If you have watched the campaigns of both McCain and Obama, there is also a clear difference in what has been said on both sides. It was even more clear for the month leading up to the election.
The Obama campaign has spent the most time saying what Barack Obama felt were the solutions to the problems, and talking about the problems out there. There was very little McCain/Palin bashing from the campaign. It may have been the press coverage, but I didn't see the Obama camp really stirring up anti-McCain feelings with fairly few advertisements saying why people should not vote for McCain.
On the other hand, EVERY rally that McCain and Palin were at showed no solutions, just reasons why they said not to vote for Obama. This shows why McCain lost, because he didn't show he was focused on why people should vote for him.
So, in the press, why should they cover, "Republican candidate bashes Obama but says nothing about how to deal with the issues" day in and day out? If McCain was more presidential BEFORE his concession speech, he would have done better.
Also, when a candidate ONLY focuses on his/her "base", it makes anyone not in that group feel that there is no reason to support that person. If people in the press have a normal bias toward a more moderate to liberal candidate, then those who are focused on ONLY targeting the conservative people, it just makes for there being no real news if that conservative candidate doesn't say anything new.
Did McCain EVER talk about having real solutions, or just how people should be afraid of having Obama as president?
It is fairly straight forward, make sure that idiots get no publicity, and any press coverage of idiots points out how idiotic the individual(s) in question are, and how being homeless should never be something to aspire to.
Right now, AMD fabs are ONLY used to produce AMD processors. They don't handle GPU manufacturing at this point. As a result of this, and because of the bad economy, the fab side of things would drag AMD down more than keeping the two companies in a good position. On top of this, from a pure bookkeeping/accounting perspective, it becomes easier for investors and potential investors to see a profit from one side of the business or the other.
The Athlon 64 X2 and Phenom sales numbers really are not bad, but the profits from the sales are never seen for investors if the fab side is losing money. The split will make it very clear how well the company is doing in each area. It will also open the doors for other companies to buy fab capacity from AMD, so AMD could make money by making chips for other companies. We may never see Intel use AMD for this, but other companies are out there.
The downside to this is that as two smaller companies, one side or the other might be purchased by another company, which would hurt in the long run. It's a dangerous time...
Since the vast majority of college applicants are under the legal drinking age, pictures posted on a public site where they are flaunting their breaking the law shows that rules clearly do not mean much to that person.
Now, I am NOT saying what anyone should or should not be doing, but advertising that you are breaking the rules is NOT a good way to impress administration officials, who in many cases need to consider the rules of the college/university they work for.
If the rules of a given college say no drinking, then seeing pictures of applicants drinking will imply that the applicant will continue to drink, without any thought given to the rules. There are also liability issues for college/universities when it comes to alcohol, so it isn't unusual that these behaviors will be frowned on.
This goes to a basic concept of acting how you want to act, but do it in private, and don't advertise it if it will not be approved of by "polite society". If you want to have a drunken orgy, nothing anyone says will stop that, but if you go through with it, make sure it doesn't become public.
It's not about how much money is spent, but is about their interests and what they notice. Women as a general rule don't pay as much attention to things like picture and sound quality, and will take the attitude of "it's good enough" when it comes to these things. They WILL focus on details of other items, just not on these particular areas.
My wife didn't even notice a difference when I first hooked up the surround sound speakers at home for example, even when it was pretty obvious sound was coming out of them. She noticed the increased picture quality for HGTV-HD, but not for any other channels(go figure). The key is what she found interesting, so would explain why many people just didn't notice the differences in the study.
If you don't have a HD capable display, then of course you won't see any benefit to Blu-Ray. Since many people purchased a 780p display as well, the advantages of Blu-Ray will also not be as obvious.
Then you also have the "female factor", where women typically do not care about an improved experience when watching TV, and things like surround sound also are not noticed. I am not saying that all women ignore the benefits of a higher quality display or sound system, but most women just don't pay attention to these things for them to care one way or the other.
Actually, it was the Bell 212A command set, and Hayes extended it. The Hayes version ended up dominating the modem industry, but it wasn't the first modem standard for commands.
There is a difference between promises made several years before release and demonstrations about the current state of the game. Every game developer out there has made insane claims about what they were going to put in their titles, and most of them have fallen far short of the initial goal.
Any game that is targeted at the console market will be limited by the power of that console. If the developers find that a console can't handle the demands of the game, features will need to be cut to make it work properly. This is why the PC is a better platform, because you CAN scale forward and scale back. A game title that is too advanced for computers at launch can still be released as-is in many cases, but scaled back based on the power of the computer being used.
I really wish that Fable 2 would have been targeted at the PC market with a console port, because at least then Lionhead would be free of hardware limitations on the console being developed for.
The key to The Witcher is that almost every decision you make isn't a question of right or wrong, good or evil, but more about how your decision affects the world. There may be no "correct" option to a situation, or every choice is the wrong one, and you have to deal with it.
A big thing that makes The Witcher different is that many player decisions end up with major or minor side effects later in the game. Even the example you gave above(in the tutorial/intro chapter) has a very minor side effect that shows up in chapter 1. Other decisions can also show up, including a decision from chapter 1 ending up with a minor side-effect in chapter 4.
