The skewed question was precisely my point in the GGGP. How else to explain games that are 15+ years old show up at the top of the favorite list in such a narrow genre?
That could be. I'm not familiar with Famitsu's reader's predilections. I just comented on the obvious slant of games listed in the top 10. Someone else pointed out the even more obvious slant, when it was factored in that 7 of the top 10 were all produced by a single company.
Re:4 of the top ten are Final Fantasy?
on
Japan's Top 100 Games
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· Score: 1, Insightful
They're not that good. Not good enough to crowd out games like Civilization, Ultima 7, Wing Commander, Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Privateer, all ground-breaking games for their times. A time period which the Top 10 list spans.
At this point, you'll be the only one to see this, I think.
I really want to address your point about the artificial economic wall. Is it really? Shouldn't a country know what's coming into its borders? Is it protectionist? Only if you raise the "cost" to be more than the actual cost of inspection. It shouldn't be that hard to really inspect every article coming in. After all, people load/unload them all.
and not via protectionist acts either. There's a very simple thing that needs to be done, and we can even blame the "terrorists" for it. It comes down to this:
Inspect every bit of imported product. 100%. Means we have to hire more people to do it, and the funds should come from those importing items.
yes, this would raise the cost of imported items. It would also truly enhance our border security in ways promised but not seen, not only because everything commercial would be inspected, but because that effort would also require more folks at the borders/ports/etc.
It would also employ more people, who may have lost jobs to those imported items. The raised cost might make it more attractive to produce some items here domestically again, again employing some of those folks.
Re:Non story, this is a technical issue.
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 1
I don't really think AMD is the underdog anymore in the performance "wars". AMD has clearly won the gamer market, and is making huge inroads into the server space. If Dell would start shipping AMD processors, Intel might fall entirely below the 50% marketshare mark.
Re:Do we have evidence that Intel coerced...
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
·
· Score: 1
AC and all:
Add in the memory controller (North Bridge) and then come back with power requirement comparisons.
You are smoking crack. USB (Flash) drives are significantly slower than HDs for anything, unless you are truly trying to read alternating bits from the inner and outer tracks of the HD. Even then, unless you compose the test carefully, drive caching will take care of most of your seek issues.
Of course, there's one exception to this: let XP handle your drive management for a few months, and your drive certainly will seem dog slow (fragmentation galore). That makes it much more difficult for the HD caching mechanism to do a good job.
My room is larger than 3X2, but I have a different problem, no place to put rear speakers (kitchen opens up behind it.)
The solution? In Ceiling speakers. I bought the Niles CM6 HD speakers, and they sound great for movies or audio. So good in fact that I'm considering buying 3 more for the front channels and center, and removing all visible speakers from the room. I've seen the setup elsewhere, and the sound field isn't as messed up as you'd think. Speech doesn't sound like it's coming from the ceiling....:) Of course, you can also mount these in the wall for the front three.
They will accept "bad" media for exchange. You can cycle that for quite a few rounds before they catch on....
BB Manager: Gee, we've sold 23 copies of HD-DVD ! BB Accountant: Nope, we've had 22 copies returned as bad, and are sending them back to the manufacturer.... BB Manager: Wow, how am I going to explain that to the RM?
As you just noted, all those bandwidth issues are no longer the case for off-the-shelf PCs. There are some plusses for non-PC machines, but those plusses are becoming less relevant every couple of months, as the next wave of PC hardware comes out for most uses.
Also, you can buy for little cash some of the same eq for PCs that are used for specialty servers. And with some knowledge, PCs can be setup to emulate many of the hot-swap features of big-iron, and sometimes even exceed them. (It's not trivial, but it can be done)
The lights-out issue is a different thing, and the real question is whether your company values your time @ midnight more than the difference in cost for the specialty servers you'd like to be running. Many don't.
Go to store. Buy HD-DVD and HD-DVD player. open box, plug in. Note that you're not seeing HD quality picture. Return all items to store (opened, of course:). Repeat. endlessly. At every store you know.
If we all do this, imagine the losses. And the stores will return these malfunctioning units to the manufacturers, so the stores won't be the ones hurt.
Of course, then the MPAA/RIAA will bitch and moan about massive losses....:-D
... is only 1 facet of a server's purpose. Matter of fact, serving data may only be an incidental purpose. Generally, processing data and requests are usually the forte of servers. It all depends upon what purpose your servers are put to. (If you doubt this, think about the number crunchers or search sites robots, not everything is about serving static web pages)
Give me a break. Bandwidth? What bandwidth? Network I/O? Throw in as many Gb network cards as you need. Disk I/O? Throw in a relatively cheap RAID card and 5+ drives in RAID 5, and you too can throw around as much data as your system can handle. (Hint, in a PC system, you can easily exceed the CPU data bandwidth capability with well-designed RAID5 systems, even on "economy" PCs) Memory bandwidth? That's a much harder problem, and you only get major gains when going to big iron.
