Interesting question. I am going to guess no. Sports are surprisingly tied to modern culture.
While it is clearly not 'high culture' in the way that Opera, art galleries, ballet, and such manage to, sports are surprisingly important to modern culture. Humans are competitive with one another. Sports are one of the few acceptable physical outlets for that. Competition in sports allow humans to compete with one another, either individually or in groups, without resorting to violence. Humans are tribal, and sports teams push several psychological buttons for people (belong to a group, and lets kick the ass of those other guys from across the river).
Individual sports may increase or decrease in importance over time, but I expect that some form of sports will continue to be culturally relevant and important as long as humans are both competitive with one another and want to impress women by showing off how dominant they are.
I have no idea who got voted off the island. But I am very satisfied with what I get from having Cable tv.
- New episodes of good tv shows like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, Dexter, and Breaking bad show up on broadcast first. Streaming is absolutely more convenient. But running up against spoilers is too damn easy to do by accident if you use any kind of social media sites.
- New tv shows like 'The Amerikans' on FX show up on broadcast long before going to streaming sites, unless they are Netflix Originals.
- Live sports matter. Turns out I like watching people fight in a cage for money. The UFC puts out a surprising amount of events on free TV; 9 events on 'Free TV' (each being 6 hours (prelims and main card) plus an additional 9 events with prelim fights, and another event on Fox Sports 1 tomorrow. Watching these events legally through the official streaming service is much more expensive. Watching illegally is a pain in the ass. On top of that is more content from Bellator on Spike and regional promotions on Fight Network. MMA is not for everyone, but it is for me. And for others, its the NFL, or NBA, or NHL, or MLB.
- Also, as far as social media + spoilers, as much as it can hurt the experience of seeing a show to know the ending, it fucking kills any kind of sporting event.
- Not all content that you may wish to watch is going to be streamed easily. My wife is a fan of the Food Network. Not much demand for streams of those shows.
Personally, I love that Netflix and others are doing their own content now, but we are still pretty far off from being able to cherry pick only the shows I want to see and then pay only for that content.
In order to displace something, the new thing has to be all that the old thing was and then some more (some more crucial features not just some more sugar). And then it has to be cheaper to top it. Until you can satisfy both requirements, trying to get someone to upgrade is probably going to be an uphill battle.
If a company invested a non trivial amount of effort into creating a web enabled system that was dependent on IE 6, it will likely continue to be used until it becomes nearly impossible to get IE 6 to run on newer computers. Can you guarantee that the new system will do something the old system could not do? If you cannot, then it is probably going to be cheaper at any given moment to fix / replace the few older computers that break down then to reimplement the entire system.
Pulling a number right out of my ass, lets say a typical person needs to earn $35 000 to $45 000 a year to support themselves at today's cost of living. . Lets say that random person X, working at a creative class job might only be able to earn $15 000 a year simply because he is just not that good.
Now lets automate the shit out of everything. Lets say we have robotic lumberjacks, miners, farmers, prefabricated construction factories for building homes, the whole smash. Lets also say that some kind of wonder tech combo both reduces the energy requirements while also making renewable energies viable for a standard of living comparable to the american average. Pure science fiction bullshit sure, but lets set that aside for a moment.
The real cost of living is going to fall way the hell down. Rich and Poor still exist because humans suck and we compete for mates as much as anything else. But the cost for a person to secure food and shelter drops to something like $10 000 a month.
The guy who can only earn $15 000 in a creative type job is going to be able to live while doing that job. Maybe they aren't living the high live but they can probably get by as well as they would have before.
Also, lets not call it a 'creative' type job, and instead call it a 'cultural' job. Some people will create art of various forms. Some people will perform (art or sports). Some will teach. I am sure some people will just try to party all the damn time.
Being slightly more relevant, comparing how men and women learn is worth while. Even if they are different, both are trying to accomplish the same thing. Men and Women obtain an education and learn skills in an effort to be economically self reliant within a modern economy. Apple's and Oranges are both fruit products that can be consumed to provide calories and nutrition.
Trying to compare something entirely different (ie, the Geopolitical ramifications of the collapse of communism within the soviet union vs an Apple) is truly useless.
Pretty much everyone here has already said it. Coding standards to help productivity, but its a group thing. ie: its more of a a +3% to +5% gain for everyone who has to share code and know what the hell is going on. Coding to a standard that is not a habit for yourself is going to be a bit of a hit to your own productivity.
So if you hate dealing with the existing code standard, you could either implement a script to do the reformatting for you, or you can find an existing tool to do the same. Write however the hell feels natural, and when its working, run the conversion script and retest. If possible, convert in both directions (ie, go from official standard to your preference before you start modifying it again). It wont help structural issues (ie, if using certain design patterns is forbidden), but it will deal with the camel case vs underscore, variable name prefixes, space vs tab, and where the hell to put curly braces.
