Yes, but there are certain ingredients you don't want to mix.
Plus, the guys who built the thing might have a combined knowledge of only 188 different kinds of drinks.
It isn't like going to a party at the house of some junior high school student whose parents are out of town, and thinks all there is to being a bartender is breaking into his dad's liquor cabinet and randomly mixing different ingredients.
Of those 16 ingredients, 188 different kinds of drinks sounds like a very reasonable number.
It has nothing to do with 188 drinks being the most the system can handle. Rather, 188 drinks was probably all they could come up with using the 16 available ingredients. Remember, with 16 ingredients the maximum possible combinations is "only" 256 different kinds of drinks. In the real world, though, it's inevitable that certain ingredients won't go together very well, so the number of possible combinations comes down, and having 188 possible combinations is a fairly reasonable number.
Does it push the system to its limits? No. Is 188 still an assload of different kinds of drinks? Yes.
It would be cool to see a real bar use something like this, just to see what the customer reaction was. Maybe they could only bring it out on the busy nights when they're understaffed or something.
But do they have a way for the system to know when the ingredients are running low? It didn't look like it to me.
While most of the VFX industry has been trying to drop SGI like an unwanted stepchild, SGIs are still very common in the world of digital color grading for feature films.
This is because an Octane2 can play back a movie at half of film resolution (1024x778) at 24fps, UNCOMPRESSED.
Being able to play back a 24fps movie uncompressed at 1/2 of film resolution (as opposed to playing it back at something like 640x480 or 720x480) is necessary for digital color grading because you need to be able to see if the correction operations you are applying degrade image sharpness and how they affect the appearance of grain. The movie has to be uncompressed because maximum image quality is a must. Even if the final images are uncompressed, the proxy images (the source images and final images are at 2048x1556 uncompressed, the proxy images used (in place of the full resolution images while the artist does his/her work) to keep test rendering time down to an acceptable level are "only" 1024x788 and uncompressed) must also remain uncompressed, because you don't want compression artifacts affecting your judgement of the picture quality. Compression artifacts in the work/proxy image can affect your evaluation of the grain appearance in a shot, etc.
How are Octane2s able to do this? Simple: SGI systems are designed to have massive I/O bandwidth. SGI's Octane (and, thusly, the Octane2) uses a crossbar-switch to send data between the components (RAM, CPU, graphics, hard disks, etc.) instead of using a system bus. The crossbar-switch can give a component a dedicated data channel to another component. For example, the CPU can be writing stuff to the hard disk (let's assume that the CPU is generating it's own data and doesn't need to access RAM to get the data) while the graphics card fetches stuff from RAM, and they can all work at maximum speed. With a system bus, the whole computer has to share that bus, so the components can only operate at full speed some of the time.
I know, I know, "But what about the lower framerate and memory bandwidth than ATI?" Read the recent article about the GeforceFX on Tom's Hardware, and you'll see why this doesn't matter.
Besides, I'll take real-world benchmarks like average FPS in Quake 3 than benchmarks in programs like 3DWinMark.
And with the extremely advanced support for programmable shaders in the GeforceFX, I expect it to kick ass when Doom 3 comes out.
Sorry to burst your anti-id Software bubble, but according to people I know who've downloaded and played the leaked alpha of Doom 3, it's scary as hell.
id keeps telling people, "No, we're not going for mindless action this time. We're trying to deliver a very cinematic game that will scare the shit out of people." but nobody seems to want to listen.
It's much easier to just write the game off as being stupid so that you can remain an elitist snob and (the real reason) not have to upgrade your computer, isn't it?
I'm not an id fanboy myself, but unlike you, I haven't decided that Doom 3 will suck before it's even out yet. If the Doom 3 alpha is any indication, then the game will kick ass.
Except that hardware makers would still be coming out with new, faster, better hardware every 6 months or so, in a continual game of one-upsmanship.
So it is only natural that game developers would want to take advantage of the abilities of the new hardware.
I'm sorry that you have to upgrade your computer every so often so that you can keep up with the rest of the world. I really am. But please, you aren't the only person in the world. If you don't want to upgrade your computer, THEN DON'T, but don't expect developers to keep supporting your TNT2 or whatever.
