The big problem is that you are talking about two very different things. You have the need for long-term jobs, and you have the need for short-term/temp jobs. Construction is a dangerous area to talk about, because for those who have a career in the construction industry, you need to have new contracts that come in so you have work AFTER each project is complete. This means you need to have a sustained environment of growth, or at least building(tearing down and then re-building would work too). So, if the building of that data center was the ONLY big project in that area going on, and nothing follows, the construction people will be back to looking for work and doing poorly.
If people have jobs, and they can spend money on other local businesses, that helps. The big problem is you need more than 50 new jobs to make a properly sustainable environment. So, 50 people have jobs....will they all shop at the same stores, live one or more towns away? It is far better for a local economy to have 5000 jobs that pay $20,000/year each than 2500 jobs that pay $40,000/year each, just because there are that many more people who spend money locally. Those who make more than $100,000/year tend to be more interested in keeping their money invested, or looking for ways to make more money than they are about spending on the local level, so you also see a gradual decline in how well money gets distributed locally as the rate of pay goes up. Even those who put their money into a 401K, while it is a good idea, that is money that isn't being spent, and the economy needs more people to be spending.
What we need is for the entire patent system to be thrown out since only the big companies have enough patents to be ALLOWED to innovate without fear of a lawsuit crushing their company out of existence. That is the REAL problem, where if you come up with an idea for a $5 product that would sell millions of units, yet you need to pay $50 per unit worth of legal fees to protect yourself from lawsuits.
Apple is a PERFECT example of this, where they will start lawsuits over their so-called intellectual property that was clearly a copy of some other product that came out in the 1980s or even earlier. I've had some great ideas for products, but know that the big companies would just steal my ideas, then if/when it went to court, it would be 10 years later, at which time the idea would seem obvious, even though it was innovative at the time of invention.
So, we need companies to be allowed to compete, without fear of being shut down. Linux doesn't have lawsuits between distributions, which is why it is a great example of competition, but that doesn't apply to the corporate for-profit world.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The Pentium Pro failed miserably as a CPU offering, yet ended up as the basis for the Pentium 2 and 3, and then the Pentium M, and going forward. Just because Bulldozer in its first release has done poorly may be due to some design issues that we just don't know about, and in the next rev, may be fixed.
There is a huge difference between saying that something is the only way to prevent dehydration and saying that something will prevent dehydration. It is not a case of the bottled water companies saying that drinking other things will not prevent dehydration.
The EU should have granted the "request", but at the same time made it clear that other drinks can also use a similar label to claim they can prevent dehydration.
It is still correct to say that drinking a large amount of water per day will prevent dehydration. Bottled water obviously can not be the only thing that can make the claim, but on the other hand, you can't say it is incorrect either.
At least the MPAA tends to have a valid point in going after movie pirates. The number of people, and the expense that goes into making a movie, even one that flops is rather high. To make one recording is NOT terribly expensive in comparison, and the person or people behind the production generally get far less than the "record label". If people actually thought about the cost to produce something, they would probably still make illegal copies of music, while they might just buy the DVD or legally stream the movie they want to watch.
And that is the flaw, this obsession with what a CPU can do. GPU power isn't just about rendering, it has far greater computational power for many things than the CPU at this point(due to the different pixel pipelines). You want to see something, try checking the performance of Folding@Home with GPU vs. the best CPU version, and you will see why the CPU isn't always the best place to get work done.
The sad thing is that we are talking Intel here. Both AMD and NVIDIA are so far ahead of Intel when it comes to rendering technologies, you have to wonder if Intel is just throwing money at Dreamworks to experiment with stuff Intel has. Do you REALLY think that Dreamworks would have initiated that relationship when there are better alternatives available?
