Yes, I did read too many D&D novels as a kid (mostly DragonLance, but seemingly all of the Forgotten Realms books I own happen to be R.A. Salvatore novels featuring Drizzt).
Not the best choice of examples of proper spelling, since Aluminum was the name chosen by the man that discovered the metal in the first place, whereas Aluminium was someone's else's idea of spelling the name so that it would conform to the ending of many other elements' names.
In other words, Aluminium is a matter of conformance, not a matter of correct spelling. Much like the changes in the book are a matter of either arrogance on the part of British publishers or a sincere wish to pander to the largest possible audience. Either way, I'd rather have my books in the English in which they were written, or the best possible translation of their native language, preferably with the original language version included.
Yeah, I got a pretty wonderful welcome to it when I took Social Psychology in college, and pretty much determined for myself that my teacher was full of it. I did my final paper in that course on the lack of effect of music and violent imagery as a tool for turning children into killers and rapists.
Without the junk/bulk mail it would cost you a fortune to mail anything because the infrastructure would be so expensive
OK, keep the junk mail, force people to pay more to mail me stuff. Maybe then they'll let me pay my bills online instead of sending me a statement every month and expecting me to send them a check (considering I write maybe 2 checks a month and pay everything else online...).
Slang To become extremely angry or deranged, especially in an outburst of violence.
from Dictionary.com, with a quick search for the word postal.
The other important point is that the USPS derived their name from their function, rather than making up the word post or postal in regards to mail and mail delivery. Their name is generic, just like that of most other government services, and the USPS moniker that they've started using/advertising more recently is simply a response to UPS and FedEx being much more common-usage than United Parcel Service or Federal Express.
Besides, if the court upheld the USPS' claim, what would happen to the Japanese Postal Service, the Military Postal Service Agency, and most other postal services around the world?;)
As for resumes and such, if it's in the interest of the company, of course you should have it on your computer. The poster was clearly indicating that he was leaning towards the more personal of things; personal emails, resumes that had nothing to do with current employment, and private documents. Again, fine to have laying around once in awhile (it's fairly inevitable if you spend most of your day in one particular spot), but to constantly have it moving in and out?
The way I see it, if you don't want your company to know you have it, you shouldn't put it on the company's computers. Personal email is legally tracked by most companies large enough to afford to do so if you put it on their computer and/or ethernet lines, especially if it's coming to a company email address (in which case it's going through their email servers which almost always are reading your email). The company I work for also monitors most employees' computer usage through programs that would put most 'spyware' to shame, collecting information about what applications are used for how long, with the ability to track much more if they feel the need to monitor a particular person more closely, and all internet traffic is monitored at the individual sites as well as at various corporate offices (almost all internet access is routed through corporate offices rather than being direct from any particular site).
At any point in time the company can easily copy anything from my hard drive or delete it completely, and can install anything on my computer. Of course, most of the people here don't use their computer as their primary tool for daily work, but rather for communication and paperwork.
Our current president wantts to take the USPS and turrn it into a private business, effectively killing the perpetuation of consistent and federally mandated service at regulated prices.
How much is a stamp again? I lost track when I ran out of the 1 cent mark-up stamps and started doubling up to finally get rid of the roll of stamps I bought two years ago. I know they've raised the price of stamps at least twice since I did that. Regulated? Maybe, but not very well, and last time I checked to see what the price hike paid for, about 75+% of it was to reduce the cost of bulk mail, which I would pay you not to deliver thank you very much.
Well, let me assure you that I am neither a southerner nor white so I can't possibly be racist.
Sorry to even go on this way, and not to imply that you are racist, but you neither have to be a southerner nor white to be a racist. Of course, I am white and am currently in the south, so ymmv. I lived most of my life in the southwestern US, and have met plenty of racists of many races, and actually find most of the people I've met in the southeast to be slightly less racist (probably because there seems to be more diversity in this area, and most people that live here are not from here).
As for linking the phrase 'I like to kill mockingbirds' to being racist, I have no clue where that came from. Maybe I missed some of the symbolism in the book, which I didn't really care for in the first place.
Are you saying your employers don't give back property which is yours? Are you saying that to get it back, you need to bribe them with property you stole from them? Are you saying you regularly keep personal stuff on their computers? Isn't that a little silly, to be keeping email and your resume there on the hard drive? Maybe once in awhile, you might have your resume there for some odd reason, but that just sounds stupid if you leave it there all the time.
The company I work for generally handles lay-offs by taking your badge and access card (which are their property anyway) and escorting you from the building with a quick stop-by at your cube/desk to pick up small personal belongings. Anything large will be packed and sent to you, and you can't log back into the computer and/or network, or take any disks/CDs. They also have a tendency, based on the employee's record with the company, to give you paid leave if you give them 2 weeks notice (in other words, you go home immediately), unless you're working on something that you intend to finish before you leave, which the company wants finished in that time.
