ME was never intended to be a long-term product, just something of a Win98 refresh before OEMs could switch over to XP. Thus, there was a shortage of good drivers for most devices.
Even though ME was MUCH more stable than 98, ME lacked the protections that the NT kernel brings, so bad drivers would wreak havoc on stability. Consequently, most OEM default configurations with ME ran great, and anytime you added new equipment and drivers, you risked hell.
ME is legendary only because it wasn't properly supported.
Yes, there are some variations on the policy where I work (government contractor), but that's the basic concept. Tolerances vary: some secure areas, employees may carry cell phones in, but may not activate them. Others are less tolerant, and all communications devices must be left at the door.
The thing about electronic media:
Why should a company be so upset about media coming into and leaving the workplace? If employees are considering stealing data, they already have tons of options besides an iPod.
At my company, they have a very sane outlook on this. The company itself does a background check on all employees, and an additional DoD check is required to have access to secure areas. At this point, they figure that employees can be trusted.
All we do is follow the standard rules for media in a secure area:
- All media must be marked classified or unclassified. - Writable unlassified media must never come in contact with a classified medium. - All classified data must be secured properly, or destroyed.
Myself, I bring my Muvo USB key to work, in a secure area...and I'm not the only employee to have a USB key drive. I just label it "unclassified". It's not as if this is anything special, I could do the same with a floppy, zip disk or CD-ROM.
Just can't do it. Have you seen the thermals on the 970FX?
They're good, but they're not "Apple notebook" good. Remember, this is a company that's known for getting 5-6 hours of normal use on a charge.
Even if you clocked the G5 dynamically, you'd only get that kind of battery life if the thing stayed at 1GHz. That wouldn't help you at all unless you never USED the machine for anything processing intensive.
Honestly, there's no good reason to go with the G5 over the G4 except for the improved bus and memory interface. Even those would be heavily scaled back to save power, as they are on all notebooks that aren't marketed as desktop replacements.
Just FYI, the goal of projects like r3mix and --alt-preset standard optimization is TRANSPARENT compression.
That is to say, professional audio engineers tweak the encoder to use as much bandwidth as required for a frame to be virtually indistinguishable from the original.
There are the obvious caveats, of course. The official mp3 codec has an upper limit of 320Kbps data rate, and sometimes "transparent" reproduction may require more. There are other obvious aspects shared by all lossy encoders, like the removal of inaudible frequencies, and the fact that on rare occasions encoders can be totally tripped up by a type of sound they are not designed for.
The point though, is this: for 99.9 percent of the population, for 99.9 percent of all music out there, high-bitrate codecs are transparent. And that is good enough.
You know, that's really sad when you think about it.
r3mix / --alt-preset standard VBR encoding has been around for half a decade, for a format that hasn't changed in over a decade, and it can produce "CD-quality" at bitrates much lower (180-200kbps typical).
Vorbis, WMA and AAC are also capable of "CD-quality" at much lower bitrates than ATRAC3Plus, and the latter two can be played on a wide variety of portable players without transcoding.
So tell me again, why does Sony in their infinite stupidity, still think they can force ATRAC on the US market, even though they failed to do so 8 years ago?
It is true that Sony whores are the closest PC equivalant of Mac-addicts; they will buy almost anything Sony puts out, because it's overpriced and trendy. However, Sony seems to be making one serious oversight: most of their "trendy" loyal customers have already bought iPods, simply because Sony has only now offered a competing product.
Likewise, the sound capabilities of the N64 are almost inexcusable[1]; whether this was the fault of the sound hardware or the simple lack of storage space on the cartridge, I don't know.
I'm confused, I was of the mindset that the N64 had excellent wavetable synthesis, better than the SNES. If the music is terrible, that is the fault of the game maker.
On the other hand, if you're simply whining about the fact that the N64 didn't use CDDA for music, you've got to face the facts: typical cart size for the N64 was 32MB, and that's hardly enough to hold a whole digital audio soundtrack.
The N64 had framerate and memory issues too--the expansion pack solved some problems, but should not have been needed in the first place.
Are you kidding me? The N64 was basically a $199 SGI Reality Engine desktop configuration in a box. The N64 could handle much more complex scenes than the PSX, and even came with double the memory standard.
In fact, memory was perhaps the single most expensive component in the entire system. You may not recall, but mainstream memory prices in 1996 were still around 5-10 bucks a MB, and performance memory could run you even more. While there is little doubt that more games would have taken advantage of the extra ram if it had shipped with 8MB, it would have been prohibitively expensive.
If you're bitching and moaning about the lack of 60fps at super high-resolution, you'll have to remember that the N64 was released in 1996, and there was no consumer-level solution capable of reaching such high performance until the Voodoo 2 SLI. 15-30fps was considered quite playable on both the N64 and PSX.