The justification is that the 'jerk' in question was basically murdering the teams morale and enthusiasm.
Some portion of management types were brainstorming ideas on how to improve things (ie, ideas for new services or products) and getting everyone involved and excited. Then the rockstar / genius / jerkass guy would crap on everything saying everything sucks. As brilliant and as respected as Employee X was, no one else really wanted to work with him.
Now, it is possible that the ideas being discussed were terrible ideas that needed to be shot down. But lets say that the ideas were not necessarily bad ideas, and just ones that employee X does not agree with. If your an employee, your part of a team. If your the most valuable member of the team, you should be taken seriously. But Employee X should not be allowed to become the proverbial albatross around the teams neck.
Employee X is like a fan favorite superstar player on a Basketball team that can score crap tons of goals, but the team is still losing. The coach has ideas to fix it, but they mean Employee X is not going to score as many goals. Letting the Superstar do what he wants is not going to get the team to win (they are already doing that). Making the changes the superstar wants the team to make is also not going to work (team cannot afford expensive players needed to back up the superstar).
At that point, the Superstar is usually traded, the team makes the changes they feel they need to. Sometimes the team starts to win again. Sometimes they lose worse. No matter what though, something needed to change.
I think that the situation as described is incomplete or missing part of the picture.
What he is describing is what happens when you have a highly valuable and contributing team member who has a vision for the company that differs from what everyone else wants.
Assume we have 10 employees. Lets say Employee X has a value of 1000, and the rest have a value of 100 each. The company has a value of 1900. Clearly Employee X is valuable and to get where you need to be, you need to accommodate his views. He is basically more than half the company
Now you grow to 40 employees. Employee X is still worth 1000, but the rest of the group is worth 3900. Employee X should not be dictating where the entire group wants to go, even if he carries so much influence.
Employee X did not become less valuable, he did become less important. The only time Employee X becomes a Jerk is if Employee X allows his ego to think he is still more than half the value of the company.
The solution is that Employee X needs to be treated as a consultant or contract. Let him be the rock star that saves every ones ass. But as good as he is, he cannot lead if no one wants to follow him, and he should not lead if the place he wants to lead is not the place the team wants to go. And Employee X should not be allowed to prevent someone else from leading if his plans do not add as much to the group as the other guy.
A good leader is not the guy who is worth 1000 to everyone else's 100. A good leader is the guy who can get a value of 120 from people with a base value of 100.
You may be long about real leather being a lot cheaper than bio engineered leather.
Granted, you have doubts about this being able to scale up. But lets assume for a moment you are wrong.
The inputs to the process are going to be somewhat similar to the inputs required to raise a cow. But the quantity of those inputs should be much lower. You only need enough food / nutrients to grow the skin. You do not need to support the rest of the mass of the cow. The waste (urine, feces) would also be lower. No bones or brains, and the support features of the rest of the cow (the lungs / spleen / kidney's) can probably be accomplished by machine filters.
I am not sure if the vat grown meat would work as well though. You would need to support much more biomass and your probably not going to be able to simulate a massive rib steak.
You mention Xbox and PC games, but those do not narrow it down to much.
On the PC side, games of the 'just one more turn' / slow play strategy games are probably not affected. The Civilization series, Galactic Civilizations 2 (not related to previous series), various 'God Games', are not likely to be affected.
If your gaming leaned more towards First Person Shooters, and Starcraft 2 style RTS games, and anything with a 'mouse to look, WSAD keys to move' is probably going to be a bitch to play with a damaged left hand. I have never gotten into World of Warcraft, but given the prevalence for keyboard macro's, that may not be the best option.
For many XBox games, it comes down to what games your playing on that console, and how usable your left thumb is. If your left thumb is functional, you probably have a huge amount of games that are perfectly playable. If your left index finger is also functional, you may find that most console games pose no issues.
Games that are playable with the Wii Remote or Playstation Move controller are also essentially one handed games as long as the 'nunchuck' attachment is not critical. Content choices on the Wii do skew very heavy to casual though.
More info on what kind of games you actually play may result in better advice.
If your content to use 3d packages like Unity, you can probably get by with little more than a strong understanding of matrix and vector math.
If you ever want to implement any of the following more directly, you need significantly more
3d Physics: requires calculus for certain ballistic calculations. Low level rendering: requires knowing how to interpolate a normal value across mulitple verticies collision vs true curved surface: if you want to use spline curves to represent geometry, you need to know how to calcuate an exact location on it to determine a collision normal.
Or what happens if you want to use a 3rd level plugin for Unity that only works with Quaternions and all you have are the Vector / matrix based positions?
You cannot always depend on an out of the box solution.