There will always be several categories of people who use a given product:
1) Those who really prefer that product or prefer products made by a given company 2) Those who dislike the MAIN competition for that product(anti-Apple people in the case of Android) 3) Those who are locked in for whatever reason(purchased applications, music format such as iTunes) 4) Work related
Now, for a long time, the anti-Microsoft crowd went to either MacOS or Linux. This sort of move will increase the anti-Apple feeling out there, though there are many fanatics out there who are so much like Islamic fundamentalists, it is almost scary. With the death of Steve Jobs, people MAY start to really look at each new release from Apple a bit more critically. Case in point, MacOS X, even with updates, is still MacOS X after ten years, and the lack of innovation and change is actually bad for Apple users. Encouraging people to be afraid of change is a bad thing since being mentally prepared for changes is a good thing.
Much of the anti-Microsoft feeling goes back to the days of Microsoft vs. Netscape, but if you stop and look, Microsoft hasn't really been all that anti-competitive, while Apple is trying to drive all competition out of the market via legal means, and is even more anti-competitive and controlling than Microsoft was back in the mid 1990s. What we really need is for the legal department to slap a $2 billion fine on Apple over anti-competitive behaviors and forcing developers to use the App Store, not to mention not making music purchased on iTunes work on other music players.
The hype is what made iOS the success that it is, not the UI. Hype....it has been the backbone of what allowed Apple to survive in even the worst years, and is really the true thing that Steve Jobs deserves credit for. Without Steve Jobs, and the cult-like following that HE inspired, the iPhone would have fallen flat.
Steve Jobs should be looked at as the perfect example of what a CEO should be, someone who generates a lot of excitement for the company, investor dollars, and pushes up the stock price. He has not been Mr. Innovation for years now, and if you look at both MacOS and iOS, you may notice that really significant innovation has been in short supply. For those who dislike change, this is good, but a lack of change also encourages stagnation. The iOS 5 new stuff was inspired by many things found in WebOS as well as Android, so really, what's really NEW that others don't have?
Try playing a modern game for six hours straight and doing that daily without doing a reboot. Windows 7 will let me go a week or more, which is better than the 3-4 days of Vista, and the 1-2 days under XP, but it is still needed.
It may be driver related that is causing it, but it's still an issue.
I suspect that it is all the redundant code used in Windows, where the same fix has to be applied in 20,000 places across the OS. You also have the insane complexity of the registry, and that is where the problems come from when it comes to updates. I suspect that Microsoft does not use a lot of shared library calls, and there is a lack of anyone looking over the code to see where multiple functions could be consolidated down into a single function.
Then again, things like.NET are not small, so the time it takes to copy the files into place and update the registry will take a bit of time with a regular hard drive.
This assumes the user is running software without memory leaks. You want to play some games on your computer(something most Mac and Linux users just don't do), you have to expect memory leaks, and the idea of sleep/hibernation to let the machine run for months at a time without a full shutdown/restart just doesn't work. I've run Linux setups where I would run them six months or more between reboots, but the software for Linux generally doesn't have the memory leaks you see under Windows.
When Apple is the source for most of the software many people run on a Mac, it is also not very strange that you don't see a lot of problems in this area. It is the third party stuff that ALWAYS causes the headaches.
We are almost to the point where quad-core will be in every laptop and desktop machine sold. With those AMD A6 and A8 based machines selling for in the $500-$700 range, how long do you think it will take before quad-core is in the $400 machines? The bulk of OS sales come from new system purchases, and it takes something really good to see a significant number of people willing to spend $100+ on an OS for their older computer.
No, if you think Windows 8 is only about a new UI, then you have not read very much about Windows 8. It sounds like Windows 8 is a solid attempt to fix the primary flaw with Windows, and that is this obsession with loading up a ton of services and garbage that you as a user and the apps you run will ever need.
Look at the services list under XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Look at how many are running all the time. Do you know if all of the running services are actually needed, based on what you run and do with your computer? Hell, even things like Remote Registry may be turned on, and for no good reason. So, if Windows 8 has a focus to cut down on things running that are not actually needed at that time, it is a big improvement.
