Benchmark it fool. I have, looking up hundreds of different sin/cos/acos values for a frame thrashes your "cache".
Additionally -- Using a float type directly IS STILL FASTER than emulating floating point math with JS opcodes -- BENCHMARK before you BERATE, lest you find yourself a FOOL.
CS is more than just how to code, but honestly: Learning to write a bit of working code first helps loads.
I taught my 11 year old brother how to code in C, C++, Java, SQL, JavaScript, (he's now 20, and learning Perl & Python on his own).
He didn't get the theory until he could compile stuff and play with real working examples (as I did), and for him, everything we needed was in The Really Big Index. Everything from the concept of Objects and variables, to arrays, branches, algorithms, GUIs, concurrency, graphics, client / servers, etc -- After the first two trails he was studying all by himself, and mastering the programming part of CS. After Java, C/C++ and JavaScript were nothing more than learning the syntax and standard libraries. We installed PostgreSQL, and he picked up SQL in two weeks. I'm helping him write a new scripting language for an existing game engine to learn compiler design -- He's beyond his fellow students, and sometimes even the CS professor in many areas simply due to experience.
As far as tests go -- I don't know about that. Tests are bogus anyhow. Have them come up with a reasonable project that they can complete and learn by doing. You can get a curriculum and do course work, but first get them coding (also note: if they don't give a damn about writing code, you will never make them want to -- Good programmers are born not made).
So -- We took SGML document language, then slapped on a shitty scripting language that successfully rode Java's coat-tails, on no other merit than "it's what's available". Then we tried to formalize everything, HTML5 got delayed (is still being delayed) for EIGHT YEARS...
All for what? What did we do with a stateless distributed document display system and a scripting language? Why we built stateful applications out of them.
We all booed and hissed at ActiveX and Java -- native code is insecure, no one has the right Java version installed, it's a slow VM! -- But now we take JavaScript and compile it into insecure native machine code, run it in a slow hybrid VM, and no two browsers have the all the same features, and visitors don't have a common version installed.
Meanwhile someone discovered that if you give the general public access to a software repository, and give coders a stable platform and channel to access customers via -- You can do the exact same bullshit as a web-app with less resources, and make it graphically slick too. (Of course fracturing is starting to happen again -- The old beast of platform diversity rares its head -- Google needs to step up and say: "If you don't give your users the updates after a set period, you can't access the Marketplace with new devices" [with an exemption for older hardware] ).
I'm no iFan, but this is what I've been saying since I wrote my first web app: "This sucks, it will eat itself alive with complexity as it gets popular".
Hey the "web" is neat -- But bending your code to support non-standard browser extensions has bit us in the ass -- Abandon ship, It's not worth the hassle to keep bailing at this point -- look over there, a good ol' fashion Repository... and it doesn't leak development time/money like a sieve...
Believe what you want. Yes, the web is too big to fail, but as long as we haven't learned that basic lesson -- Standards or Bust -- the platform (be it web or app) is doomed to be huge clumsy insecure zombie with an insatiable lust for mindshare, and development time.
Mandatory personal information disclosure is required.
Accounts can be canceled at any time without notice for any reason, esp. a breach of the TOS
Terms of Service can be revised by Apple at will without prior notice.
Apple's Privacy policy allows us to share your usage and subscription info with "partners".
(Partner has been revised to mean anyone who pays us.)
The cloud will only operate over select exclusive networks.
You give Apple unlimited unrevokable global copyright license to publish your data however they want.
Apple is not required to delete your data if you cancel your account
Only Apple sanctioned hardware and software may access the cloud.
(It will be a pain in the ass to get any data out of the cloud).
This is one of those, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" kind of things.
Seriously, many Doom sourceports are doing it wrong, including this one. The thing is, Doom used fixed point math to simulate floating point -- now our on-chip float calculations are way faster than the code required to emulate them (that Doom uses).
Additionally: JS does not have any numbers except 64 bit floats! Bitwise math works on the lower 32 bits of the 52 bits of precision that the floats have available, and results are stored in -- FLOATS. So, using floats to emulate Doom's fixed point math (to emulate floats) is RETARDED (in every sense of the word).
Additionally -- the look up tables Doom uses for "speed" are very slow in JS -- a dynamic object property lookup -- Actually doing a Math.sin(), cos(), or acos() call would be a HELL of a lot faster.
P.S. So fucking what! You can compile just about anything into javascript now that we have a compiler for it. The compiler was impressive, the old programs were impressive in their time. You want a cookie for being able to compile something? Too bad, I'm fresh out.