The Witcher has some good replay value because you can change the general course of the game. You may end up at the same place in the end, but how you get there can be very different. Sometimes, it's not if you win or lose, but how you get there that is the most fun.
This is a very common misconception about the costs for playing games on a PC. I have seen your argument over and over again, so I hope you see my response/correction.
A computer that is used for work or general "home" stuff does not come with good graphics in most cases. These machines are 100 percent focused on non-games related tasks, so as a result, you should not put those functions into the "cost for the games portion of the computer". You can also look at this from another point of view, where if you ONLY buy a computer to play games and NOTHING else, then the cost of a gaming computer is much more expensive than a console, but if you plan to buy a computer for other things as well as playing games, you can now split the costs up.
HP Pavilion desktop computer with AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 3GB RAM(DDR2), 360GB hard drive, integrated NVIDIA graphics and onboard sound will cost you $530 from Best Buy. Add a 19 inch screen, and you are looking at under $700 for the complete machine. Notice that there is nothing here that is focused on playing games.
So, what would turn the above computer into a decent gaming computer? The video card, which will run between $200 and $300 for a card that is probably more powerful than what you would see in an Xbox 360 or PS3. That is the only price you are really paying to play games here.
What many people do not think about is how many people use a flat panel TV to play their game console on. If you don't watch TV on that big flat panel screen, you should now add the price of the screen to your game console. That will be upwards of $800. Suddenly, the cost of a game console is quite a bit higher than the computer. In the same way I write off the non-gamer components from a computer, you can theoretically write down the cost of that flat panel TV if you watch TV on it.
So, what platform costs more to operate now? Do you connect your PS3 to a regular TV?
The big thing still comes down to graphics, and what sort of results you may expect. It doesn't matter how many cores or if this thing can execute x86 code if the product doesn't do a very good job at what it is intended to do.
OpenGL and DirectX performance are what people will want this thing to do, not how well it will handle folding@home, seti@home, or any other distributed project. And even then, a 300 watt demand for just the video card/GPU is a bit extreme. Sure, the current high-end graphics cards have a high draw with two GPU chips plus over 512 megs of memory on them, but you get the graphics performance in accordance with that draw. At this point, there is nothing to indicate that Larrabee will justify the power demands when it comes to graphics performance.
Think about it as buying a product that is horrible for it's primary purpose, but it's useful doing everything EXCEPT what you bought it for. Most people will NOT accept a so-called video card that has sub-par performance, no matter how useful it may be for other tasks.
The problem is that most applications out there are single-threaded applications, so the applications themselves do not take advantage of multi-core processors.
Now, there are some very good uses for more cores when it comes to the game environment. AI for example could be broken out into one thread per NPC(enemy or friend). With more cores, the AI for each of these can become more complex. Instead of needing a single monolithic design to handle all the AI needed in the game, each entity could "think" independent of the others.
Of course, that doesn't matter much for the majority of people who don't play games, but it is one use. I/O is really the big problem, going to and from the hard drive is a VERY slow process. SSD technology doesn't seem very fast because the hard drive controller isn't terribly fast in most systems. SATA may seem like a huge improvement, but it's not good enough for a SSD in most cases.
Back in the days when Palm was doing well, they spun off their OS to it's own company, figuring that a separate company that was focused on just the OS would do a better job developing the OS, and would handle the licensing of the PalmOS to other companies.
Well, the OS company ended up being purchased by Access, a company that did NOTHING. Palm was now licensing the OS that they had developed, and Access eventually decided to make a Linux based OS that would be compatible with the existing PalmOS software base. Years passed, and finally we are at the end of 2007. The ALP(Access Linux Platform I think is what it stood for) just didn't end up being what Palm was looking for.
So, here we are, Palm having wasted years waiting for Access to get their act together. Palm decides to do what they should have done years earlier, do the work themselves to make a new OS. The press from Palm indicates that they hope/expect that the OS will be ready toward the end of 2008 under the code name NOVA. NOVA based Palm devices SHOULD show up in the first half of 2009 if all goes well.
The sad truth of what has happened to Palm comes down to letting others control YOUR OS, and trusting another unproven company to develop what really is the key to keeping your company doing well.
For what it's worth, the UI for the Treo line of smartphones is a bit better than the competition, but the ancient OS is holding it back. If NOVA turns out to be any good, it has the potential to bring a LOT of people back to Palm. UI is CRITICAL to making people either love or hate a smartphone, and Windows Mobile really sucks when it comes to the UI. Symbian isn't very good either, and don't get me started on the Blackberry crap, which is only good when it comes to corporate e-mail.
So, that's the short version of what happened...customer service goes downhill when a company loses it's focus and the employees don't love the products the company produces.
The difference between "The Witcher" and other computer games is that every NPC in an area has a scheduled script that runs all the time. Most games have the majority of NPCs just standing in place or wandering randomly without considering the time of day, so the AI needed for NPCs doesn't require as much.
This is why I suggested that in a game where you have dozens of NPCs each with their own agenda in an area that it would take a LOT more CPU power than most people might expect. I don't know if there is a decent level of multi-threading in that particular game though, so that could have something to do with it.
