You need to read your own references before you call bullshit on somebody.
Your articles say that they're more efficient that incandescent (duh), and Compact Flourescent. Those are at the low end of the efficiency scale.
White LEDs aren't even close to 100% efficient, because a large portion of the light they emit isn't in the visible spectrum. They don't work strictly like normal LEDs.
Efficiency wise, white LEDs fall between CF and traditional flourescent in producing visible light. I'd provide a reference, but there's no definitive guide, so instead I'll show you how to do the research and the math yourself. First read about how to determine how much light an LED actually produces, and why you can't compare lumens to candela directly. Then take a look at some incandescent and flourescent lamps, and you'll see that incandescent produces between 15 and 20 lumens per watt, CF produces between 40 and 75 lumens per watt, traditional flourescent goes up to about 100 lumens per watt, and high pressure sodium are around 140 lumens per watt.
The best white LEDs currently available produce 37 lumens per watt and there may be 60 lumens per watt LEDs available soon.
It pisses me off that blatent mis-information like what you posted gets modded up, while the truth doesn't, just because geeks have an unnatural love for LEDs.
I know you're trolling, but in terms of lumens per watt, LEDs aren't even as good as flourescent. The only reason most LEDs use so little power is that they emit so little light. Not only that, but white LEDs cost so damned much that even if they were more efficient it would be a REALLY LONG TIME before you ever saw return on your investment.
There's a reason you can't by LED lightbulbs for your home lamps.
Do you have some actual numbers to back this up? Every stat I've ever seen from bulb manufacturers has high pressure sodium *way* ahead of flourescent in lumens per watt. Not only that, but they'll work in extreme cold environments where you'd never get a flourescent tube to start up. If you save power by using flourescents over sodium it's almost certainly because you're getting less light (which might not be a bad thing).
you can't develop games for their systems unless you already have experience developing games, preferably for similarly closed systems
That Nintendo page you linked to doesn't say that. It says you need to demonstrate technical expertiese. You're assuming that the rest of those restrictions exist when they really don't.
Like I said, if you can't get a job writing games to gain the requisite experience, you can write a demo on a PC to demonstrate your ability and concept. It doesn't have to be a finished product. Just something to show off to prove you know what you're doing and that your game concept is feasable. You can do this even for handheld platforms.
In this period of alleged jobless growth and outsourcing to less developed countries
It's just that: alleged. Jobs are plentiful for people who can demonstrate proficiency. I didn't say you have to be a salesman to get a job. I said you have to be a salesman to start a company. If you're having difficulty finding a regular job, you may wish to consider what locality you're looking in, as some areas have more jobs than others. You might also wish to bolster your skillset with a programming hobby in an area that is meaningful to the types of software industries where you live. It couldn't hurt to seek professional help with your resume either.
Plenty of companies are starting to look to fresh graduates for help, as they're not much more expensive than outsourcing (which has lots of hidden costs beyond the actual fee) yet have the benefit of being right there in the building with you. Unfortunatly, it's just as much about who you know as what you know, so if you don't have a large network of contacts it can be difficult. In that case you should find a good headhunter and take advantage of his contacts. Once you've got the first job, just doing it well will build your network to the point where subsequent jobs will be much easier to come by.
Lastly, be careful what you put your name on when you post things online. Hiring managers *do* google you, and if you say anti-business things you won't get hired.
I'm officially ignoring anybody that says some single thing is "the future".
Player made content is in the past (Late '70s, early '80s), in the present, and will be in the future. It's a niche. It will exist. Just because some guy can't figure out how to make content for a huge game in an economical way doen't mean it's the 'one true future'.
Yes, player made content is the future. Pre-made content, randomly generated content, and content free games are the future too. They'll all exist in the proportions they've always existed in, and people said the exact same crap about the first 3D consoles as they're saying about the latest thing to be called "next-gen".
I gave a glib answer to your glib question, but I figured I could be serious too instead of just being a jerk... It's tough though considering the site your URL links to. Why, you ask? Well let me give you an example: That anti-Disney site you pointed to has the followin on it:
Disney refuses to publish a Miramax film criticizing U.S. President George W. Bush for fear that it might anger Jeb Bush, brother of the President and governor of Florida, where Walt Disney World is located. Miramax may have to take it to another studio.
