how exactly is the value of a collection of stocks the underpinning of the economy? Exactly as you said, companies have revenues profits etc. Those overall determine the value of a company. If an algorithm goes crazy and suddenly sells a 20.02 price stock for 0.002002 well some other computer or some person will realize that's an opportunity and buy it up. Whether or not the stock trades 100 times going from 19.02 to 20.02 or once doesn't actually change anything underpinning the economy.
You're also making the mistake of assuming that
not based on...
You have some insight into this that the people who write the algorithms are missing because they're completely soul crushingly braindead and couldn't possibly even have read a basic business or econ 101 textbook to grasp simple concepts in stock pricing. They can, and do. And there are lots of ways to build HFT stock pricing assessments. Including sometimes shutting themselves off if something is happening that it can't interpret.
You're right that
bugs in these programs
are bad. But I hate to break it to you, people make mistakes too. Whether or not computers make *more* mistakes on average (or as is relevant more valuable mistakes as a whole) remains to be seen. Mistakes are also why you should have things like insurance.
That algorithm can be executed with or without computers.
Which is the problem in all of this. Any broad 'plan' can be executed just as well by hand as it can by HFT computers. People who are seriously concerned about shifting the entire value of a company or a market move billions of dollars in a single transaction and don't particularly care about nanosecond to nanosecond events.
Everything else is being scraped together the same way traders did before, only faster. Which isn't really good or bad. Stupid people made stupid trades, stupid people design bad algorithms and made stupid trades, people make mistakes, people programming computers make mistakes.
Not really, no that's not how google did it. Google made a radically new type of search product. And now the market has changed, and trying to have a radically better technology than google in search or a much better e-mail is really really hard. When you're going after a bigger competitor you have to be able to produce a product they can't, and get it to market before they can copy it it can get it out the door. Yahoo isn't in that situation.
Googles revenue is from adwords and search. Their search technology was innovative, adwords significantly shook up the advertising market. Everything else they do is 'competitive but different' sure, but it's not making money.
Yahoo's problem is their main revenue is advertising, (like google) but they need a revenue stream that isn't advertising or that gets them some completely new connection to advertisers. As I say, if you want to compete with adwords you need to find something that can't be blocked via a hosts file or via adblock, but has a similar backend, and that they can get out there before google can copy it. They're probably better off to find things google doesn't do well (if at all) and own those as money making endeavors.
This sort of thing is where I think it's important that the CEO of a company drink the proverbial kool-aid and actually try and use their own products. Mayer is a geek - if she tries to use any yahoo services she'll probably find what is redundant, what is broken, and what is missing. All things yahoo needs. Badly.
True, trying to compete head on with google in their core products isn't a great plan. Don't expect yahoo docs or yahoo adwords kinds of things, nor a yahoo mobile operating system. But Google does have a culture that could apply reasonably well to any software product business in terms of employee productivity, satisfaction and coordination and cooperation.
I think the big challenge for yahoo is to compete, but be different. They have search and have e-mail, and have since before google offered those products. So those foundational businesses have to innovate to at least keep pace and look like they're still a player in the market. That doesn't necessarily mean the core search technology needs to be innovative, but the way it's presented or interesting search info that goes with it etc. Pretty much the only thing I like about the yahoo front page is the 'trending now' box, that is mostly celebrity gossip nonsense, but the concept could extend well to 'trending now in tech, trending now in sports' etc. The big area is the ancillary services, flickr, yahoo travel (is that even still around?), accessibility, which is a premium market they could go after. The core ad business probably has room to innovate in providing tools for companies to host ads from their website, but have them populated from a back end ad server (to get around most ad blocking), and that sort of stuff as well, that google doesn't really bother with.
If you can convert being a computer nerd into a successful component of your career it can certainly help attract women. If your computer nerd behaviour is your life, without anything but personal fulfillment from it (i.e. you happily lounge around in your underwear eating twinkies and can't get a decent job) then you're unlikely to have much success with the ladies.
