arc de triomphe, Trafalgar square, brandenburg gate, etc?
Whatever you may think of the two bombings in particular lots of countries have killed a lot more people in their wars, and built varying types of monuments. Should the war museums in britain not have lancaster bombers given how they were used to obliterate cities? How about any monument to the royal navy which was basically built to starve continental adversaries into submission?
For all it's faults the manhattan project was also one of the largest research projects in history, if not the largest, and I think it's important to remember just went into making it, how much money and resources can be spent testing ideas in a desperate hope to find one that works, and a tribute to the people who did the work to make it happen at all. It's important to recognize the consequences of that work too, but it really was tremendous work and genius to realize the potential of uranium and plutonium, good and bad.
Surfance specifically though is expensive, and there's no obvious reason why you'd want it. Windows 8 is horrid. Everyone I know who has installed it has been desperate to get rid of it, 16 year old tech savvy kids, 16 year old technically inept kids, their 40 year old parents, computer scientists, IT people, physicists, fine arts grad, game, developers and designers.
Surface itself, the hardware, is probably OK, but it's worthless without a slate suited OS, and that isn't windows 7. So you have to spend a lot of money on hardware, with software that you won't really like, and importantly, given the negative reception, I would presume windows 9 will behave very differently from 8, but I have no idea how differently, and that's the problem. What would you be buying into with Surface? Is this a dead product before it goes anywhere? Will it support windows 9? You'd hope, but then after the WP7, WP8 thing I'd be skeptical.
Until the 3rd party guys really get into the game it's hard to see where this is going, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're holding onto what they have until MS has to admit Surface as a failure before they do their thing. Corporate politics and all that.
This is about them wanting stored records of all texts. My point wasn't technical though, it was just that people use technology that isn't secure, even when they should know it isn't secure.
If it was that easy the police wouldn't have been able to wiretap anything once skype came out (until the MS takeover and it is presumably now wire-tappable).
The phone system isn't secure, from the government or hackers, but people still use it for all sorts of business. People who know full well their technology can be tapped and tracked still use it for criminal purposes, because most people, criminals included, are stupid.
And the thing is, the dropouts who create successful tech companies don't do it alone usually, and there are lots of people who've made successful tech companies after (or part way through) more advanced degrees.
I went down the list of wealthy people who didn't inherit their billions and a few names jumped out (so I'm excluding the koch brothers and the waltons here).
Sergey Brinn has an masters in computer science and was part way through a PhD when he started to form google. Larry Page is the same. Warren Buffet has an MSc in economics, Michael Bloomberg has an MBA, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has BSc in computer science from Princeton. Steve Ballmer has a BA, and dropped out of a masters.
I don't count dropping out of a masters as a 'college dropout'. Larry Elison, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs those guys (who are, I might note all a different generation than today) were very successful in the 70's and 80's when demand for people who were even minimally technically competence was not being met with a supply of graduates at all. Zuckerberg and Dorsey (of Twitter) both got far enough into their degrees that they should have learned something which benefited them, whether they finish year 4 and go to a graduation ceremony or not is somewhat secondary.
Sure, it works for a couple of dozen of lucky people per year, but for the rest, it's an abysmal failure.
And for the ones that do win the sports or IPO lottery, they need something to do from when they're 35 on. Kurt Schilling or however you spell his name tried to make 38 studios, which went bankrupt because he overreached and he might lose his sizable sports fortune as a result.
You can certainly be successful without college. If your plan is to go into music, or theology you're probably better off not going to college financially. That's a fair, reasonably and legitimate criticism, especially if you're discussing it in the costs of rising education. If it was going to cost you 4 years of lost earnings and say 20 grand in debt, to get a degree that's a different calculation than 4 years of lost earning power and 80k in debt. For the first case just about any degree is probably worth it financially, or at least, the net cost is low enough to not be a huge problem. The latter case you really need to be one of the engineering or science or maths disciplines to justify the cost.
Lots of people make very successful careers doing second year level work, despite having 4 year degrees. These dropouts were able to do 2nd or 3rd year level stuff, well enough to do work, like a co-op student who doesn't come back. I don't think that's a failure of the post secondary system, that a success that they go to the point of being demonstrably useful after 2 years.
Because it's so monumentally bizarre that it's worth laughing at?
Would you really want to go into work on monday morning, and not know that North Korea had claimed to find a Unicorn lair?
