xml is an interchange format, not a storage format
Absolutely, positively agree. Not only is XML only an interchange format, but it only makes sense in some situations (for instance if we have an embedded piece of hardware that we have to communicate with, and we're communicating to it from a Windows box, and there is no shared common data encapsulation format, I'd greatly prefer XML (with XSD) vastly over Jimmy the Programmer making up his own data encapsulation format/documentation method/extraction system, but if I have two Windows machines running SQL Server and they're in a common security context and they'll never change, I'd use DTS or replication, not XML).
and MS SQL Server is seeing the same thing now that they've got the XML in theirs
The XML "in" SQL Server is surface fluff (I love SQL Server and I'm saying this as a good thing, not a bad thing). i.e. Some modules that'll convert an XML query to an underlying DB query, and the results back to XML, and some basic XML importing and exporting routines. This hasn't affected the underlying operations of SQL Server whatsoever.
Just as a point of reference, in the Windows world it is usually referred to as "NTFS 4.0", and this designation was the reason why MS officially named the version in "NT 5" "NTFS 5.0". Even historically lots of references have backtracked and renamed it NTFS 4.0 due to the fact that logically it goes with NT 4.0.
Just thought I'd mention that as the only group that I've seen that consistently still calls it 1.0 or 1.1 is the Linux crowd. For the rest of us it's correlated with the NT version that it was introduced with.
Perhaps you meant using an NTFS fs under Linux, however if not: What's your problem with NTFS? NTFS 4 and NTFS 5 are very feature laden, impressive filesystems, so I'm curious what your problem with them is, apart from perhaps that they're from Microsoft.
This is exactly the problem I'm talking about. The egotistical developers and other halfwits who think they know more than the IS people going in and trying to handle things for themselves. These people are very rarely as smart as they think they are, and too often screw everything up, but are too egoistic to call IT. So then I have to spend a day trying to find the source of a problem, only to find out that the loser who screwed things up knew about the problem for a week but "forgot" to tell us about it.
In my experience, developers generally have more competence with the OS than most IS/IT employees. Again, there are lots of exceptions, but in general. In general if you went to any average company and quizzed the IS department and the developers, in the majority of times you'll find the developers have more knowledge about security, configuration, pitfalls, etc. Why? Because IS is usually the career of the "Devry IT Career" graduate, or the person without the ambition, passion or intelligence to succeed in software development. Yet again let me say that there are exceptions to this, but the rule is that it's generally true. Are there developers who are idiots? Absolutely. Are there IS workers who are geniuses? Absolutely. Are either the norm? I would say no.
And what is with all the troll accusations? Is everybody here really so small-minded and petty that they dismiss anything that they don't want to believe?
I can see your point (if you work in a company with shit HR and the developers are a bunch of VB morons playing with settings), but your post seemed very confrontational to the Slashdot-type crowd, hence my suggestion that it may be a troll.
Firstly let's get something out into the open: The people who work in IS are usually the bottom of the skill rung. Sorry to say it, and there are DEFINITELY exceptions, but everyone who works at a company where the people who seem to know the least about managing/securing and running systems happen to be in IS/IT please raise your hands. Yup that's just about all of you. IS/IT is the fallback position for people who couldn't cut it in software development the majority of the time. Again there are exceptions (and those exceptions are absolute gold for their company), but I'm talking about in general.
Given that, it is absurd that developers, who often know more about the OS and reinstalling/etc., have to sit on their hands waiting for some moron from IS to come and install software for them, etc. In my company the development group (with a couple of small exceptions) absolutely eclipses the IS group as far as OS management skills, yet humorously enough along came some new SOE policies : What an irony.
I view SOEs as two things:
-A make work project for a group that is threatened with downsizing. Force people who have absolutely no use for your "skills" to have to use you through company policy.
-A power grab. I've seen IS people who feel grossly eclipsed so they make themselves "important" through policy. This pretty much relates to the first suggestion, but it's motivation is slightly different.
