It's more like "if you build it, they will come". Your correct, numbers are not enough. But companies like EA, SquareSoft, and Namco will come up with enough titles to keep the console vaild as long as they can write to the screen faster and prettier than on other platforms. X-Box is still the biggest game hardware on the market. Bling, Bling. Content is what makes or breaks consoles, and the fat pipes are coming from Redmond.
Microsoft losses money on the console, but makes money on licensing. If there were only 1 television in the world, nobody would spend 10 dollars to develop content for it. Everyone would marvel at the glass faced box and wonder how such a wonder ever happened. But in reality, there are billions of televisions, and companies are willing to pay $2.2 Million to get their content on the screen. The difference there is the potential audience. Once a half million consoles are sold, game developers can spend a couple thousand per game on licensing. Once 100 million consoles are sold, game developers can spend hundreds of thousands. The more consoles the bigger the potential audience for your game.
This is a good question. I too like to carry my mail around with me. I use an IMAP server, but the one that I need the data off of first is my Yahoo Mail account. I want to grab the 20+ Meg of messages that my account has collected over the years, and export them to a cd. I want to ween myself off of their massive MY! application. So, any way to take my mail/address book/notepad/breifcase/photos/etc with me? anyone? anyone?
you're looking at paying at least $150/mo per megabit
Yeah, but your talking about bandwidth, not usage/traffic! They are paying $300/mo for 2MB of Async throughput on a curcuit, not $300/mo for a 2 MB file. I'm not sure anyone else would have been mislead by that comment, but just wanted to clerify.
This price can be as high as $500/mo per megabit that I've seen
Don't kid yourself, the content provider I worked for/with was paying $54000/mo for 30MB of bandwidth. That's $1800/MB/Mo! It was the peering options that drove up the cost.
Friend......decline this work as being outside the specification. Right?
Right! IE fixed deliverable....expect them to be controlled by you in the workplace?
I can't allow any work on my projects to leave my "secured area". Government contracts regulate that....but attempting to exploit the contractors by asking them to carry all the risk inherent in the deal.
Yeah, It seems like that, but the contract also says that if we accept the work, then they are released from support for it. We can't go back a month later, and claim that the deliverable wasn't complete. We also, as matter of practice, don't hire contractor to write 3 year long projects. All we want is a widget or two that our developers are to busy to worry with. We give them grunt work, and we treat them like lab rats, and they love it. If they write good code, and they like the work, they renew the contracts, else we search for more rats. I contract with burger king employees that just got done at ITT Tech. These kids aren't solving world hunger; they are adding code to AED a database field in a table.
Do please get over yourself. You guys may be the best coders in the world, but I deal with the two-bit riff raff, and I separate the wheat from the chafe. So I ride them hard and put them up wet. Then the one that survives I try to sell to the highest bidder, because I made the financial investment in seeing what they are made of. If they can't hack it, they are put back on the street.
Now, in reality, I'm not a manager of anything. I'm a simple scripting geek. I have no power to hire, fire, or sign contracts for/with anyone. I started this tread because it was a slow comment day, and a top level comment like that was sure to get things moving. But I have come to realize that you guys are a bunch of cynical, bitter people.
Still I am going to add you all as friends. Bitter as you may be.
Well, I like to think of my self more as a dolphin, or a club foot baby seal... regardless... If you follow Dilbert, I'm not supposed to make good choices like "time-less" contracts. Besides, it sounds like there isn't any time involved with those contracts. hugmmmph.
No really... you beat me down. You win. I posted the comment because it was a slow comment day. I'm not even a manager, nor have I ever worked as or with a contractor. I realize that if you use I timeless contract you get better quality, but the comment generated more activity posted as it was... and don't you feel better after venting? I know I do...
Yes! This is my point exactly! except I went a step further. If you agree that the work on your car will take 237hrs, with 8 hour days, that comes out to 29.625 days, so I'll give my developer 30 days to do this project that he himself said would take 237hrs. Now, If 31 days later, he can't provide me with what we agreed on, then I want some compensation for his breech of contract, and likewise, if he finnishes early, he can take the remaineder of the terms agreed to in the contract, and go on his happy way.
we could go on like this forever sweetest, but trust me... I pay for end product, and the contract says that end product has to be delivered on or by the COB on a specified date.