Just because CPU power is at the point where it may be enough, the whole point to having a video card is to offload that work to allow the CPU to deal with "more important" work. Console games tend to be very limited in terms of what is going on around the main character in a game. Sure, the graphics may be an issue, but you don't see games where the main character in a story has to push through a crowd of computer controlled NPCs that are not just there as a part of some puzzle, but are all doing or trying to do something.
Even on the PC side of things, a game like "The Witcher" really slows down when there are many NPCs in an area. If processor power isn't enough to handle a crowd of NPCs that don't have much of an agenda in a game, how do we have enough processing power to handle the game AI PLUS Ray Tracing?
If Ray Tracing is the goal, then yes, CPUs are at the point of being able to render a scene, but if you need that CPU to handle anything else, we have a long long long way to go before we have a powerful enough CPU plus GPU to handle it. This is why you won't see a move toward Ray Tracing any time soon.
In addition to this, the standards are still evolving as far as how to properly render things on a per-pixel basis. The current technology may use "tricks" that are not as good as ray tracing when you are talking high quality, but how long will it be before those tricks are so advanced that there won't be ANY difference to speak of? If Ray Tracing gives a 100 percent perfect rendering, and the tricks allow for something to get to 98 percent, how many people will really notice the difference?
There are really two different issues when you look at and think about Intellectual property. You have inventions, which may take time to develop, and you have music/video.
When it comes to an invention system, the current patent system is very broken, because those who file a patent first are generally the ones who are awarded the patent. This precludes those who were working on the same idea or something very similar at the same time. The real problem is that if you file a patent, it lets others see your idea, which lets people copy the inventions of others for profit. Those with a lot of money can bring the product to market faster, hurting the ability of the inventor to make money if the inventor does not have access to money. This is why the system awards those who file first, but does not protect those who are developing ideas but just have not filed a patent application for it.
The only good solution to this is to change how filed patents work. Unless you have a product ready to go, if you have an idea and file a patent, that application should NOT become public information, meaning that others can NOT look at your idea and work to implement it. Instead, others can come forward and file for the same idea. Those who have filed for a patent before it becomes public(when the company is ready to sell products based on the idea) have evidence at that point of prior art, so never need to go to court over the issue. Those who do not have a product based on said invention also do not get the rights to file a lawsuit about the idea since they have not invested the resources to develop the idea in the first place. This would stop the patent trolls who never plan to implement patented ideas. If during the "blackout period" where filed ideas are not made public there are over 8 different non-connected entities who file for the same or similar idea, said idea is obviously an "obvious" invention, so the patent for it would become public. This again prevents obvious ideas from ending up patentable.
Now, on the issue of music and movies, this subject ends up being split. Can someone come along and just duplicate the efforts of others? In the past(centuries ago), if someone heard a song, they could play that song, and as long as they do not claim to have written the song themselves. This goes along with the idea that you can not copyright a concept, but you can copyright the individual words. So, you could in theory hear a song by one music artist and "cover" it, as long as credit is given. The actual playing of the music is done yourself, so it isn't the same as just copying the work of others to make money. The problem is when near-perfect duplication becomes available, at which point people without any talent can suddenly make money on the work of others without doing ANYTHING to facilitate the making of the original music.
The primary solution here is to make sure that people do not make money on the duplication of music. That idea of making money includes those who facilitate the copying of music that they do not have the rights to. So, there should be no penalties for making a copy of a song or songs for a friend as long as no money is charged. This helps the spread of music, which in turn helps artists become better known. There may be money lost in the short term for artists, but in the long run will tend to increase the popularity of the artist, so will make the artist more money. Think of it like radio, where the radio stations can play music without being charged for it because of this idea that "air time" is good for artists.
The big question with this approach is how P2P comes into play here. They facilitate the copying of music without making money from it, and the copy of music from person to person really doesn't go THROUGH their servers, so they are not involved in the copy process. It's just that they provide a way to help people search the shared content of the users. As long as the end result isn't to allow people to sell
The problem with the mudslinging is that if you do not follow the process on a daily basis, you may hear about falsehoods spread, but do not hear when those falsehoods are proven to be wrong. The same goes for these small clips that are all over the place that can easily be taken out of context.
There really isn't a lot of press coverage for when baseless accusations are proven to be nothing, but there is a ton of coverage when those initial accusations are made.
The purpose of an API is to handle all of those different hardware configurations, so individual applications do not need to. The problem on the PC side is that too many developers are getting paid by NVIDIA to "enhance" the game for that specific brand of video card, and that means that the game now needs to compare the video card in the computer to the abilities of the game, and then do all sorts of adjustments.
A proper API would be one where the application does not need to even be concerned about what the capabilities of the hardware are in order to work, but in order to optimize performance it needs to check what the hardware can do. With a fast enough CPU, and my adjusting graphics options, a DirectX 9 game SHOULD work on a DirectX 7 video card, where the API handles what the hardware can't do, but still lets the video card accelerate what it can can accelerate. In a way, this is what EA was calling for several months ago when they were saying a unified platform is needed that would work on consoles and on PCs. It is really a full API, not one that just drops what the video card can't handle.
