So why am I posting? I noticed only one person posted before me and I'm hoping an early post will get modded up and help my karma:)
Welcome to the gaming section of slashdot. The only way you're getting moderated in here is if you say something good/bad about the Xbox/PS2. And then the only way you're getting modded is down by the fanboys that you piss off, regardless of whether or not you had a valid point.
Look at the number of complaints that are from before release date. Those mean that only people who got theirs early are in the pool of availble machines, and thus able to complain about problems. When you see dozens of people complaining about their unit they got early, you have to get suspicious.
If the complaints were all from after the release date, you'd have a point about the ratio of good to bad... But if there's only a few hundred out there, and a few dozen people are bitching, something's wrong.
Either way, time will tell how bad it is, so there's no good reason to speculate.
The processors in the Xbox have *increased* in price over the last few years due to Microsoft having to pay a premium to get continued production of an obsolete part. They hardly cost "nothing".
I'd wager that at BioWare we have more designers and writers than they have at either Id or Valve.
RPGs are kindof the exception to the rule here. They've always required more content than every other genre. When I say "more" there, I don't just mean a little more either. The thing is that even though RPGs may count for a disproportionaly large amount of play time, they're a very *very* tiny slice of the overall number of online titles that are produced every year. These guys are talking about putting ads in first person shooters, tactical strategy games, and sports titles (don't those already have ads?). This is a problem most online RPGs don't need to worry about because they can just charge a fee for online play (Yes, Bioware doesn't do this, but you guys seem to be doing just fine with selling expansion content. Plus you could, and should start charging before you ever consider putting ads in a fantasy RPG.). You really need to think about games other than RPGs when you think about this argument, because RPGs require a disproportionatly large amount of effort, and really skiew the overall picture; They don't represent the whole industry.
it's simply untrue to claim that the time it takes to generate content hasn't greatly increased.
Also, I agree with you that's increased. I even said that the effort requirements have, for some genres, doubled. But doubling what is no longer a majority portion of your expenses just isn't as big a deal as they seem to be making it out to be.
I see your e-mail address. What do you do there? Pay the bills by chance? Working in the industry doesn't magically give you more insight that every other person. There are plenty of us out here who have both the contacts and the ability, but choose a different career. Game development just plain doesn't pay that well.
Lots of companies spend too much money to do what other companies manage for a lot less. That's not unique to the game business.
I'm not talking about games from before 3D became the norm. I'm talking about games from the last 8-10 years. Hell, even from 4 years ago. The costs just haven't changed that much for the actual work, but the publishers weren't complaining about this stuff then (It is the publishers that are complaining, not the developers. Unless you've got a proven track record, and you're not writing a game on spec, you're probably getting a fixed fee for your development work anyway...). It's all in the same order of magnitude. Sure, you *can* spend a lot more, but you certainly don't have to. Spending lots of money certainly doesn't guarantee success, nor does having a reasonable budget guarantee failure.
It used to cost very little to film movies, too, and now blockbuster movies have budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions.
That's exactly my point. There's a big difference between tens and hundreds. Some movies cost a little, and some cost a lot. The cost of making the movie is usually not an indication of the quality, and the production costs certainly aren't the majority of the budget. The same goes for games. It's not the development that takes up the biggest pile of the cash these days.
Oh, sure, they're not as easy to make as they used to be, but they're not *that* much harder to make. Sure, textures and environments are *slightly* more work to create, but the fact of the matter is that increased resolutions and polygon counts don't actually increase the workload that much because the processing power of the machines they're created on has increased too. You'd be hard pressed to say that content costs are more than double what they were on the first generation 3D titles; especially since there's a workforce of creators with experience now, where there used to be none.
Complex, enterprise class software products that consist of millions of lines of code are created in 1-2 years *from scratch* by teams of 20 or so engineers for less than $5 million all the time. It's not like graphics engines are harder to write than many other types of cutting edge software products. And that's for a product built from scratch, at a company that's built from scratch. Most games run on a licensed engine, or second generation engine; plus they're built by companies that have existing infrastructure (desks, offices, health plans, lab equipment, etc...).
The fact of the matter is that the majority of the money on these big-budget titles goes to publishing, licensing, voice talent, and "rock-star" game designers. Small games, with smaller budgets can also succeed, and turn very nice profits. If the "blockbuster" high budget titles feel they need to jack their prices up, there's plenty of low profile games out there, and they'll just have to wonder why more and more big titles flop as players go for a more diverse range of lower budget projects. In the meantime, most of the games that people want may not have small budgets, but you can bet they have development budgets that are as small as possible. Take any EA game and chop the marketing, voice, licensing, and top two salaries off the payroll and I'd bet you'd be surprised how little it costs to do 99.9% of the work that goes into a "blockbuster" game.
