wisdom_brewing said pretty much everything I would, but I'll add a car analogy:
A Ferrari F430 is not a terribly efficient car, but if you use up a whole gallon of gasoline going to the store 2 miles away, that's inefficient, but still more efficient than pouring only a pint of gasoline on your driveway and lighting it with a match. Less consumption does not equal better efficiency.
Here's a rewording of my original statement, to counteract your sarcasm: "Running BOINC on a computer that would otherwise be sitting idle helps improve its energy efficiency. It may be consuming electricity, but at least then it's doing something."
250MB/s is just below the theoretical limit of SATA 3Gb/s, which is 300MB/s. It's possible that there are still other bottlenecks beside the hard drive.
I also have seen SSD RAID benchmarks somewhere, but I don't remember where.
Plus in colder climates the cost of electricity for running the computer is directly offset by the amount saved on using other sources of heat, whether they be electric, oil-based, or gas-based.
At my parents' house in New Hampshire, my bedroom regularly got to 45 degrees in the winter if the door was closed and no electronics were on, because my room was across the house from the furnace. I'd turn on my computer, overclock my video card, and play games until my room temperature was closer to 60F. Overnight, I'd leave it on with BOINC running to keep it at a reasonable 55F.
I can guarantee that several orders of magnitude more kWh are consumed by computers that are needlessly on and idle.
Running BOINC on a computer that's sitting idle helps improve its energy efficiency. It may be consuming electricity, but at least then it's doing something.
As for the "increment the version number each time there's a code change" -- that would make a change that fixes the typo "teh" to "the" equally "important" with respect to the version number as a change that fixes a problem that crashes the entire program.
Most typo fixes involve a larger difference than most "Crap, I forgot to change that" fixes.
Incrementing the build number is usually done with a combination of source control software, and a regression system; you check in your code changes, and a backend system detects a new source control revision, and makes a new build, whether this revision only contains typo fixes, or a critical bugfix.
Sell a USB drive that's approximately 2 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet in size. The drive will consist of a radiation-shielded box. Inside, there's a flask filled with poison, and a hammer connected to a Geiger counter. There's also a cat with a heart monitor. If the flask breaks and the cat dies, then the drive will self-destruct.
Hell, there are games on the SNES that are more attractive than a lot of PS3/360 games.
That's because PS3/360 games are filled with ultra-realistic dirt, metal, and gravel, so your eyes get filled with brown and grey instead of red, green, and blue.
Even though the graphics are more modern, graphics have nothing to do with the scariest parts of Half-Life 2. For some people, the Fast Zombies make scary noises, and that's true. For me though, the scariest part of the game, or any game for that matter, are the sounds made by poison headcrabs. Their rattle and screech sends me into immediate "panic mode", and my priorities change immediately so that #1 on the list is killing them.
All that for an enemy that can't actually kill you.
The poison zombies also have an extremely haunting call, which brings about fear and trepidation rather than the sense of immediacy that the poison headcrabs give. They're scary as hell, so I always use an explosive on them right away.
Hell, I think Half-Life even supported colored lighting, although I can't remember for certain.
Correct. The HL engine supported RGB values. This is seen most prominently in the "Lambda Core" chapter, with yellow-based lighting, and in "Xen", with lots of different colored lights.
When they die, they fall down much more smoothly than anything I'd seen before.
By the later versions of Counterstrike, they included directionality in the death animations, which was considered the best possible solution without implementing ragdoll physics.
For a good look at the capabilities of the Half-Life engine, look at Counterstrike: Condition Zero. It came out in early 2004, and even though the engine looked dated even at the time, Turtle Rock did a good job of pushing the engine's limits.
I forget where I heard it, but someone recently said something to the effect of "Many math nerds have lost plenty of money because they saw the stock market as a simple system of cause and effect."
Personally, I'd rather Kim Jong-Il and the middle eastern royalty that you hate so much spend their money on cars made by Europeans than what they usually spend it on.
The best way to become a game dev is to do it at home on the weekends. Assuming you already know how to program, start off making simple 2D games, like Pong and Breakout clones, working through Mario and Street Fighter clones, towards the more complicated games. If you don't find it incredibly boring, then keep going, because you may be able to make a career out of it.
Most people who start developing a game on their own find that it's either too tedious, or that they don't want to bother making art (which is necessary, as at least half of making a modern game is done by artists).
Under Ubuntu I currently use Wine, and as ctaranto says, if you add the WineHQ repository, you'll have the latest version.
