Re:"evolution of user-centric design"?
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There was not a single revolutionary thing in that entire review
Not to mention that only in the most perverted of senses was it a "review". Fawning overview is more like it. We get a good sense of the so-called reviewer's credentials when he says the following:
"I stopped using non-Microsoft browsers over two years ago because I found them to be unpolished. "
Of course tastes vary, but even amongst the most fanatical Microsoft apologists (including myself) it is pretty much universal that Firefox, or even Opera, is the primary daily browser. No one needs to suck on the Microsoft choad and pretend that everything they make must be the best in the market, especially when their flagship browser is going on half a decade old.
Of course every now and then you come across the real dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft apologist, very seldomly a developer but more likely a "somewhat involved in the tech industry" kind of person (e.g. an @Home Computer virus removal technician) who'll swear that IE is the greatest thing now and forever. I suspect that's what we have here.
The only feature of IE 7 that strikes me as a nice piece of user interface is the clear and graphical method of creating a new tab. Everything else is just a minor polishing of IE 6.
Does no one find bitching about a beta a little less than productive?
Well to be fair IE 7 is a very important product release, whether it's a blazing success, or a tremendous dud. A beta 1 is usually fairly feature complete.
Having said that, the so-called review was inane, poorly written, and obviously hacked together in no-time to try to get some namespace. The "reviewer" basically just shows a couple of screenshots, and hilariously claims that this is some great new paradigm, and it isn't IE 6 with some tweeks. No, my reviewing friend, IE 7 is IE 6 with some tweaks, and in some ways is inferior to some of the IE 6 "mods" (like MaxIE) released years ago. Perhaps there is something extraordinary hidden in there, but thus far it has been the most astounding is this it???? ever. That "reviewer" is yet another lame astroturfer praying that Bill Gates might read his gloating, tripping over himself "review" and hire him (which are pretty common, and universally pathetic).
The MSDN only seems to have positive value because you are operating in an environment where Microsoft's illegal monopoly forces you to use inferior tools to develop for inferior platforms.
I develop primarily on the server and web services side, and choose Microsoft tools despite them being in the minority of deployed servers in that realm. I simply believe the.NET/SQL Server platform to be preferrable over J2EE/Oracle, or LAMP, or any of the other very viable competitors.
The monopoly nonsense is astoundingly naive in that case, and it's the case for many of the people who buy MSDN subscriptions to develop on the server side, for embedded devices (where MS is a small contender), and so on. You need to update your tired zealot rhetoric for the modern era.
I don't know of anyone who has an LCD as their TV apart from this one nursing home which got one last year.
Prepare to know a lot of people. The electronic stores are filling up with very competent 27"+ HDTV LCD TVs in the sub $800 range, and given that they're stocking so many obviously they are selling.
The price gouging claim comes from the idea that anything that is not a tangible object should cost nothing, since the costs of reproducing what is basically an abstract representation of information is nearly zero.
In Soviet Russia, your idea actually appeals to someone. In the real world it is unbelievable naive and idiotic.
An MSDN subscription is actually remarkably inexpensive given the value one derives from it. If you don't like it, then don't buy it. Go and live in your land of everything non-physical being free.
He's just a troll. Longhorn cum Vista was just plopped on MSDN last night, so there is little of value that our friendly troll could have derived from it in that short of a period of time.
I assume there is an NDA but you can tell us something....
There is no NDA, and it's hardly a secret beta - there are some 500,000 MSDN subscribers. I'm one and am installing it in a VirtualPC session right now. I doubt I'm going to be back in 20 minutes calling it the greatest thing I've ever seen.
This doesn't answer my question. Nice straw man...
What question is that? Whether LCDs have ghosting? Well they do, as do CRTs, and if you don't like that get a DLP projector.
Of course, to use your insult in another way, you're like the guy that paints around his CDs with orange marker and uses Monster cables for all his digital audio connects. Someone tells you that it's better, and you convince yourself that you couldn't have it any other way.
Are you claiming that Philips is creating a strobing LCD for no reason?
