Microsoft lost five billion dollars just to sell the same number of systems worldwide as Nintendo
Walmart bought the property of a local Zellers not far from my house. They closed down the Zellers and opened their own store. The store is not profitable on its own but it serves to weaken the competition. Money spent by Microsoft is not lost, it's an investment.
Nintendo looks to have a very strong chance of winning Japan with the Revolution and developer support for the system is massive from console dev houses.
How successful were the Power Pad and the Power Glove? Nintendo is once again banking on the assumption that people enjoy flailing around in their living rooms. I think their controller is totally brilliant but that doesn't mean I'll enjoy using it. They're taking a huge risk that maybe nobody will like, or maybe nobody can live without. All I know is there's Apple and PC, Intel and AMD, PSP and Gameboy - so maybe 3 consoles in competition is one more than the market can bear.
If you think that the most important political issue facing the world today is your right to take what does not belong to you without paying for it I really do pity you.
And if you think the most important political issue is for people to hoard what they own and make because sharing is freeloading then I pity you. But I don't have to pity you because you don't actually think that. You have a blog.
Nowhere do I say that I am against paying for things. Of course we must buy goods if we expect anyone to make them. I don't think it's unreasonable to offer the things I've bought or made, or to enjoy what other people offer. The appropriate give\take ratio is a personal opinion. Personally, I think you, Zeinfeld, are entitled to take from the digital cookie jar because you are the type of person who is kind enough to publish your knowledge and opinions for free - on/. and in your blog.
You and I may not agree, but we each have benefitted from the other's argument. Not only this, but others benefit from our argument as well because we have decided to discuss this publicly. We could sell tickets to this battle of titans or get paid to publish it in a magazine but we've chosen to do so for free, as is our right.
I'm not touting some bullshit reasoning like "movies suck so it doesn't matter if I steal them." I'm saying that every freedom we give up is a freedom lost forever, and our freedom to share, freely and anonymously, is one worth fighting for. This is precisely what the internet was designed for, and by using the internet at all you sign a contract stating your approval for sites like TPB. Furthermore, you approve of the freedom of speech for Nazis, the KKK, the Taliban, the Dalai Lama, for me, and for you.
The internet is not the real world, even though the two are tied sometimes as they are in business. The Internet Protocol transmits bits and that's it. That's how it was designed and that's all it can do. It was designed to be open, to allow anyone to create any application for it, and to allow anyone to use those applications however they wish.
An argument against file sharing is an argument against the internet. Don't you appreciate your freedom to publish your blog for free to the whole world? And the freedom of others to hyperlink to you without your written consent?
Fine, you amuse yourself by stealing from others and I will amuse myself by bringing the law down on you and people like you.
I pay levies on blank media to the Canadian Recording Industry Association even when I burn music I wrote to a CD. I pay this company money to listen to my own music on my own CD player in my own car. I pay this company money when I back up my Word documents, make a boot CD, make a DVD of my home videos, and even when the burn fails and the disc is useless. Please bring the law down on me because the law is infallable, it serves my fellow man, and it is in our best interest.
Short term memory, perhaps. Even Nintendo has given up on their Gamecube so we see them in a handheld battle with Sony if not the console battle. I don't know if it's fair to call Nintendo #2 in the console wars since Xbox and Sony outsold them big time. Many see the Revolution, a very risky endeavour, as Nintendo's possible last gasp in the console biz.
Sweedish law has said nothing about the matter to date. You are certainly not a Sweedish lawyer.
From a moral perspective this is theft. The Sweedish law may have a defect that means that this particular form of facilitating theft is not currently covered. But there is absolutely no reason to think that this represents a concious decision of the Sweedish lawmakers.
No, IANASL.
And maybe you feel morally conflicted about libraries and lending, but you don't speak for the whole. If you don't like file sharing, don't do it. But some of us feel entitled, morally and legally, to share culture with our neighbours, and we will exercise that freedom. When a huge percentage of a country would rather risk jail than obey the law, maybe the law isn't in the best interest of the people.
Did you see the E3 keynote speeches for MS and Sony? (they're floating around torrent sites) The MS speech was pure marketing bollocks and the Sony speech was technobabble bliss. I don't think the MS BS riled up anybody's panties.