That's funny, since according to a couple of guys I know who downloaded the leaked alpha version of Doom 3, it's scary as hell.
id Software has stated, time and again, that for Doom 3 they are focusing on making the game as scary and cinematic as possible. They have a story, script, the whole 9 yards.
People forget that John Carmack isn't the only id Software employee. While I would be willing to wager that most (if not all) of the id Software employees have at least some programming knowledge, only a few of them actually do the game programming. Aside from John Carmack and maybe 2 other guys, the id Software employees create levels, make textures, create and animate models, etc., and don't have anything to do with the engine programming (aside from the occasional, "Hey, John, it'd be way easier to make levels if you changed engine aspect X to be more like Y." type stuff).
It all depends on where in the world the Slashdot editors are.
If something happens at 6:00 AM in New York, and the local news doesn't say anything about it until 6:00 AM in Los Angeles, then to everyone in the same time zone as New York it would seem as though the news stations in Los Angeles had waited until 9:00 AM to tell everyone about it.
Or maybe the Slashdot editors just like to sleep late;)
The reason this guy's server got Slashdotted is because the page is generated from a Perl script.
His solution was to redirect links from Slashdot to a static HTML page.
It would be nice if Slashdot could build into Slashcode a system where you can optionally have it wait 15 minutes or whatever before an item shows up on the main page, meanwhile it fires off a boilerplate e-mail to the linked site's webmaster, something like: To: webmaster@hookahose.com Your site has been linked to on Slashdot. In 15 minutes (counting from 2:05pm GMT), the link will automatically be moved to the front page. Since this usually generates thousands of page hits to the linked site in a matter of minutes, and can last for a while, we thought it would be nice if we let you know ahead of time, so that you can redirect links from Slashdot to a static HTML page or whatever. -The Slashdot Crew
Like I said, though, this would half to be optional, both so that the webmasters at sites with beefy servers and plenty of bandwidth don't get a good chuckle at the Slashdot editor's expense, and so that urgent items can go to the main page immediately. And, of course, there is no guarantee that the site's webmaster will read the e-mail before the 15 minutes is up.
Still, though, I think having this ability in Slashcode will both encourage its use, show kindness to those with less-than-wonderful servers, and (most of all) make it more likely that it will actually happen since, being automatic, the editors won't have to do any extra work.
Except that, with "legal" keepalives, you tell the server that you want the connection kept alive, via "Connection: KeepAlive" or something like that in the HTTP header.
It has nothing to do with TCP/IP. This article, however is about TCP/IP, more specifically Microsoft's playing fast and loose with the TCP/IP standards.
This isn't an HTTP-level keep alive. It's TCP/IP, which is lower-level than that.
Additionally, this isn't a keep alive. Regardless of whether there is a connection to a server or not, IE sends a request packet first, which is wrong according to the TCP/IP standards. Secondly, it doesn't completely close connections.
Keep alives are so that the client and server keep on using the same socket to load the whole page (not just the HTML, but the images as well), but usually end the connection once the entire page has loaded. The client tells the server, "There are going to be some more requests coming real soon, so keep the connection open." and then the server acknowledges this.
On the other hand, what IE is doing is just not entirely closing the connection. The server is not informed that this is a keep alive, because it ISN'T A KEEP ALIVE. Internet Explorer is hoping that, by acknowledgint the server's FIN packet, but not sending a FIN packet of its own, the server will keep the connection open at least for a little while longer, to make IE seem faster at loading pages (a decent server would just timeout and close the connection after a set amount of time, but who knows what IIS does). While it might seem like IE is staying within the standards, there is a specified way to close a TCP/IP connection, and IE doesn't fully follow that spec.
Besides, it is a sneaky thing to do, because if the server is keeping the connection open to wait for the client's FIN packet that will never come, the server's resources are being wasted on an unused connection. The connection probably won't stay open for long, but if a server is getting hammered (the site got linked on Slashdot, or whatever), this only makes things worse.
Yes, adding a new feature will require some changes to a few parts of the engine. But that still doesn't count as a rewrite.
