Author: Michael Fiegel
Pages: 2
Publisher: Slashdot
Rating: 4
Summary: A quickie read about game marketing is summarized.
Skip this review. It consists of 12 paragraphs of rambling, none of which relate the content back to the reviewer's personal experience. It's hard to tell if the reviewed book is useful since we don't know anything about the reviewer's usage of the information. We are told it's all about "Indie" gaming markets, but that term is never defined. Akin to other genres of creative marketing, it's probably "outside the large market players".
Tip: Begin good at reading books does NOT mean you are good at reviewing a book.
The reviewer then goes on to decribe content that seems easy to derive from interacting with search engines advertising agents, and simply includes lists of sites that hold the real content.
Various soapboxing from the content author are kept to a minimum, ensuring the 28-35$ book keeps its costs low. The review tells us the Web Marketing portion was ghost written, and poorly.
Overall, I thought the review lacked any in-depth opinion (agree/disagree) and saved its commentary to words like "light" and "confused" and "may be a worthwhile investment". I didn't really have a comparison of the book against others in the market.
In comparison to other reviews on slashdot and elsewhere, this one was pretty incoherent. I would probably scrap most of it and start over with a bit more of the reviewer's background (why should we respect his opinion?) and relevance to other materials in that sector ("Compared to Secrets of the Game Business..." for example).
-- Mugnyte is the president of the "Reviewers' Reviewing Viewpoint", a nonexisting publication delivered to your dog bowl twice an eon.
So I'm a little doubtful that these changes are dramatically affecting the mindset of the Chinese population. Like I've heard in interviews before "If you want to read it, you can find it".
What raises my eyebrows is that hacks like this are a "one shot deal". You can't run an exploit for very long without it getting notice, then patched. So the charge for these must be pretty high, given that it seems like work for hire.
So the business background on this exploit is probably far juicier than the exploit itself. The path to contact, payment, motive, etc are probably a great story. I would certainly read that book.
Of course, if writing such a book, I would take the XLS information and place it on the market itself, continuing the intrigue. Let's hope its something dealing with a government, which then topples, affecting more change than someone getting rich. I mean, if writing, write big.
Chase what you love, first and foremost. That said, you should surf Sourceforge and sign into one of the projects there. It will help "the cause" of forwarding FOSS.
If you want extra money, you'll find enough few contract programming jobs (if you're competent) at places like Hire A Programmer or Xperts 4 Hire. There are others but you know how to google, right programmer?
For example, my side projects include:
- FOSS Sudoku
- Postgres Build machine agent
- General BSD OS fiddling
- Local C++ work
- various "skunkwork" projects at my local job (.NET)
The rest is non-tech. I must stress that having a non-tech side makes your life whole.
3D Realms declared today that "Duke Nuken Forever" is The Best Game Ever! With an incredible non-linear storyline, incredible learning AI across games, outrageous low-lag multiplay, both 1stP and ortho views - and runs on a standard gaming machine! Published with a complete set of of level-making tools and start-of-the-art texture and atmosphere effects, Duke Nuken Forever is set to be the most played game ever.
3D Realms gave a presentation of the all the features that will help Duke keep the number one spot in the market. It also outlined the TV channel, movies series and theme park spun from the elements of the game.
Can you acquire the sourcecode anonymously/without signing anything?
Can you compile the sourcecode into a full version of the binaries?
Does the sourcecode reference only same-level or more open sources?
Can you modify the sourcecode and deliver to others?
Can you submit your changes to the original/current authors for inclusion?
Can you redistribute/resell the sourcecode? Your modified binaries?
Sticking to an earlier philosophy, sourcecode is just a list of steps to create a certain effect. By sharing this recipe publicly, you invite comment, and can allow for various distrbutions that improve upon your version. The survival of these depends on their applicability to the market - and may find specialization. Conversely, anything that interferes with this process is pushing the market to accept tools that possibly do not fit and may never fit to your problem.
The standard shell tools on Unix are one level where it's easy to see the benefit of this philosophy. Taking this to the level of Linux, we find similar distributions fanning out, then collapsing into specializations (embedded, server, nongeek gui's).
