What saddens me about PC gaming is that the only boundary which is regularly pushed is the graphics. What happens then is that you need to buy a new $300 graphics card every year to be able to play the latest games nicely. My GF4Ti4200 is pretty much useless now, even Far Cry at 1024x768 is basically un-doable.
Half Life was an amazing game, but it wasn't because of the graphics. It's because it had a good story, it led you through the story well, the graphics weren't awful, and it had good playability. So why didn't we see a lot of games try to be like Half Life? Instead, they all tried to become graphics-fests. If some games with the depth (and graphics) of the original Half Life came out now, but at, say, $20, they'd sell like hot cakes! In a way, I'd say Return to Castle Wolfenstein almost did this. It took the old Quake 3 engine (which was a couple years' old by then), and wrapped a game with improved AI and playability around it. Result.. worked good on old kit, and was a good game.
Let's see boundaries of AI, playability, story, and concept being pushed, rather than just graphics all the time!
An upgrade from a 486-SX 25 to a P-1 133MHz cost $2000; an upgrade from a Geforce 2 GTS and an Athlon 1.2GHz to a Radeon 9800 and an Athlon XP 2500+ is what, $600? I'd much rather spend less money than more money, neh?
I have to disagree with your insight. The components are cheaper these days, but the benefits from upgrading are nearly entirely game focused, whereas the benefits of upgrading in 1994 covered everything you did with the machine.
Going up to 32 megabytes of RAM from 8 megabytes ten years ago would mean you could play the latest games, but it would have also made your PC feel like a new machine! Upgrading from 512 megabytes of RAM to even two gigabytes of RAM these days wouldn't make Windows feel significantly different at all.
And in the CPU department, too.. you can run Windows XP and have most general apps feel instantaneous on a mid-range 2.0GHz Pentium 4. Why upgrade to a 3.4GHz machine? There's no point except for gaming, and many new games will make use of that extra CPU power (try busy bot matches).
I think is going to become a sore point quite quickly. You just don't need expensive 256MB graphics cards, 3.4GHz processors, and a gigabyte of DDR RAM to do 99% of what you want on a PC now.. it's just the games that are demanding it. So.. people will drift to the cheaper options like buying an XBox, getting XBox Live, and knowing their games will work okay.. and have an el cheapo PC for the Internet and word processing.
Heck, I was a die-hard gamer in the 90's, but all this upgrading is doing my head in, I think I'm going to do the above!
If you think 'code monkeys' is racist, you obviously aren't familiar with the term and how it is used in our industry.
I'm not referring to Indians as if they are monkeys, which would be racist, but using a term which is quite common in the coding world.. 'code monkey', which means someone who's a good coder, but isn't very good at seeing the big picture, or able to question what they're doing.
My experience is that since foreign workers are more desperate for the work, they just follow your (possibly incorrect) specs to the letter, rather than question what you actually want to do (which American workers tend to do).
Google Answers can be your friend. There are a number of Linux-head researchers over there, like myself. You also tend to get reliable help for way cheaper than you could anyplace else.
Consider this. Both India and China are in the middle of economic booms, but neither country is 'rich', as such. Therefore, it made sense for the Indians and the Chinese to work for US companies, and make a lot more than they could locally, despite the inconvenience and quality issues of working online.
However, the Indian and Chinese economies are reaching points where their own citizens are crying out for advanced services. Who will code them? Those Indian and Chinese programmers. Yes, eventually the Indian and Chinese economies will force salaries up, closer to US rates. When an Indian worker's salary reaches 75% of the comparable American's.. guess what? Outsourcing will not make economic sense anymore.
From my own experience of shopping around for coders, the rates the Indians charge have SHOT UP in the last year or two. Two years ago, if I were a big company, I would have outsourced what I could. Now? No way! The salary expectations of US workers have fallen, the Indian rates have tripled, and now it makes more economic sense to hire a local American worker!
But, as always, I suggest that American workers simply work on their natural benefits.. The benefits are that they can meet me 'in the flesh', that we share a culture and can understand each others' jokes (damn necessary on big projects!), and they tend to be smarter, and not just code monkeys. If you can reply to my e-mails within the work day, be pleasant on the phone, and sound excited about the projects I'm giving you.. you're going to be hired over a half price Indian any day of the week.
Actually, when doing regular crap (i.e. not playing games) it gets just over three hours' battery time (according to TomsHardware anyway), which compared to most non-Centrino notebooks which get two hours if you're lucky.. is pretty darn good. Sure, the PowerBook is a bit sexier, but for $700 more, that should be a given.
