Looks neat, but I'll stick with my current PSX. I would like one of them white controllers though.
But this new system doesn't hold any value for me... a cell phone uplink? Why not a regular damn modem? I boycott celular phones anyway... I never want to be that accessible to anyone.
A few hundred thousand? Funny, I recall it being in the millions. (The number 6 million comes to mind, but I can't verify it.) And it wasn't just jews, mind you, it was pretty much any ethnicity that wasn't aryan or those who disagreed with the Nazi party's political views.
But a "few hundred thousand" people is still nothing to sneeze at.
Large brands can afford to put money into risky things like development and research.
I don't know if I agree that completely. Yes, they do research, and tons of it. Wired had an article a while back on all the neat things Sony was doing in their research labs. But the ones that truly innovate seem to always be the small companies. Transmeta, for example. And Nullsoft, which makes a wonderful transition to my next point. It's these smaller companies that the large ones are constantly chasing after, NEVER their larger competitors. AOL bought out Nullsoft to have a piece of the MP3 action. And we all know about Microsoft's idea of innovating... to buy up the companies that are actually doing it and then slap an M$ logo on it.
Large companies are slow to respond and change to circumstances and new competition. Intel vs. AMD. When the Athlon was released and people saw that it was outperforming the PIII while beinging significantly cheaper, Intel was literally up in arms over what to do. Now they seem to be taking action (improving their Celron line and cranking up the clock speeds on their PIII, for instance), but AMD just quickly bounces over any obsticles that Intel tries to establish.
I still think it was hilarious that Intel tried positioning the Celeron against the Athlon (to make people think Celeron ~= Athlon), and then AMD went and released the Duron and told the world, "No, Duron ~= Celeron!":D
a) I've had good luck with their drives. I still have a 120MB IDE disk that came with my 386 around here somewhere. Got used almost everyday for 5 years straight and I still keep it around as an emergency disk with some basic diagnostic tools on it.
b) The service is practically unbeatable. My friend has had problems with his 9MB Cheetah 18LP, and so far he's on free disk #3. But Seagate comes through with their support every time and has offered to replace the drive with no questions asked.
I won't disagree with you on the quality of the two products (I own them both, hehe), but I'm sorry to say they did not design the little scrolly wheel. Another company did, but had terrible marketing and MS bought it.
While the sidewinder is far from the best controller I've ever used, it is the most comfortable PC one.
I'm not sure about RH4.2, but I can verify that Mandrake 7.x works quite well. If there were any problems, it would be due to the Athlon MTRR code, which as I recall, caused the kernel not to boot on 2.2.12 and earlier.
Actually, if you read the post again, you'll note the line:
when you get bored with that, engage in twitchy, strategyless deathmatch with friends.
I am a Quake fan, so your "Quack" remark already put you on rough ground with me. I have played some multiplayer Doom, and it sucks. It sucks REALLY REALLY HARD. Quake 1 made multiplayer FPS gaming what it is today, even if Doom had the option somewhere in its menus.
In my opinion, multiplayer gaming perfection is Quake 1 with the TeamFortress mod. Nothing will ever top that. NOTHING.
Err, hello? Do you read the news or what? Corporations HAVE been either shutting down or acquiring domain names that they wish didn't exist or wish they had first. Though, with the proposal that the./ journalist had mentioned, they would be able do so without the burden of due legal process.
What you fail to realize is that the journalist in question was explaining what *would* happen, not what *is* happening. Of course what's happening right now is not good news. You read almost EVERY WEEK right here on slashdot about some large company beating down a small company, an organization, or even a single person under the disguise of copyright infringement. Right now the most big companies can do is shut down sites that collide with their profit-making ideas. Once there are even more laws and paths that allow them to do more, I believe with every fibre of my being that they will use them to their advantage to control the public.
How long before law no longer applies to an entity labeled as a corporation?
