Intel based chips typically have deep pipelines and fewer execution units and registers. Chips designed like this lose speed every time a pipeline flush is necessary (bad branch prediction, for instance), or during pipeline stalls (caused during some "exclusive" instructions and some synchronization tasks, notably when you need to stall out the pipeline). Intel makes up for this with higher clock speeds and larger high speed caches.
Number of parallel units and parallel execution is a very important factor in some performance tests - the original Pentium could either do int/float or MMX and required a context switch to flip between them, while Altivec could run at the same time as Int and Float operations (and multiple - I think 3 - could be processed at the same time). Alas, Motorola was slow out the gate, delaying the G4 multiple times, and Intel released the parallel-able SIMD around the same time (if not first) and had kicked performance well above the Motorola chips shortly afterward, which mostly made up for the aformentioned flaws.
Also, I believe some of the extra non-general purpose registers are used for context switching by the processor in PPC systems, where Intel's chips grab this information from L1 cache. I don't know if this is true for newer chips, though (even circa Pentium 2)
I think that quote was in context to the Apple ][, and it was after or around the release of the 384k capable business machine, the Apple III (with the 128k home machine - Lisa - in the works). Steve pretty much figured that consumers didn't need anything more powerful at that point, but businesses did (which was the near-fatal change in focus for the company).
In reality, though, that statement was pretty much true for that era and that machine. My mom's spreadsheets and Appleworks documents were the only things that used the upper part of the 784 our family machine had - most of my games/programs just used 64k (I think the only 128k game I ever had was Airheart). Ram was very expensive - something like $300 for 64k.
Way back during the Gulf War, I was playing on a MUD (Dartmud) and was getting scud raid news from a guild member based in Israel before the news about it came on (usually just before or after he headed to or came back from the bomb shelter). I also usually knew more about what was going on than my roommates, who were watching the war on TV.
So yes, sometimes the internet is better than TV, and no, I don't need to talk about what's on TV, as they sometimes don't really know what's going on, either.
NTSC has 525 total lines vertical lines (horizontal varies) but broadcast signals interleave (most sites say interlace, but this is technically incorrect - interlacing is skipping lines and drawing every other one, while interleaving is going every other line on one pass, then the other lines on the next pass) the signal which should amount to 263 lines per signal, but only 242 lines are sent in broadcast signals, so you lose 20 lines from the top and bottom (I think this is why we have TV and video modes on TVs). Because the 242 lines are interleaved and actually drawn at almost 60Hz (242 in one direction as the beam moves top to bottom and 242 as the beam moves bottom to top), you actually have 484 lines of information at ~30Hz.
How is the movie industry different than radio playing an album's songs before they are in stores? The radio stations have to pay every time they play a song, right?
Want to know the ugly truth?
Record companies PAY THE RADIOSTATIONS to play their songs. Yes, to do this directly is illegal, and called (Payola, and it was banned in the mid 60s. So how do the record companies circumvent this and essentially bribe the radio stations to play their songs? They pay middlemen to "promote" the songs, and those middlemen pay the radio stations (often keeping millions for themselves). Want to know why new artists can't get on the radio? Payola. Want to know why our stations are so bland? Payola again.
I can tell you horror stories about the recording industry, but that first link is pretty accurate, with the exception that most bands work with a lot less and end up PAYING the record company because their royalties after the 75% the record company takes doesn't cover the advance (note the 75% is taken off the top, then the advance is subtracted from the artists earnings). Put simply, a band forwarded $20000 puts it all into studio recording expenses. The band has 5000 CDs cut, and sells 4500 (the other 500 are promotional). The $50000 on CD sales is chopped by 75% by the record company, and the recording company claims they also put in $15000 for promotional expenses (which amounts to a bunch of calls they took from clubs your agent found for you to play at). The band takes in $13500 from CD sales - $20000 for advance, - $15000 for promotion, meaning you still owe the record company $16500 (assuming the bands' touring and promotional expenses [posters and the like] and touring fees [agent, expenses such as food and liquor] are covered by gate costs). The record company expects this to be paid back, which is why some bands declare bankruptcy (when you only own a $4000 PA system as a band, it's the cheap way out). Many indies are just as big of leeches (or even worse than) major labels. Note the record company still took in $21000 after the $16500 "loss" and the band lost everything.
