For pointing out a key point -- people consider violence masculine, so men are encouraged to enjoy violence. This is the real problem.
If you wanted more women there, either encourage women to violence, or discourage men from violence with films that aren't about stereotypical gender traits.
"I mean, ask yourself, how exactly would YOU make an interesting movie out of Halo, whose "star" is a faceless, anonymous, killing machine with virtually no backstory (and working under the studio requirement that he has to occupy most of the screen time, with a large number of pure mindless action scenes)?"
It's not that games don't have complex backstory or details in the Universe, it's that they give these screenplay projects to turkeys who have no clue.
You have the wrong perspective on the education. CS is applied logic and mathematics. Read this carefully changed copy of your post if you don't understand:
"Because the field is undefined. What is a mathematician? What do they do after they graduate?
I earn my paycheck doing accounting, in all that encompasses. I went to college for a year and half before I realized that the education I was getting wasn't going to prepare me for my chosen profession.
The schools get math majors ready to be theorists ( bad ones at that ). That's it. There is a huge gap between what the schools teach and what businesses need from their accounting personel.
I'm more valuable now than I would have been had I stuck around and graduated."
Now, you can't teach problem solving, but it's hoped after 4 years in school you have some idea of how to be useful. Learning technical trivia is easy; anyone can do it. It doesn't take a genius to change an oil any more than it takes a genius to administrate a small network. However, understanding the deeper concepts (CSMA/CD!) and other principles is very useful if you are a computer scientist.
The difference between a degree and a certificate from a trade school is exactly what you mentioned; people go to a trade school to learn how to do 1 job. People go to University to learn how to solve a superset of problems, which they can apply to any job they want from a particular perspective. I can attack problems of compiler theory, networks, operating systems, programming language theory, etc, because I'm well grounded in the theory behind these concepts, and have experience (both in class and with jobs and projects I've worked on around school).
In 20 years, the tools you use will have changed dozens of times. In 20 years, Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path on a network will likely be just as useful for link-state routing models as it is now. So your final sentence, "I'm more valuable now than I would have been had I stuck around and graduated." is probably wrong, because you didn't understand why the education was useful. Maybe you weren't cut out for it, or maybe you just wanted money now. That's ok. Just don't preach it like it's the gospel truth on Slashdot.
But I didn't read anything that sounded like a gameplay issue caused by the video. By gameplay issue, I mean "was unable to get the powerup" or "boss at end of stage 2 was invincible due to video driver."
The boss at the end of stage 2 may be impossible to see, but that can be fixed without patching the game engine itself. Merely changing the video card will fix it. The OP was referring to problems caused by hardware that made a game unplayable, but those are fixable without patching the games, so I argue that those arent't in the set of bugs to consider. The only ones we should be worried about are the ones that the game programmers are directly responsible for.
Your ATI Rage 128 didn't break because the RO programmers sucked, it broke because ATI sucks. That's why I don't buy ATI hardware:)
I see what the original replier meant. I was correct for Intel, but I'd forgotten a few details of how AMD changed things with Athlon64. Certainly, HyperTransport's important for filling RAM, but once RAM is full, it's straight to the CPU.
My AMD64 is a Socket 754, and my Sempron is Socket 462. It's on a much, much slower bus connection to its RAM. The Sempron has 180ns latency to RAM, while my AMD64 has 60 ns (worst case).
The AMD64 average context switch latency is a few microseconds; 15ns average. Sempron is 10ns best, 70ns average. I can send you a PDF with a few hundred graphs I did with lmbench on several platforms for a reseach project recently, if you don't believe me.
So, if my kernel is doing a context switch HZ times a second, I'm getting way better interactive performance on my AMD64 machine -- which is a socket 754 single-channel memory device. The FSB dominates.
The bus connection between my CPU and the RAM is, indeed, the Hypertransport. Northbridge, CPU, and RAM are all connected by it. Perhaps you missed all the AMD documentation on this, or the entry in Wikipedia:
"Front-Side Bus Replacement
The primary use for HyperTransport is to replace the front-side bus, which is currently different for every machine (or some set of them). For instance, a Pentium cannot be plugged into a PCI bus. In order to expand the system the front-side bus must connect through adaptors for the various standard buses, like AGP or PCI. These are typically included in a controller called the northbridge."