Think of it this way: You do not need to be an architect to build a house. Any idiot can hammer together some walls and a roof. If you want the damn thing to actually look good or do something no one else has done yet, you need more. Any idiot can buy a 'just add water' cake mix and make a chocolate cake. But the guy who can make one from the raw ingredients is probably going to make a much better goddamn cake.
Also, if it comes down to hiring an employee with high school level trig vs a guy with university level calculus, and the job involves working with those concepts even indirectly, than high school guy loses every goddamn time. Even if your not using it directly, your still going to be better off going with the guy who has a deeper understanding of what the hell is going on.
The reason to upgrade the hardward generally comes down to improving graphics and processing power. The added work for things like high end physics and AI is not an especially big hit in terms of development expense though. What is driving the cost upward is primarily the high res 3d graphics.
Creating high quality 3d art is extraordinarily labour intensive, and the tech to improve the toolset for the artists is not advancing as fast as the ability to push more content to the screen. If you increase the polygon count of your scene from 100 000 to 10 000 000, the labour requirements get difficult. Just watch the credits from a game made in 2001 and compare to a game made in 2012. The size of the art teams have gotten proportionally much larger compared to the size increase for the programmers.
Also, the assumption that the CEO's are getting hookers and blow is not universally true. If you produced one of the top 3 games of the year, sure, people are getting rich. If your outside the top 10 though, the development costs are eating enough of the profit that its a crap shoot on whether or not your broke even.
Used games and piracy have eaten a great deal of the profit margin for games that were good but not great. Lowering the price might actually be a good idea, but if your barely breaking even your going to have a hard time justifying the move to share holders who are seeing only marginal profitability.
In any case, change is coming because the iPhone / iPad is forcing it. All the companies that cannot compete at the $60 a game core market are starting to chase the lower dev costs for the mobile devices, and the bigger companies that see 'easy money' are following them. In any case, the long term move is to cut the retail outlets out of the game distribution entirely. Once that happens, your pretty much F*cked for buying used games anyway.
Nuclear Power has its issues. But the alternatives are not exactly free of cost either. At the end of hte day, the costs of nuclear power are arguably less than anything else that is capable of generating power at that scale. Wind / Solar would be optimal, but they do not have the scale yet to be seriously considered as alternatives unless you are content to live at a level of technology comparable to 1910.
From an environmental standpoint, I think it would be a better choice to try to deal with the accumulated nuclear waste than to deal with trying to undo the damage of the toxic emissions from using fossil fuels. The nuclear waste is at least highly localized and it can be collected and contained. You cannot really clean up all the emissions from burning coal or oil.
The problem with Nuclear power is that the costs associated with an accident are so massive (environmentally and financially) and they are incurred all at once. You will never convince most people to buy a car for $30 000 in one lump sum, but it is easy to sell someone on paying $40 000 if you tell them they can pay a little bit each month.
Part of the article reminds me of the 'Captain Hindsight' from the Cthulhu / Coon and Friends episode of Southpark. The article basically says that the risk assumptions were incorrect and they should have prepared better and made better assumptions in order to prevent the meltdown.
I disagree in part with the premise article.
There are two approaches to taking something that poses a risk, and making it safe. The choices are prevention and mitigation In this case, the problem is that a Nuclear Reactor poses a risk of dangerous meltdown. The typical safety measures are to make sure that a melt down will not happen (prevention). That approach generally works, and all risk management calculations are based on the prevention working.
Prevention is great up until it fails. If we change the discussion to sex / pregnancy, prevention of the sort described in the article is using a Condom. Its great when it works, but condoms break. If the penalty for pregnancy is death, your still taking one hell of a risk.
I think that nuclear power is a technology worth pursuing, but I think that the safety measures should start from 'if this thing melts down as soon as we turn it on, what can we do to contain the damage'? If a nuclear power plant can be designed in a manner that guarantees that a meltdown event does not endanger anyones safety, then it can be called entirely safe.
The game development market has become very competitive and very expensive.
Game became increasingly expensive to make because everyone was trying to add more and better content to their games in order to set themselves apart. As the price to develop went up, profit margins disappeared. Piracy and used game sales made the problem worse. To preserve the profits, the publishers and the developers are trying everything.
Games move from cartridges to CD's as much to bring down manufacturing costs as to increase available space to content. DRM schemes were created, and they become increasingly draconian in an effort to diminish piracy. Online pass requirements and Downloadable content are added to diminish the impact of used games sales (used games are great for retail sellers like Gamestop that buy used at $10 and sell used at $40).
Also, why do you think the publishers are chasing the iPhone / Android market so damn hard and going 'freemium' for everything? iTunes offers a huge install base, and being freemium kills the pirate problem (who is going to go to the trouble of jailbreaking a phone for a free to play game?). Users cannot resell an iTunes game, and they developers make a good profit by turning into spammers that constantly suggest their users buy freemium content on the device.
Personally I would rather deal with the DRM software then play a game clogged with nag popups asking me to spend more money on freemium content.
