...it's hurting my ears. Everybody wants to be "cool" and post exactly the same thing that's been said five thousand other times on Slashdot, which invariably boils down to 1 of 3 things:
1) "George Lucas is a flaming greedy capitalist whore, boycott his movies!!!!"
Three words: get a grip. Do you know George Lucas personally? I don't. I'm sure you don't either. Making petty personal attacks is the #1 reason no one outside of the geek community takes the geek community seriously. It smacks of both penis envy and I'm-Sixteen-And-Pissed-Off-At-The-World Syndrome, and it's also defacing a quiet, unassuming geek himself who's a decent family man. If you don't buy Lucas' reasoning that he wants to be able to do something artistically special for the DVD, that's fine. Keep your name-calling to yourself.
2) "Phantom Menace/ROTJ/the series sucks balls compared to Matrix/Dune/Cube/whatever!!!"
Lucas set out to create a movie to capture the magic of both the Saturday cartoon serial and movies that he remembers fondly from his childhood. The reason most of you thought the original trilogy kicked ass and Episode I blew isn't because of any large qualitative difference, it's because you watched them twenty years apart. I was born in 1978, so the first time I saw Star Wars was on videotape, and it had exactly the effect Lucas wanted. I went into Episode I knowing it was a movie aimed at a 10 year old, and I enjoyed it for what it was. Are The Matrix and Pokemon aimed at the same audience? Would you compare the two? So quit making lame analogies that don't fit. Oh yeah, and I hereby predict that after Matrix 3 (or whatever it'll be called) everyone and their mother on Slashdot will be rushing to be "cool" as the people who call the creators "sellouts" and "profitmongers", as they were disappointed that Matrix 3 didn't have the same "magic" as the first. Well, no shit. There's only a first time for everything. Wouldn't you think after 3 movies, or 6, that they won't have at least some feel of "been there, done that?"
3) "Lucas should stop letting down his fans with all this hype and give us the DVD/3 sequels/free movies/adult themes that we want!!!"
I'm sorry, is this art by committee? Lucas is the rare artist (extremely rare) who has enough power and influence to do things exactly how he wants, and you people flame him for not pandering to the masses?? Jesus Christ!! Go back to listening to Third Eye Blind or watching cheesy summer action flicks. I'd rather see the rare something that was uncut and unprostituted to make everyone happy, warts and all.
The bottom line is, if you don't like the series or the movie, don't contribute money to Lucas. He doesn't want it anyway - he's already one of the richest men alive, and the only reason he needs any more is so he can create more movies, which is what he loves. Don't say "well, I think the movie, but I'll buy it anyway." Just don't buy it, don't whine about it, and for God's sake don't spend your time making up mud to sling at Lucas.
I'm going a step farther to say I'm disappointed in how mindless and drone-like Slashdot is appearing in non-issues like this subject. For every post that actually has something interesting or insightful to say, there are 20 more that fit into one of the categories above marked "Score 5: Insightful". Pass the barf bag.
Speaking as someone who uses a Pentium 200 with 64 MB and a TNT, I can assure you that it's not marketing that's making me look forward to the next upgrade:
More processing power means faster multitasking.
I like to run multiple applications at once. A random example would be me running Winamp, encoding my latest Smashing Pumpkins CD on Bladeenc, browsing Slashdot, NYT, and Anand for news while taking a break from working on a presentation that's running in the background. My friend's P3 wouldn't even blink. My Pentium eventually starts lagging behind my user interactions by up to a few seconds. While that doesn't sound like much, when you expect near-instantaneous feedback, waiting five seconds for a window to redraw seems like an eternity.
Faster games are more fun; slower games detract from the entertainment.
You don't sound like a Quake or Unreal player, so I'll get down to the basics: 30 fps = no noticeable jerking
60 fps = silky smooth walking around
120 fps = large multiplayer battles without the computer choking
I run Quake 2 at 640x480 at about 30-40 fps. I can't run Quake 3 at a decent framerate without turning everything down, and I still have more than my share of framerate-induced deaths.
If you don't think shooters really matter, than try running FF8 on my setup...the full-motion video stutters, and everything runs about twice as slow as on a Playstation. It sure is pretty, though...
Code compiles, MP3 encoding, and other background tasks are directly affected by CPU power.
If time is money, CPU power saves a gold mine. Source code that would take a day to compile on my setup would take a few hours or less on my friend's P3. What happens when your computer chugs while you're burning a CD? You get a free coaster (depending on your buffer size).
I'm sick of every clueless user who's sick of upgrading complaining about "bloat" and "marketing" responsible for causing their cash drain. Do you like GUIs as opposed to command line? You need more CPU power. Do you like Starcraft as opposed to Zork? You need more CPU power.
Marketing for computers is like marketing for pop...Pepsi spends hundreds of millions on advertising annually, but no amount of nifty commercials would make me buy my cases of Mountain Dew if I didn't need the caffeine to stay/wake up.
A) a rehashed (but still interesting) story on supercooling tiny amounts of matter and B) a story on a ~$180 processor that you can slap in a mobo and overclock to a gigahertz
the obvious geek-appealing story didn't even get mentioned by "News for Nerds". (Or is this "Old News for Quantum Physicists"?)
Call me silly and slap me Sally. Or the other way around, I don't know...
...this coming from the same people who used a leaked copy of the Quake3 IHV to conduct 'exclusive' benchmarks on video cards last year...
Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing...the problem lies not with benchmarks, which are never objective, but biased review sites (such as ones that bash 3dfx for years while running nVidia's advertisements on their frontpage) that can't (or won't) put them in the proper perspective.
