Posts by Relgoshan
56 posts • joined Tuesday 1st December 2009 22:56 GMT
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Re: I'm going to ask some embarrassing questions
1) Large, slow, well balanced and well lubed fans with good bearing design. There's no trick in that. But you could always route wide cooling lines and use an external dissipator the size of an automobile radiator. With a fully submersed open impeller pump. Quiet can totally be done, silent only reduces your overclocking potential a bit more.
2) Typically more than one stick per channel slightly reduces access speed and has a (tiny) effect on stability. And unless you need the space for a server, pro renderer or giant ramdisk....all those gigs are just wasted pennies.
3) Pertaining the exact layout of disks in a given system, more speed is great but it depends on other factors....like Battlefield 3 load times can be halved whereas Shogun 2 load times are (were?) about 90%+ bound to the CPU core clock and NOT the disk.
You could have a fast and large SSD boot drive, plus a pair of sturdier small enterprise SSDs for storage caching or other r/w -intensive tasks. Then a few jumbo platter drives, preferably arrayed with ability to survive at least one device failure. But it depends on what you really need most.
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Re: The important question...
Games that have never been (should never be?) on console...I have seen people running Shogun 2 spread across a four screen grid at absurd rez...the engine could model something like fifty thousand troops at launch, and that limit has been patched upward in deference to the players. Upcoming Rome 2 is anticipated to need as much as 30-40GB disk space unless they find some good ways to cheat and recycle...granted this is hybrid conquest/RTS play but I am drooling to have it challenge my desktop.
Aside from games where max area and rez matter, there are the racing and shooting titles with enhanced immersion. They include many titles with a console version, but on PC you can run three screens for better peripheral awareness and an in-the-game feel. In the recent crop of shooter titles, there are competitive players switching to a 30" screen with 2500-3000 horizontal pixels. Those can afford it may even game on a 4K panel but I think those screens need a little more work to be game-worthy.
And then there are the crazy jackasses that play like 12 Eve accounts at the same time and require a NASA launch control's worth of screens to maintain whatever scheme is afoot. I think sometimes that game has about a hundred active players running a thousand top accounts, and all other players are either noobs or veteran trollers. I do not really respect it but beancounters need games too.
Finally there are games like Minecraft. Yes it is on 360 but really you can only play it as intended on PC. Or just games with mods in general, like the popular Day Z servers for like-named Arma II mod. Or playing a BethSoft RPG like Skyrim as a sandbox with autotuning bears and such. Maybe the PS4 will change some things the PC has almost exclusively held, but I expect next gen PCs will have their own exclusives to anticipate.
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Re: Sandy Bridge for top end gaming. Are you nuts????? eom
Do the world a favor and learn what a GPU is. The 'author' of this 'article' advocated for Intel in a purely traditional CPU role. The graphics are three so-so GPU cards from AMD. Not even 3x HD 7970 Gigahertz Edition. ;_;
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Re: About to pull the trigger on a gaming PC
One of the biggest concerns there, is that iBuyPower continues to be a rather poor gaming brand. You are paying what, a $500 markup for their shoddy workmanship. 20% OC with liquid cooling on that chip is a 15min tutorial video away, or less. 8GB system memory is just flat out bad with all the other specs taken into account, you want at least 16GB and it does NOT need to be the fastest because you're not dealing with integrated graphics here. With respect you could probably squeak along fine on 1333 but go with a decent 1600 that runs good timings to play it safe.
If you view yourself as a butterfingers and don't want to build it personally, at least fix the spec and order from a more reputable manufacturer.
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Re: The important question...
In short: NO
Slightly more detail, an overpowered desktop is for games that never launch on console. And for games that run on multiple monitors or at ludicrous rez.
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Regurgitated Tripe
In all gravity, what makes the proffered build "Bonkers" is its total lack of both function and purpose. Someone phoned this in without any diligence of really BUILDING something legendary.
Actual truly bonkers builds include dual 690s with dead silent liquid cooling that can max a game across 3-5 monitors. Or cracking together the cheapest rig that can still boot in 20sec AND max nearly all games on a single screen.
Why even mention the wholly irrelevant FX-8150 in this piece at all? Why not grab an FX-8350 and then overclock it to hell? Even then it will not be a powerhouse but it is a very cheap platform for lossless video streaming and DVD conversion. I just built an 8350 based media converter for less than $500usd including Windows, and eight overclocked cores will hold together at least a dual GPU config quite well....if as author at least got right, one either has a premium board or premium dual-GPU card.
TL;DR The author copypasta'd everything and needs to be spanked with an old slipper. Or fired. This was just EMBARRASSING.