Don't underestimate the nationalism of Japan. They've snubbed 2 generations of Xbox now and will gobble up the PS3 even if it's the same price as a computer. PS2 is perhaps the sole reason the DVD platform took off worldwide as the console was the cheapest player on the market at the time. Even if Sony takes a loss per unit on its consoles they can chalk it up as an investment in licensing of their new distribution medium.
I'm not saying Sony can do no wrong (duh.. rootkits) but I think you're underestimating them. I think they have better than a 50/50 chance vs. Xbox due to their stranglehold on Asia.
Is a library theft? If you read the book at the library doesn't that negate one sale?
Is borrowing a video game theft? If you borrow your friend's copy of Katamari Damacy and you finish the game, doesn't that negate one sale?
How about if you walk away from the TV while watching your favourite show? Don't commercials pay for the airtime?
What if you use the Adblock plugin in a web browser?
Or watch public access television without donating?
etc. etc. etc.
If you publish media in any way it is susceptible to free consumption and duplication. Nothing will ever change that as long as media is percievable by humans somewhere along the line. However, this is secondary to the point of sites like TPB. These sites are exercising the freedoms of the people to share culture with their friends. The traditional barriers of communication are breaking down and it's underground movements like P2P that facilitate this. It can't be uninvented and it can't be stopped.
It's up to media corporations to entice us to purchase its products in new ways because its monopoly on distribution is over forever.
In an ice age the rodents and cockroaches survive, not the dinosaurs.
How about your kindergarten music teacher for making you appreciate music?
Your English teacher for developing your love of poetry?
Your doctor for giving you ear medicine?
Your car manufacturer for installing a CD player that reads CDRW?
Your mayor for not reducing traffic, forcing you to listen to music?
JBL for making speakers?
How about Beethoven for making music famous?
Or suing the artists themselves for making something worth stealing?!
The inventor of the Internet Protocol?
D-Link for making ethernet cards? Linksys for making routers?
Who's up for an invigorating game of Pass the Buck?
Thats sophistry. Without that information it would not be possible for people to steal the content. The information is made available in that form for the express purpose and with the express intent of facilitating theft.
That's the law. In the eyes of Swedish law, TPB is not facilitating theft, they are a library of text files. TPB has mentioned that as soon as storing text files becomes illegal they will provide hyperlinks to the text files. And when hyperlinks become illegal they will provide hyperlinks to the hyperlinks. They are committed to bogging down copyright more than providing a specific service to the people.
I, for one, am glad to see the beaurocracy of law choke on its own bulk. Despite what some mega corporations are whining for these days, many countries allow their citizens to share culture openly. To share and to be shared with, not to give or take and remove from the source.
Technology is granting great freedoms to the populace, and some countries feel the public needn't put a nickel in the jar every time they whistle a tune.
Well said! You are right on the money about the freedom to do what you wish with the products you buy. Funny how such a socialist country retains so many freedoms, yet ironically the USA moves closer and closer to the communist ideal of state-owned property.
For those too shy to call, even a posted letter speaks decibels louder than an email or online petition. It might not hurt to speak to your elected official just the same. If and when enough noise is made on both fronts they will intersect at some point and the government will tihnk to itself "hey, I've heard this issue before".
The Pirate Bay isn't a "file sharing crewe", they're an open bittorrent tracker with a website. They're not a release group like Razor 1911 or The Humble Guys.
From the site's about page:
The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest bittorrent tracker. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers.
...
The Pirate Bay was started by the swedish anti copyright organization Piratbyrån in the late 2003, but is since October 2004 separated and run by dedicated individuals. Using the site is free of charge, but since running it costs money, donations are very much appreciated.
Can't be easy editing DV with only a gig. It sounds like you would be better suited to Pentium considering the tasks you do. Intel processors are much better at number crunching like DV, audio, zipping, and, and encoding.
As for system instability, are you sure the problem is your motherboard? Are your RAM sticks matched? If not, your mobo will clock them down to the slowest timings which may not be compatible with the faster chip. Also, more RAM requires more power to feed through the transistors. Perhaps your PSU is struggling to keep up.
Multitasking and games caused that error. Usually I could ignore the error and nothing bad seemed to happen, but sometimes a game would close. Do you play games with that config? Modern games in high res with antialiasing? With Gaim and sometimes Bittorrent running in the background?
Otherwise your setup, hard and soft, sounds very similar to my last box which I also tested with no\small swap. Strange that we had such different experiences. I suppose if no\small page file didn't work for anybody than MS wouldn't have put the option in the GUI. What is your CPU? I had Athlon XP (socket A) before and Athlon 64 (socket 75$) now.
