From a guy who makes his money not from inventing new ideas but from selling and reselling the ideas that he paid someone else to think up for him (Despite the fact that many ideas are now becoming free, see FOSS).
So this guy wants physical property to be cheap/free, but intellectual property to be more controlled and more expensive.
One of the Gamespy previews I read mentioned that swimming is possible in this game.
In fact the game includes a pseudo-RPG type system for determining your fitness and abilities.
In the first game, running around eventually increased your stamina, so you could run for longer without becoming tired.
In the new game, you eat food, and can go to a gym to pump iron to become stronger. This will in turn help you fight and run and ride your bicycle (apparently you can ride a BMX around).
Whether this level of sims-style personal micromanagement is a good thing for GTA remains to be seen.
You're joking, right? I mean, the whole B&W interface was entirely mouse driven, right down to using mouse gestures for spells... what are they going to do now? Left right left right a b a b start select?
I have the A920, a very similar Symbian OS 3G phone from Motorola. It's excellent in terms of design and functionality (a bit low on battery life with the 266MHz CPU in it, but that has been fixed).
For someone like myself who loves and uses gadgets but can't justfy carrying a seperate PDA, MP3 player, cell phone, camera... the smartphone is the only serious choice. Having one that runs linux instead of Symbian can only be an advantage.
That just wouldn't work, although it would be nice to compare that way, it would have biases towards certain processors for certain benchmarks.
A great deal of the processing power of a CPU nowadays comes from the strength of the memory controller. AMD's chief advantage is the integrated memory controller on the CPU. Intels main advantage is the speed of the memory controllers they use (allowing faster memory to be used than AMD at present).
So therefore, the performance, and selling points of these CPUs is based to some extent on the memory they can handle. What the benchmarkers do is use what they consider to be typical memory for the platforms they are testing with, to give a closer to real world performance benchmark.
Most importantly, however, due to the FSB speeds, it's simply not possible to test each CPU with the same speed memory in some cases. AMD can't do 533MHz, and Intel would have to underclock to do 400MHz. So there's just no choice.
A lot of people complain about B&W because of some of the gameplay - micromanaging the stupid creature and babysitting villagers, it all got a bit awful. But technically, in terms of graphics, sound, and architecture the game worked brilliantly.
People probably complain about it more because it had so much potential that it didn't live up to - maybe that's true, but if they listen to the players and make the second game more of what people want out of this novel game concept, more power to them!
Heaven knows, the PC platform is the gaming platform that attracts the most innovation, and we need every innovative game producer we can get. At least they're not making another "groundbreaking new concept" FPS.
Keep it civil! There's nothing to be gained by accusing people of being an MCSE.
Although you make a salient point - use of IE at all is a risk in any IT organisation.
To an extent locking down a workstation is effective when using IE - most (not all) spyware is derived from popups and click-here's that launch as a result of the very flawed design of MSIE. Locking down the WINNT or Windows folder will prevent these spyware articles from installing correctly. This does offer a good degree of protection from Bonzi Buddy.
Of course, web browsing admins are quite often the cause of many disasters in I/T. I remember a helldesk employee of ours once went to a russian website and had our whole corporate link running a DOS attack on someone we didn't even know within hours.
It's not the touch screen crashing that is the problem. It's what happens underneath that is the big concern.
These systems have been made so complex and closed source that there is no audit trail.
I get these images of a huge casino with electronic slot machines - whoever put them in did so with a view to making profit out of them. If you're the end user, you have no idea what they're doing under that screen - but you can be well assured you can't take them at face value. So if casino machines can statistically determine when or if they should pay out depending on the bank balance of the casino, what the heck are these voting machines doing?
In Australia we mark numbers on sheets of watermarked paper.
Actually if you looked at the benchmarks you would find that the cheaper Semprons outperformed the more expensive Celerons, and in some cases you can see the Semprons outperforming the incredibly expensive Pentium 4 CPU.
