And I thought people using cell phones while driving was a menace before...
I wondered how long it would be before the nanny state crowd chimed in.
This is America. We're supposed to be free. If I want to use my cell phone visor, drink and fire my gun while driving my 3 mpg S.U.V., that's my constitutionally enshrined right. I think it was put there to protect us from the British and is just as valid today as it was 200 years ago! Or something. Anyone who says differently is just plain unpatriotic.
It gives you ergonomic benefits that no "ergonomic" bump-in-the-middle keyboard comes close to.
Besides, does Dvorak make that much of a difference? Sure, the layout might be marginally better but you're still twisting your wrists 90 degrees to make your hands parallel with it (pronation), you're then angling your elbows in 45 degrees and your hands back out 45 degrees to line up with it (deviation), and you're still, likely, tilting it (extension)putting even more stress on.
A better arrangement of keys is only going to do so much for you. At the end of the day, you've still got extension, deviation and pronation going on - even if you're marginally reducing stress within those three.
The SafeType sorts all three out. Lower your arms by your sides. Now lift your forearms up so your elbows are at 90 degrees. Nothing else. That's it. You're done. Your arms are in a massively more neutral position, your carpal tunnel is now straight, letting the tendons run through without rubbing against it, all is good in your world. Wouldn't you prefer a keyboard like that to one that's just as bad as every other keyboard with a marginally better layout?
The other advantage of the SafeType is that, if you can already touch type, once you stop overthinking it, you can already use it. All the keys are still in the QWERTY position - they're just broken in to two vertical blocks. Most people I've watched are up and using it within ten minutes, typing naturally within an hour or so.
That advantage translates in to backwards compatability - you're still using QWERTY so you can transfer to a client site without ever having to make a mental switch.
I've tried a lot of ergonomic options and this one's by far the best. It's not cheap - at about $300. Then again, if you're worth anything as a developer, you likely earn that in a single day or less. Isn't one day's pay worth ensuring your career last another 20 years? One day's pay is a lot less than no more days' pay.
(Note: I reviewed the keyboard for one of the IEEE magazines. At the time I was impressed but had enough minor issues that I regarded it as only useful for those who had problems they needed to immediately address. After the review, I kept using it - and I'm completely willing to admit I was wrong. It's a great keyboard and, honestly, well worth the price for anyone who works with computers all day every day.)
Perhaps, but unlike Harry Potter books, gold will always be worth its weight in gold.
Given who significant the Harry Potter series has been within the publishing world, a famously leaked copy - the one that led to exerpts being printed in newspapers, etc., of the penultimate book in the series, naming the major character that gets killed off, etc. - would likely maintain its value, if not increase.
It's like saying the first guitar Pete Townsend smashed was only worth something before he smashed it. Just because it's no longer of value for its initial purpose doesn't mean it's not worth even more for the historical value of what happened to it.
Anyone who spends any time reading interviews with guitarists will eventually come across some guitarist - it could be almost any guitarist - saying about their favorite guitarists:
The great thing about B.B. is that while other virtuoso guitarists can play twenty notes in the time it takes him to play one, he can "say" twice as much in that one note as they can in their twenty.
It's not even about perfection vs. imperfection. You can introduce slight random imperfection (simply not hitting notes perfectly), you can introduce procedural imperfection that adds specific style (say hitting off beats slightly ahead of the beat in order to create a rock/roll feel - hmm, wonder where that name came from) - but it still doesn't capture it.
It's about expression.
It's about the guitarist who reads the audience and knows the moment when the crowd moves from listening to feeling and can smoothly transition from relatively clean notes to ones where that little extra touch is needed. Add slight vibrato to every note and it's annoying, add it to the right moments and it adds that notion of human soul. And, the thing is, it's different, every night, for the same song, depending on the audience.
It's not about playing the eight bar intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, etc... It's about responding to Jim Morrison deciding to rail on the police who beat him back stage and knowing now is the time to take that twice repeated four bar intro and keep repeating it for however long it takes him to finish. It's about knowing tonight's the last night of a tour and it's just the right time to repeat the chorus that extra few times, to extend the solo - which, on a normal night, would be pretentious and turn the crowd off.
It's about the guitarist having a bad day, feuding with the singer, whatever, and playing aggressively and capturing the audience in the tension of the moment and that dynamic.
It's all those things and so much more. Even if you have a robot that simulates human perfection/imperfection brilliantly, it doesn't express how it's feeling, it doesn't adapt to how the gig's going, it just plays the same things (with whatever generated imperfection) every night - or, potentially, improvises without any awareness of how the rest of the gig is going.
Program a robot and, sure, you can fake the technical aspects. But music's about having a "soul". Soul is all those aspects mentioned above and more - it's far more than just perfection or imperfection.
Give me the choice: A guitarist who can play Ywingie under the table, technically and it terms of number of notes played, or B.B. playing two or three perfectly expressive notes per bar and I'll take B.B. every time.
He had a reason, but it's irrational and insane. He's religious fundamentalist, and the motivations of such people are incomprehensible to reasonable, logical thinkers.
Who said anything about it being irrational or insane? It's logical, rational and completely sane - just utterly immoral:
Find a group with prejudices. Stir up those prejudices. Tell them you're their only hope. Kill a few people/commit other stunning acts to prove it. Collect power, influence and money from those people.
Like I said, entirely rational (and very effective) - just utterly immoral.
It's also exactly the same thing politicians have done for years. Why do you think the terror alert goes up every time Bush needs to remind the public that only he can save them while the liberals would "offer therapy" to the terrorists?
One is "Religious Fundamentalism" and completely inexplainable, the other is "A Strong Leader". As for which you think is which, that tends to depend on whether you're in the US or the Middle East - while everyone else seems to look down on both of them.
It's a huge mistake to generalise and dismiss as "They're insane fanatics and there's no understanding them." That leaves you with one response: Try killing them - as there's nothing else you can do. Unfortunately, that doesn't really work too well. If you're willing to open your mind that, deeply immoral as it may be, it's just another sick politician exploiting for his own gain, then you can begin to understand it and look at far more effective ways to undermine that power base and take away his ability to continue doing such harm.
Knee jerk reactions are simple, they're easy and they're reassuring. They just don't work. Understanding (whilst disagreeing) is hard, it's uncomfortable, it makes us realise our heroes are often a lot like their villains, but it's the only way we can really effect a change.
As an English gamer who moved to the U.S., I figured I'd share just how badly overcharged you guys are:
UK: Before: £19.99 (~$35) Now: £14.99 (~$25)
US: Regular retail since the Platinum line has existed: $19.99 Price if you shop around for which store has a sale this week: $14.99 ($9.99 if you're lucky)
DVDs are equally bad: I rarely pay over $14.99 (~£9), often pay $9.99 (~£6) if I wait a month or two, and, if I'm willing to wait, older titles (like Hunt For Red October - at Circuit City this weekend) are $4.99 (~£3). Plus, because all the large stores price match, you check the online ads for all stores - then go to your nearest one and ask them to match.
To be fair, in the UK, 17.5% VAT is added within those prices whereas, in the US, sales tax is added on on top. Then again, as that rarely clears 8% anywhere, it doesn't come close to making the difference.
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think. Anybody who's actually studied law knows that actual human interactions are full of corner cases, and ass-coverings easily outweigh the meat of most contracts.
Anyone who's ever spent any time programming has discovered something pretty similar.
The law's actually almost exactly like what a programmer would create:
1.0: Ten commandments. Look they're pretty obvious people. How the hell can you get them wrong.
1.0.1: Yes, it's still stealing even if you do intend to give it back.
1.5: Hmm. How did we miss rape? Technically you're not stealing anything physical. If she's unmarried, you're not coveting anything. OK, we'll add rape.
2.0: The seventeen commandments really don't have the same cool ring the ten commandments once had. So we decided to release 2.0: The Magna Carter.
2.7: OK, men can vote regardless of station in life. But they have to be over 21.
3.0 (Forked) So we decided to fork the law. A bunch of us used to work for BritainCo. but we were totally bummed out by their management. So we formed US Inc. We're still going to support legacy laws under the British system because, frankly, it works well enough, it's really big and it'd cost a fortune to overhaul it.
3.1 You know, let's stop calling these things version numbers. Let's call them "ammendments"
3.1.1 Adding guns. Everyone should be allowed a gun. It makes perfect sense in this day and age. If times change, people in the future will totally have the sense to understand this was an ammendment, relevent to the time, and so can completely be ammended back out, right?
etc.