Major change != rewrite
And what happens when the updates conflict or don't work with the changes you've made? Then you have to rewrite the updates. yes thats right - 'rewrite'.
Sorry, but that doesn't make sense. Why would you rewrite the update that the engine's developers sent you? Most people would just alter the changes they had made until they worked with the update.
A guy I know who used to work at Fry's Electronics could buy anything in the store at 10% over cost (read: take whatever it cost Fry's Electronics to get it, and add 10%) because he was an employee. He'd often buy $40 cables for $5 or $6, which means that Fry's Electronics got them for even less than that. For the math-impaired, selling a $5 cable for $40 is an 800% markup! To make things worse, Fry's Electronics has the cheapest cables in my area (Worst Buy and CompUSA sell the same cables for $10 more than Fry's Electronics does).
On some things there is barely any markup at all (computers, 3D accelerator cards), on others the markup can be well over 100%. It depends on things like what kind of deal the publisher/distributor has with the store, what the wholesale cost of the item is (computers are expensive, so there can't be a huge markup or else they would be too expensive and nobody would buy them), etc.
All the funny lines from Duke Nukem 3D were stolen.
"It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -Duke Nukem 3D
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -They Live (a John Carpenter movie starring Roddy Piper and that black guy from Platoon), release in 1988
A great many also came from the Evil Dead movies, and sounded much cooler when spoken by Bruce Campbell. I guess that's what happens when you get a radio DJ to do the lines for your game.
What's worse, George Broussard said in a magazine interview that all the sayings and such in Duke Nukem 3D and Duke Nukem Forever were original. In the same article, there were screenshots from DNF where Duke Nukem loses his hand and puts a chainsaw in its place (a la the Evil Dead movies). Message for Mr. Broussard: open mouth wider and insert other foot...
You have to be smart about which engine you pick. Smart developers pick an engine which can be easily updated.
That is why id Software engines are so popular. For example, by licensing the Quake III engine, you get access to all updates to it for something like a year. Then all you need is a few programmers to write the non-engine code for your game, modify the engine to suit your needs, integrate the latest engine versions, etc.
Epic has been doing this with their own engine for years. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003, all used THE SAME ENGINE. The only difference was that UT used a later build than Unreal, and UT 2003 used a later build than UT. Whats more, anybody who licenses the Unreal engine gets access to the latest build. So anybody who made an Unreal-engine game around the time of UT was using the same engine as UT, and anyone who makes an Unreal-engine game now would be using the same engine as Unreal Tournament 2003.
Therefore, theoretically, Duke Nukem Forever could have fairly decent graphics, assuming they updated their version of the Unreal engine to the latest build.
Nobody licenses an engine, only to rewrite it. Many companies license a game engine and then make tweaks and additions, but none license something just so they can rewrite it.
Also, like with id Software engines, when you license the Unreal engine, you get access to the updates. 3D Realms may decide not to use them, but they have access to them.
And before you say anything else stupid, the Unreal engine isn't obsolete. Unreal Tournament used it (there is NO Unreal Tournament engine; it's just a much later build of the Unreal engine than the version that shipped with the game Unreal), Unreal Tournament 2003 used it too IIRC.
You see, instead of writing a new engine from scratch for every game, Epic built a solid foundation (the Unreal engine) which they could easily update to include the latest graphic technology. All they do is keep updating the same engine, adding stuff to take advantage of newer graphics cards and faster CPUs.
Like with all id Software engines, when you license the Unreal engine, you get access to all updates. So, while they may not use them, they certainly have (or had, if they switched engines AGAIN) access to the latest stuff that the Unreal engine can produce.
And before anybody says anything stupid, there is no such thing as the Unreal Tournament engine. UT used the Unreal engine, albeit a much later build than the game Unreal.
If you buy a game in a store for $25, the best the developers could hope for is $12.5. This is because the retailer gets half of the game's cost. And them getting as much as $12.50 assumes they published the game themselves, which in the case of Max Payne, they didn't
$25 / 2 = $12.50 (half for retailer, half for publisher)
Of that $12.50 that the retailer doesn't take, it is common for the publisher to take 50%, and divide up the rest among whoever is left. Now, Max Payne was developed by Remedy Entertainment, produced by 3D Realms, and published by GodGames.