As for the other things: I've had my employer imply that I was attempting to steal company equipment on a few occasions when I decided to take home parts that I had brought in for testing purposes (which they had known I was bringing in for those purposes when I did it), and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to claim ownership of my keyboard and mouse if/when I leave, despite the fact that they would not be able to produce any record of having purchased or reimbursed me for them, and not having a single keyboard or mouse in the building that is remotely similar. On the other hand, I'm somewhat more confident that they would return my books and coffee mugs to me, though they might just move them to the 'library' in the office.
As for personal stuff on the computers, there's not really much the company can do about that here. They allow a certain amount of it, and unless it was the reason for the layoff in the first place, they don't take the time to look at the contents of your computer once you're gone anyway (unless there's something they think is on there that they need to find, such as data related to what you were working on). They also require us to update our resume periodically (to be submitted to various customers in order to win a contract), so it's quite normal for everyone in the office to have their resume on their own computer.
Guess then you don't care for the same rules applying to movies either. By this logic little Johny should be able to see M an XXX rated movies.
There's no law preventing children from buying or renting R rated movies (though most rental businesses either allow parents to control this or don't rent them to children). The XXX type ratings are produced entirely by the industry that makes those movies, and the ratings have no effect on whether or not they can be viewed by minors (and to some degree I do have a problem with the government telling parents they can't allow their teenagers to watch these movies, in many cases videos marketed and sold to teens in other countries receive these ratings and restrictions in the US).
As for 'X' rated software, either regulate it with the rest of the porn industry or don't. Violent material rarely earns a movie an NC-17 rating, or a refusal by the movie industry to rate it at all, but when it does it's often given the same treatment as porn.
The real question is whether or not the M rating that games receive should be treated as an R, NC-17, or X type of rating, or whether the games industry needs a further level of rating for M-rated games. I know there are a lot of parents out there that don't mind letting their teenagers view either nudity or violence, but not both, or more commonly not both in the same context, so it would probably help if the M-rated games had additional content information like TV ratings often do. It might also help if the ratings board refused to rate some content and subsequently that material was treated as it would be in the movie industry, but I don't really see that as helping people much (and really there are a great deal of unrated DVDs out there simply because of the amount of extra material a lot of companies are putting on their 'special edition' DVDs now).
Bleh, anyway, I'm rambling. I guess my point is that laws don't enforce the official ratings on movies (and X ratings aren't official), but the laws that enforce X ratings take choice away from parents. Meanwhile, the games that are in the industry that utilizes X ratings are sold through the same channels as the movies and other porn. Maybe if the video game industry didn't rate every thing above a certain level with an M regardless of whether or not the content would justify it as porn would help, but I have yet to see an M-rated game that even comes close to porn in the first place (anyone that's seen BMX XXX would realize how much of a marketing ploy that XXX really is).
Could violent games be to potential murderers like pr0n to the potential rapist?
Actually, that's exactly right, as in: the link between the two is either completely non-existant or is actually there for some percentage of the population, depending on who you pay to do the study.
Even porn that actually depicts rape (which is in itself illegal in most states, if not the entire country) does not appeal to all rapists, and violent video games do not appeal to all violent offenders.
If people took care to pay attention to what their children were doing instead of asking the government to prevent them from doing it, there would be fewer problems in this country (well, if that isn't stating the obvious...).
The real point I'm sure you are trying to get at though is that you suspect that GCC has been optimised much more for PowerPC than x86. Let me assure you that you could not be more wrong. If you recall the days of egcs and pgcc you'll realize that x86 optimisation with gcc has been a strong area of interest for gcc maintainers. Indeed, until VC++7 came out, gcc was one of the fastest x86 compilers out there
As a primarily C++ developer, gcc has never been a strong compiler for me, so I could be wrong in assuming that gcc was never well optimized for current x86 processors, but even PGCC and EGCS doesn't mean a great deal in terms of current x86 processors, which have another 5 years of new instructions and optimizations.
Even AMD uses the Intel compiler for their Linux SPEC results on their own processors.
Apple could've done just fine by using Dell's already published SPEC results instead of retesting. Dell's numbers are already lower than Intel's because Dell used an older version of Intel's compiler and MS' compiler (not to mention the parts Dell uses).
No, because they likely could get better performance on the PPC with a different compiler, too. Think on.
Which you would think would be the compiler that Apple and IBM have put the most time into in the last couple of years, right? Now that compiler would be... oh, yeah, gcc, the compiler that's used to build OS X in the first place.
At least everything that they did seemed to be amply documented. I found that to be refresing especially in light of all the recent benchmark tests that have not been so forthright with all their methods and procedures.
If it wasn't amply documented, it would violate the terms of the SPEC benchmark. Give them credit where it's due, but really, the only reason why there's more information about these benchmarks than they normally give is because it's required of them by the benchmark they chose to use.
What he's saying is that by coding to an abstracted API that is common across many different chipsets, you don't have to code to the chipset at all. So if the game uses DirectX, you can run the game on a TNT2 or a GeForce4 and the application will still *work*. He didn't say it would work well on a TNT2 if it's written to GeForce4 level capabilities.
But, if you code to an abstracted API in such a way that it will work on a TNT2, you are definitely *not* using the full capabilities of the card, unless you're talking about a game that will run on a TNT2 in 4 years, when the CPU is fast enough to do what the GeForce4 does for you today. That's why most games that do take advantage of newer cards have option menus that let you enable the options those cards allow, because a TNT2 w/ a 2GHz CPU can't do what a GeForce4 w/ a 2GHz CPU can do.