We're up to 3.8.7.2.5.4.b.ii at the moment. At which point a lot of programmers are starting to talk about how they'd do it far better if they were allowed to create a truly optimized system.
At some point, no doubt, a Swedish guy will write a new system of basic laws and then others will build on it.
At which point the US will nuke him out of existence for sounding far too much like the German guy (Marx) who did something pretty similar and came up with a system that was bad for the entertainment industry and thus bad for America.
Folks- speed doesn't kill, and this is something few people (especially the "won't someone please think of the children" types) fail to understand.
But, you've got to admit, it's bloody hard to get killed by a stationary car.
(Carbon monoxide poisoning etc. aside)
It's like the old Eddie Izzard line, And the National Rifle Association says that, "Guns don't kill people, people do," but I think the gun helps, you know? I think it helps. I just think just standing there going, "Bang!" That's not going to kill too many people, is it? You'd have to be really dodgy on the heart to have that.
First of all, Moore's law originally applied to processors, (complexity, not speed) and represents a trend in power/$.
I was wondering how long that would take to get pointed out. You are correct, technically, incorrect philosophically.
The reason Moore's law gets (mis)quoted so often is because, whether intended or not, it holds absolutely true over time for other areas too.
Let's take a look at memory in home PCs for the last 23 years I've been using them:
1982 BBC Micro - 32kb RAM
1990 286 PC - 1024k RAM
Time: 8 years (just over 5x18 months) Capacity increase: x32 or x2^5
1995 Pentium PC - 16mb RAM (Granted there was a 4mb 486 in the middle here but that fits the exact same pattern so I'll skip it)
Time: 5 years (just under 4x18 months) Capacity increase: x16 or 2^4
2000 Pentium 3 PC - 128mb RAM (OK, there were constant PCs in between this point as I worked in the field now - but, for simplicity's sake, I'm pulling out a few milestones)
Time: 5 years (just over 3x18 months) Capacity increase: x8 or 2^3
2004 Pentium 4 PC - 512mb RAM
Time: 4 years (just over 2x18 months) Capacity increase: x4 or 2^2
2005 Pentium 4 PC - 1gb RAM
Time: 18 months (1x18months) Capacity increase: x2 or 2^1
To prove minimal rounding errors throughout, let's look at that BBC through to today: 1982-2005 = 23 years = just over 15 x 18 months 32kb-1gb = 32768 = 2^15
Or, comparing PCs to PCs (Sorry, couldn't bring myself to say Apples to Apples) just in case you want to argue the change in systems from an 8080 to an 80x86 makes a difference (which it doesn't for this law): 1990-2005 = 15 years = 10 x 18 months 1mb to 1gb = 1024 = 2^10
Looks like it works out exactly.
So, even if Moore himself didn't hypothesize that typical home PC system memory will increase by a power of 2 every 18 months, I will. It's held true for as long as I've been using home computers which goes back to within only a few years of the birth of the genre.
If you like, as it's true that it's not Moore's law, you can call it Davison's law. Save this web page. In 25 years, people will be stealing copies of it from their libraries.
I personally can't imagine what you're going to do with 512 megs of memory.
Have you noticed how load times seem to have gone up, not down, as consoles have advanced? If that 512mb allows the game engine and level to be kept in memory when you toggle out to the menu, rather than having to watch that damn bar each time - that'd strike me as a pretty good use of it. Keeping a couple of key soundtrack files there so the optical drive can just read game data rather than having to bounce off to wherever the audio's stored and back again - all those uses would be great.
If I could pay an extra $50 (give or take, the cost of an extra stick of 512mb RAM) when buying a console and be assured of never seeing a load screen again as one 512mb stored the last level's data in case I went back, 128 stored everything to do with the menu, 128 stored common game assets like music and the last 256 was busily pre-caching the next levels, I'd absolutely pay it.
As the albeit untrue legend about Bill Gates goes: Just because you can't envisage a use for more memory now doesn't mean there isn't/won't be one.
One of the biggest limitations ended up being the meager 64MB of memory that the system shipped with.
One of the most important changes with the new consoles is that system memory has been bumped from 64MB on the original Xbox to a whopping 512MB on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. For the Xbox, that's a factor of 8 increase, and over 12x the total memory present on the PlayStation 2.
One of the biggest limitations was the 64mb of memory - clearly too little. Now, five years later, they've increased that by a factor of 8.
*quickly does sums on fingers*
4.5 years = 18 months x 3
Didn't some guy come up with a rule about this? (My local library was all out of copies of that issue of the magazine)
2^3 = 8
So, five years on, they've managed to about keep pace with historic advancement, being relatively no better than the 64mb that was widely regarded to hamstring the last generation of consoles?
Sure, right now, 512mb sounds great... But then 64mb sounded good five years ago too.
HalfLife2's High Dynamic Range lighting model is expecting to need one to two gigabytes of system RAM to work properly. Sure, PCs run with a clunky OS but it's not that bad. Battlefield 2 needs 512mb minimum and prefers 1gb.
Five years ago, console fanboys dismissed PC gamers when they pointed out 64mb might be nice now but would barely cut it in two years and seriously hamstring the console in 4-5 - the lifecycle of a typical console. They were wrong then.
Now, five years later, all they've done is up that hamstrung amount in accordance with Moore's law and, once again, it seems fine for a console's release and is going to be a major issue well within the system's lifespan.
The DOD is perfectly capable of creating robots that kill people. The hard part is making those robots NOT kill the people you don't want them to kill.
Apparently real trick is to build robot soldiers that can withstand a slashdotting.
Iraq 0600, April 4, 2013, US robot forces are on the border of Iraq for the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom II: The Really Really Patriotic One.
US 0605, April 4, 2013, Slashdot posts a story about them.
Iraq 0605:18, April 4, 2013, Entire US robot force is slashdotted. Invas^D^D^D^D^D Liberation postponed.
This sounds just simply... for lack of a better word... stupid. I mean, it is like "Let's have a TV show that does X Y and Z, but we can't let ANYONE know what it is about, EVEN THE VIEWERS, or they might steal our idea!!!!!!!!!!!!"
You may want to tell this to the producers of The Contender. If I remember the two the right way around (the confusion over it only goes to prove the forthcoming point all the more), the people behind The Contender announced they were making it, Fox jumped on the idea too with The Next Great Champ, Fox beat them to market despite legal wranglings.
If your show, product, whatever, takes a long time to get to market and others, with deeper pockets, can listen to your idea, copy it, and still release first, it pays to keep it quiet until you're at a point where they can no longer steal first mover advantage.
As a manager, unless that Master of Science comes with experience, I'm not going to offer a senior position.
There's just too much extra to a senior role that has nothing to do with level of traditional education.
I need my senior developers to be able to run a small team and make accurate project plans and time estimates. My experience of the other people at university - and myself, to be fair - was a bunch of people bitching about how unfair it was to get saddled with a team of incompetents followed by one person shouldering all the load. A couple of years in the working world where you can bitch all you like about things being unfair - but you're going to get fired rather than a bad grade if you don't get on and sort it - leads to a totally different approach to screwed up situations.
My experience of student life was sleeping in as late as possible and then crunching through the nights with a few friends to pull off insane tasks. In the working world, people start complaining they're not overtime exempt, wanting time and a half for anything out of their normal 9-to-6 and have a legally protected hard limit of 70 hours if they don't want to go over that. Besides, for the odd college project that may work - in the real world, managers who try crunching all the time churn out crap from exhausted and pissed off coders.
Those are just two examples. There are many more I could give. The point is that college experience, while providing a lot, doesn't replace the bottom rungs. It does two things: It accelerates promotions from those bottom rungs (that you still have to start on); It opens doors that would otherwise be closed, further down the line. You still start at the bottom. You just get away from there faster.
If you really want to skip the bottom rungs, there was a great article here a few weeks back about how to do that:
Start a start up.
As a student, you're used to living on ramen and crashing on your parents' couch so there's no better time than now to take the risk.
Costs of getting started in IT disappear in to background noise (if you can do the above rather than buying expensive chairs and setting up coporate offices you don't really need ala dotcom stupidity). If you know how to code, have your own PC etc. you can build a server, develop on it, etc. It's only when you're ready to release your product that you need to bring money in - and, by that point, you have a demonstrable product.
If you succeed, your company gets bought out, you cash a nice big check and parlay your CTO position or whatever you've given yourself in to a VP Of Development, Director, or whatever in the new company.
