ANY PC IN THIS COMPANY. They have basically sold the ban to other managers using this reason, and a bunch of fearmongering.
*Sigh* Looks like I'm going to be using CDs for the next 20 years. Hopefully Longhorn will have Mt. Ranier support built-in so we can finally treat CD-RWs like floppies.
In addition, real-world performance sucks without tons of cache and memory bandwidth. In fact, the original Itanium's entire bus and cache subsystem were redesigned for the release of Itanium 2, doubling the bus width, increasing the L2 cache size and tweaking the latency on the L3.
No surprise, the Itanium 2 performs much better than the original Itanium, but it's name was alreay soiled by the mediocre preformance of the original.
In addition, all that cache and high-performance bus architecture means the Itanium can't be priced competitively with anything, due to the hulking die size. I2 NEEDS a minimum of 6MB L3 cache to shine, and 9MB doesn't hurt. Note that the "affordable" I2 chips have a paltry 1MB L2 cache, and perform like crap.
All joking aside though, he's actually quite right. Games with significant slowdown in ANY play mode in this generation of consoles is unacceptable. They are perfectly capable of handling even 4-way multiplayer without a hiccup, unlike the Playstation / N64.
In addition, programmers have gotten smarter. Ever play F-zero GX? The single-player mode is immensely detailed, and runs smooth as silk, necessary for such a fast-paced racer. But kick it over to 2-player competition, and some background details are subtley removed. Move up to 4 players and even more subtle detail is missing. But you don't care, because the game still looks impressive, and runs without slowdown.
It's not really necessary to know every intracacy of the engilsh language to speak and write it properly.
Pronouns, adverbs, participles and clauses are things I don't conciously think about while writing. Instead, my mind recalls real-world examples, and pieces them together to form unique expressions. My test for properness is simple: if I read it, and it doesn't sound right, then it cannot be correct. As crazy a language as English is, it has a certain flow to it you can't miss, provided you've been exposed enough to its proper forms.
My style isn't perfect by any means, but it's good enough to make people think what I have to say is important enough to be heard. Unfortunately, kids these days aren't getting such exposure to build on because the quality of ALL the language around them sucks.
But when you look at it, most of the time they are talking about +20% on framerates that are already twice the refresh rate. It's completely artificial - in the FPS benchmark they turn off the Vsync to be a more informative test, but not in the game. In the game, the drawing code will wait for a Vsync before drawing a new frame, so both cards will end up rendering the same frame rate when you actually play the game.
Not true. Both Nvidia and ATIs' driver sets default profiles have force v-sync disabled. Most games don't have it enabled by default, and few offer an option to enable it.
What's the difference? With v-sync enabled, anytime the video card needs longer than one sync period to draw a frame, the video card displays the same frame as the last one. This, to the end user, looks like your framerate literally dropped in half, and feels jerky because it usually happens intermittently.
With v-sync disabled, the video card always draws the next frame, even if the drawing is still in progress. This means if you suddenly have to take a little longer to render a frame, you will get a torn frame, but at least the update rate to the screen will be consistent.
So, why do people want higher framerates than their monitor's refresh rate can handle?
* If you're using v-sync, you want to make sure the minimum framerate never falls much below you monitor's refresh rate, or risk the display feeling randomly sluggish during frames with significantly higher processing requirements.
* If you have v-sync disabled, the less often the minimum framerate drops below the refresh rate of your monitor, the less tearing you encounter. Of course, tearing is not as noticeable as you would think. You tend to notice tearing only on vertical polygon edges, and then only when the polygon has moved significantly in your view between frames. That's why this is typically the default in most games...it SOUNDS like it should look bad, but it rarely does.
It's basically a user preference: inconsistent sluggishness, or inconsistent bouts of tearing, but they both benefit from having an AVERAGE framerate much higher than the 85Hz refresh rate of your monitor.
When was the last time a plane left on time or you didn't have to spend an hour for security checks?
My recent vacation to Puerto Rico comes to mind. I left on a Friday morning, and returned on a Monday afternoon. Despite leaving from BWI, an extremely busy airport, there was little hassle because I wasn't traveling during peak times. Got to the airport an hour before takeoff, took 15 minutes for e-checkin, 20 minutes in security. The flight left on-time.
