Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
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· Score: 1
Sort of -- you can't tell a windows system to delete files directly AND turn off delete confirmations at the same time. I find it more annoying for the system to ask me every time I delete a file, so I set the recycle bin for 1% of the drive and turn off confirmations. When you set the size to 0%, it immediately turns on confirmations.
Not sure about other versions of Windows, but under 2k the checkbox for delete confirmations is still enabled and functions properly when you tell it not to move files to the recycle bin.
Re:Recycle Bins - don't you just hate them?
on
Undelete In Linux
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· Score: 3, Informative
At the very least, turn down the disk usage for the recycle bin. Personally, I just set it to 'use the same settings for all drives', then set 'do not move files to the recycle bin', and leave the prompt enabled just in case I accidentally hit delete, and then remove the recycle bin from my desktop (using a registry file I downloaded from OReilly in one of their Win* annoyances articles, which has worked in every version of Windows I've used from 98 to XP).
Anyway that statement about Lindows being more professional because it isn't "geeks-only" really pisses me off, and also the comparison to windows
I think they meant that it looked like a professionally-designed/made/whatever OS, rather than it looked like an OS a professional would use. A professional might care what their OS looked like, but it'd be secondary to getting the job done. An OS built by professionals would be built with a target market in mind, which is usually NOT other professionals. Finally, anyone that knew what they were doing could make Linux or Windows look like just about anything, including each other.
The last press release from Lindows.com contains the 'word' AOL 20 times in the first 5 paragraphs, including the phrase 'AOL computer' and claims of a partnership with AOL/Netscape.
Exactly how would that be MSNBC's fault, except that MSNBC should've contacted AOL for comment?
That Lindows is a really shady operation? Everything they do seems a litle scummy.
It really shouldn't be all that surprising, look at mp3.com's history. Even the whole lack of creativity in naming the OS rings the same bell, after all, if you're going to make a website that hosts mp3s, mp3.com would be the first to come to mind, and I'm sure he paid a pretty penny to someone for that domain name.
Distribute a disk(s) to all W2K and NT users with a program that makes the changes to defaults, including auto-update.
ns, most schools that I've been to which offer network access will supply a disk to simplify setting up the computer for their network. It's fairly simple to put together some scripts that check the version being run and set it to update the computer from the internal network or windows update, as well as change (or prompt the user to change) any non-secure settings.
Now of course the 9x series weren't designed with Internet access in mind. They don't have real multi-user support, so their filesystems are unprotected. However, their networking implementations aren't as deep in the OS as tehy are in NT systems. I could see how this could limit some damage. I still think it strange, though. Maybe 98 is less buggy than 2000 because it's simpler? Ah... the old KISS principle...
I'd think that 98 and Me are probably more complex because they were built on top of 95, which was built on top of DOS, rather than being built on top of NT. I could be wrong, though, as NT might be more complex from the start. It seems to me, at least from reading between the lines, that IIS might be the problem more than anything, as it takes a bit more work to install PWS on 98/Me than IIS on NT4/2k, based on the following statement from the posted 'article':
Residents' computers were compromised with several well-known vulnerabilities and used for all manner of unfriendly purposes such as the installation of viruses like Code Red and Nimda on other residents' computers, denial of service attacks, and port scanning.
Code Red and Nimda both can attack the 9x line, but Nimda specifically attacks IE, Outlook, AND IIS, which means that an NT/2k install with IIS enabled has one more open door. I really don't think it justifies it, as they could just state that any IIS installations found running on their network will be blocked, but it's a point in their favour. Otherwise, in general I'd look at requiring the latest service pack on 2k and drop NT4 and 98 (if not Me as well) from the network, given that both NT4 and 98 are close to the end of their supported life. All of that being said, I wonder how they've done with the recently publicized Linux exploits, most of which were similar in nature to these Windows exploits in that they were patched before the exploits really got underway, yet the affected users didn't bother to update their systems.
Consider the names of various government departments in the book. Most of them are named pretty much as the opposite of what they do. There are a lot of other instances in the book where things are twisted in this way, and, in general, it leads to the title. If it had been written in 1949 instead of 1948 it would've been 1994. Normally, I would go into more detail, but I haven't read the book since 1991, and am pretty sure my copy of the book is still in a box that has yet to be unpacked.
I think that GPL'd code could be used as a reference implementation, too. The recipients would have to write their own version, but could check the GPL version just as easy as they could check the BSD version.
