Everywhere I have been considers research quality to drop off significantly by 50 and they expect, on average, that older professors will need to be transitioned into more teaching, or administrative work.
When you hire you hire young because pay is based on years since PhD, and most fresh PhD's are young. You don't usually have the opportunity or desire to hire an older person because they cost more, a lot more, they're harder to get rid of if they're bad, and if they have tenure somewhere else they usually aren't about to leave.
As you become older 'research' really means supervising and managing people who do research, making the transition from manager to supervisor isn't everyones forte though.
absolutely, I have benefited enormously, as someone who bombed out of grad school in one field, to be able to get into and succeed in grad school elsewhere because tenured profs had the independent authority to make their own choices.
I was more conveying some of the things that go with it.
Besides, even private companies have crazy people. They exist, you get used to it. Where I am (ontario, canada) we no longer have mandatory retirement, which has brought a lot of these issues to the fore, with mandatory retirement you had a time horizon for how long this person would stick around for, and you could decline to rehire them as a consultant at 65 if you wanted rid of them. Now though, someone who becomes a problem at 62 could try and stick around until they die in their office.
Everything I said is quite serious. Comp sci is laughably easy compared to physics, in part because physics is necessarily inclusive of everything up to second year comp sci because if you can't do basic electronics and programming you can't do any sort of science. That's why I switched. If you can do first year calculus without having a heart attack you're doing better than 50% of the comp sci grads.
Background: undergrad theoretical physics, currently finishing a PhD in comp sci. MSc in Half comp sci half physics.
And an MBA from an Ivey (or Ivy) business school can aim to be a MS VP too, one would guess they get there from a different route than someone on the technical side of things.
It's a lousy system, and it's as if professors feel they need to fail somebody, and if there isn't anyone bad enough to fail, they'll find some other reason to fail them.
I had a prof who said 'I know what it takes to be a real physicist, and none of you have it' and failed the entire class.
We were all asked to leave after appealing.
Professors are high level employees, even though they seem relatively low in the university hierarchy they have a lot of independent authority and judgment, and the entire system is setup around professors being both professionally and ethically responsible to their discipline as a whole. If they don't think you've demonstrated the right behaviour they can be rid of you as a drain on that community, and as someone who would tarnish the universities reputation. The upshot of this is that professors can break all sorts of soft rules to get whomever they want as grad student, pay them past funding periods, run labs the way they want, run their own IT etc. But it also means the occasional asshole has quite a lot of authority to make your life miserable, and well, every department has at least one prof you just don't want to go near.
I'm in Comp sci, and we have a prof who repeatedly insists (via e-mail) that we should cut off internet access to the department. The last place I was had a professor who's entire workload was teaching 2 courses (no committees, no research), and he liked to teach courses on whatever was 'cool' (as defined by his teenage daughter I guess), even if this had nothing to do with the broader programme goals. Getting rid of a tenured professor is really really hard, it's expensive, and usually they don't go completely crazy until they're towards the end of their careers, so you don't want to fire someone with health problems etc. There's a huge legal expense, and bad press. And students sometimes love the crazy ones because they are certainly interesting.
Schools matter somewhat in terms of their career trajectories and the experiences they earned. You can't get hired as a professional engineer if you aren't an engineer sort of thing, so your school can shape your biases somewhat. But as you say, at this stage, corporate executive level, they're much more about their experience after the fact.
But different schools, especially computer science schools are wildly different in their programmes, so you can't really compare 'CS to SE', CS at one particular school to SE at a particular school sure, but in general, not so much. Some places SE grows out of comp eng and is in part electrical like comp eng, some CS places are more hardware than software, some are even pure maths vs programming etc.
A fresh grad is not a corporate executive, much as our Ivey business grads would like to think that, 10 years of experience after a degree you can go a lot of different things. Your degree sets up where it's easy to start, but not where you're going to go.
Steam isn't gaming anyway. Steam is a game distribution service, in linux world it's basically a gaming specialized repository, that takes money. Every developer under the sun still needs to package their games, although the point of steam is probably that valve will handle that for you I imagine a lot of teething pains.
Valve is only going this route to hedge their bets against windows 8, justifiably so, and that's the big opportunity for linux and always has been: waiting for a serious break in microsofts armour. If windows 8 is the trainwreck it seems like it could be, well we might have 2013 as the actual year of the linux desktop and game companies coming along for the ride.
