Indeed. I'm not a naval historian but I believe Titanic sunk because of multiple factors, not just one or two.
Titanic was cruising too fast for the conditions.
There were more bergs than usual.
The sea was too calm to spot the berg before it was too late.
Titanic's rudder was too small to turn the ship in time.
Titanic's middle prop (driven by a steam turbine, not reciprocating engines) could not be reversed, which combined with the reversed outer props caused bad turbulence for the rudder, causing the ship to turn even slower.
The berg only barely punctured the fifth compartment, which eventually caused the ship to founder. Had it only been four compartments, the ship would've survived.
And, the sinking became a legendary naval disaster because of many more factors.
Not enough lifeboats for everyone, which was entirely normal at the time.
Women and children only policy, which caused half-filled lifeboats to leave the ship.
Radio not being listened at all times while at sea, which caused the nearest ship to not hear Titanic's pleas for help. (The lights mentioned in the animation.)
Emergency signal rockets not being respected, which caused the same.
There was a third Olympic-class vessel, called the Britannic, that sailed into a mine during WW1 and sunk. Because of favorable circumstances, only 30 people out of over 1000 on board were lost. Ships sink. What we have to do as a civilization is to do our best so that sinkings don't become disasters. The Titanic disaster prompted many actions toward that goal, which helped with Britannic also. And we are constantly improving and reminded about these things by events such as the sinking of the Costa Concordia.
Any user's decision for a browser is pretty much made already. There's no "browser war" to be had. That's a good thing: in the past it was like that because IE had terrible rendering issues, bad usability and common security issues. These days the overall browser landscape is less black and white, and for web developers it matters less which client the user is running.
Basically I see the choice of browser like this:
If you're clueless about IT, uninfluenced by peers and just need to run something, you most likely will run IE11 or Edge (Windows) or Safari (iOS / MacOS). Either will probably do what you need. Web developers don't really care which it is; both render stuff quite fine.
In the enterprise environment, legacy compatibility steps into play. Occasionally that means IE9 for legacy and company-endorsed alternative for everything else. Alternative tends to mean Firefox because enterprise tends to avoid being in another company's pocket unless they really really really have to (Microsoft, IBM, etc).
Those who care at home, will probably give up Edge within 1-2 days because it's missing essential features like ad-blocking and UI nice-to-haves like getting to choose your download location.
The alternative browser choice probably ends up being Chrome if the user doesn't care about privacy stuff and Firefox if they do care. Otherwise the browsers are quite comparable.
As a part-time web developer I'm happy that IE9 is almost dead; everything else is relatively inconsequential in comparison. From my personal perspective I'd like Edge to be just slightly more competitive. Firefox is getting worse all the time (bad performance, terrible reliability, increasing bloat, breaking of old features like Firefox Sync). Google is too spooky for me to switch to Chrome. Edge would be very interesting if it was just a little bit better.
On a 4K display, antialiasing is already completely pointless. It's uses a huge amount of rendering horsepower for a blur effect that is impossible to notice without A/B comparisons. Competent system testers use it in benchmarks only to put more load on the systems, and incompetent ones to prove that SLI/CF builds are inadequate for 4K. Popular but incompetent review sites like IGN like to do that latter part regularly, which is really counterproductive because it only increases FUD and slows down 4K adoption.
Personally, I've been running games in 4K without antialising since 2013. First with an overclocked GTX 660 which required lowering the fidelity settings of new games. Afterwards, with a single GTX 980 which could run every game on maxed settings. About 6 months ago I built a GTX 980 SLI rig which could handle some useless antialising too, but instead I elect to put the cards in powersave mode which makes the rig quiet while gaming.
Disclaimer: 4K particularly on maxed settings will require you to forget about "stable 60fps" because high end graphics settings like that cause framerate drops unrelated to raw GPU performance.
Having used a 55" 4K 60Hz panel (Sony 55X9005A) as my gaming display since 2013, I can say that high resolution gaming is pretty much the same thing as high refresh rate gaming or VR gaming: you won't "get it" until you try it.
Furthermore, in my time I've observed three primary types of gamers:
"graphics & performance don't matter" gamers
"resolution & fidelity is everything" gamers
"fps & low latency is everything" gamers
If you're not in category 2 then I'm afraid you'll never "get" these very expensive high end products/builds nor do you need to.
