I remember something similar happening at a party at uni. There were a couple of guys in their mid 30's drinking soft drinks at a student party filled with 20 year olds. They kept going around asking if anyone could sort them out any drugs, or if they knew the name of anyone who could - but with a kind of zeal that your average person simply wouldn't have. They stuck out like a sore thumb, so everyone had twigged they were police well before the inevitable raid happened (by which time, anyone with anything, had already gone home). In the end, all they found was the rest of the party racking up lines of sugar on the kitchen table;)
Depends how wasted they are. I do recall seeing a particularly drunk guy at a festival trying to spoon it up his nose - his face was covered in the stuff.
Big budget games are already fast becoming untenable, but not for the reasons you cite. To develop a game you need money, and well, no one seems to have had any for a while now. If you can't find the money to fund the (2 to 4 years) development costs, you can't afford to pay the developers, and as a result you have one of two options.
a) Close the studio.
b) Find funding for 6 months, and switch to developing small titles for mobile platforms
It makes me sad to admit it, but even if you have the funding in place to develop a console title, both of the previous options are more financially viable (i.e. no profit is better than an operating loss). Unfortunately the industry seems to be caught up in a feedback loop at the moment. With less money available for development, development is being rushed, which leads to lower sales, nervous investors, and less cash for the next title.
It is common to see a slight downturn in sales towards the end of a consoles shelf life, but this one is particularly bad imho. If Sony delivers a PS4 that is another radical design which forces developers to spend years getting a single polygon on screen (as has been tradition), then I think that may mark the beginning of the end for the gaming console as we know it.....
A good car stays firmly planted on the ground, a good plane does not. A flying car would combine the absolute worst attributes of both, making it neither fund to drive, nor fun to fly. A helicopter is the closest you'll get to the aims of a flying car without being completely rubbish.
Maybe an ATI 59xx for the GPU, with a multicore CPU? Hell maybe they should team with AMD and use COTS like they did with the original Xbox. A dozen Bulldozer CPU/GPU combos feeding into a 58xx or 59xx or even a 6 series GPU would be a pretty badass console and make conversion between console and PC trivial.
Multi-core CPU and a series 6 GPU in a games console you say? Hmmmmm..... that sounds like a winning combination! I can't believe no one has thought of this before!
When you hear reports of developers receiving the first dev kits, you'll know you're 12 to 18 months from the consoles launch. Afaik, no dev kits in the wild so far...
My uncle once told me about a roadtrip across Europe he made about 50 years ago. He and his friend were drinking cans of beer whilst driving, and would periodically pull over to the side of the autobahn to throw up. Burning people at the stake for reading the bible in English used to be socially acceptable. Go back further than that to the ancient Greeks, and you'll discover that homosexuality and slavery were socially accepted norms. So is bullfighting ok? Well... is drink driving ok? How about slavery? How about homosexuality? Depending on 'when' you ask that question, you will get different answers. So I'm not sure your bullfighting argument carries much weight to be honest. In 500 years time, it may be a banned sport. Then again, it could also be the national sport of the USA. Whether or not anything is acceptable depends on the social values of the time.... and those are decided wholly by society *at that time*.
Society has in recent years valued free speech highly, but it has also decided it is unacceptable to slander or incite hatred using that freedom. So yes, you have the right to free speech, but with that, society has decided you must be accountable for the words you use. So free speech, as defined by society, requires you to associate your name with those words. What you are arguing for is something else.... anonymous speech. i.e. "say what the hell you like, and never be held accountable". I suspect you'll find that more people support the right to free speech, than support anonymous speech.
Only those who actually commit the crime can be held accountable.
Exactly. Slander, defamation, racial hatred. These are crimes.
A couple of months ago a quadro FX5800 spontaneously combusted under my desk. The flames only lasted 5 or 6 seconds at most, but that was enough to blacken the inside of the case, melt the plastic sheaths on some of the nearby fan cables, and warp the pci-e slot it had been sitting in. I can just about imagine a cardboard case surviving the fire, but I'd be much more worried about what happens next:
a) How long the cardboard case take to dissipate the heat? It took a *long* time for the quadro to cool down to a point where it could be removed.
b) What temperature does cardboard have to be to smoulder?
c) Would a small fire inside a cardboard case affect structural integrity? The last thing you'd want after a fire is the added insult of a hard drive collapsing onto your motherboard....
