sorry - had an error there - CAS is 7, not 20. 7-7-7-20 was the spec, and the ones I was looking at before that was 10-10-10-24 and 12-12-12-? (24? 30? - don't remember).
Personally, DDR2 vs DDR3 has WAY too many variables like RAS, CAS, and RAS-to-CAS delay, burst memory sends, etc. When I had my brother do this analysis for me (he designs RAM...) he found that in many cases DDR2 was smoking early DDR3 in random access and was only slightly slower in burst. That was until I found a CAS20 DDR3 chip running at 1600MHz in my price range (which sealed the deal for me going with DDR3). Just letting you know, though - if you have fast DDR2, it may be faster than early DDR3.
Memory bandwidth and transfers rates are generally quick enough now that they really don't have a huge impact on game performance (especially with 1+GB of cache memory to work with).
Ok, now on to CPUs, and interesting that you mentioned it - really one core generally runs most games, so there is little need of a quad HOWEVER, I believe one feature of DX11 (actually, confirmed via google: http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/50217/ATI-On-DirectX-11-Gaming ) is thread safe access from multiple CPUs to the GPU. What that means is if CPU1 is trying to push pixels to GPU and CPU2 is trying to do the same at the same time, it is allowed and won't blow up, so it may be possible to distribute the load more evenly. You could, therefore and for instance, assign a core for each display and let the API send it to the correct GPU (which may or may not be on a separate card) and everything is peachy.
And really, they are trying to test the GPU, so having parts that will not restrict the GPU is best for a review. I really doubt there will be much of a speed degradation due to CPU hardware or memory, but you may lose 1-2 FPS. Since that 1-2FPS will be lost for all GPUs across the board, does it really matter?
I've had exactly the opposite - if I ran anything with the GPU my ATI card machine BSoD'd. I sent the card back twice (to the manufacturer, Sapphire - I didn't have problems until about 30s-5 minutes in and didn't realize it until way past when I could return it to the store (and normal VGA tasks like my life at the time, VPN and then remote desktop to virtual machines, worked great - I really do hate crunch time in the computer world). I've planned to check driver stability for months now, but haven't really had time.
Of course, I can't really say I love nVidia either - the 8600M GS in my now deceased laptop has blown twice, once just six days after the warranty expired. I can't really say I did heavy gaming on it either (some WoW, some Guild Wars, about the worst it got was Fallout 3, but I was only about level 7) - it just is a very flaky part. It died the second time while I was doing CAD modeling and not even really taxing the GPU.
H Ross Perot Sr owned companies were already big on outsourcing before outsourcing was even popular - when EDS (also started by Perot - he was on the board of directors for part of the time I was there) bought a company I worked for the first thing they did was gut benefits and lay off 20% of the US workforce (and in the next two years layoffs were roughly 40%, even though the division I was in grew by 6x) and move those jobs to India - and that was in 2000. If anything Dell moves people from India to China where people are even cheaper to hire.
The best day of my life was leaving EDS - the constant fear of layoffs, the downward spiral of their stock, their stupid moves like selling profitable divisions and keeping unprofitable ones so their stock wouldn't go junk (what I call the Control Data spin, and yes, I worked for them, too, albeit briefly).
I should add the 1996 Montreal Protocol (leading to Bill Clinton attempting to ban them in 1997) did non have an exemption for CFC inhalers, and this was the reason behind the attempted banning. I mentioned 2% - that is the CFC contribution of inhalers that I heard when it was going to be banned (meaning 98% is non-inhaler), but that estimate is too high according to some sites - less than.5%. The space shuttle alone contributes more yearly global warming gasses (ammonium perchlorate used in solid rocket boosters is horrible environmentally... but of course is exempt). Again, this was a bureaucratic move and medical company PACs contributed lots of money to get it pushed through.
I've done some additional reading and damn, HFA inhalers are even more messed up than I ever knew (and I use them, but not as often as some people - when I get bad I need to move to steroid inhalers for a few months) - HFA-134a as a propellant was tested only on healthy people, not asthmatics (gee - testing a potential allergen on asthmatics would be logical, don't you think?). Ventolin is the only one that doesn't contain corn ethanol (both corn and ethanol can be allergens). Only short term, small clinical trials were done where results are easier to manipulate. Great job FDA!
