nVidia offers binary drivers for Windows/Linux/BSD that work flawlessly
My experience with people who say that is that they have never used nVidia drivers with multi-head under linux. Don't expect more than a few weeks of uptime in such a configuration.
Apple still tries to appeal to the publishing and photo industries. They make a big deal about keeping their screens at 100 dpi no matter what the size or model.
Re:Apparently they never heard of the Cappuccino P
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
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· Score: 1
The Cappuccino also sounds like a wind tunnel.
At my last job we used to use a pair of them as a demo cluster. The idea was that you could fit two of them in a briefcase. Unless you're doing something rediculous like that, I couldn't bring myself to recommend one of those things to anybody.
Game developers are in a losing battle against piracy.
Battle? More like a skirmish. It's a minor distraction off to the side of their money-raking enterprise. Considering how much money they're making dispite "rampant piracy," I don't see how anybody in the industry can possibly justify treating their paying customers the way they do.
It's especially obnoxious because it doesn't harm the pirates in any way. They're all off playing their hacked versions while the people who pay for their games are the only ones inconvenienced.
This is not how things typically work in my experience. In fact, it's not uncommon to have professional security audits done, and entire engineering teems know exactly what the problems are. After that, though, one of two things happens. Either somebody in marketing decides that good security practices are going to put customers off the product, or somebody in management decides they're going to look bad if the product is delayed and decides not to implement the security recommendations. When all is said and done, the product ships with crippled security.
It would hardly matter that SpeedPass type devices or RF car keys were cracked if you also needed a PIN to use them... But where's the convienience in that.
Did she have to "memorize" using the right mouse button when she was using a multi-button centric OS interface?
I wish I could give single button mice to newbie (or stubborn) windows users. If I had a nickle for every time somebody asked me "what do you mean 'right-click'" back when I used to do system administration I'd have retired a rich man at age 18. And explaining how to drag with the right mouse button? Forget it.
It's not a design flaw. It makes the system easier to learn, while maintaining options (albiet different options than Windows has) for power users. Just because it works differently than what you're used to doesn't mean it's bad.
You are arguing that the only way a game will sell big is if it is like the competition and/or previous games.
Hell no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying the only way you'll end up with a big budget for your game is if it's like the (successful) competition or like previous games. There's a huge difference there. A big budget doesn't imply success, and success doesn't imply a big budget.
That's demonstrably crap (the top 20 games by sales here is a who's who of innovative and non-formulaic gaming for the past 20 years, with a few notable exceptions (Harry Potter???)).
You're kidding, right? That list is practically proof that the development market works as I've described. Thirteen out of the twenty on that list are either sequels of successful games with essentially the same gameplay (Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo 3, Monkey Island 2, etc..), character/world licenses (Mario Anything, Zelda, Neverwinter Nights, Metroid), or direct ripoffs of an independant title (Tetris). There are exactly two games on that list that are both "big budget" and groudbreaking. Deus Ex, and Half-Life... and Half-Life is a stretch since it fints into the tried and true first person shooter category. Sure, there are innovative developers on that list, but almost none that made it to the list on their groundbreaking title.
But if games are cheaper and easier to make it will be easier for smaller game developers to earn the budgets they need for A-titles, plus big financial backing will make less difference in the quality of the output.
That is essentially what I'm saying, except that I don't think you *need* a big budget to develop an "A-title" (unless you define "A-title" as one that uses all the latest whiz-bang hardware features), and I don't think that it is expensive or difficult for smaller developers to make games. Cheaper and Easier would be better, but it's already cheap and easy. (To *develop*... Success is a different story.) It sounds like you're saying that big financial backing *improves* the quality of the output though, and I don't think that is true at all.
But you're arguing that what we're getting is a schism between big budgets (money and/or hardware budget) and big imaginations. What I'm arguing is that it's possible to have big budgets and big imaginations - provided you put the time and effort into putting that big budget to good use.
