I might need to dust off my textbook from "Parallel and Distributed Computing", but I'm pretty sure that getting double the performance from two cards is about as likely as getting double the performance from two processors. It's just not likely unless the graphics routines can split up jobs perfectly and not suffer from any overhead for communication. I imagine there will be a noticeable performance increase from 2 cards working in parallel since graphics algorithms do have a tendency to be very parallelizable, but claiming double performance in naive at best and dishonest at worst.
"Airplanes" were the first thing that came to mind for me. Are we going to go after United and American Airlines because terrorists hijacked their airplanes for illegal purposes?
"Why not just have The Master and the Daleks in every episode?"
My favorite season was the season where the Master was in every story, but that was Delgado. If Eric Roberts or the recently-departed Anthoiny Ainley were in every episode, I would tune out rather quickly.
Why not just start pushing a Sun Linux distro instead? I heard that was in the works, but I haven't heard anything about it in quite some time. I would use Sun Linux long before using x86 Solaris w/Linux compatibility.
That's the only time I ever did see a blue screen when I had a 2000 box. I went to post-98 but then went back because I just got tired of patching things on my home machine. I do plenty of that at work. I keep thinking I might go back to 2000 now that automatic update has been out for a while, but my wife insists I keep 98 on "her" machine. For what she does on it, we don't see blue screens too often (twice last year and once so far this year).
I dusted Redneck Rampage off the other day. I forgot how fun it was. I can even play at full resolution now. Lester T Hobbes was the funniest boss character I've ever seen in a game. I couldn't beat him the first time around becasue I was too busy laughing at his "I am the law, Lester T Hobbes!" and "Don't shoot at me while I'm loading my guns!" Now if I can only find my cuss pack... "F#$% you and the horse you rode in on!"
I'm also still very happy playing my favorite FPS, Rise of the Triad. Non-FPS games that I think have aged well include Jet Moto, Twisted Metal II, Space Quest IV and V, Ms.PacMan, TRON, Galaga, and Buster Bros.
I for one welcome our new 2D overlords. I hope this game does well enough to convince other development houses to dust off their 2D gaming knowledge and bring back this wonderful gaming genre.
I deal with Dell for our machines at work. As far as business accounts are concerned, Dell is the best tech support we've ever had. On several occasions I have been able to call them and tell them part X is dead and they would send me another part X and a return shipping slip for the broken part X with no questions asked (usually X is either a floppy drive or a CD-ROM drive, but once it was a motherboard). However, I do agree with the parent that Dell is terrible for home user tech support.
Development houses, video game distributors, and stores that sell video games (not the salesmen so much as the upper management) all love snotty gamers as long as they have money.
That sounds like typical AI issues in football games where the developer is not smart enough to program a good AI (especially for linemen it seems) so the linemen "cheat" to get statistical results similar to that of a real football game.
I have always wanted to find a football game where the difficulty setting makes the computer AI smarter rather than making the computer players more talented or more of a "cheater" (ex. playing Amateur difficulty puts you against a Jerry Glanville or a Dennis Ericson while Pro difficulty puts you against a Tom Landry or a Bill Walsh), but I have yet to see anything even close so until then we can expect to see more of the AI issues you mention.
I never played through Yoshi's Island but I did play it. My cousin bought it back when it first came out and we played it then. IMHO it is a sub-par 2D platform game. It was better than I expected, but it was no Super Mario World, Sonic 2, Death Valley Rally, etc.
I've looked at the GBA, but I don't own one. It does look like there are some nice 2D platformers on it, but it just doesn't interest me like it would have five or six years ago when I was actively searching for 2D platform games.
I was a huge fan of the 2-D platform games. While I do think that there were planty of bad 2-D platformers, but I really think that they had a much larger percentage of good games than most genres. When the 3-D platform games came out, it's like all game companies just abandoned the 2-D platform. The gaming companies saw 3-D platforms as an upgrade instead of seeing 3-D platforms for what they are, a different gaming style. Soon Mario, Zelda, and Sonic all left the 2-D arena (except for a couple of subpar 2-D games like Yoshi's Island and some Sonic compilations of older games). Then everyone else followed. 3-D platform games should never have been seen as a REPLACEMENT for 2-D platform games, and that makes me resent most 2-D to 3-D conversions somewhat (ESPECIALLY the 3-D bastardization of Bomberman on N64). That doesn't mean that there aren't 3-D platform games that I like (ex. Sonic Adventure series). It just means that I've got this unintentional bias towards the 3-D platform games that I can't always seem to get past.
