Oh, VR is quite amazing. I guess there's a program to do demos at some Microsoft stores, you might want to check around and see if you can find one in your area.
You put the headset on and you're there. Gamers like to talk about immersion, well I'd go so far as to say I never actually experienced it until I tried out a vive. Most of the stuff out for it now are crappy little demos, some of which work better than others, but Project Cars alone might be worth it if you have the space where you can set up a force feedback steering wheel and pedals. Turns out I drive like a granny in that scenario -- I hit 80 on the track and that's as fast as I want to go.
Apparently they have one of the worst educational systems in the USA too. Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky might be keeping them from dead last. So if you have kids, you won't be doing them any favors by moving there. Unless you live in Alabama, Mississippi or Kentucky.
The question is, does a Thread Ripper outperform a dual or quad core Xeon system, and can you justify the price of the Xeon system for the amount of extra performance you get. If my code doesn't support distributing processing out to the network, having a huge machine with 4 xeons and a mind-boggling amount of RAM on it might be the only way to accomplish what I need to accomplish. You just have to expect you're going to spend a LOT of money for that machine.
I have a system encoding 8 1080p video streams to webm in real time. It's currently running on a dual 10 core (40 threads) Xeon system and has enough processing left over to do some analysis of those video streams (OCR, Image Recognition et al.) I want to test it with a Thread Ripper, which would halve the cost of my processors, to see if it can do at least as well a job as the Xeons do. I'm one of the guys Intel is trying to hang onto.
I haven't checked in a while, but the old Mac Pro was a reasonably cost-effective way to get a multiprocessor Xeon system. I still have a couple of the aluminum towers from the mid 00's kicking around -- one has a 32 bit bootloader for 64 bit hardware, so if you want to run a 64 bit OS on it you have to install some code that thunks driver calls to 32 bits. That one is currently running Ubuntu Linux and is serving as a PBX system for an airport diner. The other one is currently awaiting a new Linux install and will end up being a development and test machine, which it's plenty powerful for.
In the 10-15 years since I purchased those machines, Dell's replaced Apple for my out-of-the-box hardware needs -- I can get better hardware for the same price and they'll frequently offer Linux as an OS install option. Personally I'd usually rather just build my own hardware, but sometimes you just need some hardware immediately. I've gotten some pretty beefy server hardware from Dell and been mightily impressed by it, and am actually dropping some decades-old grudges against the company with the caveat, "They're great as long as you NEVER have to talk to their support people."
So yeah, there are less expensive ways to get better hardware, so unless you have a boner for some of Apple's hardware, there's really not any reason to buy them. Funnily the last time they went all proprietary like this, they almost went bankrupt. Given how popular Linux is now, I'm not sure Microsoft will bail them out if it happens again.
Go out and buy a Pax vaporizer for way less money, way less risk of permanent eye damage and a much better general smoking experience. Funnily enough, a Pax loaded with loose pipe tobacco is a better overall experience than smoking tobacco in a pipe. And of course that's the ONLY WAY I USE IT! Yeah.
We have more time in The Lab than any other VR game, by a solid factor of 5. My room mate loves the bow and arrow game. It's a pretty decent workout, too. 30 rounds of that thing and I'm pooped. I'm currently having a problem that neither of my original Vive controllers want to charge anymore, though. I'm probably going to have to send them off to be fixed:-(
The 32 bit version of Skyrim also works well both with Wine and Proton. If you only have one machine and want to run Linux, you at least have some gaming options now. For me, it's good enough that I don't need to dual boot back to windows for anything anymore. Valve seems pretty committed to making gaming work on Linux, so I think the situation can only improve from here. At some point I think there'll probably be a tipping point where developing a game on Linux is actually easier than doing it on Windows and most publishers will just do that. Maybe wishful thinking, I dunno.
That's like they do. Turns out a high enough dosage of pretty much anything over a long enough period of time will give you cancer. Oddly it only seems to affect male rats that way and even though they get cancer the rats live longer than the control group. That's odd. Someone should probably look into all that a bit more.
The number is much higher than the previous status quo. Remember the bad old days of Loki Games? That was the late '90's, so some of the younger readers might not have been born then. I bought several of their titles back then. They did a Linux convention in Denver in '99 and their CEO was complaining that it took three engineers three days to figure out how to set up a multi-display X11 setup for a flight simulator. They finally threw in the towel a short time later.
