Of course Qt still has a right to existance as a kick-ass crossplatform framework, but for Nokia, who owns it, it's just a liability, and that can't be good.
QT was a profitable company with a large number of employees BEFORE Nokia bought it.
Lehmann Brothers was a profitable company with a large number of employees before...
Not everyone realizes - QT is licensed by companies not just to develop applications that run on both Windows and UNIX, but also Windows and Mac OS. This is where they make a lot of money.
Unfortunately, Nokia upset that significantly by relicensing from the GPL to the LGPL. I haven't seen the exact financials, but logically this has to reduce the revenue from selling commercial versions, as you just removed the most important reason to get a commercial license. I got one for Qt 3.x but there has been no reason to get a new one for Qt 4.5+
The question is if the remainder (consulting, ports-for-hire,...) is enough to found a new company on. If it is, I do expect either a spin-off or a mass leaving of employees.
Nokia bought Qt not so long ago, presumably because they were aiming for embedded Linux based devices and Qt is one of the best toolkits for that. Now that they are in bed with Microsoft, getting a great Linux/crossplatform GUI toolkit hardly can be a priority any more, so it makes a lot less sense to spend money on developing Qt. Particularly as unlike Trolltech, they were focussing on making it as popular as possible even at the expense of the commercial version (GPL->LGPL license change).
So now Qt just became an irrelevant, money losing division, didn't it?
Or do they plan to keep Qt but just use Windows as the underlying OS? I can't believe MS will be entirely happy with that, having.NET as competition and all...
When I got a Wii, the first thing I ran out to buy for it was Guitar Hero. I'd seen the Youtube movies, and I knew I wanted it. And boy, did I enjoy playing it!
Compared to learning to play a real guitar, Guitar Hero is way easier, gives faster feedback, and much better results. Of course it's nowhere close to the real thing, but for people who have no time, patience or talent to play an instrument (that's the majority of us, right?) it's just a brilliant game that gives one the feeling of playing a real instrument in a band.
Lack of innovation killed it off. A deserved end. But I look forward to what the next thing is an innovative developer can come up with. If you can make us lazy, talentless bums get a glimpse of what it is to be a superhero (like CoD gives you the impression of being a supersoldier without the unpleasantries of getting your legs blown off by a mine), I'll gladly put down hard cash to buy your game. And maybe, *one* of the sequels, too:)
In reference to your post's parent, it's also fair to say the other, and perhaps most enlightening, 50% is spent on some variation of "why isn't this working?" followed by "what idiot wrote this?"
Proportions wise, it costs $23 mil to make a AAA title today and the average indie game costs lets say 120k to make (3 devs working for 6 months maybe) so its about what 1/200th of the cost? 1/200th of 60 is a lot less than $10 but that is because a lot of indie games simply sell a lot less.
If you calculate an average effective sales price of something like 4 dollars, that means you have to sell 30k units just to recoup the costs. I'd like to see some real sales numbers but not many will reach that.
you're better off lowering the price and considering that discount your "marketing cost"
I think this is the key point in the article. The developers lower their games' price because it increases sales and gets them into the top x charts, which further increases sales. The lower sales price costs money to the developer. If you have more people competing for this marketing/top x position, the price gets driven down, and revenues too.
You can compare this to traditional marketing, and I guess it's a similar proposition, with AAA titles having huge marketing budgets. There prices get driven up, so working in the other direction, but that also costs money because of less sales.
The conclusion is: marketing games isn't easy nor is it free because it's a competitive market.
>Probably, once it hits 20 bucks on steam in a year or so.
Bobby Kotick laughs evilly at your naivety. The biggest discount MW2 ever had on steam was 10% (I think). It's still selling for 60 Euro (79 DOLLARS) even though its successor is out. Compare this to the closest competing product BF:BC2, released 4 months later, which was already discounted to 13 bucks a few days ago. That's also the discounted price for MW1, which is now 3 years old.
Anyway, at that price, of course I picked up BF:BC2 instead, and if I really wanted MW2, 2nd hand is indeed the best option.
You know how many times that gets you 60 bucks Kotick? ZERO.
>Find an engine with the right contract (free), code it up (free) art it up (free), add sounds (free/low cost bulk deals), music (free if skilled/a >band friend?), spin up a really good press release with a few (many) thousands of US$ to get your brand out.
Unless you found a place for cheap slave labor, it won't be that easy. You might some people who want to do some of this for free, but getting all of them aligned and agreeing on a game is no small feat. Or maybe you're a superstar who can do all of this by him or herself. In that case, kudos.
I'm sure the path to good indie games is filled with unfinished, directionless projects and games severely lacking in one area or another.
Yes, let basic economy with offer and demand work it out, rather than even considering regulating this. Don't make the mistakes the government makes:-)
I'm sure nobody involved would mind a bidding war between advertisers to get the top stop in the contributor list, and if nobody is willing to offer more than these companies, that means an ad there isn't worth more than what they gave.