If you fail, that year of running your own company will still look better on most resumes than five years of intern/junior crap at no-name firms. Even from a failed company, you can parlay that experience in to a senior role.
So: University education doesn't let you skip the bottom of the ladder - it opens the top up and gets you up it a little faster. If you really want to skip the bottom rungs, found your own company - you'll learn more, likely skip rungs and, if you're lucky, sell your share in the next online-casino equivalent for $2b like the guy in India just did and get to play MMOs for the rest of your days while starting up toy companies just to harass CEOs for the hell of it.
There is the objection that an underwater species might have difficulties fostering technology. Smelting metals, or even developing radio or astronomy, are challenging, to put it modestly, in a watery environment.
Just because your race/species' progression along your race/species' tech tree follows one path and have certain pre-requisits doesn't mean another species has to.
While the humans are sitting around in their cars, congratulating themselves on their brilliant wheels and combustion engines, a parallel but different species may well be wondering why the hell humans haven't figured out that really obvious teleporting trick that just relies on simple [to them] bacteria and water based science.
For hundreds of years, similarly arrogant Europeans congratulated themselves on how advance they could make their tin suits and big imposing castles. They laughed at those strange Eastern folk in their silly bamboo armor and paper houses. Right up until those weird Eastern guys invented this cool stuff called gun powder. At which point the really advanced armor and castle construction suddenly seemed painfully, embarassingly backward.
Besides, much as I despise supporting Gungans... He's putting down a speciest that are comfortably amphibious competing against one that's air breathing only.
The sciences he quotes have only been around for the last five thousand years or so, most for only a couple of hundred - a mere blip in evolutionary terms. So, assuming both species evolved to the point where they could learn such technologies at the same time, what would happen?
Humans invent fire. Gungans wander out of the water and try to copy it. Humans chase Gungans away. Gungans run to the safety of the water where humans, having not invented submarines yet, can't follow. Repeat a few thousand times until Gungans get lucky. Now they have fire too.
At the same time... Gungans invent [some basic water driven tech] Humans can't copy it because they can't enter the water and see it.
So Gungans get every human tech and they get all of their own. And a pompous human scientist sits there observing how they can't possibly smelt metals or invent radios while some water based tech that he's never heard of, fused with smelting, radio and everything else they simply copied, obliterates his entire species.
Well, except that they're stupid idiots which we all hated but actually, when you think about it, is the only way to explain why they didn't wipe the limited air breathing humans out millenia ago.
Of course, we pompous humans are so convinced our approach is the only one that we apparently miss all that.
And yet, somehow, the majority of people appear not to know all things.
I've just finished responding to the whole PC vs. Console thread. It has a lot of parallels to this one:
All PC hardware problems are solveable. The average person doesn't know how to go about finding that information. Thus the average person buys a console that is easier. The PC may do more but the average person doesn't, for whatever reason (laziness, disinterest, time, lack of knowledge of tools like google) have that information.
The same happens in many games (and much non gaming software too). Some problem has an incredibly easy solution when viewed from a certain direction. Most users don't see it from that direction. The developers refuse to change it because, after all, it's painfully simple to them. Users end up unable to get past it. Users stop using the product.
California may provide electronic trash collection. If the vast majority don't know about it, in effect, California does not provide electronic trash protection.
Maybe it is the consumer's responsibility to find out. Guess what though... Offload responsibility all you like. If they don't accept it and take it on, the service [effectively] doesn't exist.
Quite when did the PC gain this massive lead that the loss of which fortells nothing but doom?
Does anyone else get the feeling these doom articles get written by people who weren't actually there (or at least paying attention) for the majority of the lifecycle they're making broad statements about?
Atari vs. PC Hmm... Hercules monochrome, text screens, the vivid delights of CGA. Anyone in their right mind still had an Atari for gaming rather than one of those international BUSINESS machines.
NES vs. PC What was the figure? 50m Nintendo Entertainment Systems sold. Bill Gates hadn't even written about his dream of a PC in every home yet.
SNES vs. PC I seem to remember every other teenager having Super Street Fighter II and Super Mario World while, if I was really lucky, I could enjoy the vivid delights of Commander Keen.
Granted, it was during this generation that we finally started getting visually impressive games for the PC. Doom, Ultima Underworld, Wing Commander, Mech Warrior II (with its Glide support) all started to show up. This was the first time we really had anything that we could point to and say, "Your console just can't do that." They got ports of games like Doom (which just didn't compare) but this was the first time the PC actually had any reason for gamers to migrate.
PlayStation vs. PC Just as we got going with the PC, the PlayStation turns up. It competes with all of our 3D that the SNES never could, it has great games that we'll never get and it's politely in one box that always works, never needs upgrading and has absolutely no jumpers to futz with.
Again, the PC started to extend its lead towards the end of the generation, just as it had the generation before. What a surprise, it's almost as if the constantly developing PC loses slightly immediately after an increment but then catches up and ends up leading by a mile before the next increment. It happened with the SNES, the PS1 and it was about to happen with the PS2.
PS2/X-Box vs. PC We had great graphics for enthusiasts. The new generation of consoles gave them to everyone who owned a console.
Gran Turismo, Grand Theft Auto, Halo... They blew away everything except the very, very best PC systems and those cost more for the graphics card that could compete than the console did. And, once again, the console took no configuring, had no hardware conflicts, it just worked right out of the box.
Since that release, as always, the constantly evolving PC has clawed its way back against the static releases of consoles. It's not got "back on top" but then, for those who were actually there, was it ever on top? Can anyone point to a generation where there were more PC gamers than console gamers [that played the latest titles - sure, the PC has an insane install base but minesweeper doesn't count]?
Input Options and Specific Genres The PC with its more varied input options has always been the choice for certain genres: I'm yet to see a good PlayStation flight yoke. I'm yet to see an X-Box RPG that doesn't suffer from bastardized input (although I've seen a fair few PC RPGs die the death of a thousand cuts as they're developed for both platforms - yes, you Deus Ex 2). I'm yet to see an MMO that really works (yes Everquest Online Adventures allowed a USB keyboard but swapping from DualShock to keyboard and back again is way more painful than just using a keyboard and mouse).
That gap is closing though. Take a look at driving games which, by all rights, should be totally the domain of the PC, just as flight sims are. After all, imagine the great PC title we should have that allows the same addition of user created content from the net as MS Flight Sim does. We should be looking at a game with all the default courses and cars of Gran Turismo 4 and then triple that in user created options, played beautifully across three monitors - and yet, due to some abberation, it's console only and t
California places the financial burden of dealing with the electronic waste on consumers, charging a $6 to $10 disposal fee on every computer and television purchased.
I live in California so this one directly affects me...
Quite what service does the state provide with this money?
I know they collect my trash. That's the big black trash can.
I know they collect my cans, glass and paper - that one goes in the big blue trash can.
Where do I dispose of my PC? I have apparently paid $10 for the state to dispose of it. OK. So how exactly do they dispose of it? I certainly don't get given a different trash can. There's no PC trash collection service that comes around.
I would imagine that, for just about every home user that's paid this $10, old PCs that aren't getting reused by relatives etc. end up in the exact same black trash can as all the rest of the trash. It then gets dumped in the exact same landfill as all the other CA waste.
Quite where did the $10 go? I'm yet to see the state do anything different with the disposal of a home PC than they do with all the other trash.
I'm willing to accept they may well have separate recycling that companies with old PCs can take them down to and dump at. The average home consumer has no knowledge whatsoever of such services. So, again, I ask what the state actually provides for that fee? Or is it just a convenient way of raising a little more tax?
He had Final Fantasy VII (a '97 release) in high school. Which puts him class of what, '99? It had him haring off to art school in '99, graduating '02 or '03.
Wow. Two, possibly three whole years of industry experience? We must listen to this wise and sagely old one. He likely even remembers back to the days when monitors weren't even flat, hard drives only came in tens of gigabytes and you were lucky if your PC had 512mb of ram!
Seriously, the next article is going to be: "AOL message board reports: W177 WR1G4T iz tH3 SUX0rZ. Is this the end for The Sims and Spore franchises?!!!"
It's bad when supposedly experienced and intelligent people make really stupid "X is dead" or "Y is the most Z we'll ever need - everything else is just superfluous" statements. Someone who's been an industry leader for years thinking that a given genre is dead at the first anomalous statistic is kind of sad - but at least they have the credentials for people to maybe consider their albeit misguided notions. When a 22 or 23 year old kiddie with, at best, a couple of years professional experience (and then as an artist, not a developer, let alone in senior management or product development at a development house) gets taken seriously because, based on his limited experience, a brief trend seems like a sign of the apocalypse - something's gone wrong.