Sony obviously wants the PS2 to be the centerpiece in any home's audiovisual entertainment center. So what has this to do with the extra hardware?
Simple!
Sony sees this huge,untapped market for distributing MP3s over the internet! I mean, what else do 12 year olds do nowadays besides play video games, right? And as we all know, it takes quite a bit of HD space to hold a substantial amount of MP3s...so voila! Sony is set and poised to become an MP3 power...
Coming soon...Sony's buyout of Napster, and the addition of banner advertising...a la ICQ!
Don't worry...from the looks of things you're way ahead most of the posters today...
If you want to check out a really good, credible source of physics information on the net, I suggest the Usenet Physics FAQ if you just can't be bothered to pick up a textbook.
Both questions of yours are really close to a general question known as the Twin Paradox. Basically, who's clock moves slower (or who's actually ageing slower)? The incredibly short answer is that time in the train's frame of reference, for the period that it moves at a relativistic speed compared to you, travels slower compared to time in your frame. In other words, after you accelerate (or the train slows down) for you to compare, your clock will be ahead.
The answer to your second question lies in the fact that the spacetimes of the two ships are fundamentally different from each other. 0.75c is a measurement of speed in your reference, and not the other spaceship's. Therefore, at relativistic speeds, vectors don't add normally. The other spaceship moving towards you is going 0.96c in your frame of reference. (Work out v =((v1-v2)/(1-(v1v2/c^2))) where v1 = 0.75c, and v2 = -0.75c.)
Enough rambling...the FAQ should answer any other questions you or anybody else might have.
The source of the problem (the major one anyway) is that the most powerful items in Everquest only appear with certain unique creatures in a set location.
People have pointed out that massive organized camping is taking place right now on Everquest, where conniving (or entrepreneurial, depending on your personal preference) players hoping to make a quick buck get together and deny the lesser folk a chance to get them for free.
So what kind of solutions are there to this really?
Randomization
A lot more have pointed out that randomization would solve all the camping, and that the people at Verant were idiots not to implement it in the first place.
Just to take Verant's side for a moment, the way Everquest originally was designed (gameplay wise) pretty much eliminates any chance of real randomization. What fun is it, really, if you buy the game, start off with a level 1 character, kill some peon in the countryside, and Wow, look I got a Sword O' Instant Death! Everquest was meant to be played a whole lot like the original Diablo, except in a much bigger world - build levels by killing scrub, go on quests, kill bosses, and get the mad loot. Randomization eliminates any need to kill bosses, and by inference, any need to build up levels and abilities. How much incentive is there to spend weeks building up a level 30 character when some level 5 newbie could kill you with a randomized Sword O' Instant Death he got off a Pink Bunny Rabbit? Verant is protecting itself and its investment by making people earn items the old-fashioned way.
Get rid of ultra powerful items altogether
I find this solution a lot more intriguing, if somewhat controversial (not to mention pissing off everyone who did spend weeks getting these items). If anyone's played the old Legend of the Red Dragon or Trade Wars back in the day (way back in the day =)) you'll know that this works in its own way, even if it doesn't provide a whole lot of game interaction. If you get rid of the Monty Haul style of the RPG, you eliminate not only the camping but a large percentage of the online selling without messy GM interference. Quests (and a lot of the linearity of Everquest) would have to be dropped or massively redesigned. Virtual status could replace power, like granting nontransferable titles or something like that. Heck, gimme a sign above me saying "Please Stare At My Massive Penis" and sure, I'll kill that Dragon. =) Instead of powerful items, you could have limited, powerful abilities that can't be transferred. Then again, that would simply encourage people to try selling whole accounts...
Take legal action and virtual action by GM
Well, gee, I guess we'll know how successful this route is in a few months...
- is a quantification of "Exceptionally fast rendering". Eye candy and advanced physics are all well and good, but if the engine pulls 20 fps with a 1000 poly scene on a decent system, forget about it.
On a slightly different tack, I'm always mystified about how many people get their panties in a wad about this or that free 3D engine. People, if having a working 3D engine was even 25% of the work of game creation, Daikatana 2 would have hit the shelves yesterday. Getting a team of designers, writers, artists, architects (i.e. mappers), and programmers of the right talent, and keeping them focused on task and happy has always been a bigger burden by far. How Epic pulled it off for what, 3, 4 years for a single game has always impressed me a lot more than Unreal ever did. As a rule, creative vision is the single most precious commodity in the developer community currently, and it's likely to stay that way. There's a lot more chaff out there than wheat.
Intel releases a chip for less than $200 that easily overclocks to 83/750 MHz with simple air cooling. And that's before anyone's gotten fancy with it...or even considering that the cheaper 566 MHz chip has the option of going up to 100/850 MHz (and remember this is the same core stepping as the new CuMine 850s and 866s).
And people are bitching about this???
Talk about history repeating itself...I remember when the 300A came out, everyone whined about its low bus speed and small cache. Anyone else see the irony?
Okay, I noticed there's a lot of misinformation/total crap being thrown out on/. right now...so I'll clear a few things up.
Correction: Clock for clock, according to SharkyExtreme's and AnandTech's benchmarks, the Pentium III takes a majority decision against the Athlon while using the i820/RDRAM and KX133/SDRAM chipsets (with the notable exception of professional CAD/CAM), which is useful for the money-is-no-object department. Interestingly, Anand also benched the P3 with a Apollo 133A/SDRAM chipset revealing a give-and-take tie relative to the Athlon, for those of us that are a bit more price conscious.
