Comment Re:Please. (Score 1) 187
er, lack of sleep is speaking. Meant to say my Droid X has all that. Not sure where the heck Nexus 1 came from.
er, lack of sleep is speaking. Meant to say my Droid X has all that. Not sure where the heck Nexus 1 came from.
My Nexus 1 has all that, so I'd imagine that it'd be on a tablet as well.
It's a bargin priced performance video card not a bargin priced video card. Interestingly enough, "bargin performance" is the phrase used in the summary.
You're not going to get solid performance at a respectable resolution in modern video games for below $150-200 or so. If you spend below that you're either having to drastically cut resolution or you're cutting way back on the settings. The $200ish range of cards will let you run with most all of the pretty stuff turned on at approximately 1080p resolution with a solid framerate that's not being killed by stuttering or slowdowns. (i.e., acceptable mins)
The mid-range and high-end cards allow you to run at yet higher resolutions and/or with lots of AA. And yes, there are people that play modern FPSers at 2560x1600 with AA. I'm not one of them. I tend to go the budget performance card route and game at 1600x1200 with low or no AA but with high settings and a good frame rate. I'll likely need to upgrade come this fall though, and this card is definately on my radar.
Most modern CPUs and the compilers for them are simply not designed for multiple threads/processes to interact with the same data. As an excersize, try writing a lockless single-producer single-consumer queue in C or C++. If you could make the same assumption in this two-thread example that you can make in a single-thread problem, namely that the perceived order of operations is the order that they're coded, then it'd be a snap.
But you see, once you start playing with more than one thread of execution, you gain visibility into both CPU reordering and compiler reordering. You also gain visibility into optimizations made (such as maintaining values in a register and not moving to cache or invented predictive stores and the like). If you research enough you'll find that while the volatile keyword will solve some of the problems, it doesn't solve them all, and it introduces others (it works well for what it's designed for, which is interfacing with hardware, if it's being used for intra-thread comms it's being misused). You wind up needing to use architecture-specific memory barriers/fences to instruct the CPU about reordering and when to flush store buffers to cache and so on. You wind up needing to use compiler-specific constructs to prevent it from reordering or maintaining things in registers that you're not wanting. (volatile is often used for the later, and note while volatile variables won't be reordered around each other, the standard says nothing about reordering non-volatile around the volatile. Also, it bypasses the cache, which in x86-land introduces CPU-reordering that otherwise isn't there (as I think volatile winds up being implemented using CLFLUSH?) as well as unnecessary performance hits (which perfomance is evidently important if you're trying to avoid locks...)
Atomicity is a whole different level of fun as well. I was lucky, at the boundary I was dealing with inherently atomic operations (well, so-long as I have my alignment correct, (not guaranteed by new)), but if you're not... it's yet more architecture-specific code.
If you're referring to the Reverse Engineering section, I'd suggest you read it a bit closer. The applicability of that section to the situation described is pretty far fetched.
Doesn't matter if it's a breach of the EULA, as if you're in the US it's illegal under the DMCA.
In classes which are primarily discussion based (i.e., a nice high level philosophy course) I agree, a laptop has no place.
However, for me, having a laptop to distract myself with is creating "an environment conducive to learning." I didn't use it in a way that was disruptive to others (browse slashdot, play solitare, etc), but it's ability to keep me entertained had me attending a lot of lectures that I otherwise would have skipped. My distractionary use of the laptop was inversely related to the quality of the instructor.
Personally I'd lose all respect for an instructor that banned laptops. Students alternatively occupying themselves with their laptop is in most cases a sign that you're doing a poor job as an instructor. Attempting to remove the indicator that you suck rather than fix the problem... well... hardly seems ethical to me.
I refused to buy or play the first one because of their DRM. Essentially it turned your purchase into a lease... of unknown duration.
I'd be interested in this one, however, despite the lengthy review, I didn't see any mention of DRM. Given that this is slashdot, I'm kind of surprised and dissapointed. Why bother hosting reviews here if they're not going to focus on the geeky side of things?
As of last thursday when I was looking at thier plans in preperation for the droid launch, the 5GB limit was definately there. Looking today it seems to have been removed. Now I'm just seeing some conditions that if you use more than 5 gigs a month they can use that as grounds for cancelling your contract (or at least that's all I found with 2-3 minutes of digging)
Give Okami a try. It was originally a PS2 game... but it was almost designed for the wii-mote while on the PS2, so the port made tons of sense, and it works out wonderfully. (You cast magic by drawing on the screen. Yes, even on the PS2 version)
Thanks. It'll probably be a few weeks before I can give it a go as I have my spare machine at a friends place. I'll create everything on this machine, and then attempt to on a seperate machine with no internet access (simulating the loss of steam) get an installation to work. I'm thinking that somewhere in the process that steam servers will be needed (likely during the installation of steam if nothing else), but we'll see. I'll hunt around for the directions and such.
Read the actual statute. Also, note that the copyright office has not, as of today, made such an exception.
I'll have to test that someday. I have my doubts that it'll work... but who knows, I could well be wrong. I'd kind of like to be
I can foresee the network being bought by someone with short-term revenue farming in mind... who decides that Steam accounts shouldn't be free and starts charging a monthly fee using access to your games as leverage.
Yeah, there'd be a class action, but given an appropriate corporate structure (and bonuses/options to the leadership), I'd imagine that the ones driving the decision would come out far ahead even if thier "restructured company" came out far behind due to the resolution of the lawsuit.
My point is that while yes, there are scenarios where things stay good for the consumer, there are scenarios where things go bad for reasons outside of the consumers control.
With my old games, it's up to me if they still work or not. If I still have the installation media (and maybe the manual), I'm good. If I lost them, I'm hosed.
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception a neccessity." - Oscar Wilde