I loved BG as a child and I recently watched some re-runs for the first time since, all I can say is that the original series have not aged well, the whole thing looks cheesy and very early-80s. The scripting is laughable on occasions.
Contrast this to when I saw repeats of Dr Who, Blake's 7 etc from the same era. They seemed to have aged very well like a good wine, and despite some very dubious sets and sfx they make you realise that it's the quality of writing that make shows like these a classic.
UT2k4 works better on Linux. On identical hardware I get about 30% more FPS.
UT2004 runs poorly on ATI hardware. No doubt due to their pitiful excuse for Linux drivers. Where you see a 30% increase in fps, I see a 30% slowdown at the very least with my 9600 Pro.
ATI are said to be rewriting their OpenGL ICD and not before time. I wish I held on to my Geforce 3.
I enjoyed the original UT and very much liked UT2004 but the thing that stops me getting into them seriously is the overall 'feel' of the games. This is somewhat of a grey area but veteran fps gamers will know what I'm talking about.
Game physics is what id has always excelled at, not only with movement but with the feel of the weapons. The Q2/3 railgun is a classic example, there has never been a UT single shot hitscan weapon weapon which, in the hands of a skilled player, can be consistantly used with deadly accuracy. In UT you often hit thin air when you are certain you have your enemy in your crosshairs, possibly due to poor prediction in the netcode.
Movement also tends to feel unnatural in UT. I could never set up the mouse sensitivity to my tastes. It's too sensitive when you make small movements, as if there is in-built mouse acceleration, with id games there is a specific setting where you can adjust this along with mouse pitch and yaw. Air control is virtually none existant, when id first introduced air control with Q3, they got it spot-on.
The UT engine certainly looks very pretty, but if I was a modder and I wanted maximum exposure I would write it for Enemy Territory like the next version of Urban Terror (a great CS alternative). After all ET is free and is very popular.
It should work if it's delivered as well as sex education. Myself and my geek friends attended all our sex ed lessons at school and always paid close attention. It must have worked because I've just turned 30 and have never caught an STD or got someone pregnant, oh wait..
Well I only hope this new wireless performs better than Centrino. It's not like integrating WiFi into a chipset is rocket science as all chipset makers are at it now. Oh and this time, some Linux drivers right off the bat, please.
At the moment Centrino pairs an excellent low power, good performing processor (Pentium M); with the one of the poorest performing Wi-Fi solutions you can get. But look at how they've marketed it on it's poorest facet, with Centrino you can read your email on top of Everest, browse the web while skydiving with no mention of the strengths of the Pentium M. Almost as bad as 'Pentium 4 speeds up your internet experience' campaign. I've had people asking me about getting a new laptop because they think Centrino is the only way to get WiFi, if only they knew they can get a better performing wireless card for the price of a few beers.
A TV show here in the UK once analysed Michael Schumacher to learn what makes him the greatest racing driver in the world. To their surprise they found out that his reaction times were no better than the rest of us.
They found out that what makes him great is his ability to anticipate, to prepare himself and make the correct decisions in his mind anything up to a few seconds before he executes them. I play fps games myself and I can believe his is probably the case with the top gamers.
EDS, in cahoots with the UK govenment, have wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers money on failed IT projects. Notable ones include the Inland Revenue (UK IRS), Child Support Agency (£50M over budget and still not working) and an email and directory service for the NHS (withdrew at last minute allowing C&W to steal at a much inflated price).
Though the blame cannot completely be laid at the door of EDS, the government has been guilty of sloppy auditing and the worst being the willingness to hand over extra money when EDS has come around with the begging bowl.
It was actually Diamond who stood up to Creative and helped Aureal survive a lot longer than they did.
I've still got my MX300 safely wrapped up somewhere just in case someone figures out how it ticks and writes a decent set of drivers for it. Sometimes I take it out and cradle it and remember the good old days. Running Quake 3 with A3D was like having a 10 frag head start on your opponents, you could hear your opponents and knew exactly where they were on the map. To think they achieved this through headphones was simply incredible.
What is company in this day and age to do when faced with a much smaller competitor who with superior technology to their own. Go back to the drawing board and design better products for your customers? Perhaps reduce your prices or launch an advertising campaign? No, the answer is of course to sue them.
This is exactly what Creative did to Aureal. A3D 3.0 was to be a revolution in positional audio. Creative knew they were a threat and also knew that they did not have the means to survive a drawn out legal battle. They also put pressure on soundcard makers not to produce Vortex 2 cards under the suggestion that they might be liable for patent infrigement (does all of this sound familiar?). After Aureal's demise Creative bought their IP and now A3D 3.0 lies dormant in Craptive's vaults and will never see the light of day, instead we're left with the glorified reverb engine that is EAX.