The 'pinnacle' game is not necessarily going to be the 2nd. It might come later, or perhaps the first game stands up as the pinnacle. With the Civ games, the later one replaces the older one in the series, and that is just iterating on their own success.
Also, there are not many developers going head to head with the Civ series these days, is there?
In any case, every successful genre seems to reach a point where a particular game is considered the standard to measure other games of that type against, and of course there are some instances where opinions will differ.
In any case, I do not think we disagree over the concept so much as the finer details.
There is a reason that Starcraft 2 took about 12 years to show up.
Any given game (and this probably applies to movies and to TV to some extent) will have an initial title that proves the concept as being worth pursuing, followed by a title that effectively represents the pinnacle of the genre. For 3d Shooters you had Wolfenstien which led to Doom. For MMO's you initially had Ultima online, which gave way to Everquest, and in turn gave way to World of Warcraft. And for RTS games you had Dune which led to Warcraft 2 which led to Starcraft.
Once you have that definitive product, competitors start to back off, realizing that they have no chance to dethrone the reigning king of the genre. The expectations of the fans keep escalating, and since you can never please everyone, you have fans of the genre start to splinter off, or perhaps just get bored. Since sales fall off, the resources for sequels fall off, and that basically buries the genre.
The endgame is that the creators of the 'pinnacle' product eventually stop making new iterations, and that the competitors have usually abandoned that pursuit some time before that point. Eventually no one is making new games in that genre. Metaphorically, the challengers stopped playing the game when it was too difficult to win at it, and the champion stopped only because the rewards for victory were no longer enough to justify the effort.
But the market for that genre still exists, and after about 10 years, a new generation is available to exploit. If the original concept was strong enough, the fans are probably hungry enough that a new iteration should be successful.
I might be overly pessimistic, but I do not think this will happen. Valve is basically talking about entering a mature market with entrenched competitors which also has a high barrier to entry. They do have one potential advantage, that being (presumably) an emphasis on streaming / downloading the content. However, that advantage is one that could be erased pretty easily if any of the other console makers adopt a similar distribution approach.
They are basically taking another crack at making the phantom. I cannot say that my confidence in them would be high.
Lets have a fictional person called Phil (a victim) and Bob (the guy posting the info) for the purpose of this post.
If Bob posts Phil's name, address, and phone number in a message board without Phil's permission, there is most likely some kind of hostile intent. This usually happens when Phil has managed to make Bob angry for some stupid reason (flame war, abortion debate, maybe Phil is just being a jackass here. Who knows? The reason is not relevant). So Bob gets Phil's info and posts it online in that message board. Why does Bob do this?
Most likely, Bob is hoping someone will go to Phil's house and beat him up. Or break a few windows. Maybe Bob just wants someone to take a crap in a paper bag, light it on fire, and throw it on Phils porch. The intent is to make it easy for all of Phils enemies to harass or inflict harm on Phil.
Target or Walmart do not have any hostile intent. They just want to sell you stuff. They gather and analyze data, and the only objective harm thaty they would intentionally cause is filling your mail box with unwanted spam. I would agree that doing so should earn someone a kick in the nuts anyway, but it is only annoying, not dangerous. In many cases they are using info they gathered themselves for their own benefit. It could also be argued that what they are doing is of mutual benefit: Walmart gets Phil to buy stuff, Phil will have a chance to buy something he wants.
The only problem for Phil is when access to that data is then sold, shared , or illegally accessed by those whose interests may run against him. There needs to be legal protections in place for Phil, and Walmart needs to be held responsible for any harm that comes of them keeping that database.
In the PS2 / Gamecube era, patching a console game just did not happen much. It was the XBox that introduced the notion by having a built in ethernet port, the Xbox Live service, and the built in hard drive. On the plus side this has led to certain egregious problems being fixed.
On the downside, it has become a crutch. Getting through Lotcheck used to be more difficult. It is still an unholy pain in the ass, but the big publishers can afford to drop a patch, and the revenue gained by being able to hit a launch date mandated by a marketing campaign will make up for it. If the company is big enough (EA, Ubisoft), and the title has the potential to move the needle for hardware sales, a great deal of completely terrible bugs can be forgiven if a launch day patch is forthcoming.
Smaller developers need to anticipate that they wont be able to patch the game at launch simply due to the financial constraints though.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting question. I am going to guess no. Sports are surprisingly tied to modern culture.
While it is clearly not 'high culture' in the way that Opera, art galleries, ballet, and such manage to, sports are surprisingly important to modern culture. Humans are competitive with one another. Sports are one of the few acceptable physical outlets for that. Competition in sports allow humans to compete with one another, either individually or in groups, without resorting to violence. Humans are tribal, and sports teams push several psychological buttons for people (belong to a group, and lets kick the ass of those other guys from across the river).