The effect of being employed by google or facebook helps a lot too, since non tech people at least know those companies exist. I know a guy who used to work at ATI (when it was still ATI). When women asked where he worked rather than saying "ATI" he said "I design computer parts at a company at the 404 and 407" (404 and 407 are highways that anyone in toronto would know, though technically ATI HQ is one block west of that at Leslie). That made a big difference in his success with the ladies, and took him quite a while of failed attempts to impress saying ATI to find a better strategy. In *any* technical field it's really important to know how to relate to people who aren't in that field and the computer nerd stereotype can very much be overcome if you just assume people you meet know absolutely nothing about the computer industry, and don't act like they should.
Depends on the sort of things you want. Bestbuy gets preferential treatment for release allocations of certain products (collectors editions of video games, peripherals that sort of thing) where if you didn't pre-order you'd be SOL anywhere else. But best buy will usually have them in stock.
They also stuck a bunch of stuff that's about the same price as the decent online retailers, routers, generic speaker type parts, that sort of thing. Don't go into best buy expecting anyone there to have a brain, that's not the point, if you've got a 100 dollar gift card you're better to use it sooner rather than later before they go bankrupt, so even buying something you don't outright need, but can use, new headphones, a mouse or keyboard, a case for your phone, some USB drives and that kind of stuff is better than a worthless card. You're better to buy 10 USB drives and lose 9 of them than to have a gift card fro best buy.
They even sell boring overpriced small appliances, fans, vacuums that sort of thing. Find someone who needs a fan in this heat, and buy one of those.
Maybe, but the UK and SU overthrew the government previous to that in WW2 because it was on the verge of allying with Nazi germany, and that was 41, and the Shahs dynasty was only installed in 1925 (which is essentially the same period as the ottoman states that were formed after WW1 including Jordan, Egypt, Iraq etc.).
Political forces have play for a lot of reasons. One of the things you're seeing in the arab spring is that the people of those countries aren't really pleased with their governments for, for example, making peace with israel, making deals with the americans etc. The Shia revolution that ended up in charge did so in large part as a reaction to westernization (secular institutions, relatively liberal economic policies, in particular an alliance with the US etc.). All of those things could have come into being under the government structure from 53, and could have ended up with a similar outcome. The relatively messy revolution might not have materialized the same way had their been more democracy, but you can elect bad leaders rather than have them seize power in a revolution or coup. Just look at india and pakistan, california, israel the US federal government, the Eurozone leadership etc. They've all elected leaders with some really bad, including demonstrably wrong, policies. But that's the risk you take with any form of government. Iran is particularly extreme because they're particularly disliked, but that comes with the territory.
I would think this is more of a 2014 project than a 2013 or 2012 project. I don't know any developers with PS4 dev kits yet (I don't even think they exist), so there's no point in even talking about games for that yet. I know teams working on PS4 titles right now are just buying the fastest PC's they can afford and planning to iterate from there, but going from 'on a PC with comparable hardware' to some custom architecture job, with god knows what OpenGl library could take quite a lot longer than 5 or 6 months.
At this rate I wouldn't be surprised to see the Xbox 3 announced next year and launched late in the year or early in the next, and the PS4 following that. The PS3 was a year and half from its announcement to launch date, something similar this time around would make sense because eventually enough studios (including the second tier outsource studios) will have dev kits at which point you can't really hide what it will be.
And ya, Sony might be looking for something to reinvigorate their brand, to capitalize on the digital distribution revolution, and it's clear Valve isn't trying to make friends with microsoft at the moment.
Agreed. These are the sorts of things any serious competitor knows already, if not exactly they have a good idea about how much apple is spending on things and so on. They will hire former (disgruntled) apple staff, they'll pour over their public books, half of their competitors are also their suppliers so they know component costs, they can hire people from the phone carriers etc.
One of my friends used to work at Rogers. Rogers and RIM have a deal where any time and unrecognized* BB device ends up on Rogers RIM gets notified immediately. And that can go very badly for whomever has the device because it's almost certainly stolen.