About a year ago, I decided I was going to build myself a computer and buy only top-quality parts. This is what I have in my box:
Athlon 750 (0.18 micron, mind you) Asus K7M (Rev.4) Asus V6800 GeForce 256 Pure Tekram DC-390 U2W SCSI adapter Sound Blaster Live! Value (the rest is fairly insignificant)
I'm utterly thrilled with my machine, apart from the first week of ownership, I've had ZERO problems with the hardware itself. A word to those who buy up an old K7M mobo, though... DO FLASH A NEWER BIOS.:P I spent about a week wondering why my GeForce was getting about 15fps on a 640x480 Quake3 demo. Turns out AGP was kinda screwed up in the BIOS that shipped with the K7M. Flashed a new one and I have been happy ever since. And I have the satisfaction of knowning that I'd have payed a whole lot more if I'd have gone Intel.
Everything works great in Linux too, except those pesky DRI GeForce drivers. Grr.
For me, X is *tons* faster than windows. I think when you run across a computer that is blazing under windows but crawling under X the following is likely to be the cause... A lot of the code for certain graphics chipsets under X is pre-alpha. Experimental, even.
With this kind of code, extra features such as caching techniques or just plain acceleration are disabled because the authors aren't even sure the current code works correctly.
I had this problem with my laptop for several months until the xf86 team finally came through and released a driver that took advantage of some of the more advanced features of the chipset.
Hmm, sounds good but I'd reconsider your motherboard. You definitely want the newer via chipset (can't remember which one the FD11 uses). I highly recommend the new Asus K7V board that's out now or soon. Nothing but good reviews and it's reported to be more stable than most P3 mobos.
No, it's really 15 meters. I read it in my military techical manual at work.:)
But like you mentioned, it is quite possible to get an extremely accurate position when you figure in other things like land-based signals and that radius-tracking stuff.
Yes, radar altitude is usually only used in landings or to check ground proximity in the event that the pilot suspects his alititude signal is haywire.
Military aircraft actually have several sources of altitude. The most common way they do it is to have a static pressure line from the outside of the aircraft that leads into a computer of some sort that corrects for things like the venturi effect. That computer would then combine and average the static pressure signal from the outside with something like a radar atimiter, acceleromters, or doppler radar. And if any one of these systems were to break, the reading might be a bit less accurate, but you'd still have a reading. If the computer that controls the averaging of signals were to break, you'd still have access to the original direct static line fed directly into your altimiter. Which would be good enough to backup purposes, since you'd then have a maximum margin of error somewhere around 500 feet.
Latitude and longitude are the only two values that we're concerned about in our GPS systems. Height comes from other sources (radar altimiter, doppler, corrected static pressure systems, etc). Meanwhile, time is entered into the whole Enhanced Navigation System after you switch it on. Then you just wait a few minutes for the GPS to capture a few satellites. I'll look into it, but I don't imagine that the original time input by the flight crew or technicians is corrected by GPS's time. Exact time is relatively unimportant for most aircraft systems.
My point was it's illegal to SELL any PSX games that you've developed without a license. You can go creating all the PSX code you want, give it out to your friends, even post it to the 'net. But if you try to make a profit, you're going to be royally screwed by Sony lawers.
In fact, Sony makes (or used to) a system called the Net Yarouse which was a development system specifically intended for home development of PSX games. (Though the games created with that system were obscenely limited in things like size of the game, etc.) And when you bought the Yarouse, I believe you agree to some disclaimer that says you aren't allowed to market any of the games created with it.
So, in short, code linux on a PSX to your heart's content, but don't try to sell it.
These demos have already been running at gaming shows and other types of trade shows for the better part of this year. They're running on workstations, not the actual X-Box hardware, since none exists. (Or isn't ready for public viewing.)
Microsoft told a bunch of graphics artists to create some demos with polygon counts, etc that closely conform to the theoretical X-Box specs. Take that as you will, but since it's Microsoft I personally wonder how close they actually adhered to the specs. Or how cose the technical specs are to what we're going to see when the X-Box is launched.
Mmmm, no. As I mentioned above, they've already added enhancements for older PSX games like higher-res, bilinear filtering, anti-aliasing, deeper z-buffer, etc. I've seen the screenshots and they look swell.
