So a publisher can either design for the Wii or design for the much larger PC/360/PS3 base.
It is clear what most have chosen.
According to the vgchartz release dates, there were 25 Wii titles released in the US in May compared to 13 on the XBox360, 12 on the PS3 and 18 on the PC. A similar ratio of titles show up in June, July and so on. So from what I can tell, judging by the number of releases, developers have chosen the Wii.
And the question the publishers are asking themselves is "Is your Mother/Father/Sister/Brother/Cousin/Nursing home" going to buy my games.
From attach rates the answer is generally no.
From the article: "If a hardware system is doing gangbuster sales, then the tie ratio can go down even if there are lots of overall sales."
The fact is, the Wii generates lots of overall game sales, but its tie ratio is relatively low because it moves so much hardware. That makes it an attractive system for publishers.
In addition, a console with vastly more hardware sales than its competitors is naturally going to have a lower attach rate. For example, the Wii sells about twice as many hardware units as either the 360 or PS3 per month in the US. But since these new owners start from 0 games (not counting the bundled Wii Sports), the attach rate falls behind the higher ratio of longtime owners on the 360 or PS3 who've had more time to get more games.
But in absolute sales terms, Wii sells a lot more software, both 1st and 3rd party, than its competitors. And for a developer trying to recoup production costs, the total sales are what really matter.
Sorry, but the "dumbed down" stuff has been dominating ever since Computer Space lost out to Pong. Even in the PC realm, more accessible titles like "the Sims" dominates the latest complicated, high learning curve title. But the hardcore titles are still around, so why worry?
The Millennium Falcon Lego kit is made up almost entirely of generic pieces - triangles, rectangles, Technic-style crossbars, and so on. The only nonstandard bits in it are the bendable engine grills and the minifigs.
By making MySQL open source, the founders benefit because they received a lot of money from Sun and don't lose their product's source code, even after leaving the company.
Sun, by buying the company, not only gain the product's source code, but also the MySQL name. And the name is the important thing to them, since Sun could've made their own fork from the source if they simply wanted a database.
So it seems like everyone got exactly what they wanted out of the deal.
Its production budget is reported to be in the $150m-$200m range, and it's currently brought in $160m world-wide. Additionally, the studio itself only gets a percentage of that. So the end result is that Watchmen won't produce any sort of profit until it arrives on disc.
It's an imagined tragedy. Yes, there is a lot of duplication of effort between the two camps. But tasking their combined developers with a single desktop system (GDE? KNOME?) is unlikely to make it twice as good, or get features completed twice as fast. Instead, it'll probably lead to the reverse.
It has to be a new controller because the two Z buttons have been moved. That said, it's easy to confuse it for something like the Nyko shell because its front design changes are so minimal.
No, I think the point here is not to just recreate MAME, but to create a legitimate system of emulation that can can be used for valid historic archive purposes
MAME is a system of emulation for valid historic archive purposes. Its whole purpose is to preserve classic video games with the greatest accuracy possible. If these guys don't leverage the MAME team's work, they have no chance of success because systems like the CPS-2 or DECO Cassette System will have degraded out of existence while they spend 10 years reinventing the wheel.
And also none of them are used except in the final presentation step, including your "character" example.
Not by you, perhaps. But if you're going to punt everything to the "final presentation step", it doesn't sound like you're doing any serious work with Unicode storage anyway.
Python uses UTF-16 internally on Windows and UTF-32 on Unix (I think "UCS-4" implies that values greater than 0x10ffff are allowed, but Pythons converters to UTF-16 and UTF-8 do not handle this, so it is better to say it supports UTF-32).
I believe that if they had used UTF-8 from the start none of this crap would be happening.
Storing unicode strings internally as UTF-8 is madness. Imagine the trivial case of s[3], which bytes would we return? We'd have to walk the string to find the start of that fourth character, then walk it some more to get the whole thing. It'd transform a whole pile of O(1) operations into O(n) ones, and performance would suffer greatly for it.
