I don't understand why you think the CPU will be an automatic bottleneck for AGP cards. Right now, I'm running an AGP system with an Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego overclocked to 2.5GHz. My previous system, an Athlon XP 2600+ Mobile overclocked to 2.5GHz (pure coincidence they ended in the same place) was actually able to play FEAR with my 6800nu with all pipes unlocked and the core overclocked to 375 with fairly tolerable settings. Actually, the CPU didn't hold me back, the 128MiB of video memory held me back on that particular game. Doom 3 was playable in maximum quality settings on that system. One thing that's hard for people to believe is that games are actually designed with the assumption that you have a real hunk of junk peice of crap which can barely manage 1+1 in less than an hour plugged into that CPU slot rather than the chips that a larger majority of people TRULY have. I mean, how many people out there have anything less than a mobile barton oced to be almost as good as an Athlon 64? No, the only real CPU limit is just a few FPS here and there and better benchmarks. In real life gaming, you don't really notice on a proper system. Or do you think that AGP exists only on Pentium 3 systems or something? Personally, my system is a nForce 3 ultra, which is a socket 939 with AGP. Would you say I'm CPU limited? Or wouldn't you rather consider the possibility that this san diego would perform just as well if I stuck it in a nForce 4 board -- especially in light of the fact that CPU differences outside of benchmarks aren't as noticable as people like to think? No, CPUs will never stick around long enough to become the limiting factor. NVidia's refusal to even RESPOND to the multitudes of people complaining about the freezing bug with their high end video cards on nForce 3 (and the rare nForce 2 even) and their admission that they have no plans whatsoever "at this time" (or any other) of releasing the 7800 series in AGP (despite spending who knows how much on that HSI bridge apparently just for four cards or so -- counting both high and low end models of the same series) and ATi's clear intentions of also dropping AGP support will be a limiting factor first. LONG before a good socket 939 processor is truely cpu limiting (and I don't mean 5% FPS difference at minimum video settings, I mean as in game not running smoothly regardless of how powerful the video card may or may not be) you will be video card limited.
Frankly, I'm holding off on spending the extra cash for when the difference between the lower cost of PCI-E and the cost of having to buy a new motherboard (plus the extra pain I have to go to to change the hardware and reinstall the software) will be worth it. Right now, I can do better if I don't throw away the motherboard I spent so much on and instead spend the same amount of cash to get a better AGP card than the equivalent PCI-E + motherboard I'd have to buy with it. Later on I may have to get a board that supports both or even buy a new video card, but, a better AGP card right now has a long enough lifetime for this way to be more cost effective.
I do hope everyone realizes that if you do this, you loose quality every single time you reencode that audio to a lossy format. What I mean is, if you burn that MP3 to an audio CD, you decompress it, so, if you later decide to rip it to another MP3, you've lowered the quality. If you are using CD-RWs and decide to do this again later, then the next time you rip from the new disc, you've lost quality AGAIN. The average person might not hear one reencode, MAYBE not two, but, eventually you're going to end up with some audio that sounds even worse than an old cassette tape.
Simply put, there is no 100% solution. Vendors insist on using proprietary formats and copy protection methods to maximize their profits -- or so they assume (keyword: assume.) Realistically speaking, they'd make more money by stoping all this throwing of all their cash into stupid copy protection schemes (some of which install rootkits, you know who *coughs*) and proprietary file formats that lock the user into not being able to choose from anyone else. Actually, if you made it dirt cheap to buy a song from you, millions of users would gladly just click that buy button because, well, why not, it's just a buck, so they don't buy a coke from the coke machine tomorrow, they get to listen to that nice new song, right? It would cost the users more time and effort to get the song for free than it's worth, hurting the people who make illegal copies rather than the company (and the copy protection schemes/proprietary formats cost them far more than it costs the illegal copiers of those songs in the grand scheme of things if you average out the costs of those lawsuits that actually are won against them and, I suppose, toss in all the settlements that some were strongarmed into.)
