I couldn't agree more. I've played the various GTA's and while they're nice, GTA and Mafia aim to do completely different things. GTA is more about vast freedom, while Mafia is more about telling a story. That story is what makes it one of my favourite games, along with the gameplay which is of an excellent level. I'd wholly recommend people try and grab a copy of it if they like a good story in their game.
Indeed. Next think you know we'll have schools that are forced to put stickers on books discussing evolution that detail how evolution is only a theory... oh wait.
I would care. If I've gone to the trouble of downloading all those songs, the last thing I want to do is have to download them again. When you have a 10GB monthly download cap (which your fiance often chews through), having to get all of those again are simply too much of a hassle. I'd much rather get them from iTunes if I did get them at all, as I'd want to make sure that my songs were indeed, mine.
That's true to an extent. What often happens with Celerons is that during testing for a normal P4 chip, if some of the cache in one bank is discovered to be faulty, then they disable that bank, reducing the cache to a level equal to that of a normal Celeron. However that doesn't mean that all Celerons are defective P4's. Intel will produce as many Celerons as neccesary to meet demand, so if demand outstrips the number of defective P4 chips then they'll simply disable a perfectly functional set of cache on a P4, label it a celeron and ship it out the door. So while some Celerons may indeed be faulty, they've had those faulty parts disabled so it will have no effect. Any part of a CPU being faulty would be extremely bad, as one wrong bit could screw things up majorly, so they're not about to be tolerated.
These comments don't give me any desire to try and get into the industry. Admittedly I did use to want to develop games etc. previously (since about the age of twelve was when I decided it), but with the state of the industry I really don't see much reason to put myself through it all. Of course I still intend to make games, just small ones with my fiance, rather than big games in a large office where I may not even get an adequate say in how many hours I get to toil away each day.
Previously there was a ruling which effectively made the use of mod-chips legal, since they were viewed as a simple means of bypassing an artificial trade barrier. As such with these changes that is no longer the case, and people who want to play their important games get shafted as a result.
...and 76% of all statistics are made up on the spot. The fact of the matter is that mod chips have legitimate uses to facilitate playing import games, a number of which are not released in Australia at all. I expect quite a number of people use it for that and that alone, of course I have no statistics to backup my statement. Nonetheless, don't lump everyone into one group just because of one potentially illegal use, or would you rather bittorrent and the internet itself be gotten rid of due to the numerous venues for illegal use?
Thanks for that, I wasn't aware such things as that existed (I couldn't be bother to RTFA ^^;). Quite interesting to say the least. It'd be nice if it were possible to eventually make such devices with much better performanc that they were actually viable alternatives, though more than likely their ASIC cousins will always have too much of an edge in efficiency (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, as I'd like to be). It's a shame too, it would be very cool to have one chip for your computer which you could configure for any number of different tasks. What I'd actually do with it I don't know, but it'd be cool:P
It's doubtful that people from ATi or nVidia would have anything more than a casual interest in such a chip. More than anything with the way GPU's have been heading, this device would be more of a backwards step than a forwards one. GPU's these days are far more flexible than they used to be, and there's every indication that trend will only continue, allowing developers to do what they want with the hardware, rather than being told what they can do with it and having no real choice either way.
So to sum up, don't expect to see vastly specialised GPU's for raytraycing hitting the market, at least not for the mainstream buyer. It's more likely that we'll see GPU's become more generalised to the point where raytracing can implemented on software. Will they be as fast as a purpose built chip like this? No, more than likely they won't. Will developers be able to do a whole lot more with them? Most definitely, and though that will come at a significant performance penalty for the moment, I think it's the right trade off to make as we should see far more creative uses of hardware put into practice, such as work being done already to use GPU's for something other than Graphics Processing.
On the whole this does seem like a rather gross abuse of Intel, a company I have previously supported, well not so much supported but remained indifferent towards. However this pricing scheme seems rather off, not just in fairness, but how in the world would they be aware of the volume of a competing product that a company has purchased? Perhaps there's something simple I'm missing (more than likely) but I don't see any realistic reason why Intel would know extensive information about such things, though I'm sure they'd want to know. Anyone care to enlighten me?
Name to me someone with the vast sums of money and guts to take on microsoft over their EULA. The fact is that even though EULA's may not be enforcable, that doesn't mean one can't tie people up in court for years with it, and who really wants to go through all of that? At the end of the day it wouldn't be worth it.
