The frame rate at 1024x768 16bit is comparable (the VooDoo3 is slightly faster), particularly if you turn off Decals on the GeForce2 MX.
The big difference is smoothness and gameplay, the MX is jerky with lots of lag, and a worse frame rate in super complex scenes (when you really need it!).
Also the VooDoo3 has stable drivers (nVidia has been having driver problems for some people (including me!)).
I use the MX all day every day on my main machine, but for UT go with a VooDoo card.
Anyone who's played any serious online games over a modem knows how this is not going to pan out until consoles include an ethernet port for DSL or Cable modems.
But then what console cheapskate (I see lots of talk about about this is great because Consoles are so much cheaper than PCs) is going to pay $40 or more a month for DSL or Cable Modem? (In a world where many people think $30 a month for basic cable is a major burden).
And what else do you get with this highspeed connection? According to Microsoft, the Xbox won't do browsing or eMail, just games. Do any others? Is Joe cheapsake going to pay $40 a month for fast game play only?
As for those who say a console requires storage, they are absolutely wrong. With decent bandwidth, the settings, save games and so on can be kept online. Same with eMail, or Web bookmarks. This is pretty much how WebTV works (and that's modem only!).
Although I finally had to give up on my IBM AT 84 keyboards (one was from my genuine IBM 6mhz AT!), I needed F11 and F12, and some new motherboards hang with a AT 84 keyboard.
My middle ground was to buy a pile of IBM 101 keyboards last year, and used the Ctrl and Caps Lock key caps from my 84key keyboards to replace the backwards Ctrl/CapsLock keys on my IBM 101s.
There are programs for Win9x and WinNT and Win2K to swap the mapping of Ctrl and CapsLock.
Of course I still HATE zooming past the useless new arrow/pgup/home cluster to get to the real arrow keys 3 inches further away.
But then I hate not being able to use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-S in Brief under Win2000 because of a bug in Microsofts OS/2 Console app support (which worked fine in WinNT).
I'd say that Intel has not only shipped a buggy processor for four weeks, which is finally being recalled now. Intel has also made a chain of mistakes that delayed the recovery of the bug as well as deliberately taken the risk to disgruntle me, being the first to suggest that the Pentium III 1.13 GHz processor should be recalled some long four weeks ago.
Please tell us where Tom has been off base when going after Intel? Was it MTH fiasco? RAMBUS shoved down our throats? 1.13Ghz flakey chips? i810 with no AGP? i815 held back to protect RAMBUS? Tell us what expose was unfair?
Instead of just saying, "Tom's unfair to Intel, and yeah well this time he's right", tell us about those glaring times he was wrong about Intel!
Tom addresses the perception of his anti-Intel bias in his Athlon 1.1ghz review today (which is as much an anti-Pentium III 1.13ghz article as a review of the new Athlon).
There is a whole section titled "Tom Biased Against Intel?" written by Tom. He lists his 5 points at:
Bottom line is that in the recent past Intel has provided a long list of failures and questionable dealings. Each failure and each piece of the Rambus-affair pushed me to be very critical with Intel. I cannot help it if Intel is having the worst record of its time. Don't blame me, blame Intel!
Finally I'd like to mention that I am aware of the fact that Intel is also providing good stuff. The 'Coppermine' Pentium III processors up to 933 MHz are excellent performers at an excellent price. There's of course more, but failures, flaws and questionable deals heavily overshadow all those good things right now.
Check your links out next time, the story reviewing the Athlon 1.1ghz was posted at Tom's Hardware this morning (August 28th, 2000).
You can label me a karma whore for a cut/paste message, but the article I pointed to was from today, and the that page within the article was absolutely on-topic and up to date (it even links back to the HardOCP article).
I found out about this from Tom's review of the Athlon 1.1ghz, here is the key quote I forwarded to a few friends:
It turned out that the kernel compilation failed on all three Pentium III
1.13 GHz samples in Kyle's lab, right in front of the eyes of Intel's
engineer. My CPU happened to be the flakiest of the three, as it failed in
other tests on different platforms as well.
