I have never used the "SMOOTH MOUSE" option in any game. If you do that, your accuracy in aiming will suffer greatly. The reason being, is now you have your CPU moving your aim from point A to B by itself as you move your mouse. This means that there is no longer a 1 to 1 correspondance to you moving your mouse and your character moving on screen. I've found it much more difficult to aim.
sub-pixel sampling on fonts does not work very good at all unless you use a DVI connector for your LCD. I changed from a VGA to a DVI connector on my LCD panel at work and the difference is astounding. I'm still amazed that 90% of consumers are completely oblivious to this difference. Not to single you out specifically, but I'm tired of the average consumer being ignorant of the differences between video connection standards.
BTW, companies now make excellent DVI/USB KVM switches, so there is no execuse to use a VGA connection on a LCD panel anymore.
Low taxes on capital gains, dividends... while there are very high taxes on wages
Are you implying that only wealthy people benefit from low capital gains and dividend taxes? I would guess that a large percentage of the middle class have investment accounts and benefit just as much as the wealthy.
Everytime I see one of these CG rendered figures, the lack of accurate physics really stands out. While many advances have been made in the quality of the 3D graphics, the polygon count, and the texture detail; to me they still look like hollow shells (which they essentially are).
In Sample1.avi for example, her eyes move much too mechanically and instantly. While individual hairs on her head move with the wind, it still doesn't look quite natural. I'm not complaining, it's just it will take quite some time before mathematical models are created that can accurately represent real world physics and not crude approximations thereof.
And if you don't need full internet access (just e-mail and HTTP) you can get T-Mobile's "T-Zones" service for $5/month on top of your phone plan. Very good deal, but it's still painfully slow GPRS data transfer.
through it? Around it? No, it's just mathametically impossible. Unless you have valve's decryption key for your particular set of files, those files on your hard drive are just as good as random noise...
"Well, after four (4) posts, it is abundantly clear that this project is boring. In an attempt to remedy the situation, from here on in I am going to bring you only the most interesting pictures..."
So it sounds like the author gave up with the project. Oh well, it's still kind of interesting.
Why is Quake 2 so significant? The multiplayer Quake 1 community was quite active for sometime and many mods kept it going. Quake 2 was just another evolutionary step.
I've always wondered why they can't use some type of surface that is sensitive to infrared or ultra violet (or possibly emitting one of those non visible wavelengths). If they could find a way to split the image into a 2nd camera that was sensitive to one of those frequencies, they could then shoot with the actors wearing just about any color and be able to mask out the background perfectly. I guess it's probably too technically involved.
Decompressing the pak files? How exactly will that help? If you already have 1GB or so of RAM, most of the level data will be cached anyway.
You need to run timedemo's to verify that unpacking actually helps.
The question is, which is faster: the files unpacked, using the OS's file system; or Doom 3 handling the unpacking of resources? My guess is id probably did a good job and had a good reason for packing the files.
There will be no interoperability with other devices.
This is such an important point.
I've really wanted to purchase a pocket PC just to watch DVD's on, but the trouble of trying to figure out how to decrypt my DVD's and encode them to fit on a 1024MB CF card seems like too much trouble.
This has also prevented anything like a portable 400GB DVD jukebox like device to be marketed. Wouldn't that be great if you could take 50-100 movies with you in a small device you could just connect to any TV?
Thanks to the 'anti-piracy' mechanism built into DVD's consumers have less choice of how they want to watch their movies, and this trend will continue. In the future, we will be stuck with HD-DVD players manufactured by the movie studios that force us to watch all their movie previews and keep our subscriptions renewed if we want our movies to continue playing (it could happen).
I wish people would stop using those stupid java applets for buttons on their websites. You can get the SAME effect using JavaScript and you don't require the client machine to startup a 20MB Java VM process.
even if you don't have a cell phone, keep an old one charged up.. if theres an emergency, you can call 911 on it.
I'm not so sure about this though. I have an old cellphone I would like to keep in my car for dialing 911, but there's no way to know if it would actually work for that purpose after I have cancelled my service. What if it's just something like my car breaking down, can I justify dialing 911 for that?
I would disagree. Who's going to quibble about a few megabytes of hard drive space? The differences between 5, 15, and 25MB is trivial. The important question is what capabilites do each of these frameworks provides. Which one is easier to work with? Who provides the best support? The disk space they consume is the least of your worries.
Windows XP, installs, for instance, STILL have to laod driver extras (RAID, SCSI, etc) from a floppy at boot -- even if the computer in question doesn't have one.
This is true, but only because Micrsoft's programmers are lazy or didn't know what they were doing. I've run into this problem with installing one of our servers. Had to use the silly floppy drive. The setup program for Windows XP itself is severly FLAWED. It actually says load drivers in drive A: and gives you absoletly no choice. Maybe there was a work around, I'd have to search through Microsoft's Knowledge Base.
If I buy a piece of hardware and it comes with a driver disket I'll just throw it in the trash and immediatly go to the manufactures website and get new drivers.