However, my main problem with trying to run games under Wine currently is my hardware; I'm running on a 5-year-old machine, and the games I want to play (Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead) barely run at acceptable framerates under Windows, let alone Wine.
My specs: P4 3.2 (the old Socket 478 version), 1GB DDR400 RAM, GF 6600GT AGP. All of my interfaces are at least one generation away from current, so I plan on replacing the machine soon. When I upgrade my hardware, I'm going to try running Linux full-time, running my games under Wine. I think it should be do-able, as I've moved most of my apps over to open-source over the past couple years anyway, even under Windows.
Well, hopefully this could put people over the edge to use Linux full-time (myself included). Many people currently use Windows for gaming, and don't dual-boot because it's a hassle. If I could run in Linux 24/7, and run my games without rebooting, either in a VM or in Wine, that would be excellent.
Another option for aerobic exercise: jump rope. Back when I did karate, that was our main aerobic exercise because there's not much else you can do in a 400 sq. ft. room...
Sure, but you aren't going to get a quality rip that way. Pointing a camera at the screen is going to produce incredibly shitty results even compared to DVD. Do you really want to invite your friends round for a movie night and then show them a camcorded super compressed rip? It might be OK for personal use if you don't care about quality at all, but then a camcorded copy from a cinema will work just as well.
He's talking about grabbing the uncompressed digital signal, for example having a screen-capture program running on your computer when you start a movie. It's not as ideal as grabbing the original compressed signal, in a decrypted form, but it still works. For a typical DVD, for instance, instead of taking the original MPEG-2 signal and decrypting the CSS, you could dump the movie into an uncompressed video. Assuming 24-bit color, that would make a 160GB video for a 90-minute video in NTSC.
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wisdom_brewing said pretty much everything I would, but I'll add a car analogy:
A Ferrari F430 is not a terribly efficient car, but if you use up a whole gallon of gasoline going to the store 2 miles away, that's inefficient, but still more efficient than pouring only a pint of gasoline on your driveway and lighting it with a match. Less consumption does not equal better efficiency.
Here's a rewording of my original statement, to counteract your sarcasm:
"Running BOINC on a computer that would otherwise be sitting idle helps improve its energy efficiency. It may be consuming electricity, but at least then it's doing something."
TFA said "nearly saturating", but regardless...
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=24
250MB/s is just below the theoretical limit of SATA 3Gb/s, which is 300MB/s. It's possible that there are still other bottlenecks beside the hard drive.
I also have seen SSD RAID benchmarks somewhere, but I don't remember where.
Plus in colder climates the cost of electricity for running the computer is directly offset by the amount saved on using other sources of heat, whether they be electric, oil-based, or gas-based.
At my parents' house in New Hampshire, my bedroom regularly got to 45 degrees in the winter if the door was closed and no electronics were on, because my room was across the house from the furnace. I'd turn on my computer, overclock my video card, and play games until my room temperature was closer to 60F. Overnight, I'd leave it on with BOINC running to keep it at a reasonable 55F.
I can guarantee that several orders of magnitude more kWh are consumed by computers that are needlessly on and idle.
Running BOINC on a computer that's sitting idle helps improve its energy efficiency. It may be consuming electricity, but at least then it's doing something.
They'll have to hurry, before Ubuntu takes a cat name from under their feet; 10.04 is the "L" release, which might take up "Lion" or "Lynx"!
As for the "increment the version number each time there's a code change" -- that would make a change that fixes the typo "teh" to "the" equally "important" with respect to the version number as a change that fixes a problem that crashes the entire program.
Most typo fixes involve a larger difference than most "Crap, I forgot to change that" fixes.
Incrementing the build number is usually done with a combination of source control software, and a regression system; you check in your code changes, and a backend system detects a new source control revision, and makes a new build, whether this revision only contains typo fixes, or a critical bugfix.
Here's my idea:
Sell a USB drive that's approximately 2 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet in size. The drive will consist of a radiation-shielded box. Inside, there's a flask filled with poison, and a hammer connected to a Geiger counter. There's also a cat with a heart monitor. If the flask breaks and the cat dies, then the drive will self-destruct.
Would you be willing to buy my product?
Maybe he was speaking in Middle English!
In this context, "Yea" is a perfectly acceptable word to use when starting a sentence.
Jesus, you young punks even made HHGTG a G movie, WTF?
The director was born in 1972. He's not a part of my generation! ;)
I didn't like Doom 3, but I got it in an "id Software Package" on Steam for cheap.