The Source engine from steam, which is used for some games, being on linux matters a bit, but one game engine does not an industry make. I'll be very interested to see if the big guys in the business add in linux support while they're at it (PS4, Xbox3, Windows PC already, why not add Mac and Linux for the same reason valve is?). With kickstarter funding a few engines in the direction of linux there might be some future hope for games, rather than just a store that can be run as a webpage.
Granting someone an effective monopoly in one area in exchange for their following rules is, in effect, a subsidy. Government mandates that you must have a medical license to practice medicine and collect government healthcare funding is in effect a subsidy, in exchange for the fact that you have to actually be a doctor to practice medicine.
To quote myself on the topic
The effective monopoly postal services had on junk mail was an indirect subsidy
Is pretty much the exact opposite of
Anyway, you're not alone- I see at least 5 positively-modded comments that seem to believe there is some explicit and intentional subsidy for bulk mail
The postal service has certain monopoly privilege, even now. They are the primary distributor of government mail (social security cheques presumably being a major one), and they are, as pointed out, guaranteed to have mail service everywhere, on fixed delivery days etc. There is even an implicit backing of the federal government that your mail will still get delivered even if the postal service goes bankrupt, although I doubt anyone has any idea how this could go down.
Using the US postal service also enjoys certain legal protections about what they can and cannot do with your mail and so on.
you're not a U.S. native
Thankfully I am neither a US native nor a US resident. As can be seen from my comment history if one is so inclined. But the same basic problem with postal services applies everywhere. Including in canada where I am. Traditional mail volumes are declining, but the fixed costs of operating large mail delivery networks aren't declining with them. Here the solution has been to discontinue home delivery and move to neighbourhood boxes for all new housing.
Actually it's the rare but important stuff sent via the mail that you need to subsidize and why there are massive government postal programmes at all. If you can't check your bank balance online, if you need to send legal documents, contracts, bill etc. all of that needs to be accessible to people. Your voter registration any government correspondence etc. is all doable through mail. And mail services guarantee package delivery to the entire country usually (I'm not 100% sure how this works for the US with things like the republic of marshall islands or the like, which are sort of overseas independent dependencies of the US government, but not full blow territories like puerto rico).
All of the junk mail crap is there to subsidize the actually important stuff. The effective monopoly postal services had on junk mail was an indirect subsidy, and I can't imagine Fed Ex wanting to go door to door delivering pizza coupons, but who knows. Even things like magazines, which, yes, people actually buy and read, would be seriously inhibited if they had to pay significantly more for delivery costs.
Obviously, the basic problem all postal services have is their regulatory requirements don't line up with their financial ones in a changing market. Government needs to take a bit of a heavy hand in any industry where the goal is to actually reduce your workload. Medical providers should be looking for ways to reduce their number of people getting sick, police should be looking to reduce the amount of crime, the post office should be looking for ways to reduce paper mail, but at the same time you do need reliable cross country (cross world actually) mail delivery - because some of what is sent via mail is both important and needs to be kept inexpensive. If you want to spend 8 bucks to mail a letter to arrive tomorrow rather than 50 cents for it to arrive in 3 days fine, but for the people who cannot afford the extra 7.50 or whatever it is you don't want to lock them out of communication, most especially if they are your customers.
As to the specific problem though, of mail employees being necessarily treated like career people and not minimum wage disposables, and all of that stuff, I don't really know. If the government is going to mandate they provide a service without a way to pay for it (e.g. saturday mail delivery) that's going to have to change or the government is going to have to step in financially.
No one ever bothered with anything serious DX10 except microsoft for Halo. There are some guys getting into it now because it's not worth bothering with XP support for anything with serous performance (dirt shadowrun and NFS titles), but if you're making indie stuff you may as well stick with XP as well.
No, it wasn't a typo. DX10 weren't failures and people aren't making DX9 class games not because Dx11 isn't a good prospect, it's because PC gaming is a second thought to the market at all. That has nothing to do with directx. As a developer you just don't care about the PC market. If you have to do all of your game for a console you're not going to rewrite the game in Dx11. Directx 11 lets you do some fantastic stuff, but thats the problem, you just can't do it on a 360, so why bother? This isn't a failure of Dx10, this is a failure of the 360 and PS3 (and even then, not really a failure given when they were made). The decision is driven by the console market, not the windows market.
Sure, on PC only games you have a DX11 and DX9 market, but that's because people on windows XP aren't upgrading - and windows 7 is demonstrably better, so your customers are deliberately choosing not to upgrade. You can try and sell to them, or not. Vista being a failure doesn't factor into this at all, if your customers won't move to windows 7 from XP you have to decide if graphics performance is important (windows 7 only now, since you can count on an nvidia 8000 series equivalent or better, and those are 6 years old).