Back then, the prognosis for commercial games on Linux was "Whoever wants to port them and Loki." There weren't many who would port them -- Id Software for some of the quake titles are the only ones I can think of. And sure, there were some other options -- you could install mame and play some emulated coin-op and console games. There were some open source ones, graphical and not. There was still a pretty healthy Xtrek community back then. But if you wanted a machine to play games on, you installed windows. Funnily, OSX was in pretty much the same boat as Linux. A few more publishers decided to port to them. But you didn't really buy a Mac to play games anyway. And they were really terrible at pushing 3D. The early aluminum tower would cook the video card to death over the course of a couple of months if you actually tried to.
Fast forward to today, you can confidently install steam on Linux and reasonably expect a new title to just work. Take No Man's Sky. Good example, fairly recent game, pretty unique, works great. Borderlands 2, Stellaris, Factorio, even the old Railroad Tycoon 2 work great, for just a random selection that I have installed on my laptop. About the only thing I've tried installing that absolutely didn't want to work was the 64 bit version of Skyrim.
And a lot of the titles that didn't work before work great with wine. I used to run the 32 bit Skyrim that way. Wine will also run Wow and Eve online flawlessly, again a huge step up from the bad old days.
I still need to test it with the HTC Vive VR and my most commonly played titles for that. If that works even remotely well, I could consider formatting Windows 10 off my gaming system and installing Linux instead. That would have been impossible before now.
It's not just Microsoft. No one actually checks the contents of an ad, they just accept a large briefcase full of cash and serve whatever bytes you make available to them. If this specific case doesn't happen on Google as well as bing, it's just because google has their own adwords for their products.
Is it? Is it really, though? You sure that was the only power source on there? How much would even a capacitor have to store to be useful to a hostile third party?
I have a HTC Vive in my house. I've wanted VR since the '90's and the current generation is pretty awesome. You put the headset on and you're there. There are some games where it works really well and some games where it doesn't. I wish the current generation of headsets had made its way through a couple more iterations before it gave up. A solid wireless headset with a a bit wider FOV and a bit better resolution than the current Vive would have been really nice for the games that I have. A X-Wing game for it might have been the killer app, too, if they could have figured out the vomiting problem.
So if you're ever tempted to take a picture of your penis and send it to someone, keep in mind that US, Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies will all have a picture of your penis the moment you hit "send."
The vive is specifically pretty good for some things. The lab's archery simulator is fantastic. The space pirate trainer is also pretty good. Putting the user in a small environment they can move around in works pretty well, and although the controller is kind of clunky, it does work well for some things. Project cars' VR with a dedicated steering wheel/shifter works remarkably well too. How well does it work? Well I don't feel safe driving the course over 80 MPH, which is what I'm used to from interstate driving in the Western states. That's right, project cars VR with car controls is realistic enough to tickle my driving instincts. Turns out I drive like a granny in racing games and probably would on a real track as well.
What doesn't work well is anything that involves big movement -- the flight simulator I have makes me queasy in a matter of seconds and I don't get motion sick. If it's making me queasy, I imagine the volume of vomit it'll produce from someone who's actually prone to motion sickness. Any big FPS type thing also feels pretty clunky. If you can stand still or move within a fairly small area, you can make a decent game of it. For the tech to really work well, I feel like you need to be able to run without having to to worry about the cable or breaking your kneecaps on the coffee table. If you could do that, it'd be great for getting the next generation of gamers into shape.
I was really looking forward to a higher resolution headset and speced my gaming PC to be able to handle eit, but with HTC's financial trouble and the lack of much new content for the platform, it looks like I'll probably have to wait a while for the next iteration. Too bad, you can really see the potential in the current generation.
With the ability to not get drunk, always pay attention and communicate with every other car on the road, self-driving cars had better have a lower accident rate. In fact, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if the overall number of accidents a year drop into the single digits once self-driving cars are common.
Every year in the USA, around 30K people are killed in traffic accidents. Many more are injured. If you want to drive your car, take it to the track and don't demand that we preserve all that just because you feel like you want to be in control of something. Somehow I suspect that guy's probably not the safest driver in the world anyway.
I'm trying to think of the last time an experiment to try to prove supersymmetry actually worked, and I honestly can't remember one. I do remember a solid handful over the past couple of decades that didn't pan out, though. AFAIK the best argument for supersymmetry at the moment is that someone thinks it would be awesome if things actually were arranged that way. That's pretty much it. At this point I think even string theory is more plausible than supersymmetry, and those guys are as wacky and as out-there as it gets!
It wouldn't be hard to take over the market. Just build a phone that makes an actually pretty good phone and never rings when scammers are calling. If any other features are not at the expense of those two, I'd be all over that phone. The best they can come up with is "A phone for when it's too much of an effort to lift your main phone to your head"?
