'Could games like Civilization benefit from putting their interfaces on a diet?
Simple answer, "Yes, move along."
He mentions Civ 3.
Civilization's developers, Firaxis, streamlined the game significantly for Civ4. As the developers themselves felt that, for all the flexibility, it could use a UI/click count diet, the answer's clearly "yes."
It's kind of like waiting until six months after an election in which a new President is elected and asking, "Is the country ready for a change from the policies of [the last administration]?"
I can understand the steep financial penalty, but 6 years seems awfully harsh for a crime where no one was physically harmed.
By that definition, the Enron board, the WorldCom board and all others who cause purely financial damages should be given light sentences.
Noble ideals aside, in a monetized society, money does become essential: Without it, you don't get to eat, don't get health insurance, lose your home, etc.
This guy made enough he could buy sportscars, planes, the works. Even if you just look at the $4.1m restitution, that's a lot of salaries Adobe, Macromedia and Autodesk could have paid. It's easy to dismiss it as "Oh well, they're big companies, no harm, no foul." but it becomes much more of an issue when they cut the job of a guy whose health insurance got his daughter treatment for cancer.
So, yes, there's no easy direct link to physical harm caused. But the trickle down effect, just like the Enron and Worldcom guys wiping out people's retirements, may well be far more dramatic overall than a single assault. Given that you can't track down every indirect result, all you can do is look at the quantity of money, get a feel for the effects the fraudulent reappropriation of that likely had, and then accept that increasing dollar amounts can be translated in to just as increasing "likelihood" of physical harm.
Is say physical assualt bad? Absolutely. And whilst worse for one person, I'm not convinced the overall suffering is actually worse than say ten guys facing the gnawing fear of layoffs, ten wives dealing with losing their homes they poured their souls in to, ten kids having to deal with daddy suddenly being unemployed and having to move away from friends and ten families living with the risk of no medical insurance.
Increased thoughts of suicide in teens. Decreased libido.
When they find you're suffering side effects of one, they phase you over to another in the hopes of dodging those side effects.
You'd really want to be damned sure the source wasn't simply your body's reaction to its own seratonin in larger quantities before you modified genes and made it permanent. As far as I'm aware, you generally can't simply switch to a different set of genes if one set isn't working so well.
Storing data in random locations, often garbled beyond all recognition?
Clearly Windows ME's memory -l-e-a-k-s- management made it the most secure OS ever. If only they had some way of reconstructing that data when you wanted it back again.
There's a reason CNET use Sony's 34XBR960 was selected by them to use as the reference to judge all other HDTVs (plasma, LCD, DLP, etc.) against.
Sure, it's the size of a typical european car and weighs about the same but, for picture quality, there's a reason why most stores quietly moved it away from the much higher markup flat pannels they'd rather still be able to sell.
Granted, the follow on model (34XBR970) actually dropped picture quality (from 1440 horizontal scan lines to something like 1100) to get set reliability up. The point still remains: For reference picture quality, people still seem to be picking CRT after a decade of promises about the latest flat pannel having the greatest ever picture.
It's true the average consumer doesn't see that. Then again, they're remembering their $199 CRT of yesteryear and comparing it to a $1,999 flat pannel. Compare the budget end of any line, even an overall superior one, to a line that barely has a budget line and typical models cost ten times as much as the other's budget end and, sure, it'll give you a skewed result.
Wait until the ESRB reclassifies for this mod...
on
Oblivion Polymorph Mod
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· Score: 5, Funny
How long until we hear:
Jack Thompson today decried Oblivion as a "bestial sex simulator" citing a new mod that allows players to polymorph in to horses and then "ride" their existing mounts. Given object clashing, this creates the appearance of two horses getting it on "hot coffee"-style. "Do we really want our children being exposed to this kind of 'conditioning'?" an enraged Thompson asked. "This kind of bestial porn must be reclassified as Adults Only, if allowed for sale at all." Thompson is now reportedly looking for horses that have been sexually abused to represent in a class action lawsuit.
Can I have a special warning ring tone for when the idiot behind me is on his/her cell and paying no attention whatsoever to my speed. One that I don't have to worry about picking up - just a ring tone that warns me I'll get hit if I don't adjust my speed to compensate for the moron.
A second warning tone for when I'm car 3 would be pretty nice too - to let me know that the moron driving an oversized SUV I can't see through is about to come to a sudden and crunchy stop so I may want to back further off than I would for a driver I'd assume knew how to brake properly. Yes, we should all drive far enough back that, with reaction times included, we can still come to a complete stop even if they had infinite deceleration but, in the real world, that's called "leaving a space for someone else to pull in to" and doesn't actually work.
The act would require ratings boards to entirely complete the content of a videogame before applying a rating, and would involve the Government Accountability Office to oversee the ESRB's practices.
