In January, sure. It's February 20th. If it were Sony that still had their system sold out (think back to the PS2 launch), people here would be bitching about how incompetent they are. No matter what the excitement level, Nintendo should be able to meet demand by now. It is especially disappointing when you find out that they really weren't shipping nearly as many consoles as they said they were.
BTW, I say this as a happy Wii owner. I love everything about it except for the fact that any time I want to buy something for it I have to search.
This weekend I was at the Marlboro, MA Target, and the Leominster, MA Toys R Us. Both had a pile of Wiis. At least three at target and more than I could count at a glance at Toys R Us. TRU also had plenty of accessories, though target had none. This was Sunday afternoon. No shipment that day for obvious reasons, and the store had been open for hours.
When you hear about the huge budgets of modern video games, you rarely hear what percentage goes to actually paying developers. If more of the money went to the people actually doing the work, they could hire the developers they need to get the job done without working their developers to death. As it stands right now, no self respecting developer with a family can afford to take a job in games because the hours are crazy, and because if they're any good the pay in non-games work is as much as three times what a programmer can make in the games industry. No wonder they end up understaffed with inexperienced people, struggle to hit deadlines, and we're always hearing about how this or that experienced developer gets fed up and leaves the industry. Meanwhile, the publishers and marketers are living fat off these people's labor.
One of two things will break this trend. Either publishers will become less relevant as self funded studios become common (who knows how this will turn out as Vista pushes game development off of open platforms into a console and portable only world), or the rest of the venture backed software industry will start to treat their employees poorly enough that game development doesn't look so bad anymore. Either way, it's likely to get worse before it gets any better.
Regardless, it's hard to see how China has anything to do with this story other than to stir up the outrage of outsourcing and send hits to the website. So they opened an independent studio, and they did it in China because they have some delusion that their happiness there was due to geography and not the fact that they actually took a vacation... I wish them luck, really, but the geography of this story shouldn't be the focus. It's a red herring.
He inadvertently makes an excellent point though. Unless you're the captain of a ship, when is the last time you rolled a map? For most people, paper that is rolled is not portable.
Call me when you can fold it, or when they make a device out of it that is a hardcover book you can "reprint" on demand.
Apparently you didn't see through the Norwegian response though. Let me translate for you:
"It's quite clear that the record companies carry their share of the responsibility for the situation that the consumers are stuck in. However, no matter what agreements iTunes Music Store have entered into, they're still the company that's selling music to the consumers and are responsible for offering the consumer a fair deal according to Norwegian law."
Apple is making it difficult for other companies to offer DRM infected media to Norwegian citizens. This is unfair, as all companies doing business in Norway should be allowed to screw our citizens equally.
Do you find that this approach has worked for you?
Embargoes usually don't work. Especially when the rest of the world doesn't participate. We didn't have much luck shooting the guy though, and it doesn't seem to matter if we take peaceful or warlike positions against our enemies, the people who dislike Americans for simply existing will find a reason to bitch about it either way. Apparently you'd all be happier if we just let ourselves get nuked, and you all could have become Soviets. Perhaps it works out much better for us if we just ignore European citizens when they say they disapprove of American policies. It doesn't matter what they are unless we shoot ourselves in the foot, so why should we bother to try to make them like us?
Tell me, what should we do to countries that point nuclear missiles at us? Give them a stern talking to and then look the other way? How have policies like that worked out for European countries over the last, oh, let's say three thousand years?
Ok, so you dislike the current US administration... But that doesn't mean that the US policy towards Cuba was created by the Republicans or is solely supported by the Republicans. There was a Democrat on watch when the policy was created, and there have been several democrats who could have changed that poilcy in the meantime.
Many in the world believe that Cuba has been hurt more by the actions of the United States than by Castro. If you travel to Europe, you will likely hear a very different opinion of Castro and the history of Cuba.
See that's the thing about the US policy towards Cuba. It's not about helping the people of Cuba, it's about helping the US. Europeans get similarly protective when you're talking about countries that are closer to them on the map that may or may not pose a perceived threat. We're not screwing the Cubans economically to help them get rid of Castro. We're screwing them because *we* want to be rid of Castro. Please stop confusing self interest with misguided altruism.
