You don't get a lunar lander to the moon in Kerbal Space Program with a pair of solid fuel boosters
I was almost ready to take that on as a challenge, but the best I've done with pure solid-booster rockets in KSP is orbiting a satellite or manned craft, and that required no less than 6 boosters plus a stack of separators for the circularization burn. All stock parts, though - there's probably a mod that will get you to munar orbit in a single stage, but that's obviously cheating.
For all purposes: Firefox, Chrome and Opera - I use separate browsers to keep home/work/porn separated. Install AdBlock on both Firefox and Chrome. MPC-HC - I'm fine with WMP for music, but for video I need MediaPlayer Classic LibreOffice - Because you can't do everything with plain text files Notepad++ - Because there's a lot you *can* do with plain text files 7zip - Handles every compressed file format I've ever seen, except for one really old Mac-specific one I had to use once Steam - Because at this point I have too many games to abandon Steam, and it really is good at managing such a big library
For work only: Thunderbird - I used to be able to use GMail's web app, but now that I have two work email addresses I need a full-fledged email client Paint.NET, GIMP, and Inkscape - for image editing. Paint.NET is useful for making quick edits, like rotating an image. I'm usually done before GIMP would have started up PuTTY - Best way to connect to my fleet of Linux servers Komodo - Best IDE for when files are stored on a remote server, as is common with web apps MySQL Workbench + SQL Server Management Studio - Best way to test database stuff
If using Windows 8, also add Classic Shell Start Menu. It makes it *better* than the W7 start menu once you tweak it right. And for a first install, Ninite will let you automatically install about 90% of these. Very useful program.
Sorting things alphabetically, as in the original example, I tend to start with a bucket sort, with the number of buckets depending on how many things I'm alphabetizing. This works well because I don't have to keep any state in memory other than what buckets there are (and if things are bad enough, I can do two stages of buckets - often mimicking a binary search in reverse, if there's a massive number). Once I've gotten everything at least first-letter alphabetized, I go through with a mergesort on each bucket, or if I'm able to hold all the documents or books at once, I just do an insertion sort.
However, whenever I need to sort a deck of cards (to make sure it's a full deck, for instance), I just play a game of Klondike solitaire, cheating as needed. It's slower, sure, but more fun that way.
"Perilously close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
However, Soyuz 11 killed all on board via decompression after undocking from Salyut 1, making them the only casualties to actually occur in space - and even then one could argue that they were beginning the "descent" phase, although that argument would rely on a very loose definition.
OpenBSD is for Evil Network Admins. OK, I can accept that. So what would Windows be for? Lawful Evil, I would assume. Same for OS X. Extending that, Linux might work for True Neutral, or maybe Chaotic Good. HURD is obviously Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Evil.
Bitcoin is, by design, unregulated and unregulatable. That gives it strengths - the feds cannot seize your funds effectively, nor can your spending be monitored effectively. But it also gives it weaknesses - namely, the "banks" and other financial institutions are not inspected or insured, meaning they can "fail" rather easily either through mishap or malice.
Anyone who thought that something like this wouldn't happen is a fucking idiot.
But the fact that it could, and did, happen, just means the system is operating as designed, flaws and all. If you think the design was good, well, this doesn't change anything. If you think it was bad, now you have proof that one of the flaws can actually manifest, but that still doesn't automatically mean those flaws outweigh the benefits of the system.
Now, there is a good argument to be had about just how bad that flaw is. But so far we've had very few Bitcoin failures, too few IMO to really predict how frequently they will occur in the future. So that argument isn't going to be settled for a long while.
As for me, I'm still more concerned about speculators than about failing or fraudulent exchanges. I'll join up with cryptocurrencies once the waves of speculative investors die down - I trust them enough as currencies, but as an investment they're a horrible gamble.
My car, a Fiat 500, also uses Windows (WP7 IIRC) for the entertainment system. It has some very odd problems with USB support - it plays files just fine, but the ordering of them ignores folders and filenames, going only by when the file was added to the filesystem. If you had multiple copy operations going on while loading up your USB drive, that means it will jump around folders in a seemingly random way. Further, it means navigating by folder is broken - you can only go forward or back by track. Navigating by folder DOES work on the CD drive, if you have a data CD full of MP3s (or WMAs, I guess, but who uses those?).
