I got two monitors. On games that don't turn off aero I can use the secondary monitor to surf the web, and if that's impossible (some apps stop the mouse from going to the second monitor) alt+tab is much quicker. Also apps and games that turn off aero has to be closed to get aero back on - which means I can't pause a game and have the windows desktop behave the way I'm now used to.
It seems to me kind of like being glad Windows can't boot without a video card.
The Vista graphics path is roughly the same as having compiz enabled under Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if the Linux benchmarks were with compiz turned off...
Most fullscreen games disable WDDM on Vista, but even if Nexuiz don't WDDM is not much of a performance hit as long as you got enough graphic memory for whatever WDDM needs + the game.
Hopefully in future versions of Windows it will be impossible to turn off WDDM.
It's a teleporting device. There are no drawbacks to using it and good UT players can use it as a weapon and speed around the map, unfortunately I'm just not having fun when players randomly disappear and reappear all over the place. I'm too much of a casual player I guess.
Cool, thanks. Quake style bunny jumping is so off putting that UT was a breath of fresh air back in the day. Assuming Nexuiz does not have that lame translocator thing (ruined UT for me) I'll take a closer look.
Having never heard of this game I checked out the webpage. I see it's based on the Darkplaces engine, which is based on the Quake engine open sourced by ID Software back in the day.
The game's screenshots reminds me more of Unreal Tournament than Quake though. Has anyone here played it? What does it play like?
The windows driver is just that bad. It probably has tons of bloat and previous artifacts from older video drivers that were simply copy/pasted into the new one, with many obsolete functions, while the linux version was recently written from scratch and does not have that issue.
OpenGL is such a large API that it's possible that Nexuiz runs faster on linux since the linux drivers does a better job with some calls. Perhaps Nexuiz was one of the games the Linux devs used in their testing.
IOW, it's possible that the Windows drivers perform better on other games.
While AI is only a small but important part of a game, the AI of FEAR is one of its main selling points. For me this was the primary unique feature that made me buy the first game in the series.
FEAR's AI is great, even today. Fear 2's AI is good too but the gun battles are not quite as enjoyable. This may not be due to inferior AI though. The smoke played a more significant role in Fear 1's battles, and shadows in Fear 2 seems to be prerendered since gun flashes no longer sends them all over the place. Also the enemies have godlike reaction times, as if they're keeping their weapons at the ready all the time. Small details but they do make a difference to how I play.
All in all Fear 2 makes Far Cry 2 look like a joke in the AI department, though Crysis gives a good showing as long as you ignore the silly glitches.
I agree with you that the horror sequences feel out of sync with the rest of the game
I found the horror sequences to be a nice break in the corridor running, unlike cutscenes which tends to go on and on. Don't think the game tried to be scary since, as the ZP review points out, it's impossible to be scared when you're a respawning super solider. Now if the game randomly deleted files when one got hurt it would be the scariest game ever.
Using http://trainhorns.net/sound/ as a benchmark IE8 and Firefox 3 behaves almost the same. A yellow bar on top + that Firefox has a helpful "click to download plugin" button while IE8 has a red X.
Thought macs had a built in PDF reader. Why bother with crapware? Even version 9 install plugins and shell extensions all over, as if it's the most important app on the system. Fortunately there are efforts like Sumatra on the PC - even if it's slow to render and lacks forms, plugins and whatever Adobe thinks of next.
True, but in order to interface with NPAPI, plugin software has to be downloaded and installed.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. ActiveX also has to be downloaded and installed, it can't execute on the server.
Software that you download and install has the same security issues since, just like browser plugins, it is native code running with the same privileges.
Not all software you download and install runs natively. ActiveX and NPAPI does though.
IE is the only browser I know of which interfaces with ActiveX.
True, but those other browsers interface with NPAPI. NPAPI has the same security issues since, just like ActiveX, it is native code running with the same privileges as the browser.
Hmm... as far as I can tell Wikipedia makes it clear that they are taking statements from a "2001 IPCC report" (whatever that is) in the first example. That the report conflict with statements about NA later on is not in itself a problem. Wikipedia tries to present multiple viewpoints with the aim for that elusive [[WP:NPV]].
The article does not seem like an amazing piece of writing though and is only rated C-class by Wikipedia itself. Such articles are expected to have problems, until someone takes the time to fix them up....