What about DSL? Still not available. "Too far out."
There are two common reasons for this response:
- You're really too far away (where "far" is defined as the impedance of your loop, and not any physical measurement.
- The circuit between you an the CO is not entirely copper.
The second of those is very common in modern developments. They run a single pair of fiber to the neighborhood and switch it to copper in a big green box on the corner. DSL equipment is too expensive to put in each of those boxes, so you never get DSL support in your area. Sucks, but that's how it goes.
Signing up so that only one cable operator or local phone company can operate in an area is one of the worst decisions a municipality can make.
That happens because young people don't participate in local government. I'd bet money that the monopoly in your area (which is probably renewable on a 10 or 15 year cycle) is given in exchange for a senior citizen discount on Cable TV service, and perhaps a token sum for public access. Guess what percentage of the people participating in that decision making process benefit from the discount. Now guess what percentage of the local cable committee is in that same demographic. The rest of the participants are busy-bodies, and school moms. Those people probably don't care too much about broadband. Based on your Slashdot post count, I'd bet you would spend less time participating in your town's decision making process than you do reading these comments if you bothered to get involved. Stop whining and do something!
Writing multithreaded apps is extremely hard. There are all kinds of things you have to keep in mind. I would guess that 99.9% of all programmers never write apps with more than two or three threads (and most of the time, these two threads are not doing the same amount of work, but one of them is doing a lot more than the others), but now they're supposed to create games with 6 at least somewhat symmetrical threads. There's only so many ways you can parallelize any given application.
Why are you under the impression that each core can only run a single thread?
Why are you under the impression that most programmers only write apps with only tow or three threads? My experience is that inexperienced programmers, or programmers with no backing in theory tend to write either single threaded programs or programs with dozens or hundreds of threads (and dozens or hundreds of race condition bugs). Inbetween is pretty much unheard of.
Incidentally, rendering a multiply animated scene is very easily multi threaded.
You don't have to think it is. It is. Not only did it outsell the 360 and everything but the DS over the Christmas season... Even though it looks like it did so by a tiny margin, look at those software charts. Nine out of the top 20 for December and five out of the top ten for 2006. That's where the profit comes from.
Insidentally, look at the bestsellers for the 360 and for the DS. They each seem to have a hard time breaking out of their demographic niche, but the PS2 doesn't seem to have those barriers. If Sony can keep that up for the PS3, they'll be unstoppable again. If only their marketing department didn't keep getting in the way. They need to find out who all the marketing people they hired in the PSP timeframe are, and fire them.
Somebody reads the comic, but not the newspost I see...
The Sony exec said the consoles couldn't be found on shelves anywhere... Which depending on where you live is quite possibly dramatically untrue. Even P-A didn't claim they were "sitting" on shelves, but that they were being replaced sufficiently quickly as to be easy to find.
You missed the point.. They won't get the games if they don't solve the problems I listed.
None of the problems you listed prevent them from getting games out for the machine.
Third party developers having a hard time with the system is a potential speedbump, but well overblown and over reported. It's not a chicken and egg issue. It's purely about Sony business development closing deals. The PSP is actually a bigger problem for the PS3 than anything you listed.
I don't want to come of sounding like a fanboy for the PS3 (I don't own one, and have no current plans to buy one), but I can't help but point out that I've got the feeling I've read your comment before. When the PS2 came out people were saying the same thing, but the games that have come out over the last 10-12 months for the PS2 clearly show that wasn't the case.
If the PS3 gains enough market share, developers will figure out how to wring every last drop of power out of the machine, and if it doesn't they won't. It has nothing to do with how "hard" it is... Although it being "hard" is a big crock of shit. You either know what you're doing, or you don't. Most programmers are just that: programmers. They don't actually have a good grasp on the theory and the math behind computer science. If the profit potential is there, though, developers who know their stuff will be attracted to the platform and will have no trouble making it work for them.
Of course, if they can't sell the machine all bets are off.
The bigger the claim the more likely they are to try and get out of paying.
The difference between what I pay in insurance without an alarm and what I would pay with an alarm plus the monitoring fee is small enough that I don't feel the need to take a chance that I'm going to be the one guy in a thousand (though I think you underestimate).