Organizations claiming that they do it for "licensing" reasons or whatever are fooling themselves, and the paradox is that the increased policies increases the culpability. It's like the old situation where bulletin boards had no liability for the content...until the day some wanker moron decided that he'd "reduce their liability" by censoring select posts, yet instantly the bulletin board operators are 100% liable for every single thing that is said because they have taken baby steps towards censorship. Blah.
The man who cuts the checks makes the rules. Funny how subjects like this do not come up when applying for a job. It is in the employers best interest to make your workplace efficient, if a new solution does not work they will change it.
And it's in every employee's to push back to policies that are stupid (such as a SOE for developers. Such a notion is absolutely absurd). Loyalty is doing your part to trying to stop ridiculous endeavers in the first place, and your posting (portraying yourself as a model employee that views management as blameless) is the model of the type of an employee that leads companies to failure: The prototypical yes man that'll sit back and be ready with a "I knew it wouldn't work!" after the fact.
As virulent as RMS may be, he's alot closer to Good than Bill Gates is. (Note the cap)
You have got to be kidding. How, exactly, do you know RMS' name? That's right: Because he's out there pimping it and putting it up beside open source every chance he gets. You can selfishly get "paid" for what you do in many more ways that cash in the bank, and cult-of-personality and personal fame is one of the most powerful lures.
Hey come on! What do you expect when someone is vying for FRP (first relevant post). Just summarize what you guesstimate that it'll be about and post as fast as possible.
Thankfully there's a major purge happening in the software development industry right now (though unfortunately it's affecting people who don't deserve it too), cleaning out the loads and loads of people who signed up for software development after seeing a nightly "Train for a promising future in IT!". I do hope that there are loads of people who've redirected their career aspiritions to other fields (there still are quite a few other fields out there) lest we have an unproductive world of 5 billion "software developers".
I saw a commercial on TV that just blew me away: It was for the Goodwill I believe and they were talking about where they spend the money raised, and it went like "We train people in small engine repair, landscaping [ergo grass cutting], and software development". Give me a friggin' break. Why not "We train people in management, advertising executive positions, and medical practice". It's just as credible. So many people refuse to acknowledge the massive information mass that has to be consumed to be effective in this field.
Oh shit you're right! Actually some guy named Bill came up to me and offered me $15 to go on Slashdot and claim that I've never had 2000 BSOD, so here I am.
The reality is that perhaps, just maybe, you're an idiot. Let me repeat this: Since installing the first RC edition many, many moons back, I have not had one single BSOD. Ever. I have not had a single system failure indeed. What do I do on my PCs? Well I do software development for a living, I play games, I do P2P, I browse, I install and deinstall all nature of shitty software. Not one BSOD. The idea that you are seriously proposing that you uninstalled 2000 to put on ME just absolutely blows me away: What sort of mental deficient are you?
As far as compatability, about the only issue with 2000 is with some old games, otherwise I'd say you're just bullshitting. Regarding security: If you're really willing to run ME instead, then obviously about 90% of the services are unnecessary for you, meaning you can turn them off if you had any clue how to, but I would guess that you don't.
No one wishes that that's the case, however strategically it is simple reality: When the pickings were brutally easy in the 95/98/98SE/Me days (that just came to a close) Linux had some chance of making inroads on the desktop because the competitors were such trash, however XP is a pretty formidable system, built on an extremely stable and well-tested core, so if Linux couldn't make serious inroads into the desktop market when the competitors were so weak, how well do you think it'll do now?
While this excuse is used too often, I would suspect that you have a problem in your BIOS and/or kernel level drivers (hehe...do you have an ATi videocard? Seriously). I'm running a fairly generic system: Pentium III, Geforce 2, etc., as my dev PC and it has never locked or crashed, nor have my test PCs.
I want to get on of the new Athlon XPs but I suspect that I'd have to get a little more use to locking/crashing due to the instability of some of the Athlon support chipsets.
