I messed around with BSPs and Portals a few years ago just for fun. I was thinking that having a look at outdoors techniques might be interesting, and then this article comes along. I admit it probably hasn't done a lot more than saving me the equivalent reading time in googling, but it has been more pleasant.
Damn man, don't you READ what I post? It's not a mod, but their engine shares close evolutionary relationship. If you look inside the game files (as opposed to playing) it's blindingly obvious. Take off your consumer hat for a second and think for yourself.
Since we are talkign FPSs, it's not unlike the relationship shared by Unreal Tounement 2003 and Raven Shield. Are they the same game? Heavens, no. Do they share the same family of game engines? Hell, yes.
Now please, before you reply, take a moment to see what I wrote, instead of what you think i did.
I gather you have not looked at the the way the two products are installed on disk. There is absolutely no doubt that the KOTOR engine is an evolution of NWN's Aurora engine, with updated geometry and DX rendering. Besides, if you open the script resources, you'll see a striking similarity between the scripting done on KOTOR and nwnscript.
So much for your winzip fallacy. Now you can invoke the name of your religion's saviour again and make some pityfully inadequate jab, or you can look at the bloody games.
Unfortunately the HD sizes for laptops aren't quite up there with the ridiculously large desktop format drives yet. It's not unusual to see laptops with 40GB drives, and 700MB is not as negligible there as it would be on a 120 or even 200GB desktop drive.
And regardless, it's MY disk and I want be able to use it however i please.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean. If it is accessible by clicking on links, most search engines should be able to index it. If you want to be extra-friendly you can use $PATH_INFO to make dynamic pages look more like static ones, e.g.:
http://site.com/blah/prog.php/stat/1
instead of
http://site.com/blah/prog.php?stat=1
What OS were you using? I think you'll find the problem is more likely to be in your OS kernel than in the hardware.
I don't think you read what he wrote.
He said that the Opteron is designed to work within a fully-connected framework, ie. every processor has a direct line to every other processor. Every additional processor N you add need to be connected physically (ie, wires) to N-1 other processors, needing something close to 1/2N^2 connections for N processors in total. For N=4, it is feasible to produce such a motherboard for a reasonable price. For N=8 it is not.
That's all there is to it, and you will notice it does not involve the OS in any way. It's purely a hardware matter.
The NUMA architecture in the Opteron has its roots in Cray, back in the mists of time, and has been (and is in other incarnations) used in substantially larger systems to good effect.
Again, that's not relevant. Most modern supercomputer architectures are not (for this very reason) fully-connected. The venerable Cray T3E for example, uses a toroidal interconnect, which is basically 3-d grid with wrap-around. Messages for other processors ("Yo, gimme this chunk of memory" or similar) are propagated by the processors in between. Other interesting architectures are the famous hypercubes, where messages can be routed in at most lgN steps.
I think the decision of AMD to go with this kind of architecture makes a lot of sense. After all, their aim is to provide affordable horsepower, not to take on the HPC market. Up to four processors, they succeed admirably, and that's about a sweet spot for server work. If you do heavy numerical lifting then you are left with the usual options: clustering (2 or 4-way opterons?) or payign the big bucks for a "real" supercomputing facility.
I don't think there is a real reason why one could not build a supercomputer with Opterons. The T3E I mentioned earlier used Alpha EV5s (333 and 450Mhz I think) as processors. But it would require a significant investment in terms of development and component reliability; with 2000 processors you need a pretty high MTBF, or you'll be swapping processors all day.
The HPC market however is not as lucrative a business as consumer/business machines, and I'm not sure it would be in AMD's best interest to persue that route at this particular point in time.
I agree, but the presence of these materials could immensely aid in-situ fabrication of whatever you need, and help bootstrap a possible future colonization effort.
Now we only need to get that foundry over there at a million dollars/kg...
Whether or not the Blockbuster chain is large enough I have no idea. They are not very prevalent here in Holland, though I hear they are quite large stateside. However the rental industry as a whole generates a substantial portion of the MPAA members' revenue, and I am sure they will get their attention.
Let's be realistic here, if Blockbuster complains about it, the rest of the rental business is not likely to hold views that are a lot different. And together they certainly have the clout to make region codes go away.
If some customers were planning to buy a X-Box and bought a PS2 instead - thus supporting the theory above - is certainly debateable.
I was planning to buy an X-Box, but looking into it while I saved the money up I found out that the games I wanted to play were PS2 only, so I bought a PS2.
I had exactly the same thing, but with a Gamecube instead. I guess there is more merit to the article's premise than I originally thought.
Umm, DSA or RSA signatures? Just put up your key on the blog or whatever.
