"I think when people approach the problem with an eye on consolidation it destroys the idea of natural selection."
Corporate mergers, buyouts, and bancrupties are part of natrual selection. Consumers migrating to one company's offering can lead to 'natural selection'. One company having a big bank roll and buying out weaker competitors is also a form of selection.
In the 1930's there were hundreds of car companies. By the 1980's there were the big three and a few non-US companies. Over those 50 years a lot of 'natural selection' occured, and companies merging was just one option. General Motor's many brands of automobiles are not due to GM's internal innovation, but really are due to GM buying weaker competitors.
Let's watch to see what company will be the GM of Linux distros.
We'll pay $20 for simple, fun games with low production costs.. and not $60 for over-produced, multi million dollar titles. Where are the simple console games? Bring em on!
Haven't rushes of low quality games caused the game markets to crash in the past?
Games should get cheaper over time. Lots of my friends enjoy the sports games (Madden football for instance). They intentionally buy the year old version for $10 -$20 around the time the newest latest greatest comes out for $50 - $60. I was impressed by the wizdom of that strategy when I realized my amigos were playing the year old version with the same zest that I was playing the newest one. All I need to do is skip an year and I will be on the budget cycle too.... at least until I get the next generation consols. ha!
Games should get cheaper overtime. If they don't, make it a point to buy them used. Used games can be great bargains. The other option is to rent games. MANY games can be beat in a weak or two, so rent them for $7 a week and be done with them. If you rent a game for a week and love it then go on and buy it used, you can still beat the premium new title price if you wait long enough.
Too bad that the publishers don't recognize that people would buy games for $20 sight unseen if it was once a blockbuster. Sell the first million copies for full price, then 8 months later sell 3 million more copies at bargain price. If prices don't drop, then anyone who doesn't buy retail in the first 3 months is likely to never buy new retail.
Another game still selling at most stores (including Walmart that does not stock anything that does not sell) is Doom 2. Amazing to me that game is still on shelves. I played it for 500+ hours back in the day (1994 - 95). That people are still discovering the game TEN years later and paying to enjoy it is really amazing.
WoW could last a long while. Certainly not with millions of subscribers, but a lot. If Doom 2 is a great game and lasts 10 years with almost no new content, then WoW is a great game (check the reviews) that could last quite a while longer especially if there is excellent new content.
Does anyone factor in cable subscriptions driven by the movies that are shown? What about blockbuster and netflix subscriptions? Does anyone count games on cell phones, pdas, or non platform handheld games ? What about after market sales of movies or games on eBay, garage sales, etc?
Comparing two industries ain't easy. And I mostly agree with stratjakt (596332) anyhow that it is a moot point when you consider all the money ends up in the same few pockets.
SOME say that a dollar spent on nuclear fusion is a dollar wasted. And many, many dollars have been spent on it, as physicists try to duplicate, in a controlled setting, the process by which the sun shines. Since 1951, America alone has devoted more than $17 billion (see chart) to working out how to fuse atomic nuclei so as to generate an inexhaustible supply of clean, safe power.
The claim that this money is wholly wasted may not be entirely fair, though. Fusion science has made a big return on this investment in the form of a new universal constant. This constant is the number 30, a figure that has for the past half-century or so been cited almost religiously by researchers as the number of years that it will take before fusion power becomes a commercial reality....[continues]
With observations like that in reputable news sources like the Economist it is no wonder that investment in fusion waxes and wanes. People want a return on investment before the next election, not 30 years from now.
Just a while ago that kind of money would get you an astounding 15 megabyte harddrive. You could add an amazing 15 million characters of high speed storage for just $2495 (plus installation kit). see this ad.
The geeks at NASA never really grew up: Their jobs are all about neat toys and breaking things.
Amazing that despite all our centuries of civilized sophistication the best way to figure out how things work is still to break them. Kids break clocks. Cooks break locks. NASA breaks giant icy rocks.
Any one have some recommendations for a picture file format as slick as the mp3 file format is for music?
