I worked as a judge at the Dreamblade release event (436 players, competing for large amounts of cash with a game that the majority of them had never played before. It was... an adventure), and attended the Q&A with the Wizards of the Coast staff that took place the day before.
D&D Minis and Dreamblade are separate products, and the success of one won't really affect the other. It was noted at the Q&A that obligations to the brands for both D&D and Star Wars minis make it implausible to push those games in a direction that would make them suitable for a highly competitive tournament direction. A big part of the vision for Dreamblade was a game where the rules/gameplay and the IP situation would be suitable for a (large, cash prize) competitive environment.
It's also worth noting that this is a far different vision than Hecatomb had.
The game is fun. I'm not a minis gamer, so I don't know how that crowd will take it, but I'd describe it more as a collectible board game. It's got an interesting opening-midgame-endgame progression, where the objectives change significantly. Strategy seems subtle and non-obvious. I think it has potential.
Only time will tell, obviously.
I am confident that there will be large (prize-pool-wise, at least) Dreamblade events at next year's GenCon. Four releases (including the one premiered last week) are completed; one more is almost finished, and the 6th set is currently in development. The staff that Wizards has on development of the game and on organized play are the heavy hitters: it's the same people who are running the Pro Tour for Magic. Obviously, if the game flops, they'll discontinue it, but every sign I see suggests that they're going to take time to try to build this game and help it succeed.
The big question in my mind is whether the game is simple and attractive enough for casual gamers to enjoy. The artwork and flavor are definitely there, but the game may play a little too slowly. Folks who worked on the game insist that once you learn how to play, games should only take 20-30 minutes, but I have some lingering scepticism about that.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record
on
Homeless Wires?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Free Geek has a list of links to organizations, which (like Free Geek itself) promote computer reuse and recycling. The stuff you've got really doesn't belong in a dump, even if it's reached the point of being of no use to anyone.
If you're not near any of the places listed, please consider shipping your stuff to one of them. Most are nonprofits, which means you can compensate for some of your cost with a tax deduction, and you can feel good about knowing that your old crap is either being given to people who wouldn't otherwise have access to it, or is being taken apart and disposed of properly, rather than taking up space in a landfill and potentially leaching nasty chemicals (mmm, heavy metals).
contact the people at Free Geek -- all the machines they give away come with modems, and all the modems they get are scavenged from donated machines, so this is probably an issue that they have dealt with. they're also just a great organization. they can probably help with some of the other issues as well; they've been giving away refurbished linux machines to computer illiterate people for years now (a machine comes with a class on how to use a computer, and i think 18 months of tech support), so they've tackled a lot of these problems.
The Deschutes brewery recently ramped up production to a scale similar to Redhook. Other microbreweries with commercial levels of production in Oregon are Full Sail, Rogue, Widmer, Bridgeport... Portland actually has more breweries than any other metropolitan area in the world.
It's certainly true that Oly has for many years now been essentially just another Commercial American Pale Lager, but pre-prohibition it was a well known brewery that was one of the first west of Milwaukee to put out product that got national attention.
The word problem can be solved through straighforward deductive logic. There's no need to backtrack more than a single step. Figuring that sort of thing out is probably a key step in finishing in time.
In order to help your brain percieve the motion in a film as smooth, each frame is shown twice. While the film is stopped in front of the lens, the "shutter" (actually a spinning fan blade) blacks the lens and then exposes the film again. The the shutter blocks the lens again, the film is advanced, and the process repeats.
In really large theaters, it is actually necessary to show each frame 3 times, for an effective framerate of 72 fps (though any given frame is still up for 1/24th of a second total).
Encryption algorithms don't use floating point operations, it's all integer ops (usually in the form of bitwise logical operators like shift, xor, and...).