This doesn't mean that AMD CPUs are necessarily better than Intels, I'm no rabid fanboy here. But what it does mean is that you must shop around! Look at the performance, compare it to other CPUs of the same price, before you put down your hard earned cash.
Unfortunately, the Sempron is neither an AthlonXP or an Athlon 64.
The Sempron budget CPU's are derived from both Athlon XP and Athlon64 cores. However, the Sempron 2800+ is different from an Athlon XP2800+ and you would anticpate the performance would be slower due to reduced cache and other features of the Sempron.
Likewise, the "Athlon" name on it's own is an all-encompassing name for CPU's that covers several cores, much like the "Pentium" name covering the PII, PIII and P4 CPUs. The Athlon name currently covers the Athlon Thunderbird, the Athlon XP, the Athlon 64 and the Athlon FX, to name a few.
So, Sempron = Budget, Athlon = Performance. That's all that you can safely infer from the names.
the A64s in 32-bit mode are similar in architecture to the Athlon XPs
Not really. If you switch an Athlon64 into 32bit native mode, it still retains the bigger registers, the integrated memory controller, reworked ALU/FPUs... the list goes on. Architecturally, they are very, very different animals.
The Athlon 64 chip has a lot of improvements over the old XP core. If you look at the benchmarks in the article, you'll see where the benefits are.
Specifically, the integrated memory controller on the A64/Sempron 3100+ greatly improves throughput and latency.
I'm running an Athlon 64 3000+ at home, and the performance is significantly greater than a 3000+ Athlon XP. I'm counting the days until MS fixes DirectX on WinXP/64 so I can fully use all the capabilities of my CPU.
You wouldn't want to run Windows on PPC architecture when you've got two very cheap, more powerful architectures available, x86 and AMD64.
OSX won't ever appear outside of PPC for a lot of reasons. Firstly, the cash that Apple gets from hardware sales.
Secondly, By far the biggest problem with x86 based PC's is also it's greatest strength. The sheer customisability - an almost infinite combination of hardware that can be tailored to any use. OSX isn't ready for that. I'm not sure if it could even handle adapting to so many different kinds of hardware. Certainly, Apple has no interest in spending money to develop support for all that hardware. Apple isn't Microsoft.
If you look at it in another way, the Apple Mac is just a console. It's an XBox in a different package. The hardware is controlled and proprietary. The software is controlled and proprietary. You void your warranty if you open the box. You can get some upgrades, but only ones that Apple approves. The only difference is that you can use it to photoshop instead of just playing games.
I always find myself thinking about the services and goods that are traded around the place, and where it fits into society in terms of real value or simple exploitation (in the marxist sense of getting more out of something than you put in, or possibly deserve).
For instance, you can hire some support staff to install Linux for you. A service model. Linux is free, not a tangible good, simply a set of free ideas.
Or, you pay Microsoft and you get a "license" to use Windows - which is not an operating system but a good, as tangible as a pair of shoes. (So they would have you believe).
The same example applies better to music.
You have two ways to look at it. The American way, which is that music is property and patent, or at least copyright. You pay a company $ for a license to use music on a single playback device (CD player).
You have the service model, which is that you would only pay for an opportunity to see an event where a very talented group of musicians play music for you. If you like the music you can get devices to play it back for you - easily, in the case of an MP3 player, or more difficult, buying your own guitar.
So the question is, which gives more value to society?
I firmly believe that musicians will continue to play if music was not a commodity. Although, the musicians playing might be different to the ones we have today - brittney, metallica - and less famous, but revered more for their raw talent. So perhaps the music industry does not advance humanity, even if musicians do.
Nice and pedantic, but if you read my first post, you would notice I wrote that "people want information to be free", which is why this is all going on.
People want information to be free - which is why P2P music sharing hasn't died yet.
Of course the RIAA have done exceedingly well turning everyone on the street into a criminal, I believe there is now a jail term for music traders? Feel free to correct me on that one if I'm wrong.
The USA isn't in a position yet where they can imprison people in SK. Not yet.
