It's not unexpected. Tesla owns part of the idled NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA, where a Toyota/GM partnership produced cars until GM went bust. But Tesla just owns the property, not the equipment that Toyota left behind when they shut the plant. So some kind of deal between Toyota and Tesla makes sense.
NUMMI was a final assembly plant, with no engine line, which is good for Tesla. They can adapt an existing body plant, but their powertrain plant will have to be new.
Turbine engines are great, and they can be made small. But not cheap. Turbine makers have tried over and over to build low-cost jet engines for light aircraft. After all, large aircraft have been exclusively turbine powered for half a century.
But it seems that once you get down to the size for a light bizjet (5-6 passengers), the engines don't get significantly cheaper. The MiniJets web site has information about all known small jet aircraft engines. It's a story of great demo aircraft, with decades of frustration trying to get the cost down. Efforts continue to build a very light jet at a low cost.
The other big use for small gas turbines has been for small scale electric power production.
Then there's the idle problem. The Chrysler turbine car had a mechanical transmission, and the engine continued to consume fuel at a substantial rate at idle. Today, a hybrid approach would be used, stopping the engine entirely once the battery was charged. The Capstone microturbine, which is a good backup power source for data centers and hospitals, has been used in this role. There's is more of a bus sized unit, 30x60x70 inches. Again, the scaling-down problem strikes.
40% of Internet traffic now comes from the top 10 domains. Few people have personal web sites any more; that's all on Facebook. Businesses sell through Amazon Store or eBay. Entertainment goes out via the Steve Jobs Walled Garden of Pure Ideology paywall.
Between Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch, and Mark Zuckerberg, I'm worried.
This is starting to be available for exiting Islam. There are bus ads for leaving Islam in New York.
In countries that have freedom of religion but a big Islamic immigrant population, like the UK, France, and the Netherlands, this can work. The UK now has a Government Forced Marriage Unit, with services for people forced into marriage by their families. (Guidance of members of Parliament: "Mediation, reconciliation, and family counseling as a response to forced marriage can be extremely dangerous. There have been cases of victims being murdered while mediation was being undertaken.")
Back on October 21, 2009, Microsoft announces that Bing will provide "social search" of Facebook and Twitter.
Then, on October 22, 2009, Google announces that Google will provide "social search" of Facebook and Twitter. Which they did. And, for a while, Twitter results showed up in Google web search, scrolling along and annoying most users. Google later backed off on that.
Manufacturing companies discovered that long ago. Build a big plant in Outer Nowhere (but near an Interstate), become the biggest employer in town, and hire a captive labor force. The employees have nowhere else to go, and you can pay minimum wage and really screw them over. Plus, many small towns will give companies huge tax breaks and otherwise suck up.
What did the industry expect?
The whole "3D TV" experience sucks for casual viewing. Off-axis viewing sucks. Viewing while lying down sucks. Viewing without glasses sucks. Viewing on a screen size / distance combination that forces the eyes to cross yields a quick headache. It takes a full "home theater" setup, with properly positioned seats for it to work right. And the "home theater" experience is incompatible with shows that have 30% commercial content.
Then there's the really annoying fact that, having finally developed a display technology that does not flicker, "3D TV" brings flicker back.
Worse, it isn't really "3D". It's just stereo vision. In the real world, there's no significant stereo vision effect beyond 2 meters or so. "Distance 3D" is totally fake. There are 3D systems where, when you move your head, the image changes accordingly, and you can move to look around obstacles. (I'm surprised that Wii games don't yet have that as standard.) But that's not what's being sold.
The device shown has the FCC ID number "O9EQ2438F-M" on the outside of the box, as required by law. FCC ID numbers can be looked up in the FCC database, where details of the device and pictures of the electronics are available. It's a cell phone module, of course. The FCC was told it was for "stolen currency tracking". The maker was Wavecom, since acquired by Sierra Wireless. The unit dates from 2005.
That's just a standard RF module. That application covers the addition of a spread-spectrum module to upgrade the cell access to support PCS networks. The base device, according to the FCC application, is FCC ID NBI-MTAG216. This is more interesting. It's a "Trac Pak V", from "Spectrum Management LLC" of Carrolton, TX.
