It looks like laptops and low spec general purpose machines are dragging those scores down. Around 7.1% were running on an Intel HD Graphics 4000, which is almost a hate crime against gaming ^^
I guess the point I'm making is that if a person so chooses they can enjoy the benefits of a gaming rig that is much better than the latest gen consoles. Gaming is pretty ubiquitous now, so I'm not surprised to see the hardware summary showing people using gear that I wouldn't have used even 5 years back. Let's face it, lots of Steam games aren't exactly demanding on the hardware in any case.
I'm running a pair of GTX 670s at present on a i7 3770k with 16GB of RAM clocked to around 2ghz (note: it's not just for gaming, I do other demanding stuff on this machine). Next year I expect to upgrade to a pair of 980s. The thing is, with PC gaming, you're not restricted in the same way as a console. It's not a fairly cheap to manufacture spec that is two years out of date before the console even hits the shelves. You can choose to keep upgrading parts as newer gear becomes available. I'm not having to run my games at 720p or lower like many console games just to hit the target of 30FPS. Most games I own will run at 1080p at 60-100FPS, which is great because 30FPS looks really jerky to my eyes.
In five years time, console players will still likely be stuck on the same hardware as they have today, so that limits the games they can play. I can choose to buy new parts to support my passion for high quality gaming. It's one of the things I like more about PC gaming...that, and having a keyboard / mouse / controllers.
Perhaps on consoles, but I though we were talking about high performance machines, not the dinky little things the bro's play on ^^ Consoles are great value for money, but they're pretty lightweight compared to a decent PC rig.
I actually didn't say anything even remotely linked to burning plantations. In fact, enfranchising the slaves as owners of the plantations is pretty well the solution I would have been looking for, along with providing them full citizenship rights, education and the like. The slaves should have been immediately emancipated, and the property owners property forfeit to them as restitution. It's common law now that criminals forfeit their ill gotten gains. Even the mentioned solution of making them work for 20 years seems unreasonable number of people who wouldn't live long enough to ever see that pay day come. That's little different to indentured servitude, a more modern name we use for slavery today.
It's monstrous to hear from supposedly educated people that the believe it's better for everyone for entire generations of millions of people to stay enslaved.
Not sure where you're getting your Beaglebone Black's from, but over here in Aus they are about the same price as a Raspberry Pi from Element 14. I think my Pi's cost $35 for a bare board and the BBB cost maybe $45, but that came with a processor that's twice as fast and with 2GB of in-built memory. Once you added a memory card to the Pi they came to almost the same price - but the Pi ran about half as fast.
I'd love a BBB with 1GB RAM, slightly faster CPU as well..but, for now, they're pretty good as is.
You missed one possibility, people who are enthusiastic gamers and want to game on a platform that is flat out compiled and optimised for playing games. That's not Linux today, but...if any platform can get there, it's Linux.
Windows is pretty megalithic. It's there to support general purpose computing and tries to be useful for everyone, and that's great. I work with Windows every day. I develop code for Windows. But I also run Linux and I can see a possible future where dual booting into a Linux optimised to play games at full tilt, low input lag, pedal to metal, no wasted cycles or memory is a reality.
Look into the work John Carmack recently did to make the Samsung Galaxy 4 phone capable of working as an Oculus Rift device. He cut through layers of crap, got access to the metal in some places and squeezed that phone for all it's worth to make it capable of displaying VR content.
Linux is flexible, multi-purpose and yet still capable of being fine tuned to a very specific workload. Steam OS has the potential to give us the stripped down, bare backing, fast and lean OS we need to get...a few more FPS and lower input lag:D
Oh yeh, if you think that's not too important, try out the VR gear that's out there now, and you'll start to see why input lag and high performance are likely to be key factors in the next few years.
