The problem with rage is that it makes it hard to focus and say what you're really feeling. Intel has made a fortune selling garbage.
The problem with rage is that it makes it hard to focus and discern the truth about the world while saying instead what you're feeling.
You call it garbage. I call it economical.
Yes, Intel sells cheap, under-wrought chips (it isn't for lack of trying). But if it weren't for those, you wouldn't have a computer.
Without Intel, you'd be at the whim of Motorola, who would be only too glad absent competition to triple the price in the name of "quality".
A couple of other anti-snobby analogies:
If it weren't for companies like McDonald's, millions of people would be malnourished, having no time and too little money to feed themselves in the few minutes they have between their two jobs.
If it weren't for companies like Ford, Packard would be the dominant auto manufacturer, and the only people with cars would be the ones who could afford the American Rolls Royce. Which there would be far fewer of, without our automotive culture (think "private plane").
Intel's chips cost more than AMD's, but Wintel computers cost far less than Apple's. They provide popular functionality and acceptable reliability. They don't dress up in pretentions to perfection. They're right in the personal computing market's wheelhouse. Bottom line. Ballgame.
--Blair
P.S. VMS hasn't been "the" anything since UNIX came along. That was decades ago. Get over it.
Intel only owned the parts of Alpha that it already owned because Intel was already using Alpha technology in its chips efore it owned any of it.
Remember when Intel and DEC settled DEC's infringement suit when Intel bought the Alpha lines? How is that a settlement? Clearly DEC wasn't terribly interested in maintaining the technological independence of the Alpha design.
That same agreement multi-sourced Alpha at Samsung, AMD, and IBM. So there was and is no danger of Intel's monopolizing Alpha.
Compaq then bought all of DEC, and ended up owning whatever was left over.
(Naturally, that sounds like an inefficiency. Compaq can't handle inefficiency. Intel is organized to mediate inefficiency and even find ways to profit from it. They build a fab for one chip partly on the premise that once that chip is done in the market they can use the fab line for less-mainstream products; they've done this for 30 years; some lines are designed knowing that their primary product--this year's desktop chip, for example--will never be enough to pay the mortgage; it's a gutsy and thoroughly pro move).
Intel only owned the parts of Alpha that it already owned because Intel was already using Alpha technology in its chips.
Remember that Intel and DEC settled DEC's infringement suit when Intel bought the Alpha lines.
That same agreement multi-sourced Alpha at Samsung, AMD, and IBM. So there was and is no danger of Intel's monopolizing Alpha.
Compaq then bought all of DEC, and ended up owning whatever Intel didn't buy. Naturally, that sounds like an inefficiency. Compaq can't handle inefficiency. Intel is organized to mediate inefficiency and even find ways to profit from it (they build a fab for one chip partly on the premise that once that chip is done in the market they can use the fab line for less-mainstream products; they've done this for 30 years; some lines are designed knowing that their primary product--this year's desktop chip, for example--will never be enough to pay the mortgage; it's a gutsy and thoroughly pro move).
Semantics == information. Mine was accurate; it's yours that's degraded.
Z in graphics is depth. Period. Say "you know, Z is supposed to be up" to an old SGI hacker and he'll roll his eyes at you.
Doom was a reduced 3d, but it really was more 3d than 2d.
Yes I could shoot on an angle. I could shoot up and down (and autoaimed, at that!).
If it wasn't 3d, then how could I fire a rocket then run alongside it and see it from that side?
Sure there was a hack to render altitude, but it worked well enough that stairs were stairs, and elevators were elevators.
"Modern 3d" is only slightly more real 3d than Doom was. Walls and objects are still sprites, only they're wrapped and mapped around hollow cores, and called skins and texture maps. I'm sure you've spent hours trying to wedge Lara Croft into a tight corner and spin her around to get the camera inside her boobs.
2d-projected-3d, even if there's a full (x,y,z) model in the engine, is still just as 2d as Doom. The 3d model, again, only defers computation of the projection until runtime.
And real 3d doesn't have 3 degrees of freedom, it has 6. I may be able to swim under a bridge in Quake, but I still stand up straight every second, like a Dalek. A clever game designer like John Carmack took the DOF he had and made it feel as 3-D as anything that followed.
There's your revolution.
--Blair
P.S. Note how this argument zips around between 2.0 and 3.0 like a trapped fly. Current virtual reality models are more than 2d and less than 3d. They're on a fractal dimensionality between the two. I'm going to leave it at that.
