And they're porting to linux as a hedge against a massive failure of windows 8 and an abandoning of the Microsoft platform.
For the vast vast vast vast majority of developers the added overhead of a mac version, let alone a linux version isn't worth the investment at this time. Activision is even cutting out windows XP support (and that still has `12% of the PC game marketshare: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey for august). If you look at overall operating system marketshare, windows has about 91% of the overall market, Mac around 7, Linux 1, and then you're into the margin of error on reporting. Linux just isn't a market worth investing in unless you can count on a few tens of thousands of copies or you're looking at it as an investment in a future platform.
What this tells us is likely that valve is looking at doing a linux console (sort of like the PS3), but based around steam, as a potential future product, especially if windows 8 is as much of a disaster as it seems to be *and* windows marketshare starts to tank. I could also (or instead) see them using a steam cloud of linux servers streaming content, rather than selling you a box too, it is still easier to run a huge linux server farm than windows server farm (especially given the licensing issues with doing that with windows). That doesn't mean anyone else wants in on this plan particularly, but for Valve, who are trying to keep themselves relevant in a world of windows App stores and consoles that have their own clouds they need to be trying all sorts of stuff to keep people using Steam. They can make money on a half life 3, portal 3 etc, but keeping Steam afloat in a Windows 8/9 world presents some serious challenges.
Like Mac, the linux numbers are going to under-report 'gamer' types, because people who play games switch to windows right now, even if they would rather game on Linux. But it's still a very very small market to try and serve, especially when games usually work under Wine so why do any work for 'native' linux when you don't have to? The Eve guys gave up because they couldn't match Wine performance after all, and while WoW runs on Linux they also have an infinite pile of money to throw at the problem, and something like steam, they want to be everywhere in case the PC business completely transforms overnight.
That and Nintendo's developer qualifications scare away small-time developers
That's always a challenge when dealing with console guys. Those crazy requirements are good for consumers, but hard on developers, especially when the Apple App store and Google play just don't have the same requirements.
1) Inflation. The 20$ of 1990 was 26,35$ in 2000, 33,37$ in 2010 and 35,25$ today.
Inflation has nothing to do with it. Right now the way our arrangement works (which is fairly standard but not exactly the same as everyone else) - retail chain takes 30%, the remainder is split 50/50 with the publisher, so on a 60 dollar game we make 21 dollars. The '70' dollar figure presumably includes tax, or the added costs at retail due to sweden paying more than in north america. If we could somehow market and fund development for years on our own (bank), advertise distribute etc without added costs we could sell you the game for 21 dollars and make the same amount of money. Theoretically if the game was only 20 dollars we could sell a lot more copies too, but you'd have to sell 2x as many copies to make up for the loss of the publisher, and that's without ever putting your game in retail or on a digital distributor other than yourself.
2) Development budgets have grown many MANY times over.
Sure, but the games business was hugely profitable at one point too. Budgets crept up to meet the income, it's a competitive market, if you can get an edge by having better art, more art, voice, animation, better graphics etc. than you competitor then you spend more money. Without a doubt the huge production cost on games (easily in the 10's of millions of dollars for AAA titles) creates a huge problem in locking people out of the market, stifling innovation and making companies risk averse. If you look at something like SWTOR, which you effectively can't pirate, and cost EA upwards of 200 million dollars to make, that is going to cost them probably a 100 million dollars in losses. Now EA is big enough they can handle it, but that sort of clusterfuck is going to cause a lot of shakeup in the MMO funding space, and after losses like that they will likely be very averse to trying to build a subscription MMO at all, let alone one with a pricing structure no one has tried before (in this case trying to cut the price by 2/3rds to see if you can pick up more customers). Whether free to play will help them recover or not I don't know, but the end game is bad, a new business model won't make it a better game.
That's only kind of true. It depends on the game, but some titles, ya, the piracy rate is easily up in the 90% range. If you only release your game in the US, or France or the like you have to realize that it's going to be pirated everywhere else, a lot.
My biggest piracy gripe at the moment (as a game developer) is when one of my friends pirates a game and says something like 'I spend enough money on games already". As in, they paid for world of warcraft, call of duty etc. All the ones that have an online component you can't get out of, and can get banned from if you pirate. But then the rest of us, who make smaller indie-niche-no massive online service titles are the ones not getting paid, and it's not like EA (or paradox for that matter) just throw us money for being nice people.
Ubisoft is interesting because they don't have a lot of focus in their publishing, they have Assassin creed, splinter cell, Far cry, and then the ANNO series, and Rayman legends and just dance type stuff. For them I'm sure they are constantly grappling with using the profits from the successful games to fund popular but unsuccessful games, and trying balance that out against piracy cutting into particular portions of their business isn't going to be fun. I'd be surprised if the 97% figure is accurate, but I would not all be surprised to hear a 90% piracy rate for some of their smaller titles like shoot many robots and the like. Well that, and they got themselves enormous bad press for DRM so lots of people are pirating their stuff on principle.
I think I read that 97% of the games played in PCs was pirated copies?
For us the ratio is about 50-70% piracy, but a LOT of that is in china where you can't sell your game.
Cutting out the 'middle man' and charging a lot less is harder than it sounds. If you're a niche product (think Hearts of Iron from your own Paradox, who happen to publish the stuff I work on), then you can build a direct relationship with the customers through steam and gamersgate and just give up on retail. On the other hand, if you're someone like Bethesda, and selling Skyrim, you need walmart and gamestop to carry your game, and they won't if you sell it from your first party store for a third the price, at which point you sell a lot less games, and it's much harder to get any money at all.
At some point in cost you're better off not selling your game at all unfortunately. The 'per copy' support costs work out to a couple of bucks, pirates don't get support - that's PC at least. Console piracy is a different problem.
That's partly because no one wants to develop a game for the Wii when it's massively underpowered compared to the 360 or PS3.
At this point the term 'casual' gamer really means someone who games occasionally, it doesn't necessarily mean they want to play shitty games with low production quality, they just don't want to spend 3 hours a day every day playing games.