I think you'll love it. I've tried out Unreal Engine and it's a really great environment to develop with. It has a great toolkit and the code is really sweet looking and tidy. For me though, the look and power of CRYENGINE is worth the much higher pain and learning curve:D I've picked up an Oculus Rift DK2 kit and had a bit of a run around using that gear - it's like a little taste of the future. CRYENGINE doesn't support it yet, but there's talk they will in the future.
On a personal level, I really hope you do find your passion again. It's easy to lose sight of how fulfilling programming can be when you work on something your passionate about. I wake up in the morning and I'm keen to start back on my project. I've recently re-learnt matrices and vectors and learnt quaternions, and finally I have a use for them (35 years after initially learning them at school) so I love knowing them now (particularly quaternions).
I'm digging through a codebase of ~260,000 lines, much of which is fairly badly documented headers (not all the implementation is released to EaaS subscribers)...and loving it! It's like a treasure hunt, finding how something threads through the system, how to make it do what I want. When you start to see your animated characters moving and reacting based on code you wrote, well, that's what programming is about for me.
I have no illusions, the tasks I am setting for myself will takes years of work to complete, the thing is...finally, once again, I am enjoying the journey. I hope you enjoy yours too!
"Imagine an alternate history where they demanded, not the immediate abolishment of slavery but a "born free" act where any child born in the U.S. was a free citizen regardless of parentage."
That sounds great for everyone, except the slaves.
Once a task has been automated to the point that a reliable mass market tool is available to do the work for you, what possible reason can there still be to do it by hand any more? We use computers precisely because they automate mundane tasks. Should we switch back to having women working old switchboards to make a phone call just so we can preserve that no longer needed skill? Should farmers plough their fields using oxen just so they retain a skill that's no longer relevant? Should programmers have to write assembler and calculate their own offsets for jumps (JMP) because that is now automated.
As we move higher and higher into automation and abstraction it provides us more leverage and greater speed at completing mundane tasks. Unless you're Amish you should embrace the automation and start looking at ways to solve tomorrow's problems, not the ones solved years ago. Learn to let go of the past and embrace the future.
As cool as flipping a bunch of switches sounds, the smart programmers hand wrote their assembly code then entered it into the machine using a line editor into a BASIC programme that would assemble it into binary. There were two ways to get binary code into my old OSI C1P Challenger, one was to punch in a series of two digit numbers, which you would first have needed to hand assemble and convert to the binary operands using a table...the other was write an assembler and simply type it straight into the machine as lines of assembly and have the machine do it for you. I never hand converted my assembly code to binary ever again after figuring out that's what computers were made for:D
That really depends more on what you're programming and your work environment. If you're writing rocket control systems for nasa or the HUD for the Joint Strike Fighter then you will certainly be approaching it with more engineering skills than art skills. Conversely, if you're working on an indie game as a passion project, then likely you will utilise more art skills. Both approaches need to use the problem solving skills, but one gives the programmer more freedom to experiment and express themselves, and the other is a bit more like constructing a skyscraper. You're not solving any new problems, just applying known solutions, documenting the crap out of things, planning things years in advance, etc.
I spent my formative years doing programming as an art, then entered uni and again more work as an art. I broke new ground (for the time) and solved interesting problems. Later, when I was developing financial services software it became more and more like tedious bookwork. We'd solved all the interesting problems and were just slapping out small sections of exactly the same sort of code over and over. You know the stuff, query the DB, marshall it through layer after layer of crap, display it on a screen, react to the thing they clicked, repeat.
In the end I burnt out on the whole thing as it had lost it's challenge and was just work-a-day tedium grinding out business apps for large corporations. I was the team leader, lead programmer, and customer facing tech - so there really wasn't much more I could do except slip into management.
As it happens though, life changed again and I found myself with a lot of free time again. After not programming for a couple of years I took it up again two years ago to work on something that *I* wanted to do - a game. Now I'm working with CRYENGINE, solving really tough problems, applying engineering to the massive codebase, and art to the way I structure it. I'm learning new techniques and studying some truly awesome code and...loving programming again.
