"I wonder why Will Wright subjects us to this shit, or at the least, why he tolerates it. "
Didn't EA make a purchase that gives them control of Bioware. It didn't take long to start dragging it under.
My solution is simple. Just don't buy EA games and that includes Bioware even though in that past most of my game purchases have been Bioware. Luckily I can still play those games I purchase in the past 10 years, before crap like this started being shoved down our throats. I can install those games and play them again without calling up and begging if they will let me install my game just one more time...
Count me as a thoroughly disgusted Ex-Bioware customer.
As I noted you can't make that kind of comparison, with only 2 or 3 models in a segment. The 4 door compacts have Kia/Hyundai with a terrible grade (same manufacturer) and Toyota with a very good grade. Simply remove Kia/Hyundai from the results and they would shift massively in another direction.
Look at the discreet data instead of the supposed overall stats that are IMO invalid. Too bad they didn't give us a spreadsheet, then we could pull out the manufacturer numbers in a table and run various correlations to find the strongest correlations.
Actually look at the study. It actually correlates even more strongly with manufactures than it does with vehicle type. With GM and KIA being the death machines. (newer study: http://www.iihs.org/sr/pdfs/sr4003.pdf)
Mini four door cars are poor. But they only have 3 cars in the study 2 poor Kia/Huyndais and 1 Toyota Echo. The echo does very well.
The most deadly vehicle in the study is the GM blazer. 4 times as many death as a the tiny toyota echo.
If you want to use this as any kind of basis it would have to be model vs specific model, not generalizations based on body type. You would somehow need to move driver disposition from it as well. Sports cars don't kill their drivers, it is some of the idiot that buys a sports car that gets themselves/others killed.
Honda insight, had a minimal hybrid setup in a light weight aerodynamic body. It got the best mileages I have ever seen. Averaging over 50mpg in the real world. Getting 70mpg on the highway.
Bell sells a capped service. They say you can get 60G/month. So it should be easy to figure out the average load on the network with everyone under this Cap. If Bell can't actually provide the service they sell, then they should set the cap at a level they can support.
So how much are those nasty 5% capable of gobbling down?
If you max your cap that is 2G/day. Say all of it is in the peak 12 hour window (but actually heavy downloaders run 24/7).
So 1G/6hours. 167MB/hour = 45 kB/s. This is the most on average, that the theoretical bandwidth hogs can use. Bell advertises a service that is 10 times that speed. So if everyone was a peak user and only used it during the peak window, bells network is over-subscribed by 10 to 1 vs the evil bandwidth hogs.
BUT these are the evil 5% choking down 60% of the bandwidth according to Bell. How much does the other 40% (good users) average? So (60%) = 5% x 45 kB/s = 224kB/s, so (40%) = 150kB/s/95% = 1.58 kB/s
So a "good" user averages 1.58kB/s, less than modem speed. If sold a 5mb/s connection (Bell advertises up to 7mb/s), they are oversubscribed about 300 to 1 on what they expect from users.
So is a 300 to 1 over-subscription fair? Perhaps bell should be forced to tell it's customers their target average usage for their network. In Bells case that seems to be 1.5kB/s average if used a lot by everyone. Is this adequate for a service sold as up to 7mb/s fast and never shared?? http://www.bell.ca/shopping/PrsShpInt_Perf.page "Consistently fast service that's never shared"
High speed always on, never shared internet connections are not the telephone service, with 5 minute hold times and 2 hours a week usage. This is multi-hour/day usage. Attempting to solve bandwidth problems by traffic shaping traffic you don't like is a never ending cat and mouse game that doesn't address the real issue: Over subscription of the network or a completely incorrect usage model. This has to be addressed regardless of any traffic shaping. What is next shaping youtube? Voip? VOD? How can this be justified when you start offering VOIP and VOD services.
"You will also find Rogers prices to be ludicrously high, the networks even more congested, and the throttling even more draconian."
I had a buddy test the theory. He got 250 kB/S using BT. I was getting 30 kB/s using DSL with throttling. That is faster than my unthrottled DSL speed. I can live with that.:-)
Losing all revenue is going to have a much more significant impact on Bell decisions, than losing a bit of revenue and a pile of overhead. The CRTC won't do anything. Bell can easily fudge the network numbers to "prove" congestion, or they can do what they have likely done which is not build out the ATM interconnect to the point that they are overloaded at peak times, giving them the leverage they need over the 3rd party ISPs which they hate.
If in some bizarro twist this actually ends in favor of the DSL third parties, I can switch back, but until then, Rogers appears to be the lesser of evils.
