The first article has a "hub and pinch points" that the author notes "I have no idea what that means". Assuming that this wasn't sarcasm, a hub is a recurring place you return to often. In an RPG, you may get quest A, B, and C and need to return to the hub after completing each one for the reward. A pinch point is a place you need to go to in order to progress with the main quest. A recent and extreme "pinch point" I've experienced is in the last Guild Wars beta. You start in the city of Old Ascalon before the Charr attack. At some point, you enter the acadamy and the Charr attack, devastating the kingdom and moving you into the Ruins of Ascalon. It is a pinch point - it progresses the story but limits or removes the amount of backtracking you can do. Fallout 2 is probably the classic example of pinch points - you have several places you have to go (Navarre base, dock platform, ship), and ultimately, the game could probably be completed in a few hours (I've seen a walkthrough that shows how to complete the game in 4 hours or less by going to Navarre in the first 5 minutes of the game rather than about 20 hours in), but there's a lot of stuff you'll miss in-between and you'd miss out on many allies and chances to advance your character along the way.
From http://www.dor.state.wi.us/faqs/ise/usetax.html
1. What is the Wisconsin use tax? Use tax is the counterpart of sales tax. It must be paid on all taxable items purchased from retailers who do not collect Wisconsin sales tax and all taxable items brought into Wisconsin. It applies to purchases made in foreign countries as well as other states. Use tax only applies when Wisconsin sales tax is not charged.
2. What is taxable? All goods, services, and merchandise that are taxable under Wisconsin's sales tax law are also subject to the use tax. Use tax applies to, but is not limited to, mail-order catalog and television shopping or auctions, toll-free "800" purchases, Internet auctions, and purchases made over the Internet.
Examples of taxable items include automobiles, appliances, clothing, furniture, jewelry, cameras, VCRs, computers, and computer software. Some taxable services include repair services to your television, motor vehicle, or computer; landscaping services for your home; and reupholstering services for your household furniture.
It seems pretty cut-and-dry to me just from point 1 - if you make a purchase from anyone outside of Wisconsin and don't pay tax on it, you owe tax to the state. I know you probably could argue that you're not getting a tangible object, but if you argue that, you fail to acknowledge that "services" are also non-tangible in many cases - you still paid someone to do something for you and didn't pay tax on it.
What I'm afraid of is proposing a tax on downloads including free stuff - say on a per megabyte scale. Yikes - and I downloaded almost 2 gigs today (all legal - a bunch of large game demos).
yeah - I knew those sorts in college, too - the ones that failed out of college because they were so close to being a wizard on DartMUD (or something similar). On the plus side, they were all skinny as rails because they never left the computer to eat, either. I have a feeling those days are over, now that we have/pizza (they didn't look like this guy, but they will now)
This isn't "of people" it's of "MMORPG players" - I think that's more akin to saying 'of vodka drinkers that have a drink at least twice a week or more, 15% are alcoholics'
I don't think there really were AI lobotomies in Civ or MOO multiplayer, just that humans tend to gang up on AI characters. Having a truly trustworthy ally at your back can seriously turn the tide of a game like that. Then again, that's what many of these strategy games lack - dependable allies. With a person, if I need to leave a city undefended for a turn, I can usually trust them - with an AI, that city is gone as soon as I leave it and I'm at war with my former "friend." The hardest game of MOO2 I ever played was when I went to war against the human player right away and by the end of our spat we were minor players in the galaxy (and eventually, both human players lost - me by being crushed by the brainy Psilons and my opponent by vote, where he was WAAAY behind the Psilons and Meklar).
Another thing is most human players stick to a strategy and don't oversaturate. Civ is a prime example, where the AI saturates the area with diplomats and cheap troops at the expense of rapid expansion or heavy troop mobilization (I prefer the former, a friend the latter). In Civ, usually the _first_ thing I build is a settler, and then a cheap defense troop. After that, I either build another troop for exploration or another settler, and that strategy worked from Civ 1-3 and really pays off vs human opponents that play the "conquor" method, IMO (which essentially is never build settlers until continent is taken, only build troops and attack and take nearest city - switch directly from dictatorship to something pro-military like Communism and never use pro-growth governments).
We are - well paid IT people usually can pay for their own access, but remember that IT workers don't live in a vacuum - they need to eat lunch so there are McDonalds and Wendy's workers. They need clean offices, so there are janitors. They need groceries, so there's grocery workers. They need something to do on weekends, so there's video stores, bars, arenas, movie theaters, and coffee shops. For every one person that works in a well paid job, there's probably 30 people depending on a cut of that person's salary to make their own living. Community Internet wouldn't just be put in affluent areas of a community, it would be put in all the areas of that community.
I was going to argue on a similar grounds (TV) and add more -
city services are audited by the state auditor - yeah, there probably is a markup for the government doing it, but significant cost swings would show up. Worst case scenario - the people vote to discontinue the spending.
another point - wireless through access points can only provide so much speed, and the more people using it, the less speed they get (unfortunately, that means poorer neighborhoods will still suffer). There will always be a demand for power users like myself willing to pay for much better service, and free wi-fi may even act as a gateway to buying higher speed access (I'm sure free TV has helped cable and satellite a lot).