As I've said in other posts, both CRTs and LCDs exhibit ghosting, some modern LCDs doing so less than some higher end CRTs. From the Philips perspective, they're a large company that has to have a marketing angle to sell their sets - if they can claim a theoretical, imperceptible advantage, they will. Just because monster cable exists doesn't mean that I'm spending $200 for a 3' monster DVI cable.
I do a lot of dev work and game playing on my CRT, and whenever I've checked I've seen ghosting
And there's ghosting on CRTs. You see you probably heard "there's ghosting on LCDs", so the first thing you do with any LCD is do some ghost tests, confirming that there is, indeed, some ghosting. Yet if you did the same test on a CRT, you would see exactly the same thing, in some cases worse. Because the phosphor on a CRT has to persist between scans, it is built to hold the image for a period of time, some times a substantial period of time.
Get a black background, and drag something luminous around in a circle - on a Windows desktop you could use the trash can. Voila - it's a magical ghost garbage bin trailing it. OMG, there's ghosting on CRTs! Throw em out!
if it were a real 12ms lcd, it would uniformly and under all conditions respond at least within that threshold.
So basically you just invent whatever nonsense you want to justify your unfounded beliefs. Alrighty then.
In the real world the VESA consortium set standards on how they would measure response times, with strict conditions under which it would be measured. Now I realize that you're an authoritative voice, but I think I'll trust the labs a bit more than I trust you. Anyone who has actually been involved with LCDs for the past 6 years or so would say that you're full of shit, given the vast improvements that have happened with LCDs.
they also lie (read deceive) about viewing angles of lcds. this one is much more well known among lcd afficionados
So basically one has to signup to the cult to get the "inside scoop", right?
It is interesting that LCDs have some real deficiencies that you totally ignored, such as a subpar dynamic range, and limited colour saturation and fidelity. Instead you go for some nonsense conspiracy theory balogna.
and they also don't have a "native" resolution crippling every other resolution that requires interpolation to display.
Sure they do - it's just always in some shitty, interpolated mode, so you don't notice. Do you think that the number of physical dots on your screen changes when you change resolutions? It doesn't, it just mishmashes and overlaps them to fit the new resolution. CRTs have a fixed dot pitch, and I highly doubt you're running a 1:1 relationship with them.
so they resort to tricks and say that the response rate is now 8ms.
I'm typing this on a 27" LCD Television (which looks superlative, btw), and have watched a number of action movies, and played games on it, with absolutely zero complaints. The ghosting issue is such a holdover of 1999, and every half-wit, still trying to defend why they can't affort a new LCD display, imagines that they see ghosting all over the place on LCDs, while they carefully block out the same ghosting that occurs on all medium or long persistence phosphor CRTs (which is every high end CRT, humorously enough). Keep on convincing yourself, though.
This is the primary reason I would never buy an LCD TV.
Have you actually watched an LCD TV, and compared it against a phosphor television? I'm going to bet that you haven't, and instead you keep hearing about this theoretical ghosting issue of LCDs, and how terrible it is.
The reality is that almost all modern LCDs with 16ms or less response times are very comparable to phosphor sets. Because, as I'm sure you're aware, phosphor sets have plenty of ghosting themselves (seriously - watch when something luminous crosses a darkened screen. It's comparable, in some cases worse, than an LCD screen). Of course they do - the nature of the way that they are lit dictates that they have to use relatively slow fade phosphor or they would look even more terrible than they do.
This solution is just ridiculous, and it's basically some obscure R&D team looking for some sort of edge to make people believe that they need to buy their brand of products. I'll go without the flickering back-light, thanks. When you think about it, the solution doesn't even make any sense except in one particular type of scenario (light to dark).
Is this why people buy Windows - to run a command line tool? Gee, how is this better than Linux?
Well to be fair, the task manager does properly kill actually locked processes, instantly and without prejudice. It lags, however, when the process isn't actually locked, but is just in a dumb state - e.g. it is replying to messages being sent to it. In that case the task manager asks it to die, but gives it a period of time to clean up its stuff and terminate before finally really killing it (and the time is from your original click - clicking it 100 more times doesn't affect it). This is generally preferrable to avoid applications being terminated in the middle of some messy state.