Lets say korea had a myth of a giant cave under pyongyang where a unicorn lived, that was accessed via a bottomless well. I didn't say the legend had to make sense, bear with me a moment. So some archaeologist goes digging around under pyongyang and finds a really massive cave, and there are some remains in it that appear to be people, and it looks like there might have been a couple of places where there could have been a hole in the ceiling at some point in the past. So then the archaeologist writes an article that says 'lair mentioned in unicorn myth may have been a real place'. That's not funny. That's not a/. post unless he did it with some fancy computer algorithm and google streetview or the like. But traditional digging around archeology? Naw, not important to slashot.
But this. This is different. This appears to be claiming an actual real unicorn lair. That's hilariously crazy. And the thing with north korea is you can't tell if it's an onion piece, their version of the onion piece, or something they are seriously claiming. But it seems legit - and that makes it even more funny. Now the dude in question (who rode said unicorn) and the temple this lair is under appear to be real physical tangible things that are a least in part historically correct. And then there's a bit about a unicorn.
The guy who claimed to sequence bigfoot DNA doesn't warrant the front page, he's just a random crazy person. He's only interesting in conjunction with the story. Now I grant you, north korea is institutionally crazy, but usually they're more 'the dear leader is perfect and we're going to fire missiles over japan to please him' kind of crazy. They're still firing missiles, but they're independently claiming a real unicorn lair. That's crazy even by north korean standards of crazy, and it's not threatening, which makes it hilarious.
It seems to me that assuming a poisson distribution [wikipedia.org]) or other random distribution, is a bad assumption.
it definitely is a bad assumption.
But if you are trying to solve the general problem of where to position an elevator or a disk head in general you have to. That's why it's an 'undergraduate' level problem. The serious research today comes in knowing what the real data will be like, and whether or not you can optimize for real data rather than an average best case for any arbitrary data set.
That's an undergraduate level general optimization problem.
The one in TFA is a graduate level optimization under a particular set of data constraints. So the generally optimal algorithm for elevators has to a assume a random distribution of people to be picked up and destination floors (head is in a random location wants data from some other random location) - but in practice you may be need sequential access or the like. With elevators, I would expect that in mornings in residential buildings people want to empty out so the 'resting' point would to close to 2/3rds or 3/4ths of the way up, but in the evenings it would be the reverse direction, and business would be the reverse of residential. Schools have a somewhat more random use of bursty every hour up and down, and really big businesses may want dedicated elevators between floors shared by particular companies because there's a lot of daily movement within the floors of a company but not so much outside their area.
Lunch of course adds another complication.
There's a lot of neat work into simulating the data for a building that doesn't exist yet, or measuring the data for a building that exists but has a bad algorithm. And then trying to tailor your elevator to the specific behaviours that actually exist.
Markets certainly reward franchises. There's room for innovation, but now is not the time for it. Right now is the end of a console lifecycle and no one wants to go too far out on a limb on this generation.
Note that Borderlands, which isn't on your list was a brand new franchise not too long ago, Xcom has done very well which is a resurrection of a very old genre. You only need to sell about 500 or 600 k copies to make a decent amount of money on a moderate sized title (you aim for a million for a console title generally with ad cost etc. ).
The only big new IP lately is Dishonoured, which is a sort of action stealth game in cyberpunk world, pretty standard stuff to do technically so the technical side is low risk and the gameplay is reasonably generic, but at least it's new IP.
EA risked 300 million dollars on SWTOR and lost 200 million.
They will, eventually recoup some of that money, depending on how long it last and how well the F2P transition actually goes. But there's only so much tolerance for risk, and when you gamble and lose big like that you need to lick your wounds for a while.
There's nothing wrong with some risk but the last big space games were freelancer and the Jump to Lightspeed expansion to SWG, earth and beyond tanked and Eve has 300k players. Star Trek online is still going but it's a very very niche product at best.
Markets evolve, and making a good game can be expensive. If EA is going in they're going in for 30 or 40 million dollars likely, (not always but most of the big publishers are only going in for big money) but it's not clear they'd be able to make 30 or 40 million back. 6-10 probably. Deep involved space RPG shooters just don't have the appeal they used to, it's a bit like skyrim in space, you could make 300 million dollars or 3. And until it's out the door it's hard to predict which. The problem with trying to be an indie publisher is you don't have a bottomless pit of money from which to fund dozens of projects, and right now markets are very risk averse. Getting a bank to give you 4 or 5 million dollars to develop a game with no similar market product is not trivial.