I also disagree with your point aboug Cable and DSL not being able to compete with free wireless - sure they can - offer cleaner/more reliable reception, faster speeds, more reliable service (uptimes), and support (I imagine free community wireless will have little or none). Sure you're going to lose a few customers, especially the ones that think any access is good enough, but you're going to gain customers, as well, from people fed up with the slow, unreliable, hard to configure municipal service.
And before you argue that wireless is easy to configure and I'm nuts, I'll tell you that I've helped two people that couldn't figure out how to connect their laptops to free wireless services in just the past 48 hours (and I'm not a tech - one was my mom, the other was my brother-in-law). Neither is a complete idiot about computers, and in both cases it required multiple steps that weren't obvious to the user. My mom had even tried the Windows help wizard, without success. In both cases, the user had failed to realize that there was a key or key combo to turn on the antenna. The unlabeled radio antenna icon by a small rubber button was not obvious to one user, the other required a two character combo (Fn-F12). I later discovered that the only place the Fn-F12 was documented, at least that I could find, was a large 'using your new laptop' guide (also documenting stuff like clicking, dragging and dropping, ad nauseum), which my mom hadn't watched, since she had used many laptops and Windows PCs before.
GPUs don't really need it as much, though, unless you want to split the rendering task like SLI does(say, so you can run 1600x1200x32 at 85fps). GPUs get more bang for the buck by reducing the number of rendering passes required and doing things in hardware that are slow or impossible in a software solution (e.g. pixel and vertex shaders, pixel buffers, etc). I'm a huge fan of pbuffers (rendering textures dynamically) but until OGL 2.1 (and whatever direct X 10 is being renamed to) I don't think their full power will be realized.
I agree - 100MB at 1Mbps (150kps) is 11 minutes, which isn't too-too bad, but 40GB at 1Mbps is 3 days, which would really suck.
Even a 3Mbps rate isn't fast enough - that's still 24 hours to load 40GB of tunes.
Just to nit-pick about bits (b) and bytes (B), mbps should be Mbps (mega bits per second) and mb should be MB (megabyte).
Bluetooth was designed as a peripheral connector, not a data bus which is obvious with the low speeds. Incidentally, USB was designed the same and speed was ramped way up later.
for that matter, some of the games in the list aren't in the US yet - The Fall: The Last Days of Gaia (see this forum), Kult: Heretic Kingdoms (info here), for instance. I think RPGdot's audience is more global than their UK base, so games released globally will rack up more votes from games released globally (thus the big difference in their votes vs the world votes).
Retail typically marks up a product by 50%, so a $50 title is shipped by the publisher for $25. Often contractual agreements require the seller to use the MSRP for a certain amount of time, as well (so they can't charge less or they break the agreement). Publishers do that to be fair to smaller channels that can't compete with companies like Best Buy and WalMart. I'm a little hazy on the details, but as I understand it, this does not count as price fixing in the US - I believe these contracts only set a minimum price and must provide a timeline for market conditions. I used to be more involved with this stuff, but I've been out of the music biz for 10 years now.
The publisher also has to take into account anything not sold in retail is returned to them, as well as defective products, so it's not quite the honeypot you imagine. Still, I have little doubt Blizzard could have run the game without a monthly fee - they've been running Battle.net for years that way. I prefer the way Guild Wars is doing it - sell expansion packs every 6 months instead of charging monthly fees. I also like that because I don't have to rely on Arena.net holding onto my credit card numbers - I realize that's a bit paranoid, but I didn't like identity theft the first time and would prefer it to not happen again.
This isn't what I've seen - though I did get a popup when I installed new software that tried to access the net. I got no popup when I tried to print on port 9200 using the Windows firewall, but ZoneAlarm gave me a popup indicating the port was blocked and asking if I wanted to open it. I also had a game that Zone Alarm allowed through with a prompt but Windows firewall blocked by default (it might have been Freedom Force, which has been acknowledged by MS and patched by Irrational, tho).
Yep, forfeiting (pre-patch) has that bug. There is now a patch out, but I haven't had a chance to test it to see if the problem is solved. I avoided it by saving before the swoop and reloading if I forfeited. Getting 44 sec times wasn't hard, but 41 seemed impossible - I think I missed two of the boosters, and those near the end, and still ended up with 42 seconds. I missed 2 boosters in the staged race on a different planet (Dantoonie?) and still beat the top time in about an hour of play, so I'm glad I gave up - the 500 credits aren't worth it. Not to mention that the track was more interesting.
I agree, though, something seems skew with the view perspective making the characters look kind of flattened. It may be a byproduct of using a certain resolution, though, so I plan to test a different resolution and see if it fixes things (I'm currently at 1024x768 and I think the "base" of the PC version of the game is 800x600)
I've also been disappointed with most of the planets - very bland and not a whole lot to figure out on them. The exception is probably the Exchange homeworld, aside from combat on that world has been far too easy, especially after the Sith homeworld (I suspect it wasn't meant to be played in that order, but you can do it).