The time delay doesn't bother me, what bothers me is that the CTRL-ALT-DELETE form always takes priority, and is always drawn regardless of any errant processes, but the actual task manager runs as a normal priority, normal GUI app - so if something is running high priority and/or screwed up the GUI, you can get the C-A-D form, but the task manager will never appear, leaving you in control limbo.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. Oh, I'm sorry, you must be a Professor of Computer Sound.
In a typical new system
In a typical new system, you take what they give you. You aren't choosing amongst various silent power supplies. Understand? Do you understand that we're not talking about a new Dell Dimension here?
Thus we're talking about mod or self-build rigs. Hilarious, though. I have a PC beside me with an included el cheapo power supply, and in the order of items that I can hear there is the video card, case fan, CPU, hard drive, and then the gentle wind rush of the power supply. All new components. I guess I must be wrong.
but people like you and I who read Slashdot are not your average computer user
Fair enough, but the story isn't comparing boxed computers from IBM or Dell, the type you'll see on the average corporate desk, they're talking about mod-type power supplies, or the type you'd source yourself when building a rig. In that realm the power supply is the last thing I'd worry about, as literally I've had perfect luck buying generic inexpensive ones and getting great low-noise performance (because of course the "generic" ones are making them to try to sell them to Dell and IBM and the other big brands).
Even in the corporate environment, though, in my last two cube-type workplaces the PC was close to silent (FAR eclipsed by the HVAC and nattering co-workers), and the only noise I recall was the hard drive and the optical drive when it use.
but one of the easiest and most effect is to upgrade to a silent power supply
It has been years since I've used a PC where the power supply was a significant contributor to the noise, and even the bargain basement ones are pretty well behaved these days. Not only are power supplies generally pretty quiet, but the noise they do make is the gentle sound of airflow.
Instead the low hanging fruit in aggravating noise are the hard drive, especially as rotational speeds increase (bringing the pitch to more and more irritating levels), optical media drives (though only when in use), and CPU fans. A quick up-and-comer in the ranks of audio assaulters are video cards, some of which come with ridiculously loud cooling contraptions.
The coders and engineers working for finance (Wall St. especially) are some of the best in the world and the best salaries in the world.
Bwahahahahahahahaha.
I worked in IT for a large bank (it's a really Royal Canada Bank) here in Canada for a while, and let me say that it was largely the dregs of the industry (yeah I know - I was there too. I took the job for very specific needs at a specific period of time, which it served admirably). A bunch of bottom-feeder career IT people willing to suck on whatever is stuffed in their mouth to keep working for the same corporation for the rest of their life (which is just sad). Mega projects that were just so poorly thought out and ridiculously executed that it was hard to get up in the morning, knowing that you're just pissing in the wind (which was true). The CEO recently, from the comfort of his mega (and clearly undeserved) pay and exclusive clubs, dictated a large push to hire primarily recent immigrants, undoubtedly because they know they can pay far less.
You would see things like moronic geography majors, with little or no real technical knowledge, being titled "Senior Systems Architects", and a database group without the slightest clue about the systems they were supposedly maintaining. Desktop systems would have "Domain\Domain Users" as administrators. It really was laughable. Systems decisions were made by groups of fly-by middle managers, of which there were farrrrr too many, largely a group of clueless ass-munchers.
Of course there were exceptions, and there were several very bright people, but I'm talking generalities. Generalities is that finance is the VB slingers of the IT world, not the cutting edge. For the cutting edge the finance industry calls in consultants, or buys off the shelf. If the finance industry embraced Linux, I would guarantee that it was because the VP of salary suckage golfed with the VP of Consultants Co, and hired his buddy on to migrate their systems.
