But don't forget the free evangelist marketing that takes place.
On Console, friends are evangelists, paying full price to spread the word about good games.
On PC, pirates are evangelists, paying nothing to spread the word about good games.
While you get less from the pirates (and thus have to keep your prices lower), you get more free marketing for good games, which should combine well with lower prices to make up a lot of sales.
But the console market is bigger, so you always get more sales there. It skews the results a bit.
You have a valid point. I can't imagine what Microsoft would charge Valve for 4-5 extra campaigns, complete with a new engine and gigabytes of artwork. The download costs alone would be several dollars, and then you have certification, the chances of players re-downloading in the future, etc...
An expansion or sequel is clearly the way to go. I guess they chose sequel. Hopefully this means expansion campaigns will trickle out to us over the next few years, for free. (on PC)
You seem to be forgetting the ludicrous amount Microsoft charges for bandwidth.
If they charged $1.50 on an average update, they might be breaking even. But that still doesn't pay for the extra developers that have to figure out how the hell the game works with only some of the available DLC. $2.50 might be a better estimate.
Oh wait - Microsoft charges per download, so if you re-download DLC, ever, that costs money too. Might be best to add some padding to that figure, because I'm sure many players will re-download a few times.
For the DLC, I believe Microsoft FORCE Valve to charge. Gabe (who looks more like Peter from Family Guy by the day) has said that they want to give it away, but MS won't let them. Not sure how much truth there is in that given Valve have recently turned to the dark side and taken this DLC to its natural conclusion and are releasing what should be DLC for Left 4 Dead as a full title.
That's debateable. New engine, new art, new campaigns, new voice actors, vastly expanded team working on it. Most people arguing against L4D2 seem to be arguing because it's "too soon". It's like you guys would be happier if it were released in 2012, rather than 2009. And the irony is, the release date won't affect anything, because L4D updates are still going to come out as slow as they have been. It'll just give some extra content before the release, giving the perception that they kept their word.
Nah...no thanks. If they can churn out a quality sequel, and fix all those engine bugs in the process, I'll bite. I don't believe they're going to just ditch L4D gamers, and I don't think they should have to artificially delay release to satisfy foolish angry self-proclaimed non-customers.
Companies now realise that instead of a full expansion for, say, $20, they can now put it out in chunks and make twice that.
So what you're saying is, you're against the implementation rather than the concept? Me too. I'd be quite happy to buy extra L4D campaigns(well made ones) for say $4. That would be 5 campaigns in a $20 expansion.
$10 though is too steep.
But from Valve's point of view, it's far easier managing a unified platform, so they'd rather charge more for the game and just trickle out DLC for free forever.
I don't think it is fair to compare the exposure of information about the general public to the doings and goings on about public officials in a position of public trust. It has long been the expectation that there should be transparency in the affairs of government officials as a means by which public trust can be maintained. The standard should be different for private individuals which is precisely why we identify people as being either "public" or "private" individuals.
And yet for an undercover cop to do his job, it's rather important that he fit in the "private" group, don't you think?
Java is hardly an example of a statically and strongly typed language. Most Java value types are actually object classes, and these are heap-allocated objects checked at runtime. Combine this with the fact that you can cast an expression to another type and you end up with runtime exceptions. Now if you were talking about ML or Haskell, that would be something different, but you haven't actually mentioned any good statically and strongly typed language in your post.
It's worth noting that the Java bytecode compiler catches a lot. It's not perfect, and you can easily get around its protections by assigning null or casting to Object first - but being extremely strict may frighten people away, so it's a good compromise.
I'm just glad it's more strict than C, while cutting out a lot of the extra stuff like memory management. Mind you, I sorely miss things like public:
If you get a ClassCastException or other such runtime exception, you may not be coding properly.;)
Certainly, there are a few features that speed rendering up, while making it look better.
But those same features were probably available on older cards - just not exposed in the API. I saw an OpenGL Parallax Occlusion demo years back, running on a GeForce 6 or 7. (Can't recall which)
HDAO looks nice, but the performance hit is massive. I just know there's going to be a few games that force it on, completely tanking your framerate for a few shadows.:P
And yes, framerate dropping to 10% is completely tanking.;)
As long as your job isn't that physical, you don't need a lot of rest for your body to recover. On days where I do nothing, I can wake up the next day after 4 hours of sleep and my body feels great. But I'm just a tad groggy, and can't stay awake past 6PM.;) \
If you have a very physical job, you probably need more resting time for your body than your mind.
30-40 watts isn't a good estimate. More appropriate would be four. Processors already vastly cut their power consumption when processor usage falls to almost nothing. Even a beefy 95w CPU isn't going to consume more than 10 watts when fully idle. Speedstep saves some more of that.
Note: This doesn't refute the validity of your post. Keeping your CPU busy will cost you lots of money - just not for the reason you think.