The next gen console market will shake things up a bit, as people try new things and find new traction in a new market, but for the moment we're waiting.
And the thing with (for example) the space shooter is that a couple of them might be really good and make money, and most of them might be terrible and the people would lose their shirts, and it's hard to know what a good space shooter is going to be when there aren't other space shooters around that people can compare to. Nostalgia only gets you so far, and you have to have working tech (not a lot of working space shooter engines out there, even to prototype with), you have to know just what exactly makes it 'fun' for a new market that needs to be 10x the size of the old wing commander market.
15 years from now I expect the gaming market will have changed in a completely different way. There will be super rich guys who grew up gaming (much as I despise him, think Mark Zuckerberg types, not necessarily that rich, but still rich) who will be willing to fund pet projects like Kurt Schilling did with 38 studios, but who will be able to lose 50 million dollars and laugh it off. It will be like people who buy sports teams, they'll fund games. They'll fund nostalgia projects, they'll fund new innovative stuff and be willing to laugh off failure. That will be good for the industry as a whole, and might do a lot of good to bring in people who aren't 'games industry' guys, but oil tycoons, or rich inheritors, bankers mobile phone people, Apple guys etc.
The main disappointment with windows 8 is that it's inconsistent in how it behaves, and because windows 8 is inconsistent the different types of apps are inconsistent, and it eliminates the most basic useful element of windows, which was simply accessible list of all of the shit on your computer you don't need to scroll through.
Don't get me wrong, Windows 8 has some technical progress, and it might be a useful foundation for windows 9. But it should never have been let out the door in its current form.
They aren't supposed to really compete on any point.
Surface are deliberately overpriced so that the 3rd party manufacturers can make the same product or better for less money.
It's a kick in the ass to the 3rd party guys to stop making shit, not a serious effort by microsoft to own the tablet space hardware and software.
Besides that, the battery life is why they have an ARM version at all. The biggest weakness of surface (either of them) is that it has windows 8 on it, and windows 8 is terrible.
That will be when there are much narrower global wage differences.
If you want general manual labour the difference between india and the US is almost a factor of 50. For IT you're talking closer to a factor of 3.5 or 4. And indian wages are expected to grow at 13% a year on average, so by 2020 that 17000 could be more like 45000. Doesn't seem like much of a cost advantage anymore does it? For these guys, who are already earning more than 10x the per capita GDP (nominal) wage growth probably won't be 13% a year, but even at 7 or 8% that chips away very quickly at wage differences.
Besides that, as the Indian economy grows (and paying people 17k a year is huge wage growth from a decade ago) they will actually start to consume the products these businesses produce.
Global wage imbalances are for one of two main reasons. First, is that one economy (or one average worker) is more productive in place A than place B. The other is that one economy is not achieving its full capacity and potential, while the other is doing better job of it. India is of course a bit of both. Their educated workforce lacks the experience the US one does, but that's catching up, while corruption and insane labour laws will trap them somewhat behind the US for a long time yet.
Keep in mind that until last year on a nominal (i.e. currency converted, i.e. how much money in US dollars could you make) basis India's entire GDP was less than Canada, and it just barely passed us in 2011. A country with 1.2 billion people had less money than a country of 34 million. That meant they were worth basically nothing to big companies as a sales market. How many 1000 dollar computers do you think IBM is selling in a country where the average yearly wage is less than 1000 dollars? Right. Growing wages in poor countries mean growing markets too, and they will relatively rapidly converge to a sensibly competitive level with the US.
Indeed, Kickstarter is a great way to go to a bank and say 'we got 5 million dollars from people who will essentially buy the game without it being done yet, give us 5 million more and we'll be able to pay you back'.
The guys willing to live on ramen noodles and work in an apartment I appreciate, but that's not a way to get a game done and done well generally.
InXile: Right, they've made games. But nothing on the scale of Wasteland 2. Could be good. Could be a trainwreck. Demon's Forge has a meta critic of about 60.
Chris roberts is harder to say, Freelancer might have been his game, but I'm not sure how much of the same studio. One person does not a game make. They're using Unreal, which helps tremendously, but they're still hard to know the future on.
