The first quest in the game with any choice in it was the altar in Helm's Keep. It was the first time in NwN where I didn't feel like a monster exterminator or someone else's errand runner.
NwN's base story is ridiculous: there's a disease so they're training warriors and archers and wizards and thieves to find a cure. Shouldn't they be training doctors and alchemists instead? And if I'm such a great hero, why do I spend the entire game doing what other people tell me to do? Never in NwN are you required to actually put 2 and 2 together; from start to finish it's "go here, do this, come back for more instructions". I know they're going for a "wide audience", but there's a point where too much dumbing down is just, well, dumb. NwN may be like a "real" (PnP) RPG inthe sense that it follows the same rules, but if so, then it's a "real" RPG with a very bad DM (BTW, I'm not a big fan of PnP RPGs, and I think a good computer RPG should use much more complex rules - PnP rules are "practical", a computer CPU can handle a lot more variables, giving a game more depth).
Regarding the potential... well, Half-Life also has the potential to be used for RPGs. It's a good thing people can use the NwN engine to make their own games, but it would have been an even "gooder" thing if NwN was a better game to begin with.
Most people who go on and on about how NwN and BG (and, in some cases, Diablo) are such great RPGs are people that never played the "golden age" of Ultimas (U6, U7, UU, U7p2 and UU2). The main difference is the fact that the world in Ultima games (especially U7 and U7p2) is much more dynamic, much more "alive". NPCs have daily routines and interact with each other, your actions have logical consequences, objects are in logical places, there are hundreds of "irrelevant" side-quests and easter eggs, there are thousands of lines of dialogue (all good), etc. You can pretty much ignore the main quest (which, itself, changes a lot as you play) and just "live" there (a bit like in MMORPGs). In U7 for example you can become a baker, a farmer, a drug dealer, a professional gambler, a fisherman, etc. NwN has very linear progression and is more about stats and items than about role-playing.
The only recent RPG that I really liked was System Shock 2 (brilliant sound, great atmosphere, shame there was no dialogue, shame the ending was so predictable). I never got to play Deus Ex, but since it was made by some of the people involved in UU and UU2, I'm planning to check it out one of these days.
The current trend seems to be releasing poor games and hoping the community uses the tools (or, in some cases, develops the tools) to make a good game based on their engine. This would be perfectly OK if a) you could buy just the engine and the tools, without the original campaign and b) if most of these games' EULA didn't include a clause stating that any mod you make belongs to the game's publisher, and that you cannot profit from it. Also the original tools that shipped with NwN were very, very poor. They've been improved, but they're still not quite as flexible as they could be.
...were added to distract you from her absolutely terrible voice acting. Apart from a couple of voices (ex., Linu), the acting in NwN is pretty bad (with Arwen at the bottom of the list). And, following Bioware tradition, they make you listen to the same lines over and over and over again. If I hear Tomi say "Aww, I can pick that open easy!" again, I'll grab a baseball bat +5 and pay Bioware a visit. How hard would it be to have 5 or 6 versions of each line?
BTW, if you don't have the game and are looking for a real RPG (à là Ultima 7), this is not it. NwN is a lot more like Diablo than like Ultima. There's no food, dialogs and "quests" are very simplistic, NPCs just stand in the same place day and night (they don't have jobs, don't go to the pub, etc., like in U7), and the scenery is very repetitive. The editor doesn't really help there, either, you are limited to existing "tiles", and there's no easy way to create custom architecture or objects. Some monsters are nice, and combat can be fun, but this is not a very intellectual game (at least not the default campaign).
Software is no different from other products. It's not the lack of tariffs on software that's wrong; it's the tariffs imposed on other products.
By imposing tariffs on products made in poorer countries, you are essentially forcing them to lower their prices even more (to stay competitive). Result? USA workers lose (because tariffs are never enough to really offset the lower initial cost), foreign workers lose (because tariffs are never low enough to let them really raise their standard of living), US state wins. In a country with good welfare / unemployment funds / etc., this could be a good thing. In the US system it's not. The money ends up being spent on obscure government and defence projects, and the programmers remain unemployed and broke.
Capitalism can be a reasonably fair system if all markets are open. Tariffs screw everything up, for everyone. If there are no tariffs, the tendency is for all markets to become level. A poorer country may have an initial advantage (lower wages), but as it becomes richer, its workers will want higher wages, until it has reached the same level as richer, more developed countries, which means workers in those richer countries become an economically viable option again.