People who are a balanced combination of categories 2 and 3 are the populous target audience of Asus, MSI, Alienware, etc etc and those people keep those companies afloat. It's not the high end customers who are interested in dual GPU setups or 4K at this time.
It runs on some people's laptops (not even gaming laptops) at reasonable quality settings and resolutions like 1080p. That makes it easier than most to run at high resolutions on a desktop gaming PC. It's caused by two things. Firstly it's obviously well optimized, and secondly, sometimes it looks like crap for a 2015 game. Which is because the base game is from... 2013? And for consoles. The best example of it is during the tutorial, when you get in a car that looks like things haven't moved on at all since GTA: San Andreas. Overall, the game is a mixed bag of great high poly models, average models, and terrible eyesore models.
On my PC it's the easiest game of late to run at 4K. It runs smoothly on GTX 980 SLI without sweating the GPUs. But it has some very strange framedropping happening occasionally which I can't pinpoint but would assume is the content streaming tech working (badly). In terms of system resources it might be VRAM running out and having to be repopulated, since the GTX980 is light on VRAM (only 4 gigs). The other hardware should be fine (i7 5930k at 4,2 GHz, 32 gigs of DDR4, 1TB SSD with more than a third of it empty).
The 4K experience in GTA V isn't as incredible as all the hype makes it out to be. It's nice for detail in certain scenarios (cutscenes with closeups of people, flying, offroading, looking out in the distance). Otherwise 4K works much better in open world environments with lush foliage and high details, like the latest Dragon Age, Skyrim, Tomb Raider and so on. 1080p just can't resolve the details of foliage and that makes the 4K experience so amazing. GTA on the other hand is mostly cityscapes, desert and ocean and while it's nice at 4K, it's not mindblowing, because it's old hat by 2015.
I have a couple of screenshots on my onedrive if you want to have a look. It's at 4K almost maxed settings - yes, even the Ultra settings which some people have missed. IIRC one of the advanced sliders didn't go all the way up because the VRAM-meter very helpfully prevented it. Anyway, compare the graphical fidelity to Inquisition for example, and judge for yourself.
Re:Solution looking for a problem?
on
Apple Watch Launches
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Like any smartwatch the purpose is to get notifications on your wrist. It's super useful when your hands are full, you're driving, you don't want to start digging for your phone, you want to know whether the notification is actionable, and so on.
It's also well implemented. I tried the beta with a friend a few days before the final release. It has a way shorter delay than Twitch, about 8-10 seconds only (last time I broadcast with Twitch, the delay was something like double that). It was also very stable and bandwidth-efficient, both for the broadcaster and the viewer. It didn't stop to buffer even once during our test stream which was on full quality (I think about 3000kbps - a very nice quality 1080p gamestream). Both of us were on quite normal broadband connections, and quite regularly suffer unstable streams with Twitch. I think the only criticism from the broadcasting side was that it caused some microstuttering in some games, like Skyrim. In others it doesn't do that. I also doubt it's ever going to be as light as a streaming mechanism as ShadowPlay, but I hope I'll be proven wrong on that one.
What Steam reviews are actually filled with is information about the games... exactly what you should be interested in, as opposed to a score or a conclusion of some kind.
The aggregate score in the style of "very positive" etc. can be useful in filtering out the genuinely terrible games, but outside of that, not so much. What's needed for decisionmaking is a lot of information, a search engine, and your own thinking. Steam provides descriptions, tags, and now reviews, and for me anyway it's been incredibly easy lately to figure out whether I want to buy a particular game, or at least investigate it closer elsewhere.
Scores are almost completely worthless. Doesn't matter what kind they are (Metacritic, user review average, magazine review score). Steam has already done enough for the scoring system. What is there to fix? IMHO they should concentrate on important things like search, GUI and customer service, all of which are pretty terrible for 2014.
I don't think they mentioned official battery capacity or battery life numbers, but they did say "very easy to charge at night". That tells me it has 1 day of battery just like the Moto 360.
Honestly, the battery is the worst part of smartwatches currently. It ruined the Moto 360 for me and it comes close to ruining to Apple Watch, if it actually is only 1 day.
I would settle for 3 days, my Sony sw2 goes 4 days without charging. I was expecting the same from Apple, looking at the criticisms of the Android Wear watches which are all focused on the 1-2 day battery life. I don't want to charge a watch every night!! I get it, it has a nice screen and it's slim, and it's running a lot of sensors and wireless transactions, but still... just awful battery life!
