You know why Higher level instruction is failing? Because the title of Professor carrys the connotation of research with a duty of teaching. When a department wants to retain or attract an exceptional person as a Professor, many institutions will throw in relaxed teaching duties as a fringe benefit. Casual dress requirements is pratically a given, so that's outright. Some places even put out special Research Professorships to those especially disinterested in teaching. Not teaching becomes a status symbol among your peers.
Follow the money. The brightest minds in our field are busy bringing in millions of dollars from research grants, while tuition brings in perhaps a 100 thousand per class of 30. So clearly the suppliers are interested in research for a multitude of reasons. But what about the demand side? Generally people go to get an education, either because they wish to learn from very bright people or because they wish to earn a degree that carrys some inertia within the business community. Ivy league schools have built up a racket for themselves by setting very high entrance requirements (large alumni donations not withstanding) thereby placing far more value on the kind of person who gets INTO Princeton, as opposed to the value that Priceton imbues the person with. What's a rational person to do, if they want to look at something besides selectivity and price? US News provides a yearly survey of schools, rating their programs with arcane metrics. The best engineering schools are always the most selective, on these lists. Maybe Berkley beats out MIT one year over the next, but these sorts of "upsets" have been discussed before on slashdot as sensationalist. Furthermore, much of the rating of a school by US News is done by Professors themselves! US News sends out a questionaire and the professors rate other schools on their own perceptions of them. Unless a school is actively trying to recruit a particular respondant, its unlikely that they've ever heard of any specific school outside the top 50. And they're certainly not likely to be able to judge the effectiveness of teaching they haven't witnessed!
The worst news here is that college educations will have to get more expensive to compete for attention from the brightest minds in the various fields. Perhaps we can settle for a more personable educator who merely divines the notes of some greatness, but I can attest that this situation is not preferrable, having studied from a guy who's a real ninja, and some guy who's just interpreting the notes he left behind in order to teach another class. There is definately an advantage to someone who knows a plethora of real world examples from which the general topics the class covers is derived teaching a class.
It's getting late, but my point was that the system doesn't care about the quality of the education you get, or the effectiveness of it. If more people fail, then the piece of paper from those who pass is more valuable, both in the restricted supply sense, and in the "best of the best" sense. The system needs to reward schools that create engineers from regular people. Maybe Congress could pass bill paying for all eligible students to take the PE exam in their state. Or force students to. Hell, maybe they should just force gender equality in engineering, even if it means taking every woman and excluding 90 percent (you do the math, I'm burning precious sleep here) of the male applicants, and then see how things go.
Perhaps MGS VR Missions were great, because they were more of the fun stuff, with less Transciever conversations. If I want to hear a girlfriend talk about missing her period, I think I'd rather skip the condom than play MGS2.
Dijer does nothing to solve the problems the grandparent mentioned. From a brief reading, it essentially is some unholy combination of gnutella peer discovery and ancient block transfer protocols, dedicated to the sharing of a single file.
It doesn't solve search. You must know what you're looking for, and trust a central authority to provide it accurately. If it becomes popular, expect to get a bunch of Fight Club for Matrix subsitutions. Same as any other mechanism I've discovered thus far.
It doesn't eliminate centralization, though it does reduce it. Peer discovery requires the publication of at least one peer. No protocol on earth can solve this. The Dijer website effectively serves as an enourmous tracker.
It doesn't enforce peering. A crafty hacker can easily modify the code to perform a greedy algorithm, taking as much from the HTTP server (and peers) as possible, while sharing as little as possible. BT uses a tit-for-tat algorithm which rewards uploading, and discourages leeching.
The one thing Dijer does do better than the current BT is firewall circumvention. Hopefully, this 9 million dollars can buy a standard solution, and perhaps even create a Java applet version (or whatever else floats your boat) so people dont have to install anything. Nothing prevents you from writing a BT client that actively seeks the front end of the file. Doing this however, skews availablitiy towards the beginning of a file. Done in mass, with a large enough file, it's likely to make blocks near the end of the file rare, if not missing.