I agree that it's possible to use GPL'd code as a reference implementation, but as you've basically stated, you have to go back and rebuild it for anything other than GPL'd work. With the BSD code they'd simply have to modify it for their purpose.
As for academic code, the BSD and GPL licenses both give the recipient more rights than typical university licenses. As a Ph.D. student I'd love to release my code under the GPL, but there is no way my advisor and/or my university would allow that. You used the term "strict" to describe the rules of the GPL relative to the BSD license; compared to typical academic rules, the GPL and the BSD are more-or-less equivalent.
Well, the school I went to required use of the GPL on all code written there. Of course, at the time there was still some confusion over whether or not code compiled with gcc had to be covered under the GPL, and they were pretty much covering their own asses. I have seen more stringent academic licensing requirements, but I was thinking more along the lines of the way academic research should be, imo, rather than what some schools have decided to do as they've become more dependant on the profits from their research.
Oh, and Orwell set it in 1984 because he wanted to pick a time reasonably in the future, and as he was writing it in 1948, he just swapped the last two year digits round, thought it sounded like as good a future date as any, and used it.
Actually, the title and year it was written has more significance than that, but if you've read it and decided to accept that it just 'sounded as good as any', I don't think I want to try to explain it.
I expect that this "freer" stuff is semantic. Maybe it would be appropriate to say that the BSD license is "free as in anarchy", while the GPL is more like social freedoms (freedoms which require balance). I've never been an anarchist or libertarian, and prefer the freedom-infrastructure built by the GPL.
I think the libertarian part is probably more accurate than anarchy. I think 'freer' mostly depends on point of view, though. For the developer, the GPL has far more limits than the BSD license, because the GPL is focused on giving freedom to the end-user, not the developers. The BSD license is more academic in nature, giving the code away in such a manner that it can be used by everyone, not just people willing to follow a strict set of rules (of course, the BSD license does have some rules, but they're fairly minor, the most common version simply requiring the copyright to be maintained). This, of course, is why BSD code drives many of the most important standards for internet connectivity in most of the popular operating systems.
Keeping your code from becoming part of a proprietary project has it's benefits, I'm sure, but it's hard to argue against the fact that BSD code has helped standardize the way we do so many things. Some people point at Microsoft's TCP/IP stack as the failing of the BSD license, I look at it as the success of the license.
but only single-click an icon in the toolbar to get the same result.
I assume he's refering to the systray, where I have to double click on many of the icons there to get a response.
But at the same time, if he's referring to anything like the Quick Launch bar in Windows, you do single-click that area, just like the start menu. I had to go to a meeting a couple days ago and it drove me nuts watching the person doing the presentation double-clicking things in IE and the IE icon on the quick launch bar, and she couldn't seem to figure out why things launched twice or links took a little longer than they should to open. I think MS had the right idea when they put in the option to single-click desktop items, because it makes things more consistent, yet at the same time I can't stand it, and have never used it.
Here's a simple way to translate this to 'real life':
Download the top 20 singles on Billboard from whatever P2P program (I almost guarantee they'll all be easy to find), or if you feel like covering your ass a bit download 70 or so minutes worth of songs from bands that have spoken out saying they want people to download their music.
Decode them to CD Audio format and burn a stack of CDs with those songs in that format, so that people will be able to play them in their CD players (at least a decent percentage of them). Sure, they won't sound as good as the originals, but that's always been part of the point, right? Now, go down to your local 'chain' record store or WalMart (the largest retailer of CDs in the US) and hand the CDs out to people going into/out of the store.
Alternatively, download whatever the #1 box office draw is this week and burn it onto a stack of CDs. Bonus points for formats supported by common DVD players (VCD? MPEG?). Then go down to your local movie theater and hand them out to people in line.
Do it in groups if you must. It'll cost you a little time and money, but it's more visible than sharing files on your PC.
The port of FFVII did pretty well, especially since they revamped the graphics and redid the translation. FFVIII was almost a straight port, and didn't work well on nVidia cards at a time when 3dfx was pretty much dying. They eventually fixed most of the nVidia problems (portions of the cut-scenes were upside down last time I tried to play it, ie the backgrounds would be upside down and the characters right-side-up, or vice-versa), but the graphics were roughly the same as the PSX version. Plus FFVIII generally didn't sell as well as FFVII on the console, either, IIRC.
