An expensive hybrid isn't the only way to cut fuel consumption, though. I'm not sure about availability in the US, but there are plenty of small, cheap, reliable cars around that get similar MPG: Yaris, Micra, Aygo etc. Not suited for everyone, but perfect commuter vehicles.
I had a similar experience a decade ago, SATS of some kind at 11, then exams in every subject every year from 12-18. Something like 24-30 hours of exams a year on average.
I went to the university in the GP's article and a significant fraction of people I knew had 3-5 As at A-level back then, that fraction can only have gone up.
I'm glad somebody finally pointed this out in black and white. I remember lining up A-level (UK age 18 exams) maths papers from the 80s and 90s, you could see the questions get easier almost year-by-year.
Yet every year the exam results get better and the government congratulates itself on improving standards while denying the exams are getting easier.
I think that was kind of the point of the article. If you mention narrative to gamers they generally think of cutscenes, but cutscenes are separate from the game so you end up with this split between "doing stuff" and the story.
A better approach is to mix the two together such that what you do in game *is* the story.
Enhanced upscaling? Is that going to be like in Hollywood movies where they press someone says "Enhance" and the techie guy magically turns a blurry 640x480 CCTV shot into a perfect 20 Megapixel image?
Quote from the band's PR guy in that article: "When there are thousands of bands out there trying to get noticed this has made people sit up and listen. They've appeared on Sky and whether their music is good or not people will hear it. It's got people talking about them which is what I guess they meant to do."
So they lied in a pathetic bid to make money, and that's acceptable somehow?
Under the Data Protection Act you have the right to view data an organisation holds on you for a reasonable fee (~£10 I think) including CCTV footage: Wiki Link. Comedian Mark Thomas did a whole programme on it a few years back.
The research linked from the Wiki page says there's been no significant increase since pre-WW2. Presumably recent years have seen a massive increase in the availability of child porn via the internet, so that would suggest you're right.
Surely the default position for any free society should be to allow things and only legislate when there is demonstrable proof of harm? Otherwise you start to get chilling effects.
Wikipedia suggests 20%-25% of women and 5-15% of men in the US experienced some form of sexual abuse as children: Link. It's not clear how they define abuse, though, and only 10% is perpetrated by strangers.
Yes, the idea that the employees should share the profits their work brings is so strange.
Working for a percentage means you accept part of the risk the funding company is taking. Developers can negotiate a profit-sharing contract if they want, but I imagine that most would rather have the security of a fixed salary. For lots of actors working "for a share of the profits" is basically a euphemism for working for free, but that's the risk they're prepared to take.
Interesting, good point. I guess creative stuff always takes longer than you think - I read something recently saying that a decent drama TV series films an average of 3 minutes of finished footage per day.
Still, $100k for a few months instead of a few weeks is still a pretty good salary.
Can it really have taken more than a couple of weeks? How many hours of dialogue are there in the game per character?
The main story is something like 40 hours I think (I haven't played it). So maybe there's 10 hours of speech per character. Say 5 takes for each line, maybe he actually works 5 hours a day with overheads. That's 10 days, 2 working weeks.
To be fair, though, acting jobs very often pay more than you'd think because the work is so infrequent. Appearing in one advert can be worth $10,000s for a couple of days work.
Imperial College, London (kind of the UK's MIT, except poorer)
Perhaps it's just a difference between the countries. Lecturers would give out photocopied lecture notes and problem sheets for a nominal fee (£1 or something). Thinking back I probably *had* to buy maybe 5 books in 4 years at about £30($60) each. I ended up buying more because I skipped too many lectures, but that was my fault.
That's probably to do with the age of the subject, isn't it? CS is relatively young, so there's less for amateurs to catch up on (assuming you've got a reasonable grounding in maths).
Lots of the developers I work with (including me) are self-taught - I went for one developer job interview where they basically told me they prefer hiring people with non-CS engineering/maths degrees and teaching them programming.
On a degree, you find that you have to pay for very expensive text books (you never thought books could be that expensive)
Is that really a major expense? I did a 4-year engineering degree and only bought textbooks for the courses where I didn't go to enough of the lectures, otherwise all you needed was the lecture notes.
Sure, VBA is pretty nice for that kind of thing (much quicker than learning Perl/Python or something), the problem comes when people try to use VBA for something it's not intended for. The fact that Option Explicit isn't on by default leads to some pretty nasty code, in my experience.
My first programming job was writing a 15,000 line inventory management system in VBA, it was a horrendous mixture of VBA and VB ActiveX that stopped working as soon as they upgraded to Office 2000.
I think the reason they gave was that it was too hard to port the old Office 2004 VBA runtime from PPC to x86 code - the runtime was apparently an absolute mess that was tied very tightly to the ISA. Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know.
Whether that's true or not I don't know, it's the old choice between assuming incompetence or malice I guess.
IIRC you could reduce the resolution by shrinking the screen, so on a low end machine you'd end up squinting at a little postage stamp sized image in the middle of the screen.
The newer PS3s (40gb 65nm version) are a fair bit quieter than the old versions, I believe. The consume about 30% less power as well. I've read that the new Elite 360s are quieter as well since they switched to a new chipset.
Slashdot Mirror
An expensive hybrid isn't the only way to cut fuel consumption, though. I'm not sure about availability in the US, but there are plenty of small, cheap, reliable cars around that get similar MPG: Yaris, Micra, Aygo etc. Not suited for everyone, but perfect commuter vehicles.