Finally it's bringing the masses to a reliable operating system, and truly this is closing the window for Linux. There are lots of people who truly and rightfully got thoroughly upset when Windows 95/98/98SE/ME took a dump because they opened explorer before the soundblaster drivers had settled in, or because they made the mistake of alt-tabbing between apps a few too many times, and these were the people who were ripe for picking for conversion to the Linux camp. However how many people do you hear complaing regarding the quality of Windows 2000 (on which XP is based)? I have 2000 and I have never, since I first installed one of the RCs many moons back, got a BSOD. Ever. There are nuisances such as the fact that explorer.exe locks directories forcing you to wait several hours to delete them if you made the mistake of navigating into them, and that it itself occasionally dies, but they are trivial in the grand scheme of things.
Anyways I'll probably keep going with Windows 2000 as there is no redeeming factor for me to upgrade to XP from this, but for everyone using one of the 16/32 OS', it can't said with enough emphasis that you really don't realize how much shit that you're unnecessarily putting up with.
Certain tests, like 3DMark and other packages, pretty much bypass the drivers, and are purely a measure of theoretical hardware performance, not real-world performance. There are certainly some hooks to the low-level instructions in the drivers, but they're specific enough that they prevent driver optimizations from having too much impact on the results.
Who told you that? There is absolutely no way, whatsoever, that 3Dmark goes directly to the chipsets on the cards (especially given that that's impossible in NT/2000) : Instead it relies on an honest and credible implementation of DirectX by the video card manufacturer.
Hey ganker: Figure out wtf you're replying to. The post you replied to was saying that REVIEWERS use Quake 3 because it is relevant because of the number of games using the Quake 3 engine. Master English a bit better before you start posting.
Boy, you know this'll be objective.... In any case I run neither a 500 student system, or a 5,000 user manufacturing company, so neither scenario applies to me I suppose.
Altavista used to be my #1 search destination, but soon when the noise ratio got too high I switched to Excite which had excellent rankings of search results (remember scores such as 87%, etc.? In the day Excite had an excellent ability to dig through the crap and pull out the good stuff), however it switched to a seemingly unweighted system and became unwieldy, and that pushed me to try out Google.com which I know love. Google rocks not only for its excellent ability to dig through the crap, but also for the ability to jump between "Deja" searches and web searches in an instant.
That's why general reviewers look at more than just one statistic for one setting for one game.
Agreed, however firstly we don't know that the same sort of thing isn't happening in other games, and secondly certain games stand out as being the most important factor (and round-ups at the end of reviews usually make mention of them). For instance the ATI card rocks the Kazbaa in certain synthetic benchmarks, but it's generally ignored because it doesn't reflect reality. Quake 3, on the other hand, is given huge weight because of the fact that it's engine is used by many current, and many up-and-coming games. How many times have you heard that the Pentium 4 is great for "3d games" specifically because it does so well at Quake 3 (and pretty much only at Quake3, but it's held up as the decisive example).
The thing I do think that this points out though is that reviewers need to spend much more time on image quality in addition to simple speed though, even including subjective analysis where appropriate (such as "Even though the meter read 75FPS it felt more like 35FPS". Anyone remember that ATI dual-rendering card from a while back? Can't remember the name but it gave loads of FPS hypothetically, but to those who played it it just didn't feel like it really was). The quality is so horrible at high quality that I would have expected every reviewer to say "It did okay in Q3, but damn does it look bad.", but they didn't.
well, that and the fact I couldn't get two of the women to indulge in a hot lesbo session, despite 55 minutes of trying. I need realism, dammit!
Hehe, you tried that too eh? I did get the two female roommates in love with each other, but just wouldn't get down. Maybe I need the expansion pack or something.
What about if they made a driver that ignored the quality settings that you've asked of it, and instead downsizes your textures and decreases bitdepths: Is that honest or fair game? What if the driver pretends it's in 32-bit mode while all along it's really in 16-bit mode, giving great numbers to benchmarkers? Is that fair game?
