Both are good for shareholders. The problem is, like finance/banking executives, their bonuses are based on short term gains. When it comes to the annual review in front of the board, being able to say
"Well I shipped a $200 million product this year with a cost of only $20 million with basically zero risk, versus Bob here, who is gambling $60 million of shareholder profit on developing a new franchise "Soldiers who Shoot Stuff", and shipped nothing. We'll be lucky if we break even on Bob's little "project" here. Keep in mind when you're handing out bonuses, my product made up 40% of the gross profits for the year. Based on sales analysis we project our profit margin on next year's sequel to be X and the spinoffs for the franchise to be Y, not counting mechandise and DLC"
On the flip side, you'll almost never get fired for doing your work slow as long as you get it right and don't piss anyone off. Getting promoted for doing it quickly and correctly yes, but if you have no ambition, slow and never getting fired works great for lots of people just hanging around waiting for their (years worked=sweet gov't pension) to pay off.
Activision is making a wide variety of (crap) games; you don't have to go out and buy them. The CEO's job is to make lots of profit for the shareholders by any means he can. If you don't like the rules of that "IRL" game, buy independent games, or at least games that aren't distributed by publicly held corporations. Nobody is forcing you to buy Activision's games...
I cant help but wonder if this is incredibly common, just that we've never looked for it. Sophisticated sonar capable of detecting "non-visible methane bubbles" hasn't been cheap enough for anyone but the millitary until very recently (maybe fiften years), which is about the same time they started detecting this.
Install Samba from something like Darwinports or Fink, and then assign the samba process a max of 0.001% cpu time.
The other option is to share the images folder off a secondary eithernet card (how??), and connect the secondary eithernet card to the router using 100' of phone cable crimped into RJ-45 connectors for maximum latency.
If you want to increase his latency even more, connect that phone cable-come-eithernet cable to a dumb 10mb (not 10/100, but ten mbps) hub, add two other computers constantly pushing a dummy load of traffic across it, and then run a crossover cable to the router with another computer transfering data over the crossover cable to maximize the number of hub collisions.
We used to get together in high school and connect two dumb hubs together with a crossover cable and have about 15 people attempt to play games together using the setup described above. It hardly ever worked, which is why I'm suggesting it to you. Sucking a 30mb.psd file over high latency 10mbps phoneline-come-eithernet will teach anyone a lesson:)
Jon Katz, is that you?
on
Window Pain
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Whatever happened to that guy? He posted a bunch of worthless articles, wrote (and promoted) a book here on slashdot, got laughed out of the community and nobody's ever heard from him since.
Yeah, it's likely it was on a tripod, although you do see the camera rotate almost 45 degrees on a central axis, where tripods that have that sort of rotation capability rotate usually on the lower left corner. Now that I think about it, they mention it was done over a 4G connection, meaning it could have likely been from a phone.
I think all this technology has been around for decades (pretty much all the technology in Stephenson's Snow Crash is accessible through google or wikipedia in some way); it's just a matter of figuring out which pieces are most awesome with others, and then crafting them together in a usable and accessible fashion. Between 100mbps connections to the home and the amazing power of computers arriving in the next 5-10 years we'll probably have exhausted everything possible in 2D space, at which point walk-around 3D projection will be cheap enough to usher in the next group of 20-something garage startups like Microsoft Google and beyond.
Well shit, just buy the fan made sequel for pennies and roll it into the "ultimate Kings Quest Pack -- now with free, updated content!". Good will towards the community, plus a lot more (good) press in general for the pack.
I don't claim to be a MS fanboy, I only run XP for games; my laptops/netbooks all run ubuntu. Had any other company in the world released this you wouldn't have commented the way you did. Did you see how the user videos were overlaid right overtop of the existing data?? In google it's just a black, blank canvas (try looking up under the eiffle tower in paris). Who cares if you need a live feed to do that? Their system is infinitely more extensible than google's currently is. As for releasing tech demos, this was done right through their current map beta, which anyone can use. It's not vaporware.
Which makes the google demo look like something from 1996 in comparison. (Skip ahead to the 4:20 mark for some jaw-dropping live video overlaid on top of 3D interior shots of pike place market, generated from user pics. Mix that sort of data with technology like this and with enough computing power you could probably render a decent 3D model of the habitated world in a few weeks.
I'm a little shocked that people in the suburbs are always surprised to hear that dense cities, particularly areas with poor people recycle practically everything. In Bogota, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires - HUGE, bustling cities easily on par with the populations of NYC and LA -- it was not the least bit surprising to see an entire family (yes their 4 and 5 year old children happily helped out), or groups of widows, or simply a homeless man working together to pull apart the trashbags left out on the sidewalk and digging through all the thrown away food for the odd aluminum can, recyclable soda bottle, a pile of used staples or bent paperclips. At the end of buisness the streets would be teeming with boys aged 12-15 collecting shreded paper from banks in giant sacks 3' in diameter, carted off on wobbly, self made carts to who knows where, grinning at their great haul. Cleaning crews would show up about an hour later and cart off whatever was left behind (very, very little). Even in Dallas I've had to run off homeless people from my backyard, digging through my trash to find the odd bottle or soda can. Recycling is everywhere -- except the suburbs.