Medical inhalers were exempt from the 1987 clean air treaty. The Bill Clinton government tried to get them banned in 1997 for environmental bragging rights but consumer backlash made them retract. Even if they had been banned, it was estimated that CFC emissions from inhalers were less that 2% of all CFC emissions.
George 'W' Bush removed the exemption as his ONLY major environmental policy change in his second to last year in office, deciding that HFA inhalers were a suitable alternative. Of course, that had less to do with the environment and more to do with it directly benefiting big pharma because the HFA patents didn't expire until 2009 (I think the two patents involved were January and March), one year after the deadline for ending the sale of CFC inhalers. Environment groups lauded the change, but the CFCs involved were really an insignificant source - this battle was and always has been all about money.
I can't speak for everyone, but my laptop has been used more for movies than for what I bought it for (mostly a mobile programming platform). It's quite fun watching netflicks instant movies while sitting in the hot tub (with laptop sitting on the side of my grill and sound plugged into our outdoor patio speakers). Having a laptop that displays 1080p with a blu-ray player is nice, too, but due to that resolution it is a bit big - I'll probably have to eventually get a cheap small laptop for true mobility (this one is big even in a backpack).
I would have to agree - while I would call the model they describe (the Doom model/FPS, but I feel this extends to most online games as well) accurate for certain markets, it depends entirely on game, and even the social aspect depends on the game and platform. By marketshare, FPS's and MMORPGs do have the lion's share, but there are still huge markets for other games or
For instance, if I were creating a Wii game (extend that to games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band for any platform), my priorities would be a) multiplayer with the other player in the room, not online b) gameplay - easy to learn, easy to play, emphasize fun over difficulty c) plot and graphics (probably none, and cartoony)
Most people I know played the original guitar hero single player and later versions they usually play multiplayer. I personally never liked the game and am only going by people I know that play it.
How about a 3rd person shooter like Tomb Raider or Resident Evil (not like Left 4 Dead which uses the FPS model)? a) single player gameplay b) puzzles/problem solving b) graphic c) plot
actually, that one was tough to categorize, because all of the above are usually pretty important, but again, the plot is usually so inane I put it last.
would those same priorities apply to Starcraft 2 or an RTS in general? Absolutely not - a) gameplay - easy to learn, easy to play, hard to master b tie) single player b tie) multiplayer (online) d) graphics e) plot (single player) - some people would put this #1 or #2, but mostly people don't care because it doesn't matter
How about adventure games? a) plot (interchangeable with b, depending on game) b) puzzles/problem solving c) graphics/visuals social and gameplay are pretty much nonfactors, though some hybrid games do have gameplay factors (e.g. Dreamfall, Beyond Good & Evil).
My understanding is sales numbers weren't great for Dreamfall, which is why The Secret World gained priority over finishing the TLJ series. I'm not sure if Funcom would think the same way about MMOs now as they did three years ago, mainly because only one MMO really has pulled in massive numbers (WoW) and the rest have fallen by the wayside or are sputtering along with adequate numbers (including Tornquist's own Anarchy Online), but in 2006 MMO was still viewed as the way to go.
I'd say yes for computers, no for old consoles. I ported Z80 code (Tandy) to Apple ][ and in general it was pretty straightforward, but porting pretty much anything to, say an Atari 2600 or Intellivision is an entirely different bird - for starters, Intellivisions were 10 bit, and nothing is really straightforward to port. The main processor of the Atari 2600 was actually a stripped down 6502 (called a MOS 6507) which could only access 8k of memory, but Atari's cartridge slot only allowed 4k of this to be accessed (the rest were for internal memory and the I/O processor). Both Atari and Intellivision had special I/O processor hardware that could have only so many sprites moving at once and they could only be so large. The I/O processor hardware required custom coding, which pretty much means all graphics and movement logic needed to be written from scratch, and in those days, that was about 95% of the work (AI was pretty much scripted or shortest path and dialog non-existent).
Yeah - I remember playing this at Sears several time and not really figuring it out. However, I'd say the "clone" as they called it, Space Battle on the Intellivision was more an arcade game and the later Space Spartans was actually more similar to Star Raiders. Both had a similar map. The interesting thing is Space Battle's ships were Battlestar Galactica cylon like and Space Spartans were Star Wars ('79-80 was BSG and 82 was shortly before the last Episode VI). My brother and I played those games for... well, an hour a day for many many days (mom kept a tight leash on video game and TV time - 1 hour a day or lose all privileges for a week - she would hide the console's cord and unplug the TV).