And, yes, I am taking into account caches as well. I do appreciate the healthy skepticism.
Yea, there's lots of fibre, but wired links are supposed to be for high-bandwidth usage. The whole idea behind wireless everywhere is that it's just simpler; no more cell phone or landline phone -- just wireless. Cable can still be delivered via video-on-demand over fibre, but for surfing the web, VOIP, or email, you want wireless.
WiMax has multiple channels, better signal qualities, and TDMA (instead of CSMA) at its core, allowing you to get better network throughput as you reach (and exceed) subscriber maximums for an access point. WiMax is also fairly close to being easy to buy. I just wish governments hadn't commited to using the (broken) 802.11x set of protocols to implement wireless.
Honestly, what impact would random hardware configurations have?
We've got either Direct3D or Direct3D for our graphics API. DirectSound or DirectSound for our audio API. DirectInput or DirectInput for our input API. (I do realize I'm discluding OpenGL and SDL, which are both great tools, but it's to make a point).
So with Direct3D, DirectInput, and DirectSound wrapping different hardware, what's the big deal? I can buy the argument that console games will be more optimized because you can get up close and personal with the hardware, since everyone will have the same damn thing.
No, the differences will be things like games crashing or the computer crashing due to bugs in the DirectX side of the driver, or the kernel-side of the driver.
So what about gameplay? With gameplay bugs, that's logic in the program. If I shoot you and you don't die, that's not because I have an ATI video card instead of an nVidia card, it's because the hit detection algorithm is broken.
Non-fixed platforms mean I have to deal with lower performance (often poorly tuned game design is the major factor here) and maybe crashes, but it doesn't mean I should put up with broken game logic.
Why are MacBook Pros so much faster than Powerbooks?
The MacBook Pro sports a 666Mhz DDR FSB, while the Powerbook sports a 133Mhz FSB. It doesn't matter how fast your processor is if you don't have a fast enough way to power it (much like a V-12 will not do well with a single-barrel carb used on a lawnmower engine).
The Von Neumann bottleneck is the significant limiting factor in all machines, once your working set of data exceeds that of your L1/L2 cache. Suddenly your 1.5 Ghz G4 is 266 Mhz:/
Faster hypertransport means happier users of AMD machines. My AMD64 beats the pants off my Sempron 2500 because its 800Mhz HT bus allows it to do context switches in less than 1/3rd the time of the Sempron!
"My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow."
That sounds well and good, but you would have to do careful research and real market analysis of this. What's to stop people from buying these super cheap movies? There are only so many hours in a day, and if they're doing other things, movies can't eat them all up.
a world where high quality software, in a simple package with smiling people on the cover and no marketting speak, could be delivered in bulk, for free, to your home -- with both a live disc to try at no danger, and a full disc for when you want to run it.
And this software would work well, have free online updates and upgrades, and make it so that you could even show your friends who aren't technically inclined how to use it and gain its benefits? How it enables people like me who work on software to easily contribute to improving the lives of thousands of computer users around the world?
"When Linus is forced to sit there and watch for three minutes while Photoshop forks to run some simple helper ("
He will ask the question why the Photoshop programmers chose to use a fork and then exec, instead of a call that creates a new process without duplicating the parent memory space. If the Photoshop programmers did not have this choice, we have to ask what is wrong with POSIX that there is not a call to create a new process with some initial values in its argv/envp from a parent process without duplicating its memory space.
Conceptually, COW fork tricks worked well when CPU and memory didn't have as much of a Neumann bottleneck as they now have. Machines in the 1980s had maybe a 2x or 3x divider on memory to CPU. I recently benchmarked several machines for a thesis where the memory bus was 6x slower than the CPU, assuming peak conditions. The moment you get above cache size, performance falls through the floor; you don't want to dick around handling page faults in that situation, you want it to run as smoothly as possible. Linus is right about this.
Andy went out and said that he thought the Linux approach was wrong, and archaic, and that people should go and wait for GNU.
Linus said that he felt this was wrong, and that being a prof is no excuse for Minix being the mess it was (and Minix was a mess in the late 1980s/early 1990s). He also apologized if he came off as too harsh for his writing about how people should be able to throw away an old design in favour of a new one anyway, etc.