Of course, if the only thing compelling about your game is the graphics, maybe you have enough CPU cycles left to do the T&L in software mode at a similar quality to what the GF4 can do. Maybe you can do the shaders in software (assuming that you'd even bother doing the shaders in Direct3D instead of Cg). DirectX will do the work in software if you have features enabled that can't be done by your hardware, but that doesn't mean it will run well (or even run at all).
That is true. However, if you install the newest DirectX (which will install no matter how shitty your pc is), and you try to play a game written for say a GeForce4 and you have a TNT2, then your pc can figure out what the card should do and what the cpu should do. So, there is no reason for game designers to code to the least common denominator, they just have to code for the newest DirectX/OpenGL and the user's pc turns on available options for their card, and disables the others.
Well, you have some clue what you're talking about, but most of it went over your head or you were told something incorrect(ly). DirectX has no clue whether or not your system is powerful enough to handle the features enabled in the game, it only knows whether or not your card supports them. If your card doesn't support them, it renders them in software (which is always slower, unless you're playing a DirectX3 game on an nVidia Riva 128 with a P4 CPU, where the card, the game, nor DirectX support most of the complicated rendering done by new video cards). It won't turn features off, it will just try to do them in software, which will bog your computer down unless you have a lot of excess CPU cycles. The game has to turn them off, which is usually done through a menu or a command of some type.
The reason that the graphics card is under-used is for two reasons. The first is that game designers, as you said, want the game to work well on lower end platforms. If your cpu is good enough you can add better graphical features even if your video card doesn't support it. For example Descent 3 adds motion blur if your cpu is L33t enough. However, the main reason that video cards are underused is that it's a fucking pain in the ass.
Descent 3 ran like a solid turd on most systems available at the time of it's release, I wonder why that could be. It's simple, if you want to use the extra features and still sell your game (only OEMs bought Descent 3 as far as I can tell, since the only Descent 3 discs I've ever seen came from OEM packages), you add option menus to turn them on, and default them to off (or check the video card they're using and turn them off or on based on your testing that shows which cards can handle it). Why did Half-Life sell so well? Besides having a much-touted single-player experience, it could play on a P166 w/ a crap video card at a time when you couldn't even buy that type of system new any more.
Let's say for instance that your name is not John Carmack, and you want to make a 3d game. You code it in C++, Cg, Objective C, Visual C++, OpenGL, DirectX9, whatever. You have all these different layers of 3d graphics you have to deal with, unless you just use someone else's engine. You've got shadows, lighting, colors, textures, mip mapping, bump mapping, shading, animating, it goes on and on with the insane number of things you have to do. When new apis emerge that let you use the video card to do more stuff it is very difficult to learn that much more crap.
Most of the stuff you're doing, though, is handled by the card or DirectX/OpenGL. Cg will only be used if you're writing shaders for nVidia cards (does ATi support Cg yet?), Objective C will only be used if you're porting to OS X and for some reason want to use Cocoa (not likely). You'll use either C or C++, and whether or not you use Visual C++ is a personal choice of IDE that may or may not be determined by the company you work for. Maybe you do code both for OpenGL and for Direct3D, but most people just do one or the other because it is hard to find people that can do both well, and that can handle building the game so that the renderer can be swapped out based on a user's choice. As long as you're on Windows you're probably going to use DirectX for input and sound anyway, and maybe network support, too.
In any case, the point that seems to be missed by many people is this: the game starts development about 18-24 months before it's released (unless you're Blizzard, id, or the DNF team). Video cards come
The point that you apparently completely missed is that times, they are a'changin', and that people are spending less and going for the tried and true, rather than just buying any old thing. While not everyone is reading reviews, people are buying on word of mouth more, and when one person has read a review, they'll tell their friends.
Something else I've noticed is that game stores are pushing more trade-ins now, so they can sell the same game 2 days later for $5 less, and the publisher doesn't get anything from it (which is a good thing imo, because the first person they sold it to either didn't like it or is done with it). You can almost tell which games suck by how quickly the used copies show up and how many used copies there are.
On the other hand, games that are routinely panned here and a few other places (Enter the Matrix for example) actually have very few used copies on the shelves, and in some cases have waiting lists for the used copies (maybe because so many people have heard bad things about it that they don't want to put up the full price, but really, no one seems to be getting rid of the game).
Let's see, for the GC I have Animal Crossing, Super Smash Brothers Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, Zelda Wind Waker. 3 of those games (Metroid, Smash Bros., and Mario) I bought in the $20-30 range, as well, and Zelda came with the system (I found out the GameBoy Player replaces the game if you buy it with the system, so I bought the system with Zelda and pre-ordered the Player; there was also a bundle with Mario and a memory card for $160 but I got Mario and the memory card for less than $50).
My PS2 is mostly relegated to RPGs, and leans heavily towards PS1 games. Oh, and Tekken, and GTA 3/VC.
