not completely free, many of us use natural gas for our furnaces, for those with electrical furnaces however you're spot on. With methane, you're merely shifting the cost somewhere else, whether or not it is meaninfully cheaper remains to be seen.
That's spot on what I've been seeing as well (though PS3's still only stay on store shelves a day here). People believe there aren't enough PS3's so don't bother asking. They believe there is some miraculous super supply of Wii's and therefore assume one can be acquired and they're asking constantly.
The fact that there aren't any good games for the PS3 isn't helping. The european launch is the real launch of the PS3, by then there will be a lot of things worth playing and enough of them out there to satisfy some of the demand. People buying them right now are planning ahead (like me), have way more money than brain cells (probably like me) or are really interested in a (silent) high def player, with backwards compatability on PS2 games (though no anti aliasing at the moment, oddly) and a couple of decent games.
Though I was in walmart today and some poor bugger employee made the mistake of carrying 2 PS3's somewhere and he was nearly run over by people (and that was at like 1PM) trying to get one. So there is still demand, but people just assume they don't exist, Nintendo made the mistake of preaching limitless supply so now the only way to get one is line up every morning in front of whatever store you think most likely to have them, and then try not to get robbed on the way out with it, since you were one of the 3 people who got one, of 10 who've been waiting for 2 hours every morning for a week (and no, that wasn't the way it was 2 weeks ago).
Suggesting there is a slippery slope here is a bit of a stretch. Depending on how the filtering is done (and I think we can all agree that is the critically important part here) this could be very good. It means I cannot accidentally end up at a site providing illegal material. Child porn is a bit odd under canadian law (as it is everywhere) because what counts as porn, what counts as a child, what counts as art, what about virtual actors or drawings blah blah blah, meaning that production of child porn is illegal but possession of somethings which other places *may* define as child porn could be legal etc... All in all, if its likely illegal here, I'd rather not land there accidentally, and no one who does browse/pay/participate in those sites has any excuse if they are caught.
If goofle.com and goohle.com both led to child porn, but google.com does not, I would tend to prefer the former two by default be inaccessable. Possession of child porn, either because someone spammed me or because I can't type properly is not really something I want to deal with. Whether you're guilty of anything or not, if your name gets in the paper with 'Child pornography' next to it, your job is gone, your marriage is gone, and all in all you aren't in a good place to be.
I would suspect that making a device which intereferes with first responders (or any gov't) frequency would count as harmful interference and be illegal under most coutnries laws.
The questions is *when* did the US gov't acquire this frequency? If it was well after these things were sold, what on earth were they thinking, and if it was before, who let garage door manufacturers keep making these things?
Has there been a recall?
This might be a lead up to what happens with the change over to digital televions. As far as I know they've auctioned off the old frequencies but what if the old sets and equipment are still around causing intereference? Probably nothing good.
Well actually I don't, my dad pays extra for HDTV channels in canada (ontario, cogeco cable), my GF on rogers cable has the option to pay more for HDTV channels, and if I were so inclined I could as well. What's the problem? I pay more to get high def, if the CBC isn't getting a cut of that they should take it up with rogers, aliant, cogeco et al.
Rather obviously HDTV is more expensive, the makeup, cameras etc... cost more, the bandwidth costs more, the addition of a great many new channels costs more, and correspondingly, we have the option of paying more for it (about 7 bucks a month, which is about 15% of a monthly cable bill, to get half a dozen channels of HD of 60 total).
Now, I can believe that this does not help so much with the added costs of producing in HD, but it is a chicken and an egg problem. If everyone has an HD tv, they would, insofar as possible then prefer to watch in HD, so long as the cost is not unreasonable, if enough people are watching HD or regular Def than the competition for that ad space will drive the cost up. Unfortunately, at the moment not enough people have HD TV's, nor are the HD channels accessable or particularly useful (yes, you too can watch the canadian version of CSpan in high def, go you!)
In Europe one of the big sellers of HDTV's was the world cup, and if you weren't airing high def, people would turn in to someone who was. I suspect (though do not know for sure), that HDTV's are still largely relegated to the realm of the tech savy, and hardcore TV fans. Provide programming in HD that no one else is, that appeals to the market of HD owners and it will pay for itself. This isn't hard. In canada, if you're airing high def stanley cup, and no one else is, you'll capture the HD sports market.
except the Mac Pros don't seem to play nice with regular PCIx video cards under OSX. Yes, they work under windows, but I think it a tad strange to by a mac, install windows and then disable the mac part by installing your own video card.
Admittedly I may be out of date on that, if that's changed I'm all for buying a mac pro with a 7300 video card and dropping in an 8800 or R600 Upon release.
actually I'd prefer just one rig, and have it do everything I need. Admittedly rebooting to play games at peak performance is less than ideal, but cheaper than one really fancy gaming computer and one constant linux box.
If you look at the performance numbers for other (ie non neutered) apple hardware like their notebook line it is comparable to the equivalent wintel OSXless machines, so that's where I premise my arguement.
If I could get the same (high end) performance from a Mac as I can from a PC on games (even under windows with apple hardware), for essentially the same price, yes, I'd rather have the mac. If however, as the current situation is, and the high end mac isn't so high end, I'll build my own bloody system or buy a high end PC and a Mac can wait.
I suspect that GoW takes advantage of some Dx10 functionality and microsoft is using it as an exclusive to spur holiday 360 sales and then will use it to spur vista sales to geeks who feel the 360 is a loud, ugly prone to failure piece of dung.
If you compare the horsepower of a 8800 GTX/GTS with a core 2 duo processor and a 360/PS3, the PC wins, so expect better visuals and higher framerates, though obviously the higher pixel density of monitors may negate some of that bump.
That might happen if Apple stopped selling neutered video cards like the X1900XT with the current mac pros.
Seriously, that's a huge market that for some reason apple has completely missed. Their Mac Pro line is not far off from an ultimate gaming rig, drop in a decent video card (make OSX recognize any PCI express video card properly!), a decent soundcard (which I think they have?), apply 10 minutes of that apple case engineering to make it look pretty and keep cool and voila now you have the ultimate geek toy, it runs OSX out of the box, you can install windows and linux, massive hard drive expansion for games music, movies, and all those operating systems what more could you want?
