If it's not a motherboard chipset conflict, try pointing an extra fan at it.
I had a Geforce 4Ti which suffered from nasty screen corruption in some games, which was fixed with the aid of a CPU fan from a 486 blowing air in the general direction of the graphics card.
Yeah, high tech, I know. Even better - said fan was held in place with a mounting bracket from a 386's hard disk.:-)
The fabrication costs for one run of these cards can be huge. Even going with 130 nm technology (which is already "outdated") can cost a million dollars just for the masks. Yield, packaging, and other issues can easily push up the costs to several times that.
I think the already-mentioned FPGAs have shown that it's possible to build hardware that, while not as cheap as a fully mass-produced thing, can still prove fairly cost-effective.
I used to have an Atari ST (actually, still do - except it's only booted up on special occasions). In the dying days of that platform, various enthusiasts took it upon themselves to design their own ultra-fastAtari clones, using a mix of off-the-shelf components and custom designs on FPGAs.
Something tells me that if it's possible for someone to design a whole new machine without millions of dollars to spare, it'll also be possible to design a basic graphics card for running on an FPGA.
But then, why not use some off-the-shelf graphics chip as the heart of the system, and use any profit on the sales of that to help fund the development of a newer design? Or am I just being silly?
What? I could pay for my retirement with my (somewhat less impressive) four-digit UID? It's even got a 'comedic' username for some reason I've long since forgotten. Plus Excellent karma and everything.
It's like watching a movie -- you generally don't watch the movie again right away, but if it's really good, one lazy Sunday afternoon, you'll throw your copy in the media device of your choice, and watch it again, this time noticing things you didn't the first time.
Whoever thought up the idea of 'chapters' for games should be sainted.
It's great being able to hop into a game at a particular part of the plot, without the need to play it from the beginning again. Okay, it wouldn't work with some kinds of games, such as those with RPG features (I'd like to see stuff in Deus Ex again, but I'm not sure I want to play it from the beginning - it's a long game!) but for more conventional FPS games it's lovely...
More happened in HL2 in 13 hours than happened in doom 3 in 20 hours.
Interestingly, it seems that a fair amount of content was cut from HL2, and then what remained polished up for release. Very little from the E3 2003 stuff got into the game intact, for instance.
A game I played recently that was in dire need of some editing-down was Far Cry - there was one point where I thought I'd almost finished the game (rescuing what's-her-name from a war-torn bunker) but it turned out I was only about half-way through, and I almost ended up playing as quickly as I could just to finish the damn thing. I'd probably have appreciated it a bit more if I'd known roughly how much game was left...
Half-Life 2, despite its faults, had an 'ending' you could see from almost the very beginning of the game, that being the Combine Citadel. As you approached it, you knew just how much story (and therefore game) there was left - there was a definite sense of 'direction' to the player's actions which is frequently missing from FPS games.
One thing I'm building at the moment is a single-map HL2 mini-episode set on an island, in a similar vein to my HL map Someplace Else. I rather like building these single-map adventures - the plot and gameplay has to be boiled down into half an hour or so of action, and there's absolutely no excuse for 'filler' or arbitrary corridor-crawling. (Before anyone asks when Phosphenes will be done, the answer's of course 'soon'...)
I'd much rather have half an hour of 'great game' than several hours of boredom...
Given that I recently had a shopping cart on the Apple Store for about £10,000-worth of G5 (plus modish accessories) which I amazingly didn't consummate via credit-card, I wouldn't be too concerned about prospective customers apparently 'abandoning' their goods.
It's not like a offline shop where it's a fair amount of hassle to put stuff back on the shelves, and you'd have least half a pang of guilt if you'd spent the last forty minutes quizzing an assistant about a particular electronic widget without actually buying it - there's absolutely no commitment involved in an online 'shopping card', so 'fantasy shopping' can become a possibility.
Which, for the sake of my credit card, is probably just as well...
Is Darwinia becoming the Katamari Damacy of the PC (and Mac)? Every time someone complains about lack of innovation in gaming, it's always brought up as a counter-example.
Not that I'm complaining, of course - I went out to buy it the day it was released. It's great.:-)
I would bet that, of all the things that might go on with this version Batman, if he is shackled by moral uncertainty the movie won't do so well. People are probably in the mood for a hero who knows what's right and is willing to do terrible things to the bad guys.
Probably a bad idea to have chosen Christopher Nolan to direct it, then. Given that Memento had a main character who may (or may not) have unwittingly been used as a tool by some rather shady characters in order to kill their rivals, and Insomnia had a police officer attempting to conceal his accidental shooting and killing of a colleague, I think 'moral uncertainty' is, erm, a near-certainty in this new Batman film.