At this point, servers are whatever use you put your system to, not what's in them nor what they're sold as. Some "servers" come with additional features that make them more scalable for certain tasks than your plain jane PC, but your PC generally will handle the task within reasonable specs for at least low numbers of users.
And to counter the "what about..." arguments, large or complex DBs may require multiple drives, and possibly 64 bit CPUs and more than 4GB of RAM. 64 bit CPUs are no longer the realm of "servers" thanks to AMD, nor is the 4GB limit, with a little help from *nixes. All of these items are now available in sub 2K PCs. Yes, it costs more than $1K, but if you're going over 4GB of RAM, you're going to have to pay for it.
Well, that may have had an effect on pre-loads. It did not have the effect that Office 95 did though. Office 95, via it's mem request call at the 2GB limit broke the win32 emulation IBM had working on OS/2. This forced those in commercial environments to switch to Win95/NT to continue to communicate with, say, your boss or your clients and customers.
(Recall, if you will, that all new PCs shipped with Office 95, and that Office 95, specifically Word95, was not backwards compatible with previous versions when shipped)
I'd still pose that the biggest single item that killed OS/2 was Office 95 and MS's tactics in getting that version installed/upgraded on a large scale.
According to some show on PBS/Discovery/BBC not that long ago (sorry, don't recall which or what show), they made the seemingly plausible statement that dragon myths were supported by the findings of Cave Bear skeletons, at least for the European dragon myths. These skeletons must have looked ferocious to those that found them after their extinction 15000 years ago, being up to 20 feet long. They certainly bore little resemblance to the current bear population in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
This just in: Japanese gamers really, really like only Square-Enix games
Or so this article would have you believe.
The skewed question was precisely my point in the GGGP. How else to explain games that are 15+ years old show up at the top of the favorite list in such a narrow genre?
"We" played Zelda and Final Fantasy as well. I just don't think "we" were as myopic about our game selection as that presented in the list.
That could be. I'm not familiar with Famitsu's reader's predilections. I just comented on the obvious slant of games listed in the top 10. Someone else pointed out the even more obvious slant, when it was factored in that 7 of the top 10 were all produced by a single company.
They're not that good. Not good enough to crowd out games like Civilization, Ultima 7, Wing Commander, Doom, Quake, Half-Life, and Privateer, all ground-breaking games for their times. A time period which the Top 10 list spans.
At this point, you'll be the only one to see this, I think.
I really want to address your point about the artificial economic wall. Is it really? Shouldn't a country know what's coming into its borders? Is it protectionist? Only if you raise the "cost" to be more than the actual cost of inspection. It shouldn't be that hard to really inspect every article coming in. After all, people load/unload them all.
There's your problem. "Mission Critical" and "VB" in the same sentence.
Alarms sound, red lights flash.
and not via protectionist acts either. There's a very simple thing that needs to be done, and we can even blame the "terrorists" for it. It comes down to this:
Inspect every bit of imported product. 100%. Means we have to hire more people to do it, and the funds should come from those importing items.
yes, this would raise the cost of imported items. It would also truly enhance our border security in ways promised but not seen, not only because everything commercial would be inspected, but because that effort would also require more folks at the borders/ports/etc.
It would also employ more people, who may have lost jobs to those imported items. The raised cost might make it more attractive to produce some items here domestically again, again employing some of those folks.
I don't really think AMD is the underdog anymore in the performance "wars". AMD has clearly won the gamer market, and is making huge inroads into the server space. If Dell would start shipping AMD processors, Intel might fall entirely below the 50% marketshare mark.
AC and all:
Add in the memory controller (North Bridge) and then come back with power requirement comparisons.
Oops.
You are smoking crack. USB (Flash) drives are significantly slower than HDs for anything, unless you are truly trying to read alternating bits from the inner and outer tracks of the HD. Even then, unless you compose the test carefully, drive caching will take care of most of your seek issues.
Of course, there's one exception to this: let XP handle your drive management for a few months, and your drive certainly will seem dog slow (fragmentation galore). That makes it much more difficult for the HD caching mechanism to do a good job.
My room is larger than 3X2, but I have a different problem, no place to put rear speakers (kitchen opens up behind it.)
