Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread II

[Zelig]

Stationary PC. I was considering trying the Steam Big Picture feature. I've got a good router connected to all, via fibre to the pc, the rest wireless. TV in another room....
That Steambox Valve is developing seems like an excellent idea imo...

Yeah, I'd figure out a way to run a wire, it's just going to be better.

Same as wireless internet, it's fine, but not as good as wired for a stationary PC.

I'm not sure how a steam box is related?

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Valve is releasing different boxes, some high-end and some low-end that requires a pc. I can't imagine the low-end boxes only act as a cord. I'll have to wait and see, I guess, but this seems way more interesting than ps4, xbox or win8 imo.

 

[Zelig]

I'm still not sure how that's related to wireless/wired connectivity of a PC to a monitor?

 

[Mise]

He's saying that he expects the low-end steam boxes to offer wireless connectivity between a PC and a monitor. Wireless connectivity btwn PC and TV not something he's come across before, and he's excited about it.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

Pretty much. It seems reasonable.

 

[Zelig]

He's saying that he expects the low-end steam boxes to offer wireless connectivity between a PC and a monitor. Wireless connectivity btwn PC and TV not something he's come across before, and he's excited about it.

I don't see why Miracast on SteamLinux would work any better than on any random Windows PC.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

I'm no expert on these things. If Valve's able to do it, it'd be a very interesting piece of technology. I might skip windows altogether next upgrade.

 

[cardgame]

Wireless PC -> TV isn't going to be good for anything dependant on reaction times (rts, fps). I think we already discussed this.

If you're playing strategy (civ) it's probably fine.

If you want it for other reasons, Google has a $35 device called Chromecast which wirelessly streams anything from your Chrome window to the television. And Chrome can play movies. Try it – ctrl-o to open a file.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

I'm not playing much at all, but I'll probably try to set it up to play Witcher 3 on the TV, if possible. That's all.

 

[Zelig]

I'm no expert on these things. If Valve's able to do it, it'd be a very interesting piece of technology. I might skip windows altogether next upgrade.

If Valve is able to do what? It's a Linux PC, wireless streaming is going to be pretty much the same as any other Linux PC.

If you want it for other reasons, Google has a $35 device called Chromecast which wirelessly streams anything from your Chrome window to the television. And Chrome can play movies. Try it – ctrl-o to open a file.

You get what you pay for: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/08/you-get-the-dongle-you-pay-for-in-googles-chromecast/

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

Isn't Valve's Steambox intended to compete with the console market, not the PC market? Not sure how it's going to replace Windows for you unless you are talking about going Linux, which isn't an altogether unattractive idea despite the plethora of Windows apps.

 

[Loppan Torkel]

If you've got a mac for general purpose and a steambox/OS for games, I don't see much need for a third OS. I'm not sure what windows apps I might be missing...

Regarding steambox being a linux-pc - it's true, but hopefully it will be optimized for streaming and gaming, which is something I couldn't do on my own.

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

Ah, I must've missed the Mac part.

 

[Zelig]

I still don't really see why you're specifically talking about a SteamBox for something that regular PCs already do.

It's like talking about playing Call of Duty on your PC hooked up to your TV, and then saying "That Steambox Valve is developing seems like an excellent idea imo..."

 

[Loppan Torkel]

I still don't really see why you're specifically talking about a SteamBox for something that regular PCs already do.

It's like talking about playing Call of Duty on your PC hooked up to your TV, and then saying "That Steambox Valve is developing seems like an excellent idea imo..."

I don't get what you're objecting to that I've not already explained, to be honest. I don't have my PC hooked to my TV and I don't see a hdmi cable running across the apartment as a solution. Wireless transfer between the PC and the TV is probably possible, but I'm not sure how and my guess is that a steambox will be optimized for wireless transfer between PC and TV and for gaming on the TV, and in a convenient way too.

It's not released yet, so it's speculation, but the general purpose of the steambox seems to be as a gaming device on the TV, either with a PC as support or by itself. Are you questioning the purpose and value of the steambox as a device?

 

[Zelig]

No, I'm questioning why you'd think it would be any better at streaming.

If you're going to plug in an entire computer to the tv, streaming is trivially easy, just set up wireless networking and play the video files on the computer connected to the TV, this literally takes 60 seconds to set up on any $250 laptop you can get from walmart. (Or if you want desktop use, run Teamviewer or whatever. If you want gaming, run a cable properly, gaming over wireless is always going to suck more than the effort it takes to run a cable properly.)

 

[Mise]

Not all TVs have networking built in and existing solutions also involve a box sitting in front of your TV streaming stuff wirelessly, but aren't aimed at low-latency applications such as gaming. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that a box specifically designed for gaming will be better at running games over than a box designed for mirroring or playing videos, for which latency is much less important. It's perfectly reasonable to expect Steam to make a box that's better than existing solutions. I mean, you expect that if a big, cash rich computer games company is making a box that is specifically designed for streaming games over wifi then it will be better than boxes designed for mirroring or playing videos.

You say that streaming games over wifi sucks, but Nvidia have done it with the Shield (albeit in 720p rather than 1080p, though to me this is a perfectly acceptable compromise if you don't want a ridiculously expensive HDMI cable running across the room). The reviews I've read have said that the latency varies between "noticeable" and "not noticeable", depending on the specific conditions of the test. I would expect that Steam, having had more time to work on this, with more room in a stationary box, and arguably with more skin in the game than Nvidia, might improve on the experience of the Shield, which again, isn't too bad.

Eurogamer's Shield review, game streaming info in 2nd half of article: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-nvidia-shield-review

The ability to stream PC gameplay over an internal Wi-Fi network is another clear bonus, proving surprisingly robust across a range of networking scenarios. While frame-rates, refresh consistency and image quality could be improved, the quality of response from the controls is very good - highly playable and on par with current-gen console. This element of Shield is still in beta, but even in its current state, it's well worth checking out.

Tom's Hardware's Shield review: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-shield-tegra-4-android-geforce-review,3576-8.html
The video of him streaming Skyrim across the room with the approved router looked impressive enough to me, though of course, Skyrim isn't a particularly latency-demanding game.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I converted an aircraft's .mdl model file from M$ FS2004 to a .3ds file, but when I load it up in anim8or, it loads, but anim8or refuses to load the textures that came with it. Why? And how do I get it to load the textures?

 

[Antilogic]

I am trying to do something the hard way in Excel because I don't have access to a good program at the moment and it's bugging the hell out of me.

In short, I have a massive table of data. I need to get Excel to spit out the string in the first column that is associated with the k-th largest value in the table. So, I found the large() function and I have the target value, so to speak. Problem is, I don't know how to get the cell reference for that value so that I can point over to the first column using VLOOKUP or something of the sort. Anyone have an idea? It's basically a reverse situation of the INDEX-MATCH-MATCH trick.

EDIT: The data is also not in ascending or descending order, so that's a bit of a problem.

 

[Mise]

So you already know what the k-th largest value in the values column is? Yeah, you just use "=match(<k-th largest value>,<range reference to values column>,0)" to return the row number of k-th largest value, then use "=index(<range reference to first column>,<result of the previous match statement>)".

So for example, if your labels are in range A2:A10, your values are in B2:B10, and your value for "k" is in C1, the whole function will look like this:

=index(A2:A10,match(large(B2:B10,C1),B2:B10,0))

EDIT: PS I didn't know about the "large" function! That looks useful...