I have been a software engineer for almost 11 years, writing high level code to kernel modules, and even some assembly. I write code that works on windows, linux, realtime/safety critical systems.
the proof is in the fact they games aren't ported unless there's an obvious revenue stream.
Lot's of games are just designed to be cross platform from the start, so they don't require a separate porting effort. They just need to be designed at an abstract enough level to allow tools like unity to do the platform dependent parts.
if it was "easy" as setting some constant to "LINUX" they'd do that and make a few extra $
It's as easy as designing games in a platform independent manner to begin with.
Furthermore a lot of games already run in linux, and getting those games to run in steamOS is pretty trivial.
consoles have very custom hardware. i really can't listen to you if you are going to sit here and tell me they are "just PCs". they aren't. go do some reading. nothing could be further from the truth.
Custom != completely different. Both xbone and ps4 are using AMD jaguar APUs.
Also I said they are *basically* just PCs, meaning the basics of the architecture (e.g. instruction set, etc) are the same as a PC (as opposed to a older console like an NES or genesis, which were not like PCs at all).
the difference? consoles make money from people buying games. the console itself is a loss which is why they future proof them. if they had to R&D new consoles every two years they'd never make a profit. with PCs, the vendors make money from selling you hardware. they have zero interest in future proofing their designs.
The fact that some consoles are incidentally sold at a loss, does not make them magically have hardware that is from 10 years in the future.
Xbox 360 outperforms your 10 year old PC in gaming. period
The xbox 360 came out in 2005 and the xbox one came out in 2013. Would an xbox 360 outperform a cheap PC from 2012? definitely not. I'll bet the computer I built in 2006 would outperform an xbox 360 on the same games (although it was more expensive).
Yes an xbox 360 outperforms a 10 year old PC, but that's not really a great accomplishment. For most of the last 10 years, the choice wasn;t between an xbox 360 and a 10 year old PC. It was between an xbox 360 and a newer PC. The PCs keep getting better and consoles stay the same.
I want to know the source that *you* are specifically referencing rather than simply assuming the top google search is correct. I don't even know what state you are from.
I just said there was at least 101 fraudulent votes cited in that same article, so clearly I don't want you to believe there were only 31 cases even if we assumed the article was correct.
Except that they have a lower level API and as they are a single hardware target games can be heavily optimized
The levels exposed to developers for PCs and consoles are the same. You can write PC games in intel assembly and opengl calls, it's usually just not worth the man hours to get slightly better performance when PC hardware is so cheap.
The fact that many game companies choose to write software at this low level for game consoles is not indicative of a feature that is missing from PCs, it's just a slightly different economic situation, and even that is changing as more and more games come out on multiple different platforms.
Steam Boxes do not have these advantages thus need more powerful hardware for the same result.
Steam boxes also leverage a larger and more liquid hardware market. You can buy last years CPUs and graphics cards sometimes for half the price. You can't buy last year's PS4 or xbone on sale for half the price.
So yes you might need more powerful hardware to get the same performance on a PC, but that more powerful hardware is more than likely cheaper (if shopping for good prices) than the less powerful hardware in a console at any given time. Not to mention the fact that the PC hardware will run non-optimized code *much* faster than a console.
Nor do they have a manufacturer willing to have little profit or a loss on the hardware in order to get them in the hands of consumers.
Nor do they need a specific hardware manufacturer. PC's are commodities. It ultimately doesn't matter if some manufacturer is willing to specifically brand one of their products as a "steam box", for the same reason it doesn't matter if some manufacturer is willing to brand one of their products as a "gaming PC". I don't need to get a "steam PC" in order to run steam on it, why should it be any different for running steamOS?
For some reason people expected both games optimized for Steam Boxes as well as cheap hardware, neither of which were ever going to be a reality.
Who expected games to be optimized for steam boxes (beyond simply optimized for linux-x86_64)?
Not only do I not expect it, I don't care. It won't be long before you can get PC's *much* faster than a PS4 for a fraction of the price.
There is a reason consoles are becoming more and more like PCs both in terms of hardware and software. It's just more economical to be able to leverage this far bigger electronic ecosystem.
Consoles aren't magic. The reason they can play games 10 years after they were made, is because people take a lot of time and effort to make sure their games can still run on those 10 year old machines. It has nothing to do with the hardware itself.
Furthermore, if there were magic future proof hardware, they would just put that in PCs as well.