The only two cases anyone has really heard about were:
GTA3 (Hot Coffee) - You could play the game end to end, taking any path you liked, and never see it. It was locked content that got unlocked only through a hack.
Oblivion (topless textures) - You could also play this one end to end, as it was released, and have absolutely no way of seeing the textures. It was only through a mod to the game that they became available.
The Sims 2 (removing pixelation) - Not one I really count because no one's made much of a fuss but a console command will remove pixelation, revealing naked sims (to the degree of a Barbie doll). Again, not one that playing end to end would identify.
So, brilliantly, they've ensured the ESRB will play each game end to end and achieve... uh... well, nothing. Even played end to end, not a single one of the above cases would have come to light.
About the only case they could claim is Oblivion's "increased violence". To be fair though, this one was purely political when they were trying to justify seeming outraged (in order to placate politicians) over the nudity. The game doesn't get any more violent, there's no more blood nor more gore. It was also already rated with bullets for blood, gore and violence as part of the teen rating. The sad truth is, the topless nudity, only unlockable via a mod, really wasn't a good enough justification to demand a re-rating to Mature (which, politically, the ESRB needed to be seen to be doing) so they bundled in claims the game felt more violent than initially reported to try justifying it.
This also doesn't address the fundamentally forking nature of videogames. No one playthrough shows you everything - if it did, QA departments would consist of a single guy who works short hours. To play a game like GTA end-to-end takes anywhere from maybe 20-100 hours depending on how many side missions you take. Complete every mission, interact with every character in every way possible, jump your car off every ramp to see if you can crash through every building (who knows, you might be able to say see up someone's skirt if you get inside a building's mesh) and you're looking at tens of thousands of hours worth of work.
And that's while AI is pretty retarded. God forbid we actually develop decent AI any time soon (then again, if we can't get real intelligence in Congress, what hope do we have for the artificial kind in games). What'll happen when characters in games start learning from your interactions with them? What happens when a glitch in AI causes players who play one particularly obscure way causes creatures in Spore to learn that "giving head" is how you mate? What happens when intelligent human NPCs develop their own dialog and, thanks to your potty mouth, start learning some truly inappropriate conversational techniques? Or even totally appropriate ones that just get taken out of context?...
Imagine talking to an NPC helper who's helping you build a robot." "Now pass me the arm." "I don't want to give you [arm]." "Fine, what do you want to give me?" "I want to give you [head]" "I like arm?"
In short, videogames branch - there's no way you can review end to end and catch everything. And, even if you could, the examples everyone talks about weren't available in regular end-to-end play anyway.
Mentioned in his address are interesting details such as NVIDIA's sponsorship of Armadillo Aerospace for the X-Prize competition
Finally a good use for all the heat NVIDIA chipsets create. A four core GPU based rocket engine. Of course, rocket engines are traditionally somewhat quieter than NVIDIA's stock cooling systems so there may be some FAA/EPA regulations to overcome.
As the Mosquito emits a sound that's well out of his hearing range, he can't hear it, while most of the rest of the neighborhood is under 40 and can; at which point it's causing everyone a great deal of discomfort.
The more people realize this, the more they'll be encouraged to move here, the more demand for the same supply of housing and the more I have to pay.
Iowa is the shiznit. It's the coolest place ever. I'm in California and it's awful here. We have to walk up hill both ways and the hills are steeper here (the land's scrunched up by our daily earthquakes). And hot? Like you wouldn't believe. Don't believe that stuff about coastal areas being cooler - it's hell here. No one should ever move here because, high salaries or not, life's too expensive. Iowa's the place. Des Moines is just super awesome. Off you go!
Relative to the cost of rent, Job A is phenominal: You're making five times the cost of rent. Job B sucks: you're only earning 2.5 times rent. By this measure, job A is far and away the better option - by a factor of 2.
The thing is, once you've paid the varying rent, where do you spend the rest of your money? The decent spec new PC will be $2,000 in Rancho Santa Fe, Manhattan or BFI. The new $25,000 car will be $25,000 wherever you buy it. The big TV is the same price wherever. And, most important of all, the internet porn subscriptions run the same wherever you are too.
At that point, would you rather the job that's 5 times "cost of living" but only leaves you with $40,000 or the one that gives a sucky 2.5x but leaves you with $60,000 extra.
Next, on the simple level, let's look at that cost of living. Assuming you get on, buy and pay a mortgage off, in 20 years time the place with the poor salary relative to cost of living will leave you with a $500,000-$1,000,000 home vs. the $200,000-$250,000 place in the "better" area. Now, aged 40, you can up and move to the cheap place, selling your home, buying one of the nicest places in the cheap area and having a nice large nest egg lfet over to let you get to retire early. My in-laws have just done exactly that and apparently a lot of people in Texas are getting seriously pissed at all the Californians coming in, buying huge homes after selling up smaller places in CA and pushing up the Texan cost of living for people who're still paid no more.