Hehe, true, I figured there would be others with far heavier loads than I do, but for myself and many of my friends and such, that's fairly heavy, especially with the numerous programs I have running in the background. Also I have 1GB of ram, so I'm not usually running low, though I have seen firefox use upwards of 200MB alone which seemed somewhat high to me.
Usually though it happens after an extend period of time, without fail really, as my lone firefox window often stays open for days on end, so while my usage habits aren't much (compared to some at least) in the short term, in the long term the crashes have been making me wonder if a memory leak may be the cause, but sadly I lack the time to investigate it myself.
Could you provide more details regarding the memory leak issue you talked about? e.g. under what circumstances would it be seen and cause problems, up to the point of crashing.
I'd consider myself a fairly serious firefox user in terms of how much I'll pile onto it at once, sometimes having upwards of ten tabs at once with, all fairly content heavy, and have seen crashes occur in such circumstances, so it'd be nice to know if this bug you're talking about may be the reason for my trouble at times. I'd certainly love to see it fixed if that's the case as it's always quite a pain reloading all of what I was working on before.
Not really, as I'd bet you every cent I had that there would also be quite a number of people out there wanting to ensure there were as few as possible bugs in the software that would decide the next leader of their country. In reality this means systems would likely be more secure, rather than having us rely on an organisation selling voting machines to have done a half decent job; which by the way was shown not to be the case in 2004.
Actually there is, but you'll only like to see any real benefit in terms of games etc. at a much later date since games are typically created for the most common hardware, not the best hardware. I have no doubt that in time there will be many many games that will demand over 1GB of ram on our graphics cards, but that will be sometime off.
Of course with other applications for graphics cards being sought now as well, using them in scientific computing tasks etc. this may very well be useful even today. I guess time shall tell ultimately.
I think you'll find it more correct that Mozilla chastizes Microsoft for making new psuedo-standards based off of other standards, thereby using their monopoly to create a new standard that others either must support or face having their websites not function correctly.
The creation of new standards isn't a bad thing, at least in the instance when they're used to address a need for additional functionality.
While I expect you're correct in your assumptions about what peopla attempting to abuse this would do, shouldn't VeriSign still perform some verification of the companies details given and ensure that if false information is given, that they can somehow contact the person who brought in the application for the certificate.
After all, if there's no real verification done then what good are these? It seems like they're more $200 - $600 licenses to trick users into donwloading your spyware.
While I'm no linux fanatic, primarily using windows for the most part, I might suggest you give something like Knoppix a spin. I'm currently running it on my four year old laptop who's hard drive died sometime ago and I must say it's wonderful. Just chucking in the cd it boots up smoothly and without a hitch, detecting all my hardware without a problem. When I get in I have a very nice selection of applications to use such as Open Office and a nice variety of games to waste time on.
I'm not saying you're particularly wrong, but in some ways it sounds as if you're somewhat daunted by the complexity of Linux, when in some cases it's not nearly as complicated as you may think. Will it replace Windows just yet? No, but it's getting there. I know once I get a new hard drive for my laptop Knoppix will be a permanent fixture, or possibly some other Linux distro's. Anyway, perhaps something for you to take a look at while we all await for that day when we can comfortably say goodbye to Microsofts leash.
I'd quite heavily disagree with you that the elements version is as brilliant an alternative as you claim it to be. Comparatively the difference between Elements and regular photoshop is huge for me, as such Elements is nearly useless to me. That said I'm also one of the people who will buy a copy of Photoshop, just because it is a superb program, though I don't do professional graphics work either.
While not strictly an adventure game, I'd recommend you pick yourself up a copy of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. One of the best things about it is it really does have a very intriguing story, lots and lots of dialogue with characters with bucketloads of ways you can approach a situation. In essence it has some fantastic elements of adventure games in it.
Just a warning though, the game is quite buggy so be prepared for that. If you can deal with the bugs and don't mind vampires and such then this is a gaming experience you should find very rewarding.
Actually DRM is steadily becoming more common on CD's today as well, so your alternative isn't truly anymore viable than just downloading it and removing the DRM components. At least downloading it you get to choose what songs you want, rather than buying a cd with two good songs and sixteen crap ones.
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I couldn't agree more. I've played the various GTA's and while they're nice, GTA and Mafia aim to do completely different things. GTA is more about vast freedom, while Mafia is more about telling a story. That story is what makes it one of my favourite games, along with the gameplay which is of an excellent level. I'd wholly recommend people try and grab a copy of it if they like a good story in their game.