You presented it as as though A: directx 10 games were failures because they are dx10 (not true, they weren't relevant in the PC market because basically the only game in that category was a Halo re-release way later than the console) and B) that these decisions have much to do with the windows market. They usually don't. We're starting to see DX10 and 11 games really hit the market as of last year because finally we're getting to the point where studios are trying to prepare themselves for future consoles and the PC is a useful testbed for that.
XPress 200M is a 2004 part, so sure, technically DX9, but it's literally an 8 year old part, what did you expect?
If you're expecting windows 8 support (or any support) for 8 year old hardware you're living in a fantasy land.
I hit their http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Legacy/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.13&lang=English
Most of that stuff works under windows 7 but is officially unsupported and you aren't ever going to get the full featureset given the new driver model in Vista/DX10, and keep in mind the last update for those cards is from february of 2010.
When you're talking mobile from that era, I'll grant you I'm slightly off. The mobile parts are supported by the manufacturer not AMD, so without omega drivers you're probably SOL. But still. It's been 8 years and you're trying to run a week old OS on it. It might be worth a hardware upgrade first.
Yes, and this is why games are still being made DX9 compatible.
Uh.. no. That is because you use the same engine for the 360 and PC, and the 360 is basically DX9. If you're doing a PC only version windows xp is still 40% of the gamer market (steam hardware survey), and well... you make dx 9.
Directx 10 wasn't really very useful. Dx 11 is pretty good, I could see the Xbox 3 using DX11 (or 11.1 but that distinction won't matter), which will kind of lock in Dx11 as the defacto standard for 4 or 5 years until DX12/13 and windows 9 start to impact the market.
This doesn't change anything. At all. Nothing. It's not a reason to do anything. For anyone. Unless you're a microsoft employee, and even then it's probably not relevant.
All DX11.1 does for you is move stereoscopic 3D from vendor specific to native API, which, given trivial stereoscopic 3D is to turn on vendor specifically (it's about 3 lines of code you can copy from a sample). But stereoscopic 3D is such a useless gimmick that you only put it in if for the sake of saying you have it, not because anyone actually seriously uses it. Not that it couldn't be useful, but it's just not an important part of the market right now.
If you make games, seriously make games, you need a Dx code path for 360 support (because that's likely your biggest platform), you probably need an OpenGl path for PS3 support (because that's a huge portion of your market), if you're doing next gen development you need both for the Xbox 3 and PS4, and if you're doing a PC path you can go either way, but you really can't do just one these days. Nor does it matter much, since serious game engines already abstract all that stuff for you, and this changes so little on the engine programming side of things (especially compared to all the other stuff you're worried about related to Windows 8) that you really don't care.
Since the unified driver architectures of the mid 2000's both ATI and nVIDIA just support everything. It's only brand new cards where driver support is sketchy, but that's only ever a short term problem.
Driver support is only bad in windows if you have a directx 8 class card, and for that you're talking about 8 year old parts at this point.
Actually there is an entire field of science (monte carlo methods) about faking data for other researchers to make sure their tools work properly.
Sometimes it's really important to prove you have the skills to do the research you are proposing. Think of it as being asked to code 'pac man' on a game development job interview, and yes, I know companies that were doing that as recently as this summer, or a more IT guy thing of trying to set up an e-mail account or the like. A basic proficiency demo. The thing with researchers is that you may have skills that no one knows exist to even ask for.
But getting data - real data, millions or billions of pieces of data, requires a huge amount of time and paperwork, or you may need to write software to gather the data, you may need permission from Twitter and other networks, you may need ethical approval for data that might not be anonymous (what legal obligation do you have if this is threatening?). You need a lot more than 5 days to sort through the grant proposal for a project like this if you want to take any serious data. But to get to the point of having money to do that, you need something you can pitch.
what gets out to the media and beyond has at least some chance of being right
I don't think that has ever worked for anyone in the last 20 years I have no reason to believe it will start now.
Not too long ago/. had posts from the communications department of the university of western ontario, which is where I am a researcher, and from our own university the document was a poor characterization of what the research actually was (HIV vaccine stuff in this case, though I'm in comp sci and they don't do our work any better). Somewhere along the line someone decided that the 'public' only understand high level concepts, so everything we communicate is written as thought it was for a 16 year old to understand. It doesn't matter than dozens of other research papers and groups will actually have to do the work to make the thing the 16 year old understand though, we talk about pieces of a puzzle as though they are a solution to the puzzle. And there's no central media authority who might change it.