Labor law says that if I give you a 20 minute break, I have to pay you for it, even if you don't do any work on it. It also says that if I give you a 30 minute break, that I dont' have to pay you for it if you don't do any work. However (and I hate this part) I can't tell you NOT to work on you lunch break. Meaning that if you work from 8 to 4:30, and take a lunch break of 30 minutes, if you so much as punch a keystroke, I have to pay you for the whole 30 minutes. This could put you into overtime... BAD!!! BAD!!!
I'll see if I can find an online version of the law.
Umm, so if the mechanic manages to get it done in two days, he has to spend the extra two days working on your car, even though it is fixed, so you can get your money's worth?
Almost!!! You are on the right track. But my contracts work more like this... mechanic manages to get it done in two days, mechanic gets paid the remainer of his contracted amount for that task, and gets the option of taking another task from the pile. So if I contract for 4 days, and the work takes him 2, then effectivly, he gets paid to two days he didn't have to work. Or to look at it another way, I didn't make him stay around the aditional 48 hours.
Marching (to the death or otherwise) is, and has to be, the sole responsibility of the developer, and the choices that developer makes are crutial to the success of the project. But if the developer isn't what he presented himself to be in the proposal stage of the contract, then the problem of having to work late hours is on his back... not mine. ALSO... If I can't get good code out of some script kiddy, I want to cut my frigg'en loses.
FYI: Our seats are motivated warmth and pride by the best in the biz!!! THANKZ CREW
Q:Can the company legally make you work 10-16 hour days?
A: Yes. Well, technically no, but you are not an employee so yes. You see, an employee has to be given a total of 30 minutes rest for 8 hours of work, and while I can demand that the employee stay over 8hrs/day -or- 40hrs/wk, The state law makes sure that I compensate them with breaks, food, sometimes lodging. It gets to expensive for me to hold my employees longer than normal. I once figured the breaking point is at 9.5 to 10 hours a day. If I require my people to stay 9.5hr/day, I'm not really losing anything. However, at 10hr/day, I lose my butt. On the other hand, my lawyers have written our contracts such that when I hire a developer to work on a contract, they agree:
Work in the office on business days (M-F): This means that the contactor can't work from home or decide to work tue, wed, thu. (of course they each have a set number of sick days, and vaca, etc...
Work at the "corporate" pace: This is requirement very arbitrary. It's purpose is two fold. One, it allows me to get out of the contract with poor performers, and two, it allows me to squeeze late nights out of any contractor. It states that the contractor(s) must perform his/her/their tasks at such a pace as to not delay the development of the companies staff.
I know that it doesn't seem fair, but my view point on it is like this. If you hire a mechanic to fix your car, and they say that for $300 they can get it done in 4 days. If it take seven days, the total cost to you is greater than the price your agreed on for the service that you got. So in effect the mechanic broke your contract. I pay my contactors for end results, not time spent creating results. The Company that I hire contractors for, expects that for $300 they can get their car fixed, and if that doesn't happen it looses money.
So yes, a company can require the entity that it contracts with to what ever it takes to provide the end product on time and with a certain level of quality. And my company also requires that all work done... be done inside the confines of our building.
But no, it can get really expensive the keep regular employees.
Your right, no one would ever turn their home machines over for a corp to inspect them. I only have one wintel box at the house, and it just has a basic '98SE on it, plus IE. Nothing else. The rest of my boxes are Linux, with GNU'ed applications. But, I would suspect everyone that has a machine at home, has some p0rn (or other such embarassing content) on it. Yeah... I'm with you... there would be NO home searches.
On the other topic... Hold on, I have to switch to "I have a friend who..." type of story telling as to not anger any letigious companies, or raise susspition of slander...
I have a friend who feels like borland recently switched some staff around. Seems piracy is deemed a huge loss for the company, and a staffer was brought on to clean things up. My friend feels that borland likes the direction that the BSA is taking, and wants to build it's own internal version. There is nothing you can do. My friend feels like the plan is to go after a couple of smaller businesses, and make the department solivent. Then, as they (borland security), get more money, they keep cooking bigger and bigger businesses until they rule the market. My friend feels like they (borland) think they will win one way or the other. They might get everyone to start paying for the software, or get paid from all the people paying fines. My friend is worried about how this will impact borlands "free" market outlook.
