I was under the impression that Nvidia's cards were still well ahead of ATI's stuff in terms of price, performance, and quality (mostly concerning the drivers.) At least that's what I'm seeing after reading a bunch of reviews for different generations of fairly recent graphics cards.
Well if people are going to get you in trouble for using an program that's known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program (also known as The GIMP), then I wonder how sensitive said people are. Have you tried explaining what the acronym means? I don't have a problem with the name and if anyone asks, it's easily explained.
Radosity is very expensive to compute, uses a lot of memory, etc. That's why it's precomputed. Much like how "light maps" are precomputed for use with static geometry.
Yes, but then you wouldn't get the new controls (hopefully making aiming a lot easier) or the new content. I'm sure glad I didn't have time to play the harder mode on the GameCube version because I really really like this game.
wouldn't you rather use an OS that puts those smarts to use through powerful tools like shell scripting, built-in command-line accessible compilers, and more?
I wish I could, but it would mean rebuying interface cards for all of our computers except one, a new AP (seems to be increasingly hard to find plain APs these days and we need two to cover the entire house), and our DSes only support WEP.
Have they finally caught up in terms of 3D audio to where Aureal was a decade ago?
Nope, it's still basically an expensive reverb engine. The most recent versions can have multiple presets running at once, but it's not nearly on the same level as Aureal's stuff.
I'm a little surprised Creative hasn't started making integrated sound for motherboard companies -- did I miss some reason they don't?
They might have tried to. My old Gateway mini-tower from around 1999 has a Sound Blaster PCI 128D (or some letter) on the motherboard. Seems like Realtek is currently dominating that market though. I'm using the integrated audio on my motherboard (from Realtek, of course) and it sounds just great.
I've had really bad experiences with Creative's cards as well. Back in the day their boards were fairly decent (mostly because they could play back digital audio!) today, though, their stuff is sub par. The last Creative card I bought was a SB Live 5.1. It was an incredible pain to deal with. The system slowed down considerably, especially when playing games, while the card was seated in the PCI slot. There was a noticeable difference in performance after pulling it out (disabling it in the device manager didn't do anything.) Also, I tried using it in my computer after I had upgraded it (WinXP now) and it would BSoD all of the time. I gave it to someone else who was using 9x and it did the same thing.
Someone in my family bought an Audigy 2 for some reason and it wasn't usable for a while because Creative doesn't put any of their drivers on their web site for their hardware! Only driver updates! If you buy an OEM card or lose the driver CD, you either have to buy a new one from Creative or hope someone on the internet put an image of the disc somewhere. The thing that was particularly sad about this was, just like the SB Live, EAX did NOT work correctly in the majority of games that supported it. Either the sound was coming out of the wrong speaker or some very soft sound was being played at full volume. Pulled out that card and used the onboard Realtec audio codec instead, and magically the positional audio works correctly in EAX games. Horrible. I wish Aureal was still around.
Yeah, I do that too. I also play Tetris on my phone when I get bored and forgot my DS. I don't often need to be contacted every second that I'm away from the wired phone in my room.
Well I use Gentoo on all of my Linux systems. One thing I like about compiling from the source is that I can modify the ebuilds and insert my own small patches on the local system without a lot of work.
The article mentions that the period for data retention is 10 years with PRAM, which seems to be about the same as what's claimed for writable discs (the ones with organic dye.) I was under the impression that flash memory could retain data for a longer period of time? How long can flash memory hold data until it mysteriously disappears?
It works with a can. Pretty cool little catapult. I'd put some soda in it though.. Could launch 5 of them to your programming team without needing to leave your desk!
If they make a DS2 they had better give it the ability to do linear texture filtering. That's just driving me crazy. The DS can currently do antialiasing but not linear filtering!
Well do you have a better idea? Because these have been floating around for a while and I haven't seen anyone try to actually propose alternatives. I think the abbreviations sound cool at any rate (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc.)
Did they measure in exabytes or exbibytes (2^60 bytes)? The difference between 161 exabytes and 161 exbibytes are 24,620,362,241,702,363,136 bytes - about 21.36 exbibytes. Kind of important since the margin of error will only increase as the measured data grows. (Lets stop using the SI units when we don't actually mean it.)
um, well. I run in a user account in XP, so I have to type in the admin password when I want to modify system files. Same thing with Linux unless you're always running as root. I think UAC is making it too easy for you to just arbitrarily modify files in the windows directory.. It doesn't even ask for a password to elevate your permissions.
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I was under the impression that Nvidia's cards were still well ahead of ATI's stuff in terms of price, performance, and quality (mostly concerning the drivers.) At least that's what I'm seeing after reading a bunch of reviews for different generations of fairly recent graphics cards.