"Bell started throttling my connection, so I switched to Teksavvy. Unfortunately Bell controls the wires so my connection is still being throttled."
Looks like win-win for Bell. The get most of the revenues, and don't have to provide internet backbone bandwidth or tech support, they can now mess with your connection and don't even have to listen to you complain.
Bell gets about $20 out of $30 for just providing the throttled last mile. $30 out of $40 if you are on Dry DSL. So Bell gets to keep most of the money and they reduce over-head. I don't think they are going to be defeated by this.
I am with Vianet and being Bell throttled. I am canceling all Bell services (third party DSL, landline and long distance) and moving to Cable + VOIP.
I am actually denying Bell every penny of revenue they get from me. I will also tell them exactly why they are losing a long term customer and all associated revenues.
It is a case of choosing the lesser of evils, and in this case that is cable. I get to drop all of Bell and tell them why. As a bonus my throughput will probably quadruple (DSL is 1.5mb/s where I am) Rogers throttling doesn't appear as choking as Bells.
There is nothing to stop me from switching back to DSL in a few months if Rogers annoys me and the 3rd party DSL situation improves. Or maybe looking into a 3rd party wireless option.
I realize this may hurt tekSavvy and other small DSL players, but it is the only way, I can stop paying Bell any revenues at all. If enough people did this, there would be policy changes.
I am with a small DSL player like Teksavvy. These smaller players are great. They offer lower rates and MUCH BETTER customer service. I have no idea why anyone stays with Bell for DSL.
Teksavvy is in the lead for customer service and standing up to Bell, but it does little good, unless they win, because all DSL sucks now that Bell is throttling the last mile for everyone. (BT runs at about 20kB/s during waking hours, but full bandwidth is there for web and presumably Bells competing services).
I seriously doubt this throttling on the last mile of the competition is necessary, but once Bell throttled it's own customers (more likely to contain back end internet bandwidth than last mile bandwidth) it was losing them to the competition, so they throttled the competition.
The particularly heinous parts of this, is that the small DSL player pay $20/month to Bell for the last mile connnection, a last mile monopoly of twisted pair that was largely granted by Canadian citizens.
Bell is largely attempting to eliminate the competition.Users seemingly have little recourse, but we have one.
Bell is pervasive, you might not even be able to complain about DSL if they aren't your provider, but Bells pervasiveness is their weakness as well as strength.
Cancel your DSL and move to Cable. Tell your provider why. This will deny bell revenues and may give small players ammunition in their legal action against Bell. True the Cable side of the duopoly are no angels either but the throttling is no near as restrictive, and it cuts off any revenue to Bell.
Cancel any Bell long distance plans.
Cancel you landline and switch to Voip.
Cancel your Bell ExpressVu Satellite TV.
Cancel you Bell cell phone (or any provider reseslling the service).
Basically become Bell free, on every cancellation tell them why.
I have started the transition. In a month I will be entirely Bell free! I will no longer feel dirty know my money is funding these monopolistic pigs with hideous service.
Well I now see the first step in the EA destruction of Bioware. I don't play many games but the majority of them have been Bioware starting with Original Baldurs Gate.
This breaks a fundamental usage paradigm, it wasn't the 10 days, it was the remote authentication of any kind.
I still play 10 year old games on occasion, something this would prohibit and I have loaned out my copies of BG/NWN that resulted in more people buying them.
I will NOT buy a game that require an authentication servers to play standalone, because it is clearly evident that someday those servers will be decommissioned.
A company can have so much cash they don't know what to do with it and still shutdown servers. Just look at the MSN music service.
In short Bioware received the lions share of my gaming dollars in the past. In the future they will get none. Bravo EA, another company destroyed.
Considering you are working 24/7, that is pretty low pay rate of under $8/hr. Maybe starving students might take them up on this. I think only 20 year olds would fully recover from this as well.
I might consider doing it for Ten Times that amount $150k to $200K. Not worth risking my health otherwise.
Not to mention this would probably feel like torture after a week. My back gets sore if I lay in bed too long on Sunday mornings.
I know most people are probably oblivious to the downsides, so this will eventually be the way of things digital.
But the MSN music service should be a stark lesson about "buying" any media than needs outside authorization to use. Even if the company is not out of business and has mountains of cash lying around is no guarantee they will continue to run Authentication servers.