I know! Stick a tube down everyone's throat to supply them with food, water, and sedatives, then pack them side-by-side in oxygen bottles, and collect their heat and bioelectricity.
We could create a virtual reality world for them to inhabit, and jack it directly into their cortex. It would consume infinitesimally as much energy as the real one.
We could create AIs to help manage them. If we make the AIs smart enough, the AI's could be self-managing, freeing the rest of us up to enter the virtual world, too.
--Blair
"Man. You think the Internet is addicting..."
You're confusing several 3-d things about the Doom: environment, control, and characters.
Doom did have a "Z dimension". In 3D graphics, Z is depth. You're saying "you couldn't jump". Yes, you had no controllability in vertical unless there was an element there for you to stand on. You couldn't jump, but you sure could fall real good.
And yes, the baddies were sprites. This was done because drawing them in 3 dimensions isn't necessary for the 2-d projection of 3-d geometry that forms 1 - 1/10^7 of all "3D" today. 3-d characters exist now in order to permit realtime posability and improve the resolution of rotations. If you could predict all positions, you'd write them as sprites. They'd be a zillion times faster that way, and you could do true photorealism, but they'd have a range of motion limited by system design, instead of product design. (Most games end up with limited ranges of motion because of product design; they don't come close to the richness of motion permitted by the character engines; they do the same stupid moves over and over again). They get flattened to a 2-d array of pixels by your Geforce card, anyway.
Wouldn't you like to see Angelina Jolie reduced to a few million hi-res megapixel stills to cover the 8 or 10 moves Lara Croft can do and all the angles you might wedge her into? (Frankly, I'd prefer that they'd animated the rendered Lara on top of Angelina in the movie.)
Bottom line: Doom was a true 3-d game with a few shortcuts and a missing control axis. It was much better distributed than Wolfenstein, and created the richness of atmosphere that pervades first-person shooters to this day. Wolfie was a testbed by comparison. Doom was the real deal. Quake was Doom in makeup.
The amount of information that can be stored by the [1-liter] ultimate laptop, ~10^31 bits, is much higher than the ~10^10 bits stored on current laptops. This is because conventional laptops use many degrees of freedom to store a bit, whereas the ultimate laptop uses just one.
Er, no, Einstein, it's mostly because in the year 2001 the volume reseved on computers for primary and secondary storage is closer to 10 square cm than 1000 cubic ones.
Now, I can understand the Troll rating, even though the last thing I wanted was to start a flamewar, I just wanted to let people know how I felt. So it's wrong, but I understand how someone could think it's right. Meanwhile, the only two responses it got were in general agreement with me. No flames at all. So it's way wrong. But I still understand it. Like I understand property crimes committed by hungry people.
But offtopic? An evaluation in capsule of the history and effect of the Mac and Mac culture? No. Clearly some metamod is needed for whoever decided my post was offtopic.
You are correct. The "extra material" was enough to make me capitulate.
I will probably buy a copy of this hoary slab of Gungan-shit.
What can I say? I've had skywalkerian fantasies running through my mind since I was 14 years old. This is as thorough a part of my life as the Constitution I'd die to uphold. Having seen SW1 in the theater, I figured I'd paid my fealty. But no, marketing will out, and I'll just have to find a way to get one at the skinniest profit margin, because I can not do without.
As for the reasons for the poor quality, this time Lucas did too much by himself. He caught lightning in a bottle with Star Wars. Lawrence Kasdan and Joseph Campbell put the meat into Empire and Jedi. Lucas had to craft this one alone. Hopefully he's gone to the water and seen his destiny, and will get his act together for the next two. He's listed in IMDB as having someone else helping with the script for Episode II. We'll see.
And no, I don't expect the trilogy to appear in DVD (or whatever replaces it) until Lucas finds a way to encrypt it so that it can only be decrypted by the retina and occipital lobe of a licensed user.
Did they also drop the price of the damage waiver to a nickel? If not, then they're ripping off their customers.
Car-rental companies have been making money for decades with the non-omniscient business model. these guys could, too, but they don't want to try to compete normally.
Expect the following headline in the WSJ: ACME FILES CHAPTER WHATEVER.
the job descriptions I've seen are INSANE.... I have to assume this has something with the downturn... knowledge-poor management assuming they can combine positions and Save Bundles Of Cash[TM].
Actually, they're right. In another thread we worked out the following calculation, which was meant to be funny, but turned out being dead serious:
We all know that,
Time is money. Knowledge is power.