For the Wii basically all of the good games that have a broad appeal are first party nintendo products. That's a problem, because without the ecosystem there's no long term monetization strategy. Although just dance managed to do well as a franchise.
Also, I tend to think the premise of 'are they going to win back casuals' is wrong. I don't think they want to. They sold 100 million Wii's, and then pitifully few games. That's not a good business strategy. Now admittedly, they made money on the consoles, but they'd be happier to sell 50 million consoles and 4x as many games sort of thing. Lots of people bought a wii, wii sports, and one game, and never touched the thing again, all of that unrealized potential turns out to be really really really hard to capitalize on. It's easier to make something people who buy a lot of games want, so you can keep selling them games.
Who cares about fault? What matters is if customers have access to your service. If you have 100 million potential customers who can't access your service because they have bad IT departments you have to either build your system to work around that blocking, or give up on 100 million customers.
8 was released in 2009. IE9 last year. I'm not really sure it matters for google, but if you do custom web applications 3 years isn't really a long time to have to keep it alive.
The big thing with IE8 is that it's the last IE for windows XP. Which is why it has a larger markeshare than IE9 still. marketshare from June and more marketshare by a lot. (25% vs 18%).
If windows 8 looked like it was about to take off like a rocket and Windows XP was on a rapid trajectory to obsolescence then sure, but that isn't really what's happening. Windows XP is slowly dying away, but it's still slowly, and especially in the business market lots of potential customers are locked into the browser on XP for the moment.
Granted, google probably has a lot of metrics and they probably know this isn't a problem for *their* products, but for the us little guys it's a different problem.
Well that's the thing, dictators can still censor stuff, but that is, as you say, futile, it's not them I'm worried about. The government of Egypt, Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and a few others are mostly kinda democratic. It's about the democratic governments coming on side with being openly dismissive of crazy people in other countries and clamping down on people getting too riled up about it.
If everytime someone chanted death to america the yanks burned down an embassy there wouldn't be a lot embassies left. People sometimes need to be given perspective by their leaders, and they need to be credible leaders - right now they have credible leaders a lot of places, they just aren't quite caught up to the 16th century yet.
It is unfortunate, but nothing new to Christians who have seen their faith run through the artistic expression and philosophical
Except that Christianity doesn't expressly forbid depictions of jesus etc. Muslims don't have free speech, it's a foreign concept to them. It was, for a long time, a foreign concept to the christian world too after all, the Christian, Asian Orthodox and Catholic and protestant churches (see what I did there, I implied eastern orthodox as the real christians not anyone else, you didn't go burning an embassy down over it?) all disagree over who's interpretation is right. But that's kind of the point. By steel and gunpowder they got themselves to the point of simply disagreeing, and not making any more of a fuss over it. Part of that of course comes from the balance in power between the state and religion, and the eternal conflict between the Catholic church particularly as a state and as a religion.
Just about everything one christian denomination stands for one of the others disagrees with, about the only thing they agree on are that a god exists and that jesus is his son, and none of them are too fond of people pointing that out as being obvious nonsense. But beyond that, they've long since fought their wars and revolutions, inquisitions and witch hunts over it and it's just not worth it. Free speech isn't some grand ideal about why it's great to hear everyone's opinion, it's a grand ideal because I know I don't have to listen to other people's opinions. The new islamic movements are going to find it very hard to get anything done if they want to waste a week every time someone of no importance says something they don't like, but that will take some growing pains because for years they've been like sheltered children by their authoritarian states, and they just discovered that the world has porn and gays and they don't like that. Eventually they'll figure out that there are a lot of people in the world who say a lot of offensive things, and most of the time no one cares, and making a fuss over it just gives attention to people who don't deserve it.
Granted, it may well be that we need to extend the principles of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648), importantly 'Cuius regio, eius religio' through the UN. Your state can set its own damn rules about religion but keep your nose out of anyone elses so to speak. That would require leaders in muslim states to go along with it, and they're not there yet, or at least, not all of them, but they're getting there.
Ya, I have a champions character. Same people who made COH1. But there's no direct transfer over, you need to organize and so on. And it's the quirky little communities that are hard to replace. Fortunately the single server in champions means you'll definitely be with people from your server, it's just a matter of finding them.
In the L4D2 natively on linux comments pointed out the basic problem with this assertion.
Functions have some overhead and efficiency. A function that has a minimum execution of 4ms will effectively cap your FPS at 250, some other API might have a minimum execution of 2ms, which caps at 500. But at the 60FPS range they can both be the same, or the performance could reverse, the 4ms function could scale much better than the 2ms function for example. Also, because no one really thinks too seriously about FPS in the range of 150+ a lot of weird shit can happen that won't effect normal use.
That said, you're right, who wants to have to buy a 50 or 100 dollar more expensive video card for the same performance? New games especially try and push the limits of the hardware, and you're just not going to get 300 FPS on Guild Wars 2, Borderlands 2 or Call of Duty 2 or with lots of details turned on using affordable hardware today. L4D2 is basically based on a 4 year old engine that aims to be fast on mid range machines. But getting 15 fps or even a steady 40 or 50 FPS with 15 in the marginal cases of major effects on screen can really hurt the experience. Obviously the next generation of consoles is going to raise the bar a step further.
Without a doubt. I'm sympathetic to the costs of running an operation like CoH, and it had a good run, but it's too bad there isn't a 'COH 2' sort of thing for everyone to migrate to if they need to shut down the last one.
It touches something everyone who plays online games wonders about.
How deep is that connection with your friends you know only in a virtual way? Does their impact on the virtual world you played in matter in any sense? Is changing a game world that 300 000 people play in and enjoy a real accomplishment? If he coaches little league or his kids football people would talk about that, even though it impacts a lot less people and is not all that important in the grand scheme of things. Hundreds of thousands of people have been touched, in a small way, by this guy, he was part of their little special society.