My problem with digital photographs is keeping track of the who, what, where, when, and why that is going on in each picture. I can name files with the date they were taken, and the place or maybe who is in them if just 1 or 2 people. But what I really want is to be able to save a few paragraphs of information (potentially) direcly into the picture file. That way I don't have to keep track of such info in disconnected file (database) that might be seperated from the picture at any point. I want to be able to put information in my picture files the same way I can tag mp3 files, plus a larger free form text area so I can tell the story of the best pictures right in the file.
An iTunes like product to go with these nifty picture files would be beautiful! Thanks.
My post is already over 1000 posts into the the thread so I am not expecting answers or moderation, but maybe I'll get lucky. Luck favors the bold!
My dad worked at an oil refinery. He told me stories about how the oil was refined and opened my eyes to how many uses besides gasoline for cars. He said that over 300 products were created from the crude. (Interestingly, he also told me that the refinery was profitable just from the sale of coke, the last product off the line.)
So my question: How will we replace all the non-fuel uses for crude oil? Asphalt, fertilizers, and plastics are a pretty big part of modern life afterall...
This link lists the products that come out of crude oil:
What is in a barrel of oil?
To some, a barrel of crude may look like a gooey liquid whose only redeeming virtue is to be eventually refined into gasoline.
Researchers broke down a typical barrel of domestic crude oil into what may be produced. By the way, the average domestic crude oil has a gravity of 32 degrees and weighs 7.21 pounds per gallon.
Here's what just one barrel of crude oil can produce: Enough liquefied gases (such as propane) to fill 12 small (14.1 ounce) cylinders for home, camping or workshop use. Enough gasoline to drive a medium-sized car (17 miles per gallon) over 280 miles. Asphalt to make about one gallon of tar for patching roofs or streets. Lubricants to make about a quart of motor oil. Enough distillate fuel to drive a large truck (five miles per gallon) for almost 40 miles. If jet fuel fraction is included, that same truck can run nearly 50 miles. Nearly 70 kilowatt hours of electricity at a power plant generated by residual fuel. About four pounds of charcoal briquettes. Wax for 170 birthday candles or 27 wax crayons.
There are enough petrochemicals left in that same barrel to provide the base for one of the following:
The lighter materials in a barrel are used mainly for paint thinners and dry-cleaning solvents and they can make nearly a quart of one of these products. The miscellaneous fraction of what is left still contains enough by-products to be used in medicinal oils, still gas, road oil and plant condensates -- a real industrial horn of plenty.
News stories like this and this shut down any errant ideas I might have had over investing in the Google IPO. The company is brilliant and definitely a market leader. But the company has not yet shown that it can run itself as a publically traded company. They have no track record. They have made a few early blunders.
If you want to be successful do what succesful people do. In investing, try Warren Buffet: He invests in undervalued companies with good potential for growth. Undervalued typically requires underhyped. Google has potential for growth but is definitely overhyped. Only a fool invests at the peak and Google's IPO is definitely an overhyped peak.
Just my 2 cents - - which will be invested in not-Google by the way.
"Odd that 'harmonizing' is always in one direction - for some reason, no one ever wants to decrease IP regulation to harmonize with some other country."
Not odd at all: Just follow the money. For those people / companies with money who want to make more money the quickest way to reach that goal is to create a need and then charge to fill it. By harmonizing IP laws to help create barriers to creating copies of Intellectual Property, they create a shortage of material that they can charge to fill. In the corporate view spending a few pennies on lobbying law makers, a few dollars in the election coffers of law makers, and some dollars on creative anti-piracy ads is well worth the billions that consumers will spend on IP locked up by law and gimp technology. At least in theory: Tighter IP laws doesn't really stop pirates, only really punishes the ignorant or weak in the internet community (grandmothers and newbs), and generally will tick off consumers over time creating a backlash.
So... follow the money to understand why these laws are pushed through, but realize that consumer backlash will eventually set things right.... at least I hope so.
Scientific American: From Finish to Start Was the Grand Challenge robot race in March the fiasco it appeared to be? Hardly, argues
William "Red" Whittaker. The annual event is pushing mobile robotics to get real."
Yeah sure the last race could have been run better. But so what. The contestants learned a lot. So did the organizers. That was the point I think. DARPA learned its lessons fast, AND increased the prize money to boot. Let's see if the contestants learned as much!!