Individual sports may increase or decrease in importance over time, but I expect that some form of sports will continue to be culturally relevant and important as long as humans are both competitive with one another and want to impress women by showing off how dominant they are.
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I have no idea who got voted off the island. But I am very satisfied with what I get from having Cable tv.
- New episodes of good tv shows like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, Dexter, and Breaking bad show up on broadcast first. Streaming is absolutely more convenient. But running up against spoilers is too damn easy to do by accident if you use any kind of social media sites.
- New tv shows like 'The Amerikans' on FX show up on broadcast long before going to streaming sites, unless they are Netflix Originals.
- Live sports matter. Turns out I like watching people fight in a cage for money. The UFC puts out a surprising amount of events on free TV; 9 events on 'Free TV' (each being 6 hours (prelims and main card) plus an additional 9 events with prelim fights, and another event on Fox Sports 1 tomorrow. Watching these events legally through the official streaming service is much more expensive. Watching illegally is a pain in the ass. On top of that is more content from Bellator on Spike and regional promotions on Fight Network. MMA is not for everyone, but it is for me. And for others, its the NFL, or NBA, or NHL, or MLB.
- Also, as far as social media + spoilers, as much as it can hurt the experience of seeing a show to know the ending, it fucking kills any kind of sporting event.
- Not all content that you may wish to watch is going to be streamed easily. My wife is a fan of the Food Network. Not much demand for streams of those shows.
Personally, I love that Netflix and others are doing their own content now, but we are still pretty far off from being able to cherry pick only the shows I want to see and then pay only for that content.
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According to Wikipedia:
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nagasaki, Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOL_Comfort
So when did Japan become a 3rd world country that lacked advanced and sophisticated systems?
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In order to displace something, the new thing has to be all that the old thing was and then some more (some more crucial features not just some more sugar). And then it has to be cheaper to top it. Until you can satisfy both requirements, trying to get someone to upgrade is probably going to be an uphill battle.
If a company invested a non trivial amount of effort into creating a web enabled system that was dependent on IE 6, it will likely continue to be used until it becomes nearly impossible to get IE 6 to run on newer computers. Can you guarantee that the new system will do something the old system could not do? If you cannot, then it is probably going to be cheaper at any given moment to fix / replace the few older computers that break down then to reimplement the entire system.
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Pulling a number right out of my ass, lets say a typical person needs to earn $35 000 to $45 000 a year to support themselves at today's cost of living. . Lets say that random person X, working at a creative class job might only be able to earn $15 000 a year simply because he is just not that good.
Now lets automate the shit out of everything. Lets say we have robotic lumberjacks, miners, farmers, prefabricated construction factories for building homes, the whole smash. Lets also say that some kind of wonder tech combo both reduces the energy requirements while also making renewable energies viable for a standard of living comparable to the american average. Pure science fiction bullshit sure, but lets set that aside for a moment.
The real cost of living is going to fall way the hell down. Rich and Poor still exist because humans suck and we compete for mates as much as anything else. But the cost for a person to secure food and shelter drops to something like $10 000 a month.
The guy who can only earn $15 000 in a creative type job is going to be able to live while doing that job. Maybe they aren't living the high live but they can probably get by as well as they would have before.
Also, lets not call it a 'creative' type job, and instead call it a 'cultural' job. Some people will create art of various forms. Some people will perform (art or sports). Some will teach. I am sure some people will just try to party all the damn time.
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Sounds like an optimal way to clear your mind.
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Apples and Oranges -- A Comparison
by Scott A. Sandford, NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California
http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html
Being slightly more relevant, comparing how men and women learn is worth while. Even if they are different, both are trying to accomplish the same thing. Men and Women obtain an education and learn skills in an effort to be economically self reliant within a modern economy. Apple's and Oranges are both fruit products that can be consumed to provide calories and nutrition.
Trying to compare something entirely different (ie, the Geopolitical ramifications of the collapse of communism within the soviet union vs an Apple) is truly useless.
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Pretty much everyone here has already said it. Coding standards to help productivity, but its a group thing. ie: its more of a a +3% to +5% gain for everyone who has to share code and know what the hell is going on. Coding to a standard that is not a habit for yourself is going to be a bit of a hit to your own productivity.
So if you hate dealing with the existing code standard, you could either implement a script to do the reformatting for you, or you can find an existing tool to do the same. Write however the hell feels natural, and when its working, run the conversion script and retest. If possible, convert in both directions (ie, go from official standard to your preference before you start modifying it again). It wont help structural issues (ie, if using certain design patterns is forbidden), but it will deal with the camel case vs underscore, variable name prefixes, space vs tab, and where the hell to put curly braces.
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What if that is not an encrypted message, but the encryption key for a message?
I am not a cryptography expert, but I suppose there would be no way to discern the two right?
If it is the key and not a message, than no amount of decryption effort would matter.