Also, I can play high end games on a 10 year old PC. I just need to turn down all the graphics settings, which is exactly what the version of games running on old consoles do.
The hardware is basically just a PC. Lot's of companies already build PCs. Lot's of people build their own PCs. Building a PC is not a risky business venture.
The software is just a linux application. As long as you don't right your games in a relatively platform independent way (e.g. don't use directx), then porting the game to other platforms including steamos should be relatively easy. Even if you didn;t bother making a platform independent game, there are companies who basically only port games as their business model.
People don't (or at least shouldn't) develop games for a "said machine" anymore. There are certainly still risks associated with game development, but it should no longer be related to the machines(s) the game is running on.
A lot has changed since the 3DO came out. Both in hardware and software
As long as you are not storing all the security clearance info for the united states in your smart thermostat, I think it will be fine. The chinese will be able to mess with your temperature and turn on and off your lights with impunity. They can probably also try to unlock my doors during the brief periods of time when my wife hasn't already left them unlocked.
I would love to see these devices be better secured, but I think the reason they aren't is *because* of the lack of potential harm that is possible. If people were dying because their routers and thermostats were being hacked, then I'm pretty sure the consumer demand for secure devices would drive manufacturers to producing incredibly secure devices for a price that the market would bear.
The law could require not to hold anything a pre-18 year old says online against them. This includes mocking and laughing at those comments, or thinking someone is stupid, or thinking they are bad person, etc. In essence, if you don't have something nice to think about those comments, then you would be required to not think about them at all and act as if the comments were never made.
This law should also be about as enforceable as the one described in the article.
I think he was certainly justified to disable the drone in a way that doesn't endanger anyone else. I might be more worried about some lunatic shooting his shotgun at any passing RC aircraft more than the drones themselves.
I think the answer is to fight fire with fire. If drones are cheap and ubiquitous, we need to use that to our advantage and build drones that can take out other drones safely and efficiently. Even if it doesn't work, it sounds pretty fucking fun.
If you're going to be taking down an aircraft, you want the stopping power that a large caliber canon provides. How heavy was this drone? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 lbs?
The mig-15 and mig-17 had two 23mm cannons and one 37mm cannon. So a 40mm weapon is in the right ballpark to do the job of taking out a B-29 super fortress pretty efficiently.
Well I don't think I want the fast crazy driving of a normal taxi driver anyway. I think I prefer the normal driving of a normal person. And no I don't miss turns because the gps calls out road names and distances to the turns, and they even tell you what lane you need to be in. My wife doesn't even look at the screen, she just listens. Driving by GPS is apparently it's own skill.
And yes, data entry is getting easier and easier. And yes they do mess up sometimes, but it's not like computer experts and mathematicians don't make mistakes.
Well let's put it this way. I travel a lot. I don't know every city I go to. If I rent a car, I just use a GPS and I'm fine. If I request an uber and he is as competent with a GPS as I am, then it is satisfactory for me. I suspect most uber drivers are probably better at both using GPS and more knowledgeable about the city than I am on any given trip.
This is why we trust operating cash registers to high school drop outs. They may not know all the intricacies of arithmetic, but they can be taught how to use a cash register good enough. The whole point of the machine is to allow an mathematically inexperienced person to do it.
You need mathematicians and computer scientists to design the GPS devices and cash registers, but not to use them, and quite honestly their time is far better spent designing things anyway.
And yes if I need something done right with high accuracy I will certainly hire an expert. And that one thing is designing the thing that we will mass produce for all the laymen, saving millions of man hours of time and effort. Now everyone is more of a expert on any city than everyone without a GPS, and now everyone is better at arithmetic than everyone without a calculator. That's a pretty good version of "good enough" in my book.
We don't need people to be good at arithmetic anymore. We don't need people to memorize maps and fastest routes anymore. Just like we don;t need 80% of the population to be farmers anymore. That's progress.
He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime. Right now, he's running away from the consequences of his actions.
Or he could be pardoned...
The "He should face the consequences of his actions" argument can be used for any crime. The request for a pardon is a specific request that someone *not* face the consequences of their actions, or more accurately, that the consequences of their actions be changed to "no longer be punished".
It's like she is not even acknowledging what is being asked for.
It's like If I go to a car dealership and ask them if they sell any other cars besides what can be seen in the showroom, and the dealer then proceeds to list all the cars in the showroom. If he only has what is in the showroom, a better answer is "I only have what is in the showroom"
If the don't intend to pardon Snowden, all they need to do is say "We don't intend to pardon Mr. Snowden". If everyone *always* had to "face the consequences of their actions", then pardons wouldn't even exist.
