Game performance reviews that just target the latest cards annoy me now. A quick look at http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html shows that the latest ATI and NVidia card represent about 6-7% of users. While doing a wider range of cards obviously takes longer, looking at performance on the most popular cards of the last gen would sure be informative.
Everyone different though. I put OO in my wifes laptop a few months back and was surprised when she said to me this morning "I like this open office. Its better than word". Probably because she had been using an older version of office (maybe as old as 97 but I think 2000) but it IS possible to switch users.
What is really amazing me ATM is just how unreliable modern RAM is, even the "good stuff". I've had 2/4 sticks of 2 year old Crucial fail on me, several sticks of PNY (no surprise there) and a couple of other makes. And indeed, sometimes its not so obvious that its the cause (e.g. passes memtest, but intermittent errors on memory intensive operations).
It used to be, I really didnt worry about hard-drive reliability (8 years ago'ish) then densities increased, Maxtor dumped their garbage onto the market driving prices down and suddenly every manufacturers drives seemed to become prone to 1-4 year failure 100% failure rates. Has the same happened to RAM?
Errrm, my 11 and 9 year olds spend a lot of time creating machinima using Garry's mod. Most of it is drivel (hey they're my kids but Ive got PERSPECTIVE), some of it is genuinely amusing and I am absolutely amazed by some of their results when they have gone to pains with the gmod poser.
Point being that I can well see machinima becoming a commercialised gaming sub-genre over the coming years (e.g. "The Movies" but with the sort of engine credibility/hype surrounding ID5/UT3/Crysis) since, at least in the case of my pair of high functioning aspergertons, there is a hell of a lot of entertainment value in what is rapidly becoming an "art".
I read the parent article and comments thinking "Oh how marvelous. Things have really improved over the last 7 years since I last had to write a web-browser for CE/PPC because the IE one wouldn't connect to localhost properly"(!! Indeed. I had written one of the first webservers to target the PPC. In Java...). Obviously not!
My quick take from a nightmare project about 8 years ago :
Java : I actually believed them when they said "Write once, run anywhere". For me this became "Write once, run away". Ive not touched Java since. Windows CE/PPC : This platform was so well documented they would often have 3 or 4 versions of the documentation for an API. Which would have been fine if ANY of those versions had been either correct OR complete. This was the first project on which I actually quit from pure frustration at the toolset.
Due to a bug in the Asus G1S BIOS (http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20070901092546687&board_id=3&model=G1S&page=1&SLanguage=en-us) which ASUS refuse to acknowledge let alone fix; the speedstep throttling is totally borked resulting in the processor running at roughly 25% performance while recharging the battery. RMClock allows us to disable the thermal protection and get back near 100% performance. Great stuff.
Sadly I read the FA in the hope of some light on the other bug with the G1S that means it only runs at 100% CPU performance on battery power...sadly nothing in their but a nice introduction none the less.
I'd estimate thats its currently possible to put together a large (42" or greater) version of one of these with 1080p (display) resolutions for under $800 EXCLUDING the cost of a PC. With some clearer hackery you could probably get the sensor resolution up to higher than that.
If I currently had the space for one Id be building one to that kind of spec.
Im was trying to work out what the big deal is here....there have been multi-touch drivers around for quite a while now and that video on the table looks rather primative compared to what a lot of DIY enthusiasts have running (e.g. overhead projector). Then I realised that the big deal is having multiple input devices for one X session and that the multitouch table is actually getting in the way of that and has the potential to be quite interesting. Anyone up for missile command?:)
Having mainly worked part-time since the dot-com crash in order to look after my kids I recently started to think about returning to proper employment (Ive been consulting/freelancing mainly) on the 3 days a week that I now dont have responsibility for my children. You'd think that in 2007 a good proportion of employers would have worked out that family friendly working conditions (flexitime, part-time, telework) would be the key to getting and keeping skilled (20 years IT experience, 1st class honours degree) employees. However (from cwjobs):-
- 11,607 jobs listed in London. - 9 Jobs listed as part-time. - 0 Jobs listed as offering flexitime. - 3 Jobs listed as job-share. - 0 Jobs listed as offering teleworking.
If pizzas and pool tables ARE making a comeback due to skill shortages; I'd suggest the skill shortage actually lies with HR who are unable to recognise the benifits they need to offer to get us "more mature" employees back into the marketplace.