Even if Mr. Wayne is certain of his actions, that won't necessarily be portrayed as a good thing...
As a fan of Christopher Nolan's films already, I've been waiting for this new one with some trepidation - I knew it was either going to be awful or awesome. Luckily, from the trailer it appears to be tending towards the latter.:-)
I think the whole voice recognition without having to configure it for your voice is pretty slick. I want a Mac.
The stuff in MacOS X Panther is great fun too - I've just switched it on for a laugh (System Preferences, Speech, Speech Recognition), and it works quite well.
Although I just asked it to switch to Mail and it started iMovie instead. I'm not sure if it's faulty speech recognition or it's just trying to annoy me.
There's also the (singular) Antonov An-225, which is even bigger still, albeit in a limited number of just one.
I saw it fly at an air-show (Farnborough) many years ago - it's (a) very big, (b) very loud, and (c) has lots and lots of wheels. When I saw it, it still had the lumps on its back for carrying the Russian Space Shuttle.
I think it's still the heaviest plane in the world, even with the Airbus A380 around - 600 tonnes as opposed to a maximum 560, or something like that...
I think the moral of this story is that all jokes done with 127.0.0.1 have been done before - in your case, you beat me by a whole four minutes with a near-identical punchline...
Inotify is a replacement for dnotify. With both you can watch for a file for changes. You can even watch a directory for changes.
I've seen the older dnotify thing at work in KDE, and even that seemed to work much better than the equivalent in MacOS X on my iBook. I've frequently saved a file from Safari, gone to attach it in Mail only to find it's not present in the file selection dialogue box (that I've opened after saving the file). A quick click on the desktop makes things update, but it's bloody annoying.
I've noticed that open source solutions to problems like this often iterate through various designs, starting from a quick hack, moving on to something with more features grafted on and then an occasional redesign or two before something much longer-lasting and full-featured comes into being. I suppose the lesser need for backwards-compatibility helps a lot - you can kill a crap design and rewrite any (open source) software which used it, instead of having to keep it until the end of time in the style of Windows...
According to the Winhec keynote, Metro will be an integral part of Longhorn. Apparently, everything printable in Longhorn is a Metro document, or can be made one with ease... hey! Kind of like how everything printable in OS X is a PDF.
Or like everything printable on my nearly 20-year-old old Atari ST can be a vector.GEM metafile.
Metafiles are hardly a new idea (.WMF, Windows MetaFile, anyone?) and Longhorn's rendering subsystem obviously needed some modern way of dumping the data to disk...
There is still the slight matter of the online authentication, but I suppose with all the datafiles not being encrypted and not tied to any one machine, there had to be some way to lock things down...
Steam's quite interesting as a working implementation of DRM for software. You get a surprising number of 'fair-use' privileges (you can make backups, you can install on as many machines as you like from just a username and password so long as you only play on one at a time, etc.) but there are some serious failings (it's all tied to Valve's authentication system, the offline system is somewhat lacking, and it's very difficult to lend or sell the purchased software to someone else).
The other thing that other submitters noted was that AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well; but for display on partner sites.
I've seen graphical Google ads for a while - I think they were followed by bits of text saying something like 'What do you think of these? We're testing them' or similar.
Of course, I can't for the life of me remember where I saw them - anyone else seen these adverts, or was I imagining them?
I do remember that they were relatively small and non-Flash - and much smaller than the whopping big Google AdSense advert at the top of Slashdot as I type this...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
If it's not a motherboard chipset conflict, try pointing an extra fan at it.
:-)
I had a Geforce 4Ti which suffered from nasty screen corruption in some games, which was fixed with the aid of a CPU fan from a 486 blowing air in the general direction of the graphics card.
Yeah, high tech, I know. Even better - said fan was held in place with a mounting bracket from a 386's hard disk.
The fabrication costs for one run of these cards can be huge. Even going with 130 nm technology (which is already "outdated") can cost a million dollars just for the masks. Yield, packaging, and other issues can easily push up the costs to several times that.
I think the already-mentioned FPGAs have shown that it's possible to build hardware that, while not as cheap as a fully mass-produced thing, can still prove fairly cost-effective.
I used to have an Atari ST (actually, still do - except it's only booted up on special occasions). In the dying days of that platform, various enthusiasts took it upon themselves to design their own ultra-fast Atari clones, using a mix of off-the-shelf components and custom designs on FPGAs.
Something tells me that if it's possible for someone to design a whole new machine without millions of dollars to spare, it'll also be possible to design a basic graphics card for running on an FPGA.