Except that at work -- Where desktops will never die. Editing a spreadsheet or writing code on a portable is retarded. Even if we go to a dockable solution it's still a PC.
P.S. The "smart" in smartphone == PC == PersonalComputer.
esp. on GLinux -- At least they are releasing open source drivers, but I haven't used them for a long time (don't they still require a binary blob with those "open source" drivers?). When will they learn, we buy your shit for the hardware, your drivers mean jack shit, they are not "uber bad ass top secret", let the hardware stand on its own and give us the full open source code!
Both the open and closed Nvida drivers I use are a little flaky on GLinux too... Honestly, if you want to make it to the future, hardware accelerated GLinux/Unix support and a standardized API are a must... Look at Android / iOS.
* Why is it that stuff like user agents and other forms of AI mostly disappeared from the scene in the 90's? We have the power now to run the things that everyone seemed to be working on back then.
Because user agents are useless once you know how to use your own computer.
"Useragent search 'AI', display the 4 most interesting results in separate tabs."
- vs -
[ctrl+J] AI [enter] [click] [click] [click] [click]
Hint: middle button click == open in new tab [on FF].
P.S. "Google" <-- search engines ARE user agents! They spider the web, and determine the most relevant results. All you have to do is type your interest at the moment (or say it if you have voice activation software ala Android), and it works! I'm not sure you get that the tech didn't go away; It's just marketed differently and made more efficiently now (shit tons of personal assistants, or one big one that's a hell of a lot smarter and deduplicates the processor time individual units would waste).
I have little time to worry about pedantics -- so long as people get the gist of what I'm expressing -- That's the whole point, and all that precise attention to detail is a waste of time. Besides, the pedants will fill in the gaps for you. Clearly you got the gist, my job is done.
P.S. You have always been a pawn in my master plan, MUAHAHA!
I heard it on the "video-game web-radio" station MixWave (was V-wave, part of Rainwave).
The song is about how a player anticipates Portal2, "Please release portal 2 or I'll die".
P.S. If you like video game music, or chiptune, electro, or even Orchestras, choirs, or acapella, there are nostalgic tunes and remixes of classic video game music out there... Check out Rainwave's stations, and vote on the next song...
We have no fucking clue what it takes to support life as we know it, and we won't until we fully understand life and the process of abiogenesis. We do know a lot about where life cannot survive though, e.g. no oxygen, no water, etc. These equations are pretty much arbitrary.
And, I think that the tides provided by a moon would keep things moving around instead of stagnating.
Not to mention the tidal forces make the Earth's surface flex about 1ft (as evidenced by my GPS) per day. All that flexing keeps the insides hot as well as triggers earthquakes that would otherwise be more devastating, and helps lava flow so that smaller, more frequent volcanic outbursts occur instead of less frequent super volcanic activities that would extinct us all.
Conversely, why the hell we think only land life would be sentient and capable of technology is beyond me -- Seems that artificial water filled environments might be easier to maintain in space too (holds heat better, freezes at the edges for insulation, shields against certain UV wavelengths... There's a reason life happened in the watter first, making it to land doesn't seem all that important to me. Dolphins may actually be close to sentience -- they returned to the water because land life was harsh.
I don't understand why companies like EA don't simply make their games so they don't work at all if not bought new, or require a ~£5 payment to activate a 2nd hand copy. At least that would be clear, easy to understand and honest (even if I don't like it).
Epic Megagames did this with Bulletstorm.
I've been a paying customer of Epic Megagames since Epic Pinball, I've purchased every game they've ever made, some multiple times. They've made great progress, even introducing a female heroin (Jill of the Jungle) who saves the Prince to buck retarded gender roles. The were once a great company...
I have two Xbox360s and two game players in my home. Only one of us can be playing one copy of Bulletstorm at a time. The "game" servers are other players' consoles; MS provides Matchmaking and stats on XBL; Only one of us can be "stressing" their stats server at a time -- Yet With this new "online pass" system, the second player has to pay US$10 just to be able to play the game too.
Hint: I've already paid twice for two separate XBL subscription plans so that we can both play online!
Result: I've added Epic to the list of greed focused abusive companies that I boycott.
No. CoD publishers are just jealous of WoW. Seriously. Haven't you noticed how FPS games have stared to add the time-sinks of leveling up, gear collection and grinding that MMORPGs like WoW have been perfecting?