I was very interested in buying spore. But it is game over now. Mass Effect I wasn't interested in, but I was a big Bioware fan and this will probably end my purchase of their products. I don't buy many games, but i did buy BG1,BG2, KOTOR, and the NWN (+SoU,+HotU). No more Bioware for me. Well luckily they can't turn off my old games.
I am picky about games, I buy good ones and I often play them years later. Yesterday I got a new 2560x1600 monitor and fired up my 10 year old copy of Total Annihilation to see that it brilliantly runs in 2560x1600! If it had authentication requirements, I would no longer be playing.
The choice has always been there for me to support companies I like, by buying their products, or to download them for free. I have plenty of disposable income and know how to use bit torrent.
This pushes it to the point that the purchased product behavior is so egregious, that there is no way I will buy it. Now my choice will be download it for free, or do without. Either is a loss for the companies pushing this scheme.
I figure I can just keep playing NWN forever, there must be 10 000 modules out there now. I won't need to buy the latest graphics card either. Win-Win.
I guess I should thank them for saving me money on game and hardware purchases.
I don't think Boll is any worse than a bunch of other anonymous directors turning out B movies. He just seem the most well known among them. This generations Ed Wood?
I recently watched the Dungeon Siege movie. It was no worse than a bunch of other Fantasy B movies. The performances were often better than what George Lucas extracts from people. Can we go back in time and petition Lucas never direct again? Maybe everything after Empire Strikes Back wouldn't suck then.
I don't get why people have against Boll. At least he never really ruined a good property. He makes B movies and you pretty much get what is expected.
Boll the character is often more entertaining than his movies. His smack talking about his next movie, postal was hilarious...
We may as well have Boll direct the low budget B movies, at least when we see his name, we will know what to expect.
"So yeah wind and this new solar thermal are down as low as 6 cents. But guess what happens when a cloud comes over. Either your lights flicker or another generator has to come on to compensate."
It is not just a case of being unclear what your point was, you directly contradict the main points of the article, and show that you didn't understand the benefits of the technology.
Certainly this is pie is the sky when it comes "save our species" BS. That doesn't change the fact that this is a very useful, consistent stable power generation technology, and your objections to it are primarily targeted at weaknesses it doesn't have.
Actually weaknesses would be needing to locate in near perpetual sunny areas (deserts) and the transmission costs from those areas.
RTFA. Your main objection, is the main point of the article. The critical advantage is the storage of energy in heat (for hours), that eliminates fluctuations. This is the main advantage touted in the article.
Plus these tend to be built in the desert where clouds are a rarity. The supply curve a solar thermal system will closely follow the demand curve of users going about their day.
This is a stable, consistent source of clean energy to add to the grid.
This is the only explanation I can come up with (People impressed by shiny things). I remember the period where CRT makers fell over themselves to make antiglare coatings (fairly successfully). Then we got LCD and matte screens fixed reflections totally.
I have a Trinitron next to my matte screen LCD. The matte screen is not muddy or blurred by the matte coating and it has NO reflections at all. Where the Anti-glare screen on the CRT is halfway, it has some reflection in some cases, but no where near the glossy mirror that are the latest monitors. There is nothing anti glare or anti reflective at all. They are like mirrors.
People seem to be keying off the reflections and being impressed by the shininess. Much like glossy vs matte photos.
I was in a big box electronics place with about 30 monitors. I noticed a few on the lower shelf and I couldn't tell if they were glossy or not because at that angle there were no reflections and both glossy and non glossy screens looked the same.
It is only when you see reflections in the black, that you notice the "deeper blacks", much like reflections on a well waxed car make it look deep black/color.
I see not advantage to glossy screens, it is the fashion of the moment and impresses those who like shiny things, but I expect 5 years from now, we will start to swing back the other way as people realizing what a pain looking into a mirror screen is, and the industry will start to push matte screens again.
It is not just light sources that reflect. These new Glossy screens are mirrors. Everything in the room reflects, but hey it is shiny and apparently that impresses some people. Buy a matte screen while you can.
The average difference was much less than 5fps. The integrated solution was actually fastest in 2 of the games. This the kind of difference only noticeable in a benchmark.
In that case it is using low graphics settings that no one would actually use. In reality the graphics card would bottleneck and the numbers would barely budge and the impact of a sound cards is even less than these big jumps in CPU speed.
Doh! should have read the original article, but I am really not interested in sound cards:
Actually gaming test. Do you really think it is worth paying $100 for that negligible increase in peformance. Again I think it is completely pointless for anyone other than those whose personal ego is attached to their benchmark scores.
Show me some actual tests on a multicore CPU done by some HW site. I have seen review sites do CPU scaling features and CPU impact is minimal in most games.