>> Do you know how sore your vocal chords would be after dictating all day?
What about subvocalization?
Try talking quietly, a whisper, then quieter, till you don't hear much of anything.
I've heard of tests where they monitor nerve impulses to your tongue, jaw and so on to figure out what you are saying.
You will also find that you can talk VERY quickly like this, much faster than regular speech.
I wouldn't suprised if you see people walking around silently talking to themselves in 8 years (talking to their little pda through a little sensor on their throat).
I think it will be something like the writing recognition on the Palm vs real handwriting recognition. You will have shortcuts, and it will only recognize a limited style of subvocalization.
Gnutella is like the Beggars in Spain, no limits... put some files up, and every byte of bandwidth will be sucked out of your line.
I tried it, and whenever I put something up (like some Tangerine Dream concert bootlegs in MP3 format), a few maniacs with unlimited bandwidth start multiple downloads till my internet connection is completely overloaded.
Until there are options in Gnutella to limit the number of connections per user, and total bandwidth used, I'll opt out (as will most others who want to actually use their internet connection for other things besides Gnutella).
Re:PC is hardly dead - but it may not be very well
on
Vanishing Game Genres
·
· Score: 1
> Almost all games on the PC fall into the categories described - most of these are clones of games which have been around for years.
Sounds like Television (or the Movies), it's all been done before, everything is a clone of popular series trying to cash in on the originals success, and so on.
But somehow, every once and awhile, something really good comes out, something original, or just so well made it overcomes the cliches.
There may still be some great Adventure games to come, and new genres will appear, even if they are blends of what we have seen before.
>> Because the swapout card would cost almost as much as the ethernet chipset!
>Well duh. Please, bless me with further insights, please.
You point being? I was replying to someone who suggested a swap out card instead of building in Ethernet in addition to a modem.
I suggested that the cost of added a swapout card and supporting it is likely higher than just adding the additional ethernet to all boxes.
The retail cost of a PCI ethernet card is around $7 these days, that's in a box with manual, on a seperate PCB. I don't know the per unit cost of a RealTEK 8139 chipset, but I suspect it's around $1.
>> Plus it has to be designed, supported, and so on.
> And all those wonderful appliances appeared overnight in a lab somewhere? *sigh*
My point being that the cost of adding a swapable port, with add on cards is more complicated to design (from a mechanical standpoint, EMI problems and so on), and more of a pain to support.
If you've worked in designing and building consumer electronics, please clue us in on your experiences.
Because the swapout card would cost almost as much as the ethernet chipset!
Plus it has to be designed, supported, and so on.
It would almost be cheaper to just build the ethernet port in than offer a swapable card. Plus phone lines tend to work, internet connections go down. Do you want your TiVo to have no modem as a backup?
Give it a few years... When DSL/Cable modems include routers like the ones sold by Linksys, it will start to happen.
There is still the usenet newsgroup alt.tv.iron-chef
Very active, and upset about the whole mess.
Let's see Fuji try and shut it down....
One neat trick I've seen for other sites that carry controversial topics (like sex FAQs)is to post links to articles on Dejanews, not the actual articles.
PacBell does all it's IDSL through Northpoint, but of course the physical lines are PacBell.
So you call PacBell Internet (who for the first few calls denies you are a customer since IDSL isn't in their DSL customer database, and sends you off to data services, or phone line repair), they take a generic problem report which goes into the cue (mine sat there for 2 weeks before being forwarded to Northpoint). They asks lots of questions about operating system you are running, and other software questions (the modem sync light goes red, doesn't need to be connected to a computer to show the error, but they still make you answer all kinds of pointless questions).
Northpoint then makes a request for PacBell to check the lines. Eventually Pacbell shows up, diddles a bit, says it seems ok, and leaves. No contact number, no status, nothing.
So when it immediately fails again, you have no way to contact Northpoint or PacBell repair. You must start over with PacBell internet again.