I think for the same amount of money (give or take the cost of OSX) apple could build machines this good, and people would buy them in droves. Why would any self respecting geek by a 5700 dollar ultimate gaming rig, when they can get a 5800 dollar ultimate gaming rig, that also runs OSX (or a 2000 dollar rig or a 3000 dollar rig)? It needs to support any PCIx card though, so I can drop in a Nvidia 9800 GTX when they come out.
If you want a job in the games industry (as a developer), you need the following (forgive the things I've forgotten): 1: Good C++ engineering skills. Have this as part of your portfolio you send with a resume 2: A good understanding of algorithms in general, both single and multithreaded 3: Datastructures 4: Linear Algebra 5: If you want to be a rendering guy (which I kind of am, though more generally I'm a high performance guy), you need calculus. 6: Basic physics 7: Depending on what specifically you want to do, some 'advanced' (ie second year) physics 8: Operating systems. That is, how does the OS work, how does that impact me as a software developer.
Things that can't hurt: Familiarity with some game specific problems, such as rendering, game AI, the slightly different philosophy for some of the advanced topics like networking and distributed systems. Obviously you need to know how to program in Windows, even minimally. If you have C++ skills by the time you graduate you can easily apply those to consoles and probably mobiles.
Can you get all of those with an MSc in either CS or Game development? I suspect yes. With the game development you're probably marginally more prepared for game dev, after all this is MSc level, not BSc. Being at the MSc level means you're focusing your research interests and advanced topics on the details of some game related problems, but you can do that in a regular MSc just as well as in GD (that's what I'm doing/did, which is graphics stuff as an MSc in CS).
So which is better? The GD might give you a tiny edge over an equivalent CS person (after all you've demonstrated your interest), on the other hand, the CS MSc means you can, after working 80 hours a week for 3 months of 'crunch time' decide to screw this and work somewhere else, and be equally valuable. Also your employer knows you at least on paper are more attractive elsehwere, meaning they may be willing to do a little extra to keep you, at worst they treat you the same as every other developer they have.
Personally, I would do the MSc in CS, with a research topic/thesis on a topic that impacts game developers. If they like you, they'll give you a job, if not you still have a normal sounding MSc on paper you can use to work elsewhere. Esspecially if you're a graphics guy like me, diversify: Take medical imaging as well as game related graphics.
That's mostly what I got from a conference held in london ontario a couple of weeks ago (futureplay).
The only other useful tidbit I picked up, was a game dev studio can be picky enough to take the only the top 10% of CS grads out there. The huge desire to go into the game business means they have a large talent pool, and while right now you may feel you measure up, the last thing you want is to get your degree and find out 3 months from now that you don't.
P.S. I met some of the people setting up this programme at the conference, I may even have met you if you were there (I was the tall thin loud one), it looks like a good program though I'd prefer a MSc in CS with a research topic in game development than a MSc in game development, I don't think you're done a disservice with either.
So then the question is: How does this compare to AMD/ATI's R600 which is due out in some sort of final form somewhere between later this month and early january.
Comparing the 8800 to a x1950 is like comparing a 7800 to an x850 (granted this demonstrates it will at least for a brief period be the fastest card on the market, both in DX9.0c and being the only DX10 card out there that as well). But ATI have had their next gen card in the pipe for a while so presumably we'll see it fairly soon, and it's likely significantly faster than the x1950 series (I've heard estimates from 2-4 times as fast, including an estimate in that range from a former ATI employee, but I have no idea how likely that is to be accurate). How that would compare to the 8800 I'm not sure, but I bet they'll be fairly stiff competition.
Fortunately this can kickstart some life back into the high end computer business, which at the moment has been from what I've seen largely dead waiting on the release of SM4.0 hardware. Sure CPU's are nice and all, but why would anyone have gone out and bought the fastest card on the market for the last 3 or 4 months knowing full well that there is a whole new *featureset* in the immediate future (as opposed to the constant faster version of the same thing, which is unavoidable, radically new features, such as the geometry shader, and the whole new driver model with vista etc... and that sort of thing only comes around every couple of years).
Sadly PC games have spent the last few years on the decline, to the point that in the US it represents as low as 0.5% of sales in some stores (hence Gamestop/EB relegated PC games to a single middle of the floor display rather than a whole wall like PS2), according to the EB managers where I live in canada PC games still represent ~12% nationally (which with 3 consoles, 2 handhelds and PC's means they're holding their own). Of the total PC games market linux represents a small (probably not trivial, but small) fraction.
I think Wow supports linux natively, but otherwise what games do you want? Sports games? Not enough of the market to be worthwhile. All other MMO's? Not worth the effort. I figure each dev supports perhaps 5-10K players in most other MMO games, and I doubt one dev could do the port, and writing from the ground up for Linux useablility isn't popular, since directx is so easy (not that openGl is hard persay, but people still like DirectX). Strategy games might have a market, and I'm a bit suprised that when doing a Mac release companies don't do a windows release as well since the market share isn't that different. RPG's? Well Oblivion is a no go but since NWN how many good RPG's have there really been? And if you're going to do a 360/PC launch title its probably not worth the effort to do a linux release. Maybe the PS3 since it uses Cg and an OpenGl variant as its language, but the whole rest of the architecture is different so I wouldn't bet on it, and what % of PS2 titles come to the PC at all let alone to Linux?
The biggest weakness of PC gaming at the moment IMO is crap video cards sold in both desktops and notebooks (hint hint intel), if games won't play properly on them, people with those systems don't buy games and then the PC games market as a whole is weakened. Within the PC games market there's much better support for the hardware and development under windows (remember if your windows implementation of things don't work there is a whole team at microsoft who may help you depending). I would be interested to know what percent of games that do run under linux are actually run under linux. While linux may be 5% of the desktop market, does it represent 5% of the PC gaming market? 10%? I have no idea. If Microsoft is successful in its revival of PC gaming with vista (a dubious but hopeful claim), it probably won't help the linux market since that's just one more layer of complexity to try and change over, and the truth is that unless XNA is spectacular (and to be fair, its pretty spiffy), the hardware vendors pull their heads out of their asses, much of the PC market is going away, and we'll be left with mostly niche titles anyway, which isn't a bad thing if you like those games, but not going to inpsire anyone to write for linux any time soon.