Frankley, Dijer is a quaint way to offload a small portion of a sharing a file's requests that is easily gamed. Bittorrent at least makes it so gaming the system causes virtous cycles.
Call it a guess, but selling the iPod below MSRP is probably akin to selling it below cost, which is usually not a good idea. Grocery stores and the like can get away with taking a loss if it brings in people who buy other stuff as well. Best Buy, for example, likes to draw people in with cheap games and music, and hopes to get more sales of other music or high end stereo and TV equipment as well. At one point they also carried fridges, ovens and other expensive appliances, but I don't recall seeing any of those recently.
The iPod is increasing its margins, even as it increases the number of units sold, to the point where they're consuming something like 40 percent of Samsung's high capacity NAND chips. And yet somehow, they get a deal on parts that saves Apple like 40 percent of the cost of chips. "Crotty estimates that Apple is paying $54 for 2 gigabytes worth of memory. That would cost any other manufacturer $90." That seems like a large discount to give somebody who desperately needs your product. I do realize that manufacturers often give bulk discounts, it seems a bit silly to offer 40 percent off at the biggest order end.
No wonder Jobs says iTunes is designed to move hardware; without it, somebody would step in and produce the same thing at half the price!
Never seen a SNES cartridge with a label done in sharpie? Or one of those 60-in-one games? Here's a page with a ton of pictures of pirated megaman games!
Actually, you're forgetting pirated in Hong Kong / China pirated. The far more popular kind of pirated. I've seen plenty of pirated hardware for consoles, and the same holds true for DVDs. The worksmanship is far superiour to your average burnt in a DVD-r quality, but still not a decent release. Pirated carts are typically much easier to spot, since they usually don't work right and the labels look like trash. This is the sort of piracy that netflix can prevent by purchasing in bulk from reputable distributers, that peerflix can't quite filter for.
But the submitter probably was suggesting the usual rent-burn-return piracy. It's just not the only form out there is all.
I donno what BSD license you're thinking of, but what you've posted is basically BSD liscence, though slightly more complex and restrictive. There's several forms of the BSD, but my understanding is that the advertising clause was removed, so most people refer to BSD to mean basically "here's source code. you may use it for whatever you like, however you like. the end."
I'm not a lawyer, but if I can't understand the license as a programmer, you've probably failed in a critical part of opening the source to your code.
When they said that the DS proved their impressions wrong, so Nintendo has earned themselves a breif respite from unfounded criticism. If the games do suck, I imagine PA will have at them for it.
Fortunately, I'm under no such obligation =). I seem to recall hearing that the Revolution was backwards compatible; as fascinating as that carpal tunnel syndrome controller may be, if Nintendo provides an "out" for developers via Cube controller compatibility, a lot of them will take it. The Revolution would have to sell on unprecedented levels to convince publishers and developers to create a game that has no chance of being portable for a console.
Ah, my mistake. I realize now I'm dealing with the archetypical 'Marginalized European Gamer'. Perhaps we should move on to lamenting the demise of the Amiga and the ZX Spectrum?
For something that can be summarized as "Nolan Bushnell is the idiot savant that created video games, and Nintendo is the group that saved gamers from their creator."
NT does claim to be suitable for some soft-realtime applications. Most people knowingly waive it off as useless for anything more than trivial applications. NT makes no guarentees about service time, but it has been making strides in improving priority levels, etc. I'm not sure what XP adds to this, since I'm basically pulling this out of a textbook from an influential researcher and author.
RTLinux is generally in the same class. You mentioned that they're using a desktop beast, but those are actually mainframe/server systems they're benchmarking on! 256 CPUs, Opteron Dual Core chips, etc. These chips feature lots of stuff you can't afford in the bulk of embedded systems.