When the spread-spectrum module was added, the company issued a press release about it."Spectrum Management, L.L.C., a global provider of innovative physical and electronic security products which include its proprietary asset tracking and management systems, announced today the completion of its TracPac CS Tag and the development of an all-new web-based tracking and location system. Spectrum has combined technologies with Wavecom, a leading provider of pre-packaged wireless communications solutions for automotive, industrial and mobile professional applications, with a wide range of fully integrated modules and modems. The new Tag design pairs Wavecom's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) module with GPSOne, and Spectrum's proprietary VHF homing technology to provide a wide range of Location Based Services (LBS). Spectrum Management expects to offer similar tracking and location services on Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications by simply substituting Wavecom's plug-in compatible GSM module."
Spectrum Management's predecessor company was ProNet, which was a public company in the 1990s. They were acquired by Metrocall, and the tracking business was split off as Electronic Tracking Systems. They started as a pager company, but
branched out into tracking devices. From their SEC filing:"In
1988, the Company began to apply advanced wireless technology to the security
business by marketing radio-activated electronic tracking systems to
financial institutions. At December 31, 1996, the Company's security systems
consisted of 29,501 miniature radio transmitters, or "TracPacs," in service." Most of these were leased to banks, and attached to items of value or hidden in bundles of currency. The 1990s model was a pre-GPS technology; they had to get local cops to install receivers (like LoJack does) for this to work. So it only worked in a few markets, and they were having trouble expanding, from their SEC filings. The newer technology doesn't have that limitation.
So it's a stock piece of law enforcement equipment, circa 2005.
What the builder is bitching about is not interest rates on the capital cost. Those are lower than they've ever been in US business history. It's the down payment. The issue for private lenders is that an unfinished nuclear plant has zero to negative value. So the company has to put in enough up-front money to convince lenders the job will be finished. The industry had convinced the U.S. Government to subsidize the down payment, but there's a sizable charge for that to be paid over time, and this builder is bitching about it.
The basic problem with the Cell processor is that it has 256KB (not MB, KB) per processor, plus a bulk transfer mechanism to main memory. Given that model, it has to be programmed like a DSP - very little state, processing works on data streams. For games, this sucks. No CPU has enough memory for a full frame, or for the geometry, or a level map. Trying to hammer programs into that model is painful. (Except for audio. It's great for audio.)
In many PS3 games, the main MIPS machine is doing most of the work, with the Cell CPUs handling audio, networking, and I/O. And, of course, Sony had to put an NVidia graphics processor in the thing late in the development cycle, once people finally realized that the Cell CPUs couldn't handle the rendering.
But if each Cell CPU had, say, 16MB, the Cell machines could be treated more like a cluster. Programming for clusters is well understood, and not too tough.
It's probably too late, though. Multi-core shared memory cache-consistent machines are now too good. It's not necessary to use an architecture as painful as the Cell. It's probably destined for the graveyard of weird architectures, along with data flow machines, hypercubes, SIMD machines, systolic processors, semi-shared-memory multiprocessors, and similar hardware that's straightforward to build but tough to program.
OK, first let's look at the source. Here's the author's bio at the Washington Post: "Ezra Klein writes an opinionated blog on economic policy, collapsing banks, cap and trade, health care reform and pretty much anything else you can attach a chart to. Before coming to The Post, he was an associate editor at the American Prospect. Klein has appeared as a guest on CNN, MSNBC, NPR and C-SPAN and lots of online radio shows you've never heard of. Klein, who makes a mean kung pao, will also be a regular contributor to The Post's Food section. He contributes to the group food blog the Internet Food Association." This guy isn't a historian of science, or even a real reporter.
Many major inventions were quite unexpected. The phonograph, the traveling wave tube, the maser, and to some extent the transistor were not anticipated. Some were very hard to make work - xerography, the image orthicon, MRI scanning. Those are all from electronics. In chemistry, there are far more unexpected inventions, from nylon to modern adhesives.
It occurs to me that if you store all 325 audio streams with accurate time-codes and the relative positions of the microphones you would be able to do this at any time later on the stored sound as well. You could probably get away with much fewer than 325 microphones at some cost in quality.
This is just because the retail outlet had a temporary traffic jam, not because it's a big deal. Foxconn can make more of the things than Apple can sell.
I'm surprised the scalpers bother. They're only marking up the thing by 10%. All it takes is one truckload of new units to put them out of business and leave them stuck with inventory they'll have to sell below retail.
That happened when the PS3 came out. People were buying them to sell on eBay. Once production ramped up, the resellers were desperately trying to unload their inventory at a loss.
