You're saying you won't buy anything more than $3, and are complaining that a game an order of magnitude more expensive won't run on your computer? Especially when a computer capable of running that game is almost two and half orders of magnitude more expensive?
We've got a story about the fucking box that a bit of electronics comes in, but nothing about SpaceShip One's Ansari Xprize attempt? Yeah. News for Nerds.
Back when the PII was being launched with MMX, Intel gave the company I worked for then some money to help develop a game we were writing. A version would be bundled with new PII machines that would take advantage of MMX instructions and provide some extra features.
As it turned out, MMX wasn't all that well suited for gaming but we had some stuff in there that used MMX to generate some procedural textures on the fly, that kind of thing.
We shipped the code to Intel, and it went out with lots of Intel machines.
Later we shipped the retail version of the game - still 'enhanced for MMX'.
However, I was later working on a patch, or new networking code for the game or something (I don't remember exactly now), when I came across the source of the main bit that did the procedural textures. It had a check in to see if you had MMX and was meant to use it, falling back on a normal ASM bit if you didn't. There was also the reference C version still hanging around in the code that we had originally tested with.
When I looked at the code however, it turned out that some bright spark had obviously #ifdeffed out the ASM and MMX versions while tracking down a bug or something and had forgotten to put them back.
The version we originally shipped contained no MMX code.
Oooops.
I think some of the later builds we did (including I think the American version, as it came out some time later in the States than it did in Europe) actually had the MMX stuff all working, but it just goes to show that much of this stuff is marketing hype...
Now all we need is the biggest polluter in the world, with 5% of the population generating 25% of the pollution to finally grow up and ratify it as well...
Yup, it has been erupting every ~600k years for a while now, but the last one was ~630k years ago.
The one that exploded roughly 1.8million years ago exploded with a force somewhere between 2,500 and 8,000 times the magnitude of the last Mount St. Helens explosion, creating a crater 60km wide. It laid down ash 3m deep 1600km away.
So we're due for another explosion Real Soon Now. Fortunately for us (Well, you folks in the US, anyway), Real Soon Now in this context probably means sometime in the next few thousand years...
Whether or not it should matter to you is up to you. Really it's more of a point of interest than voting guidance.
What it does indicate is that the majority of the World feels that Kerry will be better for the World in general than Bush will be. This is not neccesarily the same thing as being better for the USA, though.
However, as a member of the Rest Of The World, it is fustrating that I am not in any way represented in the voting in of a person who will have a huge effect on my personal safety. For instance, I'd say that it's a pretty sure thing that as a Londoner who works in central London, mine and my family's chances of being victims of a terrorist attack are considerably higher as a result of Bush than they would have been if Gore had been elected, for instance.
There isn't really a similar example for you Americans - you're not going to be affected an awful lot by the election of anybody outside your own country.
I think the point of the grandparent post was that the time taken to bounds check when reading a jpeg is negligible, considering that the bottleneck is likely to be I/O.
First off the PS2 does have USB sockets. It's those little rectangular soc... there... there y'go, you've seen them now. Yes, it does fit your keyboard. And your webcam.And your mouse.
Yes, and apart from a keyboard and mouse, you can (to the best of my knowledge) plug a grand total of two peripherals into them - the eyetoy and singstar.
And to the best of my knowledge Sony have had no problems with people ringing up and insisting that they deliver scanner drivers or some other shit.
Well, I'd suggest your knowledge doesn't extend very far in this case. You can't play eyetoy with any other cameras, you can't plug PC gamepads in, the only generic parts that will work are keyboards and mice - everything else is custom for the PS2. You could insist all you like that Sony write drivers for third-party peripherals, but they're not going to do it. Hell, I don't even think the PS2 has any system for storing drivers. Where's it going to store them? on memory cards? As far as I know, games which use USB peripherals have to have the 'drivers' compiled into the game binary.