And this isn't on some weird filesystem or even a non-Microsoft - I had freshly formatted it as FAT32, under Windows. It's literally the most common denominator of filesystems, yet they can't read it properly.
I had an old GPS system that experienced similar problems with its media player, under Windows CE 6. So I think this is not an application-specific bug, but one general to CE-based systems. So that's even worse - a filesystem developed by Microsoft isn't properly supported by a Microsoft OS. That's a poor sign of quality IMO.
How many people keep the brake completely floored when stopped? I know I don't - I keep it down enough to stop the idling engine from moving me forward, but I don't doubt that my car would take off if I slammed down the gas pedal while stopped like I normally am.
General gist: A realtime OS is designed to handle a system that needs to operate in real time, generally one operating some sort of machinery. As such, the scheduler can offer certain guarantees - interrupts will be processed within a certain time limit, processes will get a certain amount of CPU time, and so on. A regular OS scheduler does not offer these guarantees, because they can come with performance limitations in peak scenarios.
Or to put it another way, a realtime OS aims for lowest maximum latency, a regular OS aims for lowest average latency, or potentially even highest average bandwidth.
Imagine an airplane (it's like a car analogy with wings). You have some sensor and a control surface, and every millisecond that sensor reads an input and that needs to affect the control surface in a very simple way. A regular OS scheduler does not guarantee that some other process won't have hold over the CPU for 2ms, while a realtime scheduler can be told to give you that guarantee, and even told how to prioritize tasks if the CPU is overutilized. In a plane, or other machinery, that guarantee can be very important because if things don't happen when they need to happen, things break.
They are at Anandtech. They do noise/temps/power at idle, in a game, or under full synthetic load. They even do an overclock and then re-compare game/synth numbers.
Basically, they're looking only for the DRM servers used by some very specific kernel-level cheats (apparently even cheats have DRM now - and these are not web sites, but DRM servers they're looking for, you won't trigger it by searching for or even buying cheats unless you use them). They do this comparison client-side, transmitting only if there is a match, and only transmitting the hashed value (which is used so the VAC servers can confirm it was a cheat when issuing the ban - otherwise one would be able to forge a "cheat" and get someone else banned). They also only do this scan at all if VAC has detected the cheat in the first place, which they claim has affected less than 0.1% of their users.
Valve is explicitly denying that they are gathering your browser history.
So my overall analysis: 1) If what they say is true, then they're doing everything they can to *not* gather your browsing history, and are only gathering the hashed value to protect users. 2) This should be possible to verify - see if the code doing the checks is triggered at all during normal use, and see what a packet sniffer picks up. 3) Even though I like Valve a lot, after recent events (Snowden, some personal betrayals, etc.) I feel I can't trust anybody. I'll let others do the verification (I'm not technically skilled enough to trust my own work on it), but if it turns out that this is all they are doing, it's a good thing that is very, very close to being a bad thing. If, however, they are not just spying on us but then lying about it, I will be downloading a Steam crack immediately (I spent over $1000 on Steam games, they're mine no matter what the law says) and taking everything into offline mode.
Most of the problem is artistic, not technological. We have more than enough horsepower to get photo-realistic rendering. At least as long as everything stays still - it's when things start to move that it all breaks down.
Particularly faces, but there are some games that look breathtaking in screenshots that look absolutely horrible once characters do anything beyond an idle animation (I'm looking at you, Skyrim). And plenty of games that manage to do good move animations and good facial animations don't do them both at once - everyone has to stand still to talk. And eye animations are very difficult, but very important if you want to cross the uncanny valley.
Much of it comes down to animators being trained mostly for non-interactive works, and game engines not being good at merging animations together or altering them dynamically (look at how feet clip through small ground obstacles). I think what is really needed are combined programmer-animators, who can write code to dynamically animate complex systems. Some games have done this in limited ways, but if you want to cross the valley completely, you need that extremely rare skillset combined in one person.
You can bypass all these problems by using prerendered cutscenes, but that makes it not exactly a "game" at that point, just movie snippets.
Of course, the other way to bypass it is by not aiming for photorealism. You don't even have to go as far as cel shading - Bioshock: Infinite certainly isn't aiming for photorealism (look at the eye-skull ratio and head-body ratio), but it also certainly isn't what I would call "cartoony".
Artists have found ways to cover up the things the coders can't do well - look at how many characters have something that covers their mouth or eyes. The good ones have always found ways to do this - Samus's massive shoulder orbs are partly to cover up how they couldn't get the complex shoulder joints to work right.