Unless you're looking for an analog connection to your TV (it sounds like you're digitally oriented), the 360 doesn't seem like the right device for you. It doesn't have any DVI or HDMI outputs. It's component or VGA only for high-def.
Whenever I see one of those banner ads, the first one is always for some girl that "lives in" the Village of Nagog Woods, which is a pseudo town a mile up the street from my house (they must map Comcast IPs or something). It's always a different picture, but there aren't that many people that live there. The population is probably 150 tops. Unless there's an extradimensional space filled with women, or everybody on the block has a "Hot Chicks room" (I wonder if I'm the only person who's ever watchedt "Upright Citizens Brigade") there's no way the links aren't fake.
Why bother? If they come anywhere close to selling as many of these as they predict, even the narrowest of profit margins will recoup the R&D costs very quickly. They probably spent $50 mil max on R&D. Sell 10 million of these things and your per-unit R&D costs get pretty slim.
The biggest cost was probably paid in "bribes" to third party developers, but hopefully they make those back in licensing. Microsoft learns quick, and they probably learned how to turn a tidy profit in their experience with the first Xbox. If they can make nice with the developers, they may well be a contender for winning this round.
Microsoft has to be eating a ton of the cost for every console sold.
Doubtful.
Looking at the parts shown in this article, it doesn't seem that the price is far outisde the $350 range*. Really, the only super-expensive parts are the CPU and GPU, and recent articles have shown that custom high performance silicon in recent years costs considerably less to produce than analysts had been predicting. Plus they're using cost saving techniques like splitting components out onto multiple dies to improve yields. Add to that the the best economies of scale when manufacturing these things comes early due to the pre-release inventory build-up, and it seems to me that if they're not turning a profit on the average costs between the core and premium models, they will be soon.
(* $150 CPU (inc. heat sink, etc...), $50 memory (probably over estimating given how cheap GDDR3 is supposed to be and how cheap GDDR3 graphics cards are), $10 DVD-ROM, $100 GPU (again, maybe over-estimating), $40-80 packaging, glue logic, etc...)
Half of those are package aliases for if you want to install a kernel series like 2.6 (and be automatically upgraded to the latest point release when you 'apt-get upgrade') instead of a specific version like 2.4.27-2. The rest are just images of the same two kernels compiled with different processor options (686, k7, smp, etc...). A single source package should be able to support a wide variety of those kernels.
What I found interesting was that the 360 has HDTV support, but only analog... There's no DVI or HDMI support.... Which means I can't connect it to the only HD display I currently own.
That's both the strength and the major weekness of Digg. It shows you what the majority wants to see. For now that means it's only slightly obnoxious. As it becomes popular with more mainstream "tech" guys it will become less and less useful for people with niche interests. We already have media that caters to the mainstream, and they know exactly how to draw readers. Just because it's user driven doesn't mean the front page won't look more and more like a cross between a variety of trade rags, just a few weeks early.
I don't know about you, but I could care less about what the majority of people want to read. I want to read what *I* want to read, and the best way to do that is to find a site that is moderated in a way that matches your interests.
Hopefully the people who like Digg better will go there instead, and stop bitching about how their stories got rejected in off topic slashdot comments.
For a bit of perspective, many new companies in the computer industry design enterprise class products with a hardware component, several hundred thousand lines of software, and a staff of 50+ people including field sales staff, support, docs writers, trade shows, etc... Plus, all the startup costs of growing a new company. They do all that for around $10 million in venture funding.
If you're an established company, and you don't pay a premium for voice talent, you should be able to make a top-notch game of any type for less than $20 mil. $20 million is a *lot* of money. You could almost build a new console platform from the ground up for $20 mil.
So update when there's an exploit... Not just every once and a while for the hell of it.
When is the last time somebody found a linux kernel exploit that a firewalled machine with only port 80 open is vulnerable to?
The last two times I upgraded the kernel on my web server were both for filesystem bugs. Those are uncommon, but they're *way* more common than remote kernel exploits. I can't even think of one linux kernel exploit from the last three years or so that would affect a properly firewalled web server.
Having it external is much preferable to having the console be huge... You can hide the power brick behind your gear, but the console has to be out in the open so you can insert disks, connect accessories, etc...