Implying, of course, that it's bad. When you're a business you have to play the game, which brings me to my next point:
someone who speaks businessese
If that's not you, you're not going to be a successful small developer. No small developer has ever been truely successful unless everybody on the team (usually just one or two guys), or at least a majority of them, know how to run and pitch a business. You also have to be a good salesman. It's just the way it is. If that means that *you* can't get a license and buy a dev kit from your favorite console manufacturer, it doesn't mean the rest of us can't. Invariably, all the big names who started small and made it weren't the best techies or developers, they were the best business people.
Once you're sure you've got those skills, the first step is to raise money. There are hundreds of ways to do this, but the most popular amongst small businesses is to save up from a salary from a normal job for a long time, or to take a loan against some existing asset, like your house. To stick with your example, think about how much a PC and a compiler cost when PKZip was written. As somebody who bought both around that same time period, let me tell you that it was in the same order of magnitude (adjusted for inflation) as what you'll need today to develop basic console games.
Additionally, don't shoot for the moon to start. Just because you want to release your game on ${console} doesn't mean you have to write it for ${console} right away. Use good design principles, and the basics of your game can be easily portable. Then you can write a working demo that will demonstrate your abilities and experience.
With cash, and a demo, you're in the door. Unless your demo sucks, or you have no sales skills and no sales plan whatsoever, your manufacturer of choice will almost certanly sell you a dev kit. Then you'll officially be done with the easy part.
one has to already have a business plan, a team of developers who are somehow already experienced, a marketing plan, and other documentation
All things you need anyway. They only have those rules so that they don't have to waste their time on you if you're sure to not be successful. Besides, there are a few things in that list that they would certainly be flexable on once they've determined that you're actually have some cash to give them. The only thing they would really need is #1 and #5.
And what do you mean by 'somehow' already experienced? Is there a shortage of experienced developers? Is it not already well established how you become an experienced software developer?
I was asking you how to do it.
Well, if I may use a baseball analogy, you start by not assuming you can play in the major league because you held a bat once.
So, given a GBA binary developed using homebrew tools, how would I go about getting it published?
Sorry, I read that wrong the first time and didn't notice you said 'with homebrew tools'. What the hell do homebrew tools have to do with whether you need a big-name publisher or not? Are you under the impression that you can't buy the official kit for some reason?
Really? Phil Katz created deflation as part of PKZIP, a shareware product, and donated the method to the public domain.
Yeah, but the problem wouldn't have gone away if he never came along, so somebody smart would have figured it out. Since then even better methods have been found, so it's not like he's the only one who could have though of this stuff. Not only that, but he based it on public domain code from ARC, and PKWare held the copyrights very closely. It's not like he gave his format to the world as a gift. (/me wonders how old you were then)
MS-DOS still came with QBasic at the time.
Sorry, DOS only came with BASICA back then.
Which handheld system is open and widely deployed in the United States?
Unimportant. Nintendo will put yust about any old shit you write on a cartridge and sell it as long as it isn't pornographic.
I want to start a company that makes games for handhelds so that players don't have to suffer the price and bulk of a laptop. [...] For another, there's no handheld equivalent to Xbox Live Arcade that's widely deployed outside of Korea; give me Xboy Live Arcade and I'll be happier.
You realize this is a discussion about publishers, right? I don't see how ditching the traditional publisher setup is going to do anything but help you with this. Without a publisher, all you need to get your game out is cash. With a publisher you have to sell it to some idiot executive with no vision, and then give him all your profits. Your examples make my argument for me.
the reality is that the documents and data of a person who lacks a sufficient understanding of computer security are not automatically less important than our data or documents.
I don't disagree. All I'm saying is that a virus that harms the person who gets infected through his own negligence is better than a virus that harms countless others through a person's negligence. This is especially true with viruses that go out of their way to have no concequence on the 'victim' such that the person won't know to try and solve the problem.
It's not that I don't think other people's documents are valuable, it's that I don't think other people should shoulder the burden for somebody's mistakes, and that viruses with obvious effects on the person who gets infected are more likely to get cleaned up quickly.
