Click on the link before asking stupid questions already answered.
I did, and I already knew the answer. That was me questioning the reliability of data coming from Ubisoft, and you citing them.
Again, in reference to this statement:
A lot? According to this interview with Ubisoft representatives, only 7% of Ubi's 2011 revenue was generated on PC and 5% of Activision's revenue:
If there are more PC gamers playing Ubisoft games than there are console gamers, which the numbers seem to indicate, then it would be fair to say that "a lot" of people use their PCs for gaming. Since this is also relevant to Steam specifically, Steam reports that over 5 million people play games every day. That sounds like "a lot" to me. Further, your conclusion is incorrect (as you've pointed out about "market"):
That means that >90% of gaming happens on other platforms anyway
It doesn't mean that 90% of gaming "happens" on other platforms, it means that 90% of sales are for other platforms (assuming, again, that Ubisoft's data is accurate across the entire industry). There is still a major market for PC games, and as the GP pointed out, a lot of people still use Windows primarily for gaming.
Since we're talking about number of players here instead of market, this is the calculation I was getting at in my previous post:
Assuming a total of 1000 sales, to keep it simple:
PC - 70 sales (7%) Consoles - 930 sales (93%)
If PCs have a piracy rate of 95%, that means there are 20 times more PC players than PC sales. 20 x 70 = 1400. So that means there are 1400 PC players (only 70 of which paid) and 930 console players, or 2330 total players, for a PC share of 60% of players. Which means that there are a lot of PC gamers out there. Again, this all assumes that Ubisoft's numbers are accurate, which personally I don't believe at all. I think they make up their stats to justify their DRM, but that's just me.
A lot? According to this interview with Ubisoft representatives, only 7% of Ubi's 2011 revenue was generated on PC and 5% of Activision's revenue:
Ubisoft. That's the same company that claims a 95% piracy rate, correct? So, if 95% of their installations are pirated, and they seem to imply that the piracy rate is measured for PCs only and not consoles, and they still get 7% of their revenue from PCs, wouldn't that mean that the 5% sales rate on PCs makes up 7% of their total revenue, and therefore that the total PC market for games is larger than the console market? If they got revenue from 100% of PC installations then that would be greater than 50% of their total revenue, assuming of course that all of the numbers they cite are actually correct and not completely fabricated.
I understand that games are played on many platforms these days. For me personally, I only play games on a PC and my phone, and those are two completely different sets of games. I don't play the new XCOM on my phone, for example.
Actually, if the average weight of you tank of petrol, as it is used up, is significantly less than your stack of batteries would be (which don't get any lighter as you use them up), then the batteries can be worse.
That comparison should actually be the petrol + tank + engine, vs. batteries + motors.
It seems like a lot of these academic authors try to "out dense" one another and deliberately make their papers as unclear as possible
I'm sure that's part of the culture, but anyone reviewing this paper should immediately see red flags. I'm not a mathematician, I have no clue what most of the terms used in that paper mean, but I'll give an example of obvious BS. I'll replace the math symbols with regular letters for the sake of Slashdot, but this example comes from the first page under Main Result.
Definition 2.1. A topos P is degenerate if Q < e.
Sounds great, right? Problem there is that, up to that point in the paper, neither P, Q, nor e have been defined.
Definition 2.2. A combinatorially surjective, complete, meromorphic isometry equipped with a nonnegative, maximal, left-canonically n-dimensional set o is Guassian if r is controlled by L.
Again, to a layman like me that sounds like a perfectly cromulent mathematical statement, but the problem is that o, r, and L have not been defined. There's a giant equation before those 2 definitions, and another smaller equation after them, and none of these symbols in the definitions are used in any equation. That should be a red flag to any reviewer. Each sentence is completely independent from all of the other sentences.
We have yet to find any. It's pretty rare right here in the solar system.
That's pretty egotistical to assume that since we haven't detected it, that it has never existed and still doesn't exist anywhere else in the solar system. It may be in 10 other places in the solar system, for all we know. We aren't exactly accomplished explorers in space.
