You're too harsh on these low-end cards. A while back I bought my daughters a PC with built-in nForce graphics. Sure, it's not that quick, but it runs their games okay, if not brilliantly. Sure the resolution is normally 640x480 or 800x600, but they seem happy with it, and it's cheap. I figured I could get them a decent card for it if they needed it, but now it doesn't look like I'll need to.
This is (IIRC) an nForce-2 board. Basically has a GeForce 4MX built in using 32Mb of system RAM for video memory.
Now, I confess they're not playing DOOM3 or HL2 on it, but for what it is it's not bad. This new card from nVidia looks to be considerably faster, so should be fine, even for games like DOOM3 or HL2, as long as you don't mind the lower resolutions and merely reasonable framerates.
You have to remember that many people are quite happy playing at 640x480 @ 25fps..
To my English Ears 'burglarize' sounds like an abomination. However, I found an interesting article that suggest that both 'burgle' and 'burglarizer' both appeared in the language at roughly the same time, and that different sides of the Atlantic simply chose differently.
Re:The word is 'burgle', you illiterate moron!
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Robbers Scared by GTA
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· Score: 1
The first automobile was invented by a Frenchman in the late 18th century, and was steam powered. The UK lead car development for a while, during which time much progress was made on thing like brakes, multi-speed transmission and the like. The first automobiles to run on internal combustion engines were invented pretty much simultaneously in 1866 by a German and an Amercian.
The word is 'burgle', you illiterate moron!
on
Robbers Scared by GTA
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· Score: 2, Informative
The verb is 'burgle', and one who burgles is a burglar.
Nowhere in the post does it say that his friend has not discussed time spent online with his kids. All it says is that he's looking for something to meter the amount of online time they're spending. Far all you know, this is a *result* of discussing it with his kids. The kind of thing he's looking for will enable them all to be informed about the amount of time spent websurfing, whether that's to help enforce the house rules, or clear up any disagreements about exactly how much time is being spent on the internet anyway.
What a lot of people seem to be missing:
on
Pixar's Drawing Tool
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· Score: 5, Informative
A lot of people seem to be missing the central point here:
The thing that is so useful about their program is not that you can sketch over the top of a picture. You can do that on a hundred different programs out there.
The big thing is that the sketches are completely integrated into their pipeline. This means that if someone makes a sketch on an image, anyone working on that show can view that sketch when they're viewing that image. They can view the sketch when they're working in their 3d package - they can view the sketch when they're working in their compositing package. It's all saved, tracked and displayed automatically.
I work at a major European Visual Effects/Post Production studio, and that kind of stuff can be tricky. Tracking all your resources, integrating all your software, that kind of thing. It's all to do with workflow making sure everything is working smoothly for everybody from Render Support through to Producers, Animators and TDs.
It's a fascinating look into his mindset, which seems to be quite common in people who are in his position - they're meant to be providing security for the country - I've heard similar things from Police Chiefs.
Basically they seem to get so fixated on security they don't seem to really have a grasp of the cost of it, in terms of our freedoms. They see only the security, and none of its social consequences.
Perhaps they feel that their blinkered view is justified, as their only concern is security and it is other people's duty to balance that by fighting to retain our freedoms.
They don't have to win in court, they merely need to threaten you with court. They have much bigger pockets than most people, and know that most people could not afford to risk a costly court case. Therefore they say "We'll sue, unless you settle out of court for $3,500" and many will just give in and pay up.
Why is someone's plaintext email address...
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Tankjumping in Halo 2
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why is someone's plaintext email address on the frontpage of Slashdot?
Bit irresponsible, don't you think?
Perhaps the submission really was anonymous and the/. editors have some beef with this Aidran Steele fellow so they decided to abuse their power to get him sent a bunch of crap to his account?
Windows insists on using seperately bundled drivers.
But it doesn't. Windows tends to include drivers for most common (and many uncommon) devices with the installation.
The main difference is that when you download a Linux distro, it's probably been put together in the last six months, whereas a Windows XP CD will have been put together four years ago, so the driver set on an XP CD will likely be a bit more out of date than a Linux distro.
Re:authorized downloads with ads inserted?
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
Joking aside, watching ads is necessary to stay informed on new product offerings so while you think you win something by skipping ads, you're loosing something as well.
... like the ability to tell the difference between 'lose' and 'loose'?
Okay - any scene with any degree of complexity in it. I think unless you are rendering very simple scenes, you'll end up thrashing virtual memory, in which case you'd be better off just buying a single machine with a lot of memory than eight Xboxes that are constantly paging to disk.
Honestly, I think in most cases you'd be better spending your 800 pounds (what 8 Xboxes would cost in the UK) on a reasonably fast machine with quite a bit of memory. You might even just about get the budget to stretch to two machines:
For example: a PC configured from www.savastore.com: 2.8Ghz P4 80Gb Hard Drive 1Gb RAM No Monitor - but hey, this is for a renderfarm... - £406.54 including VAT
I'd be willing to bet a fair bit that two 2.8Ghz machines with 1Gb of RAM each seriously outperform eigth Xboxes!