It's also strange, how our relationships with friends are changing. My friends who I play online with at least, are more likely to remember the far too many hours we spent trying to kill the first entrance trash in molten core, on the first night there were 40 people on our server who could even get in than some event where people went bar crawling and didn't quite make it home. We raided molten core, other people broke into an abandoned cement factory.
I'm 32, 4 years ago a friend of mine from public school passed away due to brain cancer. I had known him for 23 or 24 years in total (from junior kindergarten until he passed away). We did lots of stuff as kids, riding around parks on a bike, trying to meet girls, failing miserably with girls, we sat around his house and played games, we went to universities, fell in a river at a yearly university party etc. That stuff, when people gave speeches about it at his funeral is something everyone could relate to and laugh about. Including that time we accidentally set fire to our old school, his father sold school equipment and after graduation he was working for his dad and someone botched an installation... Know one really knew (or was inclined to talk about) how he'd spent the last couple of years of his life trying to help organize a guild in a video game. He couldn't be around people IRL a lot of the time due to treatments, but he could log on and help organize 40 or 50 people to get their shit together and have fun. I guess that's important, insofar as having fun is important. But it's not something people in their 40's and 50's and older can really understand or relate to generally.
Eve particularly makes this a story because it's a single world. Whatever my deceased friend accomplished was confined to one server of a cluster of servers of hundreds of thousands or millions of people all doing the same thing, in their own little instances walking past each other. But in Eve, one person can change the world for everyone, good or bad.
Notice how there's no story about the other 3 people who were killed, 2 other staffers and the ambassador. The ambassador is getting lots of coverage on the MSM. That was his 'clique' so to speak, and that will be his mark on the world is as an ambassador trying to manage US business. This was an IT guy, who played games with his friends. There's nothing wrong with that, but how we think about peoples contribution to the world is changing, this poor guy has the unfortunate distinction of getting a lot of press for it, but he's certainly not the first.
When George Lucas or Hironobu Sakaguchi, or Sid Meier pass away people on the outside of their properties (Star Wars/Indiana Jones, Final fantasy, Civilization) will understand them as the creators of those things, even if they never played the games or watched the movies. Game worlds are different, because the people who created the rules of the world, and the people who make the world aren't the same. This guy made part of the world that was created by the people at CCP, and that 300k other people play in. I don't think society has quite figured out how, if at all, it wants to try and recognize that.
Sure, those who enter the field later in life might be great at it, but your average worker in that position won't hold a candle to the one who was self-taught through driven interest, especially if they then went on to formal education in the field.
This supposes that computer science is trying to teach you to be a programmer - something that can be self taught, not a scientist - which cannot reasonably be self taught. That is not the case. If you want to just be a programmer you can go to tradeschool/community college and get training as a programmer, if that's the only training you're getting in programming you're going to be pretty bad compared to someone who is self taught. If you want to know how to lead those people, how to make sure you're setting goals they can actually achieve (algorithm complexity anyone...), designing the whole system which uses lots of people properly (software engineering).
We train both software engineering and computer science where I am. Looking at our 2011 class (the ones who graduates summer 2011, and are now a year out of work), it seems like about a third were ever programmers particularly. More than that have to do some programming, but lots of them are project managers, regulator compliance specialists, network planners and managers, design leads etc.
It's the difference between being a mechanic, and an engineer. You can learn most of being a mechanic on your own time. Learning to do differential equations on your own time is possible, but it's much much harder - because it all sort of builds in sequence from the end of high school. Most of our good comp sci grads are basically self taught techs or programmers, you kinda have to be to be able to get anything done. But there's a huge step from being able to walk into a second first year class and make everyone else look bad, and being able to do the scientific analysis of an algorithm. Probably half of our 3rd year algorithms course is stuff I never figured out on my own in 10 years of being a programmer (I was a physicist by training, so I had to do programming but with only 1 single semester course on programming).
Being a computer scientist is really about being a scientist, you need to know how to do the stats, the analysis, the high level design that is to then be implemented by programmers, who may be, but aren't necessarily CS grads themselves.
I'm collaborating on a project with a guy who is a self taught programmer. It's largely an AI project he coded himself (with data entry from 2 other people). He has a decision tree with something like 30 000 leaves. It's a nightmare. Anyone who had taken our AI 1 or AI 2 would have had some exposure to FSMs, blackboarding etc. and could have designed a system that didn't have 30 000 leaves when the same thing could be accomplished with, on a bad day 200-300 states, or more like 70 or 80, or a few hundred behaviours.
I will grant you that a lot of places (waterloo, Toronto, Western, Guelph) hardware is decidedly secondary, and if you want to do anything with hardware comp sci at those schools doesn't prepare you. But if you go to Wilfred Laurier (which is just down the street from waterloo) it's a hardware heavy school. So some schools can suck at teaching you hardware, software, or both, and that happens (although in canada at least no one is really bad at anything, but some schools are still better than others).
On the flip side, too many solo hobbyists don't know how to convert their hobby into professional work when it comes to demands, tradeoffs, and communication on the job.
Lots of professionals suck at those things too. I think that's more about the type of person you are than the type of post high school education you have.
What happens if the iPad battery fails, it's not charged,
Presumably multiple members of the flight crew will each have an iPad or equivalent, and there will probably be a charging port available (regular power outlet).
there's a bug in the software, the documentation gets hacked and changes, etc?
Not net connected iPads likely. Pretty standard systems hardening for the machines you plug them into.
Last time I checked paper didn't run out of power, doesn't get hacked, may have a typo, but certainly doesn't have the myriad of possible failure points that a piece of hardware has.
I lol'd so hard I nearly spilled my afternoon coffee on the book in front of me. Paper fails all the time. It sticks, it tears, the ink fades, stuff gets spilled on it, it accrues crud from your hands on it, and it suffers the same problem of an iPad in being stolen or misplaced.
I'll grant you, the iPad itself doesn't seem like the only, or best, solution to this problem, at least not if you could have a waterproof one. But trying to navigate 16 kilos of paper comes with its own problems.
