then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?"
Spoken like an american who has no clue how good he has it, which is saying a lot given how terrible US education is.
In India, or China or the middle east, assuming the program you want exists there are far more qualified applicants than there are places. So that's the first hurdle. Those spots may be decided by bribes, clan, political connections, or gender. And not 'oh they bias admission to black slightly' I mean 'they don't let you in if you're a woman' kind of bias.
Once you're there you have a problem. All of those political connections, bribes, clan loyalties etc. determine who gets the test questions in advance, and who doesn't. The US system, for all of its faults is relatively honest. If you get a 70% on an assignment then you can be reasonably sure that the identical assignment submitted by someone else should have gotten about 70%. And not 100% for being in the right clan, or 0 for not paying the right bribe to the right person today.
You can't just 'give people skills'. Skills come from practice, honest evaluation and actually being taught something related to the skills you are trying to learn. Those things are work, sometimes hard work, and they cost money. Which is why some places regularly charge a huge amount of money for foreign tuition. You aren't going to become a good programmer by watching youtube videos, and you have no way to prove you know how to program if no one will honestly asses your work. That's why the very best and brightest from a lot of places get sent away: because even their own governments don't trust their own education system.
That is a polite way of saying you clearly don't know how much in bribes an indian guy had to pay to get the job, because you aren't offering up that amount the right way.
Unlike IBM and thinkpad, where the company wasn't in any risk of bankruptcy, it was just not part of the new strategic plan, RIM is a whole other ballgame. They could well be completely bankrupt and liquidated in a couple of years and if someone is dumb enough to pay billions for it we (as in canada) should probably happily take their money. A change in direction might save the company, and failing that billions of dollars is better than not billions of dollars.
Well the point is that the law was not legal. If the law had made you pay a tax that was unconstitutional they'd have to send you a refund. This is simply rolling back all of the gains of the law, and it's up to the legislature to pass a law that would create (or not) and amnesty for it.
In effect this is simply reassessing the taxes for that period under a corrected tax code. They're not writing a new law, they're invalidating one that was applied inappropriately.
But that doesn't mean we need to deliberately hamstring ourselves either. No more than we should be asking people to work on a Wang for everything. We need to keep pace with the technology and culture (and the challenges those pose) like any other field. My first computer networks course was still teaching token ring and FDDI, because they were still relevant as in place technologies at the time. Today, if we talk about them at all, we gloss over them as historical concepts.
Unfortunately CS departments are just that, departments. They're part of a much bigger school, and there isn't the money at most of them for running a dedicated IT system separate from the schools IT system. Assuming they'd be allowed to anyway. And even if they did (and all CS departments end up with some dedicated IT) you can't both grant students access and expect the system to be secure.
Schools that have a lockpicking programme don't let you go around opening labs in the middle of the night - that's the unethical part. We *should* have systems that undergraduates can experiment with hacking as part of learning about security, but not all of us do.
Just because we aren't a tradeschool for programmers doesn't mean some of the students shouldn't have a strong grounding in programming, (and the rest at least a weak grounding in it). You can't really do much in say the theory of programming languages if you've never had to program, or do much in the theory of security if you've never at least been through some basic examples of how encryption and various attacks work. That doesn't mean you should be trying it on in use production systems that the school uses however. No more than fireman should practice on their own building.
The price of war is that innocent people will get killed, and you don't exactly have a choice in all of the wars you fight. I realize there are candidates more in favour of peace than others, but the practical realities of the world have something to say about it. How much oppression of women is worth preventing the death of children over? How many people would the taleban be murdering were it not for the allied presence there? No doubt we can always try and do better, but peace required everyone agree, war needs only one party to decide. And make no mistake about it there is a clash of ideals in the world today. Between Al Qaeda and it's allies, and everyone else. And the US is involved because it's part of the world, and you can't just bury your heads in the sand any more than you could in WW1 or WW2.
If these programmers' work was actually influential in the election's outcome (I doubt it, but for the sake of argument...)
How much did any single ad impact the election? Does any tool that keeps voters interested and likely to go to the polls matter? Were they using their vast databases of people to e-mail spam requests for donations? Every little bit does something, not necessarily something good, but tools are just that, and they can be used well or not at all.