A certain Discovery channel show I was watching made a really good point that sort of blew my mind. They had a scale model of the solar system that was large enough such that "Neptune" was positioned about a mile from the "sun". In this model, the Earth was about the size of a marble, and the moon was just a little bead on a toothpick. They go through the process of walking down the model measuring distance, and at each planet they would look back at the sun and see how far away everything looks, just to make the point that distances in space are larger than anything we have a reference for. The mind-blowing part was when they pointed out that, out of this entire mile full of planets and moons, that the maximum distance that humans have traveled is those 2 inches between the Earth marble and the moon bead. And you want to sit here and say that, since we haven't found other life in all of our ingenuity and awesomeness, that it must be rare. That's pretty egotistical. Give humanity another 10,000 years of exploration before we start deciding how rare life in the universe is.
They dont exactly put it in an easy to find location or draw any attention to it.
Why would they? This is how they convince people to develop for iOS, and I'm just guessing that Apple probably gets a chunk of those advertising dollars too.
Spoiler: tracking for advertisers is always going to be a feature in most mobile devices.
I suppose Venezuela would be the obvious exception, but Chavez seems to just enjoy going against the US at any opportunity. I hadn't heard that the Brazilian government had endorsed Iran though.
Over 30 years ago, yeah that happened. More recently, it's their own government's fault. Ask yourself if Iran would be facing sanctions if Mousavi or Karroubi had won that election.
He actually says he would like to replace full classes on topics like chemistry with several survey classes that expose students to many subjects before they choose the ones they are interested in. This sounds like a great idea.
It does sound like a great idea, but where does the money come to staff and equip the school to teach any possible subject the kid wants to learn? Isn't that the point of college? High school should be general education. My "full class on chemistry" wasn't exactly an entire college-level chemistry program, it was an introduction to chemistry (or biology, or physics, or economics, or history, or music, etc). It's not like the kid is being forced to major in chemistry, he's taking a chemistry class to understand what the field of chemistry is about. If he wants to pursue it further, he can take more in-depth classes in college. That applies to any subject. I was lucky in that I went to a high school with teachers who were invested in their students and knowledgeable, we had a math teacher who taught calculus up to college-level differential equations courses, after school if necessary. Not all schools have that ability though, we can't expect any class the kid wants to take to be available at every school.
My friend and I chose thermite as our presentation in high school chemistry. We had a lot of fun playing with it to "gather data" by dropping balls of burning thermite into sand in order to make glass, then describing the reactions and results. We demonstrated the same thing in the classroom, I think we put a piece of paper in front of the thermite to lessen the brightness a little bit (turns out it's really, really bright). Pretty much everyone pays attention when you're using fire to turn sand into glass in a classroom. My friend chose liquid nitrogen for his project, freezing everything in sight was also fun. We didn't get around to dropping thermite in the LN though, although we did dump the remainder of the LN off a third-floor balcony in the school, onto concrete. Buying the thermite materials and the LN was also ridiculously easy (welding supply shops FTW).
It looks like this is an attack against the games itself, via command line parameter injection, so Skyrim would have to support command line options that would let the attacker do something useful to the system. It sounds like the Source engine is somehow vulnerable by supporting command line options to write to log files, and somehow the Unreal engine lets you execute arbitrary code from the command line. The new XCOM just came out though (and is awesome), I believe that uses the Unreal engine.
Iran is under enormous pressure to play ball the way Washington and London want them to.
Washington, London, and much of the Middle East. In addition to most of Europe. And a lot of Asia (along with Australia). I'm not sure if most of Africa or South America really care either way.
are used in their parents badges when they go to work.
To be fair, if the parents don't want to be tracked then they can find another job. The same isn't necessarily true for the kid. The kid also didn't necessarily agree to this when they enrolled in school, but the parent accepted the requirement as part of their job.
Sorry about the fragment in the quote, you seem to have left some of your words in the subject.
Once you're inside the building you can't get outside without first speaking to the attendance officer, being signed out, then taking that to the office. They lock the doors during the day and the only way out is literally through the main office.
I think the fire marshall would disagree with you.
Worse yet, the questionnaire was a suicide prevention questionnaire
Aw, is it? Damn it, I was hoping the Beck Hopelessness Scale was a publication by Glenn Beck to gauge the hopelessness of society and let us all know when we should just start rioting and killing each other.
Lucius Fox: Now for high altitude jumps you're gonna need oxygen and stabilizers. Now I must say compared to your usual requests, jumping out of an airplane is pretty straightforward. Bruce Wayne: And what about getting back into the plane? Lucius Fox: I'd recommend a good travel agent. Bruce Wayne: Without it landing. Lucius Fox: Now that's more like it, Mr. Wayne. The CIA had a program back in the 60's for getting their people out of hot spots called Sky Hook. We could look into that.