Now, there were a number of things wrong with what the guy was saying in the interview. First, the reason the market has not grown is because when the tech crash happened in mid 2001(a year and a half after the.com crash happened in the stock market), that made things a lot tougher when it came to getting financing.
Think of it like some of the movie studios which used to crank out a LOT of bad movies, so now only release a few movies every year, most of which are a bit better. The low-budget movies got scaled back a LOT by the increases in costs, so low-budget really doesn't mean low-cost anymore. A flop isn't something that doesn't make a lot of money, it is something that loses a lot of money. The game industry has run into the same problem, and people are feeling it.
Have you noticed how few true RPGs there are that are not a linear console-type game with no way to choose what order you even do the main quest elements in? Games like Jade Empire may be fun, and have some RPG elements in them, but they are also a linear game, with the only choices being how you respond to the NPCs you encounter. The old adventure game genre is also pretty much gone, where the player needs to figure out what to do, not just trying to kill things. Older gamers(relative term here, we are talking those 35 years old and older) sometimes want a mental challenge, not just "how do we kill this whatever". The PC has advantages in the control system for games that give you lots of options on what to do, and when developers focus on either console games with a PC port, or making sure the consoles can handle the exact same content as the PC, it weakens the games a LOT.
This trend can be seen in the Tomb Raider Anniversary game compared to the original game. While many elements of the original TR are there, the feel has gone more "console". Instead of looking around trying to figure out where to go, looking for ledges that can be jumped up to, etc, much of the new version goes back to the action element, rather than the exploration element. It doesn't capture that sense of, "wow" when you enter a large area.
When games actually provide choices, that is when people really stand up and take notice. Bioshock had more of that feeling, which added to it's popularity. It wasn't overly simple, even if it was not overly complex. People want more complexity in gameplay.
The ISPs have always been the ones paying for it. You have an ISP, you pay or come up with a deal with the other ISPs you connect to. This is the whole concept of peering. Business accounts are where the real money comes from for most ISPs, because the businesses pay to have their servers, and the traffic is what drives the revenue model.
So, Google pays their hosting provider(s), and the hosting provider in turn has agreements with those that are connected directly to them, who in turn have agreements with those connected directly to them, etc. Due to bandwidth demand for Google, the fee gets paid, but it does not get distributed directly to every ISP out there.
Now, bandwidth usage is a valid concern, which is why you see asynchronous communication speeds are the norm for most people. You get higher download speeds than upload speeds, simply because you the customer, are NOT supposed to be a content provider. If you want higher upload speeds, you should PAY to be a content provider. The primary reason for offering more upload speed than 128kbps is that there is a balance between your download speed and your upload speed. If your upload speed is too little, you just can NOT download quickly.
Some methods for legal distribution WOULD solve many problems, such as putting an "owner key" into the video or music download. In this way, if something you have purchased turns up on a peer to peer network, it can be traced to you, and you are the one that has to pay for every copy made out there, because YOU are the source at that point. If you give a copy to a friend, and the friend redistributes it, you are the one who will have to pay since you were never supposed to give it to your friend.
You can blame Microsoft for making an API that isn't a fully implemented API. If the video card does not accelerate a certain function in the API, the API should handle it, and the application should not need to care what the abilities are of our hardware. This is the real flaw that game developers have been fighting with for a long time now.
If I have a 6GHz processor, I should be able to play DirectX 9 games with full features with a video card that only accelerates DirectX 8.1 in hardware. Performance may suffer due to the older video card, but the API should provide what is missing from the hardware. Games should not need to check if a video card has a certain feature or not in order to provide full features, but they should be able to test the performance level to see which features should be enabled or disabled by default.
EA made a call for a unified game architecture that would work across all platforms a while back for this reason.
While there are some areas in the USA that are anti-black, it seems like blatant racism isn't really a huge factor in the world at large. Sure, there are still a lot of fights caused by religious disagreements, but in general, most of the fighting out there is based on religious and ethnic differences, not based on "race". On top of this, MOST of the dislike is caused by ethnic/cultural differences, so when it comes to dealing with Europe, or Asia, I really doubt it will be a huge factor.
This really goes to the core of the problems that many people here in the USA have with the influx of people from Spanish speaking countries. It's not JUST cultural differences, it is the language barrier, and many people feeling that this country has been invaded by people who have no desire to integrate into "American Society". If people would learn the language of the land BEFORE they move to that country, there would be far fewer problems in the world.
There is a different thread for Republican discussions as well. Since we are still looking at the primaries for each party, it doesn't make sense at this point to get into Democrat vs. Republican arguments. People SHOULD mod you as a troll, not because of what you are saying as much as HOW you are saying. Direct insults generally are the sorts of things that will get you banned from most discussion forums.
As far as why only focus on Democrats or Republicans, it is because at this point, no other parties have a candidate that will even get a second glance by well over 99 percent of the people in the USA.
For the same reason a Mac comes out of the box and powers up the first time with a "cute" movie saying Mac OS X. It's called marketing, and is really needed at this point. Many people have refused to install Vista until SP1 comes out, so making sure the install WORKS instead of breaks things is a very important thing.