Funny that, except for isolated incidents, most of the delays I've experienced in all my years of air travel have been when I was flying during the busy weekend (Friday afternoon to Sunday evening), when everyone else wants to fly.
Use your head.
When was the last time you didn't hit a traffic snarl in a big city?
When I didn't insist on getting into the city during the hours of 7AM-9AM, or 4PM-6PM weekdays. People obey the schedule imposed on them like good little cattle, regardless of whether it's really beneficial that they all get to work at the same time. I arrive at work at 10AM when my presence is not required earlier, and you'd be amazed how little traffic I encounter.
My limited experience with rail transport in this country (commuting on subways and regional trains) is very similar. Using the rail during rush-hour? Expect to pay substantially more in some cities, and expect more delays and crowded cars.
You complain about price, but with the exception of key highly-competitive markets, and bundle discounts, the average price of broadband in the US is in the $40-50 range.
I have Comcast in Maryland, and I'd give them a 7. When it works, the speed is as-advertised, and pings are excellent. The system has only gone down occasionally over the last 2 years, and we've never had to call out for a tech. The original install was on-time, within their 3-hour window, and took about 20 minutes.
My only complaint: for about 2-3 months about a year ago when the blaster worm was making the rounds, Comcast was pathetically slow at filtering out the effects on their internal network, making service spotty. Once that passed, service was excellent.
Given the fact that Comcast is the only game in town in this neighborhood (more than 20k feet away, and they have a DLC preventing DSL), I'm impressed the quality of service is so high.
Two years ago I used Speakeasy in Baltimore, and I'd give them an 8. The price was a bit high at the time ($50 for 608Kb/s down, 128Kb/s up, $10 more for static IP).
The service also didn't deliver the advertised download speeds (typically 400Kb/s. even with TCP/IP overhead, this is too low), however ping times and gaming were excellent.
The customer service was top-notch.
Sure, they're both expensive, but they're hardly the exception. The only way you'd get under the $40 mark around here would be to go with Verizon, and that's just insane. They have no concept of how to run a solid broadband ISP. In addition, you'd have to have local phone service, which I do not, making the price less competitive.
You think the model number R520 sucks?
:D
The actually codename is "Fudo". Yeah, that'll make Nvidia shake in their boots
(apparently, Fudo is some Buddhist diety. What's in the water in Canada, anyway?)
I saved my pennies and bought a GeForce2...MX...and found out what a horrible decision that was. That card was actually worse than the card I already had AND the GeForce 1 Ultras
This was standard practice well before Nvidia released the GeForce 2 MX. Nvidia already pissed off the world by releasing the TNT2 M64, which performed worse than the original Riva TNT.
Your venerated 3DFX is also guilty of such actions, by releasing the Banshee six months after the Voodoo 2. This single-pipe combo card performed worse than a single Voodoo 2, and offered no SLI upgrade path.
You'll get no condolences from me. Price normally relects performance in this market. The GeForce 2 MX was actually a steal at the time it was released; it was one of the best-performing budget cards ever. It bested the previous generation GeForce SDR in performance, something you wouldn't expect from a budget card. It was, however, beaten in performance by the GeForce DDR...and the later breakdown into the models 200 (64-bit) and 400 (128-bit) only cheapened the MX brand.
As far as I know (as in, this might not be the case in the recent past with the new PCI-X cards) ATI's numbering scheme is straightforward.
Actually, ATI has been the WORST offender in this category, especially in the 9xx0 series of cards. For a simple example, the Radeon 9000, 9100, 9200 and 9250 are all DirectX 8.1 cards, and are all actually slower revamps of the Radeon 8500. This is contrary to the "9000" series numbering, which at the very least would imply these cards would have *some* defining new features.
But let's look at your examples, thay have issues too...
A 9600 is worse than a 9700. A 9600 Pro is worse than a 9700.
True, but is a 9600 XT faster than a 9700? The performance is closer than you'd think. IS there really a need for the 9600 XT when the 9700 already exists? ATI sure thought so.
A 9700 Pro is worse than a 9800, etc.
Not true.
9700 Pro: 325Mhz Core, 620MHz DDR memory.
9800: 310MHz Core, 580Mhz DDR memory.
There was little change in the core between 9700 and 9800, so the clock speeds can be directly compared.