They can get data, they can visualize it, they can run some result on it. This is a demonstration of the tools needed to do research. With a small dataset it appears that there might be some tiny bits you can extract from the data. But mostly it's a tools to implement a method, that would produce results.
I wouldn't publicise any findings until I'd had them peer-reviewed and published.
Then you'd never get funding for a project like this.
They're demonstrating that there might be something interesting to study, the press lets them ask for money rather than beg, and they're not all that invested in a project that might not go anywhere.
its irresponsible to be promoting the findings among people who clearly won't bother to understand
I hate to break it to you, but the press doesn't understand peer reviewed work any better. Whenever media ever looks at any academic work they completely misrepresent it. That's something you get used to.
The government funding, both federal and state, has decreased dramatically in the last several years for hospitals."
This is where you really run into problems. Cutting funding itself isn't the issue. But when a law mandates something from a government, and the government says 'sorry, we don't have money to pay it' it's not really obvious who wins, and you can't wait 15 years for courts to fight it out while there's someone needing healthcare right now.
Governments usually also narrowly construct laws. As I say, to qualify for medicare funding you have to follow the various emergency room rules, so you are, in effect, expected to find the revenue for your legal mandate from your medicare funding or from something else. It's a stupid system. Some hospitals partition off their budgets, so if you come in and are uninsured you get charged even more money (I know of at least one in New York that does this), because they pool all uninsured patients into the same funding pot, so a rich uninsured guy is supposedly paying for the poor uninsured guy sort of thing, but they spend a lot of money on lawyers trying to chase after people for money they don't have.
I can't imagine anyone actually thinks the US healthcare system is even remotely good. If you believe 'let them die' then you believe the emergency care laws are government overreach, and if you believe that hospitals should be government owned and operated then the whole thing is stupid. And there's not a little of middle ground that isn't going to make both sides angry about the same things.
Sure, if you look at generally how powerful cell phones are a lot of that stuff might translate ok to TV. I always wanted the PSP family to be exactly that, a portable version of the playstation, let me take my games with me from the main machine and let me play the same stuff on the Playstation that i play on the portable version. I might play with a console or phone on my commute home, but I'm not going to sit at on my couch playing a PSP game when there's a great big TV there.
I agree on the 'ouya being underpowered' complaint, it might not be the right product for the market, but clearly a lot of people like the idea.
Pretty much. Besides, they are in transition to the PS4 now and online movie distribution rather than blu ray. It's a good time for a shakeup, especially if the replacement has more expertise in one or both of the upcoming products than the current guy.
It may also be that the corporate idiot at the top is being replaced because he hasn't managed the transition to PS4 and online distribution well, and they want someone who will, and since those problems would be internal rather than external they wouldn't talk about it.
Which means they either exceeded their mandate, to provide only the minimum care necessary for regulatory compliance, or they needed better accountants.
I've helped on a number of US hospital billing systems now, basically, if someone comes in and can't pay there are layer and layers of begging for money from them first, then it becomes a medicare problem. But no, the government doesn't cover everything that could be done, and without providing emergency medical care hospitals don't qualify for medicare funding at all I believe (as per the article you linked). That's a form of insurance - a monstrously bad one, but 'monstrously bad' describes pretty much the entire US healthcare system. They have guaranteed access to funds, and it's chosen to be enough for the minimum of regulatory compliance. If they aren't managing the resources well enough the free market will force them out and find someone who can. Because fuck sick people, that's why.
Hospitals also retain a somewhat privileged monopoly on healthcare. So people who can pay have to go to you. That is, again, a form of insurance (for both patient and hospital, the Hospital is guaranteed a revenue stream and patients are guaranteed to not have to deal with quacks).
Those costs have prompted financially strapped hospitals to rely on a complex system of shifting costs. Most of the burden falls on taxpayers, with the government providing tens of billions of dollars annually to help hospitals care for the uninsured.
From page 2 of the article you listed. Yes yes, hospitals are claiming hundreds of millions in losses but they're collecting billions. The basic problem is that hospitals are incredibly inefficient in the US. If I give you 10k to solve a problem that should cost 9k (1k profit), but you're costing 12k because you're paying too many lawyers, billing staff, greeting staff, administrators for the administrators etc. well sure, you're not going to get enough cash to cover things. I didn't say this was a smart system.
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Everywhere I have been considers research quality to drop off significantly by 50 and they expect, on average, that older professors will need to be transitioned into more teaching, or administrative work.
When you hire you hire young because pay is based on years since PhD, and most fresh PhD's are young. You don't usually have the opportunity or desire to hire an older person because they cost more, a lot more, they're harder to get rid of if they're bad, and if they have tenure somewhere else they usually aren't about to leave.