Apple claims to be using aluminosilicate glass for those things. That's a tough material, but it's not a flexible one. For a device which depends on its outer glass layer for rigidity and impact protection, a laminate with a polycarbonate interior layer would have been a better choice. Most devices with a glass surface have a raised exterior ridge which usually hits before the glass does. The newer iPhone does not.
Adding an aftermarket rubber bumper ruins the aesthetic, so that's not the answer.
Your notion only works if you want to have a world filled with firemen, ballerinas, and astronauts. What kids want to be in fifth grade has zero relation to what they will eventually become.
The girl who's going to be a ballerina knows it by fifth grade. She's already taking serious dance classes.
It's a long, hard grind to a job with a major dance company, and that grind starts early. Balanchine was once asked by some college to put together a dance curriculum, to which he said "No. They're too old".
Some of the early astronauts haven't done too well in later life. They were big heroes briefly, and then has-beens for decades.
Being an astronaut today must really suck. There are about 100 "active astronauts", most of whom will never get into space again. There has to be a layoff coming. Meanwhile, they get assigned to "lunch with an astronaut" duty.
Interestingly, the "pad" form factor machines are higher than they're wide. (They may work rotated, but their "native" mode is usually vertical.) So are all the "e-readers". One can see why for the small-screen readers, but it's interesting that the "pad" machines, which are somewhat larger, are vertical.
The original Xerox Alto was designed to display a standard printed page in full size. (I feel really old. I've used, and programmed, a Xerox Alto.)
Political-correctness be damned, it's just a GOOD IDEA. It's an old saying that 'amateurs discuss tactics; professional soldiers talk about logistics'.
Right. Afghanistan is unusually difficult, though. No seaports. No navigable rivers. No railroads. Few roads. Unfriendly neighbors. Unfriendly population. Mountainous. Big. No secure rear areas. Few modern wars have been fought with such logistic obstacles. Throwing money at the problem works, but it's insanely expensive. The US is spending tons of money, and fuel, flying fuel around in C-130s.
Iraq was much easier. Baghdad is only 200 miles of freeway from Kuwait, and that's how most of the tanks got there. Once the US owned the road, bringing up supplies was straightforward. Vietnam has plenty of seacoast and useful rivers, and once the ports were built up, civilian carriers brought in most of the supplies.
I agree with the "Don't" people. I used to do physics engines, back int the 1990s when nobody else had one that worked right, and had some exposure to the game industry and Hollywood. (I did OK because I had a patent, and thus a strong bargaining position. I'm sure I'll hear whining about this from people who've never cracked a hard problem.) Both the game industry and Hollywood have more people wanting to get in than actually do get in. However, Hollywood has unions. This keeps the working hours down, the wages up, and, most importantly, the schedules sane. Because the unionized film industry pays overtime, including time and a half after 40 hours and double time after 6 days, management tries very hard to avoid "crunches", and film scheduling and budgeting are well understood. The game industry doesn't bother. Also, the film industry has better parties, better meals, and hotter women.
Even if you're at the high levels, but just an employee, game development tends to suck. SCEA had a panic after the Playstation 3 came out and they realized, far too late, that the Cell machine was nearly unprogrammable. So they basically yanked their R&D people off whatever they were doing and put them on Cell programming tools. There's also the fact that game development isn't about R&D that much any more. Most of the essential problems have been solved. How to do a big, seamless world, or a physics engine, or echo-free voice multiplayer voice chat, is well understood now. So a bigger fraction of the programming is grunt-level stuff.
I can't speak for the art side, but since game worlds got bigger, that's a huge, partially outsourced grind. Somebody has to draw all those buildings and storefronts. Doing artwork at full speed, full time, is wearing. It's much worse than typing.
I will say that the people who do well in the industry seem to have enough programming skills to write good code, enough artistic skills to make good artwork (although not necessarily at the speed of a working artist), and good insight into game playability, player dynamics, and social interaction.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a touch confused by this announcement.
It's not unexpected. Tesla owns part of the idled NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA, where a Toyota/GM partnership produced cars until GM went bust. But Tesla just owns the property, not the equipment that Toyota left behind when they shut the plant. So some kind of deal between Toyota and Tesla makes sense.
NUMMI was a final assembly plant, with no engine line, which is good for Tesla. They can adapt an existing body plant, but their powertrain plant will have to be new.