Very well, but back then there were generaly only two, maybe three different Voodoo2 cards, namely STB's, Diamond's and Creative's....And Guillemont, and Hercules, and Canopus, and Obsidian, and Jaton...and so many more. You know, only a few...
There are very blatant reasons why SLI killed 3DFX as a company. And yes, their downfall began with the Voodoo 2.
The Voodoo 2 with SLI was so incredibly fast that they had no competitor, so every graphics company in the game was making 3DFX cards, and they were all reference designs (with the exception of Canopus and Obsidian).
All those players and 3DFX themselves overestimated demand for their extremely high-priced product. Even worse, they overestimated demand for the SLI add-on at the $300 pricepoint. 3DFX was losing a lot of sales because they didn't have a competitive low-end product until the Banshee, and by then Nvidia had made quite a dent in their marketshare.
All the vendors who used the reference design got bit in the ass once more because the market discovered you could mix Voodoo 2 cards in SLI, so you could buy ANY card (read: cheapest), so all those late upgraders got a sweet deal.
While I don't see SLI destroying Nvidia (they have the diversified product like that 3DFX was lacking), I do expect it to blow up in their faces and lose them money in the long run. The market couldn't bear a $600 graphics solution in 1998, what makes them think it can handle a $900 solution 5 years later?
Let's say you charge up a flat conductive pad with DC +12v. Where are you going to direct the outgoing current? Now you're getting into the complexities of routing, and there's really no simple device that can make this happen for you.
As for your concept of a single voltage, keep in mind: Those bricks you hate so much aren't just transformers, they also have voltage regulators. Unlike transformers, they're not exactly the most efficient things either; most of the heat your brick gives off is waste from the linear regulator.
Supplying one voltage to all devices means most devices would be bulkier and disappate more power, because the regulator would have to be on-board.
Just kindly point out that an entire generation of new super-fast video cards, processor and memory sales are entirely dependent on the release of Half-Life 2.
Unfortunately, Longhorn won't be around for another 3 years, so Gabe, you've got to do your patriotic duty and make those minimum system requirements skyrocket!**
** NOTE: Minimum System Requirements: DirectX 6.0 32MB graphics accelerator, Pentium II or equivilant. RECOMMENDED: GeDeon Rage Pro Tix000 Ultra PE, PentiumFX EE XP20000. Cold cathode accented case and nuclear power plant optional.
I have a copy of the 7th guest renderer if you want it, downloaded it years ago. You can email me at madcat __AT__ jtang __DOT__ org, and we can decide how to get it to you.
The original Rainbow Six had this very same problem: missions were complex and players were fragile; combine that with long round times, and most players were sitting around waiting for the next round. Counterstrike was actually the first FPS to make round-based play really popular because it cut the average round time to under 3 minutes.
As for me, I don't like America's Army because of the hoops you have to jump through before you can play (they call it "training"). The single player training is fine, but the multiplayer training is the one that pissed me off and made me uninstall the game.
I downloaded it the week it came out, then prompty uninstalled it after the following:
A. I logged into a multiplayer training server, and discovered that qualification typically consisted of waiting in line for an hour for your turn, then playing multiple rounds for an additional 45 minutes. If you failed, you had to start over.
B. I discovered some non-official servers and got a chance to play the game anyway, and I wasn't impressed.
Imagine, having to win multiple rounds with the same team, and being held back just because of a few idiots. It feels too much like real life, just like excruciatingly long waits in between rounds. It is free, but only if you are willing to put up with such initial nonsense.
Anyway, so I can make this post on-topic, the next generation of consoles will be the first generation to not be CPU or ram-starved compared to PC servers. 256 or 512MB of ram and powerful processors would make 32 or 64-player servers with big maps easy. However, the quality of bandwidth is something that isn't going to be remedied by any fancy new console hardware. You need those dedicated servers, or the game company has to pony up and host dedicated servers (ala EA's official BF1942 servers, which they have hosted since the demo was released).
They lost several hundred times as many units in their advance on Russia as they lost in the entire rest of the war. And they would have beaten Russia, had it not been for the Japanese bombing pearl harbor
Russia has the timeless advantage of being a glorious, yet unattainable goal. The steppes are a vast land area compared to Europe, and this changes everything when it comes to managing armies. Not only must you spread out your front lines, but your rear guards and supply lines are stretched paper-thin by the time you've made any significant advances.
When Hitler grew stubborn and attempted to take Stalingrad, his supply lines and rear guard were in just such a situation. Russian forces took advantage of the situation, and used a pincer attack to cut supply lines while keeping the Germans in the Caucasus busy.
The point is, Hitler's supply lines were already stretched to the breaking point. If the Russians hadn't cracked them at Stalingrad, they would have cracked them elsewhere, because Hitler was foolish and thought the blitzkreig to be unstoppable. The fool never bothered to check how many HUNDREDS OF TONS of fuel a day those panzer divisions required.