This isn't fair game at all because it isn't optimizations: It's downgrading quality (ignoring the fact that Q3 already has numerous facilities for the user to control the quality settings) specifically to look better in benchmarks. Again: For those that want only high frame rates (of which they do exist: I've seen people run Q3 in ultra-hyper low quality mode so bad it's painful to watch, but they made that decision), the ability is already there and always has been, but for the ATI driver to say "Oh you're running Quake3...well I'll just resize these textures to 1/4 the size, oh and I'll compress them too, oh and maybe I'll reduce the bitdepth...oh you picked high quality 32-bit colour...bwahahahahaahahahaahahah", that's just deceptive. Using the term `optimization' in this context is absurd. Just as much as slower the hardware clock on a PC is and then claiming that the PC is running faster.
This isn't insightful. The whole point of the article(s) was that the ATI driver recognizes the game Quake3.exe (known to be the single most common benchmark app) and upon seeing it, it apparently dumps quality in the gutter (see the various screenshots. It looks like the difference between 1024x768, or 640x480 scaled up). Note: You already have the ability to lower the texture bitsize, and to decrease quality in Quake3, and the point is that the driver seemingly does this for you regardless of having everything set for high quality.
ATI has some serious explaining to do to regain the public's trust. As it is I see a driver team that, despite a horrendous reputation for being unable to make stable drivers, coupled with supposed claims that there's all this unharnassed power waiting to be unleashed, and they have time to put in specific benchmark-manipulating code? Give me a break.
? What images are you looking at? The quake3.exe version looks blurred and like it's a scaled up 640x480 image compared to the quack3.exe version (which is crisp and very detailed). There's no doubt that the driver is basically saying "if (strcomp(sGame, "quake3.exe")==0) fQuality-=50.0;", and that is an absolutely ridiculous, unjustifiable thing to do. This isn't "optimizations", it's benchmark fraud (IMHO). Optimizations would be tweaking OpenGL calls so that maybe the particular sequence that Q3 calls run faster, but then it wouldn't matter if the exe was called Quake3.exe, or blappo.exe, it'd still be benefiting from the optimizations (and then they would actually have a leg to stand on because the optimizations would benefit the dozens of Q3 engine based games out there).
It isn't written to make the game play better (if the user simply wants higher frame rates there are settings in Q3 to decrease the quality): It's written to intentionally increase the framerate at the cost of degraded quality of the rendering (see the links from HardOCP to the German site) under the hopes that it's a reviewer running a benchmark. Again: This is NOT in the consumer's benefit as you already have the ability to change quality in the game itself, but instead it's to give the ATI card an upperhand.
Having said that let me say this: In the high quality setting I really DO think that the ATI card renders better than the GeForce (when it's not in the bullshit scam benchmark mode), and perhaps they should push that as a feature rather than dumping quality in the toilet to look good in benchmarks.
ATI knows that just about every review compares cards primarily based upon Quake 3 (looks at any of a large number of sites to see this), often under the premise that it's totally relevant because so many current and up-and-coming games are based upon the Quake 3 engine.
At not even 28 years old, I'm already a lead developer and have people with twenty years more experience looking to me for coding hints and tips.
Experience != Specific skills in every area. In other words someone with 20 years of experience still might be coming to you for VB help because he specializes in C++ and doesn't ever want to become a VB expert. I just had a problem with the idea that it's an indication of genius because coworkers call upon your skills in certain areas: that's the idea behind teamwork.
Note that I'm not saying this as a grizzled veteran trying to defend the value of my experience: I'm around the same age, and am often in the same situation (i.e. used as a resource), but every now and then I realize that it might be more that I end up being a sucker than any inherent genius (i.e. if people know that they can ask you and you'll hunt around like a gopher to have the answers for them, pretty soon they'll get lazy and start using you in that respect).