Besides, we all backup our important documents, so having them wiped out by a virus would only cost us a days work tops, right?
without PKZIP we wouldn't have Info-ZIP, gzip, or zlib, and without zlib we wouldn't have PNG
You assume a lot. I don't think you're right. Without shareware zlib, gzip, and PNG, or at least something equivalent to them all would have been created.
Plus, the barrier to entry for software development on PCs used to be high back then almost like it is with consoles now.
In addition, I've read on sites such as warioworld.com that the console makers tend to require that your company already have a reputation
Who's forcing you to start on consoles? Besides, I know for a fact that isn't true for all console manufacturers.
I'm also not sure how you can see something like Xbox Live Arcade and still think that it will continue to be difficult to break into the console gaming market if you've got an innovative title.
MyDoom or NetSky, which merely clog networks, install backdoors (that are not usually used for anything nearly as destructive), and turn computers into spam and DoS zombies.
I'll take 10 users getting their documents destroyed over one DoS zombie any day. The former only has an impact on me if I'm an idiot, the latter becomes a problem when other people are idiots.
the console maker, who all too often denies such permission to "garage" companies
They deny permission to low quality games, sure. If you've got the cash to buy the dev kit and your game doesn't crash, they'll play. Look at how many low-budget, low-quality games there have been for the Playstation and the PS2. If you'll buy the kit and pay the fee, they'll press your game. $30,000 isn't that big of a barrier to entry. Sure, it keeps shareware/basement type games off (usually, there are exceptions. Played Alien Hominid or Snood lately?) the consoles, but it doesn't keep the little guy out. $30k is pretty average for equipment costs for just about any business you might want to start.
you'll still need a publisher in order to act as a middleman between the developer and a game console maker
Why?
All you have in that situation is two publishers. The only difference between console development and PC development (this is a really broad generalization) in this context is the cost of the development platform.
How about these greedy slobs try and produce games with lower development costs?
The development costs are already at rock bottom. The big name companies barely keep their artists and programmers fed.
The 'high development costs' actually go to buying movie licenses, paying over-rated and over-priced voice talent (or over-rated and over-priced famous designers), paying for outrageous advertizing, hype, and favorable reviews, and most of all, lining the pockets of the publisher who is making a living mostly off the backs of other people's work.
Look at hollywood actually BRAG about production costs
Yeah, most of those 'costs' are actually paid to themselves as a dodge so they can say their profits are near zero. They have to keep the production costs high to keep the bottom line artificially low. All the while they've figured out how to keep the cash anyway.
Instead of having them cut costs, how about we cut them loose and have everything be an 'independant' game? While we're at it we can do the same to their slob counterparts at the RIAA.
For the longest time, publishers were the dispicable middlemen who took the bulk of the profits. Now, due to advances in technology, the money is going to stay with the retailers, who can efficiently catalog and redistribute used copies, or to the developers who can distribute electronically and cut the publishers out of the loop entirely.
We're going to see the publishers spew this shit about how much more it costs to develop on next-gen systems and how used games make that harder, all while they're reeling from losing their cash; Cash which they keep as profits, and use for kickbacks, mis-management and marketing, which are the real bulk of game costs, dwarfing development costs by so much that it almost doesn't even matter if development costs double on net-gen systems. The same crap is happening to publishing/distributing companies in every industry. They're crying as their business models become obsolete. It's too bad that there's no good will towards them since they've been screwing people form both ends for centuries.
Let the publishers rot. Few will mourn the loss of 'Big Name' games and musicians, and their demise will make more room in the industry for artists and engineers as the money they keep from their big name titles gets spread out amongst an industry full of a larger number of lesser known titles. You won't have to be a rockstar anymore to be able to make a living as a musician, script writer, or game artist. The change is already started, and short of purchased legislation there's no way to stop it.
I was under the impression that current 10k rpm 3.5" form factor drives actually have 2.5" platters inside.
I wasn't aware of that, but it makes sense.