I hope the phone and watch will work better than their webcast. It was terrible. Worst I've seen in years. You'd think with Apple's resources they could manage a big webstream without dropped connections, website going down, audio tracks on top of one another, constant buffering, etc.
To be fair, it's not quite so dire. There are plenty of shooters that do things differently. Shooters with RPG elements, shooters with stealth elements, shooters with puzzle elements... To ignore those is unfair because your ideas will probably fall into the same category - shooters with a twist (or many twists) to make them a little different than (most of) the shooters that came before.
My favourite shooters over the last few years have been "shooters with a twist". I've still got a backlog of them. There are more coming out all the time, just some are more polished than others, and some fit my tastes better than others. In fact, taking everything into account, I honestly think now is the most exciting time period ever to be a gamer. Powerful gaming hardware readily available, really deep games being made and being successful, big companies taking gaming very seriously, VR finally maturing, DRM as an annoyance has been reduced in a major way since the 2000s, indies are blossoming, PC games are really cheap really fast after release... the list goes on.
90% of any industry is crap, especially in the software industry. It's so easy to make a buck selling promises in the software industry - games included - that a lot of companies do it.
I would be more worried about console hardware limitations, ridiculous budgets and the fact that a lot of shooters have super-dark or gross worldbuilding lately. It's bad enough that the real world is not doing great, now suddenly games have to have grim stories and apocalyptic worlds too. Also, gaming as a hobby is just as uncool as ever.
When the door is open there is a huge drain to direct water etc. from the roof to the ground (around the actual doorway).
Also when the door is open, the far end of the door is hovering outside the range where water etc. could drip inside the car.
In addition (unlike traditional car doors) when the door is open, it's hovering above the gap, acting as a roof, so that the actual rain doesn't get inside the car either.
Since Youtube was taken over by Google, server speed has increased immensely, they've moved to HD, they've removed time limits on videos, they've allowed live streaming of shows, they've given away hundreds of millions of dollars through the partnership program they introduced (including many shows that are simply vlogs)... Et cetera.
I have a rather more cynical view of that. Better latency, HD, longer videos and live streaming are basically all just effects of one good thing, better servers. That's probably the only good thing that Google has given to Youtube.
I don't count the partnership program as good. Basically it radically influences channel content for the worse. Either it introduces money, which ruins everything*, or it introduces legal protection from U.S. entities which makes for some pretty bland content**.
* I'm a viewer of some channels that thrive on the partnership program (Drive Network and TotalBiscuit for example) and they all do worse and worse the more money is involved. Instead of being fueled by passion they are fueled by ratings and money. Which is what utterly killed Hollywood and Television for me and got me into Youtube in the first place. Examples from the Drive Network: the three-minute car reviews, which are blatantly not at home on that channel, and the product placement (like Pirelli) / advertisement videos that pop up every once in a while. Examples from TB: where to even begin. Makes videos based solely on the highest ratings, to the point where it comes close to ruining his personal life. Adjusts video content and kills off series based on how much revenue they bring in and not based on what he enjoys playing/shooting, which blatantly shows in his commentary.
** Partnership channels are pretty strictly regulated in regards to what they can show in their videos. They are trying to dodge takedown requests like this one and copyright strikes which may stop their cash intake. So... anything remotely inflammatory or controversial that could be in any way interpreted as slander, copyright infringement, etc... just won't appear on a channel like this any more.
Also: the GP was right about the ridiculous "updates". They're almost all terrible. The layout changes, the default setting changes, the player changes... Just the facts that buffering still doesn't work, quality settings were broken for months, subscriptions break all the time, are all great examples of the incompetency of the devs or the misguided priorities over there. Youtube is constantly becoming more corporate, better at generating revenue, and worse for the users. And users hate it more all the time and only use it because hardly anyone could ever afford to make a better Youtube clone.
The greatest thing Youtube has introduced lately is HTML5 compatibility and I have complete confidence Youtube could've and would've implemented that without Google's "help".
I've actually got a Sony X9005A as a desktop display for my PC and no, the 29Hz refresh rate does not make it "unimpressive". If you're looking for getting impressed then the resolution will vastly overpower the refresh rate. When you have a window-like view to your games, photos etc. you just instinctively ignore the slow refresh.