If you feel it's just engineering, then maybe it's time for a change or perhaps some home project that reawakens the magic and art of programming for you again.
There's no ads on youtube, never have been...oh wait, are you one of those people who is unable to install a simple ad-blocking extension?
No, the real scourge of youtube and is the sheer number of videos of some douche doing a straight to cam in a slow rambling talk about how to do some really simple thing e.g. change a registry key to fix something or other. It would take just a two line description in the text to say how to do it, but instead they want you to watch an add laden piece of crap in the hope of actually monetising this tiny piece of information. Worse still are the ones where it's just a basic slide show of the actual text on a background, with some awful music blaring over the whole thing. The video is timed for people with the reading speed and skills of an 8 year old.
Google tends to prioritise these over useful text sites, because, well, it's their content after all and it delivers ads to people and they are an ad company.
Knowing China's appalling record on human rights they will probably cut corners and simply use existing human brains in an android body, inadvertently creating the cyberman army from Doctor Who.
I run an SLI setup and also have 3D glasses, the NVidia ones. Switching to a stereo rendering mode drops my framerate by only a few percent in general. If I'm getting 60fps on normal mode, then i'll probably get 56fps in stereo.
Of course, the Rift doesn't like SLI because SLI works by processing the next two frames on the two different cards, giving you an input lag of one extra frame. In most games this is hardly noticeable, if at all, but in the Rift it is vomit inducing.
The copyright for a movie character belongs to the production team that created that character, rather than an actor who simply portrayed them in one or more films. Actors own the right to their own image, but when they play a character they are portraying an image that the production company owns - presumably this is covered in their contracts. They can't simply walk down to the mall and hold out a hat dressed as Captain Jack, even if they played that role once.
It takes quite a few people to create the image of a lead character, and each has to assign their rights over that image to the production company as a standard part of their contract. If they don't, it becomes impossible for the company to conduct business using the image.
So while it takes a village to make a movie character (original concept, script writer, concept artist, wardrobe, make-up, director, art director, etc), a comic character is often created by just one party - the artist, and possibly a separate writer. They make the most sizeable contribution towards having that character available to the wider public...but...they too need to hand over those rights in order for the whole chain of production to run through.
Sure, they deserve a better deal that most of them get, but so most creative people. Then again, if your goal is to make money, you should have gone into management. It's indoors work with no heavy lifting, and you get to reap the rewards of everyone else's hard labour ^^
I spent literally years talking to Jehova's Witnesses who came around to 'teach' my mum 'the truth'. Every single time I brought up anything contentious or 'off script' (they read from a script pretty much like call centre personnel) they would either claim it wasn't in the bible or that it didn't mean what it said, or they would have to 'get back to me on that'. They never once got back to me on anything.
I argued using scripture from their own bible and pointed out the passages I was having difficulty with - mostly they had never heard of those passages, despite claiming to read the entire bible once every three years.
Scripture was either the literal truth or it wasn't depending on whether they needed it to be literal or just 'a dream'.
You can't ever win against people who have already taken up an entrenched position and are not willing to even consider they have a poor interpretation or notice the numerous inconsistencies and contradictions.
Even for the case where the bible myth is based off a common ancestor myth shared by the Gilgmesh story it still shows that the bible myth is only that - a myth, a story. What we know for certain is that the bible myth is neither the original telling of that story nor backed up by any credible evidence of world wide flooding.
You can get a Beaglebone Black for close to the same money, with 2GB of storage built in, 512MB RAM, a processor that is twice as fast, more GPIO pins, a pair of USB ports, and a micro-SD card slot.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like laptops and low spec general purpose machines are dragging those scores down. Around 7.1% were running on an Intel HD Graphics 4000, which is almost a hate crime against gaming ^^
I guess the point I'm making is that if a person so chooses they can enjoy the benefits of a gaming rig that is much better than the latest gen consoles. Gaming is pretty ubiquitous now, so I'm not surprised to see the hardware summary showing people using gear that I wouldn't have used even 5 years back. Let's face it, lots of Steam games aren't exactly demanding on the hardware in any case.