It wasn't an accident that he downloaded them, it was an accident that they were up there at all, or in a publicly-accessible way. They were indexed by Google, after all (shouldn't they have been named co-defendants?)
From the gibberish in TFA, it sounds like the site had some sort of Javascript user authentication on index and search pages, but direct URLs always worked. I'm not sure how that let Google index them, but even the government is claiming that anyone who tried to access those URLs would get 200s, not 403s.
Further, the documents appeared, to this guy at least, to be things that would have been public - he "hacked" the rough equivalent of the FDA, not the DOD or DHS.
Better analogy: you're in a military surplus store and find a bunch of boots (hardly unusual in a surplus store, in fact it would be very odd to find one that did not have a few racks of military footware). You buy them (because you needed costumes for a play or something (note to Hollywood: The Sound of Music hasn't been remade in nearly five decades, time to get on a modern-day retelling)), take them home, and leave them in a box for a while. A few days later the National Guard swarms your house and you're arrested for treason because those boots have some sort of new sole that's classified as weapons-grade, and those boots were never supposed to be surplussed in the first place.
At no point did you have any idea that anything was wrong - you went to a place where items are sold, you bought some items that were commonly sold (or to bypass the metaphor, you went to a site that searches public information, and found information that you were allowed to access). The fault would logically lie with whoever had those boots/documents made available to the public incorrectly (if, in fact, it is incorrect - what kind of stuff about food safety should *not* be public data?).
You are misunderstanding both the terminology and my argument.
Let's say you're a car company. You have 10 engineers work for two years to design a car, plus marketing and management, at a total cost of $20M. That is your development cost.
Let's further suppose that each car costs $20K to build, both in materials and labor. This is your per-unit cost.
You would break even if you sold a single car for $20,020,000. Or you would break even if you sold a thousand cars at $40,000. Or if you sold a million cars at $20,020. Note that your total costs (development + production) go up as you sell more units - producing a million of these cars costs a thousand times your development cost.
To put it another way, your per-unit costs are what it takes to go from a completed car design on paper to a thousand produced cars ready to be shipped to dealers. It doesn't include taxes or fees or other things that are part of the sale cost, only things that must be paid ON PRODUCTION.
If you build those thousand cars and don't sell them, you're still $40M in the hole, even though the value of them at the dealer may be $50M.
With software burned on CDs and shipped to retail, it might cost $1 per copy to burn the discs, print the manuals, buy the case, and ship it to a retailer. Again, that's your per-unit cost. Digital distribution lowers that even further - it can cost pennies for each individual download of your game, and much of it is even a flat cost (running a server farm costs about the same whether or not anyone is using it, save for bandwidth costs). With a distributor it can be higher, especially those who take a fixed percentage as their fee, but that also covers some marketing and advertizing, which is not strictly per-unit.
Your logic is also pretty absurd - by your logic, the more people download a game, the less it cost to make. I can see the point you were trying to make, but you really are not expressing it well. I think you were trying to say "distributed over X number of copies, the total cost is Y", but that's not a particularly useful metric in this situation.
With cars, or other high-per-unit-cost products, it is not feasible to crowdfund the development then give it away for free. It would be for a game - crowdfund the $20M to develop it, plus enough to cover distribution for a reasonable time, and of course some profits, and once it's done just give it away. This is a completely new business model, and AFAIK it's still theoretical right now, but it seems both feasible, and a better relation to the actual costs.
First, I'm going to operate under the assumption that proprietary software is considered ethical; if you disagree you may have some valid points but we're just going to have to disagree.
With digitally distributed software, the per-unit cost is negligible - the cost to the seller is almost entirely the cost to produce the "first copy". The ideal method of funding games entirely would reflect this fully, but I think it's going to take a while for crowd-funding to reach that level of cultural acceptance. Until then we'll continue with the selling a completed product at an arbitrary price to recover costs. But the point is, software is not a physical product - it is information.
Console software handled that by trying to emulate physical software. They tied to software to a specific disc (or earlier, cartridge) that did have a non-negligible per-unit cost. This was mainly a piracy-prevention system, but it made reselling games both possible (from a technical perspective) and sensible (from a consumer perspective).