When you are forced to wait a few minutes before a computer is really ready to be used from the time you turn it on, then yes, the time it takes IS important. Those who get to the desktop but are still forced to wait before doing anything due to the machine still loading tons of garbage want to see an improvement there. I know that between the HP software for my printer and anti-virus, those take a bit of extra time before they are finished loading before my system is properly responsive, and THAT is what needs to get addressed. I would really prefer that the normal "Windows" loading screen stay up while these sorts of programs finish loading and initializing, just so the system is actually ready when I get to the desktop.
The problem there is that with Linux, you can do a custom install that does not install anything you don't want to be running. Anti-virus on Linux? Nope, and many other things under Linux are also tuned to not start until you actually try to run them. With Debian, yes, you can get to a command line very very quickly, but once you fire up X11(whichever flavor you want), that adds a fair bit to the load time. If you set up for the system to come up with the GUI, your OS load time WILL increase.
On the flip side, Microsoft gave up on letting users do a custom install of Windows after Windows ME, so we have all those extra services and garbage that is always running. The whole idea that the system is always checking for new hardware during boot, and may not be terribly streamlined due to support for too many devices has also been a contributing factor. That is why Windows 8 sounds good, because from various reports, Microsoft is going to streamline what services are running, and that should really help.
Dungeons and Dragons Online(http://www.ddo.com) is a good game that allows you to play for free, and potentially earn extra content for free, or pay monthly to unlock all content. For every 100 favor your earn, you get 25 Turbine Points. These points stay, even if you delete your character and start fresh again. Extra content for your account can be bought with those turbine points. A positive is that there is enough unlocked content even without spending points to play for a while. Those who pay monthly(which unlocks all content) also get 500 Turbine Points per month that they are paying to play, and that is in addition to the favor points you earn, so you can pay for a while, unlock content/features, then go back to free to play and stick to the free stuff plus what you unlocked already.
No, I don't work for Turbine, but I know the game, and the model has allowed free to play people to play for a long time alongside those who are paying monthly.
For any commercial developer, which means those that at least try to break even and are not a community project that is driven by volunteers, there MUST be a focus on trying to make money. In some cases, this means just selling the game, with the hopes that there will be enough sales to at least pay the employees for the expense that went into the development process. In others, the base game is free, so income has to come from some other source.
The article is primarily about "free to play" games, and the effort to get players to pay for content. Many of these really do act as a bait and switch type game, where there is just enough "free" content to really show up as a "trial", but not enough to let you continue to play for free without spending money. Others put enough into the game where players really do have the potential to play for years without spending a penny, though making the spending of real money a real time saver. In many cases, there really is a design that focuses on addiction and using addiction to encourage the spending of real money.
Now, for what has really killed the game industry, the cost of development is VERY high, and this encourages developers to try cutting many corners, which tends to lower the quality of the product. In others, you see an endless supply of "clones", where most developers could not come up with a NEW game design, and they just follow the pack in the same genre. How many first person shooters does a person need to play before he/she/it figures out that it is the same game with some new bells and whistles? A good story is always good, but in general, deathmatch, or team vs. team multi-player with no significant change to the game concept does not advance the overall state of the industry.
So, you really have a big problem, how many millions of Dollars(or Euros) does it cost to make a game that will sell enough to at least cover the development costs? Good music, sound effects, and graphics are not enough, you also need a good story that people feel is worth paying to play to see how it plays out, and you need game play that does not feel like the game design was handled by someone doing serious amounts of drugs. That isn't cheap when you put it all together.
Going for a "lowest common denominator" when it comes to game DESIGN is also a killer. If your graphics are limited to what can be put on a Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360 and does not scale up for what modern PCs can handle(so the game improves on better equipment), those with better equipment will feel like the games are not worth paying as much for. Games should aim for MUCH higher specs than the projected highest end PCs at time of launch, and then scale down for systems that are more mid-range at the time that development starts(since those systems would be the low end after four years of development).
Then again, developers that can't come up with a new game engine that can be re-used for future titles are also looking short term. If a developer comes up with a new game engine for EVERY new title, then that is a waste of development money, so either license an existing game engine, or really focus on making a great game engine that can be licensed to others, and make your own game just be a great example of what can be done with that engine. Bioware didn't become a success just because of a few great games, it was being able to use the Infinity engine from Baldur's Gate in a good number of games, and having Interplay also picking it up for several Black Isle titles, which helped fund future games.