That being said, call a lawyer or call it quits. Have a nice day;)
If you have ever walked into a radio shack to touch on of these things, they are NOT a suitable replacement. The keys "squash" in unpredictable directions. The travel on the keys is more than the 101's 33mm. Plus the fact that the keyboard has no natural role (the upper part of the board is vertically higher than the lower), and one of the worst things, is there is no option of stands that allow you to raise the keyboard from the back. And one more thing... every time I see one now in a store, they are broke.
forget hardware for a moment, It's not all about the hardware. Matter of fact, I have two 800Mhz PC's with WinTV capture cards, Linux, and Freevo. These work in the place of Tivo, and offer me the ability to play with the underlying linux distro without voiding anything. I would never buy a TiVo. I will get the PVR with my satallite system, but for now, I just use my Freevo Boxes... I know that/. has run a story on them... check the hardware lists out. It's easy to build and sweet to run.
Yeah, brand loyalty flies out the window, when another company offers me a comprable product when I subsrcibe to their service. I got a DishNetwork PVR, and now I have no need to pay ~$300 for a few extra features. Also, the unit I have doesn't cost me a monthly programming fee.
I have the CD (1 disc), and love it. I refer to GOF-DP once or twice a month, and this cd is a great reference tool. I started with the book, and have used it for reference over the past 4 years. Recently a ex-coworker of mine left his copy of the CD around. I haven't looked at my book sence that day.
yeah, but under IBM's plan, we would all share the expence of hardware upgrades, maint, software, etc. They would provide enough "backup" suttles that when a shuttle shutsdown once a year for 3 or 4 hours for IPL, another shuttle would be there to carry the load.
We wouldn't have to worry so much about "style", because all of us would fit in the same shuttle. No one shuttle faster/bigger/better than another means no more direct "style" compatition. This, of course means the current shuttles has to be redesigned (more seating capacity/faster[wider] throughput). Speed of a processor is only relative to the time it take a proccessor(s) job que to go from 0.00 to 0.00. If 10,000 users are hitting the system at the same time, then perfomance will slow down. If 100,000 user hitt the box(es) we will see the system go yet slower. No matter how fast you make the box/shuttle, you can only move data/people 5^237421E23 fast, the REAL trick is to move MORE data/people per trip. Making the speed/cost of the trip less substainial. redundency will insure availability, and capacity will make each box/shuttle profitable. I work for a company of more than 17,000 people, and my company loves the idea of all of us using once masive machine. "bring back the green screen!", is what they are yelling. This, has been my two cents.
In sad news today, Run DMC's Jam Master Jay died today at the tender age of 37. Truely a slashdot icon, he will be missed. Gunshot wounds really suck... until you die... then they don't hurt anymore.
I'm not in favor of the Chinese government touching anything to do with technology, and if they thought that it was time to get involved in this epidemic, they would inevitably censor even more of the web in order to stop the infection rates. This case reminds me of the South African STD problem. where the uneducated allow themselves to be infected out of ignorance. The only way that the mass of china will become aware is if the government steps in. The only thing [the government] needs to do is a media blitz of public service announcements. Educate the public, and they will start to protect themselves. I'm sure that Computer Associates (InoculateIT), Network Associates (McAfee), and Symantic (Norton AntiVirus) would love to cover the cost of such education. Most, if not all, antiviral software is subscription based. And there is nobody happier to pay for a long-term contract like a mom & pop shop that didn't know anything about viruses, and then is made aware of what they stand to lose if they don't protect themselves. Yeah, answer to this is place "protect yourself" ads in every magazine, TV, and radio that circulate there. The government controls all of the media there anyways.
Maybe my answer is to simplistic, but education does make sense.
Maybe My answer is to simplistic, but education does make sence.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more like "if you build it, they will come". Your correct, numbers are not enough. But companies like EA, SquareSoft, and Namco will come up with enough titles to keep the console vaild as long as they can write to the screen faster and prettier than on other platforms. X-Box is still the biggest game hardware on the market. Bling, Bling. Content is what makes or breaks consoles, and the fat pipes are coming from Redmond.