Steam, and similar programs, does not tie games to a physical product. Even if you buy retail, you basically just get a Steam code to add the game to your account, and a physical copy of whatever the latest patch was when the disc was burned, so you only have to update from there (not that it always helps much - I think HL2 has more patches now than the original game occupied). From a legal perspective, they handwave it as a rental - of indefinite duration, and with no ongoing cost, but your "purchase" is just adding the game to your rental list. IMO that's bullshittery that's only necessary because the law hasn't caught up with reality yet.
Laws made for physical products make sense for physical products. They rarely make sense for virtual ones. We've seen this with "piracy" being made equivalent to theft - which/. regularly decries as being false because making a new copy does not deprive someone of their copy, merely the opportunity to have sold it. However, the same applies to reselling - you cannot be sure that the reseller will have removed all their copies (even with Steam's DRM, I can see ways to do keep a copy of a game playable after reselling). Further, because of the pressure of piracy, Steam has very low prices (with some exceptions - Activision seems to insist on keeping their games at $60 for years), which reduces or even eliminates the benefit to the consumer of reselling.
Yes, this is siding with a corporation over user rights. I don't like that much either, just on principle, since user rights are an endangered species these days. But they seem to actually be in the right on this.
I do think that they need to add refunds, though, for games that you purchase but then find either will not run, or do not work as advertized. I would like to think that the only reason they have not is because of the holes that would leave in their DRM.
Why the flying fuck does anybody think Slashdot readers need to have "whitelisting" defined for them, let alone think they can pass it off as a "new technology"? Did Dice start putting those retarded SlashBI articles in main Slashdot now?
It is, however, a bad idea to switch to reverse gear while the vehicle is in forward motion. Always come to a full stop before changing to a reverse gear.
So why are you pushing out a site that doesn't have even the most essential features done yet? Slashdot Beta seems like something I could have whipped up in a week as an incomplete, buggy proof-of-concept.
And that's what the popup said - that we had basically a month before the beta was released, which implicitly deprecates and eventually removes the functional version.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't get a lunar lander to the moon in Kerbal Space Program with a pair of solid fuel boosters
I was almost ready to take that on as a challenge, but the best I've done with pure solid-booster rockets in KSP is orbiting a satellite or manned craft, and that required no less than 6 boosters plus a stack of separators for the circularization burn. All stock parts, though - there's probably a mod that will get you to munar orbit in a single stage, but that's obviously cheating.
For all purposes:
Firefox, Chrome and Opera - I use separate browsers to keep home/work/porn separated. Install AdBlock on both Firefox and Chrome.
MPC-HC - I'm fine with WMP for music, but for video I need MediaPlayer Classic
LibreOffice - Because you can't do everything with plain text files
Notepad++ - Because there's a lot you *can* do with plain text files
7zip - Handles every compressed file format I've ever seen, except for one really old Mac-specific one I had to use once
Steam - Because at this point I have too many games to abandon Steam, and it really is good at managing such a big library
For work only:
Thunderbird - I used to be able to use GMail's web app, but now that I have two work email addresses I need a full-fledged email client
Paint.NET, GIMP, and Inkscape - for image editing. Paint.NET is useful for making quick edits, like rotating an image. I'm usually done before GIMP would have started up
PuTTY - Best way to connect to my fleet of Linux servers
Komodo - Best IDE for when files are stored on a remote server, as is common with web apps
MySQL Workbench + SQL Server Management Studio - Best way to test database stuff
If using Windows 8, also add Classic Shell Start Menu. It makes it *better* than the W7 start menu once you tweak it right.
And for a first install, Ninite will let you automatically install about 90% of these. Very useful program.
Sorting things alphabetically, as in the original example, I tend to start with a bucket sort, with the number of buckets depending on how many things I'm alphabetizing. This works well because I don't have to keep any state in memory other than what buckets there are (and if things are bad enough, I can do two stages of buckets - often mimicking a binary search in reverse, if there's a massive number). Once I've gotten everything at least first-letter alphabetized, I go through with a mergesort on each bucket, or if I'm able to hold all the documents or books at once, I just do an insertion sort.
However, whenever I need to sort a deck of cards (to make sure it's a full deck, for instance), I just play a game of Klondike solitaire, cheating as needed. It's slower, sure, but more fun that way.
"Perilously close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
However, Soyuz 11 killed all on board via decompression after undocking from Salyut 1, making them the only casualties to actually occur in space - and even then one could argue that they were beginning the "descent" phase, although that argument would rely on a very loose definition.