One of my students did a co-op at RIM before that was the case, and I guess this deal with rogers came into being about 3 years ago. He worked there during a transition, where they initially had 'security' that didn't actually care all that much if you walked out with phones that weren't for sale yet for a long time and then it changed, including with the staff getting a stern warning from the CEO that this would no longer be tolerated. I think this is because most of the other companies you mention, including RIM, announced products before selling them, so knowing that the next phone in the pipeline a month in advance wasn't really a problem. Engadget and a few other places actively hunt for these prototypes, but the phones are announced enough in advance of actual sales that it doesn't matter much, including through things like FCC filings.
*unrecognized as in the device isn't on the list of known devices for sale. There are special SIMS that the big phone carriers give to RIM for development devices, so presumably those accounts don't have issues. But they do get some sort of device ID.
That's still more representation than they'd have with a US corporation.
It's not like democratic governments represent more than 30 or 40% of the population at a time anyway. I'm in canada, the present conservative government got just over 40% of the vote on a 60 ish percent turnout. So on a good day they are honestly representing ~30% of canada in their choice to represent us at the UN. Randomly picking someone.. anyone to represent us would, over time, have a fairly representative conservative/liberal/other split and would at least be better than the representation we get with US corporations, which is none.
or at least investigating. Unfortunately that would smash heads directly with Sony. I'm not saying that's a really bad plan, but Sony's PS ecosystem is a hell of a lot bigger than Valve, and it would be an uphill fight.
On PC you really can't push technology boundaries and make money from it. People have too much trouble understanding what GPU to buy, for what size display, and what drivers to install for it to be a net positive financially for most people. It's a training platform for trying to know how to do this stuff for when consoles support it, or you push boundaries with consoles and that spills over to PC. Most people who buy your game won't turn on the fancy features (assuming they can figure them out at all) and a good chunk of the ones who do will just have problems.
Now people can benefit from PC technology that doesn't require special software. Notably solid state drives, and just straight up faster parts.
Sure, I'm not saying what he says should define the market. Just that he's one of the few guys who knows how successful the experience has been.
Also, drivers only get developer support, not sales. If you can get your game working under wine (which quite a lot of us do) then it's not so much a driver issue as an adoption/pay issue.
There's nothing particularly wrong with the technology in RAGE, the gpu transcoding toggle was actually kind of neat to see on/off in something with professional quality art. The game itself was medicore, but Carmack is a technology guy, gameplay is a whole other field these days.
Besides that, the part in question is whether or not you can make any money on Linux games. As one of the few companies that seriously put effort into it, their answer is: no, not really. And given the number of available data points, which is very very small, you can figure that this is interesting. Eve and WoW both have had forms of linux support, Eve ditched the native client because Wine was faster, and blizzard is big enough that they can afford it even if it's not economically sensible.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2012/01/15/amazon_reveals_2011_s_best-selling_pc_games gives a (imperfect) list of the best selling PC games of 2011. None of them had linux versions at the time (though I'm guessing we'll see Portal 2 on linux eventually). Several of them will run under Wine, but none have native linux support. You can go back a lot of years and keep saying the same thing, almost no one has a native linux client. The number of people in the industry who have any real figures on how successful linux game sales are is very very small, and Carmack is one of those people.
Now in that sense you don't need John Carmack to say it. It could be a fresh MBA monkey, or a summer intern hired by Bethesda to stand up and discuss Linux sales and it would have the same credibility, if they can look at the same spreadsheets. But Carmack still gets press whereas just about anyone else wouldn't. I would be skeptical of taking his advice on a lot of design issues (or on how to get projects done quickly), but that's not what we're talking about here, even then, he can have a lot of good ideas or lessons learned, even if his own company has trouble pulling it off.
Also, this is from a speech at quake con. If John Carmack can't be a celebrity at Quake con there's something seriously wrong with the world.
Very true. Once someone has your product you want to retain them as a customer, in the phone market this means coming up with something worth having every couple of years so they upgrade, or at least keeping in step with the competition. It can also mean trying to lock them to your platform by making migration hard (for example if you couldn't get your phone contacts from your iphone to a droid).
The people you are interested in are the ones who would only buy your product if it had ______________. Then you figure out how much money that works out to, and how much it would cost to implement, and work from there.