And, finally, there's a reason rent and property are so expensive in some areas. Go to California and look out of the window. Rumor has it that other parts of the world have a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder. Land is expensive in California because you never shovel snow, you rarely deal with crazy humidity, you rarely have the insane heat of Arizona, you rarely get mosquitos the size of Volkswagens and you can sit on the beach on New Year's Day. In short, supply and demand means that when there's a crazy price, there's generally a great reason for it.
So, yes, some areas have high costs of living and lower salaries in relation to that cost. But I.T. is famous for the fact that we out earn most other professions and, once you get past earning about three times cost of average rent, everything else is gravy. Sure, you reach that point faster elsewhere - but once you do reach it (and you do in I.T.), you keep going even further when the numbers are bigger.
I've watched a lot of friends leave California because they're in other fields and it's just too expensive to live here if you don't earn well. But once you get to the kind of salaries I.T. tends to pay, the cost of rent becomes a relatively minimal part of the total cost of living a great life.
E3 gains some of its meaning by being the big spectacle.
People want to know about E3 because it's supposedly a spectacle. Because people want to know about it, the journalists make money by writing about it so they turn up.
Have a small tradeshow that's little more than small private demos and it loses the hype. Lose the hype and you lose the profitability for journalists to attend. At that point they may as well just go to private demos at the company HQ - which the big companies can afford to put on and the little ones can't.
As it stands, the big companies presence and blown money has a trickle on effect to the small guys who couldn't attract viewers on their own. It's a lousy deal for the big guys and a great one for the small guys. Move to a smaller show and the small guy absolutely suffers because, great product or not, if relatively few journalists turn up and relatively little hype is generated, the best product that no one cares to hear about is still the best product no one cares to hear about.
[Paraphrasing] EA complained that, "The cost of putting a pig in a nice enough dress that people forget it is a pig has been increasing year on year to the point where we just don't see we're getting a reasonable return on our investment."
Strangely, the companies with good games to actually show off, despite having a very small floor presence and minimal budgets somehow get plenty of press attention.
Crysis wasn't that big a booth (nor was Far Cry several years back). Dead Rising consisted of maybe four consoles and no one to talk it up. Half Life 2 was a single small room. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a couple of years back, was a few GameCubes, some weird controllers and one girl trying to explain it to confused people. Guitar Hero was a relatively small setup too. Every one of those titles gained huge coverage because, shockingly, they relied on simply being good.
EA has about a third of the gaming market sewn up and is very profitable because it has realized the same thing the movie industry has: Make 20% profits on lots of safe investments and you'll be far better off than someone who makes 1000% on one title and has ten others fail. It's a great business model but ultimately means you put out a boring product that no amount of dressing it up is going really excite journalists who're looking for something sensational.
As such, yeah, no amount of spending will get a good return at E3 compared to the small companies that have their one really exciting release. The little companies will never need a big booth and the creme-de-la-creme of LA's strippers to get people's interest. For EA, it makes absolute sense to move to a private demo where you fly journalists in, competing against no one else, and then let the small guys starve in a world with no centralized tradeshow that journalists will be at and they're too small to pay to fly them in for one-on-ones.
For the EA business model of large quantities of predictable over taking risks, E3 was at best a waste of money and at worst a way to help the competition.
Not knocking EA per se. Other large publishers have reached similar conclusions just as the movie industry, music industry and even the book publishing industry have. I just picked EA because they're so much larger than anyone else (largely because of having been smart enough, even if we hate the reality of it, to realize this before most others).
The sad truth is, E3 was great for gamers as it rewarded small companies with great games vastly more than giants with solid but repetetive ones. As the giants have the money, its death was kind of inevitable.
At the airport, I saw a guardsman reporting for duty. I was glad to see he had to go through the same procedures we do: He had to place all metal items in the X-Ray, remove his boots and step through. They even confiscated the pocket knife he was carrying... Then, on the secure side of the scanners, they handed him back his assault rifle.
Re:Good Riddance
on
The End of E3?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
E3 represented everything that was wrong about the games industry.
Playing a video game can be a serene repose from the world, not unlike a quiet read of a good book.
And you'll notice just how popular novels have become compared to videogames in terms of mass market. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people say, "Why must kids waste their time on novels. If only we could get them to embrace videogames in the same way!"
Don't get me wrong: I love books and my wife's a writer. That doesn't change the simple fact that people vote with their wallets and videogames as they stand, however much elitist views may wish otherwise, are dramatically more popular with the average young person than books are right now.
I am glad there are great novels out there. I am glad there are great, deep, meaningful gaming experiences to be had too. But I'm also enough of a realist to accept that forcing such experiences on the masses that simply don't want them - and lamenting an industry that successfully targets what they do want as "everything that's wrong" - isn't that sensible.