So, GodGames got 50% of that $12.50, or $6.25. The remaining $6.25 was divided up between Remedy and 3D Realms. Exactly HOW it was divided up is unknown to me, but let's assume that each got 50%.
Therefore, for every $25 copy of Max Payne sold in a retail store, the developers (Remedy Entertainment) got about $3.12. Now, for a while the game cost $40 or $50, but most publishers pull all sorts of shenanigans so that they can stiff the developer out of their share of the money. Even if the publisher is as honest as a Boy Scout, that's still not a lot of money.
If Remedy was smart, they demanded royalties from the movie rights, console and Macintosh port royalties, etc., but hey, who knows, not everybody has good business sense (and some have downright horrid business sense).
and easy access to playing with your other friends online (something that PS2 doesn't can't support without a centralized server)
The advantage of Sony's way of doing things is that it is up to the individual gaming companies to provide such services. Many games feature an in-game server browser, which connects to a centralized server run by the company that made the game. So while Sony itself may not have a master server, the individual gaming companies do.
It's the same on the PC: there is no "PC Live" service, yet, somehow, people are able to play with and against their friends online. How is this possible? Because the game companies run the centralized "master" server for their game.
Companies that decide to use X-Box Live for their games are REQUIRED to host their servers in one of Microsoft's datacenters. Unlike Sony, which allows developers to put their servers wherever they want.
In addition, there is a headset available for use with the PS2. You've seen the SOCOM: Navy Seals commercials, right?
Lastly, if game developers want to make additional content available, they still can. But it will be up to them to provide the server to download it from.
The advantage of Sony's method is that 1)much less cost to Sony, which hopefully will get passed on to consumers, 2)control is in the hands of the developers.
Decimal system The numerals, at least the ones used by Western countries, are descended from Arabic numerals. The concept of zero as a number was also invented by the Arabs.
Astronomy Many cultures around the world (Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Europeans, to name a few) have contributed to astronomy. Nobody "invented" it.
I'm not bashing India. I have nothing against India. But please, get your facts straight.
Some people have classified a stone that most of the time orbits sun and only part of the time orbits the earth, a moon of the earth
Cruithne (pronounced croo-een-ya) doesn't really count as being a moon of earth's. It has a highly inclined orbit, and it never even goes around the earth. It's affected by the earth's gravity, but not in the normal way: because of the earth, Cruithne is in a horseshoe-shaped orbit around the Sun (it takes 770 years to go all the way around the Sun, but makes a single horseshoe orbit in less time). Strangely enough, it is also because of earth's gravity that Cruithne never goes around the earth: the combination of the Sun's gravity and the earth's gravity pulls it towards us, then sends it back the other way before it can get too close.
Why do people insist on having an attitude of, "Oh, well, he's a Democrat. I hate him." or "Oh, well, he's a Republican. I hate him."? The fact of the matter is that John McCain tried to greatly reduce the effects of soft money's influence on politics in America. In other words, he tried to make it harder for corporations to buy politicians. To me (a quasi-Republican), it is very telling that most Republicans did not want this to happen, and makes me ashamed of them.
As a resident of Arizona (the state John McCain represents), my oppinion is that he isn't on a power trip, but rather that he's genuinely trying to do some good. Unfortunately for him, all Americans care about is party lines. While I try to ignore what party somebody is associated with and vote for whoever I think would do the best job, most Americans aren't like that at all. Democrats vote for Democrats, and back up whatever the Democratic Party says. Republicans vote for Republicans, and back up whatever the Republican Party says. Nobody seems to care about what is RIGHT, or what is BEST. Even when their party is obviously wrong, someone who tries to do the right thing and go against their party instead of just towing the party line is labeled a traitor to the cause.
I expect McCain to at least try to do what is best for the United States, rather than just be some corporation's lap dog like Hollings. Someone who is only interested in power wouldn't try to eliminate the huge source of campaign funding that is soft money, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but there are certain ingredients you don't want to mix.
Plus, the guys who built the thing might have a combined knowledge of only 188 different kinds of drinks.