Correction: The P3 L2 cache is 8-way associative, 256 bit wide, 256KB in size, and runs at full clockspeed. The Athlon L2 cache is 512KB in size, running at 1/3 the clockspeed. The Athlon also has a 128KB L1 cache compared to the P3's 32KB L1 cache, both running at full clockspeed.
Correction: There is NO yield problem at Intel. There is, however, a supply problem, due to management mispredicting what quantity in chips they need to have supplied, as well as reallocation of resources as Intel prepares its fabs for Willamette and Itanium. Gotta love management. For proof, check out the amazing ability of Intel's 500E-600E chips to overclock to 700+ MHz. That's not a characteristic of a chipmaker with yield problems.
Correction: Why on Earth are people deciding what processor is superior by the supply of said chips? Like most sane people, I happen to judge performance on the basis of performance alone. Or maybe it's because I'm not a brand-name zealot. Either way...unless you're talking price/performance (in which case why even talk about GHz processors?) please can the supply arguments.
So who wins? The consumer does. Hopefully with the introduction of Cyrix's Joshua processors, the chipmakers will be squeezed even harder to cut both profits and prices. If you really desire a God Box, go take out a student loan and treat yourself to an SMP Alpha platform.
...is like the year 2000. They don't really mean anything (besides faster chips and slight Y2K computer problems) but it's a nice round number with lots of zeros for people to latch onto. Everyone needs a buzzword to feel cool.
Java as it's currently implemented sucks, for reasons in its runtime philosophy. The net effect of Java's cross-platform bytecode is nothing more than a shift from spending time and computing cycles on the developer side to spending them on the user side. The only way JIT compilers will ever get close to the efficiency of precompiled C or C++ binaries is by spending more and more computing resources on the compiler, and less resources actually running the program. Developers get paid to develop software, why force the user to do the work for them all in the name of "elegance" or "abstraction". If developers want their software to run on multiple platforms, they should take the time and effort to compile for those platforms.
Java by itself is a cool language, with lots of nifty features like auto garbage collection that I really love. Unfortunately though, until the folks at Sun realize that they should sell Java as a cool language, and not by preaching about changing "computing as we know it", will Java be adopted wholesale commercially.
In my Business Communications class a few weeks ago, we discussed in-depth some of the different strategies advertisement agencies use to target men and women, and how they stem from fundamental differences in the ways men and women think - starting from in the womb when testosterone severs half of the brains' connections in the male fetus.
Men are more task-oriented; they function better in repetitive, boring tasks such as stalking game, practicing musical instruments, and perfecting their jump shots. They prefer simple, direct ideas over complex issues. Hence the popularity of the Budweiser Frogs and the Swedish Bikini Team.
Women like complex, thought-provoking issues and projects. They tend to be extroverts in larger numbers than males and respond to emotional appeals better than men. Women flip the channel when the Budweiser Frogs or the Swedish Bikini Team appears.
Now, thinking back to those long, late-night hours spent slaving over the latest pointless Data Structures project, compiling, debugging, recompiling, and redebugging over and over, it suddenly isn't such a mystery why more women don't want to be CS majors.
...can be found at AnandTech. It covers much more ground than simply the rivalry between AMD and Intel, including some interesting specs about the Willamette architecture:
2x ALU unit (i.e. the integer processor runs at 3.0 GHz)
FSB runs at "400 MHz" (similar to the "200 MHz" EV6 bus)
the introduction of SSE2
It also talks more about Intel recognizing the need for DDR SDRAM systems as well.
There are two main objectives to political campaigning: expanding your political base, and changing voter participation. The net simply adds one more dimension to the media tools available to political candidates.
As Bill Clinton proved with his New Democrat politics, and Ronald Reagan with his Reagan Democrats, the easiest way to win general elections is to spread your appeal to disparate voter groups. The net becomes a way to get your message out, to get name recognition to thousands of voters without spending suitcases of cash on TV and radio sound bites (and all the problems that are associated with raising those suitcases). In the words of John McCain, the net becomes the "great equalizer", and while I'm pretty sure McCain doesn't exactly fit the profile of a power user, it's nice to see someone more "mainstream" at least notices the growing potential of the net as a political force.
The 2000 presidential race is a clear-cut example of a political fight to, on one side, expand voter participation, and on the other, to limit turnout. Negative campaigning, "good times" campaigning, and the politics of inevitability tend to suppress voter participation, which benefits one group in particular: the political Establishment. The Establishment (as defined by the hardcore elements/leadership of the political parties) is guaranteed an almost automatic 30-40% of the vote, plus the ability to rake in wads of cash for their candidate. When combatting insurrections against the Establishment, as Al Gore and George W. Bush are both doing to varying degrees of success, the easiest road to victory is to turn the moderates and independents (the main strength of rebellions) away from the ballot box. When the fanatics are all on your side, why give anybody else a reason to vote? Hence the negative attitude adopted by Gore, and the parading by Bush of his supposedly "invincible" $70 million political war chest. Conversely, the underdogs have a vested interest in getting as many voters to the ballot box as possible. McCain's biggest strength lies with his appeal to independents and Reagan Democrats, and his biggest challenge in the primaries is to convince them that their vote does mean something. And this is where the net comes in - a large chunk of netizens are moderate/independents, and populist campaigns would do well to reach out to them. A lot of the technologically franchised have a tendency (as seen here on/.) to feel politically disenfranchised, and, well, if you don't think your vote means squat, you're probably not going to make the effort to vote, right? Just remember that you're playing right into the Establishment's hands by doing so.
The point? Imagine the Slashdot effect transferred to elections. Get registered, get informed, and go rock the vote.