So, pick your reasons why the games industry has faded over the years, but people who don't understand these things really should not be in charge of game development companies.
Why is everyone so fixated on the idea that every form of life should be based on Carbon? In the same way that people in general can't seem to understand that other forms of life may use senses other than the five or six humans have, people should not be hung up on Carbon and other life that is similar in form to what we currently have on Earth.
General purpose computers will end up as the ONE powerful machine in each house, and many people who buy a laptop just to have in front of the TV may switch to tablets, but don't expect that real computers will be fully replaced in the home. The purpose for desktop machines may change, but people will still want ONE in their home for various tasks.
...to enable or disable this. If you buy a name brand machine, then yes, you might expect it to be locked down, so if that is the case, then the Linux crowd will simply stick to machines they build themselves, or have built for them that are not locked down. Simple solution really.
The thing is, times have changed, and you have to look back at the real-world issues, not just at low level "small" applications. The more complex things become, the less the CISC vs. RISC argument matters, especially when internally, CISC instructions get broken down into RISC-type instructions anyway.
So, if you are doing something really complex, a well-written application done with CISC instructions won't be any better or worse than if you did the same thing under RISC. It is like the old idea that it is far easier to have a chip with a VERY VERY high clock speed that executes a lot of NOP instructions than one that is actually doing something, and the more complicated applications become, the more you can benefit from CISC(single command to do the job of multiple commands). I am not including all the SSE instructions since they really were put in place by Intel just to try to shut AMD out for the most part.
If you take 10 scientists in a given field and ask their opinion about something in their field, you will get conflicting opinions. If these scientists reported their opinions to their supervisor/superior, then they SHOULD be off the hook, since the option to inform the public about ANYTHING is generally held by people other than the individual scientists. How many times have you seen and heard about people who were fired/demoted for talking to the public without permission/authorization?
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The big problem is that you are talking about two very different things. You have the need for long-term jobs, and you have the need for short-term/temp jobs. Construction is a dangerous area to talk about, because for those who have a career in the construction industry, you need to have new contracts that come in so you have work AFTER each project is complete. This means you need to have a sustained environment of growth, or at least building(tearing down and then re-building would work too). So, if the building of that data center was the ONLY big project in that area going on, and nothing follows, the construction people will be back to looking for work and doing poorly.
If people have jobs, and they can spend money on other local businesses, that helps. The big problem is you need more than 50 new jobs to make a properly sustainable environment. So, 50 people have jobs....will they all shop at the same stores, live one or more towns away? It is far better for a local economy to have 5000 jobs that pay $20,000/year each than 2500 jobs that pay $40,000/year each, just because there are that many more people who spend money locally. Those who make more than $100,000/year tend to be more interested in keeping their money invested, or looking for ways to make more money than they are about spending on the local level, so you also see a gradual decline in how well money gets distributed locally as the rate of pay goes up. Even those who put their money into a 401K, while it is a good idea, that is money that isn't being spent, and the economy needs more people to be spending.
What we need is for the entire patent system to be thrown out since only the big companies have enough patents to be ALLOWED to innovate without fear of a lawsuit crushing their company out of existence. That is the REAL problem, where if you come up with an idea for a $5 product that would sell millions of units, yet you need to pay $50 per unit worth of legal fees to protect yourself from lawsuits.
Apple is a PERFECT example of this, where they will start lawsuits over their so-called intellectual property that was clearly a copy of some other product that came out in the 1980s or even earlier. I've had some great ideas for products, but know that the big companies would just steal my ideas, then if/when it went to court, it would be 10 years later, at which time the idea would seem obvious, even though it was innovative at the time of invention.
So, we need companies to be allowed to compete, without fear of being shut down. Linux doesn't have lawsuits between distributions, which is why it is a great example of competition, but that doesn't apply to the corporate for-profit world.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The Pentium Pro failed miserably as a CPU offering, yet ended up as the basis for the Pentium 2 and 3, and then the Pentium M, and going forward. Just because Bulldozer in its first release has done poorly may be due to some design issues that we just don't know about, and in the next rev, may be fixed.