So if by money you mean cost, you can work out that,
Knowledge = Power = Work/Time = Work/Cost
And therefore
Cost = Work/Knowledge
So once you know how much work you need to do in order to survive, you can minimize the cost by increasing the knowledge of the workers applied to the job. An engineer with 50x the productivity usually only costs 10x the salary, and if you can convince him to take half of his pay in risk (stock or options), you save on hedge insurance, too.
Well, people who do work at McDonald's in the valley are living somewhere.
Like he said, homeless shelter, or, from what I've seen from the number of cars parked on an average Silicon Valley side street, 10 to a 3-bed, 2-bath house.
SV rates for fast food are higher than the norm; the banners proclaim $9.25 an hour at In-n-Out, but under $20k/year around here isn't going to get you an apartment you can leave after dark and food.
Everyone else that replied to this thread said what I was going to say: if you're out of a job in the Bay Area, MOVE OUT.
It's not going to come back here. The crazy money is gone forever. You're living in a dying shipyard, and it will be a century before anyone considers gentrifying it.
And maybe you'll change your luck. Much of the crazy money that piled up and went down the toilet here in the meantime created an international infrastructure that means that most of you can do the same sort of work in another state without any change in the virtual qualities of your career.
My home is in another state, and I'm here only because the client insists and pays my expenses. This place, believe me, is a step down. If I didn't have a fear of flying, I'd do what my partners do and air-commute.
There never was a good reason that dotbomb.com had to be located here. The only reason it happened was so the local VC's could see the drywall in person and dump funny money on the con-man in charge. Real online companies can be anywhere. Why grind yourself on the roughest economic emery wheel on earth when you can go to Kansas City or Penang, pay 20% as much for the same apartment, and work your options from there?
--Blair
Re:Andromeda disappoints me.
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 2
> I mean come on, there is something strangely humorous about a dead guy,
Rimmer.
> a janitor,
Lister and/or Kryten.
> a severed robot head,
Holly and/or Kryten.
> and a chick who was turned into a love slave as punishment,
That's either the resurrected Christine Kochanski, or you'll have to make do with a 3-million-year-evolved ship's cat.
> all stuck on a bug looking ship.
...all (for a significant part of the run) stuck on StarBug 1...
The only difference is one is euro-kinky, canadian/german deadpan, and the other is blatant english farce.
...and then there are the cut-scenes from Mystery Science Theater 3000...
Simba was the name of the lion in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tar-Zan novels.
You've heard of Tar-Zan, right? Disney did a movie about him, too, only people realized up-front that it was "Disney's version" of it, and didn't spaz just because it was an adaption of prior art.
Densi wrote:
>Blair wrote:
>>Platform stability, even if it's artificial... >Listen closely; I work at a game company.
O yay.
(Sort of. I keep sending my resi to LucasArts and they keep saying "please do not include pictures of the Light Saber you constructed in your application.")
>Platform stability is *not* artificial.
By "platform stability" I didn't mean reliability. I meant compatibility. Minimal drift. To support the consistency you spoke of...twice. So that companies with shoestrings as skinny as WhizGameSchtremeCo's can get off the ground and pump a few more royal pct's into SNE's P&L.
But, as long as you brought it up, yes, my PS2 has "crashed". Changing disks doesn't reset it. I have to hit the reset button after I insert a disk. You will now likely claim that's not a bug, it's a feature. Sophistry's a bitch.
And yes, I do have experience with DO-178B Level-A certification testing of Avionics software. There is no more thorough test requirement. As a good buddy of mine puts it, "there isn't enough money printed to certify a TCP/IP stack for flight" (note: this is for cockpit/control systems; the rules are different for cabin/passenger-use systems).
I attribute the fact that Sony was able to make the thing reliable at all with any sort of feasible business plan to the inference that the system is much simpler than some people are making it out to be. This can also be accomplished by building the complex system out of less-complex, well-validated subsystems. I note that my PS2 shipped with two quenched USB ports and a fat bay for an "expansion module". I.e., a year or so of buyer-beta testing will validate the main unit before it is integrated with these complicating components.
>This effect is not from lack of documentation -- even the manufacturer's games follow this rule.
Documentation is communication from one person to many. (Yeah, yeah, sometimes several people have to add pages to the doc; but still, one teacher per meme, many learners per meme.) Even the game developers within Sony have to read about what the hardware and system software team created. You do know they're not the same people, right? Thorough, accurate, readable documentation costs a lot of money. If the system is documented properly and the game teams are experienced professionals from theme to design to release, you would not see asymptotic improvements. You would see the best features of the system used well in the first games and any games thereafter. Cf. the difference between a detailed, precise, accurate map and "it's over there a few hundred miles".