The worst thing is probably the input lag introduced by the low refresh rate. The thing has one of the lowest input lag scores on the market, but the slow refresh still makes cursor input really laggy. It's not the kind of lag you see but the kind you feel. It's gone if you switch to 1080p, but you won't if you have a 4K panel, will you.
FWIW the Sony supports hdmi 2.0 and thus 4k@60fps, but good luck finding a GPU that outputs it. I'm stuck waiting for the eventual NV GTX 800 series which probably will. NVIDIA haven't even confirmed it.
On the topic of Youtube, I thought they'd supported 4K since 2010. In fact 4K vids on Youtube were one of the first materials I tested my panel on. They stream fine over 24mbps ADSL2 but the bitrate is not great (the vids are noisy).
Interestingly, major European news outlets aren't running with this either. At least not the ones I checked (BBC in the UK, N24 in Germany, YLE in Finland).
Though that may be more due to the copy & paste culture of major news outlets these days.
However, Russia Today and Japan Times are frontpaging this story just as you would expect.
I don't think the problems are gone from the NVIDIA side. The CPU might drive the GPU well but the motherboard might not. Let me explain.
For the past month I've been reviving an old system originally built for office duties and photo/video editing. That included a move from a PATA HDD to an SSD, and a new GPU. The old GPU was a GTX 280 that had to be underclocked manually at every boot for it to work.
The system is now ASUS P5K Deluxe Wi-Fi motherboard with Intel P35 chipset Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 CPU ASUS GTX 650 TOP GPU Chieftec TX series 650W PSU
The system gives no signal even in POST. The system boots normally (I can hear the OS sounds from the speakers and can interact with the OS) but there is never a signal to the monitor. This is with both DVI and HDMI cables. The system and display work fine with the GTX 280, but as soon as I swap in the GTX 650, there's no signal.
The P5K Deluxe has some relevant BIOS settings which I tried to preset before swapping in the new GPU, but that was a no-go.
I tried another PSU, a Chieftec HX series 650W, which I know to be faultless, again no signal. I also tried a recent ATI video card (I think it was a 7550 or 7750) and that gave no signal as well. I also got no signal with a GTX 560 from the same manufacturer as the 650.
The machine works fine-ish with a GTX 280, just not with Kepler GPUs. All of this may just be a non-compatibility between old ASUS motherboards and new GPUs, meaning by default they should work, but the fact remains, the old machine won't work with the new GPU.
The rage has continued for a few days now and it's no longer just about the unbelievable initial MT lineup that they put in. The focus has shifted almost completely to how CCP seems unable to handle the PR disaster, and how there appears to be a force as of yet unknown at the higher levels of the company that puts emphasis on maximizing revenue and screwing the playerbase over in the process. The senior producer is widely acknowledged as a nice guy and having a similar mindset to veteran players, but the devblog he posted reeks of committee writing and of the CEO in particular, according to some CSM members. This kind of strange behavior and obvious businesstype meddling, in addition to widely known inhouse problems like a serious lack of professionalism and poor quality of workmanship, has the players worried that CCP as a company is turning into a catastrophic trainwreck and the future and wellbeing of their beloved hobby is in danger.
To play devil's advocate for a second, seeing as though the courts dismissed the case, and the legwork was done by the ESA (not exactly competent in catching drug dealers), I think very few actual crimefighting man-hours were lost here... Unless you count the prosecution's time, in which case, if I as a foreigner understand correctly, there's still no shortage of lawyers in the U.S.
One thing, though. Ever played EVE Online? Let me tell you a little story.
The game's got some issues. Mainly technological (it lags like hell under a special set of circumstances) and some to do with game content, balancing, etc. These are other issues but the point is, they have existed for years.
When they were identified as serious problems by the community, for a while there was a wall of silence from the game makers (CCP). For some issues this went on for years, months for some. All the while the community whined away through every channel available to them, most publicly on the game's official forums. At some point the whining had gone on long enough without response that the hopelessness became an in-joke.
Recently, EVE has gained popularity and matured as a product. As a result, CCP has grown and matured as well. And so, they now have some more-or-less strict and very public standards for fixing important issues. What they do now is put together teams of specially hired developers with skills in problems of a specific nature, and assign that team a specific issue. The aforementioned lag, for instance.
What this means for the players is that the issues I was talking about have started to get fixed. There's steady improvement that's visible to the naked eye. All the while, game development goes on normally by the actual developers according to their internal roadmap. Fixing issues goes on in parallel.