Untrue. If you have 2GB of RAM and aren't doing things way beyond power user usage (ie, you're playing games, run word and excel, play with email and browse the web) you'd never hit the 2GB limit. If, however, you edit video or RAW photos or do other high memory usage tasks, and you exceed your 2GB limit, then in the windows world you need a swap file.
What you're saying makes perfect sense, but who says Windows makes sense? There are many Windows apps, first and third party, that assume you have a swap file. I've tried disabling the swap file (I have 1.5GB of DDR) which had horrendous results after a short time. I've also tried creating the minimum swap file allowable (2MB) which was annoying as well. Both scenarios yielded an error message saying "Windows has run out of virtual memory".
You're 100% right that the swap file is often overrated (whoever made up the 250% swap file to memory ratio was from a bygone era where RAM was $100\meg) but it's not completely worthless. Windows loves swapping so you gotta do it to some extent. I find 512MB on a separate fast hard drive, or on the system partition if you only have one drive, works best.
You have to attack the bottleneck problem from all angles. This means using many utilities, but also using your gut feeling. To do so, you need a lot of data.
Benchmarking programs are a great start. 3DMark and PCMark from Futuremark are great tools for this. 3DMark plays scripted animations that use the latest pixel shaders and other effects. Because it's scripted it mostly taxes the GPU. PCMark benchmarks many components in isolated tests. Both utilities let you compare results with other people's machines online. Also, Sisoft SANDRA not only gives great info and benchmarks, but also offers advice based on your configuration at the bottom of every analysis. All free and all worth a look.
Numbers are great but they're not enough. Once you've benchmarked your PC, test the whole shebang altogether. Play a variety of games that stress different components. Play Bejewelled 2 or Guild Wars to test video. Play Sims 2 to test your CPU. Play Call of Duty 2 or Civilization 4 to test everything all together.
P.s., if you're an audiophile and budget is of little matter you should consider Creative's X-fi sound cards. They have an onboard CPU that offloads digital signal processing from the CPU, freeing it for other tasks. You can expect maybe a 5% relief in CPU power even in applications that are not optimized for X-fi (even the Windows desktop!)
Hard disk is never the problem- games are not disc intensive. You might speed up laods slightly with a faster disc, but not by much.
This is mostly true, however no matter how much RAM you've got you still need at least a 512MB paging file somewhere on your system. Since the PC isn't a dedicated gaming machine you can expect Windows to fiddle with all kinds of stuff in the background which will invariably draw on the swap file. Since this guy has RAID it's a non-issue though since he's in good shape.
CPU is never the problem- for the past decade or so, the CPU has been so fast compared to RAM that it can't get enough memory.
Very untrue!! This may have been the case a decade ago but no longer. Today's games are very physics and AI-intensive which are pure CPU functions. Since this chap has a halfway decent video card he may be experiencing reductions in frame rate caused entirely by a lagging CPU. An Athlon XP 3200 is definitely no the best gaming CPU you can get (though the new 90nm 939s are faster than older chips with a faster clock rate on a bigger die).
RAM- you need enough RAM so you don't hit swap. For today's games, thats 1 GB. After that, the number 1 thing you can do to improve system performance is to get low latency RAM. Your CPU will be waiting for RAM, minimize the time that it is.
Sorry, I disagree again. 1GB ain't what it used to be. Today's games can populate an entire gig of RAM on their own - especially if the video card has lots of texture memory and is running at high resolution with antialiasing. You're correct about low latencies though. It would be best to get OCZ registered RAM, and no less than the maximum speed for Athlon 64 which is 400mhz.
Video card- how much do you insist on high end features? All you really need is enough vram to fit all your textures in. Over that is wasted.
VRAM is not limited to storing textures; It is used to store the next rendered frame (or frames) in sequence. Nobody really needs more than 256MB of VRAM these days, but that's going to change within a year. More VRAM is particularly important for people with large and\or widescreen monitors since they'll have to play at higher resolutions and probably with antialiasing. Storing frames with so many pixels takes a lot of memory, and without it you may find that increasing resolution or AA will crash you out of a game. (been there)
I viewed it on a corporate network with IE6 and it crashed the browser twice after about 60 seconds. After it loaded it pretty much appeared to be identical to google.com/ig but all cutesypoo.