Reviews don't equate to adoption. See windows phones. That's the whole root of the problem. Windows phones are decent, but they're not iphones, and they're not androids. So people aren't buying them.
Yeah you make 10% of $250 on say 1/2b
Right, but customers stopped buying those. When they can buy last years iphone, or they can buy this years iphone for 100 dollars or whatever, that market shriveled up and died on them. People would buy a cheap iphone (or a cheap droid) but no one wanted into symbian.
Symbian customers love MeeGo. Why wouldn't Symbian developers move to the new QT based platform
Have you ever done Symbian development? Have you done Symbian development and iPhone or Android (or hell blackberry) development? Symbian is soul crushingly terrible. I did a Symbian project in 2008 and people were thrilled to be onto a Blackberry project by 2009 when everyone knew BB was doomed (and still is), because that was at least better to work with than Symbian. The developer money is in ease of development and the App store model, and with those, Apple (and then Google) blew Symbian away.
Windows doesn't have developers either right now
no, and it probably won't. Nokia bet that they'd take off, and haven't. That was at a least a possibility, lots of people who jumped on the android bandwagon aren't moving anywhere either, you can guess and guess wrong or not be able to pull it off (e.g. Sony droids). But there was never any hope for symbian once there was any sort of an alternative.
Except for example, that wrongly counts health spending on the VA as 'defence' spending, which it sort of is and sort of isn't. It's an earned benefit from service, but much of that would still be an expense under medicare if it wasn't under the VA, and since civilized countries have healthcare it means the US defence budgets have this layer of spending that other countries have, but count completely differently. The DoE and DoD research budgets are kind of the same. I know a lot of civilian scientists who get money for projects that aren't specifically military in nature, but are funded by DoD or DoE. Moving the funding to some other agency but still paying it out would reduce the defence budget but not the actual budget.
From the article you linked
The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending.
is an ideological position to come up with 39% of the interest payments. In fact there's no neutral way to honestly assess that, because it's not like governments borrow money or tax or spend in a particularly specific department by department manner. Sure you can estimate the percent of government spending that is defence, and then attribute that as the defence departments borrowing as part of spending, but that's nonsense. Borrowing because of Hurricane Katrina or significantly expanding spending as a stimulus plan (whatever you may think of those ideas) has nothing to do with defence spending.
I'm not sure anyone can even come up with an accurate figure that meaningfully reflects what defence spending is, or more importantly what you can change of it, typically things like the VA aren't counted in that, because regardless of what you may think of why they were there, those people are covered by VA now and you have to pay for it, so you can't cut the VA, but you can cut F35 purchases.
Sure, I'm not saying the analysis is completely useless, just that it's not really helping evaluate if she's suggesting anything sensible or not. Fact checking if 1/7 families in the US are on foodstamps is a problem a highschool kid could easily manage, fact checking any suggested solution is much harder.
It's claiming that Villie is a specific rip off of their sims social product (where they've copied as much as possible the style of basically the entire game at every level, abilities, characters, character behaviours etc.). Not inspired by, but essentially a copy. You can be inspired by a previous work and build on it, (if you couldn't EA would be in very serious trouble with every FPS they've ever released for example), but you can't reproduce the game under a different name and try and sell it.
They aren't. EA basically ripped off the abilities in SWTOR from WoW (e.g. http://forum.gamebreaker.tv/viewtopic.php?id=3508).
You can't completely copy a game though. In effect it's a similar problem to cover bands, design patents on square corners, and Corporate brands, they all hit on a similar problem from different directions. You can be inspired by, but you can't blatantly copy someone else or their brand features without their permission. Whether this rises to that level I don't know. But Zynga pushes that line as its business model.
Given the timelines that sounds like it'll be 2020 before they can roll anything out in quantity. If they shut the network down in 2017, which will probably face squabbling and delays, 2018 and then start rolling out new technology on top of the old network it'll be tough to turn on something new before 2019.