> and if I may stray into incivility, your are an ass for suggesting that it is so
An mine ass were less civil and justified a like retort.
The point is, if they know what you're radiating and have certified their avionics as being cool with it, then it's okay to use it.
The general prohibition is there because the aircrew has no way of knowing what kind of ham gear or Eurostandard jammer J. Random Ape has brought onto the flying coffin--er, aircraft.
Boeing will give its subs hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to certify this technology for flight. It will know exactly how it affects every input register and control signal in the cockpit. The FAA will have a DER sign off on the results and buglist. (Note: the DER can't fail a certification for having bugs, only for failing to document them. At that point the manufacturer is certified to know what's wrong with his stuff and to have taken responsibility for it. The government doesn't protect you, it protects its own ass from liability. And there's no recursive requirement to test the tests. This is what you get when you let industries write their own government regulations.)
When Boeing's 802.11b flies, you still won't get to use your cellphone.
It means that if you have a certain amount of work to get done, and the person doing it has a small amount of knowledge, it's going to cost you a shitload. Vice if the person doing it has a lot of knowledge, that drops the cost of doing that work.
Which is kind of the same as
if you are dumb as dirt (Knowledge ==> 0) your money will approach infinity
> I'd be willing to say this person has not a clue.
You can be willing. You can say it. You can even believe it. But you'd have a hard time being more wrong.
I've worked on projects with 100x the complexity of a game-box that came in under 3 years. And I have worked on bus design, bus-bridge design, processor design, processor validation, and the CAD SW to do all of it from colored blocks to partitioning to fault propagation to AMP test engines (ever run your combos and randoms off a beowulf cluster? I may have prior art in my name for that).
That's where I get my perspective. I have a hard time finding computational devices I don't know all about. But until I bought my PS2, I hadn't owned a dedicated TV-game box. Ever. Not even an Atari. And I still don't, because apparently this is a game box/CD player/DVD player/network game console/web brower/interactive-tv terminal/surveillance device/base(are belong to us, all your, one each). I.e., it looks like a PC with some re-/de-featuring to make it feasible.
I like the other answers people gave. Sony needs to milk the game developers. Platform stability, even if it's artifical, is the best way to do that. By constantly saying "3 years", Sony gives the game guys a hard point against which to schedule TTM and breakeven.
Some people talked about the learning curve, but that's a simple problem to solve. Just document the thing better. Sony doesn't have to because it knows it has 3 years for people to read the release notes. I bet, though, there's some third pary out there who has written the PS2 equivalent of the Lions book and is making the SW world's life a lot easier.
I can do anything in C, including implement 00 recompilers if I want to simplify some code files.
The bug is that this is an intro class.
Does that mean it's a gut course, taken by people who will never take another formal class but need basic real-world skill? Or does that mean it's a foundation in the vocabulary and skills needed to make the journey through the meaty classes to follow, but not necessarily to enable any real-world proficiency?
Those are different goals.
In the former case, I'd go with a language that sits at the highest level and has the most intuitive interface. Believe it or not, this is National Semiconductor's LabView. Drag-and-drop coding, almost done right. G2 might be okay, too, but last time I saw it in action, it was several thousand dollars per developer seat, several hundred dollars per runtime license, and two major revs away from being high-level clean.
If the latter goal is needed, I'd want a spectrum of knowledge. Assembly to teach what the native objects and operations are in a computer. C to bridge the gap between a machine schedule and a language. And Smalltalk rather than C++ to show off the power of OO. Save it for the second-level course offerings.
The problem with Java is it's weak. The problem with C++ is it's been sold primarily as as OO but it's bloated with stuff that has nothing to do with OO. It's a buff and a polish away from MainSail, the language built by hacking in every Stanford AI Lab student project since 1969.
One concession that Covad cashed in on was payments under Performance Assurance Plans. "Under the Performance Assurance Plans, we are held financially responsible for faulty loop provisioning. Covad abused these plans. Using their bogus trouble tickets, Covad received inflated payments and rebates," said Barr.
What this implies is that Verizon paid without subtracting for the tickets that were bogus. That's purely Verizon's fuckup, and I can see it from here. I can't imagine what a judge is going to do when the defense starts showing him the fine print on the rest of their deal...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with rage is that it makes it hard to focus and say what you're really feeling. Intel has made a fortune selling garbage.
The problem with rage is that it makes it hard to focus and discern the truth about the world while saying instead what you're feeling.
You call it garbage. I call it economical.