Every time there's a new version of EVE, with shiny new features and goodies like ships or other content, there's handful of noisy idiots who start whining on the forums about fixing lag, game balance, the UI or whatever. They demand that CCP halt whatever they are doing until the lag etc. are fixed. Even though the developers are mostly in no way up to to the task like the actual issue-fixing-teams are. Those whine posts on the forums are among the most annoying stuff you could possibly read on there.
Now...
"Whoever enforce IP laws are full of shit, they should be out fixing real issues like murder, like the FBI/police homicide divisions are."
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. I'm not a naval historian but I believe Titanic sunk because of multiple factors, not just one or two.
And, the sinking became a legendary naval disaster because of many more factors.
There was a third Olympic-class vessel, called the Britannic, that sailed into a mine during WW1 and sunk. Because of favorable circumstances, only 30 people out of over 1000 on board were lost. Ships sink. What we have to do as a civilization is to do our best so that sinkings don't become disasters. The Titanic disaster prompted many actions toward that goal, which helped with Britannic also. And we are constantly improving and reminded about these things by events such as the sinking of the Costa Concordia.
Any user's decision for a browser is pretty much made already. There's no "browser war" to be had. That's a good thing: in the past it was like that because IE had terrible rendering issues, bad usability and common security issues. These days the overall browser landscape is less black and white, and for web developers it matters less which client the user is running.
Basically I see the choice of browser like this:
As a part-time web developer I'm happy that IE9 is almost dead; everything else is relatively inconsequential in comparison. From my personal perspective I'd like Edge to be just slightly more competitive. Firefox is getting worse all the time (bad performance, terrible reliability, increasing bloat, breaking of old features like Firefox Sync). Google is too spooky for me to switch to Chrome. Edge would be very interesting if it was just a little bit better.
The resolution matters more than the 4:2:0 chroma. Try it with A/B testing.
On a 4K display, antialiasing is already completely pointless. It's uses a huge amount of rendering horsepower for a blur effect that is impossible to notice without A/B comparisons. Competent system testers use it in benchmarks only to put more load on the systems, and incompetent ones to prove that SLI/CF builds are inadequate for 4K. Popular but incompetent review sites like IGN like to do that latter part regularly, which is really counterproductive because it only increases FUD and slows down 4K adoption.
Personally, I've been running games in 4K without antialising since 2013. First with an overclocked GTX 660 which required lowering the fidelity settings of new games. Afterwards, with a single GTX 980 which could run every game on maxed settings. About 6 months ago I built a GTX 980 SLI rig which could handle some useless antialising too, but instead I elect to put the cards in powersave mode which makes the rig quiet while gaming.
Disclaimer: 4K particularly on maxed settings will require you to forget about "stable 60fps" because high end graphics settings like that cause framerate drops unrelated to raw GPU performance.
Having used a 55" 4K 60Hz panel (Sony 55X9005A) as my gaming display since 2013, I can say that high resolution gaming is pretty much the same thing as high refresh rate gaming or VR gaming: you won't "get it" until you try it.
Furthermore, in my time I've observed three primary types of gamers:
If you're not in category 2 then I'm afraid you'll never "get" these very expensive high end products/builds nor do you need to.
People who are a balanced combination of categories 2 and 3 are the populous target audience of Asus, MSI, Alienware, etc etc and those people keep those companies afloat. It's not the high end customers who are interested in dual GPU setups or 4K at this time.
If you don't mind my asking, what's the difference between QA and preprod for you?
It runs on some people's laptops (not even gaming laptops) at reasonable quality settings and resolutions like 1080p. That makes it easier than most to run at high resolutions on a desktop gaming PC. It's caused by two things. Firstly it's obviously well optimized, and secondly, sometimes it looks like crap for a 2015 game. Which is because the base game is from... 2013? And for consoles. The best example of it is during the tutorial, when you get in a car that looks like things haven't moved on at all since GTA: San Andreas. Overall, the game is a mixed bag of great high poly models, average models, and terrible eyesore models.
On my PC it's the easiest game of late to run at 4K. It runs smoothly on GTX 980 SLI without sweating the GPUs. But it has some very strange framedropping happening occasionally which I can't pinpoint but would assume is the content streaming tech working (badly). In terms of system resources it might be VRAM running out and having to be repopulated, since the GTX980 is light on VRAM (only 4 gigs). The other hardware should be fine (i7 5930k at 4,2 GHz, 32 gigs of DDR4, 1TB SSD with more than a third of it empty).