An added bonus is that console power supplies are the cheapest retail multi-amp DC switching power supplies available. If you need 45 watts at 12 volts for some project you're building, a suitable switching supply from your favorite electronics components dealer would cost you $50-$100. A Gamecube brick can be had for $10.
The master system kicks ass. If you've got Shinobi, Spy vs. Spy, and Wonder Boy in Monster Land, who needs any of these new-fangled things?
Also, the master system has the best D-pad. If you greased up your thumb with potato chips before playing, you could bang out combos on that thing like no other.
Well, you're right about cabling. Cable prices are rediculous. $300 for a "Monster" DVI cable (Yes, they're $300 at Radio Shack) is probably more like a 3000% markup... I also love how a 6 foot cable can sometimes cost twice as much as a 3 foot cable, even though 95% of the manufacturing costs went to producing and attaching the connectors on the ends... That markup goes mostly to the manufacturer though.
Anyway, the markup varies for consoles in the other direction. Just like how the manufacturers expect to make the majority of their profits on the add-ons and games, they expect the retailers to do the same. If you've got a local mom & pop style gaming store around, go ask them and they'll tell you. The few that are left near me don't even stock the systems; only games and accessories. Some managers at EB are friendly enough to discuss it to; especially if you're the type that spends thousands of dollars a year in their store. (Don't bother asking the associates at one of those chains though. They just make shit up, so if you do ge4t an answer it's probably not valid info.)
Really? Find me a version of PAM that allows 61 character input for passwords by default.
I just checked Debian, and Suse defaults, and the maximums are 8 and 16 respectively. Not to mention that this exploit doesn't allow you to find a collision with an existing hash, but only to create two blocks of data with the same hash, *and* you don't have access to the hashed password.
So, you probably can't find a 491-bit value that collides with my password in any reasonable amount of time, and even if you did it wouldn't do you any good because you couldn't enter it at the prompt.
Slashdot Mirror
So why am I posting? I noticed only one person posted before me and I'm hoping an early post will get modded up and help my karma :)
Welcome to the gaming section of slashdot. The only way you're getting moderated in here is if you say something good/bad about the Xbox/PS2. And then the only way you're getting modded is down by the fanboys that you piss off, regardless of whether or not you had a valid point.
Look at the number of complaints that are from before release date. Those mean that only people who got theirs early are in the pool of availble machines, and thus able to complain about problems. When you see dozens of people complaining about their unit they got early, you have to get suspicious.
If the complaints were all from after the release date, you'd have a point about the ratio of good to bad... But if there's only a few hundred out there, and a few dozen people are bitching, something's wrong.
Either way, time will tell how bad it is, so there's no good reason to speculate.
The processors in the Xbox have *increased* in price over the last few years due to Microsoft having to pay a premium to get continued production of an obsolete part. They hardly cost "nothing".
I'd wager that at BioWare we have more designers and writers than they have at either Id or Valve.
RPGs are kindof the exception to the rule here. They've always required more content than every other genre. When I say "more" there, I don't just mean a little more either. The thing is that even though RPGs may count for a disproportionaly large amount of play time, they're a very *very* tiny slice of the overall number of online titles that are produced every year. These guys are talking about putting ads in first person shooters, tactical strategy games, and sports titles (don't those already have ads?). This is a problem most online RPGs don't need to worry about because they can just charge a fee for online play (Yes, Bioware doesn't do this, but you guys seem to be doing just fine with selling expansion content. Plus you could, and should start charging before you ever consider putting ads in a fantasy RPG.). You really need to think about games other than RPGs when you think about this argument, because RPGs require a disproportionatly large amount of effort, and really skiew the overall picture; They don't represent the whole industry.
it's simply untrue to claim that the time it takes to generate content hasn't greatly increased.
Also, I agree with you that's increased. I even said that the effort requirements have, for some genres, doubled. But doubling what is no longer a majority portion of your expenses just isn't as big a deal as they seem to be making it out to be.
I see your e-mail address. What do you do there? Pay the bills by chance? Working in the industry doesn't magically give you more insight that every other person. There are plenty of us out here who have both the contacts and the ability, but choose a different career. Game development just plain doesn't pay that well.
Lots of companies spend too much money to do what other companies manage for a lot less. That's not unique to the game business.
I'm not talking about games from before 3D became the norm. I'm talking about games from the last 8-10 years. Hell, even from 4 years ago. The costs just haven't changed that much for the actual work, but the publishers weren't complaining about this stuff then (It is the publishers that are complaining, not the developers. Unless you've got a proven track record, and you're not writing a game on spec, you're probably getting a fixed fee for your development work anyway...). It's all in the same order of magnitude. Sure, you *can* spend a lot more, but you certainly don't have to. Spending lots of money certainly doesn't guarantee success, nor does having a reasonable budget guarantee failure.
