Actually, your Diablo 2 example is indicative of a game design/development problem - I don't think it would be out of line to call it a "bug." In an ideal world, sloppy game design shouldn't be driving computer upgrades.
Yes but it's not. In an idea world we would have a great way of emulating a pixel shader and the split occuring between high end users and low end would not be as much of a problem. However it's not as simple as just lowering the resolution and putting up with it. And, while we are in an ideal world, from a programmer's point of view, it would be ideal for the drivers to emulate the missing elements rather than for each program to come up with their own way. Of course this is about as impossible as a bug free program.
To be the Diablo 2 example was slightly offtopic (as I mentioned in the post). And bug or no bug, it was a requirement brought about by hardware advancements. True Blizzard thought designed the game to use more ram, but only because the hardware people had made it possible.
Anyway I was simply saying that for PC gamers, required hardware upgrades are nothing new.
I never meant to place the blame anywhere. It's really a "chicken or the egg" problem. Sure software developers deside to require the hardware, but its the hardware vendors who make the improvements. I don't think it really matters.
He says that this is the first required hardware upgrade in gaming history (boldfaced lie), then implies that consoles don't have this problem? Excuse me?
Yes this is a lie. I find it rather ironic that Doom 3 is being used as an example. People had to upgrade their hardware (ie purchase a 3d card) to play Quake 3. id has always been ahead of others in the area of requirements, this should be no surprise to PC gamers.
While other upgrades, such as processor and ram upgrades, are not always required, they are sometimes "required" to play a game at a reasonable level of quality. Afterall, all games have "minimum requirements" (as a side note, these are usually too low).
Slightly offtopic, but a good example that comes to mind is Diablo 2. I remember when it came out I had to buy more ram because I'd go down the stairs into a dungeon and it would hit the hard drive. The server wouldn't pause for you so before I could even load the dungeon my guy would die. Sure the ram wasn't required to start the game, but as it was a requirement nonetheless, as there was no way to play the game without it.
IIRC, it's impossible to remove someone from your network once they are in. For corporate use this makes firing people more trouble. Rebuild the network when firing someone? For personal use this presents a problem too, it's easy to add a trouble user to your network (just one person need exchange keys with them), but hard (impossible?) to remove them. I wonder if VIA has addressed this with Padlock SL. I have yet to see anything that would suggest it, but then again I haven't taken a look at the source yet.
People don't have to stay on immunosuppressant drugs as once thought. IIRC the doctor who first pioneered the use of drugs that control organ rejection is now saying people don't have to be on immunosuppressant drugs their whole life. I remember some controversy a few (5?) years back about how he shouldn't be taking his patients off the immunosuppressant drugs. He was saying they don't need to be on them for their entire life and had successfully taken a lot of his patients off their drugs. I'm not good with names but I think that man might be Thomas E. Starzl, MD, PhD.
There seems to be little medical information on the web compared to the amount of information on other fields of knowledge. I'm guessing people are probably afraid of getting sued for something when it's new and when it's old and proven there isn't much a point to write about it as all in the medical feild know about it by then. I found an article on the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health matter-a-factly talking about taking kids off their antirejection drugs:
In the 10 months since the transplant, Madeline has been hospitalized just once. She is growing and developing well and is also off medication. Tolerance research has found that some transplant recipients, when taken off their immunosuppressant drugs during times of infection, are able to stay off the drugs.
I know with a webbrowser I can force a reload, but how would I do this with wget?
Add "-C off" to turn cache off, and while you are at it you can also add "-D www.carorcar.com" so you don't follow any links back to the offical site without knowing.
cd/tmp; while true; do wget -r -nd --delete-after -C off -D www.carorcar.com -o/dev/null http://www.carorcar.com/; date | xargs echo "Again at"; done
Here are 14 screenshots from the screenshots link. (Although they aren't screenshots in the literal sense.) There was no text on the page except for the links to other parts of the site so you aren't missing anything by clicking directly on the links here.
176 double color LED buttons, eight mix faders, two master faders
data wheel, data slider, cursor buttons
8.2" LCD, 640X480 pixel, 64.000 colors, external SVGA 1024X768, TV SVHS out
4 USB2.0 ports, LAN 10/100, 2 PS/2 serial ports; mouse and keyboard, COM1, COM2, game, parallel port, VGA out, S/VHS out, 4 MIDI out
four programmable footswitch jacks, sustain pedal
MIDI in X 2, MIDI out X 4, total internal/external 20 MIDI out.
audio I/O; 12 stereo analog I/O jacks, four bus matrix with programmable IN/OUT routing, four microphones, two mono cue and mix outputs, two XLR main mix outputs, two XLR monitor outputs
1/4 head phone jack
two lamps with dimmer functions (Optional)
internal standard power switching ATX, 350W, 220/110V
dimension and weight, 1170(W) 430(D) 127(H)mm, 29Kg
Software
Red Hat Linux, KDE 3.1 window manager
Mozilla web browser, Kmail, Kwrite, CD authoring
Audio and MIDI sequencer, realtime midiplayer, MP3, MP4, DVD, DIVX, MPG, WAV, AVI, CD audio player
SEQ24 midi sequencer--customized for the Mediastation
style player, automatic import with EMC style converter
software upgrades and new applications available at no additional cost by internet download
Mediastation X-76 Professional
The Professional model includes all the features of the standard model and the following:
AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 2.167MHz, 400MHz bus
4 available PCI slots for expansion
1024Mb RAM, upgradable to 3072MB
120Gb hard disk drive, 7200 RPM, 2Mb Cache, CD and DVD writer
Actually, all we need is a RFID killer. I wonder if putting that new shirt in a microwave might overload and kill it..