Unless you remove the Vidcard botlleneck, the CPU impact is trivial.
Here is an example test with Graphics set real low to avoid being the bottleneck:
Note even here, CPU has small effect. Only the slowest processor really have much impact. But this is an artificial situation, pretty much everyone runs with as much eye candy as their graphics card will support making the GPU the bottle neck and the CPU just about irrelevant.
The few cycles saved might matter to the largely irrelevant fringe with Triple-SLI/Quad Crossfire rigs, who's ego is tied to benchmark scores, but to the vast majority it is a complete non issue.
The last time I checked with multi core, multi-GHz cpus, games were no longer CPU limited, they are video card limited, the overhead for some tiny additional audio processing is negligible.
Also I have dedicated audio hardware to process my sound properly. It is called a Denon AV receiver. My computer does it's thing in the Digital domain where you don't need any special HW and and the motherboard will do it just as well as the most expensive sound card. The digital is then piped over an optical link to the receiver that is completely dedicated to Audio, where it will be decoded to analog and played back.
My original post was somewhat facetious. Of course some people still have a use for a dedicated sound card, but that market is shrinking fast and will soon be the province of people wanting to do high quality digital recording on a PC. For playback the on board solution can already be essentially perfect depending on what you connect it to.
I prefer black text on a white background, though I use syntax highlighting while coding.
But this is on CRT where you have decent control of brightness. LCD makers have gotten into a detrimental specification war and bigger ones often quote 400 to 500 nits brightness. When they do, they invariably don't have the control range to get under 100 nits for long term comfort.
I purchased a 500 nits 24" screen from Dell before I realized the problem. Even at minimum brightness I couldn't use the screen for more than 20 minutes. It hurt my eyes and this is from someone who spends 12-14hours a day staring at crts with no issues in the last 20 years. I now have a 17" cheapo LCD at home to go with my CRT. It is a 250 nits display and reduces to a nice comfortable level.
I have a Denon AVR 1802 and Paradigm Monitor 3 speakers, nothing terrible expensive. It is not just quality but versatility that AV receiver gives you. Not only that, but I have guaranteed clean path to my reciever, the music stays digital over optical right to my receiver. I don't want to ever go back to analog sound coming out of a computer. Interference is a thing of the past.
I like good sound and I haven't bought a sound card in 6 years or so (Nforce came out with very good integrated sound). Since then I run a single optical cable from my motherboard to my AV receiver; PERFECT sound. Even the HP at work driving my headphones from analog sounds great.
I really see zero need to get a soundcard these days.
Sounds like you are comparing memories of two different setups from two different times and injecting healthy bias. Hardly a serious comparison. The fact that you saw upscaling as BETTER than a full 1080p transfer should have set off a few alarm bells for you.
I compared an actual upscaled DVD against a 720p download of the same movie on a 100" screen with the sources synched and switching between them. The difference is night and day, and was obvious to everyone in the room. Upscaling can't put back the missing details. The 720p download was still quite behind a 25G full 1080p transfer (but better than apple TV pseudo HD). The best good upscaling does is eliminate the upscaling artifacts that some really poor up scalers create (jaggies, de-interlacing issues, motion compensation issues). So in the end you get a nice smooth 480p image free from artifacts. That is the best upscaling does. I don't discount many are happy with a nice smooth blown up 480p image. But even if they did a real comparison on a decent sized screen it would stand out like night and day as soft and detail limited. Do a real comparison on a decent size screen sometime. You can't compare from memory.
Downloads are a tiny niche. Apple TV. How many of those were sold vs Blu Ray players. Quality comparisons done, showd Apple TV HD is actually pretty much the same as upscaled DVD. This will never really be a serious ownership model, but more of a rental model.
If you want to own high quality HD movies, Blu Ray will be the only way to go. Price will be inconsequential for anyone actually owning an HD set within 2 years. For those with SD sets, I don't imagine there will be much incentive to move. But the people most likely to actually buy movies, are likely going to have HD sets in the next 2 years.
As I said, they are crazy optimistic to say this year, but within 2-3 years, I would expect market parity. In two years movies will likely be the same price. Why would you buy SD movies when you can get HD movies for the same price?
Slashdot Mirror
"I wonder why Will Wright subjects us to this shit, or at the least, why he tolerates it. "
Didn't EA make a purchase that gives them control of Bioware. It didn't take long to start dragging it under.