On the one hand the intro says that the MWP never happened.
From Wikipedia intro: The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region, lasting from about the tenth century to about the fourteenth century.
From Wikipedia intro in 2005: The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was an unusually warm period in history lasting from about the 10th century to about the 14th century.
They could have extended m68k like Intel has done with x86, the result would still have been messy but not as bad.
Don't be too sure about that. The good old m68k had some instructions that gave CPU designers headache at a glance:-) On the 68060 they literally dropped a number of commonly used instructions outright, don't think Intel ever did that, and with the Coldfire descendant they dropped so much that it's not possible to write a "Coldfire.libary" like Amiga users did for the 68060.
By luck or by wisdom, x86 avoids the hardest problems normally associated with CISC.
Itanium did one thing well...it killed a lot of other chips. The threat of it killed MIPS post-R12K plans - and the Alpha, and PA-RISC architectures as well.
Here's an idea: Let's throw out years of proven engineering in favor of an architecture that has yet hit silicon. That way we can fire our engineers and pocket the change. What could possibly go wrong?
I feel a big bonus is coming up, and just to be safe let's add a parachute too.
Do you think that the i7's new socket will prove to be a barrier to upgrade?
Nah. CPU only upgrades are actually pretty uncommon. New CPUs often require new FSB speeds and lower voltages so you'll end up having to change the mobo anyway.
Don't buy a mobo thinking you get to update to a much faster CPU later on - unless you buy a slow ass Celeron today and snag a cheap Extreme Edition of eBay in a few years (and even then you might be better off with the slow ass Celeron of the future:-)
Slashdot Mirror
We've seen the awesomeness of floppy drive RAID. Memstick RAID will blow that away!
Dell responded to the crack by saying that the demo laptop was a pre-production model that had already been dropped a hundred times.
If that's the case I'm a little impressed. LCD screens are depressingly fragile.
Why would you want that?
I got two monitors. On games that don't turn off aero I can use the secondary monitor to surf the web, and if that's impossible (some apps stop the mouse from going to the second monitor) alt+tab is much quicker. Also apps and games that turn off aero has to be closed to get aero back on - which means I can't pause a game and have the windows desktop behave the way I'm now used to.
It seems to me kind of like being glad Windows can't boot without a video card.
Windows can't boot wihout a video card?
Uh, meant to say Aero. WDDM is Windows Display Driver Model.
The Vista graphics path is roughly the same as having compiz enabled under Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if the Linux benchmarks were with compiz turned off...
Most fullscreen games disable WDDM on Vista, but even if Nexuiz don't WDDM is not much of a performance hit as long as you got enough graphic memory for whatever WDDM needs + the game.
Hopefully in future versions of Windows it will be impossible to turn off WDDM.
It's a teleporting device. There are no drawbacks to using it and good UT players can use it as a weapon and speed around the map, unfortunately I'm just not having fun when players randomly disappear and reappear all over the place. I'm too much of a casual player I guess.
Cool, thanks. Quake style bunny jumping is so off putting that UT was a breath of fresh air back in the day. Assuming Nexuiz does not have that lame translocator thing (ruined UT for me) I'll take a closer look.
Having never heard of this game I checked out the webpage. I see it's based on the Darkplaces engine, which is based on the Quake engine open sourced by ID Software back in the day.
The game's screenshots reminds me more of Unreal Tournament than Quake though. Has anyone here played it? What does it play like?
The windows driver is just that bad. It probably has tons of bloat and previous artifacts from older video drivers that were simply copy/pasted into the new one, with many obsolete functions, while the linux version was recently written from scratch and does not have that issue.
OpenGL is such a large API that it's possible that Nexuiz runs faster on linux since the linux drivers does a better job with some calls. Perhaps Nexuiz was one of the games the Linux devs used in their testing.
IOW, it's possible that the Windows drivers perform better on other games.
While AI is only a small but important part of a game, the AI of FEAR is one of its main selling points. For me this was the primary unique feature that made me buy the first game in the series.
FEAR's AI is great, even today. Fear 2's AI is good too but the gun battles are not quite as enjoyable. This may not be due to inferior AI though. The smoke played a more significant role in Fear 1's battles, and shadows in Fear 2 seems to be prerendered since gun flashes no longer sends them all over the place. Also the enemies have godlike reaction times, as if they're keeping their weapons at the ready all the time. Small details but they do make a difference to how I play.
