I don't think it's that you need a SLI capable MB so much as you need two full PCI-E slots. About the only systems that have these are nForce based motherboards marked for "SLI".
Do you know of any motherboards without nVidia chipsets with more than one PCI-E 16x slot? If so has anyone tried to run SLI on these?
Of course if you forget your login and password you're screwed. Even if you have the original box and key you can't play halflife without buying a new copy as Valve will not replace you lost key.
Back in the day Sierra Online would replace a lost cd or key if you could send them proof you bought the game. Receipt, Original Manual, etc. worked for this.
Because of this restriction and all the pirates out there with keygens stealing other peoples keys (this does happen), customers who bought the original boxed game back in 1999 get the shaft. I would prefer they stayed with the old WON authentication system instead of the Steaming Pile of **** called Steam.
The nForce chipsets are the ONLY systems that support hardware Dolby Digital 5.1 Encoding. Other Motherboards have jacks for this but can only pass-through pre-encoded streams such as DVD audio. The nFoce encodes the audio on the fly allowing for a 5.1 DD signal in games and all your normal applications.
Of course unless you have a home theater speaker setup connected to your computer it really doesn't matter. Most computer speakers do not decode dolby digital signals and those that do tend to do a crappy job. (This may have changed since I last looked at PC speakers) I am using a set of 5.1 home theater speakers for sound. The DD encoding feature of the nForce chipset has great sound quality. Hooking the same speakers up to the normal analog 5.1 outputs sounds like crap do to the cheap codec (DACs) used on most motherboards. Having the digital out really makes a huge difference in sounds quality.
The only downside is nVidia dropped soundstorm support after the nForce 2. Until nVidia brings back soundstorm or another company releases the same thing I'm not upgrading my board. Soundstorm (DD Encoding) is an essential feature for me and I wouldn't trade it for any other features.
The speed is not the issue with flash. As a form of semi-permanant memory flash is much, much faster than any rotating magnetic disk, speed won't be the issue. My problem with flash is that it has a limited lifetime. You can only erase a flash device so many times before it starts to break down. Sure the limit is rather high but there is a chance you could reach this limit if you are streaming files from the device (basically using it as temp storage).
You are right that a hard drive as an addon is probably a poor idea (I want one in the system). Developer's will avoid using it as not the entire install base has one. I haven't seen addon devices in consoles ever take off all that well. Take the N64's ram expansion. Most of the games didn't even bother to utilize the ram pack. The few that did had a high-res mode. Perfect Dark is about the only game I remember that required the pack for full functionality.
I hope they don't make the same mistake Sony did and let you save your games to the harddrive. No need for stupid memory cards, for me this is the best feature of the X-Box (xbmc is nice too).
Actually you are wrong. The books are based on the games. So while the games didn't really have much of a plot the books were written to fill in all the details you don't get from the games. Surprisingly a boring game made for an ok book (not great but ok).
I've used the Crystal Visions compact keyboards in the past. They are small, have a decent layout, and seem reasonably durable. I don't know what the current price is but you can check them out at http://www.crystalvisions.com/compactkeyboards.htm .
Not so. The dev kits for the X-Box 2 are PPC G5's and run a Windows NT kernel. Microsoft's NT architecture makes it relatively easy to port the OS to multiple systems. They just don't see any reason to as x86 has so much market share they can make plenty of money supporting only one architecture. Back when x86 wasn't the "only" choice Windows NT supported PPC, Alpha, and x86.
(POSIX is an API not a cpu architecture like Alpha, Microsoft even claims POSIX support in NT)
Maybe, or by expanding the loop you just induce a bunch of cache misses which hurt performance more than the couple extra instructions to check a loop variable. In today's world memory is an order of magnitude slower than today's processors.
By not unwinding the loop you get the benefit of the temporal locality. Of course the n copies of the loop may be fetched in one memory access. It all comes down to how many blocks are fetched by the cache for a miss, vs size of the unwound loop. If all n copies are fetched in a miss you win. If it takes n memory accesses instead of 1, you lose.