Yeah, but for the most part you probably hit the same sites over and over, so the hit won't be that bad. Not as bad as having your usage hijacked by your ISP.
When DNS fails to resolve, many browsers decide not to clutter your history with the bogus URL. Now if everything "successfully" resolves to some craptacular (Comcastic?) filler page that particular excellent feature will be useless. Nothing like helping your users by turning valid error messages into artificial successes... At least it will cut back on tech support calls, right?
Just because it says "open" at the front it's better? What makes it open? It looks closed to me. It's run as a for profit company, and if you want any control over it you have to give them personal data.
DNS isn't configured on your router. It's configured on your host.
However just because it has "open" in the name doesn't mean it's any better than anything else. Just run your own DNS. It's easy, free, fast, and doesn't pull any of this crap.
if DRM is removed and piracy jumps, the cause-effect logic will be very hard to refute.
How can that possibly happen?
The only way would be if removing the DRM caused additional media to be piratable... But what RIAA products aren't available in a DRM free form from illegal sources?
Selling DRM free music wouldn't increase the supply of DRM free music, since that supply is already infinite. All it would do is increase their profits.
Honestly, I could give a rat's ass if my alarm is top quality, I have it because I get a break on my home insurance, not because I feel safer when I go out.
There's nothing like the piece of mind that comes from knowing that if you forget to set your alarm and you get robbed your insurance company won't pay the claim...
Thirdly, if the alarm buyer was not a cheapskate [...]
Funny you'd say that about an industry that keeps the prices high through price fixing, collusion amongst distributors, and secrecy instead of through the introduction of new technology ("futuristic" technology that doesn't work isn't the same thing as new technology).
Keep in mind what you can get for "$99" in terms of what it can do on a network. Go walk down the wireless router isle at your local computer store to see devices 1000x more complex than your average "high-end" alarm system being sold for $30. And those routers aren't "subsidized" by your subscription and contractual obligation to a term of monitoring service either.
That $1500 system you describe is only about $200 worth of hardware (assuming no video surveillance). The default system that gets installed in most homes isn't worth as much as the lead-acid battery they put in it for backup, and is essentially the same technology (they did make it less capable when they had it use POTS instead of an alarm circuit) that they've been installing for 30 years.
This doesn't preclude the need for a good baseline though, something that would put roses higher than dog poo in a "things that smell great" list.
That's exactly what this kind of system *doesn't* need. (Well, it needs it because if we don't use the same definition of "merit" for all users, or at least limit the numbers of definition of "merit" that are available this will become a computationally infeasible project... But let's talk theoretically).
This theoretical system should learn through user feedback exactly what that particular individual's idea of 'merit' is. Using a baseline may reduce the time it would take for the system to be useful to any given user, would insert bias into the system. Bias is what everybody wants removed from search results because bias is exactly the thing that people use when they game the algorithm to put their page at the top of the results list. Any search engine that uses a static baseline definition of "merit" can be gamed by the operators of sites that want to move up the list.
I don't think it's possible for any engine, open source or not, to do significantly better than google, since without the nearly infinite processing power required for individualized definitions of merit all you will be doing is replacing one form of bias for another. Perhaps you could come up with bias that is more to the tastes of some subset of users, but empirically that's no better than what we have already.
Sorry, you also asked "how", and I didn't answer that question.
Both dpkg and rpm have a '--root' option that tells them which directory to consider as '/' when installing. You use this to install your higher level package manager of choice and its dependencies. Then you run the package manager itself with the 'chroot' command (Or run the 'sh' you installed in that subdirectory with chroot, and use it to invoke apt or whatever). If you are doing a simple installation (a single app and its libraries, like an ftp server in a chroot jail for example), you'd probably just use rpm or dpkg and skip the higher level package manager.
DOS/early version of windows had a similar mechanism in the "subst" command, but I haven't seen it used for this purpose in years... Since Windows 2000 started becoming popular.
Slashdot Mirror
In January, sure. It's February 20th. If it were Sony that still had their system sold out (think back to the PS2 launch), people here would be bitching about how incompetent they are. No matter what the excitement level, Nintendo should be able to meet demand by now. It is especially disappointing when you find out that they really weren't shipping nearly as many consoles as they said they were.