It was very polite compared to some of the non-Andy/Linux replies.
RFPolicy is a solid policy for allowing a vendor to be notified in a timely manner (5 days), let them work with the reporter to get a plan of action together (such as a quick way to notify customers and let them get the fix rolled out) and help the vendor reproduce the bug/verify the fix, before notification of the general populace.
If, at any point, the vendor suddenly decides to play not-nice, the RFPolicy is quite clear -- go ahead and post it to bugtraq or whatever you like. It also states that the vendor should acknowledge the original disclosure. That is, if I found a vulnerability in slashcode, but delayed publication because I was trying to get it fixed in good faith, the Slashcode developers would acknowledge my efforts in their advisory -- even if someone else comes along and posts an advisory after I report it to the team, but before the team has posted an announcement.
Nowhere in the RFPolicy v2.0 does it say anything along the lines of, "Hey, you should silently slip-stream fixes without ever notifying anyone ever" -- which is what this article is about Microsoft doing.
The shit that gets modded up. I swear, we need a "-1 WRONG" tag we can apply to posts. Some kind of clue stick for the mods that don't bother to look up RFPolicy would also be good.
"They may not be games for 6 year olds, but I don't remember anything in Jak II that a 3rd or 4th grader couldn't handle. Nothing that I hadn't seen in Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden or Bionic Commando. Well, except boobs, but they're clothed,"
I'm pretty sure most people don't care about boobs in any way until after puberty. Considering that people are still breastfed as kids anyway, what's the big deal? Boobs are boobs. They're not going to fly planes into buildings, or shoot your mother.
"But Yonah also supports the group of 13 new instructions known as SSE3, handles some SSE2 instructing like Shuffle and Unpack up to 30% faster, and is capable of using its instruction-grouping abilities (known as micro-ops fusion) on some SSE instructions, improving overall throughput."
SSE3 has some very nice hardware thread synchronization instructions. These are important (and AMD has them now). As for the instruction grouping, that sounds rather suspiciously like the double dispatch operations that were added to Opteron: "Appendix C of Opteron's Optimization Guide specifies to which class each and every instruction belongs. Most 128 bit SSE and SSE2 instructions are implemented as double dispatch instructions. Only those that can not be split into two independent 64 bit operations are handled as Vector Path (Micro Code) instructions. Those SSE2 instructions that operate on only one half of a 128 bit register are implemented as a single (Direct Path) instruction."
Assuming AMD can tune Turion64s to be more power friendly, they'll be able to best Intel's fancy new Core Duo. If they can't, then Intel may be the best game in town for the first time in a decade (assuming they price competitively).
"Go after the problem drivers, rather than ticketing the guy who can hanle calling his wife via voice-dial for 15 seconds to let her know he is on the way home. He is not the threat -"
Much like Anakin Skywalker, this person has taken the first step. 15 seconds, eh? Can't be bothered to make this call at his desk before he leaves, while walking to the car (a few minutes is many times 15 seconds over!), or while in the car, but with the car not turned on yet?
The only situation I could see this happening is if someone absolutely had to answer the phone while in the car. Myself, I ignore the phone and pull over before answering. If I can't pull over, I can call them back. Driving is the most important thing I'm doing when I'm driving (you should repeat that to yourself a few times if you don't understand it).
I was interjecting... "I can appreciate that you like guitar more, but don't ignore the rest of the genre:)"
If you're going to gush about it, it doesn't hurt to mention other games (and especially since Guitar Heroes is just a clone of one of the Bemani games, Guitar Freaks).
His post implied that Guitar Heroes was out of the blue, when it's just a clone of Konami's work. I interjected this extra bit of info:)
I swear, no one on this site knows how to read for content, and is too caught up in "out-doing" everyone else in comment content. Slashdot commenting is not a deathmatch:p
I assure you, I'm not. Believable fantasy worlds are not helped by the physics engine of Half-life 2, at least not in my mind, because part of the acceptance of magic is the realization that the gravitational constant may be different in that world, or that alchemy is alive and well, etc.
I'm just saying that there are a lot of other good things they could take the time to write for the game that would help a lot more, such as that AI I talked about. I've watched guards walking into walls for 20 minutes at a time in Oblivion. I've also seen mounted guards walk their horses straight into each other, then rotated on the spot, and moved around each other in perfect symmetry. That affects my suspension of belief a lot more than the fact that I can walk on cliffs in tricky ways.