Animated violence is not exactly realistic either
At least some parents didn't force their kids to walk to school in the snow uphill.. Both ways!
Well if people are going to get you in trouble for using an program that's known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program (also known as The GIMP), then I wonder how sensitive said people are. Have you tried explaining what the acronym means? I don't have a problem with the name and if anyone asks, it's easily explained.
Radosity is very expensive to compute, uses a lot of memory, etc. That's why it's precomputed. Much like how "light maps" are precomputed for use with static geometry.
Yes, but then you wouldn't get the new controls (hopefully making aiming a lot easier) or the new content. I'm sure glad I didn't have time to play the harder mode on the GameCube version because I really really like this game.
I wish I could, but it would mean rebuying interface cards for all of our computers except one, a new AP (seems to be increasingly hard to find plain APs these days and we need two to cover the entire house), and our DSes only support WEP.
Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows says there's an error with the image and won't display it
Well that's really helpful. It always took me forever to spread the compound evenly on the heat spreader, and I could never get it very even..
Nope, it's still basically an expensive reverb engine. The most recent versions can have multiple presets running at once, but it's not nearly on the same level as Aureal's stuff.
They might have tried to. My old Gateway mini-tower from around 1999 has a Sound Blaster PCI 128D (or some letter) on the motherboard. Seems like Realtek is currently dominating that market though. I'm using the integrated audio on my motherboard (from Realtek, of course) and it sounds just great.
VDMSound can work pretty nicely
I've had really bad experiences with Creative's cards as well. Back in the day their boards were fairly decent (mostly because they could play back digital audio!) today, though, their stuff is sub par. The last Creative card I bought was a SB Live 5.1. It was an incredible pain to deal with. The system slowed down considerably, especially when playing games, while the card was seated in the PCI slot. There was a noticeable difference in performance after pulling it out (disabling it in the device manager didn't do anything.) Also, I tried using it in my computer after I had upgraded it (WinXP now) and it would BSoD all of the time. I gave it to someone else who was using 9x and it did the same thing.
Someone in my family bought an Audigy 2 for some reason and it wasn't usable for a while because Creative doesn't put any of their drivers on their web site for their hardware! Only driver updates! If you buy an OEM card or lose the driver CD, you either have to buy a new one from Creative or hope someone on the internet put an image of the disc somewhere. The thing that was particularly sad about this was, just like the SB Live, EAX did NOT work correctly in the majority of games that supported it. Either the sound was coming out of the wrong speaker or some very soft sound was being played at full volume. Pulled out that card and used the onboard Realtec audio codec instead, and magically the positional audio works correctly in EAX games. Horrible. I wish Aureal was still around.
Yeah, I do that too. I also play Tetris on my phone when I get bored and forgot my DS. I don't often need to be contacted every second that I'm away from the wired phone in my room.
Well I use Gentoo on all of my Linux systems. One thing I like about compiling from the source is that I can modify the ebuilds and insert my own small patches on the local system without a lot of work.
The article mentions that the period for data retention is 10 years with PRAM, which seems to be about the same as what's claimed for writable discs (the ones with organic dye.) I was under the impression that flash memory could retain data for a longer period of time? How long can flash memory hold data until it mysteriously disappears?
It works with a can. Pretty cool little catapult. I'd put some soda in it though.. Could launch 5 of them to your programming team without needing to leave your desk!
If they make a DS2 they had better give it the ability to do linear texture filtering. That's just driving me crazy. The DS can currently do antialiasing but not linear filtering!
Well do you have a better idea? Because these have been floating around for a while and I haven't seen anyone try to actually propose alternatives. I think the abbreviations sound cool at any rate (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc.)
Did they measure in exabytes or exbibytes (2^60 bytes)? The difference between 161 exabytes and 161 exbibytes are 24,620,362,241,702,363,136 bytes - about 21.36 exbibytes. Kind of important since the margin of error will only increase as the measured data grows. (Lets stop using the SI units when we don't actually mean it.)
I can't wait for Sony to say something like: "Yes, rumble is a last generation technology, but this is Force Feedback!"
um, well. I run in a user account in XP, so I have to type in the admin password when I want to modify system files. Same thing with Linux unless you're always running as root. I think UAC is making it too easy for you to just arbitrarily modify files in the windows directory.. It doesn't even ask for a password to elevate your permissions.
You can do the same things with both of them, but Win32 threads are less of a pain in the ass to work with.
Nope. As far as I know, the launch consoles are the best. Every Dreamcast after revision 2, for example, can't boot CD-Rs.