There is a huge difference between saying that something is the only way to prevent dehydration and saying that something will prevent dehydration. It is not a case of the bottled water companies saying that drinking other things will not prevent dehydration.
The EU should have granted the "request", but at the same time made it clear that other drinks can also use a similar label to claim they can prevent dehydration.
It is still correct to say that drinking a large amount of water per day will prevent dehydration. Bottled water obviously can not be the only thing that can make the claim, but on the other hand, you can't say it is incorrect either.
At least the MPAA tends to have a valid point in going after movie pirates. The number of people, and the expense that goes into making a movie, even one that flops is rather high. To make one recording is NOT terribly expensive in comparison, and the person or people behind the production generally get far less than the "record label". If people actually thought about the cost to produce something, they would probably still make illegal copies of music, while they might just buy the DVD or legally stream the movie they want to watch.
And that is the flaw, this obsession with what a CPU can do. GPU power isn't just about rendering, it has far greater computational power for many things than the CPU at this point(due to the different pixel pipelines). You want to see something, try checking the performance of Folding@Home with GPU vs. the best CPU version, and you will see why the CPU isn't always the best place to get work done.
The sad thing is that we are talking Intel here. Both AMD and NVIDIA are so far ahead of Intel when it comes to rendering technologies, you have to wonder if Intel is just throwing money at Dreamworks to experiment with stuff Intel has. Do you REALLY think that Dreamworks would have initiated that relationship when there are better alternatives available?
There will always be several categories of people who use a given product:
1) Those who really prefer that product or prefer products made by a given company
2) Those who dislike the MAIN competition for that product(anti-Apple people in the case of Android)
3) Those who are locked in for whatever reason(purchased applications, music format such as iTunes)
4) Work related
Now, for a long time, the anti-Microsoft crowd went to either MacOS or Linux. This sort of move will increase the anti-Apple feeling out there, though there are many fanatics out there who are so much like Islamic fundamentalists, it is almost scary. With the death of Steve Jobs, people MAY start to really look at each new release from Apple a bit more critically. Case in point, MacOS X, even with updates, is still MacOS X after ten years, and the lack of innovation and change is actually bad for Apple users. Encouraging people to be afraid of change is a bad thing since being mentally prepared for changes is a good thing.
Much of the anti-Microsoft feeling goes back to the days of Microsoft vs. Netscape, but if you stop and look, Microsoft hasn't really been all that anti-competitive, while Apple is trying to drive all competition out of the market via legal means, and is even more anti-competitive and controlling than Microsoft was back in the mid 1990s. What we really need is for the legal department to slap a $2 billion fine on Apple over anti-competitive behaviors and forcing developers to use the App Store, not to mention not making music purchased on iTunes work on other music players.
I am worried that Apple will charge 33 percent of the value of what I might try to find an answer to.
The hype is what made iOS the success that it is, not the UI. Hype....it has been the backbone of what allowed Apple to survive in even the worst years, and is really the true thing that Steve Jobs deserves credit for. Without Steve Jobs, and the cult-like following that HE inspired, the iPhone would have fallen flat.
Steve Jobs should be looked at as the perfect example of what a CEO should be, someone who generates a lot of excitement for the company, investor dollars, and pushes up the stock price. He has not been Mr. Innovation for years now, and if you look at both MacOS and iOS, you may notice that really significant innovation has been in short supply. For those who dislike change, this is good, but a lack of change also encourages stagnation. The iOS 5 new stuff was inspired by many things found in WebOS as well as Android, so really, what's really NEW that others don't have?
Try playing a modern game for six hours straight and doing that daily without doing a reboot. Windows 7 will let me go a week or more, which is better than the 3-4 days of Vista, and the 1-2 days under XP, but it is still needed.
It may be driver related that is causing it, but it's still an issue.