Slashdot Mirror
xml is an interchange format, not a storage format
Absolutely, positively agree. Not only is XML only an interchange format, but it only makes sense in some situations (for instance if we have an embedded piece of hardware that we have to communicate with, and we're communicating to it from a Windows box, and there is no shared common data encapsulation format, I'd greatly prefer XML (with XSD) vastly over Jimmy the Programmer making up his own data encapsulation format/documentation method/extraction system, but if I have two Windows machines running SQL Server and they're in a common security context and they'll never change, I'd use DTS or replication, not XML).
and MS SQL Server is seeing the same thing now that they've got the XML in theirs
The XML "in" SQL Server is surface fluff (I love SQL Server and I'm saying this as a good thing, not a bad thing). i.e. Some modules that'll convert an XML query to an underlying DB query, and the results back to XML, and some basic XML importing and exporting routines. This hasn't affected the underlying operations of SQL Server whatsoever.
Just as a point of reference, in the Windows world it is usually referred to as "NTFS 4.0", and this designation was the reason why MS officially named the version in "NT 5" "NTFS 5.0". Even historically lots of references have backtracked and renamed it NTFS 4.0 due to the fact that logically it goes with NT 4.0.
Just thought I'd mention that as the only group that I've seen that consistently still calls it 1.0 or 1.1 is the Linux crowd. For the rest of us it's correlated with the NT version that it was introduced with.
Cheers!
Just DON'T even think about vfat or NTFS!
Perhaps you meant using an NTFS fs under Linux, however if not: What's your problem with NTFS? NTFS 4 and NTFS 5 are very feature laden, impressive filesystems, so I'm curious what your problem with them is, apart from perhaps that they're from Microsoft.
This is exactly the problem I'm talking about. The egotistical developers and other halfwits who think they know more than the IS people going in and trying to handle things for themselves. These people are very rarely as smart as they think they are, and too often screw everything up, but are too egoistic to call IT. So then I have to spend a day trying to find the source of a problem, only to find out that the loser who screwed things up knew about the problem for a week but "forgot" to tell us about it.
In my experience, developers generally have more competence with the OS than most IS/IT employees. Again, there are lots of exceptions, but in general. In general if you went to any average company and quizzed the IS department and the developers, in the majority of times you'll find the developers have more knowledge about security, configuration, pitfalls, etc. Why? Because IS is usually the career of the "Devry IT Career" graduate, or the person without the ambition, passion or intelligence to succeed in software development. Yet again let me say that there are exceptions to this, but the rule is that it's generally true. Are there developers who are idiots? Absolutely. Are there IS workers who are geniuses? Absolutely. Are either the norm? I would say no.
And what is with all the troll accusations? Is everybody here really so small-minded and petty that they dismiss anything that they don't want to believe?
I can see your point (if you work in a company with shit HR and the developers are a bunch of VB morons playing with settings), but your post seemed very confrontational to the Slashdot-type crowd, hence my suggestion that it may be a troll.
I presume this is a troll, but nonetheless.
Firstly let's get something out into the open: The people who work in IS are usually the bottom of the skill rung. Sorry to say it, and there are DEFINITELY exceptions, but everyone who works at a company where the people who seem to know the least about managing/securing and running systems happen to be in IS/IT please raise your hands. Yup that's just about all of you. IS/IT is the fallback position for people who couldn't cut it in software development the majority of the time. Again there are exceptions (and those exceptions are absolute gold for their company), but I'm talking about in general.
Given that, it is absurd that developers, who often know more about the OS and reinstalling/etc., have to sit on their hands waiting for some moron from IS to come and install software for them, etc. In my company the development group (with a couple of small exceptions) absolutely eclipses the IS group as far as OS management skills, yet humorously enough along came some new SOE policies : What an irony.
I view SOEs as two things:
-A make work project for a group that is threatened with downsizing. Force people who have absolutely no use for your "skills" to have to use you through company policy.