Microsoft losses money on the console, but makes money on licensing. If there were only 1 television in the world, nobody would spend 10 dollars to develop content for it. Everyone would marvel at the glass faced box and wonder how such a wonder ever happened. But in reality, there are billions of televisions, and companies are willing to pay $2.2 Million to get their content on the screen. The difference there is the potential audience. Once a half million consoles are sold, game developers can spend a couple thousand per game on licensing. Once 100 million consoles are sold, game developers can spend hundreds of thousands. The more consoles the bigger the potential audience for your game.
This is a good question. I too like to carry my mail around with me. I use an IMAP server, but the one that I need the data off of first is my Yahoo Mail account. I want to grab the 20+ Meg of messages that my account has collected over the years, and export them to a cd. I want to ween myself off of their massive MY! application. So, any way to take my mail/address book/notepad/breifcase/photos/etc with me? anyone? anyone?
you're looking at paying at least $150/mo per megabit
Yeah, but your talking about bandwidth, not usage/traffic! They are paying $300/mo for 2MB of Async throughput on a curcuit, not $300/mo for a 2 MB file. I'm not sure anyone else would have been mislead by that comment, but just wanted to clerify.
This price can be as high as $500/mo per megabit that I've seen
Don't kid yourself, the content provider I worked for/with was paying $54000/mo for 30MB of bandwidth. That's $1800/MB/Mo! It was the peering options that drove up the cost.
Good point!!!! I'm right on it.
Friend... ...decline this work as being outside the specification. Right?
...expect them to be controlled by you in the workplace?
...but attempting to exploit the contractors by asking them to carry all the risk inherent in the deal.
Right! IE fixed deliverable.
I can't allow any work on my projects to leave my "secured area". Government contracts regulate that.
Yeah, It seems like that, but the contract also says that if we accept the work, then they are released from support for it. We can't go back a month later, and claim that the deliverable wasn't complete. We also, as matter of practice, don't hire contractor to write 3 year long projects. All we want is a widget or two that our developers are to busy to worry with. We give them grunt work, and we treat them like lab rats, and they love it. If they write good code, and they like the work, they renew the contracts, else we search for more rats. I contract with burger king employees that just got done at ITT Tech. These kids aren't solving world hunger; they are adding code to AED a database field in a table.
Do please get over yourself. You guys may be the best coders in the world, but I deal with the two-bit riff raff, and I separate the wheat from the chafe. So I ride them hard and put them up wet. Then the one that survives I try to sell to the highest bidder, because I made the financial investment in seeing what they are made of. If they can't hack it, they are put back on the street.
Now, in reality, I'm not a manager of anything. I'm a simple scripting geek. I have no power to hire, fire, or sign contracts for/with anyone. I started this tread because it was a slow comment day, and a top level comment like that was sure to get things moving. But I have come to realize that you guys are a bunch of cynical, bitter people.
Still I am going to add you all as friends. Bitter as you may be.
WoooOooOOooOOoWWWW!!!!
Your busy man... Chill out!
Well, I like to think of my self more as a dolphin, or a club foot baby seal... regardless... If you follow Dilbert, I'm not supposed to make good choices like "time-less" contracts. Besides, it sounds like there isn't any time involved with those contracts. hugmmmph.
No really... you beat me down. You win. I posted the comment because it was a slow comment day. I'm not even a manager, nor have I ever worked as or with a contractor. I realize that if you use I timeless contract you get better quality, but the comment generated more activity posted as it was... and don't you feel better after venting? I know I do...
Have a nice day.
You are correct. I do pay for fulfilment of all their contractual obligations. Your right... that is important.
Yes! This is my point exactly! except I went a step further. If you agree that the work on your car will take 237hrs, with 8 hour days, that comes out to 29.625 days, so I'll give my developer 30 days to do this project that he himself said would take 237hrs. Now, If 31 days later, he can't provide me with what we agreed on, then I want some compensation for his breech of contract, and likewise, if he finnishes early, he can take the remaineder of the terms agreed to in the contract, and go on his happy way.