You are, I'm sorry, blatantly naive about the world. Opposite the people who stand for peace are people who stand for nuking afghanistan and pakistan, and the really bad people are the ones who would quite happily for a new Islamic caliphate from morroco to pakistan and kill all of the crusaders (christians), Infidels (Jews) and idol worshipers (shia's) in between. You may think Obama is a bad person, but the truth is we're all bad people. There are literally millions of people around the world at risk of starvation, who are dying of treatable diseases, there are people in the world trying to deny women the chance at an education and healthcare and we're sitting here posting on/. Omission and indifference are killing far more people every year than drone strikes.
6 million children die every year from starvation. (http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/11/17/italy.food.summit/). That's about 11 per minute. So in the time it took you to write your post, and me to reply (about an hour) 3x more people have died due to the solvable problem of hunger than innocent children to drone strikes. And yet.. here we are. And most of those people who do die from hunger do so because some corrupt government (or local warlord or the like) is stealing their food or otherwise helping them along the path to dying.
I'm not saying drones are the right tool for the job, they aren't, and they're making the US more enemies, but 4 years from now you're going to have enemies and a new President who will have to deal with them. Such is the world unfortunately. Whomever won the US presidental race would have woken up this morning to the same harsh reality of a persistent low intensity war around the world, states at risk of collapse due to these extremists, a war in mali, about 40 gun murders a day, about 100 deaths due to car accidents etc. etc. etc. Death and destruction is everywhere, and the US has a lot of enemies, some more deserved than others, but enemies none the less.
It does if you try and wait for whole model parts to load at a time between frames. Not everyones multithreaded rendering is as wonderful as we'd like.
Since when is disk I/O speed or access time relevant to frame rates in a game?
When the engine is trying to grab data in real time from disk.
This is most assuredly *not* every game. But it is some games, or games in some scenarios. In MMO's you don't have enough RAM memory of all of the possible character armours these days, so you have to dynamically grab only that which will be on screen, same with any zone streaming in data from whatever area you have around you.
I can see why people would think this is a HDD speed issue. If you have burst loads of up to say 200 MB/s on a HDD, but average around 20, well then a regular drive will hiccup periodically whereas the SSD won't even bat an eye. As you say, that isn't actually *this* issue.
No, it *was* it just isn't anymore. Maybe that means it hasn't been doing a great job for a few months or the like, but certainly for a couple of years it was the way to go.
And it's still a good idea. Even if it's only the bad (or old) viruses being caught, it's still better than nothing, or something that users can't figure out and don't keep up to date which would be equally bad.
It is only a failure because EA is giving up on it too soon.
No, it's a failure because the producers of the game thought that the first 100 hours of play experience mattered more than the next 900.
Yes at launch it had issues compared to WOW. It is not fair it was not as mature as WOW as it is 7 years old.
SWTOR sold about 2 million copies in its first 2 months, it's down around a 10th of that in players. People wanted the game to be good. It definitely made improvements, but they made enough basically bad choices that it wasn't worth putting up with for 75 or 80% of their playerbase. That wasn't EA's money pile, that was bad design, and when those people left their non-chalant guildmates left with them.
I disagree it is new content. What about the dialogue with your companions that is already done? Just voice edit it and enable gay mode in the menus in the game? Most straight players do not want to see the flirt options with other same sex characters anyway and it should disabled by default.
A new armour model is new content. A new line of dialogue is new content.
They *could* put SGR dialogue on existing things. But that would then only effect new characters or they'd need a system to go back and redo existing plot with a character. And it requires basically redoing huge amounts of dialogue. A gay flirt option doesn't do any good if it doesn't actually create a story branch. That means new dialogue, new cinematics etc. Adding it for existing characters may mean you need to divorce a current romance (whole new dialogue for the rest of the game to have your divorced spouse on your ship).
Just edit the sounds of the existing straight conversions with the new voice replying back.
uh...you need to script and record that dialogue, build in game scenes where appropriate. That costs money. A lot of it.
It's not that it cannot be done, but it's a lot of money and developer time.
Same gender relationships are new content to TOR. New content goes in new places. Trying to back add it into existing content would be a nightmare. It's not that Markab is the 'gay'planet, it's that it's the first planet going forward that supports what they are calling SGR. And all future planets likely will as well.