This, of course, ignores the extremely annoying lower cost "128-bit" Radeon 9800 cards (which are not well marked), 9600 SE cards that are barely as capable in performance as a 9200, the 9550 series (introduced well after the 9500 was replaced by the 9600).
Its much easier than trying to explain to them "Oh, get the 7800GT, not the 7800LT" (or whatever their latest business-class card is for that generation)
While Nvidia is just as guilty as ATI of playing the name game and causing ludicrous overlap (Nvidia FX series especially), they have really cleaned up their act with the 6000 series.
This is the entire lineup:
6200 TC, 6200
6600, 6600 GT
6800, 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra
That's it. Compared to ATI's xXX0 PCIe lineup numbers, this is a walk in the park. Furthermore, there is no overlap between series (except say, overlap created by companies like BFG Tech who sell overclocked parts, but that's out of Nvidia's hands).
The 6200 is slower than the 6600.
The 6600 GT is slower than the 6800.
And now, the 7800 is faster than the 6800 Ultra.
What's so confusing here?
Funny that, just hearing "75GXP" would be plenty enough to remind me of the Deathstar.
There were also some quality issues with the 60GXP, the successor to the 75GXP, but not on the same order.
My experience? 30GB 75GXP. 14 months, RIP.
Here's my take on folders versus metadata:
Folders allow for passive file metadata. Basically, by placing it in some folder under some heiarchy, you are automatically giving the file metadata. In addition, the hiearchy already exists, so deciding the correct position for a file within a tree is intuitive, once you have built the tree.
But what about files sorted purely by metadata? You have to actively add metadata to every file you create, instead of automatically inheriting it from an obvious folder structure. Every time you create a file, you have to actively think about what metadata should be associated with this particular file, and remember how it should be related to all the other files you've worked with recently. You have to make sure you don't misspell the metadata, or you risk losing your file into oblivion.
So, how can you make metadata easier to work with? You can have a list of pre-defined metadata catagories to apply to files. Even better, you could take into account the relationships between these pre-defined categories, and create a heiarchy of interdependency...and have yourself a folder-based filesystem, by any other name.
Pure metadata systems are clumsy. Use the metadata for your home directory if you must have it, but leave the rest of the system free to use concrete folders.
Very limited due to hardware of the day. Desperately needs a remake to at least bring it up to the level of 6. Magic system was far too simple. Item system was OK.
Agreed, I thought Dragon (Warrior/Quest) 2, which came out at the same time, was a superior game.
2 - Needs a *real* US release. Playstation ports are slow and sucky. GBA lacks the living-room-comfort factor Also should get "the treatment" and bring it up to more modern standards. Once they've done that, I could play it and comment on it as a game.
I can comment on it right now (you do know there's a translated NES ROM available for 2 and 3, right?). This game is terrible...there's more storyline than ff1, but it all revolves around coming to this one town, going off and doing a quest, then coming back to that town for the next quest...over and over again.
In addition, the experience system is a "use it or lose it" type that never appeared in any other Final Fantasy, for good reason. It is annoying enough to have to level grind, but it is even more annoying to have to think carefully during every moment of level grind. Let's say you meet some easy weenies...boring, easy to kill, right? Well, if you have your mage use melee, it could lower his INT, and possibly raise his STR. Better to use an item, or waste a spell, because in FF2 skill specialization is key. In other words, you have to think about EVERYTHING, even the things that should be mostly mindless. Gets annoying really fast.
3 - Has anyone that doesn't read/speak Japanese even seen this one? Same stuff as 2.
This is not a bad game, and it would be better if remade for a modern susyem. However, like FF5, I think the job system is too easy. Make it harder to switch jobs than just building up a few points, make later jobs completely dependent on having mastered previous jobs.
4 - Fuck "easytype". Give me the real deal. And a sequel. They did X-2, why not IV-2? Then again, there really wasn't much left to do at the end. As far as the game goes, Magic left much to be desired, though weapons/armor were fleshed out quite nicely. Needs a few more special items (tails and such) and some side quests.