Everyone can win, but I'm not going to lose@!
yes i do!
no you don't!
yes i do!
we could go on like this forever sweetest, but trust me... I pay for end product, and the contract says that end product has to be delivered on or by the COB on a specified date.
regards...
Labor law says that if I give you a 20 minute break, I have to pay you for it, even if you don't do any work on it. It also says that if I give you a 30 minute break, that I dont' have to pay you for it if you don't do any work. However (and I hate this part) I can't tell you NOT to work on you lunch break. Meaning that if you work from 8 to 4:30, and take a lunch break of 30 minutes, if you so much as punch a keystroke, I have to pay you for the whole 30 minutes. This could put you into overtime... BAD!!! BAD!!!
I'll see if I can find an online version of the law.
Umm, so if the mechanic manages to get it done in two days, he has to spend the extra two days working on your car, even though it is fixed, so you can get your money's worth?
Almost!!! You are on the right track. But my contracts work more like this... mechanic manages to get it done in two days, mechanic gets paid the remainer of his contracted amount for that task, and gets the option of taking another task from the pile. So if I contract for 4 days, and the work takes him 2, then effectivly, he gets paid to two days he didn't have to work. Or to look at it another way, I didn't make him stay around the aditional 48 hours.
Marching (to the death or otherwise) is, and has to be, the sole responsibility of the developer, and the choices that developer makes are crutial to the success of the project. But if the developer isn't what he presented himself to be in the proposal stage of the contract, then the problem of having to work late hours is on his back... not mine. ALSO... If I can't get good code out of some script kiddy, I want to cut my frigg'en loses.
FYI: Our seats are motivated warmth and pride by the best in the biz!!!
THANKZ CREW
A: Yes. Well, technically no, but you are not an employee so yes. You see, an employee has to be given a total of 30 minutes rest for 8 hours of work, and while I can demand that the employee stay over 8hrs/day -or- 40hrs/wk, The state law makes sure that I compensate them with breaks, food, sometimes lodging. It gets to expensive for me to hold my employees longer than normal. I once figured the breaking point is at 9.5 to 10 hours a day. If I require my people to stay 9.5hr/day, I'm not really losing anything. However, at 10hr/day, I lose my butt. On the other hand, my lawyers have written our contracts such that when I hire a developer to work on a contract, they agree:
- Work in the office on business days (M-F): This means that the contactor can't work from home or decide to work tue, wed, thu. (of course they each have a set number of sick days, and vaca, etc...
- Work at the "corporate" pace: This is requirement very arbitrary. It's purpose is two fold. One, it allows me to get out of the contract with poor performers, and two, it allows me to squeeze late nights out of any contractor. It states that the contractor(s) must perform his/her/their tasks at such a pace as to not delay the development of the companies staff.
I know that it doesn't seem fair, but my view point on it is like this. If you hire a mechanic to fix your car, and they say that for $300 they can get it done in 4 days. If it take seven days, the total cost to you is greater than the price your agreed on for the service that you got. So in effect the mechanic broke your contract. I pay my contactors for end results, not time spent creating results. The Company that I hire contractors for, expects that for $300 they can get their car fixed, and if that doesn't happen it looses money.So yes, a company can require the entity that it contracts with to what ever it takes to provide the end product on time and with a certain level of quality. And my company also requires that all work done... be done inside the confines of our building. But no, it can get really expensive the keep regular employees.
Your right, no one would ever turn their home machines over for a corp to inspect them. I only have one wintel box at the house, and it just has a basic '98SE on it, plus IE. Nothing else. The rest of my boxes are Linux, with GNU'ed applications. But, I would suspect everyone that has a machine at home, has some p0rn (or other such embarassing content) on it. Yeah... I'm with you... there would be NO home searches.
;)
On the other topic...
Hold on, I have to switch to "I have a friend who..." type of story telling as to not anger any letigious companies, or raise susspition of slander...
I have a friend who feels like borland recently switched some staff around. Seems piracy is deemed a huge loss for the company, and a staffer was brought on to clean things up. My friend feels that borland likes the direction that the BSA is taking, and wants to build it's own internal version. There is nothing you can do. My friend feels like the plan is to go after a couple of smaller businesses, and make the department solivent. Then, as they (borland security), get more money, they keep cooking bigger and bigger businesses until they rule the market. My friend feels like they (borland) think they will win one way or the other. They might get everyone to start paying for the software, or get paid from all the people paying fines. My friend is worried about how this will impact borlands "free" market outlook.