Bzzt! I found a 15" 1400x1050 (SXGA+) notebook with Athlon 64-bit 3000+ processor, 60GB hard drive, DVD-+RW, gigabit ethernet, 54mbps wireless, for 1009 (about $1800).
Compare this to the PowerBook, which, even ignoring the CPU difference, costing $2,499 for the equivalent features.. is way more expensive. And don't even look at the UK PowerBook prices which are way higher than even the US ones.
The use of arrow where most of the rest of the world uses dot was confusing.
Perl has always done things in a way that someone thought was 'right' when they coded it, and which isn't necessarily based on standards. I would contest that everyone else was doing it wrong here, and that the arrow makes way more sense, as it implies hierarchy, whereas a dot does not.
I don't know what other OS emulators had been available, but if Serenity Virtual Station does what it says it does, now I can delete my Windows partition completely!
You could have done that ages ago.. with VMWare. Serenity isn't any more special than VMWare. From what I can make out, you'll have to pay for it as well!
They might not know about open source in Ethiopia, but I'll bet you the shirt off my back they all know about 'free software';-)
Piracy is actually a legitimate reason why open source isn't as easy to spread in poorer countries. People in poorer countries tend to pirate and not have the threat of any punishment hanging over their heads. Of course, I salute the march of open source software the world over, but it won't be until these countries fully step up onto the world stage that they'll get a significant advantage out of it over using pirated stuff.
The lesson is clear: stay out of movie theaters and you won't get arrested.
If you like getting into your car and driving around at 100mph, you might be arrested. Ah well, the lesson is clear: stay out of cars, and you won't get arrested!
I'm all for jumping over privacy invasions and the ever domineering power of the state, but cracking down on things which are blatantly illegal isn't a violation of our freedom.
I wonder what you could do with a Beowulf cluster of dead badgers?
1) Install Linux on dead badgers. 2) ??? 3) Profit!
Why did the chicken cross the road? To install Linux on a dead badger.
Re:I am a trained professional...
on
Death by Coffee?
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· Score: 1
I suppose if it were possible to drink enough coffee within a certain time period such that the level of caffeine in your blood reached a fatal level (is that even possible) it could kill you.
Shame on CBS Marketwatch and MobileTracker. This is in the article linked to by the MobileTracker post above.. and was even quoted BY MobileTracker and not corrected! From CBS:
It's all about speed. Fourth-generation services would allow for data transfer speeds of up to 20 megabytes per second for uplinks and 100 megabytes per second for downlinks -- up to 260 times faster than DoCoMo's popular 3G services, which allow for downlinks of 384 kilobytes per second.
If you're going to put someone on the technology beat, please put someone in who understands the difference between bits and bytes;-)
Re:Google's speciality & ubiquity
on
Search Beyond Google
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Enough branding studies have shown that it's very very hard to knock someone off their post once they seize a certain mindshare - e.g. Coke, Windows(grin), and now Google.
This isn't entirely true. Take the 'New Coke' disaster of the late 80's. Pepsi actually overtook the flagship Coke at this time, until Coke Classic was released in 86.
Google is not much different to Coke. As soon as the water starts to taste funny (and on many searches it does now) we jump to the other main brands. Unlike Coke, however, Google cannot afford to keep its flavor constant every year.. but it must at least make it taste fresh instead of spammy.
Google pays hundreds of researchers and software developers, including more than 60 PhDs, to man the front lines in this technology war
Google is famous for only hiring the academic best (except for those they pick up in acquisitions), but I'm wondering if things are getting stale over there at Google. Google Labs has shown us some interesting concepts, but when a company opens the field to everyone and asks for people to develop ideas for them (as in the recent $10k prize thing), does it mean those PhDs are sitting around eating pizza all day?
PhDs are not the guys you leave around to do server maintenance or fix up problems in the clusters. They also don't make great coffee. So if you've got 60 extremely bright individuals (we're talking way into the top percentile) sitting around for a few years.. and Google has tons of money.. why aren't we seeing some major stuff coming out of Google?
My theory is that either 1) the PhDs are being stifled by upper management, 2) the PhDs aren't really as smart as they're meant to be, or 3) Google has something absolutely massive just around the corner... Take your bets, gentlemen.
Notice what the BBC have done with their photos. They've clearly picked the two most photogenic members for quotes, because if you look at the others way down at the bottom picture, those other girls are what you'd expect the stereotypical girl gamer to look like, rather than two pseudo-hotties.
The linked page says this so-called license applies only to commercial use.