And where did that money go? The vast majority of it, if not all of it, went to companies and workers here, in this country. Compare that with where the money spent on the wars has been spent.
And funding a couple of years of a war in a critical region to the US does seem to have a lot of value
Try that again. We're going on a decade and counting of war, not "a couple of years". Let's stick to facts, there's no reason to bring hyperbole into this. Might as well ask though.. what have those wars done for me? You seem to see the value, what is it? Is it worth 4 trillion dollars and almost 7,000 American lives? From what I can tell our mission in Afghanistan is finished, so why did my brother in law just leave for his 4th deployment?
People always trash the space program in general. "What has it ever done for me?" The number one thing the shuttle program has given us is knowledge, about many things. It's pretty hard to quantify either the amount of knowledge we've gained or the value of it, or its subsequent impact on the rest of our lives. The shuttles in particular delivered many payloads to orbit, including several satellites and great observatories including Hubble, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. They also delivered the Galileo, Magellan, and Ulysses spacecraft to orbit to begin their missions. They also delivered components for Mir and the ISS. NASA also has a list of some technologies that resulted from the shuttle program here.
As far as money goes, and spending it wisely, over its 30-year run the shuttle program ended up costing us just under $200 billion in 2011 dollars, as well as 14 lives. That sounds like a lot of money. The current estimate of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is between 3.2 and 4 trillion dollars, with over 4400 Americans killed and over 33,000 wounded in Iraq alone. Afghanistan has cost us another 2100 American lives, and those numbers don't even include non-Americans or civilians. In 2008 alone Bush proposed $190 billion for the wars, just under the total cost of the 30-year shuttle program. I'll leave it up to you to decide which is the better investment.
Slashdot Mirror
Click on the link before asking stupid questions already answered.
I did, and I already knew the answer. That was me questioning the reliability of data coming from Ubisoft, and you citing them.
Again, in reference to this statement:
A lot? According to this interview with Ubisoft representatives, only 7% of Ubi's 2011 revenue was generated on PC and 5% of Activision's revenue:
If there are more PC gamers playing Ubisoft games than there are console gamers, which the numbers seem to indicate, then it would be fair to say that "a lot" of people use their PCs for gaming. Since this is also relevant to Steam specifically, Steam reports that over 5 million people play games every day. That sounds like "a lot" to me. Further, your conclusion is incorrect (as you've pointed out about "market"):
That means that >90% of gaming happens on other platforms anyway
It doesn't mean that 90% of gaming "happens" on other platforms, it means that 90% of sales are for other platforms (assuming, again, that Ubisoft's data is accurate across the entire industry). There is still a major market for PC games, and as the GP pointed out, a lot of people still use Windows primarily for gaming.
Since we're talking about number of players here instead of market, this is the calculation I was getting at in my previous post:
Assuming a total of 1000 sales, to keep it simple:
PC - 70 sales (7%)
Consoles - 930 sales (93%)
If PCs have a piracy rate of 95%, that means there are 20 times more PC players than PC sales. 20 x 70 = 1400. So that means there are 1400 PC players (only 70 of which paid) and 930 console players, or 2330 total players, for a PC share of 60% of players. Which means that there are a lot of PC gamers out there. Again, this all assumes that Ubisoft's numbers are accurate, which personally I don't believe at all. I think they make up their stats to justify their DRM, but that's just me.
A lot? According to this interview with Ubisoft representatives, only 7% of Ubi's 2011 revenue was generated on PC and 5% of Activision's revenue:
Ubisoft. That's the same company that claims a 95% piracy rate, correct? So, if 95% of their installations are pirated, and they seem to imply that the piracy rate is measured for PCs only and not consoles, and they still get 7% of their revenue from PCs, wouldn't that mean that the 5% sales rate on PCs makes up 7% of their total revenue, and therefore that the total PC market for games is larger than the console market? If they got revenue from 100% of PC installations then that would be greater than 50% of their total revenue, assuming of course that all of the numbers they cite are actually correct and not completely fabricated.
I understand that games are played on many platforms these days. For me personally, I only play games on a PC and my phone, and those are two completely different sets of games. I don't play the new XCOM on my phone, for example.