It isn't like going to a party at the house of some junior high school student whose parents are out of town, and thinks all there is to being a bartender is breaking into his dad's liquor cabinet and randomly mixing different ingredients.
Of those 16 ingredients, 188 different kinds of drinks sounds like a very reasonable number.
It has nothing to do with 188 drinks being the most the system can handle. Rather, 188 drinks was probably all they could come up with using the 16 available ingredients. Remember, with 16 ingredients the maximum possible combinations is "only" 256 different kinds of drinks. In the real world, though, it's inevitable that certain ingredients won't go together very well, so the number of possible combinations comes down, and having 188 possible combinations is a fairly reasonable number.
Does it push the system to its limits? No. Is 188 still an assload of different kinds of drinks? Yes.
It would be cool to see a real bar use something like this, just to see what the customer reaction was. Maybe they could only bring it out on the busy nights when they're understaffed or something.
But do they have a way for the system to know when the ingredients are running low? It didn't look like it to me.
Except that Bill Gates hasn't written software for Microsoft in ~20 years.
While most of the VFX industry has been trying to drop SGI like an unwanted stepchild, SGIs are still very common in the world of digital color grading for feature films.
This is because an Octane2 can play back a movie at half of film resolution (1024x778) at 24fps, UNCOMPRESSED.
Being able to play back a 24fps movie uncompressed at 1/2 of film resolution (as opposed to playing it back at something like 640x480 or 720x480) is necessary for digital color grading because you need to be able to see if the correction operations you are applying degrade image sharpness and how they affect the appearance of grain. The movie has to be uncompressed because maximum image quality is a must. Even if the final images are uncompressed, the proxy images (the source images and final images are at 2048x1556 uncompressed, the proxy images used (in place of the full resolution images while the artist does his/her work) to keep test rendering time down to an acceptable level are "only" 1024x788 and uncompressed) must also remain uncompressed, because you don't want compression artifacts affecting your judgement of the picture quality. Compression artifacts in the work/proxy image can affect your evaluation of the grain appearance in a shot, etc.
How are Octane2s able to do this? Simple: SGI systems are designed to have massive I/O bandwidth. SGI's Octane (and, thusly, the Octane2) uses a crossbar-switch to send data between the components (RAM, CPU, graphics, hard disks, etc.) instead of using a system bus. The crossbar-switch can give a component a dedicated data channel to another component. For example, the CPU can be writing stuff to the hard disk (let's assume that the CPU is generating it's own data and doesn't need to access RAM to get the data) while the graphics card fetches stuff from RAM, and they can all work at maximum speed. With a system bus, the whole computer has to share that bus, so the components can only operate at full speed some of the time.
In SOVIET RUSSIA, 2003 has its eye on YOU.
I personally cannot wait for this card.
I know, I know, "But what about the lower framerate and memory bandwidth than ATI?"
Read the recent article about the GeforceFX on Tom's Hardware, and you'll see why this doesn't matter.
Besides, I'll take real-world benchmarks like average FPS in Quake 3 than benchmarks in programs like 3DWinMark.
And with the extremely advanced support for programmable shaders in the GeforceFX, I expect it to kick ass when Doom 3 comes out.
Sorry to burst your anti-id Software bubble, but according to people I know who've downloaded and played the leaked alpha of Doom 3, it's scary as hell.
id keeps telling people, "No, we're not going for mindless action this time. We're trying to deliver a very cinematic game that will scare the shit out of people." but nobody seems to want to listen.
It's much easier to just write the game off as being stupid so that you can remain an elitist snob and (the real reason) not have to upgrade your computer, isn't it?
I'm not an id fanboy myself, but unlike you, I haven't decided that Doom 3 will suck before it's even out yet. If the Doom 3 alpha is any indication, then the game will kick ass.
Except that hardware makers would still be coming out with new, faster, better hardware every 6 months or so, in a continual game of one-upsmanship.
So it is only natural that game developers would want to take advantage of the abilities of the new hardware.