Yes, Intel sells cheap, under-wrought chips (it isn't for lack of trying). But if it weren't for those, you wouldn't have a computer.
Without Intel, you'd be at the whim of Motorola, who would be only too glad absent competition to triple the price in the name of "quality".
A couple of other anti-snobby analogies:
If it weren't for companies like McDonald's, millions of people would be malnourished, having no time and too little money to feed themselves in the few minutes they have between their two jobs.
If it weren't for companies like Ford, Packard would be the dominant auto manufacturer, and the only people with cars would be the ones who could afford the American Rolls Royce. Which there would be far fewer of, without our automotive culture (think "private plane").
Intel's chips cost more than AMD's, but Wintel computers cost far less than Apple's. They provide popular functionality and acceptable reliability. They don't dress up in pretentions to perfection. They're right in the personal computing market's wheelhouse. Bottom line. Ballgame.
--Blair
P.S. VMS hasn't been "the" anything since UNIX came along. That was decades ago. Get over it.
Intel only owned the parts of Alpha that it already owned because Intel was already using Alpha technology in its chips efore it owned any of it.
Remember when Intel and DEC settled DEC's infringement suit when Intel bought the Alpha lines? How is that a settlement? Clearly DEC wasn't terribly interested in maintaining the technological independence of the Alpha design.
That same agreement multi-sourced Alpha at Samsung, AMD, and IBM. So there was and is no danger of Intel's monopolizing Alpha.
Compaq then bought all of DEC, and ended up owning whatever was left over.
(Naturally, that sounds like an inefficiency. Compaq can't handle inefficiency. Intel is organized to mediate inefficiency and even find ways to profit from it. They build a fab for one chip partly on the premise that once that chip is done in the market they can use the fab line for less-mainstream products; they've done this for 30 years; some lines are designed knowing that their primary product--this year's desktop chip, for example--will never be enough to pay the mortgage; it's a gutsy and thoroughly pro move).
--Blair
Intel only owned the parts of Alpha that it already owned because Intel was already using Alpha technology in its chips.
Remember that Intel and DEC settled DEC's infringement suit when Intel bought the Alpha lines.
That same agreement multi-sourced Alpha at Samsung, AMD, and IBM. So there was and is no danger of Intel's monopolizing Alpha.
Compaq then bought all of DEC, and ended up owning whatever Intel didn't buy. Naturally, that sounds like an inefficiency. Compaq can't handle inefficiency. Intel is organized to mediate inefficiency and even find ways to profit from it (they build a fab for one chip partly on the premise that once that chip is done in the market they can use the fab line for less-mainstream products; they've done this for 30 years; some lines are designed knowing that their primary product--this year's desktop chip, for example--will never be enough to pay the mortgage; it's a gutsy and thoroughly pro move).
--Blair
Blah de blah.
Semantics == information. Mine was accurate; it's yours that's degraded.
Z in graphics is depth. Period. Say "you know, Z is supposed to be up" to an old SGI hacker and he'll roll his eyes at you.
Doom was a reduced 3d, but it really was more 3d than 2d.
Yes I could shoot on an angle. I could shoot up and down (and autoaimed, at that!).
If it wasn't 3d, then how could I fire a rocket then run alongside it and see it from that side?
Sure there was a hack to render altitude, but it worked well enough that stairs were stairs, and elevators were elevators.
"Modern 3d" is only slightly more real 3d than Doom was. Walls and objects are still sprites, only they're wrapped and mapped around hollow cores, and called skins and texture maps. I'm sure you've spent hours trying to wedge Lara Croft into a tight corner and spin her around to get the camera inside her boobs.
2d-projected-3d, even if there's a full (x,y,z) model in the engine, is still just as 2d as Doom. The 3d model, again, only defers computation of the projection until runtime.
3d-projected-3d is so experimental that they're still trying mechanical solutions.
And real 3d doesn't have 3 degrees of freedom, it has 6. I may be able to swim under a bridge in Quake, but I still stand up straight every second, like a Dalek. A clever game designer like John Carmack took the DOF he had and made it feel as 3-D as anything that followed.
There's your revolution.
--Blair
P.S. Note how this argument zips around between 2.0 and 3.0 like a trapped fly. Current virtual reality models are more than 2d and less than 3d. They're on a fractal dimensionality between the two. I'm going to leave it at that.
You'll be sorry you said that in 1100 years when my stocks in landfill-mining corporations start pumping my pockets full of filthy luchre.
--Blair
"For the love of god, make me immortal!"