So these latest shenanigans by Craptive don't surprise me one bit.
We have a couple of hundred of Maxtors in our desktop machines, I can count the failures we've had on one hand. However the bearings go off after a year though and start making a horrible whine. Shouldn't be a problem with the fluid bearings you see in the latest drives.
The IDE Maxtors in our NAS boxes are a different matter. They take a beating and it shows, rarely do they last more than 18 months, sometimes less than a year. Perhaps it's worth looking at another brand for heavy duty stuff.
The other week I receieved 30 SN41G2s for the university I work at and I've got another 120 arriving soon. Once you've got used to how they are put together you can get the build time down to less than 25 minutes apiece.
We used to buy Dells (which I detested from a technicians point of view) but a couple of months ago we bought two Shuttle systems as a one-off. Everyone was so impressed about how quiet, compact and well engineered they were we decided to outfit an entire new building with them. The few man-hours spent on building them is well worth it to get a quality system that the usual supects (Dell, HP etc) can't seem to deliver. A classroom full of Shuttles is noticably quieter than a room full of Dells.
One thing though, if you are looking for an SN 41G2 then make sure it's a Version 2 (Silent X) model. There's still a lot of Version 1s about which are a bit noisier.
There's almost certainly an internal battery to keep the clock ticking over, but that begs the question can you tell the time while the main battery is kaputt?
I have done without a watch ever since I got my first mobile phone. Many of my friends also no longer have watches and merely pull their phone out of there pocket if they want to know the time. Come to think of it I'm sure I see a lot less people wearing watches than say ten years ago.
Actually, Gentoo releases don't really matter..
on
Gentoo 2004.2 Released
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If your regularly do an emerge -uD world then your system is pretty much up to date.
Worse than Dell (if that's possible) would be your bank moving it's entire operation over there.
It would take a very brave company to risk its customer's security and goodwill by transferring their operation to a state as institutionally corrupt as Nigeria. Oil companys invest there because the rewards are well worth the risks. For all others, forget it.
"Free software means users are free to run it, study and modify the source, and to redistribute it with or without changes."
Strange, I thought free meant you didn't have to pay for it. 'Free' does not necessarily mean open source.
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I loved BG as a child and I recently watched some re-runs for the first time since, all I can say is that the original series have not aged well, the whole thing looks cheesy and very early-80s. The scripting is laughable on occasions.
Contrast this to when I saw repeats of Dr Who, Blake's 7 etc from the same era. They seemed to have aged very well like a good wine, and despite some very dubious sets and sfx they make you realise that it's the quality of writing that make shows like these a classic.
UT2k4 works better on Linux. On identical hardware I get about 30% more FPS.
UT2004 runs poorly on ATI hardware. No doubt due to their pitiful excuse for Linux drivers. Where you see a 30% increase in fps, I see a 30% slowdown at the very least with my 9600 Pro.
ATI are said to be rewriting their OpenGL ICD and not before time. I wish I held on to my Geforce 3.
I enjoyed the original UT and very much liked UT2004 but the thing that stops me getting into them seriously is the overall 'feel' of the games. This is somewhat of a grey area but veteran fps gamers will know what I'm talking about.
Game physics is what id has always excelled at, not only with movement but with the feel of the weapons. The Q2/3 railgun is a classic example, there has never been a UT single shot hitscan weapon weapon which, in the hands of a skilled player, can be consistantly used with deadly accuracy. In UT you often hit thin air when you are certain you have your enemy in your crosshairs, possibly due to poor prediction in the netcode.
Movement also tends to feel unnatural in UT. I could never set up the mouse sensitivity to my tastes. It's too sensitive when you make small movements, as if there is in-built mouse acceleration, with id games there is a specific setting where you can adjust this along with mouse pitch and yaw. Air control is virtually none existant, when id first introduced air control with Q3, they got it spot-on.
The UT engine certainly looks very pretty, but if I was a modder and I wanted maximum exposure I would write it for Enemy Territory like the next version of Urban Terror (a great CS alternative). After all ET is free and is very popular.
It should work if it's delivered as well as sex education. Myself and my geek friends attended all our sex ed lessons at school and always paid close attention. It must have worked because I've just turned 30 and have never caught an STD or got someone pregnant, oh wait..
Well I only hope this new wireless performs better than Centrino. It's not like integrating WiFi into a chipset is rocket science as all chipset makers are at it now. Oh and this time, some Linux drivers right off the bat, please.