It also turns out steam takes an amazing amount of harddrive space. I gave the install a try and steam now consumes 1.5 GB of diskspace. With the EXACT same mods installed my original HL folder is only 806MB. So steam stuck another 700MB of data on my computer.
It seems as if steam doesn't allow the mods to use data from the original half-life. It replicates all of it for each mod. This means I have several copies of some of the basic hl.wads on my computer.
Valve has done away with all the.pak files which were really.zips. So what compression there was is now gone. I don't really need a ton of uncompressed wav sound effects on my computer.
It turns out that Valve will be demolishing the WON server network and will require all customers who wish to play online to use steam. From the HLDS_ANNOUNCE list valve runs:
Q: Is WON going away? A: Yes, once we have completed the rollover we will slowly remove parts of the WON system as they become obsolete.
Not only that steam has really high system requirements. Min 1GHZ machine as opposed to halflife's 133mhz requirement. That's 10 times faster than you need for the original! Even the boxed version of CS only required 333mhz.
You also need a 'net connection to play halflife in any capacity after the upgrade. This includes playing single player or on a lan. It also turns out the players are not the only people inconvenienced. Steam is a pain to setup on a dedicated server. Since there is no full server binary many ops can't get it updated. The version of DoD distributed for steam doesn't work and you have to roll back to the old one.
It also turns out the cpu usage is insane for the server. CPU usage on 2ghz dual xeons running 16 player games are up to 60-70% this is for a game that came out in 1998 when 400mhz was amazingly fast. Since I run my server on an old 600mhz Athlon which worked great until now I guess I'm out of the server op business.
I'm also getting about 200 e-mails a day form the hlds_linux mailing list and most of them are people who can't get steam running. Many ops are dropping their halflife servers and switch to other games such as Mohaa or UT. A few are holding out with the current version of HL and hoping valve doesn't force an upgade.
It turns out that Valve will be demolishing the WON server network and will require all customers who wish to play online to use steam. From the HLDS_ANNOUNCE list valve runs:
Q: Is WON going away?
A: Yes, once we have completed the rollover we will slowly remove parts of
the WON system as they become obsolete.
Not only that steam has really high system requirements. Min 1GHZ machine as opposed to halflife's 133mhz requirement. That's 10 times faster than you need for the original! Even the boxed version of CS only required 333mhz.
You also need a 'net connection to play halflife in any capacity after the upgrade. This includes playing single player or on a lan.
It also turns out the players are not the only people inconvenienced. Steam is a pain to setup on a dedicated server. Since there is no full server binary many ops can't get it updated. The version of DoD distributed for steam doesn't work and you have to roll back to the old one.
It also turns out the cpu usage is insane for the server. CPU usage on 2ghz dual xeons running 16 player games are up to 60-70% this is for a game that came out in 1998 when 400mhz was amazingly fast. Since I run my server on an old 600mhz Athlon which worked great until now I guess I'm out of the server op business.
I'm getting about 200 e-mails a day form the hlds_linux mailing list and most of them are people who can't get steam running. Many ops are dropping their halflife servers and switch to other games such as Mohaa or UT. A few are holding out with the current version of HL and hoping valve doesn't force an upgade.
Windows can do a great job of multi desktop support you just need the proper driver extension. With an Nvidia card just install the Latest Drivers and turn on the nview extensions. This allows you to have multiple desktops, always on top for any app, transparency effects on just about any window, you can send apps to different desktops/monitors. Basically all the functionality you would want in KDE and X. I think ATI has something similar. If I recall its called Hydravision but I may be wrong.