I find that it just isnt worth my time (in the billable per hour sense) to make the shift from developer/programmer to be a GOOD graphic designer/artist HOWEVER it is nice to tinker sometimes. So yes, learn some more graphically oriented apps but if you want to do anything SERIOUS and save A LOT of time, look at sites such as templatemonster and istockphoto (I am NOT affiliated in any way). istock is good but somewhat overpriced these days and templatemonster, while having some GREAT designs, the HTML is often horrendous (esp. from an accessibility standpoint).
Anyone sue similar resources that they would recommend?
Software development is now incredibly *EASY*. I mean we have tools such as C#, VB,.Net, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, COM, CORBA, SQL, J2EE, IIS, APACHE, XML, XSLT, HTML, XHTML, SOAP, XML-RPC, JBOSS, ZOPE, CSS, AJAX, Javascript, XQuery, XPath, UML, Patterns, SCRUMM, WMF, CardSpace, Passport, Windows, Linux, OS-X, WME, Direct-X, OpenGL, SDL, Eclipse, SVG....I mean, all this stuff software development still cant be "hard" now can it?
In the UK, the only place from which I can buy Ramen charges between 80 pence and £1.80 a pot!!!! (to be fair it is the genuine article imported from Japan).
Sadly, over here we have a product called "Pot Noodle" which has somehow managed to occupy the place where Ramen should be. After years of eating that muck on occassion, it was a truly miraculous thing to see how Japanese vegitables somehow rehydrated into something that looked and tasted like a vegitable! I seriously cant understand how something as nice as Ramen was transformed into something as ghastly as "Pot Noodle".
If I was Microsoft Id be lining up my coup de grace for Sony by planning to release the next next gen machine within 2 years. A substantial trade-in scheme for 360 owners, integrated dual format HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive, whatever HD/Processor/graphic card that is available and provides backwards compatibility and a price point withing a few $100 of the PS3 when they launch and the deal should be sealed. Sony are literally BANKING on the PS3 being a long term success in order to recoup their development costs. If MS choses to puts the pressure on while Sony is so vulnerable its quite possible Sony will end up as the next Sega.
While I dont neccesarily consider the aove good for the industry I would consider it good business for the cash rich MS and a suitable reward for Sonys arrogance.
If youre intellegent enough for a CS degree there are a score of other options available which offer better long-term career prospects for far less effort (long term I suspect most MDs put less than 50% of the time into retraining that a good IT worker does). I would advise anyone to only take CS if youre actually serious about CS academically. If not be prepared to put up with having to retrain every 2-4 years, be made unemployed at a moments notice based upon the whims of PHBs/the economy, have your salary stagnate/collapse at least once a decade, work ungodly hours if you end up with a ****** company that cant manage its sales forces promises and have an ulcer by your early to mid 30s.
Seriously, until IT has its own professional body that REQUIRES IT workers to be qualified/certificed in the same way as other professionals, its a career to steer clear of.
Im amazed you had automatic updates on in the first place.....
That said, I agree and will probably be migrating to Ubuntu (Debians stable tree lags too much for my liking, BSD is too niche, Red Hat too corporate, Slackware...too much work). Im really sadened my this move on Novells part since Ive been with SuSE since 7.3. Luckily no hurry since most of my servers could probably live on version 10.1 for the next 10 years:)
I read the article and it is complete total and utter garbage. Its an opinion piece, little more.
His paper however, "temperature effects of greenhouse gas forcings" (buried at the end of his PDF opinion piece) may actually have some merit in showing that the IPCCs value for "the change in mean surface air temperature at the Earth's surface per unit radiant-energy forcing at the tropopause" may be too high. I use *MAY* here though since this paper has obviously not been publically peer reviewed. Ive not read the IPCC paper and thus cant comment and too be honest Ive been out of touch with the literature for the last 10 years.
What I do know is that our climate is an INCREDIBLY complex system - almost impossible to acurately model since we dont even know the state of many of its components. Making informed decisions about the validity if climate change arguments is very, VERY difficuly. One should be very careful in making absolute statements though since what may be true today from an observed state, may well not be true tommorrow.
Personally may favorite quote from the PDF article though. "That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course. False".