There are two basic problems with trying to add SGR into existing content
First: Cost. TOR has been an epic financial failure. Trying to rehire a bunch of voice actors, add in appropriate points for them to have SGR dialogue etc. is a lot of work, and importantly:
Second: What do you do for characters that have already done the content you're changing? For good or ill, your character has made a series of choices throughout the game that set the state of that characters relationships (notably with companions). Building huge content branches where you can either change after the fact, or only effect new characters is certainly possible, but it's a lot of work for content a lot of players aren't going to see.
Besides that, as was said, BioWare didn't really understand just what it was getting itself into with an MMO, and discovering after the fact that this is going to take a lot longer than they thought necessarily means making some compromises. And the longer it goes on without SGR the harder it becomes to fix because there will be more players who've gone through the existing content because they've given up waiting on the developers.
First, proper wear leveling considers the entire disk (or at least a particular slice of it) as candidates for replacement
yes, but not really relevant if you're only rarely ever writing anything to the disk at all. Yes, when you do write 1GB of changes it pushes data around to the most suitable sector for it, but you have to have data you are trying to write at all for that to be relevant.
Your capacity should never shrink. With an SSD, by the time you start getting write errors, it's time to copy all the data off the drive and scrap it.
All of my SSD's (and I've got 6 around here right now) started with about 0.1% of sectors not working, and have gradually crept up since then to somewhere around 0.4%. That seems to be pretty normal.
How often do you really rewrite most of the contents of a drive though? With a 60 or 120 gig drive the vast majority of your space is going to be taken up by relatively static programs (OS and productivity programs themselves), give or take patch cycles that change some of the stuff. With a 960 gig drive now you're looking at a significant amount of user data, so that might not survive as long, but most drives can also detect a failed sector and turn it off so it might be that you start to see see the effective capacity of the drive shrinking.
It's sized for people who don't want to think about what to store on the drive and can pay 12x the price of a regular drive the do that, or for people who need to work on large files at high speed. In the same way the market for 64 Gig of ram machines is low but high value. People who want that performance will pay for it.
I agree with a couple of other people though, I think the way this makes the most sense to go is mainstream commercial drives with a fast SSD cache and slower magnetic tap drive, and they could be cheap, but I could be wrong, in 6 or 7 years SSD's could be just double the price of magnetic drives and that makes high capacity appealing for the convenience if nothing else.
SSD speeds require there to be *some* free space on the drive, but that's not an issue so much in the 240 Gig + drives because you can easily find a few GB to leave free.
Typical tuition here is 7k-11k for a local student for 10 courses lasting 12 weeks each (4 month courses, 12 weeks of instruction + exams). If a 'course' is actually an 8 month then 1400 dollars per course is about right.
Now the catch: Tuition for a foreign student is 20k/year. Ah ha. That's why the chinese market is so interesting. UC is a very prestigious school if you're in india or china, because even bad north american universities are way better than most of the schools in china or india (in terms of prestige anyway). And you could pay 7k per course and not have to fly half way around the world to do so.
The article talks about a pre-calculus course worth 4 credits. according to http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/manual/rpart3.html 1 has
"The value of a course in units shall be reckoned at the rate of one unit for three hours' work per week per term on the part of a student, or the equivalent."
Says 180 credits to graduate. So you need 45 credits per year. This would put their costs at 16k/year in tuition. Still cheaper than foreign student tuition (and no living costs), but not as lucrative as being a local resident going to school. Which seems exactly like the market it was aimed at.
The most dominant factor in crime, including murders are poverty and corrupt police forces (as in, what we're seeing in india where reporting a rape to the police can get you raped, and justice is so wildly perverted by bribes, and a lack of bribes that it's hard to know who to trust).
Well that and demographics, since it's mostly 15-30 year olds committing crime, so Japan's crime is actually pretty close to the EU and US average for people in the 15-30 bracket, just they have a much older population on average.
Gun control mitigates the damage criminals do, and significantly raises the difficulty of getting enraged and killing someone with a particularly lethal weapon at hand. The UK and germany for example have much higher violent crime rates than the US (and a lot of that is stabbings, and football hooliganism), but much lower murder rates because criminals in those places try and stab rather than shoot.
If they can't afford windows they can't afford hardware for playing most games on, and that's not a segment I would target anyway. Nor am I interested in targeting a game to pirates.