Slashdot Mirror
Gah, sorry missed a / on one of my quite tags and accidentally hit submit rather than continue editing.
basing the financial underpinnings of our economy
how exactly is the value of a collection of stocks the underpinning of the economy? Exactly as you said, companies have revenues profits etc. Those overall determine the value of a company. If an algorithm goes crazy and suddenly sells a 20.02 price stock for 0.002002 well some other computer or some person will realize that's an opportunity and buy it up. Whether or not the stock trades 100 times going from 19.02 to 20.02 or once doesn't actually change anything underpinning the economy.
You're also making the mistake of assuming that
not based on ...
You have some insight into this that the people who write the algorithms are missing because they're completely soul crushingly braindead and couldn't possibly even have read a basic business or econ 101 textbook to grasp simple concepts in stock pricing. They can, and do. And there are lots of ways to build HFT stock pricing assessments. Including sometimes shutting themselves off if something is happening that it can't interpret.
You're right that
bugs in these programs
are bad. But I hate to break it to you, people make mistakes too. Whether or not computers make *more* mistakes on average (or as is relevant more valuable mistakes as a whole) remains to be seen. Mistakes are also why you should have things like insurance.
That algorithm can be executed with or without computers.
Which is the problem in all of this. Any broad 'plan' can be executed just as well by hand as it can by HFT computers. People who are seriously concerned about shifting the entire value of a company or a market move billions of dollars in a single transaction and don't particularly care about nanosecond to nanosecond events.
Everything else is being scraped together the same way traders did before, only faster. Which isn't really good or bad. Stupid people made stupid trades, stupid people design bad algorithms and made stupid trades, people make mistakes, people programming computers make mistakes.
Not really, no that's not how google did it. Google made a radically new type of search product. And now the market has changed, and trying to have a radically better technology than google in search or a much better e-mail is really really hard. When you're going after a bigger competitor you have to be able to produce a product they can't, and get it to market before they can copy it it can get it out the door. Yahoo isn't in that situation.
Googles revenue is from adwords and search. Their search technology was innovative, adwords significantly shook up the advertising market. Everything else they do is 'competitive but different' sure, but it's not making money.
Yahoo's problem is their main revenue is advertising, (like google) but they need a revenue stream that isn't advertising or that gets them some completely new connection to advertisers. As I say, if you want to compete with adwords you need to find something that can't be blocked via a hosts file or via adblock, but has a similar backend, and that they can get out there before google can copy it. They're probably better off to find things google doesn't do well (if at all) and own those as money making endeavors.
This sort of thing is where I think it's important that the CEO of a company drink the proverbial kool-aid and actually try and use their own products. Mayer is a geek - if she tries to use any yahoo services she'll probably find what is redundant, what is broken, and what is missing. All things yahoo needs. Badly.
True, trying to compete head on with google in their core products isn't a great plan. Don't expect yahoo docs or yahoo adwords kinds of things, nor a yahoo mobile operating system. But Google does have a culture that could apply reasonably well to any software product business in terms of employee productivity, satisfaction and coordination and cooperation.
I think the big challenge for yahoo is to compete, but be different. They have search and have e-mail, and have since before google offered those products. So those foundational businesses have to innovate to at least keep pace and look like they're still a player in the market. That doesn't necessarily mean the core search technology needs to be innovative, but the way it's presented or interesting search info that goes with it etc. Pretty much the only thing I like about the yahoo front page is the 'trending now' box, that is mostly celebrity gossip nonsense, but the concept could extend well to 'trending now in tech, trending now in sports' etc. The big area is the ancillary services, flickr, yahoo travel (is that even still around?), accessibility, which is a premium market they could go after. The core ad business probably has room to innovate in providing tools for companies to host ads from their website, but have them populated from a back end ad server (to get around most ad blocking), and that sort of stuff as well, that google doesn't really bother with.
If you can convert being a computer nerd into a successful component of your career it can certainly help attract women. If your computer nerd behaviour is your life, without anything but personal fulfillment from it (i.e. you happily lounge around in your underwear eating twinkies and can't get a decent job) then you're unlikely to have much success with the ladies.
