Intel's going to have to do a lot more than this to catch up to AMD in the server space. This is an improvement in power consumption, but they're still gated by the front-side-bus architecture which only gets more crowded as you add processors. And 32-bit only... they must really be feeling the heat (lack of heat?) from the Opteron to release a new 32-bit server processor when mature 64-bit OS's and applications are available. Even Microsoft x86-64 Windows and SQL Server products have been out for months, while x86-64 Linux and Linux apps have been out for years.
It looks like they're desperate to show some progress...
Yeah, smaller maps. Thanks. I'll just skip the way I like to play the game and go with the smaller maps.
And new drivers - good hint. It's all over the readme's, and the Civ support site, and the independent Civ discussion forums, but - as I said earlier - I just replaced my video card and, seriously?, didn't update the drivers? Thanks for the insight.
And PC games are not like console games - again, amazing! Thank you thank you thank you, a thousand times, thank you for sharing your wisdom.
You have a point. I was using an Athlon 2800+, 512MB, GeForce3 (64 MB) setup and the game was too slow. Added 512 MB, upgraded to a GeForce 6200 with 128 MB (plain-Jane, no memory-sharing nonsense). But I still have to turn down the graphics features in the game and in the nVidia driver controls to make it playable (note: sure, there are faster video cards, but I need AGP and no extra Molex power connector because the SFF PC has a 275 Watt power supply).
Civ3 never had any problems with the previous setup, but 512 MB isn't nearly enough to play Civ4 and it still slows down during some of the zoom-way-in sequences.
This is not a game about pretty, shiny models. Or, at least, it hasn't been for the past 10 years. Don't get me wrong, I love the franchise and will keep playing it, and many game-play features have improvedbut the system requirements for this game are a bit ridiculous.
Get as much ram as you can afford. Presume you are running Windows -- so turn off the swap file if you have 1.5 - 2GB of ram. The difference in performance is
astounding.
If by "astounding" you mean "subjectively faster with more frequent crashes and other unpredictable consequences"... then yeah, astounding.
Everything from device drivers to anti-virus software assumes there's a paging file out there somewhere. There are Windows-tweaking tools which will let you page out to disk less frequently, like TweakXP or CacheMan. But why risk your system stability with funky settings when RAM is relatively cheap?
-Don
PS - to the RAID 0 suggestion - seriously? How often do you want to rebuild your machine because one of your hard drives crashed? You're better off with a single fast SATA drive, or separate disks for apps and swapfile, than any kind of striping without mirroring. RAID 0 (without RAID 1 mirroring) is just asking for trouble.
The biggest thing is competition in the local phone market. Now the copper-loop provider competes in more and more markets with the cable provider, and is starting to compete with the power provider.
How many markets have local telephone service offerings from power providers? I'm guessing I can count them on one hand, and they don't include any major cities.
Soon new providers may be offering Wireless Local Loop.
They could. Who are those providers? Have any announced a service offering, even in the future tense? Like copper local loops, wireless local loop would be a very expensive business to build from scratch and customer acquisition would, likewise, be expensive. My local phone service, bundled, from a cable company, costs around $35/month. That's not a lot of money, per customer, and a lot of access points to maintain. Wouldn't the ILEC's be in a good position to compete with them? They already have the network and the telephone poles.
AT&T also is far from having a monopoly on long-fiber: gas companies, power companies - even Google - have that stuff.
True, but AT&T probably owns more routers than any other company in the world. They have thousands of SONET rings in the US, they have extraordinary networking bandwidth and routing capacity. And network POP's - hundreds in the US. If you want to compete in local phone service, you need to have a network point of presence that's close to the customers. I'm pretty sure that's not true of Google, or other long-fiber users.
It is this type of inter-modal competition that means it makes sense to merge. You have to bulk-up to compete. Not merging would be suicide.
Why? GM and Ford have been buying up domestic and foreign competitors for years, but it turns out not to be a real winning strategy. Size isn't the same thing as innovation, and you need innovation to get new customers. If you're really big, like the biggest telecom company in the world, you need innovation just to keep from losing customers. BellSouth doesn't offer any products or services that AT&T can't offer already. Of course, they have a lot of local phone service customers - but weren't you saying that local phone service is super-competitive?