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If you have watched the campaigns of both McCain and Obama, there is also a clear difference in what has been said on both sides. It was even more clear for the month leading up to the election.
The Obama campaign has spent the most time saying what Barack Obama felt were the solutions to the problems, and talking about the problems out there. There was very little McCain/Palin bashing from the campaign. It may have been the press coverage, but I didn't see the Obama camp really stirring up anti-McCain feelings with fairly few advertisements saying why people should not vote for McCain.
On the other hand, EVERY rally that McCain and Palin were at showed no solutions, just reasons why they said not to vote for Obama. This shows why McCain lost, because he didn't show he was focused on why people should vote for him.
So, in the press, why should they cover, "Republican candidate bashes Obama but says nothing about how to deal with the issues" day in and day out? If McCain was more presidential BEFORE his concession speech, he would have done better.
Also, when a candidate ONLY focuses on his/her "base", it makes anyone not in that group feel that there is no reason to support that person. If people in the press have a normal bias toward a more moderate to liberal candidate, then those who are focused on ONLY targeting the conservative people, it just makes for there being no real news if that conservative candidate doesn't say anything new.
Did McCain EVER talk about having real solutions, or just how people should be afraid of having Obama as president?
It is fairly straight forward, make sure that idiots get no publicity, and any press coverage of idiots points out how idiotic the individual(s) in question are, and how being homeless should never be something to aspire to.
Right now, AMD fabs are ONLY used to produce AMD processors. They don't handle GPU manufacturing at this point. As a result of this, and because of the bad economy, the fab side of things would drag AMD down more than keeping the two companies in a good position. On top of this, from a pure bookkeeping/accounting perspective, it becomes easier for investors and potential investors to see a profit from one side of the business or the other.
The Athlon 64 X2 and Phenom sales numbers really are not bad, but the profits from the sales are never seen for investors if the fab side is losing money. The split will make it very clear how well the company is doing in each area. It will also open the doors for other companies to buy fab capacity from AMD, so AMD could make money by making chips for other companies. We may never see Intel use AMD for this, but other companies are out there.
The downside to this is that as two smaller companies, one side or the other might be purchased by another company, which would hurt in the long run. It's a dangerous time...
Since the vast majority of college applicants are under the legal drinking age, pictures posted on a public site where they are flaunting their breaking the law shows that rules clearly do not mean much to that person.
Now, I am NOT saying what anyone should or should not be doing, but advertising that you are breaking the rules is NOT a good way to impress administration officials, who in many cases need to consider the rules of the college/university they work for.
If the rules of a given college say no drinking, then seeing pictures of applicants drinking will imply that the applicant will continue to drink, without any thought given to the rules. There are also liability issues for college/universities when it comes to alcohol, so it isn't unusual that these behaviors will be frowned on.
This goes to a basic concept of acting how you want to act, but do it in private, and don't advertise it if it will not be approved of by "polite society". If you want to have a drunken orgy, nothing anyone says will stop that, but if you go through with it, make sure it doesn't become public.
It's not about how much money is spent, but is about their interests and what they notice. Women as a general rule don't pay as much attention to things like picture and sound quality, and will take the attitude of "it's good enough" when it comes to these things. They WILL focus on details of other items, just not on these particular areas.
My wife didn't even notice a difference when I first hooked up the surround sound speakers at home for example, even when it was pretty obvious sound was coming out of them. She noticed the increased picture quality for HGTV-HD, but not for any other channels(go figure). The key is what she found interesting, so would explain why many people just didn't notice the differences in the study.
If you don't have a HD capable display, then of course you won't see any benefit to Blu-Ray. Since many people purchased a 780p display as well, the advantages of Blu-Ray will also not be as obvious.
Then you also have the "female factor", where women typically do not care about an improved experience when watching TV, and things like surround sound also are not noticed. I am not saying that all women ignore the benefits of a higher quality display or sound system, but most women just don't pay attention to these things for them to care one way or the other.
Well, my old US Robotics 212A modem used ATDT but was NOT a Hayes compatible modem.
Actually, it was the Bell 212A command set, and Hayes extended it. The Hayes version ended up dominating the modem industry, but it wasn't the first modem standard for commands.
There is a difference between promises made several years before release and demonstrations about the current state of the game. Every game developer out there has made insane claims about what they were going to put in their titles, and most of them have fallen far short of the initial goal.
Any game that is targeted at the console market will be limited by the power of that console. If the developers find that a console can't handle the demands of the game, features will need to be cut to make it work properly. This is why the PC is a better platform, because you CAN scale forward and scale back. A game title that is too advanced for computers at launch can still be released as-is in many cases, but scaled back based on the power of the computer being used.
I really wish that Fable 2 would have been targeted at the PC market with a console port, because at least then Lionhead would be free of hardware limitations on the console being developed for.
The key to The Witcher is that almost every decision you make isn't a question of right or wrong, good or evil, but more about how your decision affects the world. There may be no "correct" option to a situation, or every choice is the wrong one, and you have to deal with it.
A big thing that makes The Witcher different is that many player decisions end up with major or minor side effects later in the game. Even the example you gave above(in the tutorial/intro chapter) has a very minor side effect that shows up in chapter 1. Other decisions can also show up, including a decision from chapter 1 ending up with a minor side-effect in chapter 4.