DLC Maps are ON YOUR HARD DRIVE, they don't have to be hosted, unlike MMORPGs where the game state is persistant and must be maintained on servers that run constantly. So, they have to create a reason to run their own servers, they have to come up with a service that they can provide (however tangential it may be to actual game-play) in order to charge for the service (read: lock out non-paying players).
IMO, it's discusting. The games themselves are overrated, and if you don't think so, they are over-priced. Bringing in more money on launch than most movies. Yet their greed doesn't stop there -- once you spend the effort to make a game it takes so little man-power to create and slowly spoon feed overpriced DLC to the players, the profit margins are huge! They realized now that they could create an autonomous service (like facebook w/ stats), and charge to access it (like DLC, but recurring payments), and they could "add value" to DLC by delaying it to non-elite members, and they would have so little overhead to operate it -- it would be a huge cash cow!
Seriously, I don't care if you want to build a subscription based FPS, but it should come with free DLC, and feature permanent online worlds where battles won and lost have real consequence, and organically change the game -- A war with endless battles is fine so long as my winning has an effect: "Oh man, you remember when we aligned with the Chinese to fight off the Russian invasion, then when our resources were weakened they broke the treaty and nearly took over the USA?! That battle was glorious!"
(An older mech game I have "Chrome Hounds" has a decent world battle system, but the game's innovative "communications towers" must be protected keep up communications have been subverted via party-chat... It was fun to take out coms and devastate via strategy and clever deception, not just fast-twitch skill and brute force).
I'm open to innovation in FPS games, but adding bullshit features that don't really directly impact game-play (ooh, STATS! and -- A clone of Facebook!) are not the way to go. If they spent have as much time figuring out how to actually make the game better than how to extract more time and money from the players then the money & players would flock naturally.
And why is this a problem?
To put in another way: do you see a problem in having gazillions of manufacturers of power tools for wood/metal works for example?
Sir! YES SIR! I will absolutely do whatever it is you say to do, SIR!
I will faithfully follow your orders with unquestionable loyalty even in violation of the rights of the US Constitution, and the treaties our governments have sworn to uphold -- These mean nothing to me now that you are my commanding officer, SIR!
As your soldier I have signed my morals away for the duration of my service period! Humanity, be damned, I will not disobey an order no matter how illegal or immoral! SIR, I know it is your ass on the line, not mine, if I strictly follow your orders, Sir!
... ...
Sir, I see you are showing a bit humanity: Permission to be your scapegoat by disobeying the order you clearly want to disobey as well, Sir?
Consumer-grade wireless is shit. We use Cisco 1130 AGs and they are the shit.
[...]
they are fucking rock solid. However, they cost like $600.
1. Cosumer = shit. Commercial = the shit. o_O Same "shit" much?
2. So what you're saying is that Cisco distances itself from the intentionally crippled consumer hardware via slapping the name Linksys on it, so that when someone buys the slightly better non-crippled hardware they can charge $600 for it -- do you really think that it's 10,000% (Ten Thousand Percent!?) better than the consumer grade device? -- or, would you agree that it's arbitrary price inflation based on pretty much the same design?
3. Why don't they just make good routers across the board, it would lower their cost to manufacture esp. in volume -- Oh, right, profit margins, never mind.
I think we've Identified the culprits. WiFi sucks because the manufacturers want it to suck. Guess what? A dime bag of cocaine, or a pirated copy of Windows is cheap too -- It's when you become a Pro at snorting lines or using Windows or running a network that the price becomes prohibitively expensive... At least with the drugs, when you "go pro" the price may get cheaper the more you use.
Make no mistake, consumer grade WiFi is marginally adequate expressly because it can be. People get used to the convenience of WiFi at home, but when they want to take it to work: Business can not afford to have flaky WiFi. Ergo the ten thousand percent price hike per unit -- You're already hooked -- if you want the clean stuff not cut with rat poison, baking soda, faulty capacitors, overheating chips, and weak antenna coils (so that you can use more like a pro and get a pure, reliable WiFi-high without O.D.ing) you'll have to pay big time.
Slashdot Mirror
Benchmark it fool. I have, looking up hundreds of different sin/cos/acos values for a frame thrashes your "cache".
Additionally -- Using a float type directly IS STILL FASTER than emulating floating point math with JS opcodes -- BENCHMARK before you BERATE, lest you find yourself a FOOL.
CS is more than just how to code, but honestly: Learning to write a bit of working code first helps loads.
I taught my 11 year old brother how to code in C, C++, Java, SQL, JavaScript, (he's now 20, and learning Perl & Python on his own).