The effect of being employed by google or facebook helps a lot too, since non tech people at least know those companies exist. I know a guy who used to work at ATI (when it was still ATI). When women asked where he worked rather than saying "ATI" he said "I design computer parts at a company at the 404 and 407" (404 and 407 are highways that anyone in toronto would know, though technically ATI HQ is one block west of that at Leslie). That made a big difference in his success with the ladies, and took him quite a while of failed attempts to impress saying ATI to find a better strategy. In *any* technical field it's really important to know how to relate to people who aren't in that field and the computer nerd stereotype can very much be overcome if you just assume people you meet know absolutely nothing about the computer industry, and don't act like they should.
Depends on the sort of things you want. Bestbuy gets preferential treatment for release allocations of certain products (collectors editions of video games, peripherals that sort of thing) where if you didn't pre-order you'd be SOL anywhere else. But best buy will usually have them in stock.
They also stuck a bunch of stuff that's about the same price as the decent online retailers, routers, generic speaker type parts, that sort of thing. Don't go into best buy expecting anyone there to have a brain, that's not the point, if you've got a 100 dollar gift card you're better to use it sooner rather than later before they go bankrupt, so even buying something you don't outright need, but can use, new headphones, a mouse or keyboard, a case for your phone, some USB drives and that kind of stuff is better than a worthless card. You're better to buy 10 USB drives and lose 9 of them than to have a gift card fro best buy.
They even sell boring overpriced small appliances, fans, vacuums that sort of thing. Find someone who needs a fan in this heat, and buy one of those.
Maybe, but the UK and SU overthrew the government previous to that in WW2 because it was on the verge of allying with Nazi germany, and that was 41, and the Shahs dynasty was only installed in 1925 (which is essentially the same period as the ottoman states that were formed after WW1 including Jordan, Egypt, Iraq etc.).
Political forces have play for a lot of reasons. One of the things you're seeing in the arab spring is that the people of those countries aren't really pleased with their governments for, for example, making peace with israel, making deals with the americans etc. The Shia revolution that ended up in charge did so in large part as a reaction to westernization (secular institutions, relatively liberal economic policies, in particular an alliance with the US etc.). All of those things could have come into being under the government structure from 53, and could have ended up with a similar outcome. The relatively messy revolution might not have materialized the same way had their been more democracy, but you can elect bad leaders rather than have them seize power in a revolution or coup. Just look at india and pakistan, california, israel the US federal government, the Eurozone leadership etc. They've all elected leaders with some really bad, including demonstrably wrong, policies. But that's the risk you take with any form of government. Iran is particularly extreme because they're particularly disliked, but that comes with the territory.
I would think this is more of a 2014 project than a 2013 or 2012 project. I don't know any developers with PS4 dev kits yet (I don't even think they exist), so there's no point in even talking about games for that yet. I know teams working on PS4 titles right now are just buying the fastest PC's they can afford and planning to iterate from there, but going from 'on a PC with comparable hardware' to some custom architecture job, with god knows what OpenGl library could take quite a lot longer than 5 or 6 months.
At this rate I wouldn't be surprised to see the Xbox 3 announced next year and launched late in the year or early in the next, and the PS4 following that. The PS3 was a year and half from its announcement to launch date, something similar this time around would make sense because eventually enough studios (including the second tier outsource studios) will have dev kits at which point you can't really hide what it will be.
And ya, Sony might be looking for something to reinvigorate their brand, to capitalize on the digital distribution revolution, and it's clear Valve isn't trying to make friends with microsoft at the moment.
Agreed. These are the sorts of things any serious competitor knows already, if not exactly they have a good idea about how much apple is spending on things and so on. They will hire former (disgruntled) apple staff, they'll pour over their public books, half of their competitors are also their suppliers so they know component costs, they can hire people from the phone carriers etc.
One of my friends used to work at Rogers. Rogers and RIM have a deal where any time and unrecognized* BB device ends up on Rogers RIM gets notified immediately. And that can go very badly for whomever has the device because it's almost certainly stolen.
