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Re: The Joys of Physical Media

Posted on 2013-02-24, 09:24

in Milliways
No Starcraft 2 LAN play is something a lot of people complained about a lot prior (and after) release. Same with no offline mode for Diablo 3. Blizzard has clearly set a "you will play online" trend in its last few releases, and I don't expect it to reverse.

Re: advice needed (windows XP)

Posted on 2013-01-04, 01:35

in Milliways
If you've got linux on a computer, you could give alternatives like darktable, rawstudio, etc. a shot. The workflow would obviously be different than you're used to (whether it's better or worse is probably a matter of preference), but it's an alternative, free, and wouldn't require you to change …

Re: dial-up modems

Posted on 2013-01-04, 01:27

in Milliways
I use a set of three USR 56k external serial modems as a backup to regular data networks. I've got a bunch of equipment located in remote sites around rural SW Ontario with less than rock-solid network infrastructure. The nature of the equipment requires that it's located in rural areas and often …

Re: Floppy label removal

Posted on 2013-01-01, 10:02

in Milliways
If you're looking into solvents, things can get a little tricky. Many are light, volatile and have very little surface tension, so they'll evaporate quickly, flow easily into any nook and cranny (even uphill through capillary action) - think acetone, isopropyl alcohol, lighter fluid, etc. You may be …

Re: Dying hard drive

Posted on 2012-12-16, 03:12

in Milliways
The freezer trick is only really worth trying if the problem is physical (usually bearings or a head issue) - and only for drives that don't use hydrodynamic bearings. I'd maybe try it on a "click of death" hdd that I wasn't too concerned about losing if the freezer trick killed it. Otherwise, …

Re: Ancient DOS Games Webshow

Posted on 2012-12-09, 23:05

LAME doesn't work for you? It works perfectly fine... so long as I'm making any other kind of file EXCEPT MP3s. >_>;;; ... ? LAME is an MP3 library. All it does is encode MP3 files. If you're encoding any other kind of file, you're not using LAME. Or to be more specific, every program I have that …

Re: Ancient DOS Games Webshow

Posted on 2012-12-09, 09:10

It's getting it into MP3 afterwards that's tricky. Yes, there's lots of software out there that can do it, but I've constantly run into problems with the free software that supposedly can and the rest costs money. Beyond that, I also run into problems with trying to properly set up the MP3's info …

Re: FLOPS Calculation

Posted on 2012-12-09, 02:42

in Milliways
Another way to get more a real world estimate of what your cluster is capable of is running a benchmarking program. I think LINPACK is commonly used in compute clusters to measure this.

Re: FLOPS Calculation

Posted on 2012-12-08, 20:56

in Milliways
No, he's roughly right. The FLOPS/cycle at the end is the key and supposes that you know that number already (you do). The rest is basically a fancy way of saying "Multiply the FLOPS of one core by the number of cores". And you're almost never going to get an exact real-world number for it in a real …

Re: Where does this all end?

Posted on 2012-11-29, 06:23

in Milliways
That model is failing them pretty badly everywhere except the business world - but even there, it's starting to falter. How many businesses do you know that jump on every new Windows release rather than riding out the versions they already have, because they're cheaper and are a known, well-used …

Re: Vectorzone Finally Back on Track!

Posted on 2012-10-26, 07:23

in Milliways
Well, you said a tile would take 4MB, so that's 1M pixels at 32bpp, or 1k x 1k square. I mean, I don't doubt that you know the size of your own textures, that just seemed like a bizarrely large number for such small tiles.

Re: Vectorzone Finally Back on Track!

Posted on 2012-10-26, 03:36

in Milliways
Gemini000 wrote: (A single tile type would take up over 4 MB, and I had almost 60 tile types to load in all at once; do the math... most GPUs don't have that kind of memory.) WHAT? There's no way your individual tiles are 1k x 1k (assuming 32bpp RGBA)

Re: Vectorzone Finally Back on Track!

Posted on 2012-10-25, 02:36

in Milliways
Would it be faster to just precompute glow "textures" with opacity and render them with additive alpha blending, than to do it all dynamically per-pixel with convolution with the GPU? Walls would be simple, since you'd only have vertical, horizontal, and corner cases to consider. I guess you could …

Re: Engineered out of trash.

Posted on 2012-09-10, 02:21

in Milliways
If it's all steel construction and not just a metallic finish coat or plating, going over it with bronze or copper scrubbers (grocery store, cleaning section - pot scrubbers) might do the trick for some of the rust spots.

Re: I need to vent for a bit: Hard drives HATE me

Posted on 2012-09-09, 02:43

in Milliways
For big media files a Raid 5 server / NAS is quite popular. Even at work, when I'm making desktop/workstation systems for our students, I always just stick two disks in and mirror them. The extra $100 (less than that now, actually) outweighs the hassle we'd be put through if something failed and we …

Re: I need to vent for a bit: Hard drives HATE me

Posted on 2012-09-09, 02:32

in Milliways
Definitely avoid bargain basement or off-brand SSDs. Avoid anything made with a crappy controller. There's a bunch of things you want to avoid doing on SSDs as well, like automatic defrag - physical arrangement of bits doesn't matter on these (and is, in fact, mixed up by the wear-levelling system …

Re: Where does this all end?

Posted on 2012-09-08, 08:04

in Milliways
In Apples defense they mean well it seems to but make dumb decisions. That's what worries me, though. If the platform is locked down, then you're subject to the decisions of the owner company. If they make bad decisions, you suffer. Even if they make decent decisions that just happen to not align …

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