Last week, I had a gaming itch to scratch and I felt like playing the XCOM reboot. It's available for £34.99 on the App Store and I was hesitant to buy it because I wasn't sure how it would run on my Macbook with an integrated graphics. It's always a hassle trying to get a refund for purchased software so I searched online for a demo to get a feel for how it would play. After some searching, I found that the demo was only available for the Window's version.
So I downloaded a torrent of the game.
To my surprise, the game ran well on my Macbook's integrated graphics chip. I spent a couple of hours checking things out, playing through the tutorials and just having fun with the game. I then shut it down, and proceeded to buy the game. screenie
The developers who made the port did themselves no favours by not releasing a demo. The lack of playable demo coupled with the asinine rules governing purchased software (no returns, wtf?) mean they would definitely have lost a sale. However, thanks to the availability of the cracked version I was able to check that the game ran fine on my machine which then led to a purchase.
But shouldn't it be about how fun/intriguing the game is and not what language it's written in?
I do agree with your sentiments of there's a place for everything though, and the web browser has ways to go if you are trying to put a league of legends, world of warcraft, or COD in the browser.
League of Legends (LoL) and World of Warcraft (WoW) are hardly taxing on hardware. The WoW engine is almost 10 years old and LoL runs without a hitch on integrated graphics (nVidia 320m on my 2010 Macbook). Performance in games isn't as critical as it used to be.
Why do you need millions of lines of code? This is an honest question.
Not every game is a triple-A title that costs millions of dollars to develop. Indie studios are becoming increasingly popular and are producing games that are unique and interesting. For a concrete example, check out the Humble Indie bundles or InXile's Wasteland 2 and Torment. The latter 2 are looking very promising and they are developed using Unity.
Performance isn't as critical as it used to be. Modern tools allow smaller dev teams to achieve more and target a wider audience, and that is a very good thing.
However the development environment and APIs are so similar to the extent that if you know Mac development you can easily port your app to iOS. The emulator is necessary because OS X runs on x86 while iOS runs on ARM.
But how is that possible given that the US has withdrawn from Iraq and military operations appear to be winding down? Drone strikes are on the increase, but I thought these were significantly cheaper than boots on the ground deployments.
Given that the US national debt is growing year on year, I think it's safe to say that there hasn't been much "austerity" going on. Where is all the money going?
When I became an adult I was just shocked at how horridly expensive photography is. And how stupidly overpowered this photography was for my needs. Nobody wants to pay $1500 for a photo of some ducks at a lake.
The key thing here is that it's overpowered for your needs.
You get enthusiasts in all sorts of fields who purchase stuff that are far more advanced/expensive than is easily justifiable by a lay person.
Press photographers rarely shoot RAW. I'd say never, but then that's just begging to be proved wrong by some random photographer who is an outlier;)
The trend in newspaper photography has always been to minimise turnaround time and the RAW workflow just slows things down too much. It's ironic that it is this mindset that has made the Chicago Sun move from DSLRs to iPhones.
This is no longer the case with modern cameras. A lot of cameras these days include face recognition and will bias the exposure to any faces detected. While this is only possible in live view, Even with older cameras like the D700 and D3 the camera was clever enough to attempt to recognise the scene it was photographing and bias the exposure accordingly (see the 1005 pixel metering sensor). I know this is what matrix metering on Nikon cameras have done for at least the last 6 years and I assume that the same thing holds for Canon.
This is not to say that the camera gets it right all the time. Manual intervention is necessary when the camera gets things wrong.
A Nikon D4 and a Canon 5D MK III referenced in the original comment do not have a "green square" mode. The modes available are S (shutter priority), A (aperture priority), P (program) and M (manual). They're aimed at competent users who the manufacturers expect to know how to operate the camera.
Yes, they used to be a great ISP, now they are just a good enough but cheap ISP.
Personally I think BT use them like a shield against small ISPs from getting too big, everytime a small company starts making inroads, Plusnet seem to have a better offer which they can afford because although they present that small ISP image they have BT's wallet to back them up.
That leaves BT free to compete against the likes of Virgin and Sky on bundled features rather than price.
Such practices shouldn't be allowed, as they must surely count as being anti-competitive.
So the rich donate to museums and humanitarian aid causes because it benefits them and that makes them evil? Are we supposed to disregard the fact that their donations have made a difference to society as a whole? Altruism is overrated. I'd rather have good results which are attainable than totally pure motives which are a pipe dream.
I confess I do not understand what you're complaining about? I do not know how much profit they should have made, but if you're saying that they made £65m profit and they paid only £157k tax, that's an effective tax rate of 0.24%.