I haven't taken anything Tom says seriously since it was revealed he used a warez Quake3 hack to conduct "exclusive" benchmarks. And then he tried to defend it! The ego of the guy is incredible...just listen to the arrogance in his writing.
Well, according to this Sharky's blurb we can expect it in the 2nd quarter, or April-June of this year. Interestingly, that's around the timeframe predicted for Intel to debut its next-gen gigahertz Willamette core.
Nothing like an old-fashioned corporate pissing contest.
Let's face it, 90% of x-philes don't watch the show for the special effects, the confusing and sometimes contradictory mytharc, or the spookiness factor (no inside joke intended).
We watch it for the Mulder/Scully interaction, the jokes, the character development, the morbid curiosity of watching a dysfunctional couple stumble through the steps of their relationship under extreme circumstances. The most irrelevant parts of the storyline (to the average x-phile) tend to be the ones that have least to do with the characters. Mulder and Scully are fully fleshed out, nuanced characters that long-time viewers identify with. It helps that the actors are both attractive, without being oversexed, and they can play their parts convincingly without being pompous or suffering from William Shatner Syndrome.
The reason I'm laying this out is that it would take an incredible amount of work to similarly flesh out the Lone Gunmen to evoke the same kind of viewer response. While they're a breath of fresh air whenever they appear on the X-Files, they are meant to play the foil, the comic relief, the supporting cast. I've watched the Lone Gunmen-centric episodes of the X-Files, and while they're enjoyable, frankly the best parts (read: most involving) are the ones where Scully or Mulder are included. While a select minority (especially the tech-oriented) would probably watch such a spin-off, the large majority of the X-Files fan base would probably lose interest.
Unreal Tournament's Linux binaries are subpar currently, and there isn't a Half-life Linux port, as far as I know...
What's your problem with id software? They've consistently fought, at their own time and expense, for open standards and alternative platforms, which is more than anyone can say for either Valve or Epic.
...besides, the current substandard 3D graphics support in Linux (compared to Windows) is not something I'd probably want to be showcasing if I was running the tech demo.
Something Tim Sweeney seems to have left out of the discussion of next-generation language concepts is real-world performance concerns. He mentions it briefly: "C++ failed to deliver binary platform-independence, and Java failed to deliver high performance."
Does he not see that binary platform-independence in Java led directly to its performance problems? Even with hacks like JIT compilers, performance of bytecode lags well behind binaries compiled from Java. This is just one of many examples that illustrates a common principle: at every level of language advancement, there's going to be some performance tradeoff.
The best example of how this affects programmers is the Quake 1 engine. Released before mainstream hardware acceleration, the most processor-intensive routines in the engine are written in assembler, and just about every possible performance/elegance conflict is resolved with performance in mind. The result? We all played Quake with 35 fps on a Pentium 166 in 320x200 software mode. In the newly released source code, rewriting the assembler in C drops performance by close to half. With today's machines its not a problem, but back then I don't think anyone would have enjoyed playing Quake too much with sub-20 fps.
But then he goes on to lay out what he sees as the major shortcomings of current generation languages, which really comes down to:
The distinction between primitives and objects (especially the lack of easy manipulation of objects a la primitives), and
The lack of uber-classes.
Let's go back to the article: "Stop for a second and ponder the power of such a concept -- with about four lines of code, you've sub-classed a 150,000 line game engine and added a new feature that will propagate to several hundred classes in that framework. Besides that, it just seems beautifully high-level to be able to express such a concept with a single statement "class DukeNukemEngine extends UnrealEngine"."
I wince just thinking about the compile times that programs from such a language would take. Throw in a requirement for the language to be binary platform-independent, and who needs Microsoft to spur hardware upgrades?
Tim Sweeney identifies social inertia as the main cause of reluctance to adopt next-generation languages, but a concern with just as much importance in developers' minds is performance, like the development of Quake 1 shows. Until near-infinite processing power and/or bandwidth is accessible to consumers, it will continue to hold back advancement in such a manner. What else can I say? Tim Sweeney is a man ahead of the times.
The actual poll results show that 50% of "entertainment software users" are female. Which brings up interesting questions...
Were they buying for themselves or someone else (i.e. Christmas gifts etc.)?
Would they be interested in reading computer gaming magazines?
How much do they plan to spend on games?
How much on a game are they willing to spend?
Is gaming a primary motivation behind their using a computer?
...among others...
You can bet the house that gaming companies know the answers to these questions and a LOT more. The point I want to make is that, while "50% of entertainment software users are female" is a nice statistic, it could just as easily be incredibly misleading, as all statistics by themselves without appropriate additional information can be.
Let me see if I get what you're saying straight...
Playing God is something new, and limited to current genetic research.
Uh, yeah. Next time you take a trip down to the grocery store, give a thank you to your ancestors who took the time to play God with wild plants and animals, breed and domesticate them, and thus cause the Agricultural Revolution. And don't think that just because it took a few centuries (i.e. the hard way) that it wasn't any less genetic tinkering than what scientific research is doing right now, using easier methods.
Perfection is bad.
I would actually buy this argument, if I didn't already know that as an online user, you're fairly well-educated and well-off compared to the rest of the world. Go check out your local hospital, and find someone suffering from Parkinson's disease, or late-stage cancer, sit down with them and explain that because you're scared of change and potential harms you don't think they're worth the exploration of genetic research as a possible cure. Better yet, just wait until someone you love (your children, perhaps) is afflicted, and have a nice chat with them about abstract things like the future evolution of humanity.
Get a grip, take your head out of the sand, and check to see how much technology has done to improve your life already. If you don't believe so, you can always take a long vacation in the Sudan or the slums of India to see what a grand life without the dangers of progress is like.