My XBox is mostly used for the 2- or 3- console releases, because in at least half of the cases the graphics are better on the XBox versions, and in the rest of the cases the games are pretty much the same on all consoles. Then there's Halo, of course. Plus I prefer the XBox controller, even to the PS2 controllers (which I prefer over the GameCube controllers, though so far the WaveBird is doing great).
Personally, I can't use a computer for long periods of time with a refresh rate below ~75 Hz, as it causes me to get very bad eye-strain and related headaches. As I said before, it's different for different people. Generally, a TV refresh rate is much lower (~25-30 Hz, sometimes listed as 50-60 Hz because it is interlaced; non-HDTV and other high resolution standards), and non-digital movies are filmed at similar framerates, and for me none of these cause any problems, it's something unique to computer displays (and possibly some lights as well) that causes this problem for me. Therefore, I limit what resolutions I use based on whether or not I can acheive 75+ Hz with my graphics card and monitor.
Anyway, the idea from a developer's standpoint is to hit a minimum of 30 fps in the worst-case scenarios on a target low-end system. This will satisfy most customers, and provide a high framerate for the mid- to high-end systems. Ideally, you'd provide a framerate lock to maintain a maximum framerate for those people that actually know enough about what they're doing with game optimization to know that the difference between your highest framerate and your lowest framerate is where perceived slowdowns come from, even if the framerate never drops below 100.
If i recall correctly Total Annihilation did this back in 97? The game was 2d top down, but the data was 3d. It allowed complicated line of sight and other 'neat' things (AA guns blasting your buildings if you didn't give them enough clearance)..
TA did something slightly different. It was a 3d game done entirely on 2d hardware (as opposed to a 2d game done entirely on 3d hardware). TA had polygon-based models and did all of the proper calculations to model the 3d space, but drew everything using 2d graphics instructions. So, even to this day, the game doesn't take advantage of any 3d graphics hardware, but does take full advantage of CPU upgrades and video RAM.
60. Anything above that is overkill. Anything less and you lose hardcore arcade gameplay.
It's a fairly arbitrary number entirely dependant on the player's ability to perceive frames at a certain rate of speed, and the monitor's ability to display them (also a factor is whether the player games with the lights on or off, and the frequency of those lights if they are on).
In theory, you want the raw framerate to be roughly 1.5 to 2 times the refresh rate of your monitor, and then enable v-synch to lock it at the refresh rate (preventing various problems caused by vertical refreshes when the card is midway through drawing a frame).
The most important part, though, is to make sure game logic is affected by framerate as little as possible (if at all), which some game developers (id comes to mind) seem to have a lot of problems doing.
You're hardly the only person to claim this here, but it sounds like you've had to do some checking out of this. I keep seeing "most games" being bandied about, but the only games I can think of right now are the collected works of id, the Diablo games, and possibly Eternal Darkness (though I've not played that).
and at the very least, the works of id and the Diablo series tend to be closer to Christian games than most of the others anyway (in that you are fighting against a distinctly Christian form of evil).
Well, I could easily see them phasing out PS1 game backward compatibility. It might not be the best step for them to do, as it will alienate some gamers. But, as with almost all companies out there, you do have to stop supporting legacy hardware and software at some time (in this case, only the software part counts).
As it stands now, the PS2 uses an I/O chip that provides the backwards compatibility with the PSOne. Sony has also moved the CPU and GPU for the PS2 onto a single chip. Therefore, maintaining backwards compatibility for the PS3 with both the PSOne and PS2 means including 2 chips, and maybe some sort of chip to sense whether or not the PS2 chip needs to be used for a particular game. If the PS2 could be embedded into the I/O the way the PSOne has been, then it would probably be even less complicated (though the I/O chip would be much more complicated). The added bonus is that existing peripherals would also work to some extent, as is the case with the PS2.
Of course, if the PS3 isn't backwards compatible all the way to the PSOne, it makes PS2 compatibility less important to someone like myself, that uses the PS2 more often for PSOne games than for PS2 games (though, admittedly, the other people I live with spend more time playing GTA than I do playing any PSOne or PS2 games).
I own a PS2 because it allows me to play current games while still playing older games (or even recent games that were made for older hardware). Old hardware is often a pain to keep working, but old software, especially in the case of optical media, can often last nearly forever. The PS2 fully replaced a console I already had, and therefore became the 1st console I bought of the current generation (I bought the DreamCast much earlier, but since it's pretty much a dead console now...). If the PS3 doesn't fully replace the PS2 in all cases, then it'll have to compete for a place rather than simply taking an existing spot, and I'm not sure that Sony can do that quickly (their strength is in numbers, not in the signal-to-noise ratio). With 4 systems already connected to my TV, space is becoming a premium.
The user doesn't have to worry about keeping up to date, it just happens automatically.
heh, I forgot to add that the same people (myself included) don't like the idea of anyone automatically downloading and installing anything on their hardware;)
I can't wait until the first breaking patch comes down the wire to all of the poor bastards that buy this thing.
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Drizzt is a dark elf from the Forgotten Realms novels by R.A. Salvatore
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http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=fr/fx2
Yes, I did read too many D&D novels as a kid (mostly DragonLance, but seemingly all of the Forgotten Realms books I own happen to be R.A. Salvatore novels featuring Drizzt).
