There is VC to be had, but not for video game developers. Most of it is going to web startups, places with lower cost to fund (2-5 guys salary, rather than 25+) and the potential to make a massive return (valuations in the 10s or 100s or millions of dollars). Indie gaming just isn't as safe of an investment or have the potential of such high returns.
You know what? I actually have more respect for pirates than I do people who whine and buy anyway because at least the pirates aren't feeding companies that don't deserve cash for the way they treat their customers. Sending a message by just pirating the game rather than buying still sends a message, and these companies aren't stupid, they know DRM has no effect on piracy and is just designed to try and slowly increase costs for the honest consumer so it's not like any further restrictions will arise as a result of increase piracy, only as an attempt to squeeze the honest consumer more.
How certain are you that these companies aren't stupid? How come I have this feeling that Activision doesn't see the pirates as people who would buy the game if it didn't have draconian measures to prevent it. I'll bet the piracy numbers of the first MW are the reason for the lack of dedicated servers and increased copy protection.
I fail to see how this is any less an issue of entitlement (at least the people who said they wouldn't buy and did anyway probably weren't that serious in the first place, while the pirates just feel entitled to play the game without paying) or that piracy would make a positive impact. Wouldn't reduced piracy numbers reduce the justification for other companies to add DRM? If Activision sees piracy stay high, won't they just try harder (read: get more draconian) with the DRM next time?
That said, I think that Steam is not the issue here, but how it's being used. I've never been one to sell my used games, just because they're not worth enough by the time I'm done playing them. It's not worth the $5 to give the game back, when I might play it sometime in the future. Besides, it's worth it to me not to need to worry about lost or scratched disks. And, of course, your argument about games costing more because of Steam just doesn't hold up. Steam has incredible sale prices, comparable to buying used. If you don't want to pay full price, then be patient and you'll get a huge discount eventually on some weekend. MW2 being $60 is entirely an Activision decision, not a Steam decision.
Leave. The government of Iraq and Afghanistan have been conquered. Their nations, as one would expect, lie in ruin. Well done, let's go home.
While that's one possibility, it's accepting defeat. I was responding to someone who claimed we could win with a WWII mindset, rather than treating it as a police action. But this is a police action that we call a war (kinda funny that we used to go out of our way to call them police actions...), our goal isn't to leave the countries in ruins.
We can go home, but it's not 'well done' at that point. If we go home, it's 'well, we cocked that one up, let's try not to make it worse'.
It also makes the entire state of Louisiana look stupid for not declaring an emergency (Federal gov't can't send in the national guard without the state's say so) or forcing an evacuation, even though they are the ones who should have best known that anything above a category 3 would put the city underwater.
After that the bombing of population and transport hubs continued in order to demoralize the population.
What population do we want to demoralize in Iraq and Afghanistan? The citizens and their governments are our allies! The bad guys hide in regular houses amongs villagers. Even a hellfire missile that destroys exactly 1 house on hour old intel can kill a dozen of people who are our friends.
But most FPGAs utilize a CPU core, which is often hard-wired and has ports to access the programable elements. Assuming the single-instruction MIPS runs faster than the common 'standard' CPUs such as PowerPC, then there would be a benefit. The CPU could be smaller (leaving more space for programmable elements) and more easily expanded upon (run additional functions by address rather than by OPCODE).
That's a big 'if', but there's merit in exploring it. The biggest barrier I can think of right now is with programming time, and that's the most expensive part of most FPGA projects already.
instead of a police action where every activity is on film or subject to investigation.
Well, the obvious difference is that the Nazis, Italians, and Japanese were the national leaders of their countries. Now we are not at war with Iraq or Afghanistan, we are working with the Iraqi and Anghani governments against irregulars within their borders. You fight these battles two very different ways.
The paper did not release any information to a third party. The contacted the registered owner of the IP address which sent the message. Most definitely a "first party".
And this is the key, isn't it? He didn't go to law enforcement or the ISP even. He went to the owner of the system and let them know that someone (probably a student at the school) was misusing one of their computers.
This wasn't internet vigilanteism, it was courtesy to the system owner. Regardless, if you troll someone, there should be no righteous indignation when you get trolled back.
Your right to free speech ends where protecting my business at large begins.
Your right to free speech ends (at least in the US) when it's no longer a public institution taking action. While the government can't censor you (though possibly could if they defined the posting as 'obscene'), no private entity is required to allow you to say what you want for any reason.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never interpreted the First Amendment as having the same power to alter private property rights, or provide any other protection against purely private action. When considering private authority figures (such as a child's parents or an employee's employer), Constitutional free speech provides no protection. A private authority figure may reserve the right to censor their subordinate's speech, or discriminate based on speech, without any legal consequences.