He didn't get the theory until he could compile stuff and play with real working examples (as I did), and for him, everything we needed was in The Really Big Index. Everything from the concept of Objects and variables, to arrays, branches, algorithms, GUIs, concurrency, graphics, client / servers, etc -- After the first two trails he was studying all by himself, and mastering the programming part of CS. After Java, C/C++ and JavaScript were nothing more than learning the syntax and standard libraries. We installed PostgreSQL, and he picked up SQL in two weeks. I'm helping him write a new scripting language for an existing game engine to learn compiler design -- He's beyond his fellow students, and sometimes even the CS professor in many areas simply due to experience.
As far as tests go -- I don't know about that. Tests are bogus anyhow. Have them come up with a reasonable project that they can complete and learn by doing. You can get a curriculum and do course work, but first get them coding (also note: if they don't give a damn about writing code, you will never make them want to -- Good programmers are born not made).
So -- We took SGML document language, then slapped on a shitty scripting language that successfully rode Java's coat-tails, on no other merit than "it's what's available". Then we tried to formalize everything, HTML5 got delayed (is still being delayed) for EIGHT YEARS...
All for what? What did we do with a stateless distributed document display system and a scripting language? Why we built stateful applications out of them.
We all booed and hissed at ActiveX and Java -- native code is insecure, no one has the right Java version installed, it's a slow VM! -- But now we take JavaScript and compile it into insecure native machine code, run it in a slow hybrid VM, and no two browsers have the all the same features, and visitors don't have a common version installed.
Meanwhile someone discovered that if you give the general public access to a software repository, and give coders a stable platform and channel to access customers via -- You can do the exact same bullshit as a web-app with less resources, and make it graphically slick too. (Of course fracturing is starting to happen again -- The old beast of platform diversity rares its head -- Google needs to step up and say: "If you don't give your users the updates after a set period, you can't access the Marketplace with new devices" [with an exemption for older hardware] ).
I'm no iFan, but this is what I've been saying since I wrote my first web app: "This sucks, it will eat itself alive with complexity as it gets popular".
Hey the "web" is neat -- But bending your code to support non-standard browser extensions has bit us in the ass -- Abandon ship, It's not worth the hassle to keep bailing at this point -- look over there, a good ol' fashion Repository... and it doesn't leak development time/money like a sieve...
Believe what you want. Yes, the web is too big to fail, but as long as we haven't learned that basic lesson -- Standards or Bust -- the platform (be it web or app) is doomed to be huge clumsy insecure zombie with an insatiable lust for mindshare, and development time.
Whoops, unfortunately they didn't take the cues from Novel -- MS is the Devil!
Report of Qt's death is greatly exaggerated.
Mandatory personal information disclosure is required.
Accounts can be canceled at any time without notice for any reason, esp. a breach of the TOS
Terms of Service can be revised by Apple at will without prior notice.
Apple's Privacy policy allows us to share your usage and subscription info with "partners".
(Partner has been revised to mean anyone who pays us.)
The cloud will only operate over select exclusive networks.
You give Apple unlimited unrevokable global copyright license to publish your data however they want.
Apple is not required to delete your data if you cancel your account
Only Apple sanctioned hardware and software may access the cloud.
(It will be a pain in the ass to get any data out of the cloud).
This is one of those, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" kind of things.
Seriously, many Doom sourceports are doing it wrong, including this one. The thing is, Doom used fixed point math to simulate floating point -- now our on-chip float calculations are way faster than the code required to emulate them (that Doom uses).
Additionally: JS does not have any numbers except 64 bit floats! Bitwise math works on the lower 32 bits of the 52 bits of precision that the floats have available, and results are stored in -- FLOATS. So, using floats to emulate Doom's fixed point math (to emulate floats) is RETARDED (in every sense of the word).
Additionally -- the look up tables Doom uses for "speed" are very slow in JS -- a dynamic object property lookup -- Actually doing a Math.sin(), cos(), or acos() call would be a HELL of a lot faster.
P.S. So fucking what! You can compile just about anything into javascript now that we have a compiler for it. The compiler was impressive, the old programs were impressive in their time. You want a cookie for being able to compile something? Too bad, I'm fresh out.
You're almost right.
Except that at work -- Where desktops will never die. Editing a spreadsheet or writing code on a portable is retarded. Even if we go to a dockable solution it's still a PC.