Deprecated?? I think not. Made Redundant, pointless, and irrelevant in the marketplace; totally outclassed and left for dead -- but not 'deprecated'.
Exactly! Have you ever tried rewinding a cassette tape with an ipod? For all this talk of this 'super sleek dial based user interface' they completely omitted an eject button. It's massive oversights like that, that has turned the ipod into just another 'almost ran'.....
For all it's faults, at least Microsoft eventually notices what people are actually doing with it's hardware, and then takes steps to legitimise those uses. Take for example the introduction of XNA (having learnt the lessons from the homebrew scene on the original xbox), or the recent announcement that they'll be providing an SDK for Kinect (having noticed that most people buying kinect were homebrew coders having fun). Sony on the other hand, removes linux support, and then proceeds to sue anyone and everyone who bought their hardware for reasons other than playing games.
You say that you don't want to support MS's efforts to prevent you tinkering, but to be honest they've given you C# & XNA for the purpose of doing just that. Yes C++ support would be nice, but I can see why that could cause too many problems (eg piracy), so I think they've come up with a reasonable half way house on this one. If you take a quick glance towards sony, you'll notice that they've started boarding up every window (of opportunity) on the PS3, and are currently in the process of mining the front garden with legal threats. The two approaches couldn't be more dissimilar imho..... It almost makes me 'like' microsoft!
On the contrary. Hollywood plots are so cohesive they've all congealed into the exact same story....
1. Film opens in meadow. Generic 'beefcake man' will be walking through the flowers with generic love interest. This part of the film was never in the script, but they didn't have the budget to pay for the FX shots of the mass battle sequence they'd originally planned, so generic love interest it is.... Expect the film to be padded out with numerous flashbacks featuring soft focus shots of flowers and flowing hair.
2. Cut to the current day. The relationship has broken down, and cue the entrance of generic beefcake mans, generic teenage boy child. Petulant teenage boy child will scream "I hate you!" and run off for some unexplained reason.
3. The phone will ring. For the next 30minutes we'll be treated to gratuitous shots of people talking on iPhones, culminating in some ridiculous plot device that triumphs the iPhone as the saviour of humanity.
4. We'll then have to sit through another 30 minutes of people driving a Humvee through some generic suburban streets. Generic teenage boy child will get some much needed moral guidance from generic beefcake man (required to avoid the dreaded 'R' rating). Cue second ridiculous plot device whereby the generic teenage boy childs life is saved by the total awesomeness of a humvee.
5. Mr Evil will kidnap generic teenage boy child. Generic beefcake man will get angry and go for a burger king.
6. The last 33 seconds will feature guns and the only special effects of the entire film. Cue another ridiculous plot device that sees generic beefcake man hacking into some generic mainframe computer via the totally awesome iPad - once again saving humanity, and the life of generic teenage boy child.
7. The final punch thrown in the film will be from either generic teenage boy child, or generic love interest woman. Don't ask me why, it just will...
8. Mr and Mrs generic live happily ever after with generic boy child.
9. The credits will role, and the audience will leave the cinema feeling a little dirtier than when they arrived.
It tells us to go to the arctic circle, for you will see nice auroras there (in a couple of days time). A *REALLY* big one might cause problems, but we get a few days warning to prepare.....
I'm sure there are number of paedophiles at large, and I'm sure that a number of them are uncles. However... one would hope that the vast majority don't have a large multi-national organisation systematically covering their tracks for them. If it was a single case of child abuse that had been over-hyped by the media, then your ill-advised post may have had some merit. But we aren't talking about a single case, we are talking about 11000 or so allegations of child abuse spanning 5 decades or more - every single one of which the Catholic Church tried to cover up. Whilst I'm sure there are many priests that do not abuse children, they still belong to the very same organisation that adopted a policy of "forgiveness" that allowed it to continue for so long. Frankly that makes the church, it's priests, and the Vatican as guilty as the paedophiles themselves.