The final fantasy series dates back over fifteen years. The last three or four of that have been well below par. Is this then end? Think about this in terms of any other industry. Stephen King writes a couple of not so good books, Aaron Spelling releases a series that doesn't get picked up for a second season, Green Day releases a less successful album. Does this mean the end for them? Of course not - though it may well seem that way to a 22 or 23 year old with no sense of perspective. While you are only as successful as your last release, the same holds true when your next release captures the zietgeist again and everyone talks about how wonderful you've always been. A few years of suckage from Final Fantasy isn't it's death. It's too strong a brand. It may go quiet for a bit but new blood, a new era, new ideas, and it's just as capable of coming back as any other series is of striking big.
Another great way to not loose keys is to just write the keys on the cd's with permanent marker....has worked wonders with me for years
I always find it a bitch to get my periscope in to the drive bay and then read the number as it spins around.
I've taken to permanent markering it on every last piece of documentation that comes with it, related manuals, etc. Whilst it's fairly likely I'll lose one copy of the serial number, so much crap comes packaged with it that it's virtually impossible to lose it all.
Also works wonders for when you lose one copy of the CD but any unique valid serial number will work - i.e. with a lot of games where you need unique serial numbers to play multiplayer. Losing the CD, when the key is written on it, blocks you. Losing one copy of the CD, when the key is copied all over the place no longer needs to.
The perception of quality has also hit the publishers. Gioia noted that at THQ, the company has shifted to where one SKU can cost as much as 15 million dollars. 'Why would I do that unless you're dealing with a substantial license or an original IP?'
Has anyone noticed the games industry has got slightly over obsessed with how big business it thinks it is?
It's like the claim they're bigger than the movie industry when, in fact, they only just beat box office sales and don't come close when comparing DVDs, Video, Rental, Cable and other distribution channels of the exact same product.
A single SKU can cost "as much as $15m"?! Woo. So what you're saying is that games are now comparable to small movies where the very cheap ones still go for a couple of million to around $20 million, the mid size ones around the $60m mark and the massive ones around the $100m mark.
Hollywood is somewhat discerning about licenses but only somewhat. For every Batman or Spiderman movie, there's going to be a Darkman, Phantom or Dick Tracey. If their budgets are even bigger still, how come they keep doing it?
Because they've got over themselves and stopped being impressed with how big they've got. Instead, they ask the simple question: Will what I invest in an IP allow me to recoup more at the end? If yes, they buy it, if no, they don't.
Just as in the movie industry, the games industry is going to discover:
The Spiderman IP is probably worth quite a few million. You can no doubt recoup that investment and more if you make a decent game.
The Darkman IP isn't ever going to add several million to what you recoup on the strength of the name alone. Thus it's not worth several million to buy in the IP. But the point is you don't buy in the IP for several million. You buy it in for several tens of thousands or whatever and it adds more than that amount to your otherwise anonymouse masked hero game.
Yes, games cost a lot and make a lot these days. But get over yourselves. You're still relative babies by the movie industry's standards. They still buy in the occasional small IP for a smaller title because it's still profitable. That's the only thing that counts. If you're so hyped up yet nervous about making a mistake that you've lost track of return - cost = profit, you really shouldn't be in the position to be making those decisions.
First, it's possible to make a fair use defense based on your ownership of the CD or DVD.
It is?
I guess most people assume there's a distinction between making a case and making a good case that stands some reasonable chance of winning.
If it were possible to make a [good] fair use case, the EFF and ACLU would be all over this. Being able to establish a legal precedent would end subsequent attempts by the RIAA.
Sure, individuals can't stand up to corporate techniques for draining a bank account with legal fees until the defendant has to declare bankruptcy and drop their side. The ACLU and EFF both have the means to fight exactly that sort of case.
The one thing neither group can afford to do is take on cases that they know have absolutely no chance of winning - that's throwing their money away.
Given the potential wins if it genuinely was a good case - putting an end to much of these lawsuits - both organizations would be all over it if they thought there was any worthwhile angle to try defending. The fact that they, with all their teams of lawyers, aren't even close to fighting that argument kind of implies they don't think that it is possible to make a [good] fair use defense.
6 stunning cars vs. 12 stunning cars? Platoons vs. Armies? Really? Are you comparing real world games or figments of your imagination?
Vision Gran Turismo: Four cars in the actual pits, two in the pit lanes, two more on the track, and that's just those in view. Plus a significantly more crowded and realistic looking pit area than GT4.
Warhawks: Very large numbers of planes flying in complex formations, etc.
Killzone: Dozens of troops running around a battlefield.
Heavenly Sword: Many hundreds of opponents in one set piece.
MotorStorm: Roughly a dozen vehicles from cars to bikes to quads.
I'd be referencing genuine tech demos. Perhaps not final games but nonetheless examples of what the hardware is basically capable of.
The important part to remember is that a lot of non affiliated experts have observed that shifting from traditional programming methodologies to the massively parallel but simpler structure of the Cell involves a serious paradigm shift. So there are two likely observations we can make about demos made after the tech's only been in developers' hands for maybe six months:
1) Tech demos usually involve features that have to get dropped to keep a non-linear game running well.
2) Even though initial releases are unlikely to quite match the levels of the demos (though Sony did show a far larger sampling of far more impressive looking demos than Microsoft for whom point 1 also holds true), the PS3 has the most potential to increase in quality even further as developers gain experience working to the new paradigm.
Are you comparing real world games or figments of your imagination?
I guess that answers the question about real world demos (there are no games for any next gen system, nor can their be until Microsoft releases around Christmas). So, no, I didn't base my opinions on figments of my imagination. Research, rather than say "bitching about things you've evidently not even seen the commonly available demos for" seems a much better way to go.
You don't play specs, you play games. And I'm not sure why you think the PS3 GPU is so much better than the 360's. Care to enumerate?
Generic Racing Game: Graphics... X-Box:360 - 6 stunning cars on a track. PS3 - 12 stunning cars on a track.
AI... X-Box:360 - 6 cars fighting it out for their share of 3 PowerPCs. PS3 - 12 cars each running their AI on a separate sub processor that's optimized specifically for that task.
Flight Sim: X-Box:360 - 10-15 planes filling the skies. PS3 - 20-30 planes filling the skies making for truly chaotic dogfights.
Space Sim: X-Box:360 - The original cut of StarWars with maybe six X-Wings and six Tie Fighters shown at any one time. PS3 - Return Of The Jedi with waves of them coming in.
Shooter: X-Box:360 - A platoon of enemy troops charging your squad. PS3 - Two enemy platoons trying to flank your allied squad while you try and find a way to out flank them.
If I'm playing a WWII game, I want occasional set piece massive battles not constant squad action because the system can't handle making that number of troops look good. If I'm playing a world war two flight sim, I want to defend a thousand bomber formation not be one of two planes guarding a six plane flight of B-17s. If I'm playing a racing game, I want all the other cars of a big race, with constant jockeying for position, not an arbitrary six needed to keep the framerate decent.
I could go on. The point is, we play games, not specs. But double the amount of processing power means developers have the ability to put double the amount of content on screen at any one time (assuming they don't simply increase detail on existing numbers). Double the amount of adversaries etc. makes for much better, more realistic games.
So, directly, I don't care that much about the tech specs. I care about the games. But the tech specs give the developers far more freedom to make the games I want to play.
As for proof of that power differential: I could argue about how [only when well coded] massively parallel simple processors can blow the crap out of only a couple of very powerful, highly generic processors. You build a processor that can do hundreds of different complex multimedia tasks - great - but half that silicon isn't getting used for any given specific instruction whereas it's all getting used in massively parallel simpler units and, because they're simpler, they can be optimized to cycle faster.
Regardless of theory though, there's a far simpler solution - take a look at the demos. The X-Box:360 demos look good. Great even. They're definitely an incremental improvement over the current generation. The PS3 demos, however, look like something a movie studio rendered. It's like the difference between companies doing better and better stop motion animation and what Weta did with huge numbers of troops in Lord Of The Rings. That is why I'm tending to believe the PS3 claims. They may just be tech demos, not real games. But what tech demos they are.
Slashdot Mirror
And I thought people using cell phones while driving was a menace before...
I wondered how long it would be before the nanny state crowd chimed in.