One of my students did a co-op at RIM before that was the case, and I guess this deal with rogers came into being about 3 years ago. He worked there during a transition, where they initially had 'security' that didn't actually care all that much if you walked out with phones that weren't for sale yet for a long time and then it changed, including with the staff getting a stern warning from the CEO that this would no longer be tolerated. I think this is because most of the other companies you mention, including RIM, announced products before selling them, so knowing that the next phone in the pipeline a month in advance wasn't really a problem. Engadget and a few other places actively hunt for these prototypes, but the phones are announced enough in advance of actual sales that it doesn't matter much, including through things like FCC filings.
*unrecognized as in the device isn't on the list of known devices for sale. There are special SIMS that the big phone carriers give to RIM for development devices, so presumably those accounts don't have issues. But they do get some sort of device ID.
So don't look to the UN for equity or equality. You will never find it.
Just like the US senate! Or the House of Lords. or ....
My point is only that it's less bad than control being held by a single country that most of us don't trust and don't like.
That's still more representation than they'd have with a US corporation.
It's not like democratic governments represent more than 30 or 40% of the population at a time anyway. I'm in canada, the present conservative government got just over 40% of the vote on a 60 ish percent turnout. So on a good day they are honestly representing ~30% of canada in their choice to represent us at the UN. Randomly picking someone.. anyone to represent us would, over time, have a fairly representative conservative/liberal/other split and would at least be better than the representation we get with US corporations, which is none.
actually what they're planning.
or at least investigating. Unfortunately that would smash heads directly with Sony. I'm not saying that's a really bad plan, but Sony's PS ecosystem is a hell of a lot bigger than Valve, and it would be an uphill fight.
On PC you really can't push technology boundaries and make money from it. People have too much trouble understanding what GPU to buy, for what size display, and what drivers to install for it to be a net positive financially for most people. It's a training platform for trying to know how to do this stuff for when consoles support it, or you push boundaries with consoles and that spills over to PC. Most people who buy your game won't turn on the fancy features (assuming they can figure them out at all) and a good chunk of the ones who do will just have problems.
Now people can benefit from PC technology that doesn't require special software. Notably solid state drives, and just straight up faster parts.
Sure, I'm not saying what he says should define the market. Just that he's one of the few guys who knows how successful the experience has been.
Also, drivers only get developer support, not sales. If you can get your game working under wine (which quite a lot of us do) then it's not so much a driver issue as an adoption/pay issue.
There's nothing particularly wrong with the technology in RAGE, the gpu transcoding toggle was actually kind of neat to see on/off in something with professional quality art. The game itself was medicore, but Carmack is a technology guy, gameplay is a whole other field these days.
Besides that, the part in question is whether or not you can make any money on Linux games. As one of the few companies that seriously put effort into it, their answer is: no, not really. And given the number of available data points, which is very very small, you can figure that this is interesting. Eve and WoW both have had forms of linux support, Eve ditched the native client because Wine was faster, and blizzard is big enough that they can afford it even if it's not economically sensible.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2012/01/15/amazon_reveals_2011_s_best-selling_pc_games gives a (imperfect) list of the best selling PC games of 2011. None of them had linux versions at the time (though I'm guessing we'll see Portal 2 on linux eventually). Several of them will run under Wine, but none have native linux support. You can go back a lot of years and keep saying the same thing, almost no one has a native linux client. The number of people in the industry who have any real figures on how successful linux game sales are is very very small, and Carmack is one of those people.
Now in that sense you don't need John Carmack to say it. It could be a fresh MBA monkey, or a summer intern hired by Bethesda to stand up and discuss Linux sales and it would have the same credibility, if they can look at the same spreadsheets. But Carmack still gets press whereas just about anyone else wouldn't. I would be skeptical of taking his advice on a lot of design issues (or on how to get projects done quickly), but that's not what we're talking about here, even then, he can have a lot of good ideas or lessons learned, even if his own company has trouble pulling it off.
Also, this is from a speech at quake con. If John Carmack can't be a celebrity at Quake con there's something seriously wrong with the world.
Very true. Once someone has your product you want to retain them as a customer, in the phone market this means coming up with something worth having every couple of years so they upgrade, or at least keeping in step with the competition. It can also mean trying to lock them to your platform by making migration hard (for example if you couldn't get your phone contacts from your iphone to a droid).