Really, the only advantage Live has over google.com/ig is that it has a much better URL. Unfortunately, that's probably enough to win over a lot of the noobs of the world.
Edonkey has actually saved my butt a few times when new software versions fuddled or broke a service. There's a great catalogue of retired legacy versions of popular (and unpopular) apps on the ED2k networks. It ain't stealing if you bought it, right?
From a legal standpoint (IANAL) gold farming is completely unacceptable according to the TOS because no one is allowed to make a profit from Blizzard's software.
This is a very similar case to the recent Valve vs. Subway shenanegans where an ad agency showed virtual billboards in Counterstrike games. Valve sued them and won very easily.
Gold farmers are LUCKY to simply be banned from the game. They could be sued (if they reside in the same country as Blizzard, I suppose).
But Linden did it the smart way! He gives a small cash allowance to all players which are more of a tease than a gift, and cash is purely optional to enjoy the full benefits of the game. This idea of spending money when you need to instead of subscribing regularly is brilliant!!
It's definitely not fair. Some people spend hours upon hours, sometimes in-game days to tradeskill (made harder by the presence of Chinese farmers) and acquire in-game wealth. Others spend a minor amount of cash to instantly acquire this same wealth (and in a manner that enables and encourages further Chinese farming). At first I found this incredibly unfair.
Why would this be unfair? It's not like gold farmers refuse to sell to gamers who play for a long time.
Mutant Storm and Space Tripper by PomPom, Uplink: Hacker Elite and Darwinia by Inversion Software, Tetris by Alexei Pajhitnov, Alley Cat by Synapse Software,.KKreiger by Kreiger demo group, Legend of the Red Dragon by Seth Robinson, etc etc etc etc etc
No innovation by indies?! What utter BS. Seems to me indies have the most potential to innovate since they don't have to convince a room of 70 year old suits how great their wacky ideas are.
I can't quote my source but I heard this a long time ago.. maybe 10 years ago. Was this service ever available? If not I apologize for being the first person to spread a falsehood on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft lost five billion dollars just to sell the same number of systems worldwide as Nintendo
Walmart bought the property of a local Zellers not far from my house. They closed down the Zellers and opened their own store. The store is not profitable on its own but it serves to weaken the competition. Money spent by Microsoft is not lost, it's an investment.
Nintendo looks to have a very strong chance of winning Japan with the Revolution and developer support for the system is massive from console dev houses.
How successful were the Power Pad and the Power Glove? Nintendo is once again banking on the assumption that people enjoy flailing around in their living rooms. I think their controller is totally brilliant but that doesn't mean I'll enjoy using it. They're taking a huge risk that maybe nobody will like, or maybe nobody can live without. All I know is there's Apple and PC, Intel and AMD, PSP and Gameboy - so maybe 3 consoles in competition is one more than the market can bear.
If you think that the most important political issue facing the world today is your right to take what does not belong to you without paying for it I really do pity you.
/. and in your blog.
And if you think the most important political issue is for people to hoard what they own and make because sharing is freeloading then I pity you. But I don't have to pity you because you don't actually think that. You have a blog.
Nowhere do I say that I am against paying for things. Of course we must buy goods if we expect anyone to make them. I don't think it's unreasonable to offer the things I've bought or made, or to enjoy what other people offer. The appropriate give\take ratio is a personal opinion. Personally, I think you, Zeinfeld, are entitled to take from the digital cookie jar because you are the type of person who is kind enough to publish your knowledge and opinions for free - on
You and I may not agree, but we each have benefitted from the other's argument. Not only this, but others benefit from our argument as well because we have decided to discuss this publicly. We could sell tickets to this battle of titans or get paid to publish it in a magazine but we've chosen to do so for free, as is our right.
I'm not touting some bullshit reasoning like "movies suck so it doesn't matter if I steal them." I'm saying that every freedom we give up is a freedom lost forever, and our freedom to share, freely and anonymously, is one worth fighting for. This is precisely what the internet was designed for, and by using the internet at all you sign a contract stating your approval for sites like TPB. Furthermore, you approve of the freedom of speech for Nazis, the KKK, the Taliban, the Dalai Lama, for me, and for you.
The internet is not the real world, even though the two are tied sometimes as they are in business. The Internet Protocol transmits bits and that's it. That's how it was designed and that's all it can do. It was designed to be open, to allow anyone to create any application for it, and to allow anyone to use those applications however they wish.