This does not condone Apple/Google/etc and the schemes they run. If Google are breaking the law, throw the book at them. If they are not, leave them alone. If you don't like the amount of tax they're paying, change the law. Absolutely no one be they individuals or corporations will pay more tax than is legally required.
How is that a smear? Stemcor paid £157k in tax on revenue of £2.1 billion. Given that corporate tax in the UK is 24% on profits, this means that Stemcor made a profit of £654k. A £654,000 profit on top of £2.1 billion in revenue is laughable and utterly unbelievable.
That's not an ultrabook. You pay a premium for small and lightweight, and a 17" is going to be cheaper and better spec'ed at the expense of portability.
11" is not enough real estate for development. Doesn't matter what resolution it is. I have a pair of 24" 1924x1200 monitors that I use for development and I find the real estate far more usable than the 1920x1200 15.6" laptop I had a few years ago.
It isn't expensive and I think it's in line with similar offerings from other manufacturers. If you know of any other ultrabook that sports similar specs (1080p screen, 256GB SSD are the specs that interest me) then please share as I avoid Dell like the plague.
Today you can have blade system with 2000 core per rack with AMD, why if cores matters would you limit yourseld to Intel CPU?
I imagine that the power draw and corresponding cooling requirements of that rack stuffed with AMD cores will be significantly higher than the Intel one.
If I have 100 dynamically allocated arrays of fixed length, then new[] delete[] is more memory efficient then both std::vector and std::array.
Why? You can set the size of the vector on initialisation and your vector is guaranteed to be deallocated in the event of an exception.
The other benefit of vectors is that the underlying buffer gets freed when the vector goes out of scope. Can you guarantee that the code you're writing will not throw an exception (factor in 3rd party libraries too)? If not, you're going to have to catch the exception, delete your buffer then re-throw the exception.
There is no reason *not* to use a vector in C++.
An ORM isn't a silver bullet. You still need to understand how your objects map onto the database or you're back to square one with a poorly performing database. In fact it's probably worse as you then need to figure out what the database *and* ORM are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Last week, I had a gaming itch to scratch and I felt like playing the XCOM reboot. It's available for £34.99 on the App Store and I was hesitant to buy it because I wasn't sure how it would run on my Macbook with an integrated graphics. It's always a hassle trying to get a refund for purchased software so I searched online for a demo to get a feel for how it would play. After some searching, I found that the demo was only available for the Window's version.
So I downloaded a torrent of the game.
To my surprise, the game ran well on my Macbook's integrated graphics chip. I spent a couple of hours checking things out, playing through the tutorials and just having fun with the game. I then shut it down, and proceeded to buy the game. screenie
The developers who made the port did themselves no favours by not releasing a demo. The lack of playable demo coupled with the asinine rules governing purchased software (no returns, wtf?) mean they would definitely have lost a sale. However, thanks to the availability of the cracked version I was able to check that the game ran fine on my machine which then led to a purchase.
TL;DR
Torrents help push sales. True story.
But shouldn't it be about how fun/intriguing the game is and not what language it's written in?
I do agree with your sentiments of there's a place for everything though, and the web browser has ways to go if you are trying to put a league of legends, world of warcraft, or COD in the browser.
League of Legends (LoL) and World of Warcraft (WoW) are hardly taxing on hardware. The WoW engine is almost 10 years old and LoL runs without a hitch on integrated graphics (nVidia 320m on my 2010 Macbook). Performance in games isn't as critical as it used to be.
Why do you need millions of lines of code? This is an honest question.
Not every game is a triple-A title that costs millions of dollars to develop. Indie studios are becoming increasingly popular and are producing games that are unique and interesting. For a concrete example, check out the Humble Indie bundles or InXile's Wasteland 2 and Torment. The latter 2 are looking very promising and they are developed using Unity.
Performance isn't as critical as it used to be. Modern tools allow smaller dev teams to achieve more and target a wider audience, and that is a very good thing.
That is pretty cool. I didn't know that.
However the development environment and APIs are so similar to the extent that if you know Mac development you can easily port your app to iOS. The emulator is necessary because OS X runs on x86 while iOS runs on ARM.
"(The money got spent on War, mostly.)"
Very possibly. Which pisses me off to no end.
But how is that possible given that the US has withdrawn from Iraq and military operations appear to be winding down? Drone strikes are on the increase, but I thought these were significantly cheaper than boots on the ground deployments.
Given that the US national debt is growing year on year, I think it's safe to say that there hasn't been much "austerity" going on. Where is all the money going?
That's interesting. As a Nikon shooter and having briefly looked at the Canon 5D, I'd assumed that was the case. I stand corrected.