And everyone lives happily ever after. As it is, you have a lot of unemployment at home, a lot of people that hardly make enough to eat abroad, and a cowboy that spends hundreds of bilions of dollars in toys that go "boom" on other people's homes.
And if for some reason all (or most of) the bugs are eliminated, you release a new version and stop supporting the old one. Hm... now where have I seen that before...?
Really...? Did you even read what I wrote? Let me repeat it:
"Photoshop can load 16-bpc images but 99% of its tools are disabled until you convert the image down to 8-bpc."
Try enabling the 16-bpc mode. Then try to paint. Or apply filters. Or use layers. Understand now?
Pretty much the only thing you can do with 16-bpc images in Photoshop is look at them. But since your graphics card is probably using a 24-bit mode, you're really looking at an 8-bpc image anyway.
Besides, 16-bpc != HDR. Proper HDR processing needs floating-point channel support, otherwise you're still establishing hard limits for the dynamic range.
I've been using Photoshop (and several high-end programs and systems) professionally for several years. Photoshop is still ubiquitous but very few people nowadays can afford to use just Photoshop. There are some free / shareware programs that clearly surpass it in terms of quality and features (support for HDR / FP and parametric editing being the main issues). The two things keeping Photoshop as a "must-have" application are its ease of use and existing user base. I hope Adobe doesn't fall asleep at the wheel as happened with many other software (and hardware) companies.
You probably mean BPC (per channel), not BPP (per pixel).
Anyway, it's not about telling the gradient, it's about preserving information. Even 10 bpc is more than enough for the output medium (even 8 bpc is more than we can distinguish, for some colours). The problem is the precision used for the calculations and the amount of information about the source. Traditional chemical film captures a lot more information than what you can see on photographs (as anyone who's into photography knows very well). That information is then either compressed into the dynamic range of the photograph or the ends are cut off (usually both). That's why you can make two (or a hundred) completely different photographs from the same negative.
Regarding your example, (mapping a scale of 255 values onto a scale of 4096), unless you also increase the resolution (and interpolate the new pixels), there's nothing to be gained; you are simply multiplying the values by 16). And besides, printers only use a handful of inks, when people say a printer "can do 1440 dpi", each one of those dots can only have one of four or five colours. To create the illusion of intermediate colours you need to consider groups of dots, not each individual dot.
1. I think it does (though I haven't used it yet). Most professional and semi-professional compositing software can work in 16-bpc, and many programs are now adding support for floating-point channels.
2. Not necessarily. Here's why:
It would be nice if the camera could capture a higher dynamic range and at a higher colour precision, but that's not the (only) point.
First, you can build a HDR image from several LDR images, taken with different exposures (HDRShop lets you do this).
Second, even if your source is LDR (ie, irreversibly clamped at both ends), you can still benefit from processing it in HDR mode, especially if you apply more than one filter (ex., one filter that makes the image darker and, later, one that makes it brighter). If you work in "normal" 8-bpc mode, you lose information at the ends of the scale (ie, several dark colours become pure black when you darken the image, and you can't recover them). If you work in floating point / HDR, the information is preserved.
Try it in Photoshop. Load an image, push the brightness up 100, apply, then pull the brightness down 100, apply, and compare the result with the original.
The real problem there is dynamic range. Photoshop still works in 8 bits per channel, which is clearly not enough for any sort of exposure / brightness / contrast control. You need at least 16 bits per channel, preferably 32 (in floating-point format). Photoshop can load 16-bpc images but 99% of its tools are disabled until you convert the image down to 8-bpc. In other words: the 16-bpc mode is there just for marketing.
There are some interesting HDR (high dynamic range) projects, such as HDRShop, and these formats are also used in several high-end 3D renderers, but I don't think they will become mainstream until Photoshop adopts them.
Unfortunately, Adobe insists on minor updates instead of doing what Photoshop (and Premiere, and several other of their products) needs, which is a complete rewrite.
High-end 3D renderers also have very good "film grain" simulation (film grain is not just random noise, it has very specific characteristics), and other tricks that can make CGI "feel" almost exactly like traditional analog media. But again, this is not something you'll find in Photoshop.
Which algorithm / program do you use to protect your "top secret" files? And is there any commonly-used algorithm / program that you wouldn't trust to protect your shopping list?
