Where does the money go?
The penalty payment is paid into the EU Budget. It does not increase the Budget, but reduces the contribution from Member States. The fines therefore reduce the overall tax burden on individuals.
Easier method would be to just grab the frames as the game renders them. Hook into the D3D/OpenGL calls and get the finished frames and save them. If you also hook the timer functions the game uses you can make it run at whatever framerate you want without having to worry about how long it takes for you to save those frames.
System Shock - Simply a stunning game... And although it isn't as scary as it used to be when I played it the first time, I'm still afraid of going to the third level
Nethack - Of course. Though I'm not that good at it:P
Transport Tycoon Deluxe (And OpenTTD) - This one never gets old, and with OpenTTD it gets new features all the time.
Thief 1 & 2 - Simply great, too bad Thief 3 (imo) wasn't nearly as good as these two
Fallout 2 - I hope Bethesda can make Fallout 3 as good as this one...
Operation Flashpoint - Not that old yet, but a superb game, especially in multiplayer co-op
Doom 1 & 2 - Somehow I still can enjoy playing the same old original maps through one more time:)
And of course many C64 and Amiga games, though most of them feel too hard today. I guess the new games have spoiled me.
All the games i've played which use it, I do not find to my liking. (the motion blur)
Thats propably because all games I have seen having a "motion blur" effect use a totally wrong kind of way to do it. The wrong way is to draw the current rendered frame as semi transparent over the last one. This is quite lightweight effect but looks really crappy (imo), nothing like proper motion blur. "Player on drugs" effect might be a better name for it.
The right way to do it in real time would require that you can render frames _very_ fast, say something like 1000fps. You would then keep rendering these frames, blending them together for a certain amount of time, and then flip the backbuffer to the front and display that one frame. This would look very good but needless to say you would need to use a very low detail level to be able to render the frames that fast on todays hardware.
I wonder if it would be possible to have both a P-M and a P4 (or P4 like) core in a dual-core processor. This way you could get the benefits of both architectures on the same chip (P4 is fast in mp3/divx encoding for example, and P-M is fast in gaming). It would propably require some special scheduling from the OS though...
In the time that it took for OGL to go from 1.2 to 2.0, DX went from roughly DX6 to DX9. What did you do if you were writing games in OGL during that time? Oh, you wrote ALL OF YOUR CODE TWICE, once for NVidia, and once for ATI, and hopefully you didn't care about other vendors. This is why when you look at Carmack's old.plans, he talks about the various codepaths.
Or when you look at Half-Life 2 you'll see that they had to write support for four different API versions of D3D, each of which have major differences in the whole API implementation.
It says "Get the target piece -- to the left.". That means you need to get the piece with the arrow to the left.
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
Steam is an interesting idea, but I think it sucks because its only for Valve's games (Or games that get some kind of deal with valve to deliver them through steam?). Imagine if all games used such a system; if you'd have 10 games installed on your system you'd also have 10 steam-like clients installed, and that would propably end up being quite messy.
The price of the games should also be much lower when ordered as a download service, and there should be an option to get the game on a CD/DVD in addition to the download with a bit of extra price. This way I could buy the game, download it immediately and also have a 'hard copy' of it sent to me after a few days. The CD/DVD version should not require this authentication thing that HL2 requires, so I could still play it after 10 years if I'd want to.
I'd hope there would be a sequel too, but one that would be more like Shock 1 than Shock 2... In my opinion, Shock 2 was a great game but not such a good sequel as they changed so many important things. The most disapointing change for me was the change of the user interface, which they changed from an 'adventure-like' point'n'click mouse interface to a typical first person shooter interface. Sure it made the fighting easier, but you no longer could examine things the way you did in Shock 1, and it made the whole game feel more like a shooter than an adventure game.
Another thing that I disliked was how they screwed up the weapons & ammo. In shock 1, there was a radical difference between different weapons and their ammo, like shooting at cyborgs with a dartgun using tranq ammo did absolutely nothing but shooting a mutant with them was very effective. Sure there were some of this still in shock 2 but it didn't make that much difference anymore, you no longer needed to plan your attacks the same way as even if you had the "wrong" ammo loaded the enemy would still die with a few extra shots.
