As for a), I had discussions on this very issue and I know what you're getting at. You're still wrong, though, the USA certainly is a democracy: "a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections". (M-W)
There are different definitions of the term: some (probably: most) apply to the USA, the more specific ones don't. However, most people usually deal with the more general terms and maybe are not even aware of the meaning of the more specific term. The burden of dealing with any ambiguity rests with those who are aware of the different meanings...
As for b) I guess most people are well aware of that. It just begs the question whether this is a good thing or not. From an outsiders point of view, the presidential election system is very weird - for instance, the existance of states which de facto already belong to one or the other party, making the elections mostly a battle for the remaining borderline candidate states. (I apologise for any incorrect terminology.)
...which, given the imprecision of "moore's law" type forecasts, means you should be suprised to see such a phone before Xmas 2005, but the current iPod-mini will probably be under some pressure by summer 2007.
Exactly! Like I said: It's only a matter of time till flash memory gets cheap enough for cell phones and similar devices become an alternative at least to the iPod mini class of devices. Thanks for "proving" my point.
My gf uses it on her iBook, so I do know it. I just don't see the point. The only thing it can do that I can't readily is tell me when I played a song last, which I suppose would come in handy for filtering rarely used songs.
Is that because of the music store or because of iTunes management capabilities? Because I never got that last one - I've got a lot of music, mostly my albums on my computer - they reside on their own partition, one folder per album. I can play them using the context menu entry that opens Foobar. I've never needed more management than that - why would anyone? Seriously, I'm asking.:)
I don't see mini hard drives being integrated in cell phones, but it's only a matter of time till flash memory gets cheap enough for cell phones and similar devices become an alternative at least to the iPod mini class of devices. Personally, I don't need 20 GB of music on the go, 1 or 2 GB would be more than sufficient - currently, I make do with multiple 250 MB mini CDs. 2 GB flash memory modules already exist, but for now they're prohibitively expensive.
And of course, the next generation of static RAM is just around the corner - where it has been for a while, admittedly.
Anyone can install a tarball and with great scripts like CompileProgram anyone can install it with one command.
No. You can do that, and I can probably figure it out easily enough, but no, most people can not install a program from source. Although I'm sure they could be enabled to do it - portage is a start, an easy to use graphical portage would be even more of a start.
Yes, that's what the article says: AMD is pretty much committed to the Socket-939 platform for the foreseeable future, and truth be told, an upgrade to a Socket-754 CPU is going to limit your motherboard or CPU options, which is an important factor since our theme today is budget gaming. Their point is - the A64 3000+ and a 754 mainboard are so "cheap", it's worth giving up the upgradability of not going with a 939 board.
In a limited way, I tend to agree: don't put too much faith into being able to keep your mainboard for the next upgrade, chances are you'll upgrade it anyway. However, all of this totally depends on how often you upgrade. If you intent to upgrade within another year, yeah, you'll be able to keep your mainboard if you bought "smart". But if you're going to wait say, 2 years, until your next major overhaul, your current mainboard will be obsolete, even though you bought a "future-proof" mainboard such as the 939 today. Even if Socket 939 is still in use by then, chances are more recent mainboards will run at a higher FSB, support different periphery, different RAM, and so on and so on.
What's more: calling that article a budget gamers guide is a stretch. The definition of what kind of a budget qualifies for a budget gamer is subjective, of course, but I doubt an A64 3000+ is the best bang for the buck right now. Socket-A boards are cheaper, as are Athlon XP (or Sempron, if you will) CPUs, and they aren't a lot slower, at least not compared to a an A64 3000+. And since you're a budget gamer, you're not likely to upgrade within a year, so you're going to toss your mainboard when you upgrade next time, and there's really no reason to buy an Athlon XP mainboard if you don't already have one.
I mean, I'm not saying he's insane for buying an Athlon 64 3000+, I suppose it's a lot better value for the money than going the Socket 939 route, but it's still a high-end choice, for seemingly no other reason than being high end. Considering the author of the story bought a A64 3000+, it kind of seems like he's trying to justify his investment.
As developers fervently try to make every game Final Fantasy length, and as worlds become increasingly more time-consuming to build, developers are going to naturally seek to reuse as much content as they can get away with.
The conclusion is, of course, to make content creation easier. And I'm sure this is already being done: instead of creating a chair from scratch, I guess most world editors offer chair templates.