I hate to say it but with all the news I have seen lately about large corporations this is not a big surprise. When someone tries to reform their company so it does not look as bad as the rest they get stomped on by those who benefit. Companies shouldn't give out loans to board members, thats what banks are for. If someone can't get a loan from a bank why would it be a good idea to give them that loan instead? The only reason these people have for taking the loan from the company is that they hope they can get away without repaying it or get little or no interest on the loan. This cannot be good for the company and it just shows that all the board members care about is their personal wealth and not the interests of the shareholders. Shareholders must unite and let the boards know they will not tolerate these practices.
I don't know about pop-ups but spam is sent because its virually free. Sending e-mail to 1000+ people maybe costs the mailer 1 cent and if they make even one sale they get a good return.
Pop-up ads most likely have different rates depending on the viewership since they are hosted by a separate company. I know that I just close any pop-ups without reading them or I note the company and not to ever buy anything from them. Besides that when have you seen a pop-up for something relevant to what your viewing. Do I really need a X10 camera or want to use Casino-on-Net?
I have yet to see a reputable company actually use a pop-up. I have seen them host them on their sites but never as an advertisement. Ebay, Amazon, Slashdot, CNN ever seen a popup link TO their sites?
I'm on Time Warner also and they do not prevent servers. The only restriction to a server is if they find one with a security vulnerability such as someone with w2k and IIS installed and not patched for code red. If they find that they will cut your service off until you patch it. Other than that restriction the user agreement says you cannot use "excessive" bandwidth. Of course they don't tell you what excessive is.
Home networks are also allowed, they even have an online store where you can get a router. I also think we were allowed 1mbs up and 2 mbs down. Since the redesigned their website I have been unable to find the actual number so I'm no longer sure.
I think you may actually be overestimating some peoples understanding. I know people who have worked with computers for the last 10 years and still do not grasp the difference between a file and a program. I'll try to patiently explain why they should sort their documents into different folders only to get uncomprehending stares in return. You would be surprised at the number of people who can use a file cabinet but cannot organise or understand files on their computer.
You are right in that most people who have any experience with computers understand that different windows are usually different apps, and the basics of mouse movement. Of course these same people have trouble keeping track of which window they are in. I cannot count the times someone has minimized something and thought they had closed it or had trouble finding it.
In my experience the average user does not want to see a bunch of options when they click save. They just want to save all their files of the same type to the same directory. How many times has someone "lost" a saved file by not saving it in the default directory?
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I don't think it's that you need a SLI capable MB so much as you need two full PCI-E slots. About the only systems that have these are nForce based motherboards marked for "SLI". Do you know of any motherboards without nVidia chipsets with more than one PCI-E 16x slot? If so has anyone tried to run SLI on these?
Of course if you forget your login and password you're screwed. Even if you have the original box and key you can't play halflife without buying a new copy as Valve will not replace you lost key.
Back in the day Sierra Online would replace a lost cd or key if you could send them proof you bought the game. Receipt, Original Manual, etc. worked for this.
Because of this restriction and all the pirates out there with keygens stealing other peoples keys (this does happen), customers who bought the original boxed game back in 1999 get the shaft. I would prefer they stayed with the old WON authentication system instead of the Steaming Pile of **** called Steam.
The nForce chipsets are the ONLY systems that support hardware Dolby Digital 5.1 Encoding. Other Motherboards have jacks for this but can only pass-through pre-encoded streams such as DVD audio. The nFoce encodes the audio on the fly allowing for a 5.1 DD signal in games and all your normal applications.
Of course unless you have a home theater speaker setup connected to your computer it really doesn't matter. Most computer speakers do not decode dolby digital signals and those that do tend to do a crappy job. (This may have changed since I last looked at PC speakers) I am using a set of 5.1 home theater speakers for sound. The DD encoding feature of the nForce chipset has great sound quality. Hooking the same speakers up to the normal analog 5.1 outputs sounds like crap do to the cheap codec (DACs) used on most motherboards. Having the digital out really makes a huge difference in sounds quality.