This is America. We're supposed to be free. If I want to use my cell phone visor, drink and fire my gun while driving my 3 mpg S.U.V., that's my constitutionally enshrined right. I think it was put there to protect us from the British and is just as valid today as it was 200 years ago! Or something. Anyone who says differently is just plain unpatriotic.
You may want to consider the SafeType keyboard.
It gives you ergonomic benefits that no "ergonomic" bump-in-the-middle keyboard comes close to.
Besides, does Dvorak make that much of a difference? Sure, the layout might be marginally better but you're still twisting your wrists 90 degrees to make your hands parallel with it (pronation), you're then angling your elbows in 45 degrees and your hands back out 45 degrees to line up with it (deviation), and you're still, likely, tilting it (extension)putting even more stress on.
A better arrangement of keys is only going to do so much for you. At the end of the day, you've still got extension, deviation and pronation going on - even if you're marginally reducing stress within those three.
The SafeType sorts all three out. Lower your arms by your sides. Now lift your forearms up so your elbows are at 90 degrees. Nothing else. That's it. You're done. Your arms are in a massively more neutral position, your carpal tunnel is now straight, letting the tendons run through without rubbing against it, all is good in your world. Wouldn't you prefer a keyboard like that to one that's just as bad as every other keyboard with a marginally better layout?
The other advantage of the SafeType is that, if you can already touch type, once you stop overthinking it, you can already use it. All the keys are still in the QWERTY position - they're just broken in to two vertical blocks. Most people I've watched are up and using it within ten minutes, typing naturally within an hour or so.
That advantage translates in to backwards compatability - you're still using QWERTY so you can transfer to a client site without ever having to make a mental switch.
I've tried a lot of ergonomic options and this one's by far the best. It's not cheap - at about $300. Then again, if you're worth anything as a developer, you likely earn that in a single day or less. Isn't one day's pay worth ensuring your career last another 20 years? One day's pay is a lot less than no more days' pay.
(Note: I reviewed the keyboard for one of the IEEE magazines. At the time I was impressed but had enough minor issues that I regarded it as only useful for those who had problems they needed to immediately address. After the review, I kept using it - and I'm completely willing to admit I was wrong. It's a great keyboard and, honestly, well worth the price for anyone who works with computers all day every day.)
Perhaps, but unlike Harry Potter books, gold will always be worth its weight in gold.
Given who significant the Harry Potter series has been within the publishing world, a famously leaked copy - the one that led to exerpts being printed in newspapers, etc., of the penultimate book in the series, naming the major character that gets killed off, etc. - would likely maintain its value, if not increase.
It's like saying the first guitar Pete Townsend smashed was only worth something before he smashed it. Just because it's no longer of value for its initial purpose doesn't mean it's not worth even more for the historical value of what happened to it.
Anyone who spends any time reading interviews with guitarists will eventually come across some guitarist - it could be almost any guitarist - saying about their favorite guitarists:
The great thing about B.B. is that while other virtuoso guitarists can play twenty notes in the time it takes him to play one, he can "say" twice as much in that one note as they can in their twenty.
It's not even about perfection vs. imperfection. You can introduce slight random imperfection (simply not hitting notes perfectly), you can introduce procedural imperfection that adds specific style (say hitting off beats slightly ahead of the beat in order to create a rock/roll feel - hmm, wonder where that name came from) - but it still doesn't capture it.
It's about expression.
It's about the guitarist who reads the audience and knows the moment when the crowd moves from listening to feeling and can smoothly transition from relatively clean notes to ones where that little extra touch is needed. Add slight vibrato to every note and it's annoying, add it to the right moments and it adds that notion of human soul. And, the thing is, it's different, every night, for the same song, depending on the audience.
It's not about playing the eight bar intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, etc... It's about responding to Jim Morrison deciding to rail on the police who beat him back stage and knowing now is the time to take that twice repeated four bar intro and keep repeating it for however long it takes him to finish. It's about knowing tonight's the last night of a tour and it's just the right time to repeat the chorus that extra few times, to extend the solo - which, on a normal night, would be pretentious and turn the crowd off.
It's about the guitarist having a bad day, feuding with the singer, whatever, and playing aggressively and capturing the audience in the tension of the moment and that dynamic.
It's all those things and so much more. Even if you have a robot that simulates human perfection/imperfection brilliantly, it doesn't express how it's feeling, it doesn't adapt to how the gig's going, it just plays the same things (with whatever generated imperfection) every night - or, potentially, improvises without any awareness of how the rest of the gig is going.
Program a robot and, sure, you can fake the technical aspects. But music's about having a "soul". Soul is all those aspects mentioned above and more - it's far more than just perfection or imperfection.
Give me the choice: A guitarist who can play Ywingie under the table, technically and it terms of number of notes played, or B.B. playing two or three perfectly expressive notes per bar and I'll take B.B. every time.
He had a reason, but it's irrational and insane. He's religious fundamentalist, and the motivations of such people are incomprehensible to reasonable, logical thinkers.
Who said anything about it being irrational or insane? It's logical, rational and completely sane - just utterly immoral:
Find a group with prejudices.
Stir up those prejudices.
Tell them you're their only hope.
Kill a few people/commit other stunning acts to prove it.
Collect power, influence and money from those people.
Like I said, entirely rational (and very effective) - just utterly immoral.
It's also exactly the same thing politicians have done for years. Why do you think the terror alert goes up every time Bush needs to remind the public that only he can save them while the liberals would "offer therapy" to the terrorists?
One is "Religious Fundamentalism" and completely inexplainable, the other is "A Strong Leader". As for which you think is which, that tends to depend on whether you're in the US or the Middle East - while everyone else seems to look down on both of them.
It's a huge mistake to generalise and dismiss as "They're insane fanatics and there's no understanding them." That leaves you with one response: Try killing them - as there's nothing else you can do. Unfortunately, that doesn't really work too well. If you're willing to open your mind that, deeply immoral as it may be, it's just another sick politician exploiting for his own gain, then you can begin to understand it and look at far more effective ways to undermine that power base and take away his ability to continue doing such harm.
Knee jerk reactions are simple, they're easy and they're reassuring. They just don't work. Understanding (whilst disagreeing) is hard, it's uncomfortable, it makes us realise our heroes are often a lot like their villains, but it's the only way we can really effect a change.
As an English gamer who moved to the U.S., I figured I'd share just how badly overcharged you guys are:
UK:
Before: £19.99 (~$35)
Now: £14.99 (~$25)
US:
Regular retail since the Platinum line has existed: $19.99
Price if you shop around for which store has a sale this week: $14.99 ($9.99 if you're lucky)
DVDs are equally bad: I rarely pay over $14.99 (~£9), often pay $9.99 (~£6) if I wait a month or two, and, if I'm willing to wait, older titles (like Hunt For Red October - at Circuit City this weekend) are $4.99 (~£3). Plus, because all the large stores price match, you check the online ads for all stores - then go to your nearest one and ask them to match.
To be fair, in the UK, 17.5% VAT is added within those prices whereas, in the US, sales tax is added on on top. Then again, as that rarely clears 8% anywhere, it doesn't come close to making the difference.
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think. Anybody who's actually studied law knows that actual human interactions are full of corner cases, and ass-coverings easily outweigh the meat of most contracts.
Anyone who's ever spent any time programming has discovered something pretty similar.
The law's actually almost exactly like what a programmer would create:
1.0: Ten commandments. Look they're pretty obvious people. How the hell can you get them wrong.
1.0.1: Yes, it's still stealing even if you do intend to give it back.
1.5: Hmm. How did we miss rape? Technically you're not stealing anything physical. If she's unmarried, you're not coveting anything. OK, we'll add rape.
2.0: The seventeen commandments really don't have the same cool ring the ten commandments once had. So we decided to release 2.0: The Magna Carter.
2.7: OK, men can vote regardless of station in life. But they have to be over 21.
3.0 (Forked) So we decided to fork the law. A bunch of us used to work for BritainCo. but we were totally bummed out by their management. So we formed US Inc. We're still going to support legacy laws under the British system because, frankly, it works well enough, it's really big and it'd cost a fortune to overhaul it.
3.1 You know, let's stop calling these things version numbers. Let's call them "ammendments"
3.1.1 Adding guns. Everyone should be allowed a gun. It makes perfect sense in this day and age. If times change, people in the future will totally have the sense to understand this was an ammendment, relevent to the time, and so can completely be ammended back out, right?
etc.
We're up to 3.8.7.2.5.4.b.ii at the moment. At which point a lot of programmers are starting to talk about how they'd do it far better if they were allowed to create a truly optimized system.