# You need a new video card, not because you couldn't play without but because the designers just decided to use the new shader model. If you don't have an acceptable video card, the game just quits to the desktop with no information. There's a hack out there to enable play with older cards and they play fine but might not look quite as good, why didn't they include the capability at least in the game
I am convinced that nVidia &| ATI paid EA a large sum of money to put out a must-have DirectX 9 hardware-only game. I say this based on the fact that the exclusivity to those cards is very out of character for modern software (which have quality sliders to facilitate older hardware), and given the bizarrely inexpensive price point of BF2: It is $10-30 less expensive than comparable games, and introd at half-price.
So EA comes out with a great new game that require a recent generation of cards, and a lot of moderate gamers are heading to the hardware store to buy a new video card. Personally, and it's a long and convoluted story, I ended up buying two new DirectX 9 hardware cards specifically because of BF2, and I seldom game.
here are some tips for optimizing your system for bf2.
Normally I wouldn't bother with something like this (1GB of RAM and it usually doesn't matter, but BF2 is such an extraordinary pig), but another tip is to firstly copy the path to the BF2 executable (from the BF2 shortcut) into the clipboard. For instance on my PC it is...
W:\Battlefield2\BF2.exe +menu 1 +fullscreen 1
Now hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and choose "Task Management". In it kill explorer.exe. Do a File/New Task (Run) and paste the shortcut. Close the task manager while BF2 loads. When the game is done do a C-A-D and New Task (Run) explorer.exe.
This has been one of my strongest complaints for a long time
Of course it's been on the wishlist of pretty much every game designer - a completely modelled universe, complete with lots of interactive elements you can do as you please with. Maybe blow up that building to put debris across the road, and so on.
The problem is that unless it's a simple scripted style action" (e.g. hurt building X amount and it does Y, such as falling West across the road), it is untenable with current technology to model it all, or to communicate it all to every player. e.g. If you modelled and rendered every brick of a building, then you'd have maintain the state of that building with every nearby player, etc.
Given that Battlefield 2 is pushing the limits of modern hardware, I could just imagine what sort of PCs we'd need for a fully modelled environment.
Do the same with a.50 cal and then watch as the soldier runs up and stabs you to death with a hairbrush.
Are you sure you're playing the right game? My experience is that while the main gun doesn't have a lot of "splash" (nor should it), the 50 cal is extremely effective on infantry. The fixed weapons throughout the maps (woefully underutilized) are also extremely powerful. This game puts gameplay over realism, so it isn't of the single shot variety, but it's a fair compromise overall.
In fact one of my favourite things is using the jeep/buggy mounted machine guns to mow down enemies with ease. Of course then some moron hops in the driver's seat and starts driving me randomly around the map (after I carefully placed it in a defensive position near a flag). There's a lot of that sort of lameness. A lot of people who hop in APCs and then drive right past their teammates asking for a ride, dumping it near the enemy base so they can quickly be dispatched by a sniper.
I think the review was quite accurate, and he hit upon a core element of the game - your "success" and enjoyment in the game will vary dramatically based upon the quality and teamwork of your team. With a capable commander, and a team in squads that are doing their thing, it is really a wonderful experience. On most public servers, though, it's just a bunch of lone wolf random people running around the map, defending nothing and just hoping to come across enemy bases with on one in them. Of course because the opposition is the same, they're often successful in capping a flag for a minute. It's just random action where the winning team has better aim, with strategy meaning little. Too few times I've stumbled into a server with capable players and it's just the opposite, with a concerted push to attack specific positions, defense, and so on. Good stuff.
There'll always be bitchers, though. Was on a map last night where there are a number of linebackers on the Chinese side (Anti-Aircraft armoured vehicles), and some chopper guy complained that it was "unfair" (because he kept getting shot down). Apparently the lesson that it isn't a good map for choppers just failed to settle in.
Usually it was in a "hidden" partition. Old school serious viruses would damage them, but the high-level spyware and scripts of today wouldn't touch them.