FPGAs, I assume.
OpenBSD is for Evil Network Admins. OK, I can accept that. So what would Windows be for? Lawful Evil, I would assume. Same for OS X. Extending that, Linux might work for True Neutral, or maybe Chaotic Good. HURD is obviously Chaotic Neutral or Chaotic Evil.
No, the US Navy of course. This discovery pushes the first use of sonar back several million years.
Not to mention the invention of the United States.
Bitcoin is, by design, unregulated and unregulatable. That gives it strengths - the feds cannot seize your funds effectively, nor can your spending be monitored effectively. But it also gives it weaknesses - namely, the "banks" and other financial institutions are not inspected or insured, meaning they can "fail" rather easily either through mishap or malice.
Anyone who thought that something like this wouldn't happen is a fucking idiot.
But the fact that it could, and did, happen, just means the system is operating as designed, flaws and all. If you think the design was good, well, this doesn't change anything. If you think it was bad, now you have proof that one of the flaws can actually manifest, but that still doesn't automatically mean those flaws outweigh the benefits of the system.
Now, there is a good argument to be had about just how bad that flaw is. But so far we've had very few Bitcoin failures, too few IMO to really predict how frequently they will occur in the future. So that argument isn't going to be settled for a long while.
As for me, I'm still more concerned about speculators than about failing or fraudulent exchanges. I'll join up with cryptocurrencies once the waves of speculative investors die down - I trust them enough as currencies, but as an investment they're a horrible gamble.
My car, a Fiat 500, also uses Windows (WP7 IIRC) for the entertainment system. It has some very odd problems with USB support - it plays files just fine, but the ordering of them ignores folders and filenames, going only by when the file was added to the filesystem. If you had multiple copy operations going on while loading up your USB drive, that means it will jump around folders in a seemingly random way. Further, it means navigating by folder is broken - you can only go forward or back by track. Navigating by folder DOES work on the CD drive, if you have a data CD full of MP3s (or WMAs, I guess, but who uses those?).
And this isn't on some weird filesystem or even a non-Microsoft - I had freshly formatted it as FAT32, under Windows. It's literally the most common denominator of filesystems, yet they can't read it properly.
I had an old GPS system that experienced similar problems with its media player, under Windows CE 6. So I think this is not an application-specific bug, but one general to CE-based systems. So that's even worse - a filesystem developed by Microsoft isn't properly supported by a Microsoft OS. That's a poor sign of quality IMO.
Perhaps if DICE had used an IDE, we could have avoided Slashdot Beta.
Microsoft: Almost as horrible as Slashdot Beta
How many people keep the brake completely floored when stopped? I know I don't - I keep it down enough to stop the idling engine from moving me forward, but I don't doubt that my car would take off if I slammed down the gas pedal while stopped like I normally am.
General gist:
A realtime OS is designed to handle a system that needs to operate in real time, generally one operating some sort of machinery. As such, the scheduler can offer certain guarantees - interrupts will be processed within a certain time limit, processes will get a certain amount of CPU time, and so on. A regular OS scheduler does not offer these guarantees, because they can come with performance limitations in peak scenarios.
Or to put it another way, a realtime OS aims for lowest maximum latency, a regular OS aims for lowest average latency, or potentially even highest average bandwidth.
Imagine an airplane (it's like a car analogy with wings). You have some sensor and a control surface, and every millisecond that sensor reads an input and that needs to affect the control surface in a very simple way. A regular OS scheduler does not guarantee that some other process won't have hold over the CPU for 2ms, while a realtime scheduler can be told to give you that guarantee, and even told how to prioritize tasks if the CPU is overutilized. In a plane, or other machinery, that guarantee can be very important because if things don't happen when they need to happen, things break.
They are at Anandtech. They do noise/temps/power at idle, in a game, or under full synthetic load. They even do an overclock and then re-compare game/synth numbers.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming...
Basically, they're looking only for the DRM servers used by some very specific kernel-level cheats (apparently even cheats have DRM now - and these are not web sites, but DRM servers they're looking for, you won't trigger it by searching for or even buying cheats unless you use them). They do this comparison client-side, transmitting only if there is a match, and only transmitting the hashed value (which is used so the VAC servers can confirm it was a cheat when issuing the ban - otherwise one would be able to forge a "cheat" and get someone else banned). They also only do this scan at all if VAC has detected the cheat in the first place, which they claim has affected less than 0.1% of their users.