At the end of the day, it is very likely the consumer will buy all of their communications products (voice, video, data, and mobile) from a single provider, and competition will be in the bundle.
When you say "At the end of the day", you mean, "some time in the future." Since AT&T sold its mobile phone business to Cingular, and their broadband business to Comcast, there are no companies that offer all four things in the US. I guess AT&T doesn't think the consumer buying all their communications products from them will be a profitable business.
If providers don't offer all four, buying from them will make about as much sense is a buying from a car maker that sold the entire car minus the wheels and seats.
Except, right now, in your analogy, everyone's buying their car and wheels and seats from different providers. Lots of people don't buy seats at all.
It is in fact de-regulation and intense competition that make this move necessary.
Deregulation allows this to happen, but it's not inevitable. Intense competition, in the local loop service business, is pretty hard to find outside major metropolitan areas.
What's the up-front cost of starting a generic Mom-and-Pop store? Or a video rental store? Let's call it one million dollars (US), though it's probably much lower in most places.
What's the up-front cost of starting a DSL or cable ISP? Remember, you can't share existing last-mile facilities with the big guys (unless they charge you much more than you'll be able to charge your customers for the resulting services). What's it going to cost to build some new copper or fiber infrastructure, even in a dense urban area? How are you even going to get right-of-way access to buildings? Maybe you can lease the conduits from a power company, like some of the ISP's do. How are you going to connect to the Internet? Don't even think about the public peering points - they're kind of saturated and run by the incumbents. So you'll have to pay someone much bigger for IP's and bandwidth. Good luck with that.
The cable television and local phone service infrastructures took decades to build, with tons of public subsidies, tax breaks, and protective legislation. How are you going to buy enough legislative influence to keep the big guys from regulating you out of business?
In round numbers, I think you would need about a billion dollars.
Let's you and me take on the AT&T death star - how about it, dada21? Sell the ma-and-pa store and let's start talking to banks and VC's about how we're going to beat AT&T or Verizon or SBC in, you know, one or two big, high-margin metropolitan markets. We can do it, right? Just like you competed with Wal-Mart. It'll be easy, like shooting womp rats in your T-16 back home.
The "market" doesn't exist without laws and regulations - ie. liability law, contract law, etc. Sure, you need buyers and sellers, but the framework in which they operate is defined largely by laws.
To pretend that people can vote with their feet and just embrace alternate ISP's is ludicrous. Businesses can do this - I can buy a T1 from plenty of providers. Consumers generally can't because Congress repealed the unbundling of local loop services. Unbundling was one of the key provisions of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and this specific regulation successfully promoted competition. Look at the huge growth in small, DSL and dial-up ISP's in the late 1990's. But the re-bundling of local loop and telecom services allows ILEC's who own the (publicly subsidized, monopoly-fueled) phone lines to kick out their competitors. Bye Covad. Bye SpeakEasy.
Since the telecoms killed the regulations *allowing* competition in the baby bells' wiring closets, and all the major telecom providers are merging from a fear of being too small, your small-ISP options are going to evaporate (assuming they're not already gone). That leaves the cable companies, who are rapidly consolidating, and the bigger, post-merger, debt-and-infrastructure-heavy, incumbent telecom providers to choose from. Unfortunately, they all have the same business plan now: milk the infrastructure and perpetuate monopolies and oligopolies, just like the pre-Internet days.
I live in a dense suburb of a major American city. If I want broadband, I can get it from Verizon, Comcast or RCN. Or I can pay a 100% monthly premium for a slower-than-cable SDSL connection from an independant DSL provider. Maybe I'll pay extra because I have some applications which benefit from unfiltered ports, and better upstream bandwidth, but I doubt it. And can I really expect my non-technical friends and family to do the same? For a principle, which almost never gives them any benefits?
Public Interest Research Group has some good analysis of the consumer-unfriendly results of telecom mergers.