The plotline was more interesting in shock 1 also... It is propably the best game I have ever played, a remake with Doom 3 engine would be my dream;)
Here's one... Though I believe some of those have it only in certain versions, ie. EU or US version only.
Also beware of the demos of those games, they install starforce too.
This is interesting, not because of added performance, but because of the ability to add more than two monitors for a gaming setup. Matrox Parhelia is the only current card (that I know of) that can do tree monitors, and its way too expensive and doesn't perform that well either...
I just hope this SLI technology gets into some cheap model cards too, buying two cheap cards could offer good performance and three (or four) monitor setup with an affordable price.
If (or when) I need to reinstall the OS from my Windows box, I always export the local_machine\software and current_user\software registry keys, take out the "Microsoft" subkeys (so it wont screw up the new windows install afterwards), then delete my windows directory, and after installing a new copy I import those keys to the fresh Windows install. After that all the programs I had installed before still work fine and there's no need to reinstall those.
...if the card would not work in Windows XP, would he blame it on Microsoft or the card manufacturer? I bet he'd pick the card manufacturer. With his problems he chose to blame Linux because he wanted to get to bash it in an article.
I wonder what makes it so hard to make co-op for the PC version too then? I'd imagine that co-op makes the leveldesign part a bit more challenging, as you need to take in consideration that the players could be in very different places in the map so you'd need to be careful about locking doors behind the player for example. But as the levels are the same in xbox and PC versions (I assume) then what could be the reason for this? If the company doing the xbox port has time to do this, then why not ID? Isn't it the ID guys saying that the game will be released "when its done", so lack of time is not a very good excuse.
Its a shame that developers seem to keep co-op play in such low regard today. For me personally co-op has given the most memorable gaming moments ever, and lots of people seem to share my thoughs about it (For example in the Stalker forums theres a huge thread where people cry for co-op support, after the developer announced that it might not make it to the final game).
Many modern warfare weapons use software
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If that Patriot missile failure counts as a "software kill" then surely software does kill; Look at the amount of people killed in Iraq for example by different types of bombs and cruise missiles that are guided (and detonated) by software.
Whats the big deal with this? I quickly went through some AMD's Athlon PDF's, and while all of them mentioned SIMD/SSE and MMX support, I didn't spot any mentioning that those are actually technologies originally developed by Intel. And why is this? Maybe because Intel and AMD have the cross-whatever license on their technologies so they can leave all that out. Come on, who would voluntarily put their competitors name in their product sheets?
After all, its not either of them copying anything from each other, but just making their own product compatible with a certain set on instructions, while still using their very own under-the-hood implementation.
Funny how they keep using that 'A' letter (the one with the ring on top, Slashdot seems to auto-convert it to a normal A?), which is spelled like 'O'... So when "Stargate" is spelled "Stargote", this new one, "Stargote Atlontis" sounds even more crazy. I hope the show itself will be good though, like the original Stargate...:)
This might be a tad offtopic but anyway, a while ago I was wondering how a big OSS project (like Apache) does a license change? If there are dozens of people involved who have contributed their work to the project under license X, wouldn't you need to ask each and every one of those people if you want to change that license in any way?
Maybe you had a PHP page that passes input from the URL to the 'include' PHP function? Its an "easy" way to exploit, since you can pass an URL to another PHP script to it and PHP will grab that file and execute it. This might have been used to download a file with wget (executed with PHP, which is why the wget's output is in the apache log) and then executed it, and the binary propably used some local root exploit to gain root privileges for the apache user.
I have had a few attempts like that on my server (this for example, no idea what it does), but I was prepared with a syntax check for the variable passed to include and it didnt work;)
umm... So they are claiming a 5,25 GHz overclock, but it wasnt stable at that speed? Then i'd hardly call it a real overclock, I could propably clock my P4 to 5GHz too but it wouldn't work for more than a few microseconds. If they want to claim that kind of results they better show some long running stresstest/benchmark results too. And why is the stock clockspeed of the CPU covered in all the pics?
Slashdot Mirror
From the FAQ:
Where does the money go?
The penalty payment is paid into the EU Budget. It does not increase the Budget, but reduces the contribution from Member States. The fines therefore reduce the overall tax burden on individuals.