An extreme example of "Rapid World Developement" is the Neverwinter Nights editor, which also brings up the danger this can pose: everything kind of looks the same. But then, the NWN editor probably was balanced too much towards easy usability to enable players instead of professionals developers to easily create maps. Nevertheless, I'm sure in the future even tools targeted at professionals will enable them to create world as rapidly and actually much more rapidly than in the NWN editor. Instead of creating a tavern yourself, there might be a "tavern wizard" which creates a tavern complete with associated NPCs, side-quests and so on. Conceivable the same goes for whole cities. The side-quests could be drawn from a huge pool of quests developed by other folks and dynamically adjusted to the context they're used in: "Go to the carpenter and buy a replacement chair for the one you broke." in the tavern, "Go to the tailor and fetch the the curtains I ordered for a reward." in an NPCs home. The main story then could be woven into the template world manually by the designer. Heh - it's fun to make this up.;)
The final utopian way of world creation, of course, just takes a verbal description and transforms it into the right world, always doing the Right Thing when the input is too vague - a la Star Trek. I guess that's still some ways off.:)
Ah! I wasn't aware of those discussions, I thought "Really Simple Syndication" was something like a joke, trying to get RSS in line some of the humorous OSS acronyms.
How is my post a flamebait? I was used to the original RDF site summary definition, and surprised to see there were others... Naming conventions nonwithstanding, I still like RSS and use it a lot now that my browser is RSS-enabled.
Even the acronym itself in "implemented" inconsistently: the article expands it to Really Simple Syndication, the (I think) original and official meaning is RDF Site Summary (where RDF:= Resource Description Framework) and IBM, among others, expands it to Rich site summary. Source: Google Definitions.
Oh well. I mean, on the one hand, you're correct, this wasn't carried out scientifically, but then again, it doesn't have to to be useful. All of the six main tests are representative or real live stress such a card might have to endure.
I assume the actual article - the BBC's is only an abstract of an article in a UK digital photography magazine - contains more detailed explanations of what the tests entail, for instance at which temperature the cards were washed. The BBC says the cards were "boiled", so that should mean they're washed at 90 - and they survived, which kind of makes any further testing at lower temperatures superfluous. That said, repeated washing might have been interesting as it's somewhat likely the cards would die at some point. However, again, while this might be interesting in a scientific test, it doesn't have a lot of real life value: you are fairly likely to accidently wash one of your flash cards at some point, you're unlikely to do it twice, and increasingly unlikely to do it more often. Unless you're not so smart.;)
Hammering is a combination of mechanical stress and vibration...
I guess it is. But maybe the just presupposed that on the one hand mechanical vibrations don't do anything to a medium that doesn't have any moving parts (probably a reasonable presupposition, but I guess you ought to test it), but more likely and very reasonable is that they thought that the "mechanical stress" part of the "hammering with a slege hammer" action is kind of more significant. I doubt a typical owner of a camera can create much more mechanical stress than with a sledge hammer...
So in conclusion, while you're right, they could have been more diligent, the test is still quite informative as it is. It's good to know the cards are that rugged.
Regarding the wildcards in phrases feature mentioned in the review, that one was actually news to me. And the way it was used in the review (Google will fill it in automatically) was actually wrong: there's a wildcard in that query, but not within a phrase. Use that query and you get the exact same results if you drop the wildcard. But a query containing a wildcard within a phrase does in fact work as advertised - cool!
This would be a nice idea for a new google meta-utility: Enter any phrase with a wildcard, and you get a list of proposed substitutions for the wildcard, perhabs in descending order of occurence.
There is no doubt that DOOM 3s minimum system specifications can easily deliver a good gaming experience. We found it simply incredible that a system this old could run DOOM 3 at all, much less run it well. It may be hard to believe, but we can honestly recommend spending $50 on DOOM 3 if you have a system comparable to this. You can still have a very worthy DOOM 3 experience with it.
I know some of you are thinking that it would be tough to call gaming at 640x480 a good gaming experience, but the environments in DOOM 3 are very forgiving in terms of resolution as discussed in our IQ section. Do we suggest you use a higher resolution to place yourself in an even more immersive environment? Without a doubt, but it is hardly a requirement to really feel a part of the DOOM 3 story.
