I have a desktop full of icons for applications, and files I'm actively using, but I don't think/.ers have their bookmarks as icons on their desktop. If you're old enough to have a PhD you might also be in the same boat as I am, which is having learned to think about accessing programs on a computer in the dos and then windows 3.1 era, where having the icon on your desktop was how it was done.
This is one of those times where it would be really neat to know the serious analytical work that must be done to find out how people use OS's, and how to design them better. How much of the way people use machines is a relic of their first computer, how much of it is taking advantage of new tools, do they even know about new tools etc. etc.
Ya, if anything the market has shifted the opposite direction, and you pay them to get your website featured prominently (however you want to define that specifically).
Search engines have no incentive to pay to link. As long as they can minimally link for free they will, and if they have to pay for everything they link, well that isn't going to happen is it, because then you'd have no search.
It's like demanding the phone company pay businesses for the right to list their name in the phonebook.
A couple of weeks ago there was a story here about some campground in spain getting screwed because a search for Alfaques or whatever it was produced a slew of images from some terrible accident near them 30 years ago. That happens because the people who publish those images have made sure their results are at the top of searches, with images in thumbnails, and they are bigger companies than the small little campground. The system can't work both directions at once, and I can't imagine it working with search providers having to pay for what they are currently paid for.
Novice users will stick to windows 7 until power users have figured out the best ways to changeup the new UI, and that will be windows 9. Which is essentially the thrust of the article, and I think sort of obvious.
Of course MS can afford a product cycle that isn't hugely popular. Their biggest competition for Windows 8 is Windows 7, which gets the job done for most people. Vista sucked in large part because people were quite happy with windows XP and didn't really want anything else.
Where they can't really afford to flop is in mobile. But they seem to have the right general idea, one core OS for both desktop and mobile (making cross platform development and use much easier), and then something that is unique from iPhone/Android. Whether it gets market traction or not who knows, but they seem to have some generally good ideas. Their desktop... meh. People can stick with windows 7 for a year or two longer while they figure out what the most important things to change from 8 are.
The other thing is that many of us on/. may not quite grasp how normal people use computers, and how much simpler something like live tiles could be. How many computers do you see that have a desktop full of icons, people who can't manage simple things like bookmarks etc.
And as I say, it's not like MS has any meaningful competition in the desktop space right now. Arguably there is a surge in mac uptake among young people especially, that poses some potential longer term risks, but then Apple without the reality distortion bubble is going to have a much harder time in the long run too, so that provides some longer term advantages. Probably it'll even out in the end.
Actually senior officials having facebook pages really doesn't matter. Once you get up high enough it's pretty hard to keep hidden who or what you are in peacetime. It's simply not practical, because you still have to drive your kids to school, and buy groceries.
There's probably a middle level, people who are actively involved in doing direct work that you don't want being paraded around publicly. But if you get called into congressional meetings (or called before parliament), if you have a press officer who works for you etc. well guess what, they know who you are, and what you're up to. It may be marginally lowering the barrier to finding out where they live, but seriously, if you can't follow a guy home from work to find out where he lives, dig up his employment record etc. well then you're not a very good spy.
Notice the name of the guy who had the fake profile. James Stavrdis. Do a google search for him. So right. How much is really practical to try and keep secret about who he is, or who he's friends with and what schools his children go to. The exact mission he's up to, sure, mildly problematic, but you now what he looks like, what books he wrote, when he was born etc. etc. etc. And that's in 5 seconds of google searching. He even has an official glog and website.
When you're high enough up, you become part of the public face of an organization, and facebook is nothing if not a place for public facing.
I'm not sure you are arguing that this is minimum wage laws hurting the poor. You're arguing that having to pay people at all is hurting them.
Minimum wage only means you have to pay the guy 10 bucks an hour, and not 2, for 3 days. (Or whatever the numbers are at this festival, minimum wage here is 10 bucks an hour). But if you could pay 2 bucks an hour they'd still have all of the other employment questions that have to be addressed (declaring it correctly to the revenue service).
To argue against the minimum wage you'd need to show how this business could run paying their people less than minimum wage, but can't manage at minimum wage, and then how those people would still be able to live at the price they can pay. When you're on a donation system though (even if the preferred price is 2 dollars for 15 minutes) you don't really know what the viable revenue stream is, and, in this case, because it's for a 3 day festival with the 'proceeds to charity' you can charge a ridiculously large amount of money, but you still have no idea how much take you'll have. It sounds like this is being run as a charity thing because well, it is. 3 days of work isn't going to be enough to meaningfully help someone out of a homeless shelter, no matter how much you pay them. But a few hundred or a few thousand bucks to the homeless shelter can help a lot of people for a lot more than 3 days.
maybe they've invested enough in the right kind of security that when they get attacked we don't hear about it. And it's not just anonymous, it's anyone who wants to try.
That seems utterly impractical. The barrier to entry for attempting to hack is sufficiently low that any big company will offend people eventually, no matter what it does. Made a game I don't like, use boxes that are too large for shipping? Price a product some jackass feels entitled to at a point more than they can afford. Etc. etc. etc.