You are still removing the freedom that someone has of not needing an insurance in their situation. A taxi driver needs insurance because the passenger can't depend on the driver for that, but a regular driver can decide if he thinks he can deal with the risk.
In California where I live, you are forced to buy insurance, so maybe I'm just used to that idea. I am in favor of freedom, but I don't think people should have the freedom to risk other people's property and health.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to require people to either have insurance, or if they don;t want to pay for insurance, put down a deposit for the coverage amount that they can retrieve if they stop driving. If you can't put down that deposit, it's means you can't actually pay for damages in the event that you are at fault in an accident.
I have been to places where driving blindly by GPS would lead to accidents or bad neighborhoods. Also, drivers that follow GPS blindly tend to be slower or to drive worse because their eyes are on the map most of the time instead of the road.
People who don't drive with a GPS are more likely to get lost, because they can't memorize an entire city map. City knowledge is great, but I'll take google maps over city knowledge any day.
It's still good to know how calculations work because you might have mistyped that number and a basic knowledge would show that the result doesn't make sense.
Knowledge of arithmetic helps, but if I had to choose between a mathematician doing math by hand, and a highschool dropout with a calculator to add a bunch of large numbers, I'll take the high school dropout. I'll bet the mathematician would too.
My point is not that the "tool" > "tool + knowledge". That's not possible. My point is that "tool" == "(tool + knowledge) * 0.95" (i.e. the tool is doing most of the work). You get the first 95% very cheaply, and that last 5% is very expensive.
So rather than hiring a few mathematicians with a calculators to add a bunch of numbers, it probably makes more sense to hire a ton of high school dropouts with calculators (and maybe one mathematician to supervise) for the same price.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been a software engineer for almost 11 years, writing high level code to kernel modules, and even some assembly. I write code that works on windows, linux, realtime/safety critical systems.
the proof is in the fact they games aren't ported unless there's an obvious revenue stream.
Lot's of games are just designed to be cross platform from the start, so they don't require a separate porting effort. They just need to be designed at an abstract enough level to allow tools like unity to do the platform dependent parts.
if it was "easy" as setting some constant to "LINUX" they'd do that and make a few extra $
It's as easy as designing games in a platform independent manner to begin with.
Furthermore a lot of games already run in linux, and getting those games to run in steamOS is pretty trivial.
consoles have very custom hardware. i really can't listen to you if you are going to sit here and tell me they are "just PCs". they aren't. go do some reading. nothing could be further from the truth.
Custom != completely different. Both xbone and ps4 are using AMD jaguar APUs.
Also I said they are *basically* just PCs, meaning the basics of the architecture (e.g. instruction set, etc) are the same as a PC (as opposed to a older console like an NES or genesis, which were not like PCs at all).
the difference? consoles make money from people buying games. the console itself is a loss which is why they future proof them. if they had to R&D new consoles every two years they'd never make a profit. with PCs, the vendors make money from selling you hardware. they have zero interest in future proofing their designs.
The fact that some consoles are incidentally sold at a loss, does not make them magically have hardware that is from 10 years in the future.
Xbox 360 outperforms your 10 year old PC in gaming. period
The xbox 360 came out in 2005 and the xbox one came out in 2013. Would an xbox 360 outperform a cheap PC from 2012? definitely not. I'll bet the computer I built in 2006 would outperform an xbox 360 on the same games (although it was more expensive).
Yes an xbox 360 outperforms a 10 year old PC, but that's not really a great accomplishment. For most of the last 10 years, the choice wasn;t between an xbox 360 and a 10 year old PC. It was between an xbox 360 and a newer PC. The PCs keep getting better and consoles stay the same.
I want to know the source that *you* are specifically referencing rather than simply assuming the top google search is correct. I don't even know what state you are from.
Can you cite your source for 2,214 voters over the age of 110 in your state?
I just said there was at least 101 fraudulent votes cited in that same article, so clearly I don't want you to believe there were only 31 cases even if we assumed the article was correct.
Some of those 31 incidents actually include multiple votes. So it is actually at least 101 fraudulent votes.
Except that they have a lower level API and as they are a single hardware target games can be heavily optimized
The levels exposed to developers for PCs and consoles are the same. You can write PC games in intel assembly and opengl calls, it's usually just not worth the man hours to get slightly better performance when PC hardware is so cheap.