Unfortunately ars has a bit of a scattershot of quality. Article on network security? Awesome stuff they wrote themselves. Article on particle physics, no problem they have a PhD in nuclear physics for that. Article on chemistry... they've got nothin'.
It's like they have the right idea, but not enough money (or a poor HR department) and just can't find the right people to cover a diverse range of topics.
Despite the writing quality of the summary here, I actually think this article is sort of relevant. Amazon (rightly) doesn't want to let you sell books that you can get for free on the same device. That's a good thing overall, and reflects and underlying shift in how we think of books. The market for references, how to guides, etc. all have to change to keep up with the internet, there's isn't much place for trying to print and sell something you can find more effectively with google.
Actually I would argue that's something every other OS does poorly. It's one of those 'logical vs physical' things that we in comp sci work so hard to abstract away physical parts. That makes sense in servers, clusters, racks or sophisticated computers and in the pure mathematical sense of a computing machine that abstractly manipulates information. But when there actually is physical hardware a 1:1 mapping between the software and hardware is a good place to start.
Linux uses a lot of terminology (e.g. Mounting a drive) that has a physical space meaning, which isn't the same in software. That is, for a 7 year old, probably confusing. We have enough trouble with these concepts with 17 and 18 year olds, trying to inflict it on a 7 year old will have some problems.
Really basic stuff can be a huge barrier to understanding. Print ("hello World"); Does that mean it's going to print... to the printer? How is 'mounting' the filesystem on a DVD different than mounting it in the brackets inside the PC? That kind of stuff. Even for 17 and 18 year olds this stuff is confusing, for a 7 year old it can be overwhelming when they're still grappling with basic language concepts.
Which side to believe when both sides are known liars?
I'd err on a developer (not necessarily this developer, but A developer), because 12 million device ID's for a collection of phones would be bizarre for the FBI. Why not just get all of them, or a more targeted subset. 12 million always seemed like it was everyone that downloaded some particular app or collection of apps, it's just not clear which one(s).
Which doesn't negate the possibility of it being on a laptop in the FBI's possession either - I just don't see what could such a half assed effort at surveillance would do, so it's more likely to be pulled from some particular app for some particular purpose.
Naturally, if the app is "how to identify soft targets" or "soft target photo sharing" you jump squarely into a more obvious why these particular apps. But who knows. Blue toad is a publishing support outfit it looks like, so this could be all of the devices that downloaded a book on a terrorist list* (and blue toad shows up because their devices download all of the books in their catalogue for example).
*I use this as a non specific term to describe any sort of book/magazine etc. that the FBI decide it should follow, fairly or otherwise.
Windows in that sense is better (if you can call it that) about exposing the relationship to hardware. The C drive and D drive are almost always physical drives. They don't *have* to be - they can be partitions or RAIDS but they usually will be.
I would stick to windows 7 just because windows 8 is bad - it's too confusing for 20 somethings with MSc's and PhD's in comp sci, and there's no point in teaching them basic computer skills (document creation for example, or web browsing) on completely antiquated software.
Definitely you get railroaded a bit in how you think about computers based on the first machines you've used. I'm at a university and we've got our first batch of kids finishing up now that never saw anything earlier than windows XP - people who got their first computer between 7-10 are now in 1st -4th year. When they see a command prompt (hello word in visual studio) they think they've broken something. It's a completely different mindset than people even a couple of years older than that.
I'm not really sure how to think of a 7 year old an linux. A lot of 7 year olds still struggle with basic vocabulary and spelling, linux tends to require you be able to read or that you not look at anything interesting. It's worth trying, but requires parental supervision. I know from experience that 8 and 9 year olds can navigate windows successfully without supervision.
And a computer can't be a toy? Geeze half the games our graduates make are for 6-12 year olds.
An Old beige box you can also pull the cards out of, and if he breaks one you can replace it. Basic stuff like how does it work, how I take it apart and put it together is not a bad starting point. A 7 year old isn't quite ready for digital logic and IC design. The PCB is a look at once sort of thing at that age, because they're too young to get much out of it.
A 7 year old is grade 1 or 2. They still need to learn multiplication tables and how to print letters on single lines. We're not really ready to jump into BASIC programming or soldering yet.
That's an argument for the larger parties not to cave in to stupid demands from the coalition partner.
See what happens in israel.
If you have a coalition partner you have to cave to some of their demands, or they won't stay part of the coalition (even the Lib dems in the UK are going through this). But this actually happens on an issue by issue basis rather than on a coalition basis.
Minority governments, however you get them, are dominated by figuring out who is easiest to pander to on any given bill, and figuring out what you trade to them. Where I am (in ontario canada) the liberal minority have to trade things like more union protection, more taxes etc. if they want socialist (NDP, who are only kind of socialist these days) support, or less taxes and less regulation if they want conservative support.
And the pandering isn't necessarily related to the bill at hand. Want to sign a trade deal, you have to pass a language law, or do something with settlements in the west bank etc.
If the conservatives in the UK (who are the lead party in coalition with the liberal democrats) just decide they won't go along with wealth taxation, and the lib dems get their backs up about it, the UK will have to go to an election. Which could quite possibly end up back where they are now, needing another election. Etc.
Now the UK and canada examples are countries that don't have full on proportional representation (fortunately), germany is a sort of proportional - but the 5% cutoff keeps the "National Democratic Party of Germany - Peoples Union" (the neo -nazi's basically) out of sets, as they'd need to more or less triple their vote count. But you can see where this could go badly.
But looking at countries that do use proportional representation, we don't really witness such things happening. There are several reasons for this:
Uh.. yes, actually, you do. Notably in israel and germany.
I also picked my 2 seats to be illustrative. If you set a threshold at say, 10% you could still let in the birthers in the US who feel that Obama is a muslim and that nothing he says is legally binding. (They're riding around 17% of the population believing such things).
Slashdot Mirror
And they're porting to linux as a hedge against a massive failure of windows 8 and an abandoning of the Microsoft platform.