I believe SCO said that they were only going to be chasing commercial users of Linux. Okay, they're still crazy, but at least it seems they have a vague sort of 'respect' for the hacking/academic community.. just not the businesses that use Linux.
That aside.. I can't wait for this all to be over, it's really putting the heebie-jeebies up some of my clients.
Re:No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
·
· Score: 1
Sure, the kids will need feeding every day, and you've all gotta stay healthy, but don't get all melodramatic with the 'hungry three times a day' bit.
It's common knowledge that the majority of people in Western society over eat. I was one of them. I suddenly realized that food was, mostly wasted money, and ate less. After a while, you get used to it, and you still stay the same weight and health.
I know families of LBYMers (Live Below Your Means) who, with a couple of kids and two parents, can live on $100 a month in groceries, yet the average American family will spend more than four times that.
If you don't want to be at the beck and call of corporate America, you have to be creative. Use those leftovers from today's meal in tomorrow's stew. People weren't as wasteful in frontier times, and we don't need to be wasteful now either.
I'd rather earn less and stretch my paycheck, than earn more and get totally whored by an unfeeling company. Luckily, however, I don't have to make that choice (yet), I work for myself.
No one took your time in the first place.
on
Take Back Your Time!
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The dearth of recreational and family time in America is nothing new, although work hours have been increasing decade by decade leading to mini 'revolts' like this. However, who actually took your time away in the first place? You did. If you let yourself be conned into working 80 hour weeks, that was your call.
"But I won't be able to afford the mortgage on my $500,000 home!" many will cry. A lot of people think it's some sort of given that they must have a large house, 2.4 children, a Lexus and an SUV parked outside. Not so! A lot of people have escaped from the 'rat race' to start farms out in the boonies, backpack around the world, or live as a family out on the ocean waves.
Living in a 60-80 hour workweek society is your choice, and if you're too blinkered to do something about improving the quality of your life, fine.. but it's YOUR CALL!
Nuff said. Okay, it's $5 plus taxes, which comes to about $5.41. Cheapest there is out there though. Don't need to be a customer of theirs either. Google for the link yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
BS, games like Civilization 3, NetHack, CounterStrike and Ultima Online are really popular, and definitely not for their dated graphics!
What saddens me about PC gaming is that the only boundary which is regularly pushed is the graphics. What happens then is that you need to buy a new $300 graphics card every year to be able to play the latest games nicely. My GF4Ti4200 is pretty much useless now, even Far Cry at 1024x768 is basically un-doable.
Half Life was an amazing game, but it wasn't because of the graphics. It's because it had a good story, it led you through the story well, the graphics weren't awful, and it had good playability. So why didn't we see a lot of games try to be like Half Life? Instead, they all tried to become graphics-fests. If some games with the depth (and graphics) of the original Half Life came out now, but at, say, $20, they'd sell like hot cakes! In a way, I'd say Return to Castle Wolfenstein almost did this. It took the old Quake 3 engine (which was a couple years' old by then), and wrapped a game with improved AI and playability around it. Result.. worked good on old kit, and was a good game.
Let's see boundaries of AI, playability, story, and concept being pushed, rather than just graphics all the time!
An upgrade from a 486-SX 25 to a P-1 133MHz cost $2000; an upgrade from a Geforce 2 GTS and an Athlon 1.2GHz to a Radeon 9800 and an Athlon XP 2500+ is what, $600? I'd much rather spend less money than more money, neh?
I have to disagree with your insight. The components are cheaper these days, but the benefits from upgrading are nearly entirely game focused, whereas the benefits of upgrading in 1994 covered everything you did with the machine.
Going up to 32 megabytes of RAM from 8 megabytes ten years ago would mean you could play the latest games, but it would have also made your PC feel like a new machine! Upgrading from 512 megabytes of RAM to even two gigabytes of RAM these days wouldn't make Windows feel significantly different at all.
And in the CPU department, too.. you can run Windows XP and have most general apps feel instantaneous on a mid-range 2.0GHz Pentium 4. Why upgrade to a 3.4GHz machine? There's no point except for gaming, and many new games will make use of that extra CPU power (try busy bot matches).
I think is going to become a sore point quite quickly. You just don't need expensive 256MB graphics cards, 3.4GHz processors, and a gigabyte of DDR RAM to do 99% of what you want on a PC now.. it's just the games that are demanding it. So.. people will drift to the cheaper options like buying an XBox, getting XBox Live, and knowing their games will work okay.. and have an el cheapo PC for the Internet and word processing.