Well, if there's not a 100% solution, all you can do is your best. Research file formats and such carefully. Find out very thoroughly what the product you buy offers. If that MP3 player won't play WMA, well, darned well make sure you don't get any WMAs. I'm not really sure if ANY of the online vendors honestly are truly trustworthy, but, stay the heck away from proprietary formats, even if one of them seems to have a great deal. Do the research and find out if they use copy protection schemes and go elsewhere if they do -- it's just not worth it in the long run. Personally, my method of handling all this is to use a standard MP3 player that plays only standard MP3 files, no weird proprietary crap sold by the maker or anything, and I make backups of my audio CD-ROMs using good extraction software, then put the discs up where they won't get scratched or anything. You're legally entitled to one backup -- though some rich people who wanted to get richer managed to get a law put in there that makes it illegal to bypass any copy protection schemes to make that backup, so avoid crap like the DRMs if you want to listen to the music you paid for. If you stick to nice standardized file formats, you'll never have to reencode and you can keep your audio files for as long as you legally own them no matter how much your os or MP3 players change. This method has worked for me since I first was introduced to MP3s, back in the late 90s I think it was. Back then I just stored them on my harddrive, then later on a MP3 CD, and now on a nice little MP3 player/thumbdrive device. Same MP3s. Some I never had to redo (some I did because back then I had crappy barely amplified 2.0 speakers and didn't realize that 128Kibps sucks.) A few I've long since lost my original CDs to various accidents (and one which I swear was not an accident, but, that's another story,) but, the MP3s remain today and still work despite that. That they were encoded over half a decade ago and still work on my hardware today says to me that this method, while maybe not the easiest, is really about the best you can do.
PS. For archival storage when you don't want to decrease quality, look into lossless codecs such as FLAC. Unfortunately, few hardware players and even some software players will never support some o
Special time/space distorting powers
on
How Zombies Work
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· Score: 1
Really, zombies aren't so frightening except for their absolutely amazing ability to just shamble along slowly dragging their ruined feet and yet, somehow the frightened heros running from them with all their might can only stay JUST ahead.
Maybe it's just me, but, it seems like MS's trend seems to be to make targets out of people. OOo has been finding itself on more and more systems, in no small part due to it's near perfect support for MS Office documents (aka easier to switch over.) Until OOo came out and started getting so popular, only WordPerfect could truly compete (well, unless you go even further back to the very early days of Windows.) As one of my teachers was recently complaining about, one of MS's little tricks seemed to be such a seemingly small thing as suddenly switching their file extentions so that they would be the same thing. On the surface,.doc makes sense for a document, so it's definitely not against any rules or anything to name them that, but, when WordPerfect has been around since before MS even made Office and had been tending to use the.doc extention for that long, it causes something of a problem for people who suddenly no longer know which type of document they've got in front of them. In the end, it was Corel that changed the WP document extention to.wpd, not MS changing to, say,.wd or something. In the case of the business my teacher worked for at the time, the solution to the confusion was to force everyone in the business to use MS Word instead of WordPerfect. It seems to me like MS has decided that OOo has become too big of a thorn in their side and now the eye is turning their way. Now, don't get me wrong, they aren't going to try to kill off OOo, at least not directly, but, remember that, simply put their goal is to get people to switch over to MS Office and away from the competition (ESPECIALLY the free competition.) OOo is harder to fight since it's essentially becoming a standard and they'll never actually even try to kill it off directly or indirectly, but, doesn't it seem to anyone that this sort of thing is the kind of thing they do to get people able to switch from OOo to MS Office and whatever proprietary format they come up with next, but, to be a royal pain to switch from MS Office to OOo? Why else is it an "import filter" and not just simply another supported documentation format in the open box and save as?
Ok, I'm a MS basher and I'll admit it, but, I just can't help but find it suspicious.
I tried to change my nickname once. I culdn't do it. I AM "Nazo" and there's nothing I hate more than when I go somewhere new and try to register it only to find that someone else has taken it and I have to append some title like san to the name, but, even then I still get the same name. I have been using this name for well over 6 years that I know of, maybe more, but, I've lost track. Personally, if I logged onto WoW someday as Nazo or somesuch (I don't have WoW as I can't afford such services) and they informed me I had to change my nickname because it sounded too close to "nazi" (and don't any of you even start, having three letters in common does NOT imply any relationship to a word of another language and meaning.) I would cancel my membership that very day. As far as I'm concerned, whether or not their rules state otherwise, they have no right to force me to change MY name, because, to me, that's what it is. I can understand if a name were chosen out of some sort of malicious intent or that sort of thing, but, as long as the user meant well, their name is their name and they should be left alone.
And I agree on the GMs especially. On the one hand, they are given far too much power to dispense with as they please to total strangers. In the game world, they are absolute gods answering to no one (at least, this is how it feels, even if it isn't entirely true, though, if you try to argue, you have to have darned good proof against them because their word gets precedence.) They can just kick you off or even ban you in so many things just because they don't like you if it suits them. They can toss enough monsters in the area to make sure you die and loose XP just for kicks and any number of other things. The thing is, they are given too much blind power, and too little accounting for it all. Then, when it comes to thinks like solving a problem, one often finds that they can't do a thing. It seems like all they are good for is kicking off the annoying people who run around making complete jerks of themselves around everyone and little else.