MS would have been better with a more expesnive but better console. Not necessarily more powerful, but less noisy and less heat. I've got one of the damn things, its sits about a meter away from me and its just plain loud. The heat isn't a problem for me, but it was for other people, they shouldn't have bothered with a hard driveless version at all, yes, more expensive, but an xbox 360 without a hardrive is about as useful as a computer without a hard drive. The hard drive version as is is rather well, weak. My ipod can hold 20 gigs of data and its 3 years old, my xbox 360 should be able to hold well over 20 gigs, which, frankly, it can't.
I think he's right people were, and will be willing to pay more for an xbox 360. Right now the choice is better video card, or xbox 360 (think TES IV: Oblivion)? But that's the point, for 400 bucks US you get a video card that is on par with that in the 360, if you've got an old computer (agp slot), then you can't even buy a video card quite as good as that in the xbox 360, so you need a new Motherboard, new board means you're getting into some pretty serious upgrading.
if they'd let it either dual boot to windows XP or somethign compatible in that vein, and charged 700 bucks for it (make it so students can install mathematica/maple/matlab, and office) and market it as a replacement for a PC with no compatibility issues and they'd have done fine. But that's innovative, are at least asymmetric for the console market, lets try a different tack
If you think of the little things that are annoying about a 360:
Shitty headphone thingy, and its bloody uncomfortatble No charger for a wireless controller too hot too loud (much too loud) too small a harddrive shoddy DVD playback poor cable selection for some people even though it looks like it, the console shouldn't be used in the upright position because of the heightend risk of disk scratching Hideous power brick, which apparently in hot weather needs special attention
By themselves each of these things is a minor nuissance and would each be small problem to fix, but that costs money, making the 360 a piece of junk out of the box, and giving poor press that reflected that. They didn't need to be innovative, but a 120Gig HDD, a decent headset, maybe a chargable battery pack for the controller and some better hardware engineering would have improved it a lot, and probably only cost a couple of hundred bucks more. A better backwards compatiblity list at launch wouldn't have hurt them either
Granted none of this addresses the core problem of the 360, whcih is that there are virtually no good games, and only a handful likely to ever come out for the console, even with XNA, which is as far as I can tell a pretty good development environment. But that's for another time.
Unfortunately you've missed your chance for the big screen likely. The film was slated for one day in a theatre and then DVD on april I think 25th (or thereabouts). Unless of course you're fortunate enough to live near cinema that will play it anyway, even with the DVD out, but I don't live in a big enough city for that sort of thing.
I really would like to see it in theatres though, I saw the japanese as part of our schools anime club, and it really does deserve the big screen (and proper audio).
Oddly enough, FFVII: AC is probably the only thing that will actually sell on UMD and make a profit. Its worth it.
well that would be why they're only building 3 of them between them (the french have another carrier of comparable size the charles de gaule), so that makes 4 total, at ~4 billion US dollars each + air group, out of budgets of ~25 billion USD each (so 16 billion dollars in aircraft carriers over probably 15 years in procurement, compared to 750 billion in military spending). And if you don't build aircraft carries what do you build a naval (invasion) force around? Aircraft are the only things at the moment which could hunt down potential sources of those missiles before they're in range and intercept them. The rest of the naval force, while equally at risk is far less glamourous than an aircraft carrier. The US for example, are building a new generation of aircraft carriers to replace the Nimitz class, the new class will likely be 10-20% larger than the Nimitz (so ~110 000 tons). Then there are missile cruisers, submarines etc... The idea of naval force composition will be to have a little of everything. A task force centered on aircraft carriers, and missile platforms (subs/surface ship) with troop transports and guarded by relatively cheap and relatively disposable ships will remain the norm for at least a few more years. Because don't kid yourself, if the russians have missiles and torpedos that can do that, so do we (or we will soon enough), which puts both parties on level footing.
I think the same arguement can be made for aircrat, and a lot of tanks etc... But we keep building them because warfighting technology is a constant back and forth evolution, we build a better, stealthier aircraft, they build a better radar with faster missile, so we build a better radar, faster missiles, and still faster, stealther aircarft, and repeat indefinately.
While its true that aircraft carriers are basically colonial war type weapons, there are still colonial wars to be fought. As the world sees stability in europe and south america, Africa is going to become more and more a focal point of operations, as well as UN operations where the national governments (who control the aforementioned missiles and rockets) are asking for help against insurgents.
Part of the problem of military equipment procurement (most notably naval capital ships) of course is planning for the 'next' war. Navy ships take a long time to build and usually aren't much use half done (compared to a tank division, which half built is at least half a division), so you have to plan well in advance, and usually its guess work. Who will it be against? Iran, North korea, iraq, the PRC, Japan, someone else? 50 years is a long time, (or more likely 30 years in UK/French service and 20 years in someone elses navy after they've been sold off). In 1900 would britain have predicted two wars with germany (and allied with france) in 40 years? Probably not. Yes yes, entente cordial... but against italy, japan, the ottoman turks, etc...? In 15 or 20 years the world may change again to some other threat. In WW2 the british were desperate for anything armoured that floated, and I think they'd hate to be caught without anything they need. Will, in the next 10 years people counter the threat of surface skimming missiles (lauched at an aircraft carrier at least), or track submarines trying to lauch torpedos? I think that's quite possible. 20 years? Very likely. Of course both sides continue this dance ad nauseum, but that's the nature of the business unfortunately.