These days, you're better off doing it in your basement and burning your own CDs...
ah, Slave Raider... how well I knew thee (ok, not that well - I was much more of a Soul Asylum (Loud Fast Rules)/Replacements fan back then:)
Chainsaw (the singer) mismanages - er, manages bands still, I think. He managed my brother's band for about 6 months about 5 years ago before they dumped him for not doing his job. As a self-managed band, they got twice as many gigs and a lot more pay before breaking up in the late '90s.
I took lessons from Tommy D, their second bassist. I've heard rumor from some old musician friends that he's in jail in California, but I have no proof to back that up. Damn good bass player. AllMusic has a picture and album listing (sorry, URL is POST not GET, so you'll have to look for yourself - www.allmusic.com). Chainsaw and Tommy are the middle row. For a good laugh, click on their record label Jive - yes, the same label that now has n-Sync and Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Anyhow, enough Minnesota trivia... OK, 1 more -remember Shattered Image?... probably not. I think the up-and-coming Kurt Jorgerson [sp?] played with them for a while, and his career has recently begun to take off. Those guys kicked my band's ass back in battle of the bands in the late '80s... of course they were giging regularly and were mostly older and more experienced musicians, while we were a bunch of intoxicated kids (OK, the guitarist and I weren't intoxicated, but the drummer and singer in my band were, and if you've ever heard Chris Mars and Paul Westerberg with the Pleased To Meet Me era Replacements, you have a good idea of what that's like).
give 'em a break - you're probably downloading 64k in images from there. 213 seconds by the old 300 baud modems (well, not technically - you could have turned on modem hardware compression and gotten it 2-3 times faster). Actually, you're right - 1200 baud is a good estimate:)
I miss my 300/110 with autodial (but not autoanswer)... no, I take that back.
I vaguely remember reading that the sphinx had two or three facelifts. I think it started as a statue of Anubis, then got the face of one ruler, changed to another by another ruler, then that face was wiped out with most records and a third likeness was carved by another ruler.
It's been too long since I've read up on egyptology, so I'm going off 15 year old recollections that I may have doctored up for Call of Cthulhu (but that, I think, was the real history).
The whole point of the AUTOnomy is to be able to swap body styles and to a lesser extent power plants of cars as needed, so you keep a basic chassis and swap out the power plant and frame as desired. GM probably won't lose money because they can sell new bodies and more efficient power plants as your needs change. Got a sports car and just had twins? Swap on the minivan frame. Want a convertible for summer but a SUV for winter? Just buy two frames and swap 'em out. What you drive suddenly becomes a fashion statement (then again, it is already or people wouldn't dump $60G-100G into Hummers).
Early battery powered cars didn't work out - they cost too much to compete with combustion engines and can't be fueled as fast (or at all, depending on where you live). This is why we have hybrid engines - a tradeoff that allows the technology to mature and cuts some of the problems. Hydrogen has similar problems - no refuling stations, more expensive to build (right now), potentially dangerous in accidents. A lot of people are also fearful that terrorists will use hydrogen powered cars as explosives, but I don't know how feasible that is (depends on quite a few factors).
Also, a good chunk of automobile parts aren't manufactured by the big car companies, they're purchased, so less parts may be BENEFICIAL to the makers. AUTOnomy specifically could be VERY beneficial to GM, seeing that frames are a big part of their profit (that and engines, but engines have more 3rd party).
Monopolies on parts are bad, however, so if one company owns the IP on batteries and charges high fees for use, manufacturers will look elsewhere for technology. So oil companies owning and charging high prices on battery technology could easily be crippling the industry. I know nothing about this, so I'll let others argue it.
Most of all, though, cars obsolete themselves just like computers, so sooner or later, people will upgrade because they use power more efficiently or have better styling, or just cooler features (mmm GPS). I really don't think automakers fear electic power all that much (in some ways it's being forced on them early, but that probably is because they want the technology to mature first and in reality the only way to get the technology to mature is to use it).