I suppose that with a fast RAID1 controller there would be some increase in latency but it is likely to be negligible
It isn't negligible. Your write can't be considered complete until your data is on both disks. Unlike old slow SCSI drives, disks on the same bus don't syncronize their rotations anymore, so you have to wait for the worst case rotational latency of both disks. It's about a 25% latency hit on average for a single IO. For linear writes the effect is less, but if you're running a database with lots of random writes, it's a big deal.
High end arrays and controllers get around this with a battery backed up cache, which allows them to call the IO complete once it is in cache. Low-end controllers, almost all SATA controllers, and many on-board controllers (even on server boards) don't come with a battery backed up cache though.
I don't. But the effects of such an action could be dramatically reduced. The worst that should be able to do is to destroy the user's data. It shouldn't be able to take over the machine.
it is easy once you have a nuke. Pack it in lead so ionization detectors can't find anything
Take it from somebody who has learned the hard way.
Putting something that can't be identified via traditional scanning methods is a great way to get your cargo shredded, disassembled, and prodded. The best anybody could hope to do is set one off on an ship that was still in port, and even that would be tricky with some of the new stuff they're doing while the ships are being loaded. The ship operator would have to be in on it, and the ship would have to be much faster than the authorities expect, because you're going to have to stop at an another port to get your weapon added to your cargo.
Even if they're not worried that you're a terrorist, you don't pull a big ship into a major port without an escort (they don't want you hitting anything), and you're not going to get an escort unquestioned if you just show up full of cargo at random, or really late.
Of course the hardest part is getting the bomb in the first place. That's not nearly as easy as in the movies. You've got to imagine that lots of fairly smart and well funded people have tried so far, and nothing has been nuked off the face of the earth by a terrorist yet.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to read your own references before you call bullshit on somebody.
Your articles say that they're more efficient that incandescent (duh), and Compact Flourescent. Those are at the low end of the efficiency scale.
White LEDs aren't even close to 100% efficient, because a large portion of the light they emit isn't in the visible spectrum. They don't work strictly like normal LEDs.
Efficiency wise, white LEDs fall between CF and traditional flourescent in producing visible light. I'd provide a reference, but there's no definitive guide, so instead I'll show you how to do the research and the math yourself. First read about how to determine how much light an LED actually produces, and why you can't compare lumens to candela directly. Then take a look at some incandescent and flourescent lamps, and you'll see that incandescent produces between 15 and 20 lumens per watt, CF produces between 40 and 75 lumens per watt, traditional flourescent goes up to about 100 lumens per watt, and high pressure sodium are around 140 lumens per watt.
The best white LEDs currently available produce 37 lumens per watt and there may be 60 lumens per watt LEDs available soon.
It pisses me off that blatent mis-information like what you posted gets modded up, while the truth doesn't, just because geeks have an unnatural love for LEDs.
I know you're trolling, but in terms of lumens per watt, LEDs aren't even as good as flourescent. The only reason most LEDs use so little power is that they emit so little light. Not only that, but white LEDs cost so damned much that even if they were more efficient it would be a REALLY LONG TIME before you ever saw return on your investment.
There's a reason you can't by LED lightbulbs for your home lamps.
Do you have some actual numbers to back this up? Every stat I've ever seen from bulb manufacturers has high pressure sodium *way* ahead of flourescent in lumens per watt. Not only that, but they'll work in extreme cold environments where you'd never get a flourescent tube to start up. If you save power by using flourescents over sodium it's almost certainly because you're getting less light (which might not be a bad thing).
you can't develop games for their systems unless you already have experience developing games, preferably for similarly closed systems
That Nintendo page you linked to doesn't say that. It says you need to demonstrate technical expertiese. You're assuming that the rest of those restrictions exist when they really don't.
Like I said, if you can't get a job writing games to gain the requisite experience, you can write a demo on a PC to demonstrate your ability and concept. It doesn't have to be a finished product. Just something to show off to prove you know what you're doing and that your game concept is feasable. You can do this even for handheld platforms.
