I have to say something in reply to this as I've recently been talking with some other long term roleplayers about different products & different Publishers...
We decided that most games (even GURPS the generic roleplaying system) have their niches which they do well... Outside of those niches some systems break & some just aren't fun...
<a href="www.wizards.com">D&D</a> is good at fantasy settings & as their Star wars RPG shows it starts to lack when asked to do something else...
<a href="www.sjgames.com">GURPS</a> does alot of settings well, but is more complex & so looses it's fun when you try not to be complex... For instance it's vehicle rules are better than most, but it's a drawn out process to flesh out a GURPS vehicle, so unless you find that complexity fun it's not for you...
<a href="www.guardiansorder.on.ca">BESM & SAS</a> are designed for Anime/Manga style games (BESM or Big Eyes Small Mouth) & Silver age comics based games (SAS or Silver Age Sentinels). BESM is horrible at modeling real world situations & SAS isn't much better...
<a href="www.palladiumbooks.com">Rifts</a> & the other related Palladium games/licenses did a good job of modeling the settings desired, but due to the lack of depth in equipment things have gone to the power gamers & munchkins who abuse the rules...
<a href="http://www.white-wolf.com/">White Wolf's WoD</a> games are good at forcing roleplay, but combat isn't very defined & equipment/skills are simplistic...
I could go on, but if you look at the examples you may see the pattern... Certain systems model certain things & situations better than others. The idea shouldn't be that one RPG publishing company is better or hungrier, or newer, or anything... It should be that you look at each systems unique advantages & disadvantages & pick the best to meet the needs of the group...
Actually I'd argue that approval voting still doesn't get rid of the need for a 'nota' choice... Sure I could vote for as many people as I want, but what if I don't want any of the choices? I've refrained from voting because I have no choice worth choosing, not because I don't want to vote...
You know Outlaw star was actually my second thought after seeign a quick clip on TV the otehr day (I was bored what can I say?)... It was right after cowboy bebop... As well as quickly followed by such other shows as Andromeda & Farscape... As well as a few others... I'm just hoping he might make me want to watch something on TV again (I loved the whole Buffy series, but was forced to tune out at season 4 due to station issues)... I've watched most of the ones I've listed above & if he can fix the few issues I've had with those shows I may have finally found something to watch again...
COuld be worse... I'm only 24 & I've never seen this... I've heard of the game, but uh... dancing at arcades? that's a new one... Maybe cuz all the arcades locally have dried up & blown away... sigh... It's been rather sad really...
Maybe you need to learn how to properly install & setup drivers?
I have only run ATI cards for the last 3 years & I never have any problems beyond what you see with the occasional game here or there (which also effects Nvidia)... (Radeon 32MB, Radeon 64MB VIVO, & currently a Radeon 8500LE if your curious)
Because of work I also run WIn XP Pro at home & their drivers don't crash my system...
I ahve noticed as a tech that dumb people can't ever seem to install a driver properly... How you screw it up I'm still uncertain, but somehow they always do...
Where I work we sell cards with both Nvidia & Ati chips... People come back complaining how they couldn't install both types of cards (or that they wouldn't run after installed). I can then spend 5 minutes & have their system up & running with their new hardware...
I'm wasn't sure which site the article was on... It was either Ace's Hardware or ArsTechnica... Unfortunately I still don't know because I haven't had the time to go check around in back articles on each site...
I do remember they were talking about the way current memory controllers (then on some VIA & AMD boards, the article itself was talking about asyncronous vs synchronous memory) and the path used to reach the memory that multiplied the base latency (those CAS/RAS latencies really) of the whole system...
having the controller on the chip & optimizing the path to the memory you drop the extra cycles it would take as the data moves thorugh the system...
Do you know that Intel spent roughly 700 million on advertising last year...? Do you realize that AMD made 2.7 billion (that is before expenses). Add to that how Intel is adding more than 200 Million more to their ad budget this year to fight against hammer (by 'helping' white box vendors & some other new monoplistic ways of advertising)...
I'd love to see AMD ads more often, but lets be a bit more realistic... Intel spends almost a third of the total earnings of AMD for a year on advertising... AMD couldn't keep up with that unless they were much bigger...
That may be, but if you want to take a look at some of the serious articles on ememory & clock latency (from the CPU's perspective) you'd realize why they are adding the memory controller where they are. A 'normal' SDRAM memory controller on a VIA or AMD motherboard for instance can easily take 70+ cpu cycles before returnign the required data... So unless the cpu has other data to process (which fits into the cache) then it just sits there til it has the data requested... With a cpu built-in memory controlelr of this sort (especially if they allow tolerences for faster rated memory within the existing class) could lower the latency down to say 6 cycles...