I suspect that it is all the redundant code used in Windows, where the same fix has to be applied in 20,000 places across the OS. You also have the insane complexity of the registry, and that is where the problems come from when it comes to updates. I suspect that Microsoft does not use a lot of shared library calls, and there is a lack of anyone looking over the code to see where multiple functions could be consolidated down into a single function.
Then again, things like .NET are not small, so the time it takes to copy the files into place and update the registry will take a bit of time with a regular hard drive.
This assumes the user is running software without memory leaks. You want to play some games on your computer(something most Mac and Linux users just don't do), you have to expect memory leaks, and the idea of sleep/hibernation to let the machine run for months at a time without a full shutdown/restart just doesn't work. I've run Linux setups where I would run them six months or more between reboots, but the software for Linux generally doesn't have the memory leaks you see under Windows.
When Apple is the source for most of the software many people run on a Mac, it is also not very strange that you don't see a lot of problems in this area. It is the third party stuff that ALWAYS causes the headaches.
We are almost to the point where quad-core will be in every laptop and desktop machine sold. With those AMD A6 and A8 based machines selling for in the $500-$700 range, how long do you think it will take before quad-core is in the $400 machines? The bulk of OS sales come from new system purchases, and it takes something really good to see a significant number of people willing to spend $100+ on an OS for their older computer.
No, if you think Windows 8 is only about a new UI, then you have not read very much about Windows 8. It sounds like Windows 8 is a solid attempt to fix the primary flaw with Windows, and that is this obsession with loading up a ton of services and garbage that you as a user and the apps you run will ever need.
Look at the services list under XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Look at how many are running all the time. Do you know if all of the running services are actually needed, based on what you run and do with your computer? Hell, even things like Remote Registry may be turned on, and for no good reason. So, if Windows 8 has a focus to cut down on things running that are not actually needed at that time, it is a big improvement.
When you are forced to wait a few minutes before a computer is really ready to be used from the time you turn it on, then yes, the time it takes IS important. Those who get to the desktop but are still forced to wait before doing anything due to the machine still loading tons of garbage want to see an improvement there. I know that between the HP software for my printer and anti-virus, those take a bit of extra time before they are finished loading before my system is properly responsive, and THAT is what needs to get addressed. I would really prefer that the normal "Windows" loading screen stay up while these sorts of programs finish loading and initializing, just so the system is actually ready when I get to the desktop.
The problem there is that with Linux, you can do a custom install that does not install anything you don't want to be running. Anti-virus on Linux? Nope, and many other things under Linux are also tuned to not start until you actually try to run them. With Debian, yes, you can get to a command line very very quickly, but once you fire up X11(whichever flavor you want), that adds a fair bit to the load time. If you set up for the system to come up with the GUI, your OS load time WILL increase.
On the flip side, Microsoft gave up on letting users do a custom install of Windows after Windows ME, so we have all those extra services and garbage that is always running. The whole idea that the system is always checking for new hardware during boot, and may not be terribly streamlined due to support for too many devices has also been a contributing factor. That is why Windows 8 sounds good, because from various reports, Microsoft is going to streamline what services are running, and that should really help.
Dungeons and Dragons Online(http://www.ddo.com) is a good game that allows you to play for free, and potentially earn extra content for free, or pay monthly to unlock all content. For every 100 favor your earn, you get 25 Turbine Points. These points stay, even if you delete your character and start fresh again. Extra content for your account can be bought with those turbine points. A positive is that there is enough unlocked content even without spending points to play for a while. Those who pay monthly(which unlocks all content) also get 500 Turbine Points per month that they are paying to play, and that is in addition to the favor points you earn, so you can pay for a while, unlock content/features, then go back to free to play and stick to the free stuff plus what you unlocked already.
No, I don't work for Turbine, but I know the game, and the model has allowed free to play people to play for a long time alongside those who are paying monthly.
For any commercial developer, which means those that at least try to break even and are not a community project that is driven by volunteers, there MUST be a focus on trying to make money. In some cases, this means just selling the game, with the hopes that there will be enough sales to at least pay the employees for the expense that went into the development process. In others, the base game is free, so income has to come from some other source.