Unfortunately, the industry really doesn't have time to wait for standards bodies. This isn't just in browsers - TCP/IP itself was a hacked together protocol that became a standard while ISO spent years devising and getting people to implement OSI and by the time they had it working, they were 5 years too late and everyone was using TCP/IP. I won't even bother mentioning DECnet - OK, I did - it was closed source and short lived.
One of the reasons many game developers only support M$'s proprietary Direct3D technology is because the standards body for OpenGL takes too long to get new features in (although GL extensions and the new pluggable APIs from nVidia and ATI may solve this problem).
A lot can be said about being first to market. If you have enough of a head start, you really can leverage the industry (although occasionally Microsoft comes around and uses their other overpriced products to destroy your market by offering theirs for free).
I agree - I haven't played D&D in years, but the last campaign I played in had one fight in about 100 hours of gaming, and that was a bar brawl that one of the PCs got in. D&D doesn't need to be a hack and slash game if you don't make it that.
I really didn't like Amber, but I never read the books and that probably would've helped. The storyteller didn't help...
GrayHawk is a pretty straightforward fantasy world, but there really wasn't anything before that (at least not that I remember). Some of the supplements were neat.
I'm not a fan of the Planescape 'world', but probably because it didn't work in the campaign I was running at the time it came out. It also seemed 1/2 baked, kinda like Torg (but at least I got a cool d20 of that).
Rolemaster was my graduation from D&D, but really was just more of a hack and slash system. I then moved to Harnmaster (well, actually a bunch of non-fantasy systems including Top Secret, Twilight 2000, Cyborg Commando, Gamma World, Villains and Vigilantes, Cyberpunk, all FASA stuff, Champions, the D&D in space system I can't remember, GURPS, Traveller, the Palladium munchkin systems and several others) before what I consider my first "real" Roleplaying experience with Call of Cthulhu. We had done some RPing before that, but CoC was the first system I played where roleplaying (and survival) really WAS more important than killing potential and experience points, and we actually started acting our characters in first person most of the time. That and my drunk (er, "medicthated... the ulsher, ya know - I have my pershcripshin righhht here") doctor.
After CoC, I replayed a lot of systems from a completely different angle and with completely different goals. A "level" could take weeks or months of real time (and years of game-time), so being 50th level meant a lot less than accomplishments in that time, and usually meant being older than dirt (I don't remember having a character past 12th level in any level based game since playing CoC).
um, he also said he's splitting it out between two other companies and sharing the bandwidth.
I don't know of any effective way to test this, because packets sent over TCP are a very unreliable meter, unless you have a connection at both ends and are only sending network traffic between two endpoints. Rerouting, packet loss, packet queuing delays, bad routing tables, slow machines or network connectors, dirty lines, and any number of other factors could skew the results.
It's possible to get a rough estimate of bandwidth, nonetheless, but it's not easy if you're splitting the line. If you know no other computer is online and running through the hub you should get close to peak performance, but it's still tough to say if you're getting shortchanged because of external factors.
I get a fairly fast cable connection (the 3.5M down/256k up variety), but the upload speed has been cut twice in the past 3 years, and the download speed continually bogs down as more users sign up. Then there's the non-guaranteed peak performance, so I can't reasonably expect more than 1Mbps/128kbps, and I'm forbidden to run servers (not that it's stopped me:)
I formerly had DSL, but that is only offered by Covad and Qwest in my area now, and neither are pushing the limits of anything - top speed 640/128, no servers allowed DHCP. The only faster service available with a static IP runs about $300/month (there are slower services, starting at 128/128 for $80/month - bah).
These speeds HAVE NOT CHANGED in almost 5 years and the only company that offered better service is now defunct. To make matters worse, some have GONE DOWN in speed, and prices have gone up.