Valve is explicitly denying that they are gathering your browser history.
So my overall analysis:
1) If what they say is true, then they're doing everything they can to *not* gather your browsing history, and are only gathering the hashed value to protect users.
2) This should be possible to verify - see if the code doing the checks is triggered at all during normal use, and see what a packet sniffer picks up.
3) Even though I like Valve a lot, after recent events (Snowden, some personal betrayals, etc.) I feel I can't trust anybody. I'll let others do the verification (I'm not technically skilled enough to trust my own work on it), but if it turns out that this is all they are doing, it's a good thing that is very, very close to being a bad thing. If, however, they are not just spying on us but then lying about it, I will be downloading a Steam crack immediately (I spent over $1000 on Steam games, they're mine no matter what the law says) and taking everything into offline mode.
This is America, we ALL have guns!
Most of the problem is artistic, not technological. We have more than enough horsepower to get photo-realistic rendering. At least as long as everything stays still - it's when things start to move that it all breaks down.
Particularly faces, but there are some games that look breathtaking in screenshots that look absolutely horrible once characters do anything beyond an idle animation (I'm looking at you, Skyrim). And plenty of games that manage to do good move animations and good facial animations don't do them both at once - everyone has to stand still to talk. And eye animations are very difficult, but very important if you want to cross the uncanny valley.
Much of it comes down to animators being trained mostly for non-interactive works, and game engines not being good at merging animations together or altering them dynamically (look at how feet clip through small ground obstacles). I think what is really needed are combined programmer-animators, who can write code to dynamically animate complex systems. Some games have done this in limited ways, but if you want to cross the valley completely, you need that extremely rare skillset combined in one person.
You can bypass all these problems by using prerendered cutscenes, but that makes it not exactly a "game" at that point, just movie snippets.
Of course, the other way to bypass it is by not aiming for photorealism. You don't even have to go as far as cel shading - Bioshock: Infinite certainly isn't aiming for photorealism (look at the eye-skull ratio and head-body ratio), but it also certainly isn't what I would call "cartoony".
Artists have found ways to cover up the things the coders can't do well - look at how many characters have something that covers their mouth or eyes. The good ones have always found ways to do this - Samus's massive shoulder orbs are partly to cover up how they couldn't get the complex shoulder joints to work right.
It wasn't an accident that he downloaded them, it was an accident that they were up there at all, or in a publicly-accessible way. They were indexed by Google, after all (shouldn't they have been named co-defendants?)
From the gibberish in TFA, it sounds like the site had some sort of Javascript user authentication on index and search pages, but direct URLs always worked. I'm not sure how that let Google index them, but even the government is claiming that anyone who tried to access those URLs would get 200s, not 403s.
Further, the documents appeared, to this guy at least, to be things that would have been public - he "hacked" the rough equivalent of the FDA, not the DOD or DHS.
Better analogy: you're in a military surplus store and find a bunch of boots (hardly unusual in a surplus store, in fact it would be very odd to find one that did not have a few racks of military footware). You buy them (because you needed costumes for a play or something (note to Hollywood: The Sound of Music hasn't been remade in nearly five decades, time to get on a modern-day retelling)), take them home, and leave them in a box for a while. A few days later the National Guard swarms your house and you're arrested for treason because those boots have some sort of new sole that's classified as weapons-grade, and those boots were never supposed to be surplussed in the first place.
At no point did you have any idea that anything was wrong - you went to a place where items are sold, you bought some items that were commonly sold (or to bypass the metaphor, you went to a site that searches public information, and found information that you were allowed to access). The fault would logically lie with whoever had those boots/documents made available to the public incorrectly (if, in fact, it is incorrect - what kind of stuff about food safety should *not* be public data?).
You are misunderstanding both the terminology and my argument.
Let's say you're a car company. You have 10 engineers work for two years to design a car, plus marketing and management, at a total cost of $20M. That is your development cost.
Let's further suppose that each car costs $20K to build, both in materials and labor. This is your per-unit cost.
You would break even if you sold a single car for $20,020,000. Or you would break even if you sold a thousand cars at $40,000. Or if you sold a million cars at $20,020. Note that your total costs (development + production) go up as you sell more units - producing a million of these cars costs a thousand times your development cost.