You can't do any decent rendering when you're stuck with 64Mb of RAM. I work at a visual effects company and all the machines in our farm have at least 2Gb in them.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be the biggest selling game in history (well, until the next GTA game). Halo 2 has no chance simple because there's at least five times as many PS2 owners out there as Xbox owners.
By the way, GTA:SA has 'broken box office records' in the UK - in it's opening weekend it sold 26million pounds worth of units - beating Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the film) into second place.
Feh. November the 11th.
on
Halo 2 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Gotta wait two more days over here in the UK./grumbles
The review seems to assume that to be a 'gamer' you'll naturally be going for the highest-end components, wanting to get the absolute maximum from your PC, overclocking it and tweaking it to get that extra 2.5% performance increase.
Well, I've got news for you, folks. Some of us gamers just want to go for the mid-range, most bang-for-the-buck parts that'll run modern games at a reasonable resolution at a reasonable framerate at a reasonable graphical quality setting.
Sure, if they'd called themselves "The PC Ricer's Best Friend", I could see a reason to grumble, but from what I read in the review, it seemed like a nice little system.
I've been meaning to make a little python library to make writing new noise scripts quick and easy. I get one of these phishing mails once every couple of days. I figure if I was quick I could drown their database in noise, especially if I made it pipe the requests through a random selection of public proxies.
If I ever get around to writing something like this, I'd be tempted to share it, but its power could be used for Evil as well as Good. Also, bizarrely enough, using such a program is probably against the law.
I don't think Microsoft expects to make a decent profit on Xbox until Xbox 3. The reason they're going early is that they don't want to be in the same position as they were the last time around, where the launched when the PS2 was already firmly embedded. Of course, they also want to avoid the curse of the Dreamcast where everybody waits for the more-powerful Playstation that is coming along.
So - I don't think they'll be expecting to make a profit, especially at the beginning. They need to make the Xbox 2 at least as powerful as the PS3 (and preferably more powerful), and launching it earlier than the PS2 is going to mean that at first they'll be taking a huge hit on each console and will probably have to sell it at below cost.
However, you've got to look at the alternative - they certainly can't launch later than the PS3 - that would suicidal. The PS2 has such a big mindshare that they have to launch first - I imagine they hope that by the time the PS3 is coming out with its launch titles, the Xbox 2 will be getting its first second-generation titles, and that will be enough to win over some of Sony's customers...
Slashdot Mirror
You're too harsh on these low-end cards. A while back I bought my daughters a PC with built-in nForce graphics. Sure, it's not that quick, but it runs their games okay, if not brilliantly. Sure the resolution is normally 640x480 or 800x600, but they seem happy with it, and it's cheap. I figured I could get them a decent card for it if they needed it, but now it doesn't look like I'll need to.
This is (IIRC) an nForce-2 board. Basically has a GeForce 4MX built in using 32Mb of system RAM for video memory.
Now, I confess they're not playing DOOM3 or HL2 on it, but for what it is it's not bad. This new card from nVidia looks to be considerably faster, so should be fine, even for games like DOOM3 or HL2, as long as you don't mind the lower resolutions and merely reasonable framerates.
You have to remember that many people are quite happy playing at 640x480 @ 25fps..
To my English Ears 'burglarize' sounds like an abomination. However, I found an interesting article that suggest that both 'burgle' and 'burglarizer' both appeared in the language at roughly the same time, and that different sides of the Atlantic simply chose differently.
American invention my ass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile
The first automobile was invented by a Frenchman in the late 18th century, and was steam powered. The UK lead car development for a while, during which time much progress was made on thing like brakes, multi-speed transmission and the like. The first automobiles to run on internal combustion engines were invented pretty much simultaneously in 1866 by a German and an Amercian.
The verb is 'burgle', and one who burgles is a burglar.
You don't call a burglar a 'burglarizer', do you?
Cripes!
Nowhere in the post does it say that his friend has not discussed time spent online with his kids. All it says is that he's looking for something to meter the amount of online time they're spending. Far all you know, this is a *result* of discussing it with his kids. The kind of thing he's looking for will enable them all to be informed about the amount of time spent websurfing, whether that's to help enforce the house rules, or clear up any disagreements about exactly how much time is being spent on the internet anyway.
A lot of people seem to be missing the central point here:
The thing that is so useful about their program is not that you can sketch over the top of a picture. You can do that on a hundred different programs out there.
The big thing is that the sketches are completely integrated into their pipeline. This means that if someone makes a sketch on an image, anyone working on that show can view that sketch when they're viewing that image. They can view the sketch when they're working in their 3d package - they can view the sketch when they're working in their compositing package. It's all saved, tracked and displayed automatically.
I work at a major European Visual Effects/Post Production studio, and that kind of stuff can be tricky. Tracking all your resources, integrating all your software, that kind of thing. It's all to do with workflow making sure everything is working smoothly for everybody from Render Support through to Producers, Animators and TDs.
It's a fascinating look into his mindset, which seems to be quite common in people who are in his position - they're meant to be providing security for the country - I've heard similar things from Police Chiefs.