This to me screams monopoly, and indeed if you think about it, it is. Quest has a monopoly on the business lines (with Covad as the only competitor, and probably only there because Quest needs them to survive to claim some competition, but I've heard the percentages are heavily in favor of Quest) and AT&T broadband for residential. Quest's residential service sucks and is tiny (not to mention the MSN debacle), and AT&T doesn't offer a business service, so in reality, they aren't competing.
I had heard bad things about Tomcat's performance (especially with a load - and that has improved over the last year or so), but not much about compatibility. I personally have to deal with Websphere and Weblogic, and would take BEA's product over IBM's in a heartbeat (that's my opinion, not my company's opinion, although many developers here share that opinion).
Truth be told, I haven't seen many compatibility problems, though. Usually something that doesn't work on Tomcat doesn't work on Weblogic or WebSphere, either. If we do find a bug in the JSP engine, it usually is fixed quickly by the vendor (except, AHEM, in IBM's case, but I'll let bygones be bygones:) or worked around. Most of our code just provides a client form-based interface, though, so I doubt we're pushing the limits of the J2EE spec.
Your arguement is assuming the bottom pulls the top down (collapse), but what would happen if it were cut in half or breaks further up? Does the top spin into orbit and the bottom collapse?
I really don't know much about this, and even less about how such a beast would be constructed...
Actually, he probably is talking about a compiler optimized divide by 2, not hand coded. All compilers I know of do this for you these days.
Another thing that could cost cycles is a bad compare guess in the pipeline (something you don't need to do for unsigned), which would result in a pipeline flush.
It does add up, but not enough that most people outside of academia and government would care. This used to be significant in games, but now most games use parallel floating point calls (floating and integer units run independently) or high speed multimedia extensions, so its importance there is very much diminished. I remember this being meaningful when I wrote a (not very pretty) flight sim about 8 years ago, but wouldn't worry about it at all, anymore (for a flight sim, at least).
I can't say much about FreeCiv, since I have yet to get it to successfully install, but yes, the board game Civilization takes about 12-16 hours to play if you've got decent opponents. I've seen it played and won in about 75 minutes (with 5 players) by a very aggressive opponent. Yes, I was the first to go:(
As for other free games for XWindows, there's also xscorch, based on the old C64 (and other platforms) scorched earth game. I personally liked the original much better than the X version, though.
Sourceforge has a few mac ported games, as well, but most need quite a bit more work before they're as fun as they should be. Most also require a bunch of free libs, and don't yet have binary dists, as well, so if you're not savvy around a compiler, don't bother.
There are also quite a few emulators other than MAME if you like older games. Emulation.net lists many of them (search for platforms at the bottom by clicking on the OS-X like file system). I'm particularly partial to Apple ][, but that's the system I had when I was 10-16 years old. Emulation.net also tells you where to get roms for some systems (like the Apple ][), so it's handy, as well. No arcade sites anymore, though, since they kept getting shut down.
Also, Ambrosia Software's older shareware games are nagware, but entirely playable. I think there newer games are demo, then they'll send you a CD, but you can play quite a bit before paying. I was hooked on Escape Velocity several years ago (and bought the game), and now there's a sequel, Nova. It's probably worth the download.
For that matter, it doesn't cover anything except TSR modules (that's in the FAQ).
I have several Role Aids and Judges Guild modules, but most of my actual AD&D modules were stolen with my first edition books in junior high (someone stole a backpack they were in). Which one of you bastards was it?!?:P
Slashdot Mirror
Intel based chips typically have deep pipelines and fewer execution units and registers. Chips designed like this lose speed every time a pipeline flush is necessary (bad branch prediction, for instance), or during pipeline stalls (caused during some "exclusive" instructions and some synchronization tasks, notably when you need to stall out the pipeline). Intel makes up for this with higher clock speeds and larger high speed caches.
Number of parallel units and parallel execution is a very important factor in some performance tests - the original Pentium could either do int/float or MMX and required a context switch to flip between them, while Altivec could run at the same time as Int and Float operations (and multiple - I think 3 - could be processed at the same time). Alas, Motorola was slow out the gate, delaying the G4 multiple times, and Intel released the parallel-able SIMD around the same time (if not first) and had kicked performance well above the Motorola chips shortly afterward, which mostly made up for the aformentioned flaws.