An argument against file sharing is an argument against the internet. Don't you appreciate your freedom to publish your blog for free to the whole world? And the freedom of others to hyperlink to you without your written consent?
Fine, you amuse yourself by stealing from others and I will amuse myself by bringing the law down on you and people like you.
I pay levies on blank media to the Canadian Recording Industry Association even when I burn music I wrote to a CD. I pay this company money to listen to my own music on my own CD player in my own car. I pay this company money when I back up my Word documents, make a boot CD, make a DVD of my home videos, and even when the burn fails and the disc is useless. Please bring the law down on me because the law is infallable, it serves my fellow man, and it is in our best interest.
Short term memory, perhaps. Even Nintendo has given up on their Gamecube so we see them in a handheld battle with Sony if not the console battle. I don't know if it's fair to call Nintendo #2 in the console wars since Xbox and Sony outsold them big time. Many see the Revolution, a very risky endeavour, as Nintendo's possible last gasp in the console biz.
Sweedish law has said nothing about the matter to date. You are certainly not a Sweedish lawyer.
From a moral perspective this is theft. The Sweedish law may have a defect that means that this particular form of facilitating theft is not currently covered. But there is absolutely no reason to think that this represents a concious decision of the Sweedish lawmakers.
No, IANASL.
And maybe you feel morally conflicted about libraries and lending, but you don't speak for the whole. If you don't like file sharing, don't do it. But some of us feel entitled, morally and legally, to share culture with our neighbours, and we will exercise that freedom. When a huge percentage of a country would rather risk jail than obey the law, maybe the law isn't in the best interest of the people.
Touche on the Ipod, but that's what I've read about their loyalty to Sony.
Did you see the E3 keynote speeches for MS and Sony? (they're floating around torrent sites) The MS speech was pure marketing bollocks and the Sony speech was technobabble bliss. I don't think the MS BS riled up anybody's panties.
Don't underestimate the nationalism of Japan. They've snubbed 2 generations of Xbox now and will gobble up the PS3 even if it's the same price as a computer. PS2 is perhaps the sole reason the DVD platform took off worldwide as the console was the cheapest player on the market at the time. Even if Sony takes a loss per unit on its consoles they can chalk it up as an investment in licensing of their new distribution medium.
I'm not saying Sony can do no wrong (duh.. rootkits) but I think you're underestimating them. I think they have better than a 50/50 chance vs. Xbox due to their stranglehold on Asia.
Is a library theft? If you read the book at the library doesn't that negate one sale?
Is borrowing a video game theft? If you borrow your friend's copy of Katamari Damacy and you finish the game, doesn't that negate one sale?
How about if you walk away from the TV while watching your favourite show? Don't commercials pay for the airtime?
What if you use the Adblock plugin in a web browser?
Or watch public access television without donating?
etc. etc. etc.
If you publish media in any way it is susceptible to free consumption and duplication. Nothing will ever change that as long as media is percievable by humans somewhere along the line. However, this is secondary to the point of sites like TPB. These sites are exercising the freedoms of the people to share culture with their friends. The traditional barriers of communication are breaking down and it's underground movements like P2P that facilitate this. It can't be uninvented and it can't be stopped.
It's up to media corporations to entice us to purchase its products in new ways because its monopoly on distribution is over forever.
In an ice age the rodents and cockroaches survive, not the dinosaurs.
How about your kindergarten music teacher for making you appreciate music?
Your English teacher for developing your love of poetry?
Your doctor for giving you ear medicine?
Your car manufacturer for installing a CD player that reads CDRW?
Your mayor for not reducing traffic, forcing you to listen to music?
JBL for making speakers?
How about Beethoven for making music famous?
Or suing the artists themselves for making something worth stealing?!
The inventor of the Internet Protocol?
D-Link for making ethernet cards? Linksys for making routers?
Who's up for an invigorating game of Pass the Buck?
Thats sophistry. Without that information it would not be possible for people to steal the content. The information is made available in that form for the express purpose and with the express intent of facilitating theft.
That's the law. In the eyes of Swedish law, TPB is not facilitating theft, they are a library of text files. TPB has mentioned that as soon as storing text files becomes illegal they will provide hyperlinks to the text files. And when hyperlinks become illegal they will provide hyperlinks to the hyperlinks. They are committed to bogging down copyright more than providing a specific service to the people.