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I don't understand why you think the CPU will be an automatic bottleneck for AGP cards. Right now, I'm running an AGP system with an Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego overclocked to 2.5GHz. My previous system, an Athlon XP 2600+ Mobile overclocked to 2.5GHz (pure coincidence they ended in the same place) was actually able to play FEAR with my 6800nu with all pipes unlocked and the core overclocked to 375 with fairly tolerable settings. Actually, the CPU didn't hold me back, the 128MiB of video memory held me back on that particular game. Doom 3 was playable in maximum quality settings on that system. One thing that's hard for people to believe is that games are actually designed with the assumption that you have a real hunk of junk peice of crap which can barely manage 1+1 in less than an hour plugged into that CPU slot rather than the chips that a larger majority of people TRULY have. I mean, how many people out there have anything less than a mobile barton oced to be almost as good as an Athlon 64? No, the only real CPU limit is just a few FPS here and there and better benchmarks. In real life gaming, you don't really notice on a proper system. Or do you think that AGP exists only on Pentium 3 systems or something? Personally, my system is a nForce 3 ultra, which is a socket 939 with AGP. Would you say I'm CPU limited? Or wouldn't you rather consider the possibility that this san diego would perform just as well if I stuck it in a nForce 4 board -- especially in light of the fact that CPU differences outside of benchmarks aren't as noticable as people like to think? No, CPUs will never stick around long enough to become the limiting factor. NVidia's refusal to even RESPOND to the multitudes of people complaining about the freezing bug with their high end video cards on nForce 3 (and the rare nForce 2 even) and their admission that they have no plans whatsoever "at this time" (or any other) of releasing the 7800 series in AGP (despite spending who knows how much on that HSI bridge apparently just for four cards or so -- counting both high and low end models of the same series) and ATi's clear intentions of also dropping AGP support will be a limiting factor first. LONG before a good socket 939 processor is truely cpu limiting (and I don't mean 5% FPS difference at minimum video settings, I mean as in game not running smoothly regardless of how powerful the video card may or may not be) you will be video card limited. Frankly, I'm holding off on spending the extra cash for when the difference between the lower cost of PCI-E and the cost of having to buy a new motherboard (plus the extra pain I have to go to to change the hardware and reinstall the software) will be worth it. Right now, I can do better if I don't throw away the motherboard I spent so much on and instead spend the same amount of cash to get a better AGP card than the equivalent PCI-E + motherboard I'd have to buy with it. Later on I may have to get a board that supports both or even buy a new video card, but, a better AGP card right now has a long enough lifetime for this way to be more cost effective.
I do hope everyone realizes that if you do this, you loose quality every single time you reencode that audio to a lossy format. What I mean is, if you burn that MP3 to an audio CD, you decompress it, so, if you later decide to rip it to another MP3, you've lowered the quality. If you are using CD-RWs and decide to do this again later, then the next time you rip from the new disc, you've lost quality AGAIN. The average person might not hear one reencode, MAYBE not two, but, eventually you're going to end up with some audio that sounds even worse than an old cassette tape. Simply put, there is no 100% solution. Vendors insist on using proprietary formats and copy protection methods to maximize their profits -- or so they assume (keyword: assume.) Realistically speaking, they'd make more money by stoping all this throwing of all their cash into stupid copy protection schemes (some of which install rootkits, you know who *coughs*) and proprietary file formats that lock the user into not being able to choose from anyone else. Actually, if you made it dirt cheap to buy a song from you, millions of users would gladly just click that buy button because, well, why not, it's just a buck, so they don't buy a coke from the coke machine tomorrow, they get to listen to that nice new song, right? It would cost the users more time and effort to get the song for free than it's worth, hurting the people who make illegal copies rather than the company (and the copy protection schemes/proprietary formats cost them far more than it costs the illegal copiers of those songs in the grand scheme of things if you average out the costs of those lawsuits that actually are won against them and, I suppose, toss in all the settlements that some were strongarmed into.) Well, if there's not a 100% solution, all you can do is your best. Research file formats and such carefully. Find out very thoroughly what the product you buy offers. If that MP3 player won't play WMA, well, darned well make sure you don't get any WMAs. I'm not really sure if ANY of the online vendors honestly are truly trustworthy, but, stay the heck away from proprietary formats, even if one of them seems to have a great deal. Do the research and find out if they use copy protection schemes and go elsewhere if they do -- it's just not worth it in the long run. Personally, my method of handling all this is to use a standard MP3 player that plays only standard MP3 files, no weird proprietary crap sold by the maker or anything, and I make backups of my audio CD-ROMs using good extraction software, then put the discs up where they won't get scratched or anything. You're legally entitled to one backup -- though some rich people who wanted to get richer managed to get a law put in there that makes it illegal to bypass any copy protection schemes to make that backup, so avoid crap like the DRMs if you want to listen to the music you paid for. If you stick to nice standardized file formats, you'll never have to reencode and you can keep your audio files for as long as you legally own them no matter how much your os or MP3 players change. This method has worked for me since I first was introduced to MP3s, back in the late 90s I think it was. Back then I just stored them on my harddrive, then later on a MP3 CD, and now on a nice little MP3 player/thumbdrive device. Same MP3s. Some I never had to redo (some I did because back then I had crappy barely amplified 2.0 speakers and didn't realize that 128Kibps sucks.) A few I've long since lost my original CDs to various accidents (and one which I swear was not an accident, but, that's another story,) but, the MP3s remain today and still work despite that. That they were encoded over half a decade ago and still work on my hardware today says to me that this method, while maybe not the easiest, is really about the best you can do. PS. For archival storage when you don't want to decrease quality, look into lossless codecs such as FLAC. Unfortunately, few hardware players and even some software players will never support some o
Really, zombies aren't so frightening except for their absolutely amazing ability to just shamble along slowly dragging their ruined feet and yet, somehow the frightened heros running from them with all their might can only stay JUST ahead.