To put it another way, your per-unit costs are what it takes to go from a completed car design on paper to a thousand produced cars ready to be shipped to dealers. It doesn't include taxes or fees or other things that are part of the sale cost, only things that must be paid ON PRODUCTION.
If you build those thousand cars and don't sell them, you're still $40M in the hole, even though the value of them at the dealer may be $50M.
With software burned on CDs and shipped to retail, it might cost $1 per copy to burn the discs, print the manuals, buy the case, and ship it to a retailer. Again, that's your per-unit cost. Digital distribution lowers that even further - it can cost pennies for each individual download of your game, and much of it is even a flat cost (running a server farm costs about the same whether or not anyone is using it, save for bandwidth costs). With a distributor it can be higher, especially those who take a fixed percentage as their fee, but that also covers some marketing and advertizing, which is not strictly per-unit.
Your logic is also pretty absurd - by your logic, the more people download a game, the less it cost to make. I can see the point you were trying to make, but you really are not expressing it well. I think you were trying to say "distributed over X number of copies, the total cost is Y", but that's not a particularly useful metric in this situation.
With cars, or other high-per-unit-cost products, it is not feasible to crowdfund the development then give it away for free. It would be for a game - crowdfund the $20M to develop it, plus enough to cover distribution for a reasonable time, and of course some profits, and once it's done just give it away. This is a completely new business model, and AFAIK it's still theoretical right now, but it seems both feasible, and a better relation to the actual costs.
First, I'm going to operate under the assumption that proprietary software is considered ethical; if you disagree you may have some valid points but we're just going to have to disagree.
With digitally distributed software, the per-unit cost is negligible - the cost to the seller is almost entirely the cost to produce the "first copy". The ideal method of funding games entirely would reflect this fully, but I think it's going to take a while for crowd-funding to reach that level of cultural acceptance. Until then we'll continue with the selling a completed product at an arbitrary price to recover costs. But the point is, software is not a physical product - it is information.
Console software handled that by trying to emulate physical software. They tied to software to a specific disc (or earlier, cartridge) that did have a non-negligible per-unit cost. This was mainly a piracy-prevention system, but it made reselling games both possible (from a technical perspective) and sensible (from a consumer perspective).
Steam, and similar programs, does not tie games to a physical product. Even if you buy retail, you basically just get a Steam code to add the game to your account, and a physical copy of whatever the latest patch was when the disc was burned, so you only have to update from there (not that it always helps much - I think HL2 has more patches now than the original game occupied). From a legal perspective, they handwave it as a rental - of indefinite duration, and with no ongoing cost, but your "purchase" is just adding the game to your rental list. IMO that's bullshittery that's only necessary because the law hasn't caught up with reality yet.
Laws made for physical products make sense for physical products. They rarely make sense for virtual ones. We've seen this with "piracy" being made equivalent to theft - which /. regularly decries as being false because making a new copy does not deprive someone of their copy, merely the opportunity to have sold it. However, the same applies to reselling - you cannot be sure that the reseller will have removed all their copies (even with Steam's DRM, I can see ways to do keep a copy of a game playable after reselling). Further, because of the pressure of piracy, Steam has very low prices (with some exceptions - Activision seems to insist on keeping their games at $60 for years), which reduces or even eliminates the benefit to the consumer of reselling.
Yes, this is siding with a corporation over user rights. I don't like that much either, just on principle, since user rights are an endangered species these days. But they seem to actually be in the right on this.
I do think that they need to add refunds, though, for games that you purchase but then find either will not run, or do not work as advertized. I would like to think that the only reason they have not is because of the holes that would leave in their DRM.
Not Slashdot Beta! Those fiends!
Why the flying fuck does anybody think Slashdot readers need to have "whitelisting" defined for them, let alone think they can pass it off as a "new technology"? Did Dice start putting those retarded SlashBI articles in main Slashdot now?
And just in time for the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
It is, however, a bad idea to switch to reverse gear while the vehicle is in forward motion. Always come to a full stop before changing to a reverse gear.
So why are you pushing out a site that doesn't have even the most essential features done yet? Slashdot Beta seems like something I could have whipped up in a week as an incomplete, buggy proof-of-concept.
And that's what the popup said - that we had basically a month before the beta was released, which implicitly deprecates and eventually removes the functional version.