I, for one, am glad to see the beaurocracy of law choke on its own bulk. Despite what some mega corporations are whining for these days, many countries allow their citizens to share culture openly. To share and to be shared with, not to give or take and remove from the source.
Technology is granting great freedoms to the populace, and some countries feel the public needn't put a nickel in the jar every time they whistle a tune.
Well said! You are right on the money about the freedom to do what you wish with the products you buy. Funny how such a socialist country retains so many freedoms, yet ironically the USA moves closer and closer to the communist ideal of state-owned property.
For those too shy to call, even a posted letter speaks decibels louder than an email or online petition. It might not hurt to speak to your elected official just the same. If and when enough noise is made on both fronts they will intersect at some point and the government will tihnk to itself "hey, I've heard this issue before".
The Pirate Bay isn't a "file sharing crewe", they're an open bittorrent tracker with a website. They're not a release group like Razor 1911 or The Humble Guys.
...
From the site's about page:
The Pirate Bay is the worlds largest bittorrent tracker. Bittorrent is a filesharing protocol that in a reliable way enables big and fast file transfers.
The Pirate Bay was started by the swedish anti copyright organization Piratbyrån in the late 2003, but is since October 2004 separated and run by dedicated individuals. Using the site is free of charge, but since running it costs money, donations are very much appreciated.
You're right about everything but the size. Hard drives are one of the biggest bottlenecks of a computer. Leave most of the job to RAM.
Can't be easy editing DV with only a gig. It sounds like you would be better suited to Pentium considering the tasks you do. Intel processors are much better at number crunching like DV, audio, zipping, and, and encoding.
As for system instability, are you sure the problem is your motherboard? Are your RAM sticks matched? If not, your mobo will clock them down to the slowest timings which may not be compatible with the faster chip. Also, more RAM requires more power to feed through the transistors. Perhaps your PSU is struggling to keep up.
Multitasking and games caused that error. Usually I could ignore the error and nothing bad seemed to happen, but sometimes a game would close. Do you play games with that config? Modern games in high res with antialiasing? With Gaim and sometimes Bittorrent running in the background?
Otherwise your setup, hard and soft, sounds very similar to my last box which I also tested with no\small swap. Strange that we had such different experiences. I suppose if no\small page file didn't work for anybody than MS wouldn't have put the option in the GUI. What is your CPU? I had Athlon XP (socket A) before and Athlon 64 (socket 75$) now.
Untrue. If you have 2GB of RAM and aren't doing things way beyond power user usage (ie, you're playing games, run word and excel, play with email and browse the web) you'd never hit the 2GB limit. If, however, you edit video or RAW photos or do other high memory usage tasks, and you exceed your 2GB limit, then in the windows world you need a swap file.
3 &pgno=0
What you're saying makes perfect sense, but who says Windows makes sense? There are many Windows apps, first and third party, that assume you have a swap file. I've tried disabling the swap file (I have 1.5GB of DDR) which had horrendous results after a short time. I've also tried creating the minimum swap file allowable (2MB) which was annoying as well. Both scenarios yielded an error message saying "Windows has run out of virtual memory".
You're 100% right that the swap file is often overrated (whoever made up the 250% swap file to memory ratio was from a bygone era where RAM was $100\meg) but it's not completely worthless. Windows loves swapping so you gotta do it to some extent. I find 512MB on a separate fast hard drive, or on the system partition if you only have one drive, works best.
For the king of all swap file guides, check this out - http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=14
You have to attack the bottleneck problem from all angles. This means using many utilities, but also using your gut feeling. To do so, you need a lot of data.
Benchmarking programs are a great start. 3DMark and PCMark from Futuremark are great tools for this. 3DMark plays scripted animations that use the latest pixel shaders and other effects. Because it's scripted it mostly taxes the GPU. PCMark benchmarks many components in isolated tests. Both utilities let you compare results with other people's machines online. Also, Sisoft SANDRA not only gives great info and benchmarks, but also offers advice based on your configuration at the bottom of every analysis. All free and all worth a look.
Numbers are great but they're not enough. Once you've benchmarked your PC, test the whole shebang altogether. Play a variety of games that stress different components. Play Bejewelled 2 or Guild Wars to test video. Play Sims 2 to test your CPU. Play Call of Duty 2 or Civilization 4 to test everything all together.