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The justification is that the 'jerk' in question was basically murdering the teams morale and enthusiasm.
Some portion of management types were brainstorming ideas on how to improve things (ie, ideas for new services or products) and getting everyone involved and excited. Then the rockstar / genius / jerkass guy would crap on everything saying everything sucks. As brilliant and as respected as Employee X was, no one else really wanted to work with him.
Now, it is possible that the ideas being discussed were terrible ideas that needed to be shot down. But lets say that the ideas were not necessarily bad ideas, and just ones that employee X does not agree with. If your an employee, your part of a team. If your the most valuable member of the team, you should be taken seriously. But Employee X should not be allowed to become the proverbial albatross around the teams neck.
Employee X is like a fan favorite superstar player on a Basketball team that can score crap tons of goals, but the team is still losing. The coach has ideas to fix it, but they mean Employee X is not going to score as many goals. Letting the Superstar do what he wants is not going to get the team to win (they are already doing that). Making the changes the superstar wants the team to make is also not going to work (team cannot afford expensive players needed to back up the superstar).
At that point, the Superstar is usually traded, the team makes the changes they feel they need to. Sometimes the team starts to win again. Sometimes they lose worse. No matter what though, something needed to change.
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I think that the situation as described is incomplete or missing part of the picture.
What he is describing is what happens when you have a highly valuable and contributing team member who has a vision for the company that differs from what everyone else wants.
Assume we have 10 employees.
Lets say Employee X has a value of 1000, and the rest have a value of 100 each. The company has a value of 1900. Clearly Employee X is valuable and to get where you need to be, you need to accommodate his views. He is basically more than half the company
Now you grow to 40 employees. Employee X is still worth 1000, but the rest of the group is worth 3900. Employee X should not be dictating where the entire group wants to go, even if he carries so much influence.
Employee X did not become less valuable, he did become less important. The only time Employee X becomes a Jerk is if Employee X allows his ego to think he is still more than half the value of the company.
The solution is that Employee X needs to be treated as a consultant or contract. Let him be the rock star that saves every ones ass. But as good as he is, he cannot lead if no one wants to follow him, and he should not lead if the place he wants to lead is not the place the team wants to go. And Employee X should not be allowed to prevent someone else from leading if his plans do not add as much to the group as the other guy.
A good leader is not the guy who is worth 1000 to everyone else's 100. A good leader is the guy who can get a value of 120 from people with a base value of 100.
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You may be long about real leather being a lot cheaper than bio engineered leather.
Granted, you have doubts about this being able to scale up. But lets assume for a moment you are wrong.
The inputs to the process are going to be somewhat similar to the inputs required to raise a cow. But the quantity of those inputs should be much lower. You only need enough food / nutrients to grow the skin. You do not need to support the rest of the mass of the cow. The waste (urine, feces) would also be lower. No bones or brains, and the support features of the rest of the cow (the lungs / spleen / kidney's) can probably be accomplished by machine filters.
I am not sure if the vat grown meat would work as well though. You would need to support much more biomass and your probably not going to be able to simulate a massive rib steak.
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You mention Xbox and PC games, but those do not narrow it down to much.
On the PC side, games of the 'just one more turn' / slow play strategy games are probably not affected. The Civilization series, Galactic Civilizations 2 (not related to previous series), various 'God Games', are not likely to be affected.
If your gaming leaned more towards First Person Shooters, and Starcraft 2 style RTS games, and anything with a 'mouse to look, WSAD keys to move' is probably going to be a bitch to play with a damaged left hand. I have never gotten into World of Warcraft, but given the prevalence for keyboard macro's, that may not be the best option.
For many XBox games, it comes down to what games your playing on that console, and how usable your left thumb is. If your left thumb is functional, you probably have a huge amount of games that are perfectly playable. If your left index finger is also functional, you may find that most console games pose no issues.
Games that are playable with the Wii Remote or Playstation Move controller are also essentially one handed games as long as the 'nunchuck' attachment is not critical. Content choices on the Wii do skew very heavy to casual though.
More info on what kind of games you actually play may result in better advice.
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If your content to use 3d packages like Unity, you can probably get by with little more than a strong understanding of matrix and vector math.
If you ever want to implement any of the following more directly, you need significantly more
3d Physics: requires calculus for certain ballistic calculations.
Low level rendering: requires knowing how to interpolate a normal value across mulitple verticies
collision vs true curved surface: if you want to use spline curves to represent geometry, you need to know how to calcuate an exact location on it to determine a collision normal.
Or what happens if you want to use a 3rd level plugin for Unity that only works with Quaternions and all you have are the Vector / matrix based positions?
You cannot always depend on an out of the box solution.
