The Space Shuttle was designed (badly) as a low cost re-launchable vehicle.
Would anyone care to explain to me why this comment was moderated down as anything other than -1 "The Truth Hurts"?
Just asking.
The space shuttle wasn't quite as stupid as the design of the Apollo spacecraft that were sent to the moon, but it was pretty close and that's not saying very much.
Disclaimer: I'm not a rocket scientist, but I used to work with them at JPL.
The 8080 chip was what grown up hardware enthusiasts were using in their S-100 computers. The kiddies had the weaker, cheaper 6502 parts.
Don't diss the 6502. It was a wonderful chip for its time and although it ran at slower clock speeds than later 8080s and Z80s, it still ran code faster because very few clock cycles were wasted. The instruction set was remarkably well done.
If you've never read through Woz's Sweet 16 interpreter, which fit in just a bit over a page of memory (about 270 bytes) and emulated a 16 bit architecture CPU, you have not experienced True Programming.
The 6502 was a remarkable work of engineering. It's a great pity that they never followed up on it.
The fledgling space industry is reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer,' notes one technology reporter, 'when a number of established vendors and startups reversed-engineered Microsoft's DOS and manufactured PCs using the Intel 8080 chip set.
I had to double check that it wasn't kdawson that edited this article. Wow. You usually do a pretty good job, timothy. But this?
No one "reversed engineered Microsoft's DOS" and it did not come out until the industry was pretty well established. The original IBM PC's BIOS was reverse engineered. The only thing Microsoft ever did that ran on an 8080 was Microsoft BASIC (which was indeed a true standard of its time - even Apple adopted it as Applesoft BASIC).
In the earliest years, the world was 6502 dominated - Apple, Commodore, etc. There wasn't any need to reverse engineer Apple Software, because they published it all in the Apple ][ red manual.
Once the 8080 came out (and its competitor the Z80) there still wasn't any need to reverse engineer software as CP/M was effectively open source.
PC DOS was very much a late comer to the game and as the industry was moving from 8 to 16 bit. Just because a bunch of whacked out journalist bozos said that the IBM PC (on the traffic light controller 8088, or so sayeth the official Intel documentation on that chip) "legitimized" personal computers doesn't make it correct.
The 9 women 1 baby analogy that I was replying to implies O(1).
That was Fred Brooks' hyperbole. Giving birth to a baby is a task that cannot be delegated to additional others. Programming can be. It's just not linear. It's been a long time since I last read Mythical Man Month, but I believe he argued something along the lines that productivity increased closer to O(log N) due to all the increased communication channels.
(I don't mean to diss Brooks by the way. Mythical Man Month is required reading in every sense of the meaning of "required").
Which is why adding more managers is O(-N).
Heh. At the moment I have three managers and 0 coworkers. I'm not sure how one would express mathematically productivity versus ratio of management to workforce. I suspect that a lot of people wouldn't like the answer.
But sorry no. In O-notation it would still be written O(N) just with a negative (implied) constant.
Great quirky games are now limited to publishers like Atlus, and have budgets designed to keep the studio alive even if the sales are nowhere near the top of any sales chart.
Atlus makes great games. I may not want to replay them this very moment, but I've never regretted buying an Atlus game. Never.
They have a very limited time frame for development of their sports titles, and they do a fair job of deciding what improvements they can make year-to-year to still meet the time constraints and still keep most of their user base happy.
Oh really? This customer, who has thrown more money at EA than at Blizzard is decidedly Not Happy.
They have serious issues. Their product (at least on PSP) is total garbage. No one can be happy about games that crash before the player can win. Their website is total garbage and do not allow you to even complain (I presume without a Microsoft Windows system, it doesn't work well with Mac OS X and Linux).
Tell your manager that there are many dissatisfied EA customers out there. I've paid you plenty of money for games. I don't expect every game to be perfectly fun, but I at least expect them to not crash and you cannot even do that on PSP. See above about being locked out at even reporting bugs.
That said, I've been screwed by the DRM in EA games more than once, and I've played enough shitty games from them that they're off my list entirely now.
No amount of advertising can make up for bad product. Games that crash before you can win are Not Fun.
He said "Konami" Beavis, heh heh heh, heh heh heh, heh heh heh.
I used to consider Konami the poorest quality game maker ever, until I encountered EA... No matter how buggy the Konami games I bought were, at least they allowed you to win, unlike EA.
Which is exactly my point. EA owns the exclusive video game rights to all major professional and college football leagues.