I would like the see a port of FFIX, if just to ditch the 'jaggies' in the PSX version, but I'm just as happy playing all of them on the PS2. In fact, I'd just like to be able to find the releases of IV-VI and see I-III on the PSX/2.
As for FFXI, my only question is does the PC version play online with people using the PS2 version?
the really great thing about an Nvidia card was incredible performance at great a great price, and not gimmicks?
You mean like: -32-bit colour -hardware T&L ('GPU') -DirectX extensions -pixel shaders -FSAA -implementing AGP4x/8x etc before any motherboards supported it -The MX line and it's predecessors -releasing cards that are essentially the previous card at higher speeds simply to push the release cycle
Eventually they all resulted in better performance and a more competetive environment, but most of them were nothing more than hype and marketing for at least 1 generation of cards. Usually the first release with a new feature couldn't perform well with that feature enabled, or the feature wasn't implemented in a single game until at least one more release of cards with that feature.
Their cards still give great performance for the price, but now ATI's competetive and nVidia has to rely more on their reputation and drivers during certain parts of the release cycle. Making deals with various developers and manufacturers helps them with the reputation side (and could hurt them in some ways), just as it does for ATI. Of course, nVidia mostly brought the competition with ATI on themselves by targetting ATI's historically dominated market: OEM sales. ATI didn't even start producing competetive 3d cards until nVidia started taking business from them in that segment with the MX and nForce lines.
Seriously how many games like EQ are we going to see made? Why didn't square try to cut into some totally uncharted territory and offer something that no one had ever seen.
Well, to be fair, it is one of the first console MMORPGs, they're just porting it to the PC. There are some things that are fairly original about the title, but you'd be better served reading a review/preview of the title than getting my rehashed summary on it, since it would simply be based on those rather than actually playing the game. It *might* actually convince me to pay $10/month for a game (or whatever they're charging for monthly fees). I tried UO and EQ, but UO didn't keep my interest for more than a few days, and EQ didn't for more than a couple of weeks.
I agree on Shadowrun, though I'd rather see an RPG with good multiplayer options than an MMORPG, just because I haven't seen an MMORPG yet that I thought was done well.
as I'm sure you know, there are effects that exist on both the nVidia and ATI cards which are not currently supported in Direct3D, except through extensions that each company has made on their own. If those are the effects being used, then they'd have to be programmed independently for each card. So, this very well could be a situation in which nVidia paid Square to add the capability to the game, rather than them paying Square not to add the same capability for the ATI card, because Square would have to do all of the coding for those effects all over again to make them work on an ATI card.
Guess Ill just be toting around a trackball for the rest of my life in that case. We use a lot of the trackpads on rackmount systems and I absolutely can't stand doing any extensive amount of work on them. One of our customers even supplied a keyboard/trackball combination for their system.
Re:There was no reason to buy anything but 3dfx
on
The Last Days at 3dfx
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· Score: 1
hmm my Viper V330 had OpenGL drivers in the box. That doesn't mean they worked very well, but they were there.
Of course, then I had to have one of those 3d switcher programs installed on my machine all the time to tell the games whether to use my Riva128 or my SLI Voodoo2 cards.
I went through the nVidia product cycles buying a TNT and then a TNT2Ultra before I pulled the Voodoo2 cards from my system. The Voodoo3 came out sometime after the GeForce if I remember correctly, which gives an idea of how bad the situation really was for 3dfx. The SLI Voodoo2 setup was better at some things than the TNT2 Ultra that came out so much later (and far superior to the cards before it), but the Voodoo3 didn't really compete very well with nVidia's cards by the time it came out.
Re:Surprising this has not happened with soundcard
on
The Last Days at 3dfx
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Makes me wonder how Creative have managed to stay top of the soundcard pile. They seem to have been making consistently the best cards, (apart from a brief time when Gravis Ultrasound marketed using the Demo scene). No-one has really compared for the non-professional market.
Both Gravis and Aureal made better sound chips than Creative, and better cards were made from the chips. Both companies lost to Creative the same way, too: Creative brought massive lawsuits with little merit that lasted so long the companies went bankrupt paying the legal fees to defend themselves.
In other words, Creative managed to stay at the top of the soundcard pile by legislating anyone that looked competetive out of existance.