There are merits to holding the source and not. If you purchase OTS non-free, you regard the program as an appliance and if you hold all the source, you are making and maintaining (perhaps with market help) your own tools. Each requires skills and risks, but they will both forever exist.
Regarding sourcecode: To the skilled (engineer), it is empowering to work with tools. To the unskilled (executive), it is efficient to work with appliances.
It doesn't matter how open software is. To my clients/managers, I merely explain the risks and rewards of either side. "You get what you pay for" vs "We can build it ourselves" - there are times when each seems advantageous, and both can bite your business.
Being the engineer, I like the $ coming to me instead of a vendor, so I usually stick my neck out to propose an in-house solution first,then line up the OTS solutions. When I land one, it lands big and usually works out well for everyone.
MS has taken this tactic for years. The the model of GPL'd source is not really MS's cup of tea. Rather, they will taken any *input* other developers would like to give to their code. For example, we use the MS Enterprise Libs for.NET here for a few things. It ships with code, which we can extend and use. However, you'll not see us distribute our modified source with anything we like, even if we merely wrap and give props to the original authors. And, you won't find Ent Lib sources anywhere else except MS. They'll take input, but be the final decision on what is in that product. This is akin to GPL, but it differs in that 2nd tier dev cannot really ship their own source based on tier 1 - which stops the innovation cycle right there. Here's EULA of that product
The intellectual property MS builds, like many software companies, is in their employees, not their code. The interesting problems they solve in code are usually boiled down to applying academically studied methods to present-day technology issues. Like any company, combining two or more current technologies in interesting ways is the innovation (ie maps+satellite+weather+traffic= cooler map program). Today, many schools don't solely use Windows (many use a *nix variant) to study info processing, so MS must often borrow/mimic from other platforms. You can bet they certainly benefit from GPL, even if it means just having a reference for a solution's implementation.
I've always believed intellectual capital is in the employees and their ability to *continuously* output creative solutions. Similar to musicians, there's a bit of money to be made from the output, perhaps a lot, but software and music are on an honor system digitally. You have to keep adapting, improving and "have another hit" to ensure your company is still the market maker.
Take a simple phrase or word, and apply your own standard cipher.
I take input (like "frankenfurter") and apply:
- reverse letters "retrufneknarf"
- substitute numbers for vowels "r1tr2fn3kn4rf" or "r4tr3fn2kn1rf"
I can write this original word right on my monitor, or in my wallet, and it still doesn't give my folks enough to hack in quickly. Each time i need a new password, I pick a new input word, but keep the cipher the same.
Pick your own cipher, but there are lots of standards morphs for words.
The MSDN documentation is lacking, but it exists. I don't think the developer base ignores it. But there are numerous sites already devoted to dev-level sharing (code exchange, the o'reilly pages, etc).
MS already has too many channels for information sharing (TV productions, podcasts, engineer/team blogs, forums, help pages, etc).
It would be nice if they consolidated, and improved the partitions of the information. MS has long been neglecting their help-searching algorithms. If they got their act together with their "improved search" on MSN and a consolidated info database, i'd be able to see reference, examples, RW usage patterns, bugs and workarounds all from a single dashboard.
Au contraire, my friend. A bunch of/.er's have much more sway to the political tide than Hillary Rosen. All they have to do is vote. (Oh, and get into the Diebold machines)
Get ready for a world of DRM-style drivers that do not get specs sent to Linux hacks, do not get reverse engineered (because they handshake with a DRM OS), and power hardware that is not backward compatible to you and your P100 beigebox w/floppy-drive.
Several years ago, I lived in Burbank CA and worked in Phoenix, AZ. I flew from the Burbank airport (10 minute taxi from home) to the Phoneix airport (57 minute flight) then went to the office (10 minute taxi ride). About a 90 minute trip each way with lines (pre-911 security). I took this trip several times a week, only staying overnight 1 or 2 nights for work. I worked 7 days a week.
It's fun, and if your spouse wants to travel (and your family situation allows it), you get many miles. In my case, I received a "companion pass" that allowed my spouse to fly with me free for 1 year. We took Southwest (the "magic bus" of US airlines) to many places - over a dozen.