Assuming the Japanese left the US out of the war, Germany COULD have beaten Russia if they had slowed down and built infarstructure in the places they conquered, but that would have taken years. This is not the kind of glorious win that keeps people in fear and awe of a government.
As for your nuclear arguement:
Before the war, the international scientific community discovered that fission was possible with uranium, and this had been published.
The US began researching nuclear weapons after the war broke out because they believed the Germans were researching such weapons. This research began before the US entered the war, as a preventive measure. Although progress would have been slower if the Japanese had not dragged the US into the war, there is no doubt in my mind that the project would have come to fruition.
Japan didn't have an active nuclear weapons program, but they did consider the possibility. Their top scientests determined that the strain on the empire to build such a weapon would be too great, so it was not persued.
Germany didn't actually have a nuclear weapons program. Their top scientests knew fission was feasable, but could not guarantee on theory alone that it could be turned into a weapon. The German High Command instead funded research into nuclear power generation, and this is why the Germans were interested in heavy water from Norway.
The irony is, if the Germans hadn't been so interested in controlling the only major heavy water source in the world, we might not have been so suspicious. It certainly would have slowed down our own nuclear developments if they had not done so.
16 million colors + an extra 8 bits of info that I have no idea what they do with. (Insight into this would be appreciated. Depth buffer maybe?)
Alpha channel. This gives objects a certain degree of transparency. Let's say you draw your scene back to front, and for one particular pixel we have 3 layers drawn on top of one and other. Normally you wouldn't see the other two layers behind the pixel closest to the front, but if the frontmost pixel had an alpha value, it would be blended with the middle pixel. The rearmost pixel would also be blended if the middle pixel had an alpha, but the blending takes into account both the frontmost pixel's alpha and the middle pixel's alpha.
Also, your example of "16-bit color" is a little off because you're comparing apples to oranges. A 16-bit image in Photoshop will look great because it has 2^16 colors to work with, typically a 5/5/6 split (RGB). On the other hand, a 16-bit frame buffer will typically use a 4/4/4/4 split (RGBA), giving you 16 levels for each color and alpha. Of course it looks like crap.
18-bit color will probably end up looking ok but not great for a television, as the correction schemes these manufactureres use to get "true 24-bit color" typically mean displaying the two colors in-sequence closest to the actual one you want. This means you'll probably get a muddy picture in practice because the fluctuating colors won't be as persistent as your eyes are used to, and so it will look it's worst when contrast is most important (like say, foggy or dark scenes).
it's purchase system to not add to gameplay as much as serve as a unbalancing feature that leads to one team dominating a map.
Maybe you weren't paying attention when you played Counterstrike. The losing team received "welfare" that increased with each consecutive loss up to a point. In fact, it was usually better to be on the losing team if you got no kills, especially if you died during the round.
As for your realism complaint, I don't buy it. Counterstrike made the Rainbow Six gameplay style more fun by reducing the average round time by an order of magnitude, and simplified all maps so they had at most 2-3 choke points, and at most 2 objectives.
The original game was fun because it combined the speed and simplicity of deathmatch with the skill and cunning of objective-based squad gameplay. I havn't played Counterstrike in about 3 years, and just as I was getting out of it the maps WERE getting bigger and more complex, so perhaps the modern game is suffering from feature bloat.
Can you say INFLATION? I actually think your MSRP for an LP in 1984 is a bit low, but just taking your numbers:
$6 (1984) = $11.04 (2004)
While there is no doubt that the RIAA was price gouging in the 90s, these days the prices are dropping and we are approaching parity. You can find new CDs for well under $15, and back-catalog items for as low as $10.
Yes, the ability to join mid-play is truely a revolutionary feature, I always seem to forget about it.
As for Counterstrike, you have to realize something: in the gaming world, it's not whether your ideas are NEW, it's whether they're FRESH and well-presented.
Counterstrike borrowed heavily from Rainbow Six, which at the time was only a mild success on the PC platform. The reason the game had only narrow appeal was the game was TOO realistic: you had to prepare before each mission, the maps were relatively large, and you died in 1-2 shots.
The Counterstrike team sped up the action, balanced the damage scales so you could take a couple bullets with body armor, and made the maps simpler. As for the inventory purchase system, while it may not have been a NEW idea even in an FPS, no really successful game or mod had incorporated it up to that time. For the vast majority of people, it was a new concept. Certainly the fact that you can't even remember the name of the mod you mentioned reflects on it's lack of popularity?
If *any* game(s) cemented the shift from SP to MP, and help keep PC gaming alive today, I'd say it was UT and/or Q3, *not* Doom.
Wrong. There are two "games" that helped cement the multiplayer culture, and you're wrong on both counts. One came before UT and Q3 and one was developed concurrently.