If you want to test your own computer's power consumption, I suggest you grab a Kill-A-Watt off newegg.
But then you lose the upgrade path. If you need a RAM upgrade, you're locked into DDR2, while DDR3 could very well be significantly cheaper when you finally need more RAM.
I just picked up an Athlon II X2 245, to give a boost to my aging Athlon X2 rig.
I've overclocked it to 3.55ghz, and I must say I'm impressed with the power usage.
Full specs: Athlon II X2 245 2.9ghz @ 3.55ghz (65w, 45nm) 2x2048MB Corsair XMS 800mhz DDR2 @ 920mhz Asus 8800GS (got it on sale for $40 CAD one year ago!) Asus M3N78-PRO Corsair HX620 WD Caviar 640GB
Now, according to my Kill-A-Watt, my draw from the wall is...
Note: For MediaCoder I was encoding H.264-mp3 on both cores, to an mp4 container, for upload to Youtube. For my Athlon II, it seems to alternate between 100 watts and 130 watts, depending on the complexity of the video. First pass seems to be mostly 100 watts, while second pass is 130 watts the entire encode.
I'm impressed by AMD's wattage ratings. They're way better than last generation, and they sure don't compare to Intel's!
And then, what about the fact that a large file which is created all at once, is normally not fragmented very much, but if the storage file is frequently modified, it is likely to become more and more fragmented â" thus giving people a way to tell if the encryption program is being used frequently.
FYI, fragmentation isn't an issue if the size of the file isn't changing.
If you append even one extra byte, or shrink the file, you may have issues, depending on the filesystem, but filesystems don't merrily go around shuffling/fragmenting files on every single write. If a file is 256MB, and you're overwriting 6MB somewhere in the middle, it overwrites those 6MB. If the file isn't fragmented, then the HDD doesn't have to seek much, so it'd be ludicrous re-writing that chunk of the file(or the whole thing) at another location. That would just slow things down, so HDDs and filesystems avoid that.
Although, I can't speak to how Truecrypt manipulates file writes... if the encryption really scatters the data, there might be a lot of seeking involved - but I really doubt it'd fragment the file.
Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, heaps of data about your playing style is collected at Eidos' servers.
Thanks for the heads up, so I won't buy it. I personally don't like having everything I do monitored in some way on some server with a shady privacy policy.
What, you mean like EQ2 and WoW do?
Apparently every single thing to take place is recorded by EQ2. A while back some giddy scientists got their hands on the massive amount of data, to run algorithms on it.
And if you don't think Blizzard does the same thing...hah...get real.:P
There's also no way it could be as cheap as the Beagleboard.
I concur, which is why I mentioned an extra $150 or so.
It's still a high profit margin, even if you factor in all the parts I couldn't think of, and 200 million in R&D. Don't forget that by the hundreds of thousands to millions, prices of everything drop to at least half.
More generally, you seem to be appealing to the fallacy of "Some things we know to be true, we once didn't know, therefore we should consider that this thing which I claim might one day turn out to be true". Right, and I claim that there are invisible pixies in my garden. One day we'll discover them, just you wait.
Wouldn't you laugh if your grandkids discovered cloaked alien sensor devices in your garden?:D
Then users "buy" $800 devices for "$99" and make fun of uncrippled foreign cell phone brands because they're "so expensive"
I make fun of Americans for believing those $800 devices cost $800.
The manufacturing cost is probably $130, plus another $50 for licensing stuff, and then you have some transport costs. The rest is profit.
For example, the $799 iPhone 3GS has much of the same hardware as the Beagleboard. (Same SoC anyway)
Now, you have to ask - is an antenna, LCD/touchscreen, some accelerometers, 32GB of flash, and a bit more dev time worth $650, or are they rolling in profit on every angle? The most expensive parts would be touchscreen and flash, but even those won't add up to more than $150. (probably not even $100, judging by bulk SD card costs)
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But don't forget the free evangelist marketing that takes place.
On Console, friends are evangelists, paying full price to spread the word about good games.
On PC, pirates are evangelists, paying nothing to spread the word about good games.
While you get less from the pirates (and thus have to keep your prices lower), you get more free marketing for good games, which should combine well with lower prices to make up a lot of sales.
But the console market is bigger, so you always get more sales there. It skews the results a bit.
You have a valid point. I can't imagine what Microsoft would charge Valve for 4-5 extra campaigns, complete with a new engine and gigabytes of artwork. The download costs alone would be several dollars, and then you have certification, the chances of players re-downloading in the future, etc...
An expansion or sequel is clearly the way to go. I guess they chose sequel. Hopefully this means expansion campaigns will trickle out to us over the next few years, for free. (on PC)
You seem to be forgetting the ludicrous amount Microsoft charges for bandwidth.
