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Comment Re:Overpowerful. (Score 3, Interesting) 281

by ponos (#38464236) Attached to: AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested

You silly newb. HDMI uses 24fps for compatibility reasons and the initial decision was probably based on an quality-cost tradeoff back in the days when actual film was used and the NTSC/PAL specifications were defined. Using 60fps would mean that the tape would last half the time, for example. There is the famous "notion" that eyes cannot see over 24fps, but in fact eyes are very sensitive to some kinds of motion, colors and contrast and less sensitive to others, so you cannot generalise that 24fps is "enough" for all kinds of motion, image and people (ye, people are different too). Furthermore, even if the above were not true, in fact you need an average of at least 50-60 fps in most games to ensure that the MINIMUM will not go below 30fps, which is not only visible but also implies a between-frame reaction time of 30ms (plus ping, plus input lag, plus keyoard lag etc). In hardcore-land this mean PWNAGE for you and your silly rig.

Comment Doctors can be useful (Score 1) 291

by ponos (#36374062) Attached to: Just Months After Jeopardy!, Watson Wows Doctors

I would just like to add the fact that doctors don't just think about the diagnosis, they also obtain data from patients. Not only by clinical
examination (try pushing Watson around when a patient is dying from e.g. pneumothorax in the street) but most importantly from the interview,
which I assume is not Watson's or any machine's strong point. And before you say anything about Elisa or whatever, do not underestimate
the subtlety and difficulty of verbal and non-verbal communication with patients in distress, with the demented, intoxicated, delirious, neurotic, comatose
etc.

In real life, Watson will be just a step higher than huge databases like UpToDate or AccessMedicine providing more intelligent feedback to
actual doctors. I don't think Watson will be able to feed himself clinical (as opposed to laboratory) data for the moment.

Also, don't forget that under current law you cannot sue an AI. A doctor has to sign somewhere at some point...
Piracy

Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year 5

Posted by Soulskill from the five-button-discount dept.
Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.

Comment Re:Confusing naming (Score 1) 152

by ponos (#34563844) Attached to: AMD's New Flagship HD 6970 Tested

Would you care to name some major games using tesselation? The only one that I know of is HAWX2 and I don't even think it qualifies
as a breakthrough game.

Tesselation was touted as a feature back in the ATI 8500 era (2001!), for those of use who have longer memories. It did not catch up.

By the time tesselation becomes a mainstream feature, I will have upgraded I think.

Submission + - When do call it quits with Linux? 4

Submitted by glebovitz
glebovitz writes: The world is going to flash. I am running Linux. The two worlds continue to collide. I can bear with the fact that I can't watch TV on Hulu or Movies on Amazon/VOD. But now I discover my favorite airline, JetBlue is using flash in their on line check in process and I can no longer print my boarding passes. For that, I have to borrow my wife's Macbook. I am against running WIndows 7 on my laptop. So what is left? Buy myself a Macbook? Most of my work these days is done in virtual machines, so VirtualBox and a Macbook is sounding better and better all the time. I don't think Adobe will ever get Flash on Linux right. At least I don't think they will never get the 64 bit version working.
PC Games (Games)

EA Shutting Down Video Game Servers Prematurely 341

Posted by Soulskill from the sixty-dollar-yearly-fee dept.
Spacezilla writes "EA is dropping the bomb on a number of their video game servers, shutting down the online fun for many of their Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 games. Not only is the inclusion of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles odd, the date the games were released is even more surprising. Yes, Madden 07 and 08 are included in the shutdown... but Madden 09 on all consoles as well?"
Games

EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308

Posted by Soulskill from the blame-it-on-the-torrents dept.
captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."
Science

Programmable Quantum Computer Created 132

Posted by Soulskill from the four-out-of-five-ain't-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. 'The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.'"
Games

Review Scores the "Least Important Factor" When Buying Games 169

Posted by Soulskill from the arbitrary-numbers-are-arbitrary dept.
A recent report from a games industry analyst suggests that among a number of factors leading to the purchase of a video game — such as price, graphics and word of mouth — the game's aggregated review score is the least important measure. Analyst Doug Creutz said, "We believe that while Metacritic scores may be correlated to game quality and word of mouth, and thus somewhat predictive of title performance, they are unlikely in and of themselves to drive or undermine the success of a game. We note this, in part, because of persistent rumors that some game developers have been jawboning game reviewers into giving their games higher critical review scores. We believe the publishers are better served by spending their time on the development process than by 'grade-grubbing' after the fact."

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