Sure, sony has earned a lot of their current hate. But every company has to realize that they will offend someone eventually, if nothing else than the thrill of trying to hack a big company.
From http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/index.html The largets US Companies in 2011 Wal-Mart Stores Exxon Mobil Chevron ConocoPhillips Fannie Mae General Electric Berkshire Hathaway General Motors Bank of America Ford Motor
I challenge you to find anyone on that list that hasn't pissed off a lot of people, intentionally or otherwise, and legitimately or otherwise, but there are still a lot of angry people at them. And you can keep going down the list.
Sony isn't any different, and even if they change their ways, people will still believe them evil a decade from now. But I don't think you do 100 billion dollars a year in business and not make enough people angry to cause all sorts of hacking problems. Even Warren Buffet has made enemies because he thinks he makes too much money and should be taxed more.
Both the UN and US project that chinas population will peak around 2030, and start declining from there. In other words, 18 years. If 18 years from now there are major population movements to mars I'll be stunned given that earth and mars only get close every 2 years that in 9 cycles we'll have made any meaningful progress, given that the next closest crossing is in august and bugger all has been happening around that. We would be very lucky to have any sort of meaningful lander get to mars for 2016/2017, which is a far cry from landing people let alone landing a meaningful number of people who will do anything.
(Note that while I realize you want to launch based on when the rocket will get there, not when the planets actually align, but the 26month cycle still applies).
There's a difference between being able to put a person on Mars and get them back, to putting enough people on Mars for it to matter in the grand scheme of things. Sure, china will still have an astronomical number of people, but an aging, shrinking population is going to leave them trying to solve a lot of very serious problems on the ground in china, and all of the political upheaval that will come with an educating population trying to cope with an aging one.
Sorry, Westminster parlance. In your case every 2 years you get a new government. In 10 years there's no reason to believe the people deciding on budgets will have the same plan they do today. Not necessarily a better plan. But different.
Laws can be changed? Doesn't seem that complicated a concept. If they have value beyond novelty as moon rocks then they'll have to allow them to be owned.
Right now moon rocks are valuable because going to the moon is novel, rocks are rare, and they have intrinsic value because they are rare (and worth studying), and even have value as display items because they are from the moon, even if they are, in all other ways, identical to, or more boring than earth rocks. That necessarily requires rules to deal with scams, and ideas of ownership that might normally apply to rocks from other places.
All that changes very quickly if they have a commercial value to be mined or the like. They could go a number of ways with it, who mines it owns it, some organization or government could own it and you buy a licence etc. etc. etc. Right now there is a state monopoly on moon rocks. But there's no reason it will have to stay that way if circumstances change.
I wouldn't bet on that. They have their own problems to solve with the money. Colonization takes a lot of money. By the time this starts being a real issue they will have a shrinking or flat population and that has a whole wack of social problems.
And it's not like a statement like this from NASA means anything. By 2016/2017 there will definitely be a new policy for NASA, with new governments with new priorities, and they could completely change their minds in any number of directions. They could decide it will be the US colonizing mars, it could be the Europeans deciding this is how they'll get the greeks out of the Euro once and for all, who knows. At best this is a cue to the private companies that for the moment NASA isn't going to stand in the way. But times change.
That's more of an art style than visual capability though. It's not like I'm making a perfect apples to apples comparison (and the screenshot from skyrim is not the most dramatic I'll grant you).
As I say elsewhere here, how they move matters a lot, and that's not captured all that well in a single screenshot.
Uh.. no. I was trying to be illustrative of a factor of 2000 difference in performance, and because there hasn't been a lot of visual fidelity improvement since DX9. At least not that comes across well in a single screenshot. Unfortunately a difference of actually 2000 takes you back before the era of 3D at all (albeit barely). Other than my other example of FFVII which is one of the first 3D games on something that would bear resemblance to a modern 3D engine, there isn't a lot from that time period that would compare fairly to something like Skyrim or Battlefield 3 or the like. A screenshot between Castle Wolfenstein and Call of Duty 4 might have illustrated the point equally well.
The picture of Lord Nagafen is from what, 1998? That's about 14 years behind where we are now, so that's, give or take what can be done with somewhere between 1/1000th and 1/500th of todays computing power. It was also expressly designed to run on a wide variety of machines, whereas skyrim runs on any console that well, and they are easily a factor of 10 slower than you *can* do on a PC gpu.
Visual quality tends to plateau a bit within a console generation. Yes, Mass Effect 3 or Uncharted 3 look better than the first ones, but not by such a dramatic amount. If you want to know what a factor of 2000 looks like in graphics, it's the difference between final fantasy 7, and something really bleeding edge today, if not moreso.
Sure, I could have pulled a screenshot from Divinity 2 Ego Draconis, but then you're also into art style questions. I'm not hugely fond of the dragons in Skyrim, they're not bad, but they seem like they make much nicer statues than flying around menaces. But of course how things fly around is a big part of graphics, it's not just straight up visual quality, but the calculations you can do that make them behave in a realistic physics manner.
if they look like a blocky collection of triangles that are clearly triangles.