But then, why not use some off-the-shelf graphics chip as the heart of the system, and use any profit on the sales of that to help fund the development of a newer design? Or am I just being silly?
Another person bought the account.
;-)
What? I could pay for my retirement with my (somewhat less impressive) four-digit UID? It's even got a 'comedic' username for some reason I've long since forgotten. Plus Excellent karma and everything.
So, starting bids at 20 pence...
It's like watching a movie -- you generally don't watch the movie again right away, but if it's really good, one lazy Sunday afternoon, you'll throw your copy in the media device of your choice, and watch it again, this time noticing things you didn't the first time.
Whoever thought up the idea of 'chapters' for games should be sainted.
It's great being able to hop into a game at a particular part of the plot, without the need to play it from the beginning again. Okay, it wouldn't work with some kinds of games, such as those with RPG features (I'd like to see stuff in Deus Ex again, but I'm not sure I want to play it from the beginning - it's a long game!) but for more conventional FPS games it's lovely...
More happened in HL2 in 13 hours than happened in doom 3 in 20 hours.
Interestingly, it seems that a fair amount of content was cut from HL2, and then what remained polished up for release. Very little from the E3 2003 stuff got into the game intact, for instance.
A game I played recently that was in dire need of some editing-down was Far Cry - there was one point where I thought I'd almost finished the game (rescuing what's-her-name from a war-torn bunker) but it turned out I was only about half-way through, and I almost ended up playing as quickly as I could just to finish the damn thing. I'd probably have appreciated it a bit more if I'd known roughly how much game was left...
Half-Life 2, despite its faults, had an 'ending' you could see from almost the very beginning of the game, that being the Combine Citadel. As you approached it, you knew just how much story (and therefore game) there was left - there was a definite sense of 'direction' to the player's actions which is frequently missing from FPS games.
One thing I'm building at the moment is a single-map HL2 mini-episode set on an island, in a similar vein to my HL map Someplace Else. I rather like building these single-map adventures - the plot and gameplay has to be boiled down into half an hour or so of action, and there's absolutely no excuse for 'filler' or arbitrary corridor-crawling. (Before anyone asks when Phosphenes will be done, the answer's of course 'soon'...)
I'd much rather have half an hour of 'great game' than several hours of boredom...
Given that I recently had a shopping cart on the Apple Store for about £10,000-worth of G5 (plus modish accessories) which I amazingly didn't consummate via credit-card, I wouldn't be too concerned about prospective customers apparently 'abandoning' their goods.
It's not like a offline shop where it's a fair amount of hassle to put stuff back on the shelves, and you'd have least half a pang of guilt if you'd spent the last forty minutes quizzing an assistant about a particular electronic widget without actually buying it - there's absolutely no commitment involved in an online 'shopping card', so 'fantasy shopping' can become a possibility.
Which, for the sake of my credit card, is probably just as well...
ArsTechnia have done a stunning write up on changes in Tiger
:-)
Yeah, I saw that too - I wondered about posting something to this thread, but didn't think anyone would read it.
I wonder if the new Linux inotify stuff can be upgraded for use as the basis for Spotlight-style stuff...
Maybe they'll team up with Activision next? It's not as is they've not done anything together before...
Would probably cut down on the dupes as well.
Nah. They'd probably aggregate the Slashdot RSS feed too...
Is Darwinia becoming the Katamari Damacy of the PC (and Mac)? Every time someone complains about lack of innovation in gaming, it's always brought up as a counter-example.
:-)
Not that I'm complaining, of course - I went out to buy it the day it was released. It's great.
The trick is not to draw what you're supposed to draw.
Actually, the real trick is to upgrade the Darwinians as much as possible, and get them to do the fighting.
They're a bit like the classical Lemmings, only somewhat brighter and armed with lasers and grenades. Excellent!
I would bet that, of all the things that might go on with this version Batman, if he is shackled by moral uncertainty the movie won't do so well. People are probably in the mood for a hero who knows what's right and is willing to do terrible things to the bad guys.
:-)
Probably a bad idea to have chosen Christopher Nolan to direct it, then. Given that Memento had a main character who may (or may not) have unwittingly been used as a tool by some rather shady characters in order to kill their rivals, and Insomnia had a police officer attempting to conceal his accidental shooting and killing of a colleague, I think 'moral uncertainty' is, erm, a near-certainty in this new Batman film.
Even if Mr. Wayne is certain of his actions, that won't necessarily be portrayed as a good thing...