P.S. The "smart" in smartphone == PC == Personal Computer.
solely based on their mediocre driver support.
esp. on GLinux -- At least they are releasing open source drivers, but I haven't used them for a long time (don't they still require a binary blob with those "open source" drivers?). When will they learn, we buy your shit for the hardware, your drivers mean jack shit, they are not "uber bad ass top secret", let the hardware stand on its own and give us the full open source code!
Both the open and closed Nvida drivers I use are a little flaky on GLinux too... Honestly, if you want to make it to the future, hardware accelerated GLinux/Unix support and a standardized API are a must... Look at Android / iOS.
--
GLinux == (GNU+Linux)
Use a VM -- write once, debug everywhere!
* Why is it that stuff like user agents and other forms of AI mostly disappeared from the scene in the 90's? We have the power now to run the things that everyone seemed to be working on back then.
Because user agents are useless once you know how to use your own computer.
"Useragent search 'AI', display the 4 most interesting results in separate tabs."
- vs -
[ctrl+J] AI [enter] [click] [click] [click] [click]
Hint: middle button click == open in new tab [on FF].
P.S. "Google" <-- search engines ARE user agents! They spider the web, and determine the most relevant results. All you have to do is type your interest at the moment (or say it if you have voice activation software ala Android), and it works! I'm not sure you get that the tech didn't go away; It's just marketed differently and made more efficiently now (shit tons of personal assistants, or one big one that's a hell of a lot smarter and deduplicates the processor time individual units would waste).
I have little time to worry about pedantics -- so long as people get the gist of what I'm expressing -- That's the whole point, and all that precise attention to detail is a waste of time. Besides, the pedants will fill in the gaps for you. Clearly you got the gist, my job is done.
P.S. You have always been a pawn in my master plan, MUAHAHA!
No, Ents only say something if it is important enough to say, because "it takes a long time to say it".
I heard it on the "video-game web-radio" station MixWave (was V-wave, part of Rainwave).
The song is about how a player anticipates Portal2, "Please release portal 2 or I'll die".
P.S. If you like video game music, or chiptune, electro, or even Orchestras, choirs, or acapella, there are nostalgic tunes and remixes of classic video game music out there... Check out Rainwave's stations, and vote on the next song...
We have no fucking clue what it takes to support life as we know it, and we won't until we fully understand life and the process of abiogenesis. We do know a lot about where life cannot survive though, e.g. no oxygen, no water, etc. These equations are pretty much arbitrary.
Ugh. Our assumptions are ignorant. Blood Falls.
TL;DR: Bacteria that live without oxygen.
Not to mention being pounded by impacts with small asteroids / comets -- that dust settles in to fill the crevices.
And, I think that the tides provided by a moon would keep things moving around instead of stagnating.
Not to mention the tidal forces make the Earth's surface flex about 1ft (as evidenced by my GPS) per day. All that flexing keeps the insides hot as well as triggers earthquakes that would otherwise be more devastating, and helps lava flow so that smaller, more frequent volcanic outbursts occur instead of less frequent super volcanic activities that would extinct us all.
Conversely, why the hell we think only land life would be sentient and capable of technology is beyond me -- Seems that artificial water filled environments might be easier to maintain in space too (holds heat better, freezes at the edges for insulation, shields against certain UV wavelengths... There's a reason life happened in the watter first, making it to land doesn't seem all that important to me. Dolphins may actually be close to sentience -- they returned to the water because land life was harsh.
Actually, the Moon's influence on the tides is only 2.21 times larger than the Sun's:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/961029b.html
No. Everyone knows that 2.21 is the number of "Jigga-watts" it takes to travel in time.
developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.
If you keep repeating it...
developers, developers, developers, deviloperas, Devil Opras!
I don't understand why companies like EA don't simply make their games so they don't work at all if not bought new, or require a ~£5 payment to activate a 2nd hand copy. At least that would be clear, easy to understand and honest (even if I don't like it).
Epic Megagames did this with Bulletstorm.
I've been a paying customer of Epic Megagames since Epic Pinball, I've purchased every game they've ever made, some multiple times. They've made great progress, even introducing a female heroin (Jill of the Jungle) who saves the Prince to buck retarded gender roles. The were once a great company...
I have two Xbox360s and two game players in my home. Only one of us can be playing one copy of Bulletstorm at a time. The "game" servers are other players' consoles; MS provides Matchmaking and stats on XBL; Only one of us can be "stressing" their stats server at a time -- Yet With this new "online pass" system, the second player has to pay US$10 just to be able to play the game too.
Hint: I've already paid twice for two separate XBL subscription plans so that we can both play online!