Games are about a suspension of disbelief. I may not know what a 200 Km long spaceship looks like, but I know it doesn't look like 6 lines on a screen. At least not anymore. The standard of what looks like what is as much determined by what you know is possible compared to what is in front of you.
Star wars the old republic (a Bioware game) looks bad compared to say... Dragon Age 2 or Mass Effect 3 (both also bioware games, one launched before, one launched after SWTOR). There are good reasons to make that compromise, but that doesn't mean it doesn't look worse.
Because mechanical people aren't software people, and inevitably some firware flashings will brick the firmware, and you need someone who is an electronics guy to fix it. You need to know how to operate the machine, how to identify problems with the update or with the machine, and have some idea how to fix them.
Right now they plug in a computer, it spits out a code and they work from there. But now you're into actually mucking with the software on the car you need people who are specialists in what the new software does, how it works, how to identify software vs hardware problems and so on, and because replacing the parts would be expensive.
These would be specialties like any other within being a mechanic. The guy who does your brakes isn't generally the same mechanic who does your radiator. But the guys who do the really routine maintenance stuff, oil changes and checking lights, they would have to change significantly to include firmware in routine maintenance. Sure, a big outfit with 20 mechanics adding one more employee or training one in a new specialization isn't a big deal, but when you have 4 mechanics it's kind of a pain.
Maybe I'm biased, around here we have shops that just do oil changes and that sort of thing (the really routine maintenance), there are big shops too. I wouldn't worry about them, but the small guys... not so much. If all you do is rotate tires, lube oil filter lights adding 'firmware' is a pretty big hurdle in manpower and training.
seems more like the sort of thing that should be done routinely when you get your maintenance done, but then mechanic shops would need to have computer techs on staff, and replacement parts for when things go badly.
Even if the system is completely disconnected from everything else on the car, it would still be problematic to have your entertainment system crash constantly.
Even if the system itself is read only (which has it's own problems) it could still crash if it tries to read in bad data.
Whenever you use an existing platform you accept that there's going to be some problems, some fixable, some not, in an era of software you have no excuse for not fixing known problems. With hardware, well, other than replacing the unit there isn't much you can do, and it's not worth replacing hardware if it fails on a bad codec or a corrupted file or whatever.
Keep in mind the resolution he targeted as well. 8000x4000. Toy story (or any movie) is aiming for a screen 20 metres across at a somewhat higher resolution, and they can just brute force it, because well, they have the CPU time.
Don't underestimate the value of dedicated hardware either. Pixar is probably stuck using variants of the same hardware the rest of use, which isn't great for ray tracing (GPU's don't play nice with out of order memory, and CPU's have shitty floating point performance). Hardware designed for the problem, even at todays technology might get you a significant speedup (not significant enough for it to be worth putting a desktop computer yet though).
Self generating environments is a graphics problem largely. Probably you'll need a lot of science to keep the workflow for artists at that level from being unmanageable. You'll have to algorithmically generate characters, faces etc, an artist will just set the parameters for the particular character they want and then tweak a little bit for uniqueness/flavour. And yes, there's some AI in making sure your core game logic will support whatever is generated.
Real time speech synthesis might be interesting, though if you've played SWTOR you can see it's not as great an idea as it sounds like, even though they just brute force it with voice actors. Cutting to a cinematic jars you out of wandering the world, and hearing the same damn thing over and over gets really annoying really fast.
Believe it or not AI isn't as much of a problem as it sounds like. There is really good AI research and really cool things you can do with AI now that you don't. Because they aren't as cool to customers as they are to developers. Most of the NPC's you encounter in a game you encounter for a few seconds, and then kill them, or otherwise move on, even if you come back to them later you only really interact with them in small snippets, 30 seconds here, a minute there. Building an AI that is believable for only 30 seconds requires you turn off most of the fancy stuff that you could do. And really sophisticated AI's, that work really hard to perceive the world, to learn, or to interact like real characters are mostly wasting CPU time. Seriously. Imagine you have an NPC who asks you to do something, and then tell him when it's finished. Now, in the real world, assuming the absence of cell phones, you have to find the person when you're done. If they're off getting lunch on the other side of town you either wait, or you go to the other side of town to tell them. Both of those things waste player time. TES4 (Oblivion) and TES5 Skyrim to an extent have this problem, and that was after they cut most of the radiant AI stuff. You have to have very out of character NPC trackers if you have very in character NPC's because they're a PITA to find, and wasting players time is the enemy of good game design. Simple NPC's don't wander off, which means they are easy to find. It also means you really have trouble building the world. Those guards, ya... they have to eat. Do you really want to have to build a changing of the guard, in every town, the vast majority of which, if not all of which, the player will never see? Or be aware of what is happening? Building and supporting a good NPC AI is a lot of work for relatively little 'fun per cpu cycle'.
Having a handful of NPC's that appear to be lifelike, that's a good idea, but since the player only ever encounters a small number of them the experience is best hand tuned.
Roughly expect a factor of 100 in 10 years. A factor of 16 in 6 more after that. So in 2018 figure 1600x the computing power of today, so by 2030 2000x the computing power in a home machine does not seem unreasonable.