I know! Stick a tube down everyone's throat to supply them with food, water, and sedatives, then pack them side-by-side in oxygen bottles, and collect their heat and bioelectricity.
We could create a virtual reality world for them to inhabit, and jack it directly into their cortex. It would consume infinitesimally as much energy as the real one.
We could create AIs to help manage them. If we make the AIs smart enough, the AI's could be self-managing, freeing the rest of us up to enter the virtual world, too.
--Blair
"Man. You think the Internet is addicting..."
You're confusing several 3-d things about the Doom: environment, control, and characters.
Doom did have a "Z dimension". In 3D graphics, Z is depth. You're saying "you couldn't jump". Yes, you had no controllability in vertical unless there was an element there for you to stand on. You couldn't jump, but you sure could fall real good.
And yes, the baddies were sprites. This was done because drawing them in 3 dimensions isn't necessary for the 2-d projection of 3-d geometry that forms 1 - 1/10^7 of all "3D" today. 3-d characters exist now in order to permit realtime posability and improve the resolution of rotations. If you could predict all positions, you'd write them as sprites. They'd be a zillion times faster that way, and you could do true photorealism, but they'd have a range of motion limited by system design, instead of product design. (Most games end up with limited ranges of motion because of product design; they don't come close to the richness of motion permitted by the character engines; they do the same stupid moves over and over again). They get flattened to a 2-d array of pixels by your Geforce card, anyway.
Wouldn't you like to see Angelina Jolie reduced to a few million hi-res megapixel stills to cover the 8 or 10 moves Lara Croft can do and all the angles you might wedge her into? (Frankly, I'd prefer that they'd animated the rendered Lara on top of Angelina in the movie.)
Bottom line: Doom was a true 3-d game with a few shortcuts and a missing control axis. It was much better distributed than Wolfenstein, and created the richness of atmosphere that pervades first-person shooters to this day. Wolfie was a testbed by comparison. Doom was the real deal. Quake was Doom in makeup.
--Blair
--Blair
Thylacine@Home : use your computer to help search the Tasmanian northlands for signs of this elusive marsupial cat-dog.
--Blair
"I see a great need."
Modded -1 Troll and -1 Offtopic.
Now, I can understand the Troll rating, even though the last thing I wanted was to start a flamewar, I just wanted to let people know how I felt. So it's wrong, but I understand how someone could think it's right. Meanwhile, the only two responses it got were in general agreement with me. No flames at all. So it's way wrong. But I still understand it. Like I understand property crimes committed by hungry people.
But offtopic? An evaluation in capsule of the history and effect of the Mac and Mac culture? No. Clearly some metamod is needed for whoever decided my post was offtopic.
--Blair
What are the Chinese going to do when they find out that every access to an American website from a Chinese IP address receives a copy of goatse.cx?
--Blair
I was almost sucked in by this subtle troll until this point:
while drinking a bottle of chilled Dom Perignon 73.
Aha! If you really were a Mac user, you would know that the '88 was better.
--Blair
"Can't fool me, boy."
You are correct. The "extra material" was enough to make me capitulate.
I will probably buy a copy of this hoary slab of Gungan-shit.
What can I say? I've had skywalkerian fantasies running through my mind since I was 14 years old. This is as thorough a part of my life as the Constitution I'd die to uphold. Having seen SW1 in the theater, I figured I'd paid my fealty. But no, marketing will out, and I'll just have to find a way to get one at the skinniest profit margin, because I can not do without.
As for the reasons for the poor quality, this time Lucas did too much by himself. He caught lightning in a bottle with Star Wars. Lawrence Kasdan and Joseph Campbell put the meat into Empire and Jedi. Lucas had to craft this one alone. Hopefully he's gone to the water and seen his destiny, and will get his act together for the next two. He's listed in IMDB as having someone else helping with the script for Episode II. We'll see.
And no, I don't expect the trilogy to appear in DVD (or whatever replaces it) until Lucas finds a way to encrypt it so that it can only be decrypted by the retina and occipital lobe of a licensed user.
--Blair
Did they also drop the price of the damage waiver to a nickel? If not, then they're ripping off their customers.
Car-rental companies have been making money for decades with the non-omniscient business model. these guys could, too, but they don't want to try to compete normally.
Expect the following headline in the WSJ: ACME FILES CHAPTER WHATEVER.
--Blair
the job descriptions I've seen are INSANE. ... I have to assume this has something with the downturn... knowledge-poor management assuming they can combine positions and Save Bundles Of Cash[TM].