I actually find the USB-to serial converters EASY to configure and more reliable than the built in ports. If I have an experiment set up I can add as many USB serial ports as I need just by plugging them in my PC and using a USB hub. You didn't have anywhere near that flexibilty before USB existed. You had to get a weird ISA COM port card and manually set jumpers if you wanted more than 2 ports. It was also very expensive. Now I just plug them in, and use them.
Yes, now stop insisting that my computer needs an arcaic mechanical device to store a mere 1.44MB when a USB memory stick can hold 512MB. Floppy disks are completely useless.
And if manufactures insist that I can't choose to not have them in my system, then they lose my business and I'm sure other people feel the same way.
Yeah I've considered doing that. It's too much trouble for me personally to set up a linux box and get it all configured. What's weird, is that I had all ports open for the first week that I got my service. I'm also thinking that it's intentional, that T-mobile does that kind of as a demo or something.
you might not be interested in learning that Bluetooth phones need a telco carrier, like Verizon.
Well, no not technically. If you buy a brand new bluetooth camera phone, if you don't have a carrier it will still work as a camera. If you're carrier supports this, you can purchase an unlocked phone and simply put your sim card into it.
I second the choice of T-Mobile if you want more freedom with what you can do with your phone. In fact the phone I got doesn't seem to have any limitations at all. I've been able to do the following on my Nokia 3660:
Use my own e-mail account on my phone to send pictures/video to people (without charge)
Use Bluetooth to send/receive any file
Use the phone as a bluetooth modem (only port 80 and e-mail works though with just the $5/month t-zones plan)
Create my own ring tones with MIDI files or uploading WAV files music to my phone.
Create my own background wallpaper for my phone
Is T-mobile not making as much money by locking me out of doing these activities? Probably not. I couldn't justify spending $0.25 or a $1.00 for each time I wanted to use one of these features. What I would like to see T-Mobile do is have a full internet access for $10/month more with an existing phone plan and maybe have a high speed plan for $25/month (128kbps+). What's taking 3G technology so long to exist, even here in silicon valley?
I make my own ringtones all the time with MP3s or Oggs. All I you need to do is open up the song, convert it to 16KHz, 8bit mono WAV format, and then upload it via bluetooth to your phone phone. I do this all the time with my Nokia 3660. Sure it take a little bit of time, but it's a lot better than paying a silly $1.50 fee or whatever for a ring tone, especially if all you get is a ugly sounding MIDI file.
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I have never used the "SMOOTH MOUSE" option in any game. If you do that, your accuracy in aiming will suffer greatly. The reason being, is now you have your CPU moving your aim from point A to B by itself as you move your mouse. This means that there is no longer a 1 to 1 correspondance to you moving your mouse and your character moving on screen. I've found it much more difficult to aim.
sub-pixel sampling on fonts does not work very good at all unless you use a DVI connector for your LCD. I changed from a VGA to a DVI connector on my LCD panel at work and the difference is astounding. I'm still amazed that 90% of consumers are completely oblivious to this difference. Not to single you out specifically, but I'm tired of the average consumer being ignorant of the differences between video connection standards.
BTW, companies now make excellent DVI/USB KVM switches, so there is no execuse to use a VGA connection on a LCD panel anymore.
25fps? You'd think that because it's High Definition they would have increased frame rate to 40fps by now. I want ultra realism!
Low taxes on capital gains, dividends... while there are very high taxes on wages
Are you implying that only wealthy people benefit from low capital gains and dividend taxes? I would guess that a large percentage of the middle class have investment accounts and benefit just as much as the wealthy.
Everytime I see one of these CG rendered figures, the lack of accurate physics really stands out. While many advances have been made in the quality of the 3D graphics, the polygon count, and the texture detail; to me they still look like hollow shells (which they essentially are).
In Sample1.avi for example, her eyes move much too mechanically and instantly. While individual hairs on her head move with the wind, it still doesn't look quite natural. I'm not complaining, it's just it will take quite some time before mathematical models are created that can accurately represent real world physics and not crude approximations thereof.
Even my ancient Kodak DC265 has a time lapse feature. You can set it up to contiusly take a picture every minute or so if you like.
And if you don't need full internet access (just e-mail and HTTP) you can get T-Mobile's "T-Zones" service for $5/month on top of your phone plan. Very good deal, but it's still painfully slow GPRS data transfer.
through it? Around it? No, it's just mathametically impossible. Unless you have valve's decryption key for your particular set of files, those files on your hard drive are just as good as random noise...
No! You don't want to give Valve any ideas for a Half-Life prequel do you???
The report also estimated it would take as long as five years and cost $5 million to $11 million to recover the bomb.
That's actually extremely cheap, for a government agency, considering what they are trying to recover. They should just go ahead and retrieve it.
"Well, after four (4) posts, it is abundantly clear that this project is boring. In an attempt to remedy the situation, from here on in I am going to bring you only the most interesting pictures..."
So it sounds like the author gave up with the project. Oh well, it's still kind of interesting.
Why is Quake 2 so significant? The multiplayer Quake 1 community was quite active for sometime and many mods kept it going. Quake 2 was just another evolutionary step.