Maybe it's just me, but, it seems like MS's trend seems to be to make targets out of people. OOo has been finding itself on more and more systems, in no small part due to it's near perfect support for MS Office documents (aka easier to switch over.) Until OOo came out and started getting so popular, only WordPerfect could truly compete (well, unless you go even further back to the very early days of Windows.) As one of my teachers was recently complaining about, one of MS's little tricks seemed to be such a seemingly small thing as suddenly switching their file extentions so that they would be the same thing. On the surface, .doc makes sense for a document, so it's definitely not against any rules or anything to name them that, but, when WordPerfect has been around since before MS even made Office and had been tending to use the .doc extention for that long, it causes something of a problem for people who suddenly no longer know which type of document they've got in front of them. In the end, it was Corel that changed the WP document extention to .wpd, not MS changing to, say, .wd or something. In the case of the business my teacher worked for at the time, the solution to the confusion was to force everyone in the business to use MS Word instead of WordPerfect. It seems to me like MS has decided that OOo has become too big of a thorn in their side and now the eye is turning their way. Now, don't get me wrong, they aren't going to try to kill off OOo, at least not directly, but, remember that, simply put their goal is to get people to switch over to MS Office and away from the competition (ESPECIALLY the free competition.) OOo is harder to fight since it's essentially becoming a standard and they'll never actually even try to kill it off directly or indirectly, but, doesn't it seem to anyone that this sort of thing is the kind of thing they do to get people able to switch from OOo to MS Office and whatever proprietary format they come up with next, but, to be a royal pain to switch from MS Office to OOo? Why else is it an "import filter" and not just simply another supported documentation format in the open box and save as?
Ok, I'm a MS basher and I'll admit it, but, I just can't help but find it suspicious.
I tried to change my nickname once. I culdn't do it. I AM "Nazo" and there's nothing I hate more than when I go somewhere new and try to register it only to find that someone else has taken it and I have to append some title like san to the name, but, even then I still get the same name. I have been using this name for well over 6 years that I know of, maybe more, but, I've lost track. Personally, if I logged onto WoW someday as Nazo or somesuch (I don't have WoW as I can't afford such services) and they informed me I had to change my nickname because it sounded too close to "nazi" (and don't any of you even start, having three letters in common does NOT imply any relationship to a word of another language and meaning.) I would cancel my membership that very day. As far as I'm concerned, whether or not their rules state otherwise, they have no right to force me to change MY name, because, to me, that's what it is. I can understand if a name were chosen out of some sort of malicious intent or that sort of thing, but, as long as the user meant well, their name is their name and they should be left alone. And I agree on the GMs especially. On the one hand, they are given far too much power to dispense with as they please to total strangers. In the game world, they are absolute gods answering to no one (at least, this is how it feels, even if it isn't entirely true, though, if you try to argue, you have to have darned good proof against them because their word gets precedence.) They can just kick you off or even ban you in so many things just because they don't like you if it suits them. They can toss enough monsters in the area to make sure you die and loose XP just for kicks and any number of other things. The thing is, they are given too much blind power, and too little accounting for it all. Then, when it comes to thinks like solving a problem, one often finds that they can't do a thing. It seems like all they are good for is kicking off the annoying people who run around making complete jerks of themselves around everyone and little else.