However, after 18 months of this type of work, I began to fight to work at home. The job didn't provide anything more than I could get through phone calls (the business relationships were built, and my code delivery could be given to the appropriate teams remotely). My home office didn't know who I was, and the remote office saw me as just another crazy consultant.
Also, I missed not really discovering much of either Burbank or Phoenix. Like so many of the side trips on longer weekends, everywhere felt like a temporary home. My wife built a home life, including neighbors, parties, etc - without me.
I must advise against such a move. But knowing how I felt in the beginning long ago, I know you will not see the drawbacks as universal, and my description of them here is inadequate. Good luck.
How can you say your 2.2 is a workable solution? Imagine: User upgrades from 3Mbit to 6Mbit, full time, anytime. User doesn't have to worry if content at "schmoe.nowhere" is in the same game as "www.abc.com", or any other closely tied affiliate of ISP.
The ISP cannot throttle what they've already sold. This is the Big Lie of bandwidth. It's dynamic on the demand side. However, scaling back based on any criteria suddenly places the carrier into a serious category: judge.
What are the public checks to ensure ISP doesn't throttle based on source? content?
If they do throttle, what are the rules? How are they communicated? enforced?
What are the true values for continuous bandwidth? can i demand content all day at full without worry? What did I pay for?
How does the market remain free for smaller ISPs? If they are throttled above them, but their competition is not, why? Who is going to police this behavior, and pay for such policing?
Overall, it's a safe bet that the money is going to the ISPs. This is a power play, IMHO. "You like internet? great, today internet is slower, unless you visit my friends' sites, or pay me". Bullshit!
If this goes through, perhaps the only recourse is homegrown networks, with fat links to other homegrowns. Suddenly, the backbone is replaced with a newborn wireless system - which will take a long time to match anything around today. However, the possibility is growing.
Keep in mind there is a current trend for cosmetics and supplements to use the word "nano" in front of all thing marketing-speak. The concern from this trend is from having the particles penetrate the subdermal layer and travel throughout the body.
see concern story here and a rebuttal here for examples
This is going on the bottom of a long list of changes that (now) require quite a bit of money to implement. I foresee 2 numbers (at least) in use for the next 15 years. SSN is a PK, Alt Key, fixed length string in thousands of databases. I doubt we're going to see much shift in this very soon.
Then, when examining the new number, one realizes that they've only solved a few of the many problems with a national id. What they're searching for is a universal hash value for individuals. This is a tough problem, and perhaps may not be solved with a single number - unless it's perhaps birthmoment & a genetic checksum + password. Even then, the amount of information in the key may be unwieldy.
I'm a proponent of appending a password to the key so that those values without a password constitute a "user layer" of information (public), and the password suffix is the "kernel layer" that allows me to promote my information to that layer. For example, when I leave a health care provider for another, I can take their records and promote them before heading to another provider. This will allow me to control the flow of information collected about me. Sadly, I'm 100% confident this will never happen.
Things are sadly more complex than this. AI dealing with a fairly consistent audience can be tuned to delight that audience. But once you ship a game, it needs to satisfy the "game quality" judgement from a large bunch of players.
When shipping a game, there are checks and balances that need to take place. AI can learn, and in fact can learn quite well. This could mean your encoutners are vastly more difficult than you expect. Certain players may amp this up, and certain down, but there are so many variables to AI that summing it up to a few "dials" is too idealistic, IMO.
Also, AI can learn incorrectly. For example, everyone has their favorite memory of creatures fighting one another in a game without the player's interaction (perhaps their instigation though). In this scenario, the AI may cause a "lesson" that completely changes the game, where creatures avoid one another, or seek to kill one another over the priority of fighting the player. Or they may simply learn to avoid fighting altogether, or always fight to the dead, and so on.
Simply put, AI with too much of a learning-pattern change takes away from the "gamey-ness" of your purchase. In fact, this "gamey-ness" is a collective opinion from many hours of demo with test groups, so it's hard to know where to even limit such learning patterns.
Perhaps if a game were to build several "races" of creature, each with a learning pattern that sweeps both the "shipped" intelligence and the "learning capability" settings. Best, one would have a big config file to tweak such things, enabling folks to change the entire feel of the game (along with the look, as done now). When I say big, I'm expecting hundreds of variables per race. To even test all your settings, you'd want a sandbox with scripted encounters. Hook in a feedback loop and suddenly you have a semi-evolutionary system. Now you've written several man-years of code, and not much game. A development house simply can't dedicate that much to AI.