He didn't know it was an employer but probably thought that maybe some student. Still an asshole and idiotic thing to do tho.
Anonymous trolling is "an asshole and idiotic thing to do". Embarrasing someone for trolling might be as well, but at that point it's just eye-for-an-eye.
DNA information and it wants to be free--just like Hollywood movies, Britney Spears songs, and videogames! Let it be free!!
Right, it's not like anyone spent money to develop your genetic code, unlike with artistic works. Well, maybe a bottle of wine facilitated the process.
“This clearly introduces a layer of uncertainty beyond what people expected when they signed up,” she told the Times. “People do need to double check what they are signing up to. These companies often use broad consent, and I worry whether people know what their data might be used for in the long term.”
Personally I feel like your genetic information is always YOUR data. Call it a biological copyright if you wish. There's only one you, and you inherited the code used to make you.
It belongs to you and only you. And your maternal twin.
Of course my favorite joke about the matter:
Q: "How did Intel decide to name the 586 processor?"
A: "They took 486, added 100, and came up with 585.999999999999824"
It's not really a static or hiss issue. Generally, the issue is a high-frequency warble as the compression picks different frequencies to hide the compression noise. If you listen to a 128kbps MP3 for a song with loud cymbal crashes, it becomes very noticable (and once you hear it, you always will). Personally, I can't hear this on 192kbps or higher MP3, but it's likely still there in small amounts.
Of course, when listening in noisier environments (car, earbuds, etc) the other sounds mask this, at least enough to be unnoticable consciously. Then the familiarity of the compression takes over and you prefer what you normally hear.
Not only that, but reviewers are even biased by the expectation of the wine type. Take a dry white wine, add red coloring, and even trained reviewers will describe the white as sweet, and the 'red' as dry. There's a huge expectation bias.
A $70 pair of SHURE earbuds has made all the difference in how I listen to music
Sorry, but no earbuds are worth $70. They are simply evil and will destroy your hearing. Get yourself some proper earphones, something that cups the ear and ventilates.
Good earbuds will exclude external sounds. If you listen properly, the volume shouldn't be turned up high enough to damage your hearing.
99.99% of Christians are not going to fear Nibiru after watching 2012, so it's only fair to distinguish between them and the people Morrison is talking about.
A large percentage -- not all, but many -- of those Christians fear that some big magic grandpa in the sky is going to throw them into a lake of fire where a horned monster will supervise their torture for infinite time.
No, they fear that the heathens will get thrown into the lake of fire. Unless, of course, they're a 'casual' Christian and don't actually believe it anyway, and then why group them together?
That is an ever wackier belief than the Nibiru catastrophe -- at least we know planets exist, unlike (the literal versions of) gods, devils, and souls.
While you can't disprove a religion, you can easily disprove a planet hiding behind the sun by looking behind it.
Sure, there are a few old church ladies who want to put their dog down before the rapture, just as there are a few old new-age ladies who want to kill their dog before Nibiru crashes into the earth. They don't really reflect on the beliefs of others who might otherwise be associated with them.
Of course, if they do, all atheists are stupid for planning to kill themselves in 2012.;-)
Of course, the issue still stands. We're running out of fuel for our nuclear reactors, and there's no easy, cheap, or simple fix. It requires new teachnology and infrastructure at at least one (or multiple) point of the process. The point is that we should have been ramping this up years ago, rather than now where we will need to scramble.
And while you're spending your time figuring out why something that isn't broken works, he is coding something that you aren't coding at all.
How do you know it isn't broken if you can't prove it works? You don't. It could be platform specific, it could be compiler specific, it could be accessing invalid memory that is by chance set to a valid value in another section of code. This means the algorithm doesn't work, and would need to be rewritten when it breaks later down the road. Any software developer worth hiring should know this. If you can't figure it out yourself, ask another developer, because shit like this is not acceptable in production code.
Sure, coding until it passes isn't the ideal, but it's a whole lot better than not coding at all (you).
Erroneous code can be worse than nothing. I'd rather know that I didn't have code for a task, rather than depend on faulty results. Just ask the 23 soldiers killed when their patriot missile battery did not launch and they were killed by a Scud missile. Better to know you are exposed and to seek cover, rather than have a false sense of security and die.