I'm running a pair of GTX 670s at present on a i7 3770k with 16GB of RAM clocked to around 2ghz (note: it's not just for gaming, I do other demanding stuff on this machine). Next year I expect to upgrade to a pair of 980s. The thing is, with PC gaming, you're not restricted in the same way as a console. It's not a fairly cheap to manufacture spec that is two years out of date before the console even hits the shelves. You can choose to keep upgrading parts as newer gear becomes available. I'm not having to run my games at 720p or lower like many console games just to hit the target of 30FPS. Most games I own will run at 1080p at 60-100FPS, which is great because 30FPS looks really jerky to my eyes.
In five years time, console players will still likely be stuck on the same hardware as they have today, so that limits the games they can play. I can choose to buy new parts to support my passion for high quality gaming. It's one of the things I like more about PC gaming...that, and having a keyboard / mouse / controllers.
Perhaps on consoles, but I though we were talking about high performance machines, not the dinky little things the bro's play on ^^ Consoles are great value for money, but they're pretty lightweight compared to a decent PC rig.
I actually didn't say anything even remotely linked to burning plantations. In fact, enfranchising the slaves as owners of the plantations is pretty well the solution I would have been looking for, along with providing them full citizenship rights, education and the like. The slaves should have been immediately emancipated, and the property owners property forfeit to them as restitution. It's common law now that criminals forfeit their ill gotten gains. Even the mentioned solution of making them work for 20 years seems unreasonable number of people who wouldn't live long enough to ever see that pay day come. That's little different to indentured servitude, a more modern name we use for slavery today.
It's monstrous to hear from supposedly educated people that the believe it's better for everyone for entire generations of millions of people to stay enslaved.
Love the signature. Hunt the Wumpus was one of the first games I ever played.
Not sure where you're getting your Beaglebone Black's from, but over here in Aus they are about the same price as a Raspberry Pi from Element 14. I think my Pi's cost $35 for a bare board and the BBB cost maybe $45, but that came with a processor that's twice as fast and with 2GB of in-built memory. Once you added a memory card to the Pi they came to almost the same price - but the Pi ran about half as fast.
I'd love a BBB with 1GB RAM, slightly faster CPU as well..but, for now, they're pretty good as is.
You missed one possibility, people who are enthusiastic gamers and want to game on a platform that is flat out compiled and optimised for playing games. That's not Linux today, but...if any platform can get there, it's Linux.
Windows is pretty megalithic. It's there to support general purpose computing and tries to be useful for everyone, and that's great. I work with Windows every day. I develop code for Windows. But I also run Linux and I can see a possible future where dual booting into a Linux optimised to play games at full tilt, low input lag, pedal to metal, no wasted cycles or memory is a reality.
Look into the work John Carmack recently did to make the Samsung Galaxy 4 phone capable of working as an Oculus Rift device. He cut through layers of crap, got access to the metal in some places and squeezed that phone for all it's worth to make it capable of displaying VR content.
Linux is flexible, multi-purpose and yet still capable of being fine tuned to a very specific workload. Steam OS has the potential to give us the stripped down, bare backing, fast and lean OS we need to get...a few more FPS and lower input lag :D
Oh yeh, if you think that's not too important, try out the VR gear that's out there now, and you'll start to see why input lag and high performance are likely to be key factors in the next few years.
I think you'll love it. I've tried out Unreal Engine and it's a really great environment to develop with. It has a great toolkit and the code is really sweet looking and tidy. For me though, the look and power of CRYENGINE is worth the much higher pain and learning curve :D I've picked up an Oculus Rift DK2 kit and had a bit of a run around using that gear - it's like a little taste of the future. CRYENGINE doesn't support it yet, but there's talk they will in the future.
