I invite you to build, for $400, a PC that is capable of playing Halo 3 (or heck, even Halo 2!) at 1080p. ZOMG! We have technical limitations? THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!!111one
It also reveals the total BSed-ness that is the "HD era". If Bungie had not even revealed this, would ANY OF YOU HAVE ACTUALLY NOTICED THE DIFFERENCE? Clearly the only major leap we've made in the last few years is from interlaced to progressive (which DOES actually look much better), but other than that...
Would it stutter? Would it falter? Would it overheat the console and crash?
Er... it would stutter. That much should be immediately obvious...
IMHO Halo 3 sets some bars that PC games haven't even yet gotten to. I think gamers are "spoiled" by the complete overuse of bumpmaps in recent years, and now that a game dares to come out where things aren't shiny and bumpy ALL OVER THE PLACE, it looks "worse" in comparison, despite being more realistic.
I was never quite comfortable with the Doom 3 engine - we didn't have enough horsepower at the time to do real-time lighting *correctly*. So all we got was really black, sharp shadows with overly shiny bumpmaps that are misused all over the place. But the gaming world clamored for more, for some odd reason, and it became the defining bar for "OMG it looks so awesome!"
GOW was guilty of this also. Look around you, look out your window. The type of uber-bumpmapping that happened in GOW simply doesn't exist in real life. Real life is much more subdued, and I really enjoyed that look from Halo 3. Bumpmapping in the right places, none where it isn't meant to be.
I can attest that Halo 3 runs smooth as butter, with consistently high framerates that haven't dipped even once in frenetic battle. It certainly feels smoother than graphical powerhouses like Gears of War, and in a multiplayer game framerate is king above all else.
I also have to add that Halo 3 is amongst the most beautiful games I've ever played. They use this incredible lighting model (I suspect it's some offshoot of ambient occlusion) that simulates global illumination remarkably well. This is a nice change from the shiny "oh look we have bumpmaps! look!" feel that most other "next-gen" games have. Everything looks natural - shiny things shiny, dull things dull, and everything in between. Really have to give kudos to their coders and artists for making it all come together so well.
Er... less ignorance, more knowledge plz. These frame buffers are on TOP of the double (or maybe even triple) buffering that is already done from frame-swapping. The whole idea is that 32-bit screen buffers do not have enough range to properly account for HDR lighting (i.e. that nice effect where your eyes take time to adjust after coming out of a dark tunnel, and also the real way to do light blooms). So in essence what they're doing is two 32-bit buffers to simulate a very large 64-bit buffer, where each pixel has 64 bits of range. In total they would need to have at least 4 of these to account for the double buffering.
In an ideal world I should just be able to tell the machine to give me 64-bit color, but our hardware isn't quite there yet (almost).
Google is open and free now? Wow! Where can I get a copy of their search engine source?!
I have my doubts that Google can remain "not evil" (on the overall karmic scale) for much longer. I would think a non-profit, transparent entity would be far more appropriate.
Yet competitors can't mimic anything because of the outrageously inept intellectual property laws that exist in the States and the in the International Law community.
I call BS on that. Somehow these laws are binding and holding back everybody *except* Apple? I'm not happy with Apple at all for their shenanigans recently with the iPhone, but you have to hand it to them - every industry they enter experiences a resurgence of interest in usability. Do you think Vista would have a slick (or rather, slicker) interface if it weren't for OSX nipping at their heels? I have to congratulate Apple for introducing the most usable phone UI I've ever used, and I pray that other companies start cloning it and quick. I want my open PDA phone with a non-crappy UI already!
"Ease of sharing documents" is the only one that's valid in that list. Honestly, I've *never* patched any version of Office I've owned, and never had a problem - even the current version, which I do patch only by virtue of the updater nagging me, poses no problems. So really, patched or not Office works fine. Also, I tend to work a lot during travel time - planes, trains, buses, what have you... A tube-based Office simply won't work, and I know a LOT of businessmen who do the same.
Not to mention that with a text-based (i.e. non-binary) file format for documents now, one can very easily use a code repository like SVN to share documents. That's what I did last time in a team project.