No, I work for CSC as internal staff, I get sick leave, annual leave, public holidays, overtime, all the good stuff that contractors don't (although without the huge cash that contractors do get).
I probably do have the skill and experience to be an independant contractor, but I'm not interested in the risks and uncertainty involved.
I'm just saying, I've seen the ins and outs of the industry, and it's not easy going it on your own. Especially not for a kid straight out of college.
I have an epson printer and I use Calidad brand refills (not sure if these are available outside Australia). They carry light magenta and light cyan, the ink is of comparable quality to epsons, and a quarter of the cost.
I suppose that makes Calidad a first rate ink jerk?
It's a well known fact that printer companies sell printers at near-loss in order to sell high volumes of ink (which is artificially priced more than gold by weight, how does that work?). Printer companies also resort to new tricks, like electronically chipping cartridges so they can't be refilled, and half-filling cartridges in new printers (so the lucky punters have to buy new ink straight away!).
I don't see the "risk" factor being very high. Certainly no higher than the risk of giving my money to companies with such questionable business practices as the ones listed above.
But are we about to be told that SS2 (and SS in fact) will have a new sequel that will be advanced and revolutionary and groundbreaking, but will capture all of the excellent features of the first two games?
And will we then be told that it will be released exclusively for XBox/PS2?
And will we then be told it will make best use of two analog sticks?
And will we then be told it will have a unified ammo system and generic instead of localised damage systems?
Please, please, please don't let them do to System Shock what they did to Deus Ex.
A 20 year old with no experience wants to become an independant IT contractor 3 years after the biggest dive in the IT market in history?
I hope you like eating cardboard! I hate to sound negative but your enthusiasm is almost comical.
But in an effort to be more constructive, I would have to say that in your current position it is simply not a realastic objective to be independantly wealthy with your current level of expertise.
Doing contract work is certainly an option, many of my first jobs were contract and I gained valuable experience, however, in order to start working I had to work for a few people for nothing just for work experience to get paid attention to in interviews. Contract work for a bigger company is a good idea because it will not only give you the experience you need to be taken seriously, but you will also get a better feel for what both the contract market and the IT market is really like. And trust me, I have a university education and while the knowledge is useful in later life, university education will not prepare you for the mercenary world of IT human resources.
Actually, given that the core rules are "open" through the SRD, there really hasn't been a need to own any of the books to play D&D since 3E came out.
Having said that, I own the books because the quality of the hardcover manuals is superior to any other RPG manual I have ever seen. They're worth owning because the authors, artists, editors and designers put so much work into every book.
That's a fine way to prevent piracy - producing a product that you know anyone can just copy, but making the product so high in quality that only the original will do. I wonder if the MPAA/RIAA would take a leaf from that book.
Compared to what, exactly? Via? I have had no end of problems with every Via chipset I've handled. Sometimes a Via chipset will outperform an nVidia one, although nVidia usually fixes that as quickly as they can.
Are there any other chipset manufacturers for AMD that are even worth considering?
A couple of things you need to understand about the technology before you immediately jump out and declare it to be "slow".
Firstly, you need to open several ports on your firewall to ensure you have a "highid", which is, for our purposes here, a measure of your connectivity to the network and therefore your usefulness as an uploader.
Secondly, you must understand that eMule uses a "credit" system. Your place on other people's queue is not simply determined on a first come first served basis. You continually jostle with other people in queues for the upload/download position. Some of the key helpers for getting a good spot in the queue: Good credit rating. If you upload a lot of stuff to the network, you will have good credit and you will quickly reach the front of the queue. Your connection speed, especially uploads, will help you. Whether you are uploading to the person you are downloading from will help. Whether you have a high-id or not (high-id's are very important!).
eDonkey/mule is a long term download program, and should not be confused with bittorrent or DCC. Once you've been online for a while with eDonkey, you will find that you achieve downloads more quickly, and you will have a better experience.
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From a guy who makes his money not from inventing new ideas but from selling and reselling the ideas that he paid someone else to think up for him (Despite the fact that many ideas are now becoming free, see FOSS).
