Continuing with my Java work, hopefully I can get back to brushing up on Visual Basic soon.  Just got a cheap book for my tablet about C++.

God-speed, mooncat.

With a recent bonus from work in the bank, we decided it wouldn't bust our budget too badly if I threw about $230 into some hardware.

That's not enough to get a new motherboard and CPU, but thank God my i7 920 is so overclockable.  I already pushed it from 2.66 GHz on stock to 3.3 GHz on a Zalman air cooler.  So I found a Corsair Hydro h60 on sale for about $60.  One hour later, I'm rocking at 4 GHz on four cores and my stress test is hitting them with 100% yet they won't break 75 degrees C (max is 80 degrees C for this chip).

That's about $170 left.

At this point, I could either get a Nvidia 650 on sale for a little more than that, or I could get another 560 Ti for $160 and get the same performance.  A second 560 Ti it is.

Word or warning: do not order hardware late at night.  I accidentally ordered a 560 first and now have to return it after learning a 560 cannot do SLI with a 560 Ti.

Then I realized my motherboard is not SLI-ready.  See warning above.  Luckily, I was able to flash the BIOS with the BIOS of another board from the same family that is SLI ready.  Phew.

Finally, I found a SLI bridge at a local mom and pop shop for $10.

$230 later and I have added another 50+% to my GPU and CPU.

Why oh why do I get worse performance in Planetside 2 when I throw in a second video card and turn on SLI, and take my 3.4 GHz overclock to 4 GHz? Temperatures are fine, everything reports as stable.

:(

I work in the software industry, albeit not in the most glamorous of positions.  My work will not dramatically change the clients' experiences in a short period of time.

But I have observed the results of a method of development that differs from what I believe I grew up seeing.  It could be the prevelance of Agile Methodology, but I'm not certain.

An overview of what I'm seeing:

1. Software product x is announced

2. Developers speak of numerous features, both promised and potentially-implmented

3. Clients or customers develop a list of expected features based off their needs, the available features of competitors' products, and/or the available features of the previous platform's features.

4. Those expected features are prioritized by both the clients and the development team.

5. The product is released with a host of features yet a number of features the clients expected are notably absent.

6. Clients feel un-heard, undervalued, and wonder if the company is out of touch.

7. The outward-facing employees of the company (sales, support, (sometimes) systems, client services) have to deal with the unhappy clients and wonder what the development team plans on doing (if anything) to rememdy the situation

I bring this up because I observed an improved version of this done recently with SOE's Planetside 2.

SOE didn't do things perfectly (far from it), but I feel they improved upon the model above by doing the following:

1. stated which features were definitely going to be in the game, which were definitely going to be added later, and which were on a wish-list

2. continued this same communication using their official forums, Twitter, Reddeit, and various other sources of communication

3. an online roadmap that communicates the development team's intended features and a general timeline for implementing those features

In regards to my company's products, I think the analysts need to step forth and document the communication among the development teams/management and the various clients.

It's not exactly what I expected, but it's interesting nontheless.

If you're anything like me, you are exceptionally spoiled in that you own multiple video games that you may not have completed, or even started.  So my questions is: how do you decide what game to play next?  What draws you to choosing that game?

For a few years, I've realized I am very visually drawn to the icon art, (previously) box art, and perhaps screenshots when it comes to choosing which game to play next.  Sometimes I stare at my desktop and see a slew of great games I have yet to really begin: Company of Heroes, Dead Space 2, Crysis 2, etc.  Instead, I keep coming back to the same games (currenly Planetside 2 and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress).

I have even tried to sort my game titles in a spreadsheet, wherein each column lists a "type" of game, such as "fun for 15-20 minutes," "will take hours," etc.

CPU:
- x64 Architecture
- 8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz)
- each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache
- each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache
- each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources
- each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock

GPU:

- custom D3D11.1 class 800-MHz graphics processor
- 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads
- each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle
- at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second

High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present

Storage and Memory:

- 8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)
- 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)
- from the GPU?s perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.
- Hard drive is always present
- 50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive

Networking:

- Gigabit Ethernet
- Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct

Hardware Accelerators:

- Move engines
- Image, video, and audio codecs
- Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware
- Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing

http://youtu.be/tL9aWePmO2k

http://youtu.be/RPuY2hvYjnw