Also, I believe some of the extra non-general purpose registers are used for context switching by the processor in PPC systems, where Intel's chips grab this information from L1 cache. I don't know if this is true for newer chips, though (even circa Pentium 2)
I think that quote was in context to the Apple ][, and it was after or around the release of the 384k capable business machine, the Apple III (with the 128k home machine - Lisa - in the works). Steve pretty much figured that consumers didn't need anything more powerful at that point, but businesses did (which was the near-fatal change in focus for the company).
In reality, though, that statement was pretty much true for that era and that machine. My mom's spreadsheets and Appleworks documents were the only things that used the upper part of the 784 our family machine had - most of my games/programs just used 64k (I think the only 128k game I ever had was Airheart). Ram was very expensive - something like $300 for 64k.
Way back during the Gulf War, I was playing on a MUD (Dartmud) and was getting scud raid news from a guild member based in Israel before the news about it came on (usually just before or after he headed to or came back from the bomb shelter). I also usually knew more about what was going on than my roommates, who were watching the war on TV.
So yes, sometimes the internet is better than TV, and no, I don't need to talk about what's on TV, as they sometimes don't really know what's going on, either.
Actually, you're both sorta right -
NTSC has 525 total lines vertical lines (horizontal varies) but broadcast signals interleave (most sites say interlace, but this is technically incorrect - interlacing is skipping lines and drawing every other one, while interleaving is going every other line on one pass, then the other lines on the next pass) the signal which should amount to 263 lines per signal, but only 242 lines are sent in broadcast signals, so you lose 20 lines from the top and bottom (I think this is why we have TV and video modes on TVs). Because the 242 lines are interleaved and actually drawn at almost 60Hz (242 in one direction as the beam moves top to bottom and 242 as the beam moves bottom to top), you actually have 484 lines of information at ~30Hz.
here's a couple of interesting links (HDTV) link with more info on all formats and the same location on NTSC. Both articles are old - circa '95, but still interesting. Use google for more modern (but mostly less informative) info.
In consoles, the full 525 can be used, as well as 600+ horizontal.
The two biggest obstacles I see are
a) refresh rate fixed at roughly 30Hz
b) vertical resolution fixed at 525
HDTV is icky, so I don't want to talk about it, but it's much better than NTSC (better v-res, better Hz).
How is the movie industry different than radio playing an album's songs before they are in stores? The radio stations have to pay every time they play a song, right?
Want to know the ugly truth?
Record companies PAY THE RADIOSTATIONS to play their songs. Yes, to do this directly is illegal, and called (Payola, and it was banned in the mid 60s. So how do the record companies circumvent this and essentially bribe the radio stations to play their songs? They pay middlemen to "promote" the songs, and those middlemen pay the radio stations (often keeping millions for themselves). Want to know why new artists can't get on the radio? Payola. Want to know why our stations are so bland? Payola again.
I can tell you horror stories about the recording industry, but that first link is pretty accurate, with the exception that most bands work with a lot less and end up PAYING the record company because their royalties after the 75% the record company takes doesn't cover the advance (note the 75% is taken off the top, then the advance is subtracted from the artists earnings). Put simply, a band forwarded $20000 puts it all into studio recording expenses. The band has 5000 CDs cut, and sells 4500 (the other 500 are promotional). The $50000 on CD sales is chopped by 75% by the record company, and the recording company claims they also put in $15000 for promotional expenses (which amounts to a bunch of calls they took from clubs your agent found for you to play at). The band takes in $13500 from CD sales - $20000 for advance, - $15000 for promotion, meaning you still owe the record company $16500 (assuming the bands' touring and promotional expenses [posters and the like] and touring fees [agent, expenses such as food and liquor] are covered by gate costs). The record company expects this to be paid back, which is why some bands declare bankruptcy (when you only own a $4000 PA system as a band, it's the cheap way out). Many indies are just as big of leeches (or even worse than) major labels. Note the record company still took in $21000 after the $16500 "loss" and the band lost everything.