Re:Bad reviews on Vampire: Bloodlines the cause?
on
Troika Games Closes
·
· Score: 1
You're probably not as fussy as me and ran using the first patch - the first patch addressed some serious crashing issues.
There still were minor scripting errors in places (e.g. females being called 'he') and definitely some AI problems, even in 1.1 - for instance, when I went to the fish market to fight the Hengeyokai, I once got the monster trapped on a bookshelf (and lesurely shot it to death) and many times got Yukie stuck shooting her crossbow and never stopping, even when there was no way for her to hit the monster in some places.
Re:Bad reviews on Vampire: Bloodlines the cause?
on
Troika Games Closes
·
· Score: 1
Speaking of KotOR2, lets talk bugs. Everywhere. Many unacceptable IMO - the broken Pazaak tutorial, aborting a swoop race and never being able to win... just awful QA.
Both cases (KotOR and Bloodlines) are most likely publishers pushing a game out before it's ready. It's really too bad.
Troika did have a history of games that had far too many bugs at release, even in their former incarnations (though Interplay was legendary for that). I thought Bloodlines was less buggy than many previous games by Troika, though it still lacked polish. Still it was probably my favorite RPG of 2004.
I knew I was going to see a lot of bugs when I found the Pazaak tutorial had problems (as I recall, there's a choice where you can't go against the dialog, even if it means you're going to lose, which happens a lot if you're using cards with negatives).
Then there's the lack of hints/tips - like the next to impossible swoop races (I've only done the first, spent 8 hours trying to win and my best time was 42 seconds - still 1 sec off from beating the game's top time). I can't imagine how someone that didn't play the first would ever win - heck, they don't tell you how to start, speed up, jump - nothing - you have to figure it out. In the first at least you'd win the first few races by missing a few of the boost points - not in this - you need to hit something like 10 of 12 to win while dodging an obstacle course that made the first game's hardest track look easy. Most XBox owners I know just used the cheat, which doesn't work on PC as far as I can tell (or my timing was bad).
I've used XP SP2 without many problems, but the transition wasn't seamless - the firewall blocked port 9100, which is used by my color laser printer, a Konica-Minolta 2300DL. People with HP or Apple printers that use PDL (page description language) will also have problems with this. I had several other firewall related problems, which easily can be confirmed by just turning off the firewall, testing the program, and then turning the firewall back on. I really wish it worked more like Zone Alarm, which asks you if you want to allow the program to run, but I suppose since 99% of users don't know the background programs that is a security risk in itself. At least you can replace it with Zone Alarm easily enough (which I did for my mom so I didn't have to fix her port problems).
There is a use tax theshold in many states that have the tax. In Minnesota, it's $770 (which hasn't adjusted for inflation over at least 5 years, probably more). I know my state's been cracking down, so I've paid it twice in the last three years. As far as I can tell, it's per household, too, which screws families. Keeping track of my wife's purchases is next to impossible, since sometimes the only record she has is on her computer at work, especially for those little gifts she buys for friends.
What's really lame is the mail in stub I got said due by Feb 9, but the tax document says April 15 (which is when they're getting it, since I missed Feb 9, anyway). If they bitch about it, I'll site the conflicting information and tell them they need to get their act together. Hee hee - I love sticking it to the man:)
why would you go anywhere? I mean, I saw lots of pictures of the grand canyon before I went there, but I went there anyway.
sometimes it makes sense to go somewhere else - I certainly enjoyed near-perfect weather in Hawaii last year when it was freezing cold at home, but I also road tripped to Arizona in the summer to sear in 105F+ (~41C) heat to see the aformentioned grand canyon (again, 'cause I saw it as a kid, too).
What I got out of the article was basically this is a rich kid fantasy - $1 million per day (or was it per voyage? - article is slashdotted and my pop sci is at home) is a tad out of my league unless Lance Bass wants to spot me a few thousand Gs.
Nah - you've got some key issues missing - my guess is that Microsoft [will/has] port[ed] DirectX to PPC, but they would NEVER release it on mac, and they also probably ported Windows CE to it, so you'd have an entirely different set of APIs and graphics calls. They may have taking advantage of the PPC's ability to work in either little or big endian modes (though only in some models - the 970 doesn't, but Sony's Cell, which is supposed to be similar to the one MS uses, does). Since all the APIs are still Windows proprietary, it will still be much easier to port to Windows.
The main problem I've seen is programmers that don't separate I/O from the core code - that's really all you need to port for C and C++, so the better the abstraction, the easier the port (especially now that added raw assembly optimizations are much rarer). Optimization, for the most part is a dark art - I've gotten 10x better performance just by using a profiler for a couple of hours, and other times tried for days and squeaked out maybe.02%. And while I felt vector units were very important just a couple of years ago, more and more of the functionality that they were used for is being moved into the GPU. Stuff like Clipping, particle systems, volumetric fog, skinning, and render to texture can all be done on the GPU now. Vectors are still useful for path finding, physics, and sometimes collision detection but their value just isn't what it was.