The reason the PS2 has USB plugs is simply so they had somewhere to plug more advanced devices into, as the control pads were backwards-compatible and therefore couldn't be used for generic (especially high-bandwidth) devices. The Xbox sockets are basically USB with a different and more suitable plug, so they don't require any seperate USB ports.
I still disagree with you about the suitablility of USB for console ports, but each to his own. I would suggest that the Xbox sockets are a better comparison than the PS2 ones though, as I feel they are better designed.
a) You don't want people plugging in all sorts of USB devices and then bitching because they don't work. Where are you going to get the drivers?
b) The physical USB plug is not well suited to consoles. It's not always immediately obvious which way up it plugs in - remember young children haveto be able to put these things in and out. Also, they don't tend to 'click' in all that well - you don't want something that comes unplugged easily. Finally, because they are quite small, they're probably not as robust as most console plugs.
I've never found virus programs to be worth it - if a new worm comes out, they are rarely quick enough to update and in the meantime they always seem to really slow down your computer.
Obviously I also take other precautions - only connect to the internet via a NAT router, never open email attachments, etcetera but Housecall is good, and it's free.
Maybe that is why VRML and X3D were not successful.
I think it's a bit early to be calling X3D unsuccessful.
Storing binary data like 3D vector data and texture data in a text file and then compressing the text file to get acceptable file sizes is just plain stupid.
I would agree that in general you'd want to stick to binary formats for textures, largely because there's a lot of very-well supported image formats out there already, and vast numbers of programs and libraries that will read them. Also, the type of data stored in images tends to be fairly flat and simple - just a large grid of colour values.
However, I don't think it's neccesary for most other things.
Text formats give you several huge advantages:
Easy to fix by hand. If something's wrong, it's a lot easier to go through and see what it is
Easy to write. Text files are very easy for anybody to write up using a quick script. No need to worry about endianness, for instance.
Easier to munge. If you need to swap some parts around in the file, you can just write something to do it easily in perl or python. You can even search/replace in your favourtite text editor.
Using a binary file for these things seems like premature optimisation to me. If you really need that small file size, just compress the file! The tools are fast and readily available. I see no reason to hobble yourself with a binary format any earlier than neccesary.
I work in the Visual Effects industry, and almost all our render and geometry data is stored in text files. We find this to be incredibly useful because you often need to write scripts that will chop and change the data, which is very easy with text files.
Just because your CPU runs cooler does not neccesarily mean it generates less heat. To do a proper test, use the heatsink supplied for use with your Athlon 1800+ and pop it on your Athlon64...
It's possible all you've proved is that coolers are getting better quicker than processors are getting hotter...
> What in the heck does someone named 'T. Kennedy' have to do with this story? That isn't his name. > Again, what does that have to do with this story? His name doesn't start with a 'T.'
FROM THE ARTICLE: "Sen. Edward "Ted" Kennedy said Thursday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government's secret "no-fly" list."...
"A senior administration official, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said Kennedy was stopped because the name "T. Kennedy" has been used as an alias by someone on the list of terrorist suspects."
> Hey moderators, how about actually reading the posts before hitting the buttons.
Hey, poster! how about actually reading the article before posting?
Riiiight. So basically anybody called 'T Kennedy' isn't allowed to fly.
According to the 1990 census information, 0.067% of Americans have the surname 'Kennedy' - given a rough poulation of 300million, that makes around 200,000 American Kennedys.
Now, also from the above information, 4.25% of the male population and 3.35% of the female population have names beginning with T.
This means that just from that single name on the no-fly list, roughly 7600 Americans could be excluded from flying.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait!
You're saying you won't buy anything more than $3, and are complaining that a game an order of magnitude more expensive won't run on your computer? Especially when a computer capable of running that game is almost two and half orders of magnitude more expensive?
True, DVD-ROM drives do cost 50% more than CD-ROM drives, but at 15 pounds, a DVD-ROM is hardly expensive!
We've got a story about the fucking box that a bit of electronics comes in, but nothing about SpaceShip One's Ansari Xprize attempt? Yeah. News for Nerds.