Yes, I was testing the PC versions (although some of the games were also released for consoles). It's easier to get things working on consoles. You don't have to deal with multiple hardware, you don't have to deal so much with localisation, you don't have to deal with saving and loading (at least not half as much as on PC games), etc..
Unfortunately, I think things are more likely to evolve the other way round. As more consoles become "net-ready", I suspect we'll start seeing a decrease in testing, and more use of post-release patches. At least in games from 3rd party developers.
As a company grows, the distance between the product and the money increases.
If they manage to sell the same number of copies, regardless of how solid or polished the game is, and if they don't feel any emotional connection to the game, why should they put time and money into testing and polishing it?
Of course, looking at certain cases (such as Rollercoaster Tycoon, Half-Life or Ultima VII) they would see that sometimes that investment does pay off. But the people making the decisions in large game companies usually prefer to spend that time and money on advertising (something they understand). It gets them the same net result (sales), it gets it in a shorter period, and it's not as risky (a game may turn out to be crap even after years in development, but with enough advertising you can sell anything).
So FIFA 2002 sucked? No problem. Next year there'll be FIFA 2003, and some people will buy it because they never played 2002 and some will buy it hoping it's better than 2002. It's not, of course. It's just more of the same - lots of polygons, zero gameplay, endless loading times, unusable menus. But as long as the dollars (or euros, or whatever) keep coming in, they'll keep doing it. And when people realise it's never going to improve, they've already given EA (or whoever) plenty of profit. And new sucke^H^H^H clients are born every year. And "editorial" advertising in the game industry is pretty cheap, especially with thousands of websites competing to be the first to review "XPTO 2003". You can be sure they won't say it's crap. At least not if they want a chance to review XPTO 2004 this time next year.
People in smaller companies want their game to turn out perfect. When they find a bug, they feel bad about it. But many of those smaller companies are now owned by large companies, and they have to obey the law of the sausage factory (keep crankin' them out). After all, that's how Big Bill got where he is today.
Above a certain size, all businesses are in the business of making money.
I've worked as a game tester for some time and we were paid more or less to not find bugs. We were given a game walkthrough and were expercted to follow it religiously. At first I completely ignored the walkthrough, and found a lot of bugs by doing "unexpected" things (such as speaking to characters in an order different from the one whoever wrote the walkthrough was expecting). When I reported back, they told me there was no point in finding all those bugs because they weren't going to fix them anyway ("to fix that we risk breaking something else"). It was as if testing was a mere formality, something they had to do to keep the gods happy.
The Natural Order of Things in game development goes more or less like this:
Finish the game, ignoring all bugs unless they crash more than 50% of systems.
Publish it and hope for...
Profit!
If planning to do a sequel, release a patch to the first game, to make people think "you care"...
Publish the (buggy, untested) sequel and go back to #3.
It's not only not fun, it's also terribly frustrating to see that the "final" version of the game still has all the 357 bugs you found and warned the developers about. After the first couple of games, I refused to have my name listed in the "credits". After a few more, I stopped doing it altogether. I worked for two companies and both worked like this. Maybe some companies are different, but judging from the average quality of games (both in terms of stability and "playability"), I suspect this is the normal policy.
My house has a back door. Even if I'm the only one to use it, it's still a back door. It's still there and it can be used by others if they find it unlocked.
They also make (or at least used to make) a 12-port (p)ATA controller. In fact, I think their SATA controller is basically the same card with converters.
3Ware makes IDE RAID controllers with up to 12 ports. I'm not even sure if they're limited to one drive per channel, or if you can plug two (though that would probably kill the RAID performance).
You believe wrong. The Itanium 2 has 3 GB of cache. The P4 has 512 KB. And, even so, they are more or less matched. Give the P4 more cache, and it leaves the Itanium eating dust in 32 bit code. Give it 64-bit extensions, and the Itanium is pretty much history. Which is why Intel cannot afford to release a direct competitor to the Athlon 64 - it would kill its own Itanium sales.
All other things being equal, a 64-bit CPU is actually slower than a 32-bit CPU (due to increased cache misses caused by longer addresses). The main advantage to moving to 64-bit registers is being able to address more memory. Current CPUs can already process 64- and even 128-bit values (using their "multimedia extensions", most of which have 128-bit registers).
AMD's Athlon 64 doesn't just increase the register size, however; it also adds more registers. That's (part of) what makes it more efficient than the Athlon XP, even when running 32-bit code (and / or working with less than 4GB of memory).