The only downside is nVidia dropped soundstorm support after the nForce 2. Until nVidia brings back soundstorm or another company releases the same thing I'm not upgrading my board. Soundstorm (DD Encoding) is an essential feature for me and I wouldn't trade it for any other features.
The speed is not the issue with flash. As a form of semi-permanant memory flash is much, much faster than any rotating magnetic disk, speed won't be the issue. My problem with flash is that it has a limited lifetime. You can only erase a flash device so many times before it starts to break down. Sure the limit is rather high but there is a chance you could reach this limit if you are streaming files from the device (basically using it as temp storage).
You are right that a hard drive as an addon is probably a poor idea (I want one in the system). Developer's will avoid using it as not the entire install base has one. I haven't seen addon devices in consoles ever take off all that well. Take the N64's ram expansion. Most of the games didn't even bother to utilize the ram pack. The few that did had a high-res mode. Perfect Dark is about the only game I remember that required the pack for full functionality.
I hope they don't make the same mistake Sony did and let you save your games to the harddrive. No need for stupid memory cards, for me this is the best feature of the X-Box (xbmc is nice too).
Actually you are wrong. The books are based on the games. So while the games didn't really have much of a plot the books were written to fill in all the details you don't get from the games. Surprisingly a boring game made for an ok book (not great but ok).
I've used the Crystal Visions compact keyboards in the past. They are small, have a decent layout, and seem reasonably durable. I don't know what the current price is but you can check them out at http://www.crystalvisions.com/compactkeyboards.htm .
(POSIX is an API not a cpu architecture like Alpha, Microsoft even claims POSIX support in NT)
Maybe, or by expanding the loop you just induce a bunch of cache misses which hurt performance more than the couple extra instructions to check a loop variable. In today's world memory is an order of magnitude slower than today's processors. By not unwinding the loop you get the benefit of the temporal locality. Of course the n copies of the loop may be fetched in one memory access. It all comes down to how many blocks are fetched by the cache for a miss, vs size of the unwound loop. If all n copies are fetched in a miss you win. If it takes n memory accesses instead of 1, you lose.
Open up the computer and look at the hardware.
It also turns out steam takes an amazing amount of harddrive space. I gave the install a try and steam now consumes 1.5 GB of diskspace. With the EXACT same mods installed my original HL folder is only 806MB. So steam stuck another 700MB of data on my computer.
.pak files which were really .zips. So what compression there was is now gone. I don't really need a ton of uncompressed wav sound effects on my computer.
It seems as if steam doesn't allow the mods to use data from the original half-life. It replicates all of it for each mod. This means I have several copies of some of the basic hl.wads on my computer.
Valve has done away with all the
It turns out that Valve will be demolishing the WON server network and will require all customers who wish to play online to use steam. From the HLDS_ANNOUNCE list valve runs:
Q: Is WON going away? A: Yes, once we have completed the rollover we will slowly remove parts of the WON system as they become obsolete.
Not only that steam has really high system requirements. Min 1GHZ machine as opposed to halflife's 133mhz requirement. That's 10 times faster than you need for the original! Even the boxed version of CS only required 333mhz.
You also need a 'net connection to play halflife in any capacity after the upgrade. This includes playing single player or on a lan. It also turns out the players are not the only people inconvenienced. Steam is a pain to setup on a dedicated server. Since there is no full server binary many ops can't get it updated. The version of DoD distributed for steam doesn't work and you have to roll back to the old one.
It also turns out the cpu usage is insane for the server. CPU usage on 2ghz dual xeons running 16 player games are up to 60-70% this is for a game that came out in 1998 when 400mhz was amazingly fast. Since I run my server on an old 600mhz Athlon which worked great until now I guess I'm out of the server op business.
I'm also getting about 200 e-mails a day form the hlds_linux mailing list and most of them are people who can't get steam running. Many ops are dropping their halflife servers and switch to other games such as Mohaa or UT. A few are holding out with the current version of HL and hoping valve doesn't force an upgade.