For the vast vast vast vast majority of developers the added overhead of a mac version, let alone a linux version isn't worth the investment at this time. Activision is even cutting out windows XP support (and that still has `12% of the PC game marketshare: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey for august). If you look at overall operating system marketshare, windows has about 91% of the overall market, Mac around 7, Linux 1, and then you're into the margin of error on reporting. Linux just isn't a market worth investing in unless you can count on a few tens of thousands of copies or you're looking at it as an investment in a future platform.
What this tells us is likely that valve is looking at doing a linux console (sort of like the PS3), but based around steam, as a potential future product, especially if windows 8 is as much of a disaster as it seems to be *and* windows marketshare starts to tank. I could also (or instead) see them using a steam cloud of linux servers streaming content, rather than selling you a box too, it is still easier to run a huge linux server farm than windows server farm (especially given the licensing issues with doing that with windows). That doesn't mean anyone else wants in on this plan particularly, but for Valve, who are trying to keep themselves relevant in a world of windows App stores and consoles that have their own clouds they need to be trying all sorts of stuff to keep people using Steam. They can make money on a half life 3, portal 3 etc, but keeping Steam afloat in a Windows 8/9 world presents some serious challenges.
Like Mac, the linux numbers are going to under-report 'gamer' types, because people who play games switch to windows right now, even if they would rather game on Linux. But it's still a very very small market to try and serve, especially when games usually work under Wine so why do any work for 'native' linux when you don't have to? The Eve guys gave up because they couldn't match Wine performance after all, and while WoW runs on Linux they also have an infinite pile of money to throw at the problem, and something like steam, they want to be everywhere in case the PC business completely transforms overnight.
That and Nintendo's developer qualifications scare away small-time developers
That's always a challenge when dealing with console guys. Those crazy requirements are good for consumers, but hard on developers, especially when the Apple App store and Google play just don't have the same requirements.
1) Inflation. The 20$ of 1990 was 26,35$ in 2000, 33,37$ in 2010 and 35,25$ today.
Inflation has nothing to do with it. Right now the way our arrangement works (which is fairly standard but not exactly the same as everyone else) - retail chain takes 30%, the remainder is split 50/50 with the publisher, so on a 60 dollar game we make 21 dollars. The '70' dollar figure presumably includes tax, or the added costs at retail due to sweden paying more than in north america. If we could somehow market and fund development for years on our own (bank), advertise distribute etc without added costs we could sell you the game for 21 dollars and make the same amount of money. Theoretically if the game was only 20 dollars we could sell a lot more copies too, but you'd have to sell 2x as many copies to make up for the loss of the publisher, and that's without ever putting your game in retail or on a digital distributor other than yourself.
2) Development budgets have grown many MANY times over.
Sure, but the games business was hugely profitable at one point too. Budgets crept up to meet the income, it's a competitive market, if you can get an edge by having better art, more art, voice, animation, better graphics etc. than you competitor then you spend more money. Without a doubt the huge production cost on games (easily in the 10's of millions of dollars for AAA titles) creates a huge problem in locking people out of the market, stifling innovation and making companies risk averse. If you look at something like SWTOR, which you effectively can't pirate, and cost EA upwards of 200 million dollars to make, that is going to cost them probably a 100 million dollars in losses. Now EA is big enough they can handle it, but that sort of clusterfuck is going to cause a lot of shakeup in the MMO funding space, and after losses like that they will likely be very averse to trying to build a subscription MMO at all, let alone one with a pricing structure no one has tried before (in this case trying to cut the price by 2/3rds to see if you can pick up more customers). Whether free to play will help them recover or not I don't know, but the end game is bad, a new business model won't make it a better game.
That's only kind of true. It depends on the game, but some titles, ya, the piracy rate is easily up in the 90% range. If you only release your game in the US, or France or the like you have to realize that it's going to be pirated everywhere else, a lot.
My biggest piracy gripe at the moment (as a game developer) is when one of my friends pirates a game and says something like 'I spend enough money on games already". As in, they paid for world of warcraft, call of duty etc. All the ones that have an online component you can't get out of, and can get banned from if you pirate. But then the rest of us, who make smaller indie-niche-no massive online service titles are the ones not getting paid, and it's not like EA (or paradox for that matter) just throw us money for being nice people.
Ubisoft is interesting because they don't have a lot of focus in their publishing, they have Assassin creed, splinter cell, Far cry, and then the ANNO series, and Rayman legends and just dance type stuff. For them I'm sure they are constantly grappling with using the profits from the successful games to fund popular but unsuccessful games, and trying balance that out against piracy cutting into particular portions of their business isn't going to be fun. I'd be surprised if the 97% figure is accurate, but I would not all be surprised to hear a 90% piracy rate for some of their smaller titles like shoot many robots and the like. Well that, and they got themselves enormous bad press for DRM so lots of people are pirating their stuff on principle.
I think I read that 97% of the games played in PCs was pirated copies?
For us the ratio is about 50-70% piracy, but a LOT of that is in china where you can't sell your game.
Cutting out the 'middle man' and charging a lot less is harder than it sounds. If you're a niche product (think Hearts of Iron from your own Paradox, who happen to publish the stuff I work on), then you can build a direct relationship with the customers through steam and gamersgate and just give up on retail. On the other hand, if you're someone like Bethesda, and selling Skyrim, you need walmart and gamestop to carry your game, and they won't if you sell it from your first party store for a third the price, at which point you sell a lot less games, and it's much harder to get any money at all.
At some point in cost you're better off not selling your game at all unfortunately. The 'per copy' support costs work out to a couple of bucks, pirates don't get support - that's PC at least. Console piracy is a different problem.
That's partly because no one wants to develop a game for the Wii when it's massively underpowered compared to the 360 or PS3.
At this point the term 'casual' gamer really means someone who games occasionally, it doesn't necessarily mean they want to play shitty games with low production quality, they just don't want to spend 3 hours a day every day playing games.
For the Wii basically all of the good games that have a broad appeal are first party nintendo products. That's a problem, because without the ecosystem there's no long term monetization strategy. Although just dance managed to do well as a franchise.