The only thing this appears to be useful for is low latency financial market trades. If they were going after the embedded system market, perhaps an embedded system benchmark would suit better.
Also, how can your RTLinux feature a RTCore based on ruggedized Linux or BSD? How much of this system is Linux, exactly? Perhaps a trademark litigation is in order over this?
When I say 'press scores' I mean general coverage of the game, not 'I give this game eight and a half lobsters.' Darwinina has had moderate success as a indie developer getting coverage from websites and obscure PC gamer magazines, but what really helps out is 'previews' those rabid articles that reveal scantily clad games in the most beneficial light possible. For reasons too complex to describe, this domain belongs big budget sequals, and turds from publishers who've previously handed out big budget hits.
Interestingly though, I hear Google does sell its search services to companies. I wonder if Google thinks it can provide gmail to companies for a fee. It's no wonder that Microsoft hates and fears everybody; each piece of software that a company becomes reliant on that isn't reliant on MS loosens the chains that keep Microsoft safe.
Google wants good ideas before they're made public (otherwise they'd just spend that money buying companies), but most of the popular good ideas orginated not from somebody who thought that today's technology was amazing, but somebody who saw today's software as okay but tedious. Bram Cohen recognized that peer to peer applications of the day were obtuse, untrustworthy and game-able, so he designed something clearly documented, with checks in place to balance leechers and liars.
In a similar manner to how people who argue the efficacy of vi vs emacs miss the greater point that they're both programs lost in today's graphical computing world, I'm not certain hiring Mr. Cerf as a Chief Evanglist will lead to the creation of new profitable ideas. He is certainly qualified enough to say, "I'm not sure what you say is feasible" but once you've settled into some habits, forsaking them in the name of improvement is difficult. The only thing I can see that Cerf has done since TCP/IP is some Interplanetary Communication Protocol, and heavily evangelize his inventions. I don't mean to belittle his accomplishments, but merely point out that he doesn't appear to have been hired to create new technology, but rather to continue to promote his inventions that are still wildly useful twenty years later.
Publishers make their real money by putting down the cash for the development of a game. Darwinia is finished; this means they get less control over the game, and less money for their investment. Given the already overwhelming number of talented independent game makers wheeling and dealing for publishers, the people who work for publishers are interested in the next big hit, a financial blockbuster.
Darwinia isn't going to be a blockbuster. It's interesting, but it hasn't had the press scores and coverage that publishers leverage for their piece of shit "like metal gear with more buttons". The good news is that Darwinia can be self-published quite easily. They won't ever score the big contract with Wal-mart, but there's plenty of publishers who regret that once their stock languishes on the shelf.
More to the point, more expensive carts were justified in that nobody could really get anything cheaper to market. You could skimp on cart size, but that quickly cuts into the game's size and scope.
If you develop an AI, it costs less per unit, the more units you make. If you use a bigger RAM chip on a cartridge, it raises the cost of every unit!
Reasoning that better games are more expensive and should therefore be more expensive to purchase is a faulty argument. Games should be priced to maximise profts; PROFIT = SALES x (PRICE - COST OF MANUFACTURE) - FIXED COSTS. The fastest way to grow profit is to grow that first term, either through increased sales, higher prices or lower cost of manufacture. Fixed costs generally pay for themselves in increased sales.
The hard part here is that Price is generally inverse related to Sales. That's basic economics. Cost of manufacture is generally out of the hands of game developers, because there's certain minimums you must provide consumers and standard interfaces you need to comply with. So developers and publishers are basically left with a tradeoff between fixed cost and sales x price. Advertising, awesome new graphics, particle effects, those are all fixed costs.
Slashdot Mirror
You know why Higher level instruction is failing? Because the title of Professor carrys the connotation of research with a duty of teaching. When a department wants to retain or attract an exceptional person as a Professor, many institutions will throw in relaxed teaching duties as a fringe benefit. Casual dress requirements is pratically a given, so that's outright. Some places even put out special Research Professorships to those especially disinterested in teaching. Not teaching becomes a status symbol among your peers.