Extreme example, of course, but I'd much rather have no software, instead of software that just appears to work.
The press in the US is simply as partisan as everything else in the country. They're only lackeys to the White House when their preferred party holds it. Note the marked difference between tone from W's administration to Obama's. Before, it was Fox News claiming it was unpatriotic to criticize the president. Now it's MSNBC and CNN's job to say that.
The frequency of light is far too high (over 400 Terahertz) to accurately measure its frequency in a handheld device. Most radar converts its input to electricity to perform frequency modulation on, and it's very difficult to get good signals over 10GHz. As well, most affordable light sensors can not generate an accurate frequency measurement. That makes a dopler laser gun infeasible, at least for small sizes. Most measurements of red/blue-shift occur at the stellar level, where the speeds are large enough to overcome measurement error. I don't believe that even the best redshift measurements with giant telescopes, would be able to tell the difference between the speed limit and 5mph faster.
RADAR isn't always accurate either, as the beam is wider and can't discriminate between different vehicles. It will always give a correct speed, but not necessarily that of the correct target.
An easy solution would be to capture video of the lazer on the target for every pull. Then compare the data points to the photos of the lazer beam. If there's an excursion, throw the ticket out.
More expensive to the industry, yes, but overall it is much more expensive to produce highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) and later thin it out to fuel grade.
A more accurate pathway is Unenriched -> Enriched (fuel grade) -> Highly Enriched (weapons grade) -> Warheads. The path to go from low enriched to highly enriched is VERY time consuming and expensive. So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
PowerPoint could either be a complete slacker medium, or could be part of a more-encompassing lecture. It's all in the way it is used.
Yup, old problem, new technology. I had professors as recently as 2 years ago who still used 20-year-old overheads. Very little chalkboard writing, and the overheads were less than useful. Of course, book-provided slides are the worst due to simply restating the book, but it has always been bad.
Some professors really knew how to utilize powerpoint to illustrate an idea. My Operating Systems class had several good slide animations on stuff like thread scheduling. It's these time-based examples where Powerpoint can really shine and improve beyond overheads or chalk.
Slashdot Mirror
There is VC to be had, but not for video game developers. Most of it is going to web startups, places with lower cost to fund (2-5 guys salary, rather than 25+) and the potential to make a massive return (valuations in the 10s or 100s or millions of dollars). Indie gaming just isn't as safe of an investment or have the potential of such high returns.
You know what? I actually have more respect for pirates than I do people who whine and buy anyway because at least the pirates aren't feeding companies that don't deserve cash for the way they treat their customers. Sending a message by just pirating the game rather than buying still sends a message, and these companies aren't stupid, they know DRM has no effect on piracy and is just designed to try and slowly increase costs for the honest consumer so it's not like any further restrictions will arise as a result of increase piracy, only as an attempt to squeeze the honest consumer more.
How certain are you that these companies aren't stupid? How come I have this feeling that Activision doesn't see the pirates as people who would buy the game if it didn't have draconian measures to prevent it. I'll bet the piracy numbers of the first MW are the reason for the lack of dedicated servers and increased copy protection.
I fail to see how this is any less an issue of entitlement (at least the people who said they wouldn't buy and did anyway probably weren't that serious in the first place, while the pirates just feel entitled to play the game without paying) or that piracy would make a positive impact. Wouldn't reduced piracy numbers reduce the justification for other companies to add DRM? If Activision sees piracy stay high, won't they just try harder (read: get more draconian) with the DRM next time?
That said, I think that Steam is not the issue here, but how it's being used. I've never been one to sell my used games, just because they're not worth enough by the time I'm done playing them. It's not worth the $5 to give the game back, when I might play it sometime in the future. Besides, it's worth it to me not to need to worry about lost or scratched disks. And, of course, your argument about games costing more because of Steam just doesn't hold up. Steam has incredible sale prices, comparable to buying used. If you don't want to pay full price, then be patient and you'll get a huge discount eventually on some weekend. MW2 being $60 is entirely an Activision decision, not a Steam decision.
Leave. The government of Iraq and Afghanistan have been conquered. Their nations, as one would expect, lie in ruin. Well done, let's go home.
While that's one possibility, it's accepting defeat. I was responding to someone who claimed we could win with a WWII mindset, rather than treating it as a police action. But this is a police action that we call a war (kinda funny that we used to go out of our way to call them police actions...), our goal isn't to leave the countries in ruins.
We can go home, but it's not 'well done' at that point. If we go home, it's 'well, we cocked that one up, let's try not to make it worse'.