Here is another option for having your clothes "automatically" pressed at home: Whirlpool's Personal Valet. The Personal Valet involves hanging your clothes in the cabnet and waiting 30 minutes. It costs $1200 plus special cleaning chemicals.
It is not as cool as a robot or a wife, but it does clean, descent, and dewrinkle the clothes.
If the game creators were to use history as the back drop, and force the game play to match the pace of history then students could pick up a lot about history.
For example, maybe make a spy game (Thiefesque) were you work for whichever side and try to help them win. You could work for the colonials, and your job is to find out what ports the British plan to blockade, troop strength and movements, etc. Everything you find out during your "missions" of course is real data from real events in real history.
Another fun game might be an empire game (Civilization like) where you have to produce the weapons of war, get them to the field, and meet the objectives to win within the date parameters set for you. A set of scenarios could be developing, producing, delivering, loading, and then fighting with enough boats to storm Normandy on D-Day. Events of course would be dictated by the real timeline of history including must-do events like when the tech for landing boats became available and random events like how many uboats are out there impeding your shipment deliveries.
I can think of lots of ways history games could go because there so much interesting material to work with. History teaches that people do their best work when in conflict: That's why history books are full of Wars and modern society runs on capitalism.
If anyone wants to hire me to make fun games see my Journal. I would love to design fun games and could make someone a lot of money doing so!
EA's competitors will go after the NFL and the player's association on the basis of the NFL unfairly using its Monopoloy. Have you ever heard at the end of a televised NFL game that "this broadcast is copyrighted by the NFL. Pictures, vidoes, and descriptions of this game my not be rebroadcast blah blah blah without written permission from the NFL". As far as I understand it, this applies even to the evening news stations. Imagine if FOX got an exclusive deal with the NFL to be the only broadcaster to be able to show video clips from the game. Every other televised news program and sports program would be in serious jeapordy with a segment of their customers. Here is where it gets interesting: The NFL (and NBA and Major League Baseball by the way) are given limited monopolies in the US by Congress. That monopoly power is powerful good for making money, but it also gives the leagues special responsibilities. If anyone or any other company thinks the NFL is abusing its monopoly power, then they can sue. Everytime the league gets sued it risks earning the ire and scrutinty of Congress which could revoke its monopoly license - imagine each team owener actually having to compete in the market place instead of being able to work closely together to set prices blah blah blah; the players union would run prices through the sky. Anyhow, for an example of the monopoly being tested in court read about the Maurice Clarett case. In a nut, if this deal goes through the other game manufacturers can sue that the NFL's monopoloy is unfairly hurting their businesses.
At the other end of the spectrum in beauty, power, and fuel economy is the Lupo 3L TDI. This plucky little Volkswagen has entered the record books for fuel economy of 101.6 mpg. Click the link for record setting details.
The Bugatti Veyron sure is beautiful and gets my adrenaline pumping. The Lupo is a economically smart car that makes a lot of sense for day-to-day living. Of course, neither is available where I live. The descision for me is between a Mazda Rx-8 and a Toyota Prius. Its like I have a little angle on one shoulder and a little devil on the other... What to do?
These cold fusion stories always tickle my imagination with visions of electricity too cheap to meter, a ctrl-alt-del on the world's economy, and awesome new industries that today are not feasible because of the expense of power. But its all fairy tales. This Economist article sums up how fusion is improbable, and throwing good money after it makes no sense until there is a real break through. It also gives overviews of some of the other big efforts to make fusion a commercial reality.
When my DVD player gets the audio out of sync with the video I can correct the problem by stopping the video (not pausing) and then restarting it. This only seems to apply tangently to the article at hand, but I bring it up to show that latency problems can show up because of any device in the chain, not just the display.
The best video games come from people who love what they do AND go after all the technical knowledge required to do the job. Love of the game can't be taught. This is true of every profession, not just making video games.
Finally, to be truly excellent a person needs to have a natural apptitude for the work. Enjoying it is first, going after the technical skills is second, and finally a person must have a natural skill.
I like to watch movies but can only have time to catch the best of the best in the theater.
I find Netflix to be a cheap way of shifting all those movies I always meant to see. The service allows you me to load up my queue with 100's of movies in any order I like. Then they send me the movies. After I watch one and mail it back they send me another one. I am catching up on 10 - 20 movies a month this way.