Ok, I don't really care much for Ted Turner or his comments here but it would be nice to see arguments that are based on Ted Turner today instead of Turner five to ten years ago. Here are some things you might have missed happening:
FoxNews had built up a large viewing audience before 9-11. FoxNews was beginning to edge out CNN in some timeslots back in 2000 around the Presidential elections. They weren't as popular as they are today but FoxNews had already "made it" long before 9-11.
In most US states, it is illegal for stores to charge extra fees for using credit cards. So over here, all buyers are subsidizing credit card fees (It's not like a business is going to eat those costs.). So in most of the US it makes little sense to not use credit cards IMHO (especially with the buying protections you get from them and the rewards programs a lot of them offer).
That's not a very good analogy. Bands go on tour in many cities. NFL teams only have one home town. It's a lot easier for a band to back out of a concert city than it is for an NFL team to move cities. Also, even if the NFL team moves cities the blackout rules still apply.
A more accurate analogy is that a band can't sell a CD (analogous to watching an NFL game at home) until they get X amount of concert sales (analogous to going to the stadium to watch an NFL game), which is pretty much the case with new bands (at least those bands that aren't studio manufactured).
I personally don't think the blackout rules make a difference one way or the other in most cases. If nobody is going to the stadium to watch a bad team, odds are that nobody is going to watch them on TV. Also, it's not like you can't see your team at all. You just can't watch home games.
The only place where I think blackout rules really matter are for teams that are traditionally bad but are having a good season. In this scenario, I'm a fan so I don't like blackout rules but I certainly understand them. I was a bit peeved in 1998 when the Falcons were having a good season and I couldn't watch a little under half of their games because they couldn't sell out the stadium to save their lives, but I did watch all of the away games that season and even went to the stadium once (on what ended up being one of their few sold out games that season D'OH) so I guess the blackout was effective there.
The article makes it look like the NFL is concerned mostly with viewers overriding blackout rules. For those who don't know, if a broadcast station is within X miles of a stadium, a game is being played in that stadium that day, and the game is not sold out (I think that 85% of capacity is concidered sold out) then that broacast affiliate cannot air the game. This is called a blackout and the idea is that people who really want to see the game will need to go to the stadium to see it. Only after the stadium is full, can viewers watch it on TV.
From Dead Milkmen song: Annette: Hey Frankie. Frankie: Yeah Annette? Annette: Aren't you going to give me your class ring? Frankie: I'm afraid I can't do that Annette. Annette: Why not? Frankie: Because I don't have any arms!
They could even have a level where you go surfing with Robert Duvall.
"The NFL, meanwhile, is concerned that a user could send a copy of a game to someone in another time zone, where the game is blacked out."
What do time zones have to do with blackout rules? Blackout applies to X distance from the stadium (or is it city, I can't remember). In fact, if NFL wants to keep people from overriding blackout rules, perhaps they should be as stern with DirecTV as they are with TIVO. I have known a couple of bar owners in the NE GA who used to claim the dish was in SC in order to show Falcons games at their bars.
I'm not a big fan of Madden, especially without Pat Summerall. Their big formula was for Summerall to say something stupid and Madden to correct him and sound smart in the process. Now that it's Madden and Michaels, the opposite is happening more often than not.
The only thing that really bothered me with Miller was that he would butt into conversation to put a joke in. You can joke around in the booth all you want, but if somebody is actually talking about the game why don't you let them finish that first.
I've talked with a few people in IT around here about music before (varying positions, but mostly programming) and it seems we all agree on liking the following bands:
1. Devo 2. Dead Milkmen (have yet to meet an IT guy who doesn't like Stuart)
After that, there's not much agreement, but I am a bit surprised that these are the two bands we almost unanimously agreed on liking.
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I might need to dust off my textbook from "Parallel and Distributed Computing", but I'm pretty sure that getting double the performance from two cards is about as likely as getting double the performance from two processors. It's just not likely unless the graphics routines can split up jobs perfectly and not suffer from any overhead for communication. I imagine there will be a noticeable performance increase from 2 cards working in parallel since graphics algorithms do have a tendency to be very parallelizable, but claiming double performance in naive at best and dishonest at worst.