Slashdot Mirror
There was not a single revolutionary thing in that entire review
Not to mention that only in the most perverted of senses was it a "review". Fawning overview is more like it. We get a good sense of the so-called reviewer's credentials when he says the following:
"I stopped using non-Microsoft browsers over two years ago because I found them to be unpolished. "
Of course tastes vary, but even amongst the most fanatical Microsoft apologists (including myself) it is pretty much universal that Firefox, or even Opera, is the primary daily browser. No one needs to suck on the Microsoft choad and pretend that everything they make must be the best in the market, especially when their flagship browser is going on half a decade old.
Of course every now and then you come across the real dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft apologist, very seldomly a developer but more likely a "somewhat involved in the tech industry" kind of person (e.g. an @Home Computer virus removal technician) who'll swear that IE is the greatest thing now and forever. I suspect that's what we have here.
The only feature of IE 7 that strikes me as a nice piece of user interface is the clear and graphical method of creating a new tab. Everything else is just a minor polishing of IE 6.
Does no one find bitching about a beta a little less than productive?
Well to be fair IE 7 is a very important product release, whether it's a blazing success, or a tremendous dud. A beta 1 is usually fairly feature complete.
Having said that, the so-called review was inane, poorly written, and obviously hacked together in no-time to try to get some namespace. The "reviewer" basically just shows a couple of screenshots, and hilariously claims that this is some great new paradigm, and it isn't IE 6 with some tweeks. No, my reviewing friend, IE 7 is IE 6 with some tweaks, and in some ways is inferior to some of the IE 6 "mods" (like MaxIE) released years ago. Perhaps there is something extraordinary hidden in there, but thus far it has been the most astounding is this it???? ever. That "reviewer" is yet another lame astroturfer praying that Bill Gates might read his gloating, tripping over himself "review" and hire him (which are pretty common, and universally pathetic).
The MSDN only seems to have positive value because you are operating in an environment where Microsoft's illegal monopoly forces you to use inferior tools to develop for inferior platforms.
.NET/SQL Server platform to be preferrable over J2EE/Oracle, or LAMP, or any of the other very viable competitors.
I develop primarily on the server and web services side, and choose Microsoft tools despite them being in the minority of deployed servers in that realm. I simply believe the
The monopoly nonsense is astoundingly naive in that case, and it's the case for many of the people who buy MSDN subscriptions to develop on the server side, for embedded devices (where MS is a small contender), and so on. You need to update your tired zealot rhetoric for the modern era.
I don't know of anyone who has an LCD as their TV apart from this one nursing home which got one last year.
Prepare to know a lot of people. The electronic stores are filling up with very competent 27"+ HDTV LCD TVs in the sub $800 range, and given that they're stocking so many obviously they are selling.
Even in Soviet Russia people charged for goods and services. Honestly you're as bad as the GP poster.
High, dumbshit, we are talking about items with zero reproduction costs, not goods and services (which obviously have reproduction costs).
The price gouging claim comes from the idea that anything that is not a tangible object should cost nothing, since the costs of reproducing what is basically an abstract representation of information is nearly zero.
In Soviet Russia, your idea actually appeals to someone. In the real world it is unbelievable naive and idiotic.
An MSDN subscription is actually remarkably inexpensive given the value one derives from it. If you don't like it, then don't buy it. Go and live in your land of everything non-physical being free.
One very simple question. Why?
He's just a troll. Longhorn cum Vista was just plopped on MSDN last night, so there is little of value that our friendly troll could have derived from it in that short of a period of time.
I assume there is an NDA but you can tell us something....
There is no NDA, and it's hardly a secret beta - there are some 500,000 MSDN subscribers. I'm one and am installing it in a VirtualPC session right now. I doubt I'm going to be back in 20 minutes calling it the greatest thing I've ever seen.
This doesn't answer my question. Nice straw man...
What question is that? Whether LCDs have ghosting? Well they do, as do CRTs, and if you don't like that get a DLP projector.
Of course, to use your insult in another way, you're like the guy that paints around his CDs with orange marker and uses Monster cables for all his digital audio connects. Someone tells you that it's better, and you convince yourself that you couldn't have it any other way.
I can't say too much because of the NDA
Oooh, you must be real important like!
Of course a) the beta is, for all intents and purposes, public, b) you could have just posted anonymously and safe the self-important pompous BS.