Actually, if the average weight of you tank of petrol, as it is used up, is significantly less than your stack of batteries would be (which don't get any lighter as you use them up), then the batteries can be worse.
That comparison should actually be the petrol + tank + engine, vs. batteries + motors.
It seems like a lot of these academic authors try to "out dense" one another and deliberately make their papers as unclear as possible
I'm sure that's part of the culture, but anyone reviewing this paper should immediately see red flags. I'm not a mathematician, I have no clue what most of the terms used in that paper mean, but I'll give an example of obvious BS. I'll replace the math symbols with regular letters for the sake of Slashdot, but this example comes from the first page under Main Result.
Definition 2.1. A topos P is degenerate if Q < e.
Sounds great, right? Problem there is that, up to that point in the paper, neither P, Q, nor e have been defined.
Definition 2.2. A combinatorially surjective, complete, meromorphic isometry equipped with a nonnegative, maximal, left-canonically n-dimensional set o is Guassian if r is controlled by L.
Again, to a layman like me that sounds like a perfectly cromulent mathematical statement, but the problem is that o, r, and L have not been defined. There's a giant equation before those 2 definitions, and another smaller equation after them, and none of these symbols in the definitions are used in any equation. That should be a red flag to any reviewer. Each sentence is completely independent from all of the other sentences.
Moses' law pertains to God's chosen people, the descendants of Abraham. That means Jews and Muslims only;
You almost make it sound like Christians worship a god who doesn't really care for them.
We have yet to find any. It's pretty rare right here in the solar system.
That's pretty egotistical to assume that since we haven't detected it, that it has never existed and still doesn't exist anywhere else in the solar system. It may be in 10 other places in the solar system, for all we know. We aren't exactly accomplished explorers in space.
A certain Discovery channel show I was watching made a really good point that sort of blew my mind. They had a scale model of the solar system that was large enough such that "Neptune" was positioned about a mile from the "sun". In this model, the Earth was about the size of a marble, and the moon was just a little bead on a toothpick. They go through the process of walking down the model measuring distance, and at each planet they would look back at the sun and see how far away everything looks, just to make the point that distances in space are larger than anything we have a reference for. The mind-blowing part was when they pointed out that, out of this entire mile full of planets and moons, that the maximum distance that humans have traveled is those 2 inches between the Earth marble and the moon bead. And you want to sit here and say that, since we haven't found other life in all of our ingenuity and awesomeness, that it must be rare. That's pretty egotistical. Give humanity another 10,000 years of exploration before we start deciding how rare life in the universe is.
They dont exactly put it in an easy to find location or draw any attention to it.
Why would they? This is how they convince people to develop for iOS, and I'm just guessing that Apple probably gets a chunk of those advertising dollars too.
Spoiler: tracking for advertisers is always going to be a feature in most mobile devices.
I suppose Venezuela would be the obvious exception, but Chavez seems to just enjoy going against the US at any opportunity. I hadn't heard that the Brazilian government had endorsed Iran though.
Over 30 years ago, yeah that happened. More recently, it's their own government's fault. Ask yourself if Iran would be facing sanctions if Mousavi or Karroubi had won that election.
He actually says he would like to replace full classes on topics like chemistry with several survey classes that expose students to many subjects before they choose the ones they are interested in. This sounds like a great idea.
It does sound like a great idea, but where does the money come to staff and equip the school to teach any possible subject the kid wants to learn? Isn't that the point of college? High school should be general education. My "full class on chemistry" wasn't exactly an entire college-level chemistry program, it was an introduction to chemistry (or biology, or physics, or economics, or history, or music, etc). It's not like the kid is being forced to major in chemistry, he's taking a chemistry class to understand what the field of chemistry is about. If he wants to pursue it further, he can take more in-depth classes in college. That applies to any subject. I was lucky in that I went to a high school with teachers who were invested in their students and knowledgeable, we had a math teacher who taught calculus up to college-level differential equations courses, after school if necessary. Not all schools have that ability though, we can't expect any class the kid wants to take to be available at every school.