Even using a cross platform API like OpenGL doesn't always solve I/O problems - take this chunk of code I pulled from a working cross-platform (but not cross-endian) 3D engine: glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_BGRA_EXT, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, data);
the fix is to use a variant of the function that tells the card the order of the bytes and passes it each of the "inverted" 32 bit blocks of RGBA data.
not only do you get a free endian fix, you also get a free performance boost since passing data to the card by int is much faster than by byte (nVidia actually recommends the above function).
First off, though, North Korea has been generating enriched Plutonium (and Uranium, I think) for several years in defiance of US threats of sanctions. They are known to have enough Plutonium to create several nuclear weapons.
Second, a Pakistani scientist sold secrets to building nuclear weapons to North Korea. Pakistan has nuclear capability and have demonstrated it. There are also rumors in the other direction - that Pakistan willingly allowed North Korea to test a plutonium device on its soil in 1998 when they still lacked enough plutonium to do it themselves. This makes some sense when you also realize that North Korea doesn't have the desert to perform its own nuclear testing, so if they did explode a nuke either above or underground, they'd likely pollute their water supply. Still, they may have done just that on the Korean-China border (see the Ryanggang explosion from late last year.
A quick google search dug up somereferences about the 1998 testing.
When I tell people I'm working on a mac port of OSS, most Windows people tell me I'm wasting my time (usually in much more colorful language). I get a much better reception if I also say I've fixed a bunch of Linux bugs (and sometimes Windows bugs) or also ported the program to Linux.
Then there's my wife, the biggest Windows bigot out there - she HATES macs (on the plus side, she never touches mine) and dislikes Linux intensely (she thought the KDE interface was "nasty," and derided OpenOffice because it "lacked the functionality and ease of use of Office") and would never think of ever trying Firefox or Mozilla over IE (I switched her browser to Firefox, but she made me switch it back). Ironically, her dad won't touch a Windows or Linux and loves macs - but only macs running OS 9 or earlier (which baffles me...).
Me, I'm happily platform agnostic - I love them all and hate them all for different reasons.
I have to agree with the "insightful" poster - he/she/it is describing optimizing using assembly, not C, and trying to optimize code in assembler is a nightmare these days. You've got deep pipelines, multiple execution units, parallel processing - it's just ugly and requires a deep understanding of how to reorder the instructions to avoid pipeline stalls as well as keeping all the parallel units working at the same time. Optimizing your C code for better assembly is a different thing entirely (unrolling loops, aligning bitmaps on power-of-2 boundaries for faster copies, putting most common loop choice first, etc.).
About the best you can hope for is to tweak C code with assembly blocks (usually after extensive profiling). Even then, you really don't see the huge performance improvements these days (nothing like 5 years ago).
I used to be excited about the future of this tech, but to me, GPU tech has become far more important (heck, the latest stuff I've been programming barely sucks up 800MHz of my CPU but throttles the GPU).
yep - programmer key (and then typing 'finder g') interupt got around it, as did an OS bootable zip drive hooked to the SCSI chain (cmd-opt-shift-esc) or pressing 'c' with an OS CD in the drive. On older macs, it was just command-esc or command-del to enter debug mode because there was no programmer key. I think early versions of At Ease could be bypassed by holding down the shift key at start or by using force quit (cmd-.), but those two workarounds didn't last for long.
In college I faced a similar but a bit different of a problem - Foolproof and nightly restore from disk images. Our mac lab head and lead lab attendant were both very smart mac users (the lab lead wrote a very popular graphical game called MacTrek [not the text game], but was forced to destroy it and all copies and source when Paramount sued him and he lost) and pulled the programmer and reset keys off, though I found I could still hit either with a well aimed paperclip... but that didn't disable foolproof like it did At-Ease. At about that time, I discovered the magical command-option-shift-delete would boot to the next available drive, not the hard disk. With an OS installed mac image on a Zip disk, I was able to bypass and remove programs... At first, I just disabled the image restore program, but the sys-admins were savvy, and quickly discovered my transgression and reinstalled the software, wiping my game folder... I needed something more. They had discovered that I hacked in, but not how I had hacked in, so I continued with my deviant ways... With some playing around with folder flags, I found one that wouldn't allow the folder to be deleted by the restore software (mark as a system folder, I think). I also found the program wouldn't erase anything contained in this protected folder, though I don't know why - maybe they thought that since foolproof wouldn't let you open the system folder, there was no need to clean it up, maybe it was a flaw in the restore program - I never did find out.
I installed a directory with games having no icon and the name " " (space). You couldn't see it unless you rectangle drag highlighted it, and needed to click the space to launch it, since I erased its icon mask to make it harder to see. I then shoved it in a place nobody would look - something under Utilities, but I forget. Later, when I was a bit more mac savvy myself, I wrote a little extension I called unfoolproof (not to be mistaken for the program by the same name) that would not load the foolproof extension if I held down the u key at boot (it was actually named something innocuous like ISO9660VolumeMount and didn't display an extension icon).