It also makes the entire state of Louisiana look stupid for not declaring an emergency (Federal gov't can't send in the national guard without the state's say so) or forcing an evacuation, even though they are the ones who should have best known that anything above a category 3 would put the city underwater.
After that the bombing of population and transport hubs continued in order to demoralize the population.
What population do we want to demoralize in Iraq and Afghanistan? The citizens and their governments are our allies! The bad guys hide in regular houses amongs villagers. Even a hellfire missile that destroys exactly 1 house on hour old intel can kill a dozen of people who are our friends.
But most FPGAs utilize a CPU core, which is often hard-wired and has ports to access the programable elements. Assuming the single-instruction MIPS runs faster than the common 'standard' CPUs such as PowerPC, then there would be a benefit. The CPU could be smaller (leaving more space for programmable elements) and more easily expanded upon (run additional functions by address rather than by OPCODE).
That's a big 'if', but there's merit in exploring it. The biggest barrier I can think of right now is with programming time, and that's the most expensive part of most FPGA projects already.
But developing a game that pushes Socialist values and limits various gameplay could essentially RUIN your sales in every country BUT China.
Game? Sales? China? They pay for games in China? Who'd of thunk it....
There's a reason the games that do well there are pay-to-play.
instead of a police action where every activity is on film or subject to investigation.
Well, the obvious difference is that the Nazis, Italians, and Japanese were the national leaders of their countries. Now we are not at war with Iraq or Afghanistan, we are working with the Iraqi and Anghani governments against irregulars within their borders. You fight these battles two very different ways.
What do you suggest we do differently?
The paper did not release any information to a third party. The contacted the registered owner of the IP address which sent the message. Most definitely a "first party".
And this is the key, isn't it? He didn't go to law enforcement or the ISP even. He went to the owner of the system and let them know that someone (probably a student at the school) was misusing one of their computers.
This wasn't internet vigilanteism, it was courtesy to the system owner. Regardless, if you troll someone, there should be no righteous indignation when you get trolled back.
Your right to free speech ends where protecting my business at large begins.
Your right to free speech ends (at least in the US) when it's no longer a public institution taking action. While the government can't censor you (though possibly could if they defined the posting as 'obscene'), no private entity is required to allow you to say what you want for any reason.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never interpreted the First Amendment as having the same power to alter private property rights, or provide any other protection against purely private action. When considering private authority figures (such as a child's parents or an employee's employer), Constitutional free speech provides no protection. A private authority figure may reserve the right to censor their subordinate's speech, or discriminate based on speech, without any legal consequences.
He didn't know it was an employer but probably thought that maybe some student. Still an asshole and idiotic thing to do tho.
Anonymous trolling is "an asshole and idiotic thing to do". Embarrasing someone for trolling might be as well, but at that point it's just eye-for-an-eye.
DNA information and it wants to be free--just like Hollywood movies, Britney Spears songs, and videogames! Let it be free!!
Right, it's not like anyone spent money to develop your genetic code, unlike with artistic works. Well, maybe a bottle of wine facilitated the process.
“This clearly introduces a layer of uncertainty beyond what people expected when they signed up,” she told the Times. “People do need to double check what they are signing up to. These companies often use broad consent, and I worry whether people know what their data might be used for in the long term.”
Personally I feel like your genetic information is always YOUR data. Call it a biological copyright if you wish. There's only one you, and you inherited the code used to make you.
It belongs to you and only you. And your maternal twin.
Read and be enlightened.
Of course my favorite joke about the matter:
Q: "How did Intel decide to name the 586 processor?"
A: "They took 486, added 100, and came up with 585.999999999999824"
It's not really a static or hiss issue. Generally, the issue is a high-frequency warble as the compression picks different frequencies to hide the compression noise. If you listen to a 128kbps MP3 for a song with loud cymbal crashes, it becomes very noticable (and once you hear it, you always will). Personally, I can't hear this on 192kbps or higher MP3, but it's likely still there in small amounts.
Of course, when listening in noisier environments (car, earbuds, etc) the other sounds mask this, at least enough to be unnoticable consciously. Then the familiarity of the compression takes over and you prefer what you normally hear.
Not only that, but reviewers are even biased by the expectation of the wine type. Take a dry white wine, add red coloring, and even trained reviewers will describe the white as sweet, and the 'red' as dry. There's a huge expectation bias.