Turbine engines are great, and they can be made small. But not cheap. Turbine makers have tried over and over to build low-cost jet engines for light aircraft. After all, large aircraft have been exclusively turbine powered for half a century. But it seems that once you get down to the size for a light bizjet (5-6 passengers), the engines don't get significantly cheaper. The MiniJets web site has information about all known small jet aircraft engines. It's a story of great demo aircraft, with decades of frustration trying to get the cost down. Efforts continue to build a very light jet at a low cost.
The other big use for small gas turbines has been for small scale electric power production.
Then there's the idle problem. The Chrysler turbine car had a mechanical transmission, and the engine continued to consume fuel at a substantial rate at idle. Today, a hybrid approach would be used, stopping the engine entirely once the battery was charged. The Capstone microturbine, which is a good backup power source for data centers and hospitals, has been used in this role. There's is more of a bus sized unit, 30x60x70 inches. Again, the scaling-down problem strikes.
40% of Internet traffic now comes from the top 10 domains. Few people have personal web sites any more; that's all on Facebook. Businesses sell through Amazon Store or eBay. Entertainment goes out via the Steve Jobs Walled Garden of Pure Ideology paywall.
Between Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch, and Mark Zuckerberg, I'm worried.
This is starting to be available for exiting Islam. There are bus ads for leaving Islam in New York. In countries that have freedom of religion but a big Islamic immigrant population, like the UK, France, and the Netherlands, this can work. The UK now has a Government Forced Marriage Unit, with services for people forced into marriage by their families. (Guidance of members of Parliament: "Mediation, reconciliation, and family counseling as a response to forced marriage can be extremely dangerous. There have been cases of victims being murdered while mediation was being undertaken.")
Is this a new namespace, or an alias for the old one?
Back on October 21, 2009, Microsoft announces that Bing will provide "social search" of Facebook and Twitter.
Then, on October 22, 2009, Google announces that Google will provide "social search" of Facebook and Twitter. Which they did. And, for a while, Twitter results showed up in Google web search, scrolling along and annoying most users. Google later backed off on that.
Manufacturing companies discovered that long ago. Build a big plant in Outer Nowhere (but near an Interstate), become the biggest employer in town, and hire a captive labor force. The employees have nowhere else to go, and you can pay minimum wage and really screw them over. Plus, many small towns will give companies huge tax breaks and otherwise suck up.
What did the industry expect? The whole "3D TV" experience sucks for casual viewing. Off-axis viewing sucks. Viewing while lying down sucks. Viewing without glasses sucks. Viewing on a screen size / distance combination that forces the eyes to cross yields a quick headache. It takes a full "home theater" setup, with properly positioned seats for it to work right. And the "home theater" experience is incompatible with shows that have 30% commercial content.
Then there's the really annoying fact that, having finally developed a display technology that does not flicker, "3D TV" brings flicker back.
Worse, it isn't really "3D". It's just stereo vision. In the real world, there's no significant stereo vision effect beyond 2 meters or so. "Distance 3D" is totally fake. There are 3D systems where, when you move your head, the image changes accordingly, and you can move to look around obstacles. (I'm surprised that Wii games don't yet have that as standard.) But that's not what's being sold.
Google does a miserable job of vetting their advertisers. A huge number of junk sites, and some outright scams, are monetized using Google ads. As I pointed out yesterday, there are even sites that are on Google's "This site may harm your computer" list, yet have Google ads. They're clearly not trying very hard to purge their advertiser base of slimeballs.
Here's a rant by a woman in the "responsible" end of the SEO industry: "Dear Google...Stop Making Me Look Like a Fool!"
The device shown has the FCC ID number "O9EQ2438F-M" on the outside of the box, as required by law. FCC ID numbers can be looked up in the FCC database, where details of the device and pictures of the electronics are available. It's a cell phone module, of course. The FCC was told it was for "stolen currency tracking". The maker was Wavecom, since acquired by Sierra Wireless. The unit dates from 2005.
That's just a standard RF module. That application covers the addition of a spread-spectrum module to upgrade the cell access to support PCS networks. The base device, according to the FCC application, is FCC ID NBI-MTAG216. This is more interesting. It's a "Trac Pak V", from "Spectrum Management LLC" of Carrolton, TX.