Yes... Unfortunately the public school system sucks, and universities are left to do quite a bit of catch-up. My school is very internship oriented (all undergrad engineers must take 6 internships before being allowed to graduate), and it never ceases to amaze me the kind of stupid jerk-off things students do while at work. There's much work to be done yet on them.
Who says the two are mutually exclusive? Besides, one has to create the foundation for a good engineer before proceeding to stuff all kinds of technical jargon into his head.
Because life is expensive, and if I had a multi-million dollar trust fund I'll probably spend my whole life learning about whatever tickles my fancy. But life isn't like that. I need to pay the bills, have a family, and God willing, own my own house (as opposed to having a mortgage shoved up where the sun don't shine for decades). For most of us getting our butts out there and making some money is not a matter of choice.
As a current undergrad in engineering, I totally agree. I have absolutely no intention of going for a graduate degree, and neither do the vast majority of my peers. Graduate engineers get paid marginally more (maybe 10% extra starting) here in Canada, and any competent and motivated engineer can completely outstrip that number in the years the grads spend in school.
The only people I know who are even remotely interested in graduate engineering are the ones who were gunning for professorships and a lifetime of academia anyway. Anybody who wans to go into private sector knows it's a waste of time (if your goal is to be highly paid, and spend as little time in school as possible).
That's stupid. IMHO the entire purpose of the international student programs should be to recruit future American citizens. The whole country is built upon gathering the talent from all over the world, there needs to be some sort of program that will encourage excellent students (odds are if they've made it in, they are already) to settle down for good.
International students pay full price for their education - and are not subsidized by the state in any way. And considering the lack of public health care and whatnot, they're really not sucking much money out of the American economy at all. As other posters also mentioned, they are not able to legally work in the USA except in an academic position, which we all know pays so little that it would not incur taxation anyway.
How do the other platforms do it? It's not as if Apple or Microsoft don't face the same restrictions when it comes to patents and DRM. There may be a real solution around it, but at this point in time if you clone OSX/Windows' solution you're at least *as good as* the competition.
First off, someone needs to pay for the damned mp3 patent, stupid as it may be, because an OS that can't play MP3's out of the box is not much of an end-user OS at all.
- If a car company will step and pay MANY millions for a sponsorship deal, they can make KITT *anything*. I will weep the day KITT becomes a Nissan 350Z or something equally stupid.
- If no car companies step up, no doubt they will go after something like a Ferrari or Lambo, to cash in on the bling-laden hip hop culture thems darned rappin' kids are into these days.
I wish I were kidding, but it's entirely plausible...
I admit I didn't RTFA - but if this was an actual reading, shouldn't it have been recorded by *multiple* sensors that are spaced very far apart? What are the odds that all the sky-facing sensors caught the same misreading at the same time? If it's just a single (or a group of local) sensors, then it's probably nothing.
I am Chinese, I understand Chinese history and culture - I was born into it. What does the current communist regime have ANYTHING to do with Chinese history and culture, besides the last 50-odd years? Why should anyone hold any allegiance to a government that has no hesitation towards killing them? This whole "we must stand by our gov't" spiel sounds like too much pride and too little thought, and reeks of brainwashing from a young age.
Please do tell what assumptions I'm making, because I was under the impression that pledging allegiance to someone who wouldn't bat an eye about killing you (and in fact does so, very often), is poor sense in ANY culture.
One the truly puzzling things about most Chinese that I meet is there bottomless capacity to defend the snake of a government they have - even the ones that have already immigrated away. I find that the upper-middle class tends to be the worst - the ridiculously rich are too educated to fall for the government's lies, while the poorest suffer too much to believe anything the government says. It's the people who fall down the middle that actually believe the things the government teaches them.
I've known many Chinese who admit their government's deficiencies, and admit that officials are almost always corrupt and self-serving. But for some reason they still declare their allegiance to the government, claiming that as a Chinese by blood they cannot possibly turn away from the Chinese government. This puzzles me greatly, since I've long ago refused to consider myself a supporter of anything BUT a Western democracy - if the government is shooting your kind by the hundreds, is corrupt, etc etc, what kind of loyalty do you owe to them? It seems very ego-driven, and amounts to stubborn refusal to admit that perhaps the West has a better sociopolitical system.