Slashdot Mirror
1) "George Lucas is a flaming greedy capitalist whore, boycott his movies!!!!"
Three words: get a grip. Do you know George Lucas personally? I don't. I'm sure you don't either. Making petty personal attacks is the #1 reason no one outside of the geek community takes the geek community seriously. It smacks of both penis envy and I'm-Sixteen-And-Pissed-Off-At-The-World Syndrome, and it's also defacing a quiet, unassuming geek himself who's a decent family man. If you don't buy Lucas' reasoning that he wants to be able to do something artistically special for the DVD, that's fine. Keep your name-calling to yourself.
2) "Phantom Menace/ROTJ/the series sucks balls compared to Matrix/Dune/Cube/whatever!!!"
Lucas set out to create a movie to capture the magic of both the Saturday cartoon serial and movies that he remembers fondly from his childhood. The reason most of you thought the original trilogy kicked ass and Episode I blew isn't because of any large qualitative difference, it's because you watched them twenty years apart. I was born in 1978, so the first time I saw Star Wars was on videotape, and it had exactly the effect Lucas wanted. I went into Episode I knowing it was a movie aimed at a 10 year old, and I enjoyed it for what it was. Are The Matrix and Pokemon aimed at the same audience? Would you compare the two? So quit making lame analogies that don't fit. Oh yeah, and I hereby predict that after Matrix 3 (or whatever it'll be called) everyone and their mother on Slashdot will be rushing to be "cool" as the people who call the creators "sellouts" and "profitmongers", as they were disappointed that Matrix 3 didn't have the same "magic" as the first. Well, no shit. There's only a first time for everything. Wouldn't you think after 3 movies, or 6, that they won't have at least some feel of "been there, done that?"
3) "Lucas should stop letting down his fans with all this hype and give us the DVD/3 sequels/free movies/adult themes that we want!!!"
I'm sorry, is this art by committee? Lucas is the rare artist (extremely rare) who has enough power and influence to do things exactly how he wants, and you people flame him for not pandering to the masses?? Jesus Christ!! Go back to listening to Third Eye Blind or watching cheesy summer action flicks. I'd rather see the rare something that was uncut and unprostituted to make everyone happy, warts and all.
The bottom line is, if you don't like the series or the movie, don't contribute money to Lucas. He doesn't want it anyway - he's already one of the richest men alive, and the only reason he needs any more is so he can create more movies, which is what he loves. Don't say "well, I think the movie, but I'll buy it anyway." Just don't buy it, don't whine about it, and for God's sake don't spend your time making up mud to sling at Lucas.
I'm going a step farther to say I'm disappointed in how mindless and drone-like Slashdot is appearing in non-issues like this subject. For every post that actually has something interesting or insightful to say, there are 20 more that fit into one of the categories above marked "Score 5: Insightful". Pass the barf bag.
telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives
More processing power means faster multitasking.
I like to run multiple applications at once. A random example would be me running Winamp, encoding my latest Smashing Pumpkins CD on Bladeenc, browsing Slashdot, NYT, and Anand for news while taking a break from working on a presentation that's running in the background. My friend's P3 wouldn't even blink. My Pentium eventually starts lagging behind my user interactions by up to a few seconds. While that doesn't sound like much, when you expect near-instantaneous feedback, waiting five seconds for a window to redraw seems like an eternity.
Faster games are more fun; slower games detract from the entertainment.
You don't sound like a Quake or Unreal player, so I'll get down to the basics:
30 fps = no noticeable jerking
60 fps = silky smooth walking around
120 fps = large multiplayer battles without the computer choking
I run Quake 2 at 640x480 at about 30-40 fps. I can't run Quake 3 at a decent framerate without turning everything down, and I still have more than my share of framerate-induced deaths.
If you don't think shooters really matter, than try running FF8 on my setup...the full-motion video stutters, and everything runs about twice as slow as on a Playstation. It sure is pretty, though...
Code compiles, MP3 encoding, and other background tasks are directly affected by CPU power.
If time is money, CPU power saves a gold mine. Source code that would take a day to compile on my setup would take a few hours or less on my friend's P3. What happens when your computer chugs while you're burning a CD? You get a free coaster (depending on your buffer size).
I'm sick of every clueless user who's sick of upgrading complaining about "bloat" and "marketing" responsible for causing their cash drain. Do you like GUIs as opposed to command line? You need more CPU power. Do you like Starcraft as opposed to Zork? You need more CPU power.
Marketing for computers is like marketing for pop...Pepsi spends hundreds of millions on advertising annually, but no amount of nifty commercials would make me buy my cases of Mountain Dew if I didn't need the caffeine to stay/wake up.
telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives
I find it odd that on a webpage with
A) a rehashed (but still interesting) story on supercooling tiny amounts of matter and
B) a story on a ~$180 processor that you can slap in a mobo and overclock to a gigahertz
the obvious geek-appealing story didn't even get mentioned by "News for Nerds". (Or is this "Old News for Quantum Physicists"?)
Call me silly and slap me Sally. Or the other way around, I don't know...
telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives
"What are we doing tomorrow, Hiboku?"
"The same thing we do every day with our PS2, Jubai, try to take over the world."
- overheard
telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives
...this coming from the same people who used a leaked copy of the Quake3 IHV to conduct 'exclusive' benchmarks on video cards last year...
Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing...the problem lies not with benchmarks, which are never objective, but biased review sites (such as ones that bash 3dfx for years while running nVidia's advertisements on their frontpage) that can't (or won't) put them in the proper perspective.
telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives
Sony obviously wants the PS2 to be the centerpiece in any home's audiovisual entertainment center. So what has this to do with the extra hardware?