As you become older 'research' really means supervising and managing people who do research, making the transition from manager to supervisor isn't everyones forte though.
absolutely, I have benefited enormously, as someone who bombed out of grad school in one field, to be able to get into and succeed in grad school elsewhere because tenured profs had the independent authority to make their own choices.
I was more conveying some of the things that go with it.
Besides, even private companies have crazy people. They exist, you get used to it. Where I am (ontario, canada) we no longer have mandatory retirement, which has brought a lot of these issues to the fore, with mandatory retirement you had a time horizon for how long this person would stick around for, and you could decline to rehire them as a consultant at 65 if you wanted rid of them. Now though, someone who becomes a problem at 62 could try and stick around until they die in their office.
Everything I said is quite serious. Comp sci is laughably easy compared to physics, in part because physics is necessarily inclusive of everything up to second year comp sci because if you can't do basic electronics and programming you can't do any sort of science. That's why I switched. If you can do first year calculus without having a heart attack you're doing better than 50% of the comp sci grads.
Background: undergrad theoretical physics, currently finishing a PhD in comp sci. MSc in Half comp sci half physics.
And an MBA from an Ivey (or Ivy) business school can aim to be a MS VP too, one would guess they get there from a different route than someone on the technical side of things.
said crazy prof let a student do a presentation on integrated circuits using interpretive dance.
And yes, I, and the entire class, were lousy physics students. That's why we failed. Comp sci is easier and it pays better anyway.
Though I should clarify, this was grad school, not undergrad, I don't think he could have pulled that in undergrad.
It's a lousy system, and it's as if professors feel they need to fail somebody, and if there isn't anyone bad enough to fail, they'll find some other reason to fail them.
I had a prof who said 'I know what it takes to be a real physicist, and none of you have it' and failed the entire class.
We were all asked to leave after appealing.
Professors are high level employees, even though they seem relatively low in the university hierarchy they have a lot of independent authority and judgment, and the entire system is setup around professors being both professionally and ethically responsible to their discipline as a whole. If they don't think you've demonstrated the right behaviour they can be rid of you as a drain on that community, and as someone who would tarnish the universities reputation. The upshot of this is that professors can break all sorts of soft rules to get whomever they want as grad student, pay them past funding periods, run labs the way they want, run their own IT etc. But it also means the occasional asshole has quite a lot of authority to make your life miserable, and well, every department has at least one prof you just don't want to go near.
I'm in Comp sci, and we have a prof who repeatedly insists (via e-mail) that we should cut off internet access to the department. The last place I was had a professor who's entire workload was teaching 2 courses (no committees, no research), and he liked to teach courses on whatever was 'cool' (as defined by his teenage daughter I guess), even if this had nothing to do with the broader programme goals. Getting rid of a tenured professor is really really hard, it's expensive, and usually they don't go completely crazy until they're towards the end of their careers, so you don't want to fire someone with health problems etc. There's a huge legal expense, and bad press. And students sometimes love the crazy ones because they are certainly interesting.
Schools matter somewhat in terms of their career trajectories and the experiences they earned. You can't get hired as a professional engineer if you aren't an engineer sort of thing, so your school can shape your biases somewhat. But as you say, at this stage, corporate executive level, they're much more about their experience after the fact.
But different schools, especially computer science schools are wildly different in their programmes, so you can't really compare 'CS to SE', CS at one particular school to SE at a particular school sure, but in general, not so much. Some places SE grows out of comp eng and is in part electrical like comp eng, some CS places are more hardware than software, some are even pure maths vs programming etc.
A fresh grad is not a corporate executive, much as our Ivey business grads would like to think that, 10 years of experience after a degree you can go a lot of different things. Your degree sets up where it's easy to start, but not where you're going to go.
Steam isn't gaming anyway. Steam is a game distribution service, in linux world it's basically a gaming specialized repository, that takes money. Every developer under the sun still needs to package their games, although the point of steam is probably that valve will handle that for you I imagine a lot of teething pains.
Valve is only going this route to hedge their bets against windows 8, justifiably so, and that's the big opportunity for linux and always has been: waiting for a serious break in microsofts armour. If windows 8 is the trainwreck it seems like it could be, well we might have 2013 as the actual year of the linux desktop and game companies coming along for the ride.
The Source engine from steam, which is used for some games, being on linux matters a bit, but one game engine does not an industry make. I'll be very interested to see if the big guys in the business add in linux support while they're at it (PS4, Xbox3, Windows PC already, why not add Mac and Linux for the same reason valve is?). With kickstarter funding a few engines in the direction of linux there might be some future hope for games, rather than just a store that can be run as a webpage.