When the spread-spectrum module was added, the company issued a press release about it. "Spectrum Management, L.L.C., a global provider of innovative physical and electronic security products which include its proprietary asset tracking and management systems, announced today the completion of its TracPac CS Tag and the development of an all-new web-based tracking and location system. Spectrum has combined technologies with Wavecom, a leading provider of pre-packaged wireless communications solutions for automotive, industrial and mobile professional applications, with a wide range of fully integrated modules and modems. The new Tag design pairs Wavecom's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) module with GPSOne, and Spectrum's proprietary VHF homing technology to provide a wide range of Location Based Services (LBS). Spectrum Management expects to offer similar tracking and location services on Global System for Mobile (GSM) communications by simply substituting Wavecom's plug-in compatible GSM module."
Spectrum Management's predecessor company was ProNet, which was a public company in the 1990s. They were acquired by Metrocall, and the tracking business was split off as Electronic Tracking Systems. They started as a pager company, but branched out into tracking devices. From their SEC filing: "In 1988, the Company began to apply advanced wireless technology to the security business by marketing radio-activated electronic tracking systems to financial institutions. At December 31, 1996, the Company's security systems consisted of 29,501 miniature radio transmitters, or "TracPacs," in service." Most of these were leased to banks, and attached to items of value or hidden in bundles of currency. The 1990s model was a pre-GPS technology; they had to get local cops to install receivers (like LoJack does) for this to work. So it only worked in a few markets, and they were having trouble expanding, from their SEC filings. The newer technology doesn't have that limitation.
So it's a stock piece of law enforcement equipment, circa 2005.
Looking at the list of "evil sites":
I ran them all through SiteTruth, which, unsurprisingly, can't find a legit business behind any of them and thus down-rates them as junk sites.
What the builder is bitching about is not interest rates on the capital cost. Those are lower than they've ever been in US business history. It's the down payment. The issue for private lenders is that an unfinished nuclear plant has zero to negative value. So the company has to put in enough up-front money to convince lenders the job will be finished. The industry had convinced the U.S. Government to subsidize the down payment, but there's a sizable charge for that to be paid over time, and this builder is bitching about it.
In the 1930's FDR went about building the interstate system,
No, that was Eisenhower in the 1950s.
The basic problem with the Cell processor is that it has 256KB (not MB, KB) per processor, plus a bulk transfer mechanism to main memory. Given that model, it has to be programmed like a DSP - very little state, processing works on data streams. For games, this sucks. No CPU has enough memory for a full frame, or for the geometry, or a level map. Trying to hammer programs into that model is painful. (Except for audio. It's great for audio.) In many PS3 games, the main MIPS machine is doing most of the work, with the Cell CPUs handling audio, networking, and I/O. And, of course, Sony had to put an NVidia graphics processor in the thing late in the development cycle, once people finally realized that the Cell CPUs couldn't handle the rendering.
But if each Cell CPU had, say, 16MB, the Cell machines could be treated more like a cluster. Programming for clusters is well understood, and not too tough.
It's probably too late, though. Multi-core shared memory cache-consistent machines are now too good. It's not necessary to use an architecture as painful as the Cell. It's probably destined for the graveyard of weird architectures, along with data flow machines, hypercubes, SIMD machines, systolic processors, semi-shared-memory multiprocessors, and similar hardware that's straightforward to build but tough to program.
OK, first let's look at the source. Here's the author's bio at the Washington Post: "Ezra Klein writes an opinionated blog on economic policy, collapsing banks, cap and trade, health care reform and pretty much anything else you can attach a chart to. Before coming to The Post, he was an associate editor at the American Prospect. Klein has appeared as a guest on CNN, MSNBC, NPR and C-SPAN and lots of online radio shows you've never heard of. Klein, who makes a mean kung pao, will also be a regular contributor to The Post's Food section. He contributes to the group food blog the Internet Food Association." This guy isn't a historian of science, or even a real reporter.
Many major inventions were quite unexpected. The phonograph, the traveling wave tube, the maser, and to some extent the transistor were not anticipated. Some were very hard to make work - xerography, the image orthicon, MRI scanning. Those are all from electronics. In chemistry, there are far more unexpected inventions, from nylon to modern adhesives.
Klein has no clue.
It occurs to me that if you store all 325 audio streams with accurate time-codes and the relative positions of the microphones you would be able to do this at any time later on the stored sound as well. You could probably get away with much fewer than 325 microphones at some cost in quality.
Yes. And that's already part of the system.
More and more sites just don't work if you enable strong privacy controls. Some of this seems to be deliberate, and it's getting worse.