The 4K experience in GTA V isn't as incredible as all the hype makes it out to be. It's nice for detail in certain scenarios (cutscenes with closeups of people, flying, offroading, looking out in the distance). Otherwise 4K works much better in open world environments with lush foliage and high details, like the latest Dragon Age, Skyrim, Tomb Raider and so on. 1080p just can't resolve the details of foliage and that makes the 4K experience so amazing. GTA on the other hand is mostly cityscapes, desert and ocean and while it's nice at 4K, it's not mindblowing, because it's old hat by 2015.
I have a couple of screenshots on my onedrive if you want to have a look. It's at 4K almost maxed settings - yes, even the Ultra settings which some people have missed. IIRC one of the advanced sliders didn't go all the way up because the VRAM-meter very helpfully prevented it. Anyway, compare the graphical fidelity to Inquisition for example, and judge for yourself.
Like any smartwatch the purpose is to get notifications on your wrist. It's super useful when your hands are full, you're driving, you don't want to start digging for your phone, you want to know whether the notification is actionable, and so on.
It's also well implemented. I tried the beta with a friend a few days before the final release. It has a way shorter delay than Twitch, about 8-10 seconds only (last time I broadcast with Twitch, the delay was something like double that). It was also very stable and bandwidth-efficient, both for the broadcaster and the viewer. It didn't stop to buffer even once during our test stream which was on full quality (I think about 3000kbps - a very nice quality 1080p gamestream). Both of us were on quite normal broadband connections, and quite regularly suffer unstable streams with Twitch. I think the only criticism from the broadcasting side was that it caused some microstuttering in some games, like Skyrim. In others it doesn't do that. I also doubt it's ever going to be as light as a streaming mechanism as ShadowPlay, but I hope I'll be proven wrong on that one.
What Steam reviews are actually filled with is information about the games... exactly what you should be interested in, as opposed to a score or a conclusion of some kind.
The aggregate score in the style of "very positive" etc. can be useful in filtering out the genuinely terrible games, but outside of that, not so much. What's needed for decisionmaking is a lot of information, a search engine, and your own thinking. Steam provides descriptions, tags, and now reviews, and for me anyway it's been incredibly easy lately to figure out whether I want to buy a particular game, or at least investigate it closer elsewhere.
Scores are almost completely worthless. Doesn't matter what kind they are (Metacritic, user review average, magazine review score). Steam has already done enough for the scoring system. What is there to fix? IMHO they should concentrate on important things like search, GUI and customer service, all of which are pretty terrible for 2014.
I don't think they mentioned official battery capacity or battery life numbers, but they did say "very easy to charge at night". That tells me it has 1 day of battery just like the Moto 360.
Honestly, the battery is the worst part of smartwatches currently. It ruined the Moto 360 for me and it comes close to ruining to Apple Watch, if it actually is only 1 day.
I would settle for 3 days, my Sony sw2 goes 4 days without charging. I was expecting the same from Apple, looking at the criticisms of the Android Wear watches which are all focused on the 1-2 day battery life. I don't want to charge a watch every night!! I get it, it has a nice screen and it's slim, and it's running a lot of sensors and wireless transactions, but still... just awful battery life!
I hope the phone and watch will work better than their webcast. It was terrible. Worst I've seen in years. You'd think with Apple's resources they could manage a big webstream without dropped connections, website going down, audio tracks on top of one another, constant buffering, etc.
To be fair, it's not quite so dire. There are plenty of shooters that do things differently. Shooters with RPG elements, shooters with stealth elements, shooters with puzzle elements... To ignore those is unfair because your ideas will probably fall into the same category - shooters with a twist (or many twists) to make them a little different than (most of) the shooters that came before.
My favourite shooters over the last few years have been "shooters with a twist". I've still got a backlog of them. There are more coming out all the time, just some are more polished than others, and some fit my tastes better than others. In fact, taking everything into account, I honestly think now is the most exciting time period ever to be a gamer. Powerful gaming hardware readily available, really deep games being made and being successful, big companies taking gaming very seriously, VR finally maturing, DRM as an annoyance has been reduced in a major way since the 2000s, indies are blossoming, PC games are really cheap really fast after release... the list goes on.
90% of any industry is crap, especially in the software industry. It's so easy to make a buck selling promises in the software industry - games included - that a lot of companies do it.
