Honestly you can ask to go permanent and that is probably it. Be grateful you appear to have a solid client that won't let you go.
From their point of view, they had the idea, the money, and the forward planning to know they needed an IT solution and put the right budget in place. If they did not have the budget, they would have offered equity at the time of your employment. You, at that time, would have said no.
Having been in a similar position, I turned it down. That venture failed eventually.
The real problem here is that there are game houses out there that are doing phenomenally well, while others are failing. A lot of this has to do with the business models they have adopted. Many of the 'failing' ones are very vertical. They contract develop games. This works well in a buoyant market, but during a recession, this can cause work to dry up.
The more successful ones have fingers in multiple pies, not only doing contract development but also developing their own in-house games with development targeted at mobile, console and PC.
Apparently crossfire scales better than sli and you are currently better off buying a couple of HD5970 as the cost is less than one HD5990/GTX590 and you get better performance.
I am on a 'tight' budget and bought one HD5970. I will upgrade next year by buying another should I get some sort of penis envy.
Microsoft have quietly sat there and let people play and even gone as far as to begin the process of releasing an official Windows API for the device and the sales figures for the Kinect are through the roof. It's an amazing piece of kit.
If this had been Sony this would have been a legal fight from beginning to end.
What I was getting at is that this type of scheme will get other countries looking at the solution and if that solution can be used within their city/town.
With a diesel bus having a range of 300 miles, timetables and the number of buses used, and the ability to interchange them quickly between routes, it will have taken years to bed the time tables in.
With the above system you are adding a 2.5 hour downtime per day to each bus. This is quite a complicated thing to factor in.
The reality is, that this type of system will become popular when they solve the ability to replace a spent battery pack in under a minute.
I do think this is a proof of concept, but to make it marketable worldwide, you need to be able to demonstrate how flexible such a system is.
My concern with this is that the solution limits you to certain routes. You could not have this operate on a rural bus route. Asking passengers to wait 30 minutes while the bus is recharged would be a bit ridiculous.
I don't understand why they didn't have an interchangeable battery pack. This would have allowed the bus to quickly swap out the exhausted pack and replace it with a new one and you could put the swapping stations at strategic points around the city/rural area.
I think it's one to watch, but until they solve the 'rural' issue this will only work in cities.
I get where you are coming from and I think it comes down to your own personal experience with WoW.
In my case there were usually 5-10 people sitting on Vent chatting while playing. So it becomes a social outlet. Although I cannot find a link to it, there is a massive social aspect to WoW, that is underpinned by the concept of the guild.
I had some great times, but a lot of it was down to the people you played with on a nightly basis.
There was a secondary reason for me quitting, I was taking off three months to work on a couple of projects and the last thing I needed was some sort of game sitting there that I could play whenever.
Personally I recognise in myself that I have an addictive personality, but usually I pick up a game play it for a week or two then move on. With WoW it was the first game where the 'social' aspect became more important than the actual game. I was using it as a chat client. (Hint Blizzard bring out a RealId chat client!)
I have made many real life friends out of the game. I can only thank Blizzard for that, but I also recognise that the game has certain aspects to it that are not compatible with my life at the moment and I really wanted to make a clean break. Cata seemed the right point.
I gave away all my gold (about 120k), sold all my gear, deleted all my characters, waved good bye to guild friends (which is one of the major pressures to play) and un-subscribed.
Boy have I been tempted to go back, but if the urge gets too great, I take a lump of wood, whittle a small penguin, stare at it for 5 minutes, look in the mirror and tell myself that I have achieved more in those 5 minutes than any achievement/raid boss kill would ever do.
Interestingly enough our fortnightly games night had become a WoW LAN party (5 of us). With me quitting WoW, we have rediscovered board games and those nights have been a lot more mentally stimulating than any WoW dungeon crawl I can remember.
WoW is an amazing life-sink that you justify because of the other 20-40 other people in your guild wasting their lives away playing a game that never ends. I can't fault them for playing, but some of them are failing school and divorcing over this game.
I was very specific. I wanted to buy something for my daughter to take home that was American made, in a place, that is sold world wide, as a great American experience (and it was).