The problem is that Linux gamers do not exist in the eyes of the developer
It's not that they don't exist. It's that they're the ones most capable of sorting out their own setup and having multiple computers etc. Because there aren't a lot of technically inept people running linux as a desktop at home.
If you make a 'linux' version of your game, for how many of your customers is the fastest solution to their problem to just use windows or a particular linux version? How many of those customers can manage that on their own? With linux, the answer is all of them. If you're a linux user and want to play a game you try it under wine and if that doesn't work you use a windows machine. For the technically illiterate... those are the ones we want to get money from and who need the most development support time.
But, and it's a big but, windows 8 is horrid. It's horrid to use, but more importantly on the business side of things, it's horrid to software developers. We do not want to support it. If consumers decide to adopt it in droves (or the same basic business problems are in Windows 9 and it is adopted in droves) we have a problem. But I'd rather not be scrambling to make a linux version after I've discovered that consumers are fleeing windows to android/linux tablets and desktops or god knows what. Then you're way behind the curve and trying to play catch up, and that's a bad place to be.
Ah but these things are fixed costs. And a tiny fraction of a huge number can itself be more money than a lot of games get.
1% of blizzards 10 million subs would be more than the last 2 games I worked on sold.. combined. (And those have 5-7 person dev teams, that pay decent salary to everyone).
Also, blizzard has enough people who are CS geeks, who read/. and are linux nerds that it probably works fine for them. Whether or not it is immediately worth it to spend a couple of hundred thousands dollars to a few million on a linux version is harder to say, but they have money they can afford to waste (after all, Activision make a lot of games, some of which flop, it happens, and those all waste piles of money too). Everyone in the industry right now is looking at how to get away from Windows if MS is really going to be committed to the windows 8 store and 'app' lockin to the windows store.
Slashdot Mirror
then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?"
Spoken like an american who has no clue how good he has it, which is saying a lot given how terrible US education is.
In India, or China or the middle east, assuming the program you want exists there are far more qualified applicants than there are places. So that's the first hurdle. Those spots may be decided by bribes, clan, political connections, or gender. And not 'oh they bias admission to black slightly' I mean 'they don't let you in if you're a woman' kind of bias.
Once you're there you have a problem. All of those political connections, bribes, clan loyalties etc. determine who gets the test questions in advance, and who doesn't. The US system, for all of its faults is relatively honest. If you get a 70% on an assignment then you can be reasonably sure that the identical assignment submitted by someone else should have gotten about 70%. And not 100% for being in the right clan, or 0 for not paying the right bribe to the right person today.
You can't just 'give people skills'. Skills come from practice, honest evaluation and actually being taught something related to the skills you are trying to learn. Those things are work, sometimes hard work, and they cost money. Which is why some places regularly charge a huge amount of money for foreign tuition. You aren't going to become a good programmer by watching youtube videos, and you have no way to prove you know how to program if no one will honestly asses your work. That's why the very best and brightest from a lot of places get sent away: because even their own governments don't trust their own education system.
It means the law has to be revisited when the 300k cap is hit, rather than listening to complaints every year.
That is a polite way of saying you clearly don't know how much in bribes an indian guy had to pay to get the job, because you aren't offering up that amount the right way.
Unlike IBM and thinkpad, where the company wasn't in any risk of bankruptcy, it was just not part of the new strategic plan, RIM is a whole other ballgame. They could well be completely bankrupt and liquidated in a couple of years and if someone is dumb enough to pay billions for it we (as in canada) should probably happily take their money. A change in direction might save the company, and failing that billions of dollars is better than not billions of dollars.
Well the point is that the law was not legal. If the law had made you pay a tax that was unconstitutional they'd have to send you a refund. This is simply rolling back all of the gains of the law, and it's up to the legislature to pass a law that would create (or not) and amnesty for it.
In effect this is simply reassessing the taxes for that period under a corrected tax code. They're not writing a new law, they're invalidating one that was applied inappropriately.
They aren't.
But that doesn't mean we need to deliberately hamstring ourselves either. No more than we should be asking people to work on a Wang for everything. We need to keep pace with the technology and culture (and the challenges those pose) like any other field. My first computer networks course was still teaching token ring and FDDI, because they were still relevant as in place technologies at the time. Today, if we talk about them at all, we gloss over them as historical concepts.