First of all, Quake was an evolution in multiplayer gaming. the community-supported Quakeworld was a revolution. It is one of the earliest multiplayer games to feature client-side prediction, and the experience was fluid even on 32-player internet servers...something that would bring a Quake server to it's knees.
Combine this with incredibly popular free mods and total conversions like Team Fortress that revolutionized gameplay, and you had a multiplayer platform that eclipsed even the popularity of Quake II at it's peak.
Half-Life is the second game on the list, not because the original HL multiplayer was anything special, but because it served as a platform for...
Counterstrike.
I know a lot of you bag on this game, but you just don't seem to understand how popular it is. The game is not even at it's peak anymore, and there are still over 100 THOUSAND active players at peak during the week. That's more players than every other current multiplayer FPS COMBINED.
Why?
It was free, well polished, and adapted gameplay styles from other genres. No rocket launchers plus the equipment purchase system made for a fresh look, and people ate it up.
I just want to make this clear to you, since you obviously have chosen to ignore it.
The use of the bomb, in the end, was entirely political. Although there is much evidence to suggest that the Japanese emperor was pushing for an end to conflict, his staff and military brass were all against unconditional surrender. The possibility of peace was stagnating, and might have failed altogether if an invasion took place.
The other key player in the politics involving the bomb were the encroaching forces of the Soviet Union. Truman was quite aware that letting the USSR participate in a Japanese invasion would be a foolhardy move with long-standing reprucussions, but there was no way to prevent this if full-scale invasion took place. The bomb was seen as a way to shake the Japanese spirit quickly before invasion was imminent.
The final political factor: we had a weapon with a development cost that was absolutely unprecedented. With very little oversight during the war, the completely unused weapon would garner much displeasure and political pressure after cessation of hostilities.
It is argued that we could have performed a warning fire on Japanese soil, but that would have left us down to one bomb if they decided to call our bluff. While it is true that more plutonium core (fat man) bombs were in development, they were expected to arive too late to stop the rapidly approaching invasion. As I mentioned above, invasion would destroy any chance of a quick peace because nationalistic soldiers and civilians would fight to the last man. Two bombs were all we had to work with to realistically stop an invasion, so we used them to their greatest physical and psychological effect: we targeted cities with large populations that had purposefully been spared bombing in the previous months.
There was no real moral impediment involving use of the bomb. We had already fallen off the moral highroad and into the gutter with out firebombing of Japanses civilians. The total death tolls produced by our firebombing of over 60 cities was greater than the immediate casualties of the two bombs combined. As far as we were concerned, anything with an industrial complex was considered a "base", and Hiroshima certainly qualified in that respect.
Just thought I'd mention this. I hope you're not giving your child the same allowance you had. You may not think 25 years is a lot of time, but inflation over that span has had quite an effect. Your $11 in, say, ~1980 would be worth almost $30 today. Considering that all but a few top sellers fall to $40 or $30 within a few months of release, this is hardly too expensive for your kid, assuming you've kept up with inflation on his/her allowance.
There is also a small but active movement in the industry to release games with $20 price tags, although it's mostly in the computer software market. It it true that ValuSoft and their ilk have given this price range a VERY bad name, but things are improving as more competitors enter this market space.
There are also notable instances such as Croteam, the creators of Serious Sam. They told the gaming community that Serious Sam would retail for 20 bucks on release, and make up for the price in volume, and it seems to have been successful.
I realise I'm probably one of the few people on SlashDot who would advise against caffeine
You can count me as one more.
I had "migraines" since I was in junior high, but I didn't realize they were just caffeine withdrawl headaches. Of course, back then I was just doing 2-3 cans of Mountain Dew a day, but it was enough. By the time I quit cold-turkey last year, I was over 500mg of caffeine a day, and thanks to some personal research I finally made the connection between the caffeine and headaches.
An interesting thing about caffeine addiction that I noticed: it doesn't work if you try to stay at "maintence levels," that is, choose a target intake and don't increase or decrease it. Logic would dictate that you could maintain a certain high intake and avoid all withdrawl symptoms. But I found that, even with consistent intake, withdrawl headaches would set in near the end of the day unless I took more. Now that's a BITCH of an addiction.
I took a couple days off and used my four-day weekend to go cold-turkey. It was very harsh, but worth it...no more "migraines". I feel cheated out of those years spent wallowing in the caffeine cycle, but I'm just happy it's come to an end.
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You have to realize some aspects about ME.
ME was never intended to be a long-term product, just something of a Win98 refresh before OEMs could switch over to XP. Thus, there was a shortage of good drivers for most devices.
Even though ME was MUCH more stable than 98, ME lacked the protections that the NT kernel brings, so bad drivers would wreak havoc on stability. Consequently, most OEM default configurations with ME ran great, and anytime you added new equipment and drivers, you risked hell.
ME is legendary only because it wasn't properly supported.