Indeed. Next think you know we'll have schools that are forced to put stickers on books discussing evolution that detail how evolution is only a theory... oh wait.
I would care. If I've gone to the trouble of downloading all those songs, the last thing I want to do is have to download them again. When you have a 10GB monthly download cap (which your fiance often chews through), having to get all of those again are simply too much of a hassle. I'd much rather get them from iTunes if I did get them at all, as I'd want to make sure that my songs were indeed, mine.
That's true to an extent. What often happens with Celerons is that during testing for a normal P4 chip, if some of the cache in one bank is discovered to be faulty, then they disable that bank, reducing the cache to a level equal to that of a normal Celeron. However that doesn't mean that all Celerons are defective P4's. Intel will produce as many Celerons as neccesary to meet demand, so if demand outstrips the number of defective P4 chips then they'll simply disable a perfectly functional set of cache on a P4, label it a celeron and ship it out the door. So while some Celerons may indeed be faulty, they've had those faulty parts disabled so it will have no effect. Any part of a CPU being faulty would be extremely bad, as one wrong bit could screw things up majorly, so they're not about to be tolerated.
These comments don't give me any desire to try and get into the industry. Admittedly I did use to want to develop games etc. previously (since about the age of twelve was when I decided it), but with the state of the industry I really don't see much reason to put myself through it all. Of course I still intend to make games, just small ones with my fiance, rather than big games in a large office where I may not even get an adequate say in how many hours I get to toil away each day.
don't blame me -- nobody I vote for ever gets elected
Then why oh why did you not vote for GWB last election?!
Previously there was a ruling which effectively made the use of mod-chips legal, since they were viewed as a simple means of bypassing an artificial trade barrier. As such with these changes that is no longer the case, and people who want to play their important games get shafted as a result.
...and 76% of all statistics are made up on the spot. The fact of the matter is that mod chips have legitimate uses to facilitate playing import games, a number of which are not released in Australia at all. I expect quite a number of people use it for that and that alone, of course I have no statistics to backup my statement. Nonetheless, don't lump everyone into one group just because of one potentially illegal use, or would you rather bittorrent and the internet itself be gotten rid of due to the numerous venues for illegal use?
Thanks for that, I wasn't aware such things as that existed (I couldn't be bother to RTFA ^^;). Quite interesting to say the least. It'd be nice if it were possible to eventually make such devices with much better performanc that they were actually viable alternatives, though more than likely their ASIC cousins will always have too much of an edge in efficiency (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here, as I'd like to be). It's a shame too, it would be very cool to have one chip for your computer which you could configure for any number of different tasks. What I'd actually do with it I don't know, but it'd be cool :P
It's doubtful that people from ATi or nVidia would have anything more than a casual interest in such a chip. More than anything with the way GPU's have been heading, this device would be more of a backwards step than a forwards one. GPU's these days are far more flexible than they used to be, and there's every indication that trend will only continue, allowing developers to do what they want with the hardware, rather than being told what they can do with it and having no real choice either way.
So to sum up, don't expect to see vastly specialised GPU's for raytraycing hitting the market, at least not for the mainstream buyer. It's more likely that we'll see GPU's become more generalised to the point where raytracing can implemented on software. Will they be as fast as a purpose built chip like this? No, more than likely they won't. Will developers be able to do a whole lot more with them? Most definitely, and though that will come at a significant performance penalty for the moment, I think it's the right trade off to make as we should see far more creative uses of hardware put into practice, such as work being done already to use GPU's for something other than Graphics Processing.
On the whole this does seem like a rather gross abuse of Intel, a company I have previously supported, well not so much supported but remained indifferent towards. However this pricing scheme seems rather off, not just in fairness, but how in the world would they be aware of the volume of a competing product that a company has purchased? Perhaps there's something simple I'm missing (more than likely) but I don't see any realistic reason why Intel would know extensive information about such things, though I'm sure they'd want to know. Anyone care to enlighten me?
Prove to me that you're infact alive and then get back to me.
Name to me someone with the vast sums of money and guts to take on microsoft over their EULA. The fact is that even though EULA's may not be enforcable, that doesn't mean one can't tie people up in court for years with it, and who really wants to go through all of that? At the end of the day it wouldn't be worth it.