It's a real shame that the American dream is primarily selling Chinese products.
Then again, the irony of a Florida Wal-Mart selling Californian orange juice seem to have been lost on our hosts. They bought it because it was a few cents cheaper than the Florida OJ.
We went to Disney in Florida a couple of years ago, and as an experiment, I tried to buy an American made product/toy for my daughter inside the parks. I just couldn't do it. Cheap seems to be the focus of corporate America.
But isn't that the point. This card is aimed at the gamer who wants run 23 or 58fps for 4 hours every day and wants to make an investment that will be good enough for the next 2 years.
What the new 68 series cards indicate is that they don't cut the mustard or more precisely are expensive for what they do and that there are better cheaper cards out on the market. That is a real shame.
You are right however. I am particularly interested in is cards capable of running 3 screens.
And for those who don't want to rtfa, the author did a cost per fps evaluation: "Somewhat surprisingly, it's the 5850 that trips up being the worst offender here – effectively costing you £5.06 for each frame per second on average across our tests at 1,920 x 1,080.
The new cards, the Radeon 6870 and 6850 meanwhile roll in at £4.35 and £3.86 respectively, which looks pricey compared to the GTX 460's £3.36 per fps."
Personally I was going to hold fire on the purchase of a new machine to see if these cards are worth considering, but I might as well get on with buying it with a GTX 460 configuration.
Although you are probably not aware of it, most trading arms of the banks are at war against each other, trying to determine the trading algorythms each of them use, and deploy trading engines that take advantage of any weaknesses. It's one of the reasons you see an immense amount of mathmatical talent recruited by the Banks.
The problem I find with this, is that, unless the t&cs they signed to indicated that they should report any flaws in the bank's trading system, then this is actually a failure on the bank's part to test their systems.
I was part of the team that developed the short-term collision alert system for Swanick, UK. This type of prediction is unnecessary and not very useful to air traffic controllers, particularly in Europe, where each air space has a different way of dealing with traffic.
For example, pilots want to get their aircraft to specific altitudes to conserve fuel (usually around 29,000ft). In the UK, ATC keeps strict vertical and horizontal seperations, in France, they just let them hit the altitude they want, then play a complicated game of checkers with the planes.
In Greece, seperation over certain space is maintained by transponders on the ground, so spacing has to be a lot more forgiving, which also limits the throughput of the aircraft.
So in principle a plane, will fly at an optimum altitude and at a certain speed at that altitude primarily to conserve fuel. However when coming into an airport, control of altitude (and speed to a certain extent) will be handed to local ATC.
Of note, ATC will 'hand off' a plane to the next air space by assigning a new frequency upon which the plane should be communicating. Planes fly with a specifi flight plan.
Now unguided rockets.....that's a completely different matter.
The major issue with all this, is that although China does produce an immense amount of polution, to a certain extent, much of it is to satisfy western consumption.
If the rest of the world wants to criticise China, the first thing they need to do is start restricting the import of products that do not meet local pollution control requirements, or request that the importer pays for some sort of carbon offset/capture.
I have a similar issue with animal husbandry, where the UK has some of the strictest welfare regulations in place, but still allow the import of animal products from other EU countries.
However I can make a consumer choice, when purchasing meat, I have less of a choice when it comes to purchasing plastic etc.
This is not about stopping China from exporting goods, just that the factories these goods come from should be upheld to local pollution quality standards.
You do realise you can go into your brower settings on Android and turn on the plug in on demand option. This is effectively no script. You choose which Flash object to download and run.
It would help if people understood what it is that is now allowed on an iPhone. You cannot run Flash on the iPhone, you, however as a developer, now write one Flash (AS3) or Flex app and WILL be able to deploy it as a stand alone application to: 1) iOS 2) Android 2.2 3) RIM 4) Symbian 5) Windows Mobile 6) Meego 7) Palm OS 8) Linux (Desktop App) 9) OSX (Desktop App) 10) Windows (Desktop App) 11) Any browser that supports Flash 10.1
So, yeah, Flash is bloody awful apparently, but the value proposition of one set of code deployed to pretty much everything, is erm...well awesome. The development tool set Adobe (and others) have released for ActionScript 3 are exceptionally good. Flash isn't going away, but people keep bitching about the performance of it within the browser and how all it is used for is messing up your web experience and that is completely missing the point.