In this period of alleged jobless growth and outsourcing to less developed countries
It's just that: alleged. Jobs are plentiful for people who can demonstrate proficiency. I didn't say you have to be a salesman to get a job. I said you have to be a salesman to start a company. If you're having difficulty finding a regular job, you may wish to consider what locality you're looking in, as some areas have more jobs than others. You might also wish to bolster your skillset with a programming hobby in an area that is meaningful to the types of software industries where you live. It couldn't hurt to seek professional help with your resume either.
Plenty of companies are starting to look to fresh graduates for help, as they're not much more expensive than outsourcing (which has lots of hidden costs beyond the actual fee) yet have the benefit of being right there in the building with you. Unfortunatly, it's just as much about who you know as what you know, so if you don't have a large network of contacts it can be difficult. In that case you should find a good headhunter and take advantage of his contacts. Once you've got the first job, just doing it well will build your network to the point where subsequent jobs will be much easier to come by.
Lastly, be careful what you put your name on when you post things online. Hiring managers *do* google you, and if you say anti-business things you won't get hired.
Does that mean I'm unemployable if [...]
I left off the end of that sentence because it doesn't matter what you tack on there...
No, it just means that you're better suited to something else.
From the article:(The cable-card) high-definition TiVo (was) announced at CES 2005, probably will be re-announced at CES 2006.
Actually, it was announced at CES 2004 for release in the first half of 2006. It's not even late yet.
Anyone remember the rocket launcher that shot dobermans?
Anybody remember the Doom mod where the enemies were all Barney?
That was years later than many online, multi-player, user created worlds.
I'm officially ignoring anybody that says some single thing is "the future".
Player made content is in the past (Late '70s, early '80s), in the present, and will be in the future. It's a niche. It will exist. Just because some guy can't figure out how to make content for a huge game in an economical way doen't mean it's the 'one true future'.
Yes, player made content is the future. Pre-made content, randomly generated content, and content free games are the future too. They'll all exist in the proportions they've always existed in, and people said the exact same crap about the first 3D consoles as they're saying about the latest thing to be called "next-gen".
I was asking you how to do it.
I gave a glib answer to your glib question, but I figured I could be serious too instead of just being a jerk... It's tough though considering the site your URL links to. Why, you ask? Well let me give you an example: That anti-Disney site you pointed to has the followin on it:
Disney refuses to publish a Miramax film criticizing U.S. President George W. Bush for fear that it might anger Jeb Bush, brother of the President and governor of Florida, where Walt Disney World is located. Miramax may have to take it to another studio.
Implying, of course, that it's bad. When you're a business you have to play the game, which brings me to my next point:
someone who speaks businessese
If that's not you, you're not going to be a successful small developer. No small developer has ever been truely successful unless everybody on the team (usually just one or two guys), or at least a majority of them, know how to run and pitch a business. You also have to be a good salesman. It's just the way it is. If that means that *you* can't get a license and buy a dev kit from your favorite console manufacturer, it doesn't mean the rest of us can't. Invariably, all the big names who started small and made it weren't the best techies or developers, they were the best business people.
Once you're sure you've got those skills, the first step is to raise money. There are hundreds of ways to do this, but the most popular amongst small businesses is to save up from a salary from a normal job for a long time, or to take a loan against some existing asset, like your house. To stick with your example, think about how much a PC and a compiler cost when PKZip was written. As somebody who bought both around that same time period, let me tell you that it was in the same order of magnitude (adjusted for inflation) as what you'll need today to develop basic console games.
Additionally, don't shoot for the moon to start. Just because you want to release your game on ${console} doesn't mean you have to write it for ${console} right away. Use good design principles, and the basics of your game can be easily portable. Then you can write a working demo that will demonstrate your abilities and experience.
With cash, and a demo, you're in the door. Unless your demo sucks, or you have no sales skills and no sales plan whatsoever, your manufacturer of choice will almost certanly sell you a dev kit. Then you'll officially be done with the easy part.
one has to already have a business plan, a team of developers who are somehow already experienced, a marketing plan, and other documentation
All things you need anyway. They only have those rules so that they don't have to waste their time on you if you're sure to not be successful. Besides, there are a few things in that list that they would certainly be flexable on once they've determined that you're actually have some cash to give them. The only thing they would really need is #1 and #5.
And what do you mean by 'somehow' already experienced? Is there a shortage of experienced developers? Is it not already well established how you become an experienced software developer?