Re:There was no reason to buy anything but 3dfx
on
The Last Days at 3dfx
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· Score: 1
At the time of the Riva128, though, 3dfx didn't have a good 2d board. While the Riva128 wasn't the best 2d board, either, it did do the job for most people and supplied opengl support that worked OK for many games (remember that opengl support didn't come along for Voodoo cards until Quake3 stopped support for the miniGL drivers).
but today there is little need for faster graphics.
The need for faster and better graphics is exactly why 3dfx died. nVidia caught up and passed them while they were making mistakes like telling people they didn't want or need 32bit colour in 3D games or making 2d/3d cards that didn't hold up to their 3d-only boards.
The intuitive reader will note that the jump from a 100MHz to 400MHz processor was also limitted by the FSB and thus did not acheive a 400% increase in speed.
Though they'll also notice that the bus speed nearly doubled from the 100MHz to 400MHz Intel CPUs. If there's even a 1.2GHz CPU available, it'd be a P3 running at 133MHz FSB, so you either have the same FSB or 4X, depending on how much stock you put in the new 533 architecture.
So you justify a $42,000 base price on 25 hp (225hp is what's currently listed for the Boxster) with a top speed of 155mph (hence I said that Porsches are not generally faster cars), 0-62mph in 7.3 sec, weight distribution and suspension?
I'd say it's more about how the car looks and perception of the Porsche name. Maybe if GM posted top speeds and 0-60 times on their website they'd sell more cars at half that price. But, who wants to talk about 0-60 times under 5.5 seconds, right? Then again, they're not expensive, so they can slap a new body, suspension, and modify the air flow on to the same engine, add some more cutting-edge electronics and sell it for about $6K-10K more, and people will pay.
I'd look up Honda specs, but apparently the browser I'm using at the moment isn't supported by their site.
You wanna take your Grandass up against my M3? Lets go, any day.
Actually, I own a Z28, so you were almost right (after all, they're all GM, right?). That wasn't my point, though. The point was simply that a Porsche or a Jaguar is not always going to be a fast car, and that the speed isn't what justifies the price for most of those people. My uncle owns a Porsche 911 Targa because he likes the car, not because it's fast (though he likes to drive fast). Still, because it's an older Porsche, it's top speed is lower than mine and, as with most Porsches, it doesn't get up to the top speed as quickly.
The point, though, is that even a low-end Porsche, Jaguar, Mercedes, BMW, etc will demand a high price in the US because of perception, and that performance only really comes into it in a small number of their models and for a certain percentage of their buyers
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Sort of -- you can't tell a windows system to delete files directly AND turn off delete confirmations at the same time. I find it more annoying for the system to ask me every time I delete a file, so I set the recycle bin for 1% of the drive and turn off confirmations. When you set the size to 0%, it immediately turns on confirmations.
Not sure about other versions of Windows, but under 2k the checkbox for delete confirmations is still enabled and functions properly when you tell it not to move files to the recycle bin.
At the very least, turn down the disk usage for the recycle bin. Personally, I just set it to 'use the same settings for all drives', then set 'do not move files to the recycle bin', and leave the prompt enabled just in case I accidentally hit delete, and then remove the recycle bin from my desktop (using a registry file I downloaded from OReilly in one of their Win* annoyances articles, which has worked in every version of Windows I've used from 98 to XP).
Anyway that statement about Lindows being more professional because it isn't "geeks-only" really pisses me off, and also the comparison to windows
I think they meant that it looked like a professionally-designed/made/whatever OS, rather than it looked like an OS a professional would use. A professional might care what their OS looked like, but it'd be secondary to getting the job done. An OS built by professionals would be built with a target market in mind, which is usually NOT other professionals. Finally, anyone that knew what they were doing could make Linux or Windows look like just about anything, including each other.
The last press release from Lindows.com contains the 'word' AOL 20 times in the first 5 paragraphs, including the phrase 'AOL computer' and claims of a partnership with AOL/Netscape.
Exactly how would that be MSNBC's fault, except that MSNBC should've contacted AOL for comment?
That Lindows is a really shady operation? Everything they do seems a litle scummy.
It really shouldn't be all that surprising, look at mp3.com's history. Even the whole lack of creativity in naming the OS rings the same bell, after all, if you're going to make a website that hosts mp3s, mp3.com would be the first to come to mind, and I'm sure he paid a pretty penny to someone for that domain name.