BTW, I say this as a happy Wii owner. I love everything about it except for the fact that any time I want to buy something for it I have to search.
This weekend I was at the Marlboro, MA Target, and the Leominster, MA Toys R Us. Both had a pile of Wiis. At least three at target and more than I could count at a glance at Toys R Us. TRU also had plenty of accessories, though target had none. This was Sunday afternoon. No shipment that day for obvious reasons, and the store had been open for hours.
By that logic, Intel shouldn't have launched any chips at all between 2001 and 2005...
Sometimes you release a product when the schedule dictates in order to keep your existing customers happy.
When you hear about the huge budgets of modern video games, you rarely hear what percentage goes to actually paying developers. If more of the money went to the people actually doing the work, they could hire the developers they need to get the job done without working their developers to death. As it stands right now, no self respecting developer with a family can afford to take a job in games because the hours are crazy, and because if they're any good the pay in non-games work is as much as three times what a programmer can make in the games industry. No wonder they end up understaffed with inexperienced people, struggle to hit deadlines, and we're always hearing about how this or that experienced developer gets fed up and leaves the industry. Meanwhile, the publishers and marketers are living fat off these people's labor.
One of two things will break this trend. Either publishers will become less relevant as self funded studios become common (who knows how this will turn out as Vista pushes game development off of open platforms into a console and portable only world), or the rest of the venture backed software industry will start to treat their employees poorly enough that game development doesn't look so bad anymore. Either way, it's likely to get worse before it gets any better.
Regardless, it's hard to see how China has anything to do with this story other than to stir up the outrage of outsourcing and send hits to the website. So they opened an independent studio, and they did it in China because they have some delusion that their happiness there was due to geography and not the fact that they actually took a vacation... I wish them luck, really, but the geography of this story shouldn't be the focus. It's a red herring.
He inadvertently makes an excellent point though. Unless you're the captain of a ship, when is the last time you rolled a map? For most people, paper that is rolled is not portable.
Call me when you can fold it, or when they make a device out of it that is a hardcover book you can "reprint" on demand.
Apparently you didn't see through the Norwegian response though. Let me translate for you:
"It's quite clear that the record companies carry their share of the responsibility for the situation that the consumers are stuck in. However, no matter what agreements iTunes Music Store have entered into, they're still the company that's selling music to the consumers and are responsible for offering the consumer a fair deal according to Norwegian law."
Apple is making it difficult for other companies to offer DRM infected media to Norwegian citizens. This is unfair, as all companies doing business in Norway should be allowed to screw our citizens equally.
Do you find that this approach has worked for you?
Embargoes usually don't work. Especially when the rest of the world doesn't participate. We didn't have much luck shooting the guy though, and it doesn't seem to matter if we take peaceful or warlike positions against our enemies, the people who dislike Americans for simply existing will find a reason to bitch about it either way. Apparently you'd all be happier if we just let ourselves get nuked, and you all could have become Soviets. Perhaps it works out much better for us if we just ignore European citizens when they say they disapprove of American policies. It doesn't matter what they are unless we shoot ourselves in the foot, so why should we bother to try to make them like us?
Tell me, what should we do to countries that point nuclear missiles at us? Give them a stern talking to and then look the other way? How have policies like that worked out for European countries over the last, oh, let's say three thousand years?
Ok, so you dislike the current US administration... But that doesn't mean that the US policy towards Cuba was created by the Republicans or is solely supported by the Republicans. There was a Democrat on watch when the policy was created, and there have been several democrats who could have changed that poilcy in the meantime.
Many in the world believe that Cuba has been hurt more by the actions of the United States than by Castro. If you travel to Europe, you will likely hear a very different opinion of Castro and the history of Cuba.
See that's the thing about the US policy towards Cuba. It's not about helping the people of Cuba, it's about helping the US. Europeans get similarly protective when you're talking about countries that are closer to them on the map that may or may not pose a perceived threat. We're not screwing the Cubans economically to help them get rid of Castro. We're screwing them because *we* want to be rid of Castro. Please stop confusing self interest with misguided altruism.
What about DSL? Still not available. "Too far out."