But sweeny is also making some assumptions around requirements that won't come to pass necessarily as quickly as computing power will catch up. Things like how high resolution displays will be may lumber along a lot more slowly that computing power, because the infrastructure to deliver regular content to those displays may not be built as quickly as he'd like it to be. It's not that he's necessarily wrong about 8000x4000 displays, quite honestly that's doable more or less today, with an eyefinity setup (2 rows of four monitors will get you around there). I'm not sure there's much value in that though. The way we focus means we only look at a relatively narrow area, and that won't need to be 8x the pixel density of today to reach eye quality. Sure, if you want 2x the quality of today and your entire field of view maybe, but I'm not sure you'd get enough out of that for it to be worth it.
And anyway, all the steps from here to there will be pretty interesting.
Well either way, a 2000 fold increase in power is about it. Ray tracing is a different memory problem than rasterization (more random memory grabs, less in order churning) but still much of the rest of it is basically the same. Lots of current rendering uses ray casting on a limited scale.
And even sweeny himself has ridden the ray tracing bandwagon, it is the future. But it's also expensive, so expect to have to have the transistors for it. a 2000 fold increase in power is only 6 generations of hardware, or, about a decade. Maybe a bit longer if things slow down a bit.
Also, realize that while a 2000 fold increase in power today is completely unrealistic for a home user. Buying 2 million dollars in graphics cards for research for an outfit like AMD, nVIDIA, epic games, or the like is not completely crazy, nor is it unrealistic for something like Pixar and those guys who are doing rendering professionally. In that situation you realize that a factor of 2000 more than exists today, and is available for use for professional grade users, it's just a matter of how long it takes for the price to come down. Probably 15 years or so.
Well that's why there's consoles. If you can't afford PC hardware, or don't want the hassle of PC hardware, you buy a console. Since they're fixed development targets you in some ways get a better experience, because the developers knew exactly how your hardware would behave with their software and tuned accordingly.
If you have absolutely no money, well, sucks to be you? Sorry, but in a world where people spend 1000 bucks on a TV, 25000 on cars etc. etc. etc. 500 dollars in disposable income on a console, which lasts for 5 years is targeting anyone who makes 35K/year or more. It's not perfect, but what else do you expect? We're not going to resell PS2's for 30 bucks here. There are about 100 million consoles sold at the price point of 700-300 dollars (launch price to current price), which is a pretty wide distribution given that not everyone even likes games, and lots of consoles serve a lot more than 1 person.
Sure, if you don't live in a first world country consoles are insanely expensive, no doubt, but then you'd have a stratification of consoles for the 2nd and third world and consoles for the first world, since people who *can* spend 500 bucks on a console will want a better experience than you're griping about at 50.
The idea that graphics doesn't matter is a misleading one. Graphics matter in their absence. Go play mass effect 3 (at a friends house, since obviously you don't have it, and can't afford it), and then compare to final fantasy 7. That's about a factor of 2000 different in performance. Sure, Final Fantasy 7 is still fun, but you're overlooking the shitty graphics because it's nostalgia, if you tried to release that today you'd be laughed out of publisher and retailer offices. Minecraft gets away with it by being uniquely quirky, but minecraft is one game in a world of AAA titles launching about 1 a week on average. When the other guy has dragons that look like dragons, and boobs that look like boobs, and you have dragons that look like a collection of 25 triangles (compare: http://zam.zamimg.com/images/i/d/id3283.png - original version of Lord Nagafen, EQ1 to http://images.wikia.com/elderscrolls/images/3/31/Ancient.jpg, Ancient dragon in Skyrim) or boobs that are just spheres, I'm sorry but it detracts from the immersion of the experience. Especially for younger people who are used to better quality graphics.
Next gen consoles will be sufficiently more powerful than a low end PC, and hopefully easier to use, such that they will retain the market of "I just want it to work". And mobile is never going to match the experience of the big AA titles. Mobile is the place to be if you're small, indie dev, but the money is on consoles, no on PC (easier to provide a consistent experience for). If you can't get console sales for a Action ish title (skyrim/mass effect/any FPS/sports games etc.) then you can't get enough money to warrant having made the game. The PC versions would never pay for themselves, they pay for the PC portion sure, but if you're not moving a million copies on Xbox2/PS3 combined you're not making a game at this point. if you're going to make a PC exclusive it has to work on garbage computers to move enough copies, which necessitates certain compromises, look at Star Wars or the Sims compared to Mass Effect or Dragon Age. Which will essentially be the same the next round, anything made for consoles can look good on PC, but you have to have a decent rig, if you don't have (or want) a decent rig you buy a console. Intel is catching up to current gen consoles, and by the time it gets there it will be left in the dust.
Indie titles will never be able to compete on average with big titles. Big money means voice acting, professional scoring, huge amounts of art. Yes, you can have the odd indie title that does crazy well (think minecraft) but the vast majority of them will be aiming to break even by flooding the market.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a desktop full of icons for applications, and files I'm actively using, but I don't think /.ers have their bookmarks as icons on their desktop. If you're old enough to have a PhD you might also be in the same boat as I am, which is having learned to think about accessing programs on a computer in the dos and then windows 3.1 era, where having the icon on your desktop was how it was done.