Yes, there are some variations on the policy where I work (government contractor), but that's the basic concept. Tolerances vary: some secure areas, employees may carry cell phones in, but may not activate them. Others are less tolerant, and all communications devices must be left at the door.
The thing about electronic media:
Why should a company be so upset about media coming into and leaving the workplace? If employees are considering stealing data, they already have tons of options besides an iPod.
At my company, they have a very sane outlook on this. The company itself does a background check on all employees, and an additional DoD check is required to have access to secure areas. At this point, they figure that employees can be trusted.
All we do is follow the standard rules for media in a secure area:
- All media must be marked classified or unclassified.
- Writable unlassified media must never come in contact with a classified medium.
- All classified data must be secured properly, or destroyed.
Myself, I bring my Muvo USB key to work, in a secure area...and I'm not the only employee to have a USB key drive. I just label it "unclassified". It's not as if this is anything special, I could do the same with a floppy, zip disk or CD-ROM.
Damn slashcode, ate up my "less than" signs.
Should read:
you'd only get that kind of battery life if the thing stayed at much less than 1GHz.
Just can't do it. Have you seen the thermals on the 970FX?
They're good, but they're not "Apple notebook" good. Remember, this is a company that's known for getting 5-6 hours of normal use on a charge.
Even if you clocked the G5 dynamically, you'd only get that kind of battery life if the thing stayed at 1GHz. That wouldn't help you at all unless you never USED the machine for anything processing intensive.
Honestly, there's no good reason to go with the G5 over the G4 except for the improved bus and memory interface. Even those would be heavily scaled back to save power, as they are on all notebooks that aren't marketed as desktop replacements.
Just FYI, the goal of projects like r3mix and --alt-preset standard optimization is TRANSPARENT compression.
That is to say, professional audio engineers tweak the encoder to use as much bandwidth as required for a frame to be virtually indistinguishable from the original.
There are the obvious caveats, of course. The official mp3 codec has an upper limit of 320Kbps data rate, and sometimes "transparent" reproduction may require more. There are other obvious aspects shared by all lossy encoders, like the removal of inaudible frequencies, and the fact that on rare occasions encoders can be totally tripped up by a type of sound they are not designed for.
The point though, is this: for 99.9 percent of the population, for 99.9 percent of all music out there, high-bitrate codecs are transparent. And that is good enough.
Foreigners could simply obtain SPARC or MIPS specs and fab a multi-GHz version of those.
Already been done. Fujitsu has been making their own SPARC64 chip and servers for years, and it even outperforms Sun's offerings.
When Congress can lock down a Japanese company, I'll actually take their hot air seriously.
You know, that's really sad when you think about it.
r3mix / --alt-preset standard VBR encoding has been around for half a decade, for a format that hasn't changed in over a decade, and it can produce "CD-quality" at bitrates much lower (180-200kbps typical).
Vorbis, WMA and AAC are also capable of "CD-quality" at much lower bitrates than ATRAC3Plus, and the latter two can be played on a wide variety of portable players without transcoding.
So tell me again, why does Sony in their infinite stupidity, still think they can force ATRAC on the US market, even though they failed to do so 8 years ago?
It is true that Sony whores are the closest PC equivalant of Mac-addicts; they will buy almost anything Sony puts out, because it's overpriced and trendy. However, Sony seems to be making one serious oversight: most of their "trendy" loyal customers have already bought iPods, simply because Sony has only now offered a competing product.
Likewise, the sound capabilities of the N64 are almost inexcusable[1]; whether this was the fault of the sound hardware or the simple lack of storage space on the cartridge, I don't know.
I'm confused, I was of the mindset that the N64 had excellent wavetable synthesis, better than the SNES. If the music is terrible, that is the fault of the game maker.
On the other hand, if you're simply whining about the fact that the N64 didn't use CDDA for music, you've got to face the facts: typical cart size for the N64 was 32MB, and that's hardly enough to hold a whole digital audio soundtrack.
The N64 had framerate and memory issues too--the expansion pack solved some problems, but should not have been needed in the first place.
Are you kidding me? The N64 was basically a $199 SGI Reality Engine desktop configuration in a box. The N64 could handle much more complex scenes than the PSX, and even came with double the memory standard.
In fact, memory was perhaps the single most expensive component in the entire system. You may not recall, but mainstream memory prices in 1996 were still around 5-10 bucks a MB, and performance memory could run you even more. While there is little doubt that more games would have taken advantage of the extra ram if it had shipped with 8MB, it would have been prohibitively expensive.
If you're bitching and moaning about the lack of 60fps at super high-resolution, you'll have to remember that the N64 was released in 1996, and there was no consumer-level solution capable of reaching such high performance until the Voodoo 2 SLI. 15-30fps was considered quite playable on both the N64 and PSX.
Very well, but back then there were generaly only two, maybe three different Voodoo2 cards, namely STB's, Diamond's and Creative's. ...And Guillemont, and Hercules, and Canopus, and Obsidian, and Jaton...and so many more. You know, only a few...