If they charged $1.50 on an average update, they might be breaking even. But that still doesn't pay for the extra developers that have to figure out how the hell the game works with only some of the available DLC. $2.50 might be a better estimate.
Oh wait - Microsoft charges per download, so if you re-download DLC, ever, that costs money too. Might be best to add some padding to that figure, because I'm sure many players will re-download a few times.
For the DLC, I believe Microsoft FORCE Valve to charge. Gabe (who looks more like Peter from Family Guy by the day) has said that they want to give it away, but MS won't let them. Not sure how much truth there is in that given Valve have recently turned to the dark side and taken this DLC to its natural conclusion and are releasing what should be DLC for Left 4 Dead as a full title.
That's debateable. New engine, new art, new campaigns, new voice actors, vastly expanded team working on it. Most people arguing against L4D2 seem to be arguing because it's "too soon". It's like you guys would be happier if it were released in 2012, rather than 2009. And the irony is, the release date won't affect anything, because L4D updates are still going to come out as slow as they have been. It'll just give some extra content before the release, giving the perception that they kept their word.
Nah...no thanks. If they can churn out a quality sequel, and fix all those engine bugs in the process, I'll bite. I don't believe they're going to just ditch L4D gamers, and I don't think they should have to artificially delay release to satisfy foolish angry self-proclaimed non-customers.
Companies now realise that instead of a full expansion for, say, $20, they can now put it out in chunks and make twice that.
So what you're saying is, you're against the implementation rather than the concept? Me too. I'd be quite happy to buy extra L4D campaigns(well made ones) for say $4. That would be 5 campaigns in a $20 expansion.
$10 though is too steep.
But from Valve's point of view, it's far easier managing a unified platform, so they'd rather charge more for the game and just trickle out DLC for free forever.
I don't think it is fair to compare the exposure of information about the general public to the doings and goings on about public officials in a position of public trust. It has long been the expectation that there should be transparency in the affairs of government officials as a means by which public trust can be maintained. The standard should be different for private individuals which is precisely why we identify people as being either "public" or "private" individuals.
And yet for an undercover cop to do his job, it's rather important that he fit in the "private" group, don't you think?
Yes, but... the police aren't broadcasting 24/7 on the internet, are they? They use that info internally, with some discretion.
Also, in many places there aren't cameras up on every corner. (I assume you're American?)
People have to eat.
Shockingly, I've seen books devoted to PHP, Apache, and C - books which cost money to buy. But get this - those things are free!
And a few ingenious companies actually built commercial products around them, too!
Java is hardly an example of a statically and strongly typed language. Most Java value types are actually object classes, and these are heap-allocated objects checked at runtime. Combine this with the fact that you can cast an expression to another type and you end up with runtime exceptions. Now if you were talking about ML or Haskell, that would be something different, but you haven't actually mentioned any good statically and strongly typed language in your post.
It's worth noting that the Java bytecode compiler catches a lot. It's not perfect, and you can easily get around its protections by assigning null or casting to Object first - but being extremely strict may frighten people away, so it's a good compromise.
I'm just glad it's more strict than C, while cutting out a lot of the extra stuff like memory management. Mind you, I sorely miss things like public:
If you get a ClassCastException or other such runtime exception, you may not be coding properly. ;)
Certainly, there are a few features that speed rendering up, while making it look better.
But those same features were probably available on older cards - just not exposed in the API. I saw an OpenGL Parallax Occlusion demo years back, running on a GeForce 6 or 7. (Can't recall which)
HDAO looks nice, but the performance hit is massive. I just know there's going to be a few games that force it on, completely tanking your framerate for a few shadows. :P
And yes, framerate dropping to 10% is completely tanking. ;)
As long as your job isn't that physical, you don't need a lot of rest for your body to recover. On days where I do nothing, I can wake up the next day after 4 hours of sleep and my body feels great. But I'm just a tad groggy, and can't stay awake past 6PM. ;) \
If you have a very physical job, you probably need more resting time for your body than your mind.
Ubuntu's hardware support has been fine on every computer I tried it on.
Although last year libata got updated to break support for an old via PATA controller... but there's always SATA. ;)
My problem with Ubuntu is still the amount of CLI & gedit configuration needed for "simple" tasks like networking.
30-40 watts isn't a good estimate. More appropriate would be four. Processors already vastly cut their power consumption when processor usage falls to almost nothing. Even a beefy 95w CPU isn't going to consume more than 10 watts when fully idle. Speedstep saves some more of that.
Note: This doesn't refute the validity of your post. Keeping your CPU busy will cost you lots of money - just not for the reason you think.
If you want to test your own computer's power consumption, I suggest you grab a Kill-A-Watt off newegg.
It's the eyes! Nothing else matters!