Distribute a disk(s) to all W2K and NT users with a program that makes the changes to defaults, including auto-update.
ns, most schools that I've been to which offer network access will supply a disk to simplify setting up the computer for their network. It's fairly simple to put together some scripts that check the version being run and set it to update the computer from the internal network or windows update, as well as change (or prompt the user to change) any non-secure settings.
Now of course the 9x series weren't designed with Internet access in mind. They don't have real multi-user support, so their filesystems are unprotected. However, their networking implementations aren't as deep in the OS as tehy are in NT systems. I could see how this could limit some damage. I still think it strange, though. Maybe 98 is less buggy than 2000 because it's simpler? Ah... the old KISS principle...
I'd think that 98 and Me are probably more complex because they were built on top of 95, which was built on top of DOS, rather than being built on top of NT. I could be wrong, though, as NT might be more complex from the start. It seems to me, at least from reading between the lines, that IIS might be the problem more than anything, as it takes a bit more work to install PWS on 98/Me than IIS on NT4/2k, based on the following statement from the posted 'article':
Residents' computers were compromised with several well-known vulnerabilities and used for all manner of unfriendly purposes such as the installation of viruses like Code Red and Nimda on other residents' computers, denial of service attacks, and port scanning.
Code Red and Nimda both can attack the 9x line, but Nimda specifically attacks IE, Outlook, AND IIS, which means that an NT/2k install with IIS enabled has one more open door. I really don't think it justifies it, as they could just state that any IIS installations found running on their network will be blocked, but it's a point in their favour. Otherwise, in general I'd look at requiring the latest service pack on 2k and drop NT4 and 98 (if not Me as well) from the network, given that both NT4 and 98 are close to the end of their supported life. All of that being said, I wonder how they've done with the recently publicized Linux exploits, most of which were similar in nature to these Windows exploits in that they were patched before the exploits really got underway, yet the affected users didn't bother to update their systems.
Consider the names of various government departments in the book. Most of them are named pretty much as the opposite of what they do. There are a lot of other instances in the book where things are twisted in this way, and, in general, it leads to the title. If it had been written in 1949 instead of 1948 it would've been 1994. Normally, I would go into more detail, but I haven't read the book since 1991, and am pretty sure my copy of the book is still in a box that has yet to be unpacked.
I think that GPL'd code could be used as a reference implementation, too. The recipients would have to write their own version, but could check the GPL version just as easy as they could check the BSD version.
I agree that it's possible to use GPL'd code as a reference implementation, but as you've basically stated, you have to go back and rebuild it for anything other than GPL'd work. With the BSD code they'd simply have to modify it for their purpose.
As for academic code, the BSD and GPL licenses both give the recipient more rights than typical university licenses. As a Ph.D. student I'd love to release my code under the GPL, but there is no way my advisor and/or my university would allow that. You used the term "strict" to describe the rules of the GPL relative to the BSD license; compared to typical academic rules, the GPL and the BSD are more-or-less equivalent.
Well, the school I went to required use of the GPL on all code written there. Of course, at the time there was still some confusion over whether or not code compiled with gcc had to be covered under the GPL, and they were pretty much covering their own asses. I have seen more stringent academic licensing requirements, but I was thinking more along the lines of the way academic research should be, imo, rather than what some schools have decided to do as they've become more dependant on the profits from their research.
Oh, and Orwell set it in 1984 because he wanted to pick a time reasonably in the future, and as he was writing it in 1948, he just swapped the last two year digits round, thought it sounded like as good a future date as any, and used it.
Actually, the title and year it was written has more significance than that, but if you've read it and decided to accept that it just 'sounded as good as any', I don't think I want to try to explain it.
I expect that this "freer" stuff is semantic. Maybe it would be appropriate to say that the BSD license is "free as in anarchy", while the GPL is more like social freedoms (freedoms which require balance). I've never been an anarchist or libertarian, and prefer the freedom-infrastructure built by the GPL.
I think the libertarian part is probably more accurate than anarchy. I think 'freer' mostly depends on point of view, though. For the developer, the GPL has far more limits than the BSD license, because the GPL is focused on giving freedom to the end-user, not the developers. The BSD license is more academic in nature, giving the code away in such a manner that it can be used by everyone, not just people willing to follow a strict set of rules (of course, the BSD license does have some rules, but they're fairly minor, the most common version simply requiring the copyright to be maintained). This, of course, is why BSD code drives many of the most important standards for internet connectivity in most of the popular operating systems.