I would say, Humble Bundle is succeeding just fine where Anonymous failed. So much for using Amazon to help coping with webload! I hope the indie authors didn't pay too much for using the "most invincible website" service.
Mod parent up and grandparent down. If you have a break and can generate hash collisions, making sure its the same size tends to be the EASY part of the break.
>push Keccak (which can derive advantage from AES round function hardware acceleration, at the cost of using the AES round >function, which is a bit like putting your eggs in one possibly dodgy basket).
Keccak has no relation to AES except for one of the authors, and is a new design. I think you are confusing it with another hash.
It has strong advantages over Skein in hardware and embedded platforms. In fact, I think Skein is weak enough there compared to the others that it won't make it.
As for tree-mode hashing: all candidates support it, even if not in the algorithm definition itself.
I don't know, there's been several cases where lawyers were arguing about the possibility of false DNA matches, which somewhat amounts to the same thing.
>Not only is the claimed quote ("too fast to be true") nowhere to be found in the linked article, but there isn't even a basis for that claim.
People read the articles? That's new.
My original post had no links, because the original announcement was on a password protected mailing list. If you read that (it's been posted elsewhere since), you will see the statement it refers to.
Some fast algorithms were eliminated based on partial attacks or observations that are not real attacks. This means there's a potential we miss out on a faster but good algorithm, because most partial attacks never make it to full attacks. Using this to eliminate ciphers means the selection is a bit of a black art (that shouldn't surprise insiders too much).
Some people were advocating the opposite approach, namely to just pick the fastest/smallest ciphers and then see which one wasn't broken at the end of the process. Clearly, NIST is taken a very different approach. And given hash function history, an understandable one.
"We preferred to be conservative about security, and in some cases did not select algorithms with exceptional performance, largely because something about them made us “nervous,” even though we knew of no clear attack against the full algorithm."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm missing some link to a comic here.
Maybe the HR people didn't know about this yet?
This will be the death knell of QT and KDE, unless those projects move quickly to find a more hospitable environment.
Luckily, GTK+ 3.0 was just released!
(runs away *very* quickly...)
The slides show a die-out strategy for Symbian: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/11/rip-symbian/
Of course Qt still has a right to existance as a kick-ass crossplatform framework, but for Nokia, who owns it, it's just a liability, and that can't be good.
1) Cheap? CHECK
2) Can sit on it without hurting ass or phone? CHECK
3) Can drop it out of shirt pocket many times? CHECK
4) At least one game? CHECK
and last but not least:
5) Can make phone calls easily? CHECK
Many smartphones fail 2 or 3, some fail 5. Most dumbphones get it right.
QT was a profitable company with a large number of employees BEFORE Nokia bought it.
Lehmann Brothers was a profitable company with a large number of employees before...
Not everyone realizes - QT is licensed by companies not just to develop applications that run on both Windows and UNIX, but also Windows and Mac OS. This is where they make a lot of money.
Unfortunately, Nokia upset that significantly by relicensing from the GPL to the LGPL. I haven't seen the exact financials, but logically this has to reduce the revenue from selling commercial versions, as you just removed the most important reason to get a commercial license. I got one for Qt 3.x but there has been no reason to get a new one for Qt 4.5+
The question is if the remainder (consulting, ports-for-hire, ...) is enough to found a new company on. If it is, I do expect either a spin-off or a mass leaving of employees.
Nokia bought Qt not so long ago, presumably because they were aiming for embedded Linux based devices and Qt is one of the best toolkits for that. Now that they are in bed with Microsoft, getting a great Linux/crossplatform GUI toolkit hardly can be a priority any more, so it makes a lot less sense to spend money on developing Qt. Particularly as unlike Trolltech, they were focussing on making it as popular as possible even at the expense of the commercial version (GPL->LGPL license change).
So now Qt just became an irrelevant, money losing division, didn't it?
Or do they plan to keep Qt but just use Windows as the underlying OS? I can't believe MS will be entirely happy with that, having .NET as competition and all...
Physical excercise? You must have missed the "lazy" part...
When I got a Wii, the first thing I ran out to buy for it was Guitar Hero. I'd seen the Youtube movies, and I knew I wanted it. And boy, did I enjoy playing it!
Compared to learning to play a real guitar, Guitar Hero is way easier, gives faster feedback, and much better results. Of course it's nowhere close to the real thing, but for people who have no time, patience or talent to play an instrument (that's the majority of us, right?) it's just a brilliant game that gives one the feeling of playing a real instrument in a band.
Lack of innovation killed it off. A deserved end. But I look forward to what the next thing is an innovative developer can come up with. If you can make us lazy, talentless bums get a glimpse of what it is to be a superhero (like CoD gives you the impression of being a supersoldier without the unpleasantries of getting your legs blown off by a mine), I'll gladly put down hard cash to buy your game. And maybe, *one* of the sequels, too :)
Oral explanation of results or answers on open-book exams worked fine.
Of course, you could argue those can be somewhat arbitrary.
In reference to your post's parent, it's also fair to say the other, and perhaps most enlightening, 50% is spent on some variation of "why isn't this working?" followed by "what idiot wrote this?"