On a personal level, I really hope you do find your passion again. It's easy to lose sight of how fulfilling programming can be when you work on something your passionate about. I wake up in the morning and I'm keen to start back on my project. I've recently re-learnt matrices and vectors and learnt quaternions, and finally I have a use for them (35 years after initially learning them at school) so I love knowing them now (particularly quaternions).
I'm digging through a codebase of ~260,000 lines, much of which is fairly badly documented headers (not all the implementation is released to EaaS subscribers)...and loving it! It's like a treasure hunt, finding how something threads through the system, how to make it do what I want. When you start to see your animated characters moving and reacting based on code you wrote, well, that's what programming is about for me.
I have no illusions, the tasks I am setting for myself will takes years of work to complete, the thing is...finally, once again, I am enjoying the journey. I hope you enjoy yours too!
"Imagine an alternate history where they demanded, not the immediate abolishment of slavery but a "born free" act where any child born in the U.S. was a free citizen regardless of parentage."
That sounds great for everyone, except the slaves.
Once a task has been automated to the point that a reliable mass market tool is available to do the work for you, what possible reason can there still be to do it by hand any more? We use computers precisely because they automate mundane tasks. Should we switch back to having women working old switchboards to make a phone call just so we can preserve that no longer needed skill? Should farmers plough their fields using oxen just so they retain a skill that's no longer relevant? Should programmers have to write assembler and calculate their own offsets for jumps (JMP) because that is now automated.
As we move higher and higher into automation and abstraction it provides us more leverage and greater speed at completing mundane tasks. Unless you're Amish you should embrace the automation and start looking at ways to solve tomorrow's problems, not the ones solved years ago. Learn to let go of the past and embrace the future.
As cool as flipping a bunch of switches sounds, the smart programmers hand wrote their assembly code then entered it into the machine using a line editor into a BASIC programme that would assemble it into binary. There were two ways to get binary code into my old OSI C1P Challenger, one was to punch in a series of two digit numbers, which you would first have needed to hand assemble and convert to the binary operands using a table...the other was write an assembler and simply type it straight into the machine as lines of assembly and have the machine do it for you. I never hand converted my assembly code to binary ever again after figuring out that's what computers were made for :D
That really depends more on what you're programming and your work environment. If you're writing rocket control systems for nasa or the HUD for the Joint Strike Fighter then you will certainly be approaching it with more engineering skills than art skills. Conversely, if you're working on an indie game as a passion project, then likely you will utilise more art skills. Both approaches need to use the problem solving skills, but one gives the programmer more freedom to experiment and express themselves, and the other is a bit more like constructing a skyscraper. You're not solving any new problems, just applying known solutions, documenting the crap out of things, planning things years in advance, etc.
I spent my formative years doing programming as an art, then entered uni and again more work as an art. I broke new ground (for the time) and solved interesting problems. Later, when I was developing financial services software it became more and more like tedious bookwork. We'd solved all the interesting problems and were just slapping out small sections of exactly the same sort of code over and over. You know the stuff, query the DB, marshall it through layer after layer of crap, display it on a screen, react to the thing they clicked, repeat.
In the end I burnt out on the whole thing as it had lost it's challenge and was just work-a-day tedium grinding out business apps for large corporations. I was the team leader, lead programmer, and customer facing tech - so there really wasn't much more I could do except slip into management.
As it happens though, life changed again and I found myself with a lot of free time again. After not programming for a couple of years I took it up again two years ago to work on something that *I* wanted to do - a game. Now I'm working with CRYENGINE, solving really tough problems, applying engineering to the massive codebase, and art to the way I structure it. I'm learning new techniques and studying some truly awesome code and...loving programming again.
If you feel it's just engineering, then maybe it's time for a change or perhaps some home project that reawakens the magic and art of programming for you again.
There's no ads on youtube, never have been...oh wait, are you one of those people who is unable to install a simple ad-blocking extension?