When trying to decide what you'll need 20 years from now you can't just throw your hands in the air and say 'its hopeless we give up'. Thats essentially the attitude our government in canada has had, and the problem is that now, when there are *some* wars which are worth fighting (Sudan, specifically darfur, Afghanistan, and ongoing peacekeeping operations), we're depending on someone else to clear a path for us, and in some cases give us a ride, literally. The worst thing you can happen is a war lands on your lap and you're unprepared.
Kill it, start over, change the timeline
on
Future Plans for SWG?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
SWG at this point can't really be saved.
What amazes me is that lucas arts let sony do SWG the way they did. Now Sony, having EQ, you would think we'd have seen everquest in space, if that had been the case (something half way between EQ and EQ2 in terms of technology) it might have been quite successful, maybe not WoW successful, because that didn't have the Sony name attached (the Sony customer service reputation is of course a disaster, although the ticket system in SWG was a huge improvement). Unfortunately what they got was UO on the ground, with space to come later. Granted when the JTL expansion came it was pretty cool, but JTL didn't have any high end content, that is to say, once you got to ace pilot, there wasn't anything to do. Sure you could fly around and kill hordes of crappy npcs for the odd bit of loot. So that's the problem first off the game didn't build on past success (everquest, which at the time was the 400 kilo gorilla in the room), and when they did have content and do things right it fell short. Its like they never expected people to max out their characters at all, let alone in a week or two, which is all it really took. Crafting was neat, and were it easier/more sensible to find resources that could have tied in well with an otherwise EQ style game (the idea being that you get components as loot rather than actual loot).
Now SWG really is beyond saving. Attracting new players to a MMO works one of two ways, either they look at it in the press and decide it looks cool and they'll buy it, or one of their friends who plays convinces them to try it. The negative press for SWG reflects what's happened to the game, its bad, and without players its even worse. The technology looks dated, now that's to be expected with MMO's, but compare to D&D online, WoW or EQ2, SWG looks bad, so its not going to attract new users with eye candy. And its been around long enough that people who do play, have already tried to get their friends in, and have long since given up. The base is what it is, and they aren't getting anyone new, unless they manage to trick them into thinking its empire at war.
One of the fundamental flaws with SWG has always been understanding the fan base. The last 3 movies to an extent suffer from this as well. SWG fans want one thing: Consistency of the universe. Sure they expect that universe to be cool, that's a given and the universide is already cool, now in a game you can expect and allow certain compromises (TIE fighters with shields for players), because its a game everyone gets that, and players are supposed to be 'special' anyway, but balance is important. On the other hand the timeline for SWG never worked, the ground game really didn't make sense, I mean... its star wars and we're out here hunting creatures? Does that make sense? PvP was never implemented particularily well either. That and people want to play jedi, the timeline they picked doesn't allow for jedi, which meant they really had to hack a solution together after the fact, poorly done.
A new SWG, set in one of two periods, either right after episode 3 or right after episode 6, learning a lot of the lessons of WoW, EQ2 etc... could probably have done well, if it was released a year ago. Get the actors to voice some of the dialogue for characters, and give the developers room to be creative with the universe, and take it somewhere interesting. As it was they were trying to fit any idea they had into the time period, which never worked right.
Now though, I think its best to rollback to a UO in the star wars world. That is the fan base, those are the people who were playing and want to play, make it what they want. Don't try and revitalize it, EQ and UO are never going to attract 100 000 more people. The game is what it is, and has the fan base it has, cater to them or shut down. I suspect SWG is sufficiently unprofitable that its time shut down and move those developers to somewhere else, but if it is profitable cater to the people who want a rollback and don't try and get WoW players or D&D players etc...
The PRC government has been making gestures towards limiting PRC players to 3 hours (or some other somewhat arbitrary time), for that reason alone I wouldn't want to play on PRC servers. All sorts of things in wow take much longer than that, and I wouldn't want to invest a great deal of time on a PRC server and then find myself blocked out by their laws unable to continue to enjoy the game.
Possibly there are. Its pretty dubious to assume the police could start cracking any given computer the moment they get it. if they have a computer that is speed X and can crack a machine in 90 days from the moment they get it, it would (assuming the problem is roughly linear, which brute force it is) need one 3.21 x as fast to crack it in 28 days. There may be other legal issues I'm not aware of, not being British. I could well see that the police can confiscate your computer, but may have various proceedures they need to follow about investigating it. For example, if you arrest someone for murder, and confiscate their computer, then find they have been looking at illegal pornography, which does not appear to be related to murder, can you then use that information separately? Can you just look at any old thing on the computer? What about material which may be private, not pertinent, are you even allowed to look at it (say naked pictures of you and your wife), what happens if that gets disclosed to the public? There may not be anything illegal on the computer, but that doesn't mean you want its contents on the public record.
Lets say from the day it arrives it takes a week to get looked at, 3 more to 'crack' it somehow, after that they need to still analyse the data they have, which they may or may not need permission to look at etc... So I can see it taking more than 14 days certainly, and possibly more than 28 days, and even there up to 90 days. That does not however, mean I can see why you would need to keep a suspect in custody for that many days without charge. If the person is suspected of a computer crime, well, you have their computer (and perhaps I can see being allowed to keep the computer 90 days), if its something not specifically computer related, you should have some other evidence.
While I find wikipedia interesting to read and not a bad starting place, because its anonymous its impossible to trace back (and sometimes correct) errors.
With real science there are all sorts of peer reviewed papers that don't lead to anything meaningful, or have errors etc... after all the peer review process doesn't necessarily include verification of results. The problem with wikipedia is that if researchers believe person x died in 2793 BC at the age of 18, and I do oodles of research and conclude in fact that he died at age 19, and then change the wikipedia article to reflect that, and then the previous author who isn't yet familiar goes and changes it back, there's no way to argue this point away really (esspecially if it is a relatively trivial part of otherwise longwinded articles), unless you create a dispute page. Which isn't always worth the effort, nor will it necessarily attract the correct attention. I would be inclined to include a changelog in wikipedia, or 'past versions' that sort of thing so you can see at the bottom of the page what is being changed and perhaps a justification where warranted, granted tools like that are non trivial to write.