There are very blatant reasons why SLI killed 3DFX as a company. And yes, their downfall began with the Voodoo 2.
The Voodoo 2 with SLI was so incredibly fast that they had no competitor, so every graphics company in the game was making 3DFX cards, and they were all reference designs (with the exception of Canopus and Obsidian).
All those players and 3DFX themselves overestimated demand for their extremely high-priced product. Even worse, they overestimated demand for the SLI add-on at the $300 pricepoint. 3DFX was losing a lot of sales because they didn't have a competitive low-end product until the Banshee, and by then Nvidia had made quite a dent in their marketshare.
All the vendors who used the reference design got bit in the ass once more because the market discovered you could mix Voodoo 2 cards in SLI, so you could buy ANY card (read: cheapest), so all those late upgraders got a sweet deal.
While I don't see SLI destroying Nvidia (they have the diversified product like that 3DFX was lacking), I do expect it to blow up in their faces and lose them money in the long run. The market couldn't bear a $600 graphics solution in 1998, what makes them think it can handle a $900 solution 5 years later?
You want a pad that carries electricity?
Let's say you charge up a flat conductive pad with DC +12v. Where are you going to direct the outgoing current? Now you're getting into the complexities of routing, and there's really no simple device that can make this happen for you.
As for your concept of a single voltage, keep in mind: Those bricks you hate so much aren't just transformers, they also have voltage regulators. Unlike transformers, they're not exactly the most efficient things either; most of the heat your brick gives off is waste from the linear regulator.
Supplying one voltage to all devices means most devices would be bulkier and disappate more power, because the regulator would have to be on-board.
Just kindly point out that an entire generation of new super-fast video cards, processor and memory sales are entirely dependent on the release of Half-Life 2.
Unfortunately, Longhorn won't be around for another 3 years, so Gabe, you've got to do your patriotic duty and make those minimum system requirements skyrocket!**
** NOTE: Minimum System Requirements: DirectX 6.0 32MB graphics accelerator, Pentium II or equivilant.
RECOMMENDED: GeDeon Rage Pro Tix000 Ultra PE, PentiumFX EE XP20000. Cold cathode accented case and nuclear power plant optional.
I have a copy of the 7th guest renderer if you want it, downloaded it years ago. You can email me at madcat __AT__ jtang __DOT__ org, and we can decide how to get it to you.
The original Rainbow Six had this very same problem: missions were complex and players were fragile; combine that with long round times, and most players were sitting around waiting for the next round. Counterstrike was actually the first FPS to make round-based play really popular because it cut the average round time to under 3 minutes.
As for me, I don't like America's Army because of the hoops you have to jump through before you can play (they call it "training"). The single player training is fine, but the multiplayer training is the one that pissed me off and made me uninstall the game.
I downloaded it the week it came out, then prompty uninstalled it after the following:
A. I logged into a multiplayer training server, and discovered that qualification typically consisted of waiting in line for an hour for your turn, then playing multiple rounds for an additional 45 minutes. If you failed, you had to start over.
B. I discovered some non-official servers and got a chance to play the game anyway, and I wasn't impressed.
Imagine, having to win multiple rounds with the same team, and being held back just because of a few idiots. It feels too much like real life, just like excruciatingly long waits in between rounds. It is free, but only if you are willing to put up with such initial nonsense.
Anyway, so I can make this post on-topic, the next generation of consoles will be the first generation to not be CPU or ram-starved compared to PC servers. 256 or 512MB of ram and powerful processors would make 32 or 64-player servers with big maps easy. However, the quality of bandwidth is something that isn't going to be remedied by any fancy new console hardware. You need those dedicated servers, or the game company has to pony up and host dedicated servers (ala EA's official BF1942 servers, which they have hosted since the demo was released).
Ehh, you've got the wrong idea on many points.
They lost several hundred times as many units in their advance on Russia as they lost in the entire rest of the war. And they would have beaten Russia, had it not been for the Japanese bombing pearl harbor
Russia has the timeless advantage of being a glorious, yet unattainable goal. The steppes are a vast land area compared to Europe, and this changes everything when it comes to managing armies. Not only must you spread out your front lines, but your rear guards and supply lines are stretched paper-thin by the time you've made any significant advances.
When Hitler grew stubborn and attempted to take Stalingrad, his supply lines and rear guard were in just such a situation. Russian forces took advantage of the situation, and used a pincer attack to cut supply lines while keeping the Germans in the Caucasus busy.
The point is, Hitler's supply lines were already stretched to the breaking point. If the Russians hadn't cracked them at Stalingrad, they would have cracked them elsewhere, because Hitler was foolish and thought the blitzkreig to be unstoppable. The fool never bothered to check how many HUNDREDS OF TONS of fuel a day those panzer divisions required.