(Aluminium)
Not the best choice of examples of proper spelling, since Aluminum was the name chosen by the man that discovered the metal in the first place, whereas Aluminium was someone's else's idea of spelling the name so that it would conform to the ending of many other elements' names.
In other words, Aluminium is a matter of conformance, not a matter of correct spelling. Much like the changes in the book are a matter of either arrogance on the part of British publishers or a sincere wish to pander to the largest possible audience. Either way, I'd rather have my books in the English in which they were written, or the best possible translation of their native language, preferably with the original language version included.
Yeah, I got a pretty wonderful welcome to it when I took Social Psychology in college, and pretty much determined for myself that my teacher was full of it. I did my final paper in that course on the lack of effect of music and violent imagery as a tool for turning children into killers and rapists.
Without the junk/bulk mail it would cost you a fortune to mail anything because the infrastructure would be so expensive
OK, keep the junk mail, force people to pay more to mail me stuff. Maybe then they'll let me pay my bills online instead of sending me a statement every month and expecting me to send them a check (considering I write maybe 2 checks a month and pay everything else online...).
Idiom:
;)
go postal
Slang To become extremely angry or deranged, especially in an outburst of violence.
from Dictionary.com, with a quick search for the word postal.
The other important point is that the USPS derived their name from their function, rather than making up the word post or postal in regards to mail and mail delivery. Their name is generic, just like that of most other government services, and the USPS moniker that they've started using/advertising more recently is simply a response to UPS and FedEx being much more common-usage than United Parcel Service or Federal Express.
Besides, if the court upheld the USPS' claim, what would happen to the Japanese Postal Service, the Military Postal Service Agency, and most other postal services around the world?
As for resumes and such, if it's in the interest of the company, of course you should have it on your computer. The poster was clearly indicating that he was leaning towards the more personal of things; personal emails, resumes that had nothing to do with current employment, and private documents. Again, fine to have laying around once in awhile (it's fairly inevitable if you spend most of your day in one particular spot), but to constantly have it moving in and out?
The way I see it, if you don't want your company to know you have it, you shouldn't put it on the company's computers. Personal email is legally tracked by most companies large enough to afford to do so if you put it on their computer and/or ethernet lines, especially if it's coming to a company email address (in which case it's going through their email servers which almost always are reading your email). The company I work for also monitors most employees' computer usage through programs that would put most 'spyware' to shame, collecting information about what applications are used for how long, with the ability to track much more if they feel the need to monitor a particular person more closely, and all internet traffic is monitored at the individual sites as well as at various corporate offices (almost all internet access is routed through corporate offices rather than being direct from any particular site).
At any point in time the company can easily copy anything from my hard drive or delete it completely, and can install anything on my computer. Of course, most of the people here don't use their computer as their primary tool for daily work, but rather for communication and paperwork.
Our current president wantts to take the USPS and turrn it into a private business, effectively killing the perpetuation of consistent and federally mandated service at regulated prices.
How much is a stamp again? I lost track when I ran out of the 1 cent mark-up stamps and started doubling up to finally get rid of the roll of stamps I bought two years ago. I know they've raised the price of stamps at least twice since I did that. Regulated? Maybe, but not very well, and last time I checked to see what the price hike paid for, about 75+% of it was to reduce the cost of bulk mail, which I would pay you not to deliver thank you very much.
Well, let me assure you that I am neither a southerner nor white so I can't possibly be racist.
Sorry to even go on this way, and not to imply that you are racist, but you neither have to be a southerner nor white to be a racist. Of course, I am white and am currently in the south, so ymmv. I lived most of my life in the southwestern US, and have met plenty of racists of many races, and actually find most of the people I've met in the southeast to be slightly less racist (probably because there seems to be more diversity in this area, and most people that live here are not from here).
As for linking the phrase 'I like to kill mockingbirds' to being racist, I have no clue where that came from. Maybe I missed some of the symbolism in the book, which I didn't really care for in the first place.
Are you saying your employers don't give back property which is yours? Are you saying that to get it back, you need to bribe them with property you stole from them? Are you saying you regularly keep personal stuff on their computers? Isn't that a little silly, to be keeping email and your resume there on the hard drive? Maybe once in awhile, you might have your resume there for some odd reason, but that just sounds stupid if you leave it there all the time.
The company I work for generally handles lay-offs by taking your badge and access card (which are their property anyway) and escorting you from the building with a quick stop-by at your cube/desk to pick up small personal belongings. Anything large will be packed and sent to you, and you can't log back into the computer and/or network, or take any disks/CDs. They also have a tendency, based on the employee's record with the company, to give you paid leave if you give them 2 weeks notice (in other words, you go home immediately), unless you're working on something that you intend to finish before you leave, which the company wants finished in that time.
As for the other things: I've had my employer imply that I was attempting to steal company equipment on a few occasions when I decided to take home parts that I had brought in for testing purposes (which they had known I was bringing in for those purposes when I did it), and I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to claim ownership of my keyboard and mouse if/when I leave, despite the fact that they would not be able to produce any record of having purchased or reimbursed me for them, and not having a single keyboard or mouse in the building that is remotely similar. On the other hand, I'm somewhat more confident that they would return my books and coffee mugs to me, though they might just move them to the 'library' in the office.