This is just because the retail outlet had a temporary traffic jam, not because it's a big deal. Foxconn can make more of the things than Apple can sell.
I'm surprised the scalpers bother. They're only marking up the thing by 10%. All it takes is one truckload of new units to put them out of business and leave them stuck with inventory they'll have to sell below retail.
That happened when the PS3 came out. People were buying them to sell on eBay. Once production ramped up, the resellers were desperately trying to unload their inventory at a loss.
Call it Glassgate.
Apple claims to be using aluminosilicate glass for those things. That's a tough material, but it's not a flexible one. For a device which depends on its outer glass layer for rigidity and impact protection, a laminate with a polycarbonate interior layer would have been a better choice. Most devices with a glass surface have a raised exterior ridge which usually hits before the glass does. The newer iPhone does not.
Adding an aftermarket rubber bumper ruins the aesthetic, so that's not the answer.
Your notion only works if you want to have a world filled with firemen, ballerinas, and astronauts. What kids want to be in fifth grade has zero relation to what they will eventually become.
The girl who's going to be a ballerina knows it by fifth grade. She's already taking serious dance classes. It's a long, hard grind to a job with a major dance company, and that grind starts early. Balanchine was once asked by some college to put together a dance curriculum, to which he said "No. They're too old".
Some of the early astronauts haven't done too well in later life. They were big heroes briefly, and then has-beens for decades.
Being an astronaut today must really suck. There are about 100 "active astronauts", most of whom will never get into space again. There has to be a layoff coming. Meanwhile, they get assigned to "lunch with an astronaut" duty.
Interestingly, the "pad" form factor machines are higher than they're wide. (They may work rotated, but their "native" mode is usually vertical.) So are all the "e-readers". One can see why for the small-screen readers, but it's interesting that the "pad" machines, which are somewhat larger, are vertical.
The original Xerox Alto was designed to display a standard printed page in full size. (I feel really old. I've used, and programmed, a Xerox Alto.)
"pooling"?
Political-correctness be damned, it's just a GOOD IDEA. It's an old saying that 'amateurs discuss tactics; professional soldiers talk about logistics'.
Right. Afghanistan is unusually difficult, though. No seaports. No navigable rivers. No railroads. Few roads. Unfriendly neighbors. Unfriendly population. Mountainous. Big. No secure rear areas. Few modern wars have been fought with such logistic obstacles. Throwing money at the problem works, but it's insanely expensive. The US is spending tons of money, and fuel, flying fuel around in C-130s.
Iraq was much easier. Baghdad is only 200 miles of freeway from Kuwait, and that's how most of the tanks got there. Once the US owned the road, bringing up supplies was straightforward. Vietnam has plenty of seacoast and useful rivers, and once the ports were built up, civilian carriers brought in most of the supplies.
I agree with the "Don't" people. I used to do physics engines, back int the 1990s when nobody else had one that worked right, and had some exposure to the game industry and Hollywood. (I did OK because I had a patent, and thus a strong bargaining position. I'm sure I'll hear whining about this from people who've never cracked a hard problem.) Both the game industry and Hollywood have more people wanting to get in than actually do get in. However, Hollywood has unions. This keeps the working hours down, the wages up, and, most importantly, the schedules sane. Because the unionized film industry pays overtime, including time and a half after 40 hours and double time after 6 days, management tries very hard to avoid "crunches", and film scheduling and budgeting are well understood. The game industry doesn't bother. Also, the film industry has better parties, better meals, and hotter women.
Even if you're at the high levels, but just an employee, game development tends to suck. SCEA had a panic after the Playstation 3 came out and they realized, far too late, that the Cell machine was nearly unprogrammable. So they basically yanked their R&D people off whatever they were doing and put them on Cell programming tools. There's also the fact that game development isn't about R&D that much any more. Most of the essential problems have been solved. How to do a big, seamless world, or a physics engine, or echo-free voice multiplayer voice chat, is well understood now. So a bigger fraction of the programming is grunt-level stuff.
I can't speak for the art side, but since game worlds got bigger, that's a huge, partially outsourced grind. Somebody has to draw all those buildings and storefronts. Doing artwork at full speed, full time, is wearing. It's much worse than typing.
I will say that the people who do well in the industry seem to have enough programming skills to write good code, enough artistic skills to make good artwork (although not necessarily at the speed of a working artist), and good insight into game playability, player dynamics, and social interaction.