The fact that many game companies choose to write software at this low level for game consoles is not indicative of a feature that is missing from PCs, it's just a slightly different economic situation, and even that is changing as more and more games come out on multiple different platforms.
Steam Boxes do not have these advantages thus need more powerful hardware for the same result.
Steam boxes also leverage a larger and more liquid hardware market. You can buy last years CPUs and graphics cards sometimes for half the price. You can't buy last year's PS4 or xbone on sale for half the price.
So yes you might need more powerful hardware to get the same performance on a PC, but that more powerful hardware is more than likely cheaper (if shopping for good prices) than the less powerful hardware in a console at any given time. Not to mention the fact that the PC hardware will run non-optimized code *much* faster than a console.
Nor do they have a manufacturer willing to have little profit or a loss on the hardware in order to get them in the hands of consumers.
Nor do they need a specific hardware manufacturer. PC's are commodities. It ultimately doesn't matter if some manufacturer is willing to specifically brand one of their products as a "steam box", for the same reason it doesn't matter if some manufacturer is willing to brand one of their products as a "gaming PC". I don't need to get a "steam PC" in order to run steam on it, why should it be any different for running steamOS?
For some reason people expected both games optimized for Steam Boxes as well as cheap hardware, neither of which were ever going to be a reality.
Who expected games to be optimized for steam boxes (beyond simply optimized for linux-x86_64)?
Not only do I not expect it, I don't care. It won't be long before you can get PC's *much* faster than a PS4 for a fraction of the price.
There is a reason consoles are becoming more and more like PCs both in terms of hardware and software. It's just more economical to be able to leverage this far bigger electronic ecosystem.
and yet it is not an over-simplification.
Consoles aren't magic. The reason they can play games 10 years after they were made, is because people take a lot of time and effort to make sure their games can still run on those 10 year old machines. It has nothing to do with the hardware itself.
Furthermore, if there were magic future proof hardware, they would just put that in PCs as well.
Also, I can play high end games on a 10 year old PC. I just need to turn down all the graphics settings, which is exactly what the version of games running on old consoles do.
Yeah, I don't want to play some indie crapware. I want to play the 15th installment of the same FPS game I always play.
Consoles are basically just PC's in a special box running special software.
The hardware is basically just a PC. Lot's of companies already build PCs. Lot's of people build their own PCs. Building a PC is not a risky business venture.
The software is just a linux application. As long as you don't right your games in a relatively platform independent way (e.g. don't use directx), then porting the game to other platforms including steamos should be relatively easy. Even if you didn;t bother making a platform independent game, there are companies who basically only port games as their business model.
People don't (or at least shouldn't) develop games for a "said machine" anymore. There are certainly still risks associated with game development, but it should no longer be related to the machines(s) the game is running on.
A lot has changed since the 3DO came out. Both in hardware and software
Actually, CPR dates back to classical antiquity. Ceramic pots from the time of the Parthian empire depict physicians performing CPR on patients.
After 5 seconds of googling.
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
As long as you are not storing all the security clearance info for the united states in your smart thermostat, I think it will be fine. The chinese will be able to mess with your temperature and turn on and off your lights with impunity. They can probably also try to unlock my doors during the brief periods of time when my wife hasn't already left them unlocked.
I would love to see these devices be better secured, but I think the reason they aren't is *because* of the lack of potential harm that is possible. If people were dying because their routers and thermostats were being hacked, then I'm pretty sure the consumer demand for secure devices would drive manufacturers to producing incredibly secure devices for a price that the market would bear.
Speaking of cameras in your bathrooms, the one in your master bathroom toilet bowl needs a new battery.
If you really thought NAT was secure, you'd give out your WAN IP.
Not to mention the fact that even if locks were perfect, windows aren't that hard to break.
The law could require not to hold anything a pre-18 year old says online against them. This includes mocking and laughing at those comments, or thinking someone is stupid, or thinking they are bad person, etc. In essence, if you don't have something nice to think about those comments, then you would be required to not think about them at all and act as if the comments were never made.
This law should also be about as enforceable as the one described in the article.
I think he was certainly justified to disable the drone in a way that doesn't endanger anyone else. I might be more worried about some lunatic shooting his shotgun at any passing RC aircraft more than the drones themselves.
I think the answer is to fight fire with fire. If drones are cheap and ubiquitous, we need to use that to our advantage and build drones that can take out other drones safely and efficiently. Even if it doesn't work, it sounds pretty fucking fun.