But then you lose the upgrade path. If you need a RAM upgrade, you're locked into DDR2, while DDR3 could very well be significantly cheaper when you finally need more RAM.
You must be relatively new to computers. If I kept every whole PC I ever made, I'd have a dozen or so sitting around doing nothing.
There's only so many NAS's one can assemble!
I just picked up an Athlon II X2 245, to give a boost to my aging Athlon X2 rig.
I've overclocked it to 3.55ghz, and I must say I'm impressed with the power usage.
Full specs:
Athlon II X2 245 2.9ghz @ 3.55ghz (65w, 45nm)
2x2048MB Corsair XMS 800mhz DDR2 @ 920mhz
Asus 8800GS (got it on sale for $40 CAD one year ago!)
Asus M3N78-PRO
Corsair HX620
WD Caviar 640GB
Now, according to my Kill-A-Watt, my draw from the wall is...
WinXP Desktop - 95 watts.
Left4Dead - 120 watts.
MediaCoder - 100 watts, or 130 watts
With my Athlon X2 4000+ (2.1ghz @ 2.65ghz), and no other hardware changed, my draw from the wall was...
WinXP Desktop - 125 watts.
Left4Dead - 160 watts.
MediaCoder - 155 watts.
Note: For MediaCoder I was encoding H.264-mp3 on both cores, to an mp4 container, for upload to Youtube. For my Athlon II, it seems to alternate between 100 watts and 130 watts, depending on the complexity of the video. First pass seems to be mostly 100 watts, while second pass is 130 watts the entire encode.
I'm impressed by AMD's wattage ratings. They're way better than last generation, and they sure don't compare to Intel's!
While Wikipedia has definitely changed, it doesn't look to me like it has changed for the worse.
I'm inclined to agree.
Although I am curious if the number of deletions is shrinking with the number of submitted articles.
I remember years back, when I was searching out obscure hardware, most of the wikipedia articles I looked up had been deleted.
Shit, I see dots from the start. My brain must be really lazy.
This is a negative in the eyes of many devs, even though it shouldn't be.
And then, what about the fact that a large file which is created all at once, is normally not fragmented very much, but if the storage file is frequently modified, it is likely to become more and more fragmented â" thus giving people a way to tell if the encryption program is being used frequently.
FYI, fragmentation isn't an issue if the size of the file isn't changing.
If you append even one extra byte, or shrink the file, you may have issues, depending on the filesystem, but filesystems don't merrily go around shuffling/fragmenting files on every single write. If a file is 256MB, and you're overwriting 6MB somewhere in the middle, it overwrites those 6MB. If the file isn't fragmented, then the HDD doesn't have to seek much, so it'd be ludicrous re-writing that chunk of the file(or the whole thing) at another location. That would just slow things down, so HDDs and filesystems avoid that.
Although, I can't speak to how Truecrypt manipulates file writes... if the encryption really scatters the data, there might be a lot of seeking involved - but I really doubt it'd fragment the file.
Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, heaps of data about your playing style is collected at Eidos' servers.
Thanks for the heads up, so I won't buy it. I personally don't like having everything I do monitored in some way on some server with a shady privacy policy.
What, you mean like EQ2 and WoW do?
Apparently every single thing to take place is recorded by EQ2. A while back some giddy scientists got their hands on the massive amount of data, to run algorithms on it.
And if you don't think Blizzard does the same thing...hah...get real. :P
There's also no way it could be as cheap as the Beagleboard.
I concur, which is why I mentioned an extra $150 or so.
It's still a high profit margin, even if you factor in all the parts I couldn't think of, and 200 million in R&D. Don't forget that by the hundreds of thousands to millions, prices of everything drop to at least half.
More generally, you seem to be appealing to the fallacy of "Some things we know to be true, we once didn't know, therefore we should consider that this thing which I claim might one day turn out to be true". Right, and I claim that there are invisible pixies in my garden. One day we'll discover them, just you wait.
Wouldn't you laugh if your grandkids discovered cloaked alien sensor devices in your garden? :D
Then users "buy" $800 devices for "$99" and make fun of uncrippled foreign cell phone brands because they're "so expensive"
I make fun of Americans for believing those $800 devices cost $800.
The manufacturing cost is probably $130, plus another $50 for licensing stuff, and then you have some transport costs. The rest is profit.
For example, the $799 iPhone 3GS has much of the same hardware as the Beagleboard. (Same SoC anyway)
Now, you have to ask - is an antenna, LCD/touchscreen, some accelerometers, 32GB of flash, and a bit more dev time worth $650, or are they rolling in profit on every angle? The most expensive parts would be touchscreen and flash, but even those won't add up to more than $150. (probably not even $100, judging by bulk SD card costs)
It worked out okay though. Games like Blast Corps and Donkey Kong 64 looked decent for what they had to work with.