This is one of those times where it would be really neat to know the serious analytical work that must be done to find out how people use OS's, and how to design them better. How much of the way people use machines is a relic of their first computer, how much of it is taking advantage of new tools, do they even know about new tools etc. etc.
Ya, if anything the market has shifted the opposite direction, and you pay them to get your website featured prominently (however you want to define that specifically).
Search engines have no incentive to pay to link. As long as they can minimally link for free they will, and if they have to pay for everything they link, well that isn't going to happen is it, because then you'd have no search.
It's like demanding the phone company pay businesses for the right to list their name in the phonebook.
A couple of weeks ago there was a story here about some campground in spain getting screwed because a search for Alfaques or whatever it was produced a slew of images from some terrible accident near them 30 years ago. That happens because the people who publish those images have made sure their results are at the top of searches, with images in thumbnails, and they are bigger companies than the small little campground. The system can't work both directions at once, and I can't imagine it working with search providers having to pay for what they are currently paid for.
Novice users will stick to windows 7 until power users have figured out the best ways to changeup the new UI, and that will be windows 9. Which is essentially the thrust of the article, and I think sort of obvious.
Of course MS can afford a product cycle that isn't hugely popular. Their biggest competition for Windows 8 is Windows 7, which gets the job done for most people. Vista sucked in large part because people were quite happy with windows XP and didn't really want anything else.
Where they can't really afford to flop is in mobile. But they seem to have the right general idea, one core OS for both desktop and mobile (making cross platform development and use much easier), and then something that is unique from iPhone/Android. Whether it gets market traction or not who knows, but they seem to have some generally good ideas. Their desktop... meh. People can stick with windows 7 for a year or two longer while they figure out what the most important things to change from 8 are.
The other thing is that many of us on /. may not quite grasp how normal people use computers, and how much simpler something like live tiles could be. How many computers do you see that have a desktop full of icons, people who can't manage simple things like bookmarks etc.
And as I say, it's not like MS has any meaningful competition in the desktop space right now. Arguably there is a surge in mac uptake among young people especially, that poses some potential longer term risks, but then Apple without the reality distortion bubble is going to have a much harder time in the long run too, so that provides some longer term advantages. Probably it'll even out in the end.
Actually senior officials having facebook pages really doesn't matter. Once you get up high enough it's pretty hard to keep hidden who or what you are in peacetime. It's simply not practical, because you still have to drive your kids to school, and buy groceries.
There's probably a middle level, people who are actively involved in doing direct work that you don't want being paraded around publicly. But if you get called into congressional meetings (or called before parliament), if you have a press officer who works for you etc. well guess what, they know who you are, and what you're up to. It may be marginally lowering the barrier to finding out where they live, but seriously, if you can't follow a guy home from work to find out where he lives, dig up his employment record etc. well then you're not a very good spy.
Notice the name of the guy who had the fake profile. James Stavrdis. Do a google search for him. So right. How much is really practical to try and keep secret about who he is, or who he's friends with and what schools his children go to. The exact mission he's up to, sure, mildly problematic, but you now what he looks like, what books he wrote, when he was born etc. etc. etc. And that's in 5 seconds of google searching. He even has an official glog and website.
When you're high enough up, you become part of the public face of an organization, and facebook is nothing if not a place for public facing.
I'm not sure you are arguing that this is minimum wage laws hurting the poor. You're arguing that having to pay people at all is hurting them.
Minimum wage only means you have to pay the guy 10 bucks an hour, and not 2, for 3 days. (Or whatever the numbers are at this festival, minimum wage here is 10 bucks an hour). But if you could pay 2 bucks an hour they'd still have all of the other employment questions that have to be addressed (declaring it correctly to the revenue service).
To argue against the minimum wage you'd need to show how this business could run paying their people less than minimum wage, but can't manage at minimum wage, and then how those people would still be able to live at the price they can pay. When you're on a donation system though (even if the preferred price is 2 dollars for 15 minutes) you don't really know what the viable revenue stream is, and, in this case, because it's for a 3 day festival with the 'proceeds to charity' you can charge a ridiculously large amount of money, but you still have no idea how much take you'll have. It sounds like this is being run as a charity thing because well, it is. 3 days of work isn't going to be enough to meaningfully help someone out of a homeless shelter, no matter how much you pay them. But a few hundred or a few thousand bucks to the homeless shelter can help a lot of people for a lot more than 3 days.
maybe they've invested enough in the right kind of security that when they get attacked we don't hear about it. And it's not just anonymous, it's anyone who wants to try.
That seems utterly impractical. The barrier to entry for attempting to hack is sufficiently low that any big company will offend people eventually, no matter what it does. Made a game I don't like, use boxes that are too large for shipping? Price a product some jackass feels entitled to at a point more than they can afford. Etc. etc. etc.
Sure, sony has earned a lot of their current hate. But every company has to realize that they will offend someone eventually, if nothing else than the thrill of trying to hack a big company.