The problem is that creativity doesn't guarantee, or even drive sales in big budget titles. Creative gameplay will sell your game to a niche audience, but once you go big budget you need broad appeal. To get your big budget in the first place you need to promise that the gameplay of your game will be based on some previously successful title, or you need to deliver a movie/sports/TV character license. Nobody is going to give you a big budget to play around with if you're not producing something that isn't related to something tried and true, so in reality is *isn't* possible to have big budgets and big imaginations.
Independant titles don't have this problem because anybody can get a small budget. Not having to appeal to your financiers frees you to explore, and having low expenses to recoup frees you appeal to a narrow audience. If your idea works there and turns out to have broader appeal, then you have a jumping off point into the big budget arena. In that case though you still haven't made a convincing argument about life becoming more difficult for smaller developers.
Developing games is becoming harder and harder to do for small developers.
That's just not true though. Developing games that appeal to gamers who are interested into shooting their friends from the first person perspective with cutting-edge detail is harder, yes. There are plenty of small developers that continue to do just fine by appealing to those of us who are more interested in gameplay though.
If you want to make a high profile game that is going to sell millions of copies, you can go Hollywood and take your chance that your non-movie-licensed title will be the one in twenty to make it, or you can concentrate on a smaller audience and overall game quality you can respect yourself in the morning and probably put food on the table...
The reason we're seeing comments like this is not because the independant game developer has gone away, but because as the games market has grown and tons of marketing dollars have been poured into the market, the smaller developers have slipped off the radar. Remember that the journalistic machine is lubricated with cash... I'd bet more people play independant games than mainstream games (think about all those flash games, PDA games, etc...), but the trade rags only write about the ones that produce advertising dollars.
Just picture the summary writer running across an open space and getting clotheslined. It's clearly the mental image he was going for, and the pure humor of it will ease that tension issue you seem to be dealing with.:)
To forbid private industry from making use of federally research is to deny them the benefits of their own tax dollars.
I suggested no such thing. They should be allowed to benefit, but they should not be allowed to profit exclusively. They also should not be allowed to deny other companies/individuals/institutions the benefits of that knowledge.
In parctice, private dollars usually err on the side of more risk. A tiny percentage of companies that are privately funded succeed, and even the ones that fail represent the best of the companies that go through the investors technical review process. Such a review process typically involves hiring some of the foremost experts in the related field to decide for the investors whether the concepts the company is based on are sound.
That makes this decision all the better. The current system that allows private companies to profit from research funded with federal grant money is broken. We should stop all such funding until the government gets royalties on discoveries made on it's dime, or until a compulsory license is issued for all patents on inventions discovered using public dollars.
The word on the street investment wise is that the smart money is already in all the stem cell research companies that have reasonable business plans and have passed technical review. The vast majority of the companies left to fund are the ones that the private dollars passed up.
On the bright side, at least Callifornia has a huge new government jobs program.
Oddly, the story states that the games in the works for the new console will also be developed for the current iteration of the Xbox. This may partially confirm the lack of backwards compatibility discussed previously
That seems to me more like a strategy to deal with the lack of forwards compatability of the original Xbox. For the same reason, EA still develops their new titles for the original Playstation and for the PS2.
This was moderated as funny, but don't laugh too much. Technically there's nothing stopping DVD players from costing the same amount as a low-end chinese discman knockoff.
Slashdot Mirror
Later on this was increased to 24 unique passwords before you could reuse the original password.
Sounds like you need a script to change your password 25 times in a row so you can always have the same password.
I'm guessing that either:
- You have a different definition of "short run time" than me.
- You don't exercize the same code paths in the driver that I do because you run different applications than I do.
- You run the XFree86 2D only driver, which works fine, but doesn't accelerate 3D.
nVidia offers binary drivers for Windows/Linux/BSD that work flawlessly
My experience with people who say that is that they have never used nVidia drivers with multi-head under linux. Don't expect more than a few weeks of uptime in such a configuration.
Don't count on that happening any time soon.