The people you are interested in are the ones who would only buy your product if it had ______________. Then you figure out how much money that works out to, and how much it would cost to implement, and work from there.
Look how well reviewed the 9 is.
Reviews don't equate to adoption. See windows phones. That's the whole root of the problem. Windows phones are decent, but they're not iphones, and they're not androids. So people aren't buying them.
Yeah you make 10% of $250 on say 1/2b
Right, but customers stopped buying those. When they can buy last years iphone, or they can buy this years iphone for 100 dollars or whatever, that market shriveled up and died on them. People would buy a cheap iphone (or a cheap droid) but no one wanted into symbian.
Symbian customers love MeeGo. Why wouldn't Symbian developers move to the new QT based platform
Have you ever done Symbian development? Have you done Symbian development and iPhone or Android (or hell blackberry) development? Symbian is soul crushingly terrible. I did a Symbian project in 2008 and people were thrilled to be onto a Blackberry project by 2009 when everyone knew BB was doomed (and still is), because that was at least better to work with than Symbian. The developer money is in ease of development and the App store model, and with those, Apple (and then Google) blew Symbian away.
Windows doesn't have developers either right now
no, and it probably won't. Nokia bet that they'd take off, and haven't. That was at a least a possibility, lots of people who jumped on the android bandwagon aren't moving anywhere either, you can guess and guess wrong or not be able to pull it off (e.g. Sony droids). But there was never any hope for symbian once there was any sort of an alternative.
Except for example, that wrongly counts health spending on the VA as 'defence' spending, which it sort of is and sort of isn't. It's an earned benefit from service, but much of that would still be an expense under medicare if it wasn't under the VA, and since civilized countries have healthcare it means the US defence budgets have this layer of spending that other countries have, but count completely differently. The DoE and DoD research budgets are kind of the same. I know a lot of civilian scientists who get money for projects that aren't specifically military in nature, but are funded by DoD or DoE. Moving the funding to some other agency but still paying it out would reduce the defence budget but not the actual budget.
From the article you linked
The National Priorities Project calculates that 39% of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending.
is an ideological position to come up with 39% of the interest payments. In fact there's no neutral way to honestly assess that, because it's not like governments borrow money or tax or spend in a particularly specific department by department manner. Sure you can estimate the percent of government spending that is defence, and then attribute that as the defence departments borrowing as part of spending, but that's nonsense. Borrowing because of Hurricane Katrina or significantly expanding spending as a stimulus plan (whatever you may think of those ideas) has nothing to do with defence spending.
I'm not sure anyone can even come up with an accurate figure that meaningfully reflects what defence spending is, or more importantly what you can change of it, typically things like the VA aren't counted in that, because regardless of what you may think of why they were there, those people are covered by VA now and you have to pay for it, so you can't cut the VA, but you can cut F35 purchases.
Sure, I'm not saying the analysis is completely useless, just that it's not really helping evaluate if she's suggesting anything sensible or not. Fact checking if 1/7 families in the US are on foodstamps is a problem a highschool kid could easily manage, fact checking any suggested solution is much harder.
It's not.
It's claiming that Villie is a specific rip off of their sims social product (where they've copied as much as possible the style of basically the entire game at every level, abilities, characters, character behaviours etc.). Not inspired by, but essentially a copy. You can be inspired by a previous work and build on it, (if you couldn't EA would be in very serious trouble with every FPS they've ever released for example), but you can't reproduce the game under a different name and try and sell it.
They aren't. EA basically ripped off the abilities in SWTOR from WoW (e.g. http://forum.gamebreaker.tv/viewtopic.php?id=3508).
You can't completely copy a game though. In effect it's a similar problem to cover bands, design patents on square corners, and Corporate brands, they all hit on a similar problem from different directions. You can be inspired by, but you can't blatantly copy someone else or their brand features without their permission. Whether this rises to that level I don't know. But Zynga pushes that line as its business model.
Given the timelines that sounds like it'll be 2020 before they can roll anything out in quantity. If they shut the network down in 2017, which will probably face squabbling and delays, 2018 and then start rolling out new technology on top of the old network it'll be tough to turn on something new before 2019.