Follow the money. The brightest minds in our field are busy bringing in millions of dollars from research grants, while tuition brings in perhaps a 100 thousand per class of 30. So clearly the suppliers are interested in research for a multitude of reasons. But what about the demand side? Generally people go to get an education, either because they wish to learn from very bright people or because they wish to earn a degree that carrys some inertia within the business community. Ivy league schools have built up a racket for themselves by setting very high entrance requirements (large alumni donations not withstanding) thereby placing far more value on the kind of person who gets INTO Princeton, as opposed to the value that Priceton imbues the person with. What's a rational person to do, if they want to look at something besides selectivity and price? US News provides a yearly survey of schools, rating their programs with arcane metrics. The best engineering schools are always the most selective, on these lists. Maybe Berkley beats out MIT one year over the next, but these sorts of "upsets" have been discussed before on slashdot as sensationalist. Furthermore, much of the rating of a school by US News is done by Professors themselves! US News sends out a questionaire and the professors rate other schools on their own perceptions of them. Unless a school is actively trying to recruit a particular respondant, its unlikely that they've ever heard of any specific school outside the top 50. And they're certainly not likely to be able to judge the effectiveness of teaching they haven't witnessed!
The worst news here is that college educations will have to get more expensive to compete for attention from the brightest minds in the various fields. Perhaps we can settle for a more personable educator who merely divines the notes of some greatness, but I can attest that this situation is not preferrable, having studied from a guy who's a real ninja, and some guy who's just interpreting the notes he left behind in order to teach another class. There is definately an advantage to someone who knows a plethora of real world examples from which the general topics the class covers is derived teaching a class.
It's getting late, but my point was that the system doesn't care about the quality of the education you get, or the effectiveness of it. If more people fail, then the piece of paper from those who pass is more valuable, both in the restricted supply sense, and in the "best of the best" sense. The system needs to reward schools that create engineers from regular people. Maybe Congress could pass bill paying for all eligible students to take the PE exam in their state. Or force students to. Hell, maybe they should just force gender equality in engineering, even if it means taking every woman and excluding 90 percent (you do the math, I'm burning precious sleep here) of the male applicants, and then see how things go.
For professional engineers? Many of them already do carry insurance for malpractice.
Perhaps MGS VR Missions were great, because they were more of the fun stuff, with less Transciever conversations. If I want to hear a girlfriend talk about missing her period, I think I'd rather skip the condom than play MGS2.
Dijer does nothing to solve the problems the grandparent mentioned. From a brief reading, it essentially is some unholy combination of gnutella peer discovery and ancient block transfer protocols, dedicated to the sharing of a single file.
It doesn't solve search. You must know what you're looking for, and trust a central authority to provide it accurately. If it becomes popular, expect to get a bunch of Fight Club for Matrix subsitutions. Same as any other mechanism I've discovered thus far.
It doesn't eliminate centralization, though it does reduce it. Peer discovery requires the publication of at least one peer. No protocol on earth can solve this. The Dijer website effectively serves as an enourmous tracker.
It doesn't enforce peering. A crafty hacker can easily modify the code to perform a greedy algorithm, taking as much from the HTTP server (and peers) as possible, while sharing as little as possible. BT uses a tit-for-tat algorithm which rewards uploading, and discourages leeching.
The one thing Dijer does do better than the current BT is firewall circumvention. Hopefully, this 9 million dollars can buy a standard solution, and perhaps even create a Java applet version (or whatever else floats your boat) so people dont have to install anything. Nothing prevents you from writing a BT client that actively seeks the front end of the file. Doing this however, skews availablitiy towards the beginning of a file. Done in mass, with a large enough file, it's likely to make blocks near the end of the file rare, if not missing.