Well I guess it's nice of them to collect all that data in one place for the hackers. No need to segregate data or anything because, you know, their computers are completely 100% unhackable:/
You watch, there will be absolutely no consequences to whomever was in charge of that shit.
My first boss got one back in '89 or '90. Big old brick of a thing. He loved to wander into the bathroom and take a leak while talking to whoever was on the other side, because that's just the kind of guy he was. By '98 or so they were getting pretty common. You could get a pre-paid one pretty reasonably. In the early to mid '00's, you could get a pretty decent Nokia phone that did most of the stuff recent smart phones do. They were mostly ignored and Apple handily beat them down with the first iPhone. Everyone jumped on the "let's copy Apple" bandwagon about 15 minutes later.
Slashdot Mirror
You put the headset on and you're there. Gamers like to talk about immersion, well I'd go so far as to say I never actually experienced it until I tried out a vive. Most of the stuff out for it now are crappy little demos, some of which work better than others, but Project Cars alone might be worth it if you have the space where you can set up a force feedback steering wheel and pedals. Turns out I drive like a granny in that scenario -- I hit 80 on the track and that's as fast as I want to go.
Apparently they have one of the worst educational systems in the USA too. Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky might be keeping them from dead last. So if you have kids, you won't be doing them any favors by moving there. Unless you live in Alabama, Mississippi or Kentucky.
I have a system encoding 8 1080p video streams to webm in real time. It's currently running on a dual 10 core (40 threads) Xeon system and has enough processing left over to do some analysis of those video streams (OCR, Image Recognition et al.) I want to test it with a Thread Ripper, which would halve the cost of my processors, to see if it can do at least as well a job as the Xeons do. I'm one of the guys Intel is trying to hang onto.
In the 10-15 years since I purchased those machines, Dell's replaced Apple for my out-of-the-box hardware needs -- I can get better hardware for the same price and they'll frequently offer Linux as an OS install option. Personally I'd usually rather just build my own hardware, but sometimes you just need some hardware immediately. I've gotten some pretty beefy server hardware from Dell and been mightily impressed by it, and am actually dropping some decades-old grudges against the company with the caveat, "They're great as long as you NEVER have to talk to their support people."
So yeah, there are less expensive ways to get better hardware, so unless you have a boner for some of Apple's hardware, there's really not any reason to buy them. Funnily the last time they went all proprietary like this, they almost went bankrupt. Given how popular Linux is now, I'm not sure Microsoft will bail them out if it happens again.
A Sale of Two Titties
Go out and buy a Pax vaporizer for way less money, way less risk of permanent eye damage and a much better general smoking experience. Funnily enough, a Pax loaded with loose pipe tobacco is a better overall experience than smoking tobacco in a pipe. And of course that's the ONLY WAY I USE IT! Yeah.
Should OBAMACARE buy SEX ROBOTS for INCELS? Your calls, after this!
We have more time in The Lab than any other VR game, by a solid factor of 5. My room mate loves the bow and arrow game. It's a pretty decent workout, too. 30 rounds of that thing and I'm pooped. I'm currently having a problem that neither of my original Vive controllers want to charge anymore, though. I'm probably going to have to send them off to be fixed :-(
The 32 bit version of Skyrim also works well both with Wine and Proton. If you only have one machine and want to run Linux, you at least have some gaming options now. For me, it's good enough that I don't need to dual boot back to windows for anything anymore. Valve seems pretty committed to making gaming work on Linux, so I think the situation can only improve from here. At some point I think there'll probably be a tipping point where developing a game on Linux is actually easier than doing it on Windows and most publishers will just do that. Maybe wishful thinking, I dunno.
That's like they do. Turns out a high enough dosage of pretty much anything over a long enough period of time will give you cancer. Oddly it only seems to affect male rats that way and even though they get cancer the rats live longer than the control group. That's odd. Someone should probably look into all that a bit more.
Back then, the prognosis for commercial games on Linux was "Whoever wants to port them and Loki." There weren't many who would port them -- Id Software for some of the quake titles are the only ones I can think of. And sure, there were some other options -- you could install mame and play some emulated coin-op and console games. There were some open source ones, graphical and not. There was still a pretty healthy Xtrek community back then. But if you wanted a machine to play games on, you installed windows. Funnily, OSX was in pretty much the same boat as Linux. A few more publishers decided to port to them. But you didn't really buy a Mac to play games anyway. And they were really terrible at pushing 3D. The early aluminum tower would cook the video card to death over the course of a couple of months if you actually tried to.