So if someone accuses all catholic priests of child abuse, so be it. It's not actually that far from the truth....
I don't think that humanities are necessary, useful, or horizon-expanding, for that matter: hard sciences are a study of all Nature, with results that often are very widely applicable, whereas humanities are a specialized study of mostly artistic output of homo sapiens. Knowing literature won't help you in understanding what makes our world work, but knowing biochemistry may well help you understand what made your favorite author "tick";)
Nonsense! I'm a senior graphics programmer in the games industry mainly doing low level simd/gpu optimisations for, well, graphics! My education is as follows: I did an Art foundation, followed by an animation degree, and then a masters in animation (And in my spare time quite enjoyed playing about with C++ and OpenGL). I actually started in the games industry as an animator, and accidentally ended up as a programmer (Started somewhere new, the dev team said something was impossible. I proved them wrong with a bit of code, and was immediately re-assigned as their graphics programmer).
Very soon I found I could communicate all technical information from the programming team to the art team in a way that made sense. I could also communicate problems from the art team (which tended to be along the lines of "leg is squelching too much"), into technical jargon ("looks like you're accumulating the wrong matrix into the skin deformation"). Then we have the small matter that developing aesthetically pleasing graphical effects is significantly easier if you've got a well trained aesthetic eye. Understanding how light, shadows, and colour interact is absolutely invaluable in my field - one of those things you get taught in art classes!
FWIW, I'd say about 35% of the programmers I've worked with in the games industry (that figure is MUCH higher in filmFX), have tended to come from an art background. Almost all of the programmers I currently work with, actually attend life drawing classes in their spare time (Even if they can't draw for sh*t!), and spend countless hours honing their art skills. The reason is pretty simple: It's one of the most useful skills you can have in this field!
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I remember something similar happening at a party at uni. There were a couple of guys in their mid 30's drinking soft drinks at a student party filled with 20 year olds. They kept going around asking if anyone could sort them out any drugs, or if they knew the name of anyone who could - but with a kind of zeal that your average person simply wouldn't have. They stuck out like a sore thumb, so everyone had twigged they were police well before the inevitable raid happened (by which time, anyone with anything, had already gone home). In the end, all they found was the rest of the party racking up lines of sugar on the kitchen table ;)
Depends how wasted they are. I do recall seeing a particularly drunk guy at a festival trying to spoon it up his nose - his face was covered in the stuff.
Big budget games are already fast becoming untenable, but not for the reasons you cite. To develop a game you need money, and well, no one seems to have had any for a while now. If you can't find the money to fund the (2 to 4 years) development costs, you can't afford to pay the developers, and as a result you have one of two options.
a) Close the studio.
b) Find funding for 6 months, and switch to developing small titles for mobile platforms
It makes me sad to admit it, but even if you have the funding in place to develop a console title, both of the previous options are more financially viable (i.e. no profit is better than an operating loss). Unfortunately the industry seems to be caught up in a feedback loop at the moment. With less money available for development, development is being rushed, which leads to lower sales, nervous investors, and less cash for the next title.
It is common to see a slight downturn in sales towards the end of a consoles shelf life, but this one is particularly bad imho. If Sony delivers a PS4 that is another radical design which forces developers to spend years getting a single polygon on screen (as has been tradition), then I think that may mark the beginning of the end for the gaming console as we know it.....
I was never even aware ID had released Quake 5, 6, 7, let alone 8!
apologies for the treachery of the letter 'd'
A good car stays firmly planted on the ground, a good plane does not. A flying car would combine the absolute worst attributes of both, making it neither fund to drive, nor fun to fly. A helicopter is the closest you'll get to the aims of a flying car without being completely rubbish.
Never. They typically suffer from concussion coming through the door.....
Via a process called copying?
They only chose 360 because 'Xbox 2' didn't sound as new as 'PlayStation 3'. Whatever the name is, it will be at least 1 more than sony....