In a sick way, it's like Stockholm syndrome... a whole race of people who are culturally conditioned to remain loyal to their government, despite the innumerable atrocities that are committed against them in front of their own eyes.
As another side note... it's depressing the "history" they learn in their schools...
True, though he can certainly minimize the dollar count going to China. Buying Lenovo would be giving every single dollar of the purchase to a Chinese company (though how they are directly related to the atrocities there... I'd never know), whereas buying, say, Dell, would only be giving manufacturing costs, while R&D remains here.
As a Chinese-Canadian I'm glad there are people who, at the very least, are willing to think along this guy's lines. There are awful, horrifying things going on in that country and it's nice to see some people who aren't so American-centric they can't point out China on a map, much less the atrocities being committed there.
As a side note... From my experience, more Americans know about these atrocities than Chinese. It's depressing, really. It's also depressing the number of new Chinese immigrants who are totally blown away by Canada's democratic government, since they thought (or were taught) that they had democracy all along.
Agreed. Although the lack of offline messaging in MSN is annoying, pidgin does everything I want MSN to do, with none of the things that the official client does that I hate.
As an Asian (who lives in Canada), I know why Asia tends to be superior in terms of mobile technology (or really, ANY consumer technology). It's because they have a techno-centric fashion culture.
Here, the iPhone *just* hit us as the first *true* "fashion phone". You could argue the RAZR was in before that, but even that was fairly recent. In Asia they've had these things for years. Phones that rival jewelery in glitziness and price. Not to mention a society that values fashion and appearance above all else - and thus the willingness to pay a lot, and pay often, for new fashionable phones.
If Americans had the same attitude towards their phones as we do for our wardrobes, we'd be pretty durned advanced too.:P
Slashdot Mirror
I invite you to build, for $400, a PC that is capable of playing Halo 3 (or heck, even Halo 2!) at 1080p. ZOMG! We have technical limitations? THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!!111one
It also reveals the total BSed-ness that is the "HD era". If Bungie had not even revealed this, would ANY OF YOU HAVE ACTUALLY NOTICED THE DIFFERENCE? Clearly the only major leap we've made in the last few years is from interlaced to progressive (which DOES actually look much better), but other than that...
Would it stutter? Would it falter? Would it overheat the console and crash?Er... it would stutter. That much should be immediately obvious...
IMHO Halo 3 sets some bars that PC games haven't even yet gotten to. I think gamers are "spoiled" by the complete overuse of bumpmaps in recent years, and now that a game dares to come out where things aren't shiny and bumpy ALL OVER THE PLACE, it looks "worse" in comparison, despite being more realistic.
I was never quite comfortable with the Doom 3 engine - we didn't have enough horsepower at the time to do real-time lighting *correctly*. So all we got was really black, sharp shadows with overly shiny bumpmaps that are misused all over the place. But the gaming world clamored for more, for some odd reason, and it became the defining bar for "OMG it looks so awesome!"
GOW was guilty of this also. Look around you, look out your window. The type of uber-bumpmapping that happened in GOW simply doesn't exist in real life. Real life is much more subdued, and I really enjoyed that look from Halo 3. Bumpmapping in the right places, none where it isn't meant to be.
I can attest that Halo 3 runs smooth as butter, with consistently high framerates that haven't dipped even once in frenetic battle. It certainly feels smoother than graphical powerhouses like Gears of War, and in a multiplayer game framerate is king above all else.
I also have to add that Halo 3 is amongst the most beautiful games I've ever played. They use this incredible lighting model (I suspect it's some offshoot of ambient occlusion) that simulates global illumination remarkably well. This is a nice change from the shiny "oh look we have bumpmaps! look!" feel that most other "next-gen" games have. Everything looks natural - shiny things shiny, dull things dull, and everything in between. Really have to give kudos to their coders and artists for making it all come together so well.