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not completely free, many of us use natural gas for our furnaces, for those with electrical furnaces however you're spot on. With methane, you're merely shifting the cost somewhere else, whether or not it is meaninfully cheaper remains to be seen.
That's spot on what I've been seeing as well (though PS3's still only stay on store shelves a day here). People believe there aren't enough PS3's so don't bother asking. They believe there is some miraculous super supply of Wii's and therefore assume one can be acquired and they're asking constantly.
The fact that there aren't any good games for the PS3 isn't helping. The european launch is the real launch of the PS3, by then there will be a lot of things worth playing and enough of them out there to satisfy some of the demand. People buying them right now are planning ahead (like me), have way more money than brain cells (probably like me) or are really interested in a (silent) high def player, with backwards compatability on PS2 games (though no anti aliasing at the moment, oddly) and a couple of decent games.
Though I was in walmart today and some poor bugger employee made the mistake of carrying 2 PS3's somewhere and he was nearly run over by people (and that was at like 1PM) trying to get one. So there is still demand, but people just assume they don't exist, Nintendo made the mistake of preaching limitless supply so now the only way to get one is line up every morning in front of whatever store you think most likely to have them, and then try not to get robbed on the way out with it, since you were one of the 3 people who got one, of 10 who've been waiting for 2 hours every morning for a week (and no, that wasn't the way it was 2 weeks ago).
Suggesting there is a slippery slope here is a bit of a stretch. Depending on how the filtering is done (and I think we can all agree that is the critically important part here) this could be very good. It means I cannot accidentally end up at a site providing illegal material. Child porn is a bit odd under canadian law (as it is everywhere) because what counts as porn, what counts as a child, what counts as art, what about virtual actors or drawings blah blah blah, meaning that production of child porn is illegal but possession of somethings which other places *may* define as child porn could be legal etc... All in all, if its likely illegal here, I'd rather not land there accidentally, and no one who does browse/pay/participate in those sites has any excuse if they are caught.
If goofle.com and goohle.com both led to child porn, but google.com does not, I would tend to prefer the former two by default be inaccessable. Possession of child porn, either because someone spammed me or because I can't type properly is not really something I want to deal with. Whether you're guilty of anything or not, if your name gets in the paper with 'Child pornography' next to it, your job is gone, your marriage is gone, and all in all you aren't in a good place to be.
I would suspect that making a device which intereferes with first responders (or any gov't) frequency would count as harmful interference and be illegal under most coutnries laws.
The questions is *when* did the US gov't acquire this frequency? If it was well after these things were sold, what on earth were they thinking, and if it was before, who let garage door manufacturers keep making these things?
Has there been a recall?
This might be a lead up to what happens with the change over to digital televions. As far as I know they've auctioned off the old frequencies but what if the old sets and equipment are still around causing intereference? Probably nothing good.
Well actually I don't, my dad pays extra for HDTV channels in canada (ontario, cogeco cable), my GF on rogers cable has the option to pay more for HDTV channels, and if I were so inclined I could as well. What's the problem? I pay more to get high def, if the CBC isn't getting a cut of that they should take it up with rogers, aliant, cogeco et al.
Rather obviously HDTV is more expensive, the makeup, cameras etc... cost more, the bandwidth costs more, the addition of a great many new channels costs more, and correspondingly, we have the option of paying more for it (about 7 bucks a month, which is about 15% of a monthly cable bill, to get half a dozen channels of HD of 60 total).
Now, I can believe that this does not help so much with the added costs of producing in HD, but it is a chicken and an egg problem. If everyone has an HD tv, they would, insofar as possible then prefer to watch in HD, so long as the cost is not unreasonable, if enough people are watching HD or regular Def than the competition for that ad space will drive the cost up. Unfortunately, at the moment not enough people have HD TV's, nor are the HD channels accessable or particularly useful (yes, you too can watch the canadian version of CSpan in high def, go you!)
In Europe one of the big sellers of HDTV's was the world cup, and if you weren't airing high def, people would turn in to someone who was. I suspect (though do not know for sure), that HDTV's are still largely relegated to the realm of the tech savy, and hardcore TV fans. Provide programming in HD that no one else is, that appeals to the market of HD owners and it will pay for itself. This isn't hard. In canada, if you're airing high def stanley cup, and no one else is, you'll capture the HD sports market.
except the Mac Pros don't seem to play nice with regular PCIx video cards under OSX. Yes, they work under windows, but I think it a tad strange to by a mac, install windows and then disable the mac part by installing your own video card.
Admittedly I may be out of date on that, if that's changed I'm all for buying a mac pro with a 7300 video card and dropping in an 8800 or R600 Upon release.
actually I'd prefer just one rig, and have it do everything I need. Admittedly rebooting to play games at peak performance is less than ideal, but cheaper than one really fancy gaming computer and one constant linux box.
If you look at the performance numbers for other (ie non neutered) apple hardware like their notebook line it is comparable to the equivalent wintel OSXless machines, so that's where I premise my arguement.
If I could get the same (high end) performance from a Mac as I can from a PC on games (even under windows with apple hardware), for essentially the same price, yes, I'd rather have the mac. If however, as the current situation is, and the high end mac isn't so high end, I'll build my own bloody system or buy a high end PC and a Mac can wait.
"What, they can't play Gears of War?"
m er-leaks-gears-of-war-pc-photo/
In a word: Yet
http://www.younewb.com/index.php/2006/11/16/pc-ga
I suspect that GoW takes advantage of some Dx10 functionality and microsoft is using it as an exclusive to spur holiday 360 sales and then will use it to spur vista sales to geeks who feel the 360 is a loud, ugly prone to failure piece of dung.
If you compare the horsepower of a 8800 GTX/GTS with a core 2 duo processor and a 360/PS3, the PC wins, so expect better visuals and higher framerates, though obviously the higher pixel density of monitors may negate some of that bump.
That might happen if Apple stopped selling neutered video cards like the X1900XT with the current mac pros.