There can however be a more complex call that converts both strings to Unicode and compares them. One huge problem with most current imlementations, including Python, is absolutely brain-dead (and "politically correct") handling of invalid UTF-8, where invalid encodings throw errors, which makes use of UTF-8 actually impossible for non-trivial programs. Instead it should never throw errors. Error bytes should represent something unique in Unicode, one popular proposal is U+D8xx (which is also an "error" in UTF-16).
That's precisely what Python's.decode('utf-8','replace') does, replacing invalid UTF-8 sequences with U+D8XX characters.
In addition, Python typically stores Unicode characters as UCS-2 internally (or UCS-4, at compile-time) rather than UTF-16, guaranteeing that each character is a fixed size. Naturally, having fixed-size Unicode characters has a lot of benefits at runtime which would be lost by trying to represent everything internally as variable-length UTF-8 byte sequences. And since UCS-2 covers everything but a few esoteric characters (which are covered by UCS-4), there's very little downside.
I have heard alot of dumb technology names in my time, but Ogg is *far and away* the worst. I used to think Athlon sounded dumb, and it did, but after a while it stopped sounding that way.
It stopped sounding dumb because lots of people used the name "Athlon" on a regular basis. If lots of people used the name "Ogg" on a regular basis, it would no longer sound dumb. But its lack of market penetration is preventing name recognition - rather than the other way around.
If it sits around long enough, who's going to care? Historians and archaeologists, perhaps. So long as a drive wipe keeps sensitive data like site passwords and bank accounts secure for their lifespan (and/or my own), there's no sense worrying about any theoretical future threat.
A single overwrite with zeroes is enough to prevent Ontrack from recovering anything. And if they can't get it back - despite running a business that charges thousands of dollars to pull data off hard drives - what hope is there for some cheap scammer? They'll just move on to somebody else's drive that hasn't been zeroed over before pulling out the electron microscopes.
Physically destroying hard drives might be entertaining, but I haven't seen any evidence that anything beyond a single overwrite is actually necessary on modern drives.
There are plenty of open MP3 implementations. LAME is LGPL, mpg123 is GPL/LGPL and so forth. What's keeping them out of Fedora is Fraunhofer's patents, not the lack of free software source code.
She gave the scammers money because they promised millions of dollars in return. Unlike a rape or armed robbery, it's the greed of the scam victims themselves that lures them into the scheme. Thus, they have some culpability in the crime that someone attacked on the street does not.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the vgchartz release dates, there were 25 Wii titles released in the US in May compared to 13 on the XBox360, 12 on the PS3 and 18 on the PC. A similar ratio of titles show up in June, July and so on. So from what I can tell, judging by the number of releases, developers have chosen the Wii.
From the article: "If a hardware system is doing gangbuster sales, then the tie ratio can go down even if there are lots of overall sales."
The fact is, the Wii generates lots of overall game sales, but its tie ratio is relatively low because it moves so much hardware. That makes it an attractive system for publishers.
In addition, a console with vastly more hardware sales than its competitors is naturally going to have a lower attach rate. For example, the Wii sells about twice as many hardware units as either the 360 or PS3 per month in the US. But since these new owners start from 0 games (not counting the bundled Wii Sports), the attach rate falls behind the higher ratio of longtime owners on the 360 or PS3 who've had more time to get more games.
But in absolute sales terms, Wii sells a lot more software, both 1st and 3rd party, than its competitors. And for a developer trying to recoup production costs, the total sales are what really matter.
Sorry, but the "dumbed down" stuff has been dominating ever since Computer Space lost out to Pong. Even in the PC realm, more accessible titles like "the Sims" dominates the latest complicated, high learning curve title. But the hardcore titles are still around, so why worry?
Firefox 3.0.x already does this, at least on the Linux version. Try to drag the tab from the tab bar of one window into the tab bar of another window.
It's much easier to justify the time and effort spent coding a web site to non-IE browsers when they have 20% market share vs. having 2% market share.
The Millennium Falcon Lego kit is made up almost entirely of generic pieces - triangles, rectangles, Technic-style crossbars, and so on. The only nonstandard bits in it are the bendable engine grills and the minifigs.
Lenovo makes a similar trackpoint/trackpad USB keyboard that's compact, but still quite usable and with built-in mouse capabilities.