The record company still owes the artist residuals for songwriting and any song stipends, so this isn't technically copyright infringement in the same respect as Jammie unless they aren't paying those (basically everyone is getting paid - songwriter, recording engineer, producer, and even artist [once expenses and advances are paid]). The point in question is whether they legally have the rights to release an album with songs that were cut or if the artist retained the rights because the studio chose not to use the material, which is interesting in the respect that the precedent has always been that they record company has the rights, going back to B-sides on singles in the early days of records and radio.
A seven album deal has never meant the record company is restricted to seven albums - it has always meant to bind the artist to that record company for at least seven albums of new material. It is not uncommon for the record company to then re-release albums with bonus material or make greatest hits albums with additional songs after that artist has left (or even, though rare, compile entire albums, usually post-posthumously in a band respect).
When I recorded I remember it being made pretty clear to us that all recorded songs were exclusively owned by the studio, not just the ones that made the album, but that was a lawyer explaining the terms to us in layman's terms, not us reading the contract.
For reference, normally when a program is launched without prebinding, the program has to look into the symbol table for the shared library and "bind" it (basically, tell the program where it is). Prebinding basically does that in advance and saves the lookup table, but any time the library is changed, the bindings have to be regenerated.
The article says prebinding is actually quite efficient for C/C++ code, but objective-C (used by macOS X and iPhone) is structured more like Smalltalk or Java, and uses selectors, which I believe can't be prebound (for you java programmers, these are equivalent to interfaces - C/C++ does not have this concept and instead allows direct access to the classes using protected or public) to interface into classes and these are instanced once for every application accessing that shared library. According to TFA, by keeping a single cached copy of the selector, they avoid the memory overhead of keeping individual copies. Since the OS itself has over 30000 selectors, you can imagine this cuts overhead by quite a bit, especially with commonly loaded libraries like Cocoa.
For people comparing this to superfetch, it's not really the same thing - superfetch was pre-loading heavily used libraries into memory to avoid the delay in loading them during start time, and this is caching the library lookups onto disk that may or may not be memory resident at any particular time.
again, the RIAA only covers recorded material - ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are the major publishers of songs and collect live performance fees (in the US). I think sheet music does include the right to perform it, but I'm not sure - generally venues pay a yearly licensing fee.
Ah, but you don't understand how the racket works - venues that provide live music in the US pay fees to ASCAP thugs (or whoever the publisher of that music is), not RIAA thugs, and those thugs are supposed to pay the songwriter (which is actually done indirectly - usually they pay the studio and the studio is supposed to pay the artist, which pretty much never happens), so the artist is really out of the loop. Venues that play both recorded and live music have to pay to both RIAA and ASCAP thugs.
Speaking as a published artist, I have never seen a penny of ASCAP or RIAA money (we sold a modest amount of albums for an indie in one of my bands - around 10k) - probably from the studio illegally holding it from me. If it was worth it, I'd continue my long history of litigation both against ex-bandmembers and the studio (confiscated gear that was mine sold by the studio to recoup recording fees and the singer and guitarist that stole all of the bands money to support drug habits - it was not a pretty ending...), but the reality is the lawsuit would cost me more both in money and time than I'd recoup.
speaking of IE6, one of the best SVG viewers available was Adobe's, but support for that died with IE6. Well, I shouldn't say died - I know of several enterprise level products that depend on it, and that is why many corporations are stuck using IE6. Unfortunately, a lot of implementations of SVG are incomplete - in fact, I don't think any are fully compliant
Well, there is a US Mint in Washington DC, as I recall. Perhaps all the politicians visit on their breaks and borrow a few bucks so they can get high on the taxpayer's dollar. Still doesn't account for all the other US Mints.
There is a correlation, I think - I worked as a jogger at a press mill and I'd say about half the people I knew working there were snorting coke or smoking pot or both on their breaks - definitely not a drug free workplace. I certainly didn't complain - I worked with a guy high on coke most of the time and he could work all four press lines and let me take my legally required breaks and not lose ground - when I ran four for him I'd have fairly large stacks by the time he got back (we're talking 1 stack of paper to move every 10 seconds, and with 4 lines that means 1 stack every 2.5 seconds - and that doesn't include moving the pallets when they got full).
yeah - that's basically the answer I got when I was a kid, too, at least from mom. The other ones are both refracted light, and mom had me look that up in the encyclopedia.