So this guy wants physical property to be cheap/free, but intellectual property to be more controlled and more expensive.
It's ludicrous.
One of the Gamespy previews I read mentioned that swimming is possible in this game.
In fact the game includes a pseudo-RPG type system for determining your fitness and abilities.
In the first game, running around eventually increased your stamina, so you could run for longer without becoming tired.
In the new game, you eat food, and can go to a gym to pump iron to become stronger. This will in turn help you fight and run and ride your bicycle (apparently you can ride a BMX around).
Whether this level of sims-style personal micromanagement is a good thing for GTA remains to be seen.
You're joking, right? I mean, the whole B&W interface was entirely mouse driven, right down to using mouse gestures for spells... what are they going to do now? Left right left right a b a b start select?
I have the A920, a very similar Symbian OS 3G phone from Motorola. It's excellent in terms of design and functionality (a bit low on battery life with the 266MHz CPU in it, but that has been fixed).
For someone like myself who loves and uses gadgets but can't justfy carrying a seperate PDA, MP3 player, cell phone, camera... the smartphone is the only serious choice. Having one that runs linux instead of Symbian can only be an advantage.
That just wouldn't work, although it would be nice to compare that way, it would have biases towards certain processors for certain benchmarks.
A great deal of the processing power of a CPU nowadays comes from the strength of the memory controller. AMD's chief advantage is the integrated memory controller on the CPU. Intels main advantage is the speed of the memory controllers they use (allowing faster memory to be used than AMD at present).
So therefore, the performance, and selling points of these CPUs is based to some extent on the memory they can handle. What the benchmarkers do is use what they consider to be typical memory for the platforms they are testing with, to give a closer to real world performance benchmark.
Most importantly, however, due to the FSB speeds, it's simply not possible to test each CPU with the same speed memory in some cases. AMD can't do 533MHz, and Intel would have to underclock to do 400MHz. So there's just no choice.
I know there's a new B&W title in the works.
A lot of people complain about B&W because of some of the gameplay - micromanaging the stupid creature and babysitting villagers, it all got a bit awful. But technically, in terms of graphics, sound, and architecture the game worked brilliantly.
People probably complain about it more because it had so much potential that it didn't live up to - maybe that's true, but if they listen to the players and make the second game more of what people want out of this novel game concept, more power to them!
Heaven knows, the PC platform is the gaming platform that attracts the most innovation, and we need every innovative game producer we can get. At least they're not making another "groundbreaking new concept" FPS.
Keep it civil! There's nothing to be gained by accusing people of being an MCSE.
Although you make a salient point - use of IE at all is a risk in any IT organisation.
To an extent locking down a workstation is effective when using IE - most (not all) spyware is derived from popups and click-here's that launch as a result of the very flawed design of MSIE. Locking down the WINNT or Windows folder will prevent these spyware articles from installing correctly. This does offer a good degree of protection from Bonzi Buddy.
Of course, web browsing admins are quite often the cause of many disasters in I/T. I remember a helldesk employee of ours once went to a russian website and had our whole corporate link running a DOS attack on someone we didn't even know within hours.
It's not the touch screen crashing that is the problem. It's what happens underneath that is the big concern.
These systems have been made so complex and closed source that there is no audit trail.
I get these images of a huge casino with electronic slot machines - whoever put them in did so with a view to making profit out of them. If you're the end user, you have no idea what they're doing under that screen - but you can be well assured you can't take them at face value. So if casino machines can statistically determine when or if they should pay out depending on the bank balance of the casino, what the heck are these voting machines doing?
In Australia we mark numbers on sheets of watermarked paper.
Actually if you looked at the benchmarks you would find that the cheaper Semprons outperformed the more expensive Celerons, and in some cases you can see the Semprons outperforming the incredibly expensive Pentium 4 CPU.
This doesn't mean that AMD CPUs are necessarily better than Intels, I'm no rabid fanboy here. But what it does mean is that you must shop around! Look at the performance, compare it to other CPUs of the same price, before you put down your hard earned cash.