:) Of course, you can also mount these in the wall for the front three.
The solution? In Ceiling speakers. I bought the Niles CM6 HD speakers, and they sound great for movies or audio. So good in fact that I'm considering buying 3 more for the front channels and center, and removing all visible speakers from the room. I've seen the setup elsewhere, and the sound field isn't as messed up as you'd think. Speech doesn't sound like it's coming from the ceiling....
I don't believe they can resell a returned, opened DVD.
I don't see the problem. You're cycling through their stock, does it matter if it's the same item or not?
They will accept "bad" media for exchange. You can cycle that for quite a few rounds before they catch on....
BB Manager: Gee, we've sold 23 copies of HD-DVD !
BB Accountant: Nope, we've had 22 copies returned as bad, and are sending them back to the manufacturer....
BB Manager: Wow, how am I going to explain that to the RM?
As you just noted, all those bandwidth issues are no longer the case for off-the-shelf PCs. There are some plusses for non-PC machines, but those plusses are becoming less relevant every couple of months, as the next wave of PC hardware comes out for most uses.
Also, you can buy for little cash some of the same eq for PCs that are used for specialty servers. And with some knowledge, PCs can be setup to emulate many of the hot-swap features of big-iron, and sometimes even exceed them. (It's not trivial, but it can be done)
The lights-out issue is a different thing, and the real question is whether your company values your time @ midnight more than the difference in cost for the specialty servers you'd like to be running. Many don't.
Go to store. Buy HD-DVD and HD-DVD player. open box, plug in. Note that you're not seeing HD quality picture. Return all items to store (opened, of course:). Repeat. endlessly. At every store you know.
:-D
If we all do this, imagine the losses. And the stores will return these malfunctioning units to the manufacturers, so the stores won't be the ones hurt.
Of course, then the MPAA/RIAA will bitch and moan about massive losses....
... is only 1 facet of a server's purpose. Matter of fact, serving data may only be an incidental purpose. Generally, processing data and requests are usually the forte of servers. It all depends upon what purpose your servers are put to. (If you doubt this, think about the number crunchers or search sites robots, not everything is about serving static web pages)
Give me a break. Bandwidth? What bandwidth? Network I/O? Throw in as many Gb network cards as you need. Disk I/O? Throw in a relatively cheap RAID card and 5+ drives in RAID 5, and you too can throw around as much data as your system can handle. (Hint, in a PC system, you can easily exceed the CPU data bandwidth capability with well-designed RAID5 systems, even on "economy" PCs) Memory bandwidth? That's a much harder problem, and you only get major gains when going to big iron.
At this point, servers are whatever use you put your system to, not what's in them nor what they're sold as. Some "servers" come with additional features that make them more scalable for certain tasks than your plain jane PC, but your PC generally will handle the task within reasonable specs for at least low numbers of users.
And to counter the "what about..." arguments, large or complex DBs may require multiple drives, and possibly 64 bit CPUs and more than 4GB of RAM. 64 bit CPUs are no longer the realm of "servers" thanks to AMD, nor is the 4GB limit, with a little help from *nixes. All of these items are now available in sub 2K PCs. Yes, it costs more than $1K, but if you're going over 4GB of RAM, you're going to have to pay for it.
Well, that may have had an effect on pre-loads. It did not have the effect that Office 95 did though. Office 95, via it's mem request call at the 2GB limit broke the win32 emulation IBM had working on OS/2. This forced those in commercial environments to switch to Win95/NT to continue to communicate with, say, your boss or your clients and customers.
(Recall, if you will, that all new PCs shipped with Office 95, and that Office 95, specifically Word95, was not backwards compatible with previous versions when shipped)
I'd still pose that the biggest single item that killed OS/2 was Office 95 and MS's tactics in getting that version installed/upgraded on a large scale.
Windows had nothing to do with killing OS/2.
#1 problem: MS Office 95.
#2 problem: IBM internal politics
there were no other relevant issues.
According to some show on PBS/Discovery/BBC not that long ago (sorry, don't recall which or what show), they made the seemingly plausible statement that dragon myths were supported by the findings of Cave Bear skeletons, at least for the European dragon myths. These skeletons must have looked ferocious to those that found them after their extinction 15000 years ago, being up to 20 feet long. They certainly bore little resemblance to the current bear population in Europe.
The CD sale is covered by the Principle of First Sale. The RIAA appears to be attempting to rewrite the law by one-sided argument.
I own a copy of that original work software or literature. You're confusing owning the rights with owning a copy.