Simple!
Sony sees this huge,untapped market for distributing MP3s over the internet! I mean, what else do 12 year olds do nowadays besides play video games, right? And as we all know, it takes quite a bit of HD space to hold a substantial amount of MP3s...so voila! Sony is set and poised to become an MP3 power...
Coming soon...Sony's buyout of Napster, and the addition of banner advertising...a la ICQ!
telnet://bbs.ufies.org
Trade Wars Lives
Don't worry...from the looks of things you're way ahead most of the posters today...
If you want to check out a really good, credible source of physics information on the net, I suggest the Usenet Physics FAQ if you just can't be bothered to pick up a textbook.
Both questions of yours are really close to a general question known as the Twin Paradox. Basically, who's clock moves slower (or who's actually ageing slower)? The incredibly short answer is that time in the train's frame of reference, for the period that it moves at a relativistic speed compared to you, travels slower compared to time in your frame. In other words, after you accelerate (or the train slows down) for you to compare, your clock will be ahead.
The answer to your second question lies in the fact that the spacetimes of the two ships are fundamentally different from each other. 0.75c is a measurement of speed in your reference, and not the other spaceship's. Therefore, at relativistic speeds, vectors don't add normally. The other spaceship moving towards you is going 0.96c in your frame of reference. (Work out v =((v1-v2)/(1-(v1v2/c^2))) where v1 = 0.75c, and v2 = -0.75c.)
Enough rambling...the FAQ should answer any other questions you or anybody else might have.
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Trade Wars Lives
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Trade Wars Lives
The source of the problem (the major one anyway) is that the most powerful items in Everquest only appear with certain unique creatures in a set location.
People have pointed out that massive organized camping is taking place right now on Everquest, where conniving (or entrepreneurial, depending on your personal preference) players hoping to make a quick buck get together and deny the lesser folk a chance to get them for free.
So what kind of solutions are there to this really?
A lot more have pointed out that randomization would solve all the camping, and that the people at Verant were idiots not to implement it in the first place.
Just to take Verant's side for a moment, the way Everquest originally was designed (gameplay wise) pretty much eliminates any chance of real randomization. What fun is it, really, if you buy the game, start off with a level 1 character, kill some peon in the countryside, and Wow, look I got a Sword O' Instant Death! Everquest was meant to be played a whole lot like the original Diablo, except in a much bigger world - build levels by killing scrub, go on quests, kill bosses, and get the mad loot. Randomization eliminates any need to kill bosses, and by inference, any need to build up levels and abilities. How much incentive is there to spend weeks building up a level 30 character when some level 5 newbie could kill you with a randomized Sword O' Instant Death he got off a Pink Bunny Rabbit? Verant is protecting itself and its investment by making people earn items the old-fashioned way.
I find this solution a lot more intriguing, if somewhat controversial (not to mention pissing off everyone who did spend weeks getting these items). If anyone's played the old Legend of the Red Dragon or Trade Wars back in the day (way back in the day =)) you'll know that this works in its own way, even if it doesn't provide a whole lot of game interaction. If you get rid of the Monty Haul style of the RPG, you eliminate not only the camping but a large percentage of the online selling without messy GM interference. Quests (and a lot of the linearity of Everquest) would have to be dropped or massively redesigned. Virtual status could replace power, like granting nontransferable titles or something like that. Heck, gimme a sign above me saying "Please Stare At My Massive Penis" and sure, I'll kill that Dragon. =) Instead of powerful items, you could have limited, powerful abilities that can't be transferred. Then again, that would simply encourage people to try selling whole accounts...
Well, gee, I guess we'll know how successful this route is in a few months...
Well, enough rambling today...
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Trade Wars Lives
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Trade Wars Lives
- is a quantification of "Exceptionally fast rendering". Eye candy and advanced physics are all well and good, but if the engine pulls 20 fps with a 1000 poly scene on a decent system, forget about it.
On a slightly different tack, I'm always mystified about how many people get their panties in a wad about this or that free 3D engine. People, if having a working 3D engine was even 25% of the work of game creation, Daikatana 2 would have hit the shelves yesterday. Getting a team of designers, writers, artists, architects (i.e. mappers), and programmers of the right talent, and keeping them focused on task and happy has always been a bigger burden by far. How Epic pulled it off for what, 3, 4 years for a single game has always impressed me a lot more than Unreal ever did. As a rule, creative vision is the single most precious commodity in the developer community currently, and it's likely to stay that way. There's a lot more chaff out there than wheat.
Damn, those stills are pretty, though.
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Trade Wars Lives
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Okay, let me get this straight..
Intel releases a chip for less than $200 that easily overclocks to 83/750 MHz with simple air cooling. And that's before anyone's gotten fancy with it...or even considering that the cheaper 566 MHz chip has the option of going up to 100/850 MHz (and remember this is the same core stepping as the new CuMine 850s and 866s).
And people are bitching about this???
Talk about history repeating itself...I remember when the 300A came out, everyone whined about its low bus speed and small cache. Anyone else see the irony?
Okay, I noticed there's a lot of misinformation/total crap being thrown out on /. right now...so I'll clear a few things up.
Correction: Clock for clock, according to SharkyExtreme's and AnandTech's benchmarks, the Pentium III takes a majority decision against the Athlon while using the i820/RDRAM and KX133/SDRAM chipsets (with the notable exception of professional CAD/CAM), which is useful for the money-is-no-object department. Interestingly, Anand also benched the P3 with a Apollo 133A/SDRAM chipset revealing a give-and-take tie relative to the Athlon, for those of us that are a bit more price conscious.