Apple still tries to appeal to the publishing and photo industries. They make a big deal about keeping their screens at 100 dpi no matter what the size or model.
The Cappuccino also sounds like a wind tunnel.
At my last job we used to use a pair of them as a demo cluster. The idea was that you could fit two of them in a briefcase. Unless you're doing something rediculous like that, I couldn't bring myself to recommend one of those things to anybody.
Game developers are in a losing battle against piracy.
Battle? More like a skirmish. It's a minor distraction off to the side of their money-raking enterprise. Considering how much money they're making dispite "rampant piracy," I don't see how anybody in the industry can possibly justify treating their paying customers the way they do.
It's especially obnoxious because it doesn't harm the pirates in any way. They're all off playing their hacked versions while the people who pay for their games are the only ones inconvenienced.
This is not how things typically work in my experience. In fact, it's not uncommon to have professional security audits done, and entire engineering teems know exactly what the problems are. After that, though, one of two things happens. Either somebody in marketing decides that good security practices are going to put customers off the product, or somebody in management decides they're going to look bad if the product is delayed and decides not to implement the security recommendations. When all is said and done, the product ships with crippled security.
It would hardly matter that SpeedPass type devices or RF car keys were cracked if you also needed a PIN to use them... But where's the convienience in that.
Are you saying that it is also illegal to use software on a newer machine that happens to be backward compatable?
Don't assume that "machine" implys a physical object. The "machine" could be a virtual device running on some other hardware (AKA an emulator).
their worthless hockey puck
Apple hasn't shipped those little round hockey pucks in almost 4 years. Their current mice are about the same size as your typical mouse.
Did she have to "memorize" using the right mouse button when she was using a multi-button centric OS interface?
I wish I could give single button mice to newbie (or stubborn) windows users. If I had a nickle for every time somebody asked me "what do you mean 'right-click'" back when I used to do system administration I'd have retired a rich man at age 18. And explaining how to drag with the right mouse button? Forget it.
It's not a design flaw. It makes the system easier to learn, while maintaining options (albiet different options than Windows has) for power users. Just because it works differently than what you're used to doesn't mean it's bad.
Time from typing A9.com and hitting enter to a usable page: 23 seconds.
Time from typing google.com and hitting enter to a usable page: less than 1 second.
Performance first. Features later.
...the patented it. So you don't have to worry about anybody other than HP actually implementing this.
Checked the price of name-brand 1GB DDR SODIMMs lately? $350 isn't that bad a price.
You can get diamond for $5 a carat no problem...
Oh, wait... You want that all in one piece?
You are arguing that the only way a game will sell big is if it is like the competition and/or previous games.
Hell no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying the only way you'll end up with a big budget for your game is if it's like the (successful) competition or like previous games. There's a huge difference there. A big budget doesn't imply success, and success doesn't imply a big budget.
That's demonstrably crap (the top 20 games by sales here is a who's who of innovative and non-formulaic gaming for the past 20 years, with a few notable exceptions (Harry Potter???)).
You're kidding, right? That list is practically proof that the development market works as I've described. Thirteen out of the twenty on that list are either sequels of successful games with essentially the same gameplay (Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo 3, Monkey Island 2, etc..), character/world licenses (Mario Anything, Zelda, Neverwinter Nights, Metroid), or direct ripoffs of an independant title (Tetris). There are exactly two games on that list that are both "big budget" and groudbreaking. Deus Ex, and Half-Life... and Half-Life is a stretch since it fints into the tried and true first person shooter category. Sure, there are innovative developers on that list, but almost none that made it to the list on their groundbreaking title.
But if games are cheaper and easier to make it will be easier for smaller game developers to earn the budgets they need for A-titles, plus big financial backing will make less difference in the quality of the output.
That is essentially what I'm saying, except that I don't think you *need* a big budget to develop an "A-title" (unless you define "A-title" as one that uses all the latest whiz-bang hardware features), and I don't think that it is expensive or difficult for smaller developers to make games. Cheaper and Easier would be better, but it's already cheap and easy. (To *develop*... Success is a different story.) It sounds like you're saying that big financial backing *improves* the quality of the output though, and I don't think that is true at all.