That being said, call a lawyer or call it quits.
Have a nice day
2056@ 16:38PM? is that all that /.'s got in it?
171 @ 13:31:00 CST 11/21/02
Credit cards with limits as high as 6 grand? wow, that kinda makes my $200 limit seem less important... :(
If you have ever walked into a radio shack to touch on of these things, they are NOT a suitable replacement. The keys "squash" in unpredictable directions. The travel on the keys is more than the 101's 33mm. Plus the fact that the keyboard has no natural role (the upper part of the board is vertically higher than the lower), and one of the worst things, is there is no option of stands that allow you to raise the keyboard from the back. And one more thing... every time I see one now in a store, they are broke.
forget hardware for a moment, It's not all about the hardware. Matter of fact, I have two 800Mhz PC's with WinTV capture cards, Linux, and Freevo. These work in the place of Tivo, and offer me the ability to play with the underlying linux distro without voiding anything. I would never buy a TiVo. I will get the PVR with my satallite system, but for now, I just use my Freevo Boxes... I know that /. has run a story on them... check the hardware lists out. It's easy to build and sweet to run.
Yeah, brand loyalty flies out the window, when another company offers me a comprable product when I subsrcibe to their service. I got a DishNetwork PVR, and now I have no need to pay ~$300 for a few extra features. Also, the unit I have doesn't cost me a monthly programming fee.
have a coke, a smile, and a nice day.
I have the CD (1 disc), and love it. I refer to GOF-DP once or twice a month, and this cd is a great reference tool. I started with the book, and have used it for reference over the past 4 years. Recently a ex-coworker of mine left his copy of the CD around. I haven't looked at my book sence that day.
yeah, but under IBM's plan, we would all share the expence of hardware upgrades, maint, software, etc. They would provide enough "backup" suttles that when a shuttle shutsdown once a year for 3 or 4 hours for IPL, another shuttle would be there to carry the load.
We wouldn't have to worry so much about "style", because all of us would fit in the same shuttle. No one shuttle faster/bigger/better than another means no more direct "style" compatition. This, of course means the current shuttles has to be redesigned (more seating capacity/faster[wider] throughput). Speed of a processor is only relative to the time it take a proccessor(s) job que to go from 0.00 to 0.00. If 10,000 users are hitting the system at the same time, then perfomance will slow down. If 100,000 user hitt the box(es) we will see the system go yet slower. No matter how fast you make the box/shuttle, you can only move data/people 5^237421E23 fast, the REAL trick is to move MORE data/people per trip. Making the speed/cost of the trip less substainial. redundency will insure availability, and capacity will make each box/shuttle profitable. I work for a company of more than 17,000 people, and my company loves the idea of all of us using once masive machine. "bring back the green screen!", is what they are yelling. This, has been my two cents.
In sad news today, Run DMC's Jam Master Jay died today at the tender age of 37. Truely a slashdot icon, he will be missed. Gunshot wounds really suck... until you die... then they don't hurt anymore.
R.I.P Jason Mizell (1965-2002)
I'm not in favor of the Chinese government touching anything to do with technology, and if they thought that it was time to get involved in this epidemic, they would inevitably censor even more of the web in order to stop the infection rates. This case reminds me of the South African STD problem. where the uneducated allow themselves to be infected out of ignorance. The only way that the mass of china will become aware is if the government steps in. The only thing [the government] needs to do is a media blitz of public service announcements. Educate the public, and they will start to protect themselves. I'm sure that Computer Associates (InoculateIT), Network Associates (McAfee), and Symantic (Norton AntiVirus) would love to cover the cost of such education. Most, if not all, antiviral software is subscription based. And there is nobody happier to pay for a long-term contract like a mom & pop shop that didn't know anything about viruses, and then is made aware of what they stand to lose if they don't protect themselves. Yeah, answer to this is place "protect yourself" ads in every magazine, TV, and radio that circulate there. The government controls all of the media there anyways.
Maybe my answer is to simplistic, but education does make sense.
Maybe My answer is to simplistic, but education does make sence.