This is great for memory intensive & system intensive tasks (from gaming to high demand servers)...
Actually if you remember back a year or twop ago you'd realize they already have a cross-licensing deal with AMD which would entitle them to use x86-64 if desired without further hassle... Of course Intel may prefer you forget that til they need to use it...
It can very well be from a certain point of view... I mean Japan has had HiDef standards for digital TV for a few years now & I personally cannot stand the resolution of conventional TV sets (I can literally see the pixels in nearly all cases). I new standard should have hapened years ago, but everyone wants to be a bloody fool and not accept a increase in quality...
As for your points... 1) "in the comfort of your own home" I don't own my own home as I don't make enough to live in a home I own (& frankly most people don't really own their homes either, more people rent or have mortgage payments on where ever they live, which means a bank owns what they live in)... 2) see point #1 3) "in a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world" Sure their are places where survival alone is a challenge, but this is and probably always will be the case. That's not a reason to not complain about something in your culture... 4) I never said what level of suffering I was reffering to, & you decided I meant in the extreme sense apparently... Well I didn't mean it in that way... Though if you want to start talking about the levels of suffering and suffering in the context of culture I'd be happy to write a few pages worth of ideas on the subject...
That's awfully nice if you can stomach those god-awful 525 scan lines at all of 30 fps with your mono speaker... If I watch a movie I'd rather have my HDTV signal providing 720 vertical lines @ 60 fps or 1024 vertical lines @ 30 fps with a full surround sound system... Heck even all my Anime on DVD has higher resolution and sound than you want...
If you want to suffer go ahead, just don't screw it up for the rest of us...
Ok would you like to tell me who I should be voting for when all the possibilities are so screwed in the head as to cause more harm then good?
Almost every politician from county gov up tends to be a bought and paid for supporter of their re-election and pocket books...
If I had someone to vote for I would vote. No candidate cares about me or my issues so I'm not given a real choice (I'm given equally bad choices). That's not really a choice at all.
I still (I've said this beofre) think we need to cause a stir by getting people not to vote... Who wins an election if neither side has a single vote? You know are whole system expects people to vote and so their is no consideration for such a thing happening... Hence I want it to happen. Maybe it would wake some people up to the fact that none of the choices were good enough to earn votes and that maybe the most money on election compaigns doens't win votes...
But no peopel would rather have us decide between equal horrid politicans who equally don't care about real people.
It could also be because of the assets they claimed from 3dfx coming into play... This is the time when we are supposed to start seeing results from the influx of 3dfx tech from them...
Maybe you aren't pushing a Voddoo 2 to it's limits where you work... But people Like John Carmack complain about the lack fo perfromance with most modern cards every time they decide to start upgrading their graphics engine for the next game...
Easy start going to gamespy & their affiliates. The reviews are normally a little more in depth even, it's doubtful they'll ever want to charge you for reviews, & their is more than reviews you can access.
So why use gamespot if they want to charge you?
Anymore I just use Gamepsy & Gamefaqs for all my gaming needs...
Um out of curiosity isn't Allegany National park in Alleghany? I ask because I went through their not all that long ago (a year? 2 at most...) & I didn't see any indication of a difference in sales tax...
I've been in most of PA from where I live in NW PA to as far direct south to the border & as far se as Philly. In all the time I've driven aroudn PA I've never had anyone try to charge me more than 6% sales tax...
Huh, I guess PA is different but it's a flat 6% here no matter where you go... Ohio is similiar (but a different %), NY is also like that... hmm... Virginia is also like that... I can't remember any more sales tax figures, but most in my experience have been flat taxes no matter what county your in...
I gotta say Red Dwarf & Tripping the Rift don't have very much in common at all...
Not unless I have compeltely misssed the fact that Red Dawrf is a Star Trek/Star Wars spoof with a truly tastless american style (not that the style wasn't funny, but)...?
Apparently you don't pay much attention to what AMD says... When they first released the XP Athlon's they made quite a big deal about how their rating was to compare to previous Athlon cpu's & doesn't (at all) compare to Intel's Ghz ratings... So far the XP's ratings would actually be far under their equivalent P4, only northwood P4's are starting to correct that...
Well I can testify (& so could some of the network or system admins I know online) that the AMD dual cpu boards are pretty solid... Tyan's boards are still the most server oriented & still the best choice for a AMD server system...