The Witcher has some good replay value because you can change the general course of the game. You may end up at the same place in the end, but how you get there can be very different. Sometimes, it's not if you win or lose, but how you get there that is the most fun.
This is a very common misconception about the costs for playing games on a PC. I have seen your argument over and over again, so I hope you see my response/correction.
A computer that is used for work or general "home" stuff does not come with good graphics in most cases. These machines are 100 percent focused on non-games related tasks, so as a result, you should not put those functions into the "cost for the games portion of the computer". You can also look at this from another point of view, where if you ONLY buy a computer to play games and NOTHING else, then the cost of a gaming computer is much more expensive than a console, but if you plan to buy a computer for other things as well as playing games, you can now split the costs up.
HP Pavilion desktop computer with AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 3GB RAM(DDR2), 360GB hard drive, integrated NVIDIA graphics and onboard sound will cost you $530 from Best Buy. Add a 19 inch screen, and you are looking at under $700 for the complete machine. Notice that there is nothing here that is focused on playing games.
So, what would turn the above computer into a decent gaming computer? The video card, which will run between $200 and $300 for a card that is probably more powerful than what you would see in an Xbox 360 or PS3. That is the only price you are really paying to play games here.
What many people do not think about is how many people use a flat panel TV to play their game console on. If you don't watch TV on that big flat panel screen, you should now add the price of the screen to your game console. That will be upwards of $800. Suddenly, the cost of a game console is quite a bit higher than the computer. In the same way I write off the non-gamer components from a computer, you can theoretically write down the cost of that flat panel TV if you watch TV on it.
So, what platform costs more to operate now? Do you connect your PS3 to a regular TV?
The big thing still comes down to graphics, and what sort of results you may expect. It doesn't matter how many cores or if this thing can execute x86 code if the product doesn't do a very good job at what it is intended to do.
OpenGL and DirectX performance are what people will want this thing to do, not how well it will handle folding@home, seti@home, or any other distributed project. And even then, a 300 watt demand for just the video card/GPU is a bit extreme. Sure, the current high-end graphics cards have a high draw with two GPU chips plus over 512 megs of memory on them, but you get the graphics performance in accordance with that draw. At this point, there is nothing to indicate that Larrabee will justify the power demands when it comes to graphics performance.
Think about it as buying a product that is horrible for it's primary purpose, but it's useful doing everything EXCEPT what you bought it for. Most people will NOT accept a so-called video card that has sub-par performance, no matter how useful it may be for other tasks.
The problem is that most applications out there are single-threaded applications, so the applications themselves do not take advantage of multi-core processors.
Now, there are some very good uses for more cores when it comes to the game environment. AI for example could be broken out into one thread per NPC(enemy or friend). With more cores, the AI for each of these can become more complex. Instead of needing a single monolithic design to handle all the AI needed in the game, each entity could "think" independent of the others.
Of course, that doesn't matter much for the majority of people who don't play games, but it is one use. I/O is really the big problem, going to and from the hard drive is a VERY slow process. SSD technology doesn't seem very fast because the hard drive controller isn't terribly fast in most systems. SATA may seem like a huge improvement, but it's not good enough for a SSD in most cases.
Back in the days when Palm was doing well, they spun off their OS to it's own company, figuring that a separate company that was focused on just the OS would do a better job developing the OS, and would handle the licensing of the PalmOS to other companies.
Well, the OS company ended up being purchased by Access, a company that did NOTHING. Palm was now licensing the OS that they had developed, and Access eventually decided to make a Linux based OS that would be compatible with the existing PalmOS software base. Years passed, and finally we are at the end of 2007. The ALP(Access Linux Platform I think is what it stood for) just didn't end up being what Palm was looking for.
So, here we are, Palm having wasted years waiting for Access to get their act together. Palm decides to do what they should have done years earlier, do the work themselves to make a new OS. The press from Palm indicates that they hope/expect that the OS will be ready toward the end of 2008 under the code name NOVA. NOVA based Palm devices SHOULD show up in the first half of 2009 if all goes well.
The sad truth of what has happened to Palm comes down to letting others control YOUR OS, and trusting another unproven company to develop what really is the key to keeping your company doing well.
For what it's worth, the UI for the Treo line of smartphones is a bit better than the competition, but the ancient OS is holding it back. If NOVA turns out to be any good, it has the potential to bring a LOT of people back to Palm. UI is CRITICAL to making people either love or hate a smartphone, and Windows Mobile really sucks when it comes to the UI. Symbian isn't very good either, and don't get me started on the Blackberry crap, which is only good when it comes to corporate e-mail.
So, that's the short version of what happened...customer service goes downhill when a company loses it's focus and the employees don't love the products the company produces.
The difference between "The Witcher" and other computer games is that every NPC in an area has a scheduled script that runs all the time. Most games have the majority of NPCs just standing in place or wandering randomly without considering the time of day, so the AI needed for NPCs doesn't require as much.
This is why I suggested that in a game where you have dozens of NPCs each with their own agenda in an area that it would take a LOT more CPU power than most people might expect. I don't know if there is a decent level of multi-threading in that particular game though, so that could have something to do with it.