The best aspects of time shifting in using netflix are that I can rent blockbusters and bombs at the same low cost. If I saw a trailer for a movie I thought would be good but never got around to, I can watch it while coding or eating dinner. I can also watch the bad movies in fast forward just to see what made it so bad. That saves alot of time (and money) compared to trying to catch every movie in the theater.
In 6 months with the service I have caught up on golden era classics, AFI top 100 flicks, explored anime titles oft mentioned on Slashdot, and seen all those big budget flops from recent years. And best of all, I saw them when I wanted to.
Majority Of Americans Thought We Already Had A Moon Base WASHINGTON, DC--A NASA poll conducted to gauge support for President Bush's space-exploration initiative revealed that a depressing 57 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. already has a research base on the moon. "We put that international space-station thing up there in the '60s," phone-poll respondent Randy Snow said. "It might be on Mars, but I think it's the moon--wherever they have the golf course that President Kennedy played on. Remember, the Cubans tried to take it over?" NASA officials said they hope someday to make Americans' perception a reality.
First, I do not like the idea of companies laying claim to off-hour creations. That is ridiculous. At this point it is very redundant in this thread to say, "Get a lawyer to make the changes", but the recommendation is a good one.
As long as you are asking a lawyer, could you ask another question: Do these agreements give companies more liability than they realize?
Companies ask employees to give up their IP such that the company would be able to profit from off-hour employee brilliance. Consider the case where off-hour employee brilliance leads to creating something that does a lot of harm in the community. In turn, that harm leads to lawsuits. It seems to me that the employee could pin the negative consequences to the employer.
Clearly companies are responsible for on-hour actions good or bad - within reason. On the good side patents and copyrights can lead to new revenue. On the bad side new products can violate other companies' IP and lead to financial penalties. Do agreements like the poster describes cause companies to take on the same potential risks and rewards for off-hour creations?
Sounds like a situation ripe for abuse by all parties involved.
I still bought Total Annhilation in 1997 and I still play it regularly. The game was great out of the box. The game was genuinely improved with the expansion packs. Cavedog made a great move in releasing its map development tools early. After Cavedog went under the gaming community did great work in improving the game in all the little ways that a version 2 should have. Releasing a true sequel will require a bit of innovation and a lot of commitment to quality to impress the many still rabid fans.
This site has a great community created expansion pack for TA that I highly recommend. It includes a patch that improves key board short cuts, adds a lot of weapons and units, improves unit strength balance, increases the power of the top end units, and adds higher levels of difficulty for the AI. The high end units are super rocking: If you remember the Krogoth as the most powerful unit then you are out of date. There are units in this expansion pack that can eat 10 Krogoths, and the new bigs don't sacrafice play balance!
TA2 should learn from these expansion packs and try to incorporate these features: - map creation tools, of course. - super large maps. If the high powered big bertha artilary cannons can fire a mile, then the maps should be able to reach several miles across. Modern processors can handle it. - At least 500 units per side should be available in TA2. In fact, there should be no hard limit - just a setting somewhere. When first released TA1's limit of 200 units per side made 133mhz processors of the time crawl. But over the years even 500 per side and 10 sides is handled quite easily by my 2 ghz processor. - Fully rendored 3d units rocked then. They rock now. - The music from TA1 could be reused. The score was awesome. Keep it or improve it; just do not give it up. - Smarter, larger, multi-functional factories. Maybe even make them mobile. Of course, fancier factories should be more expensive in resources and time. - Allow for more elevations. TA1 allowed for about 4 elevations: Flying, raised ground, normal ground / floating, and underwater. The game used real trajectory calculations to determine hits. Keep that, but do so from even more elevation possibilities. Flying units could occupy the same space and not collide - that might be an improvement area too. - Definitely keep the mutliple weapon types, even add some! Again see the community expansion packs for excellent ideas. - Release unit creation tools. Make creating home grown units even easier! Let the user select a walking kbot, or rolling tank, or flying, or floating, hovercraft, or even amphibious. Let the user select the weapon types, and how many weapons. Let the user select the number of guns, the unit size, and how much armor it has. Allow special functions to be added such as sonar, radar, cloaking, self repair, others repair, unit capture, reincarnation, etc. Then to keep the game balanced make the unit cost in resources what the requested features should require. Very Excellent! - Make the environment even more destructable. TA1 allowed for burning forests and that was cool at the time. Make the ground shaking weapons really deform the ground, and thereby potentially change the strategy of the map during game play. It is kind of annoying when a nuclear blast only leaves a black mark on the ground instead of creating a rough crater. Also, there should be units that allow strategic shaping of the envirnonment - Examples: build hills for cannons, extend coasts, or make smooth roads. - Make the game work well for a quick 30 minute skirmish or for a 9 hour megawar (not underheard of). TA1 did a good job of this. - Create a game mode where each side gets to pick a set number of unit types to play with (instead of making all units available all the time). Sometimes having hunderds of unit choices is Excellent (super war) and sometimes annoying (quick skirmish). Let the players pick. This feaure
According to this story : "Sony Corp announced on Monday that it plans to build new lines at Toshiba Corp and IBM Corp factories to produce advanced microprocessors for use in such products as digital appliances and game machines including Microsoft's Xbox gaming console and Sony's PlayStation 3."