I'd look to a future where inputs for "creatures" are normalized, so that every game can re-use a variant of the AI engine. For example, simple inputs like Others, Obstacles, Context and a myriad of parameters for the race's behavior, and then an output signal (quite complex) - that any game could use to push their creatures around. I'm not aware of such an engine as yet, but that may be because the game world as a group has just too many variables to try and normalize them.
Doesn't look like a very good performance improvement for the money. In fact, CPU's new "dual-core" marketing push may just eat up the dollars for something like this. If you simply move your physics engine to hardware, it only solves 1 part of a larger, and very delicate puzzle.
Obviously, anyone who thinks more than 1 minute about this realizes that the government can't dictate which products should be used in a market.
Legislating which containers for content are lawful and which aren't is a bit silly. Seems akin to "If your DVD box doesn't have a lock on it, the you are in violation. DVD boxes without locks are illegal."
Perhaps are some point, our corporate society will realize that the digital domain is just too full of holes and backdoors to keep contained. They will keep trying, but technology is now evolving faster than they can keep up.
Please keep the names of these folks in mind when voting, folks. Money moves bills, but votes move them out (no promises about replacements).
I agree, except you missed one major change in the energy usage: population decline. The rate of change from efficiency based on fossil to other sources may be too high. So, the populate is affected through a massive price shift for most goods and transportation. I believe most folks will eventually conclude that energy resources can only come up so far, the rest is bringing down need to match.
There's only so much "getting off the [old] grid" one can do, and when? Most folks agree that "not now" is the safe bet, but like trading I think the shift will be more emotionally triggered than anything else. We simply have to wait for the panic button to get pressed to see if any of this will make an impact, I fear.
Could someone please review the upcoming Vista product(s) for the only thing i'm interested in: Can you easily Process Information?
Not to be vague, but I would like a serious look at a task-based review. TFA got a little close with the delete shortcut skit, but it'd be great to have a lot more. Perhaps just a delta from XP, so that we know what's going on.
I could care less about the "coolness" of the UI, but speed, efficiency and intelligent presentation should somehow get reviewed. I sure hope MS isn't missing this.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, but "begin" wasn't caught since it is valid. Know of a good spell/grammar checker for Firefox?
Oh sure. It's all fun.
Author: Michael Fiegel
Pages: 2
Publisher: Slashdot
Rating: 4
Summary: A quickie read about game marketing is summarized.
Skip this review. It consists of 12 paragraphs of rambling, none of which relate the content back to the reviewer's personal experience. It's hard to tell if the reviewed book is useful since we don't know anything about the reviewer's usage of the information. We are told it's all about "Indie" gaming markets, but that term is never defined. Akin to other genres of creative marketing, it's probably "outside the large market players".
Tip: Begin good at reading books does NOT mean you are good at reviewing a book.
The reviewer then goes on to decribe content that seems easy to derive from interacting with search engines advertising agents, and simply includes lists of sites that hold the real content.
Various soapboxing from the content author are kept to a minimum, ensuring the 28-35$ book keeps its costs low. The review tells us the Web Marketing portion was ghost written, and poorly.
Overall, I thought the review lacked any in-depth opinion (agree/disagree) and saved its commentary to words like "light" and "confused" and "may be a worthwhile investment". I didn't really have a comparison of the book against others in the market.
In comparison to other reviews on slashdot and elsewhere, this one was pretty incoherent. I would probably scrap most of it and start over with a bit more of the reviewer's background (why should we respect his opinion?) and relevance to other materials in that sector ("Compared to Secrets of the Game Business..." for example).
--
Mugnyte is the president of the "Reviewers' Reviewing Viewpoint", a nonexisting publication delivered to your dog bowl twice an eon.
Sure the returns are different, but top link on yahoo.cn for ["Tiananmen Square" massacre] is enough information to start someone thinking.
So I'm a little doubtful that these changes are dramatically affecting the mindset of the Chinese population. Like I've heard in interviews before "If you want to read it, you can find it".