Just because CPU power is at the point where it may be enough, the whole point to having a video card is to offload that work to allow the CPU to deal with "more important" work. Console games tend to be very limited in terms of what is going on around the main character in a game. Sure, the graphics may be an issue, but you don't see games where the main character in a story has to push through a crowd of computer controlled NPCs that are not just there as a part of some puzzle, but are all doing or trying to do something.
Even on the PC side of things, a game like "The Witcher" really slows down when there are many NPCs in an area. If processor power isn't enough to handle a crowd of NPCs that don't have much of an agenda in a game, how do we have enough processing power to handle the game AI PLUS Ray Tracing?
If Ray Tracing is the goal, then yes, CPUs are at the point of being able to render a scene, but if you need that CPU to handle anything else, we have a long long long way to go before we have a powerful enough CPU plus GPU to handle it. This is why you won't see a move toward Ray Tracing any time soon.
In addition to this, the standards are still evolving as far as how to properly render things on a per-pixel basis. The current technology may use "tricks" that are not as good as ray tracing when you are talking high quality, but how long will it be before those tricks are so advanced that there won't be ANY difference to speak of? If Ray Tracing gives a 100 percent perfect rendering, and the tricks allow for something to get to 98 percent, how many people will really notice the difference?
There are really two different issues when you look at and think about Intellectual property. You have inventions, which may take time to develop, and you have music/video.
When it comes to an invention system, the current patent system is very broken, because those who file a patent first are generally the ones who are awarded the patent. This precludes those who were working on the same idea or something very similar at the same time. The real problem is that if you file a patent, it lets others see your idea, which lets people copy the inventions of others for profit. Those with a lot of money can bring the product to market faster, hurting the ability of the inventor to make money if the inventor does not have access to money. This is why the system awards those who file first, but does not protect those who are developing ideas but just have not filed a patent application for it.
The only good solution to this is to change how filed patents work. Unless you have a product ready to go, if you have an idea and file a patent, that application should NOT become public information, meaning that others can NOT look at your idea and work to implement it. Instead, others can come forward and file for the same idea. Those who have filed for a patent before it becomes public(when the company is ready to sell products based on the idea) have evidence at that point of prior art, so never need to go to court over the issue. Those who do not have a product based on said invention also do not get the rights to file a lawsuit about the idea since they have not invested the resources to develop the idea in the first place. This would stop the patent trolls who never plan to implement patented ideas. If during the "blackout period" where filed ideas are not made public there are over 8 different non-connected entities who file for the same or similar idea, said idea is obviously an "obvious" invention, so the patent for it would become public. This again prevents obvious ideas from ending up patentable.
Now, on the issue of music and movies, this subject ends up being split. Can someone come along and just duplicate the efforts of others? In the past(centuries ago), if someone heard a song, they could play that song, and as long as they do not claim to have written the song themselves. This goes along with the idea that you can not copyright a concept, but you can copyright the individual words. So, you could in theory hear a song by one music artist and "cover" it, as long as credit is given. The actual playing of the music is done yourself, so it isn't the same as just copying the work of others to make money. The problem is when near-perfect duplication becomes available, at which point people without any talent can suddenly make money on the work of others without doing ANYTHING to facilitate the making of the original music.
The primary solution here is to make sure that people do not make money on the duplication of music. That idea of making money includes those who facilitate the copying of music that they do not have the rights to. So, there should be no penalties for making a copy of a song or songs for a friend as long as no money is charged. This helps the spread of music, which in turn helps artists become better known. There may be money lost in the short term for artists, but in the long run will tend to increase the popularity of the artist, so will make the artist more money. Think of it like radio, where the radio stations can play music without being charged for it because of this idea that "air time" is good for artists.
The big question with this approach is how P2P comes into play here. They facilitate the copying of music without making money from it, and the copy of music from person to person really doesn't go THROUGH their servers, so they are not involved in the copy process. It's just that they provide a way to help people search the shared content of the users. As long as the end result isn't to allow people to sell
The problem with the mudslinging is that if you do not follow the process on a daily basis, you may hear about falsehoods spread, but do not hear when those falsehoods are proven to be wrong. The same goes for these small clips that are all over the place that can easily be taken out of context.
There really isn't a lot of press coverage for when baseless accusations are proven to be nothing, but there is a ton of coverage when those initial accusations are made.
The purpose of an API is to handle all of those different hardware configurations, so individual applications do not need to. The problem on the PC side is that too many developers are getting paid by NVIDIA to "enhance" the game for that specific brand of video card, and that means that the game now needs to compare the video card in the computer to the abilities of the game, and then do all sorts of adjustments.
.com crash happened in the stock market), that made things a lot tougher when it came to getting financing.
A proper API would be one where the application does not need to even be concerned about what the capabilities of the hardware are in order to work, but in order to optimize performance it needs to check what the hardware can do. With a fast enough CPU, and my adjusting graphics options, a DirectX 9 game SHOULD work on a DirectX 7 video card, where the API handles what the hardware can't do, but still lets the video card accelerate what it can can accelerate. In a way, this is what EA was calling for several months ago when they were saying a unified platform is needed that would work on consoles and on PCs. It is really a full API, not one that just drops what the video card can't handle.