Think of it this way: You do not need to be an architect to build a house. Any idiot can hammer together some walls and a roof. If you want the damn thing to actually look good or do something no one else has done yet, you need more. Any idiot can buy a 'just add water' cake mix and make a chocolate cake. But the guy who can make one from the raw ingredients is probably going to make a much better goddamn cake.
Also, if it comes down to hiring an employee with high school level trig vs a guy with university level calculus, and the job involves working with those concepts even indirectly, than high school guy loses every goddamn time. Even if your not using it directly, your still going to be better off going with the guy who has a deeper understanding of what the hell is going on.
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Perhaps not perfect for a 3 year old, but worth looking at are Atomic Robo and Axe Cop.
Atomic Robo is very much a 'child appropriate' comic.
http://www.atomic-robo.com/
Axe Cop is created by a 30 something year old cartoonist and written by his 6 year old brother.
http://axecop.com/
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The reason to upgrade the hardward generally comes down to improving graphics and processing power. The added work for things like high end physics and AI is not an especially big hit in terms of development expense though. What is driving the cost upward is primarily the high res 3d graphics.
Creating high quality 3d art is extraordinarily labour intensive, and the tech to improve the toolset for the artists is not advancing as fast as the ability to push more content to the screen. If you increase the polygon count of your scene from 100 000 to 10 000 000, the labour requirements get difficult. Just watch the credits from a game made in 2001 and compare to a game made in 2012. The size of the art teams have gotten proportionally much larger compared to the size increase for the programmers.
Also, the assumption that the CEO's are getting hookers and blow is not universally true. If you produced one of the top 3 games of the year, sure, people are getting rich. If your outside the top 10 though, the development costs are eating enough of the profit that its a crap shoot on whether or not your broke even.
Used games and piracy have eaten a great deal of the profit margin for games that were good but not great. Lowering the price might actually be a good idea, but if your barely breaking even your going to have a hard time justifying the move to share holders who are seeing only marginal profitability.
In any case, change is coming because the iPhone / iPad is forcing it. All the companies that cannot compete at the $60 a game core market are starting to chase the lower dev costs for the mobile devices, and the bigger companies that see 'easy money' are following them. In any case, the long term move is to cut the retail outlets out of the game distribution entirely. Once that happens, your pretty much F*cked for buying used games anyway.
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I had no idea what FRAND was, but a wikipedia search indicates it covers patents. This is a copyright dispute, not a patent dispute.
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Nuclear Power has its issues. But the alternatives are not exactly free of cost either. At the end of hte day, the costs of nuclear power are arguably less than anything else that is capable of generating power at that scale. Wind / Solar would be optimal, but they do not have the scale yet to be seriously considered as alternatives unless you are content to live at a level of technology comparable to 1910.
From an environmental standpoint, I think it would be a better choice to try to deal with the accumulated nuclear waste than to deal with trying to undo the damage of the toxic emissions from using fossil fuels. The nuclear waste is at least highly localized and it can be collected and contained. You cannot really clean up all the emissions from burning coal or oil.
The problem with Nuclear power is that the costs associated with an accident are so massive (environmentally and financially) and they are incurred all at once. You will never convince most people to buy a car for $30 000 in one lump sum, but it is easy to sell someone on paying $40 000 if you tell them they can pay a little bit each month.
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Part of the article reminds me of the 'Captain Hindsight' from the Cthulhu / Coon and Friends episode of Southpark. The article basically says that the risk assumptions were incorrect and they should have prepared better and made better assumptions in order to prevent the meltdown.
I disagree in part with the premise article.
There are two approaches to taking something that poses a risk, and making it safe. The choices are prevention and mitigation In this case, the problem is that a Nuclear Reactor poses a risk of dangerous meltdown. The typical safety measures are to make sure that a melt down will not happen (prevention). That approach generally works, and all risk management calculations are based on the prevention working.
Prevention is great up until it fails. If we change the discussion to sex / pregnancy, prevention of the sort described in the article is using a Condom. Its great when it works, but condoms break. If the penalty for pregnancy is death, your still taking one hell of a risk.
I think that nuclear power is a technology worth pursuing, but I think that the safety measures should start from 'if this thing melts down as soon as we turn it on, what can we do to contain the damage'? If a nuclear power plant can be designed in a manner that guarantees that a meltdown event does not endanger anyones safety, then it can be called entirely safe.
Otherwise, they are only safe until they fail.
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The game development market has become very competitive and very expensive.
Game became increasingly expensive to make because everyone was trying to add more and better content to their games in order to set themselves apart. As the price to develop went up, profit margins disappeared. Piracy and used game sales made the problem worse. To preserve the profits, the publishers and the developers are trying everything.
Games move from cartridges to CD's as much to bring down manufacturing costs as to increase available space to content.
DRM schemes were created, and they become increasingly draconian in an effort to diminish piracy.
Online pass requirements and Downloadable content are added to diminish the impact of used games sales (used games are great for retail sellers like Gamestop that buy used at $10 and sell used at $40).