Adobe, and I have spoken to the Flex product development team, don't give a damn about web browser support, they want/need Flex to run as a standalone application through Air because that means they can deliver it to the above 10 operating systems.
From a business point of view, Adobe have a development platform that really can't be touched and the clause change Apple announced rightly caused Adobe's stock to rise 15%.
For all those anti-flash people, ActionScript 3 ain't that bad, and Flex is very productive.
Have absolutely no idea why Google are forcing tablets to have 3G. The Tab will come in at around $100-$200 with a 2 year contract. I actually think this type of price discounting FUD should be illegal. Tell me the total cost of the device and what part of the monthly fee goes towards the cost.
Anyway, so I already have a mobile phone that allows tethering, so I would like a wi-fi only Android 2.2 tablet please. I do not need another SIM. Google, get your act together.
The actual price, contract free, is likely to be in the $750 range. In the UK, the price of the Tab has been stated as being slightly more expensive than a Galaxy S. I can get one of those for around £400, so I expect to get a Tab around £500.
My problem is still that most new phones can tether. So my tablet does not need to have 3G functionality.
This is the first device I have seen where I've gone, wow, this has real business potential.
We can port our Flex (Flash) based applications to this using Air or through the web (with the settings set in the browser to only run plugins on demand). The resolution is also very good.
In the UK, normal consumer broadband is shared across 50 house holds. So if I can pay to have my broadband connection prioritised over 20 other people downloading torrents, then that is fine by me.
The issue is of course, as you said, prioritisation only works IF there is an agreed limit to the 'number' of prioritised connection per set of 50 house holds.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly you can ask to go permanent and that is probably it. Be grateful you appear to have a solid client that won't let you go.
From their point of view, they had the idea, the money, and the forward planning to know they needed an IT solution and put the right budget in place. If they did not have the budget, they would have offered equity at the time of your employment. You, at that time, would have said no.
Having been in a similar position, I turned it down. That venture failed eventually.
The real problem here is that there are game houses out there that are doing phenomenally well, while others are failing. A lot of this has to do with the business models they have adopted. Many of the 'failing' ones are very vertical. They contract develop games. This works well in a buoyant market, but during a recession, this can cause work to dry up.
The more successful ones have fingers in multiple pies, not only doing contract development but also developing their own in-house games with development targeted at mobile, console and PC.
Apparently crossfire scales better than sli and you are currently better off buying a couple of HD5970 as the cost is less than one HD5990/GTX590 and you get better performance.
I am on a 'tight' budget and bought one HD5970. I will upgrade next year by buying another should I get some sort of penis envy.
Microsoft have quietly sat there and let people play and even gone as far as to begin the process of releasing an official Windows API for the device and the sales figures for the Kinect are through the roof. It's an amazing piece of kit.
If this had been Sony this would have been a legal fight from beginning to end.
What I was getting at is that this type of scheme will get other countries looking at the solution and if that solution can be used within their city/town.
With a diesel bus having a range of 300 miles, timetables and the number of buses used, and the ability to interchange them quickly between routes, it will have taken years to bed the time tables in.
With the above system you are adding a 2.5 hour downtime per day to each bus. This is quite a complicated thing to factor in.
The reality is, that this type of system will become popular when they solve the ability to replace a spent battery pack in under a minute.
I do think this is a proof of concept, but to make it marketable worldwide, you need to be able to demonstrate how flexible such a system is.
My concern with this is that the solution limits you to certain routes. You could not have this operate on a rural bus route. Asking passengers to wait 30 minutes while the bus is recharged would be a bit ridiculous.
I don't understand why they didn't have an interchangeable battery pack. This would have allowed the bus to quickly swap out the exhausted pack and replace it with a new one and you could put the swapping stations at strategic points around the city/rural area.
I think it's one to watch, but until they solve the 'rural' issue this will only work in cities.
I get where you are coming from and I think it comes down to your own personal experience with WoW.
