Or at the most possible extreme, they could just be switching to GLES to help push developers towards Windows8 RT (since it's pretty obvious they're in catch up mode at the moment).
No it's probably secret as in:
Government: "MI6 does not exist"
Everyone else: "Yes it does, it's in that big building with MI6 written on it"
Government: "No, MI6 does not exist".
Everyone else: "But you just responded to this question using the e-mail address: queries@MI6.gov.uk"
Government: "ok, so MI6 does exist"
Everyone else: "We already know"
I dispute that claim. I've worked in middleware, where we put insane amounts of effort into utilising multiple cores (kinda required for the PS3/360), and pretty much all 3rd party middleware is now happy to run across multiple cores. The more middleware a game uses, the more likely it is to make *relatively* good use of the cores (certainly much more so than most software products). If you're targetting a game at iOS, then assuming it isn't some tedious zynga-style-freemium game, you've probably put a fair amount of effort into multi-threading it (because that's the only way to locate the extra performance). The issue really comes when you hit PC gaming. If you've ported your game from console to PC, then it will have been designed to use 6 cores at 100%. Since an i7 will wipe the floor with the 360/PS3, chabces are, this game will only result in 30% CPU usage on that system. As it is, a lot of PC developers target a lower specced system (e.g. 2.0Ghz core 2) to maximise their potential market. Once again, if you run this game on an i7, it's barely going to get over 20% usage. Yes there are poorly coded (and older titles) that utilise one core only, but these days that's becomming far less common. If a game is hammering all CPU cores at 100%, it's either porrly coded, or you have a very low specced CPU (e.g. ATOM).
No, the name 'angus beef' has legal protection. Either it's certified angus beef, or it's breaking the law. It's one of the few meat products McD sells which the consumer actually knows what it is.....
No, it's really much simpler than that. Encourage a parent to install a free game from the app store, and then guide the child to the 'buy more gems' IAPs before the 15 minutes password window expires. The reason analytics has become so prevelant, is that its a way for game designers to mentally divorce the ethically dubious mechanics of their game, from the profit it's generating. I've actually had conversations with people about their daily graphs, which clearly show huge profits from new players within the first 10 minutes of play, followed by no profit thereafter. When I've pointed out what those graphs indicate, by and large the response was always "but the analytics says these people are all in the 30-40 year old age range, so we aren't exploiting children in the way you're suggesting". Sure there are some people who will make IAPs to get around some of the grind, but by and large, the vast majority of profit is made within that frst 10 minute window. It's a business ethic that made me quit the industry.
Because it is impossible to do it with knives or more likely gas bombs or half a dozen other things any of us could easily think of?
Many years ago, I was walking through town with a freind of mine (who happened to be quite good at wing chun), and a guy pulled a knife out and asked for our wallets. My friend took a single step forward, plucked the knife right out of his hand, and then asked him if he wanted it back. If someone had pulled a knife in my school, he'd either have been floored by half the rugby team in seconds, or he'd have been battered from all sides with school chairs.
until you find yourself in your car without a charger, and then you find out just how quickly the battery run out when your iphone has the maps app, gpsm and 3g running.
If you're the kind of person who's going to spend above the average list price on a car, you're either going to spend the money to 'help' the environment in some way (eg hybrid), hurt the environment in some way (Big/Fast car), or to simply make the journey more comfortable (heated seats, sound system, etc). You're certainly not the kind of person to spend the money on a radar system, sensors, cameras, computing power, and the extra petrol consumption needed to lug that equipment around just incase you have a lapse in concentration. For everyone else, cheap, reliable, and economical are usually the primary concerns. I imagine there may be a handful of people who are interested in this technology, but they're also likely to be the kind of cautious driver that only has an accident when someone else crashes into them. How will this system control the 'other drivers' ?