Burn, Karma, Burn!
Back when the PII was being launched with MMX, Intel gave the company I worked for then some money to help develop a game we were writing. A version would be bundled with new PII machines that would take advantage of MMX instructions and provide some extra features.
As it turned out, MMX wasn't all that well suited for gaming but we had some stuff in there that used MMX to generate some procedural textures on the fly, that kind of thing.
We shipped the code to Intel, and it went out with lots of Intel machines.
Later we shipped the retail version of the game - still 'enhanced for MMX'.
However, I was later working on a patch, or new networking code for the game or something (I don't remember exactly now), when I came across the source of the main bit that did the procedural textures. It had a check in to see if you had MMX and was meant to use it, falling back on a normal ASM bit if you didn't. There was also the reference C version still hanging around in the code that we had originally tested with.
When I looked at the code however, it turned out that some bright spark had obviously #ifdeffed out the ASM and MMX versions while tracking down a bug or something and had forgotten to put them back.
The version we originally shipped contained no MMX code.
Oooops.
I think some of the later builds we did (including I think the American version, as it came out some time later in the States than it did in Europe) actually had the MMX stuff all working, but it just goes to show that much of this stuff is marketing hype...
Christ!
Next we'll have people saying "Last night I was burglarized by burglarizer"!
Or perhaps in a few years time it shall be known as getting 'burglarizered'...
WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END?
Now all we need is the biggest polluter in the world, with 5% of the population generating 25% of the pollution to finally grow up and ratify it as well...
Yup, it has been erupting every ~600k years for a while now, but the last one was ~630k years ago.
The one that exploded roughly 1.8million years ago exploded with a force somewhere between 2,500 and 8,000 times the magnitude of the last Mount St. Helens explosion, creating a crater 60km wide. It laid down ash 3m deep 1600km away.
So we're due for another explosion Real Soon Now. Fortunately for us (Well, you folks in the US, anyway), Real Soon Now in this context probably means sometime in the next few thousand years...
He's a True Nerd then....
No offence, but I don't want to vote in the US that much...
Whether or not it should matter to you is up to you. Really it's more of a point of interest than voting guidance.
What it does indicate is that the majority of the World feels that Kerry will be better for the World in general than Bush will be. This is not neccesarily the same thing as being better for the USA, though.
However, as a member of the Rest Of The World, it is fustrating that I am not in any way represented in the voting in of a person who will have a huge effect on my personal safety. For instance, I'd say that it's a pretty sure thing that as a Londoner who works in central London, mine and my family's chances of being victims of a terrorist attack are considerably higher as a result of Bush than they would have been if Gore had been elected, for instance.
There isn't really a similar example for you Americans - you're not going to be affected an awful lot by the election of anybody outside your own country.
It was out yesterday over here in the UK.
I have so far resisted its siren call...
If you hate lying so much why didn't you either:
a) Buy your brother a copy of XP
b) Install Linux on his machine
c) Just let him use your machine
Obviously it can't have bothered you that much.
"Bitch Bitch Moan Moan! I'm all pissy because Microsoft told me it didn't approve of me pirating its software! How dare they!"
I think the point of the grandparent post was that the time taken to bounds check when reading a jpeg is negligible, considering that the bottleneck is likely to be I/O.
Whoops.
Does your parents know you're using the internet unattended?
Don't you have some homework to do?
I've read they will have a 940 pin part (Opteron) and a 939 pin part (Athlon64).
I wonder what that extra pin is for? Perhaps it sends the chip an 'I am a server' signal?
First off the PS2 does have USB sockets. It's those little rectangular soc ... there ... there y'go, you've seen them now. Yes, it does fit your keyboard. And your webcam.And your mouse.
Yes, and apart from a keyboard and mouse, you can (to the best of my knowledge) plug a grand total of two peripherals into them - the eyetoy and singstar.
And to the best of my knowledge Sony have had no problems with people ringing up and insisting that they deliver scanner drivers or some other shit.