Correction: The P3 L2 cache is 8-way associative, 256 bit wide, 256KB in size, and runs at full clockspeed. The Athlon L2 cache is 512KB in size, running at 1/3 the clockspeed. The Athlon also has a 128KB L1 cache compared to the P3's 32KB L1 cache, both running at full clockspeed.
Correction: There is NO yield problem at Intel. There is, however, a supply problem, due to management mispredicting what quantity in chips they need to have supplied, as well as reallocation of resources as Intel prepares its fabs for Willamette and Itanium. Gotta love management. For proof, check out the amazing ability of Intel's 500E-600E chips to overclock to 700+ MHz. That's not a characteristic of a chipmaker with yield problems.
Correction: Why on Earth are people deciding what processor is superior by the supply of said chips? Like most sane people, I happen to judge performance on the basis of performance alone. Or maybe it's because I'm not a brand-name zealot. Either way...unless you're talking price/performance (in which case why even talk about GHz processors?) please can the supply arguments.
So who wins? The consumer does. Hopefully with the introduction of Cyrix's Joshua processors, the chipmakers will be squeezed even harder to cut both profits and prices. If you really desire a God Box, go take out a student loan and treat yourself to an SMP Alpha platform.
...is like the year 2000. They don't really mean anything (besides faster chips and slight Y2K computer problems) but it's a nice round number with lots of zeros for people to latch onto. Everyone needs a buzzword to feel cool.
Java as it's currently implemented sucks, for reasons in its runtime philosophy. The net effect of Java's cross-platform bytecode is nothing more than a shift from spending time and computing cycles on the developer side to spending them on the user side. The only way JIT compilers will ever get close to the efficiency of precompiled C or C++ binaries is by spending more and more computing resources on the compiler, and less resources actually running the program. Developers get paid to develop software, why force the user to do the work for them all in the name of "elegance" or "abstraction". If developers want their software to run on multiple platforms, they should take the time and effort to compile for those platforms.
Java by itself is a cool language, with lots of nifty features like auto garbage collection that I really love. Unfortunately though, until the folks at Sun realize that they should sell Java as a cool language, and not by preaching about changing "computing as we know it", will Java be adopted wholesale commercially.
In my Business Communications class a few weeks ago, we discussed in-depth some of the different strategies advertisement agencies use to target men and women, and how they stem from fundamental differences in the ways men and women think - starting from in the womb when testosterone severs half of the brains' connections in the male fetus.
Men are more task-oriented; they function better in repetitive, boring tasks such as stalking game, practicing musical instruments, and perfecting their jump shots. They prefer simple, direct ideas over complex issues. Hence the popularity of the Budweiser Frogs and the Swedish Bikini Team.
Women like complex, thought-provoking issues and projects. They tend to be extroverts in larger numbers than males and respond to emotional appeals better than men. Women flip the channel when the Budweiser Frogs or the Swedish Bikini Team appears.
Now, thinking back to those long, late-night hours spent slaving over the latest pointless Data Structures project, compiling, debugging, recompiling, and redebugging over and over, it suddenly isn't such a mystery why more women don't want to be CS majors.
...it sounds like the name of a river...
...oh wait, it is the name of a river, since that's how Intel names its projects in development...
...now only if you could spell it correctly (Willamette), maybe I'd feel some pity for someone who buys their processors on the basis of their names.
- 2x ALU unit (i.e. the integer processor runs at 3.0 GHz)
- FSB runs at "400 MHz" (similar to the "200 MHz" EV6 bus)
- the introduction of SSE2
It also talks more about Intel recognizing the need for DDR SDRAM systems as well.There are two main objectives to political campaigning: expanding your political base, and changing voter participation. The net simply adds one more dimension to the media tools available to political candidates.
/.) to feel politically disenfranchised, and, well, if you don't think your vote means squat, you're probably not going to make the effort to vote, right? Just remember that you're playing right into the Establishment's hands by doing so.
As Bill Clinton proved with his New Democrat politics, and Ronald Reagan with his Reagan Democrats, the easiest way to win general elections is to spread your appeal to disparate voter groups. The net becomes a way to get your message out, to get name recognition to thousands of voters without spending suitcases of cash on TV and radio sound bites (and all the problems that are associated with raising those suitcases). In the words of John McCain, the net becomes the "great equalizer", and while I'm pretty sure McCain doesn't exactly fit the profile of a power user, it's nice to see someone more "mainstream" at least notices the growing potential of the net as a political force.
The 2000 presidential race is a clear-cut example of a political fight to, on one side, expand voter participation, and on the other, to limit turnout. Negative campaigning, "good times" campaigning, and the politics of inevitability tend to suppress voter participation, which benefits one group in particular: the political Establishment. The Establishment (as defined by the hardcore elements/leadership of the political parties) is guaranteed an almost automatic 30-40% of the vote, plus the ability to rake in wads of cash for their candidate. When combatting insurrections against the Establishment, as Al Gore and George W. Bush are both doing to varying degrees of success, the easiest road to victory is to turn the moderates and independents (the main strength of rebellions) away from the ballot box. When the fanatics are all on your side, why give anybody else a reason to vote? Hence the negative attitude adopted by Gore, and the parading by Bush of his supposedly "invincible" $70 million political war chest. Conversely, the underdogs have a vested interest in getting as many voters to the ballot box as possible. McCain's biggest strength lies with his appeal to independents and Reagan Democrats, and his biggest challenge in the primaries is to convince them that their vote does mean something. And this is where the net comes in - a large chunk of netizens are moderate/independents, and populist campaigns would do well to reach out to them. A lot of the technologically franchised have a tendency (as seen here on
The point? Imagine the Slashdot effect transferred to elections. Get registered, get informed, and go rock the vote.