Are you claiming that Philips is creating a strobing LCD for no reason?
As I've said in other posts, both CRTs and LCDs exhibit ghosting, some modern LCDs doing so less than some higher end CRTs. From the Philips perspective, they're a large company that has to have a marketing angle to sell their sets - if they can claim a theoretical, imperceptible advantage, they will. Just because monster cable exists doesn't mean that I'm spending $200 for a 3' monster DVI cable.
I do a lot of dev work and game playing on my CRT, and whenever I've checked I've seen ghosting
And there's ghosting on CRTs. You see you probably heard "there's ghosting on LCDs", so the first thing you do with any LCD is do some ghost tests, confirming that there is, indeed, some ghosting. Yet if you did the same test on a CRT, you would see exactly the same thing, in some cases worse. Because the phosphor on a CRT has to persist between scans, it is built to hold the image for a period of time, some times a substantial period of time.
Get a black background, and drag something luminous around in a circle - on a Windows desktop you could use the trash can. Voila - it's a magical ghost garbage bin trailing it. OMG, there's ghosting on CRTs! Throw em out!
if it were a real 12ms lcd, it would uniformly and under all conditions respond at least within that threshold.
So basically you just invent whatever nonsense you want to justify your unfounded beliefs. Alrighty then.
In the real world the VESA consortium set standards on how they would measure response times, with strict conditions under which it would be measured. Now I realize that you're an authoritative voice, but I think I'll trust the labs a bit more than I trust you. Anyone who has actually been involved with LCDs for the past 6 years or so would say that you're full of shit, given the vast improvements that have happened with LCDs.
they also lie (read deceive) about viewing angles of lcds. this one is much more well known among lcd afficionados
So basically one has to signup to the cult to get the "inside scoop", right?
It is interesting that LCDs have some real deficiencies that you totally ignored, such as a subpar dynamic range, and limited colour saturation and fidelity. Instead you go for some nonsense conspiracy theory balogna.
and they also don't have a "native" resolution crippling every other resolution that requires interpolation to display.
Sure they do - it's just always in some shitty, interpolated mode, so you don't notice. Do you think that the number of physical dots on your screen changes when you change resolutions? It doesn't, it just mishmashes and overlaps them to fit the new resolution. CRTs have a fixed dot pitch, and I highly doubt you're running a 1:1 relationship with them.
so they resort to tricks and say that the response rate is now 8ms.
I'm typing this on a 27" LCD Television (which looks superlative, btw), and have watched a number of action movies, and played games on it, with absolutely zero complaints. The ghosting issue is such a holdover of 1999, and every half-wit, still trying to defend why they can't affort a new LCD display, imagines that they see ghosting all over the place on LCDs, while they carefully block out the same ghosting that occurs on all medium or long persistence phosphor CRTs (which is every high end CRT, humorously enough). Keep on convincing yourself, though.
This is the primary reason I would never buy an LCD TV.
Have you actually watched an LCD TV, and compared it against a phosphor television? I'm going to bet that you haven't, and instead you keep hearing about this theoretical ghosting issue of LCDs, and how terrible it is.
The reality is that almost all modern LCDs with 16ms or less response times are very comparable to phosphor sets. Because, as I'm sure you're aware, phosphor sets have plenty of ghosting themselves (seriously - watch when something luminous crosses a darkened screen. It's comparable, in some cases worse, than an LCD screen). Of course they do - the nature of the way that they are lit dictates that they have to use relatively slow fade phosphor or they would look even more terrible than they do.
This solution is just ridiculous, and it's basically some obscure R&D team looking for some sort of edge to make people believe that they need to buy their brand of products. I'll go without the flickering back-light, thanks. When you think about it, the solution doesn't even make any sense except in one particular type of scenario (light to dark).
Is this why people buy Windows - to run a command line tool? Gee, how is this better than Linux?