What raises my eyebrows is that hacks like this are a "one shot deal". You can't run an exploit for very long without it getting notice, then patched. So the charge for these must be pretty high, given that it seems like work for hire.
So the business background on this exploit is probably far juicier than the exploit itself. The path to contact, payment, motive, etc are probably a great story. I would certainly read that book.
Of course, if writing such a book, I would take the XLS information and place it on the market itself, continuing the intrigue. Let's hope its something dealing with a government, which then topples, affecting more change than someone getting rich. I mean, if writing, write big.
Chase what you love, first and foremost. That said, you should surf Sourceforge and sign into one of the projects there. It will help "the cause" of forwarding FOSS.
If you want extra money, you'll find enough few contract programming jobs (if you're competent) at places like Hire A Programmer or Xperts 4 Hire. There are others but you know how to google, right programmer?
For example, my side projects include:
- FOSS Sudoku
- Postgres Build machine agent
- General BSD OS fiddling
- Local C++ work
- various "skunkwork" projects at my local job (.NET)
The rest is non-tech. I must stress that having a non-tech side makes your life whole.
I'm not I follow ("taking the piss out"). But surely you jest about such port - itself a chimera.
3D Realms declared today that "Duke Nuken Forever" is The Best Game Ever! With an incredible non-linear storyline, incredible learning AI across games, outrageous low-lag multiplay, both 1stP and ortho views - and runs on a standard gaming machine! Published with a complete set of of level-making tools and start-of-the-art texture and atmosphere effects, Duke Nuken Forever is set to be the most played game ever.
3D Realms gave a presentation of the all the features that will help Duke keep the number one spot in the market. It also outlined the TV channel, movies series and theme park spun from the elements of the game.
Check it out!
Sticking to an earlier philosophy, sourcecode is just a list of steps to create a certain effect. By sharing this recipe publicly, you invite comment, and can allow for various distrbutions that improve upon your version. The survival of these depends on their applicability to the market - and may find specialization. Conversely, anything that interferes with this process is pushing the market to accept tools that possibly do not fit and may never fit to your problem.
The standard shell tools on Unix are one level where it's easy to see the benefit of this philosophy. Taking this to the level of Linux, we find similar distributions fanning out, then collapsing into specializations (embedded, server, nongeek gui's).
There are merits to holding the source and not. If you purchase OTS non-free, you regard the program as an appliance and if you hold all the source, you are making and maintaining (perhaps with market help) your own tools. Each requires skills and risks, but they will both forever exist.
Regarding sourcecode:
To the skilled (engineer), it is empowering to work with tools.
To the unskilled (executive), it is efficient to work with appliances.
It doesn't matter how open software is. To my clients/managers, I merely explain the risks and rewards of either side. "You get what you pay for" vs "We can build it ourselves" - there are times when each seems advantageous, and both can bite your business.
Being the engineer, I like the $ coming to me instead of a vendor, so I usually stick my neck out to propose an in-house solution first,then line up the OTS solutions. When I land one, it lands big and usually works out well for everyone.
MS has taken this tactic for years. The the model of GPL'd source is not really MS's cup of tea. Rather, they will taken any *input* other developers would like to give to their code. For example, we use the MS Enterprise Libs for .NET here for a few things. It ships with code, which we can extend and use. However, you'll not see us distribute our modified source with anything we like, even if we merely wrap and give props to the original authors. And, you won't find Ent Lib sources anywhere else except MS. They'll take input, but be the final decision on what is in that product. This is akin to GPL, but it differs in that 2nd tier dev cannot really ship their own source based on tier 1 - which stops the innovation cycle right there. Here's EULA of that product
The intellectual property MS builds, like many software companies, is in their employees, not their code. The interesting problems they solve in code are usually boiled down to applying academically studied methods to present-day technology issues. Like any company, combining two or more current technologies in interesting ways is the innovation (ie maps+satellite+weather+traffic= cooler map program). Today, many schools don't solely use Windows (many use a *nix variant) to study info processing, so MS must often borrow/mimic from other platforms. You can bet they certainly benefit from GPL, even if it means just having a reference for a solution's implementation.