...it's called crack.
Side effects include delusions, decreased intelligence and coherence, as well as irritability and peevishness.
- 1 part corporate sponsorship
- 1 part hype
- 1 part misinformation
- 1 part bias
Mix ingredients. Shake, do not stir.I haven't taken anything Tom says seriously since it was revealed he used a warez Quake3 hack to conduct "exclusive" benchmarks. And then he tried to defend it! The ego of the guy is incredible...just listen to the arrogance in his writing.
Well, according to this Sharky's blurb we can expect it in the 2nd quarter, or April-June of this year. Interestingly, that's around the timeframe predicted for Intel to debut its next-gen gigahertz Willamette core.
Nothing like an old-fashioned corporate pissing contest.
Let's face it, 90% of x-philes don't watch the show for the special effects, the confusing and sometimes contradictory mytharc, or the spookiness factor (no inside joke intended).
We watch it for the Mulder/Scully interaction, the jokes, the character development, the morbid curiosity of watching a dysfunctional couple stumble through the steps of their relationship under extreme circumstances. The most irrelevant parts of the storyline (to the average x-phile) tend to be the ones that have least to do with the characters. Mulder and Scully are fully fleshed out, nuanced characters that long-time viewers identify with. It helps that the actors are both attractive, without being oversexed, and they can play their parts convincingly without being pompous or suffering from William Shatner Syndrome.
The reason I'm laying this out is that it would take an incredible amount of work to similarly flesh out the Lone Gunmen to evoke the same kind of viewer response. While they're a breath of fresh air whenever they appear on the X-Files, they are meant to play the foil, the comic relief, the supporting cast. I've watched the Lone Gunmen-centric episodes of the X-Files, and while they're enjoyable, frankly the best parts (read: most involving) are the ones where Scully or Mulder are included. While a select minority (especially the tech-oriented) would probably watch such a spin-off, the large majority of the X-Files fan base would probably lose interest.
Just my 2 cents.
Unreal Tournament's Linux binaries are subpar currently, and there isn't a Half-life Linux port, as far as I know...
...besides, the current substandard 3D graphics support in Linux (compared to Windows) is not something I'd probably want to be showcasing if I was running the tech demo.
What's your problem with id software? They've consistently fought, at their own time and expense, for open standards and alternative platforms, which is more than anyone can say for either Valve or Epic.
Does he not see that binary platform-independence in Java led directly to its performance problems? Even with hacks like JIT compilers, performance of bytecode lags well behind binaries compiled from Java. This is just one of many examples that illustrates a common principle: at every level of language advancement, there's going to be some performance tradeoff.
The best example of how this affects programmers is the Quake 1 engine. Released before mainstream hardware acceleration, the most processor-intensive routines in the engine are written in assembler, and just about every possible performance/elegance conflict is resolved with performance in mind. The result? We all played Quake with 35 fps on a Pentium 166 in 320x200 software mode. In the newly released source code, rewriting the assembler in C drops performance by close to half. With today's machines its not a problem, but back then I don't think anyone would have enjoyed playing Quake too much with sub-20 fps.
But then he goes on to lay out what he sees as the major shortcomings of current generation languages, which really comes down to:
- The distinction between primitives and objects (especially the lack of easy manipulation of objects a la primitives), and
- The lack of uber-classes.
Let's go back to the article: "Stop for a second and ponder the power of such a concept -- with about four lines of code, you've sub-classed a 150,000 line game engine and added a new feature that will propagate to several hundred classes in that framework. Besides that, it just seems beautifully high-level to be able to express such a concept with a single statement "class DukeNukemEngine extends UnrealEngine"."I wince just thinking about the compile times that programs from such a language would take. Throw in a requirement for the language to be binary platform-independent, and who needs Microsoft to spur hardware upgrades?
Tim Sweeney identifies social inertia as the main cause of reluctance to adopt next-generation languages, but a concern with just as much importance in developers' minds is performance, like the development of Quake 1 shows. Until near-infinite processing power and/or bandwidth is accessible to consumers, it will continue to hold back advancement in such a manner. What else can I say? Tim Sweeney is a man ahead of the times.
You can bet the house that gaming companies know the answers to these questions and a LOT more. The point I want to make is that, while "50% of entertainment software users are female" is a nice statistic, it could just as easily be incredibly misleading, as all statistics by themselves without appropriate additional information can be.
- Playing God is something new, and limited to current genetic research.
Uh, yeah. Next time you take a trip down to the grocery store, give a thank you to your ancestors who took the time to play God with wild plants and animals, breed and domesticate them, and thus cause the Agricultural Revolution. And don't think that just because it took a few centuries (i.e. the hard way) that it wasn't any less genetic tinkering than what scientific research is doing right now, using easier methods.- Perfection is bad.
I would actually buy this argument, if I didn't already know that as an online user, you're fairly well-educated and well-off compared to the rest of the world. Go check out your local hospital, and find someone suffering from Parkinson's disease, or late-stage cancer, sit down with them and explain that because you're scared of change and potential harms you don't think they're worth the exploration of genetic research as a possible cure. Better yet, just wait until someone you love (your children, perhaps) is afflicted, and have a nice chat with them about abstract things like the future evolution of humanity.Get a grip, take your head out of the sand, and check to see how much technology has done to improve your life already. If you don't believe so, you can always take a long vacation in the Sudan or the slums of India to see what a grand life without the dangers of progress is like.