Heck one system admin I know uses AMD dual cpu systems in his companies render farm...
Lightwave used to be an AMD benchmark til Intel funded their 'development' of 'optimizations'... Flask with optimized executables for both cpu's still shows AMD trailing by only a couple points, with non-optimized executables the Athlon wins...
Intel is just realizing that they can fund their way into supremecy by heavy optimization for their systems alone...
AMD is still the champ for power users as well... I know an entire forum of people with OC'ed Athlon's competing to see who can get their system running the fastest... a Athlon XP @ 2 Ghz (not to uncommon) can beat an OCed P4 Northwood @ 2.6 Ghz (somewhat uncommon) in almsot all benches...
If AMD made most of their own chipsets for their cpu's then you could ciritize their chipset issues... But they don't 3rd parties make their own athlon/DUron supporting chipsets based on specs AMD gives them... If they don't live up to those specs then AMD isn't at fault. AMD's own chipsets have been very stable overall with less erratia than Intel's average chipsets...
As for Intel's 'R&D'... LOL, Intel has been lossing ground in the only way we have of evaluating this.... AMD has outpaced them in this area consistantly for the last 4 years now! Not to mention AMD's open standards (such as 3dnow!) compared to Intel's restricted 'standards' (such as SSE)... There are more examples, but please... This being listed as a positive aspect of Intel is laughable...
& please, please, stop spreading that FUD about AMD chips running so hot that it can't loose it's HSF or it will just instantly die is such complete & utter crap... It just needs to die... I have (more than once) accidently not had my fan powered up for a number of reasons (like forgetting to reconnect the power cable to it, etc. during an upgrade). Has my cpu died? No. Sure in my case I had a heatsink on it, but please we haven't been able to not have fans on cpu's since the early 486 days... I've started up my Athlon system, booted the OS, proceeded to use my PC for hours, & even played UT! with out my fan running... Eventually playing UT (not anything else) caused a bios screen to pop-up stating the cpu was exceeding it's maximum temp specified in bios & the system would now shutdown...
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I have to say something in reply to this as I've recently been talking with some other long term roleplayers about different products & different Publishers...
We decided that most games (even GURPS the generic roleplaying system) have their niches which they do well... Outside of those niches some systems break & some just aren't fun...
<a href="www.wizards.com">D&D</a> is good at fantasy settings & as their Star wars RPG shows it starts to lack when asked to do something else...
<a href="www.sjgames.com">GURPS</a> does alot of settings well, but is more complex & so looses it's fun when you try not to be complex... For instance it's vehicle rules are better than most, but it's a drawn out process to flesh out a GURPS vehicle, so unless you find that complexity fun it's not for you...
<a href="www.guardiansorder.on.ca">BESM & SAS</a> are designed for Anime/Manga style games (BESM or Big Eyes Small Mouth) & Silver age comics based games (SAS or Silver Age Sentinels). BESM is horrible at modeling real world situations & SAS isn't much better...
<a href="www.palladiumbooks.com">Rifts</a> & the other related Palladium games/licenses did a good job of modeling the settings desired, but due to the lack of depth in equipment things have gone to the power gamers & munchkins who abuse the rules...
<a href="http://www.white-wolf.com/">White Wolf's WoD</a> games are good at forcing roleplay, but combat isn't very defined & equipment/skills are simplistic...
I could go on, but if you look at the examples you may see the pattern... Certain systems model certain things & situations better than others. The idea shouldn't be that one RPG publishing company is better or hungrier, or newer, or anything... It should be that you look at each systems unique advantages & disadvantages & pick the best to meet the needs of the group...
Actually I'd argue that approval voting still doesn't get rid of the need for a 'nota' choice... Sure I could vote for as many people as I want, but what if I don't want any of the choices? I've refrained from voting because I have no choice worth choosing, not because I don't want to vote...
You know Outlaw star was actually my second thought after seeign a quick clip on TV the otehr day (I was bored what can I say?)... It was right after cowboy bebop... As well as quickly followed by such other shows as Andromeda & Farscape... As well as a few others... I'm just hoping he might make me want to watch something on TV again (I loved the whole Buffy series, but was forced to tune out at season 4 due to station issues)... I've watched most of the ones I've listed above & if he can fix the few issues I've had with those shows I may have finally found something to watch again...
COuld be worse... I'm only 24 & I've never seen this... I've heard of the game, but uh... dancing at arcades? that's a new one... Maybe cuz all the arcades locally have dried up & blown away... sigh... It's been rather sad really...