This is why he was elected. Well that and gerrymandering, but this is the job his constituents (the republican party and Fox news) chose him to do. To oppose these 'false elitist scientists' or however you want to phrase it.
In 2010 'Merican voters handed gerrymandering majorities to Republicans, this is what they did with it. We're complaining because this is what he publicly stood for before coming into office. That's what he believes, that's what he was elected to do. For all of the many faults of republicans the Tea Party has made them actually stand for the things they say they stand for. They might be ignorant fools, but at least they aren't liars (or at least not lying about the policies they are going to vote for). I guess thats supposed to be an improvement.
I'm not trying to bad mouth any particular game developer here,
But this is why you don't want to put a whole lot of money into companies or brands you don't know.
Wasteland 2 sounds great - and it might be, oh how I hope it might be. But when was the last time those guys made anything? I'm willing to gamble a bit, but you have to be prepared to lose.
Obsidian and Project Eternity, well they've been around a while, they've made some good games (that made a lot of money, not necessarily for the studio, but that made a lot of money) so I figure I can risk a bit more on them.
Chris Roberts (Wing commander Fame) and his Star Citizen... again, like wasteland, I can hope, but I figure the odds of losing my money are high on this one too.
And those are just the big ones. People asking for 10 grand, or 50 grand or even less than half a million, I don't have a lot of confidence in their ability to pull it off. 7 or 8 people for a year costs a million bucks and you need a couple of years to make a decent game. You can have some fun games that are faster to make than that, but odds are if you want content it takes time and money, and if you're not asking for that kind of cash your goals are unrealistic at best.
Right, but the question is how thorough is the testing. I always though steve jobs internally played the role of company idiot that isn't really an idiot. Those people are useful in testing. It's the 'can you explain that to me like I am 5?' crowd. If he was going to put it on stage it had to be working perfectly, the way he wanted it, or else.
With the next crop of people they may have been happy as long as whatever was obviously in front of them seemed to work the way they expected and didn't really press the matter. Seems to work, that's good enough.
Also, Apple executives probably don't notice or care about things like public transit directions.
Slashdot Mirror
arc de triomphe, Trafalgar square, brandenburg gate, etc?
Whatever you may think of the two bombings in particular lots of countries have killed a lot more people in their wars, and built varying types of monuments. Should the war museums in britain not have lancaster bombers given how they were used to obliterate cities? How about any monument to the royal navy which was basically built to starve continental adversaries into submission?
For all it's faults the manhattan project was also one of the largest research projects in history, if not the largest, and I think it's important to remember just went into making it, how much money and resources can be spent testing ideas in a desperate hope to find one that works, and a tribute to the people who did the work to make it happen at all. It's important to recognize the consequences of that work too, but it really was tremendous work and genius to realize the potential of uranium and plutonium, good and bad.
Surfance specifically though is expensive, and there's no obvious reason why you'd want it. Windows 8 is horrid. Everyone I know who has installed it has been desperate to get rid of it, 16 year old tech savvy kids, 16 year old technically inept kids, their 40 year old parents, computer scientists, IT people, physicists, fine arts grad, game, developers and designers.
Surface itself, the hardware, is probably OK, but it's worthless without a slate suited OS, and that isn't windows 7. So you have to spend a lot of money on hardware, with software that you won't really like, and importantly, given the negative reception, I would presume windows 9 will behave very differently from 8, but I have no idea how differently, and that's the problem. What would you be buying into with Surface? Is this a dead product before it goes anywhere? Will it support windows 9? You'd hope, but then after the WP7, WP8 thing I'd be skeptical.
Until the 3rd party guys really get into the game it's hard to see where this is going, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're holding onto what they have until MS has to admit Surface as a failure before they do their thing. Corporate politics and all that.
Sure, my comment was more social than technical.
This is about them wanting stored records of all texts. My point wasn't technical though, it was just that people use technology that isn't secure, even when they should know it isn't secure.
If it was that easy the police wouldn't have been able to wiretap anything once skype came out (until the MS takeover and it is presumably now wire-tappable).
The phone system isn't secure, from the government or hackers, but people still use it for all sorts of business. People who know full well their technology can be tapped and tracked still use it for criminal purposes, because most people, criminals included, are stupid.
And the thing is, the dropouts who create successful tech companies don't do it alone usually, and there are lots of people who've made successful tech companies after (or part way through) more advanced degrees.