Well, I'd suggest your knowledge doesn't extend very far in this case. You can't play eyetoy with any other cameras, you can't plug PC gamepads in, the only generic parts that will work are keyboards and mice - everything else is custom for the PS2. You could insist all you like that Sony write drivers for third-party peripherals, but they're not going to do it. Hell, I don't even think the PS2 has any system for storing drivers. Where's it going to store them? on memory cards? As far as I know, games which use USB peripherals have to have the 'drivers' compiled into the game binary.
The reason the PS2 has USB plugs is simply so they had somewhere to plug more advanced devices into, as the control pads were backwards-compatible and therefore couldn't be used for generic (especially high-bandwidth) devices. The Xbox sockets are basically USB with a different and more suitable plug, so they don't require any seperate USB ports.
I still disagree with you about the suitablility of USB for console ports, but each to his own. I would suggest that the Xbox sockets are a better comparison than the PS2 ones though, as I feel they are better designed.
There's a few reasons:
a) You don't want people plugging in all sorts of USB devices and then bitching because they don't work. Where are you going to get the drivers?
b) The physical USB plug is not well suited to consoles. It's not always immediately obvious which way up it plugs in - remember young children haveto be able to put these things in and out. Also, they don't tend to 'click' in all that well - you don't want something that comes unplugged easily. Finally, because they are quite small, they're probably not as robust as most console plugs.
I've never found virus programs to be worth it - if a new worm comes out, they are rarely quick enough to update and in the meantime they always seem to really slow down your computer.
Instead, I run a web-based anitvirus program (http://housecall.antivirus.com/) about once a month.
Obviously I also take other precautions - only connect to the internet via a NAT router, never open email attachments, etcetera but Housecall is good, and it's free.
It doesn't sound to me like the policeman was being a jerk. From the description on the site, he was polite, if rather clueless about technology.
I think it's a bit early to be calling X3D unsuccessful.
Storing binary data like 3D vector data and texture data in a text file and then compressing the text file to get acceptable file sizes is just plain stupid.
I would agree that in general you'd want to stick to binary formats for textures, largely because there's a lot of very-well supported image formats out there already, and vast numbers of programs and libraries that will read them. Also, the type of data stored in images tends to be fairly flat and simple - just a large grid of colour values.
However, I don't think it's neccesary for most other things.
Text formats give you several huge advantages:
I work in the Visual Effects industry, and almost all our render and geometry data is stored in text files. We find this to be incredibly useful because you often need to write scripts that will chop and change the data, which is very easy with text files.
Just because your CPU runs cooler does not neccesarily mean it generates less heat. To do a proper test, use the heatsink supplied for use with your Athlon 1800+ and pop it on your Athlon64...
It's possible all you've proved is that coolers are getting better quicker than processors are getting hotter...
But I wonder what percentage of people actually use audio and video chat?
And I wonder of them, how many people would be prepared to drop it in favour of only having to run one IM client?
> What in the heck does someone named 'T. Kennedy' have to do with this story? That isn't his name.
> Again, what does that have to do with this story? His name doesn't start with a 'T.'
FROM THE ARTICLE:
"Sen. Edward "Ted" Kennedy said Thursday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government's secret "no-fly" list."...
"A senior administration official, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said Kennedy was stopped because the name "T. Kennedy" has been used as an alias by someone on the list of terrorist suspects."
> Hey moderators, how about actually reading the posts before hitting the buttons.
Hey, poster! how about actually reading the article before posting?
Riiiight. So basically anybody called 'T Kennedy' isn't allowed to fly.
According to the 1990 census information, 0.067% of Americans have the surname 'Kennedy' - given a rough poulation of 300million, that makes around 200,000 American Kennedys.
Now, also from the above information, 4.25% of the male population and 3.35% of the female population have names beginning with T.
This means that just from that single name on the no-fly list, roughly 7600 Americans could be excluded from flying.
It's utter, utter madness.