Whhhhhopppieee ******* dooo. Its OK boys, forget the condoms, ***** em like your ******** the planet.
P.S. Summer lasted until mid October this year in England.
Actually Sony recently revised its production estimates to 2 million by years end. Some analysts are starting to wake up and question if even this is a realistic target given the number of technical issues they are having with the cell processor and the blue diode shortage. Theres even the very real possibility of the PS3 being delayed even further due to manufacturing delays/problems (remember they only starting making them things in the last few days) so dont count your chickens.
Oh your coment regarding the 720 is quite insiteful. Im fully expecting the 360 to have a short shelf life (3-4 years) and MS to try and nail the PS3 just as the machine starts to be profitable for Sony.
Oh the machine is fast enough and it transcodes like a dream - but live WME 9.0 broadcasts are a nightmare. Sadly I needed to put together a system for novice users so Linux was out of the question:(
Installed dual core patches (both MS and AMD), installed processor optimiser and latest drivers, bought a new capture card (osprey 100), tweaked until Id run out of ideas.
FINALLY got a hold of a near identically specified machine (1 GB less RAM, slower graphics card, single core 3500+) installed the osprey card and things worked without a hitch. Ive been at this 20 years, I used to swear by AMD chips and have NEVER worried about compatability before, however the X2 chips have compatability problems (hence the processor optimiser and processor driver) above and beyond those one would expect to find in a SMP system. Im going to be buying a Core Duo too soon so it will be interesting to see if this problem is present in that chip too.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the heads-up. Sadly they are all giving me max 15Kbps so Im going to wait for the nzb.
Game performance reviews that just target the latest cards annoy me now. A quick look at http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html shows that the latest ATI and NVidia card represent about 6-7% of users. While doing a wider range of cards obviously takes longer, looking at performance on the most popular cards of the last gen would sure be informative.
Everyone different though. I put OO in my wifes laptop a few months back and was surprised when she said to me this morning "I like this open office. Its better than word". Probably because she had been using an older version of office (maybe as old as 97 but I think 2000) but it IS possible to switch users.
What is really amazing me ATM is just how unreliable modern RAM is, even the "good stuff". I've had 2/4 sticks of 2 year old Crucial fail on me, several sticks of PNY (no surprise there) and a couple of other makes. And indeed, sometimes its not so obvious that its the cause (e.g. passes memtest, but intermittent errors on memory intensive operations).
It used to be, I really didnt worry about hard-drive reliability (8 years ago'ish) then densities increased, Maxtor dumped their garbage onto the market driving prices down and suddenly every manufacturers drives seemed to become prone to 1-4 year failure 100% failure rates. Has the same happened to RAM?
Errrm, my 11 and 9 year olds spend a lot of time creating machinima using Garry's mod. Most of it is drivel (hey they're my kids but Ive got PERSPECTIVE), some of it is genuinely amusing and I am absolutely amazed by some of their results when they have gone to pains with the gmod poser.
Point being that I can well see machinima becoming a commercialised gaming sub-genre over the coming years (e.g. "The Movies" but with the sort of engine credibility/hype surrounding ID5/UT3/Crysis) since, at least in the case of my pair of high functioning aspergertons, there is a hell of a lot of entertainment value in what is rapidly becoming an "art".
I read the parent article and comments thinking "Oh how marvelous. Things have really improved over the last 7 years since I last had to write a web-browser for CE/PPC because the IE one wouldn't connect to localhost properly"(!! Indeed. I had written one of the first webservers to target the PPC. In Java...). Obviously not!
:(
My quick take from a nightmare project about 8 years ago :
Java : I actually believed them when they said "Write once, run anywhere". For me this became "Write once, run away". Ive not touched Java since.
Windows CE/PPC : This platform was so well documented they would often have 3 or 4 versions of the documentation for an API. Which would have been fine if ANY of those versions had been either correct OR complete. This was the first project on which I actually quit from pure frustration at the toolset.
Anyways, I feel for you
RMClock is great!
Due to a bug in the Asus G1S BIOS (http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20070901092546687&board_id=3&model=G1S&page=1&SLanguage=en-us) which ASUS refuse to acknowledge let alone fix; the speedstep throttling is totally borked resulting in the processor running at roughly 25% performance while recharging the battery. RMClock allows us to disable the thermal protection and get back near 100% performance. Great stuff.