Assuming the Japanese left the US out of the war, Germany COULD have beaten Russia if they had slowed down and built infarstructure in the places they conquered, but that would have taken years. This is not the kind of glorious win that keeps people in fear and awe of a government.
As for your nuclear arguement:
Before the war, the international scientific community discovered that fission was possible with uranium, and this had been published.
The US began researching nuclear weapons after the war broke out because they believed the Germans were researching such weapons. This research began before the US entered the war, as a preventive measure. Although progress would have been slower if the Japanese had not dragged the US into the war, there is no doubt in my mind that the project would have come to fruition.
Japan didn't have an active nuclear weapons program, but they did consider the possibility. Their top scientests determined that the strain on the empire to build such a weapon would be too great, so it was not persued.
Germany didn't actually have a nuclear weapons program. Their top scientests knew fission was feasable, but could not guarantee on theory alone that it could be turned into a weapon. The German High Command instead funded research into nuclear power generation, and this is why the Germans were interested in heavy water from Norway.
The irony is, if the Germans hadn't been so interested in controlling the only major heavy water source in the world, we might not have been so suspicious. It certainly would have slowed down our own nuclear developments if they had not done so.
16 million colors + an extra 8 bits of info that I have no idea what they do with. (Insight into this would be appreciated. Depth buffer maybe?)
Alpha channel. This gives objects a certain degree of transparency. Let's say you draw your scene back to front, and for one particular pixel we have 3 layers drawn on top of one and other. Normally you wouldn't see the other two layers behind the pixel closest to the front, but if the frontmost pixel had an alpha value, it would be blended with the middle pixel. The rearmost pixel would also be blended if the middle pixel had an alpha, but the blending takes into account both the frontmost pixel's alpha and the middle pixel's alpha.
Also, your example of "16-bit color" is a little off because you're comparing apples to oranges. A 16-bit image in Photoshop will look great because it has 2^16 colors to work with, typically a 5/5/6 split (RGB). On the other hand, a 16-bit frame buffer will typically use a 4/4/4/4 split (RGBA), giving you 16 levels for each color and alpha. Of course it looks like crap.
18-bit color will probably end up looking ok but not great for a television, as the correction schemes these manufactureres use to get "true 24-bit color" typically mean displaying the two colors in-sequence closest to the actual one you want. This means you'll probably get a muddy picture in practice because the fluctuating colors won't be as persistent as your eyes are used to, and so it will look it's worst when contrast is most important (like say, foggy or dark scenes).
it's purchase system to not add to gameplay as much as serve as a unbalancing feature that leads to one team dominating a map.
Maybe you weren't paying attention when you played Counterstrike. The losing team received "welfare" that increased with each consecutive loss up to a point. In fact, it was usually better to be on the losing team if you got no kills, especially if you died during the round.
As for your realism complaint, I don't buy it. Counterstrike made the Rainbow Six gameplay style more fun by reducing the average round time by an order of magnitude, and simplified all maps so they had at most 2-3 choke points, and at most 2 objectives.
The original game was fun because it combined the speed and simplicity of deathmatch with the skill and cunning of objective-based squad gameplay. I havn't played Counterstrike in about 3 years, and just as I was getting out of it the maps WERE getting bigger and more complex, so perhaps the modern game is suffering from feature bloat.
Actually, you're thinking of OSR 2.5 that comes with USB and AGP support.
Win95b (OSR 2.0) only added FAT32 and other minor improvements. It does not support USB without a patch.
Can you say INFLATION? I actually think your MSRP for an LP in 1984 is a bit low, but just taking your numbers:
$6 (1984) = $11.04 (2004)
While there is no doubt that the RIAA was price gouging in the 90s, these days the prices are dropping and we are approaching parity. You can find new CDs for well under $15, and back-catalog items for as low as $10.
Yes, the ability to join mid-play is truely a revolutionary feature, I always seem to forget about it.
As for Counterstrike, you have to realize something: in the gaming world, it's not whether your ideas are NEW, it's whether they're FRESH and well-presented.
Counterstrike borrowed heavily from Rainbow Six, which at the time was only a mild success on the PC platform. The reason the game had only narrow appeal was the game was TOO realistic: you had to prepare before each mission, the maps were relatively large, and you died in 1-2 shots.
The Counterstrike team sped up the action, balanced the damage scales so you could take a couple bullets with body armor, and made the maps simpler. As for the inventory purchase system, while it may not have been a NEW idea even in an FPS, no really successful game or mod had incorporated it up to that time. For the vast majority of people, it was a new concept. Certainly the fact that you can't even remember the name of the mod you mentioned reflects on it's lack of popularity?
I was thinking more along the lines of developing a DIMWIT-compliant platform.
Do I Mean What I Think?
When was the last time you DIDN'T second-guess yourself? I want a system so intuitive that it does the second and third-guessing for me!