A $70 pair of SHURE earbuds has made all the difference in how I listen to music
Sorry, but no earbuds are worth $70. They are simply evil and will destroy your hearing. Get yourself some proper earphones, something that cups the ear and ventilates.
Good earbuds will exclude external sounds. If you listen properly, the volume shouldn't be turned up high enough to damage your hearing.
A large percentage -- not all, but many -- of those Christians fear that some big magic grandpa in the sky is going to throw them into a lake of fire where a horned monster will supervise their torture for infinite time.
No, they fear that the heathens will get thrown into the lake of fire. Unless, of course, they're a 'casual' Christian and don't actually believe it anyway, and then why group them together?
That is an ever wackier belief than the Nibiru catastrophe -- at least we know planets exist, unlike (the literal versions of) gods, devils, and souls.
While you can't disprove a religion, you can easily disprove a planet hiding behind the sun by looking behind it.
Sure, there are a few old church ladies who want to put their dog down before the rapture, just as there are a few old new-age ladies who want to kill their dog before Nibiru crashes into the earth. They don't really reflect on the beliefs of others who might otherwise be associated with them.
Of course, if they do, all atheists are stupid for planning to kill themselves in 2012. ;-)
Of course, the issue still stands. We're running out of fuel for our nuclear reactors, and there's no easy, cheap, or simple fix. It requires new teachnology and infrastructure at at least one (or multiple) point of the process. The point is that we should have been ramping this up years ago, rather than now where we will need to scramble.
And while you're spending your time figuring out why something that isn't broken works, he is coding something that you aren't coding at all.
How do you know it isn't broken if you can't prove it works? You don't. It could be platform specific, it could be compiler specific, it could be accessing invalid memory that is by chance set to a valid value in another section of code. This means the algorithm doesn't work, and would need to be rewritten when it breaks later down the road. Any software developer worth hiring should know this. If you can't figure it out yourself, ask another developer, because shit like this is not acceptable in production code.
Sure, coding until it passes isn't the ideal, but it's a whole lot better than not coding at all (you).
Erroneous code can be worse than nothing. I'd rather know that I didn't have code for a task, rather than depend on faulty results. Just ask the 23 soldiers killed when their patriot missile battery did not launch and they were killed by a Scud missile. Better to know you are exposed and to seek cover, rather than have a false sense of security and die.
Extreme example, of course, but I'd much rather have no software, instead of software that just appears to work.
The press in the US is simply as partisan as everything else in the country. They're only lackeys to the White House when their preferred party holds it. Note the marked difference between tone from W's administration to Obama's. Before, it was Fox News claiming it was unpatriotic to criticize the president. Now it's MSNBC and CNN's job to say that.
The frequency of light is far too high (over 400 Terahertz) to accurately measure its frequency in a handheld device. Most radar converts its input to electricity to perform frequency modulation on, and it's very difficult to get good signals over 10GHz. As well, most affordable light sensors can not generate an accurate frequency measurement. That makes a dopler laser gun infeasible, at least for small sizes. Most measurements of red/blue-shift occur at the stellar level, where the speeds are large enough to overcome measurement error. I don't believe that even the best redshift measurements with giant telescopes, would be able to tell the difference between the speed limit and 5mph faster.
RADAR isn't always accurate either, as the beam is wider and can't discriminate between different vehicles. It will always give a correct speed, but not necessarily that of the correct target.
An easy solution would be to capture video of the lazer on the target for every pull. Then compare the data points to the photos of the lazer beam. If there's an excursion, throw the ticket out.
More expensive to the industry, yes, but overall it is much more expensive to produce highly enriched uranium (weapons grade) and later thin it out to fuel grade.
A more accurate pathway is Unenriched -> Enriched (fuel grade) -> Highly Enriched (weapons grade) -> Warheads. The path to go from low enriched to highly enriched is VERY time consuming and expensive. So even though going from D->B is cheaper now because we have a surplus of warheads produced with taxpayer money, it's still cheaper overall to go from A->B instead of A->D->B.
PowerPoint could either be a complete slacker medium, or could be part of a more-encompassing lecture. It's all in the way it is used.
Yup, old problem, new technology. I had professors as recently as 2 years ago who still used 20-year-old overheads. Very little chalkboard writing, and the overheads were less than useful. Of course, book-provided slides are the worst due to simply restating the book, but it has always been bad.
Some professors really knew how to utilize powerpoint to illustrate an idea. My Operating Systems class had several good slide animations on stuff like thread scheduling. It's these time-based examples where Powerpoint can really shine and improve beyond overheads or chalk.