Freak out about 386s just shows you're not reading my posts.
"Guitar Hero (the first one) is quite possibly the best and most fun game I've played in quite some time (meaning at least a decade)."
This may be true of you, but some of us were enjoying other rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, Pop'n'Music, Samba de Amigo, etc, for years before this came out. I can appreciate that you like guitar more, but don't ignore the rest of the genre:)
DDR is hardly like ballroom, but it's a heck of a lot of fun.
"No, you play Oblivion because you want to adventure in a cool fantasy world! The more realistic the fantasy world, the more clever and interesting your adventures would be."
Maybe this is true of you, but in my fantasy worlds, magic is cool, mushrooms make you bigger, and flowers give you the ability to shoot fire. Making these worlds more realistic might help a particular genre, but it'd be of limited benefit to the games I play where things like magic, jumping over buildings, etc, apply.
I think the immersion I'm thinking about is different from the immersion you're thinking about. I think the folks who wrote Oblivion would better spend their time by making it so that having more than 2 human characters on screen doesn't grind an Athlon64 with a gig of RAM and a Geforce 6800 to 7-9 fps, or make the NPCs walk into each other before moving to go around. That would help my immersion a lot more than watching me fall off a cliff.
World of Warcraft has unrealistic physics on par with Oblivion. It hasn't seemed to hurt its popularity:)
Slashdot Mirror
For pointing out a key point -- people consider violence masculine, so men are encouraged to enjoy violence. This is the real problem.
If you wanted more women there, either encourage women to violence, or discourage men from violence with films that aren't about stereotypical gender traits.
"I mean, ask yourself, how exactly would YOU make an interesting movie out of Halo, whose "star" is a faceless, anonymous, killing machine with virtually no backstory (and working under the studio requirement that he has to occupy most of the screen time, with a large number of pure mindless action scenes)?"
Why, base the screenplay off the fleshed out novelization of the detailed backstory, and you're good to go.
It's not that games don't have complex backstory or details in the Universe, it's that they give these screenplay projects to turkeys who have no clue.
You have the wrong perspective on the education. CS is applied logic and mathematics. Read this carefully changed copy of your post if you don't understand:
"Because the field is undefined. What is a mathematician? What do they do after they graduate?
I earn my paycheck doing accounting, in all that encompasses. I went to college for a year and half before I realized that the education I was getting wasn't going to prepare me for my chosen profession.
The schools get math majors ready to be theorists ( bad ones at that ). That's it. There is a huge gap between what the schools teach and what businesses need from their accounting personel.
I'm more valuable now than I would have been had I stuck around and graduated."
Now, you can't teach problem solving, but it's hoped after 4 years in school you have some idea of how to be useful. Learning technical trivia is easy; anyone can do it. It doesn't take a genius to change an oil any more than it takes a genius to administrate a small network. However, understanding the deeper concepts (CSMA/CD!) and other principles is very useful if you are a computer scientist.
The difference between a degree and a certificate from a trade school is exactly what you mentioned; people go to a trade school to learn how to do 1 job. People go to University to learn how to solve a superset of problems, which they can apply to any job they want from a particular perspective. I can attack problems of compiler theory, networks, operating systems, programming language theory, etc, because I'm well grounded in the theory behind these concepts, and have experience (both in class and with jobs and projects I've worked on around school).
In 20 years, the tools you use will have changed dozens of times. In 20 years, Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path on a network will likely be just as useful for link-state routing models as it is now. So your final sentence, "I'm more valuable now than I would have been had I stuck around and graduated." is probably wrong, because you didn't understand why the education was useful. Maybe you weren't cut out for it, or maybe you just wanted money now. That's ok. Just don't preach it like it's the gospel truth on Slashdot.
But I didn't read anything that sounded like a gameplay issue caused by the video. By gameplay issue, I mean "was unable to get the powerup" or "boss at end of stage 2 was invincible due to video driver."
:)
The boss at the end of stage 2 may be impossible to see, but that can be fixed without patching the game engine itself. Merely changing the video card will fix it. The OP was referring to problems caused by hardware that made a game unplayable, but those are fixable without patching the games, so I argue that those arent't in the set of bugs to consider. The only ones we should be worried about are the ones that the game programmers are directly responsible for.