My solution is simple. Just don't buy EA games and that includes Bioware even though in that past most of my game purchases have been Bioware. Luckily I can still play those games I purchase in the past 10 years, before crap like this started being shoved down our throats. I can install those games and play them again without calling up and begging if they will let me install my game just one more time...
Count me as a thoroughly disgusted Ex-Bioware customer.
As I noted you can't make that kind of comparison, with only 2 or 3 models in a segment. The 4 door compacts have Kia/Hyundai with a terrible grade (same manufacturer) and Toyota with a very good grade. Simply remove Kia/Hyundai from the results and they would shift massively in another direction.
Look at the discreet data instead of the supposed overall stats that are IMO invalid. Too bad they didn't give us a spreadsheet, then we could pull out the manufacturer numbers in a table and run various correlations to find the strongest correlations.
Does windows support this depth of color, do graphics cards/drivers, do the now ubiquitous DVI standard output?
How exactly do we start using a 10 bit depth displays with current PC technology? It seems to me that everything is geared toward 8 bit color depth.
Actually look at the study. It actually correlates even more strongly with manufactures than it does with vehicle type. With GM and KIA being the death machines.
(newer study: http://www.iihs.org/sr/pdfs/sr4003.pdf)
Mini four door cars are poor. But they only have 3 cars in the study 2 poor Kia/Huyndais and 1 Toyota Echo. The echo does very well.
The most deadly vehicle in the study is the GM blazer. 4 times as many death as a the tiny toyota echo.
If you want to use this as any kind of basis it would have to be model vs specific model, not generalizations based on body type. You would somehow need to move driver disposition from it as well. Sports cars don't kill their drivers, it is some of the idiot that buys a sports car that gets themselves/others killed.
Honda insight, had a minimal hybrid setup in a light weight aerodynamic body. It got the best mileages I have ever seen. Averaging over 50mpg in the real world. Getting 70mpg on the highway.
Bell sells a capped service. They say you can get 60G/month. So it should be easy to figure out the average load on the network with everyone under this Cap. If Bell can't actually provide the service they sell, then they should set the cap at a level they can support.
/95% = 1.58 kB/s
Think for a second how oversubscribed Bells network is. Here you can use Bells own claims. "5 percent of users generate 60 percent of its total traffic":
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080519-regulators-want-answers-from-bell-canada-on-p2p-throttling.html
So how much are those nasty 5% capable of gobbling down?
If you max your cap that is 2G/day. Say all of it is in the peak 12 hour window (but actually heavy downloaders run 24/7).
So 1G/6hours. 167MB/hour = 45 kB/s. This is the most on average, that the theoretical bandwidth hogs can use. Bell advertises a service that is 10 times that speed. So if everyone was a peak user and only used it during the peak window, bells network is over-subscribed by 10 to 1 vs the evil bandwidth hogs.
BUT these are the evil 5% choking down 60% of the bandwidth according to Bell. How much does the other 40% (good users) average? So (60%) = 5% x 45 kB/s = 224kB/s, so (40%) = 150kB/s
So a "good" user averages 1.58kB/s, less than modem speed. If sold a 5mb/s connection (Bell advertises up to 7mb/s), they are oversubscribed about 300 to 1 on what they expect from users.
So is a 300 to 1 over-subscription fair? Perhaps bell should be forced to tell it's customers their target average usage for their network. In Bells case that seems to be 1.5kB/s average if used a lot by everyone. Is this adequate for a service sold as up to 7mb/s fast and never shared??
http://www.bell.ca/shopping/PrsShpInt_Perf.page
"Consistently fast service that's never shared"
High speed always on, never shared internet connections are not the telephone service, with 5 minute hold times and 2 hours a week usage. This is multi-hour/day usage. Attempting to solve bandwidth problems by traffic shaping traffic you don't like is a never ending cat and mouse game that doesn't address the real issue: Over subscription of the network or a completely incorrect usage model. This has to be addressed regardless of any traffic shaping. What is next shaping youtube? Voip? VOD? How can this be justified when you start offering VOIP and VOD services.
"You will also find Rogers prices to be ludicrously high, the networks even more congested, and the throttling even more draconian."
:-)
I had a buddy test the theory. He got 250 kB/S using BT. I was getting 30 kB/s using DSL with throttling. That is faster than my unthrottled DSL speed. I can live with that.
Losing all revenue is going to have a much more significant impact on Bell decisions, than losing a bit of revenue and a pile of overhead. The CRTC won't do anything. Bell can easily fudge the network numbers to "prove" congestion, or they can do what they have likely done which is not build out the ATM interconnect to the point that they are overloaded at peak times, giving them the leverage they need over the 3rd party ISPs which they hate.