There are two common reasons for this response:
- You're really too far away (where "far" is defined as the impedance of your loop, and not any physical measurement.
- The circuit between you an the CO is not entirely copper.
The second of those is very common in modern developments. They run a single pair of fiber to the neighborhood and switch it to copper in a big green box on the corner. DSL equipment is too expensive to put in each of those boxes, so you never get DSL support in your area. Sucks, but that's how it goes.
Signing up so that only one cable operator or local phone company can operate in an area is one of the worst decisions a municipality can make.
That happens because young people don't participate in local government. I'd bet money that the monopoly in your area (which is probably renewable on a 10 or 15 year cycle) is given in exchange for a senior citizen discount on Cable TV service, and perhaps a token sum for public access. Guess what percentage of the people participating in that decision making process benefit from the discount. Now guess what percentage of the local cable committee is in that same demographic. The rest of the participants are busy-bodies, and school moms. Those people probably don't care too much about broadband. Based on your Slashdot post count, I'd bet you would spend less time participating in your town's decision making process than you do reading these comments if you bothered to get involved. Stop whining and do something!
Writing multithreaded apps is extremely hard. There are all kinds of things you have to keep in mind. I would guess that 99.9% of all programmers never write apps with more than two or three threads (and most of the time, these two threads are not doing the same amount of work, but one of them is doing a lot more than the others), but now they're supposed to create games with 6 at least somewhat symmetrical threads. There's only so many ways you can parallelize any given application.
Why are you under the impression that each core can only run a single thread?
Why are you under the impression that most programmers only write apps with only tow or three threads? My experience is that inexperienced programmers, or programmers with no backing in theory tend to write either single threaded programs or programs with dozens or hundreds of threads (and dozens or hundreds of race condition bugs). Inbetween is pretty much unheard of.
Incidentally, rendering a multiply animated scene is very easily multi threaded.
You don't have to think it is. It is. Not only did it outsell the 360 and everything but the DS over the Christmas season... Even though it looks like it did so by a tiny margin, look at those software charts. Nine out of the top 20 for December and five out of the top ten for 2006. That's where the profit comes from.
Insidentally, look at the bestsellers for the 360 and for the DS. They each seem to have a hard time breaking out of their demographic niche, but the PS2 doesn't seem to have those barriers. If Sony can keep that up for the PS3, they'll be unstoppable again. If only their marketing department didn't keep getting in the way. They need to find out who all the marketing people they hired in the PSP timeframe are, and fire them.
Somebody reads the comic, but not the newspost I see...
The Sony exec said the consoles couldn't be found on shelves anywhere... Which depending on where you live is quite possibly dramatically untrue. Even P-A didn't claim they were "sitting" on shelves, but that they were being replaced sufficiently quickly as to be easy to find.
You missed the point.. They won't get the games if they don't solve the problems I listed.
None of the problems you listed prevent them from getting games out for the machine.
Third party developers having a hard time with the system is a potential speedbump, but well overblown and over reported. It's not a chicken and egg issue. It's purely about Sony business development closing deals. The PSP is actually a bigger problem for the PS3 than anything you listed.
I don't want to come of sounding like a fanboy for the PS3 (I don't own one, and have no current plans to buy one), but I can't help but point out that I've got the feeling I've read your comment before. When the PS2 came out people were saying the same thing, but the games that have come out over the last 10-12 months for the PS2 clearly show that wasn't the case.
If the PS3 gains enough market share, developers will figure out how to wring every last drop of power out of the machine, and if it doesn't they won't. It has nothing to do with how "hard" it is... Although it being "hard" is a big crock of shit. You either know what you're doing, or you don't. Most programmers are just that: programmers. They don't actually have a good grasp on the theory and the math behind computer science. If the profit potential is there, though, developers who know their stuff will be attracted to the platform and will have no trouble making it work for them.
Of course, if they can't sell the machine all bets are off.
The bigger the claim the more likely they are to try and get out of paying.
The difference between what I pay in insurance without an alarm and what I would pay with an alarm plus the monitoring fee is small enough that I don't feel the need to take a chance that I'm going to be the one guy in a thousand (though I think you underestimate).
Yeah, but for the most part you probably hit the same sites over and over, so the hit won't be that bad. Not as bad as having your usage hijacked by your ISP.