Your ATI Rage 128 didn't break because the RO programmers sucked, it broke because ATI sucks. That's why I don't buy ATI hardware
I see what the original replier meant. I was correct for Intel, but I'd forgotten a few details of how AMD changed things with Athlon64. Certainly, HyperTransport's important for filling RAM, but once RAM is full, it's straight to the CPU.
Thanks for the reminder.
My AMD64 is a Socket 754, and my Sempron is Socket 462. It's on a much, much slower bus connection to its RAM. The Sempron has 180ns latency to RAM, while my AMD64 has 60 ns (worst case).
The AMD64 average context switch latency is a few microseconds; 15ns average. Sempron is 10ns best, 70ns average. I can send you a PDF with a few hundred graphs I did with lmbench on several platforms for a reseach project recently, if you don't believe me.
So, if my kernel is doing a context switch HZ times a second, I'm getting way better interactive performance on my AMD64 machine -- which is a socket 754 single-channel memory device. The FSB dominates.
The bus connection between my CPU and the RAM is, indeed, the Hypertransport. Northbridge, CPU, and RAM are all connected by it. Perhaps you missed all the AMD documentation on this, or the entry in Wikipedia:
"Front-Side Bus Replacement
The primary use for HyperTransport is to replace the front-side bus, which is currently different for every machine (or some set of them). For instance, a Pentium cannot be plugged into a PCI bus. In order to expand the system the front-side bus must connect through adaptors for the various standard buses, like AGP or PCI. These are typically included in a controller called the northbridge."
And, yes, I am taking into account caches as well. I do appreciate the healthy skepticism.
Yea, there's lots of fibre, but wired links are supposed to be for high-bandwidth usage. The whole idea behind wireless everywhere is that it's just simpler; no more cell phone or landline phone -- just wireless. Cable can still be delivered via video-on-demand over fibre, but for surfing the web, VOIP, or email, you want wireless.
WiMax has multiple channels, better signal qualities, and TDMA (instead of CSMA) at its core, allowing you to get better network throughput as you reach (and exceed) subscriber maximums for an access point. WiMax is also fairly close to being easy to buy. I just wish governments hadn't commited to using the (broken) 802.11x set of protocols to implement wireless.
Honestly, what impact would random hardware configurations have?
We've got either Direct3D or Direct3D for our graphics API. DirectSound or DirectSound for our audio API. DirectInput or DirectInput for our input API. (I do realize I'm discluding OpenGL and SDL, which are both great tools, but it's to make a point).
So with Direct3D, DirectInput, and DirectSound wrapping different hardware, what's the big deal? I can buy the argument that console games will be more optimized because you can get up close and personal with the hardware, since everyone will have the same damn thing.
No, the differences will be things like games crashing or the computer crashing due to bugs in the DirectX side of the driver, or the kernel-side of the driver.
So what about gameplay? With gameplay bugs, that's logic in the program. If I shoot you and you don't die, that's not because I have an ATI video card instead of an nVidia card, it's because the hit detection algorithm is broken.
Non-fixed platforms mean I have to deal with lower performance (often poorly tuned game design is the major factor here) and maybe crashes, but it doesn't mean I should put up with broken game logic.
Why are MacBook Pros so much faster than Powerbooks?
:/
The MacBook Pro sports a 666Mhz DDR FSB, while the Powerbook sports a 133Mhz FSB. It doesn't matter how fast your processor is if you don't have a fast enough way to power it (much like a V-12 will not do well with a single-barrel carb used on a lawnmower engine).
The Von Neumann bottleneck is the significant limiting factor in all machines, once your working set of data exceeds that of your L1/L2 cache. Suddenly your 1.5 Ghz G4 is 266 Mhz
Faster hypertransport means happier users of AMD machines. My AMD64 beats the pants off my Sempron 2500 because its 800Mhz HT bus allows it to do context switches in less than 1/3rd the time of the Sempron!
Seeing words like "raiseing" in the middle of an otherwise well thought out, referenced piece of writing.
I suppose that's to be expected from, "So good [sic] you'll punch your mom in the face."