According to this FAQ "there is a good chance the the tag will burst into flames first." Here's a direct quote:
Q: Can I microwave products to kill any hidden RFID tags they might contain?
A: While microwaving an RFID tag will destroy it(a microwave emits high
frequency electromagnetic energy that overloads the antenna, eventually blowing
out the chip), there is a good chance the the tag will burst into flames
first. The difficulty of destroying a hidden RFID chip is one reason we
need legislation making it illegal to hide a chip in an item in the first place.
Jabber is, well, technically superior. But history is a good teacher (Beta vs. VHS, etc, etc, etc)
For those feeling confused about all this Jabber/XMPP vs SIP/SIMPLE, here is a short article which talks about the difference between XMPP and SIMPLE.
The InfoWorld article also claims IBM is siding with SIMPLE, not with XMPP like the article in the Slashdot story suggests. Other articles also suggest IBM is siding with SIMPLE not XMPP. If you don't mind the PDF you can see for yourself that IBM's Lotus uses SIMPLE.
This is my sig, this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun.
Slashdot Mirror
The Linux Documentation Project is a good place to start. Here is an article about the optimal use of fonts. It has a section called "Why Fonts on Linux Aren't Straight Forward?" and a section called "The Easy Steps to Enlighten Your Desktop" with KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice.org, and FireFox configuration examples.
Yes but it's not. In an idea world we would have a great way of emulating a pixel shader and the split occuring between high end users and low end would not be as much of a problem. However it's not as simple as just lowering the resolution and putting up with it. And, while we are in an ideal world, from a programmer's point of view, it would be ideal for the drivers to emulate the missing elements rather than for each program to come up with their own way. Of course this is about as impossible as a bug free program.
To be the Diablo 2 example was slightly offtopic (as I mentioned in the post). And bug or no bug, it was a requirement brought about by hardware advancements. True Blizzard thought designed the game to use more ram, but only because the hardware people had made it possible.
Anyway I was simply saying that for PC gamers, required hardware upgrades are nothing new.
I never meant to place the blame anywhere. It's really a "chicken or the egg" problem. Sure software developers deside to require the hardware, but its the hardware vendors who make the improvements. I don't think it really matters.
Yes this is a lie. I find it rather ironic that Doom 3 is being used as an example. People had to upgrade their hardware (ie purchase a 3d card) to play Quake 3. id has always been ahead of others in the area of requirements, this should be no surprise to PC gamers.
While other upgrades, such as processor and ram upgrades, are not always required, they are sometimes "required" to play a game at a reasonable level of quality. Afterall, all games have "minimum requirements" (as a side note, these are usually too low).
Slightly offtopic, but a good example that comes to mind is Diablo 2. I remember when it came out I had to buy more ram because I'd go down the stairs into a dungeon and it would hit the hard drive. The server wouldn't pause for you so before I could even load the dungeon my guy would die. Sure the ram wasn't required to start the game, but as it was a requirement nonetheless, as there was no way to play the game without it.
Also, off topic but amusing, when I was browsing around their site for more information I found this: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=306
Although not the article I wanted to find, here is an article about some of the research: http://newsbureau.upmc.com/tx/Weanbg.htm
There seems to be little medical information on the web compared to the amount of information on other fields of knowledge. I'm guessing people are probably afraid of getting sued for something when it's new and when it's old and proven there isn't much a point to write about it as all in the medical feild know about it by then. I found an article on the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health matter-a-factly talking about taking kids off their antirejection drugs:
Add "-C off" to turn cache off, and while you are at it you can also add "-D www.carorcar.com" so you don't follow any links back to the offical site without knowing.
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Here are the specs from the specs link:
Mediastation X-76 Standard
Software
Mediastation X-76 Professional
The Professional model includes all the features of the standard model and the following:
No, IIRC the last story on slashdot about a vulnerablity was this one. The exploit it mentioned was an integer underflow vulnerablity.
This message has been doubly encrypted with rot13 for enhanced security.
According to this FAQ "there is a good chance the the tag will burst into flames first."
Here's a direct quote:
Q: Can I microwave products to kill any hidden RFID tags they might contain?
A: While microwaving an RFID tag will destroy it(a microwave emits high frequency electromagnetic energy that overloads the antenna, eventually blowing out the chip), there is a good chance the the tag will burst into flames first. The difficulty of destroying a hidden RFID chip is one reason we need legislation making it illegal to hide a chip in an item in the first place.
For those feeling confused about all this Jabber/XMPP vs SIP/SIMPLE, here is a short article which talks about the difference between XMPP and SIMPLE.
The InfoWorld article also claims IBM is siding with SIMPLE, not with XMPP like the article in the Slashdot story suggests. Other articles also suggest IBM is siding with SIMPLE not XMPP. If you don't mind the PDF you can see for yourself that IBM's Lotus uses SIMPLE.
This is my sig, this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun.