>>Seriously These guys aren't making millions...I >>KNOW VIDEO GAME VOICE ACTORS...not one of them >>pulls even a "normal" 30k salary based off their >>Voice work. Most of them get a few good day or >>two jobs a year..maybe 10, 1 hour or two >>sessions. so that ends the "they are making more >>than the programmers" arguement.
So? You work a 'few hours' on a project, and you expect to get a share of profits? (or 'risiduals' or whatever games you want to play). Um... fuck off. The janitor that cleans our offices EVERY DAMN DAY deserves more than you. Pick up a broom and you might have a better argument.
"A few good day or two jobs a year"? So? Don't blame me for your bad career choice. Theres a bunch of fat girls down at the mall that wish they were supermodels too. Guess what - they aren't going to get profit sharing from Vogue either.
In 99% of situtations, the SAG people are completely disposable when it comes to games. And you will be disposed of. If you expect to get residuals when you do a few hours of voice work, while we have a team of 70+ people in my office that work 1-2 YEARS on a project...... well your whines are going to fall on deaf ears.
Even regular merchants in Australia need to advertise prices **WITH** GST included. I've also lived in Canada and the U.S., and I have to tell you it's nice to buy something and pay the price on the sticker.... not up to 15% more once they punch it into the register and the tax gets calculated.
This warning came from the fact that commercial merchants (of which there are millions) on ebay were advertising without GST, and then adding it on to the final price after the auction when over. Thats pretty misleading from where I stand and perfectly reasonably. This will have no impact on the average Joe because he isn't required to charge GST.
>>It has a PPC like cpu, but the other processors >>are not PPC's. They are much more simplified and >>specialized for processing graphics and such. >>Great for games, but not all that usefull for >>general PC tasks.
No it's not. The three cores are identical. You're thinking of CELL which has one PPC-like core, and 8 APU's.
>>so if 5 million sets were sold, that's only $75 million.
did anybody here pass economics? Ok... how about at least TOOK economics?
There's a big difference between revenue and profit.
Going from the math above, fox POSSIBLY brought in $75 million for the DVD's (that's not counting promotional costs, etc etc).
Did the shows cost nothing to produce? 14 episodes of a SciFi show.... i would bet $5million an episode is a reasonable estimate. Thats $70 million in costs right there. Plus marketing, blah blah blah.
Yes the DVD has been a hit. In numbers. But you can't say it made fox a fortune. It more than likely is just covering the costs that the show LOST during its run.
>>I have to wonder, how far behind is the space station at this point?
Behind? It doesn't do anything! There hasn't been a single useful scientific thing produced with the billions that have been pumped into that flying white elephant.
Seriously - you should look into it. It's a flying joke but NASA keeps pouring good money after bad for why knows why...
And yet Hubble is going to be dropped into the ocean, monitoring of the Voyageur probes is being cancelled, and we're thinking about sending people to the moon?!? Jesus christ. NASA is such a joke.
>>The article blatantly ignores the fact that Thunderbird 1.02 has ALSO been released,
Blatantly? BLATANTLY I SAY!! BLANTANT BLANTANT BLANTANT.
Yup. And the article blatantly ignores the fact that Whitney Houston is back in rehab, the details of the Michael Jackson trial, and the current status of that vegetable in florida.
Damn those authors with their blatant ignoring of facts other than Firefox in their article about Firefox!
SO i guess by your logic, you should be able to sell anything you want, and people shouldn't be allowed to point out bugs or flaws because you might not like it?
-The alpha version limped along until Compaq stopped willing to help Microsoft support it.
-The MIPS version was discontinued after EVERY SINGLE MANUFACTURER of MIPS clone workstations stopped producing them (e.g. Netpower and friends). It's not particularly evil to stop producing software for nonexistent hardware. Don't bring up SGI - it never ran on SGI's.
>>I think its a culture thing though. Pixar is >>still new and it hasn't developped a thick >>crust of old timers who don't want to rock the >>boat, and Dreamworks is a relatively old >>company which has settled in its ways.
WTF are you talking about? Pixar dates back to the mid-early eighties. They are about twice as old as Dreamworks.
As somebody who works in 3D graphics, there are so many things wrong with this I don't even know where to start.
You just don't get it.
Damn zealots are boring.
I'll take one example:
"case in point, ExLuna: their lawyers summarily killed what was the best chance in years of having a RenderMan"
Um - no. PIXAR killed ExLuna. They sued them into the ground. Then even took the nasty step of not only suing the company, but suing the founder (Larry Gritz) and others. Hello - software patents? And even though ExLuna claimed they weren't violating them, it was easier to settle than fight with somebody who could/did crush them like a bug.
(FYI - ILM considers OpenEXR to be a big failure. They've gotten pretty much zero contributions back from anybody. It's only take take take. It still helps ILM because they're getting most other packages to implement the format so they can make their pipeline more unified, but whether that was more or less effort that open sourcing the package in the first place is subject to debate).
I'm not even going to refute the rest of your points because it's a waste of time. You don't get it.
I work at . We used to use Rush. I was a bit clunky, but it got the job done. Unfortunately, once the # of employees got up in the hundreds and the # of render slaves got >500, Rush falls over. It just doesn't scale and it's central database can't keep up with the dispatch rate and query rate from the clients. Eventually it can't keep the farm full.
The end result was we wrote our own distributor. It's a pretty sophisticated package that can distribute pretty much any batch processing job and scales properly.
Not the solution for everybody, but for our size having the code in house to control made things a lot more convenient.
I've also heard good things about Muster, but never tried it myself.
I did some tests with the Opterons about a year ago - impressive speed compared to a P4 (having all those extra registers helps a LOT). At the time it was the development tools that were lacking so we couldn't use them, but I'd guess thats improved a lot since.
>>As I see it, it's that the users are using >>Windows, not that they are coming in high speed.
Ahh..... bullshit.
Most of the worms and trojans and crap that are going around lately are all user spawned. They haven't crawled in through a remote exploit. They've been emailed to/downloaded by some genius who will execute any damn thing. I swear, these people would probably pick up a used syringe off the ground and jab it into their own arm to see what would happen.
Do you think it would be any different if the world was all running Linux? Or Solaris? Or MacOS. Please - stupid people will be stupid no matter what OS you put in front of them. It isn't going to change anytime soon.
>>I'm getting hammered by spam and worms and >>EVERYTIME I nmap back to the sender (okay >>0.001% of senders, randomly chosen as I get >>pissed off), it's a windows box.
Geee --- and what percentage of computers out there are windows boxes? What a shocking correlation.
>>Massively multiplayer games are going to get very, veyr big
In some ways yes. Generally, no.
Not a lot of people want to play a game that they have to invest so much time and energy in. If your not putting in X hours in a week you can't stay competative. If you can always be trashed by the geek that's willing to put in 80h/week, well what is the fun in that?
I know I don't want a game that I have to live - more like something I can pick up for some amusement when i've got a few spare minutes.
>>Anyone have any info on how hard it >>would be to fool an iris (or retina) scanner?
You don't have to fool the scanner. According to the article the iris print is stored on a card/passport that you present. So all you have to do is forge the source.
If they were looking up your iris in a master database that would be a different issue.
>>That said, I am eargerly awaiting his next >>work, it should be a pretty good read.
Guess what - you've already read it!
All his books that i've read have the same type of characters, the same story arc, the same 'big twist' at the end.
It's like he's got a template that he fills in names, places, objects, and conflicts.
His prose is easy to digest, but after reading 3 of his books (The DaVinci Code, Digital Fortress, Angels & Demons) I don't think I'll read another one. I can see his twists coming a mile away, and now i see the formula I've lost interest. But then again, I'm the type of person that likes to see a movie without previews or reading the 12 page synopsis in Entertainment Weekly. I want the story to be fresh and interesting. I don't get the impression Dan Brown has that in him.
"Having the Disney name on it means it automatically becomes a must see for a lot of kids(people)."
You mean like "Atlantis" or "Emperors New Groove" or "Dinosaur" or "Treasure Planet" (biggest flop of the last 10 years). Lilo & Stitch was a moderate success, and the first real one they've had in 10 years.
Disney was must-see 50 years ago (their hayday) or 15 years ago (Lion King, Beauty & The Beast etc). Now they are only producing steaming piles of shite and don't have a new idea among them.
I mean - Cinderella2? PeterPan2 LionKing2 Aladdin2&3.
>>So don't get into one-sided relationships. I >>have no sympathy for business owners who fall >>into this trap.
Thats easy to say - assuming all things are equal.
Wal-Mart is quickly becoming, effectively, a monopoly in a lot of ways.
For example, did you know WalMart sells 1/3 of ALL DIAPERS in the U.S? And comparable percentages of housewares, dog food, etc etc.
WalMart counts for **10%** of all China's exports ("Buy American" my ass).
It's hard to not get into 1-sided relationships when there is only one game in town.
Plus WalMart uses their position to censor media (national magazines must pass their scrutiny or won't be carried. CD's must be edited or won't be carried).
As God as my witness I'll never set foot in WalMart again.
You people do know that most color laster printers and a lot of non-color ones hide a subtle watermark in the printing so a given document can be traced back to a particular printer?
Slashdot Mirror
>>Seriously These guys aren't making millions...I ..maybe 10, 1 hour or two >>sessions. so that ends the "they are making more
>>KNOW VIDEO GAME VOICE ACTORS...not one of them
>>pulls even a "normal" 30k salary based off their
>>Voice work. Most of them get a few good day or
>>two jobs a year
>>than the programmers" arguement.
So? You work a 'few hours' on a project, and you expect to get a share of profits? (or 'risiduals' or whatever games you want to play). Um... fuck off. The janitor that cleans our offices EVERY DAMN DAY deserves more than you. Pick up a broom and you might have a better argument.
"A few good day or two jobs a year"? So? Don't blame me for your bad career choice. Theres a bunch of fat girls down at the mall that wish they were supermodels too. Guess what - they aren't going to get profit sharing from Vogue either.
In 99% of situtations, the SAG people are completely disposable when it comes to games. And you will be disposed of. If you expect to get residuals when you do a few hours of voice work, while we have a team of 70+ people in my office that work 1-2 YEARS on a project...... well your whines are going to fall on deaf ears.
Yours sincerely
A Games Programmer
Even regular merchants in Australia need to advertise prices **WITH** GST included. I've also lived in Canada and the U.S., and I have to tell you it's nice to buy something and pay the price on the sticker.... not up to 15% more once they punch it into the register and the tax gets calculated.
This warning came from the fact that commercial merchants (of which there are millions) on ebay were advertising without GST, and then adding it on to the final price after the auction when over. Thats pretty misleading from where I stand and perfectly reasonably. This will have no impact on the average Joe because he isn't required to charge GST.
Would you want it cluttered enough so it could spot the dupe story? I could see that being useful to the lazy editors.
>>It has a PPC like cpu, but the other processors
>>are not PPC's. They are much more simplified and
>>specialized for processing graphics and such.
>>Great for games, but not all that usefull for
>>general PC tasks.
No it's not. The three cores are identical. You're thinking of CELL which has one PPC-like core, and 8 APU's.
>>so if 5 million sets were sold, that's only $75 million.
did anybody here pass economics? Ok... how about at least TOOK economics?
There's a big difference between revenue and profit.
Going from the math above, fox POSSIBLY brought in $75 million for the DVD's (that's not counting promotional costs, etc etc).
Did the shows cost nothing to produce? 14 episodes of a SciFi show.... i would bet $5million an episode is a reasonable estimate. Thats $70 million in costs right there. Plus marketing, blah blah blah.
Yes the DVD has been a hit. In numbers. But you can't say it made fox a fortune. It more than likely is just covering the costs that the show LOST during its run.
>>I have to wonder, how far behind is the space station at this point?
Behind? It doesn't do anything! There hasn't been a single useful scientific thing produced with the billions that have been pumped into that flying white elephant.
Seriously - you should look into it. It's a flying joke but NASA keeps pouring good money after bad for why knows why...
And yet Hubble is going to be dropped into the ocean, monitoring of the Voyageur probes is being cancelled, and we're thinking about sending people to the moon?!? Jesus christ. NASA is such a joke.
>>The article blatantly ignores the fact that Thunderbird 1.02 has ALSO been released,
Blatantly? BLATANTLY I SAY!! BLANTANT BLANTANT BLANTANT.
Yup. And the article blatantly ignores the fact that Whitney Houston is back in rehab, the details of the Michael Jackson trial, and the current status of that vegetable in florida.
Damn those authors with their blatant ignoring of facts other than Firefox in their article about Firefox!
BLATANT I SAY!!!
>> That's 0.2 bil per launch. And that compares
>>quite well with shuttle launch costs (~$400 mil).
Yet again demonstrating what a colossal, fucking joke the shuttle is.
SO i guess by your logic, you should be able to sell anything you want, and people shouldn't be allowed to point out bugs or flaws because you might not like it?
Tough Shit.
You're worrying too much.
Currently in AU i'm getting 1.5MB down/256k up with 15GB a month. After 15GB the connection gets throttled down to 64k. This is $49/month.
Actually to be clear:
-The alpha version limped along until Compaq stopped willing to help Microsoft support it.
-The MIPS version was discontinued after EVERY SINGLE MANUFACTURER of MIPS clone workstations stopped producing them (e.g. Netpower and friends). It's not particularly evil to stop producing software for nonexistent hardware. Don't bring up SGI - it never ran on SGI's.
>>My humble home studio was built on a budget of
>>roughly $500, and I can record at 96khz/24-bit,
I'm willing to bet thats 96khz SAMPLING.... which equates to a 48khz audio response. c.f. Nyquist sampling theorm.
>>I think its a culture thing though. Pixar is
>>still new and it hasn't developped a thick
>>crust of old timers who don't want to rock the
>>boat, and Dreamworks is a relatively old
>>company which has settled in its ways.
WTF are you talking about? Pixar dates back to the mid-early eighties. They are about twice as old as Dreamworks.
Since when is Russian a 'race'? It's a nationality.
Dumbass.
As somebody who works in 3D graphics, there are so many things wrong with this I don't even know where to start.
You just don't get it.
Damn zealots are boring.
I'll take one example:
"case in point, ExLuna: their lawyers summarily killed what was the best chance in years of having a RenderMan"
Um - no. PIXAR killed ExLuna. They sued them into the ground. Then even took the nasty step of not only suing the company, but suing the founder (Larry Gritz) and others. Hello - software patents? And even though ExLuna claimed they weren't violating them, it was easier to settle than fight with somebody who could/did crush them like a bug.
(FYI - ILM considers OpenEXR to be a big failure. They've gotten pretty much zero contributions back from anybody. It's only take take take. It still helps ILM because they're getting most other packages to implement the format so they can make their pipeline more unified, but whether that was more or less effort that open sourcing the package in the first place is subject to debate).
I'm not even going to refute the rest of your points because it's a waste of time. You don't get it.
A different view:
I work at . We used to use Rush. I was a bit clunky, but it got the job done. Unfortunately, once the # of employees got up in the hundreds and the # of render slaves got >500, Rush falls over. It just doesn't scale and it's central database can't keep up with the dispatch rate and query rate from the clients. Eventually it can't keep the farm full.
The end result was we wrote our own distributor. It's a pretty sophisticated package that can distribute pretty much any batch processing job and scales properly.
Not the solution for everybody, but for our size having the code in house to control made things a lot more convenient.
I've also heard good things about Muster, but never tried it myself.
I did some tests with the Opterons about a year ago - impressive speed compared to a P4 (having all those extra registers helps a LOT). At the time it was the development tools that were lacking so we couldn't use them, but I'd guess thats improved a lot since.
>>As I see it, it's that the users are using
>>Windows, not that they are coming in high speed.
Ahh..... bullshit.