In my case there were usually 5-10 people sitting on Vent chatting while playing. So it becomes a social outlet. Although I cannot find a link to it, there is a massive social aspect to WoW, that is underpinned by the concept of the guild.
I had some great times, but a lot of it was down to the people you played with on a nightly basis.
There was a secondary reason for me quitting, I was taking off three months to work on a couple of projects and the last thing I needed was some sort of game sitting there that I could play whenever.
Personally I recognise in myself that I have an addictive personality, but usually I pick up a game play it for a week or two then move on. With WoW it was the first game where the 'social' aspect became more important than the actual game. I was using it as a chat client. (Hint Blizzard bring out a RealId chat client!)
I have made many real life friends out of the game. I can only thank Blizzard for that, but I also recognise that the game has certain aspects to it that are not compatible with my life at the moment and I really wanted to make a clean break. Cata seemed the right point.
And you have iron-clad proof that these same people wouldn't be failing school or divorcing over something else, were it not for WoW being there?
Yeah my wife is sleeping with me again :P
I'm banking on Diablo 3!
I gave away all my gold (about 120k), sold all my gear, deleted all my characters, waved good bye to guild friends (which is one of the major pressures to play) and un-subscribed.
Boy have I been tempted to go back, but if the urge gets too great, I take a lump of wood, whittle a small penguin, stare at it for 5 minutes, look in the mirror and tell myself that I have achieved more in those 5 minutes than any achievement/raid boss kill would ever do.
Interestingly enough our fortnightly games night had become a WoW LAN party (5 of us). With me quitting WoW, we have rediscovered board games and those nights have been a lot more mentally stimulating than any WoW dungeon crawl I can remember.
WoW is an amazing life-sink that you justify because of the other 20-40 other people in your guild wasting their lives away playing a game that never ends. I can't fault them for playing, but some of them are failing school and divorcing over this game.
"You" have a choice as to whether or not to purchase that item. It's called consumer pressure.
I was very specific. I wanted to buy something for my daughter to take home that was American made, in a place, that is sold world wide, as a great American experience (and it was).
It's a real shame that the American dream is primarily selling Chinese products.
Then again, the irony of a Florida Wal-Mart selling Californian orange juice seem to have been lost on our hosts. They bought it because it was a few cents cheaper than the Florida OJ.
We went to Disney in Florida a couple of years ago, and as an experiment, I tried to buy an American made product/toy for my daughter inside the parks. I just couldn't do it. Cheap seems to be the focus of corporate America.
The food is rather hoot over there.
But isn't that the point. This card is aimed at the gamer who wants run 23 or 58fps for 4 hours every day and wants to make an investment that will be good enough for the next 2 years.
What the new 68 series cards indicate is that they don't cut the mustard or more precisely are expensive for what they do and that there are better cheaper cards out on the market. That is a real shame.
You are right however. I am particularly interested in is cards capable of running 3 screens.
Review is here
And for those who don't want to rtfa, the author did a cost per fps evaluation:
"Somewhat surprisingly, it's the 5850 that trips up being the worst offender here – effectively costing you £5.06 for each frame per second on average across our tests at 1,920 x 1,080.
The new cards, the Radeon 6870 and 6850 meanwhile roll in at £4.35 and £3.86 respectively, which looks pricey compared to the GTX 460's £3.36 per fps."
Personally I was going to hold fire on the purchase of a new machine to see if these cards are worth considering, but I might as well get on with buying it with a GTX 460 configuration.
Although you are probably not aware of it, most trading arms of the banks are at war against each other, trying to determine the trading algorythms each of them use, and deploy trading engines that take advantage of any weaknesses. It's one of the reasons you see an immense amount of mathmatical talent recruited by the Banks.
The problem I find with this, is that, unless the t&cs they signed to indicated that they should report any flaws in the bank's trading system, then this is actually a failure on the bank's part to test their systems.
I was part of the team that developed the short-term collision alert system for Swanick, UK. This type of prediction is unnecessary and not very useful to air traffic controllers, particularly in Europe, where each air space has a different way of dealing with traffic.