From http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/index.html
The largets US Companies in 2011
Wal-Mart Stores
Exxon Mobil
Chevron
ConocoPhillips
Fannie Mae
General Electric
Berkshire Hathaway
General Motors
Bank of America
Ford Motor
I challenge you to find anyone on that list that hasn't pissed off a lot of people, intentionally or otherwise, and legitimately or otherwise, but there are still a lot of angry people at them. And you can keep going down the list.
Sony isn't any different, and even if they change their ways, people will still believe them evil a decade from now. But I don't think you do 100 billion dollars a year in business and not make enough people angry to cause all sorts of hacking problems. Even Warren Buffet has made enemies because he thinks he makes too much money and should be taxed more.
It really depends what they've been doing. I know lots of programmers who've been doing nothing related to physics or hashtables.
As with everything though, his answer is in a book. Really any half decent book on games will give him the info he needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
Both the UN and US project that chinas population will peak around 2030, and start declining from there. In other words, 18 years. If 18 years from now there are major population movements to mars I'll be stunned given that earth and mars only get close every 2 years that in 9 cycles we'll have made any meaningful progress, given that the next closest crossing is in august and bugger all has been happening around that. We would be very lucky to have any sort of meaningful lander get to mars for 2016/2017, which is a far cry from landing people let alone landing a meaningful number of people who will do anything.
(Note that while I realize you want to launch based on when the rocket will get there, not when the planets actually align, but the 26month cycle still applies).
There's a difference between being able to put a person on Mars and get them back, to putting enough people on Mars for it to matter in the grand scheme of things. Sure, china will still have an astronomical number of people, but an aging, shrinking population is going to leave them trying to solve a lot of very serious problems on the ground in china, and all of the political upheaval that will come with an educating population trying to cope with an aging one.
Sorry, Westminster parlance. In your case every 2 years you get a new government. In 10 years there's no reason to believe the people deciding on budgets will have the same plan they do today. Not necessarily a better plan. But different.
Laws can be changed? Doesn't seem that complicated a concept. If they have value beyond novelty as moon rocks then they'll have to allow them to be owned.
Right now moon rocks are valuable because going to the moon is novel, rocks are rare, and they have intrinsic value because they are rare (and worth studying), and even have value as display items because they are from the moon, even if they are, in all other ways, identical to, or more boring than earth rocks. That necessarily requires rules to deal with scams, and ideas of ownership that might normally apply to rocks from other places.
All that changes very quickly if they have a commercial value to be mined or the like. They could go a number of ways with it, who mines it owns it, some organization or government could own it and you buy a licence etc. etc. etc. Right now there is a state monopoly on moon rocks. But there's no reason it will have to stay that way if circumstances change.
I wouldn't bet on that. They have their own problems to solve with the money. Colonization takes a lot of money. By the time this starts being a real issue they will have a shrinking or flat population and that has a whole wack of social problems.
And it's not like a statement like this from NASA means anything. By 2016/2017 there will definitely be a new policy for NASA, with new governments with new priorities, and they could completely change their minds in any number of directions. They could decide it will be the US colonizing mars, it could be the Europeans deciding this is how they'll get the greeks out of the Euro once and for all, who knows. At best this is a cue to the private companies that for the moment NASA isn't going to stand in the way. But times change.
That's more of an art style than visual capability though. It's not like I'm making a perfect apples to apples comparison (and the screenshot from skyrim is not the most dramatic I'll grant you).
As I say elsewhere here, how they move matters a lot, and that's not captured all that well in a single screenshot.
Uh.. no. I was trying to be illustrative of a factor of 2000 difference in performance, and because there hasn't been a lot of visual fidelity improvement since DX9. At least not that comes across well in a single screenshot. Unfortunately a difference of actually 2000 takes you back before the era of 3D at all (albeit barely). Other than my other example of FFVII which is one of the first 3D games on something that would bear resemblance to a modern 3D engine, there isn't a lot from that time period that would compare fairly to something like Skyrim or Battlefield 3 or the like. A screenshot between Castle Wolfenstein and Call of Duty 4 might have illustrated the point equally well.
The picture of Lord Nagafen is from what, 1998? That's about 14 years behind where we are now, so that's, give or take what can be done with somewhere between 1/1000th and 1/500th of todays computing power. It was also expressly designed to run on a wide variety of machines, whereas skyrim runs on any console that well, and they are easily a factor of 10 slower than you *can* do on a PC gpu.
Visual quality tends to plateau a bit within a console generation. Yes, Mass Effect 3 or Uncharted 3 look better than the first ones, but not by such a dramatic amount. If you want to know what a factor of 2000 looks like in graphics, it's the difference between final fantasy 7, and something really bleeding edge today, if not moreso.
Sure, I could have pulled a screenshot from Divinity 2 Ego Draconis, but then you're also into art style questions. I'm not hugely fond of the dragons in Skyrim, they're not bad, but they seem like they make much nicer statues than flying around menaces. But of course how things fly around is a big part of graphics, it's not just straight up visual quality, but the calculations you can do that make them behave in a realistic physics manner.
if they look like a blocky collection of triangles that are clearly triangles.