Next time, Northpoint comes out, checks the inside wiring and modem (they just use a laptop and hookup a new IDSL modem to the outside wires). They call PacBell wiring again, who fiddles some more, again says it's fixed, again it's dead in a few hours. So we start the dance again....
You get the idea... I've been down for nearly 7 weeks.
In the meanwhile, my Cable modem has never been down for more than 5 minutes, and is insanely fast (often double the speed of a real T1).
The Book PC's name is a bit optimistic, unless you're comparing it with a phone book. It's about 270mm wide, 300mm deep and 80mm high - 10.75 by 12 by 3.25 inches.
Keep in mind, no slots, not ISA or PCI or PCMCIA. So unless it hooks up to USB, you are out of luck. I thought it might make a nice router, firewall, NAT thingie, but no slot, so no more network ports (unless you use some lame USB to Ethernet adapter).
Although it would make a nice little file server to drag around, just drop in a cheap 40GB IDE drive...
No other camera has the unique two part body of the Nikon Coolpix 9xx series.
It's amazingly useful! Imagine not having to hold the damn camera up in front of your face?! You can take shots of yourself, over your shoulder, up down, to the left, to the right, enourmously handy.
You can get a CoolPix 950 for under $500 after rebate since the CoolPix 990 has just come out (street price around $850).
I'd get a 950, and spend the rest on a a few sets of NIMh batteries (forget standard AA for any digital camera) with charger, and at least 128mb of CF. You did realize it comes with a pitiful 8mb card, right? (all the digital cameras come with pitiful storage out of the box). What would you rather have, a bunch of crummy lo-res jpegs taken on a 3mega pixel camera, or a bunch of super crisp tiffs (or low compression jpegs) taken with a 2mega pixel camera? Spend your money on storage and batteries.
The 990 is higher res, has a brighter display, and USB. The brighter display is for outdoors, but even with the brightest display, it's still pretty much hopeless in full sunlight, you need either a little hood, or use the viewfinder. The USB at first sounds great... then you realize that USB is around 120k bytes per second... Hmmm, so 120mb of pictures takes 1000 seconds to download, or over 15 minutes, Yikes!
What you want is the PCMCIA adapter, forget USB except for tiny little batches. With PCMCIA you can copy data off the card faster than your machine can write them to a harddrive. Besides, the drivers for CF PCMCIA are built into every os that supports PCMCIA, so you can plug it into any laptop and dump your photos, or even edit them directly from the CF.
Of course if you have the bucks, go buy a CoolPix 990 and a 160mb CF card!
(no the CoolPix 990 doesn't support CF Type II, so it won't work with the IBM Microdrive, but then I think 160mb is just fine, and isn't the harddrive a LOT slower and use more power than CF?)
Slashdot Mirror
I want a DirecTiVo! $399
Just shipped the first units to stores a few days ago, it's a TiVo with a DirecTV reciever built in and integrated.
It has dual satellite tuners, all sorts of fun stuff!
For a more expensive item, give it to me with more harddisk space, drop in a 80GB drive to raise the storage from 34 hours to 120 hours.
DirecTiVo FAQ
I have both a VooDoo3 and GeForce2 MX.
The frame rate at 1024x768 16bit is comparable (the VooDoo3 is slightly faster), particularly if you turn off Decals on the GeForce2 MX.
The big difference is smoothness and gameplay, the MX is jerky with lots of lag, and a worse frame rate in super complex scenes (when you really need it!).
Also the VooDoo3 has stable drivers (nVidia has been having driver problems for some people (including me!)).
I use the MX all day every day on my main machine, but for UT go with a VooDoo card.
http://www.robotwisdom.com/
Summary of 1st 190 votes: caffeine (157 use occasionally or daily), pot (56), ecstasy (10), valium (9), powder cocaine (7), lsd (6), speed (3), ghb (1), crack (1), heroin (0)
Anyone who's played any serious online games over a modem knows how this is not going to pan out until consoles include an ethernet port for DSL or Cable modems.