These days, you're better off doing it in your basement and burning your own CDs...
ah, Slave Raider... how well I knew thee (ok, not that well - I was much more of a Soul Asylum (Loud Fast Rules)/Replacements fan back then :)
Chainsaw (the singer) mismanages - er, manages bands still, I think. He managed my brother's band for about 6 months about 5 years ago before they dumped him for not doing his job. As a self-managed band, they got twice as many gigs and a lot more pay before breaking up in the late '90s.
I took lessons from Tommy D, their second bassist. I've heard rumor from some old musician friends that he's in jail in California, but I have no proof to back that up. Damn good bass player. AllMusic has a picture and album listing (sorry, URL is POST not GET, so you'll have to look for yourself - www.allmusic.com). Chainsaw and Tommy are the middle row. For a good laugh, click on their record label Jive - yes, the same label that now has n-Sync and Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Anyhow, enough Minnesota trivia... OK, 1 more -remember Shattered Image?... probably not. I think the up-and-coming Kurt Jorgerson [sp?] played with them for a while, and his career has recently begun to take off. Those guys kicked my band's ass back in battle of the bands in the late '80s... of course they were giging regularly and were mostly older and more experienced musicians, while we were a bunch of intoxicated kids (OK, the guitarist and I weren't intoxicated, but the drummer and singer in my band were, and if you've ever heard Chris Mars and Paul Westerberg with the Pleased To Meet Me era Replacements, you have a good idea of what that's like).
give 'em a break - you're probably downloading 64k in images from there. 213 seconds by the old 300 baud modems (well, not technically - you could have turned on modem hardware compression and gotten it 2-3 times faster). Actually, you're right - 1200 baud is a good estimate :)
I miss my 300/110 with autodial (but not autoanswer)... no, I take that back.
um, you're talking about someone with nothing but spare change (all of 'em).
Bill giving money to charity is no big deal, though, 'cause he can write it off his taxes just like I can (I'm sure he itemizes).
5% of his net worth yearly, or ever?
I imagine there's some inbreeding in your family. Fortunately for us, it will end when you get your first billion.
As for the original poster, can't get enough of the one you've got, 'eh?
And behind door #1...
is door #2!
I vaguely remember reading that the sphinx had two or three facelifts. I think it started as a statue of Anubis, then got the face of one ruler, changed to another by another ruler, then that face was wiped out with most records and a third likeness was carved by another ruler.
It's been too long since I've read up on egyptology, so I'm going off 15 year old recollections that I may have doctored up for Call of Cthulhu (but that, I think, was the real history).
sorry, but I don't buy your argument.
The whole point of the AUTOnomy is to be able to swap body styles and to a lesser extent power plants of cars as needed, so you keep a basic chassis and swap out the power plant and frame as desired. GM probably won't lose money because they can sell new bodies and more efficient power plants as your needs change. Got a sports car and just had twins? Swap on the minivan frame. Want a convertible for summer but a SUV for winter? Just buy two frames and swap 'em out. What you drive suddenly becomes a fashion statement (then again, it is already or people wouldn't dump $60G-100G into Hummers).
Early battery powered cars didn't work out - they cost too much to compete with combustion engines and can't be fueled as fast (or at all, depending on where you live). This is why we have hybrid engines - a tradeoff that allows the technology to mature and cuts some of the problems. Hydrogen has similar problems - no refuling stations, more expensive to build (right now), potentially dangerous in accidents. A lot of people are also fearful that terrorists will use hydrogen powered cars as explosives, but I don't know how feasible that is (depends on quite a few factors).
Also, a good chunk of automobile parts aren't manufactured by the big car companies, they're purchased, so less parts may be BENEFICIAL to the makers. AUTOnomy specifically could be VERY beneficial to GM, seeing that frames are a big part of their profit (that and engines, but engines have more 3rd party).
Monopolies on parts are bad, however, so if one company owns the IP on batteries and charges high fees for use, manufacturers will look elsewhere for technology. So oil companies owning and charging high prices on battery technology could easily be crippling the industry. I know nothing about this, so I'll let others argue it.