Of course, if my dad had to answer the first one, he'd say babies come from mistakes by parents, rainbows are formed by fairies dancing in the rain, and the sky is blue because God is always a bit blue, which is why he cries so much. At least I learned how not to be gullible from dad (eventually)...
Actually, it isn't hard to get a Vt-x enabled chip for $800 or less - for instance, as of this moment a Gateway M-6750 is $440 according to Pricewatch and has a T5550 (a Vt supporting CPU according to wiki), but it also has integrated graphics and I'm not sure if the motherboard used supports virtualization (if the graphical chipset matches the motherboard chipset, then no). I've found in general, for machines under $1000 you get an either or choice with Intel - either a Vt-x enabled CPU and integrated graphics OR a non-Vt-x CPU and dedicated graphics. It is possible to find them under $700, if you tolerate WXGA and very cheap hardware graphics like ATI 3850 with shared graphics memory (I personally prefer WSXGA or better and non-shared memory GPUs).
In fact, it seems pretty much either-or until you hit at least $900+, and then you get WXGA+ at best. I got frustrated when trying to spec out a machine with both Vt-x support and a semi-decent GPU - Dell offered one with a T7350 as the top processor in one line, but not a T7250, T7300, or T7400. The only way I could get one of those CPUs was to move to their overpriced XPS line or business machines with no GPU or an OpenGL optimized professional GPU (costing $1800+).
yep - Virtualbox uses QEMU if Vt-x or AMD-V isn't present. I've got a year old Quad-Core 8400 that doesn't support Vt-x because Intel doesn't include it in consumer grade chips (I made sure my laptop had it, though). I think this is going to bite Intel's ass just like the Intel GMA graphics thing did when they used a software timer and Vista Aero required a hardware timer.
Intel Chips are massively hit-and-miss when it comes to Vt - I suggest checking wiki before buying. I tried to find a laptop in the $1000 range with Vt support, hardware GPU (the graphics work I do requires about a class 3 GPU here), and at least 720p. You almost can't find it - either they have Vt or they have hardware GPU. I get discounts from Dell, Toshiba, and IBM, but by the time I specced them out to my minimum they were $300-500 over budget. I finally found a 30% off coupon code for laptops over $1100 from HP and bought one of those (and 30% off brought it back to my $1000 budget - Dell with my discount and their sale was $400 over budget). Sony and Apple were out of my budget range from the start.
Force feeding ID and Creationism seems a bit extremist to me. Christians like my brother and parents are deeply religious weekly churchgoers and believe in evolution, not ID. My brother is even a Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coultier/Sean Hannity loving hard right Republican (and married to a left leaning liberal wife, which is pretty amusing). I'd have to assume there are many other Christians that share that belief.
The issue at hand is the guy is forcing the students to troll, and to troll with philosophy that isn't shared by all Christians, possibly not even by the students themselves. Even if they do believe it, it is kinda like sending a guy in a blue uniform and police badge and a pistol into a gang house full of people with automatic weapons alone and asking them to surrender without a fight (except without the possibility of literally getting killed... I think).
I can't say the same - piracy brought me into assembly level programming on the Apple ][, and that was before Defender was out, though I didn't really get into assembly programming until Ultima, Sabotage, and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, all of which my little group of elementary school hoodlums modded in different ways (extreme Sabotage was more funny than fun - basically, it started at a high difficulty level and got harder).
Funny that this thread talks about Defender and Robotron - my favorite Defender-like game was actually a little known Sierra gem called Aquatron.
Yeah - I was going to mention that one. Strange, though - I could swear it had the voice of an A-list or former A-list actress in it, as well, but I couldn't find that on IMDB (I did remember it had Burroughs). Knowing the stories made the game very easy - not sure if it woulda been quite as easy if I hadn't been into Poe at the time. One of the oddities in that one is you play murderer and victim in The Telltale Heart, so you basically do that story twice as different characters.
Why even purchase it? I work for a CAD company and Cadence competitor (so I won't make specific suggestions to remain impartial), and I know we and some of our competitors routinely donate seats to schools. I don't know exactly how the schools apply for this perk, but I'd suggest e-mailing the marketing group for that company.
CAD companies want students to learn on their software as they are more likely to recommend it if they are involved in buying decisions.