Seriously, that's a huge market that for some reason apple has completely missed. Their Mac Pro line is not far off from an ultimate gaming rig, drop in a decent video card (make OSX recognize any PCI express video card properly!), a decent soundcard (which I think they have?), apply 10 minutes of that apple case engineering to make it look pretty and keep cool and voila now you have the ultimate geek toy, it runs OSX out of the box, you can install windows and linux, massive hard drive expansion for games music, movies, and all those operating systems what more could you want?
I think for the same amount of money (give or take the cost of OSX) apple could build machines this good, and people would buy them in droves. Why would any self respecting geek by a 5700 dollar ultimate gaming rig, when they can get a 5800 dollar ultimate gaming rig, that also runs OSX (or a 2000 dollar rig or a 3000 dollar rig)? It needs to support any PCIx card though, so I can drop in a Nvidia 9800 GTX when they come out.
If you want a job in the games industry (as a developer), you need the following (forgive the things I've forgotten):
1: Good C++ engineering skills. Have this as part of your portfolio you send with a resume
2: A good understanding of algorithms in general, both single and multithreaded
3: Datastructures
4: Linear Algebra
5: If you want to be a rendering guy (which I kind of am, though more generally I'm a high performance guy), you need calculus.
6: Basic physics
7: Depending on what specifically you want to do, some 'advanced' (ie second year) physics
8: Operating systems. That is, how does the OS work, how does that impact me as a software developer.
Things that can't hurt: Familiarity with some game specific problems, such as rendering, game AI, the slightly different philosophy for some of the advanced topics like networking and distributed systems. Obviously you need to know how to program in Windows, even minimally. If you have C++ skills by the time you graduate you can easily apply those to consoles and probably mobiles.
Can you get all of those with an MSc in either CS or Game development? I suspect yes. With the game development you're probably marginally more prepared for game dev, after all this is MSc level, not BSc. Being at the MSc level means you're focusing your research interests and advanced topics on the details of some game related problems, but you can do that in a regular MSc just as well as in GD (that's what I'm doing/did, which is graphics stuff as an MSc in CS).
So which is better? The GD might give you a tiny edge over an equivalent CS person (after all you've demonstrated your interest), on the other hand, the CS MSc means you can, after working 80 hours a week for 3 months of 'crunch time' decide to screw this and work somewhere else, and be equally valuable. Also your employer knows you at least on paper are more attractive elsehwere, meaning they may be willing to do a little extra to keep you, at worst they treat you the same as every other developer they have.
Personally, I would do the MSc in CS, with a research topic/thesis on a topic that impacts game developers. If they like you, they'll give you a job, if not you still have a normal sounding MSc on paper you can use to work elsewhere. Esspecially if you're a graphics guy like me, diversify: Take medical imaging as well as game related graphics.
That's mostly what I got from a conference held in london ontario a couple of weeks ago (futureplay).
The only other useful tidbit I picked up, was a game dev studio can be picky enough to take the only the top 10% of CS grads out there. The huge desire to go into the game business means they have a large talent pool, and while right now you may feel you measure up, the last thing you want is to get your degree and find out 3 months from now that you don't.
P.S. I met some of the people setting up this programme at the conference, I may even have met you if you were there (I was the tall thin loud one), it looks like a good program though I'd prefer a MSc in CS with a research topic in game development than a MSc in game development, I don't think you're done a disservice with either.
So then the question is: How does this compare to AMD/ATI's R600 which is due out in some sort of final form somewhere between later this month and early january.
Comparing the 8800 to a x1950 is like comparing a 7800 to an x850 (granted this demonstrates it will at least for a brief period be the fastest card on the market, both in DX9.0c and being the only DX10 card out there that as well). But ATI have had their next gen card in the pipe for a while so presumably we'll see it fairly soon, and it's likely significantly faster than the x1950 series (I've heard estimates from 2-4 times as fast, including an estimate in that range from a former ATI employee, but I have no idea how likely that is to be accurate). How that would compare to the 8800 I'm not sure, but I bet they'll be fairly stiff competition.
Fortunately this can kickstart some life back into the high end computer business, which at the moment has been from what I've seen largely dead waiting on the release of SM4.0 hardware. Sure CPU's are nice and all, but why would anyone have gone out and bought the fastest card on the market for the last 3 or 4 months knowing full well that there is a whole new *featureset* in the immediate future (as opposed to the constant faster version of the same thing, which is unavoidable, radically new features, such as the geometry shader, and the whole new driver model with vista etc... and that sort of thing only comes around every couple of years).
Sadly PC games have spent the last few years on the decline, to the point that in the US it represents as low as 0.5% of sales in some stores (hence Gamestop/EB relegated PC games to a single middle of the floor display rather than a whole wall like PS2), according to the EB managers where I live in canada PC games still represent ~12% nationally (which with 3 consoles, 2 handhelds and PC's means they're holding their own). Of the total PC games market linux represents a small (probably not trivial, but small) fraction.
I think Wow supports linux natively, but otherwise what games do you want? Sports games? Not enough of the market to be worthwhile. All other MMO's? Not worth the effort. I figure each dev supports perhaps 5-10K players in most other MMO games, and I doubt one dev could do the port, and writing from the ground up for Linux useablility isn't popular, since directx is so easy (not that openGl is hard persay, but people still like DirectX). Strategy games might have a market, and I'm a bit suprised that when doing a Mac release companies don't do a windows release as well since the market share isn't that different. RPG's? Well Oblivion is a no go but since NWN how many good RPG's have there really been? And if you're going to do a 360/PC launch title its probably not worth the effort to do a linux release. Maybe the PS3 since it uses Cg and an OpenGl variant as its language, but the whole rest of the architecture is different so I wouldn't bet on it, and what % of PS2 titles come to the PC at all let alone to Linux?