Most figures I've seen put the current PS3 revision at around 150W in-game, that's comparable to a desktop PC.
I had a similar experience a decade ago, SATS of some kind at 11, then exams in every subject every year from 12-18. Something like 24-30 hours of exams a year on average.
I went to the university in the GP's article and a significant fraction of people I knew had 3-5 As at A-level back then, that fraction can only have gone up.
I'm glad somebody finally pointed this out in black and white. I remember lining up A-level (UK age 18 exams) maths papers from the 80s and 90s, you could see the questions get easier almost year-by-year.
Yet every year the exam results get better and the government congratulates itself on improving standards while denying the exams are getting easier.
I think that was kind of the point of the article. If you mention narrative to gamers they generally think of cutscenes, but cutscenes are separate from the game so you end up with this split between "doing stuff" and the story.
A better approach is to mix the two together such that what you do in game *is* the story.
Enhanced upscaling? Is that going to be like in Hollywood movies where they press someone says "Enhance" and the techie guy magically turns a blurry 640x480 CCTV shot into a perfect 20 Megapixel image?
Sorry, I meant "a PR guy", it's not the band's PR.
Quote from the band's PR guy in that article:
"When there are thousands of bands out there trying to get noticed this has made people sit up and listen. They've appeared on Sky and whether their music is good or not people will hear it. It's got people talking about them which is what I guess they meant to do."
So they lied in a pathetic bid to make money, and that's acceptable somehow?
Under the Data Protection Act you have the right to view data an organisation holds on you for a reasonable fee (~£10 I think) including CCTV footage: Wiki Link. Comedian Mark Thomas did a whole programme on it a few years back.
The research linked from the Wiki page says there's been no significant increase since pre-WW2. Presumably recent years have seen a massive increase in the availability of child porn via the internet, so that would suggest you're right.
Surely the default position for any free society should be to allow things and only legislate when there is demonstrable proof of harm? Otherwise you start to get chilling effects.
Wikipedia suggests 20%-25% of women and 5-15% of men in the US experienced some form of sexual abuse as children: Link. It's not clear how they define abuse, though, and only 10% is perpetrated by strangers.
The age of consent is 16 in the UK.
Yes, the idea that the employees should share the profits their work brings is so strange.
Working for a percentage means you accept part of the risk the funding company is taking. Developers can negotiate a profit-sharing contract if they want, but I imagine that most would rather have the security of a fixed salary. For lots of actors working "for a share of the profits" is basically a euphemism for working for free, but that's the risk they're prepared to take.
(replying to myself)
From actually reading the article, he was paid about $1,050 a day, so that's roughly 4-5 months work.
Interesting, good point. I guess creative stuff always takes longer than you think - I read something recently saying that a decent drama TV series films an average of 3 minutes of finished footage per day.
Still, $100k for a few months instead of a few weeks is still a pretty good salary.
Can it really have taken more than a couple of weeks? How many hours of dialogue are there in the game per character?
The main story is something like 40 hours I think (I haven't played it). So maybe there's 10 hours of speech per character. Say 5 takes for each line, maybe he actually works 5 hours a day with overheads. That's 10 days, 2 working weeks.
To be fair, though, acting jobs very often pay more than you'd think because the work is so infrequent. Appearing in one advert can be worth $10,000s for a couple of days work.
Crap like that makes me want to kill a kitten. ;-)
Not sure that means what you think it means: definition. Unless camera angles turn you on
Imperial College, London (kind of the UK's MIT, except poorer)
Perhaps it's just a difference between the countries. Lecturers would give out photocopied lecture notes and problem sheets for a nominal fee (£1 or something). Thinking back I probably *had* to buy maybe 5 books in 4 years at about £30($60) each. I ended up buying more because I skipped too many lectures, but that was my fault.
That's probably to do with the age of the subject, isn't it? CS is relatively young, so there's less for amateurs to catch up on (assuming you've got a reasonable grounding in maths).
Lots of the developers I work with (including me) are self-taught - I went for one developer job interview where they basically told me they prefer hiring people with non-CS engineering/maths degrees and teaching them programming.
On a degree, you find that you have to pay for very expensive text books (you never thought books could be that expensive)
Is that really a major expense? I did a 4-year engineering degree and only bought textbooks for the courses where I didn't go to enough of the lectures, otherwise all you needed was the lecture notes.
Sure, VBA is pretty nice for that kind of thing (much quicker than learning Perl/Python or something), the problem comes when people try to use VBA for something it's not intended for. The fact that Option Explicit isn't on by default leads to some pretty nasty code, in my experience.
My first programming job was writing a 15,000 line inventory management system in VBA, it was a horrendous mixture of VBA and VB ActiveX that stopped working as soon as they upgraded to Office 2000.
I think the reason they gave was that it was too hard to port the old Office 2004 VBA runtime from PPC to x86 code - the runtime was apparently an absolute mess that was tied very tightly to the ISA. Why they didn't write one portable VBA engine for Windows and Mac I don't know.
Whether that's true or not I don't know, it's the old choice between assuming incompetence or malice I guess.
IIRC you could reduce the resolution by shrinking the screen, so on a low end machine you'd end up squinting at a little postage stamp sized image in the middle of the screen.
The newer PS3s (40gb 65nm version) are a fair bit quieter than the old versions, I believe. The consume about 30% less power as well. I've read that the new Elite 360s are quieter as well since they switched to a new chipset.