So the scenario is that Sony invests in IBM chip production, and then Microsoft buys chips from IBM for the XBOX 2 that competes with Sony's Playstation 2 & 3. This might be a ploy by Sony to get a leg up on Microsoft. Or, more likely in my opinion, the console market is so important to both companies that going with the technology with the best price/performance has naturally led them to the same IBM chips.
If both Sony & MS rely on basically the same chips then the next round of the consol war will truly come down to who has the best games and best exclusive games.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think when people approach the problem with an eye on consolidation it destroys the idea of natural selection."
Corporate mergers, buyouts, and bancrupties are part of natrual selection. Consumers migrating to one company's offering can lead to 'natural selection'. One company having a big bank roll and buying out weaker competitors is also a form of selection.
In the 1930's there were hundreds of car companies. By the 1980's there were the big three and a few non-US companies. Over those 50 years a lot of 'natural selection' occured, and companies merging was just one option. General Motor's many brands of automobiles are not due to GM's internal innovation, but really are due to GM buying weaker competitors.
Let's watch to see what company will be the GM of Linux distros.
Games should get cheaper over time. Lots of my friends enjoy the sports games (Madden football for instance). They intentionally buy the year old version for $10 -$20 around the time the newest latest greatest comes out for $50 - $60. I was impressed by the wizdom of that strategy when I realized my amigos were playing the year old version with the same zest that I was playing the newest one. All I need to do is skip an year and I will be on the budget cycle too.
Games should get cheaper overtime. If they don't, make it a point to buy them used. Used games can be great bargains. The other option is to rent games. MANY games can be beat in a weak or two, so rent them for $7 a week and be done with them. If you rent a game for a week and love it then go on and buy it used, you can still beat the premium new title price if you wait long enough.
Too bad that the publishers don't recognize that people would buy games for $20 sight unseen if it was once a blockbuster. Sell the first million copies for full price, then 8 months later sell 3 million more copies at bargain price. If prices don't drop, then anyone who doesn't buy retail in the first 3 months is likely to never buy new retail.
Another game still selling at most stores (including Walmart that does not stock anything that does not sell) is Doom 2. Amazing to me that game is still on shelves. I played it for 500+ hours back in the day (1994 - 95). That people are still discovering the game TEN years later and paying to enjoy it is really amazing.
WoW could last a long while. Certainly not with millions of subscribers, but a lot. If Doom 2 is a great game and lasts 10 years with almost no new content, then WoW is a great game (check the reviews) that could last quite a while longer especially if there is excellent new content.
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This space for rent.
Does anyone factor in cable subscriptions driven by the movies that are shown? What about blockbuster and netflix subscriptions? Does anyone count games on cell phones, pdas, or non platform handheld games ? What about after market sales of movies or games on eBay, garage sales, etc?
Comparing two industries ain't easy. And I mostly agree with stratjakt (596332) anyhow that it is a moot point when you consider all the money ends up in the same few pockets.
With observations like that in reputable news sources like the Economist it is no wonder that investment in fusion waxes and wanes. People want a return on investment before the next election, not 30 years from now.