Most of the worms and trojans and crap that are going around lately are all user spawned. They haven't crawled in through a remote exploit. They've been emailed to/downloaded by some genius who will execute any damn thing. I swear, these people would probably pick up a used syringe off the ground and jab it into their own arm to see what would happen.
Do you think it would be any different if the world was all running Linux? Or Solaris? Or MacOS. Please - stupid people will be stupid no matter what OS you put in front of them. It isn't going to change anytime soon.
>>I'm getting hammered by spam and worms and
>>EVERYTIME I nmap back to the sender (okay
>>0.001% of senders, randomly chosen as I get
>>pissed off), it's a windows box.
Geee --- and what percentage of computers out there are windows boxes? What a shocking correlation.
>>Massively multiplayer games are going to get very, veyr big
In some ways yes. Generally, no.
Not a lot of people want to play a game that they have to invest so much time and energy in. If your not putting in X hours in a week you can't stay competative. If you can always be trashed by the geek that's willing to put in 80h/week, well what is the fun in that?
I know I don't want a game that I have to live - more like something I can pick up for some amusement when i've got a few spare minutes.
>>Anyone have any info on how hard it
>>would be to fool an iris (or retina) scanner?
You don't have to fool the scanner. According to the article the iris print is stored on a card/passport that you present. So all you have to do is forge the source.
If they were looking up your iris in a master database that would be a different issue.
>>That said, I am eargerly awaiting his next
>>work, it should be a pretty good read.
Guess what - you've already read it!
All his books that i've read have the same type of characters, the same story arc, the same 'big twist' at the end.
It's like he's got a template that he fills in names, places, objects, and conflicts.
His prose is easy to digest, but after reading 3 of his books (The DaVinci Code, Digital Fortress, Angels & Demons) I don't think I'll read another one. I can see his twists coming a mile away, and now i see the formula I've lost interest. But then again, I'm the type of person that likes to see a movie without previews or reading the 12 page synopsis in Entertainment Weekly. I want the story to be fresh and interesting. I don't get the impression Dan Brown has that in him.
Cool - a guaranteed way to pick a winner!
Now i'm off to buy many $1.20 bottles of sugar water so I get get a free $0.99 song!!!! I can't lose!
oh wait............
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large numbers.
"Having the Disney name on it means it automatically becomes a must see for a lot of kids(people)."
You mean like "Atlantis" or "Emperors New Groove" or "Dinosaur" or "Treasure Planet" (biggest flop of the last 10 years). Lilo & Stitch was a moderate success, and the first real one they've had in 10 years.
Disney was must-see 50 years ago (their hayday) or 15 years ago (Lion King, Beauty & The Beast etc). Now they are only producing steaming piles of shite and don't have a new idea among them.
I mean - Cinderella2? PeterPan2 LionKing2 Aladdin2&3.
For christs sakes.
>>So don't get into one-sided relationships. I
>>have no sympathy for business owners who fall
>>into this trap.
Thats easy to say - assuming all things are equal.
Wal-Mart is quickly becoming, effectively, a monopoly in a lot of ways.
For example, did you know WalMart sells 1/3 of ALL DIAPERS in the U.S? And comparable percentages of housewares, dog food, etc etc.
WalMart counts for **10%** of all China's exports ("Buy American" my ass).
It's hard to not get into 1-sided relationships when there is only one game in town.
Plus WalMart uses their position to censor media (national magazines must pass their scrutiny or won't be carried. CD's must be edited or won't be carried).
As God as my witness I'll never set foot in WalMart again.
>>The ad was well done and would be understood by most anybody.
Yeah, unfortunately it's totally missing the point.
I've seen one of these ads (3 different ones so far) in front of every movie i've seen for the last for months.
HELLO!?!? I JUST PAID $10 to sit in this theatre and you're preaching to me to not steal off the internet!??! HELLO? WE'RE THE DAMN PAYING CUSTOMERS.
shit. Talk about missing the point and annoying the wrong people.
You people do know that most color laster printers and a lot of non-color ones hide a subtle watermark in the printing so a given document can be traced back to a particular printer?
You're already being monitored
http://slashdot.org/yro/99/12/08/1342209.shtml