I still play Halo and Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory, but I've got a Mac and I don't like Unreal, so those games are pretty much it in terms of modern FPS that'll play on my home machine.
Emulators, on the other hand, do a dandy job of making the pile of still-functional cartridges I have for my long-dead consoles very enjoyable:
Bionic Commando (NES, I'd kill for a Metal Gear Solid styled "update") Final Fantasy 6 (SNES please, the Playstation version introduced load time) River City Ransom (NES- single player's kind of boring, but the two-player mode is a blast.) Puzzle Fighter (Playstation, another great two-player title) Secret of Mana (SNES- good single, fun multi) Quake III (still hasn't lost the fun factor, still hate the grenade launcher)
The American masses aren't exactly world-renowned for their intelligence. Ever watch the crowd at an American football game? They make the rowdiest Rugby crowd look like a group of nuclear physicists on muscle relaxants.
Club cards are only useful if you can't chose to shop elsewhere.
Yup.
Try shopping for food in Pittsburgh. Just about every one of our balkanized little neighborhoods has a Giant Eagle, a store that does the "$store Card" thing. I've got three options in this part of town - Pay GE prices (and put up with the hyperghetto genetic waste that gluts the place like a herd of flabby sheep), Pay slightly less at the store eight blocks further away for a selection that's essentially "nothing you want, ever." or diner food.
There are a couple of Sam's Club (another card store but the gimmick is VOLUME, yay!) and Wal Mart Supercenters floating around suburbia, but a forty minute bus ride one way + shop time + forty minutes back (if you're lucky) does not compare favorably to getting it over and done with in under 30 minutes.:P
Stores do shit like $store Card because they know they're the most convenient game in town.:|
Everything you've said about processors? SGI used to be the KING of 3d graphics processing. What happened? Cheapass PC hardware caught up, broke even, and eventually lapped SGI's technology.
The Alpha still rocks. It just happened to take the rest of the industry better than a decade to catch up.
Unfortunately, there's no modern Alpha to flog the x86 with.... and all SGI has to wag over the competition is gigs of texture memory (for the price of a good sized whitebox render farm).
That would just kill all of Xenu's prisoners or whatever and RELEASE TEH THETANS!:P
Re:Ok, can we just put more empty space in now?
on
Intel Makes 45nm Chip
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· Score: 1
My dual 2ghz G5 with 2g of ram can NOT keep up with me in Photoshop. It just can't.
The 2.4ghz Athlon on my desk with a gig of ram is chunking out my 3d renders at about 30 hours per frame (print rez high quality etc). Not nearly fast enough - I spend a week waiting for four or five shots.
My beige g3/366 brings the internets at warp nine with no complaints, and my G3/900 iBook runs the Safari and the TextEdit just fine. It happens to suck total ass for Photoshop in the sense that it's not the G5.
People use the computers for more things than internet and {vai|emacs|ed|pico|whatever}, kthks. And for everything but internet and {vai|emacs|ed|pico|whatever}, top of the line shit is still not fast enough.
I'm pretty sure people said the same of Apple before the NeXT people took over (that was carefully worded and I'm still sure someone's going to point out Apple bought NeXT - yes, they did, but NeXT's people took over Apple, I mean, they became the senior people and stuff.)
Look what became of the operating system. Mac OS X is about as "Mac" as OS/2. It's NeXT for the masses and any resemblance to OS 9 is purely coincidental.:P
Then (in my experience), the Mac version would be released, costing 10$ more than the PC version did new, and three or four years later it would come down by 10$. And stay there.
Seriously. The local not-Apple Apple Store had copies of Oni for 50$. In 2004.
Seriously. His site's got RSS. Apparently there's a mechanism in slashdot slashcode that checks it weekly for updates and if there is one, submits a synopsis straight to the front page. How else could every single thing this guy says wind up here?:P
I was going to say "NT + DirectX" but then I remembered that that was lumped into 2k as well. Might explain why it's the only windows OS we run at work.:P
How's this bad? Modern search engines now spit back sound-bite sized chunks of data - a chunk of data that is JUST long enough for the modern american attention span. There's no downloading PDFs (hate that) or trying to parse some asswad's idea of "interface design" (hate that more), or flash, or flash ads (hate that almost as much). I plug in a query and I get back a short list of bullet points I can skim through in seconds, thence on to the site that looks like it's got what I'm looking for - saving me the time of trolling multiple other sources for information they don't have.
Some monkey's pissed because he's not getting revenue from me for running a site I shouldn't need to look at in the first place? Deal.