If in some bizarro twist this actually ends in favor of the DSL third parties, I can switch back, but until then, Rogers appears to be the lesser of evils.
"Bell started throttling my connection, so I switched to Teksavvy. Unfortunately Bell controls the wires so my connection is still being throttled."
Looks like win-win for Bell. The get most of the revenues, and don't have to provide internet backbone bandwidth or tech support, they can now mess with your connection and don't even have to listen to you complain.
Bell gets about $20 out of $30 for just providing the throttled last mile. $30 out of $40 if you are on Dry DSL. So Bell gets to keep most of the money and they reduce over-head. I don't think they are going to be defeated by this.
I am with Vianet and being Bell throttled. I am canceling all Bell services (third party DSL, landline and long distance) and moving to Cable + VOIP.
I am actually denying Bell every penny of revenue they get from me. I will also tell them exactly why they are losing a long term customer and all associated revenues.
It is a case of choosing the lesser of evils, and in this case that is cable. I get to drop all of Bell and tell them why. As a bonus my throughput will probably quadruple (DSL is 1.5mb/s where I am) Rogers throttling doesn't appear as choking as Bells.
There is nothing to stop me from switching back to DSL in a few months if Rogers annoys me and the 3rd party DSL situation improves. Or maybe looking into a 3rd party wireless option.
I realize this may hurt tekSavvy and other small DSL players, but it is the only way, I can stop paying Bell any revenues at all. If enough people did this, there would be policy changes.
I am with a small DSL player like Teksavvy. These smaller players are great. They offer lower rates and MUCH BETTER customer service. I have no idea why anyone stays with Bell for DSL.
Teksavvy is in the lead for customer service and standing up to Bell, but it does little good, unless they win, because all DSL sucks now that Bell is throttling the last mile for everyone. (BT runs at about 20kB/s during waking hours, but full bandwidth is there for web and presumably Bells competing services).
I seriously doubt this throttling on the last mile of the competition is necessary, but once Bell throttled it's own customers (more likely to contain back end internet bandwidth than last mile bandwidth) it was losing them to the competition, so they throttled the competition.
The particularly heinous parts of this, is that the small DSL player pay $20/month to Bell for the last mile connnection, a last mile monopoly of twisted pair that was largely granted by Canadian citizens.
Bell is largely attempting to eliminate the competition.Users seemingly have little recourse, but we have one.
Bell is pervasive, you might not even be able to complain about DSL if they aren't your provider, but Bells pervasiveness is their weakness as well as strength.
Cancel your DSL and move to Cable. Tell your provider why. This will deny bell revenues and may give small players ammunition in their legal action against Bell. True the Cable side of the duopoly are no angels either but the throttling is no near as restrictive, and it cuts off any revenue to Bell.
Cancel any Bell long distance plans.
Cancel you landline and switch to Voip.
Cancel your Bell ExpressVu Satellite TV.
Cancel you Bell cell phone (or any provider reseslling the service).
Basically become Bell free, on every cancellation tell them why.
I have started the transition. In a month I will be entirely Bell free! I will no longer feel dirty know my money is funding these monopolistic pigs with hideous service.
Well I now see the first step in the EA destruction of Bioware. I don't play many games but the majority of them have been Bioware starting with Original Baldurs Gate.
This breaks a fundamental usage paradigm, it wasn't the 10 days, it was the remote authentication of any kind.
I still play 10 year old games on occasion, something this would prohibit and I have loaned out my copies of BG/NWN that resulted in more people buying them.
I will NOT buy a game that require an authentication servers to play standalone, because it is clearly evident that someday those servers will be decommissioned.
A company can have so much cash they don't know what to do with it and still shutdown servers. Just look at the MSN music service.
In short Bioware received the lions share of my gaming dollars in the past. In the future they will get none. Bravo EA, another company destroyed.
Considering you are working 24/7, that is pretty low pay rate of under $8/hr. Maybe starving students might take them up on this. I think only 20 year olds would fully recover from this as well.
I might consider doing it for Ten Times that amount $150k to $200K. Not worth risking my health otherwise.
Not to mention this would probably feel like torture after a week. My back gets sore if I lay in bed too long on Sunday mornings.
I know most people are probably oblivious to the downsides, so this will eventually be the way of things digital.
But the MSN music service should be a stark lesson about "buying" any media than needs outside authorization to use. Even if the company is not out of business and has mountains of cash lying around is no guarantee they will continue to run Authentication servers.