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sorry - had an error there - CAS is 7, not 20. 7-7-7-20 was the spec, and the ones I was looking at before that was 10-10-10-24 and 12-12-12-? (24? 30? - don't remember).
Personally, DDR2 vs DDR3 has WAY too many variables like RAS, CAS, and RAS-to-CAS delay, burst memory sends, etc. When I had my brother do this analysis for me (he designs RAM...) he found that in many cases DDR2 was smoking early DDR3 in random access and was only slightly slower in burst. That was until I found a CAS20 DDR3 chip running at 1600MHz in my price range (which sealed the deal for me going with DDR3). Just letting you know, though - if you have fast DDR2, it may be faster than early DDR3.
Memory bandwidth and transfers rates are generally quick enough now that they really don't have a huge impact on game performance (especially with 1+GB of cache memory to work with).
Ok, now on to CPUs, and interesting that you mentioned it - really one core generally runs most games, so there is little need of a quad HOWEVER, I believe one feature of DX11 (actually, confirmed via google: http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/50217/ATI-On-DirectX-11-Gaming ) is thread safe access from multiple CPUs to the GPU. What that means is if CPU1 is trying to push pixels to GPU and CPU2 is trying to do the same at the same time, it is allowed and won't blow up, so it may be possible to distribute the load more evenly. You could, therefore and for instance, assign a core for each display and let the API send it to the correct GPU (which may or may not be on a separate card) and everything is peachy.
And really, they are trying to test the GPU, so having parts that will not restrict the GPU is best for a review. I really doubt there will be much of a speed degradation due to CPU hardware or memory, but you may lose 1-2 FPS. Since that 1-2FPS will be lost for all GPUs across the board, does it really matter?
I've had exactly the opposite - if I ran anything with the GPU my ATI card machine BSoD'd. I sent the card back twice (to the manufacturer, Sapphire - I didn't have problems until about 30s-5 minutes in and didn't realize it until way past when I could return it to the store (and normal VGA tasks like my life at the time, VPN and then remote desktop to virtual machines, worked great - I really do hate crunch time in the computer world). I've planned to check driver stability for months now, but haven't really had time.
Of course, I can't really say I love nVidia either - the 8600M GS in my now deceased laptop has blown twice, once just six days after the warranty expired. I can't really say I did heavy gaming on it either (some WoW, some Guild Wars, about the worst it got was Fallout 3, but I was only about level 7) - it just is a very flaky part. It died the second time while I was doing CAD modeling and not even really taxing the GPU.
Good luck on that.
H Ross Perot Sr owned companies were already big on outsourcing before outsourcing was even popular - when EDS (also started by Perot - he was on the board of directors for part of the time I was there) bought a company I worked for the first thing they did was gut benefits and lay off 20% of the US workforce (and in the next two years layoffs were roughly 40%, even though the division I was in grew by 6x) and move those jobs to India - and that was in 2000. If anything Dell moves people from India to China where people are even cheaper to hire.
The best day of my life was leaving EDS - the constant fear of layoffs, the downward spiral of their stock, their stupid moves like selling profitable divisions and keeping unprofitable ones so their stock wouldn't go junk (what I call the Control Data spin, and yes, I worked for them, too, albeit briefly).
I should add the 1996 Montreal Protocol (leading to Bill Clinton attempting to ban them in 1997) did non have an exemption for CFC inhalers, and this was the reason behind the attempted banning. I mentioned 2% - that is the CFC contribution of inhalers that I heard when it was going to be banned (meaning 98% is non-inhaler), but that estimate is too high according to some sites - less than .5%. The space shuttle alone contributes more yearly global warming gasses (ammonium perchlorate used in solid rocket boosters is horrible environmentally... but of course is exempt). Again, this was a bureaucratic move and medical company PACs contributed lots of money to get it pushed through.
I've done some additional reading and damn, HFA inhalers are even more messed up than I ever knew (and I use them, but not as often as some people - when I get bad I need to move to steroid inhalers for a few months) - HFA-134a as a propellant was tested only on healthy people, not asthmatics (gee - testing a potential allergen on asthmatics would be logical, don't you think?). Ventolin is the only one that doesn't contain corn ethanol (both corn and ethanol can be allergens). Only short term, small clinical trials were done where results are easier to manipulate. Great job FDA!
Medical inhalers were exempt from the 1987 clean air treaty. The Bill Clinton government tried to get them banned in 1997 for environmental bragging rights but consumer backlash made them retract. Even if they had been banned, it was estimated that CFC emissions from inhalers were less that 2% of all CFC emissions.