Keeping your code from becoming part of a proprietary project has it's benefits, I'm sure, but it's hard to argue against the fact that BSD code has helped standardize the way we do so many things. Some people point at Microsoft's TCP/IP stack as the failing of the BSD license, I look at it as the success of the license.
but only single-click an icon in the toolbar to get the same result.
I assume he's refering to the systray, where I have to double click on many of the icons there to get a response.
But at the same time, if he's referring to anything like the Quick Launch bar in Windows, you do single-click that area, just like the start menu. I had to go to a meeting a couple days ago and it drove me nuts watching the person doing the presentation double-clicking things in IE and the IE icon on the quick launch bar, and she couldn't seem to figure out why things launched twice or links took a little longer than they should to open. I think MS had the right idea when they put in the option to single-click desktop items, because it makes things more consistent, yet at the same time I can't stand it, and have never used it.
Here's a simple way to translate this to 'real life':
Download the top 20 singles on Billboard from whatever P2P program (I almost guarantee they'll all be easy to find), or if you feel like covering your ass a bit download 70 or so minutes worth of songs from bands that have spoken out saying they want people to download their music.
Decode them to CD Audio format and burn a stack of CDs with those songs in that format, so that people will be able to play them in their CD players (at least a decent percentage of them). Sure, they won't sound as good as the originals, but that's always been part of the point, right? Now, go down to your local 'chain' record store or WalMart (the largest retailer of CDs in the US) and hand the CDs out to people going into/out of the store.
Alternatively, download whatever the #1 box office draw is this week and burn it onto a stack of CDs. Bonus points for formats supported by common DVD players (VCD? MPEG?). Then go down to your local movie theater and hand them out to people in line.
Do it in groups if you must. It'll cost you a little time and money, but it's more visible than sharing files on your PC.
The port of FFVII did pretty well, especially since they revamped the graphics and redid the translation. FFVIII was almost a straight port, and didn't work well on nVidia cards at a time when 3dfx was pretty much dying. They eventually fixed most of the nVidia problems (portions of the cut-scenes were upside down last time I tried to play it, ie the backgrounds would be upside down and the characters right-side-up, or vice-versa), but the graphics were roughly the same as the PSX version. Plus FFVIII generally didn't sell as well as FFVII on the console, either, IIRC.
I would like the see a port of FFIX, if just to ditch the 'jaggies' in the PSX version, but I'm just as happy playing all of them on the PS2. In fact, I'd just like to be able to find the releases of IV-VI and see I-III on the PSX/2.
As for FFXI, my only question is does the PC version play online with people using the PS2 version?
the really great thing about an Nvidia card was incredible performance at great a great price, and not gimmicks?
You mean like:
-32-bit colour
-hardware T&L ('GPU')
-DirectX extensions
-pixel shaders
-FSAA
-implementing AGP4x/8x etc before any motherboards supported it
-The MX line and it's predecessors
-releasing cards that are essentially the previous card at higher speeds simply to push the release cycle
Eventually they all resulted in better performance and a more competetive environment, but most of them were nothing more than hype and marketing for at least 1 generation of cards. Usually the first release with a new feature couldn't perform well with that feature enabled, or the feature wasn't implemented in a single game until at least one more release of cards with that feature.
Their cards still give great performance for the price, but now ATI's competetive and nVidia has to rely more on their reputation and drivers during certain parts of the release cycle. Making deals with various developers and manufacturers helps them with the reputation side (and could hurt them in some ways), just as it does for ATI. Of course, nVidia mostly brought the competition with ATI on themselves by targetting ATI's historically dominated market: OEM sales. ATI didn't even start producing competetive 3d cards until nVidia started taking business from them in that segment with the MX and nForce lines.
Seriously how many games like EQ are we going to see made? Why didn't square try to cut into some totally uncharted territory and offer something that no one had ever seen.
Well, to be fair, it is one of the first console MMORPGs, they're just porting it to the PC. There are some things that are fairly original about the title, but you'd be better served reading a review/preview of the title than getting my rehashed summary on it, since it would simply be based on those rather than actually playing the game. It *might* actually convince me to pay $10/month for a game (or whatever they're charging for monthly fees). I tried UO and EQ, but UO didn't keep my interest for more than a few days, and EQ didn't for more than a couple of weeks.