Regular analog TV is 480i, and the majority of non-HDTV (or SDTV, which people usually just lump into HDTV) televisions can't display a progressive scan DVD picture (which is 480p, so double the piture information, though not exactly 'twice the resolution'). Some can, but a safe assumption is that you're going to have to buy a digital or digital-ready set AND a pregrssive scan DVD player in order to get the benefits of either for your movie watching.
signal11.com has nothing to do with the slashdot user signal11. signal11.com is run by slashdot user ajdub, who has never been very involved as a slashdot user.
We both worked out of his apartment for a number of months on a contract job together, so I should know.
Please elaborate. It's my understanding that not shipping enough units for the Christmas rush has had a hugely nagative impact on Sony's developer relations -- because there weren't as many units sold as expected, fewer games were sold, causing developers and publishers to fall short on earnings for the quarter (compounding this was the overspending on advertising and whatnot).
I believe this has been a factor in some developers expanding their efforts on other consoles. These factors make me pretty suspicious of a claim that Sony was holding back on consoles.
Something that seems apparent from the New Scientist diagram, but isn't mentioned in any of the articles I've read, is that it appears that this technology might enable huge improvements in refresh rate and allow a lot of improvements through development of the phosphors used in the screen.
A normal CRT uses an electromagnetic coil to direct the spray of electrons coming of the (relatively small) cathode at the back of the monitor. The lines of the screen are literally traced out by the stream. This puts hard limits on the requirements for a phosphor -- the phosphor has to be designed to be as bright as possible for the entire length of time it takes to refresh the whole screen, and then fades out as quickly as possible after that interval. This is a difficult requirement and one that can really only be approximated.
This screen, however, uses a large cathode and localized electromagnetic fields (one per pixel) to direct the beam. That means the screen is refreshing all over, all the time, instead of a line at a time. Phosphors for this new monitor, then, need not be designed to stay at full intensity for anywhere near as long as traditional CRT phosphors, which means that they can probably be made to improve the contrast significantly.
I'm no expert on this, so corrections are welcome... but as I understand it, the light0gun model and it's impact on phosphor choices has long been one of the biggest impediments in CRT improvement, and it sure looks to me like this design breaks that problem down very efficiently.
This is innaccurate. What they did was this: Beta versions of Win3.1 ran a DR-DOS detection routine; if the routine determined that it was running on a DR-DOS, a message box popped up that read "Non-fatal error detected" and gave the user the option to continue the installation or quit. This was removed from the release version of Windows 3.1. It's still crummy behavior, but it's a good bit different than "[tweaking] Windows 3.x to not run on DR-DOS".
load windows 95 from a floppy? oh, for the privledge of loading windows 95 from a floppy!
seriously, though, at my first job in high school, i was stuck doing a NT 3.51 install from floppies. 30 of them. 1.8 meg floppies that seemed to just push the tolerances of the target floppy drive. so i'd get 8-10 disks into the install, and the thing would die, and i had to start all over again.
we ended up giving up on the project.
the *really* stupid bit about it was that we had a cd, but the assistant to the head of the agency wouldn't approve purchases of cd-rom drives, thinking that they were only useful for games and porn. the head of the agency had one, and we tried that, but it was a NEC 3x-speed cd rom which seems to have been the only nec drive ever to not be on the NT HCL... go figure.
The company's Terms of Service are likely just fallout from their other problems. Wired reported last week that the BBB is mad at them for persistent reports of fradulent charges. It's my guess that they are just trying to do damage control. Though it certainly seems unlikely that they will obtain any benefit for it.
In a similar note, the last company I worked for had as part of their NDA a nondisparagement clause. "You agree not to talk smack about The Company, its business practices, its officers, etc etc". Anybody know how enforecable such an agreement is, especially for people who are no longer with the company? Seems questionable to me.
Your post is the real troll here, but I'll defend myself briefly, and let it go.
I was wrong about the recompilation just being done with the optimizing compiler. But the Intel guy who passed on the binary to Tom writes, "The engineer would have been able to squeeze some more speed with assembler, but we rather wanted to make a point that 'SSE2 is easy to implement"', especially compared to the author's comment on how he had to suffer to implement the MMX version."