Basically they seem to get so fixated on security they don't seem to really have a grasp of the cost of it, in terms of our freedoms. They see only the security, and none of its social consequences.
Perhaps they feel that their blinkered view is justified, as their only concern is security and it is other people's duty to balance that by fighting to retain our freedoms.
They don't have to win in court, they merely need to threaten you with court. They have much bigger pockets than most people, and know that most people could not afford to risk a costly court case. Therefore they say "We'll sue, unless you settle out of court for $3,500" and many will just give in and pay up.
Why is someone's plaintext email address on the frontpage of Slashdot?
/. editors have some beef with this Aidran Steele fellow so they decided to abuse their power to get him sent a bunch of crap to his account?
Bit irresponsible, don't you think?
Perhaps the submission really was anonymous and the
Windows insists on using seperately bundled drivers.
But it doesn't. Windows tends to include drivers for most common (and many uncommon) devices with the installation.
The main difference is that when you download a Linux distro, it's probably been put together in the last six months, whereas a Windows XP CD will have been put together four years ago, so the driver set on an XP CD will likely be a bit more out of date than a Linux distro.
Well, with most other cars in the US being quite big, I don't suppose it really matters *whose* crumple zones are doing the crumpling...
Oh yeah, I remember now - Opal is the Fruit...
No wait! They changed them to Starburst. Damn their eyes!
And while you're at it, I want my Marathon Bars back as well. Snickers my arse.
Define decent?
Okay - any scene with any degree of complexity in it. I think unless you are rendering very simple scenes, you'll end up thrashing virtual memory, in which case you'd be better off just buying a single machine with a lot of memory than eight Xboxes that are constantly paging to disk.
Honestly, I think in most cases you'd be better spending your 800 pounds (what 8 Xboxes would cost in the UK) on a reasonably fast machine with quite a bit of memory. You might even just about get the budget to stretch to two machines:
For example: a PC configured from www.savastore.com:
2.8Ghz P4
80Gb Hard Drive
1Gb RAM
No Monitor - but hey, this is for a renderfarm...
- £406.54 including VAT
I'd be willing to bet a fair bit that two 2.8Ghz machines with 1Gb of RAM each seriously outperform eigth Xboxes!
You can't do any decent rendering when you're stuck with 64Mb of RAM. I work at a visual effects company and all the machines in our farm have at least 2Gb in them.
... that doesn't suck.
Yes, the GIMP sucks.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas will be the biggest selling game in history (well, until the next GTA game). Halo 2 has no chance simple because there's at least five times as many PS2 owners out there as Xbox owners.
By the way, GTA:SA has 'broken box office records' in the UK - in it's opening weekend it sold 26million pounds worth of units - beating Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (the film) into second place.
Gotta wait two more days over here in the UK. /grumbles
The review seems to assume that to be a 'gamer' you'll naturally be going for the highest-end components, wanting to get the absolute maximum from your PC, overclocking it and tweaking it to get that extra 2.5% performance increase.
Well, I've got news for you, folks. Some of us gamers just want to go for the mid-range, most bang-for-the-buck parts that'll run modern games at a reasonable resolution at a reasonable framerate at a reasonable graphical quality setting.
Sure, if they'd called themselves "The PC Ricer's Best Friend", I could see a reason to grumble, but from what I read in the review, it seemed like a nice little system.
I've been meaning to make a little python library to make writing new noise scripts quick and easy. I get one of these phishing mails once every couple of days. I figure if I was quick I could drown their database in noise, especially if I made it pipe the requests through a random selection of public proxies.
If I ever get around to writing something like this, I'd be tempted to share it, but its power could be used for Evil as well as Good. Also, bizarrely enough, using such a program is probably against the law.
I'm so glad the editors actually *read* the submissions they put on the front page.
A real professional job, folks.
Yes, offtopic I know.
Firefox crashes out on me once or twice a day, taking not only the page it was rendering but all the other tabs I had open with it.
Sure, perhaps malformed HTML shouldn't render. But I'd much rather it rendered than crashed the browser, which is bad.
We don't have Editors. We have Site Maintainers.
Fool.
I don't think Microsoft expects to make a decent profit on Xbox until Xbox 3. The reason they're going early is that they don't want to be in the same position as they were the last time around, where the launched when the PS2 was already firmly embedded. Of course, they also want to avoid the curse of the Dreamcast where everybody waits for the more-powerful Playstation that is coming along.
So - I don't think they'll be expecting to make a profit, especially at the beginning. They need to make the Xbox 2 at least as powerful as the PS3 (and preferably more powerful), and launching it earlier than the PS2 is going to mean that at first they'll be taking a huge hit on each console and will probably have to sell it at below cost.
However, you've got to look at the alternative - they certainly can't launch later than the PS3 - that would suicidal. The PS2 has such a big mindshare that they have to launch first - I imagine they hope that by the time the PS3 is coming out with its launch titles, the Xbox 2 will be getting its first second-generation titles, and that will be enough to win over some of Sony's customers...