Actually, they're right. In another thread we worked out the following calculation, which was meant to be funny, but turned out being dead serious:
We all know that,
Time is money.
Knowledge is power.
So if by money you mean cost, you can work out that,
Knowledge = Power = Work/Time = Work/Cost
And therefore
Cost = Work/Knowledge
So once you know how much work you need to do in order to survive, you can minimize the cost by increasing the knowledge of the workers applied to the job. An engineer with 50x the productivity usually only costs 10x the salary, and if you can convince him to take half of his pay in risk (stock or options), you save on hedge insurance, too.
--Blair
Well, people who do work at McDonald's in the valley are living somewhere.
Like he said, homeless shelter, or, from what I've seen from the number of cars parked on an average Silicon Valley side street, 10 to a 3-bed, 2-bath house.
SV rates for fast food are higher than the norm; the banners proclaim $9.25 an hour at In-n-Out, but under $20k/year around here isn't going to get you an apartment you can leave after dark and food.
Everyone else that replied to this thread said what I was going to say: if you're out of a job in the Bay Area, MOVE OUT.
It's not going to come back here. The crazy money is gone forever. You're living in a dying shipyard, and it will be a century before anyone considers gentrifying it.
And maybe you'll change your luck. Much of the crazy money that piled up and went down the toilet here in the meantime created an international infrastructure that means that most of you can do the same sort of work in another state without any change in the virtual qualities of your career.
My home is in another state, and I'm here only because the client insists and pays my expenses. This place, believe me, is a step down. If I didn't have a fear of flying, I'd do what my partners do and air-commute.
There never was a good reason that dotbomb.com had to be located here. The only reason it happened was so the local VC's could see the drywall in person and dump funny money on the con-man in charge. Real online companies can be anywhere. Why grind yourself on the roughest economic emery wheel on earth when you can go to Kansas City or Penang, pay 20% as much for the same apartment, and work your options from there?
--Blair
> I mean come on, there is something strangely humorous about a dead guy,
Rimmer.
> a janitor,
Lister and/or Kryten.
> a severed robot head,
Holly and/or Kryten.
> and a chick who was turned into a love slave as punishment,
That's either the resurrected Christine Kochanski, or you'll have to make do with a 3-million-year-evolved ship's cat.
> all stuck on a bug looking ship.
...all (for a significant part of the run) stuck on StarBug 1...
The only difference is one is euro-kinky, canadian/german deadpan, and the other is blatant english farce.
...and then there are the cut-scenes from Mystery Science Theater 3000...
--Blair
"Ecclesiastes 1:9"
Simba was the name of the lion in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tar-Zan novels.
You've heard of Tar-Zan, right? Disney did a movie about him, too, only people realized up-front that it was "Disney's version" of it, and didn't spaz just because it was an adaption of prior art.
--Blair
Densi wrote:
>Blair wrote:
>>Platform stability, even if it's artificial... >Listen closely; I work at a game company.
O yay.
(Sort of. I keep sending my resi to LucasArts and they keep saying "please do not include pictures of the Light Saber you constructed in your application.")
>Platform stability is *not* artificial.
By "platform stability" I didn't mean reliability. I meant compatibility. Minimal drift. To support the consistency you spoke of...twice. So that companies with shoestrings as skinny as WhizGameSchtremeCo's can get off the ground and pump a few more royal pct's into SNE's P&L.
But, as long as you brought it up, yes, my PS2 has "crashed". Changing disks doesn't reset it. I have to hit the reset button after I insert a disk. You will now likely claim that's not a bug, it's a feature. Sophistry's a bitch.
And yes, I do have experience with DO-178B Level-A certification testing of Avionics software. There is no more thorough test requirement. As a good buddy of mine puts it, "there isn't enough money printed to certify a TCP/IP stack for flight" (note: this is for cockpit/control systems; the rules are different for cabin/passenger-use systems).
I attribute the fact that Sony was able to make the thing reliable at all with any sort of feasible business plan to the inference that the system is much simpler than some people are making it out to be. This can also be accomplished by building the complex system out of less-complex, well-validated subsystems. I note that my PS2 shipped with two quenched USB ports and a fat bay for an "expansion module". I.e., a year or so of buyer-beta testing will validate the main unit before it is integrated with these complicating components.
>This effect is not from lack of documentation -- even the manufacturer's games follow this rule.