I've always wondered why they can't use some type of surface that is sensitive to infrared or ultra violet (or possibly emitting one of those non visible wavelengths). If they could find a way to split the image into a 2nd camera that was sensitive to one of those frequencies, they could then shoot with the actors wearing just about any color and be able to mask out the background perfectly. I guess it's probably too technically involved.
Decompressing the pak files? How exactly will that help? If you already have 1GB or so of RAM, most of the level data will be cached anyway.
You need to run timedemo's to verify that unpacking actually helps.
The question is, which is faster: the files unpacked, using the OS's file system; or Doom 3 handling the unpacking of resources? My guess is id probably did a good job and had a good reason for packing the files.
There will be no interoperability with other devices.
This is such an important point.
I've really wanted to purchase a pocket PC just to watch DVD's on, but the trouble of trying to figure out how to decrypt my DVD's and encode them to fit on a 1024MB CF card seems like too much trouble.
This has also prevented anything like a portable 400GB DVD jukebox like device to be marketed. Wouldn't that be great if you could take 50-100 movies with you in a small device you could just connect to any TV?
Thanks to the 'anti-piracy' mechanism built into DVD's consumers have less choice of how they want to watch their movies, and this trend will continue. In the future, we will be stuck with HD-DVD players manufactured by the movie studios that force us to watch all their movie previews and keep our subscriptions renewed if we want our movies to continue playing (it could happen).
I wish people would stop using those stupid java applets for buttons on their websites. You can get the SAME effect using JavaScript and you don't require the client machine to startup a 20MB Java VM process.
even if you don't have a cell phone, keep an old one charged up.. if theres an emergency, you can call 911 on it.
I'm not so sure about this though. I have an old cellphone I would like to keep in my car for dialing 911, but there's no way to know if it would actually work for that purpose after I have cancelled my service. What if it's just something like my car breaking down, can I justify dialing 911 for that?
Less means better in this case.
I would disagree. Who's going to quibble about a few megabytes of hard drive space? The differences between 5, 15, and 25MB is trivial. The important question is what capabilites do each of these frameworks provides. Which one is easier to work with? Who provides the best support? The disk space they consume is the least of your worries.
Windows XP, installs, for instance, STILL have to laod driver extras (RAID, SCSI, etc) from a floppy at boot -- even if the computer in question doesn't have one.
This is true, but only because Micrsoft's programmers are lazy or didn't know what they were doing. I've run into this problem with installing one of our servers. Had to use the silly floppy drive. The setup program for Windows XP itself is severly FLAWED. It actually says load drivers in drive A: and gives you absoletly no choice. Maybe there was a work around, I'd have to search through Microsoft's Knowledge Base.
If I buy a piece of hardware and it comes with a driver disket I'll just throw it in the trash and immediatly go to the manufactures website and get new drivers.
I actually find the USB-to serial converters EASY to configure and more reliable than the built in ports. If I have an experiment set up I can add as many USB serial ports as I need just by plugging them in my PC and using a USB hub. You didn't have anywhere near that flexibilty before USB existed. You had to get a weird ISA COM port card and manually set jumpers if you wanted more than 2 ports. It was also very expensive. Now I just plug them in, and use them.
Can you boot from a USB dongle?
Yes, now stop insisting that my computer needs an arcaic mechanical device to store a mere 1.44MB when a USB memory stick can hold 512MB. Floppy disks are completely useless.
And if manufactures insist that I can't choose to not have them in my system, then they lose my business and I'm sure other people feel the same way.
Yeah I've considered doing that. It's too much trouble for me personally to set up a linux box and get it all configured. What's weird, is that I had all ports open for the first week that I got my service. I'm also thinking that it's intentional, that T-mobile does that kind of as a demo or something.
you might not be interested in learning that Bluetooth phones need a telco carrier, like Verizon.
Well, no not technically. If you buy a brand new bluetooth camera phone, if you don't have a carrier it will still work as a camera. If you're carrier supports this, you can purchase an unlocked phone and simply put your sim card into it.
Use my own e-mail account on my phone to send pictures/video to people (without charge)
Use Bluetooth to send/receive any file
Use the phone as a bluetooth modem (only port 80 and e-mail works though with just the $5/month t-zones plan)
Create my own ring tones with MIDI files or uploading WAV files music to my phone.
Create my own background wallpaper for my phone
Is T-mobile not making as much money by locking me out of doing these activities? Probably not. I couldn't justify spending $0.25 or a $1.00 for each time I wanted to use one of these features. What I would like to see T-Mobile do is have a full internet access for $10/month more with an existing phone plan and maybe have a high speed plan for $25/month (128kbps+). What's taking 3G technology so long to exist, even here in silicon valley?
I make my own ringtones all the time with MP3s or Oggs. All I you need to do is open up the song, convert it to 16KHz, 8bit mono WAV format, and then upload it via bluetooth to your phone phone. I do this all the time with my Nokia 3660. Sure it take a little bit of time, but it's a lot better than paying a silly $1.50 fee or whatever for a ring tone, especially if all you get is a ugly sounding MIDI file.