1 simple spell check is not too high a price to pay.
the Asus VX2025wm, which is a lot better. For a bit higher price, you get:
* 800:1 contrast.
* 1680x1050 resolution.
* 176 degree viewing angles.
Higher contrast, size, resolution, viewing angles -- precisely what you want in the thing you'll be staring at for the next few years.
Anyone who puts "FP" or any permutation of "first post" in their otherwise useful post should be moderated down, because it's stupid *.
* Except for posts where people put it in to illustrate how stupid it is.
"My bet is that if you had DVDs priced at 1.5$, film copyright infringement would end as we know it, and the amount of dollars spent in DVDs by the average family would grow."
That sounds well and good, but you would have to do careful research and real market analysis of this. What's to stop people from buying these super cheap movies? There are only so many hours in a day, and if they're doing other things, movies can't eat them all up.
That's really Spotlight, which was a refinement of Sherlock.
Google toolbar for your OS in Windows does something similar.
a world where high quality software, in a simple package with smiling people on the cover and no marketting speak, could be delivered in bulk, for free, to your home -- with both a live disc to try at no danger, and a full disc for when you want to run it.
And this software would work well, have free online updates and upgrades, and make it so that you could even show your friends who aren't technically inclined how to use it and gain its benefits? How it enables people like me who work on software to easily contribute to improving the lives of thousands of computer users around the world?
Yea, it's a damn shame that developers are doing marketters' jobs here. Let's all live in a world where the marketters do the developers' jobs by setting out the game-plan on features and design.
"When Linus is forced to sit there and watch for three minutes while Photoshop forks to run some simple helper ("
He will ask the question why the Photoshop programmers chose to use a fork and then exec, instead of a call that creates a new process without duplicating the parent memory space. If the Photoshop programmers did not have this choice, we have to ask what is wrong with POSIX that there is not a call to create a new process with some initial values in its argv/envp from a parent process without duplicating its memory space.
Conceptually, COW fork tricks worked well when CPU and memory didn't have as much of a Neumann bottleneck as they now have. Machines in the 1980s had maybe a 2x or 3x divider on memory to CPU. I recently benchmarked several machines for a thesis where the memory bus was 6x slower than the CPU, assuming peak conditions. The moment you get above cache size, performance falls through the floor; you don't want to dick around handling page faults in that situation, you want it to run as smoothly as possible. Linus is right about this.
Andy went out and said that he thought the Linux approach was wrong, and archaic, and that people should go and wait for GNU.
Linus said that he felt this was wrong, and that being a prof is no excuse for Minix being the mess it was (and Minix was a mess in the late 1980s/early 1990s). He also apologized if he came off as too harsh for his writing about how people should be able to throw away an old design in favour of a new one anyway, etc.
It was very polite compared to some of the non-Andy/Linux replies.
RFPolicy is a solid policy for allowing a vendor to be notified in a timely manner (5 days), let them work with the reporter to get a plan of action together (such as a quick way to notify customers and let them get the fix rolled out) and help the vendor reproduce the bug/verify the fix, before notification of the general populace.
If, at any point, the vendor suddenly decides to play not-nice, the RFPolicy is quite clear -- go ahead and post it to bugtraq or whatever you like. It also states that the vendor should acknowledge the original disclosure. That is, if I found a vulnerability in slashcode, but delayed publication because I was trying to get it fixed in good faith, the Slashcode developers would acknowledge my efforts in their advisory -- even if someone else comes along and posts an advisory after I report it to the team, but before the team has posted an announcement.
Nowhere in the RFPolicy v2.0 does it say anything along the lines of, "Hey, you should silently slip-stream fixes without ever notifying anyone ever " -- which is what this article is about Microsoft doing.
The shit that gets modded up. I swear, we need a "-1 WRONG" tag we can apply to posts. Some kind of clue stick for the mods that don't bother to look up RFPolicy would also be good.
"They may not be games for 6 year olds, but I don't remember anything in Jak II that a 3rd or 4th grader couldn't handle. Nothing that I hadn't seen in Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden or Bionic Commando. Well, except boobs, but they're clothed,"
I'm pretty sure most people don't care about boobs in any way until after puberty. Considering that people are still breastfed as kids anyway, what's the big deal? Boobs are boobs. They're not going to fly planes into buildings, or shoot your mother.