I'm sorry that you have to upgrade your computer every so often so that you can keep up with the rest of the world. I really am. But please, you aren't the only person in the world. If you don't want to upgrade your computer, THEN DON'T, but don't expect developers to keep supporting your TNT2 or whatever.
that's for the crappy (well, kinda) iD game
That's funny, since according to a couple of guys I know who downloaded the leaked alpha version of Doom 3, it's scary as hell.
id Software has stated, time and again, that for Doom 3 they are focusing on making the game as scary and cinematic as possible. They have a story, script, the whole 9 yards.
People forget that John Carmack isn't the only id Software employee. While I would be willing to wager that most (if not all) of the id Software employees have at least some programming knowledge, only a few of them actually do the game programming. Aside from John Carmack and maybe 2 other guys, the id Software employees create levels, make textures, create and animate models, etc., and don't have anything to do with the engine programming (aside from the occasional, "Hey, John, it'd be way easier to make levels if you changed engine aspect X to be more like Y." type stuff).
It all depends on where in the world the Slashdot editors are.
;)
If something happens at 6:00 AM in New York, and the local news doesn't say anything about it until 6:00 AM in Los Angeles, then to everyone in the same time zone as New York it would seem as though the news stations in Los Angeles had waited until 9:00 AM to tell everyone about it.
Or maybe the Slashdot editors just like to sleep late
The reason this guy's server got Slashdotted is because the page is generated from a Perl script.
His solution was to redirect links from Slashdot to a static HTML page.
It would be nice if Slashdot could build into Slashcode a system where you can optionally have it wait 15 minutes or whatever before an item shows up on the main page, meanwhile it fires off a boilerplate e-mail to the linked site's webmaster, something like:
To: webmaster@hookahose.com
Your site has been linked to on Slashdot. In 15 minutes (counting from 2:05pm GMT), the link will automatically be moved to the front page. Since this usually generates thousands of page hits to the linked site in a matter of minutes, and can last for a while, we thought it would be nice if we let you know ahead of time, so that you can redirect links from Slashdot to a static HTML page or whatever.
-The Slashdot Crew
Like I said, though, this would half to be optional, both so that the webmasters at sites with beefy servers and plenty of bandwidth don't get a good chuckle at the Slashdot editor's expense, and so that urgent items can go to the main page immediately. And, of course, there is no guarantee that the site's webmaster will read the e-mail before the 15 minutes is up.
Still, though, I think having this ability in Slashcode will both encourage its use, show kindness to those with less-than-wonderful servers, and (most of all) make it more likely that it will actually happen since, being automatic, the editors won't have to do any extra work.
Except that, with "legal" keepalives, you tell the server that you want the connection kept alive, via "Connection: KeepAlive" or something like that in the HTTP header.
It has nothing to do with TCP/IP. This article, however is about TCP/IP, more specifically Microsoft's playing fast and loose with the TCP/IP standards.
This isn't an HTTP-level keep alive. It's TCP/IP, which is lower-level than that.
Additionally, this isn't a keep alive. Regardless of whether there is a connection to a server or not, IE sends a request packet first, which is wrong according to the TCP/IP standards. Secondly, it doesn't completely close connections.
Keep alives are so that the client and server keep on using the same socket to load the whole page (not just the HTML, but the images as well), but usually end the connection once the entire page has loaded. The client tells the server, "There are going to be some more requests coming real soon, so keep the connection open." and then the server acknowledges this.
On the other hand, what IE is doing is just not entirely closing the connection. The server is not informed that this is a keep alive, because it ISN'T A KEEP ALIVE. Internet Explorer is hoping that, by acknowledgint the server's FIN packet, but not sending a FIN packet of its own, the server will keep the connection open at least for a little while longer, to make IE seem faster at loading pages (a decent server would just timeout and close the connection after a set amount of time, but who knows what IIS does). While it might seem like IE is staying within the standards, there is a specified way to close a TCP/IP connection, and IE doesn't fully follow that spec.
Besides, it is a sneaky thing to do, because if the server is keeping the connection open to wait for the client's FIN packet that will never come, the server's resources are being wasted on an unused connection. The connection probably won't stay open for long, but if a server is getting hammered (the site got linked on Slashdot, or whatever), this only makes things worse.
Yes, adding a new feature will require some changes to a few parts of the engine. But that still doesn't count as a rewrite.