And in the conlusion:
All that aside, I'm still astonished by our experience on the min spec system. While we think you'll likely have the best experience at the resolution and quality levels we suggested, dont think for a second that those are the actual requirements for playing DOOM 3. If I had a 1.5GHz Pentium and GeForce 4MX system that was two years old, I would still purchase this game knowing I was in for an incredible experience.
So yeah, I think this article is fairly balanced. They don't pretend you need the absolute latest and greatest to play the game. I don't think it's very insightful, really - their conclusion seems to be "well it runs best on really fast systems, but we guess you can also run it on older systems in 800x600" which isn't exactly a surprising outcome. OTOH I guess they do test Doom 3 on a large range of systems which will give you a fairly good idea at what res and quality settings your own systems will be able to run it, so the article does have its uses.
Hell, I didn't even know bash was still in active development. It was always just bash to me, not bash-x.y.z. But then I guess I wouldn't notice the difference, really.
GamerDad is a prominent site? I had never heard of it in my life. It doesn't look overly professional (or perhabs commercial), either - not that that is necessarily a bad thing. Or for a more "empirical" approach: According to Google 161 pages link to http://www.gamerdad.com/ - and most of those links seem to stem from the site itself. In contrast, www.gamespot.com is linked to more than 300,000 times.
So defrag it and it should be close together, and possibly in one big file. That ought to give you something close to 30 MB/s, which like I said is really the lower bound for sustained read on modern HDs. That said, I'm sure Q3 takes more than 5 seconds to load a level, but I'm not so sure if installing a RAID would help there in any significant way.
A single scene uses 80+ MB of textures. That's a LOT of reading.
Not really. Modern mid-range 7200 rpm HDs have a peak sustained read of more than 30 MB/s - up to twice that speed actually, but that'd be the best case scenario. At that speed, it'd take all of 3 seconds to load the textures into memory. Loading times of 5 seconds would be more than acceptable to me...
Now, I won't disagree with your point on graphics cards needing a lot of internal memory, that much is certainly true. Although Doom 3's maximum supported (ie. used) graphics memory of 512 MB is kind of perverse considering it's twice as much as many low-end desktops and many high-end laptops ship with on their main memory banks.
I kind of know how you feel... I mean, it's not as bad because I normally speak the standard German dialect, but I often want to bring in the occasional colloquial term in messages which requires me to work against T9 suggesting correct word forms.:)
Oh, I absolutely agree. It's just that I probably won't be seeing a lot of Tibco's protocol while I expect to hear about OpenTalk regularly in the future which makes this kind of a shame.:)
Hm. I liked Rendezvous a lot. Didn't sound like all the other product names/buzzwords. It's also really fitting for a network protocol. But then I know what it means and how to pronounce it - I thought everybody does. Nevertheless, OpenTalk sounds like any generic buzzword.
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As for a), I had discussions on this very issue and I know what you're getting at. You're still wrong, though, the USA certainly is a democracy: "a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections". (M-W)
There are different definitions of the term: some (probably: most) apply to the USA, the more specific ones don't. However, most people usually deal with the more general terms and maybe are not even aware of the meaning of the more specific term. The burden of dealing with any ambiguity rests with those who are aware of the different meanings...
As for b) I guess most people are well aware of that. It just begs the question whether this is a good thing or not. From an outsiders point of view, the presidential election system is very weird - for instance, the existance of states which de facto already belong to one or the other party, making the elections mostly a battle for the remaining borderline candidate states. (I apologise for any incorrect terminology.)
...which, given the imprecision of "moore's law" type forecasts, means you should be suprised to see such a phone before Xmas 2005, but the current iPod-mini will probably be under some pressure by summer 2007.
Exactly! Like I said: It's only a matter of time till flash memory gets cheap enough for cell phones and similar devices become an alternative at least to the iPod mini class of devices. Thanks for "proving" my point.
My gf uses it on her iBook, so I do know it. I just don't see the point. The only thing it can do that I can't readily is tell me when I played a song last, which I suppose would come in handy for filtering rarely used songs.
Is that because of the music store or because of iTunes management capabilities? Because I never got that last one - I've got a lot of music, mostly my albums on my computer - they reside on their own partition, one folder per album. I can play them using the context menu entry that opens Foobar. I've never needed more management than that - why would anyone? Seriously, I'm asking. :)
I don't see mini hard drives being integrated in cell phones, but it's only a matter of time till flash memory gets cheap enough for cell phones and similar devices become an alternative at least to the iPod mini class of devices. Personally, I don't need 20 GB of music on the go, 1 or 2 GB would be more than sufficient - currently, I make do with multiple 250 MB mini CDs. 2 GB flash memory modules already exist, but for now they're prohibitively expensive.