As for personal stuff on the computers, there's not really much the company can do about that here. They allow a certain amount of it, and unless it was the reason for the layoff in the first place, they don't take the time to look at the contents of your computer once you're gone anyway (unless there's something they think is on there that they need to find, such as data related to what you were working on). They also require us to update our resume periodically (to be submitted to various customers in order to win a contract), so it's quite normal for everyone in the office to have their resume on their own computer.
Guess then you don't care for the same rules applying to movies either. By this logic little Johny should be able to see M an XXX rated movies.
There's no law preventing children from buying or renting R rated movies (though most rental businesses either allow parents to control this or don't rent them to children). The XXX type ratings are produced entirely by the industry that makes those movies, and the ratings have no effect on whether or not they can be viewed by minors (and to some degree I do have a problem with the government telling parents they can't allow their teenagers to watch these movies, in many cases videos marketed and sold to teens in other countries receive these ratings and restrictions in the US).
As for 'X' rated software, either regulate it with the rest of the porn industry or don't. Violent material rarely earns a movie an NC-17 rating, or a refusal by the movie industry to rate it at all, but when it does it's often given the same treatment as porn.
The real question is whether or not the M rating that games receive should be treated as an R, NC-17, or X type of rating, or whether the games industry needs a further level of rating for M-rated games. I know there are a lot of parents out there that don't mind letting their teenagers view either nudity or violence, but not both, or more commonly not both in the same context, so it would probably help if the M-rated games had additional content information like TV ratings often do. It might also help if the ratings board refused to rate some content and subsequently that material was treated as it would be in the movie industry, but I don't really see that as helping people much (and really there are a great deal of unrated DVDs out there simply because of the amount of extra material a lot of companies are putting on their 'special edition' DVDs now).
Bleh, anyway, I'm rambling. I guess my point is that laws don't enforce the official ratings on movies (and X ratings aren't official), but the laws that enforce X ratings take choice away from parents. Meanwhile, the games that are in the industry that utilizes X ratings are sold through the same channels as the movies and other porn. Maybe if the video game industry didn't rate every thing above a certain level with an M regardless of whether or not the content would justify it as porn would help, but I have yet to see an M-rated game that even comes close to porn in the first place (anyone that's seen BMX XXX would realize how much of a marketing ploy that XXX really is).
Could violent games be to potential murderers like pr0n to the potential rapist?
Actually, that's exactly right, as in:
the link between the two is either completely non-existant or is actually there for some percentage of the population, depending on who you pay to do the study.
Even porn that actually depicts rape (which is in itself illegal in most states, if not the entire country) does not appeal to all rapists, and violent video games do not appeal to all violent offenders.
If people took care to pay attention to what their children were doing instead of asking the government to prevent them from doing it, there would be fewer problems in this country (well, if that isn't stating the obvious...).
How bout The No luod music law.
In California, if your car stereo is too loud, they can impound it (the stereo, or the car if they can't easily remove the stereo).
Then, of course, there's the usual laws regarding loud music (or any loud noise) between certain hours (ie after midnight).
The real point I'm sure you are trying to get at though is that you suspect that GCC has been optimised much more for PowerPC than x86. Let me assure you that you could not be more wrong. If you recall the days of egcs and pgcc you'll realize that x86 optimisation with gcc has been a strong area of interest for gcc maintainers. Indeed, until VC++7 came out, gcc was one of the fastest x86 compilers out there
As a primarily C++ developer, gcc has never been a strong compiler for me, so I could be wrong in assuming that gcc was never well optimized for current x86 processors, but even PGCC and EGCS doesn't mean a great deal in terms of current x86 processors, which have another 5 years of new instructions and optimizations.
Even AMD uses the Intel compiler for their Linux SPEC results on their own processors.
Apple could've done just fine by using Dell's already published SPEC results instead of retesting. Dell's numbers are already lower than Intel's because Dell used an older version of Intel's compiler and MS' compiler (not to mention the parts Dell uses).
No, because they likely could get better performance on the PPC with a different compiler, too. Think on.
Which you would think would be the compiler that Apple and IBM have put the most time into in the last couple of years, right? Now that compiler would be... oh, yeah, gcc, the compiler that's used to build OS X in the first place.
At least everything that they did seemed to be amply documented.
I found that to be refresing especially in light of all the recent benchmark tests that have not been so forthright with all their methods and procedures.
If it wasn't amply documented, it would violate the terms of the SPEC benchmark. Give them credit where it's due, but really, the only reason why there's more information about these benchmarks than they normally give is because it's required of them by the benchmark they chose to use.
What he's saying is that by coding to an abstracted API that is common across many different chipsets, you don't have to code to the chipset at all. So if the game uses DirectX, you can run the game on a TNT2 or a GeForce4 and the application will still *work*. He didn't say it would work well on a TNT2 if it's written to GeForce4 level capabilities.