Unfortunately CS departments are just that, departments. They're part of a much bigger school, and there isn't the money at most of them for running a dedicated IT system separate from the schools IT system. Assuming they'd be allowed to anyway. And even if they did (and all CS departments end up with some dedicated IT) you can't both grant students access and expect the system to be secure.
Schools that have a lockpicking programme don't let you go around opening labs in the middle of the night - that's the unethical part. We *should* have systems that undergraduates can experiment with hacking as part of learning about security, but not all of us do.
Just because we aren't a tradeschool for programmers doesn't mean some of the students shouldn't have a strong grounding in programming, (and the rest at least a weak grounding in it). You can't really do much in say the theory of programming languages if you've never had to program, or do much in the theory of security if you've never at least been through some basic examples of how encryption and various attacks work. That doesn't mean you should be trying it on in use production systems that the school uses however. No more than fireman should practice on their own building.
Bad is relative.
The price of war is that innocent people will get killed, and you don't exactly have a choice in all of the wars you fight. I realize there are candidates more in favour of peace than others, but the practical realities of the world have something to say about it. How much oppression of women is worth preventing the death of children over? How many people would the taleban be murdering were it not for the allied presence there? No doubt we can always try and do better, but peace required everyone agree, war needs only one party to decide. And make no mistake about it there is a clash of ideals in the world today. Between Al Qaeda and it's allies, and everyone else. And the US is involved because it's part of the world, and you can't just bury your heads in the sand any more than you could in WW1 or WW2.
If these programmers' work was actually influential in the election's outcome (I doubt it, but for the sake of argument...)
How much did any single ad impact the election? Does any tool that keeps voters interested and likely to go to the polls matter? Were they using their vast databases of people to e-mail spam requests for donations? Every little bit does something, not necessarily something good, but tools are just that, and they can be used well or not at all.
You are, I'm sorry, blatantly naive about the world. Opposite the people who stand for peace are people who stand for nuking afghanistan and pakistan, and the really bad people are the ones who would quite happily for a new Islamic caliphate from morroco to pakistan and kill all of the crusaders (christians), Infidels (Jews) and idol worshipers (shia's) in between. You may think Obama is a bad person, but the truth is we're all bad people. There are literally millions of people around the world at risk of starvation, who are dying of treatable diseases, there are people in the world trying to deny women the chance at an education and healthcare and we're sitting here posting on /. Omission and indifference are killing far more people every year than drone strikes.
6 million children die every year from starvation. (http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/11/17/italy.food.summit/). That's about 11 per minute. So in the time it took you to write your post, and me to reply (about an hour) 3x more people have died due to the solvable problem of hunger than innocent children to drone strikes. And yet.. here we are. And most of those people who do die from hunger do so because some corrupt government (or local warlord or the like) is stealing their food or otherwise helping them along the path to dying.
I'm not saying drones are the right tool for the job, they aren't, and they're making the US more enemies, but 4 years from now you're going to have enemies and a new President who will have to deal with them. Such is the world unfortunately. Whomever won the US presidental race would have woken up this morning to the same harsh reality of a persistent low intensity war around the world, states at risk of collapse due to these extremists, a war in mali, about 40 gun murders a day, about 100 deaths due to car accidents etc. etc. etc. Death and destruction is everywhere, and the US has a lot of enemies, some more deserved than others, but enemies none the less.
It does if you try and wait for whole model parts to load at a time between frames. Not everyones multithreaded rendering is as wonderful as we'd like.
Only kinda. You clearly meant at some point in the past, but it's not obvious if you meant the last six months, or the last 2 years or something else.
Since when is disk I/O speed or access time relevant to frame rates in a game?
When the engine is trying to grab data in real time from disk.
This is most assuredly *not* every game. But it is some games, or games in some scenarios. In MMO's you don't have enough RAM memory of all of the possible character armours these days, so you have to dynamically grab only that which will be on screen, same with any zone streaming in data from whatever area you have around you.
I can see why people would think this is a HDD speed issue. If you have burst loads of up to say 200 MB/s on a HDD, but average around 20, well then a regular drive will hiccup periodically whereas the SSD won't even bat an eye. As you say, that isn't actually *this* issue.
At least with MSSE it will silently update, millions of users running security software that isn't up to date isn't doing them any favours either.
No, it *was* it just isn't anymore. Maybe that means it hasn't been doing a great job for a few months or the like, but certainly for a couple of years it was the way to go.