Oh yes it does. It adds bilinear filtering to the textures, and other improvements such as a higher resolution depending on the game. I've seen it in action... no more huge texels whenever an object gets close to the camera.
*If* the XBox has good RPG's, you wouldn't play them simply because Sqauresoft doesn't make them?
This is something a non-Squaresofter would say. But in general, you are correct. We are a devoted bunch and have noticed that Squaresoft always picks the system that is going to do best in the marketplace and proceeds to make kick-ass games for it. Happened with the SNES, and it happened with the PSX. Why should we start doubting Squaresoft now?
As for Bleem!, I've tried it and it is shit. The only emulator that I can trust to give me a good gaming experience is ZSNES, which emulates a (drum roll) SNES. If SNES emulation just recently (within the last few years) got to a high-quality standard, then how long before PSX? Sure, the N64 has UltraHLE, which is pretty good, BUT the game compatibility is suck.
a) These screenshots are not new. I have seen magazines at the newsstands with these exact same screenshots. M$ probably pumped them out to the print media months ago. I've seen them online in various places also, though not in high-res.
b) Demos tell you nothing about the power of a system. I saw screenshots of demos for the Sega Saturn before it was released... a complete human skeleton with all 200-some bones dancing to hip-hop. It looked nice and was running on actual Saturn hardware, but nothing like that would ever be in a game due to practicality.
And the Nintendo 64, (back when it was the Ultra 64) had demos running on SGI workstations that had 2 to 3 times the power of the actual N64 today. As a result, Nintendo wowed the public enough to keep interest in the system. But those demos, amazing though they were, were far more impressive than the actual N64 at launch time. Thus, don't expect hundredes of butterflies in your video games when you bring the X-Box home.
c) Microsoft mentioned that these demos do not run on the actual X-Box hardware, as none exists yet. Their graphics designers were told to whip up some demos while trying to conform to the theoretical specs of the X-Box. That's why you have high-res screenshots.
Linux doesn't work if you actively try to hate it. Torvalds must've slipped an empath() function into the kernel, because I used to swear and cuss a lot, and then Linux would just refuse to work. I learned that the hard way. Now me and my box are the bestest bestest buddies, aren't we Apex?? Here, have a nice perl upgrade...
(a) Athlon uses double the power of the Pentium III, and runs twice as hot
Uhh, no. The early.25 micron ones were, but my Athlon 750 with a.18 die runs quite cool. AMD phased out the.25 dies in December or so. Also, the Athlon has more circuitry and transistors than a PIII. More pipelines, etc.
As for SMP, I can't really debate that. But AMD says their working on it, and since they've been ahead of schedule for all of their releases in recent memory, I think I can take their word for it.
(c) PC Magazine recently ran an article which said a 1 GHz Athlon is approximately as fast as the 866 MHz Pentium III. The 1 GHz Pentium III absolutely slaughters the 1 GHz Athlon in most benchmarks (especially iSPEC).
Slaughters? Nah. The benchmarks that I've seen show the Athlon and PIII getting closer in terms of power the higher the frequency goes, especially up there around 1GHz. But for the lower-end frequencies like 850 and down, the Athlon always comes out as the clear winner. The non-linearness of Athlon's performance vs. clock speed is due to the off-die cache used in the processor cartridge. AMD is going to move to on-die cache later this year which will rectify the problem.
I bought an Athlon last Feb because 1) They're more powerful 2) They're cheaper 3) They're less scare than PIII's. A quick trip to pricewatch will prove #2 and #3. A 1GHz PIII was nowhere to be found, but the Athlon 1GHz was.
So if price == performance, an Athlon 800MHz is just a bit less powerful than a PIII 700. Somehow, I doubt that very much. I even rounded the prices in Intel's favor. If a PIII's performance was 10% higher than that of an Athlon, the Athlon would still win in the price/value department.
Excuse any minor mistakes or obvious spelling errors.. it's very late as I type this. Or very early.
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Looks neat, but I'll stick with my current PSX. I would like one of them white controllers though.