"But Yonah also supports the group of 13 new instructions known as SSE3, handles some SSE2 instructing like Shuffle and Unpack up to 30% faster, and is capable of using its instruction-grouping abilities (known as micro-ops fusion) on some SSE instructions, improving overall throughput."
SSE3 has some very nice hardware thread synchronization instructions. These are important (and AMD has them now). As for the instruction grouping, that sounds rather suspiciously like the double dispatch operations that were added to Opteron:
"Appendix C of Opteron's Optimization Guide specifies to which class each and every instruction belongs. Most 128 bit SSE and SSE2 instructions are implemented as double dispatch instructions. Only those that can not be split into two independent 64 bit operations are handled as Vector Path (Micro Code) instructions. Those SSE2 instructions that operate on only one half of a 128 bit register are implemented as a single (Direct Path) instruction."
Assuming AMD can tune Turion64s to be more power friendly, they'll be able to best Intel's fancy new Core Duo. If they can't, then Intel may be the best game in town for the first time in a decade (assuming they price competitively).
"Go after the problem drivers, rather than ticketing the guy who can hanle calling his wife via voice-dial for 15 seconds to let her know he is on the way home. He is not the threat -"
Much like Anakin Skywalker, this person has taken the first step. 15 seconds, eh? Can't be bothered to make this call at his desk before he leaves, while walking to the car (a few minutes is many times 15 seconds over!), or while in the car, but with the car not turned on yet?
The only situation I could see this happening is if someone absolutely had to answer the phone while in the car. Myself, I ignore the phone and pull over before answering. If I can't pull over, I can call them back. Driving is the most important thing I'm doing when I'm driving (you should repeat that to yourself a few times if you don't understand it).
I was interjecting... :)"
:)
:p
"I can appreciate that you like guitar more, but don't ignore the rest of the genre
If you're going to gush about it, it doesn't hurt to mention other games (and especially since Guitar Heroes is just a clone of one of the Bemani games, Guitar Freaks).
His post implied that Guitar Heroes was out of the blue, when it's just a clone of Konami's work. I interjected this extra bit of info
I swear, no one on this site knows how to read for content, and is too caught up in "out-doing" everyone else in comment content. Slashdot commenting is not a deathmatch
I assure you, I'm not. Believable fantasy worlds are not helped by the physics engine of Half-life 2, at least not in my mind, because part of the acceptance of magic is the realization that the gravitational constant may be different in that world, or that alchemy is alive and well, etc.
I'm just saying that there are a lot of other good things they could take the time to write for the game that would help a lot more, such as that AI I talked about. I've watched guards walking into walls for 20 minutes at a time in Oblivion. I've also seen mounted guards walk their horses straight into each other, then rotated on the spot, and moved around each other in perfect symmetry. That affects my suspension of belief a lot more than the fact that I can walk on cliffs in tricky ways.
Freak out about 386s just shows you're not reading my posts.
"Guitar Hero (the first one) is quite possibly the best and most fun game I've played in quite some time (meaning at least a decade)."
:)
This may be true of you, but some of us were enjoying other rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, Pop'n'Music, Samba de Amigo, etc, for years before this came out. I can appreciate that you like guitar more, but don't ignore the rest of the genre
DDR is hardly like ballroom, but it's a heck of a lot of fun.
"No, you play Oblivion because you want to adventure in a cool fantasy world! The more realistic the fantasy world, the more clever and interesting your adventures would be."
:)
Maybe this is true of you, but in my fantasy worlds, magic is cool, mushrooms make you bigger, and flowers give you the ability to shoot fire. Making these worlds more realistic might help a particular genre, but it'd be of limited benefit to the games I play where things like magic, jumping over buildings, etc, apply.
I think the immersion I'm thinking about is different from the immersion you're thinking about. I think the folks who wrote Oblivion would better spend their time by making it so that having more than 2 human characters on screen doesn't grind an Athlon64 with a gig of RAM and a Geforce 6800 to 7-9 fps, or make the NPCs walk into each other before moving to go around. That would help my immersion a lot more than watching me fall off a cliff.
World of Warcraft has unrealistic physics on par with Oblivion. It hasn't seemed to hurt its popularity