I was asking you how to do it.
Well, if I may use a baseball analogy, you start by not assuming you can play in the major league because you held a bat once.
So, given a GBA binary developed using homebrew tools, how would I go about getting it published?
Sorry, I read that wrong the first time and didn't notice you said 'with homebrew tools'. What the hell do homebrew tools have to do with whether you need a big-name publisher or not? Are you under the impression that you can't buy the official kit for some reason?
So, given a GBA binary developed using homebrew tools, how would I go about getting it published?
Just because you don't know how doesn't mean it can't be done.
Without a publisher, nobody has access to the console market.
You're just plain wrong.
Really? Phil Katz created deflation as part of PKZIP, a shareware product, and donated the method to the public domain.
Yeah, but the problem wouldn't have gone away if he never came along, so somebody smart would have figured it out. Since then even better methods have been found, so it's not like he's the only one who could have though of this stuff. Not only that, but he based it on public domain code from ARC, and PKWare held the copyrights very closely. It's not like he gave his format to the world as a gift. (/me wonders how old you were then)
MS-DOS still came with QBasic at the time.
Sorry, DOS only came with BASICA back then.
Which handheld system is open and widely deployed in the United States?
Unimportant. Nintendo will put yust about any old shit you write on a cartridge and sell it as long as it isn't pornographic.
I want to start a company that makes games for handhelds so that players don't have to suffer the price and bulk of a laptop. [...] For another, there's no handheld equivalent to Xbox Live Arcade that's widely deployed outside of Korea; give me Xboy Live Arcade and I'll be happier.
You realize this is a discussion about publishers, right? I don't see how ditching the traditional publisher setup is going to do anything but help you with this. Without a publisher, all you need to get your game out is cash. With a publisher you have to sell it to some idiot executive with no vision, and then give him all your profits. Your examples make my argument for me.
the reality is that the documents and data of a person who lacks a sufficient understanding of computer security are not automatically less important than our data or documents.
I don't disagree. All I'm saying is that a virus that harms the person who gets infected through his own negligence is better than a virus that harms countless others through a person's negligence. This is especially true with viruses that go out of their way to have no concequence on the 'victim' such that the person won't know to try and solve the problem.
It's not that I don't think other people's documents are valuable, it's that I don't think other people should shoulder the burden for somebody's mistakes, and that viruses with obvious effects on the person who gets infected are more likely to get cleaned up quickly.
Besides, we all backup our important documents, so having them wiped out by a virus would only cost us a days work tops, right?
without PKZIP we wouldn't have Info-ZIP, gzip, or zlib, and without zlib we wouldn't have PNG
You assume a lot. I don't think you're right. Without shareware zlib, gzip, and PNG, or at least something equivalent to them all would have been created.
Plus, the barrier to entry for software development on PCs used to be high back then almost like it is with consoles now.
In addition, I've read on sites such as warioworld.com that the console makers tend to require that your company already have a reputation
Who's forcing you to start on consoles? Besides, I know for a fact that isn't true for all console manufacturers.
I'm also not sure how you can see something like Xbox Live Arcade and still think that it will continue to be difficult to break into the console gaming market if you've got an innovative title.
MyDoom or NetSky, which merely clog networks, install backdoors (that are not usually used for anything nearly as destructive), and turn computers into spam and DoS zombies.
I'll take 10 users getting their documents destroyed over one DoS zombie any day. The former only has an impact on me if I'm an idiot, the latter becomes a problem when other people are idiots.
C) The Anti-Virus vendors made a much bigger deal out of this than it really was to increase sales.
the console maker, who all too often denies such permission to "garage" companies
They deny permission to low quality games, sure. If you've got the cash to buy the dev kit and your game doesn't crash, they'll play. Look at how many low-budget, low-quality games there have been for the Playstation and the PS2. If you'll buy the kit and pay the fee, they'll press your game. $30,000 isn't that big of a barrier to entry. Sure, it keeps shareware/basement type games off (usually, there are exceptions. Played Alien Hominid or Snood lately?) the consoles, but it doesn't keep the little guy out. $30k is pretty average for equipment costs for just about any business you might want to start.