Slashdot Mirror
The first article has a "hub and pinch points" that the author notes "I have no idea what that means". Assuming that this wasn't sarcasm, a hub is a recurring place you return to often. In an RPG, you may get quest A, B, and C and need to return to the hub after completing each one for the reward. A pinch point is a place you need to go to in order to progress with the main quest. A recent and extreme "pinch point" I've experienced is in the last Guild Wars beta. You start in the city of Old Ascalon before the Charr attack. At some point, you enter the acadamy and the Charr attack, devastating the kingdom and moving you into the Ruins of Ascalon. It is a pinch point - it progresses the story but limits or removes the amount of backtracking you can do. Fallout 2 is probably the classic example of pinch points - you have several places you have to go (Navarre base, dock platform, ship), and ultimately, the game could probably be completed in a few hours (I've seen a walkthrough that shows how to complete the game in 4 hours or less by going to Navarre in the first 5 minutes of the game rather than about 20 hours in), but there's a lot of stuff you'll miss in-between and you'd miss out on many allies and chances to advance your character along the way.
Wisconsin also has use tax:
From http://www.dor.state.wi.us/faqs/ise/usetax.html
1. What is the Wisconsin use tax?
Use tax is the counterpart of sales tax. It must be paid on all taxable items purchased from retailers who do not collect Wisconsin sales tax and all taxable items brought into Wisconsin. It applies to purchases made in foreign countries as well as other states. Use tax only applies when Wisconsin sales tax is not charged.
2. What is taxable?
All goods, services, and merchandise that are taxable under Wisconsin's sales tax law are also subject to the use tax. Use tax applies to, but is not limited to, mail-order catalog and television shopping or auctions, toll-free "800" purchases, Internet auctions, and purchases made over the Internet.
Examples of taxable items include automobiles, appliances, clothing, furniture, jewelry, cameras, VCRs, computers, and computer software. Some taxable services include repair services to your television, motor vehicle, or computer; landscaping services for your home; and reupholstering services for your household furniture.
It seems pretty cut-and-dry to me just from point 1 - if you make a purchase from anyone outside of Wisconsin and don't pay tax on it, you owe tax to the state. I know you probably could argue that you're not getting a tangible object, but if you argue that, you fail to acknowledge that "services" are also non-tangible in many cases - you still paid someone to do something for you and didn't pay tax on it.
What I'm afraid of is proposing a tax on downloads including free stuff - say on a per megabyte scale. Yikes - and I downloaded almost 2 gigs today (all legal - a bunch of large game demos).
yeah - I knew those sorts in college, too - the ones that failed out of college because they were so close to being a wizard on DartMUD (or something similar). On the plus side, they were all skinny as rails because they never left the computer to eat, either. I have a feeling those days are over, now that we have /pizza (they didn't look like this guy, but they will now)
This isn't "of people" it's of "MMORPG players" - I think that's more akin to saying 'of vodka drinkers that have a drink at least twice a week or more, 15% are alcoholics'
I don't think there really were AI lobotomies in Civ or MOO multiplayer, just that humans tend to gang up on AI characters. Having a truly trustworthy ally at your back can seriously turn the tide of a game like that. Then again, that's what many of these strategy games lack - dependable allies. With a person, if I need to leave a city undefended for a turn, I can usually trust them - with an AI, that city is gone as soon as I leave it and I'm at war with my former "friend." The hardest game of MOO2 I ever played was when I went to war against the human player right away and by the end of our spat we were minor players in the galaxy (and eventually, both human players lost - me by being crushed by the brainy Psilons and my opponent by vote, where he was WAAAY behind the Psilons and Meklar).
Another thing is most human players stick to a strategy and don't oversaturate. Civ is a prime example, where the AI saturates the area with diplomats and cheap troops at the expense of rapid expansion or heavy troop mobilization (I prefer the former, a friend the latter). In Civ, usually the _first_ thing I build is a settler, and then a cheap defense troop. After that, I either build another troop for exploration or another settler, and that strategy worked from Civ 1-3 and really pays off vs human opponents that play the "conquor" method, IMO (which essentially is never build settlers until continent is taken, only build troops and attack and take nearest city - switch directly from dictatorship to something pro-military like Communism and never use pro-growth governments).
We are - well paid IT people usually can pay for their own access, but remember that IT workers don't live in a vacuum - they need to eat lunch so there are McDonalds and Wendy's workers. They need clean offices, so there are janitors. They need groceries, so there's grocery workers. They need something to do on weekends, so there's video stores, bars, arenas, movie theaters, and coffee shops. For every one person that works in a well paid job, there's probably 30 people depending on a cut of that person's salary to make their own living. Community Internet wouldn't just be put in affluent areas of a community, it would be put in all the areas of that community.
I was going to argue on a similar grounds (TV) and add more -
city services are audited by the state auditor - yeah, there probably is a markup for the government doing it, but significant cost swings would show up. Worst case scenario - the people vote to discontinue the spending.
another point - wireless through access points can only provide so much speed, and the more people using it, the less speed they get (unfortunately, that means poorer neighborhoods will still suffer). There will always be a demand for power users like myself willing to pay for much better service, and free wi-fi may even act as a gateway to buying higher speed access (I'm sure free TV has helped cable and satellite a lot).