When someone tells you "The Market will determine the optimal solution for consumers," they usually mean "The monopolies created by deregulation will be very profitable and the consumers get what they deserve." If it's a corporate spokesperson, they're buying (and writing) the legislation to re-shape the market. Why do you think these guys try to block all municipal ISP programs? They're allergic to competition. Look at SBC - they've built or bought all the infrastructure they care to build and now it's time to raise the prices and cut service levels. They could never do this with a truly competitive telecom market.
Why wouldn't you try to get your elected representatives to oppose such legislation? What other avenues are left? Start your own telecom business and compete with Verizon or SBC for those lucrative local phone customers? Not likely - the barriers to entry are too high. Sure, there's lots of dark fiber out there, but there's no excess capacity in the last-mile, local-loop side of things.
-Don
PS - What, exactly, is the ideology that takes the SBC chairman's statements about preparing to gouge consumers and turns that into "Consumers win! Everybody wins!"?
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like they're desperate to show some progress...
And new drivers - good hint. It's all over the readme's, and the Civ support site, and the independent Civ discussion forums, but - as I said earlier - I just replaced my video card and, seriously?, didn't update the drivers? Thanks for the insight.
And PC games are not like console games - again, amazing! Thank you thank you thank you, a thousand times, thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Civ3 never had any problems with the previous setup, but 512 MB isn't nearly enough to play Civ4 and it still slows down during some of the zoom-way-in sequences.
This is not a game about pretty, shiny models. Or, at least, it hasn't been for the past 10 years. Don't get me wrong, I love the franchise and will keep playing it, and many game-play features have improvedbut the system requirements for this game are a bit ridiculous.
If by "astounding" you mean "subjectively faster with more frequent crashes and other unpredictable consequences"... then yeah, astounding.
Everything from device drivers to anti-virus software assumes there's a paging file out there somewhere. There are Windows-tweaking tools which will let you page out to disk less frequently, like TweakXP or CacheMan. But why risk your system stability with funky settings when RAM is relatively cheap?
-Don
PS - to the RAID 0 suggestion - seriously? How often do you want to rebuild your machine because one of your hard drives crashed? You're better off with a single fast SATA drive, or separate disks for apps and swapfile, than any kind of striping without mirroring. RAID 0 (without RAID 1 mirroring) is just asking for trouble.
How many markets have local telephone service offerings from power providers? I'm guessing I can count them on one hand, and they don't include any major cities.
Soon new providers may be offering Wireless Local Loop.
They could. Who are those providers? Have any announced a service offering, even in the future tense? Like copper local loops, wireless local loop would be a very expensive business to build from scratch and customer acquisition would, likewise, be expensive. My local phone service, bundled, from a cable company, costs around $35/month. That's not a lot of money, per customer, and a lot of access points to maintain. Wouldn't the ILEC's be in a good position to compete with them? They already have the network and the telephone poles.
AT&T also is far from having a monopoly on long-fiber: gas companies, power companies - even Google - have that stuff.
True, but AT&T probably owns more routers than any other company in the world. They have thousands of SONET rings in the US, they have extraordinary networking bandwidth and routing capacity. And network POP's - hundreds in the US. If you want to compete in local phone service, you need to have a network point of presence that's close to the customers. I'm pretty sure that's not true of Google, or other long-fiber users.
It is this type of inter-modal competition that means it makes sense to merge. You have to bulk-up to compete. Not merging would be suicide.
Why? GM and Ford have been buying up domestic and foreign competitors for years, but it turns out not to be a real winning strategy. Size isn't the same thing as innovation, and you need innovation to get new customers. If you're really big, like the biggest telecom company in the world, you need innovation just to keep from losing customers. BellSouth doesn't offer any products or services that AT&T can't offer already. Of course, they have a lot of local phone service customers - but weren't you saying that local phone service is super-competitive?
At the end of the day, it is very likely the consumer will buy all of their communications products (voice, video, data, and mobile) from a single provider, and competition will be in the bundle.
When you say "At the end of the day", you mean, "some time in the future." Since AT&T sold its mobile phone business to Cingular, and their broadband business to Comcast, there are no companies that offer all four things in the US. I guess AT&T doesn't think the consumer buying all their communications products from them will be a profitable business.