When DNS fails to resolve, many browsers decide not to clutter your history with the bogus URL. Now if everything "successfully" resolves to some craptacular (Comcastic?) filler page that particular excellent feature will be useless. Nothing like helping your users by turning valid error messages into artificial successes... At least it will cut back on tech support calls, right?
Triumph of marketing over rationality.
Just because it says "open" at the front it's better? What makes it open? It looks closed to me. It's run as a for profit company, and if you want any control over it you have to give them personal data.
DNS isn't configured on your router. It's configured on your host.
However just because it has "open" in the name doesn't mean it's any better than anything else. Just run your own DNS. It's easy, free, fast, and doesn't pull any of this crap.
How can that possibly happen?
The only way would be if removing the DRM caused additional media to be piratable... But what RIAA products aren't available in a DRM free form from illegal sources?
Selling DRM free music wouldn't increase the supply of DRM free music, since that supply is already infinite. All it would do is increase their profits.
As opposed to electing Clinton, who's introduced practically the same type of legislation in the past?
Face it, they're two asses of the same horse. Except that Hillary might get her party's nomination, and Brownback doesn't have a chance in hell.
Oh, I forgot one more thing:
Honestly, I could give a rat's ass if my alarm is top quality, I have it because I get a break on my home insurance, not because I feel safer when I go out.
There's nothing like the piece of mind that comes from knowing that if you forget to set your alarm and you get robbed your insurance company won't pay the claim...
Thirdly, if the alarm buyer was not a cheapskate [...]
Funny you'd say that about an industry that keeps the prices high through price fixing, collusion amongst distributors, and secrecy instead of through the introduction of new technology ("futuristic" technology that doesn't work isn't the same thing as new technology).
Keep in mind what you can get for "$99" in terms of what it can do on a network. Go walk down the wireless router isle at your local computer store to see devices 1000x more complex than your average "high-end" alarm system being sold for $30. And those routers aren't "subsidized" by your subscription and contractual obligation to a term of monitoring service either.
That $1500 system you describe is only about $200 worth of hardware (assuming no video surveillance). The default system that gets installed in most homes isn't worth as much as the lead-acid battery they put in it for backup, and is essentially the same technology (they did make it less capable when they had it use POTS instead of an alarm circuit) that they've been installing for 30 years.
They know there's more important things to do like bust serious crimes.
If you're in the suburbs (30 cops in one town, one non-domestic violence crime in the last five years) that should read:
They know there's more important things to do, like generate ticket revenue.
This doesn't preclude the need for a good baseline though, something that would put roses higher than dog poo in a "things that smell great" list.
That's exactly what this kind of system *doesn't* need. (Well, it needs it because if we don't use the same definition of "merit" for all users, or at least limit the numbers of definition of "merit" that are available this will become a computationally infeasible project... But let's talk theoretically).
This theoretical system should learn through user feedback exactly what that particular individual's idea of 'merit' is. Using a baseline may reduce the time it would take for the system to be useful to any given user, would insert bias into the system. Bias is what everybody wants removed from search results because bias is exactly the thing that people use when they game the algorithm to put their page at the top of the results list. Any search engine that uses a static baseline definition of "merit" can be gamed by the operators of sites that want to move up the list.
I don't think it's possible for any engine, open source or not, to do significantly better than google, since without the nearly infinite processing power required for individualized definitions of merit all you will be doing is replacing one form of bias for another. Perhaps you could come up with bias that is more to the tastes of some subset of users, but empirically that's no better than what we have already.
Sorry, you also asked "how", and I didn't answer that question.
Both dpkg and rpm have a '--root' option that tells them which directory to consider as '/' when installing. You use this to install your higher level package manager of choice and its dependencies. Then you run the package manager itself with the 'chroot' command (Or run the 'sh' you installed in that subdirectory with chroot, and use it to invoke apt or whatever). If you are doing a simple installation (a single app and its libraries, like an ftp server in a chroot jail for example), you'd probably just use rpm or dpkg and skip the higher level package manager.
DOS/early version of windows had a similar mechanism in the "subst" command, but I haven't seen it used for this purpose in years... Since Windows 2000 started becoming popular.