Heck, I was a die-hard gamer in the 90's, but all this upgrading is doing my head in, I think I'm going to do the above!
That was a very racist coment.
If you think 'code monkeys' is racist, you obviously aren't familiar with the term and how it is used in our industry.
I'm not referring to Indians as if they are monkeys, which would be racist, but using a term which is quite common in the coding world.. 'code monkey', which means someone who's a good coder, but isn't very good at seeing the big picture, or able to question what they're doing.
My experience is that since foreign workers are more desperate for the work, they just follow your (possibly incorrect) specs to the letter, rather than question what you actually want to do (which American workers tend to do).
Well that was a good way of getting back the lost mod points wasn't it! ;-)
Google Answers can be your friend. There are a number of Linux-head researchers over there, like myself. You also tend to get reliable help for way cheaper than you could anyplace else.
Consider this. Both India and China are in the middle of economic booms, but neither country is 'rich', as such. Therefore, it made sense for the Indians and the Chinese to work for US companies, and make a lot more than they could locally, despite the inconvenience and quality issues of working online.
However, the Indian and Chinese economies are reaching points where their own citizens are crying out for advanced services. Who will code them? Those Indian and Chinese programmers. Yes, eventually the Indian and Chinese economies will force salaries up, closer to US rates. When an Indian worker's salary reaches 75% of the comparable American's.. guess what? Outsourcing will not make economic sense anymore.
From my own experience of shopping around for coders, the rates the Indians charge have SHOT UP in the last year or two. Two years ago, if I were a big company, I would have outsourced what I could. Now? No way! The salary expectations of US workers have fallen, the Indian rates have tripled, and now it makes more economic sense to hire a local American worker!
But, as always, I suggest that American workers simply work on their natural benefits.. The benefits are that they can meet me 'in the flesh', that we share a culture and can understand each others' jokes (damn necessary on big projects!), and they tend to be smarter, and not just code monkeys. If you can reply to my e-mails within the work day, be pleasant on the phone, and sound excited about the projects I'm giving you.. you're going to be hired over a half price Indian any day of the week.
Actually, when doing regular crap (i.e. not playing games) it gets just over three hours' battery time (according to TomsHardware anyway), which compared to most non-Centrino notebooks which get two hours if you're lucky.. is pretty darn good. Sure, the PowerBook is a bit sexier, but for $700 more, that should be a given.
Bzzt! I found a 15" 1400x1050 (SXGA+) notebook with Athlon 64-bit 3000+ processor, 60GB hard drive, DVD-+RW, gigabit ethernet, 54mbps wireless, for 1009 (about $1800).
Compare this to the PowerBook, which, even ignoring the CPU difference, costing $2,499 for the equivalent features.. is way more expensive. And don't even look at the UK PowerBook prices which are way higher than even the US ones.
Now that really is a good point, and not one I've considered before. I was specifically talking about method invocation though.. i.e.
$x = new Whatever;
$x->doSomething();
But thanks for bringing that other point up, you're on the money.
Fave quote from that article..
However, I think that search engines, if they index XML properly, will have a good shot at replacing SQL.
Discuss.
The use of arrow where most of the rest of the world uses dot was confusing.
Perl has always done things in a way that someone thought was 'right' when they coded it, and which isn't necessarily based on standards. I would contest that everyone else was doing it wrong here, and that the arrow makes way more sense, as it implies hierarchy, whereas a dot does not.
I don't know what other OS emulators had been available, but if Serenity Virtual Station does what it says it does, now I can delete my Windows partition completely!
You could have done that ages ago.. with VMWare. Serenity isn't any more special than VMWare. From what I can make out, you'll have to pay for it as well!
They might not know about open source in Ethiopia, but I'll bet you the shirt off my back they all know about 'free software' ;-)
Piracy is actually a legitimate reason why open source isn't as easy to spread in poorer countries. People in poorer countries tend to pirate and not have the threat of any punishment hanging over their heads. Of course, I salute the march of open source software the world over, but it won't be until these countries fully step up onto the world stage that they'll get a significant advantage out of it over using pirated stuff.
The lesson is clear: stay out of movie theaters and you won't get arrested.
If you like getting into your car and driving around at 100mph, you might be arrested. Ah well, the lesson is clear: stay out of cars, and you won't get arrested!
I'm all for jumping over privacy invasions and the ever domineering power of the state, but cracking down on things which are blatantly illegal isn't a violation of our freedom.
I wonder what you could do with a Beowulf cluster of dead badgers?
1) Install Linux on dead badgers.