Of course the Intel employees have a pro-Intel bent. But they are engineers, and they aren't making the claims that their initial numbers prove that the P4 is 682% faster than Tom thought, or whatever. They gave some numbers from their own tests showing improvement, and then they gave the binary to Tom so he could properly test it.
Props to anyone for taking the time to make things work better on whatever platform. Shame on them for roleplaying marketing people at the same time.
That conclusion is a little misleading, especially in light of the ongoing Tom's Hardware series of articles. While they may be correct in their conclusions, their reasoning is a little shoddy.
To summarize: what they have done is taken a hand optimized version of flask and compared encoding results against the original, on some bit of material which they chose (and which is NOT the same as the Tom's Hardware.vob that was used for his tests). This difference is expressed as a percentage increase. They then assume that this percentage increase can be applied to Tom's results, and conclude from this number swapping that their version is faster on Athlons than Tom's version is on P4s. This despite the facts that the testbeds are different and the input and output are different. No review site who wanted to continue getting review samples would ever use such shoddy methodology.
Bottom line: what the whole Tom's situation shows is that testing must be done carefully and methodically, and the way you state your conclusions must be done with even more care. This article, while showing promise for the Athlon relative to the P4, is neither coreful nor methodical, and the reasonable conclusion is "the Athlon version of Flask can be optimized further than the version used in some of the Tom's tests".
It's also clear that these folks have a <sarcasm>mild</sarcasm> pro-AMD bent. "When will it be finished? Not until the Intel Pentium 4 is completely embarrassed." They also fail to note that the P4 optimized version was done without hand optimization, via setting compile flags on Intel's compiler. There is no doubt room for improvement on that platform as well.
5% in california doesn't really seem like such a big difference when you realize that the initial count had bush winning by THREE-ONE HUNDREDTHS of a percent. 5% vs 0.03%.
Abrash talks about the memory architecture in the article. The system uses a unified memory architecture, so there is no "video memory". I can't imagine that the console is going to require you to keep two copies of textures in the same memory pool if you are using OpenGL.
Slashdot Mirror
Wizards hasn't had the Pokemon license for four years or so. Magic is their big property. It might also be Hasbro's biggest property, as well.
I'm not going to go into specifics, but I think you've just made me several thousand dollars richer. Have a very, very nice day.
Wizards owned GenCon for a time, but sold it to WotC founder Peter Adkison, who is not longer with them.
I worked as a judge at the Dreamblade release event (436 players, competing for large amounts of cash with a game that the majority of them had never played before. It was... an adventure), and attended the Q&A with the Wizards of the Coast staff that took place the day before.
D&D Minis and Dreamblade are separate products, and the success of one won't really affect the other. It was noted at the Q&A that obligations to the brands for both D&D and Star Wars minis make it implausible to push those games in a direction that would make them suitable for a highly competitive tournament direction. A big part of the vision for Dreamblade was a game where the rules/gameplay and the IP situation would be suitable for a (large, cash prize) competitive environment.
It's also worth noting that this is a far different vision than Hecatomb had.
The game is fun. I'm not a minis gamer, so I don't know how that crowd will take it, but I'd describe it more as a collectible board game. It's got an interesting opening-midgame-endgame progression, where the objectives change significantly. Strategy seems subtle and non-obvious. I think it has potential.
Only time will tell, obviously.
I am confident that there will be large (prize-pool-wise, at least) Dreamblade events at next year's GenCon. Four releases (including the one premiered last week) are completed; one more is almost finished, and the 6th set is currently in development. The staff that Wizards has on development of the game and on organized play are the heavy hitters: it's the same people who are running the Pro Tour for Magic. Obviously, if the game flops, they'll discontinue it, but every sign I see suggests that they're going to take time to try to build this game and help it succeed.