Just a while ago that kind of money would get you an astounding 15 megabyte harddrive. You could add an amazing 15 million characters of high speed storage for just $2495 (plus installation kit).
see this ad.
Wow!
The geeks at NASA never really grew up: Their jobs are all about neat toys and breaking things.
Amazing that despite all our centuries of civilized sophistication the best way to figure out how things work is still to break them. Kids break clocks. Cooks break locks. NASA breaks giant icy rocks.
Any one have some recommendations for a picture file format as slick as the mp3 file format is for music?
My problem with digital photographs is keeping track of the who, what, where, when, and why that is going on in each picture. I can name files with the date they were taken, and the place or maybe who is in them if just 1 or 2 people. But what I really want is to be able to save a few paragraphs of information (potentially) direcly into the picture file. That way I don't have to keep track of such info in disconnected file (database) that might be seperated from the picture at any point. I want to be able to put information in my picture files the same way I can tag mp3 files, plus a larger free form text area so I can tell the story of the best pictures right in the file.
An iTunes like product to go with these nifty picture files would be beautiful! Thanks.
~ Mr Blank
Your Ad Here.
My dad worked at an oil refinery. He told me stories about how the oil was refined and opened my eyes to how many uses besides gasoline for cars. He said that over 300 products were created from the crude. (Interestingly, he also told me that the refinery was profitable just from the sale of coke, the last product off the line.)
So my question: How will we replace all the non-fuel uses for crude oil? Asphalt, fertilizers, and plastics are a pretty big part of modern life afterall...
This link lists the products that come out of crude oil:
This space for rent.
News stories like this and this shut down any errant ideas I might have had over investing in the Google IPO. The company is brilliant and definitely a market leader. But the company has not yet shown that it can run itself as a publically traded company. They have no track record. They have made a few early blunders.
If you want to be successful do what succesful people do. In investing, try Warren Buffet: He invests in undervalued companies with good potential for growth. Undervalued typically requires underhyped. Google has potential for growth but is definitely overhyped. Only a fool invests at the peak and Google's IPO is definitely an overhyped peak.
Just my 2 cents - - which will be invested in not-Google by the way.
So... follow the money to understand why these laws are pushed through, but realize that consumer backlash will eventually set things right.
Here is another option for having your clothes "automatically" pressed at home: Whirlpool's Personal Valet. The Personal Valet involves hanging your clothes in the cabnet and waiting 30 minutes. It costs $1200 plus special cleaning chemicals.
It is not as cool as a robot or a wife, but it does clean, descent, and dewrinkle the clothes.
This space for rent.
If the game creators were to use history as the back drop, and force the game play to match the pace of history then students could pick up a lot about history.
For example, maybe make a spy game (Thiefesque) were you work for whichever side and try to help them win. You could work for the colonials, and your job is to find out what ports the British plan to blockade, troop strength and movements, etc. Everything you find out during your "missions" of course is real data from real events in real history.
Another fun game might be an empire game (Civilization like) where you have to produce the weapons of war, get them to the field, and meet the objectives to win within the date parameters set for you. A set of scenarios could be developing, producing, delivering, loading, and then fighting with enough boats to storm Normandy on D-Day. Events of course would be dictated by the real timeline of history including must-do events like when the tech for landing boats became available and random events like how many uboats are out there impeding your shipment deliveries.
I can think of lots of ways history games could go because there so much interesting material to work with. History teaches that people do their best work when in conflict: That's why history books are full of Wars and modern society runs on capitalism.
If anyone wants to hire me to make fun games see my Journal. I would love to design fun games and could make someone a lot of money doing so!
This space for rent. Cheap.