As Santiago, Chile has proven, there are many developed countries that are under the global radar with bustling cities that are rather self sufficient. The huge sprawling, wasteful metroplexes of the US are rather unique. Even poor China and India with their bad pollution recycles practically anything and everything.
If their server is down eight hours a day, they'd swap it immediately.
Maybe they just turn it off when they head home at night, and then back on in the morning when they get there? Perhaps the admin is trying to be 'green' DID YOU EVER THINK OF THAT.
Hell even PS3 games sometimes have the option to CYOR choose your own resolution - 480p, 720p 1080i and 1080p. Not to mention aspect ratio, and brightness levels.
I'm really shocked Borderlands wasn't included in the original article. Someone in another forum posted "i heard they finally fixed borderlands so you can play without unblocking 200 ports" - the response he got back was less than kind and more than happy to correct him. Great game, greater still with mutiplayer, but completely ruined when you can't play with three of your best pals. Also, lol @ gamespy as a matchmaking service. I felt like I'd traveled back to 1999.
In other news, the vestigial xbox360 code for L4D1 allowed you to play the PC version split screen with a friend, playing as player2 using a xbox360-come-USB controller and some well timed console commands.
Youtube 1080p videos still require some buffering on my 5mb connection. Did I mention they're compressed 1080p? It's pretty compressed video, but it's still compressed, and only in stereo. And only 30fps. Some of us have screens that support larger than 1080p. Some of us have computers that can handle 1080p at 60, or even 120fps. Imagine if Mozilla couldn't complain about which compression method we use because everyone simply had enough bandwidth to stream uncompressed video.
I, for one, welcome our 1080p+, uncompressed 120fps streaming video lords
Finally, but in replacement, Youtube is likely upgrading to their new "beta" interface they've been testing for quite some time, which has (IMO) really poor functionality, and looks like the Hulu.com's interface designer's scrappy younger brother designed (which is totally unusable, btw). No wonder they're dropping IE6 support; the new interface is such shit IE6 probably can't handle it.
Do the Myth II and "original Halo" share the same engine? I remember playing around with the Myth II map editor and couldn't help but notice that Halo looked shockingly like the Myth II maps I used to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Both are good for shareholders. The problem is, like finance/banking executives, their bonuses are based on short term gains. When it comes to the annual review in front of the board, being able to say
"Well I shipped a $200 million product this year with a cost of only $20 million with basically zero risk, versus Bob here, who is gambling $60 million of shareholder profit on developing a new franchise "Soldiers who Shoot Stuff", and shipped nothing. We'll be lucky if we break even on Bob's little "project" here. Keep in mind when you're handing out bonuses, my product made up 40% of the gross profits for the year. Based on sales analysis we project our profit margin on next year's sequel to be X and the spinoffs for the franchise to be Y, not counting mechandise and DLC"
On the flip side, you'll almost never get fired for doing your work slow as long as you get it right and don't piss anyone off. Getting promoted for doing it quickly and correctly yes, but if you have no ambition, slow and never getting fired works great for lots of people just hanging around waiting for their (years worked=sweet gov't pension) to pay off.
Activision is making a wide variety of (crap) games; you don't have to go out and buy them. The CEO's job is to make lots of profit for the shareholders by any means he can. If you don't like the rules of that "IRL" game, buy independent games, or at least games that aren't distributed by publicly held corporations. Nobody is forcing you to buy Activision's games...
I cant help but wonder if this is incredibly common, just that we've never looked for it. Sophisticated sonar capable of detecting "non-visible methane bubbles" hasn't been cheap enough for anyone but the millitary until very recently (maybe fiften years), which is about the same time they started detecting this.
Install Samba from something like Darwinports or Fink, and then assign the samba process a max of 0.001% cpu time.
.psd file over high latency 10mbps phoneline-come-eithernet will teach anyone a lesson :)
The other option is to share the images folder off a secondary eithernet card (how??), and connect the secondary eithernet card to the router using 100' of phone cable crimped into RJ-45 connectors for maximum latency.
If you want to increase his latency even more, connect that phone cable-come-eithernet cable to a dumb 10mb (not 10/100, but ten mbps) hub, add two other computers constantly pushing a dummy load of traffic across it, and then run a crossover cable to the router with another computer transfering data over the crossover cable to maximize the number of hub collisions.
We used to get together in high school and connect two dumb hubs together with a crossover cable and have about 15 people attempt to play games together using the setup described above. It hardly ever worked, which is why I'm suggesting it to you. Sucking a 30mb
Whatever happened to that guy? He posted a bunch of worthless articles, wrote (and promoted) a book here on slashdot, got laughed out of the community and nobody's ever heard from him since.
Yeah, it's likely it was on a tripod, although you do see the camera rotate almost 45 degrees on a central axis, where tripods that have that sort of rotation capability rotate usually on the lower left corner. Now that I think about it, they mention it was done over a 4G connection, meaning it could have likely been from a phone.