It allegedly does, but in my experience that's been anything but true. I've noticed speed improvements with every machine I've degragged, though none of them are "fresh" installations by any stretch of the term.
My workstation (dual g5) behaved a lot like the machine on the right, until I replaced bad memory and defragged the hard drive (diskwarrior will make ANY well-aged OS X install visibily snappier, I swear).
I've never seen OS X boot that slowly unless there's hardware problems.
If we can accurately judge a website in 50 milliseconds, can we also do so with people?
For the most part, yes. Asshats and idiots are incredibly easy to spot with some experience - and if you're one of those people who'd rather spend your life trying to get something done than indulging the inadequacies of others, you'll develope a grade-A bullshit detector real fast.
Regardless of rather or not it's actually possible, it's a thing we do anyway, as a filtering mechanism - the odds of some blinged out homie who won't stop bellowing about bitches being capable of having an intelligent conversation about Cerebus or Appleseed are vanishingly slim - he's wearing his priorities (very loudly) on his sleeve.
Other examples abound - I've found that choice of words (moreso than tone) say a lot about where a person is coming from and can quite often accurately peg rather they're worth my time, going to be a huge pain in my ass, or should just be ignored within a couple of minutes.
At least The Powers That Be gave us a really easy way to ignore Jon Katz, who was just as irritating.
Though Cringely is buzzword-compliant alphabet soup as opposed to a broken record about Columbine... and you know just how much The Powers That Be LOVE those buzzwords.
Were I to not send you DVDs, it wouldn't be more like six or seven. I've seen a great deal of Who - enough to come to the conclusion that the program went on Indefinite Hiatus at the end of Series 26 due to bad script{s| editing} moreso than any other reason.
The only "downside" to being moderately sk00led is that I can watch a BBCA ep and notice just how badly it's been chopped up. Gotta wonder how many people are first exposed to older Who with a handful of badly-recut, totally-incoherent episodes and get a foul taste in their mouths as a result.
If I had money, I'd be running new hardware for the power as well as the aesthetics.
As it stands, my rig is a piecemeal G4 Digital Audio with SATA-150 hard drives, a 16x DVD-R, Matias keyboard and Kensington trackball. The monitors are the "best" part - a 15" Sony Trinitron (15-pin on a 15-pin to ADC adapter), a 15" Apple Multiscan (25-pin on a 25-to-15-pin adapter), and a 20" Apple Trinitron (25-pin, on a 25-to-15-pin adapter which is in turn plugged into a 15-pin KVM which mates to a 15-pin-to-DVI adapter).
The only downside is that all three monitors are too old for OS X to identify.:P
There's 26 seasons of Oldskool Who in the BBC archives.* You're lucky if you can find anything other than Tom Baker (fourth doctor) on PBS or BBC America (and the BBCA Who is seriously {edited|eviscerated}- there's lots of Who available to the enthusiasts - would it hurt 'em that much to get it on the air?
Yeah, some of it's Bad, but a lot of it's pretty damned good.
* More like ~26. Several Hartnell and Troughton episodes are missing.
The Mac II was released in 87 - the first expandable mac, with 6 nubus slots. Throw six NuBus video cards in and you've got a 16mhz machine with six monitors.
I'm writing this on a Mac running three displays- two on a Radeon 9600 AGP card and one on a Radeon 7000 PCI card.
It's a damned sight easier to do multihead on a mac than it is on a PC - ever since Days Of Yore (read:68k nubus) it was a simple matter of shutting down, plugging in another video card and monitor, and starting back up again. You don't have to have a dual-head card (or didn't, before Quartz Extreme arrived), and you can mix and match brands and architectures - NVidia and ATI and TwinTurbo and anything else that supports MacOS will Just Work. Open the 'monitors' control panel or preference-pane and position/set resolution to taste.
OS X and Systems 7-9 are easier to configure for multihead than Windows, which in turn is a hell of a lot less painful to configure than linux.
Yes, the new kit is all shiny and spurty and sweet and so forth. But I'm one of The Unhappy Few who's still running Classic. I'm wondering how long it'll take until somebody gets that going, or VMWare gets ported - the apps I use have Windows counterparts, so with the move to intel it's no longer a question of buying updated MacOS X software - it's an issue of switching to windows or waiting on emulators.
Slashdot Mirror
I still play Halo and Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory, but I've got a Mac and I don't like Unreal, so those games are pretty much it in terms of modern FPS that'll play on my home machine.