Maybe an ATI 59xx for the GPU, with a multicore CPU? Hell maybe they should team with AMD and use COTS like they did with the original Xbox. A dozen Bulldozer CPU/GPU combos feeding into a 58xx or 59xx or even a 6 series GPU would be a pretty badass console and make conversion between console and PC trivial.
Multi-core CPU and a series 6 GPU in a games console you say? Hmmmmm..... that sounds like a winning combination! I can't believe no one has thought of this before!
Low level device communication aside (which can't be .NET for obvious reasons), that's not actually as bad an idea as it sounds ;)
When you hear reports of developers receiving the first dev kits, you'll know you're 12 to 18 months from the consoles launch. Afaik, no dev kits in the wild so far...
Society has in recent years valued free speech highly, but it has also decided it is unacceptable to slander or incite hatred using that freedom. So yes, you have the right to free speech, but with that, society has decided you must be accountable for the words you use. So free speech, as defined by society, requires you to associate your name with those words. What you are arguing for is something else.... anonymous speech. i.e. "say what the hell you like, and never be held accountable". I suspect you'll find that more people support the right to free speech, than support anonymous speech.
Only those who actually commit the crime can be held accountable.
Exactly. Slander, defamation, racial hatred. These are crimes.
Send the judge scuba diving in Sharm el-Sheikh, and to the gallows? Do you have any preference in which order?
Nope, you summarised the problem very succinctly. You can't get patches from a diff, you can only get a patch....
A couple of months ago a quadro FX5800 spontaneously combusted under my desk. The flames only lasted 5 or 6 seconds at most, but that was enough to blacken the inside of the case, melt the plastic sheaths on some of the nearby fan cables, and warp the pci-e slot it had been sitting in. I can just about imagine a cardboard case surviving the fire, but I'd be much more worried about what happens next:
a) How long the cardboard case take to dissipate the heat? It took a *long* time for the quadro to cool down to a point where it could be removed.
b) What temperature does cardboard have to be to smoulder?
c) Would a small fire inside a cardboard case affect structural integrity? The last thing you'd want after a fire is the added insult of a hard drive collapsing onto your motherboard....
Deprecated?? I think not. Made Redundant, pointless, and irrelevant in the marketplace; totally outclassed and left for dead -- but not 'deprecated'.
Exactly! Have you ever tried rewinding a cassette tape with an ipod? For all this talk of this 'super sleek dial based user interface' they completely omitted an eject button. It's massive oversights like that, that has turned the ipod into just another 'almost ran'.....
For all it's faults, at least Microsoft eventually notices what people are actually doing with it's hardware, and then takes steps to legitimise those uses. Take for example the introduction of XNA (having learnt the lessons from the homebrew scene on the original xbox), or the recent announcement that they'll be providing an SDK for Kinect (having noticed that most people buying kinect were homebrew coders having fun). Sony on the other hand, removes linux support, and then proceeds to sue anyone and everyone who bought their hardware for reasons other than playing games.
You say that you don't want to support MS's efforts to prevent you tinkering, but to be honest they've given you C# & XNA for the purpose of doing just that. Yes C++ support would be nice, but I can see why that could cause too many problems (eg piracy), so I think they've come up with a reasonable half way house on this one. If you take a quick glance towards sony, you'll notice that they've started boarding up every window (of opportunity) on the PS3, and are currently in the process of mining the front garden with legal threats. The two approaches couldn't be more dissimilar imho..... It almost makes me 'like' microsoft!
Although it would appear that speed traps don't earn enough money to keep them switched on.....
On the contrary. Hollywood plots are so cohesive they've all congealed into the exact same story....
1. Film opens in meadow. Generic 'beefcake man' will be walking through the flowers with generic love interest. This part of the film was never in the script, but they didn't have the budget to pay for the FX shots of the mass battle sequence they'd originally planned, so generic love interest it is.... Expect the film to be padded out with numerous flashbacks featuring soft focus shots of flowers and flowing hair.