For example, pilots want to get their aircraft to specific altitudes to conserve fuel (usually around 29,000ft). In the UK, ATC keeps strict vertical and horizontal seperations, in France, they just let them hit the altitude they want, then play a complicated game of checkers with the planes.
In Greece, seperation over certain space is maintained by transponders on the ground, so spacing has to be a lot more forgiving, which also limits the throughput of the aircraft.
So in principle a plane, will fly at an optimum altitude and at a certain speed at that altitude primarily to conserve fuel. However when coming into an airport, control of altitude (and speed to a certain extent) will be handed to local ATC.
Of note, ATC will 'hand off' a plane to the next air space by assigning a new frequency upon which the plane should be communicating. Planes fly with a specifi flight plan.
Now unguided rockets.....that's a completely different matter.
The major issue with all this, is that although China does produce an immense amount of polution, to a certain extent, much of it is to satisfy western consumption.
If the rest of the world wants to criticise China, the first thing they need to do is start restricting the import of products that do not meet local pollution control requirements, or request that the importer pays for some sort of carbon offset/capture.
I have a similar issue with animal husbandry, where the UK has some of the strictest welfare regulations in place, but still allow the import of animal products from other EU countries.
However I can make a consumer choice, when purchasing meat, I have less of a choice when it comes to purchasing plastic etc.
This is not about stopping China from exporting goods, just that the factories these goods come from should be upheld to local pollution quality standards.
You do realise you can go into your brower settings on Android and turn on the plug in on demand option. This is effectively no script. You choose which Flash object to download and run.
It would help if people understood what it is that is now allowed on an iPhone. You cannot run Flash on the iPhone, you, however as a developer, now write one Flash (AS3) or Flex app and WILL be able to deploy it as a stand alone application to:
1) iOS
2) Android 2.2
3) RIM
4) Symbian
5) Windows Mobile
6) Meego
7) Palm OS
8) Linux (Desktop App)
9) OSX (Desktop App)
10) Windows (Desktop App)
11) Any browser that supports Flash 10.1
So, yeah, Flash is bloody awful apparently, but the value proposition of one set of code deployed to pretty much everything, is erm...well awesome. The development tool set Adobe (and others) have released for ActionScript 3 are exceptionally good. Flash isn't going away, but people keep bitching about the performance of it within the browser and how all it is used for is messing up your web experience and that is completely missing the point.
Adobe, and I have spoken to the Flex product development team, don't give a damn about web browser support, they want/need Flex to run as a standalone application through Air because that means they can deliver it to the above 10 operating systems.
From a business point of view, Adobe have a development platform that really can't be touched and the clause change Apple announced rightly caused Adobe's stock to rise 15%.
For all those anti-flash people, ActionScript 3 ain't that bad, and Flex is very productive.
The FTC investigation would only need to insist Apple play by the rules and remove all apps that were not written only in Objective C.
You would probably lose 99% of the games on the store.
Have absolutely no idea why Google are forcing tablets to have 3G. The Tab will come in at around $100-$200 with a 2 year contract. I actually think this type of price discounting FUD should be illegal. Tell me the total cost of the device and what part of the monthly fee goes towards the cost.
Anyway, so I already have a mobile phone that allows tethering, so I would like a wi-fi only Android 2.2 tablet please. I do not need another SIM. Google, get your act together.
The actual price, contract free, is likely to be in the $750 range. In the UK, the price of the Tab has been stated as being slightly more expensive than a Galaxy S. I can get one of those for around £400, so I expect to get a Tab around £500.
My problem is still that most new phones can tether. So my tablet does not need to have 3G functionality.
This is the first device I have seen where I've gone, wow, this has real business potential.
We can port our Flex (Flash) based applications to this using Air or through the web (with the settings set in the browser to only run plugins on demand). The resolution is also very good.
I'm quite excited by this.
In the UK, normal consumer broadband is shared across 50 house holds. So if I can pay to have my broadband connection prioritised over 20 other people downloading torrents, then that is fine by me.
The issue is of course, as you said, prioritisation only works IF there is an agreed limit to the 'number' of prioritised connection per set of 50 house holds.