But then what console cheapskate (I see lots of talk about about this is great because Consoles are so much cheaper than PCs) is going to pay $40 or more a month for DSL or Cable Modem? (In a world where many people think $30 a month for basic cable is a major burden).
And what else do you get with this highspeed connection? According to Microsoft, the Xbox won't do browsing or eMail, just games. Do any others? Is Joe cheapsake going to pay $40 a month for fast game play only?
As for those who say a console requires storage, they are absolutely wrong. With decent bandwidth, the settings, save games and so on can be kept online. Same with eMail, or Web bookmarks. This is pretty much how WebTV works (and that's modem only!).
Maybe I shouldn't have posted the link for those RealMovies, they look just plain awful!!!
Lo-res, low frame rate, poor contrast, basicly dreadful....
I wonder if this is the result of someone sticking a cheap video camera in front of a monitor?
For those who don't have Quake installed, here are the RealMovie files:
QdQr1.rm
QdQr2.rm
QdQr3.rm
QdQr4.rm
Check out eBay!
Although I finally had to give up on my IBM AT 84 keyboards (one was from my genuine IBM 6mhz AT!), I needed F11 and F12, and some new motherboards hang with a AT 84 keyboard.
My middle ground was to buy a pile of IBM 101 keyboards last year, and used the Ctrl and Caps Lock key caps from my 84key keyboards to replace the backwards Ctrl/CapsLock keys on my IBM 101s.
There are programs for Win9x and WinNT and Win2K to swap the mapping of Ctrl and CapsLock.
Of course I still HATE zooming past the useless new arrow/pgup/home cluster to get to the real arrow keys 3 inches further away.
But then I hate not being able to use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-S in Brief under Win2000 because of a bug in Microsofts OS/2 Console app support (which worked fine in WinNT).
Yikes! The hardware review god has been offended! Check out the HEAVY use of the word ME, mostly on the page this came from:
n tiumiii-06.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q3/0008281/pe
I'd say that Intel has not only shipped a buggy processor for four weeks, which is finally being recalled now. Intel has also made a chain of mistakes that delayed the recovery of the bug as well as deliberately taken the risk to disgruntle me, being the first to suggest that the Pentium III 1.13 GHz processor should be recalled some long four weeks ago.
Please tell us where Tom has been off base when going after Intel? Was it MTH fiasco? RAMBUS shoved down our throats? 1.13Ghz flakey chips? i810 with no AGP? i815 held back to protect RAMBUS? Tell us what expose was unfair?
l on-04.html
Instead of just saying, "Tom's unfair to Intel, and yeah well this time he's right", tell us about those glaring times he was wrong about Intel!
Tom addresses the perception of his anti-Intel bias in his Athlon 1.1ghz review today (which is as much an anti-Pentium III 1.13ghz article as a review of the new Athlon).
There is a whole section titled "Tom Biased Against Intel?" written by Tom. He lists his 5 points at:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q3/000828/ath
In the summary he says:
Bottom line is that in the recent past Intel has provided a long list of failures and questionable dealings. Each failure and each piece of the Rambus-affair pushed me to be very critical with Intel. I cannot help it if Intel is having the worst record of its time. Don't blame me, blame Intel!
Finally I'd like to mention that I am aware of the fact that Intel is also providing good stuff. The 'Coppermine' Pentium III processors up to 933 MHz are excellent performers at an excellent price. There's of course more, but failures, flaws and questionable deals heavily overshadow all those good things right now.
> OVER A MONTH OLD
Check your links out next time, the story reviewing the Athlon 1.1ghz was posted at Tom's Hardware this morning (August 28th, 2000).
You can label me a karma whore for a cut/paste message, but the article I pointed to was from today, and the that page within the article was absolutely on-topic and up to date (it even links back to the HardOCP article).
I found out about this from Tom's review of the Athlon 1.1ghz, here is the key quote I forwarded to a few friends:
l on-02.html
It turned out that the kernel compilation failed on all three Pentium III
1.13 GHz samples in Kyle's lab, right in front of the eyes of Intel's
engineer. My CPU happened to be the flakiest of the three, as it failed in
other tests on different platforms as well.