By making MySQL open source, the founders benefit because they received a lot of money from Sun and don't lose their product's source code, even after leaving the company.
Sun, by buying the company, not only gain the product's source code, but also the MySQL name. And the name is the important thing to them, since Sun could've made their own fork from the source if they simply wanted a database.
So it seems like everyone got exactly what they wanted out of the deal.
Its production budget is reported to be in the $150m-$200m range, and it's currently brought in $160m world-wide. Additionally, the studio itself only gets a percentage of that. So the end result is that Watchmen won't produce any sort of profit until it arrives on disc.
It's an imagined tragedy. Yes, there is a lot of duplication of effort between the two camps. But tasking their combined developers with a single desktop system (GDE? KNOME?) is unlikely to make it twice as good, or get features completed twice as fast. Instead, it'll probably lead to the reverse.
It has to be a new controller because the two Z buttons have been moved. That said, it's easy to confuse it for something like the Nyko shell because its front design changes are so minimal.
MAME is a system of emulation for valid historic archive purposes. Its whole purpose is to preserve classic video games with the greatest accuracy possible. If these guys don't leverage the MAME team's work, they have no chance of success because systems like the CPS-2 or DECO Cassette System will have degraded out of existence while they spend 10 years reinventing the wheel.
Not by you, perhaps. But if you're going to punt everything to the "final presentation step", it doesn't sound like you're doing any serious work with Unicode storage anyway.
Python uses UCS-2 or UCS-4 internally but sys.maxunicode maxes out at 0x1114111 on UCS-4 builds because there aren't any defined characters that high. Read Include/unicodeobject.h in Python's source code to see for yourself.
Storing unicode strings internally as UTF-8 is madness. Imagine the trivial case of s[3], which bytes would we return? We'd have to walk the string to find the start of that fourth character, then walk it some more to get the whole thing. It'd transform a whole pile of O(1) operations into O(n) ones, and performance would suffer greatly for it.
That's precisely what Python's .decode('utf-8','replace') does, replacing invalid UTF-8 sequences with U+D8XX characters.
In addition, Python typically stores Unicode characters as UCS-2 internally (or UCS-4, at compile-time) rather than UTF-16, guaranteeing that each character is a fixed size. Naturally, having fixed-size Unicode characters has a lot of benefits at runtime which would be lost by trying to represent everything internally as variable-length UTF-8 byte sequences. And since UCS-2 covers everything but a few esoteric characters (which are covered by UCS-4), there's very little downside.
It stopped sounding dumb because lots of people used the name "Athlon" on a regular basis. If lots of people used the name "Ogg" on a regular basis, it would no longer sound dumb. But its lack of market penetration is preventing name recognition - rather than the other way around.
If it sits around long enough, who's going to care? Historians and archaeologists, perhaps. So long as a drive wipe keeps sensitive data like site passwords and bank accounts secure for their lifespan (and/or my own), there's no sense worrying about any theoretical future threat.
It's the difference between what slashdotters enjoy doing to old hard drives and what's actually required to securely destroy the data on them.
Perhaps he's properly removed it from Zork 3's Viewing Room...
A single overwrite with zeroes is enough to prevent Ontrack from recovering anything. And if they can't get it back - despite running a business that charges thousands of dollars to pull data off hard drives - what hope is there for some cheap scammer? They'll just move on to somebody else's drive that hasn't been zeroed over before pulling out the electron microscopes.
Physically destroying hard drives might be entertaining, but I haven't seen any evidence that anything beyond a single overwrite is actually necessary on modern drives.
Erm, Leela kept K-9 mark 1 when she stayed on Gallifrey and presumably died there. Romana kept K-9 mark 2 when she stayed in E-space.
Just a minor quibble.
and it'll be like a DS RPG, but with better stories and fewer boss battles.
There are plenty of open MP3 implementations. LAME is LGPL, mpg123 is GPL/LGPL and so forth. What's keeping them out of Fedora is Fraunhofer's patents, not the lack of free software source code.
She gave the scammers money because they promised millions of dollars in return. Unlike a rape or armed robbery, it's the greed of the scam victims themselves that lures them into the scheme. Thus, they have some culpability in the crime that someone attacked on the street does not.