Unfortunately, the Sempron is neither an AthlonXP or an Athlon 64.
The Sempron budget CPU's are derived from both Athlon XP and Athlon64 cores. However, the Sempron 2800+ is different from an Athlon XP2800+ and you would anticpate the performance would be slower due to reduced cache and other features of the Sempron.
Likewise, the "Athlon" name on it's own is an all-encompassing name for CPU's that covers several cores, much like the "Pentium" name covering the PII, PIII and P4 CPUs. The Athlon name currently covers the Athlon Thunderbird, the Athlon XP, the Athlon 64 and the Athlon FX, to name a few.
So, Sempron = Budget, Athlon = Performance. That's all that you can safely infer from the names.
the A64s in 32-bit mode are similar in architecture to the Athlon XPs
Not really. If you switch an Athlon64 into 32bit native mode, it still retains the bigger registers, the integrated memory controller, reworked ALU/FPUs... the list goes on. Architecturally, they are very, very different animals.
The Athlon 64 chip has a lot of improvements over the old XP core. If you look at the benchmarks in the article, you'll see where the benefits are.
Specifically, the integrated memory controller on the A64/Sempron 3100+ greatly improves throughput and latency.
I'm running an Athlon 64 3000+ at home, and the performance is significantly greater than a 3000+ Athlon XP. I'm counting the days until MS fixes DirectX on WinXP/64 so I can fully use all the capabilities of my CPU.
You wouldn't want to run Windows on PPC architecture when you've got two very cheap, more powerful architectures available, x86 and AMD64.
OSX won't ever appear outside of PPC for a lot of reasons. Firstly, the cash that Apple gets from hardware sales.
Secondly, By far the biggest problem with x86 based PC's is also it's greatest strength. The sheer customisability - an almost infinite combination of hardware that can be tailored to any use. OSX isn't ready for that. I'm not sure if it could even handle adapting to so many different kinds of hardware. Certainly, Apple has no interest in spending money to develop support for all that hardware. Apple isn't Microsoft.
If you look at it in another way, the Apple Mac is just a console. It's an XBox in a different package. The hardware is controlled and proprietary. The software is controlled and proprietary. You void your warranty if you open the box. You can get some upgrades, but only ones that Apple approves. The only difference is that you can use it to photoshop instead of just playing games.
It's been done before: Galactic Civilizations
Let me rephrase - people want information to have no price? It's symantics really. Free can mean no price, in that sand I suppose is also free.
I always find myself thinking about the services and goods that are traded around the place, and where it fits into society in terms of real value or simple exploitation (in the marxist sense of getting more out of something than you put in, or possibly deserve).
For instance, you can hire some support staff to install Linux for you. A service model. Linux is free, not a tangible good, simply a set of free ideas.
Or, you pay Microsoft and you get a "license" to use Windows - which is not an operating system but a good, as tangible as a pair of shoes. (So they would have you believe).
The same example applies better to music.
You have two ways to look at it. The American way, which is that music is property and patent, or at least copyright. You pay a company $ for a license to use music on a single playback device (CD player).
You have the service model, which is that you would only pay for an opportunity to see an event where a very talented group of musicians play music for you. If you like the music you can get devices to play it back for you - easily, in the case of an MP3 player, or more difficult, buying your own guitar.
So the question is, which gives more value to society?
I firmly believe that musicians will continue to play if music was not a commodity. Although, the musicians playing might be different to the ones we have today - brittney, metallica - and less famous, but revered more for their raw talent. So perhaps the music industry does not advance humanity, even if musicians do.
Nice and pedantic, but if you read my first post, you would notice I wrote that "people want information to be free", which is why this is all going on.
I see it as natural progression.
People want information to be free - which is why P2P music sharing hasn't died yet.
Of course the RIAA have done exceedingly well turning everyone on the street into a criminal, I believe there is now a jail term for music traders? Feel free to correct me on that one if I'm wrong.