Sadly I read the FA in the hope of some light on the other bug with the G1S that means it only runs at 100% CPU performance on battery power...sadly nothing in their but a nice introduction none the less.
Its not quite at consumer level but its certainly available at the enthusiast level. Have a look at http://www.instructables.com/id/EJIXKOEF3ER7VN5/ or a search for "multitouch diy".
I'd estimate thats its currently possible to put together a large (42" or greater) version of one of these with 1080p (display) resolutions for under $800 EXCLUDING the cost of a PC. With some clearer hackery you could probably get the sensor resolution up to higher than that.
If I currently had the space for one Id be building one to that kind of spec.
Im was trying to work out what the big deal is here....there have been multi-touch drivers around for quite a while now and that video on the table looks rather primative compared to what a lot of DIY enthusiasts have running (e.g. overhead projector). Then I realised that the big deal is having multiple input devices for one X session and that the multitouch table is actually getting in the way of that and has the potential to be quite interesting. Anyone up for missile command? :)
Having mainly worked part-time since the dot-com crash in order to look after my kids I recently started to think about returning to proper employment (Ive been consulting/freelancing mainly) on the 3 days a week that I now dont have responsibility for my children. You'd think that in 2007 a good proportion of employers would have worked out that family friendly working conditions (flexitime, part-time, telework) would be the key to getting and keeping skilled (20 years IT experience, 1st class honours degree) employees. However (from cwjobs) :-
- 11,607 jobs listed in London.
- 9 Jobs listed as part-time.
- 0 Jobs listed as offering flexitime.
- 3 Jobs listed as job-share.
- 0 Jobs listed as offering teleworking.
If pizzas and pool tables ARE making a comeback due to skill shortages; I'd suggest the skill shortage actually lies with HR who are unable to recognise the benifits they need to offer to get us "more mature" employees back into the marketplace.
I find that it just isnt worth my time (in the billable per hour sense) to make the shift from developer/programmer to be a GOOD graphic designer/artist HOWEVER it is nice to tinker sometimes. So yes, learn some more graphically oriented apps but if you want to do anything SERIOUS and save A LOT of time, look at sites such as templatemonster and istockphoto (I am NOT affiliated in any way). istock is good but somewhat overpriced these days and templatemonster, while having some GREAT designs, the HTML is often horrendous (esp. from an accessibility standpoint).
Anyone sue similar resources that they would recommend?
Software development is now incredibly *EASY*. I mean we have tools such as C#, VB, .Net, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, COM, CORBA, SQL, J2EE, IIS, APACHE, XML, XSLT, HTML, XHTML, SOAP, XML-RPC, JBOSS, ZOPE, CSS, AJAX, Javascript, XQuery, XPath, UML, Patterns, SCRUMM, WMF, CardSpace, Passport, Windows, Linux, OS-X, WME, Direct-X, OpenGL, SDL, Eclipse, SVG....I mean, all this stuff software development still cant be "hard" now can it?
6 for $0.79?!?! Wowww!
In the UK, the only place from which I can buy Ramen charges between 80 pence and £1.80 a pot!!!! (to be fair it is the genuine article imported from Japan).
Sadly, over here we have a product called "Pot Noodle" which has somehow managed to occupy the place where Ramen should be. After years of eating that muck on occassion, it was a truly miraculous thing to see how Japanese vegitables somehow rehydrated into something that looked and tasted like a vegitable! I seriously cant understand how something as nice as Ramen was transformed into something as ghastly as "Pot Noodle".
Sadly Ive no mod points (isnt it always the way). For once, "insightful" would have been bang on the money.
Ill bite Wii Internals.
Have a good luck arounnd WiiLi for more Wii goodness.
If I was Microsoft Id be lining up my coup de grace for Sony by planning to release the next next gen machine within 2 years. A substantial trade-in scheme for 360 owners, integrated dual format HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive, whatever HD/Processor/graphic card that is available and provides backwards compatibility and a price point withing a few $100 of the PS3 when they launch and the deal should be sealed. Sony are literally BANKING on the PS3 being a long term success in order to recoup their development costs. If MS choses to puts the pressure on while Sony is so vulnerable its quite possible Sony will end up as the next Sega.
While I dont neccesarily consider the aove good for the industry I would consider it good business for the cash rich MS and a suitable reward for Sonys arrogance.