Emulators, on the other hand, do a dandy job of making the pile of still-functional cartridges I have for my long-dead consoles very enjoyable:
Bionic Commando (NES, I'd kill for a Metal Gear Solid styled "update")
Final Fantasy 6 (SNES please, the Playstation version introduced load time)
River City Ransom (NES- single player's kind of boring, but the two-player mode is a blast.)
Puzzle Fighter (Playstation, another great two-player title)
Secret of Mana (SNES- good single, fun multi)
Quake III (still hasn't lost the fun factor, still hate the grenade launcher)
The American masses aren't exactly world-renowned for their intelligence. Ever watch the crowd at an American football game? They make the rowdiest Rugby crowd look like a group of nuclear physicists on muscle relaxants.
Club cards are only useful if you can't chose to shop elsewhere.
:P
:|
Yup.
Try shopping for food in Pittsburgh. Just about every one of our balkanized little neighborhoods has a Giant Eagle, a store that does the "$store Card" thing. I've got three options in this part of town - Pay GE prices (and put up with the hyperghetto genetic waste that gluts the place like a herd of flabby sheep), Pay slightly less at the store eight blocks further away for a selection that's essentially "nothing you want, ever." or diner food.
There are a couple of Sam's Club (another card store but the gimmick is VOLUME, yay!) and Wal Mart Supercenters floating around suburbia, but a forty minute bus ride one way + shop time + forty minutes back (if you're lucky) does not compare favorably to getting it over and done with in under 30 minutes.
Stores do shit like $store Card because they know they're the most convenient game in town.
The /. karma whoring, conversely, is priceless.
Everything you've said about processors? SGI used to be the KING of 3d graphics processing. What happened? Cheapass PC hardware caught up, broke even, and eventually lapped SGI's technology.
The Alpha still rocks. It just happened to take the rest of the industry better than a decade to catch up.
Unfortunately, there's no modern Alpha to flog the x86 with.... and all SGI has to wag over the competition is gigs of texture memory (for the price of a good sized whitebox render farm).
Which is why they make you work overtime. Can't have employees wantin' to LEAVE, now CAN WE?!
(not until we get a nice fat bonus for downsizing or outsourcing them...)
That would just kill all of Xenu's prisoners or whatever and RELEASE TEH THETANS! :P
My dual 2ghz G5 with 2g of ram can NOT keep up with me in Photoshop. It just can't.
The 2.4ghz Athlon on my desk with a gig of ram is chunking out my 3d renders at about 30 hours per frame (print rez high quality etc). Not nearly fast enough - I spend a week waiting for four or five shots.
My beige g3/366 brings the internets at warp nine with no complaints, and my G3/900 iBook runs the Safari and the TextEdit just fine. It happens to suck total ass for Photoshop in the sense that it's not the G5.
People use the computers for more things than internet and {vai|emacs|ed|pico|whatever}, kthks. And for everything but internet and {vai|emacs|ed|pico|whatever}, top of the line shit is still not fast enough .
I'm pretty sure people said the same of Apple before the NeXT people took over (that was carefully worded and I'm still sure someone's going to point out Apple bought NeXT - yes, they did, but NeXT's people took over Apple, I mean, they became the senior people and stuff.)
:P
Look what became of the operating system. Mac OS X is about as "Mac" as OS/2. It's NeXT for the masses and any resemblance to OS 9 is purely coincidental.
Then (in my experience), the Mac version would be released, costing 10$ more than the PC version did new, and three or four years later it would come down by 10$. And stay there.
Seriously. The local not-Apple Apple Store had copies of Oni for 50$. In 2004.
Seriously. His site's got RSS. Apparently there's a mechanism in slashdot slashcode that checks it weekly for updates and if there is one, submits a synopsis straight to the front page. How else could every single thing this guy says wind up here? :P
Dude, tinker toys rule.
If anything it's a fucking Duplo interface.
TONKA TOY INTERFACE.
:P
I was going to say "NT + DirectX" but then I remembered that that was lumped into 2k as well. Might explain why it's the only windows OS we run at work.
How's this bad? Modern search engines now spit back sound-bite sized chunks of data - a chunk of data that is JUST long enough for the modern american attention span. There's no downloading PDFs (hate that) or trying to parse some asswad's idea of "interface design" (hate that more), or flash, or flash ads (hate that almost as much). I plug in a query and I get back a short list of bullet points I can skim through in seconds, thence on to the site that looks like it's got what I'm looking for - saving me the time of trolling multiple other sources for information they don't have.
Some monkey's pissed because he's not getting revenue from me for running a site I shouldn't need to look at in the first place? Deal.