This would seem when Van's COMPREHENSIVE OPEN SOURCE BENCHMARK INITIATIVE (COSBI) would be useful... You could always get in touch with Van about helping out the project...
Maybe you need to learn how to properly install & setup drivers?
I have only run ATI cards for the last 3 years & I never have any problems beyond what you see with the occasional game here or there (which also effects Nvidia)... (Radeon 32MB, Radeon 64MB VIVO, & currently a Radeon 8500LE if your curious)
Because of work I also run WIn XP Pro at home & their drivers don't crash my system...
I ahve noticed as a tech that dumb people can't ever seem to install a driver properly... How you screw it up I'm still uncertain, but somehow they always do...
Where I work we sell cards with both Nvidia & Ati chips... People come back complaining how they couldn't install both types of cards (or that they wouldn't run after installed). I can then spend 5 minutes & have their system up & running with their new hardware...
I'm wasn't sure which site the article was on... It was either Ace's Hardware or ArsTechnica... Unfortunately I still don't know because I haven't had the time to go check around in back articles on each site...
I do remember they were talking about the way current memory controllers (then on some VIA & AMD boards, the article itself was talking about asyncronous vs synchronous memory) and the path used to reach the memory that multiplied the base latency (those CAS/RAS latencies really) of the whole system...
having the controller on the chip & optimizing the path to the memory you drop the extra cycles it would take as the data moves thorugh the system...
Do you know that Intel spent roughly 700 million on advertising last year...? Do you realize that AMD made 2.7 billion (that is before expenses). Add to that how Intel is adding more than 200 Million more to their ad budget this year to fight against hammer (by 'helping' white box vendors & some other new monoplistic ways of advertising)...
I'd love to see AMD ads more often, but lets be a bit more realistic... Intel spends almost a third of the total earnings of AMD for a year on advertising... AMD couldn't keep up with that unless they were much bigger...
That may be, but if you want to take a look at some of the serious articles on ememory & clock latency (from the CPU's perspective) you'd realize why they are adding the memory controller where they are. A 'normal' SDRAM memory controller on a VIA or AMD motherboard for instance can easily take 70+ cpu cycles before returnign the required data... So unless the cpu has other data to process (which fits into the cache) then it just sits there til it has the data requested... With a cpu built-in memory controlelr of this sort (especially if they allow tolerences for faster rated memory within the existing class) could lower the latency down to say 6 cycles...
This is great for memory intensive & system intensive tasks (from gaming to high demand servers)...
Actually if you remember back a year or twop ago you'd realize they already have a cross-licensing deal with AMD which would entitle them to use x86-64 if desired without further hassle... Of course Intel may prefer you forget that til they need to use it...
It can very well be from a certain point of view... I mean Japan has had HiDef standards for digital TV for a few years now & I personally cannot stand the resolution of conventional TV sets (I can literally see the pixels in nearly all cases). I new standard should have hapened years ago, but everyone wants to be a bloody fool and not accept a increase in quality...
As for your points...
1) "in the comfort of your own home"
I don't own my own home as I don't make enough to live in a home I own (& frankly most people don't really own their homes either, more people rent or have mortgage payments on where ever they live, which means a bank owns what they live in)...
2) see point #1
3) "in a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world"
Sure their are places where survival alone is a challenge, but this is and probably always will be the case. That's not a reason to not complain about something in your culture...
4) I never said what level of suffering I was reffering to, & you decided I meant in the extreme sense apparently... Well I didn't mean it in that way... Though if you want to start talking about the levels of suffering and suffering in the context of culture I'd be happy to write a few pages worth of ideas on the subject...
That's awfully nice if you can stomach those god-awful 525 scan lines at all of 30 fps with your mono speaker... If I watch a movie I'd rather have my HDTV signal providing 720 vertical lines @ 60 fps or 1024 vertical lines @ 30 fps with a full surround sound system... Heck even all my Anime on DVD has higher resolution and sound than you want...
If you want to suffer go ahead, just don't screw it up for the rest of us...
Ok would you like to tell me who I should be voting for when all the possibilities are so screwed in the head as to cause more harm then good?
Almost every politician from county gov up tends to be a bought and paid for supporter of their re-election and pocket books...
If I had someone to vote for I would vote. No candidate cares about me or my issues so I'm not given a real choice (I'm given equally bad choices). That's not really a choice at all.
I still (I've said this beofre) think we need to cause a stir by getting people not to vote... Who wins an election if neither side has a single vote? You know are whole system expects people to vote and so their is no consideration for such a thing happening... Hence I want it to happen. Maybe it would wake some people up to the fact that none of the choices were good enough to earn votes and that maybe the most money on election compaigns doens't win votes...