The big question in my mind is whether the game is simple and attractive enough for casual gamers to enjoy. The artwork and flavor are definitely there, but the game may play a little too slowly. Folks who worked on the game insist that once you learn how to play, games should only take 20-30 minutes, but I have some lingering scepticism about that.
Free Geek has a list of links to organizations, which (like Free Geek itself) promote computer reuse and recycling. The stuff you've got really doesn't belong in a dump, even if it's reached the point of being of no use to anyone.
If you're not near any of the places listed, please consider shipping your stuff to one of them. Most are nonprofits, which means you can compensate for some of your cost with a tax deduction, and you can feel good about knowing that your old crap is either being given to people who wouldn't otherwise have access to it, or is being taken apart and disposed of properly, rather than taking up space in a landfill and potentially leaching nasty chemicals (mmm, heavy metals).
contact the people at Free Geek -- all the machines they give away come with modems, and all the modems they get are scavenged from donated machines, so this is probably an issue that they have dealt with. they're also just a great organization. they can probably help with some of the other issues as well; they've been giving away refurbished linux machines to computer illiterate people for years now (a machine comes with a class on how to use a computer, and i think 18 months of tech support), so they've tackled a lot of these problems.
there's nothing in his post that indicates that he's an extract brewer... everybody boils.
The Deschutes brewery recently ramped up production to a scale similar to Redhook. Other microbreweries with commercial levels of production in Oregon are Full Sail, Rogue, Widmer, Bridgeport... Portland actually has more breweries than any other metropolitan area in the world.
It's certainly true that Oly has for many years now been essentially just another Commercial American Pale Lager, but pre-prohibition it was a well known brewery that was one of the first west of Milwaukee to put out product that got national attention.
The word problem can be solved through straighforward deductive logic. There's no need to backtrack more than a single step. Figuring that sort of thing out is probably a key step in finishing in time.
read the article. it's reversed in this setup.
can i suggest a remake of john cage's 4'33" instead?
In really large theaters, it is actually necessary to show each frame 3 times, for an effective framerate of 72 fps (though any given frame is still up for 1/24th of a second total).
Encryption algorithms don't use floating point operations, it's all integer ops (usually in the form of bitwise logical operators like shift, xor, and...).
Regular analog TV is 480i, and the majority of non-HDTV (or SDTV, which people usually just lump into HDTV) televisions can't display a progressive scan DVD picture (which is 480p, so double the piture information, though not exactly 'twice the resolution'). Some can, but a safe assumption is that you're going to have to buy a digital or digital-ready set AND a pregrssive scan DVD player in order to get the benefits of either for your movie watching.
signal11.com has nothing to do with the slashdot user signal11. signal11.com is run by slashdot user ajdub, who has never been very involved as a slashdot user.
We both worked out of his apartment for a number of months on a contract job together, so I should know.
I believe this has been a factor in some developers expanding their efforts on other consoles. These factors make me pretty suspicious of a claim that Sony was holding back on consoles.
A normal CRT uses an electromagnetic coil to direct the spray of electrons coming of the (relatively small) cathode at the back of the monitor. The lines of the screen are literally traced out by the stream. This puts hard limits on the requirements for a phosphor -- the phosphor has to be designed to be as bright as possible for the entire length of time it takes to refresh the whole screen, and then fades out as quickly as possible after that interval. This is a difficult requirement and one that can really only be approximated.
This screen, however, uses a large cathode and localized electromagnetic fields (one per pixel) to direct the beam. That means the screen is refreshing all over, all the time, instead of a line at a time. Phosphors for this new monitor, then, need not be designed to stay at full intensity for anywhere near as long as traditional CRT phosphors, which means that they can probably be made to improve the contrast significantly.
I'm no expert on this, so corrections are welcome... but as I understand it, the light0gun model and it's impact on phosphor choices has long been one of the biggest impediments in CRT improvement, and it sure looks to me like this design breaks that problem down very efficiently.