Also, I tend to think the premise of 'are they going to win back casuals' is wrong. I don't think they want to. They sold 100 million Wii's, and then pitifully few games. That's not a good business strategy. Now admittedly, they made money on the consoles, but they'd be happier to sell 50 million consoles and 4x as many games sort of thing. Lots of people bought a wii, wii sports, and one game, and never touched the thing again, all of that unrealized potential turns out to be really really really hard to capitalize on. It's easier to make something people who buy a lot of games want, so you can keep selling them games.
Who cares about fault? What matters is if customers have access to your service. If you have 100 million potential customers who can't access your service because they have bad IT departments you have to either build your system to work around that blocking, or give up on 100 million customers.
Only support current browsers
8 was released in 2009. IE9 last year. I'm not really sure it matters for google, but if you do custom web applications 3 years isn't really a long time to have to keep it alive.
The big thing with IE8 is that it's the last IE for windows XP. Which is why it has a larger markeshare than IE9 still. marketshare from June and more marketshare by a lot. (25% vs 18%).
If windows 8 looked like it was about to take off like a rocket and Windows XP was on a rapid trajectory to obsolescence then sure, but that isn't really what's happening. Windows XP is slowly dying away, but it's still slowly, and especially in the business market lots of potential customers are locked into the browser on XP for the moment.
Granted, google probably has a lot of metrics and they probably know this isn't a problem for *their* products, but for the us little guys it's a different problem.
your own nice dictatorship
Well that's the thing, dictators can still censor stuff, but that is, as you say, futile, it's not them I'm worried about. The government of Egypt, Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and a few others are mostly kinda democratic. It's about the democratic governments coming on side with being openly dismissive of crazy people in other countries and clamping down on people getting too riled up about it.
If everytime someone chanted death to america the yanks burned down an embassy there wouldn't be a lot embassies left. People sometimes need to be given perspective by their leaders, and they need to be credible leaders - right now they have credible leaders a lot of places, they just aren't quite caught up to the 16th century yet.
It is unfortunate, but nothing new to Christians who have seen their faith run through the artistic expression and philosophical
Except that Christianity doesn't expressly forbid depictions of jesus etc. Muslims don't have free speech, it's a foreign concept to them. It was, for a long time, a foreign concept to the christian world too after all, the Christian, Asian Orthodox and Catholic and protestant churches (see what I did there, I implied eastern orthodox as the real christians not anyone else, you didn't go burning an embassy down over it?) all disagree over who's interpretation is right. But that's kind of the point. By steel and gunpowder they got themselves to the point of simply disagreeing, and not making any more of a fuss over it. Part of that of course comes from the balance in power between the state and religion, and the eternal conflict between the Catholic church particularly as a state and as a religion.
Just about everything one christian denomination stands for one of the others disagrees with, about the only thing they agree on are that a god exists and that jesus is his son, and none of them are too fond of people pointing that out as being obvious nonsense. But beyond that, they've long since fought their wars and revolutions, inquisitions and witch hunts over it and it's just not worth it. Free speech isn't some grand ideal about why it's great to hear everyone's opinion, it's a grand ideal because I know I don't have to listen to other people's opinions. The new islamic movements are going to find it very hard to get anything done if they want to waste a week every time someone of no importance says something they don't like, but that will take some growing pains because for years they've been like sheltered children by their authoritarian states, and they just discovered that the world has porn and gays and they don't like that. Eventually they'll figure out that there are a lot of people in the world who say a lot of offensive things, and most of the time no one cares, and making a fuss over it just gives attention to people who don't deserve it.
Granted, it may well be that we need to extend the principles of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648), importantly 'Cuius regio, eius religio' through the UN. Your state can set its own damn rules about religion but keep your nose out of anyone elses so to speak. That would require leaders in muslim states to go along with it, and they're not there yet, or at least, not all of them, but they're getting there.
Ya, I have a champions character. Same people who made COH1. But there's no direct transfer over, you need to organize and so on. And it's the quirky little communities that are hard to replace. Fortunately the single server in champions means you'll definitely be with people from your server, it's just a matter of finding them.
In the L4D2 natively on linux comments pointed out the basic problem with this assertion.
Functions have some overhead and efficiency. A function that has a minimum execution of 4ms will effectively cap your FPS at 250, some other API might have a minimum execution of 2ms, which caps at 500. But at the 60FPS range they can both be the same, or the performance could reverse, the 4ms function could scale much better than the 2ms function for example. Also, because no one really thinks too seriously about FPS in the range of 150+ a lot of weird shit can happen that won't effect normal use.
That said, you're right, who wants to have to buy a 50 or 100 dollar more expensive video card for the same performance? New games especially try and push the limits of the hardware, and you're just not going to get 300 FPS on Guild Wars 2, Borderlands 2 or Call of Duty 2 or with lots of details turned on using affordable hardware today. L4D2 is basically based on a 4 year old engine that aims to be fast on mid range machines. But getting 15 fps or even a steady 40 or 50 FPS with 15 in the marginal cases of major effects on screen can really hurt the experience. Obviously the next generation of consoles is going to raise the bar a step further.
Without a doubt. I'm sympathetic to the costs of running an operation like CoH, and it had a good run, but it's too bad there isn't a 'COH 2' sort of thing for everyone to migrate to if they need to shut down the last one.
Know one
Really, I'd catch this after I hit post. Figures....
It touches something everyone who plays online games wonders about.
How deep is that connection with your friends you know only in a virtual way? Does their impact on the virtual world you played in matter in any sense? Is changing a game world that 300 000 people play in and enjoy a real accomplishment? If he coaches little league or his kids football people would talk about that, even though it impacts a lot less people and is not all that important in the grand scheme of things. Hundreds of thousands of people have been touched, in a small way, by this guy, he was part of their little special society.