They don't own rights to NPB, thank God. But how can I buy Japanese-only titles outside the country? Sigh.
I have some great NPB baseball simulation games from the early 2000s that I would gladly buy (and brush up on my Japanese to read the screens) newer versions of.
Also EA develops and sells the top selling video game series of all time, the SIMS.
The Sims on GBA has some replay value. The Sims title on PSP that I bought (Castaways) crashes in the middle. Wow, fun. They have a sale from me, but not a satisfied customer. EA sucks.
I'd bet real money that 9 coders who know what they're doing and know how to work as a team can get to completion much faster than one coder working alone.
That's gaming the system. The "know what they're doing" and "know how to work as a team" is the kicker and frequently upset by reorgs.
The gain may not be O(n) but it's certainly not O(1).
Look up "innumerate". Sigh.
Of course it's going to be of O(n) but the constant factor is going to vary wildly based on the makeup of the additional 8 members.
It would only remain O(1) if the other 8 members were spending their entire working day reading slashdot and doing no work whatsoever.
Btw, how much should a game like Madden cost anyways? Are they really starting from scratch? I doubt it...each Madden year is like an add-on to the last.
I have a suspicion that a large portion of the cost of that game is the license from the NFL. They certainly didn't spend that much on game play.
I've only played it on GBA and it sucked. Dang it! I'd spend $200 on a football simulation game (handheld) that didn't suck.
Well, theoretically over-hype could backfire if the game turns out to be absolute shit, but since most EA titles just require that initial sale
TFA said that they had a window of six weeks to recover costs on a game. This speaks volumes.
Six weeks sounds pretty much like the time it would take for word of mouth to spread that a game sucks big time. So yeah, produce a game that sucks and you have a very limited amount of time to sell it.
Based on the quality of the EA games I have purchased, unfun crashing crap on PSP, barely fun stuff on GBA, I'd say they are barking up the wrong tree.
TFA also said they lose lots of sales due to resales and piracy which reminds me, I want to dump the two crap EA PSP games I bought at the local GameStop maybe I can trade them for games that don't crash.
What if those ads help you sell the baby for $50,000, instead of $15,000?
That's not what ads do. Based on experiments I participated in in college, advertising has the net effect of reducing per unit costs. The buyer can more easily shop around and get the best price. Advertising in this sense Is Good.
Most of the people clamoring in favor of nationalized Obamacare have either chosen to ignore or don't know the disastrous effect that Dick Nixon's wage & price controls had in 1971 http://www.econreview.com/events/wageprice1971b.htm
If you want to reduce the cost of something, allow advertising with price to buyer and the prices will go down.
Perhaps with games the price has gone down too much. The cheapest game in terms of usage & enjoyment I've bought is World of Warcraft, even though I pay a monthly fee (well two actually since my wife plays too). There's nothing more expensive in entertainment than buying a game and after opening it up and trying it out, then discovering that it is unfun and sucks big time.
Since everyone here on Slashdot loves car analogies:
It's not so much that we love car analogies so much as it's a good way of distinguishing n00bs... (and good car analogies never seems to get old)
You could buy a car in much less time than it would take your new company to design and construct one.
You missed a very important distinction. The time it takes to make 1 car, 10 cars, 100 cars, etc. is pretty much the same once you have an assembly line (infrastructure) set up. It's also cheaper to make 10,000 cars than it is to make a 1 shot single car.
That definitely holds true with games, where you would want to outsource the graphics engine (or use the same one on multiple titles), voice actors, musicians, etc.
First of all, spending 4x the money on marketing is not going to generate 4x sales. Just isn't going to happen. A large chunk of marketing money is wasted because you're hitting the wrong audience - the problem is that you never know which dollar is actually hitting the target.
True, there are no guarantees. If the advertising is aimed at the right people (targeted marketing) one could generate more than 4x sales.
I personally don't subscribe to any gaming magazines, I don't watch G4, I don't frequent any gaming websites... I generally hear about a new game by word-of-mouth advertising. So all that money they're blowing on magazine ads and banners and commercials is just wasted on me.
With a sample size of one, you can prove just about anything you want.
TV advertising probably isn't going to reach me, but I've bought more than a couple games based on reviews in GameInformer (I'm not sure why they don't just give it away. It's worth precisely $0 for a subscription, which worked out well when I was given 1 year subscriptions from GameStop).
Some of the most memorable games I've gotten have been based on in-store recommendations, including World of Warcraft (which I had never heard of when I bought it).