And of course, the next generation of static RAM is just around the corner - where it has been for a while, admittedly.
Anyone can install a tarball and with great scripts like CompileProgram anyone can install it with one command.
No. You can do that, and I can probably figure it out easily enough, but no, most people can not install a program from source. Although I'm sure they could be enabled to do it - portage is a start, an easy to use graphical portage would be even more of a start.
Yes, that's what the article says: AMD is pretty much committed to the Socket-939 platform for the foreseeable future, and truth be told, an upgrade to a Socket-754 CPU is going to limit your motherboard or CPU options, which is an important factor since our theme today is budget gaming.
Their point is - the A64 3000+ and a 754 mainboard are so "cheap", it's worth giving up the upgradability of not going with a 939 board.
In a limited way, I tend to agree: don't put too much faith into being able to keep your mainboard for the next upgrade, chances are you'll upgrade it anyway.
However, all of this totally depends on how often you upgrade. If you intent to upgrade within another year, yeah, you'll be able to keep your mainboard if you bought "smart". But if you're going to wait say, 2 years, until your next major overhaul, your current mainboard will be obsolete, even though you bought a "future-proof" mainboard such as the 939 today. Even if Socket 939 is still in use by then, chances are more recent mainboards will run at a higher FSB, support different periphery, different RAM, and so on and so on.
What's more: calling that article a budget gamers guide is a stretch. The definition of what kind of a budget qualifies for a budget gamer is subjective, of course, but I doubt an A64 3000+ is the best bang for the buck right now. Socket-A boards are cheaper, as are Athlon XP (or Sempron, if you will) CPUs, and they aren't a lot slower, at least not compared to a an A64 3000+. And since you're a budget gamer, you're not likely to upgrade within a year, so you're going to toss your mainboard when you upgrade next time, and there's really no reason to buy an Athlon XP mainboard if you don't already have one.
I mean, I'm not saying he's insane for buying an Athlon 64 3000+, I suppose it's a lot better value for the money than going the Socket 939 route, but it's still a high-end choice, for seemingly no other reason than being high end. Considering the author of the story bought a A64 3000+, it kind of seems like he's trying to justify his investment.
As developers fervently try to make every game Final Fantasy length, and as worlds become increasingly more time-consuming to build, developers are going to naturally seek to reuse as much content as they can get away with.
;)
:)
The conclusion is, of course, to make content creation easier. And I'm sure this is already being done: instead of creating a chair from scratch, I guess most world editors offer chair templates.
An extreme example of "Rapid World Developement" is the Neverwinter Nights editor, which also brings up the danger this can pose: everything kind of looks the same. But then, the NWN editor probably was balanced too much towards easy usability to enable players instead of professionals developers to easily create maps.
Nevertheless, I'm sure in the future even tools targeted at professionals will enable them to create world as rapidly and actually much more rapidly than in the NWN editor. Instead of creating a tavern yourself, there might be a "tavern wizard" which creates a tavern complete with associated NPCs, side-quests and so on. Conceivable the same goes for whole cities.
The side-quests could be drawn from a huge pool of quests developed by other folks and dynamically adjusted to the context they're used in: "Go to the carpenter and buy a replacement chair for the one you broke." in the tavern, "Go to the tailor and fetch the the curtains I ordered for a reward." in an NPCs home.
The main story then could be woven into the template world manually by the designer. Heh - it's fun to make this up.
The final utopian way of world creation, of course, just takes a verbal description and transforms it into the right world, always doing the Right Thing when the input is too vague - a la Star Trek. I guess that's still some ways off.
Ah! I wasn't aware of those discussions, I thought "Really Simple Syndication" was something like a joke, trying to get RSS in line some of the humorous OSS acronyms.
How is my post a flamebait? I was used to the original RDF site summary definition, and surprised to see there were others... Naming conventions nonwithstanding, I still like RSS and use it a lot now that my browser is RSS-enabled.