I would be more worried about console hardware limitations, ridiculous budgets and the fact that a lot of shooters have super-dark or gross worldbuilding lately. It's bad enough that the real world is not doing great, now suddenly games have to have grim stories and apocalyptic worlds too. Also, gaming as a hobby is just as uncool as ever.
you either get rid of advertising and pay to watch each video, or you put up with advertising.
I choose the former. 100%. Now how do I do that on Youtube?
Have a look at how a properly designed gullwing door is designed.
When the door is open there is a huge drain to direct water etc. from the roof to the ground (around the actual doorway).
Also when the door is open, the far end of the door is hovering outside the range where water etc. could drip inside the car.
In addition (unlike traditional car doors) when the door is open, it's hovering above the gap, acting as a roof, so that the actual rain doesn't get inside the car either.
Since Youtube was taken over by Google, server speed has increased immensely, they've moved to HD, they've removed time limits on videos, they've allowed live streaming of shows, they've given away hundreds of millions of dollars through the partnership program they introduced (including many shows that are simply vlogs)... Et cetera.
I have a rather more cynical view of that. Better latency, HD, longer videos and live streaming are basically all just effects of one good thing, better servers. That's probably the only good thing that Google has given to Youtube.
I don't count the partnership program as good. Basically it radically influences channel content for the worse. Either it introduces money, which ruins everything*, or it introduces legal protection from U.S. entities which makes for some pretty bland content**.
* I'm a viewer of some channels that thrive on the partnership program (Drive Network and TotalBiscuit for example) and they all do worse and worse the more money is involved. Instead of being fueled by passion they are fueled by ratings and money. Which is what utterly killed Hollywood and Television for me and got me into Youtube in the first place. Examples from the Drive Network: the three-minute car reviews, which are blatantly not at home on that channel, and the product placement (like Pirelli) / advertisement videos that pop up every once in a while. Examples from TB: where to even begin. Makes videos based solely on the highest ratings, to the point where it comes close to ruining his personal life. Adjusts video content and kills off series based on how much revenue they bring in and not based on what he enjoys playing/shooting, which blatantly shows in his commentary.
** Partnership channels are pretty strictly regulated in regards to what they can show in their videos. They are trying to dodge takedown requests like this one and copyright strikes which may stop their cash intake. So... anything remotely inflammatory or controversial that could be in any way interpreted as slander, copyright infringement, etc... just won't appear on a channel like this any more.
Also: the GP was right about the ridiculous "updates". They're almost all terrible. The layout changes, the default setting changes, the player changes... Just the facts that buffering still doesn't work, quality settings were broken for months, subscriptions break all the time, are all great examples of the incompetency of the devs or the misguided priorities over there. Youtube is constantly becoming more corporate, better at generating revenue, and worse for the users. And users hate it more all the time and only use it because hardly anyone could ever afford to make a better Youtube clone.
The greatest thing Youtube has introduced lately is HTML5 compatibility and I have complete confidence Youtube could've and would've implemented that without Google's "help".
I've actually got a Sony X9005A as a desktop display for my PC and no, the 29Hz refresh rate does not make it "unimpressive". If you're looking for getting impressed then the resolution will vastly overpower the refresh rate. When you have a window-like view to your games, photos etc. you just instinctively ignore the slow refresh.
The worst thing is probably the input lag introduced by the low refresh rate. The thing has one of the lowest input lag scores on the market, but the slow refresh still makes cursor input really laggy. It's not the kind of lag you see but the kind you feel. It's gone if you switch to 1080p, but you won't if you have a 4K panel, will you.
FWIW the Sony supports hdmi 2.0 and thus 4k@60fps, but good luck finding a GPU that outputs it. I'm stuck waiting for the eventual NV GTX 800 series which probably will. NVIDIA haven't even confirmed it.
On the topic of Youtube, I thought they'd supported 4K since 2010. In fact 4K vids on Youtube were one of the first materials I tested my panel on. They stream fine over 24mbps ADSL2 but the bitrate is not great (the vids are noisy).
"Government surveillance"? At least the NSA isn't reading my stuff to figure out how to best sell me things...
So what about corporate surveillance? I'm a lot more worried about the snooping being done in this group of corporations.
Actually, clearly I'm not very worried about that either, since I keep using Windows, Google, Facebook etc.