Easier method would be to just grab the frames as the game renders them. Hook into the D3D/OpenGL calls and get the finished frames and save them. If you also hook the timer functions the game uses you can make it run at whatever framerate you want without having to worry about how long it takes for you to save those frames.
System Shock - Simply a stunning game... And although it isn't as scary as it used to be when I played it the first time, I'm still afraid of going to the third level
:P
:)
Nethack - Of course. Though I'm not that good at it
Transport Tycoon Deluxe (And OpenTTD) - This one never gets old, and with OpenTTD it gets new features all the time.
Thief 1 & 2 - Simply great, too bad Thief 3 (imo) wasn't nearly as good as these two
Fallout 2 - I hope Bethesda can make Fallout 3 as good as this one...
Operation Flashpoint - Not that old yet, but a superb game, especially in multiplayer co-op
Doom 1 & 2 - Somehow I still can enjoy playing the same old original maps through one more time
And of course many C64 and Amiga games, though most of them feel too hard today. I guess the new games have spoiled me.
So now when I come home I can have 17179869184GB of spam waiting for me instead of the pathetic 4GB that my 32bit mailbox allowed. Woohoo!
In the newest version of Photoshop (CS2) you can move even the "document" windows outside the main window, including to other monitors.
Thats propably because all games I have seen having a "motion blur" effect use a totally wrong kind of way to do it. The wrong way is to draw the current rendered frame as semi transparent over the last one. This is quite lightweight effect but looks really crappy (imo), nothing like proper motion blur. "Player on drugs" effect might be a better name for it.
The right way to do it in real time would require that you can render frames _very_ fast, say something like 1000fps. You would then keep rendering these frames, blending them together for a certain amount of time, and then flip the backbuffer to the front and display that one frame. This would look very good but needless to say you would need to use a very low detail level to be able to render the frames that fast on todays hardware.
Was? There still is nothing else like it.
I wonder if it would be possible to have both a P-M and a P4 (or P4 like) core in a dual-core processor. This way you could get the benefits of both architectures on the same chip (P4 is fast in mp3/divx encoding for example, and P-M is fast in gaming). It would propably require some special scheduling from the OS though...
In the time that it took for OGL to go from 1.2 to 2.0, DX went from roughly DX6 to DX9. What did you do if you were writing games in OGL during that time? Oh, you wrote ALL OF YOUR CODE TWICE, once for NVidia, and once for ATI, and hopefully you didn't care about other vendors. This is why when you look at Carmack's old .plans, he talks about the various codepaths.
Or when you look at Half-Life 2 you'll see that they had to write support for four different API versions of D3D, each of which have major differences in the whole API implementation.
It says "Get the target piece -- to the left.". That means you need to get the piece with the arrow to the left.
Steam is an interesting idea, but I think it sucks because its only for Valve's games (Or games that get some kind of deal with valve to deliver them through steam?). Imagine if all games used such a system; if you'd have 10 games installed on your system you'd also have 10 steam-like clients installed, and that would propably end up being quite messy.
The price of the games should also be much lower when ordered as a download service, and there should be an option to get the game on a CD/DVD in addition to the download with a bit of extra price. This way I could buy the game, download it immediately and also have a 'hard copy' of it sent to me after a few days. The CD/DVD version should not require this authentication thing that HL2 requires, so I could still play it after 10 years if I'd want to.
I'd hope there would be a sequel too, but one that would be more like Shock 1 than Shock 2... In my opinion, Shock 2 was a great game but not such a good sequel as they changed so many important things. The most disapointing change for me was the change of the user interface, which they changed from an 'adventure-like' point'n'click mouse interface to a typical first person shooter interface. Sure it made the fighting easier, but you no longer could examine things the way you did in Shock 1, and it made the whole game feel more like a shooter than an adventure game.
;)
Another thing that I disliked was how they screwed up the weapons & ammo. In shock 1, there was a radical difference between different weapons and their ammo, like shooting at cyborgs with a dartgun using tranq ammo did absolutely nothing but shooting a mutant with them was very effective. Sure there were some of this still in shock 2 but it didn't make that much difference anymore, you no longer needed to plan your attacks the same way as even if you had the "wrong" ammo loaded the enemy would still die with a few extra shots.