Well my mother (70) uses a PC to scan in old family photos as high quality RAW files, besides the usual web browsing + email. AFAIK, there are no tablet apps that support the editing of raw images (Photoshop is limited to jpeg only on tablets). Tablets are media consumption devices, and not generally that great at content creation (finger painting, and basic music creation aside)
Exactly, the 12 inch form factor is alive and well, its just nobody wants the shitty Atom CPU
I do, and infact own one (asus 1201n with the nvidia ION). It cost about £400 new (about 3 years ago i think?), which was then, and still is, about half the price of an equivalent sized ultrabook. It can run Visual C++, or any of the dev tools I need on linux, and has a GPU capable of handling CUDA and GLSL. As an R&D programmer in the film VFX industry, it means I can use my commute to do some serious work, and the low price point means I'm not too worried about it dying a death in my rucksack, or being left behind on a bus/train. I've been thinking about upgrading recently, and there really isn't anything out there that's even remotely similar. You can find 15" laptops with decent GPUs, but they're too heavy for my needs. Tablets are not suitable for my work, so they're out. You can find plenty of 13" laptops, but all of them use the intel integrated GPUs (which, whilst they have improved, still do not offer the functionality i need). Macbook airs & 13" pros are out (all use Intel GPU). Dell XPS 13" ? Intel again.
There is literally nothing available that has a small form factor, and has an Nvidia GPU (or even an ATI GPU, which would be my second choice). The only avenue that looks promising is buying a second hand ultrabook from fleabay. So your assertion that no one wants a small form factor with a shitty CPU is plain wrong. I'd happily have a shitty CPU, so long as it was paired with a good GPU. That option simply does not exist anymore:(
A lot more money than can be generated from a free-to-play game. All freemium games have a profit spike at the beginning, before tailing off into a profitless mass of users who pay nothing at all, but are just there for enjoyment.
A hand-me-down laptop has more processing power than a new iPad or smartphone, and a first generation iPad has more than enough processing power for any of the zynga games. Zynga games are nothing more than an elaborate form of stamp collecting. Grind for a bit, collect gold, buy next stamp, rinse, repeat. If the grind gets too dull, exchange cash for virtual gold, and you can skip some of the tedium. The server storage per player won't be much beyond a few hundred bytes for the game data, and maybe 1 or 2 meg to store the 'friends list' (zynga games use nothing more than a MySQL database). The server 'owns' the stamps you've been collecting. If it didn't, you'd be able to buy and sell stamps without needing to pay money to zynga, and at that point they'd have no business model. The only Zynga game(s) that were any good, were the very early scrabble/risk rip-offs (I was quite partial to a bit of risk). They were free to play, generated no income, and were only used by zynga to get up the numbers of facebook users for the later cityville/farmville spam assault that we all know and love Zynga for today. Those servers were sadly shut down quite early on (and I've yet to find a better version of online risk).
yeah, helped fix a laptop for a friend (failed HDD, vista x64), and thought I'd take advantage of the £25 pro upgrade offer on at the moment. Turns out you have to install it onto the exact same drive as the original OS, and that you have to install windows8 from inside the original OS. Since that was not possible, I spent about 4 hours on the phone to MS activation, who agreed the license was valid, and that they should be able to activate it at their end, but everything they tried to do, failed to activate windows 8. Eventually I just got fed up and asked for a refund (which appeared to be a very common request when talking to the person at MS activation). For possibly the first time in my life, I seriously considered installing linux on someone else's computer. The only sticking point was lightroom 4 (which AFAICT, does not work in wine yet, and no, gimp is not a viable alternative). Ended up turning it into a hackintosh instead.
To rub salt into the wound even further, Windows 8 is very much linked to your MS live account, so now I get a daily e-mail from MS explaining yet another hidden feature of the UI (todays was "How to use the start menu") that failed to even work in the first place. Terribly bad GUI aside, the entire experience was the worst software experience I've ever had in 30 years of playing around with computers. For the first time ever, I can actually say that 2013 may finally be the year of the linux desktop (although it will need lightroom 4 working in wine/natively, steam for games, and Open Office as a good-enough-replacement for MS office).
Slashdot Mirror
Or at the most possible extreme, they could just be switching to GLES to help push developers towards Windows8 RT (since it's pretty obvious they're in catch up mode at the moment).
No it's probably secret as in:
Government: "MI6 does not exist"
Everyone else: "Yes it does, it's in that big building with MI6 written on it"
Government: "No, MI6 does not exist".