But, if you code to an abstracted API in such a way that it will work on a TNT2, you are definitely *not* using the full capabilities of the card, unless you're talking about a game that will run on a TNT2 in 4 years, when the CPU is fast enough to do what the GeForce4 does for you today. That's why most games that do take advantage of newer cards have option menus that let you enable the options those cards allow, because a TNT2 w/ a 2GHz CPU can't do what a GeForce4 w/ a 2GHz CPU can do.
Of course, if the only thing compelling about your game is the graphics, maybe you have enough CPU cycles left to do the T&L in software mode at a similar quality to what the GF4 can do. Maybe you can do the shaders in software (assuming that you'd even bother doing the shaders in Direct3D instead of Cg). DirectX will do the work in software if you have features enabled that can't be done by your hardware, but that doesn't mean it will run well (or even run at all).
That is true. However, if you install the newest DirectX (which will install no matter how shitty your pc is), and you try to play a game written for say a GeForce4 and you have a TNT2, then your pc can figure out what the card should do and what the cpu should do. So, there is no reason for game designers to code to the least common denominator, they just have to code for the newest DirectX/OpenGL and the user's pc turns on available options for their card, and disables the others.
Well, you have some clue what you're talking about, but most of it went over your head or you were told something incorrect(ly). DirectX has no clue whether or not your system is powerful enough to handle the features enabled in the game, it only knows whether or not your card supports them. If your card doesn't support them, it renders them in software (which is always slower, unless you're playing a DirectX3 game on an nVidia Riva 128 with a P4 CPU, where the card, the game, nor DirectX support most of the complicated rendering done by new video cards). It won't turn features off, it will just try to do them in software, which will bog your computer down unless you have a lot of excess CPU cycles. The game has to turn them off, which is usually done through a menu or a command of some type.
The reason that the graphics card is under-used is for two reasons. The first is that game designers, as you said, want the game to work well on lower end platforms. If your cpu is good enough you can add better graphical features even if your video card doesn't support it. For example Descent 3 adds motion blur if your cpu is L33t enough. However, the main reason that video cards are underused is that it's a fucking pain in the ass.
Descent 3 ran like a solid turd on most systems available at the time of it's release, I wonder why that could be. It's simple, if you want to use the extra features and still sell your game (only OEMs bought Descent 3 as far as I can tell, since the only Descent 3 discs I've ever seen came from OEM packages), you add option menus to turn them on, and default them to off (or check the video card they're using and turn them off or on based on your testing that shows which cards can handle it). Why did Half-Life sell so well? Besides having a much-touted single-player experience, it could play on a P166 w/ a crap video card at a time when you couldn't even buy that type of system new any more.
Let's say for instance that your name is not John Carmack, and you want to make a 3d game. You code it in C++, Cg, Objective C, Visual C++, OpenGL, DirectX9, whatever. You have all these different layers of 3d graphics you have to deal with, unless you just use someone else's engine. You've got shadows, lighting, colors, textures, mip mapping, bump mapping, shading, animating, it goes on and on with the insane number of things you have to do. When new apis emerge that let you use the video card to do more stuff it is very difficult to learn that much more crap.
Most of the stuff you're doing, though, is handled by the card or DirectX/OpenGL. Cg will only be used if you're writing shaders for nVidia cards (does ATi support Cg yet?), Objective C will only be used if you're porting to OS X and for some reason want to use Cocoa (not likely). You'll use either C or C++, and whether or not you use Visual C++ is a personal choice of IDE that may or may not be determined by the company you work for. Maybe you do code both for OpenGL and for Direct3D, but most people just do one or the other because it is hard to find people that can do both well, and that can handle building the game so that the renderer can be swapped out based on a user's choice. As long as you're on Windows you're probably going to use DirectX for input and sound anyway, and maybe network support, too.
In any case, the point that seems to be missed by many people is this: the game starts development about 18-24 months before it's released (unless you're Blizzard, id, or the DNF team). Video cards come
The point that you apparently completely missed is that times, they are a'changin', and that people are spending less and going for the tried and true, rather than just buying any old thing. While not everyone is reading reviews, people are buying on word of mouth more, and when one person has read a review, they'll tell their friends.
Something else I've noticed is that game stores are pushing more trade-ins now, so they can sell the same game 2 days later for $5 less, and the publisher doesn't get anything from it (which is a good thing imo, because the first person they sold it to either didn't like it or is done with it). You can almost tell which games suck by how quickly the used copies show up and how many used copies there are.
On the other hand, games that are routinely panned here and a few other places (Enter the Matrix for example) actually have very few used copies on the shelves, and in some cases have waiting lists for the used copies (maybe because so many people have heard bad things about it that they don't want to put up the full price, but really, no one seems to be getting rid of the game).
Let's see, for the GC I have Animal Crossing, Super Smash Brothers Melee, Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, Zelda Wind Waker. 3 of those games (Metroid, Smash Bros., and Mario) I bought in the $20-30 range, as well, and Zelda came with the system (I found out the GameBoy Player replaces the game if you buy it with the system, so I bought the system with Zelda and pre-ordered the Player; there was also a bundle with Mario and a memory card for $160 but I got Mario and the memory card for less than $50).