Even the acronym itself in "implemented" inconsistently: the article expands it to Really Simple Syndication, the (I think) original and official meaning is RDF Site Summary (where RDF := Resource Description Framework) and IBM, among others, expands it to Rich site summary. Source: Google Definitions.
Oh well. I mean, on the one hand, you're correct, this wasn't carried out scientifically, but then again, it doesn't have to to be useful. All of the six main tests are representative or real live stress such a card might have to endure.
;)
I assume the actual article - the BBC's is only an abstract of an article in a UK digital photography magazine - contains more detailed explanations of what the tests entail, for instance at which temperature the cards were washed. The BBC says the cards were "boiled", so that should mean they're washed at 90 - and they survived, which kind of makes any further testing at lower temperatures superfluous. That said, repeated washing might have been interesting as it's somewhat likely the cards would die at some point. However, again, while this might be interesting in a scientific test, it doesn't have a lot of real life value: you are fairly likely to accidently wash one of your flash cards at some point, you're unlikely to do it twice, and increasingly unlikely to do it more often. Unless you're not so smart.
Hammering is a combination of mechanical stress and vibration...
I guess it is. But maybe the just presupposed that on the one hand mechanical vibrations don't do anything to a medium that doesn't have any moving parts (probably a reasonable presupposition, but I guess you ought to test it), but more likely and very reasonable is that they thought that the "mechanical stress" part of the "hammering with a slege hammer" action is kind of more significant. I doubt a typical owner of a camera can create much more mechanical stress than with a sledge hammer...
So in conclusion, while you're right, they could have been more diligent, the test is still quite informative as it is. It's good to know the cards are that rugged.
Well... the colors are different, but they still make me want to claw my eyes out, so it's basically the same.
Jesus christ, what is this, some kind of soap opera?! :)
The same is true in nearly all of Europe. And in Japan, seemingly.
They'd just license an engine from Id. Or Epic.
Regarding the wildcards in phrases feature mentioned in the review, that one was actually news to me. And the way it was used in the review (Google will fill it in automatically) was actually wrong: there's a wildcard in that query, but not within a phrase. Use that query and you get the exact same results if you drop the wildcard. But a query containing a wildcard within a phrase does in fact work as advertised - cool!
This would be a nice idea for a new google meta-utility: Enter any phrase with a wildcard, and you get a list of proposed substitutions for the wildcard, perhabs in descending order of occurence.
Hell, I didn't even know bash was still in active development. It was always just bash to me, not bash-x.y.z. But then I guess I wouldn't notice the difference, really.
GamerDad is a prominent site? I had never heard of it in my life. It doesn't look overly professional (or perhabs commercial), either - not that that is necessarily a bad thing. Or for a more "empirical" approach: According to Google 161 pages link to http://www.gamerdad.com/ - and most of those links seem to stem from the site itself. In contrast, www.gamespot.com is linked to more than 300,000 times.
So defrag it and it should be close together, and possibly in one big file. That ought to give you something close to 30 MB/s, which like I said is really the lower bound for sustained read on modern HDs. That said, I'm sure Q3 takes more than 5 seconds to load a level, but I'm not so sure if installing a RAID would help there in any significant way.
A single scene uses 80+ MB of textures. That's a LOT of reading.
Not really. Modern mid-range 7200 rpm HDs have a peak sustained read of more than 30 MB/s - up to twice that speed actually, but that'd be the best case scenario. At that speed, it'd take all of 3 seconds to load the textures into memory. Loading times of 5 seconds would be more than acceptable to me...
Now, I won't disagree with your point on graphics cards needing a lot of internal memory, that much is certainly true. Although Doom 3's maximum supported (ie. used) graphics memory of 512 MB is kind of perverse considering it's twice as much as many low-end desktops and many high-end laptops ship with on their main memory banks.
I kind of know how you feel... I mean, it's not as bad because I normally speak the standard German dialect, but I often want to bring in the occasional colloquial term in messages which requires me to work against T9 suggesting correct word forms. :)
Oh, I absolutely agree. It's just that I probably won't be seeing a lot of Tibco's protocol while I expect to hear about OpenTalk regularly in the future which makes this kind of a shame. :)
Hm. I liked Rendezvous a lot. Didn't sound like all the other product names/buzzwords. It's also really fitting for a network protocol. But then I know what it means and how to pronounce it - I thought everybody does. Nevertheless, OpenTalk sounds like any generic buzzword.