The USA isn't in a position yet where they can imprison people in SK. Not yet.
No, I work for CSC as internal staff, I get sick leave, annual leave, public holidays, overtime, all the good stuff that contractors don't (although without the huge cash that contractors do get).
I probably do have the skill and experience to be an independant contractor, but I'm not interested in the risks and uncertainty involved.
I'm just saying, I've seen the ins and outs of the industry, and it's not easy going it on your own. Especially not for a kid straight out of college.
I have an epson printer and I use Calidad brand refills (not sure if these are available outside Australia). They carry light magenta and light cyan, the ink is of comparable quality to epsons, and a quarter of the cost.
I suppose that makes Calidad a first rate ink jerk?
It's a well known fact that printer companies sell printers at near-loss in order to sell high volumes of ink (which is artificially priced more than gold by weight, how does that work?). Printer companies also resort to new tricks, like electronically chipping cartridges so they can't be refilled, and half-filling cartridges in new printers (so the lucky punters have to buy new ink straight away!).
I don't see the "risk" factor being very high. Certainly no higher than the risk of giving my money to companies with such questionable business practices as the ones listed above.
But are we about to be told that SS2 (and SS in fact) will have a new sequel that will be advanced and revolutionary and groundbreaking, but will capture all of the excellent features of the first two games?
And will we then be told that it will be released exclusively for XBox/PS2?
And will we then be told it will make best use of two analog sticks?
And will we then be told it will have a unified ammo system and generic instead of localised damage systems?
Please, please, please don't let them do to System Shock what they did to Deus Ex.
Don't do it.
A 20 year old with no experience wants to become an independant IT contractor 3 years after the biggest dive in the IT market in history?
I hope you like eating cardboard! I hate to sound negative but your enthusiasm is almost comical.
But in an effort to be more constructive, I would have to say that in your current position it is simply not a realastic objective to be independantly wealthy with your current level of expertise.
Doing contract work is certainly an option, many of my first jobs were contract and I gained valuable experience, however, in order to start working I had to work for a few people for nothing just for work experience to get paid attention to in interviews. Contract work for a bigger company is a good idea because it will not only give you the experience you need to be taken seriously, but you will also get a better feel for what both the contract market and the IT market is really like. And trust me, I have a university education and while the knowledge is useful in later life, university education will not prepare you for the mercenary world of IT human resources.
Actually, given that the core rules are "open" through the SRD, there really hasn't been a need to own any of the books to play D&D since 3E came out.
Having said that, I own the books because the quality of the hardcover manuals is superior to any other RPG manual I have ever seen. They're worth owning because the authors, artists, editors and designers put so much work into every book.
That's a fine way to prevent piracy - producing a product that you know anyone can just copy, but making the product so high in quality that only the original will do. I wonder if the MPAA/RIAA would take a leaf from that book.
Compared to what, exactly? Via? I have had no end of problems with every Via chipset I've handled. Sometimes a Via chipset will outperform an nVidia one, although nVidia usually fixes that as quickly as they can.
Are there any other chipset manufacturers for AMD that are even worth considering?
A couple of things you need to understand about the technology before you immediately jump out and declare it to be "slow".
Firstly, you need to open several ports on your firewall to ensure you have a "highid", which is, for our purposes here, a measure of your connectivity to the network and therefore your usefulness as an uploader.
Secondly, you must understand that eMule uses a "credit" system. Your place on other people's queue is not simply determined on a first come first served basis. You continually jostle with other people in queues for the upload/download position. Some of the key helpers for getting a good spot in the queue: Good credit rating. If you upload a lot of stuff to the network, you will have good credit and you will quickly reach the front of the queue. Your connection speed, especially uploads, will help you. Whether you are uploading to the person you are downloading from will help. Whether you have a high-id or not (high-id's are very important!).
eDonkey/mule is a long term download program, and should not be confused with bittorrent or DCC. Once you've been online for a while with eDonkey, you will find that you achieve downloads more quickly, and you will have a better experience.