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q3/000828/ath
>> Do you know how sore your vocal chords would be after dictating all day?
What about subvocalization?
Try talking quietly, a whisper, then quieter, till you don't hear much of anything.
I've heard of tests where they monitor nerve impulses to your tongue, jaw and so on to figure out what you are saying.
You will also find that you can talk VERY quickly like this, much faster than regular speech.
I wouldn't suprised if you see people walking around silently talking to themselves in 8 years (talking to their little pda through a little sensor on their throat).
I think it will be something like the writing recognition on the Palm vs real handwriting recognition. You will have shortcuts, and it will only recognize a limited style of subvocalization.
Gnutella is like the Beggars in Spain, no limits... put some files up, and every byte of bandwidth will be sucked out of your line.
I tried it, and whenever I put something up (like some Tangerine Dream concert bootlegs in MP3 format), a few maniacs with unlimited bandwidth start multiple downloads till my internet connection is completely overloaded.
Until there are options in Gnutella to limit the number of connections per user, and total bandwidth used, I'll opt out (as will most others who want to actually use their internet connection for other things besides Gnutella).
> Almost all games on the PC fall into the categories described - most of these are clones of games which have been around for years.
...
Sounds like Television (or the Movies), it's all been done before, everything is a clone of popular series trying to cash in on the originals success, and so on.
But somehow, every once and awhile, something really good comes out, something original, or just so well made it overcomes the cliches.
There may still be some great Adventure games to come, and new genres will appear, even if they are blends of what we have seen before.
Games are like everything else, 99% is
>> Because the swapout card would cost almost as much as the ethernet chipset!
>Well duh. Please, bless me with further insights, please.
You point being? I was replying to someone who suggested a swap out card instead of building in Ethernet in addition to a modem.
I suggested that the cost of added a swapout card and supporting it is likely higher than just adding the additional ethernet to all boxes.
The retail cost of a PCI ethernet card is around $7 these days, that's in a box with manual, on a seperate PCB. I don't know the per unit cost of a RealTEK 8139 chipset, but I suspect it's around $1.
>> Plus it has to be designed, supported, and so on.
> And all those wonderful appliances appeared overnight in a lab somewhere? *sigh*
My point being that the cost of adding a swapable port, with add on cards is more complicated to design (from a mechanical standpoint, EMI problems and so on), and more of a pain to support.
If you've worked in designing and building consumer electronics, please clue us in on your experiences.
Because the swapout card would cost almost as much as the ethernet chipset!
Plus it has to be designed, supported, and so on.
It would almost be cheaper to just build the ethernet port in than offer a swapable card. Plus phone lines tend to work, internet connections go down. Do you want your TiVo to have no modem as a backup?
Give it a few years... When DSL/Cable modems include routers like the ones sold by Linksys, it will start to happen.
id uses OpenGL, OpenGL is supported on Mac OSX, so porting is a reasonable process.
Almost every other game on the PC (not including those based on the id engines) uses DirectX (the Windows specific API).
So tell us, how does Carmack's evangelism of the newer Mac platforms equate to a resurgence of Mac gaming?
Are other PC developers going to switch over to OpenGL?
From: 2810_dewdrop_pl.92695_4843@usps.gov
To: 2812_dewdrop_pl.92695_4843@usps.gov
Please silence your barking dog, or I will slit it's throat while you sleep.
Thank you,
Signed:
Neighbor You've Never Met
There is still the usenet newsgroup alt.tv.iron-chef
Very active, and upset about the whole mess.
Let's see Fuji try and shut it down....
One neat trick I've seen for other sites that carry controversial topics (like sex FAQs)is to post links to articles on Dejanews, not the actual articles.
PacBell does all it's IDSL through Northpoint, but of course the physical lines are PacBell.