I went down the list of wealthy people who didn't inherit their billions and a few names jumped out (so I'm excluding the koch brothers and the waltons here).
Sergey Brinn has an masters in computer science and was part way through a PhD when he started to form google. Larry Page is the same. Warren Buffet has an MSc in economics, Michael Bloomberg has an MBA, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has BSc in computer science from Princeton. Steve Ballmer has a BA, and dropped out of a masters.
I don't count dropping out of a masters as a 'college dropout'. Larry Elison, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs those guys (who are, I might note all a different generation than today) were very successful in the 70's and 80's when demand for people who were even minimally technically competence was not being met with a supply of graduates at all. Zuckerberg and Dorsey (of Twitter) both got far enough into their degrees that they should have learned something which benefited them, whether they finish year 4 and go to a graduation ceremony or not is somewhat secondary.
Sure, it works for a couple of dozen of lucky people per year, but for the rest, it's an abysmal failure.
And for the ones that do win the sports or IPO lottery, they need something to do from when they're 35 on. Kurt Schilling or however you spell his name tried to make 38 studios, which went bankrupt because he overreached and he might lose his sizable sports fortune as a result.
You can certainly be successful without college. If your plan is to go into music, or theology you're probably better off not going to college financially. That's a fair, reasonably and legitimate criticism, especially if you're discussing it in the costs of rising education. If it was going to cost you 4 years of lost earnings and say 20 grand in debt, to get a degree that's a different calculation than 4 years of lost earning power and 80k in debt. For the first case just about any degree is probably worth it financially, or at least, the net cost is low enough to not be a huge problem. The latter case you really need to be one of the engineering or science or maths disciplines to justify the cost.
Lots of people make very successful careers doing second year level work, despite having 4 year degrees. These dropouts were able to do 2nd or 3rd year level stuff, well enough to do work, like a co-op student who doesn't come back. I don't think that's a failure of the post secondary system, that a success that they go to the point of being demonstrably useful after 2 years.
PSY would ride that unicorn like it's Oppa.
Because it's so monumentally bizarre that it's worth laughing at?
Would you really want to go into work on monday morning, and not know that North Korea had claimed to find a Unicorn lair?
Lets say korea had a myth of a giant cave under pyongyang where a unicorn lived, that was accessed via a bottomless well. I didn't say the legend had to make sense, bear with me a moment. So some archaeologist goes digging around under pyongyang and finds a really massive cave, and there are some remains in it that appear to be people, and it looks like there might have been a couple of places where there could have been a hole in the ceiling at some point in the past. So then the archaeologist writes an article that says 'lair mentioned in unicorn myth may have been a real place'. That's not funny. That's not a /. post unless he did it with some fancy computer algorithm and google streetview or the like. But traditional digging around archeology? Naw, not important to slashot.
But this. This is different. This appears to be claiming an actual real unicorn lair. That's hilariously crazy. And the thing with north korea is you can't tell if it's an onion piece, their version of the onion piece, or something they are seriously claiming. But it seems legit - and that makes it even more funny. Now the dude in question (who rode said unicorn) and the temple this lair is under appear to be real physical tangible things that are a least in part historically correct. And then there's a bit about a unicorn.
The guy who claimed to sequence bigfoot DNA doesn't warrant the front page, he's just a random crazy person. He's only interesting in conjunction with the story. Now I grant you, north korea is institutionally crazy, but usually they're more 'the dear leader is perfect and we're going to fire missiles over japan to please him' kind of crazy. They're still firing missiles, but they're independently claiming a real unicorn lair. That's crazy even by north korean standards of crazy, and it's not threatening, which makes it hilarious.
It seems to me that assuming a poisson distribution [wikipedia.org]) or other random distribution, is a bad assumption.
it definitely is a bad assumption.
But if you are trying to solve the general problem of where to position an elevator or a disk head in general you have to. That's why it's an 'undergraduate' level problem. The serious research today comes in knowing what the real data will be like, and whether or not you can optimize for real data rather than an average best case for any arbitrary data set.
Hence: reasonably generic.
That's an undergraduate level general optimization problem.