At the same clock speed, and for short sequences of instructions, a Z80 can beat a P4. The problem is... they don't make them at the same clock speed.
It's irrelevant how many times per second the chips clock says "tic-tac", what matters is how fast real chips can get real jobs done. For real-world purposes, you can compare the best (ie, the fastest chips) or the most valuable (ie, the ones with the best speed/price ratio).
So you see, Mr. Anonymous Coward, comparing the performance "per clock cycle" is irrelevant. It's like comparing the performance "per instruction length", or "per transistor count". It might be interesting from a theoretical point of view, but if a chip that does a lot of work per cycle cannot do more than a couple of cycles per second, it's still a terribly slow chip. The P4 was designed to do less work per cycle, but work at higher frequencies. The Athlon, on the other hand, does more work per cycle but cannot reach such high frequencies. In the end, they're more or less matched. So, in that situation, which one do you buy? Perhaps you buy the one with better "performance per clock cycle". I buy the one that's cheaper (funnily enough, in this case they would be the same).
I thought Macs were competitive with PCs. Or are you saying that anyone who buys a Mac is totally clueless? It all depends on the market you're talking about. When this chip is finally released, PC processors will be twice as fast than they are now, and will probably cost half what they cost now. Anyone buying a Mac for raw number-crunching is an idiot, just as anyone using Windows for a firewall or a quad Xeon for an office machine is an idiot. It doesn't matter is something is faster or slower, as long as it's fast enough.
To use a car metaphor (that most people seem to understand), not everyone needs or wants to drive a Lamborghini. It's expensive, it's hard to park, it's hard to drive, it's cramped and it drinks like a fish. Most people are better off with a "normal" car, that's fast enough and powerful enough for them, is easy to drive, and has room for the kids and the dog.
Having said that, if you spot someone selling a metallic-gray Lamborghini Diablo Roadster (convertible) for less than 15K, let me know, will you?
The problem is... if you give a Xeon 3MB of cache and a 64-bit memory controller, it'll sink the Itanic without breaking a sweat.
Which is why Intel can't release a 64-bit desktop chip to compete with AMD and IBM: they'd kill their own Itanium sales. IMO, they are going to regret this; they are giving AMD and IBM a very big opportunity. If Intel released a 64-bit Xeon, they would lose some money, but AMD and IBM would lose a lot more. As Microsoft knows very well, in the long run, keeping your competition under control is more important than maximising your profits.
Less revenue but also a lot less expenses. In fact, I think their flash memory department turned in a profit, but as a whole they lost money - because of the CPU business.
Of course, the CPU business has the potential to generate pretty big profits, so I don't think they'll drop it, even if they have a bad year or two.
1. There is no difference in the speed it takes to transfer data, because the bus is wider. There is also no difference in the time it takes to process data, because registers are also wider. There is a decrease in cache performance (because addresses take up more space). All other things (CPU design, clock speed, etc.) being equal, this hit would be of about 5%. It would only apply to programs running in 64-bit mode, though (the Hammer can still run in 32-bit mode, and can use 8, 16 and 32-bit pointers even in 64-bit mode, in certain instructions).
2. AMD's x86-64 Hammer doesn't just increase the register size to 64 bits. It adds several new registers, that can (with minor adjustments in the compilers) give a pretty good speed improvement (I'd say about 10% for the same clock speed, although this will depend a lot on the specific program). It also improves the prefetch and adds SSE2 support (one of the few areas where the P4 has an edge). This should give the Hammer approximately a 20-25% improvement over an Athlon XP at the same clock speed (more, if SSE2 is used).
That is why I put "laws" betwen quotes, you silly person. They're not "fantasy shit"; they're a simple set of abtract priorities (rules for the design of AI). Any normal person living in this century and with a decent amount of technical and philosphical knowledge would come up with them when asked "what rules should advanced robots and computers be forced to comply to, to ensure they never turn against humans". You might get a slightly different wording, or maybe 4 or 5 laws instead of the original 3, but the basic ideas will be the same.
BTW, I don't watch Star Trek and have no idea what the "prime directive" is (I assume it must be an odd directive, because even directives wouldn't be prime), but if it's something as common-sense as Asimov's "laws" of robotics, I (and a lot of other people who have never watched Star Trek) have probably thought about it, too.