-A power grab. I've seen IS people who feel grossly eclipsed so they make themselves "important" through policy. This pretty much relates to the first suggestion, but it's motivation is slightly different.
Organizations claiming that they do it for "licensing" reasons or whatever are fooling themselves, and the paradox is that the increased policies increases the culpability. It's like the old situation where bulletin boards had no liability for the content...until the day some wanker moron decided that he'd "reduce their liability" by censoring select posts, yet instantly the bulletin board operators are 100% liable for every single thing that is said because they have taken baby steps towards censorship. Blah.
The man who cuts the checks makes the rules. Funny how subjects like this do not come up when applying for a job. It is in the employers best interest to make your workplace efficient, if a new solution does not work they will change it.
And it's in every employee's to push back to policies that are stupid (such as a SOE for developers. Such a notion is absolutely absurd). Loyalty is doing your part to trying to stop ridiculous endeavers in the first place, and your posting (portraying yourself as a model employee that views management as blameless) is the model of the type of an employee that leads companies to failure: The prototypical yes man that'll sit back and be ready with a "I knew it wouldn't work!" after the fact.
As virulent as RMS may be, he's alot closer to Good than Bill Gates is. (Note the cap)
You have got to be kidding. How, exactly, do you know RMS' name? That's right: Because he's out there pimping it and putting it up beside open source every chance he gets. You can selfishly get "paid" for what you do in many more ways that cash in the bank, and cult-of-personality and personal fame is one of the most powerful lures.
Hey come on! What do you expect when someone is vying for FRP (first relevant post). Just summarize what you guesstimate that it'll be about and post as fast as possible.
Thankfully there's a major purge happening in the software development industry right now (though unfortunately it's affecting people who don't deserve it too), cleaning out the loads and loads of people who signed up for software development after seeing a nightly "Train for a promising future in IT!". I do hope that there are loads of people who've redirected their career aspiritions to other fields (there still are quite a few other fields out there) lest we have an unproductive world of 5 billion "software developers".
I saw a commercial on TV that just blew me away: It was for the Goodwill I believe and they were talking about where they spend the money raised, and it went like "We train people in small engine repair, landscaping [ergo grass cutting], and software development". Give me a friggin' break. Why not "We train people in management, advertising executive positions, and medical practice". It's just as credible. So many people refuse to acknowledge the massive information mass that has to be consumed to be effective in this field.
Oh shit you're right! Actually some guy named Bill came up to me and offered me $15 to go on Slashdot and claim that I've never had 2000 BSOD, so here I am.
The reality is that perhaps, just maybe, you're an idiot. Let me repeat this: Since installing the first RC edition many, many moons back, I have not had one single BSOD. Ever. I have not had a single system failure indeed. What do I do on my PCs? Well I do software development for a living, I play games, I do P2P, I browse, I install and deinstall all nature of shitty software. Not one BSOD. The idea that you are seriously proposing that you uninstalled 2000 to put on ME just absolutely blows me away: What sort of mental deficient are you?
As far as compatability, about the only issue with 2000 is with some old games, otherwise I'd say you're just bullshitting. Regarding security: If you're really willing to run ME instead, then obviously about 90% of the services are unnecessary for you, meaning you can turn them off if you had any clue how to, but I would guess that you don't.
No one wishes that that's the case, however strategically it is simple reality: When the pickings were brutally easy in the 95/98/98SE/Me days (that just came to a close) Linux had some chance of making inroads on the desktop because the competitors were such trash, however XP is a pretty formidable system, built on an extremely stable and well-tested core, so if Linux couldn't make serious inroads into the desktop market when the competitors were so weak, how well do you think it'll do now?
While this excuse is used too often, I would suspect that you have a problem in your BIOS and/or kernel level drivers (hehe...do you have an ATi videocard? Seriously). I'm running a fairly generic system: Pentium III, Geforce 2, etc., as my dev PC and it has never locked or crashed, nor have my test PCs.
I want to get on of the new Athlon XPs but I suspect that I'd have to get a little more use to locking/crashing due to the instability of some of the Athlon support chipsets.