George 'W' Bush removed the exemption as his ONLY major environmental policy change in his second to last year in office, deciding that HFA inhalers were a suitable alternative. Of course, that had less to do with the environment and more to do with it directly benefiting big pharma because the HFA patents didn't expire until 2009 (I think the two patents involved were January and March), one year after the deadline for ending the sale of CFC inhalers. Environment groups lauded the change, but the CFCs involved were really an insignificant source - this battle was and always has been all about money.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/saveCFCinhalers/
I can't speak for everyone, but my laptop has been used more for movies than for what I bought it for (mostly a mobile programming platform). It's quite fun watching netflicks instant movies while sitting in the hot tub (with laptop sitting on the side of my grill and sound plugged into our outdoor patio speakers). Having a laptop that displays 1080p with a blu-ray player is nice, too, but due to that resolution it is a bit big - I'll probably have to eventually get a cheap small laptop for true mobility (this one is big even in a backpack).
I would have to agree - while I would call the model they describe (the Doom model/FPS, but I feel this extends to most online games as well) accurate for certain markets, it depends entirely on game, and even the social aspect depends on the game and platform. By marketshare, FPS's and MMORPGs do have the lion's share, but there are still huge markets for other games or
For instance, if I were creating a Wii game (extend that to games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band for any platform), my priorities would be
a) multiplayer with the other player in the room, not online
b) gameplay - easy to learn, easy to play, emphasize fun over difficulty
c) plot and graphics (probably none, and cartoony)
Most people I know played the original guitar hero single player and later versions they usually play multiplayer. I personally never liked the game and am only going by people I know that play it.
How about a 3rd person shooter like Tomb Raider or Resident Evil (not like Left 4 Dead which uses the FPS model)?
a) single player gameplay
b) puzzles/problem solving
b) graphic
c) plot
actually, that one was tough to categorize, because all of the above are usually pretty important, but again, the plot is usually so inane I put it last.
would those same priorities apply to Starcraft 2 or an RTS in general? Absolutely not -
a) gameplay - easy to learn, easy to play, hard to master
b tie) single player
b tie) multiplayer (online)
d) graphics
e) plot (single player) - some people would put this #1 or #2, but mostly people don't care because it doesn't matter
How about adventure games?
a) plot (interchangeable with b, depending on game)
b) puzzles/problem solving
c) graphics/visuals
social and gameplay are pretty much nonfactors, though some hybrid games do have gameplay factors (e.g. Dreamfall, Beyond Good & Evil).
My understanding is sales numbers weren't great for Dreamfall, which is why The Secret World gained priority over finishing the TLJ series. I'm not sure if Funcom would think the same way about MMOs now as they did three years ago, mainly because only one MMO really has pulled in massive numbers (WoW) and the rest have fallen by the wayside or are sputtering along with adequate numbers (including Tornquist's own Anarchy Online), but in 2006 MMO was still viewed as the way to go.
I'd say yes for computers, no for old consoles. I ported Z80 code (Tandy) to Apple ][ and in general it was pretty straightforward, but porting pretty much anything to, say an Atari 2600 or Intellivision is an entirely different bird - for starters, Intellivisions were 10 bit, and nothing is really straightforward to port. The main processor of the Atari 2600 was actually a stripped down 6502 (called a MOS 6507) which could only access 8k of memory, but Atari's cartridge slot only allowed 4k of this to be accessed (the rest were for internal memory and the I/O processor). Both Atari and Intellivision had special I/O processor hardware that could have only so many sprites moving at once and they could only be so large. The I/O processor hardware required custom coding, which pretty much means all graphics and movement logic needed to be written from scratch, and in those days, that was about 95% of the work (AI was pretty much scripted or shortest path and dialog non-existent).
Yeah - I remember playing this at Sears several time and not really figuring it out. However, I'd say the "clone" as they called it, Space Battle on the Intellivision was more an arcade game and the later Space Spartans was actually more similar to Star Raiders. Both had a similar map. The interesting thing is Space Battle's ships were Battlestar Galactica cylon like and Space Spartans were Star Wars ('79-80 was BSG and 82 was shortly before the last Episode VI). My brother and I played those games for... well, an hour a day for many many days (mom kept a tight leash on video game and TV time - 1 hour a day or lose all privileges for a week - she would hide the console's cord and unplug the TV).