My PS2 is mostly relegated to RPGs, and leans heavily towards PS1 games. Oh, and Tekken, and GTA 3/VC.
My XBox is mostly used for the 2- or 3- console releases, because in at least half of the cases the graphics are better on the XBox versions, and in the rest of the cases the games are pretty much the same on all consoles. Then there's Halo, of course. Plus I prefer the XBox controller, even to the PS2 controllers (which I prefer over the GameCube controllers, though so far the WaveBird is doing great).
Personally, I can't use a computer for long periods of time with a refresh rate below ~75 Hz, as it causes me to get very bad eye-strain and related headaches. As I said before, it's different for different people. Generally, a TV refresh rate is much lower (~25-30 Hz, sometimes listed as 50-60 Hz because it is interlaced; non-HDTV and other high resolution standards), and non-digital movies are filmed at similar framerates, and for me none of these cause any problems, it's something unique to computer displays (and possibly some lights as well) that causes this problem for me. Therefore, I limit what resolutions I use based on whether or not I can acheive 75+ Hz with my graphics card and monitor.
Anyway, the idea from a developer's standpoint is to hit a minimum of 30 fps in the worst-case scenarios on a target low-end system. This will satisfy most customers, and provide a high framerate for the mid- to high-end systems. Ideally, you'd provide a framerate lock to maintain a maximum framerate for those people that actually know enough about what they're doing with game optimization to know that the difference between your highest framerate and your lowest framerate is where perceived slowdowns come from, even if the framerate never drops below 100.
If i recall correctly Total Annihilation did this back in 97? The game was 2d top down, but the data was 3d. It allowed complicated line of sight and other 'neat' things (AA guns blasting your buildings if you didn't give them enough clearance)..
TA did something slightly different. It was a 3d game done entirely on 2d hardware (as opposed to a 2d game done entirely on 3d hardware). TA had polygon-based models and did all of the proper calculations to model the 3d space, but drew everything using 2d graphics instructions. So, even to this day, the game doesn't take advantage of any 3d graphics hardware, but does take full advantage of CPU upgrades and video RAM.
60. Anything above that is overkill. Anything less and you lose hardcore arcade gameplay.
It's a fairly arbitrary number entirely dependant on the player's ability to perceive frames at a certain rate of speed, and the monitor's ability to display them (also a factor is whether the player games with the lights on or off, and the frequency of those lights if they are on).
In theory, you want the raw framerate to be roughly 1.5 to 2 times the refresh rate of your monitor, and then enable v-synch to lock it at the refresh rate (preventing various problems caused by vertical refreshes when the card is midway through drawing a frame).
The most important part, though, is to make sure game logic is affected by framerate as little as possible (if at all), which some game developers (id comes to mind) seem to have a lot of problems doing.
You're hardly the only person to claim this here, but it sounds like you've had to do some checking out of this. I keep seeing "most games" being bandied about, but the only games I can think of right now are the collected works of id, the Diablo games, and possibly Eternal Darkness (though I've not played that).
and at the very least, the works of id and the Diablo series tend to be closer to Christian games than most of the others anyway (in that you are fighting against a distinctly Christian form of evil).
Well, I could easily see them phasing out PS1 game backward compatibility. It might not be the best step for them to do, as it will alienate some gamers. But, as with almost all companies out there, you do have to stop supporting legacy hardware and software at some time (in this case, only the software part counts).
As it stands now, the PS2 uses an I/O chip that provides the backwards compatibility with the PSOne. Sony has also moved the CPU and GPU for the PS2 onto a single chip. Therefore, maintaining backwards compatibility for the PS3 with both the PSOne and PS2 means including 2 chips, and maybe some sort of chip to sense whether or not the PS2 chip needs to be used for a particular game. If the PS2 could be embedded into the I/O the way the PSOne has been, then it would probably be even less complicated (though the I/O chip would be much more complicated). The added bonus is that existing peripherals would also work to some extent, as is the case with the PS2.
Of course, if the PS3 isn't backwards compatible all the way to the PSOne, it makes PS2 compatibility less important to someone like myself, that uses the PS2 more often for PSOne games than for PS2 games (though, admittedly, the other people I live with spend more time playing GTA than I do playing any PSOne or PS2 games).
I own a PS2 because it allows me to play current games while still playing older games (or even recent games that were made for older hardware). Old hardware is often a pain to keep working, but old software, especially in the case of optical media, can often last nearly forever. The PS2 fully replaced a console I already had, and therefore became the 1st console I bought of the current generation (I bought the DreamCast much earlier, but since it's pretty much a dead console now...). If the PS3 doesn't fully replace the PS2 in all cases, then it'll have to compete for a place rather than simply taking an existing spot, and I'm not sure that Sony can do that quickly (their strength is in numbers, not in the signal-to-noise ratio). With 4 systems already connected to my TV, space is becoming a premium.
The user doesn't have to worry about keeping up to date, it just happens automatically.
;)
heh, I forgot to add that the same people (myself included) don't like the idea of anyone automatically downloading and installing anything on their hardware
I can't wait until the first breaking patch comes down the wire to all of the poor bastards that buy this thing.