It turns out that Valve will be demolishing the WON server network and will require all customers who wish to play online to use steam. From the HLDS_ANNOUNCE list valve runs: Q: Is WON going away? A: Yes, once we have completed the rollover we will slowly remove parts of the WON system as they become obsolete. Not only that steam has really high system requirements. Min 1GHZ machine as opposed to halflife's 133mhz requirement. That's 10 times faster than you need for the original! Even the boxed version of CS only required 333mhz. You also need a 'net connection to play halflife in any capacity after the upgrade. This includes playing single player or on a lan. It also turns out the players are not the only people inconvenienced. Steam is a pain to setup on a dedicated server. Since there is no full server binary many ops can't get it updated. The version of DoD distributed for steam doesn't work and you have to roll back to the old one. It also turns out the cpu usage is insane for the server. CPU usage on 2ghz dual xeons running 16 player games are up to 60-70% this is for a game that came out in 1998 when 400mhz was amazingly fast. Since I run my server on an old 600mhz Athlon which worked great until now I guess I'm out of the server op business. I'm getting about 200 e-mails a day form the hlds_linux mailing list and most of them are people who can't get steam running. Many ops are dropping their halflife servers and switch to other games such as Mohaa or UT. A few are holding out with the current version of HL and hoping valve doesn't force an upgade.
Windows can do a great job of multi desktop support you just need the proper driver extension. With an Nvidia card just install the Latest Drivers and turn on the nview extensions. This allows you to have multiple desktops, always on top for any app, transparency effects on just about any window, you can send apps to different desktops/monitors. Basically all the functionality you would want in KDE and X. I think ATI has something similar. If I recall its called Hydravision but I may be wrong.
I hate to say it but with all the news I have seen lately about large corporations this is not a big surprise. When someone tries to reform their company so it does not look as bad as the rest they get stomped on by those who benefit. Companies shouldn't give out loans to board members, thats what banks are for. If someone can't get a loan from a bank why would it be a good idea to give them that loan instead? The only reason these people have for taking the loan from the company is that they hope they can get away without repaying it or get little or no interest on the loan. This cannot be good for the company and it just shows that all the board members care about is their personal wealth and not the interests of the shareholders. Shareholders must unite and let the boards know they will not tolerate these practices.
Pop-up ads most likely have different rates depending on the viewership since they are hosted by a separate company. I know that I just close any pop-ups without reading them or I note the company and not to ever buy anything from them. Besides that when have you seen a pop-up for something relevant to what your viewing. Do I really need a X10 camera or want to use Casino-on-Net?
I have yet to see a reputable company actually use a pop-up. I have seen them host them on their sites but never as an advertisement. Ebay, Amazon, Slashdot, CNN ever seen a popup link TO their sites?
I'm on Time Warner also and they do not prevent servers. The only restriction to a server is if they find one with a security vulnerability such as someone with w2k and IIS installed and not patched for code red. If they find that they will cut your service off until you patch it. Other than that restriction the user agreement says you cannot use "excessive" bandwidth. Of course they don't tell you what excessive is. Home networks are also allowed, they even have an online store where you can get a router. I also think we were allowed 1mbs up and 2 mbs down. Since the redesigned their website I have been unable to find the actual number so I'm no longer sure.
I think you may actually be overestimating some peoples understanding. I know people who have worked with computers for the last 10 years and still do not grasp the difference between a file and a program. I'll try to patiently explain why they should sort their documents into different folders only to get uncomprehending stares in return. You would be surprised at the number of people who can use a file cabinet but cannot organise or understand files on their computer. You are right in that most people who have any experience with computers understand that different windows are usually different apps, and the basics of mouse movement. Of course these same people have trouble keeping track of which window they are in. I cannot count the times someone has minimized something and thought they had closed it or had trouble finding it. In my experience the average user does not want to see a bunch of options when they click save. They just want to save all their files of the same type to the same directory. How many times has someone "lost" a saved file by not saving it in the default directory?