Hell, there are games on the SNES that are more attractive than a lot of PS3/360 games.
That's because PS3/360 games are filled with ultra-realistic dirt, metal, and gravel, so your eyes get filled with brown and grey instead of red, green, and blue.
Even though the graphics are more modern, graphics have nothing to do with the scariest parts of Half-Life 2. For some people, the Fast Zombies make scary noises, and that's true. For me though, the scariest part of the game, or any game for that matter, are the sounds made by poison headcrabs. Their rattle and screech sends me into immediate "panic mode", and my priorities change immediately so that #1 on the list is killing them.
All that for an enemy that can't actually kill you.
The poison zombies also have an extremely haunting call, which brings about fear and trepidation rather than the sense of immediacy that the poison headcrabs give. They're scary as hell, so I always use an explosive on them right away.
Hell, I think Half-Life even supported colored lighting, although I can't remember for certain.
Correct. The HL engine supported RGB values. This is seen most prominently in the "Lambda Core" chapter, with yellow-based lighting, and in "Xen", with lots of different colored lights.
When they die, they fall down much more smoothly than anything I'd seen before.
By the later versions of Counterstrike, they included directionality in the death animations, which was considered the best possible solution without implementing ragdoll physics.
For a good look at the capabilities of the Half-Life engine, look at Counterstrike: Condition Zero. It came out in early 2004, and even though the engine looked dated even at the time, Turtle Rock did a good job of pushing the engine's limits.
Ah, thank you. I thought it might have been XKCD, but searching for "stock" and "market" didn't find me that strip.
I forget where I heard it, but someone recently said something to the effect of "Many math nerds have lost plenty of money because they saw the stock market as a simple system of cause and effect."
Personally, I'd rather Kim Jong-Il and the middle eastern royalty that you hate so much spend their money on cars made by Europeans than what they usually spend it on.
Technically, Deep Impact was released first, so he must be talking about that movie.
The best way to become a game dev is to do it at home on the weekends. Assuming you already know how to program, start off making simple 2D games, like Pong and Breakout clones, working through Mario and Street Fighter clones, towards the more complicated games. If you don't find it incredibly boring, then keep going, because you may be able to make a career out of it.
Most people who start developing a game on their own find that it's either too tedious, or that they don't want to bother making art (which is necessary, as at least half of making a modern game is done by artists).
Under Ubuntu I currently use Wine, and as ctaranto says, if you add the WineHQ repository, you'll have the latest version.
However, my main problem with trying to run games under Wine currently is my hardware; I'm running on a 5-year-old machine, and the games I want to play (Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead) barely run at acceptable framerates under Windows, let alone Wine.
My specs: P4 3.2 (the old Socket 478 version), 1GB DDR400 RAM, GF 6600GT AGP. All of my interfaces are at least one generation away from current, so I plan on replacing the machine soon. When I upgrade my hardware, I'm going to try running Linux full-time, running my games under Wine. I think it should be do-able, as I've moved most of my apps over to open-source over the past couple years anyway, even under Windows.
Well, hopefully this could put people over the edge to use Linux full-time (myself included). Many people currently use Windows for gaming, and don't dual-boot because it's a hassle. If I could run in Linux 24/7, and run my games without rebooting, either in a VM or in Wine, that would be excellent.
Yes, but how do you know if the potential factors are prime? Do you keep a giant list/table, or do you attempt to factor the potential prime?
Another option for aerobic exercise: jump rope. Back when I did karate, that was our main aerobic exercise because there's not much else you can do in a 400 sq. ft. room...
Except that because there's no HDCP, you'd be taking in a standard-definition copy of the movie from your component cables.
Far too often the author/publisher doesn't care.
They are content to let works just "rot in the vault".
As seen with Doctor Who, and a bunch of other programs the BBC produced back in the day.
Sure, but you aren't going to get a quality rip that way. Pointing a camera at the screen is going to produce incredibly shitty results even compared to DVD. Do you really want to invite your friends round for a movie night and then show them a camcorded super compressed rip? It might be OK for personal use if you don't care about quality at all, but then a camcorded copy from a cinema will work just as well.
He's talking about grabbing the uncompressed digital signal, for example having a screen-capture program running on your computer when you start a movie. It's not as ideal as grabbing the original compressed signal, in a decrypted form, but it still works. For a typical DVD, for instance, instead of taking the original MPEG-2 signal and decrypting the CSS, you could dump the movie into an uncompressed video. Assuming 24-bit color, that would make a 160GB video for a 90-minute video in NTSC.