When I became an adult I was just shocked at how horridly expensive photography is. And how stupidly overpowered this photography was for my needs. Nobody wants to pay $1500 for a photo of some ducks at a lake.
The key thing here is that it's overpowered for your needs.
You get enthusiasts in all sorts of fields who purchase stuff that are far more advanced/expensive than is easily justifiable by a lay person.
Press photographers rarely shoot RAW. I'd say never, but then that's just begging to be proved wrong by some random photographer who is an outlier ;)
The trend in newspaper photography has always been to minimise turnaround time and the RAW workflow just slows things down too much. It's ironic that it is this mindset that has made the Chicago Sun move from DSLRs to iPhones.
This is no longer the case with modern cameras. A lot of cameras these days include face recognition and will bias the exposure to any faces detected. While this is only possible in live view, Even with older cameras like the D700 and D3 the camera was clever enough to attempt to recognise the scene it was photographing and bias the exposure accordingly (see the 1005 pixel metering sensor). I know this is what matrix metering on Nikon cameras have done for at least the last 6 years and I assume that the same thing holds for Canon.
This is not to say that the camera gets it right all the time. Manual intervention is necessary when the camera gets things wrong.
A Nikon D4 and a Canon 5D MK III referenced in the original comment do not have a "green square" mode. The modes available are S (shutter priority), A (aperture priority), P (program) and M (manual). They're aimed at competent users who the manufacturers expect to know how to operate the camera.
It could have been a lot worse. They could have discovered it after decades and spent even more billions. Like the central NHS database project.
Yes, they used to be a great ISP, now they are just a good enough but cheap ISP. Personally I think BT use them like a shield against small ISPs from getting too big, everytime a small company starts making inroads, Plusnet seem to have a better offer which they can afford because although they present that small ISP image they have BT's wallet to back them up. That leaves BT free to compete against the likes of Virgin and Sky on bundled features rather than price.
Such practices shouldn't be allowed, as they must surely count as being anti-competitive.
So the rich donate to museums and humanitarian aid causes because it benefits them and that makes them evil? Are we supposed to disregard the fact that their donations have made a difference to society as a whole? Altruism is overrated. I'd rather have good results which are attainable than totally pure motives which are a pipe dream.
I confess I do not understand what you're complaining about? I do not know how much profit they should have made, but if you're saying that they made £65m profit and they paid only £157k tax, that's an effective tax rate of 0.24%.
This does not condone Apple/Google/etc and the schemes they run. If Google are breaking the law, throw the book at them. If they are not, leave them alone. If you don't like the amount of tax they're paying, change the law. Absolutely no one be they individuals or corporations will pay more tax than is legally required.
How is that a smear? Stemcor paid £157k in tax on revenue of £2.1 billion. Given that corporate tax in the UK is 24% on profits, this means that Stemcor made a profit of £654k. A £654,000 profit on top of £2.1 billion in revenue is laughable and utterly unbelievable.
That's not an ultrabook. You pay a premium for small and lightweight, and a 17" is going to be cheaper and better spec'ed at the expense of portability.
11" is not enough real estate for development. Doesn't matter what resolution it is. I have a pair of 24" 1924x1200 monitors that I use for development and I find the real estate far more usable than the 1920x1200 15.6" laptop I had a few years ago.
It isn't expensive and I think it's in line with similar offerings from other manufacturers. If you know of any other ultrabook that sports similar specs (1080p screen, 256GB SSD are the specs that interest me) then please share as I avoid Dell like the plague.
You are comparing server Xeon chips to *mobile* i7 chips, hence the price and performance difference!
What sort of workload is concerned with stuffing a rack with 3000+ cores only to have those cores idle?
Besides, you don't need scientific computing workloads to keep the CPU busy. Isn't that what virtualization and over-provisioning is about?
Today you can have blade system with 2000 core per rack with AMD, why if cores matters would you limit yourseld to Intel CPU?
I imagine that the power draw and corresponding cooling requirements of that rack stuffed with AMD cores will be significantly higher than the Intel one.
If I have 100 dynamically allocated arrays of fixed length, then new[] delete[] is more memory efficient then both std::vector and std::array.
Why? You can set the size of the vector on initialisation and your vector is guaranteed to be deallocated in the event of an exception. The other benefit of vectors is that the underlying buffer gets freed when the vector goes out of scope. Can you guarantee that the code you're writing will not throw an exception (factor in 3rd party libraries too)? If not, you're going to have to catch the exception, delete your buffer then re-throw the exception. There is no reason *not* to use a vector in C++.
An ORM isn't a silver bullet. You still need to understand how your objects map onto the database or you're back to square one with a poorly performing database. In fact it's probably worse as you then need to figure out what the database *and* ORM are doing.