Slashdot Mirror
The first quest in the game with any choice in it was the altar in Helm's Keep. It was the first time in NwN where I didn't feel like a monster exterminator or someone else's errand runner.
NwN's base story is ridiculous: there's a disease so they're training warriors and archers and wizards and thieves to find a cure. Shouldn't they be training doctors and alchemists instead? And if I'm such a great hero, why do I spend the entire game doing what other people tell me to do? Never in NwN are you required to actually put 2 and 2 together; from start to finish it's "go here, do this, come back for more instructions". I know they're going for a "wide audience", but there's a point where too much dumbing down is just, well, dumb. NwN may be like a "real" (PnP) RPG inthe sense that it follows the same rules, but if so, then it's a "real" RPG with a very bad DM (BTW, I'm not a big fan of PnP RPGs, and I think a good computer RPG should use much more complex rules - PnP rules are "practical", a computer CPU can handle a lot more variables, giving a game more depth).
Regarding the potential... well, Half-Life also has the potential to be used for RPGs. It's a good thing people can use the NwN engine to make their own games, but it would have been an even "gooder" thing if NwN was a better game to begin with.
Most people who go on and on about how NwN and BG (and, in some cases, Diablo) are such great RPGs are people that never played the "golden age" of Ultimas (U6, U7, UU, U7p2 and UU2). The main difference is the fact that the world in Ultima games (especially U7 and U7p2) is much more dynamic, much more "alive". NPCs have daily routines and interact with each other, your actions have logical consequences, objects are in logical places, there are hundreds of "irrelevant" side-quests and easter eggs, there are thousands of lines of dialogue (all good), etc. You can pretty much ignore the main quest (which, itself, changes a lot as you play) and just "live" there (a bit like in MMORPGs). In U7 for example you can become a baker, a farmer, a drug dealer, a professional gambler, a fisherman, etc. NwN has very linear progression and is more about stats and items than about role-playing.
The only recent RPG that I really liked was System Shock 2 (brilliant sound, great atmosphere, shame there was no dialogue, shame the ending was so predictable). I never got to play Deus Ex, but since it was made by some of the people involved in UU and UU2, I'm planning to check it out one of these days.
The current trend seems to be releasing poor games and hoping the community uses the tools (or, in some cases, develops the tools) to make a good game based on their engine. This would be perfectly OK if a) you could buy just the engine and the tools, without the original campaign and b) if most of these games' EULA didn't include a clause stating that any mod you make belongs to the game's publisher, and that you cannot profit from it. Also the original tools that shipped with NwN were very, very poor. They've been improved, but they're still not quite as flexible as they could be.
RMN
~~~
...were added to distract you from her absolutely terrible voice acting. Apart from a couple of voices (ex., Linu), the acting in NwN is pretty bad (with Arwen at the bottom of the list). And, following Bioware tradition, they make you listen to the same lines over and over and over again. If I hear Tomi say "Aww, I can pick that open easy!" again, I'll grab a baseball bat +5 and pay Bioware a visit. How hard would it be to have 5 or 6 versions of each line?
BTW, if you don't have the game and are looking for a real RPG (à là Ultima 7), this is not it. NwN is a lot more like Diablo than like Ultima. There's no food, dialogs and "quests" are very simplistic, NPCs just stand in the same place day and night (they don't have jobs, don't go to the pub, etc., like in U7), and the scenery is very repetitive. The editor doesn't really help there, either, you are limited to existing "tiles", and there's no easy way to create custom architecture or objects. Some monsters are nice, and combat can be fun, but this is not a very intellectual game (at least not the default campaign).
RMN
~~~
Software is no different from other products. It's not the lack of tariffs on software that's wrong; it's the tariffs imposed on other products.
By imposing tariffs on products made in poorer countries, you are essentially forcing them to lower their prices even more (to stay competitive). Result? USA workers lose (because tariffs are never enough to really offset the lower initial cost), foreign workers lose (because tariffs are never low enough to let them really raise their standard of living), US state wins. In a country with good welfare / unemployment funds / etc., this could be a good thing. In the US system it's not. The money ends up being spent on obscure government and defence projects, and the programmers remain unemployed and broke.
Capitalism can be a reasonably fair system if all markets are open. Tariffs screw everything up, for everyone. If there are no tariffs, the tendency is for all markets to become level. A poorer country may have an initial advantage (lower wages), but as it becomes richer, its workers will want higher wages, until it has reached the same level as richer, more developed countries, which means workers in those richer countries become an economically viable option again.