If you watch the video carefully, you will see they invented time travel as well!
Proportions wise, it costs $23 mil to make a AAA title today and the average indie game costs lets say 120k to make (3 devs working for 6 months maybe) so its about what 1/200th of the cost? 1/200th of 60 is a lot less than $10 but that is because a lot of indie games simply sell a lot less.
If you calculate an average effective sales price of something like 4 dollars, that means you have to sell 30k units just to recoup the costs. I'd like to see some real sales numbers but not many will reach that.
For some real experiences, this is a nice read: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2010/03/q-pc-indie-game-sales-numbers.html
you're better off lowering the price and considering that discount your "marketing cost"
I think this is the key point in the article. The developers lower their games' price because it increases sales and gets them into the top x charts, which further increases sales. The lower sales price costs money to the developer. If you have more people competing for this marketing/top x position, the price gets driven down, and revenues too.
You can compare this to traditional marketing, and I guess it's a similar proposition, with AAA titles having huge marketing budgets. There prices get driven up, so working in the other direction, but that also costs money because of less sales.
The conclusion is: marketing games isn't easy nor is it free because it's a competitive market.
>Probably, once it hits 20 bucks on steam in a year or so.
Bobby Kotick laughs evilly at your naivety. The biggest discount MW2 ever had on steam was 10% (I think). It's still selling for 60 Euro (79 DOLLARS) even though its successor is out. Compare this to the closest competing product BF:BC2, released 4 months later, which was already discounted to 13 bucks a few days ago. That's also the discounted price for MW1, which is now 3 years old.
Anyway, at that price, of course I picked up BF:BC2 instead, and if I really wanted MW2, 2nd hand is indeed the best option.
You know how many times that gets you 60 bucks Kotick? ZERO.
>Find an engine with the right contract (free), code it up (free) art it up (free), add sounds (free/low cost bulk deals), music (free if skilled/a
>band friend?), spin up a really good press release with a few (many) thousands of US$ to get your brand out.
Unless you found a place for cheap slave labor, it won't be that easy. You might some people who want to do some of this for free, but getting all of them aligned and agreeing on a game is no small feat. Or maybe you're a superstar who can do all of this by him or herself. In that case, kudos.
I'm sure the path to good indie games is filled with unfinished, directionless projects and games severely lacking in one area or another.
Thanks for the pointer. I've never bought from GoG before, but I see some old games I wanted to replay and which are stupidly expensive on Steam...
Yes, let basic economy with offer and demand work it out, rather than even considering regulating this. Don't make the mistakes the government makes :-)
I'm sure nobody involved would mind a bidding war between advertisers to get the top stop in the contributor list, and if nobody is willing to offer more than these companies, that means an ad there isn't worth more than what they gave.
Gee, 4 or 5 articles ago Amazon EC2 gets massive free advertising on slashdot, and now I can't buy anything because of this:
http://ec2-50-16-43-113.compute-1.amazonaws.com/#temporary-url-for-traffic-reasons
I would say, Humble Bundle is succeeding just fine where Anonymous failed. So much for using Amazon to help coping with webload! I hope the indie authors didn't pay too much for using the "most invincible website" service.
Mod parent up and grandparent down. If you have a break and can generate hash collisions, making sure its the same size tends to be the EASY part of the break.
>...that's a joke. :)
No shit!
>push Keccak (which can derive advantage from AES round function hardware acceleration, at the cost of using the AES round
>function, which is a bit like putting your eggs in one possibly dodgy basket).
Keccak has no relation to AES except for one of the authors, and is a new design. I think you are confusing it with another hash.
It has strong advantages over Skein in hardware and embedded platforms. In fact, I think Skein is weak enough there compared to the others that it won't make it.
As for tree-mode hashing: all candidates support it, even if not in the algorithm definition itself.
I don't know, there's been several cases where lawyers were arguing about the possibility of false DNA matches, which somewhat amounts to the same thing.
UNOFFICIAL COMMENT: Cryptanalysis of Skein
http://cr.yp.to/hash/skein-20101206.pdf
>Not only is the claimed quote ("too fast to be true") nowhere to be found in the linked article, but there isn't even a basis for that claim.
People read the articles? That's new.
My original post had no links, because the original announcement was on a password protected mailing list. If you read that (it's been posted elsewhere since), you will see the statement it refers to.
Some fast algorithms were eliminated based on partial attacks or observations that are not real attacks. This means there's a potential we miss out on a faster but good algorithm, because most partial attacks never make it to full attacks. Using this to eliminate ciphers means the selection is a bit of a black art (that shouldn't surprise insiders too much).
Some people were advocating the opposite approach, namely to just pick the fastest/smallest ciphers and then see which one wasn't broken at the end of the process. Clearly, NIST is taken a very different approach. And given hash function history, an understandable one.
"We preferred to be conservative about security, and in some cases did not select algorithms with exceptional performance, largely because something about them made us “nervous,” even though we knew of no clear attack against the full algorithm."
William Burr, NIST