Granting someone an effective monopoly in one area in exchange for their following rules is, in effect, a subsidy. Government mandates that you must have a medical license to practice medicine and collect government healthcare funding is in effect a subsidy, in exchange for the fact that you have to actually be a doctor to practice medicine.
To quote myself on the topic
The effective monopoly postal services had on junk mail was an indirect subsidy
Is pretty much the exact opposite of
Anyway, you're not alone- I see at least 5 positively-modded comments that seem to believe there is some explicit and intentional subsidy for bulk mail
The postal service has certain monopoly privilege, even now. They are the primary distributor of government mail (social security cheques presumably being a major one), and they are, as pointed out, guaranteed to have mail service everywhere, on fixed delivery days etc. There is even an implicit backing of the federal government that your mail will still get delivered even if the postal service goes bankrupt, although I doubt anyone has any idea how this could go down.
Using the US postal service also enjoys certain legal protections about what they can and cannot do with your mail and so on.
you're not a U.S. native
Thankfully I am neither a US native nor a US resident. As can be seen from my comment history if one is so inclined. But the same basic problem with postal services applies everywhere. Including in canada where I am. Traditional mail volumes are declining, but the fixed costs of operating large mail delivery networks aren't declining with them. Here the solution has been to discontinue home delivery and move to neighbourhood boxes for all new housing.
Actually it's the rare but important stuff sent via the mail that you need to subsidize and why there are massive government postal programmes at all. If you can't check your bank balance online, if you need to send legal documents, contracts, bill etc. all of that needs to be accessible to people. Your voter registration any government correspondence etc. is all doable through mail. And mail services guarantee package delivery to the entire country usually (I'm not 100% sure how this works for the US with things like the republic of marshall islands or the like, which are sort of overseas independent dependencies of the US government, but not full blow territories like puerto rico).
All of the junk mail crap is there to subsidize the actually important stuff. The effective monopoly postal services had on junk mail was an indirect subsidy, and I can't imagine Fed Ex wanting to go door to door delivering pizza coupons, but who knows. Even things like magazines, which, yes, people actually buy and read, would be seriously inhibited if they had to pay significantly more for delivery costs.
Obviously, the basic problem all postal services have is their regulatory requirements don't line up with their financial ones in a changing market. Government needs to take a bit of a heavy hand in any industry where the goal is to actually reduce your workload. Medical providers should be looking for ways to reduce their number of people getting sick, police should be looking to reduce the amount of crime, the post office should be looking for ways to reduce paper mail, but at the same time you do need reliable cross country (cross world actually) mail delivery - because some of what is sent via mail is both important and needs to be kept inexpensive. If you want to spend 8 bucks to mail a letter to arrive tomorrow rather than 50 cents for it to arrive in 3 days fine, but for the people who cannot afford the extra 7.50 or whatever it is you don't want to lock them out of communication, most especially if they are your customers.
As to the specific problem though, of mail employees being necessarily treated like career people and not minimum wage disposables, and all of that stuff, I don't really know. If the government is going to mandate they provide a service without a way to pay for it (e.g. saturday mail delivery) that's going to have to change or the government is going to have to step in financially.
And as I say, there were patches in 2010 and it supported but not full on officially.
Also, ATI ceased to exist and was absorbed into AMD in that time period (who are in the process of divesting it back to qualcomm likely).
No one ever bothered with anything serious DX10 except microsoft for Halo. There are some guys getting into it now because it's not worth bothering with XP support for anything with serous performance (dirt shadowrun and NFS titles), but if you're making indie stuff you may as well stick with XP as well.
No, it wasn't a typo. DX10 weren't failures and people aren't making DX9 class games not because Dx11 isn't a good prospect, it's because PC gaming is a second thought to the market at all. That has nothing to do with directx. As a developer you just don't care about the PC market. If you have to do all of your game for a console you're not going to rewrite the game in Dx11. Directx 11 lets you do some fantastic stuff, but thats the problem, you just can't do it on a 360, so why bother? This isn't a failure of Dx10, this is a failure of the 360 and PS3 (and even then, not really a failure given when they were made). The decision is driven by the console market, not the windows market.
Sure, on PC only games you have a DX11 and DX9 market, but that's because people on windows XP aren't upgrading - and windows 7 is demonstrably better, so your customers are deliberately choosing not to upgrade. You can try and sell to them, or not. Vista being a failure doesn't factor into this at all, if your customers won't move to windows 7 from XP you have to decide if graphics performance is important (windows 7 only now, since you can count on an nvidia 8000 series equivalent or better, and those are 6 years old).