"Airplanes" were the first thing that came to mind for me. Are we going to go after United and American Airlines because terrorists hijacked their airplanes for illegal purposes?
"Why not just have The Master and the Daleks in every episode?" My favorite season was the season where the Master was in every story, but that was Delgado. If Eric Roberts or the recently-departed Anthoiny Ainley were in every episode, I would tune out rather quickly.
Why not just start pushing a Sun Linux distro instead? I heard that was in the works, but I haven't heard anything about it in quite some time. I would use Sun Linux long before using x86 Solaris w/Linux compatibility.
"Update drivers."
That's the only time I ever did see a blue screen when I had a 2000 box. I went to post-98 but then went back because I just got tired of patching things on my home machine. I do plenty of that at work. I keep thinking I might go back to 2000 now that automatic update has been out for a while, but my wife insists I keep 98 on "her" machine. For what she does on it, we don't see blue screens too often (twice last year and once so far this year).
I dusted Redneck Rampage off the other day. I forgot how fun it was. I can even play at full resolution now. Lester T Hobbes was the funniest boss character I've ever seen in a game. I couldn't beat him the first time around becasue I was too busy laughing at his "I am the law, Lester T Hobbes!" and "Don't shoot at me while I'm loading my guns!" Now if I can only find my cuss pack... "F#$% you and the horse you rode in on!"
I'm also still very happy playing my favorite FPS, Rise of the Triad. Non-FPS games that I think have aged well include Jet Moto, Twisted Metal II, Space Quest IV and V, Ms.PacMan, TRON, Galaga, and Buster Bros.
I for one welcome our new 2D overlords. I hope this game does well enough to convince other development houses to dust off their 2D gaming knowledge and bring back this wonderful gaming genre.
Not Alienware. That's just a front. iD is really consiping with Aliens! That's why Doom3 and Alien Vs Predator are coming out so close to each other.
I deal with Dell for our machines at work. As far as business accounts are concerned, Dell is the best tech support we've ever had. On several occasions I have been able to call them and tell them part X is dead and they would send me another part X and a return shipping slip for the broken part X with no questions asked (usually X is either a floppy drive or a CD-ROM drive, but once it was a motherboard). However, I do agree with the parent that Dell is terrible for home user tech support.
Development houses, video game distributors, and stores that sell video games (not the salesmen so much as the upper management) all love snotty gamers as long as they have money.
That sounds like typical AI issues in football games where the developer is not smart enough to program a good AI (especially for linemen it seems) so the linemen "cheat" to get statistical results similar to that of a real football game.
I have always wanted to find a football game where the difficulty setting makes the computer AI smarter rather than making the computer players more talented or more of a "cheater" (ex. playing Amateur difficulty puts you against a Jerry Glanville or a Dennis Ericson while Pro difficulty puts you against a Tom Landry or a Bill Walsh), but I have yet to see anything even close so until then we can expect to see more of the AI issues you mention.
I never played through Yoshi's Island but I did play it. My cousin bought it back when it first came out and we played it then. IMHO it is a sub-par 2D platform game. It was better than I expected, but it was no Super Mario World, Sonic 2, Death Valley Rally, etc.
I've looked at the GBA, but I don't own one. It does look like there are some nice 2D platformers on it, but it just doesn't interest me like it would have five or six years ago when I was actively searching for 2D platform games.
...I'll have something to run on my Longhorn system.
I was a huge fan of the 2-D platform games. While I do think that there were planty of bad 2-D platformers, but I really think that they had a much larger percentage of good games than most genres. When the 3-D platform games came out, it's like all game companies just abandoned the 2-D platform. The gaming companies saw 3-D platforms as an upgrade instead of seeing 3-D platforms for what they are, a different gaming style. Soon Mario, Zelda, and Sonic all left the 2-D arena (except for a couple of subpar 2-D games like Yoshi's Island and some Sonic compilations of older games). Then everyone else followed. 3-D platform games should never have been seen as a REPLACEMENT for 2-D platform games, and that makes me resent most 2-D to 3-D conversions somewhat (ESPECIALLY the 3-D bastardization of Bomberman on N64). That doesn't mean that there aren't 3-D platform games that I like (ex. Sonic Adventure series). It just means that I've got this unintentional bias towards the 3-D platform games that I can't always seem to get past.