Well to be fair, the task manager does properly kill actually locked processes, instantly and without prejudice. It lags, however, when the process isn't actually locked, but is just in a dumb state - e.g. it is replying to messages being sent to it. In that case the task manager asks it to die, but gives it a period of time to clean up its stuff and terminate before finally really killing it (and the time is from your original click - clicking it 100 more times doesn't affect it). This is generally preferrable to avoid applications being terminated in the middle of some messy state.
The time delay doesn't bother me, what bothers me is that the CTRL-ALT-DELETE form always takes priority, and is always drawn regardless of any errant processes, but the actual task manager runs as a normal priority, normal GUI app - so if something is running high priority and/or screwed up the GUI, you can get the C-A-D form, but the task manager will never appear, leaving you in control limbo.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. Oh, I'm sorry, you must be a Professor of Computer Sound.
In a typical new system
In a typical new system, you take what they give you. You aren't choosing amongst various silent power supplies. Understand? Do you understand that we're not talking about a new Dell Dimension here?
Thus we're talking about mod or self-build rigs. Hilarious, though. I have a PC beside me with an included el cheapo power supply, and in the order of items that I can hear there is the video card, case fan, CPU, hard drive, and then the gentle wind rush of the power supply. All new components. I guess I must be wrong.
but people like you and I who read Slashdot are not your average computer user
Fair enough, but the story isn't comparing boxed computers from IBM or Dell, the type you'll see on the average corporate desk, they're talking about mod-type power supplies, or the type you'd source yourself when building a rig. In that realm the power supply is the last thing I'd worry about, as literally I've had perfect luck buying generic inexpensive ones and getting great low-noise performance (because of course the "generic" ones are making them to try to sell them to Dell and IBM and the other big brands).
Even in the corporate environment, though, in my last two cube-type workplaces the PC was close to silent (FAR eclipsed by the HVAC and nattering co-workers), and the only noise I recall was the hard drive and the optical drive when it use.
but one of the easiest and most effect is to upgrade to a silent power supply
It has been years since I've used a PC where the power supply was a significant contributor to the noise, and even the bargain basement ones are pretty well behaved these days. Not only are power supplies generally pretty quiet, but the noise they do make is the gentle sound of airflow.
Instead the low hanging fruit in aggravating noise are the hard drive, especially as rotational speeds increase (bringing the pitch to more and more irritating levels), optical media drives (though only when in use), and CPU fans. A quick up-and-comer in the ranks of audio assaulters are video cards, some of which come with ridiculously loud cooling contraptions.
The coders and engineers working for finance (Wall St. especially) are some of the best in the world and the best salaries in the world.
Bwahahahahahahahaha.
I worked in IT for a large bank (it's a really Royal Canada Bank) here in Canada for a while, and let me say that it was largely the dregs of the industry (yeah I know - I was there too. I took the job for very specific needs at a specific period of time, which it served admirably). A bunch of bottom-feeder career IT people willing to suck on whatever is stuffed in their mouth to keep working for the same corporation for the rest of their life (which is just sad). Mega projects that were just so poorly thought out and ridiculously executed that it was hard to get up in the morning, knowing that you're just pissing in the wind (which was true). The CEO recently, from the comfort of his mega (and clearly undeserved) pay and exclusive clubs, dictated a large push to hire primarily recent immigrants, undoubtedly because they know they can pay far less.
You would see things like moronic geography majors, with little or no real technical knowledge, being titled "Senior Systems Architects", and a database group without the slightest clue about the systems they were supposedly maintaining. Desktop systems would have "Domain\Domain Users" as administrators. It really was laughable. Systems decisions were made by groups of fly-by middle managers, of which there were farrrrr too many, largely a group of clueless ass-munchers.
Of course there were exceptions, and there were several very bright people, but I'm talking generalities. Generalities is that finance is the VB slingers of the IT world, not the cutting edge. For the cutting edge the finance industry calls in consultants, or buys off the shelf. If the finance industry embraced Linux, I would guarantee that it was because the VP of salary suckage golfed with the VP of Consultants Co, and hired his buddy on to migrate their systems.