About the best I can really say is, "E3 symbolizes everything that appeals to the masses but I personally don't like."
At the end of the day, it's an industry: It will attempt to make as much money as possible. If the masses want something, it will figure that out so it can profit from it and thus morph in to it. If the masses hate something (and really vote with their wallets rather than writing whiney posts and then still buying Halo 17), the industry will figure out how to sell them what they want then too. That the industry continues with bloated E3 shows and the like implies, ideals aside, it is exactly what the masses want. If anything, I think it's telling the biggest complaints were that this year's E3 had less booth babes (a decision made to chase ideals, ignoring how people actually act) and totally drowned out the righteous but ultimately not backed up by real action complaints about excess.
It's interesting to me: In Buddhism, in psychotherapy, in Dr Phil's books, you name it, they always talk about the error of making "should statements" - judging how the world should be and getting upset when it isn't, rather than accepting how it is.
Me, I accept the industry is simply how it is and, accepting that, enjoy finding great games within its breadth, enjoy reading great novels, enjoy watching my wife's writing process, and then - accepting E3 - go have fun with the excess on the years that entertains me too.
My favorite set of figures went to some listing or other of average IQs of high school leavers.
The Netherlands came first with something like a 113 average. England came a fair bit lower at something like 106. The United States, for whom the tests are normalized to 100, scored 99.
You've got to admire a nation that has the tests normalized for them and still manages to underachieve.
On the positive side, at least Texas gets a good argument to go back to joyfully executing those so mentally subnormal that they're unaware they even committed a crime: leave them living and they really screw up the averages (assuming the typical voter is smart enough to know what an average is).
How can you blame people for connecting to a wireless router with the ID "Free Porn"?
Granted, my neighbors didn't intentionally set their router up with that ID but they did leave it unsecured with the default password for the admin account. It was simply the neighborly thing to do to change their ID and resecure it with a new password (that, admittedly, they didn't know).
For every $1 invested: after 10 years, you have $2.60 after 20 years, you have $6.70 after 40 years, you have $45 after 55 years, you have $190
Keep in mind that inflation seems to end up around a factor of 10 over 25-30 years. So, in 55 years you have $190 which is roughly $1.90 in present money for every dollar you invest now.
Allow me to put it in to terms that make sense to a typical male, slashdot-reading, college student:
At the strip club, $40 will get you two lap dances now or three lap dances and a beer when you're 75. On the other hand, should you die at 60, you get the choice of two lap dances before you die or none at all if you wisely invested.
At the end of the day, investing pays the salaries of the people who do the investing for you, makes the very best investors very rich, is a gamble for most, and a good way to not really do much beyond keep up with long term inflation plus a little bit for those who want to play it safe.
Another more boring suggestion: Spend $1,000 on presentation skills classes. Spend $1,000 on a great suit that gives you the confidence of knowing you look the part. Spend $250 on getting a professional to help you with your resume when you graduate. Then sail through the interview for a job paying $5,000-10,000 more every year than you would have got otherwise. As your career continues to build from there, compounding over time, there aren't many better investments you can make. I don't know of many other investments that can pay five times over the initial investment every single year.
Who wants to live in France with it's ridiculous 2.5GB/s internet when you can live in "the land of the free" and have politicians sell out net neutrality: allowing you 1% of the speed and the right to pay more ^H^H^H^H "competetive market rates that would never be taken advantage of" to a duopoly for it?
Just be glad congress weren't around when the wheel was being invented or fire was being discovered.
Re:Comments from people who actually create Creati
on
Beginning GIMP
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· Score: 1
It's much the same as the kid whose parents didn't buy him a car and can't afford one for himself stating firmly that, "No, really, my bicycle does everything I need. I don't really need a car."
Potentially, he really doesn't need a car nor would benefit in any way from it. As far as everyone else is concerned, maybe he's even convince himself of it but no one else actually believes him.
GIMP, like a bicycle, may be capable of getting you from A to B. It won't get you there as quickly, you'll be sweatier for it, the results will likely look less polished, you're not going to impress anyone other than nerds and, sadly (except for a few specialized jobs) you're not going to find much decent work by relying on it.
Of course, similar to owning a bicycle rather than a car, you will be many hundreds of dollars better off at time of acquisition.
Slashdot Mirror
'Could games like Civilization benefit from putting their interfaces on a diet?
Simple answer, "Yes, move along."
He mentions Civ 3.
Civilization's developers, Firaxis, streamlined the game significantly for Civ4. As the developers themselves felt that, for all the flexibility, it could use a UI/click count diet, the answer's clearly "yes."
It's kind of like waiting until six months after an election in which a new President is elected and asking, "Is the country ready for a change from the policies of [the last administration]?"