Documentation is communication from one person to many. (Yeah, yeah, sometimes several people have to add pages to the doc; but still, one teacher per meme, many learners per meme.) Even the game developers within Sony have to read about what the hardware and system software team created. You do know they're not the same people, right? Thorough, accurate, readable documentation costs a lot of money. If the system is documented properly and the game teams are experienced professionals from theme to design to release, you would not see asymptotic improvements. You would see the best features of the system used well in the first games and any games thereafter. Cf. the difference between a detailed, precise, accurate map and "it's over there a few hundred miles".
> and if I may stray into incivility, your are an ass for suggesting that it is so
An mine ass were less civil and justified a like retort.
--Blair
The point is, if they know what you're radiating and have certified their avionics as being cool with it, then it's okay to use it.
The general prohibition is there because the aircrew has no way of knowing what kind of ham gear or Eurostandard jammer J. Random Ape has brought onto the flying coffin--er, aircraft.
Boeing will give its subs hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars to certify this technology for flight. It will know exactly how it affects every input register and control signal in the cockpit. The FAA will have a DER sign off on the results and buglist. (Note: the DER can't fail a certification for having bugs, only for failing to document them. At that point the manufacturer is certified to know what's wrong with his stuff and to have taken responsibility for it. The government doesn't protect you, it protects its own ass from liability. And there's no recursive requirement to test the tests. This is what you get when you let industries write their own government regulations.)
When Boeing's 802.11b flies, you still won't get to use your cellphone.
--Blair
It means that if you have a certain amount of work to get done, and the person doing it has a small amount of knowledge, it's going to cost you a shitload. Vice if the person doing it has a lot of knowledge, that drops the cost of doing that work.
Which is kind of the same as
if you are dumb as dirt (Knowledge ==> 0) your money will approach infinity
Because it will take you forever to get it done.
--Blair
For some reason, I had trouble loading that link. Here's the printable version from Wired.
but that has problems too, when you try to find the "neatest EV you've ever seen". Old links, I guess. Digging around at the source gave me this:
Mazda Maniac
Index of Wilde's cars
--Blair
> I'd be willing to say this person has not a clue.
You can be willing. You can say it. You can even believe it. But you'd have a hard time being more wrong.
I've worked on projects with 100x the complexity of a game-box that came in under 3 years. And I have worked on bus design, bus-bridge design, processor design, processor validation, and the CAD SW to do all of it from colored blocks to partitioning to fault propagation to AMP test engines (ever run your combos and randoms off a beowulf cluster? I may have prior art in my name for that).
That's where I get my perspective. I have a hard time finding computational devices I don't know all about. But until I bought my PS2, I hadn't owned a dedicated TV-game box. Ever. Not even an Atari. And I still don't, because apparently this is a game box/CD player/DVD player/network game console/web brower/interactive-tv terminal/surveillance device/base(are belong to us, all your, one each). I.e., it looks like a PC with some re-/de-featuring to make it feasible.
I like the other answers people gave. Sony needs to milk the game developers. Platform stability, even if it's artifical, is the best way to do that. By constantly saying "3 years", Sony gives the game guys a hard point against which to schedule TTM and breakeven.
Some people talked about the learning curve, but that's a simple problem to solve. Just document the thing better. Sony doesn't have to because it knows it has 3 years for people to read the release notes. I bet, though, there's some third pary out there who has written the PS2 equivalent of the Lions book and is making the SW world's life a lot easier.
--Blair
C.
I can do anything in C, including implement 00 recompilers if I want to simplify some code files.
The bug is that this is an intro class.
Does that mean it's a gut course, taken by people who will never take another formal class but need basic real-world skill? Or does that mean it's a foundation in the vocabulary and skills needed to make the journey through the meaty classes to follow, but not necessarily to enable any real-world proficiency?
Those are different goals.
In the former case, I'd go with a language that sits at the highest level and has the most intuitive interface. Believe it or not, this is National Semiconductor's LabView. Drag-and-drop coding, almost done right. G2 might be okay, too, but last time I saw it in action, it was several thousand dollars per developer seat, several hundred dollars per runtime license, and two major revs away from being high-level clean.
If the latter goal is needed, I'd want a spectrum of knowledge. Assembly to teach what the native objects and operations are in a computer. C to bridge the gap between a machine schedule and a language. And Smalltalk rather than C++ to show off the power of OO. Save it for the second-level course offerings.
The problem with Java is it's weak. The problem with C++ is it's been sold primarily as as OO but it's bloated with stuff that has nothing to do with OO. It's a buff and a polish away from MainSail, the language built by hacking in every Stanford AI Lab student project since 1969.
--Blair
"Please leave your hymnals on your pews."
--Blair