# You need a new video card, not because you couldn't play without but because the designers just decided to use the new shader model. If you don't have an acceptable video card, the game just quits to the desktop with no information. There's a hack out there to enable play with older cards and they play fine but might not look quite as good, why didn't they include the capability at least in the game
I am convinced that nVidia &| ATI paid EA a large sum of money to put out a must-have DirectX 9 hardware-only game. I say this based on the fact that the exclusivity to those cards is very out of character for modern software (which have quality sliders to facilitate older hardware), and given the bizarrely inexpensive price point of BF2: It is $10-30 less expensive than comparable games, and introd at half-price.
So EA comes out with a great new game that require a recent generation of cards, and a lot of moderate gamers are heading to the hardware store to buy a new video card. Personally, and it's a long and convoluted story, I ended up buying two new DirectX 9 hardware cards specifically because of BF2, and I seldom game.
here are some tips for optimizing your system for bf2.
Normally I wouldn't bother with something like this (1GB of RAM and it usually doesn't matter, but BF2 is such an extraordinary pig), but another tip is to firstly copy the path to the BF2 executable (from the BF2 shortcut) into the clipboard. For instance on my PC it is...
W:\Battlefield2\BF2.exe +menu 1 +fullscreen 1
Now hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and choose "Task Management". In it kill explorer.exe. Do a File/New Task (Run) and paste the shortcut. Close the task manager while BF2 loads. When the game is done do a C-A-D and New Task (Run) explorer.exe.
when I could be playing it at 1600x1200 with 8x AA
8x AA @ 1600x1200? What are you playing - Quake 2? You certainly aren't playing a modern game with those settings.
This has been one of my strongest complaints for a long time
Of course it's been on the wishlist of pretty much every game designer - a completely modelled universe, complete with lots of interactive elements you can do as you please with. Maybe blow up that building to put debris across the road, and so on.
The problem is that unless it's a simple scripted style action" (e.g. hurt building X amount and it does Y, such as falling West across the road), it is untenable with current technology to model it all, or to communicate it all to every player. e.g. If you modelled and rendered every brick of a building, then you'd have maintain the state of that building with every nearby player, etc.
Given that Battlefield 2 is pushing the limits of modern hardware, I could just imagine what sort of PCs we'd need for a fully modelled environment.
Do the same with a .50 cal and then watch as the soldier runs up and stabs you to death with a hairbrush.
Are you sure you're playing the right game? My experience is that while the main gun doesn't have a lot of "splash" (nor should it), the 50 cal is extremely effective on infantry. The fixed weapons throughout the maps (woefully underutilized) are also extremely powerful. This game puts gameplay over realism, so it isn't of the single shot variety, but it's a fair compromise overall.
In fact one of my favourite things is using the jeep/buggy mounted machine guns to mow down enemies with ease. Of course then some moron hops in the driver's seat and starts driving me randomly around the map (after I carefully placed it in a defensive position near a flag). There's a lot of that sort of lameness. A lot of people who hop in APCs and then drive right past their teammates asking for a ride, dumping it near the enemy base so they can quickly be dispatched by a sniper.
I think the review was quite accurate, and he hit upon a core element of the game - your "success" and enjoyment in the game will vary dramatically based upon the quality and teamwork of your team. With a capable commander, and a team in squads that are doing their thing, it is really a wonderful experience. On most public servers, though, it's just a bunch of lone wolf random people running around the map, defending nothing and just hoping to come across enemy bases with on one in them. Of course because the opposition is the same, they're often successful in capping a flag for a minute. It's just random action where the winning team has better aim, with strategy meaning little. Too few times I've stumbled into a server with capable players and it's just the opposite, with a concerted push to attack specific positions, defense, and so on. Good stuff.
There'll always be bitchers, though. Was on a map last night where there are a number of linebackers on the Chinese side (Anti-Aircraft armoured vehicles), and some chopper guy complained that it was "unfair" (because he kept getting shot down). Apparently the lesson that it isn't a good map for choppers just failed to settle in.
Usually it was in a "hidden" partition. Old school serious viruses would damage them, but the high-level spyware and scripts of today wouldn't touch them.