Result: I've added Epic to the list of greed focused abusive companies that I boycott.
No. CoD publishers are just jealous of WoW. Seriously. Haven't you noticed how FPS games have stared to add the time-sinks of leveling up, gear collection and grinding that MMORPGs like WoW have been perfecting?
DLC Maps are ON YOUR HARD DRIVE, they don't have to be hosted, unlike MMORPGs where the game state is persistant and must be maintained on servers that run constantly. So, they have to create a reason to run their own servers, they have to come up with a service that they can provide (however tangential it may be to actual game-play) in order to charge for the service (read: lock out non-paying players).
IMO, it's discusting. The games themselves are overrated, and if you don't think so, they are over-priced. Bringing in more money on launch than most movies. Yet their greed doesn't stop there -- once you spend the effort to make a game it takes so little man-power to create and slowly spoon feed overpriced DLC to the players, the profit margins are huge! They realized now that they could create an autonomous service (like facebook w/ stats), and charge to access it (like DLC, but recurring payments), and they could "add value" to DLC by delaying it to non-elite members, and they would have so little overhead to operate it -- it would be a huge cash cow!
Seriously, I don't care if you want to build a subscription based FPS, but it should come with free DLC, and feature permanent online worlds where battles won and lost have real consequence, and organically change the game -- A war with endless battles is fine so long as my winning has an effect: "Oh man, you remember when we aligned with the Chinese to fight off the Russian invasion, then when our resources were weakened they broke the treaty and nearly took over the USA?! That battle was glorious!"
(An older mech game I have "Chrome Hounds" has a decent world battle system, but the game's innovative "communications towers" must be protected keep up communications have been subverted via party-chat... It was fun to take out coms and devastate via strategy and clever deception, not just fast-twitch skill and brute force).
I'm open to innovation in FPS games, but adding bullshit features that don't really directly impact game-play (ooh, STATS! and -- A clone of Facebook!) are not the way to go. If they spent have as much time figuring out how to actually make the game better than how to extract more time and money from the players then the money & players would flock naturally.
TL;DR: In Soviet Russia -- Skinner-Box pays You!
And why is this a problem? To put in another way: do you see a problem in having gazillions of manufacturers of power tools for wood/metal works for example?
Yes, I'M AN ENT you insensitive clod!
SSL -- All others are pointless. They prove nothing.
Sir! YES SIR! I will absolutely do whatever it is you say to do, SIR!
I will faithfully follow your orders with unquestionable loyalty even in violation of the rights of the US Constitution, and the treaties our governments have sworn to uphold -- These mean nothing to me now that you are my commanding officer, SIR!
As your soldier I have signed my morals away for the duration of my service period! Humanity, be damned, I will not disobey an order no matter how illegal or immoral! SIR, I know it is your ass on the line, not mine, if I strictly follow your orders, Sir!
Sir, I see you are showing a bit humanity: Permission to be your scapegoat by disobeying the order you clearly want to disobey as well, Sir?
Consumer-grade wireless is shit. We use Cisco 1130 AGs and they are the shit.
[...]
they are fucking rock solid. However, they cost like $600.
1. Cosumer = shit. Commercial = the shit. o_O Same "shit" much?
2. So what you're saying is that Cisco distances itself from the intentionally crippled consumer hardware via slapping the name Linksys on it, so that when someone buys the slightly better non-crippled hardware they can charge $600 for it -- do you really think that it's 10,000% (Ten Thousand Percent!?) better than the consumer grade device? -- or, would you agree that it's arbitrary price inflation based on pretty much the same design?
3. Why don't they just make good routers across the board, it would lower their cost to manufacture esp. in volume -- Oh, right, profit margins, never mind.
I think we've Identified the culprits. WiFi sucks because the manufacturers want it to suck. Guess what? A dime bag of cocaine, or a pirated copy of Windows is cheap too -- It's when you become a Pro at snorting lines or using Windows or running a network that the price becomes prohibitively expensive... At least with the drugs, when you "go pro" the price may get cheaper the more you use.
Make no mistake, consumer grade WiFi is marginally adequate expressly because it can be. People get used to the convenience of WiFi at home, but when they want to take it to work: Business can not afford to have flaky WiFi. Ergo the ten thousand percent price hike per unit -- You're already hooked -- if you want the clean stuff not cut with rat poison, baking soda, faulty capacitors, overheating chips, and weak antenna coils (so that you can use more like a pro and get a pure, reliable WiFi-high without O.D.ing) you'll have to pay big time.