At some point, no doubt, a Swedish guy will write a new system of basic laws and then others will build on it.
At which point the US will nuke him out of existence for sounding far too much like the German guy (Marx) who did something pretty similar and came up with a system that was bad for the entertainment industry and thus bad for America.
Folks- speed doesn't kill, and this is something few people (especially the "won't someone please think of the children" types) fail to understand.
But, you've got to admit, it's bloody hard to get killed by a stationary car.
(Carbon monoxide poisoning etc. aside)
It's like the old Eddie Izzard line,
And the National Rifle Association says that, "Guns don't kill people, people do," but I think the gun helps, you know? I think it helps. I just think just standing there going, "Bang!" That's not going to kill too many people, is it? You'd have to be really dodgy on the heart to have that.
First of all, Moore's law originally applied to processors, (complexity, not speed) and represents a trend in power/$.
I was wondering how long that would take to get pointed out. You are correct, technically, incorrect philosophically.
The reason Moore's law gets (mis)quoted so often is because, whether intended or not, it holds absolutely true over time for other areas too.
Let's take a look at memory in home PCs for the last 23 years I've been using them:
1982 BBC Micro - 32kb RAM
1990 286 PC - 1024k RAM
Time: 8 years (just over 5x18 months)
Capacity increase: x32 or x2^5
1995 Pentium PC - 16mb RAM
(Granted there was a 4mb 486 in the middle here but that fits the exact same pattern so I'll skip it)
Time: 5 years (just under 4x18 months)
Capacity increase: x16 or 2^4
2000 Pentium 3 PC - 128mb RAM
(OK, there were constant PCs in between this point as I worked in the field now - but, for simplicity's sake, I'm pulling out a few milestones)
Time: 5 years (just over 3x18 months)
Capacity increase: x8 or 2^3
2004 Pentium 4 PC - 512mb RAM
Time: 4 years (just over 2x18 months)
Capacity increase: x4 or 2^2
2005 Pentium 4 PC - 1gb RAM
Time: 18 months (1x18months)
Capacity increase: x2 or 2^1
To prove minimal rounding errors throughout, let's look at that BBC through to today:
1982-2005 = 23 years = just over 15 x 18 months
32kb-1gb = 32768 = 2^15
Or, comparing PCs to PCs (Sorry, couldn't bring myself to say Apples to Apples) just in case you want to argue the change in systems from an 8080 to an 80x86 makes a difference (which it doesn't for this law):
1990-2005 = 15 years = 10 x 18 months
1mb to 1gb = 1024 = 2^10
Looks like it works out exactly.
So, even if Moore himself didn't hypothesize that typical home PC system memory will increase by a power of 2 every 18 months, I will. It's held true for as long as I've been using home computers which goes back to within only a few years of the birth of the genre.
If you like, as it's true that it's not Moore's law, you can call it Davison's law. Save this web page. In 25 years, people will be stealing copies of it from their libraries.
I personally can't imagine what you're going to do with 512 megs of memory.
Have you noticed how load times seem to have gone up, not down, as consoles have advanced? If that 512mb allows the game engine and level to be kept in memory when you toggle out to the menu, rather than having to watch that damn bar each time - that'd strike me as a pretty good use of it. Keeping a couple of key soundtrack files there so the optical drive can just read game data rather than having to bounce off to wherever the audio's stored and back again - all those uses would be great.
If I could pay an extra $50 (give or take, the cost of an extra stick of 512mb RAM) when buying a console and be assured of never seeing a load screen again as one 512mb stored the last level's data in case I went back, 128 stored everything to do with the menu, 128 stored common game assets like music and the last 256 was busily pre-caching the next levels, I'd absolutely pay it.
As the albeit untrue legend about Bill Gates goes: Just because you can't envisage a use for more memory now doesn't mean there isn't/won't be one.
One of the biggest limitations ended up being the meager 64MB of memory that the system shipped with.
One of the most important changes with the new consoles is that system memory has been bumped from 64MB on the original Xbox to a whopping 512MB on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. For the Xbox, that's a factor of 8 increase, and over 12x the total memory present on the PlayStation 2.
One of the biggest limitations was the 64mb of memory - clearly too little. Now, five years later, they've increased that by a factor of 8.
*quickly does sums on fingers*
4.5 years = 18 months x 3
Didn't some guy come up with a rule about this? (My local library was all out of copies of that issue of the magazine)
2^3 = 8
So, five years on, they've managed to about keep pace with historic advancement, being relatively no better than the 64mb that was widely regarded to hamstring the last generation of consoles?
Sure, right now, 512mb sounds great... But then 64mb sounded good five years ago too.
HalfLife2's High Dynamic Range lighting model is expecting to need one to two gigabytes of system RAM to work properly. Sure, PCs run with a clunky OS but it's not that bad. Battlefield 2 needs 512mb minimum and prefers 1gb.
Five years ago, console fanboys dismissed PC gamers when they pointed out 64mb might be nice now but would barely cut it in two years and seriously hamstring the console in 4-5 - the lifecycle of a typical console. They were wrong then.
Now, five years later, all they've done is up that hamstrung amount in accordance with Moore's law and, once again, it seems fine for a console's release and is going to be a major issue well within the system's lifespan.
The DOD is perfectly capable of creating robots that kill people. The hard part is making those robots NOT kill the people you don't want them to kill.
Apparently real trick is to build robot soldiers that can withstand a slashdotting.
Iraq 0600, April 4, 2013, US robot forces are on the border of Iraq for the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom II: The Really Really Patriotic One.
US 0605, April 4, 2013, Slashdot posts a story about them.
Iraq 0605:18, April 4, 2013, Entire US robot force is slashdotted. Invas^D^D^D^D^D Liberation postponed.
This sounds just simply... for lack of a better word... stupid. I mean, it is like "Let's have a TV show that does X Y and Z, but we can't let ANYONE know what it is about, EVEN THE VIEWERS, or they might steal our idea!!!!!!!!!!!!"
You may want to tell this to the producers of The Contender. If I remember the two the right way around (the confusion over it only goes to prove the forthcoming point all the more), the people behind The Contender announced they were making it, Fox jumped on the idea too with The Next Great Champ, Fox beat them to market despite legal wranglings.
If your show, product, whatever, takes a long time to get to market and others, with deeper pockets, can listen to your idea, copy it, and still release first, it pays to keep it quiet until you're at a point where they can no longer steal first mover advantage.
As a manager, unless that Master of Science comes with experience, I'm not going to offer a senior position.
There's just too much extra to a senior role that has nothing to do with level of traditional education.
I need my senior developers to be able to run a small team and make accurate project plans and time estimates. My experience of the other people at university - and myself, to be fair - was a bunch of people bitching about how unfair it was to get saddled with a team of incompetents followed by one person shouldering all the load. A couple of years in the working world where you can bitch all you like about things being unfair - but you're going to get fired rather than a bad grade if you don't get on and sort it - leads to a totally different approach to screwed up situations.
My experience of student life was sleeping in as late as possible and then crunching through the nights with a few friends to pull off insane tasks. In the working world, people start complaining they're not overtime exempt, wanting time and a half for anything out of their normal 9-to-6 and have a legally protected hard limit of 70 hours if they don't want to go over that. Besides, for the odd college project that may work - in the real world, managers who try crunching all the time churn out crap from exhausted and pissed off coders.
Those are just two examples. There are many more I could give. The point is that college experience, while providing a lot, doesn't replace the bottom rungs. It does two things: It accelerates promotions from those bottom rungs (that you still have to start on); It opens doors that would otherwise be closed, further down the line. You still start at the bottom. You just get away from there faster.
If you really want to skip the bottom rungs, there was a great article here a few weeks back about how to do that:
Start a start up.
As a student, you're used to living on ramen and crashing on your parents' couch so there's no better time than now to take the risk.
Costs of getting started in IT disappear in to background noise (if you can do the above rather than buying expensive chairs and setting up coporate offices you don't really need ala dotcom stupidity). If you know how to code, have your own PC etc. you can build a server, develop on it, etc. It's only when you're ready to release your product that you need to bring money in - and, by that point, you have a demonstrable product.
If you succeed, your company gets bought out, you cash a nice big check and parlay your CTO position or whatever you've given yourself in to a VP Of Development, Director, or whatever in the new company.
If you fail, that year of running your own company will still look better on most resumes than five years of intern/junior crap at no-name firms. Even from a failed company, you can parlay that experience in to a senior role.