I think all this technology has been around for decades (pretty much all the technology in Stephenson's Snow Crash is accessible through google or wikipedia in some way); it's just a matter of figuring out which pieces are most awesome with others, and then crafting them together in a usable and accessible fashion. Between 100mbps connections to the home and the amazing power of computers arriving in the next 5-10 years we'll probably have exhausted everything possible in 2D space, at which point walk-around 3D projection will be cheap enough to usher in the next group of 20-something garage startups like Microsoft Google and beyond.
Well shit, just buy the fan made sequel for pennies and roll it into the "ultimate Kings Quest Pack -- now with free, updated content!". Good will towards the community, plus a lot more (good) press in general for the pack.
I don't claim to be a MS fanboy, I only run XP for games; my laptops/netbooks all run ubuntu. Had any other company in the world released this you wouldn't have commented the way you did. Did you see how the user videos were overlaid right overtop of the existing data?? In google it's just a black, blank canvas (try looking up under the eiffle tower in paris). Who cares if you need a live feed to do that? Their system is infinitely more extensible than google's currently is. As for releasing tech demos, this was done right through their current map beta, which anyone can use. It's not vaporware.
I missed it, or maybe it was CmdrTaco's description* that made me skip it. Either way, it's worth repeating.
/. front page - "This is a really exciting video and worth your 8 minutes."
*Actual description on
I showed that link to my buddy. He responded with this link:
http://www.videosift.com/video/TED-Augmented-reality-using-Bing-maps
Which makes the google demo look like something from 1996 in comparison. (Skip ahead to the 4:20 mark for some jaw-dropping live video overlaid on top of 3D interior shots of pike place market, generated from user pics. Mix that sort of data with technology like this and with enough computing power you could probably render a decent 3D model of the habitated world in a few weeks.
Aha, I did not know they had a name! Doesn't surprise me in the least though. Thanks for sharing!
I'm a little shocked that people in the suburbs are always surprised to hear that dense cities, particularly areas with poor people recycle practically everything. In Bogota, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires - HUGE, bustling cities easily on par with the populations of NYC and LA -- it was not the least bit surprising to see an entire family (yes their 4 and 5 year old children happily helped out), or groups of widows, or simply a homeless man working together to pull apart the trashbags left out on the sidewalk and digging through all the thrown away food for the odd aluminum can, recyclable soda bottle, a pile of used staples or bent paperclips. At the end of buisness the streets would be teeming with boys aged 12-15 collecting shreded paper from banks in giant sacks 3' in diameter, carted off on wobbly, self made carts to who knows where, grinning at their great haul. Cleaning crews would show up about an hour later and cart off whatever was left behind (very, very little). Even in Dallas I've had to run off homeless people from my backyard, digging through my trash to find the odd bottle or soda can. Recycling is everywhere -- except the suburbs.
As Santiago, Chile has proven, there are many developed countries that are under the global radar with bustling cities that are rather self sufficient. The huge sprawling, wasteful metroplexes of the US are rather unique. Even poor China and India with their bad pollution recycles practically anything and everything.
Maybe they just turn it off when they head home at night, and then back on in the morning when they get there? Perhaps the admin is trying to be 'green' DID YOU EVER THINK OF THAT.
:)
Hell even PS3 games sometimes have the option to CYOR choose your own resolution - 480p, 720p 1080i and 1080p. Not to mention aspect ratio, and brightness levels.
I'm really shocked Borderlands wasn't included in the original article. Someone in another forum posted "i heard they finally fixed borderlands so you can play without unblocking 200 ports" - the response he got back was less than kind and more than happy to correct him. Great game, greater still with mutiplayer, but completely ruined when you can't play with three of your best pals. Also, lol @ gamespy as a matchmaking service. I felt like I'd traveled back to 1999.
In other news, the vestigial xbox360 code for L4D1 allowed you to play the PC version split screen with a friend, playing as player2 using a xbox360-come-USB controller and some well timed console commands.
I'll come out and say it then, if you won't. 5,971,968,000 bps is enough bandwidth for anybody.
Youtube 1080p videos still require some buffering on my 5mb connection. Did I mention they're compressed 1080p? It's pretty compressed video, but it's still compressed, and only in stereo. And only 30fps. Some of us have screens that support larger than 1080p. Some of us have computers that can handle 1080p at 60, or even 120fps. Imagine if Mozilla couldn't complain about which compression method we use because everyone simply had enough bandwidth to stream uncompressed video.
I, for one, welcome our 1080p+, uncompressed 120fps streaming video lords
Ah, it appears you can now have sections you turned off before, set to "headline only" in addtion to completely off. Problem solved!
How do I turn off stories tagged both Idle and (other topic) without turning off (other topic) completely?
Finally, but in replacement, Youtube is likely upgrading to their new "beta" interface they've been testing for quite some time, which has (IMO) really poor functionality, and looks like the Hulu.com's interface designer's scrappy younger brother designed (which is totally unusable, btw). No wonder they're dropping IE6 support; the new interface is such shit IE6 probably can't handle it.
Do the Myth II and "original Halo" share the same engine? I remember playing around with the Myth II map editor and couldn't help but notice that Halo looked shockingly like the Myth II maps I used to make.
Nice redundant post!
Yeah, google "nuclear battery".