My friend and I chose thermite as our presentation in high school chemistry. We had a lot of fun playing with it to "gather data" by dropping balls of burning thermite into sand in order to make glass, then describing the reactions and results. We demonstrated the same thing in the classroom, I think we put a piece of paper in front of the thermite to lessen the brightness a little bit (turns out it's really, really bright). Pretty much everyone pays attention when you're using fire to turn sand into glass in a classroom. My friend chose liquid nitrogen for his project, freezing everything in sight was also fun. We didn't get around to dropping thermite in the LN though, although we did dump the remainder of the LN off a third-floor balcony in the school, onto concrete. Buying the thermite materials and the LN was also ridiculously easy (welding supply shops FTW).
Anyway, who says chemistry is boring?
It looks like this is an attack against the games itself, via command line parameter injection, so Skyrim would have to support command line options that would let the attacker do something useful to the system. It sounds like the Source engine is somehow vulnerable by supporting command line options to write to log files, and somehow the Unreal engine lets you execute arbitrary code from the command line. The new XCOM just came out though (and is awesome), I believe that uses the Unreal engine.
Remind me what Iran took, and from whom?
Freedom, from their own people.
Iran is under enormous pressure to play ball the way Washington and London want them to.
Washington, London, and much of the Middle East. In addition to most of Europe. And a lot of Asia (along with Australia). I'm not sure if most of Africa or South America really care either way.
...in an effort to masturbate daily attendance records.
are used in their parents badges when they go to work.
To be fair, if the parents don't want to be tracked then they can find another job. The same isn't necessarily true for the kid. The kid also didn't necessarily agree to this when they enrolled in school, but the parent accepted the requirement as part of their job.
Sorry about the fragment in the quote, you seem to have left some of your words in the subject.
Once you're inside the building you can't get outside without first speaking to the attendance officer, being signed out, then taking that to the office. They lock the doors during the day and the only way out is literally through the main office.
I think the fire marshall would disagree with you.
What's more, I completely fail to see how this has anything to do with arranging a series of data in a line, or propelling a boat using oars.
Worse yet, the questionnaire was a suicide prevention questionnaire
Aw, is it? Damn it, I was hoping the Beck Hopelessness Scale was a publication by Glenn Beck to gauge the hopelessness of society and let us all know when we should just start rioting and killing each other.
He even described it accurately:
Lucius Fox: Now for high altitude jumps you're gonna need oxygen and stabilizers. Now I must say compared to your usual requests, jumping out of an airplane is pretty straightforward.
Bruce Wayne: And what about getting back into the plane?
Lucius Fox: I'd recommend a good travel agent.
Bruce Wayne: Without it landing.
Lucius Fox: Now that's more like it, Mr. Wayne. The CIA had a program back in the 60's for getting their people out of hot spots called Sky Hook. We could look into that.
A vast amount of money was spent up front.
And where did that money go? The vast majority of it, if not all of it, went to companies and workers here, in this country. Compare that with where the money spent on the wars has been spent.
And funding a couple of years of a war in a critical region to the US does seem to have a lot of value
Try that again. We're going on a decade and counting of war, not "a couple of years". Let's stick to facts, there's no reason to bring hyperbole into this. Might as well ask though.. what have those wars done for me? You seem to see the value, what is it? Is it worth 4 trillion dollars and almost 7,000 American lives? From what I can tell our mission in Afghanistan is finished, so why did my brother in law just leave for his 4th deployment?
I'll also note that the margin of error alone for the cost of the wars is 4 times the total cost of the shuttle program.
People always trash the space program in general. "What has it ever done for me?" The number one thing the shuttle program has given us is knowledge, about many things. It's pretty hard to quantify either the amount of knowledge we've gained or the value of it, or its subsequent impact on the rest of our lives. The shuttles in particular delivered many payloads to orbit, including several satellites and great observatories including Hubble, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. They also delivered the Galileo, Magellan, and Ulysses spacecraft to orbit to begin their missions. They also delivered components for Mir and the ISS. NASA also has a list of some technologies that resulted from the shuttle program here.
As far as money goes, and spending it wisely, over its 30-year run the shuttle program ended up costing us just under $200 billion in 2011 dollars, as well as 14 lives. That sounds like a lot of money. The current estimate of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is between 3.2 and 4 trillion dollars, with over 4400 Americans killed and over 33,000 wounded in Iraq alone. Afghanistan has cost us another 2100 American lives, and those numbers don't even include non-Americans or civilians. In 2008 alone Bush proposed $190 billion for the wars, just under the total cost of the 30-year shuttle program. I'll leave it up to you to decide which is the better investment.
Do you spend a lot of time on the La Quinta site?