Pushing checksums via the web does indeed reduce bandwidth in a best-case scenario, but if someone floods the newsgroup with fake updates all the aggregators will slam the website like mad trying (and failing) to verify the MD5 hash.
Plays great here with a 1.4 Atlhon and an Geforce 2 GTS, whiich I imagine is similar to the poster's setup.
Beware though, it can be a humongous timesink.
That's really irrelevant. Either you need to have all your licensing properly sorted out, in which case installing the software on two machines using the same key is unacceptable to begin with, or you don't. If you don't, then you also do not mind using any of the other less-than-proper approaches to get past WPA.
If anything I think there will be a booming black market in cracked WinXP disks, a record number of BSA audits, and perhaps even raiding of private residences if the lobbies push hard enough. Then hopefully someone will understand that all WPA does is bug the people that actually paid for the products, and stop these silly practices.
I'm pretty sure you could just burn through it. After all, it's rolled up graphite sheets, and those can be made to burn with minimal effort.
Re:Annoyances?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Same here. I got him a hardware-based router and didnt give him the password. It cut down drastically on "the internet doesnt work" complaints.
I'd love to have him log on on a non-previleged account, but then he'd call me every time he wants to install stuff, that's even less practical than re-installign him once in a while.
This is exaclty the same bloody list of games we play, up to and including Diablo II (tried to vary towards NWN but she really likes the shallow hacking of D2). The only ones I seem to be missign is Animal Crossing, but considerign the huge overlap I'm going to get it on the next round of console games purchases.
I heartily echo the OP's suggestion: Gamecubes are made for these thing. In fact, if anyone can reccomend more good GC games with co-op modes, I'd love to hear of them.
Besides, there is a standard (as much as anything that is as poorly diffused as IPv6 can have substandards) that generates a new throwaway address each time interval if you are truly worried about people on the internet figuring out your MAC adress. I cant remember the name/number but it is included in the WinXP stack.
After all, we wouldnt want the people at slashdot to know you run a cheapo Realtek card would we?
Up to a certain extent here you can TYPE how it looks. Of course then you wont get the benefits of all special effects and things, but i have seen games that were basically run all in chat a-la PnP. Then when there's a batle or brawl the DM would teleport us to a suitable background and spawn the encounter.
Doing this you dont use the full extent of the game engine, of course, but you gain in flexibily.
... are there any RPGs out there where one person "plays" the game master and other players play player characters, allowing for endless possibilities? If so, do they and can they bring anything to the table (so to speak) that pen and paper RPGs lack?
Neverwinter Nights fits the bill quite nicely. Despite the fact that tehre were some issues with the initial released version of the game, and that it had been hyped up so much that there was no possible way it could live up to it, it does a very good job of bringing what you have come to expect from PnP to the desktop.
The DM interface and the world-builder's toolset are a bit intimidating at first though, and you need a modicum of programming skills to script "active content" into a module.
Of course if the players are willing to suspend disbelief a bit and the DM is quick on his feet, almost anytihng can be faked with varying degrees of approximation. While it lacks some of the flexibility of PnP, it's the closest any game has come so far.
As far as I can tell, there are only two advantages to this over PnP. 1) You can play with people all over the world. 2) You don't have to roll dice and to tedious bookkeeping. Of course you pay for it in many ways, and I'm not ready to give up my bi-weekly PnP game. But it's surely a nice complement.
Slashdot Mirror
I messed around with BSPs and Portals a few years ago just for fun. I was thinking that having a look at outdoors techniques might be interesting, and then this article comes along. I admit it probably hasn't done a lot more than saving me the equivalent reading time in googling, but it has been more pleasant.
Damn man, don't you READ what I post? It's not a mod, but their engine shares close evolutionary relationship. If you look inside the game files (as opposed to playing) it's blindingly obvious. Take off your consumer hat for a second and think for yourself.
Since we are talkign FPSs, it's not unlike the relationship shared by Unreal Tounement 2003 and Raven Shield. Are they the same game? Heavens, no. Do they share the same family of game engines? Hell, yes.
Now please, before you reply, take a moment to see what I wrote, instead of what you think i did.
I gather you have not looked at the the way the two products are installed on disk. There is absolutely no doubt that the KOTOR engine is an evolution of NWN's Aurora engine, with updated geometry and DX rendering.
Besides, if you open the script resources, you'll see a striking similarity between the scripting done on KOTOR and nwnscript.
So much for your winzip fallacy. Now you can invoke the name of your religion's saviour again and make some pityfully inadequate jab, or you can look at the bloody games.
You can even open some of the game resources with the NWN GFF explorer. QED.
Unless of course you are talkign about a minimal userland too (base.tgz in Debian land I think).