I was very interested in buying spore. But it is game over now. Mass Effect I wasn't interested in, but I was a big Bioware fan and this will probably end my purchase of their products. I don't buy many games, but i did buy BG1,BG2, KOTOR, and the NWN (+SoU,+HotU). No more Bioware for me. Well luckily they can't turn off my old games.
I am picky about games, I buy good ones and I often play them years later. Yesterday I got a new 2560x1600 monitor and fired up my 10 year old copy of Total Annihilation to see that it brilliantly runs in 2560x1600! If it had authentication requirements, I would no longer be playing.
The choice has always been there for me to support companies I like, by buying their products, or to download them for free. I have plenty of disposable income and know how to use bit torrent.
This pushes it to the point that the purchased product behavior is so egregious, that there is no way I will buy it. Now my choice will be download it for free, or do without. Either is a loss for the companies pushing this scheme.
I figure I can just keep playing NWN forever, there must be 10 000 modules out there now. I won't need to buy the latest graphics card either. Win-Win.
I guess I should thank them for saving me money on game and hardware purchases.
I don't think Boll is any worse than a bunch of other anonymous directors turning out B movies. He just seem the most well known among them. This generations Ed Wood?
I recently watched the Dungeon Siege movie. It was no worse than a bunch of other Fantasy B movies. The performances were often better than what George Lucas extracts from people. Can we go back in time and petition Lucas never direct again? Maybe everything after Empire Strikes Back wouldn't suck then.
I don't get why people have against Boll. At least he never really ruined a good property. He makes B movies and you pretty much get what is expected.
Boll the character is often more entertaining than his movies. His smack talking about his next movie, postal was hilarious...
We may as well have Boll direct the low budget B movies, at least when we see his name, we will know what to expect.
Well if you RTFA, why did you say:
"So yeah wind and this new solar thermal are down as low as 6 cents. But guess what happens when a cloud comes over. Either your lights flicker or another generator has to come on to compensate."
It is not just a case of being unclear what your point was, you directly contradict the main points of the article, and show that you didn't understand the benefits of the technology.
Certainly this is pie is the sky when it comes "save our species" BS. That doesn't change the fact that this is a very useful, consistent stable power generation technology, and your objections to it are primarily targeted at weaknesses it doesn't have.
Actually weaknesses would be needing to locate in near perpetual sunny areas (deserts) and the transmission costs from those areas.
RTFA. Your main objection, is the main point of the article. The critical advantage is the storage of energy in heat (for hours), that eliminates fluctuations. This is the main advantage touted in the article.
Plus these tend to be built in the desert where clouds are a rarity. The supply curve a solar thermal system will closely follow the demand curve of users going about their day.
This is a stable, consistent source of clean energy to add to the grid.
This is the only explanation I can come up with (People impressed by shiny things). I remember the period where CRT makers fell over themselves to make antiglare coatings (fairly successfully). Then we got LCD and matte screens fixed reflections totally.
I have a Trinitron next to my matte screen LCD. The matte screen is not muddy or blurred by the matte coating and it has NO reflections at all. Where the Anti-glare screen on the CRT is halfway, it has some reflection in some cases, but no where near the glossy mirror that are the latest monitors. There is nothing anti glare or anti reflective at all. They are like mirrors.
People seem to be keying off the reflections and being impressed by the shininess. Much like glossy vs matte photos.
I was in a big box electronics place with about 30 monitors. I noticed a few on the lower shelf and I couldn't tell if they were glossy or not because at that angle there were no reflections and both glossy and non glossy screens looked the same.
It is only when you see reflections in the black, that you notice the "deeper blacks", much like reflections on a well waxed car make it look deep black/color.
I see not advantage to glossy screens, it is the fashion of the moment and impresses those who like shiny things, but I expect 5 years from now, we will start to swing back the other way as people realizing what a pain looking into a mirror screen is, and the industry will start to push matte screens again.
It is not just light sources that reflect. These new Glossy screens are mirrors. Everything in the room reflects, but hey it is shiny and apparently that impresses some people. Buy a matte screen while you can.
The average difference was much less than 5fps. The integrated solution was actually fastest in 2 of the games. This the kind of difference only noticeable in a benchmark.
In that case it is using low graphics settings that no one would actually use. In reality the graphics card would bottleneck and the numbers would barely budge and the impact of a sound cards is even less than these big jumps in CPU speed.