If providers don't offer all four, buying from them will make about as much sense is a buying from a car maker that sold the entire car minus the wheels and seats.
Except, right now, in your analogy, everyone's buying their car and wheels and seats from different providers. Lots of people don't buy seats at all.
It is in fact de-regulation and intense competition that make this move necessary.
Deregulation allows this to happen, but it's not inevitable. Intense competition, in the local loop service business, is pretty hard to find outside major metropolitan areas.
What's the up-front cost of starting a DSL or cable ISP? Remember, you can't share existing last-mile facilities with the big guys (unless they charge you much more than you'll be able to charge your customers for the resulting services). What's it going to cost to build some new copper or fiber infrastructure, even in a dense urban area? How are you even going to get right-of-way access to buildings? Maybe you can lease the conduits from a power company, like some of the ISP's do. How are you going to connect to the Internet? Don't even think about the public peering points - they're kind of saturated and run by the incumbents. So you'll have to pay someone much bigger for IP's and bandwidth. Good luck with that.
The cable television and local phone service infrastructures took decades to build, with tons of public subsidies, tax breaks, and protective legislation. How are you going to buy enough legislative influence to keep the big guys from regulating you out of business?
In round numbers, I think you would need about a billion dollars.
Let's you and me take on the AT&T death star - how about it, dada21? Sell the ma-and-pa store and let's start talking to banks and VC's about how we're going to beat AT&T or Verizon or SBC in, you know, one or two big, high-margin metropolitan markets. We can do it, right? Just like you competed with Wal-Mart. It'll be easy, like shooting womp rats in your T-16 back home.
To pretend that people can vote with their feet and just embrace alternate ISP's is ludicrous. Businesses can do this - I can buy a T1 from plenty of providers. Consumers generally can't because Congress repealed the unbundling of local loop services. Unbundling was one of the key provisions of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and this specific regulation successfully promoted competition. Look at the huge growth in small, DSL and dial-up ISP's in the late 1990's. But the re-bundling of local loop and telecom services allows ILEC's who own the (publicly subsidized, monopoly-fueled) phone lines to kick out their competitors. Bye Covad. Bye SpeakEasy.
Since the telecoms killed the regulations *allowing* competition in the baby bells' wiring closets, and all the major telecom providers are merging from a fear of being too small, your small-ISP options are going to evaporate (assuming they're not already gone). That leaves the cable companies, who are rapidly consolidating, and the bigger, post-merger, debt-and-infrastructure-heavy, incumbent telecom providers to choose from. Unfortunately, they all have the same business plan now: milk the infrastructure and perpetuate monopolies and oligopolies, just like the pre-Internet days.
I live in a dense suburb of a major American city. If I want broadband, I can get it from Verizon, Comcast or RCN. Or I can pay a 100% monthly premium for a slower-than-cable SDSL connection from an independant DSL provider. Maybe I'll pay extra because I have some applications which benefit from unfiltered ports, and better upstream bandwidth, but I doubt it. And can I really expect my non-technical friends and family to do the same? For a principle, which almost never gives them any benefits?
Public Interest Research Group has some good analysis of the consumer-unfriendly results of telecom mergers.
http://www.pirg.org/consumer/media/reports.htm
When someone tells you "The Market will determine the optimal solution for consumers," they usually mean "The monopolies created by deregulation will be very profitable and the consumers get what they deserve." If it's a corporate spokesperson, they're buying (and writing) the legislation to re-shape the market. Why do you think these guys try to block all municipal ISP programs? They're allergic to competition. Look at SBC - they've built or bought all the infrastructure they care to build and now it's time to raise the prices and cut service levels. They could never do this with a truly competitive telecom market.
Why wouldn't you try to get your elected representatives to oppose such legislation? What other avenues are left? Start your own telecom business and compete with Verizon or SBC for those lucrative local phone customers? Not likely - the barriers to entry are too high. Sure, there's lots of dark fiber out there, but there's no excess capacity in the last-mile, local-loop side of things.
-Don
PS - What, exactly, is the ideology that takes the SBC chairman's statements about preparing to gouge consumers and turns that into "Consumers win! Everybody wins!"?