This "easytype" whine-fest is just a fad perpetuated by people who have nothing better to whine about. I bothered to play through the Japanese (translated) version to see what all the fuss was about, and 3/4 of the way through the game I was not convinced it was significantly harder or more storied. Of all the fights, only two were 'harder':
Dark Cecil had about 3x more hitpoints. But at the same time, the Japanense version also has a number of helpful items that you pick up by that point in the game, which give you useful effects like direct damage, Haste (for you) and Slow (for Dark Cecil). The 'easy' US version at best makes you face him with only 1-2 Cure 2s, assuming you didn't miss them. This is just as hard because of your limited ability to heal faster than damage accumulates, it's just not as dragged out a fight.
Also, the fight with Yang and the guards is 'harder'. But I don't think much of the difficulty...with the 'easy' version, I use a single Fire 3 from Tellah...with the hard version, I had to use two. Big deal.
I didn't notice anything else that was 'harder'. All the fiends were exactly the same difficulty as the US version. In addition, I saw nothing new in the dialog that added anything to the game.
5 - Ownage. Needs an update, but not much of one. A few more secrets and side quests would be nice. The Job/Ability system kicks ass, as does most of the magic. It would be nice if you couldn't just walk into shops in the first 3 towns and buy 90% of the black/white spells in the game, though. 1 had them spread out through the entire game, which was nice.
Meh, I've already commented on the job system, but here's what made me stop playing this game:
Galuf dies at the hands of the big evil guy. I was impressed, because Square rarely
The simple fact is that labelling what are primarily domestic US sports as world championships is silly, one of those 'only in America' things.
Chill out man, it took soccer a long time to become the worldly sport that it is, with local leagues feeding players into international contests.
The following is REALLY off topic, but needs to be said:
The US sports make these "World Champion" claims because they have similarly high hopes for their sport, and they're all making gradual headway. For football, there's the CFL and NFL Europe, but I expect it to be a long time before they organize some international competition between leagues.
Baseball, on the other hand, is ripe for such an expansion. The Japanese leagues are quite good, and although it's logistically impossible to add an MLB team in Japan, there's nothing wrong with allowing the top Japanese teams into the MLB playoffs. They may, of course, have to adjust venue rules, but that's all in the details.
I mean, MLB is dying, slowly, by the onrush of the NFL, America's new favorite pastime. They need to take advantage of baseball's world-wide popularity and turn it into an international contest like the World Cup or face certain death. They can start with Japan, and others will follow suit.
Not Speakeasy.
They even handle the billing for you.
I had problems with monster (~250ms) latency to the UK, and they pretty much told me that you cant get broadband speed internationally.
That would be because you can't get low pings internationally, it's just not possible with a routed protocol, especially when both sides are not directly on the backbone.
Just take a look at the Internet Traffic Report website, the response time from backbone to backbone is well over 150ms during the day. Add in 30-50ms extra routing on both ends to make your way off the backbones, and you've got ~250ms delay easy, and no less than 150ms in off hours.
Are we talking about the same Ballroom scene here?
The scene in the picture is NOTHING like the prerendered ballroom scene. There's only one dynamic light (easy for any system even in those days), and there's no anti-aliasing just for starters. They purposefully made the scene very dark to de-emphasize the aliasing artifacts. The darkness also de-empahasizes the rendering hack that is the background. The ballroom scene in FF8 is much brighter.
The background is a hack, probably just a few dozen polygons with textures faking the dance hall background, instead of thousands of polygons depicting the contours of the walls and ornaments.
The quality of character graphics is similar to FFX real-time cutscenes, if you look at it critically. You have the dynamic level of detail, so you have tons of polys dedicated to rendering the face when it fills up half the screen, but scale it back when you're further away and need more polys for the rest of the scene.
It's nothing special, all the major consoles of this generation can do this. (Resident Evil 4 on GC,for example). The only thing is, you're only going to see it during cutscenes for two reasons:
1. You need all the console's horsepower to do it right. No time for AI or physics here, everything is scripted.
2. You really need control of the camera to create enticing movements that really show off your effects. Otherwise, the effort is wasted.
Now, I'm not down on consoles, just a realist. This generation was a step in the right direction. Now, just imagine being able to render even higher fidelity than RE4, even with real-time anti-aliasing, physics and AI. Now that will be impressive.
If you can take a note with the time and station, you can find the name and artist to almost any song played on the radio in the US.
FREE.
Just go here. Listings are updated with about 20 minutes lag.