Er... less ignorance, more knowledge plz. These frame buffers are on TOP of the double (or maybe even triple) buffering that is already done from frame-swapping. The whole idea is that 32-bit screen buffers do not have enough range to properly account for HDR lighting (i.e. that nice effect where your eyes take time to adjust after coming out of a dark tunnel, and also the real way to do light blooms). So in essence what they're doing is two 32-bit buffers to simulate a very large 64-bit buffer, where each pixel has 64 bits of range. In total they would need to have at least 4 of these to account for the double buffering.
In an ideal world I should just be able to tell the machine to give me 64-bit color, but our hardware isn't quite there yet (almost).
Google is open and free now? Wow! Where can I get a copy of their search engine source?!
I have my doubts that Google can remain "not evil" (on the overall karmic scale) for much longer. I would think a non-profit, transparent entity would be far more appropriate.
I call BS on that. Somehow these laws are binding and holding back everybody *except* Apple? I'm not happy with Apple at all for their shenanigans recently with the iPhone, but you have to hand it to them - every industry they enter experiences a resurgence of interest in usability. Do you think Vista would have a slick (or rather, slicker) interface if it weren't for OSX nipping at their heels? I have to congratulate Apple for introducing the most usable phone UI I've ever used, and I pray that other companies start cloning it and quick. I want my open PDA phone with a non-crappy UI already!
"Ease of sharing documents" is the only one that's valid in that list. Honestly, I've *never* patched any version of Office I've owned, and never had a problem - even the current version, which I do patch only by virtue of the updater nagging me, poses no problems. So really, patched or not Office works fine. Also, I tend to work a lot during travel time - planes, trains, buses, what have you... A tube-based Office simply won't work, and I know a LOT of businessmen who do the same.
Not to mention that with a text-based (i.e. non-binary) file format for documents now, one can very easily use a code repository like SVN to share documents. That's what I did last time in a team project.
Funny, I live in Canada and I still get lots of pharma spam. That being said, it's usually in the viagra/cialis category...
Yes... Unfortunately the public school system sucks, and universities are left to do quite a bit of catch-up. My school is very internship oriented (all undergrad engineers must take 6 internships before being allowed to graduate), and it never ceases to amaze me the kind of stupid jerk-off things students do while at work. There's much work to be done yet on them.
Who says the two are mutually exclusive? Besides, one has to create the foundation for a good engineer before proceeding to stuff all kinds of technical jargon into his head.
Because life is expensive, and if I had a multi-million dollar trust fund I'll probably spend my whole life learning about whatever tickles my fancy. But life isn't like that. I need to pay the bills, have a family, and God willing, own my own house (as opposed to having a mortgage shoved up where the sun don't shine for decades). For most of us getting our butts out there and making some money is not a matter of choice.
As a current undergrad in engineering, I totally agree. I have absolutely no intention of going for a graduate degree, and neither do the vast majority of my peers. Graduate engineers get paid marginally more (maybe 10% extra starting) here in Canada, and any competent and motivated engineer can completely outstrip that number in the years the grads spend in school.
The only people I know who are even remotely interested in graduate engineering are the ones who were gunning for professorships and a lifetime of academia anyway. Anybody who wans to go into private sector knows it's a waste of time (if your goal is to be highly paid, and spend as little time in school as possible).
That's stupid. IMHO the entire purpose of the international student programs should be to recruit future American citizens. The whole country is built upon gathering the talent from all over the world, there needs to be some sort of program that will encourage excellent students (odds are if they've made it in, they are already) to settle down for good.
International students pay full price for their education - and are not subsidized by the state in any way. And considering the lack of public health care and whatnot, they're really not sucking much money out of the American economy at all. As other posters also mentioned, they are not able to legally work in the USA except in an academic position, which we all know pays so little that it would not incur taxation anyway.
How do the other platforms do it? It's not as if Apple or Microsoft don't face the same restrictions when it comes to patents and DRM. There may be a real solution around it, but at this point in time if you clone OSX/Windows' solution you're at least *as good as* the competition.
First off, someone needs to pay for the damned mp3 patent, stupid as it may be, because an OS that can't play MP3's out of the box is not much of an end-user OS at all.