Most of all, though, cars obsolete themselves just like computers, so sooner or later, people will upgrade because they use power more efficiently or have better styling, or just cooler features (mmm GPS). I really don't think automakers fear electic power all that much (in some ways it's being forced on them early, but that probably is because they want the technology to mature first and in reality the only way to get the technology to mature is to use it).
Unfortunately, the industry really doesn't have time to wait for standards bodies. This isn't just in browsers - TCP/IP itself was a hacked together protocol that became a standard while ISO spent years devising and getting people to implement OSI and by the time they had it working, they were 5 years too late and everyone was using TCP/IP. I won't even bother mentioning DECnet - OK, I did - it was closed source and short lived.
One of the reasons many game developers only support M$'s proprietary Direct3D technology is because the standards body for OpenGL takes too long to get new features in (although GL extensions and the new pluggable APIs from nVidia and ATI may solve this problem).
A lot can be said about being first to market. If you have enough of a head start, you really can leverage the industry (although occasionally Microsoft comes around and uses their other overpriced products to destroy your market by offering theirs for free).
Here's a link to the AMD info
Intel also announced FinFet CMOS at some point, because it's mentioned on the frontpage of that article.
I agree - I haven't played D&D in years, but the last campaign I played in had one fight in about 100 hours of gaming, and that was a bar brawl that one of the PCs got in. D&D doesn't need to be a hack and slash game if you don't make it that.
I really didn't like Amber, but I never read the books and that probably would've helped. The storyteller didn't help...
GrayHawk is a pretty straightforward fantasy world, but there really wasn't anything before that (at least not that I remember). Some of the supplements were neat.
I'm not a fan of the Planescape 'world', but probably because it didn't work in the campaign I was running at the time it came out. It also seemed 1/2 baked, kinda like Torg (but at least I got a cool d20 of that).
Rolemaster was my graduation from D&D, but really was just more of a hack and slash system. I then moved to Harnmaster (well, actually a bunch of non-fantasy systems including Top Secret, Twilight 2000, Cyborg Commando, Gamma World, Villains and Vigilantes, Cyberpunk, all FASA stuff, Champions, the D&D in space system I can't remember, GURPS, Traveller, the Palladium munchkin systems and several others) before what I consider my first "real" Roleplaying experience with Call of Cthulhu. We had done some RPing before that, but CoC was the first system I played where roleplaying (and survival) really WAS more important than killing potential and experience points, and we actually started acting our characters in first person most of the time. That and my drunk (er, "medicthated... the ulsher, ya know - I have my pershcripshin righhht here") doctor.
After CoC, I replayed a lot of systems from a completely different angle and with completely different goals. A "level" could take weeks or months of real time (and years of game-time), so being 50th level meant a lot less than accomplishments in that time, and usually meant being older than dirt (I don't remember having a character past 12th level in any level based game since playing CoC).
According to the SPAM I get weekly, it's 87%...
:)
Looks like that crap is good for something after all
um, he also said he's splitting it out between two other companies and sharing the bandwidth.
I don't know of any effective way to test this, because packets sent over TCP are a very unreliable meter, unless you have a connection at both ends and are only sending network traffic between two endpoints. Rerouting, packet loss, packet queuing delays, bad routing tables, slow machines or network connectors, dirty lines, and any number of other factors could skew the results.
It's possible to get a rough estimate of bandwidth, nonetheless, but it's not easy if you're splitting the line. If you know no other computer is online and running through the hub you should get close to peak performance, but it's still tough to say if you're getting shortchanged because of external factors.
consider yourself lucky.
:)
I get a fairly fast cable connection (the 3.5M down/256k up variety), but the upload speed has been cut twice in the past 3 years, and the download speed continually bogs down as more users sign up. Then there's the non-guaranteed peak performance, so I can't reasonably expect more than 1Mbps/128kbps, and I'm forbidden to run servers (not that it's stopped me
I formerly had DSL, but that is only offered by Covad and Qwest in my area now, and neither are pushing the limits of anything - top speed 640/128, no servers allowed DHCP. The only faster service available with a static IP runs about $300/month (there are slower services, starting at 128/128 for $80/month - bah).