Frankley, Dijer is a quaint way to offload a small portion of a sharing a file's requests that is easily gamed. Bittorrent at least makes it so gaming the system causes virtous cycles.
Call it a guess, but selling the iPod below MSRP is probably akin to selling it below cost, which is usually not a good idea. Grocery stores and the like can get away with taking a loss if it brings in people who buy other stuff as well. Best Buy, for example, likes to draw people in with cheap games and music, and hopes to get more sales of other music or high end stereo and TV equipment as well. At one point they also carried fridges, ovens and other expensive appliances, but I don't recall seeing any of those recently.
The iPod is increasing its margins, even as it increases the number of units sold, to the point where they're consuming something like 40 percent of Samsung's high capacity NAND chips. And yet somehow, they get a deal on parts that saves Apple like 40 percent of the cost of chips. "Crotty estimates that Apple is paying $54 for 2 gigabytes worth of memory. That would cost any other manufacturer $90." That seems like a large discount to give somebody who desperately needs your product. I do realize that manufacturers often give bulk discounts, it seems a bit silly to offer 40 percent off at the biggest order end.
No wonder Jobs says iTunes is designed to move hardware; without it, somebody would step in and produce the same thing at half the price!
Never seen a SNES cartridge with a label done in sharpie? Or one of those 60-in-one games? Here's a page with a ton of pictures of pirated megaman games!
Actually, you're forgetting pirated in Hong Kong / China pirated. The far more popular kind of pirated. I've seen plenty of pirated hardware for consoles, and the same holds true for DVDs. The worksmanship is far superiour to your average burnt in a DVD-r quality, but still not a decent release. Pirated carts are typically much easier to spot, since they usually don't work right and the labels look like trash. This is the sort of piracy that netflix can prevent by purchasing in bulk from reputable distributers, that peerflix can't quite filter for.
But the submitter probably was suggesting the usual rent-burn-return piracy. It's just not the only form out there is all.
I donno what BSD license you're thinking of, but what you've posted is basically BSD liscence, though slightly more complex and restrictive. There's several forms of the BSD, but my understanding is that the advertising clause was removed, so most people refer to BSD to mean basically "here's source code. you may use it for whatever you like, however you like. the end."
I'm not a lawyer, but if I can't understand the license as a programmer, you've probably failed in a critical part of opening the source to your code.
It's probably based on you beating your brother with the controller. It's called Super Smash Bros for a reason!
Nintendo has created the first controller that can recognize when you throw it at a wall in frustration!
When they said that the DS proved their impressions wrong, so Nintendo has earned themselves a breif respite from unfounded criticism. If the games do suck, I imagine PA will have at them for it.
Fortunately, I'm under no such obligation =). I seem to recall hearing that the Revolution was backwards compatible; as fascinating as that carpal tunnel syndrome controller may be, if Nintendo provides an "out" for developers via Cube controller compatibility, a lot of them will take it. The Revolution would have to sell on unprecedented levels to convince publishers and developers to create a game that has no chance of being portable for a console.
Ah, my mistake. I realize now I'm dealing with the archetypical 'Marginalized European Gamer'. Perhaps we should move on to lamenting the demise of the Amiga and the ZX Spectrum?
For something that can be summarized as "Nolan Bushnell is the idiot savant that created video games, and Nintendo is the group that saved gamers from their creator."
huh, I thought that was a pretty huge number. Thanks for the tip.
NT does claim to be suitable for some soft-realtime applications. Most people knowingly waive it off as useless for anything more than trivial applications. NT makes no guarentees about service time, but it has been making strides in improving priority levels, etc. I'm not sure what XP adds to this, since I'm basically pulling this out of a textbook from an influential researcher and author.
RTLinux is generally in the same class. You mentioned that they're using a desktop beast, but those are actually mainframe/server systems they're benchmarking on! 256 CPUs, Opteron Dual Core chips, etc. These chips feature lots of stuff you can't afford in the bulk of embedded systems.