Finally it's bringing the masses to a reliable operating system, and truly this is closing the window for Linux. There are lots of people who truly and rightfully got thoroughly upset when Windows 95/98/98SE/ME took a dump because they opened explorer before the soundblaster drivers had settled in, or because they made the mistake of alt-tabbing between apps a few too many times, and these were the people who were ripe for picking for conversion to the Linux camp. However how many people do you hear complaing regarding the quality of Windows 2000 (on which XP is based)? I have 2000 and I have never, since I first installed one of the RCs many moons back, got a BSOD. Ever. There are nuisances such as the fact that explorer.exe locks directories forcing you to wait several hours to delete them if you made the mistake of navigating into them, and that it itself occasionally dies, but they are trivial in the grand scheme of things.
Anyways I'll probably keep going with Windows 2000 as there is no redeeming factor for me to upgrade to XP from this, but for everyone using one of the 16/32 OS', it can't said with enough emphasis that you really don't realize how much shit that you're unnecessarily putting up with.
Certain tests, like 3DMark and other packages, pretty much bypass the drivers, and are purely a measure of theoretical hardware performance, not real-world performance. There are certainly some hooks to the low-level instructions in the drivers, but they're specific enough that they prevent driver optimizations from having too much impact on the results.
Who told you that? There is absolutely no way, whatsoever, that 3Dmark goes directly to the chipsets on the cards (especially given that that's impossible in NT/2000) : Instead it relies on an honest and credible implementation of DirectX by the video card manufacturer.
Hey ganker: Figure out wtf you're replying to. The post you replied to was saying that REVIEWERS use Quake 3 because it is relevant because of the number of games using the Quake 3 engine. Master English a bit better before you start posting.
Boy, you know this'll be objective.... In any case I run neither a 500 student system, or a 5,000 user manufacturing company, so neither scenario applies to me I suppose.
Altavista used to be my #1 search destination, but soon when the noise ratio got too high I switched to Excite which had excellent rankings of search results (remember scores such as 87%, etc.? In the day Excite had an excellent ability to dig through the crap and pull out the good stuff), however it switched to a seemingly unweighted system and became unwieldy, and that pushed me to try out Google.com which I know love. Google rocks not only for its excellent ability to dig through the crap, but also for the ability to jump between "Deja" searches and web searches in an instant.
That's why general reviewers look at more than just one statistic for one setting for one game.
Agreed, however firstly we don't know that the same sort of thing isn't happening in other games, and secondly certain games stand out as being the most important factor (and round-ups at the end of reviews usually make mention of them). For instance the ATI card rocks the Kazbaa in certain synthetic benchmarks, but it's generally ignored because it doesn't reflect reality. Quake 3, on the other hand, is given huge weight because of the fact that it's engine is used by many current, and many up-and-coming games. How many times have you heard that the Pentium 4 is great for "3d games" specifically because it does so well at Quake 3 (and pretty much only at Quake3, but it's held up as the decisive example).
The thing I do think that this points out though is that reviewers need to spend much more time on image quality in addition to simple speed though, even including subjective analysis where appropriate (such as "Even though the meter read 75FPS it felt more like 35FPS". Anyone remember that ATI dual-rendering card from a while back? Can't remember the name but it gave loads of FPS hypothetically, but to those who played it it just didn't feel like it really was). The quality is so horrible at high quality that I would have expected every reviewer to say "It did okay in Q3, but damn does it look bad.", but they didn't.
well, that and the fact I couldn't get two of the women to indulge in a hot lesbo session, despite 55 minutes of trying. I need realism, dammit!
Hehe, you tried that too eh? I did get the two female roommates in love with each other, but just wouldn't get down. Maybe I need the expansion pack or something.
What about if they made a driver that ignored the quality settings that you've asked of it, and instead downsizes your textures and decreases bitdepths: Is that honest or fair game? What if the driver pretends it's in 32-bit mode while all along it's really in 16-bit mode, giving great numbers to benchmarkers? Is that fair game?