I also disagree with your point aboug Cable and DSL not being able to compete with free wireless - sure they can - offer cleaner/more reliable reception, faster speeds, more reliable service (uptimes), and support (I imagine free community wireless will have little or none). Sure you're going to lose a few customers, especially the ones that think any access is good enough, but you're going to gain customers, as well, from people fed up with the slow, unreliable, hard to configure municipal service.
And before you argue that wireless is easy to configure and I'm nuts, I'll tell you that I've helped two people that couldn't figure out how to connect their laptops to free wireless services in just the past 48 hours (and I'm not a tech - one was my mom, the other was my brother-in-law). Neither is a complete idiot about computers, and in both cases it required multiple steps that weren't obvious to the user. My mom had even tried the Windows help wizard, without success. In both cases, the user had failed to realize that there was a key or key combo to turn on the antenna. The unlabeled radio antenna icon by a small rubber button was not obvious to one user, the other required a two character combo (Fn-F12). I later discovered that the only place the Fn-F12 was documented, at least that I could find, was a large 'using your new laptop' guide (also documenting stuff like clicking, dragging and dropping, ad nauseum), which my mom hadn't watched, since she had used many laptops and Windows PCs before.
they have, but only high end.
GPUs don't really need it as much, though, unless you want to split the rendering task like SLI does(say, so you can run 1600x1200x32 at 85fps). GPUs get more bang for the buck by reducing the number of rendering passes required and doing things in hardware that are slow or impossible in a software solution (e.g. pixel and vertex shaders, pixel buffers, etc). I'm a huge fan of pbuffers (rendering textures dynamically) but until OGL 2.1 (and whatever direct X 10 is being renamed to) I don't think their full power will be realized.
I agree - 100MB at 1Mbps (150kps) is 11 minutes, which isn't too-too bad, but 40GB at 1Mbps is 3 days, which would really suck.
Even a 3Mbps rate isn't fast enough - that's still 24 hours to load 40GB of tunes.
Just to nit-pick about bits (b) and bytes (B), mbps should be Mbps (mega bits per second) and mb should be MB (megabyte).
Bluetooth was designed as a peripheral connector, not a data bus which is obvious with the low speeds. Incidentally, USB was designed the same and speed was ramped way up later.
proofreading before posting is good - that last globally should be locally :)
for that matter, some of the games in the list aren't in the US yet - The Fall: The Last Days of Gaia (see this forum), Kult: Heretic Kingdoms (info here), for instance. I think RPGdot's audience is more global than their UK base, so games released globally will rack up more votes from games released globally (thus the big difference in their votes vs the world votes).
Retail typically marks up a product by 50%, so a $50 title is shipped by the publisher for $25. Often contractual agreements require the seller to use the MSRP for a certain amount of time, as well (so they can't charge less or they break the agreement). Publishers do that to be fair to smaller channels that can't compete with companies like Best Buy and WalMart. I'm a little hazy on the details, but as I understand it, this does not count as price fixing in the US - I believe these contracts only set a minimum price and must provide a timeline for market conditions. I used to be more involved with this stuff, but I've been out of the music biz for 10 years now.
The publisher also has to take into account anything not sold in retail is returned to them, as well as defective products, so it's not quite the honeypot you imagine. Still, I have little doubt Blizzard could have run the game without a monthly fee - they've been running Battle.net for years that way. I prefer the way Guild Wars is doing it - sell expansion packs every 6 months instead of charging monthly fees. I also like that because I don't have to rely on Arena.net holding onto my credit card numbers - I realize that's a bit paranoid, but I didn't like identity theft the first time and would prefer it to not happen again.
This isn't what I've seen - though I did get a popup when I installed new software that tried to access the net. I got no popup when I tried to print on port 9200 using the Windows firewall, but ZoneAlarm gave me a popup indicating the port was blocked and asking if I wanted to open it. I also had a game that Zone Alarm allowed through with a prompt but Windows firewall blocked by default (it might have been Freedom Force, which has been acknowledged by MS and patched by Irrational, tho).
Yep, forfeiting (pre-patch) has that bug. There is now a patch out, but I haven't had a chance to test it to see if the problem is solved. I avoided it by saving before the swoop and reloading if I forfeited. Getting 44 sec times wasn't hard, but 41 seemed impossible - I think I missed two of the boosters, and those near the end, and still ended up with 42 seconds. I missed 2 boosters in the staged race on a different planet (Dantoonie?) and still beat the top time in about an hour of play, so I'm glad I gave up - the 500 credits aren't worth it. Not to mention that the track was more interesting.
I agree, though, something seems skew with the view perspective making the characters look kind of flattened. It may be a byproduct of using a certain resolution, though, so I plan to test a different resolution and see if it fixes things (I'm currently at 1024x768 and I think the "base" of the PC version of the game is 800x600)
I've also been disappointed with most of the planets - very bland and not a whole lot to figure out on them. The exception is probably the Exchange homeworld, aside from combat on that world has been far too easy, especially after the Sith homeworld (I suspect it wasn't meant to be played in that order, but you can do it).