These speeds HAVE NOT CHANGED in almost 5 years and the only company that offered better service is now defunct. To make matters worse, some have GONE DOWN in speed, and prices have gone up.
This to me screams monopoly, and indeed if you think about it, it is. Quest has a monopoly on the business lines (with Covad as the only competitor, and probably only there because Quest needs them to survive to claim some competition, but I've heard the percentages are heavily in favor of Quest) and AT&T broadband for residential. Quest's residential service sucks and is tiny (not to mention the MSN debacle), and AT&T doesn't offer a business service, so in reality, they aren't competing.
Let's face it - the EFF is paid to be paranoid, and with good reason.
Read the history of the EFF and you'll understand. The government now has legal backing to do exactly what it did to Steve Jackson Games.
I had heard bad things about Tomcat's performance (especially with a load - and that has improved over the last year or so), but not much about compatibility. I personally have to deal with Websphere and Weblogic, and would take BEA's product over IBM's in a heartbeat (that's my opinion, not my company's opinion, although many developers here share that opinion).
:) or worked around. Most of our code just provides a client form-based interface, though, so I doubt we're pushing the limits of the J2EE spec.
Truth be told, I haven't seen many compatibility problems, though. Usually something that doesn't work on Tomcat doesn't work on Weblogic or WebSphere, either. If we do find a bug in the JSP engine, it usually is fixed quickly by the vendor (except, AHEM, in IBM's case, but I'll let bygones be bygones
funny - I was about to say the same thing.
:)
Every pawn shop seems to have a rack of rings and a rack of guns.
I love America
Your arguement is assuming the bottom pulls the top down (collapse), but what would happen if it were cut in half or breaks further up? Does the top spin into orbit and the bottom collapse?
I really don't know much about this, and even less about how such a beast would be constructed...
Actually, he probably is talking about a compiler optimized divide by 2, not hand coded. All compilers I know of do this for you these days.
Another thing that could cost cycles is a bad compare guess in the pipeline (something you don't need to do for unsigned), which would result in a pipeline flush.
It does add up, but not enough that most people outside of academia and government would care. This used to be significant in games, but now most games use parallel floating point calls (floating and integer units run independently) or high speed multimedia extensions, so its importance there is very much diminished. I remember this being meaningful when I wrote a (not very pretty) flight sim about 8 years ago, but wouldn't worry about it at all, anymore (for a flight sim, at least).
I can't say much about FreeCiv, since I have yet to get it to successfully install, but yes, the board game Civilization takes about 12-16 hours to play if you've got decent opponents. I've seen it played and won in about 75 minutes (with 5 players) by a very aggressive opponent. Yes, I was the first to go :(
As for other free games for XWindows, there's also xscorch, based on the old C64 (and other platforms) scorched earth game. I personally liked the original much better than the X version, though.
Sourceforge has a few mac ported games, as well, but most need quite a bit more work before they're as fun as they should be. Most also require a bunch of free libs, and don't yet have binary dists, as well, so if you're not savvy around a compiler, don't bother.
There are also quite a few emulators other than MAME if you like older games. Emulation.net lists many of them (search for platforms at the bottom by clicking on the OS-X like file system). I'm particularly partial to Apple ][, but that's the system I had when I was 10-16 years old. Emulation.net also tells you where to get roms for some systems (like the Apple ][), so it's handy, as well. No arcade sites anymore, though, since they kept getting shut down.
Also, Ambrosia Software's older shareware games are nagware, but entirely playable. I think there newer games are demo, then they'll send you a CD, but you can play quite a bit before paying. I was hooked on Escape Velocity several years ago (and bought the game), and now there's a sequel, Nova. It's probably worth the download.
For that matter, it doesn't cover anything except TSR modules (that's in the FAQ).
:P
I have several Role Aids and Judges Guild modules, but most of my actual AD&D modules were stolen with my first edition books in junior high (someone stole a backpack they were in). Which one of you bastards was it?!?