But this new system doesn't hold any value for me... a cell phone uplink? Why not a regular damn modem? I boycott celular phones anyway... I never want to be that accessible to anyone.
A few hundred thousand? Funny, I recall it being in the millions. (The number 6 million comes to mind, but I can't verify it.) And it wasn't just jews, mind you, it was pretty much any ethnicity that wasn't aryan or those who disagreed with the Nazi party's political views.
But a "few hundred thousand" people is still nothing to sneeze at.
Large brands can afford to put money into risky things like development and research.
I don't know if I agree that completely. Yes, they do research, and tons of it. Wired had an article a while back on all the neat things Sony was doing in their research labs. But the ones that truly innovate seem to always be the small companies. Transmeta, for example. And Nullsoft, which makes a wonderful transition to my next point. It's these smaller companies that the large ones are constantly chasing after, NEVER their larger competitors. AOL bought out Nullsoft to have a piece of the MP3 action. And we all know about Microsoft's idea of innovating... to buy up the companies that are actually doing it and then slap an M$ logo on it.
Large companies are slow to respond and change to circumstances and new competition. Intel vs. AMD. When the Athlon was released and people saw that it was outperforming the PIII while beinging significantly cheaper, Intel was literally up in arms over what to do. Now they seem to be taking action (improving their Celron line and cranking up the clock speeds on their PIII, for instance), but AMD just quickly bounces over any obsticles that Intel tries to establish.
I still think it was hilarious that Intel tried positioning the Celeron against the Athlon (to make people think Celeron ~= Athlon), and then AMD went and released the Duron and told the world, "No, Duron ~= Celeron!"
I like Seagate too... mostly because:
a) I've had good luck with their drives. I still have a 120MB IDE disk that came with my 386 around here somewhere. Got used almost everyday for 5 years straight and I still keep it around as an emergency disk with some basic diagnostic tools on it.
b) The service is practically unbeatable. My friend has had problems with his 9MB Cheetah 18LP, and so far he's on free disk #3. But Seagate comes through with their support every time and has offered to replace the drive with no questions asked.
-2 offtopic.
I won't disagree with you on the quality of the two products (I own them both, hehe), but I'm sorry to say they did not design the little scrolly wheel. Another company did, but had terrible marketing and MS bought it.
While the sidewinder is far from the best controller I've ever used, it is the most comfortable PC one.
I'm not sure about RH4.2, but I can verify that Mandrake 7.x works quite well. If there were any problems, it would be due to the Athlon MTRR code, which as I recall, caused the kernel not to boot on 2.2.12 and earlier.
Did anyone actually even pay attention to the storyline for Quake? Just wondering...
I believe it was identical to the story in Doom, only less Hell and more Aliens.
Actually, if you read the post again, you'll note the line:
when you get bored with that, engage in twitchy, strategyless deathmatch with friends.
I am a Quake fan, so your "Quack" remark already put you on rough ground with me. I have played some multiplayer Doom, and it sucks. It sucks REALLY REALLY HARD. Quake 1 made multiplayer FPS gaming what it is today, even if Doom had the option somewhere in its menus.
In my opinion, multiplayer gaming perfection is Quake 1 with the TeamFortress mod. Nothing will ever top that. NOTHING.
Err, hello? Do you read the news or what? Corporations HAVE been either shutting down or acquiring domain names that they wish didn't exist or wish they had first. Though, with the proposal that the
What you fail to realize is that the journalist in question was explaining what *would* happen, not what *is* happening. Of course what's happening right now is not good news. You read almost EVERY WEEK right here on slashdot about some large company beating down a small company, an organization, or even a single person under the disguise of copyright infringement. Right now the most big companies can do is shut down sites that collide with their profit-making ideas. Once there are even more laws and paths that allow them to do more, I believe with every fibre of my being that they will use them to their advantage to control the public.
How long before law no longer applies to an entity labeled as a corporation?
Hey, I have an idea, let's all make the same stupid observation and then flog it to death under the guise of original humour!