Doh! should have read the original article, but I am really not interested in sound cards:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14500/4
Actually gaming test. Do you really think it is worth paying $100 for that negligible increase in peformance. Again I think it is completely pointless for anyone other than those whose personal ego is attached to their benchmark scores.
"Anecdotal evidence" is an oxymoron.
Show me some actual tests on a multicore CPU done by some HW site. I have seen review sites do CPU scaling features and CPU impact is minimal in most games.
Unless you remove the Vidcard botlleneck, the CPU impact is trivial.
Here is an example test with Graphics set real low to avoid being the bottleneck:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/12772/3
Note even here, CPU has small effect. Only the slowest processor really have much impact. But this is an artificial situation, pretty much everyone runs with as much eye candy as their graphics card will support making the GPU the bottle neck and the CPU just about irrelevant.
The few cycles saved might matter to the largely irrelevant fringe with Triple-SLI/Quad Crossfire rigs, who's ego is tied to benchmark scores, but to the vast majority it is a complete non issue.
The last time I checked with multi core, multi-GHz cpus, games were no longer CPU limited, they are video card limited, the overhead for some tiny additional audio processing is negligible.
Also I have dedicated audio hardware to process my sound properly. It is called a Denon AV receiver. My computer does it's thing in the Digital domain where you don't need any special HW and and the motherboard will do it just as well as the most expensive sound card. The digital is then piped over an optical link to the receiver that is completely dedicated to Audio, where it will be decoded to analog and played back.
My original post was somewhat facetious. Of course some people still have a use for a dedicated sound card, but that market is shrinking fast and will soon be the province of people wanting to do high quality digital recording on a PC. For playback the on board solution can already be essentially perfect depending on what you connect it to.
I prefer black text on a white background, though I use syntax highlighting while coding.
But this is on CRT where you have decent control of brightness. LCD makers have gotten into a detrimental specification war and bigger ones often quote 400 to 500 nits brightness. When they do, they invariably don't have the control range to get under 100 nits for long term comfort.
I purchased a 500 nits 24" screen from Dell before I realized the problem. Even at minimum brightness I couldn't use the screen for more than 20 minutes. It hurt my eyes and this is from someone who spends 12-14hours a day staring at crts with no issues in the last 20 years. I now have a 17" cheapo LCD at home to go with my CRT. It is a 250 nits display and reduces to a nice comfortable level.
I have a Denon AVR 1802 and Paradigm Monitor 3 speakers, nothing terrible expensive. It is not just quality but versatility that AV receiver gives you. Not only that, but I have guaranteed clean path to my reciever, the music stays digital over optical right to my receiver. I don't want to ever go back to analog sound coming out of a computer. Interference is a thing of the past.
I like good sound and I haven't bought a sound card in 6 years or so (Nforce came out with very good integrated sound). Since then I run a single optical cable from my motherboard to my AV receiver; PERFECT sound. Even the HP at work driving my headphones from analog sounds great.
I really see zero need to get a soundcard these days.
Sounds like you are comparing memories of two different setups from two different times and injecting healthy bias. Hardly a serious comparison. The fact that you saw upscaling as BETTER than a full 1080p transfer should have set off a few alarm bells for you.
I compared an actual upscaled DVD against a 720p download of the same movie on a 100" screen with the sources synched and switching between them. The difference is night and day, and was obvious to everyone in the room. Upscaling can't put back the missing details. The 720p download was still quite behind a 25G full 1080p transfer (but better than apple TV pseudo HD). The best good upscaling does is eliminate the upscaling artifacts that some really poor up scalers create (jaggies, de-interlacing issues, motion compensation issues). So in the end you get a nice smooth 480p image free from artifacts. That is the best upscaling does. I don't discount many are happy with a nice smooth blown up 480p image. But even if they did a real comparison on a decent sized screen it would stand out like night and day as soft and detail limited. Do a real comparison on a decent size screen sometime. You can't compare from memory.
Downloads are a tiny niche. Apple TV. How many of those were sold vs Blu Ray players. Quality comparisons done, showd Apple TV HD is actually pretty much the same as upscaled DVD. This will never really be a serious ownership model, but more of a rental model.
If you want to own high quality HD movies, Blu Ray will be the only way to go. Price will be inconsequential for anyone actually owning an HD set within 2 years. For those with SD sets, I don't imagine there will be much incentive to move. But the people most likely to actually buy movies, are likely going to have HD sets in the next 2 years.
As I said, they are crazy optimistic to say this year, but within 2-3 years, I would expect market parity. In two years movies will likely be the same price. Why would you buy SD movies when you can get HD movies for the same price?