The one in TFA is a graduate level optimization under a particular set of data constraints. So the generally optimal algorithm for elevators has to a assume a random distribution of people to be picked up and destination floors (head is in a random location wants data from some other random location) - but in practice you may be need sequential access or the like. With elevators, I would expect that in mornings in residential buildings people want to empty out so the 'resting' point would to close to 2/3rds or 3/4ths of the way up, but in the evenings it would be the reverse direction, and business would be the reverse of residential. Schools have a somewhat more random use of bursty every hour up and down, and really big businesses may want dedicated elevators between floors shared by particular companies because there's a lot of daily movement within the floors of a company but not so much outside their area.
Lunch of course adds another complication.
There's a lot of neat work into simulating the data for a building that doesn't exist yet, or measuring the data for a building that exists but has a bad algorithm. And then trying to tailor your elevator to the specific behaviours that actually exist.
Markets certainly reward franchises. There's room for innovation, but now is not the time for it. Right now is the end of a console lifecycle and no one wants to go too far out on a limb on this generation.
Note that Borderlands, which isn't on your list was a brand new franchise not too long ago, Xcom has done very well which is a resurrection of a very old genre. You only need to sell about 500 or 600 k copies to make a decent amount of money on a moderate sized title (you aim for a million for a console title generally with ad cost etc. ).
The only big new IP lately is Dishonoured, which is a sort of action stealth game in cyberpunk world, pretty standard stuff to do technically so the technical side is low risk and the gameplay is reasonably generic, but at least it's new IP.
EA risked 300 million dollars on SWTOR and lost 200 million.
They will, eventually recoup some of that money, depending on how long it last and how well the F2P transition actually goes. But there's only so much tolerance for risk, and when you gamble and lose big like that you need to lick your wounds for a while.
There's nothing wrong with some risk but the last big space games were freelancer and the Jump to Lightspeed expansion to SWG, earth and beyond tanked and Eve has 300k players. Star Trek online is still going but it's a very very niche product at best.
Markets evolve, and making a good game can be expensive. If EA is going in they're going in for 30 or 40 million dollars likely, (not always but most of the big publishers are only going in for big money) but it's not clear they'd be able to make 30 or 40 million back. 6-10 probably. Deep involved space RPG shooters just don't have the appeal they used to, it's a bit like skyrim in space, you could make 300 million dollars or 3. And until it's out the door it's hard to predict which. The problem with trying to be an indie publisher is you don't have a bottomless pit of money from which to fund dozens of projects, and right now markets are very risk averse. Getting a bank to give you 4 or 5 million dollars to develop a game with no similar market product is not trivial.
The next gen console market will shake things up a bit, as people try new things and find new traction in a new market, but for the moment we're waiting.
And the thing with (for example) the space shooter is that a couple of them might be really good and make money, and most of them might be terrible and the people would lose their shirts, and it's hard to know what a good space shooter is going to be when there aren't other space shooters around that people can compare to. Nostalgia only gets you so far, and you have to have working tech (not a lot of working space shooter engines out there, even to prototype with), you have to know just what exactly makes it 'fun' for a new market that needs to be 10x the size of the old wing commander market.
15 years from now I expect the gaming market will have changed in a completely different way. There will be super rich guys who grew up gaming (much as I despise him, think Mark Zuckerberg types, not necessarily that rich, but still rich) who will be willing to fund pet projects like Kurt Schilling did with 38 studios, but who will be able to lose 50 million dollars and laugh it off. It will be like people who buy sports teams, they'll fund games. They'll fund nostalgia projects, they'll fund new innovative stuff and be willing to laugh off failure. That will be good for the industry as a whole, and might do a lot of good to bring in people who aren't 'games industry' guys, but oil tycoons, or rich inheritors, bankers mobile phone people, Apple guys etc.
The main disappointment with windows 8 is that it's inconsistent in how it behaves, and because windows 8 is inconsistent the different types of apps are inconsistent, and it eliminates the most basic useful element of windows, which was simply accessible list of all of the shit on your computer you don't need to scroll through.
Don't get me wrong, Windows 8 has some technical progress, and it might be a useful foundation for windows 9. But it should never have been let out the door in its current form.
Ya, I've been running it since may in various forms. Horrid through and through.
They aren't supposed to really compete on any point.
Surface are deliberately overpriced so that the 3rd party manufacturers can make the same product or better for less money.
It's a kick in the ass to the 3rd party guys to stop making shit, not a serious effort by microsoft to own the tablet space hardware and software.
Besides that, the battery life is why they have an ARM version at all. The biggest weakness of surface (either of them) is that it has windows 8 on it, and windows 8 is terrible.