Everyone else: "But you just responded to this question using the e-mail address: queries@MI6.gov.uk"
Government: "ok, so MI6 does exist"
Everyone else: "We already know"
I dispute that claim. I've worked in middleware, where we put insane amounts of effort into utilising multiple cores (kinda required for the PS3/360), and pretty much all 3rd party middleware is now happy to run across multiple cores. The more middleware a game uses, the more likely it is to make *relatively* good use of the cores (certainly much more so than most software products). If you're targetting a game at iOS, then assuming it isn't some tedious zynga-style-freemium game, you've probably put a fair amount of effort into multi-threading it (because that's the only way to locate the extra performance). The issue really comes when you hit PC gaming. If you've ported your game from console to PC, then it will have been designed to use 6 cores at 100%. Since an i7 will wipe the floor with the 360/PS3, chabces are, this game will only result in 30% CPU usage on that system. As it is, a lot of PC developers target a lower specced system (e.g. 2.0Ghz core 2) to maximise their potential market. Once again, if you run this game on an i7, it's barely going to get over 20% usage. Yes there are poorly coded (and older titles) that utilise one core only, but these days that's becomming far less common. If a game is hammering all CPU cores at 100%, it's either porrly coded, or you have a very low specced CPU (e.g. ATOM).
I ate some tescos burgers last week, probably wont buy them again, they gave me the trots for days....
No, the name 'angus beef' has legal protection. Either it's certified angus beef, or it's breaking the law. It's one of the few meat products McD sells which the consumer actually knows what it is.....
'Horse DNA' was found, not meat in the real sense, but mechanichally seperated meat. So yes, a glue factory is pretty close to the mark....
No, it's really much simpler than that. Encourage a parent to install a free game from the app store, and then guide the child to the 'buy more gems' IAPs before the 15 minutes password window expires. The reason analytics has become so prevelant, is that its a way for game designers to mentally divorce the ethically dubious mechanics of their game, from the profit it's generating. I've actually had conversations with people about their daily graphs, which clearly show huge profits from new players within the first 10 minutes of play, followed by no profit thereafter. When I've pointed out what those graphs indicate, by and large the response was always "but the analytics says these people are all in the 30-40 year old age range, so we aren't exploiting children in the way you're suggesting". Sure there are some people who will make IAPs to get around some of the grind, but by and large, the vast majority of profit is made within that frst 10 minute window. It's a business ethic that made me quit the industry.
Because it is impossible to do it with knives or more likely gas bombs or half a dozen other things any of us could easily think of?
Many years ago, I was walking through town with a freind of mine (who happened to be quite good at wing chun), and a guy pulled a knife out and asked for our wallets. My friend took a single step forward, plucked the knife right out of his hand, and then asked him if he wanted it back. If someone had pulled a knife in my school, he'd either have been floored by half the rugby team in seconds, or he'd have been battered from all sides with school chairs.
until you find yourself in your car without a charger, and then you find out just how quickly the battery run out when your iphone has the maps app, gpsm and 3g running.
How about just filling them with air instead of bullets?
If you're the kind of person who's going to spend above the average list price on a car, you're either going to spend the money to 'help' the environment in some way (eg hybrid), hurt the environment in some way (Big/Fast car), or to simply make the journey more comfortable (heated seats, sound system, etc). You're certainly not the kind of person to spend the money on a radar system, sensors, cameras, computing power, and the extra petrol consumption needed to lug that equipment around just incase you have a lapse in concentration. For everyone else, cheap, reliable, and economical are usually the primary concerns. I imagine there may be a handful of people who are interested in this technology, but they're also likely to be the kind of cautious driver that only has an accident when someone else crashes into them. How will this system control the 'other drivers' ?
Well my mother (70) uses a PC to scan in old family photos as high quality RAW files, besides the usual web browsing + email. AFAIK, there are no tablet apps that support the editing of raw images (Photoshop is limited to jpeg only on tablets). Tablets are media consumption devices, and not generally that great at content creation (finger painting, and basic music creation aside)
Depends on your definition of a nice desktop
The original 20" imacs came out in 2004 and were powered by the G4 processor. Something tells me mountain lion isn't an option.....
Oh, and I'll be keeping Windows 8 at arms length as much as possible.....
Why do we consider the monitor vertical to be the only way to position a monitor?
You'd need a much bigger desk to mount it horizontally.
I know. That's exactly what I said in my post.