The plotline was more interesting in shock 1 also... It is propably the best game I have ever played, a remake with Doom 3 engine would be my dream
Here's one... Though I believe some of those have it only in certain versions, ie. EU or US version only. Also beware of the demos of those games, they install starforce too.
This is interesting, not because of added performance, but because of the ability to add more than two monitors for a gaming setup. Matrox Parhelia is the only current card (that I know of) that can do tree monitors, and its way too expensive and doesn't perform that well either...
I just hope this SLI technology gets into some cheap model cards too, buying two cheap cards could offer good performance and three (or four) monitor setup with an affordable price.
If (or when) I need to reinstall the OS from my Windows box, I always export the local_machine\software and current_user\software registry keys, take out the "Microsoft" subkeys (so it wont screw up the new windows install afterwards), then delete my windows directory, and after installing a new copy I import those keys to the fresh Windows install. After that all the programs I had installed before still work fine and there's no need to reinstall those.
...if the card would not work in Windows XP, would he blame it on Microsoft or the card manufacturer? I bet he'd pick the card manufacturer. With his problems he chose to blame Linux because he wanted to get to bash it in an article.
I guess he meant that they are missing from the kernel, which is true ;)
I wonder what makes it so hard to make co-op for the PC version too then? I'd imagine that co-op makes the leveldesign part a bit more challenging, as you need to take in consideration that the players could be in very different places in the map so you'd need to be careful about locking doors behind the player for example. But as the levels are the same in xbox and PC versions (I assume) then what could be the reason for this? If the company doing the xbox port has time to do this, then why not ID? Isn't it the ID guys saying that the game will be released "when its done", so lack of time is not a very good excuse. Its a shame that developers seem to keep co-op play in such low regard today. For me personally co-op has given the most memorable gaming moments ever, and lots of people seem to share my thoughs about it (For example in the Stalker forums theres a huge thread where people cry for co-op support, after the developer announced that it might not make it to the final game).
If that Patriot missile failure counts as a "software kill" then surely software does kill; Look at the amount of people killed in Iraq for example by different types of bombs and cruise missiles that are guided (and detonated) by software.
Whats the big deal with this? I quickly went through some AMD's Athlon PDF's, and while all of them mentioned SIMD/SSE and MMX support, I didn't spot any mentioning that those are actually technologies originally developed by Intel. And why is this? Maybe because Intel and AMD have the cross-whatever license on their technologies so they can leave all that out. Come on, who would voluntarily put their competitors name in their product sheets?
After all, its not either of them copying anything from each other, but just making their own product compatible with a certain set on instructions, while still using their very own under-the-hood implementation.
duh, dunno how this ended up here.. oh well sorry :P
Funny how they keep using that 'A' letter (the one with the ring on top, Slashdot seems to auto-convert it to a normal A?), which is spelled like 'O'... So when "Stargate" is spelled "Stargote", this new one, "Stargote Atlontis" sounds even more crazy. I hope the show itself will be good though, like the original Stargate... :)
This might be a tad offtopic but anyway, a while ago I was wondering how a big OSS project (like Apache) does a license change? If there are dozens of people involved who have contributed their work to the project under license X, wouldn't you need to ask each and every one of those people if you want to change that license in any way?
Maybe you had a PHP page that passes input from the URL to the 'include' PHP function? Its an "easy" way to exploit, since you can pass an URL to another PHP script to it and PHP will grab that file and execute it. This might have been used to download a file with wget (executed with PHP, which is why the wget's output is in the apache log) and then executed it, and the binary propably used some local root exploit to gain root privileges for the apache user.
;)
I have had a few attempts like that on my server (this for example, no idea what it does), but I was prepared with a syntax check for the variable passed to include and it didnt work
umm... So they are claiming a 5,25 GHz overclock, but it wasnt stable at that speed? Then i'd hardly call it a real overclock, I could propably clock my P4 to 5GHz too but it wouldn't work for more than a few microseconds. If they want to claim that kind of results they better show some long running stresstest/benchmark results too. And why is the stock clockspeed of the CPU covered in all the pics?