The article is primarily about "free to play" games, and the effort to get players to pay for content. Many of these really do act as a bait and switch type game, where there is just enough "free" content to really show up as a "trial", but not enough to let you continue to play for free without spending money. Others put enough into the game where players really do have the potential to play for years without spending a penny, though making the spending of real money a real time saver. In many cases, there really is a design that focuses on addiction and using addiction to encourage the spending of real money.
Now, for what has really killed the game industry, the cost of development is VERY high, and this encourages developers to try cutting many corners, which tends to lower the quality of the product. In others, you see an endless supply of "clones", where most developers could not come up with a NEW game design, and they just follow the pack in the same genre. How many first person shooters does a person need to play before he/she/it figures out that it is the same game with some new bells and whistles? A good story is always good, but in general, deathmatch, or team vs. team multi-player with no significant change to the game concept does not advance the overall state of the industry.
So, you really have a big problem, how many millions of Dollars(or Euros) does it cost to make a game that will sell enough to at least cover the development costs? Good music, sound effects, and graphics are not enough, you also need a good story that people feel is worth paying to play to see how it plays out, and you need game play that does not feel like the game design was handled by someone doing serious amounts of drugs. That isn't cheap when you put it all together.
Going for a "lowest common denominator" when it comes to game DESIGN is also a killer. If your graphics are limited to what can be put on a Nintendo Wii or Xbox 360 and does not scale up for what modern PCs can handle(so the game improves on better equipment), those with better equipment will feel like the games are not worth paying as much for. Games should aim for MUCH higher specs than the projected highest end PCs at time of launch, and then scale down for systems that are more mid-range at the time that development starts(since those systems would be the low end after four years of development).
Then again, developers that can't come up with a new game engine that can be re-used for future titles are also looking short term. If a developer comes up with a new game engine for EVERY new title, then that is a waste of development money, so either license an existing game engine, or really focus on making a great game engine that can be licensed to others, and make your own game just be a great example of what can be done with that engine. Bioware didn't become a success just because of a few great games, it was being able to use the Infinity engine from Baldur's Gate in a good number of games, and having Interplay also picking it up for several Black Isle titles, which helped fund future games.
So, pick your reasons why the games industry has faded over the years, but people who don't understand these things really should not be in charge of game development companies.
Why is everyone so fixated on the idea that every form of life should be based on Carbon? In the same way that people in general can't seem to understand that other forms of life may use senses other than the five or six humans have, people should not be hung up on Carbon and other life that is similar in form to what we currently have on Earth.
General purpose computers will end up as the ONE powerful machine in each house, and many people who buy a laptop just to have in front of the TV may switch to tablets, but don't expect that real computers will be fully replaced in the home. The purpose for desktop machines may change, but people will still want ONE in their home for various tasks.
...to enable or disable this. If you buy a name brand machine, then yes, you might expect it to be locked down, so if that is the case, then the Linux crowd will simply stick to machines they build themselves, or have built for them that are not locked down. Simple solution really.
The thing is, times have changed, and you have to look back at the real-world issues, not just at low level "small" applications. The more complex things become, the less the CISC vs. RISC argument matters, especially when internally, CISC instructions get broken down into RISC-type instructions anyway.
So, if you are doing something really complex, a well-written application done with CISC instructions won't be any better or worse than if you did the same thing under RISC. It is like the old idea that it is far easier to have a chip with a VERY VERY high clock speed that executes a lot of NOP instructions than one that is actually doing something, and the more complicated applications become, the more you can benefit from CISC(single command to do the job of multiple commands). I am not including all the SSE instructions since they really were put in place by Intel just to try to shut AMD out for the most part.
If you take 10 scientists in a given field and ask their opinion about something in their field, you will get conflicting opinions. If these scientists reported their opinions to their supervisor/superior, then they SHOULD be off the hook, since the option to inform the public about ANYTHING is generally held by people other than the individual scientists. How many times have you seen and heard about people who were fired/demoted for talking to the public without permission/authorization?