It's also strange, how our relationships with friends are changing. My friends who I play online with at least, are more likely to remember the far too many hours we spent trying to kill the first entrance trash in molten core, on the first night there were 40 people on our server who could even get in than some event where people went bar crawling and didn't quite make it home. We raided molten core, other people broke into an abandoned cement factory.
I'm 32, 4 years ago a friend of mine from public school passed away due to brain cancer. I had known him for 23 or 24 years in total (from junior kindergarten until he passed away). We did lots of stuff as kids, riding around parks on a bike, trying to meet girls, failing miserably with girls, we sat around his house and played games, we went to universities, fell in a river at a yearly university party etc. That stuff, when people gave speeches about it at his funeral is something everyone could relate to and laugh about. Including that time we accidentally set fire to our old school, his father sold school equipment and after graduation he was working for his dad and someone botched an installation... Know one really knew (or was inclined to talk about) how he'd spent the last couple of years of his life trying to help organize a guild in a video game. He couldn't be around people IRL a lot of the time due to treatments, but he could log on and help organize 40 or 50 people to get their shit together and have fun. I guess that's important, insofar as having fun is important. But it's not something people in their 40's and 50's and older can really understand or relate to generally.
Eve particularly makes this a story because it's a single world. Whatever my deceased friend accomplished was confined to one server of a cluster of servers of hundreds of thousands or millions of people all doing the same thing, in their own little instances walking past each other. But in Eve, one person can change the world for everyone, good or bad.
Notice how there's no story about the other 3 people who were killed, 2 other staffers and the ambassador. The ambassador is getting lots of coverage on the MSM. That was his 'clique' so to speak, and that will be his mark on the world is as an ambassador trying to manage US business. This was an IT guy, who played games with his friends. There's nothing wrong with that, but how we think about peoples contribution to the world is changing, this poor guy has the unfortunate distinction of getting a lot of press for it, but he's certainly not the first.
When George Lucas or Hironobu Sakaguchi, or Sid Meier pass away people on the outside of their properties (Star Wars/Indiana Jones, Final fantasy, Civilization) will understand them as the creators of those things, even if they never played the games or watched the movies. Game worlds are different, because the people who created the rules of the world, and the people who make the world aren't the same. This guy made part of the world that was created by the people at CCP, and that 300k other people play in. I don't think society has quite figured out how, if at all, it wants to try and recognize that.
Sure, those who enter the field later in life might be great at it, but your average worker in that position won't hold a candle to the one who was self-taught through driven interest, especially if they then went on to formal education in the field.
This supposes that computer science is trying to teach you to be a programmer - something that can be self taught, not a scientist - which cannot reasonably be self taught. That is not the case. If you want to just be a programmer you can go to tradeschool/community college and get training as a programmer, if that's the only training you're getting in programming you're going to be pretty bad compared to someone who is self taught. If you want to know how to lead those people, how to make sure you're setting goals they can actually achieve (algorithm complexity anyone...), designing the whole system which uses lots of people properly (software engineering).
We train both software engineering and computer science where I am. Looking at our 2011 class (the ones who graduates summer 2011, and are now a year out of work), it seems like about a third were ever programmers particularly. More than that have to do some programming, but lots of them are project managers, regulator compliance specialists, network planners and managers, design leads etc.
It's the difference between being a mechanic, and an engineer. You can learn most of being a mechanic on your own time. Learning to do differential equations on your own time is possible, but it's much much harder - because it all sort of builds in sequence from the end of high school. Most of our good comp sci grads are basically self taught techs or programmers, you kinda have to be to be able to get anything done. But there's a huge step from being able to walk into a second first year class and make everyone else look bad, and being able to do the scientific analysis of an algorithm. Probably half of our 3rd year algorithms course is stuff I never figured out on my own in 10 years of being a programmer (I was a physicist by training, so I had to do programming but with only 1 single semester course on programming).
Being a computer scientist is really about being a scientist, you need to know how to do the stats, the analysis, the high level design that is to then be implemented by programmers, who may be, but aren't necessarily CS grads themselves.
I'm collaborating on a project with a guy who is a self taught programmer. It's largely an AI project he coded himself (with data entry from 2 other people). He has a decision tree with something like 30 000 leaves. It's a nightmare. Anyone who had taken our AI 1 or AI 2 would have had some exposure to FSMs, blackboarding etc. and could have designed a system that didn't have 30 000 leaves when the same thing could be accomplished with, on a bad day 200-300 states, or more like 70 or 80, or a few hundred behaviours.
I will grant you that a lot of places (waterloo, Toronto, Western, Guelph) hardware is decidedly secondary, and if you want to do anything with hardware comp sci at those schools doesn't prepare you. But if you go to Wilfred Laurier (which is just down the street from waterloo) it's a hardware heavy school. So some schools can suck at teaching you hardware, software, or both, and that happens (although in canada at least no one is really bad at anything, but some schools are still better than others).
On the flip side, too many solo hobbyists don't know how to convert their hobby into professional work when it comes to demands, tradeoffs, and communication on the job.
Lots of professionals suck at those things too. I think that's more about the type of person you are than the type of post high school education you have.
You can make electronics extremely water resistant
Yes, you can, but the iPad by default isn't. That was my point of it not being the only or best solution, as you'd have to waterproof them aftermarket
What happens if the iPad battery fails, it's not charged,
Presumably multiple members of the flight crew will each have an iPad or equivalent, and there will probably be a charging port available (regular power outlet).
there's a bug in the software, the documentation gets hacked and changes, etc?
Not net connected iPads likely. Pretty standard systems hardening for the machines you plug them into.
Last time I checked paper didn't run out of power, doesn't get hacked, may have a typo, but certainly doesn't have the myriad of possible failure points that a piece of hardware has.
I lol'd so hard I nearly spilled my afternoon coffee on the book in front of me. Paper fails all the time. It sticks, it tears, the ink fades, stuff gets spilled on it, it accrues crud from your hands on it, and it suffers the same problem of an iPad in being stolen or misplaced.
I'll grant you, the iPad itself doesn't seem like the only, or best, solution to this problem, at least not if you could have a waterproof one. But trying to navigate 16 kilos of paper comes with its own problems.