And everyone lives happily ever after. As it is, you have a lot of unemployment at home, a lot of people that hardly make enough to eat abroad, and a cowboy that spends hundreds of bilions of dollars in toys that go "boom" on other people's homes.
RMN
~~~
And if for some reason all (or most of) the bugs are eliminated, you release a new version and stop supporting the old one. Hm... now where have I seen that before...?
RMN
~~~
You mean like with books? After some time, everything that can be written will have been written, so no-one will write books anymore. Right?
RMN
~~~
Really...? Did you even read what I wrote? Let me repeat it:
"Photoshop can load 16-bpc images but 99% of its tools are disabled until you convert the image down to 8-bpc."
Try enabling the 16-bpc mode. Then try to paint. Or apply filters. Or use layers. Understand now?
Pretty much the only thing you can do with 16-bpc images in Photoshop is look at them. But since your graphics card is probably using a 24-bit mode, you're really looking at an 8-bpc image anyway.
Besides, 16-bpc != HDR. Proper HDR processing needs floating-point channel support, otherwise you're still establishing hard limits for the dynamic range.
I've been using Photoshop (and several high-end programs and systems) professionally for several years. Photoshop is still ubiquitous but very few people nowadays can afford to use just Photoshop. There are some free / shareware programs that clearly surpass it in terms of quality and features (support for HDR / FP and parametric editing being the main issues). The two things keeping Photoshop as a "must-have" application are its ease of use and existing user base. I hope Adobe doesn't fall asleep at the wheel as happened with many other software (and hardware) companies.
RMN
~~~
You probably mean BPC (per channel), not BPP (per pixel).
Anyway, it's not about telling the gradient, it's about preserving information. Even 10 bpc is more than enough for the output medium (even 8 bpc is more than we can distinguish, for some colours). The problem is the precision used for the calculations and the amount of information about the source. Traditional chemical film captures a lot more information than what you can see on photographs (as anyone who's into photography knows very well). That information is then either compressed into the dynamic range of the photograph or the ends are cut off (usually both). That's why you can make two (or a hundred) completely different photographs from the same negative.
Regarding your example, (mapping a scale of 255 values onto a scale of 4096), unless you also increase the resolution (and interpolate the new pixels), there's nothing to be gained; you are simply multiplying the values by 16). And besides, printers only use a handful of inks, when people say a printer "can do 1440 dpi", each one of those dots can only have one of four or five colours. To create the illusion of intermediate colours you need to consider groups of dots, not each individual dot.
RMN
~~~
1. I think it does (though I haven't used it yet). Most professional and semi-professional compositing software can work in 16-bpc, and many programs are now adding support for floating-point channels.
2. Not necessarily. Here's why:
It would be nice if the camera could capture a higher dynamic range and at a higher colour precision, but that's not the (only) point.
First, you can build a HDR image from several LDR images, taken with different exposures (HDRShop lets you do this).
Second, even if your source is LDR (ie, irreversibly clamped at both ends), you can still benefit from processing it in HDR mode, especially if you apply more than one filter (ex., one filter that makes the image darker and, later, one that makes it brighter). If you work in "normal" 8-bpc mode, you lose information at the ends of the scale (ie, several dark colours become pure black when you darken the image, and you can't recover them). If you work in floating point / HDR, the information is preserved.
Try it in Photoshop. Load an image, push the brightness up 100, apply, then pull the brightness down 100, apply, and compare the result with the original.
RMN
~~~
The real problem there is dynamic range. Photoshop still works in 8 bits per channel, which is clearly not enough for any sort of exposure / brightness / contrast control. You need at least 16 bits per channel, preferably 32 (in floating-point format). Photoshop can load 16-bpc images but 99% of its tools are disabled until you convert the image down to 8-bpc. In other words: the 16-bpc mode is there just for marketing.
There are some interesting HDR (high dynamic range) projects, such as HDRShop, and these formats are also used in several high-end 3D renderers, but I don't think they will become mainstream until Photoshop adopts them.
Unfortunately, Adobe insists on minor updates instead of doing what Photoshop (and Premiere, and several other of their products) needs, which is a complete rewrite.
High-end 3D renderers also have very good "film grain" simulation (film grain is not just random noise, it has very specific characteristics), and other tricks that can make CGI "feel" almost exactly like traditional analog media. But again, this is not something you'll find in Photoshop.