The record company still owes the artist residuals for songwriting and any song stipends, so this isn't technically copyright infringement in the same respect as Jammie unless they aren't paying those (basically everyone is getting paid - songwriter, recording engineer, producer, and even artist [once expenses and advances are paid]). The point in question is whether they legally have the rights to release an album with songs that were cut or if the artist retained the rights because the studio chose not to use the material, which is interesting in the respect that the precedent has always been that they record company has the rights, going back to B-sides on singles in the early days of records and radio.
A seven album deal has never meant the record company is restricted to seven albums - it has always meant to bind the artist to that record company for at least seven albums of new material. It is not uncommon for the record company to then re-release albums with bonus material or make greatest hits albums with additional songs after that artist has left (or even, though rare, compile entire albums, usually post-posthumously in a band respect).
When I recorded I remember it being made pretty clear to us that all recorded songs were exclusively owned by the studio, not just the ones that made the album, but that was a lawyer explaining the terms to us in layman's terms, not us reading the contract.
For reference, normally when a program is launched without prebinding, the program has to look into the symbol table for the shared library and "bind" it (basically, tell the program where it is). Prebinding basically does that in advance and saves the lookup table, but any time the library is changed, the bindings have to be regenerated.
The article says prebinding is actually quite efficient for C/C++ code, but objective-C (used by macOS X and iPhone) is structured more like Smalltalk or Java, and uses selectors, which I believe can't be prebound (for you java programmers, these are equivalent to interfaces - C/C++ does not have this concept and instead allows direct access to the classes using protected or public) to interface into classes and these are instanced once for every application accessing that shared library. According to TFA, by keeping a single cached copy of the selector, they avoid the memory overhead of keeping individual copies. Since the OS itself has over 30000 selectors, you can imagine this cuts overhead by quite a bit, especially with commonly loaded libraries like Cocoa.
For people comparing this to superfetch, it's not really the same thing - superfetch was pre-loading heavily used libraries into memory to avoid the delay in loading them during start time, and this is caching the library lookups onto disk that may or may not be memory resident at any particular time.
again, the RIAA only covers recorded material - ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are the major publishers of songs and collect live performance fees (in the US). I think sheet music does include the right to perform it, but I'm not sure - generally venues pay a yearly licensing fee.
Ah, but you don't understand how the racket works - venues that provide live music in the US pay fees to ASCAP thugs (or whoever the publisher of that music is), not RIAA thugs, and those thugs are supposed to pay the songwriter (which is actually done indirectly - usually they pay the studio and the studio is supposed to pay the artist, which pretty much never happens), so the artist is really out of the loop. Venues that play both recorded and live music have to pay to both RIAA and ASCAP thugs.
Speaking as a published artist, I have never seen a penny of ASCAP or RIAA money (we sold a modest amount of albums for an indie in one of my bands - around 10k) - probably from the studio illegally holding it from me. If it was worth it, I'd continue my long history of litigation both against ex-bandmembers and the studio (confiscated gear that was mine sold by the studio to recoup recording fees and the singer and guitarist that stole all of the bands money to support drug habits - it was not a pretty ending...), but the reality is the lawsuit would cost me more both in money and time than I'd recoup.
speaking of IE6, one of the best SVG viewers available was Adobe's, but support for that died with IE6. Well, I shouldn't say died - I know of several enterprise level products that depend on it, and that is why many corporations are stuck using IE6. Unfortunately, a lot of implementations of SVG are incomplete - in fact, I don't think any are fully compliant
Well, there is a US Mint in Washington DC, as I recall. Perhaps all the politicians visit on their breaks and borrow a few bucks so they can get high on the taxpayer's dollar. Still doesn't account for all the other US Mints.
There is a correlation, I think - I worked as a jogger at a press mill and I'd say about half the people I knew working there were snorting coke or smoking pot or both on their breaks - definitely not a drug free workplace. I certainly didn't complain - I worked with a guy high on coke most of the time and he could work all four press lines and let me take my legally required breaks and not lose ground - when I ran four for him I'd have fairly large stacks by the time he got back (we're talking 1 stack of paper to move every 10 seconds, and with 4 lines that means 1 stack every 2.5 seconds - and that doesn't include moving the pallets when they got full).
yeah - that's basically the answer I got when I was a kid, too, at least from mom. The other ones are both refracted light, and mom had me look that up in the encyclopedia.