Knowing network TV, they'll go in two directions:
- If a car company will step and pay MANY millions for a sponsorship deal, they can make KITT *anything*. I will weep the day KITT becomes a Nissan 350Z or something equally stupid.
- If no car companies step up, no doubt they will go after something like a Ferrari or Lambo, to cash in on the bling-laden hip hop culture thems darned rappin' kids are into these days.
I wish I were kidding, but it's entirely plausible...
Evolution. That's what happens :)
I admit I didn't RTFA - but if this was an actual reading, shouldn't it have been recorded by *multiple* sensors that are spaced very far apart? What are the odds that all the sky-facing sensors caught the same misreading at the same time? If it's just a single (or a group of local) sensors, then it's probably nothing.
I am Chinese, I understand Chinese history and culture - I was born into it. What does the current communist regime have ANYTHING to do with Chinese history and culture, besides the last 50-odd years? Why should anyone hold any allegiance to a government that has no hesitation towards killing them? This whole "we must stand by our gov't" spiel sounds like too much pride and too little thought, and reeks of brainwashing from a young age.
Please do tell what assumptions I'm making, because I was under the impression that pledging allegiance to someone who wouldn't bat an eye about killing you (and in fact does so, very often), is poor sense in ANY culture.
One the truly puzzling things about most Chinese that I meet is there bottomless capacity to defend the snake of a government they have - even the ones that have already immigrated away. I find that the upper-middle class tends to be the worst - the ridiculously rich are too educated to fall for the government's lies, while the poorest suffer too much to believe anything the government says. It's the people who fall down the middle that actually believe the things the government teaches them.
I've known many Chinese who admit their government's deficiencies, and admit that officials are almost always corrupt and self-serving. But for some reason they still declare their allegiance to the government, claiming that as a Chinese by blood they cannot possibly turn away from the Chinese government. This puzzles me greatly, since I've long ago refused to consider myself a supporter of anything BUT a Western democracy - if the government is shooting your kind by the hundreds, is corrupt, etc etc, what kind of loyalty do you owe to them? It seems very ego-driven, and amounts to stubborn refusal to admit that perhaps the West has a better sociopolitical system.
In a sick way, it's like Stockholm syndrome... a whole race of people who are culturally conditioned to remain loyal to their government, despite the innumerable atrocities that are committed against them in front of their own eyes.
As another side note... it's depressing the "history" they learn in their schools...
True, though he can certainly minimize the dollar count going to China. Buying Lenovo would be giving every single dollar of the purchase to a Chinese company (though how they are directly related to the atrocities there... I'd never know), whereas buying, say, Dell, would only be giving manufacturing costs, while R&D remains here.
As a Chinese-Canadian I'm glad there are people who, at the very least, are willing to think along this guy's lines. There are awful, horrifying things going on in that country and it's nice to see some people who aren't so American-centric they can't point out China on a map, much less the atrocities being committed there.
As a side note... From my experience, more Americans know about these atrocities than Chinese. It's depressing, really. It's also depressing the number of new Chinese immigrants who are totally blown away by Canada's democratic government, since they thought (or were taught) that they had democracy all along.
Standing up for one's moral convictions is now silly? How far we've fallen...
Yes, the Gold Box will cost more, come with a miniature HEV suit large enough to fit a cat, and scratch your discs while it's at it. :D
Agreed. Although the lack of offline messaging in MSN is annoying, pidgin does everything I want MSN to do, with none of the things that the official client does that I hate.
As an Asian (who lives in Canada), I know why Asia tends to be superior in terms of mobile technology (or really, ANY consumer technology). It's because they have a techno-centric fashion culture.
Here, the iPhone *just* hit us as the first *true* "fashion phone". You could argue the RAZR was in before that, but even that was fairly recent. In Asia they've had these things for years. Phones that rival jewelery in glitziness and price. Not to mention a society that values fashion and appearance above all else - and thus the willingness to pay a lot, and pay often, for new fashionable phones.
If Americans had the same attitude towards their phones as we do for our wardrobes, we'd be pretty durned advanced too. :P