As a fan of Christopher Nolan's films already, I've been waiting for this new one with some trepidation - I knew it was either going to be awful or awesome. Luckily, from the trailer it appears to be tending towards the latter.
Sorry, it's the computer that does the terrible knock-knock jokes. And they really are truly awful...
I think the whole voice recognition without having to configure it for your voice is pretty slick. I want a Mac.
The stuff in MacOS X Panther is great fun too - I've just switched it on for a laugh (System Preferences, Speech, Speech Recognition), and it works quite well.
Although I just asked it to switch to Mail and it started iMovie instead. I'm not sure if it's faulty speech recognition or it's just trying to annoy me.
"Computer, tell me a joke..."
There's also the (singular) Antonov An-225, which is even bigger still, albeit in a limited number of just one.
I saw it fly at an air-show (Farnborough) many years ago - it's (a) very big, (b) very loud, and (c) has lots and lots of wheels. When I saw it, it still had the lumps on its back for carrying the Russian Space Shuttle.
I think it's still the heaviest plane in the world, even with the Airbus A380 around - 600 tonnes as opposed to a maximum 560, or something like that...
Anyone else remember warez.phantom.com?
No, but I found one which still works...
I think the moral of this story is that all jokes done with 127.0.0.1 have been done before - in your case, you beat me by a whole four minutes with a near-identical punchline...
Sounds rather familiar to me...
I think the problem's more that it's been done so many times before.
To add a bit of variation, the more clueful admin could have given a joke hostname, like one some wit at my university set up many years ago...
warez.mcc.ac.uk - "loads of stuff, but I've got it all already!"
Is the inclusion of trusted computing a good thing here? Many people in the /. crowd didn't seem to like the idea of it's inclusion in Windows...
I think the complaints about locking machines down are more in who gets the keys...
Inotify is a replacement for dnotify. With both you can watch for a file for changes. You can even watch a directory for changes.
I've seen the older dnotify thing at work in KDE, and even that seemed to work much better than the equivalent in MacOS X on my iBook. I've frequently saved a file from Safari, gone to attach it in Mail only to find it's not present in the file selection dialogue box (that I've opened after saving the file). A quick click on the desktop makes things update, but it's bloody annoying.
I've noticed that open source solutions to problems like this often iterate through various designs, starting from a quick hack, moving on to something with more features grafted on and then an occasional redesign or two before something much longer-lasting and full-featured comes into being. I suppose the lesser need for backwards-compatibility helps a lot - you can kill a crap design and rewrite any (open source) software which used it, instead of having to keep it until the end of time in the style of Windows...
According to the Winhec keynote, Metro will be an integral part of Longhorn. Apparently, everything printable in Longhorn is a Metro document, or can be made one with ease... hey! Kind of like how everything printable in OS X is a PDF.
.GEM metafile.
Or like everything printable on my nearly 20-year-old old Atari ST can be a vector
Metafiles are hardly a new idea (.WMF, Windows MetaFile, anyone?) and Longhorn's rendering subsystem obviously needed some modern way of dumping the data to disk...
From epoch-making films to, erm, ewok-mating films?
Eww.
Must ... Reinvent ... Self ... ;-)
It just makes me feel uneasy not owning a hard copy of a game I legally posess.
In the case of Steam-purchased software, you can make as many backups of the GCF files as you like, however you like. It's even got features for sizing backup files for CDR or DVD.
There is still the slight matter of the online authentication, but I suppose with all the datafiles not being encrypted and not tied to any one machine, there had to be some way to lock things down...
Steam's quite interesting as a working implementation of DRM for software. You get a surprising number of 'fair-use' privileges (you can make backups, you can install on as many machines as you like from just a username and password so long as you only play on one at a time, etc.) but there are some serious failings (it's all tied to Valve's authentication system, the offline system is somewhat lacking, and it's very difficult to lend or sell the purchased software to someone else).
the ipod carrying generation finaly has the wealth to make a difference
;-)
Especially in the UK. Have you seen the prices of downloaded tracks?
For the iTunes Music Store, it's £0.79. According to current exchange rates, in US dollars that's $1.51...
I suppose at least they didn't do the more common $1 = £1.
The other thing that other submitters noted was that AdSense would also be accepting graphical advertising as well; but for display on partner sites.
;-)
I've seen graphical Google ads for a while - I think they were followed by bits of text saying something like 'What do you think of these? We're testing them' or similar.
Of course, I can't for the life of me remember where I saw them - anyone else seen these adverts, or was I imagining them?
I do remember that they were relatively small and non-Flash - and much smaller than the whopping big Google AdSense advert at the top of Slashdot as I type this...