But you're arguing that what we're getting is a schism between big budgets (money and/or hardware budget) and big imaginations. What I'm arguing is that it's possible to have big budgets and big imaginations - provided you put the time and effort into putting that big budget to good use.
The problem is that creativity doesn't guarantee, or even drive sales in big budget titles. Creative gameplay will sell your game to a niche audience, but once you go big budget you need broad appeal. To get your big budget in the first place you need to promise that the gameplay of your game will be based on some previously successful title, or you need to deliver a movie/sports/TV character license. Nobody is going to give you a big budget to play around with if you're not producing something that isn't related to something tried and true, so in reality is *isn't* possible to have big budgets and big imaginations.
Independant titles don't have this problem because anybody can get a small budget. Not having to appeal to your financiers frees you to explore, and having low expenses to recoup frees you appeal to a narrow audience. If your idea works there and turns out to have broader appeal, then you have a jumping off point into the big budget arena. In that case though you still haven't made a convincing argument about life becoming more difficult for smaller developers.
Developing games is becoming harder and harder to do for small developers.
That's just not true though. Developing games that appeal to gamers who are interested into shooting their friends from the first person perspective with cutting-edge detail is harder, yes. There are plenty of small developers that continue to do just fine by appealing to those of us who are more interested in gameplay though.
If you want to make a high profile game that is going to sell millions of copies, you can go Hollywood and take your chance that your non-movie-licensed title will be the one in twenty to make it, or you can concentrate on a smaller audience and overall game quality you can respect yourself in the morning and probably put food on the table...
The reason we're seeing comments like this is not because the independant game developer has gone away, but because as the games market has grown and tons of marketing dollars have been poured into the market, the smaller developers have slipped off the radar. Remember that the journalistic machine is lubricated with cash... I'd bet more people play independant games than mainstream games (think about all those flash games, PDA games, etc...), but the trade rags only write about the ones that produce advertising dollars.
Just picture the summary writer running across an open space and getting clotheslined. It's clearly the mental image he was going for, and the pure humor of it will ease that tension issue you seem to be dealing with. :)
Private business is utterly ineffective at funding things that will take ten years to become a product.
That must be why we have such a shortage of privately funded pharmaceutical companies then?
I can't throw a rock without hitting one around here.
To forbid private industry from making use of federally research is to deny them the benefits of their own tax dollars.
I suggested no such thing. They should be allowed to benefit, but they should not be allowed to profit exclusively. They also should not be allowed to deny other companies/individuals/institutions the benefits of that knowledge.
Actually....
In parctice, private dollars usually err on the side of more risk. A tiny percentage of companies that are privately funded succeed, and even the ones that fail represent the best of the companies that go through the investors technical review process. Such a review process typically involves hiring some of the foremost experts in the related field to decide for the investors whether the concepts the company is based on are sound.
That makes this decision all the better. The current system that allows private companies to profit from research funded with federal grant money is broken. We should stop all such funding until the government gets royalties on discoveries made on it's dime, or until a compulsory license is issued for all patents on inventions discovered using public dollars.
The word on the street investment wise is that the smart money is already in all the stem cell research companies that have reasonable business plans and have passed technical review. The vast majority of the companies left to fund are the ones that the private dollars passed up.
On the bright side, at least Callifornia has a huge new government jobs program.
Oddly, the story states that the games in the works for the new console will also be developed for the current iteration of the Xbox. This may partially confirm the lack of backwards compatibility discussed previously
That seems to me more like a strategy to deal with the lack of forwards compatability of the original Xbox. For the same reason, EA still develops their new titles for the original Playstation and for the PS2.
Heh.
This was moderated as funny, but don't laugh too much. Technically there's nothing stopping DVD players from costing the same amount as a low-end chinese discman knockoff.