About a year ago, I decided I was going to build myself a computer and buy only top-quality parts. This is what I have in my box:
Athlon 750 (0.18 micron, mind you)
Asus K7M (Rev.4)
Asus V6800 GeForce 256 Pure
Tekram DC-390 U2W SCSI adapter
Sound Blaster Live! Value
(the rest is fairly insignificant)
I'm utterly thrilled with my machine, apart from the first week of ownership, I've had ZERO problems with the hardware itself. A word to those who buy up an old K7M mobo, though... DO FLASH A NEWER BIOS.
Everything works great in Linux too, except those pesky DRI GeForce drivers. Grr.
why is x so much slower than windows?
For me, X is *tons* faster than windows. I think when you run across a computer that is blazing under windows but crawling under X the following is likely to be the cause... A lot of the code for certain graphics chipsets under X is pre-alpha. Experimental, even.
With this kind of code, extra features such as caching techniques or just plain acceleration are disabled because the authors aren't even sure the current code works correctly.
I had this problem with my laptop for several months until the xf86 team finally came through and released a driver that took advantage of some of the more advanced features of the chipset.
Hmm, sounds good but I'd reconsider your motherboard. You definitely want the newer via chipset (can't remember which one the FD11 uses). I highly recommend the new Asus K7V board that's out now or soon. Nothing but good reviews and it's reported to be more stable than most P3 mobos.
No, it's really 15 meters. I read it in my military techical manual at work.
But like you mentioned, it is quite possible to get an extremely accurate position when you figure in other things like land-based signals and that radius-tracking stuff.
Yes, radar altitude is usually only used in landings or to check ground proximity in the event that the pilot suspects his alititude signal is haywire.
Military aircraft actually have several sources of altitude. The most common way they do it is to have a static pressure line from the outside of the aircraft that leads into a computer of some sort that corrects for things like the venturi effect. That computer would then combine and average the static pressure signal from the outside with something like a radar atimiter, acceleromters, or doppler radar. And if any one of these systems were to break, the reading might be a bit less accurate, but you'd still have a reading. If the computer that controls the averaging of signals were to break, you'd still have access to the original direct static line fed directly into your altimiter. Which would be good enough to backup purposes, since you'd then have a maximum margin of error somewhere around 500 feet.
Latitude and longitude are the only two values that we're concerned about in our GPS systems. Height comes from other sources (radar altimiter, doppler, corrected static pressure systems, etc). Meanwhile, time is entered into the whole Enhanced Navigation System after you switch it on. Then you just wait a few minutes for the GPS to capture a few satellites. I'll look into it, but I don't imagine that the original time input by the flight crew or technicians is corrected by GPS's time. Exact time is relatively unimportant for most aircraft systems.
My point was it's illegal to SELL any PSX games that you've developed without a license. You can go creating all the PSX code you want, give it out to your friends, even post it to the 'net. But if you try to make a profit, you're going to be royally screwed by Sony lawers.
In fact, Sony makes (or used to) a system called the Net Yarouse which was a development system specifically intended for home development of PSX games. (Though the games created with that system were obscenely limited in things like size of the game, etc.) And when you bought the Yarouse, I believe you agree to some disclaimer that says you aren't allowed to market any of the games created with it.
So, in short, code linux on a PSX to your heart's content, but don't try to sell it.
These demos have already been running at gaming shows and other types of trade shows for the better part of this year. They're running on workstations, not the actual X-Box hardware, since none exists. (Or isn't ready for public viewing.)
Microsoft told a bunch of graphics artists to create some demos with polygon counts, etc that closely conform to the theoretical X-Box specs. Take that as you will, but since it's Microsoft I personally wonder how close they actually adhered to the specs. Or how cose the technical specs are to what we're going to see when the X-Box is launched.
Mmmm, no. As I mentioned above, they've already added enhancements for older PSX games like higher-res, bilinear filtering, anti-aliasing, deeper z-buffer, etc. I've seen the screenshots and they look swell.
PSX2 does not enhance PSX1 games.