Unfortunately ars has a bit of a scattershot of quality. Article on network security? Awesome stuff they wrote themselves. Article on particle physics, no problem they have a PhD in nuclear physics for that. Article on chemistry... they've got nothin'.
It's like they have the right idea, but not enough money (or a poor HR department) and just can't find the right people to cover a diverse range of topics.
Despite the writing quality of the summary here, I actually think this article is sort of relevant. Amazon (rightly) doesn't want to let you sell books that you can get for free on the same device. That's a good thing overall, and reflects and underlying shift in how we think of books. The market for references, how to guides, etc. all have to change to keep up with the internet, there's isn't much place for trying to print and sell something you can find more effectively with google.
You can't call it that, period.
Actually I would argue that's something every other OS does poorly. It's one of those 'logical vs physical' things that we in comp sci work so hard to abstract away physical parts. That makes sense in servers, clusters, racks or sophisticated computers and in the pure mathematical sense of a computing machine that abstractly manipulates information. But when there actually is physical hardware a 1:1 mapping between the software and hardware is a good place to start.
Linux uses a lot of terminology (e.g. Mounting a drive) that has a physical space meaning, which isn't the same in software. That is, for a 7 year old, probably confusing. We have enough trouble with these concepts with 17 and 18 year olds, trying to inflict it on a 7 year old will have some problems.
Really basic stuff can be a huge barrier to understanding. Print ("hello World"); Does that mean it's going to print... to the printer? How is 'mounting' the filesystem on a DVD different than mounting it in the brackets inside the PC? That kind of stuff. Even for 17 and 18 year olds this stuff is confusing, for a 7 year old it can be overwhelming when they're still grappling with basic language concepts.
Which side to believe when both sides are known liars?
I'd err on a developer (not necessarily this developer, but A developer), because 12 million device ID's for a collection of phones would be bizarre for the FBI. Why not just get all of them, or a more targeted subset. 12 million always seemed like it was everyone that downloaded some particular app or collection of apps, it's just not clear which one(s).
Which doesn't negate the possibility of it being on a laptop in the FBI's possession either - I just don't see what could such a half assed effort at surveillance would do, so it's more likely to be pulled from some particular app for some particular purpose.
Naturally, if the app is "how to identify soft targets" or "soft target photo sharing" you jump squarely into a more obvious why these particular apps. But who knows. Blue toad is a publishing support outfit it looks like, so this could be all of the devices that downloaded a book on a terrorist list* (and blue toad shows up because their devices download all of the books in their catalogue for example).
*I use this as a non specific term to describe any sort of book/magazine etc. that the FBI decide it should follow, fairly or otherwise.
Windows in that sense is better (if you can call it that) about exposing the relationship to hardware. The C drive and D drive are almost always physical drives. They don't *have* to be - they can be partitions or RAIDS but they usually will be.
I would stick to windows 7 just because windows 8 is bad - it's too confusing for 20 somethings with MSc's and PhD's in comp sci, and there's no point in teaching them basic computer skills (document creation for example, or web browsing) on completely antiquated software.
Definitely you get railroaded a bit in how you think about computers based on the first machines you've used. I'm at a university and we've got our first batch of kids finishing up now that never saw anything earlier than windows XP - people who got their first computer between 7-10 are now in 1st -4th year. When they see a command prompt (hello word in visual studio) they think they've broken something. It's a completely different mindset than people even a couple of years older than that.
I'm not really sure how to think of a 7 year old an linux. A lot of 7 year olds still struggle with basic vocabulary and spelling, linux tends to require you be able to read or that you not look at anything interesting. It's worth trying, but requires parental supervision. I know from experience that 8 and 9 year olds can navigate windows successfully without supervision.
Seven-year-olds need toys.
And a computer can't be a toy? Geeze half the games our graduates make are for 6-12 year olds.
An Old beige box you can also pull the cards out of, and if he breaks one you can replace it. Basic stuff like how does it work, how I take it apart and put it together is not a bad starting point. A 7 year old isn't quite ready for digital logic and IC design. The PCB is a look at once sort of thing at that age, because they're too young to get much out of it.
A 7 year old is grade 1 or 2. They still need to learn multiplication tables and how to print letters on single lines. We're not really ready to jump into BASIC programming or soldering yet.
That's an argument for the larger parties not to cave in to stupid demands from the coalition partner.
See what happens in israel.
If you have a coalition partner you have to cave to some of their demands, or they won't stay part of the coalition (even the Lib dems in the UK are going through this). But this actually happens on an issue by issue basis rather than on a coalition basis.
Minority governments, however you get them, are dominated by figuring out who is easiest to pander to on any given bill, and figuring out what you trade to them. Where I am (in ontario canada) the liberal minority have to trade things like more union protection, more taxes etc. if they want socialist (NDP, who are only kind of socialist these days) support, or less taxes and less regulation if they want conservative support.
And the pandering isn't necessarily related to the bill at hand. Want to sign a trade deal, you have to pass a language law, or do something with settlements in the west bank etc.
If the conservatives in the UK (who are the lead party in coalition with the liberal democrats) just decide they won't go along with wealth taxation, and the lib dems get their backs up about it, the UK will have to go to an election. Which could quite possibly end up back where they are now, needing another election. Etc.
Now the UK and canada examples are countries that don't have full on proportional representation (fortunately), germany is a sort of proportional - but the 5% cutoff keeps the "National Democratic Party of Germany - Peoples Union" (the neo -nazi's basically) out of sets, as they'd need to more or less triple their vote count. But you can see where this could go badly.
But looking at countries that do use proportional representation, we don't really witness such things happening. There are several reasons for this:
Uh.. yes, actually, you do. Notably in israel and germany.
I also picked my 2 seats to be illustrative. If you set a threshold at say, 10% you could still let in the birthers in the US who feel that Obama is a muslim and that nothing he says is legally binding. (They're riding around 17% of the population believing such things).