And it's still a good idea. Even if it's only the bad (or old) viruses being caught, it's still better than nothing, or something that users can't figure out and don't keep up to date which would be equally bad.
How does skype work with 36 people in a serve
Fine
But for
Also I never have echo or other problems with Xbox Live I have terrible problems with Skype.
Skype works about as well for multi person chat as it does for two.
It is only a failure because EA is giving up on it too soon.
No, it's a failure because the producers of the game thought that the first 100 hours of play experience mattered more than the next 900.
Yes at launch it had issues compared to WOW. It is not fair it was not as mature as WOW as it is 7 years old.
SWTOR sold about 2 million copies in its first 2 months, it's down around a 10th of that in players. People wanted the game to be good. It definitely made improvements, but they made enough basically bad choices that it wasn't worth putting up with for 75 or 80% of their playerbase. That wasn't EA's money pile, that was bad design, and when those people left their non-chalant guildmates left with them.
I disagree it is new content. What about the dialogue with your companions that is already done? Just voice edit it and enable gay mode in the menus in the game? Most straight players do not want to see the flirt options with other same sex characters anyway and it should disabled by default.
A new armour model is new content. A new line of dialogue is new content.
They *could* put SGR dialogue on existing things. But that would then only effect new characters or they'd need a system to go back and redo existing plot with a character. And it requires basically redoing huge amounts of dialogue. A gay flirt option doesn't do any good if it doesn't actually create a story branch. That means new dialogue, new cinematics etc. Adding it for existing characters may mean you need to divorce a current romance (whole new dialogue for the rest of the game to have your divorced spouse on your ship).
Just edit the sounds of the existing straight conversions with the new voice replying back.
uh...you need to script and record that dialogue, build in game scenes where appropriate. That costs money. A lot of it.
It's not that it cannot be done, but it's a lot of money and developer time.
That's on a new character.
You don't replay the same (story) content on the same character.
And most players don't want to keep making new characters. Also, the leveling curve is short enough a lot of people already full leveled one of each.
Same gender relationships are new content to TOR. New content goes in new places. Trying to back add it into existing content would be a nightmare. It's not that Markab is the 'gay'planet, it's that it's the first planet going forward that supports what they are calling SGR. And all future planets likely will as well.
There are two basic problems with trying to add SGR into existing content
First: Cost. TOR has been an epic financial failure. Trying to rehire a bunch of voice actors, add in appropriate points for them to have SGR dialogue etc. is a lot of work, and importantly:
Second: What do you do for characters that have already done the content you're changing? For good or ill, your character has made a series of choices throughout the game that set the state of that characters relationships (notably with companions). Building huge content branches where you can either change after the fact, or only effect new characters is certainly possible, but it's a lot of work for content a lot of players aren't going to see.
Besides that, as was said, BioWare didn't really understand just what it was getting itself into with an MMO, and discovering after the fact that this is going to take a lot longer than they thought necessarily means making some compromises. And the longer it goes on without SGR the harder it becomes to fix because there will be more players who've gone through the existing content because they've given up waiting on the developers.
First, proper wear leveling considers the entire disk (or at least a particular slice of it) as candidates for replacement
yes, but not really relevant if you're only rarely ever writing anything to the disk at all. Yes, when you do write 1GB of changes it pushes data around to the most suitable sector for it, but you have to have data you are trying to write at all for that to be relevant.
Your capacity should never shrink. With an SSD, by the time you start getting write errors, it's time to copy all the data off the drive and scrap it.
All of my SSD's (and I've got 6 around here right now) started with about 0.1% of sectors not working, and have gradually crept up since then to somewhere around 0.4%. That seems to be pretty normal.
How often do you really rewrite most of the contents of a drive though? With a 60 or 120 gig drive the vast majority of your space is going to be taken up by relatively static programs (OS and productivity programs themselves), give or take patch cycles that change some of the stuff. With a 960 gig drive now you're looking at a significant amount of user data, so that might not survive as long, but most drives can also detect a failed sector and turn it off so it might be that you start to see see the effective capacity of the drive shrinking.
It's sized for people who don't want to think about what to store on the drive and can pay 12x the price of a regular drive the do that, or for people who need to work on large files at high speed. In the same way the market for 64 Gig of ram machines is low but high value. People who want that performance will pay for it.