You're probably not as fussy as me and ran using the first patch - the first patch addressed some serious crashing issues.
There still were minor scripting errors in places (e.g. females being called 'he') and definitely some AI problems, even in 1.1 - for instance, when I went to the fish market to fight the Hengeyokai, I once got the monster trapped on a bookshelf (and lesurely shot it to death) and many times got Yukie stuck shooting her crossbow and never stopping, even when there was no way for her to hit the monster in some places.
Speaking of KotOR2, lets talk bugs. Everywhere. Many unacceptable IMO - the broken Pazaak tutorial, aborting a swoop race and never being able to win... just awful QA.
Both cases (KotOR and Bloodlines) are most likely publishers pushing a game out before it's ready. It's really too bad.
Troika did have a history of games that had far too many bugs at release, even in their former incarnations (though Interplay was legendary for that). I thought Bloodlines was less buggy than many previous games by Troika, though it still lacked polish. Still it was probably my favorite RPG of 2004.
I knew I was going to see a lot of bugs when I found the Pazaak tutorial had problems (as I recall, there's a choice where you can't go against the dialog, even if it means you're going to lose, which happens a lot if you're using cards with negatives).
Then there's the lack of hints/tips - like the next to impossible swoop races (I've only done the first, spent 8 hours trying to win and my best time was 42 seconds - still 1 sec off from beating the game's top time). I can't imagine how someone that didn't play the first would ever win - heck, they don't tell you how to start, speed up, jump - nothing - you have to figure it out. In the first at least you'd win the first few races by missing a few of the boost points - not in this - you need to hit something like 10 of 12 to win while dodging an obstacle course that made the first game's hardest track look easy. Most XBox owners I know just used the cheat, which doesn't work on PC as far as I can tell (or my timing was bad).
I've used XP SP2 without many problems, but the transition wasn't seamless - the firewall blocked port 9100, which is used by my color laser printer, a Konica-Minolta 2300DL. People with HP or Apple printers that use PDL (page description language) will also have problems with this. I had several other firewall related problems, which easily can be confirmed by just turning off the firewall, testing the program, and then turning the firewall back on. I really wish it worked more like Zone Alarm, which asks you if you want to allow the program to run, but I suppose since 99% of users don't know the background programs that is a security risk in itself. At least you can replace it with Zone Alarm easily enough (which I did for my mom so I didn't have to fix her port problems).
There is a use tax theshold in many states that have the tax. In Minnesota, it's $770 (which hasn't adjusted for inflation over at least 5 years, probably more). I know my state's been cracking down, so I've paid it twice in the last three years. As far as I can tell, it's per household, too, which screws families. Keeping track of my wife's purchases is next to impossible, since sometimes the only record she has is on her computer at work, especially for those little gifts she buys for friends.
:)
What's really lame is the mail in stub I got said due by Feb 9, but the tax document says April 15 (which is when they're getting it, since I missed Feb 9, anyway). If they bitch about it, I'll site the conflicting information and tell them they need to get their act together. Hee hee - I love sticking it to the man
why would you go anywhere? I mean, I saw lots of pictures of the grand canyon before I went there, but I went there anyway.
sometimes it makes sense to go somewhere else - I certainly enjoyed near-perfect weather in Hawaii last year when it was freezing cold at home, but I also road tripped to Arizona in the summer to sear in 105F+ (~41C) heat to see the aformentioned grand canyon (again, 'cause I saw it as a kid, too).
What I got out of the article was basically this is a rich kid fantasy - $1 million per day (or was it per voyage? - article is slashdotted and my pop sci is at home) is a tad out of my league unless Lance Bass wants to spot me a few thousand Gs.
Nah - you've got some key issues missing - my guess is that Microsoft [will/has] port[ed] DirectX to PPC, but they would NEVER release it on mac, and they also probably ported Windows CE to it, so you'd have an entirely different set of APIs and graphics calls. They may have taking advantage of the PPC's ability to work in either little or big endian modes (though only in some models - the 970 doesn't, but Sony's Cell, which is supposed to be similar to the one MS uses, does). Since all the APIs are still Windows proprietary, it will still be much easier to port to Windows.
.02%. And while I felt vector units were very important just a couple of years ago, more and more of the functionality that they were used for is being moved into the GPU. Stuff like Clipping, particle systems, volumetric fog, skinning, and render to texture can all be done on the GPU now. Vectors are still useful for path finding, physics, and sometimes collision detection but their value just isn't what it was.
The main problem I've seen is programmers that don't separate I/O from the core code - that's really all you need to port for C and C++, so the better the abstraction, the easier the port (especially now that added raw assembly optimizations are much rarer). Optimization, for the most part is a dark art - I've gotten 10x better performance just by using a profiler for a couple of hours, and other times tried for days and squeaked out maybe
Even using a cross platform API like OpenGL doesn't always solve I/O problems - take this chunk of code I pulled from a working cross-platform (but not cross-endian) 3D engine:
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_BGRA_EXT, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, data);
the fix is to use a variant of the function that tells the card the order of the bytes and passes it each of the "inverted" 32 bit blocks of RGBA data.