Oh yes it does. It adds bilinear filtering to the textures, and other improvements such as a higher resolution depending on the game. I've seen it in action... no more huge texels whenever an object gets close to the camera.
*If* the XBox has good RPG's, you wouldn't play them simply because Sqauresoft doesn't make them?
This is something a non-Squaresofter would say. But in general, you are correct. We are a devoted bunch and have noticed that Squaresoft always picks the system that is going to do best in the marketplace and proceeds to make kick-ass games for it. Happened with the SNES, and it happened with the PSX. Why should we start doubting Squaresoft now?
As for Bleem!, I've tried it and it is shit. The only emulator that I can trust to give me a good gaming experience is ZSNES, which emulates a (drum roll) SNES. If SNES emulation just recently (within the last few years) got to a high-quality standard, then how long before PSX? Sure, the N64 has UltraHLE, which is pretty good, BUT the game compatibility is suck.
Okay, folks...
a) These screenshots are not new. I have seen magazines at the newsstands with these exact same screenshots. M$ probably pumped them out to the print media months ago. I've seen them online in various places also, though not in high-res.
b) Demos tell you nothing about the power of a system. I saw screenshots of demos for the Sega Saturn before it was released... a complete human skeleton with all 200-some bones dancing to hip-hop. It looked nice and was running on actual Saturn hardware, but nothing like that would ever be in a game due to practicality.
And the Nintendo 64, (back when it was the Ultra 64) had demos running on SGI workstations that had 2 to 3 times the power of the actual N64 today. As a result, Nintendo wowed the public enough to keep interest in the system. But those demos, amazing though they were, were far more impressive than the actual N64 at launch time. Thus, don't expect hundredes of butterflies in your video games when you bring the X-Box home.
c) Microsoft mentioned that these demos do not run on the actual X-Box hardware, as none exists yet. Their graphics designers were told to whip up some demos while trying to conform to the theoretical specs of the X-Box. That's why you have high-res screenshots.
Uh, you want some Prozac or something dude?
Linux doesn't work if you actively try to hate it. Torvalds must've slipped an empath() function into the kernel, because I used to swear and cuss a lot, and then Linux would just refuse to work. I learned that the hard way. Now me and my box are the bestest bestest buddies, aren't we Apex?? Here, have a nice perl upgrade...
(a) Athlon uses double the power of the Pentium III, and runs twice as hot
Uhh, no. The early
As for SMP, I can't really debate that. But AMD says their working on it, and since they've been ahead of schedule for all of their releases in recent memory, I think I can take their word for it.
(c) PC Magazine recently ran an article which said a 1 GHz Athlon is approximately as fast as the 866 MHz Pentium III. The 1 GHz Pentium III absolutely slaughters the 1 GHz Athlon in most benchmarks (especially iSPEC).
Slaughters? Nah. The benchmarks that I've seen show the Athlon and PIII getting closer in terms of power the higher the frequency goes, especially up there around 1GHz. But for the lower-end frequencies like 850 and down, the Athlon always comes out as the clear winner. The non-linearness of Athlon's performance vs. clock speed is due to the off-die cache used in the processor cartridge. AMD is going to move to on-die cache later this year which will rectify the problem.
I bought an Athlon last Feb because 1) They're more powerful 2) They're cheaper 3) They're less scare than PIII's. A quick trip to pricewatch will prove #2 and #3. A 1GHz PIII was nowhere to be found, but the Athlon 1GHz was.
(PIII 850 == $700 || Athlon 850 == $340)
(PIII 800 == $500 || Athlon 800 == $260)
(PIII 750 == $395 || Athlon 750 == $200)
(PIII 700 == $265 || Athlon 700 == $180)
So if price == performance, an Athlon 800MHz is just a bit less powerful than a PIII 700. Somehow, I doubt that very much. I even rounded the prices in Intel's favor. If a PIII's performance was 10% higher than that of an Athlon, the Athlon would still win in the price/value department.
Excuse any minor mistakes or obvious spelling errors.. it's very late as I type this. Or very early.