EA's competitors will go after the NFL and the player's association on the basis of the NFL unfairly using its Monopoloy. Have you ever heard at the end of a televised NFL game that "this broadcast is copyrighted by the NFL. Pictures, vidoes, and descriptions of this game my not be rebroadcast blah blah blah without written permission from the NFL". As far as I understand it, this applies even to the evening news stations. Imagine if FOX got an exclusive deal with the NFL to be the only broadcaster to be able to show video clips from the game. Every other televised news program and sports program would be in serious jeapordy with a segment of their customers. Here is where it gets interesting: The NFL (and NBA and Major League Baseball by the way) are given limited monopolies in the US by Congress. That monopoly power is powerful good for making money, but it also gives the leagues special responsibilities. If anyone or any other company thinks the NFL is abusing its monopoly power, then they can sue. Everytime the league gets sued it risks earning the ire and scrutinty of Congress which could revoke its monopoly license - imagine each team owener actually having to compete in the market place instead of being able to work closely together to set prices blah blah blah; the players union would run prices through the sky. Anyhow, for an example of the monopoly being tested in court read about the Maurice Clarett case. In a nut, if this deal goes through the other game manufacturers can sue that the NFL's monopoloy is unfairly hurting their businesses.
[[See Your Ad Here. Cheap]]
At the other end of the spectrum in beauty, power, and fuel economy is the Lupo 3L TDI. This plucky little Volkswagen has entered the record books for fuel economy of 101.6 mpg. Click the link for record setting details.
The Bugatti Veyron sure is beautiful and gets my adrenaline pumping. The Lupo is a economically smart car that makes a lot of sense for day-to-day living. Of course, neither is available where I live. The descision for me is between a Mazda Rx-8 and a Toyota Prius. Its like I have a little angle on one shoulder and a little devil on the other... What to do?
This space for rent.
These cold fusion stories always tickle my imagination with visions of electricity too cheap to meter, a ctrl-alt-del on the world's economy, and awesome new industries that today are not feasible because of the expense of power. But its all fairy tales. This Economist article sums up how fusion is improbable, and throwing good money after it makes no sense until there is a real break through. It also gives overviews of some of the other big efforts to make fusion a commercial reality.
This space for rent.
When my DVD player gets the audio out of sync with the video I can correct the problem by stopping the video (not pausing) and then restarting it. This only seems to apply tangently to the article at hand, but I bring it up to show that latency problems can show up because of any device in the chain, not just the display.
This space for rent. Cheap!
The best video games come from people who love what they do AND go after all the technical knowledge required to do the job. Love of the game can't be taught. This is true of every profession, not just making video games.
Finally, to be truly excellent a person needs to have a natural apptitude for the work. Enjoying it is first, going after the technical skills is second, and finally a person must have a natural skill.
Here is a link to the Onion article mentioned in the NY Times article.
I like to watch movies but can only have time to catch the best of the best in the theater.
I find Netflix to be a cheap way of shifting all those movies I always meant to see. The service allows you me to load up my queue with 100's of movies in any order I like. Then they send me the movies. After I watch one and mail it back they send me another one. I am catching up on 10 - 20 movies a month this way.
The best aspects of time shifting in using netflix are that I can rent blockbusters and bombs at the same low cost. If I saw a trailer for a movie I thought would be good but never got around to, I can watch it while coding or eating dinner. I can also watch the bad movies in fast forward just to see what made it so bad. That saves alot of time (and money) compared to trying to catch every movie in the theater.
In 6 months with the service I have caught up on golden era classics, AFI top 100 flicks, explored anime titles oft mentioned on Slashdot, and seen all those big budget flops from recent years. And best of all, I saw them when I wanted to.
Majority Of Americans Thought We Already Had A Moon Base
WASHINGTON, DC--A NASA poll conducted to gauge support for President Bush's space-exploration initiative revealed that a depressing 57 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. already has a research base on the moon. "We put that international space-station thing up there in the '60s," phone-poll respondent Randy Snow said. "It might be on Mars, but I think it's the moon--wherever they have the golf course that President Kennedy played on. Remember, the Cubans tried to take it over?" NASA officials said they hope someday to make Americans' perception a reality.
Thanks The Onion
First, I do not like the idea of companies laying claim to off-hour creations. That is ridiculous. At this point it is very redundant in this thread to say, "Get a lawyer to make the changes", but the recommendation is a good one.
As long as you are asking a lawyer, could you ask another question: Do these agreements give companies more liability than they realize?
Companies ask employees to give up their IP such that the company would be able to profit from off-hour employee brilliance. Consider the case where off-hour employee brilliance leads to creating something that does a lot of harm in the community. In turn, that harm leads to lawsuits. It seems to me that the employee could pin the negative consequences to the employer.