At the moment Centrino pairs an excellent low power, good performing processor (Pentium M); with the one of the poorest performing Wi-Fi solutions you can get. But look at how they've marketed it on it's poorest facet, with Centrino you can read your email on top of Everest, browse the web while skydiving with no mention of the strengths of the Pentium M. Almost as bad as 'Pentium 4 speeds up your internet experience' campaign. I've had people asking me about getting a new laptop because they think Centrino is the only way to get WiFi, if only they knew they can get a better performing wireless card for the price of a few beers.
70% of virus infections in my neighbourhood are caused by just one woman.
A TV show here in the UK once analysed Michael Schumacher to learn what makes him the greatest racing driver in the world. To their surprise they found out that his reaction times were no better than the rest of us.
They found out that what makes him great is his ability to anticipate, to prepare himself and make the correct decisions in his mind anything up to a few seconds before he executes them. I play fps games myself and I can believe his is probably the case with the top gamers.
Sorry, have to rant where I see EDS mentioned.
EDS, in cahoots with the UK govenment, have wasted millions of pounds of taxpayers money on failed IT projects. Notable ones include the Inland Revenue (UK IRS), Child Support Agency (£50M over budget and still not working) and an email and directory service for the NHS (withdrew at last minute allowing C&W to steal at a much inflated price).
Though the blame cannot completely be laid at the door of EDS, the government has been guilty of sloppy auditing and the worst being the willingness to hand over extra money when EDS has come around with the begging bowl.
It was actually Diamond who stood up to Creative and helped Aureal survive a lot longer than they did.
I've still got my MX300 safely wrapped up somewhere just in case someone figures out how it ticks and writes a decent set of drivers for it. Sometimes I take it out and cradle it and remember the good old days. Running Quake 3 with A3D was like having a 10 frag head start on your opponents, you could hear your opponents and knew exactly where they were on the map. To think they achieved this through headphones was simply incredible.
What is company in this day and age to do when faced with a much smaller competitor who with superior technology to their own. Go back to the drawing board and design better products for your customers? Perhaps reduce your prices or launch an advertising campaign? No, the answer is of course to sue them.
This is exactly what Creative did to Aureal. A3D 3.0 was to be a revolution in positional audio. Creative knew they were a threat and also knew that they did not have the means to survive a drawn out legal battle. They also put pressure on soundcard makers not to produce Vortex 2 cards under the suggestion that they might be liable for patent infrigement (does all of this sound familiar?). After Aureal's demise Creative bought their IP and now A3D 3.0 lies dormant in Craptive's vaults and will never see the light of day, instead we're left with the glorified reverb engine that is EAX.
So these latest shenanigans by Craptive don't surprise me one bit.
We have a couple of hundred of Maxtors in our desktop machines, I can count the failures we've had on one hand. However the bearings go off after a year though and start making a horrible whine. Shouldn't be a problem with the fluid bearings you see in the latest drives.
The IDE Maxtors in our NAS boxes are a different matter. They take a beating and it shows, rarely do they last more than 18 months, sometimes less than a year. Perhaps it's worth looking at another brand for heavy duty stuff.
The other week I receieved 30 SN41G2s for the university I work at and I've got another 120 arriving soon. Once you've got used to how they are put together you can get the build time down to less than 25 minutes apiece.
We used to buy Dells (which I detested from a technicians point of view) but a couple of months ago we bought two Shuttle systems as a one-off. Everyone was so impressed about how quiet, compact and well engineered they were we decided to outfit an entire new building with them. The few man-hours spent on building them is well worth it to get a quality system that the usual supects (Dell, HP etc) can't seem to deliver. A classroom full of Shuttles is noticably quieter than a room full of Dells.
One thing though, if you are looking for an SN 41G2 then make sure it's a Version 2 (Silent X) model. There's still a lot of Version 1s about which are a bit noisier.
There's almost certainly an internal battery to keep the clock ticking over, but that begs the question can you tell the time while the main battery is kaputt?
I have done without a watch ever since I got my first mobile phone. Many of my friends also no longer have watches and merely pull their phone out of there pocket if they want to know the time. Come to think of it I'm sure I see a lot less people wearing watches than say ten years ago.
If your regularly do an emerge -uD world then your system is pretty much up to date.
2004.2 will finish compiling just in time for the release of 2004.3.
Worse than Dell (if that's possible) would be your bank moving it's entire operation over there.
It would take a very brave company to risk its customer's security and goodwill by transferring their operation to a state as institutionally corrupt as Nigeria. Oil companys invest there because the rewards are well worth the risks. For all others, forget it.
"Free software means users are free to run it, study and modify the source, and to redistribute it with or without changes." Strange, I thought free meant you didn't have to pay for it. 'Free' does not necessarily mean open source.