2) ???
3) Profit!
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To install Linux on a dead badger.
I suppose if it were possible to drink enough coffee within a certain time period such that the level of caffeine in your blood reached a fatal level (is that even possible) it could kill you.
No shit! That's why it's called a 'fatal level'.
Shame on CBS Marketwatch and MobileTracker. This is in the article linked to by the MobileTracker post above.. and was even quoted BY MobileTracker and not corrected! From CBS:
;-)
It's all about speed. Fourth-generation services would allow for data transfer speeds of up to 20 megabytes per second for uplinks and 100 megabytes per second for downlinks -- up to 260 times faster than DoCoMo's popular 3G services, which allow for downlinks of 384 kilobytes per second.
If you're going to put someone on the technology beat, please put someone in who understands the difference between bits and bytes
Enough branding studies have shown that it's very very hard to knock someone off their post once they seize a certain mindshare - e.g. Coke, Windows(grin), and now Google.
This isn't entirely true. Take the 'New Coke' disaster of the late 80's. Pepsi actually overtook the flagship Coke at this time, until Coke Classic was released in 86.
Google is not much different to Coke. As soon as the water starts to taste funny (and on many searches it does now) we jump to the other main brands. Unlike Coke, however, Google cannot afford to keep its flavor constant every year.. but it must at least make it taste fresh instead of spammy.
Google pays hundreds of researchers and software developers, including more than 60 PhDs, to man the front lines in this technology war
Google is famous for only hiring the academic best (except for those they pick up in acquisitions), but I'm wondering if things are getting stale over there at Google. Google Labs has shown us some interesting concepts, but when a company opens the field to everyone and asks for people to develop ideas for them (as in the recent $10k prize thing), does it mean those PhDs are sitting around eating pizza all day?
PhDs are not the guys you leave around to do server maintenance or fix up problems in the clusters. They also don't make great coffee. So if you've got 60 extremely bright individuals (we're talking way into the top percentile) sitting around for a few years.. and Google has tons of money.. why aren't we seeing some major stuff coming out of Google?
My theory is that either 1) the PhDs are being stifled by upper management, 2) the PhDs aren't really as smart as they're meant to be, or 3) Google has something absolutely massive just around the corner... Take your bets, gentlemen.
Notice what the BBC have done with their photos. They've clearly picked the two most photogenic members for quotes, because if you look at the others way down at the bottom picture, those other girls are what you'd expect the stereotypical girl gamer to look like, rather than two pseudo-hotties.
The linked page says this so-called license applies only to commercial use.
I believe SCO said that they were only going to be chasing commercial users of Linux. Okay, they're still crazy, but at least it seems they have a vague sort of 'respect' for the hacking/academic community.. just not the businesses that use Linux.
That aside.. I can't wait for this all to be over, it's really putting the heebie-jeebies up some of my clients.
Sure, the kids will need feeding every day, and you've all gotta stay healthy, but don't get all melodramatic with the 'hungry three times a day' bit.
It's common knowledge that the majority of people in Western society over eat. I was one of them. I suddenly realized that food was, mostly wasted money, and ate less. After a while, you get used to it, and you still stay the same weight and health.
I know families of LBYMers (Live Below Your Means) who, with a couple of kids and two parents, can live on $100 a month in groceries, yet the average American family will spend more than four times that.
If you don't want to be at the beck and call of corporate America, you have to be creative. Use those leftovers from today's meal in tomorrow's stew. People weren't as wasteful in frontier times, and we don't need to be wasteful now either.
I'd rather earn less and stretch my paycheck, than earn more and get totally whored by an unfeeling company. Luckily, however, I don't have to make that choice (yet), I work for myself.
The dearth of recreational and family time in America is nothing new, although work hours have been increasing decade by decade leading to mini 'revolts' like this. However, who actually took your time away in the first place? You did. If you let yourself be conned into working 80 hour weeks, that was your call.
"But I won't be able to afford the mortgage on my $500,000 home!" many will cry. A lot of people think it's some sort of given that they must have a large house, 2.4 children, a Lexus and an SUV parked outside. Not so! A lot of people have escaped from the 'rat race' to start farms out in the boonies, backpack around the world, or live as a family out on the ocean waves.
Living in a 60-80 hour workweek society is your choice, and if you're too blinkered to do something about improving the quality of your life, fine.. but it's YOUR CALL!
Nuff said. Okay, it's $5 plus taxes, which comes to about $5.41. Cheapest there is out there though. Don't need to be a customer of theirs either. Google for the link yourself.