Now, there were a number of things wrong with what the guy was saying in the interview. First, the reason the market has not grown is because when the tech crash happened in mid 2001(a year and a half after the
Think of it like some of the movie studios which used to crank out a LOT of bad movies, so now only release a few movies every year, most of which are a bit better. The low-budget movies got scaled back a LOT by the increases in costs, so low-budget really doesn't mean low-cost anymore. A flop isn't something that doesn't make a lot of money, it is something that loses a lot of money. The game industry has run into the same problem, and people are feeling it.
Have you noticed how few true RPGs there are that are not a linear console-type game with no way to choose what order you even do the main quest elements in? Games like Jade Empire may be fun, and have some RPG elements in them, but they are also a linear game, with the only choices being how you respond to the NPCs you encounter. The old adventure game genre is also pretty much gone, where the player needs to figure out what to do, not just trying to kill things. Older gamers(relative term here, we are talking those 35 years old and older) sometimes want a mental challenge, not just "how do we kill this whatever". The PC has advantages in the control system for games that give you lots of options on what to do, and when developers focus on either console games with a PC port, or making sure the consoles can handle the exact same content as the PC, it weakens the games a LOT.
This trend can be seen in the Tomb Raider Anniversary game compared to the original game. While many elements of the original TR are there, the feel has gone more "console". Instead of looking around trying to figure out where to go, looking for ledges that can be jumped up to, etc, much of the new version goes back to the action element, rather than the exploration element. It doesn't capture that sense of, "wow" when you enter a large area.
When games actually provide choices, that is when people really stand up and take notice. Bioshock had more of that feeling, which added to it's popularity. It wasn't overly simple, even if it was not overly complex. People want more complexity in gameplay.
Are there still people who read slashdot and use IE?
The ISPs have always been the ones paying for it. You have an ISP, you pay or come up with a deal with the other ISPs you connect to. This is the whole concept of peering. Business accounts are where the real money comes from for most ISPs, because the businesses pay to have their servers, and the traffic is what drives the revenue model.
So, Google pays their hosting provider(s), and the hosting provider in turn has agreements with those that are connected directly to them, who in turn have agreements with those connected directly to them, etc. Due to bandwidth demand for Google, the fee gets paid, but it does not get distributed directly to every ISP out there.
Now, bandwidth usage is a valid concern, which is why you see asynchronous communication speeds are the norm for most people. You get higher download speeds than upload speeds, simply because you the customer, are NOT supposed to be a content provider. If you want higher upload speeds, you should PAY to be a content provider. The primary reason for offering more upload speed than 128kbps is that there is a balance between your download speed and your upload speed. If your upload speed is too little, you just can NOT download quickly.
Some methods for legal distribution WOULD solve many problems, such as putting an "owner key" into the video or music download. In this way, if something you have purchased turns up on a peer to peer network, it can be traced to you, and you are the one that has to pay for every copy made out there, because YOU are the source at that point. If you give a copy to a friend, and the friend redistributes it, you are the one who will have to pay since you were never supposed to give it to your friend.
You can blame Microsoft for making an API that isn't a fully implemented API. If the video card does not accelerate a certain function in the API, the API should handle it, and the application should not need to care what the abilities are of our hardware. This is the real flaw that game developers have been fighting with for a long time now.
If I have a 6GHz processor, I should be able to play DirectX 9 games with full features with a video card that only accelerates DirectX 8.1 in hardware. Performance may suffer due to the older video card, but the API should provide what is missing from the hardware. Games should not need to check if a video card has a certain feature or not in order to provide full features, but they should be able to test the performance level to see which features should be enabled or disabled by default.
EA made a call for a unified game architecture that would work across all platforms a while back for this reason.
While there are some areas in the USA that are anti-black, it seems like blatant racism isn't really a huge factor in the world at large. Sure, there are still a lot of fights caused by religious disagreements, but in general, most of the fighting out there is based on religious and ethnic differences, not based on "race". On top of this, MOST of the dislike is caused by ethnic/cultural differences, so when it comes to dealing with Europe, or Asia, I really doubt it will be a huge factor.
This really goes to the core of the problems that many people here in the USA have with the influx of people from Spanish speaking countries. It's not JUST cultural differences, it is the language barrier, and many people feeling that this country has been invaded by people who have no desire to integrate into "American Society". If people would learn the language of the land BEFORE they move to that country, there would be far fewer problems in the world.
There is a different thread for Republican discussions as well. Since we are still looking at the primaries for each party, it doesn't make sense at this point to get into Democrat vs. Republican arguments. People SHOULD mod you as a troll, not because of what you are saying as much as HOW you are saying. Direct insults generally are the sorts of things that will get you banned from most discussion forums.
As far as why only focus on Democrats or Republicans, it is because at this point, no other parties have a candidate that will even get a second glance by well over 99 percent of the people in the USA.
For the same reason a Mac comes out of the box and powers up the first time with a "cute" movie saying Mac OS X. It's called marketing, and is really needed at this point. Many people have refused to install Vista until SP1 comes out, so making sure the install WORKS instead of breaks things is a very important thing.