RMN
~~~
Which algorithm / program do you use to protect your "top secret" files? And is there any commonly-used algorithm / program that you wouldn't trust to protect your shopping list?
RMN
~~~
> At the end of the summer they are treated to
> a catered barbecue at Bill Gates's house
At Gates' house, Bill barbecues YOU!
RMN
~~~
Yes, I was testing the PC versions (although some of the games were also released for consoles). It's easier to get things working on consoles. You don't have to deal with multiple hardware, you don't have to deal so much with localisation, you don't have to deal with saving and loading (at least not half as much as on PC games), etc..
Unfortunately, I think things are more likely to evolve the other way round. As more consoles become "net-ready", I suspect we'll start seeing a decrease in testing, and more use of post-release patches. At least in games from 3rd party developers.
RMN
~~~
As a company grows, the distance between the product and the money increases.
If they manage to sell the same number of copies, regardless of how solid or polished the game is, and if they don't feel any emotional connection to the game, why should they put time and money into testing and polishing it?
Of course, looking at certain cases (such as Rollercoaster Tycoon, Half-Life or Ultima VII) they would see that sometimes that investment does pay off. But the people making the decisions in large game companies usually prefer to spend that time and money on advertising (something they understand). It gets them the same net result (sales), it gets it in a shorter period, and it's not as risky (a game may turn out to be crap even after years in development, but with enough advertising you can sell anything).
So FIFA 2002 sucked? No problem. Next year there'll be FIFA 2003, and some people will buy it because they never played 2002 and some will buy it hoping it's better than 2002. It's not, of course. It's just more of the same - lots of polygons, zero gameplay, endless loading times, unusable menus. But as long as the dollars (or euros, or whatever) keep coming in, they'll keep doing it. And when people realise it's never going to improve, they've already given EA (or whoever) plenty of profit. And new sucke^H^H^H clients are born every year. And "editorial" advertising in the game industry is pretty cheap, especially with thousands of websites competing to be the first to review "XPTO 2003". You can be sure they won't say it's crap. At least not if they want a chance to review XPTO 2004 this time next year.
People in smaller companies want their game to turn out perfect. When they find a bug, they feel bad about it. But many of those smaller companies are now owned by large companies, and they have to obey the law of the sausage factory (keep crankin' them out). After all, that's how Big Bill got where he is today.
Above a certain size, all businesses are in the business of making money.
RMN
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The Natural Order of Things in game development goes more or less like this:
It's not only not fun, it's also terribly frustrating to see that the "final" version of the game still has all the 357 bugs you found and warned the developers about. After the first couple of games, I refused to have my name listed in the "credits". After a few more, I stopped doing it altogether. I worked for two companies and both worked like this. Maybe some companies are different, but judging from the average quality of games (both in terms of stability and "playability"), I suspect this is the normal policy.
RMN
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My house has a back door. Even if I'm the only one to use it, it's still a back door. It's still there and it can be used by others if they find it unlocked.
RMN
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They also make (or at least used to make) a 12-port (p)ATA controller. In fact, I think their SATA controller is basically the same card with converters.
RMN
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3Ware makes IDE RAID controllers with up to 12 ports. I'm not even sure if they're limited to one drive per channel, or if you can plug two (though that would probably kill the RAID performance).
RMN
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Oh well, tried to turn off the karma bonus, turned on anonymous posting instead. This is just to confirm that wasn't an impostor.
RMN
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You believe wrong. The Itanium 2 has 3 GB of cache. The P4 has 512 KB. And, even so, they are more or less matched. Give the P4 more cache, and it leaves the Itanium eating dust in 32 bit code. Give it 64-bit extensions, and the Itanium is pretty much history. Which is why Intel cannot afford to release a direct competitor to the Athlon 64 - it would kill its own Itanium sales.
All other things being equal, a 64-bit CPU is actually slower than a 32-bit CPU (due to increased cache misses caused by longer addresses). The main advantage to moving to 64-bit registers is being able to address more memory. Current CPUs can already process 64- and even 128-bit values (using their "multimedia extensions", most of which have 128-bit registers).
AMD's Athlon 64 doesn't just increase the register size, however; it also adds more registers. That's (part of) what makes it more efficient than the Athlon XP, even when running 32-bit code (and / or working with less than 4GB of memory).
RMN
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At the same clock speed, and for short sequences of instructions, a Z80 can beat a P4. The problem is... they don't make them at the same clock speed.