So you call PacBell Internet (who for the first few calls denies you are a customer since IDSL isn't in their DSL customer database, and sends you off to data services, or phone line repair), they take a generic problem report which goes into the cue (mine sat there for 2 weeks before being forwarded to Northpoint). They asks lots of questions about operating system you are running, and other software questions (the modem sync light goes red, doesn't need to be connected to a computer to show the error, but they still make you answer all kinds of pointless questions).
Northpoint then makes a request for PacBell to check the lines. Eventually Pacbell shows up, diddles a bit, says it seems ok, and leaves. No contact number, no status, nothing.
So when it immediately fails again, you have no way to contact Northpoint or PacBell repair. You must start over with PacBell internet again.
Next time, Northpoint comes out, checks the inside wiring and modem (they just use a laptop and hookup a new IDSL modem to the outside wires). They call PacBell wiring again, who fiddles some more, again says it's fixed, again it's dead in a few hours. So we start the dance again....
You get the idea... I've been down for nearly 7 weeks.
In the meanwhile, my Cable modem has never been down for more than 5 minutes, and is insanely fast (often double the speed of a real T1).
>> spend a _lot_ of effort rearranging your code and renaming things as your program evolves.
Try this with a program maintained by more than one person, and you will instantly gets screams of anguish from the other developers.
Or more likely the person who checks in source changes to the master source will kindly ask you to shut up and go away.
(yet another reason why programming in teams often isn't "fun")
Book PC's Intel 810i Video support under Linux or XFCom Intel 810i drivers
BookPC's Davicom LAN support under Linux
Here is someone selling it with RedHat:
TWINSON COMPUTER SERVICES - Book PC
I can't find anything on the PCNet Winmodem... not that drivers are likely outside of Win9x.
Book PC Review
And another link with more details:
PC Chips full color ad
Keep in mind, no slots, not ISA or PCI or PCMCIA. So unless it hooks up to USB, you are out of luck. I thought it might make a nice router, firewall, NAT thingie, but no slot, so no more network ports (unless you use some lame USB to Ethernet adapter).
Although it would make a nice little file server to drag around, just drop in a cheap 40GB IDE drive...
I got a correction from a friend as well that has an older Philips that swivels.
Do any current models swivel like the Nikon?
No other camera has the unique two part body of the Nikon Coolpix 9xx series.
It's amazingly useful! Imagine not having to hold the damn camera up in front of your face?! You can take shots of yourself, over your shoulder, up down, to the left, to the right, enourmously handy.
You can get a CoolPix 950 for under $500 after rebate since the CoolPix 990 has just come out (street price around $850).
I'd get a 950, and spend the rest on a a few sets of NIMh batteries (forget standard AA for any digital camera) with charger, and at least 128mb of CF. You did realize it comes with a pitiful 8mb card, right? (all the digital cameras come with pitiful storage out of the box). What would you rather have, a bunch of crummy lo-res jpegs taken on a 3mega pixel camera, or a bunch of super crisp tiffs (or low compression jpegs) taken with a 2mega pixel camera? Spend your money on storage and batteries.
The 990 is higher res, has a brighter display, and USB. The brighter display is for outdoors, but even with the brightest display, it's still pretty much hopeless in full sunlight, you need either a little hood, or use the viewfinder. The USB at first sounds great... then you realize that USB is around 120k bytes per second... Hmmm, so 120mb of pictures takes 1000 seconds to download, or over 15 minutes, Yikes!
What you want is the PCMCIA adapter, forget USB except for tiny little batches. With PCMCIA you can copy data off the card faster than your machine can write them to a harddrive. Besides, the drivers for CF PCMCIA are built into every os that supports PCMCIA, so you can plug it into any laptop and dump your photos, or even edit them directly from the CF.
Of course if you have the bucks, go buy a CoolPix 990 and a 160mb CF card!
(no the CoolPix 990 doesn't support CF Type II, so it won't work with the IBM Microdrive, but then I think 160mb is just fine, and isn't the harddrive a LOT slower and use more power than CF?)
By far the best review site is Steve Digicams
http://www.steves-digicams.com