I can understand the steep financial penalty, but 6 years seems awfully harsh for a crime where no one was physically harmed.
By that definition, the Enron board, the WorldCom board and all others who cause purely financial damages should be given light sentences.
Noble ideals aside, in a monetized society, money does become essential: Without it, you don't get to eat, don't get health insurance, lose your home, etc.
This guy made enough he could buy sportscars, planes, the works. Even if you just look at the $4.1m restitution, that's a lot of salaries Adobe, Macromedia and Autodesk could have paid. It's easy to dismiss it as "Oh well, they're big companies, no harm, no foul." but it becomes much more of an issue when they cut the job of a guy whose health insurance got his daughter treatment for cancer.
So, yes, there's no easy direct link to physical harm caused. But the trickle down effect, just like the Enron and Worldcom guys wiping out people's retirements, may well be far more dramatic overall than a single assault. Given that you can't track down every indirect result, all you can do is look at the quantity of money, get a feel for the effects the fraudulent reappropriation of that likely had, and then accept that increasing dollar amounts can be translated in to just as increasing "likelihood" of physical harm.
Is say physical assualt bad? Absolutely. And whilst worse for one person, I'm not convinced the overall suffering is actually worse than say ten guys facing the gnawing fear of layoffs, ten wives dealing with losing their homes they poured their souls in to, ten kids having to deal with daddy suddenly being unemployed and having to move away from friends and ten families living with the risk of no medical insurance.
Two common side effects of most SSRIs:
Increased thoughts of suicide in teens.
Decreased libido.
When they find you're suffering side effects of one, they phase you over to another in the hopes of dodging those side effects.
You'd really want to be damned sure the source wasn't simply your body's reaction to its own seratonin in larger quantities before you modified genes and made it permanent. As far as I'm aware, you generally can't simply switch to a different set of genes if one set isn't working so well.
Storing data in random locations, often garbled beyond all recognition?
Clearly Windows ME's memory -l-e-a-k-s- management made it the most secure OS ever. If only they had some way of reconstructing that data when you wanted it back again.
No, your CRT is like having eyes...
There's a reason CNET use Sony's 34XBR960 was selected by them to use as the reference to judge all other HDTVs (plasma, LCD, DLP, etc.) against.
Sure, it's the size of a typical european car and weighs about the same but, for picture quality, there's a reason why most stores quietly moved it away from the much higher markup flat pannels they'd rather still be able to sell.
Granted, the follow on model (34XBR970) actually dropped picture quality (from 1440 horizontal scan lines to something like 1100) to get set reliability up. The point still remains: For reference picture quality, people still seem to be picking CRT after a decade of promises about the latest flat pannel having the greatest ever picture.
It's true the average consumer doesn't see that. Then again, they're remembering their $199 CRT of yesteryear and comparing it to a $1,999 flat pannel. Compare the budget end of any line, even an overall superior one, to a line that barely has a budget line and typical models cost ten times as much as the other's budget end and, sure, it'll give you a skewed result.
How long until we hear:
Jack Thompson today decried Oblivion as a "bestial sex simulator" citing a new mod that allows players to polymorph in to horses and then "ride" their existing mounts. Given object clashing, this creates the appearance of two horses getting it on "hot coffee"-style. "Do we really want our children being exposed to this kind of 'conditioning'?" an enraged Thompson asked. "This kind of bestial porn must be reclassified as Adults Only, if allowed for sale at all." Thompson is now reportedly looking for horses that have been sexually abused to represent in a class action lawsuit.
Designed for what the company calls "photocopier simplicity"
Great, so now we'll have to pry TSA goons' asses out of the machine after they decide to scan them.
Given that it'll probably be something like:
Cell1 is infront of Cell2 by about 50 yards.
Cell1: 50mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 40mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 30mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 20mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 10mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell1: 00mph Cell2: 50mph
Cell2: 00mph Cell1: involuntarily 10mph
Can I have a special warning ring tone for when the idiot behind me is on his/her cell and paying no attention whatsoever to my speed. One that I don't have to worry about picking up - just a ring tone that warns me I'll get hit if I don't adjust my speed to compensate for the moron.
A second warning tone for when I'm car 3 would be pretty nice too - to let me know that the moron driving an oversized SUV I can't see through is about to come to a sudden and crunchy stop so I may want to back further off than I would for a driver I'd assume knew how to brake properly. Yes, we should all drive far enough back that, with reaction times included, we can still come to a complete stop even if they had infinite deceleration but, in the real world, that's called "leaving a space for someone else to pull in to" and doesn't actually work.
The act would require ratings boards to entirely complete the content of a videogame before applying a rating, and would involve the Government Accountability Office to oversee the ESRB's practices.