Ok, I don't really care much for Ted Turner or his comments here but it would be nice to see arguments that are based on Ted Turner today instead of Turner five to ten years ago. Here are some things you might have missed happening:
1. Ted Turner is not married to Jane Fonda. They got a divorce.
2. Turner does not own CNN, TBS, etc. except for the small amount of stock he might still own in AOL-Time Warner company. (RTFA)
3. Turner did not own CNN at the time of the AOL-Time Warner merger.
4. Turner WAS Vice Chairman of Time Warner (who bought CNN) when the AOL-Time Warner merger happened. (According to previous link, he opposed the merger.)
FoxNews had built up a large viewing audience before 9-11. FoxNews was beginning to edge out CNN in some timeslots back in 2000 around the Presidential elections. They weren't as popular as they are today but FoxNews had already "made it" long before 9-11.
In most US states, it is illegal for stores to charge extra fees for using credit cards. So over here, all buyers are subsidizing credit card fees (It's not like a business is going to eat those costs.). So in most of the US it makes little sense to not use credit cards IMHO (especially with the buying protections you get from them and the rewards programs a lot of them offer).
And don't forget Dave Matthews.
That's not a very good analogy. Bands go on tour in many cities. NFL teams only have one home town. It's a lot easier for a band to back out of a concert city than it is for an NFL team to move cities. Also, even if the NFL team moves cities the blackout rules still apply.
A more accurate analogy is that a band can't sell a CD (analogous to watching an NFL game at home) until they get X amount of concert sales (analogous to going to the stadium to watch an NFL game), which is pretty much the case with new bands (at least those bands that aren't studio manufactured).
I personally don't think the blackout rules make a difference one way or the other in most cases. If nobody is going to the stadium to watch a bad team, odds are that nobody is going to watch them on TV. Also, it's not like you can't see your team at all. You just can't watch home games.
The only place where I think blackout rules really matter are for teams that are traditionally bad but are having a good season. In this scenario, I'm a fan so I don't like blackout rules but I certainly understand them. I was a bit peeved in 1998 when the Falcons were having a good season and I couldn't watch a little under half of their games because they couldn't sell out the stadium to save their lives, but I did watch all of the away games that season and even went to the stadium once (on what ended up being one of their few sold out games that season D'OH) so I guess the blackout was effective there.
The article makes it look like the NFL is concerned mostly with viewers overriding blackout rules. For those who don't know, if a broadcast station is within X miles of a stadium, a game is being played in that stadium that day, and the game is not sold out (I think that 85% of capacity is concidered sold out) then that broacast affiliate cannot air the game. This is called a blackout and the idea is that people who really want to see the game will need to go to the stadium to see it. Only after the stadium is full, can viewers watch it on TV.
...no Beach Party Veitman.
From Dead Milkmen song:
Annette: Hey Frankie.
Frankie: Yeah Annette?
Annette: Aren't you going to give me your class ring?
Frankie: I'm afraid I can't do that Annette.
Annette: Why not?
Frankie: Because I don't have any arms!
They could even have a level where you go surfing with Robert Duvall.
"The NFL, meanwhile, is concerned that a user could send a copy of a game to someone in another time zone, where the game is blacked out."
What do time zones have to do with blackout rules? Blackout applies to X distance from the stadium (or is it city, I can't remember). In fact, if NFL wants to keep people from overriding blackout rules, perhaps they should be as stern with DirecTV as they are with TIVO. I have known a couple of bar owners in the NE GA who used to claim the dish was in SC in order to show Falcons games at their bars.
I'm not a big fan of Madden, especially without Pat Summerall. Their big formula was for Summerall to say something stupid and Madden to correct him and sound smart in the process. Now that it's Madden and Michaels, the opposite is happening more often than not.
The only thing that really bothered me with Miller was that he would butt into conversation to put a joke in. You can joke around in the booth all you want, but if somebody is actually talking about the game why don't you let them finish that first.
A: We are DEVO.
I've talked with a few people in IT around here about music before (varying positions, but mostly programming) and it seems we all agree on liking the following bands:
1. Devo
2. Dead Milkmen (have yet to meet an IT guy who doesn't like Stuart)
After that, there's not much agreement, but I am a bit surprised that these are the two bands we almost unanimously agreed on liking.