Clearly companies are responsible for on-hour actions good or bad - within reason. On the good side patents and copyrights can lead to new revenue. On the bad side new products can violate other companies' IP and lead to financial penalties. Do agreements like the poster describes cause companies to take on the same potential risks and rewards for off-hour creations?
Sounds like a situation ripe for abuse by all parties involved.
I still bought Total Annhilation in 1997 and I still play it regularly. The game was great out of the box. The game was genuinely improved with the expansion packs. Cavedog made a great move in releasing its map development tools early. After Cavedog went under the gaming community did great work in improving the game in all the little ways that a version 2 should have. Releasing a true sequel will require a bit of innovation and a lot of commitment to quality to impress the many still rabid fans.
This site has a great community created expansion pack for TA that I highly recommend. It includes a patch that improves key board short cuts, adds a lot of weapons and units, improves unit strength balance, increases the power of the top end units, and adds higher levels of difficulty for the AI. The high end units are super rocking: If you remember the Krogoth as the most powerful unit then you are out of date. There are units in this expansion pack that can eat 10 Krogoths, and the new bigs don't sacrafice play balance!
TA2 should learn from these expansion packs and try to incorporate these features:
- map creation tools, of course.
- super large maps. If the high powered big bertha artilary cannons can fire a mile, then the maps should be able to reach several miles across. Modern processors can handle it.
- At least 500 units per side should be available in TA2. In fact, there should be no hard limit - just a setting somewhere. When first released TA1's limit of 200 units per side made 133mhz processors of the time crawl. But over the years even 500 per side and 10 sides is handled quite easily by my 2 ghz processor.
- Fully rendored 3d units rocked then. They rock now.
- The music from TA1 could be reused. The score was awesome. Keep it or improve it; just do not give it up.
- Smarter, larger, multi-functional factories. Maybe even make them mobile. Of course, fancier factories should be more expensive in resources and time.
- Allow for more elevations. TA1 allowed for about 4 elevations: Flying, raised ground, normal ground / floating, and underwater. The game used real trajectory calculations to determine hits. Keep that, but do so from even more elevation possibilities. Flying units could occupy the same space and not collide - that might be an improvement area too.
- Definitely keep the mutliple weapon types, even add some! Again see the community expansion packs for excellent ideas.
- Release unit creation tools. Make creating home grown units even easier! Let the user select a walking kbot, or rolling tank, or flying, or floating, hovercraft, or even amphibious. Let the user select the weapon types, and how many weapons. Let the user select the number of guns, the unit size, and how much armor it has. Allow special functions to be added such as sonar, radar, cloaking, self repair, others repair, unit capture, reincarnation, etc. Then to keep the game balanced make the unit cost in resources what the requested features should require. Very Excellent!
- Make the environment even more destructable. TA1 allowed for burning forests and that was cool at the time. Make the ground shaking weapons really deform the ground, and thereby potentially change the strategy of the map during game play. It is kind of annoying when a nuclear blast only leaves a black mark on the ground instead of creating a rough crater. Also, there should be units that allow strategic shaping of the envirnonment - Examples: build hills for cannons, extend coasts, or make smooth roads.
- Make the game work well for a quick 30 minute skirmish or for a 9 hour megawar (not underheard of). TA1 did a good job of this.
- Create a game mode where each side gets to pick a set number of unit types to play with (instead of making all units available all the time). Sometimes having hunderds of unit choices is Excellent (super war) and sometimes annoying (quick skirmish). Let the players pick. This feaure
According to this story : "Sony Corp announced on Monday that it plans to build new lines at Toshiba Corp and IBM Corp factories to produce advanced microprocessors for use in such products as digital appliances and game machines including Microsoft's Xbox gaming console and Sony's PlayStation 3."
So the scenario is that Sony invests in IBM chip production, and then Microsoft buys chips from IBM for the XBOX 2 that competes with Sony's Playstation 2 & 3. This might be a ploy by Sony to get a leg up on Microsoft. Or, more likely in my opinion, the console market is so important to both companies that going with the technology with the best price/performance has naturally led them to the same IBM chips.
If both Sony & MS rely on basically the same chips then the next round of the consol war will truly come down to who has the best games and best exclusive games.
This space for rent.