If *any* game(s) cemented the shift from SP to MP, and help keep PC gaming alive today, I'd say it was UT and/or Q3, *not* Doom.
Wrong. There are two "games" that helped cement the multiplayer culture, and you're wrong on both counts. One came before UT and Q3 and one was developed concurrently.
First of all, Quake was an evolution in multiplayer gaming. the community-supported Quakeworld was a revolution. It is one of the earliest multiplayer games to feature client-side prediction, and the experience was fluid even on 32-player internet servers...something that would bring a Quake server to it's knees.
Combine this with incredibly popular free mods and total conversions like Team Fortress that revolutionized gameplay, and you had a multiplayer platform that eclipsed even the popularity of Quake II at it's peak.
Half-Life is the second game on the list, not because the original HL multiplayer was anything special, but because it served as a platform for...
Counterstrike.
I know a lot of you bag on this game, but you just don't seem to understand how popular it is. The game is not even at it's peak anymore, and there are still over 100 THOUSAND active players at peak during the week. That's more players than every other current multiplayer FPS COMBINED.
Why?
It was free, well polished, and adapted gameplay styles from other genres. No rocket launchers plus the equipment purchase system made for a fresh look, and people ate it up.
I just want to make this clear to you, since you obviously have chosen to ignore it.
The use of the bomb, in the end, was entirely political. Although there is much evidence to suggest that the Japanese emperor was pushing for an end to conflict, his staff and military brass were all against unconditional surrender. The possibility of peace was stagnating, and might have failed altogether if an invasion took place.
The other key player in the politics involving the bomb were the encroaching forces of the Soviet Union. Truman was quite aware that letting the USSR participate in a Japanese invasion would be a foolhardy move with long-standing reprucussions, but there was no way to prevent this if full-scale invasion took place. The bomb was seen as a way to shake the Japanese spirit quickly before invasion was imminent.
The final political factor: we had a weapon with a development cost that was absolutely unprecedented. With very little oversight during the war, the completely unused weapon would garner much displeasure and political pressure after cessation of hostilities.
It is argued that we could have performed a warning fire on Japanese soil, but that would have left us down to one bomb if they decided to call our bluff. While it is true that more plutonium core (fat man) bombs were in development, they were expected to arive too late to stop the rapidly approaching invasion. As I mentioned above, invasion would destroy any chance of a quick peace because nationalistic soldiers and civilians would fight to the last man. Two bombs were all we had to work with to realistically stop an invasion, so we used them to their greatest physical and psychological effect: we targeted cities with large populations that had purposefully been spared bombing in the previous months.
There was no real moral impediment involving use of the bomb. We had already fallen off the moral highroad and into the gutter with out firebombing of Japanses civilians. The total death tolls produced by our firebombing of over 60 cities was greater than the immediate casualties of the two bombs combined. As far as we were concerned, anything with an industrial complex was considered a "base", and Hiroshima certainly qualified in that respect.
This may be THE FUNNIEST thing I have ever read on Slashdot.
Congratulations on the 1 dozen + post troll, may we all live long enough to again view such majesty.
Just thought I'd mention this. I hope you're not giving your child the same allowance you had. You may not think 25 years is a lot of time, but inflation over that span has had quite an effect. Your $11 in, say, ~1980 would be worth almost $30 today. Considering that all but a few top sellers fall to $40 or $30 within a few months of release, this is hardly too expensive for your kid, assuming you've kept up with inflation on his/her allowance.
There is also a small but active movement in the industry to release games with $20 price tags, although it's mostly in the computer software market. It it true that ValuSoft and their ilk have given this price range a VERY bad name, but things are improving as more competitors enter this market space.
There are also notable instances such as Croteam, the creators of Serious Sam. They told the gaming community that Serious Sam would retail for 20 bucks on release, and make up for the price in volume, and it seems to have been successful.
I realise I'm probably one of the few people on SlashDot who would advise against caffeine
You can count me as one more.
I had "migraines" since I was in junior high, but I didn't realize they were just caffeine withdrawl headaches. Of course, back then I was just doing 2-3 cans of Mountain Dew a day, but it was enough. By the time I quit cold-turkey last year, I was over 500mg of caffeine a day, and thanks to some personal research I finally made the connection between the caffeine and headaches.
An interesting thing about caffeine addiction that I noticed: it doesn't work if you try to stay at "maintence levels," that is, choose a target intake and don't increase or decrease it. Logic would dictate that you could maintain a certain high intake and avoid all withdrawl symptoms. But I found that, even with consistent intake, withdrawl headaches would set in near the end of the day unless I took more. Now that's a BITCH of an addiction.
I took a couple days off and used my four-day weekend to go cold-turkey. It was very harsh, but worth it...no more "migraines". I feel cheated out of those years spent wallowing in the caffeine cycle, but I'm just happy it's come to an end.