@kalina The faculties are supposed to record the student that used the laptops so the student can get charged. Course, this doesn't happen so the faculty pays for it.
I suppose the teacher's thought process was "Oh dear I forgot to do the paperwork to assign this laptop to this idiot, if I'm not careful I'm the one's who's going to foot the bill"
@tombull89 Of course those IT slackers don't want work
@tombull89 you'd probably cringe at the electronic bookkeeping system my old high school uses. It's all very web 0.9
you know with the grey pages and the tables everywhere and the square-image buttons with cut-off labels inside the image to fit the square format and the table borders are thick and raised and the school tells people to ignore the SSL certificate warnings and...
@badp Well, as long as it works. I'm a fan of the "proven" IT setups, servers, desktop machines, and a small number of wireless laptops. I don't want CLOUD stuff, or tablets, or any stupidly expensive stuff that looks nice but doesn't do much.
that looks like the tip of a very deep, very nasty iceberg made of string literals, string maths, XML datastores, Java 1.6 iceberg kept afloat by krakens and eldritch horrors.
Diablo 3 and the newest Simcity uses servers to store even the single player data. Steam also stores games in their server, so you can download them only when you buy, but Steam works without Internet connection, unlike Diablo 3 and the new Sim City.
What are the advantages of the disadvantages ...
@GraceNote which of those godly games have Break Damage Limit again? I googled and found some combinations but not what they do (which is oh so helpful)
I can use up to 2 godly games that don't have break damage limit I guess (thanks to nepnep and gege), if any are particularly useful though. I still have FF
It seems like quite a respectable alternative to a graphics card, but there's surprisingly little information out there about it. Like I can't tell whether I'll be able to play Europa Universalis 3 with it
well put it this way. i spent quite a lot on a nVidia card a few years back to play TES: Oblivion. my several-years-old Intel HD graphics played it more smoothly.
@tombull89 Also, it's possible that Steam is getting faked out by notebooks with graphics card switching, like mine.
My notebook runs on Intel HD Graphics 3000 until I open a game that actually needs my graphics chipset. Steam does not need my Graphics chipset, so it doesn't see it until I actually run a game.
@LessPop_MoreFizz ah, good point. We have some HP machine with i3 CPUs in, and I got seriously confused when the site provided intel and ATI graphics drivers.
it's quite funny what gamers think is "bad" though. if you had an Intel HD graphics chipset even 3 years ago, it would be considered pretty much top of the line
@Jez Fact is, new releases take advantage of new advances in tech. If you care about new releases, you need to upgrade your tech at a pace commensurate therewith.
@Jez Eh, that varies. Even without insane graphics requirements, there are periodic shifts that require you to make a generational jump.
@Jez People have been beating that drum for over a decade. While I don't doubt that 'someday' such a point is going to be reached, I don't think anyone is really sure about where 'pretty soon' is.
@Jez the truth is that the game industry for AAA releases has been kind of stuck behind what's possible with consoles from ~7 years ago. This christmas, the new year PS4 and the XBox are coming and I wouldn't be very surprised if the requirements for newer PC games wouldn't jump up as a result.
anyway i still predict that on-die graphics will win out in the end. i can't see people buying a separate graphics card instead of using on-board when they're as good as each other. in addition, buying a ton of RAM and using some of that will be much easier than bundling graphics memory on a card
@Jez if you think a HDx000 is fast enough to compete with anything other than last generation or the generation before thats graphics cards, you're misguided a little
look, the problem is that the CPU and the GPU are essentially different things that you can't mix and match
to my understanding, the CPU is a sequential unit with powerful instructions, the GPU has only very basic instructions but they run on a massive amount of data at once
you're talking about the difference between one "old" game running full screen with all the graphics options turned off vs three "new" games running on three different monitors with all the options on high/ultra
@Jez Yes, well congratulations, you and the rest of the non-hardcore gamer market have moved over to integrated graphics chipsets, which are in fact well suited to the uses of the vast majority of computer users. Gamers are a different set of people, with different needs, and require a different tool to meet those needs.
I give it another 2 seasons before HBO Game of Thrones is forced to diverge heavily from the books due to GRRM's glacial writing schedule. Then spoilers will go the other direction.
@Jez I would like you to take this statement to a professional, or even serious amateur sound engineer who uses their computer to make music and record the laughter for me, because I am in need of a new recording of people laughing for a project.
> integrated graphics core shave not only becomes substantially faster, but have also turned into an inalienable part of contemporary processors. Moreover, the company is not going to stop just yet and is working on a very ambitious plan of making integrated graphics another 10 times faster by 2015.
@kalina it's the difference between being fundamentally inferior, and just lagging behind. it it was fundamentally inferior, even very old discrete cards would be better