Posted in AMD and Intel mainstream desktop CPUs
Someone better get fired
This article would have been relevant in June of last year. Unfortunately the Trinity-generation AMD processors are already on shelves, I walked past a desktop with A10-5700 at a big box store three days past. That chip is quite amazing.
Silly Desktop User...
...you can overclock a laptop Llano to nearly the same speeds. 2.2/2.6 GHz for gaming with dual graphics, 2.8/3.0 for CPU-only work. With undervolt/underclock, 7+ hrs on a smaller battery or up to 14+ on a fat 9-cell.
Even the A4 has sufficient graphical power for DXVA-accelerated video, A8 laptops can play Battlefield 3 and other heavy games. AMD can't do much against desktop i-series, but their laptop APUs deliver an helluva value for money.
Zoicks
To my knowledge, Opera supports a master settings override file, which may be stored in a universal location with read-only access. It prevents individual users from messing with any settings you don't want them to be able to touch.
In similar fashion, it is possible to place a blocklist on the network and force all user profiles to obey its rules.
But...
...who's going to make those nerdy little clear plastic chips now....?
Hi
Unfortunately I'm with the girlish nerdy mouth-breather on this one. If you need a trusted and confirmed identity, there can be a network for that. It's important. If you're just out to troll-up some sad sacks in a Facebook game, don't give them anything they can use for a SWATting run. See?
The WHOLE POINT of the modern Internet, is there should be places where you can communicate without the fear of a social stigma in real life. Every asshat corporate who put his foot in his mouth on some blog, should clearly appreciate this. Any woman who accidentally made a public wall post about the hot sex with that guy she's seeing behind her husband's back....look, anything that keeps a stranger from driving halfway across the country to beat you "about the head and neck with an axe HANDLE", is a good thing.
That huge price...
...with or without Opera Mini?
Posted in Firefox preps native Android interface
Heh
Dumping their custom XUL turd will be a fine blessing. Opera Mobile already does the full Facebook (though I don't), the full Youtube and just about any other site. Mozilla needs to get serious with playing catchup or they will die on both mobile and desktop.
OW
My face met the keyboard so hard, it now looks like a spreadsheet.
They DO NOT need to make everything look like a touchy-feely fondleslab interface.
YYYyyaaaaarrrrr.....
The only harm these assholes can show is eveyone failing to pay them for dated concepts that don't exist in any product they directly manufacture. Plenty of companies have been using the technology for years, and I may posit that they didn't get all their ideas from combing the patent database.
When a company is only in business to extort hard-earned cash from manufacturers and small businesses, it is time for that company to cease to exist.
Everything better with LAZOR?
Actually not so much. With this, platters will be the new tape drive. A welded, gas-filled casing and a high-density medium with better-than-tape speed and hopefully better-than-tape shelf life.
However other technologies will control the bulk of live storage and transactions-on-the-fly. It's possible that we'll stop seeing platters on the shelf within five years, but it could easily be ten. For reasons of speed if nothing else, but capacity and durability have risen at a sharp pace.
Er
If it's not Mac, they probably paid less than 700 here in the US. High-end is a tiny fraction with lots of shelf space but very low volume.
Eesh
The tech seems promising but board interface would need an architectural shift to make use of that extra speed. Memory controllers are on the CPU, placing practical restraint on their size and power consumption. It's good they are building a consortium because the whole system would need to be rejigged. Anyone looking forward to PGA (or BGA) memory modules?
On the other hand, RAM will need to get "smarter" as stated by my fellow commentard above. Just as the HDD and SSD have crazyass logic, and laptop batteries can be virused, new RAM will be working a lot of invisible black magic. Ideally this would involve mixed memory and logic within the same package, for less chip overhead when the PCB already needs more traces. And the overclocked stuff may be getting water jackets.
Your point?
They're both fucking scary. So they're different types of the same thing.
Posted in Mozilla forces Firefox 7 on memory diet
Hoooo.....
What the hell are these guys doing? Shipping a major version with crippling extension bugs....
At least they've finally gotten serious about the pile of piss hanging up your whole OS for five-ten seconds running garbage collection, and this new deallocator gives back more resources too. Still a hog but not quite as hungry.
Any other grade-school basics in the works? Like summoning the menu with the keyboard while in fullscreen? Fixing the awful Downloads manager?
Fascinating
http://my.opera.com/securitygroup/blog/2011/09/28/the-beast-ssl-tls-issue
Turns out that Opera supposedly also has only Java to be concerned with. And you can change plugin policy SO easily....in fact I just did. Right now. Hole==CLOSED.
wut
Plus is like WoW. Google merely invented a system for more effectively sucking at life. Also, they stole that +1; it's meant for seconding requests!
Posted in Is Facebook worth more than Google?