The only thing this appears to be useful for is low latency financial market trades. If they were going after the embedded system market, perhaps an embedded system benchmark would suit better.
Also, how can your RTLinux feature a RTCore based on ruggedized Linux or BSD? How much of this system is Linux, exactly? Perhaps a trademark litigation is in order over this?
When I say 'press scores' I mean general coverage of the game, not 'I give this game eight and a half lobsters.' Darwinina has had moderate success as a indie developer getting coverage from websites and obscure PC gamer magazines, but what really helps out is 'previews' those rabid articles that reveal scantily clad games in the most beneficial light possible. For reasons too complex to describe, this domain belongs big budget sequals, and turds from publishers who've previously handed out big budget hits.
I'm not the one claiming it's innovative, though. That's Nintendo and the media.
Interestingly though, I hear Google does sell its search services to companies. I wonder if Google thinks it can provide gmail to companies for a fee. It's no wonder that Microsoft hates and fears everybody; each piece of software that a company becomes reliant on that isn't reliant on MS loosens the chains that keep Microsoft safe.
Google wants good ideas before they're made public (otherwise they'd just spend that money buying companies), but most of the popular good ideas orginated not from somebody who thought that today's technology was amazing, but somebody who saw today's software as okay but tedious. Bram Cohen recognized that peer to peer applications of the day were obtuse, untrustworthy and game-able, so he designed something clearly documented, with checks in place to balance leechers and liars.
In a similar manner to how people who argue the efficacy of vi vs emacs miss the greater point that they're both programs lost in today's graphical computing world, I'm not certain hiring Mr. Cerf as a Chief Evanglist will lead to the creation of new profitable ideas. He is certainly qualified enough to say, "I'm not sure what you say is feasible" but once you've settled into some habits, forsaking them in the name of improvement is difficult. The only thing I can see that Cerf has done since TCP/IP is some Interplanetary Communication Protocol, and heavily evangelize his inventions. I don't mean to belittle his accomplishments, but merely point out that he doesn't appear to have been hired to create new technology, but rather to continue to promote his inventions that are still wildly useful twenty years later.
Publishers make their real money by putting down the cash for the development of a game. Darwinia is finished; this means they get less control over the game, and less money for their investment. Given the already overwhelming number of talented independent game makers wheeling and dealing for publishers, the people who work for publishers are interested in the next big hit, a financial blockbuster.
Darwinia isn't going to be a blockbuster. It's interesting, but it hasn't had the press scores and coverage that publishers leverage for their piece of shit "like metal gear with more buttons". The good news is that Darwinia can be self-published quite easily. They won't ever score the big contract with Wal-mart, but there's plenty of publishers who regret that once their stock languishes on the shelf.
More to the point, more expensive carts were justified in that nobody could really get anything cheaper to market. You could skimp on cart size, but that quickly cuts into the game's size and scope.
If the DS is some bastion of originality and innovation, then certainly ports of existing games are out of the question!
If you develop an AI, it costs less per unit, the more units you make. If you use a bigger RAM chip on a cartridge, it raises the cost of every unit!
Reasoning that better games are more expensive and should therefore be more expensive to purchase is a faulty argument. Games should be priced to maximise profts; PROFIT = SALES x (PRICE - COST OF MANUFACTURE) - FIXED COSTS. The fastest way to grow profit is to grow that first term, either through increased sales, higher prices or lower cost of manufacture. Fixed costs generally pay for themselves in increased sales.
The hard part here is that Price is generally inverse related to Sales. That's basic economics. Cost of manufacture is generally out of the hands of game developers, because there's certain minimums you must provide consumers and standard interfaces you need to comply with. So developers and publishers are basically left with a tradeoff between fixed cost and sales x price. Advertising, awesome new graphics, particle effects, those are all fixed costs.
The best way to write about video games is to write new video games.