And regardless, it's MY disk and I want be able to use it however i please.
http://site.com/blah/prog.php/stat/1
instead of
http://site.com/blah/prog.php?stat=1
I use it all the time and it works really well.
I don't think you read what he wrote.
He said that the Opteron is designed to work within a fully-connected framework, ie. every processor has a direct line to every other processor. Every additional processor N you add need to be connected physically (ie, wires) to N-1 other processors, needing something close to 1/2N^2 connections for N processors in total. For N=4, it is feasible to produce such a motherboard for a reasonable price. For N=8 it is not.
That's all there is to it, and you will notice it does not involve the OS in any way. It's purely a hardware matter.
The NUMA architecture in the Opteron has its roots in Cray, back in the mists of time, and has been (and is in other incarnations) used in substantially larger systems to good effect.
Again, that's not relevant. Most modern supercomputer architectures are not (for this very reason) fully-connected. The venerable Cray T3E for example, uses a toroidal interconnect, which is basically 3-d grid with wrap-around. Messages for other processors ("Yo, gimme this chunk of memory" or similar) are propagated by the processors in between. Other interesting architectures are the famous hypercubes, where messages can be routed in at most lgN steps.
I think the decision of AMD to go with this kind of architecture makes a lot of sense. After all, their aim is to provide affordable horsepower, not to take on the HPC market. Up to four processors, they succeed admirably, and that's about a sweet spot for server work. If you do heavy numerical lifting then you are left with the usual options: clustering (2 or 4-way opterons?) or payign the big bucks for a "real" supercomputing facility.
I don't think there is a real reason why one could not build a supercomputer with Opterons. The T3E I mentioned earlier used Alpha EV5s (333 and 450Mhz I think) as processors. But it would require a significant investment in terms of development and component reliability; with 2000 processors you need a pretty high MTBF, or you'll be swapping processors all day.
The HPC market however is not as lucrative a business as consumer/business machines, and I'm not sure it would be in AMD's best interest to persue that route at this particular point in time.
Oh really?
Now we only need to get that foundry over there at a million dollars/kg ...
Oh, the irony.
Bioware is alive and doing very wel as far as I can tell.
Let's be realistic here, if Blockbuster complains about it, the rest of the rental business is not likely to hold views that are a lot different. And together they certainly have the clout to make region codes go away.
Pushing checksums via the web does indeed reduce bandwidth in a best-case scenario, but if someone floods the newsgroup with fake updates all the aggregators will slam the website like mad trying (and failing) to verify the MD5 hash.
Plays great here with a 1.4 Atlhon and an Geforce 2 GTS, whiich I imagine is similar to the poster's setup.
Beware though, it can be a humongous timesink.
Let's just say there might be significant overlap. And a measurable amount of sarcasm.
If anything I think there will be a booming black market in cracked WinXP disks, a record number of BSA audits, and perhaps even raiding of private residences if the lobbies push hard enough.
Then hopefully someone will understand that all WPA does is bug the people that actually paid for the products, and stop these silly practices.
I'm pretty sure you could just burn through it. After all, it's rolled up graphite sheets, and those can be made to burn with minimal effort.
I'd love to have him log on on a non-previleged account, but then he'd call me every time he wants to install stuff, that's even less practical than re-installign him once in a while.
I thought the first/second (depends on who you ask) most important gas for greenhouse purposes was good old H2O water vapour.
I heartily echo the OP's suggestion: Gamecubes are made for these thing. In fact, if anyone can reccomend more good GC games with co-op modes, I'd love to hear of them.
Besides, there is a standard (as much as anything that is as poorly diffused as IPv6 can have substandards) that generates a new throwaway address each time interval if you are truly worried about people on the internet figuring out your MAC adress. I cant remember the name/number but it is included in the WinXP stack.
After all, we wouldnt want the people at slashdot to know you run a cheapo Realtek card would we?
Doing this you dont use the full extent of the game engine, of course, but you gain in flexibily.
Neverwinter Nights fits the bill quite nicely. Despite the fact that tehre were some issues with the initial released version of the game, and that it had been hyped up so much that there was no possible way it could live up to it, it does a very good job of bringing what you have come to expect from PnP to the desktop.
The DM interface and the world-builder's toolset are a bit intimidating at first though, and you need a modicum of programming skills to script "active content" into a module. Of course if the players are willing to suspend disbelief a bit and the DM is quick on his feet, almost anytihng can be faked with varying degrees of approximation. While it lacks some of the flexibility of PnP, it's the closest any game has come so far.
As far as I can tell, there are only two advantages to this over PnP. 1) You can play with people all over the world. 2) You don't have to roll dice and to tedious bookkeeping. Of course you pay for it in many ways, and I'm not ready to give up my bi-weekly PnP game. But it's surely a nice complement.