The biggest weakness of PC gaming at the moment IMO is crap video cards sold in both desktops and notebooks (hint hint intel), if games won't play properly on them, people with those systems don't buy games and then the PC games market as a whole is weakened. Within the PC games market there's much better support for the hardware and development under windows (remember if your windows implementation of things don't work there is a whole team at microsoft who may help you depending). I would be interested to know what percent of games that do run under linux are actually run under linux. While linux may be 5% of the desktop market, does it represent 5% of the PC gaming market? 10%? I have no idea. If Microsoft is successful in its revival of PC gaming with vista (a dubious but hopeful claim), it probably won't help the linux market since that's just one more layer of complexity to try and change over, and the truth is that unless XNA is spectacular (and to be fair, its pretty spiffy), the hardware vendors pull their heads out of their asses, much of the PC market is going away, and we'll be left with mostly niche titles anyway, which isn't a bad thing if you like those games, but not going to inpsire anyone to write for linux any time soon.
MS would have been better with a more expesnive but better console. Not necessarily more powerful, but less noisy and less heat. I've got one of the damn things, its sits about a meter away from me and its just plain loud. The heat isn't a problem for me, but it was for other people, they shouldn't have bothered with a hard driveless version at all, yes, more expensive, but an xbox 360 without a hardrive is about as useful as a computer without a hard drive. The hard drive version as is is rather well, weak. My ipod can hold 20 gigs of data and its 3 years old, my xbox 360 should be able to hold well over 20 gigs, which, frankly, it can't.
I think he's right people were, and will be willing to pay more for an xbox 360. Right now the choice is better video card, or xbox 360 (think TES IV: Oblivion)? But that's the point, for 400 bucks US you get a video card that is on par with that in the 360, if you've got an old computer (agp slot), then you can't even buy a video card quite as good as that in the xbox 360, so you need a new Motherboard, new board means you're getting into some pretty serious upgrading.
if they'd let it either dual boot to windows XP or somethign compatible in that vein, and charged 700 bucks for it (make it so students can install mathematica/maple/matlab, and office) and market it as a replacement for a PC with no compatibility issues and they'd have done fine. But that's innovative, are at least asymmetric for the console market, lets try a different tack
If you think of the little things that are annoying about a 360:
Shitty headphone thingy, and its bloody uncomfortatble
No charger for a wireless controller
too hot
too loud (much too loud)
too small a harddrive
shoddy DVD playback
poor cable selection for some people
even though it looks like it, the console shouldn't be used in the upright position because of the heightend risk of disk scratching
Hideous power brick, which apparently in hot weather needs special attention
By themselves each of these things is a minor nuissance and would each be small problem to fix, but that costs money, making the 360 a piece of junk out of the box, and giving poor press that reflected that. They didn't need to be innovative, but a 120Gig HDD,
a decent headset, maybe a chargable battery pack for the controller and some better hardware engineering would have improved it a lot, and probably only cost a couple of hundred bucks more. A better backwards compatiblity list at launch wouldn't have hurt them either
Granted none of this addresses the core problem of the 360, whcih is that there are virtually no good games, and only a handful likely to ever come out for the console, even with XNA, which is as far as I can tell a pretty good development environment. But that's for another time.
Unfortunately you've missed your chance for the big screen likely. The film was slated for one day in a theatre and then DVD on april I think 25th (or thereabouts). Unless of course you're fortunate enough to live near cinema that will play it anyway, even with the DVD out, but I don't live in a big enough city for that sort of thing.
I really would like to see it in theatres though, I saw the japanese as part of our schools anime club, and it really does deserve the big screen (and proper audio).
Oddly enough, FFVII: AC is probably the only thing that will actually sell on UMD and make a profit. Its worth it.
well that would be why they're only building 3 of them between them (the french have another carrier of comparable size the charles de gaule), so that makes 4 total, at ~4 billion US dollars each + air group, out of budgets of ~25 billion USD each (so 16 billion dollars in aircraft carriers over probably 15 years in procurement, compared to 750 billion in military spending). And if you don't build aircraft carries what do you build a naval (invasion) force around? Aircraft are the only things at the moment which could hunt down potential sources of those missiles before they're in range and intercept them. The rest of the naval force, while equally at risk is far less glamourous than an aircraft carrier. The US for example, are building a new generation of aircraft carriers to replace the Nimitz class, the new class will likely be 10-20% larger than the Nimitz (so ~110 000 tons). Then there are missile cruisers, submarines etc... The idea of naval force composition will be to have a little of everything. A task force centered on aircraft carriers, and missile platforms (subs/surface ship) with troop transports and guarded by relatively cheap and relatively disposable ships will remain the norm for at least a few more years. Because don't kid yourself, if the russians have missiles and torpedos that can do that, so do we (or we will soon enough), which puts both parties on level footing.
I think the same arguement can be made for aircrat, and a lot of tanks etc... But we keep building them because warfighting technology is a constant back and forth evolution, we build a better, stealthier aircraft, they build a better radar with faster missile, so we build a better radar, faster missiles, and still faster, stealther aircarft, and repeat indefinately.
While its true that aircraft carriers are basically colonial war type weapons, there are still colonial wars to be fought. As the world sees stability in europe and south america, Africa is going to become more and more a focal point of operations, as well as UN operations where the national governments (who control the aforementioned missiles and rockets) are asking for help against insurgents.
Part of the problem of military equipment procurement (most notably naval capital ships) of course is planning for the 'next' war. Navy ships take a long time to build and usually aren't much use half done (compared to a tank division, which half built is at least half a division), so you have to plan well in advance, and usually its guess work. Who will it be against? Iran, North korea, iraq, the PRC, Japan, someone else? 50 years is a long time, (or more likely 30 years in UK/French service and 20 years in someone elses navy after they've been sold off). In 1900 would britain have predicted two wars with germany (and allied with france) in 40 years? Probably not. Yes yes, entente cordial... but against italy, japan, the ottoman turks, etc...? In 15 or 20 years the world may change again to some other threat. In WW2 the british were desperate for anything armoured that floated, and I think they'd hate to be caught without anything they need. Will, in the next 10 years people counter the threat of surface skimming missiles (lauched at an aircraft carrier at least), or track submarines trying to lauch torpedos? I think that's quite possible. 20 years? Very likely. Of course both sides continue this dance ad nauseum, but that's the nature of the business unfortunately.