Major change != rewrite
And what happens when the updates conflict or don't work with the changes you've made? Then you have to rewrite the updates. yes thats right - 'rewrite'.
Sorry, but that doesn't make sense. Why would you rewrite the update that the engine's developers sent you? Most people would just alter the changes they had made until they worked with the update.
A guy I know who used to work at Fry's Electronics could buy anything in the store at 10% over cost (read: take whatever it cost Fry's Electronics to get it, and add 10%) because he was an employee. He'd often buy $40 cables for $5 or $6, which means that Fry's Electronics got them for even less than that. For the math-impaired, selling a $5 cable for $40 is an 800% markup! To make things worse, Fry's Electronics has the cheapest cables in my area (Worst Buy and CompUSA sell the same cables for $10 more than Fry's Electronics does).
On some things there is barely any markup at all (computers, 3D accelerator cards), on others the markup can be well over 100%. It depends on things like what kind of deal the publisher/distributor has with the store, what the wholesale cost of the item is (computers are expensive, so there can't be a huge markup or else they would be too expensive and nobody would buy them), etc.
The name is Bit Boys.
IIRC, they were bought out by some other company (3Dfx if memory serves).
All the funny lines from Duke Nukem 3D were stolen.
"It's time to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum."
-Duke Nukem 3D
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum."
-They Live (a John Carpenter movie starring Roddy Piper and that black guy from Platoon), release in 1988
A great many also came from the Evil Dead movies, and sounded much cooler when spoken by Bruce Campbell. I guess that's what happens when you get a radio DJ to do the lines for your game.
What's worse, George Broussard said in a magazine interview that all the sayings and such in Duke Nukem 3D and Duke Nukem Forever were original. In the same article, there were screenshots from DNF where Duke Nukem loses his hand and puts a chainsaw in its place (a la the Evil Dead movies). Message for Mr. Broussard: open mouth wider and insert other foot...
You have to be smart about which engine you pick. Smart developers pick an engine which can be easily updated.
That is why id Software engines are so popular. For example, by licensing the Quake III engine, you get access to all updates to it for something like a year. Then all you need is a few programmers to write the non-engine code for your game, modify the engine to suit your needs, integrate the latest engine versions, etc.
Epic has been doing this with their own engine for years. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003, all used THE SAME ENGINE. The only difference was that UT used a later build than Unreal, and UT 2003 used a later build than UT. Whats more, anybody who licenses the Unreal engine gets access to the latest build. So anybody who made an Unreal-engine game around the time of UT was using the same engine as UT, and anyone who makes an Unreal-engine game now would be using the same engine as Unreal Tournament 2003.
Therefore, theoretically, Duke Nukem Forever could have fairly decent graphics, assuming they updated their version of the Unreal engine to the latest build.
Nobody licenses an engine, only to rewrite it. Many companies license a game engine and then make tweaks and additions, but none license something just so they can rewrite it.
Also, like with id Software engines, when you license the Unreal engine, you get access to the updates. 3D Realms may decide not to use them, but they have access to them.
And before you say anything else stupid, the Unreal engine isn't obsolete. Unreal Tournament used it (there is NO Unreal Tournament engine; it's just a much later build of the Unreal engine than the version that shipped with the game Unreal), Unreal Tournament 2003 used it too IIRC.
You see, instead of writing a new engine from scratch for every game, Epic built a solid foundation (the Unreal engine) which they could easily update to include the latest graphic technology. All they do is keep updating the same engine, adding stuff to take advantage of newer graphics cards and faster CPUs.
Like with all id Software engines, when you license the Unreal engine, you get access to all updates. So, while they may not use them, they certainly have (or had, if they switched engines AGAIN) access to the latest stuff that the Unreal engine can produce.
And before anybody says anything stupid, there is no such thing as the Unreal Tournament engine. UT used the Unreal engine, albeit a much later build than the game Unreal.
If you buy a game in a store for $25, the best the developers could hope for is $12.5. This is because the retailer gets half of the game's cost. And them getting as much as $12.50 assumes they published the game themselves, which in the case of Max Payne, they didn't
$25 / 2 = $12.50 (half for retailer, half for publisher)
Of that $12.50 that the retailer doesn't take, it is common for the publisher to take 50%, and divide up the rest among whoever is left. Now, Max Payne was developed by Remedy Entertainment, produced by 3D Realms, and published by GodGames.