Of course, if my dad had to answer the first one, he'd say babies come from mistakes by parents, rainbows are formed by fairies dancing in the rain, and the sky is blue because God is always a bit blue, which is why he cries so much. At least I learned how not to be gullible from dad (eventually)...
Actually, it isn't hard to get a Vt-x enabled chip for $800 or less - for instance, as of this moment a Gateway M-6750 is $440 according to Pricewatch and has a T5550 (a Vt supporting CPU according to wiki), but it also has integrated graphics and I'm not sure if the motherboard used supports virtualization (if the graphical chipset matches the motherboard chipset, then no). I've found in general, for machines under $1000 you get an either or choice with Intel - either a Vt-x enabled CPU and integrated graphics OR a non-Vt-x CPU and dedicated graphics. It is possible to find them under $700, if you tolerate WXGA and very cheap hardware graphics like ATI 3850 with shared graphics memory (I personally prefer WSXGA or better and non-shared memory GPUs).
In fact, it seems pretty much either-or until you hit at least $900+, and then you get WXGA+ at best. I got frustrated when trying to spec out a machine with both Vt-x support and a semi-decent GPU - Dell offered one with a T7350 as the top processor in one line, but not a T7250, T7300, or T7400. The only way I could get one of those CPUs was to move to their overpriced XPS line or business machines with no GPU or an OpenGL optimized professional GPU (costing $1800+).
yep - Virtualbox uses QEMU if Vt-x or AMD-V isn't present. I've got a year old Quad-Core 8400 that doesn't support Vt-x because Intel doesn't include it in consumer grade chips (I made sure my laptop had it, though). I think this is going to bite Intel's ass just like the Intel GMA graphics thing did when they used a software timer and Vista Aero required a hardware timer.
incorrect, the T9400 does support Vt.
Intel Chips are massively hit-and-miss when it comes to Vt - I suggest checking wiki before buying. I tried to find a laptop in the $1000 range with Vt support, hardware GPU (the graphics work I do requires about a class 3 GPU here), and at least 720p. You almost can't find it - either they have Vt or they have hardware GPU. I get discounts from Dell, Toshiba, and IBM, but by the time I specced them out to my minimum they were $300-500 over budget. I finally found a 30% off coupon code for laptops over $1100 from HP and bought one of those (and 30% off brought it back to my $1000 budget - Dell with my discount and their sale was $400 over budget). Sony and Apple were out of my budget range from the start.
Force feeding ID and Creationism seems a bit extremist to me. Christians like my brother and parents are deeply religious weekly churchgoers and believe in evolution, not ID. My brother is even a Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coultier/Sean Hannity loving hard right Republican (and married to a left leaning liberal wife, which is pretty amusing). I'd have to assume there are many other Christians that share that belief.
The issue at hand is the guy is forcing the students to troll, and to troll with philosophy that isn't shared by all Christians, possibly not even by the students themselves. Even if they do believe it, it is kinda like sending a guy in a blue uniform and police badge and a pistol into a gang house full of people with automatic weapons alone and asking them to surrender without a fight (except without the possibility of literally getting killed... I think).
I can't say the same - piracy brought me into assembly level programming on the Apple ][, and that was before Defender was out, though I didn't really get into assembly programming until Ultima, Sabotage, and Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, all of which my little group of elementary school hoodlums modded in different ways (extreme Sabotage was more funny than fun - basically, it started at a high difficulty level and got harder).
Funny that this thread talks about Defender and Robotron - my favorite Defender-like game was actually a little known Sierra gem called Aquatron.
Yeah - I was going to mention that one. Strange, though - I could swear it had the voice of an A-list or former A-list actress in it, as well, but I couldn't find that on IMDB (I did remember it had Burroughs). Knowing the stories made the game very easy - not sure if it woulda been quite as easy if I hadn't been into Poe at the time. One of the oddities in that one is you play murderer and victim in The Telltale Heart, so you basically do that story twice as different characters.
Why even purchase it? I work for a CAD company and Cadence competitor (so I won't make specific suggestions to remain impartial), and I know we and some of our competitors routinely donate seats to schools. I don't know exactly how the schools apply for this perk, but I'd suggest e-mailing the marketing group for that company.
CAD companies want students to learn on their software as they are more likely to recommend it if they are involved in buying decisions.