Now, I don't know how long this is going to be around, because YES is also looking to start a phone-based service. For now the old YES site is still working, so enjoy it!
Thnk about what you're comparing. The cost of vehicles doesn't generally go down because it's a replacement market. The prices generally follow inflation, and typically car makers add features and options instead of reducing prices, because the reductions in cost are small. The new features for the reasonable price get you in the door, and they make a killing on the upsell.
If all you do is sell cars on low price, you get a bunch of cheap bastards who won't buy any options, and that's bad for business.
The console market is different in many ways: price reductions due to miniaturization and new technology are BIG.
Think about all the benefits you get if you were to say, shrink all the ICs on your mainboard into one system-on-a-chip:
* Less separate components means less cost up-front, both in purchasing the parts and labor for mounting.
* Less components means less external busses and traces, which means you can use less layers on your board, and less board area More money saved.
* You can possibly reduce power of all the components by running them at a lower voltage. This leaves room for cheaper thermal dissapation (bare chip versus passive heatsink versus active cooling), and also leaves flexibility on upselling with higher clock speeds.
And that's not the only aspect of price reduction. You want to know why games have barely crept up in price in the last 20 years? Because low-level bit twiddling on the NES has given way to high-level languages and programming APIs, and "built-in" services that all games can take advantage of like Xbox Live. Since, unlike a car, the majority of costs are in development, this provides a huge reduction in cost.
But the main reason why games and consoles have crept up in price slowly? Because gaming is still a growing market. Unfortunately I think we've reached the end of rampant growth with roughly 100 million consoles sold in the last 5 years, and improvements on the development side can only do so much. I fully expect games to begin following inflation, and even beat the rate of inflation if game houses continue to push huge hollywood budgets.
What I wish for more than anything is more XCOM games, but in the same visual style as the original
There already is.
UFO: Alien Invasion
It's open-source, based on the Quake 2 engine (3D, but not overly flashy). It also maintains the look and feel of older X-COM, but you can also view the entire battle map in 6 degrees of freedom if you so desire.
Currently, it is only a tech demo (no base building, no long-term storyline, no world map combat with ships), but things can only get better.
Your body makes this wonderful thing...called saliva!
Saliva is slightly basic, and it dilutes acids you ingest, as well as the acids given off by plaque. It even helps to dissolve sugars so the plaque have less to feast on.
You know what all those "cavity prevention" sugar-free gums are promoting? Saliva production, as a byproduct of chewing.
So, you can still brush late at night and have a clean mouth during the day (provided you don't tank soda continuously). But what if you don't want to chew gum? You know what else can clean your mouth just as well, without laborious chewing?
WATER!
Oh my, what an amazing concept! After you drink a soda...get this...you can rinse your mouth out with water! Removes most of the sugar and acids.
I love it how people complain about problems while never thinking about how easily they could fix them.
To tell you the truth, if I was going to buy a mid range card by nvidia now I still wouldn't know which piece was the best bang for the buck, whereas ATI's I would know.
Agreed, although ATI also was guilty of this in the 9000 series (9000, 9100, 9200, 9250 are all DX8.1, 9500, 9550, 9600, 9700, 9800). And it doesn't help that both companies use crazy qualifiers like SE, LE, XT, PE, GT, Ultra to create overlapping markets.
Really, which one is faster: a 9600 XT, or a 9800 SE? Bet you wouldn't have any idea unless you thoroughly researched them.
Thankfully, Nvidia has finally recognized that all this crazy branding is a mistake. For the 6000 series, Nvidia only sells the 6200(TC), 6600(GT) and 6800(GT, Ultra) series, and there's little overlap. The lowest-end 6800 is faster than a 6600 GT, and the lowest-end 6600 is faster than a 6200.
ATI is working on this as well, but their product range still has considerable overlap, and they still suffer from "too many qualifiers" syndrome.
Oh, and we migth as well stay on-topic. Don't worry about the X-box 360 and security. Just like every "secure" platform before it, people will find ways to hack their way in.
Yes, the code still worked, they just messed with people's heads. Do it the new way, you get lots of goodies. Do it the old way, you die :D
Instead of doing Left-Right-Left-Right on the D-pad, you had to do L-R-L-R on the shoulder buttons.
Yes, I remember dying many times because I forgot to switch the buttons.