The only two cases anyone has really heard about were:
GTA3 (Hot Coffee) - You could play the game end to end, taking any path you liked, and never see it. It was locked content that got unlocked only through a hack.
Oblivion (topless textures) - You could also play this one end to end, as it was released, and have absolutely no way of seeing the textures. It was only through a mod to the game that they became available.
The Sims 2 (removing pixelation) - Not one I really count because no one's made much of a fuss but a console command will remove pixelation, revealing naked sims (to the degree of a Barbie doll). Again, not one that playing end to end would identify.
So, brilliantly, they've ensured the ESRB will play each game end to end and achieve... uh... well, nothing. Even played end to end, not a single one of the above cases would have come to light.
About the only case they could claim is Oblivion's "increased violence". To be fair though, this one was purely political when they were trying to justify seeming outraged (in order to placate politicians) over the nudity. The game doesn't get any more violent, there's no more blood nor more gore. It was also already rated with bullets for blood, gore and violence as part of the teen rating. The sad truth is, the topless nudity, only unlockable via a mod, really wasn't a good enough justification to demand a re-rating to Mature (which, politically, the ESRB needed to be seen to be doing) so they bundled in claims the game felt more violent than initially reported to try justifying it.
This also doesn't address the fundamentally forking nature of videogames. No one playthrough shows you everything - if it did, QA departments would consist of a single guy who works short hours. To play a game like GTA end-to-end takes anywhere from maybe 20-100 hours depending on how many side missions you take. Complete every mission, interact with every character in every way possible, jump your car off every ramp to see if you can crash through every building (who knows, you might be able to say see up someone's skirt if you get inside a building's mesh) and you're looking at tens of thousands of hours worth of work.
And that's while AI is pretty retarded. God forbid we actually develop decent AI any time soon (then again, if we can't get real intelligence in Congress, what hope do we have for the artificial kind in games). What'll happen when characters in games start learning from your interactions with them? What happens when a glitch in AI causes players who play one particularly obscure way causes creatures in Spore to learn that "giving head" is how you mate? What happens when intelligent human NPCs develop their own dialog and, thanks to your potty mouth, start learning some truly inappropriate conversational techniques? Or even totally appropriate ones that just get taken out of context?...
Imagine talking to an NPC helper who's helping you build a robot."
"Now pass me the arm."
"I don't want to give you [arm]."
"Fine, what do you want to give me?"
"I want to give you [head]"
"I like arm?"
In short, videogames branch - there's no way you can review end to end and catch everything. And, even if you could, the examples everyone talks about weren't available in regular end-to-end play anyway.
Mentioned in his address are interesting details such as NVIDIA's sponsorship of Armadillo Aerospace for the X-Prize competition
Finally a good use for all the heat NVIDIA chipsets create. A four core GPU based rocket engine. Of course, rocket engines are traditionally somewhat quieter than NVIDIA's stock cooling systems so there may be some FAA/EPA regulations to overcome.
As the Mosquito emits a sound that's well out of his hearing range, he can't hear it, while most of the rest of the neighborhood is under 40 and can; at which point it's causing everyone a great deal of discomfort.
Oh just grow up!
We can come up with all kinds of fun scientific observations as to the decline of larger, tastier species.
Or, perhaps, we could see if there's an answer in the question posed:
Why is it that tasty species are less able to survive in an environment where humans massively overfish and refuse to stop citing economic hardships?
Wait a moment, what am I saying?
The more people realize this, the more they'll be encouraged to move here, the more demand for the same supply of housing and the more I have to pay.
Iowa is the shiznit. It's the coolest place ever. I'm in California and it's awful here. We have to walk up hill both ways and the hills are steeper here (the land's scrunched up by our daily earthquakes). And hot? Like you wouldn't believe. Don't believe that stuff about coastal areas being cooler - it's hell here. No one should ever move here because, high salaries or not, life's too expensive. Iowa's the place. Des Moines is just super awesome. Off you go!
Job A:
$50,000/year, $10,000 annual rent.
Job B:
$100,000/year, $40,000 annual rent.
Relative to the cost of rent, Job A is phenominal: You're making five times the cost of rent. Job B sucks: you're only earning 2.5 times rent. By this measure, job A is far and away the better option - by a factor of 2.
The thing is, once you've paid the varying rent, where do you spend the rest of your money? The decent spec new PC will be $2,000 in Rancho Santa Fe, Manhattan or BFI. The new $25,000 car will be $25,000 wherever you buy it. The big TV is the same price wherever. And, most important of all, the internet porn subscriptions run the same wherever you are too.
At that point, would you rather the job that's 5 times "cost of living" but only leaves you with $40,000 or the one that gives a sucky 2.5x but leaves you with $60,000 extra.