Exactly, the 12 inch form factor is alive and well, its just nobody wants the shitty Atom CPU
I do, and infact own one (asus 1201n with the nvidia ION). It cost about £400 new (about 3 years ago i think?), which was then, and still is, about half the price of an equivalent sized ultrabook. It can run Visual C++, or any of the dev tools I need on linux, and has a GPU capable of handling CUDA and GLSL. As an R&D programmer in the film VFX industry, it means I can use my commute to do some serious work, and the low price point means I'm not too worried about it dying a death in my rucksack, or being left behind on a bus/train. I've been thinking about upgrading recently, and there really isn't anything out there that's even remotely similar. You can find 15" laptops with decent GPUs, but they're too heavy for my needs. Tablets are not suitable for my work, so they're out. You can find plenty of 13" laptops, but all of them use the intel integrated GPUs (which, whilst they have improved, still do not offer the functionality i need). Macbook airs & 13" pros are out (all use Intel GPU). Dell XPS 13" ? Intel again.
:(
There is literally nothing available that has a small form factor, and has an Nvidia GPU (or even an ATI GPU, which would be my second choice). The only avenue that looks promising is buying a second hand ultrabook from fleabay. So your assertion that no one wants a small form factor with a shitty CPU is plain wrong. I'd happily have a shitty CPU, so long as it was paired with a good GPU. That option simply does not exist anymore
Posted on a 12" Asus 1201N. Good enough to do some serious work on, crap enough that I don't mind losing it on my commute.
A lot more money than can be generated from a free-to-play game. All freemium games have a profit spike at the beginning, before tailing off into a profitless mass of users who pay nothing at all, but are just there for enjoyment.
A hand-me-down laptop has more processing power than a new iPad or smartphone, and a first generation iPad has more than enough processing power for any of the zynga games. Zynga games are nothing more than an elaborate form of stamp collecting. Grind for a bit, collect gold, buy next stamp, rinse, repeat. If the grind gets too dull, exchange cash for virtual gold, and you can skip some of the tedium. The server storage per player won't be much beyond a few hundred bytes for the game data, and maybe 1 or 2 meg to store the 'friends list' (zynga games use nothing more than a MySQL database). The server 'owns' the stamps you've been collecting. If it didn't, you'd be able to buy and sell stamps without needing to pay money to zynga, and at that point they'd have no business model. The only Zynga game(s) that were any good, were the very early scrabble/risk rip-offs (I was quite partial to a bit of risk). They were free to play, generated no income, and were only used by zynga to get up the numbers of facebook users for the later cityville/farmville spam assault that we all know and love Zynga for today. Those servers were sadly shut down quite early on (and I've yet to find a better version of online risk).
yeah, helped fix a laptop for a friend (failed HDD, vista x64), and thought I'd take advantage of the £25 pro upgrade offer on at the moment. Turns out you have to install it onto the exact same drive as the original OS, and that you have to install windows8 from inside the original OS. Since that was not possible, I spent about 4 hours on the phone to MS activation, who agreed the license was valid, and that they should be able to activate it at their end, but everything they tried to do, failed to activate windows 8. Eventually I just got fed up and asked for a refund (which appeared to be a very common request when talking to the person at MS activation). For possibly the first time in my life, I seriously considered installing linux on someone else's computer. The only sticking point was lightroom 4 (which AFAICT, does not work in wine yet, and no, gimp is not a viable alternative). Ended up turning it into a hackintosh instead.
To rub salt into the wound even further, Windows 8 is very much linked to your MS live account, so now I get a daily e-mail from MS explaining yet another hidden feature of the UI (todays was "How to use the start menu") that failed to even work in the first place. Terribly bad GUI aside, the entire experience was the worst software experience I've ever had in 30 years of playing around with computers. For the first time ever, I can actually say that 2013 may finally be the year of the linux desktop (although it will need lightroom 4 working in wine/natively, steam for games, and Open Office as a good-enough-replacement for MS office).
Nothing that sinister, they just wanted to be back in time for Eastenders.
Which is why I bought a monitor and a smart blu-ray player. Same functionality, but with no need to pay for a UK TV license.
My speccy 48k does that in 16kb rom space. Not saying the two are directly comparible, but it sure does make 210Mb sound somewhat less impressive....