No, the real scourge of youtube and is the sheer number of videos of some douche doing a straight to cam in a slow rambling talk about how to do some really simple thing e.g. change a registry key to fix something or other. It would take just a two line description in the text to say how to do it, but instead they want you to watch an add laden piece of crap in the hope of actually monetising this tiny piece of information. Worse still are the ones where it's just a basic slide show of the actual text on a background, with some awful music blaring over the whole thing. The video is timed for people with the reading speed and skills of an 8 year old.
Google tends to prioritise these over useful text sites, because, well, it's their content after all and it delivers ads to people and they are an ad company.
If you stand in front of a mirror and say "Adblock" three times, it summons him!
And it still doesn't handle side-tabs properly without additional third-party software, Treetab.
FTFY
Knowing China's appalling record on human rights they will probably cut corners and simply use existing human brains in an android body, inadvertently creating the cyberman army from Doctor Who.
I run an SLI setup and also have 3D glasses, the NVidia ones. Switching to a stereo rendering mode drops my framerate by only a few percent in general. If I'm getting 60fps on normal mode, then i'll probably get 56fps in stereo.
Of course, the Rift doesn't like SLI because SLI works by processing the next two frames on the two different cards, giving you an input lag of one extra frame. In most games this is hardly noticeable, if at all, but in the Rift it is vomit inducing.
I agree. Myths are terrific! I just don't like it when people confuse myths with history ^^
The copyright for a movie character belongs to the production team that created that character, rather than an actor who simply portrayed them in one or more films. Actors own the right to their own image, but when they play a character they are portraying an image that the production company owns - presumably this is covered in their contracts. They can't simply walk down to the mall and hold out a hat dressed as Captain Jack, even if they played that role once.
It takes quite a few people to create the image of a lead character, and each has to assign their rights over that image to the production company as a standard part of their contract. If they don't, it becomes impossible for the company to conduct business using the image.
So while it takes a village to make a movie character (original concept, script writer, concept artist, wardrobe, make-up, director, art director, etc), a comic character is often created by just one party - the artist, and possibly a separate writer. They make the most sizeable contribution towards having that character available to the wider public...but...they too need to hand over those rights in order for the whole chain of production to run through.
Sure, they deserve a better deal that most of them get, but so most creative people. Then again, if your goal is to make money, you should have gone into management. It's indoors work with no heavy lifting, and you get to reap the rewards of everyone else's hard labour ^^
Out of wood, in a region of the world almost devoid of wood...
I spent literally years talking to Jehova's Witnesses who came around to 'teach' my mum 'the truth'. Every single time I brought up anything contentious or 'off script' (they read from a script pretty much like call centre personnel) they would either claim it wasn't in the bible or that it didn't mean what it said, or they would have to 'get back to me on that'. They never once got back to me on anything.
I argued using scripture from their own bible and pointed out the passages I was having difficulty with - mostly they had never heard of those passages, despite claiming to read the entire bible once every three years.
Scripture was either the literal truth or it wasn't depending on whether they needed it to be literal or just 'a dream'.
You can't ever win against people who have already taken up an entrenched position and are not willing to even consider they have a poor interpretation or notice the numerous inconsistencies and contradictions.
Typical fucking lazy immigrant workers! Americans would have built that thing in 18 months flat!
Even for the case where the bible myth is based off a common ancestor myth shared by the Gilgmesh story it still shows that the bible myth is only that - a myth, a story. What we know for certain is that the bible myth is neither the original telling of that story nor backed up by any credible evidence of world wide flooding.
Dude's doing it all wrong, it's meant to go in your right hand or your forehead! ^-^
You can get a Beaglebone Black for close to the same money, with 2GB of storage built in, 512MB RAM, a processor that is twice as fast, more GPIO pins, a pair of USB ports, and a micro-SD card slot.
In ASCII, but many BASICs will reduce keywords down to a single byte.