Next, on the simple level, let's look at that cost of living. Assuming you get on, buy and pay a mortgage off, in 20 years time the place with the poor salary relative to cost of living will leave you with a $500,000-$1,000,000 home vs. the $200,000-$250,000 place in the "better" area. Now, aged 40, you can up and move to the cheap place, selling your home, buying one of the nicest places in the cheap area and having a nice large nest egg lfet over to let you get to retire early. My in-laws have just done exactly that and apparently a lot of people in Texas are getting seriously pissed at all the Californians coming in, buying huge homes after selling up smaller places in CA and pushing up the Texan cost of living for people who're still paid no more.
And, finally, there's a reason rent and property are so expensive in some areas. Go to California and look out of the window. Rumor has it that other parts of the world have a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder. Land is expensive in California because you never shovel snow, you rarely deal with crazy humidity, you rarely have the insane heat of Arizona, you rarely get mosquitos the size of Volkswagens and you can sit on the beach on New Year's Day. In short, supply and demand means that when there's a crazy price, there's generally a great reason for it.
So, yes, some areas have high costs of living and lower salaries in relation to that cost. But I.T. is famous for the fact that we out earn most other professions and, once you get past earning about three times cost of average rent, everything else is gravy. Sure, you reach that point faster elsewhere - but once you do reach it (and you do in I.T.), you keep going even further when the numbers are bigger.
I've watched a lot of friends leave California because they're in other fields and it's just too expensive to live here if you don't earn well. But once you get to the kind of salaries I.T. tends to pay, the cost of rent becomes a relatively minimal part of the total cost of living a great life.
E3 gains some of its meaning by being the big spectacle.
People want to know about E3 because it's supposedly a spectacle. Because people want to know about it, the journalists make money by writing about it so they turn up.
Have a small tradeshow that's little more than small private demos and it loses the hype. Lose the hype and you lose the profitability for journalists to attend. At that point they may as well just go to private demos at the company HQ - which the big companies can afford to put on and the little ones can't.
As it stands, the big companies presence and blown money has a trickle on effect to the small guys who couldn't attract viewers on their own. It's a lousy deal for the big guys and a great one for the small guys. Move to a smaller show and the small guy absolutely suffers because, great product or not, if relatively few journalists turn up and relatively little hype is generated, the best product that no one cares to hear about is still the best product no one cares to hear about.
[Paraphrasing] EA complained that, "The cost of putting a pig in a nice enough dress that people forget it is a pig has been increasing year on year to the point where we just don't see we're getting a reasonable return on our investment."
Strangely, the companies with good games to actually show off, despite having a very small floor presence and minimal budgets somehow get plenty of press attention.
Crysis wasn't that big a booth (nor was Far Cry several years back). Dead Rising consisted of maybe four consoles and no one to talk it up. Half Life 2 was a single small room. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a couple of years back, was a few GameCubes, some weird controllers and one girl trying to explain it to confused people. Guitar Hero was a relatively small setup too. Every one of those titles gained huge coverage because, shockingly, they relied on simply being good.
EA has about a third of the gaming market sewn up and is very profitable because it has realized the same thing the movie industry has: Make 20% profits on lots of safe investments and you'll be far better off than someone who makes 1000% on one title and has ten others fail. It's a great business model but ultimately means you put out a boring product that no amount of dressing it up is going really excite journalists who're looking for something sensational.
As such, yeah, no amount of spending will get a good return at E3 compared to the small companies that have their one really exciting release. The little companies will never need a big booth and the creme-de-la-creme of LA's strippers to get people's interest. For EA, it makes absolute sense to move to a private demo where you fly journalists in, competing against no one else, and then let the small guys starve in a world with no centralized tradeshow that journalists will be at and they're too small to pay to fly them in for one-on-ones.
For the EA business model of large quantities of predictable over taking risks, E3 was at best a waste of money and at worst a way to help the competition.
Not knocking EA per se. Other large publishers have reached similar conclusions just as the movie industry, music industry and even the book publishing industry have. I just picked EA because they're so much larger than anyone else (largely because of having been smart enough, even if we hate the reality of it, to realize this before most others).
The sad truth is, E3 was great for gamers as it rewarded small companies with great games vastly more than giants with solid but repetetive ones. As the giants have the money, its death was kind of inevitable.
As a reader wrote to Reader's Digest once:
At the airport, I saw a guardsman reporting for duty. I was glad to see he had to go through the same procedures we do: He had to place all metal items in the X-Ray, remove his boots and step through. They even confiscated the pocket knife he was carrying... Then, on the secure side of the scanners, they handed him back his assault rifle.
E3 represented everything that was wrong about the games industry.
Playing a video game can be a serene repose from the world, not unlike a quiet read of a good book.
And you'll notice just how popular novels have become compared to videogames in terms of mass market. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people say, "Why must kids waste their time on novels. If only we could get them to embrace videogames in the same way!"