It allegedly does, but in my experience that's been anything but true. I've noticed speed improvements with every machine I've degragged, though none of them are "fresh" installations by any stretch of the term.
My workstation (dual g5) behaved a lot like the machine on the right, until I replaced bad memory and defragged the hard drive (diskwarrior will make ANY well-aged OS X install visibily snappier, I swear).
I've never seen OS X boot that slowly unless there's hardware problems.
If we can accurately judge a website in 50 milliseconds, can we also do so with people?
For the most part, yes. Asshats and idiots are incredibly easy to spot with some experience - and if you're one of those people who'd rather spend your life trying to get something done than indulging the inadequacies of others, you'll develope a grade-A bullshit detector real fast.
Regardless of rather or not it's actually possible, it's a thing we do anyway, as a filtering mechanism - the odds of some blinged out homie who won't stop bellowing about bitches being capable of having an intelligent conversation about Cerebus or Appleseed are vanishingly slim - he's wearing his priorities (very loudly) on his sleeve.
Other examples abound - I've found that choice of words (moreso than tone) say a lot about where a person is coming from and can quite often accurately peg rather they're worth my time, going to be a huge pain in my ass, or should just be ignored within a couple of minutes.
Katz is the only bit of /. I've ever blocked, and I don't regret it for a second.
As for RSS... imo an RSS aggregator is an automated, user-controlled slashdot. Only without the comments.
I second that.
At least The Powers That Be gave us a really easy way to ignore Jon Katz, who was just as irritating.
Though Cringely is buzzword-compliant alphabet soup as opposed to a broken record about Columbine... and you know just how much The Powers That Be LOVE those buzzwords.
Were I to not send you DVDs, it wouldn't be more like six or seven. I've seen a great deal of Who - enough to come to the conclusion that the program went on Indefinite Hiatus at the end of Series 26 due to bad script{s| editing} moreso than any other reason.
The only "downside" to being moderately sk00led is that I can watch a BBCA ep and notice just how badly it's been chopped up. Gotta wonder how many people are first exposed to older Who with a handful of badly-recut, totally-incoherent episodes and get a foul taste in their mouths as a result.
If I had money, I'd be running new hardware for the power as well as the aesthetics.
:P
As it stands, my rig is a piecemeal G4 Digital Audio with SATA-150 hard drives, a 16x DVD-R, Matias keyboard and Kensington trackball. The monitors are the "best" part - a 15" Sony Trinitron (15-pin on a 15-pin to ADC adapter), a 15" Apple Multiscan (25-pin on a 25-to-15-pin adapter), and a 20" Apple Trinitron (25-pin, on a 25-to-15-pin adapter which is in turn plugged into a 15-pin KVM which mates to a 15-pin-to-DVI adapter).
The only downside is that all three monitors are too old for OS X to identify.
There's 26 seasons of Oldskool Who in the BBC archives.* You're lucky if you can find anything other than Tom Baker (fourth doctor) on PBS or BBC America (and the BBCA Who is seriously {edited|eviscerated}- there's lots of Who available to the enthusiasts - would it hurt 'em that much to get it on the air?
Yeah, some of it's Bad, but a lot of it's pretty damned good.
* More like ~26. Several Hartnell and Troughton episodes are missing.
The Mac II was released in 87 - the first expandable mac, with 6 nubus slots. Throw six NuBus video cards in and you've got a 16mhz machine with six monitors.
:68k nubus) it was a simple matter of shutting down, plugging in another video card and monitor, and starting back up again. You don't have to have a dual-head card (or didn't, before Quartz Extreme arrived), and you can mix and match brands and architectures - NVidia and ATI and TwinTurbo and anything else that supports MacOS will Just Work. Open the 'monitors' control panel or preference-pane and position/set resolution to taste.
I'm writing this on a Mac running three displays- two on a Radeon 9600 AGP card and one on a Radeon 7000 PCI card.
It's a damned sight easier to do multihead on a mac than it is on a PC - ever since Days Of Yore (read
OS X and Systems 7-9 are easier to configure for multihead than Windows, which in turn is a hell of a lot less painful to configure than linux.
Yes, the new kit is all shiny and spurty and sweet and so forth. But I'm one of The Unhappy Few who's still running Classic. I'm wondering how long it'll take until somebody gets that going, or VMWare gets ported - the apps I use have Windows counterparts, so with the move to intel it's no longer a question of buying updated MacOS X software - it's an issue of switching to windows or waiting on emulators.
(Dogs In Space)++
You'll fly to mars on heroin before you'll get there on the thinger outlined in the article.