Also, why do you think the publishers are chasing the iPhone / Android market so damn hard and going 'freemium' for everything? iTunes offers a huge install base, and being freemium kills the pirate problem (who is going to go to the trouble of jailbreaking a phone for a free to play game?). Users cannot resell an iTunes game, and they developers make a good profit by turning into spammers that constantly suggest their users buy freemium content on the device.
Personally I would rather deal with the DRM software then play a game clogged with nag popups asking me to spend more money on freemium content.
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The 'pinnacle' game is not necessarily going to be the 2nd. It might come later, or perhaps the first game stands up as the pinnacle. With the Civ games, the later one replaces the older one in the series, and that is just iterating on their own success.
Also, there are not many developers going head to head with the Civ series these days, is there?
In any case, every successful genre seems to reach a point where a particular game is considered the standard to measure other games of that type against, and of course there are some instances where opinions will differ.
In any case, I do not think we disagree over the concept so much as the finer details.
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There is a reason that Starcraft 2 took about 12 years to show up.
Any given game (and this probably applies to movies and to TV to some extent) will have an initial title that proves the concept as being worth pursuing, followed by a title that effectively represents the pinnacle of the genre. For 3d Shooters you had Wolfenstien which led to Doom. For MMO's you initially had Ultima online, which gave way to Everquest, and in turn gave way to World of Warcraft. And for RTS games you had Dune which led to Warcraft 2 which led to Starcraft.
Once you have that definitive product, competitors start to back off, realizing that they have no chance to dethrone the reigning king of the genre. The expectations of the fans keep escalating, and since you can never please everyone, you have fans of the genre start to splinter off, or perhaps just get bored. Since sales fall off, the resources for sequels fall off, and that basically buries the genre.
The endgame is that the creators of the 'pinnacle' product eventually stop making new iterations, and that the competitors have usually abandoned that pursuit some time before that point. Eventually no one is making new games in that genre. Metaphorically, the challengers stopped playing the game when it was too difficult to win at it, and the champion stopped only because the rewards for victory were no longer enough to justify the effort.
But the market for that genre still exists, and after about 10 years, a new generation is available to exploit. If the original concept was strong enough, the fans are probably hungry enough that a new iteration should be successful.
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I might be overly pessimistic, but I do not think this will happen. Valve is basically talking about entering a mature market with entrenched competitors which also has a high barrier to entry. They do have one potential advantage, that being (presumably) an emphasis on streaming / downloading the content. However, that advantage is one that could be erased pretty easily if any of the other console makers adopt a similar distribution approach.
They are basically taking another crack at making the phantom. I cannot say that my confidence in them would be high.
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Lets have a fictional person called Phil (a victim) and Bob (the guy posting the info) for the purpose of this post.
If Bob posts Phil's name, address, and phone number in a message board without Phil's permission, there is most likely some kind of hostile intent. This usually happens when Phil has managed to make Bob angry for some stupid reason (flame war, abortion debate, maybe Phil is just being a jackass here. Who knows? The reason is not relevant). So Bob gets Phil's info and posts it online in that message board. Why does Bob do this?
Most likely, Bob is hoping someone will go to Phil's house and beat him up. Or break a few windows. Maybe Bob just wants someone to take a crap in a paper bag, light it on fire, and throw it on Phils porch. The intent is to make it easy for all of Phils enemies to harass or inflict harm on Phil.
Target or Walmart do not have any hostile intent. They just want to sell you stuff. They gather and analyze data, and the only objective harm thaty they would intentionally cause is filling your mail box with unwanted spam. I would agree that doing so should earn someone a kick in the nuts anyway, but it is only annoying, not dangerous. In many cases they are using info they gathered themselves for their own benefit. It could also be argued that what they are doing is of mutual benefit: Walmart gets Phil to buy stuff, Phil will have a chance to buy something he wants.
The only problem for Phil is when access to that data is then sold, shared , or illegally accessed by those whose interests may run against him. There needs to be legal protections in place for Phil, and Walmart needs to be held responsible for any harm that comes of them keeping that database.
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In the PS2 / Gamecube era, patching a console game just did not happen much. It was the XBox that introduced the notion by having a built in ethernet port, the Xbox Live service, and the built in hard drive. On the plus side this has led to certain egregious problems being fixed.
On the downside, it has become a crutch. Getting through Lotcheck used to be more difficult. It is still an unholy pain in the ass, but the big publishers can afford to drop a patch, and the revenue gained by being able to hit a launch date mandated by a marketing campaign will make up for it. If the company is big enough (EA, Ubisoft), and the title has the potential to move the needle for hardware sales, a great deal of completely terrible bugs can be forgiven if a launch day patch is forthcoming.
Smaller developers need to anticipate that they wont be able to patch the game at launch simply due to the financial constraints though.
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