Seriously?
Facebook usage is approaching decline in the US and western Europe, Facebook games are not mobile-friendly, their site has terrible browser/capability detection, the list goes on. By q1 2012 when they are due to release IPO, the company valuation may already be in decline. Kneel and apologise to the readers you have just trolled.
Nightmares of Macross Plus
So, we'll have self-affected emo songstress robots BEFORE the giant killer robots? That's a pitiful revelation which will echo through history...
Posted in Save the planet: Stop the Greens
Next Disaster...
Exploding pressure-storage caverns? (the system to store wind power by compressing gas underground)
That's Funny...
The vulnerability was fixed and disclosed by both Opera and Chrome roughly FOUR MONTHS AGO. And only now, Microsoft releases its own advisory. Not to mention the video vulnerability was for a feature Internet Explorer did not even HAVE.
Billboards Aside...
Mozilla has lost the college-dropout sex appeal. At some point the community-driven project has been replaced with a number-crunching organization that moves ponderously and doesn't pay much heed to the end user. They've lost friends in the open-source community by jealously guarding the Firefox trunk against experimentation, which caused a number of groups to adopt Chromium and push Firefox into the options tree. It's just bad for business.
You Had Me at 'EHLO'
Like any of the other great failover disasters, this problem was exacerbated by the recovery plan. Load control is more important than anything, if you lose that everything else falls down around your ears. Happens with Email Storm failovers, happens with distributed hosting failovers, happens with NAS replication failovers.
Yep!
That's exactly what I'm thinking. Even if you despise the coding of sites like Facebook, or take issue with certain workarounds in Google Docs/Reader/GMail etc, the fact remains that THOSE are actual sites which receive a lot of traffic.
This Crockford arrogates himself to the position of claiming that a specialized code-analysis toolkit WHICH RUNS ONCE LOCALLY AND EXITS, should supersede REAL code that uses REAL network connections to fetch actual data and update the page. Apparently he thinks IE10 would make a decent engine for some web application that does your taxes. Unfortunately our demands are often much greater.
Meh
The guy's claims are bullshit. He's running his parse library against itself. Hardware also still plays a role. On my Atom N280 @ 1.4GHz, Opera 11.10 can run the same parse in ~3.3sec. Consistently. With sixty other tabs open. FF4.0.1 takes ~3.4sec consistently, run separately and with no other tabs open.
The new IE10 core....is this 32bit or 64bit? Because 64bit IE9 is dog-slow. Possibly the speed improvement in IE10 would just come from porting Chakra. He also fails to acknowledge that DOM operations and general rendering are integral to a web application as a whole. A better benchmark for javascript game performance would be measuring the resource consumption of JS Workers threading. In fact, his application doesn't really seem to make proper use of concurrent multithreaded javascript AT ALL. I'll have to look more closely, but I don't think I saw any Float operations either.
A program that runs once and exits, parsing plain text, is a TERRIBLE example of a modern web app. This just further advertises his shitty programming and inflated ego.
Posted in Firefox needs heavy hitter Linux power
Simple answer
Firefox has a culture problem. It is difficult to whip their developers into a coherent working body. There is plenty of lack in documentation also. Without the large volume of assistance and funding from Google, they might have sunk beneath the waves already.
Opera's position on Linux is very interesting. The browser does not rely on a specific graphics toolkit, and has some ability to inherit system appearance settings. Hardware acceleration is on their roadmap, but I couldn't say whether it will hit the mass market anytime this year. The bold step of opening their own app store is a good move, and it would be even better if this included monetizing apps delivered through the desktop browser. After all the company doesn't care about platform or patents, which should be good for the end user.
I hate to think that Ubuntu is one of the movers in Linux, but we definitely need more competition and compatibility among the consumer applications. It would be great if you could just install Linux itself, then subscribe to various interfaces and app markets. If only the idiots coluld even agree on an installer, bootloader, software package etc.....
Excellent
With all of this paranoiac bullshit, it will be cheap and uncrowded in Tokyo this summer. My good gentlemen, this is the IDEAL time for a Japanese vacation!
Dammit
Couldn't decide whether to post STOP or GO....apparently they didn't know either. Monkeys are still hoping to push 5.0 merely 3 months from now. Er, good luck? I don't really feel like complaining about feature changes in the beta; Opera has to do it since the nightlies aren't very public.
Dev channel was bitching about useragent, apparently some sites were sniffing for beta and are broken with RC.
Odd...
...and here I'd been led to believe that virtual particles were possible evidence of time having dimensional aspects. No 5th required...but rather a little something else.
Posted in Fukushima situation as of Wednesday
FOR SCIENCE!!