But no peopel would rather have us decide between equal horrid politicans who equally don't care about real people.
I second that... I can make more working a non-IT job in PA (& I do)...
It could also be because of the assets they claimed from 3dfx coming into play... This is the time when we are supposed to start seeing results from the influx of 3dfx tech from them...
Maybe you aren't pushing a Voddoo 2 to it's limits where you work... But people Like John Carmack complain about the lack fo perfromance with most modern cards every time they decide to start upgrading their graphics engine for the next game...
Um Gamespot is & has been owned by the same people that own several retail chains for console & PC games. So they've been biased for awhile...
But Game Spot doesn't have anything to do with Gamespy's Arcade. Gamespy (which is a site & it's afffiliates itself) deals in the Gamespy arcade.
Easy start going to gamespy & their affiliates. The reviews are normally a little more in depth even, it's doubtful they'll ever want to charge you for reviews, & their is more than reviews you can access.
So why use gamespot if they want to charge you?
Anymore I just use Gamepsy & Gamefaqs for all my gaming needs...
Um out of curiosity isn't Allegany National park in Alleghany? I ask because I went through their not all that long ago (a year? 2 at most...) & I didn't see any indication of a difference in sales tax...
I've been in most of PA from where I live in NW PA to as far direct south to the border & as far se as Philly. In all the time I've driven aroudn PA I've never had anyone try to charge me more than 6% sales tax...
Huh, I guess PA is different but it's a flat 6% here no matter where you go... Ohio is similiar (but a different %), NY is also like that... hmm... Virginia is also like that... I can't remember any more sales tax figures, but most in my experience have been flat taxes no matter what county your in...
I gotta say Red Dwarf & Tripping the Rift don't have very much in common at all...
Not unless I have compeltely misssed the fact that Red Dawrf is a Star Trek/Star Wars spoof with a truly tastless american style (not that the style wasn't funny, but)...?
Apparently you don't pay much attention to what AMD says... When they first released the XP Athlon's they made quite a big deal about how their rating was to compare to previous Athlon cpu's & doesn't (at all) compare to Intel's Ghz ratings... So far the XP's ratings would actually be far under their equivalent P4, only northwood P4's are starting to correct that...
Well I can testify (& so could some of the network or system admins I know online) that the AMD dual cpu boards are pretty solid... Tyan's boards are still the most server oriented & still the best choice for a AMD server system...
Heck one system admin I know uses AMD dual cpu systems in his companies render farm...
Lightwave used to be an AMD benchmark til Intel funded their 'development' of 'optimizations'... Flask with optimized executables for both cpu's still shows AMD trailing by only a couple points, with non-optimized executables the Athlon wins...
Intel is just realizing that they can fund their way into supremecy by heavy optimization for their systems alone...
AMD is still the champ for power users as well... I know an entire forum of people with OC'ed Athlon's competing to see who can get their system running the fastest... a Athlon XP @ 2 Ghz (not to uncommon) can beat an OCed P4 Northwood @ 2.6 Ghz (somewhat uncommon) in almsot all benches...
If AMD made most of their own chipsets for their cpu's then you could ciritize their chipset issues... But they don't 3rd parties make their own athlon/DUron supporting chipsets based on specs AMD gives them... If they don't live up to those specs then AMD isn't at fault. AMD's own chipsets have been very stable overall with less erratia than Intel's average chipsets...
As for Intel's 'R&D'... LOL, Intel has been lossing ground in the only way we have of evaluating this.... AMD has outpaced them in this area consistantly for the last 4 years now! Not to mention AMD's open standards (such as 3dnow!) compared to Intel's restricted 'standards' (such as SSE)... There are more examples, but please... This being listed as a positive aspect of Intel is laughable...
& please, please, stop spreading that FUD about AMD chips running so hot that it can't loose it's HSF or it will just instantly die is such complete & utter crap... It just needs to die... I have (more than once) accidently not had my fan powered up for a number of reasons (like forgetting to reconnect the power cable to it, etc. during an upgrade). Has my cpu died? No. Sure in my case I had a heatsink on it, but please we haven't been able to not have fans on cpu's since the early 486 days... I've started up my Athlon system, booted the OS, proceeded to use my PC for hours, & even played UT! with out my fan running... Eventually playing UT (not anything else) caused a bios screen to pop-up stating the cpu was exceeding it's maximum temp specified in bios & the system would now shutdown...
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