This isn't fair game at all because it isn't optimizations: It's downgrading quality (ignoring the fact that Q3 already has numerous facilities for the user to control the quality settings) specifically to look better in benchmarks. Again: For those that want only high frame rates (of which they do exist: I've seen people run Q3 in ultra-hyper low quality mode so bad it's painful to watch, but they made that decision), the ability is already there and always has been, but for the ATI driver to say "Oh you're running Quake3...well I'll just resize these textures to 1/4 the size, oh and I'll compress them too, oh and maybe I'll reduce the bitdepth...oh you picked high quality 32-bit colour...bwahahahahaahahahaahahah", that's just deceptive. Using the term `optimization' in this context is absurd. Just as much as slower the hardware clock on a PC is and then claiming that the PC is running faster.
This isn't insightful. The whole point of the article(s) was that the ATI driver recognizes the game Quake3.exe (known to be the single most common benchmark app) and upon seeing it, it apparently dumps quality in the gutter (see the various screenshots. It looks like the difference between 1024x768, or 640x480 scaled up). Note: You already have the ability to lower the texture bitsize, and to decrease quality in Quake3, and the point is that the driver seemingly does this for you regardless of having everything set for high quality.
ATI has some serious explaining to do to regain the public's trust. As it is I see a driver team that, despite a horrendous reputation for being unable to make stable drivers, coupled with supposed claims that there's all this unharnassed power waiting to be unleashed, and they have time to put in specific benchmark-manipulating code? Give me a break.
? What images are you looking at? The quake3.exe version looks blurred and like it's a scaled up 640x480 image compared to the quack3.exe version (which is crisp and very detailed). There's no doubt that the driver is basically saying "if (strcomp(sGame, "quake3.exe")==0) fQuality-=50.0;", and that is an absolutely ridiculous, unjustifiable thing to do. This isn't "optimizations", it's benchmark fraud (IMHO). Optimizations would be tweaking OpenGL calls so that maybe the particular sequence that Q3 calls run faster, but then it wouldn't matter if the exe was called Quake3.exe, or blappo.exe, it'd still be benefiting from the optimizations (and then they would actually have a leg to stand on because the optimizations would benefit the dozens of Q3 engine based games out there).
It isn't written to make the game play better (if the user simply wants higher frame rates there are settings in Q3 to decrease the quality): It's written to intentionally increase the framerate at the cost of degraded quality of the rendering (see the links from HardOCP to the German site) under the hopes that it's a reviewer running a benchmark. Again: This is NOT in the consumer's benefit as you already have the ability to change quality in the game itself, but instead it's to give the ATI card an upperhand.
Having said that let me say this: In the high quality setting I really DO think that the ATI card renders better than the GeForce (when it's not in the bullshit scam benchmark mode), and perhaps they should push that as a feature rather than dumping quality in the toilet to look good in benchmarks.
ATI knows that just about every review compares cards primarily based upon Quake 3 (looks at any of a large number of sites to see this), often under the premise that it's totally relevant because so many current and up-and-coming games are based upon the Quake 3 engine.
At not even 28 years old, I'm already a lead developer and have people with twenty years more experience looking to me for coding hints and tips.
Experience != Specific skills in every area. In other words someone with 20 years of experience still might be coming to you for VB help because he specializes in C++ and doesn't ever want to become a VB expert. I just had a problem with the idea that it's an indication of genius because coworkers call upon your skills in certain areas: that's the idea behind teamwork.
Note that I'm not saying this as a grizzled veteran trying to defend the value of my experience: I'm around the same age, and am often in the same situation (i.e. used as a resource), but every now and then I realize that it might be more that I end up being a sucker than any inherent genius (i.e. if people know that they can ask you and you'll hunt around like a gopher to have the answers for them, pretty soon they'll get lazy and start using you in that respect).