It used to cost very little to film movies, too, and now blockbuster movies have budgets in the tens or hundreds of millions.
That's exactly my point. There's a big difference between tens and hundreds. Some movies cost a little, and some cost a lot. The cost of making the movie is usually not an indication of the quality, and the production costs certainly aren't the majority of the budget. The same goes for games. It's not the development that takes up the biggest pile of the cash these days.
Oh, sure, they're not as easy to make as they used to be, but they're not *that* much harder to make. Sure, textures and environments are *slightly* more work to create, but the fact of the matter is that increased resolutions and polygon counts don't actually increase the workload that much because the processing power of the machines they're created on has increased too. You'd be hard pressed to say that content costs are more than double what they were on the first generation 3D titles; especially since there's a workforce of creators with experience now, where there used to be none.
Complex, enterprise class software products that consist of millions of lines of code are created in 1-2 years *from scratch* by teams of 20 or so engineers for less than $5 million all the time. It's not like graphics engines are harder to write than many other types of cutting edge software products. And that's for a product built from scratch, at a company that's built from scratch. Most games run on a licensed engine, or second generation engine; plus they're built by companies that have existing infrastructure (desks, offices, health plans, lab equipment, etc...).
The fact of the matter is that the majority of the money on these big-budget titles goes to publishing, licensing, voice talent, and "rock-star" game designers. Small games, with smaller budgets can also succeed, and turn very nice profits. If the "blockbuster" high budget titles feel they need to jack their prices up, there's plenty of low profile games out there, and they'll just have to wonder why more and more big titles flop as players go for a more diverse range of lower budget projects. In the meantime, most of the games that people want may not have small budgets, but you can bet they have development budgets that are as small as possible. Take any EA game and chop the marketing, voice, licensing, and top two salaries off the payroll and I'd bet you'd be surprised how little it costs to do 99.9% of the work that goes into a "blockbuster" game.
Unless you're looking for an analog connection to your TV (it sounds like you're digitally oriented), the 360 doesn't seem like the right device for you. It doesn't have any DVI or HDMI outputs. It's component or VGA only for high-def.
Whenever I see one of those banner ads, the first one is always for some girl that "lives in" the Village of Nagog Woods, which is a pseudo town a mile up the street from my house (they must map Comcast IPs or something). It's always a different picture, but there aren't that many people that live there. The population is probably 150 tops. Unless there's an extradimensional space filled with women, or everybody on the block has a "Hot Chicks room" (I wonder if I'm the only person who's ever watchedt "Upright Citizens Brigade") there's no way the links aren't fake.
The Gnu is clearly the superior image. What type of primitive being would use anything represented by a big-eyed, butt scratching monkey?
:) (or should that be :q? Damn. I can never remember ;))
Also: The Gnu could crush your monkey.
Now, if you discount the R+D costs...
Why bother? If they come anywhere close to selling as many of these as they predict, even the narrowest of profit margins will recoup the R&D costs very quickly. They probably spent $50 mil max on R&D. Sell 10 million of these things and your per-unit R&D costs get pretty slim.
The biggest cost was probably paid in "bribes" to third party developers, but hopefully they make those back in licensing. Microsoft learns quick, and they probably learned how to turn a tidy profit in their experience with the first Xbox. If they can make nice with the developers, they may well be a contender for winning this round.
Microsoft has to be eating a ton of the cost for every console sold.
Doubtful.
Looking at the parts shown in this article, it doesn't seem that the price is far outisde the $350 range*. Really, the only super-expensive parts are the CPU and GPU, and recent articles have shown that custom high performance silicon in recent years costs considerably less to produce than analysts had been predicting. Plus they're using cost saving techniques like splitting components out onto multiple dies to improve yields. Add to that the the best economies of scale when manufacturing these things comes early due to the pre-release inventory build-up, and it seems to me that if they're not turning a profit on the average costs between the core and premium models, they will be soon.
(* $150 CPU (inc. heat sink, etc...), $50 memory (probably over estimating given how cheap GDDR3 is supposed to be and how cheap GDDR3 graphics cards are), $10 DVD-ROM, $100 GPU (again, maybe over-estimating), $40-80 packaging, glue logic, etc...)
Additionally, at least for now, the linux-image packages are only for 2.6. The 2.4 packages are still called kernel-image.