If you're going to be taking down an aircraft, you want the stopping power that a large caliber canon provides. How heavy was this drone? Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 lbs?
The mig-15 and mig-17 had two 23mm cannons and one 37mm cannon. So a 40mm weapon is in the right ballpark to do the job of taking out a B-29 super fortress pretty efficiently.
Well I don't think I want the fast crazy driving of a normal taxi driver anyway. I think I prefer the normal driving of a normal person. And no I don't miss turns because the gps calls out road names and distances to the turns, and they even tell you what lane you need to be in. My wife doesn't even look at the screen, she just listens. Driving by GPS is apparently it's own skill.
And yes, data entry is getting easier and easier. And yes they do mess up sometimes, but it's not like computer experts and mathematicians don't make mistakes.
Well let's put it this way. I travel a lot. I don't know every city I go to. If I rent a car, I just use a GPS and I'm fine. If I request an uber and he is as competent with a GPS as I am, then it is satisfactory for me. I suspect most uber drivers are probably better at both using GPS and more knowledgeable about the city than I am on any given trip.
This is why we trust operating cash registers to high school drop outs. They may not know all the intricacies of arithmetic, but they can be taught how to use a cash register good enough. The whole point of the machine is to allow an mathematically inexperienced person to do it.
You need mathematicians and computer scientists to design the GPS devices and cash registers, but not to use them, and quite honestly their time is far better spent designing things anyway.
And yes if I need something done right with high accuracy I will certainly hire an expert. And that one thing is designing the thing that we will mass produce for all the laymen, saving millions of man hours of time and effort. Now everyone is more of a expert on any city than everyone without a GPS, and now everyone is better at arithmetic than everyone without a calculator. That's a pretty good version of "good enough" in my book.
We don't need people to be good at arithmetic anymore. We don't need people to memorize maps and fastest routes anymore. Just like we don;t need 80% of the population to be farmers anymore. That's progress.
He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime. Right now, he's running away from the consequences of his actions.
Or he could be pardoned...
The "He should face the consequences of his actions" argument can be used for any crime. The request for a pardon is a specific request that someone *not* face the consequences of their actions, or more accurately, that the consequences of their actions be changed to "no longer be punished".
It's like she is not even acknowledging what is being asked for.
It's like If I go to a car dealership and ask them if they sell any other cars besides what can be seen in the showroom, and the dealer then proceeds to list all the cars in the showroom. If he only has what is in the showroom, a better answer is "I only have what is in the showroom"
If the don't intend to pardon Snowden, all they need to do is say "We don't intend to pardon Mr. Snowden". If everyone *always* had to "face the consequences of their actions", then pardons wouldn't even exist.
You are still removing the freedom that someone has of not needing an insurance in their situation. A taxi driver needs insurance because the passenger can't depend on the driver for that, but a regular driver can decide if he thinks he can deal with the risk.
In California where I live, you are forced to buy insurance, so maybe I'm just used to that idea. I am in favor of freedom, but I don't think people should have the freedom to risk other people's property and health.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to require people to either have insurance, or if they don;t want to pay for insurance, put down a deposit for the coverage amount that they can retrieve if they stop driving. If you can't put down that deposit, it's means you can't actually pay for damages in the event that you are at fault in an accident.
I have been to places where driving blindly by GPS would lead to accidents or bad neighborhoods. Also, drivers that follow GPS blindly tend to be slower or to drive worse because their eyes are on the map most of the time instead of the road.
People who don't drive with a GPS are more likely to get lost, because they can't memorize an entire city map. City knowledge is great, but I'll take google maps over city knowledge any day.
It's still good to know how calculations work because you might have mistyped that number and a basic knowledge would show that the result doesn't make sense.
Knowledge of arithmetic helps, but if I had to choose between a mathematician doing math by hand, and a highschool dropout with a calculator to add a bunch of large numbers, I'll take the high school dropout. I'll bet the mathematician would too.
My point is not that the "tool" > "tool + knowledge". That's not possible. My point is that "tool" == "(tool + knowledge) * 0.95" (i.e. the tool is doing most of the work). You get the first 95% very cheaply, and that last 5% is very expensive.
So rather than hiring a few mathematicians with a calculators to add a bunch of numbers, it probably makes more sense to hire a ton of high school dropouts with calculators (and maybe one mathematician to supervise) for the same price.