Bearing that YES, this earthquake was uprated to a 9.0, and YES it occurred only a dozen miles underground....perhaps we ought to recall that it did not occur a dozen miles directly beneath this facility. It is my feeling that Fukushima's Big One and Big Two (that's what Dai-ichi and Dai-ni mean) did not experience vibration at five times their limit, but rather at almost exactly their design limit. If TEPCO says that readings taken at the site reflect a vibration of five times design capacity, that's great! But my concern would then be that Japanese nuclear plants should have a slightly higher design capacity in the future.
YES
The way I see it, this is still a rather good outcome. Considering how many things have gone wrong (worse quake than expected, worse tsunami damage than expected), the aging site has performed very well. I will grant that additional preparatory steps could have been taken (such as housing the diesels in a waterproof structure).
I would be more concerned about a few aging sites elsewhere in the world, which were built before various nuclear moratoriums came into effect after the Chernobyl revelation. Granted the Cold War, and all the radiation detectors built to monitor Soviet nuclear activity, we didn't know just HOW BAD the disaster was there, until much later. Newer designs are even less susceptible than Fukishima's 10 reactors, so there is little worry for our world.
As to radiation being released into the air, most of that dissipates seconds/minutes/hours. The small portion of longer-lasting contamination is cast over a wide area, further dissipating it. People have lived for hundreds of years in areas where the background is above modern "legal limits", mainly because the limit is so amazingly low. Hell, the DEEPLY exposed supervisor of that retarded Windscale experiment only died recently, and are a surprising number of people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki still alive. (Another recent death was the man who survived BOTH nuclear blasts, having returned to Nagasaki to report the devastation at Hiroshima.)
Boo
Company loves to push big press releases and betas of useless nearsighted features.
Hrm
Microsoft's anti-tracking detection profile is interesting. The idea that it can find an remove hostile page elements by watching their behavior....but as with Chakra speed improvements, this behavior is too aggressive at the moment. It can break sites.
Any DRM?
Would like to know more about security of the 'paid' apps.
Also, most delicious that Opera says it will "integrate to the Apple mobile app store in the near future". Not to mention bashing their way into iAd. How many other firms will their corsair be boarding this year?
Damn Furries
Extension hell is a nightmare. I had to talk this kid away from Firefox 2 so they'd stop coming back with new viruses. Problem was the "Super Mario" browser theme wasn't available for newer builds. Stupid reason but there you go: aesthetics over safety.
I would clearly state that I am of "the other browser" persuasion, so my perspective is a touch jaded; however I feel that Firefox 4 is being held back by cooking too many features at once. Also, no more Fursonas for now, right?
Anybody have a sitrep on Firebug? Dev mailing list viewable on Google, seems there are like five guys trying to make it work with all of the changed behavior in FF4. Can't even debug sites before it goes live, without functional developer tools.
On the Acid3 Matter
There was some madness on a Mozilla dev's blog yesterday. Here is an Opera CSS dev rebuttal: http://my.opera.com/MacDev_ed/blog/2011/01/25/on-mythbusting-and-the-web-and-why-svg-fonts-are-sometimes-useful
They just don't like supporting standards (SVG Tiny 1.2) when it means having to do real work.
Catch up!
https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/
Several ad-blockers, auto-completers, password managers, etc
For plugins, there are several tricks:
1) R-click, edit site preferences, content, [ ]enable plugins
2) opera:plugins, disable anything you don't want Opera to use
3) Ctrl-F12, advanced, content, enable plugins / enable plugins only on demand
4) R-click, block content, Click/Shift-Click, done
Feature Control
Perhaps Dotzler may be satisfied if everything could be administrated as a Firefox Extension? Because those certainly don't do anything bad for the experience...
Well...
...what about Mini?
What?!
Haha suckers, I'll have you know that Google can't suggest ANYthing when you disable javascript for google.com; takes you back to a simple query-in-results-out searchbox. Of course if your browser can't do per-site preferences you shouldn't be on El Reg.
Your browser will ruin your life in ten seconds
No problems with Opera then. Well especially if you turn on 10.60's on-demand plugins in "opera:config" user prefs section. With shipping webm support you don't need flash to get your porn on.
Right
So we're all dead then? See you all down at the pub just as soon's I reach Hell.
Perhaps Apple rigging iPhones to explode was a requirement for national defense?
So?
Your favorite skin hasn't been updated for the final? Cry me a river and come back when you find something wrong.
Fair enough
Now YOU have a valid problem...one which others HAVE reported. I suspect this new build was primarily intended for new users, I personally did not switch from 9.64 until 10.01 came out. Then the move to 10.10 went smoothly. Everything in the forums indicated that upgrade installs were not reliable enough yet for 10.50