You presented it as as though A: directx 10 games were failures because they are dx10 (not true, they weren't relevant in the PC market because basically the only game in that category was a Halo re-release way later than the console) and B) that these decisions have much to do with the windows market. They usually don't. We're starting to see DX10 and 11 games really hit the market as of last year because finally we're getting to the point where studios are trying to prepare themselves for future consoles and the PC is a useful testbed for that.
XPress 200M is a 2004 part, so sure, technically DX9, but it's literally an 8 year old part, what did you expect?
If you're expecting windows 8 support (or any support) for 8 year old hardware you're living in a fantasy land.
I hit their http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Legacy/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.13&lang=English
Most of that stuff works under windows 7 but is officially unsupported and you aren't ever going to get the full featureset given the new driver model in Vista/DX10, and keep in mind the last update for those cards is from february of 2010.
When you're talking mobile from that era, I'll grant you I'm slightly off. The mobile parts are supported by the manufacturer not AMD, so without omega drivers you're probably SOL. But still. It's been 8 years and you're trying to run a week old OS on it. It might be worth a hardware upgrade first.
Yes, and this is why games are still being made DX9 compatible.
Uh.. no. That is because you use the same engine for the 360 and PC, and the 360 is basically DX9. If you're doing a PC only version windows xp is still 40% of the gamer market (steam hardware survey), and well... you make dx 9.
Directx 10 wasn't really very useful. Dx 11 is pretty good, I could see the Xbox 3 using DX11 (or 11.1 but that distinction won't matter), which will kind of lock in Dx11 as the defacto standard for 4 or 5 years until DX12/13 and windows 9 start to impact the market.
No.
This doesn't change anything. At all. Nothing. It's not a reason to do anything. For anyone. Unless you're a microsoft employee, and even then it's probably not relevant.
All DX11.1 does for you is move stereoscopic 3D from vendor specific to native API, which, given trivial stereoscopic 3D is to turn on vendor specifically (it's about 3 lines of code you can copy from a sample). But stereoscopic 3D is such a useless gimmick that you only put it in if for the sake of saying you have it, not because anyone actually seriously uses it. Not that it couldn't be useful, but it's just not an important part of the market right now.
If you make games, seriously make games, you need a Dx code path for 360 support (because that's likely your biggest platform), you probably need an OpenGl path for PS3 support (because that's a huge portion of your market), if you're doing next gen development you need both for the Xbox 3 and PS4, and if you're doing a PC path you can go either way, but you really can't do just one these days. Nor does it matter much, since serious game engines already abstract all that stuff for you, and this changes so little on the engine programming side of things (especially compared to all the other stuff you're worried about related to Windows 8) that you really don't care.
What decade are you living in?
Since the unified driver architectures of the mid 2000's both ATI and nVIDIA just support everything. It's only brand new cards where driver support is sketchy, but that's only ever a short term problem.
Driver support is only bad in windows if you have a directx 8 class card, and for that you're talking about 8 year old parts at this point.
Actually there is an entire field of science (monte carlo methods) about faking data for other researchers to make sure their tools work properly.
Sometimes it's really important to prove you have the skills to do the research you are proposing. Think of it as being asked to code 'pac man' on a game development job interview, and yes, I know companies that were doing that as recently as this summer, or a more IT guy thing of trying to set up an e-mail account or the like. A basic proficiency demo. The thing with researchers is that you may have skills that no one knows exist to even ask for.
But getting data - real data, millions or billions of pieces of data, requires a huge amount of time and paperwork, or you may need to write software to gather the data, you may need permission from Twitter and other networks, you may need ethical approval for data that might not be anonymous (what legal obligation do you have if this is threatening?). You need a lot more than 5 days to sort through the grant proposal for a project like this if you want to take any serious data. But to get to the point of having money to do that, you need something you can pitch.
what gets out to the media and beyond has at least some chance of being right
I don't think that has ever worked for anyone in the last 20 years I have no reason to believe it will start now.
Not too long ago /. had posts from the communications department of the university of western ontario, which is where I am a researcher, and from our own university the document was a poor characterization of what the research actually was (HIV vaccine stuff in this case, though I'm in comp sci and they don't do our work any better). Somewhere along the line someone decided that the 'public' only understand high level concepts, so everything we communicate is written as thought it was for a 16 year old to understand. It doesn't matter than dozens of other research papers and groups will actually have to do the work to make the thing the 16 year old understand though, we talk about pieces of a puzzle as though they are a solution to the puzzle. And there's no central media authority who might change it.