When trying to decide what you'll need 20 years from now you can't just throw your hands in the air and say 'its hopeless we give up'. Thats essentially the attitude our government in canada has had, and the problem is that now, when there are *some* wars which are worth fighting (Sudan, specifically darfur, Afghanistan, and ongoing peacekeeping operations), we're depending on someone else to clear a path for us, and in some cases give us a ride, literally. The worst thing you can happen is a war lands on your lap and you're unprepared.
SWG at this point can't really be saved.
What amazes me is that lucas arts let sony do SWG the way they did. Now Sony, having EQ, you would think we'd have seen everquest in space, if that had been the case (something half way between EQ and EQ2 in terms of technology) it might have been quite successful, maybe not WoW successful, because that didn't have the Sony name attached (the Sony customer service reputation is of course a disaster, although the ticket system in SWG was a huge improvement). Unfortunately what they got was UO on the ground, with space to come later. Granted when the JTL expansion came it was pretty cool, but JTL didn't have any high end content, that is to say, once you got to ace pilot, there wasn't anything to do. Sure you could fly around and kill hordes of crappy npcs for the odd bit of loot. So that's the problem first off the game didn't build on past success (everquest, which at the time was the 400 kilo gorilla in the room), and when they did have content and do things right it fell short. Its like they never expected people to max out their characters at all, let alone in a week or two, which is all it really took. Crafting was neat, and were it easier/more sensible to find resources that could have tied in well with an otherwise EQ style game (the idea being that you get components as loot rather than actual loot).
Now SWG really is beyond saving. Attracting new players to a MMO works one of two ways, either they look at it in the press and decide it looks cool and they'll buy it, or one of their friends who plays convinces them to try it. The negative press for SWG reflects what's happened to the game, its bad, and without players its even worse. The technology looks dated, now that's to be expected with MMO's, but compare to D&D online, WoW or EQ2, SWG looks bad, so its not going to attract new users with eye candy. And its been around long enough that people who do play, have already tried to get their friends in, and have long since given up. The base is what it is, and they aren't getting anyone new, unless they manage to trick them into thinking its empire at war.
One of the fundamental flaws with SWG has always been understanding the fan base. The last 3 movies to an extent suffer from this as well. SWG fans want one thing: Consistency of the universe. Sure they expect that universe to be cool, that's a given and the universide is already cool, now in a game you can expect and allow certain compromises (TIE fighters with shields for players), because its a game everyone gets that, and players are supposed to be 'special' anyway, but balance is important. On the other hand the timeline for SWG never worked, the ground game really didn't make sense, I mean... its star wars and we're out here hunting creatures? Does that make sense? PvP was never implemented particularily well either. That and people want to play jedi, the timeline they picked doesn't allow for jedi, which meant they really had to hack a solution together after the fact, poorly done.
A new SWG, set in one of two periods, either right after episode 3 or right after episode 6, learning a lot of the lessons of WoW, EQ2 etc... could probably have done well, if it was released a year ago. Get the actors to voice some of the dialogue for characters, and give the developers room to be creative with the universe, and take it somewhere interesting. As it was they were trying to fit any idea they had into the time period, which never worked right.
Now though, I think its best to rollback to a UO in the star wars world. That is the fan base, those are the people who were playing and want to play, make it what they want. Don't try and revitalize it, EQ and UO are never going to attract 100 000 more people. The game is what it is, and has the fan base it has, cater to them or shut down. I suspect SWG is sufficiently unprofitable that its time shut down and move those developers to somewhere else, but if it is profitable cater to the people who want a rollback and don't try and get WoW players or D&D players etc...
The PRC government has been making gestures towards limiting PRC players to 3 hours (or some other somewhat arbitrary time), for that reason alone I wouldn't want to play on PRC servers. All sorts of things in wow take much longer than that, and I wouldn't want to invest a great deal of time on a PRC server and then find myself blocked out by their laws unable to continue to enjoy the game.
Possibly there are. Its pretty dubious to assume the police could start cracking any given computer the moment they get it. if they have a computer that is speed X and can crack a machine in 90 days from the moment they get it, it would (assuming the problem is roughly linear, which brute force it is) need one 3.21 x as fast to crack it in 28 days. There may be other legal issues I'm not aware of, not being British. I could well see that the police can confiscate your computer, but may have various proceedures they need to follow about investigating it. For example, if you arrest someone for murder, and confiscate their computer, then find they have been looking at illegal pornography, which does not appear to be related to murder, can you then use that information separately? Can you just look at any old thing on the computer? What about material which may be private, not pertinent, are you even allowed to look at it (say naked pictures of you and your wife), what happens if that gets disclosed to the public? There may not be anything illegal on the computer, but that doesn't mean you want its contents on the public record.
Lets say from the day it arrives it takes a week to get looked at, 3 more to 'crack' it somehow, after that they need to still analyse the data they have, which they may or may not need permission to look at etc... So I can see it taking more than 14 days certainly, and possibly more than 28 days, and even there up to 90 days. That does not however, mean I can see why you would need to keep a suspect in custody for that many days without charge. If the person is suspected of a computer crime, well, you have their computer (and perhaps I can see being allowed to keep the computer 90 days), if its something not specifically computer related, you should have some other evidence.
While I find wikipedia interesting to read and not a bad starting place, because its anonymous its impossible to trace back (and sometimes correct) errors.
With real science there are all sorts of peer reviewed papers that don't lead to anything meaningful, or have errors etc... after all the peer review process doesn't necessarily include verification of results. The problem with wikipedia is that if researchers believe person x died in 2793 BC at the age of 18, and I do oodles of research and conclude in fact that he died at age 19, and then change the wikipedia article to reflect that, and then the previous author who isn't yet familiar goes and changes it back, there's no way to argue this point away really (esspecially if it is a relatively trivial part of otherwise longwinded articles), unless you create a dispute page. Which isn't always worth the effort, nor will it necessarily attract the correct attention. I would be inclined to include a changelog in wikipedia, or 'past versions' that sort of thing so you can see at the bottom of the page what is being changed and perhaps a justification where warranted, granted tools like that are non trivial to write.