So: University education doesn't let you skip the bottom of the ladder - it opens the top up and gets you up it a little faster. If you really want to skip the bottom rungs, found your own company - you'll learn more, likely skip rungs and, if you're lucky, sell your share in the next online-casino equivalent for $2b like the guy in India just did and get to play MMOs for the rest of your days while starting up toy companies just to harass CEOs for the hell of it.
most programs haven't even got the ability to hyperthread, so do we really need the extra cores?
Bill - we know it's really you - will you ever learn? Programs used not to need more than 640Kb of ram, either.
Can't really blame the guy for posting under an alias. It's not like he and his company's all that popular around here.
There is the objection that an underwater species might have difficulties fostering technology. Smelting metals, or even developing radio or astronomy, are challenging, to put it modestly, in a watery environment.
Just because your race/species' progression along your race/species' tech tree follows one path and have certain pre-requisits doesn't mean another species has to.
While the humans are sitting around in their cars, congratulating themselves on their brilliant wheels and combustion engines, a parallel but different species may well be wondering why the hell humans haven't figured out that really obvious teleporting trick that just relies on simple [to them] bacteria and water based science.
For hundreds of years, similarly arrogant Europeans congratulated themselves on how advance they could make their tin suits and big imposing castles. They laughed at those strange Eastern folk in their silly bamboo armor and paper houses. Right up until those weird Eastern guys invented this cool stuff called gun powder. At which point the really advanced armor and castle construction suddenly seemed painfully, embarassingly backward.
Besides, much as I despise supporting Gungans... He's putting down a speciest that are comfortably amphibious competing against one that's air breathing only.
The sciences he quotes have only been around for the last five thousand years or so, most for only a couple of hundred - a mere blip in evolutionary terms. So, assuming both species evolved to the point where they could learn such technologies at the same time, what would happen?
Humans invent fire.
Gungans wander out of the water and try to copy it.
Humans chase Gungans away.
Gungans run to the safety of the water where humans, having not invented submarines yet, can't follow.
Repeat a few thousand times until Gungans get lucky. Now they have fire too.
At the same time...
Gungans invent [some basic water driven tech]
Humans can't copy it because they can't enter the water and see it.
So Gungans get every human tech and they get all of their own. And a pompous human scientist sits there observing how they can't possibly smelt metals or invent radios while some water based tech that he's never heard of, fused with smelting, radio and everything else they simply copied, obliterates his entire species.
Well, except that they're stupid idiots which we all hated but actually, when you think about it, is the only way to explain why they didn't wipe the limited air breathing humans out millenia ago.
Of course, we pompous humans are so convinced our approach is the only one that we apparently miss all that.
All information is three clicks away in google.
And yet, somehow, the majority of people appear not to know all things.
I've just finished responding to the whole PC vs. Console thread. It has a lot of parallels to this one:
All PC hardware problems are solveable. The average person doesn't know how to go about finding that information. Thus the average person buys a console that is easier. The PC may do more but the average person doesn't, for whatever reason (laziness, disinterest, time, lack of knowledge of tools like google) have that information.
The same happens in many games (and much non gaming software too). Some problem has an incredibly easy solution when viewed from a certain direction. Most users don't see it from that direction. The developers refuse to change it because, after all, it's painfully simple to them. Users end up unable to get past it. Users stop using the product.
California may provide electronic trash collection. If the vast majority don't know about it, in effect, California does not provide electronic trash protection.
Maybe it is the consumer's responsibility to find out. Guess what though... Offload responsibility all you like. If they don't accept it and take it on, the service [effectively] doesn't exist.
Quite when did the PC gain this massive lead that the loss of which fortells nothing but doom?
Does anyone else get the feeling these doom articles get written by people who weren't actually there (or at least paying attention) for the majority of the lifecycle they're making broad statements about?
Atari vs. PC
Hmm... Hercules monochrome, text screens, the vivid delights of CGA. Anyone in their right mind still had an Atari for gaming rather than one of those international BUSINESS machines.
NES vs. PC
What was the figure? 50m Nintendo Entertainment Systems sold. Bill Gates hadn't even written about his dream of a PC in every home yet.
SNES vs. PC
I seem to remember every other teenager having Super Street Fighter II and Super Mario World while, if I was really lucky, I could enjoy the vivid delights of Commander Keen.
Granted, it was during this generation that we finally started getting visually impressive games for the PC. Doom, Ultima Underworld, Wing Commander, Mech Warrior II (with its Glide support) all started to show up. This was the first time we really had anything that we could point to and say, "Your console just can't do that." They got ports of games like Doom (which just didn't compare) but this was the first time the PC actually had any reason for gamers to migrate.
PlayStation vs. PC
Just as we got going with the PC, the PlayStation turns up. It competes with all of our 3D that the SNES never could, it has great games that we'll never get and it's politely in one box that always works, never needs upgrading and has absolutely no jumpers to futz with.
Again, the PC started to extend its lead towards the end of the generation, just as it had the generation before. What a surprise, it's almost as if the constantly developing PC loses slightly immediately after an increment but then catches up and ends up leading by a mile before the next increment. It happened with the SNES, the PS1 and it was about to happen with the PS2.
PS2/X-Box vs. PC
We had great graphics for enthusiasts. The new generation of consoles gave them to everyone who owned a console.
Gran Turismo, Grand Theft Auto, Halo... They blew away everything except the very, very best PC systems and those cost more for the graphics card that could compete than the console did. And, once again, the console took no configuring, had no hardware conflicts, it just worked right out of the box.
Since that release, as always, the constantly evolving PC has clawed its way back against the static releases of consoles. It's not got "back on top" but then, for those who were actually there, was it ever on top? Can anyone point to a generation where there were more PC gamers than console gamers [that played the latest titles - sure, the PC has an insane install base but minesweeper doesn't count]?
Input Options and Specific Genres
The PC with its more varied input options has always been the choice for certain genres: I'm yet to see a good PlayStation flight yoke. I'm yet to see an X-Box RPG that doesn't suffer from bastardized input (although I've seen a fair few PC RPGs die the death of a thousand cuts as they're developed for both platforms - yes, you Deus Ex 2). I'm yet to see an MMO that really works (yes Everquest Online Adventures allowed a USB keyboard but swapping from DualShock to keyboard and back again is way more painful than just using a keyboard and mouse).
That gap is closing though. Take a look at driving games which, by all rights, should be totally the domain of the PC, just as flight sims are. After all, imagine the great PC title we should have that allows the same addition of user created content from the net as MS Flight Sim does. We should be looking at a game with all the default courses and cars of Gran Turismo 4 and then triple that in user created options, played beautifully across three monitors - and yet, due to some abberation, it's console only and t
California places the financial burden of dealing with the electronic waste on consumers, charging a $6 to $10 disposal fee on every computer and television purchased.
I live in California so this one directly affects me...
Quite what service does the state provide with this money?
I know they collect my trash. That's the big black trash can.
I know they collect my cans, glass and paper - that one goes in the big blue trash can.
Where do I dispose of my PC? I have apparently paid $10 for the state to dispose of it. OK. So how exactly do they dispose of it? I certainly don't get given a different trash can. There's no PC trash collection service that comes around.
I would imagine that, for just about every home user that's paid this $10, old PCs that aren't getting reused by relatives etc. end up in the exact same black trash can as all the rest of the trash. It then gets dumped in the exact same landfill as all the other CA waste.
Quite where did the $10 go? I'm yet to see the state do anything different with the disposal of a home PC than they do with all the other trash.
I'm willing to accept they may well have separate recycling that companies with old PCs can take them down to and dump at. The average home consumer has no knowledge whatsoever of such services. So, again, I ask what the state actually provides for that fee? Or is it just a convenient way of raising a little more tax?
He had Final Fantasy VII (a '97 release) in high school. Which puts him class of what, '99? It had him haring off to art school in '99, graduating '02 or '03.
Wow. Two, possibly three whole years of industry experience? We must listen to this wise and sagely old one. He likely even remembers back to the days when monitors weren't even flat, hard drives only came in tens of gigabytes and you were lucky if your PC had 512mb of ram!
Seriously, the next article is going to be:
"AOL message board reports: W177 WR1G4T iz tH3 SUX0rZ. Is this the end for The Sims and Spore franchises?!!!"