Half of those are package aliases for if you want to install a kernel series like 2.6 (and be automatically upgraded to the latest point release when you 'apt-get upgrade') instead of a specific version like 2.4.27-2. The rest are just images of the same two kernels compiled with different processor options (686, k7, smp, etc...). A single source package should be able to support a wide variety of those kernels.
What I found interesting was that the 360 has HDTV support, but only analog... There's no DVI or HDMI support.... Which means I can't connect it to the only HD display I currently own.
Bummer.
That's both the strength and the major weekness of Digg. It shows you what the majority wants to see. For now that means it's only slightly obnoxious. As it becomes popular with more mainstream "tech" guys it will become less and less useful for people with niche interests. We already have media that caters to the mainstream, and they know exactly how to draw readers. Just because it's user driven doesn't mean the front page won't look more and more like a cross between a variety of trade rags, just a few weeks early.
I don't know about you, but I could care less about what the majority of people want to read. I want to read what *I* want to read, and the best way to do that is to find a site that is moderated in a way that matches your interests.
Hopefully the people who like Digg better will go there instead, and stop bitching about how their stories got rejected in off topic slashdot comments.
A PHP hole isn't a kernel hole. If you've got a PHP hole, upgrade PHP, not your kernel.
For a bit of perspective, many new companies in the computer industry design enterprise class products with a hardware component, several hundred thousand lines of software, and a staff of 50+ people including field sales staff, support, docs writers, trade shows, etc... Plus, all the startup costs of growing a new company. They do all that for around $10 million in venture funding.
If you're an established company, and you don't pay a premium for voice talent, you should be able to make a top-notch game of any type for less than $20 mil. $20 million is a *lot* of money. You could almost build a new console platform from the ground up for $20 mil.
So update when there's an exploit... Not just every once and a while for the hell of it.
When is the last time somebody found a linux kernel exploit that a firewalled machine with only port 80 open is vulnerable to?
The last two times I upgraded the kernel on my web server were both for filesystem bugs. Those are uncommon, but they're *way* more common than remote kernel exploits. I can't even think of one linux kernel exploit from the last three years or so that would affect a properly firewalled web server.
That's included in my reasoning. If you've got a viable hole, you upgrade. That's a good reason.
There haven't been any of those that would matter to a web server that's running linux and is behind a firewall in a looooooong time.
I could be wrong of course, but shouldn't you at least go offline every once in a while to install kernel upgrades?
Why bother if what you've got is working? You should only change to a newer kernel if it solves a problem that you have.
A running system never changes; A changing system never runs.
Having it external is much preferable to having the console be huge... You can hide the power brick behind your gear, but the console has to be out in the open so you can insert disks, connect accessories, etc...
An added bonus is that console power supplies are the cheapest retail multi-amp DC switching power supplies available. If you need 45 watts at 12 volts for some project you're building, a suitable switching supply from your favorite electronics components dealer would cost you $50-$100. A Gamecube brick can be had for $10.
The master system kicks ass. If you've got Shinobi, Spy vs. Spy, and Wonder Boy in Monster Land, who needs any of these new-fangled things?
Also, the master system has the best D-pad. If you greased up your thumb with potato chips before playing, you could bang out combos on that thing like no other.
Well, you're right about cabling. Cable prices are rediculous. $300 for a "Monster" DVI cable (Yes, they're $300 at Radio Shack) is probably more like a 3000% markup... I also love how a 6 foot cable can sometimes cost twice as much as a 3 foot cable, even though 95% of the manufacturing costs went to producing and attaching the connectors on the ends... That markup goes mostly to the manufacturer though.
Anyway, the markup varies for consoles in the other direction. Just like how the manufacturers expect to make the majority of their profits on the add-ons and games, they expect the retailers to do the same. If you've got a local mom & pop style gaming store around, go ask them and they'll tell you. The few that are left near me don't even stock the systems; only games and accessories. Some managers at EB are friendly enough to discuss it to; especially if you're the type that spends thousands of dollars a year in their store. (Don't bother asking the associates at one of those chains though. They just make shit up, so if you do ge4t an answer it's probably not valid info.)
Really? Find me a version of PAM that allows 61 character input for passwords by default.
I just checked Debian, and Suse defaults, and the maximums are 8 and 16 respectively. Not to mention that this exploit doesn't allow you to find a collision with an existing hash, but only to create two blocks of data with the same hash, *and* you don't have access to the hashed password.
So, you probably can't find a 491-bit value that collides with my password in any reasonable amount of time, and even if you did it wouldn't do you any good because you couldn't enter it at the prompt.