I used to be more inclined to like EA. One of my college friends used to work there and he was a pretty good programmer. I prefer handhelds and like sports simulation games. Tiger Woods on the GBA isn't great, but it was worth playing most of the way through at least once. I like the Sims on GBA, though replayability is minor.
Their PSP games are a total disaster. When I got a PSP I got two EA titles mostly because I didn't know any better. The Tiger Woods I bought is unwinnable. It reliably crashes when winning one of the legs of the grand slam, though you can get most of the way through the game. The Sims game I bought crashes in the middle.
EA could throw 10x the marketing at me and it wouldn't matter. They make unfun junk and I play games to have fun, which leaves them out.
Maybe if they put out more titles that didn't crash before you can win the game, they wouldn't have to spend so much in marketing. They're at 0% on the games I've bought for the PSP. And they'll stay at 0% because I'm just not going to ever trust them again. It's a pity too. Tiger Woods for the PSP is a lovely game, right up until the point it hard crashes.
But maybe they can hire Jerry Seinfeld to make up for the lost revenue...
What I don't understand is why they make us pay income tax on unemployment checks. Or social security checks. It would make more sense to make that money tax exempt, rather than hand the money to the citizen, and then demand 20% of it back???
Making it taxable income qualifies you for income tax credits. If you collect it between high paying jobs, it also allows them to Tax The Filthy Rich, which would be you, apparently.
The comment that you made that I quoted, scares me a lot more than anything Lori Drew did. Your justification doesn't make it any better.
The time for kicking Drew's ass was before the child killed herself. Imagining any kind of punishment now is just barbaric. She should be punished as the law specifies - no more and no less. It's in the US constitution.
Slashdot Mirror
The Space Shuttle was designed (badly) as a low cost re-launchable vehicle.
Would anyone care to explain to me why this comment was moderated down as anything other than -1 "The Truth Hurts"?
Just asking.
The space shuttle wasn't quite as stupid as the design of the Apollo spacecraft that were sent to the moon, but it was pretty close and that's not saying very much.
Disclaimer: I'm not a rocket scientist, but I used to work with them at JPL.
The 8080 chip was what grown up hardware enthusiasts were using in their S-100 computers. The kiddies had the weaker, cheaper 6502 parts.
Don't diss the 6502. It was a wonderful chip for its time and although it ran at slower clock speeds than later 8080s and Z80s, it still ran code faster because very few clock cycles were wasted. The instruction set was remarkably well done.
If you've never read through Woz's Sweet 16 interpreter, which fit in just a bit over a page of memory (about 270 bytes) and emulated a 16 bit architecture CPU, you have not experienced True Programming.
The 6502 was a remarkable work of engineering. It's a great pity that they never followed up on it.
The fledgling space industry is reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer,' notes one technology reporter, 'when a number of established vendors and startups reversed-engineered Microsoft's DOS and manufactured PCs using the Intel 8080 chip set.
I had to double check that it wasn't kdawson that edited this article. Wow. You usually do a pretty good job, timothy. But this?
No one "reversed engineered Microsoft's DOS" and it did not come out until the industry was pretty well established. The original IBM PC's BIOS was reverse engineered. The only thing Microsoft ever did that ran on an 8080 was Microsoft BASIC (which was indeed a true standard of its time - even Apple adopted it as Applesoft BASIC).
In the earliest years, the world was 6502 dominated - Apple, Commodore, etc. There wasn't any need to reverse engineer Apple Software, because they published it all in the Apple ][ red manual.
Once the 8080 came out (and its competitor the Z80) there still wasn't any need to reverse engineer software as CP/M was effectively open source.
PC DOS was very much a late comer to the game and as the industry was moving from 8 to 16 bit. Just because a bunch of whacked out journalist bozos said that the IBM PC (on the traffic light controller 8088, or so sayeth the official Intel documentation on that chip) "legitimized" personal computers doesn't make it correct.
Sheesh.
The 9 women 1 baby analogy that I was replying to implies O(1).
That was Fred Brooks' hyperbole. Giving birth to a baby is a task that cannot be delegated to additional others. Programming can be. It's just not linear. It's been a long time since I last read Mythical Man Month, but I believe he argued something along the lines that productivity increased closer to O(log N) due to all the increased communication channels.
(I don't mean to diss Brooks by the way. Mythical Man Month is required reading in every sense of the meaning of "required").
Which is why adding more managers is O(-N).