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_BGRA_EXT, GL_UNSIGNED_INT_8_8_8_8_REV, data);
not only do you get a free endian fix, you also get a free performance boost since passing data to the card by int is much faster than by byte (nVidia actually recommends the above function).
actually, there is evidence of exactly that.
First off, though, North Korea has been generating enriched Plutonium (and Uranium, I think) for several years in defiance of US threats of sanctions. They are known to have enough Plutonium to create several nuclear weapons.
Second, a Pakistani scientist sold secrets to building nuclear weapons to North Korea. Pakistan has nuclear capability and have demonstrated it. There are also rumors in the other direction - that Pakistan willingly allowed North Korea to test a plutonium device on its soil in 1998 when they still lacked enough plutonium to do it themselves. This makes some sense when you also realize that North Korea doesn't have the desert to perform its own nuclear testing, so if they did explode a nuke either above or underground, they'd likely pollute their water supply. Still, they may have done just that on the Korean-China border (see the Ryanggang explosion from late last year.
A quick google search dug up some references about the 1998 testing.
you've been blinded by delusions...
When I tell people I'm working on a mac port of OSS, most Windows people tell me I'm wasting my time (usually in much more colorful language). I get a much better reception if I also say I've fixed a bunch of Linux bugs (and sometimes Windows bugs) or also ported the program to Linux.
Then there's my wife, the biggest Windows bigot out there - she HATES macs (on the plus side, she never touches mine) and dislikes Linux intensely (she thought the KDE interface was "nasty," and derided OpenOffice because it "lacked the functionality and ease of use of Office") and would never think of ever trying Firefox or Mozilla over IE (I switched her browser to Firefox, but she made me switch it back). Ironically, her dad won't touch a Windows or Linux and loves macs - but only macs running OS 9 or earlier (which baffles me...).
Me, I'm happily platform agnostic - I love them all and hate them all for different reasons.
I have to agree with the "insightful" poster - he/she/it is describing optimizing using assembly, not C, and trying to optimize code in assembler is a nightmare these days. You've got deep pipelines, multiple execution units, parallel processing - it's just ugly and requires a deep understanding of how to reorder the instructions to avoid pipeline stalls as well as keeping all the parallel units working at the same time. Optimizing your C code for better assembly is a different thing entirely (unrolling loops, aligning bitmaps on power-of-2 boundaries for faster copies, putting most common loop choice first, etc.).
About the best you can hope for is to tweak C code with assembly blocks (usually after extensive profiling). Even then, you really don't see the huge performance improvements these days (nothing like 5 years ago).
I used to be excited about the future of this tech, but to me, GPU tech has become far more important (heck, the latest stuff I've been programming barely sucks up 800MHz of my CPU but throttles the GPU).
yep - programmer key (and then typing 'finder g') interupt got around it, as did an OS bootable zip drive hooked to the SCSI chain (cmd-opt-shift-esc) or pressing 'c' with an OS CD in the drive. On older macs, it was just command-esc or command-del to enter debug mode because there was no programmer key. I think early versions of At Ease could be bypassed by holding down the shift key at start or by using force quit (cmd-.), but those two workarounds didn't last for long.
In college I faced a similar but a bit different of a problem - Foolproof and nightly restore from disk images. Our mac lab head and lead lab attendant were both very smart mac users (the lab lead wrote a very popular graphical game called MacTrek [not the text game], but was forced to destroy it and all copies and source when Paramount sued him and he lost) and pulled the programmer and reset keys off, though I found I could still hit either with a well aimed paperclip... but that didn't disable foolproof like it did At-Ease. At about that time, I discovered the magical command-option-shift-delete would boot to the next available drive, not the hard disk. With an OS installed mac image on a Zip disk, I was able to bypass and remove programs... At first, I just disabled the image restore program, but the sys-admins were savvy, and quickly discovered my transgression and reinstalled the software, wiping my game folder... I needed something more. They had discovered that I hacked in, but not how I had hacked in, so I continued with my deviant ways... With some playing around with folder flags, I found one that wouldn't allow the folder to be deleted by the restore software (mark as a system folder, I think). I also found the program wouldn't erase anything contained in this protected folder, though I don't know why - maybe they thought that since foolproof wouldn't let you open the system folder, there was no need to clean it up, maybe it was a flaw in the restore program - I never did find out.
I installed a directory with games having no icon and the name " " (space). You couldn't see it unless you rectangle drag highlighted it, and needed to click the space to launch it, since I erased its icon mask to make it harder to see. I then shoved it in a place nobody would look - something under Utilities, but I forget. Later, when I was a bit more mac savvy myself, I wrote a little extension I called unfoolproof (not to be mistaken for the program by the same name) that would not load the foolproof extension if I held down the u key at boot (it was actually named something innocuous like ISO9660VolumeMount and didn't display an extension icon).