2. Cut to the current day. The relationship has broken down, and cue the entrance of generic beefcake mans, generic teenage boy child. Petulant teenage boy child will scream "I hate you!" and run off for some unexplained reason.
3. The phone will ring. For the next 30minutes we'll be treated to gratuitous shots of people talking on iPhones, culminating in some ridiculous plot device that triumphs the iPhone as the saviour of humanity.
4. We'll then have to sit through another 30 minutes of people driving a Humvee through some generic suburban streets. Generic teenage boy child will get some much needed moral guidance from generic beefcake man (required to avoid the dreaded 'R' rating). Cue second ridiculous plot device whereby the generic teenage boy childs life is saved by the total awesomeness of a humvee.
5. Mr Evil will kidnap generic teenage boy child. Generic beefcake man will get angry and go for a burger king.
6. The last 33 seconds will feature guns and the only special effects of the entire film. Cue another ridiculous plot device that sees generic beefcake man hacking into some generic mainframe computer via the totally awesome iPad - once again saving humanity, and the life of generic teenage boy child.
7. The final punch thrown in the film will be from either generic teenage boy child, or generic love interest woman. Don't ask me why, it just will...
8. Mr and Mrs generic live happily ever after with generic boy child.
9. The credits will role, and the audience will leave the cinema feeling a little dirtier than when they arrived.
It just says a lot for the company he keeps....
Yeah he's fairly cool, although we have to wash his muddy footprints off the sofa after every visit....
It tells us to go to the arctic circle, for you will see nice auroras there (in a couple of days time). A *REALLY* big one might cause problems, but we get a few days warning to prepare.....
I'm sure there are number of paedophiles at large, and I'm sure that a number of them are uncles. However... one would hope that the vast majority don't have a large multi-national organisation systematically covering their tracks for them. If it was a single case of child abuse that had been over-hyped by the media, then your ill-advised post may have had some merit. But we aren't talking about a single case, we are talking about 11000 or so allegations of child abuse spanning 5 decades or more - every single one of which the Catholic Church tried to cover up. Whilst I'm sure there are many priests that do not abuse children, they still belong to the very same organisation that adopted a policy of "forgiveness" that allowed it to continue for so long. Frankly that makes the church, it's priests, and the Vatican as guilty as the paedophiles themselves.
So if someone accuses all catholic priests of child abuse, so be it. It's not actually that far from the truth....
I don't think that humanities are necessary, useful, or horizon-expanding, for that matter: hard sciences are a study of all Nature, with results that often are very widely applicable, whereas humanities are a specialized study of mostly artistic output of homo sapiens. Knowing literature won't help you in understanding what makes our world work, but knowing biochemistry may well help you understand what made your favorite author "tick" ;)
Nonsense! I'm a senior graphics programmer in the games industry mainly doing low level simd/gpu optimisations for, well, graphics! My education is as follows: I did an Art foundation, followed by an animation degree, and then a masters in animation (And in my spare time quite enjoyed playing about with C++ and OpenGL). I actually started in the games industry as an animator, and accidentally ended up as a programmer (Started somewhere new, the dev team said something was impossible. I proved them wrong with a bit of code, and was immediately re-assigned as their graphics programmer).
Very soon I found I could communicate all technical information from the programming team to the art team in a way that made sense. I could also communicate problems from the art team (which tended to be along the lines of "leg is squelching too much"), into technical jargon ("looks like you're accumulating the wrong matrix into the skin deformation"). Then we have the small matter that developing aesthetically pleasing graphical effects is significantly easier if you've got a well trained aesthetic eye. Understanding how light, shadows, and colour interact is absolutely invaluable in my field - one of those things you get taught in art classes!
FWIW, I'd say about 35% of the programmers I've worked with in the games industry (that figure is MUCH higher in filmFX), have tended to come from an art background. Almost all of the programmers I currently work with, actually attend life drawing classes in their spare time (Even if they can't draw for sh*t!), and spend countless hours honing their art skills. The reason is pretty simple: It's one of the most useful skills you can have in this field!