Games are about a suspension of disbelief. I may not know what a 200 Km long spaceship looks like, but I know it doesn't look like 6 lines on a screen. At least not anymore. The standard of what looks like what is as much determined by what you know is possible compared to what is in front of you.
Star wars the old republic (a Bioware game) looks bad compared to say... Dragon Age 2 or Mass Effect 3 (both also bioware games, one launched before, one launched after SWTOR). There are good reasons to make that compromise, but that doesn't mean it doesn't look worse.
Because mechanical people aren't software people, and inevitably some firware flashings will brick the firmware, and you need someone who is an electronics guy to fix it. You need to know how to operate the machine, how to identify problems with the update or with the machine, and have some idea how to fix them.
Right now they plug in a computer, it spits out a code and they work from there. But now you're into actually mucking with the software on the car you need people who are specialists in what the new software does, how it works, how to identify software vs hardware problems and so on, and because replacing the parts would be expensive.
These would be specialties like any other within being a mechanic. The guy who does your brakes isn't generally the same mechanic who does your radiator. But the guys who do the really routine maintenance stuff, oil changes and checking lights, they would have to change significantly to include firmware in routine maintenance. Sure, a big outfit with 20 mechanics adding one more employee or training one in a new specialization isn't a big deal, but when you have 4 mechanics it's kind of a pain.
Maybe I'm biased, around here we have shops that just do oil changes and that sort of thing (the really routine maintenance), there are big shops too. I wouldn't worry about them, but the small guys... not so much. If all you do is rotate tires, lube oil filter lights adding 'firmware' is a pretty big hurdle in manpower and training.
seems more like the sort of thing that should be done routinely when you get your maintenance done, but then mechanic shops would need to have computer techs on staff, and replacement parts for when things go badly.
since you could try and buffer overflow an input?
Even if the system is completely disconnected from everything else on the car, it would still be problematic to have your entertainment system crash constantly.
Even if the system itself is read only (which has it's own problems) it could still crash if it tries to read in bad data.
Whenever you use an existing platform you accept that there's going to be some problems, some fixable, some not, in an era of software you have no excuse for not fixing known problems. With hardware, well, other than replacing the unit there isn't much you can do, and it's not worth replacing hardware if it fails on a bad codec or a corrupted file or whatever.
Keep in mind the resolution he targeted as well. 8000x4000. Toy story (or any movie) is aiming for a screen 20 metres across at a somewhat higher resolution, and they can just brute force it, because well, they have the CPU time.
Don't underestimate the value of dedicated hardware either. Pixar is probably stuck using variants of the same hardware the rest of use, which isn't great for ray tracing (GPU's don't play nice with out of order memory, and CPU's have shitty floating point performance). Hardware designed for the problem, even at todays technology might get you a significant speedup (not significant enough for it to be worth putting a desktop computer yet though).
Self generating environments is a graphics problem largely. Probably you'll need a lot of science to keep the workflow for artists at that level from being unmanageable. You'll have to algorithmically generate characters, faces etc, an artist will just set the parameters for the particular character they want and then tweak a little bit for uniqueness/flavour. And yes, there's some AI in making sure your core game logic will support whatever is generated.
Real time speech synthesis might be interesting, though if you've played SWTOR you can see it's not as great an idea as it sounds like, even though they just brute force it with voice actors. Cutting to a cinematic jars you out of wandering the world, and hearing the same damn thing over and over gets really annoying really fast.
Believe it or not AI isn't as much of a problem as it sounds like. There is really good AI research and really cool things you can do with AI now that you don't. Because they aren't as cool to customers as they are to developers. Most of the NPC's you encounter in a game you encounter for a few seconds, and then kill them, or otherwise move on, even if you come back to them later you only really interact with them in small snippets, 30 seconds here, a minute there. Building an AI that is believable for only 30 seconds requires you turn off most of the fancy stuff that you could do. And really sophisticated AI's, that work really hard to perceive the world, to learn, or to interact like real characters are mostly wasting CPU time. Seriously. Imagine you have an NPC who asks you to do something, and then tell him when it's finished. Now, in the real world, assuming the absence of cell phones, you have to find the person when you're done. If they're off getting lunch on the other side of town you either wait, or you go to the other side of town to tell them. Both of those things waste player time. TES4 (Oblivion) and TES5 Skyrim to an extent have this problem, and that was after they cut most of the radiant AI stuff. You have to have very out of character NPC trackers if you have very in character NPC's because they're a PITA to find, and wasting players time is the enemy of good game design. Simple NPC's don't wander off, which means they are easy to find. It also means you really have trouble building the world. Those guards, ya... they have to eat. Do you really want to have to build a changing of the guard, in every town, the vast majority of which, if not all of which, the player will never see? Or be aware of what is happening? Building and supporting a good NPC AI is a lot of work for relatively little 'fun per cpu cycle'.
Having a handful of NPC's that appear to be lifelike, that's a good idea, but since the player only ever encounters a small number of them the experience is best hand tuned.