Fast forward to today, you can confidently install steam on Linux and reasonably expect a new title to just work. Take No Man's Sky. Good example, fairly recent game, pretty unique, works great. Borderlands 2, Stellaris, Factorio, even the old Railroad Tycoon 2 work great, for just a random selection that I have installed on my laptop. About the only thing I've tried installing that absolutely didn't want to work was the 64 bit version of Skyrim.
And a lot of the titles that didn't work before work great with wine. I used to run the 32 bit Skyrim that way. Wine will also run Wow and Eve online flawlessly, again a huge step up from the bad old days.
I still need to test it with the HTC Vive VR and my most commonly played titles for that. If that works even remotely well, I could consider formatting Windows 10 off my gaming system and installing Linux instead. That would have been impossible before now.
It's not just Microsoft. No one actually checks the contents of an ad, they just accept a large briefcase full of cash and serve whatever bytes you make available to them. If this specific case doesn't happen on Google as well as bing, it's just because google has their own adwords for their products.
The Stabinator will be programmed with your preferences. Remember, we're not the bad guys. You are. -Stabco
Is it? Is it really, though? You sure that was the only power source on there? How much would even a capacitor have to store to be useful to a hostile third party?
I have a HTC Vive in my house. I've wanted VR since the '90's and the current generation is pretty awesome. You put the headset on and you're there. There are some games where it works really well and some games where it doesn't. I wish the current generation of headsets had made its way through a couple more iterations before it gave up. A solid wireless headset with a a bit wider FOV and a bit better resolution than the current Vive would have been really nice for the games that I have. A X-Wing game for it might have been the killer app, too, if they could have figured out the vomiting problem.
So if you're ever tempted to take a picture of your penis and send it to someone, keep in mind that US, Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies will all have a picture of your penis the moment you hit "send."
What doesn't work well is anything that involves big movement -- the flight simulator I have makes me queasy in a matter of seconds and I don't get motion sick. If it's making me queasy, I imagine the volume of vomit it'll produce from someone who's actually prone to motion sickness. Any big FPS type thing also feels pretty clunky. If you can stand still or move within a fairly small area, you can make a decent game of it. For the tech to really work well, I feel like you need to be able to run without having to to worry about the cable or breaking your kneecaps on the coffee table. If you could do that, it'd be great for getting the next generation of gamers into shape.
I was really looking forward to a higher resolution headset and speced my gaming PC to be able to handle eit, but with HTC's financial trouble and the lack of much new content for the platform, it looks like I'll probably have to wait a while for the next iteration. Too bad, you can really see the potential in the current generation.
With the ability to not get drunk, always pay attention and communicate with every other car on the road, self-driving cars had better have a lower accident rate. In fact, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if the overall number of accidents a year drop into the single digits once self-driving cars are common.
Every year in the USA, around 30K people are killed in traffic accidents. Many more are injured. If you want to drive your car, take it to the track and don't demand that we preserve all that just because you feel like you want to be in control of something. Somehow I suspect that guy's probably not the safest driver in the world anyway.
I'm trying to think of the last time an experiment to try to prove supersymmetry actually worked, and I honestly can't remember one. I do remember a solid handful over the past couple of decades that didn't pan out, though. AFAIK the best argument for supersymmetry at the moment is that someone thinks it would be awesome if things actually were arranged that way. That's pretty much it. At this point I think even string theory is more plausible than supersymmetry, and those guys are as wacky and as out-there as it gets!
That'll make it easier to shut down suggestions that we use that in our projects. Thanks, MongoDB!
It wouldn't be hard to take over the market. Just build a phone that makes an actually pretty good phone and never rings when scammers are calling. If any other features are not at the expense of those two, I'd be all over that phone. The best they can come up with is "A phone for when it's too much of an effort to lift your main phone to your head"?
You watch, there will be absolutely no consequences to whomever was in charge of that shit.
My first boss got one back in '89 or '90. Big old brick of a thing. He loved to wander into the bathroom and take a leak while talking to whoever was on the other side, because that's just the kind of guy he was. By '98 or so they were getting pretty common. You could get a pre-paid one pretty reasonably. In the early to mid '00's, you could get a pretty decent Nokia phone that did most of the stuff recent smart phones do. They were mostly ignored and Apple handily beat them down with the first iPhone. Everyone jumped on the "let's copy Apple" bandwagon about 15 minutes later.
Something Something government contractors something something lowest bidder.