You're confusing results with method.
They can get data, they can visualize it, they can run some result on it. This is a demonstration of the tools needed to do research. With a small dataset it appears that there might be some tiny bits you can extract from the data. But mostly it's a tools to implement a method, that would produce results.
I wouldn't publicise any findings until I'd had them peer-reviewed and published.
Then you'd never get funding for a project like this.
They're demonstrating that there might be something interesting to study, the press lets them ask for money rather than beg, and they're not all that invested in a project that might not go anywhere.
its irresponsible to be promoting the findings among people who clearly won't bother to understand
I hate to break it to you, but the press doesn't understand peer reviewed work any better. Whenever media ever looks at any academic work they completely misrepresent it. That's something you get used to.
With only a couple of days work this isn't bad. But it's not science, it's interest and a proof of concept for doing actual research.
The government funding, both federal and state, has decreased dramatically in the last several years for hospitals."
This is where you really run into problems. Cutting funding itself isn't the issue. But when a law mandates something from a government, and the government says 'sorry, we don't have money to pay it' it's not really obvious who wins, and you can't wait 15 years for courts to fight it out while there's someone needing healthcare right now.
Governments usually also narrowly construct laws. As I say, to qualify for medicare funding you have to follow the various emergency room rules, so you are, in effect, expected to find the revenue for your legal mandate from your medicare funding or from something else. It's a stupid system. Some hospitals partition off their budgets, so if you come in and are uninsured you get charged even more money (I know of at least one in New York that does this), because they pool all uninsured patients into the same funding pot, so a rich uninsured guy is supposedly paying for the poor uninsured guy sort of thing, but they spend a lot of money on lawyers trying to chase after people for money they don't have.
I can't imagine anyone actually thinks the US healthcare system is even remotely good. If you believe 'let them die' then you believe the emergency care laws are government overreach, and if you believe that hospitals should be government owned and operated then the whole thing is stupid. And there's not a little of middle ground that isn't going to make both sides angry about the same things.
Sure, if you look at generally how powerful cell phones are a lot of that stuff might translate ok to TV. I always wanted the PSP family to be exactly that, a portable version of the playstation, let me take my games with me from the main machine and let me play the same stuff on the Playstation that i play on the portable version. I might play with a console or phone on my commute home, but I'm not going to sit at on my couch playing a PSP game when there's a great big TV there.
I agree on the 'ouya being underpowered' complaint, it might not be the right product for the market, but clearly a lot of people like the idea.
Pretty much. Besides, they are in transition to the PS4 now and online movie distribution rather than blu ray. It's a good time for a shakeup, especially if the replacement has more expertise in one or both of the upcoming products than the current guy.
It may also be that the corporate idiot at the top is being replaced because he hasn't managed the transition to PS4 and online distribution well, and they want someone who will, and since those problems would be internal rather than external they wouldn't talk about it.
Which means they either exceeded their mandate, to provide only the minimum care necessary for regulatory compliance, or they needed better accountants.
I've helped on a number of US hospital billing systems now, basically, if someone comes in and can't pay there are layer and layers of begging for money from them first, then it becomes a medicare problem. But no, the government doesn't cover everything that could be done, and without providing emergency medical care hospitals don't qualify for medicare funding at all I believe (as per the article you linked). That's a form of insurance - a monstrously bad one, but 'monstrously bad' describes pretty much the entire US healthcare system. They have guaranteed access to funds, and it's chosen to be enough for the minimum of regulatory compliance. If they aren't managing the resources well enough the free market will force them out and find someone who can. Because fuck sick people, that's why.
Hospitals also retain a somewhat privileged monopoly on healthcare. So people who can pay have to go to you. That is, again, a form of insurance (for both patient and hospital, the Hospital is guaranteed a revenue stream and patients are guaranteed to not have to deal with quacks).
Those costs have prompted financially strapped hospitals to rely on a complex system of shifting costs. Most of the burden falls on taxpayers, with the government providing tens of billions of dollars annually to help hospitals care for the uninsured.
From page 2 of the article you listed. Yes yes, hospitals are claiming hundreds of millions in losses but they're collecting billions. The basic problem is that hospitals are incredibly inefficient in the US. If I give you 10k to solve a problem that should cost 9k (1k profit), but you're costing 12k because you're paying too many lawyers, billing staff, greeting staff, administrators for the administrators etc. well sure, you're not going to get enough cash to cover things. I didn't say this was a smart system.