It's bad when supposedly experienced and intelligent people make really stupid "X is dead" or "Y is the most Z we'll ever need - everything else is just superfluous" statements. Someone who's been an industry leader for years thinking that a given genre is dead at the first anomalous statistic is kind of sad - but at least they have the credentials for people to maybe consider their albeit misguided notions. When a 22 or 23 year old kiddie with, at best, a couple of years professional experience (and then as an artist, not a developer, let alone in senior management or product development at a development house) gets taken seriously because, based on his limited experience, a brief trend seems like a sign of the apocalypse - something's gone wrong.
The final fantasy series dates back over fifteen years. The last three or four of that have been well below par. Is this then end? Think about this in terms of any other industry. Stephen King writes a couple of not so good books, Aaron Spelling releases a series that doesn't get picked up for a second season, Green Day releases a less successful album. Does this mean the end for them? Of course not - though it may well seem that way to a 22 or 23 year old with no sense of perspective. While you are only as successful as your last release, the same holds true when your next release captures the zietgeist again and everyone talks about how wonderful you've always been. A few years of suckage from Final Fantasy isn't it's death. It's too strong a brand. It may go quiet for a bit but new blood, a new era, new ideas, and it's just as capable of coming back as any other series is of striking big.
Another great way to not loose keys is to just write the keys on the cd's with permanent marker....has worked wonders with me for years
I always find it a bitch to get my periscope in to the drive bay and then read the number as it spins around.
I've taken to permanent markering it on every last piece of documentation that comes with it, related manuals, etc. Whilst it's fairly likely I'll lose one copy of the serial number, so much crap comes packaged with it that it's virtually impossible to lose it all.
Also works wonders for when you lose one copy of the CD but any unique valid serial number will work - i.e. with a lot of games where you need unique serial numbers to play multiplayer. Losing the CD, when the key is written on it, blocks you. Losing one copy of the CD, when the key is copied all over the place no longer needs to.
The perception of quality has also hit the publishers. Gioia noted that at THQ, the company has shifted to where one SKU can cost as much as 15 million dollars. 'Why would I do that unless you're dealing with a substantial license or an original IP?'
Has anyone noticed the games industry has got slightly over obsessed with how big business it thinks it is?
It's like the claim they're bigger than the movie industry when, in fact, they only just beat box office sales and don't come close when comparing DVDs, Video, Rental, Cable and other distribution channels of the exact same product.
A single SKU can cost "as much as $15m"?! Woo. So what you're saying is that games are now comparable to small movies where the very cheap ones still go for a couple of million to around $20 million, the mid size ones around the $60m mark and the massive ones around the $100m mark.
Hollywood is somewhat discerning about licenses but only somewhat. For every Batman or Spiderman movie, there's going to be a Darkman, Phantom or Dick Tracey. If their budgets are even bigger still, how come they keep doing it?
Because they've got over themselves and stopped being impressed with how big they've got. Instead, they ask the simple question: Will what I invest in an IP allow me to recoup more at the end? If yes, they buy it, if no, they don't.
Just as in the movie industry, the games industry is going to discover:
The Spiderman IP is probably worth quite a few million. You can no doubt recoup that investment and more if you make a decent game.
The Darkman IP isn't ever going to add several million to what you recoup on the strength of the name alone. Thus it's not worth several million to buy in the IP. But the point is you don't buy in the IP for several million. You buy it in for several tens of thousands or whatever and it adds more than that amount to your otherwise anonymouse masked hero game.
Yes, games cost a lot and make a lot these days. But get over yourselves. You're still relative babies by the movie industry's standards. They still buy in the occasional small IP for a smaller title because it's still profitable. That's the only thing that counts. If you're so hyped up yet nervous about making a mistake that you've lost track of return - cost = profit, you really shouldn't be in the position to be making those decisions.
First, it's possible to make a fair use defense based on your ownership of the CD or DVD.
It is?
I guess most people assume there's a distinction between making a case and making a good case that stands some reasonable chance of winning.
If it were possible to make a [good] fair use case, the EFF and ACLU would be all over this. Being able to establish a legal precedent would end subsequent attempts by the RIAA.
Sure, individuals can't stand up to corporate techniques for draining a bank account with legal fees until the defendant has to declare bankruptcy and drop their side. The ACLU and EFF both have the means to fight exactly that sort of case.
The one thing neither group can afford to do is take on cases that they know have absolutely no chance of winning - that's throwing their money away.
Given the potential wins if it genuinely was a good case - putting an end to much of these lawsuits - both organizations would be all over it if they thought there was any worthwhile angle to try defending. The fact that they, with all their teams of lawyers, aren't even close to fighting that argument kind of implies they don't think that it is possible to make a [good] fair use defense.
6 stunning cars vs. 12 stunning cars? Platoons vs. Armies? Really? Are you comparing real world games or figments of your imagination?
Vision Gran Turismo: Four cars in the actual pits, two in the pit lanes, two more on the track, and that's just those in view. Plus a significantly more crowded and realistic looking pit area than GT4.
Warhawks: Very large numbers of planes flying in complex formations, etc.
Killzone: Dozens of troops running around a battlefield.
Heavenly Sword: Many hundreds of opponents in one set piece.
MotorStorm: Roughly a dozen vehicles from cars to bikes to quads.
I'd be referencing genuine tech demos. Perhaps not final games but nonetheless examples of what the hardware is basically capable of.
The important part to remember is that a lot of non affiliated experts have observed that shifting from traditional programming methodologies to the massively parallel but simpler structure of the Cell involves a serious paradigm shift. So there are two likely observations we can make about demos made after the tech's only been in developers' hands for maybe six months:
1) Tech demos usually involve features that have to get dropped to keep a non-linear game running well.
2) Even though initial releases are unlikely to quite match the levels of the demos (though Sony did show a far larger sampling of far more impressive looking demos than Microsoft for whom point 1 also holds true), the PS3 has the most potential to increase in quality even further as developers gain experience working to the new paradigm.
Are you comparing real world games or figments of your imagination?
I guess that answers the question about real world demos (there are no games for any next gen system, nor can their be until Microsoft releases around Christmas). So, no, I didn't base my opinions on figments of my imagination. Research, rather than say "bitching about things you've evidently not even seen the commonly available demos for" seems a much better way to go.
You don't play specs, you play games. And I'm not sure why you think the PS3 GPU is so much better than the 360's. Care to enumerate?
Generic Racing Game:
Graphics...
X-Box:360 - 6 stunning cars on a track.
PS3 - 12 stunning cars on a track.
AI...
X-Box:360 - 6 cars fighting it out for their share of 3 PowerPCs.
PS3 - 12 cars each running their AI on a separate sub processor that's optimized specifically for that task.
Flight Sim:
X-Box:360 - 10-15 planes filling the skies.
PS3 - 20-30 planes filling the skies making for truly chaotic dogfights.
Space Sim:
X-Box:360 - The original cut of StarWars with maybe six X-Wings and six Tie Fighters shown at any one time.
PS3 - Return Of The Jedi with waves of them coming in.
Shooter:
X-Box:360 - A platoon of enemy troops charging your squad.
PS3 - Two enemy platoons trying to flank your allied squad while you try and find a way to out flank them.
If I'm playing a WWII game, I want occasional set piece massive battles not constant squad action because the system can't handle making that number of troops look good. If I'm playing a world war two flight sim, I want to defend a thousand bomber formation not be one of two planes guarding a six plane flight of B-17s. If I'm playing a racing game, I want all the other cars of a big race, with constant jockeying for position, not an arbitrary six needed to keep the framerate decent.
I could go on. The point is, we play games, not specs. But double the amount of processing power means developers have the ability to put double the amount of content on screen at any one time (assuming they don't simply increase detail on existing numbers). Double the amount of adversaries etc. makes for much better, more realistic games.
So, directly, I don't care that much about the tech specs. I care about the games. But the tech specs give the developers far more freedom to make the games I want to play.
As for proof of that power differential: I could argue about how [only when well coded] massively parallel simple processors can blow the crap out of only a couple of very powerful, highly generic processors. You build a processor that can do hundreds of different complex multimedia tasks - great - but half that silicon isn't getting used for any given specific instruction whereas it's all getting used in massively parallel simpler units and, because they're simpler, they can be optimized to cycle faster.
Regardless of theory though, there's a far simpler solution - take a look at the demos. The X-Box:360 demos look good. Great even. They're definitely an incremental improvement over the current generation. The PS3 demos, however, look like something a movie studio rendered. It's like the difference between companies doing better and better stop motion animation and what Weta did with huge numbers of troops in Lord Of The Rings. That is why I'm tending to believe the PS3 claims. They may just be tech demos, not real games. But what tech demos they are.