I've always believed intellectual capital is in the employees and their ability to *continuously* output creative solutions. Similar to musicians, there's a bit of money to be made from the output, perhaps a lot, but software and music are on an honor system digitally. You have to keep adapting, improving and "have another hit" to ensure your company is still the market maker.
Take a simple phrase or word, and apply your own standard cipher.
I take input (like "frankenfurter") and apply:
- reverse letters "retrufneknarf"
- substitute numbers for vowels "r1tr2fn3kn4rf" or "r4tr3fn2kn1rf"
I can write this original word right on my monitor, or in my wallet, and it still doesn't give my folks enough to hack in quickly. Each time i need a new password, I pick a new input word, but keep the cipher the same.
Pick your own cipher, but there are lots of standards morphs for words.
The MSDN documentation is lacking, but it exists. I don't think the developer base ignores it. But there are numerous sites already devoted to dev-level sharing (code exchange, the o'reilly pages, etc).
MS already has too many channels for information sharing (TV productions, podcasts, engineer/team blogs, forums, help pages, etc).
It would be nice if they consolidated, and improved the partitions of the information. MS has long been neglecting their help-searching algorithms. If they got their act together with their "improved search" on MSN and a consolidated info database, i'd be able to see reference, examples, RW usage patterns, bugs and workarounds all from a single dashboard.
Au contraire, my friend. A bunch of
One word: Drivers
Get ready for a world of DRM-style drivers that do not get specs sent to Linux hacks, do not get reverse engineered (because they handshake with a DRM OS), and power hardware that is not backward compatible to you and your P100 beigebox w/floppy-drive.
Several years ago, I lived in Burbank CA and worked in Phoenix, AZ. I flew from the Burbank airport (10 minute taxi from home) to the Phoneix airport (57 minute flight) then went to the office (10 minute taxi ride). About a 90 minute trip each way with lines (pre-911 security). I took this trip several times a week, only staying overnight 1 or 2 nights for work. I worked 7 days a week.
It's fun, and if your spouse wants to travel (and your family situation allows it), you get many miles. In my case, I received a "companion pass" that allowed my spouse to fly with me free for 1 year. We took Southwest (the "magic bus" of US airlines) to many places - over a dozen.
However, after 18 months of this type of work, I began to fight to work at home. The job didn't provide anything more than I could get through phone calls (the business relationships were built, and my code delivery could be given to the appropriate teams remotely). My home office didn't know who I was, and the remote office saw me as just another crazy consultant.
Also, I missed not really discovering much of either Burbank or Phoenix. Like so many of the side trips on longer weekends, everywhere felt like a temporary home. My wife built a home life, including neighbors, parties, etc - without me.
I must advise against such a move. But knowing how I felt in the beginning long ago, I know you will not see the drawbacks as universal, and my description of them here is inadequate. Good luck.
The ISP cannot throttle what they've already sold. This is the Big Lie of bandwidth. It's dynamic on the demand side. However, scaling back based on any criteria suddenly places the carrier into a serious category: judge.
Overall, it's a safe bet that the money is going to the ISPs. This is a power play, IMHO. "You like internet? great, today internet is slower, unless you visit my friends' sites, or pay me". Bullshit!
If this goes through, perhaps the only recourse is homegrown networks, with fat links to other homegrowns. Suddenly, the backbone is replaced with a newborn wireless system - which will take a long time to match anything around today. However, the possibility is growing.
Keep in mind there is a current trend for cosmetics and supplements to use the word "nano" in front of all thing marketing-speak. The concern from this trend is from having the particles penetrate the subdermal layer and travel throughout the body.
see concern story here and a rebuttal here for examples
This is going on the bottom of a long list of changes that (now) require quite a bit of money to implement. I foresee 2 numbers (at least) in use for the next 15 years. SSN is a PK, Alt Key, fixed length string in thousands of databases. I doubt we're going to see much shift in this very soon.
Then, when examining the new number, one realizes that they've only solved a few of the many problems with a national id. What they're searching for is a universal hash value for individuals. This is a tough problem, and perhaps may not be solved with a single number - unless it's perhaps birthmoment & a genetic checksum + password. Even then, the amount of information in the key may be unwieldy.