I agree with a couple of other people though, I think the way this makes the most sense to go is mainstream commercial drives with a fast SSD cache and slower magnetic tap drive, and they could be cheap, but I could be wrong, in 6 or 7 years SSD's could be just double the price of magnetic drives and that makes high capacity appealing for the convenience if nothing else.
SSD speeds require there to be *some* free space on the drive, but that's not an issue so much in the 240 Gig + drives because you can easily find a few GB to leave free.
Careful how you define 'course'.
Typical tuition here is 7k-11k for a local student for 10 courses lasting 12 weeks each (4 month courses, 12 weeks of instruction + exams). If a 'course' is actually an 8 month then 1400 dollars per course is about right.
Now the catch: Tuition for a foreign student is 20k/year. Ah ha. That's why the chinese market is so interesting. UC is a very prestigious school if you're in india or china, because even bad north american universities are way better than most of the schools in china or india (in terms of prestige anyway). And you could pay 7k per course and not have to fly half way around the world to do so.
The article talks about a pre-calculus course worth 4 credits. according to http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/manual/rpart3.html 1 has
"The value of a course in units shall be reckoned at the rate of one unit for three hours' work per week per term on the part of a student, or the equivalent."
http://senate.ucsc.edu/manual/santacruz-division-manual/part-two-regulations/section-three-ug-program/chapter-ten-requirementsfordegrees/index.html
Says 180 credits to graduate. So you need 45 credits per year. This would put their costs at 16k/year in tuition. Still cheaper than foreign student tuition (and no living costs), but not as lucrative as being a local resident going to school. Which seems exactly like the market it was aimed at.
And here I thought it was gun control
The most dominant factor in crime, including murders are poverty and corrupt police forces (as in, what we're seeing in india where reporting a rape to the police can get you raped, and justice is so wildly perverted by bribes, and a lack of bribes that it's hard to know who to trust).
Well that and demographics, since it's mostly 15-30 year olds committing crime, so Japan's crime is actually pretty close to the EU and US average for people in the 15-30 bracket, just they have a much older population on average.
Gun control mitigates the damage criminals do, and significantly raises the difficulty of getting enraged and killing someone with a particularly lethal weapon at hand. The UK and germany for example have much higher violent crime rates than the US (and a lot of that is stabbings, and football hooliganism), but much lower murder rates because criminals in those places try and stab rather than shoot.
If they can't afford windows they can't afford hardware for playing most games on, and that's not a segment I would target anyway. Nor am I interested in targeting a game to pirates.
The problem is that Linux gamers do not exist in the eyes of the developer
It's not that they don't exist. It's that they're the ones most capable of sorting out their own setup and having multiple computers etc. Because there aren't a lot of technically inept people running linux as a desktop at home.
If you make a 'linux' version of your game, for how many of your customers is the fastest solution to their problem to just use windows or a particular linux version? How many of those customers can manage that on their own? With linux, the answer is all of them. If you're a linux user and want to play a game you try it under wine and if that doesn't work you use a windows machine. For the technically illiterate... those are the ones we want to get money from and who need the most development support time.
But, and it's a big but, windows 8 is horrid. It's horrid to use, but more importantly on the business side of things, it's horrid to software developers. We do not want to support it. If consumers decide to adopt it in droves (or the same basic business problems are in Windows 9 and it is adopted in droves) we have a problem. But I'd rather not be scrambling to make a linux version after I've discovered that consumers are fleeing windows to android/linux tablets and desktops or god knows what. Then you're way behind the curve and trying to play catch up, and that's a bad place to be.
Ah but these things are fixed costs. And a tiny fraction of a huge number can itself be more money than a lot of games get.
1% of blizzards 10 million subs would be more than the last 2 games I worked on sold.. combined. (And those have 5-7 person dev teams, that pay decent salary to everyone).
Also, blizzard has enough people who are CS geeks, who read /. and are linux nerds that it probably works fine for them. Whether or not it is immediately worth it to spend a couple of hundred thousands dollars to a few million on a linux version is harder to say, but they have money they can afford to waste (after all, Activision make a lot of games, some of which flop, it happens, and those all waste piles of money too). Everyone in the industry right now is looking at how to get away from Windows if MS is really going to be committed to the windows 8 store and 'app' lockin to the windows store.
Steam IS DRM.