I agree on Shadowrun, though I'd rather see an RPG with good multiplayer options than an MMORPG, just because I haven't seen an MMORPG yet that I thought was done well.
as I'm sure you know, there are effects that exist on both the nVidia and ATI cards which are not currently supported in Direct3D, except through extensions that each company has made on their own. If those are the effects being used, then they'd have to be programmed independently for each card. So, this very well could be a situation in which nVidia paid Square to add the capability to the game, rather than them paying Square not to add the same capability for the ATI card, because Square would have to do all of the coding for those effects all over again to make them work on an ATI card.
Guess Ill just be toting around a trackball for the rest of my life in that case. We use a lot of the trackpads on rackmount systems and I absolutely can't stand doing any extensive amount of work on them. One of our customers even supplied a keyboard/trackball combination for their system.
hmm my Viper V330 had OpenGL drivers in the box. That doesn't mean they worked very well, but they were there.
Of course, then I had to have one of those 3d switcher programs installed on my machine all the time to tell the games whether to use my Riva128 or my SLI Voodoo2 cards.
I went through the nVidia product cycles buying a TNT and then a TNT2Ultra before I pulled the Voodoo2 cards from my system. The Voodoo3 came out sometime after the GeForce if I remember correctly, which gives an idea of how bad the situation really was for 3dfx. The SLI Voodoo2 setup was better at some things than the TNT2 Ultra that came out so much later (and far superior to the cards before it), but the Voodoo3 didn't really compete very well with nVidia's cards by the time it came out.
Makes me wonder how Creative have managed to stay top of the soundcard pile. They seem to have been making consistently the best cards, (apart from a brief time when Gravis Ultrasound marketed using the Demo scene). No-one has really compared for the non-professional market.
Both Gravis and Aureal made better sound chips than Creative, and better cards were made from the chips. Both companies lost to Creative the same way, too: Creative brought massive lawsuits with little merit that lasted so long the companies went bankrupt paying the legal fees to defend themselves.
In other words, Creative managed to stay at the top of the soundcard pile by legislating anyone that looked competetive out of existance.
At the time of the Riva128, though, 3dfx didn't have a good 2d board. While the Riva128 wasn't the best 2d board, either, it did do the job for most people and supplied opengl support that worked OK for many games (remember that opengl support didn't come along for Voodoo cards until Quake3 stopped support for the miniGL drivers).
but today there is little need for faster graphics.
The need for faster and better graphics is exactly why 3dfx died. nVidia caught up and passed them while they were making mistakes like telling people they didn't want or need 32bit colour in 3D games or making 2d/3d cards that didn't hold up to their 3d-only boards.
The intuitive reader will note that the jump from a 100MHz to 400MHz processor was also limitted by the FSB and thus did not acheive a 400% increase in speed.
Though they'll also notice that the bus speed nearly doubled from the 100MHz to 400MHz Intel CPUs. If there's even a 1.2GHz CPU available, it'd be a P3 running at 133MHz FSB, so you either have the same FSB or 4X, depending on how much stock you put in the new 533 architecture.
Fun with Hondas...
So you justify a $42,000 base price on 25 hp (225hp is what's currently listed for the Boxster) with a top speed of 155mph (hence I said that Porsches are not generally faster cars), 0-62mph in 7.3 sec, weight distribution and suspension?
I'd say it's more about how the car looks and perception of the Porsche name. Maybe if GM posted top speeds and 0-60 times on their website they'd sell more cars at half that price. But, who wants to talk about 0-60 times under 5.5 seconds, right? Then again, they're not expensive, so they can slap a new body, suspension, and modify the air flow on to the same engine, add some more cutting-edge electronics and sell it for about $6K-10K more, and people will pay.
I'd look up Honda specs, but apparently the browser I'm using at the moment isn't supported by their site.
LOL, you must be a Pontiac owner.
You wanna take your Grandass up against my M3? Lets go, any day.
Actually, I own a Z28, so you were almost right (after all, they're all GM, right?). That wasn't my point, though. The point was simply that a Porsche or a Jaguar is not always going to be a fast car, and that the speed isn't what justifies the price for most of those people. My uncle owns a Porsche 911 Targa because he likes the car, not because it's fast (though he likes to drive fast). Still, because it's an older Porsche, it's top speed is lower than mine and, as with most Porsches, it doesn't get up to the top speed as quickly.
The point, though, is that even a low-end Porsche, Jaguar, Mercedes, BMW, etc will demand a high price in the US because of perception, and that performance only really comes into it in a small number of their models and for a certain percentage of their buyers