If youre intellegent enough for a CS degree there are a score of other options available which offer better long-term career prospects for far less effort (long term I suspect most MDs put less than 50% of the time into retraining that a good IT worker does). I would advise anyone to only take CS if youre actually serious about CS academically. If not be prepared to put up with having to retrain every 2-4 years, be made unemployed at a moments notice based upon the whims of PHBs/the economy, have your salary stagnate/collapse at least once a decade, work ungodly hours if you end up with a ****** company that cant manage its sales forces promises and have an ulcer by your early to mid 30s.
Seriously, until IT has its own professional body that REQUIRES IT workers to be qualified/certificed in the same way as other professionals, its a career to steer clear of.
Im amazed you had automatic updates on in the first place.....
:)
That said, I agree and will probably be migrating to Ubuntu (Debians stable tree lags too much for my liking, BSD is too niche, Red Hat too corporate, Slackware...too much work). Im really sadened my this move on Novells part since Ive been with SuSE since 7.3. Luckily no hurry since most of my servers could probably live on version 10.1 for the next 10 years
not all should be aired in public.
I read the article and it is complete total and utter garbage. Its an opinion piece, little more.
His paper however, "temperature effects of greenhouse gas forcings" (buried at the end of his PDF opinion piece) may actually have some merit in showing that the IPCCs value for "the change in mean surface air temperature at the Earth's surface per unit radiant-energy forcing at the tropopause" may be too high. I use *MAY* here though since this paper has obviously not been publically peer reviewed. Ive not read the IPCC paper and thus cant comment and too be honest Ive been out of touch with the literature for the last 10 years.
What I do know is that our climate is an INCREDIBLY complex system - almost impossible to acurately model since we dont even know the state of many of its components. Making informed decisions about the validity if climate change arguments is very, VERY difficuly. One should be very careful in making absolute statements though since what may be true today from an observed state, may well not be true tommorrow.
Personally may favorite quote from the PDF article though. "That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course. False".
Whhhhhopppieee ******* dooo. Its OK boys, forget the condoms, ***** em like your ******** the planet.
P.S. Summer lasted until mid October this year in England.
Actually Sony recently revised its production estimates to 2 million by years end. Some analysts are starting to wake up and question if even this is a realistic target given the number of technical issues they are having with the cell processor and the blue diode shortage. Theres even the very real possibility of the PS3 being delayed even further due to manufacturing delays/problems (remember they only starting making them things in the last few days) so dont count your chickens.
Oh your coment regarding the 720 is quite insiteful. Im fully expecting the 360 to have a short shelf life (3-4 years) and MS to try and nail the PS3 just as the machine starts to be profitable for Sony.
Dell laptop advertised with core 2 duo
Click through to specify the machine and only the T2600/T2700 for sale. These are Core Duos arent they?
Wouldnt suprise me to see Dell guilty of misleading adverting (They got me on an "upgradable graphics card" before) but this looks prity blatant.
Late reply but for completeness sake :-
WME 9.0 + AMD single core processor. Works fine.
WME 9.0 + AMD SMP system (dual processor). Works fine.
WME 9.0 + AMD Dual Core processor. Broken live broadcast encoding.
Sorry, end of the day I cant help but conclude I have a case where the processors compatability isnt what I would expect.
I know what you mean about WME, most free MS apps are free for a reason - but for the most part it works GREAT!
To be fair most of those problems were motherboard rather than processor related.....
Oh the machine is fast enough and it transcodes like a dream - but live WME 9.0 broadcasts are a nightmare. Sadly I needed to put together a system for novice users so Linux was out of the question :(
Nope - wish there was something else wrong.
Installed dual core patches (both MS and AMD), installed processor optimiser and latest drivers, bought a new capture card (osprey 100), tweaked until Id run out of ideas.
FINALLY got a hold of a near identically specified machine (1 GB less RAM, slower graphics card, single core 3500+) installed the osprey card and things worked without a hitch. Ive been at this 20 years, I used to swear by AMD chips and have NEVER worried about compatability before, however the X2 chips have compatability problems (hence the processor optimiser and processor driver) above and beyond those one would expect to find in a SMP system. Im going to be buying a Core Duo too soon so it will be interesting to see if this problem is present in that chip too.