I'm a proponent of appending a password to the key so that those values without a password constitute a "user layer" of information (public), and the password suffix is the "kernel layer" that allows me to promote my information to that layer. For example, when I leave a health care provider for another, I can take their records and promote them before heading to another provider. This will allow me to control the flow of information collected about me. Sadly, I'm 100% confident this will never happen.
Things are sadly more complex than this. AI dealing with a fairly consistent audience can be tuned to delight that audience. But once you ship a game, it needs to satisfy the "game quality" judgement from a large bunch of players.
When shipping a game, there are checks and balances that need to take place. AI can learn, and in fact can learn quite well. This could mean your encoutners are vastly more difficult than you expect. Certain players may amp this up, and certain down, but there are so many variables to AI that summing it up to a few "dials" is too idealistic, IMO.
Also, AI can learn incorrectly. For example, everyone has their favorite memory of creatures fighting one another in a game without the player's interaction (perhaps their instigation though). In this scenario, the AI may cause a "lesson" that completely changes the game, where creatures avoid one another, or seek to kill one another over the priority of fighting the player. Or they may simply learn to avoid fighting altogether, or always fight to the dead, and so on.
Simply put, AI with too much of a learning-pattern change takes away from the "gamey-ness" of your purchase. In fact, this "gamey-ness" is a collective opinion from many hours of demo with test groups, so it's hard to know where to even limit such learning patterns.
Perhaps if a game were to build several "races" of creature, each with a learning pattern that sweeps both the "shipped" intelligence and the "learning capability" settings. Best, one would have a big config file to tweak such things, enabling folks to change the entire feel of the game (along with the look, as done now). When I say big, I'm expecting hundreds of variables per race. To even test all your settings, you'd want a sandbox with scripted encounters. Hook in a feedback loop and suddenly you have a semi-evolutionary system. Now you've written several man-years of code, and not much game. A development house simply can't dedicate that much to AI.
I'd look to a future where inputs for "creatures" are normalized, so that every game can re-use a variant of the AI engine. For example, simple inputs like Others, Obstacles, Context and a myriad of parameters for the race's behavior, and then an output signal (quite complex) - that any game could use to push their creatures around. I'm not aware of such an engine as yet, but that may be because the game world as a group has just too many variables to try and normalize them.
Doesn't look like a very good performance improvement for the money. In fact, CPU's new "dual-core" marketing push may just eat up the dollars for something like this. If you simply move your physics engine to hardware, it only solves 1 part of a larger, and very delicate puzzle.
Obviously, anyone who thinks more than 1 minute about this realizes that the government can't dictate which products should be used in a market.
Legislating which containers for content are lawful and which aren't is a bit silly. Seems akin to "If your DVD box doesn't have a lock on it, the you are in violation. DVD boxes without locks are illegal."
Perhaps are some point, our corporate society will realize that the digital domain is just too full of holes and backdoors to keep contained. They will keep trying, but technology is now evolving faster than they can keep up.
Please keep the names of these folks in mind when voting, folks. Money moves bills, but votes move them out (no promises about replacements).
I agree, except you missed one major change in the energy usage: population decline. The rate of change from efficiency based on fossil to other sources may be too high. So, the populate is affected through a massive price shift for most goods and transportation. I believe most folks will eventually conclude that energy resources can only come up so far, the rest is bringing down need to match.
There's only so much "getting off the [old] grid" one can do, and when? Most folks agree that "not now" is the safe bet, but like trading I think the shift will be more emotionally triggered than anything else. We simply have to wait for the panic button to get pressed to see if any of this will make an impact, I fear.
Could someone please review the upcoming Vista product(s) for the only thing i'm interested in: Can you easily Process Information?
Not to be vague, but I would like a serious look at a task-based review. TFA got a little close with the delete shortcut skit, but it'd be great to have a lot more. Perhaps just a delta from XP, so that we know what's going on.
I could care less about the "coolness" of the UI, but speed, efficiency and intelligent presentation should somehow get reviewed. I sure hope MS isn't missing this.
You insensitive clod. The King will be very upset at this.
spud
Wow, i don't know what they are, but putting a but of compenents in an optical fiber must be cool. Today compenents, tomorrow entire motherbroads!