All in all Fear 2 makes Far Cry 2 look like a joke in the AI department, though Crysis gives a good showing as long as you ignore the silly glitches.
I agree with you that the horror sequences feel out of sync with the rest of the game
I found the horror sequences to be a nice break in the corridor running, unlike cutscenes which tends to go on and on. Don't think the game tried to be scary since, as the ZP review points out, it's impossible to be scared when you're a respawning super solider. Now if the game randomly deleted files when one got hurt it would be the scariest game ever.
Using http://trainhorns.net/sound/ as a benchmark IE8 and Firefox 3 behaves almost the same. A yellow bar on top + that Firefox has a helpful "click to download plugin" button while IE8 has a red X.
Thought macs had a built in PDF reader. Why bother with crapware? Even version 9 install plugins and shell extensions all over, as if it's the most important app on the system. Fortunately there are efforts like Sumatra on the PC - even if it's slow to render and lacks forms, plugins and whatever Adobe thinks of next.
True, but in order to interface with NPAPI, plugin software has to be downloaded and installed.
Not sure what you're trying to say here. ActiveX also has to be downloaded and installed, it can't execute on the server.
Software that you download and install has the same security issues since, just like browser plugins, it is native code running with the same privileges.
Not all software you download and install runs natively. ActiveX and NPAPI does though.
IE is the only browser I know of which interfaces with ActiveX.
True, but those other browsers interface with NPAPI. NPAPI has the same security issues since, just like ActiveX, it is native code running with the same privileges as the browser.
similar performance
O RLY. I've looked at benchmarks and Cortex is half the speeds of the already slow Atom. Not impressed.
If it crashes your OS before you load Excel.
Well, there's still UAC if DEP fails to crash the OS :)
So that I can feel good about having it turned on for all apps.
...then I remembered that I use Sumatra PDF
What are the odds that two advanced SSBN submarines would collide in a vast ocean accidentally ?
About the same as the chance of two satellites colliding in space.
Hmm... as far as I can tell Wikipedia makes it clear that they are taking statements from a "2001 IPCC report" (whatever that is) in the first example. That the report conflict with statements about NA later on is not in itself a problem. Wikipedia tries to present multiple viewpoints with the aim for that elusive [[WP:NPV]].
The article does not seem like an amazing piece of writing though and is only rated C-class by Wikipedia itself. Such articles are expected to have problems, until someone takes the time to fix them up....
Also acceptable to me would be creating a new internet that requires passing a basic intelligence test to use.
I predict this internet will be filled by assholes.
On the one hand the intro says that the MWP never happened.
From Wikipedia intro:
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region, lasting from about the tenth century to about the fourteenth century.
From Wikipedia intro in 2005:
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) or Medieval Climate Optimum was an unusually warm period in history lasting from about the 10th century to about the 14th century.
???
They could have extended m68k like Intel has done with x86, the result would still have been messy but not as bad.
Don't be too sure about that. The good old m68k had some instructions that gave CPU designers headache at a glance :-) On the 68060 they literally dropped a number of commonly used instructions outright, don't think Intel ever did that, and with the Coldfire descendant they dropped so much that it's not possible to write a "Coldfire.libary" like Amiga users did for the 68060.
By luck or by wisdom, x86 avoids the hardest problems normally associated with CISC.
Itanium did one thing well...it killed a lot of other chips. The threat of it killed MIPS post-R12K plans - and the Alpha, and PA-RISC architectures as well.
Here's an idea: Let's throw out years of proven engineering in favor of an architecture that has yet hit silicon. That way we can fire our engineers and pocket the change. What could possibly go wrong?
I feel a big bonus is coming up, and just to be safe let's add a parachute too.
Do you think that the i7's new socket will prove to be a barrier to upgrade?
Nah. CPU only upgrades are actually pretty uncommon. New CPUs often require new FSB speeds and lower voltages so you'll end up having to change the mobo anyway.
:-)
Don't buy a mobo thinking you get to update to a much faster CPU later on - unless you buy a slow ass Celeron today and snag a cheap Extreme Edition of eBay in a few years (and even then you might be better off with the slow ass Celeron of the future