Hehe, true, I figured there would be others with far heavier loads than I do, but for myself and many of my friends and such, that's fairly heavy, especially with the numerous programs I have running in the background. Also I have 1GB of ram, so I'm not usually running low, though I have seen firefox use upwards of 200MB alone which seemed somewhat high to me.
Usually though it happens after an extend period of time, without fail really, as my lone firefox window often stays open for days on end, so while my usage habits aren't much (compared to some at least) in the short term, in the long term the crashes have been making me wonder if a memory leak may be the cause, but sadly I lack the time to investigate it myself.
Could you provide more details regarding the memory leak issue you talked about? e.g. under what circumstances would it be seen and cause problems, up to the point of crashing.
I'd consider myself a fairly serious firefox user in terms of how much I'll pile onto it at once, sometimes having upwards of ten tabs at once with, all fairly content heavy, and have seen crashes occur in such circumstances, so it'd be nice to know if this bug you're talking about may be the reason for my trouble at times. I'd certainly love to see it fixed if that's the case as it's always quite a pain reloading all of what I was working on before.
Not really, as I'd bet you every cent I had that there would also be quite a number of people out there wanting to ensure there were as few as possible bugs in the software that would decide the next leader of their country. In reality this means systems would likely be more secure, rather than having us rely on an organisation selling voting machines to have done a half decent job; which by the way was shown not to be the case in 2004.
Actually there is, but you'll only like to see any real benefit in terms of games etc. at a much later date since games are typically created for the most common hardware, not the best hardware. I have no doubt that in time there will be many many games that will demand over 1GB of ram on our graphics cards, but that will be sometime off.
Of course with other applications for graphics cards being sought now as well, using them in scientific computing tasks etc. this may very well be useful even today. I guess time shall tell ultimately.
I think you'll find it more correct that Mozilla chastizes Microsoft for making new psuedo-standards based off of other standards, thereby using their monopoly to create a new standard that others either must support or face having their websites not function correctly. The creation of new standards isn't a bad thing, at least in the instance when they're used to address a need for additional functionality.
So much for turning the screen off when you're looking at... home movies and your parents/friend/girlfriend walks in ;)
While I expect you're correct in your assumptions about what peopla attempting to abuse this would do, shouldn't VeriSign still perform some verification of the companies details given and ensure that if false information is given, that they can somehow contact the person who brought in the application for the certificate.
After all, if there's no real verification done then what good are these? It seems like they're more $200 - $600 licenses to trick users into donwloading your spyware.
While I'm no linux fanatic, primarily using windows for the most part, I might suggest you give something like Knoppix a spin. I'm currently running it on my four year old laptop who's hard drive died sometime ago and I must say it's wonderful. Just chucking in the cd it boots up smoothly and without a hitch, detecting all my hardware without a problem. When I get in I have a very nice selection of applications to use such as Open Office and a nice variety of games to waste time on.
I'm not saying you're particularly wrong, but in some ways it sounds as if you're somewhat daunted by the complexity of Linux, when in some cases it's not nearly as complicated as you may think. Will it replace Windows just yet? No, but it's getting there. I know once I get a new hard drive for my laptop Knoppix will be a permanent fixture, or possibly some other Linux distro's. Anyway, perhaps something for you to take a look at while we all await for that day when we can comfortably say goodbye to Microsofts leash.
I'd quite heavily disagree with you that the elements version is as brilliant an alternative as you claim it to be. Comparatively the difference between Elements and regular photoshop is huge for me, as such Elements is nearly useless to me. That said I'm also one of the people who will buy a copy of Photoshop, just because it is a superb program, though I don't do professional graphics work either.
I would move along but I'm still waiting for my train. It was supposed to be here ten minutes ago!
While not strictly an adventure game, I'd recommend you pick yourself up a copy of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. One of the best things about it is it really does have a very intriguing story, lots and lots of dialogue with characters with bucketloads of ways you can approach a situation. In essence it has some fantastic elements of adventure games in it.
Just a warning though, the game is quite buggy so be prepared for that. If you can deal with the bugs and don't mind vampires and such then this is a gaming experience you should find very rewarding.
Actually DRM is steadily becoming more common on CD's today as well, so your alternative isn't truly anymore viable than just downloading it and removing the DRM components. At least downloading it you get to choose what songs you want, rather than buying a cd with two good songs and sixteen crap ones.