That will be when there are much narrower global wage differences.
If you want general manual labour the difference between india and the US is almost a factor of 50. For IT you're talking closer to a factor of 3.5 or 4. And indian wages are expected to grow at 13% a year on average, so by 2020 that 17000 could be more like 45000. Doesn't seem like much of a cost advantage anymore does it? For these guys, who are already earning more than 10x the per capita GDP (nominal) wage growth probably won't be 13% a year, but even at 7 or 8% that chips away very quickly at wage differences.
Besides that, as the Indian economy grows (and paying people 17k a year is huge wage growth from a decade ago) they will actually start to consume the products these businesses produce.
Global wage imbalances are for one of two main reasons. First, is that one economy (or one average worker) is more productive in place A than place B. The other is that one economy is not achieving its full capacity and potential, while the other is doing better job of it. India is of course a bit of both. Their educated workforce lacks the experience the US one does, but that's catching up, while corruption and insane labour laws will trap them somewhat behind the US for a long time yet.
Keep in mind that until last year on a nominal (i.e. currency converted, i.e. how much money in US dollars could you make) basis India's entire GDP was less than Canada, and it just barely passed us in 2011. A country with 1.2 billion people had less money than a country of 34 million. That meant they were worth basically nothing to big companies as a sales market. How many 1000 dollar computers do you think IBM is selling in a country where the average yearly wage is less than 1000 dollars? Right. Growing wages in poor countries mean growing markets too, and they will relatively rapidly converge to a sensibly competitive level with the US.
Indeed, Kickstarter is a great way to go to a bank and say 'we got 5 million dollars from people who will essentially buy the game without it being done yet, give us 5 million more and we'll be able to pay you back'.
The guys willing to live on ramen noodles and work in an apartment I appreciate, but that's not a way to get a game done and done well generally.
InXile: Right, they've made games. But nothing on the scale of Wasteland 2. Could be good. Could be a trainwreck. Demon's Forge has a meta critic of about 60.
Chris roberts is harder to say, Freelancer might have been his game, but I'm not sure how much of the same studio. One person does not a game make. They're using Unreal, which helps tremendously, but they're still hard to know the future on.
I understand fully.
But I still don't want to throw away money on a game that won't ever materialize.
Right.
This is why he was elected. Well that and gerrymandering, but this is the job his constituents (the republican party and Fox news) chose him to do. To oppose these 'false elitist scientists' or however you want to phrase it.
In 2010 'Merican voters handed gerrymandering majorities to Republicans, this is what they did with it. We're complaining because this is what he publicly stood for before coming into office. That's what he believes, that's what he was elected to do. For all of the many faults of republicans the Tea Party has made them actually stand for the things they say they stand for. They might be ignorant fools, but at least they aren't liars (or at least not lying about the policies they are going to vote for). I guess thats supposed to be an improvement.
I'm not trying to bad mouth any particular game developer here,
But this is why you don't want to put a whole lot of money into companies or brands you don't know.
Wasteland 2 sounds great - and it might be, oh how I hope it might be. But when was the last time those guys made anything? I'm willing to gamble a bit, but you have to be prepared to lose.
Obsidian and Project Eternity, well they've been around a while, they've made some good games (that made a lot of money, not necessarily for the studio, but that made a lot of money) so I figure I can risk a bit more on them.
Chris Roberts (Wing commander Fame) and his Star Citizen... again, like wasteland, I can hope, but I figure the odds of losing my money are high on this one too.
And those are just the big ones. People asking for 10 grand, or 50 grand or even less than half a million, I don't have a lot of confidence in their ability to pull it off. 7 or 8 people for a year costs a million bucks and you need a couple of years to make a decent game. You can have some fun games that are faster to make than that, but odds are if you want content it takes time and money, and if you're not asking for that kind of cash your goals are unrealistic at best.
Right, but the question is how thorough is the testing. I always though steve jobs internally played the role of company idiot that isn't really an idiot. Those people are useful in testing. It's the 'can you explain that to me like I am 5?' crowd. If he was going to put it on stage it had to be working perfectly, the way he wanted it, or else.
With the next crop of people they may have been happy as long as whatever was obviously in front of them seemed to work the way they expected and didn't really press the matter. Seems to work, that's good enough.
Also, Apple executives probably don't notice or care about things like public transit directions.