Heh. At the moment I have three managers and 0 coworkers. I'm not sure how one would express mathematically productivity versus ratio of management to workforce. I suspect that a lot of people wouldn't like the answer.
But sorry no. In O-notation it would still be written O(N) just with a negative (implied) constant.
Great quirky games are now limited to publishers like Atlus, and have budgets designed to keep the studio alive even if the sales are nowhere near the top of any sales chart.
Atlus makes great games. I may not want to replay them this very moment, but I've never regretted buying an Atlus game. Never.
They have a very limited time frame for development of their sports titles, and they do a fair job of deciding what improvements they can make year-to-year to still meet the time constraints and still keep most of their user base happy.
Oh really? This customer, who has thrown more money at EA than at Blizzard is decidedly Not Happy.
They have serious issues. Their product (at least on PSP) is total garbage. No one can be happy about games that crash before the player can win. Their website is total garbage and do not allow you to even complain (I presume without a Microsoft Windows system, it doesn't work well with Mac OS X and Linux).
Tell your manager that there are many dissatisfied EA customers out there. I've paid you plenty of money for games. I don't expect every game to be perfectly fun, but I at least expect them to not crash and you cannot even do that on PSP. See above about being locked out at even reporting bugs.
EA sucks!
That said, I've been screwed by the DRM in EA games more than once, and I've played enough shitty games from them that they're off my list entirely now.
No amount of advertising can make up for bad product. Games that crash before you can win are Not Fun.
Yet, in my opinion, all those sports game are still crap.
In the US, yes. You should try some titles sold in Japan. Some of them are quite good.
2K doesn't have a soccer game, but Konami does.
He said "Konami" Beavis, heh heh heh, heh heh heh, heh heh heh.
I used to consider Konami the poorest quality game maker ever, until I encountered EA ... No matter how buggy the Konami games I bought were, at least they allowed you to win, unlike EA.
Which is exactly my point. EA owns the exclusive video game rights to all major professional and college football leagues.
They don't own rights to NPB, thank God. But how can I buy Japanese-only titles outside the country? Sigh.
I have some great NPB baseball simulation games from the early 2000s that I would gladly buy (and brush up on my Japanese to read the screens) newer versions of.
Also EA develops and sells the top selling video game series of all time, the SIMS.
The Sims on GBA has some replay value. The Sims title on PSP that I bought (Castaways) crashes in the middle. Wow, fun. They have a sale from me, but not a satisfied customer. EA sucks.
Oh, is that what all that O bollocks means? Some of us live in the real world.
You must be new here.
O-notation is used in describing the complexity of algorithms. Start here http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=573138
I'd bet real money that 9 coders who know what they're doing and know how to work as a team can get to completion much faster than one coder working alone.
That's gaming the system. The "know what they're doing" and "know how to work as a team" is the kicker and frequently upset by reorgs.
The gain may not be O(n) but it's certainly not O(1).
Look up "innumerate". Sigh.
Of course it's going to be of O(n) but the constant factor is going to vary wildly based on the makeup of the additional 8 members.
It would only remain O(1) if the other 8 members were spending their entire working day reading slashdot and doing no work whatsoever.
Btw, how much should a game like Madden cost anyways? Are they really starting from scratch? I doubt it...each Madden year is like an add-on to the last.
I have a suspicion that a large portion of the cost of that game is the license from the NFL. They certainly didn't spend that much on game play.
I've only played it on GBA and it sucked. Dang it! I'd spend $200 on a football simulation game (handheld) that didn't suck.
Well, theoretically over-hype could backfire if the game turns out to be absolute shit, but since most EA titles just require that initial sale
TFA said that they had a window of six weeks to recover costs on a game. This speaks volumes.
Six weeks sounds pretty much like the time it would take for word of mouth to spread that a game sucks big time. So yeah, produce a game that sucks and you have a very limited amount of time to sell it.
Based on the quality of the EA games I have purchased, unfun crashing crap on PSP, barely fun stuff on GBA, I'd say they are barking up the wrong tree.
TFA also said they lose lots of sales due to resales and piracy which reminds me, I want to dump the two crap EA PSP games I bought at the local GameStop maybe I can trade them for games that don't crash.
What if those ads help you sell the baby for $50,000, instead of $15,000?
That's not what ads do. Based on experiments I participated in in college, advertising has the net effect of reducing per unit costs. The buyer can more easily shop around and get the best price. Advertising in this sense Is Good.