This conversation already happened in another thread
you'll still need a publisher in order to act as a middleman between the developer and a game console maker
Why?
All you have in that situation is two publishers. The only difference between console development and PC development (this is a really broad generalization) in this context is the cost of the development platform.
How about these greedy slobs try and produce games with lower development costs?
The development costs are already at rock bottom. The big name companies barely keep their artists and programmers fed.
The 'high development costs' actually go to buying movie licenses, paying over-rated and over-priced voice talent (or over-rated and over-priced famous designers), paying for outrageous advertizing, hype, and favorable reviews, and most of all, lining the pockets of the publisher who is making a living mostly off the backs of other people's work.
Look at hollywood actually BRAG about production costs
Yeah, most of those 'costs' are actually paid to themselves as a dodge so they can say their profits are near zero. They have to keep the production costs high to keep the bottom line artificially low. All the while they've figured out how to keep the cash anyway.
Instead of having them cut costs, how about we cut them loose and have everything be an 'independant' game? While we're at it we can do the same to their slob counterparts at the RIAA.
...and now they're getting what they deserve.
For the longest time, publishers were the dispicable middlemen who took the bulk of the profits. Now, due to advances in technology, the money is going to stay with the retailers, who can efficiently catalog and redistribute used copies, or to the developers who can distribute electronically and cut the publishers out of the loop entirely.
We're going to see the publishers spew this shit about how much more it costs to develop on next-gen systems and how used games make that harder, all while they're reeling from losing their cash; Cash which they keep as profits, and use for kickbacks, mis-management and marketing, which are the real bulk of game costs, dwarfing development costs by so much that it almost doesn't even matter if development costs double on net-gen systems. The same crap is happening to publishing/distributing companies in every industry. They're crying as their business models become obsolete. It's too bad that there's no good will towards them since they've been screwing people form both ends for centuries.
Let the publishers rot. Few will mourn the loss of 'Big Name' games and musicians, and their demise will make more room in the industry for artists and engineers as the money they keep from their big name titles gets spread out amongst an industry full of a larger number of lesser known titles. You won't have to be a rockstar anymore to be able to make a living as a musician, script writer, or game artist. The change is already started, and short of purchased legislation there's no way to stop it.
I was under the impression that current 10k rpm 3.5" form factor drives actually have 2.5" platters inside.
I wasn't aware of that, but it makes sense.
I suppose that with a fast RAID1 controller there would be some increase in latency but it is likely to be negligible
It isn't negligible. Your write can't be considered complete until your data is on both disks. Unlike old slow SCSI drives, disks on the same bus don't syncronize their rotations anymore, so you have to wait for the worst case rotational latency of both disks. It's about a 25% latency hit on average for a single IO. For linear writes the effect is less, but if you're running a database with lots of random writes, it's a big deal.
High end arrays and controllers get around this with a battery backed up cache, which allows them to call the IO complete once it is in cache. Low-end controllers, almost all SATA controllers, and many on-board controllers (even on server boards) don't come with a battery backed up cache though.
I don't. But the effects of such an action could be dramatically reduced. The worst that should be able to do is to destroy the user's data. It shouldn't be able to take over the machine.
it is easy once you have a nuke. Pack it in lead so ionization detectors can't find anything
Take it from somebody who has learned the hard way.
Putting something that can't be identified via traditional scanning methods is a great way to get your cargo shredded, disassembled, and prodded. The best anybody could hope to do is set one off on an ship that was still in port, and even that would be tricky with some of the new stuff they're doing while the ships are being loaded. The ship operator would have to be in on it, and the ship would have to be much faster than the authorities expect, because you're going to have to stop at an another port to get your weapon added to your cargo.
Even if they're not worried that you're a terrorist, you don't pull a big ship into a major port without an escort (they don't want you hitting anything), and you're not going to get an escort unquestioned if you just show up full of cargo at random, or really late.
Of course the hardest part is getting the bomb in the first place. That's not nearly as easy as in the movies. You've got to imagine that lots of fairly smart and well funded people have tried so far, and nothing has been nuked off the face of the earth by a terrorist yet.