Roughly expect a factor of 100 in 10 years. A factor of 16 in 6 more after that. So in 2018 figure 1600x the computing power of today, so by 2030 2000x the computing power in a home machine does not seem unreasonable.
But sweeny is also making some assumptions around requirements that won't come to pass necessarily as quickly as computing power will catch up. Things like how high resolution displays will be may lumber along a lot more slowly that computing power, because the infrastructure to deliver regular content to those displays may not be built as quickly as he'd like it to be. It's not that he's necessarily wrong about 8000x4000 displays, quite honestly that's doable more or less today, with an eyefinity setup (2 rows of four monitors will get you around there). I'm not sure there's much value in that though. The way we focus means we only look at a relatively narrow area, and that won't need to be 8x the pixel density of today to reach eye quality. Sure, if you want 2x the quality of today and your entire field of view maybe, but I'm not sure you'd get enough out of that for it to be worth it.
And anyway, all the steps from here to there will be pretty interesting.
Well either way, a 2000 fold increase in power is about it. Ray tracing is a different memory problem than rasterization (more random memory grabs, less in order churning) but still much of the rest of it is basically the same. Lots of current rendering uses ray casting on a limited scale.
And even sweeny himself has ridden the ray tracing bandwagon, it is the future. But it's also expensive, so expect to have to have the transistors for it. a 2000 fold increase in power is only 6 generations of hardware, or, about a decade. Maybe a bit longer if things slow down a bit.
Also, realize that while a 2000 fold increase in power today is completely unrealistic for a home user. Buying 2 million dollars in graphics cards for research for an outfit like AMD, nVIDIA, epic games, or the like is not completely crazy, nor is it unrealistic for something like Pixar and those guys who are doing rendering professionally. In that situation you realize that a factor of 2000 more than exists today, and is available for use for professional grade users, it's just a matter of how long it takes for the price to come down. Probably 15 years or so.
Well that's why there's consoles. If you can't afford PC hardware, or don't want the hassle of PC hardware, you buy a console. Since they're fixed development targets you in some ways get a better experience, because the developers knew exactly how your hardware would behave with their software and tuned accordingly.
If you have absolutely no money, well, sucks to be you? Sorry, but in a world where people spend 1000 bucks on a TV, 25000 on cars etc. etc. etc. 500 dollars in disposable income on a console, which lasts for 5 years is targeting anyone who makes 35K/year or more. It's not perfect, but what else do you expect? We're not going to resell PS2's for 30 bucks here. There are about 100 million consoles sold at the price point of 700-300 dollars (launch price to current price), which is a pretty wide distribution given that not everyone even likes games, and lots of consoles serve a lot more than 1 person.
Sure, if you don't live in a first world country consoles are insanely expensive, no doubt, but then you'd have a stratification of consoles for the 2nd and third world and consoles for the first world, since people who *can* spend 500 bucks on a console will want a better experience than you're griping about at 50.
The idea that graphics doesn't matter is a misleading one. Graphics matter in their absence. Go play mass effect 3 (at a friends house, since obviously you don't have it, and can't afford it), and then compare to final fantasy 7. That's about a factor of 2000 different in performance. Sure, Final Fantasy 7 is still fun, but you're overlooking the shitty graphics because it's nostalgia, if you tried to release that today you'd be laughed out of publisher and retailer offices. Minecraft gets away with it by being uniquely quirky, but minecraft is one game in a world of AAA titles launching about 1 a week on average. When the other guy has dragons that look like dragons, and boobs that look like boobs, and you have dragons that look like a collection of 25 triangles (compare: http://zam.zamimg.com/images/i/d/id3283.png - original version of Lord Nagafen, EQ1 to http://images.wikia.com/elderscrolls/images/3/31/Ancient.jpg, Ancient dragon in Skyrim) or boobs that are just spheres, I'm sorry but it detracts from the immersion of the experience. Especially for younger people who are used to better quality graphics.
Doubt it.
Next gen consoles will be sufficiently more powerful than a low end PC, and hopefully easier to use, such that they will retain the market of "I just want it to work". And mobile is never going to match the experience of the big AA titles. Mobile is the place to be if you're small, indie dev, but the money is on consoles, no on PC (easier to provide a consistent experience for). If you can't get console sales for a Action ish title (skyrim/mass effect/any FPS/sports games etc.) then you can't get enough money to warrant having made the game. The PC versions would never pay for themselves, they pay for the PC portion sure, but if you're not moving a million copies on Xbox2/PS3 combined you're not making a game at this point. if you're going to make a PC exclusive it has to work on garbage computers to move enough copies, which necessitates certain compromises, look at Star Wars or the Sims compared to Mass Effect or Dragon Age. Which will essentially be the same the next round, anything made for consoles can look good on PC, but you have to have a decent rig, if you don't have (or want) a decent rig you buy a console. Intel is catching up to current gen consoles, and by the time it gets there it will be left in the dust.
Indie titles will never be able to compete on average with big titles. Big money means voice acting, professional scoring, huge amounts of art. Yes, you can have the odd indie title that does crazy well (think minecraft) but the vast majority of them will be aiming to break even by flooding the market.