This is innaccurate. What they did was this: Beta versions of Win3.1 ran a DR-DOS detection routine; if the routine determined that it was running on a DR-DOS, a message box popped up that read "Non-fatal error detected" and gave the user the option to continue the installation or quit. This was removed from the release version of Windows 3.1. It's still crummy behavior, but it's a good bit different than "[tweaking] Windows 3.x to not run on DR-DOS".
load windows 95 from a floppy? oh, for the privledge of loading windows 95 from a floppy!
seriously, though, at my first job in high school, i was stuck doing a NT 3.51 install from floppies. 30 of them. 1.8 meg floppies that seemed to just push the tolerances of the target floppy drive. so i'd get 8-10 disks into the install, and the thing would die, and i had to start all over again.
we ended up giving up on the project.
the *really* stupid bit about it was that we had a cd, but the assistant to the head of the agency wouldn't approve purchases of cd-rom drives, thinking that they were only useful for games and porn. the head of the agency had one, and we tried that, but it was a NEC 3x-speed cd rom which seems to have been the only nec drive ever to not be on the NT HCL... go figure.
The company's Terms of Service are likely just fallout from their other problems. Wired reported last week that the BBB is mad at them for persistent reports of fradulent charges. It's my guess that they are just trying to do damage control. Though it certainly seems unlikely that they will obtain any benefit for it.
In a similar note, the last company I worked for had as part of their NDA a nondisparagement clause. "You agree not to talk smack about The Company, its business practices, its officers, etc etc". Anybody know how enforecable such an agreement is, especially for people who are no longer with the company? Seems questionable to me.
Your post is the real troll here, but I'll defend myself briefly, and let it go.
I was wrong about the recompilation just being done with the optimizing compiler. But the Intel guy who passed on the binary to Tom writes, "The engineer would have been able to squeeze some more speed with assembler, but we rather wanted to make a point that 'SSE2 is easy to implement"', especially compared to the author's comment on how he had to suffer to implement the MMX version."
Of course the Intel employees have a pro-Intel bent. But they are engineers, and they aren't making the claims that their initial numbers prove that the P4 is 682% faster than Tom thought, or whatever. They gave some numbers from their own tests showing improvement, and then they gave the binary to Tom so he could properly test it.
Props to anyone for taking the time to make things work better on whatever platform. Shame on them for roleplaying marketing people at the same time.
That conclusion is a little misleading, especially in light of the ongoing Tom's Hardware series of articles. While they may be correct in their conclusions, their reasoning is a little shoddy.
.vob that was used for his tests). This difference is expressed as a percentage increase. They then assume that this percentage increase can be applied to Tom's results, and conclude from this number swapping that their version is faster on Athlons than Tom's version is on P4s. This despite the facts that the testbeds are different and the input and output are different. No review site who wanted to continue getting review samples would ever use such shoddy methodology.
To summarize: what they have done is taken a hand optimized version of flask and compared encoding results against the original, on some bit of material which they chose (and which is NOT the same as the Tom's Hardware
Bottom line: what the whole Tom's situation shows is that testing must be done carefully and methodically, and the way you state your conclusions must be done with even more care. This article, while showing promise for the Athlon relative to the P4, is neither coreful nor methodical, and the reasonable conclusion is "the Athlon version of Flask can be optimized further than the version used in some of the Tom's tests".
It's also clear that these folks have a <sarcasm>mild</sarcasm> pro-AMD bent. "When will it be finished? Not until the Intel Pentium 4 is completely embarrassed." They also fail to note that the P4 optimized version was done without hand optimization, via setting compile flags on Intel's compiler. There is no doubt room for improvement on that platform as well.
5% in california doesn't really seem like such a big difference when you realize that the initial count had bush winning by THREE-ONE HUNDREDTHS of a percent. 5% vs 0.03%.
it leaves out all of the x-box specs, conspicuously enough...
Abrash talks about the memory architecture in the article. The system uses a unified memory architecture, so there is no "video memory". I can't imagine that the console is going to require you to keep two copies of textures in the same memory pool if you are using OpenGL.