So, GodGames got 50% of that $12.50, or $6.25. The remaining $6.25 was divided up between Remedy and 3D Realms. Exactly HOW it was divided up is unknown to me, but let's assume that each got 50%.
Therefore, for every $25 copy of Max Payne sold in a retail store, the developers (Remedy Entertainment) got about $3.12. Now, for a while the game cost $40 or $50, but most publishers pull all sorts of shenanigans so that they can stiff the developer out of their share of the money. Even if the publisher is as honest as a Boy Scout, that's still not a lot of money.
If Remedy was smart, they demanded royalties from the movie rights, console and Macintosh port royalties, etc., but hey, who knows, not everybody has good business sense (and some have downright horrid business sense).
and easy access to playing with your other friends online (something that PS2 doesn't can't support without a centralized server)
The advantage of Sony's way of doing things is that it is up to the individual gaming companies to provide such services. Many games feature an in-game server browser, which connects to a centralized server run by the company that made the game. So while Sony itself may not have a master server, the individual gaming companies do.
It's the same on the PC: there is no "PC Live" service, yet, somehow, people are able to play with and against their friends online. How is this possible? Because the game companies run the centralized "master" server for their game.
Companies that decide to use X-Box Live for their games are REQUIRED to host their servers in one of Microsoft's datacenters. Unlike Sony, which allows developers to put their servers wherever they want.
In addition, there is a headset available for use with the PS2. You've seen the SOCOM: Navy Seals commercials, right?
Lastly, if game developers want to make additional content available, they still can. But it will be up to them to provide the server to download it from.
The advantage of Sony's method is that 1)much less cost to Sony, which hopefully will get passed on to consumers, 2)control is in the hands of the developers.
Yoga, decimal system, astronomy
Yoga
Ok, fine. It was invented in India.
Decimal system
The numerals, at least the ones used by Western countries, are descended from Arabic numerals. The concept of zero as a number was also invented by the Arabs.
Astronomy
Many cultures around the world (Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Europeans, to name a few) have contributed to astronomy. Nobody "invented" it.
I'm not bashing India. I have nothing against India. But please, get your facts straight.
Some people have classified a stone that most of the time orbits sun and only part of the time orbits the earth, a moon of the earth
Cruithne (pronounced croo-een-ya) doesn't really count as being a moon of earth's. It has a highly inclined orbit, and it never even goes around the earth. It's affected by the earth's gravity, but not in the normal way: because of the earth, Cruithne is in a horseshoe-shaped orbit around the Sun (it takes 770 years to go all the way around the Sun, but makes a single horseshoe orbit in less time). Strangely enough, it is also because of earth's gravity that Cruithne never goes around the earth: the combination of the Sun's gravity and the earth's gravity pulls it towards us, then sends it back the other way before it can get too close.
Why do people insist on having an attitude of, "Oh, well, he's a Democrat. I hate him." or "Oh, well, he's a Republican. I hate him."? The fact of the matter is that John McCain tried to greatly reduce the effects of soft money's influence on politics in America. In other words, he tried to make it harder for corporations to buy politicians. To me (a quasi-Republican), it is very telling that most Republicans did not want this to happen, and makes me ashamed of them.
As a resident of Arizona (the state John McCain represents), my oppinion is that he isn't on a power trip, but rather that he's genuinely trying to do some good. Unfortunately for him, all Americans care about is party lines. While I try to ignore what party somebody is associated with and vote for whoever I think would do the best job, most Americans aren't like that at all. Democrats vote for Democrats, and back up whatever the Democratic Party says. Republicans vote for Republicans, and back up whatever the Republican Party says. Nobody seems to care about what is RIGHT, or what is BEST. Even when their party is obviously wrong, someone who tries to do the right thing and go against their party instead of just towing the party line is labeled a traitor to the cause.
I expect McCain to at least try to do what is best for the United States, rather than just be some corporation's lap dog like Hollings. Someone who is only interested in power wouldn't try to eliminate the huge source of campaign funding that is soft money, IMHO.