Interestingly, major European news outlets aren't running with this either. At least not the ones I checked (BBC in the UK, N24 in Germany, YLE in Finland).
Though that may be more due to the copy & paste culture of major news outlets these days.
However, Russia Today and Japan Times are frontpaging this story just as you would expect.
I don't think the problems are gone from the NVIDIA side. The CPU might drive the GPU well but the motherboard might not. Let me explain.
For the past month I've been reviving an old system originally built for office duties and photo/video editing. That included a move from a PATA HDD to an SSD, and a new GPU. The old GPU was a GTX 280 that had to be underclocked manually at every boot for it to work.
The system is now
ASUS P5K Deluxe Wi-Fi motherboard with Intel P35 chipset
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 CPU
ASUS GTX 650 TOP GPU
Chieftec TX series 650W PSU
The system gives no signal even in POST. The system boots normally (I can hear the OS sounds from the speakers and can interact with the OS) but there is never a signal to the monitor. This is with both DVI and HDMI cables. The system and display work fine with the GTX 280, but as soon as I swap in the GTX 650, there's no signal.
The P5K Deluxe has some relevant BIOS settings which I tried to preset before swapping in the new GPU, but that was a no-go.
I tried another PSU, a Chieftec HX series 650W, which I know to be faultless, again no signal. I also tried a recent ATI video card (I think it was a 7550 or 7750) and that gave no signal as well. I also got no signal with a GTX 560 from the same manufacturer as the 650.
The machine works fine-ish with a GTX 280, just not with Kepler GPUs. All of this may just be a non-compatibility between old ASUS motherboards and new GPUs, meaning by default they should work, but the fact remains, the old machine won't work with the new GPU.
Put your money where your mouth is... http://www.arielmotor.co.uk/
The rage has continued for a few days now and it's no longer just about the unbelievable initial MT lineup that they put in. The focus has shifted almost completely to how CCP seems unable to handle the PR disaster, and how there appears to be a force as of yet unknown at the higher levels of the company that puts emphasis on maximizing revenue and screwing the playerbase over in the process. The senior producer is widely acknowledged as a nice guy and having a similar mindset to veteran players, but the devblog he posted reeks of committee writing and of the CEO in particular, according to some CSM members. This kind of strange behavior and obvious businesstype meddling, in addition to widely known inhouse problems like a serious lack of professionalism and poor quality of workmanship, has the players worried that CCP as a company is turning into a catastrophic trainwreck and the future and wellbeing of their beloved hobby is in danger.
Vertical resolution, PPI and having no bezel in the center of your display.
At least $3 billion.
To play devil's advocate for a second, seeing as though the courts dismissed the case, and the legwork was done by the ESA (not exactly competent in catching drug dealers), I think very few actual crimefighting man-hours were lost here... Unless you count the prosecution's time, in which case, if I as a foreigner understand correctly, there's still no shortage of lawyers in the U.S.
One thing, though. Ever played EVE Online? Let me tell you a little story.
The game's got some issues. Mainly technological (it lags like hell under a special set of circumstances) and some to do with game content, balancing, etc. These are other issues but the point is, they have existed for years.
When they were identified as serious problems by the community, for a while there was a wall of silence from the game makers (CCP). For some issues this went on for years, months for some. All the while the community whined away through every channel available to them, most publicly on the game's official forums. At some point the whining had gone on long enough without response that the hopelessness became an in-joke.
Recently, EVE has gained popularity and matured as a product. As a result, CCP has grown and matured as well. And so, they now have some more-or-less strict and very public standards for fixing important issues. What they do now is put together teams of specially hired developers with skills in problems of a specific nature, and assign that team a specific issue. The aforementioned lag, for instance.
What this means for the players is that the issues I was talking about have started to get fixed. There's steady improvement that's visible to the naked eye. All the while, game development goes on normally by the actual developers according to their internal roadmap. Fixing issues goes on in parallel.
Every time there's a new version of EVE, with shiny new features and goodies like ships or other content, there's handful of noisy idiots who start whining on the forums about fixing lag, game balance, the UI or whatever. They demand that CCP halt whatever they are doing until the lag etc. are fixed. Even though the developers are mostly in no way up to to the task like the actual issue-fixing-teams are. Those whine posts on the forums are among the most annoying stuff you could possibly read on there.
Now...
"Whoever enforce IP laws are full of shit, they should be out fixing real issues like murder, like the FBI/police homicide divisions are."
Get my drift?