Most of the people clamoring in favor of nationalized Obamacare have either chosen to ignore or don't know the disastrous effect that Dick Nixon's wage & price controls had in 1971 http://www.econreview.com/events/wageprice1971b.htm
If you want to reduce the cost of something, allow advertising with price to buyer and the prices will go down.
Perhaps with games the price has gone down too much. The cheapest game in terms of usage & enjoyment I've bought is World of Warcraft, even though I pay a monthly fee (well two actually since my wife plays too). There's nothing more expensive in entertainment than buying a game and after opening it up and trying it out, then discovering that it is unfun and sucks big time.
Since everyone here on Slashdot loves car analogies:
It's not so much that we love car analogies so much as it's a good way of distinguishing n00bs ... (and good car analogies never seems to get old)
You could buy a car in much less time than it would take your new company to design and construct one.
You missed a very important distinction. The time it takes to make 1 car, 10 cars, 100 cars, etc. is pretty much the same once you have an assembly line (infrastructure) set up. It's also cheaper to make 10,000 cars than it is to make a 1 shot single car.
That definitely holds true with games, where you would want to outsource the graphics engine (or use the same one on multiple titles), voice actors, musicians, etc.
First of all, spending 4x the money on marketing is not going to generate 4x sales. Just isn't going to happen. A large chunk of marketing money is wasted because you're hitting the wrong audience - the problem is that you never know which dollar is actually hitting the target.
True, there are no guarantees. If the advertising is aimed at the right people (targeted marketing) one could generate more than 4x sales.
I personally don't subscribe to any gaming magazines, I don't watch G4, I don't frequent any gaming websites... I generally hear about a new game by word-of-mouth advertising. So all that money they're blowing on magazine ads and banners and commercials is just wasted on me.
With a sample size of one, you can prove just about anything you want.
TV advertising probably isn't going to reach me, but I've bought more than a couple games based on reviews in GameInformer (I'm not sure why they don't just give it away. It's worth precisely $0 for a subscription, which worked out well when I was given 1 year subscriptions from GameStop).
Some of the most memorable games I've gotten have been based on in-store recommendations, including World of Warcraft (which I had never heard of when I bought it).
I used to be more inclined to like EA. One of my college friends used to work there and he was a pretty good programmer. I prefer handhelds and like sports simulation games. Tiger Woods on the GBA isn't great, but it was worth playing most of the way through at least once. I like the Sims on GBA, though replayability is minor.
Their PSP games are a total disaster. When I got a PSP I got two EA titles mostly because I didn't know any better. The Tiger Woods I bought is unwinnable. It reliably crashes when winning one of the legs of the grand slam, though you can get most of the way through the game. The Sims game I bought crashes in the middle.
EA could throw 10x the marketing at me and it wouldn't matter. They make unfun junk and I play games to have fun, which leaves them out.
Maybe if they put out more titles that didn't crash before you can win the game, they wouldn't have to spend so much in marketing. They're at 0% on the games I've bought for the PSP. And they'll stay at 0% because I'm just not going to ever trust them again. It's a pity too. Tiger Woods for the PSP is a lovely game, right up until the point it hard crashes.
But maybe they can hire Jerry Seinfeld to make up for the lost revenue ...
What I don't understand is why they make us pay income tax on unemployment checks. Or social security checks. It would make more sense to make that money tax exempt, rather than hand the money to the citizen, and then demand 20% of it back???
Making it taxable income qualifies you for income tax credits. If you collect it between high paying jobs, it also allows them to Tax The Filthy Rich, which would be you, apparently.
Take your anger and shove it up your ass. $19K in taxes?
Um, that's a lot more in income taxes than many if not most USians pay. How about if they just refund it to him?
The comment that you made that I quoted, scares me a lot more than anything Lori Drew did. Your justification doesn't make it any better.
The time for kicking Drew's ass was before the child killed herself. Imagining any kind of punishment now is just barbaric. She should be punished as the law specifies - no more and no less. It's in the US constitution.
It's highly unlikely that even the most avant-garde band is going to deliberately produce a work THAT distressing
Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song
We haven't quite advanced to the point where we can reliably "fix" murderers, rapists, arsonists etc.
What are you talking about? War, which involves all of the above, has been the most popular of recreational sports throughout human history.
RE: recidivism, it doesn't really help that the best place to learn how to commit crimes is jail.
Not to mention that after the time is served, getting a job is kind of tough - who wants to hire a convicted criminal?