It's irrelevant how many times per second the chips clock says "tic-tac", what matters is how fast real chips can get real jobs done. For real-world purposes, you can compare the best (ie, the fastest chips) or the most valuable (ie, the ones with the best speed/price ratio).
So you see, Mr. Anonymous Coward, comparing the performance "per clock cycle" is irrelevant. It's like comparing the performance "per instruction length", or "per transistor count". It might be interesting from a theoretical point of view, but if a chip that does a lot of work per cycle cannot do more than a couple of cycles per second, it's still a terribly slow chip. The P4 was designed to do less work per cycle, but work at higher frequencies. The Athlon, on the other hand, does more work per cycle but cannot reach such high frequencies. In the end, they're more or less matched. So, in that situation, which one do you buy? Perhaps you buy the one with better "performance per clock cycle". I buy the one that's cheaper (funnily enough, in this case they would be the same).
I thought Macs were competitive with PCs. Or are you saying that anyone who buys a Mac is totally clueless? It all depends on the market you're talking about. When this chip is finally released, PC processors will be twice as fast than they are now, and will probably cost half what they cost now. Anyone buying a Mac for raw number-crunching is an idiot, just as anyone using Windows for a firewall or a quad Xeon for an office machine is an idiot. It doesn't matter is something is faster or slower, as long as it's fast enough.
To use a car metaphor (that most people seem to understand), not everyone needs or wants to drive a Lamborghini. It's expensive, it's hard to park, it's hard to drive, it's cramped and it drinks like a fish. Most people are better off with a "normal" car, that's fast enough and powerful enough for them, is easy to drive, and has room for the kids and the dog.
Having said that, if you spot someone selling a metallic-gray Lamborghini Diablo Roadster (convertible) for less than 15K, let me know, will you?
RMN
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The problem is... if you give a Xeon 3MB of cache and a 64-bit memory controller, it'll sink the Itanic without breaking a sweat.
Which is why Intel can't release a 64-bit desktop chip to compete with AMD and IBM: they'd kill their own Itanium sales. IMO, they are going to regret this; they are giving AMD and IBM a very big opportunity. If Intel released a 64-bit Xeon, they would lose some money, but AMD and IBM would lose a lot more. As Microsoft knows very well, in the long run, keeping your competition under control is more important than maximising your profits.
RMN
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Less revenue but also a lot less expenses. In fact, I think their flash memory department turned in a profit, but as a whole they lost money - because of the CPU business.
Of course, the CPU business has the potential to generate pretty big profits, so I don't think they'll drop it, even if they have a bad year or two.
RMN
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There are two issues here:
1. There is no difference in the speed it takes to transfer data, because the bus is wider. There is also no difference in the time it takes to process data, because registers are also wider. There is a decrease in cache performance (because addresses take up more space). All other things (CPU design, clock speed, etc.) being equal, this hit would be of about 5%. It would only apply to programs running in 64-bit mode, though (the Hammer can still run in 32-bit mode, and can use 8, 16 and 32-bit pointers even in 64-bit mode, in certain instructions).
2. AMD's x86-64 Hammer doesn't just increase the register size to 64 bits. It adds several new registers, that can (with minor adjustments in the compilers) give a pretty good speed improvement (I'd say about 10% for the same clock speed, although this will depend a lot on the specific program). It also improves the prefetch and adds SSE2 support (one of the few areas where the P4 has an edge). This should give the Hammer approximately a 20-25% improvement over an Athlon XP at the same clock speed (more, if SSE2 is used).
RMN
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How can the military create artificial intelligence if they have no real intelligence to base it on?
RMN
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Dear Mr. Anonymous Coward:
That is why I put "laws" betwen quotes, you silly person. They're not "fantasy shit"; they're a simple set of abtract priorities (rules for the design of AI). Any normal person living in this century and with a decent amount of technical and philosphical knowledge would come up with them when asked "what rules should advanced robots and computers be forced to comply to, to ensure they never turn against humans". You might get a slightly different wording, or maybe 4 or 5 laws instead of the original 3, but the basic ideas will be the same.
BTW, I don't watch Star Trek and have no idea what the "prime directive" is (I assume it must be an odd directive, because even directives wouldn't be prime), but if it's something as common-sense as Asimov's "laws" of robotics, I (and a lot of other people who have never watched Star Trek) have probably thought about it, too.
RMN
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