Don't get me wrong: I love books and my wife's a writer. That doesn't change the simple fact that people vote with their wallets and videogames as they stand, however much elitist views may wish otherwise, are dramatically more popular with the average young person than books are right now.
I am glad there are great novels out there. I am glad there are great, deep, meaningful gaming experiences to be had too. But I'm also enough of a realist to accept that forcing such experiences on the masses that simply don't want them - and lamenting an industry that successfully targets what they do want as "everything that's wrong" - isn't that sensible.
About the best I can really say is, "E3 symbolizes everything that appeals to the masses but I personally don't like."
At the end of the day, it's an industry: It will attempt to make as much money as possible. If the masses want something, it will figure that out so it can profit from it and thus morph in to it. If the masses hate something (and really vote with their wallets rather than writing whiney posts and then still buying Halo 17), the industry will figure out how to sell them what they want then too. That the industry continues with bloated E3 shows and the like implies, ideals aside, it is exactly what the masses want. If anything, I think it's telling the biggest complaints were that this year's E3 had less booth babes (a decision made to chase ideals, ignoring how people actually act) and totally drowned out the righteous but ultimately not backed up by real action complaints about excess.
It's interesting to me: In Buddhism, in psychotherapy, in Dr Phil's books, you name it, they always talk about the error of making "should statements" - judging how the world should be and getting upset when it isn't, rather than accepting how it is.
Me, I accept the industry is simply how it is and, accepting that, enjoy finding great games within its breadth, enjoy reading great novels, enjoy watching my wife's writing process, and then - accepting E3 - go have fun with the excess on the years that entertains me too.
My favorite set of figures went to some listing or other of average IQs of high school leavers.
The Netherlands came first with something like a 113 average.
England came a fair bit lower at something like 106.
The United States, for whom the tests are normalized to 100, scored 99.
You've got to admire a nation that has the tests normalized for them and still manages to underachieve.
On the positive side, at least Texas gets a good argument to go back to joyfully executing those so mentally subnormal that they're unaware they even committed a crime: leave them living and they really screw up the averages (assuming the typical voter is smart enough to know what an average is).
Mad Dog McCree or Gigli.
How can you blame people for connecting to a wireless router with the ID "Free Porn"?
Granted, my neighbors didn't intentionally set their router up with that ID but they did leave it unsecured with the default password for the admin account. It was simply the neighborly thing to do to change their ID and resecure it with a new password (that, admittedly, they didn't know).
For every $1 invested:
after 10 years, you have $2.60
after 20 years, you have $6.70
after 40 years, you have $45
after 55 years, you have $190
Keep in mind that inflation seems to end up around a factor of 10 over 25-30 years. So, in 55 years you have $190 which is roughly $1.90 in present money for every dollar you invest now.
Allow me to put it in to terms that make sense to a typical male, slashdot-reading, college student:
At the strip club, $40 will get you two lap dances now or three lap dances and a beer when you're 75. On the other hand, should you die at 60, you get the choice of two lap dances before you die or none at all if you wisely invested.
At the end of the day, investing pays the salaries of the people who do the investing for you, makes the very best investors very rich, is a gamble for most, and a good way to not really do much beyond keep up with long term inflation plus a little bit for those who want to play it safe.
Another more boring suggestion: Spend $1,000 on presentation skills classes. Spend $1,000 on a great suit that gives you the confidence of knowing you look the part. Spend $250 on getting a professional to help you with your resume when you graduate. Then sail through the interview for a job paying $5,000-10,000 more every year than you would have got otherwise. As your career continues to build from there, compounding over time, there aren't many better investments you can make. I don't know of many other investments that can pay five times over the initial investment every single year.
Who wants to live in France with it's ridiculous 2.5GB/s internet when you can live in "the land of the free" and have politicians sell out net neutrality: allowing you 1% of the speed and the right to pay more ^H^H^H^H "competetive market rates that would never be taken advantage of" to a duopoly for it?
Just be glad congress weren't around when the wheel was being invented or fire was being discovered.
It's much the same as the kid whose parents didn't buy him a car and can't afford one for himself stating firmly that, "No, really, my bicycle does everything I need. I don't really need a car."
Potentially, he really doesn't need a car nor would benefit in any way from it. As far as everyone else is concerned, maybe he's even convince himself of it but no one else actually believes him.
GIMP, like a bicycle, may be capable of getting you from A to B. It won't get you there as quickly, you'll be sweatier for it, the results will likely look less polished, you're not going to impress anyone other than nerds and, sadly (except for a few specialized jobs) you're not going to find much decent work by relying on it.
Of course, similar to owning a bicycle rather than a car, you will be many hundreds of dollars better off at time of acquisition.
"Some lucky souls can live their lives, earn money, buy necessities and even find love on the Internet."
Why, those lucky souls truly have everything in the palm of their hand.