P.s., if you're an audiophile and budget is of little matter you should consider Creative's X-fi sound cards. They have an onboard CPU that offloads digital signal processing from the CPU, freeing it for other tasks. You can expect maybe a 5% relief in CPU power even in applications that are not optimized for X-fi (even the Windows desktop!)
Sorry, I disagree with many of your suggestions.
Hard disk is never the problem- games are not disc intensive. You might speed up laods slightly with a faster disc, but not by much.
This is mostly true, however no matter how much RAM you've got you still need at least a 512MB paging file somewhere on your system. Since the PC isn't a dedicated gaming machine you can expect Windows to fiddle with all kinds of stuff in the background which will invariably draw on the swap file. Since this guy has RAID it's a non-issue though since he's in good shape.
CPU is never the problem- for the past decade or so, the CPU has been so fast compared to RAM that it can't get enough memory.
Very untrue!! This may have been the case a decade ago but no longer. Today's games are very physics and AI-intensive which are pure CPU functions. Since this chap has a halfway decent video card he may be experiencing reductions in frame rate caused entirely by a lagging CPU. An Athlon XP 3200 is definitely no the best gaming CPU you can get (though the new 90nm 939s are faster than older chips with a faster clock rate on a bigger die).
RAM- you need enough RAM so you don't hit swap. For today's games, thats 1 GB. After that, the number 1 thing you can do to improve system performance is to get low latency RAM. Your CPU will be waiting for RAM, minimize the time that it is.
Sorry, I disagree again. 1GB ain't what it used to be. Today's games can populate an entire gig of RAM on their own - especially if the video card has lots of texture memory and is running at high resolution with antialiasing. You're correct about low latencies though. It would be best to get OCZ registered RAM, and no less than the maximum speed for Athlon 64 which is 400mhz.
Video card- how much do you insist on high end features? All you really need is enough vram to fit all your textures in. Over that is wasted.
VRAM is not limited to storing textures; It is used to store the next rendered frame (or frames) in sequence. Nobody really needs more than 256MB of VRAM these days, but that's going to change within a year. More VRAM is particularly important for people with large and\or widescreen monitors since they'll have to play at higher resolutions and probably with antialiasing. Storing frames with so many pixels takes a lot of memory, and without it you may find that increasing resolution or AA will crash you out of a game. (been there)
I viewed it on a corporate network with IE6 and it crashed the browser twice after about 60 seconds. After it loaded it pretty much appeared to be identical to google.com/ig but all cutesypoo.
Really, the only advantage Live has over google.com/ig is that it has a much better URL. Unfortunately, that's probably enough to win over a lot of the noobs of the world.
Edonkey has actually saved my butt a few times when new software versions fuddled or broke a service. There's a great catalogue of retired legacy versions of popular (and unpopular) apps on the ED2k networks. It ain't stealing if you bought it, right?
From a legal standpoint (IANAL) gold farming is completely unacceptable according to the TOS because no one is allowed to make a profit from Blizzard's software.
This is a very similar case to the recent Valve vs. Subway shenanegans where an ad agency showed virtual billboards in Counterstrike games. Valve sued them and won very easily.
Gold farmers are LUCKY to simply be banned from the game. They could be sued (if they reside in the same country as Blizzard, I suppose).
But Linden did it the smart way! He gives a small cash allowance to all players which are more of a tease than a gift, and cash is purely optional to enjoy the full benefits of the game. This idea of spending money when you need to instead of subscribing regularly is brilliant!!
It's definitely not fair. Some people spend hours upon hours, sometimes in-game days to tradeskill (made harder by the presence of Chinese farmers) and acquire in-game wealth. Others spend a minor amount of cash to instantly acquire this same wealth (and in a manner that enables and encourages further Chinese farming). At first I found this incredibly unfair.
Why would this be unfair? It's not like gold farmers refuse to sell to gamers who play for a long time.
Mutant Storm and Space Tripper by PomPom, Uplink: Hacker Elite and Darwinia by Inversion Software, Tetris by Alexei Pajhitnov, Alley Cat by Synapse Software, .KKreiger by Kreiger demo group, Legend of the Red Dragon by Seth Robinson, etc etc etc etc etc
No innovation by indies?! What utter BS. Seems to me indies have the most potential to innovate since they don't have to convince a room of 70 year old suits how great their wacky ideas are.
I can't quote my source but I heard this a long time ago.. maybe 10 years ago. Was this service ever available? If not I apologize for being the first person to spread a falsehood on the internet.